Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms - Methods - Trends

Handbook of Medieval Studies Volume 1

Handbook of Medieval Studies Terms - Methods - Trends Edited by Albrecht Classen

Volume 1

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-018409-9 e-ISBN 978-3-11-021558-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Handbook of medieval studies : terms, methods, trends / edited by Albrecht Classen. p. cm. ISBN 978-3-11-018409-9 (alk. paper) 1. Middle Ages - Historiography. 2. Middle Ages - Study and teaching. 3. Literature, Medieval - History and criticism. 4. Middle Ages - Bibliography. 5. Medievalists - Biography. I. Classen, Albrecht. D116.H37 2010 940.1072-dc22 2010040766

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

쑔 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Typesetting: Dörlemann-Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

V

Table of Contents

Table of Contents Volume 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XV

Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

XXV

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

LXVII

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LXXVII

Main Topics and Debates of the Last Decades and their Terminology and Results Arabic and Islamic Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Arab West (Thomas F. Glick) . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Arab East (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabic Literature (Mark Pettigrew) . . . . . . . . . . . . Archeology and History of Art in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia (Matteo Compareti) . . . . . . . . . . Classical Persian Literature (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . Islamic Philosophy (Alessandro Cancian) . . . . . . . . . Islamic Theology (Livnat Holtzman) . . . . . . . . . . . Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context (Glen M. Cooper) Qur’anic Studies (Erik S. Ohlander) . . . . . . . . . . . . Shi’ism (Alessandro Cancian) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Archaeology in Medieval Studies (Christopher Landon) . Art History (Elina Gertsman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Astronomical Instruments (David A. King) . . . . . . . . Bakhthinian Discourse Theory, Heteroglossia (Stephen M. Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biblical Exegesis (Frans van Liere) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Botany (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Art and Architecture (Sophia Germanidou) . . Byzantine Philosophical Treatises (Georgi Kapriev) . . .

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3 6 14

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25 38 46 56 69 81 93 104 117 126

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131 137 145

181 185

Table of Contents

Byzantine Sciences (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Byzantine Theology (George Arabatzis). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classics and Mythography (Gregory Heyworth) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Codicology and Paleography (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communication (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Computer-Based Medieval Research (with an Emphasis on Middle High German) (Ulrich Müller) . . Conversion (Matthew J. dal Santo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cornish Literature (Brian Murdoch). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crusades Historiography (Andrew Holt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deconstruction in Medieval Studies (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . . . Diplomatics (Theo Kölzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disability Studies (Julie Singer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editing of Medieval Texts (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . English Studies (Robin Gilbank) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enlightenment Perspectives on the Middle Ages (Reinhold Münster) Epigraphy (Walter Koch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eschatology (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Everyday Life in Medieval Studies (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . . . . . . Feminism (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Folklore in Medieval Studies (Salvatore Calomino) . . . . . . . . . . . Formalism (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . French Studies (Wendy Pfeffer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Friendship and Networks (Walter Ysebaert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender Studies (Hiram Kümper). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . German Studies (Francis G. Gentry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heraldry (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hermeneutics and Textual Criticism (Raymond J. Cormier) . . . . . . Historical Studies (Andrew Holt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of Medieval Medicine (Carrie Griffin). . . . . . . . . Historiography of Medieval Science (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . Iberian Studies (James A. Grabowska) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Icelandic, Danish, and Old Norse Studies (Russell Poole) . . . . . . . Inter-/Crosscultural Studies (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . Interdisciplinarity in Medieval Studies (Gerhard Jaritz). . . . . . . . Intertextuality and Comparative Approaches in Medieval Literature (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irish Studies (William Sayers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Italian Studies (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Japan, Medieval (Barbara Stevenson). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

VI 195 240 253 266 330 343 353 369 379 393 405 424 427 450 468 489 506 525 540 550 558 565 580 594 602 619 624 639 651 666 678 685 706 711 716 727 738 749

VII

Table of Contents

Jewish Studies (Jean Baumgarten) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Law in the Middle Ages (Scott Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Legal Historiography (German) (Gerald Kohl) . . . . . . . . . . . Manuscripts: Past and Present Approaches (Susan Noakes) . . . Marxist Approaches to Medieval Studies (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . Masculinity Studies (Daniel F. Pigg) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Material Culture (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medievalism (Ulrich Müller). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Medievalism in Modern Children’s Literature (Siegrid Schmidt) . Mentalities in Medieval Studies (David F. Tinsley) . . . . . . . . . Metrology (Moritz Wedell) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Museums and Exhibitions (Siegrid Schmidt) . . . . . . . . . . . . Music in Medieval Studies (James Zychowicz) . . . . . . . . . . . . Mysticism (Debra Stoudt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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756 771 788 807 822 829 836 850 866 874 897 919 931 939

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967

Volume 2: Narratives of Technological Revolution (Adam Lucas) . . . Narratology and Literary Theory in Medieval Studies (Jonathan M. Newman) . . . . . . . . New Philology (Susan Yager) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numismatics (Rory Naismith) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Occitan Studies (Michelle Bolduc) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performance of Medieval Texts (Ulrich Müller) . . . . . . . Pharmacy (Alain Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophy in Medieval Studies (Stephen Penn) . . . . . . . Political Theory in Medieval Studies (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . Popes and Papacy (Frances Parton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Popular Religion / Spirituality in Medieval Studies (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . Post-Colonialism in Medieval Studies (James Tindal Acken). Queer Studies (Forrest C. Helvie). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Race and Ethnicity (Diane Auslander) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rediscovery of the Middle Ages (Late 18th Century / Turn of the Century) (Berta Raposo) Religious Studies (The Latin West) (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . Research Institutes, Archives, and Libraries for the Middle Ages (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . Scripts (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semiotics of Culture (Sarah-Grace Heller) . . . . . . . . . . .

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990 999 1007 1023 1039 1056 1090 1111 1122

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1129 1137 1142 1155

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VIII

Table of Contents

Slavic Studies (Marta Deyrup) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Constructionism (Daniel F. Pigg) . . . . . . . . . . . Social and Economic Theory in Medieval Studies (Harry Kitsikopoulos) . . . . . . . . . . Social History and Medieval Studies (Harry Kitsikopoulos). Technology in the Middle Ages (Thomas F. Glick) . . . . . The Term ‘Middle Ages’ (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . Text and Image in the Middle Ages (James Rushing) . . . . Theology (Christian) (Leo D. Lefebure) . . . . . . . . . . . . Time Measurement and Chronology in Medieval Studies (Camarin M. Porter) . . . . . . . . . . Transfer of Knowledge (Alain Touwaide). . . . . . . . . . . Utopias / Utopian Thought (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . Welsh Studies (Andrew Breeze) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . 1253 . . . . . . 1264 . . . . . .

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1270 1292 1305 1310 1319 1339

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1350 1368 1400 1409

Aesthetics (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allegory (Bettina Full) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Author (Michelle Bolduc) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Body (Scott Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chivalry (John A. Geck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Comic (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contrafacture (Daniel E. O’Sullivan). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Curialitas (Courtliness) (Gregory Heyworth) . . . . . . . . . . . Discourse (Karen K. Jambeck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fictionality (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontier, Transgression, Liminality (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler). Game (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gestures (Klaus Oschema). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Images (Gerhard Jaritz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laughter (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory (Paula Leverage) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mouvance (Roy Rosenstein) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parody (Sarah Gordon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prosopography (Christian) (K.S.B. Keats-Rohan) . . . . . . . . Ritual and Performance (Gerhard Jaritz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Space and Nature (Christopher Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Text (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Transcendental (George Arabatzis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1421 1430 1440 1450 1459 1468 1478 1482 1488 1500 1504 1508 1513 1520 1524 1530 1538 1548 1552 1559 1563 1576 1582

Important Terms in Today’s Medieval Studies

IX

Table of Contents

Typology (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1589 Violence (Scott Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1593

Textual Genres in the Middle Ages Adversus-Iudaeos Literature (Hiram Kümper) . Art Manuals (Flavio Boggi). . . . . . . . . . . . . Autobiography and Biography (Julie Singer) . . Ballads, Songs, and Libels (Christian Kuhn) . . . Bestiaries, Aviaries, Physiologus (Renee Ward) . . Bibles (Popular) (Brian Murdoch) . . . . . . . . . Books of Hours (Elina Gertsman) . . . . . . . . . Calendars, Islamic (Simone Cristoforetti) . . . . . Cantigas de amigos (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . Ceremonial Texts (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . Chansons de geste (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . Charms and Incantations (Russell Poole) . . . . Charters (Philip Slavin). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chronicles (Graeme Dunphy). . . . . . . . . . . . Cookbooks (Timothy J. Tomasik) . . . . . . . . . . Courtesy Books (Klaus Oschema) . . . . . . . . . Debate Poetry (Patricia E. Black). . . . . . . . . . Dictionaries / Glossaries (Albrecht Classen) . . . Didactic and Gnomic Literature (Russell Poole) Dits (Steven Millen Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Drama (John A. Geck) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Encyclopedias (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . Financial and Tax Reports (Georg Vogeler). . . . Glosses (Frans van Liere) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gospel Harmonies (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . Hagiographical Texts (Michelle M. Sauer) . . . . Heroic Epics and Sagas (Hermann Reichert) . . . Historical Romances (Jaime Leaños) . . . . . . . Kharjas (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . . . . . . . .

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1605 1607 1614 1618 1634 1642 1647 1652 1657 1660 1683 1700 1706 1714 1722 1728 1735 1742 1750 1755 1760 1767 1775 1785 1791 1798 1807 1831 1840

Volume 3: Lapidaries (Rosmarie Thee Morewedge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1845 Last Wills (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1862 Latin Comedies (Gretchen Mieszkowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1872

X

Table of Contents

Legal Texts (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Letters (Christian Kuhn) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium) (Walter Ysebaert) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Minnereden (Maurice Sprague). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miracle Narratives (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mirrors for Princes Islamic (Mark David Luce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Western (Cristian Bratu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notarial Literature (Edward D. English). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Numismatic Literature (Rory Naismith) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Papal Bulls (Herwig Weigl) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Penitentials and Confessionals (Michelle M. Sauer) . . . . . . . Pharmaceutical Literature (Alan Touwaide) . . . . . . . . . . . Political Treatises (Vasileios Syros) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Prayer Books (Elina Gertsman). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Proverbs (Rosmarie Thee Morewedge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religious Lyrics (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoolbooks (Michael Baldzuhn). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Texts: Artes Liberales and Artes Mechanicae (with Emphasis on Anglophone Research) (Carrie Griffin) Sermons (Robert W. Zajkowski) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Short Verse Narratives (Norris J. Lacy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sisterbooks (David F. Tinsley) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Travelogues (Maria E. Dorninger) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trobadors, Trouvères, Minnesinger (Ulrich Müller) . . . . . . Villancicos (Samuel G. Armistead) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visionary Texts (Elizabeth Boyle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . World Maps ( Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . 1878 . . . . 1881 . . . . 1898 . . . . 1905 . . . . 1911 . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1916 1921 1950 1956 1963 1968 1979 2000 2021 2026 2056 2061

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2069 2077 2086 2093 2102 2118 2128 2131 2136

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2145 2150 2153 2160 2165 2170 2176

Key Figures in Medieval Studies from ca. 1650 to 1950 (selection) Adler, Guido (Pieter Mannaerts) . . . . . . . . Árni Magnússon (Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . Auerbach, Erich (Bettina Full). . . . . . . . . Baer, Yitzhak (Philip Slavin) . . . . . . . . . . Barbi, Michele (Beatrice Arduini). . . . . . . . Bédier, Joseph (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . Benecke, Georg Friedrich (Gertrud Blaschitz)

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XI Besseler, Heinrich (Pieter Mannaerts). . . . . . . . . Bezzola, Reto Raduolf (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . Billanovich, Giuseppe (David Lummus) . . . . . . . Bischoff, Bernhard (Hiram Kümper) . . . . . . . . . Bloch, Marc (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bodmer, Johann Jakob (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . . Borst, Arno (Judith Benz). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bosl, Karl (Stephen Mark Carey) . . . . . . . . . . . . Boyle, Leonard Eugene (Christine Maria Grafinger) . Branca, Vittore (Federica Anichini) . . . . . . . . . . Braune, Wilhelm (Joshua M. H. Davis) . . . . . . . . Brunner, Otto (Judith Benz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Burdach, Konrad (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . Cappelli, Adriano (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . Cardini, Franco (Daniel Rötzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . Castro (y Quesada), Américo (Samuel G. Armistead) . Chenu, Marie-Dominique (Leo D. Lefebure) . . . . . Cleasby, Richard (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Cohen, Gustave (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . Contini, Gianfranco (Beatrice Arduini) . . . . . . . . Curtius, Ernst Robert (Alexander Sager) . . . . . . . D’Ancona, Alessandro (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . Docen, Bernhard Joseph (Maurice Sprague) . . . . . Donaldson, E. Talbot (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . Dopsch, Alfons (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . . . . . . . Duby, Georges Michel Claude (Carol R. Dover) . . . Duhem, Pierre (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ehrismann, Gustav Adolph (Alexander Sager). . . . Ewert, Alfred (Craig Baker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Faral, Edmond (Anne Latowsky). . . . . . . . . . . . Frappier, Jean (Raymond J. Cormier). . . . . . . . . . Fuhrmann, Horst (Karina Marie Ash). . . . . . . . . Funkenstein, Amos (Yossef Schwartz). . . . . . . . . Furnivall, Frederick James (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . Ganshof, François-Louis (Valerie L. Garver) . . . . . Gerbert, Martin (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . Gilson, Etienne (Daniel Rötzer) . . . . . . . . . . . . Gollancz, Sir Israel (Stephen Penn) . . . . . . . . . . Grabar, André (Linda Marie Rouillard) . . . . . . . . Grabmann, Martin (Yossef Schwartz) . . . . . . . . .

Table of Contents

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2180 2186 2190 2193 2195 2199 2204 2208 2212 2215 2219 2223 2226 2230 2231 2236 2240 2242 2245 2249 2253 2258 2260 2263 2267 2271 2276 2280 2283 2289 2292 2294 2297 2300 2304 2309 2311 2315 2320 2323

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Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl, and Grimm, Wilhelm Karl (Scott E. Pincikowski) . . . . . . . . . Gurevich, Aron Iakovlevich (Elena Lemeneva) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich August Wilhelm von der (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haupt, Moriz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heer, Friedrich (Peter Dinzelbacher) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hibbard, Laura Alandis (Linda M. Rouillard). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hilka, Alfons (Wendy Pfeffer and Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . Hilton, Rodney Howard (Candace Barrington) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr. (Nadia Margolis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Holthausen, Ferdinand (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Huizinga, Johan (Tracy Adams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James, Montague Rhodes (Mark Cruse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeanroy, Alfred-Marie-Henri-Gustave (Beverly J. Evans) . . . . . . . Jónsson, Finnur (Russell Poole) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Junius F. F., Franciscus (Jens Eike Schnall and Robert K. Paulsen) . . . . Kane, George J. (Marilyn Sandidge) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig (Roberto Delle Donne) . . . . . . . . . . Katz, Jacob (David Graizbord) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ker, Neil Ripley (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ker, W. P. (Barbara Stevenson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kibre, Pearl (Carrie Griffin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kittredge, George Lyman (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Klaeber, Friedrich (Helen Damico) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Klibansky, Raymond (Sarah Powrie) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuhn, Hugo Bernhard (Markus Stock) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuhn, Sherman M. (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kurath, Hans (Marc Pierce). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kuttner, Stephan (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lachmann, Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm (Stephen Mark Carey) . Ladner, Gerhard B. (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lagarde, Georges de (Scott L. Taylor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lamprecht, Karl Gotthard (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . . . . Lassberg, Joseph Maria Christoph, Freiherr von (Maurice Sprague) Leclerq, Jean (Daniel J. Watkins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Le Goff, Jacques Louis (Carol R. Dover) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lehmann, Paul (Alison Beringer) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lejeune, Rita (Kevin B. Reynolds). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lewis, C. S. (Jason Herman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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XIII Lexer, Matthias von (Graeme Dunphy) . . . . . . . Liepe, Wolfgang (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . Loomis, R. S. (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . Lot, Ferdinand (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . Lowe, Elias Avery (Peter A. Stokes) . . . . . . . . . . Lubac, Henri de (Michael Johnson) . . . . . . . . . Luick, Karl (Jerzy Wełna) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maier, Anneliese (Sarah Powrie). . . . . . . . . . . Maitland, Frederic William (Janice M. Bogstad) . . Malkiel, Yakov (Samuel G. Amistead) . . . . . . . . Mallet, Paul-Henri (Jens Eike Schnall) . . . . . . . Manitius, Max (Alison Beringer) . . . . . . . . . . . Manly, John Matthews (Anita Obermeier) . . . . . Massmann, Hans Ferdinand (Maurice Sprague). . Maurer, Friedrich (Brian Murdoch) . . . . . . . . . Menéndez-Pidal, Ramón (Kimberlee Campbell) . . Meyer, Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe (Anne Latowsky). . Mitteis, Heinrich (Albrecht Classen). . . . . . . . . Mohr, Hans Wolfgang Julius (Ulrich Müller) . . . Müllenhoff, Karl Victor (Maurice Sprague). . . . . Murray, J. A. H. (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Mustanoja, T. (Kirsti Peitsara) . . . . . . . . . . . . Nardi, Bruno (David Lummus). . . . . . . . . . . . Noreen, Adolf Gotthard (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . Ohly, Ernst Friedrich (Graeme Dunphy) . . . . . . Paris, Gaston Bruno Paulin (Daniel E. O’Sullivan) Paul, Hermann (Marc Pierce) . . . . . . . . . . . . Pfeiffer, Franz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . Prawer, Joshua (Philip Slavin). . . . . . . . . . . . Rajna, Pio (Claudia Boscolo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reese, Gustave (Beverly J. Evans) . . . . . . . . . . Rico Manrique, Francisco (Enrico Santangelo) . . . Riquer Morera, Martín de (Kimberlee Campbell). . Robertson, D. W. (Jason Herman) . . . . . . . . . . Robinson, Fred Norris (Anita Obermeier) . . . . . Rougemont, Denis de (Linda Marie Rouillard) . . . Ruh, Kurt (Freimut Löser and Ulrich Müller) . . . . . Runciman, Sir Steven (Robert W. Zajkowski) . . . . Sapegno, Natalino (Enrico Santangelo) . . . . . . . Sapori, Armando (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . .

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Scherer, Wilhelm (Maurice Sprague). . . . . . . . . . . . . Schlegel, August Wilhelm (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . Schlegel, Friedrich (Berta Raposo). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schoepperle Loomis, Gertrude (Karina Marie Ash) . . . . Schramm, Percy Ernst (Janos M. Bak) . . . . . . . . . . . Schultz, Alwin (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schwietering, Julius (Heiko Hartmann). . . . . . . . . . . Sievers, Georg Eduard (Russell Poole). . . . . . . . . . . . Simrock, Karl Joseph (Christopher R. Clason) . . . . . . . . Skeat, Walter William (Kathy Cawsey) . . . . . . . . . . . Southern, R. W. (Amy Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spitzer, Leo (Bettina Full) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stengel, Edmund Ernst (Andreas Meyer) . . . . . . . . . . Strauch, Philipp (Albrecht Classen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tellenbach, Gerd (Christine Maria Grafinger) . . . . . . . . Tolkien, John Ronald Ruel (Katharina Baier) . . . . . . . Traube, Ludwig (Francesco Roberg) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian (Marc Pierce) . . . . Vinaver, Eugène (Amy L. Ingram) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wackernagel, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm (Maurice Sprague) Waddell, Helen (Robin Gilbank) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Weber, Gottfried (Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler) . . . . . . . . . Wehrli, Max (Heiko Hartmann) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. (Candace Barrington) . . . . . Whitelock, Dorothy (Ben Snook) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wright, Joseph (Marc Pierce). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Young, Karl (Regula Meyer Evitt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zingerle, Ignaz Vinzenz (Gertrud Blaschitz) . . . . . . . . Zumthor, Paul (Tracy Adams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction The present reference work aims to fill a significant lacuna in scholarship that I will address throughout this introductory article, and subsequently in a critical survey of the relevant resources in our field. As a Handbook, it wants to make available detailed and meticulous surveys of the state of art in Medieval Studies and to reflect upon the historical development of our field in its myriad manifestations (research areas, terms, topics, figures, methods, theories, etc.). After all, the Middle Ages continue to create a lot of excitement both within the academy and outside, and we are, it seems, on a positive growth curve, particularly now in the early 21st century, considering the astounding proliferation of critical editions, translations, and interpretations that flood the book market. The history of research in all kinds of areas in Medieval Studies constitutes an essential component in our understanding of where we have come from and where we will probably turn to in the near future. More precisely, any of our comments on and interpretations of any phenomenon in the Middle Ages depends considerably on the scholarly context past and present. Evaluations change, the foci on specific periods, genres, figures, themes, etc. vary, and new theoretical concepts have considerable influence on how we view the medieval past. Much fundamental work was produced already in the 19th century, whether we think of critical editions, individual studies, bibliographies, and other kinds of databases. But each discipline or subject matter has been examined from many different perspectives since then, both in light of various theoretical models and through the kaleidoscopic lens of a multitude of methodologies. Some of these approaches have maintained their validity until today, others have been dismissed, and the intense debate continues until today how best to examine the Middle Ages critically. It is not uncommon to realize that older scholarship still has to tell us a lot even now, or once again, if carefully viewed in light of what medieval voices revealed in reality.1 The relevance and meaning of specific statements in medieval documents and our

1 See the entry on “Religious Studies” by Peter Dinzelbacher for excellent insights in this regard. Another illuminating example proves to be the discussion of Lynn Townsend White Jr.’s contribution to the history of technology (see Candace Barrington’s article on White).

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reading of medieval art objects, architectural designs, and musical compositions, to mention just a few areas of scholarly investigations in Medieval Studies, have changed and continue to be in flux even today, depending on new approaches, readings, interpretations, perspectives, critical lenses, and methodologies. In other words, as in most other academic fields, the process of learning, criticizing, re-evaluating, re-assessing, canonizing, and deconstructing the very canon proves to be endlessly ongoing because we are all part of the same large scholarly discourse, or rather, we create this discourse and determine its continuous development.2 But this process requires regular review and substantive analysis, which the present Handbook hopes to provide both for the present and future generations of scholars in Medieval Studies. Total completion cannot be achieved, and comprehensive coverage of all aspects would be elusive, but the present Handbook covers a considerable breadth of a multitude of research fields. As my own criticism of previous efforts in this field will indicate (see the following survey article on the relevant reference works in Medieval Studies), the very ideal that carries such efforts seems to be almost elusive and deceptive because we can only hope to capture a faint sense of what life in the Middle Ages was really like. We can read what some philosophers had to say, and we can ponder the meaning of specific statements by poets, artists, composers, and preachers, but how easily do we fall prey to a myopic perspective, either because of our lack of comprehensive approaches, or because the texts and works by their contemporaries have not survived. A full understanding seems impossible however, wherefore the concept of discourse, as developed by Michel Foucault,3 promises a good alternative since it does not require a complete coverage of what people thought, said, and argued about at a specific time, yet takes into account the widest array of statements and reflections that constituted that discourse. In this sense, we always need to probe what the dominant discussion at a specific time can reveal about specific topics, ideas, and concerns. The entries in our Handbook do not focus primarily on the medieval discourse, but on the scholarly discourse since the late 18th century, tracing the growth of the important disciplines particularly over the last hundred years, outlining what we know, what is being discussed, and how we have approached the critical issues at stake.

2 I examine the larger implications at much greater length in my introductory article. 3 Michel Foucault, L’ordre de discourse: Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

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The goal pursued in this Handbook does not consist in an attempt to compete with such seminal reference works as the Lexikon des Mittelalters or the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Instead, the question pursued here focuses on how individual subject matters have developed in historical-scholarly terms over time. What were the various methodological approaches to specific themes, and what source materials were regarded as most relevant? What primary documents have been seen as truly relevant at what time and by whom for what purposes? In fact, all these questions allow us to probe not only further into the history of the Middle Ages at large, they also facilitate a much better understanding of how we have learned to understand the medieval world from our modern perspectives, if not how we have misunderstood it. The term ‘history’ in our context only means the specific time frame, not the narrow discipline of Historical Studies. Medieval Studies embrace virtually each and every field of human activities and ideas, whether literature, fashion, the arts, religion, technology, agriculture, banking, or architecture. But this amazing spectrum also proves to be a remarkable challenge, hence, after all, the need for encyclopedic treatments of that period. There are four different categories of entries that make up this Handbook of Medieval Studies. First the major topics of disciplinary nature come into play, such as Feminism, German Studies, English Studies, Art History, Crusade Studies, Queer Studies, and Islamic Art. Next contributors examine specific terms that have influenced Medieval Studies deeply, such as curialitas, frontier, game, rhetorics, satire, irony, and violence.4 The third group consists of articles covering the wide range of textual genres prevalent in the Middle Ages, though even here I had to make compromises and leave lacunae for a number of reasons, though I would have preferred a comprehensive coverage. However, to aim for totality would have been hubris, and no encyclopedia or lexicon has ever achieved such a goal. The truly critical ap-

4 There are, of course, numerous reference works on critical and literary terms relevant for all of world literature, see, for instance, Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, 2nd augmented and rev. ed. (1961; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Wendell V. Harris, Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory, Reference Sources for the Social Sciences and Humanities, 12 (New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1992); Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (1997; Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2009); Metzler Literatur Lexikon: Begriffe und Definitionen, orig. ed. by Günther and Irmgard Schweikle, ed. Dieter Burdorf, 3rd completely rev. ed. (1984; Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007).

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proach requires selection, discrimination, prioritization, and categorization, and this is the case in our Handbook as well. Finally, the fourth group deals with some of the key figures in Medieval Studies, that is, both the grandfathers and founders in our field, and major scholars who deeply influenced their academic discipline at least until 1950, and in a number of cases even beyond that.5 There was no way to draw an artificial line of separation a few years after the end of the Second World War, so I chose a flexible approach in this regard. Some scholars enjoyed a very long career, others only a short one, but those who became active really only after ca. 1960 are not considered here (here disregarding one or two where the circumstances justified it). After all, it was not possible, with very few exceptions, to take into consideration the last thirty and forty years of research in terms of individual participants because it would have inundated all reasonable limits for such a reference work. The emphasis hence rests on those figures who laid the foundations and have continued to be deeply influential in their specific areas of investigations until today because of their seminal work.6 The overall purpose of our reference work consists of an effort to outline the major steps in the history of research since the 19th century (in some cases since the 18th century). The articles covering the scholarly disciplines, technical terms, and textual genres are supposed to trace in a concise, yet not too skeletal fashion, who the major players were, what significant positions and schools dominated the respective field, who published the most seminal studies, who provoked major debates and influenced the discourse, and then to determine what the most critical issues have been in the evolution of each discipline. Readers should not expect to be presented with a comprehensive bibliography; instead the entries address a more substantive need, that is, to learn quickly how research on, say, the history of astronomy, medicine, German Studies, Gender Studies, Arabic literature, Biblical exegesis, Crusade Studies,

5 For an impressive and comprehensive overview of the major historians in our field, now see John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2007); Rüdiger vom Bruch and Rainer A. Müller, Historikerlexikon: von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (1991; Munich: Beck, 2002). Cf. also Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: the Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. Morrow, 1991). 6 Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), contains biographies of some of the most important medievalists from England, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and Italy.

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hermeneutics, etc., has developed over time. Likewise, in the next category, the entries cover critical terms that have been highly influential in Medieval Studies, and again the intent was to provide an overview of how each term underwent crucial transformation and how it has been used in Medieval Studies over the last hundred to two hundred years or so. Similarly, the categories of ‘genres’ and of ‘figures’ pursue the same concept. I had hoped to incorporate as much non-European research and research topics as possible, and I am rather pleased with the present result, despite all kinds of shortcomings. Particularly the research on the worlds and cultures of Asian, African, and Arabic societies in the Middle Ages could not be dealt with as exhaustively as I would have liked, either because the task itself – and this actually applies to all aspects covered or, alas, left out – was too challenging, or because of certain natural limits that we all have in reaching out to the wide world of scholarship in those, at least for scholars in the Western world, somewhat remote areas and far beyond the scope of our traditional area of expertise. The reality of academic and other professional demands made it impossible for a number of contributors to submit their promised work either in time or at all. So, horribile dictu, ‘Religion’, for example, is not as extensively covered by itself as I would have wished, but there is an entry on ‘Theology in Medieval Studies.’7 Overall, there are certain problems that cast this matter in a different light. The history of Christianity represents a huge field for which many different lexica and encyclopedias have already been published (see the following survey article). To do justice to the many branches of research on medieval religion would require a separate Handbook, for which there is no space here. Admittedly, there is a separate entry on Jewish religion, and even here severe challenges surface immediately. But despite the erroneous assumption of a monolithic medieval Christianity, the number of individual groups, orientations, interpretations, institutions, organizations, and even whole churches is legion.

7 I am particularly grateful to Peter Dinzelbacher for accepting this entry at the last minute, so to speak, after a previous author had suddenly withdrawn. See also Dinzelbacher’s excellent book series “Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum in 6 Bänden.” The individual volumes have not appeared in a chronologically linear progression; instead vol. 1 appeared in 2008, vol. 2, by contrast, already in 2000: Peter Dinzelbacher, Hoch- und Spätmittelalter. Mit einem Beitrag von Daniel Krochmalnik (Paderborn etc.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000). Apart from the historical overview, he discusses the media of how faith was conveyed, the world of imagination, spiritualization of concrete, earthly space, spiritualization of time, sacred performance, sacred words, and spirituality of human beings. Krochmalnik examines Jewish spirituality at the same time.

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All articles were written independently, and ultimately the quality of the content was the authors’ individual responsibility. Of course, as the editor I have made my utmost effort to guide, to probe, to correct, to suggest, and to add information as much as possible, but overall I had to trust the contributors in having made their own best judgment in selecting the most important publications, editions, and reference works in their specific areas. Formally, I have tried to streamline every entry as much as possible, but absolute conformity could not be achieved because of the vast differences in individual contributors’ approaches, styles, and methods, and also because of the differences of the various disciplines. For instance, scholarly literature on the history of medieval law or on prosopography had to be dealt with in structural terms that are different than in the research fields of medieval Occitan or German Studies, for instance. In general, and it is worth repeating this to make it absolutely clear what the objectives were and what was realistic altogether, comprehensiveness or an exhaustive treatment of every aspect in the medieval world, has not been possible right from the start. Nevertheless, I hope that the present result offers at least an approximation of the overarching goal. Above all, we are providing important overviews of the history of research in a wide array of fields, stretching, for instance, from Byzantine architecture to German legal historiography, and beyond. Some disciplines proved to be just too demanding and too extensive, or no contributor could be found to meet the challenge, who had the time, or who was willing to volunteer for this massive enterprise. The field of medieval law would have required a whole cohort of experts, but I am pleased that at least one contributor deals with a broad overview of legal historiography, whereas another focuses on the history of German medieval law. The same can be stated for almost all other areas, so I must beg indulgence from the future readers of this Handbook. It can provide guidance only so far, yet the current result promises to establish a solid groundwork for the wide discipline of Medieval Studies. After all, whenever we begin to investigate any aspect of the Middle Ages, irrespective of the specific angle we might pursue, immediately a plethora of new perspectives, topics, texts, works, etc. opens up almost limitlessly. In a way I also beg the reader for his/her indulgence if a specific entry is missing because circumstances beyond my control made it impossible to cover everything to the extent desirable. Perhaps some of the shortcomings can be addressed and dealt with in a second edition or in a future volume with addenda. The deeper we analyze a topic, the more sub-genres, sub-fields, sub-categories etc. tend to emerge, and then require careful and detailed critical

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Introduction

treatment. That is, however, exactly one of the critical limits that could not be breached without excessive, highly time-consuming efforts to the detriment of all other contributions. I prefer to have at least published a fragmentary Handbook of Medieval Studies that covers the majority of fields, terms, genres, and key figures than none. The bibliographical information in the main body of the text in each entry is mostly provided in a truncated manner, though this should still allow the user to trace and find each individual reference in the library with ease. By contrast, the last section then offers the full information. The titles of book series and the volume numbers, however, have always been left out. For the large topics, it was not practical to force the contributors to follow a very stringent model, so there is a certain variety of structures applied. By contrast, the entries of figures follow by and large the same pattern. After a general introduction about the person’s significance comes his or her biography. The next section deals with the scholar’s publications, and the subsequent one focuses on the impact the scholar has had on his or her field. The entry concludes with a list of the scholar’s major publications, and with a short bibliography of the relevant reference works. There are mostly six categories for these biographical entries, but some authors have collapsed one or two for practical reasons. The entries on genres and terms pursue more of a chronological perspective, but the emphasis here rests, just as in the category of topics, on the internationality of research. Contributors were strongly encouraged to consider not only secondary literature published in English, but to take into account all (!) relevant material, whether in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. Everyone has linguistic limitations, of course, but I believe that the contributors have made good to excellent attempts to be as inclusive as possible. After all, Medieval Studies are an interdisciplinary discipline by default, and there is truly an international community of Medievalists, many of whom I have had the pleasure of getting involved in this Handbook. Having said all that, I have only left the pleasant task of expressing my great gratitude to many different individuals involved in this massive project. Without the numerous contributors this project would never have been possible, of course, but I am particularly thankful for the consistently high caliber of their work. I am very thankful to the University of Arizona Alumni Foundation for giving me a small grant to support me in my endeavors. I am grateful to my research assistant, Courtney Johnson, University of Arizona, for her help in the last stages, and I must also extend my thanks to the editorial staff at Walter de Gruyter in Berlin, especially Christine Henschel and Markus Polzer. Johanna Kershaw, Oriel College, Oxford University, provided excellent

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translations of some of the articles. My greatest gratitude, however, goes to Heiko Hartmann, erstwhile editorial director at de Gruyter, who had first conceived of this plan and approached me several years ago, proposing that I assume this daunting task. I hope that the present result will meet at least most of the expectations and more or less serve the needs of our discipline outlined above. Despite all my trepidations regarding the feasibility of editing such a massive reference work, I am firmly convinced of its usefulness and of the importance in charting a field that has grown so vigorously from the late 18th century to the early 21st century, that is, today. The fact that such a reference work still can be published by a major academic press indicates clearly what I indicated at the beginning and what I will continue to examine in the introductory survey article. Despite many challenges of linguistic, institutional, administrative, financial, and even political nature, Medieval Studies are doing very well both in the academy and outside, and they continue to provide a major framework of learning and a source of inspiration for anyone interested in Western civilization and the related cultures. Of course, we would not be what we are today without the Middle Ages, and any modern university that claims to live up to minimal standards of current academics, especially in the Humanities, will have to acknowledge first and above all the fundamental significance of Medieval Studies both for teaching and research. Hence I would like to salute my own academic home, The University of Arizona, for providing me with some financial support and free time, including a one-semester sabbatical, to accomplish the goal of preparing such an extensive reference work. However, I need to emphasize as well that I basically worked without any staff and only very little supplemental financial support. Fortunately, many colleagues who contributed to this project were so gracious to alert me to problems or to provide additional information, but the ultimate responsibility for the entire Handbook rests on me, of course. If the long-term editing process has taught me anything, it is the absolute need to work in an interdisciplinary fashion in Medieval Studies. In this sense, as I believe, this field sets a standard for many other disciplines. Almost ironically, Medieval Studies have much to offer for the future of the academy.8 Presentism, as Kathleen Biddick called this phenomenon, deeply

8 I would like to express my gratitude to Pieters Maennerts (Research Foundation–Flanders / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), for valuable last minute input. My thanks also go out to many other colleagues whose names are mentioned in the final footnote to my “Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies” article.

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impacts all our research of the Middle Ages. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas offer the following observation: “Presentism dominates over preterism, its opposite, in our relations with the medieval period, because we are capable of identifying the Middle Ages more as a mirror than as a mirage. Presentism brings us closer to the period studied, no matter how distant it may be, but it undoubtedly also has the possibly perverse effect of anachronistically applying the parameters of present culture in analysing it.”9 Of course, we have all vested interests, and our modern concerns in a way always direct and influence our investigation of the past. Nevertheless, Medieval Studies represent truly interdisciplinary approaches and have demonstrated over decades and centuries the degree to which sound philological, historical, art-historical, socio-economic and other research methods can yield highly significant and trustworthy results. The present Handbook strives to provide a comprehensive overview of this long-term struggle, and as much as we are dwarfs standing on the shoulder of giants, we hope one day to offer the necessary support for future generations to look further and deeper than we have been able to do today. Finally, I have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in covering all the major topics, terms, genres, and figures relevant for our field. But the reader will certainly notice some lacunae, basically unavoidable and painful in the case of an encyclopedic reference work like this Handbook. But overall, I believe, most important topics are represented here, and if not, then there were painstaking and also difficult circumstances beyond my control.

9 Rewriting the Middle Ages, 11. See also Katheleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 83; William H. Dray, “Some Varieties of Presentism,” id., On History and Philosophers of History, Philosophy of History and Culture, 2 (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1989), 164–89; Matthew Davidson, “Presentism and the Non-Present,” Philosophical Studies 113.1 (2003): 77–92; Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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Survey of Fundamental Reference Works in Medieval Studies Albrecht Classen1

We can only concur with Joseph R. Strayer’s assessment from 1982 that “Interest in the Middle Ages has grown tremendously in the last halfcentury” (ix), and we would have to add nothing but that this growth has amazingly proliferated since then, now more than a quarter of a century later. This growth has occurred both in quantitative and also in qualitative terms, considering the impressive extent of topics covered by medievalists today, as richly documented by major and minor conferences, symposia, and workshops all over the world, such as at the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, or at the University of Leeds, the University of Cologne, the Centro di Studi sull’alto medioevo of Spoleto, etc. The sheer output of academic and non-academic books on the Middle Ages is truly staggering, and the range of topics dealt with seems almost endless, whether we think of political history, literary history, history of fashion, architecture, music, history of technology, everyday life, religion, philosophy, the relationship between man and animals or man and nature, travel, transportation, communication, the experience of death, sickness, birth, love, marriage, money, spirituality, or heresy. Whereas, in previous decades, scholarship tended to focus on Western Europe primarily, today we have learned to recognize the tremendous influence from many different cultures and the impact of the contacts between the Christian and the Muslim world, not to forget the vast and deeply learned Jewish culture within the heartland of medieval Europe. As Strayer emphasizes, “it has become impossible to ignore the Byzantine, Jewish, and Muslim contributions. They were the sources from which Western Europe drew its material and intellectual luxuries – silks and spices, algebra and astronomy – and even an undergraduate finds 1 In deliberate contrast to all the entries in this Handbook of Medieval Studies, this introduction always provides the full bibliographical information, which explains the appearance of a regular apparatus with footnotes in the traditional format.

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himself confronted by references to the scholars and techniques of these civilizations.”2 Whether the chronological demarcation of the Middle Ages still should be, for its beginning phase, at ca. 500 and, for its waning, or autumn, to borrow Johan Huizinga’s term, around 1500 C.E., respectively, might be questioned today. After all, we have learned even more than had former generations of scholars to recognize the important continuation of countless traditions from the world of antiquity to the early Middle Ages, and also from the 15th century to the world of the Reformation and the Renaissance, if not beyond. But this is a matter of recent explorations once again and should not necessarily concern a Handbook of Medieval Studies that is trying to take stock of what we know about that period today from various perspectives. Nevertheless, this should be kept in mind for many of the entries in this Handbook because literary, philosophical, economic, artistic, and religious traditions continued certainly far beyond the somewhat artificial milestone of 1500, and indeed throughout the entire Ancien Régime until 1789 (in France) or 1917 (in Russia), such as in the case of the Mirror of Princes, a highly popular didactic genre instructing rulers about how to govern and how to live an honorable, virtuous life that continued to be written and to be published far into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The enormous quantity of facts and data determining that past world is so huge, indeed, that only an encyclopedia might really accomplish the task of summarizing all relevant information, for individual scholars can no longer hope to deal with the entire universe of the medieval world all by themselves. But facts alone do not tell the whole story, and they can be rather deceiving in that we have learned just too many times how much so-called “facts” were primarily the product of imagination, wishful thinking, or simply of an ideological program. Moreover, scholars have always been victim to the selective nature of the surviving evidence, regularly produced by the winners of history, the dominant class or social group, and many times by male scribes and artists to the disadvantage of their female counterparts or minority groups within their society. The number of pertinent chronicles is legion, and they are what they are, that is, attempts by individuals to come to terms with their own past as they perceived it, some injecting a strong dose of subjectivity, others striving for as much objectivity as possible. Chronicles

2 Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), ix. It consists of 13 vols., the last vol. and the index having appeared in 1989. An important supplement volume followed in 2004, see below.

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are texts in the first case, and hence subject to some of the same limitations as many literary texts.3 The only reasonable approach to Medieval Studies can be, to state the obvious, a critical one, informed both by traditional and contemporary theoretical concepts, methodologies, and interpretive tools. We have to be critical with regard to the sources, to the proper evaluation, and to our full understanding of their meaning, an approach that already characterized the high point of the Middle Ages when rationality entered the philosophical discourse during the 12th century.4 This critical approach, however, has ever been subject to ideological influences, interpretations, and even subjective interests/agendas. Schools of thought have regularly formed and dominated intellectual life. Academia is not an institution free of value systems and programmatic principles. Of course, here I am preaching to the converted, but all this still needs to be observed and reviewed, nevertheless. Medieval libraries are filled with falsifications, and individuals and political parties even then tried their hardest to undermine their opponents’ position, esteem, authority, and power, or simply to hold on to their own property, whether properly acquired or ill secured.5 Poets competed against each other, and so did artists and composers. Scholars, theologians, medical doctors, teachers, and architects argued and polemicized hard and bitterly, which also determined the sources we have left about and from them. Our modern attempts to gain some kind of understanding requires a careful balancing of how we evaluate the documents, always keeping in mind that they represent subjective perspectives.6

3 Graeme Dunphy is currently editing a comprehensive encyclopedia on this genre, Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 4 Edward Grant, Good and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5 Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France. The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16.–19. September 1986, Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 33 (Hanover: Hahn’sche Buchhandlung, 1988–1990). 6 A great example for the excellent results that we can achieve if we consider as many different voices within one discourse, especially in the field of religious competitions since late antiquity when the bitter conflicts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims really began, now proves to be Alexandra Cuffel’s superior and well researched Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), see my review in Mediaevistik, forthcoming.

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Again, all that would not need to be stated here once again, yet it sheds important light on the ever-present necessity to evaluate where we stand today vis-à-vis the sources and the various interpretations. Neither a lexicon nor a dictionary, let alone an encyclopedia with its much more ambitious scope, normally reflects such problems. Only occasionally do we observe more specific attempts to outline the history of research, although that history informs us as much about the past as the actual sources and documents. Considering the absolutely overwhelming amount of information available today about almost any aspect of medieval life in material and intellectual/ spiritual terms, we need both an encyclopedic approach and a critical approach. The primary purpose of this Handbook of Medieval Studies, which I will illuminate in greater detail below, consists of offering such critical overviews, which will lay the foundations for future research considering that the readers will be able to learn of the major stepping stones in each respective field, avoiding the often observable dilemma of reinventing the wheel when we investigate specific aspects in medieval history, language, culture, literature, technology, economics, and agriculture. To aim for the goal of grasping the whole medieval universe, that is, to try to be a ‘Renaissance man,’ an ‘uomo universale,’ with regard to the Middle Ages, would amount to hubris in light of some 1000 years of medieval history, more than three dozen of distinctly spoken languages, and a huge geographical expanse and cultural and ethnic diversity determining medieval Europe. Just as in so many other fields of academic investigations, the more we know today about the medieval world, the more we have also to realize how limited this very knowledge truly is because it has grown almost exponentially, both horizontally and vertically over the last two hundred years.7 Interdisciplinarity proves to be a conditio sine qua non for modern Medieval Studies, whether we deal with the experience of love, death, friendship, fear, God, or natural disasters and catastrophes. Violence, hatred, contempt or fear of the other, persecutions of minorities, or wars against enemies often find their explanations in fundamental concepts common among all people. 7 Surprisingly, just such an attempt was made by Karl Bertau, Schrift–Macht–Heiligkeit in den Literaturen des jüdisch-christlich-muslimischen Mittelalters, ed. Sonja Glauch (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005); for some critical comments, see my review in Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 42, 1 (2007): 155–59. Basically, Bertau draws most of his information from the Lexikon des Mittelalters and tries to establish global intercultural links without a thorough grounding in most of the cultures, languages, and documents dealt with. Hence, the number of problems of his approach is legion, unfortunately.

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Since the early Middle Ages, for instance, if not considerably earlier, the representatives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam fought against each other drawing from deep-seated and commonly shared feelings of disgust of bodily effluents, especially blood and the excrements. The polemics launched against each other were surprisingly similar and indicate that Christians knew fairly well what Jewish thinkers argued, and vice versa, and the same applies to the Muslims and their religious counterparts.8 Simply put, the more complex the image that we can sketch of the medieval world or parts of it becomes, the more accurate it actually emerges, even though the vast diversity of aspects pertaining to any of those huge topics threatens to make us not to see the forest for just too many trees. Strayer and his colleagues aimed at North American high school and college students, and scholars, which represents a considerable challenge concerning how to design the individual articles, offering solid and in-depth information, yet without overpowering the individual readers who obviously would have very different backgrounds, interests, and abilities. Strayer noted, however, that the Dictionary would provide “definitions and explanations of medieval terms and ideas that arise in their reading. Those at the university level will find further information on the people, events, and concepts of the Middle Ages. Finally, there is the specialist, and every medievalist is a student throughout his career, for the deeper digs, the wider the gaps. By combining previously fragmented areas of Medieval Studies, the Dictionary enables the scholars and others to survey the field quickly, offering them a singular means of coordinating the various branches of medieval scholarship into an accessible and coherent whole” (x). The problems with this three-pronged approach are self-evident and have often been pointed out by critics who find this Dictionary at times too superficial and simplistic, and particularly too much focused on the English Midlands, Normandy, or the Île de France, neglecting, above all, social-historical, mental-historical, and spiritual-religious aspects, as William Chester Jordan commented in the “Preface” to a supplement volume from 2004 edited by himself.9 This additional volume laudably tries to address many of 8 See the excellent study by Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. The author impressively commands all the relevant languages and displays an amazing knowledge of the specific sources in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, not to mention various medieval vernacular languages. Cf. now John Sewell, ‘The Son Rebelled’, Laughter in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, forthcoming. 9 Dictionary of the Middle Ages: Supplement, 1, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York, Detroit, San Diego, et al.: Thomson Gale, 2004), vii.

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the concerns that had been voiced regarding the original conceptual design of the Dictionary, adding many new perspectives, themes, topics, and subject matters relevant for the Middle Ages that have surfaced in the scholarly investigations during the last decades and continued to evolve in the international academic discourse as significant for our full comprehension of that past world. Most noteworthy might be the articles on “Medievalism” and on “race,” which suggest some new approaches scholarship has pursued in the recent decades. After all, our field is in constant flux, reflecting new methodologies, concepts, theoretical approaches, and perceptions. In fact, this supplement volume impressively indicates the vibrancy and innovative character of Medieval Studies at large, whether we think of minority groups, poverty, intra-religious exchanges, the history of mentality, the history of everyday life, or the history of emotions. But despite all those attempts to internationalize and to open up our field to the widest possible range of research topics, we continue to be severely hampered by linguistic challenges, a lack of communication, and access to the primary sources, not to mention the disciplinary boundaries that limit us excessively to very narrow and specific research agendas, as if medieval poets or chroniclers, for instance, had pursued a similarly narrow viewpoint as we do today. To put it bluntly, taking into account an extreme situation, medieval scholarship published in the Far East, whether China, Japan, or Korea, normally remains inaccessible to European scholars, and vice versa. But we do not have to go so far as to realize how limited we all are because most medievalists outside of the following areas are not particularly, or not at all, versed in Scandinavian, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, or Gaelic, to mention just a few languages. Major contributions to Medieval Studies have been produced by Russian or Polish colleagues, but there does not seem to be a good linguistic bridge to Western languages, unless we can rely on a translation into any of the major languages spoken in the West (and always the other way around as well). Sadly, this linguistic limitation also emerges even within Western Europe, if we think of the many Anglophone, Francophone, or Iberophone scholars who cannot read German, Danish, Flemish, Czech, or even Italian, and vice versa. And there are many more languages that we ought to understand in order to do justice to the actual needs and demands of our academic discipline. I like to think that Latin continues to be a lingua franca, at least among the experts, though we do not speak it anymore, except, perhaps, in the Vatican, among Latin teachers, and Neo-Latin scholars. At least a certain degree of reading ability common among us all still might be the norm, irrespective

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of the specialized field within Medieval Studies. By the same token, what languages were known among medieval and early-modern poets? Most of them could probably not understand more than one or two languages other than their mother tongue, although exceptions must also have existed, particularly among poets, travelers, and artists. After all, as we increasingly begin to fathom, there was, for example, a steady stream of Indian, Persian, and Arabic literature into medieval Europe, as a considerable corpus of late-medieval verse or prose narratives indicates (e.g., Barlaam and Josaphat).10 Many translators were involved, however, even then, which ultimately made the international transfer of literary themes and motifs possible, and this probably on a much broader basis than has been previously assumed, though many details still escape us because Western medievalists do not know the complimentary material produced in the east, and vice versa. How could we expect, for instance, a 15th-century scholar working on Dutch or Slavic literature to know anything about Persian or Indian literature transmitted through many different channels and languages? In other words, there remains much work to be done, though on a more comparative and interdisciplinary level than ever before. And, to return to the issue of Latin, we must strive to reinvigorate the modern study of this lingua franca commonly used in the Middle Ages by the political elite, the Church, and the administration. Otherwise, despite the best efforts at making medieval texts available to modern readers through translations, the access to the vast depository of medieval documents will be in danger.11 The editors of the famous German Lexikon des Mittelalters, with the first fascicle of the first volume having appeared in 1977, the ninth, and last volume in 1998, aimed specifically at the scholar and intend to provide detailed and in-depth information about history, culture, and everyday life (‘lifestyles’ in their words) of the entire medieval world on the basis of written

10 Albrecht Classen, “Kulturelle und religiöse Kontakte zwischen dem christlichen Europa und dem buddhistischen Indien während des Mittelalters: Rudolfs von Ems’ Barlaam und Josaphat im europäischen Kontext,” Fabula 41, 3/4 (2000): 203–28. See also Sabine Obermaier, Das Fabelbuch als Rahmenerzählung: Intertextualität und Intratextualität als Wege zur Interpretation des Buchs der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr, Beihefte zum Euphorion, 48 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). 11 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Supplement 1, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York, Detroit, et al.: Thomson Learning, 2004), 383–89; especially 388.

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documents and visual objects.12 They realized, of course, as many other editors before them, that the spectrum of our current understanding of the Middle Ages has expanded so much that no individual scholar would be in a position any longer to gain a more or less complete overview and understanding of that world and culture. Most impressively, the Lexikon offers erudite articles about a seemingly inexhaustible range of topics, themes, ideas, people, works, and objects from the Middle Ages.13 But this Lexikon also intends to reach out to a general readership, which necessarily forced a (too) clean separation of the actual presentation of the topic covered in each entry and the relevant research literature (X).14 Moreover, the editors were faced with the difficult decision: how to limit the range of aspects because there might not be an end in sight. Consequently, they decided not to exclude any particular area, “da das der Überzeugung, ein Gesamtbild der mittelalterlichen Epoche könne nur unter Einschluß aller uns überlieferten Erscheinungsformen mittelalterlichen Lebens vermittelt werden, widersprochen hätte” (XI; because this would have contradicted the conviction that a comprehensive picture of the medieval period could be conveyed only if all forms of medieval life that have survived until today would be included). This challenge, however, could not be met for the countless numbers of medieval art works, which are therefore dealt with more collectively in a type of topography of art (“Kunsttopographie”). Mindful of these complex parameters, the Lexikon deliberately takes into account also those worlds and cultures located at the margin of the European Latin world, including the Byzantine Empire, the Arabic-Islamic kingdoms, and the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, the editors underscore that the history of medieval Jewry represents an integral aspect of medieval European history at large, irrespective of, or rather also because of, countless pogroms, persecutions, and expulsions (XI), that sometimes blind us to the intensive cohabitation and collaboration of both religious groups in everyday-life situations,

12 Lexikon des Mittelalters, 9 vols. (Munich and Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1980–1998), a separate volume with the index appeared in 1999. By now it already seems high time to produce an updated, revised, and expanded edition because Medieval Studies make such rapid progress. 13 However, there are inexplicable gaps, such as the absence of a lemma on the Inquisition or on chess. 14 When one resorts to the digital version of the Lexikon, available on a CD-ROM, the bibliography appears in a separate window only after one has clicked on the respective button, which visually distances the text even further from the critical apparatus.

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in scholarship, and medicine. Insofar as many medieval Europeans sought contacts with distant lands, including Mongolia, China, the Philippines, and India, relevant entries have been added to this Lexikon. As to the chronological framework, the editors defined as their historical period the time between 300 and 1500 C.E., meaning that late antiquity and then also the period until the end of the 15th century are considered here as well. The editors do not deny that the Middle Ages continued to hold sway well after 1500, actually extending even to the 18th century in some specific areas, but the turn from the 15th to the 16th century actually represents a decisive turning point in history that would allow us to determine the end of the Middle Ages from many viewpoints (XII). The cultural-historical lexicon for the Nordic Middle Ages, Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid (CulturalHistorical Lexicon for the Nordic Middle Ages, from the Time of the Vikings to the Age of the Protestant Reformation), first published between 1956 and 1978, with a second (identical) edition in 1980, also needs to be considered here as a major reference work.15 Each article provides in-depth information about a wide range of topics, including religion, law, agriculture, crafts, literature, social conditions, architecture, painting, sculpture, nutrition, cooking, etc., accompanied by excellent bibliographies. The editors have made every effort to meet their own theoretical goal of truly addressing cultural history in the Middle Ages, whether the respective articles deal with “Arbeidsfest” (workers’ holidays), “Bergsprivilegier” (mining privileges), “Biskop” (Bishop), or “Vindue” (window), “Vinhandel” (wine trade), or literary topics such as Volsunga saga. There are no lemmata on historical persons/characters, however. Appropriate for the targeted audiences, the articles are written in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. It would have been helpful, however, if at least the entry titles had been translated into English or German. Those unfamiliar with any of the Scandinavian languages, can now turn to a newer one-volume encyclopedia dealing with that world, Medieval Scandinavia, ed. by Phillip Pulsiano, who extended the time frame a bit further into the past, beginning roughly with the Migration Period, but ending likewise with the time of the Protestant Reformation. The range of themes is considerably broader, at least far beyond ‘cultural history’ per se, and includes such aspects as “Cosmography,” “Eddic Poetry,” “Graves,”

15 Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, ed. by a whole gremium of scholars from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. 2nd ed. 20 vols., with one supplement vol. and one vol. for the register (1956–1978; Viborg, Denmark: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1980–1982).

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“Homilies,” “Land Tenure and Inheritance,” “Outlawry,” “Reliquaries,” and “Saints’ Lives.” Although addressing a wider audience, each article is appropriately accompanied by a solid bibliography, avoiding the usual shortcoming of Anglophone publications to include only English titles for an English-reading group of users of this type of reference work.16 Slavic scholarship has also produced an excellent reference work for the Middle Ages, particularly the comprehensive Lexicon Antiquitatum Slavicarum: Summarium Historiae Cultus Humanitatis Slavorum, published in Polish.17 Scholars in neighboring countries have, of course, made many attempts to come to terms with the Middle Ages in their own areas, see, for example, A Handbook for Slavic Studies, ed. by Leonid Ivan Strakhovsky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), which is, however, not at all limited to the Middle Ages.18 See also Slovar’ srednevekovoi kul’tury, ed. Aron Akovlevich Gurevich; M. Andreev, Summa culturologiae. 2nd ed. (2003; Moscow: Rosspen, 2007); and Derzhava Riurikovichei: slaviane, Rus, Rossiia: entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ v shesti tomakh, ed. V(ladimir). V(olfovich). Boguslavskii, 6 vols. (Tula: Russkii leksikon, 1994–).19 Similarly as the Nordic cultural history, Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, especially in the Lexicon Antiquitatum Slavicarum the following topics are covered: culture, social and economic conditions, literature, linguistics, archeology, anthropology, art, religion, politics, and historical events of the Slavic peoples from their origin to the end of the 12th century. The contributors do not only deal with the cultures

16 Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano, co-ed. Kirsten Wolf (New York and London: Garland, 1993). 17 Słownik starorytno ´sci słowianskich: ´ Encyklopedyczny zarys kultury Słowian od czasów najdawniejszych, ed. Władysław Kowalenko, Gerard Labuda, and Tadeusz Lehr-Spławi nski ´ (with changing editors), 8 vols. (vol. 8 ed. by Antoni G‰siorowski, Gerard Labuda, and Andrzej We˛ dzki), Institutum Scientiae Rerum Slavicarum Academiae Scientiarum Polonae (Wrocław, Warsaw, and Cracow: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolinskich-Wydawnictwo ´ Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1961–1996). 18 See also Georgij Petrovic Fedotov, The Middle Ages: The 13th to the 15th Centuries, ed. John Meyendorff, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 19 Cf. Kirilo-metodievska entsiklopediia v tri toma, ed. Boniu Angelov, Petur Nikolov Dinekov, Dimitur Simeonov Angelov, and Liliana Grasheva, 4. vols. (Sofiia: Izd-vo na Bulgarska akademiia na naukite, 1985–2003); Sima M Cirkovic, Leksikon srpskog srednjeg veka = The Lexicon of Serbian Middle Ages (Beograd: Knowledge, 1999). I have not been able to examine all these reference works through autopsy.

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and histories of the Slavs, but also with those of peoples in contact or in neighborhood with them. Moreover, we find countless entries on locations, figures, objects, rituals, performances, texts, art works, music instruments, epitaphs and inscriptions, foodstuff, countries, tribes, territories, and archeological finds. Occasionally there are also larger topics covered, such as monastic movements, charters, the church, feudalism, trade (including with slaves), and many others. The initial goal had been to publish two volumes only, which determined the usual length of entries, but since the Lexicon then grew to eight volumes, the articles accordingly increasingly gained in length and depth. They are accompanied by most useful bibliographies. There are numerous illustrations, tables, and maps. Other attempts to update this Slavic Lexicon and to produce an equivalent in German, for instance, failed, see, for example, Enzyklopädie zur Frühgeschichte Europas, ed. Joachim Herrmann and Gerard Labuda (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980), of which only a sample fascicle appeared. See also Enzyklopädie zur Geschichte des östlichen Europas (6.–13. Jahrhundert), ed. Christian Lübke and Andrzej Wêdzki (Greifswald: n.p., 1998; only the letter ‘A’ was covered).20 But we have now Siegfried Tornow’s Was ist Osteuropa? Handbuch der osteuropäischen Text- und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat. Slavistische Studienbücher, Neue Folge, 16 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005). The author deals with the Slavic world from prehistory to the present, focuses on the languages in Eastern Europe, the expanding influence of Christian missionaries, the emergence of sacred languages and scripts, education and culture, and the various text genres used in Eastern Europe. Above all, he covers the history of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, in the age of Humanism, and the Protestant Reformation, in the Baroque, Enlightenment, the 19th, and in the 20th century. The extensive and international bibliography provides an excellent research tool. A most important reference work of recent date proves to be Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens, ed. Günther Hödl and Lojze Wieser, together with Feliks J. Bister et al. (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 1999–); vol. 18: Selbstbild und Fremdbilder der Völker des europäischen Ostens (Image of Self and Images of Foreigners by the Peoples in the European East), ed. Karl Kaser and Martin Prochazka, section 3: Dokumente-Abteilung (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2006). See also vol. 10: Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens, ed. Milosˇ Okuka with Gerald Krenn (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2002). I have not been able to autopsy this new reference work, but it promises to emerge as a 20 See also Maciej Gotwski, Komizm w polskiej sztuce gotyckiej (Warsaw: Panstwowe ´ Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1973).

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most significant data base for all studies focused on Eastern Europe in many different fields, from the Middle Ages until today.21 Although the major historical lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe does not limit itself at all to the Middle Ages, it still contains a wealth of relevant articles, whether we turn to the topic “Bauer” (farmer), “Bildung” (education), “Christentum” (Christianity), “Monarchie” (monarchy), “Natur” (Natur), or “Politik” (politics).22 If we use the entry for “Zivilisation, Kultur” (civilization, culture) as an example, we can quickly gain an idea how this monumental reference work is structured and where its true value lies, and this also for Medieval Studies. The author of this article, Jörg Fisch, begins with a global discussion of culture, then turns to ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, whereas the term ‘civilization’ was unknown in those times. Instead, it emerged, first exclusively in its Latin form, only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, in the wake of Humanism, and then was translated into the various vernaculars. Subsequently, Fisch takes his readers to the history of culture in the following centuries.23 Although the subtitle of this huge lexicon focuses on “political-social” language in Germany, the contributors regularly take all of European intellectual history into view, which is particularly prevalent in the period of the Middle Ages, and so is regularly covered here as well. In this context we need to refer to another fundamental reference work that is unfortunately much too little known outside of the Germanophone world despite its extraordinary scholarly value: the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Handbook of the German Legal History). Initiated by the famous Germanist Wolfgang Stammler in 1960, this Handbook was edited by him and the legal historians Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann until Stammler’s death in 1965. Vol. 5, edited by Erler (deceased), Kaufmann, Dieter Werkmüller, and Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, appeared in 1998. Although the emphasis rests on the Germanic aspects of legal history, particularly Roman Law and most neighboring laws have also been consulted. The historical time frame is not at all limited to the Middle Ages, in fact it extends down to the late 20th century, but medievalists will still be 21 I would like to thank Jerzy Strzelczyk, Instytut Historii, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Poznan, ´ Poland, for his help in identifying and understanding these important publications. 22 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–1999). 23 Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, 1992, 679–774.

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exceedingly well served by this reference work. Each article is composed by an individual contributor, each followed by a solid bibliography.24 A second, completely revised edition is currently in progress, ed. by Albrecht Cordes, Heiner Lück, and Dieter Werkmüller (2004–). The most erudite and comprehensive reference work for medieval German literature proves to be the famous Verfasserlexikon, also founded and published by Wolfgang Stammler,25 and completely revised and expanded in the second edition under the leadership of Kurt Ruh, together with Gundolf Keil, Werner Schröder, Burghart Wachinger, and Franz Josef Worstbrock. Here the complete corpus of texts written by authors in the German Middle Ages, along with a considerable selection of authors writing in Latin, is dealt with most comprehensively. Stammler had already set the tone when he insisted on incorporating also authors of historical, philosophical, theological, legal, medical, and scientific texts and treatises.26 The editors additionally included writers from antiquity and the Middle Ages who exerted considerable influence on German literature, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Boethius, Bonaventura, etc. Similarly, Middle Dutch authors, insofar as their impact was noticeable in medieval German literature, were also included. The editors, closely following Stammler’s guidelines, tentatively drew a line at ca. 1480 for Latin literature when humanism developed more strongly, but the major historical date really serving as a milepost was the government of Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519). Many text traditions, such as the late-medieval drama, continued well into the 16th century. The most important editorial decision for this Verfasserlexikon consists in the inclusion of the manuscript tradition with exact call numbers and references to the locations where the manuscripts are housed. Furthermore, we are informed about critical editions, interpretations, and bibliographical and historical studies pertinent for each topic, author, genre, text, etc. As in the case of virtually all encyclopedic enterprises, once a dictionary or lexicon has been completed, supplemented volumes become necessary, and this was the case with the Verfasserlexikon as well.27 There is no doubt that future ex24 Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann, co-founded by Wolfgang Stammler. Vol. 5 ed. Adalbert Erler (†), Ekkehard Kaufmann, and Dieter Werkmüller, with the philological assistance of Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, 5 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971–1998). 25 Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, 5 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1933–1955). 26 Vol. 1, “Vorrede,” V–VII; here V. 27 See also the supplement to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, cf. above.

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pansions of the general scope of texts to be covered here, new discoveries, new critical editions, and interpretations, hence new perspectives and realizations will one day require a third edition.28 Medieval French literature is also treated rather comprehensively in the Dizionario critico della letteratura francese, ed. by Franco Simone, but this work comprises the entire history of French literature.29 Of more interest to the medievalist is the excellent volume on Le Moyen Age, edited by Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage, in the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises/Le Moyen Age, substantially updated since the 1960s under the editorship of Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink.30 It mirrors, in many ways, though still limited by size, the Verfasserlexikon; it also offers qualified articles on related subjects, such as “Courtoisie,” “Musique au Moyen Âge,” or “Troubadours,” and many more. See also Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, ed. Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, and Alain Rey, 3 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1984). The same constraints apply to the Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana,31 containing, overall, good entries, along with bibliographies. In fact, there is a plethora of similar dictionaries for Spanish, English, or Portuguese, for instance, but I believe that in terms of scholarly breadth, depth, and fundamental research presented, not to for-

28 Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd, completely new ed. by Kurt Ruh, together with Gundolf Keil, Werner Schröder, Burghart Wachinger, and Franz Josef Worstbrock, 10 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–1996; supplement fascicles 1–5 as vol. 11: 2000–2004; Handschriftenregister (Register of Manuscripts), ed. Christine Stöllinger-Löser, vol. 12: 2006; Register der Drucke. Sonstige Textzeugen, Initien: vol. 13: 2007). 29 Dizionario critico della letteratura francese, ed. Franco Simone, 2 vols. (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1972); see also The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 30 Dictionnaire des lettres françaises, ed. Georges Grente. Ed. entièrement rev. et mise à jour sous la direction de Geneviève Hasenohr et Michel Zink (1951; Paris: Fayard 1992). The volume on Le Moyen Age appeared in 1964. See also the useful Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvard, Alain de Libera, and Michel Zink, Série “Quadrige” 386 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). It contains 1790 truly relevant entries on concepts and practices/customs such as “intuition,” “cénobitisme,” “courtoisie,” “cuisine,” “dot,” “encyclopédisme,” “lois somptuaires,” “pauvreté,” “peinture,” “regalia”, etc., as well as on people, places, movements, and events in Europe and the Middle East in the fields of history, literature, art history, law, philosophy, etc. I would like to express my gratitude to Nadia Margolis, Mount Holyoke, for pointing out this dictionary to me. 31 Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana, ed. Giuseppe Petronio, 6 vols. (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli; Rome: Unione Editoriale, 1966–1970).

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get the clarity of presentation, the Verfasserlexikon certainly serves as an ideal model for the study of any other language and culture in medieval Europe.32 A major attempt to address this desideratum was made by Hans Robert Jauss and Erich Köhler when they launched the book series “Grundriss der romanischen Literatur des Mittelalters” in 1972, which is incomplete until today. It was supposed to replace the book series “Grundriss der romanischen Literatur des Mittelalters,” ed. by Gustav Gröber (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1897–1906), and has, indeed, accomplished much, though the project has been riddled by many technical problems that make it rather cumbersome and difficult to utilize it easily and efficiently. Vol. 1, Généralités, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1972), outlines the overarching plan. Following this overview, vol. 2 covers lyrical genres; vol. 3: the epic romances; vol. 4: courtly romances; vol. 5: short verse narratives; vol. 6: didactic, allegorical, and satirical literature; vol. 7: the age of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch; vol. 8: 14th- and 15th-century French literature; vol. 9: 14th- and 15th-century Spanish literature; vol. 10: 14th- and 15th-century Italian literature; vol. 11: historiographical literature from the origin to 1500; vol. 12: medieval theater; and vol. 13: a synthesis, chronology, and index. Each volume consists of individual articles composed by experts in the specific fields, writing in the various Romance languages. One of the most comprehensive reference works for the history of literature both on a global level, but then also, specifically, focusing on the Middle Ages, was the “Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft,” ed. Oskar Walzel, the first volume of which focused on Die altgermanische Dichtung, by Andreas Heusler (Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1926). Of course, the passing of time required the publication of a completely new handbook, which was edited by Klaus von See, beginning with a volume on Altorientalische Literatur by Wolfgang Röllig (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1978). Von See edited the volume on Europäisches Frühmittelalter. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, 6 (1985), followed by Henning Krauss, who edited Europäisches Hochmittelalter (vol. 7, 1981), and by Willi Erzgräber, who edited Europäisches Spätmittelalter 32 There are, of course, massive biographical dictionaries for almost all European countries, see, for instance, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti, 70 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960–2004), but they are not specifically geared for medievalists, though they are often also most helpful for them. For space limitations, I abstain from listing some of the major reference works; by the same token, I will not examine the many excellent dictionaries for medieval languages here.

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(vol. 8, 1978). The highly interdisciplinary character of these volumes deserves to be praised, and to elucidate it following I will outline briefly the topics covered in the last volume as an example: European literature in its political, social, and religious context (Willi Erzgräber); Dante and the Italian literature of his time (August Buck); late-medieval German epic narratives (Kurt Ruh); short verse narratives (Oskar Roth); English secular romances (Dieter Mehl); Langland, Gower, and Chaucer (Erzgräber); literature composed by representatives of the Teutonic Knights (Hans-Georg Richert); English saints’ legends (Theodor Wolpers); German lyric poetry (Alfred Karnein); medieval popular ballads in the Germanic context (Ernst Erich Metzner), French lyric poetry from Gauillaume de Machaut to Jean Marot (Klaus Heitmann); Middle English secular poetry (Wolpers); etc.33 But one of the most comprehensive, and still ongoing project focusing on world literature, including the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, must be mentioned as well, the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” which began with a volume on The American Renaissance in New England, ed. Joel Myerson (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1978), and most recently issued a volume on Castilian Writers, 1200–1400, ed. George D. Greenia and Frank A. Domínguez (2008). Here each author and/or text finds philologically and critically sound treatment, beginning with a survey of the manuscript tradition, followed by a bibliography of the translation/s and edition/s, then by a full discussion of the content and/or significance of the author, and concluding with a list of references of secondary studies. Numerous illustrations of manuscripts, statues, paintings, etc. accompany the individual articles.34 Certainly a huge field of research, medieval Latin literature and its dissemination and reception throughout the subsequent centuries until today are remarkably well covered by Spazio letterario del medioevo.35 But the reader

33 There are, of course, many multi-volume literary histories in other languages, see, for a rather obscure example, Otto Maria Carpeaux, História da literatura ocidental, 8 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: O Cruzeiro, 1959–1966). 34 Another example would be: German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages: 1170–1280, ed. James Hardin and Will Hasty, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 138 (Detroit, Washington, DC, and London: Gale Research, 1994). 35 Spazio letterario del medioevo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Claudio Leonardi, Enrico Menestò, Piero Boitani, Mario Mancini, and Alberto Vàrvaro, 5 vols. (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1992–1998). Vol. I covers the broad topic of text production; vol. II focuses on the dissemination of texts; vol. III deals with the reception of texts (history of reception); vol. IV is concerned with the modern perception of the Middle Ages from Humanism to Romanticism, Realism, and the modern

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faces the problem of little transparency insofar as s/he has to plough through a massive amount of information displayed in lengthy narratives that do not necessarily make it easy to identify and comprehend the crucial information. Nevertheless, the critical discussion of the specific authors, texts, and aspects in general is soundly based on the relevant research literature, coupled with solid references to the important manuscripts. Some of the major medieval authors have also been dealt with in encyclopedic fashion, such as Dante, see the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard H. Lansing and Teodolinda Barolini (New York and London: Garland, 2000), or Geoffrey Chaucer (see All Things Chaucer: An Encyclopedia of Chaucer’s Works, ed. Shannon L. Rogers [Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2007]). The world of King Arthur in its countless literary, artistic, and also cinematographic manifestations is impressively covered by The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 931 (1986; New York and London: Garland, 1996). Francis G. Gentry, Winder McConnell, Ulrich Müller, and Werner Wunderlich edited a comparable reference work for the most important Middle High German epic poem, the Nibelungenlied, The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Similar publications exist also for many other genres, topics, and writers, but for our purpose suffice this short list. The enormous interest in the Middle Ages among the academic and nonacademic audience in the modern world also finds expression in smaller, more pragmatic reference works, such as Joseph Dahmus’s Dictionary of

time, including film, theater, television, opera, and the arts. Vol. V contains an extensive chronological overview (with specific data), and a bibliography of medieval Latin literature using a chronological system, concluding with Pietro d’Abana (1250/57–1315/18). In many respects, most of the above mentioned reference works, such as the Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, provide an important basis, combined with more recent primary and secondary literature. The bibliography is followed by an alphabetical index, an index of names and noteworthy topics, and index with passages cited, an index of manuscripts cited in the previous volumes, an index of the studies cited in the bibliographies following each entry, and an index of the bibliography itself. Overall, these 5 volumes (actually 6 because vol. 1 is divided into two) represent most important critical surveys and analyses. Unfortunately, because published in Italian, many international medievalists do not seem to be familiar with it, and many non-Italian libraries do not own a copy. World-wide only sixty-six research libraries currently hold a copy. I would like to thank Peter Dinzelbacher for pointing out this major reference work to me.

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Medieval Civilization,36 which contents itself with offering only short explanations of terms, names, places, concepts, objects, and texts. There is no bibliography anywhere, not even in a cumulative list that might have been included at the end of the volume. But Dahmus intended his work really as a dictionary, hence there would be no need for a scholarly apparatus because of the pragmatic purpose of this reference work. The two-volume Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, edited by André Vauchez in conjunction with Barrie Dobson and Michael Lapidge (2000),37 represents a considerable improvement, both in scope and depth, particularly with regard to the brief bibliographies that are added to each entry. These are limited to about five to eight titles, though they often also contain only one to two references. The editors are fully aware of the tremendous progress Medieval Studies have witnessed, as illustrated by the outstanding International Medieval Bibliography and Medioevo Latino. Moreover, as they hasten to add, “This rapid growth is accompanied by a renewal of methods and approaches that has affected every medieval discipline, from history and art history to archaeology, philosophy and musicology” (vii). Their purpose, therefore, was “to harvest and publish the fruits of this rich growth, to which most of the contributors to the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages have themselves contributed” (ibid.). True to the ideals of good encyclopedists, André Vauchez and his colleagues made every possible effort to address also the culture and history of those people who did not subscribe to Christianity, that is, Jews, Muslims, and “pagan” people, including Lithuanians, Lapps, Cumans, and Mongols (ibid.). Nevertheless, the focus still rests on the Christian world of medieval Europe, though this extends for them from Iceland and Vinland in modernday Canada to Ethiopia and Central Asia. This encyclopedia is primarily driven by the goal “to help Europeans of the third millennium identify with an inheritance that still marks their way of life and some of whose aspects still charm them, but whose meaning escapes them. With this intention, we have deliberately given a privileged place to philosophy, theology, spirituality, liturgy and iconography” (ibid.). Encyclopedias focused on the Middle Ages, but considerably smaller in scope include, for instance, the Encyclopedia of the Medieval World, ed. by 36 Joseph Dahmus, Dictionary of Medieval Civilization (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company; London: Collier Macmillan Publisher, 1984). See also the quite useful publication by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Medieval Wordbook (New York: Facts On File, 1996). 37 Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, edited by André Vauchez in conjunction with Barrie Dobson and Michael Lapidge (Paris: Editions du Cerf; Cambridge: James Clarke & Co.; Rome: Città Nuova, 2000).

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Edward D. English (2005),38 which also offers some further readings for each article, but again severely limits the number of titles and focuses, instead, simply on the factual information without problematizing anything. A special perspective finds most welcome consideration in the encyclopedia on women in the Middle Ages, attempting to encompass non-Western cultures (China, Japan, India, even some Aztec) in addition to the more familiar Western European topics – these too with some new approaches – edited by Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, and also, though narrower in scope, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, edited by Margaret Schaus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).39 The series “Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages” concentrates on a variety of specific cultural aspects, or groups of people, in the Middle Ages, such as Medieval Jewish Civilization and Medieval Islamic Civilization, and treating many other ‘national’ entities or identities from an encyclopedic perspective.40

38 Encyclopedia of the Medieval World, ed. Edward D. English (New York: Facts On File, 2005). 39 Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, 2 vols. (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004). Schaus’s encyclopedia also appeared in the series “The Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages” as no. 14. 40 Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Norman Roth (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). As Meri emphasizes in the introduction, “Such fundamental questions as to what Islamic civilization is and what Muslims did to contribute to European understanding of the sciences, mathematics, arts, literature, philosophy, and government remain largely unanswered. What was the nature of ‘interfaith’ relations in the Islamic world, and what roles did Jews and Christians play in medieval Islamic societies?” xi). Clearly, despite its enormous progress, Medieval Studies continue to open up many unchartered areas and there is no end in sight as to what we still need to learn about that world. For other relevant encyclopedias, see also Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); earlier volumes include Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano (New York and London: Garland, 1993); Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, ed. William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn (New York and London: Garland, 1995); Medieval England, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal (New York and London: Garland, 1998); Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, ed. John M. Jeep (New York and London: Garland, 2001); and Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). See also The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England, ed. Nigel Saul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Though of an older vintage, and primarily focused on a summary of factual knowledge, Aryeh Grabois’s Medieval Civilization (1980) still seems to serve its purpose very well even today,41 especially because of its unique emphasis on civilization on a broad scale, extending considerably beyond the medieval European latinitas. As Grabois notes, “the fact remains that most of mankind did not inhabit Western Europe, nor was civilization by any means confined to this part of the world. The Islamic culture, for example, reached a higher level of achievement than that of Western Europe before the 13th century, and cannot be ignored in an encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Nor is it possible to leave out the great Oriental civilizations – those of India, China and Japan – which, isolated from the Western and Middle Eastern world, achieved great heights. While a similar compendium on the classical world can concentrate on the Mediterranean region, an encyclopedia of medieval civilization must be almost universal in scope” (7). Grabois’s scholarly position still can be fully approved today and demands our respect: “Perhaps there is no better way of demonstrating the universality of the medieval world than by studying the continuous interrelationships in the intellectual and scientific fields, wherein, on the foundations of the classical heritage, Christians, Jews, Moslems and Orientals taught and learned from each other, despite their political and religious animosities” (8). In this regard, the Encyclopaedia Judaica proves to be an invaluable resource, at least as far as Jewish culture and history are concerned.42 The contributors to The Medieval World, edited by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, took upon themselves the task of expanding on that notion of universality and interdisciplinarity and to deepen the encyclopedic ap-

41 Aryeh Grabois, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Medieval Civilization (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Publishing House, 1980); trans. as Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters. Deutsche Übersetzung von Michael Toch. Wissenschaftliche Redaktion der deutschen Ausgabe von Peter Dinzelbacher (1981; Zurich: Atlantis, 1988). See also Die visuelle Weltgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Edmund Jacoby (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 2005); Medieval Panorama, ed. Robert Bartlett (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001; trans. into various languages). 42 See the very impressive, broadly designed, yet detail-oriented Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., Fred Skolnik, Editor in Chief, Michael Berenbaum, Executive Editor, 22 vols. (1972; Detroit, New York, et al.: Thomson Gale, 2007). One of its worthy predecessors was the English-language Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1901–1906). Berenbaum identifies also successful Hebrew and Russian efforts to publish comparable, though always much smaller publications, vol. 1, 15. All these reference works, however, are not specifically geared toward the Middle Ages, yet also include them in multifarious ways.

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proach considerably, focusing on (I) identities: selves and others, (II) beliefs, social values, and symbolic order, (III) power and power structures, and (IV) on elites, organizations, and groups.43 The problem here rests in the highly selective treatment of specialized topics in the form of lengthy articles, which cumulatively might achieve the desired goal, but still fall short of the ideal to examine that period comprehensively. Again, however, such a lofty goal seems to elude all of us too easily, yet the critical issue affecting most such scholarly enterprises needs to be addressed. Smaller dictionaries of the Middle Ages have appeared in most European languages, such as the linguistic Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, ed. Martín Alonso, 2 vols. (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1986) and the more specialized Diccionario español de textos médicos antiguos [Spanish Dictionary of Ancient Medical Texts], bajo la dirección de María Teresa Herrera, 2 vols. (Madrid: Arco Libros, 1996), which clearly signals how much that cultural-historical period is regarded as a cornerstone of Western civilization in every country. And recently there are serious attempts (once again) to provide encyclopedic overviews for individual regions and countries in Europe, including the Middle Ages, such as The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, ed. John Davies, Jigel Jenkins, Menna Baines, and Peredur I. Lynch (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). Although the Middle Ages constitute only one relatively small aspect among many pertinent to the entire history, culture, politics, and religion of Wales, the information offered spans many different themes, objects, works, monuments, texts, and figures from that period, accompanied by good maps, illustrations, photos. Shockingly, however, there is no bibliography, neither for the individual entries nor cumulatively because such matters have been “deemed impractical” (xxv). A unique perspective on the world of the Middle Ages is pursued in the encyclopedia dedicated to Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages, edited by John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg, who approach their task from a global perspective, defining their task as providing an “introduction to the history of travel, exploration, discovery, and mercantile activity in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World.” Moreover, considering the specific nature of their reference work, they also underscore the innovative and interdisciplinary nature of their enterprise which comes as by default because of their topic: “The encyclopedia has a cross-disciplinary focus that promotes the integration of historical, scientific, and literary per43 The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

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spectives, provides a synthetic view of parallel developments in East and West, and encourages immediate connections …”44 Medieval literature on a very broad scale is covered by the Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. by Jay Ruud (2006). This scale extends well into the Asian realm, including India, China, Japan, and Korea, whereas Africa and the Americas have been excluded because the medieval texts from those worlds have mostly survived only in oral traditions. And the written sources are modern renditions of the ancient material. Although each entry is accompanied by a short bibliography (with varying length), the editor really aims at English-speaking students, which also explains the greater emphasis on Old and Middle English literature. Unfortunately, instead of providing a solid overview as to which literary texts might really be the truly centrally important ones from the point of view of most recent research, Ruud has used as his guidelines “popular anthologies of world literature, of Western literature, and of English literature.” Consequently, he has “included entries from texts that are often used in introductory college or advanced high school classes, since the primary intended reading audience for this book comprises beginning students in these kinds of classes and their instructors who seek some background information.”45 Of course, this fully legitimizes his approach, and we should not look for higher, more scholarly goals, when they were not pursued in the first place. In fact, Ruud’s encyclopedia serves an excellent purpose and will provide a solid springboard for a possible cohort of future medievalists because these articles offer concisely written introductions, clear definitions, and all the necessary background information for readers of that age level.46

44 Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (New York and London: Garland, 2000), vii. 45 Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. Jay Ruud (New York: Facts on File, 2006), v. 46 There are actually many similar encyclopedic enterprises for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see, for example, Lexikon der Renaissance, ed. Günter Gurst, Siegfried Hoyer, Ernst Ullmann, and Christa Zimmermann (Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, 1989); A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). Similar publications can certainly also be found in Italian, Spanish, French, and other languages, but they do not need to be cited all. The four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), however, is a must to all interested in late-medieval and early-modern religious history.

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Most recently Gert Melville and Martial Staub tried their hands once again at this enormous and difficult task, editing a two-volume Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, downloadable also as an e-book one time upon purchase of the print copy, addressing a German-speaking audience in which they asked their contributors to examine aspects far beyond the traditional concept of history and literary history.47 Other reference works are also being made available in electronic form, and we might soon witness a revolution in publishing of reference works in the near future deeply affecting Medieval Studies at large. In contrast to common approaches to the medieval world, the editors have not simply listed all kinds of topics as possibly relevant for medieval society from a historical perspective. Instead, along with a cohort of outstanding European medievalists, they collectively examine the world of the Middle Ages in a systematic fashion, above all, and thereby as comprehensively as possible. They discuss, at first, the structure of medieval society, then turn to social formations, kinship organizations, interaction and communication, faith and knowledge, finally, in the second volume, to literature, the visual arts and music, economy, technology, living spaces and conditions, and conclude with a section on the complex of events and regional history. Impressively, here the world of technology and production (agriculture and industry/craftsmanship) enjoys just as much attention as literature, the arts, and religion. But despite all the depth and detail provided in the individual contributions, this encyclopedia basically reiterates and summarizes our current knowledge and deliberately refrains from engaging in a more critical examination of the issues at stake although this was its explicit goal. Of course, in this sense Melville’s and Staub’s approach does not differ much, if any at all, from all previous efforts to create an encyclopedia covering that time and culture. Frankly, not much more can or should be expected from them as editors of an encyclopedia, though the question always looms large – what justifies the publication of yet another reference work, if the previous ones still meet all the demands and summarize appropriately and fully the current level of knowledge about the past? Most cumbersome, here the entire bibliography is placed at the very end of the second volume, without any possibility for the reader to grasp where the individual authors stand with regard to specific issues or positions in current scholarship, as if positivism still were 47 Enzyklopädie des Mittelalters, ed. Gert Melville and Martial Staub, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), see my review, forthcoming in Mediaevistik.

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en vogue. Somewhat simplistically, the editors emphasize that they hope to appeal to the curiosity of an interested reading public, without defining at all what that means at large and what the implications might be as to the scholarly approaches for the composition of the individual entries. After all, Medieval Studies have grown so much over the last century that we have reached today a level of complexity and controversy in the interpretation of virtually every aspect in the Middle Ages that it almost seems impossible to make any simple and straightforward claims or to argue naively regarding the proper interpretation of a poem or a romance. In fact, I would almost submit that we might be beyond the point at which the publication of encyclopedias was still possible and feasible in practical terms, unless we re-conceptualize the genre altogether, refraining from plainly stating what the basic facts might have been. Actually, do we even believe that the Middle Ages, or any other culture and world, can be defined and described in straightforward terms? Do we not have to accept the fundamental discursive nature of virtually all manifestations of human life, and this also then, perhaps only five hundred years ago? And did not those who dominated that discourse determine what documents were created, what art works were commissioned, and what chronicles were written? The problem with this and all other encyclopedias rests in the assumption that the knowledge about the Middle Ages can be easily and factually summarized, which also applies to any other period in human history. We know, perhaps more than we would like to, how much our perception and understanding of that past age is significantly constructed by modern interests, or dominant viewpoints in the past, and at any rate today often determined by mythical thinking, as best represented, for instance, by the modern notion of the medieval chastity belt – both a satirical object and topic developed in the late Middle Ages and a mythical concept about the medieval past created in the modern world.48 And there are countless other examples of mythical thinking concerning the Middle Ages, as the volumes published by Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich forcefully indicate, which in a way 48 For a typical example of how the myth has become ingrained in modern thinking, without any solid historical foundation or textual evidence, reflecting almost nothing but contemporary, basically uninformed and unreflected assumptions about the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, and this even among serious and highly respected scholars, see Vern L. Bullough, “Chastity Girdles,” Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia, ed. id. and Bonnie Bullough (New York and London: Garland, 1994), 107. By contrast, see now Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt: A The Myth-Making Process, The New Middle Ages (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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also pursue encyclopedic goals.49 Whether we think of some of the major rulers, such as Charlemagne, the Crusades, then of specific locations, places, mountains, rivers, islands, poets, composers, magicians and sorcerers, we have always to realize how much modern notions have infused all those icons from the past, in a way colonizing them in order to gain a grasp on their meaning for us today. Most importantly, the myth of the ‘dark ages’ needs to be dispelled over and over again, especially because popular publishers like to perpetuate this notion because it appeals, in an intricate yet foolish fashion, to base instincts among modern audiences that prefer gruesome but fictional stories about a barbaric past over complex, sophisticated, yet scholarly accounts that seriously try to gain a full and critical understanding of events, people, texts, art works, and developments in the Middle Ages.50 Certainly, many aspects of the medieval world would have to be identified as barbaric, as primitive, as lacking in sophistication, culture, hygiene, etc. in comparison with those standards we are used to today. But any critic could raise similar charges even against the Western world in the 21st century resorting to different sets of criteria, such as the number of civilian casualties in modern wars, or ‘collateral damage’ in military parlance, the rate at which prisoners have been and continue to be tortured (see Guantanamo Bay), and the enormous contradiction between amazing and rapid advances in modern science and technology and the wide-ranging and extensive belief in superstition, magic, including religious explanations of the origin of our world, such as ‘Intelligent Design.’ At any rate, the term ‘Dark Ages’ does not help in any constructive fashion to comprehend the Middle Ages and only evokes Romantic, fanciful, titillating, horrifying, and deliberately shocking notions about a world that has been very little understood and continues to challenge us in our episte-

49 Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, ed., Mittelalter-Mythen, vol. 1 (St. Gallen: UVK Fachverlag für Wissenschaft und Studium, 1996), with a focus on: Herrscher, Helden, Heilige (Rulers, Heroes, Saints). Vol. 5, focusing on Burgen, Länder, Orte (Castles, Countries, Places), which seems to have concluded the series, appeared in 2008. 50 See the excellent contributions to Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon Lee Grigsby, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture, 7 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). Unfortunately, in many cases when the arguments reach a critical point, the authors tend to break off and wrap up their discussion too quickly. And the bibliographical references, though certainly not brief, often lack some of the most important studies, particularly those not published in English.

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mological quest, constantly requiring further investigations. In this sense, our Handbook of Medieval Studies hopes to provide important stepping stones in this global endeavor by looking backwards, taking stock of where we are today and what might be, though this is not specifically the intent pursued here, the new directions of research in Medieval Studies. I strongly concur in this regard with Graeme Dunphy’s lucid and critical analysis of the term ‘Dark Ages’ as an ideological construct that could be applied to any period in the past depending on the particular interests pursued by those who either denigrate a special time or culture, or simply ignore it as not worthy their attention – a strategy that had already begun in the Italian Renaissance, if we think of Petrarch’s contemptuous comments about the literature composed prior to his own time.51 All this is not to say that there are no real facts available about the medieval world, but all those that we tend to rely on have been viewed through myriad lenses both in the past and in the present, hence the constant growth of new interpretations, approaches, methodologies, and perceptions. After all, throughout the entire Middle Ages, as in other periods, people, institutions, social groups, alliances, federations, and factions have made great effort to gain power and influence, to hold on to their authority and wealth, and to protect their property. Falsification was the name of the game, as historians have recognized for a long time, which means that we have to regard 51 Graeme Dunphy, “Literary Transitions, 1300–1500: From Late Medieval to Early Modern,” Early Modern German Literature: 1350–1700, ed. Max Reinhart, The Camden House History of German Literature, 4 (Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 43–87; 43–87, here 43: “If we compare the high medieval writings of Walther von der Vogelweide or Wolfram von Eschenbach with the Reformation writings of Martin Luther or Ulrich von Hutten, the cultural gulf that opens up before us seems enormous, leaving the impression that the intervening years were ones of rapid transition. But when we acknowledge that a full three centuries lie between these two familiar landmarks, we realize that the rate of change was doubtless no faster than in any other literary epoch. If the period from the mid-thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth may be called a transition, it is because the early thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries are established coordinates in the discipline of literary history.” See also Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom Finsteren Mittelalter, Universität Wien, Seminar für Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte. Veröffentlichungen, 8 (1983; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1978). I particularly like Richard Raiswell’s wonderful article “The Age Before Reason,” Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, 124–34. Reinhold Münster illustrates convincingly in his contribution to this Handbook (“Enlightenment Perspectives of the Middle Ages”) how much the 18th-century discourse on the meaning and relevance of medieval texts and art works shaped and determined modern perceptions of the Middle Ages.

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any statement from that time, whether in a chronicle or in a letter, in a poem or in a liturgical drama, with great care, and we really need to read between the lines. Simply put, we need to interpret them critically. Often it seems that we know considerably less about the real world in the Middle Ages than all the encyclopedias, dictionaries, and lexicons pretend to convey. Ironically, however, Melville and Staub claim to have published an encyclopedia based on a critical concept, which essentially only means that they have subdivided the major topics and specified in greater detail the individual subject matters for a more detailed examination. For them, the ‘critical approach’ finds its expression in the fact that they have granted each author considerable freedom in developing his/her topic according to their own orientation. Ultimately, then, there is no specific or noticeable attempt to examine their subject matter from a truly critical perspective. The history of research, as they perceive it, remains hidden in a rather selective, hardly international, and certainly not comprehensive bibliography. This is not to say that the authors would have ignored to cite some of the most seminal studies, but even here, in the bibliographies, the dominant emphasis on scholarly publications in German is evident because of the narrow target of this twovolume encyclopedia, a relatively sophisticated German reading audience outside of academia. Ultimately, the allegedly critical approach is actually missing because the editors cannot decide – which also might be the virtue and pragmatic strength of their publication – whom their reference work should serve above all. Can an encyclopedia actually aim for a critical treatment of its topics, or should it not rather try to digest, synthesize, summarize, and analyze the current level of knowledge and present it in a comprehensive manner? Intriguingly, the history of Medieval Studies as an academic field of research, particularly during the formative years in the late 19th century, proves to be almost as interesting as the study of the Middle Ages itself especially because here we observe how much our discipline – in its widest ramifications, whether we think of the history of fashion, of architecture, literature, foodstuff, arms, social history, or history of music52 – has been and 52 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume, 17 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1949–1986; 2nd ed. by Ludwig Finscher, 10 vols. [Sachteil] and 17 vols. [Personenteil], Kassel and New York: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994–2007); the Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Hermann Danuser, 13 vols. (Wiesbaden: Athenaion; Laaber: Laaber Verlag Müller-Buscher, 1980–1995; The New Grove of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan; Washington, DC: Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 1980); 2nd ed., 29 vols. (New York: Grove, 2001); the Dizion-

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will be truly determined by outstanding scholarly individuals, by multinational approaches, by a noteworthy gender balance (even in the older days), and by interdisciplinarity.53 ario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, ed. Alberto Basso, 4 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1983–1984): le biografie, 8 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1985–1988); i titoli e i personaggi, 3 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1999). See also Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, ed. Emilio Casares Rodicio, 10 vols. (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999–2002). 53 Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1: History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York and London: Garland, 1995); vol. 2: Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico, with Donald Fennema and Karmen Lenz (New York and London: Garland, 1998); vol. 3: Philosophy and the Arts (New York and London: Garland, 2000). See also the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, ed. Kelly Boyd, 2 vols. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999). Further, see Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History. Reference Sources for the Social Sciences and Humanities, 3 (New York, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1986); Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Fifty Key Thinkers on History. Routledge Key Guides (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). For the history of German philology, see Klaus Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1989); Lothar Bluhm, Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie: Eine Studie zu Kommunikation und Wissenschaftsbildung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert, Spolia Berolinensia, 11 (Hildesheim: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997); Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). See also the contribution to this Handbook by Berta Raposo (“Rediscovery of the Middle Ages”), and A History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Arthurian Studies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006). Andrew E. Mathis, The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2002), also offers fascinating perspectives regarding the great popularity of medieval literature in the United States. One remarkable case of a medieval myth that still holds sway over modern fantasies and continues to influence modern media, politics, and quasi-religious groups concerns the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II. Friedrich Nietzsche, just to mention one example, went so far as to identify him as a medieval superman who provided a role model for modern people. Stefan George adored Frederick as a global ruler who had been the only one capable of bridging the perennial divides between Orient and Occident; hence also between the various religions and cultures. Personalities such as Berthold von Stauffenberg (brother of Claus von Stauffenberg who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944) and Ernst Kantorowicz adulated this medieval emperor as a mythical figure that could heal and overcome all conflicts in the present time. David Abulafia tried to deconstruct this myth with his biography from 1988 (Frederick II: a Medieval Eemperor, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1988), but the Frederick myth has even grown ever since, particularly in Apulia and Sicily; see now Hubert Houben, Kaiser Friedrich II. (1194–1250): Herrscher, Mensch und Mythos (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008), 176–228.

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Recently, Jane Chance published a most welcome biographical dictionary of women medievalists from Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) to Caroline Walker Bynum (1941–), which promises to inject the long-needed ‘feminization’ of Medieval Studies.54 But encyclopedias are not always the best medium through which to observe this intensive and complex development in the academic field of Medieval Studies from the late 18th century until today. Nevertheless, and this was the purpose of the investigation until here, the history of a specific type of encyclopedias also sheds important light on the general position of the subject matter both within the framework of scholarship and in light of public responses to it. In this sense, Strayer’s efforts more than 25 years ago were most remarkable, both for the specific accomplishments then and for the inspiration until today to produce and publish new encyclopedias, perhaps with a more narrow focus, or with a specific readership in mind. And they have spawned many comparable scholarly enterprises, though then always in much slimmer proportions. Henry Loyn, for instance, to parallel Grabois’s project, attempted to create an encyclopedic overview of a Middle Ages as “an age of real advance in every field, of political and social evolution, of intellectual and artistic creativity, and of commercial and scientific progress.”55 Without going into further details, we can be certain that similar publications focusing on the Middle Ages have appeared in many other languages as well.

54 Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), xxvii. 55 H. R. Loyn, The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopædia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Sachwörterbuch der Mediävistik, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992); see also Deno J. Geanakoplos, Medieval Western Civilization and the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: Interaction of Three Cultures (1968; Lexington, MA, and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1979). There are, of course countless other books that outline the history of the Middle Ages in brief sketches, but in this reference work we find at least the refreshing emphasis on the intercultural connectivity of Western with Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The various compendia, such as the Cambridge Medieval History, do not need to be mentioned here separately. For smaller, encyclopedic volumes, see The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, vol. II: 950–1250, ed. Robert Fossier. Trans. Stuart Airlie and Robyn Marsack (1982; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. and introd. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publisher, 1998); Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

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Other scholars editing encyclopedias have turned their attention to those periods that are intimately connected with the Middle Ages, but represent, in one way or the other, transitional phases, such as the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of early-medieval Europe, most noteworthy here the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, founded by Johannes Hoops,56 or the early-modern world from 1450 to 1789, commonly identified as the Renaissance and the Baroque.57 In other words, there is always a need for a critical review of the state of art of a study area in specific intervals so as to perceive more clearly the rungs in the ladder of research over decades, if not centuries. Otherwise we might no longer be able to see the forest for all the trees, and could run the risk of ignoring some of the most seminal studies, editions, concepts, and ideas developed by our predecessors. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, but it seems that every new generation turns its attention away from the accomplishments of previous ones and tries to chart its own map as if the beacons had not be established already a long time ago. No self-respecting medievalist, for instance, would admit his or her ignorance of Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, first published in 1948, but there is little engagement with his profound insights in current scholarship, and those who acknowledge his ‘classical’ contributions to comparative literature, both

56 Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 2. völlig neu bearbeitete und stark erweiterte Auflage unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgelehrter, ed. Heinrich Beck, Herbert Jankuhn, et al., 33 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973–2007). Not comparable at all, but for specific purposes certainly useful is Michael Frassetto, Encyclopedia of Barbarian Europe: Society in Transformation (Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, and Oxford: ABC Clio, 2001). It seems rather problematic to approach such a huge task all by oneself, as in this case. The number of lacunae and desiderata is considerable, but each entry is accompanied by a short bibliography of English-language studies only, including translations. Frassetto does not indicate what kind of audience he intends to address, but it certainly seems to be specifically Anglophone, and mostly the general readership. 57 Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald, 6 vols. (New York, Detroit, et al.: Thomson Learning, 2004), which contains solidly researched and extensive articles accompanied by mostly good bibliographies. See also Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Thomas G. Bergin and Jennifer Speake (New York and Oxford: Facts on File, 1987); Gordon Campbell, The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is also single-authored, with the accompanying problems, as in the case of Frassetto’s encyclopedia. Much more impressive proves to be the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler, 6 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999).

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ancient and medieval, early-modern and modern, are mostly unaware of its original date of publication.58 Moreover, we also have to pay attention to major encyclopedias and reference works in such fields as anthropology, sociology, musicology, art history, medicine, religion, philosophy, etc., insofar as they concern the Middle Ages.59 In particular, I would like to point out the famous Dictionnaire de spiritualité, along with related encyclopedias.60 Particular mention deserves the 58 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. from the German by Willard R. Trask. With a New Afterword by Peter Godman. Bollingen Series, XXXVI (1948; trans. 1953; 1983; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); see also Albrecht Classen, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Book. The Impact of an Idea on Modern Philological Research,” Leuvense Bijdragen 87, 1–2 (1998): 59–78. 59 See Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft, dritte, völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage, ed. Kurt Galling, together with Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Erich Dinkler, et al., 6 vols., 1 vol. for the index (1909–1913; 2nd ed. 1927–1932; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1957–1965); vierte, völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage, ed. Hans Dieter Betz et al., 9 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007); The Encyclopedia of Christianity, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Mili cˇ Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Lukas Vischer. Currently vol. 1–4; vol. 5 forthcoming (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans; Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 1999–2005); based on the German Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon, ed. Heinz Brunotte and Otto Weber, 3rd ed. Erwin Fahlbusch (orig. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956–1961; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–1997); cf. also Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Karl Rahner SJ, and Juan Alfaro, SJ, Alberto Bellini, et al., 6 vols. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968–1970; orig. in German). Invaluable also proves to be the Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Krause and many collaborators, 36 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–2004). It is accompanied by two vols. of a Gesamtregister (2006–2007), one vol. with abbreviations and acronyms (1994), and one vol. with an index of the complete work (1998). 60 Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, publié sous la direction de Marcel Viller, S.J., assisté de F. Cavallera, et J. de Guibert, S.J., avec le concours d’un grand nombre de collaborateurs, 17 vols. (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1937–1995). Vol. 17 (1995) consists of the “Tables Générales.” This dictionary proves to be so important because of its comprehensive coverage and the bibliographies attached to each article, many of which consist of older research that still holds great value but is often ignored today. See also the valuable Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, contenant l’exposé des doctrines de la théologie catholique, leurs preuves et leur histoire, commencé sous la direction de A. Vacant et E. Mangenot, continué sous celle de É. Amann. 3rd ed., 15 vols. (1902; Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1930–1950, with three volumes for the Tables Générales, 1951–1972). A major research tool also proves to be the Enciclopedia Cattolica, 12 vols. (Vatican City: L’Enciclopedia Cattolica e Il Libro Cattolico, 1948–1954);

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Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, ed. by Alfred Baudrillart, Albert Vogt, and Urbain Rouziès, with the first volume having appeared in 1912 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané), which is still in the process of being completed, having currently reached the letter ‘k’ (ed. R. Aubert, Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 2004), and which is by now also available online for a charge. It provides highly detailed information about significant personalities, locations, and historical events relevant for the history of the Christian Church. See also the excellent Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Walter Kasper with Konrad Baumgartner, Horst Bürkle, et al., 11 vols. (Freiburg, Basel, Rome, and Vienna: Herder, 1993–2001). Though the individual entries are considerably shorter, they cover a much broader thematic spectrum and offer more bibliographical references of more recent date.61 The history of the early Christian Church from the time of Jesus to ca. 600 C.E. is well served by the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson, together with Michael P. McHugh, Frederick W. Norris, and David M. Scholer (New York and London: Garland, 1990). Here we find detailed information about doctrines, practices, liturgy, heresies, locations, persons, countries, concepts, texts, terms, and art work, and each entry is most pleasantly accompanied by a detailed bibliography.62 Most useful and highly insightful prove to be the handbook of (in fact not only) German superstition, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, and the encyclopedia of the fairy tale, Enzyklopädie des Märchens. The fact that they have been published in German has unfortunately meant that many intersee also the English version, New Catholic Encyclopedia, 14 vols. (New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, et al.: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967; Index: vol. XV, 1967; Supplement: 1967–1974: vol. XVI, 1974; Supplement: Change in the Church: vol. XVII, 1979). In all these encyclopedias, the articles regularly conclude with helpful bibliographies. Most recently, the publishing house Brill has launched a huge new Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique on its website, in 2008, consisting of 30 volumes and 70,000 entries. I have not yet been able to autopsy this dictionary. 61 See also The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, based on the third ed. of the Realencyklopädie founded by J. J. Herzog, and ed. by Albert Hauck, prepared by Samuel Macauley Jackson with Charles Colebrook Sherman and George William Gilmore, 12 vols. (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1908–1912). Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, ed. Albert Hauck, 21 vols., 3rd and expanded ed. (1896–1913; Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1969); see also The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross. Sec. ed. id. and E. A. Livingstone (1958; London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974). 62 The editors also include a general bibliography for topics such as patrology, the rise of Christianity, the popes, and archeology (viii).

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national scholars are either not familiar with them or cannot utilize the treasure trove of specific information contained in them.63 Certainly, both deal with the global world of superstition and fairy tales throughout times, but a vast percentage of the material in both areas is anchored in the Middle Ages. Art historians are exceedingly well served, here disregarding numerous other encyclopedias for the entire history of art world-wide throughout time, with the Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie64 and with the encyclopedia for the Iconography of Christian Art, originally edited in German, and translated into English, to name just two major reference works.65 Then there are also the useful lexica on animal symbolism in the Middle Ages, which involves iconography, religion, mentality, art history, and other disciplines.66 From here we also need to consider quickly the world of architecture, so magisterially represented by Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, 19th ed. John Musgrove, with John Tarn and Peter Willis (London: The Royal

63 Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, together with E. Hoffmann-Krayer. Handwörterbücher zur deutschen Volkskunde. Abteilung I: Aberglaube, 9 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1927–1938/1941; vol. X: Register: 1942); Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Kurt Ranke, together with Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, et al. Since Vol. 5 (1987): ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977–; vol. 12, fascicle 3 (up to the letters Su …) appeared in 2007). 64 Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. Engelbert Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Rome, Freiburg, et al.: Herder, 1968–1976). 65 Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, 5 vols. 3rd ed. (1966; Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1966–1991); Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, CT, and New York: Graphic Society, 1971). See also Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955–1959). But there are many other similar reference works for art history, such as Erhard Aeschlimann and Paolo D’Ancona, Dictionnaire des miniaturistes du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance dans les différentes contrées de l’Europe, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1949); Michèle Beaulieu and Victor Beyer, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs français du moyen âge (Paris: Picard, 1992); see also the useful encyclopedia for French castles, Charles Laurent Salch and Dominique Martinez, Dictionnaire des châteaux et des fortifications du Moyen Age en France (Strasbourg: Éditions Publitotal, 1979), and Edward G. Tasker, Encyclopedia of Medieval Church Art, ed. John Beaumont (London: B. T. Batsford, 1993). 66 Sigrid and Lothar Dittrich, Lexikon der Tiersymbole: Tiere als Sinnbilder in der Malerei des 14.–17. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur internationalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, 22 (Petersberg: Imhof, 2004); see also Clemens Zerlin, Lexikon der Tiersymbolik: Mythologie, Religion, Psychologie, ed. Wolfgang Bauer (Munich: Kösel, 2003). There are many other reference works for symbols that are, however, too general to be cited here.

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Institute of British Architects and The University of Architecture, 1987; the 20th ed. was edited by Dan Cruickshank, together with Andrew Saint, Peter Blundell Jones, Kenneth Frampton; assistant editor Fleur Richards; Oxford and Boston: Architectural Press, 1996; the latest ed., 20a, appeared in 1998).67 Reflecting its more pragmatic approach in the first place, in its original 1896 edition, this monograph carried the subtitle: for the student, craftsman and amateur, being a comparative guide of the historical styles from the earliest period. Fletcher’s extraordinary reference work proves to be invaluable until today, excelling through its wealth of illustrative material (photos and drawings, including blueprints, detailed information about individual buildings, designs, architects, styles, and history of architecture).68 The long list of re-editions and lately also of translations into other languages has proven the enormous durability and foundational value of this magisterial reference work. What, then, by contrast, is the purpose of the present Handbook of Medieval Studies with its own claim on a certain encyclopedic approach? I have begun discussing this question in the introduction to this Handbook, but we need to pursue this topic further in the present context. Are there not already enough reference works available (see above)?69 Would there not be the great

67 Now see also Günther Binding and Susanne Linscheid-Burdich, together with Julia Wippermann Planen und Bauen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter nach den Schriftquellen bis 1250 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002). 68 See also, though a bit dated, Russell Sturgis, A History of Architecture, 4 vols. Vol. 3–4 by A. L. Frothingham (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, vol. 1: 1906; vol. 2: 1909; vol. 3–4: Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915); David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). There is, of course, a legion of similar studies of older and more recent vintage, both in English and in many European languages; see, for instance, Barbara Borngässer Klein and Rolf Toman, Geschichte der Architektur: von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart; photographs by Achim Bednorz (Bath: Parragon, 2008). 69 The subsequent cultural periods are also gaining in interest both among the academic and the lay audience, see, for instance, Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul F. Grendler, 6 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999). Looking back, we also discover massive efforts to cover specific events in the past through quasi encyclopedic writing, see, for example, Kenneth M. Setton, A History of the Crusades, 2 vols. (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). The volume on The Middle Ages in the series obviously for younger readers: The History of the Ancient & Medieval World, ed. Henk Dijkstra. Vol. 9 (New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Marshall Cavendish, 1969), proves to be beautifully illustrated. Many publications focus on world history, including the Middle Ages, and march through thousands of years, claiming to cover a solid stretch of human history from the stone age to the present, such as Chronology of European His-

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danger of repeating what others have done already, if not to perfection, but at least highly comprehensively and in depth? All the criticism raised against some of the earlier publications would sound hollow, if not hypocritical, if the present publication did not try to set new standards and pursue innovative goals. In fact, the simple answer to the questions raised at first would have to be an unconditional ‘yes,’ but even if the goal would be to produce another encyclopedia focusing on the Middle Ages, we could at least point out huge differences between older and newer works, and since scholarship is continuously advancing, there is no doubt that we are in need of new broad surveys and summaries of our current knowledge perhaps every ten or twenty years. Nevertheless, the primary purpose of this new Handbook of Medieval Studies does not follow this path. Instead, the overarching and principle goal consists of examining the history of scholarship and of our understanding of how we have reached the current level of our knowledge about all kinds of subject matters, people, topics, texts, works, etc. We are, after all, as Bernard of Chartres pointed out in the 12th century, as John of Salisbury had summarized in his Metalogicon, and as this survey illustrates, nothing but dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.70 Yet, despite our small size, we are still positioned high up and can today see further than those giants, or than cohorts of previous generations of medievalists upon whose findings we base our own research and thus reach our own goals.71 This is not meant to belittle our predecessors; on the contrary, we pay tribute

tory 15,000 B.C. to 1997, ed. John Powell, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998). There are countless other encyclopedias for ancient history, the world of Islam, the Near and Far East, and so forth. Actually, in the last decade or so publishers all over the world have produced so many encyclopedias and similar reference works about premodern history, culture, and literature that one wonders who still might be able to gain a critical perspective faced with such a flood of factual, or rather almost no longer so factual, literature, written very much in the vein of late 19th-century positivist Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). 70 R[ichard] W[illiam] Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 203. For the actual quote, see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, 98 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 116. 71 Regarding this topic and its implications for us, see Walter Haug, “Die Zwerge auf den Schultern der Riesen: Epochales und typologisches Geschichtsdenken und das Problem der Interferenzen,” id., Strukturen als Schlüssel zur Welt: Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 86–109, esp. 89–92 (orig. 1987).

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to their great accomplishments and build on their knowledge to further our own understanding. The field of research in the Middle Ages is still fairly young, barely two hundred years old, including some philologists who had begun to explore the history of medieval literature, religion, and philosophy already in the late 18th century, if not before. The 19th century witnessed an incredible surge in scholarship, and today Medieval Studies, a term originally coined by David Knowles for an inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1947,72 are practiced all over the world, focusing on virtually every aspect of human life and the human mind. We might scoff at some of the older text editions or histories of literature, but we would not be where we are today without them. This also applies to the history of art, history of technology, history of architecture, and other fields. As Paul Freedman has already observed: Although the nature of what is called medieval studies thus depends to some extent on academic organization and other external influences, some degree of interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to comprehending the medieval period. From the seventeenth century onward such great undertakings as the medieval Latin dictionary of Charles du Cange, the Bollandist project of describing the lives of the saints, or Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica have required an immense range of sources. The importance of literary, numismatic, and philological evidence was recognized early on, as was the peculiar way in which the Middle Ages has left more written records than the classical era but in a more disorganized fashion. The significance of religious controversy in forwarding pursuit of medieval texts and interpretations also meant that, from the beginning, fields, methods, and the use of sources could not be narrowly limited.73

Medieval Studies in a way have also witnessed, and responded to, all those ideological shifts and changes that have determined modern humanistic scholarship at large, whether we think of positivism, Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history), explication de texte, immanent, or close, reading, Marxism, structuralism, deconstructionism, feminism, Gender Studies, postcolonialism, Queer Studies, etc.74 Some of those have left a deep impact also on the 72 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” 383. Knowles specifically evoked a similar inaugural lecture given in 1944 by his predecessor, Z. N. Brooke, “The Prospects of Medieval History,” but by widening his own perspective, Knowles laid the theoretical foundation for the highly interdisciplinary nature of Medieval Studies today. 73 Paul Freedman, “Medieval Studies,” 383. 74 Some of the best reflections on the impact of theory on Medieval Studies can be found in Paul Strohm’s Theory and the Premodern Text, Medieval Cultures, 26 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also the contributions to The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed. William

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way how we view and approach the Middle Ages, others less so, but all of them have affected our field as well which seems to grow in leaps and bounds at least in terms of scholarship. The same observation might not hold true for teaching the Middle Ages, and in fact there are many warning signs because basic knowledge necessary for the study of that past world (medieval Latin, paleography, manuscript studies, liturgy) is taught to smaller and smaller groups of students wherever we look all over the world, even if the popular interest in the Middle Ages, also expressed in growing general education classes, not to speak of countless medieval fairs, festivals, concerts, costumes, games, etc., is steadily growing. The introduction to Medieval Studies, edited by James M. Powell first in 1976, and in a second edition in 1992, clearly signals how much we have to realize the necessity to have a solid command of many different disciplines in order to carry out comprehensive and well-grounded research in our field, especially when the focus rests on history and manuscript studies. The contributors to Powell’s volume deal with Latin paleography (James J. John), diplomatics (Leonard E. Boyle), numismatics (Philip Grierson), archeology (David Whitehouse), prosopography (George Beech), computer-assisted analysis of the statistical documents of medieval society (David Herlihy), medieval chronology R. Dean Ware), medieval English literature (Paul Theiner),75 Latin philosophy (Edward A. Synan), medieval law (Kenneth Pennington), medieval science and natural philosophy (Edward Grant), tradition and innovation in medieval art (Wayne Dynes), and

D. Paden (Gainesville, Tallahassee, et al.: University Press of Florida, 1994); Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1994); The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research, ed. Roger Dahood, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century: The Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies. A Collection of Essays, ed. Albrecht Classen, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 46 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 2000). See now Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 75 It remains entirely elusive once again why, in this context, medieval literature is exclusively identified with English literature. For another rather disappointing example, see Theodore L. Steinberg , Reading the Middle Ages: An Introduction to Medieval Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 2003), who includes The Tale of Genji and Jewish literature, but entirely ignores Iberian, Latin, or German medieval literature, not to mention mystical literature at large.

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medieval music (Theodore Karp).76 Of course, here as well numerous lacunae mar the overall picture, such as the absence of liturgical studies,77 of the investigation of foodstuff,78 of weapons and armies, fortifications, and castles,79 and of Byzantine Studies, including respective prosopography of the various areas.80 This list could be easily expanded, but it would be ultimately futile because the history of people in the Middle Ages, their culture, mentality, private and public life, etc. found expression in a myriad of material and spiritual manifestations that no one can cover in totality. Can the teaching of the Middle Ages ever live up even only to a small portion of the global expectations? But let us not sink into a jeremiad over daily woes here and there in academia, since they are often quite the same that can be heard in other fields of the Humanities generally, and have been voiced for a long time (if not for ever). Concerns about the survival of Medieval Studies within the university are legitimate because we do not directly produce money when teaching the Middle Ages; instead we seem only to create costs for the institutions of higher learning. This also applies to all other fields under this vast umbrella, and 18th-century Spanish literature is not necessarily faring considerably better than 16th-century French literature, 3rd-century Roman architecture, ancient Greek philosophy, etc. I hasten to add, however, that this might ea-

76 Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell, 2nd ed. (1976; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992). 77 See, for instance, Cyrill Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, revised and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen, with the assistance of John K. Brooks-Leonard, NPM Studies in Church Music and Liturgy (1966; Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1986). 78 Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times. Food through History (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2004); Ernst Schubert, Essen und Trinken im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006). 79 Jean-Denis G. G. Lepage, Castles and Fortified Cities of Medieval Europe: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2002); id., Medieval Armies and Weapons in Western Europe: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2005); id., The Fortifications of Paris: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, 2006). 80 Robert Browning, The Byzantine Empire (New York: Scribner, 1980); Cyril A. Mango, Byzantium and Its Image: History and Culture of the Byzantine Empire and Its Heritage, Varirorum Reprints, CS 191 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984); The Oxford History of Byzantium, ed. id. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); see also the multi-volume Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilization, ed. Alexes G. C. Savvides, Benjamin Hendrickx, Alicia J. Simpson, Thekla Sansaridou-Hendrickx (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007 [1st vol.], 2008 [2nd vol.]–).

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sily constitute a fallacious conclusion depending on the criteria we use to determine the true cost effectiveness of individual subject matters or research areas (faculties) at any given university over a long period and considering the wider social implications and the value of educating our younger generations at large. There are no valid arguments – and here I am, unavoidably, preaching to the converted – to downplay the significance of the Middle Ages for a solid education in the Humanities, both today and in the future. In fact, as Bruce Holsinger has discovered, the medieval intellectual world continues to hold sway over the postmodern world insofar as most of the leading theoreticians of our time, whether Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, but so also Panofsky, Habermas, and others, apparently received their fundamental philological training through an in-depth exposure to that world.81 Leaving aside common laments (justified or not), we witness a growing number of excellent critical investigations done in Medieval Studies, without facing any neglect in the traditional and still fundamental areas of philology and editorial work. Depending on one’s viewpoint, we are also fortunate in gaining access to more and more medieval texts from all kinds of languages and cultures through translations, which has a tremendous impact on the way how we can teach the Middle Ages. Further, there are efforts all over the world to make medieval manuscripts available in digital form, which provides us with unheard of new possibilities to carry out detailed and comparative research based on the original documents. Moreover, we also realize a slow but steady rapprochement of the various disciplines, considering the important, though still somewhat tentative collaboration of historians, art historians, musicologists, and literary historians, to mention just a few subject areas. Synergies are of greatest importance if they can be created meaningfully and effectively.82 Of course, there needs to be some common ground, shared interest, significant parallels and similarities, which are not hard to come by if we look carefully. But we do not know enough of each other, and are mostly ignorant regarding how each individual field has evolved over decades, if not centuries. Collaboration and interdisciplinary activities require shared 81 Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also Michael Johnson’s entry on Henri de Lubac in the present volume. 82 In fact, there exists a new review journal titled just that: Synergies Inde, ed. Vidya Vencatesan, whose special issue (no. 2 [2007]), honoring renowned French medievalist Jean Dufournet, devotes itself “Aux sources du dialogue des cultures: Regards croisés sur le Moyen Age en France et en Inde” (Mumbai: Revue du Gerflint, 2007). I appreciate Nadia Margolis’s pointing out this review to me.

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ground, and this ground can be established by looking at the foundational work that has been done in each area of research from the earliest days until the present. Of course, this would not be the conditio sine qua non for efforts to bring together colleagues from different disciplines to investigate topics of broader, hence shared, nature, yet each from his or her individual perspective. For instance, in order to understand how medieval people viewed children or old people we need to consult both chronicles and art objects, literary texts and musical pieces.83 After all, the history of mentalities, one of the most probing and innovative fields of research in Medieval Studies, requires a most comprehensive investigation of medieval culture, drawing all available information from a wide gamut of perspectives for the understanding of people’s mentality, that is, psychological conditions and motivations, desires, fears, and hopes.84 The same now also applies to cultural and anthropological approaches to Medieval Studies (Culture Studies), to Gender Studies, and also, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, Queer Studies and psychological approaches. We would also have to consider the latest methodological and theoretical approach determined by the interest in the human senses and the ability to perceive external signals via the various sensory organs, as reflected by medieval writers and artists.85 Albeit not encyclopedic in its format, the journal Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch (1929, originally as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale), deserves mention here. Ferdi83 Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005); Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 2 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007). 84 Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, Kröners Taschenausgabe, 469, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (1993; Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008). See also Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1999). 85 Again, see Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik; and C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Cf. also Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten, Trends in Medieval Philology, 1 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003); Lachgemeinschaften: kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten, Trends in Medieval Philology, 5 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Elke Koch, Trauer und Identität: Inszenierungen von Emotionen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, Trends in Medieval Philology, 8 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).

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nand Braudel (Mediterranean World and Philip II [1949; New York: Harper and Row, 1962) was another important member. Although they cover all centuries, this school’s adherents have added much to multidisciplinary Medieval Studies, perhaps best known through the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.86 More modern descendants are Pierre Nora, whose monumental Lieux de Mémoire (Realms of Memory) volumes contain valuable information on medieval myths carrying over into post 18th-century French culture (7 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992) and have been translated into several languages, as was the case with the studies published by the founders and leading members of the Annales. Legal and religious documents can essentially contribute to our global understanding of such issues that are indeed most important for medieval society at large, even though they seem to fall, at first sight, into the category of private life, or everyday history.87 Sexuality, one of the most pervasive issues that have troubled and excited people throughout the ages, cannot be adequately studied through the narrow lens of the historian alone, for instance, not to speak of the medievalist working in the area of religion and the arts.88 But the collective of medievalists in the widest possible range of disciplines promise to meet some of the challenges to build on past accomplishments and to forge a path toward future Medieval Studies.89 So, we are taking

86 Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Now see Autour de Montaillou, un village occitan: histoire et religiosité d’une communauté villageoise au Moyen Age: actes du colloque de Montaillou, 25–26–27 août 2000, ed. Anne Brenon et Christine Dieulafait; sous la direction de Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Castelnaudla-Chapelle: L’Hydre éditions, 2001). 87 Brilliant in the broad approach, opening up a new window into a specific, heretofore mostly ignored aspect of medieval society, but astonishingly naive and uncritical, prove to be the contributions to A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987–1991). 88 Sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 3 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008). 89 I would like to thank the following colleagues for their critical comments, suggestions, and corrections: Peter Dinzelbacher (Werfen/Salzburg), Heiko Hartmann (Berlin), Herwig Weigl (Vienna), Graeme Dunphy (Regensburg), Nadia Margolis (Mount Holyoke College, MA), Wendy E. Pfeffer (University of Louisville, KY), Raymond Cormier (Longwood University, Farmville, VA), Klaus Oschema (Heidelberg), Ulrich Müller (Salzburg), and Pieter Mannerts (Research Foundation–Flanders/Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). I am very grateful for all their observations, corrections, additional information, and above all for

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stock here, as comprehensively as possible, but in this process we also hope to lay the foundation for much more interdisciplinary research, traditionally a hallmark of Medieval Studies, and this also in the coming decades and centuries. With the help of this Handbook we can expect to meet the challenges of critical approaches to medieval research in the widest context. Knowing fully where we have come from and what the current state of research proves to be, we will be empowered to pursue our studies further on a more advanced level. More boldly, we might even claim that such a Handbook can be the springboard for all future Medieval Studies insofar as the past has always informed the present, and our knowledge of this process translates into the catalyst for future efforts, investigations, and interpretations.

their encouragement and support. Their help also strongly indicates the way how Medieval Studies will probably proceed in the future, relying much more on interdisciplinary, collaborative, and comparative research and approaches.

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Abbreviations

Abbreviations ABäG ABD ABGB ABMHRA ACIMP

ACPQ ADB AdM AE AEM AfD AfdA AfMw AHDLMA AHR AHVKB AJ AJS Review AK AKAWB Al-Qantara ALR Annales.HSS APSR AS ASNSL ASNSP (CLF)

Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik The Anchor Bible Dictionary Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch Annual Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association Atti del convegno internazionale su Marsilio da Padova (Padova,18–20 settembre 1980) [Medioevo 5 (1979] American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie Annales du Midi American Ethnologist Anuario de estudios medievales Archiv für Diplomatik Anzeiger für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur Archiv für Musikwissenschaft Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen âge American Historical Review Archi des historischen Vereins des Kantons Bern The Archaeological Journal Association for Jewish Studies Review M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972) Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin Revista de estudios árabes Allgemeines Landrecht Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales American Political Science Review American Speech Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Abbreviations

ASP ASQ AUU B.C.E. BBAL BCLSMP BEC BEO BIHR BIRHT BISI BJHP BJMES BMGS BMHG BPM BSOAS ByzZ C.E. CCCM CCM CCSL CEHE CFMA CHJ ChR CL CMA CN CNRS cols. CPh CSEL CT

LXVIII Arabic Sciences and Philosophy Arab Studies Quarterly Språkvetenskapliga sällskapets i Uppsala förhandlingar. Acta Societatis Linguisticae Upsaliensis Before Common Era Biografie e bibliografie degli accademici lincei Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques (Académie royale de Belgique) Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes Bulletin d’Études Orientales Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bulletin de l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des Textes Bulletino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo e Archivio Muratoriano British Journal for the History of Philosophy British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap Bulletin de philosophie médiévale Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Byzantinische Zeitschrift Common Era Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaeualis Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina The Cambridge Economic History of Europe Classiques français du Moyen Age Cambridge Historical Journal Chaucer Review Comparative Literature Concilium Medii Aevi Cultura Neolatina Centre National de Recherche Scientifique columns Classical Philology Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Canterbury Tales

LXIX CUP D. Hist. DA DBE DDJb DFS DMA DP DR DSAM DTÖ durchges. DVE DVG DVjs E&S ed. EdM EETS EH EHR EI.2 EJ (1) EJ (2) ELLMA ELP ENC EQ erg. erw. Est ÉT fasc.

Abbreviations

Cambridge University Press Deutsche Historiker Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch Dalhousie French Studies Dictionary of the Middle Ages M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Duquesne Review Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique: Doctrine et histoire Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich durchgesehen De Vulgari Eloquentia De Vlaamse Gids Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte Essays and Studies edited or editor Paul Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters, vols. I–V (Stuttgart: Anton Hirsemann, 1959–1962). Early English Text Society Encyclopedia of Historians The English Historical Review The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (Brill: Leiden 1960–2004) Encyclopaedia Judaica, first edition, (Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971–1972) English Journal European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart and Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1997). École nationale des chartes Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an ergänzt erweitert English Studies École de théologie fascicle

Abbreviations

FFC FMSt FSt GALex GCFI GLLM GLQ GQ

GRLMA

GRM Habil.schr. HAD

HEI History HJb HLF HPS HPT HRG

HS HSMS HVjS HZ IASL IC id. IGL IJCT

LXX Folklore Fellows’ Communications Frühmittelalterliche Studien French Studies (Oxford) A Greek and Arabic Lexicon Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters. Vols. 1–3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1911–1931). Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Theodor Nöldeke et al., Geschichte des Qorans, (1860–1938, rpt. 3 vols. in 1, Hildesheim: Olms, 1961) Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Hans Robert Jauss and Erich Köhler (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968–) Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift Habilitationsschrift The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, D. and H. Hamilton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) History of European Ideas History. The Journal of the Historical Association Historisches Jahrbuch Histoire littéraire de France Hebraic Political Studies History of Political Thought Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Adalbert Erler, Ekkehard Kaufmann and Dieter Werkmüller, 5 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971–1998) M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990). Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Historische Vierteljahrsschrift Historische Zeitschrift Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur Islamic Culture idem Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 International Journal of the Classical Tradition

LXXI IJMES IMB IOS IRMAE

ITS JAOS Jb. d. BAdW Jb. JEGP JHI JKAWLSK

JMEMS JMH JNES JÖBG JPSR JQS JR JRAS JSJT LA LCI LexMA

LGB2

Liber Floridus

Abbreviations

International Journal of Middle East Studies International Medieval Bibliography Israel Oriental Studies Ius Romanum Medii Aevi, auspice Collegio antiqui iuris studiis provehendis (Milano: Giuffrè, 1961ff.) Irish Texts Society Journal of the American Oriental Society Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Jahrbuch Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of the History of Ideas Jaarboek/Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Journal of Medieval History Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft Jewish Political Studies Review Journal of Qur’anic Studies Journal of Religion Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought L’Alighieri Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie Lexikon des Mittelalters, vols. I–VI (Munich and Zürich: Artemis, 1980–1993); vols. VII–IX (Munich: LexMA Verlag, 1995–1998); Registerband (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1999) Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, 2nd ed. Severin Corsten, Günther Pflug, and Friedrich Adolf Schmidt Künsemüller (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1995). Bernhard Bischoff and Suso Brechter, ed., Liber Floridus. Mittellateinische Studien Paul Lehmann zum 65. Geburtstag (St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag der Erzabtei, 1950).

Abbreviations

LiLi LM

loc. cit. LSE LThK

MA MA&R MAevum

MCDA MED Medieval Latin

Medioevo MedPers MET MF MGH MGWJ MGWJ MHG MHJ MiB Milde and Schuder MIÖG Misc. Med. MKVA MlatJb

LXXII Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik Karl Langosch, Lateinisches Mittelalter. Einleitung in Sprache und Literatur (1963; Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983). loco citato Leeds Studies in English Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Walter Kasper, 3rd revised ed., 11 vols. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1993–2001). Le Moyen Âge Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance Medium Ævum Marsilio da Padova (Padova, 18–20 settembre 1980) [Medioevo 5 (1979] Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2001). Middle English Dictionary Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale Medieval Perspectives Medieval English Theatre Die Musikforschung Monumenta Germaniae Historica Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Middle High German The Medieval History Journal Musikgeschichte in Bildern Wolfgang Milde and Werner Schuder, ed., De captu Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Miscellanea Medievalia Mededelingen Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België, Klasse der Letteren Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch

LXXIII MLN MLR MMIS MP MR MRS ms/mss. MTSC MTSR MW N. F. NCMH NDB NH NM NOHM NRCF

OEN OUP PAAJR PAAJR PBB PG PIASH PIASH PL PM PMLA Poetics Today Poetics Today PPM

Abbreviations

Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review Medieval and Modern Irish Series Modern Philology Medioevo Romanzo Medieval and Renaissance Studies manuscript/manuscripts Medieval Technology and Social Change Method and Theory in the Study of Religion Muslim World Neue Folge New Cambridge Medieval History Neue Deutsche Biographie Nederlandsche Historiebladen Neuphilologische Mitteilungen New Oxford History of Music Nouveau recueil complet des fabliaux, ed. Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard, 10 vols. (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983–2001) Old English Newsletter Oxford University Press Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Paul und Braune Beiträge = Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur Patrologia Graeca Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities Patrologia Latina Patristica et Medievalia Publications of the Modern Language Association Poetics Today. A Journal for Analysis of Literature and Communication Poetics Today: A Journal for Analysis of Literature and Communication Pensiero Politico Medievale

Abbreviations

PPTSL PQ PT PUF QFIAB QS R RAN RB RBA RBPh RC RCPR RDM REB RÉJ RES rev. RF RHC RHD RHDF Rhetorica RhM RHPR RIDC RLA RMS RORD RP RPA RPh RR RSF RSO RSPT RTh

LXXIV Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society Library Philological Quarterly Political Theory Presses Universitaires de France Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken Quaderni storici Romania Rendiconti dell’Accademia di Archeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti di Napoli Revue bénédictine Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Revue Celtique Revue Critique de Philologie Romane Revue des Deux Mondes Revue des Études Byzantines Revue des Études Juives Review of English Studies revised Romanische Forschungen Recueil des Historiens des Croisades Revue d’histoire du droit Revue historique de droit français et étranger Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Theologie und Philosophie Revue d’histoire et philosophie religieuse Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune Romance Languages Annual Reading Medieval Studies Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Review of Politics Revue de philosophie ancienne Romance Philology Romanic Review Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Revista degli Studi Orientali Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques Revue Thomiste

LXXV RUB SAC SATF Scand. Econ. Hist. Rev. SD SF SFI SH SI SMC SNPL SO SP sqq. SSD

TAPA TRE TRHS TS überarb. UNC unveränd. Viator Vivarium VL vol. VSWG WW YWES ZCPh ZfdA ZfdPh

Abbreviations

Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles Studies in the Age of Chaucer Société des anciens textes français Scandinavian Economic History Review Studi Danteschi Studi francesi Studi di filologia italiana Scripta Hierosolymitana Studia Islamica Studies in Medieval Culture Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature Symbolae Osloenses Studies in Philology sequentes Sign, Sentence and Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989). Transactions of the American Philological Association Theologische Realenzyklopädie Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Theological Studies überarbeitet University of North Carolina unverändert Viator. Medieval and Renaissance Studies Vivarium. A Journal for Mediaeval Philosophy and the Intellectual Life of the Middle Ages Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon volume Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Wirkendes Wort The Year’s Work in English Studies Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie

LXXVI

Abbreviations

ZfrP ZNR ZP ZRG, Germ. Abt. ZRG, Kan. Abt.

Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte Zeitschrift für Politik Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte/Germanistische Abteilung Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte/Kanonistische Abteilung

LXXVII

List of Contributors

List of Contributors Acken, James Centre for Medieval Studies, Canada Adams, Tracey University of Auckland, New Zealand Anichini, Federica The College of New Jersey, Ewing Arabatzis, George Academy of Athens, Greece Armistead, Samuel G. University of California, Davis, CA Ash, Karine Marie Los Angeles, CA Auslander, Diane P. Graduate Center, City University of New York Baier, Katharina Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany Bak, Janos Central European University, Budapest, Hungary Baker, Craig Laval Université, Quebec, Canada

Baldzuhn, Michael Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany Barrington, Candace Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT Bashir, Hassan Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar Bashir, Shahzad Stanford University, CA Baumgarten, Jean Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France Berindeanu, Florin Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH Benz, Judith Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA Beringer, Alison Colgate University, Hamilton, NY Black, Patricia California State University, Chico, CA

LXXVIII

List of Contributors

Blaschitz, Gertrud Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Krems, Austria Boggi, Flavio University College Cork, Ireland Bogstad, Janice M. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, WI

Cawsey, Kathey Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada Clason, Christopher Rochester Hills, MI Classen, Albrecht The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Clivio, Gianrenzo Toronto, Canada

Bolduc, Michelle University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI

Compareti, Matteo Stra (Venezia), Italy

Boscolo, Claudia Royal Holloway University of London, UK

Cooper, Glen M. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

Boyle, Elizabeth University of Cambridge, UK

Cormier, Raymond Longwood University, VA

Bratu, Cristian Baylor University, Waco, TX

Cruse, Mark Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Calomino, Salvatore Madison, WI

D’Alessio, Nuncio The University of Texas, Austin, TX

Campbell, Kimberlee Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Dal Santo, Matthew University of Cambridge, UK

Cancian, Alessandro Foundation for Dialogue Among Civilizations, Geneva, Switzerland Carey, Stephen Mark Oakland University, Rochester, MI

Damico, Helen University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM Dangler, Jean Tulane University, New Orleans, LA

LXXIX Davis, Joshua University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO Delle Donne, Roberto Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy De Ventura, Paolo The University of Birmingham, UK Deyrup, Marta Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ Dines, Ilya Jerusalem, Israel Dinzelbacher, Peter Werfen/Salzburg, Austria Dorninger, Maria E. Universität Salzburg, Austria Dover, Carol Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Dunphy, Graeme Universität Regensburg, Germany Egger, Christoph Universität Wien, Austria English, Edward D. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

List of Contributors

Evans, Beverly State University of New York-College at Geneseo, Geneseo, NY Evitt, Regula Meyer Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO Fritsch-Rößler, Waltraud Universität Innsbruck, Austria Full, Bettina Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany Fynn, Jeffrey Paul Tolland, CT Garver, Valerie L. Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Geck, John A. Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, Canada Gentry, Francis G. Spring Mills, PA Germanidou, Sophia Kalamata, Greece Gertsman, Elina Southern Illinois University School of Art and Design, Carbondale, IL Gilbank, Robin University of Wales, UK

LXXX

List of Contributors

Glick, Thomas F. Boston University, Boston, MA Gordon, Sarah Utah State University, Logan, UT Graizbord, David The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Grabowska, Jim Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN Grafinger, Christine Maria Biblioteca Vaticana, Città del Vaticano Griffin, Carrie University College Cork, Ireland Grosse, Max Universität Tübingen, Germany Grove, Jonathan University of Cambridge, UK Harbison, Robert Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY Hartmann, Heiko Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Haywood, Louise University of Cambridge, UK Heller, Sarah-Grace Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

Herman, Jason The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Heyworth, Gregory University of Mississippi, MS Hollengreen, H. Laura University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Holt, Andrew Starke, FL Holtzman, Livnat Bar-Ilan University, Israel Horowitz, Jeannine University of Haifa, Greece Huda, Qamar-ul Washington D.C. Ingram, Amy Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL Jaques, R. Kevin Indiana University, Bloomington, IL Jambeck, Karen K. Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT Jaritz, Gerhard Central European University, Hungary Johnson, Michael A. University of Texas at Austin, TX

LXXXI Kapriev, Georgi St. Kliment Ochridski University, Bulgaria Keats-Rohan, K.S.B. Oxford University, UK King, David Universität Frankfurt, Germany Kitsikopoulos, Harry New York University, New York, NY Koch, Walter Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany Kölzer, Theo Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany

List of Contributors

Leanos, Jaime University of Nevada, Reno Lefebure, Leo D. Georgetown University, DC Lemeneva, Elena Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada Leverage, Paula Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN Löser, Freimut Universität Augsburg, Germany Lucas, Adam Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Surrey Hills, NSW, Australia Luce, Mark David University of Chicago, IL

Kohl, Gerald Universität Wien, Austria

Lummus, David Stanford University, CA

Kümper, Hiram Universität Vechta, Germany

Macierowski, Edward M. Benedictine College, Atchison, KS

Kuhn, Christian Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany

Mack, Gregory McGill University, Canada

Lacy, Norris J. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Latowsky, Anne University of South Florida, Tampa

Mannaerts, Pieter Research Foundation – Flanders, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Margolis, Nadia Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

LXXXII

List of Contributors

Marner, Dominic University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada Meyer, Andreas Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany Meyer Evitt, Regula Colorado Springs, CO Mieszkowski, Gretchen University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, TX Morewedge, Rosmarie Binghamton University, NY Müller, Ulrich Universität Salzburg, Austria

Niederkorn-Bruck, Meta Universität Wien, Austria Nijhuis, Letty University College Cork, Ireland Noakes, Susan University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN Obermeier, Anita University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM O’Brien, Juliet Princeton University, NJ O’Sullivan, Daniel E. The University of Mississippi, MS

Münster, Reinhold Universität Bamberg, Germany

Ohlander, Erik S. Indiana University, Purdue University, Fort Wayne

Munson, Marcella Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

Oschema, Klaus Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany

Murdoch, Brian University of Stirling, Scotland, UK

Paddock, Mary Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA

Murray, K. Sarah-Jane Baylor University, Waco, TX Nagi, Joseph UCLA, Los Angeles, CA Naismith, Rory Cambridge University, UK

Parra Membrives, Eva Universidad de Salamanca, Spain Parton, Frances Cambridge University, UK Paulsen, Robert Universität Freiburg i.Br., Germany

LXXXIII

List of Contributors

Peitsara, Kirsti University of Helsinki, Finland

Reichert, Hermann Universität Wien, Austria

Penn, Stephen University of Stirling, Scotland, UK

Reinhart, Max University of Georgia, Athens, GA

Pettigrew, Mark Queens College, City University of New York Pfeffer, Wendy University of Louisville, Louisville, KY

Reynolds, Kevin York University, Toronto, Canada Rezakhani, Khodadad UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

Pierce, Marc University of Texas, Austin, TX

Rider, Jeff Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

Pigg, Daniel The University of Tennessee at Martin, Martin, TN

Roberg, Francesco Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Germany

Pincikowski, Scott E. Hood College, Frederick, MD

Rodíguez-Velasco, Jesús University of California, Berkeley, CA

Poole, Russell University of Western Ontario, Canada Porter, Camarin University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI Powrie, Sarah St. Thomas More College, Saskatchewan, Canada Raposo Fernández, Berta Universidad de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Rötzer, Daniel Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg, Austria Rosenstein, Roy The American University of Paris, France Rouillard, Linda Marie The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH Rushing, James Rutgers University, Camden, NJ

LXXXIV

List of Contributors

Sager, Alex University of Georgia, Athens, GA Sandidge, Marilyn Westfield State University, MA Santangelo, Enrico Università di Torino, Italy Sauer, Michelle M. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND Sayers, William Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Schmidt, Siegrid Universität Salzburg, Austria Schnall, Jens Eike Universität Freiburg i.Br., Germany Schwartz, Yossef Tel Aviv University, Israel Singer, Julie Washington University, St. Louis, MO

Stevenson, Barbara Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA Stock, Marcus University of Toronto, Canada Stokes, Peter University of Cambridge, UK Storey, Wayne Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Stoudt, Debra Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA Syros, Vasileios University of Chicago, IL Taylor, Scott L. Pima Community College, Tucson, AZ Taylor, Steven Millem Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI

Slavin, Philip Yale University, New Haven, CT

Tinsley, David University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA

Snook, Ben Selwyn College, London, UK

Tomasik, Timothy Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN

Sprague, Maurice Universität Salzburg, Austria

Touwaide, Alain National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

LXXXV Vallerani, Massimo Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy Van Liere, Frans Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI Vogeler, Georg Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany Vogtherr, Thomas Universität Osnabrück, Germany Ward, Renée University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada Wedell, Moritz Universität Zürich, Switzerland Weigl, Herwig Universität Wien, Austria

List of Contributors

Wełna, Jerzy Warsaw University, Poland Whitford, David Victoria, Canada Yager, Susan Iowa State University, Ames, IA Ysebaert, Walter Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Research Foundation-Flanders, Belgium Zajkowski, Robert Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghamton University, NY; Hudson Valley Community College, NY Zychowicz, James Madison, WI

List of Contributors

LXXXVI

1

Main Topics and Debates of the Last Decades and their Terminology and Results

2

3

The Arab West

A The Arab West A. Introduction The Arab West is a cultural area that conventionally includes the Maghrib (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, but usually not Libya), Sicily and al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal). The three Maghrib countries then acquired in the course of the 19th century a distinctive historiographical overlay due to French colonization that imparted idiosyncratic views of social organization (the importance of autonomous Berber “cantons”) and political organization (opposition of territory controlled by the state – bled al-makhzen – versus that under tribal control (land of dissidence, bled al-siba). B. History of Research. North Africa A series of important monographs in French formed the basis of modern North African historiography: Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le sud du Maroc, 1930; Emile Félix Gautier, Le passé de l’Afrique du nord: Les siècles obscurs (1937); Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides (1940); Hady R. Idris, La Berbérie orientale sous les Zirides (1962). Gautier and Montagne argued similar points, that Morocco had never been unified because of the prevalence of free Berber “cantons” (Montagne), or that unification never happened because of a millennial struggle between sedentary peoples (Berbers) and nomads (Arabs and Arabized Berbers) (Gautier). Gautier’s argument, fascinating but hyperbolic, is based to an extent on the hypothesis of the 14th-century polymath, Ibn Khaldun, on the role of sedentary – nomad conflict in the rise and falls of dynastic states (in his Muqaddimah and Kitab al-‘Ibar). Reevaluation of the nature of Berber society was largely the work of anthropologists, especially Jacques Berque (Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas, 1955); and Ernest Gellner (Saints of the Atlas, 1969), both of whom had immense influence on historians. A landmark in urban history was Roger Le Tourneau’s Fès avant le protectorat (1949), which however perpetuated the notion of a city-based society dating back to the early Middle Ages.

The Arab West

4

C. al-Andalus The 19th-century Spanish historiography of Islamic Spain was vitiated by an inability to distinguish between race and culture and therefore to assume that indigenous Hispano-Romans converted to Islam somehow remained “Spanish” in culture. This essentialist approach was first attacked by Américo Castro (The Structure of Spanish History, 1954; revised as The Spaniards, 1971), who first made the case that the culture of al-Andalus was a normative Arabo-Islamic one; and then definitively by Pierre Guichard (Al-Andalus: Estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en Occidente, 1976), who provided the social mechanism by which indigenous peoples were assimilated into Arabo-Muslim culture, and, at the same time, demonstrated (most importantly through a study of tribal toponyms) the tribe-based nature of settlement. The first comprehensive narrative history of al-Andalus was written by the Dutch Arabist Reinhart Dozy (Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne: jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides, 1861), a political history that extended only through the Almoravid period. The next was by Evariste Lévi-Provencal, in the form of an updated version of Dozy’s Histoire, with the same title (1932). However this political narrative was accompanied by an influential volume on the social and economic history of al-Andalus (L’Espagne musulmane au XIème siècle: Institutions et vie sociale, 1932). Because the kingdom of Granada lasted 250 years longer than the heartland of Islamic Spain, it has a distinctive historiography. The standard histories are Rachel Arie, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides (1973); and L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250–1500 (1990). The notion of social organization underlying much of this literature was a tacit adaptation of the bled al-makhzen/bled al-siba model to al-Andalus, under the assumption that the polity of the emirate, caliphate and independent kings alike was one of centralized control, punctuated by tribal rebellions. One of the problems of western Islamic historiography – especially that of al-Andalus – is the lack of Arabic documentation. As a result there has been methodologically interesting work, using Christian archival documentation for the reconstruction of aspects of Islamic history: Olivia R. Constable, who made use of Genoese notarial archives to document Italian trade with al-Andalus (Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500, 1994), Charles Du Fourcq (L’Espagne catalane et le Magrib au XIIIe et XVe siècles, 1965), using documents from the Archives of the Crown of Aragon to reconstruct relations between the Catalonia and the Magrib; and the entire literature of the Christian resettlement of al-Andalus,

5

The Arab West

using land partition documents (Libros de repartimiento) to reconstruct the social and agricultural organization of Islamic Spain (see Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Conquest, 1996, ch. 6). D. Medieval Archeology In the 1980s, a new approach to Andalusi society was adumbrated by a new wave of medieval archeologists who reexamined the social structure of al-Andalus from the perspective of Guichard who in an important study of fortifications together with André Bazzana and Patrice Cressier (Les chateaux ruraux d’Al-Andalus, 1990), replaced the older tacit paradigm of rural social organization with a new one, based on free tribal settlements under the protective wing of “castle-refuges” (husun) that were inhabited only in times of unrest. A huge investment of energy was spent over the next ten to fifteen years on identifying castle/village complexes. The paradigm was subsequently somewhat modified by Miquel Barceló and his students at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who demonstrated convincingly that water systems, not castles, were the central organizing feature of such settlement complexes. A model study is given by Helena Kirchner (La construcció d’un espai pagès a Mayurqa (1997), who demonstrates the relationship between systems of irrigation canals and tribal settlements. E. Current Trends The wave of enthusiasm that carried the new medieval archeology for twenty years seemingly dissipated around 2000, or rather, its energies were devoted to regional syntheses. Representative works are Guichard’s on Valencia (Les Musulmans de Valence et le reconquete, 1990); Rafael Azuar on Alicante and the Islamic kingdom of Denia (Denia islámica: arqueología y poblamiento, 1989), and Virgilio Martínez Enamorado on Málaga (Al-Andalus desde la periferia: la formación de una sociedad musulmana en tierras malagueñas, 2003). Methodologically what is notable about these syntheses is that their sources are both documentary and archeological. There has also appeared a kind of revanchist retrieval, although also regionally delimited and with an archeological basis, of the older line of “continuism” that stressed continuity of culture and social organization from Roman through early Islamic times (see Sonia Gutiérrez, La cora de Tudmir, de la antigüedad tardía al mundo islámica: poblamiento y cultura material, 1996).

The Arab East

6

Select Bibliography Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa, ed. Ernest Gellner (Lexington: Heath, 1972); Pierre Guichard, Al-Andalus, 711–1492 (Paris: Hachette, 2000); Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995; revised as Paisajes de conquista, Valencia: University of Valencia Press, 2006); Abdelmajid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001); Michel Terrasse, Islam et Occident méditerranéen: de la conquête aux Ottomans (Paris: CTHS, 2001).

Thomas F. Glick

The Arab East A. General Introduction The Arab East can be defined as the regions including modern day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the eastern portion of Turkmenistan. The Arab conquests of these regions began in the third decade of the 7th century and continued through the middle of the 8th century. In the 7th century, these lands were under the influence of three major powers: the Sasanian Empire in Persia, the T’ang dynasty in China and the Gupta dynasty in India. The Sasanian Empire encompassed Iraq, Iran, southwestern and northern Afghanistan and parts of Turkmenistan. On its western and northern frontiers, it bordered the Byzantine Empire, which controlled the Levant, the Caucasus and Asia Minor. Its northeastern boundaries were roughly defined as south of the Oxus River and the western bank of the Murghab River and the great Ghuzz Desert. Its easternmost province, Khurasan was less settled and expanded and contracted with the times. It comprised four main administrative centers in Marw, Abrashahr (Nishapur, modern day Mashhad), Herat and Balkh. The military command for the region was based in Marw, in present day Turkmenistan. Sijistan (Sistan), the region presently comprising portions of southeast Iran, northwestern Pakistan and southwestern Afghanistan had been nominally under Sasanian rule. Its easternmost boundary was Bust, situated at the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. Further to the east the local rulers were aligned with the Indian Empire. North of the Oxus River (Transoxiana) were Khwarazm, which bordered the southern shore of the Aral Sea and Sogdia, which occupied the Oxus –

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Jaxartes Basin. Sogdia was a federation of loosely allied Iranian city-states that were nominally under Chinese suzerainty. The major city-states of Sogdia were Paykand, Bukhara and Samarqand. Further north in Ushrusana was Shash, near present day Tashkent. The peoples of this region were primarily of Iranian stock with a mixture of Turkic speaking peoples. B. The Righteous Caliphs (632–661 C.E.) The Arabs quickly colonized Iraq during this period. The two garrison towns of Basra and Kufa were established and soon became cities that experienced massive Arab emigrations. They were the main bases of operation from which campaigns to the east were launched. Under the caliph Umar (r. 634–644 C.E.), raids were launched into Persia. Persian resistance against the Arabs continued through the caliphate of Uthman (r. 644–656 C.E.). The Arabs established garrisons and appointed governors in the major cities and relative calm prevailed. The Arab governors of Iraq administered the eastern lands from Basra and reported to the caliph in Damascus. They were largely responsible for appointing governors in the east. The furthest frontier on the eastern border of the newly emerged Arab Empire was called Khurasan. This region comprised the former Sasanian province of Khurasan as well as Sijistan (Sistan) and Transoxiana beyond the Oxus. These three regions known as “Greater Khurasan” are the main focus of this article. The Makran and Sind were conquered by the Arabs in the early 8th century, but they remained backwaters during the period which concerns us. The Arabs quickly subdued Sasanian Khurasan and Sijistan. They raided as far east as Kabul and the Sind. Treaties were negotiated with the individual rulers of the major towns and cities of Khurasan and annual tributes were agreed upon. The local rulers were responsible for the collection and payment of this tribute. The Arabs did not maintain a large physical presence there during this period. Initially, after campaigning, they typically returned to Basra in Iraq. Due to this and internal Arab upheavals, such as the assassinations of the caliphs Umar, Uthman and Ali, the Khurasanis frequently used these periods of Arab unrest to rebel. This resulted in additional Arab campaigns, which necessitated the renegotiation of treaties. C. Umayyad Period (661–750 C.E.) Under the Umayyad caliph Muawiya (r. 661–680 C.E.), 50,000 soldiers and their dependents were sent to colonize Khurasan in 671 C.E. The majority of this group settled in the administrative capital of Khurasan, Marw. In 673 C.E., the Arabs mounted campaigns, which crossed the Oxus into Trans-

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oxiana (Ar. Ma wara al-nahr), where they attacked the Sogdian city-states. These campaigns resulted in an enormous amount of booty, but the treaties established there were short-lived. Rebellions continued until the governorship of Qutayba b. Muslim (705–714 C.E.). Qutayba launched a sustained campaign against the Sogdians with the military support of local levies. Paykand was completely destroyed and Bukhara and Samarqand were subjugated and Arab garrisons were stationed in these cities. Qutayba’s campaigns extended as far east as Kashgar. Qutayba’s conquests proved to be superficial. The Sogdians allied themselves with the western Turks, whose power had surged and during the last portion of Umayyad rule, Transoxiana was nearly lost to the Arabs. Sijistan was plagued with rebellion and Umayyad control was effectively restricted to the two major cities of Zaranj and Bust. In 736 C.E., in an effort to hold Greater Khurasan together, the Umayyad governor, Asad b. Khalid moved the administrative capital from Marw to Balkh. The majority of the population of Greater Khurasan did not convert to Islam. Religiously, the area was extremely diverse with a Zoroastrian majority and Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Manichaean and pagan minorities. Among the Arabs and new converts, tribal, political and sectarian differences were rife. These divisions among the Muslims coupled with continued rebellion weakened Umayyad authority. An anti-Umayyad movement had begun around 720 C.E. Its propaganda concentrated on the populations of Khurasan and finally in 746 C.E., the Abbasid Revolution under the leadership of Abu Muslim al-Khurasani began there. It quickly gained success in Khurasan and toppled Umayyad authority there and spread westward into Persia and Iraq. Continued victories propelled the movement into Syria and in 750 A. D. the Umayyads were defeated and the Abbasid dynasty was established. Abu Muslim al-Khurasani retained control of Khurasan and reestablished Muslim control over Transoxiana. However, in 755 C.E., he was assassinated by the Abbasid caliph, al-Manur, who appointed his own governor to Khurasan. D. The Abba¯ sid High Caliphate (750–833 C.E.) The establishment of the Abbasid dynasty was a turning point in the history of the Arabs and Islam. Previously, Arab Umayyad rule had dominated. Non-Arabs converting to Islam became clients (mawali), which made them “honorary Arabs.” However, their status was not equal to that of the Arabs. After the Abbasid revolution, things began to change. The capital of the empire was moved from Damascus to Baghdad and the victorious Khurasanis, who were a mixture of Arabs and Persians obtained a special status in the

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government. Non-Arabs increasingly attained high offices and positions of authority. The Umayyads heavily exploited Greater Khurasan. The Arab governors had amassed great wealth and did little to improve the infrastructure or public services. With the establishment of a new “Muslim dynamic,” trade increased and cities along the trade routes grew and prospered. While the majority of the population remained non-Muslim until the late 10th century, the number of new converts to Islam grew, as did the number of religious scholars. Arab religious scholars were no longer an overwhelming majority and a growing class of non-Arab scholars writing in Arabic flourished. The second half of the 8th century was a period of cultural and religious synthesis. The Arabs in the east became more assimilated into the overall society while for a period of three hundred years the Persians abandoned Middle Persian and adopted Arabic as their administrative, liturgical and literary language. The Arab conquests set into motion the conditions that led to the emergence of New Persian after this period. New Persian was written in a modified form of the Arabic script and included a large number of Arabic loan words. It developed an Islamic literature and gradually became the dominant Iranian language replacing Sogdian as the lingua franca of Central Asia. As the Arabs became more Persianized, the Persians became more Arabized. Additionally, the Turks, who had traditionally adopted Sogdian as their written language, replaced it with new Persian (Dari). However, Dari did not begin to emerge as a literary language until the 10th century. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad experienced a major schism in the beginning of the 9th century, which ultimately resulted in the loss of the east to Arab authority. Upon his death in 809 C.E., Harun al-Rashid’s son, al-Amin, became caliph and his son, Mamun, became the governor of Khurasan. A rift developed between the two brothers and a civil war ensued. Mamun, who governed from Marw, eventually triumphed. Born of a Persian mother, he was at home in the east and had seriously pondered moving the capital of the empire from Baghdad to Marw. However, rebellions in the western portions of the empire forced him to decide whether he wanted to be the governor of Khurasan or the caliph of the Arab Empire. In 819 C.E., he moved to Baghdad. The Abbasid reign from its beginnings in 750 C.E. through the caliphate of Mamun is generally known as the period of the High Caliphate. After this time, Arab authority in the east rapidly declined. Mamun appointed governors to Khurasan but none were able to govern it well or keep the peace. Finally, in 821 C.E., Tahir b. al-Husayn, a trusted general of Mamun of Persian origin was appointed to Khurasan. He reestablished order and soon became a patron of Arab learning. Politically, he estab-

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lished his autonomy from Baghdad and Arab rule and founded his own dynasty, the Tahirids (821–873 C.E.). TheTahirids were the last rulers in the east to make a pretense of being Arab. The successors of the Tahirids in the east, in the late 9th century and the early 10th century, the Saffarids from Sijistan and the Samanids in Transoxiana and Khurasan were ethnically Persian and actively patronized things Persian while promoting Islam. Arab control over the east ended. Subsequent dynasties of the Ghaznavids and Saljuqs were ethnically Turkish but culturally Persian. The Arab caliphs ruling from Baghdad gradually lost control of their once large empire that fragmented into a number of different states. The caliphs were unable to reclaim their past political power and eventually became only figureheads. The institution of the caliphate continued in Baghdad until 1258, when the Mongols invaded and killed the last Arab caliph. E. History of Research Scholarship on the Arabs in the East has primarily concentrated on the Umayyad dynasty and specifically the causes of the Abbasid revolution. Gerlof Van Vloten and Julius Wellhausen led this research in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. Van Vloten’s Recherches sur la domination arabe, le chi’isme et les croyances messianiques sous les Omayyades (1894) perceived the Abbasid revolution as a Persian nationalist movement, which struggled against repressive taxes and social inequality in order to overthrow the Arab oppressors. He believed the revolution was energized by the rise of Shi’ism and the expectation of a liberator or messiah. Wellhausen supported Van Vloten’s views; however, in opposition to Van Vloten, he saw the revolution as having its roots in Islam rather than Persian nationalism. Julius Wellhausen’s The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall appeared in 1902. It was the first critical work to use Tabari’s History of the Prophets and the Kings and the first presentation of an Islamic subject using modern historical method. Wellhausen, as a product of his age, was concerned with nations, states and persons and the struggle between them for power. This preoccupation with politics and nationality completely disregarded economics. Wellhausen saw the Umayyad dynasty as essentially an Arab kingdom. He further forwarded the belief that the empire had become factionalized along north/south (Qays/Yaman) Arab tribal lines during the Islamic era. His views established the paradigm that remained virtually unassailed, for more than 70 years. Wellhausen closely and critically examined his and their sources. He favored the earliest ones. He strongly believed that the literary tradition should be subjected to intense criticism and analyzed for contradictions and biases. Wellhausen’s works were followed by a number of modern

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scholars, who advanced scholarship in the field by collating and editing critical editions of important manuscripts. European institutions had continued to collect Arabic manuscripts from the Middle East, Central Asia and India. As these works were described and catalogued a major effort began to produce critical editions of them. In these pursuits, Vasily Barthold, Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Richard N. Frye figured prominently. Vasily Barthold was a polymath. He was one of the first scholars to critically use both Arabic and Persian sources in his research. He saw the Umayyad period as one of exploitation. He believed that the Arabs had no real administrative aims and that they were content to maintain control over the Khurasani Arab population while extracting taxes and tribute from all. The rapid succession of Umayyad governors and their acquisition of vast fortunes proved this point to him. Barthold’s major contribution to this early phase of Islamic history was his groundbreaking work on the history and geography of Central Asia. He was meticulous and systematically identified cities, towns and landmarks throughout Central Asia, utilizing a variety of scientific methods and incorporating archaeological and numismatic findings. He was a prolific writer, who wrote primarily in Russian and German. His works were considered so important that his major work, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (1900) was translated into English from the Russian with Barthold’s collaboration by Hamilton A. R. Gibb in 1928. Hamilton A. R. Gibb continually added to the prior studies of his colleagues. In examining Greater Khurasan, he contrasted a highly decentralized Transoxiana with the centralized former Sasanian realm of Khurasan proper and he stressed that their social and political systems had developed independently. He viewed Qutayba b. Muslim’s conquests in Transoxiana as superficial and held that Sogdian resistance to the Arabs was based on commercial interests and their tradition of regional independence. He highlighted the roles of Asad b. Abdullah and Nasr b. Sayyar at the end of the Umayyad period in trying to right injustices and unify the frontier by bringing the Arabs and mawali closer together. He tried to demonstrate that once the Arabs began to focus on trade that resistance decreased dramatically. Gibb was one of the first to utilize Chinese sources. His major work on this subject is The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (1923). Gibbs other works focus on Islam, literature and the interaction of Islamic societies with other cultures. Richard N. Frye concentrated on examining all facets of ancient Persia. While others had primarily focused on changes that were ushered in with the Arabs and Islam, Frye maintained the point of view, that the Persians were a dominant and changing force. Some of his major works are The Golden Age of Persia: the Arabs in the East (1975), Islamic Iran and Central Asia (1979) and The

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History of Bukhara (1954). Frye took special effort to inform us as to what sources on the subject have apparently been lost to time. C. E. Bosworth’s contribution to the study of the Arabs in the East must also be mentioned. Wellhausen and Gibb examined the East as a whole. Barthold had concentrated on Central Asia and Frye on Iran. Bosworth’s contributions are in geography and particularly on Sijistan (Sïstan). His Sïstan Under the Arabs, (1968) greatly complements the study of the Arabs and the East. These six scholars comprise what has been termed as the classical school of thought. Our understanding of Umayyad Khurasan has been shaped by their seminal works. Together they have provided a firm historiographical and geographical knowledge of this period, while advancing textual criticism and exploring all available sources. F. The Revisionists In the absence of an abundance of detailed information on the causes and factors leading up to the Abbasid revolution (747–750 C.E.), a new school grew up. The common thread linking the two schools has been an emphasis on the discontent in Khurasan caused by oppressive taxes for all, the assimilation of the Arabs into Khurasani society and their subsequent loss of political status, coupled with constant ongoing inter-tribal rivalries. The ruling dynasty was viewed as mostly impious and wrongly guided. The chronicles of Tabari, Ibn al-Athir, al-Baladhuri, Ibn A’tham and Ya’qubi provided the foundation for these ideas. The discovery of new sources such as the anonymous Akhbar dawlat al-Abbasiya and Tarikh al-Khulafa, and other works have helped to feed the fire of an ongoing classical versus revisionist battle. M. A. Shaban’s radical interpretation of the character of the Abbasid revolution in his Islamic History, C.E. 600–750 (A.H. 132): A New Interpretation (1971) attacked the classical school and claimed that the Arabs had no interest in war, opposed taxes, resented the Persian elite in charge of collecting taxes and were fully assimilated with the local population and were sympathetic to conversion. He saw the Abbasid revolution as primarily Arab, emerging out of Marw, as a result of lost status and privilege. He viewed the revolution as a three-way struggle between old military, new military and settlers. He dismissed the existence of tribal rivalries and transformed the north/south (Qays/Yaman) rivalries into ideological parties with common political, social and economic interests. He claimed the northern Arabs (Qays) were advocates of expansionist policies, while the southerners (Yaman) were proponents of assimilationist ones. He further claimed that there were few converts to Islam at this time.

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Shaban’s theories caused quite a stir when they were published. They challenged Wellhausen’s paradigm. However, Shaban’s work has not withstood the critical scrutiny of scholarship. His theories were more interpretation than fact, and his use of the sources was fairly loose. However, while he is faulted for a lack of good scholarly practices, his fresh approach to the subject was much needed. His revisionist school grew to include Daniel Dennett (Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam, 1950), Farouk Omar (The Abbassid Caliphate: 132/750–170/786, 1969), Moshe Sharon (Black Banners from the East: the Establishment of the Abbasid State: Incubation of a Revolt; and Revolt: the Social and Military Aspects of the Abbasid Revolution, 1983), and Jacob Lassner (Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: an Inquiry into the Art of Abbasid Apologetics, 1986). All of them asserted the Arabness of the Abbasid revolution and minimalized the role of the Persians. G. Recent Scholarship In the wake of the classical and revisionist schools, there has been a search for new sources that could shed more light on our rudimentary understanding of this period. Again, the main interest for this period has been the Abbasid revolution and the proving or disproving of the various theories of Wellhausen and Shaban. Two others scholars, Saleh Said Agha (The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads: neither Arab nor Abbasid, 2003) and Fukuzo Amabe (The Emergence of the Abbasid Autocracy: the Abbasid Army, Khurasan and Adharbayjan, 1995) have introduced studies, which systematically examined the ethnic character of the Abbasid revolution and questioned the Abbasid dynasty claim. Agha focused on demographics and convincingly established the varied ethnic composition of the Abbasid revolution, deconstructing Shaban. Amabe in his collection of essays examines the Qays-Yaman dispute and agrees with Shaban as to its political nature in Syria but finds that the tensions in Khurasan had nothing to do with the Syrian ones. Additionally, he has convincingly disputed Shaban’s claim of the limited numbers of troops enrolled in the payrolls and that the old military (muqatila) were all dismissed from the rolls and replaced by Syrians and new troops. Finally, both Agha and Amabe have shattered Shaban’s theory that the majority of revolutionaries came from Marw and that no propagandists (da’is) operated outside of it. The debates, rebuttals and different interpretations of the events culminating in the Abbasid revolution have provided an abundance of opinions and used a variety of approaches. Both the classical and revisionist schools have fueled a continual series of studies, but none of them have approached the subject by examining Khurasan as a whole, from the advent of Islam until

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the Abbasid revolution. Scholars will continue to search for new sources on this subject. As more and more manuscripts are described and catalogued each year, it is possible that more pieces of this puzzle will be found. Select Bibliography Salih Sa’id Agha, The Revolution which Toppled the Umayyads: Neither Arab nor Abbasid (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003); Fukuzo Amabe, The Emergence of the Abbasid Autocracy: The Abbasid Army, Khurasan and Adharbayjan (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 1995); Vasily V. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (London: Luzac & Co., 1928); Clifford E. Bosworth, Sistan Under the Arabs: From the Islamic Conquest to the Rise of the Saffarids, 30–250/651–864 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1968); Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975); Hamilton A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia. (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1923); M. A. Shaban, Islamic History: A new Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Gerlof van Vloten, Recherches sur la domination arabe, le chi’isme et les croyances messianiques sous les khalifat Omayyades (Amsterdam: J. Muller, 1894); Julius Wellhausen, Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902).

Mark David Luce

Arabic Literature A. Introduction Throughout the Middle Ages, Arabic was employed by millions of Arabs and Muslims, not only as a scriptural language, but also as a shared medium of scholarly and literary communication. Accordingly, medieval Arabic literature was a rich and diverse tradition. This article provides an overview of the formation of the medieval literary canon and a survey of major trends in the study of Arabic literature from the 19th century to the present. The modern Arabic term adab signifies both “good manners” and “literature” in its specialized sense (poetry, drama, and artistic prose). In the Middle Ages, however, adab had a broader semantic range, conveying conduct and manners, knowledge and refinement, and, especially, the kind of socialization expected of secretaries, courtiers, and intellectuals. Adab writings, by extension, were those that contributed to this socialization, works that were both aesthetically pleasing and instructive. (For a full discussion of this term, see Seeger Bonnebakker, “Adab and the concept of belles-lettres,” The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ^Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ash-

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tiany et al., 1990, 16–30.) The focus of this article is the study of secular belles-lettres, but it is important to remember that in the Middle Ages, practically all non-technical writings were expected to be composed according to contemporary standards of adab. B. The Legacy of Medieval Literary Scholarship Modern scholarship on medieval Arabic literature has adopted much of the conceptual framework of literary categorization formulated in the Middle Ages. In particular, the medieval canon, with its attendant aesthetic judgments and assumptions, has had a lasting influence. Until relatively recently, modern scholars have devoted little attention to those texts regarded as inferior or marginal in the Middle Ages. The first and most fundamental criterion for determining the “literariness” of a text was its linguistic register. Early in the Islamic era, Arab linguists became concerned with the question of diglossia, the perceived corruption of formal, fully inflected Arabic into various uninflected regional dialects. With a few notable exceptions, sub-literary status was assigned to compositions in colloquial dialects. Poetry was the premier literary genre in the Middle Ages. Despite its pagan religious milieu, the orally transmitted poetic tradition of the preIslamic era (al-jahiliyya, literally, “the age of ignorance”) was especially admired and regarded as a rich repository of linguistic and cultural information. The most famous canonical collection, the mu^allaqat (“the pendants” or “hanging odes”), consists of exemplars of the qasida, a formal, polythematic, monorhymed ode, by the most highly esteemed pre-Islamic poets. Much medieval criticism was prescriptive, dwelling on ideals and models for imitation and codified norms (^umud al-shi^r, “the pillars of poetry”). Pre-Islamic poetry, the mu^allaqat especially, provided such models. The traditional periodization of Arabic literature after the coming of Islam is loosely based on dynastic shifts and perceived changes in poetic style. The early Islamic period (622–660) and the reign of the Umayyad caliphs (660–750) is generally viewed as a transitional phase. The rise of the ^Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), signaled a definitive break with the tribal, nomadic past. The panegyrical ode (madih) had served a tribal function in pre-Islamic Arabia, but became an important medium of state propaganda in the caliphal era. Its most celebrated proponents were Abu Tammam (d. 846), alBuhturi (d. 897), and al-Mutanabbi (d. 965). Shorter forms, notably the ghazaliyya (love poem) and khamriyya (wine-song), both frequently set to music, became popular in less formal court contexts. Medieval critics perceived marked differences in style and tone between pre-Islamic poetry and that of

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the ^Abbasid period. Badi^ (“innovative new style”), a trend towards complex rhetorical embellishment that came into fashion in the early 9th century, became a key means of distinguishing the ‘modern poets’ (al-muhdathun) from the ‘ancients’ (al-qudama#). In the later Middle Ages, poetry became increasingly imitative, hence the modern distinction between the ‘classical’ period (the ^Abbaasid caliphate) and the ‘post-classical’ period (beginning after the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258). Artistic prose was largely an innovation of the caliphal era, although brief narratives in the form of first-person reports (akhbar) recording important tribal events had been transmitted since pre-Islamic times. Reports of this sort, considered nonfictional, became the basis of historiography and biography. Of special significance were the hadith reports that inscribed the deeds and utterances of the prophet Muhammad. In the ^Abaasid period, reports were sometimes embedded in essays, such as those of al-Jahiz (d. 869?), and included in large compilations of short narratives on a variety of subjects. The most famous were literary anthologies: Ibn Qutayba’s (d. 889) ^Uyun al-akhbar (“Choice Anecdotes”), Ibn ^Abd Rabbihi’s (d. 940) Al-^Iqd alfarid (“The Precious Necklace”), and Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s (d. 967) Kitab al-aghani (“Book of Songs”). Other compilations of this sort fell into an endless variety of sub-genres: histories, biographical dictionaries, manuals of etiquette, Fürstenspiegels, accounts of wonders and marvels, and so on. For the most part, prose narratives were expected to have a reliable chain of transmission and to deal with (plausibly) real events. Those fictional narratives that were tolerated were instructive allegories or sophisticated (therefore edifying) satires. An early experiment in this area was Ibn al-Muqaffa^’s (d. 757) Kalila wa-Dimna (“Kalila and Dimna”), a translation of animal fables from Pahlavi. The most popular fictional form of the Middle Ages was the maqama, a picaresque genre in rhymed prose developed by al-Hamadhani (d. 1008) and al-Hariri (d. 1122) and imitated up until the early 20th century. Medieval literary scholarship was prolific and remarkably introspective. The study of Arabic literary history depends on vast Medieval anthologies, commentaries, biographical and bibliographical compendia, and other resources. Medieval terms and conceptual categories – genres, modes, rhetorical terms, and so on – have, by and large, been adopted by modern scholars. Modern scholarship has also inherited a certain geographic bias (focusing particularly on the urban centers of the Fertile Crescent), and the traditional primitivist aesthetic that favored early ‘classic’ texts over later innovations. Naturally, issues that were of particular interest to medieval commentators and critics have continued to play a prominent role in the study of Arabic literature.

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C. The 19th Century: Discovery and Rediscovery Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 is often cited as the first significant cultural encounter between modern Europe and the Arab world, and an important catalyst for scholarly activity on both sides of the Mediterranean. Not incidentally, it was also the first significant military encounter, marking the beginning of European imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. Throughout most of the 19th century, scholarship on Arabic literature, both among Arab intellectuals and Orientalists, consisted mainly of collecting, cataloguing, editing, and publishing texts. In the early 19th century, modernization programs in the Arabic-speaking Middle East coincided with a new interest in classical literature. By midcentury, this interest had grown into a broad literary and cultural movement, al-Nahda (the “Revival” or “Renaissance”), which represented, among other things, a growing awareness among Arabs of their shared cultural heritage (al-turath). Al-Nahda was contrasted with ^Asr al-inhittat, a perceived “Period of Stagnation” or ‘Dark Ages’ (from the late Middle Ages through the Napoleonic invasion), characterized, politically, by the rule of non-Arab dynasties, and artistically, by an ostensible decline in originality. As Ottoman authority waned and European colonial activity intensified, al-Nahda became identified with both a revival of interest in medieval culture on the one hand, and rapid westernization on the other. Al-Nahda is chiefly associated with Egypt and the Levant, where the principle encounters with Europe took place. While the translation, imitation, and assimilation of European literary genres in the Arab world has been widely studied, far less attention has been devoted to the process by which classical Arabic literature became an object of study in the modern Arab world. (See, however, Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939, 1962; and Jack A. Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 1984).The degree to which classical Arabic literature was ‘rediscovered’ in the 19th century is open to debate. Certainly some classical genres and authors had never ceased to be widely appreciated and studied in both the eighteenth and 19th centuries. The most dramatic development was not ‘rediscovery’ but wide distribution brought about as printing supplanted manuscript culture. In 1822, the Khedive Muhammad ^Ali established the Bulaq Press in Cairo as part of his modernization project. Although the Bulaq Press specialized in technical manuals and translations of European textbooks, it published editions of Alf Layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights”) and Ibn al-Muqaffa^’s Kalila wa-Dimna in 1822, soon followed by other medieval literary works. Protestant missionaries and the Jesuits set up presses in the Levant, and by the end of the century, most major Arab cities had presses. Newspapers and journals also published classical as

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well as contemporary literature, and soon became important fora for cultural dialogue. Some early contributors to al-Nahda include the Egyptian educator and translator Rifa^a al-Tahtawi (1801–1871), who advocated and supervised the publication of heritage texts at Bulaq, the Egyptian poet Ibrahim al-Dasuqi (1811–1883), an editor at the same press, and the Lebanese Christian poet Faris al-Shidyaq (1804–1887), an editor at the British Arabic press in Malta who later established an Arabic press in Istanbul. Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), a Lebanese Christian journalist and linguist, compiled the first modern Arabic dictionary (Muhit al-muhit, 1867–1870) and contributed to the first modern Arabic encyclopedia (Da#irat al-ma^arif, 1876–1882). The study of the Arabic heritage, including classical literature, became increasingly institutionalized with the foundation of national libraries and colleges, such as the Egyptian Dar al-kutub and Cairo Teacher’s College (both established in 1870). Efforts to preserve and disseminate the great works of the past involved constant negotiation with contemporary issues. It was chiefly modernists and reformers who guided the revival. Muhammad ^Abduh (1849–1905), the celebrated Islamic modernist, religious scholar, and educational reformer, introduced the study of classical Arabic literature at al-Azhar (Cairo’s medieval college of Islamic studies). This radical attempt to inject a ‘liberal arts’ program into al-Azhar’s hidebound religious curriculum scandalized ^Abduh’s colleagues, but inspired a new generation of Egyptian intellectuals (including Taha Husayn, on whom see below). Another prominent Arab academic, Luwis Shaykhu (Le Père Louis Cheikho, 1859–1927), a Lebanese Jesuit and professor at the University of Saint-Joseph, Beirut, played a greater role in preserving the classical canon than any other figure of al-Nahda. Shaykhu collected manuscripts and published critical editions of an amazing range of medieval texts, many of which are still used today. His Kitab shu^ara al-Nasraniyya (“Anthology of Christian Poets,” 1890) was an early (and contentious) study of Christian ‘identity literature.’ In Europe, Arabic studies were overshadowed by biblical and classical studies. The limited number of orientalists who did research in Arabic were rarely specialists, and many were adventurous amateurs rather than academics. Arabic was generally taught as if it were a dead language. Arabic studies did not coalesce into an institutionalized field of study until the end of the century (see Johann Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, 1955; and Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des ouvrages arabes et relatifs aux Arabes publiées dans l’Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1883, 4 vols., 1892–1909.) Only a handful of medieval Arabic texts had been adequately edited and published before the 19th century, and few linguistic resources were available

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in Europe. Orientalists of the first half of the century laid much of the groundwork for further study, including a series of reliable grammars and various dictionaries and lexica. Gustav Flügel (1802–1870) edited a number of valuable sources for literary history, including Hajji Khalifa’s massive 17th-century bibliography of oriental manuscripts, Kashf al-zunun (in Latin translation as Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum, 1835–1858), an edition of Ibn al-Nadim’s 10th-century bibliography Kitab al-Fihrist (1871–1872) and a concordance to the Qur#an (Concordantiae Corani arabicae, 1842). One of the towering figures of late 19th- and early 20th-century orientalism was Ignaz (Ignác) Goldziher (1850–1921), best known for his groundbreaking work in Islamic studies (Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols., 1888–1890, rpt. 1961), but also a pioneer in the study of Arabic literature (Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, 2 vols., 1896–1899). Although an ever increasing number of literary texts were available to orientalists by the end of the century, aesthetic appreciation of medieval Arabic literature was often subordinated to philological interests and broad ethnographic generalizations. On one extreme, literary works were viewed as little more than sources of raw linguistic data, or, at best, as pedagogical aids (e.g. de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe, 1806; and two editions of Alf layla wa-layla, “The Thousand and One Nights” [designated Calcutta I (1814–1818) and Calcutta II (1839–1842)], both intended for linguistic study). On the other extreme, the idea that the study of Arabic literature represented a means of understanding ‘Oriental’ manners and customs exercised great appeal in the 19th century. This ethnographic approach had been introduced by Barthélémy d’Herbolet in his Bibliothéque orientale (1697), an early and largely anecdotal encyclopedia of Middle Eastern culture and history that was widely read in the 18th century. In the 19th century, this approach was adopted in such works as Edward Lane’s detailed study of culture and everyday life in Egypt, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), and the notes to his translation of Alf layla wa-layla (later published separately under the title Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, ed. Stanley Lane-Poole, 1883). For the most part, both Arab and Orientalist scholars of the 19th century were guided by the tastes of medieval critics and anthologists, and evinced a similar reverence for the medieval canon. One interesting case of divergent evaluation deserves special notice. The variable assortment of Märchen collected under the title of Alf layla wa-layla (“The Thousand and One Nights,” often translated as “The Arabian Nights”) had been regarded as an entertaining but ultimately frivolous and sub-literary work in the Arab world. In Europe, a French translation by Antoine Galland was published between 1704 and 1717 (Les Mille et une nuits), and immediately captured the public

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imagination. What began as exoticist curiosity in the 18th century turned into a mania in the 19th. Several editions were published (including the Bulaq edition, 1822), along with numerous translations (the best known are Edward Lane’s bowdlerized and compulsively annotated translation, The Thousand and One Nights, 3 vols., 1838–1841; and Richard Burton’s eccentric and bawdy translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols., 1885). As a result of all of this attention, “The Arabian Nights” remains the most famous work of medieval Arabic literature in the West. (On its history and reception, see Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, 1995; and The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, ed. Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, 2 vols., 2004.) D. The 20th Century: Revolution and Re-evaluation 19th-century scholarship produced a sizable body of linguistic reference works and reliably edited literary texts. By the turn of the 20th century, Arabic literature had come to be recognized as an isolated object of study. Two watershed events of the 20th century, Taha Husayn’s challenge to the traditional canon and Edward Said’s postcolonial critique of Orientalism, helped to define the field and open the way for a variety of critical perspectives and methodologies. Both in Europe and the Arab world, literary history dominated the early part of the century. Notable surveys include Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, 1907; Jurji Zaydan, Tarikh adab al-lugha al-^arabiyya (“The History of Arabic-language Literatures”), 4 vols., 1911; Ignaz (Ignác) Goldziher, Arab irodalom rövid történte, 1912 (translated as A Short History of Classical Arabic Literature, 1966); Clément Huart, Histoire de la literature arabe (1923); Sir Hamilton Gibb, Arabic Literature, An Introduction, 1926; Carlo Nallino, La littérature arabe des origines à l’époque de la dynastie umayyade, 1950; Régis Blanchère, Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du XVe siècle de J-C, 3 vols., 1952–1966). Two especially ambitious projects of this sort are Shawqi DAYF’s, Ta#rikh al-adab al-^Arabi (“The History of Arabic Literature,” 10 vols., 1960–1995); and the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (commonly abbreviated CHAL), consisting of six volumes, each composed of articles by experts in particular subjects and sub-disciplines: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L. Beeston et al., 1983; ^Abbasid BellesLettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., 1990; Religion, Learning and Science in the ^Abbasid Period, ed. M. J. L. Young et al., 1990; Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi, 1992; The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. Maria Rosa et al., 2000; and Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen, 2006. Other relatively recent contributions are Wolfhart Heinrichs, ed., Neues Handbuch

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der Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 5: Orientalisches Mittelalter, 1990; and Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage, 1998. In Europe, this interest in literary history coincided with a broader Orientalist project, the compilation of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Martin Theodor Houtsma and Arent Jan Wensinck, 4 vols., 1913–1938, printed in English, French, and German (now abbreviated EI1). This became a landmark reference work for Orientalists in a variety of fields, though it placed greater emphasis on Islamic history and civilization than on literature. The Encyclopaedia of Islam represented a major international effort, but Arab and Muslim contributors were largely excluded. The project was later repeated on an even grander scale with The New Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI2), 1954–, which remains one of the central reference texts for Arabists. Another important reference project was Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (GAL) (2 vols., 1898–1902, 3 supplementary vols. 1937–1942, rev. ed. 1943–1949), a master catalog of books and manuscripts in Arabic, mostly culled from European manuscript catalogs, with brief biographical entries. Brockelmann’s work has since been supplemented by Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), 12 vols., 1967–2000. Along with surveys of Arabic literature came specialized studies of particular periods, authors, and genres. Most of these were still fairly descriptive and conventional, with a strong philological emphasis. In Europe, one area that received special attention was Sufi mystical poetry (e.g., Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921; and Louis Massignon’s highly eccentric and largely discredited study La passion d’al-Hallaj martyr mystique de l’Islam, 1925). In 1925, the British Arabist D. Samuel Margoliouth disputed the authenticity of pre-Islamic poetry, the cornerstone of the traditional canon of Arabic literature (“Origins of Arabic Poetry,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [1925]: 417–49). The next year, the Egyptian academic, critic, and author Taha Husayn published his controversial work Fi al-shi^r al-jahili (“On Pre-Islamic Poetry,” 1926), a far more elaborate study that not only contested the origins of pre-Islamic poetry but also questioned the integrity of the Qur#an. The reliability of 8th-century transmitters and collectors of pre-Islamic poetry had long been held suspect, even in the Middle Ages, but no one had suggested that the entire pre-Islamic corpus needed to be reevaluated. Because of the book’s religious implications, it was immediately banned (later to be republished with considerable revisions). Husayn was tried, though not convicted, on charges of apostasy. Husayn approached every topic with gusto and bombast. Few current scholars of Arabic poetry now agree with Husayn’s absolutist iconoclasm,

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although most would admit that it is impossible to determine how much of the pre-Islamic corpus is genuine. Rather than the specific thesis of Fi al-shi^r al-jahili, it was Husayn’s willingness to question received wisdom that had lasting impact, particularly on Arab critics. Taha Husayn was not alone in being both a critic and a litterateur: interpretation and reinterpretation of the classical Arab-Islamic heritage was a cultural project in which artists, poets, academics, and professionals all participated (see David Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics, 1974). Some prominent contributors included the Egyptian cultural historian Ahmad AMIN, the Egyptian critic Shawqi Dayf, and the Palestinian critic Ihsan ^ABBAS. By mid-century, Arab critics had begun to experiment in surprising ways. The Egyptian academic and feminist author Suhayr al-Qalamawi wrote one of the first serious Arabic studies of “The Thousand and One Nights” (Alf layla wa-layla, 1943). The Egyptian critic Muhammad al-Nuwayhi applied psychological criticism to the works of one of the most famous ^Abbasid poets in Nafsiyyat Abi Nuwas (“The Psychology of Abu Nuwas,” 1953). Muhammad Ghunaymi Hilal, another prominent Egyptian critic of the 1950’s, introduced comparative literature as an approach to classical Arabic literature, in particular, in comparison with Persian literature. The Egyptian intellectual and chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, alSayyid Qutb, in his 30-volume exegesis of the Qur^an (Fi zilal al-Qur#an, “In the Shade of the Qur^an” [1966, numerous reprints]), offered sophisticated literary insights in the context of a traditional genre of Islamic scholarship. After World War II, Western scholarship changed in two major ways. First, a significant number of European scholars immigrated to the United States, where Middle Eastern studies began to flourish. Second, interpretive studies of specific aspects of Arabic literature began to replace general, descriptive surveys. Examples include Charles Pellat’s seminal study of the 9th-century essayist al-Jahiz, Le milieu basrien et la formation de Yâhiz,1953; and, a bit later, Andras Hamori’s formalist study, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature, 1974; and generic surveys, such as Lois Giffen, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs, 1971; and Gregor Schoeler, Arabische Naturdichtung, 1974. The literature of al-Andalus, often considered derivative by Arab critics, received much attention from Western Arabists, who were especially interested in possible Arab-Islamic influence on medieval European conceptions of ‘courtly love’ and the troubadour tradition (Angel González Palencia, Historia de la literatura arábigo-española, 1945; Alois R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadors, 1946). The publication of the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s unabashedly polemical and provocative Orientalism (1978) proved to be an-

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other pivotal moment in the development of Arabic studies in the 20th century. The thesis of Orientalism is that European scholarly, literary, and artistic representations of the ‘orient’ (the Arab world especially) came to constitute a hegemonic discourse that both legitimized and participated in European imperialist projects in the Middle East. It should be noted that Orientalism touches only tangentially on studies of Arabic literature, but as a general indictment of Western scholarship on the Middle East, it prompted much soul-searching and questioning of assumptions. Now considered a foundational text of post-colonialist criticism, Orientalism still inspires bitter controversy (see Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l’Islam, 1980, a critical review of orientalist scholarship from a Marxist perspective; and a recent, caustic critique of Said: Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 2006). E. Recent Trends The influence of Orientalism has been felt in several ways in Arabic studies. Not only has it forced scholars in a variety of fields, including Arabic literature, to re-evaluate the history of European scholarship on the Middle East and Islam, but it has also raised the question of intellectual agency: how can Western scholars free themselves from the established Orientalist discourse and its Eurocentric premises? One response to this question has been to create a shared scholarly space in an attempt to integrate more Arab scholars into Western academic institutions. Taha Husayn and many of his contemporaries were also ‘cross-over’ scholars in a sense, forming bridges between European and Arabic intellectual communities, but the bulk of their publications were in Arabic, composed for an Arab readership. Now, in Western Europe and especially in the United States, Arabic literature is increasingly interpreted and taught by Arab scholars who publish in both Arabic and European languages. It could be argued that this solution does not fully address the problem of Eurocentrism, in that Arab scholars are still required to relate to the West on its own terms. Be that as it may, ‘cross-over’ scholars have played a key role in facilitating dialogue. With the influx of Arab scholars in the West, Arabic literary studies have experienced a shift in emphasis from the medieval heritage to modern literature. More often than not, early 20th-century literary histories treated Arabic literature as a fixed medieval corpus. The widespread study of modern Arabic literature has led to a breakdown in the perceived barrier between medieval and modern traditions. Many scholars work in both fields. One recent and innovative survey, Roger Allen’s The Arabic Literary Heritage (1998), begins with a polemical challenge to traditional periodization, and is organ-

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ized according to a generic scheme that explores continuities between medieval and modern Arabic literature. Similarly, the new Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (ed. Julie Meisami and Paul Starkey, 1998) includes entries on both medieval and modern Arabic literature. The latest volume of The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen, 2006) examines literary production during ^Asr al-inhiittat, the supposed ‘Dark Age’ that has, in the past, been understudied. Arabic Studies in the West have been slow to incorporate contemporary literary theory. Philological, historical-biographical, and belletrist studies still abound, but since the 1980’s, formalist approaches have prevailed. The profound influence of structuralism, especially, is evident in the frequency of such terms as ‘poetics’ and ‘structural analysis’ in the titles of modern studies. In many cases, structuralist (and post-structuralist) analyses have contributed new perspectives on old topics and debates (prominent examples include Ferial Ghazoul, The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis, 1980 [later revised and expanded as Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context, 1996]; Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Structures of Avarice: The Bukhala’ in Medieval Arabic Literature, 1985; Abdelfattah Kilito, L’auteur et ses doubles: essai sur la culture arabe classique, 1985; and Stefan Sperl, Mannerism in Arabic Poetry, 1989). Western literary theory has had significant impact on scholarship in the Arab world, predominantly through the influence of Western-educated Arab scholars, but it is also from the Arab world that some radical revisions and re-interpretations of Western theory have emerged. In this respect, the avant-garde Syrian poet and critic Adunis (also: Adonis, the pen-name of ^Ali Ahmad Sa^id) has proven to be one of the most original and challenging modern critics of the Arabic poetic tradition (works include Al-Thabit wa-al-mutahawwil [“The Static and the Dynamic”], 3 vols., 1974; and Muqaddima li-al-shi^r al-^arabi, 1986 [translated as An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. by Catherine Cobham, 1990]). Medieval literary criticism and rhetorical theory have long been of interest to Arab scholars (e.g. Muhammad Mandur, al-Naqd al-manhaji ^ind alArab [“Systematic Criticism among the Arabs, 1948]; Ihsan ^Abbas, Tarikh alnaqd al-adabi ^ind al-^Arab [“The History of Literary Criticism among the Arabs,” 1971]; and Kamal Abu Deeb, Al-Jurjani’s Theory of Poetic Imagery, 1976). Although Vincente Cantarino’s Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age, 1975, and Wolfhart Heinrich’s “Literary Theory: The Problem of Its Efficiency” (in Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development, ed. G.E. von Grunebaum, 1973, 19–69) represent two fairly early European studies, Western interest in medieval poetics largely coincided with the rising theoretical awareness of the 1980’s and 1990s (e.g., G. J. H. van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic

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Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem, 1982; Suzanne P. Stetkevych, Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the ^Abbasid Age, 1991; and Margaret Larkin, The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s Theory of Discourse, 1995). Select Bibliography Among the most important developments in the study of medieval Arabic literature is a new disruption of traditional assumptions regarding canon. Classical prose, traditionally overshadowed by poetry, has received more notice (see Stefan Leder and Hilary Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature: a Researchers’ Sketch Map,” Journal of Arabic Literature 23 [1992]: 2–26), as have formerly taboo subjects, such as homoerotic literature (Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. Jerry W. Wright and Everett K. Rowson, 1997). Contemporary scholars have begun to explore areas almost wholly ignored by medieval critics and anthologists, such as popular drama and theater (Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World, 1992) and folk-epics (see Dwight Reynolds’s study of the modern epic tradition, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition, 1995; and M. C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 3 vols., 1995). Alf layla wa-layla, the object of so much European fascination, now enjoys serious study from Arab scholars as well (in addition to works mentioned above: Muhsin MAHDI’s critical edition, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) from the Earliest Known Sources, 2 vols., 1984; and Muhsin Jasim MUSAWI, Mujtama^ Alf layla wa-layla [“The Society of the Thousand and One Nights”], 2000). Compositions in colloquial dialects have also received more attention, especially the zajal, a form of popular strophic poetry that developed in al-Andalus that has become the center of a modern debate over Arabic and European cultural influences in Muslim Spain (see Samuel Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, 1974; Federico Corriente, El Cancionero hispanoárabe, 1984; and James T. Monroe, “Which Came First, the Zajal or the Muwa ˇs ˇsaha?” Oral Tradition 4 [1989]: 38–64).

Mark Pettigrew

Archeology and History of Art in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia A. Historical Introduction During late antiquity, the vast area corresponding to Iran and Central Asia was very different from its present composition not only from the political point of view but also ethnically and culturally. In fact, before the coming of Islam, the territory from Mesopotamia to the border with China was inhabited by Iranian-speaking peoples who professed local forms of a religion commonly known as Zoroastrianism (or Mazdeism) and whose holy scripts

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are collected in the Avesta. In modern political terms, that area covered the territories of Iran (or Persia), Afghanistan, the ex-Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizistan and southern Kazakhstan and also some parts of the Uighur Autonomous Province of Xinjiang (China) corresponding to the Tarim Basin (the “Western Regions” of Chinese authors). The Tarim Basin was inhabited by Iranians in Khotan and Tumshuk, and also by Tokharians (a population related to Indo-European peoples): they all adopted Buddhism and left important artistic and literary traces before the coming of the Uighur Turks and islamization. The Amu Darja (or Oxus for the Greeks) always constituted a natural border between the area traditionally controlled by Persia and Transoxiana, that is to say, the land beyond the Oxus or, for the Arab authors, Ma Wara al-Nahr (“what is beyond the river”). Persia constituted certainly the main state entity ruled by the powerful Sasanian Dynasty (226–642) that was continuously at war with the RomanByzantine Empire on the western border and the nomads along its oriental fringes (Touraj Daryaee, “Sasanian Persia (ca. 224–651 C.E.),” Iranian Studies 31, 3–4 (1998): 431–61; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE): Portrait of a Late Antique Empire, 2008; Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, 2009; Richard Nelson Frye, “The Political History of Iran under the Sasanians,” The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (1): The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Eshan Yarshater, 1986, 116–80; Michael Moroni, “Sasanians,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. IX, ed. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and G. Lecomte, 1997, 70–83; Klaus Schippmann, Grundzüge der Geschichte des Sasanidischen Reiches, 1990; Joseph Wiesenhöfer, La Persia antica, 2003; Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals, 2007). The Central Asian regions mentioned above represent historico-geographical terms rather than political ones and, in fact, they have never been unified as it happened for Persia. For some time the Sasanians controlled part of Central Asian such as Margiana (in modern Turkmenistan), Bactriana-Tokharestan (between southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan) and Sogdiana (between southern Uzbekistan and western Tajikistan), but, apparently, not Chorasmia (corresponding to the Autonomous Region of Karakalapkistan, in northern Uzbekistan) although they were continuously open to the invasions of the nomads coming from the steppe. Archeological investigations in the first two regions have revealed a strong presence of Buddhism, too, while Chorasmia and Sogdiana mainly followed the local form of Zoroastrianism (exactly like in Persia). The invasions of the mysterious Kidarites and Hephtalites from the steppes from the 4th to the 6th

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centuries caused great loss to the Sasanian Empire which managed to re-conquer those oriental territories only during the reign of Khosrow I Anoshirwan (531–579) (Frantz Grenet, “Regional Interaction in Central Asia and Northwest India in the Kidarite and Hephtalite Periods,” Indo-Iranian Languages and People, ed. Nicholas Sims-Williams, 2002, 203–24). This Sasanian sovereign was Justinian’s main antagonist and also the initiator of a sort of “Persian Renaissance.” He not only started a series of fiscal and monetary reforms in order to give stability to the kingdom but also secured the frontiers by continuously fighting the Sasanians’ main enemies along the western and the eastern borders (Andrea Gariboldi, Il regno di Xusraw dall’anima immortale: Riforme economiche e rivolte sociali nell’Iran sasanide del VI secolo, 2006). His apogee was reached with the victory over the Hepthalites, achieved together with his new allies, the Western Turks, who soon turned into yet another menace for Persia. The Turks controlled most of Central Asia and, in the end, conquered also Bactriana-Tokharestan. The hegemony over Sogdiana allowed the Turks to control the so-called “Silk Road” since the Sogdian merchants were the main traders active on the caravan routes between Persia and China (Étienne De La Vaissière, Histoire des merchands sogdiens, 2002). During the war with Byzantium for the control of the caravan and maritime trade routes, Khosrow I even extended a Sasanian protectorate over Yemen (Janos Harmatta, “The Struggle for the ‘Silk Route’ Between Iran, Byzantium and the Türk Empire from 560 to 630 A.D,” Kontakte zwischen Iran, Byzanz und der Steppe im 6.–7. Jahrhundert, ed. Csanád Bálint, 2000, 249–52; Paul Yule, Himyar: Late Antique Yemen, 2007, 45–55) while most of the eastern Arabian Peninsula was already under his jurisdiction (Derek Kennet, “The Decline of Eastern Arabia in the Sasanian Period,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 18.1 [2007]: 86–122). With the coming of the Tang Dynasty (618–906), the whole of the Turkish domain soon fell into Chinese hands while Khosrow II Parvez (590–628) could extend the Sasanian Empire at the maximum of its length invading Byzantine and Turkish territories on both western and eastern fronts. Initially his relationships with the Byzantines were good since Emperor Maurice (582–602) had helped him against the rebel general Bahram Chobin between 590–91. After the assassination of Maurice and his family by the rebel Phocas (602–610), Khosrow II invaded the Byzantine Empire with two armies led by the Sasanian generals Shahvaraz and Shahin who directed themselves towards Egypt and Anatolia respectively, although the sources are very enigmatic on this point (Matteo Compareti, “Presenza sasanide in Africa,” Intorno all’iranica fenice/samand: un progetto di sintesi per il volo del Pegaso iranico tra Ponto, Alessandretta e Insulindia, ed. Gianroberto Scarcia and Matteo

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Compareti, 2003, 39–51, for an electronic version in English see http:// www.transoxiana.com.ar/0104/sasanians.html). He also sought to annex to Persia the Lakhmid kingdom (southern Iraq), after the imprisonment and execution of its last king: al-Numan III (Daniel T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, vol. II, 1990, 252–53). In the meantime, the Sasanian general of Armenian origins Sambat defeated the enemies of Persia in the east incorporating into the Sasanian Empire the regions which had once belonged to the Hephtalites and Turks (called in Armenian sources indistinctively Kushans). The enthronement of Heraclius (610–641) at Byzantium produced some changes in the conduction of the war against the Sasanians and, in fact, peace was declared after the assassination of Khosrow II by one of his sons in 628. In that period, the borderline between the two empires was established more or less as it was before the long war which had exhausted both antagonists. After the death of Khosrow II no other Sasanian Emperor could rule on a unified territory until the enthronement of Yazdigard III (632–651) who, however, was defeated by the Arabs and forced to abandon Persia. The last representatives of the Sasanians lived exiled at the Tang court where they were received friendly by the Chinese Emperor (Matteo Compareti, “The Last Sasanians in China,” Eurasian Studies, II/2 [2003]: 197–213). The relatively quick invasion of the Arabs in Persia and Transoxiana between the 7th and 8th centuries radically changed the cultures of those regions which slowly started to be converted to Islam and became almost completely turcized (Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran, 2007). Such historical facts are now well-known especially regarding Sogdiana (Yuri Karev, Samarcande et le Sughd au début de l’Islam (VIIe–IXe siècle): histoire politique et transformations sociales, forthcoming). With the islamization of Iranian lands local authors also started to write about their ancient history which could be reconstructed mainly through external sources, the archeological investigation and the study of numismatics (Carlo G. Cereti, “Primary Sources for the History of Inner and Outer Iran in the Sasanian Period,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi 9 [1995–1997]: 17–71). B. Art History and Archeological Investigation Despite the scarcity of direct written sources, the artistic production of Iran under the Sasanians and pre-Islamic Central Asia is quite well-known for different reasons. The history of research has been magisterially presented by L. Vanden Berghe, regarding Sasanian monuments, and by S. Gorshenina and C. Rapin for Central Asia (Luis Vanden Berghe, “Historique de la découverte et de la recherche,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 13–18; Svetlana

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Gorshenina and Claude Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande: Les arquélogues en Asie centrale, 2001). Monumental rock reliefs and architectural remains particularly concentrated in the region of Fars (south-western Iran) constitute undeniable evidence of the grandeur of Iran under the Sasanians (Remy Boucharlat, “L’architecture sassanide,” Catalogue Paris, 2006, 47–50; Luis Vanden Berghe, “La sculpture,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 71–88; E. Haerinck, “Les reliefs rupestres,” Catalogue Paris, 2006, 35–8; Dietrich Huff, “Architecture sassanide,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 45–61). Unfortunately, most of the relics newly found in Iran come from fortuitous recoveries or from the antiquary market and not from scientific excavations which have come to a stop after the Revolution of 1979 and have only very recently started to be reconsidered by local archeologists. On the other hand, the remarkable pieces of information about Central Asia in Late Antiquity are mostly due to archeological activity which continued practically uninterrupted from the Soviet period to present days. An enormous amount of publications on such topics has already been presented and this is not the place to reconsider them in detail. Here, all we can do is mention some important titles. Furthermore, two great European exhibitions in 1993 (Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993: Splendeur des Sassanides. L’empire perse entre Rome at la Chine [224–642], curator Bruno Overlaet) and 2006 (Catalogue Paris, 2006: Les Perses sassanides. Fastes d’un empire oublié [224–642], curator Françoise Demange) have been entirely dedicated to the Sasanians and, especially, to their artistic production. The bibliography given in those two catalogues should be integrated with excellent entries published in the Encyclopaedia Iranica by Dietrich Huff (“Archaeology. iv. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 302–8; Dietrich Huff, “Architecture. iii. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 329–34) and Prudence Oliver Harper (“Art in Iran. v. Sasanian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 585–94), although something more can now be added both from the point of view of monumental and minor arts. In fact, a new Sasanian rock relief attributed to Shapur I (241–72), has recently been discovered at Rag-e Bibi, in western Afghanistan (Frantz Grenet, “Nouvelles découvertes sur la période sassanide en Afghanistan,” L’art d’Afghanistan de la préhistoire à nos jours. Nouvelles donnais, 2007 85–94) and also some new pieces of Sasanian stone statues and figurative capitals have been found in Iran (Matteo Compareti, “Iconographical Notes on Some Recent Studies on Sasanian Religious Art (with an Additional Note on an Ilkhanid Monument by Rudy Favaro),” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, XLV, 3 (2006) 163–200; Matteo Compareti, “Fragmentary Sasanian Sculptures Recently Found in Iran,” Papers in Honour of Professor Biancamaria Amoretti Scarcia’s 65th Birthday, ed. Daniela Bredi and Leonardo Capezzone, 2008, 9–19).

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Monumental art of the Sasanian period received particular attention by Iranian scholars who published remarkable studies, such as the book on ancient Iranian bridges (also those traditionally attributed to Roman prisoners) by Muhammad-Ali Mokhlessi, written in Persian (Pol-ha-ye Qadimi-e Iran [Ancient Bridges of Iran], 1998). Massoud Azarnoush managed to publish the results of several studies which had been initiated before the Revolution in Iran. Two of the most interesting publications are dedicated to the excavations of Hajiabad (The Sasanian Manor House at Hajiabad, Iran, 1994) and the monumental temple of Kangavar (Massoud Azarnoush, “Kangavar: Un temple séleucide d’Anahita deviant un monument sassanide,” Dossiers d’archéologie. Empires perses: d’Alexandre aux Sassanides, 243 (1999), 52–53). An important volume which comprises a list of the caravanserais in Iran, in some cases, also dated to the Sasanian period, has been compiled by Muhammad Y. Kyani and Wolfgang Kleiss (Iranian Caravanserais, 1994). A Polish archeological team led by Barbara Kaim recovered a sacral building which could be attributed to the Sasanian period at Mele Hayram, in the southern part of today’s Turkmenistan (“Un temple du feu sassanide découvert à Mele Hairam (Turkménistan Méridional),” Studia Iranica, 31, II, 2002, 215–30). These temples belong to the “fire temple” typology which is not yet very well-known from the archeological point of view, even though numerous hints can be found in Classical literature on Persia. Strangely enough, wallpaintings did not receive the deserved consideration in the above-mentioned catalogues although – at least according to some Classical authors – they should have had a relevant role in Sasanian art. Probably, this attitude was due to the extremely fragmentary state of all those paintings which could be attributed to the Sasanian period. The recent discovery of Sasanian wall paintings at Gor (Fars) and their first analysis by the well-known archeologist D. Huff will probably change such an attitude after their publication (Dietrich Huff, “Formation and Ideology of the Sasanian State in the Context of Archaeological Evidence,” The Sasanian Era: The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 48–49). In any case, an excellent article by A. de Waele now provides all information on this aspect of Persian art already considered by experts like Boris Marshak (Boris I. Marshak, “Pre-Islamic Painting of the Iranian Peoples and Its Sources in Sculpture and the Decorative Arts,” Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources, ed. Eleanor Sims, with Boris I. Marshak and Ernst J. Grube, 2002, 7–19; An de Waele, “The Figurative Wall-Painting of the Sasanian Period from Iran, Iraq and Syria,” Iranica Antiqua XXXIX [2004]: 339–81). Information about Sasanian mosaics (displaying strong Hellenistic elements) can also be found in the two catalogues already mentioned. Beautiful figu-

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rative stucco panels – possibly dating from the 5th century – have been found during agricultural works in Bandyan (northern Khorasan). Despite their fragmentary state, the panels are among the most interesting Sasanian stucco ever recovered: the scenes represented there have been identified as hunts and battles against the Hephtalites (Medi Rahbar, “Découvert d’un monument d’époque sassanide à Bandian, Dargaz (Nord Khorassan). Fouilles 1994 et 1995,” Studia Iranica 27.2 [1998]: 213–50). The excavations at Bandyan have recently shown more interesting results since a fire altar and graffiti were discovered there. A field which yielded very interesting results is represented by inscribed seals and sealings (or bullae) belonging to relevant people of Sasanian upper classes although, once more, only few of them were recovered in Iran in controlled excavations around Shiraz. The best introduction to Sasanian seals was published by R. Gyselen in the two catalogues mentioned above. Recently, the same author has presented a collection of seals and sealings embellished with armored cavalrymen very similar to the one in the great grotto at Taq-e Bostan. The study of their inscriptions revealed that their owners were important military chieftains who served the Sasanian sovereigns. Written sources of the Islamic period reported about the division of the Persian Empire into four quadrants and the seals are even more important since they are contemporary to the Sasanians (R. Gyselen, The Four Generals of the Sasanian Empire: Some Sigillographic Evidence, 2001). Another aspect of Sasanian production which can partly compensate for the lack of direct sources is represented by numismatics. The investigations by R. Göbl are still valid although the project of publication of a systematic catalogue will soon give a more detailed idea of Sasanian coinage. Up to now, the catalogue focuses on the first sovereigns. M. Alram has offered a view of the situation on early Sasanians numismatics introducing also a new type of coin which shows Shapur I receiving the homage of the defeated Roman Emperor as it can be observed in his rock reliefs (Michael Alram, Maryse Blet-Lemarquand, and Prods O. Skjærvø, “Shapur, King of Iranians and Non-Iranians,” Des Indo-Grecs aux Sassanides: Données pour l’histoire et la géographie historique. Res Orientales, XVII, 2007, 11–40; M. Alram, “Early Sasanian Coinage,” The Sasanian Era: The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 17–30). Several monuments mentioned above represent the periphery of the Sasanian Empire while, as it is now clear, the court exerted a monopoly on the production of some luxury items, exactly as it was the case in Byzantium. Metalwork always constituted an important good among ancient Iranians who used it for diplomatic exchanges, as their recovery together with the rich outfits of those peoples in contact with the Sasanians, Bactrians and Sogdians, seems to suggest. Once

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more, archeological excavations can rarely give an idea of the Sasanian central production. The main collections of Sasanian metalwork and also the list of those few plates recovered during archeological excavations are collected now in a richly-illustrated article by Prudence Oliver Harper, certainly the main scholar in the field of ancient Persian toreutic (“Sasanian Silver Vessels: The Formation and Study of Early Museum Collection,” Mesopotamia and Iran in the Parthian and Sasanian Periods: Rejection and Revival c. 238 BC-AD 642: Proceedings of a Seminar in Memory of V. G. Lukonin, ed. John Curtis, 2000, 46–56). Most likely, textile manufactures were also directly controlled by the court but we do not yet have a clear idea about Sasanian taste since all the previous studies were based on the observation of the repertoire at Taq-e Bostan which, unfortunately, cannot be considered a typical Sasanian monument (Karel Otavsky, “Zur kunsthistorische Einordnung der Stoffe,” Entlang der Seidenstraße: Frühmittelalterliche Kunst zwischen Persien und China in der Abegg Stiftung, ed. Karel Otavsky, 1998, 119–214). From the iconographical point of view just one linen and wool fragment kept in the Benaki Museum (Athens) could be considered Sasanian, although, once more, it is a textile coming from the antiquary market (Matteo Compareti, “A Possible asanian Textile Fragment in the Benaki Museum (Athens),” Scritti in Onore di Giovanni M. D’Erme, ed. Michele Bernardini and Natalia Tornesello, 2005 289–302; Matteo Compareti, “Sasanian Textile Art: An Iconographic Approach,” Studies on Persianate Societies 3 [2005]: 143–63. See also: David H. Bivar, “Sasanian Iconography on Textiles and Seals,” Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Regula Schorta, 2006, 9–21). Unfortunately, the few data about Sasanian potteries which had to rely on Japanese excavations at Daylaman (Northern Iran, see: Namio Egami, Shinji Fukai, and Seiichi Masuda, Dailaman, vol. II, 1966; Toshihiko Sono and Shinji Fukai, Dailaman, vol. III, 1968), French ones at Susa (Miriam Rosen-Ayalon, La poterie islamique, 1974) and Italian ones at Ctesiphon (in Iraq, not far from Baghdad, see: Roberta Venco Ricciardi, “Pottery from Choche,” Mesopotamia 2 (1967): 93–104; Roberta Venco Ricciardi, “Sasanian Pottery from Tell Mahuz (North Mesopotamia),” Mesopotamia 5/6 [1970–1971]: 427–82) did not help much and their analysis still only shows partial results (Robert Wenke, “Imperial Investments and Agricultural Developments in Parthian and Sasanian Khuzestan: 150 BC to AD 640,” Mesopotamia 10/11 [1975/1976]: 31–221; John Alden, “Excavations at Tal-i Malyan. Part I. A Sasanian Kiln,” Iran 16 [1978]: 79–86; Maurer Trinkaus, “Pottery from the Damghan Plain, Iran: Chronology and Variability from the Parthian to the Early Islamic Periods,” Studia Iranica 15.1 [1986]: 23–88).

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In conclusion, in accordance with what P. Harper and G. Scarcia have recently said about Sasanian art, there was never a rupture between the past and the artistic production of Late Antiquity Iran (Prudence Oliver Harper, In Search of a Cultural Identity: Monuments and Artifacts of the Sasanian Near East, 3rd to 7th Century AD, 2006; Prudence Oliver Harper, “Image and Identity: Art of the Early Sasanian Dynasty,” The Sasanian Era. The Idea of Iran, vol. 3, ed. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart, 2008, 71–87; Gianroberto Scarcia, “La Persia dagli Achemenidi ai Sasanidi 550 a.C.–650 d.C.,” Gianroberto Scarcia and Giovanni Curatola, Iran: L’arte persiana, 2004, 9–125). On the contrary, monumental art and also minor arts continued and renewed ancient Iranian traditions already known by the Parthians (and rooted in the much more ancient culture of Mesopotamia) with the clear borrowings of Roman-Byzantine elements, especially in the last part of the Sasanian period. This has been observed by some scholars some of which have come to very curious conclusions: Philip Lozinsky, for example, even claimed that Sasanian art did not exist at all (“The Phoenix Mosaic from Antioch: a New Interpretation,” Fifth International Colloquium on Ancient Mosaics, 1995, 135–42). As it is now well-known, Sasanian culture exerted a deep influence on the whole artistic production of the Islamic world and had an echo also in Byzantium, “barbaric” Europe and the Caucasus (Klaus Schippmann, “L’influence de la culture sassanide,” Catalogue Bruxelles, 1993, 131–41). Among the typical Sasanian elements which received great attention abroad, one should mention the so-called Senmurv or “winged dog with peacock tail.” According to most recent investigations such a composite monster would instead represent the royal glory of the Sasanians bestowed by Ahura Mazda (Matteo Compareti, “The So-Called Senmurv in Iranian Art: A Reconsideration of an Old Theory,” Loquentes linguis: Linguistic and Oriental Studies in Honour of Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, ed. Pier Giorgio Borbone, Alessandro Mengozzi, and Mauro Tosco, 2006, 185–200). In fact, as an expression of a divine concept, it was later largely adopted by Muslims and Byzantines, too. Another typical Sasanian decorative element mainly used as a pedestal supporting human busts or other subjects is the beribboned spread wings. Scholars have concentrated especially on its origins and on the fact that, most likely, it is a borrowing or a development of something which pre-dates the Sasanians. On the crowns of Sasanians sovereigns and in some other places (like on the textile of the Benaki Museum), spread wings are used to support astronomical elements: this is particularly clear in the coins (Andrea Gariboldi, “Astral Symbology on Iranian Coinage,” East and West 54.1–4 (2004): 31–53. Among the Christians of the Sasanian Empire, especially concentrated in the Caucasus, beribboned spread wings very often

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support the cross. This suggests that, most likely, the astronomical elements on Sasanian crowns could be associated with the Zoroastrian religion followed at court (M. Compareti, “Tra il Palatino e Limburgo: considerazioni su alcune stele armene di età pre-islamica,” Acculturazione e Disadattamento, ed. Daniele Guizzo, forthcoming 2009). Regarding the situation in Central Asia at the dawn of the Arab invasion, the archeological data mostly relate to Sogdiana while Margiana, BactriaTokharistan, Chorasmia and the Tarim Basin are better known during earlier periods. Cooperation of local archeological teams with Russian, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Australian colleagues will certainly (and hopefully) result in interesting findings which, at least at the moment, mainly focus on the period between the end of the Parthian and the beginning of Sasanian dominion. In any case, the best publication still remains a collective study (in Russian) by several scholars who have worked on the field since the 1950s (Srednjaja Azija i Dal’nij Vostok v epohu Srednevekovyja: Srednjaja Azija v rannem srednevekov’e, 1999). This volume should be consulted together with related entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (Guitty Azarpay, “Art in Iran. vi. Pre-Islamic Eastern Iran and Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 595–603; Victor M. Masson, “Archaeology. v. Pre-Islamic Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 308–17; Galina A. Pugachenkova, “Architecture. iv. Central Asia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. II, 1987, 334–39) and with Boris A. Litvinskij’s most recent book in French (La civilisation de l’Asie Centrale antique, 1998). The results of French excavations mainly in Uzbekistan together with papers by Russian authors are now collected in a great volume (Les arts de l’Asie centrale, gen. ed. Pierre Chuvin, 1999). More curious readers can find a great selection of Central Asian sites and topics organized as entries in an excellent Italian publication edited by Ciro Lo Muzio, the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica ed orientale. Secondo supplemento 1971–1994. Central Asian paintings have also been carefully studied in a more recent Italian volume with special focus on the Sogdian production (Chiara Silvi Antonini, La pittura dell’Asia Centrale da Alessandro Magno all’Islam, 2003). Bamyan was certainly one of the main Buddhist centers of today’s Afghanistan, and Sasanian elements can be observed especially in paintings which were, unfortunately, lost in great number (Deborah Klimburg-Salter, The Kingdom of Bamyan, 1989). In the area where the great Buddhas once stood, very promising archeological excavations have started under the coordination of Z. Tarzi, Afghanistan’s main archeologist whose expertise also comprises the study of Chinese sources on Bamyan (Zemaryalai Tarzi, “Les résultats des fouilles du ‘monastère oriental’ à la fin de la IIIe campagne en 2004,” L’art d’Afghanistan de la préhistoire à nos jours: Nouvelles

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donnais, 2007, 98–124). A complete catalogue of items from the National Museum of Kabul is now available (Francine Tissot, Catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan 1931–1985, 2006). Many old pictures constitute an invaluable help to observe even those objects now irreparably destroyed during the terrible last years in the history of that tormented country. Sogdiana main sites dating from the 7th and 8th centuries are Penjikent (Western Tajikistan), Afrasyab (ancient Samarkand), Varakhsha and Paykand (not far from Bukhara). Unfortunately, the recent passing away of the two leaders of the archeological mission at Penjikent and Paykand and distinguished scholars, B. I. Marshak and G. L. Semenov, caused not only a loss for the whole scholarly community, but also a stop in the field work, which, as it has recently been announced, will be continued by another team of archeologists. Penjikent has received the name of “Pompei of Central Asia,” especially for the numerous wall paintings discovered there whose main scenes represent Rostam legendary adventures, religious scenes and also tales from Esopos’s repertoire and the Panchatantra (Boris I. Marshak, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana, 2002). The site of Paykand, in the western part of historical Sogdiana, has been studied especially from the urban and architectural point of view although some paintings belonging to different periods have been recovered (Gregori L. Semenov, “Dwelling Houses of Bukhara in the Early Middle Ages,” Eran ud Aneran. Studies presented to Boris I. Marshak on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. Matteo Compareti, Paola Raffetta, and Gianroberto Scarcia, 2006, 555–69, for the electronic version see http://www.transoxiana.org/EranArticles/semenov.html). Not far from Bukhara there is the big site of Varakhsha, possibly a fortified mansion of the Bukhar Khudat (“Lord of Bukhara”) during the pre-Islamic period. There, archeological investigations have not been carried out for a long period of time which is a pity, bearing in mind the remarkable findings of the last century. Very recently, A. Naymark wrote a stimulating paper on the site and suggested a new interpretation of its wall paintings (Aleksandr Naymark, “Returning to Varakhsha,” The Silk Road Newsletter, 1/2 (2003): 9–22, for the electronic version see http://silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/december/ varakhsha. htm). Among the sites of that region, Afrasyab has probably received the greatest attention by scholars of Sogdian art in the last years since new studies reopened the problem of the interpretation of the scenes represented on the walls of the so-called “Hall of the Ambassadors.” As it is now almost universally accepted, the four walls represent important festivities connected with calendrical matters of the Sogdians, Chinese, Indians and, possibly, Turks. The artists who realized those paintings, probably around 660 AD, must clearly have had in mind concepts about calendrical calcu-

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lation and the culture of neighboring kingdoms in contact with Sogdiana just before the coming of the Arabs, when the whole of Transoxiana was (mainly nominally) under Tang protectorate. Several papers on Afrasyab “Hall of the Ambassadors” are now collected in the proceedings of a conference focusing on those paintings (Royal Nauruz in Samarkand: Proceedings of the Conference Held in Venice on the Pre-Islamic Paintings at Afrasiab, Suppl. 1 to Rivista degli Studi Orientali LXXVIII, ed. Matteo Compareti and É de La Vaissière, 2006). It is not improbable that the Uzbek-French archeological team working on the site of Afrasyab will increase our knowledge about the site in the near future (Paul Bernard, Frantz Grenet, and Massud Isammidinov, Fouilles de Samarkand et de Sogdiane, vol. I: Travaux de la Mission Archéologique Franco-Ouzbèke à Afrasiab. 1989–2007, 2009. Other Sogdian sites are at present investigated thanks to the cooperation of local authorities and experts with foreign expeditions. A German team under the supervision of M. Mode and S. Stark is currently investigating another promising site in Ustrushana (northern Tajikistan), an historical region of Sogdian language and culture. The main focus of the mission is to come to a better understanding of the passage from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period with great attention to Chinese sources (Markus Mode, “Archaeological Glympses of Ustrushana,” electronic version at: http://www.orientarch.uni-halle.de /sfbs86/c5/ustru/ indexe.htm). Also, an Italian mission supervised by M. Tosi is collaborating with the Uzbeks at the castle of Kafir Kala where numerous Sogdian bullae, seals and coins have been discovered in the last years. Kafir Kala is a very promising site since it might have been the residence of the king of Samarkand known in Islamic sources as Revdad. Among the numerous findings, the sealings of Kafir Kala represent a unique corpus within Central Asian archeology but, unfortunately, a complete publication is not yet available (Sara Cazzoli and Carlo G. Cereti, “The Sealings of Kafir Kala: Preliminary Report,” Ancient Civilizations from Schytia to Siberia 11.1–2 (2005): 133–64). A presentation of the project and its goals can be found on the following website: http://www3.unibo.it/archeologia/ricerca/scavi/caauzbekistan/ uzbe.htm. Seals, together with coins, always represent an important source of direct information. Unfortunately, their study is not as well coordinated as it is the case for Sasanian numismatics and seals. Among the few sealings one could mention Kanka, that is to say, the area of ancient Tashkent (G. I. Bogomolov and J. I. Burjakov, “Sealings from Kanka,” In the Land of the Gryphons: Papers on Central Asian Archaeology in Antiquity, ed. Antonio Invernizzi, 1995, 217–37). Studies on Central Asian coins are numerous and mainly in Russian, although some interesting papers have recently appeared in English (Joe Cribb, “Money as a Maker of Cultural Continuity and

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Change in Central Asia,” After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam, ed. Joe Cribb and Georgina Hermann, 2007, 333–75). Much attention has been devoted to Central Asian textiles mainly from private collections and antiquary markets. Many specimens are considered to be Sogdian products since very similar decorations appear on the robes worn by Sogdian people on mural paintings from Penjikent. Few fragments have been found during the excavations in Sogdiana itself while other textiles considered to be the product of Sogdian weavers who lived abroad have been found in great quantity in the Tarim Basin, in what is now Xinjiang Autonomous Province (China). The Abegg-Stiftung Textil Museum at Riggisberg (Switzerland) has on display one of the main collections of Central Asian textiles and has already published most of its material on two occasions (Entlang der Seidenstraße: Frühmittelalterliche Kunst zwischen Persien und China in der Abegg Stiftung, ed. Karel Otavsky, 1998; Central Asian Textiles and Their Contexts in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Regula Schorta, 2006). The region of the Tarim Basin has always been a matter of Chinese archeology although in the last years there have been some initiatives by European and Japanese teams. Among the most interesting results there are the excavations by a Swiss team supervised by Christopher Baumer which led to the discovery of previously unknown 7th-century Buddhist wall paintings at Dandan Oylyk, in the area of ancient Khotan. Those paintings are particularly interesting for the mix of local, Indian, and Iranian (most likely Sogdian) iconographical elements used in the depiction of some problematic divinities (Christopher Baumer, Southern Silk Road: In the Footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin, 2000). Even though the artifacts in the huge area corresponding to Central Asia mainly come from scientific excavations, there is still a big gap in the comprehension of that region as a whole unity. Future investigations might facilitate a different approach to the study of one of the most important regions of the Eurasian continent for its role as a crossroad of cultures and civilizations during the very problematic period of late antiquity. In the last years some publications devoted to Tarim Basin archeological investigations have appeared, but the presentation of the material is almost entirely in Chinese (A Grand View of Xinjiang’s Cultural Relics and Historical Sites, 1999). Among the most interesting archeological discoveries of the last years one must not forget to mention the 6th-century funerary monuments that belonged to important Sogdians which have been found in the area around Xi’an (China). Although they reflect in all probability the production of Chinese artists for rich Sogdian immigrants, their decorative elements include many Zoroastrian themes extremely useful for the understanding of similar images found in Central Asia. Further, they present in many cases inscrip-

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tions in Chinese and the respective languages of the deceased ones revealing more interesting information (Les Sogdiens en Chine, ed. Éric Trombert and É. de La Vaissière, 2005; Boris I. Marshak, “La thématique sogdienne dans l’art de la Chine de la seconde moitié du VIe siècle,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 1 (2001): 227–64; Judith A. Lerner, Aspects of Assimilation: The Funerary Practices and Furnishings of Central Asians in China, 2005). The site where they were found used to be, most likely, a cemetery for foreigners: more than forty graves have been localized, and future investigations will surely offer fresh material for the study of ancient Central Asian civilizations in contact with China in late antiquity. Select Bibliography Guitty Azarpay, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981); History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. II: The Development of Sedentary and Nomadic Civilizations: 700 BC to AD 250, ed. János Harmatta (Paris: Unesco, 1994); History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. III: The Crossroads of Civilizations: AD 250 to 750, ed. Boris Litvinsky (Paris: Unesco, 1996); Les Perses sassanides: Fastes d’un empire oublié (224–642), Françoise Demange (curator) (Paris: Paris Musée: Suilly-la-Tour and Findakly, 2006); Splendeur des Sassanides: L’Empire perse entre Rome at la Chine [224–642], Bruno Overlaet (curator) (Brussels: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, 1993); Srednjaja Azija i Dal’nij Vostok v epohu Srednevekovyja: Srednjaja Azija v rannem srednevekov’e (Moscow: Nauka, 1999); Les arts de l’Asie centrale, gen. ed. Pierre Chuvin (Paris: Citadelles et Mazenod, 1999); Emires Perses d’Alexandre aux Sassanides, Dossiers d’Archéologie, 243, may 1999.

Matteo Compareti

Classical Persian Literature A. General Introduction Classical Persian literature only developed as a written medium in the 10th century C.E. Pahlavi or Middle Persian had been the written language of the Sasanian Empire. However, when the Arabs conquered its territories in the 7th century C.E., written Pahlavi was only maintained by the Zoroastrian clergy and by clerks and scribes employed by the Arabs to maintain the state records. For more than two hundred years, the Persian literary tradition ceased, as Persian writers wrote in Arabic. During this two hundred year hiatus, numerous Persian works from different genres were translated into Arabic.

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A slow process of Arabization and Islamization took place after the Arab conquest of Persia. Arabic vocabulary made its way into spoken Persian and gradually the Arabic script was adopted and adapted to accommodate all the sounds of Persian. Although this “New Persian” (Dari) emerged as a new medium of communication, it was not accepted as a serious alternative to Arabic, which was the lingua franca of the Islamic Empire. Arabic retained its preeminence as the major written medium. Paradoxically, the Arab conquests had played a major role in promoting this New Persian, which in the Arab East or Greater Khurasan (eastern Persia, Khurasan and Transoxiana) became the preferred language, overshadowing Sogdian and Khwarazmian. This linguistic phenomenon was initially confined to the east and it only gained currency at a much later date in western Iran. Written Persian only began to be commonly used in the second half of the 9th century in Greater Khurasan. Persian prose was deemed suitable only for propaganda and amusing stories. However, poetry was promoted and patronized at court. B. Persian Poetry The mechanics of Persian poetry strictly conformed to the rules of Arabic prosody. It can be divided into two forms: narrative and lyrical. Narrative poetry manifested itself in the form of the mathnavi (rhyming couplet), a form that was known to the Arabs but little used by them, due to their love of the monorhyme. The Persians developed this form for a number of purposes and themes, but utilized it especially for epics, romances and later, for didactic mystical works. Although mathnavis were first written in the 10th century, the most memorable mathnavis were not written until the 11th century during the Ghaznavid dynasty. Firdawsi’s Shahnama, the national epic poem of Persia, recounts the tales of the kings of Iran from the earliest times. It was completed in 1010 A.D. This was followed by Asadi Tusi’s Garshasp-Nama and other epics. The mathnavi popularized many romances such as Warqa va Gulshah, Wis va Ramin and the famous romances popularized by Niãami (1140–1209), such as Layli va Majnun, Khusraw va Shirin and Haft Paykar. Sana’i (d. 1130) was the first to use the mathnavi as a means of mystical teaching. The use of the mathnavi by the great sufi masters became standard practice as demonstrated by Farid al-Din ’Attar’s (1140–1230) The Conference of the Birds, Jalal al-Din Rumi’s (1207–1273) famous Mathnavi, and Jami’s (d. 1492) Haft Awrang and a multitude of others. Lyric poetry began by imitating the formal ode or the qaæida of the Arabs. The qaæida was often a panegyric to a patron but was also used for eulogies, elegies, satires, and religious instruction. One of the earliest masters of the

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qa#ida was Rudaki (d. 941). The 11th century is considered the period for the perfection of the Persian qa#ida, by the master poets Manuchirhi (d. 1040), Farrukhi (d. 1038) and ’Unsuri (d. 1050). The Sufi masters Sana’i, ’Attar and Rumi also used them later for their mystical poetry. The lyric ghazal replaced the qa#ida in popularity in the 13th century. The ghazal was a monorhymed shorter ode of between 5 and 15 lines. Its theme was primarily on earthly or divine love. Sa’di (d. 1292) and Hafiz (d. 1390) both from Shiraz are considered the masters of this form. The quatrain or ruba’i (ruba’iyyat pl.) with the rhyme pattern of AABA is the only true purely Persian poetic form. It is epigrammatic and lends itself well to political satire. This form was popularized by Fitzgerald’s translations of the ruba’iyyat of ’Umar Khayyam. A much larger variety of poetic forms exist in Persian poetry but the main forms are the mathnavi, qa#ida, ghazal and ruba’i. Classical Persian poetry before the modern era produced three distinctive styles (sabk) in its development: Khurasani, ’Iraqi and Hindi. The earliest Khurasani style is distinct for it use of simple and pure language almost devoid of Arabic loan words. Cultural and linguistic borders diffused with the advent of the ’Iraqi style. Poetry acquired a new technical dexterity and artifice that utilized a greatly expanded vocabulary with many Arabic loan words. By the 15th century, the Hindi style had evolved into a very aestheticized and highly stylized form. C. Persian Prose During the Samanid period (875–999) in Greater Khurasan Persian was adopted as the official language of government. By the mid-10th century, a number of Persian translations of Arabic works were commissioned. The Ghaznavids (977–1186) succeeded the Samanids in the early 11th century. In the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (998–1030), Persian poetry flourished but Arabic prose dominated. A number of Persian histories were written during this period, such as the anonymous History of Sistan and the histories of Bayhaqi and Gardizi. Also for the first time a sufi manual, the Kashf-i Mahjub was written in Persian by Hujviri. While new Persian was adequate to tell narrative stories and to relate history, most scholars and the educated elite still found Persian inadequate to clearly and precisely articulate their ideas. Arabic remained supreme. However, early efforts were made to write scientific and philosophical works in Persian, but one of the major obstacles to this was the lack of a standardized vocabulary. The great physician and polymath Ibn Sina [Avicenna] (d. 1037) wrote the majority of his works in Arabic but he helped further the development of Persian scientific prose by writing a number of works in Persian.

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Under the Saljuq Turks (1038–1194) the Persians of the Iranian plateau, Khurasan and Transoxiana were reunited for the first time in centuries and enclaves were established in Anatolia, where Persian culture and poetry flourished at court. This political union facilitated the standardization of classical Persian in western Iran at the expense of local dialects. It also coincided with the beginnings of a period that fused Khurasani and Iraqi cultures. Persian prose borrowed anything that it could from Arabic and became very ornate and full of repetitive rhyming. With the passing of the 12th century, Persian emerged fully developed, having adopted the stratagem of allowing one hundred percent of the Arabic language to be used in prose writings. As stated earlier, in the 8th century a large number of Middle Persian works were translated into Arabic. These stories were fictional frame stories, written for the elite and were very popular at court. These stories now re-entered the body of Persian literature, slightly altered and skewed to Islamic values written in a new Persian. The most notable of this genre are the animal tales of Kalila va Dimna that were originally taken from the Sanskrit Panchatantra. Later a number of romances and heroic tales such as the Sindbad-Nama and Bakhtiyar-Nama emerged, as did collections of anecdotes such as Muhammad ’Awfi’s Jawami’ al-Hikayat. Additionally popular stories traditionally told by storytellers orally were preserved in prose and often translated into other languages such as Turkish. This article has limited itself to the classical Persian literary tradition, primarily in Persia and Central Asia. However, Persian flourished in the early period of the Ottoman Empire before the emergence of Ottoman Turkish. In the 16th century, the Mughals established themselves in India, where Persian was the court language. A very large literary tradition continued on for centuries and produced many famous poets, litterateurs and historians. British India maintained Persian as the administrative language. D. History of Research Western Scholars Critical modern scientific methodologies for the study of classical Persian literature first emerged in Europe. Unfortunately space restrictions allow only a handful of contributors to be mentioned here. Sir William Jones (1746–1794). Sir William was a brilliant philologist who studied law and then moved to British India, where he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Bengal. He is credited with being one of the first influential pioneers in comparative linguistics and Indo-European Studies. Based in Calcutta, Jones was instrumental in founding the Asiatic Society of

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Bengal in 1784. The Society exists to this day and has published thousands of articles and monographs on virtually every subject. The Society’s journal and publications provided a forum for discussion and a place to publish. The press in Calcutta published a large number of Persian works even before presses became prevalent in Persia. While Jones translated a number of Persian works into English, his major contribution to the study of Persian was the establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Edward G. Browne (1862–1926) became the first professor of Persian at Cambridge University. Prior to his appointment, he traveled to Persia to buy books and manuscripts for the university. Subsequently, he wrote the four volume Literary History of Persia (1902, 1906, 1920 and 1924), which was the first modern work of its kind. Browne’s work has remained the definitive work; however, other surveys such as those published by Jan Rypka, Allesandro Bausani and Zabih Allah. Safa have supplemented it and included new information. His study was the most comprehensive, but Browne was very subjective in some of his judgments of Persian literature. For example, later poetry was judged as being too ornate and/or florid for Western tastes. Reynold A. Nicholson (1868–1945) was a colleague of Browne at Cambridge and was noted for his interests in Islamic Studies. He specialized in Sufism. While he wrote equally on Arabic literature, including a Literary History of the Arabs (1907), in the field of Persian literature his studies of the works of Jalal al-Din Rumi are considered to be a major contribution to the field. He produced the first critical edition of the Mathnavi (1925–1940) and his eight-volume translation and commentary were the first of their kind in English. Gilbert Lazard (1920–) was a professor of Iranian languages at the Sorbonne and then the Director of Iranian Studies. He has made many major contributions to the study of Iranian languages. He has emerged as one of the world authorities on the “New Persian Renaissance.” His works on the first Persian poets of the 9th and 10th centuries were groundbreaking and his collaborations with major scholars such as Zabih Allah Safa, Henri Massé and Roger Lescot to create an anthology of Persian poetry from the 11th to the 20th centuries has been of major importance. Additionally he has translated many Persian works and revised major translations such as J. Mohl’s Shahnama (1846–1848). Iranian Scholars Four Iranian scholars pioneered modern scientific methods and began to produce critical textual editions for the first time. They were Muhammad Qazvini, Muhammad ’Ali Furughi, Sayyid Hasan Taqizada and ’Ali

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Akbar Dihkhuda. The combined scholarly contributions of these four men were enormous and built a firm foundation for scholarship. However, Qazvini was one of the prime movers. Muhammad Qazvini (1877–1949) was a ground breaker in methods of textual editing and criticism and had a major influence on these distinguished scholars: Malik al-Shu’ara’ Bahar, Badi’a al-Zaman Furuzanfar, Muhammad Taqi Mudarris Razavi, Muhammad Parvin Gunabadi and Mahmud Farrukh. In 1904, he was invited by his brother to England to see the great museums and manuscript collections. He stayed in Europe for 36 years. He edited a number of important Persian works that expanded scholars understanding of Persian poetics and the early classical literary movement. His collected articles comprised more than ten volumes. ’Abbas Iqbal (1896–1955). He was sent to Paris at the age of 28 where he studied at the Sorbonne and met Qazvini. When he returned to Iran he taught at the University of Tehran. He authored more that 200 articles and 45 books on literature, history and geography. He was instrumental in establishing Yad-i gar (1944–1949) as a serious research journal. Ibrahim Pur Daud (1886–1968) translated the Avesta (1964) in 9 volumes and researched and taught ancient Iranian customs, languages and history at the University of Tehran. A large number of outstanding scholars studied under him. Muhammad Taqi Bahar (Malik al-Shu’ara Bahar) (1886–1951) sought to research unknown areas in Persian history and literature. He was one of the best poets of 20th-century Iran but also became the most outstanding scholar of Persian literary historiography. His seminal three-volume work Stylistics (Sabk shinasi [1942]) meticulously traced the development of Persian prose writing from the earliest times up until the 20th century. Bahar’s study essentially documents the evolution of the written language from one that was purely Persian through a process of Arabization. He breaks this development down into four historical periods and into six distinct prose styles. Besides this work and his own poetry, his critical edition of the anonymous History of Sistan (Tarikh-i Sistan [1935]) was one of the first of a multitude of critical editions of important literary works to be published in Iran. Parviz Natal Khanlarli (1913–1990): He wrote numerous works on Persian literature and language such as Sh’ir va hunar (1967), Tarikh-i Zaban-i Farsi (1970) and Dastur-i Zaban-i Farsi (1972). He was a poet in his own right. He served as the Director of the Shahnama Foundation and the Iranian Cultural Foundation and was instrumental in establishing the Iranian Academy of Arts and Literature of Iran.

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Zabih Allah Safa (1911–1999) was an influential professor at Tehran University and will be remembered for his famous and monumental eightvolume literary history of Iran (Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran [1956–1991]). Muhammad Reza Shafi’i Kadkani (1939–) remains one of the most outstanding Iranian literary critics, and expert on Sufism whose in-depth studies in poetics, genres, and imagery continue to inspire aspiring scholars. A few of his works are Suvar-i khayal dar sh’ir-i Farsi (1971), Guzidah-yi ghazaliyat-i Shams (1974), Avaz-i bad va baran (1998) and Chashidan-i ta’m-i vaqt (2006). E. Past Trends in Scholarship In Iran the manuscript tradition had thrived. Large numbers of scribes were employed to copy texts. Because of the large numbers of people engaged in this activity and their varied degrees of education and expertise, the quality of the subsequent copies varied greatly. Similarly, because manuscripts were largely commissioned, they did not necessarily include a text or work in its entirety. Additionally, there was nothing that compelled a scribe to remain totally faithful to the text. For example, a line of poetry might be omitted or replaced because it was considered too sexually explicit. Textual changes often occurred for sectarian reasons and differences between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims. This practice led to adding curses after the names of certain individuals, who were often reviled by extreme Shi’ites. Specialized texts presented major difficulties for those unfamiliar with the subject matter and /or the vocabulary. It has only been one hundred years since critical textual editing of classical texts began. This movement was at odds with existing publishing practices that often took inexcusable liberties with the texts. The list of scholars and medievalists who have made lasting contributions to Persian literature is truly too long to list. In the past two centuries, the prevailing views of both Europeans and Iranians have been that the rise of Persian literature had its roots in the nationalistic desires of the Persian peoples to throw off the yoke of their Arab oppressors. This fit well with the 19th-century European understanding of nationalism. In the early 20th century, the Iranians experienced the Constitution period, where nationalism, independence and democratic government were major concerns. Iranians studied abroad before the establishment of modern universities in Iran and learned scientific research methods while at the same time studying their ancient languages and literatures in foreign universities. In the 1930’s after the establishment of Tehran University, the Faculty of Literature graduated scores of excellent scholars. Muhammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran

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worked diligently to instill a sense of nationalism in the population. Huge sums of money were invested in projects, which promoted Persian culture and literature. As a result of this legacy, the predominant view of the development of Persian has been one focusing on nationalism and things deemed Persian. F. Current Trends The Iranian revolution in late 1979 has influenced the study of classical Persian literature. A reaction against the former Shah’s policy of secularization and a reemphasis of Islam, Arabic, and specifically Shi’i Islam has changed the direction of government funding. While Persian literature remains important, projects focusing on religious themes receive more funding. Iran’s political isolation has adversely affected scholarly intellectual exchanges. Travel and study opportunities have decreased. Because of these situations, scholarly studies published in Iran are less available than in the past and some important research has gone unnoticed. However, the political isolation of Iran has had a positive effect on other aspects of the study of classical Persian literature. It has sparked an increase in the study of the Persian literature of Mughal India and also in Central Asia. Currently, the study of modern Persian literature is the fastest growing area. This includes Iranian writers along with an ever-growing body of authors belonging to the Iranian diaspora. As mentioned earlier, the study of classical Persian literature has and has had too many outstanding scholars to list separately. Scholarship has concentrated on firmly defining the characteristics of both poetry and prose during the various historical periods and analyzing the linguistic development of the literature. A number of surveys of Persian literature have been published since Browne’s Literary History. They have tried to update omissions, mistakes and discoveries made since Browne’s time but have little to offer by way of interpretation or analysis. Studies on particular poets, litterateurs or genres have been published, as have many definitive critical editions with insightful analysis. Scholars and bibliographers such as Iraj Afshar have worked unceasingly to describe and produce catalogues of newly catalogued manuscripts. Many lesser known periods and poets have come to light in detailed studies in specialized areas, such as in Isma’ili Studies. There is a need to produce more studies that are interdisciplinary and interpretive but this appears to be the growing trend. Additionally, there is a great need for better translations of the classic poets. In this area Dick Davis’s translations of the Shahnama and other works serve as an inspiration to others.

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Select Bibliography Arthur J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958); Malik al-Shu’ara, Muhammad Taqi Bahar, Sabk-Shinasi, ya Tarikh-i Tatavvur-i Nashr-i Farsi baray-i Tadris dar Danishkadah-i va Dawrah-i Duktur-i Adabiyat, 3 vols. (Tehran: Chapkhanah-i Khudkar, 1958); Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902, 1906, 1920, and 1924); Gilbert Lazard, Les premiers poètes persans (IXe-Xe siècles): Fragments rassemblés, édités et traduits, 2 vols. (Tehran: Institut franco-iranien; Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1964); Gilbert Lazard, Roger Lescot, and Zabih Allah Safa, Anthologie de la poésie persane XIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Julie Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Reynold A. Nicholson, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rumi, 8 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1925); Antonio Pagliaro and Allesandro Bausani, Storia della letteratura persiana (Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1960); Jan Rypka, Iranische Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig: Otto Harassowitz, 1959); Zabih Allah Safa, Tarikh-i Adabiyat dar Iran, 5 vols. (Tehran: Kitabfurush-i Ibn Sina, 1954–1984).

Mark David Luce

Islamic Philosophy A. Introduction Muslim philosophy has a history that precedes of ten odd centuries the interest devoted to it from Western academic practices. If its very name testifies the alien origin of the notion, it is nonetheless true that Muslims partially relinked it to indigenous sources. As a matter of fact, Muslim philosophy, while sharing a great deal of features with its Greek ancestor, has developed along specific lines, so that it is easy for Muslim thinkers to watch at their philosophical tradition as no less than an influential branch of Islamic religio-intellectual building. As pointed out by Henry Corbin (Histoire de la philosophie islamique, 1964), the source of Muslim philosophical meditation is two-fold: Greek and Quranic. On the one hand, theoretical questions were raised at the beginning of Islam, when early Muslims and companions used to address the Prophet asking for explanations on religious and practical matters. On the other hand, early conquests brought Muslims into contact with alien civilizations, bearers of different forms of knowledge, of whom ruling classes promptly became admirers, giving birth to a wide translation movement that represented one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the 9th and

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10th centuries (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ^Abbasid Society, 1988). This encounter exerted an inestimable influence on the developement of Islamic philosophy, in all its aspects. If the first philosophers of the Muslim world (albeit not all confessionally Muslim) were basically Neoplatonicists, endorsing a particular Platonic spiritualism nurtured in Aristotelian logic (although some thinkers were not devoid of influences arising from Greek scepticism), the contribution of meditation on the fact of divine Revelation added their methodology a specific gist. Throughout Islamic history, the terms used to define philosophy and their meaning varied from one period to another, and also depending on the environment in which the debates occurred. The most common terms, used with a slight semantic difference, had always been hikma (literally meaning “wisdom”), and falsafa, a calque from the original Greek. Not strictly relegated in philosophical practice, methodology of philosophy entered other intellectual areas, such as dialectic theology (kalam), jurisprudence (fiqh), grammar, historiography and Sufism. Meanwhile, as the term falsafa has always been quite limited in use, in that it is referred to the practice of dialectical reasoning, hikma is often related to many kinds of wisdom, be it that of the Sufis, theologians, or philosophers, etc. Following Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s classification (The Meaning and Concept of Philosophy in Islam, 2001), the definitions of Greek origin most common among Islamic philosophers are: 1) The knowledge of all existing things qua existents (ashya’ al-mawjuda bi-ma hiya mawjuda); 2) The knowledge of divine and human matters; 3) Taking refuge in death, thus love of death; 4) The arts of arts and science of sciences; 5) Love for wisdom. But beside these definitions, one should not forget the religious nature of Muslim philosophy; the neat distinction between philosophy and theology originated in the West on the grounds of a “secularization” that is largely unknown to the world of Islam. Thus, searching for a determinate boundary separating mystical speculation, spiritual experience, and prophetic philosophy, would inevitably result in a frustrating and pointless enterprise. Classical Western handbooks on Islamic philosophy had long referred to the matter in terms of Arabic philosophy. Heir to medieval scholastic tradition, this wording must be definitly rejected, and no serious Islamicist, nor

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informed historian of philosophy, uses it any longer. As a matter of fact, not only early Muslim philosophers were not homogeneously Arabs, but a number of leading medieval thinkers composed their works completely in Persian. If one observes that even major philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna for the Latin Middle Age) composed many remarkable works in the language of Iran, the above mentioned inconsistency becomes even more evident. Several subdivision patterns have been proposed for Islamic philosophy that emphasize local priorities, confessional elements, or typological considerations. But all of these tend to focus on particular aspects and, lacking a whole encompassing view, underplay or don’t consider at all characters and themes whose importance and centrality cannot be ignored. Subdivisions of macro-periods seem to be more effective in providing a reliable picture. The first period extends from the origins to the death of Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d. 1198). It is, after all, the most studied and best known period of Muslim philosophy. The death of Averroes seals the era of the classical philosophy in Islam, marking the decline of philosophical theorization in the Western lands of Islam, and the subsequent eclipse of the Latin Avicennism in Europe. Meanwhile, hailing from the Easten lands of the Arab world, having Syrian cities as main centers, a renaissance of mystical Avicennism was radiating in the direction of non-Arab East. It is the period of the “metaphysics of Sufism,” i. e., the attempt (that actually represented a great success and a momentous epistemological turn in the history of Islamic thinking) to express in a systematic fashion the details of the mystical path toward God, and the knowledge of self as knowledge of God. It is, this second period, the time of the diffusion of Akbarian metaphysics in Persia and, therefrom, in the Indian Subcontinent, by the Persian pupils of its originator, Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). The third and the fourth perisods overlap, if not in nature of the discourse, at least in time. The former coincides with the Safavid philosophical renaissance. In 1501, a chiliastic military-religious order moving from Azerbaijan entered Iran and, after conquering the major cities, declared Twelver Shi’ism to be the official religion of the newly-instituted Safavid reign, named after Safi al-din Ardabili (d. 1334), the founder of the order. The new rule attracted scholars and theologians that animated schools and theological seminaries, that eventually became major centers of propagation and discussion of the post-Akbarian mystical philosophy. It is the period of the great summa of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1641), whose influence spread to the Qajar era and up to the last decades of the 20th century.

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The last period is that of the modern philosophy, resumed as an intellectual weapon in all the Muslim world against the influence of the West. After the decolonization and in the midst of the globalization era, Muslim thinkers partially abandoned third-worldist and nativist rhetoric and began introducing in their discourse the key-elements of democracy, secularism, postmodernism, human rights. B. History Given the particular position of Muslim philosophy in transmitting Greek philosophical knowledge to the Latin Middle Ages, modern academic interest in it bears some similarities – and up to quite recent times, even a number of its flaws – with that of the European first translators and commentators. In the contest of medieval transmission of Islamic thought, several stages can be observed. The interest began during the 12th century, as a taste for Islamic matters was rather common in Europe. It is the time of the translations of Gerard of Cremona and his colleagues at the cathedral of Toledo. This wave testifies a marked interest in Neoplatonic cosmology and psychology, with the translations of works by Al-Farabi, the Brethern of Purity (Ikhwan al-safa’), and other important Muslim Neoplatonicists. Later, Western scholastics desired to understand Aristotle in the translation by Ibn Rushd. Translations carried out during the Renaissance, when a fresh interest in Arabic emerged anew, represent the link between medieval scholastic translations and the rise of a modern academic scholarship. The first European chair in Arabic was established in Paris in 1535, and was assumed by Guillaume Postel, while in 1584 an Arabic press was set up in Rome and a second chair in Arabic appeared at the beginning of the 17th century in Leiden. By and large, the most important personality in the field of Islamic philosophy was the English Arabist Edward Pocock (1604–1691), who collected original manuscripts and published, among other noteworthy works (about which see Hans Daiber, “The Reception of Islamic Philosophy at Oxford in the 17th Century,” 1994), Ibn Tufayl’s philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (1671). Pocock’s editions remained standards until the 19th century. The rise of Islamic philosophy as a modern topic of inquiry and teaching in Western universities at the end of the 18th century also marked the end of a period in which Muslim thinkers were regarded as central as the Greeks in the culture of humanity. As a matter of fact, while the Western areas of the Muslim world were facing the lower point of their decline and, in confronting with colonial enterprises were developing the first embryo of modernist and reformist religious thinking, contemporary Persian Neoplatonicism was prospering almost ignored by European acedeme.

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While editorial activity grew in quantity and quality, a certain number of scholars began being known as experts in European, Jewish, and Islamic medieval philosophy, but by far the most important character was Ernest Renan (1823–1892), whose ideas about the relative conceptual independence of Muslim thinking, although often driven by prejudice, represented a fresh look. It is also the age of the Orientalist erudition, with the systematic recording of material for research carried out by, among others, German Orientalists such as Gustav Flügel and Ferdinand Wüstenfeld. Illuministic tendencies, with all the implications in terms of ethnocentrism and historical evolutionism, came to a more moderate approach by the end of the 19th century, while the amount of primary sources made available through critical editions and translations allowed fairly good introductory texts being written, published, and achieving wide circulation, as in the case of Ignaz Goldziher’s compendium Die islamische und die jüdische Philosophie (1909). From this time on, academic knowledge of Islamic philosophy has found a remarkable expansion, both in terms of edition of fundamental texts and of publication of original interpretive and introductory studies. In Daiber’s phrasing, “European and Arab-Islamic secondary literature […] has now become too extensive to keep track of” (Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, 1999, XXV). Most major universities around the world, both in Europe and in the Americas, has established chairs in History of Islamic or Muslim Philosophy, and the second half of the 20th century witnessed an impressive increase of excellent works, by then dissociated from the antiquated idea of the end of philosophy in the Muslim world coinciding with the death of Averroes. C. Research As already stated, Muslim philosophy scholarship didn’t begin in a proper fashion before the 19th century. The first important work in the field is Amable Jourdain’s Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions d’Aristote et sur les documents grecs ou arabes employés par les docteures scholastique (1819). However, scholars usually mention Ernest Rénan’s classic Averroês et l’averroïsme (1852) as the most influent text in the field, at least until Goldziher’s seminal study, Beitrag zur Geschichte der muhammedanischen Theologie (1884), which represented – as the rest of his publications – a very competent and insightful research, for that period quite an advanced work. Coeval of Goldziher, another standard compendium of Islamic philosophy is Tjitze J. de Boer’s Geschichte der Philosophie in Islam (1901), translated into English two years later.

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About two decades later, an ambitious study written by the German Orientalist Max Horten was published in Munich: Die Philosophie des Islam in ihren Beziehungen zu den philosophischen Weltanschauungen des westlichen Orients (1924). Unfortunately, this study is even more dated than its predecessors, in that Horten’s attempt to render Islamic philosophical notions and categories with the ideas of late-medieval scholasticism and contemporary philosophy, results in a distorted picture of its object. The influence of the late 19th century, expecially of Nietzsche, and of the phenomenalism of Edmund Husserl, is too evident to prevent Horten’s study from ending up in obscuring original texts. However, the overall state of the field was by far more healthy than one might argue by the dated work of Horten. In fact, the number and quality of general introductions and learned monographs was flourishing. But it was not before end of the Second World War that major contributions were published and knew wide circulation. Miguel Cruz Hernandez’s Historia de la filosofia española: Filosofia hispano-musulmana appeared in 1957, and though concerned first of all with Islamic philosophy in Spain, it is nonetheless informative in other areas. Another classic and still influential work is W. Montgomery Watt’s Islamic Philosophy and Theology (1962), but a major turning point, both in methodology and in scope, was Henry Corbin’s History of Islamic Philosophy. Written in collaboration with Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Osman Yahya and published in 1964 by Franch major publisher Gallimard, it has been translated into a number of languages (including Arabic and Persian). The project was completed by Corbin alone in a somewhat abridged version that gives account of the later Eastern tradition of Islamic philosophy. The approach is quintessentially phenomenological and reflects the particular taste for Twelver Shi’ism of the author. Though very popular, this major work is not void of flaws, specially in the overemphasis of the mystical attitude of Shi’ism. It is anyhow true that the project of the French philosopher was not limited to the narrow universe of Islamologists: his aim was to put again in a fruitful “operational” communication the two worlds of living Islamic Neoplatonicism and Western philosophy. One other unappreciable result of Corbin’s effort with Muslim philosophy, carried on also by the series Bibliotheque Iranien, published in Tehran and Paris by the French Research Institute of Tehran, is that it caused a rebirth of research and academic study of philosophy in Iran itself, accompained by a flourishing of insightful and high quality publications. Meanwhile, general introductions continued to be published (a full list is provided in Daiber’s 1999 bibliographical study; see below); among them, possibly the most often cited and used in university classes is Majid

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Fakhri’s A History of Islamic Philosophy (1970), also translated into various languages and republished in a 1983 revised and updated version. By the 1980s, Islamic philosophy was already an important subject of inquiry, whose momentum is testified by chapters devoted to Islamic philosophers in works on medieval thought and in encyclopedias. In spite of this, as recognized by most scholars, there is still a great deal of work to be done, especially in editing unpublished works and bringing to light manuscripts still buried in libraries and private collections, notably those of the Subcontinent. In recent years, following the development of the discipline, important contributions have been added to the specialist literature. Among them, a voluminous bibliographical study that is bound to become standard tool for resaerch in the field is Hans Daiber’s Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy (1999). Its two volumes provide an impressive list of publications (articles, monographs, translations, critical editions, etc.) both in alphabetical and thematic order, accompained by insightful remarks. Another general work that must be mentioned and explained in some detail is History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr and Oliver Leaman (1996). It encompasses general introductory essays on the origins, influences, concepts, and schools of the early Islam, followed by a section on individual philosophers of the East and the West of Muslim world. The list is as follows: (Eastern) Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, al-Razi, al-^Amiri, the Ikwan al-Safa’, Ibn Sina (plus an article by Nasr in his “Oriental philosophy”), Ibn Mishkawayh, al-Ghazzali; (Western) Ibn Masarrah, Ibn Bajjah (the Latin Avempace), Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sab^in, and Ibn Khaldun. The fourth section is devoted to the mystical tradition and the reciprocal interplay between Sufism and philosophy. The section devoted to the later Islamic philosophy presents contributions on the major philosophers that were ignored in the early academic literature: Nasir al-din al-Tusi, the “school of Esfahan” (Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra), and Shah Waliullah of Delhi. The work includes an important and groundbreaking section on Jewish philosophy, added as a pivotal interlocutor to medieval Islam. The second part of the work (pp. 783–1180) enumerates the articulations of Muslim philosophy (metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc.), and attempts to present some later interpretations. A geographical criterion is also adopted in the chapters (pp. 1037–1142) devoted to Islamic philosophy in the modern Islamic world and to some interpretations in the West.

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D. Conclusion To draw a satisfactory picture of the state of the art in the study of Islamic philosophy is a difficult, if not simply impossible, task; the variety of approaches, the multiplicity of schools, methodologies, and interpretations, and the fluid state of research – all this give an uncomfortable sense of fuzziness to those who whish to keep track of the lines of the progress. Nevertheless, some sort of description may be attempted by looking at the past tendencies and the paths of continuity and change. During the Middle Ages, Islam in general was referred to as the archenemy of Christianity, but the attitude of medieval Europe toward it was ambivalent. This ambivalence was fostered by the centrality of “the Arabs” in the transmission of ancient knowledge. As demonstrated by Italian historian Franco Cardini in his The Invention of the Enemy (L’invenzione del nemico, 2006), the relation was one of attraction/repulsion: during the 12th century, in some respects, taste for Arabism was even somewhat fashionable, and the “Saracens” were considered as good-hearted fellows deceived by a false and evil religion. It is difficult to deny that these obscuring and partial views had influenced most Western modern scholars until recently. Despite this, the same urgency to understand Muslim thought, along with the humanist cry ad fontes!, later merged with the Neo-Thomist approach, fostered the efforts by some excellent scholars, like Louis Massignon (Opera minora, 1969), Etienne Gilson (Le philosophe et la théologie, 1960), Louis Gardet (L’islam, religion et communauté, 1967; with Georges Anawati, Introduction à la theologie musulmane, 1948), Giulio Basetti Sani, (Per un dialogo cristiano-musulmano, 1969) and others. Spain, dominated for seven centuries by Muslim rulers, had one more reason to be concerned with Islam, and in fact the same Catholic inspiration, corroborated by a sense of “Spanish identity,” is evident in the work of such Spanish scholars as Miguel Asin Palacios (La escatologia musulmana en la ‘Divina Comedia’, 1919; El Islam cristianizado: Estudio del sufismo a través de las obras de Abenárabi de Murcia, 1931) Missionary concerns (today milded by a genuine urgency for religious dialogue) animate on the other hand the Jesuites revolving around the Pontificia Università Gregoriana and the PISAI (Pontificial Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies). This shows that a Catholic academic school is still active, even though not as influential as in the past. The other relevant and somehow long standing influence, albeit not referable to as a “school” by its own right, is that played by outstanding scholars of Jewish origin (Ignaz Goldziher, Saul Horovitz, Georges Vajda, Paul Kraus, Richard Walzer, and others), as such working indipendently from mainstream Christian school. The whole of these influences is noticeable along

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all academic production on Islamic philosophy, even if not explicitly recognized. As remarked by Oliver Leaman (“Orientalism and Islamic Philosophy,” History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, 1996, 1143–48), one major turning point was the publication of Edward Said’s seminal study Orientalism (1978). Even if a central stream of scholars in Islamic philosophy (notably the traditionalists influenced by René Guénon and the French school of Corbinian phenomenologists, who sought to study Islam from within, many also becoming Muslims), had already rejected Orientalist views and approaches as biased and incoherent, Said’s argument projected the problematization of the Western discourse about the Other in a wider arena, working out a critical appoach that exposed to criticism the whole history of modern Western rationality. By the end of the 1980s, new epistemologies in approaching Islamic philosophy were not limited to the somehow elitist (even if quite influential) environment of traditionalists. A few words must be said in some detail about the influence of Henry Corbin’s in the field of Islamic philosophy. It has already been observed how the editorial and scholarly effort he carried out in Iran contributed to the reawakening of the study of traditional philosophy in that country. The activities of the Imperial Academy of Philosophy (suppressed after the 1979 Revolution and reopened under the name of Institute of Hikma and Philosophy – Anjoman-e hekmat wa falsafe), lead by Corbin’s associate Sayyed Hossein Nasr – a Muslim philosopher himself – succeded in giving the theories of the philosophia perennis of the other Nasr’s mentor Fritjhof Schuon a sound academic standing, thus providing traditionalist epistemology (for many reasons opposed by Corbin) a more solid ground. But the originality of Corbin’s approach to Islamic philosophy is not limited to the role he played in connecting different universes. As pinpointed by the chapter devoted to him by Pierre Lory in Nasr and Leaman’s edited work (“Henry Corbin: His Work and Influence,” 1996, 1149–55), besides having instituted a new scholarly paradigm in interpreting Muslim philosophical texts, he proposed original reflections on themes scarcely focused on by scholars both in Muslim world and in the West. Hermeneutical emphasis on such themes as angeology and “imaginal” dimension of existence, prophetology, the “suffering God,” and the paradox of religious monotheism, figures among his achievements and provides useful material for further discussion. Although his influence must not be overemphasized, and the core of his personal project (providing Western philosophers with modern philosophy to reflect on and giving Islamic modern Neoplatonism a protagonist role in the scene of

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world philosophy) may be considered partially failed, it is nevertheless true to say that, through his work, Muslim philosophy has not remained unknown to many contemporary famed philosophers, notably, for example, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. A late rediscovery of Islamic philosophy occurred also among political philosophers, as is the case with Leo Strauss’s and his school’s somewhat biased use of Al-Farabi thought (see his essay “Farabi’s Plato,” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume: On the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman et al., 1945, 357–93, and Muhsin Mahdi’s Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 2001). An idea of the variety of approaches and the range of academic study of Islamic philosophy might be obtained by looking at Nasr and Leaman’s edited work: it is easy to notice how this field has grown from the time of the first general introductions, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Scholars from all over the world, employing different methodologies and drawing from various experiences, participate in the discourse, and scholars from different Muslim countries are represented quite well. To end with, it is not useless to hint at new media and the coming of the “fast age.” As all fields of knowledge, Islamic philosophy and its study are not exempted from the possiblities and the risks implied by the fast growth of the internet and the increasing availability of specialized literature in the web. Even though the time when a serious and rigorous research can be carried out by simply relying on electronic resources is still to come, and web-based knowledge suffers a dramatic lack of authoritativeness, it is undeniable that the web is already an indispensable tool of work for most scholars, and not only of the new generation. Websites containing high-quality information (like www.muslimphilosophy.com), permanent seminaries or annual conferences (as www.mullasadra.org), personal pages and blogs of scholars (www.mullasadra. blogspot.com; www.uga.edu/islam/philosophy/html) and electronic libraries providing direct access to major works of Muslim philosophers, both in the original languages and in translations, are quickly and steadily growing. The importance of these is bound to encounter a rapid and progressive growth in the next years. Select Bibliography Roger Arnaldez, Averroes: A Rationalist Islam (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); David B. Burrel, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Arabic Philosophy and the West: Continuity and Interaction, ed. Therese-Anne Druart (Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 1988); Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philos-

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ophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jules L. Janssens, An Annotated Bibliogrphy in Ibn Sina (1970–1989) Including Arabic and Persian Publications and Turkish and Russian References (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991); Parviz Morewedge, Neoplatonism and Islamic Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992); Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993); William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology. An extended Survey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985); Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Alessandro Cancian

Islamic Theology A. General Definition Islamic theology, which is one of the branches of Islamic religious sciences, is mostly referred to as ^ilm al-kalam (the science of kalam), and in short kalam. Kalam is usually translated as “theology,” although this rendering does not express well its scholastic methods. The term “speculative theology” conveys in a better way the nature of the theological discussions of the mutakallimun (doctors of Kalam), who used logical argumentation in order to prove some of the principles of religion (Georges C. Anawati, “kalam,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, XIII [1987], 231–42). Kalam is only one of the two major trends in Islamic theology. The other trend is that of traditionalist theology (^ilm al-usul, the science of theological principles). Since the scholastic methods of kalam had a tremendous impact on medieval thinkers within the circles of traditionalist Islam, and also on Jewish and Christian thinkers (Harry Austryn Wolfson, Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy, 1979) this survey dedicates its lion’s share to kalam. Nevertheless, the difference between kalam and Islamic traditionalist theology is also addressed here, since the boundaries between these two trends were never definite, especially after the emergence of the Ash^ari school in the first half of the 10th century. The terms kalam and traditionalist Islam refer to Sunni Islam, which is the main body of opinion in Islamic thought. Unless otherwise stated, the schools of kalam and the main thinkers mentioned in this survey are Sunnis (Louis Gardet, “^ilm al-kalam,” EI, 2nd ed., vol. III [1971], 1141–50). The use of discursive arguments is Kalam’s salient feature, which is mostly reflected in the discussions on the existence of God and the creation of

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the world. In these questions the kalam uses the proof from accidents, which is based on the doctrine of atoms (the major works on these questions are Shlomo Pines, Beiträge zur islamischen Atomenlehre, 1936; id., trans. Michael Schwarz, Studies in Islamic Atomism, 1997; Herbert A. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, 1987). Kalam has also a lot to do with apologetics. Influenced by Hellenistic philosophical and theological thought, it uses various rationalistic tools in order to defend Islamic doctrines and uproot what it perceives as heretical concepts, infiltrated Islamic thought (D. D. de Lacy O’Leary, Arabic Thought and Its Place in History, 1939). Thus, it is tightly connected to the term ^aqida (pl. ^aqa#id), which stands for belief, creed or article of faith (William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Creeds, 1994). The goals of kalam, as the mutakallimun themselves define it in a report given by the Ash^ari theologian Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), are “to grasp the unity of God, and study the essence of God and His attributes” (Ihya# ^Ulum al-Din [The Revival of Religious Sciences], I [n.d.], 25). The theologian al-Jurjani (d. 1413) expands kalam’s definition to dealing with divine justice and eschatology (Kitab al-Ta^rifat, [The Book of Definitions], ed. Gustav Flügel, 1969 [photocopy of the Leipzig 1845 ed.], 194). Thus, kalam aims to back up various articles of faith, whose origins are to be found in the Qur#an and hadith (i.e. prophetic traditions), by using analytical methods. B. The Origins of Kala¯ m The common use in the Arabic language of the word kalam is word, words, or speech. How this term came to indicate Islamic speculative theology is an issue not fully revealed or discovered. There is an almost general agreement within the ranks of modern scholarship, that the dialectical technique of kalam was borrowed from early Christian theology (Carl Heinrich Becker, “Christliche Polemik und islamische Dogmenbildung,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete 27 [1912]: 175–95; rpt. in: id., Islamstudien, 1924–1932, 432–49, trans. Mark Muelhaeusler, “Christian Polemic and the Formation of Islamic Dogma,” Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert Hoyland, 2004, 241–58; Josef van Ess, Anfänge muslimischer Theologie: zwei antiqadaritische Traktate aus dem ersten Jahrundert der Hipra, 1977; id., “The Beginnings of Islamic Theology,” The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, 1975), while pointing out Greek (Josef van Ess, “The Logical Structure of Islamic Theology,” Logic in Classical Islamic Culture, ed. Gustav E. von Grunebaum, 1970; Ibrahim Madkour, “La Logique d’Aristote chez les mutakallimun,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 58–70) and Syriac (Michael A.

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Cook, “The Origins of Kalam,” BSOAS 43 [1980]: 32–43) texts as possible sources of inspiration (Francis Edward Peters, “The Origins of Islamic Platonism: the School Tradition,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 14–45; Louis Gardet, “Aux débuts de la réflexion théologique de l’Islam,” ibid., 46–59). In the same vein, it has been suggested that kalam was used to translate into Arabic the different meanings of the Greek terms logos or dialexis (Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, 1976) or the Syriac memra (Frithiof Rundgren, “Über den griechischen Einfluß auf die arabische Nationalgrammatik,” AUU 2.5 [1976]: 119–44). C. The Exponents of Kala¯ m The exponent of kalam was called mutakallim (lit. speaker, pl. mutakallimun). The mutakallimun are described by both Latin and Hebrew medieval thinkers. The Hebrew designation ha-medabberim and the Latin loquentes were derived from the literal meaning of mutakallim (Lawrence V. Berman, “kalam,” EJ, 1st ed. X [1971]: 701–03). The mutakallimun were engaged not only in articulating the fundamentals of Islam in an analytic language, but also in polemics of both political and religious nature (Shlomo Pines, “A Note on an Early Meaning of the Term Mutakallim” IOS 1 [1971]: 224-40; rpt. in: id., Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy, 1996). The first mutakallimun did not belong to a specific school. Their teachings, if they had ever been written, did not survive, and only fragments of their views have been preserved, mostly in the rich Arabic heresiographical literature written from the 9th century onward. The early mutakallimun were very cautious in not revealing the foreign sources of their doctrines. Later mutakallimun, when citing the views of their predecessors, did not actually know the foreign roots of their doctrines (Richard M. Frank, “Remarks on the Early Development of the Kalam,” Atti del terzo congresso di studi arabi e Islamici, Ravello 1–6 settembre 1966 [1967], 315–29). D. The Schools of Kala¯ m In the end of the 7th century emerged a group of mutakallimun, who were adherents of the principle of free will, as opposed to the strict predestinarian view, which was held by traditionalist theologians. This group, the Qadariyya (Carlo Alfonso Nallino, “Sul nome dei Qadariti,” RSO 7 [1918]: 461–66), was the forerunner of the Mu^tazila, which is the most known kalam school (Joseph van Ess, “Kadariyya,” EI, 2nd ed., IV [1974]: 368–72; Henri Laoust, Les Schismes dans l’Islam, 1965). The Mu^tazila (Carlo Alfonso Nallino, “Sull’origine del nome dei Mu^taziliti,” RSO 7 [1918]: 429–54) flourished as two separate schools in

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Basra and Baghdad from the first half of the 8th century until the middle of the 11th century (Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948). The Mu’tazili theses survived in Zaydi-Shi^i Islam until the present day, but not in Sunni Islam (Wilferd Madelung, Der Imâm al-Qâsim ibn Ibrâhim und die Glaubenslehre der Zaiditen, 1965). The rival school of the Mu^tazila is the Ash^ariyya, founded in Basra in the first half of the 10th century. The eponym of the Ash^ariyya, Abu al-Hasan alAsh^ari (d. 935) was a former Mu’tazili, who used the rationalistic tools of the Mu^tazila in order to defend the doctrines of traditional Islam and to defeat the Mu^tazila (Ahmad AmIn, Duha al-Islam [The Forenoon of Islam], I–III, 1952; id., Fajr al-Islam [The Dawn of Islam], 1978; William Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, 1973). Another important theological school is the Maturidiyya-Hanafiyya, established as a definite school in central Asia in the 11th century. Its eponym is Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. 944) from Samarqand (Wilferd Madelung, “al-Maturidi,” EI, 2nd ed., VI [1991]: 846–47). The heresiographic literature, written from the 11th century mainly by Ash^ari theologians, mentions a great number of other kalam schools, whose existence is questionable (Michael Schwarz, “Can We Rely on Later Authorities for the Views of Earlier Thinkers?” IOS 1 [1971]: 241–48). E. Kala¯ m and Traditional Theology Most of the activity of the mutakallimun was in the inner circles of Islam, mainly against Sunni traditionalist theologians. Kalam’s dialectical discourse, which gives precedence to human reason in the process of perceiving God and the world, is supposedly antithetical to Islamic traditional theology, which declares to draw its authority solely from Divine revelation, prophetic traditions and the teachings of the ancestors of the Muslim community. These epistemological questions were discussed by both the mutakallimun and the traditionalist theologians. Further points of dispute between the two trends were the question of God’s unity, the nature of Divine attributes, anthropomorphism, predestination and free will (William Montgomery Watt, Predestination and Free Will in Early Islam, 1948; Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane, 1980), theodicy (Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought, 1984), eschatology, the status of prophecy and the essence of the Qur#an as God’s uncreated speech (Jan R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 1976). The division between mutakallimun and traditionalist theologians never was clear-cut, since kalam’s methods had a huge impact upon traditionalist theologians. Consequently, the latter embraced rationalistic argumen-

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tations in their works and public debates (Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology- Traditionalism and Rationalism, 1998). Among traditionalist theologians, the group called Hanabila after their eponym Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) is the most conspicuous (Henri Laoust, “Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” EI, 2nd ed., I [1960]: 272–7; id., “Hanabila,” EI, 2nd ed., III [1971], 158–62). F. Theology and the Qur#a¯n The Qur#anic text inspired the molding and refining of theological notions and formulae elaborated not only in theological treatises and kalam manuals but also in Qur#an exegeses (tafsir pl. tafasir), written by prominent theologians such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) and Ibn al-^Arabi (d. 1240). The Qur#an exegete Ibn Kathir (d. 1372) based his tafsir on the theological and jurisprudential teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). The main theological themes in the Qur#an are surveyed and discussed in research on Qur#anic studies (Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Quran, 1980; Tilman Nagel, “Theology and the Qur#an,” EQ V [2006]: 256–75; Binyamin Abrahamov, “Theology,” The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, ed. Andrew Rippin, 2006, 420–33). Among the theological concepts refined from the Qur#anic text are predestination and free will (Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the KoranSemantics of the Koranic Weltanschauung, 1964), human responsibility (Andrew Rippin, “Desiring the Face of God,” Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur#an, ed. Issa Boullata, 2000), creation (Husam Muhi Eldin alAlousi, The Problem of Creation in Islamic Thought – Qur#an, Hadith, Commentaries and Kalam, 1968), anthropomorphism (Binyamin Abrahamov, Anthropomorphism and Interpretation of the Qur#an in the Theology of al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim, Kitab al-Mustashrid, 1996), and ethics (Daud Rahbar, God of Justice: a Study in the Ethical Doctrine of the Qur#an, 1960). G. Theology and H. adı¯ th Hadith literature, which is the narrative of the Prophet Muhammad’s life and practices, contains numerous statements of Muhammad and some of his Companions (sahaba), serving as a starting point for theological debates. While traditionalist theologians used hadith literature as a locus of their religious thought (Livnat Holtzman, “Human Choice, Divine Guidance and the Fitra Tradition – The Use of Hadith in Theological Treatises by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,” Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, ed. Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (2010), the credibility of this literature was questioned by rationally inclined theologians who tended to discredit this literature (Roger Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, 1956). Hadith literature covers almost every topic in theological thought,

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such as God’s transcendence and anthropomorphic depictions of God (Daniel Gimaret, Dieu à l’image de l’homme: les anthropomorphismes de la sunna et leur interprétation par les théologiens, 1997), predestination and free will (Joseph van Ess, Zwischen Hadi© und Theologie: Studien zum Entstehen prädestinatianischer Überlieferung, 1975; Louis Gardet, Dieu et la destinée de l’homme, 1967; Geneviève Gobillot, La Fitra – La Conception originelle – ses interprétations et fonctions chez les penseurs musulmans, 2000; Helmer Ringgren, Studies in Arabian Fatalism, 1955), ethics (Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, 1991), creation (Ernst Behler, Die Ewigkeit der Welt – Problemgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu den Kontroversen um Weltanfang und Weltunendlichkeit im Mittelalter, 1965; Iysa Bello, The Medieval Islamic Controversy Between Philosophy and Orthodoxy, 1989), eschatology (David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apochalyptic, 2002) and the nature of the Qur#an (Wilfred Madelung, “The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran,” Orientalia Hispanica 1 [1974]: 504–25). H. Kala¯ m and Philosophy Kalam is not based on philosophical speculation per se, in spite of the resemblance of kalam’s set of conceptions and areas of interest to that of Muslim philosophy (falsafa). It has been claimed, however, that kalam should not be disregarded as an apologetic discipline, since it shares areas of interest with Islamic philosophy (Richard M. Frank, “Kalam and Philosophy: A Perspective from One Problem,” Islamic Philosophical Theology, ed. Parviz Morewedge, 1979, 71–95). Kalam accepts the Islamic dogma. Thus, the mutakallimun challenged the philosophers, among other groups within Islam, and labeled them as heretics. The most famous attempt to attack philosophy is the Ash^ari theologian al-Ghazali’s (Algazel, d. 1111) Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers, ed., trans. and annot. Michael Marmura, 2000). A rebuttal of al-Ghazali’s argumentation is Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes, d. 1198) Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence, ed., trans. and annot. Simon van den Bergh, 1978). I. History of Research The history of research in the field of Islamic theology is in many senses similar to the history of Islamic studies in general. The study of kalam is a sub-discipline of the studies of Islamic history and philology. The interest of European scholars in Islamic theology dates as early as the establishing of the University of Leiden in 1575. The earliest scholarly efforts at studying Islam were characterized by comparing and judging Islamic doctrines in the light of Christian doctrines (Robert Caspar, A Historical Introduction to Islamic Theology, 1998). In other words, the study of Islam was not perceived as a scholarly

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field in its own right. The change occurred in the early 19th century along with the scholarly efforts taken by European and Muslim scholars in cataloguing, classifying, and publishing Arabic manuscripts in critical and uncritical editions. As the publication of manuscripts of heresiographical works and theological treatises advanced, kalam was dealt not only in general surveys on Islam (Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, rev. 2nd ed. 1925, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 1981; Alfred von Kremer, Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des Islams, 1868), but also in the frame of monographs, thus shaping the study of Islamic theology as an independent discipline. Research on Islamic theology in the late 19th century and the early th 20 century is characterized by a reliance on heresiographic literature, whose nature (see “sources”) dictates a descriptive historical approach. The European researchers, trained for the most part in philology and history and not in philosophy and theology as such, tended to deal more with the history of theological trends and less with the teachings of Islamic theologians. The historical approach is well reflected, for example, in the works of Julius Wellhausen (Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz, 1902, trans. Margraet Graham Weir, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, 1927; Die religiös-politischen Oppositionsparteien im alten Islam, 1901, trans. R. C. Ostle and S. M. Walzer, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam, 1975). All the relevant entries of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published between 1913–1936, reflect the historical approach, which dominated Western research in the field of Islamic theology (Duncan Black Macdonald, “Kadariya”; id., “kalam”; id, “al-Maturidi”; Arent Jan Wensinck, “al-Ash^ari”; Ignaz Goldizher, “Ahmad ibn Hanbal”; Henrik Samuel Nyberg, “Mu^tazila” – all available in the convenient version: Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. H. A. R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers, 1995). The relevance of these early studies is defied time and again, although their importance as introductory works to the study of the history of Islamic theology still exists. Research approaches still relevant today are those focusing on a methodological close reading of theological texts. A representative example is Harry Austryn Wolfson’s comprehensive work on the origins of kalam (Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, 1976). Wolfson’s method of conjecture and verification, which he called “a hypotheticodeductive method,” paved the way to researches concentrating on the theological texts, in which references to political developments, if they exist at all, are provided merely as an aid of understanding the developments in theology. The definitive study of the early phase of the formation of Islamic theology is Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert

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Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 1991–1995 (6 vols.). All the relevant entries of the second edition of EI, published between 1960–2004 (also as an online electronic version), reflect a close reading of a wider variety of published manuscripts than was available to the contributors of the first version. It has been claimed that the lion’s share of studies of Islamic theology from the second half of the 20th century was dedicated to the earliest period of kalam, while fewer studies were dedicated to theologians of the 11th century onward, with the one exception of the thought of the Ash^ari theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (Algazel, d. 1111), whose works have been studied by Western scholarship for more than a century (Daniel Gimaret, “Pour un Rééquilibrage des études de la théologie musulmane,” Arabica 38 [1991]: 11–18). Nevertheless, from the 1980s, the tendency in research is to focus on the thought of theologians of the 11th century onward. The work of researchers of Islamic theology, although not specifically subjected to the harsh criticism pointed to Orientalists in general (Edward E. Said, Orientalism, 1978), should be understood and evaluated within the frame of European Orientalism with its faults and virtues (Jean Jacques Waardenburg, “Mustashrikun,” EI, 2nd ed., VII [1993]: 783–93). J. Sources The study of Islamic theology, as other branches of the Islamic religious sciences, depends upon the publication of original manuscripts in critical and uncritical editions. The two fundamental works in this area (Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, 1902–1942; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1967) list manuscripts of Islamic Arabic works, theological works included, while providing essential biographical details on the authors of these works. Even today the task of publishing manuscripts of theological works is a major feature of research. Every newly published theological work often incites the interest of scholars to pursue the investigation in the direction which that work offers, while it sheds light on unknown aspects, trends, and ideas in Islamic theology. For example, in 1962 William Montgomery Watt wrote: “the earliest extant works of Sunnite theology in the strict sense are those of al-Ash^ari (d. 935)” (Islamic Philosophy and Theology, xii). Two years later, in 1964, Morris Seale published the first translation of Ahmad b. Hanbal’s (d. 855) al-Radd ^ala al-Jahmiyya wa-’l-zanadiqa (Responsa to two heretic sects), a theological work which precedes the works of al-Ash^ari in a century, thus contradicting Watt’s categorical statement quoted above (Morris S. Seale, Muslim Theology, 1964). This example demonstrates that the field of Islamic theology is far from being exhausted.

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Until the discovery of several original Mu^tazili works, heresiographic works dated as early as the 10th century were the main source for researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries to study the earlier trends of kalam and traditional theology. The major overviews on Islamic theology and particularly Mu^tazili theology written in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were based solely on heresiographic literature (for example, Israel Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shi^ites in the presentation of Ibn Hazm,” JAOS 28 [1907]: 1–80; 29 [1909]: 1–183). The heresiographers, mostly Mu^tazili and Ash^ari mutakallimun, organized their works so that they were compatible with a tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, in which he prophesied that the Muslim community would be divided into seventy-three sects, seventy-two of them inheriting Hell, and the surviving group going to Heaven. The heresiographers strove in finding seventy-three Islamic sects, thus counting as separate sects groups of people whose views differed only slightly from one another (Hellmut Ritter, “Philologika III: Muhammedanische Häresiographen,” Der Islam 18 [1929]: 34–59). A recognition of the mishaps of heresiography, a literature which provides only a partial picture of the teachings of theological trends as well as of their historical development, led to a pioneering attempt to study the molding of traditionalist theology based on the first Sunni ^aqa#id (creeds, articles of faith), dated from the 8th century (Arent Jan Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, 1932, re-ed. 1965). Nevertheless, only the discovery of original theological works or the reconstruction of such works based on later sources, enabled Western research to validate the biased descriptions of trends and thinkers as they appear in heresiographical literature (See the above-mentioned works of M. Cook and J. van Ess; Richard M. Frank, “The Neoplatonism of Pahm b. Safwân,” Museon 78 [1965]: 395–424) While numerous extant texts of the two major kalam trends in Islam, the Mu^tazila and the Ash^ariyya, enable scholars to depict Islamic scholastic tradition during the period of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 C.E.), the beginnings of that tradition during the Umayyad age (661–750 C.E.) are much harder to establish. The authenticity of a few epistolary texts and fragments belonging to the reign of Caliph ^Abd al-Malik (685–705 C.E.) (Joseph van Ess, “The Beginnings of Islamic Theology,” J. E. Murdoch and E. D. Sylla, eds. The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, [1975], 87–111), has been challenged. It has been argued that these writings were pseudepigrapha from the late Umayyad times, some fifty years after the reign of ^Abd al-Malik (Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma, 1981).

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K. Mu^tazila Many researchers were drawn to deal with the Mu^tazila from the second half of the 19th century, and it is by all means the most studied theological school in Western research. The attraction to the Mu^tazila can be explained by the fact that several European scholars favored some of the views of this school. In 1865, Heinrich Steiner spoke of them as “the free-thinkers of Islam” (Heinrich Steiner, Die Mu^taziliten oder die Freidenker im Islam, 1865). This concept, enhanced by the views of prominent scholars like Ignaz Goldziher, and duplicated in dozens of works (for example, Henri Galland, Essai sur les Mo^tazélites: Les rationalistes de l’Islam, 1906; George Fadlo Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: the Ethics of ^Abd al-Jabbar, 1971), has dominated Western scholarship for decades. The image of Mu^tazilis as free-thinkers was mainly based on heresiographic literature. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s Henrik Samuel Nyberg, who discovered and edited Kitab al-Intisar (The Book of Triumph) by the Mu^tazili al-Khayyat (d. 912) a genuine Mu^tazili work, which remained the solely-known Mu^tazili work for decades, challenged this concept (Henrik Samuel Nyberg, “Zum Kampf zwischen Islam und Manichaismus,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 32 [1929]: 425–41). Henceforth, Mu^tazilis were portrayed as theologians and not as philosophers. Furthermore, the discovery of a large quantity of Mu^tazili sources in the 1960s, contributed to a considerable progress in studies relating the Mu^tazila. Nevertheless, studies written before that time and previously considered as corner-stones in the field, are now considered as outdated (for example, Albert N. Nader, Le système philosophique des Mu^tazila, 1956). The entry in The Encyclopaedia of Islam indeed provides an excellent overview of the updated approaches in research (Daniel Gimaret, “Mu^tazila,” EI, 2nd ed.,VII [1993]: 783–93) L. Ash^ariyya Although the Ash^ariyya (or Asha^ira) is the most important orthodox theological school, its history and origins have been little studied. This lacuna in research is opposed to the numerous published writings of Ash^ari theologians and the Ash^ari rich heresiographical literature. Researches based on Ash^ari material, mainly focus on themes and doctrines rather than on the history of the school. An indication to the little known on the history of the Ash^ari school is the very short entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (William Montgomery Watt, “Ash^ariyya,” EI, 2nd ed., I [1960]: 696). In this entry Watt summarizes the dominating view in Western research, according to which the Ash^ariyya was the dominant, if not the official, theological school in the 8th–14th centuries. This view appeared in a number of studies (Duncan

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Black Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, 1903; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought, 1973), and was contested in the works of George Makdisi (“Muslim Institutions of Learning in Eleventh-Century Baghdad,” BSOAS 24 [1961]: 1–56; id., “Ash^arî and the Ash^arites in Islamic Religious History,” SI 17 [1962]: 37–80; 18 [1963]: 19–39; The Rise of Colleges, 1981). M. Ma¯turı¯ diyya- H. anafiyya Not much was known on the Maturidiyya-Hanafiyya before the discovery of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi’s Kitab al-Tawhid (The Book of Unity) (by Joseph Schacht, “New Sources for the History of Muhammadan Theology,” SI 1 [1953]: 23–42; the manuscript was published by Fathallah Kholeif in 1970, and the authenticity of the manuscript was challenged by Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane, 1980 and discussed by M. Sait Özrevali, “The Authenticity of the Manuscript of Maturidi’s Kitab al-Tawhid,” Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies 1 [1997]: 19–29). Western research perceived this school as parallel to the Ash^ariyya (Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 1925; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948), however without sufficient collaborating textual evidences. Different aspects in al-Maturidi’s thought are discussed in several researches (J. Meric Pessagno, “Intellect and Religious Assent: the view of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi,” MW 69 [1979]: 18–27; id., “Irada, Ikhtiyar, Qudra, Kasb – The View of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi,” JAOS 104,1 [1984]: 177–91; id., “The Uses of Evil in Maturidian Thought,” SI 60 [1984]: 59–82). N. H. ana¯bila The traditionalist Hanbali school has been neglected for years by western research, although the life and personality of its eponym, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, were discussed in length for more than a century (Walter Melvil Patton, Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the Mihna, 1897; Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic biography. The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma#mun, 2000; Nimrod Hurvitz, The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power, 2002; Chistopher Melchert, “The Adversaries of Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” Arabica 44 [1997]: 234–53). The Hanabila who, according to their own avowal in numerous writings, had given precedence to the Quranic text and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and rejected the excessive use of rationalistic methods, were perceived by Western scholarship as ultra-conservative or worse, as a

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mob (Goldziher, op. cit.; Macdonald, op. cit.; Henri Lammens, L’islam: croyances et institutions, 1926; trans. E. Denison Ross, Islam: Beliefs and Institutions, 1968). An insufficient treatment of Hanbali manuscripts and an exclusive reliance on Ash^ari heresiography contributed to that unjustified image. The pioneering work of Henri Laoust (Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Taki-d-Din Ahmad b.Taimiya, 1939) has paved the way for researches on the Hanabila, revealing a theological system combining logical kalam argumentations with the traditional sources (George Makdisi, “Hanbalite Islam,” Merlin L. Swartz ed., Studies on Islam, 216–274, Daniel Gimaret, “Theories de l’acte humain dans l’école Hanbalite,” Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales 29 [1977]: 157–78; Binyamin Abrahamov, “Ibn Taymiyya on the Agreement of Reason with Tradition,” MW 82.3–4 [1992]: 256–73; Wesley Williams, “Aspects of the Creed of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal: A Study of Anthropomorphism in Early Islamic Discourse,” IJMES 34 [2002]: 441–63; Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 2007). O. The Thought of Prominent Thinkers The most conspicuous developments in the field of Islamic theology are in reevaluation and reassessment of the thought of prominent theologians. It is far beyond the scope of this entry to introduce the entire research done on dozens of medieval Islamic theologians, and we shall have to do with three examples demonstrating the progress made in research with regard to the thought of prominent thinkers. Research on the Ash^ari theologian Abu al-Ma^ali al-Juwayni (d. 1085), known primarily as the teacher of Abu Hamid al-GhazalI (d. 1111), has progressed immensely with the publication of critical editions of his works (Abu al-Ma^ali al-JuwaynI, al-Irshad, trans. Jean-Dominique Luciani, 1938), translations (Léon Bercher, trans., Les Fondements du Fiqh, 1995; Paul Walker [trans.], A Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief, 2000) and researches (Helmut Klopfer, Das Dogma des Imâm al-Haramain al-Djuwainî und sein Werk al-Aqîda al-nizâmîya, 1958; Tilman Nagel, Die Festung des Glaubens, 1988; Mohammed Moslem Adel Saflo, Al-Juwayni’s Thought and Methodology, 2000). These and other works established al-Juwayni’s unique contribution to the field of rational argumentations. In the case of Abu Hasan al-Ash^ari (d. 935), the eponym of the Ash^ari school of theology, whose works have been studied for more than a century (Wilhelm Spitta, Zur Geschichte Abu’l Hasan al-A ˇs^ari’s, 1876; Duncan Black Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory, 1903; Arthur Stanley Tritton, Muslim Theology, 1947; Louis Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Introduction à la théologie musulmane, 1948),

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the whole scope of his thought and its repercussions is far from being fully revealed (Binyamin Abrahamov, “A Re-examination of al-Ash^ari’s Theory of Kasb according to Kitab al-Luma^,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1–2 [1989]: 210–21; Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ash^ari, 1990; Richard M. Frank, “Bodies and Atoms: the Ash^arite Analysis,” Islamic Theology and Philosophy, ed. Michael E. Marmura, 1984, 39–53, 287–293, just to mention a few. Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), an ascetic whose views on free will were investigated at length (Hans Heinrich Schäder, “Hasan al-Basri- Studien zur Frühgeschichte des Islam,” Der Islam 14 [1925]: 1–75; Hellmut Ritter, “Studien zur Geschichte der islamischen Frömmigkeit: I. Hasan el-Basri,” Der Islam 21 [1933]: 1–83; Julian Obermann, “Political Theology in Early Islam: Hasan al-Basri’s Treatise on Qadar,” JAOS 55 [1935]: 138–62; Michael Schwarz, “The Letter of al-Hasan al-Basri,” Oriens 22 [1967]: 15–30), is considered to be a mile stone in Islamic theology, although the authenticity of teachings attributed to him has been questioned recently (Suleiman Ali Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History: al-Hasan al-Basri and the Formation of his Legacy in Classical Islamic Scholarship, 2006). Select Bibliography Binyamin Abrahamov, Islamic Theology: Traditionalism and Rationalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Robert Caspar, Traité de théologie musulmane (Rome: PISAI, 1987), trans. Penelope Johnstone, A Historical Introduction to Islamic Theology (Rome: PISAI, 1998); Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991–1995); Livnat Holtzman, “kalam,” EJ, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., XI (2006), 729–31; Tilman Nagel, The History of Islamic Theology: From Muhammad to the Present [Geschichte der islamischen Theologie von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart], trans. from German by Thomas Thornton, (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000 [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994]); Gustav Pfannmüller, Handbuch der Islam-Literatur (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1923); William Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973); Id., Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962); Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

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Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context

Natural Sciences in the Islamic Context A. Introduction and Terminology Islamic civilization provides a rich field for the historian of science. History of Islamic science is a relatively young field, having developed only since World War II, with new discoveries being made regularly. Discussions of science in Islam in the past, and still to a certain extent within the generalist literature, have suffered from the shortcomings of the Orientalist paradigm, which holds as axiomatic the following: Islam is an inferior religion and culture to that of the Judaeo-Christian, and now secular West; and Islamic civilization was merely an intermediary between the classical Greeks and the Renaissance, then Enlightenment West. The consequences of this paradigm for scholarship are exemplified by the following untenable assertion that still appears, in one form or another, in the literature: science in Islam declined beginning in the 11th century and eventually died out, either due to the forces of religious conservatism, or to Mongol invasions, or both. The present historical outline, which re-addresses these and other conclusions, owes much to George Saliba (Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 2007), the most recent overall re-assessment of the subject. How to designate the science of Islamic civilization in English is a problem. The Arabic word for “science” ‘ilm means an intellectual discipline generally, much like German Wissenschaft. Several terms have been employed by scholars to designate the scientific tradition of Islamic civilization, among them: “Arabic science” and “Islamic science.” The former has the advantage of referring to the linguistic tradition, but which ignores important works written in Persian; the latter, preferred by the present author, emphasizes the dominant culture and civilization within which these scientific activities took place. B. Historical Outline An Islamic scientific tradition began during the period of the 7th-century conquests, as Muslims came into closer contact with Byzantium and Iran. The translation of the administrative apparatus from Greek and Persian into Arabic and the displacement of the former bureaucratic class, which began during the reign of caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), precipitated social factors that drove the pursuit of science for centuries, and led to the epochal Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the early Abbasid period (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998; George Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007).

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The early Abbasid period (mid-8th to 10th c.) presented increased opportunities for scientists to be useful to the needs of society. The presence of three astrologers assisting in the founding of Baghdad (762 C.E.) attests to the existence of an established astronomical tradition by that time, as astrology required advanced technical ability in applied mathematical astronomy. Progress in the sciences was motivated by competition for positions at court. A climate of scrutiny was fostered, which encouraged scientists to be as precise as possible, and even affected translations into Arabic. For example, the translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest involved a critical reading and correction of the text, updating it to then current observations and methods, such as the substitution of the newly invented trigonometric functions for Ptolemy’s chord tables. The concentration of wealth in Baghdad and the motivation of the regime to possess the fruits of science and technology ensured the presence of the best scientists at the capital. Among them were the Banu Musa, three brothers (“Sons of Musa”), who used their positions and fortunes to advance the sciences, both through patronizing translations from accomplished translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873), who commanded large fees, and through original research. By the mid-9th-century, Islamic scientists had attained a level of competence that enabled them to devise wholly new disciplines and sub-disciplines. Astronomers distanced themselves from the astrological aspects of their field, redefining the discipline as a purely descriptive science (‘ilm al-hay’a “the science of the configuration [of the heavenly bodies]”). Focusing on physical structure alone made the physical inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic system obvious, the solution of which became a major concern of Islamic astronomers for several centuries, described below. In mathematics, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (d. ca. 850) devised the science of algebra, which was advanced much farther by Ghiyath al-Din Jamshid ibn Mas’ud al-Kashi (d. 1429) and Omar Khayyam (d. 1131). The practical needs of navigation and religion, in determining prayer times and the direction of Mecca, led to the invention of spherical trigonometry. Astronomical instruments, such as the astrolabe, were developed. A portable analog computer containing a model of the heavens, the astrolabe was used for a variety of calculations, including timekeeping, astrological horoscopes, and the sighting of stars. Following a long period of critique, Islamic astronomy began to reach maturity in the late 13th century at the Maragha observatory in northwestern Iran. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), Mu’ayyad al-Din al-‘Urdi (d.1266) and several other scientists revised planetary models in the course of their observations. The tradition of reform continued down well past the 15th century,

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and some of the mathematical models developed in this tradition by Ibn alShatir (d. 1375) and others found their way into the work of Nicholas Copernicus (d. 1543). Islamic physicians, though based in Greek medicine, made original contributions to medical thought, and exerted a formative influence on the European medical tradition. Greek humoral pathology in the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions became dominant, reaching its fullest expression in the Canon of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (d. 1037). The Canon was attractive both to Islamic and Western medical scholars, because it presented essentially Galenic medicine in an easier to use format than that of the ancient Master. Although originating in Christendom, under Islam the hospital became a more sophisticated institution, a place of treatment of the sick and wounded, an asylum for the mentally ill, a hospice for the dying, and a facility for medical instruction. One of the most enduring examples was the Mansuri hospital of Cairo, established in 1284 and which functioned through the 19th century. The translations from Arabic to Latin were especially important for the creation of a medical curriculum in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. The major translation centers were in Salerno and Toledo. The Canon eventually became central to medical instruction in the Italian universities. Nancy Siraisi has shown that the Canon continued to be used in the Italian universities well after Greek medical texts had become available, and after the new medical discoveries as part of the scientific revolution (Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities After 1500, 1987). In the earlier period of the Arabo-Latin translations (11th–12th c.), the Latin West benefited not only from Arabic versions of ancient Greek scientists and philosophers, but also directly from the translated contributions of scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (d. 1039) and Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and philosophers such as al-Ghazali (Algazel) (d. 1111) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës) (d. 1198). C. History of the Discipline The discipline of history was important to Muslim scholars from the early period of Islam, since they understood their civilization to be the heir to the empires of the ancient world and to their intellectual legacies, especially that of the Greeks. They further understood the Christian Greeks to be special rivals of Islam, since the still powerful Byzantine Empire was the greatest political and ideological obstacle for Islam. Therefore, the appropriation of Greek science was seen as a kind of victory for Islam, in particular since the Byzan-

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tines – then wracked by theological controversy and economic upheaval – had little interest in it (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998). Although credit for the invention of history of science as a discipline is given to the modern West, scholars within Islam from early times recognized the epochal significance of their science, and attempted to account for it historically. The Islamic tradition of scholarship about its own science is rich and sophisticated, but has remained largely unknown to non-specialists. Beginning toward the end of the Graeco-Arabic translation period, when a scientific culture was already flourishing in Islam, works of intellectual biographies of prominent scientists and thinkers began to appear in Arabic. The development of this genre is related to that of the biographies used by the Traditionist scholars to verify reports about the Prophet for the use of jurists in applying Islamic Law. The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995) toward the end of the translation era, and the ‘Uyun al-anba’ fi tabaqat al-atibba’ of Ibn Abi ‘Usaybi’a (d. 1269), well into the supposed era of decline, for example, were biographical encyclopedias of the intellectuals active in their eras, which provide modern scholars with rich insight into the development of scientific activity in Islam. The number of lives and works recorded shows that during the lifetimes of these authors there was already a critical mass of practicing scientists and physicians that they could write about. This fact is strong evidence in favor of the existence of a true scientific culture in Islamic civilization. An example of a mature Islamic historical self-consciousness is found in the works of Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). In the introduction to his History, he outlines a sociological and economic approach to historical analysis (The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 1958). The work contains lengthy discussions of the sciences and their place within Islamic civilization, a fact that reflects the importance he placed on these activities, which he characterized as the epitome of the activities of civilized man, whom God has created and endowed with the gift of rational thought. The pseudo-sciences of astrology and alchemy he refutes, primarily because they are not open to public scrutiny. He understood that science can exist only in sedentary cultures, and that it is disrupted when urban centers have been disturbed by war or famine. Regarding the decline of science in the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun observed that science had declined in some regions such as Baghdad, which he attributed to its destruction by the Mongols (1258). However, he left open the possibility that decline might occur at different times and for different reasons, suggesting that there was no uniform decline of science in Islamic civilization.

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D. Criticisms of Greek Science Scientific research in Islam was driven by a sophisticated historical consciousness, the product of a well-developed scientific tradition. This began as a critique of the Greek sciences and ultimately led to advances in the sciences far beyond the Greek legacy. The competitive climate of Baghdad encouraged this critical stance, as each scientist sought to outdo his rivals. In time, the critique became more clarified and precise, resulting in many new discoveries. In connection with the critique, there arose a genre called shukuk “doubts” (cf. dubitationes), that first appeared in the treatise Doubts about Galen, by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes) (d. 925), in which he attacked Galen’s medical doctrines. The shukuk genre was a register of doubts and difficulties with scientific works of the past, which provided practicing scientists with a place to begin fresh approaches to old problems, without repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. This genre implies the existence of a continuous high-level scientific culture and tradition. In the astronomical tradition, about a century later, Abu ‘Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (d. 1039) wrote his Doubts about Ptolemy, in which he catalogued all the elements of Ptolemaic astronomy that were physically inconsistent or impossible, among other aspects of Ptolemaic science. Ibn al-Haytham’s work led directly to the greatest reform of Ptolemaic astronomy, in the Maragha tradition, mentioned earlier. The tradition of criticism of Greek medicine has been less studied than astronomy, perhaps because it provides less clear-cut examples than the exact sciences. Nevertheless, there are scattered examples of observations by Islamic physicians that disagree with Galen’s doctrines. For example, ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d. 1231), observing many human skeletons during a famine in 1200, failed to find the features of the lower jaw and sacrum bones that Galen had described. The Syrian physician Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288) working in Cairo, failed to find the porosity of the cardiac septum described by Galen, through which the blood was supposed to pass from the venous to the arterial systems. He proposed instead the “pulmonary transit” whereby blood passes between systems via the lungs. It is too much to conclude, as some modern scholars have done, that this discovery is a direct precursor to William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation (1628) or to Michael Servetus’s earlier theological musings (1553) (Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990, covers both Islamic and medieval European medical traditions. Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 2007, is the most recent discussion of the Islamic medical tradition).

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E. Modern Scholarship Although Western scholars have been interested in Arabic scientific writings as part of their own research agendas, from the 11th century down through the Renaissance, a systematic effort to study the history of science in Islam per se did not begin until the 20th century. The pioneer researcher in the history of this subject was George Sarton (d. 1956), who was also the founder of the history of science in general as a modern academic discipline. Sarton made the scholarly world aware of the work of Arabic scientists, and he provided an initial rough chronology of the subject. Although Sarton’s monumental Introduction to the History of Science (1927–1948; 3 vols.) is, on the whole, an outdated survey, it facilitated many subsequent discoveries. History of Islamic science became a respected field in the post-WWII era through the researches of Edward S. Kennedy (Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences, 1983), Abdelhamid I. Sabra (see below), David A. King (see below), Willy Hartner (Oriens-Occidens: Ausgewählte Schriften zur Wissenschafts- und Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols., 1968–1984), George Saliba, and others. For a broadranging survey of the various sub-fields of Islamic science, see Roshdi Rashed (Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 1996). The discipline began with a surprise: Edward S. Kennedy’s accidental discovery in the 1950’s of the debt of Copernicus to Islamic predecessors, as well as subsequent research by Hartner and others, awakened scholars to a wealth of new material in the period of the supposed “decline” of Islamic science, although their announcement was greeted in the West by some with hostility. The very idea that Copernicus might have derived a crucial idea from Islamic thinkers is rejected by many without giving the evidence a hearing. It is very likely that Byzantine émigré scholars in Italy who contributed to the Western Renaissance brought key ideas of Islamic science with them, including knowledge of Ibn al-Shatir’s work in astronomy, on which Copernicus’s astronomy is partly based. These Byzantine scholars, products of the Palaeologan Renaissance that was partly inspired by contacts with the Islamic world, most likely derived their knowledge of Islamic astronomy from men such as Gregory Chioniades (d. 1302), who traveled into Muslim lands to study astronomy, then returned and established an astronomical research center at Trebizond. David Pingree, Maria Mavroudi, and others have begun to investigate Islamic-Byzantine connections. (David Pingree, The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades, 2 vols., 1985, 1986; Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, 2002). There are multiple facets to the history of Islamic science, and many of the founding scholars of the discipline are still living. Those active in the

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study of scientific instruments are mainly David A. King and his students, including François Charette and Benno van Dalen (François Charette, Mathematical Instrumentation in Fourteenth-Century Egypt and Syria: The Illustrated Treatise of Najm al-Din al-Misri, 2003; From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas, ed. Benno van Dalen, 2002). David King’s monumental two volume survey of Islamic scientific instruments has recently appeared (In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2005). Abdelhamid I. Sabra has written extensively about Islamic optics, as well as about science in Islam generally (The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham: Books i-iii: On Direct Vision. 2 vols., trans. Abdelhamid I. Sabra, 1989). One of his students, F. Jamil Ragep, published an edition and study of the important Tadhkira of al-Tusi (Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy (al-tadhkira fi ^ilm al-hay’a), 2 vols., 1993). Another, Elaheh Kheirandish, has published on the tradition of optics in Islam (The Arabic Version of Euclid’s Optics (Kitab Uqlidis fi Ikhtilaf al-Manazir), 2 vols., 1999). David Pingree made groundbreaking contributions to the study of Islamic astrology, and has shown important interconnections between Greek, Sasanian, Indian, Byzantine, and Arabic sources (“Indian Reception of Muslim Versions of Ptolemaic Astronomy,” in Ragep, ed., Tradition, Transmission, Transformation, 1996, 471–85). One of the pioneer historians of Islamic astronomy was Aydin Sayili, whose The Observatory in Islam: And Its Place in the General History of the Observatory (1960, rpt. 1981) is a classic in this field. George Saliba has devoted his career to the study of planetary theories in Islam, and the transmission of Islamic science to Europe (A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam, 1994). His students Ahmad Dallal and Robert G. Morrison have written about Islamic planetary theory, and the latter has also written about the connection between astronomy and religion (Ahmad S. Dallal An Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy, 1995; Robert G. Morrison, Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi, 2007). Another student of Saliba’s (and of D. Gutas’s also), the author of the present article, is a Graeco-Arabist active in the study of the transmission of medicine and astronomy between the Greek and Arabic traditions (Glen M. Cooper, Galen’s Critical Days in the Graeco-Arabic Tradition, Ashgate, forthcoming). George Saliba’s major contribution has been to present a fresh scenario about the beginnings of science in Islam and its later transmission to the West, which can explain more than predecessor theories (Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007). One of George Saliba’s key insights is the role of the nonArabic-speaking diwan administrators, displaced after ‘Abd al-Malik’s re-

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forms, mentioned earlier, who sought to restore their lost positions by using their knowledge of the sciences along with their native fluencies in the older languages (Syriac and Persian) to acquire even greater competence in these sciences in order to make themselves indispensable to the government. Thus he has shown that scientific expertise became a means to powerful court positions, such as personal physician or astrologer to the caliph himself. Roshdi Rashed, J. Lennart Berggren, and Jan P. Hogendijk have published extensively and made important discoveries about Islamic mathematics. Sonja Brentjes has written about Euclid’s Elements in Islam (J. Lennart Berggren, Episodes in the Mathematics of Medieval Islam, 1986; Roshdi Rashed, Les mathématiques infinitésimales du IXe au XIe siècle, vol. V: Ibn al-Haytham: Astronomie, géométrie sphérique et trigonométri, 2006; Jan P. Hogendijk, Ibn al-Haytham’s Completion of the Conics, 1985. Sonja Brentjes, “An Exciting New Arabic Version of Euclid’s Elements: MS Mumbai, R.I.6,” Revue d’histoire des mathématiques 12, fascicule 2 (2006): 169–97). In Islamic medicine, there are several recent important studies. Nancy Siraisi has written about the influence of Islamic medicine in Europe in the late medieval and early Renaissance period (Nancy Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990). A selection of this scholarship includes: Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, 1970; Gotthard Strohmaier, Von Demokrit bis Dante: Die Bewahrung antiken Erbes in der arabischen Kultur, 1996; Emilie Savage-Smith, “The Practice of Surgery in Islamic Lands: Myth and Reality,” The Year 1000: Medical Practice at the End of the First Millennium, ed. Peregrine Horden and Emilie Savage-Smith, 2000, 308–21; Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, Oxford 1992; Françoise Micheau and Danielle Jacquart, La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval, 1990. Bernard R. Goldstein and Y. Tzvi Langermann have written about Islamic science in the Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic tradition. Charles Burnett’s subjects deal with subjects that include astrology and the transmission of Islamic science into Latin. Juan Vernet, Julio Samsó, Merce Comes, and others have researched science in Islamic Spain. Donald R. Hill wrote a fundamental text on Islamic technology and engineering. S. Nomanul Haq has studied the alchemical tradition in Islam, especially the figure of Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber). (Bernard R. Goldstein, The Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344), 1985; Y. Tzvi Langermann, The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages, 1999; Charles Burnett, Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages: The Writings of Al-Kindi (with Gerrit Bos), 2000; Juan Vernet, Historia de la ciencia española, 1975; Julio Samsó, Islamic Astronomy and Medieval Spain, 1994; Donald R. Hill, Islamic Science and Engineering, 1994;

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S. Nomanul Haq, Names, Natures, and Things: The Alchemist Jâbir ibn Hayyân and His Kitâb al-Ahjâr (Book of Stones), 1994). The Graeco-Arabic translations are being studied as an historical phenomenon (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998), and in lexical detail (Gerhard Endress and Dimitri Gutas, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (GALex): Materials for a Dictionary of the Mediaeval Translations from Greek into Arabic, 1992–present). One of Dimitri Gutas’s insights in these publications is a reassessment of the translation movement. His careful attention to the sources ruled out the special role that Western scholarship has often attributed to the caliph al-Ma’mun (r. 813–833 AD) such as single-handedly beginning the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement and sponsoring science in response to a dream about Aristotle, or as part of his rationalist theological pet project, Mu‘tazilism. Furthermore, there are journals and a newsletter that publish research. For example, Michio Yano publishes a journal, SCIAMVS: Sources and Commentaries in Exact Sciences, that includes articles about the exact sciences. SUHAYL: Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilization is published by the University of Barcelona. F. Jamil and Sally Ragep maintain a bulletin (http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/) for the Commission on History of Science & Technology in Islamic Societies, part of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, which provides a great service to the field, keeping scholars informed of conferences and research. Scholars publish in the following journals, among others: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Early Science and Medicine, Journal for the History of Arabic Science, and Journal for the History of Astronomy. F. Current Issues and Future Trends, Challenges Once the obstacle of the outmoded paradigm about the rise and decline of Islamic science has been superseded, the major challenge to scholarship in this subject is the inaccessibility of source texts. Primary sources were written in languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, which, most still in manuscript form, are scattered in libraries and private collections all over Europe and the Muslim world. Finding aids, such as Fuat Sezgin (Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1967–1984, 9 vols.), are a great help in locating extant manuscripts, but occasionally new manuscripts come to light and mistakes in existing catalogues are discovered, and there does not yet exist an effective way to share this information between scholars. Furthermore, the most useful of these, Sezgin’s, is rendered less useful in that it does not extend past 430 AH (1038–1039 C.E.). The decision to end there was perhaps influenced at the outset by the former paradigm of decline of Islamic science,

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which seems odd, for even Sarton much earlier was aware of significant scientific activity in the Islamic world during the period after this cutoff date, described above. However, by the time volume 6 appeared (1978), Sezgin had become aware of the creative science in the later period, of Maragha and the new planetary models. A new paradigm has appeared, arguing that scholars ought to view the sciences not by isolated language or culture, but in an entire region of sibling cultures, as part of an “Islamo-Christian” civilization (Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, 2004). The increasingly obsolete designation “Judaeo-Christian civilization,” although acknowledging the debt to Jewish civilization, inaccurately excludes Islam from the historical scenario. Bulliet’s useful paradigm enables one to understand the varied transformations of science in the greater Mediterranean region as part of a long intercultural tradition, with various collateral descendants – language, cultural, religious, and political differences notwithstanding. Earlier scholars, eager to find connections on the basis of superficial evidence, were hindered by what is now referred to as the “Myth of Gondeshapur” (Arabic: Jundaysabur). The narrative is as follows: Gondeshapur in southwest Iran had become an outpost of Hellenism, a haven for intellectual and religious refugees from the persecutions of Emperor Justinian (d. 565) and other Christian Roman emperors. There these intellectuals – so the narrative proceeds – established an academy of translation, hospitals, libraries, etc. The Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (d. 833) then engaged the services of one of the Syrian Bakhtishu^ family of physicians, who brought all of this knowledge and tradition to Baghdad, where the Hellenistic tradition then continued. This Western scholarly reconstruction was an attempt to account for the transmission, by providing a ready resource for the Graeco-Arabic translations. The problem with this account is that it is based on one late source; there is no other evidence except supposition. Another tendentious antiChristian account, by the philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950), tries to show how the sciences, persecuted by Christian empire, found a home and intellectual freedom only under Islam. The reality is somewhat more complex, and infinitely more interesting (Saliba, Islamic Science, 2007). G. Science and Religion Islamic civilization provides a rich source for the study of the relationship between science and religion in society. The usual Western view is that science and religion necessarily are in conflict, for which the notorious “Galileo affair” is cited as an example. Islamic civilization, on the other hand, offers many examples of non-antagonistic, even constructive relationships

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between scientists and the religious establishment. The old Western paradigm of Islamic science suggested that science had lost the battle against the religious forces, and eventually died out in Islam. While it is true that religion forced some Greek-derived disciplines such as astronomy to redefine themselves, more often scientists served religion, as for example religious scholars – many of the scientists were also legal scholars or theologians, or time-keepers of the mosque, a famous example being Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), of Damascus. And it is also clear that science never completely died out as claimed, and that there was a continuous, though perhaps uneven, tradition down well into Ottoman times. There have been a few recent studies of the connection between knowledge and religion in Islam, such as Morrison (Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi, 2007). H. The End of the Sciences in Islam? A major question that has been asked by some scholars since the study of Islam began in earnest in the 19th century, and one that continues to be of interest to the public is this: If there were so many leading scientists in Islamic civilization during the “golden age” of Islamic civilization, and then science vanished – how and why did it disappear? The early Western orientalists proposed reasons for the failure of the Islamic world to sustain its lead in the sciences: Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Max Weber (1864–1920), Gustave E. von Grunebaum (1909–1972) advanced essentializing, reductive, or simply racist reasons for the ultimate failure of Islam to maintain its lead in science. More sophisticated (but still essentializing and reductive) scenarios have been advanced since, including: 1) the conflict between science and the religious establishment; 2) the negative influence of al-Ghazali’s (d. 1111) devastating attack on Greek thought; 3) the inherent inferiority of the Islamic religion; and, 4) the dominance of the non-rational aspects of Islam, etc. In the West, the trend has been (and still is to some degree) to apply methods and paradigms derived from the issues and particulars of Western society and its history to Islam (Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs, 2003). The results have often been distortions, if not caricatures of their subject, for example, in the application of Weber’s theories to Islam. The Orientalist-inspired paradigm of decline has implications beyond the Western academy as well: some contemporary scholars from the Muslim world, having been educated in the West and having been imbued with the earlier distorting paradigms about science, have written about their native scientific traditions in the terms bequeathed them

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from the West. Careful attention to the scholarship of George Saliba (Islamic Science, 2007) and his colleagues can help to reverse this trend. There were, in fact, major changes in the Islamic world in the several centuries since the beginning of the supposed decline in the 11th century, and the period of these Orientalists in the 19th century. It has become increasingly known, beginning in the 1950’s through the pioneering work of Kennedy (Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences) and others, that original science continued to be produced well into the 16th century, and probably beyond. Furthermore, many pre-colonial era Western scholars knew this to have been the case, since, due to the research of Saliba, it is now understood that several European thinkers were reading the works of Arabic scientists and philosophers well into the Renaissance and beyond, searching for useful material for their own research. They or their agents scoured the Middle East in search of scientific texts in which they expected to find material to assist them in their own scientific projects, not unlike the manner in which 9th-century Arabic translators sought out Greek texts (Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998). No less a figure than John Locke studied the works of Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), and early aspects of his own epochal philosophy was formatively influenced thereby (Gül A. Russell, “The Impact of the Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends,” The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell, 1994, 224–65. See also Gül A. Russell, The Mind as a ‘tabula rasa’: John Locke and the Arabic Philosophus Autodidactus, forthcoming). Furthermore, it is now better understood how the economics of a society are interconnected with the extent of scientific practice that a given society can support. Some reasons for the decline in Islamic science must be sought outside of that civilization, in the significant economic changes that have occurred in the West after the Renaissance – changes that dramatically altered the balance of technology, trade and intellectual exchanges between these societies. Two of the most important of these events – discussed by Saliba – were, first, the discovery of the New World and, next, the discovery of a direct water route to the actual Indies. The former produced, through the exploitation of human and natural resources, tremendous wealth in Europe that was used to drive a scientific and technological revolution. The latter adversely affected the economy of the Middle East, which had long benefited from overland trade along the Silk Route, and was now mostly cropped out of the picture. The history of science in Islam is an exciting young field, attracting talented scholars. There are formidable challenges as is the case with all new disciplines, but the field is wide and ripe for the scholarly harvest, provided

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one is equipped with the proper tools. This field forces scholars to jettison old and cherished stereotypes of European cultural (or racial) superiority or uniqueness. It forces all scholars to confront their own intellectual heritage in fresh ways that reveal the inter-cultural nature of the great scientific movements and discoveries of the past. Select Bibliography Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, ed., The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003); Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma, ed. F. Jamil Ragep, Sally P. Ragep, and Steven Livesey (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. Roshdi Rashed, 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2007); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 9 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1984); Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, ed. B. Spuler, Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1970).

Glen M. Cooper

Qur’anic Studies A. Introduction Qur’anic Studies refers to the post-Enlightenment historical-critical study of the Qur’an qua text as well as, beginning in the mid-20th century, critical reflection upon the text’s relationship, meaning and possible significance to broader issues concerning Islamic history, historiography, the development of intellectual and religious traditions (especially law) in Islam’s formative period (7th through 9th centuries) and, with the contemporary postmodern turn in the humanities, its relevance for larger questions concerning the interpretation of issues related to what might properly be described as sociocultural history. After a brief terminological definition, this entry covers, in a necessarily broad manner, the history, development and major trends in this field from its inception in mid-19th-century Germany to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the latter of which has witnessed the publication of a work of major significance for Qur’anic Studies, the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an

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(ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, 6 vols., 2001–2006; hereafter EQ). Given both its broad topical range and bibliographical thoroughness, it is with the EQ that any inquiry into the history of research in Qur’anic Studies should begin. As such, this entry assumes that it would be superfluous to reference other sources concerning the development of the field beyond the relevant entries in the EQ. B. The Qur’an The Qur’an, literally ‘recitation’, refers to the fixed, orally preserved, and written text understood by Muslims to be the ipsissima verba of God revealed piecemeal to the historical founder of Islam, Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullah (570–632), in and around the cities of Mecca and Medina (Yathrib) in the northwestern littoral of the Arabian peninsula from around 610 until shortly before his death in 632. Unarguably the preeminent unifying force among Muslims across time and space, both historically and phenomenologically speaking, the Qur’an has stood at the center of Islam as a religious system and, followed by the Hadith and various institutional, textual, and learned traditions associated with the activities of the corporate body of Muslim religious scholars, has served as the basic source and reference for matters of law and theology, of state and polity, of ritual, social, and cultural life in uniquely far-reaching and historically significant ways. Beyond the well-attested practice of memorization and oral transmission among Muhammad and his companions, although the Islamic sources admit traditions concerning the written transcription of portions of the Qur’anic text via dictation during his lifetime as well as the compilation of privately circulated codices shortly following his death, generally the Muslim tradition has maintained that the consonantal text of the Qur’an as known today was codified about two decades following the death of Muhammad during the latter half of the reign of the Caliph ‘Uthman (r. 644–56). Compiled in order to quell disputes over variant readings of the text which had broken out between various troop contingents stationed outside of the Arabian peninsula, along with the official promulgation of this new codex (copies of which were sent to the newly established Iraqi garrisons of Kufa and Basra as well as to Damascus with one copy being kept in Medina) the Caliph ordered all competing codices destroyed. While descriptions of competing redactions are preserved in classical Muslim Qur’anic scholarship, by both fact of history and force of convention any reference to the “Qur’an” is necessarily a reference to the ‘Uthmanic text, the textus receptus, ne varietur. Roughly about the length of the Greek New Testament, the Qur’an is organized into 114 sections or chapters (Ar. sura), each of which is further

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subdivided into a varying number of verses (Ar. aya), with the exception of the opening chapter the suras being arranged in more-or-less decreasing order of length. Cast in an elevated, rhymed Arabic prose, the Qur’an is not marked by a straightforward thematic or narrative arrangement, but rather weaves together eschatological monitions, theological pronouncements, terse narratives concerning previous prophets, words of consolation to Muhammad and his community, admonitions and polemics directed against their enemies and prescripts concerning moral, cultic and civil matters. Its substantive content mirrors themes found in the normative Biblical tradition and the apocryphal and midrashic writings of Judaism and Christianity as well as topics associated with the non-scriptural tribal religion(s) of preIslamic Arabia. Written in a considerably defective orthography, by the first half of the 10th century a standard number (seven, ten, or fourteen) of variant systems of reading came to be applied to the basic consonantal skeleton of the ‘Uthmanic text, one of which in particular, that of the Kufan scholar ‘Asim (d. ca. 744) as transmitted by his student Hafs (d. ca. 805–06), came to enjoy particular prestige (see further, Frederik Leehmuis, “Readings of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 [2004], 353–63). It is this reading which served as the basis for the so-called Egyptian Standard edition, or Royal Egyptian edition, of the Qur’an printed under the patronage of King Fuad I in 1923–1924, the edition which not only quickly became the standard for the overwhelming majority of printed Qur’ans in the modern Muslim world (a second, slightly amended edition appeared in 1952) but also, a few exceptions aside, within western scholarship where it came to supplant the edition prepared earlier by the German Arabist Gustav Flügel (Corani textus arabicus, 1834; rev. in 1841 and 1858). While discussed prior to the outbreak of the Second World War (on which see, Frederik Leehmuis, “Codices of the Qur’an,” EQ 1 [2001], 350) a critically edited text of the Qur’an has yet to be prepared, although scholarly resources exist to do so and steps have recently been taken to realize such a project (on which see, Andrew Rippen, “Tools for the Scholarly Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 5 [2005], 294–95). At present, nothing even remotely approaching a textus criticus of the likes of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or the Nestle-Alands’ Novum Testamentum Graece has been attempted for the Qur’an.

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C. Qur’anic Studies The origins of Qur’anic Studies as a distinct area of scholarship in Islamic studies (in which it has always played a significant role) is directly traceable to the researches of 19th-century continental Semitic philologists. Although emerging from the same milieu, however, in comparison to its sister field of Biblical criticism the disciple of Qur’anic Studies has developed at a considerably slower pace, being comparatively so tardigrade that even a brief account of developments in the field must take into account scholarship of a vintage normally baulked at in others. Although there are antecedents connected with the rise and development of Arabic studies in the major European universities during the 17th and 18th centuries (on which see Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Preface,” EQ 1 [2001], vi–viii; and, Hartmut Bobzin, “Pre-1800 Preoccupations of Qur’anic Studies,” ibid. 4 [2004], 245–51), in large part both the methodological framework and much of the topical agenda of modern Qur’anic Studies were determined by the work of German scholars such as Abraham Geiger (Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum aufgenommen, 1833; English trans. as Judaism and Islam, 1898), Gustav Weil (Historisch-kritische Einleitung in den Koran, 1844; id., Mohammed der Prophet, 1843) and, much more significantly, by the Semiticist Theodor Nöldeke in his still oft-referenced Geschichte des Qorans (1860), normally cited in its much belated 2nd edition rewritten and expanded by Freidrich Schwally in two volumes (1909, 1919), the second of which dealing mainly with questions concerning the collection of the Qur’an, to which was eventually added a third by Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl (1938) which, among other things, takes up issues related to known variant readings of the Qur’anic text (rpt. 3 vols. in 1, 1961; hereafter GQ). It is in this body of work where many of the major topics of subsequent scholarship in Qur’anic Studies make their first systematic appearance, three areas receiving particular attention. First, questions regarding the structure and arrangement of the text in relation to its Sitz im Leben, meaning attempts to assign a probable chronology to the individual suras of the Qur’an based, in broad outline at least, on the biography of the Prophet as found in the classical Muslim sources. Second, a largely source-critical concern with the substantive content of the text in terms of its relation to larger religious patterns, trends, and traditions associated with the eastern Mediterranean oikumene on the eve of Islam and, more importantly, its position vis-à-vis the religious milieu of the Arabian peninsula in the late 6th and early 7th centuries. That is to say, an attempt to identify, uncover, or determine the probable sources, especially Jewish and Christian, for the Qur’an’s substantive content as well as the relationship of such content to the specifically Arabian

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milieu from which it emerged. Third, although less so than among future generations of scholars, there was a concern with questions pertaining to the redaction history of the text itself, something which was necessarily connected with a wider body of questions of interest to Comparative Semitics. In a sense, all of these concerns were firmly grounded in the methodological and interpretive strategies associated with higher criticism as applied to the Hebrew Bible. Although not always directly building upon the work of Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), Gustav Weil (d. 1889), or Theodor Nöldeke (d. 1930), a major concern in scholarship on the Qur’an in the latter 19th century concerned the vexed question of the chronology of individual suras. Among a range of solutions proposed, those of William Muir (The Life of Mahomet, 1858–1861; id., The Coran, its Composition and Teaching, 1878), Hubert Grimme (Mohammed, 1895) and Hartwig Hirschfeld (New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran, 1902) figured most prominently. Whereas Nöldeke, following Weil and in agreement with the traditional Muslim understanding of recognizing suras as either Meccan (610–622) or Medinan (622–632), had differentiated between three Meccan periods and one Medinan based primarily on style and content, Muir proposed a six-period solution, five Meccan and one Medinan, Grimme two Meccan and one Medinan based almost solely on doctrinal characteristics, and Hirschfeld a sequence based on the differences, in individual passages rather than suras, between what he identified as the six major rhetorical modes of Qur’anic discourse. Shortly following the initial publication of GQ, the English churchman J. M. Rodwell published a translation of the text in which he rearranged the suras largely according to the scheme of Nöldeke, while also speculating on the possibility of analyzing single passages chronologically over and against entire suras as the Qur’an’s basic chronological unit (The Koran, 1861; 2nd rev. ed., 1876). In most cases, such chronological reconstructions were based almost solely on stylistic and linguistic features while virtually ignoring the vast tradition of Muslim Qur’anic scholarship, something undoubtedly a result of both a simple lack of access to texts and the perceived irrelevance of such literature for establishing a fixed chronological order for the suras in any case. Although issues of chronology and textual integrity continued to be discussed, Qur’anic Studies in the first few decades of the 20th century was marked by a shift in focus to the interrelationship between linguistic and substantive aspects of the Qur’anic text. Here, questions concerning the specificities of Qur’anic vocabulary or the original language of the ‘Uthmanic codex were especially prominent. Although still very much rooted in

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the atomizing procedures of continental philology, the pioneering study of Charles C. Torrey on the Qur’anic use of commercial terminology and its relationship to the mercantile milieu of early 7th-century Mecca (The Commercial-Theological Terms in the Koran, 1892) and that of Arthur Jeffery on the non-Arabic vocabulary of the Qur’an and the significance of likely routes of transmission for understanding the text’s original Sitz im Leben (The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an, 1938; on which in general see, Andrew Rippen, “Foreign Vocabulary,” EQ 2 [2001], 226–37) are representative of this trend. As evinced by Martin R. Zammit’s recent work on lexical interrelationships between Qur’anic vocabulary and a number of geo-historically proximate Semitic languages (A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur’anic Arabic, 2002), however, many of the conclusions of scholars working at this time do not stand up to contemporary standards of linguistic theory. Much the same can be said regarding research on the language of the Qur’an. From the confessional perspective of classical Muslim exegetes, the Arabic of the Qur’an was understood to have been that of Muhammad himself, meaning the regional dialect of the Hejaz, or more specifically the tribal dialect of the Quraysh. This description has been challenged by western Arabists in a rather vigorous debate initiated by Karl Vollers in his seminal Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (1906) in which he argued that the Qur’an was initially promulgated, orally, in a non-inflected colloquial Arabic, whereas the ‘Uthmanic text was the product of the efforts of later Muslim philologists to make it conform to the language used by the ancient Arab poets which, quite unlike the common language, was a poetic koinè distinguished from the vernacular by its use of a full system of grammatical inflection (Ar. i‘rab). Few exceptions aside, recent research has seemed to settle upon the idea that the original language of the Qur’an as preserved in the ‘Uthmanic recension is indeed reflective of an intra-tribal poetic koinè, although bearing traces of the dialect associated with Mecca, but Vollers’s model of a diaglossic linguistic situation in pre-Islamic Arabia has largely been replaced with a polyglossic model based, in part at least, on both the ever increasing availability of data in Arabic studies as well as substantial theoretical advances made in the field of sociolinguistics in general (see further, Claude Gilliot and Pierre Larcher, “Language and Style of the Qur’an,” EQ 3 [2003], 109–35). Alongside this linguistic turn, Qur’anic Studies at this time witnessed what Marco Schöller rightly characterized as “the true novelty of early twentieth-century scholarship on the Qur’an … research into the supposed Jewish or Christian roots of early Islam” (“Post-Enlightenment Academic Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 [2004], 194). Following the lead of earlier works

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such as those of Abraham Geiger or Hartwig Hirschfeld (esp. the latter’s Jüdische Elemente im Korân, 1878) of tracing Biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic parallels in the Qur’an, scholars such as Wilhelm Rudolph (Die Abhängigkeit des Korans von Judentum und Christentum, 1922), the aforementioned Charles C. Torrey (The Jewish Foundation of Islam, 1933), Heinrich Speyer (Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran, 1931), and Richard Bell (The Origins of Islam in Its Christian Environment, 1926) framed a field of inquiry which, in its attempt to trace and situate a larger range of Jewish and Christian elements in the Qur’anic text, has continued, with different foci, unabated from the post-war era of the 1950s – in the case of, for example, the work of Denise Masson (Le Coran et la révélation judéo-chrétienne: études comparées, 2 vols., 1958; 2nd rev. ed. as Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique: Doctrines comparées, 1975) – up to present such as in the recent collective volume Bible and Qur’an: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality (ed. John Reeves, 2004). While certainly informed by both theoretical and interpretive shifts characteristic of the post-war western academic study of religion in general, in large part the difference between pre- and post-war scholarship in this area of Qur’anic Studies is the general recognition of the historical complexity of the range of borrowings and intersections between Jewish, Christian and other socio-religious or sectarian trends and currents converging in, on, or around the immediate historical context of the Arabian peninsula in the late 6th and early 7th century. The essays in the aforementioned Bible and Qur’an are particularly instructive in this regard. At the same time, issues of chronology continued to be treated during the first part of the 20th century as well, especially in the case of what turned out to be the most elaborate effort to date in reconstructing the Qur’anic text on the basis of its chronology, that of the Scottish Arabist Richard Bell in his The Qur’an, Translated with a Critical Rearrangement of the Surahs (2 vols., 1937, 1939). Based on an elaborate hypothesis which posited that the text was the result of a complex, and by no means transparent, process of redaction in which individual suras were collated with one another in such a manner that the individual leaves or sheets on which they were actually written, in some cases both recto and verso, came to be confused and intermixed in such a way that parts of one sura were mistakenly inserted into another, Bell “critically rearranged” individual suras into short passages, verse groupings, or single pericopes. Based on an elaborate three-phase hypothesis of the development of the Qur’an from simple homiletic elocutions to a book proper, the main novelty was its positing that the final ‘Uthmanic textus receptus was redacted solely from written documents. Further notes and explanations on Bell’s work have recently been made available in the posthumously published

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A Commentary on the Qur’an culled from materials left in his estate (ed. C. Edmund Bosworth and M.E.J. Richardson, 2 vols., 1991), although the publication of these notes have garnered little notice because of the generally dismissive view taken of Bell’s hyper-atomistic theories (on this, see Andrew Rippen, “Reading the Qur’an with Richard Bell,” JAOS 112.4 [1992]: 639–47). It should be noted that Bell went far beyond the mere chronological rearrangement of his predecessors in that his aim was ultimately that of textual emendation, something which the American Arabist James Bellamy dealt with beginning in the 1970s in a series of seminal studies which propose emendations to difficult passages in either the ‘Uthmanic text or to its pointing based on the identification of likely scribal errors (see id., “Textual Criticism,” EQ 5 [2005], 237–52). Qur’anic Studies in the latter half of the 20th century was marked by a number of significant developments which, while never wholly displacing the basic concerns of the foundational scholarship of the 19th century, witnessed the emergence of new methodologies and areas of inquiry which would set a much expanded agenda for the discipline over the rest of the century. First, it should be noted that the post-war period witnessed a certain type of stocktaking in the form of the publication of a number of monographic attempts to synthesize the state of the western academic study of the Qur’an, in particular Arthur Jeffery’s The Qur’an as Scripture (1952), Richard Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an (1953; rev. William Montgomery Watt, 1970), and, of greater significance, the substantial introduction of Régis Blachère to his French translation of the Qur’an (Le Coran, 3 vols., 1947–1949), later published separately in a slightly updated 2nd edition (Introduction au Coran, 1959). In addition to these works, a synthesis, and vast contribution to previous scholarship is also to be found in Rudi Paret’s pioneering German translation of the Qur’an (Der Koran, 1962–1966) which, when coupled with his extremely valuable addenda parenthetically inserted into the translation, along with his Kommentar und Konkordanz (1971; 2nd rev. ed., 1982) is commonly acknowledged to be a major monument of 20th-century Western scholarship on the Qur’an. Despite their individual shortcomings, each of these works has typically been considered (alongside Nöldeke’s revised and expanded GQ) essential for those working in the field, and no serious student of the Qur’an is without them. It remains to be seen, however, how the publication of the EQ might effect scholarly perception and use of these materials, especially on account of the sheer scope of its collective bibliographical apparatus. Second, the post-war period witnessed a flurry of activity related to issues and concerns that, either directly or indirectly, resonated with larger

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methodological and interpretive trends associated with the burgeoning discipline of Religionswissenschaft (History of Religions / Comparative Religion). As a discrete, yet topically diffuse, Euro-American scholarly enterprise which looked kindly upon the generation of comparative data, it was in such a context where the mid-20th century interest in the theological and ethical content of the Qur’anic text is best situated, especially as preserved in the works of scholars such as Thomas O’Shaughnessy (The Koranic Concept of the Word of God, 1948), M. A. Draz (La Morale du Koran, 1951), or Daud Rahbar (God of Justice, 1960). At the same time, this period also witnessed the publication of the pioneering researches of the Japanese polymath, and scholar of Comparative Religion, Toshihiko Izutsu on the semantic world of the Qur’anic text, namely his The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Koran (1959; later rewritten as Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’an, 1966) and God and Man in the Koran (1964). In treating the Qur’anic text semantically rather than through the largely non-contextual assumptions framing the traditional historicocritical philological approach, Izutsu’s work inaugurated a new chapter in the field, and has influenced the research of no small number of scholars of Qur’anic Studies in the latter part of the 20th century. Such influence can be seen, for example, in the equally pioneering work of Angelika Neuwirth (Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren, 1981; résumé in ead., “Form and Structure of the Qur’an,” EQ 2 [2002], 245–66) whose careful microstructural analysis of relations between elemental verse groups of the Meccan suras (following the chronology proposed in GQ) finds the text to be originally liturgical or oral in nature, or, with a shift in emphasis, in that of Daniel Madigan (The Qur’an’s Self-Image: Writing and Authority in Islam’s Scripture, 2001) wherein Qur’anic notions of the significance of the “book,” or lack thereof, and the idea of revelation are explored through a painstaking semantic analysis which in the end argues for a much less significant role given to writing in the Qur’an than previously thought, something which challenges the idea of the Qur’an as a text which initially identified itself as a scripture in the sense of the Torah or the Gospels. Third, in contradistinction to the penchant of 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship in Qur’anic Studies to ignore the vast body of traditional Muslim exegetical literature, in the early 1970s a number of scholars began to re-evaluate the relationship between the critical study of the text and the critical study of its confessional exegesis. In many ways, this linking parallels scholarship done in Islamic studies concerning the development of Islamic jurisprudence wherein both text and the dynamics of communal constitution are seen to exist in an historically complex interrelationship which inevitably calls into question received notions regarding the historical devel-

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opment of basic Islamic institutions during its first two centuries, something expressed nowadays in the lively debate on “Islamic origins” (on which, see Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. Herbert Berg, 2002). As applied to Qur’anic Studies, two works, both published in 1977 (as was the classic work in the “Islamic origins” debate, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s controversial Hagarism), stand out as seminal: John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation and John Burton’s The Collection of the Qur’an, especially since they reach diametrically opposing conclusions. Both, however, do so through questioning the historicity of traditional accounts largely accepted as accurate since the time of Nöldeke concerning the origin(s) of the ‘Uthmanic text. Employing a methodology which in Biblical criticism would be called form-criticism (Formgeschichte), for Wansbrough the Qur’anic canon emerged very late (i.e., at the end of the 8th and into the 9th century) simply because the need for it also emerged late. In essence, he saw the text as the organic result of a juridical and polemical need for an authoritative scripture which, in a highly charged sectarian context, was addressed by the production of a text collected out of a mass of previously independent Near Eastern prophetic logia and other materials which had been circulating among various proto-Muslim communities for some time later blended together, as was the “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) of the traditional biography (sira) of the Prophet, in the context of sectarian monotheistic polemic in Iraq so as to legitimate Arab political domination throughout the region (résumé in Charles Adams, “Reflections on the Work of John Wansbrough,” MTSR 9.1 [1997]: 75–89). It should be noted that in his work, Wansbrough was careful to state that his reconstructions were little more than working hypotheses, and that he saw many of the same processes at play in the genesis of both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. For his part, Burton argued for the existence of a fixed canon at a much earlier date: at the time of Muhammad’s death, interpreting traditions concerning the production of an ‘Uthmanic recension as a device invented by later Muslim jurists to ground their own positions, often in variance with the apparent rulings contained in the ‘Uthmanic text, in the authority of the Qur’an through anachronistically projecting support for the critical juridical doctrine of abrogation (Ar. naskh; in this case the doctrine of naskh al-tilawa duna ’l-hukm, “deletion of a [Qur’anic] verse without the abrogation of its legal status” as related to both the circulation of varying codices and the prophetic sanction of variant readings) back into an invented past when, in fact, the Qur’an had already been codified by the Prophet himself, something which would, of course, militate against the acceptability of the doctrine of abrogation in the first

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place (résumé in John Burton, “The Collection of the Qur’an,” EQ 1 [2001], 351–61). D. Recent Developments In addition to the stimulating effect which the revisionist theories of Wansbrough and Burton have had on the continued development of Qur’anic Studies from the late 1970s to the present, new questions have also established themselves as significant research trajectories in the field at the beginning of the 21st century. Although much of this work has focused on issues related to the significance of the Qur’an in Muslim life and thought in modern and contemporary contexts, such as ethnographical studies on the cultural and religious significance of socially regulated systems of Qur’anic recitation in modern Muslim societies (e.g., Kristina Nelson, The Art of Reciting the Qur’an, 1st ed.,1985, 2nd rev. ed., 2002; or, Anna Gade, Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in Indonesia, 2004), within the ambient of medieval studies a similar shift to what would be called in the context of Biblical studies reader-response criticism (Rezeptionsästhetik) has emerged as a promising area of research. The work of the American scholar of Islam William Graham (Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion, 1987) and, more forthrightly, that of the Iranian-German scholar Navid Kermani (Gott ist schön: Das ästhetische Erleben des Koran, 1999) are excellent examples of what is clearly a reaction against the traditional historical-philological approach dominant in much previous scholarship. Working from the perspective of reception history, Kermani’s research in particular demonstrates that, historically speaking, the significance of the Qur’an has been primarily rooted in its status as a pre-eminently oral/aural phenomenon, its historical import laying not in the midst of its reputed origins, but rather in the ways in which its origins have been imagined in the context of the collective Muslim “cultural memory” (das kulturelle Gedächtnis). He argues that this should be the primary object of scholarly inquiry on the Qur’an and not, as the late Canadian scholar of Islam Wilfred Cantwell Smith himself argued nearly twenty years earlier, the scripture’s origins in the positivistic sense (“The True Meaning of Scripture: An Empirical Historian’s Nonreductionist Interpretation of the Qur’an,” IJMES 11.4 [July, 1980]: 487–505). In many ways, this new direction in Qur’anic Studies has been inspired by a wider postmodern dismissal of the monologic search for meaning or coherence as a meaningless endeavor in and of itself. It should be noted, however, that at the same time concerns of earlier generations of scholars over basic source-critical issues do still make an ap-

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pearance in the field, although in no small number of cases such work seems to be irretrievably situated in an overtly polemical context tied to larger geopolitical dynamics characteristic of the late 20th century. The recent study of a comparative Semiticist writing under the name of Christoph Luxenberg (Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache, 2000) is perhaps the best example. While the issue of Syriac borrowings have long been discussed in literature, Luxenberg, following in the spirit of the earlier polemical work of the German Protestant theologian Günter Lüling (Über den Ur-Qur’an: Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion vorislamischer christlicher Strophenlieder im Qur’an, 1974; English trans. A Challenge to Islam for Reformation, 2003) attempts to emend difficult passages in the ‘Uthmanic text by positing an original Syro-Aramaic-Arabic “Urtext” which he hypothesizes emerged in the linguistic and religious context of an originally Aramaized Christian settlement (Mecca) whose Syro-Aramaic liturgical book (later the ‘Qur’an’ proper) was at some point recast into a particular form of the Arabic language so as to be comprehensible to the Arabs who, for reasons unclear, became heirs to a developing tradition which would eventually configure itself into Islam proper. Among scholars working in the field, Luxenberg’s work has met with a mixed reception, from cautious support of his overall methodology (e.g., Claude Gillot and Pierre Larcher, op. cit., 130–32) to charges of outright dilettantism (e.g., François de Blois, “Review of Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran,” JQS 5.1 [2003]: 92–97; cf. Marco Schöller, op. cit., 201–02). As the field looks into the future, there is little doubt that the publication of the EQ, described by its general editor as the result of both “the desire to take stock of the field of Qur’anic Studies at the turn of the century and an interest in seeing this field flourish in the new millennium” (Jane Dammen McAuliffe, op. cit., ix), will serve as a major impetus for continued developments. In addition, the establishment in 1999 of the first journal dedicated solely to Qur’anic Studies, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies (JQS) will undoubtedly contribute to this task as well. With its editorial office housed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and under the general editorship of the Cambridge trained Egyptian scholar of the Qur’an M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, JQS not only simultaneously publishes academic research on the Qur’an in English and Arabic by both non-Muslim and Muslim scholars, but has also been associated with sponsoring a number of international academic conferences devoted to furthering the field. Taken together, both the EQ and JQS well capture the emerging dynamics of Qur’anic Studies as it begins to define, or perhaps redefine, itself at the beginning of the 21st century.

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Select Bibliography The bibliographical reach of individual entries of the EQ as a whole both encompasses and supersedes all previous summaries of the history and development of Qur’anic Studies. Although the relevant entries have been cited above, special attention should be given to Marco Schöller, “Post-Enlightenment Academic Study of the Qur’an,” EQ 4 (2004), 188–208.

Erik S. Ohlander

Shi ism A. Definition Shi ^ism represents the numerically most relevant minority of Islam, generally distinct from Sunni Islam for its stress on the legitimacy of the succession of the members of the family (ahl al-bayt) of the Prophet Muhammad at the head of the Muslim state after his death. Presently no precise statistics are available, but according to most reliable sources Shi^a Muslims should range from 10 to 15 % of the whole world Muslim population. While a detailed definition of Shi ^ism through history is above the scope of the present article, some important points need to be stressed on. The name is the ellyptical form of shi ^a ^Ali, that is the group of supporters of ^Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 662), whose claims to the right of being the only legitimate Caliph after Prophet Muhammad were staunchly opposed by the Meccan traditional ruling elite. As pointed out by Jafri (Origins and Early Development of Shi ^ism, 1979), Muhammad was linked to the most prominent sacerdotal family of Mecca, the clan of the Hashimites, or Banu Hashim, and according to the pre-Islamic custom in fact of political authority, the leadership had to remain in that line. As head of the Hashimites was generally recognized ‘Ali, on the grounds of his kinship with the Prophet, his marriage to Fatima and his undisputed religious knowledge and ascetic spirituality. Nonetheless, a (later disputed) election established Abu Bakr (d. 634) as leader of the newborn community, and the close associates of ‘Ali followed him in refusing to pledge allegiance to the first Caliph. ‘Ali was not the only member of the Hashimite family to be given preference, but his standing as the closest associate of Muhammad was supported by a number of testimonies and eventually led to a wider recognition during the first years of Umayyad rule.

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Soon the majority of the legitimist opposition to the rule of the Banu Umayya, whose centers were Medina and even more the new city of Kufa, shifted its stress from the Hashimites to the ‘Alid line of the family, through Hasan b. ‘Ali and his brother Husyan. The latter, slaughtered along with some eighty supporters in the plan of Karbala by a vanguard of the army of Yazid b. Mu‘#awiy ya, second Umayyad ruler then based in Damascus, on 680 a.D. had to become the main charachter in the tragedy that soon turned into one of the most powerful foundative metaphor of the Shi ^ite ethos. Messianic and chiliaistic doctrines that had always accompanied ‘Ali’s feelings passed through the decades on the religious line of the lineage of Husayn, up to his 9th successor in the time of the early ‘Abbasid rule, Hasan al-‘Askari, later recognized as the 11th Imam, who gave birth to the 12th and last Imam recognized by the principal branch of the Shi ^as, later to become the so called “twelver Shi ^is”. According to their doctrine, the 12th Imam known as the mahdi (“right guided”) never died and entered a state of occultation in the year 940, to come back only at the end of times to deliver universal justice to the whole world. Around the theme of the absence of the Imam, twelver Shi ^as had developed along centuries a rich philosophy, a subtle theology and a complex, yet not univoque, system of political thought. While the first culminated in the 17th century with the influential summa of the Persian philosopher Sadr al-Din Shirazi (d. 1640), which synthesized the ishraqi philosopy of Suhrawardi and the visionary neoplatonism of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the second was a substantial re-arrangement of Mu ^tazilite rationalist kalam in Imami terms, the latter – after some four centuries of travail – brought to the endorsement of the theory of the Islamic State, worked out in practice by Imam Khomeini’s principle of the government of the Islamic jurisprudence scholar (Wilayat al-Faqih). The elementary articles of faith based upon the belief in five “pillars” (arkan al-din) – that is oneness of God (tawhid), Justice of god (^adala), prophecy (nubuwwa), imamate (imama), and judgment (qiyama) –, though not incorrect in principle, must be considered a later development, stressed on as a consequence of confrontation with the Sunni’s “five pillars.” This codification in any case does not date back to the time of the Imams. Shi ^ism itself is divided into branches, following the recognition of the authority of one or another of the Imam of ^Ali’s lineage, the most importants of which nowadays are Ismailis, Zaydis, and Alawites (the latters being recently absorbed, at least as to what concerns official juridic recognition, into the mainstream of Imami twelver Shi ^ism), who maintain the bulk of their followers respectively in the Indian subcontinent, Yemen, and the costal areas between Syria and Turkey. Detailed account of history and doctrines of

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the sects mentioned and of the others either numerically esigue or disappeared along centuries, falls beyond the scope of this introductory outlook, but the interested reader may begin looking the the relevant entries in EI2, EIr, and the works mentioned above. Needless to say, Shi ^ites did not escape the broadening of geographical landscape that interested, at the end of 20th century, all the traditional religious and cultural groups, this being a major epistemological turn in the definition of the object of Islamic studies, that today must relocate their focus both on Muslim countries and diasporic cultures. B. History of Research The history of the study of Shi ^ism suffered the fate of being approached as a matter merely tangential to that of mainstream Sunni Islam. The scarce accessibility of primary sources that affeced research up to the second half of the 20th century has certainly contributed to the backwardness of academic awareness on history and doctrine of Shi ^ism; nevertheless, Sunni prejudice – vehiculated by eresiographers such as al-Baghdadi, Ibn Hazm, and alShahrastani – by the means of wich most scholars of Islamic studies approached the theme, had been central to their understanding of that important branch of Islam, and must not be downplayed. Accordingly, many early scholarly overviews have been made either taking into account biased sectarian perspectives or considering Shi ^ism as a minor chapter in the history of Islam, also given the difficulties faced by scholars wishing to obtain Shi ^i manuscripts in Sunni countries. Thus the picture of Shi ^ism that has emerged is one of a political and economic-based movement degenerated into a religious millenaristic heresy. In the Middle Ages, scanty information on Shi ^ism, particularly gathered in encounters with Fatimid Ismailis, were provided by Crusader writers such as William of Tyre and Jaques de Vitry (see Etan Kohlberg, “Western Studies of Shi#a Islam,” Shi#ism, Resistance and Revolution, ed. Martin Kramer, 1987, 31–44,), but were marred by prejudice and distortion. After the Crusades, Shi ^ism remained largely unknown in Western academic circles. Even after the establishment of the Safavid empire, in the 17th century, those European Islamicists who engaged in the study of Arabic as an extension of the study of Hebrew and theology, paid no or little attention to the accounts of diplomats, missionaries and merchants based in Imamite Persia. An exception can be found in the well-informed and somehow pre-postmodern writings of the eclectic diplomat Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau, whose Trois ans en Asie (1859), Religions et philosophies de l’Asie centrale

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(1865), and Histoire des Perses (1896) proved to be rather impartial accounts about Iranian Shi ^ism, quite an oddity for his times. Pioneering academic undertakings and publications devoted to Shi ^ism, such as Garcin de Tassy’s edition and translation of a “Shi ^i” chapter of the Qur#an (1842), Ignaz Goldziher’s Beiträge zur Literaturgeschichte der Shi#a und der sunnitischen Polemik (1874), G. Browne’s relevant chapters in A Literary History of Persia (published in 1969), and Dwight M. Donaldson’s The Shi#te Religion (1933), must be evaluated considering their over-dependence on polemical works (whose echoes continue affecting scholarship even in later literature). The only works comparable to that of Goldziher for the brand of robust scholarship are those authored by the German scholar Rudolph Strothmann, among whose writings, the book Die Zwölfer-Schi#a (1926), and several entries for the first edition of the Encyclopédie de l’Islam, provide excellent samples of early scholarship on Imamism, Zaydism and Ismailism. One major turning point in the availability of primary sources, both for Western and native academics of Shi ^ism, has been the publication between 1934 and 1978 of the most comprehensive list of writings by Imami religious scholars, collected in 25 colossal volumes by Aqa Buzurg Tihrani (Al-dhari ^a ila tasanif al-shi ^a, 1353–1398). Anyhow, an even superficial overview of the first volume of Parson’s Index Islamicus, the main bibliographical index for Islamic studies, covering the years 1906–1955, can give an idea of the paucity of works dedicated to the matter. The key character in the passage from the first Orientalist and Sunnioriented scholarship on Shi ^ism to a more aware and informed research has been the French scholar Louis Massignon. Serving as military officer in Iraq and thereby providing an unusual and pioneering critique of the then dominating Orientalist discourse, Massignon contributed to the development of the study of Shi ^ism by first outlining important aspects of the mystical-oriented ethos of Shi ^ism (see Opera Minora, vol. 1, articles: “Die Ursprünge und die Bedeutung des Gnostizismus im Islam;” “Der gnostische Kult der Fatima im Shiitischen Islam;” “La Mubahala de Médine et l’hyperdulie de Fatima;” “La notion du voeu et la dévotion musulmane à Fatima,” 1963), and – not less relevant – by tutoring Corbin’s first steps in the world of ithna ^ashariyya (“Twelver”) mysticism. A pupil of Etienne Gilson and Jean Baruzi, Heideggerian philosopher Henry Corbin, once having been in touch with Iranian Shi ^ism at the Sorbonne as a young phenomenologist, then with first-hand sources in Istanbul while working at the local French Institute, and finally in Tehran as the director of the French Institute of Iranian Studies and founder of the series Bibliothèque iranienne, never abandoned

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his spiritual and scholarly attachment to Iran and Shi ^ism, devotedly collecting, editing, and translating some of the most important works of Shi ^ite theology, philosopy, and gnsosis (^irfan). By the time Henry Corbin was completing his monumental magnum opus about Iranian Islam, devoting volumes I and II of En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques (1971–1972) respectively to twelver Shi ^ism and to the Esfahan’s and Shaykhi’s schools of thought, social protest against the despotic rule of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, led by the clergy of Qom, was erupting in the streets of Tehran, and eventually ended in the last revolution of the 20th century. The religious nature of the new political order drew international attention to Shi ^ism, and prompted an unprecedented impetus for examination of the phenomenon by Western scholars, whose interest in political science, sociology and anthropology of Iranian Shi ^ism was paralleled by a corresponding resurgence in religious studies. C. Articulation and Main Issues The history of the study of Shi ^ism might be functionally divided in the two broad categories of religion and social sciences. The first is referred to the scholarly tradition that may be considered heir to the lineage of classical Oriental studies, yet taking into account a great deal of internal differentiation and the introduction of the critique of orientalist discourse, which is commonplace after the publication of Edward W. Said’s momentous Orientalism in 1978. The second, different in scope, methodologies, and foci, encompasses those works whose concern have more to do with contemporary problems enacted in social and cultural practices than with hair-splitting philological and textual matters. The two approaches are getting more and more overlapping and interrelated, so that it is not unusual for authors to shift from one to the other with ease. Therefore, this diadic conceptual structure has to be considered functional and fuzzy. The above-mentioned 1874 study of Ignaz Goldziher was not followed by a corresponding flow of studies on Shi ^ism, and up to the publication of En islam iranien, research about Shi ^ism was desultory and intermittent both diachronically and synchronically. Nonetheless, a number of landmark works were produced in different research centers around the world, are worth being mentioned. Italian historians Sabino Moscati (“Per una storia dell’antica Shi#a,” 1955, 251–67) and Laura Veccia Vaglieri (“Sul ‘Nahj al-balagha’ e il suo compilatore ash-Sharif ar-Radi,” 1958, 1–46) provided informed contributions on various aspects of early Shi ^ism. Most studies on Shi ^ism were, however, carried out by mainstream islamologists working on the history of early Islam, such as in the case of the articles of

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W. Montgomery Watt (among which “Shi ^ism under the Umayyads,” 1960, 158–62; “The Rafidites: A Preliminary Study,” 1970, 110–21), and worldacclaimed historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson (“How Did the Early Shi ^a Become Sectarian?,” 1955, 1–13); one exception may perhaps be found in the seminal works of one of the pupils of the renowned Islamicist Alessandro Bausani, Gianroberto Scarcia (“A proposito del problema della sovranità presso gli Imamiti,” 1957, 95–126; “Intorno alla controversia tra Akhbari e Usuli presso gli Imamiti di Persia,” 211–250 1958; “L’eresia musulmana nella problematica storico-religiosa,” 1962, 63–97). Different is the case of the Soviet islamologist W. Ivanow who, beginning from the 3rd decade of the 20th century, had devoted his whole scientific endeavor to the study of the Ismaili religious phenomena, editing and studying an impressive amount of first-hand works (Studies in Early Persian Ismailism, 1948). Meanwhile, Corbin was training a generation of scholars that would eventually vivify international debate on Shi ^ism both in Iran and in Western academia, and his contribution to the development of studies on Shi ^ism, though not void of methodological oddities (at least for standard Islamic studies; after all he was a phenomenologist philosopher by training), can hardly be overestimated. His intellectual circle, linked to the broader and prestigious milieu of European phenomenologists meeting on a regular basis at the Eranos sessions in Ascona, haunted by, among others, Mircea Eliade, Carl Gustav Jung, and Gershom Scholem. Famed Iranian intellectual Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a prolific traditionalist scholar still active and presently based in North America, besides writing a number of best selling general surveys about Shi ^ism and Sufism, authored significant contributions to the knowledge of Imami philosophy (“Le shi#isme et le soufisme: leur relations principelles et historiques,” 1970, 215–33; Sadr al-Din and His Transcendent Theosophy, 1978; Shi#ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality, 1988), but his major achivement was the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Philosophy in Tehran (after the Revolution renamed Anjuman-i hikmat wa falsafa, Institute for [the study] of Hikma and Philosophy), that eventually became, besides the French Institute of Iranian Studies directed by Henry Corbin, the second research center of attraction for those academics, Iranian and foreigners alike, interested in the study of Imami Shi ^ism. Outside of Iran, two major centers were involved in Corbin’s effort to vivify traditional Iranian philosopy. The first was of course the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, where Corbin used to teach dense courses related to his pioneering research in Iran (Itineraire d’un enseignement, 1993); the second was McGill’s University Institute of Islamic

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Studies, founded in 1954 by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and whose Professor of Islamic Thought was, from 1964, Corbin’s close associate Hermann Landolt. Other important public intellectuals and researchers that shared a common path with Corbin’s pupils play a pivoltal role in Iranian internal debate today, and their names are well-known: Dariush Shayegan, based in Paris and Tehran, where he teaches courses on comparative religions, and author of widely acclaimed and best-selling essays on Iranian religious culture; Reza Davari Ardakani, a conservative philosopher, famous for his controversy with the leading progressive intellectual ^Abdolkarim Sorush; Nasrollah Pourjavady (Kings of Love, 1978, with Peter Lamborn Wilson), whose books and articles on Imami Sufism are widely read both in Iran and abroad. More than tangential to the main characters of this environment were the contributions of revered Imami clerics, most notably the late ^Allama Tabataba#i, author of the renowned introductory essay Shi ^a dar Islam (1962, English trans. by Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, Shi#ite Islam, 1972), and whose importance is testified by his conversations and correspondences with Henry Corbin (Shi ^a, 1960). The situation changed for the better at the end of the 1960s, when one major event occured in marking the passage of the study of Shi ‘ism from a small circle of practitioners to a broader audience of specialists and readers, that is the 1968 Colloque de Strasbourg, a round table about Shi ^ism attended by the then leading specialists of Imamism plus a representation of the old generation of Islamicists that had done research on this topic. Worth noting is the participation of Henry Corbin, G. Vajda, Seyyed Hosseyn Nasr, Francesco Gabrieli, Wilfred Madelung, and the leading Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr, whose paper never reached the editors and is thus missing from the proceedings. Starting from the end of the 1970s, a number of excellent monographs have appeared, marking the new course of interest that experienced a determinant acceleration due to the imminent revolution. Among these, Seyyed Husayn M. Jafri’s The Origins and Early Development of Shi#a Islam (1979), provides an interesting account of the ideological substratum preparing the ground for the formation of Imami doctrines; Mojan Momen’s An Introduction to Shi ^i Islam (1985), provides a general and well-informed overview, and Heinz Halm’s Die Schia (1988) gives a well-grounded solid sample of scholarship on Imamism. Furthermore, Farhad Daftary’s writings on Ismailism (especially The Isma#ilis: Their History and Doctrine, 1992), represents an indispensable reference for those interested in this branch of Shi ^a Islam.

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D. After the Revolution in Iran and the Rise of Social Sciences Applied to Shi ism Besides those academics investigating Shi ^ism on the religious and historical level, the revolution fueled another quite fruitful research line, which isthat of the social sciences, notably anthropology, political science and sociology. Earlier enterprises, like the fieldwork conducted by Bryan Spooner in Iran during the 1960s (“The Function of Religion in Persian Society,” 1963, 83–95) proved to be isolated undertakings. It was carried out on the grounds of a solid training in anthropology but without a deep awareness of the textual tradition of Shi ^ism. Following the political concerns that arose in the West due to the revolution, research centers began to produce a generation of specialists with solid training in Islamic Studies but at the same time more and more interested in contemporary matters. Modern and contemporary history (Nikki Keddie, Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi ^ism from Quietism and Revolution, 1983), at times viewed from a rigorous religious historical perspective (Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran 1785–1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period, 1969), sociology (Said Amir Arjomand, Farhad Khosrokhavar), anthropology (Micheal J. Fischer, Mehdi Abedi, Oliver Beaman), social history (Roy P. Mottahedeh), came to be well represented as academic disciplines encompassing several sides of the Shi ^ite religious phenomenon. On the other hand, interest in Iran happened to awake an innovative stream of scholarship in contemporary Shi ^ism in other geographical settings, namely Iraq, Syria, and the Sub-continent. In addition to this, debate around themes critical to the understanding of Shi ^ism as an autonomous spiritual reality, as sketched out by Corbin and his associates, continued providing the academe with exceptional scholars, such as Wilfred Madelung, Ethan Kohlberg, Andrew J. Newman, Todd Lawson, Juan Cole, Norman Calder, Robert Gleave and others, while a brilliant generation of native academics based in outstanding Western research centers, like Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, Hossein Modarresi Tabatabai, Abdulaziz Sachedina, succeeded in animating the landscape by introducing a significant deal of fresh ideas and expertises. They represent at present the backbone of the academic study of Shi ^ism around the world, and their capacity to share their knowledge through a transnational network makes the perspectives for further development of the field decidedly stimulating and multifaceted in approaches, methodologies and views. In the last years, renewed academic interest of Shi#ites in their own religion gave birth to the publication of basic research tools like specialistic encyclopedias. Those who read Arabic or Persian use regularly these often well-written and peer reviewed (even if not void of bias) works as start up

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tools for their research. One such work is the Persian Da#irat al-ma^arif-i tashayyu^ (2001). E. State of Reaserch and Perspectives Scholars hailing from the two above mentioned offsprings (i.e., those heirs to Corbin’s experience in Iran and those continuing the “classical” orientalist positivist approach), together with the well represented new generation of native scholars endowed with either religious or academic background, enhanced significantly the quantity and quality of research on Shi ^ism during the nineties and up to the first decade of the 21st century. As for Twelver Shi ^ism, research has achieved relevant goals in better assessing the crucial terms of the phenomenon as an independent chapter of the spiritual history of Islam, ponting out the esoterical peculiarities of ‘Alid religion as emerging from a detailed analysis of the early sources. This is in particular the case with the work of one of the most influential scholars of Shi ^ism, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, who inherited the phenomenological gist of Corbin, merged with a more rigorous brand for methodological accuracy. His Le guide divin dans le shi ^isme originel (1992) no doubt represents a milestone in determining the exact nature of the first historical manifestations of Imamism, presented as a religion grounded on the initiation into divine secrets and essentially depicted as a mystical doctrine. As Amir-Moezzi puts it, critical to the understanding of Shi ^ism is the evolution from a non-rational esoterical doctrine to a rationalist and politically engaged movement, centered on the expansion of the prerogatives of the ulemas during the absence of the Imam. Complementary to Amir-Moezzi’s work, are the studies of Etan Kohlberg on the historical process that led to the definition of the Twelver orthodoxy (see Belief and Law in Imami Shi ^ism, 1991). Crucial to all these discourses is in fact the very theme of the a ^lamiyya (the quality of the “most learned,” a ^lam) and of its social and political implications, once relegated to the Imams and their designed representatives, and shifted along history to an organized class of religious professionals, a theme of momentous importance for the modern Shi ^ite political thought. Thus, the so called “Imamology,” – so deeply investigated by Amir-Moezzi in a series of articles, published separately in various specialistic journals between 1992 and 2005 and recently collected in one volume (La religion discrète: Croyances et pratiques spirituelles dans l’Islam shi#ite: Aspects de l’imamologie duodécimaine, 2006) – devoid of the figure of the legitimate Imam, becomes the justification for the institution of the rationalist imitation (taqlid) of the “most learned” and the management of political power by its ultimate theorization, the marja ^al-taqlid (lit. “source of the imitation”), discussed in depth in The Most Learned of the Shi ^a: The Institution of the

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Marja ^Taqlid, ed. Linda S. Walbridge, 2001. Another well represented area of scholarship is that of the Esfahan school of philosophy, be it or not connected to jurisprudence theories of any relevance to political actuality (for an example of both, see respectively A. J. Newman’s “Towards a Reconsideration” (1986, 165–99), and Christian Jambet, Se rendre immortale, 2001), subject of a scholarly renaissance even in Iran as a consequence of Corbin’s rediscovery, and its mystical implications. International symposia on Mulla Sadra and his school are held on a regular basis in Iran. Needless to say, the revolutionary elite’s interest in, and appreciation of, the subject matter is not unrelated to the success of Mulla Sadra and his school of thought in his motherland after the revolution. Whatever the political implications of the study of Mulla Sadra in Iran, outstanding works on him and his school were recently published (one example is Sajjad Rizvi, Mulla Sadra Shirazi: His Life, Works and Sources for Safavid Philosophy, 2007). Closely intertwined with the issue of the authority of the marja ^, one of the main object of scholarly analysis, is that of the internal intellectual and juristic debate among Shi ^ite religious scholars. In this sense, the conflict between the akhbaris (traditionalists) and the usulis (rationalist “fundamentalists”) represents one of main lines of research, object of close scrutiny by a number of scholars (see for instance Andrew J. Newman, “The Nature of the Akhbari/Usuli Dispute in late Safawid Iran,” 1992, 21–51, and 250–61). Obviously Islamic Republic of Iran, being nominally a Shi ^i theocracy, lies on the backgronund of most areas of the scholarly discourse on Shi ^ism, and provides live material (such as the problem of Islam and democracy, Muslim reformism, relations between religion and politics, and so on) to the specialists, even those who are not directly involved in modern political history. In recent years, some high-quality introductions to Shi ^ism have been written andpublished, such as Juan Cole’s Sacred Space and Holy War (2002), Amir-Moezzi and Christian Jambet Qu’est-ce que le shi#isme (2004), and Marco Salati e Leonardo Capezzone, L’islam sciita: storia di una minoranza (2006). Khomeini’s theory of the “guardianship of the jurist” (wilayat-i faqih) is also a much debated matter and does not cease to be at the center of scholarly production, having among Muslim scholars few overt supporters (as Hamid Algar, author of The Roots of Islamic Revolution, 1983 and Christian Bonaud, author of L’Imam Khomeini, un gnostique méconnu du XXe siècle. Métaphisique et théologie dans les œuvres philosophiques et spirituelles de l’Imam Khomeyni, 1997) and many detractors. The abrupt rush of the theme on the international scene had as a consequence a retroactive inspection of the history of the notion, and recently the vibrant debate on the legitimacy of the theory culminated in West-

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ern academia reporting the most outstanding and controversial voices and themes of the dispute, as in Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, Islam and Democracy in Iran. Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform, 2006. To grasp an idea of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of today’s Shi ‘ite studies, it is useful to refer to Colin Turner and Paul Luft’s Shi ‘ism (2007) which provides a collection of studies on Shi ‘ism written over the last 50 years. Indicative of the lively status of the subject at large is the proliferation of initiatives, research groups, conferences and scholarly publications (one in particular, the Journal of Shi ^i Islamic Studies, is entirely devoted to the study of Shi#ism in its full complexity). At present, even though Iran and Twelver Shi ^ism remain to a great extent the most crowded topics in academic enquiry on Shi ^ism, the state of research on either lesser religious sects or ethnic realities is significatively active, if one notices that one of the most prestigious and qualified institution of the study of Shi ^ism is the London based Institute for Ismaili Studies, which is vocated for (even if not only) the academic study of Ismailism, and gives voices to the views of ethnic minorities. Another quite promising research subject is the rising theme of the articulate structure of relations and conflict between tradition/religion, in this case Shi ^ism, and democacy, a debate that engages at a high degree many high-rank religious intellectuals in Iran and abroad. Projects, conferences, and centers focusing on Shi ^is in general or on specific aspects of Shi ^ism are proliferating particularly in the UK. One telling example is the British Academy-funded project on the “Authority in Shi ^ism” (www.thehawzaproject.net), which aims to create a broad network of scholars working on the theme and improve the status of research on Shi ^ism. The rise of the internet as a research tool has introduced in the arena of the academic study of Shi ^ism a wave of novelty. Even if authoritative validation criteria are not yet commonplace in the use of electronic public resources, most present-day scholars non only use the internet as a quick basic search tool, but also have implemented personal or instuitional web pages – like the resource list of the University of Georgia (USA), http://www.uga.edu/ islam/shiism.html – (even excellent up-to-date weblogs) that constitutes valuable databases for students and scholars. One such example is the Institute of Ismaili Studies website (www.iis.ac.uk), whose Academic Publications sections provides a useful list of high-quality academic writings. Another relevant example is the personal page of University of Michigan’s Professor Juan R. I. Cole (http://www-personal.umich.edu/ jrcole/), also providing a quite good selection of his academic papers dealing with Shi#ism. A major epistemological shift has occurred in Religious Studies (and thus in the Study of Islam and Shi ^ism), with the rise of the internet: old

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encyclopedias, even scholarly and specialistic, usually failed in giving voice to their “object of inquiry” and resulted in rather monophonic approaches. Today every student has the possibility to have a glance at a plethora of resources directly written and published in the net (often in a great variety of languages) by religious foundations, charities, research institutes and the like. This kind of resources (such as the good Twelver Shi ^a-run www.al-islam.org, providing an impressive number of primary sources, links, scholarly and non-scholarly articles and e-books) offers a stimulating challenge for traditional academic approaches to Shi#ism, overcoming the risk of one-way academic interpretations. Select Bibliography Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, La guide divin dans le shi ^isme originel: au sources de l’ésotérisme en Islam (Paris: Veridier, 1992); Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and Christian Jambet, Qu#est-ce que le shi#isme? (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Henry Corbin, En islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–1972); Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge Ms. & London: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Syed M. Jafri, Origins and Early Development of Shi#ism (London: Longman, 1978); Farhad Khosrokhavar, Anthropologie de la révolution iranienne. Le rêve impossible (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Ethan Kohlberg, The Formation of Classical Islamic World: Shi ^ism (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003); Heinz Halm, Die Schia (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988); Le Shi#isme imamite. Colloque de Strasbourg (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); Yitzakh Nakash, The Shi ^is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi ^I Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi ^ism (Oxford: Geroge Ronald, 1985); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi, and Seyyed Reza Vali Nasr, Shi#ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality (New York, SUNY Press, 1988); Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Just Ruler in Shi ^ite Islam: The Comprehensive Authority of the Jusrist in Imamite Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); ^Allama Tabataba#i, Shi ^a dar Islam (Tehran: Nashr-e Sherkat-e Enteshar, 1348); Liyakatali Takim, The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shi ^ite Islam (Albany: State University of New York, 2006).

Alessandro Cancian

Archaeology in Medieval Studies A. Definition Medieval archaeology is the study of the material culture of the Middle Ages in all its forms, but especially as evidenced through the systematic processes of survey, excavation and interpretation common to the wider archaeologi-

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cal discipline. The study of this archaeological evidence allows researchers to uncover aspects of medieval culture and history which our written sources are unable to reveal. Consequently, medieval archaeology can contribute significantly to our knowledge and understanding of the Middle Ages and should hold an important place within the interdisciplinary field of Medieval Studies. It should be stated at the outset, however, that ‘medieval archaeology’ as such is something of a false appellation. From a methodological point of view, there is nothing that separates the study of the archaeology of the Middle Ages from the study of the archaeology of any other period for which there survives written as well as material evidence. Medieval archaeology must therefore be considered to constitute one part of ‘historical archaeology’ in general (Anders Andrén, Between Artifacts and Texts: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective, 1998). The degree to which archaeological research is united with other avenues of enquiry into the Middle Ages is, however, largely dependent on the historical development of the discipline within individual countries and regions and its position within modern university faculties or departments. Medieval archaeology is, for example, closely connected with classical studies in Italy, with art-history and architecture in France and with prehistory in Scandinavia, while in North America archaeology in general is considered a sub-discipline of anthropology, within which field the archaeology of the Middle Ages receives limited attention. Furthermore, the periodization and chronological terminology of the ‘Middle Ages’ differ from country to country, and often between the historical and archaeological disciplines within countries (for a run-down of some of the different chronologies used throughout Europe see The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, vol. 1, ed. James Graham-Campbell, 2007, 17–18). Such regional differences in approaches to and conceptions of archaeology often affect the degree of contact and discussion between medieval archaeologists and those scholars who study the Middle Ages from other perspectives. Despite this variation in development and focus, however, medieval archaeology has nevertheless developed in recent years into a cohesive, independent branch of the historical sciences, and many universities in Europe now offer both graduate and undergraduate-level programmes of study in medieval archaeology (The Study of Medieval Archaeology, ed. Hans Andersson and Jes Wienberg, 1993). At the same time, the recent rise of Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has resulted in an increased dialogue between medieval archaeologists and other scholars concerned with the Middle Ages.

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B. Development of the Discipline The roots of medieval archaeology can be found in the antiquarian interests of the early modern period and the Middle Ages themselves. Although cases like the reputed discovery of King Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191 or the frequent exhumations of saints and their relics throughout the Middle Ages could be interpreted as some of the earliest archaeological activity directed at medieval material culture (Christopher Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches, 2003), it was in the centuries associated with the European Renaissance that scholars with a humanistic rather than ecclesiastical bent began to collect books, record inscriptions and make sketches of ancient art and architecture (A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989, 2nd ed. 2006, by Bruce Trigger gives a thorough account of the development of archaeology in relation to underlying intellectual currents). The work of such figures as Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli (1391–1452) and Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), whose subjects included some medieval monuments, are early examples of this new interest in the material culture of the past. This enthusiasm was, however, for the most part directed at classical antiquity, and the term ‘media aeva’ itself, first coined in this period, is indicative of the somewhat dismissive attitude that existed towards the period ‘in between’ classical civilization and modernity. Nevertheless, this apparent shift in historical consciousness opened the way for the study of the Middle Ages from both documentary and material perspectives. A focus on classical culture was especially strong in the south of Europe, where a strong sense of cultural continuity with ancient Greece and Rome was felt and actively promoted through a reverence for and imitation of ancient art and architecture. This fascination with the classical past spread throughout Europe, but, in the countries of northern Europe, antiquarians also turned their attention to more local historical traditions, including those of the prehistoric and medieval periods. In these countries, as in Italy, interest in the material past was closely aligned with issues of local, national and religious corporate identity. Antiquarians like John Aubrey (1626–97) made detailed descriptions of prehistoric monuments described by medieval chronicles, including Avebury and Stonehenge, which are both included in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Christopher Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology, 2003, 10–15; Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989; 2nd ed. 2006, 45–48). The Scandinavian countries, meanwhile, quickly extended an enthusiasm for the medieval records and folklore of their countries to an interest in their physical monuments, including the Viking age tombs at Uppsala, Sweden, which were excavated in the 17th century by Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) using what were at the time relatively

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novel archaeological methods. Rudbeck carried out the excavations by cutting trenches into the tombs and making drawings of the vertical sections. In this manner he was able to arrive at a relative chronology for the burials within each tomb, even hypothesizing roughly how much time had passed since the act of burial based on the relative thickness of the sod on top (Ole Klint-Jensen, A History of Scandinavian Archaeology, 1975). Most early excavations were, however, little more than treasure-hunting expeditions, with enthusiasts removing artefacts from the earth with little in the way of documentation or regard to their context. Artefacts were valued as objets d’art or, in some cases, simply for their material value. Many significant artefacts from this early stage of archaeology, such as the grave-goods of the Frankish King Childeric, whose grave was first excavated in Tournai, Belgium, in 1633, have since been stolen and we know about them only from fortuitously surviving sketches and written descriptions (Stéphane Lebecq, Les Origines franques, 1990). In the 18th and 19th centuries, breakthroughs in the natural sciences led to a newfound awareness of the antiquity of both the earth and humanity, and to a conviction that these issues could and should be studied scientifically. At the same time, driven by a pervading atmosphere of Romantic nationalism, many archaeologists employed these new approaches in their efforts to anchor burgeoning national identities in past ages (see Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, ed. Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Timothy Champion, 1996; The Myth of Nations, by Patrick Geary, 2003; and Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 1989; 2nd ed. 2006). Throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, high profile discoveries such as the Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway (excavated in 1880 and 1904 respectively) and the Sutton Hoo ship burial in England (excavated in 1939) fuelled this Romantic enthusiasm for archaeological exploration by tracing apparent links with early medieval literature (in the case of Sutton Hoo, apparent similarities with the Old English poem Beowulf). Archaeology came to be viewed as a solution to the dearth of written evidence for Europe’s ‘Dark Ages’ and the dim origins of the modern nation-states. This nationally oriented archaeology was given scientific justification through figures such as Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931), a philologist turned prehistorian for whom prehistory (whether investigated through archaeology or literature) was an “eminently national discipline” (Díaz-Andreu and Champion, 173). It was Kossinna who pioneered the culture-historic school of archaeology which asserted that styles of artefacts (e. g., pottery types or jewellery designs) could be tied to specific ethnic groups. This approach heavily influenced archaeologists studying the ‘barbarian migrations’ of late antiquity and the

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early Middle Ages, and some archaeologists continue to uncomplicatedly conflate material culture with categories such as ethnicity or language. It has been in the years since WWII, however, that medieval archaeology has truly come into its own as a discipline. Excavations of large-scale settlements, most notably Novgorod in Russia and Bergen in Norway, demonstrated the research potential of carefully planned, thoroughly documented investigations (Michael Welman Thompson, Novgorod the Great, 1967; and Helen Clarke, “Asbjørn Herteig: Archaeologist and Pioneer,” Archaeology and the Urban Economy, ed. S. Myrvoll and A.E. Herteig, 1989, 23–27). Developments in technology, various kinds of cultural heritage legislation, a greater attention to theory and methodology and an increasing public interest all contributed to the rise of medieval archaeology as an independent discipline in the second half of the 20th century. C. Archaeology and Science Scientific and technological innovations have changed the way that all archaeological research is conducted. Absolute (as opposed to relative) dating techniques such as radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology (i. e., tree-ring dating) now allow researchers to date organic materials and associated nonorganic artefacts and features with relative certainty. Geophysical methods of subsurface detection allow archaeologists to build maps of subsurface anomalies such as walls or ditches over large geographical areas. The development of the ‘Harris Matrix’ method of excavating and recording distinct archaeological layers has vastly increased the potential for post-excavation interpretation as well as the ability to carefully dig complexly layered urban sites (Edward Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy, 1979; 2nd ed. 1989). Since the 1980s, computers have had an increasingly essential role to play in the cataloguing and analysis of data, and are now being used for mapping and reconstructing archaeological sites. Satellite imaging and GPS systems are increasingly being used and are eliminating the need for costly aerial survey. Ancillary disciplines such as archaeozoology, archaeobotany, and biomolecular archaeology are now seen as integral parts of archaeological research. Just a few recent examples of the application of new scientific methods of analysis to medieval archaeology include: the detailed reconstruction of local medieval diets in Viking age Scotland based on stableisotope analysis of human bone; the detection of the rise of hop-gardens in Denmark through archaeobotanical analysis; and the detection of gendervariegated degenerative joint disease in Germany based on bone analysis (James Barrett et al., “Diet and Ethnicity During the Viking Colonization of Northern Scotland: Evidence from Fish Bones and Stable Carbon Iso-

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topes,” Antiquity 75 [2001]: 145–54; Karl-Ernst Behre, “The History of Beer Additives in Europe: A Review,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 8 [1999]: 35–48; Wolf-R. Teegen and Michael Schultz, Geschlechtsabhängige Arbeitsverteilung in slawischen Gräberfelden nach Aussage der Gelenkerkrankungen, 2005). The Journal of Scientific Archaeology (1974 onwards) focuses on the scientific aspects of archaeological research. D. Theory and Archaeology Against the backdrop of scientific and technological innovation within the field, a new theoretically oriented approach to archaeology emerged throughout the 1950s and 60s. The American archaeologist Lewis Binford became the leading figure of ‘processual archaeology’, publishing a series of papers advocating a more scientific approach to the study of the material past (Lewis Binford, An Archaeological Perspective, 1972). Essentially, Binford felt that archaeology was capable of more than simply classifying and cataloguing pot shards: that it could have explanatory power with regards to social and cultural phenomena. The ‘New Archaeology’ as it came to be called, advocated the development of ‘Middle Range Theory’ “a distinct body of ideas to bridge the gap between raw archaeological evidence and the general observations and conclusions to be derived from it” (Brian Fagan, Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice, 2004, 13–16). Processual archaeology exerted its strongest influence in North America and in the field of prehistoric archaeology, however, and had little impact on medieval archaeology. For archaeologists of the Middle Ages, the written record continued to provide a more fruitful interpretive paradigm than the more generalist theories of the processual school. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, however, there was a strong reaction to the processual school, and this movement had a definite impact on medieval archaeology. The main proponent of this ‘post-processual’ movement was Ian Hodder, a British prehistorian whose views are summarized in his Reading the Past (1986; 3rd ed. 2003; for a summary of the theoretical debates within different European countries see also Archaeological Theory in Europe: The Last Three Decades, ed. Ian Hodder, 1991). Inspired by post-modernism, Hodder and other post-processualists criticized what they perceived as processualism’s positivist approach and advocated a more relativistic and varied understanding of the archaeological record. Fundamentally, post-processualists argued that material culture should be ‘read’ as a text, acknowledging the role of the researcher’s own biases and interpretations in every step of the archaeological process. The debate has since cooled, but has left an im-

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pression on all areas of archaeological research, including medieval archaeology. From the Baltic to the Black Sea: Studies in Medieval Archaeology, ed. David Austin and Leslie Alcock (1990) was a collection of archaeological research on various subjects that grappled with many of post-processualism’s concerns about identity and structures of power. Perhaps the greatest influence of post-processualism on medieval archaeology has had to do with the proper relationship between archaeological and written evidence. In 1935, the famous British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler asserted that “the historian and the archaeologist of the Dark Ages are very like two men clutching each other in mid-air to prevent themselves from falling” (London and the Saxons, 1935). Recently, however, a number of archaeologists have made strenuous arguments in favour of detaching archaeological research from “the tyranny of the historical record,” as Timothy Champion has put it, in order that archaeologists might act with more agency in setting a research agenda specifically suited to the archaeological discipline’s own methods and types of evidence (Timothy Champion, “Archaeology and the Tyranny of the Historical Record,” From the Baltic to the Black Sea, 1990; John Moreland, Archaeology and Text, 2001). John Moreland specifically argues that archaeology’s relegation to matters of economy and subsistence is the result of the privileging of the written word over the physical object. Others, however, have argued for a rapprochement between archaeology and history (Martin Carver, “Marriages of True Minds: Archaeology with Texts,” Archaeology: The Widening Debate, ed. Barry Cunliffe, 2002, 465–96). Regardless, the written record will continue to play an essential role in informing archaeological research, while medieval historians are making increasing use of the growing body of archaeological evidence for life in the Middle Ages. E. Current Trends Medieval archaeology has benefited over the past several decades from its increasing coherence as a scholarly discipline, its employment of new scientific techniques, and the widening of its geographical focus to include regions beyond the countries of the traditional medieval Latin West. A number of recent major works dealing with the Middle Ages have raised the profile of archaeological evidence, including Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy (2001), Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and the series of books published under the aegis of The European Science Foundation’s project, The Transformation of the Roman World. These works and others like them are typical of the medieval archaeology of recent

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years, tackling old problems from new perspectives and combining archaeological data and interpretive methods with written evidence, all resulting in more comprehensive and nuanced understandings of the medieval world. One of the leading figures of recent medieval archaeology has been Richard Hodges, whose research has focussed primarily on trade and towns in the early medieval period. Some of Hodges’ important works include: Dark Age Economics (1982, and revised 1989); Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (1983 with David Whitehouse); The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (1989); Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (2000); and the essay collection, Goodbye to the Vikings? (2006). Hodges has also worked on the earliest large-scale monastic complex in western Europe at San Vincenzo al Volturno in southern Italy (Light in the Dark Ages, 1997). Hodges’s work has been fundamental in both advocating for the consideration of archaeological evidence within the field of medieval studies and in setting the research agenda of medieval archaeologists, especially for the early Middle Ages (see, however, Grenville Astill’s critique of Hodges’ early work, “Archaeology, Economics and Early Medieval Europe,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 4.2 [1985]: 215–31). Commerce and Travel: One of the areas which has benefited most from the recent surge in archaeological investigation has been that of trade and commerce. The traditional historical interpretation of the end of the Roman economy was set out by the famous Belgian Historian Henri Pirenne in his book Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937). The so-called ‘Pirenne Thesis’ proposed that the essential structure of the Roman imperial economy survived the collapse of Roman administration and only disappeared in the face of the Arab conquest, which choked shipping lanes and cut off trade between east and west. New archaeological evidence and analysis has, however, drastically changed this picture, giving a far more nuanced impression of late antique trade in the Mediterranean. Evidence from the distribution of coins (Arab as well as Byzantine), African Red Slipware (a distinctive ceramic often used in long distance trade) and ship-wrecks illustrate an economic world already beginning to stagger in the 5th century and, after a brief recovery, crumbling entirely by the late 6th. Archaeological evidence has forced scholars to view the Arab conquest as “the consequence rather than the cause of the catastrophe” (Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, 1983; also see Hodges’ other works as well as McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, 2005). Continuing research, meanwhile, is pushing outwards our evidence of long-distance trade networks and the Arab role in the medieval economy. New evidence suggests

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that by the 11th century, cane sugar may have been making its way from New Guinea to Cyprus, Sicily, and beyond (Marie Louise Wartburg, “Production du sucre de canne à Cypre: un chapitre de technologie médiévale,” Coloniser au moyen âge, 1995, 126–130). In northern Europe, meanwhile, large-scale excavations carried out over the last several decades have uncovered trading ports around the North Sea and Baltic on a scale which had not been previously considered. Regularly laid out and equipped with numerous docks and jetties, these ‘emporia’ made up a sophisticated northern European trade-network (See Hodges’ Dark Age Economics and most of his other works as well as McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, 2005; Søren Sindbæk makes use of cooperative research between physics and archaeology in “Networks and Nodal Points: the Emergence of Towns in Early Viking Age Scandinavia,” Antiquity 81, [2007]: 119–32; Søren Sindbæk, “The Small World of the Vikings: Networks in Early Medieval Communication and Exchange,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 40 [2007]: 59–74). Merchants based out of Dorestad and Quentovic in the Frankish kingdoms, Hamwic in England, and Birka, Hedeby and Kaupang in the Scandinavian countries – to name a few examples – traded in stone, metals, wine and other commodities from northwest Europe, as well as luxury goods from the Arab and Byzantine worlds and slaves from eastern Europe. Archaeology has revealed a complex northern economy on a hitherto unthought-of scale These early towns served not only as trading centres, but also as central places in which religious and royal influence could be concentrated (Franz Theuws, “Exchange, Religion, Identity and Central Places in the Early Middle Ages,” Archaeological Dialogues 10.2 [2004]: 121–38). Settlements, Rural and Urban: There has been a wealth of archaeological research conducted on settlements, both urban and rural. Helena Hamerow’s recent book, Early Medieval Settlements (2002), provides an overview of the subject for the early medieval period, while Chapelot and Fossier’s Le village et la maison au Moyen Âge (1980), although 30 years old and written before a huge surge in rural archaeology, provides an overview for the whole of the Middle Ages. As discussed above in the section on trade and commerce, the discovery of the North Sea emporia has forced a rethinking of urban development in northern Europe (Richard Hodges and Brian Hobley, ed., The Rebirth of Towns in the West, AD 700–1050, 1988 andWics: The Early Medieval Trading Centres of Northern Europe, ed. David Hill and Robert Cowie, 2001). Improved methods of stratigraphic excavation have made possible the effective investi-

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gation of complexly layered urban sites such as those uncovered in Dublin and York (Patrick F. Wallace, The Viking Age Buildings of Dublin, 1992, and Richard Hall, Viking Age York, 1994). No urban centers within Western Europe, however, rivaled the cities of Muslim Spain and recent urban excavations have confirmed their size and complexity; Cordoba is thought to have had a population of over 100,000 in the 10th century (John Schofield, “Urban Settlement, Part 1: Western Europe,” The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, vol. 1, 2007, 111–29). Overall, recent research has focussed on variegated modes of town development and the role that urban centres played as ‘central places’, becoming hubs for economic, religious, royal and other social functions. See also David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City: From Late Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century (1997) and Urban Europe, 1100–1700 (2003). Despite the growing importance of towns in the Middle Ages, however, the vast majority of the population continued to live in rural, agricultural environments. Rural archaeology has, nevertheless, been slow to develop and there are few comprehensive overviews of the topic. The abovementioned studies by Hamerow and by Chapelot and Fossier offer considerations of the topic, while results of the Ruralia Association’s biennial conferences are published as Ruralia (1996 onwards). Much of this recent research has focussed on the long-term development of settlements and building traditions, as well as interactions with the surrounding environment. Ancillary archaeological disciplines, including archaeozoology and archaeobotony, play important roles in the analysis of ecofacts such as seeds, bones and other naturally occurring substances that might yield information about human activity (Archäologische und naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen an ländlichen und frühstädischen Siedlungen im deutschen Küstengebiet vom 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zum II. Jahrhundert n. Chr., ed. Georg Kossack, Karl-Ernst Behre, and Peter Schmid, 1984). The discovery and excavation of many deserted medieval villages from the later Middle Ages have produced an abundance of evidence concerning architectural traditions, standards of living and changing patterns of land use (Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages, 1971, and Wharram Percy: Deserted Medieval Village, 1990). Buildings: Buildings archaeology concerns the study of in situ structures using archaeological methods (Richard Morris, The Archaeology of Buildings, 2000). The construction and development of medieval buildings is of foremost importance within this archaeological subfield, but also the role they fulfilled within social contexts (Jane Grenville, Medieval Housing, 1997; Richard Morris, Churches in the Landscape, 1989; 2nd ed. 1998). Churches and castles, the largest and most conspicuous buildings surviving from the

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Middle Ages, have long been studied and their various architectural developments are well-documented (Charles McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture, 2005; John Thompson, The Decline of the Castle, 1987, and id., The Rise of the Castle, 1991). Modern excavations have, however, uncovered some surprises, such as the huge monastic complex at San Vincenzo al Volturno, Italy. The site is roughly contemporary with the 9th century plan of St. Gall, an architectural blueprint of the ideal Carolingian monastery which was formerly thought to be absurdly precocious. The excavation of San Vincenzo has forced a reassessment of the standards of material culture and the scope of architectural ability in the early medieval period (Richard Hodges, Light in the Dark Ages, 1997; for the plan of St. Gall, see Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall, 3 vols., 1979; and Studien zum St. Galler Klosterplan, ed. Peter Ochsenbein and Karl Schmucki, 2002). The ideological meaning of architecture has become an important topic in recent years as scholars have begun to focus more and more on the role that buildings played in legitimizing political and religious authority (Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain, 1990; Dale Kinney, “Roman Architectural spolia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145 [2001]: 138–50). The archaeology of buildings from before the year 1000 is, however, extremely limited compared to our knowledge of castles, cathedrals and churches from the later Middle Ages, a time when large-scale stone architecture flourished. Research on domestic architecture has concentrated on architectural continuity or lack thereof with the Roman heritage, growing social differentiation and division of space and the influence of religious and secular institutions on housing design and construction throughout the medieval period (The Rural House from Migration Period to the Oldest Still Standing Buildings, ed. Jan Kláp st ˇ e, ˇ 2002; Geoff Egan, The Medieval Household: Daily Living c.1150–c.1450, 1998; Gwyn Meirion-Jones and Michael Jones, Manorial Domestic Buildings in England and Northern France, 1993). Burials: Burials, as cemeteries or individual graves, constitute a vitally important yet problematic source of archaeological evidence. The excavation and study of human remains can sometimes offer hints at the population, the demography and the lives and deaths of medieval people. New techniques in palaeo-demography and palaeo-pathology are helping medieval archaeologists investigate questions about population, life-span and disease more accurately than in the past (Reconstructing Past Population Trends in Mediterranean Europe, ed. John Bintliff and Kostas Sbonias, 1999; Jesper L. Boldsen, “Analysis of Dental Attrition and Mortality in the Medieval Village of Tirup, Denmark,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 126 [2005]:

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169–76). Grave goods and burial customs, meanwhile, can offer some kind of clue as to group and/or individual identity. Throughout antiquity and the early medieval period, individuals were normally buried with some of their personal belongings. Such belongings are often indicators of status, gender, occupation or religion, though their interpretation can be problematic (see Guy Halsall’s criticisms of using grave-goods to infer ethnicity in Early Medieval Cemeteries: An Introduction to Burial Archaeology in the Post-Roman West, 1995 and his review article “Movers and Shakers: The Barbarians and the Fall of Rome,” Early Medieval Europe, 8.1 [1999]: 131–45). In the later Middle Ages, these grave-goods were generally replaced by more generic symbolic items such as crosses or vessels (Thomas Meier, “Inschrifttafeln aus mittelalterlichen Gräbern: Einige Thesen zu ihrer Aussagekraft,” Papers of the ‘Medieval Europe Brugge 1997’ Conference 2: Death and Burial in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe, 1997, 43–53). The careful investigation of cemeteries as unified archaeological sites can meanwhile yield valuable information about social differentiation in the treatment of the dead within and across time periods. The re-excavation of the English royal cemetery site of Sutton Hoo in the 1980s and early 90s by Martin Carver, for example, located a special section for the burial of executed individuals (Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?, 1998), while infant burials are commonly separated from the rest of the dead at cemeteries throughout medieval Europe. Climate and Environment: The interaction between humans and their environment has always been a subject of archaeological investigation. The growing importance of environmental archaeology as a bona fide sub-discipline as well as the rise of ‘environmental history’ has, however, caused a new emphasis to be placed on situating the material culture of the Middle Ages within the context of its natural environment (Glynis Jones, Environmental Archaeology, 2002). Archaeobotany and archaeozoology have made significant contributions to our understanding of daily human interaction with the medieval environment. Human adaptation to and effects on the natural world are currently studied from ecological, economic and socio-political perspectives (Lech Leciejewicz, La nuova forma del mondo: La nascita della civilità europa medievale, 2004). The effects of climate and the environment on food production, disease and demographics have always been acknowledged, as in the medieval period’s ‘little ice age’. The recent drilling of glacial cores by palaeoclimatologists have allowed scholars to speculate about the effects of climate even on the minutiae of socio-political events (Michael McCormick, Paul Edward Dutton and Paul A. Mayewski, “Volcanoes and the

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Climate Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A.D. 750–950,” Speculum 82 [2007]: 865–95). Further collaborations between archaeologists, historians and scientists will surely yield new and exciting results in the arena of human interaction with the medieval environment. Scholars who study the Middle Ages can no longer afford to ignore the evidence provided by archaeological research. Archaeology’s successes over the last decades in both corroborating and debunking the historical record have proven its value, while new kinds of evidence gleaned through archaeozoology, archaeobotany, and meticulous excavation are opening windows on aspects of medieval life that would otherwise have remained obscure: The cooperation of historians, archaeologists and scientists will surely yield even greater returns in the future, while increased international cooperation will help address questions on a far broader scale than the nationally-focussed research agendas of the past (The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300, ed. Martin Carver, for example, offers a collection of interdisciplinary essays concerning the question of conversion in the North across Celtic, Germanic and Slavic areas by authors from across northern Europe). The fruits of the archaeological research, which has concentrated far more on the early Middle Ages, will hopefully be more generally applied to the later medieval period. F. Resources The main journals in the field are: Medieval Archaeology (1957 onwards), Archéologie Médiévale (1971 onwards), Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters (1973 onwards), and Archeologia medievale (1974 onwards). Antiquity (1927 onwards), a general archaeological journal with a wide-ranging and mainly prehistoric focus, often carries research which is related to the medieval period as well as methodological debates which are of significant interest. The huge number of volumes published under the aegis of British Archaeological Resources (or BAR) covers an incredible span of time periods, regions and topics, including many publications on various aspects of the archaeology of medieval Europe. Select Bibliography Medieval Archaeology: An Encyclopedia, ed. Pam J. Crabtree (New York: Routledge, 2001); The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, ed. James Graham-Campbell, vol. 1 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007; the second volume of which on the later Middle Ages is expected shortly). Some more recent region-specific studies can be found in: Neil Christie, From Constantine to Charlemagne: An Archaeology of Italy, AD 300–800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Lloyd Laing, The Archaeology of Celtic Britain and Ireland 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Günter P. Fehring, The Archaeology of Medieval Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Christopher Gerrard,

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Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches (London and New York: Routledge, 2003; this volume serves as an excellent introduction to the archaeological study of the later Middle Ages in Britain). Works of more general archaeological interest include: Colin Renfrew, Archaeology: Theories, Methods, and Practice (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004); Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: A Brief Introduction (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999); and The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, ed. Brian Fagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Christopher Landon

Art History A. General Definition Art history is the scholarly study of visual culture, the intellectual pursuit of knowledge pertaining to works of art, their creation, their meanings, and their reception. Historians of medieval art generally focus on western European, Byzantine or Islamic art; their expertise may lie anywhere between the third and the fifteenth centuries. The first comprehensive work on medieval art appeared in 1823: Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d’Agincourt’s six-volume study entitled Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XIVe (see Daniela mondini, Mittelalter im Bild: Seroux d’Agincourt und die Kunsthistoriographie um 1800, 2005). Two important things should be noted about d’Agincourt’s work: the title, which, in the tradition of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, takes as a given that the quality of art declined in the Middle Ages; and the structure of the study itself, completed in the tradition of the Roman school of Christian archaeology (W. Eugene Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico, 2000, vol. 3, 215–29, at 216). In Austria, Rudolf von Eitelberger von Edelberg founded the Vienna School of Art History, which ushered in the reign of positivism in the history of medieval art; the eighteen-volume publication Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, which von Edelberg co-edited with Albert Ilg, gathered between its covers a selection of various medieval texts relevant for the study of medieval and Renaissance art (Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 217). It was from this Viennese school that Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl emerged (for an essay on Riegl’s scholarship as well as for a comprehensive bibliography of his work,

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see Margaret Olin, “Alois Riegl (1858–1905),” Medieval Scholarship, 231–44). Wickhoff’s main contribution lay in his passionate defense of the study of periods other than the Renaissance; he argued for the continuity between Roman and (incorrectly dated to the second and third centuries) Christian painting (see Roman Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early Christian Painting, 1900, translation of Wickhoff’s introduction to his commentary written for Die Wiener Genesis, 1895).The importance of riegl’s Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie, the work that established the term Kunstwollen (“artistic volition”), lies in the fact that, in dealing both with fine and applied arts, it traces the development – not the decline – of fine arts from late antiquity to the eighth century (1901). In Germany, two late nineteenth-century art historians – Wilhelm Vöge and Adolph Goldschmidt – completed work that was highly influential in developing various methods of inquiry into medieval art (Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt and the Study of Medieval Art, 1996). Goldschmidt in particular is to be credited for his contributions to the development of objective formal analysis and his scrupulous methods of classification of works of art (Kathryn Brush, “Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944),” Medieval Scholarship, 245–58, at 253); his focus on illuminated manuscripts and ivories yielded the four volumes of Die Elfenbeinskulpturen (1914–1926) and the two-volume Die deutsche Buchmalerei (1928) on Carolingian and Ottonian book illumination. In France, scholars formulated the positivist methodology called archaéologie médiévale, which approached medieval churches as written documents that stood witness to stages of construction and were used to attribute a given building to a particular “school” from a particular region (Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 221). Arcisse de Caumont proposed seven such regional schools (further on de Caumont, see Arcisse de Caumont (1801–1873): érudit normand et fondateur de l’archéologie française, ed. Vincent Juhel, 2004). On the other hand, de Caumont’s contemporary, Adolphe Napoléon Didron, and his intellectual successor Émile Mâle, focused on an iconographic approach to medieval art. Still classic, Mâle’s three volumes (L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898 [corrected edition 1902]; L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France: étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1908; and L’art religieux du XIIe siècle en France; étude sur les origines de l’iconographie du moyen âge, 1922) explore the meaning of medieval objects through the lens of literary texts. It is important to note that this approach was influential in the study of Byzantine as well as of western art, seen especially in the work of André Grabar (on Grabar’s work see, most recently,

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Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo: Vizantiia i Drevniaia Rus: k 100-letiiu Andreia Nikolaevicha Grabara [1896–1990], ed. A.L. Batalov et al., 1999). If Goldschmidt wrote about Carolingian and Ottonian art, the prolific Henri Focillon limited his definition of medieval architecture to Romanesque and Gothic buildings. Unlike Mâle, Focillon was a formalist, but his focus lay in the study of monumental edifices and architectural sculpture: this is evident in Art d’Occident (1938), which has been called “the most comprehensive statement of Focillon’s views on the art of the Middle Ages” (Walter Cahn, “Henri Focillon [1881–1943],” Medieval Scholarship, 259–71, at 261). Focillon’s student, Louis Grodecki, continued the study of Gothic architecture, and made a particular contribution to the examination of stained glass; a number of his studies appeared in the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi series, among them the monumental Les vitraux de Saint-Denis: étude sur le vitrail au XIIe siècle, 1976. American scholarship is immensely indebted to the work of German ex-patriots, Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky among them. Krautheimer, an authority on early Christian and Byzantine art, who worked in the iconographic tradition, stressed the importance of considering socio-historical contexts in the study of medieval buildings, and inquiring into the roles of patrons who were directly associated with these buildings (“Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Studies 1942, discussed in Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” 2000, 223). Panofsky, who wrote on medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art, drew a sharp distinction between medieval and Renaissance sensibilities. A brilliant iconographer, he continues to inspire contemporary scholarship; among his key works on medieval art are Renaissance and Renascenses in Western Art (2nd ed. 1965), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures (1946), and Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). Panofsky is also to be credited with the formulation of the iconological approach, which, much like later work that would involve reception theory, emphatically separates intent from content: Panofsky urged art historians to engage with symbolic values of a work of art, which “may even emphatically differ from what [the artist] consciously intended to express” (Studies in Iconology, 1939, 8). Two American-born scholars, Charles Rufus Morey and Arthur Kingsley Porter, contributed greatly to the enrichment of the discipline. Morey, the founder of the Index of Christian Art, was a specialist in early Christian art who was particularly interested in the plasticity of ancient themes continued and transformed into early Christian motifs (see Early Christian Art: an Outline of the Evolution of Style and Iconography in Sculpture

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and Painting from Antiquity to the Eighth Century, 1942). Porter specialized primarily in Romanesque art: his ten-volume study Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923) and the four-volume Lombard Architecture (1915–1917) are still among the classics of the discipline; he is said to have “singlehandedly launched the study of medieval architecture and sculpture in the United States as a serious discipline” (Linda Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter [1883–1933],” Medieval Scholarship, 2000, 273–86, at 283). Although formal and iconographic analyses continue to form important bases for the discipline of art history, and object catalogues (such as those compiled by Goldschmidt) continue to provide extremely useful information, a number of other methods of inquiry emerged in the study of medieval art. For instance, the Lithuanian-born Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), a Marxist, ventured to define socio-political contexts for medieval objects and to explore the interaction between the religious and the secular; in the preface to the third volume of his selected papers entitled Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval Art, Schapiro writes: “I have assumed that religious art, like religious cult, is not just an expressive representation of sacred texts and a symbolizing of religious concepts (largely mâle’s thesis – E.G.); it also projects ideas, attitudes and fantasies shaped in secular life and given concrete form by imaginative, I may say, poetic minds” (1980, XV). In shifting the focus from text to image, Schapiro paved the way for scholars like Michael Camille who, in his The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989), argued that images themselves constructed various ideologies and generated meaning. Close scrutiny of images as generators of meaning, of course, is impossible without the study of political, social, literary and religious histories. Hence, semiotics, along with theories of narrative and reception, form the basis for recent approaches to medieval art: in addition to Camille’s work, see the writings of Suzanne Lewis (such as Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse, 1995) or Kathryn A. Smith’s Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (2003). Smith’s book not only highlights the importance art historians afford to studying patronage as an integral part of a work’s creation, but also points to the recent interest in a feminist approach to the history of medieval art and in a visual history of medieval women: among the important work published in this field are Jeffrey Hamburger’s The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (1998), as well as Madeline Caviness’s Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (2001). That Caviness’s book engages with Lacanian theory points to the fact that psychoanalysis played an important role in the development of art his-

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torical scholarship. From early works, such as Ernst Kris’ “A Psychotic Artist of the Middle Ages” (in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, 1952, 118–27), grew the interest in the history and psychology of perception as well as in the nature of representation (see, e. g., Ernst Gombrich, “Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form,” Aspects of Form, a Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, ed. Lancelot Law White, 1951, 209–24). The recentlypublished Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (ed. Robert Nelson, 2000) examines the idea of visual perception, of the act of seeing and of its importance to the study of artistic production; especially useful for the student of medieval art are the contributions by Nelson (“To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium”), Cynthia Hahn (“Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality”), and Michael Camille (“Before the Gaze: the Internal Senses and Late Medieval Visuality”). The connection between the visual and the cognitive within the contexts of visionary and contemplative discourses has been recently explored in Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (1999). In addition to studying the style, the content, and the cultural context of a work of art, and in addition to scrutinizing the creator of the work and its patron, art historians are interested in the beholder of the work as well. So, in “Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers,” Caviness writes about the need to “contextualize the medieval experience of a work of art by constructing […] a group [of viewers] that might have had a shared experience of the work” (A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2006, 1–43). Such analyses, especially when they concern visual imagery accompanied by words, often explore the visual and the textual literacy of the viewer (see Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 [1985]: 26–49). Recently, the definition of “performative reading,” in which “the mise en images shaped the reader’s reception and visualization of the […] text,” and “the images were conceived to facilitate a specific kind of reading of the text, either by individuals or in small groups,” was put forth by Pamela Sheingorn and Robert Clark (“Performative Reading: The Illustrated Manuscripts of Arnoul Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion,” European Medieval Drama 6 [2002]: 129–54, esp. 129–30). “Performative reading,” which considers play manuscripts, signals scholarly interest in exploring the relationship between medieval performance and visual representation (see Richard K. Emmerson, “Visualizing Performance: The Miniatures of Besancon MS 579 (Jour de Jugement),” Exemplaria 11 [1990]: 245–72, on manuscript illumination, and Elina Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntinge: Performing the

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Dance of Death,” Studies in Iconography 27 [2006]: 1–43, on murals and largescale panels). The study of the history of medieval art is multifaceted: it is engaged with the study of forms and symbols, codes and signs, words and images; it inquires into the history of ideas; it examines social, political and religious contexts; it comprises gender and cultural studies, feminist and Marxist theories; informed by the work in psychoanalysis, reaching out to the field of performance studies, it moves beyond the study of the object to inquire into the histories of patronage and reception, and beyond the confines of the field in quest of interdisciplinarity. B. History of Research The discipline of art history as we understand it now is fairly young, and historiographic studies of medieval art have only recently come to the fore. One of the key historiographic sources is Eugene Kleinbauer’s introduction to Part III of Medieval Scholarship (2000, 215–229); although his essay centers on the six art historians to be discussed in the edited volume, Kleinbauer also provides a thorough context for the emergence of those scholars. The choice of the scholars – Alois Riegl (1858–1950), Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944), Henri Focillon (1881–1943), Arthur Kingsley porter (1883–1933), Louis Grodecki (1910–1982) (discussed by Caviness) and Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989) (a scholar of Armenian Byzantine art discussed by Nina G. Garsoian) – was dictated by the fact that their work, in Kleinbauer’s own words, “typif[ies] a number of truly major developments in the discipline of medieval art history as it has emerged over the past one hundred and ten years” (227). These developments receive a clear, brief, and sophisticated treatment in his introduction, while a fuller narrative that embraces art history as a discipline in general, but includes generous material on the Middle Ages in particular, is fleshed out in Kleinbauer’s introduction to the edited volume entitled Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (1989; 1971, 1–105); in addition, see Wayne Dynes’ “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Art,” published in James M. Powell’s Medieval Studies: An Introduction (1976; 313–2); Paul Frankl’s The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (1960); Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960); Harry Bober’s introduction to Mâle’s Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (1978); and Tina Waldeier Bizzarro’s Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (1992). These and other sources are cited in the latest essay to date that provides an in-depth historiographic overview of the field: Conrad Rudolph’s intro-

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duction to his edited volume, A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (2006), which collects thirty essays that address the history and theory of medieval art. Rudolph’s essay is a sweeping account of developments in the study of medieval historiography. He begins his account with what he terms the “pre-history” of the study of medieval art, and locates it in “the formation and continuation of the authority of Classical art” (2). He briefly considers the role of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550, revised in 1568) in the formation of the discipline, noting Vasari’s “naturalistic and biographical paradigms and cyclical model of stylistic development” (5) and therefore his perception of the Middle Ages as an epoch of decline. The section entitled “Reformation and its Aftermath” inquires into the work of John Leland (1506–1552) and other English antiquarians such as William Camden (1551–1623) and Robert Bruce Cotton (1571–1631), and discusses the development of the art market on the Continent and the advent of collecting; it is followed by the discussion of Enlightenment views on Gothic architecture in England, Germany, and France, and the introduction to Winckelmann’s work. In exploring nineteenth-century developments, Rudolph considers Romantic reactions to medieval art as well as the then new scholarly focus on “periodization, dating, regionalism, and the use of exegesis in interpretation” (21). For the rest of his introduction, Rudolph zeroes in on the work of scholars who are considered to be instrumental in the development of the study of medieval art (from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc [1814–1879] to Schapiro [1904–1996]) and describes the establishment of seminal organizations, journals and indices, encyclopedias, catalogues and corpora. He concludes with a discussion of the “new art history,” and the “adoption of interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that have transformed other areas of the humanities and social sciences” (36), from literary criticism to social art history. Rudolph’s volume contains a number of valuable contributions to the historiography of medieval art (for a thorough evaluation of the book see Smith’s review on the College Art Association Web site [http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1188; last accessed on Feb. 21, 2009]). A different approach is taken by Herbert Kessler, who, in his essay “On the State of Medieval Art History” (Art Bulletin 70, 2 [1988]: 166–87), provides a survey of the main concerns and themes in medieval art; current – along with long-established – research on these themes is cited in the footnotes. The essay, which eventually gave rise to Kessler’s Seeing Medieval Art (2004), therefore provides less of a historiography of medieval art study per se than a review of various developments in the art of the Middle Ages, accompanied

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by extensive bibliography (subsections of Kessler’s essay are telling: “Periodization,” “The Medieval Art Object,” “Production,” “The Place of Art” etc); for a critique of this approach by Lucy Freeman Sandler (who points out that Kessler’s essay does not specifically address current research in the field, and characterizes it instead as “a historical survey of the period from late antiquity to the beginning of the Renaissance” [506]) as well as Kessler’s rebuttal, see “An Exchange on ‘the State of Medieval Art History’” (The Art Bulletin 71.3 [1989]: 506–07). In addition, a number of historiographic studies that focus on specific media or particular approaches to and topics in medieval art, have appeared in the past two decades; two essays in the JEGP (2006) are particularly useful: Eric Palazzo’s “Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages: Survey of Research (1980–2003) and Some Reflections on Method” (170–84), and Richard K. Emmerson’s extremely useful overview of recent research on interdisciplinary approaches to illuminated manuscripts in “Middle English Literature and Illustrated Manuscripts: New Approaches to the Disciplinary and the Interdisciplinary” (118–36). For a discussion of the application of the iconographic method of inquiry to medieval architecture, see Paul Crossley, “Medieval Architecture and Meaning: The Limits of Iconography” (The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1019, Special Issue on Gothic Art [1988]: 116–21); for an essay that reviews literature on Romanesque studies, see Ilene H. Forsyth, “The Monumental Arts of the Romanesque Period: Recent Research” (The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. Elizabeth C. Parker with Mary B. Shephard, 1992, 3–25). Finally, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies” by Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel (AHR 103.3 [1998]: 677–704) must be noted: the essay probes into a peculiarly twentieth-century American concept of the Middle Ages – specifically, what authors see as “the recent revival of interest in strange and extreme forms of belief and behavior now perceived as characteristic of medieval civilization” (677). Two review studies, which appeared in 1996 and 1997, focus on approaches to medieval art that isolate early medieval and Byzantine art from the rest of the medieval “canon.” Lawrence Nees’s introduction to the special issue of Speculum (72. 4 [1997]: 959–69), entitled “Approaches to Early-Medieval Art,” addresses the state of early medieval art history, and discusses “romanticized historiographical emphasis on the ‘wandering peoples’ in the discussion of early-medieval culture in general and art in particular” (964). One of the effects of such an approach, Nees concludes, which implies ethnically-based divisions in the early medieval visual culture, is the emphatic separation of Byzantine art from the general developments in medieval art

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at large (Nees finds particular fault with art history survey texts, such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages, which was at the time edited by Fred S. Kleiner and Richard G. Tansey, 1996). Robert S. Nelson’s “Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art” (Gesta 35,1 [1996]: 3–11) surveys texts written between the mid-nineteenth and the end of the twentieth century and concludes that “the alterity of Byzantine art and the denial of its coevalness with Western medieval art have been features of general histories of art for 150 years” (8). An effective historiographic survey of Byzantine art, Charles Barber’s “Art History” (ed. Jonathan Harris, 2005, 147–56), canvasses a variety of developments in and provides a variety of references for the study of the art of Byzantium. Barber cites both printed and online resources for research (such as the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, the Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, the catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks Library and the Index of Christian Art), and outlines the crucial survey texts available to the student of Byzantine culture, from Nikodim Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin considéré principalement dans les miniatures (2 vol., 1886–1891) to Robin Cormack’s Byzantine Art (2000). He proceeds to point out the importance of primary text collections (such as Cyril Mango’s The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources and Documents, 1972), as well as exhibitions and museum and exhibition catalogues (such as Byzantium: Faith and Power [1261–1557], edited by Helen C. Evans or Nezih Firatli’s La sculpture Byzantine figurée au Musée Archéologique d’Istanbul, 1990) for the study of Byzantine art. Barber subsequently considers monographs on church architecture and its decoration (e. g., Robert Ousterhout, The Architecture of the Kariye Camii in Istanbul, 1987; The Kariye Djami, 4 vol., ed. Paul Underwood, 1966–1975; Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 1984), literature on illuminated manuscripts in general (from the aforementioned study by Kondakov to Kurt Weitzmann’s Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration, 1947 and John Lowden’s The Octateuchs: A Study in Byzantine Manuscript Illustration, 1992, which questions Weitzmann’s approach) and select manuscripts in particular (Suzy Dufrenne and Paul Canart, Die Bibel des Patricius Leo: Codex Reginensis Graecus I B, 1988); on icons (e. g., Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, 1952, 2nd ed., 1982); and on sculpture (André Grabar, Sculptures byzantines de Constantinople [IVe-Xe siècle], 1963 and Sculptures byzantines du Moyen Age [XIe–XIVe siècle], 1976). Finally, Barber points out that while extensive work has been done on early and especially middle Byzantine periods, the late Byzantine period has not yet generated enough scholarship. Because of the constraints of space, this entry provides, per force, a limited introduction to the historiography of medieval art. Nonetheless, it is

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perhaps prudent to note the obvious: that the concerns, methods, theories, problems and issues that occupy historians of medieval art are not necessarily unique to their particular field of study. For an excellent series of essays that engage topics relevant to medievalists and others, see Critical Terms in Art History (ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 1996, 2nd ed., 2003) and the anthology of critical texts in the history of art from Vasari to Oguibe entitled Art History and Its Methods: a Critical Anthology, ed. Eric Fernie, 1995). Finally, for a discussion of whether “the academic discipline of art history no longer disposes of a compelling model of historical treatment,” see Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? (1987) translated from the second edition of Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (1984). Select Bibliography Charles Barber, “Art History,” Palgrave Advances in Byzantine History, ed. Jonathan Harris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 147–156; Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts, ed. W. Eugene Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, rpt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).

Elina Gertsman

Astronomical Instruments A. Introduction Over 150 astronomical instruments have survived from the European Middle Ages (In this article we are dealing with the period from ca. 950 to ca. 1500). The European tradition is closely related to that of the Islamic Middle Ages (see David King, In Synchrony with the Heavens, vol. 2, 2005), and, in many cases, instrument-types and even individual instruments are directly or indirectly inspired by these. For both European and Islamic instrumentation, the associated textual traditions are important, not least for instrument-types of which no examples survive. By far the most common medieval instrument is the astrolabe – a two-dimensional model of the three-dimensional heavens that one can hold in one’s hand. The celestial part or rete – for the sun and the stars – can rotate over a terrestrial part, a set of plates for different latitudes –

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with markings for the meridian, the horizon, and altitude circles up to the zenith. The astrolabe was used primarily for timekeeping, and this holds for the other principal instruments, the horary quadrant and sundial. For computing the positions of the sun, moon and planets, either astronomical tables or an instrument known as the equatorium could be used. Other less common instruments intended for observational purposes include the armillary sphere and the torquetum. B. Instruments No comprehensive overview of medieval European instruments exists; indeed, there are no published descriptions of the majority of such instruments. Numerous instruments of different kinds preserved in Oxford have been surveyed by Robert Gunther (Early Science in Oxford, 5 vol., vol. 2, Astronomy, 1923), and later the same scholar published close to 40 medieval astrolabes (The Astrolabes of the World, 2 vol., dealing respectively with Eastern and European pieces [1932, rpt. 1976]). Most of the instruments discussed by Gunther have not been investigated again since his time, and not because his descriptions were exhaustive or without fault. Brief but useful introductions to medieval instrumentation are by Francis Maddison (“Early Astronomical and Mathematical instruments: A Brief Survey of Sources and Modern Studies,” History of Sciences 2 [1963]: 17–50) and Emmanuel Poulle (“Les instruments astronomiques de l’Occident latin aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” 15 [1972]: 27–40). A more thorough overview of instrument-types with a survey of makers and their works from Germany and the Netherlands was presented by Ernst Zinner (Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts, 1956, rpt. 1972), although the descriptions of individual instruments are restricted to a few lines. The same author published a survey of European fixed sundials (Alte Sonnenuhren an europäischen Gebäuden (1964), of which only very few are medieval. Zinner’s works are still unsurpassed. On transmission from the Islamic world to medieval Europe see Astronomical Instruments in Medieval Spain: Their Influence in Europe, ed. Juan Vernet and Julio Samsó (1985); David King, “Islamic Astronomical Instruments and some Newly-Discovered Example of Transmission to Europe,” Mediterranean: Splendour of the Medieval Mediterranean: 13th–15th Centuries, ed. Elisenda Guedea, 2004, 400–23 and 606–07); also various studies on the elusive Jeber (Jâbir ibn Aflah) by Richard Lorch (Arabic Mathematical Sciences: Instruments, Texts, Transmission [1995]). Certain medieval instrument types have recently been shown to be Islamic in origin, although no Islamic examples survive, and we must rely on the textual tradition. Thus, for example, the

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popular quadrans vetus, a universal horary quadrant with movable cursor is an early Islamic invention (King, “A Vetustissimus Arabic Treatise on the Quadrans Vetus,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 33 [2002]: 1–19, also King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIa). No such conclusive evidence is available for the elusive medieval English navicula de Venetiis, a universal device for timekeeping by the sun, although we have a 9th-century Arabic text on a more complicated universal device for timekeeping by the stars (King, “14th-Century England or 9th-Century Baghdad? New Insights on the Origins of the Elusive Astronomical Instrument Called the Navicula de Venetiis,” Centaurus 45 [2003]: 204–26, also King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIb). C. Texts on Instruments The texts on different unusual kinds of instruments by a single individual, in this case, the early 14th-century English scholar Richard of Wallingford, have been published in an exemplary study by John North (Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Writings with Introductions, English Translation and Commentary, 1976). Likewise exemplary is a detailed account of all medieval equatoria and related texts by Emmanuel Poulle (Les instruments de la théorie des planètes selon Ptolemée: Équatoires et horlogerie planétaire du XIIIe au XVIe siècle, 2 vols., 1980). A new edition of Chaucer’s treatise on the astrolabe is now available in A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol VI, The Prose Treatises, pt.1, A Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Sigmund Eisner (2002). Yet no survey of all medieval English astrolabes in the Chaucerian tradition exists because scholars prefer texts to instruments and think that the former are more important than the latter. Because of certain features – such as the widespread quatrefoil decoration on astrolabe retes and the lack of place-names on astrolabe plates for different latitudes – it is often difficult to attribute a particular instrument to a specific geographical location; there are, for example, pieces that could be Spanish or French or Italian. Various centres of instrumentation arose in which the attribution is not problematic; the school of Jean Fusoris in Paris (ca. 1400) has been studied by Emmanuel Poulle (Un constructeur d’instruments astronomiques au 15e siècle: Jean Fusoris, 1963) and some 45 instruments surviving from the school of 15th-century Vienna have been listed by David King (Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ, 2007, 234–58). Reliable catalogues of the major collections with detailed descriptions of individual instruments are few in number and serve Greenwich (Koenraad van Cleempoel et al., Astrolabes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Astrolabes in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2005); London British Museum (F. A. B. Ward, A Catalogue of Scientific Instruments in the …

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British Museum, 1981; based on information previously recorded by Derek J. de Solla Price); Munich (Burkhardt Stautz, Die Astrolabiensammlungen des Deutschen Museums und des Bayerischen Nationalmuseums, 1999); and Nuremberg (David A. King, “Die Astrolabiensammlung des Germanischen Nationalmuseums,” Focus Behaim-Globus, ed. Gerhard Bott, 2 vols., 1992, I, 101–14, and II, 568–602). Often only astrolabes are catalogued and other related instruments, particularly quadrants and pocket sundials, are overlooked. Numerous other catalogues could be mentioned in which Islamic or Renaissance European instruments predominate, there being so few surviving medieval European examples. Thus, for example, of the two dozen astrolabes discussed in careful detail by Salvador García Franco (Catálogo crítico de los astrolabios in España, 1945), not a single one can be classified as medieval; the only surviving Catalonian and Spanish instruments just happen to be preserved in collections outside Spain. The potential of astronomical instruments as historical sources has been stressed by David King (“Astronomical Instruments between East and West,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. Harry Kühnel, 1994, 143–98; and id., In Synchrony, Pt. XIIIa; the latter dealing with astrolabes). Some individual instruments of particular historical interest have now been studied in exhaustive detail. Thus, for example, we have lengthy descriptions of the earliest European astrolabe from late-10th-century Catalonia (collected articles in The Oldest Latin Astrolabe, ed. Wesley Stevens, Guy Beaujouan and Anthony J. Turner, Physis: Rivista di storia della scienza, N. S. 32:2–3,1995, 189–450; with several contributions of doubtful value); an astrolabe from Catalonia datable ca. 1300 (David A. King and Kurt Maier, “The Medieval Catalan Astrolabe of the Society of Antiquaries, London,” From Baghdad to Barcelona: Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences in Honour of Prof. Juan Vernet, ed. Josep Casulleras and Julio Samsó, 2 vol., 1996, II, 673–718); a non-functional 14th-century Italian astrolabe copied from a highly sophisticated Islamic prototype (King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XIIId); a 14th-century Spanish astrolabe with inscriptions in Hebrew, Latin and Arabic (King, In Synchrony, 2005, pt. XV); an astrolabe, probably made in Erfurt, commissioned by the treasurer of the Stiftskirche in Einbeck (King, “An Astrolabe from Einbeck datable ca. 1330,” to appear in a Festschrift for Menso Folkerts, ed. Andreas Kühne, Paul Kunitzsch, and Richard P. Lorch); a 14th-century Picard astrolabe with numbers written in monastic ciphers (King, The Ciphers of the Monks: A Forgotten Number-Notation of the Middle Ages, 2001, 131–51 and 391–419); an early-14th-century astrolabic quadrant (Elly Dekker, “An Unrecorded Medieval Astrolabe Quadrant from ca. 1300,” Annals of Science 52 [1995]: 1–47); and the remarkable astro-

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labe presented by the astronomer Regiomontanus to his patron Cardinal Bessarion in 1462 with a complex acrostic in its dedication (King, Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas, 31–46 and 259–74). A catalogue of the entire corpus of surviving medieval instruments, still mainly unpublished, and a survey of the related literature, also mainly unpublished, is a desideratum for the future. Since this would be such a monumental international project (previous ventures by Derek Price and David King did not achieve a publishable handlist or a catalogue, respectively), regional overviews (say, detailed descriptions of all medieval English instruments, or all Fusoris astrolabes, or all 15th-century Vienna instruments) or surveys of all examples of a specific instrument-genre (say, all naviculas, or all torqueta) would be more feasible undertakings. In all cases, the associated textual tradition should not be overlooked. Select Bibliography Robert T. Gunther, The Astrolabes of the World, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932; rpt in 1 vol., London: The Holland Press, 1976; long out of date but still the major work on medieval European astrolabes); David A. King, “Astronomical Instruments between East and West,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. Harry Kühnel (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), 143–98; David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004–05; although mainly dealing with Islamic instruments, this work contains substantial new material on the medieval European tradition); John North, Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Writings with Introductions, English Translation and Commentary, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976); Ernst Zinner, Deutsche und Niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1956, rpt. 1972).

David A. King

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B Bakhtinian Discourse Theory, Heteroglossia A. Introduction Љ Miha“loviљ Љ BAHTiЉ N) (born NoMikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Mihail vember 17, 1895; died March 7, 1975) was not a medievalist per se. However, the theories of discourse and the novel that he composed in the 1930s and 40s have found significant reception among medievalists since the early 1980s with appearance of Michael Holquist’s and Caryl Emerson’s translation The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (1981) and the subsequent wider reception of Hélène Iswolsky’s translation of Rabelais and His World (1968). Dialogic Imagination is based on a collection of Bakhtin’s essays written during the 1930s and 40s, which appeared together for the first time in Russian as Questions of Literature and Aesthetics (Vopros« literatur« i Њste tiki) in 1975; thus placing the full emergence of Bakhtinian studies in the early 1980s is not unique to the English speaking world. Dialogic Imagination contains the four essays, “Discourse in the Novel” (“Slovo v romane,” 1934–1935), “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (“Form« vremeni i hronotopa v romane,” 1937–1938), “From the Pre-History of Novelistic Discourse” (“Iz pred«storii romannogo slova,” 1940), and “Epic and Novel” (“Ѓpos i roman,” 1941). These essays, along with Rabelais and His World (Tvorљestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaѕ kulцtura sredneve kovцѕ i Renessansa, 1965), contain the five key concepts of Bakhtinian discourse theory most relevant to medieval studies: dialogism, heteroglossia, the chronotope, the carnivalesque, and the grotesque. It is important to note, however, that Bakhtin had limited access to medieval texts and only really glances the medieval period as he explores the development of the novel, which culminates, in Bakhtin’s theoretical oeuvre, with the work of Dostoyevsky. B. Theory of the Novel Bakhtin seeks “the authentic spirit of the novel” in texts that “anticipate the more essential historical aspects in the development of the novel in modern times” (“Epic and Novel,” 22). He identifies two lines of stylistic development in the move from monologic to a fully dialogic novelistic discourse,

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that of the First and Second Line novel (“Discourse in the Novel,” 366–76). Bakhtin locates the courtly romance as the site of transition between these two stylistic lines and his theory has, therefore, become a focus of medieval studies. He asserts that the novel emerged out of a gradual development from single-voiced (monologic) to double-voiced (dialogic) literary discourse in Western literature (“Discourse in the Novel,” 259–422). Monologic discourse is the language of First Line novels and dialogic discourse is the language of Second Line novels. Bakhtin’s theory holds that only one cultural code or one voice operates within the monologic text. The novel, on the other hand, is double-voiced or dialogic. Bakhtin locates the beginnings of the First Line of novelistic development in the novellas, satires, biographies and autobiographies of late antiquity. He explicates Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (ca. 160 C.E.) as an example of the First Line of the development of novelistic discourse. He also places the medieval vitae and some courtly epics in this category, the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue, and Gottfried von Straßburg, for instance. Bakhtin employs the term heteroglossia to characterize the multiple voices and various cultural codes interacting with one another in the novel. Some courtly romances contain heteroglossic and dialogic discourse and are regarded as novels. First Line novels have dialogic or heteroglossic elements like word plays or parodies but more advanced forms of heteroglossic discourse, like the inclusion of non-literary discourses, such as the language of medical science or animal husbandry, remain outside of the narrative. Bakhtin then concludes that the dialogical discourse functions in the background of First Line novels, where the idealizing language of the narrative and the everyday language of the world in which the narrative emerges conflict (“Discourse in the Novel,” 376). According to his theory, the Second Line of novelistic development produces the full-fledged dialogic and heteroglossic novel. Bakhtin describes heteroglossia as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324). Heteroglossia denotes language alien to a given context, which is employed to express intentions that conflict with what might be generally understood by the communication. The language of this discourse is double-voiced. It serves two speakers at once and expresses their conflicting intentions. In the same word or expression, the literal meaning articulated by the fictional characters in the work collides with the covert intentions of the author. The dialogic utterance expresses two voices, two meanings and two perspectives simultaneously. These voices charge the dialogic expression and react to one another within that expression (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324–25). Hetero-

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glossia and dialogic discourse differ therein that the double-voiced word or dialogic expression provides a space in which conflicting discourses collide to produce one word or expression with two possible meanings. Heteroglossia simply denotes the concurrence of conflicting discourses not their interaction. The arrangement of heteroglossic and dialogic elements expresses authorial intention. Bakhtin’s author intentionally subverts her/his own intentions. That is, Bakhtin’s author consciously activates dialogic discourse and crafts a language whose meaning strays intentionally beyond his/ her control. The author provides the reader with an “interruptive,” a word or expression which points to the plurality of its meaning. The resulting instability of meaning in the text remains, to a certain degree, under the control of the author and his text cannot be conceived as something totally subject to the whims of the reader. Bakhtin notes that the literary consciousness of the authors and audience of the courtly romances formed during a period of extensive cultural exchange. Individual European cultures began assimilating elements of foreign languages and cultures into their own. The exchange between the French and the Germans exemplifies this process. Bakhtin asserts that this cultural assimilation impacted on the literary production of the period and produced a new literary consciousness: “Translation, reworking, re-conceptualizing, re-accenting – manifold degrees of mutual orientation with alien discourse, alien intentions – these were the activities shaping the literary consciousness that created the chivalric romance” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 377). Bakhtin regards Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as the first truly dialogic novel and one of the earliest examples of a Second Line “real” novel. According to Bakhtin, Wolfram’s particular brand of heteroglossia, a language that revels in the mixing of high and low discourses, inaugurated the predilection for this type of discourse in the German literary tradition (“Discourse in the Novel,” 324–25). C. The Chronotope Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope represents the third equally important contribution to literary theory discussed here. He uses the term chronotope to describe the phenomenon of the organization and interaction of time and space in a given text (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” 84–85). Arthur Groos (“Dialogic Transpositions: The Grail Hero Wins a Wife,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, 1993, 257–76.) describes the chronotope as “the differentiation of discourse through the articulation of time and space” (“Dialogic Transpositions,” 262). The degree of chronotopic complexity, as with the notion of

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single and double-voiced discourse, depends on the genre and line of development. Single-voiced or monologic forms have very simple and distinctly separate chronotopic levels. Bakhtin identifies the adventure as the most common chronotope. During an adventure the rules of time and space change. The site of the adventure is enchanted and unfamiliar. The events that occur in this space are of an indeterminate duration. Pure chance usually governs the switch from the “realistic” stable chronotopes of the narrative (the court) to the adventure chronotope (the wilderness) (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 87–92). D. The Carnivalesque In his essay “Epic and the Novel” Bakhtin distinguishes the novel further by ascribing an intrinsically subversive element to it. The novel differentiates itself from epic, in that epic relies on the notion of past and tradition as sacred, where as the novel continually functions to destabilize such notions (“Epic and Novel,” 15). Continuing in this vein, Bakhtin develops the notion of the carnivalesque, “In the world of the carnival the awareness of the people’s immortality is combined with the realization that established authority and truth are relative” (Rabelais and his World, 10). Like the novel, for Bakhtin the “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete” (Rabelais and his World, 109). The carnivalesque unfolds as class struggle with lower elements of society, discourse, and the body itself. The latter aspect being central to Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, also developed in his work on Rabelais, in which the body itself, particularly the body in a state of openness, expulsion or transformation such as during eating, drinking, copulating, defecating, urinating, menstruating, birthing and dying and all of the fluids associated with these activities become expressions of class struggle and social anxiety. Bakhtin characterizes the literary mode which describes these activities as grotesque realism, and ascribes to it an essentially socially transgressive quality. E. Critical Reception Thomas J. Farrell observes that “Bahktin hovers around medieval topics, he usually stops at the threshold” (Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, 1995). As useful as Bahktinian theory is for exploring medieval literature, there are many gaps to fill and pitfalls to avoid when applying it. Bakhtin constructs the history of the novel from back to front. He begins with narrative strategies specific to Dostoyevsky and then searches for traces of these characteristics elsewhere. Bakhtin mainly looks for a mixing of genres. Heteroglossia is

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the language produced by this pastiche. Heteroglossic language is inherently dialogic, that is, double voiced. Readers of Bakhtin often overlook the fact that discourse does not need to be heteroglossic in order to be dialogized. Moreover, neither of these elements, the heteroglossic nor the dialogic, account for the distinctive evolution of narrative practice that remains far more important for the development of the novel and must play a role in any consideration or definition of novelistic discourse. In “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid” (Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, 1985), Cesare Serge points out that “experimental and heteroglot texts constitute, outside the novel’s development but also within it, a discontinuous, frequently interrupted series,” while the romance as narrative form “develops by means of its very transformations, uninterruptedly and coherently to the present day” (26). The fetishization of polyphonic discourse as rigidly defined by modern reception of Bakhtin obscures the larger role that medieval romances play in the development of the novel. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia presumes that the competing discourses arise from the mixing of discursive genres organized according to social stations. The language of the court competes with scientific narrative or the language of peasants, creating multiple perspectives that serve to destabilize one another. This theory, steeped in Marxist ideology, makes too much of the social milieu. The changing perspectives in any text, regardless of the idiolect employed, can generate this heteroglossia, or a web of competing meanings. Moreover, in many “chivalric novels” the generation of dialogic discourse does not result from heteroglossia but rather from the introduction of metonymical symbolic import, which relies on the introduction of time and internal progression in the text. Bakhtin posits his theory of time in the novel, the chronotope, independently of his theory of heteroglossia. Although his theory explores the interrelationship of the generation of multiple meanings and the portrayal of time, too often, critics employing his theories treat these aspects separately. The varying discourses must be inserted into a progression over time in order to activate the social import and context that distinguishes them from one another; simple heterogeneity of discourse does not produce multiple meanings. The formulation of novelistic discourse based on socially or stylistically distinguishable genres of language does not engage the competing medieval literary conceptual models behind the emergence of heteroglossia. Bakhtin fails to consider fully the role of allegory or medieval historiography in the development of the novelistic discourse in the “chivalric novels.” In fact, this omission accounts for the problematic position of chivalric verse narrative in his theory, because these were the very narrative forces informing the ro-

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mances. Recent scholarship has shown that the gradual separation of historical and imaginative literatures in the 12th and 13th centuries was the pivotal moment in creation of both the novel and modern historiography (see for example, Gabrielle M.Spiegel, “Social Change and Literary Language: The Texualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 [1987]: 149–74.) Moreover, in many medieval texts, the role of time in the generation of a “double voiced” discourse depends on the development of religious and spiritual conceptions. Since Bakhtin’s theory does not account for these impulses, nor even address the Bible as literary text within the framework of his theory, it hardly provides an accurate description of discourse in the romances. Moreover, already in many presumed First Line “novels” the dissolution of the chronotopic boundaries between the various adventure spaces thwart the linear progressive model that Bakhtin applies to them. The most widely applied of Bakhtin’s theories, the carnivalesque, is also the most widely assailed. The assertion of the carnival as social transgressive represents perhaps the weakest aspect of the concept. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out in Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981), “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare’s Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool” (148). In their work The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, then, seek the transgressive elements of carnivalesque in the grotesque. For medievalists however, the notion of the grotesque has a history that precedes Bakhtin and conflicts with his theory. As John Ganim notes, “Bakhtin’s grotesque, and his Middle Ages, intervene in [a] long history of spurious associations […] his own definition of the medieval was not meant to be historically accurate; instead, it was meant to be itself carnivalesque and dialogic, responding to and parodying definitions which had attempted to repress the anarchic energies he admired” (“Medieval Literature as Monster: The Grotesque Before and After Bakhtin,” Exemplaria 7.1 [1995]: 27–40). Despite these well-considered theoretical objections, the usefulness of Bakhtinian concepts for the analysis of medieval literature continues to be manifest in practice. Select Bibliography Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981); John Ganim, “Medieval Literature as Monster: The Grotesque Before and After Bakhtin,” Exemplaria 7.1 (1995): 27–40; Arthur Groos, “Dialogic Transpositions: The Grail Hero Wins a Wife,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, ed. Martin H. Jones and Roy Wisbey (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1993),

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257–76; The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Cesare Segre, “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid,” trans. Elise Morse, Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), 23–46; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Stephen M. Carey

Biblical Exegesis A. Historical Background Medieval Biblical exegesis is greatly indebted to the Patristic period. Some scholars identify two distinct exegetical traditions in ancient Christianity, the Alexandrine tradition, more prone to allegoresis, mainly represented by the Church father Origen (d. 254), and the Antiochene tradition, one more literal, mainly represented by Theodore of Mospuestia (d. 428) (Frances Young, “Alexandrian and Antiochene Exegesis,” A History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 1, The Ancient Period, ed. Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, 2003, 334–54). But this distinction is more descriptive of early Christianity in the East than Western (Latin) Christendom. The Western church fathers, such as Jerome (d. 420), Augustine (d. 430), and Gregory the Great (d. 604), all of whose commentaries became foundational for the medieval understanding of Scripture, believed that the spiritual meaning of Scripture was its hidden, but true meaning, only perceptible to those who were initiated into the mysteries of faith. Jerome, in addition to producing the Latin Bible translation that would become basis of the standard Vulgate Bible translation of the Middle Ages, wrote commentaries on almost all books of the Old Testament that would be the source of many medieval commentaries. In the early Middle Ages, scholars like Isidore of Seville (d. 636) built upon the patristic tradition, while providing a great number of allegorical interpretations of Biblical passages that would become standard fare throughout the Middle Ages. Commentaries and Bible glosses of a more “Antiochene” character were produced in monastic foundations by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks, such as Saint Gall, Werden, and Reichenau (M. L. W. Laistner, “Antiochene Exegesis in Western Europe During the Middle Ages,” Harvard

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Theological Review 40 [1947]: 19–31). Many of these commentaries bear the traces of the scholarly activity of archbishop Theodore (d. 690) and his companion Hadrian, whose arrival in Canterbury in the 7th century marked the beginning of a rich tradition of learning in the British isles (Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, 1994), which eventually would culminate in the work of the Venerable Bede (d. 735) (Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner, 1976). On the Continent, the Carolingian period witnessed a proliferation of Biblical commentaries, many of them associated with monastic learning in monastic centers such as Fulda, Auxerre, and Saint Gall (John J. Contreni, “Carolingian Biblical Studies,” Carolingian Essays: Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Early Christian Studies, ed. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, 1983, 71–98). The aim of the Carolingian commentators was primarily educational: to make the patristic heritage accessible to clergy and monks, by inventorizing and classifying the diverse patristic commentaries, sermons, homilies, treatises, histories, and handbooks, and transforming them into consistent, running commentaries on almost the entire Bible (Bernice M. Kaczinsky, “Edition, Translation, and Exegesis: The Carolingians and the Bible,” The Gentle Voices of Teachers: Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age, ed. Richard E. Sullivan, 1995, 171–85). Among these exegetes, Haimo of Auxerre (d. 855), Johannes Scottus Eriugena (d. 877), Paschasius Radbertus (d. 865), and Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) stand out. For instance, Hrabanus composed commentaries on almost the entire Bible by collecting exegetical opinions of the Church fathers, and he often listed their original authors (PL, 107–112). This way, he created a new genre of Bible commentary, which would have enormous influence on the formation of the 12th-century Glossa ordinaria (E. Ann Matter, “The Church Fathers and the Glossa Ordinaria,” The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus, 1997, 83–111). In the High Middle Ages, monasteries continued to be important sites for the composition and collection of Biblical commentaries. The large number of commentaries, and especially sermon series, on the Song of Songs by Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1135), Gilbert of Hoyland (d. 1172), and William of Saint Thierry (d. 1149) attest to this. But in the 12th century, the main focus of medieval learning shifted to the cathedral schools. It was here, and in the other schools of the pre-university era, that the main exegetical works were composed. The greatest exegetical accomplishment of the 12th-century cathedral schools was the compilation of patristic and Carolingian exegesis into a standard gloss on almost all books of the Bible, the Glossa ordinaria.

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This gloss was unique in that it combined the two prevalent formats of Biblical commentary: a marginal commentary that surrounding the central Biblical text, and interlinear glosses featuring short explications. Until the mid-20th century, scholars assumed that the origin of the Glossa ordinaria was Carolingian. But its authorship is more correctly associated with Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) and his brother Ralph of Laon (d. 1133). They were probably the authors of the gloss on Song of Songs, the Gospels, and Romans, while Gilbert of Auxerre (also nicknamed “the Universal”, d. 1134) was the likely author of the gloss on Lamentations, the Twelve Prophets, and possibly Samuel and Kings (Giuseppe Mazzanti, “Anselmo di Laon, Gilberto L’Universale e la ‘Glossa ordinaria’ alla Bibbia,” Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo e Archivio Muratoriano 102 [1999]: 1–19). The composition of the gloss was not a planned and uniform process by one author; for example, the Gloss on Psalms went through no less than three successive redactions, by Anselm of Laon, Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154), and Peter Lombard (d. 1160) respectively (Mark A. Zier, “Peter Lombard and the ‘Glossa Ordinaria’ on the Bible,” A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle O.P., ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman, 1997, 629–41). In the 1130s through 1150s, Paris (possibly the collegiate abbey of Saint Victor) became a major center for the production of glossed Bibles (Christopher F. R. De Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade, 1984; Patricia Stirnemann, “Oú ont été fabriqués les livres de la glose ordinaire dans la première moitié du XIIe siècle?,” Le XIIe siècle: Mutations et renouveau en France dans la première moitié du XIIe siècle, ed. F. Gasparri, 1994, 257–301). The Church fathers already had distinguished between a literal and a spiritual sense of Scripture, while often dividing the latter into a tropological (that is, moral), an allegorical (referring to the life of Christ or the Church), and an anagogical sense (referring to matters pertaining to the future life). Medieval exegetes generally adopted this fourfold scheme (or threefold, since allegory and anagogy were often seen as two different aspects of the same sense). It was not until the late 13th century that the famous mnemotechnic verse was formulated: Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria moralia quid agas, quid speres anagogia. (The letter teaches historical facts; allegory what to believe. The moral sense how to act; what to hope for, anagogy.) (Augustinus de Dacia, “Rotulus Pugillaris,” ed. A. Waltz, Angelicum 6 [1929]: 256)

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Ironically, in this period, the strict division between the different senses was fading (if, indeed, it ever existed), and authors started to emphasize the importance and primacy of literal exegesis over allegory. This emphasis on the primacy of the literal sense was developed by Hugh of Saint Victor, in his foundational reformulation of Augustinian hermeneutics in his Didascalicon, basing himself on the theory of signification offered in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and De magistro (Hugo de Sancto Victore, Didascalicon De Studio Legendi: A Critical Text, ed. Charles Henry Buttimer, 1939). Hugh’s methodology gave the study of literal interpretation, and with it, the study of Hebrew and of Jewish exegesis, a new impetus. We can see his influence not only in Richard (d. 1173) and Andrew of Saint Victor (d. 1175) (Rainer Berndt, André de Saint-Victor[†1175]: Exégète et théologien, 1992; Bibel und Exegese in der Abtei Sankt Viktor zu Paris, ed. Rainer Berndt, 2006), but also in exegetes who had ties to the abbey of Saint Victor, such as Herbert of Bosham (d. after 1189), one of the most accomplished Hebraists of his time (Deborah L. Goodwin, “Take Hold of the Robe of a Jew”: Herbert of Bosham’s Christian Hebraism, 2006), and Peter Comestor (d. 1179), the author of the influential medieval exegetical handbook, the Historia Scholastica (PL, 198). Another contributing factor to the emphasis on the literal sense was the demand for the practical and pastoral training for clerics by the end of the 12th century. The Gregorian Reform had stressed the pastoral responsibilities of the clergy, and schools were offering more practical training as a result. Preaching and confession were seen as the two main purposes for the study of the Bible in the schools, and as a result, Biblical exegesis now emphasized the doctrinal and moral implications of Scripture over the more meditative spiritual exegesis. We can see this development represented in the works of schoolmen like Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and Alexander Neckham (d. 1217). At the same time, the 12th century brought about a renewed interest in the philological dimension of Scriptural exegesis. Cistercian scholars such as Nicholas de Maniacoria (12th c.) and Stephan Harding (d. 1134) had started the process of correcting the Biblical text against the original Greek and Hebrew (Vittorio Peri, “‘Correctores immo corruptores,’ un saggio di critica testuale nella Roma del XII secolo,” Italia Medievale e Umanistica 20 [1977]: 19–125; and Matthieu Cauwe, “Le Bible d’Étienne Harding,” Revue Bénédictine 103 [1993]: 414–44). This work would be continued in the 13th century in the so-called correctories of Franciscans and Dominicans such as Guillelmus Brito, William de la Mare, and Hugh of Saint Cher (Franz Ehrle, “Die Handschriften der Bibel-Correctorien des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Heinrich Denifle and Franz Ehrle, 1888, 263–311). The mid-13th century also saw an explosion

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in the commercial production of Bibles of a small format, the so-called Paris Bible. It was innovative in its format, and it offered a portable and accessible Bible for used by the emergent Mendicant orders (Christopher F. R. De Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible, 2001, 114–39). The Bible was one of the main school texts in the mendicant studia, which prepared students for study at the universities. This was attested by the great number of didactic works meant to facilitate the study and preaching of Scripture: glossaries, such as Marchesinus of Reggio’s Mammotrectus (ca. 1280) and John Balbo’s Catholicon; didactic versifications (such as Petrus Riga’s Aurora); concordances; topical indexes; and Biblical Distinctiones (Louis-Jacques Bataillon, “Intermédiaires entre les traités de morale pratique et les sermons: Les ‘Distinctiones’ bibliques alphabétiques,” Les genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales, 1982, 213–26). The scholastic practice of reading the Bible cursorie through the first years of theology study also generated a large number of commentaries referred to as Postillae. These Postillae were commentaries on the entire Biblical text that combined textual analysis with moral and doctrinal application (Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocubulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, 2003, 307–08). They generally abandoned the sharp distinction between literal and spiritual exegesis that had characterized the monastic commentaries. They established the literal sense as the basic and most important interpretation of Scripture, but this literal sense often incorporated the idea that much of the Biblical texts should be regarded as metaphor. The “literal” sense was thus broadened to include a Christological interpretation of most Old Testament passages. These Postillae probably reflected much of the scholastic practice of the medieval universities, with their Aristotelian emphasis on text division as a method of interpretation, and with their incorporation of thematic quaestiones among the more verse-by-verse commentaries. Some of the most important postillators were the Dominicans Nicholas de Gorran (d. 1295) and Hugh of Saint Cher (d. 1263); the latter’s massive commentary was undoubtedly undertaken not by one person, but by a whole team of Dominican exegetes at the friary of Saint Jacques in Paris under the direction of Hugh. The most important Franciscan postillators were Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), William of Meliton (d. 1257), John of Peter Olivi (d. 1298), and especially Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), whose Postilla literalis, known for its high standard of Hebrew scholarship, was often printed together with the Glossa ordinaria to provide a standard Bible commentary in the 16th century. The later Middle Ages saw a steady increase in the quantity and volume of Biblical commentaries and sermons, partly as a result of the growth of universities and studia, where these were the staple of academic output. Ironi-

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cally, little scholarly attention has been given to exegesis in this period; scholars have even characterized it as a period of “decline”, partly because it has often been viewed teleologically through the lens of the subsequent Reformation. This false teleology has, for instance, characterized much of the scholarship on John Wycliffe (d. 1384) (Gustav Adolf Benrath, Wyclif ’s Bibelkommentar, 1966). As the work of scholars like Henri of Langenstein (d. 1397), Alonso Tostado (d. 1455), Francis Michele of Padua (d. 1472), and Johannes de Zymansionibus (15th c.) shows, late medieval exegesis was a lively field of scholarship, with more continuities between the late medieval period and the Reformation than has often been assumed (William J. Courtenay, “The Bible in the Fourteenth Century: Some Observations,” Church History 54 [1985], 176–87; Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and Reformation, 2002). Christians were not the only Biblical scholars in medieval Europe. Jewish exegesis in the early Middle Ages produced substantial homiletic commentaries (the Midrashim), which mainly expanded on the narrative to provide moral edification and legal and ritual guidance. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jewish exegesis in Northern France took a distinctive turn away from this more associative exegesis (Derash), and under Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes (Rashi, d. 1105) started to emphasize the “simple”, that is, more literal and direct, meaning of scripture, the Peshat (Menahem Banitt, Rashi: Interpreter of the Biblical Letter, 1985). Rashi’s example was followed by a number of Northern French exegetes, such as his son-in-law R. Solomon b. Meir (Rashbam, d. 1174), Joseph Kara (d. 1170), Eliezer of Beaugency (12th c.), and Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak, d. 1235). Possibly the rise of Hebrew philology, exemplified by the Spanish/Southern French commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1164), influenced this Peshat exegesis. It had considerable influence on the Christian exegetes of its time, such as Andrew of Saint Victor, Herbert of Bosham, and Nicholas of Lyra (Gilbert Dahan, Les Intellectuels Chrétiens et les Juifs du Moyen Âge, 1990). At the same time, a reaction against rationalist Aristotelianism and the rise of the mystical movement of Kabbalah produced a completely different kind of commentary; kabbalistic commentaries are best exemplified in the works of Ezra of Gerona (d. 1238) and Moses of Leon (d. 1305) (Geshom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 1987; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 1988). B. Research History The outline given by Ceslas Spicq is still considered a classic overview of medieval exegesis. Good general introductions to medieval Biblical exegesis are given in the Cambridge History of the Bible: The West, soon due for a complete

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revision; its French counterpart La Bible au Moyen Âge; and the Italian La Bibbia nel Medioevo. An indispensable reference work on the sources of medieval exegesis is Friedrich Stegmüller’s Repertorium Biblicum (1950–1980), which gives an alphabetical list of medieval exegetes and their works, with a handlist of printed editions and manuscripts. For the Patristic and early medieval period (up to Bede, d. 735), however, the updated version of the Clavis Patrum Latinorum (ed. Eligius Dekkers and Aemilius Gaar, 1995) should also be consulted. Many exegetical texts have recently been edited (such as Andrew of Saint Victor, CCCM, 53–53G, Petrus Comestor, CCCM, 191, and Petrus Cantor, Glossae super Genesim, ed. Agneta Sylwan, 1992). Because the edition of Glossa ordinaria in the Patrologia latina (PL, 113) left much to be desired, Margaret T. Gibson and Karlfried Froehlich oversaw the reprint of the 1480 edition of the Glossa ordinaria (Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria. Anastatical Reproduction of the First Printed Edition: Strassburg, c. 1480 [Adolph Rusch?], 1992). The critical edition of the entire Gloss is a massive undertaking, which has been taken up only recently (Glossa ordinaria in Canticum Canticorum, CCCM, 177; Glossa Ordinaria in Lamentationes, ed. A. Andrée, 2005). Good overviews of the textual history of the Vulgate are offered by Samuel Berger (Histoire de la Vulgate pendent les premiers siècles du Moyen Âge, 1893) and P. M. Bogaert (“La Bible latine des origines au moyen âge. Aperçu historique, état des questions,” Revue théologique de Louvain, 19 [1988]: 137–59, 276–314). Two scholars whose work was seminal for the field of Biblical exegesis were Beryl Smalley (The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 1952; see also The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Honour of Beryl Smalley, ed. Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood, 1985) and Henri de Lubac (Exégèse Médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, Paris, 1959–1964). De Lubac saw the greatness of medieval exegesis in the monastic, spiritual exegesis, while Smalley’s research emphasized the more “literal” and philological strain of medieval exegesis as a scholastic activity. This same emphasis characterizes the work of Gilbert Dahan (L’Exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe–XIVe siècle, 1999). Most scholarly work of the last decades has been published in conference volumes and anthologies. Some of these emphasize the 12th and 13th centuries (La Bibbia nel Medioevo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Claudio Leonardi, 1996; La Bibbia nel XIII secolo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Francesco Santi, 2004); others sum up recent trends in scholarship (Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. Robert E. Lerner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, 1996); and yet others emphasize exegesis across religious cultures of Christianity and Judaism (Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, ed. Magne Sæbø, Chris Brekelmans, and Menahem Haran, 2000), or even Islam (With Reverence for the Word, ed. Jane Dammen

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McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering, 2003; Scripture and Pluralism, ed. Thomas. J. Heffernan and Thomas E. Burman, 2005). It was Bernhard Bischoff who first emphasized the importance of Insular exegesis (“Wendepunkte in der Geschichte der lateinischen Exegese im Mittelalter,” Sacris Erudiri 6 [1954]: 189–281), even though his thesis is still very much debated (Michael M. Gorman, “A Critique of Bischoff’s Theory of Irish Exegesis: The Commentary on Genesis in Munich Clm 6302,” Journal of Medieval Latin 7 [1997]: 178–233; Dáibhí O Cróinín, “Bischoff’s Wendepunkte Fifty Years On,” Revue Bénédictine 110 [2000]: 204–37). Bischoff also was the first to “discover” the Biblical glosses from the school of Theodore and Hadrian. These anonymous Bible glosses have now appeared in a comprehensive edition (CCCM, 189A-B). Irish exegesis was the topic of a 1976 conference (Irland und die Christenheit, ed. Próinséas Ní Chatáin and Michael Richter, 1987); much of it focusing on the so-called Bibelwerk, an early medieval collection of various exegetical texts, which appeared in a 2000 edition (CCCM, 173). A recent congress volume edited by Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards (The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, 2003) gives a good overview of the current state of studies in Carolingian Biblical exegesis. Various scholastic postillators have been the subject of conferences and anthologies, such as Nicholas of Lyra (Nicholas of Lyra, ed. Philip D. Krey and Lesley Smith, 2000), John of Peter Olivi (Pietro di Giovanni Olivi: Opera edita et inedita, 1999), and Hugh of Saint Cher (Hugues de Saint-Cher, ed. Louis-Jacques Bataillon, Gilbert Dahan, and Pierre-Marie Gy, 2004). Olivi’s exegetical works have appeared in some critical editions (Peter of John Olivi on the Bible, ed. David Flood and Gedeon Gál, 1997; Expositio in Canticum Canticorum, ed. Johannes Schlageter, 1999; Lectura Super Proverbia et Lectura Super Ecclesiasten, ed. Johannes Schlageter, 2003). By contrast, many of the other postillators’ works are still waiting critical editions, such as Nicholas of Lyra (Lyons, 1545), and Hugh of Saint Cher (Cologne, 1621). The classic work on the theory of medieval interpretation and the study of hermeneutics is still that of Hennig Brinkmann (Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, 1980), but much research has been done to connect medieval hermeneutics with medieval literary theory, often emphasizing the study of the medieval Accessus (Edwin A. Quain, “The Medieval Accessus ad Auctores,” Traditio 3 [1945]: 215–64; Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 1984). A good introduction to the sources of Rabbinical exegesis is offered by Hermann L. Strack in 1887, but updated many times (Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch, 1982; Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Mid-

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rash, 1991). Erwin I. Rosenthal offers a fine overview and bibliography of medieval Jewish exegesis (“Medieval Jewish Exegesis: Its Character and Significance,” Journal of Semitic Studies 9 [1964]: 265–81). A recent anthology by Michael Fishbane offers a good impression of the state of scholarship on Rabbinical and early medieval Jewish Midrashic exegesis (The Midrashic Imagination, 1993), while the study of 12th-century peshat exegesis owes much to the work of Sarah Kamin (Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible, 1991; see also The Bible in the Light of its Interpreters: Sarah Kamin Memorial Volume, ed. Sara Japhet, 1994, in Hebrew). Especially the exegete Rashi has been the subject of several studies and anthologies (Esra Shereshevsky, Rashi: The Man and His World, 1982; Albert Van der Heide, “Rashi’s Biblical Exegesis: Recent Research and Developments,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 41 [1984]: 292–318; Rashi 1040–1990, ed. G. Sed-Rayna, 1993). Select Bibliography La Bibbia nel Medioevo, ed. Giuseppe Cremascoli and Claudio Leonardi (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1996); Gilbert Dahan, L’Exégèse Chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe-XIVe siècle, Patrimoines: Christianisme (Paris: Cerf, 1999); Henri De Lubac, Exégèse Médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de l’Écriture, Théologie (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964); Le Moyen Âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952, 3rd ed. 1983); Ceslas Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse Latine au Moyen Âge (Paris: Vrin, 1944); Friedrich Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Francisco Suárez, 1950–1980); The West From the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G.W.H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Frans van Liere

Botany A. The Dark Ages of Medieval Botany Knowledge of plants during the late 15th century, which was closely linked to materia medica and therapeutics, was made obsolete by the reintroduction of classical literature (particularly Greek) principally by Ferrara physician Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524). In a booklet published in 1492 (De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus), Leoniceno virulently attacked the transformation of botany from antiquity to his days – mainly the influence of the Arabic world –, arguing that patients’ lives were at risk because of the many

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confusions between plants used for therapeutic purposes. He thus promoted to return to ancient literature, principally Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.) whose treatise (De materia medica) he contributed to get published in a critical edition printed by Aldo Manuzio (July 1499). From then on, medieval botany and therapeutic uses of plants were largely ignored in Western scholarly literature, science, and practice, even more so because, at the same time as Leoniceno, the civil authority in Florence requested a commission of physicians to compile a new codex medicamentarius (the Ricettario fiorentino first published in 1499) aimed to replace any anterior receptory. The movement was further amplified with the herbals of those whom the historian of classical botany and medicine Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) called the ‘German Fathers of Botany’ (Historia Rei Herbariae, 2 vols., 1807–1808), among others Otto Brunfels (ca. 1489–1534) (Eicones vivae herbarum, 1530) and Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) (Historia stirpium, 1542). Shortly after, new botanic gardens were created in Pisa and Padua, and the teaching of botany at such medieval university as Montpellier was transformed with the introduction of a teaching based on Dioscorides, field work (herborisation in which François Rabelais [ca. 1494–ca. 1553] participated), and a botanic garden (Louis Dulieu, La médecine à Montpellier, vol. 2: La Renaissance, 1979, passim). Last but far from least, the introduction of plants and drugs from the New World that were unknown in the Old World led to relativize the notion of local flora, and opened the way to a new concept of the vegetal world. As a result, medieval botany had been definitely made obsolete by mid-16th century and almost disappeared from the history of the discipline. In his Bibliotheca Botanica qua scripta ad rem herbariam facientia a rerum initiis recensentur (2 vols., 1771–1772), the Swiss anatomist, physiologist and natural historian Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) devotes to the Middle Ages only 40 out of the 1.500 pages in the work (vol. 1, 214–54), while he dedicated 170 pages to antiquity (vol. 1, 1–170) and barely more than 40 to the Arabic world (vol. 1, 171–213). Significantly, the chapter on the Middle Ages is entitled Arabistae (vol. 1, 214), whereas the chapter on the Renaissance is entitled Instauratores (vol. 1, 255), and starts with the following statement: Felicitas est seculi XV. quod eo vertente literae in Europa renasci ceperint. Eo enim aevo Graeci Constantinopoli pulsi in Europam confugerunt, & secum codices veterum M.S. adtulerunt […] Ita sensim barbarities Arabum displicuit […].

Coming almost fifty years after Sprengel’s Historia Rie Herbariae, the monumental Geschichte der Botanik in four volumes (1854–1857) by Ernst H. F. Meyer (1791–1858) opened the doors of the history of botany to the Middle Ages, though in a subtle, oblique, and highly biased form. After the entire

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volume 1 (X + 406 pp.) and half of volume 2 (pp. 1–273 out of X + 440 pp.) on antiquity, he discussed together the East and the West in the book covering the period from Julian the Apostate to Charlemagne (that is, 363–800 C.E.) (vol. 2, 274–423). In volume 3, after a long discussion of Arabic botany (preceded, maybe significantly, by an 88-page section on East-Asian, Indian, Persian, and Nabatean peoples), he turned to the Europeo-Christian world from Charlemagne to Albertus Magnus (corresponding to the years 800 to 1280 C.E.). The pre-Salernitan West is briefly dealt with (391–434) and followed by a long chapter on Monte Cassino and Salerno (435–513). Meyer then turned to the transalpine area, France, England, Germany (mainly Hildegard von Bingen [1098–1179]), and Denmark, concluding the volume with a fourpage section on travels to unknown countries (539–42: “Reisen in unbekannte Länder”). Interestingly, in the section on Germany, Meyer included a list of botanical lexica (521–23) “left unused by [his] predecessors” (521: “[…] die zahlreichen botanischen Glossarien des Mittelalters […] die meine Vorgänger noch unbenutzt liessen […]”). Volume 4 is not less significant: it opens with Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280) under the title “Botany under the renewed influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy” (1: “Die Botanik unter dem erneuerten Einfluss der aristotelischen Naturphilosophie”). In this view, Albertus receives 80+ pages (1–84). Short chapters follow, which are more like a series of unavoidable intermezzos: the encyclopedias (84–106), the “botanical knowledge from the countries opened to Christians thanks to the Crusades” (110–14), the travels of Christians to far, non-European countries (114–38), agronomical theory (138–59), medical dictionaries (159–77), and popular books on medicinal plants (177–206). The Renaissance coming then and covering half of the volume (207–444) is a “return to the observation of nature thanks to the study of classical literature” (207: “Rückkehr durch das Studium der klassischen Literatur zur Naturbeobachtung”). The door opened onto medieval literature in Meyer’s history was quickly closed. In 1875, Julius von Sachs (1832–1897), a professor for Botany at the University of Würzburg, published a history of botany, which was translated into English as early as 1906. Although the title announces 1530 as the starting point (that is, the publication of Brunfels’ herbal), the analysis actually starts with the year 1542 (that is, with the first edition of Fuchs’s herbal). The Middle Ages are simply eliminated with such considerations as (p. 3 of the 1906 English translation): […] the corrupt texts of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen had been in many respects improved and illustrated […] [by] the Italian commentators of the 15th and of the early part of the 16th century […] a great advance was made by the first German composers of herbals, who went straight to nature, described the

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wild plants growing around them and had figures of them carefully executed in wood. Thus was made the first beginning of a really scientific examination of plants […]

Further on, Sachs explained better his idea about the pre-1530 state of botany (14–5): […] the botanical literature of the middle ages […] continually grows less and less valuable […] the works of Albertus Magnus, as prolix as they are deficient in ideas […] productions of medieval superstitions […] (15) […] botanical literature had sunk so low, that not only were the figures embellished with fabulous additions, as in the Hortus Sanitatis, and sometimes drawn purely from fancy, but the meager descriptions of quite common plants were not taken from nature, but borrowed from earlier authorities and eked out with superstitious fictions […]

Going on, he identified the cause of this in the fact that (15): […] the powers of independent judgment were oppressed and stunned in the middle ages, till at last the very activity of the senses, resting as it does to a great extent on unconscious operations of the understanding, became weak and sickly; natural objects presented themselves to the eye of those who made them their study in grotesquely distorted forms; every sensuous impression was corrupted and deformed by the influence of a superstitious fancy […]

Concluding, he opposed the newly produced herbal of Bock, though “artless,” as an achievement (15) “[…] in comparison with these perversions […]” of the Middle Ages. The two-volume work Les Plantes dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge (1897–1904) by the French Charles Joret (1839–1914) announced a treatment of the Middle Ages of a new type. In the introduction, he described, indeed, his project as follows (vol. 1, XV–XVI): […] je voudrais essayer de retracer l’histoire agricole, industrielle, poétique, artistique et pharmacologique des espèces végétales connues des différentes nations de l’antiquité classique et du moyen âge. Je ne me dissimule pas les difficultés de l’entreprise; elles sont d’autant plus grandes que personne jusqu’ici n’a abordé ce vaste sujet.

It seems, however, that he could not achieve his vast and ambitious program, as the two published volumes (which were the first part, devoted to what Joret called “L’orient classique”) cover only a short segment of the topic: the ancient Near East (actually Egypt, the Chaldeans, Assyria, Judea, and Phoenicia) (volume 1), and Iran and India (volume 2). It is not sure, however, that Joret would have dealt with the Middle Ages with the same depth as he would have for antiquity. In summarizing the contributions of his predecessors in the introduction, he jumped, indeed, from antiquity to modern times, simply dropping the Middle Ages (vol. 1, XVI):

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Two works written during the same period share a similar omission, although they are very different under many aspects: the Landmarks of Botanical History by the botanist Edward Lee Greene (1843–1915), and the epochmaking Herbals by another botanist, Agnes Arber (1879–1960). Greene’s work, which was completed in 1907 but left unpublished until 1983 (2 vol.), was intentionally conceived as a sort of portrait gallery. According to Green himself, indeed, knowledge of the history of botany is almost impossible, because it requires first to have “mastered that science itself” (vol. 1, 89) and, then, to have a “second lifetime” (ibid.). But even so: […] the presentation of a complete and accurate history of botany would remain impossible. Important data wanting, and hopelessly so […] the same is in a measure true of comparatively recent periods […] (ibid.).

This is why he limited himself to a presentation of landmarks, with “some prominence […] given to biography” (vol. 1, 91). Significantly, however, no medieval author appears in this gallery, even though Green himself, who was then a seasoned scientist, recognizes that the work of the German Fathers should be scrutinized as (vol. 1, 90): […] no annalist of a later age seems to have had time or disposition to ascertain how much of the assumed new and original botany of those German Fathers […] was taken out of old manuscripts which, although they may still be extant, later historians have neither consulted nor troubled themselves to enquire after.

As for Arber’s volume (first published in 1912, with several re-editions, some of which revised and augmented), which was the first essay of a young scholar, it had a very specific object, made clear from its full title: Herbals, their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670. The introductory chapter (1–12) devoted to the pre-printing period (since herbal printing is the focus of the book) and entitled “The Early History of Botany,” falls short from what it announces, as it focuses on Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Theophrastus, and Dioscorides, that is, the Aristotelian and the classical tradition, omitting the Middle Ages even in the treatment of medicinal botany. Nevertheless, the next chapter (13–37), on early printed herbals, deals with some medieval works, with a major, if not an exclusive, focus on them as printed objects, rather than as scientific achievement. It was the merit of the German botanist Hermann Fischer (1884–1936) to create the field of the history of medieval botany in his book Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde (1929). As he put it in the preface ([V]–VI), there was a growing

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interest in the Middle Ages, not only in Europe but also in America. However, only an interest in, and a love for, medieval culture ([V]: “Nur Interesse und Liebe”) could push anybody to penetrate into the domain of medieval plant “systematic” and “scholastic method.” After this opening remark, in which he seems to consider medieval botany as an arcane science requiring uncommon interests, Fischer defined it as a history of plants, which, when applied practically, contributes to the cultural history of peoples ([V]): die mittelalterliche Botanik hauptsächlich Geschichte der Pflanzen bleibt und die angewandte Botanik einen Teil der Kulturgeschichte der Völker bildet.

To research the history of medieval botany, Fischer used the sheer quantity of material that came to light after the publication of the then last history of medieval botany, Meyer’s Geschichte der Botanik. Such material consisted in manuscripts and early printed books with botanical contents, for the further exploration of which Fischer’s book was to serve as a tool to penetrate the scientific thinking and method of work of medieval authors ([V]-VI). With this book, Fischer not only pulled the medieval botany out of the dark ages in which it had been relegated in the early-Renaissance, but also he sketched a new historiography of medieval botany, identified its sources, proposed an agenda and, on this basis, defined appropriate methods. Nevertheless, the concept of Dark Ages of Botany had a long after-life, as the notso-ancient volume by Alan G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day, 1981 shows (see the chapter 4 [82–114] entitled “The Dark Ages of Botany in Europe (200 to 1483)”). Whereas the history of Western medieval botany underwent this slow transformation, botany of the Arabo-Islamic world was gaining increasing attention as the difference in its treatment from Haller to Meyer indicates. As a further example, the French physician and Arabist Lucien Leclerc (1816–1893) started publishing in 1877 a translation of the treatise of medical botany by the Andalusian scientist ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248 C.E.) considered to be the most achieved work of the Arabic world in the field of botany. The real nature of this interest in Arabo-Islamic should not be overestimated, however, as Leclerc emphasizes much the role of Arab and Arabic speaking scientists as intermediaries in the transmission of the Greek heritage. This was already the case in his history of Arabic medicine published one year before, in which Arabic science is presented as an intermediary between Antiquity and the West. Its title makes it plain: “Histoire de la médecine arabe, […] exposé complet des traductions du Grec, […], leur transmission à l’Occident par les traductions latines […].” Not to mention

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the Orientalism so much criticized by Edward Said (1935–2003). Whatever the case, Arabic botany was the only one to be considered in the scholarly community, as Byzantine botany did not retain much the attention, in spite of sporadic mentions in Meyer’s Geschichte der Botanik. B. Beginnings and Institutionalization However programmatic and promising it was, Fischer’s Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde was not immediately followed by specific studies on the history of medieval botany. With some exceptions, research in the field started only after World War II, particularly with the late Jerry Stannard (1926–1988), whose major publications have been reproduced in two volumes of collected studies edited by Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay, both published in 1999: Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, and Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance. Jerry Stannard was followed by John Riddle, who specialized more on the history of pharmacy, however. Several of his many publications have been reproduced in a volume of collected studies: Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992. Although both have paved the way for new and innovative research, they have not been followed by other scholars, be it in-house or in another institution, nationally or internationally. In the current state, the only real school for historical studies in the field of botany is the School for Arabic Studies (Escuela de Estudios Arabes) of the National Foundation for Scientific Research of Spain (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) in Granada, specialized, however, on Andalusian botany and agriculture. Also, a program on the history of botany, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a special focus on medicinal plants, is currently running in the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where the collection Historia plantarum specialized on the history of botany is housed. There are individual scholars, however, who work on some topics in the field, in departments of classics, history, history of medicine, or history of medieval languages and literature. With some exceptions, research is rarely of a transdisciplinary nature, taking into account all the components of the topic, from manuscripts and textual tradition to botany stricto sensu and medicine in the case of therapeutic uses of plants. On the other hand, since medicinal plants are currently the object of a renewed interest in contemporary society, there are plenty of micro-studies of a monographic nature on the uses of determined plants made by ethno-botanists and ethno-pharmacologists that include historical data. The historical part of such studies is not

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necessarily based on a direct access to primary sources in the original language, as accurate as a sound historical investigation would require, or done in collaboration by a team of specialists of the several disciplines involved in the research. Finally, there is no scientific journal specifically devoted to the history of botany, no society or formal group either, no conference or meeting of any type, except occasional articles in such journals as the Journal for the History of Biology, Isis, Taxon, Economic Botany, Journal of Ethnopharmacology or Fitoterapia, for example, and occasional panels in conferences organized by such societies as the History of Science Society (of America, but by far and large the most important worldwide), the Renaissance Society of America, or national societies of history of science. C. Primary Sources, Encyclopedias, Bibliographies In spite of this absence of institutionalization, much work was been done during the 20th century. Some primary sources – actually the Greek, viz. Byzantine manuscripts containing anonymous treatises of botany currently preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France – have been inventoried as early as 1933 by Margaret Head Thomson, “Catalogue des manuscrits de Paris contenant des traités anonymes de botanique,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 46 (1993): 334–48. In the absence of any other specific inventory of manuscripts, it is still necessary to consult the catalogue of medical manuscripts by Hermann Diels, given the confusion of medical botany and medicine during the Middle Ages. The catalogue lists not only the Greek (viz. Byzantine) manuscripts of Greek medical treatises, but also those of their Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew translations, accordingly (Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, 1906, with a supplement in 1908). Since then, some new documents were brought to the attention, a papyrus (Campbell Bonner, “A Papyrus of Dioscorides in the University of Michigan Collection,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 53 [1922]: 142–68), as well as a manuscript of Dioscorides with color plant representations (Elpidio Mioni, Un ignoto Dioscoride miniato (Il codice greco 194 del Seminario di Padova), 1959, the first part of which was published in Libri e stampatori in Padova. Miscellanea di Studi storici in onore di Mons. G. Bellini, 1959, 345–76, while the color illustrations were published under the title “Un nuovo erbario greco di Dioscoride,” Rassegna Medica. Convivium Sanitatis 36 [1959]: 169–84). Since collections changed location, manuscripts were destroyed or damaged during 20th-century conflicts of all kind, and some codices previously unknown came to light, a new catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts is current being prepared (Alain Touwaide, “Byzantine Me-

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dical Manuscripts: Toward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 [2008]: 199–208; ID ., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595). For the Arabic world, there are now the encyclopedic studies published almost simultaneously by Fuat Sezgin and Manfred Ullmann, which, for each author and work, list all the manuscripts known at the time of the publication: Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H., 1971, and Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 1972. For Latin Pre-Salernitan codices, see the classical inventory by Augusto Beccaria, I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano (secoli IX, X e XI), 1956. For the late-medieval medical manuscripts in French libraries, see: Ernest Wickersheimer, Les Manuscrits latins de médecine du haut moyen âge dans les bibliothèques de France, 1966. Useful also, the catalogue of incipit of Latin medieval texts by Lynn Thorndike, and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 1963 (the work is now available in an expanded and updated digital version identified as eTK, which is accompanied by the so-called eVK, that is, the updated version by Linda Ersham Voigts, and Patricia Deery Kurts, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, CDRom, 2000). In recent times, the range of primary sources for the history of botany has also included remains of plants found in archeological excavations. This archeology of a new genre was developed largely thanks to the late Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski (1910–2007), who worked on Pompeii (see her 1979 volume The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculanum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, followed by a more recent synthesis edited in collaboration with Fredrick G. Meyer, The Natural History of Pompeii, 2002). Here are some examples of this new archeology: (Byzantium) Jon G. Hather, Leonor Peña-Chocarro, and Elizabeth J. Sidell, “Turnip Remains from Byzantine Sparta,” Economic Botany 46 (1992): 395–400; (the Arabic world) Natália Alonso Martínez, “Agriculture and Food from the Roman to the Islamic Period in the North-East of the Iberian Peninsula: Archaeobotanical Studies in the City of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain),” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14 (2005): 341–61; (the Western Middle Ages) Marta Bandini Mazzanti, Giovanna Bosi, Anna Maria Mercuri, Carla Alberta Accorsi, and Chiara Guarnieri, “Plant Use in a City in Northern Italy during the Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Periods: Results of the Archaeobotanical Investigation of “The Mirror Pit” (14th–15th c. A.D.) in Ferrara,” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14 (2005): 442–52. A synthesis on this field is now available: Rowena Gale,

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and David Cutler, Plants in Archeology; Identification Manual of Vegetative Plant Materials Used in Europe and Southern Mediterranean to c. 1500, 2000. History of botany has been included in the several encyclopedias of history of science published during the 20th century (mainly in the form of bio-bibliographical chapters or entries) from George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols., 1927–1948; and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols., 1923–1958; to the recent encyclopedia of medieval science Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, including the Neue Pauly, 13 vols. with an index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003, and its English translation Brill’s New Pauly, 16 vols. and 1 supplement (published from 2002) and, most recently, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser, and Georgia Irby-massie, 2008, for all the classical authors and texts that were transmitted to the subsequent periods, Byzantium, the Arabic World and the West. In addition, for Byzantium, there is also Herbert Hunger (1914–2000), Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978, vol. 2, 271–76, and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991. For the Arabo-Islamic world, in addition to Sezgin and Ullmann above, see the entries in the Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd ed.), the Encyclopaedia Iranica (also available on the Internet in open access), and in the most recent encyclopedia, Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006, 2 vols. In the field of medical botany, an inventory of the literature on materia medica and formulas was compiled by Jakob Büchi, Die Entwicklung der Rezept- und Arzneibuchliteratur, vol. 1: Altertum und Mittelalter, 1982, recently completed by Freyer H.-P. Michael, Europäische Heilkräuterkunde: Ein Erfahrungsschatz aus Jahrtausenden, 1998. For an analysis of botanical data in latemedieval receptaries, see Jerry Stannard, “Botanical Data and Late Medieval Rezeptliteratur,” Fachprosa-Studien: Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Wissenschafts- und Geistesgeschichte, ed. Gundolf Keil et al., 1982, 371–95 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. VI). D. Rupture or Continuity? One of the questions about medieval botany is its continuity with the previous period. This is particularly the case for the Arabic world and the West. Among the works on this problem, we can mention here Alonso Martínez, “Agriculture and Food from the Roman to the Islamic Period […]” (above) for the Western Arabic World (al-Andalus), and, for the West: Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Reception of Classical plant Names,” Actes du XIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris août 1968, Colloque no 2: Traduc-

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tions médiévales, Communications du 28 août, 1971, 150–62 (published also in Revue de Synthèse 2e série, nos. 49–52 [1968]); and also Innocenzo Mazzini, “Présence de Pline dans les herbiers de l’Antiquité et du haut Moyen-Age,” Pline l’Ancien temoin de son temps. Conventus Pliniani Internationalis, Namneti 22–26 Oct. 1985 Habiti, ed. Jackie Pigeaud, and José Oroz Reta, 1987, 83–94. Most of the research during the 20th century was about texts: inventory of manuscripts, history of the text (including analysis of the manuscripts, some of which have been reproduced in facsimile [below]), critical editions (sometimes also with a translation), and/or analysis from a botanical viewpoint. E. Byzantium For Byzantium, Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940) published as early as 1904 the lexicon of the 14th-century Constantinopolitan monk, philosopher and probably physician Neophytos Prodromenos (“Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 [1903–1904]: 129–55). From 1930, the Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) published several botanical lexica and texts on plants: “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus Graecus 2419,” Serta Leodiensia ad celebrandam patriae libertatem iam centesimum annum recuperatam composuerunt philology leodienses, 1930, 59–101, and Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2: Textes Grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim. It was not until 1955, however, that new editions came to light, thanks to Margaret H. Thomson already mentioned, who published two volumes (Textes grecs inédits relatifs aux plantes, 1955, and Le Jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI, 1960). More recently Ernst Heitsch edited the so-called Carmen de viribus herbarum, in his work Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, vol. 2, 1964, 23–38; John Riddle focused on 14th-century commentators on Dioscorides (“Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough, 1985, 95–102 [reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. XIII]); and, to quote but a few, Jean Barbaud who offered a synthesis of the research on the alphabetical manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica (“Les Dioscorides ‘alphabétiques’ (à propos du Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1),” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 41 [1994]: 321–30), while Alain Touwaide focused on Byzantine lexica of plant names, of which he gave a list (“Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28). Somewhat different, but not less important, is the tradition of Theophrastus’s botany from antiquity to the Renaissance, which has been the

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object of a systematic examination in the context of the Theophrastus Project. The fragments of the several authors quoting Theophrastus have been collected and discussed in Robert W. Sharples, Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life, Writings, Thought and Influence. Commentary, vol. 5: Sources on Biology, 1994, 124–207. F. The ArabicWorld During the 20th century research on Arabic botanical texts has been more abundant, although it was largely focused on medical botany and on the major Andalusian botanists, al-Ghafiqi (d. ca. 1165), and ibn al-Baitar (ca. 1204–1248). One of the most active scholars before World War II was Max Meyerhof (1874–1945), author, among others, of the following essays in the history of botany: Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghafiqi, 1930; Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Beruni, 1932; Sarh asma’ al-‘uqqar (l’Explication des noms de drogues), un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide. Texte publié pour la première fois d’après un manuscrit unique, avec traduction, commentaire et index, 1940 (rpt. in Mûsâ ibn Maymûn/Maimonides (d. 1204). Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996; English translation: Moses Maimonides’ Glossary of Drug Names. Translated from Max Meyerhof ’s French edition by Fred Rosner, 1979). Several botanico-pharmacological articles by Meyerhof were reproduced recently (for some of them, see below; also: Max Meyerhof, Studies in Medieval Arabic Medicine: Theory and Practice, ed. Penelope Johnstone, 1984). The post-World War II period saw two major achievements: one was the first critical edition of an Arabic translation of Dioscorides, De materia medica. The text was edited by César E. Dubler (1915–1966) and Elias Terés (1915–1983) in the second volume of the monumental work by the former, La “Materia Medica” de Dioscórides, 6 vols., 1953–1957 (the second volume was published in Tetuan in 1952, and in Barcelona in 1957). This edition was made on the basis of three manuscripts (Madrid, El Escorial, and Paris). Several more have been brought to the attention since, something that would require to have a new edition of the text. One of the manuscripts (Leiden, Or. 289) has been studied in detail: Mahmoud M. Sadek, The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides, 1983. The other achievement was an inventory of the folios torn out of manuscript Ayasofia 3703 (dated 1224 C.E.) now preserved at the Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi in Istanbul. The leaves appeared on the antiquarian market in the early 20th century (actually, after the exhibition of Muhammadan art, as it was called, in Munich in 1910), and repeatedly changed owner since then; although some had been gradually located, the list was never complete. It was the merit of Ernst J. Grube to publish an almost com-

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plete inventory: “Materialen zum Dioskurides Arabicus,” Aus der Welt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel, 1959, 163–94. Since some folios changed owners after the publication, and since Grube’s list appeared to be incomplete, the research has been taken over by Alain Touwaide, who published also a large portion of the body of the manuscripts and almost all the loose folios: Farmacopea araba medievale: Codice Ayasofia 3703, 4 vols., 1992–1993. In addition to these two achievements, a major contribution was the edition of the preserved fragments in several Oriental languages (actually Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew), together with the Greek and Latin text, of Aristotle, De plantis, in the version of Nicolas of Damas: Hendrik J. Drossart Lulofs, and E. L. J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus “De plantis”: Five Translations, 1989. The original text is lost, as well as its revision by Nicolaus of Damas. The Greek text currently known is a recent retro-version whose authorship has been discussed; see: Bertrand Hemmerdinger, “Le De plantis de Nicolas de Damas à Planude,” Philologus 111 (1967): 56–65; and more recently: Elizabeth A. Fisher, “Manuel Holobolos, Alfred of Sareshel, and the Greek Translator of Ps.-Aristole’s De Plantis,” Classica et Mediaevalia 57 (2006): 189–211. Among the other publications on Arabic botany, several were devoted to ibn al-Baitar whose works were edited: Ibrahim Ben Mrad, Ibn al-Baytar (m. 646 H./1248 J.C.): Commentaire de la “Materia Medica” de Dioscoride, 1990; Ana María Cabo González, Ibn al-Baytar al-Malaqi (m. 646–1248), Kitab al-Yami li-mufradat al-adwiya wa-l-agdiya, Colección de Medicamentos y Alimentos. Introducción, edición crítica, traducción e índices de las letras sad y dad, 2002. Also, the French translation by Lucien Leclerc published under the title ibn al Beithar, Traité des simples, 3 vols., 1877–1883, was reprinted twice: by the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris (1992), and by Fuat Sezgin, at the Institut für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1996. Several studies were also published and included: Rainer Degen, “Al-safarjal: a Marginal Note to Ibn al-Baytar,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 2 (1978): 143–48; Juan Luís Carrillo, and Maria Paz Torres, Ibn al-Baytar y el arabismo español del XVIII: Edición trilingue del prologo de su “Kitab al-chami,” 1982; S. M. Imamuddin, and S. M. Pervaiz Imam, “Impact of the Spanish Muslim Pharmacologist Ibn al-Baitar,” Hamdard medicus 36 (1993): 116–18; Esin Koahya, “Ibn Baitar and his Influence on the Eastern Medicine,” Actas del XXXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Medicina: Granada-Sevilla, 1–6 septiembre, 1992, ed. Juan Luís Carrillo, and Guillermo Olagüe de Ros, 1994, 401–07.

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Production was not less abundant on al-Ghafiqi: Max Meyerhof, Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghafiqi, 1930; Max Meyerhof, and George P. Sobhy, The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus). Edited from the only known Manuscript with an English Translation, Commentary and Indices, 1932, and Max Meyerhof, The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus). Edited from the only two known Manuscripts with an English Translation, Commentary and Indices, vol. 2: Letters BA’ and GIM, 1937 (both works have been reprinted as vols. 51 and 57 [1996] of the series Islamic Medicine of the Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, published under the direction of Fuat Sezgin at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt). Also, three previously published studies on al-Ghafiqi have been reproduced in the same series under the title Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Ghâfiqî (d. c. 1165): Texts and Studies Collected and Reprinted, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996: Moritz Steinschneider, “Gafiki’s Verzeichniss einfacher Heilmittel (1873 and 1881)”; Max Meyerhof, “Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghâfiqî (1930)”; Max Meyerhof, “Deux Manuscrits illustrés du Livre des Simples d’Ahmad al-Gâfiqî. (1940–41).” Research on other authors included: Hakim Mohammed Said, al-Biruni’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica, 2 vols., 1973 (vol. 1 contains the text edited with an English translation by H. K. Said; and vol. 2 an introduction, commentary, and evaluation by Sami K. Hamarneh); Rana M. H. Ehsan Elahie, “Sources of Kitab al-Saidana of al-Biruni,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 118–21; Max Meyerhof, Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Beruni, 1932; Kamal Muhammad Habib , “The Kitab al-Saidana: Structure and Approach,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 63–79; Martin Levey, and Noury al-Khaledy, The Medical Formulary of al-Samarqandi: and the Relation of Early Arabic Simples to those Found in the Indigenous Medicine of the Near East and India, 1967; Max Meyerhof, “Sur Un Glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte 17 (1935): 223–35 (reproduced in Mûsâ ibn Maymûn / Maimonides (d. 1204): Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996). Three further works should be mentioned here as they illustrated the trends in the research about Arabic science and botany: the catalogue of an exhibition that displayed many lavishly illustrated manuscripts, including botany, together with original scientific essays that went beyond the commentary on the pieces on display (À l’ombre d’Avicenne: La Médecine au temps des califes. Exposition présentée du 18 novembre 1996 au 2 mars 1997, Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996); a list of manuscripts that contains a significant number of

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copies of scientific texts, particularly of botany (Marie-Geneviève Guesdon, “Manuscrits et histoire de la médecine: le fonds arabe de la Bibliothèque nationale à Paris,” Maladies, médecines et societies: Approches historiques pour le présent, ed. François-Olivier Touati, 2 vols., 1993, vol. 1, 36–40), and a study on the life sciences in the Arabo-Islamic world (Paola Carusi, Lo zafferano e il geco. Le scienze della vita nella società islamica del Medioevo, 2007). A special case is al-Andalus. Botanical work in the area dated back to the early time of the Arabo-Islamic presence in the peninsula, which included the transfer and naturalization of Eastern plants. Also, in the 10th century, local scientists who had an Arabic translation of Dioscorides, De materia medica, made in Baghdad in the 9th century, were in contact with Byzantine scientists (on this, see Juan Vernet, La cultura hispanoárabe en Oriente y Occidente, 1978 [French translation: Ce que la culture doit aux Arabes d’Espagne, 1985], 81–5; more recently, Julio Samsó, Las ciencias de los antiguos en Al-Andalus, 1992, 110–16). The production of al-Andalus has been abundantly researched as early as Max Meyerhof, who published “Esquisse d’Histoire de la Pharmacologie et Botanique chez les Musulmans d’Espagne,” Al-Andalus 3 (1935): 1–41. However, it is mainly thanks to the school in Granada (above) that research made substantial progress. Several essays were published in the following volumes: Ciencias de la naturaleza en Al-Andaluz, Textos y Estudios, 1–3, ed. Expiración García Sanchez, 1990–1994, and 4–6, ed. Camilo Alvarez De Morales, 1996–2001. It is not possible to mention here all these publications, also because they deal mainly with agriculture (for the Arabo-Andalusian sources on agriculture, see Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. 4 … [above], and, for a synthetic presentation of the Arabic contribution to this field, including Andalusia, see Toufic Fahd, “Botany and Agriculture,” Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols., ed. Roshdi Rashed, and Régis Morelon, 1996, vol. 3, 813–52). Nevertheless, one work needs special mention, because of its originality and innovative method: Julia Ma Carabaza Bravo, Expiración García Sánchez, Esteban Hernández Bermejo, and Alfonzo Jiménez Ramírez, Árboles y arbustos de Al-Andalus, 2004. Although the question is discussed below, it should be mentioned here that, on the identification of the plants mentioned in ancient texts, this work is of a truly interdisciplinary nature. The work on al-Andalus The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma KhadraJayyusi, 2 vols., 1994, includes some contributions on, or related to, the history of botany as: Juan Vernet, “Natural and Technical Sciences in al-Andalus” (937–51); Expiración García Sánchez, “Agriculture in Muslim Spain” (987–99); Lucie Bolens, “The Use of Plants for Dyeing and Cloth-

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ing” (1000–15); James Dickie, “The Hispano-Arabic Garden: Notes Towards a Typology” (1016–35). One cannot conclude the review of the work done on Andalusian botany without mentioning the fundamental editions (with translation and commentary) by the late Albert Dietrich (1913–2001), who taught at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and specialized on Arabic botanical lexicology. His three major contributions to this field are (in chronological order of publication): Dioscurides triumphans: Ein anonymer arabischer Kommentar (Ende 12. Jahrh. n. Chr.) zur Materia medica. Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 2 vols., 1988; Die Dioskurides-Erklärung des Ibn al-Baitar: Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Pflanzensynonymik des Mittelalters. Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 1991; Die Ergänzungen Ibn Gulgul’s zur Materia medica des Dioskurides: Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 1993. G. Late Antiquity in the West The area of the Middle Ages that was most studied in our field here is the West. For the sake of clarity, it may be useful to divide its history in three major phases, however artificial and conventional such divisions might be: Late-Antiquity, the Early Middle-Ages, and the Salernitan/Post-Salernitan period. For Late-Antiquity, texts are listed with the references of their editions in Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, Pierre-Paul Corsetti, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, 1987, with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999, 2000. For the authors of many of such texts (or on the anonymous ones), see the entries to the Neue Pauly/New Pauly, and Keyser and Irby-Massie (above). Botanical texts of this period were mainly the Latin translation(s) of Dioscorides, De materia medica, and its epiphenomena. The “old” Latin translation of Dioscorides identified as Dioscorides Longobardus was edited by Konrad Hofman, and Theodor M. Auracher, “Der langobardische Dioskorides des Marcellus Virgilius,” Romanische Forschungen 1 (1882): 49–105 (Book I); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Aus T. M. Aurachers Nachlass herausgegeben und ergänzt,” Romanische Forschungen 10 (1897): 181–247 (Book II), and 369–446 (Book III); 11 (1899): 1–93 (Book IV); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337),” Romanische Forschungen 13 (1902): 161–243 (Book V); and Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Index der Sachnamen und der wichtigeren Wörter,” Romanische

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Forschungen 14 (1903): 601–36. Book I, has been re-edited by Haralambie Mihaescu, Dioscoride Latino, Materia medica, Libro primo, 1938. See also John Riddle, “The Latin Alphabetical Dioscorides,” Actes du XIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Moscou, 18–24 août 1971, Sections III & IV: Antiquité et Moyen Age, 1971, 204–09 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. IV), and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Notas para la difusión altomedieval de una traducción latina de Dioscórides,” Actas del II Congreso Hispánico de Latín Medieval (León, 11–14 de noviembre de 1997), 1998, vol. 1, 471–81. First among the epiphenomena of Dioscorides, De materia medica, there is the so-called De herbis feminis ascribed to Dioscorides. It was studied as early as Hermann Kästner, “Pseudo-Dioskorides de herbis femininis,” Hermes 31 (1896): 578–636. More recently, see (chronological order of publication): John Riddle, “Pseudo-Dioscorides’ Ex herbis feminis and Early Medieval Medical Botany,” Journal of the History of Biology 14 (1981): 43–81 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. IX); Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “El Pseudo-Dioscórides De herbis femininis, los Dynamidia e Isidoro de Sevilla, Etym. XVII, 7,9–11,” Tradición e innovación de la medicina latina de la Antigüedad y de la Alta Edad Media, ed. Manuel E. Vázquez Buján, 1994, 183–203; as well as Annalisa Bracciotti, “Un modello greco per l’erba spheritis degli erbari pseudo-dioscoridei latini,” Helikon 38 (1995–98): 419–35; Ead., “Gli erbari pseudo-dioscoridei e la trasmissione del Dioscoride alfabetico nell’Italia meridionale,” Romanobarbarica 16 (1999): 285–315; Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Le Ex herbis femininis: traduction, réélaboration, problèmes stylistiques,” Les textes médicaux latins comme literature: Actes du VIe colloque international sur les textes médicaux latins du Ier au 3 septembre 1998 à Nantes, ed. Alfrieda and Jackie Pigeaud, 2000, 77–89; Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’esemplare del De herbis femininis usato dal traduttore dell’Erbario antico inglese,” Cassiodorus 6–7 (2001): 249–74; ead., “Osservazioni sulla forma del latino lauer nell’edizione Wellmann di (pseudo)-Dioscoride e nelle edizioni di alcuni erbari latini,” Filologia antica e moderna 26 (2004): 45–55; and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Una fuente desconocida del De herbis femininis, la antigua traducción latina del De plantis duodecim signis et septem planetis subiectis atribuido a Tésalo de Tralles,” Latomus 64 (2005): 153–68. Many of the other derivatives from Dioscorides are grouped in the LateAntique corpus that can be qualified as classical and included Antonius Musa, De herba vettonica; the herbal attributed to Apuleius; and Sextus Placitus. It was edited by Ernst Howald, and Henry E. Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba vettonica liber. Pseudoapulei Herbarius, Anonymi De taxone liber. Sexti Placiti liber Medicinae ex animalibus, 1927. The full text of the corpus as it appears in the codex 296 of the Biblioteca Statale at Lucca has been reproduced and trans-

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lated into Spanish in the volume of commentary that accompanies the recent facsimile reproduction of the manuscript under the title Herbolarium et materia medica (Biblioteca Statale de Lucca, ms. 296), 2007. Since the edition above, the Pseudo-Apuleius was the object of several publications among which: Friedrich W. T. Hunger, The Herbal of PseudoApuleius: from the Ninth-Century Manuscript in the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Codex casinensis 97) together with the First Printed Edition of John Phil. De Lignamine (Editio princeps Romae 1481), 1935; Erminio Caproti, and William T. Stearn (1911–2001), Herbarium Apulei (1481) – Herbolario volgare (1522), 1979 (introduction by E. Caproti with an essay by W.T. Stearn). For the study of the text, see Henry E. Sigerist, “Der Herbarius Apulei,” Janus 29 (1925): 180–82; id., “Zum Herbarius Pseudo-Apulei,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 23 (1930): 197–204; Linda Erhsam Voigts, “The Significance of the Name Apuleius to the Herbarium Apulei,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 214–27; Maria Franca Buffa Giolito, and Gigliola Maggiulli, L’altro Apuleio. Problemi aperti per una nuova edizione dell’Herbarius, 1996. Among the other texts that have been edited, translated, and/or studied, there was the so-called curae herbarum. The text was edited by Sofia Mattei, “Curae herbarum,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Macerata, 1995, and further studied by Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’apporto della tradizione indiretta per la costituzione di un testo critico delle “Curae herbarum,” Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale 42 (2000): 61–102; Ead., “Nomen herbae selenas: Un passo bilingue delle Curae herbarum,” Il plurilinguismo nella tradizione letteraria latina, ed. Renato Oniga, 2003, 213–53; and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Un manuscrito con textos inéditos de las Curae ex animalibus,” Vir bonus docendi peritus: Homenaxe a José Pérez Riesco, 2002, 123–39; and id., “Las Curae herbarum y las interpolaciones dioscorideas en el Herbario del Pseudo-Apuleyo,” Euphrosyne 32 (2004): 223–40. Other texts include the so-called alfabetum Galieni studied by Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Un Herbier médical du haut moyen âge: l’Alfabetum Galieni,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 4 (1982): 65–97; and Gargilius Martialis, first analyzed by John Riddle, “Gargilius Martialis as Medical Writer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984): 408–29 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. X), and recently edited by Brigitte Maire, Gargilius Martialis, Les Remèdes tirés des légumes et des fruits, texte établi, traduit et commenté, 2002; see also the concordance by Brigitte Maire, Concordantiae Gargilianae, 2002. For the inventory of the plants mentioned in these and other texts, see Alexander Tschirch, Handbuch der Pharmakognosie, 4 vols., 1909–1925, vol. 2 (1910), passim, and also Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée de Ier au

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Xe siècle, 2 vols., 1989, with a short description of the research program, and, for each text, a brief characterization, the editions, and, when appropriate, any other relevant literature. Also, for the identification of the plants, see Stirling below. H. The Pre-Salernitan Centuries For the early-medieval or Pre-Salernitan period, the Carolingian world provides much information (see Carmélia Opsomer-Halleux, “The Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine,” Medieval Gardens, ed. Elizabeth B. Macdougall, 1986, 93–114, which includes [106–12] a Tentative List of Garden Plants). A significant document is the Capitulare de Villis. Whatever its date (which has been debated), it provides (paragraph 70) a list of 95 herbs supposedly to be cultivated in the villae of the Empire (Opsomer-Halleux, “The Medieval Garden …” [above], 98; edition of the text in Gerhard Schmitz, Die Kapitulariensammlung des Ansegis, 1996). Another important document is the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (dating back to ca. 795), which was recently rediscovered (facsimile edition with a volume of commentary under the title Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Faksimile der Handschrift Msc. Med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1989. The volume of commentary contains an introduction and the translation of the text by Ulrich Stoll and Gundolf Keil in collaboration with Albert Ohlmeyer. For a critical edition of the text, with a German translation and a study, see Ulrich Stoll, Das “Lorscher Arzneibuch”: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts [Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1]: Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar, 1992). This manuscript documents not only the range of plants known in North-West Europe at that time, but also the continuity with previous knowledge and practice, as well as, if not more, the contacts between West and East, that is, between the Carolingian and the Byzantine Worlds. Saint Gall Abbey documents further the botany of the Carolingian period. The so-called Botanicus Sangallensis, which was known since 1928 at least (see Erhard Landgraf, “Ein frühmittelalterlicher Botanicus,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Leipzig, 1928 [reproduced in Kyklos 1 [1928]: 114–46]), was not studied until very recently, however: Monica Niederer, Der St. Galler ‘Botanicus’. Ein frühmittelalterliches Herbar: Kritische Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2005. The study of the garden is part of the research program conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Virginia, and consisting, among others, in producing a virtual tri-dimensional reconstructing of the monastery. See Walter Horn, and Ernest Born, The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, & Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols., 1979 (see vol. 2, 175–209 and 300–13 for the garden).

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The next document in a chronological sequence is the Hortulus by Walahfrid Strabo. It was repeatedly studied during the 20th century: Karl Sudhoff, Des Walahfrid von der Reichenau Hortulus: Gedichte über die Kräuter seines Klostergartens vom Jahre 827, Wiedergabe des ersten Wiener Druckes vom Jahre 1510, eingeleitet und medizinisch, botanisch und druckgeschichtlich gewürdigt, 1926; Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, translation by Raef Payne; commentary by Wilfrid Blunt, 1966; or, more recently, Hans-Dieter Stoffler, Der hortulus des Walahfrid Strabo: aus d. Kräutergarten d. Klosters Reichenau, 1978. Also, in a volume published on the occasion of the rediscovery of the Lorscher-Arzneibuch (Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Klostermedizin in der Karolingerzeit. Ausgewählte Texte und Beiträge, 1989), there is (196–98) a list of the plants mentioned in the Hortulus together with their identification. The same volume contains also (199–202) an inventory of the plants in the Würzburg collection, dating back to 840 circa. Of this period are also the many receptaries published by Henry E. Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur, 1923, and Julius Jörimann, Frühmittelalterliche Rezeptarien, 1925. The many plants they mention are listed in Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée … (above). I. Salerno and After The translation into Latin of Arabic medical and, particularly, pharmaceutical treatises transformed previous botanical knowledge. Books of medicinal plants circulated in a significantly increased number. Although many texts of this period have already been edited, several are still waiting to be brought to light. This is the aim of the program recently launched on Salerno, aiming to edit as many texts as possible (see the several essays in La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2007). The texts that have been edited and/or studied include the following: (circa instans) Carmélia Opsomer, Livre des simples medecines. Codex Bruxellensis IV 1024, 2 vols., 1980; and Ead., Book of Simple Medicines, with a preface by William T. Stearn, 2 vols., 1984; Le livre des simples médecines d’après le manuscrit français 12322 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, 1986, and Le Livre des simples médecines, 2001; Leo J. Vandewiele, Een middelnederlandse versie van de “Circa instans” van Platearius naar de hss Portland, British Museum ms. Loan 29/332, XIVe eeuw, en Universiteitsbiblioteek te Gent Hs. 1457, XVe eeuw. Uitgegeven en gecommentarieerd, [1970]; (Albertus Magnus) Klaus Biewer, Albertus Magnus, De vegetabilibus Buch VI, Traktat 2, lateinisch-deutsch, Übersetzung und Kommentar. Mit einem Geleitwort von Rudolf Schmitz, 1992; and the following three studies by Jerry Stannard, “Identification of the Plants Described by Alber-

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tus Magnus, De vegetabilibus, lib. VI,” Res Publica Litterarum 2 (1979): 281–318; “The Botany of St.Albert the Great,” Albertus Magnus, Doctor Universalis, 1280/1980, ed. Gerbert Meyer, and Albert Zimmerman, 1980, 345–72 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina medicamenta … [above], no. XIV); and “Albertus Magnus and Medieval Herbalism,” Albertus Magnus and the Sciences. Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl, 1980, 355–77 (reproduced in Stannard, Ibidem, no. XIII); (Arnau de Vilanova) edition of his Latin translation of the Book of Simple Medicines (that is, medicinal plants) by Abu l-Salt Umayya in a volume that contains several texts by different scholars (I reproduce the Latin title from the frontispiece): Arnaldi de Villanova, Traslatio Libri albuzale de medicinis simplicibus. Ediderunt José Martínez Gásquez et Michael R. McVaugh. Abu l-Salt Umayya, Kitab al-adwiya almufrada. Edidit Ana Labarta. Llibre d’Albumesar de simples medecines. Edidit Luis Cifuentes. Praefatione et comentariis instruxerunt Ana Labarta, José Martínez Gásquez , Michael R. McVaugh, Danielle Jacquart et Luis Cifuentes, 2004; (Rufinus) after a first study was published by Lynn J. Thorndike, “Rufinus: A Forgotten Botanist of the Thirteenth Century,” Isis 18 (1932): 63–76, his text was edited by the same, assisted by Francis S. Benjamin, The Herbal of Rufinus, Edited from the Unique Manuscript, 1946; on it, see recently Annalisa Bracciotti, “Osservazioni sull’Erbario di Rufino,” … un tuo serto di fiori in man recando: Scritti in onore di Maria Amalia D’Aronco, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, and Silvana Serafin, 2 vols, 2008, vol. 2, 63–73; (Pierre d’Auvergne) his botanical treatise (in fact, a commentary on Aristotle and Theophrastus) has been recently edited: E. L. J. Poortman, Petrus de Arvernia, Sententia super librum De vegetabilibus et plantis, 2003; (anonymous herbals and receptaries) see for example: Maria Sofia Corradini Bozzi, Ricettari medico-farmaceutici medievali nella Francia meridionale, vol. 1, 1997; Anna Martellotti, I ricettari di Federico II. Dal “Meridionale” al “Liber de coquina,” 2005; Paul Aebischer, and Eugène Olivier, L’herbier de Moudon, un recueil de recettes médicales de la fin du 14e siècle. Notes sur la botanique médicale du moyen-âge, 1938; Stefania Ragazzini, Un erbario del XV secolo. Il ms. 106 della Biblioteca di botanica dell’Università di Firenze, 1983; and the so-called Herbal of Roccabonella, on which, see, for example: Francesco Paganelli, and Elsa M. Cappelletti, “Il codice erbario Roccabonella (sec. XV) e suo contributo alla storia della farmacia,” Atti e memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 (1996): 111–17. A special case is the transfer of classical botany to England, which has been much studied and discussed (for an overview, see Maria Amalia D’Aronco, “Le traduzioni di testi medico-botanici in inglese antico,” Testo medievale e traduzione, ed. Maria Grazia Cammarota, and Maria Vittoria

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Molinari, 2001, 227–35). At the center of this, there is the manuscript of the British Library, Cotton Vitellius C III, which contains the late-antique corpus above (among others, the Pseudo-Apuleius). It was studied as early as 1864 by Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England: Being a Collection of Documents, for the Most Part Never Before Printed, Illustrating the History of Science in this Country before the Norman Conquest, 3 vols., 1864–1866. Vol. 1 includes “Herbarium of Apuleius. Continued from Dioskorides … Medicina de quadrupedibus of Sextus Placitus; all from Brit. mus. ms. Cotton. Vitellius C. III …” The Cotton Vitellius manuscript has been recently reproduced in facsimile by Maria Amalia D’Aronco, and Margaret L. Cameron, The Old English Illustrated Pharmacopoeia. British Library Cotton Vitellius C III, 1998, with a study. One should also mention here such other publications as (selection; chronological order of publication): Walter Hofstetter, “Zur lateinischen Quelle des altenglischen Pseudo-Dioskurides,” Anglia 101 (1983): 315–60; Maria Amalia D’Aronco, “L’erbario anglosassone, un’ipotesi sulla data della traduzione,” Romanobarbarica 13 (1994–1995): 325–66; Annalisa Bracciotti, “L’esemplare del De herbis femininis usato dal traduttore dell’Erbario antico inglese,” Cassiodorus 6–7 (2001): 249–74, and Philip Rusche, “Dioscorides’ De materia medica and Late Old English Herbal Glossaries,” From Earth to Art: The Many Aspects of the PlantWorld in Anglo-Saxon England: Proceedings of the First ASPNS Symposium, University of Glasgow, 5–7 April 2000, ed. Carole P. Biggam, 2003, 181–94. Also, Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and AngloSaxon medicine, 2002, who suggested a new approach to the text, which may be characterized as ethnobotanical. J. Lexica and inventories of plants In the study of primary sources, a first – and major – problem is the lexicon of plant names. Whereas no other modern reference work is available for the Greek Byzantine world than the 19th-century analytical lexicon by Bernhard A. Langkavel (1825–1902), Botanik der spaeteren Griechen vom dritten bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderte, 1866 (rpt.: 1964), there is now a particularly useful instrument recently published by Johannes Stirling, Lexicon nominum herbarum arborum fructuumque lingua latinae, 4 vols., 1995–1998, for the West. Similarly, vernacular names have been systematically collected by Willem F. Daems (1911–1994), Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta: Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde, 1993. Some studies have been made on such aspects of the medieval botanical lexicon as the continuity of classical names (Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Re-

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ception of Classical Plant Names,” (above), and the contribution of some medieval scholars to this question (Jerry Stannard, “Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Thirteenth Century Botanical Nomenclature,” Actes du XIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Paris, août 1968, 1971, vol. 8, 191–94 [reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XVI]). Linked with the lexicon is the inventory of plant names in the texts. A pioneering work was the research program THEOREMA, which aimed to inventory all the terms of materia medica – including plant names – in the pharmaceutical literature prior to the 10th century (on which, see in chronological order of publication: Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, and Louis Delatte, “Ancient Medical Recipes and the Computer: the THEOREMA Project,” Pharmacy in History 23 (1981): 87–9; Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Le traitement informatique des recettes médicales du haut moyen âge,” Actes du Congrès International “Informatique et Sciences Humaines,” 1981, 649–67; and Ead., “Une banque informatisée de pharmacopée ancienne: Pour une histoire quantitative du médicament,” Actes du XXVIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine, 1982, vol. 2, 215–19), which led to the publication of an index by Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée … (above). Another program was launched slightly later, which was presented by Sergio Sconocchia, Programma di concordanze e lessici di autori medici latini, Atti del I Seminario di studi sui Lessici tecnici greci e latini (Messina, 8–10 marzo 1990), ed. Paola Radici-Colace, and Maria Caccamo-Caltabiano, 1991, 311–21. As a result of this research program, several lexica of Late-Antique texts were published in the Alpha-Omega series of Olms. They are listed in 1991, along with other publications, by Alain Touwaide, “L’inventaire des matières médicales dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age: des compléments,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 291 (1991): 393–97. A similar program dealing with classical and Byzantine Greek texts was presented by Alain Touwaide in 1993: “Towards a Thesaurus of Ancient Materia Medica: a Methodological Analysis for the Constitution of a Computerised Database,” Lingue tecniche del greco e del latino: II, Atti del II Seminario internazionale sulla letteratura scientifica e tecnica greca e latina, Trieste, 4–5 ottobre 1993, ed. Sergio Sconocchia, and Lucio Toneatto, 1997, 227–47. The program is now carried out in the Department of Botany of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. K. Identification of Plants The identification of the plants according to current taxonomy is of primary importance. It has been the object of much research in the early 20th century, particularly on the basis of Greek illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides,

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De materia medica. The literature published on this question from Linnaeus to 1998 has been collected in Alain Touwaide, “Bibliographie historique de la botanique: Les Identifications des plantes médicinales citées dans les traités anciens, après l’adoption du système de classification de Linné (1707–1778),” Centre Jean Palerne – Lettre d’Information 30 (1997–1998): 2–22, and 31 (1998): 2–65. Among the several works of this type, one could quote here: Edmond Bonnet (1848–1922), “Essai d’identification des plantes médicinales mentionnées par Dioscoride, d’après les peintures d’un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (Ms. grec No. 2179),” Janus 8 (1903): 169–77, 225–32, 281–85; id., “Etude sur les figures de plantes et d’animaux peintes dans une version arabe, manuscrite, de la Matière Médicale de Dioscoride, Conservée à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris,” Janus 14 (1909): 294–303; Emmanuel J. Emmanuel, “Etude comparative sur les plantes dessinées dans le Codex Constantinopolitanus de Dioscoride,” Journal Suisse de Chimie et Pharmacie/Schweizerische Wochenschrift für Chemie und Pharmazie 50 (1912): 45–50, 64–72; Krikor Jacob Basmadjia (Grigor Pasmachean), “L’identification des noms de plantes du Codex Constantinopolitanus de Dioscoride,” Journal Asiatique 230 (1938): 577–621 (rpt. in Texts and Studies on Islamic Medicine, 1, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1997, 27–71). In the current state of research, the classical reference work on this point is still Jacques André (1910–1994), Lexique des termes de botanique en latin, 1956, with a revised edition published almost 30 years later under a new title: Les noms de plantes dans la Rome antique, 1985. However useful it is, it does not include any methodological statement. Some works have been devoted to this question (in chronological order of publication): Bernhard Herzhoff, “Zur Identifikation antiker Pflanzennamen,” Vorträge des ersten Symposions der Bamberger Arbeitskreises “Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption (AKAN),” 1990, 9–32; Alain Touwaide, “L’identification des plantes du “Traité de matière médicale” de Dioscoride: Un bilan méthodologique,” Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, vol. 1 and 2, ed. Klaus Döring, and Georg Wöhrle, 1992, 253–74; James L. Reveal, “Identifying Plants in Pre-Linnean Botanical Literature,” Prospecting for Drugs in Ancient and Medieval European Texts: A Scientific Approach, ed. Bart K. Holland, 1996, 57–90; Giovanni Cristofolini, and Umberto Mossetti, “Interpretation of Plant Names in a Late Medieval Medical Treatise,” Taxon 47 (1998): 305–19. A new approach – of a truly interdisciplinary nature – has been proposed for the trees mentioned in Andalusian agronomic literature by Carabaza Bravo et al., Árboles y arbustos … (above), 2004.

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L. Plants Some plants have been studied in monographic publications (books or articles). Being impossible to mention here all such works, I list some (recent or not so recent), representative of this type of research because of the nature of the plant, the method of the research, or any other significant aspect. Works are listed in alphabetic order of English plant names: (beet) John A. C. Greppin, “The Words for ‘Beet’ in three interrelated Systems: GrecoRoman, Armenian and Arabic,” Byzantion 60 (1990): 145–63; (belladonna) Brigitte Schwamm, Atropa Belladonna: eine antike Heilpflanze im modernen Arzneischatz. Historische Betrachtung aus botanischer, chemischer, toxikologischer, pharmakologischer und medizinischer Sicht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des synthetischen Atropins, 1988; (betony) Valérie Bonet, “La bétoine et ses noms,” Le Latin médical: La constitution d’un langage scientifique: Réalités et langage de la médecine dans le monde romain. Actes du IIIe Colloque internationale “Textes médicaux latins,” Saint-Etienne, 11–13 septembre 1989, ed. Guy Sabbah, 1991, 143–50; (garlic) John Heinerman, The Healing Benefits of Garlic, 1994 (Spanish translation: El ajo y sus propriedades curativas. Historia, remedios y recetas, 1995); (hellebore) Ferdinand Wick, “Beiträge zur Geschichte von Helleborus und Veratrum,” Ph. D. thesis, University of Basel, 1939; (liquorice) Marielene Putscher, “Das Süssholz und seine Geschichte,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Cologne, 1968; (mandrake) Laurie Gluckman, “Mandragora: its Pharmacology and Superstitions,” Scalpel & Tongs 37 (1993): 58–60; (mistletoe) Hans Becker, and Helga Schmoll, Mistel: Arzneipflanze, Brauchtum, Kunstmotiv im Jugendstil, 1986; (roses) Mia Touw, “Roses in the Middle Ages,” Economic Botany 36 (1882): 71–83; (rue) Antonino Pollio, Antonino De Natale, Emanuela Appetiti, Gianni Aliotta, and Alain Touwaide, “Continuity and Change in the Mediterranean Medical Tradition: Ruta spp. (Rutaceae) in Hippocratic Medicine and Present Practices,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 116 (2008): 469–82; (saffron) Annick Lallemand, “Le Safran et le cinnamome dans les Homélies sur le Cantique des cantiques de Grégoire de Nysse,” L’Antiquité Classique 71 (2002): 121–30; (silphium) Denis Roques, “Médecine et botanique: Le Silphion dans l’oeuvre d’Oribase,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 106 (1993): 380–399; (thyme) Quentin Seddon, A Brief History of Thyme: From Magical Power to the Elixir of Youth, 1994; (valerian) Mansoor Ahmad, “Valerian, a Drug Ignored by Us,” Hamdard medicus 35 (1992): 80–85. In some cases, such publications cover a group of plants, related or not: Pierre Cuttai, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der officinellen Drogen Semen Lini, Fructus Colocynthidis, Radix Saponariae,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Basel, 1937; Heinrich Lehmann, “Beiträge zur Geschichte von Sambucus nigra, Juniperus communis und Juniperus Sabina,” Ph.D. thesis, University of

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Basel, 1935; Jerry Stannard, “Vegetable Gums and Resins in Medieval Recipe Literature,” Acta Congressus Internationalis Historiae Pharmaciae Bremae MCMLXXV, 1978, 41–8 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XVII). Spices constitute a chapter in itself in the history of medieval botany, with a wide range of aspects, from the identification and trade of the substances (among others along the silk-road) to their social and cultural meaning. It will suffice to mention here two works of a different nature recently published: Sami H. Hamarneh, “Spices in Medieval Islam: a Perspective,” Hamdard medicus 35 (1992): 82–90; and Marina Ferrara Pignatelli, Viaggio nel mondo delle essenze, 1991. The cultural values linked with spices have become the object of a dictionary: Hansjörg Küster, Wo der Pfeffer wächst: Ein Lexikon zur Kulturgeschichte der Gewürze, 1987. More recently, spices in the Middle Ages have been analyzed in an essay by Paul Freeman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, 2008. From a more general viewpoint, the history of plants with therapeutic applications has been of particular interest, with a significant transformation from late 19th-century pharmacognosy (which was living its last days, as it was replaced shortly after by pharmaco-chemistry) to the current revival worldwide. Here is a selection of this variety of aspects (works are listed in chronological order of publication): Friedriech A. Flückiger (1828–1894), and Daniel Hanbury (1825–1875), Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin Met with in Great Britain and British India, 1874; Heinrich Marzell (1885–1970), Alte Heilkräuter, 1926; Pierre Delaveau, Histoire et renouveau des plantes medicinales, 1982; Ernesto Riva, Non far di ogni erba un fascio. Botanica e storia di proprietà farmacologiche di duecento piante medicinali, 1990; Liana Palazzi Mariotti, Il giardino dei semplici: Un itinerario fra le piante aromatiche medicinali velenose esotiche, 1993; Pierangelo Lomagno, Storie di piante medicinali eccellenti, 1994. M. Herbals Books of herbs used for medicinal purposes were also the object of a theoretical analysis on their actual nature, evolution, and transmission. A fundamental work was Arber, Herbals … (above). Later on, Agnes Arber returned to the topic: “From Medieval Herbalism to the Birth of Modern Botany,” Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice written in honour of C. Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols., 1953, vol. 1, 317–36. In the meantime, other contributions explored the antique and medieval history of such books.Among them, see, for example: Warren Royal Dawson (1888–1968), “Studies in Medical History, a) the Origin of

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the Herbal, b) Castor-Oil in Antiquity,” Aegyptus 10 (1929): 47–72; Charles Singer (1876–1960), “The Herbal in Antiquity,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 47 (1927): 1–52; Juan Carlos Ahumada (1890–1976), Herbarios medicos primitivos, 1942; Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Herbals and their Development,” Clio Medica 9 (1974): 23–33 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. III); and Salvatore Pezzella, Gli erbari: I primi libri di medicina (Le virtù curative delle piante), 1993. N. Botanical Science Theoretical notions of botany, its scientific methods, and other aspects of the approach to the world of plants have been little investigated. On the classical background of medieval botanical knowledge, see Alain Touwaide, “La botanique entre science et culture au Ier siècle de notre ère,” Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften in der Antike, vol. 1: Biologie, ed. Georg Wöhrle , 1999, 219–52. The continuity of the ancient system of classification in a 7th-century Greek manuscript of Dioscorides was ascertained in Annamaria Ciarallo, “Classificazione botanica delle specie illustrate nel Dioscoride della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,” Automata 1 (2006): 39–41. A global evaluation of the contribution of Byzantium to botany was made as early as 1939: Félix Brunet (b. 1872), “Contribution des médecins byzantins à l’histoire des plantes et à la botanique médicale en France,” Hippocrates 5 (1939): 524–31. Similarly, Jerry Stannard, “Botany,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (1982), 344–49, proposed a synthesis that he further substantiated in such article as “The Theoretical Bases of Medieval Herbalism,” Medical Heritage 1 (1985): 186–98 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. IV). Other scholars focused more on the scientific method behind the construction of botanical knowledge: Guy Beaujouan (1925–2007), “La prise de conscience de l’aptitude à innover (le tournant du milieu du 13e siècle),” Le Moyen âge et la science: Approche de quelques disciplines et personnalités scientifiques médiévales. Actes du colloque d’Orléans, 21–22 avril 1988, ed. Bernard Ribemont, 1991, 5–14, and, in the same volume, Bernard Ribemont, and Geneviève Sodigne-Costes, “Botanique médiévale: tradition, observation, imaginaire: L’Exemple de l’encyclopédisme,” 153–72. The question of observation was also taken into consideration in the analysis of illustrated herbals as in the following contribution by Giulia Orofino, “Il rapporto con l’antico e l’osservazione della natura nell’illusrazione scientifica di eta’ sveva in Italia meridionale,” Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen: Proceedings of the symposium sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 18–20 January 1990, ed. William Tronzo, 1994, 129–49. Also, the notion

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of observation has been approached from a theoretical viewpoint: Danielle Jacquart, “L’observation dans les sciences de la nature au moyen âge: Limites et possibilités,” Micrologus 4 (1996): 55–75. This set of notions is linked with the concept of nature, which was the object of several studies, among which we can mention here: Franz Gräser, “Die Naturwissenschaften und das Benediktkloster Fulda im VIII. und IX. Jahrhundert,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Rotterdam vom 17. – 21. September, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1965, 61–71; Andreas Speer, “The Discovery of Nature: The Contribution of the Chartrians to Twelfth-Century Attempts to Find a Scientia Naturalis,” Traditio 52 (1997): 135–51; also Vito Fumagalli, L’uomo e l’ambiente medievale, 1992. Research on these aspects also included an investigation on the link between folk lore and learned herbalism: Jerry Stannard, “Folk Medicine, Philosophy and Medieval Herbalism,” Res Publica Litterarum 3 (1980): 229–36, and id., “Folkloristic Elements in Medieval Herbalism,” Actes du XXVIe Congrès international d’histoire de la médecine, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), 20–25 août 1978, 1981, vol. 2, 203–5. Finally, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was the object of some studies that included the theoretical aspects (works are listed in chronological order): Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Italian Medical Botany,” Atti del XXI Congresso internazionale di storia della medicina, Siena, 22–28 settembre 1968, 2 vol., 1970, 1554–65 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta … [above], no. XI); Richard Palmer, “Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 149–57; and Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities, 1991. O. Astrology and Symbolism The uses of plants also included astrology and magic as the many manuscripts listed and accurately described in the Corpus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (11 vols., 1898–1951) show. Specific studies have been devoted to this aspect of medieval botany, from a general presentation in the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Friedrich Pfister, “Pflanzenaberglaube,” RE XIX, 2 [1938], 1446–56) to the edition and analysis of manuscripts and texts, as for example: Armand Delatte, “Le traité des plantes planétaires d’un manuscrit de Léningrad,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 9 (1949): 145–77; Adalberto Pazzini (1878–1975), Virtù delle erbe secondo i sette pianeti. L’erbario detto di Tolomeo e quelli di altri astrologi (Cod. Vat. 11423), 1959, which analyses a broad range of texts; or, more recently, an edi-

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tion of some fragments: Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Dos fragmentos inéditos de la antigua traducción latina del De plantis duodecim signis et septem planetis subiectis atribuido a Tésalo de Tralles,” Traditio 59 (2004): 368–82. On magic, see also, and among many others, such study as Jerry Stannard, “Magiferous Plants and Magic in Medieval Medical Botany,” The Maryland Historian 8 (1977): 33–46 (reproduced in Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism … [above], no. V). Such uses of plants were linked with, and implied, the whole discourse on plant symbology, which cannot be presented in detail here, however. We shall mention only the general Cultural History of Plants edited by Ghillian Prance, and Mark Nesbitt, 2005, and the recent synthesis by Marcel De Cleene, and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, 2 vols., 2002. Of interest, also a text edited by Margaret H. Thomson (Le jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI [above]), and the study by Jean-Pierre Albert, Odeurs de sainteté: La mythologie chrétienne des aromates, 1990, which focused on the Christian discourse of spices. Contributions to this vast sector dealt also with particular plants, among which (to quote just one): Anthony R. Littlewood, “The Symbolism of Apple in Byzantine Literature,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 23 (1974): 33–59. P. Gardens Theoretical botany and plant uses and symbolism combined in the creation of gardens. Much literature has been devoted to the topic of medieval gardens. A collection of essays is Der Garten von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter, ed. Maureen Carroll-Spillecke, 1992. For Byzantium, more specifically, we could mention the classical work by Otmar Schissel (1884–1943), Der byzantinische Garten: seine Darstellung im gleichzeitigen Romane, 1942, now to be replaced (or completed) with the series of essays in the volume Byzantine Garden Culture, ed. Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-bulmahn, 2002. Other essays should also be mentioned, as for example: Leslie Brubaker. and Anthony R. Littlewood, “Byzantinische Gärten,” Der Garten …, ed. Carroll-Spillecke (above), 212–48; Anthony R. Littlewood, “Gardens of Byzantium,” Journal of Garden History 12 (1992): 126–53; and id., “Gardens of the Palaces,” Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire, 1997, 13–38. For the Arabic world, one could select, among the abundant production, the following recent essays, all lavishly illustrated (photos and maps of gardens, reproductions of manuscripts, photos of works of art) (chronological order of publication): Arabesques et jardins de paradis: Collections françaises d’art islamique, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 octobre 1989 – 15 janvier 1990, 1989; Il

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giardino islamico. Architettura, natura, paesaggio, ed. Attilio Petruccioli, 1994; D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, & Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, 2000; and Yves Porter, and Arthur Thévenart, Palaces and Gardens of Persia, 2003 (first published in French: Palais et Jardins de Perse, 2002). For the Western Medieval world, we could mention Marilyn Stokstad, and Jerry Stannard, Gardens of the Middle Ages, 1983; Dieter Hennebo, Gärten des Mittelalters, 1987; Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden, 1995; and Sur la terre comme au ciel: Jardins d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Age. Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age – Thermes de Cluny, 6 juin-16 septembre 2002, 2002. Gardens of a special type were the monastic garden (on which see Paul Meyvaert, “The Medieval Monastic Garden,” Medieval Gardens …, ed. Macdougall [above], 23–53) and the garden of medicinal plants (on which see Gundolf Keil, “Hortus Sanitatis, Garten der Gesundheit, Gaerde der Sunthede,” Medieval Gardens …, Macdougall ed. [above], 55–68). The archetype of both is the garden of Saint Gall, which has been the object of an exhaustive analysis: Horn, and Born, The Plan of St Gall … (above), vol. 2, 175–209, and 300–13 for the garden of medicinal plants. At the other end of the chronological spectrum are the Renaissance botanic gardens, the best and earliest examples of which are those of Pisa and Padua. On these gardens, see most recently: Fabio Garbari, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Alessandro Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici: L’Orto botanico di Pisa dal XVI al XX secolo, 1991, and L’Orto botanico di Padova, ed. Alessandro Minelli, 1995. On the plants in the medieval gardens, whatever their nature, there are several contributions in the volume Byzantine Garden Culture above: AliceMary Talbot, “Byzantine Monastic Horticulture: the Textual Evidence,” 37–67; Costas N. Constantinides, “Byzantine Gardens and Horticulture in the Late Byzantine Period, 1204–1453: the Secular Sources,” 87–103; Robert Rodgers, “Kêpopoiia: Garden Making and Garden Culture in the Geoponika,” 159–75; and John Scarborough, “Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy,” 179–88. For the Western medieval garden, see (in chronological order of publication): Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Gardens and their Plants,” Gardens …, ed. Stokstad, and Stannard, (above), 37–69; Penelope Hobhouse, Plants in Garden History, 1992; Miranda Innes, and Clay Perry, Medieval Flowers, 1997; Michel Botineau, Les Plantes du jardin médiéval, 2001; and Deirdre Larkin, “Hortus Redivivus: The Medieval Garden Recreated,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 228–41, which offers new insights on this question, as its author grew the plants of medieval medicinal gardens at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum outside New York City.

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Q. Plant Acclimatation The question of the range of the plants in gardens leads to another one: the transfer of plants, and, in the best cases, their acclimatization and naturalization. A methodological essay was published by Alain Touwaide, “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing …, ed. Dendle, and Touwaide (above), 72–100. The problem is not only to ascertain that non-native plants mentioned in texts are actually present in a new environment, but also to identify appropriate sources to trace introduced plants. In this sense, Jerry Stannard explored medieval tables of taxes: “Medieval Arzneitaxe and Some Indigenous Plant Species,” Orbis Pictus: Kultur und pharmaziehistorische Studien. Festschrift für Wolfgang-Hagen Hein zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Dressendörfer, and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke , 1985, 267–72. As for tracing non-native plants, some studies were made (in chronological order of publication): John M. Riddle, “The Introduction and Use of Eastern Drugs in the Early Middle Ages,” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften 49 (1965): 175–98 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. II); Jerry Stannard, “Eastern Plants and Plant Products in Medieval Germany,” Actes du XIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire des Sciences, Moscou, 18–24 août 1971, Sections III & IV: Antiquité et Moyen Age, 1974, 220–25; and several studies by Alain Touwaide: “Un manuscrit athonite du Traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: l’Athous Magnae Laurae  75,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 122–27; “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science,” Science and Technology in the Islamic World, ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997; “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina … [above]”; “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation. A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53; “Magna Graecia iterata. Greek Medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th Centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma , 2004, 85–101; and “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II. Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo, and Guido Bellingghieri, 2008, 39–55. Such process of transfer of plants had also an impact on botanical lexicon, on wich there are many studies. For an example, see John A. C. Greppin, Bark’ Galianosi: The Greek-Armenian Dictionary to Galen, 1985.

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R. Botanical Illustration Last but far from least, the botanical illustration. Publications are numerous, from coffee-table books and commented color tables from illuminated manuscripts to expensive facsimiles of manuscripts (with a volume of commentary) and specialized studies best represented by such work as Giulia Orofino, “Gli erbari di età sveva,” Gli erbari medievali tra scienza simbolo e magia: Testi del VII Colloquio Medievale, Palermo, 5–6 maggio 1988 [1990], 325–46, and, more recently, Ead., “Ad decus et utilitatem operis. Caratteristiche e funzioni dell’illustrazione scientifica nel medioevo,” Medicina nei secoli 14 (2002): 439–60. This field of study was radically transformed during the 19th century. At its very beginning, indeed, Aubin-Louis Millin de Grandmaison (1759–1818) published an article in which he denied that plant representations in the manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica, had any value: “Observations Sur les Manuscrits de Dioscorides qui sont conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Magasin Encyclopédique/Journal des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts 2 (1802): 152–16. Nevertheless, the English botanist John Sibthorp (1758–1796), who was the first to describe and identify the Greek flora according to Linnaeus’ system, consulted three illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides. On his way to Greece, indeed, he stopped in Vienna where he examined the 6th-century manuscript now at the Österreichische National Bibliothek, medicus graecus 1, and the 7th-century copy now in Naples, National Library. He also visited Mount Athos where he inspected a codex of Dioscorides, which might be the mid-11th-century copy in the collection of the Megisti Lavra Monastery ( 75). In 1855, the German bibliographer of the history of medicine Ludwig Choulant (1791–1861) drew the attention of the scientific community to the Vienna and Naples copies of Dioscorides’ treatise and to their use by Western botanists from Rembert Dodoens (1516–1585), author of the famous Cruydeboeck first published in 1554: “Ueber die Handschriften des Dioskurides mit Abbildungen,” Archiv für die zeichnenden Künste 1 (1855): 56–62. In 1883, Henri Bordier (1817–1888) published a systematic census of the illustrations in the Greek codices of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, including the medical manuscripts with botanical illustrations: Description des peintures et autres ornements dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883. However, it was only with the magisterial study of the codex Vienna medicus graecus 1, published in 1906 accompanying its first facsimile that the scientific analysis of ancient botanical illustration started: Antonius De Premerstein (1869–1935), Carolus Wessely (1860–1931), and Iosephus Mantuani (1860–1933) De codicis Dioscuridei Aniciae Iulianae, nunc Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 historia, forma, scriptura, picturis, ed. Iosephus de Karabacek (1845–1918), 1906.

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Since then, much work has been done. A classical volume is The Art of Botanical Illustration: An Illustrated History by Wilfrid Blunt (1901–1987) with the assistance of William T. Stearn, which was first published in 1950, and has been repeatedly reedited since. The work was followed by The Illustrated Herbal by Blunt, and Sandra Raphael, first published in 1979 (with a revised edition in 1994), and also translated, among others into Italian (1989). Among the many illustrated books in this vein, we could mention the following (of different types, in different languages, and in chronological order of publication): Karl Eugen Heilmann, Kräuterbücher in Bild und Geschichte, 1966; Immagine e natura: L’immagine naturalistica nei codici e libri a stampa delle Biblioteche Estense e Universitaria. Secoli XV XVII, Catalogo della mostra, Modena, 21 marzo-15 maggio 1984, 1984; and Celia Fisher, Flowers in Medieval Manuscripts, 2004. S. Facsimiles of Herbals The study of botanical manuscripts and, by way of consequence, of botanical illustration – has immensely benefitted from the improvement in printing techniques and quality during the last quarter of the 20th century, and, more recently in image technology, which made it possible to produce facsimiles of manuscripts of the highest quality, almost identical to the originals. The most ancient Greek manuscripts of Dioscorides, De materia medica, have been reproduced twice each (also in more common editions), as well as the Greek Nicander of Paris, some Arabic copies of Dioscorides, other botanico-pharmaceutical compilations, many Latin herbals and, also, the splendidly and lavishly 14th-century illustrated copies of the Tacuinum sanitatis. The production of such high-quality and expensive facsimiles is now challenged by the digital reproduction of manuscripts, be it on CDRom or on the Internet, which is much less expensive and open to a larger audience. Many libraries and museums, particularly libraries of botanical gardens and specialized rare-book collections, are currently digitizing all or parts of the herbals in their collections (manuscript and printed). However interesting these reproductions are (as they give a wider access to these documents, usually rare and often of a restricted access), they do not cover the whole sector and do not provide relevant analytical information (especially botanical). This is the objective, instead, of the Web site PLANT (the name of which is the acronym of Plantarum Aetatis Novae Tabulae or Renaissance Botanical Illustrations) created at the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, on the site of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/herbals). Though devoted to Renaissance botanical illustration, it includes late medieval books.

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Furthermore, it adds original scientific metadata on the authors and their works, the books themselves, and the history of plant representations. Also and no less important it gives the scientific name of the plants, as well as their medieval names in a broad range of languages extracted from the books themselves, and their names in five modern languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish). Images can be consulted by author, title, period, and plant name (in all the languages above, including the several medieval ones). A world inventory of medical and natural history manuscripts with scientific illustrations (in all languages) was published by Loren MacKinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965. The photographic archive created by MacKinney to compile this list is deposited at the library of the North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill and is accessible via Internet (http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney). T. The Classical Pictorial Tradition In spite of the vast quantity of material preserved, research on botanical illustration has focused on some major illustrated herbals, principally De materia medica by Dioscorides and its epiphenomena, particularly in the Latin West, from the Pseudo-Apuleius to late medieval anonymous herbals of all kinds. On Dioscorides, one could single out the following publications in addition to the 1906 epoch-making study edited by de Karabacek above, and the volumes of commentary that accompany the facsimiles. See, for example (in chronological order of publication): Miranda Anichini, “Il Dioscoride di Napoli,” Atti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche Serie VIII, n. 11 (1956): 77–104; Ranuccio BianchiBandinelli (1900–1975), “Il Dioscoride napoletano,” La Parola del Passato 11 (1956): 48–51; Herbert Hunger, “Dioskurides,” Reallixikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 1 (1966): 1191–96; and, more recently, Sergio Toresella, “Dioscoride,” Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale, vol. 5 (1994), 655–63. These publications of an introductory or encyclopedic nature can be usefully complemented by the following in-depth analyses of illustrated herbals: [Henri Omont (1857–1940)], Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei De Materia Medica Libri VII: Accedunt Nicandri et Eutecnii Opuscula Medica. Codex Constantinopolitanus saeculo X exaratus et picturis illustratus, olim Manueli Eugenici, Caroli Rinuccini Florentini, Thomae Phillipps Angli, nunc inter Thesauros Pierpont Morgan Bibliothecae asservatus, 2 vol., 1935; Paul Buberl (1885–1942), Die byzantinische Handschriften, 1. Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis, 1937; Otto Mazal, Pflanzen, Wurzeln, Säfte, Samen. Antike Heilkunst in Miniaturen des Wiener Dioskurides,1981; Alain Touwaide, “Un recueil grec de pharmacologie du Xe siècle illustré au XIVe siècle: le Vaticanus graecus 284,” Scriptorium 39 (1985): 13–56; Emilie

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Leal, “Un manuscrit illustré du traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride le Paris grec 2180,” B. A. thesis, University of Provence, Aix-Marseille, 2 vols., 1997; Alessia Aletta, “Studi e ricerche sul Dioscoride della Pierpont Morgan Library M. 652”, B. A. thesis, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” 2 vols., 1997–1998; Daniela Fausti, “MP3 2095 Erbario illustrato,” Estratto provvisorio dal Corpus dei Papiri Greci di Medicina, 1998, 43–58; Mauro Ciancaspro, Guglielmo Cavallo, and Alain Touwaide, Dioscurides, De materia medica, facsimile edition with a commentary, 2 vols., 1999; and Alain Touwaide, “The Salamanca Dioscorides (Salamanca, University Library, 2659),” Erytheia 24 (2003): 125–58. Many of such publications deal mainly with the tradition of the illustrations, that is, their models and copies, without necessarily considering the macroscopic tradition of botanical illustration. We cannot discuss here the debated question of the origins of botanical illustration (do they go back to Dioscorides or have they been introduced later into the manuscripts of De materia medica?), as it is out of the scope of the present essay (for one of the latest contributions to this question in the current state, see Giulia Orofino, “Dioskurides war gegen Pflanzenbilder,” Die Waage 30 [1991]: 144–49). The major question posed by the representations of plants in medieval manuscripts (whatever the language, Greek, Latin, or Arabic) is their relation with ancient models. This question implies, as a corollary, another one, on the existence or not of periods of artistic revival. The major contributions in this field were by the historians of art Kurt Weitzmann (1904–1993) (see Die byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., 1935 [rpt. 1996]; “Das klassische Erbe in der Kunst Konstantinopels,” Alte und Neue Kunst: Wiener kunstwissenschaftliche Blätter 3 [1954]: 41–59; English translation: “The Classical Heritage in the Art of Constantinople,” Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. Herbert L. Kessler with an introduction by Hugo Buchthal, 1971, 126–150; and Geistige Grundlagen und Wesen der makedonischen Renaissance, 1963; English translation: “The Character and Intellectual Origins of the Macedonian Renaissance,” Studies … [above], 176–223), and Heide Grape Albers (Spätantike Bilder aus der Welt des Arztes: Medizin. Bilderhandschriften der Spätantike und ihre mittelalterliche Überlieferung, 1977). On this question, see also such work as Diane O. Le Berrurier, The Pictorial Sources of Mythological and Scientific Illustrations in Hrabanus Maurus’ De rerum naturis, 1978. Another corollary of this question of the link between book production and tradition is the problem of personal observation of nature. In an often cited article considered as seminal, Otto Pächt (1902–1988) (author also of “Die früheste abendländische Kopie der Illustrationen des Wiener Dioskurides,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 38 [1975]: 201–14) ident-

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ified the late 13th-century manuscript now in London, British Library, Egerton 747, possibly of Salernitan origin, as the first manifestation of the interest for nature showed by Italian artists (“Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 [1950]: 13–47). Much of the later production focused on this question of the birth or realism (see, for example, Sergio Toresella, “Il Dioscoride di Istanbul e le prime figurazioni naturalistiche botaniche,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 [1996]: 21–40, who locates the origin of realism in a 13th-century of the Arabic translation of Dioscorides), and on the Egerton manuscript, traditionally considered as a milestone in the development of scientific botanical illustration (in this sense, see, for example, the recent reproduction of the manuscript, with a study, by Minta Collins, and Sandra Raphael, A Medieval Herbal: A Facsimile of British Library Egerton MS 747, 2003. For a renewed approach to the manuscript, its text and its illustrations, see Jean Givens, “Reading and Writing the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, 1280–1526,” Visualizing … , ed. Givens, Reeds, and Touwaide, (above), 115–45, and also Iolanda Ventura, “Per un’edizione del Tractatus de herbis manoscritto Egerton 747,” Salerno: Un progetto di paesaggio, ed. Paola Capone, and Pierfranco Galliani, 2002, 129–37). However correct Pächt’s study might be, other manuscripts make it possible to trace earlier signs of observation of nature. On this question of observation in ancient natural sciences, see, in addition to the articles by Beaujouan, “La Prise de conscience …” (above), Ribemont and Sodigne-Costes, “Botanique médiévale …” (above), and Jacquart, “L’Observation …” (above), Orofino, “Il rapporto con l’antico e l’osservazione …” (above), and also Jean Givens, Observation and image-making in Gothic art, 2005. More generally, see also Guy Beaujouan, “Réflexions sur les rapports entre théorie et pratique au Moyen Age, The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science, and Theology in the Middle Ages September 1973, ed. John E. Murdoch, and Edith Dudley Sylla, 1975, 437–84. The recent work by Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions, 2000, does not bring any new element (and is largely misleading on numerous points), however lavishly illustrated it is and well documented it might seem. The fact is that the approach to ancient and medieval botanical illustation lacks a semantics of scientific illustration and particularly of natural history illustration in spite of such publications as, for instance, Alfred Stückelberger, Bild und Wort: Das illustrierte Fachbuch in der antiken Naturwissenschaften, Medizin und Technik, 1994. However needed such study is, the most recent research shifted focus from the pictures themselves to their making and the way they translate the perception of nature (rather than the sup-

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posed objectivity of nature itself), in a significant, and probably post-modern way, as is shown, for example, by the several essays in the collection Visualizing …, ed. Givens, Reeds, and Touwaide, (above). Select Bibliography Julia Ma Carabaza Bravo, Expiración García Sánchez, Esteban Hernández Bermejo, and Alfonzo Jiménez Ramírez, Árboles y arbustos de Al-Andalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004); Willem F. Daems, Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta: Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1993); Marcel De Cleene and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, 2 vols. (Ghent: Mens & Cultuur, 2002); Hendrik J. Drossart Lulofs, and E. L. J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus ‘De plantis’: Five Translations (Amsterdam, Oxford, and New York: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1989); Hermann Fischer, Mittelalterliche Pflanzenkunde (Munich: Verlag der Münchner Drucke,1929; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967); Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée de Ier au Xe siècle, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Olms, 1989); John M. Riddle, Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1992); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Jerry Stannard, Pristina medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1999); id., Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999); Johannes Stirling, Lexicon nominum herbarum arborum fructuumque lingua latinae ex fontibus Latinitatis ante saeculum XVII scriptis, collegit et descriptionibus botanicis illustravit, 4 vols. (Budapest: Encyclopaedia, 1995–1998); Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1972).

Alain Touwaide

Byzantine Art and Architecture A. Introduction Byzantine art is a Christian art, dedicated to the expression of the faith and the dogmas of the Eastern, Orthodox Church. It includes several aspects of pictorial arts, such as mosaics, murals, icon-painting, illuminative manuscripts, sculptures, ceramics, metal and stone objects, jewels, coins, textiles as well as church- and secular architecture. Both chronologically and topographically it concerns a vast space of time and a wide geographical area,

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with, however, unstable borders; from eastern Asia Minor to southern Balkans, and from northern Africa to Italy and Greece. A typical – not by all scholars accepted – date for its official start is 324 A.D., when the emperor Constantine the Great transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the newly-founded city of Constantinople. An equally important date is 313, when the Mediolano (Milano) Edictum was declared, which led to religious liberty, and consequently, to the recognition of Christian faith as the state’s religion. A definite end is 1453, when Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine state, was finally conquered by the Ottoman Turks. During the Byzantine era foreign cultures, such as Islam or the West, accepted impacts and transferred influences, establishing interesting forms. After the fall of Constantinople, the tradition of Byzantine art remained vivid and it was reflected centuries hereafter to the artistic production of eastern world (Georg Ostroworsky, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates [1940; 1963]; The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV, 1966; Dionysios Zakythinos, The Byzantine Empire 324–1071, 1st ed. 1969, 1972, 19–23; Gilbert Dagron, Naissance d’ une capitale: Constantinople et ses constitutions de 330 à 451, 1974; Ekaterini Christophilopoulou, Byzantine History, vol. 2, 1st ed. 1975, 1993, 20–21,127–138; Ioannis Karayiannopoulos, The Byzantine State, 1st ed. 1983, 2001, 52–61. B. Terminological Definition and Analysis Despite the variations of style, due to epoch or locality, Byzantine art and architecture is of uniform and distinct character, without nevertheless lucking of experimentations. In order to study it in a more effective, methodological way, a division of time periods and geographical locations is traditionally established. Consequently, there is a typical distinction of the Early Christian (330–843), Middle Byzantine (843–1204) and Late Byzantine era (1204–1453), as well as the artistic production and monuments of great centers (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, northern Italy, etc.) and those of the provinces (Greece, Asia Minor, Balkans, Near East, etc.). The typological evolution of Byzantine architecture is characterized by the progressive abandonment of the large scale basilicas with wooden or vaulted roofs of the first centuries. Parallel to this tendency is the emergence of the magnificent domed churches in Constantinople (Saint Sophia, Saint Erene, etc.) in the middle of the 6th century, which led to the adoption of new provincial types like triconchs, tetraconchs, free crosses, remaining however to a modest scale. The popular use of the cross-in-square inscribed domed type appeared officially in mainland of Greece, in the second half of the 10th century

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(Church of Theotokos, Boiotia). The use of brick patterns as decoratives (letters, crosses, meanders, etc.) as well as of the cloisonné masonry (stones encircled by bricks), prevailed as elements that characterized the church architecture hereafter. The dominance of the Crusaders after 1204 in lands of the Byzantine empire brought about changes in the provincial church architecture. Cheaper and easier to built types became common, such as the traverse vault or the single vaulted churches. The style of late Byzantine architecture is expressed by the addition to the main church of collateral spaces, such as naves, and chapels, with a rich and elegant brick decoration. In pictorial arts, the main tendencies were a higher or lesser degree of abstraction, the corresponding amount of classical heritage, the intense spirituality of figures and the deliberate refusal of nature resemblance. The earliest depictions are testified in tombs and catacombs, with vivid symbolic content. Landmarks of the early Christian period are the panel-icons of the encaustic technique, dated from the 6th to 9th century. The application of mosaic decoration was also common during this period, reaching a peak during the reign of emperor Justinian (527–565). The fact displays the lavish patronage that allowed huge funds on the erection and the decoration of the churches in the grand centers. During however the centuries of Iconoclasm (726–843), a period of political and religious crisis, non-pictorial symbols, such as crosses or geometrical and plant motives were imposed as the official expression of art. A period of great influence of classical artistic values succeeded, known as “Macedonian Renaissance” named after the dynasty that ruled the empire from the 9th century. It inspired miniature painting and reflected in ambitious iconographic programs. In the region of Cappadocia a provincial expression of painting was exercised, further influencing iconography and style of the so-called “lay” art. The conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and the consequent division of the former Byzantine lands in Latin states, left decisive effects in the pictorial arts of the East, visible in details in figures and in compositions. The last phase of the Byzantine art, the so-called “Paleologean Renaissance.” named after the last dynasty that ruled the empire, adapted a humanistic character, with dramatic and passionate gestures, voluminous and plastic figures, representations of rich architectural and natural landscape (Architecture: Gabriel Millet, L’ École grecque dans l’ architecture Byzantine, 1916; Georgios Sotiriou, Christian and Byzantine Archaeology, 1942; André Grabar, Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’ art Chrétien antique, 1946; Anastasios Orlandos, H  «      

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    «   « «, vol. 1–3, 1952–1957; Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 1st ed. 1965, Cyril Mango Architettura Bizantina, 1979; Friedrich-Wilhelm Deichmann, Einführung in die christliche Archäologie, 1983; Painting: Otto Demus, Byzantine mosaic decoration, 1964, Viktor Lazarev, Storia della pittura bizantina, 1967, David TalbotRice, Byzantine painting, the last phase 1968; Kurt Weitzmann-Manolis Chatzidakis, Krsto Mijatev, and Svetozar Radojcic, Frühe Ikonen: Sinai, Griechenland, Bulgarien, Jugoslawien, 1965; Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, 1971. C. History of Research and Future Trends The particular interest in Byzantine studies was first demonstrated in the sections of Byzantine literature and theology. Foreign travelers were the first who preserved a picture of Byzantine monuments, through descriptions and engravings. Byzantine art was at first considered as part of medieval history and philology, and the first “Department of Byzantine Studies” was founded in Munich, Germany, in 1892 by the scholar Karl Krumbacher. The first books concerning architecture and mural painting were published mainly at the beginning of the 20th century. Scholarly interest was especially focused on the Byzantine antiquities of Asia Minor and Cappadocia, as well as those of Northern Africa. Matters concerning the origin and the expansion of the cross-in-square and of the traverse vault type are still open to debate. A long list of scientific journals and institutes treat aspeds of Byzantine culture, history, and archaeology. The “International Association for Byzantine Studies” was organized in 1948 and since then 21 conferences have been held in several cities. After the end of Second World War, publications as well as great scale excavations took place. One of the greatest expositions that brought out the Byzantine art to the world was organized in Athens in 1964. Since then, numerous exhibitions and museum collections from Europe to the United States have been dedicated to the art of Byzantium. Future trends include the study of settlements, church, secular and preindustrial buildings. Light is also shed upon fields such as ceramics or metal artifacts of daily life – finds often neglected in former times.

Select Bibliography Marcell Restle and Klaus Wessel, Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1966); Charles Delvoye, L’art byzantin (Paris: Arthaud, 1967); Wolfgang Fritz Volbach and Jacqueline Lafontaine-dosogne, Byzanz und der christliche Osten (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1968); André Grabar, L’art de la fin de l’antiquité et

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du moyen age, 3 vol. (Paris: College de France, 1968); David Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era (New York: Praeger 1963/1994); L’art byzantin, art européen (Athens, 1964 [exhibition catalogue]); The Glory of Byzantium, ed. Helen Evans and William Wixom (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997 [exhibition catalogue]); Byzantium: Faith and Power, ed. Helen Evans (London: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004 [exhibition catalogue]).

Sophia Germanidou

Byzantine Philosophical Treatises A. Introduction Modern academic Byzantine Studies began around the mid-19th century. Because these Studies had their origin in classical philology, they were first focused on literature, historiography, rhetoric, the visual arts and jurisprudence. Philosophy remained outside the scope of the main interests in Byzantine Studies, despite the seminal research of Karl Krumbacher (Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, 1897), and perhaps precisely because of his work, insofar as he treated philosophical texts within the study of Byzantine literature in general, without specifically differentiating philosophical texts from other types of literature. Moreover, Krumbacher denied the possibility of any original philosophical development in Byzantine thought, and spoke of the “further fruitlessness” of the “Greek intellect” (op. cit., 428). In light of the origins of Byzantine Studies and Krumbacher’s judgment, Herbert Hunger’s statement in the mid-20th century comes as no surprise: “It could be argued that there was no Byzantine philosophy at all! Theology was once and for all responsible for the sphere of metaphysics, and every philosophical work produced outside this framework, as far as we can conceive today, essentially is merely some derivative of Platonism and/or Aristotelianism, without even mentioning that there is no room for talking about some development of the Byzantine philosophy” (Herbert Hunger, Byzantinische Geisteswelt, 1958, 15). Exactly twenty years later, however, the same author devoted the first sixty pages of his major work, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (vol. 1, 1978, 4–62), to philosophy in Byzantium, defining the main orbits that research in the next 20 years would follow. So, something happened between 1958 and 1978 – the foundations of which were laid somewhat earlier – that changed Hunger’s views.

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B. The Real Beginning: Tatakis Indeed, the real beginning of the study of Byzantine philosophy may be dated shortly before Hunger’s first book, and is related to the works of Basil Tatakis, most of all to his book La Philosophie Byzantine, published in 1949 as a fascicule supplementaire to the Histoire de la philosophie of Emile Brehier. Tatakis himself declares in the preface of that book that there had been no preceding studies or texts on the subject that he could use in his own research: the philosophical thought in Byzantium had not before then been an object of detailed and systematic research. Although some of Tatakis’s analyses may seem superficial today, we would be ungrateful not to remark his exceptional merits in the study of Byzantine philosophy, of which he undoubtedly is to be considered as the modern founder. Besides identifying the major figures in Byzantine philosophy and their most important teachings, Tatakis posed several questions that became crucial for interpreters in the course of the next 50 years. The first question posed by Tatakis is whether philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, really existed in Byzantium or whether it was merely a technical and didactic instrument of theology. Tatakis answered this question in favor of the independence of philosophy, stressing the higher level of autonomy of philosophy in Byzantium in comparison with the situation in medieval Western Europe. In the context of that argument, it is not by chance that he highlights the work of Michael Psellos; because of Tatakis’s influence Psellos is still regarded by many as “the central figure in Byzantine philosophy,” and his name is known even to those who otherwise do not have the slightest idea about the existence of philosophy in Byzantium. Tatakis’s position entails another question, concerning the relative influence on Byzantine philosophy of ancient philosophy, on the one hand, and of Christian dogma, on the other (for ancient philosophy and Christian dogma indisputably are the two basic sources of philosophy in Byzantium). Tatakis also raised questions concerning, strictly speaking, the actual temporal beginning of Byzantine philosophy. The question arises because of the gradual, “evolutionary” and non-catastrophic beginnings of the historical Byzantine period. Even now historians still argue whether Byzantine philosophy has its origins in the 4th or in the 6–7th or even in the 9th century. Today, there is a tendency to accept that the main problems, definitions and methods of Byzantine philosophy were formed in the period before the 7th century, that the independence of Byzantine philosophy is already visible during the 7–8th century, and that in the 9th century we are able to speak about a “Byzantine classicism” (so Paul Lemerle’s expression, Le Premier humanisme byzantin, 1971, 196 and 204) that refers to “classics” at the roots of its

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own tradition. An overemphasis on the problem of dating is evidence of the uncertainty concerning the constructive elements of Byzantine philosophy. Tatakis, who in 1949 put the beginning in the 4th century, in 1969 (“La Philosophie grecque patristique et byzantine, “Histoire de la philosophie, vol. I, Orient, Antiquité, Moyen Age, 1969, 936–1005) yet speaks about a preceding “early Byzantine period,” which he names “patristic.” He thus symptomatically introduces a concept of “patristic” that is alien to the Byzantine tradition itself, and thereby casts the problem of the self-identity of philosophy into an inadequate and distorting framework. For a long time the criteria determining the “essence” of Byzantine philosophy have been borrowed from the perspective and categories of Western European medieval culture. That perspective is especially evident in the ways scholars have posed and resolved questions concerning the relationship between “theology and philosophy” in Byzantium. C. The Establishment of the Paradigm The book Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich by Hans-Georg Beck, published in 1959, advanced this question further. Beck catalogues, systemizes and characterizes the authors and the texts, which still today remain the most important objects of research for the historians of Byzantine philosophy; working as an historian of theology and adopting an entirely Western European definition of “theology,” he subdivides philosophical texts into the categories “dogmatic and polemical.” He thus began a discussion that has lasted for nearly 50 years, providing a framework for the investigation of the philosophical affiliations of authors, with fundamental significance for philosophical developments in Byzantium. In his collection of articles titled Antike Philosophie und byzantinisches Mittelalter and especially in his program text, “Die Kontinuität in der Philosophie der Griechen bis zum Untergang des byzantinischen Reiches” (op. cit., 15–37), Klaus Oehler established another circle of questions and problems concerning Byzantine philosophy. As the title of his program text indicates, Oehler sought to prove that Byzantine philosophy was essentially a continuation of ancient philosophy in the Byzantine Christian “regime;” thus he emphasized the continual reception of Aristotle and especially of Plato by Byzantine thinkers, and invented the formula of the “neo-Platonic-Byzantine” philosophy – also under the sign of Christianity – which according to him lasted from the 3rd until the 15th century. Oehler’s interpretation has given rise to endless discussions concerning Platonism and Aristotelianism in Byzantium; as a result of being analyzed in these broad categories, it became a commonplace that the prevailing “Platonic” character of Byzantine

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philosophy may be contrasted with the prevailing “Aristotelian” character of Western philosophy. Reading Byzantine philosophy in these terms made it difficult to find anything philosophically specific to the thought of Byzantine thinkers themselves. This discussion has become exhausted. Contemporary scholarship on Byzantine philosophy supports the argument of Linos Benakis that despite the direct reception and assimilation of terms, concepts, problems and views articulated in ancient philosophy, it is proper to think of “an authentic […] philosophical tradition in the Byzantine world” (“Byzantine Philosophy,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 2, ed. E. Craig, 1998, 160–65, here 162). Indeed, we can speak properly and not merely generically about Byzantine “Platonism” and “Aristotelianism” only during and after the decade of the 1440s! It is curious, for Benakis claims that Byzantine philosophy exactly at that time is “unsystematic,” a statement which itself has recently become an object of dispute. Oehler also undertook to identify and systemize what he judged to be the main problems of Byzantine philosophy. He determined the most important basic questions concerning not only the origins and primary sources of Byzantine philosophy but also concerning its “essence” or “spirit.” That ‘essence’ of Byzantine philosophy, Oehler argued, is to be found especially in anthropological questions concerning the human substance and hypostasis, the soul, reason and the body. Within this network of anthropological questions, Oehler identifies the doctrine concerning the distinction between the essence and its energies (which has its origins in Aristotle but was transmitted as well in neo-Platonic and Christian speculations) as central to all of Byzantine philosophy. The main lines of research on Byzantine philosophy in the period 1949–1969 were consolidated and ratified in Hunger’s fundamental work published in 1978. The whole problematic of this line of interpretation centers around three questions or topics: (1) the definition of philosophy (which established, entails the question of the historical “continuity” and “innovation”); (2) the relations between “Platonism” and “Aristotelianism”; (3) the relation between “philosophy and theology.” Another product generated by Hunger’s analysis of Byzantine philosophy is the notion “Christian Humanism” in Byzantium, which term in the end explains nothing – or perhaps everything. In any event, the tight linking of philosophy with theological discourse in Byzantium has enabled scholars to comprehend the whole content and wide range of problems discussed by Byzantine “philosophic” thinkers. In 1977 Gerhard Podskalsky published his capital work titled Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz (Podskalsky’s recent book, Von Photios zu Bessarion,

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2003, develops the same line of interpretation). The significance of Podskalsky’s book surpasses that of the works I have mentioned heretofore. Podskalsky’s work is based on a detailed knowledge of the sources and evinces several other remarkable qualities, without which the advances of contemporary studies of Byzantine philosophy would be inconceivable. At the same time, one cannot fail to remark the polemic character of his work, whereby he defines his own positions by contrast with those of a set of opponents (which doe not include any of the authors that was mentioned so far). This character of Podskalsky’s work makes it easy for one to identify the preconceptions that affect his interpretations. One should first note that Podskalsky does not radically pose the question of the specific meaning of the concept of ‘theology’ within Byzantine culture; rather, he insists that in relation to this term we ought to speak mainly of a spiritual experience, and he points out further that in Byzantium theology was not transformed into “science,” as was attempted in the West. Although he does not say so explicitly, Podskalsky’s arguments suggest that the speculative discourse and reflection on theological problems in Byzantium is an element of philosophical thought, that is, that such discourse and speculation pertains to the superior part of “first philosophy.” Podskalsky’s re-conception of Byzantine theological speculation enables him to draw attention to the actual methods of philosophizing in Byzantium, and to differentiate diverse tendencies in Byzantine philosophical culture. Some of his preconceptions and prejudices, however, cause him underestimate a limine some trends in Byzantine thought in favor of others; thus, for example, he speaks of a collision between “mystical theology” (identified with some “bildungsfeindliche Orthodoxie”) and “humanism” standing for an “assimilationsfreudige theologische Wissenschaft.” Podskalsky’s criteria for “humanism” (like Hunger’s) are such that under this category one may include, de facto, all of the philosophically active authors in Byzantium. That Podskalsky places authors whom he does not like in a contrary category is not the result of an analysis of historical realities but of his polemical preconceptions. Podskalsky’s modern opponents are thinkers, who have contributed decisively to the development of the studies in Byzantine philosophy, even though none of them is a philosopher ex professo and many of them explicitly reject philosophizing in the theological sphere. Here we refer to such figures as Vladimir Lossky, Georgy Florovsky and Jean Meyendorff, to which we can add the names of Vasilij Kriwoshein, Dumitru Staniloae, Kallistos Ware and others. The works of these scholars and thinkers, the so-called “neo-Palamites” (originally a pejorative name), began to appear in the years

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immediately following World War II; in their writings they construct an immanently coherent or “integral” theological teaching, based strongly on the works of Gregorius Palamas, which they polemically defend and cast in the conceptual framework of western European culture, where most of them anyway live and work. The significance of these thinkers’ work is to be appreciated by reason of the fact that, by means of immanent criteria, they discovered the main problems pertaining to thought about God in the Eastern Christian tradition, emphasized the main stages in its unfolding, and produced the first critical editions of Byzantine authors of capital importance. Their work reveals the specific character of thought within the Eastern tradition and its independent value. Precisely in their attempt to stress the specific identity of Byzantine thought and its independence, and in their responses to sharp criticisms of their work by its opponents, the “neo-Palamites” choose often to exaggerate the “otherness” of the Eastern tradition, to ascribe to it an absolute incommunicability with Western philosophical and theological thought, and in so doing not rarely impose upon Byzantine thought a certain antirationalism and anti-philosophic attitude, etc. D. The Academical Establishment and the Quest for Philosophical Histories It is within this perspective that one should evaluate the work of Linos Benakis, whose first article on Byzantine philosophy was published in 1958. One can say surely that thanks to the books and articles of Benakis, concerning key authors and the general characteristics of Byzantine thought, studies of Byzantine philosophy now move steadily in the direction of the investigation of authentic philosophical problems within the Byzantine cultural tradition, and that they are perceived through the lens of a problematic specific to Byzantine thought (and not, for example, imported from the study of Western Latin philosophy). Benakis has made another major contribution: from Tatakis until now students of Byzantine philosophy have lamented that a huge number of Byzantine philosophical texts remain unedited or published at all. Benakis, his students and the school founded by him have done much to remedy that situation and to fill that serious void. Concerning Benakis one should acknowledge yet another important contribution: it was because of his initiative that in 1987 the Commission on “Byzantine philosophy” in the Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M.) was founded; Benakis served as the President of that Commission from that date until 2002. In sum, one can say that it is due to the efforts of Linos Benakis’s that studies in Byzantine phil-

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osophy have become recognized as a normal research and academic discipline. At this historical juncture, it is a fact that all of the large questions concerning Byzantine philosophy posed by scholars during the second half of the 20th century concerning the existence, sources and general characteristics of Byzantine philosophy, its main trends, historical developments, periods and figures are in principle answered, at least according to the terms in which they were posited. Essentially a macro-framework for the study of Byzantine philosophy has achieved consensus. This makes possible and even demands the investigation of what until now have been by-passed fields of research. Such, for instance, are the analyses of the influence of Latin philosophy and theology upon Byzantine thinkers (important here are the works of John Demetracopoulos) and comparative analyses of the Byzantine and Latin traditions (such as the works of Tzotcho Boiadjiev and generally those of the Bulgarian school of philosophical medieval studies, exemplified, e. g., by the volume Die Dionysius Rezeption im Mittelalter, ed. Tzotcho Boiadjiev, Georgi Kapriev, and Andreas Speer, 2000). Likewise Byzantine philosophers have been studied in perspectives that are not strictly “philosophical”; noteworthy in this regard is Nagel G. Wilson’s Scholars of Byzantium (1st ed. 1983, 2nd. ed. 1996), wherein Wilson explores the Byzantine philosophers in terms of their relation to the written text. As I stated above, the study of Byzantine philosophy has become increasingly recognized as a distinct academic discipline. Since 1999 course in the history of Byzantine philosophy have been established in the curricula of the universities in practically all of the Orthodox Balkan countries. Such courses have also appeared in the universities of Western Europe and in America. There is a noticeable similar expansion of the geography of the research centers. More and more Byzantine philosophy has attracted interest independently of religious or regional and cultural motivation, and there has developed an interest in philosophical texts beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and theology, e. g., among sociologists. Having reached the first decade of the 21st century, it is just to say that the founding, accumulative phase of research in Byzantine philosophy – during which the basic facts were accumulated, the major themes determined and the proper methods established – has successfully come to an end. It is for that reason to disagree with Linos Benakis’s thesis from 2002, according to which “we are not yet ready to replace Tatakis’s work with a new, more comprehensive history of Byzantine philosophy” (“Current research in Byzantine Philosophy,” Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources,

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ed. K. Ierodiakonou, 285). On the contrary, today we are not only ready but obliged to “replace” it. Of course, the point here is not simply to replace Tatakis’s book with books of the same kind, even if these books would be broader in scope, more detailed or more precise. The development of research has already reached a point at which the creation of historical surveys of Byzantine Philosophy, i. e. of more or less elaborate descriptions of its contents, could be viewed only as anachronism. On the contrary, the period that was started in such one honorable way by Tatakis, requires, in order to be worthy of the honor due to its pioneers, to be finished by the construction of a philosophical history or even philosophical histories of the philosophical practices in Byzantium (to make use of a Kent Emery’s, Jr., terminological formulation of this distinction). Only a mature conceptual analysis of the Byzantine philosophical tradition can explicate to the full the essence of what Tatakis started in 1949. One contribution to that effort is Georgi Kapriev’s book, Philosophie in Byzanz, 2005; as well as its pilot Bulgarian version (The Byzantine Philosophy: Four Centres of the Synthesy, 2001). The object in that book is to present a general outline of Byzantine philosophy, constructed in light of the research accumulated during the period that has just now come to an end. The book answers or responds to at least two questions that have remained open. First, it has addressed the problem of the so-called “unsystematic” quality of the thought of Byzantine philosophers. This view was imposed by two different parties. The first group is constituted by the Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, who correctly relate the concept of a “system” with a certain quality of the strictly rational reflection, and therefore reject such a notion in light of their entirely theological interpretation of the Byzantine tradition. The second group consists of those who have adopted the Western assumption that the presence of a “system” requires and is necessarily verified by a systematic text. On the contrary, the book argues that “systematic” thought exists foremost in the mind, whether or not it ever finds explicit literary expression, which it is not obliged to do by some inner necessity. Following a remark by Vladimir Lossky, Kapriev has determined the systematic structure of Byzantine philosophy through certain points of the synthesis in which the whole tradition regroups around a given concept, which defines the paradigm of philosophizing for a sufficient period of time, although Byzantium does not witness the establishment of philosophical schools in the strict sense of the term. Against this background can be solved the problem of the “development” of Byzantine philosophy, which is “unthinkable” (Hunger) if one tries to chart that development

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according to the measure of the Latin tradition. If, however, one considers the new problematic spheres that emerge from a different structuring of the thematic massifs, the increasing subtlety of the conceptual apparatus, and an in-depth control of the problems, we can speak with confidence of the unfolding of a philosophical tradition that moves towards a more-and-more universal philosophical synthesis, until the time that it was violently ruptured. The end of the 50-year period of scholarly research that outlined will be marked by the critical recapitulation of that research to be published in the fascicule on Byzantinische Philosophie in the new Ueberweg history of philosophy (Byzantinische Philosophie: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Begründet von Friedrich Ueberweg, rev. ed., ed. Helmut Holzhey, Die Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. 1/1, ed. Georgi Kapriev, forthcoming). Klaus Oehler was indignant at the fact that in the old four-volume edition of the UeberwegGeschichte all of Byzantine philosophy is summarized in 7 pages. In the new edition Byzantine philosophy will receive around 30 times more space, which still is not enough to do full justice to the scope of the tradition and the factual knowledge that we have about it. Even so, it is adequate for a fitting summary. E. The New Phase of Research At the same time, the strategies and perspectives that will characterize the new period of research on Byzantine philosophy have already been delineated. These may be seen most clearly in the volume Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, 2002, edited by Katerina Ierodiakonou. The approach taken by the authors in this volume leaves behind generalizing problems, while standing firmly on what has already been achieved. The authors study their subjects in-depth and in detail, focusing on special, concrete and symptomatic problems. So the authors refrain from generalizing conclusions, understanding that new discoveries will call into question some things that have seemed evident until now. I do have no doubts that this volume will be interpreted as the first complete product establishing the paradigm for a new, second period of research in Byzantine philosophy. Thus, we are entering an intensive (as opposed to extensive) phase of scholarship in Byzantine philosophy. During this phase texts offering a general explanation of Byzantine philosophy will be fewer and fewer. The scholarship will concentrate on investigating concrete details through different, sometimes unexpected and provocative points of view. An expansion of horizons will undoubtedly occur, as will discoveries of unexpected connections, until now not seriously considered, and new parameters of the Byzantine

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tradition of thought will be established. Prejudices and clichés of the past generation will be overcome, although the new scholarship will probably generate its own “clichés of the second generation” that will be detected by some third generation of scholars that follow. The new phase of scholarship that we are entering will be more firmly based on a more elaborate and perfected material and technical apparatus; this aspect means that we shall see a more dynamic activity in the editing and publishing of primary texts and sources. Another salient characteristic of the new research agenda will be extensive international cooperation, conceived in the framework of precisely formulated and detailed projects, conducted by large-scale international teams. In this context, one can expect a closer cooperation among the growing number of research centers dedicated to specialized research in Byzantine philosophy and intellectual history. All will observe that this state of affairs parallels rather closely the present historical situation in many long well-established fields of research (e. g., in the field of medieval Latin philosophy). Studies in Byzantine philosophy, then, are not under-going some scientific revolution, but are experiencing a normal stage of growth, evincing all of the advantages and disadvantages of its particular condition. Select Bibliography Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich: Beck, 1959); Linos Benakis, Byzantine Philosopha (Athens: Parusia, 2002); Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1978), 4–62; Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, ed. Katerina Ierodiakonou (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Georgi Kapriev, Philosophie in Byzanz (Wuerzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des oströmischen Reiches (527–1453) (1892; Munich: Beck, 2nd ed. 1897); Paul Lemerle, Le Premier humanisme byzantin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); Klaus Oehler, Antike Philosophie und byzantinisches Mittelalter: Aufsätze zur Geschichte des griechischen Denkens (Munich: Beck, 1969); Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz: Der Streit um die theologische Methodik in der spätbyzantinischen Geistesgeschichte (14./15. Jh.), seine systematischen Grundlagen und seine historische Entwicklung (Munich: Beck, 1977); Basile Tatakis, La philosophie byzantine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).

Georgi Kapriev

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Byzantine Sciences A. The End of Byzantine Science: the East Scientific activity was thriving in the Byzantine Empire after the re-conquest of Constantinople in 1261 over the ephemeral Latin Kingdom (particularly in the late-13th and the early-14th centuries). Nevertheless, it necessarily decreased during the last decades of the Empire because of the strong reduction of the territory, the population, and the available resources, without ceasing, however, and not even after the fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453, contrary to an opinio communis. After the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantine scientists who had stayed in the area of the former empire, be they physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, or geographers for instance, integrated into the Ottoman society and worked for the new ruling class – including in close collaboration with Ottoman and other colleagues – as such a manuscript as Vienna, Austria National Library, medicus graecus 1 (dating back to ca. 512 C.E.) suggests. If the practice of science was not interrupted by the Ottoman conquest, it was partially transformed, however, as it included from then on a process of transcultural interaction and transfer, as the many multilingual lexica of plant names, for example, indicate. Such transcultural exchange increased over time, particularly with the expansion of the Ottoman Empire by Soliman the Magnificent (b. ca. 1494; sultan 1520; d. 1566), the conquest of Persia, and the capture of such important cities as Baghdad in 1535. The library collections in the capital and in other wealthy cities of the ex-Abbasid Empire were transferred to Istanbul, and their books moved to the hands of Greek librarians, if not scientists, as their re-binding indicates. Nevertheless, with the passing of time, this trend decreased, if it did not stop. With the organization of Ottoman Empire and the instauration of the system of the millet, that is, the groups within the Ottoman society defined on the basis of religions, Greek speaking communities interacted increasingly less with the other linguistic and religious groups of the Empire, and became gradually isolated without necessarily having the indispensable means to pursue and develop a scientific culture. Among others, they did not have access to printing within the Ottoman Empire (books in Greek alphabet were printed outside, principally in the Austrian Empire). In these conditions, Greek communities in the Ottoman world tended to perpetuate the Byzantine tradition. In medicine, this took the form of the iatrosofia, that is, compilations of formulas for medicines listed according to the principle a capite ad calcem (from head to toe). Although such compilations

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were often entitled as being by Hippocrates (460–between 375 and 351 B.C.E.), Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.), Galen (129–after 216 [?] C.E.), and Meletius (of uncertain epoch; usually dated between the 7th and the 13th c.), the formulas were often of a different origin: they came from the medical practices of the authors of these manuals, as well as from Byzantine medical encyclopedias and therapeutic handbooks preserved among Greek-speaking groups. The attribution of iatrosofia to the physicians of classical Antiquity is significant, for it reveals a process of self-identification of Greek-speaking populations, who affirmed in this way not only their authenticity, but also – if not above all – their anteriority in a context in which they felt segregated, and even oppressed. As for the Byzantine Meletius, he was included in the titles of iatrosofia because he was the author of the work of Christian anthropology that had probably the largest circulation in the Byzantine world. The presence of his name in the title of iatrosofia reveals the second most important parameter of the self-definition of the Greek-speaking communities in the Ottoman world, that of religion, in the specific case here Orthodoxy, and shows that the Ottoman division of society into groups defined by their religion was not necessarily perceived as a measure imposed from the outside by the political authority, but corresponded to a reality (for the primary sources on Greek science in the Ottoman Empire, see the inventory by Giannês Karas, Oi epistêmes stên Tourkokratia: Cheirographa kai entupa, 3 vols., 1992–1994; for the iatrosofion, see Touwaide Alain, “Byzantine Hospital Manuals (Iatrosophia) as a Source for the Study of Therapeutics,” The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers, 2007, 147–73). It was only with the independence of Greece in 1829 that modern, viz. Western, science arrived in Greece, mainly with the German scientists invited by King Otto (b. 1815; king 1832; d. 1867) to become the first professors of the newly founded university at Athens. Printing also started to develop in the country, contributing to the introduction and diffusion of modern science among the Greek population of the kingdom. Nevertheless, such works as the iatrosofia continued to be copied by hand until late in the 19th century, not only within the Greek-speaking communities still in the Ottoman empire (for example, in Egypt), but even in Greece. B. The End of Byzantine Science: the West In the West, Byzantine science had a different fortuna. During the 15th century, particularly after the fall of Constantinople, many Byzantine scientists left the territory of the defunct Empire in a wide move of population going into exile. They fled westward, to Crete (then a Venetian territory) or further west to Italy, mainly Florence, Venice-Padua, and Rome, but also to such im-

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portant cities as Milan or smaller, but not necessarily less intellectually active towns such as Ferrara, Modena, or Urbino. They brought with them the texts that provided the basis of their education, be it general – from Homer to Demosthenes, including Pindar, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides or Thucydides to mention some – philosophical – Plato, for example – or scientific – from Aristotle to Dioscorides, Ptolemy, or Galen, for instance. In a first phase, such texts were newly translated into Latin and printed, replacing old medieval translations. The availability of Greek works in the original language – be they literary, philosophical, or scientific – and their comparison with the Latin versions produced in the Middle Ages made Western scientists aware of the transformations introduced in these works over time, particularly because of their translation(s) and their transmission from one culture to another, first from Byzantium to the Arabic world and then from the Arabic world to the West. Although these transformations were not always deteriorations resulting from the reproduction of texts by hand, but were often new developments added to the texts in layered levels of sedimentation by AraboIslamic and then medieval scientists, they were seen by Western Renaissance scientists as corruptions of the original contents. The medieval versions of classical texts that circulated in the West at that time were rejected, as were also their epiphenomena, be they glosses, more developed commentaries, new interpretations, or more original works rooted, however, in the ancient heritage. One of the most adamant defenders of this return to the supposed original purity of ancient scientific works was the physician of Ferrara, Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524). Probably transferring to scientific treatises the methods of textual criticism developed for literary works by Angelo Poliziano Ambrogini (1454–1494), better known as Poliziano, Leoniceno promoted a return to the most ancient works of the Greeks, which, in the field of medicine, were those by Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen, thus eliminating de facto, though not necessarily explicitly, their subsequent developments in the Byzantine world, from Oribasius (4th c.) to Nicolaus Myrepsus (14th c.), and including Aetius and Alexander of Tralles (both 6th c.), Paul of Egina (7th c.), Theophanes Chrysobalantes (10th c.; renamed Theophanes Nonnos in the Renaissance), Symeon Seth (11th c.), or Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (13th–14th c.). The corpus of writings by or attributed to Aristotle was printed in Greek as early as 1495–1497 by the humanist publisher Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), the Corpus Galenicum in 1525 by the heirs of Aldo Manuzio, and the whole series of treatises ascribed to Hippocrates in 1526 by the same. There were some exceptions in this shift from contemporary to ancient works, the most characteristic of which was Giorgio Valla (ca. 1447–1500).

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The owner of the largest collection of Greek manuscripts of that time, he translated into Latin some Byzantine scientific treatises, among them the 11th-century Byzantine translation of the Arabic treatise On Smallpox and Measles originally by abû Bakr ar-Râzî (865–925 C.E.). The work seemed to offer therapeutic value for the treatment of syphilis that was spreading throughout Europe at that time. This case of transfer from Byzantine to Western medical practice is probably unique, however. Leoniceno’s program, first embraced and reinforced by publishers and printers, particularly Aldo Manuzio with whom Leoniceno was in close contact, had a deep impact on contemporary scientists. Byzantine scientific literature did not disappear totally, however, but benefitted from the search of ancient Greek books in the 16th century and the formation of collections of manuscripts such as the Bibliothèque royale in France, the Bibliotheca Vaticana, or the collection at El Escorial in Spain, to mention just a few. Byzantine science entered the many collections of Greek manuscripts created at that time, without being printed, be it in Renaissance Latin translations or in the original Greek text, before the 1530s, however (with few exceptions) (alphabetical order of names and titles: Aetius: 1533–35 Latin, and1534 Greek; Cassius iatrosophistes [between the 4th and the 7th c.]: 1541 Greek [and also a Latin version the same year]; Demetrius Pepagomenos [15th c.], De podagra: 1517 Latin, and 1558 Greek; Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, De actionibus et affectibus spiritus animalis: 1547 Latin, 1557 Greek; De medicamentorum compositione: 1540 Latin; De urinis: 1519 Latin; Methodus medendi: 1554 Latin; Meletius: 1552 Latin; Nemesius [late 4th c.]: 1538 Latin, 1565 Greek; Nicolaus Myrepsus: 1541 Latin; Oribasius: 1543 Greek and Latin; Paul of Egina, Book I: 1510 Latin; opera omnia: 1528 Greek; Stephanus of Athens [or Alexandria; 5th/6th c.], Alphabetum empericum: 1581 Latin, and Commentarium in Galeni de medendi methodo: 1536 Greek). Even when Byzantine scientific texts were printed, the interest was more of an antiquarian than of a scientific nature, contrary to what happened with the Corpus Hipppocraticum, Dioscorides, and Galen. C. Early History of Byzantine Science At the turn of the 17th to the 18th century, the interest in Byzantine science faded even more. The field of medicine is significant. When the Frenchman Daniel Le Clerc (1652–1728) wrote his Histoire de la médecine, which was published in 1702, he covered the period from Hippocrates to Galen. It was the merit of the Englishman John Freind (1675–1728) to take over the history of medicine from Oribasius on in his History of physick published in 1725–1726. However, whereas he treated Oribasius in seven pages (4–10 of the 1735 Latin edition of Venice), Aetius and Alexander of Tralles in twelve each (11–23 and

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24–35 respectively), Uranius (6th c.) and the historian Procopius (507–after 555) in eight (36–43), and Paul of Egina in seventeen (44–60), he covered the whole period from 640 (the supposed date of Paul of Egina) to 1453 in 26 pages (61–86) which included general considerations on the style of late Byzantine physicians and conclusive reflections (five pages, 82–86).The only late Byzantine to receive more attention is Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, to whom Freind devoted nine pages (73–81). This exception might result from a practical consideration, expressed by Freind in the title page of his History, where the subtitle reads: “… In qua ea praecipue notantur quae ad Praxin pertinent …” Yet, in the fight of English physicians against smallpox, Freind suggested, in a way that reminds of Giorgio Valla, the use of treatments prescribed by ancient physicians, namely purgation. Indeed, in his History of medicine, Freind prized Actuarius for being, according to him, the first among Greek authors to recommend the use of purgative agents (75–76). This regain of interest was short-lived. After Freind and during the whole 18th and 19th centuries, Byzantine medicine and, more generally, Byzantine science did not receive much attention among scholars and scientists. This was particularly the case in the 19th century, during which two monumental editions of classical works were produced that eclipsed almost any other work: the Opera omnia of Galen edited by the German physician and classicist Karl Gottlobb Kühn (1754–1840) and published in 20 volumes (with 22 tomes) from 1821 to 1833, and, slightly later, the Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate by the French scholar and lexicographer Emile Littré (1801–1877), published in 10 volumes from 1839 to 1861. Classicism was triumphant as was further demonstrated by the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts published under the direction of the German philologist Hermann Diels (1848–1922) by the Academy of Sciences of Prussia in Berlin (Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 1: Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. Hermann Diels, 1905; Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 2: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte ausser Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. id., 1906; with a supplement: Bericht über den Stand des interakademischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 and 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. und II. Teil, ed. id., 1908. The first two parts were republished in 1906 under the following title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, ed. id., 1906. This version was reprinted together with the supplement under the following title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. Hippokrates und Galenos; II. Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte; III. Nachtrag, ed. id., with a preface by Fridolf Kudlien, 1970). The purpose of the enterprise was to edit critically Greek medical texts (see, for example, Hermann Diels, “Über das neue Corpus medicorum,” Neue Jahrbücher

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für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und für Pädagogik 19 [1907]: 722–26). The focus was mainly on a narrowly defined classical antiquity as an overview of the two volumes of the catalogue shows. Whereas the first volume (1905) was devoted to Hippocrates and Galen and contained 151 pages, the second (1906) was to “all other physicians” from Diocles (4th c. B.C.E.) to Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius, and consisted of only 112 pages. The list of physicians included the post-Aristotelian physician Diocles (2 pp., 27–28), the Alexandrian surgeon Heliodorus (2 pp., 41–42), such classical authors as Aretaeus (3 pp., 17–19), Dioscorides (6 pp., 29–35), Rufus (4 pp., 88–91), and Soranus (3 pp., 92–94), the three 4th-century Christian anthropologists Basil the Great (1 p., 21), Gregory of Nyssa (2 pp., 39–40), Gregory the Theologian (2pp., 40–41), Meletius (3pp., 62–64), Nemesius (3pp., 66–68), and Hermes Trismegistus (6pp., 43–48). Among the Byzantine authors, Aetius (3 pp., 5–7), Alexander of Tralles (3 pp., 11–13), Oribasius (5 pp., 70–74), and Paul of Egina (4 pp., 77–81) (that is, the early Byzantines who pursued the classical tradition) cover 15 pages (i. e., 14 % of the volume), while the others (actually, some early Byzantine, and a selection of Middle- and Late-Byzantine ones) are almost all treated in one page as the following cases show (selection; alphabetical order of names): Antonius Pyropoulos (15th c.) (p. 15, 2 manuscripts), Constantine Meliteniotes (14th c.) (p. 24, 1 ms.), Ioannes of Alexandria (6th or 7th c.) (p. 51, 1 ms.), Ioannes Choumnos (15th c.) (p. 52, 1 ms.), Ioannes Staphidaces (14th c.) (p. 55, 1 ms.), Leo (9th or 10th c. ?) (p. 57, 3 mss. and some fragments), Neophytos Prodromênos (14th c.) (p. 68, 7 mss.), Nicolaus Myrepsus (59, 7 mss.), Stephanus of Alexandria and Athens (2 pp. each, pp. 95–96 and 97–98, and 18 and 29 mss., respectively), Theophilus (7th c.) (6 pp., pp. 101–106), and Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (4 pp., pp. 108–111). This treatment reflects a major focus on classical antiquity (177 pages out of a total of 263 corresponding to almost 70 %), and, for the rest, a similar importance given to the authors of late antiquity (15 pp.) and the Christian anthropologists (11 pp.), followed by Hermes Trismegistus (6 pp.). None of the Byzantine physicians equal this latter number of pages, with the exception of Theophilus, whose treatises had been very influential in the West (in Latin trans.). D. 20th-Century Obscurantism In 20th-century Byzantine Studies, science(s) might be rightly considered as la grande absente. As in the previous centuries, the case of medicine is particularly revealing. The conclusions by Auguste Corlieu (1825–1905), Les médecins grecs depuis la mort de Galien jusqu’à la chute de l’empire d’Orient (210–1453), 1885, are emblematic (pp. 173–74):

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Byzantine Sciences Qu’ont produit les médecins que nous avons cités dans les pages précédentes? Peu de choses sans doute … Oribase n’a presque rien ajouté à l’anatomie de Galien … Aétius ne fut qu’un compilateur … C’est le seul médecin que fournisse le Ve siècle. Le VIe siècle ne nous laisse aussi qu’un nom … Le VIIIe siècle est moins riche … Le XIe siècle et les siècles suivants n’ont guère produit que des thérapeutistes”. As for the causes of this (p. 174): “… nous trouverons, dans des considérations d’ordre politique, l’application de cette décadence de la médecine grecque … il n’y avait de calme que dans les monastères. Ce furent alors les moines qui s’emparèrent en Occident de l’étude de la médecine grecque. Ce fut le temps propice pour les pratiques mystiques, les prières, les invocations. On retombait dans les temps pré-hippocratiques. En Orient, au contraire, un essor avait été donné par des chefs arabes …

This judgment was shared by Byzantinists as the epoch-making Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur von Justinian bis zum Ende des oströmischen Reiches (527–1453), published in 1897 by Karl Krumbacher (1856–1909), shows (pp. 613–14): Auch auf diesem Gebiete [= medicine] … äusserte die blindgläubige Verehrung der alten ihre verderbliche Wirkung auf die Entwicklung einer originellen forschenden und darstellenden Thätigkeit …

Krumbacher covered the whole section of Byzantine science in only 23 out of the 1193 pages contained in his monumental work, treating all disciplines in an equally brief way (medicine, pp. 613–16 [bibliography 616–20]; mathematics and astronomy, 620–24 [bibliography 624–31]; zoology, botany, mineralogy, alchemy, 631–33 [bibliography 633–34]). The historian of medicine, Iwan Bloch (1872–1922), in the Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin edited by Max Neuburger (1868–1955) and Julius Leopold Pagel (1851–1912), and published in 1902, had a somewhat more complex, though still negative, opinion. Starting with a seemingly positive reevaluation of Byzantium (p. 492): Die Kultur des byzantinischen Reiches war nicht bloss … eine Kultur des Verfalls, nicht bloss eine in das Mittelalter hineinragende Ruine des Altertums …

He went on with a dark evocation of Byzantine political life (p. 492): Die politische Geschichte des Byzantinerreiches ist im grossen und ganzen eine “eintönige Geschichte der Intrigen von Priestern,Verschnittenen und Frauen, der Giftmischereien, der Verschwörungen der gleichmässigen Undankbarkeit, der beständigen Vatermorde” …

Once the stage was set, he described science in negative terms and identified the following factors as the causes of this:

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(493) Das Christentum … musste, je mehr es sich in der Kirche organisierte, den Fortschritt der Wissenschaft in ungünstigem Sinne beeinflussen … (p. 501) Neben dem Einflusse der christlichen Lehre ist derjenige der philosophischen Mystik und des Aberglaubens bezeichnend (p. 502) für den Charakter der byzantinischen Epoche … (p. 504) Eine noch bestimmtere Ausgestaltung erfuhren Magie und Zauberglauben durch ihre Verknüpfung mit der Philosophie …

Nevertheless, Bloch credited Byzantine physicians with one merit: they traveled abroad to learn about medicine and therapeutics ([sic]) (p. 513)! More recently, the authoritative and deeply respected Viennese Byzantinist Herbert Hunger (1914–2000), though not openly as critical as his predecessors, was no more positive, devoting to science some 100 pages (vol. 2, p. 218–320) of his 2-volume set Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978 (XXVI + 542, and XX + 528 pp.) in the new authoritative Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. His consideration on iatrosofia is significant (vol. 2, p. 304): Niemand wird monatelange Arbeit auf das Lesen elend geschriebener Codices aufwenden wollen, um zuletzt eine Rezeptsammlung mehr aus dem Dschungelbereich der Iatrosophia in Händen zu haben, noch dazu wo es in der byzantinischen Literatur allenthalben reizvollere Inedita gibt …

Shortly after, in his introductory remarks to a symposium on Byzantine medicine held in 1983, the convener, John Scarborough, opened the meeting with the following statement (Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, 1984) (see p. ix): Among medical historians, the commonly held opinion of Byzantine medicine is one of stagnation, plagiarism of the great medical figures of classical antiquity, and a somber boredom that seemingly awaited the Italian Renaissance …

And referring to Guido Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World, 1975, he added (p. ix): Typical is Majno’s “… after Galen, the history [of medicine] grinds to a halt for at least one thousand years. Europe sank into the Dark Ages” …

E. The Long Search for a Method 20th-century research on Byzantine science came out of an increased interest in material life and the developments in manuscript heuristic in the 19th century. The German classicist August Friedrich von Pauly (1796–1845), who was more interested in the concrete aspects of life than in linguistics, literary criticism, or hermeneutics, as he himself stated, conceived and started publishing the Real-Encyclopädie der Alterthumswissenschaft in 1839 (Stuttgart).

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His death in 1854 at the age of 49 prevented him from completing the work, which was achieved in 1852 (6 vols.). The Real-Encyclopädie, which was later expanded, devoted a certain number of entries to the history of sciences, including the continuity of classical science in Byzantium, although the work was specifically about classical antiquity. Manuscript heuristic started at almost the same period, with the German physician and classicist Friedrich Reinhold Dietz (1804–1836) of Königsberg. In preparing critical editions, he did not limit his work to consulting only locally available manuscripts, but he traveled throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain, systematically searching codices containing Greek medical texts. Although he was mainly focused on Hippocrates, he was also interested in Byzantine physicians from Oribasius to Actuarius. He was supposed to prepare an edition of Oribasius for the corpus edited by Kühn (below), and he collated manuscripts of (in chronological order) Aetius, the Alexandrian commentators on Hippocrates, Paul of Egina, Theophilus, Symeon Seth, Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius and others. He could not fully complete his program, however, because he died in 1836 at the age of 32. Editorial activity was taken over and transformed into a systematic enterprise by the German physician and historian of medicine, Karl Gottlob Kühn, who launched a monumental corpus entitled Medicorum graecorum opera quae exstant in 28 volumes (Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, and Aretaeus), which should have also included Oribasius (to be published by Dietz), Aetius (to be published by Karl Christian Lebrecht Weigel [1769–1845]), and Paul of Egina (to be published by the botanist and historian of botany Kurt Sprengel [1766–1833]). The search for manuscripts was pursued mainly by the French physician and historian of medicine Charles Daremberg (1817–1872), who proposed in 1847 the publication of a new corpus of ancient medical texts, the Collection des médecins grecs et latins, with an intention similar to that of Dietz, that is, to produce critical editions based on an accurate examination and collation of manuscripts. Daremberg differred from Dietz, however, as he wanted to be exhaustive. He visited libraries in Germany, Belgium, England, and Italy, and brought back a great wealth of data, which he combined with the results of his examination in loco of the codices in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. On this basis he prepared what he called a Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits médicaux, a project that dated back to an incubation in the years 1841–1844. The catalogue was conceived as the necessary first step for the publication of medical texts in the Collection des médecins grecs et latins. But, as Daremberg explained, this catalogue was more than a list of manuscripts: it also included data on the production of the manuscripts (their

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period and place of writing), as, according to him, such information is of primary importance for the history of science. A specimen of the catalogue was published in two parts in 1851 and 1852, with a revised edition in 1853. As active Daremberg had been, neither the full Catalogue raisonné nor the comprehensive Collection of ancient medical texts he had envisioned ever appeared, with the exception of an edition of Oribasius prepared in collaboration with the Dutch scholar Ulgo Cats Bussemaker (1810–1865). Nevertheless, Daremberg could illustrate the validity of his intuition about the value of manuscripts as witnesses to the practice of science in Byzantium. In analyzing a codex of the Phillipps collection in England, he investigated the genesis of the Byzantine translation of the zâd al musâfir wa qût al hâdir (Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary) by ibn al-Jazzâr (d. 979/980 or 1010 C.E.), known as the efodia tou apodêmountos (that is, [Medical] Recommendations for the Traveler), producing an important contribution to the history of medicine in the Byzantine world, particularly in southern Italy (Sicily or the mainland). Nevertheless, he did not apply this approach to other works, and did not bring to light, thus, the new scientific activity generated by the classical texts. It will be a century before Daremberg’s intuition is rediscovered and applied in a productive way. In the meantime, several Byzantine scientific texts were edited, among which (in the fields of medicine, and natural sciences) Alexander of Tralles in 1878–1879 by Theodor Puschmann (1844–1899); the the Epistula de vermis of Alexander of Tralles, Cassius iatrosophistes, and Theophilus, to mention some, by Julius Ideler (1809–1842) in the Physici greci minores (2 vols., 1841–1842); Adamantius (5th c.) by Valentin Rose (1829–1916) in his Anecdota Graeca et Graecolatina (vol. 1, 1864); Meletius by John Anthony Cramer (1793–1848) in his Anecdota Graeca (4 vols., 1835–1837); the Scriptores physiognomici (1893) by Richard Förster (1843–1922); Theophilus by William Alexander Greenhill (1814–1894) in 1842, and the alchemists (1887–1888) by Marcelin Berthelot (1827–1907) and Charles-Emile Ruelle (1833–1912). The idea of a systematic inventory of manuscripts first launched by Daremberg was still present in the scholarly community even though Daremberg could not implement it. The Athenian ophthalmologist Georges A. Costomiris (1849–1902), who was also doing historico-medical research in Paris in the footsteps of Daremberg, began in 1887 to browse the holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and to consult printed catalogues of Greek manuscripts, in order to bring to the attention of the scholarly community unknown Greek medical texts. Costomiris’s catalogue, published in five issues of the French Revue des Études Grecques (1889–1897), listed 214

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different codices containing the texts of twenty authors, many of whom were Byzantines (names are followed by the references to the several issues of Costomiris’ work [number of the issue, and pages]): Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius (5.414–445), the Byzantine compilations attributed to Aelius Promotus (2nd c. C.E.) in the manuscripts and by modern scholars (1.363–368), Aetius (2.150–179), Damnastes (11th c. [?]) (4.71–72), the Ephodia (11th c.) (3.101–110), the Hippiatrica (4.61–69), Leo the Philosopher (3.99–100), the enigmatic Metrodora of unknown time period (2.147–148), Nicolaus Myrepsos (5.406–414), Oribasius (2.148–150), Psellus (1018– after [?] 1081) (4.68–60), Symeon Seth (4.70–71), Theophanes Nonnos (3.100–101), Timotheus (5th c.) (3.99), and Tzetzes (ca. 1110–between 1180 and 1185) (5.405). On the basis of such inventory – and as a sort of défense et illustration – Costomiris produced a critical edition of the twelfth book of Aetius’ medical encyclopedia (1892). Another Greek physician, Skeuos Geôrgios Zerbos (1875–1966), investigated Greek medical manuscripts, with a particular interest in Aetius, Paul of Nicea (between the 7th and the 9th/10th c.), Metrodora, and Magnos of Emessa (4th c. [?]) as he himself indicated (“Kathorismos tôn onomatôn tôn suggrafeôn duo anônumôn iatrikôn keimenôn,” Athêna 20 [1908]: 502–08; see 502). On this basis he published critical editions of Aetius (partial; see [chronological order of publication]): Aetii Sermo sextidecimus et ultimus: Erstens aus Handschriften veröffentlicht mit Abbildungen, Bemerkungen und Erklärungen, 1901; “Aetiou Amidênou peri daknontôn zôôn kai ibolôn êtoi logos dekatos tritos,” Athêna 18 (1905): 241–302 (contains many, but not all chapters of book 13), with a re-edition as a monograph under the same title and two different printings (1905, in the series Editio graeca scriptorum medicorum veterum graecorum, and Syros, 1909); “Aetiou Amidênou logos dekatos pemptos,” Athêna 21 (1909): 2–138; “Aetiou Amidênou logos enatos,” Athêna 23 (1911): 265–392. Also, he studied some aspects of Byzantine medicine and some Byzantine physicians, including specific manuscripts (“O suggrafeas duo anônumôn archaiôn iatrikôn keimenôn,” Athêna 21 [1909]: 381–83) (alphabetical order of names of Byzantine authors): (Aetius) Die Gynekologie des Aëtios, 1901, and “Paratêrêseis eis ton triskaidekaton logon êtoi peri daknontôn zôôn kai ibolôn ofeôn Aetiou Amidênou,” Epetêris Ethnikou Panepistêmiou (1908): 307–60; (Metrodora) “Das unveröffentliche medizinische Werk der Metrodora,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 3 (1909–1910): 141–44; (Paul of Nicea) Oi kôdikes tôn archaiôn anekdotôn iatrikôn cheirografôn tou Paulou Nikaiou: Ai peri toutôn dêmosieutheisai eidikai meletai mou kai ai ep’ autôn kriseis tês akadêmias tôn epistêmôn tou Berolinou kai tou kathêgêtou tês Istorias tês iatrikês en tô Panepistêmiô tou Berolinou, 1915.

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Daremberg’s and Costomiris’s work highlighted the interest and urgent need of a systematic catalogue of manuscripts containing scientific works, be they Byzantine or earlier. It was the merit of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to produce such a general catalogue of medical manuscripts, published under the direction of Hermann Diels and referred to above. Interestingly, the catalogue included the codices of the medieval Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew translations of the Greek works, and constituted a basis for further study of the diffusion of classical science from the Byzantine Empire to the West (the early medieval Latin translations) and to the East (the translations into oriental languages). The project of new editions to be published in a new Corpus Medicorum Graecorum came to fruition as early as 1908, with the first volume on Philumenus (3rd c. C.E. [?]), edited by Max Wellmann (1863–1933) on the basis of an unicum (Vaticanus graecus 284). After 3 volumes of Galen were published (1914 [2 items] and 1915), Paul of Egina (2 vols., 1921–1924) was edited by Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928), Oribasius by Johann Georg Raeder (b. 1905) in 5 volumes (1926–1933), and half of Aetius’s medical encyclopedia in 2 volumes (1935 and 1950) by Alessandro Olivieri (b. 1872). Whereas this editing activity seemed promising for Byzantine science, it was only in 1969 that a volume on a physician of the middle Byzantine period came out (Leo, edited by Robert Renehan). Then, from 1983 to 1997, the commentaries on Hippocrates, Aphorisms, and Prognostic by the late Alexandrian Stephanus were edited in 5 volumes by Leendert G. Westerink (1913–1990). That is, a total of 15 out of the almost 60 volumes currently published in the Corpus (= 25 %), with three authors from late antiquity – actually a commentator on a classical author and three encyclopedists who synthesized the classical literature (mainly Galen) – and only one after the end of the school of Alexandria. A leading figure in the publication of Greek scientific texts from the 1880s to 1927 was the Danish scholar and historian of ancient science Johan Ludvig Heiberg. He edited (alphabetical order of ancient authors’ names): (anonymous) Anonymi logica et quadrivium cum scholiis antiquis (1928); (Apollonius of Perga [between 260 and 190 B.C.E.]) Apollonii Pergaei quae graece exstant (2 vols., 1891–1893); (Archimedes [287–212 B.C.E.]) Archimedis opera omnia (3 vols., with two editions: 1880–1881, and 1910–1915); (Corpus Hippocraticum) Aphorisms (1892), and the first volume of the Opera (1927) in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (in collaboration with Johannes Mewaldt [1880–1964], Ernst Nachmanson [1877–1943], and Hermann Schöne [1870–1941]); (Euclid [ca. 300 B.C.E.]) Euclidis opera omnia (8 vols., 1883–1916); (Hero [1st c. C.E.]) Heronis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt omnia

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(5 vols., 1899–1914); (mathematicians) the Mathematici graeci minores (1927); (Paul of Egina) Pauli Aeginetae libri tertii interpretatio latina antiqua (1912); Glossae medicinales (1924); (Ptolemaeus [1st-2nd c.]) the Syntaxis mathematica (2 vols., 1898–1903), and the Opera astronomica minora (1907) in Claudii Ptolemaei opera quae exstant omnia; (Serenus [4th c. C.E.]) Sereni Antinoensis opuscula [mathematica] (1896); and (Theodosius [ca. 160–ca. 90 B.C.E.]) De sphaericis (1927). Heiberg wrote also a history of mathematical and natural sciences in antiquity (Geschichte der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften im klassischen Altertum, published in the Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, 1st ed. in 1912 [English trans. in 1922; Italian trans. in 1924], with a rev. ed. in 1925). In spite of its title, the latter includes some data about post-classical and Byzantine science, as it extends up to Martianus Capella (early 5th c.) for the mathematics; it mentions the university of Constantinople, created in 425 (p. 61), and such Byzantine scientists as Psellus, Theodoros Metochites (1270–1332), Nicephore Gregoras (ca. 1290–between 1358 and 1361), Georgios Chrysokokkes (fl. ca. 1335–1350) (author of a work based on Persian astronomy and dated 1346), Isaak Argyros (between 1300 and 1310–ca. 1375), and Nicolaus Kabasilas (d. 1371) in the chapter on astronomy (pp. 61–62); and, in that on medicine (p. 116), it includes Oribasius, Paul of Egina, Stephanus of Athens (and Alexandria), and Theophilos Protospatharios. Next, however, the chapter passes to Byzantium, which it treats in half-a-page, with such considerations as (p. 117): Auch in Byzanz wurde medizinische Schrifstellerei bis zuletzt betrieben, ohne Originalität, aber recht fleissig … Im 10. Jahrh. hat Theophanes Nonnos eine kümmerliche Kompilation Iatrika aus Oreibasios hergestellt …

This corresponds to what Heiberg wrote about Byzantine geography (deprived of originality according to him [p. 87]) and botany (supposedly absent from the Byzantine scientific panorama unless it was agronomical or medical [p. 90]). Such statements contrasted with Heiberg’s knowledge of Byzantine manuscripts, of which he mentioned some (for example the Florentinus Laurentianus 74, 7, containing Apollonius of Citium [1st c. B.C.E.] and richly illustrated [p. 117]), and in some of which he traced an Arabic influence on Byzantine astronomy (pp. 61–62) and medicine (p. 117). To prepare his many editions, Heiberg consulted, indeed, a great many manuscripts from several collections in Europe, which he knew well, including their history (he published an article on one of the most significant collections of the Renaissance, that of Giorgio Valla [above], which is still the work of reference on the topic). Also, he participated in the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs

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(vols. 1 and 3 [both 1924]). Such familiarity with manuscripts probably contributes to explain why, in 1901, he invited Diels to publish a new corpus of ancient Greek medical literature for which preparation the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts would be indispensable. But, at the same time, this deep knowledge of the manuscripts stresses a contradiction in Heiberg’s work, and perhaps also in the practice of the history of ancient and Byzantine science, be it at Heiberg’s time or possibly also in current research: Byzantium was viewed mainly – if not only – as the agent of transmission of classical science, and not so much as a producer of science, whatever its form. Such an interpretation is not contradicted by the major programs on astrological and alchemical manuscripts (all Byzantine) that started at that time and in the launching of which Heiberg participated (Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 20 vols., 1898–1953; Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 8 vols., 1928–1932): astrological and alchemical manuscripts were considered as sources for the history of mentalities and religion, both in Antiquity and Byzantium, and not for the history of science(s), according to an approach going back to Karl Usener (1834–1905), who had been a university teacher of Diels. Such approach was particularly the case of the Belgian philologist Franz Cumont (1868–1947), who created and directed the corpus of astrological manuscripts for a certain time, and shared such responsibility with his co-citizen Joseph Bidez (1867–1945). In this view, Heiberg did not bring to light the data he discovered in the Byzantine manuscripts of the texts he studied, and did not consider the data resulting from their codicological, paleographical, and historical analysis as a significant primary source for the history of Byzantine science(s). Instead, he simply reproduced the interpretation of Byzantine science developed during the 19th century, particularly in the German school of Altertumswissenschaft, for which culture and science were born in classical antiquity (particularly in Greece) and declined afterwards until the Renaissance. Significantly, however, although he used the few available 19th-century editions of Byzantine scientific texts and some 19th-century secondary literature (among others the works by Usener), Heiberg relied on late 18th-century antiquarian bibliography in his references to Byzantine scientists (mainly the Bibliotheca graeca of Johann Albert Fabricius [1668–1736] in the 4th edition by Gottlieb Christoph Harles [1738–1815], published in 1790–1804). Only in the 1930s did historians and philologists begin to have a per se interest in Byzantine scientific texts. The Greek physician Aristotelês Kouzês (1872–1961) of Athens published several articles on Byzantine physicians and their works on the basis of his explorations of Greek manuscripts. His activity seems to have proceeded in two waves. In a first time (1907–1910),

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after a critical edition of Marcellus of Side, On pulses (1907), he focused on three key, though minor, Byzantine texts, which he edited: the treatise On Gout by Demetrius Pepagomenos (Dêmêtriou Pepagomenou, Suntagma peri tês podagras, 1909), the translation into Greek of the treatise On Smallpox and Measles originally written in Arabic by the physician abu Bakr ar-Râzî, best known in the medieval West as Rhazes (Razê, Logos peri loimikês exellênistheis ek tês surôn dialektou pros tên êmeteran, 1909), and the influential treatise On urine by Theophilos (Theofilou, Peri ourôn biblion, 1910). Then, after an interruption of almost 20 years, he published again on the history of Byzantine medicine, starting with a general note drawing the attention to some unedited manuscripts (“Paratêrêseis epi tinôn anekdotôn iatrikôn kôdikôn tôn bibliothêkôn tês Eurôpês kai kathorismos eniôn toutôn,” Epetêris Etaireias Byzantinôn Spoudôn 6 [1929]: 375–82). His subsequent production was more markedly based on, and oriented toward, manuscript analysis, and resulted in bringing little known texts to the attention (chronological order of publication) (Neophytos Prodromênos): “To peri tôn en odousi pathôn ergon Neofutou tou Prodromênou,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 7 (1930): 348–57; (Ioannes Prisduanôn [of unknown epoch: 12th c. ?]) “To peri ourôn ergon tou Iôannou episkopou Prisduanôn,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 10 (1933): 364–71; (Constantine Meliteniotes) “Quelques considérations sur les traductions en grec des oeuvres médicales orientales et principalement sur les deux manuscrits de la traduction d’un traité persan par Constantin Méliténiotis,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 14 (1939): 205–20; (Nicephoros Blemmydes [1197–ca. 1269]) “Les oeuvres médicales de Nicéphore Blémmydes selon les manuscrits existants,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 56–75; (Theophilos) “The Apotherapeutic of Theophilos according to the Laurentian Codex, plut. 75, 19,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 9–18; (Romanos [10th c.]) “The Medical Work of Romanos According to the Vatican Greek Codex 280,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 162–170; (Leo) “The Written Tradition of the Works of Leo the Iatrosophist,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 19 (1944): 170–177; (Antonius Pyropoulos [15th c.]) “Some New Informations on Antony Pyropoulos as Physician and on his Small Notice: ‘Peri metrôn kai stathmôn’ according the Codex 877 of the Iberia Monastery on Mount Athos and the Cod. med. gr. 27 of the National Library of Vienna,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 21 (1946): 9–18. Almost at the same time Kouzês was starting the second phase of his activity, the Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) published several botanical lexica and texts on plants from manuscripts: “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus graecus 2419,” Serta Leodiensia ad celebrandam patriae libertatem iam centesimum annum recuperatam composuerunt philologi leodenses,

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1930, 59–101, and Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2: Textes grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim. The troubled history of the 20th century brought an end to these attempts. After World War II, it was the merit of Joseph Mogenet (1913–1980) to show that Byzantine manuscripts of classical scientific texts may illustrate the practice of science in Byzantium – instead of being just the vehicles of these texts. Mogenet showed, indeed, that a scholion in a manuscript of Ptolemy’s Almagest (Vaticanus graecus 1594, 10th c.) reveals a practice of the text that was not limited to a poor or impoverished repetition, but was also used for new applications, including methods of calculation borrowed from the Arabic world (Joseph Mogenet, “Une Scolie inédite du Vat. gr. 1594 sur les rapports entre l’astronomie et Byzance,” Osiris 14 [1962]: 198–221). In so doing, Mogenet transformed the study of Byzantine scientific manuscripts: instead of only transmitting classical texts, they also bear witness to the way these texts were studied and to the work done on these texts, in a significant shift of the focus that brilliantly illustrated the validity of Daremberg’s intuition on the interest of studying the history of manuscripts, and eventually laid down the necessary methodological foundations for Byzantine science to be investigated on a solid basis. F. 20th-Century Research While history of Byzantine science(s) was searching its way in the late 19th and early 20th century, ongoing research on the history of science(s) included Byzantium in some of its encyclopedic programs. One of them was the monumental five-volume Introduction to the History of Science (1927–1948) by the Belgian-born historian of science(s) George Sarton (1884–1956), covering the whole Mediterranean and Western tradition from Homer to the 14th century. In the first volume, the work proceeds by time-periods characterized by a leading figure each, some of whom are Byzantine: the time of Oribasius (second half of 4th c.) (1, pp. 359–76); the time of Proclus (412–485 C.E.) (second half of 5th c.) (1, pp. 399–413); and the time of Ioannes Philoponus (ca. 490–ca. 570) (first half of 6th c.) (1, pp. 411–42). All chapters (whatever their emblematic figure) include data about the several scientific traditions taken into consideration, Byzantine, Syriac, Arabic (when appropriate), Persian, Indian, and Chinese. In the second volume, Sarton used the same approach, together with a more analytical one, by disciplines and/or problems. For the first half of the 12th century, for example (under the sign of William of Conches [before 1090–after 1154], Abraham Ibn Ezra [ca. 1089–ca. 1167], and Ibn Zuhr [= Averroes] [ca. 1091–1162]), the place of Byzantium in the initial synthetic survey (2.1, pp. 109–52) is pretty much reduced: it receives,

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indeed, 9 lines (p. 120) in Philosophic Background (pp. 117–22), 4 (p. 124) in Mathematics and Astronomy (pp. 122–27), 5 (p. 133) in Natural History (pp. 132–33), and 6 (p. 134) in Medicine (pp. 133–37). Absent from Chemistry (pp. 129–130) and Geography (pp. 130–32), it does not appear either in the analytical part, in Religious Background (pp. 153–66), Translators (pp. 167–81), Chemistry (pp. 218–20), and Geography (pp. 221–25), and is briefly treated (191–92) in Philosophic Background (pp. 182–203), as in Mathematics (pp. 204–15; 209 for Byzantium), Natural History (pp. 226–28; 228 for Byzantium), and Medicine (pp. 229–48; 236 for Byzantium). On astronomy, specifically, Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) compiled Le Système du monde, devoted to the history of the discipline until Copernicus (1473–1543). Whereas he intended it as a twelve-volume work, he could complete only nine (published 1913–1959; English trans. of volumes 7–9 under the title Medieval Cosmology, 1985). Similarly, on experimental sciences, Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) wrote an eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–1958), During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era, as the sub-title specifies. Byzantium is barely present (1, pp. 480–503) with Basil, Epiphanius (between 310 and 320–402 or 403), and the Physiologus, and postclassical medicine (actually Oribasius, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, and Paul of Egina; 1, pp. 566–84). Continuous during the 20th century with such major projects as the Encyclopedia of Islam (2 editions, especially the 2nd; the 3rd is in preparation) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica (now also available on the internet in open access), encyclopedism was particularly productive toward the end of the century, with the following realizations, specifically devoted to the history of science or including it (in chronological order of publication): Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Gillispie, 18 vols. (1970–1990), containing the following entries on Byzantine scientists (alphabetical order of names): Alexander of Tralles (1 p. 121), Nemesius (10, pp. 20–1), Oribasius (10, pp. 230–31), Paul of Egina (10, pp. 417–19), Psellus (11, pp. 182–86), and Stephanus of Alexandria (13, pp. 37–8); the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, 5 vols., 1973–74; the Lexikon des Mittelalters, ed. Robert Auty, 9 vols., 1980–1999; the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer (1904–1987), 13 vols., 1982–1989; the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al., 3 vols., 1991; the Neue Pauly, ed. Hubert Cancik, and Helmuth Schneider, 13 vols. with an index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003 (English trans. under the title Brill’s New Pauly, 16 vols. and 4 supplements published from 2002); Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, with contrasted information: whereas there is no entry on By-

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zantium and no mention of Byzantium in some important entries (Astronomy [64–67], Euclid [164–67], Illustration, Medical [262–64] and Scientific [264–67], Medicine [336–40], Ptolemy [427–29], and Translation Movements [482–86]), others include Byzantium (Botany [96–8], Burgundio of Pisa [104–105], Cartography, Byzantine [117–18], Dioscorides [152–54], Galen [179–82], Herbals [218–20], Kosmas Indikopleustês [302–303], Pharmaceutic Handbooks [393–94], Pharmacology [394–97], and Pharmacy and Materia Medica [397–99]); Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte, ed. Werner E. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil, and Wolfgang Wegner, 2005, with several entries on Byzantine physicians (alphabetical order of names): Aetius (16), Alexander of Tralles (31–2), Iohannes Zacharias Aktuarios (703), Nicolaus Myrepsus (1020), Nemesius (1030), Oribasius (1076–77), Paul of Egina (1116), Philaretos (9th c. [?]) (1150), Psellus (1189), Stephanus of Athens (1360), Symeon Seth (1332), the Suda (ca. 1000 [?]) (1366), and Theophilos Protospatharios (1385); the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, ed. Thomas Hockey, 2 vols., 2007, with a limited number of Byzantine astronomers (alphabetical order of names): Gregory (or George) Chionides (or Chioniades) (ca. 1240–1250–ca. 1320) (229); Nicephore Gregoras (440–41); Hypatia (ca. 370–415) (544–45), Olympiodorus the Younger (ca. 495/505–after 565) (853); Pappus of Alexandria (4th c. [?]) (869–70); Ioannes Philoponus (900–1); Simplicius of Cilicia (ca. 490–ca. 560) (1062–63); Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 365/370–ca. 413) (1117–18); and Theon of Alexandria (ca. 335–ca. 400) (1133–1134); Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols., ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006; the Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser, and Georgia Irby-massie, 2008, which presents some data on Early-Byzantine scientists or anonymous works; and the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge, 8 vols., 2008, which has some entries on less known or recently better researched Byzantine men of science (alphabetical order of names, with the mention of the field of activity): Isaac Argyrus (1300 or 1310–ca. 1375) (1, 98–9; astronomy); George (or Gregory) Chioniades (or Chionides) (2, 120–2; astronomy); Ioannes Philoponus (4, 51–3, natural philosophy); Theodore Meliteniotes (ca. 1320–1393) (5, 94–6, astronomy); Manuel Moschopoulos (ca. 1265–after 1340) (5, 196, mathematics); Olympiodorus of Alexandria (5, 338–40, natural philosophy, astrology, alchemy); and Stephanus of Alexandria (6, 516–19, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, medicine, mathematics). Specialized research in the 20th century dealt with such topics as (alphabetical order of disciplines; within each section, chronological order of publication; selection) (alchemy) Robert Halleux, Les Textes alchimiques, 1979; Maria Papathanassiou, “Stephanus of Alexandria: On the Structure and

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Date of his Alchemical Work,” Medicina nei secoli 8 (1996): 247–266; L’alchimie et ses racines philosophiques: La tradition grecque et la tradition arabe, ed. Cristina Viano, 2005; (arithmetic, general) Paul Tannery (1843–1904), Mémoires scientifiques, vol. 4: Sciences exactes chez les Byzantins, ed. Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen (1839–1920), 1920; André Allard, “L’enseignement du calcul arithmétique à partir des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: l’exemple de la multiplication,” Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les Universités médiévales, 1994, 117–35; Jaap Mansfeld, Prolegomena Mathematica from Apollonius of Perga to Late Neoplatonism with an Appendix on Pappus and the History of Platonism, 1998; (arithmetic, Diophantus of Alexandria [3rd c. C.E.]) Paul Tannery, Diophanti Alexandrini Opera omnia cum Graecis commentariis, 1893–1895; André Allard, “La Tradition du texte grec des Arithmétiques de Diophante d’Alexandrie,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 12/13 (1982/3): 57–137; Id., “Les scolies aux arithmétiques de Diophante d’Alexandrie dans le Matritensis Bibl. Nat. 4678 et les Vaticani gr. 191 et 304,” Byzantion 53 (1983): 682–710; Jean Christianidis, “Une Interpretation byzantine de Diophante,” Historia Mathematica 25 (1998): 22–28; (arithmetic, George Pachymeres [1242–ca. 1310]) Paul Tannery, Quadrivium de Georges Pachymère ou Suntagma tôn tessarôn mathêmatôn arithmêtikês, mousikês, geôgraphias kai astronomias, ed. E. Stéphanou, 1950; (arithmetic, Isaac Argyrus) André Allard, “Le Petit traité d’Isaac Argyre sur la racine carrée,” Centaurus 22 (1978): 1–43; (arithmetic, Indian) André Allard, “Le premier traité byzantin de calcul indien: Classement des manuscrits et édition critique du texte,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 7 (1978): 57–107; (arithmetic, Maximos Planudes [ca. 1255–ca. 1305]) André Allard, Maxime Planude, le ‘Grand calcul selon les Indiens’: Histoire du texte, édition critique traduite et annotée, 1981; Jean Christianidis, “Maxime Planude sur le sens du terme diophantien plasmatikon,” Historia Scientiarum 6 (1996): 37–41; (astronomy) David Pingree (1933–2005, “Gregory Chioniades and Palaeologan Astronomy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964): 135–160; Anne Tihon, “Le calcul de la longitude de Vénus d’après un texte anonyme du Vat. gr. 184,” Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 39 (1968): 51–82; Ead., Le ‘Petit Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux Tables Faciles de Ptolémée: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, 1973; Joseph Mogenet, and Anne Tihon, in collaboration with Daniel Donnet, Barlaam de Seminara, Traités sur les éclipses de soleil de 1333 et 1337: Histoire des textes, éditions critiques, traductions et commentaires, 1977 (on Barlaam [ca. 1290–1348]); Anne Tihon, “Un traité astronomique chypriote du XIVe siècle,” Janus 64 (1977): 279–308; 66 (1979): 49–81; 68 (1981): 65–127; Ead., “L’astronomie byzantine,” Byzantion 51 (1981): 603–24; Joseph Mogenet, Le ‘Grand Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux

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Tables Faciles de Ptolémée, Livre I: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction. Rev., with a trans. by Anne Tihon, 1985; Ead., “Calculs d’éclipses byzantins de la fin du XIVe siècle,” Le Muséon 100 (1987): 353–61; Ead., Le ‘Grand Commentaire’ de Théon d’Alexandrie aux Tables Faciles de Ptolémée, Livres II et III: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, and id., Livre IV, 2 vols., 1991–1999; Ead., Etudes d’astronomie byzantine, 1994 (reproduces articles previously published by the author); Ead., “Sous la plume de Jean Chortasmenos: Des scolies byzantines sur la trépidation des équinoxes,” Philosophie et sciences à Byzance de 1204 à 1453: Les textes, les doctrines et leur transmission, ed. Michel Cacouros, and Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, 2006, 157–184 (on Ioannes Chortasmenos [ca. 1370-before 1439]; (astronomy, applied) Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990), and Henry Bartlett Van Hoesen (1885–1965), Greek Horoscopes, 1959; (biology) Jean Théodoridès, Les sciences biologiques et médicales à Byzance, 1977; (botany) Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940), “Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 (1903–1904): 129–55; Armand Delatte, “Le lexique de botanique …” (above); Id., Anecdota … (above), passim; Félix Brunet (b. 1872), “Contribution des médecins byzantins à l’histoire des plantes et à la botanique médicale en France,” Hippocrates 5 (1939): 524–31; Armand Delatte, “Le traité des plantes planétaires d’un manuscrit de Léningrad,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 9 (1949): 145–77; Margaret H. Thomson, Textes grecs inedits relatifs aux plantes, 1955; Ead., Le jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI, 1960; Ernst Heitsch, ‘Carmen de viribus herbarum’, Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, vol. 2, 1964, 23–38; John Riddle “Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough, 1985, 95–102 (reproduced in John M. Riddle, Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992, no. XIII]); Alain Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28; (chemistry) James R. Partington (1886–1965), A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder, 1960; Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, “Il fuoco greco,” Storia della guerra futura: Atti del Convegno, Varallo, 22 settembre 2006, ed. Carlo Rastelli, and Giovanni Cerino Badone, 2006, 125–32; (geography) Didier Marcotte, Les géographes grecs, vol. 1: Introduction générale and Pseudo-Scymnos, Circuit de la Terre, 2000; Maria Gabriela Schmidt, Die Nebenüberlieferung des 6. Buchs des Geographie des Ptolemaios. Griechische, lateinische, syrische, armenische und arabische Texte, 1999; (mathematics) Jean Verpeaux (1922–1965), Nicéphore Choumnos, homme d’état et humaniste byzantin (ca. 1250/1255–1327), 1959 (see 151–70: chapter 5: Nicéphore Choumnos et les connaissances mathématiques); Alistair Macintosh Wilson, The Infinite in the Finite, 1995, on Pappus of Alexandria (408–20) and The

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Last of the Greeks (420–23); (medicine [general; see below for specific studies]) Théodoridès, Les sciences … (above); Aristotelês Eytichiadês, Ê aksêsis tês buzantinês iatrikês epistêmês kai koinônikai afarmogai autês kata schetikas diataxeis, 1983; Nicoletta Palmieri, “La théorie de la médecine des Alexandrins aux Arabes,” Les voies de la science grecque: Etudes sur la transmission des textes de l’Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle, ed. Danielle Jacquart, 1997, 33–133; MarieHélène Congourdeau, “La médecine byzantine: Une réévaluation nécessaire,” La revue du praticien 54 (2004): 1733–37; Ead., “La médecine à Nicée et sous les Paléologues: état de la question,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 185–88; Alain Touwaide, “The Development of Palaeologan Renaissance: An Analysis Based on Dioscorides’ De materia medica,” ibid., 189–224; (metrology) Erich Schilbach, Byzantinische Metrologische Quellen,1970; Id., Byzantinische Metrologie, 1970; (mineralogy) Dietlinde Golz, Studien zur Geschichte der Mineralnamen in Pharmazie, Chemie und Medizin von den Anfängen bis Paracelsus, 1972; Sonja Schönauer, Untersuchungen zum Steinkatalog des Sophrosyne-Gedichtes des Meliteniotes mit kritischer Edition der Verse 1107–1247, 1996; (oneirology) M. Andrew Holowchak, Ancient Science and Dreams. Oneirology in Greco-Roman Antiquity, 2001; Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, 2002; Steven M. Oberhelman, Dreambooks in Byzantium: Six Oneirocritica in Translation, with Commentary and Introduction, 2008; (pharmacy) Pan. G. Kritikos, and Stella P. Papadaki, “Contribution à l’histoire de la Pharmacie chez les Byzantins, “Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Athen vom 8. bis 14. April 1967, ed. Georg Edmund Dann (1898–1979), 1969, 13–78; Jerry Stannard, “Aspects of Byzantine Materia Medica,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 205–11 (reproduced in Jerry Stannard, Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, ed. Katherine E. Stannard, and Richard Kay, 1999, no. IX); John Scarborough, “Early Byzantine Pharmacology,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 213–32; Maria Papathomopoulos, “Stephanus of Alexandria: Pharmaceutical Notions and Cosmology in his Alchemical Work,” Ambix 37 (1990): 121–33; Rudolf Schmitz (1918–1992), Geschichte der Pharmazie, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1998, 205–17; Marie-Hélène Marganne, “Etiquettes de médicaments, listes de drogues, prescriptions et réceptaires dans l’Egypte gréco-romaine et byzantine,” Pharmacopoles et apothicaires: Les ‘Pharmaciens’ de l’Antiquité au Grand Siècle, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2006, 59–73; (veterinary medicine) Gudmund Björck (1905–1955), “Le Parisinus grec 2244 et l’art vétérinaire grec,” Revue des études grecques 48 (1935):

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505–24; Anne-Marie Doyen-higuet, “The Hippiatrica and Byzantine Veterinary Medicine,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 111–20; Stavros Lazaris, “Les rapports entre l’illustration et le texte de l’Epitome, manuel byzantin d’hippiatrie,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 49 (1999): 281–301; Id., “La production nouvelle en médecine vétérinaire sous les Paléologues et l’oeuvre cynégétique de Dèmètrios Pépagôménos,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 225–68; Anne-Marie Doyen-Higuet, L’epitomé de la Collection d’hippiatrie grecque: Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction et notes, vol. 1, 2006; Anne McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources, Compilation, and Transmission of the Hippiatrica, Oxford, 2007; (zoology) Jean Théodoridès, “L’intérêt scientifique des miniatures zoologiques d’un manuscrit byzantin de la ‘matière médicale’ de Dioscoride (Codex M 652, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York),” Acta biologica Debrecina 7–8 (1969–1970): 265–72; Zoltan Kádár, Survivals of Greek Zoological Illuminations in Byzantine Manuscripts, 1978; Stavros Lazaris, “Le Physiologus grec et son illustration: Quelques considérations à propos d’un nouveau témoin illustré (Dujcev. gr. 297),” and Jacqueline Leclerc-Marx, “La sirène et l’(ono)centaure dans le Physiologus grec et latin dans quelques Bestiaires: Le texte et l’image,” Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles, ed. Baudouin Van den Abeele, 2005, 141–67 and 169–82 respectively; Pierre Beulens, “L’étude de l’Histoire des animaux durant l’occupation latine de Constantinople et sous les Paléologues,” Philosophie et sciences …, ed. Cacouros, and Congourdeau (above), 113–25. The current bibliography on the history of sciences, can be found in the volume ISIS Current Bibliography of the History of Science and its Cultural Influences, published as a yearly supplement to ISIS, the journal of the History of Science Society (HSS) of America. Byzantium is dealt with in a specific section (no. 220), which includes several sub-sections (by disciplines). Since there are also disciplinary sections (nos. 101–64), all sections are crossed-referenced and indexed (subject index) in order to make it possible to easily locate any relevant item. Besides the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum and the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs (above), another important 20th-century achievement is the Corpus des astronomes byzantins, 10 vols., by different publishing companies over time, 1983–2001 (in chronological order of publication, and number in the series): Joseph Mogenet, Anne Tihon, Robert Royez, and Anne Berg, Nicéphore Grégoras, Calcul de l’éclipse de Soleil du 16 juillet 1330, 1983; David Pingree, The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades, 2 vols., 1985–1986; Alexander Jones, An Eleventh-century Manual of Arabo-Byzantine

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Astronomy, 1987; Régine Leurquin, Théodore Méliténiote, Tribiblos astronomique, 3 vols., 1993; Raymond Mercier, An Almanac for Trebizond for the Year 1336, 1994; David Pingree, The Preceptum Canonis Ptolomei, 1997; Anne Tihon, and Raymond Mercier, Georges Gémiste Pléthon, Manuel d’astronomie, 1998; Anne Tihon, Régine Leurquin, and Claude Scheuren, La version grecque du Traité sur l’astrolabe du Pseudo-Messahalla, 2001. G. The Case of Medicine The field of Byzantine science that developed more in 20th-century Western scholarship is medicine. Though with the limitations we have stressed, many texts have been edited and studied (including sometimes the biography of the author). A bibliographical guide on Greek medical literature (actually, a list of critical editions by ancient authors) including some Byzantine authors has been published by Helmut Leitner, Bibliography to the Ancient Medical Authors, 1973, which was not necessarily well received (see, for example, a review by K. R. Walters, and David Wilson, Gnomon 48 [1976]: 604–06). Supplementary bibliographical information has been provided in such notes as John Scarborough, “Texts and Sources in Ancient Pharmacy,” Pharmacy in History 29 (1987): 81–84, and 133–39; Wesley D. Smith, “The Leitner Supplements: An Addendum,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 20 (1992): 34–35; and John Scarborough, “New Texts in Byzantine and Arabic Toxicology and Pharmacology,” Pharmacy in History 38 (1996): 96–99. Also, several reports on such major enterprise as the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (which includes some early-Byzantine physicians) have been published during the century; for the most recent (with the references of the earlier reports), see: Jutta Kollesch, “Das Berliner Corpus der antiken Ärzte: Zur Konzeption und zum Stand der Arbeiten,” Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Anacrapri 29–31 ottobre 1990, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1992, 357–50. Finally, an anthology of texts (in Italian trans.) has been recently published by Neapolitan philologists (see below): Medici Bizantini, 2006, (includes [chronological order of Byzantine authors] Oribasius, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, Paul of Egina, Leo; translations are by Antonio Garzya, Roberto De Lucia, Alessia Guardasole, Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, Mario Lamagna, Roberto Romano). For specific studies on Byzantine authors and medical texts, see (alphabetical order of Byzantine authors’ name; selection): Aelius Promotus (pseudo-) Sibylle Ihm, “Der Traktat peri tôn iobolôn thêriôn kai dêlêtêriôn farmakôn des sog. Aelius Promotus: Vorstellung eines erstmals vollständig edierten toxikologischen Textes,” Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption, ed. Klaus Döring, Bernhard Herzhoff, and Georg Wöhrle, vol. 5 (1995):

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79–89; Ead., Der Traktat peri tôn iobolôn thêriôn kai dêlêtêriôn farmakôn des sog. Aelius Promotus: Erstedition mit texkritischen Kommentar, 1995; (Aetius), Alessandro Olivieri, “Gli Iatrika di Aetios nel cod. Messinese no. 84,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 9 (1901): 299–367; Zerbos, Die Gynekologie … (above); Id., Aetii Sermo sextidecimus … (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou peri daknontôn zôôn …” (above); Id., “Paratêrêseis eis ton triskaidekaton logon …” (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou logos dekatos pemptos” (above); Id., “Aetiou Amidênou logos enatos” (above); Jean Théodoridès, “Sur le 13e livre du traité d’Aétios d’Amida, médecin byzantin du VIe siècle,” Janus 47 (1958): 221–37; Antonio Garzya, “Problèmes relatifs à l’édition des livres IX–XVI du Tétrabiblon d’Aétios d’Amida,” Revue des Etudes Anciennes 86 (1984): 246–57; (Alexander of Tralles) Félix Brunet, Médecine et thérapeutique byzantines: Œuvres médicales d’Alexandre de Tralles, le dernier auteur classique des grands médecins grecs de l’antiquité, 4 vols., 1933–1937; Barbara Zipser, “Die Therapeutica des Alexander Trallianus: Ein medizinisches Handbuch und seine Überlieferung,” Selecta colligere, vol. 2: Beiträge zur Technik des Sammelns und Kompilierens griechischer Texte von der Antike bis zum Humanismus, 2005, ed. Rosa Maria Piccione, and Matthias Perkams, 2005, 211–34; (anonymous) Ivan Garofalo (ed. and comm.), and Brian Fuchs (trans.), Anonymi Medici, De morbis acutis et chronicis, 1997; (Antonius Pyropoulos) Kouzês, “Some new informations …” (above); (Constantine Meliteniotes) Kouzês, “Quelques considérations …” (above); (Demetrius Pepagomenos) Kouzês, Dêmêtriou Pepagomenou, Suntagma …, (above); Maria Capone Cipollaro, Demetrio Pepagomeno, Prontuario medico, 2003; (Dioscorides) Pan. G. Kritikos, and Theodora Athanassoula, Sur les codex pharmaceutiques grecs: Un Codex inconnu de Dioscoride (1ère communication), no date; Geôrgios Christodoulos, Summikta kritika, 1986, 131–99 (on the Athos manuscript of Dioscorides [=  75, 11th c.]); Alain Touwaide, “Le traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride en Italie depuis la fin de l’Empire romain jusqu’aux débuts de l’école de Salerne: Essai de synthèse,” From Epidaurus to Salerno: Symposium held at the European University Centre for Cultural Heritage, Ravello, April, 1990, ed. Antje Krug, 1994, 275–305; Emilie Léal, “Un manuscrit illustré du traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: le Paris grec 2180,” 2 vols., B.A. thesis, University of Provence, Aix-Marseille, 1997; Alessia Aletta, “Studi e ricerche sul Dioscoride della Pierpont Morgan Library M.652,” 2 vols., B.A. thesis, University of Rome, 1997–1998; Pascal Luccioni, “La postérité de l’œuvre de Dioscoride jusqu’au VIe siècle: Remèdes, fraudes et succédanés,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998; Annamaria Ciarallo, “Classificazione botanica delle specie illustrate nel Dioscoride della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,” Automata 1 (2006): 39–41; (Pseudo-Diosco-

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ride, toxicological treatises) Julius Berendes (1837–1914), “I. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die Gifte und Gegengifte – II. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die giftigen Tiere und den tollen Hund,” Apotheker Zeitung 20 (1905): 908–11, 918, 926–28, 933–35, 945–46, 952–54; Alain Touwaide, “Les deux traités toxicologiques attribués à Dioscoride: La Tradition manuscrite grecque, édition critique du texte grec, index,” 5 vols., Ph.D. thesis, University of Louvain, 1981; Id., “L’authenticité et l’origine des deux traités de toxicologie attribués à Dioscoride: I. Historique de la question. II. Apport de l’histoire du texte grec,” Janus 70 (1983): 1–53; Id., “Les deux traités de toxicologie attribués à Dioscoride: Tradition manuscrite, établissement du texte et critique d’authenticité,” Tradizione e ecdotica … (above), 291–339; (Pseudo-Dioscorides [?], On simple medicines) Julius Berendes, “Die Hausmittel des Pedanios Dioskurides, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 12 (1907): 10–33, 79–102, 140–63, 203–24, 268–92, 340–50, 401–12; (efodia) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “À propos d’un chapitre des Éphodia: L’avortement chez les médicins grecs,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 55 (1997): 261–77; Alain Touwaide, “Magna Graecia iterata: Greek medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma, 2004, 85–101; Id., “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II: Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo, and Guido Bellinghieri, 2008, 39–55; (Galen) Nigel G. Wilson, “Aspects of the Transmission of Galen,” Le strade del testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 45–64; Jean Irigoin (1920–2006), Tradition et ecdotique des textes grecs, 1997, passim; Vivian Nutton, “Galen in Byzantium,” Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453): Proceedings of the International Conference (Cambridge, 8–10 September 2001), ed. Michael Grünbart, Ewald Kislinger, Anna Muthesius, and Dionysios Stathakopoulos, 2007, 171–76; Peter E. Pormann, “The Alexandrian Summary (Jawami) of Galen’s On the Sects for Beginners: Commentary or Abridgment?,” Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and M. W. F. Stone, 2 vols., 2004, vol. 2, 11–33; (Hippocrates) Owsei Temkin (1902–2002), “Geschichte des Hippokratismus im ausgehenden Altertum,” Kyklos 4 (1932): 1–80; Id., Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians, 1991; (Ioannes of Alexandria) Iohannis Alexandrini Commentaria in Librum De Sectis Galeni, ed. C. D. Pritchet, 1982; John of Alexandria, Commentary on Hippocrates’ Epidemics VI, Fragments, ed. and trans. John M. Duffy, and Commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of the Child, ed. and trans. T. A. Bell et al., 1997; (Ioannes Argyropoulos [ca. 1393/4–1487]) Alain Touwaide, “The Letter …

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to a Cypriot Physician attributed to Johannes Argyropoulos (ca. 1448–1453),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 585–601; (Ioannes Prisduanôn) Kouzês, “To peri ourôn …” (above); (Ioannes Zacharias Actuarius) Stauros Iô. Kourouzês, “O Aktouarios Iôannês Zacharias paralêpês tês epistolês i’ tou Geôrgiou Lakapênou,” Athêna 78 (1980–1982): 237–76; Armin Hohlweg, “Johannes Aktouarios: Leben, Bildung und Ausbildung; De methodo medendi,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 76(1983): 302–21; Id., “John Actuarius’s De methodo medendi: On the New Edition,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 121–33; Stauros Iô. Kourouzês, To epistolarion Geôrgiou LakapênouAndronikou Zaridou (1299–1315 ca.) kai o iatros Aktouarios Iôannês Zacharias (1275 ca.-1328?): Meletê filologikê, Athens, 1984–1988; (Leo the Physician) Kouzês, “The Written Tradition …” (above); Robert Renehan, “On the Text of Leo Medicus: A Study in Textual Criticism,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 113 (1970): 79–88; Lawrence J. Bliquez, “The Surgical Instrumentarium of Leon Iatrosophistes,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 291–322; Barbara Zipser, “Überlegungen zum Text der Sunopsis iatrikes des Leo medicus,” Studia Humanitatis ac Litterarum Trifolio Heidelbergensi dedicata: Festschrift für Eckhard Christmann, Wilfried Edelmaier und Rudolf Kettemann, ed. Angela Hornung, Christian Jäkel, and Werner Schubert, 2004, 393–99; Ead., “Zu Aufbau und Quellen der Sunopsis iatrikes des Leo medicus,” Antike Fachtexte-Ancient Technical Texts, ed. Thorsten Fögen, 2005, 107–15; (Meletius) Robert Renehan, “Meletius’ Chapter on the Eyes: An Unidentified Source,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 159–68; (Metrodora) Zerbos, “Das unveröffentlichte medizinische Werk …” (above); Marie- Hélène Congourdeau, “Mètrodôra et son œuvre (traduction d’un traité de gynécologie populaire),” Maladie et société à Byzance, ed. Evelyne Patlagean, 1994, 21–42; (Nemesius) Hellen Brown Wicher, “Nemesius Emesenus,” Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz (1914–1998), vol. 6, 1986, 31–72; Moreno Morani, Nemesius, De natura hominis, 1987; (Neophytos Prodromênos) Lundström, “Neophytos Prodromenos’ …” (above); Kouzês, “To peri tôn en odousi pathôn …” (above); (Nicephoros Blemmydes) Id., “Les œuvres médicales …” (above); Evangelia A. Varella, “Nicephorus Blemmydes: Naturwissenschafliches Porträt eines Gelehrten des späten Mittelalters,” Orthodoxes Forum 2 (1990–1991): 1–16; Athanasios Diamantopoulos, Musical Uroscopy: On Urines by the Wisest Vlemydes; An Excellent Medical Work in the Iambic Manner by the Wisest Psellus, 1996; (Paul of Egina) Julius Berendes, “Des Paulos von Aegina Abriss der gesammten Medizin in sieben Büchern, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 13 (1908): 417–32, 515–31, 538–600, 654–69; 14 (1909): 33–49, 124–39,

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602–24, 689–707, 754–74; 15 (1910): 9–40, 73–111, 143–73, 229–60, 462–83, 534–62, 622–49; 16 (1911): 153–68, 381–89, 492–511, 548–65; 17 (1912): 20–44, 93–116, 233–61, 316–47, 368–99, 448–79, 557–72, 593–609; 18 (1913): 24–55, 121–51, 210–14, 282–97, 380–401; this translation was further reproduced in a monographic form under a new title: Paulos’ von Aegina des besten Arztes, Sieben Bücher. Übersetzt und mit Erläuterungen versehen, 1914; Mario Tabanelli, Studi sulla Chirurgia Bizantina: Paolo di Egina, 1964; Eugene F. Rice, “Paulus Egineta,” Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides, ed. F. Edward Cranz, vol. 4, 1980, 145–91; (Paul of Nicea) Zerbos, Oi kôdikes tôn archaiôn anekdotôn iatrikôn cheirografôn tou Paulou Nikaiou … (above); Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, Paolo di Nicea, Manuale Medico, 1996; (Philaretos) John A. Pithis, Die Schriften peri sfugmôn des Philaretos: Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, 1983; (Psellus) Armin Hohlweg, “Medizinischer ‘Enzyklopedismus’ und das ponêma nousôn des Michael Psellos,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 81 (1988): 39–49; Robert Volk, Der medizinische Inhalt der Schriften des Michael Psellos, 1990; Diamantopoulos, Musical Uroscopy …, (above); (Râzî) Kouzês, Razê, Logos peri loimikês … (above); (Romanos) Id., “The Medical Work …” (above); (Stephanos of Athens [and Alexandria]) Wanda Wolska-conus, “Stéphanos d’Athènes et Stéphanos d’Alexandrie: Essai d’identification et de biographie,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 47 (1989): 5–89; Ead., “Les commentaires de Stéphanos d’Athènes au Prognostikon et aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: de Galien à la pratique scolaire alexandrine,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 50 (1992): 5–86; Ead., “Stéphanos d’Athènes (d’Alexandrie) et Théophile le Prôtospathaire, commentateurs des Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: Sont-ils indépendants l’un de l’autre?,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 52 (1994): 5–68; Ead., “Sources des commentaires de Stéphanos d’Athènes et de Théophile le Prôtospathaire aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 54 (1996): 5–66; Ead., “Un ‘Pseudo-Galien’ dans le commentaire de Stéphanos d’Athènes aux Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: O neôteros exêgêtês,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 56 (1998): 5–78; Keith Dickinson, Stephanus the Philosopher and Physician: Commentary on Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon, 1998; (Theophanus Nonnus [actually, Chrysobalantes]) Io. Steph. Bernard (1718–1793), Theophanis Nonni Epitome de Curatione Morborum Graece ac Latine ope codicum manuscriptorum recensuit notasque adiecit, 2 vols., 1794–1795; Joseph A. Sonderkamp, “Theophanes Nonnus: Medicine in the Circle of Constantine Porphyrogenitus,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 29–41; Id., Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung der Schriften des Theophanes Chrysobalantes (sog. Theophanes Nonnos), 1987; (Theophilos) Kouzês, Theofilou, Peri ourôn biblion … (above); Id., “The Apotherapeutic …” (above).

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Over time – particularly in recent years – a different type of approach developed, by topics (alphabetical order of topic names; selection) (abortion) Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou, John Lascaratos, and Spyros G. Marketos, “Abortions in Byzantine Times (325–1453 AD),” Vesalius 2 (1996): 19–25; Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Les abortifs dans les sources byzantines,” Le corps à l’épreuve: Poisons, remèdes et chirurgie. Aspects des pratiques médicales dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2002, 57–70; (Alexandria) Owsei Temkin, “Studies on Late Alexandrian Medicine. I: Alexandrian Commentaries on Galen’s De Sectis ad Introducendos,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 3 (1935): 405–430; (analgesics) George Kalantzis, Constantine Trompoukis, Constantine Tsiamis, and John Lascaratos, “The Use of Analgesics and Hypnotics in the Ancient Greek and Byzantine Era,” Proceedings of the History of Anaesthesia Society 32 (2003): 27–31; Kônstantinos Tsiamês, and Iôannês Laskaratos, “Analgêtika kai upnôtika stên Archaia Ellada kai sto Buzantio,” Hellenic Journal of Surgery 76 (2004): 65–71; (anthropology, Christian) Carolus Burkhard (b. 1858), Alfanus, Nemesii Episcopi Premnon Physicon Peri fuseôs anthrôpou liber a N. Alfano achiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum translatus, 1917; Alexis Smets, and Michel Van Esbroeck, Basile de Césarée, Sur l’origine de l’homme (Hom. X et XI de l’Hexaéméron): Introduction, texte critique, tradution et notes, 1970; Kristijan Domiter, Gregor von Nazianz, De human natura (c. 1, 2, 14): Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, 1999; (cosmetic medicine) John Lascaratos, Constantine Tsiamis, Gerassimos Lascaratos, and Nicholas G. Stavrianeas, “The Roots of Cosmetic Medicine: Hair Cosmetics in Byzantine Times (AD 324–1453),” International Journal of Dermatology 43 (2004): 397–401; (Crusades) Piers D. Mitchell, Medicine in the Crusades: Warfare, Wounds and the Medieval Surgeon, 2004; (dentistry) Effi Poulakou-Rebelakou, M. Stravrou, Constantinos Tsiamis, J. Stravrou, and M. Prokopidi, “Dental Drugs during the Byzantine Times (330–1453 AD),” Program Abstracts of the XXth Nordic Medical History Congress, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 10–13, 2005; (diet) Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics, 2004; Feast, Fast or Famine: Food and Drink in Byzantium, ed. Wendy Mayer, and Silke Trzcionda, 2005; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19): Food and Wine in Byzantium, in Honour of Professor A. A. M. Bryer, ed. Leslie Brubaker, and Kalliroe Linardou, 2007; (elderly) John Lascaratos, and Effie Poulacou-rebelacou, “The Roots of Geriatric Medicine: Care of the Aged in Byzantine Times (324–1453 AD),” Gerontology 46 (2000): 2–6; (generation) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Sang féminin et génération ches les auteurs byzantins,” Le sang au moyen âge: Actes du quatrième colloque inter-

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national de Montpellier, Université Paul-Valéry (27–29 novembre 1997), 1999, 19–23; Ead., “L’embryon entre néoplatonisme et christianisme,” Oriens-Occidens 4 (2002): 201–16; (hospital) Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Hospitals,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 53–63; Id., The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire, 1985 (rev. ed. 1997); Urs Benno Birchler-Argyros, Quellen zur Spitalgeschichte im Oströmischer Reich, 1998; Timothy Miller, “Byzantine Physicians and Their Hospitals,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 323–35; David Bennett, “Three Xenon Texts,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 507–19; Andrew Crislip, From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism & the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity, 2005; Peregrine Horden, “The Earliest Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2005): 361–89; Id., “How Medicalised were Byzantine Hospitals?,” Medicina e storia 10 (2005): 45–74; (iatromathematics) Maria Papathanassiou, “Iatromathematica (Medical Astrology) in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Period,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 357–76; (illness, plague) Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “La peste noire à Constantinople de 1348 à 1466,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 377–89; Plague and the End of Antiquity, ed. Lester K. Little, 2007; (illness, smallpox) Karl-Heinz Leven, “Zur Kenntnis der Pocken in der arabischen Medizin, im lateinischen Mittelalter und in Byzanz,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten: Kongressakten des 4 Symposion des Mediävistenverbandes in Köln 1991 aus Anlass des 1000. Todesjahres der Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Odilo Engels, and Peter Schreiner, 1993, 341–54; John Lascaratos, “Two Cases of Smallpox in Byzantium,” International Journal of Dermatology 41 (2002): 792–95; (Late Antiquity) Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander: Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in Late Antiquity,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 1–14; (leprosy) Luke Demaître, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body, 2007; (monasteries) Volk Robert, Gesundheitswesen und Wohltätigkeit im Spiegel der byzantinischen Klostertypika, 1983; (ophthalmology) John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “Ophthalmological Therapy in Hospitals (xenones) in Byzantium,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 77 (1991): 377–83; John Lascaratos, “Eyes on the Thrones: Imperial Ophthalmologic Nicknames,” Survey of Ophthalmology 44 (1999); 73–8; Id., “Ophthalmology in Byzantium (10th–15th Centuries),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 391–403; (psychosomatic medicine) Aristotelis Chr. Eftychiadis, “Byzantine Psychosomatic Medicine (10th–15th Centuries),” Medicina nei Secoli 11 (1999): 415–21; (rabies) Jean Théodoridès, “Rabies in Byzantine and Islamic Medicine,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 149–58; Id., Histoire de la rage: Cave canem, 1986; (Ravenna) Nicoletta Palmieri, “Un antico commento a Galeno della scuola medica di Ravenna,” Physis 23 (1981):

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197–296; (religion) Gary B. Ferngren, and Karl-Heinz Leven, “Médecine aux premiers siècles du christianisme,” Lettre d’informations-Université Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne (Centre Jean Palerne) 26 (1995): 2–22; Pierre Julien, François Ledermann, and Alain Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano dal culto popolare alla protezione di chirurghi, medici e farmacisti: Aspetti e immagini, 1993; JeanClaude Larchet, Théologie de la maladie, 1991; Les pères de l’église face à la science médicale de leur temps, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, and Bernard Pouderon, 2005; (rhumatism) Constantine Tsiamis, Nicholas Tiberio Economou, and Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou, “Teorie e trattamento delle malattie reumatiche nel periodo bizantino (330–1453),” Reumatismo 58 (2006): 157–64; (surgery) Lawrence J. Bliquez, “Two Lists of Greek Surgical Instruments and the State of Surgery in Byzantine Times,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 187–204; John Lascaratos, and Athanasios Kostakopoulos, “Operations on Hermaphrodites and Castration in Byzantine Times (324–1453 AD),” Urologia Internationalis 58 (1997): 232–35; John Lascaratos, C. Liapis, and C. Ionidis, “Surgery on Aneurysms in Byzantine Times (324–1453 A.D.),” European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery 15 (1998): 110–14; John Lascaratos, Constantine Tsiamis, and Alkiviadis Kostakis, “Surgery for Inguinal Hernia in Byzantine Times (A.D. 324–1453): First Scientific Descriptions,” World Journal of Surgery 27 (2003): 1165–69; Stephanos Geroulanos, “Surgery in Byzantium,” Material Culture ... (above), 129–34; (terminal patients) John Lascaratos, Effie PoulakouRebelakou, and Spyros G. Marketos, “Abandonment of Terminally Ill Patients in the Byzantine Era: An Ancient Tradition?,” Journal of Medical Ethics 25 (1999): 254–58; (therapy) Aristotelês Eytychiadês, Eisagogê eis tên buzantinên therapeutikên, 1983; Pavlos Ntafoulis, and G. Lavrentiadis, “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy in 6th Century: St. John’s Ladder of Divine Ascent,” Psychiatriki 16 (2005): 270; (urology) Mario Lamagna, ‘Il trattato De urinis di Stefano d’Atene e l’uroscopia alessandrina,” Galenismo e medicina tardoantica: Fonti greche, latine e arabe. Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Siena, Certosa di Pontignano, 9 e 10 settembre 2002, ed. Ivan Garofalo, and Amneris Roselli, 2003, 54–73; (uroscopy) Konstantin Dimitriadis, “Byzantinische Uroskopie,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Bonn, 1971; Athanasios A. Diamantopoulos, “Uroscopy in Byzantium,” American Journal of Nephrology 17 (1997): 222–27 (reproduced in Istoria tês Ellênikês Nefrologias, vol. 1., ed. Thanasês Diamantopoulos, 2000, 220–25); Alain Touwaide, “On Uroscopy in Byzantium,” Istoria tês Ellênikês Nefrologias (above), 218–20; The History of Byzantine Uroscopy, ed. Athanasios Diamantopoulos, 2005; (well being) Athanasios Diamandopoulos, “The Effect of Medicine, in Particular the Ideas about Renal Diseases, on the ‘Well-Being’ of Byzantine

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Citizens,” Material Culture … (above) 93–99; Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing: A Cultural History of Healthy Living, 2008. Also, social historians have become increasingly interested in the history of medicine. Investigation on the scientific and intellectual life in Byzantium, which constituted the context of the exercise of science, is not new, as it was illustrated as early as the 1960s (if not before) by such works as Ihor Sev cenko ˇ (1922–2009), Etudes sur la polémique entre Théodore Métochite et Nicéphore Choumnos: La vie intellectuelle et politique à Byzance sous les premiers Paléoloques, 1962; Id., “Théodore Métochites, Chora et les courants intellectuels de l’époque,” Art et société à Byzance sous les Paléologues: Actes du colloque organisé par l’Association Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, Venise, 1968, 1971, 13–39 (reproduced in Id., Ideology, Letters & Culture in the Byzantine World, 1982, no. VIII; English trans.: “Theodore Metochites, the Chora, and the Intellectual Trends of his Time,” The Kariye Djami, vol. 4: Studies in the Art of the Kariye Djami and its Intellectual Background, ed. Paul Atkins Underwood, 1975, 19–91). In this view, teaching, be it general or scientific, became an object of renewed study after such classical works as (chronological order of publication): Theodor Puschmann (1844–1899), Geschichte des medicinischen Unterrichts von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, 1889, 113–30 (see chapter 2: Der medicinische Unterrichte im Mittelalter: Der Einfluss des Christenthums); Friedrich Fuchs (b. 1890), Die höheren Schulen von Konstantinople im Mittelalter, 1926. For more recent work, see Marjorie Ann Moffat, “School-Teachers in the Early Byzantine Empire, 330–610 A.D.,” Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1972; Constantinos N. Constantinides, Higher Education in Byzantium in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (1204–ca. 1310), 1982; John Duffy, “Byzantine Medicine in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries: Aspects of Teaching and Practice,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 21–27; Anne Tihon, “Enseignement scientifique à Byzance,” Organon 24 (1988): 89–108 (reproduced in Ead., Etudes d’astronomie … [above], no. IX). Also, the place of medicine in literature became a topic for research: Alice Leroy-Molinghen, “Médecins, maladies et remèdes dans les Lettres de Théophylacte de Bulgarie,” Byzantion 55 (1985): 483–92; Alexander Kazhdan, “The Image of the Medical Doctor in Byzantine Literature of the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 43–51; Karl-Heinz Leven, Medizinisches bei Eusebios von Kaisareia, 1987; Paraskevi Timplalexi, Medizinisches in der byzantinischen Epistolographie (1100–1453), 2002. Similarly, the place of medicine in society, its role and impact on the patients’ health was investigated. One component of such research is the investigation about famous patients: Ewald Kislinger, “Der kranke Justin II. und die ärztliche Haftung bei Operationen in Byzanz,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen byzantinistischen Gesellschaft

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36 (1986): 39–44; John Lascaratos, “The Poisoning of the Byzantine Emperor Romanos III Argyros (1028–1034 A.D.),” Mithridata 10 (1995): 6–10; John Lascaratos, and Panaghiotis Vassilios Zis, “The Epilepsy of the Emperor Theodore II Lascaris (1254–1258),” Journal of Epilepsy 11 (1998): 296–300; John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “The Cause of Death of the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimisces (969–976): Poisoning or Typhoid Fever?,” Journal of Medical Biography 6 (1998): 171–74; John Lascaratos, and V. Manduvalos, “Cases of Stroke on the Throne of Byzantium,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 7 (1998): 5–10; John Lascaratos, and Effie Poulakou-rebelakou, “Did Justinian the Great (527–565 CE) Suffer from Syphilis?,” International Journal of Dermatology 38 (1999): 787–91; John Lascaratos, and Panaghiotis Vassilios Zis, “The Epilepsy of Emperor Michael IV, Paphlagon (1034–1041 A.D.): Accounts of Byzantine Historians and Physicians,” Epilepsia 41 (2000): 913–17. Going together, research on famous historical individuals who are also physicians: John Lascaratos, and Spyros Marketos, “A Little-known Emperor-physician: Manuel I Comnenus of Byzantium (1143–1180),” Journal of Medical Biography 4 (1996): 187–90. This shift toward the perception of medicine – rather than its production – took a new dimension with the interrogation on the body and the construction of a new perception of the body in the Early-Byzantine world: Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 1988. In the same way, research became interested in the reactions, both of individuals and the society, toward diseases, plague among others: Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, and Mohammed Melhaoui, “La perception de la peste en pays chrétien byzantin et musulman,” Revue des Études Byzantines, 59 (2001): 95–124; Alessio Sopracasa, “Aspetti dell’immaginario bizantino: Le fantasie e la verità nell’esperienza della malattia, una quotidianità straordinaria,” Annali 2000. Studi e Materiali dalle Tesi di laurea, II, Università Ca’ Foscari-Venezia, Dipartimento di studi storici, 2001, 29–50; Id., “La maldie et la peste dans l’empire byzantin à l’époque des Paléologues (XIIIe-XVe siècles)”, M.A. thesis, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2000–2001. Another aspect of this new orientation is the interest in a whole region approached in all its aspects at a certain point of time, as is the case in Patricia Skinner, Health & Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy, 1997. The focus is not on the capital or a major city (wherever it was located), but on an area taken as a whole, in the periphery of the empire; not only the producers of medical knowledge, but also the users of such knowledge in the daily practice of medicine; not only the schools and centers of learned medicine (including libraries and their books, as well as other professional loci), but also the places where medical service was provided, with the providers and users

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(that is, the patients) of such service, including the epidemiological conditions of the population. This orientation of the historical enquiry had also an impact on the approach to the primary sources, that is, the manuscripts containing medical texts. The medical book became a specific object of historico-medical investigation, of an archeological nature. See for example: Aristomenis Matsagas, Spyros Marketos, and Konstantinos Siokos, “Das medizinische Buch in Byzanz,” Proceedings of the XXX International Congress of the History of Medicine, Düsseldorf, 1986, 1988, 1139–45; Guglielmo Cavallo, “I libri di medicina: Gli usi di un sapere”, Maladie et société …, ed. Patlagean (above), 43–56; Iatrika buzantina cheirografa, 1995. In this view, scientific illustration was particularly scrutinized as a source of information on the practice of medicine, making inventories of illustrations more necessary than ever, from the old and now obsolete, though still useful work of Henri Bordier (1817–1888), Description des peintures et autres ornements dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883, to such other works as Loren Mackinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965, or, more recently (though limited to only one sector): Stavros Lazaris, “Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits grecs scientifiques illustrés de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris: Manuscrits zoologiques, botaniques, remèdes, recettes d’antidotes, alchimiques, astrologiques,” Byzantiaka 13 (1993), 191–265. Also, single manuscripts of particular importance were analyzed in detail (chronological order of publication; selection): Paul Buberl (1885–1942), Die Byzantinischen Handschriften, vol. 1: Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis, 1937 (about codex Vienna, National Library of Austria, medicus graecus 1); Jean Théodoridès, “Remarques sur l’iconographie zoologique dans certains manuscrits médicaux byzantins et étude des miniatures zoologiques du codex Vaticanus graecus 284”, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 10 (1961): 21–29; Alain Touwaide, “Un recueil grec de pharmacologie du Xe siècle illustré au XIVe siècle: Le Vaticanus graecus 284”, Scriptorium 39 (1985): 13–56; Léal, “Un manuscrit illustré …” (above) (about codex Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, graecus 2180); Aletta, “Studi e ricerche …” (above) (about codex New York, Morgan Library, M652); and Alain Touwaide, “The Salamanca Dioscorides (Salamanca, University Library, 2659),” Erytheia 24 (2003): 125–58. Also, the lexicology of medical texts was newly approached, particularly in the context of the dictionary of Byzantine Greek prepared at the University of Vienna (below). See for example: Armin Hohlweg, “Terminologie in Byzantinischen Medizinischen Texten und Lexikographie,” Lexicographica Byzantina: Beiträge zum Symposion zur Byzantinischen Lexikographie (Wien, 1.–4. 3.

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1989), ed. Wolfram Hörander, and Erich Trapp, 1991, 129–35; Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, “Die Terminologie der Pest in Byzantinischen Quellen,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 48 (1998): 1–7. The analysis of textual traditions, however, remained mainly oriented to the construction of a stemma codicum (instead of considering the way the texts were read and used at the different time periods of Byzantine history or, conversely, investigating what the books and texts tell about the places where they were produced and used as is the case, for example, in David Bennett, “Medical Practice and Manuscripts in Byzantium,” Social History of Medicine 13 [2000]: 279–91), following a tradition going back to the early days of the scientific approach to textual tradition and illustrated in the 20th century by such works as Hermann Diels, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Galenschen Commentars zum Prorrheticum des Hippokrates, 1912; Georg Helmreich (1849–1921), Handschriftliche Studien zu Meletius, 1918; Fridolf Kudlien, Die handschriftliche Überlieferung des Galenkommentars zu Hippokrates De articulis, 1960; Jean Irigoin, “Tradition manuscrite et histoire du texte: Quelques problèmes relatifs à la Collection hippocratique,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 3 (1973): 1–13; Id., “L’Hippocrate du Cardinal Bessarion (Marcianus graecus 269 [533]),” Miscellanea Marciana di studi Bessarionei a coronamento del V Centenario della donazione nicena, 1976, 161–74; Jacques Jouanna, “L’analyse codicologique du Parisinus gr. 2140 et l’histoire du texte hippocratique,” Scriptorium 38 (1984): 50–62; Id., “L’Hippocrate de Modène: Mut. Est. gr. 233 (. T. 1. 12), 220 (. O. 4. 8) et 227 (. O. 4. 14),” Scriptorium 44 (1995): 273–83; Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, “Testi ginecologici tra Oriente ed Occidente, 1. Metrodora ed il Dynameron di Nicola Mirepso. 2. Una testimonianza italogreca su una Quaestio medicalis salernitana,” La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, Convegno internazionale, Università degli Studi di Salerno, 3–5 novembre 2004, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2007, 283–314. This is also – and particularly – the case of the Italo-French conferences on medical literature organized since 1990, markedly of a philological nature, rather than of history of medicine (chronological order of the conferences and their proceedings): Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini: Atti del Convegno internazionale, Anacapri, 29–31 ottobre 1990, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1992; Storia e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del II Convegno Internazionale, Parigi 24–26 maggio 1994, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 1996; I testi medici greci: Tradizione e ecdotica: Atti del III Convegno Internazionale, Napoli, 15–18 ottobre 1997, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 1999; Trasmissione e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale, Parigi, 17–19 maggio 2001, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 2003; Ecdotica e ricezione dei testi medici greci: Atti del V

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Convegno Internazionale Napoli, 1–2 ottobre 2004, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, Antonio Garzya, Jacques Jouanna, and Amneris Roselli, 2006. Among the many contributions to these volumes of proceedings, one could quote the following from the 2006 proceedings, which illustrate well the strictly philological approach of such conferences (alphabetical order of modern author’s name): Maria Capone Ciollaro, “Un ricettario medico attribuito a Giovanni Archiatra,” 213–30; Marie Cronier, “Quelques aspects de l’histoire du texte du De materia medica de Dioscoride: Forme originelle, remaniements et révisions à Constantinople aux Xe – XIe siècles,” 43–65; Roberto De Lucia, “La sezione ginecologica della miscellanea medica in Vat. gr. 299,” 231–51; Rita Masullo, “Sul Peri sfugmôn attribuito a Mercurio monacho,” 335–46. More interested in the transmission of knowledge, instead, though based only on manuscripts, is Nigel G. Wilson, “Aspects of the Transmission of Galen,” Le strade del testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 45–64, and Jean Irigoin, Tradition et critique des textes grecs, 1997, which contains several fundamental studies on the history of medical texts: (35–7) Le corpus hippocratique: la tradition médiévale; (191–210) Hippocrate et la Collection hippocratique; (211–36) Hippocrate, Galien et quelques autres médecins grecs. In general, the model of textual explanation of classical literature (be it Greek or Latin) is simply transferred to medical treatises. This is particularly the case in the critical editions and in the analysis of medical and scientific texts, which focus on such aspects as the literary explanation, the identification of the sources, and/or the influence. For example: Claudio Schiano, “Il trattato inedito Sulle febbri attribuito a Giovanni Filopono: Contenuto, modelli e struttura testuale,” Galenismo e medicina …, ed. Garofalo, and Roselli, …, 75–100; Nicoletta Palmieri, “Fonti galeniche (e non) nella lettura alessandrina dell’Ars medica,” ibid., 133–60; Ivan Garofalo, “I sommari degli Alessandrini,” ibid., 203–231; Peter E. Pormann, “Jean le Grammarien et le De sectis dans la littérature médicale d’Alexandrie,” ibid., 233–263. H. Current Organization of Research and Future Directions As this panorama shows, the history of Byzantine science(s) is still largely philological, and deals predominantly with the search for manuscripts, their deciphering and analysis, the edition of texts that may have been known but have been overlooked, or, instead, that remained unknown, and the understanding of their content from a philological, and not necessarily from a technical viewpoint, that is, from the viewpoint of the history of science(s).

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History of Byzantine science(s) is a multi-faceted field of scientific investigation located at the intersection of several historical techniques and requiring a solid philological formation, an excellent training as codicologist, the acute eye of a paleographer, the perseverance of a Benedictine (to decipher texts), the endurance (and funding) of an explorer (to travel worldwide, visit the libraries where manuscripts are preserved, and browse their collections), and also a good level of acquaintance with – or at least of understanding of – the scientific discipline of the field of study, astronomy, medicine, botany, or mathematics, for example. As such, the history of Byzantine science(s) does not always find a place in the current structure of the academia. As a consequence, there are no departments, no research centers, no society, no journal, or no specialized library collection on the argument, with the very few exceptions below. More deeply, many of the indispensable instrumenta studiorum are still lacking, starting with the inventory of the manuscripts and, on this basis, of the texts that have been preserved. Medicine, astrology, and alchemy are exceptions, however, as there are specific catalogues of manuscripts (Diels, Die Handschriften …; the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum …, and the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs [all above]). Nevertheless, these catalogues, which were compiled in the early or until mid-20th century, are not as useful as one would wish because of limitations in their approach (this is particularly the case for medical manuscripts, predominantly oriented toward classical antiquity sensu stricto), the sources used to compile the information (earlier printed catalogues, sometimes with two catalogues for the same collection, each of them possibly using a different system of shelfmarks), and changes in the collections during the 20th century (damages because of conflicts in Europe, and/or move of some collections) (for some updates for medical manuscripts, see, for example, Mariarosa Formentin, I codici greci di medicina nelle tre Venezie, 1978, and, though of a different nature [the manuscripts produced in southern Italy]: Anna Maria Ierraci Bio, “La trasmissione della letteratura medica greca nell’Italia meridionale fra X e XV secolo,” Contributi alla cultura greca nell’Italia meridionale, I, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1989, 133–258). Also, cataloguing of Greek manuscripts made substantial progress during the 20th century, particularly the second half (for a list of the catalogues of Greek collections of manuscripts by cities, see Jean-Marie Olivier, Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs de Marcel Richard. Troisième édition entièrement refondue, 1995). On the basis of this renewed production, the so-called Greek Index Project, originally located at the Pontifical Institute of Medieaeval Studies in Toronto, aimed to catalogue all the manuscripts of all Greek authors from Antiquity to the end of Byzantium, including scientists and anonymous scientific texts

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(Robert E. Sinkewicz, and Walter H. Hayes, Manuscript Listings for the Authored Works of the Palaeologan Period, 1989; Robert E. Sinkewicz, Manuscript Listings for the Authors of Classical and Late Antiquity, 1990; Id., Manuscript Listings for the Authors of the Patristic and Byzantine, 1992). In 1993, the Project was transferred to the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes of the French CNRS and transformed into the database PINAKES: Textes et manuscrits grecs, which has been recently (September 2008) made available through the Internet (http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr). PINAKES compensates partially for the problems of the Project, as it includes some update on the current location of items that have been moved during the 20th century and since the publication of the catalogues in which they are listed (if any). Also, some catalogues and/or studies of scientific manuscripts by author and type of texts have been published. For Aristotle, see Paul Moraux (1919–1985), Dieter Harlfinger, Dietrich Reinsch, and Jürgen Wiesner, Aristoteles Graecus: Die griechischen Manuskripte des Aristoteles, vol. 1: Alexandrien-London, 1976; for medical commentaries: Sibylle Ihm, Clavis Commentariorum der antiken medizinischen Texte, 2002; for lexica: Les manuscrits des lexiques et glossaires de l’antiquité tardive à la fin du moyen âge: Actes du Colloque international organisé par le “Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture” (Erice, 23–30 septembre 1994), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, 1996, and Lexiques bilingues dans les domaines philosophique et scientifique (Moyen Age et Renaissance): Actes du Colloque international organisé par l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris, 1997), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, and Danielle Jacquart, 2001; and Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina …” (above). Also, a program aimed at producing a new listing and, later on, a catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts is currently running at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions located at the Smithsonian Institution (Alain Touwaide, “Greek Medical Manuscripts-Toward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 [2008]: 199–208; Id., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595). Such listing is posted on the Internet (as the catalogue also will be) so as to be possibly updated constantly (http://www.medicaltraditions.org). Research centers that have been active in the last decades of the 20th century – or still are – in History of Byzantine Science(s) include the Université de Louvain (Belgium), where the type of analysis based on manuscripts described above has been particularly developed. Anne Tihon (above, for her publications) pursued the activity on Byzantine astronomy started by Joseph Mogenet (above) and, before him, by Adolphe Rome (b. 1889), editor of Pappus’ and Theon’s commentaries on Ptolemy’s Almagest (3 vols., 1931–1943). Besides her own publications – with a particular focus on the

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exchanges between the Arabic and Byzantine worlds in more recent times – Tihon has launched the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above). Typically, publications from Louvain are of a technical nature, and analyze the data of the texts in great detail. The historian of mathematics and astronomy David Pingree (below) published important texts in the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above), as did also Alexander Jones (above), who edited astronomical papyri, including early-Byzantine ones (Astronomical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, 1999), and is now with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University in New York, N.Y. The model developed at Louvain on the history of astronomy was further transposed to other sectors: the history of mathematics with André Allard (Faculté Universitaires de Namur, and Université catholique de Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve [Belgium]) (above); medicine and natural sciences with Alain Touwaide (currently at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. [U.S.A.]) (below); and veterinary medicine with Anne Marie Doyen-Higuet (Faculté Universitaires de Namur, and Université catholique de Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve [Belgium]) (above). In Belgium also, the Université de Liège has developed similar research programs in history of science, which include Byzantine science and deal with two different disciplines: medical papyri with Marie-Hélène Marganne at the CEDOPAL-Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire. Marganne has published an inventory of Greek medical papyri (including EarlyByzantine pieces) (Inventaire analytique des papyrus grecs de médecine, 1981), and wrote a thesis on the same topic (“Papyri Medicae Graecae. Contribution de la papyrologie à l’histoire de la médecine antique,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Liège, 1982–1983). She curates the so-called Mertens-Pack3 archive on literary papyri, with a particular focus on medical pieces. She has published regular updates, with a synthesis in “Médecine grecque et papyrologie: bilan et perspectives,” Colloque la médecine grecque antique: Actes, ed. Jacques Jouanna, and Jean Leclant, 2004, 235–251. The archive on Greek medical papyrus has been transformed in a computerized database available on the Internet since 2001: http://promethee.philo.ulg.ac.be/cedopal/indexanglais.htm. In collaboration with the pharmacist Pierre Koemoth, she has also posted on the Internet a bibliographical list on pharmacology in papyri entitled Pharmacopoea aegyptia et graeco-aegyptia, which contained some material on the Byzantine period and is regularly updated (http://www2.ulg.ac.be/facphl/services/ cedopal/pages/bibliographies/PHARMEG.htm). In Liège also, Robert Halleux at the Centre d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques, specialized on mineralogy and metallurgy and edited, among others, Greek lapidaries (Les

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lapidaires grecs: Lapidaire orphique, Kérygme, Lapidaires d’Orphée, Socrate et Denys, Lapidaire nautique, Damigéron-Evax, 1985). Other centers worldwide include the Laboratoire “Médecine grecque” currently directed by Véronique Boudon-Millot, in the Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 8167 Orient et Méditerranée affiliated with the French CNRS and the Université Paris Sorbonne. The Laboratoire co-organizes with the University of Naples the philological conferences on medical texts originally started by Antonio Garzya (above). Some of the scholars associated with the Laboratoire work on early-Byzantine medical texts, doing philological work. The Laboratoire has created and still develops the Medic@ Library in collaboration with the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine (BIUM) in Paris directed by Guy Cobolet (himself a historian of medicine). It is a digital collection available in open access on the Internet (http://www.bium. univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm), which contains, among others, printed editions (16th to the 19th c.) of Byzantine medical texts (Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, Oribasius, Paul of Egine, Stephanus of Athens, Theophanes Nonnus, and Theophilus) and also secondary literature. In Paris also, the Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance affiliated with the CNRS and participating in the Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 8167 Orient et Méditerranée is hosted by the Collège de France. Some among the scholars associated with the Centre (for instance Marie-Hélène Congourdeau) include Byzantine medicine in their programs. In Italy, the Istituto Papirologico “G. Vitelli” in Florence prepares a corpus of Greek medical papyri (including Early Byzantine [up to the 6th c.]), which was coordinated by Isabella Andorlini, now with the University of Parma. A prototype of the corpus was published in 1997: ‘Specimina’ per il Corpus dei Papiri Greci di Medicina: Atti dell’incontro di studio (Firenze, 1996), ed. Isabella Andorlini, 1997. Andorlini also published a list of medical papyri similar to that previously authored by Marganne (above): Isabella Andorlini Marcone, “L’apporto dei papiri alla conoscenza della scienza medica antica,” ANRW II.37.2 (1996): 458–562. In Naples, Antonio Garzya, formerly at the Department of Classics of the University Federico II, fostered the study of the history of Greek medicine, including early-Byzantine texts. In so doing, he followed Alessandro Olivieri, editor of Aetius (vols. 1 and 2) in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (above). He also launched the series of philological conferences on classical medical texts now held in Naples and Paris (above), and announced a program aimed to take over the program of completing the critical edition of Aetius. In Greece, the Chair of History of Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Athens was held for a long time by Spyros Marketos. Himself

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a physician, he associated several others to the Chair, among whom John Lascaratos (an ophthalmologist), and Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou (a pediatrician). Frequently with one or more of his collaborators, he authored several specialist analyses on Byzantine medicine (see the many references above). Also, Stefanos Geroulanos, a physician initially in Zürich and now in Athens, developed a museum of history of medicine at the University of Iôannina, and published on the history of Byzantine medicine and surgery (above). In Patras, Athanasios Diamantopoulos, a physician and an archeologist, worked particularly on nephrology and urology (above). In Thessalonika, the pharmacist Evangelia Varella specialized on the history of her own discipline (including Byzantium), and contributed to the creation of a museum of history of pharmacy, which opened recently. In Germany, the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum in Berlin, which was directed for a long time by Jutta Kollesch, publishes the Corpus (above) and holds the archive of the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts compiled by Diels’s collaborators (above). Many of these centers host researchers preparing a Ph.D. thesis, as do also individuals worldwide, and other research centers and libraries specialized in Byzantine studies or in the history of medicine. Vienna (Austria) is a major center for Byzantine studies with a cluster of institutions that have published (or are preparing) reference works for Byzantine studies: the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik at the University, the Institut für Byzanzforschung of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Österreichische National Bibliothek. None of the research programs in Vienna (conducted or sponsored by any single institution or in collaboration) specifically deals with the history of science(s). However, many such programs (completed or still running) offer important information for the study of science(s) in Byzantium: the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaeologenzeit (directed by Erich Trapp [now with Bonn University] and published by the Academy, 1976–1996) lists all the individuals in the Byzantine Empire from 1261–1453 known by name (including scientists); the Lexikon zur Byzantinischen Gräzität, besonders des 9.–12. Jahrhunderts (University and Academy) includes many items from scientific texts (published by the Academy; current state of publication: until palianthrôpos); the program on Alltagsleben und materielle Kultur von Byzanz (University) studies the material component of every day life in the Byzantine Empire, including medicine; the Bibliography on Byzantine Material Culture and Daily Life (University) aims “to collect all secondary sources concerning objects of daily life and the material culture of Byzantium”; and the Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800–1600 (Academy, 3 vols. published so far; research has been conducted under the supervision of the

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late Herbert Hunger, by Ernst Gamillscheg [now at the National Library] in collaboration with Dieter Harlfinger then [and now again, after years in Hamburg] at the Aristoteles-Archiv in Berlin [below]; from volume 3 on, external collaborators have been associated) lists all the Greek manuscripts signed by, attributed to, or newly identified as being produced by known copyists. The Aristoteles-Archiv, at the Freie Universität in Berlin, “has a unique microfilm collection of all Greek Aristotle manuscripts as well as approximately 1,000 additional manuscripts with late antique and Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle’s treatises.” The Program in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections of Harvard University, but located in Washington, D.C. (U.S.A.), hosts a collections of 149,000 volumes devoted to all aspects of Byzantine history, including sciences. It offers yearly fellowships for pre- and post-doctoral research, and publishes the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. In Washington also, the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions hosted by the Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany) preserves a library collection of ca. 15,000 items specifically on the history of science(s) (mainly natural and life sciences) in the ancient Mediterranean (Antiquity, the Middle Ages [with a particular focus on Byzantium], and the Renaissance), which contains critical editions of primary sources, secondary literature (from classical philology to botany, ethnobotany, and ethnopharmacy, and including Greek paleography and codicology), microfilms of Greek medical manuscripts, computerized databases, and a digital collection of still unpublished Byzantine medical texts reproduced from manuscripts. Close to Washington (actually in Bethesda, MD), the History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine on the campus of the National Institutes of Health has one of the most extensive collections in the world on the history of medicine, including early printed books. Though not specialized on Byzantium or any other specific time period and/or area, it holds a vast quantity of material relevant for the study of Byzantine medicine and science (from incunabula printed editions to the most recent secondary literature). In the United States also, Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) had a Department of History of Mathematics specialized in the Mediterranean tradition from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance and including Byzantium. The Department was created by Otto Neugebauer (above) and directed until recently by David Pingree (above), who built a library of more than 20,000 items on the history of exact sciences. The collection is now included in the library of Brown University. In London (U.K.), the Wellcome Library of History of Medicine is a major repository of material on the history of medicine (books, journals, manu-

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scripts, and pictures), including Byzantium (some items in the manuscript collection are Byzantine). Whereas there is no society, group of any kind, or conference specifically devoted to the history of Byzantine science(s), many local, national, and international societies (be they devoted to Byzantine history or history of science, medicine, pharmacy or other discipline[s]) usually include Byzantium into their fields of interest (even though, often, they do not necessarily encourage the history of Byzantine science[s]). Many such societies usually organize annual meetings (particularly the national societies), whereas the international societies (history of science, and Byzantine studies) organize large conferences every four years. There is no specific medium for publications on the history of Byzantine science, with the exception of the Corpus des astronomes byzantins (above) and, for medicine, the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (particularly its Supplementum Orientale as the Corpus is focused on classical antiquity from the 5th century B.C.E. to the end of antiquity [“… vom 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zum Ausgang der Antike …”]), and the newly created series Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean focusing on Byzantium and its neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, such journals as (alphabetical order of titles) Byzantinische Zeitschrift (currently edited by Albrecht Berger, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich), Byzantinoslavica (published by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in Prague), Byzantion (published by the Société belge d’études byzantines), the Dumbarton Oaks Papers (above), Erytheia (directed by Prof. Pedro Bádenas de la Peña [Madrid] and published by the Asociación cultural Hispano-Helénica), Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (edited by Duke University, Durham, N.C. [U.S.A.]), the Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik (edited by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna [Austria]), the Revue des Etudes Byzantines (published by the Société française d’études byzantines), and Thesaurismata (published by the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini in Venice [Italy]) accept articles on topics related to the history of science(s) in Byzantium. The Byzantinische Zeitschrift also includes in each issue a bibliography of current production with the following sections on the history of sciences: 11. Fachwissenschaften, with the subsections A. Mathematik, Physik, Astronomie, Astrologie; B. Naturwissenschaften (Zoologie, Botanik, Minealogie, Alchemie); C. Medizin, Pharmazie. Also, the editions of texts (including scientific ones) are listed in the section 1 A. Hochsprachliche Literatur, with its several subdivisions: b. Literaturgattungen; c. Fortleben antiker Autoren; d. Byzantinische Autoren (Ausgaben, Übersetzungen, Sekundärlitertur). On the other hand, the journals on the history of sciences below publish ocasionally articles on Byzantine science (though

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not necessarily soliciting them) (alphabetical order of titles): Ambix (specialized on the history of alchemy), Centaurus (history of mathematics), Early Science and Medicine, Historia Scientiarum, Historia Mathematica, ISIS (history of sciences in general), Nuncius (id.), Physis (id.), and Sudhoffs Archiv (id.). Given the importance of manuscripts and texts in the field, such journals as (alphabetical order of titles) Codices manuscripti, Manuscripta, Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Scriptorium, Scrittura e civiltà (until 2001), and the newly created journals Galeno and Scripta also publish articles on manuscripts and the tradition of text of scientific works, including Byzantine ones. Finally, some of the journals above are accompanied by a series of monographs, and the International Society of History of Sciences edits the series De diversis artibus, which publishes any work relevant to the history of science(s), including Byzantine science(s). Byzantine science(s) is an under-researched field of historical inquiry, where fundamental research is urgently needed (actually, inventory and critical editions of primary sources from manuscripts [themselves still to be systematically explored], ideally also translation of edited texts into a modern language, and technical analysis of such edited texts). Such need explains the profile of the all too rare researchers in the field, who are primarily (and altogether) classicists, Byzantinists, philologists, historians, codicologists, paleographers, historians of texts and editors, preferably with a good level of understanding, if not of knowledge, of the scientific discipline of the texts they are working on. Only such fundamental research will make it possible to write the documented syntheses on Byzantine science(s) that are still missing, and, on this basis, to do comparative work on the several medieval traditions, so as to make it possible to perceive the place, importance, and impact of Byzantine science(s) in medieval Mediterranean science(s). Work of this type has already started, however. As I have mentioned, indeed, the introduction of Arabic medicine into Byzantium has been noticed as early as the 1930s by Aristotelês Kouzês (“Quelques considérations …,” [above]). Later on, Joseph Mogenet brought to light the earliest known trace of this phenomenon in astronomy (“Une scolie …,” [above]), and the German historian of medicine Georg Harig (1935–1989) in Berlin (Germany) made similar work on the 11th-century polymath Symeon Seth (“Von den arabischen Quellen des Simeon Seth,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 2 [1967]: 248–68). Probably following Mogenet, Anne Tihon studied more indepth the introduction and assimilation of Arabic astronomy into Byzantium, as did also Alain Touwaide for medicine (chronological order of publication): Anne Tihon, “Les tables astronomiques persanes à Constantinople dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle,” Byzantion 57 (1987): 471–87;

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Ead., “Sur l’identité de l’astronome Alim,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 39 (1989): 3–21; Ead., “Tables islamiques à Byzance,” Byzantion 60 (1990): 401–25; Alain Touwaide, “Un Manuscrit athonite du Traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: l’Athous Magnae Laurae  75,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 122–27; Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Prolongements et diffusion: Le monde byzantin,” A l’ombre d’Avicenne: La médecine au temps des califes, 1996, 271–73; Alain Touwaide, Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, vol. 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997; Anne Tihon, “Les textes astronomiques arabes importés à Byzance aux XIe et XIIe siècle,” Occident et Proche-Orient: Contacts scientifiques au temps des Croisades. Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997, ed. Isabelle Draelants, Anne Tihon, and Baudouin van den Abeele, 2000, 313–24; Ead., “Un texte byzantin inédit sur une horloge persane,” Sic itur ad Astra: Festschrift für den Arabisten Paul Kunitzsch zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Menso Folkerts, and Richard Lorch, 2000, 523–35; Alain Touwaide, “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53; Id., “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science,” Science and Technology in the Islamic World,” ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; Id., “Magna Graecia iterata …,” Medicina …, ed. Musajo Somma (above), 85–101; Id., “Arabic Urology in Byzantium,” The History of Nephrology New Series, vol. 1, ed. Natale G. De Santo, Luigi Iorio, Spyros G. marketos, Shaul G. Massry, and Garabed Eknoyan, 2004, 167–73; Id., “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 72–100; Id., “Medicina Bizantina …,” Medicina …, ed. De Santo, and Bellinghieri (above) (the works by Mario Lamagna, “La recensio amplior inedita del De urinis di Avicenna,” Trasmissione e ecdotica …, ed. Garzya, and Jouanna [above], 271–80; and “La recensio amplior del De urinis di Avicenna: Lo stato della tradizione manoscritta,” Ecdotica e ricezione …, ed. Boudon-Millot et al. [above], 321–44, are only philological [producing a stemma codicum and discussing the variant readings] and not interested in the origin of the text, a comparison with the text in Arabic, the impact of the translation on Byzantine medicine, a scientific approach and/or evaluation, or any other aspect of the transfer of knowledge). This highly-specialized and multi-faceted profile required from historians of Byzantine science(s) may contribute to explain their rarity and, consequently, the exiguity of the space given to the history of Byzantine science(s) in current historical research. Also, the high level of specialization of the discipline may be responsible for the absence or misconception about Byzantine

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science(s) in reference works aimed at a wider audience, however well informed such works might be (see for example in Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter [1946–2002], and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition, vol. 1: 800 BC to AD 1800, 1992, where Byzantium is almost totally absent, and Gotthard Strohmaier, “La ricezione e la tradizione: la medicina nel mondo bizantino e arabo”, Storia del pensiero medico occidentale, vol. 1: Antichità e medioevo, ed. Mirko D. Grmek, 1993, 167–215 [English trans.: “Reception and Tradition: Medicine in the Byzantine and Arab World”, Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek [1924–2000], 1998, 139–69], where Byzantine medicine is briefly treated as lacking originality). Conversely, the rarity of scholars in the field, and the lack, together with the crucial need, of reference works leaves the field open and more necessary than ever, also allowing for original research. This is valid for both individual involvement and major research programs to be institutionally supported and sponsored (be it in the disciplines that have already been – and still are – studied [from medicine to zoology, for example] or new ones still to be explored). Only new and innovative research, preferably based on primary sources and of a truly trans-disciplinary nature, will make it possible to compensate for the lacunas on Byzantium in the current panorama of history of science(s), as it has started to be the case, though in a limited way, in such historical dictionaries and encyclopedias as the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (above), the Encyclopedia of Astronomers (above), and Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine (above), in which entries on Byzantine scientists of different disciplines have been written by modern specialists. Select Bibliography Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 5 tomes in 8 vols. (Brussels: Lamertin [except vols. 4 and 8: Secretary of the Union Académique Internationale], 1924–1932); Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 12 tomes in 20 vols. (Brussels: Lamertin [except vols. 5/4, 9/1 and 9/2: Aedes Academiarum], 1898–1953); Corpus des astronomes byzantins, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben [vols. 1–6]; and Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia-Erasme [vol. 7]; Academia Bruylant [vols. 8–9]; and Bruylant-Academia [vol. 10], 1983–2001); Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1978); Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985); Anne Tihon, Etudes d’astronomie byzantine (Aldershot [UK]: Variorum, 1994); Alain Touwaide, “Greek Medical ManuscriptsToward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 (2008): 199–208; id., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 453–595.

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Byzantine Theology A. Historical Background Byzantine theology was shaped through a succession of debates, conflicts and confluences, intellectual and others, that took place ever since the instauration of the Byzantine state as a Christian state. The Hellenistic heritage was simultaneously denied and assumed by the intellectuals of the new faith. A series of Ecumenical Councils, seven in total (from 325 to 787), were to construe the doctrinal configuration of the new Church. The struggle against the heresies such as monophysitism was the impetus behind the need for stating the dogmas in a time where doctrinal formulations were the subject even of common discussion. The Cappadocian Fathers, Gregory Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil the Great, together with John Chrysostom (4th c.), were key figures in the origin of the new tradition. The co-presence of the organized Church and the imperial structures gave to the new state form its distinctive nature although remnants of the Roman ‘imperial cult’ continued to play some role. The decisive factor that Church and Orthodoxy were in Byzantium made possible the later attribution to this form of government of the rather confusing terms of ‘Theocracy’ or ‘Caesaro-papism.’ The conflict with the rising Islamic force of the Arabs restrained the spread of Byzantine Christianity but made the men of the Church even more decisive as to the defense of their faith. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) distilled the negative theology of pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and the origenism in the service of Orthodoxy and Byzantine mysticism; apophatic or negative theology became the special trend of the Eastern Christian tradition. The Iconoclastic crisis, from 730 to 843, permitted to decide, on the basis of the paradigm of the cult of the icons, upon the measure of abstraction that was theologically admitted and to confirm that the more spiritual and mystic representatives of the Church, i. e. the monastic people, were an important factor in the overall life of the state. John of Damascus (Mansur ibn Sarjun to his real name, ca. 665–749) although residing out of Byzantium contributed greatly to the construction of the new tradition with his work The Fountain Head of Knowledge, a sum of the up to his time theological and philosophical knowledge; the same man was of the principal defenders of the icons. By the end of the crisis, the reinforced Church assumed a more humanistic role regarding the safeguard and cultivation of the Greek letters while the dogmatic argument became less inspired. The splendor of the Byzantine Church appealed to the non-Christians of the North, the Slavs, and attracted them to Orthodoxy. The opposition to the

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Church of Rome was to push even further towards the affirmation of the identity of the Byzantine Orthodoxy. An imposing Patriarch like Photius (ca. 820–893) is emblematic of the evolution of Byzantine theology: a great humanist himself but also a strong ecclesiastical man who did not hesitate before the conflict with the Roman Church. The Schism between the two Churches was not to be consumed before two centuries, at the time of the Patriarch Michael Keroularios. The period before the Schism was marked by the exceptional presence of a mystical writer as Symeon the New Theologian. The invasions of the Crusaders and the sack of Constantinople (1204) opposed radically the orthodox folk religion and the spiritual representatives of Orthodoxy to the ‘Latins’. The short-lived Latin Empire could not alter this state of things and attract the Byzantines to the western faith. The regain of Constantinople by the Byzantines (1261) gave life to the mortally wounded state. In front of the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, the union with the Latin Church was felt as a necessity by a part of the governing elite as the state needed the help of the forces of the West but the Orthodoxy had by then acquired a distinctive national character and the people and the monks strongly opposed to the idea of a possible association between the two Churches. The Hesychast crisis (14th c.), from which the defender of the mystical method of the hesychast-quietist monks – the ‘omphaloscopes’/navel gazers for their opponents – Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and his followers came out triumphant, insisted upon and furthered the tradition of the orthodox spirituality and mysticism. Among his adversaries figured an intellectual party that was influenced by and translating the works of Thomas Aquinas. A Union purposed Council held in Florence/Ferrara in the 15th century had no pragmatic effect. Georgios Gemistos Pletho (ca.1355–1452), a neo-pagan anti-unionist philosopher, felt that the rescue of the state could be achieved by the adoption of a state religion inspired by the Hellenic twelve-gods paganism but this idea found no echo and the Greek nation could not henceforth be regarded as distinguished from Orthodoxy. Only a small portion of the Byzantine intellectuals that fled the Turks was converted to Catholicism. The fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453 did not condemn the Orthodoxy that continued to live as a ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’ for the Slavic peoples and strengthen the sentiment of national identity of the Greeks. B. The Problem of Definition The study of the Byzantine theology is an historical science not to be confused with Orthodox theology although the two domains are often intermingling. Since Orthodox religion and theology is still vivid, Byzantine

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theology is an historical discipline concentrated on dogmas and ideas about the divine developed in the areas once governed by the Byzantine state. The Orthodox Theology refers to a tradition that is still living and active while Byzantine Theology refers to a tradition that is historically limited. We could say that the second is a part of the first but there is another crucial distinction: the study of Byzantine theology does not have to draw the same conclusions as the Orthodox theology because the former is not directly a theological or religiously motivated or oriented science. Hans-Georg Beck defined the representatives of the historical science of Byzantine theology as the “theologische Byzantinistik” (Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantininschen Reich, 1959, 7–23). In reality, the study of Byzantine theology as doctrinal science is further obstructed by the fact that the Byzantines were reluctant to reduce all religious sentiment to dogma and were very sensitive to the mystical aspect of their religion. Thus Beck rightly divides the history of Byzantine dogmas in two parts: “Dogmengeschichte,” the proper history of dogmas and “Askese und Mystik,” ascetism and mysticism (op. cit., 279–368). This double feature of Byzantine theology is shown in the title of Joan Mervyn Hussey’s and T.A. Hart’s, “Byzantine Theological Speculation and Spirituality” in the Cambridge Medieval History (see Bibliography). Yet, Beck’s doctrinal chapter constitutes only a small part of his basic work and it reflects the fact that in practice the historical study of Byzantine theology is of philological character and seems to concern texts of which the more profound understanding is left to the study of the general histories of the Byzantine state and civilization – such as those by Alexander Vasiliev, Louis Bréhier, George Ostrogorsky, John Bagnell Bury, Steven Runciman, André Guillou, Ioannes Karayannopoulos and others. We shall see later the problems that are engendered by the philological ‘take over’ in the study of Byzantine theology. C. Research History (1) Erudition Edward Gibbon has written in the concluding chapter of his monumental historical work: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion” (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–1788], ed. D. Womersley, 1994, 1068). In this way, he was summing up the Enlightenment’s view on Middle Ages and religion, a position that was already manifest in Montesquieu’s Grandeur et décadence des Romains (1734) and in Voltaire’s Essais sur les mœurs (1756). The merit of the writers of Enlightenment is to have perceived a separate historical entity; but, they failed to distinguish between

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different religious traditions and saw in the medieval religion a common tradition of misplaced faith. That the medieval religiosity is one is an idea that we see in scholars like the Greek Leo Allatius (1586–1669) who, converted to Catholicism, worked for the accomplishment of the reconciliation between the Greek and the Roman Church and to this end he wrote the book De Ecclesiae Occidentalisatque Orientalis perpetua consensione (1648) in which he emphasized the aspects of agreement between the two Churches and minimized their differences. Other western writers tended to see a series of errores graecorum in the Byzantine religion. While Allatius fails as to the consideration of the specificity of Byzantine theology, his work corresponds to the time and place of birth of the modern research on the topic. Other Renaissance scholars have also turned to the study of the Oriental tradition; a list of the names and the tendencies is presented by Beck (“Entwicklung der theologischen Byzantinistik,” Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantininschen Reich, op. cit., 7ff.). Among them, Aloisius Lippomani (1500–1559), Lorenz Sauer (Surius; 1522–1578), Francesco Torres (Turrianus, 1504–1584), Theodor Peltanus (1511–1584), Pierre Stevart (1547–1624), Petrus Canisius (1521–1597), his nephew Heinrich Canisius (1557–1610), Jacob Spanmüller (Pontanus; 1542–1626), Fronton de Duc (Ducaeus; 1558–1624), Balthasar Cordier (Corderius; 1592–1650), Jakob Goar (1601–1654), Philippe Labbe (1607–1667), Pierre Poussines (Possinus; 1609–1686), Jean Morin (1591–1659) et al. Other names are of greater distinction: Dionysius Petau (Petavius; 1583–1652), an important historian of Dogmas and his pupil Louis Thomassin (1619–1695); Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629) who is at the origin of the study of the Lives of the Saints; François Combefis (1605–1679), editor of works by Maximus the Confessor. It is a time of ‘intuitive science’, erudition and editing effort. With the names of Casimir Oudin (1638–1717), Eusèbe Renaudot (1648–1720), Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), Michel Lequien (1661–1733), Jean Mabillon (1682–1771), William Beveridge (Beveregius; 1638–1708), William Cave (1637–1713) we pass to the 18th century. Joannes Bollandus (1596–1665), a continuator of the work of Rosweyde is the initiator of the Bollandist tradition of studying the Lives of the Saints. Giovanni Domenico Mansi (1692–1769) from Lucca, Italy, presented an ample collection of the Acts of the Councils (Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima Collectio, 31 vols., 1759–1798). If another Greek of Italy, Nikolaus Comnenus Papadopoulos (1651–1740) walks on the steps of Allatius as to the erudition and the idea of the unity between the churches of the East and West, we see other Greeks to insist upon the specificity of the Orthodox faith often with a strong

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anti-Latin stand; this is the case of Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem (1641–1707) and his collections of Byzantine Anti-latin writings: Tomos katallagis (1692), Tomos agapis (1698), Tomos haras (1705) published in Jassy, Romania. The first representative of Greek Enlightenment, and also an Orthodox ecclesiastical man, Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806), besides his philosophical and other works, hasn’t disdained the study of Byzantine theology: he published the works of the theologian of the 15th c. Joseph Bryennios. His successor to the episcopate of Cherson in Russia, Nikephoros Theotokis (1731–1800) was of the same flair. The 18th century saw also the formation of an anthology of Byzantine mystical writers from the 4th c. and onwards like Gregorios Palamas, Symeon the new theologian, Markos Eugenikos and others; the anthology had the title Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers (Philokalia in brief; 1st ed. 1782 Venice). The editors were St Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805) and St Nikodimos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), zealots who belonged to the movement of kollyvades proclaiming a return to the sources of Orthodox Christianity. Nikodimos, nevertheless, according to some views, was influenced by the legalist spirit of the Catholic church. Philokalia played an important role in the safeguard of the Byzantine religious spirit in Greece, the Slavic countries and elsewhere in the world. (2) Romanticism–Nationalism–Positivism Later, the need for greater syntheses and higher scientific ambitions as to the critical editing was becoming more and more evident. The German Joannes Albertus Fabricius (1668–1736) and his Bibliotheca Graeca (14 vols., 1705–1728) offered much to the knowledge of the Byzantine theological literature. His compatriots contributing to the same field were: Gottfried Christoph Harles (1738–1815), Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775), Johann Rudolf Kiesling (1706–1778), Christian Friedrich Matthäi (1744–1811), Joannes Jacob Reiske (1716–1774), Karl Bernhard Hase (1780–1864), Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler (1792–1854), Walter Wolfgang (1818–1885), and Konstantin Tischendorf (1815–1874). Wilhelm Gass (1813–1889) presented an edition of the mystic Nicolaos Kabasilas’s On the Love of Christ and the Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther (1824–1890) a study on Patriarch Photius. The liberation of Greece from the Turkish yoke coincided with the rising of Romanticism and in the case of the Greek struggle for freedom caused a strong philhellenic movement. In this light we must see the grand fresco of the Byzantine history, a part of a general history of the Greek Nation, written by the Greek Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos (1815–1891), Historia tou Hellinikou Ethnous, 1860–1876. Paparrigopoulos presented a

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theory about the origins of iconoclasm, seeing in it the struggle of the Greek love for the Forms against the oriental aniconism. He was preceded by the Greek Spyridon Zampelios (1815–1881) who, in his work Asmata Dimotika tis Hellados ekdothenta meta meletis historikis peri mesaionikou hellinismou (1852), applied the Hegelian tripartite model to Greek history making the Byzantine theology an inheritor of Ancient Greek Philosophy and a prelude to Greek nationalism. Other Greek scholars with less breadth of inspiration were Andronikos Demetracopoulos (1825–1872), Joannes Sakkelion (1815–1891), Joannes Valettas (1814–1900), who published the letters of Patriarch Photius and Matthaios Paranikas (1832–1885) editor of an anthology of Byzantine church poetry. In France, the Abbé Jacques Migne (1800–1875), thanks to his organizational skills, published the important series of Byzantine theological literature (Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Graeco-Latina = Patrologia Graeca, 161 vols. (162), 1857–1866). The exemplary figure of the times is the Italian Cardinal and philologist Angelo Mai (1782–1854), representative of the Italian ecclesiastic Romantic movement. Jean Baptiste Pitra (1812–1889) walked on the steps of Mai (see his Analecta Sacra et Classica Spicilegio Solesmensi Parata, 8 vols., 1876–1888). A lot of historical texts concerning matters of Byzantine theology were published in the German series Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, 1828–1897. In Germany, Karl Eduard Zachariae von Lingenthal (1812–1894) presented a collection and study of Byzantine laws including or relevant to canon law (Collectio Librorum Juris Graeco-Romani Ineditorum, 1852; Jus GraecoRomanum, 7 vols., 1856–1884). In Greece, his work was continued by the Jurists Georgios A. Rhallès (1804–1883) and Michael Potlès (1812–1863). The Greek Konstantinos Sathas (1842–1914) published a vast editorial work of Orthodox and other sources in his Medieval Library series. The ancient erudition was thus culminating in the development of the modern editing science. This modern editing spirit was simultaneous to the Romantic movement that, in contrast to the Enlightenment’s aversion, had an esteem for the medieval literature and coincided with the rise of nationalist sentiments. The Russians contributed to the study of Byzantine culture and theology that were seen as precursors of the Russian culture and theology. The names of Vasilij Vasil’evski (1838–1899), Alexej Pavlov (1832–1898), and Nikolaj Krasnol’cev (1845–1898) are to be mentioned here. In France, following Pope Leo’s XIII (1810–1904) opening to sciences and the study of religious traditions, the French Assumptionists started researching the oriental traditions and from their labor the journal Échos d’Orient was to come up. Among the scholars distinguished in this field were Jules Pargoire (1872–1905),

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Jean Baptiste Rabois-Bousquet (1864–1911), Louis Petit (1868–1927) also the Catholic Archbishop of Athens, Severien Salaville (1881–1965), and mostly Martin Jugie (1878–1954), the great historian of Dogmas of the Christian oriental churches (Theologia Dogmatica Christianorum Orientalium ab Ecclesia Catholica Dissidentum, 5 vols., Paris, 1926–1935). Together with L. Petit and the Greek scholar from Constantinople Xenophon Sideridès (1851–1929), he published (1928–1930) the Complete Works of the Byzantine anti-unionist leader Georgios Scholarios who under the name Gennadios II became the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the city in the hands of the Ottomans. Notable contributions to the editing explosion concerning Byzantine theology, are: Frank E. Brightman, Liturgies Eastern and Western, I. Eastern Liturgies, 1896; Heinrich Gelzer, Texte der Notitiae Episcopatum, 1901; Philipp Meyer, Die Haupturkunden für die Geschichte der Athos-Klöster, 1894 (now also available online at: http://books.google.com/ books?id=Rwf2-Dh7Rb0C&dq=%3B+P.+MEYER,+Die+Haupturkunden+ fü); Franz Miklosich and Joseph Müller, Acta et Diplomata Graeca Medii Aevi Sacra et Profana, 6 vols., 1860–1890. (3) From Philologism to Postmodernism It is often said that the proper Byzantine theology has been developed after the Patristic period. The passage from the 19th to the 20th century saw an important rise of the patristic studies. From this tendency, some names of importance for the research on Byzantine theology are: Otto Zöckler, Wilhelm Bousset, Nathanael Bonwetsch, Karl Holl, Friedrich Loofs, Ernst von Dobschütz, Adolf von Harnack, Franz Diekamp, LouisMarie-Olivier Duchesne, Gustave Bardy, Henri Leclerq. The scholarship that inclined to the study of Byzantine theological literature is marked by the edition of the monumental history of Byzantine literature by Karl Krumbacher (Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, Munich, 1891, 2nd ed. 1897). In the second edition, Albert Ehrhard was responsible for the chapters on the religious literature where we see the exposition of prominent writers, of the relevant genres and the history of their evolution. It followed an important development in the study of the Byzantine Christian literature, inspired by the “Krumbacher Schule” that marked the scientific activity of scholars like August Heisenberg, Carl de Boor, Philipp Meyer, Johannes Dräseke, where the science of philology had an important part. The study of the Lives of the Saints was developed by the work of Charles de Smedt and mainly by the prolific Hippolyte Delehaye (1859–1940). In Greece, Spyridon Lampros (1851–1919) responded to this call for philological rigor, especially by the publication of the series Neos Hellenomnemon that offered a

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stand for inventory and editing work. A Greek of the diaspora, Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus (1856–1919) accomplished an important editing work with his Analekta Hierosolymitikis Stahyologias, I–V, 1891–1898. Other notable Greek scholars were: Manuel Gedeon (1851–1943), the Archbishop of Athens Chrysostomos (Papadopoulos; 1868–1938), Gregorios Papamichael, Sophronios Eustratiadès, Konstantinos J. Dyobouniotès (Ta mysteria tès anatolikès orthodoxou ekklesias ex apopseos dogmatikis, 1923), Demetrios S. Balanos (Oi ekklesiastikoi byzantinoi syggrafeis, 1951). In Russia, we have the historians Fedor Uspenskij (1845–1928), Chrysanth Loparev (1862–1918), and Aleksandr Aleksandrovic Vasiliev (1867–1953). Supplementary information about the Byzantine theology we find in: A. Bardy, chapters 5–10 in Augustin Fliche and Victor Martin, Histoire de l’Église, IV, 1–2, 1934; and in: Karl Joseph von Hefele, Histoire des Conciles, (contin. and trans. Henri Leclerq, 8 vol, 1907–1921). Information is also available in: Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, I, 2 vols., 1958. A lot of relevant entries are to be found in: Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (ed. Alfred Vacant et al., 15 vols., 1907–1953). See also: Dictionnaire de la Spiritualité, 1932ff; and August Pauly and Georg Wissowa, Real-Enzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, 1893–1980. As for the monastic institutions see: Placido de Meester, De monachico statu iuxta disciplinam byzantinam, 1942. The 20th century brought about a real outburst in the disciplines related to Byzantine theology of which philology was only an introduction. History, of course, continued to have a preponderant place invigorated by new approaches and thematic pluralism. Here, we can give only an indicative image of the literature strictly relevant to theology. Among the notable historians of ideas we find Francis Dvornik (The Photian Schism, Cambridge, 1948; The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, 1958; Byzantium and the Roman Primacy, 1966; Byzantine Missions among the Slavs, 1970) as well as another eminent historian, Sir Steven Runciman (Eastern Schism, 1956; The Great Church in Captivity, 1968; The Byzantine Theocracy, 1977). For general and introductive studies to Byzantine theology, see: Mauricius Gordillo, Compendium theologiae orientalis in commodum auditorum facultatis theologicae concinnatum, 2 vols., 1939; Andrea Palmieri, “La teologia bizantina,” Studi Religiosi 2 (1902): 115–35, 333–51. Venance Grumel, “Les aspects généraux de la théologie Byzantine,” Echos d’Orient 30 (1931): 385–96; Konstantinos Bonis, “Byzantinè Theologia,” Theologia 19 (1941–1948): 171–86, 287–300; J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, 1986. In sum, the general surveys are never as definitive as we would like them to be due to the dispersion of the related scientific fields and to the difficulty of the subject itself characterized by a mystical aspect that resists analysis.

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The question of the relations of the Church of Constantinople with the Church of Rome is a dominant subject. See: Walter Norden, Das Papsttum und Byzanz. Die Trennung der beiden Mächte und das Problem ihrer Wiedervereiningung bis zum Untergange des byzantinischen Reiches, 1903; Marcel Viller, “La question de l’union des églises entre Grecs et Latins depuis le Concile de Lyon jusqu’à celui de Florence,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 16 (1921): 260–305, 515–32, and 18 (1922): 20–60; Anton Michel, Humbert und Kerullarios, 1924–1930; Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West, 1959; J. Gill, The Council of Florence, 1959; Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1976–84; On the relations between Byzantine theology and Western ideology, see Ioannes S. Romanides’ Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay between Theology and Society, 1981. On the influence of Thomist theology and philosophy in Byzantium, see: Stephanos Papadopoulos, Hellinikai metaphraseis thomistikon ergon. Thomistai kai antithomistai en Byzantio, 1967. The question of ecclesiastical geography is also an issue. See: Raymond Janin, La Géographie ecclésiastique de l’Empire byzantin, 1953; relevant are the subjects dealing with regionalism: John A. Hackett, A History of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus, 1901; Mgr Chrysanthos, Hè Ekklesia tès Trapezountos, 1933; Orest Tafrali, Thessalonique au quatorzième siècle, 1913. We see also regional studies combined with the research on the spreading of Orthodoxy into the Slavic countries: Dimitrije Bogdanovic, Jovan Lestvicnik u vizantijskoi I staroj srpskoi knjizenvosti (John Climacus in Byzantine Literature and the Ancient Serb Literature), 1968, and in connection with heresies: Jacques Jarry, Hérésies et factions dans l’Égypte Byzantine, 1970. The relation to the Islamic world is detailed in studies like: Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamisation from the 11th through the 15th Century, 1971. On the two Byzantine ‘Commonwealths’, following Dmitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, 1971, see: for the first commonwealth, in the East: Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, 1993; for the second one, in the North: Simon Franklin, Byzantium-Rus-Russia, 2002. See also: Evangelos Chryssos, Hè ekklesiastike politikè tou Ioustinianou, 1969 and Walter Emil Kaegi, Army, Society and Religion in Byzantium, 1982. On the question of the ‘imperial cult’ or ‘imperial religion’ in Byzantium, see: Louis Bréhier and Pierre Battifol, Les Survivances du culte impérial romain, 1920; Franz Joseph Dölger, “Zur antiken und frühchristlichen Auffasung der Herrschergergewalt von Gottes Gnaden,” Antike und Christentum 3 (1932): 117–27); Wilhelm Ensslin, Gottkaiser und Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden, 1943; for the difference between ‘worship’ and ‘adoration’ related to the ‘imperial

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cult’, see Kenneth M. Setton, Christian Attitude Towards the Emperor in the 4th Century, 1941. See also: Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et prêtre: Étude sur le ‘césaropapisme’ byzantin, 1996. Jacques Gouillard translated a brief selection from the Philokalia: Petite philocalie de la prière de cœur, 1953. A full edition in French was begun in 1979 and completed in 1986 (trans. Jacques Touraille). It was also partly translated into English, first by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (1951) and later gradually by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos (Timothy) Ware (4 vols. since 1979). Jacques Gouillard published a study about the liturgical text “Synodicon of Orthodoxy” (“Le synodikon de l’Orthodoxie. Edition et commentaire,” Travaux et mémoires 2 (1967): 1–316). A lot of information about Byzantine religiosity and everyday life we find in: Phaidon Koukoulès, Byzantinon Bios kai Politismos, 8 vols., 1947–1957. The question of ‘philosophical theology’ was debated in: Basil Tatakis, La philosophie Byzantine, 1949 (the first monograph on Byzantine philosophy) and more particularly in: Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz, 1977; see also, Endre von Ivánka, Plato Christianus, 1964; Georgi Kapriev, Philosophie in Byzanz, 2005. For the relation to ethical philosophy, see: Georges Arabatzis, Éthique du bonheur et orthodoxie à Byzance, 1998. Jacques Gouillard edited and commented on the trial of the philosopher John Italos for impiety in the 11th c.: “Le procès officiel de Jean l’Italien, les Actes et leurs sous-entendus,” Travaux et mémoires 9 (1985): 133–73. On that period see: Lysimaque Oeconomos, La vie religieuse dans l’Empire Byzantin au temps des Comnènes, 1918, and Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081–1261, 1995. The relations between theology and education are treated in studies such as J. M. Hussey, Church and Learning in the Byzantine Empire, 867–1185, 1937. On the relations between Hellenism and Christianity from an Orthodox point of view, see John Zizioulas, Hellinismos kai Christianismos. Hè synantisi ton dyo kosmon, 2003. Byzantine spiritualism was approached by Irénée Hausherr, La méthode d’oraison hésychaste, Orientalia Christiana, IX, 1927; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners, Einsiedeln, 2nd ed. 1961. The Greek Panayotis Chrestou edited the complete works of Gregorios Palamas and inaugurated in Thessaloniki a book series of high scholarly quality (Analekta Vlatadon); The iconoclasm constitutes a separate field of study, see: Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 1930; and more recently an overview of the literature: Leslie Brubaker, John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): The Sources, an annotated survey, with a section on “The Architecture of Iconoclasm: the Buildings” by Robert Ousterhout, 2001. For the philosophical

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foundations of the iconoclastic crisis, see: Marie-José Mondzain, Nicéphore: Discours contre les iconoclastes, 1989. Besides the great heresies of the times of the formation of Dogmas, a more recent heresy like Paulicianism (7th–9th c.) has been studied in: Paul Lemerle, “Histoire des Pauliciens d’Asie Mineure d’après les sources grecques,” Travaux et Mémoires, 5 (1973): 1–144. The Paulician texts were edited in: Charles Astruc, Wanda Wolska-Conus, Jacques Gouillard, Paul Lemerle, Denise Papachryssanthou, Joseph Paramelle, Travaux et mémoires 4 (1970): 2–227; see also: Dmitri Obolensky, The Bogomils, 1948; Nina G. Garsoïan, The Paulician Heresy: A Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the Eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire, 1967; Janet and Bernard Hamilton, Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650 – c. 1405, 1998. An outline of the evolution of heresies is Jacques Gouillard’s, “L’hérésie dans l’empire byzantin des origines au XIIe siècle,” Travaux et Mémoires 1 (1965): 299–325. The outcome of the soviet research on Byzantine theology has been bibliographically summed up in sections of the French series Travaux et mémoires. The circle of the Russian theologians exiled in the West after the rise of Communism was very prolific and influential and rightly called the ‘Russian Renaissance’. Interesting figures as to the study of Byzantine theology are: Georges Florovsky (1893–1979; St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers, 1961; Collected Works. Vol. 8: Byzantine Fathers of the Fifth Century; Vol. 9: Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Centuries; Vol. 10: Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers, 1972) and Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), a familiar of the French historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson, who wrote the very influential Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’église de l’orient, 1944. John Meyendorff (1926–1992) was issued from the circle of the Russian exiled; he wrote abundantly on subjects related to Byzantine theology and spiritualism: Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680, 1989; St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality, 1974; (with Aristeides Papadakis), The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453, 1994. To John Meyendorff we owe a summa on Byzantine theology: Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 1974. For particular topics, see: Agostino Pertusi, Fine di Bisanzio e fine del mondo. Significato e ruolo storico delle profezie sulla caduta di Constantinopoli, 1988; Gerhard Rottenwöhrer, Unde malum? Herkunft und Gestalt des Bösen nach heterodoxer Lehre von Markion bis zu den Katharen, 1986; Alexander Böhlig, Mysterion und Wahrheit: Gesammelte Beiträge zur spätantiken Religiongeschichte, 1968. On the question of the relations between clerical organization and theology some of the relevant publications are: Hans-Georg Beck, “Kirche und Klerus im

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staatlichen Leben von Byzanz,” Revue des études byzantines 24 (Mélanges V. Grumel, I) (1966): 1–24; Luciana Mortari, Consacrazione episcopale e collegialità. La testimonianza della Chiesa antica, 1969; André Guillou, “L’évêque dans la société méditerranéenne des VI–VII siècles. Un modèle,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 131 (1973): 5–19. Guillou wrote also on the central sentiment of piety (eusebeia) in the Byzantine orthodoxy: “Piété filiale, piété impériale,” Mélanges P. Lévêque 1, 1988, 143–53, offering an approach based on the subjects of mentality and emotions. Separate studies on Byzantine theology we find in the following journal series: Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels, 1882ff.; Acta Sanctorum, ed. Socii J. Bolandi, Antwerpen, 1643ff.; Byzantinoslavica, Prague, 1929ff.; Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Leipzig, 1892ff, Munich, 1950ff.; Byzantion, Brussells, 1924ff.; Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Washington DC, 1941ff.; Ekklesiastikè Aletheia, Constantinople, 1880–1923; Echos d’Orient, Paris-Constantinople, 1897ff.; Epetèris Etaireias Byzantinon Spoudon, Athens, 1924ff.; Neos Hellenomnemon, 1904–1917, 1920–1927; Nea Sion, Jerusalem, 1901ff.; Orientalia Christiana Periodica, Rome, 1935ff.; Revue d’études Byzantines, Paris, 1943ff., etc. From the philologism of the early 20th century that remains a dominant trend in research, and through the outburst of the historical emphasis, we pass to the postmodernism of studies focusing on the peripheral, the decentred, the research on genre literature (Margaret Mullett) and on the relations between knowledge and power in Byzantine theology. See the precursory, Robert Browning, “Enlightenment and Repression in Byzantium in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Past and Present 69 (1975): 3–23, and Paul J. Alexander, “Religious Persecution and Resistance in the Byzantine Empire of the 8th and 9th Centuries: Methods and Justifications,” Speculum 52 (1977): 238–64; Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire, ed. Susanna Elm, Éric Rébillard and Antonella Romano, 2000; Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of the Empire: The Formation of Christian Discourse, 1991; Dion Smythe, “Alexios I and the Heretics,” Alexios I Komnenos, ed. M. Mullett, D. Smythe, 1996, 232–52; Paul Speck, Ich bin’s nicht: Kaiser Konstantin ist es gewesen: Die Legenden vom Einfluss des Teufels, des Juden und des Moslem auf den Ikonoklasmus, 1990; for a different perception of a Cappadocian Father: Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed. Jostein Bortnes and Thomas Hägg, 2006; and for another basic writer of Byzantine theology: Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, 2002; and also, Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday, 2006. In spite of the plurality and abundance of studies, the fragmentation of the Byzantine religious tradition by various scientific disciplines, and in first place by philology, had been so successful that the research often lost track of the specific character of Byzantine spirituality.

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Select Bibliography Albert Ehrhard, “Theologie,” Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur, ed. Karl Krumbacher 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2nd ed. 1897; 1st ed. of 1891, but without the section of Ehrhard; rpt. Burt Franklin Bibliographical Series XIII, New York: Burt Franklin), 37–218; Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich: Beck, 1959); The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. IV: The Byzantine Empire, Part II: Government, Church and Civilisation, ed. Joan Mervyn Hussey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; of special interest are the chapters: Emil Herman S.J., “The Secular Church,” 105–34, J. M. Hussey, “Byzantine Monasticism,” 161–84, J.M. Hussey and T.A. Hart, “Byzantine Theological Speculation and Spirituality,” 185–205); John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York and London: Fordham University Press/Mowbrays, 1974); J. M. Hussey, “The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire,” Oxford History of the Christian Church ed. Henry and Owen Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. II, XIIIe–XIXe siècle, ed. Carmelo Giuseppe Conticello and Vassa Conticello (Turnhout: Brepols (Corpus Christianorum), 2002) (two more vols. are expected).

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C Classics and Mythography Although not all Greek and Latin works concern themselves with religion or what later epochs called mythology, myth forms the foundation of classical history and the allusive backcloth to most classical literature. The general study of the classics in the Middle Ages and classical mythology per se, therefore, necessarily overlap. Yet while mythologists and classicists specializing in the Middle Ages both took philological study of European culture as their starting point, their theories and methodologies soon diverged. A. The theory that myth, grammar, and culture share cognate structures, what would later be called structuralism, was a notion born among early nineteenth century German comparative philologists standing at the confluence of historical linguistics and anthropology. Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (2 vols., 1835), which pursued the etiologies of German myths to classical fonts and beyond, transformed a folklore archive into a cultural and linguistic history and source of paradigms for his later philological work, the Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (2 vols., 1848), and Deutsche Grammatik (4 vol., 1819–1837). Alongside other 19th-century scholars such as Franz Bopp in comparative grammar (Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Send, Armenischen, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen, Altslavischen, Gothischen und Deutschen, 3 vol., 1857–1861), and in comparative religion Max Müller (Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols., 1862–1865), Anthropological Religion (2 vols., 1890), and James Frazer (The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 1892), Grimm helped pioneer an approach to human culture through an analysis of the deep structures that unite culture’s linguistic and psycho-social aspects, structures that reveal themselves at their most naked and unmediated in myth. Further developed in Vladimir Propp’s work on folklore, Morphology of the Folktale (1927), as well as that of that of Annti Aarne and Stith Thompson (The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, 1961), this line of inquiry matured into the myth-based anthropology of Claude LéviStrauss (Anthropologie Structurale, 1958; Mythologiques, I–IV, 1964–1971), and the formalist genre theory of Northrop Frye (The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957).

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Preferring historicism to structuralism, twentieth century medievalists tended not to make distinctions of manner or matter between classical mythology and classical literature. Their scholarly interests ran rather to Rezeptionsgeschichte, that is to the history of rhetoric through the Middle Ages as the conduit through which classical cultural and aesthetic ideals were transmitted to and appropriated by a Christian Europe hungry for sophistication. Ludwig Traube, who coined the terms aetas virgiliana, horatiana, and ovidiana to characterize the 8th–9th, 10th–11th, and 12th–13th centuries respectively (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 2, 1909–1920, 113), popularized the notion that medieval cultural history can be correlated to a canon of classical authors whose particular stylistic influence imprinted an indelible stamp on all aspects of artistic expression in a given age. The cultural homology that Traube found in the medieval Latin inheritance – Europe’s shared romanitas – took shape in and against the climate of racial and cultural division of World Wars I and II, finding oblique expression in Ernst Robert Curtius’s epitome of classical rhetoric in medieval literature European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (1948). Curtius’s work remains to this day the highwater mark of medieval Geistesgeschichte in which ethics and aesthetics form a unified category accessible entirely through Christianized classicism. The post-war period witnessed a polemicization of medieval source and influence study and the emergence of critical schools of reception. Building on the work of patristic scholars such as Pierre Courcelle (Recherches sur les Confessions de St. Augustin, 1950) and Henri de Lubac (Exégèse médiéval, 1959), D. W. Robertson Jr. argued that Augustinian hermeneutics served as the ineluctable lens through which classical mythology passed into medieval culture: all medieval literature and art taught the distinction cupiditas and caritas, and all classical literature was allegorised tendentiously in the service of Christian morality (“The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens,” Speculum 26 [1950]: 24–49; A Preface to Chaucer, 1963). While detractors chafed at the critical, not to mention cultural reductivism of Robertsonian exegetical historicism, it furnished an acute corrective to wayward interpretations of classical doctrines of love, particularly Ovidian, and their relation to “courtly love” as articulated by such classicizing medievalists of the previous generation as C.S. Lewis (The Allegory Of Love, 1936). If Curtius’ Middle Ages favored a timeless classicism whose aesthetic continuity is extra-historical, and Robertson’s a classicism whose aesthetic is historically contingent, Hans-Robert Jauss offered a compromise. In his 1967 essay “Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft” (reprinted in Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Rainer Warning, 1994, 126–62), the medievalist argued that literary historicity exists only at the point of recep-

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tion by the contemporary reader, but that it is possible to derive historically objective local meanings from classical and medieval texts through a system of expectations (Erwartungshorizonte) encoded in the text’s generic, formal and thematic gestures as well as through its aesthetic distance from the source of imitation. With reception theory, Jauss breathed new life into the superannuated study of classical influence in the Middle Ages weakened by the depredations of Marxists and historicists. To be sure, other scholars of classical influence were working independently toward a similar shift from influence to reception in apparent ignorance of Jauss. Thomas Greene’s The Light in Troy (1982), which applies his theory of “dialectical imitation” to late medieval and Renaissance reception of Latin classics, is likewise dedicated to bridging the gap between the historical and aesthetic treatment of literature, while David Quint’s more recent Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) explores the ways in which political ideology is transmitted in myth and encoded in genre. Indeed, Jauss’s theoretical presence among classicists and medievalists grew slowly beginning in the 1980s (J. E. Müller, Literaturwissenschaftliche Rezeptionstheorien und empirische Rezeptionsforschung, 1981; Udo Frings, Antike Rezeption im altsprachlichen Unterricht, 1984; Peter Leberecht Schmidt, “Reception Theory and Classical Scholarship: A Plea for Convergence” Hypatia [1985]: 67–77), eventually achieving a degree of prominence in the work of Charles Martindale who has edited several important collections of essays (Virgil and his Influence, 1984; Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, 1988; Classics and the Uses of Reception, 2006). The last noteworthy approach to classics and mythology in the Middle Ages is one that has not yet earned a critical cognomen, although somatic theory will suffice provisorily. In The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (1986), Leonard Barkan traces the reception not of Ovid per se, but of the idea of the metamorphic body as a figural microcosm of larger social, cosmological, and poetic issues present in medieval and Renaissance art and literature. The body, in effect, becomes a metaphor for the connection between social or anthropological evolution of a culture and the classical mythological corpus that both effects and records that change. Barkan’s approach has been refined and extended by Lynn Enterline in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), Bruce Holsinger in Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (2001), particularly in the final chapter on Orpheus, and Gregory Heyworth in Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form (2009).

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B. Bibliography and Transmission Of course, all theoretical work in classical reception in the Middle Ages must be built first on a material knowledge of sources – what texts were available, when, and where – and then, at one remove of abstraction, on a diachronic understanding of the history of manuscript diffusion that defines a textual tradition. Cataloguing the material records of the medieval appropriation of classical literature is a project in many ways more vast and daunting than understanding the cultural and poetic theories guiding that appropriation. Much of the research in the field of classics in the Middle Ages in the past century has been dedicated to the less-than-glamorous disciplines of bibliography and textual transmission. These, in turn, make possible the study of reception. Catalogues of manuscript holdings in classics are an essential instrument for research into influence, reception, and the connections of medieval intellectual life to antiquity. But as Albert Derolez notes (Les catalogues de bibliothèques, 1979), a record of the existence of a classical text at one point in time affords little insight into its history of use, and hence its influence. Thus, while catalogues provide the raw bibliographical repertories, they are only as informative as the collateral data that accompany them. Some of the first bibliographies of classical manuscript holdings to attempt a more ambitiously contextual account are Hans Meier’s two-volume A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics (1931–33), a project thereafter abandoned, and Max Manitius’s Handschriften antiker Autoren in mitteralterlichen Bibliothekskatalogen (1935). Hilda Buttenwieser’s Master’s thesis “The Distribution of the Manuscripts of Latin Classical Authors in the Middle Ages” (1930) while never published, is a useful resource particularly for the thirteenth century, and is augmented by her subsequent article “Popular Authors of the Middle Ages: The Testimony of the Manuscripts” (Speculum 17 [1942]: 50–55). For Latin manuscripts prior to the ninth century, there is E. A. Lowe’s Codici Latini Antiquiores, vol. 1–12, (1934–1971), supplemented with addenda and corrigenda in 1985 by Bernhard Bischoff and V. Brown (Mittelalterliche Studien 47, 317–66). The next significant bibliographical contribution is a two-volume collection of essays published as La cultura antica nell’Occidente latino dal VII all’XI secolo (1975), a resource rendered nugatory by its extreme scarcity. During the 1980s, the Danish scholar Birger Munk Olsen, the premier bibliographer of classical reception in the Middle Ages, published his four-volume L’étude des auteurs classiques aux XIe et XIIe siècles (1982–1989). Olsen details European manuscript holdings and fragments by author in both public and private collections, important bibliographic material treating each author, and essays on the history of significant collections and col-

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lectors. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 1–6 (1963–1992), while describing mainly late manuscripts, gives a wealth of references to classical texts not found in other catalogues. Finally, there is Bernhard Bischoff’s Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (trans. Michael Gorman, 1994), which serves both as a catalogue and as a work of intellectual history. Specialized catalogues of individual libraries abound. Their contribution to bibliography in classical literature of the Middle Ages is narrow, and yet those covering the most important collections deserve mention. Such are Colette Jeudy’s and Yves François Riou’s, Les manuscrits classiques latins de bibliothèques publiques en France (vol. 1, 1989), and Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane (ed. Elisabeth Pellegrin, vol. 1–4, 1975–1991). Similarly narrow but important for the study of mythology are the single author manuscript lists for Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Franco Munari (Catalogue of the MSS of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. BICS supplement 4 [1957]); and the supplements by Munari (“Supplemento al catologo dei manoscritti delle ‘Metamorfosi’ ovidiane,” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica, 93 [1965]: 288–97; id. “Secondo supplemento al catalogo dei manoscritti delle ‘Metamorfosi’ ovidiane,” Studia florentina A. Ronconi oblata [1970]: 275–80), and Frank Coulson (“Newly Discovered Manuscripts of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’,” Scriptorium 46 [1992]: 285–88). Also important is Frank Coulson’s and Bruno Roy’s Incipitarium ovidianum: A Finding Guide for Texts in Latin Related to the Study of Ovid in the Middle Ages (2000). For medieval manuscripts of Vergil, see L. Holtz’s “La redécouverte de Virgile aux VIIIe et IXe siècles d’après les manuscrits conservés” (Lectures médiévales de Virgile: Actes du colloque organisé par l’Ecole française de Rome, 1985, 9–30), and his “Les manuscrits carolingiens de Virgile (Xe et XIe siècles),” (La fortuna di Virgilio: Atti del Convegno internazionale, 1986, 127–49); and G. C. Alessio “Medioevo – tradizione manoscritta,” (Enciclopedia virgiliana, vol. 3, 1987, 432–43). Much of the work in classical transmission and textual tradition in the Middle Ages has been undertaken in article form and published diffusely. Several books, however, present the subject in epitome. R. R. Bolgar’s The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries: From the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (1954) is essential, as is his subsequent edited volume Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500 (1971). Also seminal are Herbert Hunger’s Geschichte der Textüberlieferung (2 vols., 1961–1964), Leighton Reynold’s and Nigel Wilson’s Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (2nd ed. 1974), and Reynold’s later Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (1983). For the study of textual trans-

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mission in the Middle Ages, three single-author histories deserve mention: Birger Munk Olsen’s “Ovide au Moyen Age (du IXe au XIIe siècle)” (Le Strade del Testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1987, 65–96), L. Holtz’s “La survie de Virgile dans le haut moyen âge” (Présence de Virgile: Actes du colloque des 9, 11, et 12 décembre 1976, ed. Raymond Chevallier, 1978, 209–22), and Robert Kaster’s The Tradition of the Text of the Aeneid in the Ninth Century (1990). As bibliographers and textual historians were compiling the material evidence of medieval classical influence and reception, so philologists were recording vernacular borrowings from classical sources. Studies of source, influence, and reception all concern themselves with imitatio in one sense or another, but the object of source study, the earliest intervention in the field, was analogue. Uninflected by theories of intertextuality, classicizing medievalists collected literal, verbatim borrowings in a preliminary effort to demonstrate the habits of medieval classical appropriation. Foremost among these was Edmond Faral whose Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge (1913) pioneered investigations into the relationship of the medieval romance to classical models. In general, source study treats medieval popular literature, which is to say genres involved in the invention of a medieval vernacular mythology, namely romance and the fabliau. While source studies modulated relatively early into influence studies as scholars turned their attention from genres to the relationship of individual classical and medieval authors, they endured in work on fabliaux. Thus, Edmond Faral’s “Le Fabliau Latin au Moyen Age” (Romania 50 [1924]: 321–85) was supplemented fifty years later by Peter Dronke’s “The Rise of Medieval Fabliau: Latin and Vernacular Evidence” (Romanische Forschungen 85 [1973]: 275–97), and even today articles on the fabliau and classical influence still appear. C. Reception Medieval culture in Western Europe rests upon the twin pillars of the Bible and classical mythology. Each contributes a discrete aesthetic and ethos. One of the major tasks of medieval scholarship, then, has been to understand the differences and confluences of Christian and pagan mythoi through the literature and art that employ them. The opus is vast. First, the classical sources of mythology are many, the most important of which are Ovid, Vergil, Statius, Homer (or pseudo-Homer), Plato, Varro, Horace, Lucan, Hyginus, Aesop and the late antique authors Boethius, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella. The influence of these canonical authors is in turn mediated by important commentators, Chalcidius or Guillaume de Conches on Plato, Arnulf of Orleans or Alexander Neckam on Ovid, Servius or Bernardus Silvestris on

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Vergil, Remigius or Trivet on Boethius to name but a few, as well as by patristic interpreters and encyclopedists such as Augustine and Isidore of Seville, and christianizing mythographers and allegorizers such as Fulgentius, Lactantius, Claudian, Dracontius, the Vatican mythographers, and Petrus Berchorius. It is not within the scope of this essay to give more than an overview of the most important these. C.1. Ovid Often called collectively the “poet’s Bible,” Ovid’s main mythographic works – Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, Heroides, Fasti – constituted the primary reference manuals for classical myth and Augustan culture in the Middle Ages, acting also as the cultural counterpoise to the Christian Bible. The tension between rival aesthetic and moral systems especially as concerns love, is at the crux of the earliest influence studies. Articulated by Edward Rand (Ovid and His Influence, 1925) and Salvatore Battaglia (“La tradizione di Ovidio nel Medioevo,” Filologia romanza 6 [1959]: 185–224), the dichotomy has endured to the present as manifest in Robert Edward’s The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer (2006). Many early and mid-century studies of Ovid’s medieval Nachleben indulged an actuarial penchant for source-spotting and allusion-counting, a practice that fell into disregard after the publication of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) which encouraged critics to search for creative misreadings rather than faithful ventriloquism. Subsequent work in the field has focused therefore on “appropriation” whereby medieval authors consciously recontextualize and culturally reinflect canonical texts rather than forge allegorical harmony from literal discord. John Fyler’s Chaucer and Ovid (1979), a book that treats nearly exclusively Ovid’s amatory writings, represents this trend, as well as that of dual author influence studies. More recently still, Ovidian influence has been considered diachronically in books of collected essays each treating the dialogue of such authors as Chaucer, Gower, Dante, Petrarch with Ovid (Ovid Renewed, ed. Charles Martindale, 1988; The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Schnapp, 1991; Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid through Chaucer, ed. James Paxson and Cynthia Gravlee, 1998). The drawback of these essay collections is that they lack a unifying argument that comprehends Ovidian reception as something more than a series of local readings of mythic transformations. The dilemma facing Ovidian commentators and imitators of the Middle Ages turned on how to reconcile his stylistic attractions with his ostensible immorality, or more subtly whether his mores should be understood themselves as a stylistic posture. Early Christians intent on appropriating, or

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merely perpetuating, the sophistication of the classical cultus, what Origen called “plundering the Egyptians,” produced a series of influential allegorizations of the major authors designed to resolve that problem, most prominently of Ovid and Vergil (Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, 1987). Research into Ovidian commentators and allegorizers falls into two categories: descriptive (historical) and interpretive, the former tracing the various traditions of allegory, and the latter the idea of allegory as a poetic theory or cultural response to paganism. Among the former, Fausto Ghisalberti made seminal early contributions on Arnulf of Orleans (Arnolfo d’Orleans: Un cultore di Ovidio nel secolo XII, 1932) and John of Garland (Integumenta Ovidii: Poemetto Inedito del Secolo XIII, 1933), and Lester Born gives an overview in “Ovid and Allegory” (Speculum 9 [1934]: 362–79), while Jane Chance provides useful, well-documented accounts in chapters one and two of Medieval Mythography (vol. 2, 2000). Among the latter, Jon Whitman’s book (see above) treats medieval allegoresis generally, while Robert Levine (“Exploiting Ovid: Medieval Allegorizations of the Metamorphoses” Medioevo Romanzo XIV [1989]: 197–213), Judson Boyce Allen (“Commentary as Criticism: The Text, Influence, and Literary Theory of the ‘Fulgentius Metaphored’ of John Ridewall” Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis, ed. P. Tuynman, G. Kuiper, and Eckhard Kessler, 1979, 25–47), and Ralph Hexter (“Medieval Articulations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: From Lactantian Segmentation to Arnulfian Allegory,” Medievalia 13 [1987]: 63–82) explore issues of poetics and cultural appropriation specific to Ovidian allegoresis. The final important line of inquiry into medieval readings of Ovid has sought to understand popular interpretations through records of Ovid’s corpus and Ovidian commentary as school texts. E. H. Alton’s and D. E. W. Wormell’s “Ovid and the Medieval Schoolroom” (Hermathena 94 and 95 [1960–1961]: 21–38; 67–82), and Ralph Hexter’s Ovid and Medieval Schooling (1986) underscore the primary importance of Ovid’s erotic writing in schools, often interpreted, as Hexter demonstrates, in a frank and literal manner. Gregory Hays gives a brief account of the reception of the most important, late-antique Ovidian commentator as a school text in “Tales out of School: Grammatical Culture in Fulgentius the Mythographer” (Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice, ed. Carol Dana Lanham, 2002, 22–47).

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C.2. Virgil A pagan as near as possible to sainthood as Dantean providence could allow and widely credited in the Middle Ages for prophesying the advent of Christ in the fourth Eclogue, Virgil was never the catalyst of controversy and division that Ovid was. Untainted by problems of irony, political heterodoxy, and moral turpitude, Virgilian influence in the Middle Ages has generated commensurately fewer lines of research, a fact exacerbated first by the overshadowing presence of two works of critical influence, and second, by the lack of a thorough and reliable modern edition of Servius’ commentary. In 1872, Domenico Comparetti published Virgilio nel medioevo which, in its numerous translations and editions, dominated studies of medieval Vergil until Pierre Courcelle’s monumental Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de l’Enéide (2 vols., 1984). Both books incline more toward source studies than influence studies and are complementary. Volume one of Courcelle updates Comparetti, compiling Virgilian readings by both patristic and secular authors while volume two provides detailed descriptions and discussions of manuscript illustrations of mythographical themes between the 10th and 15th centuries, the latter serving as a useful prequel to Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (1953). The primary focus of research into the medieval Vergil has been to assess the allegorical interpretations of his major works, particularly the Aeneid and the Eclogues. The Aeneid’s main allegorical interpreters – Fulgentius (6th c.), Bernardus Silvestris (12th c.), and Cristoforo Landino (15th c.) – agree on three salient points: (1) that Vergil followed “Platonic” moral doctrine; (2) that the epic is a Bildungsroman depicting Aeneas’s maturation into pietas or “grace;” (3) that book 6 illustrates a crucial descent to knowledge motif (J. W. Jones, Jr., “The Allegorical Traditions of the Aeneid,” Vergil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence, ed. John D. Bernard, 1986, 107–32; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 1972, 105–06). The Eclogues, by contrast, were read, especially by Servius, as biographical allegory of the author’s political and financial fortunes (James Zetzel, “Servius and Triumviral History in the Eclogues,” Classical Philology 79 [1984]: 139–42; Raymond Starr, “Vergil’s Seventh Eclogue and its Readers,” Classical Philology 90 [1995]: 129–38). While Servius’s biographical conjectures about Vergil were an attempt at an allegorical historicism, non-allegorical readers used the Aeneid, particularly Book 6, as material for medieval legends about Vergil himself as psychopomp, magician (L. virga = magician’s wand), and genius. This latter tradition is taken up by John Spargo in Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in Virgilian Legends (1934), and Jane

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Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1975, esp. 42–64). C.3. Statius Second in influence only to the Ovidian corpus, Statius’ Thebaid and Achilleid served as mythological sourcebooks throughout the Middle Ages (C. Landi, “Stazio nel Medio Evo,” Atti dell’Accademia Padovena 37 [1921]: 201–32). Influence on Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer form the central thrust of research into the medieval Statius. Dante is attracted to Statius less poetically than personally, both because of the legend that he converted to Christianity after reading Vergil’s fourth Eclogue and because he may have found his own poetic career echoed in that of Statius (Winthrop Wetherbee, “Dante and the Thebaid of Statius,” Lectura Dantis Newberryana, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Antonio Mastrobuono, vol. 1, 1988, 71–92). Boccaccio’s Thebaid makes a romance of epic, substituting amatory motives (the love of Emilia) for political ones, as does Chaucer’s remaniement of Statius via Boccaccio (David Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s “Teseida,” 1988). The pseudo-Fulgentian commentary Super Thebaiden, which allegorizes the Thebaid as a psychomachia with Thebes as the soul, ruled by virtue (Laius) and vitiated by carnal desire (Oedipus), may also be of influence on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (Boyd Wise, The Influence of Statius on Chaucer, 1967, rpt. of 1911). C.4. Plato The “renaissance” of the twelfth century, as Charles Homer Haskins described it in his classic The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), was fueled intellectually in large measure by the confluence of Ovidian mythology and Platonic philosophy. Plato’s Timaeus, widely read, provided poets and philosophers with a powerful myth of a rational cosmos, a world of seeming flux superintended by a divinely ordained figure of natural order, what in the Platonising Boethius appears allegorically in the figure of Lady Philosophy, in Alanus Insulis as Nature, and the Romance of the Rose as Raison. Not only did Plato’s rational cosmology of the Timaeus jibe neatly with Biblical genesis, as Thierry of Chartres endeavored to demonstrate in his Heptateuch, but, mediated by the in bono commentary of Arnulf of Orleans on the first book of the Metamorphoses, with Ovidian cosmology and ideology of metamorphosis (Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, 1973, 11–73). Recent research into medieval Plato, particularly into his influence upon literature and mythography, has failed to discover new lines of inquiry.

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Scholars of the field in the mid- to late 20th century took on the task of distinguishing the various ways in which Plato was used in the service of art, theology and literature – as philosopher, moralist and cosmographer – and with distinguishing among the schools of thought and commentary he provoked – Middle Platonism, neo-Platonism, the School of Chartres. Raymond Klibansky’s overview The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (1939), has been superseded by Stephen Gersh’s Middle Platonism and NeoPlatonism: The Latin Tradition (2 vol., 1986). Of Plato’s readers, St. Augustine is the most influential purveyor of the moral imperative to transcend the worldly for the supersensual that becomes the corner stone of Christian theology (Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 1955). Numerous works have treated the commentary on the Timaeus, and the connection between cosmography and myth in the twelfth century, the best of which remain Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie comme science au XIIe siecle (1957), and Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (1972). C.5. Boethius Writing in the fifteenth century, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla commented astutely that Boethius was the “last of the Romans, and first of the scholastics,” accurately placing him between commentator and poetic innovator. Translator and exegete of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, theorist of music and arithmetic, and theologian, his single most influential work in the Middle Ages was the Consolation of Philosophy. Second in popularity perhaps only to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Consolation of Philosophy served as an ideological and mythological counterpoise to the latter (Durant Waite Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, 1962, 27) for authors such as Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Petrarch. With more than 400 extant manuscripts of the Consolation of Philosophy alone, and a commentary vaster and more complex still, Boethian scholarship is still in the early stages of sorting out textual history, and editing various commentary traditions as a preliminary step toward authoritative reception study. In the meantime, early studies treating synoptically the life, works and literary influence of Boethius provide a useful general overview. Howard Patch’s The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of his Importance in Medieval Culture (1935), with short chapters on biography and biographical legend, philosophy, translations and influence, is meager. Henry Chadwick’s Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (1981) is strong on biography, cultural context and and gives the most thorough discussion of Boethian philosophy and logic, omitting the literary influence. Fortunately, the latter is treated thoroughly by Pierre Courcelle La Conso-

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lation de Philosophie dans la tradition littéraire: Antécedents et Posterité de Boèce (1967). The most sophisticated literary and rhetorical interpretation of Boethius’ work in late antique and medieval context, particularly of the Consolation, comes from Seth Lerer (Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the ‘Consolation of Philosophy,’ 1985) who reads Boethius’ dialogical structure as a response to dialogues of Cicero, Augustine and Plato (Timaeus), while making intertextual readings of mythographic technique and motif in Fulgentius (on Aeneas) and Seneca (on Orpheus and Circe). The Latin and vernacular commentary traditions of Boethius – Remigius, Trevet, William of Conches, Alfred – as well as the translations of the Consolation of Philosophy, the most famous of which by Chaucer and Jean de Meun, are a subject too complex for a single author. Overviews of the traditions by Alistair Minnis (The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of the ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae,’ 1987; Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ and the Medieval Traditions of Boethius, 1993) and Maarten Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the ‘Consolatio Philosophiae,’ 1997) both present the subject in its Hydra-headed enormousness, and correct earlier misconceptions of the commentators (such as Courcelle’s notion that Trevet was an anti-Platonist) was by placing them in the context of medieval scholastic debates. The commentaries of King Alfred are the subject of the ongoing collaborative Alfredian Boethius Project centered in Oxford and directed by Malcolm Godden. D. Mythography Mythography, the systematic collection and critique of a culture’s mythos, begins for Greco-Roman antiquity in Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, but has its critical origins in Herodotus and Plato who first theorized the relationship of myth to history, literature, and philosophy (Felix Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la Pensée Grecque, 1956). In the Middle Ages, Platonic and neo-Platonic interpretation of myth served as the model upon which Christian mythographers systematized classical mythology (Jean Pépin, Mythe et Allegorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes, 1976; Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 1986). From Cicero’s De natura deorum, medievals had received the notion that myth was euhemerized history, a theory that flourished in the early medieval mythography of Orosius and Isidore of Seville (Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l’espagne wisigothique, vol. 2., 1959). The long standing connection between astrology and the Olympian pantheon promulgated influentially by Eratosthenes’s Catasterismi and popularized in Latin by Hyginus’s Astronomica, was a mythographic ideology

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opposed by such late antique and early medieval writers as Boethius and Augustine who argued that divine providence and man’s free will can overcome the influence of pagan cosmic deities. The pagan mythographer Macrobius also opposed astrological interpretation of myth after a fashion, arguing for a kind of monotheism whereby all the gods are expressions of the Sun, the cardinal deity. Christian apologists, hungry for classical sophistication, were caught in a desperate quandary: because mythology served as the single frame of reference for classical physics, philosophy, literature, and ethics, Christian apologists wary of irreligion could not simply dismiss it or wholly reinvent it according to a Christian mythos (Gerard Ellspermann, The Attitude of Early Christian Latin Writers Toward Pagan Literature and Learning, 1949, 9). The alternative was to impose a new ideological hermeneutic upon it through allegory. Allegoresis, justified by Biblical precedent, and theorized by patristic writers, became the predominant method of mythography among Christian mythographers beginning with Fulgentius and continuing in the work of the Vatican mythographers (Paule Demats, Fabula: Trois études de mythographie antique et médiévale, 1973; Richard Krill, “The Vatican Mythographers: Their Place in Ancient Mythography,” Manuscripta 23 [1979]: 173–77). Modern research into medieval mythography begins with Thomas Muncker’s annotated edition Mythographi Latini (1681) reprinted and augmented by August van Staveren (1742), that anthologizes Hyginus, Fulgentius, Lactantius Placidus, and Alberic of London. From the late nineteenth century onward, the study of mythography has been shared among the disciplines of art history and philology with the former as the motive force. Aby Warburg and the art historical library and institute he founded at the turn of the twentieth century effectively established iconography as a central modern concern of mythography, a tendency expressed in the work of Fritz Saxl, the Warburg Library’s first curator (Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters, 2 vols., 1915–1927), and other art historians in Warburg’s circle, among whom Erwin Panofsky (Studies in Iconology, 1939; Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955). The classic work on the history and iconography of mythography from the Warburg-circle remains Jean Seznec’s La survivance des dieux antiques (= Studies of the Warburg Institute 11, 1940). Scholars of allegory have benefited as well from the iconography of classical myth, particularly the Robertsonians (D. W. Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 1962; id. and Bernard Huppé, Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories, 1963; John Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography, 1969), and independently Rosemond Tuve (Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity, 1966).

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Theorists of allegoresis, who represent the other main thrust of research into mythography, recognize the importance of the image to mythic narrative, hence Peter Dronke’s notion of the fabula as interchangeably narrative and iconic (Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, 1974). Purely textual studies of mythography continue to appear, most focusing on the vernacular tradition (Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretation in Medieval French Literature, 1997; Jane Chance, The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, 1990; Jane Chance, The Mythographic Chaucer: The Fabulation of Sexual Politics, 1995). Lacking, however, is a study that combines the art historical and philological approaches to mythography. Jane Chance’s two-volume Medieval Mythography (1994–2000), manages at once to be compendious and superficial, useful for its comprehensive overview of mythographic commentary and for its bibliography, but poor (or wrong) in its interpretation of the sources it covers. Meanwhile, the field awaits the scholar or group of scholars to provide a panoptic view of myth and its medieval reception both in its vastness and minuteness. Select Bibliography Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Pierre Courcelle, Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de L’Enéide, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Gauthier-Villars, 1984); Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke, 1948); Birger Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Paris: ed. Du C.N.R.S, Imprimerie Daupeley-Gouverneur, 1982); Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1958).

Gregory Heyworth

Codicology and Paleography Introduction: the Beginnings The analysis and history of ancient and medieval writing and book making may be the fields of historical investigation that underwent the most dramatic transformation over the past century. They changed status within the realm of historical studies, passing from ancillary techniques (“sciences auxiliaires de l’histoire” in French; “Hilfsdisziplin” in German) to disciplines of their own. It is a tradition, however, to consider that paleography obtained a

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proper status with the work on ancient Greek writing by the French Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), Palaeographia graeca, sive, De Ortu et Progressu Literarum Graecarum: et De variis omnium saeculorum Scriptionis Graecae generibus: itemque de Abbreviationibus & de Notis variarum Artium ac Disciplinarum, Additis Figuris & Schematibus ad fidem manuscriptorum Codicum … 1708 (rpt. [1970]). Whatever the contribution of Montaucon might have been, the interest in, and a certain level of analysis of manuscripts (all medieval) and their writing started as early as the Renaissance, and took much more time to lead to a discipline than the historiographical narrative in the style of the Founding Fathers attributing the origin of paleography to one specific person (in the specific case, to Montfaucon) wants. For practical reasons (principally, the quantity of available studies, the recent expansion of the field, and, consequently, the unavoidable specialization), this essay focuses more on Greek manuscripts and their study in Western scholarship (for a synthetic presentation of manuscript studies, see, for example and recently: The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentieth-Century Bibliography, ed. Peter Davison, 1992, particularly the following three chapters: Christopher De Hamel, “Medieval Manuscript Studies” [37–45]; Tom Davis, “The Analysis of Handwriting: An Introductory Survey” [57–68]; and John Bidwell, “The Study of Paper as Evidence, Artefact, and Commodity” [(69–82]). With some exceptions, however, it does not consider Latin paleography and codicology (however active the field might have been; for a bibliographic survey, see Leonard E. Boyle [1923–1999], Medieval Latin Palaeograhy: A Bibliograhic Introduction, 1984, and, for an overview of current trends, see for example: Id., Integral Palaeography, 2001, and Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, ed. Frank Thomas Coulson and Anna Grootjans, 2008; for an instance of specialized study, see Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, 2003), or any other linguistic area of the Middle Ages. A. Renaissance Collectionism and Knowledge of Manuscripts During the Renaissance, existing collections were further developed and several others were created by individuals often wealthy but also of any rank in society, acting on their own or on behalf of a patron, as well as by all sorts of institutions (civil, religious, or political). Whatever the case, collections were developed or created by transferring a private collection to a civil institution (as it happened, for example, in Venice with Bessarion’s collection [below]), by acquiring entire collections or large group of manuscript (sometimes in loco, for example, from Greeks selling the family collection, as in the case of

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Antônios Eparchos [below], but also by sending agents to the East [e. g., the Greek Janos Laskaris for Lorenzo de’ Medici [below]), by purchasing manuscripts on the market or having them newly copied (intramurally or overseas [for example, Michaêl Apostolês in Creta [below], by copyists hired by a wealthy patron or working independently, alone or in the context of a scriptorium duly organized [see below on copyists and scriptoria]), or simply by seizing entire manuscript collections (by confiscation, peace treatises at the conclusion of a conflict, or any other kind of agreement not necessarily fair). All this happened in Italy and in the trans-alpine world (Andreas Darmarios, for example, in Spain [below]). Much research has been devoted since the 1830s until recently to the search (often presented as a discovery process) and study of manuscripts in the Renaissance with both detailed and synthetic studies. Among the synthetic studies, one could mention the following (chronological order of publication; to allow for contextualization, author’s names are followed [whenever possible] by the years of birth and death at their first mention, except for contemporary scholars): Remigio Sabbadini (1850–1943), La scoperta dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV, 1905; Robert Ralph Bolgar (1913–1985), The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, 1954; Nigel Guy Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 1992 (on Greek manuscripts, more specifically); or Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), “The Search for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (1976): 307–10. As for detailed studies, many publications have dealt with specific collections (alphabetical order of owners’ name [followed, here as in the whole essay, by the years of birth or death of the collectors in order to allow for historical contextualization; the list is not exhaustive, either for the collectors or for the publications, but aims to be representative of the history of the book and its research; in each section, the selected works are listed in chronological order of publication): Bessarion (1399/1400–1472) Heni Omont (1857–1940), “Inventaire des manuscrits grecs et latins donnés à Saint-Marc de Venise par le Cardinal Bessarion en 1468,” Revue des Bibliothèques 4 (1894): 129–87; Lotte Labowsky (1905–1991), “Manuscripts from Bessarion’s Library Found in Milan,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1961): 108–31; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace (1910–1969), and Elpidio Mioni (1911–1991), Cento codici Bessarionei, 1968; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace, “L’ordinamento della bibliotheca Nicena,” Medioevo e Umanesimo 24 (1976): XIII–XX; Lotte Labowsky, Bessarion’s Library and the Biblioteca Marciana: Six Early Inventories, 1979; Concetta Bianca, Da Bisanzio a Roma: Studi sul cardinale Bessarione, 1999 (see especially 43–106: chapter 3: “La formazione della biblioteca latina del Bessarione”); Marino Zorzi,

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“Bessarione e i codici greci,” L’eredità greca e l’ellenismo, ed. Gino Benzoni, 2002, 93–121; Jean Hurault de Boistaillé (†1572): Karl Wilhelm Mueller (1801–1874), “De Boëstallerii bibliotheca greca,” Analecta Bernensia 1 (1839/1840): 2–19 (reproduced in Id., “Der Katalog der griechischen Bibliothek von Boistaillé,” Serapeum 19 [1858]: 161–64, 169–72, and also in Pandôra 20 [1869]: 117–18, 138–40); Henri Omont, “Inventaire des manuscrits de Hurault acquis pour la bibliothèque du roi en 1622,” Anciens inventaires et catalogues de la Bibliothèque nationale, vol. 2, 1909, 404–15; Donald Jackson, “The Greek Manuscripts of Jean Hurault de Boistaillé,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 4th ser., 2 (2004), 209–52; Marie-Pierre Laffitte, “Une acquisition de la Bibliothèque du roi au XVIIIe siècle: Les manuscrits de la famille Hurault,” Bulletin du bibliophile 2008, 42–98; Federico de Montefeltro (1422–1482): Cesare Guasti (1822–1889), “Inventario della Libreria Urbinate compilato nel secolo XV da Frederigo Veterano,” Giornale storico degli archivi toscani 6 (1862): 127–47; 7 (1863): 46–55, and 130–54; Antonio Valenti, Sul trasferimento della biblioteca ducale d’Urbino a Roma: Memorie critiche, 1878; Stanislaus Legrelle, “De ordinibus codicum urbinatum,” Codices Urbinates Latini, ed. Cosimo Stornajolo (1849–1923), vol. 3, 1921, VI*-XXIX*; Fugger family: Paul Lehmann (1884–1954), Eine Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliotheken, 2 vols., 1956–1960; Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–1585): Brigitte Mondrain, “Copistes et collectionneurs de manuscrits grecs au milieu du XVe siècle: Le cas de Johann Jakob Fugger d’Augsbourg,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84 (1991–1992): 354–90; Domenico Grimani (1461–1523): Henri Omont, “Notes sur quelques manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque archiépiscopale d’Udine provenant du Cardinal D. Grimani,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 12 (1895): 415–16; Theobald Freudenberger (b. 1904), “Die Bibliothek des Cardinals Domenico Grimani,” Historisches Jahrbuch 56 (1936): 15–45; Giovanni Mercati (1866–1957), Codici Latini Pico Grimani Pio e di altra biblioteca ignota del secolo XVI, 1938; Donald F. Jackson, “Grimani Greek Manuscripts in Vienna,” Codices Manuscripti 27/28 (1999): 3–7; Aubrey Diller (1903–1985), Henri Dominique Saffrey, Leendert G. Westerkink (1913–1990), Bibliotheca graeca manuscripta Cardinalis Dominici Grimani (1461–1523), 2003; Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–1575): Gregorio De Andrés, “Dos listas inéditas de manuscritos griegos de Hurtado de Mendoza,” La Ciudad de Dios 174 (1961), 381–96; Id., “La biblioteca de Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1576),” Documentos para la Historia del Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, vol. 7, 2, 1964, 235–324; Isodoros of Kiev (between 1380 and 1389–1463): Giovanni Mercati, Scritti d’Isodoro, il cardinale Ruteno e codici a lui appartenuti che si conservano nella Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1926; Otto Kresten, Eine Sammlung von Konzilsakten aus dem Besitze des

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Kardinals Isidoros von Kiev, 1976; Ioannês Laskaris (1445–1535): Pierre de Nolhac (1859–1936), “Inventaire des manuscrits de Jean Lascaris,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 6 (1886), 251–74; Léon Dorez (1864–1922), “Un document nouveau sur la bibliothèque de Jean Lascaris,” Revue des Bibliothèques 2 (1892), 280–81; Graham Speake, “Janus Lascaris’ Visit to Mount Athos in 1491,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 34 (1993), 325–30; Basile Markesinis, “Janos Lascaris, la bibliothèque d’Avramis à Corfou et le Paris. gr. 584,” Scriptorium 54 (2000), 302–306; Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524): Daniela Mugnai Carrara, La biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno: Tra Aristotele e Galeno: cultura e libri di un medico umanista, 1991; Stefania Fortuna, “A proposito dei manoscritti di Galeno nella biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 35 (1992): 431–38.; Ead., “Sui manoscritti greci di Galeno appartenuti a Nicolò Leoniceno e al cardinale Bessarione,” ‘In partibus Clius’: Scritti in onore di Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, ed. Gianfranco Fiaccadori, 2006, 189–211; Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490): Csaba and Klára Csapodi, Bibliotheca Corviniana, 1967 (in Hungarian; several translations: The Corvinian Library: History and Stock, 1973; Bibliotheca Corviniana: La Bibliothèque du roi Mathias Corvin de Hongrie, 1982); Otto Mazal (1932–2008), Königliche Bücherliebe: Die Bibliothek des Matthias Corvinus, 1991; de’ Medici family: Enea Piccolomini (1844–1910), “Delle condizioni e delle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508,” Archivio storico italiano 3rd ser., 19 (1874): 101–29; Id., “Documenti intorno alle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508,” ibid., 254–81; Id., “Inventario della libreria medicea privata compilato nel 1495,” ibid. 20 (1874): 51–94; Id., “Richerche intorno alle condizioni alle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1498 al 1508,” ibid. 21 (1875), 102–12, 282–96 (the articles in all three issues have been reproduced in 1875 as a monograph with the same title); Francis AmesLewis (b. 1943), “The Inventories of Piero de’ Medici’s Library,” La Bibliofilia 84 (1982): 103–142; Id., The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, 1984; Edmund Boleslav Fryde (1923–1999), Greek Manuscripts in the Private Library of the Medici 1469–1510, 2 vols., 1996; Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492): Enea Piccolomini, “Due documenti relativi ad acquisti di codici fatti da Giovanni Lascaris per conto di Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Rivista di Filologia Classica 2 (1874): 401–23; Karl Konrad Mueller (1854–1903), “Neue Mitteilungen ueber J. Laskaris und die Mediceische Bibliothek,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 1 (1884): 333–413; G. Del Guerraiorgio (1905–1979), “I manoscritti greci di Lorenzo il Magnifico e il rinascimento medico italiano,” Rivista di Storia delle scienze mediche e naturali 43 (1952): 225–34; Donald F. Jackson, “Fabio Vigili’s Inventory of Medici Greek Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 52 (1998), 199–204; Id., “A New Look at an Old

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Book List,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 3rd ser., 16 (1998): 83–108; Id., “Janus Lascaris on the Island of Corfu in A.D. 1491,” Scriptorium 57 (2003): 137–39; Markesinis, “Janos Laskaris …” (above); Guillaume Pellicier (1498/1499–1568): Richard Foerster (1843–1922), “Die griechischen Handschriften von Guillaume Pellicier,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 40 (1885): 453–61; Henri Omont, “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pellicier,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 6 (1885): 45–83 and 594–624; Id., “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Guillaume Pélicier, ambassadeur de François Ier à Venise (1539–1542),” Catalogues des manuscrits grecs de Fontainebleau sous François Ier et Henri II, 1889, 393–427; Id., “Inventaire de la bibliothèque de Guillaume Pellicier évêque de Montpellier (1529–1568),” Revue des Bibliothèques 1 (1891): 161–72; Annaclara Cataldi Palau, “Manoscritti greci della collezione di Guillaume Pellicier, Vescovo di Montpellier (ca. 1490–1568): Disiecta membra,” Studi italiani di filologica classica, 3rd ser., 3 (1985): 103–15; Ead., “Les vicissitudes de la collection de manuscrits de Guillaume Pellicier,” Scriptorium 40 (1986): 32–53; Annaclara Palau, “Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier, évêque de Montpellier,” Scrittura e civiltà 10 (1986): 199–237; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494): Pearl Kibre (1900–1985), The library of Pico della Mirandola, 1936; Mercati, Codici latini Pico … (above); Hermann Walter, “Per la biblioteca di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: L’inventario anonimo nel cod. Va. lat. 3436, foll. 263r–296v,” Studi Umanistici Piceni 24 (2004): 119–28; Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601): Adolfo Rivolta (b. 1876), Contributi a uno studio sulla biblioteca di Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, 1914, and Id., Catalogo dei codici Pinelliani dell’Ambrosiana, Milano, 1933; Angelo Poliziano Ambrogini (1454–1494), more commonly known as Poliziano: Mostra del Poliziano nella Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana: Manoscritti, libri rari, autografi e documenti, ed. Alessandro Perosa (1910–1999), 1954; Augusto Campana (1906–1995), “Contributi alla biblioteca del Poliziano,” Il Poliziano e suo tempo: Atti del IV convegno internazionale di studi sul rinascimento, 1957, 173–229; Ida Maïer, Les manuscrits d’Ange Politien: Catalogue descriptif, avec dix-neuf documents inédits en annexe, 1965; Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550): Henri Omont, “Un premier catalogue des manuscrits grecs du Cardinal Ridolfi,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 49 (1888): 309–24; Giovanni Mercati, “Indici di Mss. Greci del Card. N. Ridolfi,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 30 (1910): 51–55; Roberto Ridolfi (1899–1991), “La biblioteca del cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi (1501–1550),” La Bibliofilia 31 (1929): 173–93; Donald F. Jackson, “Unidentified Medici-Regii Greek Codices,” Scriptorium 54 (2000): 197–208; Royal Library, Paris: Henri Omont, Catalogues des manuscrits grecs de Fontainebleau sous François Ier et Henri II, 1889; Janos Számboki (Johannes Sambucus) (1531–1584): Hans Gerstinger

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(1885–1971), “Johannes Sambucus als Handschriftensammler,” Festschrift der Nationalbibliothek zur Feier des 200 jährigen Bestehens des Gebäudes, 1926, 251–400; Henry (1549–1622) and Thomas (d. 1593 Saville: Mark Sosower (1949–2009), “Greek Manuscripts Acquired by Henry and Thomas (d. 1593) Saville in Padua,” The Bodleian Library Record 19 (2006): 157–184; Henry Scrimgeour (ca. 1505–1572): John Durkan, “Henry Scrimgeour, Fugger Librarian: A Biographical Note,” The Bibliotheck: A Scottish Journal of Bibliography and Allied Topics 3 (1960): 68–70; Id., “Henry Scrimgeour, Renaissance Bookman,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 5 (1978): 1–31; Nicolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531): Fabio Vendruscolo, “Manoscritti greci copiati dall’umanista e filosofo Nicolò Leonico Tomeo,” Odoi Dizêsios, Le vie della ricerca: Studi in onore di Francesco Adorno, ed. M. Serena Funghi, 1996, 543–55; Giorgio Valla (1447–1500): Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928), Beiträge zur Geschichte Georg Vallas und seiner Bibliothek, 1896. No less important, the search of manuscripts, their collection and circulation, and their use among printers and publishers, often in collaboration with scholars and scribes. Although research on Renaissance printers and editions of classical work started early (see, for example, Antoine Augustin Renoir (1765–1853), Annales de l’imprimerie des Aldes, ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs éditions, 1803), the identification of the manuscript source(s) of their editions has only recently become an object of study particularly illustrated by Martin Sicherl (1914–2009), Handschriftliche Vorlagen der Editio princeps des Aristoteles, 1976. The same scholar pursued this type of research and published several studies, which he reproduced later in a volume of collected studies: Id., Griechische Erstausgaben des Aldus Manutius: Druckvorlagen, Stellenwert, kultureller Hintergrund, 1997. Among the many similar publications, one could single out Annaclara Cataldi Palau, Gian Francesco d’Asola e la tipografia aldina: La vita, le edizioni, la biblioteca dell’Asolano, 1998, on the editions by the successor of Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), Gian Francesco d’Asola (ca. 1498–1557/1559). It is true that the search of manuscripts, collectionism, and the use of the texts found in manuscripts (be it for scholarly studies or for the preparation of printed editions) did not necessarily translate into a specific science. Nevertheless, there was a certain level of practical expertise and knowledge of manuscripts, particularly thanks to the scribes and craftsmen specialized in the business of book (be they local or Greek immigrants) who collaborated to the development or creation of collections. Furthermore, manuscripts were objects of prestige and were used for display of opulence and culture, and thus needed to be properly showcased, something that required to have at least some information on their history, textual interest, and cultural value.

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B. Pre-Montfaucon History In their rediscovery of ancient literature (be it Greek or Latin) through manuscripts – whose circulation, for the Greek ones, increased dramatically in the West after the Fall of Constantinople (29th May 1453) without starting at that moment, however, contrary to an ancient historical interpretation – Humanists, whoever they were, used paleographical and codicological parameters to estimate the value of manuscripts as testimonies of the text(s) they were reading, studying and possibly also editing. In so doing, they followed the philological approach to ancient literary works (including medieval) developed (but not necessarily created) by Poliziano in his Miscellanea, published in two Centuriae (1489 for the first, while the second [achieved between 1493 and 1494] remained unpublished, and was rediscovered only recently and published in 1972: Poliziano, Miscellaneorum centuria secunda, ed. Vittore Branca [1913–2004], and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1972 [on this discovery, see Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, and Alessandro Daneloni, “Manoscritti e edizioni,” Pico, Poliziano e l’umanesimo di fine Quattrocento: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 4 novembre-31 dicembre 1994, ed. Palolo Vitti, 1994, 308–09]). A sign of this early paleographical and codicological interest can be found in the many critical editions of classical authors by 16th-century humanists: in their triumphalist titles, scholars claimed to have used manuscripts defined as antiquissimi, vetustae antiquitatis, and other paleographicocodicological descriptions supposed to guarantee the quality of the newly published critical editions precisely thanks to the antiquity of the manuscript(s) they were based on (on the humanist meaning of these and similar terms, see Silvia Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti, 1973, passim). For a remarkable example, see Conrad Celtis’s discovery of the religious plays and narratives by the 10th-century canoness Hrotsvita of Gandersheim (ca. 935–ca. 1002)in 1493 and his re-edition of her works in 1551. In spite of the subordination of such paleographico-codicological considerations – whatever their value – to the work of critical edition, manuscripts were the object of a more specific interest. They were soon listed and inventoried in more or less systematic ways, with different purposes: private use, heritage, and also consultation by external readers. A fundamental work – though not the first – was by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner (1516–1565) often qualified with the title of Father of Bibliography (according to the historiography of the Founding Fathers already evoked, even if such attribution is not necessarily correct) in his Bibliotheca Uniuersalis, siue Catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus, in tribus linguis, Latina, Graeca, & Hebraica extantium & non extantium, veterum & recentiorum in hunc usque diem, doctorum & indoctorum, publicatorum & in Bibliothecis latentium. Opus nouum, & non Bibliothe-

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cis tantum publicis priuatisque instituendis necessarium, sed studiosis omnibus cuiuscunque artis aut scientiae ad studia melius formanda utilissimum, 1545 (with a summary ten years later: Epitome Bibliothecae, 1555). In many cases, the interest in manuscripts at that time was more directly oriented toward the search of texts to be edited and printed, particularly because the printing press was making technical progress and allowed for the reproduction of texts previously known only in manuscript form. The circulation of manuscripts, the printed editions of Latin translations, and commentaries of several classical authors have been studied in the volumes of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum (8 volumes published so far, 1960–2003), originally edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999). The diffusion of ancient scientific works during the century of 1450–1550, for example, has been the object of an inventory by Margaret Bingham Stillwell (1887–1984), The Awakening Interest in Science during the First Century of Printing 1450–1550: An Annotated Checklist of First Editions viewed from the Angle of their Subject Content, 1970. Catalogues of collections and libraries appeared shortly thereafter with such works as Giacomo Filippo Tomasini’s (1595–1655), Bibliothecae Patavinae Manuscriptae publicae et privatae quibus diversi scriptores hactenus incogniti recensentur ac illustrantur, 1639, and Id., Bibliothecae Venetae manuscriptae publicae et privatae quibus diversi scriptores hactenus incogniti recensentur, 1650. Immediately after (1653), the French Jesuit Philippe Labbé (1607–1677) published a list of libraries (and their holdings), together with a list of bibliographies of all kind (Nova bibliotheca mss librorum, sive Specimen antiquarum lectionum latinarum & graecarum in quatuor partes tributarum, cum coronide duplici, poetica et libraria, ac supplementis decem, 1653, with a second edition of the list of libraries in 1657 under the title Novae bibliothecae manuscript. librorum tomus …. In 1664, he published the list of bibliographies as a separate volume, entitled Bibliotheca bibliothecarum curis secundis auctior: Accedit Bibliotheca nummaria …). Published catalogues of manuscripts were not necessarily just lists of codices whose content was cursorily listed, but they began to offer some description of the manuscripts and their texts. Among the catalogues published during the post-Labbé and pre-Montfaucon era, one can list the following examples, with different levels of completion (selection, chronological order of publication [first volume]; for the clarity, the name of the library and city follows the date): 1665, Vienna, Imperial Library: Peter Lambeck (1628–1680), Commentarium de augustissima bibliothecae Caesareae Vindobonensi, 1665–1679; 1676, Leipzig, Library of the Academy: Joachim Feller (1628–1691), Oratio de Bibliotheca Academieae Lipsiensis Paulina: in so-

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lemni XIX. Philosophiae Baccalaureorum renonciatione d. XV. April. Anno Aer. Chri. M.DC.LXXVI. habita, cui duplex subjunctus est catalogus Alter Manuscriptorum membranaceorum, alter manuscriptorum chartaceorum, in eadem bibliotheca extantium; 1690, Vienna, Imperial Library: Daniel De Nessel (1644–1700), Breviarium et Supplementum Commentariorum Lambecianorum sive Catalogus aut Recensio specialis Codicum Manuscriptorum Graecorum, necnon Linguarum Orientalium Augustissimae Bibliothecae Caesareae Vindobonensis, cum locupletissimis Indicibus et selectissimis Additamentis. Partes I–V; 1697, England and Ireland: Edward Bernard (1638–1696), Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, cum indice alphabetico. Characteristically, during the three decades covered by the publication of these catalogues, a reflection started on the impact of available manuscripts on the reading of the texts they contain. Two (almost contemporary) scholars played a fundamental role in these new developments: the Frenchmen Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) and Richard Simon (1638–1712). A Benedictine monk of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, Jean Mabillon formulated first rules for a critical evaluation of manuscripts as testimonies of the texts they contain in his edition of the life of St Bernard (1091–1153) (Sancti Bernardi … Opera omnia …, 9 vols., 1667) and in the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti to the publication of which he collaborated (several volumes, by century: 1st c.: 1668; 2nd c.: 1669; 3rd c. [2 vols.]: 1672; 4th c. [2 vols.]: 1677–1680; 5th c.: 1685; 6th c. [2 vols.]: 1701). Also, on the basis of his examination of charts and archival documents related to the history of the Church (some of which of discussed authenticity) he laid down the basis of diplomatics in his 1681 treatise De re diplomatica whose title deserves to be quoted in full, as it makes explicit the work performed by Mabillon: De re diplomatica libri VI, in quibus quidquid ad veterum instrumentorum antiquitatem, materiam, scripturam, et stilum; quidquid ad sigilla, monogrammata, subscriptiones, ac notas chronologicas; quidquid inde ad antiquariam, historicam forensemque disciplinam pertinet, explicatur et ilustratur. Accedunt commentarius de antiquis regum Francorum palatiis; veterum scripturarum varia specimina, tabulis LX comprehensa; nova ducentorum, et amplius, monumentorum collectio (with a supplement in 1704 and several re-editions from 1709). Typically, Mabillon traveled to explore library and archive collections for his further works – and in some cases also to acquire manuscripts for the royal collection of France (Flanders, 1672; Switzerland and Germany, 1683; Italy, 1685–1686), reporting the results of his travels in different works: (Flanders) Iter Burgundicum, 1685; (Germany) Iter germanicum anni 1683, s.l.n.d., and also Libri Germanicum or Itererarium Germanicum, 1685 (in the 5th vol. of the Analecta, with a reproduction in 1717 by Johann Albertus Fabricius [1668–1736] under the title Io. Mabillonii

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Iter Germanicum et Io. Launoii De Scholis celebribus a Carolo M. et post Carolum M. in Occidente instauratis liber …); (Italy): Iter italicum litterarium … annis 1685 et 1686, 1687 (with a reproduction of the first part of the 1st vol. as Museum italicum, seu Collectio veterum scriptorum ex bibliothecis italicis, 2 vols., 1687–1689). His major work was his Vetera analecta (Veterum analectorum tomus I[-IV] complectens varia fragmenta et epistolia scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, tam prosa, quam metro, hactenus inedita. Cum adnotationibus et aliquot disquisitionibus, 4 vols., 1675–1685). Richard Simon, studying the text of the Old and New Testament, was less prolific, but not less influential, as he laid down the basis of textual criticism in five seminal studies (in French) published first in Paris and then in Rotterdam because of the opposition of his religious order with a final volume in Paris again: Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 1678; Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament où l’on établit la vérité des actes sur lesquels la religion chrétienne est fondée, 1689 (rpt.1968); Histoire critique des versions du Nouveau Testament où l’on fait connaître quel a été l’usage de la lecture des Livres sacrés dans les principales Eglises du monde …, 1690; Histoire critique des principaux commentateurs du Nouveau Testament depuis le commencement du christianisme jusqu’à notre temps, avec une Dissertation critique sur les principaux actes manuscrits qui ont été cités dans les trois parties de cet ouvrage …, 1693; Nouvelles observations sur le texte et les versions du Nouveau Testament, 1695. C. The Montfaucon Era Bernard Montfaucon (above) was a contemporary of both Mabillon and Simon, though slightly younger. As early as 1702 he published a Diarium Italicum, sive Monumentorum Veterum, Bibliothecarum, Musaeorum, etc. Notitiae singulares in Itinerario Italico Collectae; adiectis Schematibus ac figuris (rpt. [1968] and 1982) in which he related a travel he made to Italy (1698–1701), collecting information on antiquities, libraries, and any other curiosity worth of notice. With this travel, he confirmed Mabillon’s paradigm for collecting information on library collections and manuscripts. In Italy, he gathered the information that enabled him to publish his 1708 Palaeographia greca, in which he formalized the study of ancient writing, particularly Greek. The antiquarian component present in Montfaucon’s travel to Italy (and dating back to the Renaissance, if not earlier) shaped the work of Johann Albertus Fabricius , whose monumental Bibliotheca Graeca (14 vols. in the original ed.: Bibliotheca Graeca, sive notitia scriptorum veterum graecorum quorumcunque monumenta integra, aut fragmenta exita exstant: tum plerorumque e MSS. ac deperditis, 1705–1728) is a sum of all available information on ancient Greek literature, including data coming from the manuscripts that had been

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brought to the attention of the scholarly community of that time thanks to printed catalogues, or were available in any other form. Catalogues of manuscripts continued to be published, in different styles and with different levels of achievement (chronological order of publication): 1715, Paris: Bernard Montfaucon, Bibliotheca Coisliana, olim Segueriana; 1734, London: David Casley (1681/82–1754), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the King’s Library: An Appendix to the Catalogue of the Cottonian Library: Together with an Account of the Books Burnt or Damaged by a Late Fire: One Hundred and Fifty Specimens of the Manner of Writing in Different Ages, from the Third to the Fifteenth Century, in Copper-plates: and Some Observations upon Mss, in a Preface; 1739–1744, Paris: Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae regiae …; 1740, Venice: Antonio Maria Zanetti (1706–1778), and Antonio Bongiovanni (b. 1712), Graeca D. Marci Bibliotheca codicum manu scriptorum per titulos digesta …. In 1739, Bernard Montfaucon, capitalizing on his personal knowledge of collections and available catalogues, published a general inventory of manuscripts, returning, in a certain way, to the tradition of Gesner (although he no longer proceeded by authors and works, but by libraries) and to the simple listing of manuscripts, not necessarily with any kind of paleographical or codicological information: Bibliotheca bibliothecarum manuscriptorum nova: ubi, quae innumeris pene manuscriptorum bibliothecis continentur, ad quodvis literaturae genus spectantia & notatu digna, describuntur et indicantur, 1739 (rpt. 1982). Publication of catalogues was for a long time the major goal of manuscript studies as the following examples show: 1749, Turin: Joseph Pasini (1687–1770), Antonio Rivautella (1708–1753), and Francesco Berta (1719–1787), Codices manuscripti Bibliothecae regii taurinensis athenaei, per linguas digesti: & binas in partes distributi, in quatrum prima Hebraei, & Graeci, in altera Latini, italici, & Gallici, recensuerunt, & animadversionibus illustrarunt … insertis parvis quibusdam opusculis hactenus ineditis, praeter characterum specimina, & varia codicum ornamenta partim aere, partim ligno incisa, 2 vols.; 1759–1763, London: A catalogue of the Harleian Collection of manuscripts purchased by authority of Parliament for the use of the publick, and preserved in the British Museum; 1764, Paris, Collegium Claromontani (Collège de Clermont): Catalogus manuscriptorum codicum Collegii Claromontani quem excipit catalogus mss. domus professae parisiensis, 1764. 1764–1770, Florence: Angelo Maria Bandini (1726–1803), Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae varia continens opera Graecorum Patrum …, 3 vols. (rpt.: Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Mediceae Laurentianae. Accedunt supplementa tria ab Enrico Rostagno et Niccola [sic] Festa congesta necnon additamentum ex inventariis Bibliothecae Laurentianae

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depromptum, ed. Fridolf Kudlien, 1961); 1769, Madrid: Joannes Iriarte (1701–1771), Regiae bibliothecae matritensis codices graeci ms. …; 1780, Vienna: Peter Lambeck, Commentariorum de Augustissima Bibliotheca Caesareae Vindobonensi, liber sextus, ed. Adam Franciscus Kollar (1718–1783), 1780; and 1784, Venice, Nani family: Iohannes L. Mingarelli (1722–1793), Graeci codices manu scripti apud Nanios patricios Venetos asservati, 1784. More careful exploration of collections and increased interest in manuscripts brought to light texts previously unknown and sometimes – if nof often – incorrectly identified and unduly considered as discoveries. The titles of such editions were carefully written so as to make clear that these were first editions based on manuscripts newly located in library collections, such as Johannes Stephanus Bernard (1718–1793), Synesius de Febribus, Que nunc primum ex codice MS. Bibliothecae Lugduno Batavae edidit, vertit, notisque illustravit –. Accedit Viatici Constantino Africano interprete lib. VII. Pars, 1749. Almost fifty years later, the same author edited another medieval work from manuscripts as the title makes clear (with a major difference, however: the ed. was based on several manuscripts cursorily discussed in the Praefatio [vii-xxii], and no longer just one as in the 1749 work): Theophanis Nonni Epitome de Curatione Morborum Graece ac Latine ope codicum manuscriptorum recensuit notasque adiecit, 2 vols., 1794–1795. Also, collections of anecdota were published, for example by the French scholar Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison (1750–1805), who studied first in Paris and explored the holdings of the Bibliothèque royale, before sojourning in Venice, where he frequented the Marciana library, befriended with the curator of manuscripts, and published a wealth of previously unknown and unpublished texts: Anecdota graeca e Regia Parisiensi et e Veneta S. Marci Bibliothecis deprompta, 2 vols., 1781. A similar case is provided by the German scholar Christian Friedrich Matthaei (1744–1811), who was a professor at the imperial university in Moscow and explored – and exploited – systematically the holdings of the Synodial (that is, Patriarchal) library. Among the results of his investigations, he published a critical edition of the New Testament in no less than 12 volumes: Nouum Testamentum XII tomis distinctum Graece et Latin textum denuo recensuit, varias lectiones nunquam antea vulgatas ex centum codicibus mss. variarum bibliothecarum … summa diligentia et fide collegit et vulgauit, lectionaria Ecclesiae Graecae primo accurate euoluit singulasque lectiones sedulo indicauit, plerorumque codicum specimena aere expressa exhibuit, priorum editorum … sententias examinauit, editiones etiam alias … inspexit, scholia Graeca maximam partem inedita addidit, commentarios Graecos … notauit … animadversiones criticas adiecti et edidit …, 12 vols., 1782–1788. The title is pretty different from the modest – almost

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anonymous – one of d’ansse De Villoison: Matthaei claims, indeed, to include in his edition variant readings never previously published and compiled from a hundred of manuscripts preserved in different libraries. Also, he provided tables reproducing pages of the codices he used in the preparation of the edition. Later on (1805), Matthaei published a catalogue of the manuscripts in the Synodial collection (Accurata codicum Graecorum mss. bibliothecarum Mosquensium Sanctissimae Synodi notitia et recensio, 2 vols., 1805) and, shortly after (1808), he edited a collection of medical fragments extracted from a manuscript in the Moscow collection: XXI Veterum et Clarorum Medicorum Graecorum Varia Opuscula. Prima nunc impensis Anastasii, Nicolai, Zoës, et Micahëlis, fratrum Zosimadarum Ioanninorum, de litteris graecis intra et extra patrima suam optime meritorum ex Oribasii codice mosquensi graece edidit, interpretationem latinam Io. Baptistae Rasarii item suas animadversiones et Indicem vacabulorum adjecit, 1808. More careful inspection of library holdings in many European libraries and editorial activity made it possible to renew the encyclopedias of ancient works available until then, with, among others, a new edition of Fabricius’s Bibliotheca greca that updated the original information of the author and included also new analytical chapters based on data compiled from manuscripts and from the scholarly literature available at that time: Johann Albertus Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca sive notitia scriptorum veterum graecorum quorumcumque monumenta integra aut fragmenta edita exstant tum plerorumque e mss. ac deperditis ad auctore recognita. Editio nova variorum curis emendatior atque auctior curante Gottlieb Christophoro Harles. Accedunt Iohannis Alberti Fabricii et Christophi Augusti Heumanni (1681–1763) supplementa inedita, 5 vols., 1790–1807 (rpt. 1966–1970). Similarly, the genre of specialized encyclopedias was renewed (among other reasons thanks to a better knowledge of manuscript evidence) as shown by the scientific encyclopedias by the Swiss physician Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), in which ancient works are abundantly mentioned and referred to (chronological order of publication): Bibliotheca botanica, 2 vols., 1771–1772; Bibliotheca anatomica, 1774; Bibliotheca chirurgica, 2 vols., 1774–1775; Bibliothecae medicinae practicae, 4 vols., 1776–1788. C. Travels, Catalogues, Ecdotics The troubled period of the late 18th and early 19th century affected many libraries as several private or institutional collections (among others those of the religious communities in France) changed owners. As a consequence, the circulation of books on the market increased dramatically. The English bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847), for example, toured

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Europe to acquire books on this new market, and authored an Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (1802) (on him and his activity, see Edward John O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognal Dibdin: Bibliographer & Bibliomaniac Extraordinary, 1967), while the Frenchman JacquesCharles Brunet (1780–1867) wrote his famous Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres (1810), typically illustrating the renewed interest in books in the post-Napoleonic era. Awareness of the interest of the information contained in manuscripts was rising, sometimes in a community different from that of library curators, classical scholars, and book collectors. An example is provided by the English botanist John Sibthorp (1758–1796) who described the flora of Greece. In order to take advantage of historical resources before beginning his field work, he stopped in Vienna on his way to Greece in 1786 where he examined two illustrated copies of the herbal extracted from Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.), De materia medica, which was the most important botanical work produced in antiquity. One of these two copies is the early 6th-century manuscript now at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, medicus graecus 1, and the other the 7th-century manuscript now in Naples. Sibthorp also visited Mount Athos in 1787 where he inspected a codex of Dioscorides, which might be the mid-11th-century copy in the collection of the Megisti Lavra Monastery. Perhaps such awareness (or classicizing assumption, instead) contributed to the subsequent development of travels to visit libraries and personally inspect manuscript collections and single codices on the model of Mabillon and Montfaucon. A pioneer in the early 19th century was the German scholar Friedrich Reinhold Dietz (1804–1836) of Königsberg. In preparing critical editions of classical medical texts, he traveled throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain systematically searching for codices. The titles of his editions make it clear: Galeni de dissectione musculorum et de consuetudine libri: Ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum alterum secundum, primum alterum graece edidit, 1832; Analecta medica ex libris mss., 1833; Apollonii Citiensis, Stephani, Palladii, Theophili, Meletii, Damasci, Ioannis aliorum Scholia in Hippocratem et Galenum e codicibus mss. Vindobonens. Monacens. Florentin. Mediolanens. Escorialens. etc., 2 vols., 1834 (rpt. 1966); Severi Iatrosophistae De clysteribus liber: Ad Fidem Codicis Manuscripti unici Florentini primum Graece edidit, 1836. Whatever the rationale of this renewed interest, manuscript studies began to develop greatly, even though traditional cataloguing continued at the same time, with catalogues by libraries such as Ignatius Hardt (1749–1811), Catalogus codicum manuscriptorum graecorum Bibliothecae Regiae Bavaricae, 5 vols., 1806–1812, and also more comprehensive catalogues by

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areas as Gustav Friedrich Haenel (1792–1878), Catalogi Librorum Manuscriptorum qui in Bibliothecis Galliae, Helvetiae, Belgii, Britanniae M., Hispaniae, Lusitaniae asserrantur, 1830 (rpt. 1976). The several European countries where manuscripts began to be studied more properly, approached such study differently – among others on the basis of their own scholarly tradition(s) – and gradually developed differentiated orientations (almost methodological schools) that have had (and probably still have) a long-term impact on the discipline. One such orientation is the search and analysis of manuscripts aimed at (and subordinated to) the critical edition of texts. This was particularly the case in Germany as the example of Dietz suggested. Editorial activity was prosperous then, particularly because scholars launched large-scale programs, pre-industrial printing allowed for audacious endeavours, and scholars and librarians took the risk of creating publishing companies. One of these vast edition and publishing projects was the Medicorum Graecorum opera quae exstant directed by the physician and classical scholar Karl Gottlob Kühn (1754–1840). Whereas the initial project included the works of Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, Aretaeus, Oribasius, Aetius, and Paul of Egina in 28 volumes, only the volumes on the first four appeared between 1821 and 1833. Kühn himself edited Hippocrates (3 vols., [nos. 21–23 of the Corpus], 1825–1827), Galen (20 vols., [nos. 1–20], 1821–1833), and Aretaeus (1 vol., [no. 24], 1828). Dioscorides (2 vols., [nos. 25–26], 1829–1830, including the two treatises On Venoms and On Poisons ascribed to Dioscorides), was edited by the botanist and classical scholar Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833). While Kühn mainly reproduced the text of previous editions (for Galen, see vol. 1 [1821], IX–XIII, where Kühn explains that he reproduced the edition of René Chartier [1572–1654] published in Paris, in part posthumously, from 1639 to 1679, and that he collated the manuscripts that he could find, together with the corrections and conjectures by Joseph Scaliger [1540–1609] and Janus Cornarius [1500–1558]; on the Aretaeus edition, see Carolus Hude, Aretaeus, 1958, X), Sprengel collected variant readings from codices on the basis of a personal inspection of manuscripts (enumerated and briefly described in the preface) or through collations reported in existing printed editions as the title page explicitly mentions. Editorial activity, which was by no means limited to medical and scientific treatises but covered the whole range of classical texts, was theorized at that time by the German classical philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). In his many critical editions, he applied rules aiming to be objective in the selection of the manuscripts to be used as sources and in the choice of their possible variant readings (his method has been studied in detail by Sebas-

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tiano Timpanaro [1923–2000], La genesi del metodo di Lachmann, 1963 [several reprints]; English trans.: The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, Glenn W. Most [ed. and trans.], 2005, which includes an analysis of Timpanaro’s contribution to the history of ecdotics). Lachmann, however, did not formulate an explicit theory of ecdotics, something that did slightly later the Danish philologist Jean-Nicolas Madvig (1804–1886) in his edition of Cicero, De finibus (1839). Another approach to manuscript studies was the systematic cataloguing of large collections formed by the acquisition en bloc of earlier collections over the centuries. This was particularly the case in the United Kingdom, where such libraries as the British Museum (now British Library) in London, and the Bodleian at Oxford required continued effort. At the British Museum, many such collections were merged, and the immense collection resulting from these successive accretions was gradually catalogued further, starting with Samuel Ayscough (1745–1804), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum, hitherto undescribed, Consisting of Five Thousand Volumes, including the Collections of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., the Rev. Thomas Birch, D.D. and about Five Hundred Volumes Bequeathed, Presented, or Purchased at Various Times, 2 vols., 1782. This first work was followed by a series of others: Joseph Planta (1744–1827), A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library deposited in the British Museum, 1802; Robert Nares (1753–1829), A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols., 1808–1812; Josiah Forshall (1795–1863), Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, New Ser., vol. 1, part 1: The Arundel Manuscripts, 1834; vol. 1, part 2: The Burney Manuscripts, 1840; Frederic Madden (1801–1873), and Edward-Augustus Bond (1815–1898), Index to the Additional Manuscripts with those of the Egerton Collection preserved in the British Museum and Acquired in the Years 1783–1835, 1849. Then, the recent acquisitions were listed in periodical publications, following an irregular calendar: List of Additions made to the Collections in the British Museum in the Year 1831, 1833; List [2] … 1833, 1835; List [3] … 1834, 1837; List [4] … 1835, 1839; List [5] … 1836–1840, 1843; Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years 1841–1845, 1850; Catalogue [2] … 1846–1847, 1864; Catalogue [3] … 1848–1853, 1868; Catalogue [4] … 1854–1875, 3 vols., 1875–1880; Catalogue [5] … 1876–1881, 1882; Catalogue [6] … 1882–1887, 1889; Catalogue [7] … 1888–1893, 1894; Catalogue [8] … 1894–1899, 1901; Catalogue [9] … 1900–1905, 1907; Catalogue [10] …, 1906–1910, 1912; Catalogue [11] … 1911–1915, 1925; British Museum, Catalogue of Additions to the Mss, 1916–1920, 1933; British Museum, Catalogue [2] … 1921–1925, 1950. The strategy at the Bodleian Library was slightly different: its several collections were catalogued one by one in a somewhat summary form by

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three generations of classical scholars, starting with Thomas Gaisford (1779–1855), Codices manuscripti et impressi, cum notis manuscriptis, olim d’Orvilliani, qui in Bibliotheca Bodleiana apud Oxonienses adservantur, 1806, and Catalogus sive notitia manuscriptorum qui a Cel. E.D. Clarke comparati in Bibliotheca Bodleiana adservantur, vol. 1, 1812. He was followed by Henry O. Coxe (1811–1881), who worked on most of the collections of Greek manuscripts and also on some Latin codices: Catalogi Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae, Pars Prima Recensionem Codicum Graecorum Continens, 1853; Catalogi Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae Pars Tertia Codices Graecos et Latinos Canonicianos Complectens, 1854. Then, all the still uncatalogued collections and items were systematically included in a comprehensive short-title catalogue, whose publication extended from the end of the 19th century to well into the 20th: Falconer Madan (1851–1935), A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford which have not hitherto been catalogued in the Quarto Ser. with References to the Oriental and Other Manuscripts, vol. 3: Collections Received during the 18th Century, Nos 8717–16669, 1895; vol. 4: Collections Received during the First Half of the 19th Century, Nos. 16670–24330, 1897; vol. 5: Collections Received during the Second Half of the 19th Century and Miscellaneous Manuscripts Acquired between 1695 and 1890, Nos 24331–31000, 1905. This monumental work was further completed going backward in time by Madan in collaboration with Herbert H. E. Craster (1879–1959): vol. 2, 1st part: Collections Received before 1600 and Miscellaneous Mss acquired during the First Half of the 17th Century, Nos 1–3490, 1922; vol. 2, 2nd part: Collections and Miscellaneous Mss acquired during the Second Half of the 17th Century, Nos 3491–8716, 1937. Once the whole catalogue of the collections and items acquired in the past was completed, Madan and Craster covered the current acquisitions: vol. 6: Accessions 1890–1915, Nos. 31001–37299, 1924. The libraries of the several colleges oxonienses were catalogued altogether by Henry O. Coxe, Catalogus codicum MSS. qui in collegiis aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adservantur, 2 vols., 1852. However, the catalogue of a single library was published shortly after: George William Kitchin (1827–1912), Catalogus Codicum MSS. qui in Bibliotheca Aedis Christi apud Oxonienses adservantur, 1867. At Cambridge, Oxford’s first strategy was followed for the University Library (Henry Richards Luard [1825–1891], A Catalogue of the Manuscripts preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 5 vols., 1856–1867), whereas Oxford’s second strategy was adopted for the many colleges. It was the merit of Montague Rhodes James (1826–1936) to catalogue almost all from 1895 to 1913: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts others than Oriental in the Library of King’s College, 1895; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in

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the Library of Sidney Sussex College, 1895; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse, 1899; The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College. A Descriptive Catalogue, 4 vols., 1900–1904; The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Emmanuel College, 1904; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts in the Library of Queen’s College, 1905; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts in the Library of Christ’s College, 1905; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College, 1905; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts in the Library of Clare College, 1905; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, 2 vols., 1907–1908 (with a Supplement in 1914); A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the College Library of Magdalene College, 1909; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, 1912; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College, 1913. A more analytical approach was preferred in France. Nevertheless, printed editions of classical and medieval texts, which were not necessarily prepared on the basis of an exhaustive census of manuscripts and a first codicological and paleographical analysis contrary to what was happening in Germany at the same time, continued to be published. An example of this editorial practice is the Patrologiae (Greek and Latin) by the Maurist JacquesPaul Migne (1800–1875) (on the whole enterprise, see R. Howard Bloch, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne, 1994). The edition of the complete work of Hippocrates in 10 vols. (1839–1861) by the French scholar Emile Littré (1801–1880) indicates a substantially different orientation (that is, the direct examination of manuscripts), which Charles Daremberg (1817–1872) followed. He visited several libraries in Europe, searching for medical manuscripts in order to publish a Bibliothèque des médecins grecs et latins (see his prospectus: Bibliothèque des médecins grecs et latins, publiée avec le concours de médecins érudits de la France et de l’étranger: Prospectus et spécimen, 1847). Although he could not publish his Bibliothèque, Daremberg made groundbreaking work, with an accurate description of manuscripts that he published in the reports of his research travels: “Rapport adressé à M. le Ministre de l’Instruction Publique par … chargé d’une mission médico-littéraire en Allemagne,” Journal général de l’instruction publique 14.33 (1845): 193–96, and 14.34 (1845): 198–202 (also printed as a booklet under the same title, 1845); “Résumé d’un voyage médico-littéraire en Angleterre lu à l’Académie des inscriptions et belle-lettres, dans la séance du 6 octobre,” Gazette médicale de Paris 4 novembre 1848; Notices et extraits des manuscrits médicaux d’Angleterre, 4 fascicles, 1851–1852 (with a new ed. under the title Notices et extraits des manuscrits médicaux grecs, latins et français, des principales bibliothèques de l’Europe, 1st part: Manuscrits grecs d’Angle-

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terre suivis d’un fragment de Gilles de Corbeil et de scolies inédites sur Hippocrate, 1853). Such method was adopted also by a Greek ophthalmologist interested in the history of medicine and doing research in Paris: Georges A. Costomiris (1849–1902) (sometimes also spelled Kostomoiris). He browsed, indeed, the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, and compiled also information from printed catalogues of collections worldwide. On this basis, he published a series of inventories of Greek medical manuscripts (“Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs et ceux dont le texte original est perdu, mais qui existent en latin ou en arabe. Première série: Hippocrate, Cratevas, Aelius Promotus, Galien,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 2 [1889]: 343–83; “Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs. Deuxième série: L’Anonyme de Daremberg, Métrodora, Aétius,” Revue des études grecques 3 [1890]: 145–79; “Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs. Troisième série: Alexandre (Sophiste et Roi), Timothée, Léon le Philosophe, Théophane Nonnos, les Ephodes,” Revue des Etudes Grecques, 4 [1891]: 97–110; “Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs. Quatrième série: Hippiatriques et auteurs du XIe siècle: Psellus, Siméon Seth, Damnastès,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 5 [1892]: 61–72; “Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs. Cinquième série: XIIe–XIVe siècles. Jean Tzetzès. Nicolas Myrepsus. Jean Actuarius,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 10 [1897]: 405–45). During the same period, a curator of ancient manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale, Henri Auguste Omont, opted for a different strategy, closer to that of the British Museum. He published, indeed, many summary catalogues of manuscript collections of different size (chronological order): Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits du supplément grec de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883; “Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits grecs des Bibliothèques Mazarine, de l’Arsenal et de Sainte-Geneviève à Paris,” Mélanges Graux: Recueil de travaux d’érudition classique dédié à la mémoire de Charles Graux, maître de conférences á l’Ecole pratique des hautes études et à la Faculté des lettres de Paris, bibliothécaire à la Bibliothèque de l’Université; né à Vervins le 23 novembre 1852, mort à Paris le 13 janvier 1882, 1884, 305–20; Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de la bibliothèque royale de Bruxelles et des autres bibliothèques publiques de Belgique, 1885; “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs des Bibliothèques de Suisse: Bâle, Berne, Einsiedeln, Genève, Saint-Gall, Schaffouse et Zurich,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 3 (1886): 385–452; and his monumental Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale et des autres bibliothèques de Paris et des Départements, 4 vols., 1886–1898. A similar activity took place across Europe, with some individuals emerging as major catalographers (alphabetical order of country names; within

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each section, chronological order; selection): Denmark: Charles Graux (1852–1882), Notices sommaires des manuscrits grecs de la grande Bibliothèque royale de Copenhague, 1879; Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean: Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus (1856–1912), Ekthesis peri tôn en tê bibliothêkê tês Palaias Phôkaias ellênikôn cheirografôn, 1876; Id., Katalogos tôn cheirografôn tês en Smurnê bibliothêkês tês Euaggelikês Scholês, 1877; Id., Katalogos tôn en tais bibliothêkais tês nêsou Lesbou ellênikôn cheirografôn, 1888; Id., Ierosolumitikê Bibliothêkê, êtoi Katalogos tôn en tais bibliothêkais tou agiou apostolikou te kai katholikou orthodoxou patriarchikou thronou tôn Ierosolumôn kai pasês Palestinês apokeimenôn ellênikôn kôdikôn, 5 vols., 1891–1915; Iôannês (1815–1891) and Alkibiadês Sakkelion, Katalogos tôn cheirografôn tês bibliothêkês Ellados, 1892; Spyridon P. Lambros (1851–1919), Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts on Mount Athos, 2 vols., 1895–1900; Athanasios Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Katalogos tôn ellênikôn cheirografôn tês Mêleais bibliothêkais, 1901; Sophrônios Eustratiadês, Katalogos tôn en tê monê Vlateôn (Tsaous-monastêri) apokeimenôn kôdikôn, 1918; Id., Katalogos tôn kôdikôn tês monês Batopediou, 1921; Sophrônios Eustratiadês, and Arkadios of Batopedi, Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, 1924; Spyridon Lauriotês, and Sophrônios Eustratiadês, Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts in the Library of the Laura on Mount Athos, with Notices from Other Libraries, 1925; Italy: Giuseppe Valentinelli (1805–1874), Bibliotheca manuscripta ad S. Marci Venetiarum, 6 vols., 1868–1873; Emilio Martini (1852–1940), Catalogo di Manoscritti greci esistenti nelle Biblioteche italiane, 2 vols., 1893–1902; Vittorio Puntoni (1859–1926), “Indice dei codici greci della Biblioteca Estense di Modena,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 4 (1896), 379–536; Emilio Martini (1852–1940), and Domenico Bassi (1859–1942), Catalogus codicum graecorum Bibliothecae Ambrosianae, 1906; Seymour de Ricci (1881–1942), “Liste sommaire des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliotheca Barberina,” Revue des Bibliothèques 17 (1907): 81–125); the Netherlands: Jacobus Geel (1789–1862), Catalogus librorum manuscriptorium qui inde ab anno 1741 Bibliothecae Lugduno-Batavae accesserunt, vol. 1: Codices graeci, vol. 2: Codices latini; vol. 3: Libri recentiores, 1852; Philip Christian Molhuijsen (1870–1944), Codices Scaligerani (praeter Orientales), 1910; Portugal and Spain: Emmanuel Miller (1810–1886), Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque de l’Escurial, 1848; Charles Graux, “Rapport sur une mission en Espagne,” Archives des Missions scientifiques et littéraires, 3e série, 5 (1879): 111–36; Charles Graux, and Albert Martin (1844–1912), Notices sommaires des manuscrits grecs d’Espagne et de Portugal, 1892, and Rudolf Beer (1863–1913), Handschriftenschätze Spaniens: Bericht über eine im Auftrage der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in den Jahren 1886–1888 durchgeführte Forschungsreise, 1894; Vatican City: Henry M. Ste-

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venson (1818–1898), Codices manuscripti palatini graeci bibliothecae Vaticanae, 1885; Id., Codices manuscripti graeci Reginae Suecorum et Pii PP. II Bibliothecae Vaticanae, 1888; Cosimo Stornajolo, Codices Urbinates Graeci Bibliothecae Vaticanae, Rome, 1895. D. Fresh Activity However Herculean it might have been, the task of cataloguing these and many other collections contributed to the development of a specific paleographical and codicological approach. This dynamic relationship is particularly illustrated by the development of investigations on the history of libraries and collections, and such cataloguer as Henri Omont, curator of manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and author of the catalogues mentioned above. If he worked on collections at the origin of the Bibliothèque nationale (“Un premier catalogue des manuscrits grecs …” [above], and Catalogues des manuscrits grecs … [above]), he also investigated other, non-French collections, for example: “Inventaire des manuscrits grecs et latins donnés à Saint-Marc …” (above) and “Notes sur quelques manuscrits grecs …” (above). In so doing, he was not a pioneer, however, as this type of historical investigation had started before him. To the examples above, one could add among others: Richard Foerster, De Antiquitatibus et Libris Manuscriptis Constantinopolitanis Commentatio, 1877, and Karl von Christ (b. 1878), “Zur Geschichte der griechischen Handschriften der Palatina, “Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 36 (1919): 3–34; 49–66. Significantly, new journals on the history of libraries and archives were created during the second half of the 19th century, such as the Giornale storico degli archivi toscani 1 (1857), Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 1 (1884), and Revue des Bibliothèques 1 (1891). In one case at least, this new type of inquiry did not grow out of intellectual curiosity, but was probably linked to contemporary circumstances: the collection of manuscripts formed by Guillaume Pellicier, which was acquired in 1764 by the Dutch book collector Gerard Meerman (1722–1771) after several other intermediary passages and in 1824 by the famous British collector Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), was purchased by Germany after Phillipps’s death (on the history of the collection, see recently Jos van Heel, “From Venice and Naples to Paris, The Hague, London, Oxford, Berlin …: The Odyssey of the Manuscript Collection of Gerard and Johan Meerman,” Book on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, 2007, 87–111). On the occasion of their acquisition by Germany, the manuscripts were catalogued by Wilhem Studemund (1843–1889), and Leopold Cohn (1856–1915), Verzeich-

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niss der griechischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 1st part: Codices ex Bibliotheca Meermanniana Phillippici Graeci nunc Berolinenses, 1890. During the same period, paleography was developing. In 1866, the specialist of primary sources (Urkunden) (manuscripts and archives) Wilhelm Wattenbach (1819–1897) published his Beiträge zur lateinischen Paläographie, 1866 (2nd ed. 1872; 3rd ed. 1878; 4th rev. ed. 1886 [rpt. 1971]), followed in 1867 by: Anleitung zur griechischen Palaeographie, 1867 (2nd ed. 1877; 3rd ed. 1895 [rpt. 1971]), and, four years later, by a more general work: Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 1871 (2nd rev. ed. 1875; 3rd rev. ed. 1896; 4th ed. 1958). This initial impetus was taken over by Viktor Emil Gardthausen (1843–1928), who started with Griechische Palaeographie, 1879, and also catalogued two collections: Catalogus codicum graecorum sinaiticorum, 1886; and Katalog der griechischen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek zu Leipzig, 1898. Between Gardthausen’s initial work and his catalogues, Theodor Birt (1852–1933) authored a more comprehensive work on the history of ancient book: Das antike Buchwesen in seinem Verhältniss zur Literatur, mit Beiträgen zur Textgeschichte des Theokrit, Catull, Properz und anderen Autoren, 1882, followed, in 1907, by Die Buchrolle in der Kunst: Archäologisch-antiquarische Untersuchungen zum antiken Buchwesen. Ten years after Das antike Buchwesen, the classical philologist, editor of texts, and theoretician of textual criticism Friedrich Blass (1843–1907) wrote the chapter “Palaeographie, Buchwesen und Handschriftenkunde,” of the Handbuch der klassischen Altertums-Wissenschaft, vol. 1: Einleitende und Hilfsdisziplinen, 2nd ed., ed. Iwan von Müler (1830–1917), 1892, 297–355. Shortly after, the English scholar Edward Maunde Thompson (1840–1929) authored a similar manual: Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography, 1894 (2nd rev. ed. 1903; 3rd ed. 1906; rpt. 1966, 1975; Greek trans. 1973). Complementary, cataloguers and paleographers reproduced pages of manuscripts whose writing illustrated particularly the history of paleography. In London, a group of scholars (mainly curators of the British Museum) founded in 1873 a Palaeographical Society, which was funded by private subscriptions, and launched an important initiative: the Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, with a first series edited by Edward August Bond, and Edward Maunde Thompson, 3 vols., 1873–1883. In 1894, the Society was dissolved and a New Palaeographical Society was created later (1903), which started again the publication of facsimiles. In the meantime, several similar publications followed (chronological order): Wilhelm Wattenbach, Schrifttafeln zur Geschichte der griechischen Schrift und zum Studium der griechischen Palaeographie, 2 vols., 1876–1877 (the subsequent editions have a different title: Scripturae graecae specimina in usu scholarum, 1883, with two re-editions in 1897 and

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1936); Id., Exempla codicum Latinorum litteris maiusculis scriptorum et supplementum, 1876; Wilhelm Wattenbach, and Adolf van Velsen (1832–1900), Exempla codicum graecorum litteris minusculis scriptorum, 1878; the Palaeographical Society (in London): Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, 2nd ser., I, ed. Edward August Bond, Edward Maunde Thompson, and George Frederic Warner (1845–1936), 2 vols., 1884–1894; Catalogue of Ancient Manuscripts in the British Museum, part 1: Greek, 1881; part 2: Latin, 1884; Girolamo Vitelli (1849–1935), and Cesare Paoli (1840–1902), Collezione fiorentina di facsimili paleografici greci e latini, 1884–1897; Henri Omont, Facsimilés de manuscrits grecs des XVe et XIVe siècles reproduits en photographie d’après les originaux de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 1887; Id., Facsimilés des manuscrits grecs datés de la Bibliothèque Nationale du IXe au XIVe siècle, 1891 (shortly followed by “Les manuscrits grecs datés des XVe et XVIe siècles de la Bibliothèque nationale et des autres bibliothèques de France,” Revue des Bibliothèques 2 [1892]: 1–32); Charles Graux and Albert Martin, Facsimilés de manuscrits grecs d’Espagne gravés d’après les photographies de Ch. Graux, avec transcription et notices par Albert Martin, 1891, 2 vols. (1: Texte; 2: Planches); Henri Omont, Facsimilés des plus ancients manuscrits grecs en onciale et en minuscule de la Bibliothèque Nationale du IVe au XIIe siècle, 1892. As paleographical studies were quickly developing, it became necessary to sum up contemporary production. It was the merit of the German philologist Wilhelm Weinberger (1866–1932), who first authored Adnotationes ad graecos Italiae codices spectantes, 1897, to compile a bibliography of current research on the model of the bibliographies that had been developing since the early 19th century by Theodor Johann Chrisitan Enslin (1787–1851), Samuel Fridrich Wilhelm Hoffmann (1803–1873), Wilhelm Engelmann (1808–1878), Emil von Preuss (b. 1845), and Rudolf Klussmann (1846–1925). Weinberger started in 1898 with a report covering the production of twenty five years (1874–1896) (“Bericht über Paläographie und Handschriftenkunde,” Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschft begründet von C. Bursian 98 [1898]: 187–310), and continued until the issue 236 (1932): 85–113 of the same Jahresbericht with a report covering the years 1926–1930. More specialized studies started to appear, such as on abbreviations (Thomas William Allen [1862–1950], Notes on Abbreviations in Greek Manuscripts with Eleven Pages of Facsimiles by Photolithography, 1889 [rpt. 1967]; and Grigori Filimonovich Tseretelli [1870–1938], De compendiis scripturae codicum graecorum praecipue Petropolitanorum et Mosquensium anni nota instructorum, 1896), on the paleography of Greek papyri (Frederic George Kenyon [1863–1952], The Palaeography of Greek Papyri, 1899 [rpt. 1970]), on specific

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manuscripts (Thomas William Allen, Notes on Greek Manuscripts in Italian Libraries, 1890), and also on the illustration of manuscripts with both the analysis of some codices (François Lenormant [1837–1883], “Peintures d’un manuscrit de Nicandre,” Gazette archéologique. Recueil de monuments pour servir à la connaissance et à l’histoire de l’art antique 1 [1875]: 125–27; Id., “Pan Nomios et la naissance des serpents: Peintures d’un manuscrit de Nicandre,” Gazette archéologique. Recueil de monuments pour servir à la connaissance et à l’histoire de l’art antique 1 (1875): 69–72; and Edouard de Chanot, “Miniatures d’un manuscrit de Nicandre,” Gazette archéologique. Recueil de monuments pour servir à la connaissance et à l’histoire de l’art antique 2 [1876]: 87–89) and a first inventory and analysis of illustrated manuscripts in a library (Henri Bordier [1817–1888], Description des peintures et autres ornements dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1883). The decades at the turn of the century were characterized by special projects, particularly selective inventories of manuscripts (chronological order of publication) (Patristic, Latin) Bibliotheca Patrum Latinorum Britannica, ed. Henry Schenkl (1859–1919), 13 vols., 1890–1908, and the Bibliotheca Patrum Latinorum Hispaniensis, ed. Wilhelm August von Hartel (1839–1907) (who was also a papyrologist and edited in 1895 the volume Die Wiener Genesis, on the illustrated ms. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, theol. gr. 31, perhaps of the 6th c.), and Zacharias Garcia, originally published as 5 issues of the Sitzungsberiche der philosophisch-historische Classe der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (111, issue 1; 112, 1 and 2; 113, 1; 169, 2) and further reproduced in 2 vols. (1887–1915); (astrology, Greek) Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 20 vols., 1898–1953, originally edited by Franz Cumont (1868–1947); (Fathers of the Church, Latin) Wilhelm Weinberger, Catalogus catalogorum: Verzeichnis der Bibliotheken, die ältere Handschriften lateinischer Kirchenschriftsteller enthalten, 1902; (medicine, Greek) Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, 1st part: Hippokrates und Galenos; 2nd part: Die übrigen griechische Ärzte auser Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. Hermann Diels (1848–1922), 1905, 1906, with a supplement in 1908: Bericht über den Stand des interakademischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und Erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 and 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. und II. Teil (parts 1 and 2 have been reproduced as a vol. under the title Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung in 1906, and this vol. has been reprinted with the 1908 supplement in 1970 with a preface by Friedolf Kudlien). Pursuing the enterprise of facsimiles started by the Paleographical Society in London, scholars reproduced manuscripts of exceptional significance (be it for paleographical, codicological, textual, or artistic reasons) such as the

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Clarkianus 39 of the Bodleian Library containing Plato, Phaedrus, in the hand of Arethas of Caesarea (ca. 850–944): Thomas William Allen, Codex Oxoniensis Clarkianus 39 Phototypice editus, 2 vols., 1898–1899; Allen also reproduced the 11th–12th-century Venice copy of Aristophanes containing seven of his plays: Facsimile of the Codex Venetus Marcianus 474, 1902; and a group of scholars contributed to a facsimile of the so-called Dioscorides of Vienna, that is, the early 6th-century codex medicus graecus 1 of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, lavishly illustrated with plant representations; the volume was edited by Josef von Karabacek (1845–1918) and included exhaustive studies by Anton von Premerstein (1869–1935) on the history of Dioscorides’s text and its manuscripts; Karl Wessely (1960–1930) on the paleography of codex Vindobonensis; and Josef Mantuani (1860–1933) on its illustration: De codicis Diosuridei Aniciae Iulianae, nunc Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 historia, forma, scriptura, picturis, 1906, 2 vols. Somewhat later and on the basis of the Viennese Dioscorides, the historian of science Charles Singer (1876–1960) sketched the first attempt for a modern history of botanical illustration in manuscripts: “The herbal in antiquity and its transmission to later ages,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 47 (1927): 1–52. In these years, major paleographical publications came out, particularly in the German world, such as (chronological order of publication): Viktor Emil Gardthausen, Sammlungen und Catalogue griechischer Handschriften, 1903 (a list of published catalogues of manuscripts); Wilhelm Schubart (1873–1960), Das Buch bei den Griechen und Römern: Eine Studie aus der berliner Papyrussammlung, 1907 (2nd ed. 1921); Viktor Emil Gardthausen, Geschichte der griechischen Tachygraphie, 1st part, 1906; Marie Vogel, and Viktor Emil Gardthausen, Die griechischen Schreiber des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 1909 (Greek manuscripts signed by their copyists, listed in alphabetical order of copyists’ name; rpt. 1966); Wilhelm Weinberger, Beiträge zur Handschriftenkunde, 2 vols., 1908–1909 (vol. 1: Bibliotheca corvina). Another fundamental contribution of these years was the study of watermarks in paper (for a synthesis on the history of studies on watermarks, see Jean Irigoin (1920–2006), “La datation par les filigranes du papier,” Codicologica 5 [1980]: 9–36). Much research on paper history was done in the 19th century, among others the inventory and reproduction of watermarks. See, for example, the work by the brothers Aurelio (1830–1902) and Augusto Zonghi on Fabriano paper making (Aurelio Zonghi, Documenti storici fabrianesi, 1880, and The Ancient Papers of Fabriano Exhibited at the General Italian Exhibition Held at Turin, 1884; see also the album of watermarks published in 1953, Zonghi’s watermarks) (on their work, see recently: Giancarlo Castagnari, L’opera dei fratelli Zonghi: L’era del segno nella storia della carta, 2003), and

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Francisco de Asís de Bofarull y Sans (1843–1936) (La heráldica en la filigrana del papel, 1901 [Engl. trans. Heraldic Watermarks or La Heráldica en la filigrana del papel, 1956], and Animales en las marcas del papel, 1910 [Engl. trans. Animals in Watermarks, 1959]). After some precursory studies, the Russian scholar Nikolai Petrovitch Likhachev (1862–1936) published in 1899 a dictionary (in Russian) La signification paléographique des filigranes du papier, 3 vols.: 1. Liste numérique; 2. Listes alphabétique et numérique; 3. Album, 1899 (Engl. trans.: Likhachev’s Watermarks: An English-language version, 1994). As Likhatscheff puts it (see also his review of the catalogue by Briquet [below] in Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 25 (1908): 265–67), he transferred to the study of manuscripts a method already applied by scholars for the analysis of early printed books and incisions from the early 19th century. Whatever the explanation and the claim for priority, in 1907 Charles-Moïse Briquet (1839–1918) published another dictionary. Briquet started working on the history of paper (Recherches sur les premiers papiers employés en Occident et en Orient du Xe au XIVe siècle, 1886) and shifted quickly to the inventory of watermarks in dated archival documents (Papiers et filigranes des archives de Gênes de 1154 à 1700, 1888). Then, he published his dictionary: Les filigranes: Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600, 4 vols., 1907, with a second edition in 1923 (and several reprints) that has been the major reference after the method of dating manuscripts by means of their watermarks had been accepted. Paleographical publications increased dramatically. Thomas William Allen took over the task of reviewing current production started by Weinberger: “Greek Palaeography (and Textual Criticism),” The Year’s Work in Classical Studies, 1911, 127–32 (pursued until 1934, 69–74). Almost every year, indeed, new publications of all types came out, often followed shortly by a new, revised edition (chronological order of publication): Franz Steffens (1853–1930), Lateinische Paläographie: Hundert Tafeln in Lichtdruck mit Transcription nebst Erläuterungen und einer systematischen Darstellung der Entwicklung der lateinischen Schrift, 4 vols., 1903 (2nd rev. ed. [125 tables], 1909; supplement in 1910; French trans. 1910; rpt. 1964); The New Palaeographical Society, Facsimiles of Ancient Manuscripts and Inscriptions, 1st ser., ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, George Frederic Warner, Frederic George Kenyon, and Julius Parnell Gilson (1868–1929), 10 parts constituting 2 vols., 1903–1912; Franz Steffens, Proben aus handschriftlichen lateinischen Schriftstellern: 24 Tafeln in Lichtdruck zur ersten Einführung in die Paläographie für Philologen und Historiker, 1909; Scato Gogko de Vries (1861–1937), Album palaeographicum: Tabulae LIX selectae ex cunctis iam editis tomis codicum graecorum et latinorum photogrphice depictorum, 1909; Pio Pietro Franchi de’Cavalieri

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(1869–1960), and Hans Lietzmann (1875–1942), Specimina codicum graecorum Vaticanorum, 1910 (2nd ed. 1929); Wilhelm Schubart, Papyri Graecae Berolinenses, 1911; the second edition of Viktor Emil Gardthausen’s manual of paleography published the same year (1911) is in two volumes each of which with a separate title: Das Buchwesen im Altertum und im byzantinischen Mittelalter, and Die Schrift, Unterschriften und Chronologie im Altertum und im byzantinischen Mittelalter (rpt. 1978) (with an index of the manuscripts quoted by Beate Noack, Indices zu Viktor Gardthausen, Griechische Palaeograhie, 2Leipzig 1911/1913, 1983); Edward Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, 1912 (rpt. 1973); Franz Steffens, Proben aus griechischen Handschriften und Urkunden: 24 Tafeln im Lichtdruck zur ersten Einführung in die griechische Paläographie für Philologen und Historiker, 1912; The New Palaeographical Society, Facsimiles of Ancient Manuscripts and Inscriptions, 2nd ser., I, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson, George Frederic Warner, Frederic George Kenyon, Julius Parnell Gilson, John Alexander Herbert (1862–1948), and Harold Idris Bell (b. 1879), 13 parts constituting 2 vols., 1913–1930. The circle of paleographers and codicologists was enlarged with Russian scholars. The collections of the Synodial library had already been studied by Matthaei (above). Since then, the holdings in Greek manuscript in the country increased, among others with the leaves of the so-called codex Sinaitius (a 4th-century copy of the Bible originally at the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai on which see recently: Scot McKendrick, In a Monastery Library: Preserving Codex Sinaiticus and the Greek Written Heritage, 2006) brought from the Sinai by Constantine Tischendorf (1815–1874) in three campaigns (1844, 1853 and 1859), and the many other manuscripts and fragments he brought to Russia (see Eduard von Muralt [1808–1895], Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque impériale publique, 1864). Tischendorf specialized in editing vetero- and neo-testamentary texts from ancient manuscripts (including the codex Sinaiticus), which he submitted to a certain paleographical and historical analysis (the titles of his works are particularly significant and deserve to be quoted almost all in full although they may seem repetitive): Monumenta sacra inedita, sive reliquiae antiquissimae textus Novi Testamenti Graeci ex novem plus mille annorum codicibus per Europam dispersis, 1846; Codex Friderico-Augustanus, sive Fragmenta Veteris Testamenti e codice graeco omnium qui in Europa supersunt facile antiquissimo in Oriente detexit, in patriam attulit, ad modum codicis edidit, 1846; Evangelium Palatinum ineditum, sive Reliquiae textus Evangeliorum Latini ante Hieronymum versi, ex Codice Palatino Purpureo quarti vel quiti P. Chr. Saeculi nunc primum eruit atque edidit, 1847; Codex amiatinus: Noveum Testamentum latine interprete Hieronymo, ex celeberrimo codice amiatino omnium et antiquissimum et praestantissimo nunc primum

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edidit, 1850; Codex Claromontanus, sive Epistulae Pauli omnes Graece et Latine ex codice Parisiensi celeberrimo nomine Claromontani plerumque dicto, sexti ut videtur post Christum saeculi, nunc primum edidit, 1852; Fragmenta sacra palimpsesta, sive Fragmenta cum Novi tun Veteris Testamenti ex quinque codicibus Graecis palimpsestis antiquissimis nuperrime in Oriente repertis: Addita sunt fragmenta Psalmorum papyracea et fragmenta evangelistariorum palimpsesta, item fragmentum Codicis FridericoAugustani nunc primum eruit atque edidit, 1855; Fragmenta evangelii Lucae et libri Genesis ex tribus codicibus Grecis quinti, sexti, octavi saeculi, uno palimpsesto ex Libya in Museum Britannicum advecto, altero celeberrimo Cottoniano ex flammis erepto, tertio ex Oriente nuperrime Oxonium perlato; addita sunt et Novi et Veteris Testamenti fragmenta similia nuperrime in codicum sex antiquissimorum reliquiis inventa nunc primum eruit atque edidit, 1857; Fragmenta Origenianae Octateuchi editionis cum fragmentis Evangeliorum Graecis palimpsestis ex codice Leidensi folioque Petropolitano quarti vel quinti, Guelferbytano Codice quinti, Sangallensi octavi fere saeculi eruti atque edidit, 1860; Notitia editionis codicis bibliorum Sinaitici auspiciis Imperatoris Alexandri II susceptae; accedit catalogus codicum nuper ex oriente Petropolin perlatorum …, 1860; Bibliorum codex sinaiticus petropolitanus auspiciis augustissimis imperatoris Alexandri II ex tenebris protraxit in Europam transtulit ad iuvandas atque illustrandas sacras litteras edidit, 1862; Novum Testamentum Sinaiticum sive Novum Testamentum cum epistula Barnabae et fragmentis pastoris, ex codice sinaitico auspiciis Alexandrii II descripsit, 1863; Epistulae Pauli et Catholicae fere integrae ex libro Porphyrii Episcopi palimpsesto saeculi octavi et noni nuper ex Oriente allato rara textus antiquitate insigni eruit atque edidit, 1865; Appendix codicum celeberrimorum Sinaitici, Vaticani, Alexandrini, cum imitatione ipsorum antiqua manuscriptorum, s.l.n.d.; Apocalypsis et Actus Apostolorum cum quarti Maccabaeorum libri fragmento; item quattuor Evangeliorum reliquiae ex duobus codicibus palimpsestis octavi fere et sexti saeculi, altero Porphyrii Episcopi, altero Guelferbytano eruit atque edidit, 1869; Codex Laudensis, sive Actus Apostolorum graece et latine ex codice olim Laudiano iam Bodleiano sexti fere saeculi; addita sunt nonnulla ex celebri codice Prophetarum Marchaliano Vaticano eruit atque edidit, 1870. The Russian scholars of the early 20th century had a special interest in paleography and codicology, rather than in text edition, and published tables of manuscripts: Grigori Filimonovich Tseretelli (who had authored a book on abbreviations from manuscripts in St. Peterburg and Moscow [above]), and Sergei Ivanovich Sobolevski (1864–1963), Exempla codicum graecorum litteris minusculis scriptorum annorumque notis instructorum, 1st part: Codices Mosquenses; 2nd part: Codices Petropolitani, 1911–1913; Id., Exempla codicum Graecorum litteris uncialibus scriptorum, 1913; and Vladimir Nikolaevich Bene sevi ˇ cˇ (1874–1943), Monumenta Sinaitica archaeologica et palaeographica, 2 vols., 1912–1925.

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At this time, too, and linked with Tischendorf also, is the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest, that is a 10th-century copy of Archimedes that was re-used in the 12th century to copy a liturgical text. Tischendorf saw it in Constantinople in the 1840s and brought a page to Russia. The Danish editor of scientific texts, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, saw it again in 1906, photographed it, and published its text 1910–1915. The manuscript disappeared then and resurfaced only recently on the antiquarian market (below). With the progress of research, paleography and codicology took new directions. For example, the paleographer Thomas William Allen investigated the origin of Greek minuscule writing (“The Origin of the Greek Minuscule Hand,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 40 [1920]: 1–12), while the classical philologist Paul Maas (1880–1964), author of a synthesis on Greek paleography (“Griechische Paläographie”) in the third edition of the Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft, ed. by Alfred Gercke (1860–1922) und Eduard Norden (1868–1941) (vol. I, 9, 1927, 69–81) (as did also Wilhelm Schubart, Griechische Palaeographie, 1925), revisited Lachmann’s principles for the analysis of textual tradition (Paul Maas, Textkritik, 1927 [several re-editions]; Italian trans. 1952; Engl. trans. 1958). Also the Canadian classical scholar Margareth H. Thomson compiled a specialized catalogue of manuscripts containing texts on botany (“Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Paris contenant des traités anonymes de botanique,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 46 [1933]: 334–48). Work that was already traditional was pursued, contributing to consolidating the realm, objectives, and methods of paleography and codicology, although the two disciplines were still at the edge of the more established field of Classical Studies (chronological order of publication): Wilhelm Weinberger compiled a list the collections of ancient manuscripts (Wegweiser durch die Sammlungen altphilologischer Handschriften, 1930); Alejo Revilla (1892–1951) started cataloguing the collection of the Escorial, in Spain, which had remained rather unknown until then (Catálogo des Codices Griegos de la Biblioteca de El Escorial, vol. 1, 1936). Collections of tables of different types were published: scribes identified in the manuscripts of a library (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) by Josef Bick (1880–1952), Die Schreiber der Wiener griechischen Handschriften, 1920; dated manuscripts of a determined period (9th c. and 10th c.), for example, by the Louvain paleographers Louis Théophile Lefort (1879–1959), and Joseph Cochez (1884–1956), Palaeographisch album van gedagteekende grieksche minuskelhandchriften uit de IXe en Xe eeuw, met enkele specimina van handschriften uit de XIe–XVIe eeuw-Album paleographicum codicum graecorum minusculis litteris saec. IX et X certo tempore scriptorum, 1932–1934, and also a more general album by Joseph Cochez, Paleographisch

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album, 1935; as well as a study on earlier Greek writing by the Italian papyrologist Medea Norsa (1877–1952), La scrittura letteraria greca dal secolo IV A.C. all’VIII D.C., 1939 (followed after World War II by her volume Papiri greci delle collezioni italiane: Scritture documentarie dal III secolo a.C. al secolo VIII d. C., 1946). During these years, the geography of manuscript studies underwent an important change: in Europe, the Vatican Library started emerging as a major research center not only thanks to its collection of an exceptional antiquity and its tradition of scholarship illustrated by such erudites as, in the 19th century, Angelo Mai (1782–1854) (who was first [1813] a doctor of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan before moving to the Vatican [1819]) (see, for example, his Picturae antiquissimae bellum Iliacum repraesentantes nunc primum ex Homeri codice non sine descriptionibus editae, 1819 [reproduction of manuscript Ambrosianus F 205 inf.]; Catalogo de’ papiri egiziani della Biblioteca Vaticana e notizia più estesa di uno d’essi, con breve discorso e con susseguenti riflessioni, 1825; and Scriptorum veterum nova collectio e vaticanis codicibus, 10 vols., 1825–1838) and, from the early 20th century, by Franz Ehrle (1845–1934) (author, among others, of a history of the Vatican library: Historia bibliothecae romanorum pontificum, tum Bonifatianae tum Avenionensis, 2 vols., 1890; and of a collection of paleographical tables: Specimina codicum Latinorum Vaticanorum [in collaboration with Paul Liebaert, d. 1915], 1912), and Giovanni Mercati, for example, but also thanks to its catalogues, which took advantage of the progress made in codicology over the past decades and transformed earlier practice. The best example was by Givoanni Mercati, and Pio Pietro Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Codices Vaticani Graeci, vol. 1: Codices 1–329, 1923, where watermarks of paper manuscripts, for example, were identified, though not systematically. The other major change in the geography of our studies was the appearance of America in the field. Thanks to the economic development of the continent, some successful businessmen who generated exceptional fortunes started acquiring manuscripts on the European market. One of them was John Pierpont Morgan Jr. (1867–1943) who acquired, for example, the 10th-century Dioscorides manuscript owned by the Phillipps library in Cheltenham (U.K.) (shelfmark 21975 in the Phillipps collection; M652 in the Morgan Library, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.). In collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, particularly Henri Omont, a sepia facsimile of the manuscript was produced: Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei, De Materia Medica Libri VII. Accedunt Nicandri et Eutecnii, Opuscula Medica. Codex Constantinopolitanus saeculo X exaratus et picturis illustratus, olim Manuelis Eugenici, Caroli Rinuccini Florentini, Thomae Phillipps Angli, nunc inter Thesauros Pierpont Morgan Bibliothecae asservatus, 2 vols., 1935. The same year, Seymour de Ricci

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(1881–1942) (who had previously published the catalogue of several collections in Europe: A Hand-List of a Collection of Books and Manuscripts Belonging to the Right Hon. Lord Amherst of Hackney at Didlington Hall, Norfolk, 1906; Liste sommaire des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliotheca Barberina, 1907; Catalogue d’une collection de miniatures gothiques et persanes appartenant à Léonce Rosenberg, 1913; Les Manuscrits de la collection Henry Yates Thompson, 1926; and also English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, 1530–1930, and their Marks of Ownership, 1930) started publishing, in collaboration with William Jerome Wilson (b. 1884), a Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, made up of three volumes (1935–1940). Also, exhibitions of manuscripts were organized, such as: The Pierpont Morgan Library: Exhibition of Illuminated Manuscripts Held at the New-York Public Library, introduction by Charles Rufus Morey (1877–1955), catalogue of the manuscripts by Belle da Costa Greene (1882–1950), and Meta Philippine Harrsen (b. 1891), 1933–1934. Academic research on manuscripts was also starting in America thanks to a translatio eruditorum. A pioneer was the English-born Biblical scholar Kirsopp Lake (1872–1946). A professor at the University of Leiden (1904–1913), he then moved to Cambridge, MA, Harvard University (1914). His research activity was devoted to neo-testamentary literature, particularly through Greek manuscripts. He explored the collection of several libraries in the Levant (Mount Athos, Sinai, and Turkey), and published extensively on this topic (including on the codex Sinaiticus above) while still in Europe: The Text of the New Testament, 1900 (several re-editions); Texts from Mt Athos, 1902; Codex 1 of the Gospels and its Allies, 1902; Facsimiles of the Athos Fragments of Codex H of the Pauline Epistles Photographed and Deciphered, 1905; Facsimiles of the Athos Fragments of the Shepherd of Hermas Photographed and Transcribed, 1907; Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus: the New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas Preserved in the Imperial Library of St. Peterburg now Reproduced in Facsimile from Photographs with a Description and Introduction to the History of the Codex, 1911 (in collaboration with Helen Courthrope Forman Lake, his first wife). After he moved to America, Lake pursued the research activity started in Europe: Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus et Friderico-Augustanus Lipsiensis: The Old Testament Preserved in the Public Library of Petrograd, in the Library of the Society of Ancient Literature in Petrograd, and in the Library of the University of Leipzig, now Reproduced in Facsimile from Photographs, with a Description and Introduction to the History of the Codex, 1922, in collaboration with Helen Lake; and, in collaboration with Silva Tipple New (b. 1898), further on Silva Lake (his second wife and a professor at Bryn Mawr College): Six Collations of New Testatment Manuscripts, 1932; The Byzantine Text of the Gospels, 1940; and Family 13 (the Ferrar group): the Text according to Mark with a collation of Codex 28 of the Gospels, 1941.

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Of a definitely more paleographical inspiration was the collection of tables of minuscule manuscripts published in collaboration with Silva Lake (Dated Greek Minuscule Manuscripts to the Year 1200, 9 fascicles, 1934–1939 [with a 10th fascicle of index, 1945]), in which the Lakes included the description of the ruling of the manuscripts, as well as the article “The Scribe Ephraim,” Journal of Biblical Literature 62 (1943): 263–68. Paleographical studies in the United States were further pursued by Alexander Turyn (1900–1981). Originally from Poland, Turyn earned a Ph.D. degree in Warsaw (1923), left his country for the United States for political reasons, and became a professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he opened the way for the study of the textual tradition of classical texts. In Poland, he published some preliminary works of this type: De Aelii Aristidis codice Varsoviensi atque de Andrea Taranowski et Theodosio Zygomala, 1929; De codicibus Pindaricis, 1932; and Symbolae ad recensionem Pindaricam pertinentes, 1934. As soon as he was stabilized in America, he published the first of his studies on the manuscript tradition of the Greek playwright: The Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Aeschylys, 1943. After World War II, he pursued and expanded his activity, with significant contributions to the field of dated manuscripts (below). A similar case is that of the historian of art Kurt Weitzmann (1904–1993). He started his career in Germany, publishing a fundamental work on Byzantine book illustration (Die byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts, 1935 [rpt. 1996]). Due to the political climate in his homeland, he emigrated to America where he pursued his intense activities, concretized immediately after World War II by Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration, 1947 (several translations). Illustration was entering the agenda of paleographers and codicologists. Such interest came out of several lines of investigation: cataloguing of collections with such a work as Henri Omont, Miniatures des plus anciens manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque nationale du VIe au XIVe siècle, 1929; history of art: Hans Gerstinger (1885–1971), Die griechische Buchmalerei, 1926; and analysis of scientific viz naturalist manuscripts, particularly of Dioscorides, De materia medica: Henri Omont collected material (Etudes et notes sur les manuscrits de Dioscoride) left unpublished and currently preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as Papiers Henri Omont, XLI (Parisinus Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, 13052); Eulogios Kourilas authored a work very similar to that of Omont, which was for a long time the only major study on the Athos copy of Dioscorides (Dioskorideioi meletai kai o Lauriôtikos Dioskoridês, 1935), and also Paul Buberl (1885–1942) wrote an essay on the Viennese Dioscorides: “Die antiken Grundlagen der Miniaturen des Wiener Dioskurideskodex,” Jahr-

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buch des Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts 51 [1936]: 114–36; then in analyzing Viennese illustrated manuscripts, he focused on both the Dioscorides and the so-called Wiener Genesis: Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Österreich, N. F. IV, vol. 1: Der Wiener Dioskurides und die Wiener Genesis, 1937. E. Second Beginning In the 1920s-1930s, the French archivist and paleographer Félix Grat (1898–1940), a graduate from the Ecole des Chartes who spent some time at the Ecole française in Rome where he discovered still unknown manuscripts of Tacitus and taught paleography in Paris and Nancy upon his return, wished to take advantage of the progress of photographic techniques to create a collection of images that would gather copies of manuscripts in collections across the world. Such collection would be an ideal library that would save scholars from the obligation to travel all over the world to inspect personally the codices they wouldbe interested in, and would also allow to compare manuscripts preserved in different institutions. In 1937 he succeeded in convincing the French Minister of scientific research to create the so-called Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. World War II interrupted the initiative and Grat died in the hostilities. After 1945, the project was taken up again and the Institute started creating a collection of microfilms of manuscripts open to the scientific community that made it possible to access codices from all over the world in an easy and inexpensive way. This was not an isolated initiative. The papyrologist Bernhard Abraham van Groningen (1894–1987), who had published, among other philological works, De papyro oxyrrynchita 1380 before World War II (in 1912), authored a Short Manual of Greek Palaeography, 1940 (2nd rev. ed. 1955; 3rd rev. ed. 1963; 4th ed. 1967), and, in 1946, a group of Belgian scholars – Camille Gaspar (1876–1960), Frédéric Lyna (1888–1979) who was then the Director of the Bibliothèque royale in Brussels, and François Masai (1909–1979) – founded Scriptorium. According to its title, it was to be an International Review of Manuscripts Studies. However, its object was more precise as the editorial of the issue no. 1 (1946–1946) explains (III–IV): … L’objet de Scriptorium n’est pas défini de façon adéquate par le terme de “paléographie,” à moins d’entendre par là l’étude des manuscrits sous tous leurs aspects. En effet, ce ne sont pas les écritures mais les manuscrits mêmes qui constitutent l’objet premier, le centre de nos études. De là, à côté des recherches de paléographie proprement dite, des études consacrées à l’enluminure des manuscrits, à leur décoration, à leur reliure, à leur histoire aussi et à l’histoire des bibliothèques et des scriptoriums qui nous les ont donnés …

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Since then, Scriptorium has been hosted by the so-called Cabinet des manuscrits at the Bibliothèque royale in Brussels, which preserves a significant collection dating back to the Dukes of Burgundy. Scriptorium is published in two issues per year, including the so-called Bulletin codicologique, which lists and reviews current production. This was the sign of a fresh start, characterized by a group of works that played a fundamental role in the history of codicology and paleography, mentioned here not in strict chronological order, but from a conceptual viewpoint. The French classical philologist and editor of many classical and less classical texts Alphonse Dain (1896–1924) published in 1949 a small book entitled Les manuscrits (1949; 2nd rev. ed.: 1964; 3rd ed.: 1975) in which he proposed the term codicology to identify the study of manuscripts as a discipline of its own (there have been discussions to know who was the author of the term, Alphone Dain or the historian Charles Samaran [1879–1982]. It seems, however, that Dain actually created codicology, while Samaran suggested codicography). The difference of perspective in manuscript studies between the period in discussion here and the previous one is best illustrated by the two volumes by Paul Henry (1906–1984) on Plotinus (études plotiniennes) published with an interval of 10 years, before and after World War II. Whereas the first volume deals with the textual tradition (Les états du texte de Plotin, 1938) and is of a Lachmannian nature, the second is about the manuscripts (Les manuscrits des Ennéades, 1948) and takes advantage of the codicological analysis of the manuscripts, including the identification of watermarks. In the context of this new approach, the systematic heuristic of manuscripts became a fundamental issue. Coming after Labbé, Montfaucon, and Gardthausen, the French Marcel Richard (1907–1976) doing research at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes where he created the Greek section, published as early as 1948 a new list of libraries holding Greek manuscripts, together with their catalogue(s): Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs, 1948, followed by a second edition in 1958 and a Supplément 1 (1958–1963) in 1964 (it was not followed by any other supplement, but by a 3rd ed. by Jean-Marie Olivier in 1995 [below]). Another fundamental work in these years was by the French Classical philologist Jean Irigoin (1920–2006): Histoire du texte de Pindare, 1952. A student of Alphonse Dain (whom he followed as director of the Greek section in the so-called Collection des Universités de France and also as Directeur d’études at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, IVe section), he did not limit his approach to Pindar’s tradition to textual analysis as was often the case before, but integrated the data resulting from the codicological analysis of manu-

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scripts, which he carefully described. Complementary, Joseph Mogenet (1913–1980) transformed the way to analyze the transmission of texts in his volume Autolycus de Pitane: Histoire du texte suivie de l’édition des traités de la sphère en mouvement et des levers et des couchers, 1950. Instead of analyzing the transmission of a text as a mechanic phenomenon in a Lachmannian way, he proposed more realistically to consider it as a human endeavour. He tried to conceptualize the human dimension of the act of copying, and succeeded in translating such theoretical analysis in parameters that can account for, and precisely measure (in an objective way), the impact (or interference) of human intervention in the tradition of texts. At that time, manuscript cataloguing had become a key issue, with a double set of requirements: on the one hand, it was tempting to integrate all the new developments of codicology into catalogues and, on the other hand, it was indispensable to do it in a handy way. The rules applied in the catalogues of the Vatican library by Mercati and Franchi de’ Cavalieri (above) did not seem to be universally applicable. Coming after Karel Adriaan de Meyier, Bibliotheca Universitatis Leidensis, Codices manuscripti, vol. 6: Codices Vossiani graeci et miscellanei, 1955 (who published earlier a history of the collection of Paul [1568–1614], and Alexandre [d. 1672] Petau: Paul en Alexandre Petau en de geschiedenis van hun handschriften, voornamelijk op grond van de Petahaundschriften in de Universiteitsbibliothek te Leiden, 1947), the Austrian scholar Herbert Hunger (1914–2000), who had directed the papyrus collection of the National Library of Austria and was a Professor of Byzantine studies at the University of Vienna, tried to solve this contradiction. In his endeavour of cataloguing the Greek holdings of the National Library in Vienna for which the only available catalogue at that time was by Lambeck in the revised edition by Kollar, he created, indeed, a model that integrated the recent acquisitions of codicology and, at the same time, did it in a simplified, synthetic form, without abandoning, however, the necessary precision and exactness. Together with a concise, though detailed, analysis of the texts, his catalogue of the Viennese collections of Greek manuscripts contributed to creating and diffusing a standard format that has been widely adopted since, even though it has often been modified on a case-by-case basis according to individual or institutional exigencies, local peculiarities of collections, or any other parameter: Herbert Hunger, Katalog der griechischen Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, vol. 1: Codices Historici, Codices Philolophici et Philologici, 1961; vol. 2: Codices Juridici, Codices Medici, 1969; vol. 3: Codices Theologici, in 3 parts, 1976–1992; vol. 4: Supplementum graecum, 1994. Hunger did not limit his academic production to this catalogue, but also published extensively on paleography and codicology

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(below), including “Antikes und mittelalterliches Buch- und Schriftwesen,” Geschichte der Textüberlieferung der antiken und mittelalterlichen Literature, vol. 1, 1961, 25–247. The field of book illustration was also consolidating. Again, the illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides drew the attention. Two studies on the Napolitan codex came out the same year: Miranda Anichini, “Il Dioscoride di Napoli,” Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche dell’Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, ser. 8, 11 (1956), 77–104, and Ranucio BianchiBandinelli (1900–1975), “Il Dioscoride Napoletano,” La Parola del Passato 11 (1956): 48–51. Shortly after, entries on Dioscorides were included in two histories of ancient and Byzantine art: Carlo Bertelli, “Dioscuride,” Enciclopedia dell’Arte Antica, vol. 3 (1960), 127–31, and Herbert Hunger, “Dioskurides,” Reallexikon zur byzantinischen Kunst, vol. 1 (1966), 1191–96. Then Elpidio Mioni discovered a new copy: “Un ignoto Dioscoride miniato (Il codice graeco 194 del Seminario di Padova),” Libri e stampatori in Padova: Miscellanea di studi storici in onore di Mons. G. Bellini, 1959, 345–76, and Id., “Un nuovo erbario greco di Dioscoride,” Rassegna Medica-Convivium Sanitatis 36 (1959): 169–84. As early as high-quality photo and printing techniques made it possible, a facsimile of the Viennese manuscript of Dioscorides was published, which was a milestone in the history of facsimile production: Dioskurides Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 der. Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, with a volume of commentary by Hans Gerstinger, 1970. The reproduction and study of Dioscorides’s manuscripts was to be pursued during the last decades of the 20th century. F. Two Established Disciplines Paleography and codicology developed in an unprecedented way in the following decades. This increase was consecrated in 1974 when the first conference on Greek paleography was organized in Paris in collaboration by the Hellenist Jacques Bompaire (1924–2009) and Jean Irigoin: La paléographie grecque et byzantine, Paris, 21–25 octobre 1974, 1977. This first initiative has been followed by other conferences that have contributed to create a tradition: 1983, Germany, Berlin and Wolfenbüttel; 1988, Italy, Erice; 1993, United Kingdom, Oxford; 1998, Italy, Cremona; 2003, Greece, Drama; the most recent one was held in Spain, Madrid, and Salamanca, 2008. Proceedings have not been published for all the editions of the conference: Paleografia e codicologia greca: Atti del II Colloquio internazionale (Berlin-Wolfenbüttel, 17–21 ottobre 1983), ed. Dieter Harlfinger, and Giancarlo Prato, in collaboration with Marco D’Agostino, and Alberto Doda, 2 vols., 1991; I manoscritti greci tra riflessione e dibattito: Atti del V Colloquio Internazionale di Paleografia Greca (Cremona,

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4–10 ottobre 1998), ed. Giancarlo Prato, 3 vols., 2000; Actes du VIe Colloque International de Paléographie Grecque (Drama, 21–27 septembre 2003), ed. Basile Atsalos and Niki Tsironi, 3 vols., 2008. Other paleographical conferences have been organized, of a thematic nature: Scritture, libri e testi nelle aree provinciali di Bisanzio: Atti del seminario di Erice (18–25 settembre 1988), ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Giuseppe De Gregorio, and Marilena Maniaci, 2 vols., 1991, and Ancient and Medieval Book Materials and Techniques (Erice, 15–25 september 1992), ed. Marilena Maniaci, and Paola F. Munafò, 1993. The new developments of paleography and codicology resulted not only from the ground-breaking work in the immediate after-war period, but also from the personal involvement of individuals who devoted their scientific activity to manuscript studies, often capitalizing on a local tradition or new initiatives. At the Vatican Library, for example, Mgr. Paul Canart, originally a scriptor in the historical tradition of the library, catalogued the Greek manuscripts in the Archivio di San Pietro (Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de l’Archivio di San Pietro, 1966), edited, completed, and compiled the index of the catalogue left unachieved by Ciro Giannelli (1905–1959) (Codices Vaticani graeci, Codices 1684–1744, 1961), and compiled the catalogue of the Vaticani graeci 1745–1962 (2 vols., 1970–1973). He also started a research activity on Greek copyists which gradually led him to other paleographical and codicological topics, and taught these disciplines at the Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia Diplomatica e Archivistica. Some of his many – and fundamental – contributions are listed below, under the several sections they are related to, and several of them have been recently republished in a volume of collected studies: Etudes de paléographie et de codicologie, which Paul Canart himself edited in collaboration with Maria Lusia Agati, and Marco D’Agostino, 2 vols., 2008. In Rome, at the University, Guglielmo Cavallo had a polymorph career and activity. Successively a professor of textual tradition, Latin and then Greek paleography, he started publishing on paleography (Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 1967, for example) and shifted rapidly toward a dynamic analysis of writing (“Struttura e articolazione della minuscola beneventana libraria tra i secoli X–XII,” Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., 11 [1970]: 343–68) and a cultural analysis of calligraphy (for instance, “Fenomenologia ‘libraria’ della maiuscola greca: stile, canone, mimesi grafica,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 19 [1972]: 131–40), book production (“La genesi dei rotoli liturgici alla luce del fenomeno storico-librario in Occidente ed Oriente,” Miscellanea in memoria di Giorgio Cencetti, 1973, 213–29), and book consumption (“Libri di medicina: gli usi di un sapere,” Maladie et société à Byzance, ed. Evelyne Patlagean, 1993, 43–56). Initially more focused on

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southern Italy (“Manoscritti italo-greci e trasmissione della cultura classica,” Magna Grecia bizantina e tradizione classica: Atti del decimosettimo Convegno di studi sulla Magna Grecia, Taranto, 9–14 ottobre 1977, 1978, 193–233) and the West (“La produzione di manoscritti greci in Occidente tra età tardoantica ed alto medioeve: Note ed ipotesi,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 [1977]: 111–31), he gradually expanded the scope of his investigations, and included other areas and periods. He teaches Greek paleography at Rome University “La Sapienza,” Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Department of Studies on Medieval Societies and Cultures (Dipartimento di studi sulle società e culture del medioevo), whose two units (paleography and medieval history) study jointly Western and Eastern medieval societies with a particular focus on the problems linked with writing culture (“… due sezioni di Paleografia e di Storia Medievale, che congiuntamente affrontano lo studio delle società medievali nel mondo occidentale e orientale con particolare attenzione alle problematiche connesse con la civiltà della scrittura …). In Berlin, the Belgian classical philologist Paul Moraux (1919–1985) created in 1965 the so-called Aristoteles Archiv at the Freie Universität, which is “dedicated to the exploration of the history of how the Corpus Aristotelicum has been handed down through time.” It has “a unique microfilm collection of all Greek Aristotle manuscripts as well as approximately 1,000 additional manuscripts with late antique and Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle’s treatise.” A researcher at the center, Dieter Harlfinger, investigated the textual history of Aristotle treatise De lineis insecabilibus (Die Textgeschichte des Pseudo-Aristotelischen Schrift peri atomôn grammôn; Ein kodikologischkulturgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Klärung der Überlieferungsverhältnisse im Corpus Aristotelicum, 1971) and was able to identify the hand of a great number of the manuscripts containing the text. Other collaborators of the center worked on a similar endeavour (Jürgen Wiesner and Ulrich Victor, “Griechische Schreiber der Renaissance,” Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, new ser. 8–9 [1971–1972]: 51–66). Harlfinger also collaborated to the catalogue of the Aristoteles Graecus project: Die griechischen Manuskripte des Aristoteles, ed. Paul Moraux, vol. 1, 1976, for the preparation of which he personally analyzed many of the codices in-situ. Dieter Harlfinger further moved to the University of Hamburg, where he contributed to the organization of TeuchosCenter for Manuscript and Text Research (Teuchos-Zentrum für Handschriften und Textforschung) devoted to the application of information technologies to philological research, with a special focus on textual tradition, codicology, and variant readings in manuscripts. In Vienna, where there was not only a cluster of institutions with collections of Byzantine manuscripts (the National Library of Austria) and a strong

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interest in Byzantine studies (the Academy and the University), but also a rich tradition of pre-paleographical and pre-codicological studies dating back to Peter Lambeck that was then brilliantly illustrated by Herbert Hunger (above), Ernst Gamillscheg developed an expertise in codicology and paleography, particularly the identification of hands of Greek copyists similar to that of Dieter Harlfinger. They quickly joined their efforts for a program on Greek copyists aimed to list all the manuscripts that have been signed by one or more copyist(s) or that are unsigned but can be attributed to known copyists (or even to anonymous ones whose hand can be recognized in several items). To this end, both Gamillscheg and Harlfinger surveyed the major collections in Europe and published as early as 1978 a specimen of the catalogue they were preparing: Ernst Gamillscheg, and Dieter Harlfinger, “Specimen eines Repertoriums der griechischen Kopisten,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 27 (1978): 293–322. Since then, they have published three volumes of the Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800–1600, vol. 1: United Kingdom, 1981; vol. 2: France, 1989; vol. 3: Rome, including the Vatican Library, 1997. Characteristically, each volume contains three parts: A. List of copyists; B: Paleographical analysis (by Herbert Hunger); C: Tables. Studies were further boosted by an unexpected discovery: in 1975, indeed, the monks of Saint Catherine monastery in the Sinai discovered in a wall 12 leaves and forty fragments of the codex Sinaiticus (for a report, see, for example: Linos Politis, “Nouveaux manuscrits grecs découverts au Mont Sinaï: Rapport préliminaire,” Scriptorium 34 [1980]: 5–10), which had been dismembered and whose leaves are now in Leipzig, London, and Saint Petersburg (above). During this period color-printing technique made further progress, allowing for unprecedented development of manuscript reproduction. A spectacular realization was the 1970 facsimile of the Dioscorides of Vienna already mentioned, published by the Austrian company ADEVA, which was a pioneer in this sector and recently celebrated 60 years of activity. Since then, many new publishing houses specialized in this type of production have been created, particularly in recent years in Italy (in the north; for example, Directa in Brescia; Franco Cosimo Panini, in Modena; Ozzano Emilia, in Bologna; or Trident Editore, in Castel San Pietro) and Spain (among others, AyN and Testimonio in Madrid, Moleiro in Barcelona, and Patrimonio in Valencia). This development resulted not only from technical improvements and reduced costs, but also from the interest in manuscripts outside the world of specialists. From the late 1980s, indeed, the antiquarian market of art grew in an exceptional way, particularly in auctions in London and New York. Impres-

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sionist painting was especially sought after and some works were sold for record prices that ended up on the front page of newspapers worldwide. The book market – among others Western and Arabic manuscripts – benefitted from this dynamic. Auction houses hired the services of specialists from the academia or had in-house experts who moved later on to the academia, as did Christopher De Hamel who had been for years with Sotheby’s. Some auctions and manuscripts were largely publicized in the news, such as the Archimedes palimpsest studied in the early 20th century by Heiberg, and recently re-emerged on the market as the “property from a French private collection” (for the auction catalogue, see: Christie’s New York, The Archimedes Palimpsest, Thursday 19 October 1998, with a thorough analysis by Nigel Guy Wilson). The codex was acquired by a private collector, and submitted to a highly technologized treatment that brought its first text to light. The whole story has generated a strong interest in the media, and led also to the publication of a popular book (William Noel, and Reviel Netz, The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist, 2007). The interest in manuscripts generated by this activity and its report in the news offered an opportunity for books of introduction, coffeetable volumes lavishly illustrated, and even novels of historical inspiration that had been preceded by such a masterpiece as the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980), which was built on a library and manuscript story. Not all items offered on auction attracted the attention of the lay audience. This is the case, for example, of the Galen codex sold by Christie’s in London (Christie’s London, Valuable Manuscripts and printed Books, Wednesday 7 June 2006 … King Street … London, 2006), which is now at the Beinecke Library of Yale University and appears to be a key piece in the medieval transmission of Galen’s text. In earlier years, interest in manuscript and ancient book outside the academia was limited to the world of collectors, with such specialized antiquarians as Hans Peter Kraus (1907–1988) in New York, who has been one of the most important for several decades (Kraus published an autobiography: A Rare Saga: The Autobiography of H. P. Kraus, 1978; when Kraus’s business closed, the collection was sold: Sotheby’s, The Inventory of H. P. Kraus. Property of Sotheby’s, New York: Sotheby’s, Thursday & Friday, December 4 & 5, 2003); large antiquarian companies as Bernard Quaritch and Maggs Bros. in London, or smaller individual booksellers like Alan G. Thomas in London also (see, for example, his catalogues, Fine Books: Catalogue Twenty-Nine 1972, 1972, and Fine Books: Catalogue Thirty-Four 1975, 1975, which include manuscripts), and, among many others, Heribert Tenschert in Bibermühle (Switzerland). This without mentioning the major auctioneers Christie’s and Sotheby’s worldwide.

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The 20th-century book market was largely dominated by the dispersal of Thomas Phillipps’ collection (for the catalogue of the collection, see Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in bibliotheca D. Thomae Phillipps Bart. A.D. 1837–1871, 4 parts, 1837–1871 [rpt.: The Phillipps Manuscripts: Catalogus librorum manuscriptorum in biblioteca D. Thomae Phillips, BT: impressum typis Medio-Montanis 1837–1871, ed. Alan Noel Latimer Munby, [2001]) (for some catalogues of the dispersal of Phillipps’s manuscripts, see [selection]: William Robinson Ltd., A Selection of Precious Manuscripts, Historic Documents, and Rare Books, the Majority from the Renowned collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, Br (1792–1872), 1950; Sotheby & Co, Bibliotheca Phillippica, Catalogue of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Yugoslav and Slavonic Manuscripts from the Celebrated Collection Formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Br. (1792–1872), New Ser., Sixth Part: comprising … which will be sold by Sotheby & Co, Days of Sale, Monday, 15th June, 1970; Tuesday, 16th June, 1970; Sotheby & Co, Bibliotheca Phillippica, Medieval Manuscripts, new ser., 6th part: Catalogue of Manuscripts on Papyrus, Vellum and Paper of the 7th century to the 18th century from the celebrated collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust, Day of Sale: Tuesday, 30th November 1971; Sotheby & Co, Bibliotheca Phillippica, Catalogue of French, Spanish and Greek Manuscripts and English Charters From the Celebrated Collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792–1872). The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust, new ser., 9th part: Monday, 25th June 1973 and Tuesday, 26th June 1973; Sotheby & Co, Bibliotheca Phillippica, new ser., 4th part: Catalogue of Italian, French, Greek, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian Manuscripts From the Celebrated Collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792–1872). The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust, Tuesday, 8th July, 1975; Sotheby’s, Bibliotheca Phillippica, new ser., 16th part: Catalogue of French, Spanish, Greek and Serbo-Croat Manuscripts with a few Slavonic and Portuguese From the Celebrated Collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792–1872). The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust. [London: Sotheby’s], Monday, 29th June, 1976, and Tuesday, 26th June, 1976; Sotheby’s, Bibliotheca Phillippica, new ser., 18th part: Catalogue of Pritned Books on Science, Medicine and Botany with a Few Botanical Drawings From the Celebrated Collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792–1872) and from other sources. The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust, Monday, 29th November, 1976; Sotheby’s, Bibliotheca Phillippica, new ser., 19th part: Catalogue of English, French, Greek & Icelandic Manuscripts From the celebrated collection formed by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt. (1792–1872). The Property of the Trustees of the Robinson Trust. [London: Sotheby’s], Monday, 27th June, 1977, Tuesday, 28th June, 1977.

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G. Major Trends of Research: Codicology After codicology had emerged as a discipline of its own, the number of publications rapidly increased according to a typical pattern, from introductory to more specialized works. A list follows, which is far from being complete and includes, instead, some representative works on a series of topics ordered according to the process of production of manuscripts (after introductory works) (within each section, works are listed in chronological order of publication): (definition of the field and introduction) Robert Devreesse (1894–1978), Introduction à l’étude des manuscrits grecs, 1954; Léon Gilissen, Prolégomènes à la codicologie, 1977; Denis Trémault, Archéologie du livre médiéval, 1987; Jacques Lemaire, Introduction à la codicologie, 1989; Marilena Maniaci, Archeologia del manoscritto: Metodi, problemi, bibliografia recente, 2002; (terminology, English, Renaissance to modern) Peter Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450–2000, 2008; (terminology, French) Denis Muzerelle, Vocabulaire codicologique du français, 1985; (terminology, Italian) Marilena Maniaci, Terminologia del libro manoscritto, 1996; (terminology, Spanish) Pilar Ostos, Maria Luisa Pardo, and Elena E. Rodríguez, Vocabulario de codicología, 1997; (bibliography, general) Laurel Nichols Braswell, Western Manuscripts from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance: A Handbook, 1981; (bibliography, Greek manuscripts) Paul Canart, Paleografia e codicologia greca: Una rassegna bibliografica, 1991; (current work) Id., “Nouvelles recherches et nouveaux instruments de travail dans le domaine de la codicologie,” Scrittura e civiltà 3 (1979): 267–307; analytical bibliography of current production in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 3rd part: Bibliographische Notizen, Sections 2 A, a: Allgemeine Darstellungen; b: Kataloge, Tafel- und Facsimile Ausgaben, …; c: Kopisten, …, and Scriptorium, Bulletin codicologique; (terminology, Greek, Byzantium) Basile Atsalos, La terminologie du livre-manuscrit à l’époque byzantine, 1971; (bibliography on manuscripts, Vatican library) Paul Canart, and Vittorio Peri (1932–2005), Sussidi bibliografici per i manoscriti greci della bibiotheca Vaticana, 1970; Massimo Ceresa, Bibliografia dei fondi manoscritti della Biblioteca Vaticana (1991–2000), 2005; (form of the book: roll) William A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus, 2004; (transition from roll to codex) Colin Henderson Roberts, The Birth of the Codex, 1983; Alain Blanchard, Les débuts du codex, 1989; (medium: parchment) Julien Leroy (1916–1987), “La description codicologique des manuscrits grecs de parchemin,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 27–41; (medium: paper, production) Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, 1978; Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, 2001; (medium: paper, diffusion) Jean Irigoin, “Les premiers manuscrits grecs écrits sur papier et le problème du

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bombycin,” Scriptorium 4 (1950): 194–204; Id., “Les débuts de l’emploi du papier à Byzance,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 46 (1953): 314–19; Id., “Papiers orientaux et papiers occidentaux,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 45–54; Id., “Les types de formes utilisés dans l’Orient méditerranéen (Syrie, Égypte) du XIe au XIVe siécle,” Papiergeschichte 13 (1963): 18–21; MarieThérèse Le Léannec-Bavavéas, Les papiers non filigranés médiévaux de la Perse à l’Espagne: Bibliographie 1950–1995, 1998; Ead., “Les papiers non filigranés médiévaux dans les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothéque Nationale de France,” Scriptorium 53 (1999): 275–324; (watermarks, methods) Jean Irigoin, “La datation par les filigranes …” (above); Dieter Harlfinger, “Zur Datierung von Handschriften mit Hilfe von Wasserzeichen,” Kodikologie und Textüberlieferung, ed. Dieter Harlfinger, 1980, 144–69; Monique Zerdoun Bat- Yehouda, Les papiers filigranés médiévaux: Essai de méthodologie descriptive, 1989; (watermarks, dictionaries) Vladimir A. Mo sin, ˇ and Seid M. e e Tralji c, ´ Vodeni znakovi XIII. i XIV vijeka – Filigranes des XIII et XIV siècles, 2 vols., 1957; Monumenta chartae papyraceae historiam illustrantia, or Collection of Works and Documents Illustrating the History of Paper, ed. E. J. Labarre, 14 vols. and a Supplement, 1950–1994 (includes the albums by the Zonghi brothers, Bofarull y Sans, Likhachev, and Briquet [above]); Dieter and Joanna Harlfinger, Wasserzeichen aus griechischen Handschriften, 2 vols., 1974–1980; the several volumes by Gerhard Piccard among which: Die Kronenwasserzeichen, 1961; Die Ochsenkopfwasserzeichen, 3 vols., 1966; Die Turmwasserzeichen, 1970; Wasserzeichen Waage, 1978; Wasserzeichen Anker, 1978; Wasserzeichen Horn, 1979; Wasserzeichen Schlüssel, 1979; Wasserzeichen Werkzeug und Waffen, 2 vols., 1980; Wasserzeichen Fabeltiere: Greif-Drache-Einhorn, 1980; Mark L. Sosower, Signa officinarum chartariarum in codicibus graecis saeculo sexto decimo fabricatis in bibliothecis Hispaniae, 2004; (ruling) Julien Leroy, Les types de réglures des manuscrits grecs, 1976; Id., “Quelques systèmes de réglure des manuscrits grecs,” Studia codicologica 1977, 291–312; Jacques-Hubert Sautel, Répertoire de réglures dans les manuscrits grecs sur parchemin, 1995; (layout) Henri-Jean Martin, Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, 1990; (ink) Monique Zerdoun Bat-Yehouda, Les encres noires au Moyen Âge (jusqu’à 1600), 1983; Carlo-Maria Mazzucchi, “Inchiostri bizantini del XII secolo,” Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neogreci, new ser. 42 (2005): 15–62; (writing, concept) Colette Sirat, Jean Irigoin, and Emmanuel Poulle, L’écriture: Le Cerveau, l’oeil et la main, 1990; (writing, origin) Peter Damerow, The Origins of Writing as a Problem of Historical Epistemology, 2006; (writing, general history) Khosro Khazai, Naissance et évolution de l’écriture, 1985; Donald Jackson, The Story of Writing, 1981 (Italian trans.: La scrittura nei secoli, 1988); (writing, semantics) Stanley Morison, Politics and Script: Aspects of Authority and Freedom in the Devel-

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opment of Graeco-Latin Script from the Sixth-Century BC, 1972; Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, 1986; Id., The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, 1987; (paleography, terminology) André Bataille, Pour une terminologie en paléographie grecque, 1954; (paleography, manuals) Elpidio Mioni, Pat Easterling, and Carol Handley, Greek Scripts: An Illustrated Introduction, 2001; Stan Knight, Historical Scripts from Classical Times to the Renaissance, 2003; Guglielmo Cavallo, Il calamo e il papiro: La scrittura greca dell’età ellenistica ai primi secoli di Bisanzio, 2005; (paleography, tables) Colin Henderson Roberts, Greek Literary Hands, 350 B.C.–A.D. 400, 1956; Alexander Turyn, Codices graeci Vaticani saeculis XIII et XIV scripti annorumque notis instructi, 1964; Martin Wittek, Album de paléographie grecque: Spécimens d’écritures livresques du IIIe siècle avant J.C. au XVIIIe siècle, conservés dans des collections belges, 1967; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace, and Elpidio Mioni, Cento codici bessarionei: Catalogo di mostra, 1968; Athanasios D. Komines, Facsimiles of Dated Patmian Codices, 1970 (originally published in Greek in 1968); Richard Seider, Paläographie der griechischen Papyri, vol. 1: Tafeln, 2 parts, 1967–1970; Enrica Follieri (1926–1999), Codices graeci Bibliothecae Vaticanae temporum locorumque ordine digesti commentariis et transciptionibus instructi, 1969; Eric Gardner Turner (1911–1983), Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, 1971 (2nd rev. ed. 1987); Alexander Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in the Libraries of Italy, 2 vols., 1972; Nigel Guy Wilson, Medieval Greek Bookhands: Examples Selected from Greek Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries, 2 fascicles, 1973; Dieter Harlfinger, Specimina griechischer Kopisten der Renaissance, vol. 1: Griechen des 15. Jahrhunderts, 1974; Elpidio Mioni, and Mariarosa Formentin, I codici greci in minuscola dei sec. IX e X della Biblioteca Marciana, 1975; Agamemnôn Tselikas, Deka aiônes ellênikês grafês (9os-19os ai.), 1977 (collection of the Benaki Museum, Athens); Silvio Bernardinello, Autografi greci e greco-latini in Occidente, 1979; Alexander Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in the Libraries of Great Britain, 1980; Ruth Barbour, Greek Literary Hands A-D. 400–1600, 1981; Dieter Harlfinger, Dieter Roderich Reinsch, Josef A. M. Sonderkamp, and Gian-Carlo Prato, Specimina Sinaitica: Die datierten griechischen Handschriften des Katharinin-Klosters auf dem Berge Sinai. 9. bis 12. Jahrhundert, 1983; Guglielmo Cavallo, and Herwig Maehler, Greek Bookhands of the Early Byzantine Period A.D. 300–800, 1987; (dated manuscripts) Turyn, Codices graeci Vaticani saeculis XIII et XIV scripti … (above); Id., Dated Greek Manuscripts … Italy … (above); Id., Dated Greek Manuscripts … Great Britain (above); Manuscrits grecs datés des XIIIe et XIVe siècles conservés dans les bibliothèques publiques de France, 2 vols, 1989–2005; (paleography, evolution of writing) Jean Irigoin, “Structure et évolution des écritures livresques de l’époque byzantine,” Polychronion Fest-

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schrift für Franz Dölger, 1966, 253–65; (paleography, majuscule) Guglielmo Cavallo, Ricerche sulla maiuscola biblica, 1967; Jean Irigoin, “L’onciale grecque de type copte,” Jahrbuch der Östereichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 8 (1959): 29–51; Guglielmo Cavallo, “Funzione e strutture della maiuscola greca tra i secoli VIII–XI,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 95–110; (paleography, minuscule) Herbert Hunger, Studien zur griechischen Paläeographie, 1954, 22–32: “Die Perlschrift, eine Stilrichtung der griechischen Buchschrift des 11. Jahrhunderts”; Enrica Follieri, “La minuscola libraria dei secoli IX e X,” La Paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 139–65; Herbert Hunger, “Minuskel und Auszeichnungsschriften im 10.–12. Jahrhundert,” ibid., 201–20; Jean Irigoin, “Une écriture du Xe siècle: la minuscule bouletée,” ibid., 191–99; Cyril Mango, “L’origine de la minuscule,” ibid., 175–80; Silvio Bernardinello, “Nuovi manoscritti in minuscola ‘bouletée’ dalle biblioteche di Firenze, Ochrida, Padova, Venezia, Wolfenbüttel,” Miscellanea codicologica François Masai dicata, 1979, ed. Pierre Cockshaw (1938–2008), Monique-Cécile Garand, and Pierre Jodogne, 2 vols., 1979, vol. 1, 105–13; Julien Leroy, “Les manuscrits grecs en minuscule des IXe et Xe siècles de la Marcienne,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 27 (1978): 25–48; Maria Luisa Agati, “La congiunzione kai nella minuscola libraria greca,” Scrittura e Civiltà 8 (1984), 69–81; (majuscule letters in minuscule writing) Enrica Follieri, “La reintroduzione di lettere semioncali nei piu antichi manoscritti greci in minuscola,” Bulletino dell’Archivio paleografico italiano, 3rd ser., 1 (1962): 15–36; R. Valentini, “La reintroduzione dell’onciale e la datazione dei manoscritti greci in minuscola,” Scritti in onore di Carlo Diano, 1975, 455–70; Herbert Hunger, “Epigraphische Auszeichnungsmajuskel: Beitrag zu einem bisher kaum beachteten Kapitel der griechischen Paläographie,” Jahrbuch der Östereichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 26 (1977): 193–200; (paleography, areas) (Athos) Boris L. Fonki c, ˇ “Biblioteka Lauri su. Afanasii na Afone v. X–XIII vv.,” Palestinskij Sbornik 17 (1967), 168–69; Id., “La production des livres grecs et les bibliothèques de l’Athos aux Xe-XIIIe ss.: Quelques résultats et perspectives de la recherche,” Bolletino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata n. s. 49–50 (1995–1996): 35–61; (Cyprus) Jean Darrouzes, “Manuscrits originaires de Chypre à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 8 (1950): 162–96; Id., “Autres manuscrits originaires de Chypre,” Revue des Etudes Byzantines 15 (1957): 131–68; Paul Canart, “Un style d’écriture livresque dans les manuscrits chypriotes du XIVe siècle: la chypriote ‘bouclée’,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 303–21; Id., “Les écritures livresques chypriotes du milieu du XIe siècle au milieu du XIIIe et le style Palestino-Chypriote ‘epsilon,’” Scrittura e Civiltà 5 (1981): 17–76; (Grecia) Giancarlo Prato, “Manoscritti greci in Grecia,” Scrit-

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ture, libri e testi … (above), 3–24; Id., “Scritture e libri in Grecia tra IX e XIV secolo,” Bisanzio fuori di Bisanzio, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 1991, 48–65; (Italy, Southern) Robert Devreesse, Les manuscrits grecs de l’Italie méridionale (histoire, classement, paléographie), 1955; Julien Leroy, “Les manuscrits grecs d’Italie,” Codicologica 2 (1978): 52–71; Id., “Le Parisinus gr. 1477 et la détermination de l’origine des manuscrits italo-grecs d’après la forme des initiales,” Scriptorium 22 (1978): 191–212; Paul Canart, “Le livre grec en Italie méridionale sous les règnes Normands et Souabe: aspects matériels et sociaux,” Scrittura e Civiltà 2 (1978): 103–62; André Grabar (1896–1990), Les manuscrits grecs enluminés de provenance italienne (IXe–XIe siècles), 1972; Guglielmo Cavallo, “Scritture italo-greche librarie e documentarie,” Bisanzio e l’Italia: Raccolta di studi in memoria di Agostino Pertusi, 1982, 29–38; Giancarlo Prato, “Attività scrittoria in Calabria tra IX e X secolo: Qualche riflessione,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 36 (1986): 219–228; Annaclara Cataldi Palau, “Manoscritti greco-latini dell’Italia meridionale: Un nuovo Salterio vergato da Romano di Ullano,” Nuove ricerche sui manoscritti greci dell’Ambrosiana: Atti del Convegno, Milano, 5–6 giugno 2003, 2004, 37–78; (Reggio di Calabria) Paul Canart, and Julien Leroy, “Les manuscrits en style de Reggio: Etude paléographique et codicologique,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine (above), 241–61; (West) Guglielmo Cavallo, “La produzione di manoscritti greci in occidente tra età tardo antica e alto medioevo: Note ed ipotesi,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 (1977), 111–31; (paleography, periods) (9th c.) Boris L. Fonki c, ˇ “Sulla datazione dei codici greci in minuscola del secolo IX,” Byzantina Mediterranea: Festschrift für Johannes Koder zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Belke, Ewald Kislinger, Andreas Külzer, and Maria A. Stassinopoulou, 2007, 175–81; (1071–1261) Boris L. Fonki c, ˇ “Les manuscrits à Byzance (1071–1261),” XVe Congrès international d’études byzantines, Rapports et co-rapports: II Langue, Littérature, Philologie, 3: Les conditions matérielles, sociales et économiques de la production culturelle à Byzance, 1976, 26–35; (1204–1261) Giancarlo Prato, “La produzione libraria in area greco-orientale nel periodo del regno latino di Costantinopoli (1204–1261),” Scrittura e Civiltà 5 (1981): 105–147; (Palaeologan period) Id., “I manoscritti greci dei secoli XIII e XIV: Note paleografiche,” Paleografia e codicologia: Atti … (above), 131–149; Id., “Scritture arcaizzanti della prima età dei paleologi e i loro modelli,” Scrittura e Civiltà 3 (1979), 151–193; (paleography, tachygraphy) Sofia Torallas Tovar, and Klaas A. Worp, To the Origins of Greek Stenography: P. Monts. Roca 1, 2006; (paleography, styles) Paul Canart, “Le problème du style d’écriture dit en as de pique dans les manuscrits italo-grecs, “Atti del 4o congresso storicocalabrese, 1969, 53–69; Dieter Harlfinger, “Zu griechischen Kopisten und Schriftstilen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts,” La paléographie grecque et byzantine,

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(above), 326–62; (colophon) Thérèse Glorieux-De Gand, Formules de copiste: Les colophons des manuscrits datés, 1991; (binding) Elisabeth Baras, Jean Irigoin, and Jean Vezin. La reliure médiévale: Trois conférences d’initiation, 1981; Legature bizantine vaticane e marciane: Storia dei materiali e delle tecniche di manifattura, ed. Assunta Di Febo, 1989; Heinz Petersen, Bucheinbände, 1991; Philippa J.M. Marks, Bookbinding: History and Techniques, 1998; Anthony Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting: Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their Books and Bindings, 1999; Annaclara Cataldi Palau, “Legature costantinopolitane del monastero di Prodromo Petra tra i manoscritti di Giovanni di Ragusa (+ 1443),” Codices Manuscripti 37/38 (2001): 11–50; La reliure médiévale: Pour une description normalisée, ed. Guy Lanoë, 2008; Nikê Tsirônê, To biblio sto Buzantio: Buzantinê kai metabuzantinê bibliodesia. Praktika diethnous sunedriou, Athêna 13–16 oktôbriou 2005, 2008; (trade) Jean Irigoin, “Les ambassadeurs à Venise et le commerce des manuscrits grecs dans les années 1540–1550,” Venezia centro di Mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV– XVI) Aspetti e problemi, ed. Hans Georg Beck (1910–1999) et al., 2 vols., 1977, vol. 2, 399–415; Paul Canart, “Jean Nathanaël et le commerce des manuscrits grecs à Venise au XVIe siècle,” ibid., vol. 2, 419–38; Ellês Giôtopoulou-Sisilianou, Antônios o Eparchos enas kerkuraios oumanistês tou IST’ aiôna, 1978 (owners and readers) Giovanna Derenzini, “Demetrio Triclinio e il codice marciano greco 264,” Scrittura e Civiltà 3 (1979): 223–41; (manuscripts and printing) Griechische Handschriften und Aldinen, ed. Dieter Harlfinger, Joanna Harlfinger, Josef A. M. Sonderkamp, and Martin Sicherl, 1978. H. Major Trends of Research: Copyists and Scriptoria (signed manuscripts and identification of hands, general works) Alphonse Dain, “Copistes grecs de la Renaissance,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé n. s. 3 (1963): 361–363; Christos G. Patrinelis, “Ellênnes kôdikografoi tôn chronôn tês Annagennêseôs,” Epetêris Mesaiônikou Archeiou 8–9 (1958–1959): 63–124; Paul Canart, “Scribes grecs de la Renaissance,” Scriptorium 17 (1963): 56–82; Karl Antoon de Meyier, “Scribes grecs de la Renaissance,” Scriptorium 18 (1964): 258–66; Jürgen Wiesner, and Ulrich Victor, “Griechische Schreiber der Renaissance,” Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici n. s. 8–9 (1971–1972): 51–66; Carla Casetti Brach, “Copisti greci del Medioevo e del Rinascimento: Aggiunte ai repertori di Vogel-Gardthausen, Patrinelis, Canart, De Meyier e Wiesner-Victor,” Epetêris Etarireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 42 (1975): 234–52; Ernst Gamillscheg, and Dieter Harlfinger, “Specimen eines Repertoriums …” (above); Martin Sicherl, “Parerga zu griechischen Kopisten der Renaissance,” Studi in onore di Aristide

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Colonna, 1982, 265–81; Gamillscheg and Harlfinger, Repertorium … (above). (copyists: signed manuscripts and identification of hands, individual copyists) (Anonymus Dioscoridis) Daniele Arnesano, “Il ‘Copista del Dioscoride’: Un anonimo salentino del secolo XIII,” Bolletino dei Classici, 3rd ser., 24 (2003): 29–55; (Anonymus Harvardianus) Philippe Hoffman, “Un mystérieux collaborateur d’Alde Manuce: L’Anonymus Harvardianus,” and “Autres données relatives à un mystérieux collaborateur d’Alde,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Age, Temps Modernes 97 (1985): 45–143, and 98 (1986): 673–708 respectively; (Apostolês Michaêl) Martin Wittek, “Manuscrits et codicoloqie. 4: Pour une étude du scriptorium de Michel Apostolès et consorts,” Scriptorium 7 (1953): 290–97; Id., “Michel Apostolès et la survie des textes classiques grecs,” Ph.D. thesis University of Brussels, 1963; (Apostolês, Michaêl and Aristoboulos) Paul Canart, “Note sur l’écriture de Michel et Aristobule Apostolès et sur quelques manuscrits attribuables à ce dernier,” Un esemplare autografo di Arsenio e il Florilegio di Stobeo, ed. Anna Lucia Di Lello-Finuoli, 1971, 87–101; (Bessarion) Henri D. Saffrey, “Recherches sur quelques autographes du Cardinal Bessarion et leur caractère autobiographique,” Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 3, 1964, 263–97; Elpidio Mioni, “Bessarione scriba e alcuni suoi collaboratori,” Miscellanea marciana di studi bessarionei, 1976, 263–318; (Dêmêtrios Damilas) Paul Canart, “Démétrius Damilas alias le Librarius Florentius,” Rivista di Studi bizantini e neoel1enici, new ser. 14–16 (1977–1979): 281–347; (Andreas Darmarios) Otto Kresten, “Der Schreiber und Handschriftenhändler Andreas Darmarios: Eine biographische Skizze,” Griechische Kodikologie …, ed. Harlfinger (above), 406–19; Id., “Die Handschriften des A. Darmarios im Jahre 1564,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 24 (1975): 147–93; (Nicolas de la Torre) Karl Antoon de Meyier, “Les manuscrits grecs de Leyde écrits par Nicolas de la Torre,” Scriptorium 5 (1951): 46–59; Gregorio De Andrés, El Cretense Nicolas de la Torre, copista griego de Felipe II, 1969; Mark Sosower, “The Greek Manuscripts Written by Nicholas Turrianos in the Library of Diego de Covarrubias (1577), Bishop of Segovia,” Codices Manuscripti 41 (2002): 13–30; (Glynzounios) Martin Sicherl, “Manuel Glynzounios als Schreiber griechischer Handschriften,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 49 (1956): 34–54; Paul Canart, “Nouveaux manuscrits copiés par Emmanuel Glynzounios,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 39–40 (1972–1973): 527–544; (Geôrgios and Manouêl Grêgoropoulos) Elenê Kakoulidi, “Duo neoi kôdikes tôn krêtikôn bibliografôn Geôrgiou kai Manouêl Manousou Grêgoropoulou,” Ellênika 21 (1968): 178–79; (Iôannês of Korônê) David Speranzi, “Un nuovo codice di ‘Giovanni di Corone’: lo Strabone Laur. Plut. 28.40,” Medievo e

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Rinascimento 16 (2005): 61–80; (Andronikos Kallistos) Robert B. Todd, “Baltasar Meliavacca, Andronicus Callistus, and the Greek Aristotellian Commentators in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 37 (1994): 67–75; (Kônstantinos Laskaris) Teresa Martinez Manzano, Konstantinos Laskaris: Humanist, Philologe, Lehrer, Kopist, 1994; Ead., “Un nuevo manuscrito de Constantino Láscaris en la Biblioteca universitaria de Gotinga,” Erytheia 21 (2000): 131–36; (Michaêl Louloudês) Antonio Bravo García, and Inmaculada Peréz Martin, “Un nuevo manuscrito copiado por Miguel Luludes: el Escurialensis . III. 11,” ‘Opôra: Studi in onore di Mgr Paul Canart per il LXX compleanno, 1998, 227–234; (Manouêl Malaxos) Giuseppe De Gregorio, Il copista greco Manouel Malaxos: Studio biografico e paleografico-codicologico, 1991; (Theodôros Meliteniôtês) Régine Leurquin, “Un manuscrit autographe de la Tribiblos astronomique de Théodore Méliténiote: le Vaticanus graecus 792,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 145–62; (Moschos family) Graham Speake, and Francis Vian, “The So-Called D Manuscript of Apollonius,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 14 (1973): 301–18; Graham Speake, “The Scribal Habits of Demetrius Moschus,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974): 113–33; (Markos Mousouros) Martin Sicherl, “Musuros Handschriften,” Serta Turyniana: Studies in Greek Literature and Paleography in Honor of Alexander Turyn, ed. John Heller, 1974, 564–608; (Iôannês Onorios a Maglia) Maria Luisa Agati, Paul Canart, and Carlo Federici, “Giovanni Onorio da Maglie instaurator librorum graecorum à la fin du Moyen âge,” Scriptorium 50 (1996), 363–69; (Petros Krêtikos) Ernst Gamillscheg, “Beobachtungen zur Kopistentätigkeit des Petros Kretikos,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 24 (1975): 137–45; Jean Irigoin, “Deux copistes d’Apollonios de Rhodes au début du XVe siècle: Pierre le Crétois et Georges Chrysokokkès,” Rodônia: Timê ston M. I. Manousaka, 2 vols., 1994, vol. 1, 147–55; (Maximos Planoudês) André Allard, “L’Ambrosianus Et 157 sup., un manuscrit autographe de Maxime Planude,” Scriptorium 33 (1979): 219–34; Mariarosa Formentin, “La grafia di Massimo Planude,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 32 (1982): 87–96; (Emmanouêl Probatarês) Paul Canart, “Les manuscrits copiés par Emmanuel Provataris (1546–7570 environ),” Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, vol. 6, 1964, 173–287; (Kônstantinos Resinos) Paul Canart, “Constantin Rhésinos, théologien populaire et copiste de manuscrits,” Studi di bibliografia in onore di Tammaro De Marinis, 2 vols., 1964, vol. 1, 241–71; (Iôannês Seberos) Paul Canart, “Un copiste expansif: Jean Sévère de Lacédémone,” Studia codicologica, ed. Kurt Treu, 1977, 117–39; (Zacharias Skordulês) Ernst Gamillscheg, “Scordyliana,” Codices manuscripti 3 (1977): 17–22; (Nikolaos Sofianos) William A. Pettas, “Nikolaos Sophianos and Greek Printing in Rome,” The Library,

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5th ser., 29 (1974): 206–13; (Geôrgios Tribizias, Andronikos Kallistos, Geôrgios Ermônumos) Aubrey Diller, “Three Greek Scribes Working for Bessarion: Trivizias, Callistus, Hermonymus,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 10 (1967): 403–10; (Dêmêtrios Tribolês) Alexandre Oleroff, “Démétrius Trivolis, copiste et bibliophile,” Scriptorium 4 (1950): 260–63; (scriptoria, general) Jean Irigoin, “Pour une étude des centres de copie byzantins, II. Quelques groupes de manuscrits,” Scriptorium 13 (1959): 177–209; (scriptoria and libraries) Jean Irigoin, “Centres de copie et bibliothèques,” Byzantine Books and Bookmen, 1975, 17–27; Horst Blanck, “Scriptoria e biblioteche nel mondo classico,” La città e la parola scritta, ed. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli (1911–2010), 1997, 3–61; Francis Newton, The Scriptorium and Library at Monte Cassino 1058–1105, 1999; (scriptoria) (monastery of Dousikou) Photios Ar. Demetrakopoulou, “To kôdikografiko ergastêrio tês monês Dousikon ton 16o aiôna kai o bibliografos Kallistos,” Epetêris Etaireias Buzantinôn Spoudôn 50 (1999–2000), 403–47; (Iôannikios) Nigel Guy Wilson, “A Mysterious Byzantine Scriptorium,” Scrittura e civiltà 7 (1983): 161–76; Id., “New Light on Burgundio of Pisa,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, 3rd ser., 4 (1986): 113–18; Id., “Ioannikios and Burgundio: a Survey of the Problem,” Scritture, libri e testi … (above), 447–55; (scriptorium of Paleologina) Inmaculada Pérez Martín, “Irene Cumno y el ‘Taller de la Paleologuina’,” Scrittura e civiltà 19 (1995): 223–34; (Guillaume Pellicier) Annaclara Palau, “Les copistes de Guillaume Pellicier …” (above). I. Major Trends of Research: Codicology and Textual Tradition (general studies) Dieter Harlfinger, Griechische Kodikologie und Textüberlieferung, 1980; Guglielmo Cavallo, Dalla parte del libro: Storie di trasmissione dei classici, 2002; (general studies, areas, Southern Italy) Jean Irigoin, “L’Italie méridionale et la tradition des textes antiques,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 18 (1969): 37–55; Vittorio Peri, “Birgilios = sapientissimus: Riflessi culturali latino-greci nell’agiographia bizantina,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 19 (1976): 1–40; Giovanna Derenzini, “All’origine della tradizione di opere scientifiche classiche: vicende di testi e di codici tra Bisanzio e Palermo,” Physis 18 (1976): 87–103; Paul Canart, “Le livre grec en Italie méridionale sous les règnes Normand et Souabe: aspects matériels et sociaux,” Scrittura e Civiltà 2 (1978): 103–162; Guglielmo Cavallo, “La trasmissione scritta della cultura graeca in Calabria e in Sicilia tra i secoli X–XV: Consistenza, tipologia, funzione,” Scrittura e civiltà 4 (1980): 157–245; Id., “La cultura italo-greca nella procuzione libraria,” I bizantini in Italia, 1982, 495–612; Id., “Mezzogiorno svevo e cultura greca: Materiale per una messa

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a punto,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84–85 (1991–1992): 430–40; (general studies, periods, Renaissance) Paul L. Rose, “Humanist Culture and Renaissance Mathematics: The Italian Libraries of the Quattrocento,” Studies in the Renaissance 20 (1973): 46–105; (studies on specific authors) (Aristotle) Harlfinger, Die Textgeschichte … (above); Aristoteles graecus: Die Griechischen Manuskripte … (above); (Autolycus of Pitane) Mogenet, Autolycus de Pitane … (above); (Dioscorides) Antonio Giuliano, “Il codice di Dioscuride a Vienna in una notizia di Giovanni Tortelli,” La parola del passato 23 (1968): 52–54; Pan. G. Kritikos, and Stella Athanassoula, “Oi en Elladi euriskomenoi farmakeutikoi kôdikes: Athônikoi kôdikes tou Dioskoridou,” Archeia tês farmakeutikês 4 (1972): 41–69; (Euripides) Alexander Turyn, The Byzantine Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Euripides, 1957; (Jambichus) Martin Sicherl, Die Handschriften, Ausgaben und Übersetzungen von Jamblichos De Mysteriis: Eine kritisch-historische Studie,1957; (Lucian) Jürgen Coenen, Lukian Zeus tragodos: Überlieferungsgeschichte, Text und Kommentar, 1977; (Marc Aurelius) Charles Astruc, “Un fragment de manuscrit grec (extraits de Marc-Aurèle et d’Elien) conservé à la Bibliothèque Mazarine dans la Collection Faugère,” Serta Turyniana … (above), 525–46; (Musaeus) Paolo Eleuteri, Storia della tradizione manoscritta di Museo, 1981; (Strabo) Aubrey Diller, The Textual Tradition of Strabo’s Geography, 1975; (Theognis) Douglas C. C. Young, “A Codicological inventory of Theognis manuscripts,” Scriptorium 7 (1953): 3–36; (Theophrast) John J. Keaney, “The Early Tradition of Theophrastus’ Historia Plantarum,” Hermes 96 (1968): 293–98; Benedict Einarson, “The Manuscripts of Theophrastus’ Historia Plantarum,” Classical Philology 71 (1976): 67–76; (Xenophon) Michele Bandini, “Senofonte nella prima età paleologa: il testo di Memor. IV 3, 7–8 nel codice Urb. gr. 95,” Nea Rômê 3 (2006): 305–16. J. Major Trends of Research: Illustration (introductions) Maurits Smeyers, La miniature, 1974; Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms, 1994; (inventory of reproductions) Sever J. Voicu, and Serenella D’Alisera, I.M.A.G.E.S.: Index in Manuscriptorum Graecorum Edita specimina, 1981; (general studies) Kurt Weitzmann, Ancient book Illumination, 1959; Victor Lazarev (1897–1976), Storia della pittura bizantina, 1967; Hans Belting, Das illuminierte Buch in der spätbyzantinischen Gesellschaft, 1970; Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscripts Illumination, ed. Herbert Kessler, 1971: (126–150) “The Classical Heritage in the Art of Constantinople”; (176–223) “The Character and Intellectual Origins of the Macedonian Renaissance”; Kurt Weitzmann, The Place of Book Illumination in Byzan-

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tine Art, 1975; Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1986 (Italian trans. Manoscritti miniati, 1987); Giulia Bologna, Manoscritti e miniature: Il libro prima di Gutenberg, 1988 (Engl. trans.: Illuminated Manuscripts: The Book Before Gutenberg, 1988); (analysis by time period) (1261–1667) John Lowden, “Manuscript Illumination in Byzantium 1261–1667,” Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans, 2004, 259–69; (manuscripts by places of preservation) (America) Illuminated Greek Manuscripts in American Collections: An Exhibition in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, ed. Gary Vikan, 1973; (Athens) Catalogue of the Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts of the National Library of Greece, 3 vols., 1978–1997; (Athos) Oi thêsauroi tou Agiou Orous, 1st ser.: Eikonografêmena cheirografa, 4 vols., 1973–1991; (London, British Library) Janet Backhouse, The Illuminated Page: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Painting in the British Library, 1997; (Oxford) Irmgard Hutter, Corpus der byzantinischen Miniaturhandschriften, vols. 1–3: Oxford, Bodleian Library, 1977–1982; vol. 4: Oxford, Christ Church, 1993; vol. 5: Oxford, College Libraries, 1997; (Sinai) Kurt Weitzmann, and George Galavaris (d. 2003), The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Illuminated Manuscripts, 1990; (relation illustration and text) Kurt Weitzmann, Problems in the Relation between Text and Illustration, 1982; (illustration, studies, topics) (Arabic world) Kurt Weitzmann, “The Greek Sources of Islamic Scientific Illustrations,” Archaeologia Orientalia in Memoriam E. Herzfeld, 1952, 244–66; (Athos) George Galavaris, “Aspects of Book Illumination on Mt. Athos,” Diethnes Sumposio Buzantinê Makedonia 324–1430 m. Ch., Thessalonikê 29–31 Oktôbriou 1992, 1995, 91–103; (Beatus de Liébana) John Williams, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, 5 vols., 1994–2003; and the facsimiles of several manuscripts: Beato de Liébana: Códice de Fernando I y Doña Sancha, 2 vols., 1994; Beato de Liébana: Códice del Monasterio de San Andrés de Arroyo, Palencia, 2 vols., 1999; Beato de Liébana: Códice del Monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña, 2 vols., 2000; Beato de Liébana de Girona, 2 vols., 2003; Beato de Liébana: Códice del Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos, 2 vols., 2004; (botany) Giulia Orofino, “Gli erbari di età sveva,” Gli erbari medievali tra scienza, simbolo, magia: Testi del VII Colloquio Medievale, 1994, 325–46; (Dioscorides) Otto Mazal, Pflanzen, Wurzeln, Säfte, Samen: Antike Heilkunst: Miniaturen des Wiener Dioskurides, 1981; Alain Touwaide, “Un recueil grec de pharmacologie du Xe siecle illustré au XIVe siècle: le Vaticanus gr. 284,” Scriptorium 39 (1985): 13–56; Id., “Les manuscrits grecs illustrés du traité Peri ulês iatrikês de Dioscoride,” Proceedings of the XXX International Congress of the History of Medicine, Dusseldorf 1986, 1988, 1148–51; Salvatore Lilla, Guglielmo Cavallo, Giulia Orofino, and Carlo Bertelli, Dioskurides, Codex Neapolitanus, Napoli, Biblioteca nazionale, Ms. Ex Vindob. gr. 1: Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe in Original-

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format, Graz and Rome, 1988; Otto Mazal, Der Wiener Dioskurides: Codex medicus graecus 1 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2 vols., 1998 (a small size reproduction of codex Vindobonensis medicus graecus 1); Mauro Ciancaspro, Guglielmo Cavallo, and Alain Touwaide, Dioscurides, De materia medica: Codex Neapolitanus graecus 1 of the National Library of Naples, Athens, 1999; Alain Touwaide, “The Salamanca Dioscorides (Salamanca, University Library. 2659),” Erytheia 24 (2003): 125–58; (Gregory Nazianzenus) George Galavaris, The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies of Gregory Nazianzeus, 1969; (hippiatric) Stavros Lazaris, “Les rapports entre l’illustration et le texte de l’Epitome, manuel byzantin d’hippiatrie,” Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences, 49 (1999): 281–301; (Hraban Maur) Diane O. Le Berrurier, The Pictorial Sources of Mythological and Scientific Illustrations in Hrabanus Maurus’ ‘De rerum naturis’, 1978; Marianne Reuter, Metodi illustrativi nel Medioevo: Testo e immagine nel codice 132 di Montecassino ‘Liber Rabani de originibus rerum’, 1993; (Italy, southern) Irmgard Hutter, “La décoration et la mise en page des manuscrits grecs de l’Italie méridionale: Quelques observations,” Histoire et culture dans l’Italie byzantine: Acquis et nouvelles recherches, ed. André Jacob, Jean-Marie Martin, and Ghislaine Noyé, 2006, 69–93; (Antônios Malakês) Robrt S. Nelson, “The Manuscripts of Antonios Malakes and the Collecting and Appreciation of Illuminated Books in Early Palaeogan Period,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 36 (1986): 229–54; (mythology) Kurt Weitzmann, Greek Mythology in Byzantine Art, 1951; (Nicander) Stavros Lazaris, “A Propos du Nicandre de Paris (Suppl. gr. 247): son illustration et son modèle,” Scriptorium 59 (2005): 221–27; (Octateuchs) Kurt Weitzmann, and Massimo Bernabò, with the collaboration of Rita Tarasconi, The Byzantine Octateuchs, 1999; (Physiologus) Stavros Lazaris, “Le Physiologus grec et son illustration: Quelques considérations à propos d’un nouveau témoin illustré (Dujcev. ˇ gr. 297),” Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions textuelles, ed. Baudouin van den Abeele, 2005, 141–318; (Regimen sanitatis) Giulia Orofino, “L’iconografia del Regimen Sanitatis in un manoscritto angioino (Napoli, Bibl. Naz., XIII C 37),” Studi Medievali 3rd ser., 31 (1990): 775–87; (Sacra parallela) Kurt Weitzmann, The Miniatures of the Sacra parallela, Parisinus graecus 923, 1979; (Septuagint) Kurt Weitzmann, The Illustrations in the Manuscripts of the Septuagint, 1941; (Vangel) Saveria Rito, “Un Vangelo di età comnena dal monastero del Prodromo di Petra e Constantinopoli: l’Angel. gr. 123,” Nuovi Annali della Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari 20 (2006): 5–17; (Virgil) David H. Wright, The Roman Virgil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design, 2001; (Zoology) Jean Théodoridès, “Remarques sur l’iconographie zoologique dans certains manuscrits médicaux byzantins et étude des miniatures zoologiques du

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codex Vaticanus graecus 284,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 10 (1961): 21–29; Id., “Intérêt scientifique des miniatures zoologiques d’un manuscrit byzantin de la ‘Matière médicale’ de Dioscoride (Cod. M 652 Pierpont Morgan Library, New-York),” Acta Biologica Debrecina 7–8 (1969–70): 265–72; Zoltan Kadar, Survivals of Greek zoological illuminations in Byzantin manuscripts, 1978. K. Major Trends of Research: Collections and Libraries For several collections, see above. Furthermore, see: (bibliography) Paul Oskar Kristeller, Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600: A List of Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections, 4th rev. and enlarged ed. by Sigfrid Krämer, 1993; (general) Konstantinos Sp. Staikos, Libraries from Antiquity to the Renaissance and Major Humanist and Monastery Libraries (3000 BC-AD 1600), 1997; Id., The History of the Library in Western Civilization, 3 vols. published so far, 2004–2007; (ancient libraries in Byzantium) (Constantinople, Thessalonika and Asia Minor) Otto Volk, “Die byzantinischen Klosterbibliotheken von Konstantinopel, Thessalonike und Kleinasien,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Munich, 1954; (Constantinople) Kônstantinou Manafê, Ai en Kônstantinoupolei bibliothêkai autokratorikai kai patriarchikê kai peri tôn en autais cheirografôn mechri tês alôseôs (1453): Meletê filologikê, 1972; (Constantinople, Prodromos) Elenê D. Kakoulidê, “Ê bibliothêkê tês Monês Prodromou Petras stên Kônstantinoupolê,” Ellênika 21 (1968): 3–39; (El Escorial) Gregorio de Andrés, Catalogo de los codices desaparecidos de la Real Biblioteca de El Escurial, 1968; Id., Documentos para la Historia del Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real del Escorial, vol. 7, 1964; (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana) Cesare Pasini, “Giovanni Donato Ferrari e i manoscritti greci dell’Ambrosiana (con note su Francesco Bernardino e Ottavio Ferrari e sui manoscritti di Ottaviano Ferrari all’Ambrosiana),” Nea Rômê 1 (2004): 351–86; Id., “Giovanni Santa Maura e la Biblioteca Ambrosiana,” Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici n. s. 42 (2005): 223–70; (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France) Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800, 1988; (Salamanca, University) Teresa Martínez Manzano, “El Salm. 2659 de Dioscórides y la historia del fondo griego de la Biblioteca de Salamanca procedente del Colegio de San Bartolomé,” Helmantica 44 (1998): 309–27; (Vatican Library) Robert Devreesse, “Pour l’histoire des manuscrits du fonds Vatican grec,” Collectanea Vaticana in honorem Anselmi M. Card. Albareda a Bibliotheca Apostolica edita, 315–36; Id., Le fonds grec de la Bibliothèque Vaticane des origines à Paul V, 1965; Jeanne Bignami Odier (1902–1989) and José Ruysschaert, La Bibliothèque vaticane de Sixte IV à Pie XI: Recherches sur l’histoire des collections de manuscrits, 1973; Salvatore Lilla, I manoscritti vaticani

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greci: Lineamenti di una storia del fondo, 2004; (collections and collectors) (Augsburg) Donald F. Jackson, “Augsburg Greek Manuscript Acquisitions 1545–1600,” Codices Manuscripti 29 (2000): 1–10; Id., “Augsburg Greek Manuscript Acquisitions 1600–1633,” Codices Manuscripti 30 (2000): 27–34; (Johannes Cuno) Martin Sicherl, Johannes Cuno, ein Wegbereiter des Griechischen in Deutschland, 1978; (John Moore [1646–1714]) Donald F. Jackson, “The Greek Manuscripts of John Moore and Etienne Baluze,” Codices Manuscripti 56/57 (2006): 29–42; (Ziskind collection) Bernard M. W. Knox, “The Ziskind Collection of Greek Manuscripts,” The Yale University Library Gazette 32 (1957): 39–56. L. Major Trends of Research: Cataloguing and Catalogues (guidelines for the catalographic description of manuscripts) Guide pour l’élaboration d’une notice de manuscrit, 1977; Viviana Jemolo, and Mirella Morelli, Guida ad una descrizione catalografica uniforme del manoscritto, 1984; Richtlinien Handschriftenkatalogisierung, 4th ed., 1985 (published by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft); Pieter F. J. Obbema, “Varia Bibliographica: Towards a Uniform Inventory of Surviving Medieval Manuscripts,” Quaerendo 17 (1987): 284–88; Armando Petrucci, La descrizione del manoscritto: storia, problemi, modelli, 2nd rev. ed., 2001; (computerized description of manuscripts) The Use of Computers in Cataloging Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts: Papers from the International Workshop in Munich, 10–12 August 1989, ed. Menso Folkerts, and Andreas Kühne, 1990; Bibliographic Access to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts: A Survey of Computerized Data Bases and Information Services, ed. Wesley M. Stevens, 1991; Metodologie informatiche per il censimento e la documentazione dei manoscritti ed. Antonio Maria Adorisio, 1993; (new locations of manuscripts) Guy Fink-Errera, “A propos des bibliothèques d’Espagne: Tables de concordance,” Scriptorium, 13 (1959): 89–118; (cataloguing of manuscripts, overview) cataloguing of manuscripts remained a major enterprise during the last decades of the 20th century. Periodic notices about new catalogues or cataloguing enterprises were published such as: Jean Irigoin, “Trois catalogues de manuscrits grecs,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 74 (1961): 275–291; Id., “Les manuscrits grecs, I,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 83 (1970): 500–29, and “Les manuscrits grecs, II,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 85 (1972): 543–71; or Renate Schipke, “Die Katalogisierung mittelalterlicher Handschriften in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” Scriptorium 37 (1983): 275–85. It became necessary to publish toward the end of the 20th century a “new Richard”: Jean-Marie Olivier, Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de manuscrits grecs de Marcel Richard. Troisième édition entièrement refondue, 1995.

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(catalogues) among the many catalogues, notes or any other form of list of Greek manuscripts published during the second half of the 20th century, one could quote the following items, significant from some viewpoint, be it the methods, the novelty, the richness of the collection catalogued, or any other remarkable feature (chronological order of publication): Valentinus Capocci (1901–1969), Codices Barberiniani graeci, vol. 1: 1–163, 1958; Charles Astruc, and Marie-Lousie Concasty, Bibliothèque nationale, Catalogue des manuscrits grecs, 3rd part: Le Supplément grec, vol. 3: nos 901–1371, 1960 (with a preface by Alphonse Dain); Ruth Barbour, “Summary Description of the Greek Manuscripts from the Library at Holkham Hall,” The Bodleian Library Record 6 (1960): 591–613; Elpidio Mioni, Bibliothecae Divi Marci Venetiarum codices graeci manuscripti, 3 vols. in 4 parts, 1960–1972; William H. Bond, Supplement to the Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada originated by Christopher U. Faye, 1962; Samuel Arthur Joseph Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, vol. 1: MSS. written before 1650 AD, 1962; Gino Pierleoni (1875–1951), Catalogus codicum graecorum Bibliothecae nationalis Neopolitanae, vol. 1, 1962; Linos Politês, “Ta cheirografa tou Agiou Orous,” Nea Estia 74 (1963): 116–27; Antonio Tovar (1911–1994), Catalogus codicum graecorum universitatis salamantinae, 1: Collectio Universitatis antiqua, 1963; Karel Adriaan de Meyier, and Elfriede Hulshoff Pol, Bibliotheca Universitatis Leidensis, Codices manuscripti, vol. 8: Codices bibliothecae publicae graeci, 1965; Nikos A. Bees (1887–1958), Les manuscrits des Météores, Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits conservés dans les monastères des Météores, vol. 1: Les manuscrits du monastère de Transfiguration, 1967; Martin Wittek, “Les manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier: nouvelles acquisitions (1974–1978),” Miscellanea Codicologica F. Masai Dicata (above), 551–57; Elpidius Mioni, Bibliothecae Divi Marci Venetiarum codices Graeci Manuscripti, vol. 1: Thesaurus Antiquus, Codices 1–209; vol. 2: Thesaurus Antiquus, Codices 300–625, 1981–1985; JeanMarie Olivier, and Marie-Aude Monegier du Sorbier, Catalogue des manuscrits grecs de Tchécoslovaquie, 1983; Nikos A. Bees, Les manuscrits des Météores. Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits conservés dans les monastères des Météores, vol. 2: Les manuscrits du monastère de Barlaam, 1984; Salvatore Lilla, Codices Vaticani Graeci: codices 2162–2254 (Codices Columnenses), 1985; Demetrios Z. Sofianos, Les manuscrits des Météores,Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits conservés dans les monastères des Météores, vol. 3: Les manuscrits du monastère de Saint-Etienne, 1986; Athanasiou Kominê, Patmiakê bibliothêkê êtoi neos katalogos tôn cheirografôn kôdikôn tês ieras monês agiou Iôannou tou theologou Patmou, vol. 1: Kôdikôn 1–101, 1988; Joseph Mogenet, Codices Barberiniani Graeci, vol. 2: Codices 164–281, ed. Julien Leroy, and Paul Canart, 1989; Demetrios Z. Sofianos,

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Les manuscrits des Météores, Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits conservés dans les monastères des Météores, vol. 4: Les manuscrits du monastère de Sainte-Trinité (Hagia Triada), 2 vols., 1993; Angel Escobar Chico, Codices Caesaraugustani Graeci: Catálogo de los manuscritos griegos de la biblioteca capitular de La Seo Zaragoza, 1993; Panagiôtê Sôtêroudê, Iera Monê Ibêrôn, Katalogos ellênikôn cheirografôn, vol. 1: 1–100, 1998; Scot Mckendrick, The British Library: A Summary Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts, 1999; Annette von Stockhausen, “Katalog der griechischen Handschriften im Besitz der Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 94 (2001): 684–701; Marina Molin Pradel, Katalog der griechischen Handschriften der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, 2002; Catálogo de Manuscritos de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Salamanca, vol. 2: Manuscritos 1680–2777, 2002; Nadia Kavrus-Hoffmann, “Catalogue of Greek Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Collections of the United States of America, Part I: Columbia University: Rare Book and Manuscript Library,” Manuscripta 49 (2005): 165–245; Id., “Part II: The New York Public Library,” Manuscripta 50 (2006): 21–76; Erich Lambertz, Katalog der griechischen Handschriften des Athosklosters Vatopedi, vol. 1: Codices 1–102, 2006; Mark Sosower, A Descriptive Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at St John’s College, Oxford, 2007; Matoula Kouroupou, and Paul Géhin, Catalogue des manuscrits conservés dans la Bibliothèque du Patriarcat Oecuménique: Les Manuscrits du monastère de la Panaghia de Chalki, 2 vols., 2008; R. Varteni Chétanian, Catalogue des fragments et manuscrits grecs du Matenadaran d’Erevan, 2008. (thematic catalogues of manuscripts) (medicine, Hippocrates, Latin) Pearl Kibre, “Hippocrates latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages,” Traditio 31 (1975): 99–126; 32 (1976): 257–92; 33 (1977): 253–95; 34 (1978): 193–266; 35 (1979): 273–302; 36 (1980): 347–92; 37 (1981): 267–89; 38 (1982): 165–92 (published as a monograph: Hippocrates latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages, rev. ed. 1985); (medicine, illustrated manuscripts) Loren MacKinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965; (medicine, Latin) Richard J. Durling (1932–1999), “Corrigenda and Addenda to Diels’ Galenica. I. Codices Vaticani,” Traditio 23 (1967): 461–76; Id., “Corrigenda and Addenda to Diels’ Galenica. II. Codices Miscellanei,” Traditio 37 (1981): 373–81; Id., “Corrigenda and addenda to Diel’s Galenica,” Traditio 23 (1967): 461–76; (medicine, Greek, area of Venice) Mariarosa Formentin, I codici graeci di medicina nelle tre Venezie, 1978; (humanistic manuscripts) Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 1: Italy, Agrigento to Novara, 1963; vol. 2: Italy, Orvieto to Volterra Vatican City, 1967; vol. 3: Alia itinera I: Australia to Germany, 1983; vol. 4: Alia Itinera II: Great

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Britain to Spain, 1989; vol. 5,1: Alia itinera III and Italy III: Sweden to Yugoslavia, Utopia, Supplement to Italy (A-F), 1990; vol. 5,2: Alia itinera III and Italy III: Sweden to Yugoslavia, Utopia, Supplement to Italy (A-F). Index and Addenda. Compiled by Mrs. Judith Wardman and her assistants in collaboration with the author, 1993; vol. 6: Italy and Alia Itinera IV: Supplement to Italy (G-V), Supplement to Vatican and Austria to Spain, 1992; vol. 7: A cumulative index to volumes I–VI of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Iter Italicum accedunt alia itinera, 1997; (humanistic manuscripts, medicine) Richard J. Durling, “A Guide to the Medical Manuscripts mentioned in Kristeller’s ‘Iter italicum’ III,” Traditio 41 (1985): 341–65; Id., “A Guide to the Medical Manuscripts mentioned in Kristeller’s ‘Iter italicum’ I–II,” Traditio 44 (1988): 485–536; Id., “A Guide to the Medical Manuscripts mentioned in Kristeller’s ‘Iter italicum’ IV,” Traditio 46 (1991): 347–79; Id., “A Guide to the Medical Manuscripts mentioned in Kristeller’s ‘Iter italicum’ V–VI,” Traditio 48 (1993): 253–316. (computerization of catalogues) heuristic of manuscripts has been greatly improved by the use of computerized methods of recording, storing, and retrieving information. The so-called Greek Index Project, originally located at the Pontifical Institute of Medieaeval Studies in Toronto, aimed to cataloguing all the manuscripts of all Greek authors from Antiquity to the end of Byzantium: Robert E. Sinkewicz, and Walter H. Hayes, Manuscript Listings for the Authored Works of the Palaeologan Period, 1989; Robert E. Sinkewicz, Manuscript Listings for the Authors of Classical and Late Antiquity, 1990; Id., Manuscript Listings for the Authors of the Patristic and Byzantine, 1992. In 1993, the Project was transferred to the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes of the French CNRS (see below). M. Current Organization of Research Besides the manuscript departments in such libraries as (alphabetical order of name) the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Vatican City, the Biblioteca del Real Monasterio at San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the British Library in London, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, the Universiteitsbibliothek in Leiden, and the University Library in Cambridge, and individuals all over the world, the major research centers and documentation repositories, and the schools specialized in paleography and codicology include (alphabetical order of countries) (Austria) the Kommission für Byzantinistik of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaft in Vienna; (Belgium) the Cabinet des manuscrits at the Bibliothèque royale, which is also the head-quarter of Scriptorium, and the Société des Bollandistes,

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“dedicated to the critical study of hagiography,” in Brussels; at the Flemishspeaking University of Louvain, the Series Graeca of the Corpus Christianorum; (Canada) Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto; (France) the Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance of the Collège de France, the Institut de Recheches et d’Histoire des Textes of the French CNRS, and the Ecole des Chartes in Paris; (Germany) the Aristoteles Archiv at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Teuchos Center at the University of Hamburg; (Greece) the Center for History and Paleography of the Morfôtikê Idruma tês Ethnikês Trapezês Ellados (Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece) in Athens, directed by Agamemnon Tselikas; (Italy and Vatican City) the Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica in Vatican City; the Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari, and, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, the Department of Studies on Medieval Societies and Cultures (Dipartimento di studi sulle società e culture del medioevo), unit of paleography, both at the University “La Sapienza,” in Rome, and the Monastery of Cassino, and the University of Cassino. In the United States, several libraries have extensive holdings in manuscripts (not necessarily Greek; for an ongoing catalogue of Greek manuscripts, see Kavrus-Hoffmann, “Catalogue of Greek Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Collections of the United States of America …” [above]), complemented with large filmotheques of microfilms and substantial collections of secondary literature. Among the prominent collections, one could quote the following (alphabetical order of cities) (Chicago, Illinois) Newberry Library; (Collegeville, Minnesota) Hill Monastic Library (specialized in “creation and preservation of manuscript images”); (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University) Beinecke Library; (New York, New York) Columbia University and the Morgan Library; (Notre Dame, Indiana) Notre Dame University, which owns a large collection of microfilms of manuscripts of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milano (see Gabriel L. Astrik (1907–2005), A Summary Catalogue of Microfilms of One Thousand Scientific Manuscripts in The Ambrosian Library, Milan, 1968); (Saint Louis, Missouri) Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, which holds an extensive collection of microfilm reproductions of manuscripts of the Vatican Library; (Washington, District of Columbia) Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies whose library (149,000 volumes) is complemented by a unique collection of images, including of manuscripts. Many of these research centers offer competitive grants and support for research. Besides the many collections published by the several research centers and institutions above, the major journals in the field are (alphabetical order of titles) Codices Manuscripti, Zeitschrift für Handschriftenkunde, started in 1975,

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with a series of supplements beginning in 2009; Manuscripta, from 1957 edited by the Vatican Film Library; Scripta-An International Journal of Codicology and Palaeography, launched in 2008; Scriptorium (above); Scrittura e Civiltà, 1977–2001, which was a major journal for the cultural dimension of book history. There is also now a magazine devoted to manuscript studies aiming at a wider audience: Alumina: Pagine illuminate. Publication started in 2003 and is quarterly. Lavishly illustrated articles usually deal with a specific manuscript, a collection or also a spectacular restoration, and are authored by specialists of the argument. Each issue contains a presentation of a publishing company specialized in facsimiles and/or an antiquarian bookseller. A group of scholars specialized in Greek paleography and codicology have formed in 1981 the so-called “Comité International de Paléographie Grecque (CIPG)”. In 1953, a “Comité international de paléographie” was founded, which changed its name in 1985 and became the “Comité international de paléographie latine.” Members of the CIPG are 20 maximum; new members are elected by current members upon nomination by one of them. The Comité has taken over the task of overseeing the series of conferences started in 1974 and held every five years (above). There is also an Association Paléographique Internationale: Culture, Ecriture, Société (APICES), open to “everyone interested in the scholarly study of the history of writing …, books and documents, both in their physical aspects and in their contents, the persons and institutions connected with making, using and keeping books.” N. Recent and New Directions of Research and Ideas In recent years, some new initiatives have been developed, which capitalize on the activity of the last decades and go beyond, opening new avenues for productive research. Some of these new directions and ideas are listed here (alphabetical order of major themes; within the sections, chronological order of publication): (comparative studies and material for comparative studies) Recherches de codicologie comparée: La composition du codex au Moyen Âge, en Orient et en Occident, ed. Philippe Hoffmann, 1998; Adam Gacek, The Arabic Manuscript Tradition: A Glossary of Technical Terms and Bibliography, 2001 with a Supplement, 2008; Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, 2007; (computerization of paleographical analysis) Peter A. Stokes, “Palaeography and Image-Processing: Some Solutions and Problems,” Digital Medievalist 3 (2007–2008), available online at: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/3/stokes; (computerized modelization of stemmatic relationships) Caroline Macé, Thomas Schmidt, and Jean-François Weiler, “Le classement des manuscrits par la statistique et la phylogénétique: Les cas de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Basile

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le Minime,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 31 (2001): 243–76; Philippe Baret, Marc Dubuisson, Anne-Catherine Lantin, and Caroline Macé, “Experimental Phylogenetic Analysis of a Greek Manuscript Tradition,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 89 (2003): 117–24; Marc Dubuisson, and Caroline Macé, “Handling a Large Manuscript Tradition with a Computer,” Caroline Macé, and Philippe Baret, “Why Phylogenetic Methods Work: The Theory of Evolution and Textual Criticism,” and Philippe V. Baret, Caroline Macé, Peter Robinson et al., “Testing Methods on an Artificially Created Textual Tradition,” The Evolution of Texts: Confronting Stemmatological and Genetical Methods. Proceedings of the International Workshop held in Louvain-laNeuve on September 1–2, 2004, ed. Caroline Macé, Philippe Baret, and Andrea Bozzi, 2006, 25–37, 89–108, and 255–283 respectively; (digital reconstruction of manuscripts) virtual reconstruction of the Codex Sinaitius (above) whose folios are currently preserved at Saint Catherine Monastery in the Sinai, Leipzig (University Library), London (British Library), and Moscow (National Library of Russia): http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en; (digital reproduction of manuscripts on CD) Historia plantarum: Erbe, oro e medicina nei codici medievali, 3 vols., 2002; reproduction on CD-ROM of manuscript Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 459, with a volume of commentary edited by Vera Segre Rutz, and a volume with the transcription and Italian trans. of the text; (digital reproduction of manuscripts online) several models of presentation and delivery of digital images are currently developed; here are some examples: Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG): http://www.cesg. unifr.ch: digital reproduction of the manuscripts in the Stiftsbibliothek of St. Gallen; Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI): http://sceti. library.upenn.edu/ljs: digital catalogue and reproduction of the private collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg; the digitization, Web site and on-line consulation of the manuscripts is made in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Teuchos Repository of the Teuchos Center, University of Hamburg and Aristotle Archiv, Freie Universität Berlin; the Repository will offer a digital version of selected manuscripts, together with all the relevant information on such codices; as of July 2009, a catalographic description and digital reproduction of manuscript Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Hamilton 512 is available: http:// beta.teuchos.uni-hamburg.de/teuchosclient2/home.seam; the Turkish Ministry of Culture has launched a large project to digitize manuscripts (in Turkish and/or Arabic) currently preserved in libraries in Turkey, as well as in libraries across the world (for example, the Vatican Library): https:// www.yazmalar.gov.tr/index.php?dill=eng. Access is upon registration; images need to be ordered and are delivered via email for a very small fee; (early

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medieval book) Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts, 1995; Dorothy Verkerk, Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnam Pentateuch, 2004; Anthony Grafton, and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, 2006; Megan Halle Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship, 2006; (fragments of manuscripts in bindings) Franca Petrucci Nardelli, Legatura e scrittura: Testi celati, messagi velati, annunci palesi, 2007; (gender) Katrin Graf, Bildnisse schreibender Frauen im Mittelalter 9. bis Anfang 13. Jahrhundert, 2002; Cynthia J. Cyrus, The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany, 2009; (laboratory analysis of manuscripts) Nikolaos Poulakakis, Agamamnon Tselikas, Ianis Bitsakis, Moysis Mylonas, and Petros Lymberakis, “Does the Molecular Analysis Shed Light on the Origin of the Ancient Greek Manuscripts?” Journal of Archaeological Science 34 (2007): 675–80; Nikolaos Poulakakis, Agamenon Tselikas, Ianis Bitsakis, Moysis Mylonas, Petros Lymberakis, “Ancient DNA and the Genetic Signature of Ancient Greek Manuscripts,” Journal of Archaeological Science 34 (2007): 675–80; (margins) Howard J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, 2001; Camille Michael, Images dans les marges: Aux limites de l’art médiéval, 1997; Maurizio Fiorilla, Marginalia figurati nei codici di Petrarca, 2004; Scientia in margine: Etudes sur les marginalia dans les manuscrits scientifiques du moyen âge à la Renaissance, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Charles Burnett, 2005; Kathleen McNamée, Annotations in Greek and Latin texts from Egypt, 2007; (mathematical modelization of manuscript destruction/preservation) Sharon Larimer, and Florence Eliza Glaze, “How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts as Fossils”, and John L. Cisne, “How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts’ “Demography” and Classical Texts’ Extinction,” Science 307 (2005): 1208–1209 and 1305–1307 respectively; (online catalogues of manuscripts) the Greek Index Project originally located at the Pontifical Institute of Medieaeval Studies in Toronto and managed by Robert E. Sinkewicz (above) has been transferred in 1993 to the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes of the French CNRS and transformed into the database PINAKES: Textes et manuscrits grecs, which has been recently (September 2008) made available on-line (http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr); (palimpsests) Rinascimento Virtuale: Digitale Palimpsestforchung, Rediscovering written records of a hidden European cultural heritage, 2002; Dieter Harlfinger, “Palimpsest,” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 6, 2003, 837; Dieter Harlfinger, Carl Wolfram Brunschön, and Maria Vasiloudi, “Die griechischen medizinischen Palimpseste (mit Beispielen ihrer digitalen Lektüre),” Ärzte und ihre Interpreten: Medizinische Fachtexte der Antike als Forschungsgegenstand der Klas-

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sischen Philologie, 2006, 143–64; El palimpsesto grecolatino como fenómeno librario y textual, ed. Angel Escobar Chico, 2006; (reconstruction [virtual] of dispersed libraries) reconstruction of the library of Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490), king of Hungary (1458), duke of Austria (1486), and king of Bohemia (1468); the project Bibliotheca Corviniana Digitalis (BCD) aims to listing and digitizing the volumes of the library: http://www.corvina.oszk.hu; (scientific manuscripts) Linda Ehrsam Voigts, and Patricia Deery Kurtz, Electronic Thorndike Kibre (eTK) and Electronic Voigts Kurtz (eVK), 20 August 2004; Alain Touwaide, “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Toward a New Catalogue,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101 (2008): 199–208; id., “Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: Towards a New Catalogue, with a Specimen for an Annotated Checklist of Manuscripts Based on an Index of Diels’ Catalogue,” Byzantion 79 [2009]: 435–595; (themes in illustrations) Janet Backhouse, Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter, 2000; Ead., Medieval Birds in the Shelborne Missal, 2001; Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts, 2002; Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts, 2002; Pamela Porter, Courtly Love in Medieval Manuscripts, 2003; Justin Clegg, The Medieval Church in Manuscripts, 2003; (medical miracles) Deirdre Jackson, Marvelous to Behold: Miracles in Medieval Manuscripts, 2007; (medicine) Peter Murray Jones, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts, 1998; (writing in bilingual context) Paolo Radiciotti, “Il problema del digrafismo nei rapporti fra scrittura latina e greca nel medioevo,” Nea Rômê 3 (2006): 5–55. Select Bibliography Leonard E. Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeograhy: A Bibliograhic Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Charles-Moïse Briquet, Les filigranes: Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 16002, 4 vols. (Leizpig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1923); Paul Canart, Paleografia e codicologia greca: Una rassegna bibliografica (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1991); Alphonse Dain, Les manuscrits3 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975); Dieter Harlfinger, Griechische Kodikologie und Textüberlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980); I manoscritti greci tra riflessione e dibattito: Atti del V Colloquio Internazionale di Paleografia Greca (Cremona, 1998), ed. Giancarlo Prato, 3 vols. (Florence: Gonelli, 2000); Jean Irigoin, “La datation par les filigranes du papier,” Codicologica 5 (1980): 9–36; Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800–1600 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), 3 parts published so far; part 1: Ernst Gamillscheg, Dieter Harlfinger, and Herbert Hunger (vol. 2), Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Grossbritaniens, 3 vols., 1981; part 2: Id., Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Frankreichs und Nachträge zu den Bibliotheken Grossbritaniens, 3 vols., 1989; part 3: Ernst Gamillscheg, and Herbert Hunger (vol. 2), in collaboration with Dieter Harlfinger, and Paolo Eleuteri, Handschriften aus Biblioheken Roms mit dem Vatikan, 3 vols., 1997.

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Communication in Medieval Studies A. Definition All human interaction, including transportation, labor, art, currency, sales, religious services, and literature can be defined as communication because they connect people. A narrow definition, however, would limit communication to an exchange via human language, either through spoken words in some kind of syntactical sequence so as to create signs, images, and actions, or gestures with the purpose of establishing meaning relevant for both sides. Even performance, including dance, posture, and other body movements, can serve the purpose of communication. Communication has been of central importance for all human societies throughout time (Christof Bäumle, “Kommunikation/Kommunikationswissenschaft,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. XIX, 1990, 384–402), and so also in the Middle Ages, insofar as it establishes structure, community, and institutions, such as the court, or the Catholic Church (Peter Strohschneider, “Institutionalität,” Literarische Kommunikation und soziale Interaktion, ed. id., Beate Kellner, and Ludger Lieb, 2001, 1–26). Communication as practiced in the Middle Ages has been preserved through manuscripts, but also in a more abstract fashion through illustrations, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, and other objects. Wherever we turn, we observe the preeminence of human language as the crucial instrument to establish, maintain, and protect the social community predicated on a firm set of rules, values, morals, ethics, and ideals (or, of course, to destroy it, depending on the individual strategies and interests, see Convaincre et persuader: Communication et propagande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Martin Aurell, 2007). Laws, common rules regarding human interaction, contracts, but also literary documents, chronicles, and gnomic texts encapsulate the petrified oral communication carried out in the past. Medieval documents provide a rich panoply of references to communication, either oral (dialogue), written (letters), or a combination thereof, such as through messengers who delivered oral reports and letters (Albrecht Classen, “Female Epistolary Literature from Antiquity to the Present,” Studia Neophilologica 60 [1988]: 3–13; Martin Camargo, The Middle English Verse Love Epistle, 1991; Gespräche – Boten – Briefe, ed. Horst Wenzel, 1997; see also the entries on letters and letter collections in this Handbook). But as we know from our own time, communication has always been prone to failure or to suffer from numerous shortcomings, which has continually led to countless conflicts throughout history. In fact, good communication might well be defined as the basic approach to combat violence, both on a personal and a public level (William T. H. Jack-

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son, “Problems of Communication in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes,” Medieval Literature and Folklore Studies, ed. Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg, 1970, 39–50; Albrecht Classen, “Kommunikation: Mittelalter,” Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, 1993, 370–90; 2nd ed. 2008, 424–47). B. Oral Communication It is generally assumed, and has often been documented for individual cases, that the early Middle Ages were characterized by orality because only a small percentage of people were literate. Only the high Middle Ages, but especially the late Middle Ages, witness the growth of literacy, both within the world of the cities and also at the courts (Eric A. Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy, 1976; Michael Thomas Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 1979; Franz Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55 [1980]: 237–65; John Miles Foley, Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research, 1985). We can identify oral communication as it took place in the past only through indirect sources, but research on “oral poetry” has unearthed numerous approaches to this fascinating and fruitful field of investigations (Michael Curschmann, “Oral Poetry in Mediaeval English, French, and German Literature: Some Notes on Recent Research,” Speculum 42 [1967]: 36–52; D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading, 1994). Political and military operations throughout the Middle Ages were determined, as in other periods, by communicative approaches, both successful and unsuccessful, either establishing a harmonious community or leading to violence and disruption (Word, Image, Number: Communication in the Middle Ages, ed. John J. Contreni and Santa Casciani, 2002). Functioning communication has always been fundamental for peace, whereas the opposite resulted in war (Albrecht Hagenlocher, Der guote vride, 1992; Stefan Hohmann, Friedenskonzepte, 1992; Peace and Negotiation, ed. Diane Wolfethal, 2000; Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. Corinne J. Saunders et al., 2004). Moreover, communication determines the relationship between representatives of many different social groups, such as between men and women, old people and young people, parents and children, rulers and their subjects, merchants and their customers, lords and their farmers, priests and their flock, local authorities and criminals, teachers and students, architects and masons, doctors and their patients, etc. (Sophia Menach, The Vox Dei, 1990; Dialoge: sprachliche Kommunikation in und zwischen Texten im deutschen Mittelalter, ed. Nikolaus Henkel et al., 2003). All these documents reflect specific forms of communication and also constituted elements of the general communication process that experi-

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enced a dramatic paradigm shift in the 12th century when a sudden increase of literacy at various social levels occurred (Peter Dinzelbacher, Europa im Hochmittelalter 1050–1250, 2003). In this sense, most, if not practically all, fields within the Humanities dealing with the Middle Ages have been concerned with the question of communication because everything pertaining to humans can be translated into a signal, which in turn translates into a basic communicative element (Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Hundsbichler, 1991). C. Religious Communication Mystical visions, prayers, and other religious texts reflect the attempt by individuals to establish communication with the divine (Peter Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 1992; Volksreligion im hohen und späten Mittelalter, ed. id. and Dieter R. Bauer, 1990; Karl A. Keller, Communication avec l’ultime, 1987; Margarete Hubrath, Schreiben und Erinnern, 1996; Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife, 1995), whereas sermons and penitentiaries represent the practical efforts by clerics to communicate with their flock (G. R. Oust, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 1933; Michel Zink, La prédication en langue romane avant 1300, 1976; Franco Morenzoni, “Les prédicateurs et leurs langues à la fin du moyen âge,” Zwischen Babel und Pfingsten, ed. Peter von Moos, 2008, 501–17). The vast number of medieval sermons informs us in most impressive terms how the authoritative institution of the Church struggled hard to reach out to its parishes and to offer instruction, guidance, information, education, and teaching, not to mention the most important function, spiritual support (Aaron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, orig. 1981, Engl. trans. 1992; D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars, 1985; Daniel R. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence, 1989; De ore Domini, ed. Thomas L. Amos et al., 1989). D. Military Communication On the other hand, numerous accounts of military conflicts and a plethora of other violent interactions provide insights into the enormous difficulties characterizing human interaction and communication throughout time, and so in the Middle Ages (Roger D. Sell, Literature as Communication, 2000; Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004). In this sense, medieval knighthood can be described both as an expression of successful communication within the social group for the purpose of defense and self-identification, or self-representation, and also as the result of failed communication with the outside world, such as in the case of the Crusades (Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, 1953;

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José María Gárate Córdoba, Espiritu e milicia en la España medieval, 1967; Maurice Hugh Keen, Chivalry, 1984). For instance, only those military operations in the Crusades achieved their goals and intentions if there was internal organization and efficient communication among the members of the mostly diverse armies. A peaceful crusade, organized by Frederick II, on the other hand, was possible because of his outstanding communicative skills that allowed him to reach out to the Sultan, Al-Kamil, with whom he negotiated a long-term armistice and the return of the demilitarized Jerusalem to the Christians (Ulrich Müller, “Friedrich II.,” Herrscher, Helden, Heilige, ed. id. and Werner Wunderlich, 1996, 197–212), though this led to severe conflicts with the papacy (John Phillip Lomax, “Frederick II,” Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John Victor Tolan, 1996, 175–97). One of many communicative systems within the world of knighthood was the use of coats of arms, shields, and other elements signaling personal identity and social status in a world where weapons speak the loudest and traditional communication with words takes a back-seat. Heraldry, in other words, was also an extremely important vehicle for non-verbal communication (see, for instance, Gustav A. Seyler, Geschichte der Heraldik, 1885; Evan John Jones, Medieval Heraldry, 1983; Giacomo C. Bascapè and Marcello Del Piazzo, Insegne e simboli, 1983; Stephen Friar, A New Dictionary of Heraldry, 1987; Michel Pastoureau, Les armoiries, 1998; Waltraud Gut, Schwarz auf weiß, 2000; and Ludwig Biewer, Wappen als Träger von Kommunikation im Mittelalter, 2003). Vol. 11 of the journal Das Mittelalter, ed. by the “Deutsche Mediaevistenverband” (2006), was dedicated to the idea of coats of arms as vehicles for communication (Wappen als Zeichen) (see further the entry on “Heraldry” by Heiko Hartmann in this Handbook). E. Symbolic Communication Especially the early Middle Ages, a time characterized by wide-spread illiteracy, witnessed the emergence of a whole apparatus of ritual symbols, as Geoffrey Koziol (Begging Pardon and Favor, 1992), Klaus Schreiner (“Texte, Bilder, Rituale,” Bilder, Texte, Rituale, ed. id. and G. Signori, 2000, 1–15) and Gerd Althoff (Die Macht der Rituale, 2003; id., Inszenierte Herrschaft, 2003), among others, have demonstrated. Symbolic communication implies the use of gestures, objects, clothing, and performance because words prove to be incapable of relaying the complex set of information within a political, religious, but also amatory context. It also substitutes for the writing process that became more widespread not until the 12th century (Gabriele Raudszus, Die Zeichensprache der Kleidung, 1985). The considerable body of heroic epics, byzantine bridal quest narratives, religious tales, and charms indicate the

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predominance of oral cultures in the early period. This might explain the interest of the Church in these text genres because they served well as communicative channels to address their flock, to utilize their communicative strategies, and to establish a common, because symbolic language (Giselle de Nie, “Text, Symbol and ‘Oral Culture’ in the Sixth-Century Church,” Mediaevistik 9 [1996]: 115–33; Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002, 1–52). By the 11th century, however, as Patrick Geary underscores, a new interest in written documents emerged among the learned, which profoundly transformed the nature and performance of communication (Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium, 1994; see also Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 1983; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 1993; Communicatie in de Middeleeuwen, ed. Marco Mostert, 1995). In most cases, however, communication operates with numerous different elements, incorporating oral, written, symbolic, and deictic elements (Werner Faulstich, Medien und Öffentlichkeit im Mittelalter 800–1400, 1996). C. Stephen Jaeger has explained this paradigm shift as the result of the disappearance of charismatic teachers at the cathedral schools and their substitution through the written book and disputational learning (Envy of Angels, 1994). F. Types of Communication As Verena Epp has outlined, communication includes: 1. written documents, such as contracts, and correspondence; 2. embassies; 3. oaths; 4. gifts and tributes; 5. hostages; 6. marriage between dynasties; 7. personal contacts between the contract partners, along with festive means (“Rituale Frühmittelalterlicher ‘Amicitia’,” Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff, 2001, 11–24). In the same volume, Matthias Becher (“Cum lacrimis et gemitu,” 25–52) examined the communicative function of shedding of tears by victors or the defeated as symbolic language, which finds its perhaps best expression in the heroic epic Diu Klage (Albrecht Classen, “Trauer müssen sie tragen,” Ostbairische Grenzmarken 41 [1995]: 51–68). Klaus Schreiner studied the nature of the ritual performance of walking with bare feet that signaled the person’s willingness to submit him/ herself under the Church’s authority in order to gain penance (“Nudis pedibus: Barfüssigkeit als religiöses und politisches Ritual,” ibid., 53–124). According to Gerd Althoff, in an article also included in this volume (“Die Veränderbarkeit von Ritualen im Mittelalter,” [2001, 157–76]), religious rituals might have been performed unchangeably throughout times, whereas rituals in the political arena underwent countless transformations and were constantly adapted to the demands of the respective circumstances. He em-

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phasizes that the semi-oral world of medieval society heavily relied on both the ritual/performance and on the written record to certify the validity of the intended purposes (see also Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, 1979; Michel Banniard, Viva voce, 1992; and the contributions to Vox intexta, ed. A. N. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack, 1991; Enrico Artifoni, “Sull’eloquenza politica nel Duecento italiano,” Quaderni medievali 35 [1993]: 174–75). Similar observations have already been developed by Dietmar Peil in his Die Gebärde bei Chrétien, Hartmann und Wolfram (1975), by the contributors to Höfische Literatur, Hofgesellschaft, höfische Lebensformen um 1200 (ed. Gert Kaiser and Jan-Dirk Müller, 1986), Harald Haferland (Höfische Interaktion, 1989), Martin Schubert (Zur Theorie des Gebarens im Mittelalter, 1991), and Jan-Dirk Müller (Spielregeln für den Untergang, 1998). We also need to consider negative types of communication, especially in cases of lying, deception, cheating, falsifying, and misrepresentation, as Umberto Eco argued in his Theory of Semiotics (1976) and, together with Constantino Marmo, in his On the Medieval Theory of Signs (1989 [orig. 1972]), which are discussed both in the Latin exempla literature and in the wide range of short verse and prose narratives in the vernacular. More profoundly, many late-antique and medieval theologians, beginning with St. Augustine, examined the meaning of lying in its theological and communicative significance (Gregor Müller, Die Wahrhaftigkeitspflicht und die Problematik der Lüge, 1962; Arno Baruzzi, Philosophie der Lüge, 1996). G. Ritual and Gesture as Communication Sociolinguists, such as Adam Kendon, have explicitly underscored that all bodily actions that serve to convey meaning are communicative, such as gestures and ritual. Adam Kendon identifies gesture as the “visible action as utterance” (Gesture, 2004). Marc Bloch already emphasized that feudal society was highly ritualized and relied more on gestures and spoken words than on the written record (La société féodale, 1939). But Jean-Claude Schmitt has warned us not to distinguish schematically the “gestural” culture” from the “literate” culture, though the communicative codes of gestures could easily change from one social group to another, but they played the most significant role within the monastic communities, as perhaps best reflected by Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Institutio novitiorum (Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures in the West,” A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 1991, 57–70). Following these approaches, recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of gesture and ritual in medieval literature. For instance, parallel approaches inform the studies by Corinna Dörrich (Poetik des Rituals, 2002) and Christiane Witthöft (Ritual

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und Text, 2004), the former placing the emphasis on the performance of political actions, whereas the latter focusing on the mode of symbolic communication as reflected in German historiographical writing and literature from the late Middle Ages. But Will Hasty also deserves to be mentioned for his collection of articles in the volume Art of Arms that deals with aggression and dominance in medieval German courtly literature (2002), indirectly media for communication as well. One of the most powerful examples of misunderstood ritual, or at least of how to respond to the ritual, can be found in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, respectively, which leads to a collapse of the communicative community (Jesse M. Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century, 1995; Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002). Very important for all societies, and so in the Middle Ages, was the ability to command the language or code of gestures, as most courtly romances, but also courtly love poems, and other genres demonstrate in multiple fashion (for Middle High German literature, see Martin J. Schubert, Zur Theorie des Gebarens im Mittelalter, 1991; for Middle English and Italian literature, see John Anthony Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative, 2002). H. Public Communication One remarkable example, carefully studied first by Heinrich Fichtenau (Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts, 1984; but see also his Mensch und Schrift im Mittelalter, 1946), then by Klaus Schreiner, was the function of the kiss on the mouth as a public sign of a peaceful relationship (“Er küsse mich mit dem Kuß seines Mundes,” Höfische Repräsentation, ed. Hedda Ragotzky and Horst Wenzel, 1990, 89–132). Along the same lines, Horst Fuhrmann analyzed the symbolic functions of greetings at public events in the Middle Ages (“‘Willkommen und Abschied’,” Mittelalter: Annäherungen an eine fremde Zeit, ed. Wilfried Hartmann, 1993, 111–39). Most remarkably, as Gustav Ehrismann had discovered in a lengthy article (“Duzen und Ihrzen im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung 1 [1901]: 117–49; 2 [1902]: 118–59; 5 [1903–1904]: 127–76, 177–220), in Old High German literature the use of the second person singular “du” (you) was common even among members of different social ranks, whereas in Middle High German literature the difference was expressed with the second person plural “Ihr” (you) for the lord and “du” for the lower-ranking subject, and by the late Middle Ages with “Euer Gnaden” (Your Honor) (see now Thomas Behrmann, “Zum Wandel der öffentlichen Anrede im Spätmittelalter,” Formen und Funktionen, 2001, 291–317). In this regard, ambassadors and legates determined much of public communication, connecting the various kingdoms

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and the papacy, cities and the empire (see Wilhelm Janssen, Die päpstlichen Legaten vom Schisma Anaklets II. bis zum Tode Coelestius II. (1130–1198), 1961; Johannes Bachmann, Die päpstlichen Legaten in Deutschland und Skandinavien (1125–1159), 1965 (orig. 1913); Donald E. Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages, 1967; Hans Ollendiek, Die päpstlichen Legaten, 1976; Theodor Schieffer, Die päpstlichen Legaten, 1976, Christina Lutter, Politische Kommunikation an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, 1998, etc.). Interestingly, even the process of canonizing a holy person served exceedingly well for the establishment of intense communication channels, see Christian Krötzl, “Fama sanctitatis: Die Akten der spätmittelalterlichen Kanonisationsprozesse als Quelle zu Kommunikation und Informationsvermittlung in der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft” (Procès de Canonisation au Moyen Âge: Aspectsjuridiques et religieux, ed. Gabor Klaniczay, 2004, 223–44). I. Communication as Strategy Political performance also served, quite naturally, the purpose of propaganda, which heavily relied on, or was determined by, the skillful use of communicative strategies, as Donald A. Bullough (Games People Payed, 1974), Janet L. Nelson (“Ritual and Reality in the Early Medieval Ordines,” ed. Derek Baker, The Materials, Sources and Methods of Ecclesiastical History, 1975, 41–51), and David A. Warner (“Henry II at Magdeburg,” Early Medieval Europe 3 [1994]: 135–66) have demonstrated (see also Convaincre et persuader: Communication et propagande aux XII et XIIIe siècles, ed. Martin Aurell, 2007). Jean Claude Schmitt confirmed these observations in his study La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (1989), whereas Jeffrey Chipps Smith argued that tapestries could also function for the same purpose (“Portable Propaganda: Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold,” Art Journal 48 [1989]: 123–29). See also the excellent collection of articles ed. by Martin Aurell, Convaincre et persuader: Communication et propagande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (2007), that focus on propaganda, communication, collection of information, transmission and alteration of memory, and visual aspects of propaganda in the high Middle Ages. By the same token, throughout the Middle Ages numerous efforts to bridge conflicts failed for many different reasons, hence leading to a collapse of the communicative efforts and internal harmony, as Gerd Althoff (“Demonstration und Inszenierung,” Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalters, 1997 [1989], 229–57) and Werner Goetz, “Canossa als deditio?,” Studien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters: Jürgen Petersohn zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Matthias Thumser et al., 2000, 92–99) have pointed out. Ceremonies, such as a ruler’s official entry

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into a city (adventus ceremony; see Gerrit Jasper Schenk, “Enter the Emperor: Charles IV and Siena Between Politics, Diplomacy, and Ritual [1355 and 1368],” Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 20.2 [2006]: 161–79), or religious processions, also belonged to the vast field of symbolic communication (Karl Leyser, Communication and Power, 1990; Zeremoniell als höfische Ästhetik in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Thomas Rahn, 1995; Gerrit Jasper Schenk, Zeremoniell und Politik, 2003). According to Adam J. Kosto (Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia, 2001), we could also identify commercial contacts as important elements of mercantile, and furthermore as cultural and political communication. J. Honor and Gift Giving Honor, once compromised or damaged, could not be easily recovered, leading to profound conflicts in the political communication, as the contributors to Verletzte Ehre: Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (ed. Klaus Schreiner and Gerd Schwerhoff, 1995) demonstrated (see also George Fenwick Jones, Honor in German Literature, 1959). The extent to which gifts were accepted or rejected indicated the social status of the respective other and the degree to which open communication dominated their relationship (William C. McDonald, “‘Too softly a gift of treasure’,” Euphorion 78 [1984]: 1–16; Knut Görich, “Geld und ‘Honor’,” Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation, 2001, 177–200). In fact, the courtly world fully acknowledged the value of gifts as a political gesture, as a communicative instrument, and as a symbol of legal, religious, and economic commitment (contract), mostly requiring some kind of reciprocity both in terms of value and also in terms of self-imposed modesty (Harald Haferland, Höfische Interaktion, 1988, 150–59). The Irish knight Gandin in Gottfried von Strasbourg’s Tristan, for instance, inordinately demands Isolde as the reward for his playing music, thereby painfully betraying the basic courtly values of the communicative gift-giving principle (Hugo Bekker, Gottfried von Strassburg’s ‘Tristan’, 1987, 191–92). The same conflict, or breakdown of symbolic communication also occurs in the Saga and in Sir Tristrem, but not in Eilhart of Oberg’s Tristrant, though we observe it again in the various Lancelot romances (Rosemary Norah Combridge, Das Recht im ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Straßburg, 1964, 123ff.; see also Irmgard Gephart, Geben und Nehmen im “Nibelungenlied” und in Wolframs von Eschenbach “Parzival,” 1994). Valentin Groebner, responding to the seminal anthropological work done by Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, emphasized the political nature of gift-giving, which was always a highly ambivalent and multivalent operation (Gefährliche Geschenke, 2000; see also Medieval Transformations: Texts,

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Power, and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Mayke B. de Jong, 2001). Nevertheless, gift-giving was fundamental and crucial for medieval society because, as we might add, gifts have always served either as media of communication or could have easily been misconstrued as instruments of blackmail, extortion, or simple political and personal demands on the receiver. Laws certainly regulated most medieval societies, but only gift-giving, on a symbolic level, when predicated on altruistic, loving motifs, made human coexistence truly possible because this process relied on voluntariness and mutual respect, as the Italian cleric Thomasin von Zerclaere emphasized, who wrote his didactic treatise Der Welsche Gast in Middle High German in 1215, addressing a wide range of values, strategies, and principles of human coexistence (Haferland, 1988, 150–59). This meta-language, determined by communicative symbolism, made it possible for all public figures on the pan-European stage and considerably beyond, as Janet Nelson has underscored (“Government and Rulers,” The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. III, 1999, 95–129), to understand each other within the world of curialitas (Curialitas, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1990). Its components consisted, as we have seen above, of symbols, rituals, and rules, all determining either the behavior of members of social units (family, tribe, kingdom) or of the heads of political territories, as William I. Miller (Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 1990) has illustrated with respect to the Icelandic sagas, whether we think of strategies of persuasion or harmonious peacemaking, of aggressive exchanges or bloody warfare (Lars Lönnroth, “Rhetorical Persuasion in the Sagas,” Scandinavian Studies 42 [1970]: 71–98; Volker Roloff, Reden und Schweigen, 1973; Ulrich Baltzer, “Strategien der Persuasion,” ZfdA 121 [1991]: 119–39). K. Purpose and Effectiveness of Communication On another level, as social historians have pointed out, the exchange of emotions could also serve the global purpose of communication, such as anger, sorrow, happiness, and moodiness (Dietmar Rieger, “‘E trait sos meillors omes ab un consel’,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 114.4 [2001]: 628–50; Anger’s Past, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein, 1998). Most recently, Irmgard Gephart (Der Zorn der Nibelungen, 2005) emphasized the communicative function of gestures of wrath, hatred, love, and lament within a heroic society, such as the one portrayed in the Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200). Similar observations could be made with respect to Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland (also the Rolandslied), and El Cid, wherever the protagonists resort to symbolic gestures and mimicry to communicate their inner emotions and to exchange their ideas and values with their compatriots (see, for instance, A Cultural History

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of Gesture, ed. Jan N. Bremer and Herman Roodenburg, 1993; Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild, 1995, 138–42). Insults and damage to honor could only be overcome through public penance, gifts, negotiations, and contracts, as Gerd Althoff indicated (Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 1997), all of which intimately pertained to symbolic communication, most powerfully represented by the deditio, the public submission under the Church or a worldly lord (Timothy Reuter, “‘Velle sibi fieri in forma hac,’” Formen und Funktionen, 2001, 201–25). Robert Jütte rightly identified this type of public communication as the semiotics of the ruling class, whether we turn to the royalty and the courts, or to the political situation in medieval cities (“Funktion und Zeichen: Zur Semiotik herrschaftlicher Kommunikation in der Stadtgeschichte,” Anzeiger des germanischen Nationalmuseums: und Berichte aus dem Forschungsinstitut für Realienkunde, 1993, 13–21; see also Karl-Heinz Spiess, “Kommunikationsformen im Hochadel und am Königshof,” Formen und Funktionen, 2001, 261–90). Words often proved to be not enough to establish peaceful relationships, hence political communication had to be utilized to overcome profound conflicts and to force an opposing group or individual to accept the other’s submission, outreach, or implied messages. This problem emerged as a critical aspect especially in 14th-century philosophy with its deep “nominalist climate,” when all human signs and all communicative efforts were increasingly cast in deep ambivalence and ambiguity, as powerfully reflected in the narrative works by Boccaccio, Juan Ruiz, and Geoffrey Chaucer (N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love, 1996, 49). The need to probe the relevance and meaning of human communication might have, however, already gained in urgency and poignancy since the 13th century, as Cesare Vasoli has argued (“La ‘crisi’ linguistica trecentesca,” Conciliarismo, stati nazionali, inizi dell’Umanesimo, 1990, 245–63; see also Holly Wallace Boucher, “Nominalism: The Difference for Chaucer and Boccaccio,” The Chaucer Review 20 [1985/1986]: 213–20), if we don’t have to accept that people have always lied, have always resorted to deceptive strategies, and so have deliberately undermined the premises of the communication process for their own purposes (Hans-Jürgen Bachorski, “Lügende Worte, verstellte Körper, falsche Schrift,” Gespräche–Boten–Briefe, ed. Horst Wenzel, 1997, 344–64). In fact, as Karen K. Jambeck has recently suggested (“‘De parler bon’ eloquence’: Words of Love in the Lais of Marie de France,” Words of Love and Love of Words, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2007), the entire discourse of courtly love, both in Latin and in the various vernaculars, was predicated on eloquence, hence on successful communication, as it is perhaps best illustrated by the most theoretical, yet also highly ironic, text, Andreas Capellanus’s

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De amore (Don A. Monson, Andreas Capellanus, 2005; Bonnie Wheeler, “The ‘Sic et Non’ of Andreas’s De Amore,” Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2008, 149–68). L. Literature and Communication As we have learned only recently, particularly medieval literary texts provide intriguing insights into the wide range of communicative efforts among people, whether we think of the numerous dialogues, speeches, discussions, debates, but also letters (Christine Wand-Wittkowksi, Briefe im Mittelalter, 2000), gift exchanges, aggressive exchanges that determine much of medieval heroic poetry, courtly romance, courtly love poetry, and didactic treatises (Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002; Corinna Dörrich, Poetik des Rituals, 2002; Christiane Witthöft, Ritual und Text, 2004). We might even want to go so far as to identify some of the greatest accomplishments of 12th- and 13th-century literature as having created new forums for the establishment of communicative communities (Paul Zumthor, La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, 1984; C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness, 1985; for a survey, see Marco Mostert, “Lezen, schrijven en geletterdheid,” Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 28, 2 [2002]: 203–21). By contrast, late-medieval literature, though still predicated on the understanding of the profound relevance of human communication, indicates a growing realization how easily this community could break apart. For instance, Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350), Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1395–1400), Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring (ca. 1400), and Christine de Pizan’s La Cité de dames (1405) illustrate the drastic consequences if people fail to establish harmonious, constructive relationships through communicative operations (for a detailed study of Boccaccio’s Decameron, now see Ursula Kocher, Boccaccio und die deutsche Novellistik, 2005). Powerful echoes of this thematic interest (Albrecht Classen, “Wort und Gemeinschaft: Sprachliche Apokalypse in Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 8 [1994/1995]: 141–57; Wim Blockmans, “The Feeling of Being Oneself,” Showing Status: Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Wim Blockmans and Antheun Janse, 1999, 1–16; Speaking in the Medieval World, ed. Jean E. Godsall-Myers, 2003; Peter Dinzelbacher, Europa im Hochmittelalter, 1050–1250, 2003; Elizabeth C. Zegura, “True Stories and Alternative Discourses,” Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 351–68). The danger might be, however, that the term “communication” could be used in such generic contexts that every exchange between literary figures can become the topic of scholarly investigations (Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,

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ed. Helmut Hundsbichler, 1991; Andreas Urscheler, Kommunikation in Wolframs ‘Parzival,’ 2002), thereby watering down the critical issue of communication in epistemological, logical, and social terms. On the other hand, numerous medieval epics, romances, and poems reflect a profound concern with communication and its fragility, which could lead to catastrophic consequences (Albrecht Classen, “What Could the Burgundians Have Done to Avoid the Catastrophe? The Breakdown of the Communicative Community in the Nibelungenlied,” Neophilologus LXXXV, 4 [2001]: 565–87; id., Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002). As the pan-European narrative Apollonius of Tyre indicates, for instance, the degree to which communication is practiced among individuals and social units represents the well-being of the community at large (Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004). But many texts, such as Marie de France’s Lais (ca. 1150–1160), Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (13th c.), and Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor (14th c.) offer powerful insights into the complex, numerous, and fertile attempts at establishing communication within the literary universe (Sandra Linden, Kundschafter der Kommunikation, 2004), providing a fictional basis for the critical examination of how people ought to communicate with each other (see also Joy Hambuechen Potter, Five Frames for the Decameron, 1982). In most cases, however, as we can observe especially in late-medieval texts, this communication tends to fail, or at least reveals its problems, because of unequal power distribution, gender-specific language codes, vested interests, and material competition, whether we think of the anonymous Historia septem sapientum, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring (Marilyn Migiel, A Rhetoric of the Decameron, 2003, ch. 6). Neither the Lexikon des Mittelalters nor the Dictionary of the Middle Ages offers an entry on the topic of “communication,” and older historiography, though already investigating many aspects of the history of intellectualism, science, urban life, and popular religious movements (Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927; Friedrich Heer, Mittelalter, 1961), had not yet focused on this issue. Although difficult to pinpoint, research on human interaction in the Middle Ages began approximately in the early 1980s, particularly emphasizing political relations between rulers and their subjects, everyday life, and epistolarity (Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections, 1976; Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 1980; Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity, 1982; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiévale, 1990; see also the entries on “Letters” and “Letter Collections in this Handbook). Percy Ernst Schramm coined the

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metaphor of the “political drama” for the public events determining medieval society (Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, 1954–1956; see also his Kaiser, Könige, Päpste, 4 vols., 1968–1971). Research on communication in the Middle Ages, however, did not really begin until Sophia Menache published her seminal study on The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middles Ages (1990; see also Karl J. Leyser, Communication and Power in Medieval Europe, ed. Timothy Reuter, 1994; La circulation des nouvelles au Moyen Age, 1994; Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann et al., 1998). The considerable impact of political correspondence is powerfully demonstrated by Christina Antenhofer’s monograph on the diplomatic exchanges involving the wedding of Paula de Gonzaga and Leonhard von Görz (Briefe zwischen Süd und Nord, 2007). Select Bibliography On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989); New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik, 1999; Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2001); Albrecht Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung: Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2002); Convaincre et persuader: Communication et propagande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Université de Poitiers-centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, 2007); J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Zwischen Babel und Pfingsten: Sprachdifferenzen und Gesprächsverständigung in der Vormoderne (8.–16. Jh.), ed. Peter von Moos (Vienna and Berlin: LIT, 2008).

Albrecht Classen

Computer-Based Medieval Research (with an Emphasis on Middle High German) A. Introduction For centuries people have dreamt of getting support in mathematics from elaborate machines and not only by an abacus, that is “a calculation tool, often constructed as a wooden frame with beads sliding on wires” (Wikipedia), which are used, for example, in China until today. For example Raimundus Lullus Ars magna (ca. 1300/ 1305), Giordano Bruno De lampade combinatoria lulliana (1587), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ars combinatoria

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(1666) wrote about such elaborate mathematical machines, and Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels 1726: III, 5: “The Academy of Lagado;” see Jan Christoph Meister, 2005) even delineated a ‘literary engine’ which would be capable “to write books […] without the least assistance from genius or study” – a satire. Roughly 200 years later, in the 1930s, the first electronic devices or machines were developed which could be used with some kind of programming software for calculating (Konrad Zuse 1910–1995, Louis Couffignal 1902–1966, Howard Aiken 1900–1973, George Stibitz 1904–1995): Soon the military, especially in the United States during World War II, realized how useful such electronic devices, i. e., mainframe machines of impressive size, were for military purposes. The first academic disciplines which benefitted from the new technology were, of course, natural sciences of all kinds; in the 1960s the humanities began to explore the new technique, and so did very soon medievalists. In the 1980s the epoch of microcomputers began, of so-called ‘personal’ computers (Apple, PCs), and it became more and more common to use them on individual writing desks. Personal computers and word processing software are nowadays indispensable tools for nearly most people who are professional writers. Probably no academic book, article, or even a student’s paper is anymore written without using IT – and of course this is also the case in Medieval Studies. We can assume that colleagues who use a typewriter today or even write their manuscripts by hand are now a very rare species. Publishers nearly all over the world expect to get the texts from their academic authors as electronic files, and often the authors are even responsible for the lay-out. It is therefore not only impossible, but no longer neccessary to outline the importance of IT tools for writing all kind of texts. At the moment Microsoft’s Word for Windows is nearly omnipresent although it is not an perfect writing software for academic writers; some saw Wordperfect for Windows as superior. I myself, for example, prefer Nota Bene (and here still one of the later DOS-versions, not that for Windows); it dates back to old CP/M-times, but it was very creatively conceived for academic writers and adapted for DOS and Windows, especially in the humanities. A software, originally conceived for mainframe machines and later adapted for DOS, called TUSTEP (Tübinger System von Textverarbeitungsprogrammen, ‘Tübingen System of Text-Processing Programs’), is probably the most powerful software for texts, but unfortunately also extremely difficult to handle. It is no WYSIWYG program, but otherwise one can use it for nearly every purpose to produce and retrieve words: for writing the most tricky texts (for example for all natural sciences, for maths, and linguistics), but also for comparing several texts, to produce at least half-automatically an edi-

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torial apparatus, or concordances; it was conceived by Wilhelm Ott (University of Tübingen: Classical studies [!]), and various times used for editions of old German texts (and here Paul Sappler, Tübingen, should be mentioned as an oustanding specialist; see: Wilhelm Ott, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Programmsystemen für wissenschaftliche Textverarbeitung,” Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte, ed. Kurt Gärtner, Paul Sappler, and Michael Trauth, 1991, 129–39). But in the philologies word-processing was not the origin of applying IT: In the beginning there was the analysis of huge amounts of linguistic material to collect word indexes and word concordances. The following paragraphs will outline the evolution (and revolution!) of computer-based research in medieval philologies, mainly based on my own experience and competence as a medievalist of German Studies. B. Concordances, Indexes Two theologians, Roberto Busa and Bonifatius Fischer, were the forerunners for computer-based word indexes and concordances. Father Busa, professor at the Papal Gregorian University of Rome, started in 1949 to analyze the complete works of Thomas of Aquin with the help of indexes and concordances; the project was supported by IBM with millions of dollars, and finally the Index Thomasticus comprised altogether 57 volumes. Bonifatius Fischer (Vetus Latina Institut at the Benedictine Monastery of Beuron, Germany) conceived a concordance of the complete Bible (Vulgata), which was published in 1977: Novae concordantiae Bibliorum sacrorum iuxta vulgatam versionem critice editam, 5 vols., 1977. Both projects, naturally, took decades to complete. The first medievalist in German Studies who produced a computer index was Harald Schuller at the University of Ann Arbor (A Word Index to the ‘Nibelungenklage’. Based on K. Lachmann’s Edition, 1966). The decisive protagonist in this field was the British medievalist Roy A. Wisbey (Cambridge, later London): Between 1967 and 1976 he published concordances for the following works: Wiener Genesis (1967), Vorauer and Strassburg Alexander (1968), Latin and Early Middle High German Speculum ecclesiae (1968), Konrad’s Rolandslied (1969), Middle High German Biblical Epics (David A. Wells, Vorauer Bücher Moses; Roy A. Wisbey, Altdeutsche Exodus; Brian O. Murdoch, Anegenge, Microfiche, 1976). In 1968, he founded a series for concordances: Compendia (see: Kurt Gärtner, “Concordances and Indices to Middle High German,” Computer and Humanities 14 [1980], 39–45; Roy A. Wisbey, “Computer und Philologie in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft,” Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte IV, ed. Kurt Gärtner, Paul Sappler, Michael Trauth,

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1991, 346–61; Kurt Gärtner and Peter Kühn, 1998 [see bibliography]). Together with Roberto Busa he was a co-founder of the Association for Literary and Lingistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973, which later became a founding chapter of the important Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), which has ACLL’s journal LLC (Literary and Linguistic Computing: Journal for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 1986 sqq.) as its main print publication. The first German computer-index for later German texts (18th to 20th centuries) was published in 1968 by Helmut Schanze (Index zu Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen). During the following three decades dozens of computerbased indexes and concordances of medieval German texts were presented: A list which comprises most of these books (not all!) can be found in Kurt Gärtner and Peter Kühn (1998, 719–21, 735–39). They applied different methods: plain alphabetization of word-forms; with or without parsing, lemmatisation and/or segregation of homographs; some with a ranking list of frequencies, an index of rhymes, or a reverse index of the graphic forms. Many editors can be named (for details see Gärtner and Kühn, 1998): Robert R. Anderson et al. (Die Heidin, 1981; Heinrich von Mügeln, Der meide kranz, 1981; Ackermann aus Böhmen, 1973/1974); Erika Bauer (Heinrich Haller, 1982, 1984); Franz H. Bäuml and Eva-Maria Fallone (Nibelungenlied, 1976); Roy A. Boggs (Hartmann von Aue 1979); Ernst Brenner and Klaus Ridder (Vocabularius optimus 1990); Harald Bühler (Frauenlob, 1985); Udo von der Burg (Stricker, Karl der Große, 1974); Siegfried Christoph (Stricker, Werke, 1997); Hans Eggers (Latin and Old High German Isidor 1960); Ulrich Goebel (Moriz von Craon, 1975); Dagmar Gottschall (Lucidarius, 1975); Clifton Hall (Parzival, 1990; Tristan, 1992); Clifton Hall and Samuel Coleman (Walther von der Vogelweide, 1995); Olga Janssen (Schweizer Minnesänger,1984); Thomas Klein, Joachim Bumke et al. (Hessisch-thüringische Epen um 1200); Jean L.C. Putmans (Herzog Ernst, 1980); Margot Schmidt (Rudolf von Biberach); Masahiro Shimbo (Otfrid, 1990); Hirohiko Soejima (Stricker, 1988, Helmbrecht, 1990); Paul Sappler (Kaufringer, 1974); Katrin Woesner (Albrecht, Jüngerer Titurel, 2003). For years there was a productive teamwork of conceiving concordances between the universities of Maryland, College Park (George F. Jones et al.), and Salzburg (Ingrid Bennewitz, Hans-Dieter and Heike Mück, Ulrich Müller, Franz Viktor Spechtler et al.): Oswald von Wolkenstein (1974), Mönch von Salzburg (religious songs, 1975), lyric manuscript B Weingarten and Stuttgart (1978), lyric manuscript A Heidelberg (1979), Hugo von Montfort (1981), Neidhart, Berlin Ms. c (1984). The quality of all these indexes and concordances is different, and it depends above all of the quality of the edition which was used (Franz Viktor

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Spechtler, “Textedition–Textcorpus–EDV: Zum Problem der philologischen Grundlagen für die linguistische Datenverarbeitung,” Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, Bulletin 4 [1976]: 95–96). Four of the College Park, MD, Salzburg concordances are based on the authentic texts of important manuscripts lyrical mss. A very special case are three indexes by Klaus M. Schmidt (Ulrich von Lichtenstein, 1981; Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, 1993; Kudrun, 1994): They present not only word lists, but also semantic glossaries, and this method became the basis of the MHDBDB (Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank, ‘Middle High German Conceptual Data Base’), which since 2002 has been installed at the University of Salzburg (see below). All these printed indexes and concordances are books which can simply be used and which present a lot of information, at least for philologists, but they represent a former epoch of computing. The present state of art is much more effective, more elegant – and costs much less to publish: medieval texts, stored in computer databases, which can be analyzed by any word-searching or concordance program (early examples: TUSTEP [see above], OCP = Oxford Concordance Program; Wordcruncher). A combination of book and computer data-base was created by Hermann Reichert (Nibelungenlied, MS B, 2 vol., 2006). C. Conferences Possibilities and methods of literary and linguistic computing have been presented and discussed at an increasing number of conferences. For old German texts the first was organized by Winfried Lenders and Hugo Moser at Mannheim (Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte I, 1971, published 1978 [!]; see also Winfried Lenders, “Lexigraphische Arbeiten zu Texten der älteren deutschen Literatur mit Hilfe von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 90 [1971]: 321–36; Untersuchungen zur automatischen Indizierung mittelhochdeutscher Texte, ed. Winfried Lenders, HansDieter Lutz, and Ruth Römer, 1969, 2nd ed. 1973). More conferences of the same kind followed, for example: Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte II (Mannheim 1973; published in 1978: ed. Winfried Lenders and Hugo Moser); III (Tübingen 1977; published in 1980: ed. Paul Sappler and Erich Strassner); IV (Trier 1988, published 1991: ed. Kurt Gärtner, Paul Sappler, and Michael Trauth); V (Würzburg 1997, published in 2001, ed. Stephan Moser); Mediävistik und neue Medien (Bamberg 2001, published in 2004, ed. Klaus van Eickels, Ruth Weichselbaumer, and Ingrid Bennewitz). See also, for example, Data Bases in the Humanities and Social Sciences (conference Grinnell, Iowa 1987), ed. Thomas F. Moberg, 1987; Historische Edition und Computer: Möglichkeiten und Probleme interdisziplinärer Textverarbei-

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tung und Textbearbeitung (conference Graz 1989), ed. Anton Schwob et al., 1989. D. CD-ROMs, Internet/World Wide Web Indexes and concordances were only the beginning. To produce them it was necessary to transform printed texts into computer-readable texts. Most of them were just used for a special project, but there were also plans to publish them on CD-ROMs, and very soon in the new World Wide Web, making them directly accessible – and mostly gratuitous. PCs, the Internet, and the World Wide Web introduced possibilities to present and to analyze large amounts of data, home-pages which could be linked, and which made projects accessible without publishing them as printed and mostly expensive books. They revolutionized research in all disciplines, and so also in Medieval Studies. Nearly monthly there are new plans, concepts, and projects world-wide, and things change so rapidly that it is nearly impossible to overview even the IT-sites of an individual academic field. Some people prophesied the exitus of printed books, the end of the so-called ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ (Marshall McLuhan), but that seems to be an exaggeration created by technical enthusiasm. Even if there are academic journals, monographs, and articles published in the World Wide Web, large projects and sample of data which can only be presented by IT, the new technology as well as printing on paper will probably coexist according to specific intentions. Robert Darnton (“The New Age of the Book,” New York Times Review of Books, March 18th, 1999 [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/546]) wrote about reading texts on a screen: “The world of learning is chanching so rapidly that no one can predict what it will look like ten years from now. But I believe it will remain within the Gutenberg galaxy – though the galaxy will expand, thanks to a new source of energy, the electronic book, which will act as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Gutenberg’s great machine.” And Darnton quotes William H. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft: “Reading off the screen is still vastly inferior to reading off a paper. Even I, who have these expensive screens and fancy myself as a pioneer of this Web Lifestyle, when it comes to something about four of five pages, I print it out and I like to have it to carry around with me and annotate. And it’s quite a hurdle for technology to match that level of usability.” Academic texts until today must be written according to the rules, and there is no fundamental difference in academic rules and standards if the texts will be published on paper or on screen. One can present texts and data of enormous size in the WWW, much faster and less expensive than printed books, but they must have sufficient quality. Furthermore, there is always

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the problem of their volatile character. Websites appear and disappear, and a text, printed on paper and/or bound as a book, is probably much more lasting (and it might be that in hundreds or thousands of years only texts survive that are written on parchment manuscripts or in stone, but not printed on paper or published by electronical methods). But there is also the opposite opinion: “People worry about the problems of digital preservation, and wether the e-texts of today will still be readable ten years from now. We all know some standard horror stories to illustrate this, but again, can we really believe that this will be other than a transient problem?” (David Pearson: “Digitisation: do we have a strategy,” Ariadne, 30 [2001] [http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/digilib/]; see also Susanne Dobratz and Inka Tappenbeck, “Thesen zur Zukunft der digitalen Langzeitarchivierung in Deutschland,” Bibliothek, 26 [2002]: III: 257–61). E. Travelling in the WWW It is until today possible to be more or less informed about what is presented on CD-ROMs (and also what has been printed on paper). But the enormous amount of material which can be found in the WWW makes special reference tools a necessity. Two of them should be mentioned here as examples, both with a focus on German Medieval Studies. Ruth Weichselbaumer published in 2005 a monograph (Mittelalter virtuell: Mediävistik im Internet) about Medieval Studies and IT, presenting and discussing many websites and IT tools. It is an excellent guide book through the regions of the WWW; there is a short and legible description of the many websites which are enlisted. Another guide tool can be found within the WWW itself: Mediaevum (www.mediaevum.de). It is kind of a IT-‘portal,’ i. e., it assembles information and presents it with a classified system of links. One can, for example, look for the names, addresses and bibliographies of medievalists of the German-speaking universities; for a list of medieval manuscripts which are at the moment accessible as a digitalized version in the WWW; for links to databases about the Middle Ages; for a conference calendar etc. The presented material is, of course, sometimes incomplete. Regarding digitalized medieval manuscripts and information about manuscripts there should be added the medieval section of the website of the University Library of Salzburg (www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/sosa/webseite/sosa.htm; conceived by Beatrix Koll) and the famous Wolkenstein-MS of the University Library of Innsbruck – at the moment it is nearly ingeniously hidden, and the easiest way to visit is via Wikipedia (Oswald von Wolkenstein: links). For many more ‘guides,’ see Ruth Weichselbaumer, Mittelalter virtuell (2005); there is also a good, but of course subjective overview published by Sonja Glauch,

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one of the protagonists of the above mentioned mediaevum: “Neue Medien, alte Texte? Überlegungen zum Ertrag digitaler Ressourcen für die Altgermanistik,” Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft auf dem Weg zu den neuen Medien, ed. Michael Stolz, Lucas Marco Gisi, and Jan Loop, 2007; also: www.germanistik.ch/autorin.php?id=Sonja_Glauch). Further Mediävistik – Das deutschsprachige Mittelalter, a homepage at the University Bayreuth should be mentioned, conceived in cooperation with the University of Regensburg (http://www.aedph.uni-bayreuth.de/media evistik.htm): It is a mailing list for medievalists, which is extensively used for questions and discussions (in German). Also very useful is a bibliographical searching machine (bibliographical ‘portal’) which is presented by the university library of Karlsruhe, the Karlsruher Virtuelle Katalog (KVK: ‘Karlsruhe virtual catalogue’: http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/ kvk.html). There one can search for a book in dozens of scientific libraries all over the world, including the US (Library of Congress), UK (British Library), France (Bibliothèque National), and elsewhere in Europe; the various library catalogues to be searched through with one single [!] command can be selected specifically; the KVK can be used for books in general, as far as they are listed in electronic catalogues, but it is extremely helpful also for medieval studies. F. Electronic Texts, Editions, Editorial Databases Texts of all kinds have been increasingly stored and presented in the WWW (sometimes also on CD-ROMs). Numerous websites present texts, also medieval ones of various languages, and very often gratuitous (see the list of links to medieval Latin and German texts in: texte.mediaevum.de/index.htm; for medieval English, French and other Romance languages, see Ruth Weichselbaumer, Mittelalter virtuell, 2005, 67–70). But there is one problem: they can only be as good as the editions on which they are based, and therefore one should look for editorial information before downloading them and using them. Of course also older editions may be presented in the WWW (and as mentioned above, now all new ones have been written and published with the help of IT). Followers of the so-called New Philology have been advising strongly to publish future editions not as printed books, but with the help of computers and online (see, above all, Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variance: Histoire critique de la philologie, 1989; regarding the ‘New Philology,’ see “The New Philology” Speculum 65 [1990]: 1–208). But until today no completely electronic edition has been published, and many scholars suppose that such an edition would not be useful and not practical; above all, German medieval-

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ists have argued against this ‘new wave’ and stressed that much of it is not really ‘new’ at all (Karl Stackmann, “Die Edition – Königsweg der Philologie?,” Probleme und Methoden mittelalterlicher deutscher Texte, ed. Rolf Bergmann et al.,1993, 1–18; Ingrid Bennewitz, “Alte ‘Neue’ Philologie?,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 116 [1997], Sonderheft: Philologie als Textwissenschaft, 46–61; Rüdiger Schnell, “Was ist neu an der ‘New Philology’?” Alte und neue Philologie, Beihefte zu ‘editio,’ 1997, 61–95). It might be a perspective for the future to combine for editions a printed book and presentation of additional material in the WWW; Wernfried Hofmeister’s new edition of the songs of Hugo von Montfort (2005) is a first example. But the best possibilities to display medieval texts would be to combine the presentation of digitalized manuscripts or incunabula, transcriptions, editions, and – perhaps – translations all in one project online. Ulrich Müller (“Mittelalterliche Codices und Computer: Projektskizze einer integrierten Video- und Datenbank,” Jahrbuch der Universität Salzburg 1983–1985, 1987, 163–68; id., “Mittelhochdeutsche Texte im Aktenköfferchen,” Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte: Beiträge zum Vierten Internationalen Symposion 1988, ed. Kurt Gärtner et al., 1991, 96–103) proposed such a design, applying the possibilites of hypertexts. Such projects are beeing been carried out at several universities, for example: (a) the Princton University (The Princeton Charrette Project, i. e., Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, le Chevalier de la charette, conceived by Karl D. Uitti 1994 sqq.: http://www.princeton.edu/ lancelot/ss/); (b) the University of Birmingham, UK (The Canterbury Tales project: CD-ROMs, and on-line: www.canterburytalesproject.org); (c) the Florida Gulf Coast University (Roy A. Boggs 1991 sqq.: The Hartmann von Aue (Knowledge Based) Portal: www.fgcu.edu/rboggs/Hartmann; or: www.HvA.uni-trier.de; see: Roy A. Boggs, “The Hartmann von Aue (Knowledge Based) Portal. An Introduction and Description,” cristallîn wort. Hartmann Studien 1 [2007]: 13–32); and (d) the Universities of Basel and Bern (Michael Stolz, Parzival-Projekt). Michael Stolz, who refers to the Chaucer project as one of his prototypes, presented the latest plans of this ambitious project at the conference Graz 2008 (see below): Selected sections of Wolfram’s Parzival are presented in the WWW – digitalized manuscripts, parallel transcriptions, variants of the other manuscripts (www.parzival.unibe.ch); the full Parzival manuscript of the Bavarian State Library Munich cgm 19 (CD-ROM 2008, and on-line: http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/ db/bsb00002134/images/index.html). A complete printed edition of the four most important manuscripts will follow, presented in parallel columns. All these projects are, naturally, works in progress (Roy A. Boggs 2007 [see above], 13: “never be perfect, never be finished, and always without boundaries […], an imperfect tool for better scholarship”);

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but ‘work in progress’ also means that they can continually and easily be augmented and actualized. G. Databases About the Middle Ages The same must be said about nearly all databases. Meanwhile there are numerous databases that store and present all kinds of information on Medieval Studies. Just some philological ones (German Studies) might be mentioned here: (a) Handschriftencensus (www.handschriftencensus.de), an online digital archive of dates about medieval German manuscripts and early printings; this international project is situated at the University of Marburg; (b) Mittelhochdeutsche Wörterbücher im Verbund (‘Collected Middle High German Dictionaries’: germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/MWV), a database which presents the two major dictionaries of Middle High German (Lexer, and Benecke/Müller/Zarncke) and additional material; it is also available on CDROM; and (c) the Middle High German Conceptual Data Base (‘Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdaten-Bank’: mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at), conceived by Klaus M. Schmidt and Horst Peter Pütz (Bowling Green State University and University of Kiel), and since 2002 located at the University of Salzburg: It is the largest database of MHG language (about 250 works, roughly 8 million words at the moment [April 2010]). All the word material can be searched for word-forms, parts of words, or any compounds of letters, everything in various combinations, and partly further for “Begriffsfelder.” It is by far the largest ‘intelligent’ medieval database and is much more powerful, for example, than the above mentioned TUSTEP (see Klaus Schmidt and Horst Peter Pütz, “Die Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 130 [2001]: 493–95; Margarete Springeth, “Die Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB: http://mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at) “[= “Computer und Film als Medien der Erinnerung,” I], Literatur als Erinnerung: Winfried Woesler zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Bodo Plachta, Tübingen 2004, 52–58). The most recent information about various MHG databases was presented at a conference in Graz (Austria), September 2008, among others by Klaus Klein (Handschriftencensus) and Margarete Springeth (MHDBDB), and can be read in the proceedings (Wege zum Text: Grazer germanistisches Kolloquium über die Verfügbarkeit mediävistischer Editionen im 21. Jahrhundert, (Beihefte zu ‘editio’), ed. Wernfried and Andrea Hofmeister, 2009). The MHDBDB is linked with an on-line collection of medieval miniatures and paintings depicting every-day life in the late Middle Ages and early modern times, a project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (‘Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften’), and established in Krems (Lower Austria): REALonline: www.imreal.oeaw.ac. at/realonline.

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IT is nowadays indispensable to write and publish any texts; and it will be more and more applied to analyze and evaluate them – also in Medieval Studies where they were used rather early. An online catalogue is currently created at the UCLA for the location and identification of digitized medieval manuscripts: http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu. Select Bibliography Kurt Gärtner and Peter Kühn, “Indices und Konkordanzen zu historischen Texten des Deutschen: Bestandsaufnahme, Typen, Herstellungsprobleme, Benutzungsmöglichkeiten,” Sprachgeschichte: Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung, ed. Werner Besch et. al. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2nd ed. 1998), I, 715–42; Kurt Gärtner, “Texte im Netz – Perspektiven Digitaler Bibliotheken” (paper at the Internationale Conference of Manuscript Editors 2003), online: http://www.dfg.de/forschungsfoerderung/wissenschaftliche_infrastruktur/lis/ veroeffentlich ungen/dokumentationen/download/vortrag_gaertner.pdf; Jan Christoph Meister, “Projekt Computerphilologie: Über Geschichte, Verfahren und Theorie rechnergestützter Literaturwissenschaft,” Literarität und Digitalität: Zur Zukunft der Literatur, ed. Harro Segeberg and Simone Winko (Munich: Fink, 2005), online: http://www.jcmeister.de/downloads/texts/jcm-project-cp.html; Maschinelle Verarbeitung altdeutscher Texte I–V (conferences 1971–1997), ed. various (Berlin and Tübingen: Schmidt and Niemeyer, 1977–2001); Mediävistik und Neue Medien (conference Bamberg, 2001), ed. Klaus van Eikels, Ruth Weichselbaumer and Ingrid Bennewitz (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2004); Ulrich Müller, “Medieval German Lyric Poetry and Computers: A Project at the University of Salzburg: With the prospect of a computer-based integration of facsimile, transcription and concordance,” Data Bases in the Humanities and Social Scienes, ed Thomas F. Moberg (Osprey, FL: Paradigm, 1987), 329–36; Wege zum Text: Grazer germanistisches Kolloquium über die Verfügbarkeit mediävistischer Editionen im 21. Jahrhundert (conference Graz, September 2008), Beihefte zu ‘editio,’ ed. Andrea and Wernfried Hofmeister (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009); Ruth Weichselbaumer, Mittelalter virtuell: Mediävistik im Internet (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2005). All Web sites which are mentioned in the article above were last accessed in October 2008.

Ulrich Müller

Conversion A. Definition In the year 300, Christianity was only one of many religions in the Roman world, a sect occasionally persecuted by the emperors. By 1000, however, Christian churches dotted the map from Iceland to western China. More-

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over, throughout a string of lands running from the Atlantic to the River Volga and Asia Minor, Christianity was the established religion. Together these Christian states represented Christendom: a self-conscious Christian community that abutted still pagan territories to the north and east (especially in the Baltic region) and the dominions of Islam stretching from Spain to Syria (which hosted a significant Christian population down to the modern period). Although always a mystery to most medieval western Christians, a Christian state also existed throughout the Middle Ages in Ethiopia. The seven centuries between the conversion of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to legalize Christian worship, and the turn of the millennium when, in the words of a contemporary, Europe was “decked white” in a flurry of church-building are usually conceived as the conversion of Europe. The main stages in this conversion can be quickly sketched, beginning of course with Constantine’s Edict of Milan (313) that granted Christians the right to free public assembly. Increasing imperial patronage of the Christian Church followed, with the outlawing of the sacrifices of traditional GrecoRoman paganism in 395. In 438, the Codex Theodosianus proclaimed the Roman Empire a formally Christian state, establishing an intimate identification between romanitas and Christianity that was reiterated in the Codex Iustinianus in 529. Justinian’s Code provided the legal foundation for Rome’s continuation in the Eastern Mediterranean, “Byzantium” (the empire ruled from Constantinople whose inhabitants never ceased to call themselves Romans until the final demise of their state in 1453) and sealed the formal Christian (‘Orthodox’) identity of the eastern, Greek-speaking half of medieval Christendom (see Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome, 1980; and Averil Cameron, The Byzantines, 2007). In the East, Byzantium exported Christianity to Ethiopia during the 4th century; periodically sponsored Christian communities in the Caucasus (where an Armenian Christian state had existed since the early 4th century) against Persian domination until that empire’s collapse in 651; and brought the southern and eastern Slavs into the medieval Christian orbit. The conversion of the Slavs to Orthodoxy took place notably through the missionary endeavors of Ss Cyril (827–869) and Methodius (826–885), the baptism of the Bulgar khan, ca. 865, and the adoption of Christianity by the rulers (later tsars) of Kiev from 988 and later Moscow, and giving birth to what Dimitri Obolensky called the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ (The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, 1971). Church leaders in Orthodox Slav lands acknowledged the pre-eminence of the bishop of Constantinople as Ecumenical patriarch and drew heavily on Byzantine theology and spirituality translated from Greek, but developed a liturgy in “Old Church” Slavonic. On

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the other side of the ledger, Christological disputes between 431 and 553 splintered the Eastern Church into a complex array of mutually-hostile hierarchies, that included the Syriac- and Coptic-speaking churches that inhabited the Islamic Caliphate from its rise in 632, central Asia and southern India, whose later medieval developments are admirably covered by Gilbert Dagron, Pierre Riché and André Vauché (Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours, 4, Évêques, moines et empereurs (610–1054), ed. id., 1993). A different story unfolded in western Europe where the bishops of Rome, the See of St Peter, Prince of the Apostles, developed a distinctive claim to direct jurisdictional authority over all Christian peoples. Following the disintegration of Roman authority, symbolized in the abdication of the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, in 476, Rome’s western territories fell under the sway of Germanic military leaders (“barbarians” to the Romans) who were either Arian Christians (heretics in “Catholic” Roman eyes for Christological reasons) – as with the Goths in Italy, Spain and southern Gaul, the Burgundians in the Rhone valley, Sueves in Galicia and the Vandals in North Africa – or pagans – such as the Franks in northern Gaul and Anglo-Saxons in lowland Britain. In the eyes of early medieval Catholic Churchmen, therefore, conversion signified as much the persuasion of Arians to adopt Catholic Christianity as it did the baptism of pagans. The latter often took place first, beginning with St Patrick’s mission to Ireland during the 5th century (see David Dumville, Saint Patrick, AD 493–1993, 1993; Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society, 1966 [1980]) and followed by the all-important conversion and baptism of Clovis, king of the Franks, around 500, which inaugurated a long tradition of Frankish leadership of western Europe, in tandem with the papacy from 754 (Clovis: Histoire et mémoire, ed. Michel Rouche, 1997; John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church, 1983; La christianisation des pays entre Loire et Rhin, ed. Pierre Riché, 1976). In 597, Pope Gregory I (“the Great”) sent a Roman mission to England which succeeded in converting Ethelbert, king of Kent (Robert Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 1972; St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Richard Gameson, 1999). Despite Walter Ullmann’s long-standing thesis to the contrary (The Growth of Papal Government, 1955; id., A Short History of the Papacy, 1972 [2003]), Gregory’s mission should be considered an act of spiritual devotion rather than political strategy according to Robert Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (1997). With competition for converts between the native British church, Roman and Irish missionaries, all of Britain’s Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were formally Christian by 700. By this time Anglo-Saxon missionaries were actively baptizing their German cousins on the Continent, where the Irish

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were also actively promoting a new monastic revival among the old GalloRoman Christians further south. Further north still, Catholic Christianity reached Scandinavia from the 9th century, initiating the gradual foundation of bishoprics and monasteries, as well as the introduction of literacy that had been typical of Christianity’s advance elsewhere in western Europe (see Birgit and Peter Sawyer and Ian Wood, The Christianization of Scandinavia, 1987). Poland and Hungary formally entered the Catholic fold in 963 and 1001 respectively. The Baltic states proved more resistant, but with the conversion of Lithuania in 1386 the final piece in the jigsaw of medieval Christendom fitted into place. The first Germanic kingdom to adopt Catholic Christianity in place of Arianism was Visigothic Spain in 589. The Arian elites of that country possibly deduced the dangers that could flow from allowing religion to divide them from their catholic subjects. In 533, Justinian, emperor of Byzantium, manipulated Arian persecution of Catholics in Vandal Africa to justify the liquidation of that kingdom; a similar fate eventually befell the powerful Ostrogothic state in Italy in 554. Conversely, the kings of the Franks (and subsequently of France) derived prestige throughout the medieval period from the fact that they had converted directly to Catholicism, with no intervening period spent in heresy. The Lombards oscillated between paganism, Arianism, and Catholicism throughout their independent existence in Italy. Arianism was finally extinguished as an organized competitor to the Catholic Church with Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774 and incorporation of it into his greater Catholic, Frankish empire that dominated Continental north western Europe. Of course, the baptism of kings is only one aspect of the formation of Christendom. Equally important was the evangelization of the countryside. From the start, Christianity was a city-based religion; scattered communities of illiterate village-peasants fitted ill with the traditional Christian paradigm of city-based congregations under the oversight of a literate bishop and clergy. Outreach by bishops such as St Martin of Tours (ca. 316–ca. 397) to the peasantry began under the Christian emperors of the 4th century, as is documented through the destruction of sacred groves and rural shrines and temples in contemporary saints’ Lives from Gaul (see Clare Stancliffe, St Martin and his Hagiographer, 1983). Thanks in part to similar sources, Frank Trombley (Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529, 1993) charts the resilience of non-Christian traditions in Asia Minor as late as the 6th century. Such activities remained the standard practice of missionaries in German and Scandinavian lands down to the turn of the millennium. Folk customs, including “magic,” were labeled as sacrilegious superstition by Church auth-

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orities throughout the Middle Ages but, according to Valerie Flint (The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 1991) never ceased to inform the lives of a significant proportion of the population of Christendom. Even if the memory of pre-Christian gods had vanished, their functions were often subsumed in the spectacular multiplicity of popular medieval saints’ cults. Another important conversion that took place during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was the Christianization of space, time and communal history, according to norms that were perceived to be consistent with biblical revelation and Christian teaching. As shown by Robert Markus (The End of Ancient Christianity, 1990) this can be observed in the creation of the Christian liturgical year, beginning with the celebration of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany and culminating in Lent and the great celebrations of Easter and Whitsun (Pentecost). Modelled on the life of Christ, the Christian year was also punctuated by the feasts of the martyrs and saints, some local others Europe- and Mediterranean-wide. Corresponding to this was the overlaying of an old pagan landscape with a new Christian topography. Emperors raised basilicas that housed dazzling mosaics of Christ, the saints and the heavenly city to steal the glory of the old pagan temples. Bishops dedicated shrines to the memory of martyrs in various corners of early medieval cities: where a city possessed the body of no martyr of its own, relics brought from elsewhere ensured that it was nonetheless connected to the great Christian network that recast the sacred geography (pagan springs, groves and oracles) of the pre-Christian era. States depicted Christian themes on coins, ivory diptychs and other objects imbued with official significance, where emperors and kings projected an image of themselves as ruling with the authority of Christ. In church, prayers for Christian rulers were an integral part of the Sunday liturgy. The result was by the 6th century a society on the way to becoming completely transformed in its own imagination of itself. The metamorphosis was most striking perhaps in the city of Rome where the popes deployed the relics of Ss Peter and Paul to create a Christian city designed to eclipse the memory of pagan Rome with its myth of Romulus and Remus. This is documented by Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City (1980); id., Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics (1983). B. History of Research The emergence of medieval Europe as a formally Christian society clearly demands explanation. It has long been accepted that the so-called conversion of Constantine (306–337) launched Christianity as a formerly persecuted religion on its way to becoming within less than a century the sole permitted religion in the Mediterranean world and an essential element of Roman

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political and cultural identity. Continuing a tradition epitomized by A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (1948), Ramsay MacMullen’s words have much justification for the medievalist as well: “Nothing counts more than the year 312” (Christianizing the Roman Empire, 1984, 102). Outwardly, the only hiccup in this steady process was the pagan revival pursued by Julian the Apostate during his brief reign (360–361). Since the 1970s, however, historians of early medieval Europe have increasingly recognized the indispensability of a deeper understanding of late antiquity as the cultural matrix for Europe’s conversion. Peter Brown (The World of Late Anitiquity, 1971; The Rise of Western Christendom, 1996 [2003]), places the formal acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Empire’s barbarian successor states in the context of late antique developments, and demonstrates that the nature of the Christianity medieval people were converted to was hierarchical, bishop-dominated and culturally Roman, thanks at least in part to the Church’s experience in the Empire. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (1986) remains the classic treatment of relations between pagans and Christians in the empire up to Constantine’s death; Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (1995) and R. A. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity (1990) have brought to the fore the tensions that Christianization provoked in the Roman world. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (1991) investigates how words themselves were converted in the late antique world as Christians created literary discourses and developed a totalizing Christian worldview. The various contributors to Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (2003) have underscored the social and political tensions between church and empire that accompanied the public expansion of Christianity in the Roman world and Neil McLynn’s concluding essay especially is an invaluable roadmap of possibilities for future research into the social ramifications of changed religious loyalties in late antiquity. Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (1987) serves as the handbook for the growing awareness of distinctive eastern (“Orthodox”) and western (“Catholic”) Christian identities from the 5th down to the 9th centuries. It is helpful to seek some definitional clarification, given that the meaning a scholar of the middle ages attaches to the word “conversion” will inexorably bear upon his or her appreciation of it as a socio-historical phenomenon. There are perhaps three principal ways in which medieval conversion has been conceived and each implies its own chronology and view of medieval society. These are, broadly, conversion as a (1) personal and inward experience, (2) historico-political narrative, and (3) ongoing sociological pro-

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cess. Conversion as a personal experience of changed religious conviction is embodied above all in the “Damascus Road” model provided by St Paul’s conversion in the Acts of the Apostles – the text of primordial importance for all Church history. Although Acts provides other models of conversion as well, conversion as conceived of as a dramatic change in an individual’s religious conviction was entrenched in 20th-century English-language scholarship by Arthur Darby Nock’s Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1938). Nock famously defined conversion as “the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or an earlier form of piety to another, […] a consciousness that […] the old was wrong and the new is right” (7) and his focus on the individual’s psychological motivations for conversion from one religion to another owed its methodology to the American psychologist William James’s turn-of-the-century study, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). As Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe (1997), points out (see below), the problematic nature of representing medieval conversion in these terms is compounded by the fact that, for the entire period from Constantine to Luther (†1546), the sources for the history of personal conversion from inside the mind of the convert are lacking, with exceptions in only an extremely limited number of cases. Among these, however, are the towering figures of Ss Augustine of Hippo (ca. 354–430) and Anselm of Canterbury (†1109), modern biographies of whose Christian calling provide superb historical analysis: Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967; 1998), and Richard Southern, St Anselm and his Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130 (1961). In a similarly individual-orientated perspective, Karl Morrison, Understanding Conversion (1990) also studies the language used to describe conversion to discern the religious experience of monastic converts during the 11th and 12th centuries in the context of an outwardly-converted Christian society. The second way in which scholars have imagined conversion is as part of a quasi-political historical narrative leading to the formation of Christendom with its individual national kingdoms. This conception of conversion focuses on peoples rather than individuals and often takes its cue from the sources themselves, e. g., Bede’s 8th-century History of the English Church and People (731) or Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, although the objectivity of these texts has been problematized by Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (AD 550–800) (1988). The underlying model for conversion is “top-down,” with the entry of a previously pagan or heretic people group following upon the baptism of a powerful king and his retainers. Conversion as national narrative is the favored domain of most traditional scholarship

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on medieval conversion, e. g. Ferdinand Lot, La fin du monde antique et le début du Moyen Âge (1927) and Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (1932; 2003). Such works entwine “Church” and “State” as normative categories for the consideration of the whole of medieval history, constructing the Christian Middle Ages as a concerted dance between political and ecclesiastical interests and typically focus on the conversion of the various Germanic kingdoms between the collapse of Rome’s authority in the West, ca. 378–476, and the flowering of the Frankish empire under Charlemagne (774–814). On the contrary, Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200–1000 (1996; 2003) proposes as an important revisionist view of early medieval Christian societies that considers as much the cultural as the political dynamics of Europe’s conversion; in place of a single grand narrative, the second edition presents the Mediterranean and north-western Europe as a devolved network of regional “micro-Christendoms.” Within a longer chronological purview, the most accessible and comprehensive recent contribution in English to this strand of medieval conversion history is Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371–1386 (1997). Jacques Brosse, Histoire de la Chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident: De la conversion des barbares au sac de Constantinople (1995) and relevant volumes of Desclée’s Histoire du Christianisme des origines à nos jours are noteworthy in French. In German, Lutz von Padberg, Die Christianisierung Europas im Mittelalter (1998) provides an invaluable pocket-sized overview of the expansion of Christianity throughout the Roman and medieval periods, including diachronic discussions of important themes and translations of selected sources; Peter Thrams, Die Christianisierung des Römerreiches und heidnischer Widerstand (1992) restricts himself to the Roman period. Marina Montesano, La Cristianizzazione dell’Italia nel Medioevo (1997) is the handbook for this change in Italy, with Augusto Fraschetti, La Conversione: Da Roma pagana a Roma cristiana (1999) concentrating on the dynamics of Constantine’s conversion. Articles in Guyda Armstrong and Ian Wood, Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals (2000) suggest the possibility of revisionist perspectives, with those by Wood and Pohl containing important considerations for students of the Anglo-Saxons and Lombards respectively. The conversion of Europe as narrative has been contested by different historiographical traditions. Among Roman Catholic historians (e. g., Dawson), the early medieval conversion period is portrayed as the Church’s heroic age – an “age of saints,” as Henri-Iréné Marrou put it in his Nouvelle Histoire de l’église: Des origines à saint Grégoire le Grand (vol. 2, 1963, 247–48) – during which disciplined Benedictine monks overcame the uncouth barbar-

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ism of the continent’s un-Romanized peoples to lay the foundations for the achievements of European civilization that followed. The obvious flaw in a narrative history of conversion is the teleology it often involves, particularly in triumphalist accounts that assume the inevitability of Christianity’s winning out over competitors. Apart from representing a late flowering of the esteem in which 19th-century romanticism held the Middle Ages (consider especially the Neo-Gothic craze of Victorian Britain), however, such a perspective was, of course, also a reaction to the overwhelmingly negative view of a period cast during the Enlightenment as the “Dark Ages” – a view expressed especially in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which considered the rise of Christianity as a cause for Rome’s disintegration. Since the 1970s, Peter Brown has led the critique of Gibbon, presenting the triumph of the Church not as the result of Christianity’s inherent superiority or divine favor, but of the Church’s willingness to negotiate and ability to adapt creatively to different cultural environments. Brown’s many publications emphasize early medieval continuities with antiquity (hence, the widespread rise of “late antiquity” as a term that sometimes replaces “early Middle Ages”). They also highlight the extent to which Christianity shared its adaptability with other religions in the dynamic circumstances of a period that saw not only the consolidation of Christianity, but also the formalization of Talmudic Judaism and the birth of Islam in the Persian-dominated Near East, territory that was Rome’s, if not north western Europe’s, next door neighbor (see Brown, The World of Late Anitiquity, 1971; id., Rise of Western Christendom, 1996 [2003]). Brown’s thesis has been extremely successful and supplied a new narrative for the origins of Christendom that was especially creative during the 1990s and early years of this millennium, as reflected in the various volumes of the Transformation of the Roman World series published by Brill (Leiden, The Netherlands). Even when they do not deal with conversion itself, these volumes often dramatically shift notions concerning the cultural setting of late Roman and early medieval societies in which the expansion of Christianity took place. Nevertheless, whereas such a perspective encourages a view of the adoption of Christianity by Rome and its successors as dynamic and culturally creative, recently Christianization has been once again viewed as an outright negative because culturally destructive phenomenon (see Raymond Van Dam, Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia, 2003, 3). This probably reflects a post-colonial critique of Christian mission in general, which, as Antony Grafton and Kenneth Mills expressed it, could signify “an unyielding conquest […] the takeover of human identity, imagination and consciousness” (Conversion: Old Worlds and New, 2003, ix). Since the

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late 1990s, moreover, the Brownian narrative has itself been challenged by historians reasserting the magnitude of Roman political and social collapse during the 5th century and the real cultural regression that ensued in north western Europe: e. g. Andre Giardini, “L’esplosione di tardo antico,” Studi Storici 40 (1999): 157–80; Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005); Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006). Recently, a more popular way of conceiving of conversion is as less a linear narrative than an on-going process of negotiation between various competing parties, with the study of which prioritizing sociological and anthropological theories. Whereas the focus of narrative histories of conversion was top-down, conversion as process aims to view the phenomenon from the bottom up. Exemplary studies of this sort from the early medieval period are James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (1994); Carole Cusack, Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (1998); and especially The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, ed. Martin Carver (2003). These studies portray conversion as a dialectical process between the representatives of Christianity and the recipients of the new religion, stressing the changes that Christianity itself underwent to appeal to early medieval converts, particularly convert rulers. According to Carver, “the Age of conversion was […] an age of ideological diversity and political experiment” (12). Other studies of this kind, with differing degrees of emphasis are Nicholas Higham, The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England (1997); and Barbara Yorke, The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, c. 600–800 (2006), both treating Anglo-Saxon England. Rather than taking the Christian identity of medieval society for granted, scholars have also re-examined the depth of commitment to Christianity by the vast majority of the members of medieval society who existed outside the orders of the Church. This has reminded historians to consider conversion an on-going process throughout the Middle Ages in which Europe never completely succeeded in living up to its claims to be a uniformly Christian society. Conceived as process, the conversion of medieval Europe has no historical endpoint other than the end of the Middle Ages themselves, with relations between the various parties to religious change constantly transforming as each renegotiated their place in Christian society, as shown in the relationship between the Church and military aristocracies in Guerriers et moines: Conversion et sainteté aristocratiques dans l’Occident médiéval (IXe–XIIe siècle), ed. Michel Lauwers (2002). This perspective has been employed by historians to great effect in diversifying historical accounts of conversion to concentrate upon more than just the baptism of rulers or the organization

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of an established Church. From this point of view, every aspect of medieval society can be considered from the perspective of conversion, understood as the Christian’s unending spiritual pursuit of God, including the written word: Michel Zink, Poésie et conversion au Moyen Âge (2003) who argues that medieval Latin poetry was not completely “converted” before Dante. Conversion as process also foregrounds the aporetic character of medieval Europe’s Christian identity, as can be seen regarding women, Jews and other marginalized groups. Nicole Bériou and François-Olivier Touati, Voluntate Dei Leprosus: Les lépreux entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1991), examine the religious experience of lepers. Recent studies also stress the medieval rather than modern meaning of the Latin word conversio, placing Christians themselves – saints and heretics alike – in the category of those who fitted awkwardly within the strictures of Christian society. Accepting medieval Latin terminology on its own terms, historians have also investigated the meaning of conversio to medieval people themselves, drawing attention to the factors that led certain individuals in a nominally Christian society to seek a deeper sense of personal religious vocation, as well as the often destabilizing social consequences of such a choice. Conversion in this sense is inseparable from the study of monasticism, especially monastic reform, sainthood, popular religion and heresy. Far from imagining the European Middle Ages as synonymous with Christendom, modern studies of conversion have therefore tended to highlight the diversity of medieval religious experience – including that of women (see below), Jews, Muslims and other non-Christian minorities – along with the inherent tension between the claims of a Christian society and the convert’s call to the renunciation of social bonds with its implicit condemnation of the Christian credentials of society at large. Taking the ideal of renunciation implicit in the ideal of conversion seriously, John van Engen has argued that such individuals considered personal conversion to Christianity paradoxically to require exile from and condemnation of wider medieval Christian society: “Conversion and conformity in the early fifteenth century, “(Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills, 2003, 30–65). C. Issues in Conversion History C.1. Theological Considerations In the immediate post-imperial setting (ca. 400–600) many of Germanic warrior societies (Visigoths in the Iberian peninsula and southern Gaul, Ostrogoths in Italy, Vandals in north Africa, etc.) were at least nominally Christianized before their formal entry into Roman territories. This requires

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engagement with patristic theology since the Christology to which these Germanic peoples converted was Arian, which maintained in opposition to the Orthodox, or Catholic, Nicene Christology the ontological subordination of Jesus as Word of God to God the Father. The authoritative guide to these developments is Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (1971). Theological considerations reappear regarding the different positions held by Rome and Constantinople on matters such as images, the filioque clause, papal primacy and permissible liturgical languages (that is, whether as Rome insisted, God could be formally worshiped in a language other than Hebrew, Greek or Latin). This is especially true during the competition between both of these patriarchal sees for influence in Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans. The sharpening of the Catholic-Orthodox divide during the High Middle Ages demands familiarity with the late antique ecclesiastical context that set eastern (Greek) and western (Latin) Christianity on their separate trajectories, on which see Herrin, Formation of Christendom (1987). C.2. Conversion as Acculturation (Christianization) Most modern studies increasingly take the view that the conversion of the barbarians really represented a process of acculturation, rather than religious conversion per se, and consequently prefer the term ‘Christianization’ to ‘conversion.’ Roman Christianity promised the possibility of belonging, through the diplomatic recognition that a converting barbarian king received from the Roman emperor who still existed in Constantinople, to a Mediterranean-wide political network with its roots in the unimpeachable legitimacy of Greco-Roman antiquity and of access to sophisticated Roman culture, especially reading and writing, with the obvious advantages inherent in both for effective government and tax collection. Given the cultural prestige attached to bishops as representatives of literate Roman culture with a history of pretensions to universal authority, the fact that more than religious factors were at play in this conversion seems obvious. It has been argued that the greatest attraction for pagan kings in conversion to Christianity was the religion’s association with Roman culture. It is worth noting that the attraction of similar incentives involving access to what is deemed to be a more universal and prestigious cultural system still seems to be at play in conversions to Christianity among modern peoples: Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert Hefner (1993), the introduction to which by Hefner is the best account available of the theoretical history of conversion and conversion as an anthropological-historical phenomenon. The conversion of the Franks is paradig-

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matic of the problems for the historian of Europe’s conversion. Clovis received baptism from a leading representative of the former Roman provincial order and the conversion is recorded for posterity in the writings of another representative of that order several decades after the event. This reflects the early medieval situation in general. Historians can seldom assess the religious experience of the vast majority of early medieval people other than through the writings of those supportive of Christianity, owing to a lack of sources from non-Christian agents. C.3. Diplomacy and “Native” Christians Despite the tales of the missionaries themselves, Ian Wood (Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian Wood, 2000, 27–36) has shown that early medieval missionaries to the AngloSaxons probably did not arrive among peoples who had had no exposure to Christian symbols or teachings. This seems to be a model capable of extension to other sectors of early medieval conversion where cross-cultural contact in frontier zones arguably played a much greater role in preparing pagan societies for Christianization than has heretofore been recognized. Christian influence among pagan societies was often the by-product of diplomacy aimed at other ends. Telescoping several centuries to the politics of conversion along the 13th- and 14th-century Baltic coast, the rulers of Lithuania were certainly familiar with at least the outwards demands of Christianization (such as the destruction of non-Christian temples and the erection of churches) several decades before their final acceptance of Catholicism through marriage to the heir to throne of Poland (see Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe, 1997). C.4. Women The important role played by the wives of early medieval rulers in their husbands’ is often noted in historical accounts. This disguises, however, the general scarcity and brevity of sources dealing directly with women throughout the conversion process in early medieval Europe. As demonstrated by Cordula Nolte and Ruth Mazo Karras in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (ed. James Muldoon, 1997, 91–99 and 100–14), this throws into relief, with its preponderance of monks, bishops and kings, not only the male-dominated interests of the early medieval sources, but also those of much modern historiography. The most extensive treatment of women in the early medieval conversion process is Cordula Nolte, Conversio und Christianitas: Frauen in der Christianisierung vom 5. bis 8. Jahrhundert (1995). In other periods, finding new ways of approaching taciturn sources has achieved

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startling effects, with Valerie Flint deploying a close and subtle reading of male sermonizing in the context of high medieval art, symbolism, and science to argue for women’s resistance to conversion – or at least conversion to the Crusades, if not to Christianity – in 13th-century England and France: “Conversion and Compromise in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, Conversion: Old Worlds and New (2003, 1–29). C.5. The Means of Conversion The Christianization of the barbarians also raises important questions about the means employed to promote conversion. Language arose as an especially important issue during the 9th century when both Frankish and Byzantine missionaries competed for influence in central Europe. The willingness of the Greek Church to permit native liturgies is usually seen as affording Byzantium a distinct advantage in this field over the Papacy with its insistence on the use of Latin. The place of the vernacular in the Christianization process of lands that fell under papal authority is therefore an important issue. As Bruno Dumézil has argued in his Les Racines chrétiennes de l’Europe: Conversion et liberté dans les royaumes barbares, Ve–VIIIe siècles (2005) the use of force to impose conversion must also be considered, especially from the time of Charlemagne’s baptism of the Saxons at sword-point during the early 800s (see also Famille, violence et christianisation au Moyen Âge: Mélanges offerts à Michel Rouche, ed. Martin Aurell and Thomas Deswarte, 2005). High medieval theology and canon law generally eschewed violence as a means for obtaining baptism, but sanctioned it for punishing those who had converted and relapsed, as was often claimed in the case of Jews, see Guyda Armstrong and Ian Wood, Christianizing Peoples (2000). Dual monastic-military orders such as the Teutonic Knights were also crucial for the Christianization of the Baltic from Pomerania to Lithuania, and demonstrate what later medieval conversion techniques owed to the ideology of the Crusades. C.6. Medieval European Conversion in a Global Context Traditionally focused upon the experience of the western barbarian kingdoms during the early medieval period (ca. 500–1000), only recently has scholarship broadened its horizons to include eastern and central Europe, including Russia and the Caucasus, extending the conversion period itself up to the symbolic conversion of Lithuania to Catholicism in 1386 – the last state in Europe to do so. A horizon as broad as western China is necessary for understanding what was historically distinctive about the conversion of the various kingdoms of north-western Europe to Roman, Latin-language Christianity, but also for how the medieval Christendom to which it gave rise con-

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sidered Jews and Muslims both within and outside its porous frontiers. Such a viewpoint also has the great advantage of relativizing western Europe’s Catholic Christian identity by affording equal room historically for Christianity’s growth and implantation in Byzantium, including especially medieval Bulgaria and Russia, Armenia and the Caucasus (Die Christianisierung des Kaukasus, ed. Werner Seibt, 2002), Coptic Ethiopia (Stephen Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia, 1984) and the significant, if politically disenfranchised communities, of Syriac and Coptic Christians throughout the Near East, Central Asia and India. Throughout the Middle Ages, Catholic Europe was just one among many Christian societies. Guyda Armstrong and Ian Wood, Christianizing Peoples (2000) is again a good place to get a sense of the cultural and linguistic breadth of medieval conversion experiences in both the early, high and late medieval periods. Chronologically and geographically, Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills, Conversion: Old Worlds and New (2003) bridges the gap between conversion in high medieval Christian Europe and experiences in early modern Asia and the Americas, as well as modern Africa. D. Sources Important sources include theological treatises; chronicles, histories and annals; law codes; saints’ Lives; sermons, letters, penitentiaries. Almost all sources for the period were produced by parties favorable to the mission and subsequently transmitted by through the Christian monastic tradition. The lack of sources providing reliable evidence for pre-Christian religion is characteristic of the early medieval period. Consequently, very little is known about Europe’s pre-Christian religions at all. For a thorough introduction to the primary sources for conversion in the early medieval period, see Ian Wood, “Christianization and the Dissemination of Christian Learning,” (New Cambridge Medieval History, I, c. 500–700, ed. Paul Fouracre, 2005, 710–34); On Saints’ Lives especially, see Ian Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelization of Europe, 400–1050 (2001). E. Questions for Future Research Future research will continue to probe what Christianity meant to the societies that received it and develop awareness of how the conversion process shaped both medieval Christianity and the medieval Church. Considerable interest still surrounds groups who were marginalized in Christian society. Above all, perhaps, it is important not to overlook the broader historical context of Europe’s early medieval Christianization. The rise and spread of Islam from the 640s across the Near East and the southern shore of the Medi-

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terranean (including Spain) provides a crucial and compelling comparison for Europe’s experience of Christianization. The 9th-century conversion of the Khanate of Khazaria on the Black Sea to Judaism should not be overlooked either. Questions for future research concern why monotheism itself flourished in the early medieval period, how they differed historically between them and what both similarities and differences in the historical experience of monotheism meant to contemporaries. It is fitting to end with Zink’s comment: “Pourquoi la conversion? Parce que c’est au Moyen Âge ce vers quoi doit tendre toute vie.” F. Modern Congresses A string of favorable anniversaries in recent years (viz., 1000th anniversary of the acceptance of orthodoxy from Byzantium by Kievan Rus’ in 1988; the 1400th anniversary of the arrival of the Roman monk St Augustine at Canterbury in 1997; 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis 1999–2005) has seen a proliferation of international conferences and congresses dedicated to the subject of conversion. The proceedings of many of these have been published and provide a useful starting point for revisionist accounts of many aspects of the traditional conversion narratives, for example: Conversion and Christianity in the North Sea World (ed. Barbara Crawford, 1998); and The Legacy of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Kiev and Moscow (ed. Anthony-Emil Tachiaos, 1992). Select Bibliography Ian Wood, “Christianization and the Dissemination of Christian Learning,” New Cambridge Medieval History, I, c. 500–700, ed. P. Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 710–34; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200–1000 (1996; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Jacques Brosse, Histoire de la chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident: De la conversion des barbares au sac de Constantinople (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995); Lutz von Padberg, Die Christianisierung Europas im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998); Marina Montesano, La cristianizzazione dell’Italia nel Medioevo (Rome: Laterza, 1997).

Matthew J. Dal Santo

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Cornish Literature A. Definition Cornish is one of the Celtic languages of the British Isles, specifically one of the so-called p-Celtic group, its closest relatives being Welsh in Britain, and more closely Breton in present-day Brittany. South-West Brythonic, the common ancestor of Cornish and Breton, separated from the ancestor of Welsh in the 6th century. In some early documents (especially glosses) it can be unclear whether the language is Cornish or Breton, but the distinction becomes clear from the later eleventh to the mid-12th century. Cornish was spoken broadly in the area of modern Cornwall, but retreated gradually and survived longest as a spoken language in the far west of the duchy. Very little survives of the earliest stage of the language (a manumission document of the late 10th or early 11th century with a list of names, and a Vocabularium Cornicum from about 1100 with around a thousand Cornish words), but after 1200 the second stage of the recorded language, Middle Cornish, began to develop a literary tradition which had a florescence in the drama of the 14th century. By the late 16th century the language underwent further changes, but was by now under considerable pressure from English. Late Cornish, its final stage as a spoken community language, shows a small amount of (not always very) literary survivals, mostly short pieces, and it is usually assumed that Cornish died out as a language of spoken intercourse even in the far western region in the 18th century, the final surrender to English assisted by the absence of a tradition of printed material, and especially of a Bible and an authorized liturgy in Cornish, although the existence of a now-lost Middle Cornish Bible has been postulated (Charles Penglase, “La Bible en moyen-cornique,” Etudes Celtiques 33 [1997]: 233–43; against this Malte W. Tschirschky, “The Medieval Cornish Bible,” Cornish Studies 11 [2003]: 308–16). See Mathew Spriggs, “Where Cornish was Spoken and When: A Provisional Synthesis” (Cornish Studies 11 [2003]: 228–69). The importance of the Cornish language and its literature for Medieval Studies lies in the existence of a number of works in Middle Cornish, most notably Biblical and other dramas, which provide evidence of a tradition different from medieval drama in English, sometimes with unusual material, which was performed in a different way, and which in some respects matches more closely continental forms. This has been a focus of comparative and contrastive scholarship.

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B. Medieval Literature The earliest text with a claim to be seen as literature is probably the Charter Fragment, forty-one lines of Cornish verse probably from the late 14th century, and written on the back of a charter dated 1340 relating to the parish of St Stephen in Brannel, containing two different speeches, perhaps from a play. The earliest full work is a strophic Passion-poem (first published as Mount Calvary, but referred to now as Pascon agan Arluth, “The Passion of Our Lord”). The major medieval work, however, is the so-called Ordinalia, a threeday cycle of strophic verse-plays on the Creation, the Passion and the Resurrection related to (and including material from) the poem, and probably with a provenance in a single literary center. The Passion-poem and plays were probably written in the 14th century, and have been linked with Glasney College, a college of secular canons with a constitution based on the Chapter of Exeter cathedral, established near Penryn in 1265 by Bishop Walter Bronescombe and dissolved in 1545. Glasney was not the only secular college in Cornwall – other similar establishments were known at various times at different locations – but there are strong links through place-names in the plays between the college at Penryn (near Falmouth) and the Ordinalia, which not only drew upon the Passion-poem but which was also known to the writer of a later Cornish Creation-drama. There is some indication that there may originally have also been a nativity play, and two modern versions have been supplied by modern writers: Ken George, Iuventus Christi/Flogholeth Krist (2006), in Cornish and English; and Alan Kent, Nativitas Christi (2006), in English, both imitating the style of the other plays. The Glasney appropriations included the church of St Just in Penwith, near one of the surviving playing-places or rounds where the plays were performed. J. A. C. Vincent, “The Glasney Cartulary” (Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall 6 [1878–81]: 213–58); James Whetter, The History of Glasney College (1988). Later than the Ordinalia is a two-day verse drama cycle centered upon the life of a Breton saint, Meriadoc, the Cornish version of whose name, Meriasek, gives the title Beunans Meriasek, “Life of Meriasek.” It also includes material on St Sylvester and the conversion of Constantine, plus a legend of the Virgin known from the Golden Legend. Camborne was the center of Meriasek’s cult, but the probable time of composition (late 15th century; the manuscript is dated 1504) coincides with the move of Provost John Nans of Glasney to Meriasek’s church at Camborne. Few dramatized saints’ lives have survived in Britain in English, and none of non-biblical saints. The world of Cornish Studies was surprised in 2001 when the discovery was announced of a mid-16th century manuscript donated to the National Library of Wales containing the fragmentary text in late medieval Cornish, probably of the later

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15th century, of two hitherto unknown verse plays or parts of a cycle (Graham C. G. Thomas, “Two Middle Cornish Plays: A Note,” The National Library of Wales Journal 32 [2001]: 121–22). The manuscript contains 3308 lines, increasing the Middle Cornish corpus by about twenty percent. Of the two pieces, the first is on the life of another non-biblical saint, St Kea, also known from Breton sources and the patron of Kea parish in Cornwall, and his (successful) conflict over land-claims with Teudar, a local king who appears also in Meriasek (see W. H. Pascoe, Teudar: A King of Cornwall, 1985); the other, based largely on Geoffrey of Monmouth, is concerned with King Arthur’s (disputed) tribute payments to the Roman emperor Lucius, with Guenevere and Modred, and the battle with the latter. The work clearly contains contemporary historical allusions and is of course also linguistically valuable. The manuscript has now been published as Bewnans Ke/Bywnans Ke, “The Life of Kea.” The last major work in Cornish was composed probably around the middle of the 16th century; the first play survives of another two-day biblical verse cycle, known as Gwreans an Bys; the manuscript, dated 1611, has the English title The Creacion of the World. It draws to a certain extent upon the Ordinalia (using mainly the role of God, in fact: Paula Neuss, “Memorial Reconstruction in a Cornish Miracle Play,” Comparative Drama 5 [1971]: 129–37), but is essentially a different work, again with unusual biblical motifs. William Jordan, to whom it was once ascribed, was probably the copyist. The basic form of the medieval Cornish drama is stanzaic rhymed verse, with stanzas of varying lengths and lines usually of seven syllables (sometimes shorter) and repeated rhymes (the Passion-poem is in regular 8-line stanzas). There are, however, a great many differences from the medieval English drama-cycles. The Cornish plays were performed in a circular plenan-gwary (‘playing place’), which had various stations around the edge where the most important characters were based, with the action taking place in the central area; the manuscripts of the Ordinalia and of Meriasek contain diagrams of this staging in the round. The content of the plays differ from that of the English dramas not only in the dramatization of the lives of non-biblical saints, but in the inclusion of unusual material within the biblical context not found in the English cycles (though they are known on the continent), such as the motif of the Holy Rood and the extended dramatization of the story of David and Bathsheba in the Ordinalia, or the death of Cain in Gwreans an bys. There is little post-Reformation material in Cornish. One curiosity is a collection of sermons (identified as Cornish only in 1949) known as the Tregear Homilies, from the name of the presumed translator, John Tregear, a clericus who cannot otherwise be identified. The translation is of the first twelve ser-

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mons in a collection of thirteen published in 1555 by Edmund Bonner, John Harpsfield and Henry Pendleton, from the Catholic side in a period of heated religious conflict. The material in the thirteenth Cornish piece, which may not be a sermon, however, is distinct from the rest of the manuscript and has aroused interest. It is not a translation or the same as the thirteenth sermon in the original collection, and has been evaluated by D. H. Frost (“Sacrament an Alter: A Tudor Cornish Patristic Catena,” Cornish Studies 11 [2003]: 291–307) as a collection of patristic quotations, providing evidence of ongoing Catholicism in Cornwall. An oration in Cornish was reputedly held at Valladolid in 1600, and Nicholas Roscarrock, a 16th-century Catholic scholar and collector of the lives of British saints, referred in a letter in 1607 to a (lost) Cornish life known to him of a (female) St Columba, and there may very well have been others. C. Editions The following standard editions contain texts and translation unless otherwise stated. C.1. Early Cornish: M. Förster, “Die Freilassungsurkunden des BodminEvangeliars,” A Grammatical Miscellany Presented to Otto Jespersen, ed. N. Bøgholm (1939), 77–99; Eugene van Tassel Graves, “The Old Cornish Vocabulary” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia, 1962; Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms, 1962). C.2. Middle Cornish: Lauran Toorians, The Middle Cornish Charter Endorsement: The Making of a Marriage in Medieval Cornwall (1991); Whitley Stokes, “The Passion. A Middle Cornish Poem,” Transactions of the Philological Society (1860–1), Appendix, 1–100; Edwin Norris, The Ancient Cornish Drama, 2. vol. (1859, rpt. 1968); Phyllis Pier Harris, “Origo Mundi: First Play of the Cornish Mystery Cycle, The Ordinalia: A New Edition” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1964; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1964); Markham Harris, The Cornish Ordinalia: A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy (1969) (prose translation only); Whitley Stokes, The Life of St Meriasek, Bishop and Confessor: A Cornish Drama (1872); Markham Harris, The Life of Meriasek: A Medieval Cornish Miracle Play (1977) (prose translation only); Myrna Combellack-Harris, “A Critical Edition of Beunans Meriasek” (Ph.D. diss., Exeter, 1985); Bewnans Ke: The Life of St Kea, ed. Graham C. G. Thomas and Nicholas J. A. Williams (2007); Bywnans Ke, ed. Ken George (2006) (original text, translation, version in Kernewek Kemmyn); Whitley Stokes, Gwreans an bys: The Creation of the World (1864); Paula Neuss, “The Creation of the World” (Ph.D. diss.,

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Toronto, 1970; 1983); Christopher Bice, The Tregear Manuscript: Homeliyes XIII in Cornysche (1969): rpt. as The Tregear Homilies by Ray Edwards (1994). Following the Cornish language revival in the 20th century, editions in Unified Cornish of some of the texts have been produced with translations: R. Morton Nance and A. S. D. Smith, Passyon agan Arluth, ed. E. G. R. Hooper (1972);, The Cornish Ordinalia, Second Play: Chris’s Passion, ed. R. Morton Nance, A. S. D. Smith and Graham Sandercock (1982); The Cornish Ordinalia, Third Play: Resurrection, ed. id. (1984); The Cornish Ordinalia, First Play: The Creation of the World, ed. and trans. R. Morton Nance and A. S. D. Smith, new ed. Ray Chubb, Richard Jenkin and Graham Sandercock (2001); R. Morton Nance and A. S. D. Smith, Gwryans an bys (1959), rev. E. G. R. Hooper (1985). Separate translations have since appeared of Gwyreans an bys, Beunans Meriasek, and of the Ordinalia, the latter using modern Cornish dialect. Donald R. Rawe, The Creation of the World (Gwryans an bys) (1978); Myrna Combellack-Harris, The Camborne Play: A Verse Translation of Beunans Meriasek (1988); Alan Kent, Ordinalia: The Cornish Mystery Play Cycle (2005). See also the anthology Looking at the Mermaid: A Reader in Cornish Literature 900–1900, ed. Alan M. Kent and Tim Saunders (2000). D. History of Research The first scholarly work on Cornish was being carried out at precisely the time Cornish was ceasing to be used as a community language, with 17th- and 18th-century scholars showing an interest in and collecting the early material (“gathering the fragments”), and thus consciously preserving a knowledge of the language and such written material as they could before it was too late. Special mention must be made of William Scawen, vice-warden of the Stannaries, whose studies of the language and of some of the medieval texts, his Antiquities Cornubrittanic, were published long after his death and even then not in the full form (Matthew Spriggs, “William Scawen (1600–1689): A Neglected Cornish Patriot and Father of the Cornish Language Revival,” Cornish Studies 13 [2005]: 98–125); of John Keigwin of Mousehole, (1641–1716), who translated the medieval Biblical texts; and of Edward Lhuyd (1659/60–1709), a Welsh-speaker and Oxford antiquary who printed a grammar with a long preface in Cornish (Entries on Scawen and Keigwin by Matthew Spriggs in the Oxford DNB, vol. 49 (2004), 195–56, and 31, 39; entry on Lhuyd by Brynley F. Roberts in vol. 33, 710–12). The lawyer and antiquary Daines Barrington (1727–1800) published in the journal Archaeologia (3 [1777]: 278–84), a piece “On the Expiration of the Cornish Language,” on the alleged last speaker of the language, Dolly Pentreath (who died in that year), though there are other claimants, and it is never entirely

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clear when a language ceases to be a living one; see also his “On Some Additional Information Relative to the Continuance of the Cornish Language” (Archaeologia 5 [1779]: 81–86). The Boson family of Newlyn (Nicholas, Thomas and John) wrote and preserved works in Cornish in the 17th and early 18th centuries (Oliver J. Padel, The Cornish Writings of the Boson Family (1973), including the folktale John of Chyanhor, which has elements in common (service rewarded with ‘points of wisdom’) with material as early as the 11th-century German-Latin Ruodlieb (Brian Murdoch, “Is John of Chyanhor really a Cornish Ruodlieb?” Cornish Studies 4 [1996]: 45–63). Other antiquaries concerned with the preservation and study of Cornish include William Gwavas (1676–1741), Thomas Tonkin (1678–1742), William Borlase (1696–1772) and Henry Ustick (1720–1769). The earliest scholarly productions in the 19th century were of (Keigwin’s) texts and translations of the medieval works, most notably those edited by Davies Gilbert, Mount Calvary […] Interpreted in the English Tongue […] by John Keigwin (1826) and The Creation of the World with Noah’s Flood, written in Cornish in the Year 1611 by Wm. Jordan, with an English Translation by John Keigwin (1827). Edwin Norris’s two-volume Ancient Cornish Drama, appeared in 1859, and new versions of the Passion-poem and of the later Creation-play, plus the drama of Meriasek were published towards the end of the century by the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes. The early editions by Gilbert (original name Giddy, 1767–1839) are more usually cited with opprobrium than applause because in the preface to Gwreans an bys in 1826 he seemed to welcome the demise of the Cornish language. Notwithstanding the outrage expressed by Cornish language enthusiasts ever since, Gilbert praised the excellence of the original language, but as a Member of Parliament and an early technocrat he knew that separation and provinciality was bad for Cornwall. Gilbert did not glory in the death of Cornish, but he was concerned for the development of Cornwall, and his editions, if flawed, were still the first. Even Matthew Arnold voiced the opinion that Cornwall was the better for adopting English and for becoming one with the rest of the country. The 19th century also saw the publication of dictionaries by Robert Williams, Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum (1865) and by Fred. W. P. Jago, An English-Cornish Dictionary (1887, rpt. 1984). Norris’ edition of the Ordinalia included a grammar and vocabulary of about 300 pages, but there was really no convenient scholarly grammar of medieval Cornish until the early 20th century, and for some time this was only available in Welsh: Henry Lewis, Llawlyfr Cernyweg Canol (1923, 2nd ed. 1946, rpt. 1980). It was translated into German by Stefan Zimmer (with an updated bibliography by Andrew Hawke) as Handbuch des Mittelkornischen (1990).

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In the early years of the 20th century a book by Henry Jenner, A Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904), sparked off a renewed interest in the language which led to a revival of Cornish on the basis of Middle Cornish, because that stage of the language contained fewer English borrowings and a larger (though necessarily not complete) lexicon than Late Cornish, which had, however, undergone distinctive sound-changes. Jenner (1848–1934) himself, and then in particular Robert Morton Nance (1873–1959), established a “Unified Cornish” which was used for teaching the revived language and for new writing. Other orthographic and grammatical systems for revived Cornish have since been developed, not without considerable controversy, and the future of this development remains unclear. The existence of (various) revived forms, incidentally, accounts for variations in the titles given to some of the Cornish works. The publication of Jenner’s Handbook was of considerable importance to the development of scholarship, even though Jenner was himself not convinced of the literary value of some of the early texts. Once the language revival established itself under the forceful hand of Nance, a Federation of Old Cornwall Societies came into being in the 1920s and a journal, Old Cornwall, was begun in 1925, followed by the establishment of a gorsedd with bards in 1928. The journal included material of general antiquarian interest and also more preserved fragments of the language, sometimes little more than a sentence. Other journals appeared later at intervals, devoted largely to promoting the revived language (see Henry and Katharine Jenner, ed. Derek R. Williams, 2004; Derek Williams, “Robert Morton Nance,” An Baner Kernewek/The Cornish Banner 88 [May 1997]: 14–18; Brian Murdoch, entry on Nance in the Oxford DNB, vol. 40 [2004], 137–38). The efforts of Nance and his collaborator A. S. D. Smith (1883–1950) led to new writing in Cornish, but also to the re-editing and translating of many of the medieval texts. However debatable the linguistic principles of these new editions may be, this meant that the texts were again disseminated and examined closely, and some errors in the older editions were corrected. The publication for language teaching purposes of individual episodes from the medieval plays may, however, have been detrimental to the perception of the unity in the cycles in terms of literary scholarship. E. Recent Research Even for some years after the Second World War, medieval Cornish literature was often (though not always) regarded as an insignificant subsidiary to the English drama-cycles. Gradually, however, it came to be viewed both as a literary area in its own right and appreciated for its literary and especially dramatic value. The full-scale studies by Robert Longsworth, The Cornish

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Ordinalia: Religion and Dramaturgy (1967) and by Jane Bakere, The Cornish Ordinalia: A Critical Study (1980) provided detailed analyses of the principal dramas in the Ordinalia, and already in 1955 F. E. Halliday had published a selection from the Ordinalia in English focussing upon the unusual Holy Rood material: The Legend of the Rood (1955). However, once again extracting the episodes from the cycle as such did not help in the evaluation of the unity of the integrated trilogy, which critics from Bakere onwards have tried to stress (see in this case: Brian Murdoch, “Legends of the Holy Rood in Cornish Drama,” Studia Celtica Japonica 9 [1997]: 19–34). The coherence of other plays, initially seen as disparate in their apparently varied themes within a single cycle has also been asserted (R. T. Meyer, “The Middle Cornish Play Beunans Meriasek,” Comparative Drama 3 [1969]: 54–64; Brian Murdoch, “The Holy Hostage: de filio mulieris in the Middle Cornish Play Beunans Meriasek,” Medium Aevum 58 [1989]: 258–73). Cornwall in the Middle Ages has an interest for literary studies which goes beyond the material that is actually extant, and there are major European motifs that are linked with Cornwall. One such is the Tristan-material, on which see O. J. Padel, “The Cornish Background of the Tristan Stories” (Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 [1981]: 53–81). Important figures of Cornish origin, such as John Trevisa of Oxford, for example, have also been the object of study: David C. Fowler, John Trevisa (1993). Within the context of the surviving literature, evidence from outside written material as such is also of importance. Thus Evelyn Newlyn, “Between the Pit and the Pedestal: Images of Eve and Mary in Medieval Cornish Drama” (New Images of Medieval Women, ed. Edelgard DuBruck, 1989, 121–64; and also in the Cornish material in the relevant volume of the Records of Early English Drama) examines church windows portraying the saga of Adam and the Rood as reflected in the plays. Full-scale overviews of the literature were rare for a long period after Jenner’s language-based introduction. Surveys were provided by P. Berresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and its Literature (1974) and Brian Murdoch, Cornish Literature (1993). It is important as far as the perception of Cornish drama is concerned that a chapter on Cornish had already been included in a reference work on the medieval drama in England: Brian Murdoch, “The Cornish Drama” (Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle, 1993, 211–39). The Passion-poem has received less attention. Brian Murdoch established its chronological precedence (“Pascon agan Arluth: the Literary Position of the Cornish Poem of the Passion,” Studi Medievali 22 [1981]: 822–36) and compared it with other Gospel-narratives (“Various Gospels,” Studi Medievali 26 [1995]: 777–96), and he has been particularly

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concerned to link the Cornish plays with a broader European tradition, while stressing their differences from the English plays (Brian Murdoch, “Dos piezas dramáticas en verso del Génesis, una germana y una celta, de finales de la Edad Media,” Acta Poetica 16 [1995]: 349–68). Interest was shown from an early stage in the special nature of performance of the Cornish material, from Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round (1957) onwards; George F. Wellwarth, “Methods of Production in the Medieval Cornish Drama” (Speech Monographs 24 [1957]: 212–28); Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (1972); Neville Denny, “Arena Staging and Dramatic Quality in the Cornish Passion Play,” in his Medieval Drama (1973, 124–53). Some modern performances have also taken place. Textual work on smaller pieces, such as the Charter Fragment (in Toorians’s edition) are also important, but it has to be stressed that all the work done on medieval Cornish literature before the turn of the millennium was rendered incomplete by the discovery of Bewnans Ke, which had and still has implications for literary and linguistic research. In language studies based on the early material, detailed work (and computer technology) has been carried out by Kenneth J. George, “The Phonological History of Cornish” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Brest, 1984); id., “A Computer Model of Sound Changes in Cornish,” Association for Literary and Language Computing Journal 4 (1983): 39–48. On Cornish and English, see Martyn F. Wakelin, Language and History in Cornwall (1975). A separate issue has been the thorough investigation of Cornish elements in place-names, most notably by Oliver J. Padel, Cornish Place-Name Elements (1985); and id., A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names (1988). See also W. M. N. Picken, A Medieval Cornish Miscellany, ed. O. J. Padel (2000). F. Current Conditions Work continues (especially in the context of Bewnans Ke) on the Cornish language. Much energy – sadly – has been expended upon conflicts within the proponents of different forms of revived Cornish, but the interest thus generated in the language has proved fruitful insofar as more detailed attention has necessarily been paid to the earlier stages of the language, with a focus on the medieval period (for those in favor of “Unified Cornish” or amended versions of it), or on the last stage (for those who wished to see a revived language based upon Cornish in the 17th century). Dictionaries, grammars and original writings have been produced in all the forms. Nance’s Unified Cornish held sway for a long period, and has more recently been amended by N. J. A. Williams. Kenneth J. George developed a phonemic “common Cornish” (Kernewek Kemmyn), while Richard Gendall

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based his revived modern Cornish (Kernuack) on the final stage of the language (see Neil Kennedy, “Fatel era ny a keel? Revived Cornish: Taking Stock,” Cornish Studies 10 [2002]: 283–302). Scholarly editions of some of the medieval texts remain in forms that are hard to access (Beunans Meriasek) or are still desiderata (the Tregear Homilies). There has, on the other hand, been a steady increase in the study of aspects of the medieval works, again with an emphasis on the drama. The individuality and special value of these works on the one hand, and their internal coherence on the other, have continued to be the focus of study, and the Cornish medieval plays are increasingly included in surveys and comparative studies. In parallel with the attempts to stress the value of the medieval Cornish material and also to afford it a place within the broad scheme of medieval writings, attempts have also been made to seek for a continuity between medieval Cornish writings and new constructions of Cornish identity in Anglo-Cornish (or Cornu-English) from the end of the middle ages, notably by Alan M. Kent, The Literature of Cornwall: Continuity, Identity, Difference, 1000–2000 (2000). The application of new approaches and of new theoretical areas to the study of Cornish (Bernard Deacon, “From ‘Cornish Studies’ to ‘Critical Cornish Studies’: Reflections on Methodology,” Cornish Studies 12 [2004]: 13–29) and to individual aspects of the medieval plays (Paul Manning, “Staging the State and the Hypostatisation of Violence in the Medieval Cornish Drama,” Cornish Studies 13 [2005]: 126–69) has been marked. In terms of performance, an invaluable sourcebook was provided by the Records of Early English Drama volume, the Cornish section of which includes sections on both the Cornish and the English drama in Cornwall, edited by Sally L. Joyce and Evelyn S. Newlyn (1999). Other relevant material now available includes Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, ed. Nicholas Orme (1992; see also as a reference text Nicholas Orme, The Saints of Cornwall, 2000). Studies of medieval Cornish literature and of the language continue to appear in mainstream literary and drama-history journals, journals concerned with medieval studies and with Celtic studies as a whole (there is interest in the area in Japan, for example), and most notably in Cornish Studies under the editorship of Philip Payton, Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies of the University of Exeter, as well as in more localized magazines, such as An Baner Kernewek/The Cornish Banner. Cornish Studies are available at the University of Exeter, which has a Cornwall campus not far from Glasney.

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Select Bibliography Jane A. Bakere, The Cornish Ordinalia: A Critical Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980 2nd ed. 2009); P. Berresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and its Literature (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); Crysten Fudge, The Life of Cornish (Redruth: Truran, 1982); Henry Jenner, A Handbook of the Cornish Language (London: Nutt, 1904); Alan M. Kent, The Literature of Cornwall: Continuity, Identity, Difference 1000–2000 (Bristol: Redcliffe, 2000); Robert Longsworth, The Cornish Ordinalia: Religion and Dramaturgy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Brian Murdoch, Cornish Literature (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993); Brian Murdoch, “The Cornish Drama,” Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 211–39; P. A. S. Pool, The Death of Cornish 1600–1800 (1975; Saltash: Cornish Language Board, 2nd ed. 1982); Records of Early English Drama: Dorset, ed. Rosalind Conklin Hays and C. E. McGee; and op. cit. Cornwall, ed. Sally L. Joyce and Evelyn S. Newlyn (Toronto: Brepols and University of Toronto Press, 1999); Lauran Toorians, “Passie, lief en leed; de oudste poëzie van het Keltische Cornwall,” Kruispunt 129 (March 1990): 3–55.

Brian Murdoch

Crusades Historiography A. Introduction Dating nearly to the inception of the crusading movement, we can trace a large number of trends and shifts in the way scholars and historians have analyzed and understood the crusades. Not surprisingly, there have been nearly as many disagreements over issues concerning the crusading movement, as there have been crusades historians. Yet what is perhaps the most important recent dispute among crusades scholars is also fundamental to this study of crusades historiography. B. Definition While historians have differed over what qualifies as a crusade, such a qualification is necessary in determining the proper scope of crusades historiography. The issue is an important one for historians because with the expansion of the crusading movement comes the corresponding expansion of sources available for study. Yet the very issue of defining a crusade has, until recently, been one of the areas of greatest disagreement among crusades scholars. Historians have essentially divided into two camps on the issue, those known as traditionalists and those known as pluralists.

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Traditionalists have emphasized the well-known and often popularized crusading efforts in the East, which took place from the end of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth centuries, as the embodiment of the crusading movement. In this case, the purpose of a crusade is either to assist eastern Christians or to liberate Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher. Among the most notable of the traditionalists is the German historian Hans Eberhard Mayer. In his work The Crusades, first published in German in 1965 and in English in 1972, Mayer defined a crusade as having Christian domination over the Holy Sepulcher as its goal. This narrow definition allows for only those expeditions to Jerusalem as a proper crusade and may also be a more accurate reflection of contemporary understandings of the crusades. Pluralists, as opposed to the traditionalists, cite papal authorization as the defining feature of a crusade, regardless of against who or where it is directed. Consequently, the pluralists’ definition of a crusade provides for a broad expansion of the crusading movement including expeditions against religious dissenters, pagans, political opponents, and Muslims in Europe. Among such expeditions are included the so-called Reconquista, the Albigensian Crusades, the Baltic or Northern Crusades, and the Italian Crusades. Because pluralists are increasingly dominating the ranks of crusades historians, the field of crusades studies has grown correspondingly to address the broader pluralist definition. Perhaps the most well known and influential of the pluralists is Cambridge University historian Jonathan Riley-Smith. In 1977 he defined a crusade as “[…] a holy war authorized by the pope, who proclaimed it in the name of God or Christ […] a defensive reaction to injury or aggression or as an attempt to recover Christian territories lost to the infidels, it answered the needs of the whole church or all of Christendom […] rather than those of a particular nation” (Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 1977). Historian Elizabeth Siberry is representative of many other scholars in that she has embraced Riley-Smith’s definition with minor modifications arguing the crusades were also launched by the papacy “against heretics, schismatics, and Christian lay powers in the West as well as the campaigns against the Muslims in the Near East” (Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1985, preface). Riley-Smith argues that the pluralist movement began with Princeton historian Giles Constable in 1953. It was then that Constable demonstrated that the various expeditions around the time of the Second Crusade taking place in the Levant, Spain, and Central Europe, were parts of a larger collective movement, rather than separate unassociated movements (see Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 [1953]: 213–79). Contributing to Constable’s pluralist position was Norman Housley’s work on the Italian Crusades,

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which demonstrated their compatibility with the crusades to the East (Norman Housley, The Italian Crusades: The Papal-Angevin Alliance and the Crusades Against Christian Lay Powers, 1254–1343, 1984). Additional summaries of the pluralist-traditionalist debate, as well as a broader examination of crusading historiography, are found in Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” The Oxford History of the Crusades (1999), 1–15; and Giles Constable, “The Historiography of the Crusades,” The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (2001), 1–22. C. Chronological Overview of Crusades Historiography The historiography of the crusades begins with the earliest accounts of contemporaries who were often, but not always, participants and eyewitnesses to the crusades. Like in any area of historical studies, a critical analysis of primary source texts is necessary, as it often would have benefited many source authors to portray their involvement in the best possible way. By most primary source accounts, the crusaders believed they were fighting what amounted to a defensive war that sought to end the Turkish abuse of Eastern Christians and restore the Holy Land to Christian control. Byzantine source authors, with the exception of limited initial praise for some of the earliest crusaders, are generally distrustful of crusaders whom they view as rude, unrefined, and ungrateful guests in their homeland. The accounts of contemporary Muslim historians of the crusades are equally dominated by cultural and religious loyalties. Regardless of past Turkish and Arab conquests of Christian lands, for Muslims, the crusades amounted to a brutal invasion by western Christians. A large number of surviving manuscripts demonstrate the continued legitimacy with which the crusading movement was viewed in Latin Christendom after the fall of the last crusader state at Acre in 1291. Perhaps this is best demonstrated by the repeated calls for renewed crusading in the East to reclaim the Holy Land during the fourteenth century and later. Peter Dubois was typical of the many Christian authors who called for a new crusade to reclaim the Holy Land. Writing in the wake of the events of 1291 (ca.1305) Peter advocated the study of oriental languages as the means by which crusades preachers might convert large numbers of Arabs and make it possible to retain the Holy Land after a successful crusade. As late as 1430, Joan of Arc wrote to the Hussites and equated them with Muslims in their rejection of the Catholic faith. She used the imagery of crusading, implying its continued legitimacy in her age, as she threatened to lead an army against them if only she were not so busy with her efforts against the English. During the sixteenth century, crusading ideology survived largely in response to the advance of the Turks into Europe as well as the wars of religion.

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Both Catholics and Protestants used crusading rhetoric in their calls for warfare against the Turks, and occasionally each other. For example, Pope Gregory XIII offered the same indulgence that had been offered to crusaders centuries earlier to the Irish who opposed the Protestant English Queen Elizabeth. Also, the enthusiastic reception to the publication in 1581 of Tasso’s fictional Gerusalemme Liberata, which came out ten years after the battle of Lepanto, reflected the way in which European clashes with the Turks had inspired interest in the crusading movement and crusading theory. In 1611 appeared the important collection of primary sources on the crusades edited by Jacques Bongers called the Gesta Dei per Francos sive orientalium expeditionum et regni Francorum Hierosolimitani historia. This influential collection of sources was followed by the 1639 publication of the Protestant Minister Thomas Fuller’s Historie of the Holy Warre, considered the first serious general history of the crusades. Fuller, writing from a decidedly anti-Catholic perspective, was the first to both question the legitimacy of the crusades and assign them to the past, rather than as part of a continuing movement. In 1670 the French writer Louis Maimbourg responded with his generally more positive depiction of the crusades in his Histoire des croisades. It would not be until the period of the Enlightenment that the general hostility of several thinkers of this era toward religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, initiated a significant shift in European thinking about the crusades. For the rationalists of the Enlightenment, the crusades were nothing more than the product of religious extremism and greed. In Voltaire’s 1751 work on the crusades, which was incorporated into his Essai sur les mœurs, he referred to the crusaders as adventurers motivated only by “the thirst for brigandage.” His opinion of Christianity was perhaps best summed up in a letter to Frederick the Great in which he wrote that Christianity was “the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.” About the Albigensian crusade, Voltaire wrote, “[…] there was never anything as unjust.” In comparison with Voltaire and other Enlightenment era writers, the English writer Edward Gibbon wrote generally more sympathetically of the crusaders. Yet in some instances Gibbon reflected the spirit of many Enlightenment era authors as when he claimed the crusaders were motivated by a “savage fanaticism” (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vol., 1776–1789). With the rise of the Romanticism movement of the nineteenth-century, the influence of Enlightenment depictions of the crusades was reduced and the crusades were increasingly portrayed in a positive way. Popular novelists like Sir Walter Scott emphasized the heroism and adventure of the crusading

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movement through positive portrayals of the heroic exploits of both crusaders and their Muslim opponents. Out of this era of greater popular interest for the crusaders emerged the so-called “golden age” of crusades scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century. Few had a greater influence on understandings of the crusades during this period than the French historian Joseph-François Michaud (d. 1839). Michaud’s popular and monumental work, Histoire des Croisades (1st ed., 3 vol., 1812–1817; 6th ed. Poujoulat, 6 vol., 1841) became a standard reference work during the late nineteenth century and portrayed the crusaders as heroes whose achievements inspired the rebirth of the West. As a supplement to his Histoire, Michaud also produced a four volume collection of crusades sources in translation, including one volume of Arabic sources translated by M. Reinaud, titled the Bibliotheque des croisades. Michaud also served as a member of the Acadèmie des Inscriptions et Belles letteres which in 1824 began several decades of work on what remains to the present as the most important collection of crusades sources, the sixteen volume Recueil des Historiens des croisades. Michaud’s work was representative of the efforts of German and French scholars during the 19th century who laid a foundation for modern scholarly approaches to crusades studies. During this time scholars critically sifted through the earliest primary source accounts, which were becoming increasingly accessible during this period, and made significant breakthroughs on a number of issues. For example, from the era of the crusades until the nineteenth century, the origins of the First Crusade were often attributed to the efforts of a wandering preacher known as Peter the Hermit. According to the traditionally accepted narrative, Peter had been the inspiration behind Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade and spoke at the Council of Clermont in 1095. However, in the later nineteenth century the German historian Heinrich Hagenmeyer convincingly demonstrated that Peter did not inspire the Pope to preach, did not speak at Clermont, and was only a minor figure during the First Crusade (Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Peter der Eremit, 1879). In the early 20th century, Princeton University historian Dana Carleton Munro was perhaps the leading U.S. scholar of the crusades. Munro published numerous journal articles and essays on the crusades on a host of issues in leading publications of his time. His influence on the field of crusades studies was demonstrated by the 1928 publication of a collection of essays by his former students, many of whom were by then teaching at various universities and colleges, titled The Crusades and Other Historical Essays Presented to Dana C. Munro by his Former Students. Munro’s final work, The Kingdom of the Crusaders, was published shortly after his death in 1935 and focused on

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the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Munro died before finishing what would have been his opus magnum, a history of the crusades based on an exhaustive and critical use of contemporary sources and fieldwork in the Near East. Munro also contributed an influential essay on perceptions of Islam during the crusades with his 1931 article for Speculum, “The Western Attitude Toward Islam During the Period of the Crusades” (329–43) Munro’s efforts were followed with significant research in this area by R.W. Southern’s broader examination of Medieval Europe in his 1962 work, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. As recently as 2002 John Tolan also contributed to this field of study with his book, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. While both Southern and Tolan did not focus exclusively on the period of the crusades, their work addressed the issue substantively enough to be of value for crusades studies. Conversely, few crusades historians have dealt with the issue opposing issue of Muslim perspectives of the crusades. That is until Carole Hillenbrand came out with her groundbreaking work published in 2000, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. Many of these books, to varying degrees, also touch on the issue of MuslimChristian interaction during the crusades, but among the most focused recent works dedicated to the subject is the 1986 volume edited by Vladimir P. Goss, The Meeting of Two Worlds. While Dana Carleton Munro was active in the United States in the 1930s, European scholarship during this time was perhaps best represented by French historian Rene Grousset who published his authoritative Histoire des croisades between 1934–1936, and German scholar Carl Erdmann, whose influential Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, published in 1935, argued that the crusades was a product of the eleventh century ecclesiastical reform movement. Erdmann posited that the efforts to purify the church during this period extended to the greater Christian society, including Christian knights and soldiers. Consequently, the crusading movement provided an opportunity to purify the actions of such warriors, by their taking up arms in defense of other Christians and Christian holy places. As a result, the so-called Erdmann thesis is that the crusades were effectively an export of violence carried out primarily for the benefit of a western Christian society attempting to reform itself. It would be nearly thirty-five years before Oxford historian H.E.J. Cowdrey provided the first serious challenge to the Erdmann thesis. Cowdrey’s most direct rebuttal to Erdmann came in 1970 with the publication of his article “Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the Second Crusade” (History 55 [1970]: 177–88). In it Cowdrey convincingly argued that Pope Urban II’s true goal was the liberation of Jerusalem, rather than simply an export of violence as advocated by Erdmann.

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The later half of the twentieth century saw the rise and eventual dominance of British historians of the crusades. British historian Jonathan RileySmith has described this movement as nothing less than “phenomenal.” He notes that in the early 1950s there were only two historians of the crusades teaching in British universities, but by 1990 there were twenty-nine British universities and colleges that had faculty members belonging to the Society for the Study of the Crusades to the Latin East, the leading scholarly organization for crusades historians. While not many crusades historians were employed at British universities in the 1950s, this does not take into account the influence of Steven Runciman, perhaps the world’s most famous crusades scholar. Runciman’s three volume History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954, remains among the most popular works on the crusades even today. Runciman approached the crusades from a Byzantine perspective and, as a result, found several causes for criticism of the movement and he did not shy away from expressing moral indignation. This was perhaps best demonstrated in Runciman’s often quoted description of the crusading movement, “High ideas were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self righteousness, and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” Current scholars generally speak of Steven Runciman with respect for the popular enthusiasm his works have generated for crusades studies. Yet while current popular understandings of the crusades remain largely in line with those propagated by Runciman, scholars have largely rejected his moral condemnation of the crusaders, preferring instead to understand the crusaders according to standards and morality of their time. This has resulted in a striking divide of current scholarly and popular opinions of the crusades. Runciman, as well as many modern popular writers on the crusades, found it hard to accept that violence motivated by religion was considered legitimate to those who took the cross. Yet as Jonathan Riley-Smith has argued, this is a mental block that belongs to a post-Enlightenment Christian age, rather than medieval Christianity. Riley-Smith notes, “They, and everyone else, have forgotten how intellectually respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was.” Then the 1960s saw the rise of the Christian Liberation movement in South America. Some aspects of the movement justified the use of violence during acts of rebellion as a moral good and an act of Christian charity. As a result, crusades historians realized that there were sincere Christian contemporaries advocating positions nearly identical to those of the crusaders, thus making the concept of Christian violence during the crusades much more believable and respectable for modern scholars.

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In 1965, German historian Hans Eberhard Mayer argued that the crusaders were motivated by religious reasons. Specifically, Mayer noted that the crusaders were driven by a desire to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control and to come to the aid of Eastern Christians whom they believed suffered as a result of Turkish abuse. Mayer based his conclusions on a common theme in contemporary western Christian accounts of the crusades that claim Christian charity was essentially at the heart of crusading. Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith has explored this issue in his 1980 article aptly titled, “Crusading as an Act of Love” (History, 65, 177–85) The idea of crusading “as an act of love” or charity, comes from the reasoning reportedly employed by the earliest crusades preachers used to stir their listeners to take crusading vows. Clerics regularly cited the suffering of eastern Christians under Turkish rule and the blasphemies committed by Turks against holy places in the Holy Land to great effect, contributing to the argument that many crusaders held only sincere motives in taking the cross. This was the dominant thought of crusades historians roughly until the Enlightenment when greater suspicion was directed toward the motives of the crusaders. Yet since the late twentieth century, largely due to the work of Riley-Smith, historians are reconsidering the issue and increasingly favoring the view that many participants in crusades understood crusading as, essentially, an act of Christian charity. One would have to go back to Steven Runciman to find another scholar that has had nearly the impact on crusades studies as Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith. Undergraduates are usually introduced to the scholarship of Riley-Smith through his massively popular 1987 textbook titled, The Crusades: A Short History. As already mentioned in this essay, and as reflected by the scope of his textbook, Riley-Smith is a major proponent of the idea that the crusading movement included efforts in Europe against northerners, heretics, and Muslims in Spain, rather than only the crusades to the East. Riley-Smith’s works are greatly at odds with many popular perceptions of the crusades. His scholarship, once considered revisionist in light of the popular works by earlier historians like Runciman, is now mainstream in the scholarly community. Riley-Smith has effectively argued that the crusaders were largely sincere and motivated by piety more than greed, as had been argued since the Enlightenment. Riley-Smith has also shown the great personal sacrifice involved for each crusader and his or her family, demonstrating the enormous amount of wealth that flowed from West to East rather than the other way around. He also has contributed substantially to undermining the so-called “younger sons” theory of crusade motivations in his 1986 work The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. In the

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work, he demonstrates that heads of families often went on crusade, and that younger sons seeking land of their own, as normally only their oldest brother would inherit their father’s lands, were a small minority of crusaders. While the vast majority of modern crusades historians have embraced the theories advocated by Riley-Smith concerning the motivations of the crusaders, there are some dissenters. A major challenge has come from John France, another respected British historian from the University of WalesSwansea. While crusades historians have largely embraced Riley-Smith’s rejection of greed as a motivation of the crusaders, France has argued that many crusaders did, in fact, hope to get wealthy. France does not deny Riley-Smith’s argument that religious devotion was a major motivating factor for crusaders, but he argues that the hope of acquiring wealth also served as a motivation for crusaders (see, for example, “Patronage and the Appeal of the First Crusade” The First Crusade, ed. Jonathan Phillips, 1997, 5–20). Although crusades scholars generally agree that crusading was expensive and a very poor way to try to earn one’s wealth, France argues that the earliest crusaders did not yet know of the burdensome costs associated with crusading. If France’s argument is correct, it would apply only to the motives of the earliest crusaders, as the hardships of crusading became well known by the Second Crusade at the latest. In addition to France, historian Ronald C. Finucane has also challenged the religious motivations theory. In his 1983 book, Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War, Finucane argues that while religious motivations were significant, many other factors must also be acknowledged. He argues that political, social, economic, and military factors also played an important role in determining the composition of crusader armies. Few historians would deny this; however the real dispute is over the level of importance of such factors when weighed against religious factors. Among U.S. scholars, Thomas Madden is quickly becoming one of the most visible and highly regarded historians of the crusades. In addition to Madden’s well-received scholarly works, his articles for non-scholarly publications, including religious and political magazines, have positioned him in the thick of modern debates over the crusades and Islam and generally reflect his conservative viewpoints of each. His highly regarded scholarly work has examined Italian history at the time of the crusades as well as the Fourth Crusade. His work on the controversial Fourth Crusade resulted in his 1997 co-authorship of The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople with the late Donald Queller. Madden and Queller argued what has come to be known as the accident theory, which holds that the crusaders only ended up attacking Constantinople at the end of a series of unforeseeable and

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unpredictable events rather than plotting such an attack from the beginning. D. Areas of Crusades Studies Regardless of how one defines or limits the crusading movement, the crusades remain an enormous field for scholarly study. Scholars working in disciplines including literature, philosophy, and religion will find enough to satisfy a lifetime of study within the crusading movement. Even researchers in non-traditional areas like economics and psychology have ventured into the realm of crusades studies for their research. Despite the appeal of crusades studies to scholars in other disciplines, it is without doubt historians who dominate the field. Historians of the crusades approach their studies from several broad backgrounds, including Medieval European, Byzantine, and Islamic History. Areas of specialization range from the more traditional study of the military orders, the clerical preaching of the crusades or the crusader states, to relatively new areas of specialization such as the study of sex and gender during the crusades. E. The Current State of Crusades Research and Graduate Studies Because the United Kingdom is home to a disproportionate share of prominent crusades historians, it is one of the best places to pursue advanced studies of the crusades. A large number of historians completed their PhD studies at Cambridge University under the supervision of Jonathan RileySmith. His former students have had great success in obtaining teaching positions at various universities and colleges in the United Kingdom and the United States, and essentially form a school of historians that insure the survival of Riley-Smith’s influence on crusades studies well into the future. The University of London currently offers an M.A. in Crusader Studies that is jointly run by the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London and the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their program boasts a faculty of no less than five crusades historians, an exceptionally large number to be associated with one university. They include such prominent historians as Jonathan Phillips, Thomas Asbridge, Jonathan Harris, and Susan Edgington. Oxford University is the home of crusades historian Christopher Tyreman, author of the recent mammoth work, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (2006), as well as Eric Christiansen, perhaps the leading scholar of the so-called Northern Crusades against European pagans (Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 1980). Other important British historians one might consider working with for advanced studies of the crusades include Carole Hillenbrand at the

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University of Edinburgh, Peter Edbury and Helen Nicholson at Cardiff University, Marcus Bull at the University of Bristol, A. J. Forey at the University of Durham, John France at the University of Wales-Swansea, Malcolm Barber at the University of Reading, Norman Housley at the University of Leicester, and Alan V. Murray at the University of Leeds. If the United Kingdom is at the forefront of Crusades Studies, the United States is not far behind. Although a number of esteemed U.S. historians of the crusades are retired, they are in most cases still active at conferences and in publishing and are known for their willingness to help younger scholars. Included among their ranks are James Powell, Alfred Andrea, and James Brundage. U.S. historians active in teaching positions at universities and colleges include William Chester Jordan at Princeton, Michael Lower at the University of Minnesota, Thomas Madden at St, Louis University, Kelly Devries at Loyola College in Maryland, Jaroslav Folda and Brett Whalen at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Ronald Finucane at Oakland University, William Urban at Monmouth College, and Edward Peters at the University of Pennsylvania. Especially noteworthy are the efforts of scholars at St. Louis University which, at times, has appeared poised to become a center for crusades studies in the United States under the direction of Thomas Madden. French and German scholars, whose predecessors laid the foundations of modern crusades studies from the nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, continue to rank among the leading specialists of the crusades. The French historian Jean Richard, for example, has published a number of important works on varying crusading topics over a period of more than four decades including Le royaume latin de Jérusalem (1953), Saint-Louis (1983), and his popular general history Histoire des croisades (1996). Jean Flori, who serves as Director of Research at the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale in Poitiers, has also established himself as a leading French historian of the crusades through several well received works including Pierre l’ermite et la premiere croisade (1999) and La guerre sainte: la formation de l’idee de croisade dans l’Occident chretien (2001). Michel Balard at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, has also made important contributions to crusades studies (see M. Balard, ed., Autour de la Première Croisades, 1996). Karl Borchardt at the University of Würzburg is among the leading German scholars of the crusades (see The Hospitallers, the Mediterranean, and Europe: Festschrift for Anthony Luttrell, ed. K. Borchardt, Nikolas Jaspert, and Helen J. Nicholson, 2007). Sabine Geldsetzer has also made an important contribution to the study of women during the crusades (Frauen auf Kreuzzügen, 2003). Allan Oslo’s work Der Erste Kreuzzug: Hintergründe und Auswirkungen (1999) challenged many

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scholarly assumptions about the uniqueness of the First Crusade by pointing out that very similar holy wars had been waged against various European peoples prior to 1095. Finally, Malte Prietzel at Humboldt University of Berlin has published two recent works on warfare in the Middle Ages (Kriegsführung im Mittelalter, 2006, and Krieg im Mittelalter, 2006). There are, of course, a host of scholars from other countries who have made important contributions to crusades studies. They include, but are not limited to, Niall Christie at the University of British Columbia whose knowledge of Arabic allows for his comparative research on the nature of early crusades and jihad (see “Parallel Preachings: Urban II and al-Sulami,” with Deborah Gerish, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 15 [2003]: 139–48); Italian scholar Francesco Gabrieli whose 1957 Islamic sourcebook Storici arabi delle crociate (Arab Historians of the Crusades) has been translated into several languages and is commonly assigned by instructors teaching crusades courses throughout the world; Christoph T. Maier at the University of Zurich, whose research has focused on crusading sermons and propaganda, is perhaps the leading Swiss scholar of the crusades (Crusade Ideology and Propaganda: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross, 2000); Israeli historian Joshua Prawer, who innovatively used legal and governmental sources for research on crusader institutions (Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem, 2 vols., 1969, 1970); Hebrew University historian Benjamin Z. Kedar is one of the leading scholars of the Frankish Levant (The Franks in the Levant, 11th to 14th Centuries, 1993) and his colleague David Jacoby has also made significant contributions in the same area (“Aspects of Everyday Life in Frankish Acre,” Crusades, vol. 4 [2005], 73–105). Most recently Conor Kostick of Trinity College in Dublin Ireland has published a promising volume examining the social structure of the First Crusade (The Social Structure of the First Crusade, 2008). F. Language Competencies The largest number of surviving crusades sources unsurprisingly originates with western authors, but a large number of Arabic sources survive, as well as considerable Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, and Old French records. Consequently, Latin is the essential language for crusades studies while additional training in the other relevant languages opens new possibilities for the scholar. While it is standard that crusades scholars are proficient in Latin, and to a lesser extent Greek, relatively few are trained in Arabic. The primary modern research languages for a study of the crusading movement include English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

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G. Professional Associations The sole international organization for scholars of the crusades is the Society for the Study of the Crusades in the Latin East, more commonly known as the SSCLE. It claims nearly 500 members from thirty countries, including the world’s top scholars, and is active in the promotion of crusades research around the world. SSCLE conferences, held every four years, have met in the United Kingdom, France, Israel, and the United States, and their next meeting is scheduled for 2008 in Carcassonne, France. The Society is also active hosting panels at various other medieval studies conferences including the Annual Congress on Medieval Studies held each May at Western Michigan University. The SSCLE also publishes its prestigious annual journal Crusades (Ashgate Press), which is devoted exclusively to the crusades and boasts an impressive editorial board including Jonathan Riley-Smith, Karl Borchardt, Jean Richard, James Brundage, and many others. While the SSCLE is the only scholarly organization exclusively devoted to the broader crusading movement, a number of crusades historians are involved with related organizations such as the Society for Medieval Military History or organizations devoted to the studies of particular military orders. H. Source Collections The largest and most important collection of crusades sources is the Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, commonly known as the RHC. The Acadèmie des Inscriptions et Belles letteres began compiling the sources for the RHC in 1824 and took decades to complete. The RHC comprises sixteen lengthy volumes of crusades sources in their original languages including Latin, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and Old French. Lengthy introductions written in modern French accompany the sources for each volume. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica Project, has generously made the entire RHC available online for viewing or downloading by volume in PDF format. Other important collection of crusades sources include the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, commonly referred to as the MGH and the Palestine Pilgrims Text Society Library (PPTSL). The MGH contains a number of important papal documents related to the crusades while the PPTSL includes a large collection of documents of travelers to the Holy Land before and during the time of the crusades as well as important crusades era histories and biographies. For additional sources on the Latin East one might also consult Comte Riant’s Archives de l’orient latin published in Paris between 1881–1884 and for sources concerning Byzantium during the crusades see the Exuviae Sacrae Constantinopolitanae.

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Select Bibliography For a useful examination of the various trends in crusades historiography, including important secondary sources addressing issues disputed by historians, see Thomas Madden. The Crusades: The Essential Readings, ed. Thomas Madden (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). For bibliographical references, see Aziz Atiya, The Crusade: Historiography and Bibliography (Bloomington, IN: University Press, 1962); Hans E. Mayer, Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1960); and J. Mclellan and H.W. Hazard, “Select Bibliography of the Crusades,” History of the Crusades, vol. 6: The Impact of the Crusades on Europe, ed. Kenneth M. Setton (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 511–664.

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D Deconstruction in Medieval Studies A. General Outline of Topic Deconstruction, pioneered by the French philosopher Jacque Derrida (1930–2004), has yet to achieve comparable influence in Medieval Studies as it has in the study of modern literature. In the study of medieval texts this is likely due to what appears to be a tendency to apply an hermeneutic interpretational approach, the objective of which is to reconstruct and convey the intention of the author through textual analysis to the modern reader and thus establish a ‘most likely’ or ‘most accurate’ interpretation or understanding – and thus significance – of a piece of literature for the reader, whereas deconstruction is understood in a contrastive manner as a process of demonstrating the potential for any number of alternative interpretations, effectively endlessly deferring meaning and, as a result, final significance of the text for the reader. It is noted here that the topic of this entry is that of deconstruction in a very narrow sense, and will not conflate it with the topics of post-structuralism, post-modernism, New Medievalism etc. B. The Rise and Spread of Deconstruction Jacques Derrida first addressed what would grow to become ‘deconstruction’ in the late 1960s: Speech and Phenomena (1967), Structure, Sign and Play (1967), Of Grammatology (1967); among other works important to the spread of deconstruction are his Dissemination (1972) and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These works emerged to constitute a school of philosophy formulated as a response to the philosophical considerations of Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand de Saussure and Sigmund Freud, among others, whose works were significant for phenomenology, structuralism and psychoanalysis. Deconstruction is considered to both criticise and expand upon Martin Heidegger’s Dekonstruktion and Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Western metaphysics and philosophy. Deconstruction was developed by Derrida to encourage/enable a new understanding of the influence of metaphysics on intellectual history and the field of philosophy, quickly transcended the boundaries of the discipline, and was adopted/co-opted by scholars of literary criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s in what is today known as the Yale

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School that included professors from both English and Comparative Literature departments such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction” (The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism VIII: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, ed. Raman Selden, 1995, 166–96), notes that “Derrida was made famous (in Englishspeaking countries) not by his fellow-philosophers but by literary critics (who were looking for new ways of reading texts rather than for a new understanding of intellectual history), this label has (in those countries) become firmly attached to a school of which Derrida is, rather to his own surprise and bemusement, the leading figure. As used by members of this school, the term ‘deconstruction,’ refers in the first instance to the way in which the ‘accidental’ features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly ‘essential’ message.” This development lead deconstruction to be more significant as a movement in the U.S.A. than in continental Europe, and was further facilitated by Derrida teaching at Yale from 1975–1985. The Yale School established itself in print in Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971), and the closest this circle came to establishing or making a programmatic statement for the school of deconstruction can be found in the anthology Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Deconstruction as practiced in the U.S.A. has often been criticized as investing literary texts with a philosophical agenda, treating the text as an inferred and/or accidental statement about said agenda (e. g. epistemological issues). Derrida’s work can thus be viewed as having been adapted into a ‘method’ of reading or ‘strategy’ of approaching the text through which it is possible to challenge the canonical understanding, interpretation and significance of any given text. Thus, what was originally a critical approach toward the question of the metaphysics of presence (the privileging of presence over absence; logocentrism, phallogocentrism) in Western philosophy was adopted by the field of literary criticism (for a summary of the differing objectives between Derrida and the reception of his work among literary critics, see: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Deconstruction deconstructed: Transformationen französischer Logozentrismuskritik in der amerikanischen Literaturwissenschaft” [Philosophische Rundschau 33 [1986]: 1–35); this process that has been criticized on numerous fronts, among others by Umberto Eco, “Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art” (Differentia 2 [1988]: 147–68): “It so happened that a legitimate philosophical practice has been taken as a model for literary criticism and for a new trend in textual interpretation […] this […] should not have happened” (166).

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C. Definition The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000) provides the following definition of deconstruction: “A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: ‘In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning’ (Rebecca Goldstein).” Despite this and the ensuing attempt at defining Deconstruction, it should be noted that many of the prominent scholars who have written on it have intentionally (and inevitably in keeping with deconstruction itself) left any definition purposefully vague. Perhaps the most widely cited ‘definition’ of Deconstruction isn’t a definition at all, but an indication of what it can do; Paul de Man writes: “It’s possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements” (Interview with de Man in: A Recent Imagining, ed. Robert Moynihan, 1986, 156). It is this subversive aspect that led Nikolaus Wegmann to provide the definition of deconstruction as “Kalkül, das bei der Lektüre von Texten angewandt wird, um die Geltungsansprüche einer auf die Ermittlung von Sinn zentrierten Interpretation zu unterlaufen” (“Calculation used for reading texts in order to subvert the validity of an interpretation that is based on the conveyance of meaning”) (Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 1 [1997], 334). A perhaps more benign definition can be found in Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (1980, 5): “Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’, however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically mean ‘to undo’ – a virtual synonym for ‘to de-construct’. The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text’s critical difference itself.” In the face of many misapprehensions Martin McQuillan, “Five Strategies for Deconstruction” (Deconstruction: A Reader, 2001, 1–46), has attempted to define what deconstruction is not: “Deconstruction is not a school or an ‘ism.’ There is no such thing as ‘deconstructionism’: this is a word used by idiots. Deconstruction is

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not a theory or a project. It does not present an idea of the world with which we should keep faith, nor does it offer rules for achieving that idea. Deconstruction is not an ‘application’ of the thought of Derrida or de Man or Hillis Miller or Barbara Johnson or … Deconstruction undoes the logic of outside-inside which the idea of an application presupposes. Deconstruction is not literary criticism. Deconstruction is not philosophy … Deconstruction is not postmodernism … Deconstruction is not a political ideology … Deconstruction is not solely about language … Deconstruction is not opposed to reality/history/the world … Deconstruction is not discourse … Deconstruction is not reading … This word ‘deconstruction’ is only the metaphysical name we give to the effects of an ethico-theoretico-political situation. Deconstruction is what happens” (41–42). It may be worth venturing the definition that deconstruction, at least in literary studies, is a ‘strategy’ for approaching a text that identifies and expounds upon key concepts and terms that evidence paradox and the subversion of meaning, that identifies those elements that compromise or entail a re-evaluation of ‘traditional’ understandings, traditionally with regards to the tenets of Western metaphysics. Deconstruction could be understood as a ‘strategy’ of textual criticism that identifies foundational concepts and the assumptions that accompany them in order to enable alternative readings by questioning the logocentrism they are attributed or with which they are invested by the reader. Finally, Deconstruction entails recognizing the malleable or unstable meanings found in a text in order to derive, differ with, or defer meaning and/or significance. Derrida himself specifically states that deconstruction is not a literary method of textual analysis, insofar as there is not a set sequence of steps for “deconstructing” a text, however, literary critics that attempt ‘deconstructive’ readings frequently employ a strategic approach to the text that questions the self-evident, hierarchical scale of dichotomies within a text by emphasizing the interdependence, instabilities, tensions and contradictions within it, the attention to which in ‘traditional’ reading has been marginalized. Thus multiple readings of the same text are possible – those of established canonical significance and/or those that break from such a view and examine its deviation and marginality produced through the ‘wandering’ of meaning. Derrida makes use of many different terms in his texts treating deconstruction, which is considered one means of demonstrating the mutability of meaning inherent in the strategy of deconstruction, and by doing so enables him to focus on discrete words or themes within a text that undermine the ‘explicit’ intent of the text on account of their ambiguity. Frequently utilized and referred to terms in deconstructive readings include arche-écriture, blanc, différance, écriture, iterability, hymen,

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invagination, pharmakon, supplement and trace among others. For an introduction to deconstruction and its terminology, consult Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1983); Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholars Royle (2000); Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New Accents) (2002). D. Deconstruction in Medieval Studies D.1. Current State of Deconstruction in Medieval Studies To date there are no monographs or reference works that specifically treat the topic of deconstruction in Medieval Studies as a whole. The recognition of deconstruction as relevant for Medieval Studies has been present from the beginning, and a few authors have ventured to break ground in what will certainly become an important aspect of Medieval Studies, namely the re-evaluation of traditional understandings – or re-approaching – of medieval texts by questioning long-held assumptions about the medieval text, author and/or environment. In an expanded sense, whenever a new interpretation of a medieval text is presented that questions previous interpretations, or whenever a specific ‘under’-recognized aspect of a text is drawn to the fore and the possibilities for (non/-)significance or deferral of meaning inherent in its presence are expounded upon, it could be considered an inroad of deconstruction into Medieval Studies. For the purposes of this entry only those texts that make explicit use or mention of deconstruction as such in order to explicate their (medieval) topic will be referenced. Further, an appropriation of ‘deconstruction’ as ‘revision’ or ‘exacting analysis’ can be identified in certain instances in lieu of an explicit methodological approach, as can a lack of theoretical stringency through the conflation of ‘deconstruction’/’poststructuralism’/’post-modernism’ in others; despite this said studies will be included below to provide a broader foundation for future consideration of deconstruction in medieval studies. The following overview of research to date is arranged chronologically within the ‘sub-discipline’ of Medieval Studies in which it is deemed most appropriate, and should not be considered an exhaustive list of available literature as countless studies avail themselves of the tenets of deconstruction or reference Derrida’s ideas without being beholden unto them/him.

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D.2. Select Publications Exhibiting the Influence of Deconstruction in Medieval Studies As perhaps can be expected by the rise of deconstruction’s popularity in the United States, it appears that most treatments of medieval topics with recourse to deconstruction are to be found in the English speaking world, and more specifically in terms of English studies, in the study of Geoffrey Chaucer: An early study considering the Chaucer’s puns in a deconstructive light can be found in Joseph Gerhard, “Chaucer’s Coinage: Foreign Exchange and the Puns of the Shipman’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 17 [1983]: 341–57). It appears that the decisive publications for widespread advent of the treatment of Chaucer from a deconstructive approach were two pieces detailing a pro and con debate on this issue of whether his work should be ‘deconstructed’: Peggy Knapp, “Deconstructing The Canterbury Tales: Pro” (Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings 2, 1986, 73–81), and Traugott Lawler, “Deconstructing The Canterbury Tales: Con” (Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings 2 1986, 83–91). Marshall H. Leicester Jr.: “Oure Tonges Différance: Textuality and Deconstruction in Chaucer” (Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A Finke and Martin Shichtman, 1987, 15–26), discusses Chaucer’s literary environment as one in which the textual heritage has assumed the status of culture, and Chaucer’s puns and other language thus constitutes him as “an active deconstructionist” (22). At the end of the 1980s we find: Ruth Waterhouse, “‘Sweete Wordes’ of Non-Sense: The Deconstruction of the Moral Melibee” (Chaucer Review 23–24 [1989]: 338–61 and 53–63); and R.Allen Shoaf, “Medieval Studies after Derrida after Heidegger” (Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian Wasserman and Lois Roney, 1989, 9–30), in which Shoaf explores the ramifications of Derridean concepts of margin and différance for modern understanding of medieval discourse, “we humans come to the truth only by wandering. For Derrida such wandering consists in detours” (23); Henry Marshall Leicester, Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (1990), argues that Chaucer represents a “disenchanted” and practical comprehension of self-construction in terms of gender and social ranking, indeed, in his discussion of the Pardoner he notes in a decidedly deconstructionist vein that “The ironist notoriously does not ‘stand behind’ what he says. Because you can never be sure if he is serious or ironic, sincere or rhetorical, his ‘real meaning’ and his ‘real self’ are always displaced. They are always something and somewhere else, different and deferred […] Language itself reflexively deconstructs the self” (170), and can be considered one of the major works in the field availing itself of deconstruction to make its arguments, which was followed and expounded upon

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in his “Structure as Deconstruction: ‘Chaucer and Estates Satire’ in the General Prologue: Or, Reading Chaucer as a Prologue to the History of Disenchantment” (Exemplaria 2 [1990]: 241–61). In that same year, R.Allen Shoaf, “Literary Theory, Medieval Studies, and the Crisis of Difference” (Reorientations: Critical Theories & Pedagogies, ed. Bruce Henricksen and Thais Morgan, 1990, 77–92), discussed the difficulties of translation, particulary in regards to Chaucer and Beowulf, commenting that the crisis of différance has significant ramifications for the translation of medieval literature: “Translation without transformation is a dream of fullness and presence hopelessly afflicted with nostalgia – a nostalgia, moreover, that is corrupt, since it entices its victim to shirk authorial responsibility” (80). This is followed by a deconstructive approach to the narrative frame in Peter Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction” (Exemplaria 3 [1991]: 135–58), and David Aers, “Medievalists and Deconstruction: An Exemplum” (From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simons, 1992, 24–40), who discusses the deconstructionist approach of Leicester (1987, 1990). This was followed by a consideration of Andrew Taylor, “Chaucer Our Derridean Contemporary?” (Exemplaria 5 [1993]: 471–86). This was followed by Liang Sun-chieh, “Chaucer, Joyce, Lacan, and Their ‘We Men’” (Ph. D. diss. State Univ. of New York, Buffalo 1997), who discussed the role of femininity in Chaucer with recourse to the theoretical approaches of Jacques Lacan and Derrida. A contribution in Korean, with English summary was provided by Jae-Whan Kim, “[M/W: A Deconstructive Reading of the Wife of Bath]” Journal of English Language and Literature/Yongo Yongmunhak 44 [1998]: 255–74). A brief summary of scholarship with an eye to postmodern literary theory and criticism was provided by Michaela Grudi, “Chaucer Scholarship at the Turn of the Century: Postmodernism, Poetry, and Comfortable Assumptions” (Review 23 [2001]: 107–37). Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (2002) reminds us that “In foregrounding the role of the reader and the act of communication as a two-way process, Derrida reminds us to put our own habits of reading into the historical picture” (72). A broader discussion of Chaucer in regards to literary theory and criticism, in which deconstruction plays a role, can be found in Carolyn Dinshaw, “New Approaches to Chaucer” (The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Jill Mann, 2003, 270–89). Franziska Scheitzeneder, “‘For myn entente nys but for to pleye’: On the Playground with the Wife of Bath, The Clerk of Oxford and Jacque Derrida” (PhiN – Philologie im Netz [2006]: 44–59), discusses how “taking Derrida’s assumptions and implications about decentered structure […] for a reading of the Wife of Bath and the Clerk […] show(s) how both the anxieties and the affirmation in regard to a dismissal of the illusion

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of stability are inherent in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” demonstrates how a reading that is “delayed from the writing process bears unexpected interpretations […] It illustrates how we as modern readers approach a medieval text from our own background and influence the text accordingly. And ultimately, it acknowledges that in the end, interpretation is itself simply a play of infinite substitutions while we are on the quest for a center of the text” (55–56). And most recently the possibilities for instruction have been considered by James Paxson, “Triform Chaucer: Deconstruction, Historicism, Psychoanlysis, and Troilus and Criseyde” (Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems, ed. Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl, 2007, 127–32). Arthurian: Other notable contributions to the deconstructive approach in the study of medieval English literature can be found in the Arthurian vein, including a treatment of King Arthur and his relationship to women in light of deconstruction provided by Sheila Cavanagh, “‘Beauties Chalice’: Arthur and Women in The Faerie Queene,” The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. Christopher Baswell and William Scharpe, 1988, 207–18. See also the unpublished considerations of Cathy Darrup, A New Medievalist Approach to the Madness of Merlin/Lailoken, B.A. thesis, Bucknell University, 1995. To these can be added Miranda Griffin, “Writing Out the Sin: Arthur, Charlemagne and the Spectre of Incest,” Neophilologus 88 (2004): 499–519; and Raluca L. Radulescu: “‘Now I Take uppon Me the Adventures to Seke of Holy Thynges’: Lancelot and the Crisis of Arthurian Knighthood,” Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler et al., 2004, 285–95. Theology: In addition to English studies, deconstruction has found a forum in relation to metaphysics, which can be considered a logical outgrowth of Derrida’s own concerns with the ontology of presence. This category can be discerned as treating the relationship between deconstruction and Christian (particularly Meister Eckhart), Arabian and Jewish metaphysics. Christian Metaphysics: John Caputo, “Mysticism and Transgression: Derrida and Meister Eckhart,” Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh Silverman, 1989, 24–39; David Thomson, “Deconstruction and Meaning in Medieval Mysticism,” Christianity and Literature 40 (1991): 107–21; David Thomson: “Deconstruction and Negative Meaning in Medieval Mysticism,” Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality, ed. Daniel Fischlin, 1994, 41–58; Maris Fiondella, “Derrida, Typology and the Second Shepherds’ Play: The Theatrical Production of Christian Metaphysics,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 429–58; Niklaus Largier, “Repräsentation und Nega-

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tivität: Meister Eckharts Kritik als Dekonstruktion,” Contemplata aliis tradere: Studien zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Spiritualität, ed. Claudia Brinker et al., 1995, 371–90; Marie-Ann Vannier, “Déconstruction de l’individualité ou assomption de la personne chez Eckhart?” Individuum und Individualität im Mittelalter, ed. Jan Aertsen and Andreas Speer, 1996, 622–41; William Young, “Naming God and Friendship in the Work of St. Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Derrida”, Ph. D. diss. University of Virginia, 2000); Anne Clark Bartlett, “Reading It Personally: Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, and Language in Crisis,” Exemplaria 16 (2004): 437–56; Susan Stephenson, “Derrida, Deconstruction and Mystical ‘Languages of Unsaying’,” Studies in Spirituality 16 (2006): 245–71. Arabian Metaphysics: The consideration of deconstruction in relation to Western metaphysics in the Middle Ages has found a counterpart in Ian Almond’s treatment of deconstruction and medieval Arabic mysticism: Ian Almond, “The Honesty of the Perplexed: Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi on ‘Bewilderment’,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70 (2002): 515–37; Ian Almond, “The Meaning of Infinity in Sufi and Deconstructive Hermeneutics: When Is an Empty Text an Infinite One?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004): 97–117. Jewish Studies: Straddling the border can be found Inge Siegumfeldt, “The Double Movement of Creation: Vignettes of Kabbalistic and Deconstructive Thought” (Creations: Medieval Rituals, the Arts, and the Concept of Creation, ed. Sven Havsteen et al., 2007, 247–54), which leads to the few studies available linking deconstruction and medieval Jewish Studies, which includes such contributions as Steven Kruger, “The Spectral Jew,” New Medieval Literatures II, ed. Rita Copeland et al., 1998, 9–35, and Albrecht Classen, “Jewish-Christian Relations in the German Middle Ages-The Exploration of Alternative Voices? The Deconstruction of a Myth or Factual History? Literary-Historical Investigations,” ABäG 58 (2003): 123–49. This enables us to segue to the study of language and literature in German, French, Italian, and Spanish Studies: German studies: The contributions in German also appear limited, but notable contributions include: Priscilla Hayden-Roy, “Till Eulenspiegel’s Transgressions against Convention: Interpreting the Parasite,” Daphnis 20 (1991): 7–31; Waldemar Riemer, “Deconstructing an Established Ideal: Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Criticism of the Minne/Aventiure System in Parzival,” ABäG 35 (1992): 65–86; Volker Mertens, “Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion heldenepischen Erzählens: Nibelungenlied–Klage–Titurel,” PBB 118 (1996): 358–78; Armin Schulz, “Morolfs Ende: Zur Dekonstruktion der feudalen Brautwerbungsschemas in der sogenannten ‘Spielmannsepik’,”

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PBB 124 (2002): 233–49; Albrecht Classen, “Moriz, Tristan, and Ulrich as Master Disguise Artists: Deconstruction and Reenactment of Courtliness in Moriz von Craûn, Tristan als Mönch, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst,” JEGP 103 (2004): 475–504; Jan-Dirk Müller, Rules for the Endgame: The World of the Nibelungenlied, trans. William Whobrey, 2007. Similarly, French, Italian and Spanish studies have seen limited inroads of deconstruction into the study of medieval texts and/or traditions: Peter Haidu, “The Hermit’s Pottage: Deconstruction and History in Yvain” The Sower and His Seed: Essays on Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Rupert Pickens, 1983, 127–45; John Grigsby, “Perceval devant l’herméneutique et la grammatologie,” Esprit Créateur 23 (1983): 25–37; Carine Bourget, “Allégorie et déconstruction dans Le Roman de la rose,” Chimères 24 (1997): 41–52; Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature, 2006; John Leavey, “Derrida and Dante: Différance and the Eagle in the Sphere of Jupiter,” MLN 91 (1976): 60–68; Marguerite Waller, “Historicism Historicized: Translating Petrarch and Derrida,” Historical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet Smarr, 1993, 183–211; Christian Thomsen, “Was haben der Garten von Bomarza und die Divina Commedia mit dem Dekonstruktivismus zu tun? Leuchtspuren zu Techniken und Ausdrucksformen des Komischen in der Architektur,” Von Rubens zum Dekonstruktivismus: Sprach-, literatur- und kunstwissenschaftliche Beiträge-Festschrift für Wolfgang Drost, ed. Helmut Kreuzer et al., 1993, 228–64; John Dagenais, “That Bothersome Residue: Toward a Theory of the Physical Text,” Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Alger Doane and Carol Pasternack, 1991, 246–59. E. Current Issues and Future Perspectives Whereas deconstruction has apparently in some instances been misappropriated as an orientation with which to champion an exclusive orientation on ‘modern’ as ‘relevant’ and ‘medieval’ as ‘irrelevant’, as depicted in the following passage, it should not be so: “Others have pointed out the need to change our historical perspective altogether and to follow an exclusively postmodernist, deconstructionist path both in research and teaching of literature: that is to say, to turn away from the Middle Ages and begin with a ‘more relevant’ interpretive work, resisting traditional orientation and stifling canon building. This has led, indeed, to practical consequences in a number of graduate programs across the country” (Paden 21f.) as quoted in Albrecht Classen, “The Never-Ending Story of the (German) Middle Ages: Philology, Hermeneutics, Medievalism and Mysticism” (Rocky Mountain Review [Fall 2001]: 67–79, here 67; see also his “The Literary Puzzle of Hein-

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rich von Türlin’s Diu Crône: Seen from a Postmodern Perspective,” Michigan Germanic Studies XXIV,2 [1998, published in 2000]: 111–28). It is worth speculating if the apparent reluctance to adopt or adapt postmodern theoretical approaches, including deconstruction, has not done more to harm medieval studies than to preserve them by enabling the study of the Middle Ages to appear outdated or irrelevant to those who must compete for funding to see their own ‘modern and relevant’ research goals achieved. As Ursula Schaefer, “Alterities: On Methodology in Medieval Literary Studies” (Oral Tradition 8 [1993]: 187–214), has discussed, “Medieval literary studies hold a privileged position in methodological and theoretical argumentation. The privilege is based on the limitedness of and the in-immediate access to their ‘material.’ The latter is created by the philological barrier that virtually keeps theoretical and/or methodological intruders out. In that sense medieval literary studies potentially enjoy a sanctuary privilege: theoretical and methodological novelties may enter the sanctuary only if the philologically trained so warrant. That is, literary medievalists are very much in control of theoretical and/or methodological import because, due to their philological training, they are the only ones who can handle the ‘material’ in the first place” (187). If this is an accurate depiction of the field, as it appears to be to this author at this time, it would behove medievalists to actively adopt and adapt new theoretical approaches in order to deconstruct the misapprehension of the intentionally maintained ivory tower and encourage others – particularly students to preserve the discipline for future generations – to engage themselves with medieval topics from a ‘post-/modern’ perspective. This engagement could be considered as encouraged and facilitated by Schaefer’s consideration that “Due to the limitedness of their material, medieval literary studies do, however, have another kind of privilege. The concept of some monolithic entity called ‘the Middle Ages’ creates a kind of laboratory situation where new approaches/methods/theories can furnish quick results. Since the Middle Ages – or any period within it, or any ensemble of phenomena from remote periods that are made the object of research – are constructs in the mind of the scholarly beholder to begin with, the (sometimes sparse) building blocks, as it were, out of which the respective constructs are built, can more easily be shuffled about according to one’s (methodologically geared) Erkenntnisinteresse” (187–88). In order to achieve this posited harmonious synthesis of post-modern approaches (here understood as deconstruction in particular) and medieval studies, the current issue that is in most dire need of being addressed is a clear distinction between deconstruction and other post-modern, post-structuralist approaches in their methodological application to the field of Medieval Studies, achieving consensus on

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which would be a significant contribution, and a more stringent use of the term, so as – at least in academic study – to preserve the term deconstruction from becoming diluted and synonymous with ‘revision’ or ‘exacting analysis’. Thereto a monograph treating deconstruction in medieval studies in terms of a comprehensive survey of its impact, influence, forms and adaptation and trends in the respective sub-disciplines would prove beneficial. Being as no such work is available for the study of modern literatures, where deconstruction has experienced the widest reception, nor for the individual medieval sub-disciplines, and the (perhaps) slow adaptation of deconstruction to the medievalist’s repertoire of tools for literary criticism and interpretation, such a project would require both innovation and cooperation between many individuals, departments and universities. Fortunately, the advent of what is known as New Medievalism does avail itself of post-modern intellectual achievements in order to understand medievalism, as William Paden, “‘New Medievalism’ and ‘Medievalism’” (The Year’s Work in Medievalism X [1995]: 232–33), defines it “What, then, does New Medievalism mean? I will offer you two versions. First, it means study of the Middle Ages in the light of what literary scholars call, by ellipsis, ‘theory’ – that is, the literary and cultural theories associated with thinkers such as Derrida and Michel Foucault […] More specifically, New Medievalism means Postmodern Medievalism, study of the Middle Ages from a consciously held postmodern perspective, a point of view which distinguishes itself from modernity, or what I have proposed to call the Long Renaissance.” Despite the challenges facing a harmonious synthesis of deconstruction and medieval studies, the future of deconstruction in medieval studies, perhaps precisely due to the lack of distinction often drawn between it and post-structuralism and post-modernism, is bright. The pluralities of understandings that are capable of being rendered by deconstruction do point towards a new horizon, if not several new horizons, for medieval studies. Perhaps the most readily feasible could be the expanded provision of alternative readings in traditional annotated commentaries to medieval texts, and the ready provision to students of understandings that have traditionally been marginalized. One such example in medieval German literature could be to provide additional annotation allowing that Isolde’s trial before God in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan could be understood as a staged event following her dutiful payment of an indulgence, and not rigidly as a miraculous moment of divine mercy for an adulterous duo. As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Writing Commentaries” (The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship, 2003, 41–52), rightfully comments “Commentaries should be every deconstructor’s dream” (49).

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Select Bibliography Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1983); Jacques Derrida, ed. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2001); Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Maurice Sprague

Diplomatics A. Definition The term ‘diplomatics’ is derived from Jean Mabillon’s standard work De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris 1681) and stands for both the teaching and the study of charters (in German: “Urkundenlehre,” “Urkundenforschung”). Diploma (greek  ), originally denoting a writing on two folded sheets (in paleography and codicology, the folded double sheet is called ‘diploma’), is, in the wider sense of the word, synonymous with the term ‘document’, and in its narrow sense a synonym for praeceptum, i. e., a document (of an authority, i. e., a king/emperor, pope, or bishop) which – at least in theory – claims permanent validity, as opposed to the mandatum, which is a temporary order. Therefore, a diploma is both a dispositive document and a document of proof, and the word is still used in this sense today (e. g., university diploma). “The term document designates […] written declarations recorded in compliance with certain forms alternating according to the difference in person, place, time, and matter, which are meant to serve as a testimony of proceedings of a legal nature” (Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre, vol. 1, 4th ed. 1969, 1). B. Nature of Documents Thus, documents, unlike annals and chronicles, are legal documents and, therefore, unfiltered relics of the past as defined by Ernst Bernheim (Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, 3rd/4th ed. 1903). Such legal documents remained valid right up to the French Revolution, which, in the name of “égalité” and on the basis of a codified uniform law, put an end to prerogatives based on privileges. Consequently, early diplomatics was the

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profession of lawyers, and the well-known bella diplomatica dealt with the legality and authentication of documents as legal titles. Diplomatic criticism remained the most important task of diplomatics even after the French Revolution, although it was now historians who pursued the discrimen veri ac falsi in order to use documents as reliable historical sources; diplomatics changed from a predominantly legal to a purely historical auxiliary science. After all, even documents identified as forgeries do not lose their significance as historical sources, although they must then be understood as being situated in different historical contexts. This means: a diplomatist decides, first of all, on the usefulness of a document as a source; all subsequent interpretations depend on this judgment. With this in mind, the diplomatist needs to rank undated documents or forgeries chronologically and, last but not least, preserve the text on the basis of systematically collected testimonies (normally in the form of a critical edition into which all diplomatic observations need to be incorporated). Every diplomatist, hence, works in an interdisciplinary way by systematically utilizing the findings of other auxiliary sciences and related disciplines or those of specialized fields of history, true to Jean Mabillon’s motto that, first and foremost, all findings are to be gathered with regard to internal and external features, before a judgment can be formed. C. Forgeries Medieval diplomatic criticism was, by all means, underdeveloped, and this is why the general conditions were auspicious for forgers: both methodological and technical prerequisites and reliable parameters were missing, so that the efforts of Pope Alexander III and, most notably, Innocent III to counteract the proliferation of forgeries appear rather inept in retrospect; Innocent III himself was frequently taken in by forgeries. When Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (†1457) exposed the famous Constitutum Constantini as a forgery (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione [= MGH Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 10], ed. Wolfram Setz, 1976) or the Centuriators of Magdeburg furnished proof of the fictitiousness of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals (Martina Hartmann, Humanismus und Quellenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters, 2001), they did their research cum ira et studio and primarily drew on contents-based criteria. When analyzing large corpora of forgeries, a large variety of motives come to light. As a general rule, forgeries react to political, legal and even personal issues in their time of origin: unlawful acquisition or endorsement of actual legal titles, precautions against impending legal disputes, personal vanity, etc. Occasionally, for instance in the case of the monastery of Reichenau in the 12th century, a single forger served customers from a whole region,

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which suggests a widespread knowledge of the existence and adoption of forgeries, even although secular and ecclesiastic law allotted severe penalties for forgeries; confessions of forgers, however, are rarely recorded. Just as manifold as the motives are also the forms of forgery of documents, ranging from interpolation and falsification of authentic documents (usually by means of erasure) and forgeries based on an authentic specimen (if applicable as copies figurées, possibly including the fraudulent use of a seal) all the way to completely forged documents (including the falsification of a seal); cf. Theo Kölzer, “Urkundenfälschungen im Mittelalter,” Gefälscht! Betrug in Politik, Literatur, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Musik, ed. Karl Corino, 1990, 15–26; id., Studien zu den Urkundenfälschungen des Klosters St. Maximin vor Trier, 10.–12. Jahrhundert, 1989. D. Jean Mabillon In the early stages of diplomatics, at best incidental comparative materials were consulted in disputes about single documents, which frequently resulted in forgeries being compared with other forgeries; a method that, as is generally known, still played a role in the controversy about the Hitler Diaries. There was urgent need for a comprehensive compendium, finally provided by the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon (†1707), who was assisted in his work by the whole order (Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Jean Mabillon, 1988). Mabillon responded to a rival project which had been undertaken by the Jesuit Daniel Papebroch (Papenbroek, †1714). As the successor of Jean Bolland, Papebroch was head of the editing project Acta Sanctorum (published since 1643), and in a royal charter (MGH Diplomata Merov., ed. Theo Kölzer, vol. 1, 2001, n. 65) he found that Saint Irmina of Oeren (Treves) was supposed to have been the daughter of a certain King Dagobert. It was the trustworthiness of this source that Papenbroch was interested in, and accordingly he attempted to develop methodological parameters for its evaluation on a total of 31 folio sheets (Acta Sanctorum, Aprilis t. 2, 1675) – after all with the correct result that the document was a forgery. The Order of Saint Benedict, however, in view of its antique treasury of documents, felt challenged by Papebroch’s casual remark that he had not found a single genuine document in the whole of France that dated back to before King Dagobert I (†639) (this observation, too, is not to be easily dismissed, since the oldest predominantly authentic Merovingian royal charter is dated 596: MGH Diplomata Merov. 25). Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (1681), hence, was written as an apology of Benedictine transmission. Contents: (Book I) types of documents, general fundamental terms, writing materials, typefaces; (II) style and conventional form of charters, chancery staff, seals, witnesses,

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signatures, dating; (III) Criticism on the old doctrines (e. g. Papebroch’s et al.), notitiae, cartularies; (IV) palatinates of the Frankish kings; (V) specimen of handwriting; (VI) appendix of documents. It is important to note that in his methodological approach (comparison of each single document with contemporary practice) Mabillon did not surpass his rival Papebroch; however, his findings were founded on a decidedly wider and more sound basis of material (the materials of the “correspondents” have been mostly preserved at the BnF Paris). In spite of a few critical voices (e.g., Bartholomé Germon S. J.), Mabillon’s opus proceeded quickly to conquer the world of letters in Europe (an enhanced second edition was prepared in 1709 by Mabillon’s disciple Thierry Ruinart; 3rd ed. in 2 vols., 1789). This compendium has been the methodological key to diplomatic transmission ever since, in legal practice as well as in regard to historical epistemological interest. It is remarkable that the first usage in Germany was by a jurist, Johann Nikolaus Hert (†1710), Professor of Law at Gießen university, who also was the first to attempt a compendium of German diplomatics: Dissertatio de fide diplomatum Germaniae imperatorum et regum (1699, several reprints); cf. Theo Kölzer, “Mabillons ‘De re diplomatica’ in Deutschland,” Papstgeschichte und Landesgeschichte: Festschrift für Hermann Jakobs, ed. Joachim Dahlhaus and Armin Kohnle, 1995, 619–28. For the teachings at universities, too, the alliance of diplomatics and palaeography with jurisprudence was still in effect, starting with Christian Eckhard in Halle (†1751), Johannes Heumann von Teutschenbrunn in Altdorf (†1760) and Johann Christoph Gatterer in Göttingen (†1799), all of whom were, at the same time, also authors of their own compendia; cf. Richard Rosenmund, Die Fortschritte der Diplomatik seit Mabillon, 1897. E. The Aftermath The progress of diplomatics after Mabillon occurred primarily in four domains: 1. amendment of the subject matter; 2. systematization of the subject matter; 3. instruction and institutionalization; 4. special analyses. Ad 1) An unsurpassed opus is that of the two Maurists Charles-François Toustain and René-Prosper Tassin, Nouveau traité de diplomatique …, 6 vols., 1750–1765. Nevertheless, it did not have the same impact as Mabillon’s compendium, apparently for the sole reason that the accumulated bulk of material rather impeded its use. More comprehensive editions of documents were only rendered possible by a facilitated access to the archives. In the wake of the French Revolution, thus, the consolidation of documents and archival material of the clerical institutions abolished in 1803 into cen-

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tral national archives with soon well-regulated access proved advantageous. As early as 1794, a right of admission for all citizens was certified in France. Subsequently, the Vatican Archives were opened to historic research in 1880. Ad 2) The most extreme example is, without doubt, Johann Christoph Gatterer, who essayed to graft Linné’s system of biological classification onto diplomatics and paleography, without achieving any scientific progress. At least, however, this dependence on the natural sciences anticipates Sickel in some respects. Ad 3) In 1821, the École nationale des Chartes was founded in Paris as the central French training post for the higher archival service (one of the Grandes Écoles). Thus, diplomatics – in union with the other auxiliary sciences – was provided with a study center outstanding even by today’s standards, whose instructors have always ranked among the leading professionals throughout the world. When founding the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Austrian Institute for Historical Research) in Vienna in 1854, Theodor Sickel, who had been allowed to attend courses at the École des Chartes, took the latter as his model; in 1894, Paul F. Kehr established the Marburger Archivschule along with the Institut für historische Hilfswissenschaften (Institute for Auxiliary Historical Sciences). The Monumenta Germaniae Historica, founded in 1819, have since then been aiming at publishing and researching Germany’s medieval sources. And even though the first edition of royal charters turned out to be entirely uncritical (Diplomatum imperii tomus I [Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Merowingica], ed. Karl A. F. Pertz, 1872; replaced by: Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Merovingica, ed. by Theo Kölzer in collaboration with Martina Hartmann and Andrea Stieldorf, 2 vols., 2001), the Diplomata series of the MGH has substantially advanced the field of diplomatics in both terms of methodology and factual findings; Theodor Sickel’s edition of Ottonian royal charters (Conradi I., Heinrici I. et Ottonis I. Diplomata, 1879–1884) can be regarded as the first really critical edition of medieval documents. Ad 4) Various specific analytical methods were applied to all aspects of diplomatics (seals, monograms, practice of shortening, etc.), thus deepening the knowledge of the material and refining the parameters of comparison. The analysis of particular corpora of documents or periods of time was also begun at this time. The abbot of Göttweig Abbey, Johann Georg Bessel (†1749): Chronicon Gotwicense … Tomus prodromus de codicibus antiquis manuscriptis: De imperatorum ac regum Germaniae diplomatibus (1732), must be considered groundbreaking in this respect. He analyzed the documents issued for his monastery in the time from Konrad I to Frederick II in reference to their internal and external features (Peter G. Tropper, Urkundenlehre

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in Österreich, 1994, chap. 4). The above-mentioned Johannes Heumann (†1760) can be seen as on a par with him: Commentarii de re diplomatica imperatorum ac regum Germanorum inde a Caroli Magni temporibus adornati (2 vols., 1745–1753), Commentarii de re diplomatica imperatricum ac reginarum germaniae (1749). Heumann could not draw upon the original documents and accordingly underestimated the importance of the external features; in turn, however, he was forced to give more emphasis to the contents of the documents. Both criteria are of equal importance. Another factor not to be underestimated is the improvement of the general conditions of diplomatic research. The enhanced accessibility of the material in well organized archives has already been mentioned. Improved conditions of travel and communication, as well as technical innovations (photography of documents, photocopies, scans, computers) have to be taken into account as well. Against this background, one has to appreciate the achievements of past editors, who were forced to cope without the technological possibilities taken for granted nowadays. F. Progress after Mabillon After Mabillon, substantial progress in the field of diplomatics is closely connected with the names of Johann Friedrich Böhmer (†1863), Theodor Sickel (†1908), and Julius Ficker (†1902). Johann Friedrich Böhmer, town registrar and librarian of his hometown of Frankfurt/Main, and in the MGH’s beginnings considered for the position of editor of the royal and imperial documents, today is regarded as the originator of the Regesta Imperii. This organization, nowadays financed by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities as well as by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has devoted itself to the systematical and chronological registration of all attestable royal activities, including the issuing of documents. These activities have been paraphrased in a “regest,” a short synopsis. (For the current state of research, see www.regesta-imperii.org). Admittedly, however, the test prints of documents of Conrad I as submitted by Böhmer still reflect the pre-scientific practices of editing, thus prompting Georg Waitz to raise the fundamental question, “How should documents be edited?” (Historische Zeitschrift 4 [1860]: 438–48). Waitz’s study is one of the earliest theoretical treatises on the subject-matter. The most relevant methodological progress, however, was achieved by Sickel and Ficker, the former working in a strictly diplomatic context, while the latter analyzed relations to the field of general history. Sickel’s Beiträge zur Diplomatik of the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties, published between 1861 and 1882 in the Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akadmie, proved to be

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pioneering: they presented comprehensive studies of the documents of Louis the German, of Carolingian privileges of protection and immunity, of the chancellors and those who filled in their recognition, etc. In 1867, with his Acta regum et imperatorum Karolinorum (2 vols.), Sickel published the first selfcontained specimen of special diplomatics, in which he elaborated his Lehre von den Urkunden der ersten Karolinger (751–840). This work was followed by a sample of documents in the form of regests commented at great length. His argumentation focused on the organization of the chancery, which he seems to have envisaged as too bureaucratic – according to the habits of his times –, as well as on chancery style, i. e. the observable practice of issuing documents as a parameter of the discrimen veri ac falsi. His methodological tools were comprised of the detailed analysis of the external structure, as well as of a comparative analysis of handwriting and dictamen, and, for documents exclusively transmitted in copied form, the recordation and assessment of all transmissions according to Lachmann’s method, the clarification of possible originals, or of the use of formulae, etc. His endeavor to align diplomatics as a quasi-empirical academic discipline with the aspiring natural sciences of his day is apparent. That this method not infrequently mislead into unwarranted certainties can be clearly discerned from a present-day point of view, but this does not discredit Sickel’s approach at all. The comparative analysis of dictamen in particular every now and then meets with a certain skepticism, particularly since this method used to be applied in a very superficial way at times in the past – resulting in grave misjudgments (e.g., Bernhard Schmeidler, Kaiser Heinrich IV. und seine Helfer im Investiturstreit, 1927). In principle, however, the scientific value of the comparative analysis of dictamen should always be taken into account, provided that it is implemented with caution and a strict adherence to the philological method, and without succumbing to the “manie de la certitude” (Georges Tessier) (Heinrich Appelt, “Diktatvergleich und Stilkritik erörtert am Beispiel der Diplome Friedrichs I.,” MIÖG 100 [1992]: 181–96). Today, the use of information technology (corpus linguistics) offers substantial assistance, also regarding the discrimen veri ac falsi (Nicolas Brousseau, “Lemmatisation et traitement statistique: De nouveaux instruments pour la critique diplomatique? Le cas des diplômes pseudo-originaux au nom de Louis le Germanique,” Médiévales 42 [2002]: 27–44). It may be legitimate to venture the prognosis that, due to these technological possibilities, the old diplomatics of the context à la Stengel, an approach which has not yet found an adequate successor, may be obsolete (Edmund E. Stengel, Diplomatik der deutschen Immunitäts-Privilegien vom 9. bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts, 1910). Problems similar to those of the comparative analysis of dictamen also apply to the comparative analysis

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of handwriting and to the identification of scribes: there is no absolutely reliable method, but many uncertainties exist, especially with regard to the limits of tolerance. Yet this does not imply a fundamental discreditation of the methodological instruments (some methodological remarks are given by Jan W. J. Burgers, “Aspekte der diplomatischen Methode,” Skripta, Schreiblandschaften und Standardisierungstendenzen: Urkundensprachen im Grenzbereich von Germania und Romania im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Kurt Gärtner, Günter Holtus et al., 2001, 9–36). For the practical implementation of his methodological arguments, Sickel did not, as might be expected, choose the Carolingian documents, but the documents of the Ottonian kings, which were published between 1879 and 1893 (3 vols.). For a long time, these earliest truly critical editions of charters were considered to be the benchmark, although they have, by now, come into the need of supplementation (cf. http://www.mgh.de/diplomata/ nachtraege.htm). Julius Ficker, Westphalian by birth, declined any kind of participation in the MGH on account of Prussian predominance. Throughout his life, he remained a historian first and foremost, in particular focusing on Legal and Constitutional History, and he has come to be most notably known as the adversary of Heinrich von Sybel in the so-called Sybel-Ficker Controversy (1859/62), in which he advocated a pan-German position. His main interest was in Forschungen zur Reichs- und Rechtsgeschichte Italiens (4 vols., 1868–1874), as well as in the Constitutional History of the 12th to 14th centuries in general. Documents were important sources for these fields, and this is why he pursued diplomatics as an auxiliary science in the truest sense of the term. In opposition to the “Sickeliotes” of “strict observance,” Ficker stated that diplomatics drew its “raison d’être” exclusively from a general historical epistemic interest. Hence, Ficker did not draw up a system of theories (Beiträge zur Urkundenlehre, 2 vols., 1877–1878). He was primarily concerned with the genesis of documents, which might account for some anomalies, and with their “place in life,” i. e., the actual analysis of documents as historical sources. Ficker was the one to realize that the chancery was not a well-coordinated agency and did not function nearly as reliably as had been assumed; that discrepancies in dating could frequently be traced back to a time lag between legal act and registration; that, subsequently, the roles of witnesses needed to be differentiated; and, furthermore, that inconsistencies in the lists of witnesses could by no means automatically be classified as a sign of forgery, etc. In summary, the rules of diplomatics might not be applied schematically. Most certainly, nevertheless, Ficker too adhered to Hans Hirsch’s dictum that “a diplomatist’s synthesis is legal history” (“Die Syn-

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these des Diplomatikers heißt Rechtsgeschichte”: Hans Hirsch, Die hohe Gerichtsbarkeit im deutschen Mittelalter, 2nd ed. 1958, 9). The 1908 founding of a new periodical called Archiv für Urkundenforschung by Harry Bresslau, Karl Brandi, and Michael Tangl also led to an increased historical orientation of diplomatics, which was taken as an offence by inveterate followers of Sickel (Annkatrin Schaller, Michael Tangl [1861–1921] und seine Schule, 2002, 215–28). The Archiv für Diplomatik, founded after World War II (1955), has continued this tradition. G. The 20th Century The methodological principles of diplomatics, established in their fundamentals by Mabillon, Sickel and Ficker, were subsequently refined more and more in connection with the major editing endeavors or the evaluation of larger complexes of documents and forgeries. It is no coincidence that the two authoritative handbooks of diplomatics were written in the final years of the 19th century (Arthur Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, 2 vols., 1894; Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien, 2 vols., 2nd ed. 1912/1915 [1st ed. in 1 vol.: 1889]). Heinrich Fichtenau, Das Urkundenwesen in Österreich vom 8. bis zum frühen 13. Jahrhundert (1971) must be considered a fundamental exemplar of regional diplomatics, Tom Graber’s (ed.), Diplomatische Forschungen in Mitteldeutschland (2005) might serve as a preliminary work in this respect. There is also a very well-written survey from more recent times that deserves mentioning, concerning the diplomatics of papal documents (Thomas Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2nd ed. 2000). Furthermore, the growing efforts concerning the diplomatics of modern times should also be noted (Olivier Poncet, “Défense et illustration de la diplomatique de l’époque moderne,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 [2006]: 395–416; Bernard Barbiche, “La diplomatique royale française de l’époque moderne,” id., 417–27). Completely innovative methodological approaches are comparatively rare. One example is W. Schlögel’s attempt at applying the methods of forensic document analysis to the analysis of subscriptions (Waldemar Schlögl, Die Unterfertigung deutscher Könige von der Karolingerzeit bis zum Interregnum durch Kreuz und Unterschrift. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Technik der Unterfertigung im Mittelalter, 1978). Due to the rarity and characteristics of the source material, the benefits to be expected from this approach are admittedly limited. Contributions to a more recent miscellany demonstrate, however, that the methodological approach in conjunction with graphology and typographics may prove advantageous for diplomatics and paleography (Methoden der Schriftbeschreibung, ed. Peter Rück, 1999). Besides special diag-

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nostic procedures (fluorescence photography, X-rays, CT), other scientific analytical methods have also been employed occasionally (Karl-Ernst Lupprian, “Die Altersbestimmung mittelalterlicher Pergamenturkunden mit der Radiokarbonmethode,” Archivalische Zeitschrift 88 [2006]: 573–83). Especially Paul F. Kehr (†1944), with his life achievement as editor of documents and his skills in organizing, brought about a lasting advance. The first three volumes of the Diplomata regum Germaniae ex stirpe Karolinorum (documents from Louis the German to Arnolf, 1932–1940), besides preliminary studies (Paul F. Kehr, Ausgewählte Schriften, 2 vols., ed. Rudolf Hiestand, 2005), are owed to him. The founding of the Göttinger Papsturkundenwerk (Center for Research on Papal Documents at Göttingen) (Hundert Jahre Papsturkundenforschung: Bilanz – Methoden – Perspektiven, ed. Rudolf Hiestand, 2003), Kehr’s contribution to the work of the Prussian Institute of History in Rome, which he headed from 1903 on (Italia Pontificia, vols. I–VIII, 1906–1935; vols. IX–X, 1962, 1975; Germania Pontificia [for regular reports cf. Deutsches Archiv], Gallia Pontificia [vol. 1: Diocèse de Besançon, par Bernard De Vrégille, René Locatelli et Gerard Moyse, 1998; most recently vol. 3/1: Diocèse de Vienne, par Beate Schilling, 2006]), must be considered groundbreaking. No less so was his founding of the Germania Sacra, the historical statistical study of the medieval German Church, which is based on archival materials and documents to a notable extend (www.germaniasacra.mpg.de/). Kehr, a stranger to theoretical reflections or historical descriptions, shared the rigorism of his teacher Sickel. Late antiquity’s foundations of medieval documentary practices were remarkably illuminated by Peter Classen (“Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde: Diplomatische Studien zum römisch-germanischen Kontinuitätsproblem,” Archiv für Diplomatik 1 [1955]: 1–87; 2 [1956]: 1–115; rpt. as: Kaiserreskript und Königsurkunde. Diplomatische Studien zum Problem der Kontinuität zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter, 1977; id., “Spätrömische Grundlagen mittelalterlicher Kanzleien,” Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1983, 67–84). The new edition of the documents of the Merovingian kings (Diplomata regum Francorum e stirpe Merovingica, ed. Theo Kölzer et al., 2 vols., 2001) has insofar led to more precision as it indicated that, in the Frankish Empire north of the River Loire, the transition from late antiquity’s records to early medieval documents must have taken place in the last third of the 6th century (Theo Kölzer, Tra tarda Antichità e Medioevo: l’edizione critica dei diplomi merovingici. Inaugurazione del Corso Biennale Anni Accademici 1998–2000, 2000; id., “Merowingische Kapitularien in diplomatischer Sicht,” Scientia veritatis. Festschrift für Hubert Mordek zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Oliver Münsch and Thomas Zotz, 2004, 13–23).

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Of all the major European editing endeavors, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica has made the most notable progress in the postwar period. Today, there are only a few gaps left in the line of royal charters from the Merovingian time to the end of the Hohenstaufen era; the editions still due are being worked on, and, in some cases, much progress has been made. In the neighboring countries there has been less progress and the gaps are wider, despite an ongoing editing process (Rudolf Schieffer, “Diplomatik und Geschichtswissenschaft,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 [2006]: 233–48). For the royal charters of South Italy and Sicily, the Codex diplomaticus regni Siciliae, ed. Carlrichard Brühl, Francesco Giunta, and André Guillou, might be cited as an example of an editing endeavor that started as a private initiative (Rogerii II. regis diplomata latina, ed. Carlrichard Brühl, 1987; Guillelmi I. regis diplomata, ed. Horst Enzensberger, 1996; Tancredi et Willelmi III regum diplomata, ed. Herbert Zielinski, 1982; Constantiae imperatricis et reginae Siciliae diplomata, 1195–1198, ed. Theo Kölzer, 1983; new edition: id., MGH Diplomata XI/3, 1990). In reference to this and to the accompanying special studies cf. Theo Kölzer, “Codex diplomaticus regni Siciliae. Erläuterungen zu einem internationalen Forschungsvorhaben,” Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1983, 1984, 17–22; id., “Die normannisch-staufische Kanzlei 1130–1198,” Archiv für Diplomatik 41 (1995): 273–89. The documents of Frederick II (1198–1212), originally intended for this series, have now been edited within the MGH: Friderici II. diplomata, ed. Walter Koch et al., vol. 1, 2002. After a long time of editing, the Codice diplomatico longobardo was also completed, whose first two volumes, containing private documents, had been edited by Luigi Schiaparelli in 1929/33 for the Fonti per la storia d’Italia (vol. III/1 [royal charters], ed. Carlrichard Brühl, 1973; vol. III/2: Indici, 1984; vol. IV/1 [dukes of Spoleto], ed. Carlrichard Brühl, 1981; vol. IV/2: I diplomi dei duchi di Benevento, ed. Herbert Zielinski, 2003; vol. V: Le chartae dei ducati di Spoleto e di Benevento, ed. Herbert Zielinski, 1986). The number of successes like this one might very well grow, since the activities of editing and collecting regesta, including that of local or regional documentary corpora, are progressing everywhere (Robert-Henri Bautier, “Les orientations de la diplomatique en Europe depuis la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale,” Cento anni di cammino. Scuola vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivistica (1884–1984), a cura di Terzo Natalini, 1986, 101–45; Rudolf Schieffer, “Neuere regionale Urkundenbücher und Regestenwerke,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 127 (1991): 1–18; id., “Diplomatik und Geschichtswissenschaft,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 (2006): 233–48; Stand, Aufgaben und Perspektiven territorialer Urkundenbücher im östlichen Europa, ed. Win-

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fried Irgang and Norbert Kersken, 1998), although editing is not held in high regards nowadays and constantly needs defending, even against historians (Quelleneditionen und kein Ende? Symposium der Monumenta Germaniae Historica und der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Lothar Gall and Rudolf Schieffer, 1999; Vom Nutzen des Edierens. Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150-jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Wien, 3.–5. Juni 2004, ed. Brigitte Merta, Andrea Sommerlechner and Herwig Weigl, 2005; Hubert Seibert, “Wozu heute Urkunden edieren? Zum Abschluß des Babenberger Urkundenbuches,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 64 [2001]: 295–308). Nevertheless, critical editing will, even in the future, retain its central position in a scholarship of history that considers historical sources its essential foundation, since sources and methods are all that historians have at their disposal. Diplomatic editions do not guide research in terms of concept, and neither do they follow the ever-changing trends, both because they are based on a reliable methodology and because further editions are predetermined by the obvious gaps. In this respect, the “crisis of diplomatics,” which was declared in the beginning of the 1960s (Armando Petrucci, “Diplomatica vecchia e nuova,” Studi medievali, 3a ser. 4 [1963]: 785–98), is a misinterpretation; to speak of an exhaustion of the material or the method would be plainly wrong (Theo Kölzer, “Diplomatik und Urkundenpublikationen,” Historische Hilfswissenschaften, ed. Toni Diederich and Joachim Oepen, 2005, 7–34; Herwig Wolfram, “Die Krise der Diplomatik – ein Missverständnis,” Tirol – Österreich – Italien. Festschrift für Josef Riedmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Brandstätter and Julia Hörmann, 2005, 661–71). Despite the false premise that, in the field of documents, everything, or at least the major part, has already been accomplished, it would be misleading to follow the recommendations uttered in the wake of this discussion and extend the field of diplomatics to all kinds of archival documents (Robert-Henri Bautier, “Propositions méthodologiques pour la Diplomatique du Bas Moyen Age et les débuts des temps modernes,” id., Chartes, sceaux et chancelleries. Études de diplomatique et de sigillographie médiévale, vol. 1, 1990, 35–45, in particular p. 36), because then it would compete with what in German is called ‘Quellen- und Aktenkunde’ (the study of sources and documents) by employing a method which was not developed for this purpose and seems hardly applicable to it. Most recently, however, even Ivan Hlavácek, ˇ “Das Problem der Masse: Das Spätmittelalter,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 (2006): 371–93 has argued in agreement with Bautier.

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H. More Recent Trends With their studies on the arenga and the intitulatio (Heinrich Fichtenau, Arenga. Spätantike und Mittelalter im Spiegel der Urkundenformeln, 1957; Herwig Wolfram, Intitulatio I. Lateinische Königs- und Fürstentitel bis zum Ende des 8. Jahrhunderts, 1967), which they regarded as being in line with the tradition of historical diplomatics as established by Julius Ficker and Hans Hirsch, Heinrich Fichtenau and his disciple Herwig Wolfram have opened up the field of diplomatics to the history of ideas. Works with similar aims but of a more limited scope have also been dedicated to other parts of written documents: the invocations, formulas of devotion, addresses, appartenance clauses, as well as the intercessors and witnesses or the subscriptions (Heinrich Fichtenau, Beiträge zur Mediävistik, vol. 2, 1977, 37–61; op. cit., vol. 3, 1986, 149–66; Dietrich Lohrmann, “Formen der Enumerationes bonorum in Bischofs-, Papst- und Herrscherurkunden, 9.–12. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Diplomatik 26 (1980): 281–311; Alfred Gawlik, Intervenienten und Zeugen in den Diplomen Kaiser Heinrichs IV., 1056–1105, 1970; Lothar Saupe, Die Unterfertigung der lateinischen Urkunden in den Nachfolgestaaten des weströmischen Reiches, 1983). Both rhetoric and royal propaganda, including “political dating,” have also been objects of diplomatic interests (Heinrich Fichtenau, Beiträge zur Mediävistik, vol. 2, 1977, 18–36, 126–56; vol. 3, 1986, 186–285; Herwig Wolfram, “Politische Theorie und narrative Elemente in Urkunden,” Kanzleiwesen und Kanzleisprachen im östlichen Europa, ed. Christian Hannick, 1999, 1–23; id., “Diplomatik, Politik und Staatssprache,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 [2006]: 249–70) and have thus supplemented the more legal and formal approach of earlier stages of research. In more recent times, increasing attention has been given to the ritual and performance surrounding the act of privileging (Peter Worm, “Beobachtungen zum Privilegierungsakt am Beispiel einer Urkunde Pippins II. von Aquitanien,” Archiv für Diplomatik 49 [2003]: 15–48; Hagen Keller and Christoph Dartmann, “Inszenierungen von Ordnung und Konsens: Privileg und Statutenbuch in der symbolischen Kommunikation mittelalterlicher Rechtsgemeinschaften,” Zeichen – Rituale – Werte, ed. Gerd Althoff, 2004, 201–23; Arnold Angenendt, “Cartam offerre super altare: Zur Liturgisierung von Rechtsvorgängen,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 36 [2002]: 133–58), and documents have been considered a link for “the communication between the king and his retainers” (Hagen Keller, “Zu den Siegeln der Karolinger und der Ottonen. Urkunden als ‘Hoheitszeichen’ in der Kommunikation des Königs mit seinen Getreuen,” FMSt 32 [1998]: 400–41). The ritual act of privileging has been perceived as the one crucial act which opens up a new dimension of meaning essential to understanding the

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text and its function. Before this, Peter Rück had already postulated a return to a discipline of diplomatic semiotics that regards documents as a system of signs in a communication process (Peter Rück, “Beiträge zur diplomatischen Semiotik,” Graphische Symbole in mittelalterlichen Urkunden, ed. id., 1996, 13–47; regarding Rück’s approach, cf. most recently Peter Worm, “Ein neues Bild von der Urkunde: Peter Rück und seine Schüler,” Archiv für Diplomatik 52 (2006): 334–52). Rück focuses on “visual rhetoric,” on encrypted sub-messages, and graphical symbols that, in a largely illiterate society, render documents “medieval posters”. However, for the decryption of such mystery symbols (“Rätselzeichen”), there is want of a reliable tertium comparationis keeping subjective interpretations at bay; the interpretative approaches offered so far cover a spectrum too broad for these symbols to be a reliable source of historical insight (cf. Theo Kölzer, “Diplomatik und Urkundenpublikationen” [see above], 20 ss.). Despite the fact that there has been constant skepticism regarding the details, Peter Rück nevertheless is to be considered the most innovative diplomatist of the last third of the 20th century, who, amongst other things, has emphasized the epistemic value of statistical survey methods, stressed the importance of format and layout, reevaluated the musicality of rhythmical conclusions of sentences, underlined the value of modern photography, and provided a new impetus to the field of parchment research (Fotografische Sammlungen mittelalterlicher Urkunden in Europa, ed. Peter Rück, 1989; Pergament. Geschichte – Struktur – Restaurierung – Herstellung, ed. Peter Rück, 1991; Fachgebiet Historische Hilfswissenschaften: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zum 65. Geburtstag von Peter Rück, ed. Erika Eisenlohr and Peter Worm, 2000). The work on documentary language which has been intensified by the École des Chartes and the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (La langue des actes. International congress in Troyes, September 11–13, 2003; for most contributions, refer to: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/sommaire163/ html) stands as one attempt at measuring a field long neglected. In more recent times, and following the example of Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (1979, 2nd ed. 1993), impact and usage of documents in a predominantly illiterate society (Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, “Diplomatic Sources and Medieval Documentary Practises: An Essay in Interpretive Methodology, “The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John van Engen, 1994, 313–43; Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker, 2000) have more and more become a focus of research, especially in the context of conflicts (Laurent Morelle, “Les chartes dans la gestion des conflits [France du Nord, XIe – début XIIe siècle],” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 155 [1997]: 267–98).

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The French ARTEM-Project ([Atelier de Recherche sur les Textes Médiévaux, Nancy]: La diplomatique française du Haut Moyen Age: Inventaire des chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France, 2 vols., sous la direction de Benoît-Michel Tock par Michèle Courtois et Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean avec la collaboration de Philippe Demonty, 2001) demonstrates that systematically surveyed material yields surprising results, raising a variety of new questions. In turn, entirely new insights are gained by regarding the different kinds of document traditions not as “quarries” for the purpose of constituting a text as part of a critical edition, but rather as carriers of individual traditions in the context of a recipient’s archives (Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth, 2002), of its keeping and organization (Elke Goez, Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit und Archivpflege der Zisterzienser, 2003). Recent French research has been particularly dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of cartularies (Les Cartulaires, ed. Olivier Guyotjeannin et al., 1993). It should be noted that the richly decorated cartularies possessed a great symbolic value as a collection of different libertates (Theo Kölzer, “Codex libertatis. Überlegungen zur Funktion des “Regestum Farfense” und anderer Klosterchartulare,” Il ducato di Spoleto. Atti del 9 Congresso internazionale di studi sull’alto medioevo, vol. 2, 1983, 609–53). A special research project based in Münster is devoted to “pragmatic writing” in its broadest sense (Hagen Keller, “Träger, Felder, Formen pragmatischer Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 22 [1988]: 388–409; Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter: Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, ed. Hagen Keller et al., 1992). Research in the Italian notary’s office, traditionally the field of Italian medieval studies, has recently been added to by two profound foreign contributions (Andreas Meyer, Felix et inclitus notarius: Studien zum italienischen Notariat vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, 2000; Petra Schulte, Scripturae publicae creditur: Das Vertrauen in Notariatsurkunden im kommunalen Italien des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, 2003). Two more recent research papers have had far-reaching methodological ramifications: H.-H. Kortüm falsified the idea of an early institutionalized Papal chancery predominant so far by showing that, in their individually formulated parts (Petitio, Dispositio), Papal documents were strongly influenced by the addressee (Hans-Henning Kortüm, Zur päpstlichen Urkundensprache im frühen Mittelalter: Die päpstlichen Privilegien 896–1046, 1995). As a methodological ramification, the parameters of “chancery style” and “individual dictamen,” employed since Sickel in the context of the discrimen veri ac falsi, now carry much less weight and also demand a systematic review from the addressee’s point of view in every single case. Generally speaking,

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there should be claims for a more diligent differentiation when it comes to identifying chancery documents and documents originating from outside the chancery (Jaap G. Kruisheer, “Kanzleiausfertigung, Empfängerausfertigung und Ausfertigung durch Dritte: Methodologische Anmerkungen anläßlich einiger neuerer Untersuchungen,” AfD 25 [1979]: 256–300). Along similar lines, W. Huschner opposed Sickel’s idea of an hierarchically organized, bureaucratic royal chancery in Ottonian times by pointing out that, in the royal or imperial court, the persons engrossing the documents were often distinguished prelates, and not the subordinate, anonymous notaries to whom Sickel had attributed grammalogues (Wolfgang Huschner, Transalpine Kommunikation im Mittelalter: Diplomatische, kulturelle und politische Wechselwirkungen zwischen Italien und dem nordalpinen Reich, 9.–11. Jahrhundert, 3 vols., 2003; for a critical comment cf. Hartmut Hoffmann, “Notare, Kanzler und Bischöfe am ottonischen Hof,” Deutsches Archiv 61 [2005]: 435–80). Consequentially, royal and imperial documents may no longer be interpreted as statements by the monarchs themselves; a closer look should be taken into the striking innovations enacted, for instance, during the reign of Otto III. French researchers have recently suggested comparing “European” diplomatics with cultures outside of Europe (contributions on Mesopotamia, Japan etc. in Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 160 [2003]: 477 ss.). However enriching this may prove, it cannot and will not change the very nucleus of diplomatics, which is still arranged around the discrimen veri ac falsi as the source of all further conclusions. Not least of all, the large amount of medieval forgeries demonstrates that contemporaries used to perceive medieval documents as legal documents first and foremost (Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongreß der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 6 vols., 1988, 1990, especially vols. 3–4). “Visual rhetoric” is not the “raison d’être” of medieval documents but merely a circumstantial detail; this does not affect the notion that documents may also and additionally be “expression du pouvoir,” a notion that has, after all, never been contended by anyone (Les actes comme expression du pouvoir au Haut Moyen Age, ed. Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean and Benoît-Michel Tock, 2003). I. Digital Diplomatics Recent technological developments have started a revolution in respect to availability and linking of the source material: whole series of editions and regesta have been made available on CD-ROM or can be accessed on the Internet (e.g. the d(igital)MGH; Regesta Imperii; Thesaurus diplomaticus [CD-ROM], ed. Paul Tombeur et al., 1997); first attempts with single archival material

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or archival stocks look promising, and it does no longer appear illusory to believe that, one day, the most important stocks of documents will be accessible from individual computer workstations and will supplant extremely elaborate and expensive facsimile editions, such as, for instance, the systematic collection of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, which covers the period up to the year 800 and has by now been extended to the 9th century (ed. Anton Bruckner and Robert Marichal, 49 vols., 1954–1998; 2nd series, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Giovanna Nicolaj, 27 vols., since 1997). For “digital diplomatics” cf. most recently the contributions by Patrick Sahle, Georg Vogeler and Gautier Poupeau, Archiv für Diplomatik 52 (2006): 429–78. Already the first special internet journal (Scrineum) is available online (http://scrineum.unipv.it). All the euphoria notwithstanding, it should be noted that neither the increased availability of material nor the digital architectures of editions, however sophisticated they may be, will be able to supplant the methodologic work of the diplomatist. In fact, the nearly unlimited options of digital editing actually call for an intensification of the historian’s technical training, which has, in some places, been unduly neglected. Whether a new area of applications might be opened up to diplomatics, such as, for instance, the categorizing of digital administrative records, is still a controversy (Angelika Menne-Haritz, “Archivwissenschaft, Diplomatik und elektronische Verwaltungsaufzeichnungen,” Archiv für Diplomatik 44 [1998]: 337–76). J. Diplomatics of the Papal Document In view of the large amount of material scattered all over the whole Orbis christianus, there is still a lot of catching up to do when it comes to critical editions; we are largely dependent on outdated regesta and occasional editions (a survey can be found in Thomas Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2nd ed. 2000). The first critical edition not to recur to Papal Registers was published only two decades ago (Papsturkunden 896–1046, 3 vols., ed. Harald Zimmermann, 2nd ed., 1988/1989). There is no prospect of a sequel, particularly since it is reasonable to reckon on another 20.000 documents for the period up to 1198. For the subsequent period, a compensation is offered by the Papal Registers, edited by the Österreichisches Kulturinstitut and the École française in Rome, and supplemented for their original transmission with the “Censimento Bartoloni” (planned until 1417) (Die Register Innozenz’ III., ed. Othmar Hageneder et al., vols. 1–2, 5–8, 1964–2001; the French printed series of registers [Paris 1883 ss.] and the current status of the “Censimento” in Frenz, Papsturkunden, op. cit., 123–25; last volume: Tilman Schmidt, Die Originale der Papsturkunden in Norddeutschland [Bremen, Hamburg,

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Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schleswig-Holstein] 1199–1415, 2003). A more recent conference of the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (Papsturkunde und europäisches Urkundenwesen: Studien zu ihrer formalen und rechtlichen Kohärenz vom 11. bis 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Peter Herde and Hermann Jakobs, 1999) has highlighted how profoundly European diplomatics were shaped by the Papal document in the High Middle Ages. The best survey of the current state of research on Papal documents is offered by Frenz, Papsturkunden (2nd ed. 2000). K. Private Documents Another field that is difficult to survey and has only been explored to varying degrees is, for obvious reasons, the wide field of so-called “private documents,” including in particular the Episcopal charters, the notary’s office, and urban diplomatics. Here, too, the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique has organized important conferences to establish at least approximate surveys and to initiate a dialogue among the experts (Landesherrliche Kanzleien im Spätmittelalter: Referate zum VI. Internationalen Kongress für Diplomatik, München 1983, ed. Gabriel Silagi, 2 vols., 1984; Notariado público y documento privado: de los orígenes al siglo XIV. Actas del VII. Congreso internacional de diplomática, Valencia 1986, Josip Trenchs Odena, 1989; Estudios sobre el notariado europeo (siglos XIV–XV), ed. Pilar Ostos and Maria Luisa Pardo, 1997; Die Diplomatik der Bischofsurkunde vor 1250: Referate zum VIII. Internationalen Kongress für Diplomatik, Innsbruck 1993, ed. Christoph Haidacher and Walter Köfler,1995; La diplomatique urbaine en Europe au moyen âge: Actes du Congrès de la Commission internationale de diplomatique, Gand 1998, ed. Walter Prevenier and Thérèse de Hemptinne, 2000). Exemplary for the analysis of the significant Episcopal charters are, for instance, the closed series of the regesta of the Archbishops of Cologne, which by now comprises 12 volumes (Die Regesten der Erzbischöfe von Köln im Mittelalter, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Oediger, 1954–1961, vols. 8–12, ed. Norbert Andernach, 1981–2001), as well as the more recent editing project of the English Episcopal Acta, which has reached a total of 28 volumes in relatively short time (1980–2004). L. Quo vadis? Despite the fact that university posts are currently being cut everywhere (with the two exceptions of Italy and Spain), and, consequently, education is being stunted, diplomatics may look into the future rather optimistically. This positive attitude, which seems to disregard the bleak academic reality, is rooted in the confidence that no historian will, upon unbiased reflection, deny the fact that diplomatics is able to uncover crucial historical findings

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otherwise inaccessible; in many areas, diplomatics establishes the parameters of the historical verdict. For even in the aftermath of the “linguistic turn,” documents are neither random “texts” nor iridescent sources of memory, but legal documents intended to record specific circumstances of a legal nature. In this respect, they are more reliable witnesses of the past than the sources of “tradition”. It is, accordingly, no coincidence that diplomatics have remained unchallenged by past theoretical disputes; they are, at any rate, not subject to the need of vindicating themselves, even if this may not be immediately evident to every single disciple of Clio’s. Resting on the firm foundations of a well-tried methodology, the field of diplomatics will continue to be open to new research questions and technical challenges in times to come. In doing so, however, it must always be mindful of its actual purposes, to determine the usefulness of documents as historic evidence, and to exploit them as extensively as possible in the line of general historical epistemic interest. A source-oriented historiography will not be able to forego these contributions. Now more than ever, the new world of bits and bytes calls for a solid education in diplomatics and the auxiliary sciences in general. Select Bibliography Carlrichard Brühl, “Derzeitige Lage und künftige Aufgaben der Diplomatik,” Landesherrliche Kanzleien im Spätmittelalter, vol. 1 (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1983, rpt. id., Aus Mittelalter und Diplomatik: Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 2 [Hildesheim: Olms, 1989], 463–73); Robert-Henri Bautier, “Les orientations de la diplomatique en Europe depuis la fin de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,” Cento anni di cammino: Scuola vaticana di paleografía, diplomatica e archivistica (1884–1984), ed. Terzo Natalini (Città del Vaticano: Scuola Vaticana, 1986) 101–45; Ma Milagros Cárcel Ortí, La eseñanza de la paleografía y diplomática (Valencia: Artes Gráficas Soler, 1996); Rudolf Schieffer, “Zur derzeitigen Lage der Diplomatik,” Diplomatische Forschungen in Mitteldeutschland, ed. Tom Graber (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 2005), 11–27; Theo Kölzer, “Diplomatik und Urkundenpublikationen,” Historische Hilfswissenschaften: Stand und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Toni Diederich and Joachim Oepen (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), 7–34; Diplomatik im 21. Jahrhundert: Stand und Perspektiven: Tagung der Commission internationale de Diplomatique, Bonn 7.–11. September 2005, Archiv für Diplomatik 52 (2006): 233–673. Handbooks: Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien, 3 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1958, 4th ed. 1969); Alain de Boüard, Manuel de diplomatique française et pontificale, 2 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1929, 1952); Georges Tessier, La Diplomatique, Paris: PUF, 1952, 3rd ed. 1966); Alessandro Pratesi, Genesi e forme del documento medievale (Roma: Jouvence, 1979, 2nd ed. 1987); Giovanna Nicolaj, Lezioni di diplomatica generale (Roma: Bulzoni, 2007); Thomas Vogtherr, Urkundenlehre (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2008). An introduction to diplomatics as well as a first-rate work book for self-study (with a comprehensive bibliography): Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and Benoît-Michel Tock, Diplomatique médiévale (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993, 2nd ed. 2006). Technical terms are explained in: Vocabulaire

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international de la diplomatique, ed. M. Milagros Cárcel Ortí (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, 1994, 2nd ed. 1997). Introductions to diplomatics in English are rare, however: Leonard E. Boyle, “Diplomatics,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2nd ed. 1992), 82–113; Richard Sharpe, “Charters, Deeds, and Diplomatics,” Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Frank A. C. Mantello and Arthur G. Rigg (Washington: Catholic University of America University Press, 1996), 230–40; Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, “Diplomatic Sources and Medieval Documentary Practises: An Essay in Interpretive Methodology,” The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 313–43. Web sites containing important hyperlinks or bibliographies: http://www.vl-ghw.uni-muenchen.de/diplomatik/html http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/histhw/bibliographie.html http://theleme.enc.sorbonne.fr/sommaire64.html More useful bibliographical references are to be found in: Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 2001); revised German version: Werkstatt des Historikers (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2004).

Theo Kölzer

Disability Studies A. Definition Disability Studies is, broadly speaking, an interdisciplinary approach stemming from the consideration of disability as a social construct. The Disability Studies perspective is less clinical than representational, focusing on perceptions of the impaired body and on interactions between the impaired subject and sociopolitical institutions. Therefore, like the related fields of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, Disability Studies draws upon a variety of materials and disciplinary approaches, such as social history, literary and visual analysis, history of science and medicine, ethnology, and sociology. B. Emergence of Disability Studies Disability Studies emerged principally in the social sciences in the late 1980s and early 1990s; its inception thus coincided with the surge in activism surrounding the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States in 1990. Early articles and monographs, such as many reproduced in the Disability Studies Reader, tend toward an ahistorical and presentist view of the social construction of disability. Prior to the mid-2000s,

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most general social histories of disability, as well – with the notable exception of Henri-Jacques Stiker (Corps infirmes et sociétés, 1982) and Walter Fandrey (Krüppel, Idioten, Irre: Zur Sozialgeschichte behinderter Menschen in Deutschland, 1990) – omitted the medieval period or depicted it as a “Dark Age” marked by the neglect or persecution of the physically and mentally disabled. C. Disability Studies from a Medieval Perspective From the late 1990s onward Disability Studies broadened in its scope, as the Middle Ages became the object of several articles, and in its disciplinary apparatus, as scholars of literature and art history began adopting key concepts and terminology. Lois Bragg (now known as Edna Edith Sayers) was among the first literary scholars to develop Disability Studies as an approach to medieval texts in her studies of Icelandic saga, notably “Disfigurement, Disability, and Dis-integration in Sturlunga Saga” (Alvíssmál 4 [1994]: 15–32), “From the Mute God to the Lesser God: Disability in Medieval Celtic and Old Norse Literature” (Disability and Society 12.2 [1997]: 165–77), and Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Medieval Iceland (2004). Edward Wheatley, author of numerous studies of blindness in England and Normandy (“‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14 [2002]: 351–82; “A River Runs Through It: Disability, Homosexuality, Queered/Disabled Discourse, and the Isle of Blandie in Bérinus,” Exemplaria 19 [2007]: 386–401), has developed the concept of the “religious model” of disability, an institutionalized construction of disability that, like the modern era’s “medical model,” stands in opposition to the construction of disability as a social category and serves to segregate and disempower the disabled. Other major contributors to medieval Disability Studies include Irina Metzler, author of the first monograph offering an overview of disability in the Middle Ages (Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400, 2006), which adopts a spiritual framework for the understanding of medieval disability; Wendy J. Turner, who has explored the definition and treatment of mental illness, particularly in a legal context, in medieval England (“Mental Incapacity and Financing War in Medieval England,” The Hundred Years War: vol. 2: Different Vistas, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald Kagay, 2008, 387–402); and Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, whose research has focused on women and disability in medieval Spain (“The Autobiography of the Aching Body in Teresa de Cartagena’s Arboleda de los enfermos,” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 2002, 131–43). Much research concerning the medieval body, while not explicitly subscribing to

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the Disability Studies approach, nonetheless intersects with medieval Disability Studies: for example, Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s essay “Mentalités and Marginality: Blindness and Mamlûk Civilization,” Power, Marginality, and the Body in Medieval Islam, 2001, 211–37, or Caroline Walker Bynum’s studies of embodied female spirituality (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987; Fragmentation and Redemption, 1991). Scholarship in medieval Disability Studies has continued to expand through the present decade. A number of recent dissertations and dissertations in progress (including those of Mark O’Tool, University of California Santa Barbara, 2007; Alexsandra Pfau, University of Michigan, 2008; Julie Singer, Duke University, 2006; and Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Loyola University Chicago, 2009) have provided deeper consideration of the applicability of Disability Studies to medieval materials and contributed to the elaboration of critical vocabulary appropriate to the study of medieval disability. The ongoing establishment of Disability Studies programs at numerous U.S. and U.K. universities will likely increase the level of scholarly interest in medieval disability. Additionally, a number of monographs and essay collections are forthcoming as of January 2009: Edward Wheatley’s Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros’s Women and Disability in Early Modern Spain: Duennas, Prostitutes and Saints (Mujeres y discapacidad en la España pre-moderna: dueñas, prostitutas y santas), Wendy J. Turner’s collection on Madness and Law in the Middle Ages, and Joshua T. Eyler’s collection of essays on disability in the Middle Ages. These studies, supplementing Metzler’s monograph, provide more detailed accounts of the social markers of disability within specific geographic areas. In addition to offering a more nuanced social history of disability, the authors of recent and ongoing projects in medieval Disability Studies are increasingly attuned to the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Selected Bibliography Lois Bragg, Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997; 2nd ed., 2006); Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London: Routledge, 2006); Henri-Jacques Stiker, Corps infirmes et sociétés (Paris: Aubier, 1982); Edward Wheatley, “Blindness, Discipline, and Reward: Louis IX and the Foundation of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts,” Disability Studies Quarterly 22 (2002): 194–212.

Julie Singer

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E Editing Medieval Texts A. Introduction Because of the nature of textual transmission in the Middle Ages, the majority of texts that have come down to us are at some remove from the authors who composed them. Few authorial MSS or authorized copies have survived from before the end of the Middle Ages, and the later copies that preserve medieval works inevitably contain errors and often present modifications introduced by scribes who sought to adapt these works to the esthetic, linguistic and cultural codes of their milieu. Whether only a single MS is extant or whether several divergent copies have survived, editors are faced with the question of how best to represent the work to a modern public. In practical terms, this has often meant deciding to what degree an edition should faithfully reproduce the text as it stands in MSS, and to what degree, on what grounds, and according to what methods the text should be modified in passages where it is perceived to be faulty or to result from scribal intervention. The various solutions that have been adopted over time depend on practical considerations like the nature of the documents preserved and knowledge of the material aspects of transmission, but are also determined by the ways in which editors have defined the nature of medieval works and evaluated the respective roles of author and scribe. B. Early History and the Terms of the Debate B.1. Early History The critical editing of medieval texts has a long history. As early as the 14th century, Boccaccio produced an ‘edition’ of Dante’s Commedia based on several MS witnesses that combined their readings with conjectural emendations in order to restore the text of his illustrious predecessor. In Italy, the interest in medieval texts would remain more or less constant over time and literary works continued to be read and published; in most countries, however, the medieval heritage rapidly fell into oblivion and went virtually unknown for several centuries. This situation changed at the beginning of the 19th century, when a renewed interest in medieval history and literature led

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to the rediscovery and publication of numerous works. The editors of this period were not only scholars, but also antiquarians, bibliophiles, and amateurs. As a result, and because there were as yet no rigorous standards for the editing of medieval texts, the nature and reliability of these early editions varied greatly. The quality of the texts produced depended largely on the number and quality of MSS known to the editor and on his skill in reading the witnesses and correcting their errors, either by combining variants from other known MSS or through conjectural emendation. Moreover, editorial procedures differed widely, and editors did not always feel the need to inform their readers about the provenance of the lessons adopted: whereas Francisque Michel, for example, published a text of the Chanson de Roland (1837) that closely adhered to the oldest known witness, Dominique Martin Méon silently combined lessons from twelve MSS to create as complete a text as possible of the Roman de Renart (4 vols., 1826). As the century progressed, Medieval History and Medieval Literary Studies continued to gain importance and would eventually establish themselves as recognized disciplines within the academic world. This led to the inclusion of medieval literature in university curricula, the founding of institutions specialized in the study of MSS and archival materials, and the creation of learned societies and editorial collections for the publication of medieval works (e.g., Les Anciens Poëtes de la France, 1856; Deutsche Klassiker des Mittelalters, 1864; EETS, 1864; Chaucer Society, 1865; SATF, 1875; Società dantesca, 1888). As the discipline became increasingly professionalized, scholars sought to elaborate a series of norms and scientific methods that would guarantee the quality of their research and publications. The debates that took place and the methodological innovations that were introduced in the late 19th and early 20th century have had a long-lasting influence on the theory and practice of medieval textual philology. Almost all modern discussions center around two methods that pursue opposing goals: a documentary approach, that aims to reproduce faithfully the documents that have come down to us, and a reconstructive approach, that attempts to go beyond the documentary evidence in order to restore the text of the author’s lost original. In the history of editing, these opposing approaches are not new; the arguments set forward in the modern period and, to some degree, the methods adopted, however, are. In classical and medieval studies, these two approaches have come to be associated (rightly or not) with two major figures: the German classical scholar Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), and the French medievalist Joseph Bédier (1864–1938).

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B.2. The “Lachmannian” Method This editorial approach – variously referred to as the scientific, commonerror, stemmatic, or recension method – was devised in order to establish a text which approximates as closely as possible the author’s original work in cases where the original has been lost, but where multiple copies have survived. Ideally, the systematic nature of the early stages of the editorial work was to allow for establishing the majority of the critical text by objective, mechanical procedures (recensio). Whereas previous editors had often based their texts on an incomplete knowledge of the extant MSS or had given undue preference to the lessons contained in the largest number of witnesses, in the vulgate (textus receptus), or in a single MS deemed the most reliable (because of age, completeness or correctness), the new method insisted on the need to examine all the surviving MS evidence and to establish the critical text based on a precise knowledge of the relationships that exist between the various copies and between these copies and the original. The determination of these relationships is based on the principle of common error, according to which two copies that make the same mistake in the same passage must be related to one another: either one MS was copied from the other, or both derive from a third copy that contained the error but which no longer exists. On the basis of these errors, the filiation of the MSS is established: the MSS are grouped into families, and the relationship of these families to the lost original is defined by positing a minimal series of lost intermediaries. Ideally, these relationships are represented graphically in the form of a stemma codicum (genealogical tree of MSS). In the final stage of recension, the stemma serves to reconstruct step by step the lost intermediaries between the extant MSS and the original, until reaching the oldest common ancestor of all surviving copies (the archetype). In its simplest form, the reconstruction obeys a more or less mechanical procedure. If it can be ascertained that the MSS fall into three main families, the text of the common ancestor is automatically established by the agreement of any two of them, unless it can be shown that they agree in an error. If the MSS form only two families, the text of the common ancestor can be determined whenever the two families agree; if they disagree, and both lessons are acceptable, the editor must rely on other sources or on his own judgment to establish the authentic text. This last operation belongs to the second phase of the editing procedure (examinatio), in which the editor examines the reconstructed text and attempts to determine if it corresponds to the original work as written by the author. In cases where the editor is faced with two variants of equal stem-

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matic value, the text is to be established either by selecting one or by conjecturing a third lesson that can explain the divergence in the MS tradition. Even if the reconstructed text does not present variants, however, it must be examined in all passages in order to detect and emend corruptions. Since the MSS can offer no more assistance, corrections will necessarily be introduced by conjecture (divinatio), informed by an intimate knowledge of the author’s language, style, and intellectual milieu. The successive operations of recensio and examinatio produce a critical reconstruction that resembles the texts offered by extant witnesses, but is identical to none of them; in the “Lachmannian” perspective, these copies are merely a means to attaining the ultimate goal, which is the recovery of the original work of the author. Although most often referred to as the “Lachmannian” method, this editorial approach was in fact not invented by the great German scholar, nor, does it seem, was it even employed by him. Sebastiano Timpanaro (La genesi del metodo del Lachmann [1963], 2nd ed. 2003) has shown that the various concepts and techniques that compose the stage of recension are the result of a collective endeavor begun by classical and biblical scholars in the 18th century; key principles were developed by such early critics as Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), Johann Jacob Wettstein (1693–1754), and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824). The first systematic description of the mechanical method in its canonical form would come only much later, when in 1927 Paul Maas published his slender volume on textual criticism (Textkritik, 4th ed. 1960; Elio Montanari, La critica del testo secondo Paul Maas, 2003). Lachmann himself seems to have had little interest in stemmatics. While he was a tireless and talented editor of medieval German and classical texts, and although he greatly impressed contemporaries with his detailed description of the archetype of the extant MSS of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, his editions were largely based on what he determined to be the best MS of each work and he never attempted to reconstruct an archetypal text by mechanical application of a stemma (Giovanni Fiesoli, La genesi del lachmannismo, 2000). The method continued to gain favor amongst critics, however, and by the end of the 19th century it had entered most fields of medieval studies. In the romance literatures, the first detailed exposition and full application of the new method came with Gaston Paris’ 1872 edition of the Old French Vie de saint Alexis. In a lengthy introduction, Paris not only explained and demonstrated the technique of establishing the substantive lessons in his critical text (“critique des leçons”), but also offered a more than 100-page study of the original language of the poem (“critique des formes”), which formed the basis for his linguistic reconstruction of the work. Doubts and

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misgivings were expressed by early reviewers and critics, but the new technique won large acceptance from practicing editors and by the beginning of the 20th century it had been used to produce important editions in a number of medieval literatures: e.g. editions by Léopold Constans of the Roman de Thèbes (1890), by Michele Barbi of Dante’s Vita nuova (1907), by Carl Appel of Bernart de Ventadorn’s poetry (1915), by John Manly and Edith Rickert of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (8 vols., 1940). In Spain, where the number of extant witnesses is generally much lower than in other national literatures, the stemmatic method, which is designed to deal with multiple-MS traditions, would only be introduced much later and in a more evolved form: the first applications to works in medieval Castillian came in 1964 with Alberto Vàrvaro’s Premesse a un’edizione critica delle poesie minori di Juan de Mena and Giorgio Chiarini’s edition of the Libro de buen amor (Alberto Blecua, “Los textos medievales castellanos y sus ediciones,” RPh 45 [1991]: 73–88). B.3. Joseph Bédier While the stemmatic method met with some early resistance, the strongest challenge would come at the beginning of the 20th century from the student of one of its most fervent promoters. In 1913, Joseph Bédier, who had studied under Gaston Paris, published his second edition of Le lai de l’ombre; with its polemical introduction and iconoclastic editorial approach, it severely shook confidence in the scientific method. In his first edition of the poem (1890), Bédier had adopted the then prevalent editorial method: basing analysis on the principle of common error, he determined that the seven extant MSS divided themselves into two major families; he then proceeded to establish the critical text according to the stemma he had devised, and finally rewrote the work in what he deemed to be Jean Renart’s original language. The edition was reviewed by Paris, who contended that Bédier’s stemma was faulty: the MSS formed three families, not two; the text could therefore be reconstructed mechanically. When Bédier returned to the text some twenty years later, however, he would reject the “Lachmannian” method altogether. His contestation stems from the study of other editions of Old French texts. While three-branch stemmas appear in preliminary studies and critical reviews, scholars who actually publish editions of medieval texts arrive almost invariably at two-branch stemmas: of the eighty editions he consulted, seventy-eight were based on bipartite stemmas. This “surprising law” of textual editing was, he argued, evidence of a methodological flaw: that the extant copies all derive from two exemplars may very well be the case for

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some texts, but the systematic nature of this conclusion “indicates that we are most often not in the presence of true facts of the history of textual transmission, but of phenomena that occur in the minds of textual editors” (1913, xxvii). He explained the predominance of two-branch stemmas by the unconscious desire of editors to maintain control over the establishment of their critical texts and exercise their judgment when faced with two variants, rather than blindly follow a mechanical two-against-one rule that imposed the choice of lessons. Therefore, while in theory the “Lachmannian” method appeared to be scientific and objective, in practice it allowed for a subjective representation of the facts and an arbitrary reconstruction of the text. In the specific case of the Lai de l’ombre, Bédier strove to show that the common-error method was incapable of producing unequivocal results. His demonstration is based on three main considerations. First, one of the two MS families he had identified in 1890 contained no obvious errors and the reality of the family was therefore impossible to prove: in such a case, the decision to group the MSS in one family, as he had done, or to divide them into two separate families, as Paris proposed, was arbitrary. In the absence of errors, the method was incapable of providing a solution. Secondly, the “Lachmannian” method is based on an unexamined assumption that the original (or the archetype) was without flaw, and that the MS transmission of the text was an uninterrupted process of degradation at the hands of incompetent scribes. Surely, Bédier argued, this was not the only possibility: when, for example, one of his MS families presented an error absent from the other, it was equally possible that the error was already present in the archetype and that the seemingly correct lesson was no more than a scribal emendation. Finally, faced with one very innovative MS of the Lai de l’ombre, he declared that it was not possible to decide whether its text represented the work of an intelligent scribe – in which case its individual lessons should be eliminated – or a second authorial redaction – in which case it was to be considered apart from the rest of the tradition. Bédier concluded that the interpretation of the MS evidence could lead to the elaboration of different stemmas and to the constitution of different critical texts; the reconstruction of the lost “original” was therefore “generally nothing more than one more or less plausible, but unverifiable hypothesis, arbitrarily chosen from amongst several others that are equally plausible and equally unverifiable” (xl). Refusing to base his edition on such questionable grounds, Bédier chose to reproduce the text of one witness and to introduce only a minimal number of corrections. As his base MS, he chose what he considered to be a “good manuscript,” i. e. one that was not necessarily the closest to the original, since this was impossible to determine, but that presented the fewest

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number of individual lessons and that the editor was therefore less often tempted to correct. In the 962 lines of the poem, Bédier intervened only 34 times, in order to eliminate obvious scribal errors. Because the new method he advocated did not function mechanically and because the subjective nature of weighing variants was explicitly recognized, he provided numerous textual notes, convinced as he was that for this type of edition “the editor must endeavor to justify his choice in each doubtful case” (xliv). The first response to Bédier’s challenge came from the French biblical scholar Dom Henri Quentin, who had devised what he considered a more mathematical and objective stemmatic method in order reconstruct the text of the Vulgate (Essais de critique textuelle [ecdotique], 1926). Quentin advocated a method based on the comparison of all MS variants and not just their errors. By a statistical analysis of the agreement and disagreement between the MSS, he claimed it was possible to arrive at an objective determination of the MS families and their relationships to the lost original. Though concentrating on the text of the Vulgate, Quentin applied his method to the Lai de l’ombre and drew up a stemma for the MS tradition that was different from both Bédier’s and Paris’. Bédier’s reply came almost immediately, in the form of a cogent, polemical critique of stemmatic methods: “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre. Réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes” (R 54 [1928]: 161–96 and 321–56). Reiterating his arguments of 1913 against “Lachmannian” reconstructive techniques and the composite texts they produced, Bédier went on to show that Quentin’s proposed modifications produced results that were no more certain and that the text reconstructed according to his stemma was esthetically unsatisfying. Bédier’s main argument rests, again, on the impossibility of reaching an unequivocal interpretation of the MS tradition based on the variant distribution. If Quentin’s method, like Lachmann’s, succeeded in grouping the MSS into families, neither, he argued, could determine the exact relationships of these families to one another and to the lost original. In addition to the four possible stemmas he had drawn up in his 1913 edition, he now added seven more – including Quentin’s – that were equally possible, and equally unverifiable. Since each stemma would produce a different critical text, Bédier contended that editors of medieval texts in the vernacular should refrain from reconstructing originals until such a time as editorial methods might provide us with the one “true” stemma. Generalizing from his experience with the Lai de l’ombre, he concluded with the following recommendation:

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Therefore, the most commendable editorial method is perhaps, in final analysis, one dictated by an attitude of distrust of oneself, of prudence, of extreme “conservatism,” and by a strong, indeed unyielding determination to trust scribes as much as possible and to modify the text of the manuscript one is publishing only in cases of extreme and nearly self-evident necessity: all conjectural emendations should be relegated to an appendix (356).

In calling for conservative single-MS editions, Bédier not only rejected reconstructionist methods, he also ultimately rejected the values on which they were predicated. Inverting the “Lachmannian” view both in his demonstration and in his final recommendation, he transformed the traditional defiance of scribal copies into defiance of oneself: copyists were now to be “trusted”; and their copies were no longer a mere means to end: given the impossibility of attaining the authorial original, they had become an end in themselves. In the years following, notably in his work on the Chanson de Roland (1927, 1937–1938), Bédier would endorse and practice an increasingly conservative adherence to the base MS. The approach recommended by Bédier was not entirely new. Editions that offered the text of a single MS with minimal emendations had been published by many early editors and advocated by such scholars as Hermann Paul and Gustav Roethe (Leithandschriftenprinzip); contemporary editors of Old English were already shifting to an even more conservative, diplomatic approach. Bédier’s importance, however, lies in the fact that his self-proclaimed “return” to pre-scientific editorial techniques rests upon a methodical examination and critical rejection of the “Lachmannian” method, and offers a clearly articulated theoretical justification for single-MS editions. Reactions to Bédier’s propositions varied according to national traditions: whereas the majority of editors of Old French texts, for example, quickly adopted them, such conservative principles were slow to spread into the neighboring fields of Spanish and German literatures; in general, Italian editors and editors of medieval Latin texts have strongly opposed them (see Pratiques philologiques en Europe, ed. Frédéric Duval, 2006 and Scholarly Editing, ed. David C. Greetham, 1995). B.4. Merits and Limitations Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses. Alongside the obligation to examine the entire body of available evidence, one of the greatest contributions of the “Lachmannian” method is the principle of common error, i. e. the realization that amidst all the lessons shared by different MSS, only the agreement in errors is pertinent for retracing MS filiation. The discovery of this principle, grounded in the very nature of scribal activity, was

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a milestone in the historical understanding of MS transmission and has had a profound impact on the evaluation of extant documents. At the same time, as Bédier showed, the immediate usefulness of this principle was limited, and at times counteracted, by the fact that the “Lachmannian” method, at least in its early formulation, adopted a simplistic view of MS transmission and assumed that all copies derived from a single archetype in a linear descent that could be characterized as a slow but constant degradation of the original. Other criticisms, such as the argument of circularity (errors are used to establish a stemma that determines error) or the idea that the method leads only to subjective, modern rewritings of ancient texts, are unfounded (D’Arco Silvio Avalle, “La critica testuale,” GRLMA t. 1 [1972]: 538–58, rpt. as “Fenomenologia ecdotica del Medioevo romanzo,” La doppia verità, 2002, 142–45; R. B. C. Huygens, Ars edendi, 2001, 40). One of the great merits of Bédier’s challenge resides in his reevaluation of scribal activity, which has brought about a heightened awareness of the complexity of MS transmission and the intrinsic value of scribal copies; and his call for single-MS editions and editorial justification of all doubtful passages has fostered undeniable progress in the linguistic analysis of medieval texts. For a number of scholars, however, Bédier’s radical skepticism is no less dangerous than the naïve optimism of some early “Lachmannians,” since it denies the possibility of studying an essentially historical phenomenon from a historical perspective and thereby leads to a misrepresentation of medieval texts by placing the editor, and reader, at the mercy of capricious scribes. It has been argued, moreover, that Bédier’s conclusions are exaggerated: while the study of one MS tradition (the Lai de l’ombre) indeed highlights certain limitations of the “Lachmannian” method, it by no means impeaches its general usefulness or its validity for other traditions. In this respect, however, it has also been noted that Bédier’s attitude towards “Lachmannian” techniques was in fact less radical than some of his polemical affirmations suggest (Cesare Segre, “L’Après Bédier: Due manuali francesi di critica testuale,” Ecdotica 2 [2005]: 171–82). C. Development and Diversification of Methods Neither of these competing methods has won unanimous favor with editors and the debate continued – and sometimes raged – throughout the 20th century. Whereas some adopted, and even radicalized Bédier’s recommendations, others took up his challenge to “define the limits of [the “Lachmannian” method], to refine it, to make it more flexible, and, thereby, to solidify it” (“La tradition manuscrite …,” 355–56). New orientations, the diversity of practices and the importance of methodological innovations are such that

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current references to the mythical figures of Lachmann and Bédier are often anachronistic and misleading; one may more accurately speak of “author-centered approaches” and “transmission-oriented approaches” (Mary B. Speer). C.1. Author-Centered Approaches Unwilling to abandon the search for a historical understanding of MS transmission, as Bédier had done, and convinced that the “Lachmannian” method offered valuable, if imperfect, techniques for distinguishing between the work of authors and the work of scribes, a number of scholars continued to reflect on the process of MS transmission and the means at the disposal of editors for coming to terms with it. Giorgio Pasquali’s landmark Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934), which grew out of a review of Paul Maas’s Textkritik, constitutes a penetrating reevaluation of the method that takes into account the complex nature of MS traditions. Together with Michele Barbi’s La nuova filologia (1938), Pasquali’s study marked the beginnings of the Italian school of New Philology that was founded on the conviction that editors needed to exercise their judgment at all stages of the editing process and adopt a case-by-case approach, since no method could claim universal validity: “each text presents a specific critical problem, each problem has its own solution, and […] editions are not established according to a model or […] by a machine” (Barbi, 1938, x). Building on the “Lachmannian” legacy and attempting to render it more historical and less mechanical, these scholars believed that the editor’s main task remained the reconstitution of the author’s original text from the entire MS tradition. With the following generation of Italian scholars, nuova filologia evolved into the influential school of “neo-Lachmannian” criticism (a term coined by Gianfranco Contini). A similar attitude and similar goals were adopted by contemporary textual critics in other countries – often referred to as “eclectic” editors. Over the course of the last century, continued reflection by editors who have refused the single-MS approach has striven to implement more rigorous definitions of concepts and a more judicious application of techniques, to specify the limits of the “Lachmannian” method, and to discover new criteria that could complement traditional techniques or be used in their stead. C.1.1. Common Errors Given that the very act of copying lends itself to certain characteristic mistakes (Louis Havet, Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins, 1911) and that scribes tend to intervene and correct errors in their exemplars, Maas argued as early as 1937 for a more stringent selection of errors and

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a more methodical examination of their significance for the establishment of the stemma (“Stemmatica,” rpt. in Textkritik, appendix; cf. Pasquali, 1934, 17). In order for a shared error to be stemmatically relevant, it must be a “significant error” (Leitfehler), i. e., a mistake such that one may reasonably exclude the possibility that two scribes committed it independently or that another copyist corrected it by conjecture. To establish MS families with certainty, the significance of the errors must be determined by distinguishing those that demonstrate kinship between two copies (errores coniunctivi) and those that prove their independence (errores separativi). Some more recent editors have also argued in favor of the stemmatic value of innovations and interpolations that can be surely identified as such. C.1.2. Recentiores, non deteriores Contrary to a previously common assumption, it has been proven that older MSS are not necessarily less corrupt than more recent ones and that the quality of a witness is in fact independent of its age (Pasquali, 1934), a fact that underscores the necessity to examine carefully the entire MS tradition. C.1.3. Two-Branch Stemmas Recent scholarship has shown that while bipartite stemmas predominate, they are not as systematic as Bédier claimed. Purely statistical explanations for this prevalence have been advanced, but fail to convince; current views tend to consider either that a number of bipartite stemmas result from insufficient analysis of MS traditions on the part of editors, or that their predominance in fact results from the material conditions of medieval MS production (Armando Balduino, Manuale di filologia italiana [1979], 3rd ed. 2001, 354–60). C.1.4. Types of Manuscript Traditions Critical reflection on various traditions has lead to a better understanding of the complexity of MS transmission and its relevance to textual editing. Pasquali proposed a typology distinguishing, on the one hand, traditions in which scribes were content to merely copy their exemplars (closed traditions) from those in which they more or less freely intervened in the text they were copying (open traditions), and, on the other, traditions in which each copy was based on a single exemplar (vertical traditions) from those in which MSS from one family were contaminated through consultation of members of another family (horizontal traditions). Since the early mechanical procedures of the “Lachmannian” method assumed, and were therefore only applicable to closed, vertical traditions, editors searching to restore the au-

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thor’s original but faced with other types of transmission had to proceed with extreme caution, adopt other means, or limit their ambitions. Pursuing Pasquali’s reflections, Alberto Vàrvaro has explored differences between medieval and ancient traditions and the techniques used by their respective editors (“Critica dei testi classica e romanza. Problemi comuni ed esperienze diverse,” RAN 45 [1970]: 73–117, rpt. in: Identità linguistiche e letterarie nell’Europa romanza, 2004, 567–612). C.1.5. Multiple Redactions and Authorial Variants Pasquali was also one of the first scholars to accord critical attention to the fact that ancient and medieval authors, like their modern counterparts, at times produced more than one version of their works. While this is obvious in cases like that of Petrarch, where autograph or partially autograph copies have survived, the distinction between authorial variants and scribal innovations can often be difficult to make. Subsequent research has established minimal stemmatic criteria for the identification of authorial redactions (Balduino, Manuale, 378–79), but the distinction can be blurred in instances where the author revised a corrupt scribal copy rather than a pristine copy of the original redaction. C.1.6. Contamination Medieval correctors at times revised MSS on exemplars from different families, inscribing corrections and variants in the margins or between lines of text. When such a MS in turn served as model, the new copy could contain lessons derived from two different families, thus obscuring its place in the tradition. While rampant contamination can render the establishment of a stemma impossible, scholars have devised criteria for identifying contamination, for determining its nature and degree in various traditions, and for limiting, if not eliminating the risks it poses to critical reconstructions (Maas, Textkritik, § 10; Segre, “Appunti sul problema delle contaminazioni nei testi in prosa,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale, ed. Raffaele Spongano, 1961, 63–67, rpt. in: Ecdotica e comparatistica romanze, 1998, 71–74; Avalle, Principî di critica testuale [1972], 2002, § 3.3). C.1.7. Lectio difficilior, lectio potior Based on the observation that scribes tend to replace unfamiliar words and constructions with more familiar ones, this old axiom asserts that a more difficult or idiosyncratic lesson contained in one or more MSS is more likely to be authentic than other banal lessons offered by the tradition. Because this principle, like that of usus scribendi, trumps the rule of stemmatic majority,

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thus offering a corrective to the mechanical nature of the stemma, it has attracted a good deal of attention. Gianfranco Contini, in a series of penetrating contributions dating from 1953–1977 (now in Breviario di ecdotica, 1986), showed how difficult lessons create a phenomenon of diffraction in the MS tradition, with various scribes either misreading the lesson or replacing it with a more common synonym; the occurrence of this phenomenon in traditions where the lectio difficilior has been preserved by at least one witness leads to positing a lectio difficilior, and correcting by conjecture, when it has not been, but when the tradition shows such a typical dispersion of variants. The plausibility of this type of conjectural emendation is reinforced by the serial nature of certain phenomena within the same work or the same historical period. Maurizio Perugi, a student of Contini, has further refined the concept and invested it with greater methodological importance in his editions of Arnaut Daniel (1978) and La vie de saint Alexis (2000). C.1.8. Usus scribendi Like the concept of lectio difficilior, the linguistic and stylistic traits of the author are extra-stemmatic criteria that have received much attention from theorists and practitioners. In cases where the common-error method fails to produce results (due to bipartite stemmas or contamination), some recent scholars have given it a central role in the establishment of the critical text. Good examples of this are Alfred Foulet’s “grid-editing” (“On Grid-Editing Chrétien de Troyes,” L’Esprit créateur 27 [1987]: 15–23) and George Kane and E. T. Donaldson’s “deep editing” of Piers Plowman (1960, 1975; Lee Patterson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” Negotiating the Past, 1987, 77–113). Assigning the concept a more limited role, Segre has offered a clear theoretical exposition based on the linguistic concept of diasystem and has underscored the need to study the habits of each individual scribe, in order to found editions on a differential analysis of competing linguistic, esthetic and ideological systems that coexist in medieval copies (“Critique textuelle, théorie des ensembles et diasystème,” BCLSMP 62 [1976]: 279–92). C.1.9. Control Manuscripts Faced with problematic traditions, other editors have sought less conjectural means for editing. In cases where the stemma remains uncertain, but the MSS can be divided into families, the control method consists of choosing the best MS of the least innovative family as base and using the best MSS of the other families as controllers (Alexandre Micha, Prolégomènes à une édition de

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Cligès, 1938; id., La tradition manuscrite des romans de Chrétien de Troyes, 1939). This method allows for a limited restoration of the authorial text by eliminating obvious scribal innovations. C.1.10. Use of Computers In the last few decades, some editors have attempted to explore the usefulness of modern technologies for the analysis of MS traditions (e. g. The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers, 1993–). For all its help in managing large amounts of information, however, the computer remains incapable of distinguishing between a minor variant and a significant error, and has thus not brought with it any tangible methodological advantage in this respect. C.2. Transmission-Oriented Approaches Abandoning interventionist methods, others scholars have reaffirmed the primacy and intrinsic interest of individual copies. The motivations for producing conservative editions of scribal copies are varied. In some cases, an individual MS warrants particular interest: autograph MSS, texts copied under the supervision of the author, MSS of particular historical or linguistic value, etc. In other cases, the adoption of this approach to textual editing is prompted by methodological and theoretical concerns. Some editorial projects are closely associated with the elaboration of dictionaries (e. g., EETS, HSMS) and the conservative editorial principles have aimed at supplying lexicographers with a large and varied array of attested words and constructions. Most frequently, however, the adherence to the text of scribal copies results from a perceived impossibility or the affirmed undesirability of reconstructing an authorial version. In almost all cases, the choice to present the text of one or more scribal copies rests on the argument that this type of edition offers the reader access to actual documents that were written and read during the medieval period; its historical, documentary nature is often opposed to the hypothetical nature of reconstructive editions. While the solution adopted seems simple, theory and practice have brought out a certain number of complexities. Over the course of the 20th century, the various solutions devised by editors for presenting scribal copies bears witness to the continuing reflection on the nature of medieval documents and the aims and implications of modern editions. C.2.1. The “Best-Manuscript” Approach Where the decision to present this type of edition rests on a conscious rejection of other methods, the solution implies a rehabilitation of scribal copies. The nature of this promotion and its consequences, however, vary. In the

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case of Bédier, the decision to edit a scribal copy resulted not from the undesirability, but rather from the methodological impossibility of retrieving the authorial original. Although he argued for the historical and esthetic value of scribal copies and suggested the interest of editing all extant copies of medieval works, his own published editions offered the text of only one witness, deemed to be “good” or “the best.” Over the course of the entire history of editing medieval texts, the presentation of one scribal copy of a work is undoubtedly the solution that has most commonly been adopted by practicing editors. While the value of such editions is undeniable, it has been noted that the approach presents other limitations. At the same time it shifts the editor’s and the reader’s attention away from the authorial original, it also runs the risk of turning attention away from the MS tradition as a whole: in its presentation of MS evidence, the best-MS approach in fact does not invest all scribal copies with greater value, but accords a privileged status to one single witness. Other scholars and critical currents have given greater importance to scribal activity and sought new ways to present and understand the dynamic character of textual transmission. A useful distinction may be drawn between approaches that focus on the scribe and those that remain centered on the work. C.2.2. The Scribe-Centered Approach Examining editorial practices and their relationship to the historical reality of textual transmission, Avalle concluded that insufficient attention had been given to individual copyists and the MSS they produced (“La critica testuale,” GRLMA, t. 1, 1972, 546–48). For him, Bédier’s shift from authorial original to scribal copy was incomplete and his recommendation to edit according to conservative principles would remain unproductive so long as the object and the aims of an edition had not also been redefined. As a corrective, he advocated expanding the perspective from single texts to complete MSS containing multiple texts. In this larger framework, he argued, a conservative approach to editing found its legitimate application and could contribute to a genuine renewal of MS studies: by integrating the study of the treatment of individual texts into a global vision of the MS as a coherent cultural program, such an approach would afford a more complete picture of medieval scribal activity while at the same time offering invaluable insights into the cultural and historical significance of MSS (concrete linguistic usage, medieval “editorial techniques,” the chronological and geographical diffusion of texts, the existence of scriptoria, the role of entire MSS in textual transmission, etc.). This renewed approach to scribal activity informs not only his study of the occitan tradition (La letteratura medievale in lingua d’oc

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nella sua tradizione manoscritta, 1961), but also his edition of early Italian lyric MSS (Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini, 1992). C.2.3. Work-Centered Approaches and the Concept of “mouvance” Whereas Avalle focused on individual scribes whose activity could be observed through multiple texts, other editors and theorists have sought to understand scribal activity by concentrating on the multiple manifestations of individual works. This has led to editions that rather than, or in addition to presenting a single critical text, offer editions or transcriptions of all major redactions or even of every single witness of a given work. While in and of itself the decision to edit multiple versions of a medieval text is by no means indicative of the rejection of the authorial original (as witness the editions of the Vie de saint Alexis by Gaston Paris [1872], or Guido Faba’s Formule volgari by Arrigo Castellani [SFI 13 (1955): 5–78]), the approach has become more frequent and has inspired – and in turn been inspired by – a radical redefinition of the concepts of “author” and “work.” Building on his study of lyric poetry in a neo-traditionalist perspective, Paul Zumthor coined the term “mouvance” (see also Roy Rosenstein’s contribution in this Handbook of Medieval Studies) in order to underscore what he considered to be one of the defining characteristics of medieval literature: its inherent instability, as seen in the course of its transmission (Essai de poétique médiévale, 1972, 65–75 and 507). He conceived this instability not as a negative phenomenon, but rather as a positive form of re-creation that constitutes the very life of medieval works. In his view, the modern notion of a fixed text attributable to a single author is anachronistic: for the medieval period, the notion of author must be expanded to include the performers and scribes who continually reinterpreted and recreated works; and the abstract notion of a static work must be replaced by a dynamic conception that includes, and is defined by the multiple, concrete manifestations of the work in extant documents. Though Zumthor did not deny the possible existence of an original authorial composition, his conception of medieval textuality refuses any esthetic priority to such an original, whose relevance is reduced to that of a reference point from which to measure the textual variance of its individual materializations. It is the latter, he argued, that constitutes the proper subject of scientific enquiry. Such a radical redefinition of the nature of medieval works and the aims of scholarly research questions the traditional notions upon which textual philology was founded, and goes beyond Bédier’s views by attributing, at least virtually, the same value to all copies of a given work. Similar revisions have since been pursued in other fields, such as that by Hubert Heinen who developed the

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concept of Mutabilität in his study of German lyric (Mutabilität im Minnesang, 1989). This new conception of medieval textuality may be responsible for an increasing number of parallel-text editions, but has remarkably not lead to a full-scale revolution in editing techniques. The first, and one of the only editions, to be explicitly based on Zumthor’s theory of mouvance illustrates well the difficult relationship between theories of literature and the concrete practice of editing. Published in 1978, Rupert T. Pickens’s edition of Jaufre Rudel’s occitan lyrics reproduces the texts of all extant witnesses, but organizes them according to their greater or lesser proximity to the poet’s lost original, thus reintroducing a “Lachmannian” hierarchy based on the notion of textual authority. Later parallel-text editions have shown a similar tendency (see Mary B. Speer, “Wrestling with Change: Old French Textual Criticism and Mouvance,” Olifant 7 [1980]: 311–26; id., “Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice,” RPh 45 [1991]: 7–43). Though paradoxical within this theoretical framework, attempts to establish the relative authority of different lessons or redactions are not entirely illogical, for if MS variance is to be understood, and not just reproduced, it can only be evaluated with respect to the putative original. Further theoretical reflections on the fundamental instability of medieval works and on the relevance of the concept of authority have been offered by scholars such as Bernard Cerquiglini, in his highly polemical Eloge de la variante (1989), and Tim W. Machan, in Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (1994). While rightly underscoring the difficulty of representing MS variance in print format, both works have been faulted for failing to bridge the gap between theory and practice by proposing new editorial solutions and, especially in the case of Cerquiglini, for placing too much faith in computer-based editions, a medium which is no less anachronistic than the printed book. The potential influence of such work on concrete editing practice remains to be seen. C.2.4. Conservative Emendation Whatever the theoretical and practical concerns that motivate transmissionoriented editions, conservative editors remain faced by the question of when and how much to correct. Answers to these questions have varied, as the goals of editors and their conception of what an edited text should represent have differed. In order to reduce the number of potentially unjustified alterations of the documentary evidence, Bédier and many other editors have advocated correcting only obvious scribal errors. As early as 1939, Eugène Vinaver analyzed the concrete process of copying in order to establish a typology

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of purely mechanical errors and thereby provide objective criteria for such limited editorial intervention (“Principles of Textual Emendation,” Studies in French Language and Mediaeval Literature presented to Mildred K. Pope, 351–69). The resultant text offers a compromise between respect for the scribal copy and the desire to produce a text that is intelligible. To some degree, it also constitutes a compromise between the scribal copy and the authorial original, since in order to establish an acceptable text editors will at times correct an error that appears not only in their base MS, but also in the entire MS family to which it belongs. A similar tension between the original and the copy arises when in versified texts a semantically and grammatically sound lesson runs counter to meter: while emendation is not rare, some recent editors have preferred to retain the scribal variant. Alongside conservative editions that present varying degrees of intervention, a number of scholars choose to publish transcriptions of scribal copies without any editorial emendation. The aim of such diplomatic or near-diplomatic editions is to provide an exact documentation of the MS evidence, the interpretation of which is either provided elsewhere or left to the reader. D. The Diversity of Problems and the Variety of Solutions Although approaches to editing medieval texts and the theoretical models that inspire them differ widely, the acrimony of the debate between different schools of thought has abated in recent years as readers and editors have increasingly realized the validity and complementary nature of apparently opposing critical stances. Both author-centered and transmission-oriented approaches have, in various ways, made us aware of the complex nature of medieval textuality and scribal activity. Certain approaches are characteristic of various national and critical traditions, but individual editors continue to question their methods, attempt to adapt their strategies to the nature of the specific work they are editing, and explore new ways of understanding and presenting MS evidence. D.1. Production and Diffusion Progress in research into various aspects of the creation and circulation of medieval texts allows for a continually better informed, more nuanced approach to editing. Reflection on specific metrical traditions, for example, has underscored the problems posed by certain types of verse, regional practices, and diachronic evolutions that affect the work of editors (Middle English alliterative verse, anisosyllabism in Castillian, Anglo-Norman, Sicilian, etc.). Much work has been devoted to the specific issues raised by differing modes of composition and of diffusion for various genres and types of texts (oral

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vs. written transmission; the pecia-system; romance, epic, translations, technical texts, etc.). Among the fastest growing fields of inquiry are those of MS studies and of research on individual scribal copies. From the notion of “the scribe as editor” to “New Codicology,” these studies offer an increasingly clear view of the general mechanisms of MS variance while at the same time demonstrating that each scribal copy represents a more or less personal and coherent linguistic, esthetic, and ideological project in the framework of which individual innovations may be understood. D.2. Approaches Informed by such considerations, the diversity of current editorial practice not only illustrates attempts to adapt methods to varying material circumstances, but also attests to the vitality of reflection on what a critical edition can or should be. D.2.1. Single-MS Traditions The conservation of a medieval text by only one non-autograph witness imposes severe limitations on any attempt to restore the lost original. Editors therefore tend to adopt a conservative approach, or opt for diplomatic or semi-diplomatic editions. The fact that only one MS has survived, however, is not in and of itself an argument in favor of a diplomatic transcription. Careful consideration of internal and external evidence – such as authorial usage, scribal error patterns, genre, period, linguistic usage, or indirect testimony – can allow for restoring a certain number of critical passages. Though rarely applied to texts whose interest is primarily linguistic or historical, a more interventionist approach has at times been taken to literary texts. The Cantar de Mio Cid offers a good example of the various possibilities: the unique MS that preserves its text has been published in a diplomatic transcription (Ramón Menéndez Pidal [1908–1911], Obras completas, 1964–1969, 3: 907–1016), reproduced in facsimile (1982), and edited according to both conservative (ed. Colin Smith, 1972) and more interventionist principles (ed. Alberto Montaner, 1993). Exemplary editions offer detailed codicological analyses of the sole surviving witness, and departures from the documentary evidence are often signaled directly in the critical text by the use of diacriticals. Since there are no MS variants to document, some editors have used the critical apparatus to record the conjectural emendations of previous scholars, thus providing a valuable tool for future research and reflection on the text (see also: Edmond Faral, “A propos de l’édition des textes anciens: Le cas du manuscrit unique,” Mélanges Clovis Brunel, 1955, 1: 409–21; Rudolf Hofmeister, “The Unique Manuscript in Mediaeval German Lit-

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erature,” Seminar 12 [1972]: 8–25; Germán Orduna, “La edición crítica y el codex unicus: el texto del Poema de Mio Cid,” Incipit 17 [1997]: 1–46.). D.2.2. Originals The existence of original documents, autograph and partially autograph MSS create a situation similar to that of single-MS traditions, by most often imposing the choice of base MS and inspiring a conservative editorial approach. While the accurate reproduction of such documents is invaluable, original official acts and autograph copies are not always error-free and some critics advocate and practice limited emendation in order to establish the text as it was intended by the writer (cf. Franca B. Ageno, L’edizione critica dei testi volgari, 1975, 2nd ed. 1984, 31–44). Even when the original survives, recent work has shown the importance of examining the entire tradition, since later innovations, such as the falsification of acts, and variant versions by which texts were widely known and cited may have historical significance. (Gli autografi medievali, ed. Paolo Chiesa and Lucia Pinelli, 1994). D.2.3. Multiple Copies In cases where the original has been lost, but multiple copies survive, current editorial practices vary widely as editors continue to explore the full range of possibilities in terms of presentation of MS evidence. The commonly adopted solution of publishing a single critical text tends to imply some degree of editorial intervention, but the goals pursued by editors range from the reproduction of one witness with minimal emendation (e. g., The Fables of ‘Walter of England,’ ed. Aaron E. Wright, 1997) to the restoration of the author’s “ipsissima verba” (Chrétien de Troyes: Le roman de Perceval, ed. Keith Busby, 1993). Editions based on variations of the best-MS approach (Dantis Alagherii Comedia, ed. Federico Sanguinetti, 2001), on eclectic principles (Robert de Boron. Joseph d’Arimathie, ed. Richard O’Gorman, 1995), and on a flexible application of stemmatic methods (Il trovatore Raimon Jordan, ed. Stefano Asperti, 1990) regularly appear. Some editors, aware that a single-text edition may convey an unduly static image of the MS tradition, but convinced that, when feasible, a synthetic presentation of the documentary evidence is desirable, have experimented with the critical apparatus: the organization of variants according to MS families, redactions, or relative pertinence to establishing the text, and the distinction between variants and other elements (rejected lessons, previously proposed emendations) facilitate consultation of the critical apparatus, while at the same time emphasizing the dynamic character of the tradition and the importance of editorial decisions. Other scholars, faced with highly divergent redactions, have attempted to produce

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stratigraphic editions that distinguish successive stages of the work’s evolution by the use of various typographical conventions within the critical text (e. g., La chanson de Roland, ed. C. Segre, 1971; La vie de saint Alexis, ed. M. Perugi, 2000). Editors who, for various reasons, conclude that it is not possible or not desirable to reduce the MS tradition of the works they are editing to a single version often choose to edit two or more copies in parallel or in sequence. Here, too, practices and aims vary from one edition to the other. For example, A. V. C. Schmidt’s parallel-text edition of the A, B, C, and Z versions of Langland’s Piers Plowman (1995) focuses attention on the relationships between these four supposedly authorial redactions, while Neil Wright’s edition of the Historia regum Britannie (1985–1991) contrasts the authorial text with later variant versions. Less concerned with authority, Willem Noomen and Nico van den Boogaard offer diplomatic transcriptions of all MS witnesses of the Old French fabliaux (NRCF, 1983–2001), thus supplying a wealth of raw material that invites inquiry into all aspects of the diffusion of these comic tales. And, going a step further by offering individual editions of every extant witness, collaborative editions like those of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (gen. ed. David Dumville, and Simon Keynes, 1983–), the German poet Neidhart (ed. Ulrich Müller, Ingrid Bennewitz, and Franz V. Spechtler, 2007) or the Chanson de Roland (dir. Joseph J. Duggan, 2005) elevate scribal copies to the status of works in their own right. D.2.4. Complete-MS Editions A number of recent editors have taken a different approach to medieval texts and scribes by editing entire composite MSS. Following Avalle’s example, Francesco Carapezza produced an edition of a songbook, accompanied by a lengthy study: Il canzoniere occitano G (Ambrosiano R 71 sup.) (2005). Other, more diversified MSS have been edited by Middle Dutch scholars, who show particular interest in this type of edition: since 1994, the Middeleeuwse verzamelhandschriften uit de Nederlanden series has published ten complete-MS editions. While it is curious to note that MSS have not yet been elevated to the same artistic and intellectual status as some of the scribal versions of individual works they may contain – complete-MS are transcribed diplomatically, not edited critically – this type of edition offers interesting new perspectives on linguistic usage, scribal activity, and social and cultural aspects of the codex.

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D.3. The Letter An apparently minute aspect of editing, but one that continues to provoke reflection, is that of accidentals, and in particular the question of how words and letters are to be represented in the published text. Answers have varied over time, and in some fields the issue is not yet settled. Early editors had a tendency to rewrite medieval texts: Lachmann, for example, convinced that medieval poets wrote in a literary koine, regularized orthography and eliminated dialectal traits, whereas a number of romance scholars attempted to systematically recreate the presumed dialect of authors. Such reconstructions have been criticized for obscuring important aspects of medieval linguistic usage, and in most – though not all – fields have been abandoned in favor of a greater fidelity to the forms actually present in the MSS. Some linguists and critics have objected to other types of intervention, notably in terms of modernization (resolution of abbreviations, modern word-division and punctuation, etc.), and individual editors continue to seek an acceptable compromise between fidelity to the MSS and adaptation to a modern public. D.4. From Page to Screen While the use of computers has not had a profound impact on editorial techniques, it clearly offers new possibilities in terms of presentation. By overcoming some of the physical and economic constraints of the printed book, it allows editors to accompany their critical texts with large amounts of supplementary information (complete MS transcriptions, the texts of previous editions, reproductions of miniatures, etc.) and offer an impressive array of search options. A number of projects have already shown the rich potential of this medium, and the diversity of possible formats: entirely webbased editions (José Manuel Lucía Megías, Literatura románica en internet: los textos, 2002), CD-ROM publications (e. g., Canterbury Tales Project), and combinations of print and digital media (e. g., Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, ed. Florian Kragl, 2006). While the quantity of raw material presented in a format that is not always congenial to in-depth study may daunt readers who lack training in textual criticism, the abundant documentation provided by such editions is clearly one of the great advantages of this type of project. The challenge posed to electronic editors, however, may well be that of insuring the long-term conservation and accessibility of their work in the face of rapidly evolving digital technologies.

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D.5. Current Research The vitality of current critical reflection on textual editing is visible not only in the intense, multifarious activity of recent editors and their specific projects, but also in the ever-increasing number of publications devoted to questions of method. Alongside individual monographs and isolated articles, a number of colloquia have made important contributions to the debate: e. g. Atti del XIV congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza, ed. Alberto Vàrvaro, 1978; Editionsberichte zur mittelalterlichen deutschen Literatur, ed. Anton Schwob, 1994; La critica del testo mediolatino, ed. Claudio Leonardi, 1994; Alte und neue Philologie, ed. Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft, 1997. In addition to such sporadic publications, various permanent fora for discussion have also been established, and periodicals dedicated principally or entirely to editing are increasingly numerous: e.g., Studi e problemi di critica testuale (1970–); Incipit (1981–); TEXT (1984–2006; continued as: Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation [2006–]); Editio (1987–); Critica del testo (1998–); Variants (2002–); Ecdotica (2004–). Faced with the swell of activity and the proliferation of individual case studies, however, many have felt the need for comprehensive reviews of current practice, as well as for the establishment or reaffirmation of shared norms. This has lead to the publication of numerous manuals and introductions, most often conceived along linguistic or national boundaries: e.g. Armando Balduino, Manuale di filologia italiana, 1979 (3rd ed. 1989; rpt. 2001); Alfred Foulet and Mary Blakely Speer, On Editing Old French Texts, 1979; Alberto Blecua, Manual de crítica textual, 1983 (cf. Hugo Bizzarri, “Veinte años de reflexión sobre crítica textual [1983–2003],” RCPR 4–5 [2003–2004]: 296–318); Thomas Bein, Textkritik, 1990 (2nd ed., 2008); Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat, 1998; Ursula Kocher, Einführung in die Editionswissenschaft (forthcoming). By offering an overview of current practices and norms, such works play an important role within the various fields of medieval textual criticism; one may hope that they will also facilitate exchange and discussion across the disciplines. Several recent publications clearly encourage this larger debate by adopting a pluridisciplinary perspective: e.g. Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. David C. Greetham, 1995; Filologia classica e filologia romanza: Esperienze ecdotiche a confronto, ed. Anna Ferrari, 1998; Pratiques philologiques en Europe, ed. Frédéric Duval, 2006. E. Conclusions The current rhythm of publication of new editions and critical reflections on editing shows no signs of abating and clearly attests to the vitality and importance of the discipline. Whether they are editors or simply readers of

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medieval texts, scholars are increasingly aware of the ways in which modern editions help shape our understanding of the past and of the symbiotic relationship between textual theories and editorial praxis. Interpretation, reading, and editing are intimately bound together. Over time, approaches to editing and the concepts that inform them have evolved and diversified; and the aims and methods of textual criticism continue to vary according to national traditions, critical orientations, and individual convictions. The diversity of current approaches and the on-going debates are healthy signs, since the practice of editing consists of a constantly renewed effort to discover the strategies best-suited to the materials and to our understanding of them, and there can probably be no “definitive” editions. While the critical edition is established according to tried methods and rigorous standards, it remains a “working hypothesis” (Contini), an interpretation of the documentary evidence and an attempt to convey to the modern reader a certain understanding of a specific historical reality. And it is precisely for this reason that textual editing continues to play a central role in medieval studies. Select Bibliography D’Arco Silvio Avalle, La doppia verità (Florence: Galluzzo, 2002); Joseph Bédier, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre: réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes,” R 54 (1928): 161–96 and 321–56 [rpt. independently, Paris: Champion, 1929, 1970]; Conseils pour l’édition des textes médiévaux, 3 vols. (Paris: ENC, 2001–2002); Gianfranco Contini, Breviario di ecdotica (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1986); Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters zwischen Handschriftennähe und Rekonstruktion, ed. Martin J. Schubert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005); Pratiques philologiques en Europe, ed. Frédéric Duval (Paris: ENC, 2006); Les problèmes posés par l’édition critique des textes anciens et médiévaux, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve: UCL, 1992); Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. David C. Greetham (New York: MLA, 1995); Martin L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973).

Craig Baker

English Studies A. Definition Medieval English Studies denotes the modern academic investigation of literature produced in England in the vernacular during the period ca. 650–ca. 1500 CE. Talk of English literature as constituting a single, unified field is problematic, even anathema, since the body of writing has diverse linguistic

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bases, which evolved over time. The English language contains numerous Celtic components derived from the early inhabitants of the British Isles. With the annexing of the territory to the Roman Empire, Latin was installed as the official language of the Church (Richard Gameson, St Augustine and the Conversion of England, 1999), and the vernacular was affected also by the tongues of Norse and Germanic settlers during the first millennium. After the Norman Conquest of the 11th century Norman French operated within England with various linguistic registers (Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England,” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 [1991]: 229–49; William Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 [1994]: 45–67). For the purposes of the present article Old and Middle English texts are dealt with exclusively and cognate literatures are touched upon as source materials rather than a subject of immediate study. B. Terminological Definition: the Canon of Medieval English Literature B.1. Old English Literature Although verse comprises only about nine per cent of the corpus of extant Old English writing its critical understanding historically dominates the field of pre-Conquest English studies (Robert D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature, 2000, 26). A handful of early poems, including Caedmon’s Hymn, the Ruthwell Cross Inscription, Bede’s Death Song, can be dated to the 8th century and are concerned with creation and mortality. The transience of life and wealth are recurrent themes throughout Anglo-Saxon verse, having their efflorescence in elegies like The Wanderer, and Resignation, a poem which likens separation from one’s kin to martyrdom. The Old English poetic record survives in four main manuscripts: London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius AV, the so-called “Beowulf-manuscript,” famed for its illustrations of monsters; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius XII, which contains three poetic versions of Old Testament books (Genesis, Exodus, Daniel) together with the poem Christ and Satan; the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501) includes a mixture of saints’ lives (Guthlac A and B, Cynewulf’s Juliana), elegy (The Wanderer, The Seafarer), three poems from the Physiologus or bestiary (The Panther and The Whale and The Partridge), and a set of cryptic riddles; the Vercelli Book (Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolaire CVII) resided largely unnoticed in an Italian library until the 18th century and preserves the hagiographies Andreas and Elene by Cynewulf and The

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Dream of the Rood, a devotional vision centred on the cross of Christ, which bares close verbal affinities with the inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross. Dating any of these texts is troublesome, since they may have circulated aurally for generations prior to their recording in the present codices (Jeff Opland, Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry: A Study of the Traditions, 1980). The Vercelli Book is usually ascribed to ca. 970 and MS Cotton Vitellius AV to the first quarter of the 11th century. Heroic poems like Widsi6 in the Exeter book and Beowulf, by far the longest epic in the corpus, make allusion to having been heard and memorialised, but the historical truth, if any, behind the antediluvian stories they recount remains obscure. The Battle of Maldon is atypical, since it refers to an actual event which happened in 991 CE and purports to record the testimony of survivors or observers thereof. Apart from the preeminent genres outlined above (Old Testament poetry, hagiography, epic, elegy, riddles, homily), Old English poetry encompasses a number of modes, which seem not to have lasted into the later Middle Ages. The Gifts of Men in the Exeter Book is based around the parable of the talents found in Matthew 25:14–20, meanwhile The Fates of the Apostles in the Vercelli book, appears as a mnemonic on the deaths of Christ’s followers, intended as an aid to meditation on the life of holiness. The watershed for Anglo-Saxon prose occurred during and after the reign of King Alfred (871–899), who instigated an educational programme, which brought a number of Latin texts into the vernacular for the first time. His Pastoral Care is drawn from Gregory the Great’s Regula Pastoralis and his own added Preface outlines the duty which he feels he has as king, namely to restore the golden age of Anglo-Saxon learning now long past. Other texts translated under Alfred are Boethius from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which exhorts the reader to strive after God, and the Soliloquies, which completes Saint Augustine of Hippo’s dialogue to affirm that one must think always upon the afterlife. Wærferth’s Dialogues also translates Gregory and the anonymous Orosius renders Paulus Orosius’s History Against the Pagans to show the triumph of Christian civilisation over barbarity. Similarly Bede takes the Venerable Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People as a timely account of the conversion of the English to Roman Christianity. History writing flourished too with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which provides a mostly retrospective digest for the period 1–1154 CE, with two manuscripts recording the Roman invasion of Britain. The composition of prose saints’ lives came to intervene in the consolidation of a native identity and literary tradition. In the late 9th century, following a precedent established by Bede and others, the Old English Martyrology set 238 vitae to the dates of the calendar. Ælfric, the abbot of Eynsham

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(died ca. 1010), was to take the form one stage further with his two sets of Catholic Homilies and Lives of the Saints. The homilies are organized for recitation over a period of two years so as not to become langsumlic (“tedious”) to the layman. Contemporary anxieties about Danish incursion are enunciated in his hagiographical narratives, palpably in the passio of Saint Edmund King and Martyr. Through his Biblical prefaces Ælfric devised a more straightforward, less verbose manner of composition, attuned to his educative purposes. Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023), was a prolific homilist like his contemporary Ælfric. His Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (“Sermon of the Wolf to the English”) sees the coming Danish raids as an expression of divine wrath upon the English, with later versions of the text suggesting that the English should remember how God was thought to have used their pagan ancestors as a scourge against the Christian Britons four centuries earlier. Scientific texts dating from the latter end of this period, such as Ælfric’s De temporum anni, medical works like Bald’s Leechbook, and the Old English Lapidary each possess a rhetorical value, but have yet to be drawn into the orbit of literary examination. B.2. Middle English Literature The period of Middle English literature is broadly given as ca. 1100–ca. 1500 C.E. when the Germanic character of the language was transformed by the absorption of Norman French. Early Middle English texts such as The Ormulum, a life of Christ, retained the orthography of Anglo-Saxon as did later works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1380) originating from far beyond the London metropolis. Debate literature continued to be one means of illustrating philosophical arguments. Just as the Old English The Soul’s Address to the Body had set the angry soul against the corrupt body, The Owl and the Nightingale employed fictive avian personae to argue the benefits of a stoical versus a care-free attitude towards life. A small body of latter-day homilies is extant from the 12th century, and from the 13th century there survives literature of guidance like the vernacular rule for anchoresses Ancrene Wisse or Ancrene Riwle and the Wohunge Group, a set of prayers addressed to Christ, and the Katherine Group, a collection of saints’ lives also compiled for female recluses. The production of instructive writing in the vernacular gained necessary impetus from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which instituted the requirement of annual confession from the laity. The long didactic poem the Pricke of Conscience and Handlyng Synne seems to succour to just such a need for penance. The works of the hermit Richard Rolle (ca. 1300–1349) became

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hugely popular amongst the clergy and non-clerical devotees. His epistles Ego Dormio, The Commandment and The Form of Living were originally composed for a female anchoritic audience, yet were evidently embraced with enthusiasm by what Pantin was to call “the devout and literate layman,” individuals who had the education, the curiosity and the material means to seek out literature that would nourish their spiritual development (W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, 1955, 262). Far more restricted in their contemporary circulation, though of great modern interest, were the two versions of the Shewings of Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343–post 1416), and the Book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–ca. 1439). The latter, a genre defying memoir-cum-auto-hagiography, lay unknown for centuries only to resurface in the 1930s. A large body of saints’ lives survives in collections like the Northern Homily Cycle, the Southern English Legendary and Osbern Bokenham’s (1393–ca. 1467) Legendys of Hooly Wummen, together with the vitae of Saints Katherine, Augustine and Gilbert of Sempringham translated by John Capgrave (1393–1464). Alongside exemplary hagiography later medieval readers could glean an insight into the afterlife through works like The Vision of Tundale and A Vision of Purgatory, a genre already rehearsed in the Old English Vision of Saint Paul. Medieval drama transformed the Scriptures and the life of Christ into public spectacle, with the principal extant records deriving from York, Chester, Wakefield and the semi-anonymous “N-town” in East Anglia. Geoffrey Chaucer’s (ca. 1343–1400) œuvre reveals a keen awareness of the possibilities of pre-existing literary forms, many of them ultimately continental in derivation. In addition to the Canterbury Tales, which included adaptations of the French fabliau and the romance, he reworked the dream vision in The Book of the Duchess. The same genre provided William Langland (ca. 1325–post 1388?) with a vehicle for interrogating abuses of the Church and charity in Piers Plowman and gave rise to a poignant exploration of paternal grief in the poem Pearl. Chaucer, like his contemporary John Gower (ca. 1330–1408), drew upon a rich stock of classical and ancient myth, so for instance, The Man of Law’s Tale and Book II of Gower’s Confessio Amantis both retell the legend of the exiled queen Constance. Gower is notable for straddling the three languages of England, using Latin in the apocalyptic Vox Clamantis (“A Voice Crying Out”) and French in the allegorical Mirour de l’omme (“The Mirror of Man”). The likes of Thomas Hoccleve (ca. 1367–1426) and John Lydgate (ca. 1371–1449) carried over the Chaucerian style of poetry into the 15th century, though these men were always overshadowed by their illustrious predecessor. As well as producing poets of lasting repute, the later Middle Ages saw the rising popularity of “commonplace” and “household”

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manuscripts, compilations often gathering together anonymous materials. One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, which contains an eclectic variety of religious and secular lyrics. As in the Early Middle Ages the telling of historical narratives continued to assume many guises. Layamon’s Brut (after 1189) drew upon Anglo-Norman and Latin sources to present an alliterative account of the history of England from the arrival of Brutus to Cadwallader (639 CE). The massive Cursor Mundi (“runner of the world”) of ca. 1300 presents the history of the universe from the creation until the apocalypse. In spite of its vivid descriptions of foreign lands and races, the Travels of John Mandeville was likely to be a fabrication, the brainchild of one who may never have ventured much beyond the confines of a well-stocked library. Romance persists in different milieus passing down the centuries. Alongside the refined courtliness of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there survive numerous later medieval texts termed as “popular romance” by modern day criticism (Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, 2000). Sir Gowther, The King of Tars and The Squyr of Low Degre are appreciably more explicit and unsettling in their treatment of violence, sex and monstrosity. At the farthest extremity of later Middle English writing the Morte d’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) stands as the great summa of Arthurian literature. The extensive emendation of this text by the print pioneer William Caxton in 1485 gives cause to reflect upon how late the standardisation of English had its inception. C. History of Research, Schools of Thought, Approaches C.1. Philology and the Classics in the Academy Attempts to catalogue and describe the early vernacular literature of England began centuries before the development of English as a field for university study. Only decades after Caxton published Malory, John Bale’s (1495–1563) Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum (1548 and 1549), and Leland’s (ca. 1503–1552) de Rebus Brittanicis Collectanea (6 vols., 1716) and Commentarii de scriptoribus britannicis (2 vols., 1709) reviewed the insular literary achievements of recent centuries. Latin literature and authors form the backbone of Leland’s Commentarii, though he does refer to Ælfric’s use of “the Saxon tongue” (lingua Saxonica scriptae) (John Leland, Commentarii, vol. 1, 169), confusing him with the Archbishop of Canterbury of the same name, and laments how later authors who sought to write in Latin were forced to confront the “massive barbarity” (ingens barbaries) (John Leland, Commentarii, vol. 2,

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348; translation James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2: 1350–1547, 2002, 25). Stemming from the middle years of the 16th century, a smattering of wordlists, the earliest of which is that of Robert Talbot (ca. 1505–1558), reveal a curiosity with the Old English language. Matthew Parker’s A Testimonie of Antiquitie (1566/1567), which includes items by Ælfric, is believed to have been the first volume to reproduce Anglo-Saxon writing in type. At around the same time Laurence Nowell (1530–ca. 1570) was compiling the Vocabularium Saxonicum, consulted by generations of scholars in manuscript form. It was to be another century before an Old English dictionary was actually published with the appearance of William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum in 1659. Somner derived encouragement from William Camden’s (1553–1623) Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine, the Inhabitants Thereof, Their Languages, Names (1605), an innovative descriptive guide to the Anglo-Saxon heritage of England, touching on architectural remains, language and customs. In 1705 the scope of pre-Conquest learning was to become evident as never before with the addition of Humphrey Wanley’s inventory of manuscripts containing Old English to George Hickes’ earlier Institutiones grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae, et Moeso-Gothicae (1689). The foundations of modern scholarship on medieval literature are to be found in the 18th and 19th centuries. Popular accounts like Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (3 vols., 1799–1805) posited an almost evolutionary view of vernacular writing whereby the rude accents of Old English poetry foreshadowed the greater achievements of present day authors. This notion was still current in the time of Macauley (Thomas Babbington Macauley, History of England, 5 vols., 1848). The first recognition for medieval studies within the academy came in 1795 with Richard Rawlinson’s creation and assumption of a Chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. Rawlinson’s Chair was subsequently occupied by a number of Anglo-Saxonists, although the marginality of Old English literature meant that these were invariably autodidacts. On the other side of the Atlantic, Old English studies had a similarly long gestation period and the University of Virginia became the first college to offer it as a discipline in the 1830s. In the United Kingdom the systematic investigation of early vernacular languages flourished under the aegis of several individuals of exceptional linguistic range. With little in the way of dictionaries to aid him, the palaeographer Sir Frederic Madden used his long-term post at the British Museum to edit Havelok the Dane (1828), Gesta Romanorum (1838), Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight (1839) which he also discovered, Layamon’s Brut (1847) and the Wycliffite Bible (1850). Two of the early English Anglo-Saxonists of note

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Benjamin Thorpe and John Mitchell Kemble were heavily influenced by continental philologists; the Dane Rasmus Christian Rask in the case of the former and the German Jakob Grimm in the case of the latter. Thorpe published in Copenhagen an English translation of the second edition of Rask’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar (1830) and followed this with, amongst other works, the anthology Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (1834). The latter was embraced by the then Rawlinson Chair and remained a standard textbook, alongside Edward J. Vernon’s Guide to the Anglo-Saxon Tongue (1846), until the appearanc e of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876). These were in turn accompanied by the dictionaries of Bosworth (1789–1876), revised by Toller (1844–1930) (An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of Joseph Bosworth. Edited and Enlarged by Thomas Northcote Toller, 1882–98); Clark Hall (John R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary for the Use of Students, 1894); and James W. Bright’s Anglo-Saxon Grammar (1891), and Reader (1894). John Kemble is frequently credited with having introduced “scientific” rigour to the study of Old English in Britain (Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition, 1990, 34–35). He pioneered the now standard practice of using half-line lineation to organise Anglo-Saxon poetry on the printed page and the introduction to his edition of Beowulf reveals an interest in recovering the Germanic past of his homeland (John M. Kemble, The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Travellers Song and The Battle of Finnes-burh, 2nd ed., with trans., 2 vols., 1835–1837). His nationalism is similarly evident in The Saxons in England (2 vols., 1849) and in his two part essay on the connections between the runic inscriptions on the Northumbrian Ruthwell obelisk and the poem The Dream of the Rood (John M. Kemble, “On Anglo-Saxon Runes,” Archaeologia XXVII [1840]: 327–72, esp. 349–57; id., “Additional Observations on the Runic Obelisk at Ruthwell,” Archaeologia XXX [1843]: 31–46). The last-named anticipates the interdisciplinary flavour of much subsequent Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Where Old English poetry was concerned, the question of the historicity of events behind the epics continued to prove vexatious. The same problems had previously surfaced in relation to the narratives of Homer and Virgil and German philologists proffered that the Classics were assembled from lieder, units which circulated for centuries as oral legend. The so-called liedertheorie was extended to explain the late date of many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, though it seldom yielded favourable comparisons with ancient Greek and Latin literature. Karl Müllendorff, Bernhard Ten Brink, and Levin L. Schücking approached Beowulf as a composite of short episodic tales (Kar Müllendorff, “Die innere Geschichte des Beowulfs,” ZdfA 14 [1869]:

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193–244; Bernhard Ten Brink, Beowulf: Untersuchungen, 1888; Levin L. Schücking, Beowulfs Rückkehr: Eine kritische Studie, 1905). Across the English Channel, W. P. Ker found the same text irremediably diffuse when set alongside the Iliad and the Aeneid (W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance, 1st ed. 1897, 2nd ed., 1908, 159–78). If liedertheorie endorsed askew value judgments, Germany nonetheless set persistently high standards of scholarship which the Anglophone world would struggle to follow. The Old English poetic record was gathered in its entirety by Grein and Wülcker in the second half of the 19th century (Christian W. M. Grein, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, 2 vols., 1857–1858; 2nd rev. ed. Richard P. Wülcker in 3 vols., 1881–1898). Two generations were to pass before Krapp and Kirk Dobbie completed the successor to this collection (George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols., 1931–1953). British interest in Middle English literature during the same period was in no small way bound up with emerging political consciousness. When Thomas Dale resigned as the first Chair of English at University College, London, in 1835 his position was taken by the proto-Christian socialist F.D. Maurice, who was anxious to establish Chaucer at the centre of the canon. He felt that The Canterbury Tales, with their gallery of social types, demonstrated the essentially middle class origins of the English literary tradition and earmarked its suitability for study by the contemporary bourgeoisie and proletariat. Many of Maurice’s principles, both scholarly and political, were imbibed by Frederick R. Furnivall. The long time secretary of the Philological Society at Oxford, he was the prime instigator of the Early English Text Society (1864), the Chaucer Society and the Ballad Society (1868), and the Wyclif Society (1882). Furnivall’s Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1869) introduced the editorial practice of presenting parallel columns of variant manuscript texts. This was one of several innovations taken up by W.W. Skeat, for instance in his edition of Langland (William Walter Skeat, The Vision of Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols., 1886), and more generally by the E.E.T.S. Even though Skeat’s habit of occasionally “correcting” Chaucer’s language so as to neaten the poetic meter remains controversial, the inclusion of continental antecedent texts and glossary in his edition of the author’s complete works demonstrates how far English Studies had advanced towards becoming a fully fledged source-based discipline (William Walter Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Edited, from Numerous Manuscripts, 1894). The late 19th century also saw the publication of Horstmann’s Yorkshire Writers, which in spite of its spurious attribution of many works to Richard

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Rolle, long remained an invaluable anthology of devotional and didactic literature (Carl Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle and his Followers, 2 vols., 1895–1896). The turn of the 20th century heralded a new era of bibliographic endeavour, encompassing John Edwin Wells’ manual (John Edwin Wells, Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, 1916) and the Index to English Medieval Verse (Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index to Medieval English Verse, 1943), sources which enabled scholars to overcome the vagaries of referencing texts between different manuscripts. It also witnessed the first etymological dictionary of Old English (Ferdinand Holthausen, Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1934; 2nd ed. with a bibliographical supplement by H. C. Matthes, 1963; rpt. 1974) and the inception of a multi-volume Middle English dictionary (Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn, 1956–). New heights of rigour were attained at the heart of the canon through a line-by-line examination of Chaucer (John M. Manly, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of all Known Manuscripts, 1940) and attempts were made to establish authoritative editions in more marginal genres like romance (Middle English Metrical Romances, 2 vols., ed. W. H. French and C.B. Hale, 1930). C.2. New Criticism versus Exegetical Criticism (“Robertsonianism”) in the Mid-20th Century English studies post World War II was initially colored by the tension between two conflicting schools of thought. ‘Exegetical criticism,’ a term coined only in the 1980s (Lee Patterson, “Historical Criticism and the development of Chaucer Studies,” id., Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature, 1987, 3–39), emphasized the allegorical nature of medieval writing, imputing to literary texts a sophisticated engagement with theological questions first raised by the Church Fathers. The roots of this approach can be seen in an essay by J. M. Campbell (J. M. Campbell, “Patristic Studies and the Literature of Medieval England,” Speculum 8 [1933]: 465–78), though its application was most closely identified with the work of D.W. Robertson, Jr., and “Robertsonianism” or “the Princeton school,” after the university at which he was based, were often used as titles for the movement. He adopted Alain de Lille’s metaphor of the text as a fruit in which the shell or rind (the fable) was merely a covering to the kernel (the meaning) and argued, apropos Saint Augustine of Hippo’s De Doctrina Christiana, “that story and expression are of value only insofar as they leave the mind with a conception of fundamental doctrinal truths” (Bernard F. Huppé and D. W. Robertson, Fruyt and Chaf: Studies in Chaucer’s Allegories, 1950, 6; see also D. W. Robertson, “Historical Criticism,” 1950, in id.,

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Essays in Medieval Culture, 1980, 3–20; id., Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, 1951). Robertson’s neglect of romance analogues in his monograph on Chaucer (id., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, 1963) was noted at the time (R. E. Kaske, “Chaucer and Medieval Allegory,” English Literary History 30 [1963]: 175–92). Meanwhile others decried his perceived inattention to aesthetics and the apparent disposition towards searching for literary examples which neatly augmented his thesis (R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities, 2 vols., 1967, 2:246–58). Exegetical criticism became one of the motors driving the return to sources and a renewed emphasis on allegory in Anglo-Saxon studies. Mid20th-century editions of Beowulf searched for Christian echoes in the epic (C. L. Wrenn, Beowulf with the Finnesberg Fragment, 1953) as did critical studies (Morton W. Bloomfield, “Patristics and Old English Literature,” Comparative Literature XIV [1962]: 36–37, and 39–41; Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf, 1970). For Bernard Huppé and Geoffrey Shepherd Augustine’s theory of literature provided the main cipher for understanding Old English poetry (Bernard F. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry, 1959), both the manifestly allegorical, as in the Anglo-Saxon elaborations of the Old Testament found in the Junius XI manuscript (Geoffrey Shepherd, “Scriptural Poetry,” Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. Eric G. Stanley, 1966, 1–36), and the heroic (Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words: Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems, Vainglory, the Wonder of Creation, the Dream of the Rood, and Judith, 1970; Hero in the Earthly City: A Reading of Beowulf, 1984). Counter-posed to “Robertsonianism,” “New Criticism” (J. C. Ransom, The New Criticism, 1941), or “practical criticism” as it was known in the United Kingdom (I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; id., Practical Criticism, 1929), stressed the integrity of the text as an individual and self-sufficient artefact, dismissing the biography of the author and literary history as apparatus for producing a critical reading. The independence of the text was expressed through several figures, including the “well-wrought urn” (Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 1947) and the “verbal icon” (William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, 1954). New Criticism was indebted to the practices of the Russian formalists of the early 20th century. It sought to produce “explications” or “close readings” of literary works, whereby the reader was made conscious of the internal function of irony, symbolism, figures of speech, fallacy and ambiguity in the production and undercutting of meaning. For the study of medieval literature, New Criticism at first represented a break with the dominant tradition of philology. Tolkien’s decision

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to focus upon the vocabulary employed to describe Grendel and his mother propagated interest in the application of close reading to Old English texts (J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII [1936]: 245–95; Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of Old English Literature, 1965). In later medieval poetry New Criticism afforded the opportunity to concentrate on the function of irony and symbolism in authors such as Chaucer (Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Crucial Passages in Five of the Canterbury Tales: A Study in Irony and Symbol,” JEGP 52 [1953]: 294–311; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 1957). It also presented a means of interrogating the narrowly allegorical interpretations encouraged by exegetical criticism. Donaldson’s rejoinder to Robertson’s “Historical Criticism” demonstrates the potential inattention to verbal effects resulting from the reading of poetry through the prism of selected Scriptures and Augustine (E. Talbot Donaldson, “Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition,” Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum, 1960, 1–26). Leading advocates of close reading were not, however, wholly averse to philological endeavour as witnessed in Donaldson’s attempt to establish an edition of Piers Plowman (E. Talbot Donaldson and George Kane, Piers Plowman: The B Version, 1975; rev. 1988). Therein the footnotes are crammed with linguistic variants from different manuscripts as opposed to the notation of antecedents. The relict of the debate between “New Criticism” and “Exegetical Criticism” persists in the generation of scholars who reached maturity before the rise of literary theory. John V. Fleming has tried to establish the centrality of Augustine’s Cassiciacum dialogues to the education of Jean de Meun, author of the Roman de la Rose (John V. Fleming, Reason and the Lover, 1984) and has stressed the strong Classical antecedents of Chaucer (id., Classical Imitation & Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus, 1990). Ann Astell’s exploration the Song of Songs has revealed how exegesis seeped into religious and secular literature (Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages, 1990). C.3. Current Issues and Future Trends C.3.1. Germania and Latina in Old English Literary Criticism Joyce Hill has linked the rise in exegetical criticism within Old English studies with a shifting perception of early medieval literary endeavour, based around two contrasting viewpoints, Germania and Latina. Germania stressed “the survival of essential Germanic spirit, evidenced in vocabulary, formulaic structures, verse form, and those scenes and episodes which – so the

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critics claim – testify to the heroic ethos of the Anglo-Saxons” (Joyce Hill, “Confronting Germania Latina: Changing Responses to Old English Biblical Verse,” Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe: Proceedings of the First Germania Latina Conference held at the University of Groningen, 26 May 1989, ed. Richard North and Tette Hofstra, 1992, 71–88; here 71). During the 19th and early 20th centuries this approach predominated under the apostasy of Anglo-German scholarship. She labels exegetical criticism, as practiced by Huppé and Robertson, as “the extreme manifestation of the shift to the Christian (Latina) approach to Old English poetry” (North and Hofstra, 81). Hill suggests that these in turn affected the shape of the canon. During the height of the Germania phase, critical attention was focused squarely upon the heroic poems Beowulf and Widsi6 and the fragmentary remnants of Waldere and Finnsburh to the neglect of the series of Old Testament verses found in London, British Library, MS Junius XI. Ethnographic readings of Old English literature have resurfaced in more sophisticated guises, aided in recent years by the work of historians Patrick Wormald and Sarah Foot (Patrick Wormald, “Enga-Lond – The Making of an Allegiance,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7. 1 [1994]: 1–24; Sarah Foot, “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series 6 [1996]: 25–49). Wormald has questioned the privilege traditionally afforded to historiography over heroic poetry in recovering the attitudes of the later Christian Anglo-Saxons to the paganism of their ancestors. He asks us to consider the values conveyed by epic poets as being just as informative as the judgements of ecclesiastical commentators (Patrick Wormald, “Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy,” Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. T. Farrell, BAR 46 [1978]: 32–95). Nicholas Howe has investigated how the migration of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes to Britain continued to be an important legitimising myth in a range of writers from Archbishop Wulfstan to Bede and the Junius-poet, working after the conversion (Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, 1989). Those poems which depict documented historical conflicts (The Battle of Maldon, AD 991, ed. Donald G. Scragg, 1991; Janet Cooper, The Battle of Maldon: Fact and Fiction, 1993; C. R. Davis, “Cultural Historicity in the Battle of Maldon,” Philological Quarterly 78:1–2 [1999]: 151–69) and the disputed (Patrizia Lendinara, “The Battle of Brunanburh in later Stories and Romances,” Anglia 117.2 [1999]: 201–35) have also been re-assessed in their cultural and ethnic contexts.

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C.3.2. Theory and the Medieval Text Theory had its naissance in the study of modern literary texts, and yet recent decades have seen the application of conceptual or even counter-intuitive modes of thought to medieval writing. Early attempts at scrutinising literature in terms of the Marxist view of history proved to be short-lived in their influence (Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and its Social Foundations, 1956). These accounts were succeeded in the 1980s by a new generation of historical analyses informed by cultural materialism (David Aers, Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, 1986). The pertinence of New Historicism, a line of enquiry developed first within Renaissance literary studies, has been debated (Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 1980; Paul Strohm, “Postmodernism and History,” id., Theory and the Premodern Text, 2000, 149–64), and the spectre cast over literature by political upheavals, most prominently the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt, continues to exercise fascination (J. R. Maddicott, “Poems of Social Protest in Early Fourteenth-Century England,” England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. Mark Ormrod, 1986, 130–44; Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts, 1992). Gender studies have interacted in productive ways with English studies. Old English heroic poetry has been re-evaluated for its portrayal of feminine protagonists (Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, 1986) with some critics contending that Cynewulf’s Elene possesses considerable agency for a woman (Alexandra Hennessey Olson, “Cynewulf’s Autonomous Women: A Reconsideration of Elene and Juliana,” New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olson, 1990, 222–32), whereas others see the character’s gender as part of her casting as an elaborate, if conventional, figura for the Church (Clare A. Lees, “At a Crossroads: Old English and Feminist Criticism,” Reading Old English Texts, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, 1997, 146–69). In later literature, the mystic Julian of Norwich’s claim to be a “simple creature vnlettyrde” has come to be seen as something more than a reflection upon the state of her schooling. Her Shewings have frequently been studied alongside The Book of Margery Kempe as expressive of, and even subversive of, medieval constructions of the female body and femininity (Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 1991; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 1994; Elizabeth Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, 2004). The interrogation of the human subject and authorial intention, two pillars of literary criticism, have come to be re-considered in the light of psycho-

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analysis and queer theory. Psychoanalytic readings of Beowulf (Clare A. Lees, “Men and Beowulf,” Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. id., 1994, 129–40; Judy Anne White, Hero-Ego in Search of a Self: A Jungian Reading of Beowulf, 2004) have scrutinized the heroic ethic of the poem, whilst in the study of later medieval romance the questioning of patriarchal power has become a leitmotif (Clare R. Kinney, “The Disembodied Hero and the Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees, 47–60; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Gowther among the Dogs: Becoming Inhuman c.1400,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 1997, 219–44). Psychoanalysis has also influenced the interpretation of Chaucer (L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer, 2002) and the interaction between the male hagiographer and his female subject (Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint, 2000). “Queer”-informed readings have illumined subversive gender relations in romance (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 2003; Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” diacritics 24, 2–3 [1994]: 205–26). Meanwhile, Queer Studies has made possible a radical re-evaluation of John Gower, a writer sometimes seen as an uncomplicated exponent of politically conservative myth and literature (Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex and Politics, 2003), as well as one Anglo-Saxon poem, maligned as a problem text for its generic uniqueness and manifest paganism (David Townsend, “The Naked Truth of the King’s Affection in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre [Reflections on constructions of gender and sexuality],” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.1 [2004]: 173–95). Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval pursues “historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity of sex,” a call to see the increasing instability of categories of sexuality as a hermeneutic tool for understanding the past (Carloyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 1999, 1). Concepts of “Otherness” now inform the reading of Mandeville’s Travels (Chapter 5 of Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, 2003). One of the additional insights of post-colonialism has been to see the spread of early English studies across the world through such organs as the E.E.T.S. as being complicit with the values of colonialist enterprise (Kathleen Biddick, “introduction,” The Shock of Medievalism, 1998).

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C.3.3. The Return to Philology The manuscript and the codex have never been entirely eliminated as fertile fields of enquiry. Interest in the nature of literacy (Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, c. 1066–1307, 1979), the way literature was memorialised (Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory) and the composition of the reading public (Felicity Riddy, ‘“Women Talking about the Things of God’: A Late Medieval Subculture,” Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale, 1993, 104–27) have ensured the persistence of the material letter in Medieval English Studies. In the early 1990s the coming of a “new philology” was postulated (Speculum 65 [1990]). One of the watchwords of this movement was “mouvance,” the notion that the scribe is in some instances as much the maker of the medieval text as the author, since many considerations affecting the reception of a text, such as lineation and interpolation, lie in his hands (Bella Millet, “Mouvance and the Medieval Author,” Late Medieval Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. Alistair J. Minnis, 1994, 9–20; Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, 1972). Many of the protocols of “new” philology were, however, already long evident in the work of scholars and editors like E. J. Dobson (E. J. Dobson ed., The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from B.M. Cotton MS. Cotton Cleopatra C.VI, 1972), Pamela Gradon (Elene, ed. Pamela Gradon, 1958) and Malcolm Godden (Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series: Text, ed. Malcom Godden, 1979). A specific point of rupture with the “old philology” remains unidentified. In the area of dialectology, the completion of The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English has given a comprehensive view of the language used in postConquest vernacular manuscripts (Angus McIntosh and M. L. Samuels, The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, 4 vols., 1987), though reservations have been expressed about the practical value of the project to English textual criticism (Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. Felicity Riddy, 1991). The continued importance of palaeography to literary studies as opposed to philology per se has been demonstrated by Linne Mooney’s recent, and contentious, unmasking of Chaucer’s “drasty” scribe as Adam Pinkshurst. Pinkshurst was a clerk hitherto known for his copying of petitions rather than poetry (Linne Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 [2006]: 97–138).

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C.3.4. Medieval Literary Theory The variegation of English studies to absorb a range of contemporary conceptual approaches has coincided with renewed interest in pre-modern attitudes towards authorship and textual authority. The potential anachronism of applying, for instance structuralist or poststructuralist methodologies has helped give rise to the postulation of a “medieval literary theory.” Minnis and Scott have sought to recover and translate the auctores, scholastic authorities who were appropriated during the Middle Ages (Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 1984, 1988; Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c1100-c1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. Alistair J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, with David Wallace, 1988) Amongst the topics illumined by their work are the different levels of exegesis and the aesthetic value of literature as comprehended in the Middle Ages. Minnis’s and Scott’s framework has been followed up by the editors of the argued anthology The Idea of the Vernacular, which brings together prologues from Middle English works and uncovers the politics and theory behind the act of translation (The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., 1999). A number of other collections have attempted to situate the drive towards composition in Middle English within a broader European context of translation (The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren, 2002). Rita Copeland’s coining of the expressions “primary” and “secondary” translation has lent vitality to the debate over the relationship between writing in which the “exegetical motive” seems to take precedence and literature by the likes of Chaucer, which renders continental or Latin sources into Middle English and yet reveal greater “rhetorical” or “literary” ambition (Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts, 1991, 94). The work of Seth Lerer shows indebtedness to both medieval and modern literary theories. His discussions of authority and authorship reference the auctores and exploit structuralist and post-structuralist conceptions of the nature of the sign (Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature, 1991). C.3.5. Periodization and the Rethinking of the Canon The division of medieval writing into separate periods has been one of the practices to be re-evaluated in the light of modern criticism. Hitherto it was commonplace to speak of the early Middle Ages and later Middle Ages as though they were distinct entities, each possessing his own literatures. Upon

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reflection, the boundary between Old English and Middle English is increasingly porous. Work on post-Conquest writing in English has highlighted how past studies have underestimated the vitality of the vernacular in the Central Middle Ages (Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, 2000). Treharne brings to our attention a number of homilies produced after Ælfric and Latin sermons which include piquant annotations in English (Elaine M. Treharne, “The Production and Script of Manuscripts Containing English Religious Texts in the First Half of the Twelfth Century,” Rewriting Old English, 11–40), also Susan Irvine reveals a continued reverence towards Anglo-Saxon literature during the Latinate Central Middle Ages (Susan Irvine, “The Compilation and Use of Manuscripts Containing Old English in the Twelfth Century,” Rewriting Old English, 41–61). At the other end of the chronological scale, Derek Pearsall, James Simpson, and David Lawton have each drawn into question the priority long given to the literature of the 14th century over that of the 15th. The title of an essay by Lawton encapsulates how the generations following Chaucer’s death had been retrospectively seen to witness an atrophying of literary skill and ambition (David Lawton, “The Dullness of the fifteenth century,” English Literary History 54 [1987]: 761–99). Hoccleve’s reputation has been rehabilitated so that he is now no longer seen as merely a clerkly imitator of Chaucer (Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England, 2001; Albrecht Classen, Die autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelaltlers, 1991), and Lydgate has re-emerged as a hagiographer and historiographer of incidence (Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate, 1970). Simpson reminds us of the fact that Julian of Norwich died after 1416 and that Margery Kempe lived on until ca. 1439, so that to group these women among the “14th-century mystics” would be to risk overlooking the changing context to religious writing since the death of Rolle in 1349 (James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2: 1350–1547, 2002). Nicholas Watson has demonstrated that the copying and circulation of Middle English religious literature occurred under ecclesiastical prohibitions not envisaged by their authors (Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 [1995]: 822–64). Helen Cooper’s study of romance utilizes the taxonomy of evolutionary biology to unpick the development of the genre. “Meme” expresses the capacity of an individual motif, such as the penitential quest, to behave like a gene, in its capacity “to replicate faithfully and abundantly, but also on

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occasion to adapt, to mutate, and therefore survive in different cultures” (Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare, 2004, 3). A more seminal role has simultaneously been argued for popular romance (Nicola F. McDonald, Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, 2004). D. Summary Writing at the beginning of the 1990s, Allen Frantzen reflected upon how the quest for a sense of origin has always been intrinsic to Old English studies (The Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition, 1990). The examination of early vernacular literature yields a host of questions about linguistic and ethnic antecedents, and also about how English relates to Latin, the dominant language of ecclesiastical and secular administrative communication. Origins loom large in institutionalised university English studies to which Frantzen ascribes a Foucauldian desire to excavate an epistemological ground for present endeavours. Both Old and Middle English studies continue to be shaped by the tension between emergent methodologies and the pull of philology in its various guises. Select Bibliography Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990); R. D. Fulk and C. M. Cain, A History of Old English Literature, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Lee Patterson, “On the Margins: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (January 1990): 87–108; Wendy Scase, “Medieval Studies and the Future of English,” Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in Twenty-First Century Education, ed. id. (Leicester: English Association, 2002); Paul Theiner, “Medieval English Literature,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992).

Robin Gilbank

Enlightenment Perspectives on the Middle Ages A. Definition of the Period Enlightenment can either be understood ahistorically as a cultural manner of thought, or historically as an epoch. As an epoch, the Enlightenment covers, at most, the period between 1688, when Charles Perrault began the Querelle

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des Anciens et des Modernes in the Academie Francaise, and the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804. The period thus covers the rationalism of the early Enlightenment, Sentimentalism, ‘Sturm and Drang,’ Weimar Classicism, the Early Romantics, and the Berlin Late Enlightenment. However, a narrower definition of ‘Enlightenment’ underlies the following article. It should be remembered, although this cannot be considered in the present article, that elements of the Middle Ages continued to be of significance in the culture of the Enlightenment (law, Christian religion, scholarship, politics, and lordship), as well as its institutions (courts, monasteries, churches, libraries, universities, courts, and administrative structures) and its art (architecture, painting, texts). B. Enlightenment in the Middle Ages A few studies have focused on the ahistoric aspect of the Enlightenment, claiming a group of enlightenment ideas as peculiarly medieval. They regard Enlightenment as a modernizing movement which began in the early modern period and especially in the late Middle Ages. An overview can be found in the work of Kurt Flasch and Udo R. Jeck (Das Licht der Vernunft: Die Anfänge der Aufklärung im Mittelalter, ed. Kurt Flasch, and Udo R. Jeck, 1997), as well as the collection of essays on Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment (Walter Haug, “Experimenta medietatis im Mittelalter,” Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der europäischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Jochen Schmidt, 1989, 129–51; and Kurt Flasch, “Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung im späten Mittelalter,” op. cit., 152–67). Maimonides, Averroes, Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, and Boccaccio have all been linked to the enlightenment. C. ‘Medieval’ as a Pejorative Term in the Enlightenment The concept of the “dark Middle Ages” is explored in two studies (Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom finsteren Mittelalter, 1932; Klaus Arnold, “Das finstere Mittelalter: Zur Genese und Phänomenologie eines Fehlurteils,” Saeculum 32 [1981]: 287–300;). Furthermore, Haslag investigates the change in meaning of the term ‘Gothic’ in relation to conceptions of the barbaric and of the dark night (Josef Haslag, Gothic im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhunder: Eine wort- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung, 1963). Varga argues that medieval structures were active within the Enlightenment, but were strongly and systematically opposed by William Robertson, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, David Hume, Voltaire, Marie Jean Caritat de Condorcet, and Isaak Iselin. She points to the continued presence of the topos of night in the later Johann Gottfried Herder (“Nacht der

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mittleren Zeiten,” night of the middle times, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1787). The Enlightenment developed three points of criticism: a) criticism of medieval understanding of religion; b) criticism of medieval culture; c) criticism of the absence of a concept of statehood in the Middle Ages. The theorists named generally understand the Middle Ages as a period of decline. Arnold expands this argument. The term “dark Middle Ages” was first found in Petrarca and Boccaccio. The Renaissance saw itself as an epoch of light, which was played off against the darkness of the Middle Ages, which were viewed negatively. The motif can again be found in the Enlightenment. In his Essais sur Moeurs (1752–1756), Voltaire spoke of “ces tristes temps,” “siècle d’ignorance,” of ignorance, rawness, superstition, and barbarism. David Hume added to the picture: “some faint glimmerings of common sense might sometimes pierce through the thick cloud of ignorance.” In Leviatan (1677) Thomas Hobbes spoke of a “kingdom of darkness.” Yet Arnold points out that the negative view was not the only one. Valentin Ernst Löscher made an early rescue attempt in his Die Historie der Mittleren Zeiten als ein Licht aus der Finsterniß vorgestellet (1725). In 1718 Polykarp Leyser went so far as to speak of the riches of medieval poetry in his Dissertatio de ficta medii aevi barbarie inprimis circa poesiam Latinam. In this connection, Zimmermann further considers Löscher’s manifesto, although it never got beyond the draft stage (Harald Zimmermann, “Valentin Ernst Löscher, das finstere Mittelalter und dessen Saeculum obscurum,” Gesellschaft, Kultur, Rezeption und Originalität im Wachsen einer europäischen Literatur und Geistigkeit, ed. Karl Bosl, 1975, 259–77). Josef Haslag (Gothic, 1963) has shown the development of the term ‘Gothic’ in English literature. This term, too, was taken over from the Renaissance. The Neo-classical period used it as a derogatory term for an idea of art and a political attitude which the Middle Ages had not yet overcome. In the course of its development, ‘Gothic’ came to be used as a classification of a type of style, which was later used ahistorically: ‘Gothic taste’ set against ‘true taste.’ The Neo-classic epoch rejected Gothic architecture and pre-Enlightenment garden design. The decisive change can be found in a dualistic attitude which was fully developed in England around 1750. Contemporary historiography understood ‘Gothic’ as describing something barbaric, yet at the same time Germanic and medieval society and politics were thought of as highly civilized. The models were the totally uncivilized barbarian, or the hospitable, moderate and brave, yet also just member of a society which viewed freedom as the highest good. The familiar tripartite scheme of ideal antiquity, barbaric

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Middle Ages, and the revival of the ideal in the Renaissance began to dissolve. These characteristics also dominated the debate surrounding the reception of the Middle Ages in other European countries. By the early Enlightenment period, some scholars, critics, and thinkers used the term ‘Gothic’ in art appreciation. James Thomson or Richard Steele viewed the medieval epoch positively; Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury rejected it as a period lacking freedom; Thomas Warton even spoke of Gothic slavery. However, the whole early and middle Enlightenment was dominated by the traditional view of the Middle Ages as an epoch of night. The terms “German,” “Teutonic,” “northern,” “Gothic,” and “barbarian” could be easily substituted for each other. However, in the Neo-classical period and the transition to the late Enlightenment, study of the older texts of the North, such as the Gothic Bible, and a growing knowledge of old Scandinavian literature, began to alter attitudes, especially among British historians and philosophers. The aesthetic and poetic condemnation lasted longer. In debates about taste, Gothic was whatever was not Greco-Roman. The argumentation was expanded on the basis of architecture, painting, and landscapes. Everything ‘unnatural’ was labeled as ‘Gothic,’ as raw and barbaric. The old cathedrals, in particular, were perceived as ugly. Musical aesthetics agreed: opera was ‘Gothic’ with its swollen style (compared to tumors) and bombastic ornamentation. In the late Enlightenment, the term ‘Gothic’ underwent several changes of meaning. It certainly changed from an ethnological, political or social concept to a stylistic term which could be used ahistorically. By 1760 at the latest, the Middle Ages were viewed not as the night of reason, which was to be opposed, but as a night with positive connotations. Richard Hurt introduced a relativized reading of the period, connecting ‘Gothic’ with ‘chivalry’ and ‘romance’ (Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 1762). Ossian’s songs determined the outcome of the matter: aesthetically, ‘Gothic’ now partook of the spirit of the sublime, of romance and fancy. With Ossian and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), a sensational novel drawing on medieval matter and motifs, a positive concept of the Middle Ages appeared in poetics, which the Romantics quickly and enthusiastically espoused for their own purposes. D. The Middle Ages Before and During the Early Enlightenment Heinrich Heine argued that the discovery of medieval culture was an achievement of German Romanticism (Heinrich Heine, Die romantische Schule, 1836). While this belief held good for over a century, today it is only of literary-his-

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torical significance (Wolfgang Harms, “Das Interesse an mittelalterlicher deutscher Literatur zwischen der Reformationszeit und der Frühromantik,” Akten des VI. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses, ed. Heinz Rupp and HansGert Roloff, 1981, 60–84). There are two reasons for this: first, the Renaissance appears in some discussions as an integral part of the early enlightenment (Daniel G. Morhof, Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, 2nd ed. 1700; cf. Wolfgang Beutin, “Contraria contrariis curantur? Über die Interdependenzen von Mittelalter-Rezeption und Renaissance-Rezeption von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart,” Mittelalter-Rezeption, ed. Ulrich Müller et al., 1996, 46–61); second, the epochs after 1500 continued traditions and research of and about the Middle Ages. Arnold lists Christoph Cellarius, Du Cange, Georg Horn, Philipp Labbé, William Camden, and Estienne Pasquier. The Baroque period was heavily influenced by the Middle Ages, although the term itself had no clear meaning then (Wolfgang Harms, “Rezeption des Mittelalters im Barock,” Deutsche Barockliteratur und europäische Kultur, ed. Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Deutsche Barockliteratur, 1977, 23–52). Baroque reception of the Middle Ages has been described in detail in early studies like that of Lempicki (Sigmund von Lempicki, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1920, 99–188; Rudolf von Raumer, Geschichte der germanischen Philologie vorzugsweise in Deutschland, 1870, 154–93, 247–91; Hermann Paul, “Geschichte der germanischen Philologie,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, ed. Hermann Paul, vol. 1, 1897, 2nd ed. 1901, 9–158) and briefly sketched by Janota (Johannes Janota, “Zur Rezeption mittelalterlicher Literatur zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James Poag, Gerhild Scholz-Williams, 1983, 37–43). Janota describes the work of Melchior H. Goldast as the most important stage of the reception, and a long list of medieval works which received intensive attention (Melchior H. Goldast, Paraeneticorum veterum, pars I, 1604; on this: Wolfgang Harms, “Des Winbeckes Genius. Zur Einschätzung didaktischer Poesie des deutschen Mittelalters im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” MittelalterRezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 46–59). Harms argues differently, rejecting the thesis and maintaining that the reception of individual works was rare. Harms believes that the reception of the mentality of the Middle Ages was more important than that of content, though at the same time he points to a small but real interest in the Latin literature of the Middle Ages, as well as vernacular chapbooks and romances. The Baroque seems to have viewed the Middle Ages as possessed of high ethical value and a secure authority for both scientific and religious knowledge. In particular, the encyclopedic literature of the baroque draws on medieval texts. Harms

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also shows that traditions survived within art history on the basis of the example of fortune’s wheel. As Albrecht Classen could demonstrate, considerably more Baroque authors were interested in and drew more from the medieval world than has been assumed so far (Albrecht Classen, “Literarhistorische Reflexionen in der Barockliteratur: Interesse an und Widerstand gegen das Mittelalter als Medium der poetischen Selbstidentifikation im Werk von Lohenstein und Hoffmannswaldau,” Etudes Germaniques 63.3 [2008]: 551–70). E.1. The German Enlightenment and the Middle Ages Only two detailed monographs address the history of reception. Christoph Schmid divided it into four phases: around the mid-18th century (Gottsched, Bodmer); Sturm und Drang (Herder, Ossian, folk song); the transition to the early Romantics (Bodmer and his ‘school’, ballads); and the early Romantics (Novalis, Tieck). He sees a dominant continuity of reception between the early Enlightenment and the Romantics (Christoph Schmid, Die Mittelalterrezeption des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik, 1979). Felix Leibrock assesses the manuscripts of Bodmer and Gottsched, with the focus of his study resting not on the portrayal of the Middle Ages, but from the standpoint of memory and understanding, which he sees as important for Bodmer (Felix Leibrock, Aufklärung und Mittelalter: Bodmer, Gottsched und die mittelalterliche deutsche Literatur, 1988). For him the ideas of Gottsched and Bodmer are in radical opposition to each other. Leibrock also wrote the only study containing a literature review on the theme of ‘reception of the Middle Ages’ in the works of both authors (9–14). A shorter overview of the history of reception is also offered by Brinker-Gabler (Gisela BrinkerGabler, Poetisch-wissenschaftliche Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ludwig Tiecks Erneuerung altdeutscher Literatur, 1980).According to existing views, the study and reception of the Middle Ages built upon the pejorative judgment of the Renaissance, which viewed (as shown in the example of England) the epoch as a time of decay, barbarism, darkness, superstition, scholasticism, ignorance, despotism, and a decline in morals. The reformation criticism of the Catholic church was expanded by the Enlightenment to apply to the Middle Ages as a whole. The criticism by empirical natural scientists of book learning strengthened this rejection. On the other hand, a minority opinion quickly formed which stressed continuity between the eras. This was particularly the case in Scandinavia, where scholars of the Nordic Enlightenment developed a positive view of the Germanic period. The models of world literature, which quickly emerged within literary theory and literary history, and which viewed the Middle Ages as an independent era, should also be taken into

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account here (Reinhold Münster, “Der Beginn der Komparatistik in der Aufklärung und die Konzeption der Weltliteratur,” Estudios Filológicos Alemanes 12 [2006]: 147–60). E.2. The Significance of Bodmer The focus of the current research of reception has been on the work of Johann Jakob Bodmer (Wolfgang Bender, J. J. Bodmer und J. J. Breitinger, 1973, 30–51; Albert Debrunner, Das güldene schwäbische Alter: Johann Jakob Bodmer und das Mittelalter als Vorbildzeit im 18. Jahrhundert, 1996; Jan-Dirk Müller, “J. J. Bodmers Poetik und die Wiederentdeckung mittelhochdeutscher Epen,” Euphorion 71 [1977]: 336–52; Paul Merker, “J. J. Bodmers Parzivalbearbeitung,” Vom Werden des deutschen Geistes: Festschrift Gustav Ehrismann, ed. Paul Merker and Wolfgang Stammler, 1925, 196–219; Volker Mertens, “Bodmer und die Folgen,” Die Deutschen und ihr Mittelalter: Themen und Funktionen moderner Geschichtsbilder vom Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff, 1992, 55–80; Berta Raposo, “Parzival ilustrado, Parzival romántico: Bodmer y Fouqué,” Parzvial: Reescritura y transformación, ed. eadem, 2000, 185–202). Delbrunner’s study aims to depict Bodmer’s part in the development of the Romantic view of the Middle Ages, and describes the influence of the Zurich artist on the mode of observations of the 18th century with regard to literature and art. The monograph places Bodmer’s method of reception in the context of the discourse of the time (understanding of history, poetry as Anacreonics, Thomas Blackwell’s theories, parallels between the Middle Ages and antiquity, architecture). Scholarship has, as whole, stressed the significance of Bodmer as an editor and a poet who revived medieval themes and material, and even wrote in Middle High German, and as a literary critic and historian. Bodmer’s examination of the Middle Ages began in his Discoursen der Mahler (1721–1723). In it, he compared Gothic architecture with Baroque fashion, and rejected both. This attitude was based on an enlightened cultural criticism and the aesthetic ‘tumor criticism’ (Tumorkritik), attacking swollen, ugly forms, in vogue at the time. Bodmer perceived a continuity with inflated stylistic techniques such as hyperbole, metaphor, and wordplay. He criticized the doggerel of previous epochs. Equally, he rejected the chivalric romances and adventure stories, the tales of murder and violent death, witch stories, alchemical books and astrological writings. His attitude in the Discoursen tended ever more to ahistorical judgments, such as he might have found in British Classicism, which had a strong influence on the circle around the Moralische Wochenschrift. Bodmer developed a new approach in his Character Der Teutschen Gedichte (1734). Bodmer defended German poetry against the attacks of the Abbé Bouhours in the Querelle des Anciens et des Mod-

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ernes, and the reproach that Germans were incapable of culture. He painted a history of progress in the matter of ‘taste’ (Geschmack), which was simultaneously a critical portrayal of German literary history. In the night of history, bards sang their sublime songs, which echoed the raw manners of the populace, and the bardic song soon sank back into the dark night. Monks, with their superstitious teaching, drove men and art still deeper into the dark. The Middle Ages were in “tieffer Dunckelheit” (deep darkness). A dim light shone under the Hohenstaufens, as the “Winsbekin” sang her didactic poems (he refers to an anonymous 13th-century didactic debate poem involving a mother and her daughter). Once again art fell back into barbarism, into a fantastic-wild world, and the savage night. Only with Sebastian Brandt and Johann Fischart did the light begin to return in the Renaissance, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam’s art, as if by itself, revived. The height of artistic development, however, was the poetry of Martin Opitz (1597–1639). Once again, Bodmer turned to the English and French classicist aesthetics (Richard Steele, Joseph Addison; Nicolas Boileau) and disarmed the criticism of the alleged provincialism of medieval literature. The ‘bardic’ period and that of the Hohenstaufens, later Bodmer’s ‘Swabian’ period were depicted as positive developments. This method of appraisal can be found in Tactitus and Caesar – Bodmer used Roman opinions in his understanding. The Catholic Church – Bodmer was a Reformed minister in Zürich – was criticized from the standpoint of the reformed tradition. The next stage of reception can be found in the text Von den vortrefflichen Umständen für die Poesie unter den Kaisern aus dem schwäbischen Hause (in Sammlung Critischer, Poetischer und Geistvoller Schriften, 7th part, 1743). Here enlightened anti-feudalism combined with Blackwell’s theories on Homer. Bodmer reapplied the classical model of Homeric Greece to the European Middle Ages. Greece replaced Rome. The key features of this innovative essay are: an enlightened conception of nature, an expanded conception of a high medieval cultural progress influenced by bourgeois-urban mobility, and more general civilizing developments, the abandoning of purely national criteria of reception, and a recognition of extra-national influences on culture, the description of specific feudal social and cultural experiences, the actual living conditions of medieval singers, and finally the interpretative possibilities of a liberal, sensualist aesthetics of effect and expression. Some thoughts on an authentic emotionality of the Middle Ages were also explored. To be sure, this essay was a giant step in a new direction for medieval reception (Anacreonics and sentimentalism served as the basic models). This change of events cannot be fully grasped without a consideration of Enlightenment editorial activity. Bodmer’s interest as a collector ranged from

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the Bible to medieval texts; he was particularly interested in lyric poetry, including that of the Paris Minnesänger manuscript. He edited texts from the Codex Mannese. He drew parallels between the lyrics from the 13th century [really the 12th] (Proben der alten schwäbischen Poesie des Dreyzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1748) and those from antiquity to the Anacreonics, the typical Enlightenment literary form, which Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Johann Peter Uz, and Johann Nicolaus Götz had made the dominant paradigm, with encouragement from Friedrich von Hagedorn. In Neue Critische Briefe (1749) Bodmer discussed the influence of the lyrics from the Provence (France) on Minnesang, which he thought was transmitted via Tuscan literature. Bodmer came to favor the art of the south (in contrast to the research of his Scandinavian contemporaries) in his reception of the Middle Ages, and he thus attempted to show the similarities between the lyrics of the Provence and Swabia. (In this connection, he published his own Middle High German compositions). In all his works, sharp criticism of the Catholic church remained. However, Bodmer connected his criticism ever more closely with Enlightenment historicism as established in the middle period of the Enlightenment, and he also drew from Abbé Dubos’s climate theories. The positive response which his poetry edition received, particularly from the Anacreontics and Hagedorn, encouraged Bodmer to bring out his Sammlung von Minnesingern aus dem schwäbischen Zeitpuncte CXL Dichter enthaltend, durch Rüdiger Manessen … (1758, 1759). Although Bodmer, rejecting knightly and adventurous stories, regarded medieval epics with skepticism, he reworked Parzival (Der Parcival. Ein Gedicht in Wolframs von Eschilbach Denckart …, 1753) for an edition. He also turned to the Nibelungenlied. Jacob Hermann Obereit, the medical doctor who had discovered manuscript C at Schloß Hohenems, informed Bodmer of his find, who published the manuscript under the title Crimhilden Rache, und die Klage, zwey Heldengedichte: Aus dem schwäbischen Zeitpuncte. Samt Fragmenten aus dem Gedichte von den Nibelungen und aus dem Josaphat. Darzu kömmt ein Glossarium (1757). Bodmer still clung to Blackwell’s theories, and compared the Nibelungenlied with the Ilias. Bodmer’s preoccupation with the Middle Ages continued for the rest of his life. However, Sturm und Drang developed new paradigms of reception, which the elderly Bodmer rejected. In Literarische Denkmale von verschiedenen Verfassern (1779) he opposed the views of Herder and the importance of the Nordic-Germanic in literature. However, his editorial work continued with Altenglische Balladen: Fabel von Laudine. Siegeslied der Franken (1780).

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E.3. Gottsched’s Contribution Gottsched’s significance lies in his literary criticism and historical writings, as well as his frequent efforts to acquire medieval texts, and so to form a kind of school. Scholarship has placed emphasis on his concept of the patron. Gottsched attempted to interest absolute rulers of his time in the medieval period and its literature. He quickly developed the goal of a comprehensive history of literature and language, but his various drafts remained incomplete. His plan to tackle the literary history of the Middle Ages can be shown to have existed by 1742 at the latest. Gottsched made intensive use of the various editions produced in the Baroque period or earlier. There is evidence of countless research trips to libraries in search of medieval texts (he consulted libraries in Vienna, the monasteries of Melk and Neuburg, Gotha, Kassel, Göttingen, Hanover, Braunschweig, Wolfenbüttel, Dresden, and Leipzig). A comprehensive list of texts which Gottsched owned or obtained copies from can be found in Leibrock (47–49). Gottsched also published the work of other authors who had concerned themselves with the Middle Ages. In a speech delivered at the University of Leipzig in 1746, the Abhandlung von dem Flore der deutschen Poesie, zu Kaiser Friedrichs des ersten Zeiten, eine Rede, Gottsched sketched out his concept of literary history. His model of understanding, and the selection of his sources, owed much to Tacitus. He placed the beginnings of German poetry with the bards; Charlemagne was praised as a patron of the arts and the sciences. Despite his sympathy for absolutism, Gottsched particularly criticized the Catholic Church and the Pope. A further preparatory work on the history of literature can be found in the Nöthiger Vorrat zur Geschichte der deutschen Dramatischen Dichtkunst (vol. 1, 1757; vol. 2, 1765), a catalogue of dramatic works from 1450 to 1760. Gottsched’s handwritten bibliography, Verzeichnis einiger alter deutscher Gedichte, so im XVten XVIten und XVIIten Jahrhunderte durch den Druck bekannt gemacht worden (1767), is also worthy of note. Gottsched, too, initially analyzed medieval texts according to the paradigms of Classicism, but increasingly turned to more academic-objective positions. Gottsched, as an editor and critic, appeared most concerned with questions of dating and origins. He was also interested in Old French epics. Gottsched made few alterations to the linguistic form of the Middle and Old High German texts, and hoped that the reader would learn the old languages. This can be seen, too, in his translation of Reineke Fuchs (1752, edition and translation). Leibrock provides a further list of his publications (61–62). Gottsched’s concentration on the prince as patron (both in the past and in his present) remained. In his Critischen Dichtkunst (esp. 4th ed., 1751; 1st ed. 1729) Gottsched added many sections on medieval literature. In the chapters on Milesian tales

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and knightly novels and heroic epic, he undertook a periodization of German epic poetry. The criterion he used was the matter of the poems: Theoderic’s conquest of Italy, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, Charlemagne and the deeds of Roland, the crusades. Reineke Fuchs is classed with the ‘comic heroic epic.’ A comparison of Gottsched and Bodmer shows that their opinions were frequently opposed. Gottsched paid more attention to Old High German literature, interpreted the texts from the perspective of courtly patronage, and portrays the Middle Ages in relation to national ideology and the dynasties of the day. While Bodmer gave central importance to lyric poetry, Gottsched was most interested in the didactic tendencies of medieval literature. His intellectual model was defined by three stages: the mythological, bardic period, the age of heroic epic, and the crusades. E.4. The Reception of the Middle Ages Around Gottsched and Bodmer In the first phase, the school around Gottsched replied to Bodmer’s 1734 didactic poem on Die Teutsche Poesie. Johann J. Schwabe published Der Deutsche Dichterkrieg (1741). He attempted to integrate the Middle Ages into the courtly tradition (specifically, that of the Saxon court), and to view it as a national inheritance. In opposition to Bodmer, he rehabilitated the bardic poetry, the love of liberty, and the heroism of the Germanic tribes in their war of independence against Rome. He also viewed the clerical early Middle Ages positively, as the monasteries made a contribution to education. Schwabe shows himself to be a strict follower of Enlightenment ideas arguing for a parallel to the pedagogical ideals of his own era. Like Bodmer, Schwabe developed comparisons here with antiquity (Homer) and medieval authors. Schwabe’s attitude cannot be understood without consideration of the development of research into Scandinavian literature. Germanic scholarship became particularly important, thanks to D. von Stade, Frederik Rostgaard, Olof Rudbeck, Erik Berelius, Gerg Stjernhjelm, who edited the Edda, Johann G. von Eckhart (Hildebrandslied), Johann Philipp Palthen (Tatian), and D. Dieckmann (Maurus Rhabanus). From 1760, knowledge of Germanic culture and Nordic literature became more widespread. Christian D. Ebeling published a Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Dichtkunst in the Hannoverisches Magazin (1767), based on Michel Hubers Choix de poesis allemands (1766). He described the character of medieval literature critically, and judged it according to the spirit of the north. At that point, Skaldic poetry was enjoying a wide reception in Scandinavia through the efforts of Daniel Bartholius, Erich Julius Björner, and Ole Wormius. The trend was strengthened by Thomas Percy’s Relicks of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and

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James Macpherson’s Fragments (1760–1763), as well as by the imitations of Ossian. The sphere of influence of the Gottsched school also included the 18thcentury Austrian researchers who had close ties with Gottsched and advised him on his travels (Fritz Peter Knapp, “Die altdeutsche Dichtung als Gegenstand literarhistorischer Forschung in Österreich von den Brüdern Pez bis zu Friedrich Schlegels Wiener Vorlesungen im Jahre 1812,” Die österreichische Literatur: Ihr Profil an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert, 1750–1830, ed. Herbert Zeman, vol. 2, 1979, 697–734). The Benedictines Bernhard and Hieronymus Pez, who both undertook countless journeys in Austria, Switzerland, and Bavaria in the hopes of locating and collecting medieval texts merit particular mention. Placidius Amon provided Gottsched and his pupil Franz Christoph Scheyb with many texts for publication. Florian Anton von Khautz, from the Viennese Bücherhofkommision, supplied Gottsched’s magazine, the Neuer Büchersaal, with sources and documents. Johann Bendedikt Gentilotti and Adam Franz Kollar carried out manuscript studies in the Imperial Court Library in Vienna. Michael Denis translated Ossian and discovered the poems by Oswald von Wolkenstein. Gottlieb Leon not only published lyrics in the medieval-anacreontic style of Gleims, but analyzed and evaluated medieval manuscripts from the court library (Wienerischer Musenalmanach [Minnelieder], 1778; Gedichte, 1788). The beginnings of German philology can be traced to Karl Joseph Michaeler (Iwein, 1786). Johann Baptist Gabriel Mareck contributed a Verzeichniß österreichischer deutscher Dichter (manuscript 1795, published in 1972). Bernhard Christian B. Wiedeburg of the University of Jena brought Bodmer’s theories to the book trade in his Ausführliche Nachricht von einigen alten teutschen poetischen Manuscripten aus dem dreyzehnten und vierzehnten Jahrhunderte, welche in der Jenaischen Bibliothek aufbehalten werden (1754). Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, following the didactic concerns of the Enlightenment, was interested in medieval fables. He enthusiastically took up Bodmer’s edition of Fabeln aus der Zeit der Minnesinger (1757), but he had published a preface to his own fable edition long before that (Nachricht und Exempel von alten deutschen Fabeln, 1746). Gellert’s own fables owe much to Johann Georg Scherz’s Philosophiae moralis Germanorum medii aevi (1704–1710). Over time, the quarrel between the two schools died down. Johann Jakob Rambach expanded Bodmer’s model of the Middle Ages (Abhandlung aus der Geschichte und Litteratur, 1771); while he still referred to Anacreonics, he related Minnesang to the folk song tradition. He also considered non-literary elements: the development of sea travel, trade and the crusades, as well as the cultural influence of the East.

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Leonhard Meister also worked in the Bodmer tradition. The medieval section of his book, Beyträge zur Geschichte der teutschen Sprache und NationalLiteratur (1771), showed the influence of Enlightenment historicism. Meister investigated the differences between Gothic and Old High German, and broadened the corpus of texts studied (the Wulfila Bible in Fr. Junius’s edition, the Weingartner Liederhandschrift, the Trojanerkrieg and Freidank from Strasburg, Iwain and Tristan from Florence, Justus Möser’s Reinbot manuscript, the Annolied (first ed. by Martin Opitz, 1639), the Rolandslied, the Weltchronik, and Rudolf von Ems’s Josaphat, the Cruziger manuscript from Klosterneuburg, and the St. Gallen Codex (the Nibelungenlied B text). His Charakteristik der Dichter (2 vols., 1789) offered further texts from the Gothic period to the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Middle Ages became a popular source of themes, material, and motifs in literature. Bodmer wrote dramas and epics in that vein: Heinrich IV. (1768), Conradin von Schwaben (1771), Friedrich der Rothbärtige and Albert von Gleichen (1778), Hildebold und Wibrade (1776), and Maria von Brabant (1776). Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock took up the theme, e.g. in his ode Kaiser Heinrich (1764; 1771). His poetry was aimed at the princes, whom he wished to win over to nationalist literature. At the same time, he drew on the bard cult. Klopstock (Hermanns Schlacht, 1769; Hermann und die Fürsten, 1784; Hermanns Tod (1787), and Johann Elias Schlegel (Herrmann, 1743) wrote dramas on Arminius. Schlegel also produced an epic (Heinrich der Löwe, 1742) and a DanishNordic national drama (Canut, 1746). Treatments of Götz von Berlichingen and Faust appeared in print. Many of those texts were influenced by the Anacreonticists, or the ideal of archaism and the adaptation of medieval linguistic forms as practiced by the Göttingen League of the Grove (Göttinger Hain-Bund). Ossianism played a central role for belletristic literature (Sven Aage Jørgensen, Klaus Bohnen, and Per Øhrgaard, Aufklärung, Sturm und Drang, frühe Klassik, 1990, 159–67). James Macpherson had laid the foundations with his Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760). The epics Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763) followed next. Ossian was later turned into hexameters by Michael Denis. Johann Georg Sulzer tackled the parallels with Homer in the article “Oßian,” in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (1771–1774; vol. 2, 865–73). In addition to Ossianism, a fashion for bardic and skaldic literature emerged. Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg published the Gedicht eines Skalden (1766). He maintained that Ossian should be taken as an example for literature. Herder believed that Ossian was not forged, although arguments suggesting this were already circulating at that time. By contrast, the interest in

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Ossian grew considerably, influenced by French studies. Paul Henri de Mallet (Introduction à la Historie de Dannemarc, 1755; Monuments de la Mythologie et de la Poesie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves, 1756) argued for the identity of Celtic with the Scandinavian languages. His works were translated into English by Percy. Klopstock developed a similar line of argument to Mallet (theory of Scythian natural religion). Klopstock’s Germanic enthusiasm can be traced in his lyrics Der Hügel und der Hain and Vaterlandslied (1770). General information on the image of the Teutons can be found in Klaus See (Deutsche Germanenideologie: Vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, 1970). E.5. The Reception of the Middle Ages in and around the Journals Deutsches Museum, Bragur and Olla Potrida, and by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing The editions of the Deutsches Museum (1776–1791) brought out by Heinrich Christian Boie, provided an important basis for scholarship on the general and for the literary reception of the Middle Ages (esp. for the Göttingen Grove) in particular. Johann Jakob Eschenburg, active in Boie’s circle, began a comparative study of medieval texts (Wigamur manuscript in Wolfenbüttel, Engelhart, edited with Lessing, and Vom alten Hildebrandt, 1799). Carl August Küttner broke away from Bodmer in Charaktere teutscher Dichter und Prosaisten (1780/1781). Küttner produced a biographical-bibliographical work and added Johannes Tauler to his objects of study. Christian Heinrich Schmid continued this line of academic research in the Anthologie der Deutschen (1770–1772), the Biographie der Dichter (1769/1770) and Skizzen der teutschen Dichtkunst (1780–1784) in Olla Potrida. Schmid attempted to write a representative and complete history of literature. This was also the goal of Johann Traugott Plant in his Chronologischer biographischer und kritischer Entwurf einer Geschichte der deutschen Dichtkunst und Dichter von den ältesten Zeiten bis aufs Jahr 1782 (1782), in which he focused on national aspects. Erduin Julius Koch’s Grundriss einer Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur der Deutschen von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf Lessings Tod (1790) then provided a reliable basis for literary history. Koch also attempted to produce a bibliography of the complete history of German national literature. The number of editions increased enormously in this period. Bodmer’s pupil, Christoph Heinrich Müller/Myller published a representative selection of texts. His Sammlung deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII. XIII. und XIV. Jahrhundert (1784, 1785, 1787) was one of the most important editorial projects of its day. Müller printed manuscripts C and A of the Nibelungenlied, Eneite, Got Amur, Parzival, Der Arme Heinrich, Tristan, Floris und Blanchflur, Iwein, Freidank, Meliure und Partenopier, the Trojanerkrieg, and count-

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less songs. Gundolf Schütze edited texts from the holdings of Hamburg libraries, and became an important historian of Old Norse and of Germanic antiquarianism. Friedrich Christoph Jonathan Fischer published Waltharius (De prima expeditione Attilae … ac de Rebus gestis Waltharii (1780) and commented on the Middle Ages in Sitten und Gebräuche der Europäer im V. und VI. Jahrhundert (1784). Wilhelm Johann Gustav Casparson added Willehalm to the list of editions (1781). Karl Michaeler of the Viennese University Library presented the Innsbruck Iwain manuscript (1786). By this stage, a complete translation of De La Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie (1759–1781) was available, which further stimulated scholarship. Johann Ludwig Klüber, a legal historian, added a commentary and further material relating to cultural history to his translation (1786, 1788, 1791). Other authors used the theme of Prussia as their point of departure. Martin Ernst v. Schlieffen used Germanic ideology to justify the eastern colonization in Prussia in his Nachricht von einigen Häusern der Geschlechter der von Schlieffen (1784). Christian Wilhelm Dohm pointed to Prussia’s claim to leadership in an Abhandlung worin die Ursachen der Ueberlegenheit der Deutschen über die Römer … (Deutsches Museum, 1780). Chistian Ernst Weiße, the son of the poet Christian Felix Weiße, glorified feudalism in Von den Vortheilen der teutschen Reichsverbindung (1790). Meves provides information on the close connection between Prussianism and the Middle Ages in the late Enlightenment in the Berlin grammar schools (Uwe Meves, “Zur Rezeption der altdeutschen Literatur an den Gelehrtenschulen in Preußen am Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 473–98). Christian Heinrich Müller, an author who worked as a teacher, published a collection of poets from the 12th to the 14th centuries (1784), Johann Peter Willenbücher (Praktische Anweisung zur Kenntnis der Hauptveränderungen und Mundarten der teutschen Sprache, von den ältesten Zeiten bis ins vierzehnte Jahrhundert, 1789) and Erduin Julius Koch advanced the knowledge of the Middle Ages in schools. A similar transfer of knowledge took place in Hamburg grammar schools, thanks to Paul Dietrich Giesecke (Über der Nibelungen Liet, 1795) and Gundolf Schütze (Rudolf von Ems: Weltchronik, 1779/1781). The Deutsches Museum and Olla Potrida played an important role for literature inspired by the Middle Ages. Here works were published which glorified the literature of the past. The contribution of August Wilhelm Iffland, Schloss Frankenstein (Deutsches Museum, 1782) in particular shows a literary reception of the Middle Ages which drew on the English Gothic novel and aimed to revive the vanished glory of times past. Christian Vulpius (Das Abentheuer auf dem Raubschlosse, Olla Potrida, 1783) continued this trend.

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Scholarship gained its first journal of medieval literary history in Bragur: Ein litterarisches Magazin der Deutschen und Nordischen Vorzeit (ed. Friedrich David Gräter, 1791–1797) It numbered among its staff Herder, Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Uz, Gotthart Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, Friedrich Weiße, Johann Joachim Eschenburg, Karl Gottlob Anton, David Christoph Seybold, Georg Gustav Fülleborn, August Böckh, J. Wilhelm Petersen, G. W. Friedrich Panzer, Johann Heinrich Häßlein, Karl Joseph Michaeler, Michael Denis, Gottlieb Leon, Johann Friedrich August Kinderling, Friedrich A. Knittel, Johann Christian Zahn, Karl Friedrich Conz, W. Hertzberg and, later, the Brothers Grimm, and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. Lessing was particularly influential in the Late Enlightenment. He was especially interested in the didactic genre of the fable, and remained within the traditions of the nationalist Enlightenment, without taking on Bodmer’s and Herder’s expanded view of the Middle Ages. Two recent studies present his achievements as a medievalist (Ursula Liebertz-Grün, “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing als Mediävist,” Euphorion 77 [1983]: 326–41; Albrecht Classen, “Lessing als Philologe: Seine Kenntnis und Wertung mittelalterlicher Dichtungen und Texte,” Lessing Yearbook 19 [1987]: 139–65). Liebertz-Grün links Lessing to 17th-century polyhistoricism, but also sees his academic writings as exemplary for the Enlightenment period. LiebertzGrün emphasizes that Lessing first became seriously preoccupied with the Middle Ages in Wolfenbüttel. The study concentrates on Lessing’s observations on the medieval Biblia Pauperum. Classen shows that Lessing was interested in the fashion for bardic poetry from an early age, and undertook detailed criticism of it. Lessing listed philological errors in the Swiss fable edition (Über die sogenannten Fabeln aus den Zeiten der Minnesinger: Zweyte Entdeckung, 1781). From an anti-Absolutist position, he investigated the patron-theory developed by Gottsched in the study Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur von den Minnesängern bis auf Luther (1777). Lessing was also interested in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript of Hugo von Trimberg’s Renner on the grounds of its didactic content. In the field of theology, Lessing dealt with Berengar of Tours (who had been labeled a heretic), in whom he believed he had discovered a kindred spirit. Marco Polo also gained Lessing’s attention. Lessing and Herder entered into an intensive debate on the term ‘folk poetry’ (Volkspoesie). On the one hand, Classen sees this as confirming the polyhistoricist theory, but on the other, he gives Lessing and his endeavors toward objectivity a place between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The article concludes with a complete list of Lessing’s work on the Middle Ages (156–61).

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E.6. Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism Scholarship connects the reception of the Middle Ages in ‘Sturm and Drang’ above all with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg opened the horizon of reception for the concept of ‘genius’ and anti-Classicist approaches. The alteration in opinion about Shakespeare and the folk song also formed the new picture of the Middle Ages. Irrational elements of the Middle Ages (e.g. the witches in Macbeth) were now viewed positively. The reception of folk songs was enabled by the concept of natural poetry (Naturpoesie). Nordic mythology replaced the Greek. The young Herder agreed with these views (Heinz Stolpe, Die Auffassung des jungen Herder vom Mittelalter, 1955; Schmid. loc. cit.). In Fragmente ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur (1766–1767), he was guided by the ideal of a national literary language, which is linked to his observations on medieval language. At the same time, he stressed the cultural and political freedom of the Germanic tribes. He counted freedom as one of the elements of the German national character. As he saw it, an oriental-Arabic influence was also present. Herder drew comparisons between contemporary war poetry (Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim’s Grenadierlieder) and the national war songs of the Germanic tribes. His Kritische Wälder (1769) explicitly compared Oriental and Nordic literature and developed the term ‘folk literature’ (Volksdichtung), not to be confused with the vulgar literature of the mob, and the concept of the Nordic national character. He criticized the contemporary Ossian craze (Oßian und die Lieder der alten Völker) in the collection Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1773). Against it, he placed the sense of German ancestral strength and simplicity. The medieval Germanic peoples or tribes are used as models for the ur-German, who honored the ideals of virtue, patriotism, and chastity. Herder saw the Ossian lyrics, however, as an opportunity to rehabilitate the term ‘Volk,’ and the focus of his interest shifted to the lyric. By contrast, Paolo Frisis’s contribution to the collection (Versuch über die Gothische Baukunst) persisted in using ‘medieval’ as a pejorative term. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s essay Von deutscher Baukunst (1772) related it to the organic, and compared the cathedral with an enormous tree. He thus placed himself in line with the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon Gothic revival and the Gothic novel. Justus Möser’s Patriotische Phantasien (1766) began with knightly epic, which he took to mirror the social conditions of the Middle Ages. His key term was the law of the jungle. Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774) was influential for the further development of Sturm und Drang and beyond. The old structures (the patriarchy as the original model of bourgeois order, the church, feudalism) guaranteed historical continuity. Herder inter-

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preted the history of feudalism teleologically. The Northern air and the wildness of nature produced knights inspired by the values of courage, honor (noblesse obligée), chastity (marriage), devotion (the church), and loyalty (the feudal structure). This allowed him to integrate criticisms of the church (especially those formulated by the French Enlightenment). The work found a provisional end in a collection of folk songs, but curiously Herder omitted Minnesang from his considerations on linguistic and aesthetic grounds. In Jena, 1790 Friedrich Schiller published Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoires as well as Universalhistorische Übersicht der vornehmsten an den Kreuzzügen teilnehmenden Nationen on Anna Commnena, Otto von Freising and Bohadin Saladin (Byzantium–Rome–Arabia). Although Schiller saw the crusades as a folly (“Raserei,” delirium), he gave the Middle Ages a singular place in European history. In his view, Rome had placed the nations in an unnatural calm, a soft slavery which suffocated humanity’s powers. The stormy, rebellious revolt for freedom in the “Germanic period” (i. e., the Middle Ages) struck against this repression of the energies of humanity, which eventually reached the happy medium which benevolently combined calm and activity, freedom and order, variety and harmony. Schiller constructed a three stage development from captivity (“non-freedom,” Unfreiheit) via anarchy (lawlessness) to the freedom of an ethically ordered life (Rudolf Stadelmann, “Grundformen der Mittelalterauffassung von Herder bis Ranke,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft 9 [1931]: 45–88). E.7. German Painting and Enlightenment Art Within the development of Enlightenment historical painting, a small but significant corpus of medieval subjects can be made out. (Frank Büttner, “Die Darstellung mittelalterlicher Geschichte in der deutschen Kunst des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts,” Mittelalter-Rezeption: ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 407–33). Wilhelm Tischbein painted Konradin von Schwaben und Friedrich von Österreich vernehmen im Gefängnis von Neapel ihr Todesurteil at Bodmer’s instigation. Tischbein, true to the narrative models of the Enlightenment, intended the painting to have exemplary functions, but he also attempted to portray his figures in accurate dress (Enlightenment historicism). His paintings reveal, however, that patriotism had not yet achieved enough influence on the art world to justify putting medieval subjects on canvas. The situation is different with regard to the frescos in the Würzburg Residence (1752). Giovanni Battista Tiepolo gives scenes showing the bestowal of feudal fees a central place, which points to the great significance which the Prince Bishops of Schönborn and Greiffenklau ascribed to feudalism. A transformation took

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place in book illustration where the painter Bernhard Rode was active from 1751. He was concerned with the historical fidelity of his depictions, not their effects. In historical painting, medieval themes first achieved their breakthrough from 1780 onwards. Daniel Chodowiecki attempted to popularize knightly and old German themes. He chose to paint historical celebrities of heroic temper with characteristic local color. F. The Middle Ages in France France’s appropriation and judgment of the Middle Ages and its culture was dominated by the discourse of the European Enlightenment. Two studies deal explicitly with this question (Jürgen Voss, Das Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalterbegriffes und der Mittelalterbewertung von der zweiten Hälfte des 16. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1972; Werner Krauss, “Das Mittelalter in der Aufklärung,” Medium Aevum Romanicum: Festschrift Hans Rheinfelder, ed. Heinrich Bihler and Alfred Noyer-Weidner, 1963, 223–31). Several categories of reception can be distinguished: the movement influenced by Classicism took a negative view; there was a small counter-movement that created a positive judgment; then there was a larger movement which was objective, a group driven by political considerations, and finally one which was militantly against the Middle Ages. The first group inherited the judgments of Classicism, but was inclined to relativize its prejudices. The works of Ellis Dupin, Abbé Claude Fleury, Gabriel Daniel, Abbé Louis de Gendre, Charles Rollin, Luc de Clapier Marquis de Vauvenargues, Abbé Velly, Juvenal de Carlancas, Joseph Ducreux, Chevalier de Méhégan, Rigoley de Juvigny, Abbé Bérault-Bercastel, Abbé de Longchamps, and Nicolas de Bonneville belong into this category. They all repeated in some form the idea that the Middle Ages were an epoch of barbarism, ignorance, and decline. The classical attitude condemned medieval architecture on the basis of the same criteria, but here too the theory of an art which is defined by the individual historical situation and the customs of the time began, slowly, to emerge. The belief of the second group, of which there is still no summarizing account available, were determined by a positive revaluation of the Middle Ages, and they became interested in old French and Provencal literature. In this group Classicist dogma retreated to the background, and great names were involved: Jean Baptiste de La Curne, who covered several art forms in his reflections (theater, novels, poetry, opera), Guillaume Massieu, Abbé Goujet, Legrand d’Aussy, and Etienne de Barbazan, who compiled a dictionary of Old French and published medieval fables for the educated public, and thus rehabilitated older French literature. (It was at this time that Bodmer

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was taking up studies of older German in Switzerland.) The troubadours were declared models of contemporary literature. On the artistic side of the movement, older lyrics were revived by the Comte de Tresan or the Marquis de Paulmy. The third group attempted an objective evaluation of the Middle Ages. The Christian congregations and the Academies, in particular the “Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (AIBL),” gave this model of reception cultural importance. Jacob Nicolas Moreau’s “Cabinet des Chartes” also belongs into this category. Importance should be given to the congregations’ efforts, which resulted in the writings of Bernard de Montfaucon, Antoine Rivet, and Martin Bouquet. In due course, the discussion developed outside the structures of the church, in the Academies, which now, like the AIBL, made a definite turn toward the Middle Ages: their members included Abbé Vertot, the Orientalist Antoine Galland, Jean Boivin de Villeneuve, Antoine Lancelot, Camille Falconet, and J. B. de La Curne de Sainte Palaye (on La Curne cf.: Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment, 1968). The latter wrote his own chivalric romances, as well as investigations of chivalric culture and medieval languages. He linked the study of objects to the study of words, and so set new standards. Abbé Lebeuf compiled a glossary, commented on Gothic architecture, and practiced an enlightened form of scientific archaeology. Abbé Octavien de Guasco worked on the art and literature of the Middle Ages. Jean Baptiste d’Anville researched medieval geography. In Alsace, Johann Daniel Schöpflin dedicated himself to writing regional history (Alsatia illustrata, 1761). Up until 1770, the group was dominated by subject-oriented research interests with a politically conservative undertone. J. N. Moreau devoted himself to legal questions, and built up a historical and legal library, together with his circle and some AIBL members. The fourth group was concerned with the political model of the medieval state, and was dedicated to the restoration of the rights of the nobility. Abbé Dubos expanded upon theories of Absolutism, and believed that he had found the vindication of this form of government in the Middle Ages. The final group consisted of militant Enlightenment ‘philosophers,’ who researched and assessed the medieval epoch not out of an interest in historical knowledge, but in opposition to it and with political considerations in mind. The aesthetic principles of classicism were applied to cultural ones in general, to state institutions, and to the Church. The key names here are Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu and Voltaire, whose universal history portrayed the Middle Ages as barbaric, Gothic, and as a time of ignorance. Only the 13th century brought a small change, where Voltaire located the replacement of “ignorance sauvage” with “ignorance scolastique.” This atti-

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tude did not prevent Voltaire from publishing a popular play with knights, Tancrède (1771). D’Alembert’s and Diderot’s Encylopaedia, by contrast, appeared without an article on the ‘Middle Ages.’ Etienne Bonnot de Condillac categorically rejected the Middle Ages; Gabriel Bonnot de Mably deprecated it, and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot described it as an epoch of decay. Marie Jean Caritat de Condorcet saw the crusades as the beginning of a dark decadence, but he viewed scholasticism positively. Abbé Sièyes traced contemporary social injustice to the Frankish conquests. All the authors in this group discovered the origins of the miseries of the revolutionary period in the Middle Ages: absolutism, ecclesiastical dominance, and oppression. G. The Middle Ages in Spain The situation in Spain was very different to that in France (Werner Krauss. loc. cit.; Heinrich Bihler, Spanische Versdichtung des Mittelalters im Lichte der spanischen Kritik der Aufklärung und Vorromantik, 1957). In Spain, a continuity remained between the epochs. The accent placed on historical questions merely shifted. The Academia de Historia, founded in Madrid in 1735, assembled an impressive amount of research on the Middle Ages. The work of Padre Enrique Flórez, whose handbook España sagrada was first printed in 1747, deserves special notice. Caspar Melchior de Jovellanos wrote about medieval culture in detail. Xavier Lampilla attempted to portray the Arab Middle Ages in Spain. Thomás Antonio published a four volume collection of texts (1779–1790), including El Cid, Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros, and the Arcipreste de Hita’s Libro de buen amor. H. Research on Individual Medieval Works and Themes Rautenberg and Grosse provide information on adaptations and translations of medieval texts during the Enlightenment (Ursula Rautenberg, and Siegfried Grosse, Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher deutscher Dichtung: Eine Bibliographie, 1988). Frenzel does the same for individual figures of medieval literature and history (Elisabeth Frenzel, Stoffe der Weltliteratur, 9th ed. 1998; 1st ed. 1961). Grunewald reports on the reception of the Manessa lyrics (Eckhard Grunewald, “Zur Rezeption und Reproduktion der Manessischen Liederhandschrift im 18. Jahrhundert und frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Mittelalter-Rezeption, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 435–49). A new collection of essays describes the reception of Arthur with a detailed perspective on France and England (Moderne Artus-Rezeption: 18.–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Kurt Gamerschlag, 1991). Ehrisman provides information about knowledge of the Nibelungenlied in the 18th century (Otfrid Ehrismann, Nibelungenlied 1755–1920. Regesten und Kommentare zu Forschung und Rezeption, 1986).

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Select Bibliography Lucie Varga, Das Schlagwort vom finsteren Mittelalter (Aalen: Scientia, 1932); Josef Haslag, Gothic im siebzehnten und achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Eine wort- und ideengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Cologne: Böhlau, 1963); Christoph Schmid, Die Mittelalterrezeption des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (Frankfurt a. M., Bern, and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1979); Felix Leibrock, Aufklärung und Mittelalter: Bodmer, Gottsched und die mittelalterliche deutsche Literatur (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1988); Gisela BrinkerGabler, Poetisch-wissenschaftliche Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ludwig Tiecks Erneuerung altdeutscher Literatur (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1980); Jürgen Voss, Das Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalterbegriffes und der Mittelalterbewertung von der zweiten Hälfte des 16. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1972).

Reinhold Münster

Epigraphy A. Terminology ‘Epigraphy’ is the study of inscriptions. The name of the discipline derives from the Greek words  and φ (write upon), so that  φ (epigraphe, Lat. inscriptio) initially meant merely ‘writing,’ that is script on some kind of material (not further defined). It occurs as a term for ‘inscription’ from the late 17th century on. ‘Epigraphy’ is found as an academic term from 1843 on, and was adopted by the Academie Français in 1878. The Latin inscriptio was used in antiquity to mean ‘writing’ or ‘heading,’ but while it can occasionally be found in our sense in the Middle Ages, it only became usual during the 16th century. In the Middle Ages, titulus or epitaphium occured more frequently, or verbal forms such as scriptum, inscriptum, caelatum, etc. were used (Robert Favreau, Les inscriptions médiévales [= Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 35], 1979, 13–17). Epigraphy concerns itself with everything necessary for the appraisal of inscriptions. This means – apart from the script form and the graphical ‘mise-en-page’ as a whole and among other considerations – language and linguistic characteristics, formularies, metrics and musicality where relevant; text analysis and a determination of the sources used, the patron, where possible the author of the text and the craftsman responsible; the placing of the inscription within the context of inscription genres (grave inscriptions, memorial inscriptions, building or dedication inscriptions, house inscriptions etc.); interpretation of the content of the inscription and valuation of its

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sources; the investigation of the object bearing the inscription according to historical, and art and cultural historical criteria; culminating in a suitable editorial strategy for the publication of the texts. Increasingly, the term Inschriftenpaläographie (inscription paleography) is being used for the area of the subject dealing purely with script (Walter Koch, “Inschriftenpaläographie: Ein schriftkundlicher Beitrag zu ausgewählten Inschriften Kärntens mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Gurk,” Carinthia I.162 [1972]: 115–47, esp. 115–17; id., Inschriftenpaläographie des abendländischen Mittelalters und der früheren Neuzeit: Früh- und Hochmittelalter, 2007, 26). Inscription paleography deals with everything that has to do with the appearance of the script. The goal is a description of the script style, as well as the determination of dating and, where possible, localization characteristics. Initially, it is concerned with individual forms. Individual letter forms and their proportions and construction in strokes, cross-strokes, bows and finishing strokes and their formation, the thickness of strokes and its variation within a form, the decorative elements attached to the letters, combinations of letters such as nexus litterarum, ligatures, merged and connecting bows, enclaves, interlacing, the appearance of abbreviations, word division and signs indicating word divisions, as well as numbers and their development are of interest. However, graphical study is not restricted to the consideration of individual forms. Attention must be paid to whether the aspect of the script is open or cramped, the layout of lines, the question of ‘scriptura continua,’ the homogeneity of the script as a whole, as well as the possibility of later revision(s) or additions (cf., on the criteria to be studied, Rudolf M. Kloos, “Methoden und Möglichkeiten der lateinischen Epigraphik des Mittelalters,” Actes du VIIe Congrès International d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine, Constantza, 9–15 septembre 1977, ed. D. M. Pippidi, 1979, 91–107, esp. 95ff.; and Robert Favreau, Èpigraphie médiévale, 1997, 59–60. On the technique of letter description, cf. Deutsche Inschriften: Terminologie zur Schriftbeschreibung, devised by the staff of the Academies of the Sciences and Humanities in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Mainz, Munich, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, 1999). B. Subject Inscriptions form the central – and often exclusive – source-material on civil and public life for the ancient historian, and the international corpora begun in the 19th century for the collection and critical edition of inscriptions of classical antiquity – Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) or Inscriptiones Graecae (IG) – made epigraphy the most prestigious branch of the study of antiquities. Yet at the same time, the systematic cataloguing and methodical

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academic study of medieval and early modern inscriptions of the post-antique, western-occidental area, (that is inscriptions in Latin script) which is the subject of this literature review, is relatively young, developing slowly during the 20th Century on the local and national level – far too late, according to some (Alphons Lhotsky, Quellenkunde zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte Österreichs, 1963, 65). Although the study of the inscriptions of the Middle Ages and the periods following constitutes a new and independent discipline, at least a basic knowledge of the epigraphy of antiquity is necessary. After all, it is the alphabet developed and formed then which despite many modifications – remains the bearer of the inscription, even to this day. The capitalis developed for the political and sacral epigraphic requirements of Rome and the Latin parts of the Roman empire, a script suitable for stone monuments with the greatest representative function, was later – in a deliberate recourse to antiquity – revived, not merely in the humanism of the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern, but also, for instance, in the socalled Carolingian renaissance. Indeed, it was the broad tradition of epigraphic script of Late Antiquity and above all the early Christian period which in many cases seamlessly continued in early medieval epigraphy, though the quality of execution varied considerably. While it is often the case that medieval and modern inscriptions exist in parallel to other textual sources (archival sources and chronicles) – and this is even more the case for the more recent – , the spontaneity of their statements nevertheless often makes them valuable sources. In addition, the inscriptions are often still at their original location, or easily localizable, so that their connection to a limited area is generally clear. Due to the almost unlimited range of themes which appear in the texts, the value of inscriptions as sources is manifold. The variety of their form and above all content – there is almost nothing which cannot be the theme of an inscription – makes them valuable sources for countless disciplines; not just for the epigrapher in the narrow sense, but also the local or town historian, the social historian, the historians of the economy, law, and the church, for the genealogist and the student of heraldry, the philologist – the latinist as well as the representatives of the vernacular –, students of dialect, art historians, ethnologists, for modern disciplines like the history of mentalities or objects, and more. As bearers of cartulary information – though more in the south of Europe than further north – inscriptions are often of value to the diplomatist, while connections to various kinds of writing interest the paleographers (cf. the case studies in Walter Koch, “Epigraphische Editionen europaweit: Inschriften als Quellen verschiedenster Art,” Vom Nutzen des Edierens: Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichts-

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forschung. Wien, 3.–5. Juni 2004, ed. Brigitte Merta, Andrea Sommerlechner, and Herwig Weigl, 2005, 229–54, esp. 236–54). In the last three or four decades, the study of medieval inscriptions, and to a lesser extent the epigraphy of the early modern period have been taking the decisive step towards academic coherence and have established themselves as an individual discipline in the canon of historical subjects. As an expression of this, they have begun to appear in the regular teaching programs of a number of universities, and a number of international co-operations have been begun or are planned, and, most importantly, a number of handbooks summarizing the principles and practice of working with inscriptions and the editing process have appeared (see below). C. Definition It is impossible to give a definition of the term ‘inscription’ which does justice to all aspects without some reflection. Its differentiation from other written utterances, which fall instead within the competence of the paleographer, remains at times unclear or willful. The primary characteristics of an inscription are, according to Robert Favreau, durability and publicity, “durée” and “publicité” (see Robert Favreau, “L’épigraphie médiévale,” Cahiers de la civilisation médiévale Xe–XIIe siècles 12 [1969]: 394–98; or id., Les Inscriptions médiévales, 1979, 16). Further, monumentality or a sculptural impulse are certainly criteria which generally or at least to a great extent fit inscriptions, but they are doubtless unable to cover the whole spectrum of monuments which can be viewed as inscriptions. In the German-speaking area, a negative definition formulated by Rudolf M. Kloos, which confines itself to the lowest common denominator, has proved serviceable: “Inschriften sind Beschriftungen verschiedener Materialien – in Stein, Holz, Metall, Leder, Stoff, Email, Glas, Mosaik u.s.w., die von Kräften und Methoden hergestellt sind, die nicht dem Schreibschul- und Kanzleibetrieb angehören” (Rudolf M. Kloos, Einführung in die Epigraphik des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1980, 2nd ed. 1992, 2). The most important element of the definition is the almost unlimited variation in the carriers of the inscription, and therefore the varying production techniques. The formulation aims at a clear distinction from paleography, which according to an established academic consensus describes the description and interpretation of written utterances on ‘soft’ substances, i. e., papyrus, parchment, paper, and also on wax tablets. Kloos’ definition shuts out certain marginal areas which tend to be classed as inscriptions, such as the broad group of graffiti. They are made on ‘epigraphic’ surfaces, and there is a certain wish for durability and above all, public communication. However – many scribbles on walls are executed with ink

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or colored pens – they generally, if not exclusively, fall under the graphical assessment of the paleography of written hands, in particular that of the cursive. By contrast, the inscriptions on seals and coins do fall entirely under Kloos’ definition. However, they tend to be considered to lie at the margins of epigraphy, as their study remains the province of the older special disciplines of sphragistics and numismatics, particularly as the inscription is only one aspect relevant to the classification of the object as a source. It is only with regard to the script that the interests of the epigraphers coincide with those of the other disciplines, although of course the serial mass production means that the inscription reveals the age of the type or the die, rather than the date of production of the actual seal or coin (among the few epigraphic studies of these objects, cf. Ilse-Maria Michael-Schweder, Die Schrift auf den päpstlichen Siegeln des Mittelalters, 1926). Inscribed monuments have, as a result of their function, physical characteristics, and production, a different status to other textual utterances as preserved in codices and charters. A different group of people was responsible for their origins; they were craftsmen of varying techniques, whether masons, fresco painters, goldsmiths, mosaic makers or others. In many periods a different writing system appears in the inscriptions than the writing of the codices; genuinely epigraphic scripts which have their origins in the capitalis of the monuments of antiquity. Nonetheless, it would be mistaken to hermetically seal epigraphy and paleography off from each other. There are always connections between the two, though they vary in their thickness from era to era. For instance, the most prestigious antique monumental script was adopted in the decorative scripts of Carolingian manuscripts, and later – in the Romanesque and Gothic eras – the headings of the codices acted, more or less, as examples for inscriptions. Finally, in the later period (from the beginning of the long 14th century) various types of writer’s hand – such as textura, bastarda and humanist minuscules – appeared, suitably adapted, in the field of inscriptions (gothic minuscule; fractura, antiqua minuscule). D. Corpora The large scale – often national – projects for the collection and critical edition of material are of decisive importance for our knowledge of the Middle Ages. While large collections of transcriptions of important inscriptions have existed in manuscript or printed form since the humanist period (cf. the summary in Walter Koch, Inschriftenpaläographie des abendländischen Mittelalters und der früheren Neuzeit: Früh- und Hochmittelalter, 2007, 11–14), these older works, usually the fruit of individual labor, were generally made out of

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antiquarian interest, to serve as evidence for mostly regional history or genealogy, or as a preliminary documentation of larger collections. They did not yet involve the wish for the development of systematic academic study of the inscriptions of post-antiquity. Nevertheless, these collections – particularly those from the 17th and 18th century – are of considerable value, as they preserve in transcription, and sometimes even as illustrations, countless medieval inscriptions which have been destroyed in the succeeding centuries by war, in some regions by radical ‘baroquization’ and, to this day, simple carelessness. Only the national ventures of the 20th century were intended, not merely to make available valuable historical sources, but to lay the foundations of an academic discipline concerned with medieval and, with reservations, early modern, inscriptions, allowing a correct and consistent evaluation of the inscriptions and their carriers – that is, much later than was the case with epigraphic monuments of antiquity or the early Christian period. The large, long term projects currently underway are products of the second half of the 20th century. This is true – de facto – even of the oldest of them, the German inscription project (Die Deutschen Inschriften), which has published around 70 imposing quartos, with more than two dozen well in hand. While the undertaking was begun in the thirties, and the first volume actually appeared in 1942, the war and the immediate post-war period interrupted and indeed seriously threatened the project. In other countries comparable endeavors began decades later – and in some cases only in the recent past, around the millennium. E. Projects, Corpora and Editions Die Deutschen Inschriften owes its existence to the dogged enthusiasm of one individual, the Heidelberger Germanist Friedrich Panzer, whose proposals and plans for a national inscription catalogue comparable to the great corpora of inscriptions of antiquity was adopted in 1934 by the German academies and the Viennese Academy as the basis of a joint project (on its history, cf. Walter Koch, “50 Jahre Deutsches Inschriftenwerk (1934–1984): Das Unternehmen der Akademien und die epigraphische Forschung,” Deutsche Inschriften: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, 1984; Vorträge und Berichte, ed. Karl Stackmann, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philol.-hist. Kl. 3. Folge Nr. 151, 1986, 15–45). In 1938 Friedrich Panzer published a programmatic paper summarizing the scholarly motives behind the ambitious project for a wider audience: Die Inschriften des deutschen Mittelalters: Ein Aufruf zu ihrer Sammlung und Bearbeitung (1938). These included the development of medieval epigraphy, a history of numbers and figures, the techniques of production, linguistic history,

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the accommodation between German and Latin, the role of middle Latin and the German dialects, the sociological and the religious distribution of the inscriptions, the objects bearing the inscriptions and their art-historical interpretation, an interpretation of religious scenes, the development of epitaphs and ideas about the afterlife, study of memorial stones and cartulary inscriptions, mentions of historical events, inscriptions of secular buildings, inscriptions of ethnological interest, joke and puzzle inscriptions, etc. This rather unsystematic list at least shows how large the goals of the project were – a huge demand on the staff of the project (as it is to this day). A comprehensive sourcebook was also planned. The basis for unified working and editorial guidelines was laid in the first phase. Far-reaching modifications in the seventies meant, in addition to a coherence of working practices, the deciphering of abbreviations using round brackets, whereas previously only the exact letters of the inscription had been reproduced. The optically attractive but academically worthless gimmick of devising fonts to represent the various alphabets used had already been abandoned. The project collects, criticizes and edits the Latin and German inscriptions of Germany and Austria of the Middle Ages and the early modern period (until c. 1650) in chronological order – both those inscriptions preserved in the original as specimens surviving only in pictorial or transcript form. Every academy involved – today, all the German academies except Berlin, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences – has a particular working area. The common editorial principles for the Viennese element of the project have been published: Walter Koch, Bearbeitungs- und Editionsgrundsätze für die “Wiener Reihe” des deutschen Inschriftenwerks (1991; with additional guidelines privately printed for internal use). The inscriptions are generally grouped by political units at district level or by town – occasionally single locations, such as cathedrals are used where they offer a rich enough source of material. A pragmatic decision was made to exclude runes as well as seals and coins which – given their serial production – are left to the relevant specialist disciplines. An inter-academy steering group was set up at when the project was re-founded in 1960, made up of the chairs of the individual academy commissions. As previously, staff members of the individual academies meet regularly and are the real bearers of the work. More than a third of all the volumes thus far published date from the last decade (1997–2006), nearly two thirds from the last two decades (1987–2006), a sign of the enormous development of the project and how work on it has intensified. The French inscription center, founded in 1969 at the ‘Centre d’études supérieurs de civilisation médiévale’ of the University of Poitiers under René-Edmond Labande, has published, under the academic supervision of Robert Favreau (who later took over leadership of the center)

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22 volumes of the Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale between 1974 and the present. The small staff of the project has completed the South of France and most of the central region. The last volume published, on the departements of Normandy, has reached the northern areas. Inscriptions up to the end of the medieval period have been photographically documented, but only those pre-1300 are to be published. While this early cut-off point is regrettable, the richness of southern France in particular, where the edition began, in the old inscriptions is undeniable, for there is an often seamless tradition dating back through the early Christian period to antiquity. Two French volumes include almost as much material from the Early and High Middle Ages as all existing German volumes put together. The catalogue entries are strictly schematized and offer quick access to information: A) function of the inscription, B) location, C) material, technical execution, size, D) transcription, E) translation, F) paleographic comments, G) linguistic comments, H) biblical, liturgical or secular sources, formularies, I) historical commentary and date, finally bibliographical material. The work begins in the Carolingian period and thus follows on from the excellent new version of Edmond Le Blant’s older edition of early Christian Gaulish inscriptions, which covers the period up to the end of the Merovingian, and has been slowly appearing since 1975 under the title Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule antérieures à la Renaissance carolingienne. Only three of the planned 19 volumes are available to date (Première Belgique, Aquitaine Première, Viennoise du Nord). The Corpus Inscriptionum Medii Aevi Helvetiae, founded in 1971 at the Medieval Institute of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, under the leadership of Carl Pfaff, was completed in 1997 with the fifth volume, the inscriptions of Graubünden and Ticino. This edition, too, only covers the period up to 1300, but offers excellent specimens, particularly from the early period of transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. The treatment is characterized above all by an effort to link individual inscriptions to literary or linguistic monuments. Among the older projects of the second half of the 20th century is the Corpus Inscriptionum Poloniae, founded by Józef Szymanski in 1973, which covers the inscriptions of modern Poland until 1800 (medieval inscriptions worth mentioning being lacking). The project consists of teams of historians at various Polish universities, who have divided the country up between them. Up to the present, 17 volumes/fascicles have appeared, covering nine voivodeships (regions). New projects – clear evidence both of increasing interest in inscriptions and a concern to preserve these sources from increasing environmental threats – continue into the very recent past. The first volume of a Corpus Inscriptionum Bohemiae, closely linked to the art historical survey of the

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Czech Republic appeared in 1996, covering the inscriptions of the mining town Kuttenberg, the second volume on the Kuttenberg region appearing in 2002. Material from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period until about 1800 is covered. An epigraphic centre at León University in northern Spain is being set up under Vicente Garcia Lobo and his colleague María Encarnación Martín López with the aim of producing a Corpus Inscriptionum Hispaniae Medievalium. At present, one volume has been published – that on the inscriptions of the town and province of Zamora, from 1997. The growth of epigraphic studies in Spain is extremely gratifying, as it offers not only extremely interesting material which differs significantly from the rest of Europe until well into the Middle Ages, but also connections to the inscriptions of the South of France. A three volume book on the medieval inscriptions of Portugal has recently appeared, in which volume two – split into two half-volumes – offers an edition which reaches into the start of the 15th century: Mário J. Barroca, Epigrafia medieval Portugesa, 842–1422 (2000). The beginnings of a national Italian corpus of medieval inscriptions (Inscriptiones Medii Aevi Italiae [saec. VI–XII]), centered on Spoleto, which occurred a few years after several attempts, is also cheering. Presumably this took place so late because of the overweening competition from inscriptions from antiquity and the early Christian period in the consciousness of the Italians. However, the new project only covers material from the 6th century up to 1200. That is bitter, considering the endless riches of late-medieval inscriptions in the politically and culturally diverse Italian landscape. The first volume, covering the inscriptions of part of the province Viterbo has appeared (2002). The new project will eventually replace the five volume work on the 6th–8th century by another hand, Pietro Rugo, Iscrizioni dei secoli VI–VII–VIII esistenti in Italia (1974–1980). In addition to these national corpora, countless editions exist dealing with larger regions, towns or individual locations scattered across Europe. A few important larger scale projects are: Sabino De Sandoli, Corpus inscriptionum crucesignatorum Terrae Sanctae (1099–1291): Testo, traduzione e annotazioni (1974); Inscripciones medievales de Asturias, ed. Francisco Diego Santos (1994); André Guillou, Recueil des inscriptions grecques médiévales d’Italie (1996); Rolant A. S. Macalister, Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, 2 vols. (1945–1949); Elisabeth Okasha, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (1971); Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, Early Christian Inscriptions of Munster: A Corpus of the Inscribed Stones (2001); Martin Syrett, The Roman-Alphabet Inscriptions of Medieval Trondheim, 2 vols. (2002); Ottavio Banti, Monumenta epigraphica Pisana saeculo XV antiquiora (2000); Giancarlo Roversi, Iscrizioni Medievali Bolognesi (1982); id., Corpus Inscriptionum Medii Aevi Liguriae, 4 vols. currently available (1978–2000).

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F. Phases and Emphases of Scholarship Approaches to the inscriptions can take various routes. The most obvious is that via the visual, i. e. the form of the lines of text and the individual letters and the general impression the inscription makes, as well as its layout and, where relevant, artistic aspects. This is closely related to technical questions and the production of the text. A further possibility is via literary-linguistic considerations – the formularies used, rhythm, the question of the composition of the text. Finally, the interpretation of the manifold information contained in the texts and their integration into a social context remains a major goal of research, including a determination of the desired goal – ‘eternal’ validity, representative character, public announcement, etc. The first steps on the road to a systematic academic discipline studying the inscriptions of the Middle Ages were taken between the wars, both in Germany and in France. It began with the creation of an overview of the development of script, the change of forms over the centuries – concentrating initially on inscriptions in stone. In the German area, the earliest works attempt to study relatively small areas over long periods. Konrad F. Bauer should be mentioned first, who studied material from Mainz and created a basis of knowledge which is useful to this day (“Mainzer Epigraphik, Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Monumentalschrift,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Buchwesen und Schriftttum 9 [1926]: 1–45). His work began with early Christian material and reached to around 1400. He was followed by Rudolf Conrad, Niederrheinische Epigraphik vom achten bis zum dreizehnten Jahrhundert (1931), and Rudolf Rauh, Paläographie der mainfränkischen Monumentalinschriften (1935), while Karl Brandi – in connection with the beginnings of the Deutsche Inschriftenwerk (see above) – produced the summary Grundlegung einer deutschen Inschriftenkunde (1936, 11–43; see also id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 1938, 64–8). Another pioneer of the early period – though in the area of inscription formularies – was Rudolf Zimmerl, “Die Entwicklung der Grabinschriften Österreichs” (Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Leo-Gesellschaft [1934]: 185–220). In French scholarship, it was Paul Deschamps who listed and discussed the development of forms up to the end of the 12th century using a selection of material from all over France (“Étude sur la paléographie des inscriptions lapidaires de la fin de l’époque mérovingienne aux dernières années du XIIe siècle,” Bulletin monumental 88 [1929]: 5–88). Nicolette Gray’s study, written between the wars but not published until 1948, is still useful today (“Paleography of Latin Inscriptions in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Centuries in Italy,” Papers of the British School at Rome 16 [1948]: 38–171). She discusses 161 inscriptions from all over Italy, ordered by period and region, with especial reference to regional differences and to comparing the products of ‘popular

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schools’, i. e., rustic inscriptions, with those on a higher stylistic level. Gray came from the circle around the venerable representative of early Christian epigraphy Angelo Silvagni, whose four volume Monumenta epigraphica christiana saeculo XIII antiquiora quae in Italiae finibus adhuc extant (1943) and its pictures is indispensable for medieval Italian epigraphy. It offers examples from various Italian towns (Rome, Milan, Pavia, Como, Lucca, Naples, Benevento). German epigraphic scholarship in the sixties and seventies was dominated by the leading researchers of the great inscription projects, distinguished personalities from the first period following the recommissioning of the inter-academy project. They were Rudolf M. Kloos (Munich), Renate Neumüllers-Klauser (Heidelberg), and Ernst Schubert (Halle-Berlin), the former regularly offering epigraphic courses at the University of Munich since 1967. Apart from the preparation of volumes, the discussion dealt with questions of editorial practice, the validity of 1650 as a period marker, but also the criteria used to judge the inscriptions by internal and external markers. On the French and German sides the first handbook summaries of the state of the field appeared almost simultaneously in 1979 and 1980, acting both as a stock-taking and the basis of further work (Robert Favreau, Les Inscriptions médiévales, 1979; and Rudolf M. Kloos, Einführung in die Epigraphik des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1980, 2nd ed. 1992). The two works complement each other admirably. The French epigraphic centre in Poitiers prioritizes, as can be seen in the work of Favreau and his colleagues, the inscription as a source on medieval life as influenced by Christianity; that is, the cultural or history of mentalities aspect clearly dominates (cf. Favreau’s work as summarized up to 1995 in: Études d’épigraphie médiévale, 2 vols., 1995). German scholarship, however, has always been dominated by an orientation toward the auxiliary sciences, i. e., a preoccupation with the script of the inscriptions as the basis for their dating and where applicable localization, or where required a judgment as to the “discrimen veri ac falsi,” and all this as a precondition for all further interpretation of the texts. This fundamental orientation has been followed by recent surveys: Robert Favreau, L’épigraphie médiévale (1997); and – restricted to the paleographic aspect – Walter Koch, Inschriftenpaläographie des abendländischen Mittelalters und der früheren Neuzeit. Früh- und Hochmittelalter (2007). In Italy, alongside investigations of individual monuments and places, as in the countless studies of Ottavio Banti on Pisa (cf. the summary of his works up to 1995 in: Scritti di storia, diplomatica ed epigrafia, ed. Silio P. P. Scalfati, 1995), there is a trend toward work which thematizes written culture – codex, charter, and inscription as a whole (Gugliemo Cavallo, “Le tipologie della cultura nel riflesso delle testimonianze scritte,” Bisanzio, Roma e l’Italia nell’ Alto medioevo: Settim-

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ane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 34, vol. 2, 1988, 467–516; id., “La cultura scritta a Ravenna tra antichità tarda e alto medioevo,” Storia di Ravenna 2: Dall’età Bizantina all’età Ottoniana, ed. Antonio Carile, 1992, 79–125; Francesco Magistrale, “La cultura scritta latina e greca: Libri, documenti, iscrizioni,” Federico II. Immagine et potere, ed. Maria S. Calò Mariani, Raffaella Cassano, 1995, 125–41; id., “Cultura grafica a Bari fra IX e XI secolo,” Storia di Bari dalla Preistoria al Mille, ed. Raffaella Cassano, Giosue Musca, and Mario Pani, 1989, 411–43; Armando Petrucci, “Mille anni di forme grafiche nell’area milanese,” Il millennio ambrosiano: La nuova città dal Comune alla Signoria, ed. Carlo Bertelli, 1989, 140–63). Epigraphic interest in the British Isles on a significant scale is restricted almost entirely to the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Celtic period (6th/7th–9th century). Cf. a number of larger works under “Selected Bibliography.” One of the specific features of the insular inscription culture of the period – and this is an appreciable difference to the situation on the continent – is that the national language, whether Anglo-Saxon or Celtic can be found in inscriptions in parallel to the imported learned language, Latin, and are only gradually driven out by it. The co-existence of the Latin alphabet, also for texts in the vernacular – with inscriptions in Germanic runes and Celtic Ogham, which are often bilingual, is also worthy of notice. It is hardly surprising that stone inscriptions have been, and are, at the centre of epigraphy. However, from the end of the sixties on, there was a systematic turn towards inscriptions on other surfaces (cf. Walter Koch, “Paläographie der Inschriften österreichischer Fresken bis 1350,” MIÖG 77 [1969]: 1–42; id., “Zur Schrift auf den österreichischen Bildfenstern,” Corpus vitrearum medii aevi, Österreich, vol. 2: Die mittelalterlichen Glasgemälde in Niederösterreich, part 1, ed. Eva Frodl-Kraft, 1972, LI-LVI; Rudolf M. Kloos, “The Paleography of the Inscriptions of San Marco,” The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, part 1: The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, vol. 1, ed. Otto Demus, 1984, 295–307, and 382–85; Clemens M. M. Bayer, “Versuch über die Gestaltung epigraphischer Schriften mit besonderem Bezug auf Materialien und Herstellungstechniken: Beobachtungen und Folgerungen anhand von Inschriften rhein-maasländischer Goldschmiedewerke des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts,” Inschrift und Material, Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch and Christine Steininger, 1999, 95–125). The trend continues, as the question of ‘inscription and material,’ and the varying techniques of production, often connected to the cultural gradient from West to East are sometimes of paramount importance for the dating of inscriptions, for instance in the High Middle Ages just prior to the triumph of Gothic script. It is apparent that painted inscriptions or those in gold- or

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enamelwork are considerably more sophisticated than those works in stone in terms of stylistic developments (cf. Walter Koch, “Auf dem Wege zur gotischen Majuskel: Anmerkungen zur epigraphischen Schrift in romanischer Zeit,” Inschrift und Material, Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch and Christine Steininger, 1999, 225–47). While some publications have recently appeared on the subject, the question of the closeness – or otherwise – of the relationship between heading scripts in books and, sometimes, charters, remains a desideratum, the relative priority always requiring reassessment. The question is particularly interesting with regard to insular inscriptions of the 7th–9th centuries, as well as those of the Iberian peninsula of the 9th–11th centuries (some studies are: John Higgitt, “The Stone-Cutter and the Scriptorium: Early Medieval Inscriptions in Britain and Ireland,” Epigraphik 1988: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Graz, 10.–14. Mai 1988, ed. Walter Koch, 1990, 149–62; Walter Koch, Auszeichnungsschrift und Epigraphik: Zu zwei Westschweizer Inschriften der Zeit um 700, 1994; Jean Vezin, “Épigraphie et titres dans les manuscrits latins du haut Moyen Âge,” Titres et articulations du texte dans les oeuvres antiques: Actes du Colloque International de Chantilly, 13–15 décembre 1994, éd. par Jean-Claude Fredouille, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé et al., Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 152 [1997], 549–58; Vicente García Lobo, “La escritura publicitaria en la Península Ibérica: Siglos X–XIII,” Inschrift und Material, Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch and Christine Steininger, 1999, 151–90; Walter Koch, “Epigraphik und die Auszeichnungsschrift in Urkunden,” Documenti medievali greci e latini: Studi comparativi: Atti del seminario di Erice 23–29 ottobre 1995, ed. Giuseppe de Gregorio, and Otto Kresten, 1998, 309–26). Some studies have also appeared on the subject ‘inscription and printing’ (FranzAlbrecht Bornschlegel, “Druckschriften und epigraphische Schriften auf der Schwelle zum Frühdruck am Fallbeispiel Augsburg,” Inschrift und Material, Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch and Christine Steininger, 1999, 213–24; Thomas Glöss, Druckschrift und Inschrift: Formzusammenhänge und wechselseitige Einflüsse von frühen Druckschriften und epigraphischen Schriften der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, 2006). Epigraphic studies of geographically limited areas within the framework of the large corpora projects make it possible, during periods where much material exists, to identify many groups of inscriptions which should probably be regarded as the products of workshops. The identification and study of workshops whose names are known is an area of particularly pro-

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ductive cooperation between art history and epigraphy, especially for the period of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern. In not a few uncertain cases, the identification of characteristic graphical elements which appear repeatedly is very helpful in attributing monuments to particular masters (Franz-Albrecht Bornschlegel, “Die Inschriften des Loy Hering und seiner Werkstatt,” Pinxit / sculpsit / fecit. Kunsthistorische Studien: Festschrift für Bruno Bushart, ed. Bärbel Hamacher and Christl Karnehm, 1994, 39–50; id., “Stilpluralismus oder Einheitszwang? Die Schriften in süddeutschen Bildhauerwerkstätten der frühen Renaissance,” Epigraphik 2000: Neunte Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Klosterneuburg 9.–12. Oktober 2000, ed., Gertrud Mras and Renate Kohn, 2006, 39–63; Rüdiger Fuchs, “Die Schrift der Werkstatt Hans Ruprecht Hoffmanns [†1616] in Trier,” Sancta Treveris: Beiträge zu Kirchenbau und bildender Kunst im alten Erzbistum Trier: Festschrift für Franz J. Ronig zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Michael Embach, Christoph Gerhardt, Wolfgang Schmid, Annette Schommers, and Hans-Walter Stork, 1999, 147–71; id., “Die Kapitalis-Inschriften von Trierer Bildhauern des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Epigraphik 2000: Neunte Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Klosterneuburg 9.–12. Oktober 2000, ed., Gertrud Mras and Renate Kohn, 2006, 15–37; Ramona Epp, “Inschriften als Quellen für Leben, Werk und Werkstatt Jörg Gartners,” Passauer Jahrbuch 47 [2005]: 85–106). With regard to historical periods, recently the 12th and 13th centuries, and the transition between the medieval and the modern have recently been of particular interest. The first relates to the Gothicization of script, the phase of transition between the various developments from Romanesque script to the Gothic majuscule. This was a process which regionally took genuinely different courses, fairly continuous in German-speaking territories, but elsewhere – for instance, southern and central France, detouring via various whimsical, hypertrophic forms, whose variations first opened the way to the Gothic majuscule, a script form prevalent throughout Europe (Walter Koch, “Auf dem Weg zur gotischen Majuskel: Anmerkung zur epigraphischen Schrift in romanischer Zeit,” Inschrift und Material, Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch, and Christine Steininger, 1999). The majuscule scripts ‘between’ the Middle Ages and the early-modern world, that is, after the end of the Gothic Majuscule – in central Europe around 1400, in Rome around the second quarter of the 15th century, and in Liguria only later in the second half of the century – and the revival of the capitalis of antiquity under the banner of humanism first in Italy and then, much later, north of the Alps, sometimes takes rather curious forms. These ‘early humanist’ scripts are often given an individual form by each master,

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and often appear as a conglomerate of pre-Gothic majuscules and modern capitalis forms. The net result is the co-existence of multiple script forms. With regard to miniscule, a transition style exists, the ‘gothic-antiqua’ primarily found in Passau’s sphere of influence, which departs from the gothic miniscule and was eventually replaced, a few decades later, by the modern antiqua miniscule (Barbara Treli nska, ´ “Epigraficzna kapita a protorenesansowa w Polce,” Tradycje i perspektywy nauk pomocniczych historii w Polce, ed. Mieczyslawa Rakosza, 1995, 209–22; Ottavio Banti, “Dall’ epigrafica Romanica alle Pre-umanistica: La scrittura epigrafica dal XII alla fine del XV secolo a Pisa,” Scrittura e civiltà 24 [2000]: 61–97; Walter Koch, “Das 15. Jahrhundert in der Epigraphik: Die Schriften ‘zwischen’ Mittelalter und Neuzeit in Italien und nördlich der Alpen,” Libri, documenti, epigrafi medievali, possibilità di studi comparativi: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio dell’ Associazione italiana dei Paleographi e Diplomatisti, Bari 2.–5. ottobre 2000, ed., Francesco Magistrale, Corinna Drago, and Paolo Fioretti 2002, 587–606; id., “Variationsfreudige Majuskel,” Mediterraneo, Mezzogiorno, Europa: Studi in onore di Cosimo D. Fonseca, ed. Giancarlo Ardenna and Hubert Houben, 2004, 621–40; id., “Epigraphische Vielfalt am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 54 [2000]: 367–76; Ramona Epp, “Eine epigraphische Minuskel zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Die Gotico-Antiqua in den Inschriften,” Archiv für Diplomatik 47/48 [2001/2002]: 167–221). Characteristic of the growing academic professionalism of the epigraphy of post antiquity and the increase of knowledge is a gratifying growth of international networks, which continues apace, and has the ultimate goal of a European comparative discipline. The process is driven by international congresses which are wholly or partly dedicated to inscriptions. This is particularly true of the German inscription project, which has been holding regular conferences with foreign participants since 1980, usually on clearly defined themes. Furthermore, congresses and seminars on medieval epigraphy have taken place in Rome, Erice, Poitiers, Oxford, León and Prague. Most of the proceedings, with contributions from leading epigraphicists, most of whom are involved in the large-scale projects, and representatives of related fields, have been published and make clear the progress made in medieval and modern epigraphy, and the continual opening of new themes (Fachtagung für lateinische Epigraphik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit. Landshut, 18.–20. Juli 1980, ed. Rudolf M. Kloos, 1982; Epigraphik 1982: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Klagenfurt, 30. September – 3. Oktober 1982, ed. Walter Koch, 1983; Deutsche Inschriften: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Lüneburg 1984, ed. Karl Stackmann, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philol.-hist.

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Kl. 3. Folge Nr. 151, 1986; Deutsche Inschriften: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, ed. Harald Zimmermann, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Kl. der Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur zu Mainz Jahrgang 1987, Nr. 12, 1987; Epigraphik 1988: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Graz, 10.–14. Mai 1988. Referate und Round-Table-Gespräche, ed. Walter Koch, Denkschriften der Phil.hist. Kl. der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 213 = Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die Herausgabe der Inschriften des deutschen Mittelalters 2, 1990; Vom Quellenwert der Inschriften: Vorträge und Berichte der Fachtagung Esslingen 1990, ed. Renate Neumüllers-Klauser, Supplemente zu den Sitzungsberichten der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-hist. Kl. 7, 1992; Inschriften bis 1300: Probleme und Aufgaben ihrer Erforschung. Referate der Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Epigraphik, ed. Helga Giersiepen and Raymund Kottje, Abhandlungen der Nordrhein-westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 94, 1995; Inschrift und Material: Inschrift und Buchschrift: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Ingolstadt 1997, ed. Walter Koch and Christine Steininger, Abhandlungen der Phil.-hist. Kl. der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften NF 117, 1999; Epigraphik 2000: Neunte Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik, Klosterneuburg 9.–12. Oktober 2000, Denkschriften der Phil.-hist. Kl. der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 335 = Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 10, 2006 [the meeting was dedicated to the early modern period]). The proceedings of the last two conferences – Halberstadt 2004 (Theme: “Inscriptions and European Treasures”) and Greifswald 2007 (Theme: “Traditions, Caesuras, Fresh Starts: Inscriptions of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period;” the event was mostly concerned with the Baltic regions) – have not yet been published. (On proceedings of conferences outside German-language scholarship, see: Epigrafia medievale greca e latina. Ideologia e funzione: Atti del seminario di Erice 12–18 settembre 1991, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Cyril Mango, Biblioteca del “Centro per il collegamento degli studi medievali e umanistici in Umbria,” 11, 1995; Épigraphie et iconographie: Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers les 5–8 octobre 1995, ed. Robert Favreau, Civilisation Médiévale, 2, 1996; Roman, Runes and Ogham: Medieval Inscriptions in the Insular World and on the Continent, ed. John Higgitt, Katherine Forsyth, and David N. Parsons, 2001; Documenti medievali greci e latini: Studi comparativi: Atti del seminario di Erice 23–29 ottobre 1995, ed. Giuseppe de Gregorio and Otto Kresten, 1998; Libri, documenti, epigrafi medievali: Possibilità di studi comparativi: Atti del Convegno internazionale dell’Assoziazione Italiana dei Paleografi e Diplomatisti, Bari, 2–5 ottobre 2000, ed. Francesco Magistrale, Corinna Drago, and Paolo Fio-

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retti, 2002; Epigraphica & Sepulcralia 1: Sborník prísp ˇ evkù ˇ ze zasedání k problematice sepulkrálních památek poradn ˇ ych ´ Ústavem Dejin ˇ Kmení ˇ AVMR v letech 2000 azˇ 2004, ed. Dalibor Prix and Jiri Rohá cek, ˇ 2005). The Epigraphische Forschungs- und Dokumentationszentrum (center for epigraphic research and documentation) of the University of Munich, founded in the 1980s within the School of History (Dept. of the auxiliary sciences) regards itself as a service point for the discipline. It aims to catalogue and where possible acquire works published on the subject throughout Europe, both that directly relating to epigraphy as well, in selection, historical and art historical works where inscriptions play a central role. With what is now the largest library on medieval and modern epigraphy, the center is the first port of call for research trips and enquiries from Germany and abroad. Literature reviews are published at intervals (see “Selected Bibliography”), which arrange and discuss publications under eight thematic headings: 1) Conference proceedings, handbooks, large-scale summaries. 2) National edition series. 3) Other editions. 4) Epigraphic methodology, aims, projects. 5) Scripts. 6) Language, formularies, meter, ‘mentalité.’ 7) Individual monuments or groups of monuments in historical perspective. 8) Epigraphy and art history, the applied arts, studies of objects and restoration questions. These reviews have become a means of international communication, and show the progress made in research, as well as the growing appreciation throughout Europe of inscriptions as a varied and spontaneous source on the life of earlier ages. Select Bibliography Rudolf M. Kloos, “Epigraphische Bemerkungen zum Aachener Karlssiegel,” Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsvereins 82 (1972): 5–10; Harald Drös, “Siegelepigraphik im Umfeld des ältesten Kölner Stadtsiegels,” Archiv für Diplomatik 39 (1993): 149–99; Jürgen Sydow, “Paläographie der Kölner Münzinschriften des Mittelalters,” Bonner Jahrbücher 149 (1949): 239–86; Rudolf M. Kloos, Einführung in die Epigraphik des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980, 2nd ed. 1992; with an excellent bibliography); Robert Favreau, Les Inscriptions médiévales: Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979); id., L’Épigraphie médiévale. L’Atelier du Médiéviste, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997; with an excellent bibliography); Nicolette Gray, A History of Lettering (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986); Helga Giersiepen and Clemens Bayer, Inschriften, Schriftdenkmäler – Techniken, Geschichte, Anlässe (Niedernhausen/Ts.: Falken, 1995); Vicente García Lobo and Encarnación Martín López, De Epigrafia Medieval. Introducción y Album (León: n.p., n.y.); Walter Koch, Inschriftenpaläographie des abendländischen Mittelalters und der früheren Neuzeit: Früh- und Hochmittelalter (Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007; with an excellent bibliography); Rudolf M. Kloos, “Die deutschen Inschriften: Ein Bericht über das deutsche Inschriftenunternehmen,” Studi Medievali 3a serie XIV, I (1973): 335–62; Walter Koch, “50 Jahre Deutsches Inschriftenwerk (1934–1984): Das Unternehmen

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der Akademien und die epigraphische Forschung,” Deutsche Inschriften: Fachtagung für mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik. Lüneburg 1984. Vorträge und Berichte, ed. Karl Stackmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 15–45; Robert Favreau, “L’Épigraphie médiévale: Naissance et dévéloppement d’une discipline,” Académie des inscriptions & belles lettres: Comptes rendus des séances de l’année (Paris: Boccard, 1989), 328–63; Walter Koch, “Das Schweizer Inschriftenwerk im Rahmen der europäischen Epigraphik,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 61 (2004): 45–59; id., “Die mittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Epigraphik: Das Werden einer neuen Historischen Hilfswissenschaft,” AfD 50 (2004): 547–77; id., Literaturbericht zur mittelalterlichen und neuzeitlichen Epigraphik (1976–1984) (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1987; with an introduction reviewing the discipline’s history); Walter Koch (with contributions from Franz-Albrecht Bornschlegel, Albert Dietl, and Maria Glaser), Literaturbericht zur mittelalterlichen und neuzeitlichen Epigraphik (1985–1991) (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1994); Walter Koch, Maria Glaser, and Franz-Albrecht Bornschlegel, Literaturbericht zur mittelalterlichen und neuzeitlichen Epigraphik (1992–1997) (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2000); Walter Koch and Franz-Albrecht Bornschlegel, Literaturbericht zur mittelalterlichen und neuzeitlichen Epigraphik (1998–2002) (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005).

Walter Koch

Eschatology A. Definition Eschatology (from Greek “ta eschata,” the last things) will here be understood as collective term for all conceptions concerning the life after death current in Latin Christendom between the age of migration and the Protestant Reformation. During that epoch, death, judgment, Heaven and Hell were known as the four last things, quattuor novissima, de veer uitersten, etc. The idea of our present dwelling in this ‘vale of tears’ being but a short time of examination for the everlasting life to come shaped the mentalities of our forefathers much more intensively than we can imagine today. The existence of the Church as organisation and of monasticism as institution, both considering themselves and being considered by most lay people as necessary intermediaries between man and the divinity, depended most on the suggestion that priests and monks possessed the means of securing a place in Heaven for the believers. This they would do only in exchange for earthly goods, i. e., administer the sacraments and pray for the dead. Eschatological beliefs therefore had a most intensive impact not only on medieval mental-

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ities, but on economics and power structures as well (as has been, several errors notwithstanding, convincingly demonstrated by Robert B. Ekelund et al., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm, 1996; Achim Mayer, Fegefeuer und Bettelorden: Päpstliches Marketing im 13. Jahrhundert, 1996). Most modern investigations into this subject of the medieval history of religiosity, however, usually do not have an interpretative character, but try, in the tradition of positivism, to collect and classify the material. This is sound, because much less work has been done in that field than, e. g., on the medieval epic, the iconography of the saints, or the political theories etc. It is self-evident that for this subject matter the period which attracts the majority of scholars from different disciplines are the late Middle Ages, which provide extensive source material. Perhaps the psychological and social functions of fantasies of a life after death, when the good will be rewarded and the bad ones be punished, are so obvious that psychohistory does not see a particular need to deal with this subject. For the historian of medieval mentalities, however, it would be vital to integrate these all-pervasive concepts into every single kind of his reconstructions of that period. B. Dying The shifts in the situation and conception of dying throughout the various ages have become one of the favourite themes for the history of mentalities after the general books by Philipp Ariès and Jean Delumeau, which, however, are not well informed concerning the epochs before the 16th century (Ariel Guiance, Muertes medievales: Mentalidades medievales. Un estado de la cuestion sobre la historia de la muerte en la Edad Media, 1989; T. Worcester, “In the Face of Death: Jean Delumeau on Late-Medieval Fears and Hopes,” Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck and Barbara I. Gusick, 1999, 157–74). Pre-Christian attitudes can be reconstructed via the archaeological finds and those Old Norse texts that point to the time before conversion (G. Steinsland, “Antropologiske og eskatologiske ideer i förkristen nordisk religion,” Collegium medievale 3 [1990]: 59–71). For the Middle Ages, it has become clear that usually people died at home, surrounded by their family, not separated in medical care (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Sterben/Tod – Mittelalter,” Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte, ed. id.,1993, 244–60, now see the 2nd ed. 2008; in how far there was a new sentiment of privacy at the end of the Middle Ages remains to be seen, cf. Christoph Kiening, “Privatheit und Innerlichkeit: Figuren des Todes an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit,” Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Gert Melville et al., 1998, 527–48). More and more, Christian rites surrounded the act of dying (Fre-

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deric Paxton, Christianizing Death, 1996), though pagan uses were never completely eradicated (cf. The Pagan Middle Ages, ed. Ludo J. R. Milis, 1991/ 1998). Given the much more detailed pictures of the afterlife which the new religion communicated to the people, death and the realms of the dead probably figured more strongly in Christian thinking than in that of classical or Germanic antiquity. In the hour of death, spiritual leaders tried to give their fellow-Christians exemplars of a “pia mors” (M. Lauwers, “La Mort et le corps des saints: La scène de la mort dans les Vitae du haut Moyen Age,” Le Moyen Age 94 [1988]: 21–50), but even repenting criminals did the same (Valentin Groebner, Ungestalten: Die visuelle Kultur der Gewalt im Mittelalter, 2003, 111). There is a great number of general overviews on the subject, e. g., Le Sentiment de la mort au moyen âge, ed. C. Sutto, 1979; Death in the Middle Ages, ed. H. Braet and W. Verbeke, 1982; Dies irae: Death in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Taylor, 1984; Tod im Mittelalter, ed. Norbert Ohler and Arno Borst et al., 1993; D. Alexandre-Bidon et al., A Réveiller les morts: La Mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval, 1993; du guoter tôt: Sterben im Mittelalter: Ideal und Realität, ed. Markus Wenninger, 1998; D. Alexandre-Bidon, La Mort au Moyen Age, 1998. Though a general set of expectations was shared by all Christians, one must not marginalize the individual, temporal, and social differences (for the medieval sovereigns, see Medievales 31, 1996; all contributions dedicated to the theme ‘La mort des grands’; see also Der Tod des Mächtigen, ed. Lothar Kolmer, 1997). One of the most remarkable studies dealing with those attitudes in front of death typical for a certain community, the followers of the Devotio Moderna, is still Leen Breure, Doodsbeleving en levenshouding: Een historisch-psychologisch studie betreffende de Moderne Devotie in het Ijsselgebied in de 14e en 15e eeuw (1987). The Carthusians have created an especial interest in the last hour as an English manuscript of that provenience dealing with all sorts of death-motifs demonstrates (e. g., see James A. Hogg, “Morbid Preoccupation with Mortality?” Analecta Cartusiana 117.2 [1986]: 139–89. Because of its broad overview, Ariel Guiance, Los disursos sobre la muerte en la Castilla medieval [s. VII–XV], 1998, can be recommended as a regional study. Much shorter is Arnved Nedkvitne, Mötet med döden i norrön medeltid, 2004). The memento mori and the ars moriendi were at first monastic, later on general themes for pious meditations which were supposed to help to produce contrition at the hour of death, considered, during the later Middle Ages, more and more the decisive point of man’s destiny in the other world (cf. Gerhild Scholz Williams, The Vision of Death: A Study of the Memento Mori Expressions … of the 11th and 12th Centuries, 1976. As an example of the ars moriendi

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may serve: Scone leeringe om salich te sterven: Een Middelnederlandse Ars moriendi, uitegeg, geannoteerd en ingeleid door, ed. B. de Geus and J. van der Heiden, 1985. A collection of texts from ancient Rome to the Protestant Reformation is presented by Jacques Laager, Ars moriendi, 1996). Studies on dying in diverse literary genera have not proved to be particularly helpful, but can be used for collecting source-material (e. g., Edelgard Dubruck, The Theme of Death in French Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1964; Philipp Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature, 1976; B. Gottschling, Die Todesdarstellung in den Islendingasogur, 1986; Claude Blum, La Représentation de la mort dans la litterature francaise de la Renaissance, I, 2nd ed. 1989; Alois Haas, Todesbilder im Mittelalter, 1989; Daniel Schäfer, Texte vom Tod: Zur Darstellung und Sinngebung des Todes im Spätmittelalter, 1995). Many regional studies deal with last wills as serial sources which are unambiguous testimonies of the attitudes toward death and of the fear of Purgatory and Hell. They show, among other things, which religious orders might be preferred for donations in exchange for masses, which churches in a certain town would be most searched after for being interred in, how many percent of the legacies were intended for the family, for monks and nuns, for secular priests, and so on (to quote a few examples: Heinz-Dieter Heimann, “‘Testament’, ‘Ordenung’,‘Giffte under den Lebendigen’: Bemerkungen zu Form und Funktion deutscher Königs- und Fürstentestamente sowie Seelgerätstiftungen,” Ecclesia et Regnum, ed. Dieter Berg and Hans-W. Goetz, 1989, 273–84; A. Bejarano Rubio, El hombre y la muerte: Los testamentos murcianos bajomedievales, 1990). C. Death The personification of death is an intellectual invention of the later Middle Ages, appearing at first in Latin poems of the second half of the 12th century, becoming more frequent in the 13th century, and entering iconography only after 1300 (L. E. Jordan, “The Iconography of Death in Western Medieval Art to 1350,” Ph.D. diss. Notre Dame, 1980). Whilst the famous triumph of death at Pisa is a work shortly before the Plague (Friederike Wille, Die Todesallegorie im Camposanto in Pisa, 2002), the epidemics did reinforce the occupation with this sinister figure (Peter Dinzelbacher, Angst im Mittelalter: Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung: Mentalitätsgeschichte und Ikonographie, 1996). The late 15th century were the heydays of this allegory both in art, literature, and on the stage, developing not only the skeleton shaped death but also a set of special motives as death riding on an oxen, etc. (Anna Rooth, Döden och den svarta oxen, 1985). Best known are the dances of death – more correctly:

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of the dead with the living – mostly painted on the walls of churches and cemeteries, but existing also in dramatized versions. They seem to be an inexhaustible topic, as demonstrated by regular congresses of the international society for their study (e. g., Il trionfo della morte e le danze macabre dagli Atti del VI Convegno Internazionale tenutosi in Clusone, 1997; Den Tod tanzen? Tagungsband des Totentanzkongresses Stift Admont 2001, ed. Renate Hausner and Winfried Schwab, 2002). For a bibliography, see: Hans Ferdinand Massmann, Literatur der Totentänze, rpt. of the 1840–1850 ed., with an epilogue, and bibliography of the dances of death 1830–1976 by Rainer Taepper, 2002. The fullest studies remain, however, Stephan Cosacchi, Makabertanz, 1965; and Reinhold Hammerstein, Tanz und Musik des Todes, 1980; to be supplemented by Hélène Bertrand Utzinger, Itinéraires des danses macabres, 1996; Brigitte Schulte, Die deutschsprachigen spätmittelalterlichen Totentänze: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Inkunabel “Des dodes dantz,” Lübeck 1489, 1990; and Andreas Mühling, Der Tod tanzt mit dem Leben: Totentänze des Spätmittelalters und ihre theologische Deutung des Lebens, 2005. It goes without saying that the concept of the macabre, so typical for late-medieval art, is the background for this phenomenon (Roberto Gigliucci, Lo spettacolo della morte: Estetica e ideologia del macabro nella letteratura medievale, 1994). D. Burial For the early Middle Ages, we are very well informed on all manners of interment and the objects with which the corpses were provided in the hope of their usefulness in the other world (cf. e. g., Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages, 2003). There is, however, no unanimity about the question of how characteristic the diverse grave goods were for a certain ethnic group. Many descriptions of the ceremonies surrounding the interment of a person of a high social rank have been conserved, be it for a certain city (Leonor Gómez Nieto, Ritos funerarios en el Madrid medieval, 1991), be it for one of the great persons in history (a south-east European example is analyzed by Johannes Grabmayer, “Das Opfer war der Täter: Das Attentat von Belgrad 1456 – über Sterben und Tod Ulrichs II. von Cilli,” MIÖG 111 [2003]: 286–316). There is no need to underline the fact that we are best informed about the ceremonies celebrated for the religious and secular leaders, the popes (Agosto Paravicini Bagliani, Le corps du pape, 1997; Wendy J. Reardon, The Deaths of the Popes, 2004), and the kings (F. Sabaté, Lo senyor rei est mort! Actitud i cerimònes dels municipes Catalans baix-medievals devant las mort del monarca, 1994; Hartmut Jericke, Begraben und vergessen? Tod und Grablege der deutschen Kaiser und Könige, 2005). The lament for the dead always had been

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also a topic of learned lyrics, and is well documented in the vernacular tongues as well (e. g., Albrecht Classen, “Death Rituals and Manhood in the Middle High German Poems The Lament, Johannes von Tepl’s The Plowman, and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring,” Grief and Gender 700–1700, ed. Jennifer Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner, 2003, 33–47), whereas preachers spoke only in honor of the great (e. g., D. L. D’Avray, Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching Before 1350, 1994). For the central and late Middle Ages, the inscriptions and tomb slabs are the richest sources for a person’s concrete ‘memoria,’ being addressed to the living, among whom the ‘glory’ of the dead should be preserved. An overview has been published by Hans Körner (Grabmonumente des Mittelalters, 1997), but there appear, of course, continually new monographs on the local level (cf., e. g., the collection edited by Wilhelm Maier et. al., Grabmäler: Tendenzen der Forschung an Beispielen aus Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 2000). Of course, also the place of interment has been studied (cf. Michel Lauwers, “Le cemetière dans le Moyen Âge latin: lieu sacré, saint et religieux,” Annales: Histoire: Sciences sociales 54/5 [1999]: 1047–72). But ‘memoria’ is also a term used by modern medievalists for all possible positive ways of dealing with the dead, the study of the varied forms of keeping alive their memory, being intensively promoted above all in Germany by the school of Otto Oexle (cf. his Memoria in der Gesellschaft und in der Kultur des Mittelalters: Modernes Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1999, 297–323; cf. also Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres, la souci des morts: Morts, rites et société au Moyen Âge, 1997). E. Visions of the Other World For medieval people, the main sources of information on the life after death would have been the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the visions of contemporaries, from those of the Frankish monks Barontus and Wetti of Reichenau to that of the Irish knight Tundal (1148, the best known text of this genus, ca. 200 manuscripts still extant today) or of the monk Edmund of Eynsham and of the peasant Gottschalk (both late 12th c.). Contrary to common opinion, the revelations of the late-medieval female mystics do not contain only images of heavenly and symbolic spaces, but also extensive and extremely sadistic descriptions of the punishments in Purgatory and Hell, such as provided by Hildegard of Bingen (Barbara Newman, “Hildegard of Bingen and the ‘Birth of Purgatory’,” Mystics Quarterly 19.3 [1993]: 90–97), Mechthild of Magdeburg (Katharina Bochsler, Ich han da inne ungehyrtú ding gesehen: Die Jenseitsvisionen Mechthilds von Magdeburg in der Tradition der mittelalterlichen Visionsliteratur, 1997), and, much more detailed, Bridget of Sweden

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and Francesca of Rome, whose eschatological ideas still remain to be explored. Even if mirroring authentic experiences, the structure and details of these showings, when recorded by an ‘amanuensis,’ were influenced markedly by apocalyptic apocrypha (Jewish and early Christian, like the otherworldly journeys ascribed to the apostles Peter and Paul), for which the volumes of the specialized yearbook Apocrypha: Le Champ des apocryphes (1990–) are indispensable. Though singular studies on the vast visionary literature have from time to time been published already by 18th century theologians and 19th century literary scholars, especially by those interested in the “precursors” of the Divine Comedy (the fullest overview remains August Rüegg, Die Jenseitsvorstellungen vor Dante und die übrigen literarischen Voraussetzungen der “Divina Commedia”, vol. I, 1945; the most recent one, albeit concentrated on Italian texts, is Guiseppe Tardiola, I viaggiatori del Paradiso: Mistici, visionari, sognatori alla ricerca dell’Aldilà prima di Dante, 1993), the subject has not been – and still is not sufficiently – recognized in its importance for the history of mentalities (notwithstanding the full monograph of Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, 1981; and id., Mittelalterliche Visionsliteratur: Eine Anthologie, 1989; see also his “Vision Literature,” Medieval Latin, ed. Frank A. Mantello and A. Rigg, 1996, 688–93; cf. id., “La Littérature des visions au Moyen Age: un document historique,” Revue historique 275 [1986]: 289–305). Even when both Jacques Le Goff (“The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages,” Understanding Popular Culture, ed. Steven L. Kaplan and W. De Reuyter, 1984, 19–37) and Aaron Gurevich (“Per un’antropologia delle visioni ultraterrene nella cultura occidentale del Medioevo,” La semiotica nei paesi slavi, ed. C. Prevignano, 1979, 443–62; id., “Oral and Written Culture in the Middle Ages: Two ‘Peasant Visions’ of the Late Twelfth-Early Thirteenth Centuries,” New Literary History 16 [1984]: 51–66) declared their interest in this matter, only a few historians would accept these texts as valuable enough to be considered in historical studies. At least one volume of the Typologie de sources du Moyen Age occidental (57) by Peter Dinzelbacher (Revelationes, 1991) has been dedicated to this type of texts as a historical source. The best bibliography on the subject of the eschatological visions, though rather specialized, is Robert Easting, Visions of the Other World in Middle English (1997); many details are given by Claude Carozzi, Le Voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la littérature latine (Ve-XIIIe s.) (1994); (cf. also the collective volume Le ‘visiones’ nella cultura medievale, 1990; and J. Rubio Tovar, “Literatura de visiones en la Edad Media románica: Una imagen del Otro Mundo,” Etudes de lettres 4. ser. 3 [1992]: 53–73).

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Therefore, the bulk of editions and secondary publications comes from literary historians, who usually overstress the part of fiction and topoi in this genus, minimizing the actual experiences of seers and mystics (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Zur Interpretation erlebnismystischer Texte des Mittelalters,” ed. id.: Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 1993, 304–31). The interest in the dissemination of the manuscripts of eschatological visions has been stimulated above all by Nigel Palmer (Visio Tnugdali: The German and Dutch Translations and their Circulation in the Later Middle Ages, 1982). The most recent critical editions in this field are: Th. Silverstein, A. Hilhorst, Apocalypse of Paul, 1997 (the long Latin versions); L. Jirousková, Die Visio Pauli, 2006 (medieval Latin, German, and Czech texts); La visione di Tungdal, ed. Margherita Lecco, 1998 (medieval French translations); Die ‘Vision des Tnugdalus’ Albers von Windberg, ed. Brigitte Pfeil, 1999 (the Latin text, without the German; the interpretation fills the bulk of this book!). Though most manuscripts have not been adorned by illuminations, there is nevertheless a splendid exception, viz. the French Tundalus, made for Margaret, King Eduard’s IV sister, by the painter Simon Marmion (†1489): Thomas Kren, ed., Margaret of York, Simon Marmion, and ‘The Visions of Tondal’ (1992). Not a few visions contain descriptions of the divine punishments which persons of political importance have (or will have) to endure. That often has been used for propagandistic aims, so by Carolingian writers (Paul Edward Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire, 1994), as well as during the investiture controversy (Roland Pauler, “Visionen als Propagandamittel der Anhänger Gregors VII.,” Mediaevistik 7 [1994]: 155–79), and in the contest between the popes in Rome and Agivnon, as both parties were supported by their prophets (Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417, 2006). One can gain a wealth of information about the knowledge of popular expectations regarding the hereafter by analyzing visions of peasants, as demonstrated by Peter Dinzelbacher’s articles “verba haec tam mistica ex ore tam ydiote glebonis: Selbstaussagen des Volkes über seinen Glauben, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Offenbarungsliteratur und der Vision Gottschalks” (Volksreligion im hohen und späten Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter Bauer,1990, 57–99), and id., “Bäuerliche Berichte über das Leben in der anderen Welt” (du guoter tôt: Sterben im Mittelalter: Ideal und Realität, ed. Markus Wenninger, 1998, 255–71). It should be noted that this corpus of texts is of interest to modern thantology as well, given that the medieval visions of the other world have been near death experiences, psychologically not different from those of reanimated patients which have received so much attention through the seminal

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work of R. Moody Jr. (Caroline Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of NearDeath Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, 1987; and, independently, Peter Dinzelbacher, An der Schwelle zum Jenseits: Sterbevisionen im interkulturellen Vergleich, 1989). The evidence from different cultures makes it impossible to explain similarities as nothing but literary topoi (as was the opinion of Marc Van Uytfanghe, “Les Visiones du très haut Moyen Age et les récentes ‘expériences de mort temporaire’,” Instrumenta Patristica 23 [1991]: 447–82; continued in Sacris Erudiri 33 [1992/1993]: 135–82). F. The Realms of the Other World Though understandably denied by modern theologians, the common opinion of all orthodox medieval writers was (in concordance with St. Augustine) that only a small number of human beings was predestined for salvation, whereas the vast majority (all pagans, heretics, and unrepentant sinners) would go to Hell. The evidence has been collected already by François Xavier Godts, De paucitate salvandorum quid docuerunt sancti (3rd ed., 1899). According to the norm setting Thomas Aquinus, “very few will be redempted […] most fail salvation […] (Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, 7, resp. ad 3). It is small wonder, then, to find much more evidence for fear of Hell than for anticipated joy of bliss. Regularly, eschatological texts and paintings treat the underworld with much more detail and fascination than the regions of the righteous. In both cases, however, one can often recognize a mirror of the social groups of the seer’s or writer’s time in the descriptions of the transcendent realms: clerics and lay people, for example, though the main grouping was structured according to virtues (virgins, martyrs, confessors …) or to vices (like in Dante’s Divine Comedy) (see Peter Dinzelbacher, “Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 12 [1979]: 20–40; id., “Reflexionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen in mittelalterlichen Jenseitsschilderungen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61 [1979]: 16–34). G. Heaven In medieval imagination, the land of the blessed was constructed with elements drawn from the Bible and from the many eschatological apocrypha in circulation (Mary Dean-Otting, Heavenly Journeys: A Study of the Motive in Hellenistic Jewish Literature, 1984). Both in the literature and painting of the era, its descriptions were significantly less vivid than the places of punishment. Here all structures are well ordered and extremely calm, whereas the devil’s home is a place of utmost chaos (Jerôme Baschet, “Image du désordre et ordre de l’image. Représentations médiévales de l’enfer,” Médiévales 2 [1983]: 15–36; Margherita Lecco, “Ordine” e “disordine” nelle rap-

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presentazioni medievali del Aldilà,” Quaderni medievali 20 [1985]: 133–43). This restricted fascination may be the reason for the rather limited quantity of modern works on medieval Heaven, too (cf. the works by Oechslin Weibel and by Dinzelbacher, quoted below). Who enters this region? Before resurrection, the saints only; after the Judgment, all good Christians. But prior to humans, this realm has been populated by the angels faithful to God. Their nine choruses (a conception of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita) have interested both art historians (Barbara Bruderer Eichberg, Les neuf choeurs angéliques: Origine et evolution du thème dans l’art du Moyen Âge, 1998) and, because of their singing and playing, musicologists (Reinhold Hammerstein, Die Musik der Engel, 1962, containing many illustrations; Hubert Herkommer, “Sphärenklang und Höllenlärm, Lächeln oder Fratzen,” Engel, Teufel und Dämonen, ed. id., 2006, 199–224). A controversy about the “visio beatifica” (do the righteous souls see God immediately after death or only after the Last Judgment?), initiated in 1334 by Pope John XXII., did affect only the learned specialists (Frans van Liere, “Johannes XXII en het conflict over het moment van de visio beatifica,” Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift 44 [1990]: 208–22). In accordance with the Revelation, Heaven was often imagined as ‘Hierusalem caelestis,’ the many-towered, shining city of God (Piere Prigent, La Jérusaleme Céleste, 2003), and as such it was seen in many a medieval shewing, with many symbolic details; e. g., by Elisabeth of Schönau, † 1164 (Die Werke der Elisabeth von Schönau, trans. Peter Dinzelbacher, 2006). (Cf. J. Emmerson, H. Feiss, ed., Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, 2000. Collective publications by art historians comprise: The Iconography of Heaven, ed. C. Davidson, 1994; and Der Himmel über der Erde, ed. Friedrich Möbius, 1995.) H. Hell Based on the Bible (parable of Lazarus; Revelation) and a bag of apocrypha (Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature, 1983; Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds, 1993) medieval people ‘knew’ that God had created Hell as the most terrible torture chamber he could think of in order to punish there those angels who had sided with Lucifer in the great rebellion against Him after creation. It used to be located in the very center of earth, the volcanoes being regarded as entrances thereto. Hell was omnipresent in the religious didactics of the epoch (theological and devotional writings, visions, preaching, art, theater, etc.), but figured in satires, too (D. D. R. Owen, The Vision of Hell: Infernal Journeys in Medieval

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French Literature, 1970; H. Thieulin-Pardo, “La Vision de l’enfer et de la damnation dans les manuels de confession, Castille, XIVe–XVe siècles,” Enfers et damnations dans le monde hispanique et hispano-américain, ed. Jean-Paul Duviols et al., 1996, 213–30). As all Romanesque and Gothic churches possessed reliefs or wall paintings with the Last Judgment, and preachers loved to speak about it, everybody was confronted with this dogma. (A rich source for pictorial representations of this place in wall paintings is Jerôme Baschet, Les justices de l’au-delà, Les représentations de l’enfer en France et en Italie (XIIe – XVe s.), 1993; whereas The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler, 1992, offers only a few studies from the point of art history and drama.) Rarely have musicologist written on the cacophonies with which the damned are tortured, the standard work remaining Reinhold Hammerstein, Diabolus in musica (1974), who offers many illustrations of devilish musicians, too (Hieronymus Bosch!). I. Purgatory Until the seminal book by Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (1981), the place of cleansing for those Christians who were neither very good nor very bad – a characteristic element of Catholicism in contrast both to the teachings of the Early Church and of the reformed churches – had been studied exclusively by theologians who, however, used to treat this subject in an ahistoric dogmatic and apologetic way. Le Goff was the first medievalist to draw attention to the significance of the “third place” between Heaven and Hell for the history of mentalities, comparing this new structure to the more differentiated society of the high Middle Ages (cf. J. Bougerol, “Autour de ‘La naissance du purgatoire’,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litterature du moyen âge 58 [1983]: 7–59). On the whole, one can accept this conception as valid, though several reviewers have shown the invention of the term “purgatorium” to predate by one or two generations the last quarter of the 12th century (when Le Goff assumed its creation). And even if the term did not exist during the early Middle Ages, there is no doubt that then already such a cleaning punishment existed for the souls of Christians (Peter Brown, “Vers la naissance du purgatoire,” Annales HSS [1997/1996]: 1247–61).The more people were indoctrinated with this belief (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Das Fegefeuer in der mittelalterlichen Schrift- und BildKatechese,” Studi medievali 3a, serie 38 [1997]: 1–66, Tav. I–VIII; and id., Von der Welt durch die Hölle zum Paradies – Das mittelalterliche Jenseits, 2007; C. S. Watkins, “Sin, Penance and Purgatory in the Anglo-Norman Realm: The Evidence of Visions and Ghost Stories,” Past and Present 175 [2002]: 3–33),

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especially during the late Middle Ages, the more they spent money for indulgences (J. Chiffoleau, “Sur l’usage obsessionnel de la messe pour les morts à la fin du Moyen Age,” Faire croire, 1981, 236–56). That abuse, which has never been forgotten, was to lead to the abolishment of this part of the other world topography by the Protestant Reformers (J. Finkenzeller, “Purgatory,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 1996, III, 363–64). An important step in the propagation of the cult of the poor souls has to be ascribed to the priests in Southern France during the time of the residence of the popes at Avignon (Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Age, 1980; Michelle Fournié, Le ciel peut-il attendre? Le culte du Purgatoire dans le Midi de la France (1320 environ – 1520 environ), 1997). The presence of evocations of purgatory in late-medieval literature as analyzed partly by Takami Matsuda (Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, 1997) could easily been shown for the other national literatures as well. Only a few saints, like Pope Gregory I and Odilia of Alsace, were specialized in saving souls from purgatory (Leopold Kretzenbacher, Legendenbilder aus dem Feuerjenseits, 1980). However, most of the late medieval practical mystics, especially the female ones, saw apparitions of tormented souls begging for help and were asked by believers to use their special contacts with Jesus in order to free their relatives from the purgatorial fires (Erich Bauer, “Die Armen-Seelen- und Fegefeuervorstellungen der altdeutschen Mystik,” Ph.D. diss. Würzburg, 1960). There was yet the possibility to make a pilgrimage to a famous entrance to this place, a cave in an island in Lough Derg, Ireland, known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory. A stay there would free the penitent from all purgatorial pains after his/her passing away (bibliography and edition of the Latin and Middle English treaties on the “Purgatorium Patricii” by Robert Easting, St Patrick’s Purgatory, 1991). There is a famous AngloNorman version of the story by Marie de France, which has been edited many times, lately by: G. Lachin, Maria di Francia: Il purgatorio di San Patrizio (2003); and Sonia Maura Barillari, Maria di Francia: Il purgatorio di San Patrizio (2004); Visiones Georgii (ed. Bernd Weitenmeier, 2006) prints the earlymodern German versions of Gregory of Hungary’s record of his visit to S. Patrick’s Purgatory in 1353. It is a strange contrast that medieval Latin and vulgar writings on purgatory by far outnumber the pictorial representations conserved today even in the Catholic countries. Therefore the revision of the iconography of this place has been undertaken only insufficiently (Gaby and Michel Vovelle, Vision de la mort et de l’au-delà en Provence d’après les autels des âmes du purgatoire, XVe – XXe siècles, 1970; and Susanne Wegmann, Auf dem Weg zum Himmel: Das

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Fegefeuer in der deutschen Kunst des Mittelalters, 2003, which should be supplemented by studies on other countries). But not all souls have to await their purgation in that subterranean dungeon. Some must stay as ghosts at the place of their sinful life, others are forced to join the wild hunt. Given the possibility to explore in these concepts pre-Christian forms of beliefs in man’s afterlife, which, however, must be distilled out of ecclesiastical records, this had been a preferred theme of the German mythological school before 1945, recently revived by French medievalists: Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Les Masques, Le Diable, Les Morts dans l’occident medieval” (Razo 6, 1986, 88–140); Claude Lecouteux, Geschichte der Gespenster und Wiedergänger im Mittelalter (1987); id. and Philippe Marcq, Les esprits et les morts, croyances médiévales (1990); Peter Assion, “Von den abgeschiedenen Seelen: Kirchenlehre und Volksglaube in der spätmittelalterlichen Fegefeuer- und Geisterliteratur” (Geist und Zeit: Festschrift für Roswitha Wisniewski, ed. Carola Gottzmann and Herbert Kolb, 1991, 255–75); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Die Wiederkehr der Toten (1995); Philippe Walter (Le mythe de la chasse sauvage dans l’Europe médiévale, ed. id., 1997); Andrew Joynes, Medieval Ghost Stories (2001); Claude Lecouteux, Das Reich der Nachtdämonen (2001); Christoph Fasbender, Von der Wiederkehr der Seelen Verstorbener (2001; from a theological point of view); Alwine Slenczka, Mittelhochdeutsche Verserzählungen mit Gästen aus Himmel und Hölle (2004). From the 12th century onward, the stories about souls appearing in order to get relief from the living via alms etc. multiplied (cf. Vito Fumagalli, “Il paesaggio dei morti: Luoghi d’incontro tra i morti e i vivi sulla terra nel Medioevo,” Quaderni Storici 50 [1982]: 411–23; Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Dialogue avec un fantôme, 1994; Robert Easting, ed., “Dialogue Between a Clerk and a Spirit of a Girl de Purgatorio (1153),” Mediaevistik 20 [2007]: 136–83). J. The Limbs Limbus patrum Located as a kind of vestibule to hell or a special compartment of it, a separate subterranean dungeon was assumed to exist for the fathers and mothers of the Old Testament. The main source for this idea was the Evangelium Nicodemi, the narration of Christ’s “descensus” into the netherworld in order to save these forerunners of the new religion, which is of course a special version of the world-wide mythological theme of the hero’s journey to the netherworld (cf. Höllen-Fahrten: Geschichte und Aktualität eines Mythos, ed. M. Herzog, 2006). Zbiginiew Zydorczyk edited an important handbook on the

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Latin and vulgar versions of this most influential apocryphon (The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus, 1997). There were numerous pictorial representations of the harrowing of Hell (Gary D. Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell, 1995), but the most important consequence of the reception of this tale was the development of liturgical stage-plays at Easter time. Here the descensus was dramatized, at first in Latin, but soon in the vernacular tongues, too (to quote but one example: Das Redentiner Osterspiel: Mittelniederdeutsch / neuhochdeutsch, ed. Brigitta Schottmann, 2002). Limbus puerorum Medieval theologians taught that the unbaptized children would be shut up forever in the Limbus puerorum, another prison for souls near hell. Opinions were divided in how far they had to endure punishments because of the original sin, the most severe doctrine being formulated by the Augustinian Gregory of Rimini, therefore called “tortor parvulorum” (torturer of the little ones) (cf. R. Weberberger, “Limbus puerorum,” Revue de theologie ancienne et médiévale 35 [1968]: 83–133, 241–59; Jaques Le Goff, “Les limbes,” Nouvelle revue de psychoanalyse 34 [1986]: 151–73; Didier Lett, “De l’errance au deuil: Les enfants morts sans baptême et la naissance du Limbus puerorum aux XIIe-XIIIe s.,” La Petite enfance dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne, ed. Robert Fossier, 1997, 77–92. Still very valuable, but nearly unknown, remains G. G. Coulton, Infant Perdition in the Middle Ages, 1922). K. Paradise This word was used both for heaven and for the terrestrial garden of the Old Testament, and could also mean a spiritual-allegorical place, the monastery, a part of the church (Reinhold R. Grimm, Paradisus coelestis, paradisus terrestris, 1977; Ursula Frühe, Das Paradies ein Garten – Der Garten ein Paradies, 2002). In the tradition of the Greek and Roman islands of the blessed, the Celtic Avalon, and the Oriental myths of the Garden of Eden (John Prest, The Garden of Eden, 1981; Günther Lanczkowski, Die Inseln der Seligen und verwandte Vorstellungen, 1986) medieval legends had much to tell about the Biblical paradise. As not a few people believed that the souls of the righteous Christians would await the last day in the Earthly Paradise, a place situated in the East, on a high mountain, and inaccessible for the living ones, it must be considered one of the eschatological regions (Lars-Ivar Ringbom, Paradisus Terrestris: Myt, Bild och Verklighed, 1958; Arturo Graf, Il mito del paradiso terrestre, rpt. 1982). Visionary excursions to this eschatological place, however, seem to have been infrequent, like, e. g., the recently published narration of a devout woman of Cologne, living in the early 13th century (Peter Dinzel-

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bacher and Renate Vogeler, ed., “Die Jenseitsreise der Kölner Begine Petrissa,” MlatJb 32 [1997]: 77–104). L. Personal Judgment Only very recently the completely incoherent doctrines of both a personal judgment immediately after death and the Last Judgement at the end of time have been investigated (Jerôme Baschet, “Jugement de l’âme, Jugement dernier,” Revue Mabillon 67 [1995]: 159–204; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Persönliches Gericht und Weltgericht,” Endzeitvorstellungen, ed. Barbara Haupt, 2001, 95–131; Robert Easting, “Personal Apocalypse: Judgement in Some Other-World Visions,” Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed. Nigel Morgan, 2004, 68–85). That double concept has been the result of two Biblical models of divine arbitration which to reconcile medieval and post-medieval theology never really succeeded. The most famous representation of the personal (or particular) judgment is St. Michael who weighs the soul’s good and evil deeds (also integrated in scenes of the Last Judgment) (cf. Leopold Kretzenbacher, Die Seelenwaage, 1958; Mina Martens, Saint Michel et sa symbolique, 1979; J. Yarza Luaces, “San Miguel y la balanza,” Formas artisticas de lo imaginario, ed. id., 1987, 119–55). An other device or rather automatic instrument to the same effect was the testing bridge, waxing broad for the just souls, but growing so thin for the bad ones that they must fall down into the fiery river of the underworld (Peter Dinzelbacher, “The Ways to the Other World in Medieval Literature and Art,” Folklore 97 [1986]: 70–87; id. and Harald Kleinschmidt, “Seelenbrücke und Brückenbau im mittelalterlichen England,” Numen 31 [1984]: 242–87; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Il ponte come luogo sacro nella realtà e nell’immaginario,” Luoghi sacri e spazi della santità, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucia Scaraffia, 1990, 51–60). Rather as a symbol for the difficult ascension to heaven, the ladder functioned as a popular pictogram (Christian Heck, L’échelle céleste dans l’art du Moyen Âge, 1997). M. Apocalyptic Expectations In contrast to the first centuries of Christendom, when the new religion tried to win adepts by promising them never-ending felicity in heaven, without stressing so much the doom of their enemies, in the Middle Ages there was much more menacing with the tortures of Hell expecting not only all pagans but all disobedient Christians, too. Therefore the waiting for the second coming of Christ to judge all the world implicated much more fear than hope, which is most evident in liturgy (the sequence Dies irae), art, religious prose and poetry (some general overviews may be read in Bernard McGinn,

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Apocalypticism in the Western Tradition, 1994; Claude Carozzi, Weltuntergang und Seelenheil: Apokalyptische Visionen im Mittelalter, 1996; P. Eligh, Leven in de eindtijd: Ondergangsstemmingen in de Middeleeuven, 1996; The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, ed. John J. Collins et al., 1999; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Antichrist/Apocalypse,” The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, vol. I, ed. Richard M. Golden, 2006, 45–48). A vital question, getting acute in situations of depression, was the concrete term of the Great Judgment. That millennial fears existed about the years 1000, 1033, 1260, 1348 etc. cannot be denied, though it is a matter of discussion how far not only the intellectuals, but the common people, too, were affected by such speculations (e. g., L’an mil: Medievales 21, 1991). As the perhaps most interesting thesis in this connection, Johannes Fried, Aufstieg aus dem Untergang: Apokalyptisches Denken und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaft im Mittelalter (2001), can be recommended. In this welldocumented book he shows how the wish to compute the date of the world’s end fertilized studies in the fields of astrology/astronomy, mathematics, optics etc. during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The black death of the 14th century did have an impact to the religious imaginary, reviving, e. g., the angry God, the father from the Old Testament who destroys his creations with darts and sword (Robert Lerner, “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities,” AHR 86 [1981]: 533–52; Dinzelbacher, Angst, loc. cit.). Though Jesus himself had blocked any speculations on the hour and day of the coming of the final realm, medieval scholars of course did reflect about this question. Given his influence in particular among the Franciscans, the theology of history by abbot Joachim of Fiore (†1202) has become a favorite theme for historians of religion and philosophy. Only the two most recent contributions can be mentioned here: G. L. Potestà, Il tempo dell’apocalisse: Vita di Giocchino da Fiore (2004); Matthias Riedel, Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit (2004). In any case, the specialized review Florensia: Bolletino del centro internazionale di studi Gioacchimiti, should be consulted. Antichrist, as a central figure of the last days, became, predominantly in the later Middle Ages, a subject for theological disputations, the tractate by the papal surgeon Arnold of Villanova, De tempore adventus antichristi (1300) raising much objection against this idea (Manfred Gerwing, Vom Ende der Zeit: Der Traktat des Arnald von Villanova über die Ankunft des Antichrist in der akademischen Auseinandersetzung zu Beginn des 14. Jahrhunderts, 1996; C. Backman, “Arnau de Vilanova and the Body at the End of the World,” Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Bynum and Paul Freedman, 2000, 140–55, and 313–16). The legends surrounding him, telling

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about his seduction of the kings and peoples by feigned miracles, were represented, from the 12th century onwards, on the stage (cf. Hans-Dieter Kahl, “Der sog. ‘Ludus de Antichristo’ [De Finibus Saeculorum] als Zeugnis frühstauferzeitlicher Gegenwartskritik,” Mediaevistik 4 [1991]: 53–148). These legends have attracted many scholars, such as Richard Kenneth Emmerson (Antichrist in the Middle Ages, 1981), or J. Guadalajara Medina (Las profecías del anticristo en la edad media, 1996). Also, images of that figure and his deeds could been seen especially in early printed books of his vita (Rosemary Muir Wright, Art and Antichrist in Medieval Europe, 1995). Another complex of legends emerged around the strange “enclosed nations” Gog and Magog, who were supposed to attack Christianity at the end of time (A. R. Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog and the Enclosed Nations, 1932; Helmut Brall-Tuchel, “Die Heerscharen des Antichrist: Gog und Magog in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Endzeitvorstellungen, ed. Barbara Haupt, 2001, 197–228). Apocalypticism manifested itself in many fields and movements, as has been recognized since Norman Cohn’s seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1961, 3rd ed. 1970) (perhaps overinterpreting the evidence). Some of the legends about the events of the last days could even become motivations for political actions, be it within the pauperistic movements of the high and late Middle Ages (Peter Classen, “Eschatologische Ideen und Armutsbewegungen im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert,” id., Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 1983, 307–26), be it when an impostor asserted to be the last of the emperors (Hannes Möhring, Der Weltkaiser der Endzeit, 2000). Also the Hussite movement was influenced by speculations on the end of the world (Eschatologie und Hussitismus, ed. Alexander Patschovsky and F. Smahel, 1996). N. Last Judgment and Resurrection The end of the world and the second coming of Christ occupied many authors and artists of the period, as it then was a nearly undisputed element of the weltbild (R. Schwarz, “Die spätmittelalterliche Vorstellung vom richtenden Christus: Ein Ausdruck religiöser Mentalität,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 32 [1981]: 526–53). It also used to be represented, in the 14th and 15th century on the stage (one example must suffice: Churer Weltgerichtsspiel: Nach der Handschrift des Staatsarchivs Graubünden Chur Ms. B 1521, ed. Ursula Schulze, 1993). Remarkably, most newer generalizing work on this subject seems to have been carried out by art historians, given the importance of illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse (and especially of its commentary by Beatus of Liebana), and the frequency of the Final Judgment on the western facades

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or the apsides of Romanesque and gothic churches and on famous reredos of the 15th century (Fra Angelico, Memling, Bosch) (see Frits van der Meer, Apokalpyse, 1978; De l’art comme mystagogie: Iconographie du Jugement dernier et des fins dernières à l’époque gothique, ed. Yves Christe, 1996; id., Das Jüngste Gericht, 2001). A few scholars have put forward the question: Who should be addressed by these pictures, and how did people react to them? (Cf. C. Consoli, “Il Giudizio finale del Battistero di Firenze e il suo pubblico,” Quaderni medievali 9 [1980]: 55–83; P. Klein, “Programmes eschatologiques, fonction et réception historiques des portails du XIIe s.,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 33 [1990]: 317–49.) Though in medieval scholasticism the most minute details concerning the appearance or age of the new bodies of the resurrected were matters for discussion (Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 1995), this expectation did not play an important role in the common beliefs, as, e. g., the rareness of tomb labels with an iconography and inscription hinting to the future bodies shows (N. Rogers, “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,” Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, ed. Morgan, 342–55). The new earth and the new heaven of the Apocalypsis also remained mostly a theologumenon without stimulating the concrete hopes of the faithful people. A final note: In medieval literature, the Other World figured also in forms which did not reflect Christian or apocryphal lore, but reflected ancient motifs (as Charon, Cerberus, Elysium …), best known through the katabasis in book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. Of course the courtly Norman Roman d’Eneas (1160) dwells deeply in Greco-Roman mythology, as does its somewhat later Teutonic counterpart, Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit (Hans Fromm, “Die Unterwelt des Eneas, Topographie und Seelenvorstellung,” Arbeiten zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, id., 1987, 101–21). Foremost poets writing allegorical journeys to the beyond used such motifs, which were accepted as literary devices, not as eschatological realities. They flourished mostly in France, Spain, and England (Chaucer’s dream visions), but found their undisputed climax in Dante’s Divine Comedy (A. Iannucci, “Already and Not Yet: Dante’s Existential Eschatology,” Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolina Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, 2003). Even the allegory of life as a voyage integrated both Christian and antique motives which originally had been founded in eschatological believes (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Die mittelalterliche Allegorie der Lebensreise,” Monsters, Marvels, and Miracles: Imaginary Journeys and Landscapes in the Middle Ages, ed. Lars Söndergaard and R. Hansen, 2005, 65–112; id., “Il viaggio allegorico per il mare del mondo nella letteratura medioevale,” Poeti e poesia a Genova [e dintorni] nell’età medievale, ed. Margherita Lecco, 2006, 101–25).

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Select Bibliography A comprehensive review of the relevant publications between 1980 and 1993 has been published by Peter Dinzelbacher, “Nova visionaria et eschatologica,” Mediaevistik 6 (1993): 45–84; see further: Christoph Auffarth, Mittelalterliche Eschatologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Cieli e terre nei secoli XI–XII (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1998); Peter Dinzelbacher, Die letzten Dinge: Himmel, Hölle, Fegefeuer im Mittelalter (Freiburg: Herder, 1999); id., Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, II., Hoch- und Spätmittelalter (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000); id., Himmel, Hölle, Heilige: Vision und Kunst im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002); id., “Visioni e profezie,” Lo spazio letterario del medioevo, vol. II (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1994), 649–87; id., Von der Welt durch die Hölle zum Paradies – Das mittelalterliche Jenseits (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007); Ende und Vollendung: Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter, ed. Jan Aertsen and Martin Pickavé (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002) (mostly on philosophical and theological questions); Enfer et paradis (Conques: Centre Européen d’Art et de Civilisation Médiévale, 1995); Endzeitvorstellungen, ed. Barbara Haupt (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2001); Friedrich Heer, Abschied von Höllen und Himmeln (Esslingen: Bechtle, 1971) (best general essay); Himmel, Hölle, Fegefeuer: Das Jenseits im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Jezler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994); Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline W. Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom: Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nigel Morgan (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2004); H. R. Patch, The Other World according to the Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988).

Selected Studies on Individual Autors Berthold von Regensburg: Christa Oechslin Weibel, ‘Ein übergülde aller der saelikeit …’ Der Himmel und die anderen Eschata in den deutschen Predigten Bertholds von Regensburg (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); Floris: J. H. Winkelmann, “Eschatologie als dieptestructuur: Over oorsprong en interpretatie von de Oudfranse Florisroman en zijn Middelnederlandse bewerkingen,” Middelnederlandse letterkunde, stand en toekomst, ed. F. P. van Oostrom and Frank Willaert (Hilversum: Verloren, 1989), 135–52; Giacomino da Verona: Marco Schrage, Giacomino da Verona: Himmel und Hölle in der frühen italienischen Literatur (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003); Gregory the Great: R. Manselli, “L’eschatologia di S. Gregorio Magno,” Ricerche di storia religiosa, vol. 1 (1954; journal demised thereafter), 72–83; id., Scritti sul medioevo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 81–95; Heinrich von Neustadt: Peter Dinzelbacher, “Eschatologie bei Heinrich von Neustadt,” Wirtschaft–Gesellschaft–Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: Festschrift Rolf Sprandel, ed. Hans-Peter Baum et al. (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2006), 643–58; Johannes Eriugena: T. Gregory, “L’escatologia di Giovanni Scoto,” Studi medievali 16 (1975): 497–535.

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Everyday Life in Medieval Studies

Everyday Life in Medieval Studies A. Definition The study of everyday life comprises an effort by medievalists to understand the common or mundane experiences of medieval people rather than focusing on traditional issues of politics, economy, religion, institutions, and language. Because this field is rather broad and encompassing, a precise definition of everyday life is elusive. Contemporary scholars have written that they are examining daily life while investigating strikingly different topics. Scholars also sometimes disagree about the subjects that should fall under “everyday life.” Studies of court culture can certainly offer much information about the daily experiences of the elite, and rich pictures of the quotidian activities of royalty, for example, are often possible. Yet many scholars of everyday life wish to emphasize the lives of the many rather than the few in their studies, giving examinations of rural and city life primacy. Furthermore, this frequent emphasis on the underrepresented has led to overlap with studies of women, the poor, children, and other groups often ignored in scholarship prior to the 20th century. Investigations of everyday life in the 1970s sometimes intersected or overlapped with the effort of scholars to understand Lebensformen (ways of life) and mentality. Examining the way medieval people thought about their world became increasingly important with the development of postmodernism and the new cultural history, which tend to emphasize the views that texts allow medievalists to discern rather than the reconstruction of common events that scholars of everyday life first emphasized. Although this diversity does not lend the same coherence to everyday life as that of many other established subject matters, it has led to a remarkably rich literature in a variety of disciplines. Historians, however, dominate the subject, thus far producing more studies concerning everyday life than their counterparts in literary studies, art history, or archeology. Nevertheless, many examinations of daily life employ an interdisciplinary approach especially given the nearly unparalleled information that art and material culture can provide. In order to explain this aspect of the Middle Ages, which few medieval texts take as their main focus, medievalists have used a wide range of sources, textual and material. They include court proceedings, wills, archeological remains, chronicles, art, architecture, literature, trade records, financial documents, inventories, theological and philosophical tracts, city and manorial records, laws, church documents, mirrors, and hagiography. The study of medieval everyday life is therefore inherently interdisciplinary,

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and because of the rich information archeology can provide about everyday life, it has strong intersections with material culture studies. Studies of medieval daily life often take up rather specific topics, and even those that purport to be general, covering the whole of the Middle Ages and all of Europe, tend to focus on western Europe in the later Middle Ages. Very few works have traversed both the early and late Middle Ages, which contributes to the volume and diversity of studies produced. Everyday life (vie quotidienne in French and Alltagsleben in German) became a common subject of study in the early 20th century though it has roots in the late 19th century. Neither the Lexikon des Mittelalters nor the Dictionary of the Middle Ages offer an entry on everyday or daily life perhaps because of the difficulty of working out its precise definition and scope. Although it is a relatively recent subject of study, it is a well established one. Since the 1960s broad examinations of everyday life as well as narrower studies that either draw from this concept or directly address it have proliferated. In July 2007, a search for the general subject “Daily Life” in the International Medieval Bibliography produced a list of 5497 articles, and the number of books that could fall under this category is enormous. The immense size of this field relates to the fact that it naturally overlaps with many other areas of study. One could argue that almost all medieval subjects touch upon aspects of daily life. Thus, this essay can only offer a sampling of the various subjects one might place under “everyday life” and some of the most important works. Works of lesser importance will be listed to show the variety and proliferation of such studies for there is no way to offer a comprehensive list in such a short piece. B. History of Research The first historians, art historians, and literary scholars to examine everyday life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wished to investigate what they termed “domestic life,” “private antiquities,” or domestic antiquities.” Their strong desire to examine antiquities eventually developed into the common use of material culture as a source in later investigations of everyday life. Many of the most prominent among these early scholars were German speakers: among them Jakob Heinrich von Hefner-Alteneck, Hermann Weiss, Jacob von Falke, Moriz Heyne, and Georg Steinhausen. (Kühnel, 7). John Thrupp, an example from Anglophone scholarship, published in 1862 The Anglo-Saxon Home: A History of the Domestic Institutions and Customs of England, whose originality for the time is recognized by current AngloSaxonists. Among these early pioneers in the subject, the one still most cited today is Alwin Schultz who wrote Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger (1889); Alltagsleben einer deutschen Frau zu Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts (1890);

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and Deutsches Leben im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (1892). As an art historian, he drew much evidence from artworks though he also employed literature and other historical texts. In the most famous of his books, Das höfische Leben, he used art and poetry especially to examine courtly life in the 12th and 13th centuries. In its focus on the elite, sometimes too literal interpretation of sources, and desire to list and categorize, it is in keeping with much late 19th-century and early 20th-century scholarship, but his interest in the quotidian was relatively innovative. Using artistic and textual descriptions Schultz covered a staggering array of topics in chapters that employed the following topics as organizing principles: fortifications, children, getting up in the morning, meals, hunting, travel, courtly love, weapons, tournaments, “feuds, the Peace of God, and robber barons,” warfare, ships, repentance, starving a castle, and old age. Alltagsleben einer deutschen Frau equally reflects 19th-century ideas of possible female historical activities with its thematic organization into chapters on love and betrothal, clothing, marriage, housekeeping, daily life and pleasures, birth, baptism, and child-raising, death and burial, and prevailing beliefs. The study of everyday life would not, however, take off until the early 20th century. Influenced by sociology and anthropology, medievalists began in the 1920s and 1930s to address aspects of the past hitherto ignored in scholarship. The ideas of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim began, for example, to influence the work of medievalists. For historians, this scholarship was part of the ‘new history’ that strove to examine not the elite, but society as whole, making various groups, institutions, and ideas valid subjects of scholarly research. Highly influential in this period was Charles-Victor Langlois’ La vie en France au moyen âge de la fin du xiie au milieu du xive siècle (1926–1928). This two-volume study represents the ways this scholar worked against romanticizing history and rejected the idea that history could be a “scientific” inquiry. In his first volume, Langlois examined French life by studying the romances, and in the second he considered the same subject from the view of contemporary moralists. Before discussing certain French romances in turn, Langlois paid tribute to Alwin Schultz’s Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger, whom he credited with employing literary sources to learn about courtly life (vol. 1, x-xi). He defined moralists as those men who wrote seriously about the mores of their time, a large group of medieval writers, whom he believed to deserve more attention for the light they could cast upon French history. Though recognizing that they could not entirely be separated from the romance writers and their commentary on courtly life, he believed they offered another view of medieval existence (vol. 2, vi-vii). In his willingness to employ a wide range of sometimes under-

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appreciated sources, he presaged a typical approach to finding evidence in the field of medieval everyday life. Eileen Power helped to popularize the study of daily life and to bring Langlois’s ideas to Anglophone scholarship. Having studied for a year (1910–1911) with Langlois in Paris, she acknowledged her debt when she dedicated to him her edition and translation of the Le ménagier de Paris, a 14thcentury manual on female deportment. With her famous portrait of “Bodo” in the popular book Medieval People (1924) and with her depiction of a rural English family, The Paycockes of Coggeshall (1920), Power helped many to appreciate peasants’ historical roles. She called scholarly attention to the details in medieval individuals’ lives, arguing that it was worthwhile to study them, and at the same time she made social history accessible to a general audience. To this day, everyday life remains a subject of great interest to non-scholars with a rich bibliography of works addressed to the average reader. Even children’s books cover this topic, such as Neil Grant’s beautifully illustrated but not entirely up-to-date Everyday Life in Medieval Europe (2004). Power furthermore brought women to the forefront of historical inquiry (Medieval Women, published posthumously in 1975) reconstructing their role in medieval everyday life. Her English colleague and sometime collaborator George Gordon Coulton edited and translated many medieval documents for his Life in the Middle Ages (1910, 2nd ed. 1928) with later reprintings. He then edited the series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought and along with Power co-edited the Medieval Life and Letters Series. Historians interested in social and economic history opened inquiry into life in the medieval city and countryside. Though ostensibly interested mainly in economic history, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne offered examinations of both the merchant and “middle class” as well as the institutions that governed civic life in his influential Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1925, French edition 1927), thereby demonstrating the close connection between economic and social history. This relationship between these two historical branches results in the strong economic and trade components of many studies of everyday life. When Pirenne also wrote the seminal Mahomet et Charlemagne (English translation 1937; German translation 1963), he inspired historians like Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre to start the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Among other subjects, Marc Bloch turned to the study of medieval rural life in many articles and the monograph Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931). He took a wide view, concentrating upon broad developments in rural life. Edmond Faral in his La vie quotidienne au temps de Saint Louis (1938), continued the trend of working against romantic notions of the Middle Ages. In

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addition to examining the material particularities of medieval life, he tried to determine the views that individuals held – their morals and conscience – but within relatively narrow chronological and geographic confines in order to produce a more comprehensive tableau. After describing the work and customs of various groups (women, royalty, knights, clergy), including a long chapter on “the people,” the non-elite from townspeople to rural peasants and doctors to charlatans, he covered comforts and diversions, ideas of life such as religious and moral views, literary conceptions, and concepts shaping and shaped by the social order. This work’s appearance as part of the Hachette series on la vie quotidienne directed mainly to a popular audience again demonstrates the rather wide popularity of this approach to scholars and average readers alike. The subject of everyday life continued to be popular in France and elsewhere in the West. In 1972, Robert Delort’s Le Moyen Âge: Histoire illustrée de la vie quotidienne appeared (English translation 1973). It was lavishly illustrated, using many images of everyday objects and artistic depictions of daily events to make its points and was clearly meant to appeal to general readers. The subjects of each of this book’s sections reflect areas of growing concern to scholars, which would shape works on everyday life for the next few decades. Delort’s chapter on the environment presages the interest in natural resources. One on mentality reflects an interest in the common perceptions of medieval people, especially those underrepresented in the sources. Following the medieval idea of ordo, he offered successive chapters on peasants, knights, and clerics. His last chapter on towns covers a group that was in some senses outside the traditional medieval order – the inhabitants of urban areas. The early 1970s were an especially important era in the development of Medieval Studies of everyday life. In his Lebensformen in Mittelalter (1973), Arno Borst influentially concerned himself with Lebensformen, a word he admitted was imprecise in meaning or “unscharf.” (14) Borst argued that the idea that people conceived of themselves as being able to follow various forms or ways of life was quite ancient in the West and that their conceptions of these Lebensformen had changed over time. Therefore, he saw utility in determining how medieval people understood their roles in life and their perceptions of the possibilities they had for how they lived. Dividing his work in two sections entitled condicio humana and societas humana, he indicated his desire to understand not only how medieval people lived but also how they understood their place in society as a whole and the effects each had upon the other. In the chapters “Time and Life,” “Space and Environment,” and “Man and Community,” he explored a wide array of subjects such as ruins, voluntary poverty, village planning, clothing, nature, insanity, and dialect. For the next section’s chapters, “Farmers and Burghers,”

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“Nobles and Princes,” “The Spiritual and the Educated,” and “Outsiders and the Exotic,” he touched upon an equally diverse list of topics including market economy, communes, robbers, virtue, court poets, students, heretics, and Mongols. In addition to displaying the sheer variety of medieval experience among other matters, Borst offered a means to examine how medieval ideas shaped everyday events. Another work to appear in 1973 was Pierre Riché’s La vie quotidienne dans l’empire carolingien (English translation 1978), which examined everyday life in the Carolingian Empire. As part of Hachette’s daily life series, it was meant to serve a popular audience as well as a scholarly one. The book was among the first works to examine daily life in the early Middle Ages. General works on medieval everyday life prior to and after Riché’s book frequently ignore or give little consideration to the centuries prior to 1000. On his first page, Riché noted the difficulties of his undertaking given the paucity of evidence for the early Middle Ages, but he was able to discern an extraordinary amount about common experiences and groups underrepresented in the sources. In addition to many chapters on lay and religious elite life, he included ones on rural technology, artisan technology, building trades, furniture and clothing, lighting, heating, and hygiene, food and drink, the landscape, cities, and demography. Other early medievalists have continued Riché’s efforts to learn about this aspect of their period. For example, Monika Obermeier has produced a study of servile women in the early Middle Ages (“Ancilla:” Beiträge zur Geschichte der unfreien Frauen im Frühmittelalter, 1996), Gale Owen-Crocker a book on Anglo-Saxon dress (Dress in Anglo-Saxon England, 1986, rev. ed. 2004), and Mechtild Müller a monograph on early medieval clothing (Die Kleidung nach Quellen des frühen Mittelalters). Various articles have touched upon early medieval everyday life, especially in the Carolingian Empire for which sources are relatively abundant (Jean Verdon, “La femme vers le milieu du ixe siècle d’après le polyptyque de l’abbaye de Saint-Remi de Reims,” Mémoires de la société d’agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts du département de la Marne 91 [1976]: 111–34; Ludolf Kuchenbuch, “Trennung und Verbindung im bäuerlichen Werken des 9. Jahrhunderts,” Frauen in der Geschichte VII, ed. Werner Affeldt and Annette Kuhn, 1986, 227–42; id., “Opus feminile. Das Geschlechterverhältnis im Spiegel von Frauenarbeiten im früheren Mittelalter,” Weibliche Lebensgestaltung im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz, 1991, 139–78; Chris Wickham, “Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe,” TRHS 6th ser., 2 [1992]: 221–46). Though not necessarily directing himself squarely at the idea of daily life, Jacques Le Goff made major contributions to the field through his

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studies of many everyday issues as well as of the mentalities and views of a broad spectrum of medieval society. Representative of his work is the collection of essays, Pour un autre Moyen Âge: temps, travail et culture en occident, (1977, English translation 1980). Divided into four sections, the individual pieces each examine the past through a different lens while combining the quotidian experience with its contemporary intellectual understanding. In “Time and Labor” Le Goff explored conceptions of time among merchants, laborers, and the church, legal and illegal trades, early medieval workers and peasants, and the development from the 9th to 12th centuries of the social ideology of ordo which divided the population into those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. For “Labor and Value Systems” he studied university life and confessors’ understanding of other trades and professions while for “High Culture and Popular Culture” he chose not to view the two cultures as separate phenomena but instead considered culture in the Merovingian kingdoms, ritual and the cult of the saints, dreams, the marvels of the east, and folktales. By ending with “Toward a Historical Anthropology” Le Goff suggests anthropology as a means of better understanding the “ordinary man” as well as medieval ritual and indeed all the topics he covered. In his introduction he argues that anthropology allows historians to examine important sources like folklore and topics such as “daily habits, beliefs, behavior, and mentalities” that might otherwise lie outside historical study (x-xi). Some scholars, such as Heinrich Fichtenau in his Lebensordnung des 10. Jahrhunderts, (1984, English translation 1991), embraced the idea of examining the social order as medieval individuals understood it. He was not the first to examine life in the 10th century (Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Death and Life in the Tenth Century, 1967), but he brought many of the theoretical ideas of the 1970s to bear on the surprisingly rich sources of this century. Overlapping with scholars interested in mentality, Fichtenau gave a rich account of the experiences of a variety of 10th-century people as he explained both how they lived and how they understood the world around them. After establishing medieval ideas of ordo and familia, Fichtenau then covered in turn various groups (nobility, secular clergy, monks, and peasants) discussing the manifestations of these two mentalities within each. He ended with a chapter on disorder, a means to examine the ways in which people also mistreated each other. Other general studies of medieval everyday life including Otto Borst’s Alltagsleben im Mittelalter (1983), tried to make the daily life of medieval people come alive for readers, to illuminate what might seem an alien past. Borst wrote that “everyday” consisted of experiences that occurred on all days. Acknowledging that surviving sources generally reflected the elite

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rather than the majority of the medieval population (13), he nevertheless offered in thematic chapters what he believed to be a sort of antidote to the nationalist pride that some past Germans had taken in medieval high culture and the nobility. Covering both medieval world views and occurrences while emphasizing the rich variety and changes from the 11th to 15th centuries, he insisted that medieval everyday life was not timeless. In Harry Kühnel’s Alltag im Spätmittelalter (1984), he and his fellow authors examined the everyday life of late medieval Germany employing the latest methodologies for analyzing material culture as well as considering textual sources. Among the subjects they covered were conceptions and measurement of time, norms and sanctions, city society, peace, social mobility, death, birth, work, food, clothing, shelter, and art. These choices reflect both earlier interests in this field and the topics of subsequent studies, doubtless influenced in part by this richly illustrated publication from the Institut für Realienkunde Österreichs. In his Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit (1989), Gerhard Jaritz hoped to call attention rather than provide solutions to the many problems of researching daily life in the 13th to 15th centuries. He argued that the history of the everyday must necessarily be more than describing and explaining, noting for example that medieval people themselves recognized a difference between holidays and other days, that they, too, would have recognized an “everyday life.” He urged historians also to examine concepts, processes, and structures as a means of explaining daily experiences. (10–11) Jaritz, for example, explored subjects such as communication, the individual and the group, meanings and symbols, and types and names in part to demonstrate the variety of methods one could employ in examining everyday life. Jaritz has also played a leading role at the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, founded in 1969 and based in Krems. The Institut has published proceedings from their congresses held regularly since 1977 concerning many topics related to everyday life and material culture. In, for example, Norm und Praxis im Alltag des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 1996), the various essays all tackle the fraught question of the degree to which sources reveal norms or expectations versus actual practices. For scholars examining everyday life, this question gets to the heart of how they must interpret evidence in order to learn about a subject almost no medieval text addressed directly. Most agree that they must pay careful attention to the details, conventions, and contexts of their sources in order to distinguish between expectation and practice though the split between the two is rarely tidy. A number of the essays in Jaritz’s collection rely upon material culture as a means of testing and balancing evidence of

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written sources that may reflect norm more than practice. Like most scholars of everyday life, however, they recognize that one must be just as careful in interpreting material evidence as texts. In another related volume, Terminologie und Typologie mittelalterlicher Sachgüter: Das Beispiel der Kleidung (ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 1986), the participants examined the problems in the terminology used for medieval clothing in texts, an example of the difficulties historians of everyday life face in interpreting the evidence available to them. The Krems volumes also cover a wide range of topical subjects. Disziplinierung im Alltag des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 1999), for example, covered discipline in late medieval cities and in Jewish communities as well as addressing different forms of discipline – royal discipline concerning violence, discipline both as a means of explanation and as a social reality in late medieval city chronicles, and self-discipline in mirrors for princes. In sum, the publications of this group highlight the methodological problems of examining everyday life while suggesting new avenues of inquiry. Associated with this Austrian institute is the society Medium Aevum Quotidianum, founded in 1982, which in addition to publishing a journal of the same name, promotes the study of everyday life and material culture through conferences, publications, and research. During the 1970s and 1980s, American scholar David Herlihy produced books and articles that addressed aspects of everyday life especially as they related to women and family. In Medieval Households (1985) he offered a broader European view of the family than Les Toscans et leurs familles (with Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, 1978). In examining the family through successive eras in Medieval Households, Herlihy touches upon many aspects of everyday life including domestic labor, child rearing, family size, marriage practices, affection between parent and child, and management of familial goods. In Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Europe, 1990, he examined women’s labor in chronologically arranged chapters that provided a rich picture of the daily experiences of many medieval women. His posthumous collection of previously published essays, Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe (1995), allows one to see both the breath of Herlihy’s interests and the ways in which they drew from earlier works on everyday life, especially in their concentration upon understudied groups like women and children and in their details concerning society and customs in medieval Italy. In the Festschrift for Herlihy, Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living (ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, 1996), scholars produced a variety of essays including a few on matters directly pertaining to daily life such as Lisa Bitel’s “Reproduction and Production in Early Medieval Ireland,” 71–90; Giles Constable’s “Was There a Medieval Middle Class? Mediocres

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(mediani, medii) in the Middle Ages,” 301–324; and Lorraine Attreed’s “Poverty, Payments, and Fiscal Policies in English Provincial Towns,” 325–48. A rich collection of essays concerning late medieval England appears in Christopher Dyer’s Everyday Life in Medieval England (1994). Originally published between 1980 and 1990, they reflect the subjects and approaches of this decade. Touching upon economic history as well as issues of identity, power, and material culture, Dyer examined village life and settlement, diet, buildings, wages, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and markets. In essays concerning “The Growth and Decline of Rural Settlements” and freshwater fish consumption, he employed archeological evidence. Other important sources for him and historians of England are manorial and parish records, estate surveys, and other documents which allowed him to present findings on changes in diet, peasant buildings, gardens, and orchards. Through analysis of relevant portions of the Domesday Book, he was able to provide rather abundant information on towns and cottages in the 11th century. Dyer admits that a combination of material and documentary evidence is best but only rarely possible when exploring medieval rural life (101). Insistent that a combination of local studies and general concepts provide the best way to examine rural life, he also offered looks at Pendock, Worcestershire; Suffolk; and especially the West Midlands. Since the 1980s, research on aspects of everyday life has blossomed. Listing all recent studies is neither possible nor desirable, but a sampling of recent works will indicate representative subjects and methodologies. Rather than selecting the “most important” studies since it is as yet too early properly to judge their influence, those books and articles discussed below will rather highlight areas that have been of particular interest without addressing large fields with which everyday life has strong connections such as women’s studies, memory, death and dying, and the history of science and medicine. Often archeology provides rich evidence for medieval everyday life not found in written texts; furthermore scholars sometimes weigh archeological finds against the evidence of written sources. (Martina Hartmann, Aufbruch ins Mittelalter, 2003) For western Europe, archeological studies that concern medieval everyday life are much more common than for eastern Europe, in part because Byzantine layers and finds have often been discarded in excavations focused on earlier periods. A collection of essays edited by Ken Dark, however, covers palaces, housing, shops, and religious artifacts in an effort to cast light on Byzantine daily life (Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday Life in the Byzantine Empire, 2004). Similarly, the interdisciplinary Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life (ed. Nevra

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Necipoglu, 2001) provides essays on various topics including ritual, urban planning, architecture, markets, and foreign inhabitants. The authors often combined the approaches of historians, art historians, and/or archeologists in exploring these subjects. Others continue to examine the East through more “traditional” means. Nicolas Oikonomidès, for example, employed literature and inventories among other textual sources in order to understand everyday life in the Byzantine world as seen in his collected essays, Social and Economic Life in Byzantium (ed. Elizabeth Zachariadou, 2004). Studies of everyday life continue to foster interest in those with the least social status in the Middle Ages. Prisoners, jails, guards, and release conditions are some of the subjects Jean Dunbabin discusses in her Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300, 2002. Clearly informed by cultural history, Dunbabin in her examination of captivity nevertheless comments frequently upon the daily conditions of the imprisoned and those who put and kept them in and released them from confinement as well as prevailing views of these individuals and the reasons for their detention. She demonstrates a skepticism concerning the information of romances far removed from the approach of Alwin Schultz and Charles-Victor Langlois, noting that such sources are often imaginative. Though she agrees that skepticism may not be a problem for “some postmodern literary critics,” it is a problem for a historian trying to discern probable historical conditions. Like many of her contemporaries she compares the literary sources to other historical documents, in which she discovered enough commonalities to determine that the romances could sometimes yield information about imprisonment (16). If economic history has long overlapped with that of everyday life, in the last thirty years cultural and social history have had many intersections in studies of common and unusual medieval circumstances and experiences. Among those individuals with low status who have interested medievalists are children, whose everyday experiences have been the subject of much exploration. Among those works not already mentioned that discuss children in the Middle Ages is Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960, English translation 1962), a famous work whose arguments concerning medieval childhood have not held up under scrutiny. After using a small fraction of the available medieval evidence on children, he concluded mainly on the basis of artistic depictions that the concept of childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages. Ample ensuing scholarship covering a range of eras and places has proven this thesis untenable. Barbara Hanawalt in Growing Up in Medieval London (1993), employed a wide range of evidence to learn about the material culture, birth, baptism, mortality, instruction, and apprenticeship of children as well as about orphans, adolescence, and young servants

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in late medieval London. Her use of legal evidence demonstrates its utility to scholars desiring to learn about daily experiences. Taking an expansive chronological view but focusing mainly upon France, Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett explored the daily experiences of children from religious life to education, living conditions to apprenticeship, street children to elite children in their Les enfants au Moyen Âge (1997, English translation 1999). Nicholas Orme, examined later medieval English childhood in his Medieval Children (2001), including chapters on daily experiences such as danger, words, rhymes, and songs, and play. He expanded upon his consideration of English children’s education in Medieval Schools (2006). Many of the essays in the collection Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (ed. Albrecht Classen, 2005), explore aspects of the everyday experiences of children and particularly the nature of the parent-child relationship (see also the collection of articles edited by Classen in 2007, Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance). Shulamith Shahar also examined childhood among other aspects of medieval everyday experience. Her books Childhood in the Middle Ages (1990); Growing Old in the Middle Ages (1997); Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (1983, rev. ed. 2003), all reflect the desire of those examining everyday life to tap into the lives of the many people who lived during the Middle Ages, not simply the male elite for whom the evidence is much more abundant. In each of these works she synthesizes a great deal of scholarship as well as adding new research. Typical of general studies, however, the books focus far more upon the later than the early Middle Ages. Concern with modern social problems has led scholars to explore them in the Middle Ages. For example, the essays “Home and Homelessness in the Middle of Nowhere” by William Ian Miller and “Looking for Home in Anglo-Saxon England” by Nicholas Howe (Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World, ed. Nicholas Howe, 2004, 125–42, 143–63), examined the homeless and what constituted a home in the Middle Ages. In Iceland, Miller determines that the law against homelessness, a capital offense, resulted in part from a desire to identify each person with a household, the primary legal and economic unit. Exploring evidence mainly from the sagas, Miller examines issues such as the qualities of a home, hospitality, outlaws, exiles, laws and beliefs concerning houses, the wild versus the domestic, and contemporary conceptions of home. He notes that “nothing seemed to horrify the Icelandic sensibility more than unattached people” (137). Howe employs the evidence of Old English literature to determine how Anglo-Saxons thought of home. Noting that much poetry suggests that the hall, not a person’s individual dwelling, embodied one’s sense of home, he further points out the dearth of evidence for housing since it was built of

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materials that leave little archeological trace. Typical of early medievalists working on the mundane experiences so rarely addressed in contemporary sources, Howe must use the evidence available to him: in this case literary sources since architectural remains and law codes offer little data. He ably draws a surprising amount of information on building types, ideals of home, and domesticity, though in the end he concludes that legal documents demonstrate that Anglo-Saxons thought of home “through the concept of land rather than the fact of houses” (159). As for more ordinary matters, scholars have discovered a great deal about food and drink from both written and archeological sources. Michel Rouche examined Carolingian caloric consumption and food types by examining monastic records (“Le repas de fête à l’époque carolingienne,” Manger et boire au Moyen Âge, 1, ed. Denis Menjot, 1984, 265–96). Donald Bullough examined the relationships and conflicts that could result from sharing meals and drinking together (Friends, Neighbours and Fellow-Drinkers, 1991). In order to learn about the level of nutrition for groups of varying social status, gender, and age, Kathy L. Pearson examined a wide range of textual evidence in her “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet” (Speculum 72. 1 [1997]: 1–32). Bonnie Effros noted how food and drink affected the development of Christian community in Merovingian Gaul, arguing that clerics understood its profound importance in creating bonds or setting groups apart from one another and in delineating status, authority, and hierarchy (Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul, 2002). Maria Giagnalovo employed the notebooks of a Tuscan merchant in order to learn about eating and drinking in Avignon in the 14th century (“Manger et boire à Avignon,” Provence Historique 54 [2004]: 463–72). Using Chaucer as a source, David Moses examined the diet of late medieval monks (“Soul Food and Eating Habits,” MAevum 75.1 [2006]: 213–22). Lack of food, particularly during a famine, could become a crisis, but with the difficulties of medieval agriculture hunger was not an unusual phenomenon (Hubert Mordek, “Karls des Großen zweites Kapitular von Herstal und die Hungersnot der Jahre 778/779,” DA 61.1 [2005]: 1–52). Waste disposal was a common problem in the past as now; archeology can cast light on this matter of daily importance (Wim van Neer, Ides Boone, and Bea de Cupere, “Social Status as Reflected in the Food Refuse from Late Medieval Sites in Namur,” RBPh 80.4 [2002]: 1391–94; Jill Hooper, “Waste and its Disposal in Southwark,” London Archaeologist 11.4 [2006]: 95–100). Examining the lifecycle of certain groups of individuals has been a fruitful means to understanding medieval everyday life. Some works are quite broad (Deborah Youngs, The Life-Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–c.1500, 2006).

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Others have focused on certain groups. Isabelle Réal, for example, structured her examination of kinship as presented in Merovingian hagiography in part by moving from the stage of marriage through the raising of children (Vies de saints, vie de famille, 2001). In her Queens, Concubines, and Dowagers (1983), Pauline Stafford organized her material according to the lifecycle of the early medieval women she discussed. Similarly, Bridget Ann Henisch, in The Medieval Calendar Year (1999) examined late medieval illuminations of the “labors of the months” in books of hours in order to explore the rhythm of the medieval year. Though shaped by an idealized view of medieval laborers, these depictions of seasonal activities provide “glimpses” of aspects of everyday life in the countryside. Additionally, she included three non-seasonal chapters on portrayals of children, women, and pursuits of pleasure in these images. Festivals were another means of marking the passage of time and pastime for medieval people (Ronald Hutton, “Seasonal Festivity in Late Medieval England,” EHR 120 [2005]: 66–79). Other leisure activities involved games, and scholars have begun to examine their social meanings as Oliver Plessow does in “What the Artefacts Tell: Medieval chess pieces and the interpretation of the social connotations of the game of chess” (The Mediation of Symbol in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times, ed. Rudolf Suntrup, Jan R. Veestra and Anne Bollmann, 2005, 109–41). The games of religious minorities such as the Jews have also been the subject of research (Gerd Mentgen, “Alltagsgeschichte und Geschichte der Juden. Die Juden und das Glückspiel im Mittelalter,” HZ 274.1 [2002]: 25–60). Music and performances were also forms of medieval entertainment. Though most scholarship on music and drama is directed more at musicologists and literary specialists than at the general medievalist, many such studies touch upon everyday life. It is, however, quite difficult to learn about the experiences of performers given the available sources, and late medieval performers are the easiest to examine because of the greater number of extant texts for that period (James Stokes, Musicians and Performance in Lincolnshire,” Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 24.2 [2002]: 121–51). Understanding human interaction with the environment and people’s use of natural resources have also been topics of study relevant to medieval everyday life. As medievalists across the 20th century became more interested in understanding the living conditions of the majority of people, agricultural history, for example, received increased attention (Georges Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiéval, 1962, in English 1968; Bernard H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, English ed. 1963; Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe, 3rd ed., 1978, in English 1980, 1–95). Paolo Squatriti in his Water and Society in

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Early Medieval Italy (1998), examined the relationship between Italians and perhaps their most essential natural resource, water, from 400 to 1000. This approach allowed him to comment on various aspects of everyday life: domestic water supply and usage, hygiene, bathing, laundry, floods, drainage, irrigation fishing, and milling. The use of space has also been the subject of work by medievalists of various disciplines; understanding how medieval people interacted with their natural and created environments has proven a rich area of study. In particular, the use of domestic space received attention in various archeological studies such as Chris King, “The Organization of Social Space in late Medieval Manor Houses” (AJ 160 [2004]: 104–24), as well as in some of the essays from Cadre de vie et manières d’habiter: xiie–xvie siècle (ed. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, Françoise Piponnier, and Jean-Michel Poisson, 2006): André Bazzana, “Espace privé/espace public: Maisons, ruelles et jardins dans l’habitat andalou,” 293–306; and Danièle AlexandreBidon, “Le confort dans la maison médiévale,” 129–44; Geoff Egan, “Le mobilier et le décor de la maison médiévale à Londres,” 221–27; Gerhard Jaritz, “Entre espace public et espace privé: le décor de la maison urbaine (Europe centrale, XIVe–XVe siècle),” 249–52; Françoise Piponnier, “Dénominations et fonctions des espaces dans l’habitation dijonnaise (XIVe–XVe siècle),” 109–16. Selected Bibliography Alwin Schultz, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger, vol. 1–2 (1889; Osnabrück: O. Zeller, 1965); Eileen Power, Medieval People (1924; London: Methuen, 1963); Charles-Victor Langlois, La vie en France au moyen âge de la fin du Xiie au milieu du XIVe de l’histoire, vol. 1–2 (Paris: Hachette, 1926–28); Edmond Faral, La vie quotidienne au temps de Saint Louis (Paris: Hachette, 1938); Arno Borst Lebensformen in Mittelalter (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1973); Robert Delort, Le Moyen Âge: Histoire illustrée de la vie quotidienne (Lausanne: Editions Edita, 1972; English translation 1973); Pierre Riché, La vie quotidienne dans l’empire carolingien (Paris: Hachette, 1973; English translation 1978); Jacques Le Goff, “L’historien et l’homme quotidien,” Pour un autre Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1978; English trans. 1980), 335–48; Otto Borst, Alltagsleben im Mittelalter (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1983); Heinrich Fichtenau, Lebensordnung des 10. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1992; 1st ed. 1984, English trans. 1991); Alltag im Spätmittelalter, ed. Harry Kühnel (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1984); Gerhard Jaritz, Zwischen Augenblick und Ewigkeit: Einführung in die Alltagsgeschichte des Mittelalters (Vienna: Böhlau, 1989).

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F Feminism A. Definition Over the last century no movement has altered the medieval studies landscape more than has feminism, an approach to the evaluation of women involving research from all disciplines: history, humanities, sciences, social sciences, economics. Feminist scholarship seeks to recover medieval women’s contributions that had fallen into obscurity, to examine the relationship between men and women in patriarchal cultures, and to study the roles of women during the Middle Ages. The impact of feminism upon Medieval Studies can be dramatically demonstrated by a comparison between two medieval readers, popular anthologies that offer translations of primary sources from the Middle Ages on such diverse topics as government, religion, and literature. The 1949 Portable Medieval Reader (ed. Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin) contains a letter by a woman of the Stonor family, a selection from Anna Comnena’s chronicle, and an excerpt from Margery Kempe’s autobiography. As for writings addressed to or about women, there is a letter from Abélard to Héloïse, excerpts from The Goodman of Paris’s The Good Wife and from “The Case of a Woman Doctor in Paris,” and various literary selections from the Miracles of the Virgin and from romance literature (e. g., Tristan and Iseult). In contrast, Norman F. Cantor’s 1994 The Medieval Reader covers women much more extensively: it doubles the number of women writers to six, it includes excerpts from Joan of Arc’s trial, and it contains romantic literature and Miracles of the Virgin similar to the 1949 volume; most notably, it has a section entitled “Alienated Segments and Unresolved Problems,” with nearly half of the selections by or about women (the other group that is well represented is Jews). B. Historical Development With the onset of the Renaissance/Early Modern Era, women’s roles in Europe tended to become restricted to the private sphere of the home, with women who published, governed, or held other visible roles viewed with increasing suspicion. Thus, very few printed editions of medieval women writers appeared during the Early Modern Era – in 1501 Hrotsvit’s Opera

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Hrosvitae was published in Nuremberg and in 1566 Hildegard’s Epistolarum Liber was published in Cologne. Although Christine de Pizan’s Les Faits d’Armes et de Chevalerie appeared in a number of editions beginning in 1488, many were printed without listing her name as author. Like Christine, Joan of Arc’s influence became diminished: French official court historians of the 16th century had little to say about their national heroine, and Shakespeare in 1590 in 1 Henry VI depicted Joan as a witch in league with evil spirits. This tendency to exclude women from spheres of power extended to educational systems, so as modern universities in the 19th and 20th centuries created departments organized around nation-states (e. g., German, Italian, and English), women’s contributions from the past were often overlooked. For example, W. P. Ker’s influential surveys of medieval literature made brief mention of Marie de France and Anna Comnena, but no medieval woman writer received the attention given to the men. Political histories were geared toward celebrating “Great Men” as founders of civilizations, so one had to turn to social histories to read about women and their daily lives, such as those by Eileen Power (Medieval People, 1924). One subject that fascinated both academic and popular audiences was the mystical experiences of religious women, particularly Joan of Arc and medieval saints, like St. Catherine of Siena. The Catholic Church responded to public interest in Joan by canonizing her as a saint in 1920. However, academic opinion dismissed the visions of female mystics as “hysteria,” a misogynistic misapplication of science to women (Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture, 1996). In recent decades academics have begun to analyze the behavior of medieval female saints in the context of their culture and belief, not as a mental illness (Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 1987; Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer, 1985; Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 1992). Feminist scholarship in Medieval Studies paralleled political and civil rights movements in Europe and the United States. Research into medieval women’s contributions and lives developed at about the same time as the suffragette movements of the late 19th century. The amount of scholarship steadily increased as more and more women enrolled in the academy and become lecturers/researchers. Certain subjects quickly became staples. There were the “Great Women” of the Middle Ages, such as the Byzantine princess and writer, Anna Comnena (Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena, 1929); religious life was, of course, another popular topic (Lina Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism, 1896; Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 1922; Evelyn Underhill, Mystics of the Church, 1925).

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The rate of scholarship greatly accelerated with the feminist movement of the 1960s. As feminists theorized about sex/gender and established places in the academy for women, such as feminist presses and women’s studies departments, the number of publications related to medieval women exploded in the 1980s. Popular culture and the arts also drew attention to medieval women – for instance, the film The Lion in Winter (1968) about the relationship between Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979), a work of art that referenced Christine de Pizan and other influential women from the past. Just as the suffragette and feminist movements proved controversial, so, too, has been the academic study of medieval women. No figure better illustrates the historical trajectory of feminism and Medieval Studies than Christine de Pizan, the “first professional writer” and the inventor of “medieval feminism.” This prolific author became one of the first medieval female subjects of modern study (Raimond Thomassy, Essai sur les écrits politiques de Christine de Pisan, 1838). Christine has fascinated feminists by her role in the “querelle des femmes / woman question,” a debate in which Christine defended women against the misogyny of her contemporaries. Thus, it is not surprising that in the 20th century so many academics devoted their research to the writings by Christine (Liliane Dulac, Earl Jeffrey Richards, Charity Cannon Willard). Just as Christine’s defense of women created a backlash against her during the 15th century, there has been a similar modern backlash against Christine and feminism. Gustave Lanson refused to include Christine in his French literary history because he considered her the original mediocre bluestocking (Histoire de la literature française, 1920). Even today critics debate as to whether Christine’s writings have enough merit to be in the canon or whether she is an inferior author being included because “political correctness” demands it (see essays in Politics, Gender, Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant, 1992). A timeline that summarizes major publications by and about medieval women entitled “Milestones in Medieval Women’s History” appears as Appendix 2 in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (ed. Margaret Schaus, 2006). Women Medievalists and the Academy (ed. Jane Chance, 2005) contains entries on feminist scholars and their contributions to Medieval Studies. These two books provide helpful information relevant to the historical development of this subject.

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C. Major Contributors Feminist research can be divided roughly into two categories – (1) gynocritic treatments of medieval women and their contributions and (2) feminist critiques of medieval men and patriarchal institutions. In the 1980s, anthologies of translated primary documents by or about medieval women began to be published. Peter Dronke (Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete, 1984) interspersed translations of medieval women writers in his critical overview, while Katharina M. Wilson (ed., Medieval Women Writers, 1984) and Marcelle Thiébaux (The Writings of Medieval Women, 1987) provided critical introductions to the translations of medieval women writers, covering both religious and secular writers. Elizabeth A. Petroff (ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 1986) focused upon those women who related their mystical experiences; although most are women affiliated with the church – St. Perpetua, Hrotsvit, Hildegard, etc. – a few are affiliated with the court, such as Christine de Pizan. Collectively these anthologies established a new gynocentric canon for the Middle Ages. Also, essay anthologies and survey books summarizing and synthesizing historical research were made available. Becoming Visible: Women in European History (ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, 1976; 2nd ed. 1987; 3rd ed. 1997) was an early women studies book, quickly becoming a standard, that surveyed women in societies from around the world (despite the title) but with a decided emphasis upon Europe and from ancient up through modern times. The essays in Women and Power in the Middle Ages (ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 1988) broadened the definition of power beyond such traditional public institutions as governments in examining women from various cultures throughout the Middle Ages. Suzanne Wemple’s Women in Frankish Society (1981) reviewed the changes and continuities of aristocratic women’s powerful roles in Frankish society as it adopted Christianity provided a model for medieval feminist research on a particular culture. Shulamit Shahar’s Fourth Estate: History of Women in the Middle Ages (1981) examined laws as applied to diverse groups of medieval women – nuns and wives, aristocrats and peasants, witches and heretics. Edith Ennen published a monumental historical introduction to significant women in the Middle Ages and examined, above all, women’s roles in the various social classes (Frauen im Mittelalter, 1984; 3rd ed. 1987; English trans. as The Medieval Woman, 1989). Karl Schnith edited a volume with biographies of some of the leading medieval queens and empresses (Frauen des Mittelalters in Lebensbildern, 1997), and Helmut Feld published a useful collection of twenty biographies of the most significant religious women in the Middle Ages (Frauen des Mittelalters, 2000).

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One problem with the historicizing of the Middle Ages is that the epoch, as it has been defined, spans a thousand years and covers countless cultures. This brief article will focus upon the scholarship that casts a broad net, but much of the available research narrows upon a particular figure or topic. When introducing their work to general audiences, medieval scholars – not just those dealing with feminism – inevitably grapple with the doctrine of progress established during the 18th century that still has a stranglehold today. This false assumption holds that the Middle Ages was the Dark Ages, and subsequent history has been one of steady progress, with the history of women illustrating this well: modern women in the West have rights, while medieval women were repressed. Indeed, scholarly studies can reinforce this misconception – e. g., Silences of the Middle Ages (vol. 2 in Georges Duby’s and Michelle Perrot’s series, A History of Women in the West, 1992). This volume claims that women in the Middle Ages were silenced and controlled by a patriarchal church and government, while a revolution was slowly growing among a small group of women writers. Examining the titles of the many books that take medieval misogyny as their subject can also reinforce the opinion that the Middle Ages was a dark time – for example, Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski’s Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (1990) and R. Howard Bloch’s Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1992). It is undeniable that women in the Middle Ages faced many obstacles. However, Alcuin Blamires’s anthology of misogynist tracts, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended (1992), includes defenses of women, and Blamires later wrote The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (1997), which focuses upon profeminine literature of the Middle Ages, serving as a counterbalance to the misogynous tracts. Feminist critiques of the representations of medieval women by their male contemporaries illustrate the complexity of this subject. The ambiguous evidence resists a reductive reading that men of the Middle Ages saw all women as evil daughters of Eve or, conversely, as angelic daughters of Mary. Joan M. Ferrante’s Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (1975) surveys how male writers of the Middle Ages used women as symbols of masculine hopes and fears. Jenny Jochens (Old Norse Images of Women, 1996) and Sarah Anderson (ed., Cold Counsel: The Women of Old Norse Literature and Myth, 2002) delve into the ways that Scandinavian Christian men depicted ancient pagan goddesses and legendary feminine characters in sagas and eddic literature. Irish writers were faced with a similar situation (see, for instance, Joanne Findon, A Woman’s Word: Emer and Female Speech in the Ulster Cycle, 1997). Rosalind McKenzie points out that while Russian clerics produced misogynist

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literature about the evils of women, chroniclers wrote about the historical figure of Princess Olga as though she were a folklore heroine (“Women’s Image in Russian Medieval Literature,” A History of Women’s Writing in Russia, ed. Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne Gheith, 2002, 16–36). In many instances, male Christian authors, products of patriarchal cultures, had to wrestle with cultural memories of powerful pagan women, both divine and earthly, who were dominant figures from ancient matriarchal societies. These ambiguous images of women from the Middle Ages can appear contradictory to modern readers. The Wife of Bath, the popular character in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, amply demonstrates the difficulties in interpreting portrayals of women. Critical opinion ranges from labeling the outspoken and bawdy Wife – and by extension, her creator, Chaucer – as a humorous “protofeminist” to condemning the Wife as the satiric embodiment of Chaucer’s sexist attitudes (for an overview of conflicting opinions on the Wife, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “‘Of His Love Dangerous to Me’: Liberation, Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath, ed. Peter G. Beidler, 1996, 273–89). Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M., published two volumes on The Concept of Woman from antiquity to the Renaissance, broadening our concept of how women were viewed by their contemporaries (The Concept of Woman, vol. 1, 1985; vol. 2, 2002). Despite the sexist attitudes of many men in the Middle Ages, the main body of research refutes the opinion that women in the Middle Ages were unable to accomplish anything because of a repressive patriarchy. The most famous challenge to this assumption came in Joan Kelly-Gadol’s essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (Becoming Visible, ed. Bridenthal, et al., loc. cit., 1st ed.1976; 2nd ed., 1987, 175–201), in which she posits that medieval women had more civil rights than women of the Renaissance/Early Modern Era, since that later era witnessed the rise of the division between public and private spheres in which women were confined to the private sphere of the home. Although scholars have not always agreed with some of Kelly-Gadol’s arguments – such as her claim that the courtly love affairs celebrated in medieval romance literature helped to elevate women in society – nonetheless, her thesis has become a commonly accepted theory. Despite misogynist literature by male clerics, women in the Church carved a space for themselves based upon their readings of the Bible and of church fathers, which are ironically the sources for the misogynist tracts. One such Church Father was Jerome, who claimed that through commitment to Christianity and to chastity, fallen women could become “virile” – equal to men (Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Womanchrist: Studies in

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Medieval Religion and Literature, 1995). Women could also empower themselves through allegorical readings about “goddesses,” such as Lady Philosophy (Barbara Newman, Gods and Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, 2002). Caroline Walker (Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 1988) and Albrecht Classen (The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007) provide additional evidence that women of the church, if not impervious to misogyny, nonetheless did not subscribe to the view that they were inferior creatures unworthy to serve God. According to Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, “Active participation in religious life thus offered women access to power in all its forms, power that was otherwise denied them. By carefully exploiting the institutional church (which barred them from the priesthood and from high ecclesiastical office) and by astutely manipulating religious precepts (which were a principal source of the ideology of female inferiority), women were able to carve out for themselves broad areas of influence” (Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. Margery Schneider, 1996, 2). Examples from medieval Italy provided by Bornstein and Rusconi include St. Catherine of Siena and the “Poor Clares.” At courts, powerful women encouraged positive attitudes about women through their patronage of the arts, with the most famous example being Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thus, writers, such as Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes, may have been encouraged by their patrons to create the ideal we now call “courtly love” (Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, 1975; Joachim Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter, 1979; Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician, ed. William Kibler, 1976; The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash, 1995; Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 1988). Some patrons may have been artists themselves. One popular legend – now under attack – holds that Queen Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, commissioned and helped embroider the Bayeux Tapestry celebrating her husband’s victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Although few works in the plastic arts, except for textile art, have been attributed to medieval women artists, female patrons could dictate the nature of the art. For instance, in 1329 Emilia Pannocchieschi d’Elci was granted funds and permission to construct the convent and church of Santa Marta in San Marco, Italy (Diana Norman, “An Abbess and Painter,” Renaissance Studies 3.14 [2000]: 273–300). The wealth of research available refutes the reductive view that women suffered in silence throughout the Dark Ages, while awaiting some ray of light from the Renaissance. However, it would be equally wrong to suggest that the Middle Ages was a matriarchal golden age. It was an era when numerous women overcame ob-

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stacles to lead productive, successful lives (Claudia Spanily, Autorschaft und Geschlechterrollen: Möglichkeiten weiblichen Literatentums, 2002). Although the scholarship yields many differing opinions about the lives of women in the Middle Ages, all these studies have resulted in remarkable recoveries of the valuable contributions by women of the Middle Ages, which in turn have expanded our knowledge about this epoch (see, for instance, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe, ed. Emilie Amt, 1993). These recoveries constitute an important part of feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most spectacular find came in 1934 when Hope Emily Allen uncovered a late medieval English manuscript, The Book of Margery Kempe (ed. Sanford Brown Meech, 1940). The first autobiography in English, this book recounts Margery’s personal history of her mystical visions. More recently, June Hall McCash has convincingly argued that Marie de France, most famous for her Lais, was the author of the Vie Seinte Audree (The Life of Saint Audrey, ed. June Hall McCash and Judith Barban, 2006). A similar recovery has occurred with the Hungarian-German chambermaid Helene Kottanner, who composed a journal of her experiences at the Hapsburgian court under Queen Elizabeth between 1439 and 1440 (first edited by Karl Mollay, Die Denkwürdigkeiten der Helene Kottannerin 1439–1440, 1971; English trans. by Maya Bijvoet Williamson, 1998; for a critical examination, see Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007). Artistic and literary contributions by Italian women in the Middle Ages are highlighted in the volume Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (ed. Ann Matter and John Coakley, 1994). Aside from literature, songs and music of medieval women have also been recovered. For a focus on courtly love, see Medieval Woman’s Song (ed. Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen, 2002). The significant role of religious women composing hymns in late-medieval Germany is extensively documented by Albrecht Classen (‘Mein Seel fang an zu singen’: Religiöse Frauenlieder der [sic] 15.–16. Jahrhunderts, 2002; for a partial English transl., see id., LateMedieval German Women’s Poetry, 2004; see also his edition of secular women’s songs, Deutsche Frauenlieder des fünfzehnten und sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1999). Recovered work from women of the Middle Ages and other epochs has led to speculation about “écriture féminine,” Hélène Cixous’ term for an essentially female style of writing. Although many debate over what role gender expectations and innate sexual characteristics play in determining language, feminists tend to focus upon the manifestations of female subjectivity and experience. Thus, much criticism centers upon autobiographical genres. In medieval literature, there have been a numberous publications on the epistolary genre (Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, 1993). Examples include

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Héloïse’s letters to her castrated husband Abélard (Listening to Héloïse, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, 2000), Catherine of Siena’s dictated letters about her mystical visions (Maria Luisa Doglio, trans. Jennifer Lorch, “Letter Writing, 1350–1650,” A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, 2000), and private letters by such women as those of the Paston family (Diane Watt, The Paston Women, 2004). In the Middle Ages autobiography typically took the form of religious confession, beginning with St. Augustine’s Confessions. A late medieval autobiographical writer like Margery Kempe – who hired scribes to pen her story – had a long tradition of female spiritual autobiographies to draw upon, and in particular she chose as her model St. Birgitta of Sweden (see Translation of the Works of St. Birgitta of Sweden into the Medieval European Vernaculars, ed. Bridget Morris and Veronica O’Mara, 2000). Even the Alexiad by Anna Comnena contains personal reflections, although ostensibly she was writing a chronicle about her father’s role in the Crusades composed in a style reminiscent of the epic. Anna provides eyewitness accounts about the beginnings of the Crusades and highlights her own involvement, while minimizing the role of her brother and rival to the throne (Anna Komnene and Her Times, ed. Thalia Gouma-Peterson, 2000). During the 1960s, feminist scholarship hovered at the margins of academe, but began to make inroads through women’s studies courses and through components grafted onto traditional courses. Now feminist scholarship has merged into the mainstream of Medieval Studies so that women are no longer studied in isolation. Nowadays, many women’s studies courses/departments have been replaced by gender studies, which examine both masculine and feminine gender roles, sexual orientation, and body theory (see also the article on “Gender Studies” in this Handbook). Now feminism intersects with virtually every postmodern movement. For example, rather than seeing “woman” as an absolute category, “woman” is examined in the context of other factors – ethnicity, race, class. Tova Rosen breaks ground with her study on the medieval Jewish view of women with Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (2003), closely paralleled by Elisheva Baumgarten’s Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2004). Louise Mirrer calls attention to the hybridity that existed in the Iberian Peninsula in Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (1996). Women in the Medieval Islamic World (ed. Gavin Hambly, 1998) corrects the Orientalist notion that Muslim women throughout time have lived in repression behind a veil and in a harem. Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers (ed. Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho, 2000) examines European medieval

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women writers in context with those from Heian, Japan, perhaps the only culture in the world whose classic literature is dominated by women writers. D. Current Research Because the number of approaches to and publications about medieval women seems to be expanding exponentially, this article is cursory and highly selective; it has only skimmed the surface of a rich, vast topic. The best way to sort through the multitude of materials is to consult reference works that can serve as overviews. For biographies on medieval women from around the world, see Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis, 2004), and for entries on a wide range of topics – patronage, medicine, etc. – see Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (ed. Margaret Schaus, 2006). Printed materials become dated rapidly, so fortunately The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship maintains an online bibliography, Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html, in addition to printing its periodical, the Medieval Feminist Forum. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, 2003) provides helpful critical essays on medieval women writers. Historical surveys also serve as useful starting points (Lisa M. Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–1100, 2002; Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500, 2002). Finally, various publishers devote entire series to medieval women – for instance, Brepols’ Medieval Woman: Texts and Contexts and Boydell and Brewer’s Library of Medieval Women Series. The study of medieval women has attracted scholars from all over the world (see, for instance, Eva Parra Membrives, Mundos femeninos emancipados, 1998). Select Bibliography Lisa M. Bitel, Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500 (London: Longman, 2002); Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (1976; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 3rd ed. 1997); The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html; Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006); Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004).

Barbara Stevenson

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Folklore in Medieval Studies A. Introduction As an approach or field of inquiry with significance for medieval studies, the beginnings of modern research in folklore are traced to 18th- and early 19thcentury figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder, the Grimm Brothers and the Englishman William John Thoms. The latter scholar first encouraged use of the term “folklore,” (Athenaeum) in order to render a concept that would subsume the various approaches to both study and enjoyment of popular culture. From the start, the archaeological nature of the discipline was recognized, and the collection of pertinent data from among various manifestations of the folk was pursued vigorously. Herein lay a problem broached by later generations of medievalists who wished to incorporate the methods of folklore into their areas of research, i. e., the present collecting of evidence cannot reflect a full record of popular traditions from the past. Since live performance or exercise of living custom was bound up with the evidence of folkloric patterns, it was eventually recognized that a later, written record of a deed or performance could represent only the shadow of an actual event. Despite this critical admission, folklorists have been able to pursue their research based on the supposition that some aspects of an oral or popular culture are retained in written evidence as well. Although much of this documentation must be presumed incomplete, the collection and evaluation of both oral and written putative sources of folklore have been encouraged with the general understanding that even a slight increment to the previous base of accepted knowledge provides ample grounds for speculative research. Contributions from the early generations of folklorists are identified primarily as varying processes of collection. Both Herder and the Grimm Brothers initiated projects whose goal was to assemble as broad an array of folk songs or folk narratives as could be collected from contemporary memory. Herder aimed at the revival of a national German identity, in his view, by means of learning from supposed evidence of earlier folk traditions. His collection of Volkslieder (1778–1779), and Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1806) are testaments to the spirit of this endeavor. A modern revisionist perspective on Herder’s methods and the international influence of his goals in using folk poetry to rediscover a culture’s past may be consulted at William A. Wilson, “Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism” (Journal of Popular Culture 6 [1973]: 819–35). Although the primary interest of Herder and his contemporaries was focused on the Germanic past, their efforts created a model strong enough to be imitated by other cultures in search of a national

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folk tradition. In the early decades of the 19th century Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published their first editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1814–1816) and Deutsche Sagen (1816–1818). By 1835 Jakob Grimm added to the field of research in native culture with the completion of his Deutsche Mythologie, seen both at that time and later as a major compendium serving the theoretical and etymological background of Germanic folklore. These early endeavors proved to be influential beyond immediate boundaries, so that by the late 19th and early 20th centuries the example of the Grimms had spawned both imitations and alternate, collective models for accepted medieval lore in other Western and Slavic cultures. Significant examples of these include the collection of Danish folk ballads under the direction of Svend Grundtvig (1824–83) and the well-known, multi-volume English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1864–1871; last rev. ed. 1882–1898) assembled by Francis James Child. Comparable endeavors were initiated in France, Russia, and other Scandinavian cultures. Although similarities in the degree and scope of assembling a localized past record of folk traditions pervaded many research plans until well into the 20th century, the methods of evaluating any data collected varied in keeping with several fundamental premises. Essential differences in methodology centered on a philological vs. an anthropological approach. The former approach, among whose proponents may be counted the Grimm brothers, traced folk beliefs and traditions back to a single point of origin, i. e., folk tales represent a latter day variation on original motifs inherited from an Indo-European background. The alternate, anthropological view, fostered especially by the Englishman Andrew Lang, associated the principle of evolution with popular cultural development. According to this line of thought, one presumes that all cultures are marked by an evolutionary process, at each stage of which predictable yet individual types of custom or habit will naturally arise. The expectations of this method led to an equally comparative approach not only between cultures but also chronologically within individual societies. This model of folkloric development would then project oral motifs and tales as being reinvented or surviving within the popular strata of society, making it possible to study their transformation over an extended period of generations. B. The Early 20th Century and the Finnish Approach Among methodologies of research in folklore during the first half of the 20th century the Finnish school gave rise to the motif or type index of folk tales and folkloric patterns. From the first decade of the 20th century until 1950 the historic-geographic method, by which the Finnish approach is gen-

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erally known, was developed on the basis of Märchen and folk-tale analysis and categorization. The work of Kaarle Krohn and his student Antti Aarne coincided with the foundation of the series “Folklore Fellows’ Communications” (FFC), in which the early leading research undertaken, in keeping with this method on folklore, was published. The influence of the FFC as a forum and outlet for research in the field persisted throughout the last century; indeed, the FFC continues now to serve, by its own definition, as a “refereed monograph series in the fields of folkloristics, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, and ethnology.” This focus has been maintained to the present as exemplified by recent titles on the body, society, and the supernatural in rural Finland (Laura Stark, “The Magical Self,” 2006) and on Moroccan (Maarten Kossmann, A Study of Eastern Moroccan Fairy Tales, 2000), Tamil (Stuart Blackburn, Moral Fictions: Tamil Folktales from Oral Tradition, 2001) or Portuguese folktales (Isabel Cardigos, Paulo Correia, and J. J. Dias Marques, Catalogue of Portuguese Folktales, 2006). The earliest essays in collective volumes and individual monographs published by the FFC (1910–1915) featured investigations on specific folklore collections (Axel Olrik and Astrid Lunding, 1910), catalogues (Aantti Aarne and Oskar Hackman, 1910–1911), and attempts to categorize motivic studies of inherited popular tales (Antti Aarne and Reidar Christiansen, 1912–1914). In 1910 Aarne completed and published in the FFC the first version of his Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (Catalogue of Folktale Types), subsequently translated into English and expanded significantly under the direction of Stith Thompson (1927; 2nd rev. ed. 1961; rpt. 1987). This catalogue served a twofold purpose in folklore research as it could be applied to the study of medieval literature and culture: 1) the principles of assembling such a working list could be expanded to include additional stories or variants of the same from alternate yet related cultural milieux; 2) at the same time, the index could serve as a model or paradigm for predominant types in other genres of popularly transmitted lore. During the first fifteen years or so of its existence the series published not only catalogues of fairy and folk tales and their variants but also individual studies on magic, puzzles and riddles, ethnic and Slavic religions, and the first modern investigations on the Kalevala. The latter were published by Krohn during the 1920s, who also released at this time Die folkloristische Arbeitsmethode (1926; Folklore Methodology, trans. R. Welsch, 1971), his summary discussion of the method that had been developed among the scholars associated from the start with the Bund der Folklore Fellows, or “Folkloristischer Forscherbund.” During succeeding decades the international influence of research promoted by the FFC can hardly be overstated. Both in publications undertaken

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by the FFC series and investigations appearing independently the Finnish approach was evident in American and European scholarly plans. In addition to the above-noted translation and expansion of Aarne’s work on The Types of the Folk-Tale, Stith Thompson published in the FFC, beginning in 1932, his multi-volume Motif-Index of Folk Literature using principles of organization similar to those of the earlier work on Types. In the larger Index the text base was significantly broadened to include not only folk-tales and Märchen, but also – as indicated in the title – ballads, myths, fables, romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, local legends, and proverbial texts. An equivalent depth of focus was noted from the European perspective as well. By the time of Thompson’s start on his Motif-Index the tradition of German folktales had received additional significant attention and attempts at theoretical categorization due to the work of Johannes Bolte. In his collaborative research on folktales Bolte contributed 1) detailed commentaries on the Grimms’ collected tales, and 2) individual monographs on Märchen published in 1920 and 1921 respectively by the FFC (Name und Merkmale des Märchens and Zeugnisse zur Geschichte der Märchen). During its first thirty years the FFC thus established guiding principles for further investigations and enabled the publication of results that would affect the course of research on Folklore and Medieval Studies for years to come. C. Research on Medieval Drama and Folklore The type of expansion into related, additional fields evident in the work of Thomspon and his school was also found in projects initiated during these years and afterward by other scholars who took up independent investigations. Groundbreaking studies of importance to medievalists as well as folklorists were The Medieval Stage (1903) by E. K. Chambers and The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933) by Karl Young. Whereas the earlier study by E. K. Chambers (on The Medieval Stage, 1903) was divided between folk drama and its potential background in one volume, followed by religious drama in a second, Young focused on the liturgy, the Bible, and popular legends as predominant sources for medieval drama. Both Chambers and Young discuss manuscripts as a source for performance practice or as evidence for the development of dramatic habit and taste. The earlier work by Chambers takes its impetus from the “persistence of the deep-rooted mimetic instinct in the folk,” an inborn tendency surviving even after the collapse of the Roman world. After treating the earlier, popular manifestations of drama, Chambers examines religious plays, derived from the liturgy, as further evidence of this instinct in the display of Christian ceremony and ritual. As a synthesis of both religious and non-religious aspects of dramatic

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inspiration, Chambers finally details the gradual evolution of sacred drama into secular presentation. With often rich, accompanying detail he presents a thesis on the secular transformation of religious spectacle in reference to both participants and locales. Chambers concludes his presentation with an overview of early Humanist drama showing the effects of a coalescence of learned and folk elements. His appendices provide financial records for dramatic performances, lists of performers according to guild, as well as reprints of pertinent sacred and popular texts edited from localized manuscripts. Karl Young’s work from thirty years later profited, to be sure, from a wider accessibility to manuscripts and liturgical records. Taking the Roman Mass as a starting point, Young reviews the canonical structure of the liturgy in its typical form from the 10th century, thus coinciding with the beginnings of surviving religious drama. Following this introduction, the eight separate services, which make up the Canonical Office and are observed at specific hours of each day, are examined in their relation to the established mass. Young’s intent is to undertake “an examination of the dramatic elements inherent in the authorized liturgy itself, and in certain seasonal observances which arose within the general liturgical frame-work and which received the sanction of tradition.” Since for Young, “the plays of the Church owe to the liturgy their very existence,” his method of examining dramatic elements in the Mass or the Office could be expanded into scenic representation of designated celebrations on the Passion or the Resurrection. In the same way, Young treats the Nativity and specific narrative events, from both the Old and New Testaments, which he shows to be transformed into dramatic traditions. The appendices to his two-volume work provide – as a further trove of data supplementing that given in Chambers’ work – yet further records on the performance of and attitudes toward medieval drama, hence making available vital information on popular custom and pattern All subsequent textual and critical studies on the confluence of folklore and medieval drama draw on the groundwork completed by Chambers and Young. During the decades following the appearance of Young’s study a number of authentic, dramatic texts were made available in both critical and diplomatic editions covering manuscripts in various vernacular languages as well as in Latin. This editorial work, undertaken by scholars from Eduard Hartl to Hansjürgen Linke, was often accompanied by research into evidence of performance or documents of municipal and church records. Despite the fragmentary nature of these data, they provided folklorists with further examples of occasional authentic performance, thus fulfilling the needs of a discipline attempting to base its evidence on a continuous tradition of performance. With increasingly more work focused on manuscripts

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of secular dramatic traditions – e. g., Shrovetide and Robin Hood plays – research since the 1970s has been divided more evenly between earlier religious and subsequent popular traditions. Evidence for the former was especially documented in revised catalogues from this period. A categorization of German liturgical plays, dealing especially with the Easter and Passion cycles was published in 1970 as Die deutschen Oster- und Passionsspiele des Mittelalters by Rolf Steinbach. A more expansive catalogue based on comparable religious evidence was completed by Rolf Bergmann in 1986 as Katalog der deutschsprachigen geistlichen Spiele und Marienklagen des Mittelalters. Scholarly works with a primary focus on Latin Easter tropes and their dramatic development proved to be a springboard to critical discussion on a broader European base. Hence the study by Helmut de Boor from 1967 on Die Textgeschichte der lateinischen Osterfeiern considered the development of such dramatic traditions in France, England, and Spain in addition to the status in German-speaking regions. In the same vein Sandro Sticca’s The Latin Passion Play: Its Origins and Development (1970), and George B. Bryan’s Ethelwold and Medieval Music-Drama at Winchester (1981) traced the early seeds of religious drama in liturgical contexts with an eye to their subsequent transformation in the following centuries. These and related developments were documented by the ongoing series Bibliography of Medieval Drama, sponsored in the 1970s and 1980s by Emporia State University, Kansas. As a resource the Bibliography covered trends in both religious and popular drama, thus emphasizing the critical attention which folklorists and literary historians had by now assured to all aspects of the medieval stage. The growing focus on popular drama since the 1970s and its emphasis equivalent to that earlier afforded liturgical plays can be seen not only in the number of contributions but also in the type of publications in this field. What earlier counted as evidence of a comedic play or representation of a legendary, popular figure has gradually developed into more recent attempts to categorize dramatic types. Just as liturgical events had been studied by Chambers and Young, among others, and had been defined according to type, concerns of those working on secular drama now tend to cover not only motif but also the categorization of plays and the significance of this concept for a historical development of the genre. These tendencies have become a predominant focus of the series “Ludus, Medieval and Renaissance Theatre and Drama.” In recent volumes of “Ludus” individual essays grouped around a common topic have especially covered issues in folklore as well as religious drama with volumes such as Between Folk and Liturgy (1997), and Carnival and the Carnivalesque (1999). In the latter volume, as an example of recent trends, Peter H. Greenfield’s article on “The Carnivalesque in the Robin

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Hood Games and King Ales of Southern England” (19–28) emphasizes depictions of a popular figure, evidence of Robin Hood in dramatic performances as documented, and the simultaneous connection to customs during a repeated popular season. Eckehard Simon’s book on the tradition of the late medieval German secular play, Die Anfänge des weltlichen deutschen Schauspiels, 1370–1530 (2003), takes even further this method and the earlier work on German popular plays undertaken by Dieter Wuttke and Hansjürgen Linke. Simon examines potential categories of popular performance that developed in the period from the late 14th through the early 16th century. In his consideration of Linke’s categories, earlier postulated for the seasonal Neithart, and Shrovetide plays, Simon is concerned with broadening the discussion on “modalities of performance.” Especially in his presentation on methods and records of performance of the Shrovetide plays Simon provides vital information on locations, processions, staging, and timing of the dramatic presentations. Finally he discusses vernacular plays dealing with saints’ lives that could also have been performed regionally during carnival. Because of its emphasis on actual performance, the genre of drama has yielded especially significant evidence bearing on the juncture of studies in folklore and medieval culture. Critical research on both religious and secular plays during the past two decades as noted points to continued future efforts to examine the practice and performance of medieval drama as a source of folkloric evidence. D. Research on Medieval Lyric/Narrative and Folklore In the fields of poetry, or song, as well as narrative the concepts of popular performance and derivation from folk tradition have shown a degree of critical overlap. The figure of Robin Hood, already noted as significant in dramatic performance, has been widely discussed as a subject of ballad literature. Scholarly attention has focused primarily on efforts to differentiate late medieval examples of the verifiable Robin Hood ballads from those later accretions which added to the earlier authentic base. In general, the initiatives on popular song and ballad begun by Child continued to show his influence for decades after the publication of his work. Long after Child’s pioneering efforts in collecting ballads had been established, methods of analyzing or achieving a critical understanding of ballad literature became and still remains an ongoing task. It is here that a practical conflation with approaches to the narrative or folk tale has taken place. The historic-geographic or Finnish approach, applied earlier primarily to Märchen and folk tales, was used subsequently in ballad research as a means of critical analysis of the corpus collected by Child. Archer Taylor and Holger Olof Nygard made note-

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worthy contributions using this method from the 1930s through the 1950s. Starting in 1959, Bertrand Bronson began the publication of his musical analysis The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, a project which broadened the interdisciplinary possibilities of research in folk poetry and narrative. The composition and recitation of narrative poetry and songs subsequently underwent significant fieldwork, the noteworthy figure in this area remaining Albert B. Lord. Starting with the publication of The Singer of Tales in 1960 Lord analyzed the Yugoslav recitation of oral narrative poetry based on formulas and themes. In his first book on this topic Lord applied the formulaic technique especially to Homeric narrative. His later book, The Singer Resumes the Tale (1995), devoted considerably greater focus to medieval narrative poetry and the ballad. Just as Child’s work remained a predominant force in the study of song and ballad, the research and published catalogues by Aarne and Thompson have shown continued applicability in the areas of Märchen and folk tale. In the next generation Richard Dorson expanded in large measure interest in the areas of folklore studies and fieldwork undertaken by scholars. Categorization and collecting have also progressed as models for folk narrative in the work of Lutz Röhrich and Max Lüthi. Both have been involved in assembling editions of folk tales, exempla, and popular stories, these including previously inedited texts and alternate versions of known narrative sources. The number of prose genres considered has grown to include more recent work on proverbs as well as sermons. The motif index of Thompson has remained an invaluable tool as witnessed by its continued use in individual scholarly studies and in recent handbooks. In keeping with Thompson’s definition of the motif as “the smallest element in a tale having the power to persist in tradition,” the significance of this method in the joint fields of folklore and Medieval Studies has relied on the expectations of tradition coupled with the search for new data showing its transformation.

Select Bibliography H. R. Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988); Deutsche Märchen und Sagen (CD-Rom, No. 80) (Berlin: Digitale Bibliothek, 2004); Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les fées au moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 1984); Medieval Folklore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); Albert Lord, The Singer Resumes the Tale, ed. Mary Louise Lord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Max Lüthi, Volksmärchen und Volkssage (Bern: Francke, 1975); Lutz Röhrich, Erzählungen des späten Mittelalters und ihr Weiterleben in Literatur und Volksdichtung bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Bern: Francke, 1962/67); Lutz Röhrich and Erika Lindig, Volks-

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dichtung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1989); Eckehard Simon, Die Anfänge des weltlichen deutschen Schauspiels, 1370–1530 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003); Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols. (Helsinki: FFC, 1932–1936); Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933).

Salvatore Calomino

Formalism A. Definition Formalism holds that some particular fields of study or endeavor constitute a type of closed system, in which interpretation and evaluation of system products are largely, if not entirely, governed by rules inherent in or generated internally by the system itself. One prototype for formalism is the category of mathematical and philosophic models founded on so-called “game formalism,” which holds that mathematical proof is construable as adherence to a set of mechanical rules, much like chess, wherein all that ultimately matters is a result engendered by the following of those rules. Another is the related concept of formal language, consisting of linguistic symbols and the rules for concatenating those symbols. Within such systems, change, if any, is necessarily incremental and comprehensible only with reference to the pre-existing elements and rules, whose vestiges are contained within any “novelty.” In a sense, the field is ahistorical, the system having a history of its own insulated from the larger historical context in which it occurs. Since few fields of human endeavor can be conceived in terms of perfectly rigorous rational or logical systems, formalism is usually a relative term. Those scholars who emphasize in their work the historical continuities of their field, whether law, art, literature, or philosophy, are frequently labeled as formalists by their peers whose research objectives are directed to uncovering innovation, though the former hardly deny all change however evolutionary, nor do the latter presume ex nihilo novelty. Rather, the debate surrounds the degree of historicity or ahistoricity of the subject matter. B. Formalism in Medieval Studies: French Iconography In Medieval Studies, formalism has been most pervasive in the areas of art history (iconology) and literary history (topoi); and, indeed, the two were closely linked during the first half of the 20th century due to the “iconologi-

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cal” program of Kunstgeschichte of the Warburg institute. Before that, the French had made the greatest contribution to medieval art and iconography. The 19th century saw a spate of monographs on most of the major French cathedrals, and from 1830 onward a number of reviews dedicated solely to medieval art appeared, including the Annales archéologiques edited by Adolphe-Napoléon Didron who was captivated like so many of his era with Hugo’s Romanticism. Generally, however, medieval art was viewed simply as a subset of Christian art and iconography, and rarely related specifically to medieval theological, liturgical or legendary texts. The first significant effort at a comprehensive analysis of medieval art qua medieval art manifesting a cultural unity was the creation of Emile Mâle, a schoolteacher and dilettante, who, between 1892 and 1922, completed a classic three-volume work on French art and architecture from the 12th through the 15th centuries (L’art religieux du XIIIe siécle en France: Etude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1898, rev. and corrected, 1958; L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge en France: Etude sur l’iconographic du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 1908, 5th ed. rev. and corrected, 1949; L’art religieux du XIIIe siécle en France. Etude sur l’origine de l’iconographie du moyen âge, 1922, rev. and corrected, 1953). For Mâle, “In the Middle Ages form always clothed a thought. One might say that thought worked within matter and formed it. Form can never be separated from the idea that created and animated it.” While largely descriptive, it is true some scholars such as Norman Cantor are far too easily dismissive of a work whose scholarship has influenced such contemporary art historians as Michael Camille. It was Mâle, after all, who in his first volume related the cathedral and the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais, and treated the former as if it were a summa in stone, the sculpture as though a form of writing, anticipating by several decades some of Panofsky’s work in principle if not in scholarly technique. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable scent of connoisserism to Mâle’s compilations and comparisons, itself representing a sort of intuitive formalism that has prevailed in subsequent French iconographic studies. C. Formalism and German Kunstwissenschaft The more influential school of medieval art history begun by Erwin Panofsky was the direct descendant of the development of a philosophicallygrounded aesthetic counterpoint to the notion of logical formalism, the product of a peculiarly German movement of psychological aesthetics in the determined search for a basis for a true Kunstwissenschaft. The genesis of this “aesthetic formalism” in 19th-century German philosophy lay with Kant’s efforts to provide aesthetic judgment with a certain universality while preserv-

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ing its subjectivity. Hence, defining form as “that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations,” he added to his pure forms of intuition, which encompassed the a priori idea of time and space, and his forms of thought, regulating perceptual and conceptual structuring of the world, a new notion of Zweckmäßigkeit (purposiveness), representing the sense of internal harmony that we presume to exist. According to Kant, feelings of pleasure or discomfort relate to the apprehension of form; and the harmonious relation of objective form with the subjective structure of cognitive faculties implies that these judgments are universal, being disinterested, nonconceptual and without exterior purpose. Indeed, his third moment of beauty he defined as “purposiveness without a purpose.” However, realizing the limitations of his definition, he proceeded to subdivide beauty into “free” and “ideal,” the latter adhering to a concept and hence uniting harmonious form with content. Kant admitted an ideal basis only to the human form.The consequence of Kant’s somewhat tortuous efforts to define a science of aesthetics was nothing less than a schism within 19th-century aesthetics itself. The idealist component Kant introduced to broaden aesthetics beyond “pure” (i. e., free) arts such as nonprogrammatic music, supported the formulations of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and especially the latter’s unification of matter and Geist in harmonious balance implying the cultural embeddedness and historicity of art. Kant’s initial problem of objective form subjectively apprehended by the cognitive faculties prompted a line concerned first with the subjective aspects of aesthetic contemplation and second, with the attributes of pure form without content. This latter line of thought included Schopenhauer’s will-less aesthetic contemplation, the capacity for which he denominated “objectivity,” and attempted to found upon the physiology of the perceptual act; and the underrated Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), whose psychologism undertook to define aesthetics as the science of elementary relations of lines, tones, planes, colors, ideas, etc., stripping away all “intrusions” into aesthetic perception, most notably, “content,” and demanding as the perfect frame of mind a state of complete indifference. Herbert influenced a generation of German thinkers, not least Robert Zimmerman (1824–1898), who in his Aesthetik undertook to expand Herbart’s prototypes into an aesthetics founded entirely on form. To these efforts at a purely formalist aesthetics devoid of content, Robert Vischer (1847–1933), son of the more famous Friederich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887), who pioneered an aesthetics founded on symbolization, introduced a sort of “counter-formalism” founded upon Einfühlung (empathy) and symbolization, which process “can be based on nothing other than the pantheistic urge for union with the world, which can by

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no means be limited to our more easily understood kinship with the human species but must, consciously or unconsciously, be directed toward the universe” (Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, 1873, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Ikonnomou Eleftherios, Empathy, Form and space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, 1994, 109). Forms are never empty or subject to mathematical reduction, but are judged harmonious or not according to the degree to which they complete or fulfill the perceiver’s own complex mental life. “In the visual arts, it is not a question of content or form but of the power of the image, of its phenomenality.” These two strains, both anti-Idealist, are united in the work of Adolf Hildebrant (1847–1933) who beginning with the Hebartian “visibility” thesis of Conrad Fiedler (1841–1895), suggests that art can only be approached through itself because its essence was the opposite of idealism – i. e., rather than trending from the sensuous to the nonsensuous, from the visible to the invisible, from perception to abstraction, art takes place in the realm of visual imagination or ideas (Vorstellungen) – argued that form should not simply be perceived but should be intensified by art (Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 1893). A more rigorous and self-conscious formalism was advanced by the Swiss art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin, who eschewed in the closing lines of Die klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (1899) “a mere formalistic appreciation of art,” but maintained as well that all pictures owe more to other pictures than they do to nature. For Wölfflin style and change of style were matters of culture and psychology, both potentially understood as encompassing a sort of Jungian collective memory. But that memory for Wölfflin encompasses formal problems, such that every painting is a sort of variant on its predecessors: “Every artist finds certain visual possibilities before him, to which he is bound. Not everything is possible at all times. Vision itself has its history, and the revelation of these visual strata must be regarded as the primary task of art history.” Hence, Wölfflin has earned the wrath of art historians such as Arnold Hauser, a product of the Vienna school, who pointed to his “unhistorical” approach, read as indifference to sociological explanation, and more generally, for concentrating exclusively on the issue of morphology of visual forms to the exclusion of “meaning” (The Philosophy of Art History, 1958, 147 et sqq.). D. Formalism in Medieval Studies: Kulturwissenschaft and Iconology While confluences of Wölfflin’s formalism and the Warburg program are not hard to find, including an implicit reliance on the Jungian collective memory, iconology can be seen just as easily as a type of counter-formalism better labeled “contextualism,” and located not so much in Kunstwissenschaft

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as in the Kulturwissenschaft. Aby Warburg, scholar and heir to a banking fortune, who invested his inheritance in the library and institute in Hamburg which was to bear his name, advanced a tripartite focus: the continuity of images (iconography per se); the close relation of images to the systematically examined literary text; and the interaction of artistic image with cultural context. In this approach, closely akin to philology, the collective memory is active and self-conscious, not the Jungian unconscious collective that seems more at home in Wölfflin’s formalism. Moreover, also contrary to Wölfflin, it presumes the formal elements of the artwork are understood by the artist as having meaning transcending mere taste or convention. Indeed, Warburg described these formal elements as engrams become exemplars which the artist employs as “maximal values of expressive movement.” Art can be understood as the skill with which the craftsman employs these elements. Hence, the importance of such concepts as “pathos formulae” to Warburg’s analysis. Content and form thus are not easily separable, but must be seen in their mutual illumination, as systemically one. The artist is confronted with a panoply of choices in composition, not as mere epigone in the historicist chain of evolving style reflective of the Zeitgeist, but as an individual often in conflict with that spirit. But to appreciate that artistic achievement, it is necessary to “read” the artwork, in a sort of hermeneutics of formulae. Neither Wölfflin, nor somewhat strangely in light of his concern for pathos formulae, Warburg were interested in medieval art. That field would become the bailiwick of Erwin Panofsky, who in a 1915 essay “Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst” (Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10, 460–67), already had criticized Wölfflin’s effort to separate form and content and in1920 had written an essay exhibiting a more than passing sympathy for Alois Riegl’s Kunstwollen, but defined so as to be no longer synthetic (as, in fact, it was for Riegl), but directed toward the “ultimate meaning residing in the artistic phenomenon (not for us but objectively)” (“Der Begriff des Kunstwollen,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 [1920], 321–39). A professor at the new Hamburg University, given his interests, he naturally gravitated toward the Warburg library, until he fled the continent in 1933 for the United States. His program of iconology became essentially a restatement of Warburg’s in an attempt to approach an artwork exegetically, employing “historical methods, tempered, if possible, by common sense. We have to ask ourselves whether or not the symbolical significance of a given motif is a matter of established representational tradition; […] whether or not a symbolical interpretation can be justified by definite texts or agrees with ideas demonstrably alive in the period and presumably familiar to its artists; […] and to

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what extent such a symbolical interpretation is in keeping with the historical position and personal tendencies of the individual master” (“Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, 1955, 32, in a bracketed remark added to the original 1939 essay, Early Netherlandish Painting, 142, 143, quoted and discussed in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 1984, 164 and note 18). This does not obviate attention to form: “in a work of art, ‘form’ cannot be divorced from ‘content’: the distribution of color and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood as carrying a more-than-visual meaning” (“Titian’s Allegory of Prudence: a Postscript,” op. cit., 168). E. Formalism in Medieval Studies: Literature and Topology Unfortunately, as critics have suggested, many of Panofsky’s followers, and, too often, he himself, lost track of these theoretical underpinnings and his iconological approach devolved into simple iconographical deciphering. In fact, when pursued in such formalistic fashion, Panofsky’s iconology bears much relationship to the topological method of the German linguist and literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948). For Curtius, an admirer of Warburg, medieval literature is an extended dialogue with successive generations of literary texts, expressed in topoi largely inherited from classical and early Christian literature, wherein multi-faceted human experience is expressed symbolically through the encoded system. But as in the case of the Jungian archetypes, to which he himself seemingly acknowledged a debt, there is a certain loss as to individual application. Even more formalistic are those works arguing that the literary text is not merely a dialogue with preceding texts, but is essentially self-reflexive. These include Paul Zumthor’s 1972 Essai de poétique médiéval; Michael Zink’s Roman rose et rose mouge: Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole de Jean Renart (1979); and Roger Dragonetti’s Le mirage des sources: L’art du faux dans le roman médiévale (1987). Like in Derrida’s deconstructionism, writing is ultimately about writing, and hence, historically incommensurate. It was for E. Talbot Donaldson, principally, Charles Muscatine, and Robert Hanning, inter alia and to a lesser extent, to develop the topological approach into a more dynamic Exegetical method, wherein literary traditions were employed consciously and frequently manipulated for the author’s own purposes, and hence as in the New Criticism, meaning lies in the text itself not merely its genealogy. A more formalist approach was advocated by Durant Waite Robertson, Jr., in which the literary topoi are skillfully (or not) manipulated by the medieval author, not

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always in the manner, but always in accordance with the larger harmonious meaning, or convenientia, of their predecessors and the culture as a whole; so that, unlike Warburg’s formulae, the artist is never found in conflict with his culture’s Weltanschauungen, which is no longer unbewusst, but as Patterson has suggested, “neatly if illegibly printed in the marching columns of Migne’s Patrologia,” and in Robertson’s case, more particularly in the Augustinian corpus. Hence, there is a tendency to gravitate away from a hermeneutics of depth, requiring interpretation, and towards a positivizing of Geistesgeschichte requiring merely description, because the content is absorbed entirely into the form. F. Criticism Indeed, this is the most frequently raised criticism of both the iconological artistic and the exegetical literary approaches. As Henri Zerner wrote of the former: “Only the methods and techniques of interpretation permit the attainment of meaning.” Panofsky’s development is to be understood in this sense. He worked to put in place a method of reading, limited to artistic themes and valid only for the Christian West. But his ultimate goal was the iconological level; that is to say, objective immanent meaning. His disciples having lost sight of his theoretical preoccupations, which he himself seemingly neglected more and more, the discipline he established has been transformed into an isolated technique of decipherment. The aim of an iconological level is generally abandoned and, what is worse, the iconographic decipherment itself is too often substituted for meaning (“L’art,” Faire de l’histoire: Nouveau problèmes, vol. 2, ed. J. Le Goff and Pierre Nora, 1974, 188). Such degeneration is not inevitable. In the last decade of the 20th century, studies by scholars such as Michael Camille, while conceding the importance of icons and topoi, have emphasized, contrary to the more static and formalistic approaches, that “visual representations do not have settled significance but are constantly changing.” Furthermore, “Once we see that the transfer of power is a more important factor in the history of art than the tedious transmission of models, and that this is the mechanism by which content is carried down into tradition, the capacity of image-makers constantly to reinvent rather than refer to meaning becomes clear and the more easily will art history become essential to all historical inquiry” (The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, 1989, 114).

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Select Bibliography Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1993); Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute by University of London, 1970); Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed., trans. and introduction Harry Francis Mallgrave and Ikonnomou Eleftherios (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press); id., Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Meridian, 1956); Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale, 1982); Earl Jeffrey Richards, Modernism, Medievalism, and Humanism (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 1983); D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University, 1962); id., Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University, 1980); Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915).

Scott L. Taylor

French Studies A. Definition The field of Medieval French Literature and Language is extremely broad, built on the contributions of many. From all over the world, scholars have been drawn to France and to its literary traditions. Certainly the great majority of students of this literary tradition have spent at least some time in France and in its libraries, either as students or as scholars. This essay will consider the study of medieval French literature and language in France, Germany and North America. It must be noted that this division of topic by country conceals the many interactions between scholars across national borders. At all times, students of this discipline have studied in foreign universities; as scholars they have maintained contacts, personal and epistolary, with colleagues in other countries.

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B. The French Side of French Studies Not surprisingly, the position of French Studies in France is unequaled; scholars are studying their own literary and linguistic heritage. One starting point for French interest in the Middle Ages is Jean Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697–1781), who published a good number of Old French texts as part of the Enlightenment effort to shed light on French literary history. While little of his scholarship is still cited, he merits responsibility for making the French aware of their medieval literary history (see Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment, 1968). French scholars of note from the 19th century include Francisque Michel (1809–1887), famous for having first identified in manuscript, and then publishing the Chanson de Roland, the French national epic (1837). Another important name is that of Achille Jubinal (1810–1875), a graduate of the Paris-based Ecole des Chartes. While described as a historian, his contributions to medieval French literary studies are major. He published many texts, the contents of entire manuscripts, for which his editions or transcriptions remain the only printed source. Among the most important ones are Jongleurs et trouvères ou choix de saluts, épitres, rêveries et autres pièces légères des XIIIe et XIVe siècles publiés pour la première fois (1835), and Nouveau recueil de contes, dits, fabliaux et autres pièces inédites des XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles, pour faire suite aux collections de Legrand d’Aussy, Barbazan et Méon, mis au jour pour la première fois d’après les manuscrits de la bibliothèque du roi (2 vols., 1839–1842; rpt. 1975). Two truly significant individuals are Collège de France professor Paulin Paris (1800–1881), and more important still, his son, Gaston Paris (1839–1903) who succeeded his father at the Collège de France in 1872. Gaston Paris studied in Germany under Friedrich Diez and maintained an active correspondence with German scholars throughout his life. He “lectured on the Song of Roland as a national monument during the German siege of Paris, 1870” (The Future of the Middle Ages, ed. Paden, 1994, 180; see also Gerard J. Brault, “Gaston Paris [1839–1903],” Medieval Scholarship [1998]: 151–66). After the 1870 defeat of France, French scholars used medieval literature as an instrument of national promotion. The Emperor Charlemagne was one bone of contention between French and German scholars, each group claiming the emperor as their own. This political fight became a scholarly battle as well; German scholars, following Lachmann, established a strong German tradition of scholarship in French. Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann (1793–1851) was a German classicist who believed it possible to “recreate” an original text by dint of comparing all the various extant manuscripts for that text and making judicious choices as to which reading to

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follow. In reaction to Lachmann and particularly to what is called the Lachmannian method of textual scholarship, the French sought a different approach. One alternative was developed by Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), a student of Gaston Paris. Bédier demonstrated the merits of using a single manuscript with his edition of the Lai de l’ombre (1890). The Bédierist approach did not seek to recreate an Ur-text, but offered readers a clean (some argue completely rewritten) version of one manuscript witness. While the edition of the Lai de l’ombre was ground-breaking, his work with the Chanson de Roland (1920) was also very important. His renown in the non-scholarly world comes from his reworking of the Roman de Tristan et Iseut (first published in 1900; reprinted repeatedly, most recently in 1996), blending the different medieval sources into a single tale, rewritten in his inimitable French prose (see William W. Kibler, “Joseph Bédier [1864–1938],” Medieval Scholarship [1998]: 253–66). Before becoming a teacher at the Collège de France, where his assigned discipline was “langues et littératures de l’Europe méridionale,” Paul Meyer (1840–1917) first worked at the French Bibliothèque nationale. In 1882, he became director of the Ecole des Chartes. His work in Old French literature is still cited, though it is also sometimes ridiculed, for his scholarship reflects strongly the biases of his epoch. Among his lasting achievements is the founding of the journal Romania (1872–present) and the establishment, with Gaston Paris, of the Société des Anciens Textes Français (SATF), which continues to publish and reprint critical editions of Old French texts. Félix Lecoy (1903–1997), held the chair of medieval French language and literature at the Collège de France from 1947 until 1974. In 1961, he became editor of the important French series, Classiques français du Moyen Age, in which series he published his edition of the Roman de la Rose (1965–1970). Under the editorship of Lecoy, Mario Roques (1875–1961) a student of Gaston Paris and another Collège de France faculty member, published his editions of Chrétien de Troyes, Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, édités d’après la copie de Guiot (Bibl. nat., fr. 794), vol. I: Erec et Enide, vol. II: Cligés, vol. III: Le Chevalier de la charrette, vol. IV: Le chevalier au lion (Yvain), and vol. V: Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) (1957–1960; multiple reprintings). Lecoy’s scholarly editions of the important works of the French Middle Ages cannot be underestimated, as their multiple reprintings demonstrate. Outside the traditional academic track was Frédéric Godefroy (1826–1897), a self-trained scholar who compiled “the most fundamental dictionary of reference for Old French,” his ten-volume Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (Rodney Sampson, “Review of Frédéric Godefoy: Actes du Xe colloque international sur le moyen français,”

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French Studies 59 [2005]: 587–88). Godefroy remained outside the university world his entire life. In 1896 he sought a chair in the Académie française, against the candidacy of Gaston Paris; Godefroy was defeated twentyeight votes to two (42 in Fréderic Duval, “Frédéric Godefroy: Parcours biobibliographique,” Frédéric Godefroy: Actes du Xe colloque international sur le moyen français, 2003, 25–42). Godefroy’s contribution to the discipline was enormous, for his dictionary, published in fascicules between 1879 and 1893 with a Complément published between 1895 and 1902, was the first modern effort to build an Old French dictionary based on citations. Godefroy devoted his life to this project, “pour le bien de la science” in his words, a dictionary so important that it is known today simply as “Godefroy.” The work has been reprinted repeatedly and now exists in CD-ROM format (Editions Champion, Paris). Important names in the 20th century include the Sorbonne professor Jean Frappier, whose doctoral work on La Mort le roi Artu (1936) led to a career, devoted both to 13th-century Arthurian literature, and to a major effort to popularize medieval texts. Frappier published a number of works destined for a general audience (see his Chrétien de Troyes, published with Hatier, 1968) or for teaching professionals (see his Le théâtre religieux au moyen âge: Textes, traductions, analyses, avec des notices, des notes explicatives, des jugements, un questionnaire et des sujets de devoirs, 1935, rpt. 1964). Michel Zink (1945–), currently teaching at the Collège de France, has built his career more as a literary historian than as an editor of texts. His most noteworthy publications are his dissertation, La prédication en langue romane: avant 1300 (1976; rpt. 1982) and his Littérature française du Moyen Age (1992; rpt. 2001, and 2004). Recent publications have brought his arguments to the general audience, as in Nature et poésie au Moyen Age (2006). Long-time faculty member at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, Philippe Ménard (1935–) is now the senior figure among French literary medievalists. Ménard’s dissertation, Le rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Age (1150–1250) (1969), was followed by the publication of editions of lyric poetry by Guillaume le Vinier (1970), and by the supervision of a massive edition of the Roman de Tristan en prose (1987–1997). Most recently, he has worked on travel literature, supervising the edition of Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du monde (2001), for example. Important journals published in France that deal with French Studies and medieval literature include Romania (Paris), founded in 1872 by Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris, and the Revue des langues romanes (Montpellier), founded in 1870. Both journals were created in reaction to the French defeat in 1870; both served to remind French scholars of the glory of the French lit-

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erary past. And both served as intellectual if not also political reactions to German periodicals that had begun to appear at roughly the same time, such as the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, founded in 1877 by Gustav Gröber. The French Ecole Nationale des Chartes, an elite graduate school founded in1821, is known for the quality of its program, providing training in philology, paleography, the edition of texts, and other topics relevant to the research interests of the faculty. Graduates of the Ecole may become manuscript librarians in research libraries or professors at well-respected schools. One graduate of note is Félix Grat, who established the Paris-based Institut de Recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT) in 1937. Scholars of medieval French have been well served by the IRHT over the years. Now a branch of the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS), the institute offers scholars a research library in Paris, a bibliographic catalogue, access to photographic and microfilm copies of documents, and the expertise of its staff, important scholars in their own right. French Studies is housed in the “Section romane,” which describes itself with terms that include romance philology, French manuscripts, codicology, medieval literature, hagiography, historic literature and medieval literature. The IRHT has its own series of specialized publications. Scholars of the IRHT have also published works of general interest – one example is the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age (ed. Robert Bossuat, Louis Pichard, and Guy Raynaud de Lage, 1964, re-edited and updated in 1992 by editors Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink). Current trends in France include a renewed effort to popularize medieval French literature for the modern audience, with the publication of facing-page editions and modernized texts (the collection Lettres gothiques is a good example). French scholars appear interested in using modern approaches to their medieval literature, though not with the vigor of American or British scholars. The reverence of French scholars for their teachers makes it difficult for a young French scholar to offer an interpretation that overturns the received wisdom. Some younger scholars have expressed off-the-record frustration about this aspect of French Studies in France. C. French Studies in Germany Germany was a destination for scholars throughout the 19th century, in part because of the strength of the German university system. The study of French was pursued by German scholars with as much eagerness as by French. For example, Friedrich Christian Diez (1794–1876) studied French and Occitan (Provençal), inspired in part by Goethe, whom he had met in

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1818. In 1830 Diez was named to the first chair of Romance Philology at the University of Bonn. Noted among his students: Gaston Paris, Adolf Tobler, and the linguist Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke. Diez was much more a linguist than a French Studies scholar and more interested in Occitan and Spanish languages than in Old French. His work as an historical grammarian and as the author of important and still used dictionaries (e. g., Eymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen, 1869) marks him as the founder of Romance Studies in Germany (Antoni M. Badia i Margarit, “‘Romania,’ ‘Romanitas,’ ‘Romanistica,’” Estudis romanics 22 [2000]: 7–22, here 14). Wendelin Foerster (1844–1915) was a student of Diez who succeeded Diez as professor of Romance Philology in Bonn; Foerster also taught in Prague and Vienna. His ground-breaking publication of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes is still cited (Christian von Troyes Sämtliche Werke, 3 vols., 1890; reprinted in Romanische Bibliothek as separate volumes); he is described by Pierre Kunstmann as the “père fondateur” of Chrétien studies (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/kunstmann, last accessed on Jan. 6, 2009). Foerster was responsible for fifteen volumes in the Altfranzösische Bibliothek (15 vols., 1879–1897), in which he published many Old French romances in addition to those of Chrétien. Gustav Gröber (1844–1911) taught Romance Philology at the University of Strasbourg while Alsace was a part of Germany. He authored the Grundriss der romanischen Philologie (1888–1898), an important and still cited work. His other important contribution was the founding of the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (1877–present), one of several learned journals founded in the 1870s. The Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie serves not only as a periodical, but also as the sponsor of the monograph series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, which published its 347th volume in 2008. Covering the entire field of Romance Philology, the series is an important venue for significant publications by scholars in the discipline of French Studies from all over the world. Philipp August Becker (1862–1947) began his university studies in Strasbourg with Gröber, following these with work in Paris and at the University of Fribourg where he studied Romance Philology. His first teaching position was at the University of Budapest, where he taught for twelve years. In 1905, Becker moved to Vienna to replace Adolf Mussafia. Twelve years later, he moved again, to Leipzig, where he taught until retirement in 1930. He trained a number of students, the most significant of whom may well be linguist Ernst Gamillscheg (1887–1971). Becker’s name is not particularly well-known in the United States, perhaps because his works have not been translated. However, his work on Old French epics (e. g., Die altfranzö-

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sische Wilhelmsage und ihre Beziehung zu Wilhelm dem Heiligen, 1896, rpt. 1974) and on French authors of the late medieval and Renaissance periods is important and worthy of note. An important student of Diez was Adolf Tobler (1835–1910), who spent most of his teaching career at the University of Berlin, where he held the first chair in Romance Studies, starting in 1867. Tobler’s career in French was capped by his work on a major dictionary of Old French, the Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, eleven volumes, known to this day simply as “ToblerLommatzsch.” Essentially completed by his student, Erhard Lommatzsch (1886–1975), the dictionary appeared in fascicles, starting in 1915. A final fascicule, with additional notes and additions by Hans Helmut Christmann, Richard Baum, Willi Hirdt, and Brigitte Frei was completed in 2002; the dictionary has been reprinted (1955, 1965, 1989) and is now available in DVD and CD-ROM formats. That this work of a 19th-century scholar has been converted to contemporary digital formats proves the importance of this tool for scholars. Karl Bartsch (1832–1888) studied first in Breslau and then at the University of Berlin, though there was not, at that time, a position in French or Romance Studies at that school. On completion of his studies, he worked first as a tutor and then as librarian in the newly founded German National Museum in Nuremberg. In 1871, he took the chair of Germanic and Romance Philology at the University of Heidelberg, where, in 1877, he created a department that included those disciplines. He remains important as the editor of several important anthologies of texts, notably the Chrestomathie de l’ancien français, VIIIe–XVe siècles, accompagnée d’une grammaire et d’un glossaire (1884; at least 12 re-editions, rpt. as recently as 1988) and Romances et pastourelles françaises des XIIe et XIIIe siècles: Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen (1870, rpt. as recently as 1975). Hermann Suchier (1848–1914) studied in Marburg and Leipzig. His first teaching post was at Zurich before he moved to Halle. His work as an editor of texts, notably that of Aucassin et Nicolette (first published in 1878; reprinted repeatedly, most recently in 1957), and as a literary historian (Geschichte der französischen Literatur von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, 1900; rev. and expanded 1905; rpt. 1913) makes him a name to remember. Erich Köhler (1924–1981) studied at Leipzig before teaching first at Heidelberg and then at Freiburg. He brought to his studies of epic and lyric a sociological angle which led the way to new interpretations of medieval French literature. His contemporary, Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997) studied in Heidelberg, working on Marcel Proust before turning to medieval literature. His first teaching position was at Münster, before moving to

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Gießen. In 1966, when Jauss’ former teacher Gerhard Hess became Rector at the University of Constance, Jauss followed, there to continue his work on Rezeptionsästhetik, the aesthetics of reception. Köhler and Jauss worked together on what would become the Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (1972–1990), modeled, in part, on Gröber’s 19th-century opus. This monumental bibliographic and critical effort, begun in the late 1960’s, was led by an international team of scholars, with the goal of covering all Romance languages and their medieval literatures. Organized by genre, then by language, the volumes were intended to cover all of medieval literature in the Romance languages. The initial plan was for thirteen volumes, each with two sides, one containing literary-historical analysis written by the leading world scholars in that subject, the second a complete bibliographic entry for each and every work known, the two sides linked by a system of cross-referencing. Though the Grundriss will never be completed, the editorial team having run out of steam, the published volumes represent a remarkable contribution to scholarship and serve as an invaluable aid to the scholar and student. The Grundriss project spun off at least one side project, the publication of Begleitreihe which offered additional analysis and critical approaches to medieval Romance literature. Two of these volumes appeared: Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters (ed. Hans U. Gumbrecht, 1980) and Mittelalter-Rezeption: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters in der Neuzeit (ed. Reinhold R. Grimm, 1991). D. French Studies in the United States French Studies have an American history longer than one might suspect. Having served American interests in France in the 1770’s and knowing the need for French speakers, Silas Deane “proposed a professorship in French to his alma mater [Yale University] in 1778” (Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, 2005, 166), an offer that Yale declined. Harvard began to teach French after 1787 and “Yale recognized it officially in 1825” (Schiff, 166). In part, French Studies had a slow beginning in the United States because of concerns about morality: “There were those who reflexively felt [French] should be kept from the ladies. Where the French language went, depravity, frivolity, and indolence were sure to follow” (Schiff, 166). Several decades later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) worked to establish French and French studies, initially at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1829–1834). While teaching in Maine, Longfellow translated C. F. L’Homond’s Elements of French Grammar (1830) for American

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students. Longfellow then moved to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was professor of modern languages from 1836 until 1854. In that capacity, holding the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres, he brought European languages and literatures, including French, to the attention of American students and scholars. Harvard University’s collection of Longfellow papers includes notes on “History of the French Language,” “Dialectes de la langue française,” and “Etat de la langue française en Angleterre,” some of which appeared in print as “The French Language in England” (1840). Longfellow set a high standard for scholarship, but left the academy. The baton soon passed to Aaron Marshall Elliott (1844–1910), who established the art of textual criticism in North America while teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Elliott learned his craft in Europe, where he had studied in Paris at the Collège de France and Institut des Hautes Etudes, before moving on to Florence, Madrid, Tübingen, and Munich in a grand linguistic and scholarly tour (Francesco Carapezza, Ecdotica galloromanza negli Stati Uniti d’America. Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 152, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche: Memoria, ser. 9, vol. 19, fasc. 4, 2005, 598 n. 4). Elliott devoted his life to work on a critical edition of the Lais of Marie de France. He was also instrumental in founding a learned society, the Modern Language Association (MLA). Though Elliott never published his work on the Lais, he trained a remarkable number of scholars in Old French and in editorial technique, including H. A. Todd, E. C. Armstrong, D. L. Buffum, T. A. Jenkins, J.E. Matzke, and W.A. Nitze (Carapezza, Ecdotica galloromanza negli Stati Uniti d’America, 2005, 600). Henry Alfred Todd (1854–1925) also studied in a number of European universities, attending lectures given by Adolf Tobler in Berlin, Ernesto Monaci in Rome, and Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo in Madrid, before spending a year in Paris as a student at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes working with Gaston Paris, Paul Meyer, and Arsène Darmesteter (Carapezza, Ecdotica galloromanza negli Stati Uniti d’America, 2005, 601). Todd was the first foreigner to publish an edition with the Société des anciens textes français in Paris, the Dit de la Panthère (1883). He followed this work with the editio princeps of the Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne (1889), with critical apparatus in English, a significant departure from the press’ practice of publishing only in French (Carapezza, Ecdotica galloromanza negli Stati Uniti d’America, 2005, 603). John Ernst Matzke (1862–1910), of German birth, was another of Elliott’s students, though one who died quite young. Nonetheless, his edition of Les œuvres de Simund de Freine (1909) has stood the test of time;

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it remains the only edition of Simund’s work to date (Carapezza, op. cit., 605). Thomas Atkinson Jenkins (1868–1935) moved from Johns Hopkins to become professor at the University of Chicago, where he built its program in French Studies. His work as a text editor includes the edition of Marie de France’s Espurgatoire Seint Patriz (1903). Edward Cooke Armstrong (1871–1944) replaced Elliott on the latter’s death in 1910, serving as director of the department at Johns Hopkins and as editor of Modern Language Notes (Carapezza, op. cit., 608) before moving to Princeton University in 1917. Among Armstrong’s accomplishments are the establishment of the series “Elliott Monographs in the Romance Languages and Literatures” (Carapezza, op. cit., 608) and the edition of the Chevalier à l’épée (1900), an edition not replaced until 1972. Armstrong was also a key member of the team that edited the Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre (ed. M. S. LaDu, E.C. Armstrong, A. Foulet, 1937–1976). Armstrong was succeeded at Princeton by his student Alfred Foulet (1900–1987), son of peripatetic French scholar Lucien Foulet (1873–1958). Born in Pennsylvania, Alfred Foulet followed his father to Berkeley before going to Paris for study; he completed his doctoral studies in the United States, with an edition of the Couronnement de Renard (1929). Part of the Roman d’Alexandre team, Foulet’s mark on American scholarship was crowned with the publication of On Editing Old French Texts (1979), in which he and co-author Mary Blakely Speer (1942–) offered American scholars guidelines for preparation of critical editions. This volume has received uniform praise in reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. William Albert Nitze (1876–1957) trained at Johns Hopkins and taught at Chicago from 1909 until 1942 (Carapezza, op. cit., 614). Editor of several Old French texts, he is best known for his work on Robert de Boron’s Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal (1927; rpt. 1971, 1983) and the enormous Le haut livre du graal: Perlesvaus (1932; rpt.1972). A student of Nitze, William Joseph Roach (1907–1993) taught at the Catholic University of America before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. Roach’s work began with publication of the Didot Perceval (1941; rpt.1977), followed by the monumental edition of the Continuation of the Old French Perceval cycle (1949–1983). He was also responsible for student editions of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval (1959). The importance of Roach for American scholarship cannot be overstated. In the words of Keith Busby, “L’influence de cet homme […] a été incalculable, non seulement à cause de ses propres travaux, mais aussi grâce à ses nombreux élèves” (quoted in Carapezza, op. cit., 650, n. 114).

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In another quarter, after World War II, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, became a venue for French Studies, particularly under the leadership of Urban Tigner Holmes (1900–1972), described by Yakov Malkiel as “one of the three or four most conspicuous figures on the American scene” (“Necrology: Urban Tigner Holmes,” Romance Philology 27 [1973]: 62–67). Though Holmes was not a prolific editor (he edited but one text, Adenet le Roi’s Berte aus grans piés, 1946; see Carapazza, op. cit., 669), he wrote a significant number of literary studies relating to Chrétien de Troyes as well as the history of French language and literature (with Alexandre Schutz, A History of the French Language, 1938; rpt.1967), and he trained a remarkable cohort of students, including Jan Nelson, Emmanuel Mickel, Rupert Pickens and William Kibler. Founder of the series University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Holmes’ mark on French Studies extends well beyond his own work. On the West Coast, the University of California, Berkeley, maintained its importance as a center for French Studies, notably within the broader discipline of Romance Philology. Edward Billings Ham (1902–1965) worked as a professor at the University of Michigan, but may have made his mark as a visiting faculty member at Berkeley while he was on the faculty at California State College (now University) at Haywood. He was a prolific scholar in his own right, though he may be better known today for his students than for his own words. Berkeley was home to linguist Yakov Malkiel (1914–1998), founder of the journal Romance Philology. While Malkiel’s own scholarship was not in French Studies, his journal has been very important for that discipline. Students in the Berkeley program included Peter Florian Dembowski and Karl David Uitti. Another member of this cohort, still teaching at Berkeley, is Joseph John Duggan (1938–), who published his important Concordance of the Chanson de Roland in 1969. This volume gave scholars of the epic access to the entire text in key-word-in-context (KWIC) format, breaking new ground for linguistic and literary analysis of the poem. The Concordance opened the eyes of scholars to the utility of computer-generated data, extremely beneficial in the linguistic analysis of a medieval French text. Peter Florian Dembowski (1925–) has taught at the University of Chicago since 1969, following in the footsteps of Nitze. Dembowski’s personal history is fascinating; part of it chronicled in his Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered (2005). He received graduate training in French philology at Berkeley, where he studied with Ham and Malkiel, before taking a teaching position at the University of Toronto (1960–1967) and then at Chicago (1969–). His contributions to French Studies are many, including his editions of Ami et Amile (1969), Jourdain de Blaye (1969; rev. and

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rpt. 1991), Erec et Enide (1994), as well as texts from the later Middle Ages such as Le paradis d’amour and L’orloge amoureus of Jean Froissart (1986). Now professor emeritus, he remains an active scholar. Karl David Uitti (1933–2003) followed his studies at Berkeley with a position at Princeton. Uitti’s importance to the field is apparent on several fronts. A regular contributor to American debates on text editing (see his “A la recherche du texte perdu,” L’hostellerie de pensée: Etudes sur l’art littéraire au Moyen Age offertes à Daniel Poirion, 1995, 467–86), he also was a leader in the use of new technology, notably publishing edited texts on-line. His work with the “Charrette Project” points the way of the future for French Studies – on a web site, scholars and the general public can see manuscript images, transcriptions, lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical-poetic data for the multiple manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes’ Chevalier de la charette (Lancelot) (see http://www.princeton.edu /˜ lancelot/ss/index.shtml [last accessed on Jan. 6, 2009]). E. Recent Trends Bernard Cerquiglini’s publication, Eloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989), an attack on the traditions of scholarship in France, elicited a spirited response in the pages of the American journal Speculum. In a special issue entitled “The New Philology” (Speculum 65.1 [1990]) Stephen G. Nichols led the charge with his introduction “Philology in a Manuscript Culture” (1–10). Nichols’ argument, “[…] the insistence that the language of texts be studied not simply as discursive phenomena but in the interaction of text language with the manuscript matrix and of both language and manuscript with the social context and networks they inscribe” (9), marks the movement of American scholarship away from philology per se and towards incorporation of new critical theory in approaches to medieval French literature. In the same issue, Suzanne Fleischmann (“Philology, Linguistics and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” 19–37) argues for the use of linguistic theory to understand Old French texts. Reinforcing the approaches of his fellow contributors, Lee Patterson titles his contribution, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History and Medieval Studies” (87–108). For several reasons, this issue of Speculum was a watershed moment in American scholarship. First, it was a concerted reaction to a French challenge; second, the response was published in the highly respected journal of the Medieval Academy of America; and third, from that point on, American scholars moved quickly to change approaches, so that critical theory (albeit French critical theory) invaded scholarship and education.

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F. French Studies in Canada North of the US border, Medieval Studies has long been centered at the University of Toronto, where the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies (founded in 1929) and the more recent parallel Centre for Medieval Studies (established in 1959) have long attracted students. Medieval French language and literature were part of the University of Toronto curriculum in the 1920’s, taught by Joseph Stanley Will. His successor, William Hilliard Trethewey (1898–1981), trained at the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1935), published the first volume to appear in the Anglo-Norman Text Society’s publications, La Petite philosophie, an Anglo-Norman Poem of the Thirteenth Century (1939). In the1960’s and 1970’s the faculty in French at the University of Toronto grew to include many medievalists, including Edward A. Heinemann (1942–), noted for his work on Old French epics and the oral tradition; Robert A. Taylor (1937–), author of a major bibliography of Old Occitan literature; Brian S. Merrilees (1939–), editor of numerous Anglo-Norman texts; Peter Grillo (1940–), editor of three volumes of the Old French Crusade Cycle; John Ferguson Flinn (1920–), whose Le Roman de Renart dans la littérature française et dans les littératures étrangères au Moyen Age (1963) is still current; A. Robert Harden (1919–), known for his work on medieval French drama; and his student, Frank Collins (1942–), who began his career with work on Chrétien de Troyes though he is currently more active in the field of semiotics. Other Canadian universities followed the lead of the University of Toronto. Significant centers of study include the Université de Montréal and the University of British Columbia, though the latter is more important for its faculty in medieval history than in medieval French literature. In Montreal, for example, Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker, who earned her doctorate at the Sorbonne in France, has been a leader in French studies, working in the university’s department of Linguistics and Translation. SchulzeBusacker’s book, Proverbes et expressions proverbiales dans la littérature narrative du Moyen Age français: recueil et analyse (1985), updated and improved on Joseph Morawski’s Proverbes français antérieurs au XVe siècle (1925) in important ways. Her research extends across Old French genres; she is also an active scholar of medieval Occitan literature. Exerting great influence was, of course, Paul Zumthor (1915–1995), who ended his career at the Université de Montréal (retiring in 1980). Zumthor received his training in Paris and taught for twenty years at the University of Amsterdam. During the period from 1968–1972, a turbulent moment in university circles, he moved from the Université de Vincennes (France), to Yale University, before arriving in Montreal in 1972. His Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale (VIe–XIVe s.) (1954) is still actively cited; his Langue et technique poétiques à l’époque romane (XIe–XIIIe

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s.) (1963), and Essai de poétique médiévale (1972; rpt. 2000) are scholarly masterpieces. Zumthor brought linguistic theory to literary analysis, bringing his unequaled understanding of the medieval French corpus, ranging from the beginnings of that literature to the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the subject of his later work. G. Conclusions One significant international trend, beginning after World War II, and particularly noticeable in recent years, has been the growth in the number of topic-specific or author-specific learned societies, each with its own journal. Some of these are international in membership; others restricted more or less to one country. Examples of the former would be the International Arthurian Society (devoted to all matters touching on King Arthur of Britain), founded in 1948 with an annual Bulletin biliographique, the Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes (devoted to study of medieval epic poetry), founded in 1956 and publishing a Bibliographic Bulletin since, and the International Courtly Literature Society (open to all topics that relate to the court, particularly in the Middle Ages), founded in 1973 with its journal Encomia. Each of these societies counts several thousand members. Smaller in size but equally international would be organizations like the Christine de Pizan Society (founded circa 1990), with a regular program of international conferences. An example of the latter, smaller, recent groups, would be the Marie de France Society (founded in 1992), essentially based in North America though drawing members from beyond those confines. These societies have a tighter focus than is the case with organizations such as the Modern Language Association, open to all languages, all disciplines and all time periods. Another highly significant recent development has been the emergence of the Annual Congress on Medieval Studies organized by the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May of each year. The meeting has become the pre-eminent event of its type in the world and is known today simply as “Kalamazoo.” First organized in 1965 as a central meeting for students and faculty from the Universities of Wisconsin, Toronto and all points between, this congress has become a major meeting for any scholar interested in the medieval period. Today, bringing together more than 3000 participants from all over the world, the more than 500 sessions of this conference are a prime opportunity for the exchange of ideas in the area of French Studies, along with other aspects of the Middle Ages. “Kalamazoo” has proved so popular and so important an intellectual venue that the British University of Leeds has copied it, creating a parallel medieval conference in Europe. After a small beginning in 1994, the International

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Medieval Congress in Leeds now describes itself as “the largest conference of its kind in Europe,” drawing roughly 1500 scholars to Leeds in July of each year. Kalamazoo remains the congress for any medievalist, whereas Leeds tends to draw more historians than scholars in other disciplines. French Studies has long engaged scholars, who have seen medieval French literature as a source of delight, national pride, and scholarly inquiry. The discipline extends well beyond the borders of the countries discussed here. As a discipline, French Studies has responded to events in the contemporary world, from wars in the 19th century, to the advent of new technology in the twentieth. This article has focused on the edition of texts, leaving discussions of critical theory to other authors. The reader is invited to consult specific entries on Deconstruction, Formalism, Hermeneutics, Intertextuality, Marxist and Socialist Approaches, Narratology and Literary Theory, and Structuralism, for more information on these topics. More detailed entries can be found for a number of the scholars mentioned in this essay as well. While medieval French literature may seem old to some, it remains alive and well and flourishing in the 21st century. Select Bibliography Francesco Carapezza, Ecdotica galloromanza negli Stati Unite d’America: Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 152, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche: Memorie, ser. 9, vol. 19, fasc. 4 (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 2005), 585–773; Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico, Donald Fennema, and Karmen Lenz (New York and London: Garland, 1998); Frédéric Duval, ed., Pratiques philologiques en Europe: Actes de la journée d’étude organisée à l’Ecole des chartes le 23 septembre 2005. Etudes et rencontres de l’Ecole des chartes 21 (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 2006); Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et al. (Heidelberg: Winter; vol 1: Généralités, 1972; vol. 2: Les genres lyriques, 1979–1990, still incomplete; vol 3: Les epopées romanes, 1981–2005, still incomplete; vol. 4: Le roman jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle, 1978–1984; vol. 5: Les formes narratives brèves, 1985–1991, still incomplete; vol. 6: La littérature didactique, allégorique et satirique, 1968–1970; [vol. 7, originally dedicated to L’âge de Dante, Boccacce et Pétrarque has become part of vol. 10]; vol. 8: La Littérature en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles, 1988, still incomplete; vol. 9: La littérature dans la péninsule ibérique aux XIVe et XVe siècles, 1983–1985, still incomplete; vol. 10: Die italienische Literatur im Zeitalter Dantes und am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Renaissance, 1987–1989, still incomplete; vol. 11: La Littérature historiographique des origines à 1500, 1986–1993, still incomplete; vol. 12: Le Théâtre des origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, never appeared; vol. 13: Synthèses, Chronologie, Index, never appeared); Tra filologia e comparatistica: Le riviste e la fondazione della filologia romanza, ed. Maria Luisa Meneghetti, and Roberto Tagliani (Tavarnuzze: Sismel, forthcoming); The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed. William D. Paden (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).

Wendy Pfeffer

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Friendship and Networks A. Introduction Medieval friendship, amicitia (derived in the modern Germanic languages from the Gothic frijõnds [friend] and the Indo-Germanic prãi- [to love], and derived in the Romance languages from the Latin amicitia), whether linked or not with the Christian concept of charity, caritas, has long been studied by medievalists (cf. e. g., the already long contribution G. Vansteenberghe, “Amitié,” DSAM I (1937): 500–29, with many references; cf. also Heinz-Horst Schrey, “Freundschaft,” TRE 11 [1983]: 590–99). Significantly increasing attention to the subject has been evident in the last three decades, not only to the Western Middle Ages but also to Scandinavia and Byzantium (cf. below), through which it has been analyzed from various approaches in an interdisciplinary and comparative manner (fitting in with the renewed points of special interest within contemporary historiography), with current national and international research projects (cf. in this respect the Medieval Friendship Networks project, cf. www.univie.ac.at/amicitia) and an already abundant bibliography as a result. B. The Medieval West Medieval friendship is not understood to be only an emotional-affective relationship between two or more individuals – the “narrow” interpretation characteristic of modern Western culture – but is understood also as a phenomenon that had social, political and cultural interpretations and forms of expression. This means that the focus of medievalists has become broader than the study of the terms amicitia and caritas within a spiritual or philosophical context, which was typical for the first half of the 20th century. Various approaches have led to medieval friendship being differentiated not only substantively, but also to a link being made, through the study of friendship as a socially important and complex phenomenon, with other Medieval social and other manifestations, such as courtly love, spiritual brotherhood, kinship, feudalism, marriage, and the like. Medieval friendship was an important social, political and cultural organizing principle within Medieval (pre-modern) society. It encompassed a broad spectrum of significance and externalized itself as a bond, whether formal or not, that had a socializing function for individuals occupying various levels of the population. ‘Friends,’ together with relations, provided a fundamental support in the struggle for social security; ‘friendship,’ whether formalized or not, not only played a socializing role, but also constituted a central fact within the processes of social

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networking and the formation of states. In addition, it exerted influence as an ideologizing frame of reference upon the cultural and intellectual executives of the clerical and secular elites, with the development of a set of conventions and norms that, integrated into forms of communication, ceremonials, ritual, and informal or formalized etiquettes, shaped human behavior in a fundamental way. The research of past decades has demonstrated that the study of medieval friendship is not without its problems of methodology. The lexicon of the medieval sources that refer to friendship, in particular those in Latin but also in the vernacular languages – the main point of entry for historians seeking to analyze the issue – were acknowledged as being hardly unambiguous, cloaked in limitations, and complex, which has given rise to a fragmented and differentiated picture. Behind the language that points to friendship could lie concealed, depending on the source, author and context, both spiritual, emotional-affective, pragmatic, instrumental, political, formal, homo-erotic, intellectual, etc. relationships of friendship (as well as all possible combinations of the same; cf. below). At the same time, this is a form of expression for group-related cultural, intellectual, and social conventions that can also degenerate into a genre-bound form of communication (Julian Haseldine, “Understanding the Language of Amicitia: The Friendship Circle of Peter of Celle (ca. 1115–1183),” Journal of Medieval History 20 [1994]: 237–60; Gillian R. Knight, The Correspondence Between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairveaux: A Semantic and Structural Analysis, 2002) or into a rhetorical artefact (Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval LetterCollections as a Mirror of Circles of Friendship? The Example of Stephen of Tournai, 1128–1203,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 285–300). Design and function of the sources, in other words, play an important role in interpreting the friendship and the options available for this. Furthermore, the loss of sources due to time leads to a selective inventory, further distorting the picture. Finally, account must be taken of the possibility that the lack of linguistic usage referring to friendship does not exclude a source from offering access to the underlying social relationships; this applies in particular to letters (cf. below). Especially the study of what friendship meant within clerical circles has in recent years brought about a growing sense of the complexity evident within this area of study (cf. the interesting and synthesizing approach of those problems in Mullett’s introduction in Margaret E. Mullett and Walter Ysebaert, “Power, Relations and Networks in Medieval Europe,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 255–60).

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C. Medieval Friendship in Byzantium and Scandinavia As in the case of the Medieval West, increased interest in friendship can be established for Byzantium and Scandinavia, where the general conditions described above also apply. Specific to Scandinavia, it can be argued that, given the nearly total absence of theorizing texts and letters and correspondence, historiography is aimed especially at the role and importance played by friendship as a socializing phenomenon and as an element of political activities and network formation. ‘Friendship relationships’, as reflected, for example, in the Icelandic sagas – having a vertical structure with reciprocal obligations – and friendship networks formed a foundational element of the social structures and, as evidenced by the development and deployment of political structures and institutions, had a significant effect (cf. e. g. Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth, 1999; Lars Hermanson, Släkt, vänner och makt: En studie av elitens politiska kultur i 1100-talets Danmark, 2000). The study of friendship in Byzantine society was particularly stimulated by an article of Margaret Mullett (Margaret E. Mullett, “Byzantium: a Friendly Society?” Past and Present 118 [1988]: 1–24), who explained the lack of historiography by the absence of Byzantine theoretical treatises on friendship, which left the issue long neglected. Since then there is evidence of catching up, whereby friendship is well studied in relation to other social ties and formalized forms of conduct (spiritual and kinship ties; patron-client relationships; teacher-pupil-relations), with a great amount of attention to narrative sources (such as vitae) and letters and collections of correspondence (cf. Byzantium Matures: Choices, Sensitivities and Modes of Expression (Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christine Angelidi, 2004; Michael Grünbart, “‘Tis love that has warm’d us’: Reconstructing Networks in 12th century Byzantium,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 301–14; Margaret E. Mullett, “Friendship in Byzantium: Genre, Topos and Network,” Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine, 1999, 166–184; Stratis Papaioannou, “Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and the Self in Byzantine Epistolography,” L’épistolographie et la poésie épigrammatique, ed. Michael Grünbart and Wolfram Hörandner, 2003; Franz Tinnefeld, “Freundschaft in den Briefen des Michael Psellos: Theorie und Wirklichkeit,” JÖBG 22 ([1973]: 151–168; for a comparative approach toward a definition of the question, which considers various regions, cf. Margaret E. Mullett and Walter Ysebaert, “Power, Relations and Networks in Medieval Europe,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/ Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 255–314).

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D. Sources The vocabulary of friendship may be found in medieval source material of differing types. Depending on their approach, medievalists used different types of sources to study friendship: literary, theoretical, religious-philosophical and iconographic, and normative sources and letters and collections of correspondence lent themselves in particular to research into the way in which friendship and caritas were conceived. Narrative, diplomatic, administrative and juridical sources and letters and collections of correspondence were and are used for the analysis of role, function, practice, and significance of friendship in the societal context. More recent publications increasingly reveal a combined use of the diversity of source materials. It can be said in respect of the evolution of the source materials as such that no sources predating the 12th century have been found in which friendship is specifically and exclusively written of. While there is frequent reflection throughout this period about friendship and love in all sorts of texts (and the vocabulary referring to friendship can be found in the most diverse types of sources), actual treatises on friendship do not appear until the 12th century, in specific those written by Aelred of Rievaulx (De spiritali amicitia) and Peter of Blois (De amicitia christiana). A great deal of reflection on friendship and caritas may be found, however, in older philosophical-religious treatises and in medieval letters, as well as in poetic and literary texts from the late 11th century, where the ideal of friendship is oftentimes linked to (courtly) love. Where one especially finds in both of the former categories of sources theoretical observations about ‘ideal friendship’ (or in relation to God in particular), both chivalric and courtly literature often provide an image of ideal friendships between two individuals – based for the most part on ideal types of wellknown pairs of friends as may be found in these older sources and in Biblical passages. The scholastic tradition and the influence of the courtly ideology led to an increasing number of reflections in the source material from the 13th century onward, including literary sources. The diplomatic, juridical and administrative source material after all employs a choice of words that for the most part directly refers to some social reality but in general is lacking in contemplative reflection. E. Friendship (as an Ideal) in Spiritual, Philosophical and Theological Texts The medieval theoretical concepts, both spiritual and theological, of amicitia and caritas, find their roots in the classical authors, chiefly Aristotle and Cicero, but also Seneca, Lucian, and Plutarch, and in the manner in which the views or models of these authors combined with Biblical passages and Chris-

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tian ideology were further developed by Augustine and other Church Fathers, particularly in the 4th century (e. g., Wolfgang Brinckmann, Der Begriff der Freundschaft in Senecas Briefen, 1964; Eoin G. Cassidy, “‘He who has Friends can have no Friend’: Classical and Christian Perspectives on the Limits to Friendship,” Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine, 1999, 45–67; Ludovic Dugas, L’amitié antique, 1894; Pierre Fabre, Saint Paulin de Nole et l’amitié chrétienne, 1949; Jean-Claude Fraisse, La notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique, 1984; G. Herman, Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City, 1987; David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 1997; James McEvoy, “Philia and Amicitia: the Philosophy of Friendship from Plato to Aquinas,” Sewanee Medieval Colloquium Occasional Papers 2 [1985]: 1–23; James McEvoy, “De la Philia païenne à l’amicitia chrétienne: rupture et continuité,” Les philosophies morales et politiques au moyen âge: Actes du neuvième Congrès International de Philosophie médiévale I, ed. Bernardo C. Bazan, Eduardo Andujas, and Léonard G. Strocchi, 1996, 136–47; Hélène Pétré, Caritas: Etude sur le vocabulaire latin de la charité chretienne, 1948; Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century, 1992). Aristotle developed a model of friendship (philia, ) based on the concept of ‘attraction’; what attracts is a sociability, whoever would know friendship must study its object, that is, what is friendly. He argued that friendship manifests itself in three ways: in the form of utility, pleasure and virtue. From this he derived three types of friendship. Only friendship based on virtue represents the paradigm of ‘ideal friendship’; the other two are inherently unstable and transitory in nature because they focus more on the object of the friendship, which was changeable, than on the friendship itself. Ideal friendship was dedicated to the whole person and committed to the joint project of living, not to separate utility or pleasure characteristics. Aristotle thus endowed friendship with an altruistic significance. In its ideal form it was a perfect social bond that brought about unity among the citizens of the same city-state (Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea VIII and IX; cf. e. g. John M. Cooper, “Friendship and the Good in Aristotle,” Philosophical Review 86 [1977]: 290–315; John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,” Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie O. Rorty, 1980, 301–40; Lorraine S. Pangel, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, 2003; Anthony W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, 1989; Bénédicte Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge, 2007 [with an extensive bibliography]; Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, 1995). Cicero formulated an analogous school of thought with the image of the ideal friendship based on virtue framed within a Roman civil society and within the ideal of humanitas. Friendship (amicitia) refers to a perfect combination of expressions of wills, tastes and thought, approaching an absolute agreement

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(consensio) on all matters human and divine, accompanied by benevolence (benevolentia) and love (caritas). The ideal of friendship was linked with aeternitas – the purpose of friendship existed in the life eternal (Cicero, Laelius vel de amicitia, ed. and transl. Robert Combès, 1999 [Les Belles Lettres]). The ideas of Aristotle and especially of Cicero had a lasting influence, not only on the concepts of the Church Fathers such as Augustine and Ambrosius (e. g., Ephrem Boularand, “L’amitié d’après saint Ambroise dans le De officiis ministrorum,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 73 [1972]: 103–23; Eoin G. Cassidy, “Le rôle de l’amitié dans la quête du bonheur chez S. Augustin,” Actualité de la pensée médiévale: Recueil d’articles, ed. Jaques Follon and James McEvoy, 1994, 171–201; Marie A. McNamara, Friendship in Saint Augustine, 1958; Venantius Nolte, Augustins Freundschaftsideal in seinen Briefen, 1938; Tarcisius J. Van Bavel, “The Influence of Cicero’s Ideal of Friendship on Augustine,” Augustiniana Traiectina: Communications présentées au Colloque international d’Utrecht, ed. Jan Den Boeft and Johannes Van Oort, 1988, 59–72), but also on those of monks and theologians of later centuries (among Benedictine and especially Cistercian monks; cf. below), on scholastic doctrine (e. g., Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghendt) and on the humanist ideals and ethics of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (e. g., Ulrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccacio to Corneille, 1994). Christianity reformulated the Classical doctrines and added new elements to them, such as the universal character of Christian love, caritas, the purposefulness of the eternal and associativity of the individual love upon God (the love of God was reflected in the friendship with one’s neighbour). Passages from the Old Testament (I. Kings, XVIII–XX, II. Kings, I, dealing with the perfect friendship of David and Jonathan; Chron, XX, 7; Prov., XIII, 20, XIV, 20, XVIII, 24, XIX, 4, 6, XXVII, 5, 6, 9, 10; Eccl, VI, 5–17, XXII, 17–24, XXVII, 1–6, 16–21; Isa., XLI, 8), the New Testament (especially Joh, XV) and the letters of Paul (such as I Cor., 13) influenced the development of Augustine’s views, which linked the personal experience of friendship to the omnipresence of God (Contra Academicos, III. 6, 13; Confessions IV, 9), Cassian, who integrated friendship in a monastic context (Collationes, XVI), and other authors of the early Christian period (cf. especially Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century, 1992; also, besides the references already mentioned, several contributions in Adèle Fiske, Friends and Friendship in the Monastic Tradition, 1970). Together with the classical texts, these authors in turn were the object of reflection for later monastic and theological writers, leading to a doctrine in which ideal friendship took on a largely spiritual character whereby it was experienced as a power to hold dear, as a power that called up the concept of the image (imago) of God. The accent among the mon-

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astic writers was on the gratuitousness of friendship. Whoever sought any reward other than the friendship itself, did not understand what friendship was, since it was its own reward, its own fruit. Friendship may not have any ‘utility’ but must be sought or desired for its intrinsic value. The friend was a revelation of God’s hidden presence. God stood at the start and the finish of each friendship. By having love for a friend one adored God. Friendship was, in other words, inherently bound to the consideration of God and of divine love (caritas); it is an inseparable part of all contemplative attitude. The passages in the medieval letters and sources that treat explicitly of divine love (cf. for example the De natura et dignitate amoris of William of Saint Thierry, or De speculo caritatis of Aelred of Rievaulx), cannot, therefore, be viewed apart from Christian friendship. While these ideas were already fully developed in the texts of Early Medieval writers, the actual working out of a doctrine took place especially starting from the long 12th century, when one can observe not only a considerable increase in reflections on amicitia and caritas in letters – to such a degree that this period has been referred to as a “Century of Friendship” (Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200, 1972) – but also when, simultaneously, the first true treatises on friendship appear. Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spiritali amicitia is a reflection cast in dialogue strongly influenced by Cicero concerning the nature and origins of Christian friendship (see the editions and translations, and e. g., Damien Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au Moyen Âge. Autour de l’anthropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx, 2005; Pierre-André Burton, “Ælred face à l’histoire et à ses historiens. Autour de l’actualité aelrédienne,” Collectanea Cisterciensia, 58 [1996]: 161–93; Julian Haseldine, “Friendship, Equality and Universal Harmony: The Universal and the Particular in Aelred of Rievaulx’s De spiritali amicitia,” Friendship East & West: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Oliver Leaman, 1996, 192–214; Letterio Mauro , “L’amicizia come complimento di umanità nel De Spirituali Amicitia di Aelredo di Rievaulx,” Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 66 [1974]: 89–103; James McEvoy, “Notes on the Prologue of St. Aelred of Rievaulx’s “De Spiritali Amicitia” with a translation,” Traditio 37 [1981]: 396–411; Brian Patrick McGuire, Brother and Lover: Aelred of Rievaulx, 1994); Peter of Blois’s De amicitia christiana was a not very original and revived interpretation of this (cf. especially Un traité de l’amour du XIIème siècle, Pierre de Blois, ed. and trans. Marie-Magdalène Davy 1932). A further theoretical systematization may be found in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (Ia IIae, q. 36, a. 3 et 4). Friendship is presented as “one” form of love, based on four forms of love that are distinguished and combined (amor, amicitia, dilectio and caritas); amicitia is offered as the perfect form: it is rational, stable, spiritual, and reflects the mystic perception of divine love. The systematics of Thomas Aqui-

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nas and the scholastics gave form to the development of a traditional friendship that was offered up by the late medieval commentators and rethinkers of Aristotelian ethics (Thomas Aquinas, Willem Ockham, Johannes Altensteig, John Major and others), next to the Neo-Platonic tradition with its confusion of erotic love and friendship. Both gave rise to a proliferation of texts and treatises during the 13th–15th centuries (cf. James McEvoy, “Amitié, attirance et amour chez S. Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain, ser. 4, 91 [1993]: 383–408; James McEvoy, “The Sources and the Significance of Henry of Ghent’s Disputed Question ‘Is Friendship a Virtue?’” Henry of Ghent, ed. Willy Vanhamel, 1996, 121–38; James McEvoy, “Grosseteste’s Reflections of Aristotelian Friendship: A ‘New’ Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics VIII. 8–14,” Robert Grosseteste. New Perspectives on his Thought and Scholarship, ed. James McEvoy, 1996, 149–168; Patrick Quinn, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Understanding of Friendship,” Friendship East & West. Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Oliver Leaman, 1996, 270–79; Bénédicte Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge, 2007). F. Friendship in Literature. Friendship appears frequently in literary texts of the Middle Ages, referring to an informal contractual bond with associated reciprocal obligations, in which often mythical friend-pairs are offered as examples (such as Amicus and Amelius, Oliver and Roland in the Song of Roland, Athis and Prophilias), as well as the sublimated form of friendship described in 12th century chivalric romances (especially Danielle Buschinger, Amitié épique et chevaleresque. Actes du colloque d’Amiens, mars 2000, 2002; Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Litterature, 1994; Huguette Legros, L’amitié dans les chansons de geste à l’époque romane, 2001). Particularly in the latter, the perception and conception of friendship, in courtly contexts, cannot be viewed separately from the manner in which the concept of courtesy love developed (see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210, 1985, and id., Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility, 1999). Just in the way in which the language of friendship was used especially in medieval letters (cf. infra), in these sources this also gave rise to discussions of the question as to what degree such usage referenced homo-erotic physical contact, no matter to what degree sublimated (cf. infra). A few studies have also researched the degree to which the Ciceronian concepts related to friendship were appropriated in literary sources (Albrecht Classen, “Friendship in the Middle Ages: A Ciceronian Concept in Konrad von Würzburg’s Engelhard (ca. 1280),” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 41 [2006]: 227–46, with further references; or Jan M.

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Ziolkowski, “Twelfth-century Understandings and Adaptations of Ancient Friendship,” Mediaeval Antiquity, ed. Andries Welkenhuysen, Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke, 1995, 59–81). G. Friendship in Practice Secular World The idealization of friendship, as it is found in medieval literature and the philosophical and theological treatises, should not draw attention away from the fact that, during all of the Middle Ages, friendship formed the completion of an important social relationship that exerted a structural and organizing influence on society. In pre-modern society, the institutional structures were for the most part inadequate in guaranteeing social cohesion. The consequence was that stability largely depended on personal ties. Friendship was a concept that served to strengthen these ties, as did kinship and other types of relationships and group bonds, whether formalized or not (cf. Gerd Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue: Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindung im früheren Mittelalter, 1990; Gerd Althoff, Amicitiae und pacta: Bündnis, Einung, Politik und Gebetsdenken im beginnenden 10. Jahrhundert, 1992; id., “Friendship and Political Order,” Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine, 1999, 91–105; Verena Epp, Amicitia: Zur Geschichte personaler, sozialer, politischer und geistlicher Beziehungen im frühen Mittelalter, 1999; Claudia Garnier, Amicus amicis – inimicus inimicis. Politische Freundschaft und fürstliche Netzwerke im 13. Jahrhundert, 2000; Klaus Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens zum systematisierten Konflikt: Die englisch-französischen Beziehungen und ihre Wahrnehmung an der Wende vom Hoch- zum Spätmittelalter, 2002; Klaus Van Eickels, “Tradierte Konzepte in neuen Ordnungen: Personale Bindungen im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, “Ordnungskonfigurationen im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Schneidmüller and Stefan Weinfurter, 2006, 93–125; Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth, 1999). Friendship stood for the promotion of consensus, peace and solidarity. For the individual, friendship signified an expression of a relationship with mutual obligations, solidarity in the form of practical assistance and moral support (cf. besides the mentioned references, also the studies on ‘amis charnels’: e. g. Françoise Autrand, “‘Tous parens, amis et affins’: Le groupe familial dans le milieu de robe parisien au XVe siècle,” Commerce, Finances et Sociétés (XIe–XVIe s.), ed. Philippe Contamine, Thierry Dutour and Bertrand Schnerb, 1993, 347–57; Myriam Carlier, “Solidariteit of sociale controle? De rol van vrienden en magen en buren in een middeleeuwse stad,” Hart en marge in de laatmiddeleeuwse stedelijke samenleving,

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ed. Myriam Carlier, 1997, 71–91; Juliette M. Turlan, “Amis et amis charnels d’après les actes du Parlement au XIVe siècle,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 47 [1969]: 645–98). Within the societal context it acted as an instrument for the promotion of social cohesion. The influence of courtly ideology, scholastic tradition and placement of the social context into a judicial framework appeared to lead in the Late Middle Ages to a transformational referential framework among some social and other elites. Friendship acquired a normative and bureaucratic character from the tendency to embody the mutual and reciprocal obligations and ties of friendship in the form of a contract (Claudia Garnier, Amicus amicis – inimicus inimicis: Politische Freundschaft und fürstliche Netzwerke im 13. Jahrhundert, 2000; Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism, 1995; Peter S. Lewis, “Decayed and Non-Feudalism in Late Medieval France,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37/38 [1964–1965]: 157–84). In courtly milieus, one saw a ritualization and formalization of individual codes of behavior and obligatory activities as they might fit into the context of friendship (Klaus Oschema, Freundschaft und Nähe im spätmittelalterlichen Burgund: Studien zum Spannungsfeld von Emotion und Institution, 2006). Clerical Friendship and the Study of Letters and Letter Collections It had been assumed for a long time that in spiritual milieus the perception and experience of friendship more closely approached its idealized, theoretical manifestation (cf. supra) than was the case in the secular, social and political forms of friendship. There seemed to be no room in the abbeys, convents and chapters for friendship as a socializing, socially structuring, organizing principle. A great deal of research in this area is still needed, but it is in the meantime evident that ‘clerical friendship’ was more than a spiritual or religious friendship, and that the language of friendship, adopted by clerics and referring to the practice of friendship relationships within the clerical milieus, pointed to a complex set of underlying social ties and cultural practices (which in many cases were inherently tied to secular society) – insight that to a significant degree was and is gained through the careful study of medieval letters and correspondence. The unique character of letters as documents of the ego that offer the reflection of the relationship between one or more persons has given rise to an extensive stream of publications focused on medieval friendship, chiefly in clerical settings. Letters provide conceptualizations of friendship, ideal or not, any forms of expression of friendship relationships in a discursive framework, and were for a long time regarded as sources that provided insight into what friendship meant in practice. The increase in the number of letters, especially during the long 9th and 12th cen-

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turies (with attention to, for example, Lupus van Ferrières, Alcuin of York, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Peter of Celle, John of Salisbury, Stephen of Orléans, Peter of Blois, et al.) led to the doctrines and practices relating to friendship and love within the clerical milieus already being intensively studied, with them being cast in widely ranging and sometimes contradictory formulations. The studies of Leclercq (Jean Leclercq, “L’amitié dans les lettres au Moyen Age. Autour d’un manuscrit de la bibliothèque de Pétrarque,” Revue du Moyen Age Latin 1 [1945]: 391–410), Fiske (cf. supra), McGuire (especially Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship & Community. The Monastic Experience 350–1250, 1988), and Robinson (especially Ian S. Robinson, “The Friendship Network of Gregory VII,” History 63 [1978]: 1–22) seem to have given the most important impetus to this historiographical flood. McGuire in particular has worked out in great depth (for monastic centers up to the 13th century) the relationship between linguistic usage in these letters, on the one hand, and the so-called actual relationship on the other. Based on the content and function of the letters and linguistic usage, McGuire characterized the relationship between the author and the addressee (or in some cases, third parties). Based on this he depicted an evolution whereby the relationships between clerics, depending on the context and the prevailing ideologies and conventions, appear to fluctuate between ideal-Christian friendships to those rather to be characterized as pragmatic. In more recent publications, such a view was both qualified and contradicted. Not only could the language of friendship point to a greater range of forms of social relationships with a horizontal or vertical, spiritual, political-pragmatic, homoerotic, emotional-affective, or spiritual-mystic character (see the many references in Margaret E. Mullett and Walter Ysebaert, “Power, Relations and Networks in Medieval Europe,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 255–314; for gay or homo-erotic friendship, see especially John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, 1980; John Boswell, The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, 1994; Alan Bray, The Friend, 2003; The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, ed. Mathew Kuefler, 2006; Dion C. Smythe, “In Denial: Same-Sex Desire in Byzantium,” Desire and Denial, ed. L James, 1999, 139–48), but it was also demonstrated that the language of friendship would be used as a form of communication within intellectual groups (Julian Haseldine, “Understanding the Language of Amicitia”). Or, influenced by the genre of the artes dictamines, it could take on a rhetorical character that stood apart from any social reality (Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval Letter-Col-

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lections as a Mirror of Circles of Friendship?”). The understanding that there is no direct link between the language used in the letters and the social relationship between author and addressee has since become definitive. The manner in which friendship and friendship relationships are studied on the basis of medieval letters reflects the historiography of medieval friendship in general. A good example of this is provided by the relationship between Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. Based on the language used in the letters that both abbots sent to one another, and those handed down in their collected correspondence, it was originally concluded that their mutual relationship could be characterized as having been one of deepest friendship, an expression of “real Christian friendship,” even if at the time of their holding office there was a serious rivalry between the orders of which they were heads (cf. for example, JeanBaptiste Auniord, “L’ami de Saint Bernard,” Collectanea ordinis cisterciensium reformatorum 18 [1956]: 88–99 (with references to older studies) or Ann P. Lang, “The Friendship between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux,” Bernard of Clairvaux: Studies Presented to Dom Jean Leclercq, 1973, 35–53 (for the context of the competing orders cf. especially Adriaan H. Bredero, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle: l’histoire d’une controverse monastique, 1985). Goodrich criticized this position with the argument that both authors held a fundamentally different interpretation of the concept of charity, and concluded that each conclusion with respect to the relationship between them drawn directly from their use of words in the letters that referred to caritas and amicitia, was incorrect (W. Eugene Goodrich, “The Limits of Friendship. A Disagreement Between Saint Bernard and Peter the Venerable on the Role of Charity in Dispensation From the Rule,” Cistercian Studies 16 [1981]: 81–97). Lortz had already dismissed the linguistic usages in the letters as merely rhetorical devices (Bernhard von Clairveaux: Mönch und Mystiker: Internationaler Bernhardkongress Mainz 1953, ed. Joseph Lortz, 1955), and Piazzoni argued in an extensive article that conclusions drawn about the relationships between the two, on the basis of linguistic usage in the letters, were impossible from a methodological point of view, and that the presentation of the question was irrelevant from an historiographical point of view (Ambrogio M. Piazzoni, “Un falso problema storiografico. Note a proposito della ‘amicizia’ tra Pietro il Venerabile di Cluny e Bernardo di Clairvaux,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivo Muratoriano 89 [1980–1981]: 443–87). Bredero eliminated the so-called relationship of friendship based on a very thorough and detailed study of all related sources, with a view to contextual circumstances (Adriaan H. Bredero, “Saint Bernard in his Relations with Peter the Venerable,” Bernardus Magister: Papers Pres-

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ented at the Nonacentenary Celebration of the Birth of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Kalamazoo, Michigan), ed. John R. Sommerfeldt, 1992, 315–47). Finally, Gillian Knight studied the letters in a chronological semantic-intertextual framework, arguing that the relationship between Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable could only be understood as a textual reflection of an intellectual discourse that must be projected to the 4th century (Gillian R. Knight, The Correspondence Between Peter the Venerable and Bernard of Clairvaux: A Semantic and Structural Analysis, 2002). Notwithstanding the various critical interpretations, the discussion continues to this day about the relationship, whether it is to be interpreted as one of friendship or not, between Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable (and others) (cf. further references in Julian Haseldine, “Friends, Friendship and Networks in the Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux,” Cîteaux 57 [2006]: 243–80). H. Friendship Groups, Networks and Circles Studies that have as their subject friendship within the medieval secular world have paid more attention to the socializing and group formational character of friendship, than to individual friendship relationships as such (especially Althoff, mentioned above). As far as friendship within clerical milieus is concerned, just the opposite holds. Starting in the 1980s, the first studies appeared that passed over the individual relationship as a subject of research and took on the study of an author’s friendship relationships in respect of his or her social and cultural living environment, as part of the whole of relationships that could be detected (Marinus Maier, “Ein schwäbisch-bayerischer Freundeskreis Gregors VII.: Nach der Vita Herlucae des Paul von Bernried,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens und seiner Zweige 74 [1963]: 313–32; John McLoughlin, “Amicitia in Practice: John of Salisbury [c. 1120–1180] and his Circle,” England in the Twelfth Century: Proceedings of the 1988 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams, 1990, 165–81; and the already mentioned studies of Robinson, Haseldine, Mullett and Ysebaert). These publications demonstrate the importance of friendship relationships and networks through the structures of classical institutions and illustrate the way in which individual clerics were embedded in various types of networks that had different social, cultural, and political purposes.

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Select Bibliography Gerd Althoff, Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue: Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindung im früheren Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990); Friendship in Medieval Europe, ed. Julian Haseldine (Thrupp/Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999); Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994); Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship & Community: The Monastic Experience 350–1250 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1988); Margaret E. Mullett, “Byzantium: a Friendly Society?” Past and Present 118 [1988]: 1–24; Margaret E. Mullett and Walter Ysebaert, “Power, Relations and Networks in Medieval Europe,” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 [2005]: 255–314; Huguette Legros, L’amitié dans les chansons de geste à l’époque romane (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2001); Bénédicte Sère, Penser l’amitié au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth (Odense: Odense University Press, 1999); Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Walter Ysebaert

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G Gender Studies A. Definition From the 1970s onwards and being enduringly influenced by the linguistic turn, the historical study of gender at large has emerged from women’s history and still may to some extant overlap with feminist approaches (cf. “Feminism” in this Handbook) while not being identical to it. Scholars such as Allen Franzen (“When Women Aren’t Enough,” Studying Medieval Women, ed. Nancy F. Partner, 1993, 143–69) even have proclaimed the end of feminism in Medieval Studies due to the advancements of gender studies and queer theory (cf. “Queer Theories” in this Handbook). Generally, gender is understood as the social and cultural construction of sex differences encompassing certain gendered identities, roles, and ideologies. Not only can these vary in different times and (social as well as geographical) spaces but be multiple and even ambivalent within any society and its respective fragmented spheres. Medievalists have participated early and actively in the larger enterprise of historicizing gender systems and have hence inspired diverse, sometimes even conflicting interpretations of how gendered thinking and gendered performances have shaped the historical past (this, however, seems somehow inherent in gendered thinking since early Christianity; cf. Daniel Boyarin, “Paul and the Genealogy of Gender,” Representations 41 [1993]: 1–33; and Jacqueline Murray, “Thinking about Gender: The Diversity of Medieval Perspective,” Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean, 1995, 1–26). The subjects range from classic fields of feminist scholarship such as infanticide or labor division to questions of crime and violence, literary production or representations of piety, while one of the most prospering is the study of gender identities (cf. Sarah Salih, “Sexual Identities: a Medieval Perspective,” Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tom Betteridge, 2002, 112–30), especially that of “masculinity” (cf. the article in this Handbook).

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B. Gender and Religion Still the primary fields of debating questions of gender are readings in religious or hagiographic literature and romance, both genres particularly foregrounding gendered bodies and related issues. This connects to a tradition deriving from earlier feminist scholarship who have fruitfully rediscovered not only women’s voices in the medieval past through witnesses of women’s spirituality but also uncovered women and women’s bodies’ as images or icons, as passive representations of abstract concepts that is (cf. Joan M. Ferrante, Women as Image in Medieval Literature, 1985; Karl F. Morrison, History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, 1990, 154–95; more recently Kate Cooper, “The Virgin as Social Icon: Perspectives from Late Antiquity,” Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip, 2005, 9–24; Fiona J. Griffith, “Siblings and the Sexes within Medieval Religious Life,” Church History 77 [2008]: 26–53). Carolyn Walker Bynum, for instance, in her seminal study Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) has particularly fostered the metamorphosis from medieval women’s history to gender history. Focusing on the nature of medieval asceticism and the significance of gender in medieval religion, Bynum comes to unveil the diversity of medieval religious as well as bodily experiences beyond clerical preoccupation usually perceived through canonical texts. In the last decades, the investigation in intersections between gender and religion has flourished in numerous studies, especially concerning questions of sanctity (amongst others cf. Catherine M. Mooney, “Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity,” Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney, 1999, 1–15; Katherine Allen Smith, “Mary or Michael? Saint-switching, gender and sanctity in a medieval miracle of childbirth,” Church History 74 [2005]: 758–83). Indeed, the saint, whom already in 1978 Alexander Murray had identified as a “man without social class” (Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, 1978, 383–404), appears to lend itself specifically for questioning and testing the gender dichotomy and its related representations. The study of religious, pastoral and hagiographic sources, however, has also brought gender questions to flourish within the field of Medieval Latin Studies (cf. amongst others The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin, ed. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor, 1998; and Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, ed. Barbara K. Gold et al., 1997).

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C. Thinking Sex and Gender in the Pre-Modern Era As another aspect, gender issues have become one of the most vivid fields of explicit interdisciplinary cooperation between medievalists and scholars of Renaissance and early modern history who both engage in shaping the distinctive alterity of gendered thinking in the pre-modern era. One key work that has consequently inspired both Medieval as well as Early Modern Studies is Thomas Laquer’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) in which he questions the validity of the two-sex-model (male/ female) for the study of pre-modern mentality claiming it to have basically developed only in the 18th century. According to his findings, medieval contemporaries did not perceive the female body as fundamentally distinct from the male but rather the former as an imperfect and physically underdeveloped guise of the later. Hence, Laquer argues, there was no distinction between the sexes but only one between genders (“one-sex-model”). Although this proves to be true for a variety of medieval philosophers and scientists, such as Thomas Aquinas or Hildegard of Bingen, medievalists have brought a variety of evidence that confute Laquer’s assumption in its generality. Recent scholarship rather has stressed the diversity of contradicting, co-existing and sometimes plainly ambivalent ways of gendered thinking in medieval times. Joan Cadden, in her telling study Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture, has posited “a cluster of gender-related notions, sometimes competing, sometimes mutually reinforcing; sometimes permissive, sometimes constraining; sometimes consistent, sometimes ad hoc” (1993, 9–10; also cf. Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, 2000). Still Laquer’s ideas have brought forward the understanding that not only gender but sex as well owes its cultural debts and therefore directly aim at basic ideas of earlier gender studies. Since its beginning, the concept of gender has been opposed to that of sex, the latter addressing an anatomic if not even biological component which initially seemed downright graphically palpable in the possession of certain genitals. Yet the transgression of such seemingly biological boundaries has formed one of the most vivid fields of gender studies – and still does so. It is one of the key questions of more recent works to what extent gender and sex actually can be assumed to be so closely related yet discrete. While still a common differentiation in many current studies, critics inspired by Judith Butler’s ground-breaking and controversially discussed books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) have stressed the performative dimensions of the sex-gender-binary and have challenged it as a new bias that blurs historical perceptions. Gender, Butler argues, by encompassing the most diverse discursive or cul-

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tural practices inescapably fosters the pre-discursive prescription of what is conceived biological, hence what ascribes a person’s sex. Still it remains a rather open and heavily debated question how to cope with both the radical constructiveness of gender and the intractable physicality of the body (cf. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why all the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnel, 1999, 241–80). This is especially true for studies that question the heteronormative feminity/ masculinity-binary in terms of gay/lesbian or queer studies, cross-dressing or other phenomena of sexual and/or corporeal expression apart from the paths of heterosexuality and gender-binaries. Karma Lochrie, for instance, has suggested that the opposition between “natural” and “unnatural” sex seems to have been much more pervasively binary than that between homosexual and heterosexual intercourse for an estimable period of the European past (Covert Operations: The Medieval Use of Secrecy, 1999, 199). Other recent works utilize “third gender”-approaches in conceptualizing medieval accounts toward eunuchs, virgins, or ascetic celibacy (cf. Jo Ann McNamara. “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours,” The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. Kathleen A. Mitchel and Ian N. Wood, 2002, 199–209). David Nirenberg, when investigating the relations of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in 14th-century Aragon, even finds “a society of six dynamically related genders, rather than of two genders and three religions” (Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, 1996, 148; on gender ideologies in medieval cultures others than the Christian cf. the first section of articles in the volume Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack, 2003; and Steven Kruger, “Conversion and Medieval Sexual, Religious, and Racial Categories,” Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie et al., 1997, 158–79; for the often neglected Northern parts of Europe cf. Else Mundal, “Female Impurity and Cultic Incapability: the Influence of Christianisation on Nordic Gender Models,” Christian and Islamic Gender Models in Formative Traditions, ed. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, 2004, 203–18). As Felice Lifshitz has pointedly put it: “Ultimately, indeed ironically, Gender History seeks to disaggregate the very categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ – presumably its very subjects/objects of inquiry – rather than to reify them” (“Difference, [Dis]appearances and the Disruption of the Straight Telos: Medievalology [‘Mediävistik’] as a History of Gender,” Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut, 2003, 295–312: 299; though not from a medievalist’s perspective cf. also the inspiring thoughts of early modern scholar Lynn Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender: Deconstruction of Categories and Reconstruction of

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Narratives in Gender History,” Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektiven, ed. Hans Medick and Anne-Charlotte Trepp, 1998, 57–97). One of the most radical and prominent exponents of the constructivist trends in Medieval (Gender) Studies has lately been Kathleen Biddick who emphatically claims “nonfoundational medieval studies that articulates rather than re-presents the Middle Ages as a historical category” (The Shock of Medievalism, 1998, 85). Indeed, while for the most part accepting gender as a problematic yet indispensable category in historical investigation, recent developments in- and outside of gender related studies have compelled medievalists to consider the ways in which gender not only poses hierarchy and domination between the sexes but interacts with other categories of difference and power as well (cf. amongst others Kimberly A. LoPrete, “Gendering viragos: Medieval Perceptions of Powerful Women,” Victims or Viragos?, ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless, 2005, 17–38; as well as “Queer Theories” and “PostColonialism” in this Handbook). This is why gender issues among other such concepts still lie at the very heart of many recent theoretical debates in Medieval Studies. Ultimately, emphasizing gender as a ground-laying category of historical research implicitly challenges chronology and epoch-boundaries as one of the basic scale types of traditional historiography, which already in 1977 led Joan Kelly to ask (and negate) provokingly: “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal et al., 1977, 137–64; cf. Barbara Stevenson’s discussion of this article under the lemma “Feminism”). More recently, Jo Ann McNamara (“Women and Power Through the Family Revisited,” Gendering the Master Narrative: Gender and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Earler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 2003, 17–30) has argued for a new periodization of European history by the shifting of the gender systems. D. International Research Employing questions of gender in Medieval Studies already has a very strong tradition in both Great Britain and the US (cf. Patrick Geary, “Mittelalterforschung heute und morgen: Eine amerikanische Perspektive,” Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Arnold Esch et al., 2000, 73–97), while in France, for instance, Medieval Studies seem to have adopted gender as a category of historical research to far less extent (cf. some more recent pertinent collective volumes, such as Bilan et perspectives des études médiévales 1993–1998, ed. Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2004; or Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du

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Moyen Age en France et en Allemagne, ed. Jean-Claude Schmitt, 2002, with only the latter touching gender aspects, significantly under the headline “Pour une histoire des femmes”) – probably due to its strong traditions in the history of mentalities. Some notable exceptions, such as Alain Boureau, Le droit de cuissage (2001), or Régine le Jan, Femmes, pouvoir et société dans le haut Moyen Âge (2001), were followed cautiously by very few scholars who have more explicitly drawn upon the concept of gender in their studies (cf. Isabelle Chabot, “‘Biens de famille’. Contrôle des ressources patrimoniales, ‘gender’ et cycle domestique (Italie, XIIIième–XVième siècles),” La maisonnée dans les villes au bas moyen âge, ed. Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens, 2001, 89–104). The same seems to be true for Italy, where medieval genders seem to be a field farmed predominantly by studies in literature (cf. Ashleigh Imus, “‘Vaga è la donna vaga’: The gendering of vago in the Commedia, the Decameron and the Canzoniere,” Forum Italicum 40 [2006]: 213–33), and Spanish scholarship (cf. Lifshitz 2003, as above, 297; with respective itemizations, as well as the remarkable intersections between Christian and Arabic poetry observed by Vicente Cantarino, “Wa-hiya taklifu ghannat: Genre and Gender in Hispano-Arabic Poetry,” Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context, ed. William D. Jr. Paden, 2000, 255–72). Germanophone medievalists, especially those active in studies in literature (cf. Judith Klinger, “Ferne Welten, fremde Geschlechter: Gender Studies in der germanistischen Mediaevistik,” Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 3 [1999]: 47–61; Genderdiskurse und Körperbilder im Mittelalter: Eine Bilanzierung nach Butler und Laqueur, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz and Ingrid Kasten, 2002), have comparatively late but with sensible verve adopted trends from the AngloAmerican (Lifshitz 2003, as above, 295: “The Second Language of Gender Medievalology is German […]”). Noteworthy inspirations also were taken up from the Netherlands, where medievalists have begun early to put gender on their research agenda but have often been overlooked (cf. Anja Petrakopoulos, “Middeleeuwse vrouwen, gender en macht. Historiografische reflecties in een spiegelpaleis,” Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis 16 [1996]: 17–35). This is especially true for publications in Dutch language, such as the noteworthy study of Petra J. E. M. van Dam and Johanna Maria van Winter on the significance of gender for medieval eating habits (“Theorie en praktijk van eetregimes in de Middeleeuwen,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 29 [2003]: 385–412). Still, scholarly English remains the lingua franca of medieval gender history. Overall, gender approaches in medieval archaeology, such as Roberta Gilchrist’s important Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (1993; cf. also the special forum on Gilchrist’s monograph in Cam-

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bridge Archaeological Journal 5 [1995]; a more recent example of plausible gender awareness in early medieval archaeology is Christina Lee, “Grave Matters: Anglo-Saxon Textiles and Their Cultural Significance,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 86 [2004]: 203–21), have gotten few notice outside its discipline. In this respect interdisciplinary cooperation still has remained relatively dense although there is a vivid discussion on this field within medieval archaeology which not only plainly employs but also engages in critically reviewing and testing earlier and recent debates in gender theory (Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Gender Archaeology, 2000, provides a useful introduction; for more specifically medieval questions, cf. Roberta Gilchrist, “Ambivalent Bodies: Gender and Medieval Archaeology,” Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology, ed. Jenny Moore and Eleanor Scott, 1997, 42–58). The same is comparably true for Medieval Byzantine Studies, although scholars in this field have recently published remarkable investigations in the political implications of gender in Byzantine imperial politics (cf. amongst others Judith Herrin, “The Imperial Feminine in Byzantium,” Past and Present 169 [2000]: 3–35; or Ruma Niyogi, Gender, Politics, and Rhetoric in Byzantium, 1025–1081, 2005), especially in the role of eunuchs in higher positions of Byzantine governance (cf. Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium, ed. James Liz, 1997 – with an instrumental introductory chapter by James Liz, “Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Byzantine Studies,” XI– XXIV). Though the study of monasticism, asceticism, and sanctity leaves indications for fruitful encounters (such as Paul Halsall, Women’s Bodies, Men’s Souls: Sanctity and Gender in Byzantium, 1999), which indeed thankfully have been taken up by scholars of western Christianity (cf. Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900, ed. Leslie Brubaker and Julia Mary Howard Smith, 2004), basic comparative questions dealing with gender in western and eastern Christianity, aside from examples of extraordinary religiousness (sanctity etc.), have been touched upon neither extensively nor even more explicitly. Still, “gender” in Medieval Studies figures far too often as a simple synonym for “women” – an observation being true for probably most other fields of historical research as well (some scholar once called that phenomenon “add women and stir”). But, as sketched above, there is more to the concept of “gender,” and an increasing number of highly inspired studies being constantly published prove that.

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E. Getting Started So far, there is no explicit least monographic introduction to the field of medieval history and literatures specifically concerned with matters of gender (except the notable attempt of Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Masculus et Femina: Systematische Grundlinien einer mediävistischen Geschlechtergeschichte, 2001; 2nd rev. ed., 2005), while an almost overflowing pool of scholarly, introductory and more popular monographs and collections on medieval women has accumulated in the last forty years. The increasing interest of the last two decades in the histories of medieval sexuality, as one of the most basic practices of doing gender, has also brought up a series of publications of considerable depth as well as digestible synthesizes for introductory purposes. The first place to go when starting research in this specific field might be the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 1996; 2nd rev. edition, 2000; cf. especially Joyce E. Salisbury’s chapter “Gendered Sexuality,” 81–102; for a comprehensive survey of recent scholarship, see the Introduction and numerous contributions to: Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2008). Also Katherine Crawford’s recent textbook European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (2007), which frequently glances back far into the Middle Ages, can turn out to be useful once in a while. A good starting-point to the diverse fields of research touched by gendered aspects should be Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (ed. Margaret Schaus, 2006) and the second volume of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship and Sexuality Through History (6 vol., 2007), while a useful tool in bibliography is provided by the online-databases Feminae (http://www.haverford.edu/library/reference/mschaus/mfi/mfi.html, hosted by Margaret Schaus as well) and Matrix (http://monasticmatrix.usc. edu), the latter however focusing on medieval religious women. There is no scholarly journal specifically focusing on medieval gender systems, but all major periodicals active in historicizing gender, such as Gender & History or the Journal of the History of Sexuality, do regularly publish articles on medieval history. Select Bibliography Caroline Walker Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1999), 241–80; Joan Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mary C. Earler and Maryanne Kowaleski, ed. Gendering the Master Narrative: Gender and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis et al.: University of Minnesota

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Press, 2003); Felice Lifshitz, “Difference, (Dis)appearances and the Disruption of the Straight Telos: Medievalology (‘Mediävistik’) as a History of Gender,” Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 295–312; Nancy F. Partner, ed. Studying Medieval Women (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1993); Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75.

Hiram Kümper

German Studies A. Definition While German scholars dominated the field in the 19th century and continued well into the 20th – even after World War II –, scholars from other nations were also busy building on the ground-breaking efforts of their German colleagues and, beyond that, establishing their own identities and approaches which came into full fruition, in the United States, especially, in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st. This essay will concentrate on the development of the field in Germany and, to a lesser extent in the United States, Great Britain and France. The number of significant scholars in the field – on both sides of the Atlantic and past and present – is immense. If an attempt were to be made to include the names of even just “a lot” of the individuals, this essay would degenerate into a mere list. In the 19th century in Germany and Austria alone, for example, such a list would comprise at least one hundred names from Johann Christoph Adelung to Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle. Thus more attention will be directed toward the establishment of the discipline, the schools of thought, controversies, indeed disputes, and will demonstrate the slow, but inexorable development from a narrow philological viewpoint of a text to the exciting, multifaceted literary approaches continuing to unfold in the present. Only those individuals will be singled out by name whose work truly played a significant role in the development of the field. The scholars of the 20th century, who will be singled out, will be considerably fewer in number, not because this essay is epigonic in nature, far from it – for are we not all like dwarves on the shoulders of giants? Nonetheless, rather than citing the names of individual scholars, especially of more recent times, for the important scholarly contributions that they have made and, in some in-

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stances, continue to make, this essay will concentrate on the research impulses that inform their work, but which, again, would not have been possible without the pioneering work of their 19th- and 20th-century forebears. B. The Corpus The periodization of medieval German literature (ca. 750 – ca. 1400) is as follows: The Old High German Period (ca. 750 – ca. 1050) is not only a stage in the development of the German language, but also in the process that ultimately culminates in a distinctively German literature. The beginnings are, however, mainly a continuation of the impulses of late antiquity and early Christianity. The extant literature can be seen as a voice trying to define itself primarily within the Christian missionizing context, seeking to mediate between the new and foreign on the one hand and the traditional and familiar on the other. With one significant exception, vernacular writings from this period are primarily religious in nature. Most, if not all, had surely enjoyed a pre-literary existence. Aside from many glosses and simple prayers the literature of this period offers fragments of Biblical epics and a heroic song (Hildebrandslied, ca. 800) in alliterative verse, as well as a complete Life of Christ (Heliand, ca. 830), in Old Saxon, also in alliterative verse, and, most importantly, Otfried’s Evangelienbuch (ca. 870). Middle High German literature (ca. 1060 – ca. 1400) can be subdivided into three not completely discrete eras: a) Early Middle High German (ca. 1060 – ca. 1160) comprising over ninety works primarily of a religious content; b) The Classical Period (ca. 1160 – ca. 1250) comprising the great romances of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Straßburg, and Hartmann von Aue, the heroic epic, the Nibelungenlied, and the first flourishing of German courtly love lyric, (Minnesang), including Neidhart (von Reuental) who made this very subtle genre even more so by appearing to coarsen it; and c) Late Middle High German (ca. 1250 – ca. 1400) comprising the sometimes very lengthy, often extremely tedious didactic works as well as shorter didactic and poetic pieces of great originality, e. g., Helmbrecht (ca. 1280), masterpieces of German mysticism, and one of the most original poets of the Middle or any other age, Oswald von Wolkenstein. Of course there are many more works, authors and genres. But before a broader public could become acquainted with any of them, editions had to be produced. C. The Beginnings Long before the establishment of systematic editorial procedures in the 19th century, portions of the Old High and Middle High German corpus were published. The earliest complete text is an edition of Williram’s (d. 1085)

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paraphrase (ca. 1060) of the Song of Songs (Paullus Merula, Willirami Abbatis in Canticum Canticorum Paraphrasis genuina, prior Rhythmis Latinis. Altera veteri lingua Francica; addita explicatio lingua Belgica et notae quibus veterum vocum Francicarum ratio redditur, 1598). With respect to this Leiden Williram, it should be noted that the text is based on a lost Old High German original and is the result of an unknown scribe’s attempt to render the East Franconian of the original in his local Old Dutch dialect. And while it is true that the previous year, 1597, also witnessed the publication of a fragmentary section (lines 19–78) of the ca. 1080 Annolied (Bonaventura Vulcanius, De literis et lingua Getarum sive Gothorum, 1597), Vulcanius’s work is of prime importance not for the appearance of several lines from an Early Middle High German work, but rather that he was the first to make available the translation of the Gospels in Gothic, as well as the first who connected this version with the name of Ulfilas. It is to Martin Opitz (1597–1639) that we owe the only complete copy (878 lines in 49 strophes of unequal length) of the Annolied (Incerti poetae teutonici: Rhythmus de Sancto Annone colon: Archiepiscopo, 1639). Interestingly both appear to be based on different redactions of the same manuscript which is, unfortunately, lost. Other works like the Nibelungenlied and the Klage saw several editions, either complete or fragmentary, by such individuals as Johann Jakob Bodmer (1757 – fragmentary using ms. C), Christoph Heinrich Myller (1782 – using mss. A and C), Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1807 – mainly mss. A and C, with some consideration of mss. B and D; and again, somewhat more scientifically, but still inadequate, in 1816 and 1820 according to ms. B), August Zeune (1815 – using mss. A and C, with occasional consideration of ms. B.). No doubt reflecting the nationalistic attraction of the Nibelungenlied, Zeune published a “Zelt- und Feldausgabe” (edition for use in the tent or field) in a smaller format which the soldiers could carry with them into the war against Napoleon. Other works which were edited (after a fashion) prior to Karl Lachmann were Minnesang (Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, 1759), Hartmann von Aue’s Arme Heinrich (Christoph Heinrich Myller, Samlung deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII., XIII. und XIV. Jahrhundert, vol. 1, 1784, 197–208) and Hartmann’s Iwein (Christoph Heinrich Myller, Samlung deutscher Gedichte aus dem XII., XIII. und XIV. Jahrhundert, vol. 2, 1784/1785). All of these editions were for their time important and the Opitz edition is still being used today, to be sure in place of the lost manuscript. Nonetheless the range of quality among the various early editions even among those by one editor, e. g. von der Hagen, was quite large and did not begin to approach that of the editions which would soon follow. The response of the

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readers to these editions was varied from Goethe’s early disinterest in the Nibelungenlied to his enthusiasm for it in later life to the outright rejection of the great epic by no less a personage than Frederick the Great, whose reaction to Myller’s edition is well known: “In my opinion, such ‘poems’ are not worth a rap and do not deserve to be lifted from the dust of obscurity. In my library at any rate, I would not tolerate such miserable stuff but would toss it out!” D. The New Discipline As crisp, clear, and unambiguous as the above declaration of Frederick the Great might be and as appropriate as the sentiment expressed in it might have been for Myller’s edition, the time of the emergence of German Philology as an independent discipline was at hand and the value of medieval German literature would soon be recognized on the basis of reliable and scientifically edited texts. The area of Medieval German Studies is, however, quite complex and cannot be understood properly without at least a glance at the discipline of which it is an offspring, Classical Philology. With the publication of Richard Bentley’s (1662–1742) Epistola ad Millium, appended to the 1691 edition (editio princeps) of the Oxford Malalas, a new era of critical, philological methodology began. This slender tract (fewer than one hundred pages) is a masterpiece of brilliant emendations and corrections and displays the author’s complete familiarity with ancient grammarians, drawing on their works to bolster his readings. He was in close contact with the great German Classical scholar, Johann Georg Graevius (1632–1703), who was a professor in Utrecht and for whom he collected all the fragments of Callimachus, half of which were unknown at that time – even to Graevius – and contributed them to the latter, making Graevius’s Callimachus a model edition. In the Netherlands, in general, Bentley was held in great esteem, but in Germany it was primarily Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1820) who hailed him and, according to Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, viewed himself as a sort of Bentley teutonicus, a conceit that was carried on by Karl Lachmann and others of his students. If, as is claimed, in the beginning was the word, i. e. the text, then immediately thereafter came Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), who, although a Classical philologist by training, together with Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) fashioned and defined the area of German philology (the only “German Studies” at the time). Without his (Lachmann’s) editorial work the evolution of the discipline to its present form would be quite unthinkable. As the initiator of textual criticism in German philology as well as being one of the

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greatest textual critics in the history of Classical philology, Lachmann’s approach utilized the “genealogical” or “stemmatic” method which compared all textual witnesses of a work and drew up a “family tree,” so to speak, mainly by comparing variants, i. e. errors and omissions. After discarding all repetitions, the text is reconstructed (with emendations) from the remaining agreements among the witnesses. This text would then represent the “archetype,” i. e., the lost copy from which all the witnesses descend. During the time he was a student in Göttingen, Lachmann attended lectures on older German literature delivered by Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762–1844), professor of English and older German. This experience left a lasting mark on him – as well as leading to a later collaboration with the great scholar –, and he spent the rest of his life dedicated both to Classical and German philology. In addition to his pioneering work in the new discipline, he also continued to be active in the area of Classical philology, among other things editing the works of Propertius and Lucretius. Although Lachmann was involved with several editorial undertakings in Classical Latin, the Bible, and Middle High German, the discipline of German Philology can really be said to begin with his treatise Über die ursprüngliche Gestalt des Gedichts von der Nibelungen Noth (1816). In this work, Lachmann applied Friedrich August Wolf’s theory, set forth in his well-known Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) on the origin of the Homeric epics, to the Nibelungenlied (Liedertheorie). Wolf postulated that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the work of one poet, but rather of a series of poets or singers who composed short pieces which were then later ordered, edited, and combined into the epics known by subsequent ages as being composed by Homer. In his consideration of the Nibelungenlied, Lachmann had two major concerns: the identification of the primary manuscript, which, in his opinion, would be the least complete – something that would speak for its greater age; and determining the structure of the epic. With regard to the first concern, he determined that there were three genealogical groups, aligned according to the three main manuscripts, A, B, and C, for all textual witnesses known at that time. Because of its lack of polish and apparent lacunae, he considered manuscript A to be the earliest and, therefore, primary manuscript (an assumption that would later be refuted as would the concept of three genealogical groups; today they are viewed as representing two redactions: the – nôt group and the – liet group, so named after the last lines of the epic: “daz ist der Nibelunge liet” [C], or “daz ist der Nibelunge nôt” [AB]). By 1836 in his Anmerkungen zu den Nibelungen und zur Klage, Lachmann had refined his Liedertheorie to the extent that he determined there were twenty individual “Lieder” or rhapsodies that made up the structure of manuscript A.

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From the beginning, Lachmann’s views were questioned, most notably by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1780–1856), the first academic to hold the professorship for German Language and Literature in Berlin. As noted above, von der Hagen, himself, had published editions of the Nibelungenlied in 1807, 1816, and 1820. Unfortunately the editions, but especially the earliest, were not characterized by scholarly or any other kind of rigor. The 1807 edition received little positive notice from the scholarly community, and in 1809 Wilhelm Grimm wrote about it: “It [the edition] is a modernization, which is worse than the original, and yet not at all modern.” As a result, von der Hagen’s protests failed to gain any significant support. A brief glance at the events which took place after Lachmann’s death with regard to the Nibelungenlied will provide a fascinating glimpse into the development of German philology in general in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For after his death, a scholarly struggle over his theories – concerning both the primary manuscript and the genesis of the epic – ensued, characterized by unusual vituperativeness and ad hominem attacks, the so-called Nibelungenstreit. The dispute centered around those followers of Lachmann like Karl Müllenhoff (1818–1884) who not only advocated the primacy of manuscript A, but also applied Lachmann’s Liedertheorie to the epic Gudrun, and “dissidents,” like the Heidelberg professor Adolf Holtzmann (1810–1870) and Friedrich Zarncke (1825–1891), professor at Leipzig who claimed primacy for manuscript C. Holtzmann’s Untersuchungen über das Nibelungenlied (1854) not only advocated manuscript C, but rejected the Liedertheorie to boot! He was joined later in the same year by Zarncke, who modified his support somewhat when Karl Bartsch (1832–1888) was the first to champion manuscript B (1865) as the primary manuscript. We owe to Bartsch the most widely-used critical edition of the epic to the present day. Supporting Bartsch’s conjecture as to the primacy of B was Wilhelm Braune’s (1850–1926) study, Die Handschriftenverhältnisse des Nibelungenliedes (1900). He posited the stemma in which, as mentioned above, the three main manuscripts form two branches *AB and *C and all derive from one original *x. In 1963, in his Beiträge zur Handschriftenkritik des Nibelungenliedes, Helmut Brackert subjected Braune’s theory to a rigorous examination. Brackert concluded that the presupposition upon which Braune constructed his stemma, namely that there was an original (*x), was simply not verifiable. Brackert’s equally controversial position theorizes that there never was one single work that could be considered the original Nibelungenlied. The common text appearing to lie behind the transmitted texts is, in actuality, just one of several versions. As might be expected, Brackert’s

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theories were also quite controversial. Although most scholars agreed that Brackert had successfully dismantled Braune’s stemma, his conclusion that there can thus be no ‘original’ provoked much discussion. While agreeing with Brackert about the inadequacy of Braune’s stemma, Joachim Heinzle’s observations are typical of some of the scholarly reservations: “We can infer an original in the sense that the Nibelungenlied tradition goes back to an original or basic text, in whose author we may see the poet of the Nibelungenlied. *AB and *C are revisions of this basic text, which is fairly well preserved in *AB whereas *C represents a systematic reworking, which in turn, however, influenced the total *AB tradition secondarily. In general, one has to take into consideration also the repeated impact of oral epic tradition on the written, but it is not the rule as Brackert thought. We have to see the written tradition as essentially closed. In spite of these facts, it is just as impossible to reconstruct the basic text, which probably originated in Passau around 1200, as it is to reconstruct the *AB-version” (The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia, 2002, 210). The other Lachmann hypothesis, the Liedertheorie, was also disposed of in the new century. In his classic work Lied und Epos in germanischer Sagendichtung (1905), Andreas Heusler (1865–1940) convincingly demonstrated the untenableness of Lachmann’s theory. Heusler differentiated between “lay” and “epic” as follows: “A lay does not relate [just] an episode, but rather a cohesive narrative. The epic narrative and the lay content are the same,” or put more concretely: “According to [Lachmann’s] theory, the epic stands in the same relationship to a lay as a group of trees to an individual tree […]. In reality, however, the epic stands in relationship to a lay as a grown person to an embryo.” Heusler’s refutation of the Liedertheorie, while viewed by some scholars as too rigid, was nonetheless the final nail in the Lachmannian Nibelungen coffin. We will return to the Nibelungenlied when discussing the turn from philological to literary studies. However completely Lachmann’s Nibelungen hypotheses were disproved, his other critical and methodological achievements have stood the test of time. Not only did he provide an exemplary edition of the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach (1833), but also, together with Georg Friedrich Benecke, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (1827) which forms the basis for all subsequent editions to the present. In this connection mention must be made of Benecke’s dictionary to Iwein (Wörterbuch zu Hartmanns ‘Iwein’, 1833). Indeed there is scarcely a major work from the Classical Middle High German period with which Lachmann did not occupy himself – with the notable exception of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan. He also began work on an edition of Minnesang which was, however, completed by his longtime

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associate and admirer Moriz Haupt (1808–1874), who, too, must be recognized as playing a most important role, possibly as important as Lachmann’s, in the establishment of German philology. Like Lachmann, he was a follower of the theory of the Classical philologist, Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848), who maintained that the accurate knowledge of the respective language(s) – in his case Latin and Greek – was the only path to an understanding of the ancient world (language as the only correct way to knowledge). (In other words such “tangential” subjects as archeology, history and the like play no significant role in Classical philology. This is in opposition to August Böckh [1785–1867] whose expansive view of Classical philology can be summed up as “language as one way among others.” The “BöckhHermann dispute” – much like the Nibelungenstreit in German philology – dominated the discussion in Classical studies in the 19th century.) Thus it is no surprise that he (Haupt) defended Lachmann’s text-critical methods, especially with regard to the Nibelungenlied (third and fourth editions of Lachmann’s text, 1852, and 1867). As mentioned above, Haupt published the edition of Minnesangs Frühling (1857) which Lachmann had started. In addition, he edited and published the following: Hartmann von Aue’s Erec (1839) and his Lieder, Klage, and the Arme Heinrich (1842); Rudolf von Ems’s Guten Gerhard (1840); Konrad von Würzburg’s Engelhard (1844); the Winsbeke (1845); Gottfried von Neifen’s Lieder (1851); the poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide (1853, and 1864); Neidhardt von Reuental’s Lieder (1858; modern scholarship no longer refers to this poet as ‘von Reuental’, which is only his nom de plume); and Moriz von Craon (1871). To be sure, most of these editions had to be completely reedited in the 20th century – and Minnesangs Frühling – already in the early 1900s. In the newest edition (Hugo Moser and Helmut Tervooren, Des Minnesangs Frühling, 1977) the entire editorial procedure was changed from the basic principle of emendation, conjecture, and reconstruction of the “archetype” to that of the “Leithandschrift,” a principle that Werner Schröder also employed with his monumental edition of Wolfram’s Willehalm (1978). These editions, plus several others, as well as important studies, e. g. Brackert’s observations about the Nibelungenlied manuscripts, demonstrate the gradual loosening of the philological bonds imposed upon the discipline by Lachmann and his followers. (We will have occasion to mention these later when discussing “New Philology” in the medieval German context.) Nonetheless, it must be pointed out, and forcibly so, that the more recent developments would have been unthinkable, without the pioneering accomplishments of Lachmann and others!

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E. Noteworthy Editions of Smaller Works (including Old High German) in the 19th Century Of course editing activity was not limited to the well-known epic and lyric works of the Middle Ages. Many text editions were made which offered, in addition to excerpts from larger works, complete texts of smaller works, especially those from the Early Middle High German period as well as the few monuments in Old High German and Old Saxon, and collections of courtly love lyric. Some of the more noteworthy collections are: Karl Bartsch, Deutsche Liederdichter des zwölften bis vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (2nd ed. 1878, rpt. 1966); Karl Bartsch, Die Schweizer Minnesänger (1886, rpt. 1964); Eberhard Gottlieb Graff, Diutiska: Denkmäler deutscher Sprache und Litteratur aus alten Handschriften, vol. 1 (1826), vol. 2 (1827), vol. 3 (1829); Heinrich Hoffmann (von Fallersleben), Fundgruben für Geschichte deutscher Sprache und Litteratur, vol. 1 (1830), vol. 2 (1837); Hans Ferdinand Massmann, Deutsche Gedichte des zwölften Jahrhunderts und der nächstverwandten Zeit, part 1: Die Straßburg-Molsheimische Handschrift, and part 2: Aus Wiener Handschriften (1837); Theodor G. von Karajan, Deutsche Sprach-Denkmale des zwölften Jahrhunderts (1846); Joseph Diemer, Deutsche Gedichte des XI. und XII. Jahrhunderts (1840, rpt. 1968); Karl Goedeke, Deutsche Dichtung im Mittelalter (1854); Oskar Schade, Geistliche Gedichte des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts vom Niederrhein (1854); Oskar Schade, Veterum Monumentorum Theotiscorum Decas, Diss. Halle/Saale (1860); Oskar Schade, Altdeutsches Lesebuch (1862); Karl Müllenhoff and Wilhelm Scherer, Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII.-XII. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (1864, 2nd ed. 1873, 3rd ed. 1892 by Elias Steinmeyer, rpt. 1964); Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (1875, 17th ed. 1994); Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsche Grammatik (1886, 14th ed. 1987); Paul Piper, Lesebuch des Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen (Die Sprache und Litteratur Deutschlands bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert, 2. Theil) (1880); Paul Piper, Die geistliche Dichtung des Mittelalters, 1: Die biblischen und die Mariendichtungen (1888, rpt. 1986); Albert Waag, Kleinere deutsche Gedichte des XI. und XII. Jahrhunderts, (1890, 2nd ed. 1916). Waag’s edition has been reedited twice: an East German edition by Hans Joachim Gernentz, Kleinere deutsche Gedichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts: Nach der Ausgabe von Albert Waag (1970, 3rd ed. 1977); and a West German one by Werner Schröder, Kleinere deutsche Gedichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts: Nach der Ausgabe von Albert Waag, 2 vols. (1972). The latter two editions, especially Schröder’s, were made as a “protest” against the magisterial accomplishment of Friedrich Maurer, Die religiösen Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts: Nach ihren Formen besprochen und herausgegeben, 3 vols. (1964, 1965, 1970). This became a fairly contentious issue among some scholars at the time in that Maurer maintained that the strophic form

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of Early Middle High German religious literature (ca. 1060 – ca.1160) was composed of strophes of unequal length employing essentially the Otfridian long line (ca. 870) with internal rhyme, as opposed to short line rhyming couplets, the “new” form of Middle High German poetry. In volume three Maurer presents those works which no longer offer evidence of the longline structure. The foreword to the third volume, in which Maurer discusses the criticism the first two volumes encountered, primarily from Werner Schröder, reflects that the “battle” was still going on. Although, ironically enough, Maurer, in his refutation of Schröder, makes his claim even more compelling. F. Other Disciplinary Developments in the 19th Century In addition to textual criticism and the establishment of a more or less reliable scholarly corpus, three outstanding journals were founded: Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum (1841) by Moriz Haupt; Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie (1868) by Julius Zacher; and the Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (1873) by Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Braune. All three journals are still thriving today. And, of course, they have been joined by many more in all parts of the world. Large-scale dictionaries of Middle High German were also produced: Georg Friedrich Benecke, Wilhelm Müller, and Friedrich Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 4 vols. (1854–1866; = BMZ); and Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 3 vols. (1872–1878). The BMZ is truly a colossal achievement. While it has an abundance of contextual examples taken from 250 sources, it can be difficult to work with due to its arrangement according to word stem rather than the alphabet arrangement. And what started out to be an alphabetical index to the BMZ became the massive three-volume Lexer that not only collates its alphabetical entries with the word stem ones in the BMZ, but also has included many more sources (720) and a substantial supplement section – in the modern print version over 400 pages. Excerpted from the Handwörterbuch – mainly for the convenience of students – was the venerable Taschenwörterbuch, the so-called ‘kleine Lexer’ (1882) which went through numerous reprintings and revisions well into the 1990s. It has now been thoroughly revised by Beate Hennig (Kleines mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 1993, 5th ed. 2007). The two dictionaries together with supplementary materials linked to the original sources mentioned in the dictionaries are available as a CD-Rom (Mittelhochdeutsche Wörterbücher im Verbund, 2002). It is produced by a team of scholars led by Professor Kurt Gärtner of the University of Trier. The ultimate goal of the project, which is also being carried out in part at the University of Virginia, is to produce an-

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other printed dictionary – to be completed by 2025. More information about the project can be found at: http://www.mwb.uni-trier.de/index.php?id= 6907. G. University Professorships in the 19th Century The discipline slowly established itself at German universities. The number of Chairs dedicated to German philology before the full effect of Lachmann was felt was small. Some of the more important of the early Chairs and their holders were: Benecke, Professor of English and “Old German” in Göttingen (1805); Jacob Grimm, Professor in Göttingen (1830) and in Berlin (1841); Wilhelm Grimm, Extraordinary Professor (1831) then Ordinary Professor in Göttingen (1835), and in Berlin (1841); von der Hagen moved from Berlin as an Extraordinary Professor (1810) to Breslau and back to Berlin as an Ordinary Professor (1824); Haupt, Ordinary Professor in Leipzig (1843) and Berlin (1853); Karajan, Ordinary Professor in Vienna (1850); Lachmann, Extraordinary Professor of Classical and German philology in Berlin (1825) and Ordinary Professor (1827). The first “Deutsch-Philologische Seminar” (=department or institute) dedicated to German Studies was instituted in 1858 at the University of Rostock. By the end of the century, however, Chairs and Seminars were to be found at all universities in Germany and Austria. A major reason for the acceptance of Altgermanistik, aside from the scientific editorial procedures which were set in place or the enthusiasm which the leading professors instilled in their students, was that the German Middle Ages and its literature, particularly the Nibelungenlied (as indicated above) filled a patriotic need of the Germans who until 1871 were united in language only. From the wars of liberation in the 19th century to the periods of the First World War, the Weimar Republic, and World War II in the twentieth, the Nibelungenlied was viewed more as a nationalistic artifact than as a work of genius in its own right, which hindered any serious literary analysis of it until well after World War II. Essentially, medieval German literature was viewed not so much as literature, but rather either as a philological or nationalistic laboratory exhibit. H. The 20th Century (and Beyond) If one can characterize the 19th century as the era of a new beginning, the 20th is somewhat more elusive regarding convenient, all-encompassing designations. In addition to the obvious, the two World Wars greatly hindered the productive analysis and study of medieval German literature. If nothing else, at least two generations of young scholars either had their studies severely interrupted or they were killed. Philological inquiry together with

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source studies still held the dominant hand through World War II. However, whether that was because the subject matter was “objective” and, thus, nonpolitical, i. e., controversial or whether it was because philological investigations had not run their course is difficult to say. I suspect it was a combination of both. One important contribution to the discipline was made in the area of word-field investigations by Jost Trier (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes: Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes, 1931). His work remained influential well into the latter part of the century. However, some important literary and cultural analyses were also undertaken. Hans Naumann (1886–1951) is an interesting, if unfortunate case in point. He produced major studies on Germanic history and culture, medieval culture, and folklore. Höfische Kultur (1929) and Der staufische Ritter (1936) are two noteworthy contributions. He was, however, an adherent of National Socialism and was unable to separate his later writings, especially, from his ideology. But perhaps one of the most important contributions and a topic which Naumann might have taken up with more resolve had the political situation been different was written before World War I “Ministerialität und Ritterdichtung” (Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 52 [1910]: 135–68) by Paul Kluckhohn. Kluckhohn’s short but seminal work opened up an area of research that introduced social factors for consideration, namely the role that the ministerials played in the creation of chivalric literature that received its greatest attention only well after the end of the World War II, first in Romance Studies with Erich Köhler (Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfischen Epik, 1956; 2nd ed. 1970) followed in German Studies by Joachim Bumke (Ministerialität und Ritterdichtung, 1976; and Studien zum Ritterbegriff im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 1964, 2nd ed. 1976). The thesis was applied to the Arthurian romances of Hartmann von Aue by Gert Kaiser (Textauslegung und gesellschaftliche Selbstdeutung, 1973, 2nd ed. 1978). Influential for Bumke and Kaiser were the many writings on the ministerials and medieval German society of the eminent historian Karl Bosl. Developments after World War II gradually shifted away from an almost exclusive concentration on medieval works as philological artifacts to consideration of them as literary ones. The late 1940s and the 1950s witnessed the reemergence of Altgermanistik as discipline worthy of international respect, and the 1960s and 1970s were the “golden age” of medieval German research. From Hugo Kuhn and his pioneering essay on the formal structure of Hartmann’s Erec (1948) to Gert Kaiser’s abovementioned socio-historical study on Hartmann’s Arthurian romances, new critical vistas were being opened and the emphasis had shifted irrevocably from exclusive concern with textual criticism. Perhaps the one work which, in my opinion at any rate, was

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decisive in the struggle to view medieval literature as literature was by Friedrich Maurer (Leid: Studien zur Bedeutungs-und Problemgeschichte, besonders in den großen Epen der staufischen Zeit, 1951, 3rd ed. 1964). Maurer’s study came as a breath of fresh air in the area of Medieval German Studies, especially in Nibelungenlied research, and while Maurer was a philologist of the first order, he thought it possible to grasp authorial intention in a medieval literary work and arrive at a consistent interpretation by utilizing the basic philological tool of the word study. And as such, his examination represents a decisive break with the thrust of medieval German research in Germany up to that time. Well into the 1980s the major impulses in research methodologies came from Germany, perhaps most conspicuously: Reception studies. The name most closely linked with reception in Medieval German Studies is Ulrich Müller, who in the late 1970s and 1980s held a series of conferences in Salzburg which served to define the methodology – understood in English more as “medievalism” than the theoretical proposals of Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. The fruitful interface of the latter’s ideas with concerns in German studies occurred during the “orality-literacy” debate, about which more below. Other areas which had their start in Germany would include Gender and Cultural studies which were more or less conceived as part of the already-existing socio-cultural approach. Last but certainly not least is the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Krems (http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/) whose research focus is Material Culture and daily life in the Middle Ages. Perhaps a brief mention about the phenomenon known as “New Philology” would be in order at this point. As has been pointed out in other essays in this volume, volume 65/1 (1990) of Speculum was devoted to the “New Philology” and was hailed as the cornerstone of a new way of looking at medieval literature without being encumbered by the various modes of thought of traditional philology. Manuscript texts are perceived to have an “openness,” a unique variability (or mouvance). Of course, the “New Philology” could have implications for Medieval German Studies, which relies on texts, many of which were produced using the methods of Lachmann or his followers, i. e. reproducing the stemma or archetype. To determine how or if “New Philology” affected Medieval German Studies, Horst Wenzel and Helmut Tervooren edited a Special Volume of the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie (116 [1997]), “Philologie als Textwissenschaft: Alte und neue Horizonte.” A nuanced discussion of the volume and of the “importance,” if any, for Germanists is provided by D. H. Green in The Modern Language Review (94.4 [1999]: 1145–47). In addition to demonstrating clearly that the “newness” of the “New Philology” is, in most cases in German studies, at any rate, not all

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that terribly new, Green also raises the issue of the apparent absolute concentration on the “manuscript” and the ignoring of other methods of transmission or reception, namely oral. The question or “Orality” and “Literacy” will be discussed below. To the other examples he cites indicating the anticipation of “New Philology” in Medieval German Studies, e. g., the research areas of reception studies and analysis of the roles of patrons (Joachim Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter: Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höfischen Literatur in Deutschland 1150–1300, 1979), one could also add the results of Helmut Brackert’s above-mentioned research on the manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied as anticipating the manuscript uniqueness aspect of “New Philology.” I. Medieval German Studies in the Diaspora Until relatively recently, Medieval German Studies in non-German speaking countries tended to be quite conservative in their methodologies, mirroring the time-honored text-critical approach. Of course, there were some brilliant scholars outside of Germany who contributed philological and literary studies of high quality, but who were not pioneering in their methodologies and, thus, did not influence the discipline as a whole. One who might have been able to make a difference was the French scholar, Ernest Tonnelat (La chanson des Nibelungen, 1926), who provided a new close reading of the Nibelungenlied, focusing on the style and character descriptions. Unfortunately, Tonnelat’s theories could not overcome the dominance of Heuslerian thought. Among Dutch scholars who have also made noteworthy, if not suitably acknowledged, contributions to the field is Hendricus Sparnaay. His Hartmann von Aue: Studien zu einer Biographie (2 vols., 1933, 1938), while now somewhat out of date, still has much to offer in terms of the biographical material collected in the volumes. In addition to much work on Hartmann von Aue, Sparnaay wrote the unique monograph (Karl Lachmann als Germanist, 1948) which offers a remarkable depiction of Lachmann and convincingly demonstrates that he truly deserves to be viewed as a giant of the discipline. One important branch of research that began with the seminal essay of the German historian Herbert Grundmann (“Litteratus-illitteratus. Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm vom Altertum zum Mittelalter,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 [1958]: 1–65) concerned the notion of literacy and the modes of reception of literature in the Middle Ages. The attraction of this avenue of inquiry (but not “medievalism” as advocated by Müller) resonated especially with scholars in the United States and Great Britain. The American scholar Franz Bäuml was a pioneer in this endeavor and was the first to apply the theories of Jauss and Iser to his work in “oral-formulaic theory” (for an excellent appreciation of Bäuml’s achievement as well as a compre-

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hensive overview of pertinent research on the topic see: Ursuala Schaefer, “Alterities: On Methodology in Medieval Literary Studies,” Oral Tradition 8.1 [1993]: 187–214). And although British researchers have been more philologically and text-critically oriented, within the group of the many productive scholars one, especially, stands out, Dennis H. Green. His The Carolingian Lord: Semantic Studies on Four Old High German Words. Balder, Fro, Truhtin, Herro (1965) was to Medieval German Studies in English what Maurer’s Leid was in German. Along with like-minded scholars in Germany (Alois Wolf) and the United States (Michael Curschmann), Green took up the topic of “orality” and “literacy.” Green provides insight into his thinking in his 1989 plenary lecture to the Medieval Academy of America (“Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 [1990]: 267–80). In this lecture he, too, acknowledges the debt owed to Franz Bäuml. He writes: “Franz H. Bäuml, to whom we owe the first applications of the Parry-Lord theory to medieval German, now stresses more the need for research into the interrelationship between literacy and orality, while Michael Curschmann, whose work on the theory was always critical of it, now writes on the different dimensions of hearing, reading, and seeing” (269). The culmination of his research can be seen in Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300 (1994). (For a thorough and critical review not only of Green’s work but also its place within that strand of research, see: David F. Tinsley, Speculum 71 [1996]: 952–54.) Medieval German Studies – actually German Studies in general – in North America, as in other countries in the diaspora, was dominated by textcritical, philological methodology until well after World War II. (For a brief overview of the establishment of German Studies, in general, and Medieval Studies, in particular, in the United States see: Francis G. Gentry, “Medieval German Literary Research from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present,” German Studies in the USA: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 2003, 275–84.) Colleagues in the area of modern German literary studies, however, were able to emancipate themselves much earlier, due, in part, to the emigration of many literary scholars from Germany in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s who were able to convey to their students the excitement of literary research then in full swing in Europe and to train them correspondingly. But the post-WWII years did not see an influx of such scholars interested in Medieval German Studies to this country – prominent exceptions would be Julius Schwietering who spent part of 1954 at the University of Chicago (Illinois) and Joachim Bumke who spent several years at Harvard (Cambridge, MA) in the 1960s. Thus, the comparable catalyst for much of the change in modern German Studies research in the 1950’s

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and 1960’s was missing. Some German colleagues did, of course, come to America and enjoy distinguished careers, e. g., Otto Springer (Tübingen, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Michael Curschmann (Munich, Princeton University, Princeton), Ingeborg Glier (Munich, Yale University, New Haven), and Ernst Dick (Münster, University of Kansas, Lawrence). “Medieval German Studies in the United States had to travel a long road from its beginnings as a field in which only research into the structure of the language counted, a view which continued well into the second half of the 20th century. And even though by the late 1950s/early 1960s when the discipline had managed to free itself of its philological shackles, American medieval scholarship was, by and large, conservative and quite provincial” (Gentry, 282). However, by the 1980s and especially 1990s, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, consideration of the body, and the problem of the “other,” all these and more became part and parcel of the critical apparatus of those who were in the first “medieval wave” as students in the 1960s and which they passed on to their students, who, likewise, continue to pass on to theirs. The contact and cooperation with German colleagues, long lost, has been restored and significant research impulses (precisely in the areas just mentioned) are emanating from this side of the Atlantic and are stimulating research endeavors in German-speaking areas of Europe. Medieval German research in North America has come of age. J. Postscriptum One of the great accomplishments on medieval German research has been the almost continuous production of one-volume or multi-volume literary histories. These are valuable handbooks for the present-day student and scholar alike. Some of the more useful ones are: (1) Gustav Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2 vols. in 4 parts (1918–1935; rpt. 1965/1966) – still an indispensable reference work – the bibliographies are complete until the date(s) of publication, all known manuscripts and manuscript fragments are recorded. (2) Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Wolfgang Stammler and Karl Langosch, 5 vols., (1933–1955; has been superseded by no. 7 below. But it is still of historical interest). (3) Julius Schwietering, Die deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters (1932; rpt. 1957); (4) Gechichte der deutschen Literatur, ed. Helmut de Boor and Richard Newald, 4 vols. in 5 parts (1949–1987; de Boor: vol. 1–3/1; I. Glier: vol. 3/2; H. Rupprich: vol. 4/1).

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(5) Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ewald Erb, 2 vols. in 3 parts (1963/1964; of historical interest – presentation from a Marxist viewpoint). (6) Karl Bertau, Deutsche Literatur im europäischen Mittelalter, 2 vols. (1972/ 1973). (7) Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., 14 vols. (complete 2nd rev. ed. 1978–2007; an enormous undertaking, completely revising the earlier edition, adding new authors and works as well including the Latin literature produced in Germany during the Middle Ages). (8) Joachim Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter: Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höfischen Literatur in Deutschland 1150–1300 (1979). (9) Max Wehrli, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom frühen Mittelaiter bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (1980; the best, in my opinion, one-volume literary history available). (10) Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 3 vols. in 6 parts (1984–2004; Wolfgang Haubrichs: vol. 1/1; Gisela Vollmann-Profe: vol.1/2; L. Peter Johnson: vol. 2/1; Joachim Heinzle: vol. 2/2; Johannes Janota: vol. 3/1; Werner WilliamsKrapp: vol. 3/2). Of course the list can be expanded almost infinitely. The above represent, however, the best of the literary histories that are available, that is, literary histories that provide literary, historical, and cultural material in a coherent context. There are, to be sure, many “companions” or essay collections, but since Heinzle few, if any, literary histories that are worthy of note. Select Bibliography Jacob Grimm, Reden und Abhandlungen (Berlin: Dümmler, 1864, 2nd ed.1879); Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Geschichte der Philologie (Leipzig: Teubner,1921); Hugh Lloyd-Jones (trans.), History of Classical Scholarship (London: Duckworth,1982); Germanistik und deutsche Nation 1806–1848, ed. Jörg Jochen Müller et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler,1974); Jürgen Forhmann, Das Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988); Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann, and Wilhelm Vosskamp (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1994).

Francis G. Gentry

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H Heraldry A. Definition Heraldic signs are personal, enduring, colored identifying symbols of a family or a particular body, which are incorporated into the medieval defensive weapons of shield and helmet. As dynastic emblems, they emerge from the middle of the 12th century. Crests arose from the necessity of distinguishing the troops fighting in mass battles, and to make the contingents recognizable from a distance. Systematized battle standards were used during the crusades in particular, in order to differentiate between large groups of knights. The Greeks and Romans, too, had organized their troops with the aid of banners and standards. However, the medieval heraldic system was a novelty which cannot be directly derived from the standards of antiquity or Germanic shield symbolism. Initially, the choice of various patterns and figures was strongly determined by personal motifs. They became coats of arms in the more narrow sense when they became permanently associated with the family of their knightly bearer, and became hereditary. They then became exclusive symbols of identity and lordship, without a direct connection to matters military. The medieval tournament had a decisive influence on the development of heraldry. The great courtly combats offered participants the chance to portray themselves and their chivalric paraphernalia in the best possible light. Furthermore, the crests were necessary in battle situations, in order to identify the squadrons and keep them separate as they charged. The office of the herald developed in connection with the tournaments. He stood in the service of the noble tournament participants, where his knowledge of weapons and arms was indispensable during the preparation and staging of the show fights. Coats of arms quickly came into use as distinguishing marks in other sections of society, too. While they were at first only used by the higher and lower nobility, from the 13th century on they were also used by the patricians, craftsmen and clerics, as well as corporate bodies such as dioceses, orders, abbeys, towns and guilds. The zenith of heraldry came during the mid-13th century and the beginning of the 17th. The heraldry which was invented for battle and tournament in the Middle Ages lives on today in the coats of arms of families, states and towns.

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B. History of Research There has been extensive international research into heraldry, and the results are almost impossible to keep track of. If one discards the heraldic records and literature of the Middle Ages, and the first attempts at systemization in the 14th and 15th centuries, then heraldic research proper only began in the modern period. In the 16th and 17th centuries, large collections of arms and studies of the laws of heraldry were produced, which often also treated questions of regulation, systemization, and the description of crest (Bartholomaeus Cassaneus’s Catalogus gloriae mundi, 1529; Cyriacus Spangenberg’s Adelsspiegel, 1591; Silvester de Petra Sancta’s De symbolis heroicis, 1634; Claude François Ménestrier’s Le Véritable art du blason, 1659; Philipp Jacob Spener’s Insignium Theoria seu operis heraldici pars generalis, 1690; Johann Christoph Gatterer’s Abriss der Heraldik, 1773). Academic heraldry began in England with the work of James Dallaqay (Inquiries Into the Origin and Progress of the Science of Heraldry in England, 1793), in Germany with the research of Christian Samuel Theodor Bernd (Handbuch der Wappenwissenschaft, 1836), Leopold Freiherr von Ledebur (Streifzüge durch die Felder des Königlichen Preußischen Wappens, 1842) and Hermann Grote (Geschichte des welfischen Stammwappens, 1862). Johann Baptist Rietstap’s Armorial général (1884–1887), in which thousands of European crests are described, formed a decisive breakthrough. The period around 1900 was particularly fruitful for academic heraldry, and saw not only the founding of national heraldic societies, but also numerous important academic works, for instance those of Louis Bouly de Lesdain and Jacques Meurgey de Tupigny in France, of Maximilian Gritzner and of Gustav Adelbert Seyler in Germany. The latter’s Geschichte der Heraldik (1890) is a standard work which is still useful today, paying particular attention to the emergence of heraldry in the Middle Ages and analyses rich and diverse sources, including medieval epics. With its wide range of historical documents and examples from medieval material culture, it is still indispensible for the modern medievalist. The 20th century, in which heraldry has long become established as an exacting auxiliary historical discipline, produced not only countless profound monographs and textbooks but above all great historical surveys, in which the history of heraldry, its rules, and its artistic forms and expressions were thoroughly categorized. The Lehrbuch der Heraldik by Donald L. Galbreath and Léon Jéquier (1978), the handbook Heraldik: Wappen – ihr Ursprung, Sinn und Wert, ed. Ottfried Neubecker (1977) as well as Michel Pastoureau’s Traité d’héraldique (1977, 4th ed. 2003) are viewed as standard works. They all deal thoroughly with the form and significance of medieval coats of arms, and are richly illustrated. They also show how heraldry can be made fruitful as a source for cul-

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tural and sociological studies. Shorter introductions to the subject are provided by, among others, Václav Vok Filip (Einführung in die Heraldik, 2000), Adolf Matthias Hildebrandt (Handbuch der Heraldik, 1887, 19th ed. 1998), Thomas Woodcock and John Martin Robinson (The Oxford Guide to Heraldry, 1988), Arthur Charles Fox-Davies (A Complete Guide to Heraldry, 1969), Michel Pastoureau (Les armoiries, 1998) as well as Claude Wenzler (Le Guide de l’héraldique, 2000). The best German language textbook currently available is by Georg Scheibelreiter (Heraldik, 2006). In addition, many countries have a long tradition of publishing heraldic journals with valuable single studies, e. g., Archivum heraldicum (since 1953) in Switzerland, Der Herold: Vierteljahrsschrift für Heraldik, Genealogie und verwandte Wissenschaften (since 1869) and Adler: Zeitschrift für Genealogie und Heraldik (since 1874) in Germany, The Coat of Arms (since 1950) in Great Britain and the Revue française d’héraldique et de sigillographie (since 1938) in England. The comprehensive German and Austrian research on heraldry is described in various bibliographies, for instance the Bibliographie zur Heraldik by Eckart Henning and Gabriele Jochums (1984), French literature being described in Gaston Saffroy’s five-volume Bibliographie généalogique, héraldique et nobiliaire de la France (1968–1988). Journal articles on genealogy and heraldry are documented in the Göttingen catalog Der Schlüssel (ed. Wolfgang Ollrog and Dieter H. G. Gerlach, 1986), where a well-differentiated index helps the reader. Since 1953 the Archivum Heraldicum has regularly published up to date selective bibliographies for individual countries. C. Major Contributors Only a few central themes and questions of the comprehensive academic literature can be dealt with here. From its beginnings, heraldic studies have concerned themselves with the origins of heraldry. Older scholarship attempted to derive the crest from the civic symbols of classical antiquity, the military symbols of the Eastern armies which the crusaders encountered, and from the runes and house symbols of the Germanic tribes (cf. Bernhard Koerner, Handbuch der Heroldskunst, 1920–1928; Otto Höfler, Zur Herkunft der Heraldik, 1962). All these theories have been superseded. Instead, modern scholars assume that the coat of arms primarily developed in connection with medieval tournaments and pitched battles, in order to identify individual groups of fighters (cf. Christian U. Freiherr von Ulmenstein, Über Ursprung und Entstehung des Wappenwesens, 1941; Lutz Fenske, Adel und Rittertum im Spiegel früher heraldischer Formen und deren Entwicklung, 1985; Michel Pastoureau, Les armoiries, 1998, 24–37). The question of the meaning of coats of arms has also always been regarded as central. Modern heraldic scholars

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approach the symbolism of individual crests with great caution, always paying attention to historical, art historical, and regional considerations. The interpretation of historical coats of arms is extremely complicated, and generally, medieval crests had no deeper meaning, being simply inherited dynastic identifiers, which often merely portrayed the name of a family as a graphic, or indicated loyalty to a superior lord. The reconstruction of a subtle meaning remains highly speculative in such cases – or is simply anachronistic (Adolf Matthias Hildebrandt, Handbuch der Heraldik, 1998, 131–133; Michel Pastoureau, Les armoiries, 1998, 71–76; Georg Scheibelreiter, Heraldik, 2006, 146–51). The origins and expression of medieval heraldry is relatively well accounted for. There are many regional studies and histories of individual motifs, as well as comprehensive surveys which show, among other things, how unstable and dependent on the needs of their bearer coats of arms initially were (Paul Ganz, Geschichte der heraldischen Kunst in der Schweiz im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 1899; Egon Freiherr von Berchem, Donald L. Galbreath and Otto Hupp, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Heraldik, 1939; Evan John Jones, Medieval Heraldry, 1943; Anthony R. Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages, 1956; Lutz Fenske, Adel und Rittertum im Spiegel früher heraldischer Formen und deren Entwicklung, 1985; Michel Pastoureau, Les armoiries, 1998, 24–37). Heinz Waldner offers a reliable documentation of the earliest European coats of arms (Die ältesten Wappenbilder, 1992). An overview of the stylistic history of heraldry and its dependence on the tastes of the day and the art historical context can be found in Walter Leonhard (Das große Buch der Wappenkunst, 1976). As well as this, there are countless specialist studies on important aspects of medieval heraldry, such as the use of animals, or particular contexts of usage (Bruno Bernhard Heim, Wappenbrauch und Wappenrecht in der Kirche, 1947; Georg Scheibelreiter, Tiernamen und Wappenwesen, 1976; Carl-Alexander von Volborth, Fabelwesen der Heraldik in Familien- und Städtewappen, 1996). Little has been established about the literary heraldry of the Middle Ages. The romances of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Konrad von Würzburg have been most frequently studied (Arnold Galle, Wappenwesen und Heraldik bei Konrad von Würzburg, 1912; Manfred Zips, Das Wappenwesen in der mittelhochdeutschen Epik bis 1250, 1966; Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon, 1972; Michel Pastoureau, Introduction à l’héraldique imaginaire (XIIe–XVIe s.), 1978; Claus D. Bleisteiner, Heraldik im ‘Trojanerkrieg’ Konrads von Würzburg und ihre Reflexion des Wappenwesens seiner Zeit, 1999; Heiko Hartmann, Heraldische Motive und ihre narrative Funktion in den Werken Wolframs von Eschenbach, 2002; id., Grundformen literarischer Heraldik im Mittelalter am Beispiel der ‘Krone’ Heinrichs von dem Türlin, 2006). It has been shown that medieval authors made precisely targeted use of imaginary coats

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of arms, in order to characterize and individualize figures, to relate them to kin groups, and in general to make the work more plastic and more vivid. Authors also used real coats of arms, in order to make multi-layered connections between their fictional figures and contemporary people – mostly exemplary kings and princes – thus giving them more prestige and historical depth. A comprehensive documentation of literary coats of arms and their poetological function in European medieval literature is an urgent task which remains for future scholars. D. Current Research A tendency towards analysis of coats of arms using, for example, theories drawn from media studies, semiotics, sociology, and symbol theory can be observed in recent scholarship. German literary studies, in particular, have developed demanding sign theories with which to describe the function of crests within literary texts. Haiko Wandhoff’s studies on the relationship between texts and images in courtly literature view the use of coats of arms as part of a narrative technique of visualization (Der Schild als Bild-Schirm, 2002). He sees them as windows into the world of the text, through which readers or listeners are drawn into the medium. Wandhoff interprets coats of arms as part of a courtly poetics of visibility, which is intended to produce optical impressions on the recipient, and thus to communicate the text as multimedia. The journal of the German medievalists association (Das Mittelalter) dedicated an interdisciplinary thematic issue, with contributions from historians, literary scholars and art historians, to the subject (vol. 11, 2006: Wappen als Zeichen). Further sign-theoretical approaches have been produced by e. g. Waltraud Gut (Schwarz auf weiß, 2000) and Ludwig Biewer (Wappen als Träger von Kommunikation im Mittelalter, 2003). The meaning of weapons in connection with literary presentations of the body was investigated by Hans Belting (Wappen und Porträt, 2002) and Walter Seitter (Das Wappen als Zweitkörper und Körper-Zeichen, 1982). Beside these ambitious semiotic analyses, the international heraldic research continues to value the indispensable, positivistic work of collection, documentation and interpretation of historical and contemporary coats of arms in repertories and periodicals, and thus makes an important contribution to the preservation and transmission of a cultural phenomenon which has remained vibrant for hundreds of years, and creates individuality and identity using aesthetically valuable symbols.

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Select Bibliography Gustav Adelbert Seyler, Geschichte der Heraldik. Wappenwesen, Wappenkunst und Wappenwissenschaft, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Bauer & Raspe, 1885–1889); Adolf Matthias Hildebrandt, Handbuch der Heraldik. Wappenfibel (Neustadt an der Aisch: Degener, 1887, 19th ed. 1998); Paul Ganz, Geschichte der heraldischen Kunst in der Schweiz im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1899); Beiträge zur Geschichte der Heraldik, ed. Egon Freiherr von Berchem, Donald L. Galbreath and Otto Hupp (Berlin: Verlag für Standesamtswesen, 1939); Anthony R. Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages: An Inquiry into the Growth of the Armorial Function of Heralds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, 2nd ed. 1956); Gérard J. Brault, Early Blazon. Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: With Special Reference to Arthurian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Ottfried Neubecker, Heraldik: Wappen – ihr Ursprung, Sinn und Wert (Frankfurt am Main: Krüger, 1977); Donald L. Galbreath and Léon Jéquier, Lehrbuch der Heraldik (Munich: Battenberg, 1978); Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique (Paris: Picard, 1979, 4th ed. 2003); Thomas Woodcock and John Martin Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Michel Pastoureau, Les armoiries (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Claude Wenzler, Le guide de l’héraldique: Histoire, analyse et lecture des blasons (Rennes: Editions Ouest France, 2002); Georg Scheibelreiter, Heraldik (Vienna and Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006).

Heiko Hartmann

Hermeneutics and Textual Criticism A. Definition The word hermeneutics derives from the Greek verb hermeneuein meaning translation, interpretation or explanation. Aristotle’s simple definition took it as “a concern with linguistic action on things” (Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts, ed. Minnis, 1991, 18). Historically, it has been applied to the general principles of Biblical exegesis. In ancient Judaic-Talmudic and Christian traditions, hermeneutic analysis aimed primarily at uncovering the sacred book’s divinely-revealed values and truths – analysis of its allegorical “secondary speech,” so to say (Hennig Brinkman, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, 1980: “Zweite Sprache,” 260). Recently, scholars have supplemented the study of allegory with that of grammar and rhetoric. The sophisticated medieval understanding of grammar is closely linked to the medieval philosophy of language. Exegesis, rooted in grammar and a philosophy of language, is an integral part of this continuity – both of Scripture and of secular works. The purpose is to illuminate the ontology of discourse, whether fictional,

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parabolic or historical. As Patrick Gallacher and Helen Damico confirm, in Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (1989, 6), “A classic function of interpretation is to discover new meaning in a particular text or to restore a meaningful context to a work no longer fully understood.” St. Augustine observed, in his extraordinary treatise De doctrina christiana (De vera religione, ed. K. D. Daur and J. Martin, 1962, III, i, 1), that Scriptural ambiguity lay in the words themselves, whether metaphorical or translated. For this Church Father, divine signs and allegory are inseparable, and language remains the path to sacred truth: its revelation need not proscribe heathen knowledge, though genuine revelation must arise uniquely from Christ, the true teacher. More broadly speaking, hermeneutics, essentially an 18th-century development, belongs under the heading of epistemology and metaphysics: it is the scholarly discipline that studies the character of and presumptions in the interpretation of expression within the human sphere. The densely-semiotic and conflicted term may in the end be indefinable (Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, 1985, x). This article will focus principally on concepts related to philosophy, theology, medieval literature and textual criticism, but not on those principles that apply hermeneutical methods as a tool of analysis in the fields of law, legal, jurisprudence or computer science. Coverage will include (in order) illustrative biblical imagery and examples; medieval exegesis and allegory in general; biblical hermeneutics; interpretation and intentionality; commentary, translation and appropriation; medieval poetics; and, finally, the contemporary complexities of editing medieval texts. Pervasive allegory in Dante’s Divina Commedia will permit us to lay a bridge to textual criticism and the traditional discipline of medieval philology (to create so-called definitive and valid texts), but before that we concentrate on medieval Latin and vernacular topics (on textual criticism cf. David Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction, 1994, 295–346). Under this rubric come comparative literature (and its twin, translation theory), and metacritical studies (although this latter applies more to the modern and postmodern eras). B. An Image: “La Belle Captive” In his exhaustive treatise on exegesis in the medieval period, Henri De Lubac provides a powerful statement (Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, 2 vols., trans. Marc Sebanc (I) and E. M. Macierowski (II), 2000, I. 211–24) on one resonant and frequently-cited biblical metaphor that carries over to translation and interpretation. Like Augustine’s argument about

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“Egyptian gold” (De doctrina christiana II, xxxx, 28), the image stressed here is that of the vile and illicit pagan woman (i. e., heretic), who is captured by the skillful arms of desire: her head is shaved, her nails are pared and all poisonous members are cleansed and superfluous dress removed. This imagery recalls 5th-century philosopher Martianus Capella’s character Grammar (in De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii) who uses a “pruning knife” to excise learners’ errors (II, iii, 64–65). Now-disinfected classics retain their graceful and elegant musicality. The art of translation and the craft of editing a text rely upon a similar strategy – apprehending the beautiful and legitimate truth that lies beneath, though perhaps she ought not be too sanitized. Like perfection, complete consistency surely belongs to the superhuman sphere. C. Illustrations Perhaps a few examples of hermeneutics in action (solving puzzles, bringing clarifications) are in order: one of the best and most illustrative examples lies in the 19th-century view that the Old Testament Pentateuch derives from a composite source – the Jahweh and the Elohim as vying redactions of Genesis, then the Deuteronomy and Priestly codes, like overlays, supplying even further textual versions (Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 1992, 277 f). Exodus 34:30 (Covenant restored) describes Moses as being “radiant,” and the word was rendered in the Latin Vulgate as cornuta, which is why most medieval visual representations of the prophet depict him with horns. New Testament readers have no doubt long wanted to reconcile the variable accounts of Christ’s Ministry and Passion, told in four different ways by the evangelists. Elsewhere, in Romans 5:1, Paul writes that Christians, as a result of their “justification by faith,” are told that they in fact “have peace with God” (Vulgate) or that they “are to have peace with God.” The choice depends on either the Greek indicative (echomen) or the hortatory subjunctive (echemen) found in the different manuscript traditions. Dutch Biblical scholar and humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) tells a story of a priest who fancied the ludicrous and nonsensical Latin mumpsimus reading over the correct sumpsimus (“let us take or choose”). Indeed, a single word variant can significantly alter a given text’s meaning. Biblical scholar, theologian and critic William Warburton (1698–1779) set himself on the level of Shakespeare, for instance, by correcting “good” to “god” in the text of Hamlet (Act II, sc. 2).

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D. Medieval Exegesis While Hermes the ancient Greek messenger of the gods and divinity of boundaries was early portrayed as a cunning and crafty rogue, certain theorists saw him as the one who translated or interpreted the vague and complex messages from on high. The deity, like the Roman Mercury, was a go-between who made all language intelligible. At the most fundamental level, among patristic theologians (as De Lubac argues cogently, I, 66–74 and passim) four major modes of hermeneutics came to light around 400 A.D.: the literal (or historical), moral (or tropological), allegorical, and anagogical (or eschatological). The first two (human-related) are complemented by the historical and etiological senses (Mauricio Beuchot, La hermenéutica en la Edad Media, 2002, 28). Aquinas added another category – parabolical (Jesse Gellrich, The Idea of the Book: Language Theory, Mythology and Fiction, 1985, 67). Medieval exegesis of some passages in the Bible aimed, following these classic paths, to bring the true meaning of Scripture closer to its pristine originality: the hope was to retrieve the Holy Spirit’s verbal presence in the texts, without historical corruption. God’s words, in order to be understood and interpreted, need to be read and re-read repeatedly, using these modes, as St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) might have expressed it. Of the fourfold way, the historical or literal interpretation first emphasizes that a biblical text is to be explained according to the essential meaning expressed in its grammatical structure and historical milieu. Authorial intentionality and belief in divine inspiration are the significant measures for the literalist approach – favored by biblical students of the patristic, medieval and Reformation eras. Yet medieval scholar Eugene Vance (Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages, 1986, 232) has shown that Augustine viewed literal readings as perversely carnal, and that, according to Dante, only charitable hermeneutics avoids vice and error (Vance, 253). Moral interpretation is characterized by retrieval-like exegetical assumptions following axiomatic lessons, a mode that draws from various parts of the Bible and often employs allegorization. On the other hand, allegorical or tropological interpretation, divinely-inspired, construes biblical narratives as referring to another level behind or beyond immediate textual situations. One kind of allegorical explanation is biblical typology, according to which the key elements (figures, events and principal objects) of the Old Testament are taken as anticipations (“types”) or foreshadowings of New Testament persons, events or matters. This mode was doubtless inspired by the example, found in Matthew’s Gospel (12:40), reporting the words of Jesus analogizing Jonah’s three days and three nights in a whale’s belly with Christ’s own experience in time after physical death, and before the Resur-

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rection (de Lubac, I, 123). Further, as medieval literary critic and philosopher Brian Stock has explained (Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation, 1996, 167–68), the bishop of Hippo proposes the book of Exodus not as a prefiguration of Corinthians 10:1–11, but rather as a subtle allegorical rearrangement. Finally, with the anagogical or mystical level, also divinely-inspired, scholars examine biblical events insofar as they might prefigure the life to come. Allusions to secret metaphysical or eschatological meanings are unearthed. For example, authors of the Jewish Kabbala sought to unveil the mystical significance of numerical values found in Hebrew letters and words. E. Medieval Allegory Allegory derives from the Greek allegorein or allos-agoreuin, “other speak.” Before Dante’s intellectual and spiritual elaborations in Italian, allegory in the high medieval vernacular blossoms with the 13th-century Old French Roman de la Rose, composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. To understand the subject (too broad to be fully treated here), one may think of Lady Liberty in New York City as a prime example of an abstraction meaning not necessarily the statue itself but a principle and goal of human endeavor, a symbol as well of Franco-American friendship. The signifier (the statue) is not the same as the signified (liberty). To comprehend the vitality of allegorical meanings in Dante’s Divina Commedia, Joseph Mazzeo observed authoritatively, “[…] figural and typological interpretation, exemplaristic analogies between the creation and the Creator, between this world and a transcendental one, the belief in correspondences and affinities between orders of being, are all essentially poetic ways of looking at the world, ways conducive to metaphorical plenitude and exuberance” (“Medieval Hermeneutics: Dante’s Poetic and Historicity,” Religion & Literature 17 (1985): 1–24, here 15). Where Dante’s deployment of “other-speaking” allegory in his great Commedia takes on a powerful theological and historical tenor even while gambling with what was considered at the time “mendacious” poetic allegory. The Florentine’s poem, profoundly concrete, realistic and honest, with its endless metaphoricity, yet with a plenitude of historico-biographical underpinnings, shows how one “flawed human soul called ‘Dante’ is gradually educated, first by reason (referred to as ‘Virgil’), and then by theological certainty (code name ‘Beatrice’)” (Robert and Jean Hollander, Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 2nd ed. 2002, xxix).

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F. Biblical Hermeneutics In the early-medieval and patristic era, by the studious collating and careful study of biblical texts, Jerome, Basil and Augustine each attempted to avoid the heavy hand of the older Judaizing interpretation (too literal), as well as the proliferating figurations of the more recent Hellenizing insights. Similarly, while we do see some reflection of this activity on the part of authors in the high medieval period, it is the work of Renaissance humanists who sought to establish scientifically-reliable texts of classical antiquity: for their pioneering work on the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, one might say they applied an “anonymous hermeneutics” to determine the authentic Homeric “originals.” As we will see, it was Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) who in the end developed a standardized methodology for producing ancient texts. As noted, the modern principles of hermeneutics actually date from the Enlightenment and after. It originated in attempts to resolve conflicting interpretations of texts. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834; “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” trans. H. Wojcik and R. Haas, New Literary History 10 [1978/1979]: 1–16) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911; Selected Works, vol. IV, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, trans. Makkreel and Rodi, 1996) are credited with advancing the discipline within and for the new cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, i. e., the humanities), to rival the field of natural sciences. Foundational hermeneutical strategies for resolving textual obscurities and contradictions – the obvious textual sign and its deeper meaning – may be said to begin, as Dilthey observed, with the post-Reformation. Scripture had acquired that “dense mist” of obscurities and ambiguities Augustine described (De doctrina II, vi, 7). This is the era when Catholics (favoring the traditional spiritual sense) and Protestants (new literalists) bickered over versions of the Bible (see Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 1994, 297–305). A contemporary of Schleiermacher, classical philologist P. A. Boeckh (1785–1867; On Interpretation and Criticism, 1877, ed. and trans. Prichard, 1968) devised four types of interpretation that lead to understanding: grammatical, historical, individual and generic (Kurt Mueller-Vollmer The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, 1985, 136). But it fell to Schleiermacher – with his emphasis on grammar, language, individual sensibility and psychology – to establish an intuitive or psychological methodology of reliving an author’s aesthetic consciousness (via the historical and cultural context), thus allowing an interpreter to understand a text better than its author (see further E. Donald Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation, 1967, 86–89 and 199). As Schleiermacher himself states, “it is the primary task of interpretation not to under-

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stand [… the] ancient text in view of modern thinking, but to rediscover the original relationship between the writer and his audience” (5–6). Yet historian Karl Morrison opines (the “Hermeneutical Gap,” in “Interpreting the Fragment,” 1989, 30–31) that medieval authors were inclined to digest Scripture inwardly, i. e., by meditating within the “eye of the heart,” a step that often deemed authorial intentions irrelevant. For philologist Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical “comparative” methodology should be combined with the “divinatory” because of its two modes, “grammatical” and “psychological” (this latter Spitzer linked to the “philological circle;” Linguistics and Literary History, 1969, 19, and 33 f). G. Interpretation and Intentionality The hermeneutical circle, neither personal nor general, takes understanding as the relationship of tradition in motion, toward, as it were, the interpreter: the circle is not methodological but is inscribed within “the ontological structure of understanding” (Bruns 281–283). Placed in relation to the hermeneutical circle, the philological circle implies an analysis of the whole text’s aesthetics, then its parts, then its whole again, not unlike the parsing of a Latin sentence. Spitzer illustrates this process deftly in his famous explication of Marie de France’s Prologue to her Lais (Spitzer, “The Prologue to the ‘Lais’ of Marie de France and Medieval Poetics,” Modern Philology 41 (1943); but see now Jeff Rider, “Whence? Wither?” Exemplaria 3.1 [1991]: 261–65). As the philologist asserts, “Our to-and-fro voyage from certain outward details to the inner center and back again to other series of details is only an application of the principle of the ‘philological circle’” (Linguistics and Literary History, 19–20). In this sense, hermeneutical analysis would seem to mimic the complex but paradigmatic voyage of Odysseus: to reach home is to grasp and reveal the true essence of a given text. The process produces knowledge. Symbolic techniques for Holy Scripture may be applied in the field of iconology as well, as medieval art especially lends itself to the kind of hermeneutical decoding involved in these analyses. But in the sense that hermeneutics may be said to search for what modernists term the “master narrative,” the discipline embraces an aesthetic not of contradiction or ambivalence, rather one of harmony. As Copeland points out in her important monograph, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, hermeneutical methodology goes back at least to Aristotle’s notion of practical and applied hermeneutics for rhetorical purposes (application to appropriate circumstances, like “subject, audience, and moment” – Copeland, 19). Harmonizing the master narrative par excellence, as Robert

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Kaster (Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity, 1988, 169–97) has demonstrated convincingly, was the happy task of ancient grammarians, like St. Augustine’s contemporary Servius, whose lengthy commentary became an intimate part of the Virgilian canon; such glosses sought to clarify textual obscurities, and, in so doing, availed themselves of similar hermeneutical undertakings to resolve uncertainties and inconsistencies. Competing claims of the poet’s words or written words (verba, scriptum) were weighed against his meaning or will (voluntas). The textual intention of the whole poem in relation to its parts, its historical context, key-word definitions, poetic passages from the same text or from contemporary or near-contemporary poetry – all these may confirm and corroborate the interpretation of the poem or text as a whole (Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy & Its Humanist Reception, 1997, 21–22). H. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation More recently, the study of hermeneutics has focused on the role of rhetoric, translation and interpretation. In Copeland’s detailed study, while it treats mostly the later medieval period, she has explored how hermeneia, interpretatio, translatio and ethimologia became linked in medieval terminology, as translation itself was often taken as a form of exegesis, and how adaptation of elucidating commentary qua textual paraphrase came to represent a standard mode of vernacular translation (87–102). Following Cicero’s formula of privileging not the source but the target language and culture, simple paraphrase became elevated in the Middle Ages to textual commentary, and this was associated with a new-style rhetoric (30–40). Copeland illustrates as well the process of reconstructive inquiry and advanced recuperative investigation, which used rhetorical and grammatical glossing, as developed in the 7th century by Isidore of Seville (57–60; 87–89). The secular tradition of exposition or commentary (enarratio), Copeland declares, “interprets, reconstructs, revalorizes a world of ancient literature and learning from whose original intellectual and cultural framework the Middle Ages is increasingly distanced […]. Enarratio comes to represent a dynamic [and] re-creative engagement with the language of tradition.” (61) Copeland proclaims early on that “[m]edieval vernacular translation at once serves, then mediates, and like an oppositional rival, displaces, and thus appropriates the originary, authoritative text” (4). In her chapter on translation and interlingual commentary, regarding medieval hermeneutical practice in Latin specifically, she states that it not only participates in the favorable language of classical elegance, it embodies a “myth of continuity,”

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guaranteeing “its own cultural privilege” to those who employ that discourse (105). Whereas, Copeland writes, “vernacular exegesis and paraphrase introduces the factor of an interlingual movement, the rendering of text and commentary in a new language, or more precisely, in diverse new languages which are outside the official culture of academic discourse […].” (106) At once contesting, then substituting by displacement the authority of Latin, the “vernacular challenges the symbolic order of continuity by breaching the very order that had suppressed historical difference and had contained the disruptive force of exegesis itself.” (ibid.) Simply, a translated text means the original loses authority. Copeland sees vernacular translation as “appropriating the texts which it proposes to serve” (ibid.). I. Commentary, Translation and Appropriation However neglected today, hermeneutics and translation have often been associated, since the first obvious step in analyzing a text in another language is to grasp the meaning of the lexicon, whether Hebrew, Greek or Old Norse. As the 12th-century lexicographer Uguccio tersely noted, translatio est expositio sententie per aliam linguam (Magne derivationes, s.v. glossa; A. J. Minnis, The Medieval Boethius, 1987, 106). The inspired German thinker Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), in his “Task of the Translator” (first trans. into English in 1969; “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 1955; “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” ed. Arendt, 1968, 69–82), sets an impossible, messianic goal for any serious approach to translation – a quest for perfect, pure and universal language leading up or back to God’s memory. The work fulfills or completes the original, he argues, as language is viewed as a heap of fragments of a broken vessel which, reassembled in a work of art or a translation, reveal inner Platonic integrity and, one might say in today’s technological jargon, synergy (Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice, 1993, 242–59). Strategies here may range from formal or verbal equivalence to functional or dynamic equivalence, not to mention paraphrase (Herbert Samworth, “The English Bible and its Translators (Part Six: From the King James to Modern Translations),” Glosses: The Bulletin of the Scriptorium 4.2–3 [1999]: 3). In the quest for sublime absolutes, humans (even scholars) search for something like Pygmalion’s “ivory girl” – here the Belle captive rejoins Benjamin’s “reine Sprache” (“Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers,” id., Illuminationen, 1923 [rpt. 1955]; here cited from “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 1968, 69–82, here 71).

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Just as Servius exploited via exhaustive commentary upon the irresistible works of Virgil in order to elucidate their deeper and archaic meanings, one might take a small but powerfully illustrative example of hermeneutics at work, the 12th-century French Eneas romance, which offers us a halcyon but not insignificant “eloquent appropriation” of Virgil’s “hypotext.” This romance “serves” Virgil by vernacularizing the Latin (Uitti and Freeman, 159). Old French scholar Karl Uitti (1935–2005) himself, ever aware of the hermeneutic principle of elucidation and interpretation, proposes elsewhere (Chrétien de Troyes Revisited, 1995) that the new 12th-century vernacular genre, romance narrative, because of its hermeneutic challenges, is analogous to the obscurities in the all-embracing commentaries on the Trinity written by scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard’s (1079–1142): “Romance narrative thrives on containing apparent contradictions,” insofar as its context “legitimizes the genuineness of these individuals’ lives [i. e., the lovers]” (25). On another, more disputational and scholarly level, but dealing as well with the overall interpretation of romance, the contentious clash over the deeper meaning of Chrétien de Troyes’ Grail story – whether inspired by Christian symbolism or Jewish allegory – set Urban Tigner Holmes and Jean Frappier at hermeneutical crossed swords for over a decade (see for instance Frappier, “Le Conte du Graal est-il une allégorie judéo-chrétienne?” Romance Philology 16 [1962–1963]: 1–31). Coming back now to the subject of appropriation, as Maria Fabricius Hansen might allow (The Eloquence of Appropriation, 2003, esp. 167–80) in her study of early Christian spolia (plunder), the medieval anonymous Eneas romancer intentionally reshapes Virgil’s masterwork into his own creation. She writes: “[The] ideal of borrowing from a multiplicity of sources with the aim of transforming the gathered material to a coherent but new and different whole, seems precisely to have been at stake in building with spolia” (19). One can make the same observation about the “Romance of Eneas” as a synthesizing translation that “re-uses” and inverts the text of Virgil (and many other sources as well). Diverging with flourish – as in Book I with a special treatment of the Judgment of Paris episode; in Book IV with Dido’s deathbed pardon of Eneas; or having the rejoicing Trojans drink from the Tiber, Book VII – the medieval poet faithfully translates here, as if in a mode of collusion or confluence, whereas elsewhere, and for the most part, he embellishes, and his eclectic strategies result in a completely new work, filled with heterogeneity. The romancer, taking full ownership of Virgil in every sense of the word, is, one might say, reusing “classical columns” correctly here, to build his own Romanesque “church.” His interpretive imitation is a real innovation, just like his egregious and exceptional female heroine, Lavine. By lift-

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ing and integrating elements from a wide variety of extraneous texts (for us moderns anyway, e. g., glosses from Servius, characters and mythological episodes from Ovid or descriptions from Pliny), the Old French author has reiterated the hermeneutical act, smoothing out his narrative to recreate a new and appealing story in the vernacular for his patrons. In addition, his convoluted weaving (so much more subtle than anything Mary Louise Pratt (“The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration,” Profession 2002, 25–36) might imagine for her 18th-century Peruvian problematic text) is still being undone by modern critics using a hermeneutical methodology on the fabric. Similarly, the 12th-century authors of Old French adaptations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, freely amplified and rewrote Ovid’s tragic tales for a new audience (see Cormier, Three Ovidian Tales of Love, 1986). J. Medieval Poetics On the subject of 12th-century vernacular poetics, Walter Haug (Vernacular Literary Theory, 1997 [orig. Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter, 1985, 15]) has argued for their emergence with new narrative forms of fictionality, i.e., not arising from the Latin rhetorical tradition (that gave birth to Christian predication forms), but rather from the classics of antiquity. Haug claims to identify the distinctive and experimental qualities of 12th- and 13th-century vernacular literature. More focused on logical argumentation (dialectics) in historical development, Haug then applies a more literary hermeneutic analysis to Chrétien de Troyes’s first romance, Erec et Enide, concluding that the closing sequence, the so-called “Joie de la Cort” episode, is quasi-allegorical not typological, because it parallels the opening sequences of the romance (ibid., 97). While he is at it, Haug attempts to draw out of Chrétien’s Prologue a narrative theory, a new fictional approach (100), and, in the end, he deduces poetry’s function as entertainment vs. instruction – to please (delectare, cf. 123) vs. to teach (docere, cf. 125–127; see also Augustine, De doctrina IV, xvii, 34). In a hermeneutical mode as well, medieval French scholar Douglas Kelly (The Art of Medieval French Romance, 1992, 85) observes, “[…] a given romance may well be clear and precise, original and inspired – yet false or defective in the eyes of others. Medieval romance is a great dialectic between idealism and human perception. Expressing that perception in matiere [matter, content] is the art of bringing the unknown past into a meaningful present context. It is the invention and reintegration of presumed historical origins.” Haug, like Kelly, aims to establish a poetics of medieval narrative by drawing on theoretical statements by authors in their medieval texts. Else-

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where Haug exhorts medieval scholars to take literary fiction as a possible path to the truth (for example in Die Wahrheit der Fiktion, 2003). K. Textual Criticism Let us turn finally and specifically to the scholarly editing of medieval literature, whether Latin or vernacular, which often presents just as challenging a task as biblical hermeneutics, though perhaps less spiritually rewarding. Discernment and common sense must prevail amidst the swirl of hermeneutical theories on the subject. Textual criticism aims to devise and apply rules that allow an editor to select the most accurate text among variant readings. Superior textual editors are born, not made, it seems, for the discipline is not a science but an art, as Alfred Foulet and Mary Blakely Speer remind us (On Editing Old French Texts, 1979), while echoing 1955 remarks by Edmond Faral. Perhaps born editors possess that “science of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaft) that Schleiermacher advocated. Famed bibliographical scholar Fredson Bowers (1905–1991) defined the term textual criticism as “a general term for the application of logical method to analyzing the relationship between preserved and inferential forms of the text, followed by the application of various techniques, including critical judgment, designed to establish what will ordinarily be the single definitive form of the text” (Foulet and Blakely Speer, 2; cf. Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 394–99). While this definition may well apply to Shakespeare, Milton or even James Joyce, “a single definitive form” cannot resolve the problems faced by medievalists (on manuscript editing see Greetham, 272–83). Indiscriminate, corrupt and generally irrelevant editions of medieval texts preceded objective and scientific methodologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Controlled and non-subjective strategies must outweigh divinatory, analogical or overly conjectural approaches. As Jeff Rider expresses it cogently, “[h]istory and philology have […] formed the propaedeutic disciplines of the study of medieval literature, which attempts to reconstruct as fully and as authentically as possible the text’s original inscription and to imagine as fully and as authentically as possible its original context” (“Whence? Wither?” 249). The critical circle that encloses an author’s text, a scribe and an audience must be tread nimbly and cautiously, to paraphrase philologist Karl Lachmann (cf. Greetham, loc. cit., 320–23, 347–72). Lachmann’s formula of recension maintained that agreement in error implied identity of origin. He created a stemma for Lucretian manuscripts, and the edition – not based on a “best single manuscript” – but rather on the significance of common errors in several manuscripts became, as did his subsequent edition of the New Testament, milestones for classical and Biblical studies. One may summarize

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very briefly Lachmann’s principles as follows: agreement by all authorities even if from different regions validates attestation (which nullifies particular witnesses), and uncertain readings are those not universally attested in the same region. L. The Critical Edition Consequently, and following now classical scholar E. J. Kenney’s authoritative guide (“Textual Criticism,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 2006), modern editors of critical editions move from a) recension, to b) examination and thence to c) emendation, a process that harbors the habitus (or relevant information and evidence on the “witnesses” and circumstances) of one’s chosen text and its author (where possible). Examination involves an appropriate search for authentic variants while implementing an historical analysis of language, style, period, genre and so forth. “Conjectural emendation” may follow, especially when the critic must use intelligent and discriminating guessing, all the while “balancing possibilities” (Kenney). The directing principle, as recommended by 18th-century New Testament editors, is: difficilior lectio potior (“the more difficult reading is to be preferred”). As Karl Morrison suggests, process and mediation lead not to facts but to understanding (“Sounding Hermeneutics: Two Recent Works,” Speculum 73 [1998]:787–98, here 797). Contemporary with Lachmann’s innovations, more conservative methods were developed, in Belgium, for example, by the Jesuits known as Bollandists, by the Benedictines in France known as Maurists, and by the French priest, Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–1875), whose extraordinary energy resulted in the Patrologia Latina (1844–1855; now available in full-text electronic version), plus four volumes of indexes (1862–1865; now digitized). The Latin Patrologia comprises in 221 volumes the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III. in 1216. In addition, Migne edited the Patrologia graeca (81 vols., 1856–1861; a second series contains the Greek text with Latin translations (166 vols., 1857–1866). This activity was paralleled by a scientific team that produced, using (toward the end, from ca. 1880) Lachmann’s formula, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In France, the editorial labors of Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer on medieval French texts led to a renewed emphasis on the importance of common scribal errors. This initiative was reinforced by what has been called the “Roques rules,” an empirical prescriptive recipe devised by Mario Roques, dating from 1925–1926, to reconstruct, wherever possible the Ur-text or honor the best available manuscript (Foulet and Blakely Speer, On Editing Old French Texts, xiii). Rational and scientific textual criti-

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cism, deferential to the “author’s literary creation” allowed Gaston Paris to create, with his landmark and trend-setting edition of La Vie de St. Alexis (1872, 6th ed. 1965), a possible text as it might have existed in the period (ibid., 8–12). To illustrate, let us compare just one line, the opening verse of this poem (“Life was good in ancient times”) as found in Paris’ reconstructed edition (often called recensio), that drew on the text’s seven surviving manuscripts, and in a more recent one, edited by English scholar Christopher Storey, who chose a single manuscript: Bons fut li siecles al tems ancïenor […] (Paris) Bons fut li secles al tens ancïenur […] (Storey)

The differences are minute but crucial. Paris’ “archetypal” text has been superseded by Storey’s reproduction of the text “just as it is.” Moreover, endless attention to what the literary theorist E. D. Hirsch named the “shared experiences, usage traits, and meaning expectations,” (Validity in Interpretation, 1987, 131–32) can hardly ever help us know exactly what the anonymous poet or the scribe of the St. Alexis wished to convey by this particular sequence of linguistic signs. We have lost the keys to the text’s pristine, originary meaning: the text and its context are all we have at present. The author’s original intention in this instance cannot be discerned – no matter how convincing or thorough the philological circle – but the indeterminacy of textual meaning arises more from the historicity of the text than from the historicity of modern understanding (Anthony Yu and Larry Bouchard, “Literature and Religion,” Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2005, 5466–76). Thus, an author’s purpose obviously cannot be a major concern for medieval texts, so that an “authoritative edition” takes on a different meaning for the medieval philologist. Arbitrary or conjectural emendation can be taken to perilous extremes as well, so that the resulting mosaic might actually represent another version of the text (Foulet and Blakely Speer, 15). Bédier reconstituted Jean Renart’s masterful Lai de l’Ombre (1913, following 19th-century standards), then re-edited it using his revolutionary art of editing texts (see Romania 54 [1928]: 161–96, 321–56). But, in the final analysis, modern scholarship has determined that Bédier, his nemesis Dom Quentin and Lachmann’s doctrines are too subjective, too systematic and too controlled (Foulet and Blakely Speer, 19). Laboring without the spark of mythical powers, yet like the mythological Hermes, today’s textual critic takes as a guiding editorial principle the need to buttress the “divine” readers’ understanding of the text’s base manu-

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script. The editor’s maxims should be “knowledgeable work, judgment, commitment” (Karl Uitti, “Medieval Specificity: Editing, Continuing, Reading, Inventing: Poetico-Literary Dimensions and the Critical Editing of Medieval Texts: The Example of Old French,” What is Literature?: France, 1100–1600, ed. François Cornilliat et al., 1993, 146; cf. Hirsch, 139–44). In this ever-fluid and unstable environment (like the manuscript variants themselves, i.e., mouvance), emendations bear, therefore, on the dubious grammatical or lexical constructions which comparison with the other relevant manuscripts of the text as well as of Old French show to be attributable in all likelihood to scribal slips. Preferred readings of the chosen manuscript (should be the least individualistic) must make good structural and syntactical sense – the best version of an original, i.e., a real text, should be reproduced, one that ideally a medieval reader might have enjoyed, as French philologist F. Lecoy asserts (Jean Renart, 1983, vi-vii). Scholars are still debating today which method works best, for despair will lead only to nihilism. But, Old French scholar Peter Dembowski avers succinctly that “[t]he editor’s responsibility should not be abrogated in favor of any seemingly satisfying theory. The first duty of any editor is not to be absolutely consistent with this or that theoretical stance but to make the text readable for another reader” (“The ‘French’ Tradition of Textual Philology and Its Relevance to the Editing of Medieval Texts,” Modern Philology 90, 4 [1993]: 512–32, 529). This was, by the way, the guiding principle of the edition and translation of Three Ovidian Tales of Love (ed., trans. Raymond Cormier, 1986). Foulet and Blakely Speer simply phrase the procedure this way: “One must conserve the most possible, repair the least and restore in no way” (ibid., 20). As French scholar Philippe Ménard surmises (“Problèmes de paléographie et de philologie dans l’édition des textes français du Moyen Âge,” The Editor and the Text, ed. Philip Bennett and Graham Runnalls, 1990, 8) caution and prudence must be invoked when faced with manuscript conflicts and/or a copyist’s errors. Neither blind adherence (i. e., excessive conservatism) nor too-facile (i.e., excessive intervention) interpolation of a text will succeed. As he notes, “En tout domaine rien ne vaut la clarté” (10; Clarity must be the rule in all cases). Perhaps, finally, it is the image of the “Belle Captive” – bathed and clothed by “Radiant Textuality” (Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, 2001) – that heuristically embodies today the definitive edition. And this brings “new meaning,” an illuminated ontology, to edited texts. Hermeneutical methodology today remains very much alive and relevant. Whether it is with the applications of CASE (Computer Assisted Scholarly Editing; see Greetham, 360; and Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. [Edi-

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torial Theory and Literary Criticism], 1st ed. 1986, 3rd ed. 1993), or especially for the late Karl Uitti, she (it – the text’s meaning and access) would consist of a reconstructable electronic hypertext with archived forms of all the manuscripts, variants and reworkings – exemplified by his exuberant Charrette Project (quondam Princeton, hunc Baylor U.; see Uitti, 166–74). As the Princeton don declared back in 1993, “The critical edition is here to stay […]” (166). Select Bibliography Pascale Bourgain and Françoise Vieillard, Conseils pour l’edition des textes mediévaux, Fascicule III: Textes Littéraires (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques/ École nationale des chartes, 2002); Walter Haug, Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition, 800–1300, In Its European Context, trans. Joanna M. Catling (orig. in German, 1985; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989); Geschichte der Textüberlieferung der antiken und mitteralterlichen Literatur, ed. Herbert Hunger, 2 vols. (Zürich: Atlantis, 1961–1964); E. J. Kenney, “Textual Criticism,” Encyclopædia Britannica (2006; Encyclopædia Britannica Online: 17 Mar. 2006 http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9108631); Ralph McInerny, ed., trans., “How Words Mean: Exposition of On Interpretation, 1–5,” in Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 456–81; Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. William Harris Stahl et al., vol. 2, in Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971–1977); La Vie de Saint Alexis, Texte du Manuscrit de Hildesheim (L), ed. Christopher Storey (Geneva and Paris: Droz and Minard, 1968); Sebastiano Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1963).

Raymond J. Cormier

Historical Studies A. Definition The field of medieval Historical Studies traditionally refers to the study of European history from the decline of the Roman Empire in the West (c. 500 C.E.) to the beginning of the early modern era (c.1500 C.E.). The idea of a medieval period, or “Middle Ages,” as a distinct period in European history originated during the Italian Renaissance as humanists conceptualized this period as a bridge between the classical and early modern worlds. Although the idea of a Middle Ages began as a European construct, similar periods in the histories of China, India, and the Islamic world are increasingly studied as distinct in their own right. Consequently, the study of the history

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of the Middles Ages has grown to encompass a much larger world view than simply the traditional, though still dominant, study of medieval Europe. B. Areas of Study and Language Competencies The research interests of modern historians of medieval Europe fall into several major areas. They include the more traditional fields of political, intellectual, cultural, ecclesiastical, and military history, as well as relatively newer fields like the history of mentality, everyday life, hagiography, and gender. Because the Middle Ages cover roughly one thousand years, historians are also often considered specialists in either the early (ca. 500–1000 C.E.) or late (ca. 1000–1500 C.E.) medieval period. Although the majority of research on the Middle Ages has been done by Western scholars who focus on Europe, the study of the neighboring worlds of Islam and the Mediterranean (including North Africa) have also long been considered important areas of study. The growing popularity of world history as a distinct field has also contributed to the increased study of medieval China and medieval India. Knowledge of multiple languages, both medieval and modern, is essential for historians doing original research on the Middle Ages. Latin is the most important language for historians of medieval Western Europe, as is Byzantine Greek for those who focus on Byzantium and other parts of medieval Eastern Europe. Arabic is an important language for scholars of medieval Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. A host of regional languages are necessary for more detailed study of particular areas. Scholars of medieval France often work with documents in Old French, Provençal, and Occitan, whereas in Spain one might work with Catalan, Galician, or Basque sources. Those studying medieval England might have the need to understand both the old and middle forms of English, while those studying medieval German might learn both Old and Middle German as well as the high and low dialects of each language. Similar medieval vernacular languages are often important for the study of medieval Italy (Sardinian, Venetian, and Tuscan), Ireland (Gaelic), and Eastern Europe. Important languages for those studying the medieval Middle East and Central Asia include Arabic, Persian (and its predecessor Middle Persian), as well as various Turkic languages. Middle Chinese is useful for those studying medieval China as is Hindi and Urdu for those studying medieval India. Considerable new research is published each year in English, French, German, and Italian, whether in books or specialized journals. Rarely is such material translated into other languages, making knowledge of these languages important for modern scholars to keep up with the latest research in their fields. Additional modern languages may be necessary for highly specialized research.

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C. Historians of Medieval Europe, ca. 1500–1800 During the Middle Ages history was commonly divided according to Biblical schemes. For example, some medieval European scholars divided history into six ages based on the six days of creation in the Bible. The Italian humanist Flavio Biondo was apparently the first to use the term “Middle Ages” to refer to the period from the end of the Roman Empire until his time in the early 15th century. In contrast to their medieval predecessors, early Renaissance historians who were motivated by their love of the classical age divided history into three parts including the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and their own age. In this scenario, the Middle Ages served as a bridge between their beloved classical world and the Renaissance or modern age. Consequently, because the achievements of the Middle Ages had little appeal to Renaissance scholars, the period became commonly referred to as a “Dark Age” or simply, “the Dark Ages.” From this point on the Middle Ages were increasingly understood as a distinct period, covering a timeframe from roughly 500 C.E. to 1500 C.E. Negative views of the Middle Ages were also widely held during the Protestant Reformation. Protestant reformers, like Renaissance humanists, also had an appreciation of the ancient world. Yet their focus was not on classical authors, but rather on the birth of Christianity and the life of the primitive church, which many reformed churches claimed to imitate. As a result, the Protestant belief that the medieval Catholic Church had become corrupted and no longer resembled the primitive church of early Christianity became a major justification for the Protestant Reformation. Enlightenment era thinkers and writers also embraced the Renaissance view of the Middle Ages as “Dark Ages” on account of their rejection of traditional religious, social, and political beliefs in favor of an “age of reason” (see the entry on “Enlightenment” in this Handbook). Thinkers like Voltaire were representative of the Enlightenment era view of the medieval world as a place of endless feudal wars with scholasticism and the church as the enemies of reason. A reflection of this hostility, especially to organized religion, is found in English historian Edward Gibbon’s classic work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its six volumes published between 1776 and 1788. For Gibbon, the Roman Empire in the West had collapsed as a result of Germanic invasions and finally ended with the death of the last Emperor in 476 C.E. Thus began the Middle Ages, according to Gibbon, as the focus of Gibbon’s work then shifted from the West to the East and the development of the Byzantine Empire. Gibbon’s dating of the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages in Western Europe has been enormously influential among scholars, as his periodization was not

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seriously challenged by scholars until the 20th century and continues to influence popular understandings of the transition from the ancient Roman world into the medieval period. D. Historians and Historiography, ca. 1800 to Present Many during the 19th century, although not all, found a new appreciation for the Middle Ages. The industrial age was in full swing and the threat of urbanization and pollution to traditional norms of life provoked a backlash among the so-called Romantics of the period. The Romantics rejected the modern age and instead promoted what they understood as distinctly medieval virtues in their art, literature, and nationalism. This new and more positive image of the Middle Ages also extended to 19th-century historians, although for different reasons. Modern historiography effectively began with efforts of the highly influential late medievalist/early modernist Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), whose stated goal was to write history the way it was. His purpose was to understand past cultures as they understood themselves. Hence, he rejected the teleological view that modern societies are superior to older societies and, consequently, refused to accept the idea that the Middle Ages were inferior to the Renaissance. The new popularity of the medieval world during the 19th century resulted in the production of many important historical projects that continue to have an impact on various fields of medieval history. Certainly one of the most impressive projects was the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), an enormous collection of edited sources with an emphasis on German history from the end of the Roman Empire until 1500 C.E. The MGH is divided into five major areas including the Scriptores, Leges, Diplomata, Epistolae, and Antiquitates, as well as thirty-three sub-series covering a wide range of medieval historical documentation. The MGH was inspired by the Prussian reformer and nationalist Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom Stein who, in 1819, established a society for its creation with its first volumes published in 1826. The project benefited enormously from the leadership of Georg Heinrich Pertz who took over as editor in 1826 and remained so until 1874. During this period the best scholars from Germany, and many other nations, contributed to the MGH’s many scholarly editions. In 2004 the entire collection of the MGH was placed online in photo-digital reproduction at the MGH web page at http://www.mgh.de. The scholarship of French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767–1839) was foundational for the so-called “golden age” of Crusades Studies. Among his most influential works were his multi-volume History of the Crusades (1st ed., 3 vols., 1812–1817; 6th ed., 6 vols., 1841), which served

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as one of the most important historical approaches to the study of the crusades during the 19th century. Michaud followed this achievement with a four volume collection of sources titled the Bibliothèque des Croisades (1829) containing French translations of several European and Arabic chronicles of the Crusades. Finally, as a member of the renown Academy of Inscriptions, Michaud was instrumental in the creation and publication (published in Paris from 1841 to 1906) of the sixteen volume Recueil des Historiens des Croisades (RHC), which remains the most important collection of crusades sources in their original languages to the present day. The entire collection of the RHC, consisting of thousands of pages of sources in the original languages is made available online through the Bibliotheque nationale de France’s Gallica project at http://gallica.bnf.fr. Yet another important source collection was constructed during the 19th century by the French priest and scholar, Jacques-Paul Migne. Beginning in 1844, Migne oversaw the publication of the first volumes of the Patrologia Latina (PL), a monumental collection of 217 volumes covering over one thousand years of Latin sources from Tertullian to Pope Innocent III. It remains among the most influential source collections for the study of medieval history and the entire collection is now available on CD-ROM at some research libraries and an electronic version is available online for paid subscribers. In the mid-19th century the Communist Manifesto was published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Feb. 21, 1848). Although the work was a political call to action which sought to justify a revolution by workers, it had an important impact on how later adherents of Communism would view the past. Marx and Engels argued that economics was the driving engine of history and that until their time human societies had been defined by the exploitation of the common worker by a small elite minority. In the case of the Middle Ages this meant that the aristocracy and clergy had unfairly subjugated the peasantry, representing the vast majority of the population, to a harsh servitude. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) influenced how scholars understood the birth of the Middle Ages as a result of the so-called “Pirenne Thesis.” Pirenne argued in his now classic work Mohammed and Charlemagne against the traditional view (advanced by Edward Gibbon) that Germanic barbarians had caused the fall of the Roman Empire and that the removal of the last western Roman Emperor from the Imperial throne in 476 C.E. effectively meant the end of the Roman Empire. According to Pirenne, the real break in Roman history occurred in the 7th century as a result of Arab conquests which shifted European civilization to the North and away from the Mediterranean. Pirenne’s works were also highly influential

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in subdividing the roughly one thousand year medieval period into what are today known as the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Princeton scholar Dana Carleton Munro (1866–1933) published in a number of areas concerning the Middle Ages. Among his more popular or influential works are A History of the Middle Ages (1902), The Middle Ages and Modern Europe (1903), Medieval Civilization (1907), and The Middle Ages, 395–1272 (1921). His superior scholarship was recognized by his peers when he became president of the American Historical Association in 1926, and he was honored by his former students, many of whom went on to teach in universities themselves, in 1928 with the publication of a collection of essays titled The Crusades and Other Historical Essays Presented to Dana C. Munro by his Former Students. Munro died in 1933 before finishing what would have been his “magnum opus,” a history of the crusades based on an exhaustive and critical use of contemporary sources and field work in the Near East. Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937) was considered America’s first medieval historian (a curious distinction in light of Dana Carleton Munro’s earlier career) and also served as an advisor to US President Woodrow Wilson (a relatively common role for prominent historians in that period). Haskins focused primarily on institutions, but his most influential work had to do with his argument in favor of a 12th-century renaissance. In his 1927 work The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Haskins examined art, science, philosophy, architecture, literature, and the rise of universities to argue that this was a period of unique innovation and creativity. Haskins had also won respect for his earlier work Norman Institutions (1918) which contributed fundamentally to our understanding of medieval Normandy. Later scholars honored Haskin’s work on the Middle Ages by founding the Haskins Society in 1982, an international scholarly organization dedicated to the study of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and early Angevin history. Haskins’s best known student was medieval historian Joseph Strayer who began teaching at Princeton University in the 1930s. During his career he served as chair of the history department for twenty years and president of the American Historical Association in 1971. Strayer’s greatest influence on Medieval Studies undoubtedly comes from the large number of American medievalists teaching in universities that studied with him during his lengthy career. German historian Carl Erdmann (1898–1945) has been considered as one of the most influential and important German scholars of medieval political culture in the 20th century. Erdmann is perhaps best known for his often cited 1935 work on the origins of the crusades Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens (The Origins of the Idea of Crusade, trans. M. W. Baldwin and

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Walter Goffart, 1977). Erdmann argued that the crusades represented an attempt by the Papacy to bring peace to Western Europe through redirecting the violent energies of knights and other combatants to the East. Erdmann’s 1938 work on 11th-century correspondence between secular and ecclesiastical elites titled Studien zur Briefliteratur Deutschlands im XI. Jahrhundert also won him considerable praise. Erdmann also worked as a researcher for the prestigious Munich based institute of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) was a pioneer in the field of cultural history. He wrote widely on a number of topics including not only medieval history, but also American and early modern Dutch history. His most important work of medieval history was his popular 1919 book The Autumn of the Middle Ages, which rejected the idea of a Renaissance in the later Middle Ages and instead viewed the period as one of pessimism and decadence. French historian and medievalist Marc Bloch (1886–1944) had an enormous impact of modern understandings of historiography and feudalism. In 1929 Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (now called Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations). The name of the journal became the basis for the name of the so-called Annales School of Historiography, which combined history with geography and sociological approaches to understanding the past and rejected the traditional 19th-century emphasis on politics, diplomacy, and war. Instead of focusing on particular events, Bloch and Febvre focused on long-term historical structures known as la longue durée. In 1941 Bloch also authored a popular historiographical work Apologie pour l’histoire ou metier d’historien (translated into English in 1953 as The Historian’s Craft) that is still used widely in undergraduate historiography classes today. Concerning specifically medieval history, Bloch’s influence was most seen on mid-20th-century understandings of feudalism. In his 1939 work Feudal Society, Bloch argued that in addition to a hierarchal relationship between lords and vassals in medieval feudal systems, there was a similar relationship between lords and peasants, an argument that had not previously been made. Bloch’s thesis was been discredited for many as the concept of feudalism itself has come under intense scrutiny by historians. In 1974, U.S. historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown, in “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe” (American Historical Review 97: 1063–88), rejected the term feudalism arguing that medieval economic and social systems were far too complicated for the term to have any real meaning. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was a student of Annales co-founder Lucien Febvre and became a prominent annales historian

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in his own right. He was best known for his monumental work La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II. Although Braudel reportedly wrote the work from memory while he was a prisoner of war in Germany in the early 1940s, La Méditerranée soon became the defining work of the Annales School and was widely praised for its consideration of outside disciplines (including economics, anthropology, and geography) over the longue durée of medieval Mediterranean history. Certainly one of the most popular medieval scholars during the 20th century was British historian Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, better known as Steven Runciman (1903–2000). He was best known for his work on Byzantium and the Crusades, we well as his linguistic abilities. He reportedly began learning French at the age of three and by the age of eleven he had learned Latin, Greek, and Russian. Later in his life, he picked up various Islamic languages that greatly informed his many scholarly works about the Middle Ages including The History of the Crusades (3 vols., 1951, 1952, and 1954), The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (1947), The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958), The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965). Runciman was most influential on modern understandings of the crusades and he did not portray the crusaders with sympathy. For Runciman, the crusaders destroyed the last bastion of Antiquity, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. One of the most distinguished living historians of medieval Byzantium is Angeliki E. Laiou, who is currently Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History at Harvard University. Laiou is also a former director of the Dumberton Oaks Research Library and Collection, an international center for scholarship providing resources for the study and publication of scholarly works in Byzantine history. She is also the author of a dozen books and several dozen articles on Byzantine history covering topics ranging from gender to the crusades. Perhaps her most important recent work is The Economic History of Byzantium (2002) for which she served as editor in chief for its three volumes. Irish historian Peter Brown (b. 1935), who began his career as a medieval historian, is without question the leading historian of the period known as late antiquity, a field that overlaps with the medieval period and did not exist until he defined it in The World of Late Antiquity A.D. 150–750 (1971), and The Making of Late Antiquity (1978). Brown’s many works led to the establishment of late antiquity as a distinct period from roughly 200 C.E. to 800 C.E. that focuses on the transformation of the Roman world into the medieval world in both the East and the West. Brown is also well known for his seminal work Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967, and 2000), which is still

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considered by many to be the best available work on the life of Augustine. Brown has also made an impact on modern understandings of the development of the cult of the saints (see The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 1981), about which he argues that such cults were not carry overs from the pagan past. The annales historian Georges Duby (1919–1996) ranked among the most influential of French medievalists for his work on the first three centuries of France under the Capetians (ca. 10th to 13th centuries). Duby’s colleague, French historian Jacques LeGoff (b. 1924), also won international renown for his work on medieval Europe. LeGoff is another Annales historian who since 1977 has dedicated himself to researching the historical anthropology of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. LeGoff held that medieval Europe was a distinct civilization from the ancient Roman world and, although the Annales School is not known for its appreciation of biographies, he is also well know for his biographies of Louis IX and Francis of Assisi. Oxford University historian Richard W. Southern’s (1912–2001) 1953 book The Making of the Middle Ages won him considerable respect early in his career and became a classic history of the Middle Ages covering the 10th to 13th centuries. He followed up this work with other well received efforts including Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962) and Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970). Jonathan Riley-Smith (b. 1938), also of Oxford University, found even greater success with his work on the crusades which revolutionized modern crusades historiography. As the author of more than a dozen books on the crusades, Riley-Smith has convincingly argued that greed as the primary motivator of the crusaders is unlikely and misleading, as genuine religious devotion seems to have been an even greater motivator. Riley-Smith has also been a chief advocate of expanding modern understandings of the crusading movement to include similar efforts in places other than the Holy Land. He argues that crusading against Muslims, pagans, and heretics also took place in Spain, the Baltic, Italy, and France. Several medievalists have studied under Riley-Smith at Oxford and have gone on to teaching positions at major research institutions around the world. They include scholars such as Peter Edbury, Norman Housley, and Michael Lower who have carried Riley-Smith’s perspectives into the scholarly world. University of Southern California historian Judith Bennett is one of the leading scholars of the history of gender during the Middle Ages. Bennett has published extensively on the subject with seven books and more than two dozen articles that have helped to define the field. Perhaps her best

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known work is her account of the extraordinary life of Cecilia Penifader, an English single woman living in the early 14th century in A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1297–1344 (1998). University of Minnesota historian Ruth Mazo Karras is another leading historian of gender and sexuality. While she has published on a broad number of topics within her area of interest, her more recent efforts focus on the formation of masculine identity in the later Middle Ages. Her recent books include From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (2003), and Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (2005). E. Major Journals for Medieval Historians There are a number of important peer reviewed journals, both interdisciplinary and focused solely on history, in which historians of the Middle Ages publish their research. Speculum has been published quarterly by the Medieval Academy of America since 1926 and is the first scholarly journal in North America devoted exclusively to the Middle Ages. Traditio, a leading journal of ancient and medieval history, thought, and religion has been published since 1945 by Fordham University. The interdisciplinary journal Viator has been published since 1969 under the direction of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. UCLA also has a graduate journal, Comitatus, dedicated to Medieval Studies and it is gaining increasing respect as a place for graduate students to publish. Duke University Press annually publishes three issues of its Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, while Blackwell Publishing issues its Early Medieval Europe quarterly. Mediaevistik: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Medieval Research, ed. by Peter Dinzelbacher and Albrecht Classen (by himself since 2010), is published in Frankfurt, Germany and accepts submissions on an ongoing basis in German, English, French, and Italian. The Medieval Review (formerly the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review) has published reviews in all areas of Medieval Studies dating back to 1993. There are some journals focused more narrowly on medieval history (as opposed to literature, philosophy, etc …) including The Journal of Medieval History and The Medieval History Journal. Additionally, there are a number of journals devoted to more specific medieval historical themes including The Journal of Medieval Military History (published by De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History), Crusades: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Gender & History, and Golden Horn: Journal of Byzantium.

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F. Major Organizations for Historians of the Middle Ages The Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1926, is the leading organization for historians of the Middle Ages in North America. Other important North American organizations include the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, founded in 1974 to promote the study of medieval Spain; and the Southeastern Medieval Association which promotes the study of the Middle Ages in the southern United States. There are also more than seventy Medieval Studies centers based at various colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada and dozens more at higher education institutions in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies was founded in 1996 to promote Medieval and Early Modern Studies in the Pacific, as was the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney (established in 1997). The Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris was founded in 2003 to assist academics in Paris doing research on the Middle Ages and regularly hosts symposiums on a number of medieval topics. In Germany, the Medieval Institute at the University of Freiburg was established in 1965 to promote and coordinate research and teaching in all fields related to the study of medieval civilization. G. Major Conferences The largest gathering devoted to Medieval Studies in general, and Medieval Historical Studies in particular, is without doubt the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies hosted at the University of Western Michigan in Kalamazoo. The conference is usually held at the beginning of each summer and is attended by more than three thousand scholars and students of all fields related to the Middle Ages, as well as a considerable number of novelists and interested persons unaffiliated with a college or university. The relatively informal atmosphere at Kalamazoo makes it an excellent place for collaboration and collegiality among scholars. A similar event, which serves as a type of European counterpart to the Congress at Kalamazoo, the International Medieval Congress, is held in the United Kingdom each year and is hosted by the University of Leeds. Although neither conference is specifically devoted to the field of history, historians are heavily represented in the listings of those presenting papers and these conferences are among the most important gatherings for historians of the Middle Ages. There are, of course, several dozen other conferences and gatherings taking place throughout the world in which historians devoted to medieval history might present their research. Some include the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy of America, the Midwest Medieval History Conference, the American His-

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torical Association, the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and the annual symposium of the International Medieval Society, Paris. Select Bibliography Fortunately, a high number of works dealing with Medieval Historical Studies have been written by medievalists. One of the more interesting is the late Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991) which argued that romanticized modern notions of the Middle Ages (as a place of knights, ladies, saints, wars, tournaments, etc …) are a conceptual invention of 20th-century scholars influenced by their particular backgrounds and modern events (World War II, for example). The 2005 work Medieval Concepts of the Past, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) examines how the history of the Middle Ages is being restructured by medieval historians in Germany and the United States in the light of cultural and social-scientific investigations into ritual, language and memory. Ernst Breisach has written a useful review of historiography from the ancient Greeks to the present in his work Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 1994), and another work examining the impact of rhetoric on the study of medieval history in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University,1985). Johns Hopkins University historian Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s book The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) examines the impact of postmodernism and how it has challenged historians to look at historical texts in a new way. Kathleen Canning’s work Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), examines the field of gender history from its origins in the 1980s until the present – a process in which Canning herself has held a major role as an author, a teacher and an editor. For information on women in Medieval Studies see Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Marc Bloch’s 1953 work The Historian’s Craft (New York: Knopf, 1953) investigated the techniques of historical inquiry to help the beginning researcher, whether focusing on medieval history or other periods. Bloch’s work has been widely distributed and is commonly assigned in college level historiography classes. A revised and updated edition of Louis John Paetow’s classic 1931 work A Guide to the Study of Medieval History (Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1980) was made available in 1980 and was followed in 1981 with the release of Gray Cohen Boyce’s Literature of medieval history, 1930–1975: A Supplement to Louis John Paetow’s A Guide to the Study of Medieval History (Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1981). R. C. van Caenegem’s Guide to the Sources of Medieval History (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1978) provides a useful review of five areas of medieval history, including the typology of medieval history, libraries and archives, collections and repositories of sources, reference works, and a bibliographic introduction to the auxiliary sciences of history. Historian James M. Powell’s work Medieval Studies: An Introduction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992) is designed to provide the advanced student with an introduction the world of Medieval Studies by offering essays by various authors on all aspects of Medieval Studies including paleography, diplomatics, chronology, literature,

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music, archaeology, law and science. For information about particular medievalists, historians or otherwise, see Répertoire international des medievalists (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995).This work provides the names, addresses, and fields of specialization for 16,000 medievalists worldwide.

Andrew Holt

Historiography of Medieval Medicine A. General Definition There are many fundamental, practical and theoretical differences between what is laterally understood by the term ‘medicine’ and how it was defined in the Middle Ages. The difficulty in this regard arises out of the lack of useful contemporary definitions. Accordingly, 20th-century scholarly contributions to the history of medicine tend to be academically judged largely in terms of their accuracy and scope and, crucially, in terms of how the term ‘medicine’ is understood by the researcher. We should not be surprised to learn, then, that one of the major issues in the study of medicine in the Middle Ages is precisely that of nomenclature; simply, the term ‘medicine’ and what that implies cannot be as easily or cleanly applied to the medieval period as it is used post-Enlightenment. When considering both the historiography of medieval medicine and the practice of medicine in the Middle Ages, then, it is necessary to regard both categories as fluid, with boundaries sufficiently blurred to overlap into the academic sciences and folklore (herbalism, for example) and pseudo-sciences (astrology, physiognomy and palmistry); manuscript and book history; theories of textual production and dissemination; university history; the study of practitioners, both learned and local; and social history. The problems of definition have always been pivotal for the major contributors in the field, most notably in the now-famous exchange between George Sarton and Henry Sigerest. Sarton, in a paper titled “The History of Science versus the History of Medicine” (Isis 23.2 [1935]: 313–20), challenged medicine as a science; this elicited a response from Sigerist in “The History of Medicine and The History of Science” (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 4 [1936]: 1–13), in which, as well as noting that medical history is a field of study in its own right, he agreed that much of the work hitherto carried out on the history of medicine was amateurish. The debate on the valid-

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ity of medical history as a branch of science continues to some extent; Gert Brieger notes, however, that the historiographical work has now become more sophisticated and reliable (“Guest Editorial: The History of Medicine and the History of Science,” Isis 72.4 [1981]: 537). Perhaps one of the most helpful definitions of medieval medicine is that of Linda E. Voigts, who asserts that medical texts are the records of “the theory and practice of what was both science and craft … [which] survives, for the most part, in fourteenthand fifteenth-century manuscripts [and] includes both highly learned and popular, traditional material” (“Medical Prose,” Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, 1984, 315–35). Elsewhere, the same author notes that “in practical terms, then as now, [medicine] was largely perceived less as an attempt to understand the natural world than as a technology for maintaining or restoring health” (“Scientific and Medical Books,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall, 1989, 345–402). The historiography of medieval medicine, then, in its broadest terms, involves the consideration of writings – and the application of learning in the practical sense – of varying sophistication. As Rossell Hope Robbins wrote: “Allowing for the distinction between the graduate doctor and the leech … as far as the actual craft of medicine itself was practiced, both classes would be relying on essentially the same manuscript authorities” (“Medical Manuscripts in Middle English,” Speculum 45.3 [1970]: 393–415). Medical practice, it would seem, had a considerable theoretical grounding, whether treatment was administered by the leech doctor, the barber surgeon, or the university-trained physician. European medical theory of the Middle Ages was largely based on the writings of Hippocrates (c. 470–360 BC). Generally credited as the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates professionalized medical practice, linking it to philosophy but divorcing it from religion and superstition. He also wrote in detail on proper conduct and practice for physicians. His most enduring legacy in the Middle Ages, however, was his theory of the humors. This medical theory centered on the balance between the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile), in turn connected to the four elemental “qualities” (hot, cold, dry and moist); wellbeing was thus dependent on balance, and much medieval medical healing was concerned to restore imbalances in the bodily humors, which could be achieved by regulating the diet, for example, or through an intervention like bloodletting. Pearl Kibre’s work on Hippocratic reception in the Middle Ages is standard: Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages (1985). Equally influential, in terms of medical theory and practice in medieval Europe were the writings and thoughts of Galen, whose treatises perpetu-

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ated the Hippocratic method; in particular, the work of Vivian Nutton (in particular, his edited volume Galen, Problems and Prospects, 1981, and his monograph John Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen, 1987) is crucial with regard to Galen’s reception in the Middle Ages. However, European medical theories were frequently coupled with a belief, central to Arabic treatises, that astrology had a part to play, with each house of the zodiac assumed to exert influence over a particular body part; contemporary ‘vein men’ illustrations show Aries having dominance over the head. Aries, in terms of qualities, was considered “a fiery, hot and dry sign” (Irma Taavitsainen, “Science,” A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown, 2000, 378–396). Medicine was, thus, inextricably linked to astrology and astronomy, and a belief in the influence of the skies on humans in a holistic manner. The early work of Donald Campbell, Arabian Medicine and its Influence on the Middle Ages (1926; rpt. 2001) is testament to the influence of Arabic ideas on Europe’s medical people; similarly, Kibre’s study “Giovanni Garzoni of Bologna (1419– 1505), Professor of Medicine and Defender of Astrology,” Isis 58 (1967): 504–14 demonstrates that medical theory, even at the scholastic level, was inextricably linked to cosmology. Further, the research carried out by Allan Chapman, “Astrological Medicine,” Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (1979, 275–300), explains the principles of medieval astrological medicine as a background to developments in the Renaissance. Religion, too, had its influence on medicine; the role of the medieval church – linked, naturally, to the role of the hospital – has been the subject of several studies, including Eugene A. Hammond’s “Physicians in Medieval English Religious Houses,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 32 (1958): 105–20. The history of 20th-century scholarship on medieval medicine has generally taken two approaches: a concern with medical texts and books, of varying academic interest but nonetheless widely read, disseminated, copied, and translated throughout Europe, and an attempt at classification of the texts circulated therein; and the social history of medicine: the identification of sites of hospitals and doctor’s rooms; persons involved in medical practice; the analysis and impact of epidemics like the Black Death and influenza; and gender, politics, and class studies. It is perhaps due to this dichotomous approach that it is frequently argued that students of the Middle Ages lack “reference works” that provide a “reliable history of medicine” (Jonathan Erlen, “Book Review: A Dictionary of the History of Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56.2 [2001]: 183). Nonetheless, the absence of a defining study, encyclopedia or dictionary dedicated to the history of medicine, rather than highlighting the difficulties connected to definition and

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concentration, instead serve to demonstrate the richness and diversity of the field. Moreover, this absence has the effect of foregrounding the many specific and unique contributions that have been made by individual scholars to the many different aspects of historical medicine over the course of the 20th century which, taken together, build an impressive repertoire of writing and research on this multifaceted topic. B. History of Research The focus of much research into medicine in the Middle Ages is on the people responsible for the practice of medicine, and appropriately, perhaps, it is with this that the history of research into medicine in the 20th century begins. The publication of two important scholarly resources for medieval medicine: John Flint South’s Memorials of the Craft of Surgery in England (ed. D’Arcy Power, 1886), and Sidney Young’s Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (1890), enabled further study by giving researchers access to important documents, while at the same time igniting interest in the theory and practice of medicine in medieval Europe. These quickly became standard reference works, and precipitated further investigation into the records of doctors, surgeons, and other medical men. Ernst Wickersheimer’s two-volume Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au moyen âge (1936; rpt. 1979) provides a similar survey of practitioners in medieval France, and is updated by Danielle Jacquart’s Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au Moyen Âge. Tome 3: Supplément, (1979). A different perspective on medieval France is Isaac Alteras’s “Jewish Physicians in Southern France during the 13th and 14th Centuries,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 68.4 (1978): 209–23, which uses notarial records to provide a list of practitioners living in ten major towns in the south of France. Alteras notes that these pockets of medical men “developed an activity that produced much original literature and translations from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin” (209). Further focus on the English medical community of the Middle Ages came mid-century in the work of Charles H. Talbot and Eugene A. Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical Register (1965), a directory of specific practitioners from the more learned to the barber-surgeons and empirics, and dating from Anglo-Saxon times up to the mid-16th century. Richard T. Beck’s The Cutting Edge: Early History of the Surgeons of London (1974) has a similar focus, as does Robert S. Gottfried’s Doctors and Medicine in Medieval England, 1340–1530 (1986), which broadens its subject matter to consider apothecaries. 20th-century history of scholastic medicine is somewhat divided between studies conducted by practitioners of medicine – or medical professionals –

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at the beginning of the century, and the professional study of the history of medicine, begun quite late in the century. Scholarly work on the sources for the history of medicine was facilitated in no small part by Charles Joseph Singer, a professor in the history of medicine at University College London, and his many publications on Galen, the history of biology and the history of science. It was the work of his wife, Dorothea Waley Singer, however, that allowed the scholarly community unprecedented access to the medical and scientific books held in British and Irish libraries. The results of her endeavors are a card-catalogue (held at the British Library but available, too, on microfilm, and numerous publications: “Survey of Medical Manuscripts dating from before the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 12 (1918–1919): 96–107; and with Annie Anderson, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Plague Texts in Great Britain (1950). A similar work resulted from the collaborative writings and research of Pearl Kibre and Lynn Thorndike. Their Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (1937) remains a standard tool for works of medicine in Latin. Much early work, then, centered on the tradition of Latin scholastic texts in the Middle Ages; for example, George W. Corner’s Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages (1927) contains a revised Latin text of the Anatomia Cophonis. Lynn Thorndike’s Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929) is a survey of manuscript sources for the history of medicine and surgery. Recently – more specifically in the last two decades – academic interest in medicine and medical texts of medieval Europe has shifted to include work on vernacularization; as Keiser notes, “the demand for scientific and practical writings in the English language seems to have become more urgent in the second half of the fourteenth century, and the response … was the production of an extensive corpus of works” (1999, 3595). That demand was mirrored throughout Europe as the producers and readers of medical texts and books embarked upon a massive and important project to translate books out of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. William Cossgrove’s introduction to a dedicated volume of Early Science and Medicine (“The Vernacularization of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Late Medieval Europe,” 3.2 [1998]: 81–87) succinctly explains the situation with regard to medicine as being complex, since “this discipline was both a subject of scholastic study and a practice carried out by healers without formal training, so we find medical texts in vernacular languages, presumably aimed at bridging the gap between learned and popular medicine, which coexisted with far more numerous Latin medical treatises throughout the Middle Ages” (82). However, with the spread of literacy came the translation of the great encyclopedias and works, like those of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Albertus Mag-

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nus, into various vernacular languages and, too, the compilation and even composition of new texts in vernacular languages. One of the most common subjects of medical tracts in the Middle Ages in Europe is phlebotomy, or bloodletting. Because of the belief that astrology / astronomy had a profound influence on all aspects of human existence, particularly connected to medical treatment and diagnosis, many bloodletting tracts are subsumed into longer treatises on the zodiac, into lunary and calendar texts, sometimes going unnoticed since as text might be classified as ‘scientific’ as opposed to medical. On bloodletting and diet see Linne R. Mooney, “Diet and Bloodletting: A Monthly Regimen,” Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed. Lister M. Matheson (1994), 245–61. Medical charms and recipes – connected in some ways to herbalism and herbal lore – present problems in terms of classification, largely because of their closeness to prayers, culinary recipes, and the occult; they present difficulties too in terms of cataloguing because of the sheer numbers that survive, copied either as collections in various types of manuscripts, or preserved individually either in longer tracts or on flyleaves and as marginalia. There is also some overlap into the occult and magic, as acknowledged by the work of John Henry Grafton Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (1952). Again, though, the impetus to list, chronicle, and discuss charms and recipes is primarily evident in short, exploratory yet important work recorded in serial publications. The research by Thomas R. Forbes, for example, took a wide view of folk charms in medicine, noting that in the past, medical historians routinely ignored folk medicine, it being “the product of superstition, hearsay and ignorance,” going on to state that since “good’ medical care was not available to the majority of people in the Middle Ages, charms and such texts are “profoundly important to the social history of medicine” (“Verbal Charms in British Folk Medicine,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115.4 [1971]: 293–316). Forbes goes on to identify varieties of verbal charms and provides examples – that are revealing in terms of how medicine was understood in the Middle Ages – and that include dentistry and exorcism. Similarly Douglas Gray (“Notes on Some Middle English Charms,” Chaucer and Middle English Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, 1974, 56–71) connects medicine and prayer, quoting Singer’s assertion that “paternosters accompany every conceivable medical process” (59). Particularly noteworthy in Gray’s paper is the example of the ‘Flum Jordan’ charm (or Jordan-segen), one of the most frequently occurring methods to staunch blood, and which is transmitted from a 9th-century Latin version into various languages.

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The history of hospitals in the Middle Ages has recently witnessed a revival with the appearance of several dedicated, general studies; this is a welcome trend, according to Alfons Labisch, who notes that hospital histories frequently treat of “single institutions and places … conceptualised and written as special contributions on the occasion of anniversaries” (“Book Review,” Journal of the History of Medicine 56.2 [2001]: 181). Rotha Mary Clay’s Mediaeval Hospitals of England (1909) has long been the reference work for the student of medieval care-giving institutions, and has only recently been matched by Nicholas Orme’s and Margaret Webster’s The English Hospital, 1070–1570 (1995). The latter is now a standard text, being an authoritative examination of hospitals both nationally and locally, providing valuable records of practices, administration, finances and organization (Linda E. Voigts, “Book Review,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 71.4 [1997]: 707). Sheila Sweetinburgh’s recent study, The Role of the Hospital in Medieval England: Gift-Giving and the Spiritual Economy (2004) focuses on local institutions in Kent, and while she draws comparisons with religious and political power structures, Sweetinburgh’s focus is largely on the culture of gift-giving to hospitals. Finally, Günther B. Risse’s Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (1999) offers an overview of hospital history up to the present day, with some sections on the Christian and plague hospitals of the Middle Ages. The history of textual scholarship as it relates to medicine in the Middle Ages is particularly germane here; simply put, without editions of key Latin and vernacular medical texts we would not have as complete a picture of medieval attitudes towards, and the practice of, medicine and surgery. In this regard, the foundation in 1864 of the Early English Texts Society by Frederick James Furnivall, Richard Morris, Walter Skeat and others was crucial to the dissemination of previously-unseen medical tracts – both scholastic and commonplace – throughout the scholarly community. The series had immediate impact, bringing out an Extra Series in 1867, to re-issue texts that already existed in inaccessible editions. Notable amongst the early editions published by the society are Lanfrank’s Science of Cirurgie I (OS 102: 1894; rpt. 2002), edited by Robert von Fleischbacker, and The Anatomie of the Bodie of a Man by Thomas Vicary (ES 53: 1888; rpt. 1996), ed. Frederick J. Furnivall and Percy Furnival. Important, too, are Margaret Sinclair Ogden’s edition, The Liber de Diversis Medicinis in the Thornton Manuscript (OS 207: 1938; rpt. 1970) and her edition of the Cyrurgie of Guy de Chauliac (OS 265: 1971). Important, too, is the edition of William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Feuer Pestilence (Mark Bullen and Arthur Henry Bullen; ES 52: 1888; rpt. 2001), as well as longer, encyclopedic texts that deal with medical matters generally, such as the Secretum Secretorum (ed. Mahmoud. A. Manzalaoui; OS 276: 1977) and

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the verse dialogue Sidrak and Bokkus I and II (ed. Tom Burton; OS 311 & 312: 1998, 1999). Old English medical material is represented chiefly by Hubert J. de Vriend’s The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus (OS 286: 1984). Although the EETS series has done much to promote the editing and publication of lesser-known, overlooked, or obscure medical tracts, the relatively small number of editions of medical texts produced may point to the difficulties faced by editors of these writings; moreover, the Liber de Diversis Medicinis contained in Robert Thornton’s commonplace book, or the material contained in a text like the Secretum, material medica can be absorbed into longer, more generally-themed tracts or books, and hence they defy facile location or definition or, as is probably the case with the EETS, medical texts can be too short, too fragmentary, or too variant to warrant a single edition. The latter two decades of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of interest in Fachliteratur in general (e. g., Bernhard Dietrich Haage and Wolfgang Wegner, Deutsche Fachliteratur der Artes in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, 2007), and in works of medicine in particular, due in no small part to the identification and listing of unedited and/or unnoticed texts and tracts. As George Keiser puts it, “writings that had once seemed marginal and deserving of concern only for their philological value are now being shown to be central to an understanding of literary, social, intellectual, political, and cultural history” (“Scientific, Medical and Utilitarian Prose,” Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards, ed., 2004, 231–48). Medical texts in Middle English have been extremely well-served by Keiser’s own weighty contribution to the Manual of the Writings in Middle English series; his volume ten, Works of Science and Information, includes a lengthy and detailed section on medicine, along with a handlist of manuscripts. Initiatives such as the ongoing publication of volumes in the Index of Middle English Prose series allow editors ready access to handlists of both complete and fragmentary texts surviving in library collections worldwide. Prose medical tracts, specifically, have received continued attention since the inclusion of Laurel Braswell’s chapter on “Medicine” in Edwards’ edited collection Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, 1984, 337–87), which surveyed major texts and traditions, and catalogued known manuscripts preserving materia medica. That the recent updated and reworked version of this volume omits this cataloguing work is testament to the amount of new research carried out in the intervening twenty years. In A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. Edwards (2004), Keiser surveys research to date whilst foregrounding texts and manuscripts in need of further attention (“Scientific, Medical and Utilitarian Prose,” 231–48). The appearance of A New Index of Middle English Verse (Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, 2005)

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records medical treatises that appear in verse form, as well as verse prologues to prose tracts, updating the previous Index of Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins (1943), and its Supplement (Robbins and John. L. Cutler, 1965). There has also been a move to update the philological work carried out by Fredrick J. Furnivall and colleagues for The Early English Text Society at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the last. The publication of Rossell Hope Robbins’s seminal paper, “Medical Manuscripts in Medieval English,” in Speculum (45 [1970]: 393–415) arguably spearheaded attempts to generically classify medical texts in terms of the approach taken by each. Prior to this, Robbins noted, texts were classified either as university tracts or guides for unlearned practitioners. One of the enduring legacies of Robbins’s work has been to encourage specific research work, such as that of Monica H. Green. Her important study, “Obstetrical and Gynecological Texts in Middle English” (Studies in the Age of Chaucer 14 [1992]: 53–88) builds on the work of Robbins, analyzing, identifying, and cataloguing texts which either concern themselves with maladies particular to women or those that address themselves to a female audience or readership. Green notes that several Latin texts on women’s medical concerns (such as the Gynaecia of Musico) circulated in medieval Europe, along with translations from Greek and some translations into Anglo-Norman; these texts were deposited in the extensive libraries of priories and abbeys. Also circulating, and likewise important for research into medical practices concerned with women, are the large encyclopedic tracts, like that of Gilbertus Anglicus, which contained chapters or sections on childbirth and women’s diseases (55). Green’s handlist, which accompanies the paper, divides the extant texts into three categories: Middle English translations of Trotula; manuscripts of “The Sekenesse of Wymmen,” and other obstetrical and gynecological material, including recipe collections and shorter remedies. Studies of the bubonic plague – and the plague tracts first catalogued by Singer and Anderson (1950, see above) – are in many ways the nexus of medical and social history, and were common in the Middle Ages. They have steadily received critical attention throughout the 20th-century, notably by Jean-Noël Biraben’s two-volume Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens (1975); in the work of Luke Demaitre (“The Description and Diagnosis of Leprosy by Fourteenth-Century Physicians,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 59 [1985]: 327–44, and Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body, 2007); and in a more general study by Rosemary Horrox (The Black Death, 1994).

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C. Major Contributors As with the history of science, some of the most important and influential contributions both on the cultural and practical history of medieval medicine have appeared in serials. The journals Isis and Osiris, both founded early in the 20th century, have been the loci for debate, new research, and definitions of the study of medicine. Notable here is the volume of Osiris edited by Michael R. McVaugh Nancy G. Siraisi and dedicated to medical knowledge in Western Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries (6: 1990). This issue contains studies by Vivian Nutton, Chiara Crisciani and Danielle Jacquert, as well as by both editors. One of the standard reference works on the history of medicine in specific societies and European countries is Charles H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (1967), which is aimed at the general reader but nonetheless is exhaustive in its scope, examining medical texts from the leech-book to the scholastic and addressing specific case-studies such as the medical schools at Montpellier and Salerno, as well as treating of subjects such as hygiene and etiquette, hospitals and epidemics. With much of the focus on the history of medicine in England – or indeed on medical texts in Old and Middle English – works that consider continental European medicine are welcome. General studies include Henry Siegerist’s influential two-volume A History of Medicine (1951–1961); France is treated of by Loren C. MacKinney’s Early Medieval Medicine with Special Reference to France and Chartres (1937). Medieval European medical practice and textual history is recovered by Lusia Cogliati Arano’s Medieval Health Handbook – Tacuinum Sanitatis (1976), a blend of medical illustration and texts that display the influence of Arabic medicine – from manuscripts produced in the Po Valley in the late 14th century. Early – and extremely influential – German scholarship for the history of medicine in Europe came with Heinrich Häser’s three-volume Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medizin und der epidemischen Krankheiten: Geschichte der Medizin im Alterthum und Mittelalter (Jena, 1882; rpt.1971). Notable new scholarship in German is the edited volume of conference proceedings from Andreas Meyer and Jürgen Schulz-Grobert, Gesund und krank im Mittelalter: Marburger Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Medizin (2007), containing new research on German and European medical history of the Middle Ages. Research in English with a continental focus includes Vivian Nutton’s “Medicine at the German Universities 1348–1500: A Preliminary Sketch,” Roger. French et al., ed., Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease (1998), 85–109. Nutton has also placed focus on the Netherlands: “Dr James’ Legacy: Dutch Printing and the History of Medicine,” Lotte Hellinga et al., ed., The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in

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the Book Trade, 1473–1941 (2001), 207–18. Medicine and materia medica in Ireland have long been overlooked, with the exception of the work of Winifred Wulff, who edited the Rosa Anglica, a Latin text that was extensively translated into Irish, in 1929. This neglect is slowly being redressed, not least by Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha (“Irish Medical Manuscripts,” Irish Pharmacy Journal 69.5 [1991]: 201–02), and by the important editoral work of the CELT Project (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/medical.html). Cornelius O’ Boyle’s book-length study of the Ars medicine builds upon the important research carried out by Paul Oskar Kristeller on Articella in the late 1970s (“Bartholomaeus, Musandinus and Maurus of Salerno,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 19 [1976]: 57–87). O’ Boyle, in The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250–1400 (1998), traces the textual tradition of the Ars, noting that of all texts studied in medieval and Renaissance medical schools, it attracted the most commentaries. Furthermore, O’ Boyle uses the Ars to compare medical centers in the 13th and 14th centuries, significantly identifying how “differences in the style of textual arrangement in Italy anticipated in Paris, and vice versa” (Walton O. Schalick, “Book Review,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 55.4 [2000]: 428). Schalick also notes that O’Boyle marries textual and social history to demonstrate how the text was used by both students and teachers. Vern L. Bullough has been a major contributor, specifically with regard to the role of the universities, the professionalization of medicine, and the experiences of both students and teachers of medicine not just in England but on the continent. Notable amongst his numerous contributions are: “The Teaching of Surgery at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine 15 (1960): 202–04; “Medical Studies at Medieval Oxford,” Speculum 36 (1961): 600–12; and the monograph The Development of Medicine as a Profession (1966). Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (1999) collects some of the published articles of Jerry Stannard. Perhaps reflecting the trans-disciplinary nature of the history of medicine, this work gathers papers of Stannard’s that were previously disparate, described in one review as having been “hidden away in Festschriften, congress proceedings, and small newsletters” as well as in “journals [such] as the Bulletin of the History of Medicine” (Ynez Violé O’Neill and Mark H. Infusino, “Book Review,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56.2 [2001]: 184). Hailed as the “authority on premodern medical pharmacology,” Stannard’s collection is divided into four main sections: medieval herbals, late medieval Rezeptliteratur, Renaissance Italy and Germany, and species studies, completing a study that is not only important and comprehensive, but reflective of Stannard’s ulti-

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mate legacy: “the development of scholarship that does not disdain Fachliteratur” (O’Neill and Infusino, 2001, 187). Significant here, too, is Tony Hunt’s Plant Names of Medieval England (1989), a scholarly and comprehensive account of the complex linguistic history and medical significance of botany. Linda Ersham Voigts, “Scientific and Medical Books,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (1989), 345–402, and Peter M. Jones, “Medicine and Science,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga et al. (1999), 433–69, are the starting points for students of book history, textual dissemination, and reception of medieval English medical treatises. Parallel to this, Renate Wittern offers a solid overview of the continuities and changes in the history of medicine from the 14th to the 16th century (“Kontinuität und Wandel in der Medizin des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts,” Mittelalter und frühe Neuzeit, ed. Walter Haug, 1999, 550–71). The cataloguing work carried out by Singer (1919) and Thorndike and Kibre (1937) are still relevant, built upon by Voigts (1984), Keiser (1999), and the re-publications by Voigts and Kurtz (2000), and Pahta et al. (2004). In the areas of the contribution of medieval women to medicine, and the medical care of women in the Middle Ages, Monica H. Green’s research must be the starting point. Falling into both categories, Green’s edited translation of and commentary on the 11th-century Trotula, a compendium of gynecological, regimens of health, and other material pertaining to the wellbeing of women, is the first modern translation into English of a text that circulated widely and in learned circles for much of the medieval period (Christiane Nockels, “Book Review,” Journal of the History of Medicine 57 [2002]: 353). The Trotula, reputedly authored by a woman named Trota in Salerno, is not only revealing in terms of contemporary medical treatment of women but is important too for the study of attitudes to and actualities of female sexual practices. A general study on women’s health issues, specifically gynecology, is Paul Diepgen’s Frau und Frauenheilkunde in der Kultur des Mittelalters (1963). Significant in the latter distinction is Beryl Rowland’s Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (1981), which edits a text from London, British Library, MS Sloane 2463; for a response to this, see Jerry Stannard and Linda E. Voigts in Speculum 57 (1982): 422–26. M.-R. Hallaert does similar work in “The Sekenesse of wymmen: A Middle English Treatise on Diseases in Women (Yale Medical Library, MS 47 fols. 60r-71v,” Scripta: Mediaeval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 8 (1982). For a comprehensive study of the relationship between the body, medicine, and gender, see Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomassat, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (1988).

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Anglo-Norman medicine and medical texts have recently had one sole champion in Tony Hunt; his Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts (1990) edited some previously ignored treatises, recipes, and notes. In Anglo-Norman Medicine, vol. 1: Roger Frugard’s ‘Chirurgia’ and the ‘Practica brevis’ of Platearius (1994), he treats the scholastic tradition; both texts are academic and theoretical, and Hunt comments on the contexts in which they survive, noting the close connections between French and English medicine in the 12th century (John Scarborough, “Review,” Isis 86.3 (1995): 477–48). Scarborough observes, too, that the fresh editions of and commentaries on these surgical texts represent the “long-awaited corrections to the badly edited Latin texts by Karl Sudhoff” at the beginning of the 20th century (477). The second volume of that work, Shorter Treatises (1997), completes the edition of the Anglo-Norman texts from Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.1.20 (the Trotula and a treatise on visitation of the sick) and includes two medical compendia: the “Euperiston” from Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS 18.6.9, and the practica from Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.5.32. Volume 2 also contains a comprehensive bibliography, manuscript descriptions, and discussion. Earlier work on the social history Anglo-Norman medicine was carried out by Edward J. Kealey: Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine (1981). The contribution of Karl Sudhoff to German medical history cannot be ignored. Generally credited with the professionalization of medical history as a discipline in German universities, Sudhoff published extensively, his focus being philological and source-oriented (Thomas Rütten, “Karl Sudhoff and ‘the Fall’ of German Medical History,” Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings, ed. Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, 2004, 95–114). His editorial work for the Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin (est. 1907) led to the change in name to Sudhoff ’s Archiv in 1929; both publications are littered with his contributions, and are too numerous to mention here; however, among the most influential are his work on the translator Gerard of Cremona: “Die kurze Vita und das Verzeichnis der Arbeiten Gerhards von Cremona,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 14 (1923): 73–82, and his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chirurgie im Mittelalter: Graphische und textliche Untersuchungen in mittelalterlichen Handschriften, 2 vols. (1914–1918). Medical imagery, or illustrations in medical manuscripts (or, indeed, accompanying medical texts) were also concerns of Sudhoff’s; he surveyed anatomical drawings and schemas in “Anatomische Zeichnungen (Schemata) aus dem 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und eine Skelettzeichnung des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Studien zur Geschichte der Medizin (1907), 49–65. Such matters, however, have more recently had their champions in Loren Mac-

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Kinney and Peter M. Jones, who build upon the work of Charles Singer (“Thirteenth Century Miniatures Illustrating Medical Practice,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 9 [1916]: 29–42). MacKinney’s Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts (1965) is influential, covering medical manuscripts and texts in nearly 200 European library repositories; Jones’s Medieval Medical Miniatures (1984) and the slightly revised version, Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts (1998) are comprehensive and authoritative, and contain admirable, wide-ranging surveys of medieval European medicine in their respective introductions. Also useful is Robert Herrlinger’s A History of Medical Illustrations from Antiquity to AD 1600 (1966). Some recent, general yet important overviews are excellent for an introduction to trends in research: in particular, Carol Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (1995) and Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (1998). An accessible study has also recently been produced by Roy Porter: Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine (2003). Rawcliffe has, moreover, contributed a valuable compendium of documentary sources: Sources for the History of Medicine in Late Medieval England (1995). D. Discussion of Current Research In recent times, technology has been employed to produce searchable databases of texts surviving in Middle English in particular. The CD-Rom, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (routinely cited as eVK; Linda Ersham Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, 2000) hosts an searchable database of texts, critical editions and secondary material, and catalogues approximately ten thousand items from 1,134 codices surviving from the period 1375–1475 (Linda Ersham Voigts, “What’s the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England,” Speculum 71.4 [1996]: 813–26). Revealingly, only one hundred of these texts have been fully edited (Päivi Pahta and Irma Taavitsainen, “Vernacularisation of Scientific and Medical Writing in Its Sociohistorical Context,” Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, 2004, 1–22. This publication helpfully incorporates the still-relevant work carried out by Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre in their ‘TK’ Index (Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (1937, rev. 1963). An equally important electronic publication comes out of the collaboration between Päivi Pahta, Martii Mäkinen, and Irma Taavitsainen, along with Raymond Hickey, taking the form of a fully-searchable CD-Rom entitled Middle English Medical Texts or MEMT (2005). This resource, which is intended for use by philologists and linguists as well as historians of medicine, covers the period 1375–1500 (from c. 1330 for recipes). It differs from

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eVK in that it mostly edits texts from printed sources, though some texts have been transcribed for the first time from their manuscript sources (Peter Grund, “Book Review,” Journal of English Linguistics 35.1 [2007]: 103). The compilers impose a classification system on the eighty-three texts examined: surgical, specialized, and remedies and materia medica, distinguishing verse texts. The CD-Rom features a comprehensive introduction, detailing editorial practices, relevant scholarly publications and editions, and catalogues, cross-referencing both Keiser (1999), eVK and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin, 1986) (Year’s Work in English Studies 86.1: 216). The CD-Rom places its focus on the later Middle Ages, naturally, due to the exponential increase in the numbers of texts appearing in English, as opposed to in Latin or French, at this time; significantly, this publication also contains extracts from, for example, John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things and from some versions of the Secretum, both of which contain medical advice and lore. Advances in textual scholarship and in the identification, classification, and cataloguing of texts has allowed research to be concentrated on specific contexts of medieval medicine; M. Teresa Tavormina’s Sex, Ageing and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium (2006) places focus on one MS, Cambridge, Trinity College, R.14.52, and seems to be representative of a shift in studies of medieval medicine. Work by the same author on uroscopy is similarly demonstrative of the tendency toward focused, specialized studies (“The Twenty-Jordan Series: An Illustrated Middle English Uroscopy Text,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Notes, Articles, and Reviews 18.3 (2005): 43–67. On the whole, the future of research into medicine in the European Middle Ages is taking a directional change, discovering what medical texts and their audiences can tell us about reading contexts and communities, scribal activity, and book history, rather than just the theory and practice of medicine. Recent work on reception, sociolinguistics, and translation collected by Taavitsainen and Pahta (2004) is significant in that it foregrounds the more holistic treatment of the history of medicine in the Middle Ages. Select Bibliography Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Tony Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, 2 vols. (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1994); Loren C. MacKinney, Early Medieval Medicine with Special Reference to France and Chartres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937); Roy Porter, The Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rossell Hope Robbins, “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English,” Speculum 45.3 (1970): 393–415; George Sarton, “The History of Science versus the History

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of Medicine,” Isis 23.2 (1935): 313–20; Henry A. Siegerist, “The History of Medicine and The History of Science,” Bulletin in the History of Medicine 4 (1936): 1–13; Jerry Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999); Scientific and Medical Writing in Late Medieval English, ed. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Carrie Griffin

Historiography of Medieval Science A. Foundations and Early Debates: Scientific Revolution or Continuity The history of 20th-century interest in medieval science and science history begins with George Sarton (1884–1956) and Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). Sarton is considered to be the founder of the history of science, since he worked to establish the infrastructure and tools required for the institutionalization of the discipline. In 1912, he founded the journal Isis, which continues as the foremost journal in the field. With funding from the Carnegie institute, he conducted research and directed graduate students at Harvard. His Introduction to the History of Science (3 vol., 1919–48) was intended to be a compendium of sources for students. However, he underestimated the slow pace of historical research and after three decades, he was only able to complete half of the projected volumes, and so the study ends with 14th-century Europe. Sarton had established the study of science history, believing that it would become a “new humanism” and would celebrate the achievement of human progress from superstitious belief to enlightened rationalism (Thackray and Merton, “George Sarton,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1976, XI: 113). Sarton’s idealistic teleology of progress has disappeared as a methodological principle and an explanation of scientific change. However, questions concerning the causes of scientific change remain central to the discipline: To what degree are changes in scientific thought the consequence of historical continuity or the result of rebellion against tradition? What factors should be considered when examining the causes for change? Is the history of scientific theory best described as a sequence of intellectually motivated changes, as “internalist” historians would argue? Or are scientific changes motivated by social or economic pressures, or by personal or religious beliefs, as “externalist” historians maintain? Pierre Duhem provided a radical reformulation of the first question, and introduced a new thesis for the nature of scientific change. Duhem was

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perhaps the first person to recognize the intellectual worth of medieval science and to challenge Burkhart’s representation of the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual stagnation. In his three-volume Études sur Léonard de Vinci (1906–1913) Duhem argued that many of the scientific theories supposedly developed by Leonardo and Descartes were already found among the 14th-century scholastics. In the first four volumes of Le système du monde he presented medieval theories of cosmology, and demonstrated how the reaction to Aristotelian science in the 14th century allowed a new conceptualization of the word-system to develop and flourish. Duhem translated and set into print the work of Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan and other scholastics, whose writings were previously unknown, being concealed in the Paris archives. Drawing from the innovative achievements of these masters, Duhem argued that the history of scientific change was characterized principally by continuity and respect for tradition, not by revolution, reaction or the inspiration of isolated genius. He argued that 14th-century theories of motion already contained the essential elements of classical physics, and that many of the so-called innovations of the 17th century had drawn largely from this earlier period. Duhem’s thesis had a polarizing effect and initiated an on-going debate between medievalists, who defended the importance of earlier innovations, and early modernists, who saw their chosen period as introducing a fundamentally different character of thought. Alexandre Koyré (1882–1964), a historian of early modern science, was perhaps Duhem’s most persuasive and influential opponent. He maintained that revolution was a necessary part of scientific change, and indeed Koyré’s description of the Scientific Revolution shaped the 20th-century understanding of the notion (H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, 1994, 74). Koyré argued that the science of the early modern era broke radically with its predecessors. If the early modern period had intellectual precursors at all, these were to be found among the Greeks with Archimedes, not in the Middle ages with Oresme and Buridan, as Duhem claimed (Koyré, Études galiléennes, 1939). He also argued that Duhem had grossly over-exaggerated the importance of the Condemnations of 1277 as inaugurating a new era in scientific thought, since the event was more accurately the result of ignorance and misunderstanding (Koyré “Le Vide et l’espace infinie au XIVe siècle,” AHDLMA 24 [1949]: 47–91). Several scholars in the United States extended Duhem’s continuity thesis, applying the principle to other historical periods or other aspects of scientific thought. During the years that Duhem was engaged in research for his Études sur Léonard de Vinci, Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) had nearly

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completed his dissertation on the place of magic and experimental science in intellectual history. Thorndike received his doctorate in 1905 and in the following decade published several articles on Roger Bacon and astrology. The publication of the first volume of The History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923) marked the beginning of his life’s work. This encyclopedic study of the history of science would extend eight volumes and four decades (1923–64), and today Thorndike’s study remains an important research tool for the history of science. Like Duhem, Thorndike introduced into currency a wealth of texts and authors which had long remained hidden in European archives. However, Thorndike’s handling of primary sources was more careful and attentive than that of Duhem. Duhem often overtranslated the scholastic authors, presenting medieval natural philosophy in the terms of 20th-century physics. In addition, Duhem had also set the writings of individual authors into an overarching narrative of progress. Thorndike’s scholarship resisted providing a connecting narrative. Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937) drew from Thorndike’s work, but focused his attention upon the 12th century. He considered the dissemination of Arabic treatises in mathematics and physics over the course of the century, and demonstrated how the influx of these texts contributed to the cultural renaissance of that period (Studies in the History of Medieval Science, 1924). Thorndike provided a favorable review of the book (Review: “C.H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science,” American Historical Review 30 [1925]: 344–46). The scientific topics Duhem investigated – physical theory, cosmology, and mathematics – would dominate and define the history of science during its first few decades. Attention to these areas was reinforced by George Sarton, who preferred the theoretical nature of physical science. Sarton promoted internalist histories; that is, he considered the history of science to be a history purely of ideas. He objected to the study of the history of magic, which he considered to be antithetical to true scientific inquiry: the historian of science does not study magic, Sarton claimed, “because this does not help him very much to understand human progress” (Introduction to the History of Science, 1927, I: 19). Consequently, Sarton was initially critical of Thorndike’s work (Review: “Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era,” Isis 6 [1924]: 74–89). However, he did acknowledge Thorndike’s contributions: the eleventh volume of Osiris (1954) is dedicated to Lynn Thorndike. Likewise, Sarton considered the history of life sciences to be secondary to the study of physics and mathematics: “the historian of medicine who imagines that he is ipso facto a historian of science, is laboring under a gross de-

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lusion […] however excellent of its kind, considered as history of science, [the history of medicine] is essentially incomplete and misleading” (Sarton, “The History of Science Versus the History of Medicine,” Isis 23 [1935]: 315–20). Sarton’s preferences held a wider currency among historians of his generation, and so the initial decades of the history of science were dominated by these interests. The history of biology, chemistry and medicine has received less attention. The history of medieval technology emerged as a topic in the early 1960s, thanks largely to Lynn White, Jr. The history of occult arts and experimentation has held an ambiguous relationship with historians of science, being disregarded by Sarton and positivist historians, but supported by the Warburg Institute and its community of scholars. During the 1960s the breadth of topics encompassing medieval science would continue to diversify, as scholars became more attentive to the ways in which social factors impinge upon and shape theories. The scientific problems which Duhem had introduced continued to receive attention between the 1920s and 1960s. These topics included theories of projectile motion, the acceleration of bodies in free fall, the intention and remission of forms, the reformulation of Aristotelian theories of space and time, and finally, speculations concerning other possible worlds and void space. However, while Duhem’s topics persisted, the cardinal points of his continuity thesis were modified. In 1959, Marshall Clagett (1916–2005) a student of Lynn Thorndike, observed that “the succeeding study of medieval mechanics has been largely devoted to an extension or refutation of Duhem’s work” (The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, 1959, xxi). There are three principle components to Duhem’s continuity thesis, all of which were revised by the scholars of these decades. First, Duhem claimed that the principal achievements of 17th-century physics were already found in 14th-century science. For example, he claimed that Buridan’s impetus theory already embodied the law of inertia. The second part of Duhem’s thesis identified the Condemnations of 1277 as the primary cause for the remarkable outgrowth of innovative theories throughout the 14th century. The Condemnations of 1277 had challenged Aristotelian philosophy and its definitions of time and space. Consequently philosophers were free to formulate new definitions of the universe and so cultivate a new breed of experimental science. Duhem even claimed that 1277 signaled the birth date of modern science. The third, less crucial aspect of the thesis was that the principal achievements of the 14th century occurred in France. He gave considerable attention to the French masters Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme, and overlooked the role of the Oxford Calculators. He often credited the French masters with innovations which had in fact originated among the Oxford Calculators

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(John E. Murdoch, “Pierre Duhem and the History of Late Medieval Science and Philosophy in the Lain West,” Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento, ed. Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Maieru, 1991, 253–302). The Dutch scholar, Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965), was one of the first to respond to Duhem’s work. In his Val en Worp (1924), he continued to examine the topics which Duhem introduced: the theory of free fall and projectile motion. His De Mechanisering van het wereldbeeld (1950) (in English trans.: The Mechanization of the World Picture, 1960) proposed that scientific developments were spurred by the “mathematization” of nature; in other words mathematical and mechanical explanations of physical change were fundamental in bringing about modern science. For instance, Bradwardine’s theories of motion, describing variations in speeds through a series of proportions, thus represent an important step towards Galileo’s experimentations in measuring velocities. Like Duhem, Dijksterhuis emphasized the continuity of scientific thought, though he would also criticize Duhem for inaccuracies in his translations. Anneliese Maier (1905–1971) provided one of the most influential reassessments of Duhem’s thesis. She agreed with principle of continuity; however she criticized Duhem for anachronism and presentism. Duhem had often translated scholastic theories into the terms of 20th-century physics presentind them in relation to the writings of Galileo or Leonardo. Maier maintained that 14th-century scholasticism must be examined in its own terms, without reference to later periods. While Duhem translated his Latin sources into French, Maier provided extensive Latin quotations to supplement her German prose, and she used the terminology found within the authors themselves, rather than importing terms from classical physics. She modified Duhem’s continuity thesis. She demonstrated that the 14th-century theory of impetus was fundamentally different from the law of inertia. Thus, she claimed, the latter generation of 17th-century scientists can indeed be credited with introducing a revolutionary new order of nature. The title of her book, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert (1949), suggestively indicates her response to Duhem’s thesis. Obviously, then, Maier did not see 1277 as the birthdate of modern science; nor did she consider it the primary cause of change initiating the re-conceptualization of nature in the 14th century. She looked for other historical influences, and found that 14th-century natural philosophy had imported many of its innovations from optics, medicine and technology. Apart from her criticisms and revisions, Maier still hailed Duhem’s research as a pioneering achievement, not only because he had brought to light so much scholastic material, but because he opened up a new field of research.

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Maier published a series of articles on 14th-century impetus theory throughout the 1940s. The articles are still considered authoritative today. At the time of their publication, however, her contributions were not acknowledged, being overshadowed by the war. At the end of the 1950s, Marshall Clagett drew attention to the importance of her work, and he is likely responsible for the recognition she received in North America and her influence there. In the same preface where Clagett states the ambiguity of Duhem’s legacy, he praises Maier for having put Duhem’s discoveries into their proper setting (The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, 1959, xxi). Because of Clagett’s praise, Maier’s method of presentation and analysis formed the model for examining scholastic material, situating it in its philosophical and historical context (Edith Sylla, Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science, 1997, xii). Marshall Clagett’s scholarship shared with Maier’s own a careful attention to detail and fidelity to 14th-century terms. His most influential book, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1959) examined the medieval science of weights and motion. He drew attention to the importance of the Oxford Calculators, which Duhem had overlooked. He collaborated with Ernst Moody, who originally had served on Clagett’s dissertation committee, and together they edited a collection of medieval statistical works: The Medieval Science of Weights: Treatises ascribed to Euclid, Archimedes, Thatbit ibn Qurrar, Jordanus de Nemore, and Blasius of Parma (1952). Clagett would pursue this interest in the history of weights, editing Latin translations of Archimedes’ writings (Archimedes in the Middle Ages, 10 vol., 1964–1984). Clagett engaged in a detailed investigation of specific topics and signaled the need for more critical editions and translations of sources in medieval science which might facilitate further studies of this nature. The students of Moody and Clagett answered this call and produced critical editions of their own: Lamar Crosby, Jr., Curtis Wilson, and Edward Grant, have provided a small library of edited texts, published through University of Wisconsin. Alister Crombie presented a variation Duhem’s continuity thesis, invoking a different body of evidence. His Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100–1700 (1953) claimed that the procedure of experimentation carried out by Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon formed the model for the experimental method of Francis Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton. All of these thinkers recorded the results of their experiments by writing discourses and in doing so, they followed a medieval tradition. Clagett spoke positively of the book, but cautioned that the causal chain which Crombie had outlined exaggerated the evidence (Review: “A. Crombie, Robert Grossetest and the Origins of Experimental Science,” Isis 46

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[1955]: 66–69). Koyré challenged the book and argued that the documentation of experimentation is not enough to create science (“The Origins of Modern Science: New Interpretation,” Diogenes 16 [1956]: 1–22). Koyré was interested in the more theoretical branches of science. Like Dijksterhuis, he believed that the mathematization of physical sciences had lead to the Scientific Revolution and he disregarded the role of the technical or experimental as a force for scientific change. Crombie would find a more sympathetic voice with Lynn White and others who were more willing to consider the role of the technical or experimental in shaping science theories. B. “Paradigm Shifts”: Social Forces in Science History During the 1960s, the study of science history changed dramatically, as scholarship became more aware of how knowledge can be shaped and determined by social forces. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In the year prior to this publication, a symposium on science history was held at Oxford, and it anticipated some of the redirections heralded by Kuhn’s study. The title of the published proceedings, Scientific Change: Historical Studies in the Intellectual, Social and Technical Conditions for Scientific Discovery and Technical Invention, from Antiquity to the Present, as well as the list of presented topics, both point to a growing interest in sociological factors and in the role of technology; the papers show that the range of topics in science history was becoming increasingly diversified. Lynn’s paper, “What Accelerated Technological Progress in the Western Middle Ages” anticipated his book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, published in the following year. Kuhn’s paper “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research” anticipated the problems discussed in the The Structure. A. C. Crombie’s introduction to the published proceedings acknowledges the diversity of factors, both internal and external, which the historian of science considers. The study of science history began to look increasingly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of science history was only underscored by Kuhn’s important study. What is so powerful and original with Kuhn’s account is that it describes scientific theory as being embedded in culture and language. He describes a knowledge system as shaped, not only by its own internal logic, but by definitions which are agreed upon by a community of practitioners; thus scientific theory is a sociological phenomenon. He describes knowledge systems as languages with their own lexicons, which require translation; thus science theory shares the hermeneutical problems of literary studies. Kuhn was hugely successful in disseminating his thesis because he invited the entry of different disciplines. In response, these disciplines appropriated his model, so that the term “paradigm shift” is today ap-

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plied throughout the humanities and social sciences. To what degree a Kuhnian paradigm shift, in its strictest sense, can be applied to medieval science is debated (Edward Grant, “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View,” History of Science 16 [1978]: 93–106). The role of belief systems or symbolic mentalities which had been previously characterized as anti-rational and antithetical to science were reconsidered and shown to be influential for major scientific thinkers. Frances Yates pointed to the influence of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism in the work of Giordano Bruno (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964). Her claims were often overstated, and her work has been reconsidered and modified in succeeding studies (Charles B. Schmitt, Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science, 1981; Robert Westman, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, 1977). Studies examining the origins of modern chemistry in alchemical and occult practices were stimulated by Walter Pagel (Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 1958), and Allen Debus (The English Paracelsians, 1965). Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966), might be grouped as part of these investigations, since it also examined how symbolic mentalities persisted in the scientific discourse of the early modern period. However, Brian Copenhaver has challenged the historical grounding of Foucault’s method, describing the work as “architecture,” not “archeology” (“Did Science have a Renaissance?” Isis 83 [1992]). The intersection of the history of science and the religion was examined by the Dutch historian R. Hooykaas, who made the counter-intuitive claim that Greek science was hindered by its overconfidence in reason, and that the facts of nature can only be clearly interpreted when the claims of reason are balanced with experience (Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, 1972). Amos Funkenstein demonstrated how medieval theological conceptions of divine omnipresence and divine knowledge were transformed into the principles of 17th-century science (Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 1986). Given the tremendous growth in the field from the 1970s to the present, the following survey can only provide a sketch of major contributions. John Murdoch has written numerous articles examining the Oxford Calculators and the principal advancements which distinguished 14th-century physics and mathematics. Edith Sylla’s published dissertation The Oxford Calculators and the Mathematics of Motion, 1320–1350, Physics and Measurement by Latitudes (1991) provides a detailed investigation of the major figures in the Oxford school. Murdoch’s historiographical article surveying the scholarly literature on 14th-century philosophy is an invaluable research tool for navigating these studies (“Pierre Duhem and the History of Late Medieval Science and

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Philosophy in the Latin West” Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento, ed. Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Maieru, 1991). Edward Grant’s books cover a wider historical range and address the history of cosmologies. His Much Ado About Nothing (1981) examines a history of theories concerning void space and the vacuum. His Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos 1200–1687 (1991) considers changes in theories of cosmology and natural philosophy over the course of these centuries. His A Source Book in Medieval Science (1974) remains the most comprehensive collection of primary sources in medieval science. Richard Sorabji also investigates the history of cosmologies; however his research engages more directly with the transmission of Greek theories of cosmology through the Arabic and Jewish traditions (Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 1983; Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, 1987). David Lindberg’s books provide a helpful overview, showing the historical development of topics. His earlier career was devoted to the medieval science of optics. He edited John Pecham and the Science of Optics (1970), and later wrote an overview of medieval optical theories: Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (1976). His Science in the Middle Ages (1978) provided a compilation of essays from leading scholars of different fields and aimed to serve as an introduction to each of these branches of medieval science. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context 600–1450 (1992) readdresses the topics of Science in the Middle Ages, and inserts the topics into a framework spanning centuries and cultural traditions. C. The History of Medicine The historiography of medical history has undergone a similar transition, from an emphasis on the intellectual theories of doctors, to a cultural history of practices and patients. The earliest histories of medicine appeared during the 18th and 19th centuries and were written by doctors for a medical audience. H. E. Sigerist was one of the first scholars to consider medicine as a sociological phenomenon. When Sarton questioned the status of medicine as a science in an article titled “The History of Science Versus the History of Medicine” Sigerist issued a printed response titled “The History of Medicine and the History of Science” in which he defended the history of medicine as a field of study in its own right. The history of medicine is not a subsidiary of science history, he claimed, but a social science (“The History of Medicine and the History of Science,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 4 [1936]: 1–13). Sigerist’s A History of Medicine (2 vol., 1951–1961) is one of the

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first histories to include a study of patients, as well as doctors, and to draw from historical and medical texts alike. The history of medieval medicine has given considerable attention to medical treatises and institutional history. Pearl Kibre published several articles on the curriculum of medical studies at medieval institutions; she also edited the Hippocrates Latinus. Vivian Nutton examined the continuity of the Galenic tradition. Danielle Jacquart investigated the transmission of Arabic medicine into the Latin west, giving particular attention to the influence of Gerard of Cremona’s translations. The cultural impact of disease has been most extensively investigated in relation to the Plague. Studies include Philip Ziegler’s Black Death (1969); Ann Carmichael, The Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (1986); Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (1994). The rift between institutional learning and the experience of the patient is more pronounced in medieval medicine, where the education of physicians was based upon texts and theory, while those who practiced healing-arts could include unschooled practitioners and midwives. Michael Mcvaugh’s Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients (1993) successfully bridges the polarity between theory and practice. He draws upon his knowledge of Arnald of Villanova’s medical writings and examines the relation between his theoretical writing and the documented evidence of his practice. The collection of essays included in Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture (ed. Sheila D. Campbell et al., 1992), investigates links between medical practice and its social impact. Carole Rawcliffe’s Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (1995) draws from literary sources to reveal popular beliefs, examines the economic factors of cost and availability of treatment, and considers the largely undocumented history of midwives. Faye Getz’s Medicine in the English Middle Ages (1998) examines the relation between the medical practitioner and patient, and considers how the practitioner establishes a reputation and audience. Nancy Sirasi’s Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: an Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (1994) provides an overview of medieval medical theory and its applications. Several studies have examined the intersection between medical theory and notions of the body and sexuality: Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (1993); Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasett, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (1995); Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1992).

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D. The History of Technology The history of medieval technology was pioneered by Lynn White. He introduced the topic to North American scholarship (“Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15 [1940]: 141–59). A. C. Crombie, given his interest in history of experimentation, encouraged White’s scholarship and invited him to contribute to the Oxford Symposium on Scientific Change in 1961. White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) explored developments in agriculture, irrigation, and military technology. He showed the impact technological innovation had on medieval society, and demonstrated how advances in agriculture led to increasing food supplies and rising population levels. He also introduced new models of research, drawing upon evidence from archeology, iconography and art history, as opposed to documented records (White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays, Introduction, 1978). White’s research focused on technologies in agriculture. However, the field of medieval technology has significantly broadened to include the study of innovations in glass-making, cartography, navigation, and jewelry. The list of entries in the recently published Medieval Science Technology and Medicine: An Encyclopedia (ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005), indicates the extent to which the field has diversified. Following the interest in the influence of technology upon scientific theory, Elizabeth Eisenstein examined the role of the printing press in the Scientific Revolution in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). She argued that the Scientific Revolution was made possible by print technology, since it allowed for the dissemination and influence of emerging theories. Eisenstein’s perceptive appreciation of the power of print technology to establish knowledge and authority has been tremendously influential; however, several of her claims within the book have required modification (Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada, and Nick Jardine, 2000; and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, 1998). These studies on print technology have implications for our understanding of medieval science, since they suggest how communication media shape scientific theories and communities. From Sarton’s unified vision of the objectives of the history of science, the field has grown and diversified to include a broad range of questions and themes. This growth implies certain challenges. There have been an increasing number of studies on specialized topics, and it has become very difficult to offer a synoptic, generalized account of the history which the discipline purports to examine. One speaks of a “Scientific Revolution” with quotations marks, since so many studies have pointed to its failings and anach-

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ronistic presuppositions. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (ed. David Lindberg, and Robert Westman, 1990) contains a collection of statements from prominent historians who consider whether the term “Scientific Revolution” still holds validity. One of the future challenges for the discipline will be to recover or discover its purpose and identity. Select Bibliography Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1974); John Harley Warner, “History of Science and the Science of Medicine,” Osiris 10 (1995): 164–93; David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious and institutional context, 600B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Anneliese Maier, Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1949); John E. Murdoch, “Pierre Duhem and the History of Late Medieval Science and Philosophy in the Lain West,” Gli studi filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento, ed. Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Maieru (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1991), 253–302; Nancy Sirasi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Lynn Thorndike, The History of Magic and Experimental Science in the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 8 vols., 1923–1958).

Sarah Powrie

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I Iberian Studies A. Definition Medieval Iberian studies began with fits and starts, but slowly grew and developed to become an energetic field of study that continues to open new avenues to illuminating and understanding the Middle Ages and the role of Iberian inhabitants in shaping Western, as well as Eastern thought and tradition. In broad terms, the history of Iberian studies may be said to begin in the 19th century with the three-volume work by George Ticknor in 1854 (History of Spanish Literature), followed by Amador De Los Ríos’s seven-volume work seven years later (Historia crítica de la literatura española, 1861–1865). Ticknor’s research and presentation of Iberian texts was colored by a philosophy of literature that led him to pursue a historical rather than critical examination of the works he presented, and to emphasize “national character” as a central tenet to that philosophy. The “genuinely national” expressions of character were to be found in the 13th to the 15th centuries and “El cantar de mío Cid,” more than history or fact was seen by Ticknor to contain the manners and interests of the Spanish “race.” The presentation of his work to a non-Spanish speaking world was hailed not only by western Europeans outside of Spain, but within Spain as well. For Spaniards of the later 19th century, the value of Ticknor’s work lay in its service to the definition of a Spanish national identity in particular, which he defined in his study. In fact, writers of the Generation of 1898, foundering after the loss of the last vestiges of Spanish empire and greatness during the Spanish and American war, found in Ticknor’s History a noble character that was for all intents and purposes Castilian. Emblematic of attempts to describe a Spanish national identity through medieval peninsular texts is the work of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, whose influence on Iberian Medieval Studies continues to be felt to the present day. Menéndez Pidal founded a school of scholars in what was called Neotraditionalism that expanded on German Romantic theories of folk traditions of literary composition. The later 19th century approach involved analyzing concepts of anonymous poets, a series of continuously re-worked medieval compositions, and the diffusion of these compositions by traveling

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minstrels. The analysis provided by this school was closely related to Ticknor’s preference for folk literature and in particular, ballads, as indicators of national characteristics. Menéndez Pidal likewise privileged ballads, marking those from Castile as the most significant and original (La épica medieval española: Desde sus orígenes hasta su disolución en el Romancero, ed. Diego Catalán and María del Mar Bustos, 1992). When he turned his critical eye on the epic, he included a section on the national value of the work (La España del Cid, 1929) in the introduction to his edition of the “Cid.” Pidal’s historico-literary approach privileged Castile as the center of historical, literary and linguistic developments in Spain and, due to his prolific and meticulous interdisciplinary scholarship, marginalized, in effect, all other cultures on the Iberian Peninsula as secondary, inferior, or copied works from Castilian originals. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that the association of Spain = Castile was finally brought up for debate with arguments to include influences that had been previously ignored, specifically, Jewish, Arabic, and the range of important Iberian cultures geographically peripheral to Castile, especially those of Catalunya and Galicia, to name two. B. Major Scholars Perhaps the scholar most responsible for challenging the central position of Castile in the Spanish Middle Ages was Américo Castro who published his España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos in 1948. Castro’s thesis was that medieval Spanish culture was unique in Europe due to the confluence and mixing of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures on the peninsula. His thesis was given support in the same year with Samuel Stern’s “discovery” of the jarchas, strophs in Mozarabic that formed part of a larger poetic composition written in Arabic or Hebrew presented in the article “Les vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwassahs hipano-hébraïques: Une contribution a l’histoire du muwassah et a l’étude du vieux dialecte espagnol ‘mozarabe’” (Al-Andalus, XIII, 1948). In addition, Ernst Robert Curtius published Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, in the same year, a major study of medieval Latin literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European languages. The effect of Castro’s work, Stern’s discovery, and Curtius’s insertion of Spain in the broader European medieval milieu through his study, was to open the door to debate on the historico-literary approach espoused by Menéndez Pidal and his school, as well as initiate discussions on the Iberian medieval canon in its broadest sense. In point of fact, the three studies were not mutually supportive nor were they universally embraced. They continue to spark opposing points of view, for example, concerning the uniqueness of Iberian culture due to the influence of the

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three different cultural groups that occupied the peninsula for some 700 years (Américo Castro: The Impact of His Thought: Essays to Mark the Centenary of His Birth, ed. Ronald E. Surtz et al, 1988). Nevertheless, the impact on Iberian Studies was to open, over time, and expand fields of investigation (The Sephardi Heritage: Essays on the History and Cultural Contribution of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, vol. I, ed. R. D. Barnett, 1971; The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Handbuch der Orientalistik, vol. 12, 1992; José Mattoso, Identificação de um país: Ensaio sobre as origens de Portugal, 1096–1325, 2 vols., 1985). Approaches and topics, combined with the rigorous interdisciplinary research introduced by Menéndez Pidal, yielded a robust, ever-widening and more eclectic field of investigation focused on the Iberian Middle Ages. For the first time, these discussions moved beyond the Pyrenees and introduced Medieval Iberian scholars to works by Marc Bloch (La société féodale, 2 vols., 1939, 1940), Otto Brunner (Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutschlands im Mittelalter, 1939), Georges Duby (L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiévale (France, Angleterre, Empire, IX–XV siècles): Essai de synthèse et perspectives de recherches, 2 vols., 1962), Umberto Eco (Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale, 1959) and Jacques Le Goff (La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval, 1964), for example. Attempts to broaden the fields of study concerning the Iberian Middle Ages faced some limitations, the first of which was the scholars’ limited access to pertinent materials important to the investigation of the Iberian Middle Ages. Histories of the time period were antiquated, as were encyclopedias and had to be updated (Benito Sánchez Alonso, Fuentes de la historia española e hispano-americana, 3 vols., 3rd ed., 1952; and António José Saraiva, História da Cultura em Portugal, 1950). Bibliographies of the Iberian Middle Ages were limited until Francisco López Estrada published his Introducción a la literatura medieval española in 1952. Rafael Lapesa (Historia de la lengua española, 1942) contributed a still-valuable linguistic study and Joan Corominas (Diccionario crítico-etimológico de la lengua castellana, 1954) added his critical and etymological dictionary to the linguistic studies of the languages in use on the peninsula during the Middle Ages. As these works appeared, so too did more and more literary, historical, linguistic and cultural studies on the Iberian Middle Ages, and with them, the need for means of faster publication (António Henrique Oliveira Marques, A sociedade medieval portuguesa: Aspectos de vida quotidiana, 1964; Alan Deyermond, A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages, 1971). The study of the Iberian Middle Ages was en vogue and several journals like Speculum, Hispanic Review, Hispania, and MLN published important articles by scholars like Anthony Zahareas (“Juan Ruiz’s Envoi: The Moral

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and Artistic Pose,” MLN 79 Spanish Issue [Mar., 1964]: 206–11), Joaquín Gimeno Casalduero (“Notas sobre el Laberinto de Fortuna,” MLN 79.2 [1964]:125–39), and Otis Green (“The Artistic Originality of ‘La Celestina’,” Hispanic Review 33 [1965]:15–31). Almost concomitant with the works that served to open the discussion on the Iberian Middle Ages was the rise of literary theory (Edad Media y literatura contemporánea: ensayos sobre tradición y modernidad, ed. Fernando Valls, 1985). Some theories, apart from their novel methods and conclusions, questioned what constituted a “text.” Theories such as Formalism placed importance on the distinction between ‘literary’ and other sorts of texts, other schools like Structuralism (Javier Huerta Calvo, “La teoría literaria de Mijail Bajtín: Apuntes y textos para su introducción en España,” Dicenda I [1982]:143–58]), Feminism (María Jesús Lacarra, “Mujer y literatura,” en Mujer y literatura [1986] 100–131), and Marxism (John Beverly, “Class or Caste: A Critique of the Castro Thesis,” Américo Castro: The Impact of His Thought: Essays to Mark the Centenary of His Birth, ed. Ronald E. Surtz, Jaime Ferrán, and Daniel P. Testa, 1988,141–49) applied their respective tools of interpretation to a wide range of ‘texts’, thus opening the discussion of what constituted the “canon,” which in turn had scholars turning critical eyes on non-fiction, historical documents, law, and the like, in addition to fictional works (Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200, 2001). At the same time, Iberian studies emigrated from the peninsula and to other countries, principally the United Kingdom and the United States. There, literary theory enjoyed its greatest popularity from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In addition to the theoretical approaches mentioned above, scholars investigated texts under the lens of Reader-Response theory (Libros españoles de viajes medievales (Selección), ed. Joaquín Rubio Tovar, 1986), Psychoanalysis in its variety of permutations, and Queer Theory (Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 1999), for example. During these years, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge research, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study literature and culture through one or the other theoretical approach and incorporate classes on literary theory or criticism into their curricula. By the early 1990s, the texts of literary theory had been incorporated into the study of almost all peninsular medieval courses.

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C. Recent Trends Perhaps as an outgrowth of the development of literary theory or as a reaction against it, the 1980s and 1990s saw a renewed focus on the particular rhetoric and theoretical premises characteristic to the Middle Ages, such as the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, John of Salisbury, Brunetto Latini, Matthew of Vendôme, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Ars praedicandi, laudandi, vituperandi, rhetorica, and orandi, for example, were brought to bear on the texts produced in the same era (Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction, 1982). The functions of memory, orality, exempla, the auctores, and the commentary tradition were employed in order to analyze and illuminate Iberian Medieval works (Alistair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 1984). Medieval texts were used to illuminate themselves and the era in which they were produced (James A. Grabowska, The Challenge to Spanish Nobility in the 14th Century: The Struggle for Power in don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor, 1335, 2006). This “new” approach was called “New Philology” or “New Medievalism” (Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 [Jan., 1990]: 1–10). New Philology was articulated as an attempt to advance the study of the Middle Ages which had, according to some scholars, grown stale. The goal of the New Philologists, then, was to transform traditional philology and reinvigorate Medieval Studies in which interdisciplinarity would take a prominent position (The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee et al., 1991). History, histories of art, music, science, architecture, and warfare, literary history, philosophy, law, paleography, sociology, economics, theology and the like, in addition to linguistics, and more traditional philology, would all be brought to bear on Iberian medieval manuscripts in order to tease out the historical factors that affected the meaning of the literary work. By implication then, the medieval manuscripts would be placed in a broader context that would consider the illuminations that accompanied them, the hands that wrote them, a manuscript’s musicality, and the impact of law or theology as aspects that influenced the creation and interpretation of the literary work, for example. Thus, the search for a definitive manuscript out of the varieties available or the reconstruction of an “original” manuscript would be abandoned in favor of making the different versions all available so that the different versions of a story could be read and studied.

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D. Journals and Electronic Resources Journals like La Corónica and more recently Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/ content/brill/me) limited their scope of interest, offering a venue to specialists of many different aspects of the Iberian Middle Ages. In addition, scholars turned to digital technologies to publish their research. Significant digital publications that focus on Iberian Medieval Studies include Lemir, la Revista de Literatura Española Medieval y del Renacimiento (http://parnaseo.uv.es/ lemir.htm), and Memorabilia, la Boletín de Literatura Sapiencial (http://parnaseo.uv.es/Memorabilia.htm). Other online journals dedicated to the study of aspects of the Middle Ages began to reflect the mission statement of the online journal Exemplaria (http://www.english.ufl.edu/exemplaria/index06. html) offering a “forum where different approaches can communicate without sacrificing any of their distinctiveness.” Integral to this expanded notion of Medieval Studies and distinctiveness was the availability of digital technologies that made access to manuscripts easier and accommodated the vast amounts of space necessary to bring additional studies to bear on the medieval Iberian work to be analyzed. The Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota (USA) and the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA) were two centers that recognized early on the value of using contemporary technologies for the conservation and dissemination of medieval manuscripts, as well as Charles Faulhaber, Francisco Marcos Marín, and Angel Gomez Moreno and the development of ADMYTE, (http://www.admyte.com/home.htm). Faulhaber and Francisco Marcos Marín recognized in 1992 that manuscripts, indeed entire libraries, were being lost to deterioration and lack of care. “Pero no basta con conservar, también es necsario que esas obras cumplan su función al servicio de los lectores, del público culto interesado, en general. Para ello sería preciso ponerlas a disposición de éste, lo que inevitablemente acarrearía su deterioro y hasta su destrucción, lentamente.” They observed that preservation was insufficient and suggested that it was necessary to make the surviving Iberian Medieval texts available digitally to the interested public so they would not be lost through deterioration (Francisco Marcos Marín and Charles B. Faulhaber, “La conservación y utilización de textos en el futuro inmediato: ADMYTE, el archivo digital de manuscritos y textos españoles,” Hispania 75 [Oct., 1992]: 1010–23). This mission statement has been broadly adopted and has spread to other areas of Medieval Studies as well. Later came such sites as ORB (http://www.the-orb.net/), LIBRO (http://libro.uca.edu/), LABYRINTH (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/library.html), the

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Medieval Sourcebook (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1p.html), NetSerf (http://www.netserf.org/), and the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (http:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/index.jsp), to name a few. Many of the online sites offer access to manuscripts as well as scholarly works and concordances dedicated to their study. Today scholars have much broader access to original texts and primary historical works as well as to secondary works associated with Iberian Medieval Studies. A project begun in the Stanford Humanities Lab took the practice of storing materials on Medieval Iberia to the next level with Medieval Spains (http://shl.stanford.edu/research/medieval_spains.html) an interdisciplinary source of research- and curriculum-based materials on the different communities of the Iberian Peninsula from 1st century Italica to the 16th century expansion of Peninsular/Iberian influence. The site combines primary sources with current scholarship and multimedia presentations that are designed to provide students and scholars with research opportunities beyond what is available strictly through paper publications. Medieval Spain is illustrative of the current state of Iberian Medieval Studies. Iberian medievalists in the past used texts to establish national history and national character. When that position was challenged, Iberian Medieval Studies lost its role and began, out of necessity, to ask new questions: If there is no single national history, no single national character, who were the peoples who inhabited the Iberian peninsula? What did they think? Feel? How did they act and interact? These questions opened the canon to a wide variety of texts that had heretofore been ignored. Studies began to explore science (Isidro J. Rivera, “Negotiation of Scientific Discourse in the First Printed Edition of the Historia de la donzella Teodor: Toledo: Pedro Hagenbach, ca. 1500,” Hispanic Review 66.4 [1998]: 415–32), gender (Michael Solomon, The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain: The Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill, 1997), day-to-day living (Bernard F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains, 1993), law (Kathryn A. Miller, “Muslim Minorities and the Obligation to Emigrate to Islamic Territory: Two fatwâs from Fifteenth-Century Granada,” Islamic Law and Society 7.2 [2000]: 256–88), historiography (E. Michael Gerli, “Social Crisis and Conversion: Apostasy and Inquisition in the Chronicles of Fernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez,” Hispanic Review 70.2 [2002]: 147–67), culture studies and so on (Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature, and Music, ed. Dru Dougherty and Milton M. Azevedo, 1999). In addition, and as the New Philologists pointed out, the difference between medieval and modern was no longer to be so clearly defined, and new relationships were established. The current state of Iberian Medieval Studies has become so diverse so as to make some scholars and critics question if the term

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“medievalist” may be obsolete (Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung, 1999). Scholars specialize in a necessarily limited area or period. By breaking the Iberian Middle Ages into smaller, more focused fields, Iberian medievalism has grown much larger, in some cases more germane, and perhaps, more interesting. Select Bibliography Bibliografía de Latín Medieval en España (1950–1992), ed. Jose Manuel Díaz De Bustamante, María Elisa Lage Cotos, and José Eduardo López Pereira (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1994); Historia y crítica de la literatura española, vol. I, edad media, ed. Alan Deyermond (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1980), I/I, edad media, ed. Alan Deyermond (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1991); Iberia Cantat: Estudios sobre poesía hispánica medieval, ed. Juan Casa Rigall and Eva María Díaz Martínez (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2002); Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. Michael Gerli (New York: Routledge, 2003); Medieval Iberia: Essays on the History and Literature of Medieval Spain, ed. Donald J. Kagay, and Joseph T. Snow (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. Olivia Remie Constable (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Francisco Muñoz marquína, Bibliografía fundamental sobre la literatura española: Fuentes para su estudio (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2003).

James A. Grabowska

Icelandic, Danish, and Old Norse Studies A. General Outline of Topic This article will base itself on the textual monuments written in Latin and the vernacular in medieval Scandinavia and its settlements. Most distinctive and best known among them are the Icelandic sagas, the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, the so-called Poetic Edda, the skaldic poems, the runic inscriptions, and the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, but there also survives a large body of religious literature, courtly romances, grammatical treatises, legal codes, annals, and official documents. Numerous foreign sources for study in this field also exist, among them the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Frankish Annals, Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, and the Russian Primary Chronicle, but they will not be considered here.

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B. Terminological Definition: the Corpus of Primary Sources for Medieval Scandinavian Studies A Viking Age, characterized by extensive territorial movements and acquisitions on the part of Scandinavian groups extending from the late 8th century up until the early 12th century, overlaps with and is succeeded by the Scandinavian Middle Ages, which take their inception with the Christianization of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland in the late 10th century and stretch as far as the Reformation. The key geopolitical units are Denmark (which included parts of modern Sweden and Germany), Sweden, and Norway, with Iceland, Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, Greenland, Normandy, and Ireland among the seats of important settlements. Medieval sources claim that Scandinavians spoke a common language, the dönsk tunga, “Danish tongue.” By the 10th century, this common language had started to break up into mutually intelligible varieties spoken in Norway, Greenland, Iceland, and the other Atlantic islands, to the west, and in Denmark, Sweden, and Gotland, to the east. Earliest among the primary texts are numerous brief runic inscriptions, extant in homeland Scandinavia and in most of the settlements, with the notable exception of Iceland. The Viking Age marks their greatest flourishing but some of the oldest inscriptions are yet earlier. In the Middle Ages runes continue in regular use in Norway and Sweden but decline in Denmark, albeit with a significant late flourishing in the so-called Codex Runicus (ca. 1300). The oldest extant Scandinavian texts in the Latin alphabet date from the decades immediately preceding 1200. The overwhelming majority of manuscripts are Icelandic in origin and accordingly the writings are for the most part in either Latin or Old Icelandic, although numerous brief vernacular texts from before 1370 are extant in Norway. In the case of some texts it is difficult to ascertain whether the region of origin was Iceland or Norway. Remains in the other languages are much thinner or minimal. The corpus of vernacular poetry is conventionally split into two types: eddaic and skaldic (both terms being post-medieval misnomers). Eddaic poetry centers upon the poems of the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda and divides into mythological poems such as Völuspá and Hávamál and legendary poems such as Atlakvi6a and Ham6ismál. Relicts of similar poetry occur in runic inscriptions such as the 9th-century Rök stone. The remainder of the poetic corpus is composed principally of skaldic poetry, which is characterized by elaborate syntax, diction, and verse-forms. Praise-poetry (such as Einarr Skálaglamm’s Vellekla), battle narratives (Sigvatr Qór6arson’s Nesjavísur), and mythological and legendary pieces (Qjó6ólfr ór Hvini’s Haustlöng) are the dominant genres but personal poetry (Egill Skallagrímsson’s Sonatorrek), hagiography (Einarr Skúlason’s Geisli), translations

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(Gunnlaugr Leifsson’s Merlínússpá), instructional pieces (Snorri Sturluson’s Háttatal), and devotional poems (Eysteinn Ásgrímsson’s Lilja) also occur. Skaldic poetry emerges in the 9th century in Denmark and Norway and soon spreads to Iceland, which becomes its key center of cultivation. The 10th-century Karlevi runestone from Öland (modern Sweden) contains the oldest attestation. It continued in currency to the Reformation in Iceland and as late as the 14th century in Norway, but was outmoded much earlier in Denmark and Sweden. The composition of the earliest Icelandic rímur, among them Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar, Skí6aríma, and Bjarkarímur, has its documented origins in the 14th century, overlapping with later skaldic poetry. A remarkable vernacular prose treatise on native poetics and mythology is the 13th-century Edda of Snorri Sturluson, which divides into a Prologue and then three main sections: the Gylfaginning (a digest of the ancestral mythology), Skáldskaparmál (an account of poetic diction), and Háttatal (a model poem, with prose commentary). Grammatical treatises are also extant. Rímbegla (a misleading early 16th-century title) is used in reference to a set of computistic treatises. The sagas are another predominantly Icelandic genre. The sagas of Icelanders, the classic type, with their air of realism and historical veracity, were authored or compiled in the 13th to 15th centuries. They include Bandamanna saga, Egils saga, Fóstbrœ6ra saga, Hrafnkels saga, and Njáls saga. A notable sub-group centers upon poets: Bjarnar saga Hítdœlakappa, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hallfre6ar saga, and Kormáks saga. Another has outlaws as its protagonists: Gísla saga and Grettis saga. Another covers whole districts and communities rather than individual protagonists, among them Eyrbyggja saga, Flóamanna saga, Laxdœla saga, Ljósvetninga saga, and Vatnsdœla saga. The so-called fornaldarsögur “sagas of ancient times” (a 19th-century term) also appear to date from the 13th to the 15th centuries. All the fornaldarsögur have a dominant ingredient of romance or fantasy. Some, such as GönguHrólfs saga, Hervarar saga ok Hei6reks, Hrólfs saga kraka, Ragnars saga lo6brókar, Völsunga saga, and Yngvars saga ví6förla, center on semi-historic personages who are given a predominantly legendary treatment. Others lack the historical element altogether, among them Ásmundar saga kappabana, Bósa saga ok Herrau6s, Fri6qjófs saga ins frœkna, Gautreks saga, Gríms saga lo6inkinna, Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka, Ketils saga hœngs, and Örvar-Odds saga. Kings’ sagas center on fully historical figures and are also predominantly Icelandic in authorship. Vernacular sagas devoted to Norwegian kings are Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar (originally composed in Latin by Oddr Snorrason), Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta, the misleadingly titled Legendary Saga of St Óláfr, Böglunga sögur, Sverris saga (in part by Karl Jónsson), and Hákonar saga

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Hákonarsonar (by Sturla Qór6arson). Vernacular synoptic treatments include Ágrip, Fagrskinna (a Norwegian redaction), Heimskringla, Hulda-Hrokkinskinna, and Morkinskinna. Denmark is represented by Knytlinga ´ saga and the relicts of a Skjöldunga saga. Loosely affiliated with the kings’ sagas are Jómsvíkinga saga, Orkneyinga saga, and Færeyinga saga, which center on communities ruled over by earls. Among the samtí6arsögur “contemporary sagas,” Sturlunga saga is the example par excellence. It represents a compilation prepared ca. 1300 from nine originally separate sagas, among them Geirmundar qáttr heljarskinns, Qorgils saga ok Hafli6a, Sturlu saga, and Íslendinga saga, the last-named, by Sturla Qór6arson (1214–1284), being the most imposing. Related works are Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar and Arons saga Hjörleifsson. The biskupa sögur could also be termed contemporary sagas for the most part, encompassing bishops’ lives and ecclesiastical histories written from around 1200 until the mid-14th century. One major group of these sagas devotes itself to the Skálholt diocese: Hungrvaka (a synoptic account of the first five bishops), Qorláks saga helga, Páls saga, and Árna saga biskups. Fragmentary Latin lives of Qorlákr are also preserved, along with an early account of his miracles. A second group of biskupa sögur centers on the diocese of Hólar: Jóns saga helga (originally written in Latin by Gunnlaugr Leifsson), the Prestssaga Gu6mundar Arasonar, four further Gu6mundr sagas, and Lárentíus saga. Kristni saga (mid-13th century) offers synoptic coverage of the Conversion of Iceland and the first bishops of Skálholt. The corpus of foreign saints’ lives runs to over one hundred, drawn primarily from the Latin lives of the apostles (postola sögur) and other sources. Also extant are Latin and vernacular lives of the native Norwegian saints. Among the pseudo-historical works are Alexanders saga (from the Alexandreis), Amícus saga ok Amilíus (based on the Speculum historiale), Breta sögur (from the Historia Regum Britanniae), Klári saga, Trójumanna saga (from De excidio Troiae), Qi6reks saga af Bern (from the Dietrich cycle) and Veraldar saga. Closely aligned with these are the riddarasögur, sagas of knights or chivalric sagas, which consist of two subtypes, translated and indigenous. The translated riddarasögur mostly stem from commissions from the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson (1217–1263). Some are based on French chansons de geste, among them Bevers saga and Elis saga ok Rósamundu; Karlamagnús saga additionally draws on chronicle material. Others represent translations of French courtly romances, among them Erex saga, Ívens saga, Möttuls saga, Parcevals saga, Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, Valvens qáttr, and the Strengleikar “stringed instruments,” the latter uniquely extant in a Norwegian manuscript of ca. 1270 and containing versions of lais attributed to Marie de France. Works in similar style, some perhaps also commissioned by Hákon, are Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr,

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Flóvents saga, and Partalopa saga. Indigenous riddarasögur (sometimes termed lygisögur) include Adonias saga, Ála flekks saga, Blómstrvallasaga, Bærings saga, Dámusta saga, Ectors saga, Gibbons saga, Kirialax saga, Konrá6s saga keisarasonar, Mágus saga jarls, Melkólfs saga ok Solomons konungs, Mírmanns saga, Samsons saga fagra, and Viktors saga ok Blávus. Some riddarasögur, such as Hrings saga ok Tryggva and Sigur6ar saga fóts, are not clearly distinguishable from the more romantic fornaldarsögur. Affiliated to all these subtypes of sagas are numerous qættir (singular qáttr), brief sagas (literally “strands”) that could be told separately or incorporated into a more extensive compilation. Examples are Grœnlendinga qáttr, Hrómundar qáttr halta, Ævi Snorra go6a, Norna-Gests qáttr, Ragnarssona qáttr, Sörla qáttr, Arnórs qáttr jarlaskálds, Au6unar qáttr vestfirzka, Qorleifs qáttr jarlaskálds, Sneglu-Halla qáttr, Qorvalds qáttr ví6förla, and Ísleifs qáttr. Many qættir affiliated to the kings’ sagas appear in manuscript compilations such as Morkinskinna and Flateyjarbók. Among the more strictly historical works relating to Iceland, the earliest extant is the Íslendingabók of Ari Qorgilsson inn fró6i (c. 1122–1133). Landnámabók, which lists Iceland’s major settlers and their land-takes, exists in several compilations, the oldest being Sturlubók, followed by Hauksbók, Skar6sárbók, and Qór6arbók. The oldest of the several sets of annals date from the turn of the 14th century. The Diplomatarium Islandicum (Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn) contains some 160 diplomas from before Union with Norway in 1264, along with numerous subsequent diplomas and letters. Among works of religious instruction, the Old Icelandic Homily Book and Old Norwegian Homily Book were written early in the 13th century. Several other manuscripts contain homiletic material, notable among them Hauksbók, written at the beginning of the 14th century for, and in part by, the Icelandic lawman Haukr Erlendsson. Also fragmentarily extant is an Icelandic “Physiologus” (ca. 1200). The Elucidarius, adapted from Honorius Augustodunensis, is extant in an early 13th-century fragment. Stjórn, a free translation of scriptural material with commentary, stemmed from a commission by King Hákon Magnússon (1299–1319). The Book of Judith and (in part) Daniel appear separately in late 14th-century redactions. Ni6rstigningar saga is a 12thcentury translation of the Gospel of Nicodemus. Gy6inga saga, a history of the Jews, was translated from Latin by Brandr Jónsson for King Magnús Hákonarson (1263–1284). Konungs skuggsjá, a father-son dialogue which combines theological and judicial teachings with guidance to everyday life, is a mid13th-century Norwegian compilation. Also preserved are Lei6arvísir (a vernacular itinerary to the Holy Land), 12th-century translations of the Dialogues of Gregory and of the Visio sancti Pauli apostoli, Duggals lei6sla (a 13th-century

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translation of the Latin Visio Tnugdali), and Speculum penitentis (a 15th-century Icelandic penitential tract). The surviving law-code of the Icelandic Commonwealth, editorially entitled Grágás “grey goose,” survives in two main codices: Konungsbók and Sta6arhólsbók, both written in the later 13th century. It was superseded first by Járnsí6a (1271–1281), associated with Sturla Qór6arson, and more definitively by Jónsbók (1280), named for Jón Einarsson and extant in some 300 manuscripts. Of Latin texts composed in Norway, notable are two synoptic histories from around 1160–1190: the Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagiensium, composed by Theodoricus monachus, and the fragmentary Historia Norwegiae. The oldest Passion of St Óláfr, the Passio Olaui, survives in a northern French manuscript. Of either Norwegian or Danish authorship is the Historia de Profectione Danorum in Hierosolymam, a Crusader itinerary composed around 1200. Of largely vernacular Norwegian texts, the Diplomatarium Norvegicum contains documents ranging from ca. 1050 to 1570, the bulk of them after 1300. The law codes of Gulaqing and Frostuqing survive in early 13th-century manuscripts. The Bjarkeyjar réttr (laws for the trading centers) were first recorded toward the end of the 12th century. King Magnús Hákonarson issued Landslög (a secular code for the whole of Norway), Hir6skrá (a manual for courtiers), and a new municipal code. An ecclesiastical code was compiled by Archbishop Jón of Ni6aróss. Of Latin texts from Denmark, a number are historical works: the 12thcentury Chronicon Lethrense, Chronicon Roskildense, a version of Lex Castrensis (a code of conduct for military personnel) compiled by Sven Aggesen around 1182, Sven’s Brevis Historia Regum Dacie from around 1187, and fragments of his Genealogia Regum Dacie. Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus dates from the first two decades of the 13th century. To these can be added the Colbaz Annals, the Valdemar Annals, and later Lund annals, one preserved only in a Danish translation from about 1400. The Vetus chronica Sialandiae was written at Sorø ca. 1300, and on this are based the Annals of Ryd, while the Jutish Chronicle (Jyske krønike) depends on Ryd as well as on Sorø. The Diplomatarium danicum contains both Latin and Danish texts. Saints’ lives in Latin include a Passio Sancti Kanuti regis et martiris (ca. 1090) and a fragment of Robert of Ely’s legend about Knud Lavard (ca. 1135), from which the anonymous Passio de Sct. Canuto duce (ca. 1170) derives material. Also extant are lives of Sts Anders, Kjeld, Knud, Margrethe, and Thøger, along with Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii, Ailnoth’s life of Sven Estridsen and his five sons, a Vita et miracula S. Guillermi, and a book of miracles devoted to Erik Plovpenning.

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Of vernacular Danish texts, the so-called Jutish Law (Jyske Lov) is preserved in a manuscript from 1280, along with supplementary documents. The Scanian Law (Skånske lov) and Scanian Ecclesiastical Law are preserved in Codex Runicus. A fragmentary regnal list, chronicle, and description of the DanishSwedish border (“the Daneholm settlement”) are believed to have been added to the Codex later. The oldest law-code of Zealand, Valdemar’s Zealandic Law, is extant in three redactions. Earliest among attested Swedish writers of Latin texts is Petrus de Dacia (ca. 1230–1289), who composed a Vita Christinae Stumbelensis and De virtutibus Christinae Stumbelensis. Latin lives of saints are devoted to Botvid, David, Erik, Eskil, Helena of Skövde, Henrik, Ingrid of Skänninge, and Sigfrid. The writings of St Birgitta were published as Revelationes celestes in 1492. Two lives of Birgitta survive, as also of Birgitta’s daughter Katalina and of Petrus Olofsson of Skänninge. Some of these lives were translated into the vernacular. A 15th-century Swedish life of Birgitta’s family is also extant. The Fornsvenska legendariet “Old Swedish legendary” contains lives of many foreign saints and martyrs. Early Swedish vernacular texts include three chronicles of Västergotland (Västgotakronikorna). Västgötalagen, the oldest of the Swedish provincial laws, is extant in a manuscript dating to 1281, with an appended list of Swedish kings. The national code (Landslag) was completed around 1350 on the basis of provincial laws. Guta saga, a legendary history of Gotland (the title is editorial), is included alongside the Laws of Gotland (Gutalag) in a medieval manuscript. Tänkeböcker, 15th-century magistrates’ records, survive from Arboga, Jonköping, Kalmar, and Stockholm. Of more literary monuments, Namnlos och Valentin is a prose romance and Satiren om abbotarna an antimonastic piece, both from the 15th century. The Eufemiavisorna, consisting of translations in knittelvers of Hærra Ivan, Hærtogher Fredrik, and Flores ok Blanzaflor, date from the early 14th century. Later poetry includes the chivalric romance Riddar Paris och Jungfru Vienna and a series of political pieces from the Kalmar Union (1397–1523): the Brunkebergsvisan, Frihetsvisan, Gotlandsvisan, and Thoro Bondes mord. The Swedish abduction ballads (klosterrovsvisor) probably go back to the 14th century, in an early exemplification of the composition of ballads in Scandinavia, but this genre is only fragmentarily attested in medieval manuscripts. C. History of Research, Schools of Thought, Approaches In a sense, Medieval Scandinavian Studies have “always already” been underway – at least since the 12th century, when the cultivation of skaldic poetry was taking a scholastic turn that culminates in Snorri Sturluson’s commen-

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tary upon traditional skaldic practice and terminology in his Edda (Gu6rún Nordal, Tools of Literacy, 2000). Some degree of antiquarian enquiry enters into works such as Egils saga, Eiríks saga rau6a, and Eyrbyggja saga. Saxo Grammaticus claims to have collected materials from Icelandic informants. The compilation and redaction of kings’ sagas, genealogies, and law codes was being intensively pursued. Many significant contributions to the field were made during the Humanist era. Antiquarians and aristocratic patrons in Sweden and Denmark commissioned the collection and transcription of Icelandic manuscripts, aided by bishops Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt (d. 1675) and Qorlákur Skúlason of Hólar (d. 1656) and also by Arngrímur lær6i Jónsson (d. 1648). This work culminated in the massive labors of collection and transcription undertaken by Árni Magnússon (1663–1730). Meanwhile Ole Worm (1588–1655) and other scholars undertook pioneering publications of medieval poems and runic inscriptions, drawing on materials gathered by Icelandic informants, among them the self-taught farmer Björn Jónsson of Skar 5 sá (d. 1655). Modern scholarship can be traced back to the 19th century, with the publication of monumental editions of such major individual works or compilations as Breta sögur, Flateyjarbók, Njáls saga, and Snorra Edda and of text series such as the fornaldarsögur. The native Icelandic scholars, notable among them Jón Sigur 5 sson and Sveinbjörn Egilsson, did much of their work in Copenhagen, where the University presided over Icelandic studies and the largest library and manuscript repositories were located. Some Icelandic scholars, among them Gu6brandur Vigfússon and Eiríkur Magnússon, gained opportunities to operate from non-Scandinavian institutional bases. Among the most eminent non-Scandinavian scholars were German academics Konrad Maurer and Eduard Sievers. By the 20th century the field had become fully internationalized, with notable contributions from the United Kingdom, European countries, and the United States, while native Icelandic and other Scandinavian scholars have continued to play key roles. Only a few facets of this huge research endeavor can be noted in the present article. A great part of the scholarly effort, down to the present day, has been directed toward putting the medieval legacy in order through editorial and explicatory activities so as to create what might be called a “resource base” for the field. What could be regarded as “superstructural” types of scholarship, such as literary criticism and theory, though far from neglected, have played a much subordinate role if one compares with other fields of Medieval Studies. Medieval Scandinavian Studies continue to be informed by a strong

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ethos of positivism even in an era of poststructuralist and other literary or cultural theory. At the same time, significant essays in literary criticism and theory are offered in the collective volume edited by John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber, Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, 1986; along with Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 1969, for the eddaic poetry; and Roberta Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry, 1978, for the skaldic poetry. Topics in comparative ethnography, economics, and anthropology are essayed in a collection edited by Ross Samson (Social Approaches to Viking Studies, 1991) and in monographs by Kirsten Hastrup (e. g., Island of Anthropology, 1990). In the present section of this article, primary attention will be given to the status of the resource base. Editions of the national runic corpora have been published in each of the mainland Scandinavian countries and although they contain some speculative commentary that has been superseded they still provide the basis for scholarship. Meanwhile, however, the runic corpus continues to expand spectacularly, in particular thanks to archaeological excavations of medieval town centers, making this a permanent work in progress, for which on-line databases are being increasingly utilized rather than traditional publication. Diplomatic and facsimile editions of many significant manuscripts have been made available. Text editions are sometimes on a fully critical basis but more often, as in the case of the sagas, where typically numerous manuscripts are preserved, a preferred manuscript is employed as copy-text and corrected selectively from other manuscripts. Full scientific editions of many texts have yet to be made. The building of lexicographic resources remains another work in progress. Two dictionaries of medieval Icelandic (and Norwegian) were published in the 19th century: Richard Cleasby and Gu6brandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 1874, and Johan Fritzner, Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog, 1886–1896. For the present these two dictionaries, reissued with supplements, remain the default reference for the prose corpus. The new collaboratively-edited dictionary project for Old Norwegian and Icelandic (Ordbog over det norrøne prosaprog, 1989–), inaugurated in 1939 and still proceeding, concentrates on the prose corpus and will be complemented by a thesaurus of non-runic Norwegian texts from ca. 1200 down to ca. 1550 being undertaken at the University of Oslo. A specialist dictionary of the poetic corpus, Lexicon Poeticum, was prepared by Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1860) and revised by Finnur Jónsson (1931), and although badly outdated it remains the sole comprehensive resource, despite useful partial coverage provided by glossaries to the Poetic Edda (Glossary to the Poetic Edda, ed. Beatrice La Farge and John Tucker, 1992), to Snorra Edda (Snorri Sturluson Edda: Prologue

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and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 1982; Skáldskaparmál, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 1998), and to a selection of rímur (Finnur Jónsson, Ordbog til de … Rímur, 1926–1928). Scholarship on eddaic poetry has focused on codicology and redaction criticism (Gustav Lindblad, Studier i Codex Regius av Äldre Eddan, 1954), on establishment of the text, and on close philological explication of the poems. The analysis of meter by Eduard Sievers (Altgermanische Metrik, 1893), in broad comparison with other early Germanic verse corpora, has proved largely definitive for the purposes of textual criticism. Privileged place in scholarship has been given to the contents of Codex Regius, which are supplemented in most editions by a somewhat arbitrary selection of other poems in “eddaic” style. To complement the standard edition by Gustav Neckel revised by Hans Kuhn (Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius, 1983), a comprehensive commentary is in progress (Klaus von See et al., Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, 1997–). An English-language edition, with facing translation, is also in progress (Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 1969–). The skaldic corpus has proved itself highly resistant to the concerted efforts of scholars to create definitive editions and ancillary resources. Key among pioneering activities was the reconstruction of extended poems from the verse citations found in prose compilations (Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, ed. Jón Sigur 5 sson et al., 1848–1887; Bjarne Fidjestøl, Det norrøne fyrstedigtet, 1982). Such reconstructions remain tentative at best but of necessity built upon them are the editions by Finnur Jónsson (Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, 1912–1915) and E. A. Kock (Den norsk-isländska Skaldediktning, 1946), which for the present remain the default. Both rely upon copy-texts, rather than attempting a full critical recension, and resort to heavy emendation and reconstruction. A project toward a fully scientific edition is currently underway (Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross et al., 2008–). Scholars face the systematic difficulty that a proper understanding of skaldic diction and syntax, a comprehensive and objective glossary, and a fully authoritative edition are interdependent desiderata, none of which has yet been met. Thus, for instance, the standard study of diction (Rudolf Meissner, Die Kenningar der Skalden, 1921) is founded on Finnur Jónsson’s edition. Refinements on Meissner have been attempted using close reading (Edith Marold, Kenningkunst, 1983) and structuralist analysis (Bjarne Fidjestøl, “Kenningsystemet. Forsøk på ein lingvistik analyse,” Maal og Minne [1974]: 5–50) but the presupposition that an all-encompassing single system existed is not necessarily valid. The study of skaldic meter, by contrast, has advanced to a point where, although the underlying prosodic analysis is still disputed (Kristján Árnason, The

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Rhythms of Dróttkvætt and other Old Icelandic Metres, 1991), an understanding sufficient for practical editing purposes has been attained (Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik, 1893; Hans Kuhn, Das Dróttkvætt, 1983; Kari Ellen Gade, The Structure of Old Norse Dróttkvætt Poetry, 1995). A recent summation of progress in skaldic studies is Margaret Clunies Ross, A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics, 2005. Scholarly work on the Prose Edda has centered upon questions of Snorri’s putative authorship and his attitudes to the mythological material. The various redactions have been thoroughly documented, in order to reveal successive states of the text and to reconstruct the writing process (Gu6rún Nordal, Tools of Literacy, 2000). Of the saga literature, it is the sagas of Icelanders and kings’ sagas that have bulked largest for scholarship. Interest in the former starts to make itself felt in the 19th century, coinciding with expressions of Icelandic nationalism. A dominant element in the early to mid-20th century was the so-called “Icelandic school,” which pursued textual and source criticism while largely eschewing discussions of ideology and aesthetics. Its central achievement is the production of the Íslenzk fornrit series of editions, inaugurated in the 1930s and currently still proceeding. Another notable series was the Altnordische Saga-Bibliothek, from the turn of the 20th century. Numerous post-medieval saga manuscripts have yet to be fully collated toward definitive editions, with exceptions such as the recent editions of Hrólfs saga kraka (ed. Desmond Slay, 1960) and Plácidus saga (ed. John Tucker, 1998). Most scholarly among comprehensive translations is the German Thule series, from the earlier 20th century but being reissued. Where the kings’ sagas are concerned, the bulk of scholarly effort has gone into identifying sources and disentangling textual relationships. The three “Norwegian synoptics” (Historia de Antiquitate Regum Norwagiensium, Historia Norwegiae, and Ágrip), the so-called Oldest Saga of St Óláfr, and Fagrskinna have posed especially acute problems (Bjarni A 5 albjarnarson, Om de norske kongers sagaer, 1937; Svend Ellehøj, Studier over den ældste norrøne historieskrivning, 1965). Attempts have been made to localize the composition of some kings’ sagas in a secular context at Oddi (Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Sagnaritun Oddaverja, 1937). In the case of Sturlunga saga and related “contemporary sagas,” the thrust of scholarship has been to accept them as an historically reliable source for political and social history. More recently, in a reaction against this orthodoxy, their historical truth-value has been put in question by means of comparisons with contemporary European chronicles. The fornaldarsögur have been extensively compared with related legendary materials, such as the Gesta Danorum and the Nibelungenlied. They have

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begun to attract attention as embodying myths and legends that may have played an enabling role in the foundation of the Scandinavian colonies, notably Orkney and Iceland (Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, “The Sea, the Flame and the Wind,” The Viking Age in Caithness, Orkney and the North Atlantic, ed. Colleen Batey et al., 1993, 212–21; Hermann Pálsson, Úr landnor6ri, 1997). Scholars have given the riddarasögur, whether translated or indigenous, short shrift compared to other saga types. There are few diplomatic or critical editions. The indigenous riddarasögur (or lygisögur) are usually regarded by scholars as artistically inferior to the other indigenous genres. Some remain untranslated into modern languages and as a genre they have attracted least attention in the research community, although some critical reassessment has occurred under the influence of reception theory and the so-called New Philology (Matthew Driscoll, The Unwashed Children of Eve, 1997). The translated riddarasögur have received surprisingly little attention not merely in Scandinavian scholarship but also in international romance research, though initiatives of a comparative kind have not been altogether lacking (Marianne Kalinke, Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland, 1990). Research on the creation of the Scandinavian ballads has focused on the literary culture of Norway’s courtly milieu in the 13th and early 14th centuries, with the production of the Eufemiavisor as a key element. The translation process in and of itself has also been investigated, as for instance by Mattias Tveitane (Om språkform og forelegg i Strengleikar, 1973) and Marianne Kalinke (“Erex saga and Ívens saga: Medieval approaches to translation,” Arkiv for nordisk filologi 92 [1977]: 125–44). The biskupa sögur are at present being issued in an entirely new edition under the aegis of Íslenzk fornrit. Some research on this genre has been directed toward tracing authorship, assisted by the fact that a number of the sagas were composed by known clerical authors who were contemporaries of the subject of the saga (Stefán Karlsson, “Icelandic Lives of Thomas à Becket: Questions of Authorship,” Proceedings of the First International Saga Conference, ed. Peter Foote et al., 1973, 212–43). Other research has gone into identifying political tendencies and allegiances, as revealed by the saga texts. The literature of religious instruction is another area where basic work is still in progress. Diplomatic editions of the Homily Books exist, but a fully annotated collation of versions of various homilies, some of which are attested in other manuscripts, and identification of sources and analogues remains a task for the future (David McDougall, [Review of The Icelandic Homily Book, ed. Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen, 1993], alvíssmál 5 [1995]: 107–11). Whole and partial sources for some of the homilies have been identified

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among patristic texts but the Latin background of many others still awaits investigation. In stylistic analysis, a number of standard Latin-based rhetorical features have been identified (Jakob Benediktsson, “Cursus in Old Norse Literature,” Mediaeval Scandinavia 74 [1984]: 15–21). Research on Landnámabók was for many years preoccupied with disentangling the different major redactions (Jón Jóhannesson, Ger6ir Landnámabókar, 1941). Work on annals has centered upon tracing their sources (both patristic and vernacular) and textual relationships. In the case of the Icelandic annals, comparisons with known historical works or sagas have resulted in the identification of a large number of entries that must originate in other types of source, for instance Easter tables. The sites of annalistic activity have also been canvassed, with Qingeyrar and Lund as leading candidates. Several scholars have sought to associate compilation activity with known figures such as Sturla Qór6arson (Jónas Kristjánsson, “Annálar og Íslendingasögur,” Gripla 4 [1980]: 295–319). In the case of the Danish annals, a topic of investigation has been the place of composition and its connection with official authority (ecclesiastic or secular, e. g., the royal Chancellery). From early notions that each religious house maintained its own set of annals, recognition has grown that only a few centers were entrusted with this function or chose to undertake it (Anne K. G. Kristensen, Danmarks ældste annalistik, 1969). While publication of the various law codes was among the earlier priorities of scholars, much of the later medieval Norwegian corpus has yet to see printed form. Ancillary research has centered upon source criticism, the relation to continental law-codes, the possible presence of literary as well as oral elements, the institutional or political status of compilations, and their relation to actual social conditions at the time of enactment. The transfer of legal and religious ideas and terminology from Latin codes into vernacular codes remains to be fully investigated (Gudmund Sandvik and Jón Vi6ar Sigur 5 sson, “Laws,” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, 2005, 223–44). Saxo’s Gesta Danorum has been investigated from the point of view of its author’s biography and affiliations, about which tantalizingly little is known despite seemingly promising leads. His politics and ideology are equally difficult to pinpoint, though some kind of program of allusions to the Danish crown is likely to have been intended. Source studies have combed the first nine books for analogues to vernacular sources on myths and legends (Saxo Grammaticus:, Gesta Danorum: Books 1–9, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson and Peter Fisher, 1979–1980; Georges Dumézil, The Stakes of the Warrior, trans. David Weeks, ed. Jaan Puhvel, 1983). While earlier generations of scholars at-

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tempted to reconstruct the traditional Danish and Icelandic poetry to which Saxo declares his indebtedness (Axel Olrik, The Heroic Legends of Denmark, transl. Lee M. Hollander, 1919), latterly greater emphasis has been placed upon his emulation of poetry by Horace, Virgil, and other classical authors (Karsten Friis-Jensen, “The Lay of Ingellus and its Classical Models,” Saxo Grammaticus, ed. Karsten Friis-Jensen, 1981, 65–78). Appreciation of his rhetorical and compositional skill has concomitantly increased (Thomas Riis, Einführung in die Gesta Danorum, 2006). The first comprehensive literary history, with primary emphasis on the Icelandic and Norwegian material, was that by Finnur Jónsson (Den oldnorske og oldislandske Literaturs Historie, 1920–1924). Like other scholars of his time, he devoted much attention to the origin of the texts and their value as historical and cultural sources, resisting attempts to trace vernacular works to foreign sources and insisting on the general historical veracity of the sagas of Icelanders. The main subsequent literary history, that by Jan De Vries (Altnordische Literaturgeschichte, 1964–1967), revised his predecessor’s approach so as to incorporate perspectives from comparative literature, sometimes rather uncritically. D. Current Issues and Future Trends Here, as before, amid a host of keenly debated issues and a variety of scholarly trends only a few select points can be made. The decipherment of runic texts remains amongst the most difficult and elusive goals in Medieval Scandinavian Studies: such significant monuments as the Rök inscription continue to be the subject of intricate and largely inconclusive debate (Raymond Page, Runes and Runic Inscriptions, 1995). Also far from straightforward is the integration of runic evidence into the wider study of texts and material culture, at a stage when the corpus has still not been systematically excerpted for lexicography (Judith Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age, 2001). The scope of runic texts, their possible functions (on a spectrum from pragmatic to ceremonial to magical to ritual), and the social status and functionality of “runic literacy” are matters of continuing discussion. Although most medieval vellum manuscripts have long since been thoroughly examined and recorded and very few discoveries have been made in recent years, the later Icelandic paper manuscripts have only partially been taken up in existing scholarship. By the same token, they represent an outstanding research opportunity, at a time when the New Philology (or “social textuality”) is pointing up the need to examine individual witnesses in their own immediate cultural-historical context. Such work would tie into a “longue-durée” type of approach to sagas, where the shifting social relevance

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and also, to a considerable extent, the shifting textuality of certain key works is traced through the centuries (Kirsten Hastrup, “Tracing Tradition: an Anthropological Perspective on Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar,” Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature: New Approaches to Textual Analysis and Literary Criticism, ed. John Lindow, Lars Lönnroth, and Gerd Wolfgang Weber, 1986, 281–316). Many aspects of the eddaic corpus continue to be disputed. The problems of dating remain unresolved, though three groups of poems – early, middle, and late – have been postulated with broad consensus (Bjarne Fidjestøl, The Dating of Eddic Poetry, 1999). Locations of composition have been subject to rival claims, with Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and the British Isles as principal contenders. German influence has been posited for the Völsungcycle poems, the so-called “Fremdstofflieder” (Hans Kuhn, “Westgermanisches in der altnordischen Verskunst,” Beiträge 63 [1939]: 178–236; Theodore M. Andersson, The Legend of Brynhild, 1980). Connections with classical poetry have also been made, thus Völuspá with the Sybilline oracles (Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda, 1997) and Hávamál with Disticha Catonis (Klaus von See, “Probleme der altnordischen Spruchdichtung,” ZfdA 104 [1975]: 91–118). In attempts at a genre taxonomy, such categories as “wisdom poetry,” “senna” (Carol Clover, “The Germanic Context of the Unfer6 Episode,” Speculum 55 [1980]: 444–68), and elegy have been proposed, but the validity of genre classifications arrived at from comparative literary perspectives is questionable. Especially problematic is the invocation of dramatic and even ritual functions for certain poems (Bertha Phillpotts, The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama, 1920; Terry Gunnell, The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia, 1995). A more viable view under discussion is that while eddaic poetry may not represent ritual per se, it may contain allusions to it (Einar Haugen, “The Edda as Ritual,” Edda: a Collection of Essays, ed. Robert Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason, 1983, 3–24; Timothy R. Tangherlini, “Some Old Norse Hang-ups,” Mankind Quarterly 31, 1–2 [1990]: 87–108). Meanwhile, the aesthetic and reception aspects of eddaic recitation have been imaginatively reconstructed by Lars Lönnroth (Den dubbla scenen, 1978). Similarly, many if not most questions relating to skaldic poetry remain unresolved. Dating is one acute problem. Most scholars harbor a conviction that verses preserved in kings’ sagas are contemporaneous with the events they describe, but this remains a strong probability rather than a certainty. Considerably more problematic is Finnur Jónsson’s conviction that the bulk of saga lausavísur are authentic personal statements from named saga personages. The latter presupposition has been sharply contested by Peter Foote (“An Essay on the Saga of Gísli and its Icelandic Background,” The

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Saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston, 1973, 93–134), among many other scholars, but it still underlies the standard chronology of the corpus. Recent work has isolated metrico-syntactic patterns that are arguably distinctive of specific periods and poets (Kari Ellen Gade, The Structure of Old Norse Dróttkvætt Poetry, 1995) but at the risk of circular reasoning. The content of a few of the poems with a prima facie claim to contemporaneity with Viking Age events can be corroborated by comparison with foreign sources (Russell Poole, “Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History,” Speculum 62 [1987]: 265–98); in the great majority of cases, however, no such controls are available. The Viking Age origins of the skaldic art-form likewise remain undetermined. One possibility is that it may have evolved internally from native Germanic verse-forms, and one scholar has gone so far as to argue for stylization under the influence of the plastic arts (Hallvard Lie, “Skaldestil-Studier,” Maal og Minne 1952, 1–92). Recent discussion has seen ekphrastic poetry, as practiced at the Carolingian court, playing a formative role (Russell Poole, “Scholars and Skalds: the Northwards Diffusion of Carolingian Poetic Fashions,” Mediaeval Scandinavia, forthcoming). Another candidate for external influence is Irish bardic poetry (Edward O. G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 1976). Contact with external poetic traditions in the later Middle Ages has also been suggested (Alison Finlay, “Skalds, troubadours and sagas,” Saga-Book 24. 2–3 [1995]: 105–53). Given the complexity of skaldic poetics, the intelligibility of the poems has been hotly debated. Such scholars as Ernst A. Kock (Notationes norrœnæ, 1923–1944) strove to wring “naturalness” and lucidity out of the inherited texts, often in violation of the manuscript evidence, while others have countered more pragmatically that “difficult poetry” is a recognized type and have adduced evidence that the audience would have been led by a poetically adept aristocratic élite (John Lindow, “Riddles, Kennings, and the Complexity of Skaldic Poetry,” Scandinavian Studies 47 [1975]: 311–27). Recent research indicates that these élite skills continued down to the scribal period, when leading families in Iceland exploited them as a “tool of power” to be taught side by side with Latin-based learning (Nordal, Tools of Literacy, 2000). Possible links to Latin-based learning in Snorra Edda have been detected in encyclopedic literature and school handbooks of grammar and rhetoric (Margaret Clunies Ross, Skáldskaparmál, 1987). Concomitantly, if current scholarship is to be believed, the traditional mythography and cosmography presented in the Edda and more fugitively in compilations like Landnámabók were not simply of antiquarian appeal to their audience but retained an enabling function where land tenure, legitimacy, and kinship links were concerned (Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes, 1994–1998).

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Issues in scholarship on the sagas include the relationship between orality and literacy in the genesis of the saga; the contribution of indigenous and foreign literary models; the relationship between verse and prose in the prosimetric sagas (Joseph Harris, “The Prosimetrum of Icelandic Saga and Some Relatives,” Prosimetrum, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, 1997); and the underlying causes for the distinctive features of structure and style. Debate continues as to whether (and why) the first two-thirds of the 13th century was the golden age of saga writing (Jürg Glauser, “Sagas of Icelanders and qættir as the Literary Representation of a New Social Space,” Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, 2000, 203–20) and how the various subtypes (sagas of Icelanders, fornaldarsögur, kings’ sagas, riddarasögur, biskupa sögur) are sequenced within a posited chronology. One theory starts with lives of saints and traces the evolution onwards to kings’ sagas, skald sagas, and ultimately sagas of Icelanders (Gabriel Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature, 1953). Bjarni Einarsson preferred to see the skald sagas as deriving from continental European romances (Skáldasögur, 1961). Such theories have a certain plausibility but have been shown to fall down in the face of the detailed documentary evidence. As to the type of textual process that generated the sagas, early debate centered on opposed theories: “bookprose,” which sought to give sagas the status of written artifacts, and “freeprose,” which treated them as the product of oral composition and transmission (Theodore M. Andersson, The Problem of Icelandic Saga Origins, 1964). But these antinomies have broken down in current work, so that orality and literacy are increasingly seen as existing in interaction (Gísli Sigur 5 sson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, 2004). As current hypotheses would have it, more or less free-standing episodic story materials became aggregated and consolidated into classic saga format (Theodore Andersson and William Ian Miller, Law and Literature in Medieval Iceland, 1989). Saga lausavísur have been investigated as a possible clue to the workings of these processes (Russell Poole, “Composition Transmission Performance: The first ten lausavísur in Kormáks saga,” alvíssmál 7 [1997]: 37–60). Recent publications encourage us to envisage a synthesis – and indeed a synergy – of secular and ecclesiastical cultures. The kings’ sagas could arguably have emerged as the product of this kind of dynamic and it could also help to account for the indebtedness of specific saga episodes to patristic texts, chivalric romances, Irish heroic tales, eddaic poetry, and other external sources. A perennially fascinating candidate example of mixed oracy and literacy is the so-called Vínland or North Atlantic group of sagas, Eiríks saga rau6a and Grœnlendinga saga, which have attracted special attention in virtue of what appears to be historical, geographical, and ethnographic reportage (Ólafur

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Halldórsson, Grænland í mi6aldaritum, 1978). Attempts to identify “authors” of individual sagas continue. Snorri Sturluson retains his place as preferred nominee for Egils saga, Haukr Erlendsson has been nominated as author of Flóamanna saga (Richard Perkins, Flóamanna saga, Gaulverjabær and Haukr Erlendsson, 1978), and Sturla Qór6arson’s name has been linked with a lost redaction of Grettis saga. Peter Hallberg used statistical analyses of vocabulary in an endeavor to place the sagas in groups and assign them to authors (Stilsignalement och författarskap i norrön sagalitteratur, 1968). Other scholars have tried to establish affiliations with specific families and districts, thus Njáls saga with the Svínfellingar (Lars Lönnroth, Njáls saga: A Critical Introduction, 1976). Attempts at dating individual sagas and the establishment of a relative chronology have had an equally long and on the whole inconclusive history. Among various works to undergo radical changes of dating is Fóstbrœ6ra saga (Jónas Kristjánsson, Um Fóstbrœ6ra sögu, 1972). Vigorous debate has also centered on the historical veracity or fictionality of sagas, with Hrafnkels saga as virtually a test case (Sigur6ur Nordal, Hrafnkels saga Freysgo6a, trans. R. George Thomas, 1958; Óskar Halldórsson, Uppruni og qema Hrafnkels sögu, 1976; Dietrich Hofmann, “Hrafnkels und Hallfre6s Traum,” Skandinavistik 6 [1976]: 19–36). In the confidence, not necessarily justified, that the sagas reflect social conditions in the settlement period accurately even if their narrative is partially fictitious, these texts have been drawn on as sources towards studies of feuding (Jesse L. Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, 1982; William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 1990), ethics (Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, Fortælling og ære, 1993; Gu6rún Nordal, Ethics and Action in Thirteenth Century Iceland, 1998), slavery, infanticide, concubinage, status of women (Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society, 1995), gift-exchange and the location of power and resources (Aron Gurevic, “Wealth and Gift-Bestowal Among the Ancient Scandinavians,” Scandinavica 7 [1968]: 126–38). But an unease at this trend is also being registered. Assessments of the sagas of Icelanders against the testimony of recent excavations (Orri Vésteinsson, “Archaeology of Economy and Society,” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, 2005, 7–26) and foreign primary sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reveal awkward discrepancies. The use of law codes to corroborate the sagas has been characterized as doubly hazardous, since we cannot be sure of the validity of either source type (Jón Vi6ar Sigur 5 sson, Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth, 1999; but cf. Gunnar Karlsson, “Social Institutions,” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, 2005, 503–17). Preferable for some scholars is to see the sagas as embodying the later medieval ideology and culture within which they were

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produced and consumed rather than that in which they are set (Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga og samfund, 1977; Vésteinn Ólason, Dialogues with the Viking Age, 1998). Discussions of saga reception and audiences have explained the impersonality and impartiality of saga style as perhaps due to the pragmatics of narrating hostilities between kindreds while not inflaming their descendants in the audience. The nature of the ethical values to be elicited from the sagas has proved equally debatable, with some scholars positing a continuum from early Germanic society (Peter Hallberg, The Icelandic Saga, trans. Paul Schach, 1962) and others seeking a basis in Augustinian doctrine (Hermann Pálsson, Art and Ethics in Hrafnkels Saga, 1971). Formalist and structuralist analyses have sought to detect standard patterns of plot and narrative but it is difficult to make headway beyond the “true but trivial” (Theodore Andersson, The Icelandic Family Saga, 1967; Joseph Harris, “Genre and Narrative Structure in Some Íslendinga qættir,” Scandinavian Studies 44, 1 [1972]: 1–27). In aesthetic and literary-critical evaluations, Njáls saga and Laxdœla saga have enjoyed special prominence (Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Njáls saga: A Literary Masterpiece, trans. Paul Schach, 1971; Richard F. Allen, Fire and Iron: Critical Approaches to Njáls saga, 1971; Rolf Heller, Die Laxdœla Saga, 1976). Whereas the fornaldarsögur traditionally enjoyed scant literary-critical attention, probably on the grounds that the content is typically less realistic than that of the sagas of Icelanders, at present their study is undergoing a revival (Fornaldarsagornas struktur och ideologi, ed. Ármann Jakobsson et al., 2003). This may be in part a reflex of the current vogue for fantasy literature. Scholars are also sifting these sagas more thoroughly for source material on ancestral mythology and religious practices. Jens Peter Schjødt, for example, interprets the Höttr and Bö6varr bjarki episode from Hrólfs saga kraka as a possible vestige of a pre-Christian initiation ritual (“Balder og Høt: Om guder, helte og initiationsritualer,” International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. Michael Dallapiazza et al., 2000, 421–33). A methodological difficulty in this is that although elements within the story material may indeed have ancient origins, the extant redactions have been shown, in this and other cases, to date from as late as the 15th century. Many basic points about the genesis of the individual kings’ sagas remain unresolved and perhaps permanently beyond our reach. In the case of the Historia Norvegiae, for example, the location and dating of the composition remain uncertain (Carl Phelpstead and Devra Kunin, A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr, 2001). The methodology of redaction criticism continues to be debated. One approach has been to

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assume that the relationships between redactions are literary rather than oral and therefore to posit lost written sources when unexplained material crops up in sagas (Gustav Indrebø, Fagrskinna, 1917). The place of oral tradition was partially reinstated by Siegfried Beyschlag (Konungasögur, 1950) and in the case of Morkinskinna the core “oldest” redaction has recently been explained as drawn directly from oral tradition and skaldic verse (Theodore M. Andersson, “Kings’ Sagas,” Old Norse-Icelandic Literature, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow, 1985). Trends in the copying of kings’ sagas in later medieval Iceland have yet to be fully documented but the notion is emerging, again in the spirit of New Philology, that each redaction or individual manuscript witness must be situated within its own temporal context and moreover can be used as a source of information about contemporary attitudes (Sverre Bagge, “How Can We Use Medieval Historiography?,” International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, loc. cit., 2000, 29–42). Thus the activity of Icelanders in composing or perpetuating kings’ sagas has been accounted for on the basis that it helped to define attitudes towards royal power and the Norwegian parent society (Ármann Jakobsson, Í leit a6 konungi, 1997). The application of literary criticism and aesthetic evaluation to the kings’ sagas has been strikingly uneven. If Heimskringla is the work to have undergone most searching analysis, it is in part because of the conviction that Snorri Sturluson himself was the “true begetter” (Hallvard Lie, Studier i Heimskringlas stil, 1937). By contrast, other redactions have been considered of little merit and indeed Morkinskinna and Hulda-Hrokkinskinna have never been published in normalized form. One direction of scholarship on the biskupa sögur has been to align them with known scriptoria and centers of literary patronage – each center being credited with trademark methods and aesthetics. Sigur6ur Nordal reconstructed a process whereby the Skálholt set of sagas, such as Qorláks saga helga, came into being under the influence of the Hólar sagas, such as Jóns saga helga (“Sagalitteraturen,” Litteraturhistorie: Norge og Island, 1953). More recent scholarship has tried to foster a more holistic discussion of these vernacular sources in integration with the Latin-language lives. Such a perspective reveals the Latin Qorlákr fragments as an experiment in the biskupa saga genre antedating Jóns saga helga (Bjarni A 5 albjarnarson, “Bemerkninger om de eldste islandske bispesagaer,” Studia Islandica 17 [1958]: 27–37). Another scholarly approach had been to divide the biskupa sögur into two categories, saints’ lives and historical works, and to evaluate their historical veracity accordingly. More recently a realization has grown up, once again as an outcome of more holistic study, that many of the works traditionally considered historical, notable among them Hungrvaka, in fact show the influence of

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saints’ lives (Margaret Cormack, “Christian Biography,” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk, 2005, 27–42). Current investigations in religious history are focusing on the Conversion to Christianity in Scandinavia on an interdisciplinary basis, with skaldic verses, Kristni saga, and other textual sources under investigation side by side with evidence from material culture (Lesley Abrams, “The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia,” Anglo-Saxon England 24 [1995]: 213–50). Landnámabók is another text whose historicity continues to be at issue. Attempts have been made to link its compilation with the assertion of the property rights of certain chieftains (Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, “A6fer6ir og vi6horf í Landnámurannsóknum,” Skírnir 150 [1974]: 213–38). If this line of argument could be sustained, it would tend to call in question the veracity and non-partisanship of this key text as a supposedly comprehensive account of settlements. Like Landnámabók, the Icelandic annals are problematic insofar as their relationship with the sagas has proved difficult to disentangle. E. Summary This is a field with copious primary materials and an increasingly voluminous scholarly literature. At the same time, a number of essential long-term projects toward the establishment of basic scholarly resources are still proceeding and others have yet to be initiated. Coverage of the field is markedly uneven, with an evident enduring preference for sources that can be construed as indigenous, ancestral, and vernacular over those that are foreign and Christian. Likewise, we see a preference for empiric and positivistic approaches over the more theoretical or aesthetically oriented. Select Bibliography Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingetid til reformationstid, ed. Jakob Benediktsson and Magnús Már Lárusson (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1956–1978); Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide, ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rory McTurk, A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Encyclopedia of Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Phillip Pulsiano et al. (New York: Garland, 1993); Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–).

Russell Poole

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Inter-/Cross-Cultural Studies A. Definition In general, Cultural Studies examines the whole of texts produced by a culture – not just traditional, canonical literature of “high” culture (the purview of literary studies) – to include popular literature and other cultural forms, such as art and architecture; thus, Cultural Studies tends to be interdisciplinary and to subsume other disciplines, especially literary studies. In particular, Intercultural Studies focuses upon cultural artifacts produced as a result of contact between two or more distinct cultural groups, while Crosscultural Studies investigates a particular mode of cultural production, like theater, that exists within various cultures that may not have had direct contact with one another. There has been considerable discussion about distinctions among various approaches to the study of cultural artifacts. Multiculturalism surveys diversity that is found within a particular region or nation and values the diversity existing in that area. This subject also overlaps with Border Studies, which explores the development of hybrid cultural forms by those peoples whose positions on boundary lines separate them from other groups. Postcolonialism is a term for the theoretical analysis of the culture of former colonies and is inclined to critique sharply the colonizer’s assumed attitude of superiority and the conflicted identity of the colonized. World literature provides an overview of canonical literatures from across the world in translation, while comparative literature suggests a closer analysis of smaller clusters of texts in their original language. Whether or not comparative/ world literature should be submerged within the broader rubric of Cultural Studies has been under intense debate. In holocultural research, social scientists use statistical analysis to examine large sets of data systematically collected from many cultures. (For definitions and debates, see Charles Bernheimer, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, 1995; Jan Walsh Hokenson, in Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, 2003; Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. James Helpers, 2005). Thus, cultural analysis involves a bewildering array of approaches and terms. For the purposes of this article, what follows is a brief survey of selected Intercultural and Crosscultural Medieval Studies examined within the context of controversies in the field. That this subject provokes conflict is not surprising; the term “the Middle Ages” is a construct that subsequent eras have imposed upon the past, and the interpretation of the medieval past

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frequently reveals more about the scholar’s attitude toward cultural identities than about the Middle Ages itself. B. History of Research Inter/Cross-Cultural Studies has its roots in the 18th-and 19th-century comparative studies – particularly comparative literature and anthropology – when European empires became established across the world. Crosscultural Studies stemmed from the work of 19th-century anthropologists, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, who published his influential Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom in 1871. The investigation into mythology by Max Müller (1823–1900) and Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) had a profound effect upon the study of literature and led to early comparative studies that searched for the sources and analogues of later literature. These early researchers, influenced by Charles Darwin and other evolutionary theorists, assumed cultural evolution would explain the difference between the “civilized” world of Europe and North America of the researchers and the “primitive” societies that they researched. As for Medieval Studies, the tension between “primitive” and “civilized” has been a pertinent point of debate in the formation of the Middle Ages. According to a traditional definition of the medieval era, the thousand years between the 400s and 1400s was a “middle” period between the fall of classical civilization and its “rebirth” during the Renaissance. Edward Gibbon popularized this view with his monumental work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), which firmly established the belief that Germanic barbarians destroyed the civilized classical world, thereby ushering in the Dark Ages of the medieval period. According to this view, during late antiquity and early Middle Ages, invasions by Germanic tribes – pagan, illiterate, primitive – overwhelmed the Classical world – literate and civilized, with a nascent Christianity. Medievalists subsequently tempered this harsh view of the Middle Ages to posit that, starting in late antiquity, a transformation was underway, caused in part by the rise of Christianity along with the assimilation and collision of Germanic and Roman cultures. Also, this change was limited to the West and did not affect the eastern portion of the empire based in Byzantium and Constantinople. Henri Pierre in a series of papers in 1922–1923 argued that it was not the Germanic barbarians but the rise of Islam that created the social, economic, and cultural shifts that led to the Middle Ages. W. P. Ker (The Dark Ages, 1904) maintained that the decaying classical world manifested itself in the pedantic Latin literature of the Dark Ages and that vigorous literature was instead found in the sagas

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and epics of the Germanic and Celtic peoples. Just as Homer and the ancient Greeks were uncultured illiterates who formed the basis of classical grandeur, so, too, the barbarians of Northern Europe formed the basis of a high culture that would emerge as these barbarians became literate and civilized under the influence of the Christian Church and the legacy of the Roman Empire. Ernst Robert Curtius (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948) demonstrated that the Latin language served as an assimilating force for the various ethnic groups in Europe from the time of the Roman Empire well into the Renaissance, and thus the elite culture of the Romans never really disappeared. Since the 1970s, Peter Brown (World of Late Antiquity, 1971) has described the Middle Ages as a cultural transformation occurring when Roman and Germanic leaders shared power. Thus, medievalists have altered the perspective that the Middle Ages was a period devoid of civilization and dominated by primitive barbarians to the view that the Middle Ages formed a distinct civilization resulting from the assimilation of Christian, Germanic, and Classical cultures. However, the tension between the “primitive” and the “civilized” persists today as seen in the titles of books that delineate the intercultural origins of the medieval period. In The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), Bryan Ward-Perkins used textual and archaeological evidence to prove that indeed the Germanic barbarians destroyed Roman civilization. A few years earlier Thomas Cahill also pointedly used “civilization” in the title for his book How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), which portrayed pre-Christian Ireland as barbaric but vigorous and Rome educated but decadent, save for its new religion of Christianity. As Germanic barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire, the Irish remained in relative peace and converted to Christianity and adopted the Roman alphabet. They copied texts that would otherwise have been lost in the chaos of Europe, they assimilated their native Celtic culture to Christianity, and they sent missionaries to spread their work, with the result that the Irish “saved civilization.” Although Cahill’s research was not ground breaking (despite the subtitle’s claim that the book is an “untold story”) and scholars disputed some of his conclusions, its reception was unusual in that it became a popular bestseller, a rarity for a nonfiction account of cultural change in the Middle Ages. Its anti-English slant appealed strongly to those of Irish descent who believe that their contributions have been overlooked and even maligned by historians favoring English imperialism. Giving voice to the colonized and oppressed has been a hallmark of scholarship in recent decades. Scholarship dramatically shifted in the latter half of the 20th century in response to profound political events: World War II ended with the dismantling of European Empires and the rise of postcolo-

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nial nations; the 1960s were marked by civil rights movements and student protests, leading to interest in feminism and the rights of ethnic/racial minorities; the 1980s saw the end of the Cold War and a new emphasis upon area studies of such regions as Eastern Europe. A variety of postmodern theories emerged in response to the new political landscape. A call for medievalists to join the new theory movements came with William Paden’s 1994 collection of essays, The Future of the Middle Ages, in which Joan Ferrante encouraged medievalists to conduct “international, interdisciplinary, and ‘intersexual’ studies” (145) – i. e., Inter-/Cross-Cultural Studies. In this new climate, previous medieval approaches that stressed homogeneity gave way to diversity, with perhaps no better example than that of multicultural medieval Spain. In 1948 Américo Castro (España en su historia) argued that Spanish cultural identity was formed during the Middle Ages with the convivencia (i. e., coexistence) of the Jews, Muslims, and Christians living in the Iberian peninsula. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in 1956 denied this claim in España: Un enigma histórico; he said that the national character was indigenous and preceded the invasion of the Islamic Moors. These diametrically opposing views are caused by the paucity of evidence from the Middle Ages, compounded by researchers’ subjectivity. Thomas Glick lamented that the rancor of the debate on the Spanish national character hindered progress on Intercultural Studies in medieval Spain. However, with the rise of postmodern theory, convivencia is now a popular topic of research concerning medieval Iberia (Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, 1979; and Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, ed. id. et al., 1992; Stacy N. Beckwith, Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, 1999; Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings in Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, 1997). As the case of Spain illustrates, people have a strong interest in locating the origins of their identity in the medieval past, and over the past century research into this subject has moved from an emphasis on homogeneity that excluded other voices to an investigation into diversity’s role in cultural formation. As the above scholarship implies, religion played an enormous part in intercultural relationships during the Middle Ages. According to Richard Gyug, religion was the most common source of identity formation for the era (Medieval Cultures in Contact, ed. id., 2003, xii), later replaced by national affiliation in the modern period. It was during the Middle Ages that Christianity and Islam formed the base of empires that overshadowed other religions. In antiquity, Christianity began as a small sect that broke with mainstream Judaism. Jeremy Cohen, in Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of Jews in Medieval Christianity (1999), traced the development of Christian reactions to

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Judaism. Since Jesus was a Jew, early Christians had to create a distinctly different cultural identity. Although Pope Urban II originated the Crusades as a campaign to take Jerusalem from Muslims, some Crusaders generalized the “holy war” to all non-Christians and attacked Jews. Robert Chazen, in European Jewry and the First Crusade (1987), discussed Hebrew chronicles about Crusader attacks on Jews in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, and he analyzed the ways that the chronicle genre as practiced by Jewish writers reflected the influence of Christian genres. Chazen’s study underscored the closeness of the Christian and Jewish communities in Germany, despite Crusader violence. However, by the late Middle Ages, the Church attempted to build its eroding power and strengthen Christian unity by intensifying its rhetoric against Jews, Muslims, pagans, and heretics. Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late-Medieval Jews (1999) included medieval narratives of supposed murders perpetrated by Jews against Christians. By the 1490s, Jews had been expelled from England, France, and Spain (which also eventually expelled the Moors). Currently, massive immigration movements, especially in Europe and North America, along with increased religious hostilities, as evidenced by the rise of Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups, have magnified interest in the medieval origins of inter/cross-cultural conflict, particularly of religious origin. Scholarly publications reflect this concern, with Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue being one journal. Palgrave’s New Middle Ages Series frequently publishes volumes about cross-cultural studies on a given topic – e. g., Robes and Honor (ed. Stewart Gordon, 2001) surveyed the practice of investiture during the medieval era in such diverse areas as Christian Europe, the Islamic Middle East, along with China and the Far East. Routledge’s The Multicultural Middle Ages Series published Sheila Delany’s Chaucer and the Jews (2002), a book that illustrates another trend: taking a canonical subject aligned with a particular national literature (in this case, Chaucer’s writings) and placing it in the context of other cultures (Jews). Academic conferences and their published proceedings often feature inter/cross-cultural themes: e. g., Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World before 1700 (ed. David Blanks, 1997), a collection of essays presented at the Conference on Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Mediterranean. Studies now cover a panoply of medieval inter/cross-cultural topics. For example, Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002) discussed depictions of the Other by medieval writers primarily from England and Germany. Alexandra Cuffel’s In Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (2007) examined images of bodily impurity shared by medieval Jews, Muslims, and Christians in their religious

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debates. Travel writing has proven to be a rich source of information about intercultural relationships, as Marina Münkler has shown in her research on travelogues about the Far East written by Marco Polo and other Europeans (Erfahrung des Fremden, 2001). The Medieval World (ed. Peter Lineham and Janet Nelson, 2001) spanned a broad geographical range with essays on “Courts in East and West” (Jonathan Shepard, 14–36), “How Many Medieval Europes? The ‘Pagans’ of Hungary and Regional Diversity in Christendom” (Nora Berend, 77–92) and “Christians, Barbarians, and Monsters: the European Discovery of the World Beyond Islam” (Peter Jackson, 93–110). Medieval Cultures in Contact (ed. Richard Gyug, 2003) contained essays on topics that have not been given much notice in the past; for example, James D. Ryan detailed the reasons for the failure of 14th-century missionaries in converting Central Asia to Christianity (19–38). It seems every topic imaginable related to the Middle Ages is now being discussed from the perspective of multiple cultures because Medieval Europe was “multicultural in historical fact” (James Helpers, Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2005, 7). Select Bibliography Medieval Cultures in Contact, ed. Richard Gyug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. James P. Helpers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); The Medieval World, ed. Peter Lineham and Janet Nelson (London: Routledge, 2001); the journal Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Cultures in Confluence and Dialogue (Leiden: Brill, 1999–present).

Barbara Stevenson

Interdisciplinarity in Medieval Studies A. Definition Questions of the relationship between different disciplines are generally rather old. Today in the humanities and the sciences, on the one hand efforts have increased greatly at differentiation and specialization, on the other hand and at the same time interest in interdisciplinary research has considerably intensified. The term ‘interdisciplinarity’ has become common among members of every academic discipline. Thus, the seeming paradox can be observed that the more knowledge production is differentiated the more loudly the call for interdisciplinarity is articulated. Interdisciplinarity and special-

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ization are parallel (Peter Weingart, “Interdisciplinarity: The Paradoxical Discourse,” Practising Interdisciplinarity, ed. Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, 2000, 25–41). Some of the problems with interdisciplinary research are connected with uncertainty over the meaning of the term and the lack of a clear definition (Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice, 1990, 12). In this respect, one may compare the difficulties with ‘interdisciplinarity’ to the sometimes also ambiguous use of the terms ‘transdisciplinarity,’ ‘cross-disciplinarity,’ and ‘multi(pluri-)disciplinarity’ (Tom HorlickJones and Jonathan Sime, “Living on the Border: Knowledge, Risk and Transdisciplinarity,” Futures 36 [2004]: 441–56; Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak, “Theory, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Discourse Analysis,” Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. id., 2003, 15–23). A definition of ‘interdisciplinary history’ may be formulated as “historical scholarship that makes use of the methods or concepts of one or more disciplines other than history” (T. C. R. Horn and Harry Ritter, “Interdisciplinary History: A Historiographical Review,” The History Teacher 19 [1986]: 428). The motivation for interdisciplinarity is recognition of incompleteness (Mark Gibson and Alec McHoul, “Interdisciplinarity,” A Companion to Cultural Studies, ed. Toby Miller, 2006, 26). The trend toward interdisciplinarity has become one of the most important developments in the methodology of Medieval Studies in the second half of the twentieth and in the 21st century. Today, interdisciplinary approaches offer a variety of new opportunities but are also constrained by a number of (institutional) obstacles. Often, interdisciplinarity just occurs as a fashionable term used to get funding for projects but is ultimately not realized. Interdisciplinary research (still) sounds innovative and substantial but one has to be aware that each discipline has its own expert knowledge and methods. This can lead to the situation and danger that someone working interdisciplinarily is a specialist in one field but a dilettante in others with which she or he wants to combine her or his research. The hazard of uncritically adopting perspectives from other disciplines cannot be denied. Thus, “[…] the question of whether or not the historian should use the ideas and methods of other fields is no longer at issue. The question is, rather, how well the historian selects and makes use of those concepts and techniques” (Horn and Ritter, “Interdisciplinary History,” 446). One of the dangers is also that ‘uncontrolled’ interdisciplinary research may serve as an opportunity for prejudice and wishes to be included in scientific discourse (Ken Kalling, “Interdisciplinarity: A Gate for Wishful Thinking?” History of Medieval Life and the Sciences, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 2000, 29–43)

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The particular question remains: whether and at what point proceeding from the disciplinary to the interdisciplinary levels of research will end. ‘Mediävistik’ (Medieval Studies), which has always postulated a kind of unity of the field, could become or, at least, should be seen as, the ideal of an ‘interdisciplinary interdiscipline,’ being about reaching new content and a new program of research (Frank Fürbeth, “Was heißt, wozu dient und wohin führt uns Interdisziplinarität?” Interdisziplinarität, ed. Wihelm G. Busse and Hans-Werner Goetz, 1999, 7–16). B. Developments and Emphases Following the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest instance of the use of the term ‘interdisciplinary’ goes back to a sociological article published in 1937. The research of scholars in historical studies from the second half of the 19th century already manifested these ideas. In this respect, Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), who taught at the University of Leipzig, is particularly important for Medieval Studies. In his approach toward cultural history he tried to unite concepts of history, art history, economics, and ‘social psychology.’ Lamprecht remained isolated in German research, but he influenced the New History that started to flourish in the United States around the period of the First World War. In France, the Revue de Synthèse Historique, founded in 1900 by the philosopher Henry Berr, turned against extreme specialization in various disciplines. This interdisciplinary orientation, at least indirectly, had an impact on the founding of the famous French ‘Annales School,’ led at the beginning by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and its journal Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale in 1929. The Annales have influenced Medieval Studies in its interdisciplinary focus for decades. The actual discussion of interdisciplinarity started at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s (see, e. g., Wassily Leontieff, “Note on the Pluralistic Interpretation of History and the Problem of Interdisciplinary Cooperation,” The Journal of Philosophy 45 [1948]: 617–24). ‘Interdisciplinary history’ became fashionable in the 1960s, particularly with the founding of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History in 1970. The peak of discussion concerning interdisciplinarity was reached in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1971, Roland Barthes stated (tr. 1977 as “From Work to Text,” id., Image-Music-Text, 155) that interdisciplinarity “is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively […] when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down […] in the interests of a new object and a new language […].” On the one hand, positive statements about the function and possibilities of interdisciplinary research were expressed and a number of

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important interdisciplinary studies published. On the other hand, questions about the sense and problems of interdisciplinarity were put in larger numbers: whether it was a new game for bored scholars or a system for vague speculations (Nancy Ann Cluck, “Reflections on the Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Humanities,” Liberal Education 66 [1980]: 77); whether Clio should not remain a virgin undefiled by contact with other disciplines; and so on (see John M. Theilmann, “Crossing the Sacred Boundary Between the Disciplines: Medieval History and Symbolic Anthropology,” The Midwest Quarterly 24 [1982]: 28–38). Pressure for interdisciplinary studies was emphasized, which showed that a situation had arisen in which the current categories of knowledge had become obsolete and new ones were not yet established (Daniel Marder, “The Interdisciplinary Discipline,” ADE Bulletin 45 [1975]: 30). One author even stated that interdisciplinarity was “so overused as to be abused” (Michael W. Messmer, “The Vogue of the Interdisciplinarity,” The Centennial Review 12 [1978]: 467–78). A large number of institutions dealing with Medieval Studies appointed interdisciplinarity as one of the main aims of their existence. When the German ‘Mediävistenverband’ (1983) was founded, support for the interdisciplinary cooperation of medievalists was included in the by-laws. In the German-speaking countries, the ‘Institut zur Interdisziplinären Erforschung des Mittelalters und seines Nachwirkens’ was founded at the University of Paderborn, the ‘Interdisziplinäre Zentrum Mittelalter–Renaissance–Frühe Neuzeit’ at the Free University of Berlin, the ‘Interdisziplinäre Arbeitskreis Mediävistik’ at the University of Mainz, and the ‘Interdisziplinäre Zentrum für Mittelalter-Studien’ at the University of Salzburg. In this peak period of interest, interdisciplinary approaches in Medieval Studies could, in particular, be found in research that made use of concepts of sociology, anthropology, psychology, the sciences, and medicine. Strong influences, especially concerning urban history, may be seen coming from sociology, notably in the tradition of Max Weber (1864–1920) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918). The interdisciplinary approaches and cooperation of Medieval Studies and social anthropology were strongly influenced by Victor Turner’s comparative symbology and Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ (see Theilmann, “Crossing the Sacred Boundary between the Disciplines,” 28–38). Both of them emphasized that the interpretation of culture is necessarily semiotic. This corresponds with the statement of Umberto Eco, who defined semiotics as a methodological approach serving many disciplines or, simply, as an interdisciplinary approach (“Semiotics: A Discipline or an Interdisciplinary Method,” Sight, Sound and Sense, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 1978, 73–83). Studies based on the interdisciplinary use of anthro-

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pology (see Natalie Z. Davis, “The Possibilities of the Past,” The New History: The 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Robert I. Rotberg, 1982, 264–75) received special acknowledgment (e. g., Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, 1981). Particularly in the 1970s, in the context of developments in social and economic history, a special trend started toward the application of quantitative methods in Medieval Studies (e. g., Quantitative Methoden in der Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Vorneuzeit, ed. Franz Irsigler, 1978). A number of interdisciplinary approaches were implemented based on taking over concepts of technology. Lynn White’s classic Medieval Technology and Social Change (1st ed. 1962) influenced, and continues to influence, a number of other studies. Various areas of the sciences had important impacts on Medieval Studies (e. g., Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, 1981; Dietrich Denecke, “Interdisziplinäre historisch-geographische Umweltforschung: Klima, Gewässer und Böden im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit,” Siedlungsforschung. Archäologie–Geschichte–Geographie 12 [1991]: 235–63; History of Medieval Life and the Sciences, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 2000). Interdisciplinary cooperation with medicine and psychology, in particular, gave rise to new views on some old questions of Medieval Studies (e. g., Psychologie in der Mediävistik, ed. Jürgen Kühnel et al., 1985; Friedrich Wolfzettel, “Mediävistik und Psychoanalyse: Eine Bestandsaufnahme,” Mittelalterbilder aus neuer Perspektive, ed. Ernstpeter Ruhe and Rudolf Behrens, 1985, 210–237; John Theilmann and Frances Cate, “A Plague of Plagues: The Problem of Plague Diagnosis in Medieval England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37 [2007]: 371–93). The application of concepts of psychology, however, occasionally shifting to psychohistory, sometimes led to massive criticism (e. g., David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory, 1982). In a large number of other fields of Medieval Studies the successful realization of interdisciplinary approaches can be seen; for instance, in art history and social and cultural history (e. g., Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 1972); in literary history, art history, cultural history, and the history of mentalities (e. g., Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild, Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter, 1995); and so on. Some conferences have concentrated on interdisciplinary approaches toward traditional as well as new topics (e. g., Le travail au Moyen Age: Une approche interdisciplinaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Colette Muraille-Samaran, 1990; Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History, ed. Mary Jo Maynes et al., 1996, with contributions concern-

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ing the Middle Ages by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and Barbara Hanawalt; Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2005; Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. id., 2007; Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. id., 2008; Urban Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. id., 2009; Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. id., 2010. German research particularly has been conducting an ongoing discussion about the perspectives and possibilities of interdisciplinary studies in the future (e.g., Werner Rocke, “Weltbilder–Mentalitäten–kulturelle Praxis: Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Mediävistik,” Mittelalter und Moderne: Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt, ed. Peter Segl, 1997, 3–14; Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Stand und Perspektiven der internationalen und interdisziplinären Mittelalterforschung, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut, 2003). Problems in today’s society have also initiated intersdisciplinary approaches by medievalists. Nowadays this is particularly true concerning the global effects of climate (e. g., Michael McCormick et al., “Volcanoes and the Climatic Forcing of Carolingian Europe, A. D. 750–950,” Speculum 82 [2007]: 865–95). Select Bibliography T. C. R. Horn and Harry Ritter, “Interdisciplinary History: A Historiographical Review,” The History Teacher 19 (1986): 427–48; Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Interdisziplinarität, ed. Wihelm G. Busse and Hans-Werner Goetz (Das Mittelalter: Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 4,1) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1999); Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (New York: Routledge, 2002); In(ter)discipline: New Languages for Criticism, ed. Gilian Beer et al. (London et al.: Maney Publishing, 2007).

Gerhard Jaritz

Intertextuality and Comparative Approaches in Medieval Literature A. Definition Since much of medieval literature in some way responds to oral or written authorities, many critical approaches to medieval intertextuality have been offered over the years. Imitation, allusion, reference, indirect reference, citation, quotation, insertion, poetic contests on a theme, rewriting, pas-

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tiche, montage, gloss, recycling, plagiarism, parody (see entry on “Parody” in this Handbook), and other forms of influence or derivation may all be read as forms of intertextual writing. Intertextuality may be seen in works of the same language, or through a comparative approach in different languages; comparative approaches to medieval literature today owe much to the critical concept of intertextuality. Reading each text as open and each composition as fluid, intertextuality is the phenomenon whereby the meaning of a given text may only be discovered in its relation to other texts. Growing out of structuralism, semiotics, and dialogism, as well as out of the work of Saussure, Bakhtin, and the French Tel Quel group, the poststructuralist study of intertextuality centers on the meanings and signs of a given text in relation to other texts. The theory of intertextuality has provided an approach to reading and decoding the encoding of writers and readers in a given text in relation to the context of other posterior and anterior texts. Intertextuality as a named theory was first identified by Julia Kristeva in 1966. Since being coined by Kristeva in Paris of the 1960s, intertextuality has come to mean many things to literary scholars and has been particularly useful in studying the relationships between medieval texts, in which originality was not the most prized quality. Harold Bloom termed an author’s relationship to prior sources as “the anxiety of influence” (Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 1973), suggesting that all poems, indeed all texts, must inescapably be responses to prior works and precursors, that authors, readers, and critics alike cannot separate themselves from relationships of textual influence; Bloom’s idea that essentially there are no texts, only relationships between texts, informed many poststructuralist readings and studies on intertextuality. Roland Barthes’s concept of intertextuality is similar to that of Kristeva’s, but Barthes addresses more the reader’s pleasure as part of le plaisir du texte, in recognizing the playful elements of recognizing intertextuality. Gérard Genette’s Palimpsestes: La littérature au seconde degré, 1982, a title that suggests the study of the medieval scribal phenomenon of the palimpsest (writing that has been partially erased or scratched off and written over by the ink of a new text) as a metaphor for imitative and derivative texts with intertextual, or what he terms more specifically hypertextual relationships. In the 21st century, literary critics and philosophers have begun to question the usefulness of the seemingly all-encompassing term intertextuality. Postmodernism and the term hypertextuality offer an alternative perspective. More recently, William Irwin, “Against Intertextuality” (Philosophy and Literature 28.2 [2004]: 227–42), attacks the possibility of careless overuse of the term and criticizes the ambiguous use of the term by Julia Kristeva,

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Roland Barthes, and their followers, pointing out that with intertextuality, the pluralism of possible interpretations and relationships is nearly endless. B. Early Comparative Approaches The beginnings of comparative approaches to medieval literature were tied to approaches of folklore in the 19th and early 20th century. Before the perspectives of intertextuality, translation studies, or comparative literature, Folklore Studies was one of the first disciplines to cross language barriers in comparing commonalities between literatures of different languages and cultures. The perspective of folklore focused on the repetition archetypical motifs that may be indexed according to their most basic elements (e. g., the trickster, the loathly lady, the enchanted ring, the other world crossing, etc.). Folklore scholars and scholars of Celtic literature published some of the first comparative studies, which were essentially source studies which focused on common folklore motifs; in the 19th century one of the first comparative Medieval Studies was Albert Schulz, An Essay on the Influence of Welsh Tradition upon the Literature of Germany, France, and Scandinavia (1840, transl. M. Berrington, 1841), and in the 20th century, Jessie Laidlay Weston’s roughly contemporary and now very dated comparative folklore studies on the Celtic rituals and Biblical origins of the Grail tradition and the romance genre in The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913), and From Ritual to Romance (1920). Such studies tended to focus on Celtic origins and oral or written sources of extant European romance and epic. Even before the term intertextuality was coined, medievalists provided a number of other terms to describe the intertextual relationships so common between medieval texts. In the late 19th century, source-studies and folklore archetype studies were the early precursors to the critical perspective of intertextuality that was used in the late 20th century and early 21st century. In 1893, pioneering French philologist Joseph Bédier (Les fabliaux, études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge; see also entry on “Bédier” in this Handbook) employed a metaphor to explain the medieval strategies of composition that include the reuse of familiar material in the notions of originality and invention. Bédier introduced the notion that Arthurian romances especially were not unoriginal; rather, they shared many commonalities because they were all nourished by what he conceived of in a sense as a common pollen. Several other attempts have been made to define such reused literary allusion as the following: commonplaces, oral formulae, matierel roulant, and parties cristallines. Daniel Poirion even referred to links between medieval texts as a playful game or interplay on variations

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and literary echoes (Précis de littérature française du moyen âge, 1983). Other images have been applied to the phenomena of imitation and rewriting in any period, from Roland Barthes’ appetizing metaphor of secondary literature as a multi-layered filled feuilleté pastry, to Gérard Genette’s striking image of hypertextuality with multi-layered traces of ink left on erased or recycled manuscript parchment with palimpsestes. Such metaphorical terms have assisted critical dialogue concerning commonplaces and conventions, but do not get at the heart of the phenomenon of 13th-century derivative literature and relations to the prior texts to which it responds; the perspective of intertextuality has aimed to better address these relations between texts. Studies in the 1970s and 1980s (such as John A. Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 52 [1977]: 80–99), looked at inserted quotations and literary references of an intertextual nature before the use of the term “intertextuality” as such came into full-scale critical vogue in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1981, a groundbreaking special issue of the journal Littérature explored the term and concept of intertextuality as applied to the reading of medieval literature; from this special journal issue on, the application of this term became a widely-used approach in medieval literary criticism, in particular in the areas of English, French, Dutch, and German verse and prose romance. Terms such as Paul Zumthor’s textual mouvance and Daniel Poirion’s ré-écriture, or re-writing, became allied concepts to intertextuality in Medieval Studies (see Hubert Heinen on intertextuality and relationships between genres in the German tradition, for instance in his edited volume, Genres in Medieval German Literature, 1986). The most influential articles in this issue have been Paul Zumthor’s illustration of the concept of medieval textual fluidity and mutability with mouvance (“Intertextualité et mouvance,” Littérature 41 [1981]: 8–16; see also entry on “Paul Zumthor” in this Handbook). Zumthor uses the image of movement to explain the plurality and openness of medieval texts; he attempts to re-historicize the theoretical concept of intertextuality so that the application of the theory to medieval texts is not anachronistic. In the same landmark issue of Littérature, Peter Dembowski’s article (“Intertextualité et critique des texts,” Littérature 41 [1981]: 17–29) gives practical arguments for the application of intertextuality to literary criticism, while Daniel Poirion explores the concept of ré-écriture and reuse of borrowed material as a medieval compositional strategy (“Écriture et ré-écriture,” Littérature 41 [1981]: 109–18). The influence of the Littérature editor Michael Riffaterre and the conclusion by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner provided an illustration of theory and practice that led to many future studies on intertextual relationships in

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medieval romance and other genres. Over a decade later, Heinz Bergner (“The Openness of Medieval Texts,” Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, ed. Andreas H. Jucker, 1995, 37–54) gives a similar argument to the definition given for mouvance by Zumthor, but instead with a historian’s perspective, emphasizing again the openness of the concept of “text” within the context of manuscript culture, scribal copying and error, gloss, rewriting of material, oral influence and other influences that might change a text over time as it is transmitted, retransmitted, and modified. C. Romance Intertextuality The Arthurian romance tradition lends itself to comparative studies because of its broad range of genres and languages over the centuries. Taking the much-studied case of intertextual relationships between Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and later 13th century verse and prose romances in French and in other language traditions as an example, it becomes clear that medieval intertextuality scholarship has focused on more than just source studies or recurring folkloric motifs; later scholarship has taken into view romancers’ reception of prior works and rewriting of familiar material in a complex dialogue with past writers. Many such “intertextual” studies are essentially comparative studies or translation studies of two or more different language versions of a given story. Several of the first intertextual studies involving Chrétien’s romances examined Lancelot, le chevalier de la charrette and its relationships to Chrétien’s Yvain, Le Chevalier au lion and to other romances. The debates on intertextuality and Chrétien’s Charrette continued through the 1980s and 1990s (Karl D. Uitti, “Intertextuality in Le Chevalier au Lion,” DFS 2 [1980]: 3–13), and continuing well over a decade later in more theoretical discussions (Debora B. Schwartz, “The Horseman before the Cart: Intertextual Theory and the Chevalier de la Charrette,” Arthuriana 6.2 [1996]: 11–27). A central work in Arthurian studies focuses on the intertextuality between Chrétien de Troyes and the 13th-century French verse romancers, or epigones, who were possibly inspired by, responding to, borrowing from, or parodying Chrétien is the highly influential scholarship of Beate SchmolkeHasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart (1980, trans. Margaret Middleton and Roger Middleton, 1998); this study demonstrates that far from suffering from the anxiety of influence, that poets in the centuries following Chrétien could even be critical of his models. The definitive two-volume collection of essays on Chrétien’s influence, which was also produced in the1980s, investigates intertextual

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echoes of Chrétien in later verse, prose, and other language texts, while helping to define the very nature of intertextuality in the Middle Ages (The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, 2 vols., 1987–1988). Elsewhere, intertextual studies involving Chrétien have tended to be comparative studies, borrowing from the disciplines of Comparative Literature or Translation Studies, and focusing on primarily medieval German adaptations of or references to Chrétien’s romances. In the past, many Chrétien scholars have treated Chrétien’s successors as romancers as affected by such an anxiety of influences, treating them often with a sort of intertextual inferiority complex, a relationship between the individual poet and his/her tradition to be overcome. 21st-century scholars increasingly have begun to treat Chrétien’s followers as romancers in their own right, considering them often independently of Chrétien’s influence. A pan-European comparative approach to intertextuality in romance is offered by the contributors to The European Dimensions of Arthurian Literature (ed., Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma, 2007), which includes intertextual references and ties between French, German, Dutch, Celtic, and English texts. Looking at Arthurian romance has led to “generic intertextuality,” a broad subset of intertextuality which explores commonalities between texts of different genres; this perspective is to be distinguished from “Intertextuality,” which explores the links between specific texts, rather than between genres or across genre lines. A section of essays in Norris J. Lacy, ed., Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature (1996), cover generic intertextuality between verse/prose romances, lyric/narrative verse, English/French romances, and Italian/English traditions; Text and Intertext also revisits the definition of intertextuality and reevaluates its use in examining the alterity of medieval texts. D. Intertextuality and Genres Intergeneric and even interdisciplinary studies between history and literature begin to reappear in the late 1980s and 1990s under the framework of intertextuality, as in Neil Wright, History and Literature in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West: Studies in Intertextuality (1995). Intergeneric intertextual studies concerning references, parody, and allusions to epic, romance, and religious texts in the French Roman de Renart have also been a focus of scholarship, and not only by North American and French scholars (Massimo Bonafin, “Intertestualità nel Roman de Renart,” MR 14 [1989]: 77–96). In the 21st century, work on intertextuality continues, Caroline A. Jewers, Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (2000), takes a comparative approach as it

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traces style, characterization, and commonalities in content from European medieval romance to the modern novel, in a wide-reaching study of intergeneric intertextuality over several centuries. Many early comparative and intertextual studies on English medieval literature focused on Chaucer, Malory, the Gawain poet, and others. Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition a Study in Style and Meaning (1957), was one of the first significant comparative studies comparing English and French texts in both form and content. Intertextual relationships between Chaucer and Boccaccio have been revived as in Chaucerian studies through the approach of Comparative Literature. The first studies in this area were essentially lists of textual sources (Hubertis Cummings, The Indebtedness of Chaucer’s Works to the Italian Works of Boccaccio: A Review and Summary, 1916; rpt. 1965). Another source-study with a folklore approach at the dawn of Comparative Literature as a discipline was Originals and Analogues of Some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (5 vols., ed. Frederick James Furnivall [see entry on “Furnivall” in this Handbook], Edmund Brock, and W. A. Clouston, published as a collaborative effort by the Chaucer Society over a decade, 1928–1937). It includes excerpts from a wide-range of suggested sources for the Canterbury Tales with a global scope, including passages from Old French fabliaux, Italian tales, analogues from Asian folklore, and Buddhist tales, Latin fables, Marie de France, Le Roman de Renart, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others. Further linking French, English, and Italian traditions was Marius Lange, Vom Fabliau zu Boccaccio und Chaucer: Ein Vergleich zweier Fabliaux mit Boccaccios Decamerone IX. 6 und mit Chaucers Reeves Tale (1934); many later comparative studies also tend to focus on a particular tale in relation to influential or derivative French or Italian texts (see, for instance Klaus Grubmüller, Die Ordnung, der Witz und das Chaos: Eine Geschichte der europäischen Novellistik im Mittelalter, 2006; and the contributors to Mittelalterliche Novellistik im europäischen Kontext, ed. Mark Chinca, Timo Reuvekamp-Felber, and Christopher Young, 2006). Later comparative studies on Chaucer focus more on thematic and stylistic intertextuality, such as N. S. Thompson, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Debate of Love: a Comparative Study of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales (1996), focusing on the themes of pilgrimage and love. Malory scholars, too, in the late 20th century extend their analysis far beyond the source-studies of earlier decades, building on earlier work by Eugène Vinaver and others but informed by the critical discourse of intertextuality; Sandra Ness Ihle’s study, for example (Malory’s Grail Quest: Invention and Adaptation in Medieval Prose Romance, 1983), demonstrates the intertextuality between the French prose romances and Malory’s compositional strategies of rewriting, translation, and adaptation. A similar perspective on intertextual-

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ity between the Gawain poet and French precursors is Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (1995). Germanist Dennis Howard Green’s influential Irony in the Medieval Romance (1979; rpt. 1980, 2005) is another example of a truly comparative study, written when intertextual and comparative studies were on the rise, focusing on narrative and stylistic strategies of verbal and dramatic irony, drawing on sources from the English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to German and French courtly romance. Among several comparative or translation studies between English and French romances that have appeared, the most comprehensive is William Calin’s The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (1994). Much comparative and intertextual scholarship has been focused on cycles of romance, especially French, English, and German; however, intertextuality has also been an important theoretical framework in other languages, particularly in comparative studies on Scandinavian texts and their manuscript traditions, as for example in Jonathan Evans, “Intertextuality and Old Icelandic Manuscripts” (MedPers 2.1 [1987]: 17–24), which compares not only content, but stylistic and scribal intertextual connections. Classical Greek and Latin and biblical intertextual borrowings in medieval narrative or lyric have also been a focus of scholarship in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the case of Ovid in relation to medieval French romance and to Dante. Douglas Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (1999), reveals classical rhetorical and Ovidian influences and intergeneric intertextuality. Another study focusing on intertextual play with classical and Ovidian sources is Doris Ruhe, “Intertextuelle Spiele bei Andreas Capellanus” (GRM 37 [1987]: 264–79). Madison U. Sowell’s Dante and Ovid: Essays in Intertextuality (1991), covers Ovidian intertextual style, rhetoric, and content. A similar intertextual approach to Dante and the Italian tradition, but looking at biblical references and citations inserted within the narrative, is taken by Christopher Kleinhenz, “Dante and the Bible: Intertextual Approaches to the Divine Comedy” (Italica 63 [1986]: 225–36). 19th- and early 20th-century studies on German literature primarily concentrated on source-studies and relationships between the romances of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von Aue, and Gottfried von Strassburg and their adaptations of earlier romance (in particular Chrétien) or epic. In the 1980s and 1990s scholarship on the German literary tradition became increasingly informed by the French and North American use of intertextuality theory and terminology. Neil Thomas (The Defence of Camelot: Ideology and Intertextuality in the “Post-Classical” German Romances of the Matter of Britain

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Cycle, 1992) considers political themes in looking at later German Arthurian and other romances through the lens of intertextuality. James W. Marchand’s study on Wolfram defines theoretical terms as well as identifying intertextual references in Wolfram, “Inter-, Intra-, and Intro-Textual Analysis in Medieval Literature: The Case of Wolfram von Eschenbach” (The Ring of Words in Medieval Literature, ed. Ulrich Goebel and David Lee, 1993, 203–18). Albrecht Classen has written on intergeneric intertextuality and authorial response to a prior literary tradition, for example in Gottfried, “Intertextualität und Quellenbezug: Gottfrieds von Straßburg ‘Tristan’ und der ‘Morîz von Craûn’?” (Tristania 16 [1995]: 1–44). More importantly, his books Zur Rezeption norditalienischer Kultur des Trecento im Werk Oswalds von Wolkenstein (1987) and Die autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters (1991) establish new cross-European perspectives. He also explores the relationship between Spanish and German literature during the Middle Ages in numerous articles, for instance, “Spain and Germany in the Middle Ages: An Unexplored Literary-Historical Area of Exchange, Reception, and Exploration” (The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries, ed. Conrad Kent, Thomas K. Wolber, and Cameron M. K. Hewitt, 2000, 47–76); “Die Iberische Halbinsel aus der Sicht eines humanistischen Nürnberger Gelehrten Hieronymus Münzer: Itinerarium Hispanicum (1494–1495)” (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 111.3–4 [2003]: 317–40); “Christoph Weiditz Paints Spain (1529): A German Artist Discovers the Spanish Peninsula” (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CV.4 [2004]: 395–406); and “Südwesteuropäische Grenzüberschreitungen aus deutscher Perspektive: Fremdbegegnung zwischen deutschsprachigen Reisenden und der iberischen Welt im Spätmittelalter” (Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 116.1–2 [2008]: 34–47). On intertextuality in the Germanic romance tradition, see several chapters on the topic in The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Medieval Dutch Literature (ed. W. H. Jackson and Silvia Ranawake, 2000). More recently, a Routledge series of collaborative “Casebooks” crosses linguistic borders and temporal lines in a broad comparative study of the Arthurian tradition, focusing on a particular major literary figure in several genres and languages over time, including English, French, German, Dutch, Celtic, and some Middle Eastern material, and extending into popular culture, including for example: The Grail: A Casebook (ed. Dhira B. Mahoney, 2000); Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook (ed. Lori J. Walters, 2002); Perceval/ Parzival: A Casebook (ed. Arthur Groos, 2002); Tristan and Isolde: A Casebook (ed. Joan Tasker Grimbert, 2002); Merlin: A Casebook (ed. Peter Goodrich, 2003); Gawain: A Casebook (ed. Raymond H. Thompson, 2005). Other “case-

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book” studies include Arthurian material from different language traditions as well as non-Arthurian texts from a comparative perspective focusing on a particular theme, such as Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages (ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002); Violence in Courtly Medieval Literature: A Casebook (ed. id., 2004); then his Childhood in the Middle Ages (2005), and his volumes in the series Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Walter de Gruyter): Old Age in the Middle Ages (2007); Sexuality in the Middle Ages (2008); Urban Space in the Middle Ages (2009); Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (2010). Comparative literary studies in the 21st century, such as these casebooks, tend to be collaborative in nature, drawing on scholars from different languages and disciplines. Comparative Literature as an academic discipline has long been more inclusive of non-Western traditions than have other perspectives. Comparative or intertextual studies on medieval Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and other languages have become more numerous in the 1990s and beyond. Numbers of Arabic-Spanish, Hebrew-Spanish and Hebrew-Arabic comparative studies and Ph.D. dissertations are also now on the rise globally. One of the first initial studies in the area of Arabic and European intertextuality in epic, song, music, romance, and lyric poetry was Ramón Menéndez Pidal (known also for his literary studies on Don Quixote and La Chanson de Roland), Poesía árabe y poesía europea, conotros estudios de literatura medieval (rpt. 1963), which opened the doors to scholars of medieval Iberian literature to study Arab traditions in Spain. In addition, Menéndez Pidal’s 42-part Historia de España (1935–), and in particular volumes 4–18 offer a comparative historical and literary study, which – although it includes Arabic and Hebrew literary and historical texts and an in-depth exploration of Muslim culture and intellectual production in medieval Spain – in its analysis remains a conservative, Eurocentric history and literary history of Spain. The debate between Americo Castro, La realidad historica de España (1954), and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, España un enigma historico (1956, rpt. 1962), continued to bring to light the polemics of comparative approaches in Iberian Studies revealed by Menéndez Pidal, with questions on how scholars may approach Arabic, Hebrew, and other influences in the study of Iberian medieval literature, history, and culture. Decades later, an example of scholarship which seems to have overcome this polemic, Spanish Hebrew Poetry and the Arab Literary Tradition: Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry (ed. Arie Schippers, 1994), offers a more recent thematic intertextual study of Iberian literature. Addressing secular and religious intertextuality between Spanish texts, the Bible, Hebraic poetic tradition, and Arabic texts through a comparative thematic approach is

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the edited collection Wine, Women and Song:Hebrew and Arabic Literature of Medieval Iberia (ed. Michelle Hamilton, Sarah Portnoy, and David Wacks, 2004). See also the numerous articles published in German, English, and French in the journal arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies (1966–). Finally, looking at academic associations may also give insight into the rise of the comparative perspective in medieval literary scholarship. The fields of Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature have been long been allies, and have been linked officially for three decades in the United States and Canada in academic departments, journals, and scholarly associations. For example, the official divisions and discussion groups that currently structure the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Annual Convention began meeting at the 1976 convention, and the “Division on Comparative Studies in Medieval Literature” was one of the original divisions. In the decades to follow, the division (along with allied organizations also) has sponsored many conference sessions on comparative topics, translation studies, and intertextuality. The 1976 Division Executive Committee of Comparative Studies in Medieval Literature, which was the first, was composed of: R. William Leckie, Jr., Univ. of Toronto (1976 chair); Robert Kellogg, Univ. of Toronto; Ruth Roberts, New York State Univ. Coll., Fredonia (1976 secretary, 1977 chair); and Barbara Sargent, Univ. of Pittsburgh (1977 secretary). Before MLA divisions were created, a medieval section was created for the 1942 convention (not held because of the war). One of the original language groups, however, covered medieval literature, and it was categorized as a Comparative Literature group, thus a primary example of how medieval literary studies have long been linked in the history of scholarship to the academic discipline of Comparative Literature. Select Bibliography Special journal issue: “Intertextualités médiévales,” Littérature 41 (1981); Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart (1980, trans. Margaret Middleton and Roger Middleton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, 2 vols., ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987–1988); Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1996); Allen Graham, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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Irish Studies

Irish Studies A. Introduction The study of medieval Irish language and literature has followed a number of parameters established early in the first modern efforts to edit a treasure trove of manuscripts. Old Irish is used of the language of the first written records from the 8th and 9th centuries. Middle Irish designates the period from the 10th to 12th century, after which early modern and modern Irish are customary terms. In relative terms, early Ireland offers a huge corpus of vernacular writings, in part the product of a precocious literacy following the proselytizing efforts of St. Patrick in the 5th century and the introduction of Latin. The Ogam or Ogham alphabet was chiefly used for epigraphical purposes, while most Irish was written in a native adaptation of the Roman alphabet. In this respect, both medieval Irish literature and the scholarly efforts to transcribe, edit, and explicate it that began in the mid-19th century have striking parallels with the literature, literary history, and scholarship of medieval Icelandic language and literature, including an anti- and post-colonial nationalist or nativist ideology that informed efforts to account for the flourishing state of letters in the Middle Ages. This critical insularism also affected the texts studied, often regarding them, initially, as almost free-standing entities. The central medieval Irish literary corpus has traditionally been divided into a number of relatively discrete “cycles”: the mythological cycle, associated with relations with the pagan divine; the cycles of the kings, comprising free-standing tales and some dynastic groupings of the birth, life course, and death of kings and kingdoms; the Ulster cycle, in which the focus shifts slightly to address both the Hero and the King; and, finally, the Fenian cycle, shifting in mode from epic toward romance and concerned with the adventures of Finn mac Cumhail and his band of Fenian warriors, who protected Ireland from both supernatural and foreign threats. The value attached to this traditional matter is illustrated by its collection into great codices, some of the best known among which are the Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Leinster, the Book of Ballymote, and the Yellow Book of Lecan. Drama as a genre is unrepresented, although dialogue is an important feature of both epic and romance. Nor does satire make an appearance outside poetry until the Middle Irish period. Native hagiography in both Latin and the Irish vernacular is relatively self-contained but has important links with the kings’ cycle. A considerable body of poetry is dispersed throughout these prose tales but a corpus more organized in terms of content, metrics, conditions of pa-

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tronage and reception, often called “bardic poetry”, emerged at the numerous local courts. Another eminent genre was “hermit poetry”, purportedly lyric effusions by anchorites about their relations with God within the natural setting of isolated monastic cells. Medieval Ireland was also deeply interested in topographical legend, whether deployed in the prose tales, celebrated in poetry, or recorded in the distinct genre of dindshenchas. There was a similar interest in the Irish language itself, resulting in a number of “glossaries”, in which words are analyzed in an etymologizing process adapted from Isidore of Seville. Grammatical and metrical tracts were also produced, as well as a body of wisdom literature. A large corpus of early Irish law has also been preserved, one in which modern editors and scholars can discern archaic core passages that were the object of successive glossing and reinterpretation over the centuries. Chronicles in the modern sense of the term, developing from Churchsponsored annals, make a relatively late appearance in Ireland. (Irish history, like archaeology, art history, etc., is not tracked in the following outline; see Prehistoric and Early Ireland in the multi-volume A New History of Ireland, 2006.) But running in parallel with this great production of literature in the vernacular was a comparable production of hagiographical, legendary-historical, and scientific literature in Latin. In the 12th century and later, British and continental Arthurian literature made only a slight impact on Irish letters. An impressive heritage of stories, themes, motifs and even the language of medieval Irish letters was preserved in largely rural Irish-speaking communities and has been recovered in modern times through the efforts of the Irish Folklore Commission, founded in 1935. B. History of Irish Studies In Ireland scholarly attention was first directed toward medieval Irish language and literature in the mid-19th century, at a time when the number of native speakers of Irish was in precipitous decline but echoes of the longstanding tradition of native Irish law, as distinct from British law adapted to Ireland, were still resonating. The great achievement of these first Irish scholars was the publication of The Ancient Laws of Ireland (1865–1901), edited by John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, and others. As an instantiation of incipient Irish nationalism, this edition was later matched by relatively uncritical adaptations of medieval and later Irish story-telling in serialized translations, which ultimately led to the incorporation of much medieval matter in the works of the Irish Literary Revival. In this same nationalist cultural context, Douglas Hyde, later the first president of the Republic of Ire-

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land, published The Story of Early Gaelic Literature in 1895. Much of the credit for scholarly interest in the language, literature, law, and lore of early Ireland must, however, go to non-Irish scholars. Soon after the first comparative philological work on Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin that would have a determinative influence on historical linguistics for almost two centuries, in that language origins would be favored over language evolution and socio-linguistics, Celtic was recognized as an important and richly documented branch of what was construed as the Indo-European family of languages. Paired with the first archaeological and historical explorations of the very widespread Celtic presence in the Europe of antiquity, compilations were made of Celtic personal and place names, and Celtic cognates were listed along with Greek, Indian, Italic, and Slavic reflexes of purported Indo-European “roots” in the first great lexicographical works. The best current representative of this tradition is Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1959). European scholars trained in classical philology applied this relatively refined methodology, with its focus on codicology and transmission, text and variants, to the inchoate mass of medieval Irish manuscript materials. Interest focused early on the Irish glosses intercalated in manuscripts of the Latin Bible, often recovered at Irish monastic foundations in continental Europe, as evidence of the earliest recorded stage of the Irish language. Although Irish scholarship produced some noteworthy facsimile and more critical editions of major codices, a vast amount of lightly critical editing and translation was also undertaken by a handful of Irish and European scholars. Many of these contributions were published in the small number of series and scholarly journals that were founded at this time: Irische Texte (from 1880), publications of the Irish Texts Society (1898), Revue Celtique (1870), Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (1896), Ériu (1904), and continue to be consulted today as the best, often only, editions and translations of the texts. Two major initiatives, one personal, one collective, lent a sense of scope and structure to scholarship on early Irish language and literature. In 1913 Richard Irvine Best (also active as an editor) published the first volume of his Bibliography of Irish Philology and of Printed Irish Literature. A second volume would cover the period 1913–41, and a third (Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature), under new editorship and appearing only in 1986, that from 1942 to 1971. The initial offering summarized a wealth of articles, many published in non-scholarly venues and, through no fault of their own, scarcely meeting today’s standards of critical rigor but nonetheless indicative of the surge of interest in the Ireland of the Middle Ages. The collective venture was A Dictionary of the Irish Language, although its scope and title would later be

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qualified by the addition “based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials”. Sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy, the dictionary project was initially led, in practical editorial terms, by the Norwegian scholar C. J. S. Marstrander. The exhaustive treatment that characterized his first published fascicule, D-Degóir (1913), acted as a check on further releases when he left the editorship. The project stalled but was eventually resumed at a more sustained pace in the 1950s and ’60s and completed in 1976 (now available in a compact edition and online). Other lexicographical projects, while not strictly medieval, shored up DIL as it gradually achieved finished form. One was Patrick S. Dinneen’s Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla: An Irish-English Dictionary (1927), which incorporated many meanings and phrases reflective of the Irish of earlier eras, the other, Tomás de Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary (1959, reissue 2004, 2006). And also in 1959 the great French Celticist Joseph Vendryes began Lexique étymologique de l’ancien irlandais, a lexicographical project still not completed under its succeeding editors (at present, Pierre-Yves Lambert). Hyde’s history aside, the first great overview of the Irish literary corpus was Henri Arbois de Jubainville’s Le cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique (1884). An eclectic but most rewarding collection of texts and (incomparable but now dated) translations by Standish Hayes O’Grady appeared in 1892 as Silva Gadelica. A portion of this material would be examined with greater critical rigor and more advanced philological knowledge in Rudolf Thurneysen’s Die irische Helden- und Königssage (1921). A rather different approach is evidenced in Thomas O’Rahilly’s Early Irish History and Mythology (1946). For the first time, a scholar stood back from the detail of plots, onomastics, manuscript filiation, textual difficulties and the like, and attempted to summarize and synthesize early Irish literature and belief in its cosmographical and ideological dimensions. O’Rahilly’s principal theses concerning pagan Celtic mythology, theses in which all available evidence was marshaled under a few major concepts, have not stood the test of time but must be seen as a milestone in Irish scholarship. Rather less ambitious but of lasting value is Marie-Louise Sjoestedt-Jonval’s Dieux et héros des Celtes, which appeared in 1940, with an English translation in 1949. In 1931 the Mediaeval and Modern Irish series was launched, subsequently (1941) taken over by the School of Celtic Studies within the recently founded Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. After Ireland’s relative isolation during World War II, a number of publications appeared and have since been judged landmarks in the modern study of early Irish language and literature. In 1946, the translation of Rudolf Thurneysen’s Handbuch des Altirisches (from 1909) by D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin, both established scholars

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in their own right, appeared under the title A Grammar of Old Irish. This comprehensive volume has remained the indispensable cornerstone of philological inquiry since that time, and is still in print. Similarly enduring, in a rather different way, is Tom Peete Cross’ Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature from 1952. Its current limitations are those of the original conceptual categories, where such modern notions as gender, ideology, physical aberrance, the abject, and the like are absent, and the pre-1952 editions of texts on which it bases its listings. To Cross and his collaborator, Clark Harris Slover, we owe the very popular anthology of texts in translation (mostly from earlier published works), Ancient Irish Tales (1936). In 1954 Myles Dillon published Early Irish Society, a first synthetic work linking literature and social history. A year later appeared James Carney’s Studies in Irish Literature and History. Intentionally iconoclastic, as the author would later concede, it rejected the nativist view of the insularity and idiosyncrasy of early Irish literature, linking, for example, the tale of Díamait and Gráinne with that of Tristan and Yseut. This lead was later followed in studies by Raymond Cormier. The influence of Carney’s collection of essays was far-reaching and revolutionized the study of the early Irish tradition. Another highly influential work was Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age (1964). It demonstrated the extreme conservatism of the Irish literary tradition in its reflection of an earlier social and material culture, although modern scholars such as J. P. Mallory have shown that neither an oral nor a literate tradition can preclude the insertion of later detail and, further, the Iron Age roots, of the literary tradition at least, are now seriously doubted. A different kind of continuity, the Irish cultural influence on the European continent, was studied by Tomás Ó Fiaich. Patrick Henry, in turn, studied the Ireland-Iceland connection. The same decade saw the publication of volumes of only moderate ambition but still of a fresh synthesizing nature: a collection of radio broadcasts on the principal early Irish tales, edited by Myles Dillon as Irish Sagas (1968), and an overview, Early Irish Literature, published by Eleanor Knott and Gerald Murphy (1966). Máirín O Daly (née Nic Dhiarmada) contributed numerous articles on the kings’ cycle in these same years. A broader perspective on early Celtic literature and history had become available a year earlier with the appearance of The Celtic Realms under the editorship of Myles Dillon and Nora K. Chadwick. A complementary volume, although never intended as such, appeared in 1970. This was Proinsias Mac Cana’s lavishly illustrated Celtic Mythology. Less thesis-driven than O’Rahilly’s pioneering work, it illustrated not only the widely held Celtic conceptions of the organization of the cosmos, relations with the divine, and just secular rule on earth, but also

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the great local variety in cultic practice across generally decentralized Celtic communities and cultures. Another work of compilation with a sustained effort at synthesis was Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (1961), which sought to interpret a vast range of Irish and Welsh evidence for cosmology and basic story types, largely from the perspective of Georges Dumézil’s theories of a trifunctional organization of archaic Indo-European belief and culture. Based in Brittany, Christian Guyonvarc’h and Françoise Le Roux pursued the accommodation of the Dumézilian thesis with Celtic materials. However stimulating this work at the time, the trifunctional paradigm has been little followed since within mainstream Irish scholarship. Josef Weisweiler also contributed to the study of the possibly most distant roots of the Irish epic tradition. From these same decades came two examples of the thoroughness of textual editing and accuracy of translation that were then achievable but also the limited concern for critical analysis of content. In 1967 Cecile O’Rahilly edited and translated the Book of Leinster recension of the great epic Táin bó Cúailgne (The Cattleraid of Cooley) and in 1976 the Book of the Dun Cow version appeared. Both are accompanied by notes and glossaries but the introductory material gives pride of place to manuscript filiation, despite a useful overview of theories concerning the Irish heroic saga in the earlier volume. Also active in manuscript studies were Robin Flower and William O’Sullivan. Similar editing practices are reflected in titles from the Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series, while those published by the Irish Texts Society, with its much greater range of materials, are rather more fully situated in the literary tradition. By the close of the 20th century, Irish studies were established and even flourishing. The best single example is perhaps and appropriately the collection of essays published to honor James Carney, Sages, Saints and Storytellers (1989). There were few university chairs in Celtic but medieval Irish language, literature and history were represented on a growing number of university curricula. Some journals had passed from the scene (Celtica), others experienced difficulties in keeping to editorial schedules (Études Celtiques). Prominent among newcomers were Studia Celtica (1966) and Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies (1981), later relocated and renamed as Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, and Peritia (1982). Scholarship in general may be judged to have continued to be somewhat introspective; few scholars published in other than traditional venues, although linguistics may be an exception here. Yet scholarship had clearly passed from a preoccupation with the editing of texts to a variety of approaches that would qualify as literary criticism in the modern sense of the

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term. Major themes of cosmology, sovereignty, the relation of secular royal rule with the divine; the territorial integrity of Ireland in the face of invasion; the fertility of the land; the relations of patron and poet, the ideal vision of social organization as reflected in law had all been thoroughly explored, although the tie of Irish literature to Irish history remained understudied, despite efforts by John V. Kelleher and Donnchadh Ó Corráin. With the founding of the Early Irish Law series in 1988, facilitated by Daniel Binchy’s edition of the vast Corpus Iuris Hibernici in 1978, studies of the Irish legal tradition took a quantum leap forward and now represent some of the most thorough and best scholarship in the field of Irish studies. The most recent volume is Liam Breatnach’s A Companion to the Corpus Iuris Hibernici (2005). Studies in the Middle Irish period continued to be underrepresented, despite Kenneth Jackson’s thorough edition of Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (The Vision of Mac Con Glinne) which ultimately appeared only in 1990. By this time as well most of the major texts of the medieval Irish corpus were available in English translation, and a good many in French and German as well. Despite some telling analogues, Irish literature seems to have had, for understandable reasons, far less influence on continental European literature of the Middle Ages than Welsh, Cornish, and Breton storytelling and there have been proportionally fewer source, analogue, and comparative studies. Similarly, Irish matter is more often classified as analogous to, rather than an influence on, Old English literature (literature in Latin excepted). C. Milestones This review of major contributions to the field of Irish Studies and of the scholars behind them is of necessity selective and unavoidably subjective. Most often a single work will be called on to characterize what is often scholarship across a broad field. Few today will consult the Ancient Laws of Ireland (1865–1901), yet the monumental work of its chief editors, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, R. Atkinson, and others, is a testimonial to the earnestness which modern studies of the Irish tradition were launched. But O’Curry in particular is worth a second look for many pieces published in now rare journals and magazines on texts that not always became part of the subsequent canon. The first introduction to Old Irish was John Strachan and Whitley Stokes’s Thesaurus Paleohibernicus (1901), economically identified by its subtitle, A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia, Prose and Verse. Like Thurneysen’s Grammar of Old Irish, the Thesaurus has proved one of the longest-lived reference works from the first phase of Irish studies. Like Kuno Meyer, Stokes edited and translated a staggering range and array of texts in journals and monographs. Several of the latter are now helpfully being

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reprinted. A few representative titles: Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living (1895); Cáin Adammán: An Old Irish Treatise on the Law of Adamnan (Adomnán in subsequent scholarship); Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes; Stokes, a first edition of Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, RC [1901]); The Tripartite Life of Patrick (1887); Cormac’s Glossary (1862); and editions of largely neglected translations from classical Latin. R. A. S. Macalister is remembered for The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937, as well as his archaeological work) as is George Calder for his edition of Auraicept na nÉces: The Scholar’s Primer (1917), both illustrative of the fascination of the Irish learned class with language, alphabets, cryptology and explication. Anders Ahlqvist has now examined the latter work under the title The Early Irish Linguist. E. G. Quin saw the Dictionary of the Irish Language through difficult years as its general editor (1953–75). Daniel Binchy’s monumental contribution is the basic editing of the Irish law tracts, although he had earlier edited the celebrated text on social station, Crith Gablach (1941) and given an influential series of lectures on Celtic and AngloSaxon kingship (1970). Wolfgang Meid’s edition of the Ulster cycle tale Táin bó Fráich first appeared in the MMIS series (1967), but a second German-language edition (Die Romanze von Froech und Findabair, 1970) provided a wealth of linguistic and cultural information, making it an isolated example of an excellent text for the tyro scholar working in isolation. Other contributions to the MMIS, distributed across the major tale cycles noted above, were Ruth Lehmann, Eleanor Knott, A. G. van Hamel, David Greene, Myles Dillon, Lil Nic Dhonnchadha, J. Carmichael Watson, Maud Joynt, J. G. O’Keefe, Joseph Vendryes, and Rudolf Thurneysen, whose edition of Scéla mucce meic Dathó (The Tale of Mac Dathó’s Pig, 1935) is still a popular introductory tale for students, because of its concentration of action and thematic material. Although not publishing in this series but part of this editorial tradition is Vernam Hull. Gerard Murphy’s Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth century (1956), published and marketed by Oxford University Press, was instrumental in bringing a most representative selection of verse, with valuable supporting notes, to a wide readership. Here mention should be made of Brian Ó Cuív’s important lecture, The Linguistic Training of the Medieval Irish Poet (1973), a complex topic still in need of elucidation. Enrico Campanile and Gearóid Mac Eoin have also made important contributions to the study of early Irish verse. Dynastic verse in particular was explored by Sean Mac Airt. Kenneth Jackson’s anthology in translation, A Celtic Miscellany (1951), and, somewhat later, Jeffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas (1981) similarly found wide and appreciative audiences.

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Heinrich Wagner, who worked indefatigably as a collector in the field, and as editor and commentator over a wide range of Irish materials, is remembered for both his linguistic atlas and Studies in the Origins of the Celts and of Early Celtic Civilization (1971). In the cultural context so defined, the conception of a goddess of territorial sovereignty, who joins with a suitable candidate for royal rule in a distinctive Celtic hieros gamos, and the attendant dynamics of a triangle whose corners might be labeled the King, the Hero, and the Goddess have attracted the interest of several scholars, all also active in other subject areas, R. A. Breatnach, Máire Bhreatnach, Maartje Draak, Máire Herbert, Proinsias Mac Cana, Donncha Ó hAodha, Philip O’Leary (specifically on honor), Yolande de Pontfarcy, Maria Tymoczko (for the relevance to James Joyce), and most recently (2006) Amy C. Eichhorn-Mulligan. Tomás Ó Cathasaigh’s The Heroic Biography of Cormac mac Airt (1977) marks a scholarly milestone in this respect. Tangential topics are the ‘prince literature’ (Audacht Morainn – The Testament of Morainn, ed. Fergus Kelly), the ‘wild man of the woods’, and the ‘threefold death of kings’ (Pádraig Ó Riain, Joan Radner, Jean-Michel Picard). As traditional tales were adapted to new ends, contentious Christian clerics became important players in narrative, upsetting the dynamics between the supernatural and the secular, between divine power and human rule, between kings and consorts. A related concern of the medieval Irish learned class was cosmological speculation and, in its broadest conception, the earliest history of the land of Ireland, areas in which a synthesis of pagan tradition and Christian doctrine generated very idiosyncratic productions such as Saltair na Rann, a versified psalter, and Lebor Gábala Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland). Here important studies have come from John Carey and Mark R. Scowcroft. Mention must also be made of Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (1990), and Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (1997). The latter study is devoted to Acallamh na Senórach (often called The Colloquy of the Ancients), now expertly translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe as Tales of the Elders of Ireland (1999). Most of the scholars engaged in literary studies have also devoted efforts to the Irish language, given the myriad textual difficulties. To their names may be added those of Rolf Baumgarten, Johan Corthals, Eric P. Hamp, Frederik Kortlandt, Fredrik Lindeman, Damian McManus, Tomás Ó Máille, Paul Russell, and Peter Schrijver. While historical scholarship has been excluded from this overview, a numbers of historians have made important contributions to filling in the ecclesiastical, political and

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social background in which Irish letters were cultivated: F. J. Byrne (high kingship), Thomas Charles-Edwards (literacy, kinship and kingship), David Dumville (the environment of textual production), Donnchadh Ó Corráin (marriage, kingship, royal prerogative), and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Hiberno-Latin literature and computistics). Fine single volume surveys are Thomas Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (2000), and Michael Richter, Medieval Ireland: The Enduring Tradition (2005). This said, historical overviews of early Irish literature have been few: James Carney contributed a synthesizing essay to The New History of Ireland, published posthumously. Patrick Ford edited and translated J. E. Caerwyn Williams’ history in Welsh as The Irish Literary Tradition (1992), while the current state of scholarship was summarized in Kim McCone and Katherine Simms, Progress in Medieval Irish Studies (1996). In 2003 appeared Future Directions for the Study of Irish, edited by Máire Herbert and Kevin Murray. Most recent are two fine chapters on medieval Irish literature to about 1200 by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006). D. Scholarship Today Research in Irish studies in this century is characterized by heightened contextualization and the abandon of insularity, and this in two senses. While the scholarship of an earlier century would be unjustly called “naïve,” it is now recognized that such tales as The Cattleraid of Cooley are not the products of collective memory, fortuitously given literate form at an early, opportune, but still not identifiable moment. Rather, the tale and its congeners, like those of the kings’, mythological, and Fenian cycles, are products of early medieval antiquarianism. While a surprising amount of pagan material – plot, personage, cultural concerns and values – has been preserved in these tales, the thoroughly Christian environment in which they were redacted has shorn them of every trace of pagan cult. Myth, legendary history, and topographical lore have been accommodated with Christian doctrine. Increased awareness of just how the medieval Irish learned class cherished and cultivated their past allows the modern scholar to identify the ideological purposes such tales served: dynastic politics, enhanced or antagonistic church-state relations, the claims of monastic establishments, Irish identity. Even that literature initially produced in the medieval period, such as bardic poetry, is revealed as having flourished under very complex conditions of inter- and intra-dynastic conflict, artistic patronage, poetic apprenticeship, professional rivalries, tensions between tradition and innovation, all seemingly matched by the recognized complexities of Irish metrics.

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If this domestic contextualization has been one major shift in scholarly perspective, situating Irish letters in both the Indo-European and the broader medieval European context is another. Now comparative studies of Irish and Indian epic are undertaken; Norse and Irish poetics are juxtaposed, historically and technically; and fresh avenues for comparative research are continuously being opened up. Yet fresh editions of major texts are few and far between. Newcomers to Irish linguistic and literary studies now have a greatly enhanced choice of introductions, among which Kim McCone’s A First Old Irish Grammar and Reader, including an introduction to Middle Irish (2005) and David Stifter’s Seangoídelc: Old Irish for Beginners (2006) should be mentioned. Further, scholars have not been slow to exploit new electronic media. Among examples are the Celtic Digital Initiative (http://www.ucc.ie/academics/smg/CD/ index.html), CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts (http://www.ucc.ie/celt), Scéla: Catalogue of Medieval Irish Narratives and Literary Enumerations (http://www.volny.cz/ enelen), MsOmit: Manuscript Sources to Old and Middle Irish Tales (http:// www.ucc.ie/celt/MS-OMIT/Index.htm), The Ulster Cycle (http://homepage. ntlworld.com/patrick.brown/ulstercycle/tain.html), The Cycles of the Kings (http://www.hastings.edu/academic/english/Kings/Sagas.htm), all of these with useful links to other resources. Old-Irish-L is one of numerous discussions lists. A continuation to the Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature is now available in draft form (http://bill.celt.dias.ie/vol4/index2.html). The annual bibliography of the Celtic Studies Association of America (http:// www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/celtic/csanabib.html) is also a valued complement to the coverage of medieval Irish language and literature in the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography. Here may be traced the work of such presently active scholars as Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, Dorothy Bray, Doris Edel, Elizabeth Gray, Bart Jaski, Catherine McKenna, Daniel Melia, Lil Ní Dhonnchadha, Ruairi O Huiginn, Patrick Sims-Williams, Edgar Slotkin, Hildegard Tristram, Calvert Watkins, and Dan Wiley. Charles W. Dunn was instrumental in the founding of the association and in the promotion of Celtic studies in North America. It is a wry irony that the Irish epic corpus is so much greater than that of Old English yet every college has its Anglo-Saxonist. Now, the relatively small number of scholars working in Medieval Irish Studies – all, outside Ireland, with other strings to their bows – will be greatly assisted by new technologies that will offset limited library holdings that reflect the earlier research and curricular priorities of many institutions. In terms of critical theory, Irish Studies has been invigorated by new impulses but has fed little back to the study of other literatures. This said, books

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that would have been unpublishable – almost inconceivable – two decades ago, such as Ann Dooley’s Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Táin bó Cúailgne (2006) and Robin Chapman Stacey’s Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (2007), demonstrate to what immense profit a more open perspective on, and familiarity with, gender studies, feminist studies, intertextuality, ideology, patronage, performative utterances, rhetorical suasion, and metaphor – to name but a few vital current topics – has been to medieval Irish Studies. Despite the current vogue for all things Celtic, studies of specifically Celtic medievalism have been slow to appear. Yet the combined efforts of the Irish Folklore Commission and of the scholars here passed in review have ensured that what Daniel Corkery, in a slightly different context, called The Hidden Ireland (1924) is now open to view, preservation, and just possibly further cultivation. Select Bibliography Bibliography of Irish Philology and of Printed Irish Literature, comp. R. I. Best (Dublin: H. M. Stationery Office, 1913, rpt. 1992); Bibliography of Irish Philology and of Printed Irish Literature, 1913–41, comp. R. I. Best (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1942, rpt. 1969); Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature, 1942–71, comp. Rolf Baumgarten (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Study, 1986); Dictionary of the Irish Language, based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials, gen. ed. E. G. Quin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913–76); Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

William Sayers

Italian Studies A. The Diatribe of Philology Against Aesthetics (1890s–1945) Critical studies on medieval Italian literature began during the second half of the 19th century, with the work of Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883). De Sanctis can be considered as the initiator of the critical methodology now referred to as scuola storica. At the beginning of the 20th century, German philology influenced the Italian approach to literary criticism. The introduction in Italy of Lachmann’s theoretical model led to a systematic application of the German philological method to medieval texts (Luigi Russo, La critica letteraria contemporanea, 1977). De Sanctis produced outstanding critical research on Italian literature, especially on historical figures por-

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trayed by Dante Alighieri in the Divina commedia and on Dante’s influence on Italian writers of all ages. His method, according to the Lachmann standard, was based on a very detailed historical and philological analysis of archive documents and various relevant sources of information, which could provide insight and grounds for discussion on obscure passages of Italian medieval literature. De Sanctis provided an overview of all literary currents from the middle ages to his contemporary time, offering also a critical analysis of Italian masterpieces of all ages (Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana, 1870–1871). Although De Sanctis was considered by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile as the most important literary critic of the 19th and early 20th century, his work is not well known outside of Italy. One English translation dates to 1931, but De Sanctis’s convoluted and often monotone style at times makes it difficult for the Anglo-Saxon reader to appreciate it. However, it is possible that his lack of popularity outside Italy is due to the complexity of his line of thought and to a certain ambiguity that characterizes his approach. Overall, De Sanctis does not belong to a school or a stream of thought, but was rather involved in a completely Italian perspective and in the intellectual and political renaissance of Italy during the Risorgimento. He was also very much tied to the environment of Naples, so much so that his thought may be perceived as provincial. However, his critical synthesis of Italian literature is so unique and relevant that he deserves a place of honor in the history of Italian Studies. Having introduced into Italian Studies a methodology that implied detailed archive research and textual analysis based on both sources and linguistic exegesis, De Sanctis was revered and his mission was continued by scholars of great impact such as Alessandro d’Ancona, Pio Rajna, and Michele Barbi. Each of these scholars imported their original contribution to the field, which implemented and updated the knowledge and comprehension of medieval Italian texts, setting them into a historical framework and widening the understanding of the value of medieval Italian production. Domenico Comparetti (1835–1927) can be considered as an exception to the scuola storica (Roberto Antonelli, “Interpretazione e critica del testo,” Letteratura italiana: L’interpretazione, 1985, 141–243), in that he followed a personal approach in the analysis of Italian medieval literature. Comparetti’s prolific activity includes studies on Dante and on vernacular literature (Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, 1872). Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914), an enthusiast of De Sanctis’s historical method, proved to be a fine pursuer of literary analysis and produced a number of works of great relevance from the viewpoint of the historical-philological approach in Italy (Le antiche rime volgari secondo la lezione del Codice Vaticano 3793,

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1875–1888). Interested mainly in the origins of Italian popular culture, he also devoted great attention to Dante (Scritti danteschi, 1912–1913). Michele Barbi (1867–1941) wrote on the question of the modern Italian philological tradition. As at the end of the 19th century French scholars were offering a major contribution to the birth of modern philology, especially Quentin and Bédier, Barbi introduced an approach that helped clarify the characteristics of the Italian philological school, which followed Lachmann’s method against variants proposed by Quentin and Bédier, and was based on the study of the individual manuscript, refusing a real system (Michele Barbi, La nuova filologia e l’edizione dei nostri scrittori, da Dante al Manzoni, 1938). When in 1906 Pio Rajna (1847–1930) published his principles of textual criticism, he established the difference between the new age and the past, based on method (influence from Lachmann) and dogmatism. The result was representative of the spirit of the German approach to medieval texts. Rajna was an active scholar throughout the first half of the 20th century and focused mainly on the discovery of the sources of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Pio Rajna, Le fonti dell’Orlando Furioso), a book that was received with great enthusiasm by the followers of the historical methodology, because it revealed the contribution to the origin of the Italian chivalric tradition of texts belonging to the late 14th century, which had never been studied from this perspective. Rajna viewed the creation of the Italian chivalric poem as a development of earlier poems that were circulating in the form of songs performed by popular story tellers in market squares, the cantari, short poems in ottava rima, a metre typically Italian. Thus, he contributed to creating a connection between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rajna also published extensively on Dante Alighieri, devoting particular attention to historical and philological problems related to his works, and edited Dante’s treatise on the vernacular (Pio Rajna, Il trattato ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia,’ 1896). The editing of Italian medieval texts and their analysis according to the precepts of De Sanctis’s theoretical model triggered two different reactions. On the one hand, a great number of scholars were trained under the aegis of the historical school, who applied the new method to critical editions of the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, and to other less known medieval writers. Enormous effort was made at the beginning of the 20th century to bring back the wealth of medieval Italian literature to the public. On the other hand, the systematic application of Lachmann’s method was severely criticized by Benedetto Croce and his followers, who viewed it as merely an instrument to create good critical editions and as a theoretical model that served no purpose in literary criticism, which must be involved with the appreciation of the literary text. Italian

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medieval studies were, thus, from the start characterized by a dichotomy between philology and literary criticism, the former being engaged with the editing of texts the closest possible to the original version, the latter being devoted to the reading and awareness of the value of medieval literary creations. The diatribe of philology versus aesthetics engaged major medieval scholars at the beginning of the century. Barbi intervened on the question defending the need of critical editions of works by writers such as Dante and Manzoni, for the literary critic to access texts the closest possible to the original. The diatribe, as far as Italian Medieval Studies are concerned, was never resolved, as new questions arose that overcame these concerns. Seen with today’s eyes, the two fields of philology and literary criticism are evidently concerned with different approaches to literature, as nowadays philologists rarely if ever engage in discussions on interpretive aspects of a literary text. The predominance of the historical-philological school triggered critics concerned with aesthetics to react rather strongly. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) is the Italian literary critic who most influenced opinions and literary evaluations of generations to come. Croce’s interpretation and aesthetical theory remained predominant throughout half a century, and became the norm in Italian literary criticism until new currents of thought were imported from abroad that updated Italian Studies in the 1970s (Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 1902). Croce maintained that philology is an auxiliary technique, which must not interfere with an esthetical evaluation of the literary text. In his view, philology and literary criticism should work in separate ways. In other words, he viewed philology as craftsmanship. He criticized severely Rajna’s work on the sources of the Orlando Furioso, considering the subtle work of reconstruction as a mere exercise with no relevance to the appreciation of the poetic value of Ariosto’s original invention. It was Croce’s contention that the existence of sources from which the poet might have drawn his inspiration in no way diminished the genius of the artist. Therefore, he viewed Rajna’s meticulous reconstruction as an effort that added nothing to the beauty of the poem. The same line of reasoning applies to Rajna’s work on Dante’s sources, in that appreciation of the artist’s genius excludes, according to Croce, the consideration that the external import of sources such as documents, legends, and classical culture may cast doubt on the originality of his creative impulse. The founding principle on which Croce’s thought is based is that art is intuition. His definition of the term “intuition” must be understood as Anschauung (“representation”), or, as he himself described it “l’unità indifferenziata della percezione del reale e della semplice immagine del possibile.”

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Intuition is therefore a wider category of what we normally call art (René Wellek, “La teoria letteraria e la critica di Benedetto Croce,” Letteratura italiana: L’interpretazione, 1985, 351–391). Croce’s main idea was that poetry can never be realistic because it belongs to the soul and not to reality as we know it and consider it (Benedetto Croce, Poeti e scrittori del pieno e tardo Rinascimento, 1945–1952). This summarizes his point of view on archival research on the sources for historical figures in Dante and Renaissance poetry. In his book La poesia di Dante (1921), he stated that each episode in Inferno must be identified as a poem in itself independent of the poem’s structure: according to Croce, “structure” is the non-poetic scaffolding behind the poetic intuition. Croce’s thought was influential both in Italy and abroad, particularly in the United Stated where New Criticism gathered several suggestions from the Italian scholar. In Italy, a number of followers disseminated his teachings, most of whom eventually differentiated themselves from their master. Among them, Attilio Momigliano (1883–1952) authored important readings of Dante’s works and his language and especially one edition and commentary of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1945). Natalino Sapegno (1901–1989) merged Croce’s aesthetics with Gramsci’s position on art and literature as the expression of freedom of thought. His edition and commentary of the Divine Comedy (1955–1957) for decades was adopted in Italian schools as the standard textbook. He also authored a history of Italian literature (Natalino Sapegno, Storia della letteratura italiana, 1965–1969), which cast writers and their works within their historical context. This was also used as the standard handbook in Italian schools throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Walter Binni (1913–1997) contributed extensively to the exegesis of Dante’s Comedy (Chiara Biagioli, Bibliografia degli scritti di Walter Binni, 2002). It was with the critical work of Carlo Dionisotti (1908–1998) that the attention to a general overview of medieval literature as a whole was imported into Italian critical studies (Carlo Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 1967). He provided critics with an entirely new approach to Italian literature, which considered the geographical element as a unifying trait, establishing thus a connection between writers of various ages. Dionisotti opened up Italian literary criticism to the possibility of merging various approaches: the philological method and the historical approach, a wholesome aesthetic appreciation of poetry and the sense of its historical meaning. A collaborator of Natalino Sapegno at the University of Rome, he then moved to England in 1947, where he taught Italian at the University of Oxford. He then became professor of Italian at Bedford College in London in 1949. Dionisotti spent the greatest part of his career in England where he

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collaborated intensively with the journal Italian Studies. His major field of interest was 15th-century Italian literature, of which he analyzed particularly the historical and philological aspects and political implications. Dionisotti died in 1998, saluted by the community of Italianists as the greatest literary critic of the century, specifically for the broad vision of Italian literature as a whole. B. Marxist Criticism (1945–1960s) The influence of Marxist criticism in Italian Medieval Studies became particularly strong during the aftermath of World War II, as a reaction to the previous fascist cultural hegemony. The question of realism in Italian medieval literature started being explored under the influence of the Hungarian theorist György Lukács. However, the highest achievement of textual exegesis done from the perspective of the representation of realism can be found in Erich Auerbach (Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Welt, 1946), with two chapters dedicated to the figure of Frate Alberto in Boccaccio’s Decameron and the episode of Farinata and Cavalcante in Dante’s Hell. Marxist criticism aimed at finding a reflection of the economic and social conditions of the Middle Ages in literature. This stream of thought is represented by Carlo Salinari (1919–1977) who wrote especially on realism in Boccaccio (Carlo Salinari, La questione del realismo, 1958), and also published a commentary to the Decameron (Il Decamerone di Boccaccio, 1963). Among literary critics in the 1960s who carried further an analysis of medieval literature according to the canon of neo-realism, Eduardo Sanguineti (born in 1930) distinguished himself for applying the principles of Marxist criticism to the study of Dante. Sanguineti was, with Umberto Eco (b. 1932), a member of the “Gruppo 63,” a circle of progressive writers and critics of a Marxist background, but not necessarily faithful to the orthodox line of Marxist thought. Sanguineti’s work explores elements of realism in Dante’s poetry, and offers a valuable interpretation of the literary production of the Florentine master (Edoardo Sanguineti, Il realismo in Dante, 1966). An important contribution to Italian Medieval Studies came from Alberto Asor Rosa (b. 1933), who dedicated great effort to interpreting the figure of the lay intellectual inaugurated by Dante (Alberto Asor Rosa, “La fondazione del laico,” Letteratura italiana: Questioni, 1986, 17–121). He edited the collective volumes of the Letteratura italiana published by Einaudi, which offers an interesting perspective on the medieval period, viewed from an entirely Marxist perspective. Marxist criticism was demolished by the introduction in Italy of the writings of the critics belonging to the Frankfurt school, such as Walter Ben-

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jamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, who aimed at defending the public from mass culture since the 1970s. C. Philology in the 1960s and Later In spite of the fact that theories of contemporary criticism started circulating in Italy in the 1960s, several of the major Italian philologists remained faithful to the teachings of the Italian historical school of the beginning of the century, continuing the mission of editing texts according to a detailed historical and philological analysis, rather than offering interpretations. The Italian philological school stayed far away from the influence of structuralism. Amongst the major contributors of this current is Umberto Bosco (1900–1987), an expert on the Italian Trecento, who conceived and directed the monumental Enciclopedia dantesca (1970), one of the greatest achievements in Dante Studies. In 1966–1967 Giorgio Petrocchi (1921–1989) edited a critical edition of the Commedia according to the vernacular tradition. Both Sapegno’s and Petrocchi’s commentaries to the text remain standard editions used for the purpose of research and interpretation. Gianfranco Folena (1920–1992) published mainly in the field of 15th and 16th-century literature, while Vittore Branca (1913–2005) edited and commented Boccaccio’s Decameron and devoted much attention to contextualizing Boccaccio within the framework of medieval culture, viewed from different perspectives (Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decameron, 1981). Branca also edited Boccaccio’s opera omnia in ten volumes between 1964 and 1999 and is considered the most respected authority in Boccaccio Studies. His legacy has been taken up by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, who followed in Branca’s footsteps and has offered major contributions on Boccaccio and on the culture of Trecento, especially regarding the courtly civilization of inland Venice. Aurelio Roncaglia (1917–2001) was a romance philologist, who also devoted some interest to the study of the origins of the Italian literature and the definition of Franco-Italian (Aurelio Roncaglia, “La letteratura franco-veneta,” Storia della letteratura italiana, 1965, 727–759). However, the scholar who most embodies the tendency to follow a strictly philological approach is Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990), who offered a critical edition of Petrarch’s rhymes (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, 1964). He has been held responsible for the rebirth of philology, and most of contemporary philologists acknowledge their debt to his teaching. His critical approach, which considered variants both in manuscripts and in earlier editions as the starting point for reconstructing the genesis of the text, concentrated especially on linguistic elements (Varianti e altra linguistica, 1970). Contini’s main theory is that Dante’s language is characterized by pluri-

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linguism, while mono-linguism started with Petrarch’s style. His edition of Dante’s poems has long been considered the most reliable (Dante Alighieri: Rime, 1970). Contini published at least two works that are viewed as the basis of Italian contemporary philology, Poeti del Duecento (1960); and Un’idea di Dante (1970), two collective volumes that provide a thorough overview of Italian 13th-century literary culture and a general idea of the style and beliefs of the author. D. Structuralism in Italy (1961–1980s) A sign that Italian Medieval Studies were gradually being enriched with groundbreaking perspectives came from Russian formalists (Victor Rklovskij, Lettura del ‘Decameron’: Dal romanzo d’avventura al romanzo di carattere, 1969; Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du ‘Décaméron,’ 1969). However, it was only in the 1970s that the reworking of formalist theories and the contribution of semiotics and structuralism blended with the traditional philological approach, producing interesting results. A number of critics gradually subscribed to semiotics, for example, Paolo Valesio who followed Jakobson in his analysis of the various structures of one rhyme by Dante (Roman Jakobson and Paolo Valesio, “Vocabulorum Constructio in Dante’s Sonnet Se vedi li occhi miei,” Studi danteschi 43 [1966]: 7–33). It was Cesare Segre (b. 1928) who officially introduced structuralism and semiotics into the field of Italian Medieval Studies (Cesare Segre, I segni e la critica, 1969). Segre, a student of Gianfranco Contini, started his career as a romance philologist. He displayed great competence and methodology in his critical edition of the Chanson de Roland (1971), which remains a fundamental version of the French epic text. He then became interested in semiotics and displayed the results of his merging of philology and the new approach in Semiotica filologica (1979). He produced outstanding research on the 13th century, and a number of interesting studies on various topics, of which his analysis of medieval folly deserves special mention (Cesare Segre, Fuori del mondo: I modelli nella follia e nelle immagini dell’al di là, 1990). Cesare Segre and Maria Corti (1915–2002) are the major contributors to the dissemination of semiotics in Italy and have encouraged the fusion of the traditional Italian philological school with the needs of contemporary interpretation represented by semiotics (Giorgio Baroni, Storia della critica letteraria in Italia, 1997). Corti’s studies aimed at defining hidden cultural models and intertextual relationships in Dante and his contemporary culture (Maria Corti, Metodi e fantasmi, 1969, now in Scritti su Cavalcanti e Dante, 2003). Corti and Segre produced an interesting summa of the tendencies of Italian criticism in I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (ed. C. Segre and M. Corti, 1970). Generally speaking it can be said that

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they brought the basic principles of structuralism into the heart of Medieval Italian Studies (Marin Mincu, La semiotica letteraria italiana, 1982). Literary interpretation, philology, and semiotics found a perfect balance in the works of these two critics. Among other critics who obtained interesting results by adopting this approach, D’Arco Silvio Avalle (1920–2002) was the first Italian critic to apply narratology and Propp’s morphology to Dante’s Comedy (Modelli semiologici nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante; 1975; L’ultimo viaggio di Ulisse, 1966). The author who systematically researched in Medieval Studies adopting an entirely semiotic approach is Umberto Eco, whose career is varied and comprises studies on medieval philosophy (Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, 1970; Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale, 1987). While on the one hand his name is strictly linked to Medieval Studies because of his background, Eco became gradually more interested in a general theory on reception and reader oriented studies. His thought provoking analyses opened up a new approach in literary criticism (Opera aperta, 1962; Lector in fabula, 1979). E. New Approaches (1981–2000s) Apart from a few scattered incursions in Medieval Italian Studies, postmodern criticism has not been particularly influential in this field. The fusion of deconstructionism, feminism, and Marxism was applied to Dante in one instance, where Dante is compared with Yates (Gayatri C. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 1988). Other experiments were based on the attempt to apply contemporary theories of reception to Dante’s Commedia (for example, Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, 1992). A post-Lacanian approach was adopted for a psychoanalytical examination of Petrarch’s poetry (Stefano Agosti, Per una lettura psicanalitica del Canzoniere di Petrarca, 1993). However, the most recent developments of literary criticism have influenced Italian Medieval Studies only marginally in that the last twenty years have featured a major effort to compile editions of minor works, with the purpose of allowing for a reconstruction and examination of the historical and cultural context where the texts were produced. A new edition of Dante’s Commedia, including a revised commentary that contains interesting interpretations of the text has been published by Tommaso Di Salvo (La ‘Divina Commedia’ di Dante Alighieri, 1987). One important contribution to the knowledge of the Italian Trecento is focused on Franco-Italian literature, particularly on the Entrée d’Espagne which is placed within the vibrant framework of northern Italy in the 14th century. A most accurate profile of the historical

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circumstances contemporary to the composition of the poem was drawn by Corrado Bologna, “La letteratura dell’Italia settentrionale nel Trecento,” (Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia, 1987, I: 511–600), while Alberto Limentani (1940–1992) authored a major study on this topic (L’‘Entrée d’Espagne’ e i signori d’Italia, 1992). The field of Franco-Italian and the late medieval period with particular focus on the genesis and significance of the chivalric poem have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. For example, Daniela Delcorno Branca dedicated numerous studies to the tradition of Buovo d’Antona. In the Unites States, Leslie Zarker Morgan founded and currently directs the Franco-Italian On-Line Archive (www.italnet.nd.edu/ fiola). Her studies on the omniscient narrator and on questions of style in Franco-Italian literature, together with a study by Nancy BradleyCromey (Authority and Autonomy in L’Entrée d’Espagne, 1993) opened up new perspectives on this tradition. Recently, the evaluation of Duecento poets connected with Dante and technical points of textual editing were made the object of a critical analysis by Guglielmo Gorni (Dante prima della Commedia, 2001). British and American scholarship is greatly contributing to the understanding of the Italian Trecento. Two translations of the Divine Comedy were published by Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957) and Charles S. Singleton (1909–1985), who also worked on Boccaccio. His contribution to the development of Dante-Studies in America is of foremost importance (Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova, 1949; id., Commedia: Elements of Structure, 1954). Attention has especially been devoted to Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, for example, Robert Hollander published several essays on Dante and Boccaccio: Dante: A life in works (2001); Boccaccio’s Dante: The Shaping Force of Satire (1997), and one translation of the Divine Comedy, which initially was aimed at updating Singleton’s translation, but then evolved in a new version. Amongst critics, who contributed to the understanding of Italian medieval literary culture, Peter Armour, Mark Musa, and J. S. Scott offered studies that made Dante available to a wider audience. John Took’s philosophical approach introduced a new perspective on Dante’s thought (Dante’s Phenomenology of Being, 2000), while Zygmunt Baranski focused above all on intertextuality and cultural history (‘Chiosar con altro testo:’ Leggere Dante nel Trecento, 2001; Zygmunt Baranski and Martin McLaughlin, The Italy’s Three Crowns: Reading Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio, 2006). Different aspects of the Comedy were explored by Michelangelo Picone (Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi, 1987), while studies on the reception of Dante in contemporary society were published by Amilcare A. Iannucci (for example, Dante, Cinema and Television, 2006).

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Computer-aided literary criticism produced interesting results (David Robey, Sound and Structure in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ 2000), a field which is now being expanded. Finally, a historical perspective on different aspects of Italian medieval culture is offered by Chiara Frugoni, whose approach represents the influence of the Annales on Italian scholarship (Vita di un uomo: Francesco d’Assisi, 1995). An encyclopedia that gathers together the most recent scholarship on medieval Italy was edited by Christopher Kleinhenz (Medieval Italy, 2003). Among the journals that publish updates on Italian medieval literary culture is Studi di filologia italiana, the annual bulletin of the Accademia della Crusca; Rivista di Studi Danteschi, the biannual journal of the Centro Pio Rajna; Studi Danteschi, annual journal of the Società Dantesca Italiana; The Italianist, biannual journal of the department of Italian Studies of the University of Reading; Dante Studies, annual journal of the Dante Society of America, and the proceedings of the Dante Series organized by John Barnes at University College Dublin. Select Bibliography Letteratura italiana: L’interpretazione, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia, ed. by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1987); Storia della critica letteraria in Italia, ed. by Giorgio Baroni (Turin: UTET, 1997); Alberto Casadei, La critica letteraria del Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001); Teresa De Lauretis, “Semiotic in Italy,” The Sign: Semiotics Around the World, ed. Richard W. Bailey, Ladislav Matejka, and Peter Steiner (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978), 248–57.

Claudia Boscolo

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J Japan, Medieval A. Defining the Japanese Middle Ages Starting in the early modern era, European scholars used the term the “Middle Ages” (or its Latin equivalent, “medieval”) as a disparaging term to mark the epoch from the fall of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance, which supposedly was the time when the Classical world was reborn. Not only have medievalists actively resisted the misperceptions about the Middle Ages (solidified with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–88), but have also explored the possibility that the term “medieval” or “Middle Ages” can appropriately describe societies outside of Europe. Those who believe that medieval culture existed in areas outside the West have turned to Japan more frequently than to any other country. The reason stems from early Japan’s court culture, reaching its zenith in Heian Japan, which possessed a striking resemblance to the court culture of medieval Europe; and especially from the feudalism that flourished during the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, characterized by a samurai warrior class that followed the principles of Buddhism in ways comparable to the medieval knights with their Christian-based chivalry. However, even those who believe that Japan had a medieval era similar to that of Europe’s cannot agree upon the same timeline. Traditionally Japanese history is divided into periods that reflect ruling powers and the locations of their capitals. The Kamakura period (1185–1333) and the Muromachi period (1333–1573) constitute the Japanese medieval era, according to most historians, because these are the times when feudalism and the samurai class flourished. Thus, for Japanese history, the terms “feudalism” and “medieval” are interchangeable, although this is not the case for some other cultures labeled as medieval. A few scholars still extend the medieval era into the Edo period (1615–1868), although typically it is now classified as the beginning of the Modern era. Literary scholars examining texts cross-culturally often include the Heian period (794–1185) as part of medieval Japan because its court literature paralleled European medieval genres in striking ways. However, there are those who express concern that Eurocentric scholars are projecting Western historical patterns upon other cultures that have their own

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distinct historical patterns and that European terms like “medieval” do not fit other cultures. B. Historical Overview of Japan and Western Scholarship Among Europeans it was the Portuguese who first traded and interacted with the Japanese from the 1540s until the Edo period (1615–1868) when foreigners were banned from the islands. Westerners did not establish significant contact again until Commodore Perry’s 1853 “request” for Japan to open its doors, a request made from American steamships with artillery pointed toward Japan. After 1853 Japan rapidly adopted modern Western practices. This rapid transformation was a characteristic of the Meiji era (1868–1912) when power shifted from the shogun to the emperor. Europe and America set up diplomatic relations with Japan, although Japan’s imitation of Western empires, including colonizing territories, proved to be a significant factor leading to World War II and to temporary suspension of diplomatic relations with the Allies. As part of its modernization process, Japan created Keio University, established in 1858 and modeled after Western institutions of higher learning. Japanese scholars were eager to describe their history and culture in ways that paralleled the West. Therefore, in the late 1800s Japanese history was cast in such Western terms as “medieval,” with the feudal period extending from the Kamakura era through the Edo (1185–1868). Literature was classified according to such Western genres as the novel. Western scholars readily adopted this familiar terminology (Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, eds. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, 2000). A small handful of Western diplomats served as the first scholars who introduced North America and Europe to the Japanese. For example, one envoy was George Sansom, advisor and representative of the United Kingdom to Japan in 1904, British consular in Japan 1939–1941, and later professor at Columbia University after World War II. He was one of the first scholars writing in English to note parallels between feudal Japan and Europe; his studies included Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931) – in which he dated Japan’s feudal period from the Kamakura era up through the Edo – and a series of history books that started publication in 1958. W. G. Aston, a British consular and contributor to Cambridge’s Japanese collection, wrote an early book in English on Japanese literature (A History of Japanese Literature, 1899). Instead of using the term medieval, Aston referred to the Heian period as the Classical age, the Kamakura as the era of decline, and the Muromachi as the Dark Ages. Translations played an important role in encouraging Westerners to compare their history and culture with that of Japan. For instance, in 1935

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Arthur Waley produced the first English translation of The Tale of Genji, recognized by Japan and by the rest of the world as the literary masterpiece of Japan and as one of the world’s classics. A product of Heian culture and written by Murasaki Shikibu, Genji has been classified as one of the world’s greatest novels and as one of the world’s greatest romances on the scale with the medieval romances of Arthur. In 1918 A. L. Sadler began publishing translated portions of the Tale of the Heike, which has been compared to Western war epics; it is the narrative account of the fall of the Taira clan to the Minamoto clan, an event which ended the Heian period with its sophisticated court and ushered in the feudal era of Kamakura (Helen Craig McCollough published a full English translation in 1988). Hostilities between Japan and the United States during World War II led to an increase in American interest in its enemy. Hence, English-language scholarship on Japan expanded. After World War II research would modify earlier perceptions of medieval Japan. John Whitney Hall, who was born to American missionaries in Japan and who worked for American naval intelligence during World War II, was the historian who shaped current views on Japanese periods and their parallels with the West. He was the first to argue that trends during the Edo period would qualify it as the beginning of Japan’s modern era. Hall and his student Jeffrey Mass contended that Kamakura Japan formed the early Middle Ages (with its seeds sown in the Heian era that ended with the Gempei War that would establish the power of the samurai) and the Muromachi era constituted the late Middle Ages. Hall and Mass edited the first study in English on medieval Japan (Medieval Japan: An Institutional History, 1974), and Hall became the first editor of the standard history, Cambridge History of Japan. The standard study that came to define and periodize Japanese literature was written by Jin’ichi Konishi (translation of his five-volume study is entitled A History of Japanese Literature). Konishi placed literature of the Heian period under the Early Middle Ages. Donald Keene, a U.S. Navy intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II and later professor at Columbia, compiled English-translated anthologies of Japanese literature (1955), in which he identified the literature of the Kamakura and Muromachi eras as medieval. C. Current Trends in Scholarship There was a global shift in research during late 20th century in response to profound political events: World War II ended with the dismantling of empires (both English and Japanese, for example) and the rise of postcolonial nations; the 1960s were marked by civil rights movements and student protests, leading to interest in feminism and the rights of ethnic/racial minor-

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ities; the 1980s saw the end of the Cold War and a new emphasis upon area studies. One feature of these emerging studies has been the increased interest given to world literature and world history, to an international Middle Ages. The recent interest in world perspectives was presented, for instance, in The Longman Anthology of World Literature, which defined the international Middle Ages as a time that followed the Classical period. A culture’s Classical time period could vary from area to area; however, these societies produced foundational texts, often religious in nature – the Bible, Vedas, etc. The subsequent Middle Ages built upon these religious foundational texts and developed certain institutions connected to religion and government. The medieval era eventually gave way to the modern, marked by secularization, nationalism, urbanization, industrialization, and other such trends (Volume B: The Medieval Era, ed. David Damrosch, 2004, 1–4). Damrosch subtitled one section as “Lords and Ladies, Knights and Samurai,” thereby explicitly linking the European Middle Ages with Japan. According to Damrosch, traits inherent to the medieval era were (1) royal courts that were sites for patronage of the arts (such as Lady Murasaki who wrote Genji at the court of Empress Shoshi), (2) a large peasant population often serving as serfs for feudal overlords in an agrarian economy, (3) a warrior class that became the subject for epics and romances and other literary forms, (4) and cultures dominated by the rise of certain religious beliefs (Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist). Although Damrosch included Heian Japan in the medieval era in the introduction and in the volume itself, for the section specifically on Japan, Haruo Shirane followed traditional dating and separated the Heian period from the Japanese medieval era (Kamakura and Muromachi periods). D. Heian Literature The Heian period was distinguished for its refined, artistic court culture. Given its royal courts’ focus upon aesthetics, it is not surprising that the Heian era is viewed as the Japanese golden age for the arts. The Heian period marked the epoch in Japanese history extending from 794 to 1186, when the capital city was located in Heiankyo (modern day Kyoto). This early medieval period began when the Emperor moved the capital from Nara, and it ended after the Gempei War, when the victorious Minamoto clan transferred the capital to Kamakura. We know about the aristocracy through the courtly writings of its members, but little is known of the lower classes, who would have formed the majority of the population. Heian Japan looked back to the Chinese T’ang Dynasty of the 600–900s as a model, much in the same way that medieval Europe was inspired by the earlier Roman Empire. Fusing native Japanese characteristics with this bor-

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rowed Chinese culture, Heian aristocracy devoted itself to what Ivan Morris called the “cult of beauty in art and nature” (The World of the Shining Prince, 194). Women writers dominated the Heian literary canon, making it unique among the world’s traditional literatures: first and foremost is Murasaki Shikibu, author of Japan’s most treasured classic, The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), classified as the world’s first novel and one of the finest; Sei Shonagon, whose Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) is a complex piece of autographical writing that defies easy categorization and description; and Izumi Shikibu, Heian Japan’s leading poet. Most Heian writers in Japanese were women because – as in medieval Europe where men dominated the official language of Latin – in medieval Japan men tended to write in the official language of Chinese, not in Japanese. Secluded behind screens from the prying eyes of men, women writers like Murasaki Shikibu would entertain their royal patrons, like the Empress Shoshi, with romance prose narratives interspersed with poetry (monogatari), waka poetry reflecting the Shinto appreciation of nature, and autobiographical writings, such as diaries (nikki). Because of the rise of women’s studies, a number of scholarly works in recent years have focused upon this corpus of women’s literature: H. Richard Okada, Figures of Resistance: Language, Poetry, and Narrating in The Tale of Genji and Other Mid-Heian Texts, 1991; Edith Sarra, Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs,1999; Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan, 2001; At the House of Gathered Leaves: Shorter Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives from Japanese Court Literature, ed. and trans. Joshua S. Mostow, 2004. As some of these scholars have noted, attempts to place genres into Western categories have proven vexing. For example, it is standard in the West to differentiate between genres of poetry and prose whereas Japanese literature traditionally mixes the two modes. Thus, there is resistance among some literary scholars to pigeonhole Japanese literature into Western genres, a practice common since the 19th century. In contrast, some studies have attempted to trace parallels between Western and Japanese women’s writing: Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on European Medieval and Japanese Heian Women Writers, ed. Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho, 2001; The Female Autograph, ed. Domna Stanton, 1987; Marilyn Miller, Poetics of Nikki Bungaku: A Comparison of the Traditions, Conventions, and Structure of Heian Japan’s Literary Diaries with Western Autobiographical Writings, 1985. Japan’s most important contribution to world literature, The Tale of Genji is a romance novel about Genji – a son of the Emperor, his many loves, and their descendants. Although Genji is nicknamed “the shining one,” Murasa-

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ki’s careful characterization avoids reducing Genji to an idealistic, stereotypical hero, as Genji’s flaws lead to mistakes that he must atone for. The novel’s detailed descriptions provide insights into life during Heian Japan and illustrate the power politics of the time (many scholars believe she modeled Genji, other characters, and some episodes after the lives of members of the powerful Fujiwara clan). Although a voluminous novel with countless characters, the careful plotting in Genji brings coherence and unity to the work. The Tale of Genji has proven to be an especially popular topic for Western scholarly studies: Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, 1969; Norma Field, The Splendor of Longing in The Tale of Genji, 1987; Haruo Shirane, Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji, 1988; Doris Bargen, A Woman’s Weapon: Spirit Possession in The Tale of Genji, 1997. Aside from the interesting psychology of her characters, Murasaki develops central themes drawn from her Buddhist beliefs: karma and impermanence are two major ones. The prevalence of religious beliefs was another marker of medieval culture, according to Damrosch. For medieval Japanese literature, the prevailing tragic sensibility derived from the Buddhist realization of the ephemeral beauty of this world (William Lafleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan, 1983). Although Buddhist ideas were imported from China, they were modified by native Shinto thought. For instance, the belief in spirits and demons was based in Shinto, but exorcists were frequently Buddhist clerics. Later, the Spartan ethics of Zen Buddhism would dominate the ideals of the samurai warrior class that would ascend at the end of the Heian period and beginning of the Kamakura (Richard Bowring, The Religious Traditions of Japan, 500–1600, 2005). Relics formed an important aspect of Buddhist worship (Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 2000) much as relics were integral to medieval Christianity. The same was true of the building of sacred sites and of pilgrimages (Janet Goodwin, Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan, 1994). E. Feudal Japan The Heian period ended when warriors in the Kamakura region empowered themselves by winning the Gempei War (1180–85), the subject of the Tale of the Heike, the monogatari that ranks second to the Genji. Because the Kamakura and Muromachi eras were dominated by the samurai, there was an artistic decline from the Heian period, although significant literary masterpieces were written. Certain literary genres continued, such as the monogatari (Tale of the Heike) and poetry anthologies (Shinkokinshu). The new, striking

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development was the rise of Noh Drama during the Muromachi era. Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) was the central character in the history of the Noh drama, a highly stylized, poetic tragic genre featuring song, dance, and music performed by masked actors. Influenced by Zen Buddhism and Shinto rituals, Noh drama drew its plots from events from Heian history, such as the Gempei War that ended the period, as commemorated in Tale of the Heike (Michele Marra, Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan, 1999; Elizabeth Oyler, Swords, Oaths, and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan, 2006; David Blalock, Eccentric Spaces, Hidden Histories: Narrative, Ritual, and Royal Authority from the Chronicles of Japan to the Tale of the Heike, 2007). One major focus of scholarly discussion for the medieval era of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods has been the nature of Japanese feudalism. The shogun, the first of which was Minamoto no Yoritomo, replaced the emperor in authority, although the imperial family was allowed to continue as figureheads who oversaw ceremonies. The government, called bakufu, resembled western feudalism, in that the shogun had loyal retainers, the samurai who formed a warrior class (bushi) that managed land holdings. The warrior codes of the samurai owed much to Zen Buddhism, just as western knights followed chivalry, which was linked to Christianity. Modern Japan emerged in the Edo period (1615–1868) with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate, located in Tokyo. Karl Friday traced the rise of warriors in Hired Swords (1992) and Samurai, Warfare, and the State in Early Medieval Japan (2003), noting that the rise of warriors and feudalism were not synchronous as they were in Europe; Friday’s work built on Jeffrey Mass’s earlier studies that divided the Japanese Middle Ages into an early period about the beginnings of the samurai and the later period about their dominance. Since Japan and Western Europe are so far apart, why do their historical cultures seem so similar? Parallels between Western Europe and Japan may be the result of geography, according to essays written by Tadao Umesao in the 1950s, but just recently translated into English (An Ecological View of History: Japanese Civilization in the World Context, trans. Beth Cary, 2003). During the Middle Ages, parallel cultures evolved because of a temperate zone and rainfall for agriculture (leading to the establishment of feudalism) and because of their distance from early centers of civilization (Rome and China). Historians currently debate the topic of a global feudalism, not confined just to medieval Europe and Japan. According to R. J. Barendse, “The feudal process can be perceived as a specific world historic juncture in which peasant societies were subjugated by an aristocracy of mounted warriors that became more powerful than any central institution and increasingly appropriated the

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jurisdiction over the peasants, and thus the land revenue” (“The Feudal Mutation: Military and Economic Transformations of the Ethnosphere in the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 14.4 [2003]: 503–29, here 511). In contrast, Stephen Morillo argued that feudalism is a vexed term and scholars cannot agree upon its meaning; in fact, he claimed, some historians have begun to avoid using the term because of its vagueness. Morillo maintained that Barendse was projecting the European concept of feudalism upon other cultures (“A Feudal Mutation? Conceptual Tools and Historical Patterns in World History,” Journal of World History 14.4 [2003]: 531–550). This conflict calls attention to a central issue in inter/cross-cultural studies: when are similarities random, and when do similarities form a meaningful pattern? Was there, in fact, a “feudal” Japan during its “Middle Ages,” or is Japanese cultural history being forced into Western patterns? Select Bibliography Cambridge History of Japan, ed. John W. Hall et al., 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988–); William Deal, Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (New York: Facts on File, 2006); Jin’ichi Konishi, A History of Japanese Literature, trans. Aileen Gatten and Nicholas Teele, ed. Earl Miner, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984–); Earl Miner et al., The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Richard Bowring, The Religious Traditions of Japan, 500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Barbara Stevenson

Jewish Studies A. Historical Overview The medieval period was instrumental in establishing the legitimacy of Jewish Studies as a field of research, teaching and at the center of many debates, especially concerning periodization. If the “Middle Ages” in general history is relatively clearly defined – from the collapse of the Roman Empire (476) to the capture of Constantinople (1453) – the Jewish notion of yemey ha-beynayim (“Middle Ages” in Hebrew) is open to discussion. In the Rabbinical sources, the term defines a multiplicity of geo-cultural contexts, the best known being the division between sefarad (“Iberian Peninsula”) and ashkenaz (“Germany”). But above all, it defines a long period between the conquest of the Persian Empire by Muslim forces (7th c.) and the beginning of modernity.

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A majority of historians, from Heinrich Graetz (Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols., 1853–1875) to Jacob Katz (Out of the Ghetto, 1973) consider that the penetration into Jewish communities of rationalism, emancipation, and the ideas of the French Revolution go with the collapse of medieval culture. The history of Jews in the Middle Ages was always a major topic of research (Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Middle Ages,” History of the Jewish People, ed. Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, 1976, 385–723; Irving Abraham Agus, The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry, 1969; id., Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe, 2 vols., 1965; Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, 1987) mostly because of the great significance of Jewish philosophy, commentary or literature, and the leading role of important personalities such as Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines, 1963). Its scholarly study, however, is quite a recent phenomenon. In the second half of the 19th century, the study of medieval Jewry was treated as the core of the new scientific platform elaborated by the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Leopold Zunz, “Grundlinien zu einer künftigen Statistik der Juden,” Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums [1822]: 523–32, rpt. Gesammelte Schriften, tome I, 134–41). The life and thought of the medieval Jews is analyzed with scientific methods and tools, forsaking the traditional apologetic or “theological” Rabbinical approach. A clear division is made between the orthodox commentary of the canonical texts and the scientific philological-historical study of the cultural heritage of the Jews. The social mutation encouraged a better participation in academic institutions, the desire to investigate the past, to foster the Jewish identity and to gain the right for Jews, like other citizens, to teach in academic institutions and universities. Jewish intellectuals and scholars, especially in Germany, were conscious of the social significance of academic research (Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context, the Turn to History in Modern Judaism, 1994). For the Maskilim, the enlightened Jews who sought the modernization of Jewish life, scientific inquiry into all aspects of the Jewish past, including medieval history and literature, was seen as an object of study disconnected from religious practices, which could, in a political perspective, promote participation in social and academic life. Science served as a tool for the recognition of the Jewish role in European culture and in the struggle for the rights of the Jewish minority (Lionel Kochan, The Jew and History, 1977). If some historians, in their desire to hasten socio-political integration, emphasize the points of encounter between Jews, Christian or Muslims (Marcus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 10 vols., 1820–1847), some, on the contrary, view their academic work as a recognition and promotion of the Jewish cultural tradition as part of the European heritage. They demon-

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strate the participation of Jews in the building of European or Mediterranean cultures and analyze the socio-religious autonomy of the kehilot (“Jewish communities”) in the general framework of medieval societies (Nachman Krochmal, Moreh nevukhei ha-zeman, ed. by Leopold Zunz, 1851; Shimon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 3 vols., 1920–1946). For Jewish scholars (Guido Kisch, Jew in the Medieval Germany, 1949; Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dans le monde occidental 430–1096, 1960; Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, 5 vols., 1955–1994; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism, 1982), it was also important to rectify the errors, negative stereotypes, and religious prejudices accumulated for many centuries by theologians and scholars about Jews in medieval times. Many historians referred to the period as the “dark ages” characterized by violence and religious intolerance. They presented the Jews as a passive, alien minority, confined in the cultural insularity of the ghettos and separated from society by the restrictive codes of laws, rituals, and religious practices concentrated in the “obscure Talmud,” and enduring an endless suffering in exile. The impact on Christian historians of religious prejudices and theological debates tended to obliterate the perception of Judaism. In the 19th and the early 20th centuries, no Jewish scholar wrote a history of Jews in the Middle Ages, although the period was studied by the major researchers. Some, like Heinrich Graetz (Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols., 1853–1875), emphasized the leading roles of great personalities in the course of Jewish history. Others, like Shimon Dubnov (Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, vol. 4, Das frühere Mittelalter, vol. 5, Das späte Mittelalter, 1926–1927) analyzed specific themes related to political issues, such as, for example, the positive effect of the creation of the autonomous community (kehilot) on Jewish continuity. The leading place that Middle Ages occupy in most general works on Jewish history shows how central this period is to understand Jewish creativity and cultural specificity in the context of Christian and Muslim societies. Other historians chose to focus their studies on more circumscribed topics in order to initiate a dialogue with the general history of both East and West. This approach, which combines a comparatistic perspective with an internal analysis of Jewish societies, has helped to better analyze the specific traits of the medieval Jewish heritage in fields as varied as literature, philosophy or education. As an oppressed minority in various European countries, without recognized institutions and with no possibility to learn outside the communities, the Jews gave great importance to teaching and studying, either in synagogues (beyt ha-knesset), talmudic academies (yeshivot), or in houses of study (beyt ha-midrash) (Moritz Guedemann, Die Geschichte des

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Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der abendländischen Juden während des Mittelalters und der Neueren Zeit, 3 vols., 1880–1888). Historians such as Ephraim Elimelech Urbach (Baalei ha-tosafot, 1955) and Abraham Grossman (Hakhmei ashkenaz ha-rishonim, 2001; id., Hakhmei tsarfat ha-rishonim, 1995) emphasize the leading role of a small elite of great rabbis, sages, halakhists, philosophers, kabbalists and commentators in the preservation of Jewish identity and the transmission of canonical sources and religious values in learned circles as well as among the less educated. Several generations of scholars have investigated medieval Jewish thought and philosophy (Julius Guttmann, Die Philosophie des Judentums, 1933, English 1964; Georges Vajda, Introduction à la pensée juive du Moyen âge, 1947; Shlomo Pines, “Jewish Philosophy,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, IV, 1967, 261–77; Colette Sirat, La philosophie juive au Moyen âge, 1983), law (Menahem Elon, Jewish Law, History, Sources, Principles, 4 vols., 1994), or exegesis (Menahem Banitt, Rashi, Interpreter of the Biblical Letter, 1985; Israel Ta-Shma, Ha-Sifrut ha-parshanit la-Talmud be-eyropah uvi-tsafon afrikah, 3 vols., 1999–2002), revealing its remarkable richness and creativity. This broad investigation stimulated the publication of books and editions of many important texts of the medieval heritage showing the continuity and innovation of Jewish culture and methods of interpretation (Solomon Munk, Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe, Paris, 1955). Although the principal aim of 19th-century scholars was to transmit ethical values, to disseminate pious interpretations and to investigate God’s word through Rabbinical techniques and hermeneutical rules of interpretation, this continuous research and the publication of classical sources paved the way for contemporary Jewish scholarship (among many publications, see, Maimonide, Mishneh Torah, trans. and ed. by Moses Hyamson, 1937–1949; Harry Austryn Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle, 1929, with the translation of the beginning of Or Adonai; Levi ben Gershom, Les guerres du Seigneur, trans. and ed. by Charles Touati, 1968). Analyzing the perception of “the other” in Jewish sources and that of Jews in Christian or Muslim texts became a central point in illustrating how, contrary to the assertions of theologians and propagandists, Jews contributed to the formation of both Western and Oriental civilization, from an economic, cultural, and social point of view (Moritz Steinschneider, Die Juden als Dolmetscher, 1893; Cecil Roth, The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation, 1940). Studying the sources on the origins of the Ashkenazi community – its organization, legal status and autonomy within the feudal states – is part of the desire to show that, far from being a “marginal minority,” Jews in fact contributed to fashioning the features of European history (Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, 1977). The same per-

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spective applies to the phenomena of cultural porosity and the impact of Christian values on medieval Jewish culture, leading to the study of ambivalent relations between Jewish communities and their Christian neighbors. Through this type of study, scholars felt they were doing their part in reducing the barriers between the Jewish world and the surrounding society, while at the same time questioning the existence of a “Judeo-Christian symbiosis.” Historians of the 20th century first questioned, then rejected this concept, preferring the idea of a minority’s survival by affirming and defending its difference within a dominant culture (Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and the Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, 1994; Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain, 1994; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity, 1999). In this context, the “golden age” of Spain played a major role as a case for studying relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and is regarded as a social laboratory to measure the interpenetration and mutual enrichment between cultures (Yitzhak Baer, Die Juden in christlichen Spanien, 2 vols., 1926–36; Bernard Septimus, Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition, 1982). Inversely, this historical period is also a way of recalling the permanence of persecutions, violence, and expulsions as a constitutive dimension of the history of the Jews in Europe (Simcha Goldin, Alamut, ahavukha al-mavet ahavukha, 2002). These traumatic ruptures caused waves of migration to Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, which served to develop new communities and a rich Jewish culture, notably in Poland (Moshe Rosman, The Lord’s Jews, 1990) and in the Ottoman Empire (Minna Rozen, History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul, the Formative Years 1453–1566, 2002). The construction of Jewish historiography has always been influenced by ideological and religious debates. In the 19th century, the leading scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums participated in the cultural emancipation of the Jewish intelligentsia. Some historians integrated the study of medieval sources in the political framework of Jewish nationalism, along with the cultural struggle for recognition of political independence. In the following century, many historians had the premonition of the catastrophe that would shake Europe. Massacres, persecutions, and suffering are the result of exile, lack of political sovereignty, and are considered as the consequence of the status of Jews as an alien minority (Simon Bernfeld, Sefer ha-demaot, 3 vols., 1923–26; Yitzhak Baer, Galut, 1936). The end of the “valley of tears” presupposes the conquest of political independence and the return to Zion. Studying the history of persecutions is seen as an intellectual tool to fight anti-Semitism. It leads to a reflection on the relation between suffering, loss of political sovereignty, and feelings of alienation. For many historians, such

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as Ben-Zion Dinur (Toldot Israel: Israel ba-golah, tomes 5–6, 1925–1926) only Jewish independence could bring political redemption and liberation and put an end to the exile from history. If we can distinguish a line of continuity between the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and most of the Jewish historians of the first half of the 20th century, the contemporary period reflects a gradual mutation with some radical changes. The “new history” of medieval Jews shows a renewal of objects, objectives, methods and the emergence of new fields of research. It should be recalled, first of all, that the general histories of the Middle Ages gave little place to Jews. This shadowy presence meant that Jews were assigned a subaltern role in the social and economic history of Europe. But more importantly, it made it difficult to integrate their history into the general economy of both East and West. Contemporary historians, inversely, have worked on re-positioning Jewish society within the general framework so as to better define the role of Jews in medieval culture. The historians sought to understand the specificity of their transnational history, to examine the intercommunity links that united them, and to retrace the genesis of communities in the body of feudal legal and political structures (The Jewish Political tradition, ed. Michael Walzer, Menahem Lorberbaum and Noam J. Zohar, 3 vols., 2000). B. Rethinking Jewish Medieval History The questioning of what has been called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” (Salon Wittmayer Baron) has also made it possible to rethink Jewish historiography. The Middle Ages is no longer considered as a period of darkness that ended at the end of the 18th century by the triumph of the Enlightenment, an era of reason and progress that eventually gave civil rights and made the integration into European societies possible. Moreover, the study of Jews in the medieval period for a long time accentuated the lack of historical chronicles, political thinking, or Jewish art on a par with those produced by representatives of the dominant societies. It lends weight to the idea of an insular culture, focused almost exclusively on religion, and minimized the notion of contacts with surrounding worlds. As for Jewish creativity, scholars tended to reduce it to a mere appendix of the cultures in which they lived. Medieval Jewish history was seen as a ramification of European history, in the same way as Jewish medieval literature was merely a branch of universal literature. The transformation of medieval Jewish studies also led to abandoning the vast perspectives and overall explanations of macrohistory, which, like Salo Wittmayer Baron (Social and Religious History of the Jews, vols. 3–8, High Middle Ages; vols. 9–12, Late Middle Ages, 1952–1993)

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embraced the totality of medieval Judaism in its plural dimensions and its maximum geographic expansion. Contemporary historians have abandoned these conceptions, emphasizing rather the exceptional intellectual creativity of medieval Jews, the phenomena of interaction with the ambient culture and the constant invention of collective responses to the attacks, prejudices, and violence of Christian society. Many areas formerly unexplored have now been thoroughly researched. From the second half of the 20th century, the Jewish studies show a re-centering on micro-history, on more circumscribed themes providing access to the dynamic complexity of Jewish society in its plural and contradictory dimensions. Among these themes are economic and cultural history, particularly the history of education (Ephraim Kanarfogel Jewish Education and Society in High Middle Ages, 1992), history of the family (Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family in Medieval Europe, 2004), women (Abraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, 2004), sexuality (David Biale, Eros and the Jews, 1992), art, theater, and music (Cecil Roth, Jewish Art, 1961; Amnon Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions, 1992; Ahuva Belkin, Ha-Purim-shpil, 2002), mentalities, and material culture (Ariel Toaff, Love,Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria, 1996), or the links between martyrology, stereotypes, and social violence (Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion and Antisemitism, 1990; Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism, 1997). Intellectual changes have also been emphasized, including the opposition between Rabbinic thought and the formation of the scientific spirit (David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, 1995; Yizhak Tzvi Langermann, The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages, 1999). An important field of research is the study of Rabbinical sources, including the responsa, as an access to social and economic history (Irving Marcus, Teshuvot baalei ha-tosafot, 1954; Hayim Soloveitchik, “Can Halakhic Texts talk History?,” AJS Review 3 [1978]: 153–96; id., Sheelot u-teshuvot ke-makor histori, 1990). We could also mention the circulation of persons, property, and knowledge in the diaspora, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic (Gérard Nahon, Métropoles et périphéries séfarades d’Occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jérusalem, 1993). One of the major aspects of modern historiography is that it called into question the stereotypes of Jewish isolation in communities that were microsocieties impermeable to outside influences. Jewish society is no longer analyzed as a world closed into itself, in which only internal dynamics (whether unification around the canonic texts or creative tensions between complementary components) enabled preservation and survival. Among the recurrent themes we can cite the integration of Jewish history into the general con-

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text of medieval culture and the evaluation of the role of the surrounding cultures, be they Christian or Muslim, in the formation of medieval Jewish culture (Albrecht Classen, “Jewish-Christian Relations in the German Middle Ages – the Exploration of Alternative Voices? The Deconstruction of a Myth or Factual History? Literary-Historical Investigations,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 58 [2003]: 123–49; id., “Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval Literature,” German Literature Between Faiths: Jew and Christian at Odds and in Harmony, ed. Peter Meister, 2004, 53–65). Many historians have favored the phenomenon of osmosis between Jewish society and the modes of thought, beliefs, customs, and symbols of the surrounding cultures. The study of relations between Christian theological thought and the methods of the Jewish commentators has helped put into perspective the idea of cultural porosity (Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge, 1990). A good example can be found in the influence of Christian monastic thought on the social ethics of the Jewish pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz). Their doctrine, although clearly linked with ancient Jewish magic, mysticism, and cosmogonies, also appeared to be a non-violent response to the persecutions and discriminations of Christian society (Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-megammah ha-datit ha-hevratit be-Sefer Hasidim,” Zion 3 [1938]: 1–50). Contacts within educated circles also show intellectual relations between Jews and Christians. Jewish philosophy in Islamic lands, which served to transmit concepts, doctrines, and technical vocabulary, attests to the circulation of texts and manuscripts, and to the role of translation in the formation of medieval Jewish thought (Shlomo Pines, Studies in the History of Jewish Philosophy, The Transmission of Texts and Ideas, 1977). One can observe similar phenomena in the realm of language practices, linguistic terminology, grammatical tradition or literature, both learned and popular (Leo Prijs, Die grammatikalische Terminologie des Abraham Ibn Ezra, 1950). Other historians have stressed the dialectic between the dynamic effect of interaction and acculturation on the one hand and the conservative role of the law and the traditional social framework on the other. A good example is the organization of communal power in Spain and the complex social stratification based on a division between a Jewish “aristocracy” a developing urban bourgeoisie, and the people, which was simultaneously a factor of stabilization, tensions and mutation (Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Communities and Society in the Crown of Arago 1213–1327, 1997). The political role of the Jews within the local power, or the phenomena of cultural transfer between Arab, Greek, Latin, and Jewish medicine and sciences (John M. Efron, Medicine and the German Jews, 2001), as mathematics or astronomy, are further examples of the circulation of knowledge (Joseph Shatzmiller,

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Jews, Medicine and Medieval Society, 1994; Ron Barkai, A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts in the Middle Ages, 1998; Gad Freudenthal, Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions, 2005). In the Ashkenazi lands, the emergence of the major Jewish communities is related to the development of urbanization, which stimulated Jewish participation in the economic expansion of Europe, notably in international trade and money lending (Michael Toch, “The Economic Activities of German Jews in the 10th to the 12th Centuries: Between Historiography and History,” Facing the Cross, ed. Yom Tov Assis et al., 2001, 32–54). Present-day historians tend to reposition this role in the broader context of the history of cities and “minorities” including the Lombards. The same is true of the place of Jews in the economic policy of princes and monarchs. Although Poland is an interesting example of Jewish participation in the exploitation of properties of the nobility, one should not overestimate this role, which depends on the amount of social contact between the peasantry, the Jewish middlemen, and the Christian authorities (Israel Halperin, Yehudim ve-yahadut be-mizrah eyropah, 1968; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Poland-Lithuania, vol. XVI, 1976). Another essential area of research is to study the phenomena of violence, tensions, and conflicts. The systematic attacks on Jewish communities during the Crusades were the culmination of the long-standing hostility toward the Jews. Numerous chronicles attest to the scope of the disasters, although in using them, historians have to distinguish between the commemorative and the historical, relating martyrdom and documenting history. Faced with such persecutions, Jews exalted spiritual resistance (as shown, among others, by the non-violent current of the Sefer hassidim), and advocated death for the sanctification of the holy name (kiddush ha-shem) rather than conversion (Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists in Medieval Germany, 1981; Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 2004). This violence extends into the realm of ideas, with the polemic anti-Jewish literature based on a critical scrutiny of the Torah, refutation of the Talmud, or, on the contrary, searching the Talmudic literature for foundations of Christianity. In the name of a rational and all-encompassing vision of religion, the theologians condemned the Talmud as a receptacle of all the errors and ravings of the Jewish religion. It is seen as the canonic text par excellence, in which are concentrated all the blasphemous heresies of Jews toward Christians. As such, it must be denounced and criticized but also burned or otherwise destroyed (Gilbert Dahan, La polémique crétienne contre le judaïsme au Moyen âge, 1991; id., ed., Le brûlement du Talmud à Paris, 1242–1244, 1999). Jews are stigmatized for their pernicious role in society as magicians, sorcerers, and as the vehicle of

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evil forces. Representations of the demonic Jew contribute to the proliferation of denunciations, culminating in the accusations of ritual murder, blood libels, and profanations of the host. In most European countries, antiJewish ideology was to have tragic implications (Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews, 1943; id., Jewish Magic and Superstition, 1939). The history of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds are marked by pogroms or other manifestations of violence to minorities or marginal groups. Social pressure, exacerbated by theological conflicts, leads to discriminatory legislation and waves of expulsion (Markus J. Wenninger, Man bedarf keiner Juden mehr, 1981; Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, 1998). In Spain and Portugal, voluntary or forced conversions make it necessary to reconsider the terms of Jewish identity and the religious practice of the conversos. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 marks the high point of antagonism between the royal power, the ecclesiastic authority, and the Jewish minority. Historiography has attempted to determine the multiple reasons for this catastrophe, which changed the face of medieval Judaism. The pressure of the Inquisition, fueled by theological controversies, the policy of unification of the monarchy around a centralized power, and a single religion fostered by the urban oligarchy and the resentment of the lower classes of society led to the eradication of Jewish life in Aragon and Castille (Benzion Netanyahu, The Marranos in Spain: From the Late 14th Century to the Early 16th Century According to Contemporary Sources, 1966; Hayyim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, 2 vols., 1994). On the other hand, anti-Jewish violence forced the authorities to separate Jews from the rest of the population with the creation of ghettos. Although there are many variations, the formation of Jewish quarters inscribed legal discrimination and social segregation into the space of the medieval city (Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in the Renaissance, 1994). In describing the plurality of social ethos of the Marranos, torn between their loyalty to Judaism and the lure of assimilation, historians revealed the modernity of the Marrano condition. The religious crisis, the strategies of re-Judaization in the Netherlands in the 17th century, and the study of the economic role of the Sephardic Diaspora in the Mediterranean world, in America, and in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies attest to the fundamental role of Marranism for the birth of Jewish modernity (Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, 1989). Studies of the Jews in Islamic lands (Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam, 1984; Moshe Gil, Erets Israel ba-tequfah ha-muslimit ha-rishonah, 3 vols., 1983; Haim Zeev Hirshberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 2 vols., 1974– 1981; Moshe Gil, Be-malkhut yishmael bi-tequfat ha-geonim, 4 vols., 1997), made possible in part by the recovering of many sources that had long been

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unavailable, provided a welcome contribution to the renewal of medieval Jewish studies. The historians of Wissenschaft des Judentums often presented (in contrast to the situation in Europe) an idealized vision of the Jews living in Islamic countries, particularly in Spain before the reconquista, while also seeking to show how Islam drew inspiration from Judaism (Abraham Geiger, Was hat Muhammad aus dem Judenthume ausgenommen, 1833). As the tensions were growing in Europe, the ties between Jews, Christians, and Muslims were magnified as a form of social symbiosis based on tolerance and recognition (Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, 1973–1984). The historic dramas of the 20th century, especially the conflict between Jews and Arabs, brought about a revision of this utopia of a “golden age” (Norman A. Stillman, The Jews in Arab Lands: An History and Source Book, 1979). At the end of the 19th century, Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the documents of the Cairo Geniza dating from the 11th to the 13th century and their study by Shlomo Dov Goitein (A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols., 1967–1993) made it possible to recompose a Mediterranean society in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted. This considerable mass of documents, literary, religious, or related to the economic and social life, furthered the understanding of Jewish life in relation to Muslims in its most varied aspects. The status of a “protected” people (dhimmi) shows the legal framework, but also the limits of tolerance, in Islamic territory, based on religious freedom, protection of the authorities, and payment of taxes (Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam, 1958). The autonomy of the communities reveals the combined influence of the Islamic surroundings, the leadership of the academies of Babylon and Palestine, and the local Jewish power, as in Egypt (Yizhak Baer, “The Origins and the Organization of the Jewish Community in the Middle Ages,” Zion 15 [1950]: 1–41; Menahem Ben-Sasson, Semihat ha-qehilah ha-yehudit be-artsot ha-islam, 1996). C. Between Traditional Sources and New Perspectives Some historians have minimized the cultural exchanges, giving more importance to the autonomy of Jewish communities in the framework of the medieval society. Apart from the main question about external influences on Jewish medieval culture, much of the major research in the field deals with the study of the social, political, spiritual development, and with the characterization of the Jewish culture seen from the inside. Important research in the field of Hebrew codicology and paleography has transformed the knowledge about the production and circulation of the manuscripts (Malachi BeitArie, Hebrew Codicology, 1981). Many sources, critical editions, archives, and

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documents, either from the Jewish communities or from authorities of surrounding societies were also published (Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs, 2 vols., 1920–1922; id., Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, 2 vols., 1935–1955). All these achievements gave a different and broader picture of Jews in the medieval culture, for example in philosophy (“Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. by Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, vol. II, 1997, 83–573), mysticism (Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1946; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 1988; id., Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, 1988), with, for example, the Zohar (Daniel Matt (trans. and ed.), The Zohar, 5 vols., 2003–2009), Biblical exegesis (Charles Ber Chavel (trans. and ed.), Nahmanides Commentary on the Torah, 1971–1976), Jewish literature, especially folktales and stories (Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, perakim le-toldotehah, 1988; Jerold Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts 1100–1750, 2004; Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, 2005; Vera Moreen, In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature, 2000; Eli Yassif, Sippurei ben sira bimey ha-beynayim, 1984), or Jewish languages (Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 1973; 2 vols., 2008; David Bunis, Sephardic Studies, 1981; Joshua Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of JudeoArabic, 1999). In the reconfiguration of medieval Jewish studies, a central place is occupied by Rabbinic literature, Talmudic commentaries, responsa literature, and studies of Jewish law (halakha), liturgy, and customs (Israel Ta-Shma, Minhag ashkenaz ha-qadmon, 1994; id., Halakhah, minhag u-metsiut be-ashkenaz, 1000–1350, 1996; Jacob Katz, Halakhah ve-kabbalah, 1986). Talmudic tradition, as a foundation of medieval Jewish communities, created a system of norms, customs, and ritual observances that pervaded all aspects of Jewish life. The codes of conduct placed individual life into a strict framework and assured the survival of the group, though this quickly caused frictions and tensions with the Christian authorities. Jewish law imposed limits on commercial relations with non-Jews, but it also required constant adjustments in areas like money lending or wine trade (Haim Soloveitchik, Yeynam, sahar beyeynam shel goyim, 2003). From the vast domain of Rabbinic literature emerges the central figure of the medieval commentator Rashi (Binyamin S. Moore (trans. and ed.), Chumash and Rashi’s Commentary, 2002) along with his students and disciples, the Tosafists, in the constitution of the vast body of Biblical and Talmudic commentaries representing the traditions of study and teaching and the intellectual role of the scholar within Ashkenazi Jewry of the 12th and 13th centuries (Ephraim Elimelech Urbach, Baalei ha-Tosafot, 1954).

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This type of study provides important access to Rabbinical hermeneutics and methods of transmission, teaching, and the exegesis of canonic texts. In addition, beginning with the responsa, including those of Rabbi Jacob Tam or Meir of Rothenburg (Irving Abraham Agus, R. Meir of Rothenburg, 2 vols., 1947), it affords a look into social history, concerning such questions as the autonomy of Jewish communities, relations between Jews and Christians, or the role of customs (minhag) in the affirmation of Ashkenazi Jewry of the Middle Ages. In a diachronic perspective, studies have also focused on the constitution of Ashkenazi law from the 11th century onward in relation to Palestinian and Babylonian tradition as well as to Roman law. Similar research in legal literature were undertaken in the Sephardic world in central geographic areas, including the Provence, Spain, Italy, and North Africa, or around the great codifiers, such as notably Shmuel ha-naggid, Isaac Alfasi, Meir Abulafia, Jonah Gerondi, Solomon ibn Adret, Nahmanides or Nathan ben Yehiel (Neil S. Hecht et al., An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, 1996). Two legal codes, the Mishneh Torah by Maimonides and the Shullhan arukh by Joseph Caro, which present the classical corpus of the Jewish law, played an important religious and social role in the Jewish society up to the contemporary period (Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah), 1980; Raphael J. Z. Werblowsky, Joseph Caro, Lawyer and Mystic, 1977). Scholars have begun to compile and publish multiple sources from this vast corpus, some of which had been unknown, but more important, they have also focused on the importance of Jewish legal literature as a zone of transmission of values, preservation of practices, and ongoing inventiveness (Phyllis Holman Weisbard and David Schonberg, Jewish Law: Bibliography of Sources and Scholarship in English, 1989; Nahum Rakover, A Bibliography of Jewish Law, 1975–1990; id., The Multi-Language Bibliography of Jewish Law, 1990). An adjacent field is the study of the legal status of Jews. The juxtaposition and contradictions between Roman and Byzantine legislation and the laws of Christian Europe, between secular and religious law, and between royal legislation and common law reveal the astounding diversity of legal situations specific to the Sephardic and Ashkenazi worlds. In certain periods, Jews were granted special status and perceived as a tolerated socio-religious “minority” within kingdoms or empires. But most of the time Judaism, as a religion close to pagan cults and heresies, called forth discriminatory laws, which in turn caused a nearly uninterrupted series of persecutions and expulsions. In Christian society, Jews were treated as deviant subjects, like Muslims, heretics, lepers, and the insane, to be subjected to special jurisdiction and exiled to the fringes of society (Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Toler-

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ance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times, 1977; Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of Inquisition, 1995; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 1991; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe, 1992; Ora Limor, Beyn yehudim le-notsrim, 5 vols., 1993; Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, 1997). Another field that has an important place: Jewish literature and narrative traditions (Moritz Steinschneider, “Jewish Literatur,” Ersch’s and Gruber’s Allgemeine Enzyklopaedie der Wissenschaften und Kuenste, 1850, tome 27, 357–471, rpt. 1970; Israel Zinberg, An History of Jewish Literature, 9 vols., 1972–1978). Although it is difficult to separate Biblical and postBiblical literature from that of later periods – they are rooted in the same religious soil and draw on similar sources – the Middle Ages saw a blossoming and a greater autonomy of narrative traditions. Legends and stories (Maasim, sippurim, aggadot, shevahim) draw on Rabbinic sources are no more appearing in all kind of contexts, including commentaries, sermons and ethical treatises, to constitute independent anthologies and narrative collections (Joseph Dan, Ha-Sippur ha-ivri bimey ha-beynayim, 1974; Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, 1999). Beginning with the pioneer generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the narrative traditions had given rise to philological and historic studies on the tradition of the Aggadot and Midrashim. This tradition led to the publication of anthologies and chrestomathies that demonstrate the unity and diversity of Jewish narrative traditions through time and space, as well as reciprocal influences between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions (Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., 1909–1938; Moses Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis, 1924; Hayyim Schwarzbaum, The Mishlei Shualim (Fox Fables) of Rabbi Berachiah ha-Nakdan, 1979). Research on Jewish literature which from the late 19th century is done in a political context of affirmation of cultural identity, then of the return of Jews to Palestine, constitutes the beginning of the collection and scholarly analysis of narrative traditions. The study of medieval literary texts reveals the creativity of Jews within European culture and in the Muslim world, but also the interpenetration of genres, notably in the numerous studies of comparative stylistics and poetics (Dan Pagis, Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1991; Jefim Schirmann, Toldot ha-shirah ha-ivrit, 2 vols., 1995–1997). Another example is in secular poetry or religious hymns (piyyutim) created in the late Middle Ages in the Oriental communities before developing in Europe (Israel Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, vols. 1–4, 1970; Ezra Fleischer, Shirat ha-kodesh be-ivrit bimey ha-beynayim, 1975; Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Gazelle, Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel and the Soul,

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1991). Other investigations of medieval Jewish accounts focus on the anthropological or folkloric dimension, showing porosity between different cultures in whose contact Jews evolved, and the mingling of oral and written registers (Sarah Zfatman, Beyn ashkenaz le-sefarad, le toldot ha-sipur ha-yehudi bimey ha-beynayim, 1993). Narrations, aside from their literary interest, are also considered as means of access to many dimensions of social life, material culture, and history of mentalities. Some researchers consider stories as creations of the religious imagination in which the historical base is subject to the deformations of myth and legend, while others link stories to the society and the historical period in which they were invented and transmitted (David Flusser, Yosippon, 2 vols., 1978–1980; Tamar Alexander-Frizer, The Pious Sinner: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Medieval Hasidic Narratives, 1991). Thus, studies of medieval Judaism have, since the 19th century, played a central role in the consolidation and recognition of Jewish studies as a part of social sciences and as a laboratory of methods and problems of Jewish historiography. Because of its central position, this field of research has, of course, gone through a number of evolutions proper to historical scholarship for nearly two centuries. It has demonstrated nonetheless a continuity and vitality that make it one of the major fields of Jewish studies. Select Bibliography Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols. (1853–1875; Berlin: Arani, 1998); Shimon Dubnov, Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, vol. 4: Das frühere Mittelalter, vol. 5: Das späte Mittelalter (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1926–1927); Salo Wittmayer Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, vols. 3–8: High Middle Ages; vols. 9–12: Late Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952–1993); Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (1896; New York: Atheneum, 1978); Yitzhak Baer, Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel (Jerusalem: The Historical Society of Israel, 1985); Cecil Roth, An History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1963); Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Middle Ages,” History of the Jewish People, ed. id. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 385–723; Ivan G. Marcus, Medieval Jewish Civilization (New York: Wiener, 1988).

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L Law in the Middle Ages I. History A. Legacy of Antiquity Central to medieval law, indeed, European law generally was the great compilation of Roman law ordered by Justinian, which would be dubbed by early publishers the Corpus Juris Civilis, and not uncommonly referred to as the “ius commune” on the argument that it was common to all the peoples once within the old Roman Empire, and when so used includes as well the canon law, and occasionally called the “civilis sapientia,” since legists considered the Corpus to represent the epitome of reason in civil governance. For a full discussion of this concept of the European common law, the works of Ennio Cortese (La norma giuridica: spunti teorici nel diritto comune classico, 2 vols., 1962–1964 and Manlio Bellomo (L’Europa del diritto comune, 1989) are indispensable. The Corpus is divided into the Code itself, consisting of twelve books subdivided into titles, and comprising Imperial decrees originally judicial in nature, but ultimately becoming more quasi-legislative in character towards the later Empire; the Digest or Pandects, made up of fragments from the jurists and arranged topically, divided into fifty books, subdivided into titles, and further subdivided into sections frequently referred to by their numbered fragments, usually designated laws (leges), or the unnumbered prefatory text, called the principium; the Institutes, essentially a text book of legal principles, and the only unilingually Latin portion of the Codex, similarly divided into titles and subdivided further into a principium and numbered “leges” often cited by incipit, or opening words; and the Novellae, the only part of the collection that remained open, and which originally had 168 laws promulgated between 535 and 545. In the Middle Ages, this latter portion was known through unofficial collections of 134 laws, referred to as the Authenticum, or by the Latin High Middle Ages, 96 of those laws, divided into nine collations; or alternatively, the collection of 122 constitutions, called the Epitome of Julian. In truth, much of the West had never been subject to Justinian and his collations, and Italy itself was made subject to its provisions only by reason of

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Justinian’s decree of 554 following the reconquest from the Ostrogoths. The latter had deliberately continued Roman law in its earlier presentation, and in Southern France, it was continued in the “Roman Law of the Visigoths,” or Alaric’s Breviary, based upon the earlier Theodosian Code, and the Institutes of Gaius, as well as other anthologies. Within a few years of Justinian’s death, much of northern Italy would be overrun by the Lombards, including the Benevento, Lombardy itself, whose capital was Pavia, and Tuscany, including Florence, Pisa, and Siena, and in these areas Lombard law would predominate, though by 1000, Lombard law would be generally taught, practiced, and interpreted through Romanist principles. The remaining areas, including Rome itself and Ravenna, maintained an unbroken legacy of courts and bar in which the Institutes, the first nine Books of the Code, together with Julian’s Epitome were known and regarded as authoritative. The last three Books of the Code together with the entire Digest would be forgotten until the late 11th century. In the area of ecclesiastic law, collections such as the Didache, or Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, began to emerge as early as the end of the 1st century. Sometimes, these works appeared in the guise of apocalyptic visions, such as the 2nd-century Shepherd of Hermas. Others, such as the 3rd-century Traditio apostolica ascribed to Hippolytus, are largely devoted to liturgy; while the expanded Didascalia apostolorum appends material on treatment of widows and orphans, Jewish-Christian relations, and rules for fasting and penance (Jean Gaudemet, Sources du droit de l’église en Occident du IIe au VIIe siècles, 1985). With the accession of Constantine and the end of the persecutions, the role of law within the Church was transformed. In particular, church councils became a more frequent aspect of ecclesiastic governance, and the decrees and canons of the councils became the major source of canon law. At the same time, being essentially incorporated into the imperial bureaucracy, the church inevitably became more hierarchical in structure, and by 381 when the First Council of Constantinople recognized the pentarchy of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Rome, had reached the organization of patriarch, metropolitan, bishop and priest that dominated medieval mentality. During this period also arose the earliest claims of Petrine supremacy, and decretals of the bishops of Rome, which began to appear with greater regularity in canonical collections such as the Dionysiana and the Hispana, the latter appearing successively as the Collectio hispana chronologica and the Collectio hispana systematica. Finally, from Constantine forward, the emperors specifically recognized the jurisdiction of bishops over issues involving doctrine and morals. The audientia episcopalis hence had the status of public courts.

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B. Early Middle Ages While Roman law by the later imperial period had come to be viewed as a product, inter alia, of a legis lator, the emperor himself, who since he bore the law, could in some sense be viewed as legibus solutus, the successor Germanic kingdoms of the West emphasized the character of law as the immemorial custom of a people. As a result, law was generally regarded as personal, rather than territorial: regardless of location, Burgundians were subject to Burgundian law, Romans to Roman law, etc. The primary function of a king was to uphold the applicable custom, not displace it with new law: the law is “discovered,” not made. Late in the 5th century, kings began to publish written versions of these laws, beginning with the Visigoths and the Burgundian laws of King Gundobald. Should circumstances necessitate a modification of or addendum to the received body of law, such revisions were subject to the consent of the community, typically speaking through some form of council or Witengemote, and in principal, whose approval was to be reinforced by popular acceptance, either manifest as by Lombard custom reflected in the mid-7th-century Edict of Rothari; by agreement of local magistrates to enforce them, as with the Carolingian scabinei; or merely tacitly, as seems to be envisioned in the Edictum Pistense of 864. Lacking both advisors with sufficient technical expertise and a bureaucracy to apply enactments at the local level, royal legal innovation was largely restricted to ad hoc judgments or particular privileges, highlighting the extraordinary nature of the extensive Carolingian capitularies or the legislative traditions of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Not surprisingly, although a number of the Germanic kingdoms were initially hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the Visigothic and Ostrogothic regimes, the Goths having initially adopted Arianism, once converted to the Roman faith, despite a desire to retain power within the warrior elite, the redaction of laws fell to clerics as the literate apparatchiki of the once barbarian realms, accounting for their memorialization in Latin and the frequently privileges and immunities extended to the clergy and ecclesiastic property. On this process generally, consult Wilhelm Wattenbach and Wilhelm Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter: Vorzeit und Karolinger, 3 vols. (1952–1957), and the supplement Die Rechtsquellen by Rudolf Buchner; on the Visigothic kingdom, P. D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom, Cambridge studies in medieval life and thought, 3rd ser., vol. 5 (1972). Meanwhile, church governance and canon law generally followed the same pattern as civil governance in the wake of the collapse of imperial authority. Monasteries had traditionally viewed themselves as self-governing communities, eschewing by in large both episcopal

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and royal authority. The secular clergy adopted practices particular to their bailiwicks, with local councils and synods assuming the principle role in generating canons and rules, while at the same time the power of metropolitans waxed against Rome, but waned against Christian kings who as self-styled protectors of the Church, undertook to preside over synods, fill clerical vacancies, persecute heretics and enforce Christian morality, leaving bishops as little more than arbiters of clerical behavior and disputes. During this period, then, in addition to synodal adoptions, a primary source of law for the faithful was the spate of penitentials that began to appear in the middle of the 6th century. Another new source of law was the compendium now known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Attributed to “Isidore Mercator,” it contained a vast number of legitimate canons and papal letters interspersed with fraudulent canonical material, apparently in an effort to boost episcopal and papal authority in the archdiocese of Reims sometime in the 9th century. It became one of the most pervasive canonical collections of the middle ages, genuine and fraudulent canon being copied and disseminated indiscriminately until the forgery was unmasked in the 16th century by a protestant clergyman. The most authoritative work on the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals is Horst Fuhrmann’s three-volume Einfluß und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen, von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit (1972–1974). A legitimate collection was also compiled in 774 by Pope Adrian I at the request of Charlemagne, who directed that the new Hadriana, essentially a revision of the older Dionysiana, would along with the Hispana serve as the fundamental legal authority in the bishops’ courts throughout the realm. The Carolingians likewise issued capitularies for church reform and discipline, many of which found their way into subsequent canonical collections. The radical decentralization of power characterizing the 9th and 10th centuries for the church marked the zenith of the Eigenkirchentum, whose practical realities required new collections, the most significant being the two books of Abbot Regino of Prium, the Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, and the early 11th-century Decretum of Burchard of Worms, in twenty books, the last two of which were circulated separately under the titles the Corrector and the Speculator. On canonical collections before Gratian, the fundamental work remains Paul Fournier and Gabriel Le Bras, Histoire des collections, canoniques en Occident depuis les fausses décrétales jusqu’au Décret de Gratian, 2 vols., 1931–1932; rpt. 1972. Also invaluable is the recent handbook by Lotty Kéry, Canonical Collections of the Early Middle Ages (ca. 400–1140): a Bibliographical Guide to the Manuscripts and Literature, 1999.

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C. The Reform Papacy and the Legal Palingenesis The degeneration of clerical discipline frequently characterizing the Eigenkirchentum early drew resistance from such establishments as the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, whose reforming zeal attracted not only clerical attention, but by the 11th century, the support of like-minded monarchs such as Otto III and Henry III, the latter appointing Bruno of Toul as Pope Leo IX in 1048, who brought with him such luminaries as Frederick of Lorraine (Stephen IX), Humbert of Moyenmoutier, and Hildebrand (Gregory VII). For these men, law was a principal tool of reform, and, as James A. Brundage (Medieval Canon Law, 1995) points out, they identified four tactical objectives: (1) the compilation of fresh collections of law demonstrating the ancient foundations of their reform efforts; (2) the creation of new laws filling lacunae in the existing corpus; (3) the development of procedural mechanisms; and (4) the institution of more efficient means of detection and prosecution of offenders. With regard to the former, a number of new collections appeared in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, including Anselm of Lucca’s Collectio canonum, the collected canons of Cardinal Deusdedit, and the anonymous Collection in Seventy-four Titles. The ambitious reformer, Ivo of Chartres, compiled a vast compendium entitled the Decretum, as well as the more compact Panormia. Ivo has also been credited, however doubtfully, with the Collection tripartita. As to new law, the reform papacy immediately began the issuance of new canons, reaching a crescendo during the reigns of Gregory VII and Urban II. The mechanisms available to the reforming popes were somewhat limited. By tradition, the multi-purpose synod acted as necessary in the role of a court. Less unwieldy, and used increasingly, was the papal legate, who could serve variously as judge, prosecutor and/or investigator. On the local level, episcopal visitations were the primary tool for detection and correction of irregularities, but were frustrated by various claims of exemption. The search for precedent justifying the reforms impelled Gregory VII to appoint commissioners to comb the libraries of Italy for legal ammunition in his efforts to combat lay investiture in particular. It is probable that copies of the Digest were discovered during this quest. Doubtless, the Pandects remained undiscovered in the 7th decade of the 11th century, but was cited in a Tuscan judgment of 1076. It is certain that the papal agents uncovered the Authenticum. The uncovering of the Codex Iustinianus, however, hardly signified its comprehension. According to Radulfus Niger, writing in his Moralis Regum, ca. 1189, a certain Peppone was the rising dawn of the civil law renaissance subsequently propagated by Irnerius (Warnerius, Guarnerius). The latter seems to have been self-taught, beginning ca. 1100 to copy and

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edit the lost Codex Secundus, variously called the Littera Bononiensis or Vulgata, in distinction to the surviving Littera Pisana, referred to as the Florentina since its capture in 1406. The Codex S. apparently already had the Greek of Book 29 translated: the remainder was either omitted or still in Greek, and Irnerius did not know them, or those in the Code. He interpolated passages from the Authenticum into the Code in places where they would have been included had they not been novellae. Of the Authenticum, he included only 97 “constitutions” as he denominated them. These he grouped into nine “Collations.” The whole of the corpus he divided into five volumes: The Digest, divided into the Old Digest, the Infortiatum and the New Digest; the fourth volume, consisting of the first nine books of the Code; and the Parvum Volumen, containing the Institutes, the Authenticum and eventually the last Tres Libri of the Code. The Greek passages were eventually translated by Burgundio from the Littera Pisana, but the Bolognese canon left lacunae until the Renaissance, with the exception of some older manuscripts which copied them in Greek. His teaching, if any, seems to have been limited to the Four Doctors, Bulgarus Bolgarini, Martin Gosia, Ugo da Porte Ravennata, and Jacobus, and that largely as a matter of tradition. It is with this generation, ending with the death of Jacobus in 1178, five years before the Peace of Constance, that the law school at Bologna began. Concentrating on the academic study of the Codex Justinianus, with practical training limited largely to the moot court, the proceedings of which were sometimes reported by students under the rubric Questiones Disputate, to be distinguished from the Questiones Dominorum, frequently more aptly entitled Dissensiones Dominorum, the majority of which were between Bulgarus and Martin, whose disagreements included not least the former’s devotion to strict law, the latter’s critical tendencies which earned him, and subsequent adherents known as “Gosians,” including in the third generation Roger and Placentine, a reputation as champions of equity. In addition to their teaching, the Four Doctors left glosses and distinctions, as well as apparatus, collections of glosses in the order of the text, but omitting the text itself, occasional summule, commentaries on the subject of a whole Title, and tractate, being comments on particular subjects. The latter would become more significant in future generations, but surely these first baby-steps represent a significant moment in the efforts at legal systemization. Ennio Cortese, Il rinascimento giuridico medievale (1992); Hermann Kantorowicz with William Warwick Buckland, ed., Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law: Newly Discovered Writings of the Twelfth Century (1938; rpt. 1969). The prestige of the law school had a number of repercussions. One was to spur Tuscan cities from Lombard to Roman law, including Pisa in 1161,

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Siena in 1176. Ca. 1151, Conrad III had directed the exclusive use of Roman law in Rome itself. A second was the growing prestige of the afforded jurisperiti, with protections for law students away from home by constitution of Frederick I at Roncaglia, and limitations on serving as judge or consultant provided by Bolognese statute also of 1158 (without five years law study). But perhaps no consequence of the legal palilngenesis was more far reaching than Gratian’s systematic compilation of canon law, the Decretum, or Concordia discordantium canonum, whose very title reveals the dialectical method employed by the Camaldolese monk in a unique integration of source, distinction and comment. Completed perhaps as early as 1140, over the next thirty years copyists added material omitted by Gratian as “Paleae.” Texts from the civil law were also added as canons, and Gratian’s commentary was augmented by such civilians as Bulgarus and James. Also added to the Decretum were two theological treatises: De penitentia to Part II, and De consecratione, constituting Part III. The Decretum was glossed before 1148 by Pocapaglia and Rolandus published a commentary entitled Stromata between 1143 and 1145. As J. A. Clarence Smith (Medieval Law Teachers and Writers: Civilian and Canonist, 1975), suggests, Gratian’s approach did for canon law what Irnerius had done for civil law. As the latter had severed the cord binding civil law to philosophy and rhetoric, Gratian separated the study of canon law from that of theology. And while legists and canonists might disagree on the ultimate imperial supremacy, they would be henceforth regarded as pari generis. D. The Thirteenth Century: Glossators, Coutumiers, Orleans The first half of the 13th century represented the heyday of the glossators. Somewhere between 1208 and 1210, Azzo published his Summa on the Code, which was never superseded during the middle ages. His plethora of glosses on the Old Digest, as well as the Code, represent a veritable Apparatus. In 1215, Joannes Teutonicus completed his Apparatus on the Decretum, which became the Glossa Ordinaria, supplemented circa 1245 by Bartholomew of Brescia. Around the same time, Tancred completed the standard gloss to the first three compilations of the Decretales extravagantes. These compilations, ultimately five in number, were displaced in 1234 by the Liber Extra, promulgated by Pope Gregory IX in 1234. Apparatus on the Liber Extra were completed circa 1240 by both Goffredus de Trano and Bernard of Parma, that of the latter becoming the glossa ordinaria. As Sinibald Fieschi, Innocent IV composed a Commentary on the Liber Extra which was never superseded; while about the same time, Hostiensis completed his definitive Summa, and nearly twenty years later his overly long Lectura thereon. By 1230, Accursius had completed the initial apparatus which was to become the Glossa Ordinaria on

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the Justinian Corpus, and without which the text of the Corpus would scarce be published before 1627. It was probably he as well who added as a tenth collation of the Authenticum, the Libri Feudorum, a collection of the customary law made by Oberto dall’Orto, and on which Pillio, a student of Placentine, had written a Summa in the late 12th century. His son, Francis Accursii, would compose the standard Casus on the New Digest mid-century, about the same time as Vivian Toschi composed the standard casus on the Code, the Old Digest and the Infortiatum. In the last half of the century, jurists such as James of Arena, Martin Sylliman and Dino of Mugello were diligently assembling additiones to the glossa ordinaria – essentially, glosses on the glosses. These years saw also the publication of the great procedural treatise, Speculum judiciale (1st ed., 1271; 2nd ed. 1290), whose medieval ubiquity gained for its author, William Durand, his sobriquet of the Speculator. Much recent research has been done on the issue of procedure, including Linda Magerl-fowler, Ordines, iudiciarii and Libelli de ordine iudiciorum (From the Middle of the Twelfth to the End of the Fifteenth Century) (1994), and Ordo iudiciorum vel ordo iudiciarius: Begriff und Literaturgattung (1984); Wieslaw Litewski, Der römisch-kanonische Zivilprozeß nach den älteren ordines iudiciarii, 2 vols. (1999); and Susanne Lepsius, Die Richter und die Zeugen: Eine Untersuchung anhand des Tractatus testimoniorum des Bartolus von Sassoferrato, mit Edition (2002), and Von Zweifeln zur Überzeugung: Der Zeugenbeweis im gelehrten Recht ausgehend von der Abhandlung des Bartolus von Sassoferrato (2003). Outside Italy, efforts were made to suppress the teaching of civil law. It was barred at Paris in 1219; in the preceding century, the Angevins had made every effort to prohibit it altogether. Instead, in England one witnesses the proliferation of professional manuals emphasizing custom and practice, such as the treatise generally known as Glanvill, ca. 1187–1189, or the monumental De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae composed by Henry of Bracton sometime before 1250. In France, too, there was a wave of compilations, beginning with Le tres ancien coutumier de Normandie, ca. 1199, with French translation ca. 1250, and a larger compilation, Summa de legibus Normandie in curia laicali, ca. 1255. Despite its title, the Establissements de Saint Louis, 1273, is largely a compilation of the Customs of Orléans and the touraine. Mid-century also appeared Li Livres de justice et de plet and Le conseil de Pierre de Fontaines. The most significant of these treatises was the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir, ca. 1280, which is discussed in length by Georges Hubrecht, Commentaire historique et juridique (1972), which was published as volume 3 to the 2 vols. ed. of Am. Salmon, ed., Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis (1970; orig. 1899); and by F. R. P. Akehurst in the introduction to his translation, The Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beauma-

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noir (1992). Early coutumiers were also assembled for Champagne, Bretagne, and the Lille region. Simultaneously, across the Alps from its berceau the civil law was finding expression, first at Orléans and Angers, and in the Midi, following a lull of almost a century marked by the departure of Placentine ca. 1185, at Montpellier, and another at Toulouse. A number of articles by Edward Mauritz Meijers on the schools of Roman law at Orléans and Toulouse are collected in Etudes d’histoire du droit, vol. 3: Le Droit romain au moyen âge (1959). Guy of Como, a student of James Baldwin, author of the standard casus on the Institutes and a noted Bolognese “Gosian,” was teaching at Orléans at least by 1243. This critical approach to the law, combined with dialecticism the students, all Masters of Arts, brought to analysis, probably accounts for the reputed Glossa Aurelianensis, though no such apparatus existed per se. Rather the term was dubbed by Italians contemptuous of Orléans’s lack of reverence for the glossa ordinaria, inter alia. This general inclination for criticism reached fruition beginning in the third generation with James of Revigny, who studied at Orléans with John of Moncy, Guichard of Langres and Simon of Paris, and then successively, with Peter of Belleperche, a student of James’s pupil, Ralph of Harcourt. These two would significantly affect the future of civil law through their influence on Cino of Pistoia, with whom the mos italicus can be said to have begun. E. The Fourteenth Century: the Commentators and the Mos Italicus The first quarter of the 14th century witnessed the completion of the corpus iuris canonici. The Liber sextus was promulgated by Boniface VIII by the bull Sancrosanctae Romanae ecclesiae in 1298, and dispatched to the students at Bologna, Padua, the Curia Romana, and significantly, Orléans and Toulouse. John XXII promulgated the Constitutiones Clementinae by Quoniam nulla in 1317. This closed the medieval canon, though a small private collection of decretals was assembled between 1325 and 1327 by Zenzelinus de Cassanis. These Extravagantes Johannis XXII were not published until 1500, since which time they have been considered part of the Corpus. Giovanni d’Andrea, a student of Martin Sylliman, composed the glossa ordinaria on the Sext and the Clementines in 1304 and 1326, respectively. He also annotated shortly before his death in 1348 William Durand’s Speculum, which thenceforth rarely appeared without his annotations. More significant was Cino Sinibuldi of Pistoia. Although he studied with Dino and Francis Accursii at Bologna, the greatest influence on his great Commentary on the Code was Peter of Belleperche, and from Peter, James of Revigny. With Cino, the commentary became the favored juristic literary form;

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more important, Cino adopted a dialectical approach and an accompanying critical attitude particularly toward the glossa ordinaria that had characterized the school of Orléans. His student at Perugia, Bartolo da Sassoferrato, studied as well with James Buttrigar, a student of Martin Sylliman, and Rainer of Forli, both adherents of the Accursian tradition of nostri doctores. With Bartolo, the mos italicus proper emerges as a synthesis of the two traditions, emphasizing four traits identified by Donald R. Kelly, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence in the Italian Manner,” Historical Journal (1979): 777–94, 784: a methodological concern for history and first causes; a formalism centered on legal subjectivity; a systematic attempt to comprehend and order human nature and experience through equity and interpretation; and a general deference to Romanist tradition and authority. For the rest of the middle ages, Bartolo’s Commentary on the entirety of the Justinian Corpus would be accorded an authority approaching that of the Corpus itself. His students, Baldo and Angelo Ubaldi, would join him in teaching at Perugia. Baldo’s learning was particularly broad, and he commented on the Titles of the Corpus, composed a lectura on the first three Books of the Extravagantes, annotations to the Speculum iuris, and the glossa ordinaria on the Libri Feudorum and the Peace of Constance, as well as annotations to Martin Sylliman’s work on feudal law. The last of the great civilian commentators was Bartolomeo da Saliceto whose uncle and tutor was a student of James Buttrigar. Also at Bologna was Joannis de Lignano, who despite commenting on the entire Corpus iuris canonici, is best remembered for his treatises, De bello, De represaliis, and De Duello, which have been credited as precursors of modern international public law. Of particular note as a canonist, despite being degreed utroque and spending nearly twenty years as judge and vicarius of the Podesta of Bologna and consultant to the Republic of Venice, was Peter of Ancarano, author inter alia of a Commentary on the Extravagantes and lectura on the Sext and the Clementines, who taught at Bologna from 1390 until his death in 1416. F. The Late Medieval Period: 1400–1550 With the Schism of 1378, many of the leading Italian jurists found themselves preoccupied with politics, including Baldo, John of Legnano and Francis Zabarella. While the latter composed Commentaries on the Extravagantes and the Clementines, the abortive Council of Pisa in 1409 and the election of John XXIII caused him to give up his chair at Padua, and he was made Bishop of Florence and Cardinal. He and Peter of Ancarano would both die during the subsequent Council of Constance, but before the election of Martin V, against whom Nicolas Todeschi, a student of Zabarella, and author

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of an influential Commentry on the Extravagantes and a Thesaurus singularium in jure canonico decisivorum, would intrigue at Siena (1423–1424), but then execute Eugenius IV’s mandate to disperse Basel in 1432, failing which he returned to conciliarism, ultimately receiving the Cardinalate from Felix V and dying in 1445 before the collapse of Council and anti-pope. Meanwhile, France was to see a new spate of coutumiers, perhaps spurred by the Pragmatic sanction of 1438, which in making Parlement the standardbearer of Gallicanism (Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century, 1996), would give impetus to what Vittorio De Caprariis, Propaganda e pensiero politico in Francia durante le guerre di religione, 1559–1572, 1959, called “juridical nationalism,” analyzed at length by Donald R. Kelley in Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance, 1970. The bulk of legal literature consisted of Commentaries on the Customs by legal practitioners, notably on those of Berry by Nicolas of Bohier (1508), on those of the Duchy of Burgundy by Bartholomew of Chasseneuz (1517, rev. 1528), of Poitou by Andrew Tiraqueau (unpublished), of Nivernais by Guy Coquille (1590), and of Brittany by Bertrand D’Argentre (1568). Literature dealing with Roman law did so from the perspective of French practice, such as the Practica Forensis of John le Masuyer (d. 1450), or John Imbert, who in addition to his four volume Institutiones Forenses Galliae (1542), published an Enchiridion Juris Scripti Galliae Moribus et Consuetudinibus Recepti (1556). The greatest of these, the so-called “prince of legists,” was Charles Du Moulin, who believed in the unity of law, albeit not Roman law, but the underlying unity of the various Customs, as he expressed in Oratio de Concordia et Unione Consuetudinum Franciae (Jean-Louis Thireau, Charles De Moulin (1500–1566): Etude sur les sources, la méthode, les idées politiques et économiques d’un juriste de la Renaissance, 1980). At the same time, he commented extensively on the Roman law, and in his determination to demonstrate that the text of the law, Roman or customary, provided an equitable norm for new circumstances, he was clearly a Bartolist. II. Historiography A. General Considerations Since World War II, the study of medieval canon law, indeed, of medieval law generally, has been dominated by Stephan Kuttner, founder of the Institute of Research and Study in Medieval Canon Law, which attracted dozens of young scholars since 1955. As a consequence, Kuttner’s standards of rigorous textual analysis, and the cosmopolitan nature of the International

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Congresses of Medieval Canon Law, have produced a renaissance in canon law studies and a truly international historiography that has poured over into medieval legal studies generally. Nonetheless, contingencies of epoch and geography frequently impact the selection of research topic as well as the research method. Not surprisingly have the English shed much ink on the development of the possessory writ of novel disseissin, the French on coutumes. While the international character of modern scholarship may attenuate such parochial inclinations, given the nature of research opportunities on one hand, the professional as well as academic character of many researchers on the other, it is unlikely to obviate them entirely. Similarly, while undeniably an important doctrine, it is difficult to presume that the turbulence of 20th-century Realpolitik spawned no reactive interest in the doctrine of the just war, or that the changing role of women did not spur interest in such work as Giovanni Minnucci’s La capacità processuale della donna nel pensiero canonistico classico da Graziano à Uguccione da Pisa (1989), and 2, Dalle scuole d’oltrape à S. Raimondo di Pennaforte (1994), no matter how fine the scholarship. The ensuing historiographical notes are designed to draw the reader’s attention to general tendencies in approach and subject matter in the English and in the French-speaking worlds, particularly before the Second World War, many of which inclinations persist in varying degrees of subtlety despite the aforesaid cosmopolitanism and the flow of scholars from nation to nation. B. Anglo-American Research In many respects, Anglo-American legal history can be seen as a reaction to prior analytic jurisprudence, whether the natural law theory of Blackstone or the utilitarianism of Bentham and Austin, and more particularly, the tendency of both toward positivist emphasis on law as the product of a legis lator, a variation on the adage “Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem.” In 1861, Sir Henry Maine published the first edition of Ancient Law, which introduced historical jurisprudence qua comparative method, to the Victorian intellectual community. Sir Frederick Pollock, who would with Frederic William Maitland author the classic, the History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. (1895, 2nd ed. 1898), who had himself turned to the study of Roman law in the belief that not only was it a model for systemization, but because it improved English lawyers through comparison and analysis, wholeheartedly embraced Maine’s comparative approach, though he was as frequently at odds to define it precisely as was Maine. Maine established no school per se, his principle, if not sole, disciple being Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence, 2 vols. (1920–1922), who

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also authored the monograph Roman Law in Medieval Europe (1909), and with Pollock was literary editor of the Selden Society for twelve years. As it happened, Maitland was no admirer of Maine), and had little use for historical jurisprudence, which remained too much theory, too little history. His tastes ran more to William Stubbs, whose Constitutional History of England, 3 vols. (1873–1878), dominated Anglo-American constitutional history of medieval England for more than eighty years, and whose most vocal critics, H. O. Richardson and George O. Sayles, The Governance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (1963), nonetheless propound many of Maitland’s views. Apparently, Maitland could not see in Stubbs or at least not as clearly, what he saw so clearly in Maine: an intuitive, and hence faulty, reconstruction of the past in the service of a Whiggish historicism. For this reason, Maitland disclaimed any a priori relevance to research as an obstacle to reconstructing the legal past true to fact, which required unbiased analysis of the often voluminous available documentary evidence, which he attempted to do not only in The History of English Law, but in Domesday Book and Beyond (1898), his 1901 Rede Lecture, published as English Law and the Renaissance, 1901, and the six essays reprinted as Roman Canon Law in the Church of England (1898), as well as his editions of Bracton’s Notebook, 3 vols. (1987), and Memorando de Parliament (1893). Nor did he believe law could be examined outside its social context. Indeed, to interpret the law of an epoch required one to understand it as though one lived under it. Legal doctrine was not the mere product of analysis and reasoning in a closed system, but represented responses to problems and forces within the larger society. For this reason, Maitland demanded at least implicitly that the legal historian be trained both as lawyer and historian. With his passing, legal history tended to return to the former model, as evidenced by Sir William S. Holdsworth’s gargantuan seventeen volume History of English Law (1922–1952). Meanwhile, in the United States, the pedagogical program of Christopher Columbus Langdell with its emphasis on practical instruction and the case method, tended to shunt legal history and philosophy from the standard curriculum. For a succinct, entertaining but perceptive analysis of Maine, Pollock and Maitland within the context of the Anglo-American legal community, the reader is directed to Richard A. Cosgrove, Our Lady the Common Law: an Anglo-American Legal Community, 1870–1930 (1967), and Scholars of the Law: English Jurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart (1996). Despite his successors’ abandonment of his program, both Maitland’s reputation and his work – research and conclusions – have held up amazingly well to the century’s scrutiny following his death in 1906. Arthur Ogle disputed some of his arguments concerning the authority of Roman canon

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law over English ecclesiastical courts, based largely on the meaning of William Lyndwood’s Provinciale, which Maitland had argued Stubbs had incorrectly interpreted. Subsequently, H. W. C. Davis, “The Canon Law in England,” Historical Papers (1933): 123–43, convincingly refuted Ogle. In The Birth of the Common Law (1973), R. C. von Caenegem took issue with Maitland’s conclusion that the Anglo-Saxon experience with the grand jury circa 1000 was temporary, arguing instead that it was a continuing, albeit local, feature of disperse communities until reinstituted by the Angevins. A more serious challenge was raised by S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations and the Common Law (1969; 2nd ed. 1981); The Legal Framework of English Feudalism: the Maitland Lectures given in 1972 (1972); Studies in the History of the Common Law (1985); A Natural History of the Common Law (2003), who argues that Maitland failed to follow fully his own program. In particular, Milsom argues that in the development of land law, Maitland by working backward from Bracton, over-emphasized the role of the royal courts in the 12th century. According to Milsom, the legal procedures applicable to conflicts over realty were the product of several generations of landed families, barons and their tenants, working out a suitable system of litigation. While this debate continues, it seems reasonable to ask, inter alia, why procedures, such as novel disseisin, which seems so obviously based on the Roman (and, hence, canon) law of spoliation and the Roman interdict Unde vi, with its emphasis on trying possessory before petitory actions, should have taken generations to evolve, or how such actions would ever benefit tenants in capite. Both Maitland and Milsom are in the last analysis functionalists, relating the evolution of law to the cultural, social and economic milieu. An interesting application to the later medieval period is found in Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381: A Transformation of Governance and Law (1993), which in its emphasis on the role of chancery in responding to the displacements of the demographic disaster of the 14th century by creating new causes of action and issuance of new forms of process, perhaps is closer to Maitland than Milsom. Another scholar who has emphasized the role of professional jurists in the evolution of the English common law is Paul Anthony Brand, The Making of the Common Law (1992); The Origins of the English Legal Profession (1992); Kings, Barons and Justices: the Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England (2003). The recently published tome by James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (2008), promises to attain the status of a classic. If the line of legal research from Maitland to Milsom can be seen as a reaction against the Victorian predilection for Whiggish constitutionalism,

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it can also be interpreted as a continuation of the notion of “primacy of law:” the notion that in many important respects, law preceded and legitimized government, rather than vice versa. This idea, though separable from corporatist theses, was certainly implicit in Otto von Gierke’s Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, 3 vols. (1868–1881), the third volume of which Maitland himself translated and published as Political Theories of the Middle Ages (1900). This work also presumed contrasting Germanic and Roman conceptions of order that was to provide a focus for important works on medieval kingship such as Fritz Kern’s Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter, translated and published under the title, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, 1939. Even more emphatically devoted to legal primacy, but without the concern for Germanic “exceptionalism” was R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. (1903–1936). The dichotomous approach would find new and fertile ground in the work of Walter Ullman (The Medieval Idea of Law as Represented by Lucas de Penna: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Legal Scholarship, 1946; The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists, 1949), who would identify the conflict of ascending and descending theories of authority as the key to medieval political theory, although both could be derived from the learned or common, i. e., Roman and canon law. For a discussion of the role of primacy of law in twentieth-century research on medieval politics, and particularly for Walter Ullman and his students, the reader is directed to the entry Political Theory herein. As Ullman was a germinal figure in British research on learned law and political theory, Stephan Kuttner, who had already begun a program of collecting and publishing surviving but unpublished and inaccessible canonistic material that was to engender a subfield of textual scholarship transformative of the modern study of medieval canon law before fleeing Europe for the United States in 1940, was to act as a major motivating force in American, indeed, world canon law studies. As a consequence, in addition to the important work done relating to political theory, the second half of the 20th century saw considerable research on topics relating to private life, including sex and marriage: Richard H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (1974); John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (1965); James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (1987), and id., Sex, Law and Marriage in the Middle Ages (1993). Significant work has also been done on economic theory and the poor: Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Applications in England (1956); John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (1957); John W. Baldwin, Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1959);

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John T. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (1969). On the jus belli, Maurice Keen, The Law of War in the Late Middle Ages (1965); James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (1969); Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (1975); James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World 1250–1550 (1979). C. French Historiography If much 19th-century Anglo-American legal history was characterized by a Whiggish constitutionalism bespeaking an affection for German exceptionalism, French historiography can be seen as the product of tendencies already evolving in the medieval period toward “juristic nationalism.” Although one could argue that the English had their Fortescue and his De laudibus legum Anglie, French jurists such as Etienne Pasquier, a student of Ramus, Hotman, Alciato, and Cujas, whose humanist philological and historical hermeneutical techniques he and Pierre Pithou, inter alia, adapted to medieval law and institutions, and Antoine Loisel, along with Francois Hotman himself, protege of Charles du Moulin and polemicist against Romanism in the universities, established something of an unbroken line of historiography that survived well into the 1800’s, and arguably beyond. This “school” of practitioner/historians sought the spirit of French law not only in the provincial customs, which continue to receive much attention even today among French historians, but as early as Loisel’s Institutes coutumiers, in proverbs and popular literature as well. Additionally, because they were practicing avocats, they sought to establish the prerogatives of what they considered an ancient order. Hence, Loisel’s Pasquier, ou Dialogue des avocats du Parlement de Paris, is the predecessor of careful but uncritical studies by practicing lawyers, such as Jean-Francois Fournel, Histoire des avocats au Parlement de Paris et du barreau de Paris depuis St. Louis jusqu’au 15 octobre 1790, 2 vols. (1813); Joachim-Antoine-Joseph Gaudry, Histoire du barreau de Paris, depuis son origine jusqu’a 1830, 2 vols. (1864); Charles Bataillard and Ernest Nusse, Histoire des procureurs et des avoués, 1303–1816, 2 vols. (1882); and Andre Damien, Les avocats du temps passé (1973). On the politics past and present of this phenomenon, the reader should consider David A. Bell, Lawyers & Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (1994). It was not until 1885 that the archivist, Roland Delachenal (Histoire des avocats au parlement de Paris 1300–1600) published a more rigorous study of the subject. During this same period, scholars undertook to collect, edit and publish the coutumes, among the most notable being the work of ErnstJoseph Tardif (Coutumiers de Normandie: Textes critiques publiés avec notes et éclaircissements, 2 vols., 1881–1903); Paul Viollet (Les établissements de

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St. Louis, 4 vols., 1881–1886); and Amédée Salmon (Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 2 vols., 1899–1900). Spurred by the work of the learned Dominican, Heinrich Denifle, and his epoch-making Die Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400 (1885), several French scholars undertook studies of the medieval law faculties. The first, Marcel Fournier’s three-volume Histoire de la science du droit en France (1892), was careless and of inferior quality, as was the work of Antonin Deloume, himself of the law faculty of Toulouse, and who borrowed copiously in composing Aperçu Historique sur la faculté de droit de l’université de Toulouse: Maîtres et escoliers de l’an 1228 à 1900 (1900), and his subsequent two volume revision, Histoire sommaire de la faculté de droit de Toulouse fondée en 1229: centenaire de la réorganization de 1805 (1905). For a discussion and evaluation of these works, the reader should consult the bibliographic essay by Cyril E. Smith, The University of Toulouse in the Middle Ages (1958). Of generally higher quality are the more recent studies by Eduard Mauritz Meijers contained in the 3rd and 4th volumes of Etudes d’Histoire de Droit (1959), and the work of André Gouron, La science du droit dans le midi de la France au moyen âge (1984). These latter works followed, of course, the impact of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Ferdinand Braudel and others associated with Annales on French historiography. In many respects, this effect corresponded to the effect of Maitland on Anglo-American historiography. Unlike Maitland, with his functional emphasis, the Annales school, in its Durkheimian concern for totality and its search for deeply ingrained mentalities developed and persisting over the long duration, was largely structuralist. Also unlike Maitland’s functionalism which was by its very nature at loggerheads with preceding Whiggish constitutionalism, the concerns of the Annales school were not manifestly incommensurate with, indeed found an echo in, legal scholarship from the days of Pasquier with its privileging of custom and authority. The works of a number of French scholars have become mainstays of scholarship, particularly in early canon law, and church-state relations, including Paul Fournier and Gabriel Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident depuis les fausses décrétales jusqu’au Décret de Gratien, 2 vols. (1931–1932), Dictionnaire de Droit canonique, ed. Robert Naz, 7 vols. (1935–1965). Le Bras is also editor with Jean Gaudemet of the 18-volume series Histoire du Droit et des Institutions de l’Eglise en Occident, which includes as volume 7 his L’Âge classique 1140–1378 (1965), authored jointly with Charles Lefebvre and Jacqueline Rambaud, and as volume 13, Paul Ourliac and Henri Gilles, La Période postclassique, 1378–1500, vol. I, La problématique de l’époque (1971). The series also includes Charles Munier, L’Eglise dans l’empire romain (IIe–IIIe siècles): Eglise et cité (1979), and Jean Gaudemet, L’Eglise dans l’empire romain (IVe–Ve

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siècles), 2nd ed. (1989, orig. 1958), both of which are useful references on early canon law. Despite the unquestioned merits of these works, there remains a hint of that structuralism that characterized the Annales school, as well as arguably the thought of Pasquier. Gouron, for example, is also author of La réglementation des métiers en Languedoc au Moyen Âge (1958), as well as a number of works on coutumes. And just as Loisel sought in proverb and popular literature what Annales historians would call mentalities underlying the law, so Ourliac, who in additional to the foregoing work has published with J. De Malafosse a multi-volume Histoire du droit privé, 1968, has written extensively on law and medieval French literature, which essays are included in Etudes d’histoire du droit medieval (1972), as well as authoring two volumes on Coutumes de L’Agenais (1976 and 1981) and the edition, Fors anciens de Béarn (1990). Select Bibliography Manlio Bellomo, Società ed istituzioni in Italia tra medioevo ed età moderna (Catania: Editrice Giannotta, 1977); James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London and New York: Longman, 1955); The History of Medieval Canon Law in the Classical Period, 1140–1234: from Gratian to the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, ed. Wilfried Hartmann and Kenneth Pennington (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008); J. A. Clarence Smith, Medieval Law Teachers and Writers, Civilian and Canonist (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1975); Francesco Calasso, Medio Evo del Diritto, vol. 1: Le fonti (Milan: Giuffre, 1954); Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, ed. Helmut Coing, vol. 1: Mittelalter (1100–1500) (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973); Antonio Garcia Y Garcia, Historia del derecho canonico, vol. 1: El primer milenio (Salamanca: University of Salamanca, 1967); Robert Naz, ed., Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, 7 vols. (Paris: Letourney et Ane, 1935–1965); Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, 7 vols. (Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1834–1851).

Scott L. Taylor

Legal Historiography (German) A. Terminology, Boundaries of the Field Research into medieval law falls primarily into the domain of legal history. This discipline, on the borders of law and history, is greatly influenced by the relevant legal culture and the lines of development towards modern law. European law is not so much a single field as a checkerboard landscape, characterized by the co-existence of various law communities. Primarily, it

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is divided into the German, Roman, English, and Nordic law communities (Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz, Einführung in die Rechtsvergleichung, 11969, 31996). Legal history is faced with specific problems in each law community, and despite the suggestive titles of a number of books (Hattenhauer; Robinson, Fergus, Gordon; Willoweit, Seif), a genuinely European legal historiography is at best in its infancy. This article confines itself to the German law community, and will examine the significance of medieval law for the changing conditions of development of the history of law (see also the contribution by Scott Taylor, Law in the Middle Ages). It must be remembered that modern law in central Europe – more so than in other law communities – is a product of very diverse roots. In the Middle Ages, the indigenous customary law was supplemented by the Roman common law, whose importance for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation so increased from the late 15th century that this process was often later described as a ‘reception’; this existed in parallel to the legal system of the (Catholic) church. These very different roots are reflected in the various sub-disciplines of the history of law, whose emergence is a result of developments in the 19th century (see below, 2). Roman law, at best including the ‘common law’ into which it had developed in medieval practice (cf. Hermann Lange, Maximiliane Kriechbaum, Römisches Recht im Mittelalter, vol. I: Die Glossatoren, 1997; vol. II: Die Kommentatoren, 2007), became the object of study of the history of Roman law; the law of the Catholic church that of the history of canon law. The nature and the institutions of native law were studied by historians of German law, albeit giving increased consideration to those influences proceeding from other development strands. Thus German legal history has particular potential as the possible core of an integrative history of law which unites all factors in the development of law and reaches the present day, especially given the manner in which the study of Roman law has to some extent been dehistoricized and developed into a propaedeutic of civil law. In it, the sub-disciplines which have been maintained since the 19th century (particularly in the field of the history of modern private law; cf. Wieacker) could potentially merge into one. A wish to overcome these traditional specializations, which can for instance be observed in the Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (ZSRG, first published in 1883; on which most recently: Werner Ogris, “Zum Erscheinen von Band 125 der Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte,” ZSRG/GA [2008]: XXXI–XLVIII) with its three sections (German, Roman, canon, the last only since 1911), is frequently voiced even today (cf. Stolleis 2007). It had been called for as early as the beginning of the 20th century (Möller, 69); and the Deutsche Rechtshistorikertage, a meeting

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of German legal historians held since 1927, were intended to encourage a concentration on the “places of contact” between the “individual fields.” For this reason, the invitation to their first congress distinguished between “the history of law in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Church,” thus equating ‘German’ law with the history of medieval law (cf. the facsimile in: Berthold Sutter, Fünfundzwanzig Deutsche Rechtshistorikertage, Heidelberg 1927-Graz 1984, 1984). The significance of the Middle Ages in the German language area within the context of what was formerly called the ‘German’ history of law will be the focal point of this article. B. On the History of Legal Historiography Legal history, as an academic subject within legal studies, emerged from the ‘historical legal school’ (‘Historische Rechtsschule’) of the 19th century, in reaction to the so-called reasonable law (‘Vernunftrecht’), if one disregards its forerunners in the 17th and 18th centuries, ‘imperial history’ and ‘German Private Law.’ Reasonable law, an idea of a secular natural law, was formed by the Enlightenment. Emancipated from Christian ideas of morality and characterized by a rational, logical and systematic mode of thought, it had achieved a special historical importance in lawmaking due to its connections to political Absolutism. Its most important result was the codification of (natural) law, resulting in a fundamentally new type of legal text, which manifested itself as a claim to generate a timelessly reasonable, systematic, and logically contradiction free summary of the legal order (or important parts of it). Any loopholes which did become apparent ought to be closable using the code itself alone, without reference to other legal authorities. Thus the codes (for example the Prussian ALR of 1794, the French Code Civil of 1804, or the Austrian ABGB of 1812) put an end to the previously dominant system of a mixed law made up of various elements (Ius Romano-Germanicum). This rejection of other sources of law, and the premise of an eternal human reason unbound by the concrete circumstances of its time resulted in a widespread rejection of a historical conception of law as bound to a particular point in time. Skepticism towards ‘reasonable law’ had become apparent even in the 18th century. Immanuel Kant criticized it as an ahistoric, artificial construct, and Johann Gottfried Herder understood every cultural phenomenon as the mutable result of a historical process. The reasonable law, as fixed by the codification process to form the judicial code of the establishment, could not fulfill the expectations of eternal validity placed upon it; partly, too, it appeared compromised by its association with the absolutist law-giver. The discipline of law, whose considerable importance for the Ius Romano-Germanicum

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had been eroded by the lawgiving of the absolutist state, sought a new role. Following the spirit of the age of romanticism and historicism, there was a turn away from the enlightened reasonable law and towards the historical method. Thus arose the “historical legal school,” founded by Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861) and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn (1781–1854), which gained its first focal point in the journal Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft, founded in 1815 (Joachim Rückert, “Geschichtlich, praktisch, deutsch: Die ‘Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft’ [1815–1850], das ‘Archiv für die civilistische Praxis’ [1818–1867] und die ‘Zeitschrift für deutsches Recht und deutsche Rechtswissenschaft’ [1839–1861],” Juristische Zeitschriften: Die neuen Medien des 18.–20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Michael Stolleis, 1999, 107–257). The Historical School, influenced by Herder, believed that law originated, as part of the general cultural achievement of a people, in their collective beliefs (the Volksgeist, i. e., the spirit of a people). Out of this, the legal discipline, using a historical and systematic methodology should deduce the positive legal order (scientific positivism). Savigny and his pupils (e. g., Georg Friedrich Puchta, 1798–1846) saw the classical Roman law as suitable material, because of its high dogmatic quality. This close connection with the Pandects (Digests), the central element of the 6th-century Justinian law code, gave this method of legal scholarship its name, “Pandectistics.” Its representatives emphasized the dogmatic aspect of their work, while the historical aspects retreated into the background. That those who, like Savigny (cf. Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, 1815–1831, 21834–1851) – assumed a “denaturing” of classical Roman law by medieval law scholarship, gave a low importance to the Middle Ages goes without saying. By contrast, Eichhorn turned to the native German element of law, founding the ‘Germanist’ branch of the Historical School (Deutsche Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, 1808ff; Einleitung in das deutsche Privatrecht mit Einschluß des Lehnrechts, 1823ff). Under the influence of contemporary political efforts towards German unity (further references: Gerald Kohl, Deutsche Einheit, Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, vol. II, ed. Friedrich Jäger, 2005, 934–35), scholars of that persuasion saw a preoccupation with the learned, Roman law (the ‘academic law’ of the ‘Romanists’) as a contradiction to the genuine national law which formed the actual spirit of the people (cf. Georg Beseler [1809– 1888], Volksrecht und Juristenrecht, 1843). The ‘Germanist’ and ‘Romanist’ branches of the subject became increasingly separate from around 1840, actualizing the potential for schism which had been apparent in the diverging emphases of the two branches since the founding days of the Historical School.

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While the Pandectists, with their emphasis on classical Roman law, had little interest in the Middle Ages, the Germanists took as their object the native law before it was influenced (in their view, negatively) by Roman common law. The so-called ‘national tragedy’ of the reception of Roman law directed their attention to the preceding era: this necessarily meant that the Middle Ages took centre stage. Building on tendencies in the 18th century, various writers (e. g., Bluntschli, Stobbe, Roth, Gierke) attempted reconstructions of a general ‘German civil law,’ which was to be based on a wide variety of native German legal sources (town laws, legal treatises [Rechtsbücher], collections of rural law [Weistümer], etc.). This Germanist interest corresponded to the political aims of the German nationalist movement which had developed in the Napoleonic Wars. Recent research has viewed the general turn to history as a compensation for the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the consequent loss of a political and constitutional legal framework (Wolfgang Burgdorf, Ein Weltbild verliert seine Welt: der Untergang des Alten Reiches und die Generation 1806, 2006, esp. 283–318). In this sense, the early meetings of the Germanists (“Germanistenversammlungen”: 1846 Frankfurt/Main, 1847 Lübeck) acted not just as an academic, but also as a political forum. While the Pandectists found the object of their studies in the Justianian Corpus Iuris civilis, the Germanists had to begin by establishing their basic sources: thus, editions of legal sources formed the beginnings of Germanist research and determined its future course – to a certain extent even to this day. Their numbers are so great and their objects so various that only a few representative names can be mentioned here. The connections with contemporary politics find their expression in the scholars associated with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, founded in 1819 by Karl vom und zum Stein (1757–1831) and including in particular the editions (reprinted toward the end of the 20th century) of Germanic folk law in the series Leges or Leges nationum Germanicarum (e. g. L[eges etc.]. Alamannorum, L. Baiuwariorum, L. Burgundionum, L. Frisionum, L. Langobardorum, L. Saxonum, L. Thuringorum, L. Ribuaria, L. Francorum Chamavorum etc.). The collection and edition of the rural customary law compilations (Weistümer or Taidinge), the records of legal traditions as manifested in judicial proceedings which were kept by legally experienced members of various – mostly rural – law communities formed, quantitatively speaking, a main focus (further references: Christiane Birr, “Weistümer und ‘Ländliche Rechtsquellen’, Quellenkunde der Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Josef Pauser, Martin Scheutz and Thomas Winkelbauer, 2004, 390–408). The beginnings of this tradition of collection can be found with Jakob Grimm (1785–1863) and his seven volume edition (Weisthümer,

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1840–1878, rpt. 1957). From 1864 (the year marking the foundation of the Weistümer- und Urbarkommission, commission on rural customary laws and urbaria) on, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Humanities collected Weistümer for Austria in its series Österreichische Weistümer (1870–). A further focus of interest was on the study of legal handbooks or individual records of customary law, such as work on the Sachsenspiegel (Mirror of the Saxons; Heiner Lück, Über den Sachsenspiegel, 1999). Legal history, seen as a form of ‘historical legal studies,’ initially aimed at the treatment with historical methods of questions concerning the current legal order. In the late 19th century there was a growing sense that the historical material was valuable in its own right; legal historians had “spent long enough patiently acting as a chamberlain to jurisprudence, laboriously collecting stones out of which others built palaces.” (Möller, 68; abbreviated quotation in Ogorek, 17 fn. 11). An important impulse was given by the Pandectistic codifications of law (German BGB 1900, Swiss ZGB 1912) which had been preceded by the replacement of academic positivism with a legal positivism and the consequent estrangement between the history of law and the current legal order. This “separation of the dogmatic and the historical views of law” (Ogorek, 19) forced the history of law into yet another repositioning and made possible a stronger turn to non-judicial but allied disciplines such as philology and general history, from which medieval studies as a whole was able to benefit. On the other hand, this ‘historicizing,’ which still marks the subject today, meant that the history of law lost ground within the faculties of law. Not a few representatives of the subject assumed that the National Socialist takeover would open a way out of this imminent marginalization; thus, research interests shifted to “topics of political interest” (Hans Thieme, as cited in Rückert, Willoweit, 347). In private law, such hopes centered above all on the new political masters’ propaganda rejecting Roman law; in constitutional history on Germanic concepts of community, as well as the Empire before its alleged decline due to the formation of separate territories. In both areas (which in medieval times appeared as a unity: Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland I, 1988, 63) attention was concentrated on the Middle Ages or still more remote eras: “even those who up till then had only been concerned with later epochs began, in accordance with the trend towards the depiction of thousand-year continuities, to reach back to the distant, Germanic past.” (Anna Lübbe, “Die deutsche Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung,” Stolleis and Simon, 73–74). Parallel to this, since the turn of the last century, historians’ increased interest in constitutional history (cf. the appointment, in 1902, of the his-

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torian Otto Hintze as the first Full Professor of constitutional history in Germany: Grothe, 54) led to a criticism of the views held by legal historians that were determined by concepts characteristic of the modern period. This also influenced the post-war period. It was the historian Otto Brunner (1898–1982) who broke new ground in replacing modern categories with closeness to medieval sources. As a discipline, the history of law at first responded hesitantly to this challenge. After 1945, a questioning of the discipline’s understanding of itself and its relations with the National Socialist regime seemed more urgent (cf. Heinrich Mitteis, Vom Lebenswert der Rechtsgeschichte, 1947). On the one hand, its unsubtle attempts at relevance were criticized for turning legal history into the “whore of the present-day” (Karl Siegfried Bader, Ursache und Schuld in der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit, 1946, 34), while on the other it was condemned for a descriptive historicism which had no values of its own to set against the National Socialists (cf. further references in Ogorek, 37). The result was that the Germanists of the post war period not only distanced themselves from 19th-century constitutional history but also abandoned the intensive interest in the Germanic period. At the same time there was a tendency to turn toward modern history which found its expression in the study reform from 1935. Introducing courses in ‘modern constitutional history’ and ‘modern history of private law’, this reform was heavily influenced by the legal historian Karl August Eckhardt (1901–1979). Literature: Ernst v. Möller, Die Trennung der Deutschen und der Römischen Rechtsgeschichte (1905); Marcel Senn, Rechtshistorisches Selbstverständnis im Wandel: ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftstheorie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Rechtsgeschichte (1982); Gerhard Dilcher, Bernd-Rüdiger Kern, “Die juristische Germanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Fachtradition der Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte,” ZSRG/GA (1984): 1–46; Dieter Wyduckel, Ius publicum: Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts und der Staatsrechtswissenschaft (1984); Frantisek Graus, “Verfassungsgeschichte des Mittelalters,” Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986): 529–89; Rechtsgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Michael Stolleis, Dieter Simon (1989); Marcel Senn, “Stand und Zweck der neueren Grundlagendiskussion in der Rechtsgeschichtswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte (1993): 66–77; Regina Ogorek, “Rechtsgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik [1945–1990],” Rechtswissenschaft in der Bonner Republik: Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Jurisprudenz, ed. Dieter Simon (1994), 12–99; Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Die deutsche verfassungsgeschichtliche Forschung im 19. Jahrhundert (11961, 21995); Joachim Rückert, Dietmar Willoweit, Die Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte in der NS-Zeit, ihre Vorgeschichte und ihre Nachwirkungen (1995); Andrea Nunweiler, Das Bild der deutschen Rechtsvergangenheit und seine Aktualisierung im ‘Dritten Reich,’ (1996); Diethelm Klippel, “Rechtsgeschichte,” Joachim Eibach and Günther Lottes, Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft (2002), 126–41, 171–73; Anne Christine Nagel, Im Schatten des Dritten Reichs: Mittelalterforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1970 (2005); Ewald Grothe,

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Zwischen Geschichte und Recht. Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung 1900–1970 (2005); Ernst Pitz, Verfassungslehre und Einführung in die deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte des Mittelalters (2006); Michael Stolleis, Rechtsgeschichte, Verfassungsgeschichte, Geschichte. Ein Grundkurs, ed. Hans-Jürgen Goertz (11998, 32007), 391–412.

C. Focuses of Research in the History of Law The focal points of research in the last decades have been affected by the traditions of the subject described above. In this sense, editions of legal sources remain an important task for the legal historian. In part, this is a matter of continuing and completing the mammoth projects of the 19th or early 20th century (e. g. Nikolaus Grass, ed., Tirolische Weistümer: Ergänzungsbände Oberinntal, 1994; Karl Schumm and Marianne Schumm, ed., Hohenlohische Dorfordnungen, 1985). Reprints, too, testify to this continuity (eg. Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, ed., Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer [by J. Grimm] 1, 11828, 41899, rpt. 1992). However, these are often also new projects in which the influence of social, urban and regional history can be felt. Interest in law books remains unbroken, not merely in the famous examples of the genre, for attention is now being paid to regional or local accounts. Increasingly, urban legal sources are of interest to researchers: for example Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand (ed.), Die Wolfenbütteler Bilderhandschrift des Sachsenspiegels (1993–1998); Der Oldenburger Sachsenspiegel (2006); Hans Schlosser and Ingo Schwab, Oberbayerisches Landrecht Kaiser Ludwigs des Bayern von 1346 (2000); Carl August Lückerath and Friedrich Benninghoven (ed.), Das Kulmer Gerichtsbuch 1330–1430 (1999); Dietrich Poeck (ed.), Das älteste Greifswalder Stadtbuch (1291–1332) (2000); Konrad Elmshäuser (ed.), 700 Jahre Bremer Recht 1303–2003 (2003); Der Kolberger Kodex des Lübischen Rechts von 1297: Das Kolberger Rechtsbuch (2005); Winfried Irgang (ed.), Das ‘Leobschützer Rechtsbuch,’ (2006). Institutional support of editorial projects is a significant factor, for example that of the Kommission für Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs (Commission for Austrian Legal History) of the Austrian Academy of Science and the Humanities with its series Fontes rerum austriacarum / Fontes iuris: Wilhelm Brauneder, Gerhard Jaritz, and Christian Neschwara (ed.), Die Wiener Stadtbücher 1395–1430. I: 1395–1400 (1989); II: 1401–1405 (1998); III: 1406–1411 (2006); Christa Schillinger-Prassl, Die Rechtsquellen der Stadt Leoben (1997), Roman Zehetmayer, Das Urbar des Grafen Burkhard III von Maidburg-Hardegg aus dem Jahre 1363 (2001), Günter Schneider (ed.), Das Urbar des niederösterreichischen Zisterzienserklosters Zwettl von 1457 (2002); Ingo Schwab, Das Landrecht von 1346 für Oberbayern und seine Gerichte Kufstein, Kitzbühel und Rattenberg (2002).

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In the field of constitutional history, the criticism first voiced by historians in the first half of the 20th century of the unsuitable terminology applied to the Middle Ages by legal historians, determined the character of the second half. Many works of conceptual history were written in this spirit, some of them profiting from links to researches into regional history (e. g. the terms Personenverbandsstaat, a (feudal) state based on personal alliances and institutioneller Flächenstaat, ‘institution-based territorial state’ in Theodor Mayer; cf. Nagel, 156ff, 173). The Vereinigung für Verfassungsgeschichte, Association of Constitutional History, founded in 1977, attempts to unite the varying viewpoints of historians, legal historians and constitutional lawyers; its biannual conferences on broader themes usually also consider their medieval aspects. The association has repeatedly examined historiographical questions of constitutional history (1981: Subject and concepts of constitutional history, cf. Der Staat, Beiheft 6, 1983; 2006: Constitutional History in Europe, cf. Ewald Grothe in forum historiae iuris: http://www.rewi.huberlin.de/FHI/news/Tagungsbericht_Hofgeismar.htm). On the central questions of ‘Constitution’ and ‘Constitutional History, cf. the bibliography listed above, under 2. In addition to this association, the Konstanz Working Group on Medieval History (Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für mittelalterliche Geschichte) merits mention as an institutional base for the discipline (on the group: Traute Endemann, Geschichte des Konstanzer Arbeitskreises, 2001; Peter Moraw, Rudolf Schieffer, ed., Die deutschsprachige Mediävistik im 20. Jahrhundert, 2005). In its publications Vorträge und Forschungen, questions of medieval constitutional history are frequently examined, e. g. Reinhard Schneider (ed.), Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich (1987); Reinhard Schneider, Harald Zimmermann (ed.), Wahlen und Wählen im Mittelalter (1990); Peter Moraw (ed.), Deutscher Königshof, Hoftag und Reichstag im späteren Mittelalter (2003); Werner Maleczek (ed.), Fragen der politischen Integration im mittelalterlichen Europa (2005). Here a noticeable dominance of the historian over the jurist in the field of the history of the medieval constitution can be observed. This interest in fundamental conceptual questions, as well as the trend towards social history in the historical disciplines which has characterized the last quarter of the 20th century – can also be observed in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (ed.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 1972ff (e. g., the two articles on “Verfassung” by Heinz Mohnhaupt and Dieter Grimm, vol. VI, 1990, 831–62, 863–99). If the historians’ interest had initially been in the institutions of territorial rulership [Landesherrschaft] (Brunner; Walter Schlesinger, Die

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Entstehung der Landesherrschaft, 1941, rpt. 1964), then in the following period that interest was joined by research into manorial rulership [Grundherrschaft] and communalism, e. g., Hans Patze (ed.), Die Grundherrschaft im späten Mittelalter I–II (1983); Peter Blickle, Unruhen in der ständischen Gesellschaft 1300–1800 (1988); André Holenstein, Die Huldigung der Untertanen: Rechtskultur und Herrschaftsordnung (800–1800) (1991) Grundherrschaft und bäuerliche Gesellschaft im Hochmittelalter, ed. Werner Rösener (1995); Theorien kommunaler Ordnung in Europa, ed. Peter Blickle (1996); Gemeinde und Staat im alten Europa, ed. Peter Blickle (1998; in particular Sibylle Hunziker, “Die ländliche Gemeinde in der juristischen Literatur 1300–1800,” 397–468) One of the areas in which research into constitutional history is centered is regional history; and interests in this field seem to be, given the federal nature of the states of the German speaking area, politically not unwelcome (cf., e. g., for the Austrian states, with further references Brauneder, Kohl in: CPH 2002, especially 23, 28f). Also deserving of mention are works on public peaces (with further references Landfrieden: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed. Arno Buschmann and Elmar Wadle, 2002) and on the feudal system (with further references Karl-Heinz Spiess , Das Lehnswesen in Deutschland im hohen und späten Mittelalter, 2002). In addition to a large number of individual monographs, there are now modern surveys of medieval constitutional history, such as that by Hans K. Schulze (Grundstrukturen der Verfassung im Mittelalter I, 11985, 42004; II, 11986, 32000; III, 1998; VI, 2005) or Rolf Sprandel (Verfassung und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, 11975, 51994). The comprehensive Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte also gives the subject thorough consideration (Karl Bosl, Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft im deutschen Mittelalter, 11970, 101999 [paperback ed.]). A history of administration, as distinct from the constitution, could only establish itself in the last quarter of the 20th century. While its emphases lie in the modern era, the analyses of Kurt G. A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl, and Georg-Christoph von Unruh, Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, 1983–1988, begin in vol. 1 with the late Middle Ages. The history of international law is younger still (Karl-Heinz Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 11994, 22007). In connection to enquiries into constitutional history, and influenced by increased interest in social history, research into court procedure, and the history of justice and the legal process has become significant (cf. Hans Schlosser, “Situation, Zielsetzung und Perspektiven der rechtshistorischen Forschung zum Zivilprozeß,” in: Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 1982: 42–51). Here, too, emphasis lies on the modern period, as in the central series in this field, Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im alten Reich (1973–) makes clear. Of the over fifty volumes which have to date

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appeared, only few are devoted to medieval themes (e. g., Die Protokoll- und Urteilsbücher des Königlichen Kammergerichts aus den Jahren 1465 bis 1480 I–III, ed. Friedrich Battenberg, 2004). However, since 1986 Bernhard Diestelkamp has been editing a special series, Urkundenregesten zur Tätigkeit des deutschen Königs- und Hofgerichts bis 1451 (1986–). Works published outside these series include, for example, Friedrich Battenberg, Herrschaft und Verfahren: politische Prozesse im mittelalterlichen Römisch-Deutschen Reich (1995); Heiner Lück, Die kursächsische Gerichtsverfassung 1423–1550 (1997); Bernd Kannowski, Bürgerkämpfe und Friedebriefe: rechtliche Streitbeilegung in spätmittelalterlichen Städten (2001); Ignacio Czeguhn, Die kastilische Höchstgerichtsbarkeit 1250–1520 (2002). In the field of private law, after 1945 the idea of a common ‘European’ development of law replaced the national perspectives. Here, the interests of Germanist and Romanist historians of law coincided with the political zeitgeist, which led to the beginnings of a softening of the traditional subject boundaries. The project on the medieval history of Roman law, under the working title Der Neue Savigny, and whose results appear in the series Ius Romanum Medii Aevi (IRMAE, 1963ff) deserves mention. However, the project petered out after something less than two decades, for which the publication of Coings’s Handbuch, which is still indispensable for research into the history of private law today, offered a welcome legitimation. For that reason, too, the period after 1945 saw a rejection of ‘German Private Law’, with its pandectistic terminology and dogmatic emphases; it also vanished from teaching. Instead, as Coings’s Handbuch demonstrates, scholars turned to the history of the academic discipline and of law-giving (seminally, Wilhelm Ebel, Geschichte der Gesetzgebung in Deutschland, 11956, 21958; see also the classic study by Wieacker), whose most important result in terms of content was probably the discovery of the ‘early reception’ of scholarly law and its spread and influence in the Middle Ages (cf. Winfried Trusen, Die Anfänge des gelehrten Rechts in Deutschland: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Frührezeption, 1962; Winfried Stelzer, Gelehrtes Recht in Österreich: von den Anfängen bis zum frühen 14. Jahrhundert, 1982). Interest in native law has centered in particular on its conception of the law, its manifestation in legal customs, and its relationship to judicial procedure; cf. for instance Gerhard Köbler, Das Recht im frühen Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zu Herkunft und Inhalt frühmittelalterlicher Rechtsbegriffe im deutschen Sprachgebiet (1971); Gerhard Dilcher, Heiner Lück, Reiner Schulze, Elmar Wadle, Jürgen Weitzel, and Udo Wolter, Gewohnheitsrecht und Rechtsgewohnheiten im Mittelalter (1992); Karl Kroeschell, “Recht und Rechtsbegriff im 12. Jahrhundert,” id., Studien zum frühen und mittelalterlichen

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deutschen Recht (1995); Rechtsbegriffe im Mittelalter, ed. Albrecht Cordes and Bernd Kannowski (2002). Monographic studies such as Andreas Deutsch, Der Klagspiegel und sein Autor Conrad Heyden: Ein Rechtsbuch des 15. Jahrhunderts als Wegbereiter der Rezeption (2004); Bernd Kannowski, Die Umgestaltung des Sachsenspiegelrechts durch die Buch’sche Glosse (2007); Stephan Dusil, Die Soester Stadtrechtsfamilie: Mittelalterliche Quellen und neuzeitliche Historiographie (2007) appeared in parallel to the editions of law books and sources on urban law (see above). Further, there has been increasing interest in the history of the legal profession, which is now reflected in a number of reference works which include the Middle Ages: Juristen in Österreich. 1200–1980, ed. Wilhelm Brauneder (1987); Juristen. Ein biographisches Lexikon, ed. Michael Stolleis (11995, 22001); Deutsche und europäische Juristen aus neun Jahrhunderten: eine biographische Einführung in die Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft, ed. Gerd Kleinheyer and Jan Schröder (52008; 1 first ed. 1976 under the title: Deutsche Juristen aus fünf Jahrhunderten). Various reference works have become last sanctuaries for the dogmatic ‘German Private Law’ tradition. In them, countless articles are dedicated to the institutions of private law, which however often merely continue to reiterate the work of older scholarship. The second edition of the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde (11911–1919; 21973–2007 with various editors, founded by Johannes Hoops [1865–1949]), the Lexikon des Mittelalters (latest volume IX, 1998; paperback ed- 2002) and, in particular, the Handwörterbuch zur Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte are very relevant here. Thanks to influential research into early modern historical criminology, medieval criminal law is also enjoying a new boom (for older research, Rudolf His, Das Strafrecht des deutschen Mittelalters, 1920–1935; Hans Hirsch, Die hohe Gerichtsbarkeit im deutschen Mittelalter, 11922, 21958; more recently, and with further references, Hinrich Rüping, Günter Jerouschek, Grundriß der Strafrechtsgeschichte, 11981 [by Rüping], 52007). As a result of the frequent representation of this field in museums and exhibitions, laypeople often assume this to be the central interest of the history of law (c.f. Justiz in alter Zeit. Katalog des Mittelalterlichen Kriminalmuseums Rothenburg, no date). Symptomatic of this new boom is the series Konflikt, Verbrechen und Sanktion in der Gesellschaft Alteuropas, which began in 1997, with the subdivisions Fallstudien (1997ff.) as well as Symposien und Synthesen (1999ff; c.f., e. g., Hoheitliches Strafen in der Spätantike und im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Jürgen Weitzel, 2002). Together, work on conceptual history, justice and the history of urban law have shattered the picture of a “homogenous medieval world of norms” (thus, with further references, the assessment of Ogorek, 66).

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Various fields of research which have gained in importance in the past decades crossover between the history of constitutional, criminal and private law. They include legal ethnology (Rechtliche Volkskunde), legal iconography and the archaeology of law, whose most important organ of publication has been, since 1978, Forschungen zur Rechtsarchäologie und Rechtlichen Volkskunde (ed. Louis Carlen). It regularly publishes reports on the conferences of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rechtliche Volkskunde (International Society for Legal Ethnology) as well as the Arbeitskreis Rechtsikonographie (Working Group on Legal Iconography), which has been expanding in recent years. The latter has produced a new publication series: Signa Iuris: Beiträge zur Rechtsikonographie, Rechtsarchäologie und Rechtlichen Volkskunde (ed. Gernot Kocher, Heiner Lück, Clausdieter Schott, 2008ff). In addition to volumes with a general focus, (Gernot Kocher, Zeichen und Symbole des Rechts, 1992), more narrow subjects, most recently depictions of Roland, are treated as well (Dietlinde Munzel-Everling, Rolande. Die europäischen Rolanddarstellungen und Rolandfiguren, 2005; Dietlinde Munzel-Everling, Rolande der Welt. Interaktive CD-ROM, 2004). Research into the language of law, equally, is not bound by the established borders between the various subdivisions of legal history. Here the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch, founded in 1896/1897, merits special mention (I, 1914–1932, most recently XI 2003–2007); work on it is expected to be completed by around 2035. A traditional interest of Germanist legal history, legal proverbs, remains current (e. g., Deutsche Rechtsregeln und Rechtssprichwörter, ed. Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, 2002). D. Trends In a search for tendencies common to the various themes of research, the overcoming of the rigid barrier between the Middle Ages and modern times is the most readily apparent. For instance, one of the most important textbooks of recent times (Willoweit, Verfassungsgeschichte) has consciously abandoned the division between medieval and modern constitutional history, and devotes around a quarter of the work to the Middle Ages. Also of significance are the two volumes of essays collected by Hartmut Boockmann, Ludger Grenzmann, Bernd Moeller, and Martin Staehelin (ed.), Recht und Verfassung im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit I: Bericht über Kolloquien der Kommission zur Erforschung der Kultur des Spätmittelalters 1994 bis 1995 (1998), and II: Bericht über Kolloquien der Kommission zur Erforschung der Kultur des Spätmittelalters 1996 bis 1997 (2001). An important consequence of the vanishing barrier between the eras is that the medieval discipline shares all the tendencies of legal history as a whole. Thus, themes important in the study of the early modern and modern periods are also examined for the

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Middle Ages. This even leads to anniversaries of modern events affecting medieval scholarship: the anniversary of the end of the Holy Roman Empire triggered an interest in its whole history. The publications appearing under cover of the anniversary included work extending back into the Middle Ages (cf., with further references, Gerald Kohl, “Altes Reich und modernes Europa: Literatur zum Jubiläum 1806–2006,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte [2008]: 117–28). Currently fashionable research topics such as gender studies (c.f. for example Amalie Fössel, Die Königin im mittelalterlichen Reich: Herrschaftsausübung, Herrschaftsrechte, Handlungsspielräume, 2000), asylum law (c.f. for example Daniela Fruscione, Das Asyl bei den germanischen Stämmen im frühen Mittelalter, 2003) or European integration (c.f. for example Fragen der politischen Integration im mittelalterlichen Europa, ed. Werner Maleczek, 2005) have been extended to the study of medieval law. Similarly, historical criminology has discovered the Middle Ages via the Early Modern (see 3, above, and c.f. for example Herrschaftliches Strafen seit dem Hochmittelalter, ed. Hans Schlosser, Rolf Sprandel, and Dietmar Willoweit, 2002; Kriminalität in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Diethelm Klippel, 2007). This often reduces the Middle Ages to a mere prehistory of the modern period. See also the contributions to Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages, ed. Connie Scarborough (forthcoming). However, the most remarkable trend is that legal historical research is (in contrast to general history: Peter Johanek, “Mittelalterforschung in Deutschland um 2000,” Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut, 2003, 21–33) experiencing a far-reaching ‘loss of the Middle Ages.’ This is most immediately apparent in bibliographic research into publications in Austrian legal history – which is anything but atypical of the German speaking world – in the last two decades (Brauneder, Kohl in CPH 2002; Wilhelm Brauneder, Gerald Kohl, “A jogtörténeti kutatás Ausztriában” [Austrian Research into legal historiography], Jogtörténeti Szemle [History of Law Review] 3 [2006]: 29–35). Exceptions to this loss of the Middle Ages are confined to the editorial projects and particular scholars’ research interests, as well as to research into medieval constitutional and regional history, which continues but is now dominated by historians rather than lawyers. This actualizes expectations published in 1991: in a volume of collected essays on the subject (Die österreichische Rechtsgeschichte: Standortbestimmung und Zukunftsperspektiven, ed. Hans Constantin Faussner, Gernot Kocher, and Helfried Valentinitsch, 1991), medieval legal history played a very minor role. These tendencies, which for Austria are also observable in the relevant bibliographies, can be confirmed in legal history as a whole. For this pur-

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pose, my research assistant Ramon Pils (to whom thanks) undertook a count of the relevant articles in the Germanistic section of the Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte for the years 1950–1954 and 2003–2007. Comparison of the two periods shows remarkable changes. Shortly after the Second World War, between 60 and 90 % or more of the contributions and miscellaneous items were dedicated to medieval themes; at the beginning of the 21st century they took up between a quarter and somewhat less than half (with authors who are generally not legally trained). The decline of the Middle Ages as a subject of research is even more noticeable in the comprehensive reviews section of the ZSRG. While between 30 and 40 per cent of the books discussed after 1950 dealt with medieval questions, in the most recent volumes they were between 2.5 and a little over 10 %. This drop is even more remarkable, given that between the two periods studied – in 1979 – an independent Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte dealing solely with questions of modern legal history was founded. Its editors believed the “restriction to the modern period” to be “necessary, as this period is on the one hand covered only imperfectly by the classical subjects of legal history, and therefore in special need of study, and on the other because the roots of contemporary legal and constitutional systems, which are still of importance today, are undoubtedly to be sought particularly in the modern period” (ZNR [1979]: 1). The ZSRG itself was at least occasionally conscious of this development. In 1961, Hans Thieme noted that “only today is Hugo Böhlau’s wish of 1861 [becoming true]: a stronger consideration of the dogmatic and academic history, the reception, and more recent centuries” (Hans Thieme, “Hundert Jahre Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte,” ZSRG/GA [1961]: XII–XVI, here: XV). More than two decades later Thieme assumed “certain focuses of interest [of the journal], such as research into the Leges or the high Middle Ages.” However, this was, so Thieme, not the result of a programmatic decision, but reflected “what most pre-occupied the university scholars of the day.” At least, as he noted, apparently with reference to the newly founded ZNR, the ZSRG was “by no means closed to […] nineteenth century matters” (Hans Thieme, “Zum Erscheinen von Band 100 der Savigny-Zeitschrift, Germanistische Abteilung,” ZSRG/GA [1983]: 1–8, here 3). That is, a quarter century ago this openness was regarded as still particularly worthy of notice, although voices had been calling the “legal historiography of the nineteenth century” a task for the future of the discipline even at the beginning of the twentieth (Möller, 76). Equally symptomatic are the contents of the most important reference work on German legal history, the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte:

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many of the articles, particularly those of the first years of publication, show a particular emphasis on the Middle Ages, while modern developments are treated within a few lines. This is not least a result of the scholarly literature produced in the preceding century (c.f. for example the articles “Adel” [nobility], “Alter” [age], “Aussteuer” [dowry], “Geselle” [journeyman], “Nachbar” [neighbour], “Vieh” [livestock]). By contrast, toward the end of the process of publishing the first edition, the modern period was almost always considered. The new edition, begun in 2004, explicitly declared as its goal “giving stronger consideration to […] modern and recent history of law than has been the case before.” A further ‘loss of the Middle Ages’ becomes apparent in an analysis of the focus of occupation of legal historians, including historians of constitutional and criminal law, in German-speaking areas, or rather of the departments and chairs of 42 German, six Swiss and five Austrian universities. Almost everywhere, publications on matters of medieval legal history were made by professors emeriti. Only Frankfurt/Main has a chair specifically dedicated to medieval history of law (Albrecht Cordes). Together with the Max-PlanckInstitute for European Legal History, which it hosts, Frankfurt forms a center of legal history; although not specifically devoted to the field, a somewhat stronger concern with the Middle Ages can also be observed in Freiburg i.Br. (c.f., e. g., the collection of essays, which had its origins in a student seminar, Funktion und Form: Quellen- und Methodenprobleme der mittelalterlichen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Albrecht Cordes, Karl Kroeschell, 1996; see also Ph.D. theses, such as Steffen Bressler’s “Schuldknechtschaft und Schuldturm: zur Personalexekution im sächsischen Recht des 13.–16. Jahrhunderts,” 2004) as well as in Halle, Hamburg, Munich and Würzburg. As a result, many works of legal history with a focus on the Middle Ages turn out to be a collection of essays summarizing a life’s work. The recent publication date obscures the fact that they often contain old (though not out-dated) research (e. g., Karl Kroeschell, Studien zum frühen und mittelalterlichen deutschen Recht, 1995; Winfried Trusen, Gelehrtes Recht im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, 1997; Elmar Wadle, Landfrieden, Strafe, Recht: Zwölf Studien zum Mittelalter, 2001; Andreas Fijal, Hans-Jörg Leuchte, Hans-Jochen Schiewer [ed.], Friedrich Ebel, Unseren fruntlichen grus zuvor: deutsches Recht des Mittelalters im mittel- und osteuropäischen Raum, 2004). Although until a few decades ago habilitation theses often covered medieval themes, a vanishing small number have treated the period in recent years (examples from Viennese habilitations: Werner Ogris, Der mittelalterliche Leibrentenvertrag, 1961; Wilhelm Brauneder, Die Entwicklung des Ehegüterrechts in Österreich: Ein Beitrag zur Dogmengeschichte und Rechtstatsachenfor-

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schung des Spätmittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1973; an exception in recent times is Christian Neschwara, Geschichte des österreichischen Notariats I: Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum Erlaß der Notariatsordnung 1850, 1996). Relevant dissertations have become rare: in the series Rechtshistorische Reihe, founded in 1978, which chiefly publishes theses, less than 10 % of the 373 volumes are on medieval themes; of the roughly 200 which have appeared in the last ten year, less than 6 %. The loss of the Middle Ages can also be observed in the text-books. Comprehensive Germanistic surveys, in which the Middle Ages are given extensive space (c.f. for example Richard Schröder and Eberhard v. Künssberg, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, 11889 [by Schröder], 71932, in which of 1000 pages only 160 covered the modern period) are now practically inexistent. The last significant representative of this genre was Hermann Conrad (Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte I [Frühzeit und Mittelalter], 11954, 21962, II [Neuzeit] 1966). While some textbooks with an elaborated section on the Middle Ages (e. g., Karl Kroeschell, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, vol. I: Bis 1250, 11972, 132008; Karl Kroeschell, Albrecht Cordes, and Karin Nehlsenvon Stryk, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, vol. II: 1250–1650, 11972 [by Kroeschell], 92008) and even new works which do not cover the modern period at all (Wolfgang Ingenhaeff, Ältere Rechtsgeschichte, 2005) do exist, the Middle Ages lead a more shadowy existence in the textbooks which are conceived with regard to the current curricula of law faculties (e. g., Thomas Olechowski, Rechtsgeschichte, 12006, 22008, pp. 19–30 [of 422] contain the section “Mittelalter”; further isolated remarks e. g. 127–129). The same tendency can also be seen in specialized works, for example those on Austrian constitutional history: while in Ernst C. Hellbling, Österreichische Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte (11956, 21974), the Middle Ages took up 41 % of the work, in Wilhelm Brauneder, Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte (11976, 102005), it is only around 13 %. This touches but on one of the reasons for the “loss of the Middle Ages,” namely the dwindling importance of the subject of history of law within legal studies. More important is the low degree of acceptance by modern jurisprudence of all historical research which is not of immediate benefit to the subjects dealing with current law. The combination of legal history and current law subjects in the German faculty structure and the appointment of lecturers and professors who work in both areas encourage a preoccupation with modern questions. In any case, measured against the demand for practical, results-oriented research, legal history looks to the wider public like a curious, ivory tower subject. A concentration on the Middle Ages would heighten this impression, and thus tends to be avoided. Highlighting more

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contemporary roots of current conditions by contrast increases the subject’s social acceptability. In addition, a simple curiosity about recent legal history, in combination with a lack of interest in periods which have been extensively treated by earlier generations of scholars probably also entails this loss. The parallel development of legal contemporary history (cf., e. g., the Jahrbuch der Juristischen Zeitgeschichte, 2000–), which in processing the history of law in the GDR has found a new, broad field of occupation following the end of the division of Germany, is no coincidence. Furthermore, there are also pragmatic factors. The decline in knowledge of Latin, a fear of learning to read antiquated German or manuscript sources and the effort required for archive work all contribute to the ‘loss of the Middle Ages’. This tendency is strengthened by a growing need for legitimization in the eyes of the public or published opinion: an evaluation based on a quantitative assessment of publications forces scholars towards work which can be finished quickly, to which archive work in general and such that involves medieval sources in particular is an obstacle! Legal historians are, due to their institutional home in the faculties of law, held to different standards than other historians. Due to the tendencies listed here, the focuses of research listed above under (3) cannot be generalized, but must rather be seen as reflecting increasingly individual interests. There is no sign of the trend being reversed. Select Bibliography Wilhelm Brauneder and Gerald Kohl, “Die rechtshistorische Forschung in Österreich,” Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne (2002): 17–55; Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft (Baden near Vienna et al.: Rohrer, 11939; Darmstadt: WBG, 51965, rpt. 1973); Helmut Coing, ed., Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren Europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte I: Mittelalter (1100–1500) (Munich: Beck, 1973); Handwörterbuch zur Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin: Schmidt, 1I–V, 1964–1998, ed. Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann; 22004–, ed. Albrecht Cordes, Heiner Lück and Dieter Werkmüller); Hans Hattenhauer, Europäische Rechtsgeschichte (Heidelberg: Müller, 11992, 42004); Alfred Heit and Ernst Voltmer, Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (Munich: DTV, 1997; esp. 156ff, 209, 283); Heinrich Mitteis, Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters (Weimar: Böhlau, 11940; Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 111986); Heinrich Mitteis and Heinz Lieberich, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (Munich et al.: Biederstein, 11949 [by Mitteis], Munich: Beck, 191992); O. F. Robinson, T. D. Fergus, and W. M. Gordon, European Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 32000; Abingdon: Professional Books, 11985 under the title: An Introduction to European Legal History); Hans Schlosser, Grundzüge der Neueren Privatrechtsgeschichte (Heidelberg: Müller, 102005; Karlsruhe: Müller, 11949 by Erich Molitor); Marcel Senn, Rechtsgeschichte – ein kulturhistorischer Grundriß (Zurich: Schulthess, 11997, 42007); Uwe Wesel, Geschichte des Rechts: von den Frühformen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 11997, 22001); Gerhard

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Wesenberg and Gunter Wesener, Neuere deutsche Privatrechtsgeschichte im Rahmen der europäischen Rechtsentwicklung (Lahr (Baden): Schauenburg, 11954 [by Wesenberg], Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 41985); Franz Wieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 11952, 21967, rpt. 1996 [esp. 26–96: Die mittelalterlichen Grundlagen]); Dietmar Willoweit, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 11990, 52005); Europäische Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Dietmar Willoweit and Ulrike Seif (Munich: Beck, 2003; a sourcebook).

Gerald Kohl

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M Manuscripts: Past and Present Approaches A. Definition Many specialized repertories of information on the Middle Ages do not treat manuscripts as a single topic; rather, they provide separate entries on, for example, “illuminated manuscripts” and the special areas of study which deal with manuscripts, specifically “paleography,” “codicology,” “diplomatics,” and textual criticism (ecdotics). This article, on the other hand, aims to synthesize, in an informed yet introductory manner, information about the use of manuscripts in medieval studies in the broadest sense. While the areas of study listed just above will be defined further on in this section and their history will emerge from the selective historical narrative which follows it, this article is meant to provide in a single entry a somewhat more comprehensive and general orientation than a series of such entries would. It is intended for those approaching the study of the Middle Ages who may have seldom encountered a medieval text or document in its medieval, handwritten form and thus need to know something of the nature and variety of manuscripts in Medieval Studies before proceeding to learn about the specialized disciplines which make it possible to study these precious and unique documents. The capital feature of medieval manuscripts that the beginning student must keep in mind is that each manuscript, or handwritten document, is absolutely unique; ideas about texts or documents based on the products of printing, a means of mechanically creating exact duplicate documents, cannot be applied to the manuscript, which can be studied only as a document with a unique content, history and character. (For easy access to some digital photographs of examples of medieval manuscripts, please see http:// www.hmml.org/). B. Approaches to medieval manuscripts By far the largest proportion of the manuscripts from the Middle Ages which have been intensively studied are written in the Latin alphabet. For the sake of introductory concision, then, this article will focus almost exclusively on the study of manuscripts in that alphabet; it should, however, be kept in mind that the period left many manuscripts in Greek, Arabic, and many

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other languages; some indications pertinent to Byzantine manuscripts are included in the bibliography at the article’s end. Manuscripts, ranging from deeds and wills to liturgical or illuminated codices, have formed the foundation of Medieval Studies from its inception. (Codices are bound books, with pages or folios which may be turned; they thus function differently from the rolls characteristic of ancient manuscripts.) Manuscripts are the primary sources which, first of all, allow scholars to learn the vernacular languages from the medieval period, which in most cases differ markedly from modern forms of these languages. Manuscripts are certainly not the only sources of primary information about the very long period known as the Middle Ages, for this period left many forms of visual and symbolic communication, as well as an important archeological record. Nonetheless, manuscripts containing written language offer a pathway to the Middle Ages which is especially valuable because of its detail and extent. Manuscripts are the primary sources of written information about the Middle Ages. A mere thirty years ago, the well-known paleographer Gilbert Ouy estimated that only about 10 % of the manuscripts surviving from the European Middle Ages to the present have been carefully studied. Indeed, many repositories have large collections of medieval materials which have yet to be cataloged, that is, examined and described by a qualified scholar, able to identify the text or, usually, texts which a given manuscript conveys. The reasons for this neglect, which may surprise some, will emerge from the discussion of the history of manuscript study, below. Recent technological advances offer avenues which can make it possible for increasing numbers of scholars to participate in such basic investigations of this vast yet understudied manuscript record. At the same time, awareness among medievalists is also growing that thorough study of all the manuscripts of the European Middle Ages, were such a project to be undertaken, funded, and completed, would still yield only a partial picture of this transformative period in the history of the world, for the world of the handwritten book or document included continents other than Europe (see http://idp.bl.uk and http://www.timbuktufoundation.org/ for images of manuscripts from China and West Africa, respectively). There is thus a bright and challenging prospect for Manuscript Studies within Medieval Studies, especially for those who obtain the proper training in working with manuscripts and engage in projects which are carefully and systematically organized, linked to those of other scholars. The disciplines through which medieval manuscripts must be deciphered and studied were long regarded as subsidiary to other “major” disciplines (history, literature, and so forth), so that such disciplines were rel-

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egated to “minor” status by generations of scholars. Indeed, paleography, codicology, diplomatics, and textual criticism have often been assigned the label of “ancillary,” from the Latin “ancilla,” handmaiden. That is, they have been deemed to belong to a lower class, the role of which is to serve agendas set by the major fields of study, which are often supported by entire university departments and define the vocations of many scholars. Only in recent decades have new critical perspectives, along with new technologies, begun to bring the study of manuscripts back into the center of the field. Now, a student of the Middle Ages who knows how to work exclusively with edited, printed texts, lacking an understanding of and experience in work with manuscripts, risks excluding him or herself from the most exciting and consequential developments in Medieval Studies in the 21st century. C. Disciplines The disciplines essential to the study of medieval manuscripts are: Paleography, the study of older forms of writing, the history of the formation of letters, including abbreviations, and punctuation systems. The discipline of paleography identifies writing styles or sets of letter forms (scripts) according to historical typologies, that is, names and categories agreed upon by scholars. With these typologies, scripts and individual scribes can be dated to a century or even a few years, as well as placed in a geographical area of origin or perhaps a specific scriptorium (writing center). This dating and placing of a manuscript, however, must be done not only in reference to its script but also in conjunction with the study of the manuscript as a whole, including its physical state (see Codicology, below) and its texts. Hence the term “paleography” is sometimes loosely employed to cover all of manuscript studies, since an actual manuscript is best approached holistically, while the division into specialized disciplines remains a matter of convenience, as Father Leonard Boyle emphasized in his widely-used bibliographical guide to manuscript study. Most medievalists need at least a knowledge of Latin paleography, which includes the study of all medieval languages written in the Latin alphabet, whether Latin or vernacular. Important for many areas of medieval study are also the paleography of other alphabets, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and so forth. Codicology, the study of the entire codex, or bound group of pages or documents, as a physical and historical object in its own right, distinct from the history and character of the text or texts it contains. Codicology, which can be explored only by those who already have some mastery of relevant paleography, teaches methods to identify and interpret clues to how, when, and why a codex was assembled. This includes examination of the materials

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used and the physical formats employed in the book’s construction, as well as determination of physical additions, losses, or damages. It can suggest to the trained scholar much about how certain texts were used in particular places and at particular times in the Middle Ages and reveal information about the audiences for texts, as well as the authors. Textual criticism (ecdotics), the methods used to determine the most authentic form of a text. For example, when the form of the text as it was first created by an author is no longer in existence, it can only be reconstructed using one or more hand-made copies, which may be presumed to have been altered from the original form by human error or misunderstanding, physical damage or fragmentation, and other causes. “Criticism” means, among other things, scholarly evaluation of the limits of the reliability of each manuscript which has survived the passage of a millennium (or thereabouts) in conveying the original words and structures of a text. Textual criticism has usually aimed not only to clarify a text for purposes of interpretation, but also to establish a version for publication in a printed edition. Now, some textual critics prefer to exploit the possibilities of digital media to create editions conveying multiple versions of a text, rather than reconstructing what can seldom be proved to be the single authentic and original version of the text. Diplomatics, the study of documents used in law or business. Diplomatics can be pursued only by those who have already achieved a certain mastery of the relevant paleography, codicology, and textual criticism. Its practitioners study deeds, wills, contracts, registers of acts written by notaries, and so forth. The diplomatic practices of a particular chancery or of the merchants or notaries of a particular region may vary greatly from those of other chanceries or regions, even if they are geographically near each other. A specialist in the history of legal or commercial matters in a particular locality must be well oriented to the diplomatic practices of that locality. Art history and musicology can also be important to the study of manuscripts. Illuminations, that is, miniature paintings, as well as historiated initials (initial letters decorated with narrative paintings) and marginal decorations can provide important indications about the time and place of production of a particular manuscript. Liturgical manuscripts containing musical notation likewise offer telling clues about a manuscript’s production or use. C. General History of Research The organized study of medieval manuscripts in Europe may be said to have begun late in the 17th century, before there was much interest in the Middle Ages as a historical period and thus before Medieval Studies as a field began to

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develop. (The Middle Ages were constituted as an historiographical concept, and named, by those who invented the idea of the following period, the “Renaissance,” in part by characterizing the period of their immediate forebears as a “middle,” something of an interruption, between the enlightened glories of classical antiquity and their own time.) The scholars who first studied medieval manuscripts in post-medieval times were generally motivated by contemporary legal and/or economic interests, rather than an historical interest in understanding the Middle Ages in their own right. The research of such early manuscript scholars aimed to document, for example, the history of ownership of a parcel of land, often in the context of an 18th-century dispute about ownership or rights. Nearly all who studied manuscripts at this period were affiliated with religious societies or orders, which might have competing claims to properties, differing from those of other ecclesiastical societies or orders, of a diocese, or of a layperson. The foundation of medieval manuscript studies in litigation placed the early emphasis of the field on paleography and diplomatics, which could yield clues as to the authenticity of legal documents. The detection of forgery, or of the alteration in a later period of a document written earlier, was an important tool in 18th-century litigation. Medieval Studies, as the pursuit of an understanding of the medieval period itself, for its own sake, began primarily in the early 19th century. This changed the context for the study of medieval manuscripts. At this time, the Middle Ages began to be seen as an historical period which was interesting and valuable in its own right, rather than simply an interruption in the progress from antiquity to the Renaissance. This revaluation of the Middle Ages was in part the work of adherents of the Romantic movement in European thought, who found the Enlightenment ideas which were the legacy of the Renaissance to be too narrow to explain human experience and history. The birth of Medieval Studies in a context outside litigation was also strongly motivated by the growth of nationalist movements in many parts of Europe. These movements envisioned the Middle Ages as the starting point for the definition of languages, nations, or even “races.” Thus, the scope of the study of manuscripts, and some of the ends this study was meant to serve, expanded dramatically. The wills, deeds, and other instruments of legal and economic life which had motivated the study of medieval manuscripts in the 18th century were no longer the only manuscripts which seemed valuable. Manuscripts containing poems, narratives, religious treatises, and so forth were seen as having potential to reveal how languages were written and spoken in their earliest forms, and this linguistic history was regarded as a precious clue to “national character” and values. More-

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over, such “literary” texts in themselves became important tools in the articulation of national difference. Manuscripts of, for example, The Song of Roland were “discovered” in libraries, lying neglected, and then studied intensively as keys to the character of France and the French. Establishment of the most authentic text of such national “monuments” as early epic poems became central to the educational enterprise in some European nationstates. In the 19th century, the study of medieval manuscripts at moments captured at least some portion of the imagination of a wide public, so that paleographers occasionally became characters in stories (today, a story with a character described as a “paleographer” would be mysterious to most readers). Large projects were organized, often with government sponsorship and funding, to catalog and even transcribe and publish medieval manuscripts important to the history of a people, their political structures, and “culture.” The results of some of these nationalist projects are still heavily used by many medievalist scholars today. They must keep in mind, nonetheless, that the manuscripts represented by these 19th-century editions were selected within a very particular political context, leaving uncataloged, untranscribed, and unpublished very large numbers of medieval manuscripts which, in the 19th century, did not appear to serve key political goals. For example, legal (notarial) documents, commercial records, documents of lay social and benevolent organizations, poems and stories not deemed of the first rank according to a particular – inevitably politically influenced – aesthetic, and many other categories of medieval texts remain outside historical studies because they do not appear to serve the interests of scholars or the institutions which support them. The 20th century brought many changes to the study of medieval manuscripts, particularly in the periods immediately preceding and following the Second World War. Medieval Studies began gradually to free itself of nationalistic limits to some extent, although the largest projects for the study of medieval manuscripts were still organized and funded by nationstates. It must be acknowledged that sometimes nationalistic ends were replaced with the celebration of a kind of supernationalism: a pan-Europeanism with an emphasis on Europe as a pre-eminent continent with a shared heritage dating from the Roman Empire. Medieval manuscripts came to be prized as witnesses to this heritage, which was envisioned as having vital importance for the entire world because of its long and uninterrupted documentary history. This unbroken written record was construed as showing commonalities of thought across national and linguistic borders, marking Europe as a coherent and thus superior place.

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Science and technology also began, arguably more radically than politics, to change the study of medieval manuscripts in the 20th and into the 21st century. Methods and tools became available for dating inks, paper, and parchment (animal skin prepared for the writing of documents and books). These methods and tools enhanced those offered by paleography. Perhaps even more important, microfilm and, later, digital photography made possible the examination of photographic images of manuscripts by scholars unable to travel to the many locations where medieval manuscripts were stored. Manuscripts of the same text which are housed all over Europe and even beyond could be systematically reviewed and compared, using such photographic images. While scholars realized that the study of a photographic image could for many purposes not replace study of the actual manuscript itself, many also learned that, for example, blowing up a photographed detail from a manuscript often helped their work in important ways. Next, computers made possible the compilation of data bases on medieval manuscripts, some containing catalog references to manuscripts and others containing actual photographic images of the manuscripts themselves. At times, issues about ownership of these images arose, and expertise in navigating such issues became essential to the training of scholars who studied medieval manuscripts. Two reasons make prospects for the study of medieval manuscripts in the 21st century seem particularly bright and argue for a major investment of scholarly effort and technological support. First, even when two medieval manuscripts reside in libraries far distant one from another, digital photography not only makes access to their content more widely available; it also makes it easier, and less perilous to the manuscript, to study very small details of, for example, letter formation, through enlargement and comparison of images of one manuscript alongside or superimposed upon images of another. Second, caches of medieval manuscripts of which scholars were largely or entirely unaware, even some located outside Europe or the United States, are being digitally recorded and made available for study on the worldwide web. Broad access to these unstudied primary materials may well change many aspects of Medieval Studies in coming decades. From this perspective, the study of medieval manuscripts emerges, no longer a handmaiden, as a major key to the future of the field. While a majority of people may fail to recognize that strongly held cultural attitudes are often rooted in the knowledge produced by Medieval Studies, scholars in the field increasingly know that their work is not isolated in an ivory tower and that their study of the primary sources of the period, especially in the form of medieval manu-

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scripts, has consequences for the cultural understanding, or misunderstandings, on which contemporary decisions may be based. D. Major Contributors to Development of Field Any brief account of the major figures in the development of the study of medieval manuscripts must inevitably be indicative rather than comprehensive: the field is vast and has been influenced by many scholars from many countries. In recent years, important innovations in the field must also be attributed not only to individual scholars but also to scholarly institutions. Nonetheless, a review of the following names, ranging through many European countries, and consideration of the achievements of the scholars selected, who are librarians, historians, art historians, and literary critics, may provide an introductory orientation to the broad field of medieval manuscript study and suggest directions for further reading. Many regard Jean Mabillon as the first paleographer. A member of the Benedictine monastic order, he became a monk in the northern French city of Reims, near his birthplace, in 1654. Reims is the traditional site of the crowning of the kings of France, and consequently ecclesiastical establishments there were closely connected to the traditions and needs of maintaining French legal and political continuity. The Benedictine order, moreover, has held the copying, protection, and maintenance of written books and records as a defining obligation since the order was founded by St. Benedict (6th c. C.E.). Mabillon was ordained a priest in 1660 at Corbie, a location which had been famous for its scriptorium, or center for the copying of manuscripts, in the Middle Ages. In 1664 he moved to Paris, to the prominent Abbey of St. Germain des Près, and began his life’s work as part of a widespread community of Benedictine scholars, the Congregation of St. Maur, or Maurists. This Benedictine Congregation had been founded in 1618 in order to advance critical historical studies and especially the editing of historical materials, that is, the scholarly evaluation of existing documents and document fragments which transmitted texts of many kinds in forms that were often damaged, partial, or dubious, possibly even forged. The Maurists’ goal was to prepare from these old and varying source manuscripts historically reliable versions of the texts these manuscripts transmitted. Mabillon, with his Maurist collaborators, published the sixvolume landmark study De re diplomatica in 1681, forming the historical and conceptual basis for the field of paleography by establishing principles for dating manuscripts and determining whether they were authentic or forged. His work was important also for the history of the Church and church prop-

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erties in France, in that it responded to claims by Jesuit scholars that none of the documents traditionally dated to the Merovingian period (before about 700 C.E.) were authentic. Lodovico Muratori was trained in northern Italy in the methods of paleographical analysis pioneered by the Maurists. Born in Modena in 1672, he studied with Benedictine scholars there and, after his ordination to priesthood in 1694, went on to work at the Ambrosian Library in Milan. Returning to Modena in 1700 to serve the Este family, he was enlisted to work on the documentary basis of some of that ducal family’s property disputes. He developed great expertise in Italian medieval law and history, publishing between 1723 and 1751 the 28-volume series Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Through his work, the paleographical principles developed by Mabillon and his French collaborators were adapted and refined in a country with a medieval manuscript heritage even more extensive than that of France. Like other Maurists, he was associated with opposition to Jesuit historical scholarship and claims regarding property. Karl K.F.W. Lachmann, born in Braunschweig in 1793, moved from paleography to an entirely new method of textual criticism, that is, the determination of a definitive or authoritative text of a work with a complex and lengthy transmission history. While serving as Professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he developed a definitive commentary on Lucretius’s De rerum Natura. He also published numerous studies on his method of establishing “stemmata,” or genealogical diagrams, showing the historical relation among various manuscripts transmitting different versions, or fragments, of what was presumed to have been at one time the same original text. Built upon the work of several German predecessors, especially in the field of Biblical studies, the genealogical method of working with manuscripts which came to be associated primarily with Lachmann’s name attracted many followers. It established a standard for evaluating and placing individual manuscripts in an historical framework that could lead to publication of an edition based on many manuscripts which would then be regarded as a definitive representation of the original (author’s) text. Though much of his work concerned ancient Roman texts, the manuscripts bearing these texts which he used had usually been made in the Middle Ages. Lachmann showed that, whenever a text is copied by hand, variations are introduced, as the result of ignorance, carelessness, or choice. The critic’s task, then, becomes the correction of these variations, resulting in the “reconstruction” of a text which no longer exists. Joseph Bedier, on the other hand, developed a method of textual criticism which was not primarily genealogical in character and did not require

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the construction of stemmata. His interest was primarily medieval, rather than ancient, texts, and he argued that the stemmatic method was ill-suited to the circumstances of transmission of the texts of the Middle Ages. Bedier, born in Paris in 1864, established his reputation in medieval manuscript studies with his critical edition of the version of Le Roman de Tristan by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas. Bedier published his edition of Thomas’s Tristan between 1902 and 1905. Appearing in 1922, his edition of La Chanson de Roland was deemed definitive by the French scholarly public. His argument for the selection of the “best manuscript” of a text as the sole basis for an edition was, however, received with skepticism outside French or heavily French-influenced scholarly circles. Charles Samaran, born in Armagnac in 1879, became a member of the staff of the Archives Nationales (Paris) in 1904 and subsequently, over a period of some forty years of service, became recognized as one of the master paleographers of the century. He moved the discipline forward to a remarkable degree by initiating a series of photographic facsimile editions of important manuscripts which, among other things, enabled students in many locations to begin the study of paleography even when unable to travel to major archives. He began this project with the very Merovingian documents which had been at the center of controversy between Maurists and Jesuits in the days of Mabillon: in 1908, with Philippe Lauer, he published Les diplômes originaux des Mérovingiens: Fac-similés phototypiques. He then produced, in 1932, a photographic edition of a manuscript important to the controversy between the followers of Bedier and those of Lachmann, La Chanson de Roland: Reproduction phototypique du manuscrit Digby 23 de la Bodleian Library d’Oxford. At this period, he conceived the important project of reproducing photographically a set of manuscripts bearing indications of date, that is, manuscripts which did not require inferential dating. This demanding project was completed with the publication between 1959 and 1985, partly in collaboration with Robert Marichal, of seven volumes of such photographic reproductions. The availability of Samaran’s Manuscrits datés definitively changed the study of medieval manuscripts by providing worldwide access to photographs of writing from many different periods of the Middle Ages, and many different places. In the next generation, Bernard Bischoff’s legendary expertise and indefatigable labor also had a defining impact on medieval manuscript study in the 20th century. Born in 1906, Bischoff began in the 1930s an extensive series of journeys to visit and make notes on medieval manuscripts. His focus was the paleographic history of the 9th century, a period of great energy, innovation, and influence in the production of manuscripts. In dating and locat-

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ing such Carolingian manuscripts, paleographers had not achieved the precision that had come to be expected in the study of later medieval manuscripts. Bischoff studied not only manuscripts originating in German-speaking lands, but also those of France, Italy, England, and Ireland. Among the new concepts he contributed to paleography was that of the Schriftprovinz (writing province), an area of the production of a particular style of writing which certainly did not correspond with modern national boundaries and only in part mirrored contemporary (medieval) political or ecclesiastical boundaries. This concept helped shift the attention of students of medieval manuscripts toward groupings of scriptoria (medieval copying centers), an approach which has increasingly proved fruitful. Estimating that a comprehensive study of the manuscripts of the 9th century would need to include some 7,200 items, Bischoff was unable to conclude before his death in 1991 publication of the results of the task he had set himself. Nonetheless, his achievement anchored the study of early medieval primary sources in a way never previously attempted, clarifying many details and trends in the development of European document and book production, as well as Carolingian civilization in its broadest sense. Léon M.J. Delaisse, born in Belgium in 1914, brought to the forefront of medieval manuscript studies the discipline of codicology, or, more specifically, what he called the “archeology of the medieval book.” Already a subject of interest to Samaran and his students, codicology demonstrated its usefulness dramatically in Delaisse’s dissertation at the University of Louvain, published in 1956 as Le manuscrit autographe de Thomas à Kempis et ‘L’imitation de Jésus-Christ.’ Using codicological or “archeological” arguments, this work established definitively the manuscript’s authenticity. Delaisse’s work made clear the importance of the identification and study of the workshops in which manuscript books had been produced, often over a considerable period of time, by a team of workers playing different roles, all of them requiring careful historical contextualization before the resulting book could be fully understood. To this end, he emphasized that scholars must not limit their studies to luxury books, but must explore in its entirety the manuscript production of a particular medieval period and place. Gianfranco Contini, born in 1912 at Domodossola, in a part of Italy bordered on the East and West by Swiss cantons, divided his teaching career between Italy and Switzerland. In the mid-thirties, he spent two years at Paris, studying with Bedier. A student of European literature in a very broad sense, Contini brought to medieval manuscript studies a new method, based on the interpretation of variants, the phases a text passes through as its author revises it over a period of time. Contini compared these variants, especially

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in the manuscripts of Petrarch, developing an editorial technique that, where applicable, moves beyond the Lachmann-Bedier controversy, opening new and fruitful directions for research on medieval manuscripts. Variant criticism was further developed by the French medievalist Bernard Cerquiglini in Eloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie, published in 1989. To this list of key individual contributors to the development of the study of medieval manuscripts, one must add the contributions of many institutions or organizations, some built around an ambition to edit and publish a large body of medieval manuscripts, others aiming to preserve photographic images of them and organize them using the technology offered by computers. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica, begun early in the 19th century, is a massive undertaking in textual criticism, extending far beyond the boundaries of what most scholars would today consider “German” and providing the stimulus for many important developments in the study of medieval manuscripts. Another enormous and influential editorial project, the Patrologia Latina, begun by J.-P. Migne in the following generation, made available in printed (and eventually online) form the work of ecclesiastical writers (Church “Fathers”) from many periods and places. The Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (Institute for Research on and History of Texts) was conceived in 1937 as the first laboratory in a field other than the hard sciences. Its founder, Félix Grat, saw even greater possibilities for the study of manuscripts through the development of photography than had Charles Samaran. Although the Institute’s first task was the photographing, with microfilm, of manuscripts in the Latin language housed in many parts of Europe, Grat envisioned the creation of departments for the preservation and study of manuscripts in Arabic, Greek, French, Celtic, and so forth. The Institute’s goal was to make it possible for scholars to compare microfilm images of texts in manuscripts from many locations, stored in an effectively organized system along with detailed information about each of the manuscripts thus made available in microfilm. The Institute has gradually come to serve as an international clearinghouse for information about manuscripts. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (formerly the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library) was established at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota (USA), partly because of concern about the destruction of medieval manuscripts during World War II (most spectacularly in the bombing of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, in southern Italy). To ensure the safety of the sources of medieval European history, and especially the history of the Church, in an environment outside Europe itself, the monks of St. John’s chose to continue millennial Benedictine tradition with post-war technol-

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ogy. They began filming manuscript collections, in both monastic and state libraries, in Austria, then Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and Malta. In 1973, the monks extended their work to Ethiopia and more recently have gone on to film in the Middle East, in particular manuscript collections in Lebanon and Syria, including an important collection of Armenian manuscripts. They have also been filming actively in Sweden for a number of years. Employing digital photography since 2003, HMML has microfilm and digital collections which are currently approaching 100,000 manuscripts. The IRHT and HMML collaborated in producing In Principio, an index of incipits of Latin manuscripts available by subscription on the worldwide web (incipits are the opening lines of medieval texts and serve as identifiers for texts, since titles were not assigned to books in the Middle Ages in a consistent manner). In Principio, then, is akin to a title index of Latin texts. It is regularly updated, making it possible to search online the incipits of most major manuscript collections in Europe, through the joining together of IHRT and HMML holdings. This is a very significant breakthrough for scholars seeking to identify an unknown text in a manuscript housed anywhere in the world. Still more recently, a consortium of universities in the United States has established Digital Scriptorium. Currently maintained by Columbia University, Digital Scriptorium is an image database bringing together photographic images and brief descriptions of portions of manuscripts housed at many universities. It serves the purposes of teaching and research by providing sample images of parts of many manuscripts, without requiring libraries to provide extensive cataloging information, or metadata. Digital Scriptorium emphasizes manuscripts signed and dated by their copyists. Its website currently samples over 5,000 manuscripts. Virtual Vellum, the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), and the White Rose Universities Consortium (WRC) involve British, French, and US institutions in experimental projects bringing together for comparison on the web, side-by-side, manuscripts produced at the same medieval workshop but now housed in locations distant one from another. While no trained paleographer has suggested that even very large computers are presently capable of paleographic analysis, a project initiated by the Computer Science and History Departments of the University of Pisa aimed to assist already-trained paleographers in classifying and identifying medieval scripts. This project created the System for Palaeographic Inspections (SPI) software suite. Arianna Ciula, research associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, has experimented with applying SPI to a small corpus of Tuscan manuscripts from the 10th through

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12th century now owned by the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati in Siena, in an attempt to characterize the ideal form of each script in a given manuscript, comparing the forms of letters made by different scribes, and ultimately defining the relationships among individual scripts and manuscripts. The study of medieval manuscripts thus continues to seek out new ways to address old challenges. Moreover, new challenges for the field arise. In particular, as the public begins to realize that the study of the Middle Ages, focused by the founders of the field almost exclusively on Europe, omits the development of knowledge about the rest of the world during the period of (at least) a crucial millennium, collections of manuscripts from this period outside Europe have begun to attract attention. The existence of such collections was, in some cases, not known in the West before the 20th-century; some such collections were even neglected, or entirely unknown, in their own countries for many centuries. Exemplary among these are the Genizah collection (Egypt), the Dun Huang collection (China), and the Timbuktu collection (Mali). The Genizah collection contains manuscripts documenting the medieval Mediterranean world; many, but not all, of them are written in Hebrew. The existence of an old “genizah,” or library storehouse, associated with the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo was known to few in that city, and almost no one outside it, until two Scots scholars, Dr. Agnes Smith Lewis and Dr. Margaret Dunlop Gibson, set out in 1890 to research manuscripts in the Sinai peninsula and Egypt. They obtained an interesting Hebrew manuscript in 1895 and consulted Dr. Solomon Schechter, at Cambridge University, regarding it. Dr. Schechter then traveled to Cairo in pursuit of the source of the document and, upon finding it at the Ben Ezra genizah, obtained permission from the synagogue to transport most of its contents to Cambridge. A research unit of the Cambridge University Library makes available in the United Kingdom about 140,000 Genizah manuscripts or manuscript fragments, primarily in Hebrew or Arabic. An online database (GOLD) offers some 1,200 annotated images from the collection, together with catalog databases. Parts of the Cairo Genizah collection are also now housed in New York, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, etc. The Genizah manuscripts are still being classified and studied. The Dunhuang collection, named for a town near the intersection of the northern and southern routes of the Silk Road, includes manuscripts from a “library cave” discovered by a Taoist monk in 1900. The International Dunhuang Project, housed at the British Library, makes available online items taken from Dunhuang and now located not only in Beijing but also in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and other countries. Dunhuang manuscripts are written in some twenty languages and many

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scripts, documenting life at this important cultural and commercial crossroads before, during, and after the Middle Ages. Timbuktu, on important salt and gold trading routes between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean coast, was a major center of Islamic learning from the 12th century. It is thought that over 700,000 manuscripts are housed in various collections in Timbuktu, the largest being that of the Ahmed Baba Research Center (Centre de documentation et de recherches historiques Ahmed Baba). Founded by the government of Mali in the 1970s, this Center had initial support from UNESCO and ongoing collaboration from several Arabic and Islamic organizations. In 2000, it was transformed by the government into the Institut des Hautes Etudes et de Recherche Islamiques Ahmed Baba or IHERI-AB and continues a program of acquisition, preservation, research, and education, with a collection reportedly numbering close to 20,000 documents. Due to the initiative of Mamadou Iallo Diam, an organization was formed and began preserving Timbuktu manuscripts through photography in 2000. Archivage électronique des manuscrits de Tombouctou (ARELMAT: Electronic Archiving of the Timbuktu Manuscripts) has drawn to this Malian effort support from Norway, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, and the US. Select Bibliography Bernard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daibhi o Croinin and David Ganz (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) [orig.: Paläographie des römischen Altertums und des abendländischen Mittelalters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979)]; Leonard Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographic Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984) [updated and exp. Italian trans.: Paleografia latina medievale: Introduzione bibliografica con supplemento 1982–1998, trans. Maria Elena Bertoldi, ed. Fabio Troncarelli (Roma: Edizioni Quasar, 1999)]; Charles-Moïse Briquet, Les filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600 (Amsterdam: Paper Publications Society, 1968 (orig. Leipzig K. W. Hiersemann 1923) [rpt. Mansfield Centre, Conn.: Martino Publishing, 2001]; Adriano Cappelli, Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, 6th ed., anastatic rpt. of ed. of 1929 (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1985); Arianna Ciula and Francesco Stella, Digital Philology and Medieval Texts (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2007); Elias Avery Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores; a palaeographical guide to Latin manuscripts prior to the ninth century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–); Brigitte Mondrain, “Paléographie et codicologie, rapport de la Séance plénière Instrumenta Studiorum,” Pré-actes du XXe Congrès international des Etudes byzantines, t. 1, Paris, 2001, 321–325; Leighton Durham Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: a Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Charles Samaran, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, 7 vols. (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1959–1985).

Susan Noakes

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Marxist Approaches to Medieval Studies A. Early Marxist Medievalists Marxist views of medieval social and cultural history have exploited Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) descriptions of medieval peasantry and aristocracy in pre-capitalist feudal structures, have relied on Marxist theories of power and ideology, and have applied his cyclical views of history. In late 19th-century Britain, as socialist parties grew in popularity around them, instrumental figures such as socialist feminist Eleanor Marx (1855–1898), philologist and editor Frederic James Furnivall (1825–1910, founder of the E.E.T.S. and O.E.D., see entry in this Handbook), and artist and critic William Morris (1834–1896) began to combine socialist and utopian socialist ideologies with Victorian medievalist aesthetics in a nostalgic criticism of modern industrial society. Subsequent to this earlier vogue, Marxist approaches to Medieval Studies were most common in the ideologically grounded analyses published by historians and literary critics through the 1950s. They were also influenced by 19th-century French historians of the socialist left. The 1960s and 1970s continued to see the use of or responses to Marxist terminology and theoretical frameworks in Europe and North America, focusing on economic and social issues related to power and ideology. Marxist views of Medieval Studies have been so persistent in part because medieval dialectic, Hegelian dialectic, and Marxist dialectical materialism were able to go hand in hand in approaching the history of medieval thought. To simplify, the social and the economic are often seen as one and the same in a cyclical view of history in the literary and socio-historical scholarship summarized below. The discipline of Cultural Studies in history and literature grew out of Marxist, Historicist, and New Historicist traditions. Today, Cultural Studies and cultural historians of the Middle Ages continue in the legacy of Marxist historiography and social theory (with the added theoretical influence of Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno, Louis Althusser, Mikhail Bakhtin, Terry Eagleton, and other Marxist or post-Marxist theorists). Grandfathers of French Marxist historiography, Marc Bloch (1886– 1944, see entry in this Handbook) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956, see entry in this Handbook), founded the journal Annales in 1929, placing emphasis on social analyses of history, on Marxist interpretations of class power struggles following medieval feudalism, and on modernist conceptions of progress. The Annales School of history, ‘L’École des Annales’, though only loosely organized, has informed the discipline of Medieval Studies for decades, par-

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ticularly in political and economic perspectives in criticism of medieval literary and historiographic texts. The Annales approaches embraced much of Marxist historiography and models of feudal hierarchy. Prior to this work, French socialist historicism focused primarily on timelines of reigns and dates of specific events, battles, or treatises. Heavily influenced by developments in the growing fields of human geography and sociology in France, Marc Bloch endeavored to provide instead a “total” socio-economic history covering the whole socio-economic spectrum in La société féodale (2 vols., 1939–1940), as part of the series L’évolution de l’humanité, and Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (2 vols., 1955–1956), published posthumously. In response to Marc Bloch and others, French social historian Georges Duby (1919–1996, see entry in this Handbook) continued class-based social history and also reintroduced the historical significance of “events.” This “events” perspective, which tended to focus on a crucial battle or decisive date that may have “changed” history, became part of Duby’s perspective, though he remained part of Annales movement of socio-economic historiography, for example in his Le dimanche de Bouvines: 27 juillet 1214 (1973). Duby’s approach to feudalism through the Marxist lens of the concept of les trois ordres [the three orders] of society (the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate) remained pervasive in his work for decades and greatly influenced French historiography. In the next generation of Annales school disciples is French social and anthropological historian Jacques Le Goff (born 1924, see entry in this Handbook), who had focused much of his scholarship on notions of work, time, and social class in the Middle Ages. For a consideration of the full impact and limitations of Le Goff’s work on Medieval Studies (see the cultural history volume edited by Miri Rubin, The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, 1997, which also contains a review of Annales scholarship in national historical traditions following in Le Goff’s footsteps in Spain, the Netherlands, and North America, set within its ideological context). Jacques Le Goff’s work has concentrated on 12th- and 13thcentury French intellectual and social history with a Marxist and New Historicist leaning, working from the background of the Annales-School and becoming a landmark figure in approaches of the New History, or La Nouvelle Histoire, by the 1970s. Le Goff’s L’imagination médiévale is a seminal example of this newer approach; much of his work has been powerful or controversial, such as his questioning the validity of the term “moyen âge” (Le Goff’s methodologies are detailed in Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, 1985).

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B. Marxist Approaches and Feudalism Many studies on feudalism were socialist or Marxist-inspired through the 1970s, based on Marx’s and Engels’s arguments about the evolution from feudal society to capitalism, and more specifically responding to Friedrich Engels’ (1820–1895) Über den Verfall des Feudalismus und das Aufkommen der Bourgeoisie [The Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie] (1884). Studies that respond to these influential arguments are too numerous to detail. Also responding to Marx’s and Engels’ concepts of feudalismus was the general study of the political and ideological history of feudalism and state building by Austrian social historian Otto Brunner (1898–1982, see entry in this Handbook), in his Feudalismus (1959), or best known in English by the translated book chapter “Feudalism: The History of a Concept” (Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe, ed. Fredrich Cheyette, 1968, 32–56). His earlier nationalist study, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutschlands im Mittelalter (1939), became somewhat controversial, given the context of national socialist Germany. A critical review of Brunner’s work may be found in, Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Sozialgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners” (VSWG 71 [1983]: 305–41). A Paris think-tank produced a definitive typology Sur le féodalisme (ed. Centre d’Études et de recherches marxistes, 1974), while at the same time a significant North American study called into question the concept of feudalism and the legacy of Marx, Elizabeth Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe” (American Historical Review 79 [1974]: 1963–88). Maurice Dobb took up the debate of the validity of Marx’ arguments involving pre-capitalist feudal society in several of his pieces, beginning with his Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), and somewhat redefining his stance on feudalism and historical materialism in the 1960s, with “From Feudalism to Capitalism” (Marxism Today 6 [1962]: 285–87), and the book Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1963). In Britain, economic historian Michael Moïssey Postan and others have focused Marxist analyses on economic aspects of agrarian, labor, and peasant history in feudal England; see his Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (1950), in particular the first chapter therein on “The Economic Foundations of Medieval Economy” (1–28). Also important to early 20th-century medieval economic history was Postan’s scholarship on labor services, the rise of a money economy in Europe, and the social conditions and charters of the villein, in articles originally published from the 1930s to 1960s, some of which appear in Michael Moïssey Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (1973), pro-

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viding a cyclical ground-up view of what Postan terms the peasant base of the medieval economy. This work, as well as his Medieval Trade and Finance (1973), offers a Marxist-based consideration of the beginnings of capitalism and new experiments with taxation. Other notable Marxist cultural historians for the interwar and postwar period are: Fernand Braudel, Ernst Fischer, and Perry Anderson. Late 20th-century studies have continued to highlight the cycles and progress of history, for example Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1996), which also focuses on the Middle Ages as a “transitional” period and shows a progression in economic history from nomadism to the absolute power of monarchies and offers a typology of medieval feudalism. This essay also subscribes to the cyclical view of history in an attempt to describe the “fall” of the Roman and Byzantine empires and the end of the “Dark Ages.” Anderson is also author of Lineages of the Absolutist State: Considerations on Western Marxism; In the Tracks of Historical Marxism, and other studies in Marxist historicism, and he has served on the board of the New Left Review. Russian and former Soviet Medieval Studies publications were also characterized by Marxist perspectives through the 1970s; a useful bibliography and review of scholarship in this area is to be found in O. L. Vainshtein, Istoriia sovetskoi medievistsiki: 1917–1966. In Asian Studies, a review of Marxist treatments of medieval Asian social history was provided by R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “The Analysis of Pre-Colonial Social Formations in Asia in the Writings of Karl Marx” (The Indian Historical Review 2 [1976]: 365–88), based on an earlier 1975 article. A more comprehensive view of Eastern feudalism with a Marxist point of departure is Feudalism and Non-European Societies (ed., Terrence Byres and Mukhia Harbans, 1985, reprinted by Routledge from a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies 12 [1985]). Thus, the application of Marxist political theory to medieval history is not limited to continental historians or critics. British Marxist social historian Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (1977), focuses on the role of peasants and peasant revolts in the social history of feudalism, attempting to redefine terms such as serfdom, peasantry, and even feudalism. Hilton picks up where Marx and Engels left off in their models of medieval peasantry, beginning with his Freedom and Villeinage in England (1965), and his edited volume The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976). The 1960s saw the development of Peasant Studies (later termed Subaltern Studies in the context of postcolonial criticism), spawning the scholarly journals The Journal of Peasant Studies in Britain and Peasant Studies in the United States while rehabilitating Marx’s view of the peasant. Post-Marxist interpretations of social and economic history have continued into the 21st-century,

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with studies on peasant social history such as: Philipp Schofeld, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200–1500 (2002), which focuses on the political, economic, and ecclesiastical relationships between peasants and lords as well as everyday life within the peasant family unit itself; concentrating on commercial and economic facets of everyday life is Schofeld’s Credit and Debt in Medieval England c. 1180–c. 1350 (2002). C. Later Influences of Marxist Thought The end of the 20th-century and the first decade of the 21st-century have seen a rise in popularity in post-Marxist studies on peasants, everyday life, commodities, urban history, and material culture in medieval and early modern European history, recalling some of Duby’s work on private life, historical materialism, and the growth of the economy, such as: D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (2003); and social historian Christopher Dyers’s Everyday Life in Medieval England (2003), which is another example of the focus on aspects of material culture in peasant, sub-aristocratic, or subaltern life. The Greenwood Press’ “Daily Life through History” series offers several volumes combining scholarly and popular Marxist perspectives of feudalism and material culture. Christopher Dyers’s An Age of Transition?: Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (2007), responds to prior Marxist and post-Marxist historians, presenting the latest account of economic and commercial growth from 1200–1500, demonstrating that new conceptions of property, consumption, economic development, and credit came from the peasantry and eventually led to England becoming the first industrial nation. Though skeptical of some Marxist approaches in later years Norman Cantor (1929–2004, see entry in this Handbook), scholar of comparative literature, sociology, and history, made an enduring impact on interdisciplinary Marxist perspectives of medieval social and intellectual history with his Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization (1963, updated in 1994 as The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, to include more information on the roles of women in society, religion in society, later medievalism, and other topics). This work takes a cyclical and class-based approach to medieval historiography and stresses the need to include the history of those on the margins of society. As a response to such earlier studies, Marxist perspectives on cultural and social history have been pervasive in literary criticism through the early 1990s, often taking a dialectical view of social classes, as demonstrated in, Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History (ed. David Aers, 1986). For the Marxist literary critic, literary production and material culture of everyday life

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reflect social conflict or class struggle. Studies on literary satire and sites of resistance also hail from Marxist beginnings. Cultural-historical interpretations appear in literary analysis in the1990s, for example with articles on resistance and social status in courtly literature, such as Caroline Jewers, “The Name of the Ruse and the Round Table: Occitan Romance and the Case for Cultural Resistance” (Neophilologus 8 [1997]: 187–200), or Class and Gender in Early English Literature (ed. Briton Harwood and Gillian Overing, 1994). Sheila Delany’s Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (1990), also proposes a Marxist and cultural history approach to literary production. Postcolonial criticism is now influencing readings of resistance, class, and gender in medieval narratives. D. Marxist and Ideological Approaches Across Disciplines Marxist and ideological interpretations are not limited to literary and historical studies; they extend to all modes of cultural production, from art to architecture to Saint’s Lives. In the 1950s, Marxist studies of medieval hagiography transformed the field, as with Bernhard Töpfer’s significant study on material culture, ideology, and the institution of religion: “Reliquienkult und Pilgerbewegung zur Zeit der Klosterreform im burgundischaquitanischen Gebiet” (Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit 65 [1956]: 420–39; translated as “The Cult of Relics and Pilgrimage in Burgundy and Aquitaine at the Time of the Monastic Reform,” The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes, 1992, 41–57). Social class becomes important in work such as Head’s and Landes’s, which takes into consideration both popular and elite cultural production in the religious sphere. Leftist Czech medievalist Frantisek ˇ Graus (1921–1989; active mostly in Germany) also worked from a Marxist point of departure to show that hagiographical texts had much to reveal about religion in the context of social classes, power, ideology, and state building in French, German, and Slavic examples (see his Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit, 1965; Struktur und Geschichte: 3 Volksaufstände im mittelalterlichen Prag, 1971; and Die Nationenbildung der Westslawen im Mittelalter, 1980). Marxist and postMarxist views on ideology related to religious cultural production and state building are investigated in the sociologic study of The Birth of Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France (ed. Fredrich Cheyette, 1991); similarly, focusing on Iberian ideology is Jerrilynn Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (1990). Related to such ideologically-based studies, a key perspective in Medieval Studies has been historicism. A review of historicist methodology and

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practice contrasted with newer approaches may be found throughout the important special journal issue “The Ends of Historicism: Medieval English Literary Study in the New Century” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44.1 [2002]). This entire issue invites scholars to rethink historicism; for example Elizabeth Scala critiques the theoretical framework of historicism popular for so long with medievalists, Scala, “Historicists and Their Discontents: Reading Psychoanalytically in Medieval Studies” (108–131). Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, “The Marxist Premodern” (The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 [2004]: 463–71) focus on Marxist and post-Marxist readings of literature and history, beginning by considering class-based studies of the Middle Ages as well as the limitations of the Marxist, Hegelian, and pre-Marxist appropriation of the image of the feudal system as the precursor to modern bourgeois society. Other challenges to different permutations of Marxist views of feudal order preceding capitalist society include: Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism” (New Left Review 104 [1977]: 25–92). Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (2003), offers a historicist view of medieval subjectivity, mapping the cultural development of the subject through historiographic and literary examples (ranging from the Serments de Strasbourg to Old French epic, from Marie de France to Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier). In a new reading of how the individual is created by state ideology as seen in texts ranging from the Chanson de Roland to the Domesday Book, Haidu attempts to disrupt the binary opposition of medieval vs. modern subjectivity. He finds modern subjectivity constructed by political ideology and individuals who are defined by violence, resistance, or institutional subjugation from the 6th century on. Select Bibliography Marc Bloch, La société féodale, 2 vols. (Paris: Berr, 1939–1940); Norman Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Miri Rubin, The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997); Bruce Holsinger and Ethan Knapp, “The Marxist Premodern,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.3 (2004): 463–71.

Sarah Gordon

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Masculinity Studies A. Definition Since the time that Medieval Studies began to treat literary texts as literature rather than as linguistic expressions of earlier forms of contemporary vernacular languages, literary scholars have been writing about male characters in texts. Medieval historians – whether social, intellectual, or military – have also been mining various archives in order to understand the particular actions and events in which historical persons made an impact. Literary studies and historical studies were not interested in examining male characters from the vantage of their gender because from the critical perspective, they did not have gender. With the rise of feminist criticism, also discussed in this volume, scholars began to chip away at ideas held about the representation of the feminine through studies of literature and history, but as the new masculinity studies began to emerge in the early 1990s, there was a sense that the feminist project was not complete. Some have called this shift in feminist studies the work of a second generation of feminism – one that tended to see masculinity as more than an undifferentiated other and one that was monolithic. Such was the practice in the beginning years of feminist criticism because scholars were attempted to redress the error of omitting explorations of female experiences in history and literature. The April 1993 issue of Speculum treating the study of women in the Middle Ages, with essays by Nancy F. Partner, Carol J. Clover, Kathleen Biddick, and Allen J. Frantzen, influenced by this second wave of feminist approaches, examined the subtle dance of masculinity and femininity in new ways, drawing heavily on the work of social history and the studies of sexuality of Michel Foucault. In 1994, Claire A. Lees edited a volume of essays that would serve as the foundation for future studies of masculinity that looked at men as possessing gender and as not always conforming to the notions of hegemonic masculinity (Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages). Essays in the collection explore social history and literary texts, ranging from England and Europe, even with attention of the “other men” of the Muslim world. The breadth of the volume suggested the vast work that lay ahead with uncovering the male experience. The expressed idea in the volume is that men had a variety of experiences and that it is important to recover the range of men’s experiences as men. Jacqueline Murray’s observation in her essay in the Handbook on Medieval Sexuality (ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 1996) suggests that studies of men as males is important to deconstructing the idea of the “universal male” as the paradigm for understanding human experience.

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B. Historical Development In the early to mid 1990s, historians working with both material culture and in concert with the growth in the historical study of medicine saw a number of new developments in scholarship. Joan Cadden’s Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (2003) examines the nature of male and female sexuality, countering the reductionist vision of the single sex model proposed by Thomas Laquer (Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990). Exploring theological and medical texts, she shows a clear differentiation between the sexes and reveals the binaries as important elements for structuring civilization and life. In the collection of essays, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage), a number of essays not only reference the Cadden study but also extend her work. Joyce C. Salisbury (“Gendered Sexuality”) suggests the specific powers of female sexuality to put in jeopardy male sexuality, thus introducing gender anxiety. Warren Johansson and William A. Percy (“Homosexuality,” 155–189) suggest the challenges in defining this particularly oriented male behavior and offer a counter James Boswell who had argued for an increasing tolerant view of male homosexual behavior during the late classical and early Middle Ages. Matthew Keufler (“Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” 279–306) suggests the importance of this topic in both Christian and Jewish circles in the Middle Ages and the use of the practice of castration in legal action. The event, however, does create gender ambiguity. Other essays in the volume bring to light the male experience in Old Norse society, Islamic culture, and Eastern Roman culture. The emphasis in these essays, following the work of Cadden, suggests the strong essentialist nature of masculinity as well as some attempts to being a movement toward the social construction of identity. Beyond the scope of this essay are a significant number of studies of homosexual masculinity generated by this methodological approach also found in this volume. If biological gender was one area of historical study, there is a sense of male identity also being socially constructed. Barbara Hanawalt (Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History, 1993) gives the sense of personal history through her method of tracing the fortunes of two apprentices as well as using the more traditional approaches of social history. She shows the subtly nuanced experience of males in their growth to adulthood. Her method clearly attempts to thwart the histories which record a hegemonic and unified male experience. In From Boys to Men: Formation of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (2003) Ruth Karras expands the work begun by Hanawalt and considers the variety of masculinities that obtained in various vocational and social areas. Thus masculinity for knights, university

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students, and craft workers would differ. Karras notes that knightly masculinity was likely the “hegemonic model,” but that clearly others models were available as indicated by the varieties males could exist in the world. Masculinity is tied to a series of social relationships. Her study is keen to refocus the study of masculinities so that modern readers do not force onto the evidence a model of male independence. Shannon McSheffrey (Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, 2006) applies some of the new masculinities studies to her analysis of the institution of marriage in London demonstrates the socially governing constraints on male behavior during apprenticeship. Many of the new studies relate to masculinity in knightly or middle class situations, but a collection of essay extends the study of masculinity to the religious life. Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis, 2004) examines an area that seems quite traditional through a new prism. Masculinity in the hegemonic sense was about power, control, and manipulation of one’s external circumstances. For the religious, particularly monks, there is some sense of being placed in a position of gender anxiety through the balance of power relationships. Investigating historical figures as well as literary texts, this collection also examines the blurry lines of gendered identity that actually feminizes the representation of the male in religious contexts. This study brings new light to what many previously considered an unproblematic area for the representation of masculinity. Historical studies using court documents and following the influence of the New Historicism that attempted to locate other histories inscribed in texts apart from the grand narrative of history reveal a much more subtly nuanced masculinity than had been appreciated earlier. Anxieties surrounding biological function and socialization were dominate forms of imagining in both the historical record and in literary texts. Studies such as Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (2004) examine the social anxiety related to definitions of masculinity and the boundaries that sodomy sets on those definitions. Biological and social functioning at other times was also helpful in defining the differences in gender roles as well as in establishing social formation. Becky R. Lee (“Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth,” Gender & History 14.2 [August 2002]: 224–41) has shown the role of men in the purification rituals associated with women after childbirth. Through a study of proof-of-age inquests, she demonstrates that the public performance of such rituals were important to male identity and to larger social formation.

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As Medieval Studies and Masculinity Studies began to find a common ground for study in the 1990s, another important dimension developed. While many of the original studies attempted to show the variety of masculinities that were apparent in medieval life, the collection of essays entitled Conflicted Masculinities (ed. Jacqueline Murray, 1999) demonstrated that these various images of masculinity from court, church, and urban society while conflicting were actually finding points of communication. Many of the essays, founded upon the work of Judith Butler on gender performance, tend to demonstrate that various masculinities were marshaled to the reification of patriarchy, but there are also elements, including same sex-desire that operate both within and between the lines of that status. From studies of gender systems (Jo Ann McNamara, “An Unresolved Syllogism: The Search for a Christian Gender System,” 1–24) to relational and ambiguous desire in Old Norse texts (Jenny Jochens, “Triangularity in the Pagan North: The Case of Bjorn Arngeirsson to Thodor Kolbeissen,” 111–34) to the norms of masculinity in university settings (Ruth Mazo Karras, “Separating the Men from the Goats: Masculinity, Civilization and Identity Formation in the Medieval University” 189–213) to more overt same-sex desire in the medieval court (John Carmi Parsons, “’Loved Him – Hated Her’: Honor and Shame in the Medieval Court,” 279–98), the intersections of competing desires and representations are drawn more clearly. The volume does more than set a range of behaviors termed “masculine,” and at the same time suggests the level of uneasiness latent in those presentations. The hybridity of methodologies between historical and literary studies has produced a variety of new studies of medieval guilds and urban identities. Claire Sponsler (“Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and LateMedieval Laboring-Class Festivities,” 321–47) examines the way that dress for dramatic productions enables particular visions of masculinity and at the same time challenges the hegemonic views of laboring class masculinities (Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 1997). Also working in this same area of urban studies is Christina M. Fitzgerald (The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture, 2007). Looking particularly at the structure of guild life based on the records of York and Chester, Fitzgerald argues that the production of drama, oriented around its subjects and participants, valorizes the notions of medieval urban masculine identity. Both of these studies, typical of a growing traditions in medieval studies, examines the role of activities themselves to produce images of identity in the performative sense.

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C. Literary Development If historical studies have experienced a Renaissance in the study of masculinity in material cultural practices, literary studies have also seen the development of a growing industry of studies. Many of the studies examined in this selection have been made possible through the historical studies noted in this article. To date, medieval English literary studies have seen the greatest number of studies growing out of the new masculinity studies movement initiated by Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (ed. Claire Lees, Thelma Fenster, and Jo Ann Mcnamara, 1994). Among the essays are several which examine major, canonical texts of medieval literature in instructive ways to aid later critical studies. Claire Kinney examines Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and contends that the poem is not at all clear which version of masculinity (Gawain, Bercilak, or the court) is the authorized one, but probably suggests that medieval courtly society has the ability to reinvent and reinterpret itself accord to need so that masculinity is hardly static, but open to change (“The (Dis)Embodied Hero and the Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” 47–57). Harriet Spiegel investigates gender relationships in Marie de France’s Fables and suggests that while the representation does support the traditional views of masculinity, there is still an ambivalence that suggests the world of the male is not the total experience of humanity, but is indeed gender-specific (“The Male Animal in the Fables of Marie de France,” 111–126). Claire Lees’s essay on Beowulf takes on one of the classic critics of the poem, J. R. R. Tolkien, and suggests that the poem is actually a critique of masculine aggressiveness (“Men and Beowulf,” 129–148). The poem is seen as a critique of the warrior class as everything seems to become the victim to this culturally hegemonic view of society. Another series of essays focused on literary texts examines the concept of what it must have meant to become a male in society. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 1997) This collection of essays asserts that there is always a sense of “becoming” with respect to the male gender and that it is important to study males and females as both related and opposites. This collection of essays shows the growing fluidity between masculinity studies as they are developing as well as feminist and queer studies, which are related. Allen J. Frantzen examines what maleness means in the context of sexual activity in Anglo-Saxon penitentials (“Where the Boys Are: Children and Sex in Anglo-Saxon Penitentials,” 43–66). David Townsend examines the problems with hegemonic masculinity which he argues is undercut in Waltharius (“Ironic Intertextuality and the Reader’s Resistance to Heroic Masculinity in the Waltharius,” 67–86). Essays by Martin Irvine (“Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration,

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Identity, and Remasculinization,” 87–106) and Bonnie Wheeler (“Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession,” 107–28) look at correspondence written by Abelard after his castration and his attempts to reconstruct a vision of his own masculinity after the removal of those aspects most essential in nature. Studies of Chaucer by Glenn Berger (“Erotic Discipline … or ‘Tee Hee, I Like My Boys to be Like Girls: Inventing with the Body in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale,” 245–60) and Robert Sturges (“The Pardoner, Veiled and Unveiled,” 261–77); transvestite knights by Ad Putter (“Transvestite Knights in Medieval Life and Literature,” 279–302); sodomical aspects within Mankind by George Epps (“The Vicious Guise: Effeminacy, Sodomy, and Mankind,” 303–20); drag in dramatic performance by Claire Sponsler (“Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-Class Festivities,” 321–47); and gender construction in the works of Sir David Lindsay by James Goldstein suggest the margins and yet permeable boundaries of masculine desire and behavior (“Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount,” 349–65). There is a sense always here that masculinity is in flux, not so much anxious as in other studies, but less clearly defined. Without question major authors have received a great deal of attention in the new masculinity studies. This is seen most clearly in studies on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Susan Crane addressed issues of male rivalry in Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1994) in terms of performative masculinity. The collection of essay, Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (1998), ed. Peter Beidler, set a new standard for examining masculine representation in Chaucer’s works. In seventeen essays, this collection does not speak with a single conclusion about the nature of masculinity in the individual selections, but there is actually a free play that readers will find among the articles themselves. The sense is that these various essays are intended to fill in some gaps in understanding that previous feminist works have not examined. Holly Crocker (Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood, 2007) attempts in an historicist way to look at issues of visibility and invisibility of masculinity encoded in the works of Chaucer through the interesting dichotomy of Chaucer the poet/Chaucer the man. Chaucer does not produce a single version of masculinity; in fact his texts defy such an attempt. All of these studies attempt to position the examination of one of the major figures of medieval literature against the cultural norms and beliefs about gender to produce reading of Chaucer’s texts that show Chaucer’s more than subtle awareness of the complexities of gender, even as he pressed the margins in representation.

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D. Current Research This survey of criticism is by definition only a beginning of sorts. Many of the articles and books written even in the last five years talk about the reality that masculinity studies in medieval studies still remains in its early stages. Isbel Davis has recently moved the study to somewhat lesser known literary texts by author such as Thomas Usk, William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve (Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages, 2007). This survey suggests the breadth and depth of these studies, all highly informed by critical theory and deeply indebted to the methodology of the New Historicism that attempts to find histories rather than the grand narrative of history. As this survey also shows, much of the work on masculinity studies to date has appeared in collections of essay, many a part of the The New Middle Ages series, edited by Bonnie Wheeler. While feminist studies in the Middle Ages has a number of important outlets for bibliography, these remain to be written for masculinity studies and a coherent picture of this scholarly approach is still developing. Select Bibliography Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997); William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Conflicting Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999); Holly A. Crocker, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007); Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996); Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge: Brewer, 1998); Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Claire A. Lees, Thelma Fenster, and Jo Ann McNamara (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism, ed. Nancy F. Partner, Speculum 68.2 (April 1993), special issue; Isbel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Daniel F. Pigg

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Material Culture A. Definition The interdisciplinary field of material culture studies the ways in which humans manipulate their material environment, the uses to which they put objects, and the meanings they assign to them. It presumes that any object constructed, adapted, decorated, or otherwise produced for human use represents larger cultural dynamics, be they related to social relationships, economic structure, ritual practice, warfare, or any other dimension of human activity. From this perspective, there is no hierarchy of artifacts – all objects related to human life, from spoons to skyscrapers, contribute to our understanding of cultural practice and production, though some contribute more than others. Clearly, material culture in the Middle Ages encompasses an immense amount of object types, let alone individual artifacts, each of which is a point in a larger web of cultural significance. Three fundamental observations are therefore worth making at the outset. First, despite the vast variety of objects and practices associated with them in medieval culture, the medieval understanding of the material world derived primarily from the Bible (particularly as it endowed material creation with divine immanence and symbolic meaning), Roman antiquity (ceramics and armor technology, farm implements, artisanal tools), and the “barbarian” invaders (weapons, the plow, folklore). Secondly, traditional notions about medieval technological “stasis” should not blind us to the extraordinary technical achievements of medieval craftsmen and builders – illuminated manuscripts, enamels, stained-glass windows, tapestries, and cathedrals would be sophisticated objects in any age. Moreover, a great many medieval industrial, farming, artisanal, and building techniques remained standard well after the end of the Middle Ages, which points up the problems with periodization and with notions of rapid postmedieval technological progress. In this, as in other ways, material culture helps explode many myths about the medieval “interruption” in history. Finally, any generalizations about technology, or about the design, use, or meaning of a given object in the Middle Ages, must be tempered with the caveat that many historical exceptions and local variations may always be found. Tools The majority of people throughout the Middle Ages were peasants engaged in some form of agricultural production. Fundamental to medieval material life was the wide array of implements they used, most of which were made of

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wood and derived from types inherited from the Romans. A notable exception was the plow, which originated among Germanic and Slavic peoples in late antiquity. By the 12th century the plow was in general use in Western and Central Europe, while the older ard, or scratch-plow, was still in use in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean basin. Another major agricultural innovation of the 9th to 11th centuries was the gear that allowed the harnessing of horses for harrowing and plowing (iron shoes, rigid collars, shafts and traces, flexible couplings) (Bibliographia historiae rerum rusticarum internationalis; Georges Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval, 1962; George E. Fussell, Farming Technique from Prehistoric to Modern Times, 1966; Getreidebau in Ost- und Mitteleuropa, ed. Iván Balassa, 1972; id., “Die Verbreitung der Kehrpflüge in Europa,” In memoriam Antonio Jorge Dias, II, 1974, 39–59). Artisans – carpenters, metalsmiths, sculptors, mason –, too, relied on a great variety of tools that had antecedents in Roman culture. These tools underwent changes and refinements as they were adapted to new needs and techniques – hammers acquired new shapes, different types of punches for impressing metal were invented – but there were no major innovations in their design during the medieval period (John Harvey, Medieval Craftsmen, 1975). More than utilitarian objects, these tools could have important symbolic significance, which is another crucial dimension of their cultural existence. The agricultural implements depicted on cathedral façades and in the calendars for books of hours express the sacred and ideological connotations of these objects and of the work they did; goldsmiths were buried with balances and weights as signs of their social standing and in recognition of the weighing of souls on Judgment Day (Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, ed. Del Sweeney, 1995; Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 1999). Domestic Objects It is likely that for most of the Middle Ages, the vast majority of society had extremely limited housewares and little if no furniture. While peasants had buckets, some crockery, wood platters, and other rudimentary articles, the traditional image of a family sitting at a table while stew boils in a pot is likely fantasy, since there is almost no archaeological evidence of furniture in poor households, and large iron implements were prohibitively expensive. Again, the study of material culture provides a useful reminder of the distortions of modern stereotypes, as well as evidence of the subsistence economy that predominated for much of the Middle Ages.

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The housewares and furnishings that we know most about belonged to the merchant and noble classes and date to between the 13th and 15th centuries, when population growth, economic stability, expanded trade, and urbanization led to the increased production and documentation of domestic goods. For those who could afford them, standard household items included chests, benches, long tables, cupboards that doubled as side tables, linens, rugs, table coverings, and beds covered with hangings or entirely enclosed (as with the lit-clos of Brittany). The wealthier could afford chairs, open dressers to display tablewares, and buffets to exhibit goldware and other finery. A noble household with multiple residences would have some furniture built into the walls to impede theft, other furniture designed for portability (such as tables on trestles), and many chests in which to put housewares, linens, and wall hangings. The appearance of joined furniture in the 15th century, first in the Low Countries but soon elsewhere in Europe, replaced heavy panels with solid frames filled in with light panels, greatly reducing the weight and cost of furniture, and making it more portable (The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages, ed. Timothy B. Husband and Jane Hayward, 1975; Penelope Eames, Medieval Furniture, 1977; Histoire de la vie privée, vol. I and II, ed. Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby, et al., 1985–1987; Rebecca Martin, Textiles in Daily Life in the Middle Ages, 1985; Geoff Egan, The Medieval Household: Daily Living c. 1150–c. 1450, 1998; Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380, 2001; The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850–c. 1550: Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body, ed. Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones, 2003; The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective, ed. Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw, 2003; David Alban Hinton, Gold and Gilt, Pots and Pins: Possessions and People in Medieval Britain, 2005). In addition to these basics, the wealthiest households also had numerous objects that doubled as both sumptuous forms of decoration and functional wares. Tapestries beautified interiors and displayed wealth and taste, while providing insulation and privacy (Adolfo Salvatore Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993; Guy Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry, 1999; Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns, 2004). Costly tablewares of ceramic and glass served as containers (Rachel Tyson, Medieval Glass Vessels found in England, c. AD 1200–1500, 2000; Karl Hans Wederpohl, Glas in Antike und Mittelalter: Geschichte eines Werkstoffs, 2000; Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, Une Archéologie du goût: Céramique et consommation (Moyen-Âge-temps modernes), 2005). Among the more impressive objects for table service were enamelled gemellions, shallow bowls used to pour water over the hands, and metalwork aquamani-

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lia in human and animal form, which served as pitchers (Lions, Dragons, and other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages, Vessels for Church and Table, ed. Peter Barnet and Pete Dandridge, 2006). Military Objects Few aspects of medieval material culture have had a more enduring appeal than arms and armor. Many of the accoutrements we associate with the medieval knight already existed among the mounted warriors of the Alanic and Germanic tribes of antiquity: helmet; undergarment covering arms, torso, and legs; body armor; spear; horse armor. This gear, minus the horse armor and combined with the short-sleeved mail shirt of Roman soldiers, a sword, a scabbard, and a shield, had become that of the early 9th-century noble warrior as stated by the Carolingian Lex ripuaria. By the 11th century, the mounted knight was present across Western Europe; as cavalry warfare became more common, the round Viking shield was replaced by the elongated “Norman” shield, which covered the rider’s left (jousting) side from eye to knee (Terence Wise, Saxon, Viking and Norman, 1979; Richard Underwood, Anglo-Saxon Weapons and Warfare, 1999; Ulrich Lehnart, Kleidung und Waffen der Früh- und Hochgotik 1150–1320, 2001; A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle, 2002). Military conflict within and beyond Europe, along with the codification of chivalric practices, led to the rapid evolution and refinement of armor in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. Crusaders took to wearing sleeveless surcoats over their mail shirts and cloth coverings over their helmets to protect them from the sun; this became the fashion throughout Europe in the 12th century and long thereafter. During the same period, the appearance of a new helmet covering the face propelled the development of heraldry as a means for recognizing knights in tournaments and battles (Michel Pastoureau, Traité d’héraldique, 1979; David Nicolle, Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050–1350, 1999). More complete leg armor led to the diminishing of shield sizes in the 13th century, which also saw the introduction of the padded undergarment (acton), shoulder joint armor (ailettes), and the return of horse armor (Ewart Oakeshott, A Knight and his Horse, 1998). During the first half of the 14th century, crossbows became powerful enough to send bolts through shields and mail, leading to the development of plate armor. After 1380, when the plate armoring of the arms and torso had become common, shields were rarely used in the field by mounted knights. Swordsmen continued to use round shields (bucklers), crossbowmen pavises (large rectangular shields with protruding ridges in the middle) (David Edge and John Miles Paddock, Arms and Armour of the Medieval Knight, 1988; Kelly

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Devries, Medieval Military Technology, 1992; Jim Bradbury, The Routledge Companion to Medieval Warfare, 2004). During the final flourishing of armor, in the 15th and 16th centuries, decorative suits were designed for kings and emperors by the finest artists of the period, including Leonardo, Mantegna, and Dürer (Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and his Contemporaries, ed. Stuart W. Pyhrr and José-A. Godoy, 1998; Ulrich Lehnart, Kleidung und Waffen der Spätgotik, 2000). Beyond their military uses, arms and armor were intimately connected to chivalric symbolism and social identity. The naming of swords in literature, their identification with the mythical heroes who bore them, and the attribution of special powers to them reflected the magical thinking and mythologizing of weaponry that the Middle Ages shared with all warrior cultures. Kings and nobles were buried with swords, or depicted on tombs in armor, as a sign of their status, of their personal combat history, and of their membership in a warrior brotherhood. Heraldry, crests, elaborately wrought shields, and brilliantly shining armor were all means of projecting power and magnifying military charisma. Arms and armor represented a unique marriage of the material, the imaginary, and the social (Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the later Middle Ages, ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle, 1980; Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 1984; Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, 1995). Medieval civilization invented or adapted numerous other objects for military use. Bows and arrows, slings, axes, maces, ball-and-chain whips, flails, and knives all served as personal weapons along with the sword, lance, and crossbow. The widespread construction of stone fortresses in the 11th and 12th centuries renewed the need for siege engines such as wheeled siege towers, catapults (replaced by trebuchets in the late Middle Ages), and battering rams. The appearance of gunpowder and cannons in the 14th century began the slow process by which many kinds of medieval armor and weaponry became obsolete (Arms, Armies, and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes, 1994; Kelly Devries, Guns and Men in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500: Studies in Military History and Technology, 2002; Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly Devries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363–1477, 2005). Ritual Objects The greatest number of furnishings to survive from the Middle Ages were made for liturgical use, a testament both to the Church’s immense investment in material production and to its preservationist culture. While the altar was the most sacred such object, many others were needed that were

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also constructed, used, and destroyed following strict canonical rules (John B. O’Connell, Church Building and Furnishing: A Study in Liturgical Law, 1955). Special containers in the shape of pyxes and doves held the consecrated host and were hung at the altar to safeguard against vermin. These were also stored in locked cupboards built into the wall of the sanctuary and, during the last three days of Holy Week, in the receptacle known as the Easter sepulcher (Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England, 1987). The altar space could be enclosed by a ciborium (canopy set on four columns), by balustrades surmounted by a pergola, by a choir screen in the form of an arcade or solid wall, or by an ironwork grille (Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel, 2006). In a cathedral, seating was limited to the bishop’s throne and to stools or benches for the clergy attending the bishop. In the late Middle Ages, choir stalls were provided for the lower clergy, canons, and musicians; seating for the laity did not become common until the 16th century (Dorothy and Henry Kraus, The Gothic Choirstalls of Spain, 1986; Charles Tracy, English Gothic Choir-Stalls, 1200–1400, 1987). Readings were performed from raised ambos, pulpits, or from the jube. Many kinds of illumination, in the form of both lamps and candles, were employed, as were elaborate metalwork chandeliers and candelabra (David R. Dendy, The Use of Lights in Christian Worship, 1959). Tapestries and banners might be hung in the choir, crossing, or nave to celebrate particular saints or display wealth and prestige (Laura Weigert, Weaving Sacred Stories: French Choir Tapestries and the Performance of Clerical Identity, 2004). Other ritual objects included special containers for blessed water and oil, censers, funereal furniture, musical and signaling devices, and numerous processional objects such as crosses, paintings, umbrellas, and canopies (J. Charles Cox and Alfred Harvey, English Church Furniture, 1908; Friedrich and Helga Möbius, Ecclesia ornata: Ornament am mittelalterlichen Kirchenbau, 1974; Margaret English Frazer, Medieval Church Treasuries, 1986; Enamels of Limoges: 1100–1350, ed. Elisabeth TaburetDelahaye and Barbara Drake Boehm, 1996; Objects, Images, and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy, ed. Colum Hourihane, 2003; Justin E.A. Kroesen and Regnerus Steensma, The Interior of the Medieval Village Church, 2004). Perhaps the most striking fusion of sacred meaning and material function was visible in reliquaries. Relics themselves inhabit a liminal zone between the physical and the spiritual, and the receptacles made for them inspired goldsmiths, enamelers, sculptors, and painters to achieve some of the most luminous effects and sophisticated craftsmanship of the medieval period. Combining wood, copper, silver, gold, enamel, rock crystal, gem

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stones, intaglios, cameos, and other precious materials, reliquaries simultaneously showcased the saint, protected his or her relics, and invited the contemplation and prayers of the faithful (Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, Les routes de la foi: Reliques et reliquaires de Jérusalem à Compostelle, 1983; Materielle Kultur und religiöse Stiftung im Spätmittelalter: Internationales Round-Table-Gespräch, Krems an der Donau, 26. September 1988, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 1990; Luigi Canetti, Frammenti di eternità: Corpi e reliquie tra antichità e Medioevo, 2002; Reliquiare im Mittelalter, ed. Bruno Reudenbach and Gia Toussaint, 2005). Spolia and Foreign Objects In many cities and regions of medieval Europe, the Roman past remained a material presence for centuries. Indeed, the notion of a rupture between antiquity and the Middle Ages is belied by the continuous use and upkeep of Roman infrastructure well after the fall of Rome. Long into the medieval period, temples, arenas, amphitheaters, bath complexes, cemeteries, fortifications, roads, and aqueducts still dotted the European landscape, giving rise to legends about their origins and, often, providing ready sources of building material. Especially in heavily Romanized areas such as Spain, the south of France, and Italy, spolia were regularly used to fill foundations, build houses, and to provide jambs, lintels, window frames, columns, capitals, and altars for churches. Reliquaries and jewelry often employed Roman intaglios and cameos, perhaps the most famous example being the reliquary of Sainte Foy at Conques. Spolia certainly appealed to medieval builders and patrons as ready-made objects of structural integrity and fine craftsmanship, but their importance was more than practical or decorative. These objects, often made of the finest material (marble, gem stones), were tangible signs of wealth and prestige. More importantly, they tied the possessor or object in which they were reintegrated to the imperial past (like the intaglios reset in Ottonian brooches) or to the origins of Christianity (like the bas-relief late antique tombs reused in churches) (Michael Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages, 1989; Ilene Forsyth, “Art with History: The Role of Spolia in the Cumulative Work of Art,” Byzantine East, Latin West: Art-Historical Studies in Honor of Kurt Weitzmann, ed. Christopher Moss and Katherine Kiefer, 1995, 153–62; Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Medieval Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2006). Like spolia, objects of foreign manufacture exerted great fascination over medieval European society and exposed it to unknown materials, artisanal techniques, and aesthetic vocabularies. Among the most prized of these were

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silks produced in Asia, Byzantium, and the Islamic kingdoms. While silk had been known in the West during antiquity, silk production did not reach Western Europe until the 13th century, and even thereafter foreign silks retained their mystique and value. Moreover, the patterns on these textiles were copied by Western artists and diffused through pattern books, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations, greatly enriching the medieval visual repertory. Byzantine icons, enamels, and ivories also provided new modes of representation to artists all over Europe, and reinforced the Western notion of a sophisticated and marvelously wealthy empire. It has even been argued that this contact with the riches of Byzantium and the Islamic realms helped fuel the Crusades, and especially the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 – a vivid illustration of how material culture shapes identity (in this case, a sense of Western inferiority) and spurs behavior (Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, ed. Jerilynn D. Dodds, 1992; The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, 1997; Adrian J. Boas, Crusader Archaeology: The Material Culture of the Latin East, 1999; Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans, 2004; Philip Ditchfield, La culture matérielle médiévale: L’Italie méridionale byzantine et normande, 2007; Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. Stefano Carboni, 2007). Animal Objects Medieval people lived in much closer proximity to the animal world and used animals in many more ways than most in the West do today. Because most of the medieval population lived on agriculture and animal husbandry at a subsistence level, every part of a slaughtered or hunted animal was used. The hide could be made into clothing or bags; rawhide could be cut into strips and used for laces, straps, loose pouches, and drums, or kept in sheets and used as vellum; hide hardened through boiling and drying could be used for book pouches, coffers, shields, or body armor; removed hair could be used as insulation or for weaving; wool, of course, was the basis of the medieval textile industry and one of the most important commodities in medieval society (Leather and Fur: Aspects of Early Medieval Trade and Technology, ed. Esther Cameron, 1998). Feathers could be used for insulation, pillow and blanket stuffing, fletching for arrows, or writing quills. The muscle, brain, ears, tongue, heart, liver, intestines, kidneys, testicles, and tail could all be eaten; the fat could be eaten, used as a lubricant, or used to make torches; hooves could be crushed and made into glue; cleaned intestines could be used as sausage skins, or dried for instrument cordage or bowstrings; the sinew could be dried and pounded to make thread, fishline, bowstring, lashing,

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and snare lines; the bones could be broken and their marrow eaten, or else carved into fishhooks, awls, or needles; the bladder could be blown up into a ball. Nor were farm and forest animals the only ones exploited by the medieval population. In northern Europe, walrus tusks were carved into sculptures, and whalebone was used for needles, smoothing boards, combs, and other tools (Arthur MacGregor, Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn: The Technology of Skeletal Materials since the Roman Period, 1985; Kathleen Biddick, The Other Economy: Pastoral Husbandry on a Medieval Estate, 1989; Pam J. Crabtree, West Stow, Suffolk: Early Anglo-Saxon Animal Husbandry, 1989; Norbert Benecke, Archäozoologische Studien zur Entwicklung der Haustierhaltung: In Mitteleuropa und Südskandinavien von den Anfängen bis zum ausgehenden Mittelalter, 1994; Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning, 1994; Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 1994; Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Aleksander Pluskowski, 2007; Naomi Jane Sykes, The Norman Conquest: A Zoological Perspective, 2007). Other animal parts, though known to medieval society, inhabited a mythical realm because their source was rarely or never seen. Such was the case with elephant ivory, a highly prized material with an exotic mystique. Throughout the Middle Ages, oliphants made from the end of elephant tusks were decorated with elaborate carvings and kept in noble and ecclesiastical treasuries as signs of wealth and as quasi-magical objects (Avinoam Shalem, The Oliphant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context, 2004). Beginning in the 13th century, the growth of international trade routes brought great quantities of raw ivory as far as northern France and England, leading to a surge in the production of ivory writing tablets, devotional panels, and statues (Paul Williamson, An Introduction to Medieval Ivory Carvings, 1982; Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. Peter Barnet, 1997). Of even greater value were narwhal tusks, commonly denoted in cathedral and royal inventories as “unicorn horns.” Surviving accounts and examples show that, skeptical though the learned might have been about the existence of unicorns, for centuries these horns were carved into cups for kings and emperors, ground up for medicinal use, and hung out of reach to prevent theft, such was the enduring power of the legend about the purifying magic of the “unicorn’s” horn (Margaret B. Freeman, The Unicorn Tapestries, 1976; Fred Bruemmer, The Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea, 1993).

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Craftsmen One of the more striking facts about medieval craftsmen is that they inhabited nearly all social spheres – lay and ecclesiastical; rural and urban; peasant, bourgeois and, in the later Middle Ages, even aristocratic. In an era with no mass production and little industrialization, every community needed people with the skills to produce the objects its economy and culture demanded. Even so, the urban expansion and population growth that began in the 11th century led to three important developments in the role of craftsmen. The first of these, broadly speaking, witnessed the shift of many forms of expertise from monasteries to towns, particularly as pertained to more sophisticated arts such as goldsmithing and manuscript making. For example, Saint Eligius was a goldsmith and cleric who rose to become bishop of Noyon in 641, while in the later Middle Ages it was Parisian laymen who dominated the profession in northern France and acquired an international reputation (Éva Kovács, L’âge d’or de l’orfèvrerie parisienne: Au temps des princes de Valois, 2004). Similarly, while monasteries were the primary centers of book production through the high Middle Ages, the rise of universities and of lay readers brought manuscript making into cities and the hands of lay artisans and scribes (Christopher Dehamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1986; Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work, 1992; Richard and Mary Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2000). The second development was the increasing specialization and organization among craftsmen. Guilds began to reappear in the 11th century in order to protect craftsmen from the interference of feudal lords, to regulate competition, to ensure quality, and to guard trade secrets. The guild system ensured the education of artisans through apprenticeships, but did not ensure employment; it is important to remember that craft guilds were primarily organizations for masters, or employers, and not for the many tradesmen who worked for them. Guilds were also social groups who performed religious and other services, such as maintaining chapels in local churches or subsidizing the staging of mystery plays (Clifford Davidson, Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama, 1996). Through such organization, craftsmen attained substantial power in their towns and cities (Artistes, artisans et production artistique au Moyen Âge: Colloque international, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université de Rennes II, Haute-Bretagne, 2–6 mai 1983, ed. Xavier Barral I Altet, 1986–1990; Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, 1984; Richard MacKenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650, 1987; Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, 1991).

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The third development related to the lives of medieval craftsmen resulted from this increased power, which led to greater regulation on the part of urban and royal authorities, and to resentment among workers not protected by guilds. Thus King John II of France ordered in 1355 that every goldsmith have a personalized stamp to impress on his wares to regulate quantity and quality; thus workers allied with the peasants during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, a clear sign that they identified more with the aggrieved lower class than with the masters they worked for (R.B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 1983; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425: Italy, France, and Flanders, 2006). Technology Medieval technology was marked by rupture and continuity with antiquity. A great many medieval tools and production techniques descended directly from the Romans; others were lost in certain parts of Europe but not others, or lost in Europe but not in Byzantium and north Africa, whence they were reintroduced to Europe. Glassmaking, metalworking, and textile production give a general sense of how technology remained traditional but also advanced in the Middle Ages. After the fall of Rome, some parts of northern Europe, like Britain, lost glassmaking technology entirely, while others lost sophisticated craftsmanship and the ability to make colorless glass; glassmaking was only reestablished in England around 1240 (Five Thousand Years of Glass, ed. Hugh Tait, 1991). But glassmaking continued in Italy, arriving in Venice by at least the 7th century, where it appears the art of glass decolorizing was never lost; subsequently Venetian glass would become the most prized and technically advanced of all European glass (Attilia Dorigato, L’Arte del vetro a Murano, 2002). The major medieval advances in metalworking were the invention of wiredrawing, which had appeared in Scandinavia by the early Viking period; the use of water to power the drop-hammers that beat iron rods and bars extracted from the furnace, which began in the 12th century; and the invention of the blast furnace in the Rhineland in the early 15th century. The invention of plate armor in the 14th century was a notable addition to the medieval armory (Alan Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, 2002). There is no evidence that techniques for working with nonferrous metals changed with the passage from antiquity to the Middle Ages (De re metallica: The Uses of Metal in the Middle Ages, ed. Robert O. Bork, 2005). The technological transformations witnessed in textile production were more profound than in glassmaking and metalworking, and date to the sec-

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ond half of the Middle Ages, when increased wealth and population led to sharp increases in demand at the same time that expanded international trade introduced new machinery. The warp-weighted loom, which was probably of Chinese origin, appeared in Western Europe in the late 11th century. In the 12th century, another Chinese invention, the reeling drum for spinning large skeins of yarn, also appeared in the West. The spinning wheel, a device of ancient origin, appeared in Europe in the twelfth century, as did carding, a combing process that forces wool fibers to run parallel and thus enhances lacing and felting. Fullers, like metalworkers, turned to waterpowered drophammers in the twelfth century, so that fulling became the first thoroughly mechanized process in European industrial history (F. P. Thomson, Tapestry: Mirror of History, 1980; John H. Munro, Textiles, Towns and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries, 1994; Dominique Cardon, La draperie au Moyen Âge: Essor d’une grande industrie européenne, 1999). Most technical know-how was transmitted orally and by demonstration in the Middle Ages. We therefore derive most of our knowledge of medieval technology, especially for the early and high Middle Ages, from artifacts. An extraordinary exception to this rule is the 12th-century technical treatise De diversis artibus by the Benedictine monk who called himself Theophilus. This invaluable document discusses in great detail, among other arts, painting, glassmaking, metalworking, bone carving, and the working of precious stones. A rare statement of both aesthetic principles and technical practice, Theophilus’s treatise provides a trace of the vast body of knowledge, experience, and lore that had accumulated among medieval craftsmen by the 12th century (Erhard Brepohl, Theophilus Presbyter und die mittelalterliche Goldschmiedekunst, 1987; Heinz Horat, Der Glasschmelzofen des Priesters Theophilus: Interpretiert aufgrund einer Glasofen-Typologie, 1991). By the end of the Middle Ages, Europe possessed technologies unknown to the ancient (European) world – clocks, galleys, artillery, paper, printing equipment, eyeglasses. What this list demonstrates, first of all, is that European technology was never a self-contained sphere. Many of these devices, like the warp-weighted loom and reeling drum, had come to Europe from the East, just as many materials – ivory, silk, lapis lazuli – had come from beyond Europe to transform its art, dress, and economy. This list, then, is also significant for what it tells us about the material world’s impact on the world of ideas and actions – about how things shape behavior and history. The printing press and paper were catalysts for the Reformation; larger ships and better weaponry enabled the age of exploration and colonialism, which exploded traditional notions about the Earth’s geography and inhabitants.

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As just these two examples demonstrate, technology was one of the main forces that brought an “end” to the Middle Ages – or, seen through the lens of continuity, one of the forces with which medieval society transformed, and achieved greater control over, its world (A History of Technology, ed. Charles Singer et al., 1954–1984; Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1962; Science and Technology in Medieval Society, ed. Pamela O. LONG, 1985; Frances and Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages, 1994; Chiara Frugoni, Medioevo sul naso: Occhiali, bottoni, e altre invenzioni medievali, 2001; Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005). B. History of Scholarship The rise of the study of material culture over the past thirty years reflects the dissatisfaction that humanists, social scientists, curators, and conservators who work with objects have felt as they confronted disciplinary boundaries and inadequate methodologies. A way was needed to assess artifacts both in their materiality – as the products of a specific time, place, and technique – and as expressions of human thought, feeling, behavior, and relationships. Therefore, at their core, material culture studies unite approaches developed in archaeology and anthropology, the former providing object-focused analysis, the latter ways to integrate objects into cultural networks. Just as material culture studies recognize no hierarchy of artifacts, they also eschew disciplinary categories. In contemporary journals, studies, and academic programs devoted to material culture, one finds history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, decorative arts, crafts, folk art, design, and a variety of scientific methodologies all brought to bear on the origins and functions of objects (Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17/1 [1982]: 1–19; Beth Preston, “The Function of Things: A Philosophic Perspective on Material Culture,” Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. GravesBrown, 2000, 22–49; Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 [2001]: 1–22; Journal of Material Culture; The Material Culture Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). To a great extent, the history of Medieval Studies is the history of the study of medieval artifacts from an interdisciplinary perspective. In other words, material culture studies have not transformed Medieval Studies; rather, they apply to all artifacts approaches that have existed for generations among medievalists, who have had to be creative in their interpretive methodologies because their evidence is often so scant. Medieval art and

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architectural historians have long had to consider historical documents, rituals, artisanal and building techniques, and a host of other factors in order to interpret objects and sites. Philologists and literary historians, who had to account for the material conditions in which texts were produced and disseminated, developed the science of codicology, which has since moved from the medievalist domain to the study of all books. Medievalists have also shown great ingenuity in harnessing the sciences in their analyses of material culture. Carbon 14 dating has been used on a vast range of artifacts of biological origin; dendochronology has aided with the dating of many wood structures, such as cathedral roof supports; neutron activation analysis has revealed the provenance of stone sculptures and ceramics; architectural historians rely on laser measuring and computer-aided design to reconstruct building programs; and conservators have made great strides in determining the chemical compositions and application techniques of all manner of pigments, dyes, and bonding agents. The Internet has increased exponentially the presence of medieval material culture, from museum websites to videos of craftspeople employing medieval techniques, which has led to new understandings of materiality and to new opportunities for teaching and research. In one of history’s great ironies, medieval material culture may be more accessible to us now than it was to its contemporaries. Select Bibliography Material Culture: A Research Guide, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985); Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women, 1994; Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Material Culture and Medieval Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999); Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación (New York: Palgrave, 2002); A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Medieval Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

Mark Cruse

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Medievalism A. ”Medievalism”/ “Mittelalter-Rezeption” “The Middle Ages Are Everywhere” is the title of a monograph published in 1997 by German historian Manfred Fuhrmann (Überall ist Mittelalter: Von der Gegenwart einer vergangenen Zeit). Fuhrmann argues that the impact of the Middle Ages on our present world can still be witnessed in all parts of Europe, the daily life and behavior of many Europeans, as well as the designs of cities and towns, the many cathedrals and castles, and the rituals of the Catholic (and of course also the Orthodox) church, are influenced by medieval history. For example, modern modes of greeting others and performing gallantry toward women are inherited from the Middle Ages. European emigrants brought parts of this medieval heritage to the New World. There are, of course, situations outside Western Europe that are more or less comparable; for example, in Eastern Europe, Muslim countries, India, Central Asia, China, and Japan. During the Renaissance, artists and scholars developed their own concepts of the revival of classical antiquity by judging the former centuries as “Dark Middle Ages.” Yet as Kurt Flasch (Aufklärung im Mittelalter? Die Verurteilung von 1277: Das Dokument des Bischofs von Paris, 1989) and others have stressed, many roots of modern Europe, its “Sonderweg” (particular route) can be traced to the Middle Ages (Der europäische Sonderweg, ed. Rolf Peter Sieberle, 2000; Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs, 2003). The use of medieval topics, works, and names far beyond the Middle Ages has always been conscious (German scholars called it “Wirkungsgeschichte” of the Middle Ages), but academic research on this – and approach now called “Medievalism” and Mittelalter-Rezeption – was not widespread in the humanities, and especially in philology, until the 1970s. Both terms, “Medievalism” and Mittelalter-Rezeption, have dual meanings – one referring to a tendency to employ the Middle Ages for modern purposes (movies, novels, music, etc.), and the other referring to academic research of this process. The English word “Medievalism” dates from the late 19th century, whereas the German phrase Mittelalter-Rezeption was conceived by Gerard Kosielek in 1977 (Mittelalterrezeption: Texte zur Aufnahme altdeutscher Literatur in der Romantik, 1977); both terms primarily now refer to academic research, but the other meaning is still sometimes applicable. Systematic research in the U.S., and the UK began with Leslie J. Workman (1927–2001) and his scientific group (above all his wife, Kathleen Ver-

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duin). The first issue of the journal Studies in Medievalism was published in 1979. Several years later, The Year’s Work in Medievalism was founded, and in 1986, they began with a series of conferences on Medievalism. Workman identified influential authors for his concept of Medievalism; these included: Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order (1970); and Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (1991) (see also Richard Utz: “Speaking of ‘Medievalism’: An Interview with Leslie J. Workman,” Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Leslie Workman, ed. id. and Tom Shippey, 1998), 433–49; and in the same festschrift: Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, “Medievalism in the Modern World: Introductory Perspectives,” 1–13). The first conference on Mittelalter-Rezeption took place in Europe, also in 1979, at the University of Salzburg (Austria), and the proceedings were published in the same year: Mittelalter-Rezeption: Gesammelte Vorträge des Salzburger Symposions “Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Dichter und ihrer Werke in Literatur, Bildender Kunst und Musik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts” (ed. Jürgen Kühnel, Hans-Dieter Mück, and Ulrich Müller, 1979). This was followed by several conferences in Salzburg, in the beginning organized and edited by Jürgen Kühnel (University of Siegen), Hans-Dieter Mück (Literaturarchiv Marbach), Ursula and Ulrich Müller (Salzburg): Mittelalter-Rezeption [I] (see above); Mittelalter-Rezeption II: Gesammelte Vorträge des 2. Salzburger Symposions “Die Rezeption des Mittelalters in Literatur, Bildender Kunst und Musik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts” (1982); Mittelalter-Rezeption III: Gesammelte Vorträge des 3. Salzburger Symposions “Mittelalter, Massenmedien, Neue Mythen” (1988). The Salzburg philologists (among them Siegrid Schmidt) also co-organized conferences at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (Mittelalter-Rezeption IV: Medien, Politik, Ideologie, Ökonomie, ed. Irene Von Burg, Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller, and Alexander Schwarz, 1991), in Wetzlar, Germany (Artus-Mythen und Moderne: Aspekte der Rezeption in Literatur, Kunst, Musik und in den Medien, ed. Sieglinde Hartmann, Thomas Le Blanc, Ulrich Müller, and Bettina Twrsinek, 2005), and Schöppenstedt, Germany (Mittelalterrezeption im 21. Jahrhundert: Neue Medien, ed. Joachim Behr, with Charlotte Papendorf, 2006, see Eulenspiegel-Jahrbuch 46 [2006]: 13–183). In 1990, Kathleen Verduin, Leslie J. Workman, and Ulrich Müller also organized a joint congress at Kaprun Castle (near Salzburg): Mittelalter-Rezeption V: Gesammelte Vorträge des V. Salzburger Symposions/ Year’s Work in Medievalism 5 (Burg Kaprun, 1990) / Papers from The Fifth Annual General Conference on Medievalism 1990 (ed. Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, 1996). There were also conferences at the University of Odense, Denmark, in 1991 (The Medieval Legacy: A Symposium, ed. Andreas Haarder, Jørn Piø, Reinhold Schröder, and

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Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, 1982); the University of Greifswald, German Democratic Republic, in 1979 (Rezeption deutscher Dichtung des Mittelalters: Ausgewählte Beiträge von der Jahrestagung des Arbeitskreises ‘Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters’ zum Thema ‘Rezeption mittelalterlicher Dichtung in der Literatur der DDR,’ 1982); and at the Washington University at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1982 (Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur (ed. James F. Poag and Gerlinde Scholz-Williams, 1983). Of great importance was also a congress in 1983, which was organized by Peter Wapnewski et al. in Berlin (see below). Prototypes for the European Mittelalter-Rezeption have been the concepts of Wirkungsgeschichte by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wahrheit und Methode, 1965) and the philologist Hans-Robert Jauss (Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft, 1969, several reprints). Medievalism and Mittelalter-Rezeption were born from a rising public interest in history, especially in medieval and exotic cultures, in the 1960s, as demonstrated by book publications, exhibitions, medieval markets, and festivities, movies, and TV-productions. Newspapers in the German-speaking regions invented a new term for this, “Mittelalter-Boom” (‘boom of the Middle Ages’). Some aspects of this boom are pseudo-medieval or simply wrong, but they have nevertheless created public interest. Academic research has partly been a reaction to heated discussions at the universities about the relevance of the humanities since 1968, above all, in the philologies; thus many younger scholars were involved in the beginning. This field of research has definitively been accepted as part of the philologies by a symposion of the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (DFG) in Berlin, organized by Peter Wapnewski, together with Joachim Bumke, Thomas Cramer, Volker Mertens, Ulrich Müller (‘Kuratoren’), Ursula Liebertz-Grün, Silvia Schmitz, Anselm Hänsch, Hans-Dieter Mück, and Irene Erfen-Hänsch (‘Redaktoren’): Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion (ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986). Political problems between the two Germanies and West Berlin instigated the so-called German-German “Elefantentreffen” (meeting of the elephants) in the East Berlin apartment of Margit and Rolf Bräuer (Professor at the University of Greifswald; see Ulrich Müller, Mittelalter-Rezeption IV, 1981, 521–23). There were also many sessions about Medievalism/Mittelalter-Rezeption at the big medieval conferences in Kalamazoo (Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute; several proceedings edited by Sibylle Jefferis) and Leeds (University of Leeds, Institute for Medieval Studies). The names of the participants in these world-wide symposiums and sessions about Medievalism/Mittelalter-Rezeption, and the contents of the many proceedings, read like an international ‘Who’s Who’ in this academic

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field (for France there must be added Danielle Buschinger, University of Amiens, who directed several relevant symposiums) (articles about Mittelalter-Rezeption/Medievalism can now be found in recent reference books, for example: Rüdiger Krohn, “Mittelalterrezeption,” Literaturlexikon: Begriffe, Realien, Methode [II], ed. Volker Meid, 1993; Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, ed. Walther Killy, vol. XIII, 117–20; and Ulrich Müller, “Mittelalterrezeption,” Metzler Lexikon Literatur: Begriffe und Definitionen, ed. Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender, and Burkhard Moennighof, 3rd ed. 2007, 506–07). It seems inexplicable that the term Mittelalter-Rezeption (just as “New Philology”) is missing in the new edition of the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft (1997–2003), not to speak of non-German reference works, although two medievalists were members of the editorial team of six scholars. B. Types of Approaches to Medievalism According to Ulrich Müller (“Formen der Mittelalter-Rezeption II, Einleitung,” Mittelalter-Rezeption [1986]: 507–10; also “Vorwort,” Mittelalter-Rezeption III [1988]: III–VII) the large field of Medievalism/ Mittelalter-Rezeption can be subdivided into four parts: (1) The creative (“schöpferische”) Mittelalter-Rezeption: Topics, works, themes, and also authors of the Middle Ages, are used for new works in a creative way; (2) the reproducing (“reproduktive”) Mittelalter-Rezeption: Medieval works are reconstructed in a way, which is supposed to be ‘authentic,’ according to their medieval context, for example by musical performances or renovations (paintings, buildings etc.); (3) the scholarly (“wissenschaftliche”) Mittelalter-Rezeption: Medieval authors, works, events, objects, or concepts are studied and explained using the methods of the the relevant academic disciplins; (4) the political-ideological (“politisch-ideologische”) Mittelalter-Rezeption: Works, themes, ‘ideas’ are used for political purposes to legitimate or denounce (for example: the ideology of ‘crusade’).” In most cases, several types of “reception” are combined. Depending on the dominant motifs and goals, different categories of verification must be used: To divide between “right” or “wrong” is only possible for (2) and (3); the matter of taste and ideology is decisive in (1) and (4).

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C. Examples of Medievalism It is completely impossible to cover the process and research of Medievalism/ Mittelalter-Rezeption in one single article with necessary depth and breadth. Only some brief outlines and examples can be presented. Much more information can be found, in detail, in the monographs and proceedings mentioned in this article. Incidents (like battles), or names of historical and literary men and women from the Middle Ages have never really fallen into oblivion, but they have lost importance since the periods of Renaissance and Baroque. Until today there are no profound comparative studies of the diverse and varying situations and evolutions of Medievalism in individual parts of Western Europe, but it is easy to realize that there have been differences among developing nations like England, Scotland, France, Spain on the one hand, and Italy, and Germany on the other, which were politically dissolved regions until the end of the 19th century. Interest in the Middle Ages arose and has intensified since the end of the 18th century as a result of Romanticism and the beginnings of European patriotism and nationalism. Rulers and warriors of the Middle Ages became important for national purposes (for example Charlemagne, Roland, Jeanne d’Arc, El Cid, King Arthur, and Saladin in the Arab countries), and even for chauvinistic propaganda (the myth of the Nibelungs or the defeat of the Serbian kingdom by the Ottoman army at the Kosovo Polje in 1389). Medievalism and Mittelalter-Rezeption can be observed in all aspects of modern culture: literature, music, art, architecture (for example ‘Gothic’ railway stations), etc. The following paragraphs mainly, but not exclusively, focus on literature, and they only present examples. There is no comprehensive monograph about the modern tradition of medieval epics and novels, just a brief survey by Ulrich Müller (“Das Nachleben der mittelalterlichen Stoffe,” Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed. Volker Mertens and Ulrich Müller, 1984, 424–48; see also: Elisabeth Frenzel in cooperation with Sybille Grammetbauer, Stoffe der Weltliteratur, 10th ed. 2005; Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur, 1976; Gegenwart als kulturelles Erbe: Ein Beitrag der Germanistik zur Kulturwissenschaft deutschsprachiger Länder, ed. Bernd Thum, 1985; Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century: The Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2000; Lili 38.151 [September 2008], 5–169: “Erfindung des Mittelalters”); but there are numerous studies about specific medieval myths, legends, and works, both in book form and articles. Profound studies about Medievalism in the UK were presented by Mark Girouard (The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, 1981), and Michael Alexander (Medievalism: The

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Middle Ages in Modern England, 2007), and a broader survey, also including the US, by Veronica Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (2006). D. The Nibelungs, the Germans, and the Austrians The Middle High German Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) was not regarded as a national work in the Middle Ages; it was just a successful heroic epic among other tales and novels – unlike the epics of Homer or the Old French chansons de geste (“songs of actions and battles,” for example about Charlemagne, Roland, and Guilleaume d’Orange and his clan), which had an early national significance. The Nibelungenlied fell into oblivion until several important manuscripts were rediscovered in Vorarlberg (Hohenems Castle, Austria) and St. Gall (Switzerland). At first, interest in this and other Middle High German epics was moderate, but during the wars against Napoleon I around 1800, it gradually became a national epic (“Nationalepos”) like Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greece. This progress is well documentated, above all, by Otfrid Ehrismann (Das ‘Nibelungenlied’ in Deutschland: Studien zur Rezeption des ‘Nibelungenlieds’ von der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, 1975; id., Nibelungenlied 1755–1920: Regesten und Kommentare zu Forschung und Rezeption, 1986), Werner Wunderlich (Der Schatz des Drachentöters: Materialien zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Nibelungenlieds, 1977), Joachim Heinzle (Die Nibelungen: Sage-Epos-Mythos, ed. Joachim Heinzle et al., 2004), and the “Nibelungen Encyclopedia” (The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Frank G. Gentry, Winder McConnell, Ulrich Müller, and Werner Wunderlich, 2002; see also Ulrich Schulte-Wüwer, Das Nibelungenlied in der deutschen Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 1980; and Die Nibelungen: Bilder von Liebe, Verrat und Untergang, ed. Wolfgang Storch, 1987). Scholars and translators like Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1807), August Zeune (1814), and Karl Simrock (1827) promoted its national meaning and politicians used it for propaganda. The “Nibelungen-Treue” (Nibelungian fidelity) of the German Empire for the Habsburg Empire before World War I is notorious; after the empire’s defeat, the so-called ‘Dolchstoss-Legende’ arose (this is the political fiction that the armies were not defeated in battles, but at home, with a dagger stabbed into them from behind); and the infamous result was a public speech by the Nazi leader Hermann Göring who, in 1943, compared the disastrous defeat of the German army at Stalingrad with the carnage of the Burgundian Nibelungs, provoked by the excessive revenge of Kriemhilde at King Etzel’s court – both of them, according to Göring, were “heroic.” After World War II, the legend of the Nibelungs became ideologically dubious in the two Germanies and in Austria, but probably not in Switzerland. Since the

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mid-1960s, scholars have begun to discuss the Nibelungenlied in the context of politically dominated Mittelalter-Rezeption, and some years later serious research of its problems and and qualities as an epic of the early 13th century assumed center stage, but now without nationalistic tendencies. For a number of years the Viennese singer Eberhard Kummer has performed the complete Nibelungenlied, using a medieval ‘Nibelungen’ melody; in 2007 it was published by the Chaucer Studio, Provo, UT (2 MP3 discs, ca. 20 hours). E. Medieval Myths and the Operas of Richard Wagner That several legends and protagonists of the Middle Ages are still more or less well-known today is undoubtedly stimulated by the popularity of the operas of Richard Wagner (1813–1883): The literary legends, myths, and tales about Tannhäuser and the Contest of the Singers at the Wartburg, about the Grail, Parzival, and Lohengrin, about Tristan and Isolde, and above all about Wotan, Brünhilde, Siegfried, and Hagen were revived by him, and his operas have a world-wide reputation today, although Wagner, too, was temporarily used for ideological purposes, in spite of the anti-Semitism found in some of Wagner’s essays (but most likely not in the libretti of his operas). Sources for Wagner’s tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (first performance: Bayreuth 1876) were only partly the Nibelungenlied, but especially Scandinavian texts: songs of the Edda, and prose-sagas like the Völsunga saga and Thidreks saga; these have been documented and studied in several monographs and articles (for example: Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden, 1978; William O. Cord, The Teutonic Mythology of Richard Wagner’s ‘The Ring of the Nibelung,’ 3 vols., 1989–1991; Elizabeth Magee, Richard Wagner and the Nibelungs, 1990; Richard Wagner und sein Mittelalter, ed. Ursula and Ulrich Müller, 1989; Ulrich Müller, Oswald Panagl et al., Ring und Gral: Materialien und Beiträge zu Wagners späten Musikdramen, 2002; Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, trans. John Deathridge, 1992 [German version: 1986]; Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music, ed. Barry Millington, 1992). Unlike in his late operas about Tristan and Isolde (1865) and Parsifal (1882), Wagner did not re-interpret the Nibelungen legend radically. Instead, he kept its basic lines, but combined Germanic and Ancient Greek mythology. In recent years, Wagner’s Ring has been recorded many times and produced world-wide at opera houses, not only by the grand ones, but also, often with the same artistic quality, by smaller and more moderate ones. Many more opera composers have used medieval material: Henry Purcell (King Arthur, 1691), Giuseppe Verdi (I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata, 1843), Claude Debussy (Pelléas et Mélisande, 1902), Ernest Chausson (Le roi Arthus,

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1903), Harrison Birtwhistle (Gawain, 1991), Olivier Messiaen (Saint François d’Assisse, 1975–1983), or Kaija Saariaho (L’amour de loin, 2000); Robert Schumann conceived a list of medieval operas which contains the same topics as Wagner’s, but he never composed even a single one. Regarding Arthurian music, Richard Barber edited a collection of papers, King Arthur in Music (2002). An exhaustive list of musical theatre about the Middle Ages, composed after 1945, can now be found in Andrea Schindler’s book (Mittelalter-Rezeption im zeitgenössischen Misiktheater, 2009). F. King Arthur, the English, and Americans – and the European Continent The Arthurian legends have been and continue to be a patriotic or national myth in the English-speaking countries, first in England and later in America. In medieval Europe they were mostly regarded as a “social myth,” namely the international ideology of the Christan knight. This interpretation, which has been dominant for centuries, was created by an author from Northern France, Chrétien de Troyes, between 1160 and ca. 1185. His courtly romances about Erec and Enide, Lancelot and Gueneviève, Ivain, and Perceval and the Grail became paragons of medieval secular romances, for which, of course, he used various sources, and which later were frequently retold, enlarged, merged, and mingled in many European languages. Of utmost importance for the later ‘Medievalism’ and Mittelalter-Rezeption was the prose compilation of the legends and tales about King Arthur, the Knights of his Round Table, the magician Merlin, the quest for the Grail, and the disastrous love stories of Lancelot and Guenevere, and Tristan and Isolde, conceived by the English Thomas Malory (†1471): His Morte d’Arthur, for which he used primarily French novels en prose, became the the first secular and most popular printed book in England (William Caxton, 1469); it is influential and still widely read today. The so-called Arthurian Revival and its long-lasting impact in the arts, literature, and music have been described and examined in numerous monographs and articles. For the 19th century, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson deserves to be mentioned above all as “father of the Arthurian Renaissance in Victorian England” (David Staines, “Tennyson, Alfred Lord,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia [1996]: 446–48), as best represented by his poetic cycle The Idylls of the King (1832–1889). Academic painters like William Dyce, James Archer, Joseph Noël Paton, Thomas Woolner, John Lyston Byam Shaw, Frank Dicksee, and John Williams Winterhouse, then Pre-Raphaelite artists like Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Arthur Hughes, finally illustrators like Julia Margaret Cameron, Audrey Beardsley (and in

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France Gustav Doré), did their part (Barbara Tepa Lupack with Alan Lupack, Illustrating Camelot, 2008). Often their works were “medieval only in superficial details of costume and setting; it reflected instead current taste” (Debra N. Mancoff, “Arthurian Revival,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia [1996]: 22), and – one must add – contemporary ideology (impressive and appropriately illustrated monographs are: Roger Simpson, Camelot Regained: The Arthurian Revival and Tennyson, 1800–1849, 1989; Muriel Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, 1990; Debra N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art, 1990). This kind of Arthurian Revival, like Victorian idealism, came to an end with World War I, but its results can still be seen today. In the UK and U.S., not dozens but hundreds of books have been published that translate, retell, modernize, and transpose the ancient legend, above all in novels, but also in short stories and even in guide books for Arthurian traveling. Beverly Taylor and Elisabeth Brewer (The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1900 [recte 1800], 1983), Raymond H. Thompson (The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern Fiction, 1985), and Veronica Ortenberg (In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages, 2006) presented extensive surveys; Alan and Barbara Tepa Lupack described the importance of the Arthurian legend in the U.S. (King Arthur in America, 1999), where John F. Kennedy’s administration very soon after the president’s assassination was identified with King Arthur’s Camelot, an identification which, according to Alan J. Lerner, was a result of Kennedy’s love of Lerners’s and Loewes’ s musical, Camelot (1960). Arthurian names are also often used in popular culture (for example the “Excalibur,” a huge hotel in Las Vegas, or “Merlin” as a name for PC-shops). All relevant names associated with medieval myths from all over the world (not only the US and UK), and even many names of minor importance, can be found in the exhaustive New Arthurian Encyclopedia (ed. Norris J. Lacy, associate ed. Geoffrey Ashe, Sandra Ness Ihle, Marianne E. Kalinke, and Raymond H. Thompson, updated paperback edition 1996 [with separate updates: Arthurian Literature 18 (2001), 22 (2005), 26 (2009)]). Only some authors of Arthurian novels can be mentioned here: Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, T. H. White, Mary Stewart, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson, A. A. Attanasio, Thomas Berger, Gillian Bradshaw, Stephen R. Lawhead, Sharan Newman, Susan Shwartz, Rosemary Sutcliff, Bernard Cornwall, Parke Godwin/Kate Hawks, Peter Vansittart, Phyllis Ann Karr, T. A. Barron, Nancy McKenzie, Rosalind Miles, Sarah Zettel, Anna Elliott. T. S. Eliot, in his influential poem The Waste Land (1922), used the story of the wounded Grail King (Fisher King); the American Walker Percy (Lancelot, 1978) transposed the legend of Lancelot, a sinner, to New Orleans; the British

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David Lodge (Small World, 1984), the grail quest into the modern world of travelling scholars. A special case is the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) by the American author Dan Brown. It is an “extraordinary publishing phenomenon,” which “brought the Grail back into the public eye” (Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend, 2nd ed. 2005, 371–72). The novel used, some even think plagiarized, the conspiracy theory of a pseudo-historical book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1980), which is primarily, but erroneously, based on a hoax of the French Pierre Plantard and two of his friends (see also Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, 2008). In a different way, an Arthurian revival can also be discovered in France, for example the very successful reconstitution of the legend of Tristan and Iseult by the philologist Joseph Bédier (1900), the play Les chevaliers de la table ronde (The Knights of the Round Table, 1937) by Jean Cocteau, and the wellknown movie L’éternel retour (1943), based on a screenplay of the same author which transposes the Tristan legend into the years around 1940. In the German-speaking countries Wagner’s operas dominated the reception of the Arthurian legend, which means there was an “Arthurian tradition without the King” (Ulrich Müller, “Artus-Rezeption ohne König Artus: Zur deutschen Artus-Rezeption unter dem Einfluß von Richard Wagner,” Moderne Artus-Rezeption, 18.–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Kurt Gamerschlag, 1991, 143–66; see also Ulrich Müller, “Narrated Europe: ‘Epic Myths’ and Modern Europe,” The Medieval Text: Methods and Hermeneutics: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed. William C. McDonald and Guy R.Mermier, 1990, 269–79). That means that in German literature, Parzival/Parsifal and the Grail were important, like in the play Das Spiel vom Fragen by the Austrian dramatist Peter Handke (1990), especially in the philosophy (Anthroposophy) of Rudolf Steiner (Rudolf Meyer, Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit: Die Gralsgeschichte, 1980), and the depth-psychology of C. G. Jung (Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, 1986 [German version 1960]). The first Arthurian novel in German was written by the Austrian Wilhelm Kubie (Mummenschanz auf Tintagel, 1946 [‘Masquerade at Tintagel’]; see the exhaustive and indispensable monograph of Siegrid Schmidt, Mittelhochdeutsche Epenstoffe in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945: Beobachtungen zur Aufarbeitung des Artus- und Parzival-Stoffes in erzählender Literatur für Jugendliche und Erwachsene mit einer Bibliographie der Adaptationen der Stoffkreise Artus, Parzival, Tristan, Gudrun und Nibelungen 1945–1981, 1989; there Kubie’s novel is reprinted). The situation changed rapidly when since the 1960s translations

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of English and American Arthurian novels, and Arthurian movies (see below) became known in the German-speaking countries. Finally, the monumental play Merlin oder Das Wüste Land by Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler (1981) made the Arthurian legend well-known there on the stages, a Baroque profusion of images, unique in its blending of drama, epic storytelling, and song. It portrays the rise and fall of a civilization, which in contrast to the English tradition ends in catastrophe and leaves nothing to hope for: Human inadequacy destroys the “utopia” of the Round Table (Rüdiger Krohn, “‘Die Geschichte widerlegt die Utopie’? Zur Aktualität von Tankred Dorsts Bühnenspektakel ‘Merlin oder Das Wüste Land’,” Euphorion 78 [1984]: 160–79); the drama instigated the creation of several “sequels,” among them Christoph Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, the so-called “Play of the Political Change” of 1989 (Wende) in the two Germanies. Last but not least, a completely new Arthurian novel, conceived and invented by the philologist Tanja Weiss, should be mentioned: the novel (allegedly by a fictitious Tanja von dem Rübenberge: Bannerträger der Nacht, 2003) is Arthurian in style, and it tells knightly adventures using the form of courtly verses and rhymes (but in modern German); the book is a fictional edition, and probably the brightest parody of philological editing ever written: there are not only a bibliography and a list of manuscripts included, but also detailed information about the transmission of the text (“Textkritischer Apparat”) and even facsimiles, and miniatures – everything invented and fictitious. The retellings and modernizations of medieval novels and legends became well-known again, and important novels, epics, tales, and short-stories from the Middle Ages were translated. Siegfried Grosse and Ursula Rautenberg created an exhaustive documentation of translations and adaptations in German literature only: Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher deutscher Dichtung: Eine Bibliographie ihrer Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (1989). Although the bibliograpy does not list translations and adaptations of foreign languages, it presents a nearly exhaustive number of entries. It is noteworthy when a monograph combines lingustic and philological methods in the field of Medievalism/Mittelalter-Rezeption, as when Alexander Schwarz presented such a book, in which he analyzes and compares the central love scene of the Tristan and Isolde legend along the centuries: Sprechaktgeschichte: Studien zu den Liebeserklärungen in mittelalterlichen und modernen Tristandichtungen (1984).

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G. The Middle Ages and the Movies The most popular adaptations of medieval stories were realized by the movies and TV. For a long time, most scholars neglected this area of modern Medievalism, with only some exceptions, see, for example, Frank Gentry or John Margetts. Finally, the American scholar Kevin J. Harty published several impressive books about the Middle Ages in the movies: Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film (1991, rev. ed. 2002), and King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema (1999). An indispensable documentation for everybody, who deals with ‘medieval movies,’ is Harty’s The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films About Medieval Europe (1999). More recent publications on this topic are John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (2003); The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, 2004); François Amy de la Bretèque, L’Imaginaire médiéval dans le cinéma occidental (2004); and Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism (2008) (see also Veronica Ortenberg, “Camelot Goes Celluloid, “In Search of the Holy Grail, 2006, 193–223).Only a few years earlier, severals scholars had already published a number of articles about “medieval cinema” in the abovementioned series, Studies in Medievalism (in German in Mittelalter-Rezeption, 1–5; in Mittelalterrezeption, ed. Wapnewski, 1986; and in Gamerschlag’s collection of papers, 1991). The first German book on medieval movies was published in 2006: Mittelalter im Film (ed. Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, 2006). Unfortunately, the concept developed here and the list of the movies described are both partly insufficient. Some of the medieval movies are of excellent cinematographic quality, for example Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (in 2 parts: Germany, 1924); L’Eternel retour by Jean Delannoy, a modern adaption of the Tristan and Isolde legend, based on a script by Jean Cocteau (France, 1943); The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet: Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957); The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1959); Saladin (Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1963); Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, France, 1974); Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, France, 1978). Harty (1999) registers altogether 564 movies, some of which deserve to be mentioned here: Ivanhoe (Richard Thorpe, Great Britain, 1952); The Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, USA/UK, 1953); Camelot (Joshua Logan, USA, 1967, based on the musical of Frederick Loewe and Alan J. Lerner, 1953); Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, UK, 1968); Parzival (Walter Blank, tv, Germany, 1980); Excalibur (John Boorman, UK, 1981); Feuer und Schwert (‘Fire and Sword’ – The legend of Tristan and Isolde: Veith von Fürstenberg, Germany, 1981); I Paladini, loosely adapted from the Italian epics about

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Orlando (Giacomo Battiato, Italy, 1983); Ladyhawke [sic], the story of two lovers temporarily transformed by a jealous bishop and sorcerer into a female hawk and a male wolf (Richard Donner, USA, 1985); The Name of the Rose / Der Name der Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, Germany, 1986 – after the bestseller of Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa, 1980); First Knight – The story of Arthur, Guenevere and their noblest knight (Jerry Zucker, USA, 1995); Kingdom of Heaven – About the defeat of Jerusalem against Saladin in 1189 (Ridley Scott, 2005). By far the most popular topic for medieval movies is Robin Hood: Harty (1999) mentions the first Robin-Hood movie from 1908, and many famous actors have presented the role of the charming outlaw: Douglas Fairbanks (Robin Hood, 1922), Errol Flynn (The Adventure of Robin Hood, 1938), Patrick Barr (The Story of Robin Hood and His Merry Men, 1952), Kevin Costner (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991, with an uncredited appearance of Sean Connery as King Richard Lionheart); also appaling was the animated version of Wolfgang Reitherman for the Walt Disney Productions (Robin Hood, 1973). A real medieval cult movie continues to be Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, UK, 1975), which in 2006 became a successful Broadway musical (Spamalot). There have also been several tv mini-series about medieval legends, for example about Merlin, Arthur, Tristan and Isolde, and the Nibelungs. H. The Middle Ages, Science Fiction and the Computer Games Most scholars, even specialists of medieval movies, forget that medieval, above all Arthurian “structures,” are also used for films about the American Wild West (for example, Shane, 1953, with Alan Ladd as a cowboy-Lancelot, arguably one of the best classical Westerns), for fantasy books and films, and above all for science fiction novels and movies; see J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings and the three films by Peter Jackson (The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001; The Two Towers, 2002; The Return of the King, 2003). Tolkien’s novels are a modern heroic epic, the story of which was invented by a philologist specialized in medieval languages and heroic epics. Interestingly, recent investigations have unearthed how much modern concerns with race, gender, and class have informed medieval films (Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh, 2007). Medieval structures can also be found in movies like those about the Star Wars (with science fiction knights, riding on space ships, but eventually fighting with swords), Krull (1983), or Dune (1984; TV 2000). One medieval cult science fiction movie is Zardoz (1974, directed by John Boorman, with Sean Connery). The medieval quest for the grail was used as a pattern in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Solaris (1972), and Stalker (1979), the

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latter two by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker, with its medieval structure, can be named one of the most impressive science fiction films ever made. Until now, no comprehensive study about the medieval traditions in the fields of fantasy and science fiction (novels and films) was written, except Karoline Firch’s small book Die Wiederkehr des Mythos: Zur Renaissance der Artus-Mythen in der modernen Fantasy-Literatur (1998), and the same can be said about former role-playing-games and modern electronic games which combine quest and fightin – beloved by young people, but nearly ignored by scholars; see several articles in the proceedings mentioned above (Willibald Kraml and Elisabeth Werner, “Computer-Aventiure,” Mittelalter-Rezeption III [1988]: 609–26; Otto Kölbl, “Das Mittelalter in Videospielen: Was kann man daraus lernen?” Mittelalterrezeption im 21. Jahrhundert [2006]: 81–96; see also Ulrich Müller, “Moderne Gral-Questen: Vom Nachleben des ‘Epischen Mythos’ der sinnsuchenden Reise: Fragmentarische Beobachtungen und Bemerkungen zu einigen modernen Dramen und Romanen sowie zu science fiction-Filmen von Stanley Kubrick und Andreij Tarkovskij,” Georg Mayer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ursula Bieber and Alois Woldan, 1991, 69–92; and id., “Auf der Suche nach dem Gral? Säkularisierte Filmmythen,” Artus-Mythen und Moderne, 2005, 17–29). I. Medieval Songwriters: Walther von der Vogelweide, François Villon and Others Modern songwriters and also some scholars have emphasized that in some respects, contemporary popular songs can be compared with medieval songs of the trobadors, trouvères, and minnesinger. Among others, the French chansonnier Georges Brassens (“Le moyenageux” 1966) and the German Wolf Biermann have identified François Villon as one of their predecessors. Franz Josef Degenhardt and the Italian cantautore Angelo Branduardi rewrote Walther von der Vogelweide’s poems. Some scholars have published a few articles dealing with these relationships, but here also there is no comprehensive monograph. The Salzburg doctoral dissertation by Siegrid Neureiter-Lackner is available only as manuscript (Schöpferische Rezeption mittelalterlicher Lieder und Dichtersänger in der Gegenwart 1945–1989: Analyse und Rezeption, 1990); see also several articles in some of the above mentioned proceedings and collections of essays (Mittelalter-Rezeption II/III, 1982/1988; Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, 1982; Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2000). Beside countless examples of creative Medievalism, there is a lot of performative Mittelalter-Rezeption: medieval music concerts, LPs, and CDs. The monograph by Annette Kreutziger-Herr (Ein Traum vom Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung mittelalter-

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licher Musik in der Neuzeit, 2003), and the compendium edited by Wolfgang Gratzer and Hartmut Möller (Übersetzte Zeit: Das Mittelalter und die Musik der Gegenwart, 2001) deal with both types in detail (regarding performances, see the articles of Martin Elste and Robert Lug in Übersetzte Zeit, 2001). A different approach is pursued by Tanja Weiss which finds a concise explanation in the title of her monograph: Minnesang und Rock – Die Kunstgattung ‘Aufgeführtes Lied’ in ihrer Ästhetik & Poetik: Aufführung und ihre Bedingungen für die Liedinterpretation (2007). A very special case of creative Mittelalter-Rezeption is the so-called “Preislied” by Walther von der Vogelweide (probably 1203). The German scholar and poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben took it as a model for his “Song of the Germans” (“Lied der Deutschen”), written in 1841, and he used the melody Joseph Haydn had composed for the anthem of the Habsburg Empire (“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” [God save Emperor Franz]). Fallersleben’s song was patriotic, and thus also was the meaning of the ominous verses, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles / Über alles in der Welt” (“Germany is [for me] above all,” that is: more important than everything else); Fallersleben wrote these verses when there was still no Deutschland, but just a collection of separate medium and small German-speaking countries. Several years later, the mentioned verses were understood as nationalistic announcements of a rising new Empire (since 1871); this song became the national anthem of Germany only after World War I, and it was ironically the Social-Democratic German president Friedrich Ebert who choose the words of Fallersleben, because the poet, who was also a professor at the university of Breslau, Prussian Silesia, was accused of having been a revolutionary and was expatriated by the Prussian government. The song was politically used and mis-used by the Nazis; there were heated discussions about it subsequently, but with the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany only its third stanza (about unity and justice for Germany) became the national anthem. Since 1990 the old song is again used for the now reunited country. Information about this extraordinary example of MittelalterRezeption was presented by Kurt Herbert Halbach and Rolf Ehnert (“Walther: Lehrer der Deutschen: Zur Rezeption Walthers von der Vogelweide in der Dichtung und Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” MittelalterRezeption I [1979]: 225–55; “Walther von der Vogelweide, Hoffmann von Fallersleben und Schiller/ Hölderlin: Rezeption und Convergenz,” op.cit., 40–62), Peter Wapnewski (“Die Deutschen und ihr Lied: Eine Nation auf der Suche nach sich selbst in ihrer Hymne,” Das neue Europa, ed. Margarita Mathiopoulos, 1992, 290–319, now in Peter Wapnewski, Zusammenschreibungen: Gesammelte Schriften, 1994, 477–506), and Ulrich Müller

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(“‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles’? Walther von der Vogelweide, Hoffmann von Fallersleben and the ‘Song of the Germans’: Medievalism, Nationalism and/ or Fascism,” Medievalism in the Modern World [1998]: 115–29). I. The Middle Ages, Science Fiction and the Computer Games Both Leslie J. Workman (Medievalism in the Modern World, 1998: Interview), and Hans-Joachim Behr (Preface to Mittelalterrezeption im 21. Jahrhundert: Neue Medien, 2006) remember the academic problems with Medievalism/Mittelalter-Rezeption as they experienced them in the beginning. Behr (2006, 14) reports that, in 1979, older colleagues told him this euphoria would vanish quickly. “But experience revealed that the prophet had erred, because ‘Rezeptionsforschung’ has probably produced more publications than did research about editions and topoi in literature together. There is no end in sight, not only because there are many texts […] still ‘waiting’ to be explored, but because there is a ‘Medienwandel’ (changing of the media) which could not have been imagined in 1979 and which evolves more and more suprisingly and fast.” And finally: Feminism created new interest in the Middle Ages, which have also been rediscovered by modern esoteric and alternative groups. Select Bibliography Mittelalter-Rezeption I–V (= Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 296, 358, 479, 550, 630), ed. Ulrich Müller et al. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1979–1996); Ulrich Müller, “Das Nachleben der mittelalterlichen Stoffe,” Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed. Volker Mertens and Ulrich Müller (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1984), 424–48; Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986); Siegfried Grosse and Ursula Rautenberg, Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher deutscher Dichtung: Eine Bibliographie ihrer Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989); Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honor of Leslie Workman, ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films About Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1999); Medieval German Voices in the 21st Century: The Paradigmatic Function of Medieval German Studies for German Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000); Übersetzte Zeit: Das Mittelalter und die Musik der Gegenwart, ed. Wolfgang Gratzer and Hartmut Möller (Hofheim/Ts.: Wolke, 2001); Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung mittelalterlicher Musik in der Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Elisabeth Frenzel (10th ed. in cooperation with Sybille Grammetbauer), Stoffe der Weltliteratur (1962; Stuttgart: Kröner, 2005).

Ulrich Müller

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Medievalism in Modern Children’s Literature A. Introduction Modern children’s literature all over the world features nearly all literary topics of medieval everyday life. This article emphasizes English/American children’s literature (Christine Bimberg, Perspektiven der englischsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Perspectives on Childrens’s Literature in English, 2000; Daniel T. Kline, Medieval Literature for Children, 2003) and German children’s literature (Siegrid Schmidt, Mittelhochdeutsche Epenstoffe in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945: Artus- und Parzival Stoff in erzählender Literatur für Jugendliche und Erwachsene, 1989. This literature can be divided into two genres, fiction and non-fiction. B. Non-Fictional Children’s Literature The earliest children’s literature was created for educational purposes. “During the Middle Ages the Venerable Bede […] and St. Anselm all wrote school texts in Latin […]” (The Columbia Encyclopedia [1952], 1031). These non-fiction books were used to inform readers about the ways of the world, but they are not considered school books. They included information about history and the state of present-day affairs. This content is generally presented as definitions, descriptions and illustrations, meant to address children of various ages. Information meant for younger children frequently included large pictures and the description of the pictures. Information for older children was given in explanatory texts. Today there are two types of non-fiction books on medieval phenomena. The first type presents a single topic throughout the centuries, with developments to that topic given chronologically, as on a timeline. One example of this is Peter Kent’s, A Slice through the City: A Voyage of Discovery from Stone Age to Nowadays (1995, German translation 1996). Kent provides 10 two-page chapters about different historical periods. The fourth and the fifth chapters deal with the early and high Middle Ages. These chapters show small houses for the farmers, a bigger house for the noblemen and – in the high Middle Ages – citizens’ houses surrounding a castle. Further illustrations depict religion, medieval theatre, and the building methods used at that time. The text teaches the readers about the beginning of the Middle Ages, the growth of the cities, different kinds of buildings, trade, and leisure activities. Various layers of the earth are also shown, providing a view of historical remains from earlier times.

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Another example by Kent is Fabulous Feasts (first published in 1998, German version 1999). Kent describes feast traditions from 8000 B.C.E. to 1951 C.E. He also chooses different geographical locations, including Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, South America and India. Only one of the 11 chapters deals with the Middle Ages, at 1400. The picture (a fictional painting) shows a great meal at a noble court. The reader can see nobles, servants, knights and fools, and even some commoners who are observing the event. There is very little text; there are only two lists that tell the reader what was available to eat and drink at such feasts. The special quality of this book is that it is interactive – the reader has to find the meals and drinks in the picture that are listed. The second type of non-fiction book presents a single Medieval subject. Similar topics are presented in both English/American and German children’s literature of this sort. The favourite topics are castles, knights, the crusades, a general overview of the Middle Ages, and medieval cities and food. One example is Pamela White’s Exploration in the World of the Middle Ages 500–1500 (2005). This book includes extensive information about these centuries all over the world, from Asia to Europe and even the “New World.” The book treats geographical, political and cultural aspects of the Middle Ages while addressing children of about 12 years of age. There are fewer illustrations and more textual explanations than in the books previously mentioned. In another example, Neil Grant’s The Medieval World (2001), there is an introduction to inform readers about the structure of the book and how to use it. One chapter includes maps, fact boxes, illustrations of historical figures, paintings, and modern depictions and photos of the places described. As the title predicts, the book seeks to educate readers about the whole world during the era spanning 500–1500 C.E. Similar structures can be found in books about knights and castles. For example, Marie Farré and Dominique Thibault, Stolze Burgen, Edle Ritter (1998). This book, for children about eight years of age, concentrates on Europe and presents aspects of building a castle and the cultural environment inside a castle. Another example is Christopher Gravett and Brett Breckon’s, Medieval Knight/Die Welt der Ritter (1996, English with German translation). This book also concentrates primarily on Europe. It depicts the various equipment and tasks of a knight, and includes timetables and maps of the crusades. Tony McAleavy’s Life in a Medieval Castle (2003), concentrates on Great Britain. The book includes pictures of Medieval manuscripts and castles, and fictional drawings. This text-heavy book addresses children of about 12 years of age. Three more examples are important because of their special structure and/or content: Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections: Castle: Inside an Amazing

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14th Century Castle (1994) seems at first glance to be a very big picture book, but the extraordinary cross-section pictures of a castle present much information about the structure of a castle and its inhabitants, including both realistic elements and humorous curiosities. A child of six or twelve years could look at one picture for minutes or more. A second example is Marc Cels’s Arts and Literature in the Middle Ages (2005). This book contains a historical and geographical introduction to the Middle Ages, with African, Byzantine, and Muslim Art as the center of attention. The creation of different types of art, including architecture, sculptures, stained-glass windows, manuscripts, literature, and music and musical instruments, are described in text and depicted through images drawn from manuscripts. There are also photos of the objects themselves. The final example is Freya Stephan-Kühn’s Viel Spaß im Mittelalter (1996). This book is partly fiction and partly-non fiction. Stephan-Kühn treats such historical topics as childhood and learning in the Middle Ages, social structures, church and religion, living and clothing, and eating. She does not describe all these, but rather combines the historical phenomena with a story about two children and a monk living in the Middle Ages. She tells the story with several types of text, including prose, reports, letters, comic strips, and pictures of rulers and manuscripts. This is also an interactive book because there are riddles, recipes and opportunities for children to color some of the pictures. These few examples demonstrate a great variety in non-fictional children’s literature dealing with the Middle Ages. A large number of these books come from the English/American tradition. This means there is a tendency to leave the European point of view and include the history and culture of other continents during the same time period. C. Fictional Children’s Literature It is not clear if the first fictional children’s books originated in the Middle Ages (such as Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, as claimed by the Columbia Encyclopedia [1952], 1205), or if this form of literature began not before the early 19th century (Sheila Egoff, Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today, 1988). In any case, both ideas of the origin of children’s literature came together in the 19th century (since about 1840), during a flowering of children’s literature (Columbia Encyclopedia [1952]: 1031) when Medieval subjects were picked up and retold for children (Barbara T. Lupack, Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children, 2004). For example, the tradition of retelling Geoffrey Chaucer in Great Britain (Velma B. Richmond, Chaucer as Childrens’s Literature: Retellings from the Victorian and Edwardian Eras. 2004) and retelling the Nibelungenlied in the German-speaking world (Werner

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Wunderlich and Andreas Härter, “Nibelungenhelden? Zur Vorbildwirkung von Heldensagen auf jugendliche Leser,” Waz sîder da geschach: AmericanGerman Studies on the Nibelungenlied, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, 1992, 231–47). It is not possible to discuss easily even a fraction of the copious fictional children’s literature dealing with medieval topics that has been produced in the last two centuries (Adrienne Gavin and Christopher Routledge, Mystery in Children’s Literature: From Rational to the Supernatural, 2001). The subjects chosen for children and some methods for retelling historical events are important to note. There are two different methods to adapt medieval material, themes, and topics for modern children’s literature. The first is to retell a medieval story in total or in parts. The other method is to choose figures or objects from medieval literature or life and use them to create a new fictional narrative (Warum nicht einmal Mittelalter: Lektüreempfehlungen für Schule und Freizeit, ed. Maria Dorninger, 2004). The most frequently treated medieval epic tale in German children’s literature was, until the 1970s, the Nibelungenlied. Retellings of this epic can be found in legendary tales (Sagenbücher) of the 19th and 20th century, and in novels written for young readers. The Nibelungenlied was also created (or: adapted) for a special type of drama for use in the classroom, mainly in the 1930s and 1940s. The plot was given in a very conservative manner, constructing the figures and events in a conservative old-fashioned manner, for instance with traditional construction of gender roles in general and with male heros as the absolute protagonists (Maren Bonacker, “Die Liebe jedoch war tabu: Kinder- und jugendliterarische Adaptationen des Artus-Mythos im Viktorianischen England und heute,” Von Mythen und Mären, ed. Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, 2006, 110–26). Auguste Lechner, an Austrian author, retold nearly all well-known medieval stories in a similar way, but each in its own novel: Nibelungenlied, 1954; Herzog Ernst: Jenseits des Goldenen Nebels, 1958; Parzival, 1965; Wolfdietrich: Das Königsgrab im gelben Felsen, 1967; Gudrun: Die geraubte Königstochter, 1968; Die Rolandsage, 1975; König Artus,1985; Iwein, 1988 (Antonie Schreier-Hornung, “Mittelalter für die Jugend: Auguste Lechners Nacherzählungen von Nibelungenlied, Rolandslied und Kudrun” Mittelalter-Rezeption, vol. 3, ed. Ulrich Müller, 1988, 181–98). Beginning in about the 1960s there was a great change in German children’s literature. The traditional authorities, such as teacher and priests, and traditional methods of educating were suddenly discussed in public and in children’s literature (this begins tendency, however, can already be observed in stories that had been published many years earlier and continue to be published today, such as Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, 1946, and Otfrid Preussler, Die kleine Hexe, 1957; see Margary Hourihan, Decon-

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structing the Hero: Children’s Literature, 1998). Heroes changed their gender roles, specific abilities, and characters (Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, 1999, ed. Beverly Clark). Beside the Nibelungenlied numerous medieval subjects were treated in different types of literary genres, such as novels, dramas, and narratives, and religious legends (Jörg füllgrabe, “Dietrich von Bern: Ein alternativer germanisch-deutscher Heldenentwurf,” Von Mythen und Mären, ed. Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, 2006, 373–95). For instance, Arthurian subject matter has gained popularity in various forms. At first it was adapted for books of legendary tales. The legend is greatly abridged and then retold in these books. In the 1970s and 1980s many translations from English and American literature – partly from children’s literature for German speaking children, partly from novels for adult readers that were adapted for children – were published. For example, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court was translated in several versions for adults (Lore Krüger 1967 and 1982, Franz H. Link 1981), for children (Katarina Horbatsch 1977, Walter Widmer 1977, short version of Lore Krüger’s translation in 1984) and for comic-strips (Hank Morgan am Hofe König Arthurs, 1973, 1976). The adaptation of Twain’s story includes critical discussion of the Middle Ages, medievalism, and the present times. Rosemary Sutcliff’s stories about the Arthurian legend were translated into German in 1979 and 1980. An Austrian adaptation about Arthur and his knights was published in 1977: W. J. M. Wippersberg, Erik und Roderik. Erik and Roderik are young knights from the same region who find themselves in constant, farcical warfare with one another. When the elderly, impoverished King Arthur and his debased knights want to live at the cost of the two knights, they form an alliance. Eventually Erik and Roderik prevent through trickery Arthur’s intended raid on France, which Arthur falsely calls a holy war (W. McDonald and S. Schmidt, “Wippersberg W. J. M,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. Norris lacy, 1996, 519). Through examples like this, readers can see this critical approach to the Middle Ages, primarily in regard to medievalism and its traditional heroes (These traditional heroes are mainly very strong, they are good fighters, rigidly regard traditional hierarchy and some of them are political powerful; the so-called ‘new heroes’ are not physically strong but very intelligent and they prefer to speak to one another than to fight. The most important point is the discourse about different ways to solve a problem. Similar discussions also take place with the Nibelungen material, for instance in Ingo Sax’s Das Ding der Nibelungen, 2001. The Nibelungen figures in this school play make fun of themselves and one another. Most critical treatment of this material is found in literature for

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adults. This making fun of medieval heroes was also popular in 1970s children’s literature (Siegrid Schmidt, “Die Nibelungen respektlos gesehen?” Von Mythen und Mären, ed. Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, 2006, 322–40). Wippersberg’s Erik and Roderik includes another new aspect of retelling medieval materials: The book includes some traditional figures but adds new characters and a new plot. This method of combining medieval literary elements with contemporary ones is also used in the following decades by English/American and German authors. This ultimately resulted in a connection between different genres, the medieval retellings and fantasy literature. For example, Gerald Morris’ books were translated by Gabriele Haefs in 2002. Sir Thomas Malory’s version of King Arthur serves as the backdrop in Morris’ books, but Morris’ figures and their adventures build new stories. The most popular example of the connection of a new story and medieval literary elements is Joanne K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Rowling connects her child-magician, Harry, with elements of fantasy literature like big spiders and other monsters, witches and castles, but she also mentions concrete medieval literary figures such as Merlin. Rowling also includes details of modern day life such as school and cars, etc. Rowling creates a new hero who is, unlike the traditional medieval heroes, not brave, strong and successful from the beginning. He needs his friends and must learn a lot before he can reach that point. In English/American and German children’s literature, also other Medieval subjects have been retold. For instance, in the English speaking world the retellings of Chaucer and Thomas Malory have a long tradition, as do various versions of Beowulf. Mark Twain’s adaptation also plays an important role in the English/American Arthurian tradition. Moreover there is one medieval topic that can only be found in English versions, not in German ones: Gawain and the Green Knight (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Miriam Miller and Jane Chance, 1986). In the last two decades there has been an increasing number of novels for children, both in English and in German, that deal with everyday life in the Middle Ages or with groups of people such as crusaders, witches, monks and wise women. For example, Karen Cushman, The Midwife’s Apprentice (“Alyce und keine andere”), 1993/1995; Isolde Heyne, Jerusalem ist weit, 1993; Harald Parigger, Der schwarze Mönch 1994; and Waltraut Lewin and Miriam Markgraf, Die Hexe, 2002. The dragon is another creature that frequently comes to mind when people today discuss the Middle Ages. Stories about this animal, however, have changed in the last 50 years. Until the 1960s, a dragon was simply a monster that had to be killed by the hero. More recently, the dragons in children’s literature have become friendly: Hans Baumann,

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Die Kinder und der große Drachen, 1979; Jack Kent, There Is No Such a Thing as a Dragon (“Drachen gibt’s doch gar nicht”), 1975; Walter Schmögner, Das Drachenbuch, 1972; Franz Sales Sklenitzka, Drachen haben nichts zu lachen, 1979. Dragons have changed in character just as much as human heroes have inmodern children’s literature. Medieval subjects also have an intercultural aspect; they are popular almost everywhere in the world and in international children’s literature (Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature form Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, 2002; Evelyn Freeman, Global Perspectives in Children’s Literature, 2001) In other countries there are stories about regional folk literature as well as retellings of English, French and German medieval tales. In Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, for example, books are published containing retellings of some stories about King Arthur: Hovardas Pailas, Karalius Arturas ir apvaliojo stalo riteriai, 1999. Pailas tells the story of King Arthur from his birth until his entrance into Avalon. In Michel Rio’s Morgana: Bretony Princesé, 2001, Rio tells the story of Morgane almost exactly as Marion Zimmer-Bradley does, but in a much shorter version. These titles prove that some literary subjects are well known internationally. There are also other medieval figures popular around the world, with Charlemagne as a good example (Siegrid Schmidt, “Intercultural Medieval Myths,” Translation and Transgression: Formen und Verfahren: Interkulturelle Probleme und Chancen der Übersetzung, ed. Siegrid Schmidt and Ulrich Müller, 2008, 255–64). There are many similarities between German and English fictional children’s literature. Obviously, the same stories appear when they have been translated from English into German. But there also are similar developments in the methods of retelling a medieval topic: there are adaptations of medieval stories and there are stories about medieval figures and everyday life. The third similarity between English and German children’s literature is the books’ different types and characters of the heroes and the social and ethical values conveyed at large (Fred Inglis, Values and Meaning in Children’s Fiction, 1981). Both the English and German traditions of retelling medieval stories for children began with the embedding of the dominant conservative and – to some extent – nationalistic value system. Approximately 150 years later, medieval heroes have become democratic and international figures. D. History of Research and Didactic Approaches Literary critics have seriously discussed children’s literature for the past 35 years. Before that, children’s literature was only part of a child’s education or was considered trivial. The didactic aspect of children’s literature, especially in children’s literature about the Middle Ages, is also important in both lan-

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guages today. Günther Bärnthaler and Ulrike Tanzer, Fächerübergreifender Literaturunterricht: Reflexionen und Perspektiven (1999), describe and discuss several examples for teaching literary texts at school. Four of the examples deal with medieval topics. The same didactic series “Information zur Deutschdidaktik” edited a special book by Werner Wintersteiner, Mittelalter (2001), presenting medieval topics for use in schools. The general cultural and historical aspects and new media play an important role in this book. Franz and Martina Mittendorfer produced a book with practical teaching material, Minne und Mäzene: Neue Materialien zur Literatur des Mittelalters, 1999. See also Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradition, ed. Maureen Fries and Jeannie Watson, 1992, and Approaches to Teaching World Literature: Chaucer’s Caterbury Tales, ed. Joseph Gibaldi, 1980. These contain corresponding information and materials for the English speaking world. Today, children’s literature is also discussed in light of gender construction, the history of ideas, and critical and literary history. For example, Dorothea Markert, Momo, Pippe Rote Zora … und was dann? Leseerziehung, weibliche Autorität und Geschlechterdemokratie, 1998. Select Bibliography Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975); Carmen Bravo-Villasante, Weltgeschichte der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung (Hanover: Hermann Schroedel Verlag, 1977); Swantje Ehlers, “Historisches Erzählen in Kinder- und Jugendliteratur,” Von Mythen und Mären, ed. Gudrun Marci-Boehncke (Hildesheim and New York: Olms 2006), 94–109; Bettina Hürlimann, Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe (Zurich: World Publishing Company, 1967); Von Mythen und Mären: Mittelalterliche Kulturgeschichte im Spiegel einer Wissenschaftler-Biographie: Festschrift für Otfrid Ehrismann (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 2006); Mittelalter-Rezeption III, ed. Ulrich Müller, et. al. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1988); John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories: Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Childrens’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 1998); Kay Vandergrift, Children’s Literature: Theory, Research and Teaching (Englwood: Libraries Unlimited, 1990); Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, ed. Reiner Wild (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler Verlag, 2002).

Siegrid Schmidt

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Mentalities in Medieval Studies In the spirit of Marc Bloch’s declaration that “the interrelations, confusions, and infections of human consciousness are, for history, reality itself,” scholars of mentalité (mentalities, Mentalität, mentalidad, mentalità) attempt to identify essential patterns in collective attitudes as manifested in the documents and artifacts of a given period (The Historian’s Craft, 1954, 151). Jacques le goff describes mentalities as “the unitary expression of the spirit of past societies,” which finds voice in the “mechanical discourse of the past” (“Mentalities: a history of ambiguities,” Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, 1985, 169). Peter Dinzelbacher defines mentalité as the “totality of modes and contents contained in the thoughts and feelings that inform a given social collective at a particular time” (Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte, 1993, xxi). These definitions highlight four presuppositions that most studies in mentalities share: (1) that social collectives take precedence over the fate of individuals as objects of analysis; (2) that values and attitudes of collectives receive a higher priority than chronologies or events; (3) that these values and attitudes remain accessible to the historian despite the frequently formulaic language of sources; (4) and that a totality of knowledge is attainable for a given time frame. In summary, scholars of mentalité seek nothing less than the incremental mapping of a social collective’s inner landscape. A. The Annales Tradition Because most scholars of mentalité employ concepts and methods derived from the work of annalistes such as Lucien Febvre, Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Le Goff and Georges Duby, some of whom specialized in early modern history, a brief exposition of key terms and methods is essential to our understanding of the presuppositions that inform research into inner landscapes of social collectives. La nouvelle histoire defined itself in opposition to traditional historiography as embodied in Treitschke’s truism that “men make history” (Fernand Braudel, On History, 1980, 10). Its goal was to transcend the narrow obsession of traditional historians with great men, individual events, and political developments. The quest for narrative veracity was abandoned in favor of a new goal of totality; the narrow range of documentary sources was expanded to include evidence gathered by geologists, archeologists, climatologists, economists, and sociologists, thereby privileging interdisciplinarity; the chronology of individual events as determined by causality was subsumed under Braudel’s tripartite model of temporality;

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and the interdependence of historical sources and historiographical practice found acknowledgement in a more self-conscious, yet still positivist subjectivity. When Braudel declares unequivocally, “There is no unilateral history,” he states the precept informing the new-historical notion of totality (On History, 10). Not only do the Annales historians reject the possibility of an exact recreation of historical events – not to mention the value of such a practice – they also deny the ability of a single discipline or theory to do justice to “the complex, intermeshed reality” in which all individuals necessarily find themselves. Although individual studies or theories remain by definition oversimplifications of historical complexity, they “have set us progressively farther along the path of transcending the individual and the particular event” (On History, 10). Bloch uses the stages of human life as an analogy: “Having grown old in embryo as mere narrative, for long encumbered with legend, and for still longer preoccupied with only the most obvious events, [the study of history] is still very young as a rational attempt at analysis” (Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 1954, 13). Achieving totality meant for the Annales historians not only the necessity of working between and across disciplines, but also the freedom to consult and analyze sources which previously had been the exclusive province of other disciplines. In his masterpiece, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 1972–3), Braudel drew upon research in climatology and geography, as well as in economic and social history. Braudel believed that historians were uniquely qualified to collect, synthesize, and analyze all such data. “For me, history is the total of all possible histories – an assemblage of professions and points of view, from yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (On History, 34). The mass of data required for total history finds interpretive structure in Braudel’s tripartite model of temporality. In the eyes of Braudel and his Annales students, “history is … the study of time in all of its manifestations” (On History, 69). At the basis of all historiography is the “history of man in his intimate relationship to the earth,” called the longue durée. It is a history “almost changeless, … slow to alter, often repeating itself and working itself out in cycles which are endlessly renewed” (On History, 12). Here climate, geography, landscape, mineral deposits, types of agriculture, flora and fauna all have their roles to play. Superimposed upon “almost changeless” time, is a temporal sphere of medium changes and cycles, dominated by the phenomenon of conjoncture, in which historical phenomena occur and recur in vast networks of lateral dependencies. This medium temporal sphere is made up of economic factors on the one hand – price curves, demographic progres-

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sions, movements of wages, variations in interest rates and productivity – and social factors on the other hand – political institutions, linguistic change, religious reforms, and civilizations. The cycles tend to run in decades or generations. Finally, there is the short time span of “historic events” as a journalist might experience them, the temporal sphere of catastrophes and “the mediocre accidents of daily life.” Braudel does not deny the significance of such events, but rejects as superficial the focus of narrative history on chronology, causality, and origins. Braudel’s temporal model transforms history from a linear series of events and decisions into an infinite nexus of interactions among cycles operating at different frequencies of time. This universal vision of history requires a new kind of historian. Traditional historians are for Braudel like landscape painters who attempt to reproduce every detail of the reality before them even as they suppress their own roles as observers. The result, Braudel asserts, can only be superficiality with the illusion of objectivity. Instead new historians should, in Bloch’s view, work like master lute-makers who reshape the raw material of nature into a beautiful instrument (The Historian’s Craft, 1954, 27). In the process, the reconstruction of the past achieves a productive reciprocity with the sensibilities of the present (Braudel, On History, 1980, 37). In denying the possibility of objectivity and historical veracity, Annales historians reject the naïve positivism of 19th-century historiography. Nevertheless, knowledge of the past becomes possible through the judicious exercise of proper judgment; insight remains possible for historians who work in the awareness of their limitations; and historical inquiry transpires within a dialectic. Despite greater receptivity to theory in the fourth generation, la nouvelle histoire never wholly abandoned its positivist roots. B. Theoretical Approaches to mentalité Because leading annalistes have resisted engagement with theory, systematic attempts at developing theoretical constructs for the study of mentalities have tended to occur outside of France. Frantisek ˇ Graus, Peter Dinzelbacher, and Aaron Gurevich all argue that scholars of mentalities assume a position analogous to that of a foreign visitor in a contemporary culture. As Graus notes, “Everyone who spends an extended period of time in an unknown environment becomes aware that people act and react differently than what he has been used to” (Frantisek Graus, Mentalitäten im Mittelalter, 1987, 12). The alienation of the foreign visitor from what seems to be a “confusing and contradictory ménage of customs, rituals and reactions” deepens as his own reactions and responses continue to meet with bewilderment, criticism or hostility. The foreigner who wishes to assimilate must decipher

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a “code,” the unwritten rules, customs and norms that shape individual responses to social interaction. Cultural anthropologists can rely upon direct interaction and observation in their attempts to decipher this code; historians of mentalité have the more daunting task of working through artifacts and documents. They look beyond the surface of words and events to discover the thoughts, feelings, and prejudices of a given collective at a given time. Dinzelbacher (1948; Linz, Austria) an historian specializing in legal, social, and cultural history of the Middle Ages, remains one of the few medievalists to contribute substantially both to the theory and to the practice of the study of mentalities. Following his studies in Graz und Vienna, Dinzelbacher received his doctorate in history from the University of Vienna in 1973. His Habilitation followed in Stuttgart in 1978, where he has held an Associate Professorship since 1998. He also holds the position of Honorarprofessor at the University of Vienna. In 1999–2000 he was a visiting fellow at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dinzelbacher is one of the principal editors of the interdisciplinary medieval journal Mediävistik. In the anthology Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, 1993 (2nd ed. 2008), Dinzelbacher offers a brief and systematic introduction to mentalité. Modes of thought (Denkweisen) are the particular approaches that a given group at a given time devotes to processing information. This information can originate in the outside world of the group studied or in the inner world of the group’s psyche. Dinzelbacher defines objects of thought (Denkinhalte) as the “generally accepted notions and ideological, political, religious, or aesthetic concepts that inform the individual areas of religion, culture, and art. They must have the ability to be verbalized and they must be the object of discursive reflection in the documents related to the group” (Mentalitätsgeschichte, xxiii). In addition to modes of thought, there are also modes of feeling (Empfindungsweisen), which consist of the sometimes subconscious application of values or value judgments to the routine perceptions of daily life. These also include aesthetic criteria that the group subconsciously applies to works of art, fashion, technical objects, or music. Objects of feeling (Empfindungsinhalte) comprise all possible social and psychological generators of feeling, including objects of prejudice or stereotyping. Theoreticians of mentalité define actions in the broadest possible sense, to include verbal and written communication, including gestures, many of which may be interpreted in contexts other than those intended by their authors. Dinzelbacher lists key areas for analysis which I reproduce here without the accompanying examples: the relationship of body and soul;

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attitudes regarding youth and aging; expressions of fear and hope; notions of joy, sorrow, and happiness; interpretations of illness and healing; attitudes and rituals surrounding death; individuality, the family and society; social values; the meaning of work and festivals; structures of power; attitudes towards violence, war, and peace; ethics and systems of justice; aesthetic experience; religiosity; attitudes towards nature and the environment; cosmology; notions of time and space; forms of thought and analysis; and modes of communication. As Dinzelbacher notes, each social collective’s attitudes towards each example must be exhaustively studied before a “global image of collective mentality” can emerge for a given period. Dinzelbacher’s Angst im Mittelalter: Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung: Mentalitätsgeschichte und Ikonographie (1996) surveys one of the primary human emotions in its cultural context. Important here is the addition of iconography, so that scholars benefit from Dinzelbacher’s analysis of the depiction of fear in text and image. Here he draws on his earlier research in the literature of medieval visionaries and mystics. Like Le Goff, Dinzelbacher recently tried his hand at a more comprehensive cultural history. The volume Europa im Hochmittelalter 1050–1250: Eine Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte, Kultur und Mentalität (2003) contains an insightful and accessible survey of medieval attitudes designed for the educated lay reader. The volume opens with a sweeping survey of the social and economic background of the collectives under discussion, followed by a chapter on the transitions of feudal structures before turning to notions of individuality, the individual and society, and the individual and the natural world. (Kristina Wengorz, review of Angst im Mittelalter, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2004–3–101). Frantisek ˇ Graus (1921; Brno (Brünn), Czech Republic – 1989; Basel, Switzerland), a Czech historian specializing in Bohemia and Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, attempted a more systematic definition of mentalité in the Konstanz Working Group on Medieval History’s anthology, Mentalitäten im Mittelalter, 1987. After receiving his school diploma in 1940, Graus studied history and paleography at the Universities of Brno and Prague. His university career was interrupted during the Nazi occupation by his arrest and internment in concentration camps. After the defeat of the Nazis, Graus returned to his studies in Prague, earning his doctorate in 1948/9. He held an archival post at the Staatliches Historisches Institut in Prague until 1950, where he was awarded his Habilitation. After two years as a lecturer on medieval history at the Karls-Universität, Graus was called to a professorship at the newly founded Historical Institute of the Czechoslavakian Academy of Sciences. There he served as Editor in Chief of the journal Ceskosloven-

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sky Casopis historicky. Following the events of the Prague Spring, in 1970 Graus was forced to resign his post and to emigrate to West Germany. He accepted a position as Ordentlicher Professor at the University of Gießen. In 1972 he was called to a similar position in Basel, where he remained until his death in 1989 (Susanna Burghartz ed., Spannungen und Widersprüche: Gedenkschrift für Franti ˇsek Graus, 1992); “Frantisek Graus,” Der Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für Mittelalterliche Geschichte 1951–2001: Die Mitglieder und ihr Werk: eine bio-bibliographische Dokumentation, vol. 2, ed. Jürgen Petersohn, 2001, 149–57). In his introduction, Graus rejects any method that relies solely upon direct description of social behavior or phenomena. Rather, the historian of mentalité works to decipher the opinions (Meinungen) and attitudes (Verhaltensweisen) brought forth by the range of expectations (Erwartungshorizont) within a given collective (Mentalitäten, 14–16). Mentalities remain one level of abstraction removed from opinions and attitudes. Opinions and attitudes may be described, but mentalities can only be tested by the analysis of opposites within the “bandwidth” of social and moral expectations. Graus seeks to define mentalité negatively against most other traditions in the context of historiographical praxis. Thus mentalities are not directly accessible through ideologies, dogmas or doctrines, which are codified by definition. They cannot be limited to a social history of ideas, nor can they be articulated by the members of collectives themselves. They cannot be defined exclusively against cultural notions of “the Other.” Models of national character and class structure also fail ultimately because of regional and social variants (Mentalitäten, 17–19). Graus also opposes as untenable past attempts to define a particular Zeitgeist, even as he rejects the exclusive application of the longue durée. Instead he prefers the comparative study of differing attitudes within smaller manifestations of a social collective. As he asserts, “What can be historically determined is always only a conglomerate of components with differing temporal dimensions, a ‘contemporaneousness of noncontemporary elements’” (Mentalitäten, 23). Graus finally arrives at the following definition: “Mentality is the collective voice of long-term attitudes and opinions articulated by individuals within groups. They are never uniform, often contradictory, and form specific internalized patterns. Mentalities find expression both in specific receptivity to certain stimuli as well as in varieties of reactions. They cannot be articulated by insiders, but they can be tested and verified” (Mentalitäten, 17). Although the least vulnerable of all theories of mentality to deconstructive challenges, Graus’s theory becomes problematical in its application. Indeed, several historians cited in this article do not meet Graus’s criteria. Nonetheless, Graus’s introduction is useful

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in combating the overgeneralization and unsystematic application of criteria that undercut the effectiveness of earlier mentality studies. The Russian medievalist Aaron Gurevich’s (1923; Moscow, USSR) essays on historical anthropology, although hampered by his limited access to contemporary scholarship during the Cold War, are innovative in their consistent application of theory to the new historiography (Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, 1992). Born in Moscow to a secular Jewish family, Gurevich overcame anti-semitism and to complete his studies in medieval history at the University of Moscow, earning his doctorate in 1950. Unable to find employment in Moscow, he took a position in Kaliningrad at the provincial university. In Kaliningrad he developed his interests in Old Norse literature, the subject of his successful postdoctoral dissertation in 1966. He taught at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy for two years before moving to Institute of World History at the Moscow Academy of Sciences (Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aaron Gurevich,” JMEMS 35 [2005]: 122–157; Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz, Moderne Konturen historischer Anthropologie: Eine vergleichende Studie zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J., 1994). At the heart of Gurevich’s critical enterprise is the search for mentalité as Weltanschauung or world view à la Max Weber. This search necessarily occupies itself with collectives, for “a world-view is not so much possessed by individuals as it is the possessor of them” (Historical Anthropology, xiii). For Gurevich, historical anthropology transforms traditional historiography in three essential areas: the nature of sources, the self-awareness of the historian, and the conscious choice of cultural phenomena. First, sources are to be evaluated much more broadly, according to the model of semiotics; they transcend documents to encompass all possible artifacts. Furthermore, they must be examined “not as inanimate artifacts but as the creation of the human psyche.” In this way the interdisciplinarity of Bloch and Braudel finds its complement in the diversity of sources themselves. Second, historians must never lose sight of their own cultural backgrounds and biases as they wrestle with medieval alterity. Like Graus, Gurevich aims here to create a dialogue between the present subject and its historical subjects which arises inevitably in the intellectual tensions of misunderstanding. He traces this reciprocity of past and present back to Huizinga, but locates its theoretical exposition in the aesthetic theory of Bakhtin. Third, Gurevich acknowledges the indebtedness of the mentalité-historians to Marxist social history, especially in their focus on conjoncture and collectives. For Gurevich, authentic historiography strives to decipher the world view of popular culture. At the same time he does not exclude the history of elites from the

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process, preferring a dialectic between elite and popular history. Finally, gurevich decries the “dehumanization” of history at the hands of both doctrinaire Marxists and the Annales school. “The entire range of human moods, beliefs, convictions, values and moral judgments should form part of the structure of historical explanation” (Historical Anthropology, 12). C. Landmark Mentalité-Studies within the Annales Tradition Any discussion of scholarship on mentalité by medieval historians begins with Marc Bloch (1886; Lyon, France – 1944; Saint-Didier-de-Formans, France), French historian and co-founder of the Annales school of historiography. Born in Lyon into an Alsatian family of assimilated Jewish intellectuals, Bloch grew up in Paris. His superior performance in the elite lycée Louis-leGrand won him early entrance to the world-famous Ecole Normale Supérieure. Bloch spent 1908 studying in Berlin and Leipzig before returning to Paris for three years of dissertation work with Thiers Foundation support. In 1912 Bloch obtained a one-year appointment to the lycée in Montpellier. His subsequent assignment to the lycée of Amiens in the Picardy was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. In the next four years he saw combat in Champagne and Algeria and was awarded the Legion of Honor. Following the war Bloch took a position as head of the Institute of the Middle Ages at the French university in Strasbourg. Here he made the acquaintance of Lucien Febvre. The highlight of their collaboration was the founding of the Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale, in 1929, which would, under various editors as the Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, transform the study of history in the 20th century. In 1936 Bloch followed Febvre to Paris, taking a post at the Sorbonne as professor of economic history. In World War II Bloch fought on behalf of his country until its defeat and occupation. Sometime in late 1942 he joined the French resistance and was captured in Paris and executed by the Gestapo in 1944. The influence of Bloch’s historiography has been profound and immense. Although his research was limited by his military service, he still produced major works on royalty and miraculous healing (Les rois thamaturges, 1924; The Royal Touch, 1973); on French rural history (Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, 1931; French Rural History, 1966); and on the social structure of western and central Europe (La societé féodale, 1939/1940; Feudal Society, 1961). In Les rois thaumaturges, Bloch “incorporated insights from medicine, psychology, and anthropology into his investigation of the origins, development, and durability of the gigantic fausse nouvelle, the belief in the royal miracle of the healing of scrofula” (Fink, Mark Bloch: A Life in History, 1989, 109). “Because of Bloch’s use of the Durkheimian term ‘collective

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consciousness’ and his search for evidence in a wide variety of documents, Les rois has also been termed a forerunner of what is imprecisely termed the history of mentalités” (Fink, Marc Bloch, 111). Innovative but controversial in Les caractères originaux was Bloch’s division of medieval French society into three rural orders, influenced more by geography and culture than by races or national origins. His decision to focus almost exclusively on the peasantry, as well as his use of conditions documented in the recent past as a means of interpreting medieval conditions have provoked criticism (Norman F. Cantor, “The French Jews. Louis Halphen and Marc Bloch,” Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, 1992, 118–60, here 145–6). La société féodale, Bloch’s masterful two-volume study of feudalism and its unifying principles, begins with a portrait of European geopolitics centered around conditions of disruption and destruction brought about by persistent Moslem, Magyar, and Norse incursions. The chapter on material conditions analyzes in broad strokes the economic conditions of the time. Bloch then turns to mental landscapes, notions of time and space, varying systems of justice and inheritance, the oral tradition, the symbiosis of Latinity and vernaculars, and customs of the family, all of this before examining the attributes of vassalage and the fief. The second volume concerns itself with sociopolitical factors, the transformation of the nobility, and the evolution of political organizations and judicial institutions. The result is a vivid and yet dynamic portrait of a way of life which evolved in response to social and economic disruption over several hundred years. Bloch’s Apologie pour l’histoire, ou, Métier d’historien, 1949 (The Historian’s Craft, 1980) sets forth with admirable clarity his approach to history and, by implication, to mentalité. As Norman Cantor reflects, “[The Historian’s] Craft became the clarion call for a generation of transatlantic historians who gave free rein to the historical imagination, who used concepts from the social and behavioral sciences as vehicles of exploration, who disdained narrative history for structural analysis, and who wrote social history from data – some of them quantitative – that revealed patterns of human behavior” (Inventing the Middle Ages, 1991, 141). Bloch borrowed methods from Vidalian geography and Durkheimian sociology, but with important modifications. “Rather than examining landscapes to uncover an explanatory enchaînement leading to geographical laws, he hoped [through reference to geography] to add some concreteness to his understanding of a particular social reality … Unlike Durkheimian sociology, he refused to make a strict separation between the individual and the social and argued that as a study of conscious beings, history must examine motives.” (Susan W. Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and

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Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines, 1996, 177–79). Bloch’s enduring legacy is reflected in the interdisciplinary approach to history which evolved through the work of Febvre’s protégé Braudel and the “third generation” of annalistes – Le Goff, Duby, and Le Roy Durie – into the predominate historiography in France and in the United States. Now being eclipsed by changing demographics, the consolidation of feminist approaches within the American medieval academy, and the growing interest in medieval-Byzantine, medieval-Jewish, and medieval-Arabic studies, Bloch’s legacy helped to shape the course of medieval history during the last half of the 20th century. Among the “Third Generation” of annalistes, Jacques Le Goff’s prolific research on multifarious aspects of medieval life earned him the title “cultural anthropologist of medieval Europe.” His approach, known as “historical anthropology,” combines methodologies of the new historiography, economics, and sociology. Of his own nascent years as a medievalist, Le Goff has said, “The concept of ‘civilisation’ appealed to me. A cultural approach, the notion even of civilization, the crossing of disciplines, carried with it a sense of the living, of bringing people and a social fabric back to life …” (Jacques Le Goff, My Quest for the Middle Ages, 2003; À la recherche du Moyen Âge, 2006, 10). The interdisciplinary totality which Le Goff calls “civilisation” becomes accessible through the modes in which it is represented. “Here is a historian who has taken the most concrete of medieval realities – time, space, work, trade, the body, social order, institutions – and studied them as perceived realities, as the products and vehicles of representation” (Stuart Clark, “Le Goff, Annales, and ‘the Future,’” The Work of Jacques Le Goff, ed. Miri Rubin, 1997, 261). Le Goff’s goal in his researches on medieval mentalities has been to describe convincingly “the attitudes and sensitivities of a people as they were shaped by a certain economic and technical conditioning, by a social structure, and by the antagonism of dominant forces” (Lester little, review of Le Goff’s Le civilisation,” Speculum 42 [1967]: 175–77, here 176). Also noteworthy is the transcendent role le goff assumed as “intellectual authority” and “indispensable cultural touchstone” for France, Italy and a large segment of the progressive medievalist community in the United States (André Vauchez, “Le Goff and Italy,” The Work of Jacques Le Goff, ed. Miri Rubin, 1997, 71–76, here 71). Born in Toulon to an academic family – his father was professor at a lycée – , Le Goff took preparatory classes for the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Marseilles before spending several months with the maquis in the Alps. After Paris was liberated he enrolled at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, beginning his studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1945. He studied at the Uni-

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versity of Prague from 1947–48. Still in the process of completing his dissertation, Le Goff obtained a one-year appointment to the lycée in Amiens, studied in Oxford (1951–2) and at the Ecole française in Rome (1952–3) before occupying a position in the Faculty of Letters at Lille from 1954–1959. In 1962, he took a position at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He succeeded Fernand Braudel as director in 1972 and also served for many years as editor of the flagship journal of the new historiography, Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (Miri Rubin, ed., The work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, 1997; Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz, Moderne Konturen historischer Anthropologie: eine vergleichende Studie zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J. Gurjewitsch, 1994). Le Goff’s wonderfully nuanced portrait of medieval temporality, “Temps de l’Église et temps du marchand,” Annales. HSS 15 [1960]: 417–33 (“Merchant’s Time and Church Time in the Middle Ages,” Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages, 1980, 29–42), set a standard for studies in mentalities. Le Goff contrasts the canonical hours of the convent, with their unequal divisions and variations influenced by the liturgical year and the seasons with the precise division of the day into hours controlled by the evolving technology of the clock. At once evocative of the differences in world view the understanding of time can evoke, Le Goff’s article also achieves a dynamic aspect of mentalities in conflict and in transition. Even more influential was Le Goff’s La naissance du Purgatoire, 1981 (The Birth of Purgatory, 1984) in which he traces the conceptual roots and social implications of the transformation of the Christian cosmos through the emergence of a new dimension of afterlife. “Le Goff argued that the rise of the idea of purgatory formed part of ‘the transformation of feudal Christianity,’ that there were connections between intellectual change and social change. At the same time he insisted on the ‘mediation’ of ‘mental structures,’ ‘habits of thought,’ or ‘intellectual apparatus;’ in other words, mentalities, noting the rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of new attitudes to time, space, and number, including what he called ‘the book-keeping of the after-life’” (Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution, 1990, 72). Among the problematical aspects of Le Goff’s study remain the rather arbitrary process by which he arrives at purgatory’s genesis, the paucity of references to the cultural contexts from which tales of the afterlife emerged, and the lack of analysis of the sociological dimensions of purgatory itself (Richard Trexler, review of The Birth of Purgatory,” AE 13 (1986): 160–61, here 160). The essays contained in Le Goff’s L’imaginaire médiéval: essais (1985), provide a number of examples of his “scientific” method: “First, as he himself claims, he gives priority to the history of words: “The history of words is

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history itself. When terms appear or disappear or change their meaning, the movement of history stands revealed … A second element of Le Goff’s method entails an effort to combine a structuralist’s eye for codes “vestimentary,” alimentary, linguistic) and oppositions (nature and culture; country and city; left and right; father and son; inside and outside) with a historian’s eye for change and context” (Sharon Farmer, review of The Medieval Imagination, AHR [1990]: 473–74, here 474). In his longer historical surveys of the Middle Ages, such as La civilisation de l’Occident medieval, 1977, Le Goff has argued for the importance of what he calls popular culture as an object of historical study. “At the heart of Le Goff’s … vision is an argument for two distinct cultures, the one clerical and bookish, the other popular, oral, and customary, the first accessible through traditional intellectual and spiritual categories, the second mainly through cultural anthropology and comparative religions” (John van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” AHR 91 [1986]: 519–52, here 529). Le Goff’s vision of the Middle Ages has been attacked mainly on three grounds: He allegedly tries to inject an anachronistically Marxist interpretation into his saga of popular culture; through his refusal to write about the elites, he paints a one-side, very dark and overly primitive portrait of the complexity of medieval life; and he assumes that “folkloric” sources, “despite stereotyping, repetition, and elaboration, preserve a core of authentic experience and belief alien to the Christian establishment,” something that is essentially unprovable (Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages, 1986, 531). Certainly the most visible of all medievalists active in the study of mentalities, the French historian Georges Duby (Paris; 1919 – Provence, 1996), was perhaps the leading practitioner of la nouvelle histoire in post-war medieval studies. Born in Paris, Duby passed his agrégation in Lyon in 1942. His doctoral work was done at the Sorbonne, where his thesis was approved in 1953. He subsequently was appointed to the Chair of Medieval Social Studies in the History Department at Aix-en-Provence, where he founded the Center for Study of Mediterranean Societies. In 1970, Duby received a coveted post at the Collège de France, from which he developed extensive collaboration and networks of support with colleagues from Belgium, Britain, the United States, and Eastern Europe. In 1974, he was inducted into the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres and at the height of his fame, in 1987, to the Académie française. Duby died at his country home in Provence in 1996 (Claudie Duhamel-Amado and Guy Lobrichon, Georges Duby, l’écriture de l’histoire, 1996; “Georges Duby,” EH, ed. Kelly Boyd, 1999, 326–28).

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Duby’s research may be said to have proceeded in three phases, all of which touch upon some aspect of mentalité. His initial research into the society of Macon and rural economies (La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise, 1953; Lineage, nobility, and chivalry in the region of Macon, 1976), and L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident medieval (1962; Rural Economy and Country Life, 1968), undertook the analysis of traditional historical sources with the subjective style of his idol Marc Bloch. Duby’s middle period (Le Dimanche de Bouvines, 1973; The Legend of Bouvines, 1990), and Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme, 1978 (The Three Orders, 1980), featured intensive involvement with the possibilities of mentalité. In his final phase, Duby moved beyond Bloch to work on the boundaries between mentalité and the history of ideologies (Le chevalier, la femme et le prître: le mariage dans la France féodale, 1981; The knight, the lady, and the priest, 1983), and Mâle Moyen Âge (1988; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, 1994). In his contribution to ego-histoire, Duby argues against any access to historical truth through pure objectivity. Instead he sees the obligation of animation falling to the historian, making connections in order that history comes alive (Georges Duby, L’histoire continue, 1991; History Continues, 1994, 43–4). Indeed, Duby never shied away from the use of conjecture and speculation to fill in the gaps that documents inevitably leave, a tendency that caused his work to be questioned by traditional historians. At the same time, Duby urges historians to strive for as much objectivity as possible in their work with sources and artifacts (History Continues, 44–5). Duby’s middle phase was dominated by a methodological transformation from the re-creation of economic and social conditions through distillation of sources to the exposition of medieval collective attitudes. “Until then I had expected the documents to instruct me as to the truth of the facts whose memory it was their mission to preserve. I now realized that this truth is inaccessible and that the historian can approach it only through a mediator, the witness, whom he must examine not as to the facts he relates but as to the manner in which he reports them” (History continues, 82). Through the evaluation of the narrator’s manner, Duby then would attempt to decipher the attitudes of the collectives that the narrator described. In his book Li Dimanche Duby focuses not so much on the “battle that made France” itself as on the reception and depiction of the battle over the centuries. “The ‘newness’ of Duby’s event history is found in the function which Duby attributes to the event. It certainly does not correspond to the extraordinary, singular, change-producing event of traditional historical narratives, nor, however, does it correspond to those iterable ‘elements’ that are the subject matter of serial history. Duby’s third way, inspired by anthropology, consists in using

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the battle as a ‘révélateur’ in order to learn something about the culture – or in this concrete example, about feudal society at the beginning of the thirteenth century” (Axel Ruth and Jocelyn Holland, “The Battle of Bouvines: Event History vs. Problem History,” MLN 116 (2001): 816–43). Duby’s particular focus is the mentalité of knights and soldiers: “I observed them as Margaret Mead had observed the Manus” (History continues, 93). In his classic study Les trois ordres, Duby sought to “measure the influence of mental categories on the fate of human societies,” (94) producing “not simply a history of the idea of trifunctionality,” but rather “an attempt to trace the ways in which the meaning of the trifunctional model changed according to the social location of its user, whereby it came to validate entirely different sets of propositions about the ideal nature of society” (Gabriele Spiegel, review of Les trois orders, AHR 87 [1982]: 263). Duby sought to illuminate “the relations between the material and the mental in the course of social change” by tracing the evolution of traditional representations of medieval society in terms of three orders, those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Of particular interest to scholars of mentalities is Duby’s research into how the metaphor of the three orders was continually rediscovered, reinvented, and employed to justify any number of differing social and feudal structures. In this way Duby illuminates the dynamic interaction between mentalities and ideology and attempts to show how this interaction was exploited to consolidate power relationships. Both studies stand as landmark achievements of mentalité. Duby devoted himself in his subsequent research to aristocratic marriage and gender issues. His analysis of aristocratic attitudes towards marriage (Le chevalier, la femme et le prítre, 1981, and Mâle Moyen Age, 1988) focused more on ideological concerns and less upon the attitudes of larger collectives, even if the emphasis remained on the representations of the societal and spiritual functions of marriage as they developed in the High Middle Ages. Although he rejected pure materialism, Duby nonetheless examined medieval marriage customs through the quasi-Marxist lens of class perceptions. Hampered by his insistence on traditional sources and by his unwillingness to accept basic tenets of feminist medieval studies, Duby’s two forays into the mentalité of gender were less enthusiastically received, (Jo Ann McNamara, Speculum 74 (1999): 732–3). Nonetheless, Duby’s willingness to explore the mentalities of medieval women makes him almost unique among practitioners of mentalité. The five-volume anthology, Histoire des femmes en occident (1991; A History of Women in the West, 1992) which he coedited with Michelle Perrot, includes a number of insightful gender studies.

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Yet another landmark in the history of mentalité came with the publication of Philippe Ariès’s L’enfant et la vie familiale (1960; Centuries of Childhood, 1962). Although not a study of medieval mentalities, Ariès’s claim that no true sense of childhood (le sentiment de l’enfance) developed until the 17th century sparked a world-wide debate regarding medieval and early-modern mentalities. Scores of books and articles on medieval notions of childhood and family life have succeeded in refuting Ariès’s generalizations regarding the Middle Ages, but the influence of his work on medieval studies of childhood and death remains unquestioned. Even a selective survey of mentalité must include Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s (1929; Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, France) innovative reading of inquisitional interrogation records in the form of a anthropological study of community. His Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, 1975 (Montaillou, 1978) greatly accelerated two important trends in the study of mentalities: the move towards microhistory, that is, towards achieving a totality of data for a smaller geographical or social area; and the ability to uncover socio-historical data by reading between and against the intentions of the documentary source. Son of a Norman family of aristocratic landowners – his father served as Minister of Agriculture under the Vichy regime – Le Roy Ladurie attended the Collège Saint-Joseph in Caen, the Lycèe Henri-IV in Paris and the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux before earning his agrégation in History from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He went on to study history at the Sorbonne, receiving his doctorate for his thesis on the peasants of Languedoc. Between 1955 and 1963 he occupied a series of secondary and university posts in Montpellier, as well as an adjunct position at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). In 1973 Le Roy Ladurie was awarded the Chair for Modern History at the prestigious Collège de France. He also served as the Director of the Bibliothèque nationale from 1987 to 1994. Le Roy Ladurie is not only one of the most influential annalistes of the Third Generation, he also has become one of the leading intellectuals and commentators of the Parisian cultural scene. Le Roy Ladurie concentrated his research on the early modern period, focusing on the sociological effects of climate change and on the lives of the peasants, but in Montaillou, he draws on the inquisitional records of Bishop Jacques Fournier, the future Pope Benedict XII, who kept meticulous and detailed notes of interviews with 114 residents of Montaillou and the surrounding area of Languedoc. Le Roy Ladurie’s innovation was to read the records as artifacts of peasant society rather than as documents of the inquisition. The result is “a fascinating picture of the social and cultural structure

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of a backward, illiterate, unsanitary and rather disagreeable Pyrenean village society of the early fourteenth century” (P.S. Lewis, Review of Montaillou, EHR 92 [1977]: 371–73). Categories explored include marriage and love, death, childhood, social relationships, religion, morality, and magic, set against the backdrop of the longue durée of geography and climate. Le Roy Ladurie’s surprising discovery was that the domus, “a domestic group of co-residents” served as the “unifying concept in social, family, and cultural life,” more important than social hierarchy, religious affiliation or economic status (Montaillou, 1978: 25). Three aspects of the book were especially controversial: 1) Le Roy Ladurie’s colloquial, deliberately unscholarly style, which made the book accessible beyond the narrow community of scholars; 2) his decision to eschew a traditional scholarly apparatus; 3) and his assumption that the villagers’ testimony could be taken largely at face value, even though it was recorded in a different language by scribes with their own political and religious agendas (Leonard Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited,” Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis, 1981, 119–40). Nevertheless, Montaillou endures as a classic of medieval microhistory and as a monument to the insights available through the application of techniques developed for the study of mentalities. The Polish historian Bronislaw Geremek made especially significant contributions to our understanding of marginalized lives in late-medieval Paris. His book His Ludzie marginesu w âsredniowiecznym Paryçzu XIV–XV wiek (1971; The Margins of Society in Late-Medieval Paris, 1987) applied Le Roy Ladurie’s microhistorical approach to a single urban environment, a method also employed with considerable success by early modern historians like Natalie Davis and Carlo Ginzburg. Born in Warsaw, Geremek received his degree in history from the University of Warsaw in 1954. From 1956–1958 he engaged in graduate studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He subsequently earned his doctorate in medieval history from the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1960. After serving as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Polish Culture at the Sorbonne between 1960 and 1965, geremek returned to Warsaw, where he held a number of posts at the Historical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences between 1965 and 1985. In 1985 he resigned his posts to serve the Polish state before returning to the Historical Institute and being awarded a full professorship in 1990. In 1992–3 he was visiting professor at the Collège de France. Geremek “uses every possible source to recreate the milieu and the social topography of the late-medieval Parisian underworld, including its criminals, clerks and bohemians, beggars, and prostitutes,” suppplement-

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ing late-14th-century judicial registers with “hospital accounts, chronicles, and literary sources, such as François Villon’s poetry” to weave together “a coherent picture of the low life of late-medieval Paris … The great strength of the book is the author’s care in creating the environment in which the marginals functioned” (Barbara Hanawalt, review of The Margins of Society, Speculum 64 [1989]: 947–49). As an example of mentalité, Geremek’s research was groundbreaking in its devotion to marginal collectives, sparking a series of comparable studies such as Michael Mollat’s on the poor of the Middle Ages, Miri Rubin’s on alms and hospitals of medieval Cambridge, and Leah Otis’ on prostitutes of Languedoc. If anyone may be said to anchor the fourth generation, it would be JeanClaude Schmitt (1946; Colmar, France), a French historian best known for his researches into popular culture of the Middle Ages as well as for his championing of historical anthropology. His approach takes some of its inspiration from mentalité as developed in the work of Bloch and Le Goff. The Alsatian Schmitt studied at the Sorbonne before pursuing graduate studies in paleography at the Ecole nationale des Chartes in Paris. He received his doctorate in history in 1973 and took a position for two years at the L’Ecole pratique des hautes études before becoming an assistant at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales from 1975 to 1983. In 1981 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Schmitt succeeded his mentor Le Goff as head of the EHESS in 1983. Since then he has accepted visiting professorships at several leading universities of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Schmitt’s researches into the cult of Sainte Guinefort, Le saint lévrier: Guinefort (1979; The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, 1983) seek to uncover in sources compiled by the noble elite the roots and motifs of peasant legend as an expression of popular culture. To overcome the limitations of the written sources, schmitt draws upon geography, art, sculpture, architecture and landscape description. Schmitt’s monograph on medieval ghosts, Les revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (1994; Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 1998) is even more wide-ranging, exploring notions of life and death, of the body and the soul, of interiority and exteriority and of kinship. Schmitt’s most influential and also most controversial claim, advanced in his books and in his collection of essays, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: essais d’anthropologie médiévale (2001) is on behalf of what he calls “popular culture,” the solution that he and his mentor le goff proposed for the problem of Christianization. “At the heart of Le Goff’s and Schmitt’s vision is an argument for two distinct cultures, the one clerical and bookish, the other

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popular, oral, and customary, the first accessible through traditional intellectual and spiritual categories, the second mainly through cultural anthropology and comparative religions” (John van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” AHR 91 [1986]: 519–52, here 529). As Schmitt argues, “La ‘Religion’ … ne consiste pas en la conviction privée d’un croyant: c’est un imaginaire social qui contribue, par la représentation (mentale, rituelle, imagée) d’un ailleurs qu’on peut nommer le divin, à ordonner et à légitimer les relations des homes entre eux” (Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Une histoire religieuse du Moyen Âge est-elle possible?,” Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps, 2001, 31–41, here 36). Schmitt prefers a model of cultural conflict and by reading church documents “against themselves” à la Marc Bloch , he demonstrates not only how written language constituted “an extraordinarily powerful tool of control,” but he also wishes to unearth through the use of sociological, anthropological and psychological models the “rituals, myths, spatial and temporal structures” of popular culture which the Christianity was trying to subdue (Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Religion, Folklore, and Society in the Medieval West,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Lester K. little and Barbara H. rosenwein, 1998, 376–87). D. Contributions Outside of the Annales School It is hard to overestimate the influence of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872; Groningen, Netherlands – 1945; De Steeg, Netherlands) on mentalité. Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 1919 (The Waning/Autumn of the Middle Ages, 1924/1996) stands as one of the early classics of medieval mentalité-studies (Walter Prevenier, “Johan Huizinga en de geschiedschrijving der 20e eeuw: Dwarsligger of kind van zijn tijd?,” DVG 11 [1973]: 74–82). Son of a physician and professor at the University of Groningen, Huizinga studied Indian literature and culture at the University, earning his doctorate with a thesis on Sanskrit drama. From 1897 to 1905 he taught high school in Haarlem, where he spent his final two years as an unpaid lecturer in Indiology at the University of Amsterdam and published on Sanskrit and Indian culture. In 1905 he was called to the chair of Netherlands history at the University of Groningen, where he focused his research on the early history of Haarlem. In 1914 he took the chair in general history at the University of Leiden. He spent his remaining years in Leiden until the German occupation closed the Unversity in 1940. In 1942 Huizinga resigned his position and was subsequently arrested for insubordination and sent to a detention camp. He was freed in 1942 and spent the final three years of his life in De Steeg near Arnhem, where he died in 1945.

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Huizinga’s unique approach to history had its roots in three areas: 1) He approached medieval and early modern history as an Orientalist, having come to Sanskrit through Arabic, thereby ensuring that his view of culture and mentalité was cosmopolitan; 2) He was himself a skilled graphic artist, which meant he approached the Middle Ages with aesthetic sensibility; 3) Through his long friendship with Andre Jolles, he was comfortable with a proto-structuralist, interdisciplinary approach to cultural history. In his brief reminisces, “My Path to History,” Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays (1968), 244–76, he downplays his erudition, the depth of his historical training, and his Latinity. Huizinga’s masterpiece, the Herfsttij, was originally focused on the art of the Van Eyks, but evolved into a study of “the entire (chiefly aristocratic and Francophone) cultural sensibility of much of northwestern Europe” (Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons, “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages,” Speculum 74 [1999]: 587–620, here 606). The reader is struck by the preeminence of the sensual in Huizinga’s world. “Just as the contrast between summer and winter was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence anymore, not does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout” (Huizinga, Autumn, 1996, 2). Huizinga’s principal aim was to evoke a culture caught between the impossibilities of world denial and world reform. “There remained only the alternative of dreaming – for those who could afford to dream – in a world ruled by darkness and perceived by its inhabitants only through an impossibly polarized sensorium and in sharply contrasting colors” (Peters and Simons, “The New Huizinga” [1999]: 608). Huizinga’s use of vivid anecdotes drawn from a multitude of sources brings behaviors and attitudes to life which are incomprehensible to modern sensibilities. Huizinga’s analysis of these incongruous actions underscores the otherness of the later Middle Ages, not only in contrast to modernity but also to the more rational and ordered interactions of the 12th century. Modern scholars of mentalities would reject Huizinga’s presupposition that such generalization was possible for the collective of all medieval Europeans. They would also question his selective and sometimes undifferentiated use of biographical sources. Still, after Huizinga, it was impossible to think about the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in the same way. The image of the Dark Ages had been replaced by descriptions of processes of decline and change, focused largely upon behaviors and attitudes. The German historian Arno Borst’s (1925; Alzenau, Germany) attempt to introduce the term Lebensformen (modes of life) into the historiographical

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lexicon resulted in an unsuccessful but nonetheless interesting foray into the study of mentalité (Lebensformen im Mittelalter, 1973). After serving in the Wehrmacht during the war, Borst began his university studies in Göttingen, earning his doctorate in 1951 for a thesis on Cathar dualism. Herbert Grundmann called him to Münster as his Assistent, where his massive study of attitudes towards language and meaning, Der Turmbau von Babel, won him his Habilitation in 1961. After a year as a visiting professor in Münster, Borst was called to a chair at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he became disillusioned by the political turmoil of the 60’s and moved to the University of Konstanz in 1968. In 1990 he retired to Emeritus status, continuing his association with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Constance Work Group for Medieval History, and the foundation he had set up in his own name for the support of the study of history (Arno Borst, “My Life,” Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics, and Artists in the Middle Ages, 1992, 244–50; in German: Barbaren, Ketzer, und Artisten: Welten des Mittelalters, 1988; “Arno borst,” Der Konstanzer Arbeitskreis für Mittelalterliche Geschichte 1951–2001: Die Mitglieder und ihr Werk: Eine bio-bibliographische Dokumentation, vol. 2, ed. Jürgen petersohn, 2001, 45–54). Lebensformen find definition in the “attempts of a collective to satisfy essential needs of existence such as eating and drinking; furthermore they consist of conventions and institutions of society such as codes of ethics or family structures; finally they find expression in the behavior of the community towards foreigners” (Lebensformen, 1973, 19). Crucial for borst is the notion that Lebensformen are “not immutable ethical norms, but rather historically determined rules of behavior” within communities which are continually changing. For each concept or category such as “space,” “rights,” “death, “teachers,” or “Mohammedans,” Borst provides several brief anecdotes or excerpts drawn from a wide variety of documentary sources. Particularly valuable is the open-ended nature of his analysis, in which he highlights interesting modes of medieval alterity without insisting that on their universal applicability for the Middle Ages. But Borst’s approach also does not link his insights to the totality of attitudes within particular communities, which lessens its applicability in practical terms and runs the risk of his commentaries lapsing into superficiality or irrelevance With the notable exception of Duby’s five-volume anthology, Histoire des femmes, 1991, which he co-edited with Michelle Perrot, both the analysis of women’s collectives and notable contributions by feminist medievalists have remained on the margins of mentalité-studies. The work of Caroline Walker Bynum (1941; Atlanta, Georgia), an American historian whose pioneering research in the 1970’s and 1980’s transformed our understanding of medi-

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eval notions of gender, the body, and their spiritual significance, illustrates how the methods of mentalité can find useful application in the study of medieval attitudes towards gender. A product of the Atlanta public schools, Bynum spent two years at Radcliffe College before receiving her B.A. from the University of Michigan. She did her Masters and doctoral work at Harvard, earning her Ph.D. in 1969. Her first teaching positions were in the history department at Harvard (1969–1973) and then in the Department of Church History at the Harvard Divinity School (1973–1974). Bynum then moved to the University of Washington in Seattle where she was awarded tenure and a full professorship. Since 1988 she has been Full Professor of History at Columbia University, holding the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Chair from 1990 to 1999. A winner of numerous teaching awards, Bynum is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She has served as an essential link between the disciplines of history, art history and women’s studies among American medievalists. In Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1982); Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987); and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (1991), Bynum “posits a fundamental gender dichotomy in cultural forms which produces in women a greater bodily sensibility, a heightened awareness of the flesh, and a privileged attachment to the meaning of food … This dichotomy could be transcended in Christian culture only by that transcender of all polarities, Christ, who combines human and divine, priestly man and nurturing woman.” (Miri Rubin, “Medieval Bodies, Why Now and How?” The Work of Jacques Le Goff, ed. Miri Rubin, 1997, 209–219, here 212). Holy Feast and Holy Fast, to cite just one example, “was in fact an argument against isolating a single aspect of religious practice such as food abstention both from other food practices (such as the Eucharist, food multiplication miracles, food distribution, etc.) and from other forms of denial and celebration (such as extreme asceticism or mystical ecstasy)” (Carolyn Walker Bynum, “My Life and Works,” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance, 2005, 995–1006, here 997). The value of Bynum’s research for feminist approaches to mentalité lies in her productive interaction with the work of Victor Turner in sociology as well as with traditional art-historical approaches to gender, sexuality, and the body. She has shown how descriptions and visions of mystical interactions with the Divine were not necessarily gendered, how women’s asceticism could be linked to an innovative women’s spirituality of imitatio, and how women’s understanding of their own bodies did not necessarily conform to modern notions of gender and sexuality. The response of Bynum’s

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feminist-medievalist critics, who argued for more emphasis on feminist critical sensibility for the analysis of medieval ascetic practices like fasting and self-mortification, has generated a lively debate as well as productive studies on the meaning of the body related to mentalité. Although scholars of mentalities always have drawn extensively from research in sociology, economics, and geography, and more recently from the history of architecture and archeology, there has been less productive interaction with art historians. (Notable exceptions are Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 1921, and Duby’s Les temps des cathedrals, 1976.) The approach of Jeffrey Hamburger (1957; London, UK), an American art historian, to medieval religious life exemplifies a particularly promising path in religious and cultural history related to mentalité. Hamburger attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven before spending his undergraduate years at Yale. He did his Masters and doctoral work in Art History at Yale. His prizewinning dissertation on the Rothschild Canticles appeared in the Yale University Press and won the John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book from the Medieval Academy of America. Hamburger first taught at Oberlin College from 1986 to 1997 before moving to the University of Toronto for two years, where he became a full professor. Since 2000 he has taught in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. In his book Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, 1997, Hamburger attempts to reconstruct the visual repertoire of the Dominican nuns of Walburga in all of its aspects. For Hamburger’s nuns, images assumed their traditional functions, namely as illuminations, to depict significant moments in salvation history and in the classical Gregorian sense as signa that “spur the memory and the affections of those unable to rely on words alone.” Small drawings, sculptures and dolls served the nuns as aids to devotion, as commentaries on devotion, and as spurs to memory and meditation, but they also assumed the function of keepsakes, amulets, and talismans. Hamburger’s book is not only interdisciplinary in its merging of historical, art historical and literary historical analysis; it also focuses upon a social collective at the turn of the 15th century in order to map some of the features of its spiritual sensibility. In 1999 Nuns as Artists won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society as well as the Otto Gründler Prize from the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Hamburger’s monumental study of medieval religious iconography, The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval German (1998) makes an enduring contribution to the interaction of text and image in fashioning spiritual vocabulary and attitudes in women’s religious collectives of the later Middle Ages.

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E. The Future of Studies in Mentalities Fundamental tenets of mentalité such as interdisciplinarity, the integrative analysis of documents with other artifacts, the focus on collective consciousness, especially outside elite circles, and the self-conscious exercise of reconstruction against the literal sense of the text have won widespread acceptance both in medieval and early modern studies. The proliferation of such methods also has served to highlight their limitations: 1) an over-emphasis on otherness at the expense of long-term continuity; 2) a tendency to overgeneralize about collective attitudes; 3) an overly simplistic equivocation of documentary assertions with collective consciousness; and 4) a failure to develop underlying theoretical constructs and a consistent methodology (Leonard Boyle, “Montaillou Revisited,” Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis, 1981, 119–40) and John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” AHR 91 [1986]: 519–52). In recent decades Mentalité has evolved into more of a method than a movement, having been absorbed largely into historical anthropology for the purpose of studying popular culture (Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Religion, Folklore, and Society in the Medieval West,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, 1998, 376–87). Nonetheless, the methods of mentalité remain essential tools for medievalists interested in the archaeology of medieval attitudes. Select Bibliography Georges Duby, “L’histoire des mentalités,” L’histoire et ses méthodes: Recherche, conservation et critique des têmoignages, ed. Charles Samaran (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 937–66; Philipp Ariès, “L’histoire des mentalités,” La nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1978), 402–23; Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: a History of Ambiguities,” Constructing the Past: Essays in Hstorical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and P. Nora (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 166–80; Frantisek ˇ Graus, Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: methodische und inhaltliche Probleme (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1987); Mentalitäten: Geschichte zur historischen Rekonstruktion geistiger Prozesse, ed. Ulrich Raulff and André Bruguière (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1989); Aaron Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, 2nd ed. (1993; Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 2008); Patrick H Hutton,“History of Mentalities,” Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Witing, ed. Kelly Boyd (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 800–02.

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Metrology

Metrology A. General Outline General Definition. Metrology is the study of measurement. Its historical branch concerns itself with norms and conditions, the objects and methods of measurement, the conversion of old measures into the metric system, and measuring systems themselves, especially in the pre-metric period. There is no independent ‘medieval’ branch of metrology; methodologically, research into the metrology of the Middle Ages is often grouped with research into the early modern period, and even up to the introduction of the metric system in the 19th century, despite significant differences of source material, instruments available and material historical factors. Objects of Study / Thematic Fields. The objects of study for medieval metrologists are the norms and procedures of measurement, as well as the mental systems of order and social practices connected with them. These measurements were used for raw materials, trade goods, and taxable property (lengths, volumes, weights, amounts). Land surveying and town planning also belong here, as well as measurement of money-weights, and time. Medieval scholars of the liberal arts working within musica developed their own theory of measurement. The linguistic expression of the measurement forms constitutes a separate sub-area of research. The medical measurement of the human body inspired by the medieval principle of ordo, and the religiously motivated measurement of acts of piety and fruits of religion, however, constitute a marginal area. Like the ‘measurement’ of literary and musical monuments, they are essentially characterized by an interpretative scheme based on number symbolism and number-based composition, and should be mainly treated from this perspective. B. Central Research Goals The Conversion of Medieval Measurements to Metric: A central aspect of medieval metrology is the conversion of medieval units to metric, with the aim of facilitating reading of the sources. In this respect, metrology is an auxiliary discipline of economic history. Overviews of the medieval and early modern trading weights and measures in England, France and Italy can be found in the work of Ronald Edward Zupko (England: A Dictionary of English Weights and Measures: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Nineteenth Century, 1968; British Weights and Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, 1977; A Dictionary of Weights and Measures for the British Isles: The Middle Ages to the

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Twentieth Century, 1985; France: French Weights and Measures before the Revolution: A Dictionary of Provincial and Local Units, 1978; Italy: Italian Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, 1981). Zupko explains each unit of measurement listed with a short history of their developments, their metric equivalent, a short account of sources and explanation of terminology. Because of the highly summary, concise character, the data must be checked in individual cases. For Germany, see the works of Harald Witthöft (passim), who also always gives metric equivalents. Ulrich Rebstock, “Weights and Measures in Islam,” Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 1997, vol. II, 2255–67, provides information also about medieval traditions in the Islamic world. Reference works on “old” weights and measures do not, as a rule, discuss medieval usage, or do so in such general terms that extreme caution must be observed in using the information they contain. Reconstruction of Medieval Systems of Measurement: For German speaking Europe, Harald Witthöft’s monograph Umrisse einer historischen Metrologie zum Nutzen der wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtlichen Forschung: Maß und Gewicht in Stadt und Land Lüneburg, im Hanseraum und im Kurfürstentum/Königreich Hannover vom 13. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, 2 vols., 1979, is definitive. The author combines the reconstruction of old trading weights and measures in the metric system with the development of an integrated theoretical structure. The positivist conversion of individual instances is accompanied by a depiction of the intrinsic logic and coherence of north-east European system of weights and measures. The author sees its basis as lying in the Carolingian system of money-weight; cf. Harald Witthöft, Münzfuß, Kleingewichte, ponus caroli und die Grundlegung des nordeuropäischen Mass- und Gewichtswesens in fränkischer Zeit, 1984. The systematic logic of the historical system of measures is also emphasized in the introductory volume Introduction à la métrologie historique, ed. Bernard Garnier, Jean-Claude Hocquet, Denis Woronoff, 1989. In this, it is demonstrated by careful analysis that, in French speaking areas, there were always three ensembles of measures competing in the pre-metric age. First, the ‘working measures’ found in daily life; second the measures connected with specific techniques or situations of use; thirdly the official measure based on the pied du Roi, and the livre poids de marc etc. This is placed within a comparative framework in Jean-Claude Hocquet, Anciens systèmes de poids et mesures en Occident, 1992. Social Historical and Integration of Measuring Customs into Daily Life: A social historical and ethnographic perspective is offered by Witold

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Kula, Les mesures et les hommes, trans Joanna Ritt, rev. K. Pomian and J. Revel, 1984, on Polish and French measurements in the 16th and 17th century, which is methodologically fundamental for the Middle Ages also. He considers the social construction of measures, their situational functionality, their objective and symbolic representations as well as the process of measurement, almost without any interest in metrical conversions. The aim is the description of measures between variability and stability. With its concern with how weights and measures were integrated into everyday life, the study corresponds to the historical-semantic interest in the pre-metric measurement terms of Karl Menninger, Zahlwort und Ziffer: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Zahl, 1934 (however, reference has been chiefly made to the second, rev. and extended ed. of 1958, rpt. ed. 1979). Research into numerical words and measurement terminology was last summarized and reviewed by Georg Schuppener, Die Dinge fassbar machen: Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der Maßbegriffe im Deutschen, 2002. The study only partly covers the Middle Ages, and also has no claim to study the sources critically. Material Remains: Medieval measures only survive in small numbers, and are often difficult to date and contextualize. Their study has not produced any coherent scholarly discussion. Most finds and analyses are published disconnectedly in the relevant journals and series. Especially relevant is a monograph (summarizing a series of articles which proceeded it) on stone capicity measures in the French tradition (Germain Darrou, Enquête sur les mesures de capacité en pierre, 2005) as well as the stock-taking by Harald Witthöft, “Das Erfassen der gegenständlichen Überlieferung zur historischen Metrologie im Gebiet des Deutschen Reiches bis 1871: Ein Forschungsvorhaben gefördert durch die Stiftung Volkswagenwerk 1980–1985,” Die historische Metrologie in den Wissenschaften: Philosophie – Architektur und Baugeschichte – Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften – Geschichte des Münz-, Maß- und Gewichtswesens, ed. Harald Witthöft, Ivo Schneider, and Albert Zimmermann 1986, 285–337. History of Quantification: In contrast to the every-day, practical aspect of weights and measures, a fifth research interest centers on showing the beginnings of modern scholarship. Studies in this field are devoted, above all, to the development of learned study of measurement. The thesis that the perception of and emphasis placed on qualitative differences in European society was replaced by a prioritizing of the formulation of quantitative differences in the late Middle Ages is represented by Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600, 1997. A source-based

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analysis of musicological writings of the 14th century with a demonstration of (a) a speculative theory of measures which preceded empirical measurements and (b) the function of music as an epistemological model and be found in Ulrich Taschow, Nicole Oresme und der Frühling der Moderne: Die Ursprünge unserer modernen quantitativ-metrischen Weltaneignungsstrategien und neuzeitlichen Bewusstseins- und Wissenschaftskultur, 2 vols., 2003. Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, 1998 provides a thorough analysis of the medial and metrological function of money in the epistemological context of the 14th century. Statistically and Digitally-Supported Surveys of the Evidence: Finally, and bordering on scientific metrology, there is interest in the statisticalmetrological analysis of historic sources. The first volume of the journal Histoire & mesure (1986ff.) played a foundational role here, especially the opening article by Jean-Philippe Genet, “Histoire, Informatique, Mesure,” Histoire & mesure 1 (1986): 7–18, as did the relevant chapter in Alain Guerrau, À l’avenir d’un passeée incertain: Quelle histoire du moyen âge au XXIe siècle?, 2001, 163–90. Archeometric approaches also belong in this field, cf. Albert Hesse, “Introduction à l’archéométrie,” Historie et mesure 9 (1994): 209–12. The work is chiefly applied in the field of the history of architecture, cf. for example Wolfgang Wiemer, Baugeometrie und Massordnung der Abteikirche Ebrach: Ergebnisse einer Computeranalyse – zugleich Einführung in die Methodik, 1995. C. Terminological Definition The colloquial expression ‘measure’ includes – though the distinction is frequently ignored, either conceptually or explicitly – on the one hand ‘(measurable) quantity’ (‘attribute of a phenomenon, a body or substance, which may be distinguished qualitatively and determined quantitatively’) as well as the ‘unit’ (‘particular quantity, defined and adopted by convention, with which other quantities of the same kind are compared in order to express their magnitudes relative to that quantity’). The ‘measurement’ is the ‘set of operations having the object of determining a value of a quantity’. These definitions are taken from the International Vocabulary of Basic and General Terms in Metrology, ed. International Organisation for Standardization, 1984, 4th ed. (English/French); trans. of 2nd ed. of 1993: Internationales Wörterbuch der Metrologie, ed. Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V., 1994, rpt. 2001 (German/English), a normative publication for scientific-technical usage. The terms and methodology of modern metrology are ultimately derived from Hermann von Helmholtz, “Zählen und Messen, erkenntnistheoretisch betrachtet,” Philosophische Aufsätze, Eduard Zeller zu seinem fünfzigjährigen

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Doctor-Jubiläum gewidmet, 1887, 17–52 (rpt. in Hermann von Helmholtz, Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie, ed. Moritz Schlick, Paul Hertz, 1921, 99–129, rpt. ed. Ecke Bonk 1998). The instrumental and conceptual differences of historical measurement have been made only partly the object of theoretical consideration. Generally, the attempt is made to reconstruct and reproduce the historical conceptions found in the sources (though normally neither coherently nor conceptually ordered). This applies particularly to the work of Harald Witthöft (passim), who historicized the term aequalitas, connected by Charlemagne with the formation of a measurement system, and uses it as a key term. Ludolf Kuchenbuch went one stage further back and, in a series of studies investigated the conceptual achievements of the early seigneurial administration, which underlie all system formation (most recently “Ratio vel numerus: Numerische und rechnerische Aspekte der seigneurialen Güter- und Einkünfteverwaltung im 9. Jahrhundert,” Status und Poetik der Zahl: Ordnungsangebote, Gebrauchsformen und Erfahrungsmodalitäten des ‘numerus’ im Mittelalter, ed. Moritz Wedell, 2010, forthcoming). On the terminological discussion, cf. further Jean-Philippe Massonie, “Introduction à la théorie de la mesure,” Histoire et mesure 3 (1988): 7–18, and the section on the history of measures in Moritz Wedell, Zeigen, zählen und erzählen: Semantische und praxeologische Studien zum numerischen Wissen im Mittelalter, 2010, forthcoming. Franck Jedrzejewski, Histoire universelle de la mesure, 2002, 9–43, developed an epistemological framework for measures from a modern perspective and with the aim of producing a typology. D. History of Scholarship, Schools of Thought, Approaches D1. State of Scholarship a. Literature Reviews Three literature reviews on historical metrology (focused on Germany) have been produced by Harald Witthöft. The first, “Sammelbericht – Literatur zur historischen Metrologie 1945–1982,” VSWG 69 (1982): 515–41, is deepened by an analysis which continues into the middle of the 19th century in “Zur Entwicklung von Gegenstand und Methode der historischen Metrologie und zum Stand der Forschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Acta Metrologiae Historicae: Travaux du 3e Congrès International de la Métrologie Historique (Linz 1983), ed. Gustav Otruba 1985, 5–38, and supplemented by the study “Ökonomie, Währung und Zahl – Wirtschaftgeschichte und historische Metrologie: Ein Literatur- und Forschungsbericht 1980–2007,” Vierteljahrschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 95 (2008): 25–40. The last par-

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ticularly considers monographic research and essentially serves to classify the author’s publication. From a French perspective comes a progress report with historical background: Jean-Claude Hocquet, “La Métrologie, voie nouvelle de la recherche historique,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1990, 59–76. b. Beginnings – up to 1975 Reception of Antiquity in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Modern research into the history of metrology begins with the writings which attempt, from a medical standpoint, to reconstruct antique measures, cf. Georgius Agricola, Schriften über Maße und Gewichte (Metrologie) [1550], trans. Georg Fraustadt and Walter Weber (Georgius Agricola – Ausgewählte Werke 5), 1959; Dominicus Massarius, De ponderibus et mensuris medicinibus libri tres, 1584, with a discussion by Conradus Gesnerus, Mensurae apud veteres Graecos et Latinos scriptores usitatae, liquidorum et aridorum, ita dispositae, ut quae wunt maioris ponderis semper praecedant. The medical interest was supplemented by a historical-theological concern (Heinrich Bünting, De monetis et mensuris Sacrae Scripurae. Das ist/ Ein eigentümliche Ausrechnung und Beschreibung aller Müntz und Masse in heiliger Schrift. Darin (…) alle Korn und Weinmasse der Hebreer/ Griechen und Lateiner/ so viel deren im Alten und Newen Testament gedacht (…), 1583 (rpt. 1632) and shortly thereafter by a further-reaching interest in fiscal and economic history, cf. Rechenbergus Adamus, Historiae rei nummariae veteris scriptores aliquot insigniores ad lectionem sacrarum et profanum scriptorum utiles, 1692, with discussions by Philippus Labbe, Bibliotheca nummaria ex theologis, iuris consultis, medicis ac philologis concinnata et in duas partes tributa: I. De antiquis numismatibus, hebraeis, graecis, armenis, II. De monetis, ponderibus et mensuris, as well as Johannes Caspar Eisenschmid, De ponderibus et mensuris veterum Romanorum, Graecorum, Hebraeorum; (…) nec non de valore pecuniae veteris disquisitio nova (…), 1708 (rpt. 1737), and Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, Traité des mesures itinéraires anciennes et modernes, Paris 1769 (cf. further the bibliography compiled by Witthöft, 55–60). Occasionally a critical methodology for the reconstruction of older measures appears (Matthew Raper, “Enquiry into the Measure of the Roman Foot,” Philosophical Transactions 51 (1759/60): 774–823). Trade-Determined Conversion of Measures, 16th–19th Centuries. Examination of the contemporary measures systems increase into the 18th and 19th century. This is a result of the growth in trans-regional trade, and the resulting necessity to convert local units. The merchant handbooks produced from the late Middle Ages on are a particularly useful source of information. Cf. John E. Dotson, Merchant Culture in Fourteenth Century Venice:

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The Zibaldone da Canal, 1994, and the data in Ars Mercatoria: Handbücher und Traktate für den Gebrauch des Kaufmanns/ Manuels et traités à l’usage des marchands, 1470–1820. Eine analytische Bibliographie in 6 Bänden, ed. Jochen Hoock, Pierre Jeannin, vols. 1–3, 1991, 1993, 2001 have so far appeared. Conversion to the Metric System and New Interest in History. In the 19th century, the adoption of the metric system in continental Europe was the occasion of an intensive preoccupation with the conversion of old measures to new ones (on this cf. supplement 2 of Cahiers de métrologie: Mise en application du système métrique, ed. Désiré Roncin, 1985, and Genèse et diffusion du système métrique. Actes du Colloque: La naissance du système métrique. Musée national des techniques (1989), ed. Bernard Garnier, Jean-Claude Hocquet, 1990). French conversion tables are listed in the library catalogue of Bernard Garnier; on German-speaking Europe see the bibliography by Witthöft, 105–19, for Italy Tavole di Ragguaglio fra le nuove e le antiche misure e fra i nuovi e gli antichi pesi della Repubblica Italiana pubblicate per ordine del Governo, 1803 (Northern Italy) and Angelo Martini, Manuale di metrologia ossia misure, pesi e monete in uso attualmente e anticamente presso tutti i popoli, 1883. At the same time, classical philology produced differently accented working methods and impressive results, especially those of August Boeckh, Metrologische Untersuchungen über Gewichte, Münzfüße und Maße des Alterthums in ihrem Zusammenhange, 1838 (rpt. 1978). Independently of this, Karl Lamprecht’s economic historical source studies appeared towards the end of the century (Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 2 vols, 1886 (rpt. 1969), 3–16, 481–512). These were initially influential within legal historiography, and were used in the debates on the origins of German town constitutions between Gustav Schmoller and Georg von Below, which became bitterly polemical (Georg von Below, Der Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung, 1889, Gustav Schmoller, Die Verwaltung des Maß- und Gewichtswesens im Mittelalter, 1893). Further sources, supporting Schmollers were published by Georg Küntzel, Über die Verwaltung des Maß- und Gewichtswesens in Deutschland während des Mittelalters, 1894. Trends up to the Beginning of the 20th Century. The interest of classical philology in fiscal history continued to influence the classification of metrology within the sub-discipline of numismatics into the 20th century. The trend corresponds to the displacement of research into historical measures from the universities into the local history associations and their publications. These were partly run by interested laypeople, and were periodically disconnected from the methodological trends of the universities (Schauinsland, Deutsche Gaue etc.). French scholarship of the 20th century begins with the work of Paul Guilhiermoz on medieval weights and measures in the French-speaking world (the last being “Remarques diverses

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sur les poids et mesures du Moyen Âge,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 80 [1919]: 5–100) and from the 1920s on has been chiefly concerned with the agrarian measure inherited from antiquity, cf. for example Joseph Bourrilly, Mesures agraires en Provence, 1928; Henri Navel, Recherches sur les anciennes mesures agraires normandes: Acres, vergées et perches, 1932; Marc Bloch, “Le témoignage des anciennes mesures agraires,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (1934): 280–82. The Breadth of Research, 1930s-1970s. Influential work from the mid twentieth century includes the summary of research into an aspect the history of surveying by David Hannerberg, Die älteren skandinavischen Ackermaße: Ein Versuch zu einer zusammenfassenden Theorie, 1955, the studies of technology and artefact history by Fritz Schmidt, Geschichte der geodätischen Instrumente und Verfahren im Altertum und Mittelalter, 1935; Armand Machabey, La métrologie dans les musées de province et sa contribution à l’histoire des poids et mesures en France depuis le XIIIe siècle, 1962, and Nils Sahlgren, Äldre svenska spannmålsmått: en metrologisk studie, 1968, as well as the ground-breaking history of the scales by Bruno Kisch, Scales and Weights: A Historical Outline, 1965. The tabulated, historical-typological survey by Hans-Joachim von Alberti, Maß und Gewicht: Geschichtliche und tabellarische Darstellung von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 1959 is much quoted, but very unsatisfactory for the purposes of medievalists. Anne-Marie Dubler’s local historical work Masse und Gewichte im Staat Luzern und in der alten Eidgenossenschaft, 1975, locates the territorial distribution of weights in a systematic cartographic representation. The state of Italian scholarship in the period is described by Alfredo Ferraro, Dizionario di metrologia generale, 1965, the Danish by Poul Rasmussen, Mål og vaegt, 1967, and the Swedish by Sam Owen Jansson, Måttordbok: Svenska måttstermer före metersystemet, 1950. For Southeastern Europe cf. Milan Vlajinac, Re ˇcnik na ˇsih starih mera u toku vekova (Dictionary of our old Measures and Weights through the Centuries), 4 vols., 1961–1974, Zlatko Herkov, Na ˇse stare mjere i utezi (Our old Measures and Weights), 1973, Mere na tlu Srbije kroz vekove (Measures on Serbian Soil through the Centuries), 1974. The Islamic tradition is portrayed by Walther Hinz, Islamische Maße und Gewichte, umgerechnet ins metrische System, 1955. These studies laid the foundations for the development of historical metrology from the late seventies on. c. 1975–1995 The trends of scholarship in the 1970s-90s emerge clearly from the representative journals and series. They cover, methodologically and thematically, a very wide spectrum of approaches. Despite this fundamental heterogeneity, a number of accents can be distinguished among the various programs.

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Proceedings of the Colloquia of the International Committee for Historical Metrology (Acta Metrologiae Historicae). The beginnings of coordinated communication of research can be found in the series of colloquia held since 1975 by the International Committee for Historical Metrology (CIMH), which reveal the stages of the institutionalization of the subject. (Bibliographic details of the congress proceedings 1975–1992, not published as a coherent series, can be found, with their tables of content, in the bibliography of Heit/Petry (vol. 2). The colloquia represent the broad field of research in central Europe. The contributions tend to concentrate on the systems of older weights and measures (in a local and comparative perspective, including criticism of simple conversion of old measures to new ones), the description of measuring objects and sources on weights and measures. The first two volumes are characterized by a stronger presence of Eastern European authors. The papers for the fifth colloquium were dedicated to state efforts to control weights and measures. Proceedings of the Colloquia of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (C.N.R.S.) (Cahiers de métrologie). A second focus of research was founded in 1981 by a colloquium of the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (I.H.M.C.) (Les anciens systèmes de mesures: projet d’enquête métrologique [Table ronde du 17 octobre 1981 Caen], ed. Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 1982). The aims of the loosely allied research group were formulated as: 1. the foundation of a specialized library, 2. the publication of a comprehensive bibliography, 3. the generation of a comprehensive atlas of weights and measures and a handbook of metrologie. The undertaking led, in 1983, to the foundation of the Cahiers de métrologie, which are also edited by the I.H.M.C. of the C.N.R.S. and aim to be a research guide for all researchers concerned with metrological questions. The journal, which covers all epochs, remains thematically true to the program detailed in the first volume: “La métrologie, c’est d’abord la recherche de l’objet, de l’instrument, d’est ensuite la quête du document qui permettra, surtout aux historiens, de calculer une équivalence, c’est infin, par l’étude des systèmes, le passage à des catégories de pensée et d’action.” (Bernard Garnier, “En Préambule,” Cahiers de métrologie 1 [1983]: 3). The Journal Histoire & mesure. Building on the French tradition of histoire quantitative, the periodical Histoire & mesure has been published since 1986 (also edited by C.N.R.S.). As well as to the traditional historical metrological research, it is dedicated to digital data-processing and to the newer archeometric methods for the surveying of surviving artifacts. It aims, via an integrated field of research, to inform and to begin a discussion about its perspectives and problems (“Editorial,” Histoire & mesure 1 (1986): 5–6). In

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the course of time, the technological focus of the periodical has shifted to the application of statistical methods in the subject of history. The journal’s program entails the subdivision of every issue into (1) Outils et démarches, (2) Histoire de la mesure, (3) Mesure de l’histoire. The contributions related to the Middle Ages thus go beyond the depiction of grain, land and building measures to cover subjects such as the history of coins and money, the statistical analysis of sources, as well as questions of lexicometrics, prosopography, and population history questions. Its archeometric sections include history of ceramics, settlement and nutrition. Tables of content, abstracts and some full text articles can be found at http://histoiremesure.revues.org (last accessed on Apr. 21, 2010). The Series Ordo et Mensura is an addition to the field of general descriptions of projects, finds and analysis. Methodologically speaking, it orients itself towards the work of the general editors Dieter Ahrens und Rolf A. C. Rottländer (programmatic: Rolf A. C. Rottländer, Antike Längenmaße: Untersuchungen über ihre Zusammenhänge, 1979, updated in id., “Fortschritte bei der Materialsammlung vormetrischer Längenmaße und deren Buchstabencode,” Ordo et Mensura II: 2. Internationaler und interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (1991 Trier), ed. Dieter Ahrens, Rolf A. C. Rottländer, 1993, 85–107). This methodology gives positivistic-statistical techniques precedence over historical or research-history derived contextualizations; cf. for instance Albrecht Kottmann, “Das Differenzverfahren, ein sicherer Weg zur Bestimmung von Längen und -gewichtseinheiten,” Ordo et Mensura VII: 7. Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (München 2001), ed. Florian Huber, Rolf A. C. Rottländer, 2002, 41–53, and Wolfgang Rieger, “Ein Verfahren zur Bestimmung von Maßvermutungen,” ibid., 54–64. On methodological debates, see for example the controversy between Rottländer and Witthöft in Ordo et Mensura III: 3. Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (1993 Trier), ed. Dieter Ahrens, Rolf A. C. Rottländer, 1995, 24–35. The series has a particular focus of interest on architectural measurement. Other. As well as the journal Bulletin or the Society of Historical Metrology (Japan, 1979–), which has no geographical or temporal limits, the collectors’ periodicals Maß und Gewicht: Zeitschrift für Metrologie (Germany, 1986–, focusing on the 16th–19th century) as well as Equilibrium, the magazine of the International Society of Scale Collectors (Great Britain) as well as Libra, ed. Maurice Stevenson, London, 1962–, should be mentioned.

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D2. Schools of Thought Both because of the heterogeneity of approach and the weak institutionalization of research into Historical Metrology, one cannot speak of the formation of schools of thought in the precise sense. Nevertheless a couple of positions can be distinguished. a. Trade Measures Jean-Claude Hocquet. The work from the circle around Hocquets analyses the measures found in written sources or as material objects in terms of their place in everyday, practical, institutional or political/ lordship history, which are always developed and understood from their complex local situations. Hocquet himself is chiefly concerned with the development of systems of measures, especially as they were used to manage interregional trade relations, particularly the salt trade. On those closest to his position, cf. the work of Pierre Portet and in the wider context the publications of Cahiers de métrologie, of which Hocquet has been a co-editor since 1988. Harald Witthöft. Harald Witthöft’s work foregrounds the systematic aspect of measures, and is intended as a structural theory. The aequalitas demanded by Charlemagne did not mean a metrical identity of measures, but that they be readily and mutually convertible. In the medieval tradition, all trading measures are transferable in that sense, and in particular can be related back to the weight of money. In Witthöft’s perspective the measures system shows a stability, which reaches from antiquity to the 18th century and covers the whole measures system of the north-east European aerea. It is distinguished from French studies by a larger claim to geographic and chronological generalization. Closest to this approach are the source and object historical studies of Heinz Ziegler (collected in Heinz Ziegler: Studien zum Umgang mit Zahl, Maß und Gewicht in Nordeuropa seit dem Hohen Mittelalter, ed. Harald Witthöft, 1997) and Elisabeth Pfeiffer (particularly the monograph, mostly without reference to sources or scholarship, Die alten Längen- und Flächenmaße: ihr Ursprung, geometrische Darstellung und arithmetische Werte, 2 vols., 1986). Witthöft’s theses have been accepted in all areas of historical research, mostly without criticism. For an overview of his diverse work, see the bibliography in ‘Vom rechten Maß der Dinge’: Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Harald Witthöft zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Rainer S. Elkar et al., 2 vols., 1996, 773–804, and the notes in Harald Witthöft, “Über Korn und Brot – Geld und Münze. Rechte Zahl und aequalitas als gerechter Preis in Mittelalter und Neuzeit,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 93 (2006): 438–79.

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b. Architectural Surveying and Town Planning Architectural Surveying. In the area of the history of the built environment, particularly sacred architecture, the older practice, which began with idealized ground plans and interpreted them allegorically has retreated behind an exact surveying and measuring of the building as it exists. There are now varying positions with regard to the determination of measurements. a) research which considers measures in the context of the immediate local written sources: cf. the volume edited by Philippe Bernardi, Mesurer les bâtiments anciens, und the studies of Günther Binding; lastly id. and Susanne Linscheid-Burdich, Planen und Bauen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter nach den Schriftquellen bis 1250. Lateinisch und Deutsch, 2002, 101–56. b) the survey method: this privileges advanced, non-historically oriented, computer aided processes (Wolfgang Wiemer, Friedrich Balck, Werner Heinz) against the emphasis given to manual, conceptually historicizing surveying techniques, for instance in Alain Guerreau. c) Retrieval of the underlying historical measures: within the framework of the publication series Ordo et mensura the positivistic, chronologically generalizing branch of historical metrology associated with Ralf A.C. Rottländer has formed its own school. Town Planning. The discussions around the surveying and measuring of towns is largely dictated by discipline. The idea of a stringently planned and rapidly populated core from which towns developed (as assumed in art history, historical geography) opposes the thesis that towns developed their structures in a long, complex process (assumed by urban history, increasingly urban archeology). On the rivalry between the schools, cf. Matthias Untermann, “Planstadt, Gründungsstadt, Parzelle: Archäologische Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Urbanistik und Geschichte. Einführungende Bemerkungen,” Die vermessene Stadt: Mittelalterliche Stadtplanung zwischen Mythos und Befund, ed. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2004, 9–16, and Martina Stercken, “Gebaute Ordnung: Stadtvorstellungen und Planungen im Mittelalter,” Städteplanung – Planungsstädte, ed. Bruno Fritzsche, Hans-Jörg Gilomen, and Martina Stercken, 2006, 15–37. D3. Recent Research a. Systems Building on the monographic studies, the following publications have discussed the matter of the system underlying medieval weights and measures: programmatically in Jean-Claude Hocquet, “Methodologie de l’histoire des poids et mesures le commerce maritime entre Alexandrie et Venise dur-

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ant le haut Moyen Age,” Mercati e mercanti nell’Alto Medioevo: L’area euroasiatica e l’area mediterranea, ed. Centro italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1993, 847–83, and, summarizing older research, Harald Witthöft, “Maß und Regio. Herrschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur: Von aequalitas, Einheitlichkeit und langer Dauer,” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 24 (2006): 49–75. Pierre Portet reflects upon the genesis of the system in the Carolingian period in “Remarques sur les systèmes métrologiques carolingiens,” Le moyen âge: Revue d’histoire et de philologie 97 (1991): 5–24, as does Harald Witthöft in “Von Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer legalen europäischen Metrologie in Mittelalter und Neuzeit,” Ordo et Mensura IV/V: Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie: Ordo et mensura IV (1995 Schloß Hohentübingen), Ordo et Mensura V (1997 München), 1998, 394–404. Local systems are analyzed by Jean-Marie Yante, “Poids et mesures dans le pays de Luxembourg-Chiny (XIIIe-XVIe siècles),” Cahiers de métrologie 11/12 (1994): 13–16, Pierre Portet, “Le système métrologique de Paris au Moyen-Age,” ibid. 463–88; Markus A. Denzel, “Münz- und Währungssysteme in der Levante nach Pegolottis ‘Practica della mercatura’,” Ordo et Mensura III: 3. Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (1993 Trier), 1995, 384–402, as well as John E. Dotson, and Ulrich Rebstock, Rechnen im islamischen Orient, 1992, 112–29. b. Objects of Study Agrarian Surfaces. General methodological preconditions are formulated by Bruno Andreolli, “Misurare la terra: metrologia altomedievale,” Uomo e spazio nell’alto Medioevo, ed. Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2003, 151–91, and Gérard Chouquer, “Les formes des paysages médiévaux: déclaration d’ouverture de controverse,” Au-delà de l’écrit: Les hommes et leurs vécus matériels au Moyen Âge à la lumière des sciences et des techniques – Nouvelles perspectives (Actes du Colloque international de Marche-en-Famenne, 16–20 octobre 2002), ed. René Noël, Isabelle Paquay and Jean-Pierre Sosson, 2003, 167–95. For a case study, see Cédric Lavigne, Essai sur la planification agraire au Moyen Âge: les paysages neufs de la Gascogne médiévale (XIIIe–XIVe siècles), 2002. Via the medieval measuring out of the agrarian field divisions the author develops a method which connects use of planimetric techniques based on air photography with topographic maps and field allocation records of the 19th century, as well as the differentiated study of medieval charters. More general regional studies are offered by Kenneth P. Witney, “Kentish Land Measurements of the Thirteenth Century,” Archaeologia Cantiana: Being Contributions to the History and Archaeology of Kent 109 for 1991 (1992): 29–39, and Jean-Marie Martin, “La mesure de la terre en Italie méridionale (VIIIe-XIIe siècles),” Histoire & me-

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sure 8 (1993): 285–93, as well as the monograph by Anna Dunin-Wasowicz, Die Vermessung von Dorf und Flur in den Ländern der polnischen Krone vom 16. bis in das 19. Jh.: Agrotechnik, Landmessbräuche und metrologische Traditionen, 2000, whose methodology is based on Hannerberg. The arithmetic practice of land surveying is reconstructed in Monique Zerner, René Lozi, and Jean-André Cancellieri, “Quelques réflexions inspirées par un document cadastral de la fin du XVe siècle: Pratique de l’arithmétique et mesure de la terre,” Histoire & mesure 8 (1993): 295–312. The practical use of instruments and the experts who wielded them are approached in the works of Aguiar Aguilar, Maria Maravillas, “Las aplicaciones del quadrante de senos en agrimensura através de un tratado árabe oriental del siglo XIV,” Ciencias de la natureza en Al-Andalus: Textos y estudios IV, ed. Camilo Álvarez de Morales, 1996, 93–113, Manuel Riu Riu, “Reflexions sobre el destre, la cana de destre i l’agrimensor Jaume de Sanctacília,” Mediaevalia 9 (1990): 191–201, id., “Problemas de metrología aplicados a la estructuración del suelo: medidas lineales y de superficie,” Experimentació arqueològica sobre conreus medievals a l’Esquerda, 1991–1994: Arqueologia experimental, aplicació a l’Agricultura medieval mediterrànie, ed. Imma Ollich, 1998, 70–76, as well as Martínez Carrillo, Maria de los Llanos, “Sobre las medidas agrarias en la Baja Edad Media: los sogueadores,” Homenaje a la professora Carmen Orcástegui Gros (Arágon en la Edad Media 14–15), ed. Facultad de Filosofi y Letras, Departamento de Historia Medieval, Ciencias y Técnicas Historiográficas y Estudios Arabes e Islámicos, 1999, 1005–13. Food. Salt: The fundamental studies are those by Witthöft and Hocquet, which were developed using the history of salt production and the salt trade. Marija Zaninovi c-Rumora ´ analyzes a local Croatian system in “Solne mjere otoka Paga od 14. do 16. stoljeca ´ (“Salt measures on the island of Pag from the 14th to 16th centuries”)”, Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti Hazu u Zadru 38, ed. Mate Sui c, ´ (1996), 97–102, as does Josip Kolanovi c, ´ “Fibenski metroloski ˇ sustav u 15. stoljecu ´ (“The Metrical System of Fibenik in the 15th Century”)”, Arhivski vjesnik 37 for 1994 (1995): 189–207. Grain: The origins of the corn measure and its connection to other measures in the Rhineland is analyzed by Youri L. Bessmertny, “Combien pesait la maldra de grain? Note sur les rendements du grain dans la Rhénanie des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Histoire & Mesure 5 (1990): 213–20 and for the South Italian area by Rita Compatangelo, “Unités de mesures agraires et cadastres romains: stabilité et variabilité des mesures en Italie méridionale,” ibid., 221–57. By contrast, questions of morality are at the foreground of the study by Miguel Ángel Barbero, “‘Blanca la harina, negras las conciencias’: Acarreadores y fieles de peso en la Baja Edad Media hispánica,” Fundación.

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Fundación para la Historia de España (Argentina) 6 (2004): 207–18. Bread: Alain Guerreau provides information on bread measures: “Mesures du blé et du pain à Mâcon (xive-xviiie siècles),” Histoire & mesure 3 (1988): 163–219; see also James Davis, “Baking for the Common Good: a Reassessment of the assize of Bread in Medieval England,” Economic History Review 57 (2004): 465–502, and Miguel Ángel Barbero, “De engañifas, trapacerías y otras transgresiones: Molinos en la Baja Edad Media hispánica,” Sociedad y Memoria en la Edad Media: Estudios en homenaje de Nilda Guglielmi, ed. Ariel Guiance, Pablo Ubierna, 2005, 61–70. Wine and beer: Orientation on medieval wine measures in France and Catalonia can be found in Pierre Portet, “Les mesures du vin en France aus XIIIe et XIVe siècles d’après les mémoriaux de la Chambre des comptes de Paris,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 149 (1991): 435–46, and Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, “Les mesures del vi a Catalunya abans de la reducció de 1585,” Jornados sobre la viticultura de la conca mediterrània, 1995, 617–25. Kerstin Schukowski and Katrinette Bodarwé examine beer measures from the point of view of morality “‘Wenn ich je in diesen Gefäßen falsches Maß gegeben habe, so soll dieses Haus verbrennen’: Von Professionalität und Geschäftsmoral,” Stadt der Frauen: Szenarien aus spätmittelalterlicher Geschichte und zeitgenössischer Kunst, ed. Annette Kuhn and Marianne Pitzen, 1994, 38–39, and V. T. van Vilsteren, “Niet meer dan een stampe or twe …,” Zwols Historisch Tijdschrift 8 (1991): 58–62. On the practical-geometrical preconditions of the calculation of cubic capacity of vessels, see the important studies by Menso Folkerts, most recently “Die Faßmessung (Visierkunst) im späten Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit,” Visierund Rechenbücher der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Rainer Gebhardt, 2008, 1–36. Ad Meskens, Germain Bonte, Jacques De Groote, Mieke De Jonghe, and David A. King describe an unusual early document in “Wine-Gauging at Damme: The Evidence of a Late Medieval Manuscript,” Histoire & mesure 14 (1999): 51–77. Buildings. Research into medieval architectural measures is extraordinarily diverse and heterogeneous. The current state of debate is described in a series of collected essays. The thematic issue Mesurer les bâtiments anciens of the journal Histoire & mesure 16, issue 3/4 (2001) aims methodologically at a synthesis of the reconstruction of surveying practices of the object and the analysis of archival sources. The themes are the origins and use of local units (buildings/material), the role of costing calculations in measurement practices, as well as a comprehensive theoretical consideration of the relationship between measure, representation and social structures. The most recent methodological relevant publications are Texte et archéologie monumentale. Approches de l’architecture médiévale (Actes du colloque d’Avignon, 30 nov.-2 déc. 2005),

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ed. Philippe Bernardi et al., “L’atelier: données provençales sur la place du travail au Moyen Âge,” Cadre de vie et manières d’habiter (XIIe–XVIe siècles), ed. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, Françoise Piponnier, and Jean-Michel Poisson, 2006, 117–24. The thematic volume Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture, ed. Nancy Wu, 2002, by contrast, uses various source types (sketch plans and model drawings, surveys of buildings, measures of buildings, and analysis of proportions), to focus on the planning of medieval buildings. The reconstructions connect the precise status of the genuine measurement with the respective state of knowledge of practical-geometry and arithmetic, its case-by-case implementation in building practice, and the question of the role of the underlying medieval units (cf. also Binding). An approach based on the aesthetics of measure, first rejected by Konrad Hecht and again justifiably criticized by Alain Guerreau among others (Konrad Hecht, “Maß und Zahl in der gotischen Baukunst,” Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft 21 (1969): 215–326; 32 (1970): 105–263; 33 (1971/72): 25–236; Alain Guerreau, “L’analyse des dimensions des édifices médiévaux. Notes de méthode provisoires,” Paray-le-Monial, Brionnais-Charolais: Le renouveau des études romans. IIe colloque scientifique international de Paray-le-Monial (2–3–4 octobre 1998), ed. Nicolas Reveyron, 2000, 327–35) has recently been revived by Werner Heinz, Musik in der Architektur: Von der Antike zum Mittelalter, 2005. On the wider implications of this issue, also considered from the point of view of the history of the discipline, cf. Adriano Peroni, “Ordo et mensura nell’architettura altomedievale,” Uomo e spazio nell’alto Medioevo, ed. Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2003, 1055–117. Towns. Medieval town planning has recently been intensely discussed from the standpoint of historical metrology. A connection between building and town measures in the metrological-political framework of the Lombard communes of the 12th century is reconstructed by Emanuele Lugli, “A Mathematical Land: measurements in twelfth-century Modena and the Po valley,” Status und Poetik der Zahl: Ordnungsangebote, Gebrauchsformen und Erfahrungsmodalitäten des numerus im Mittelalter, ed. Moritz Wedell, forthcoming. Archaeological, historical and town history research have formed independent traditions in order to explain the shape of medieval towns, in which measurement in the metrological sense played an implicit role. On the state of research cf. Stercken. The generalizing, measurement practice based approach of Klaus Humpert, Martin Schenk, Entdeckung der mittelalterlichen Stadtplanung, 2001, challenged the disciplines of archeology and history. Though it is now basically disproved, it triggered a far reaching metrological discussion. Cf. the volume of conference proceedings, Die ver-

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messene Stadt: Mittelalterliche Stadtplanung zwischen Mythos und Befund, ed. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2004. The Holy, Measures, and Number Symbolism. The transfers between the metrological and the holy belongs to the margins of measuring. Corresponding studies include Gustav Otruba, “Die Bedeutung ‘heiliger Längen’ im Rahmen der Kulturgeschichte, insbesondere des österreichischen Raumes,” Acta Metrologiae Historicae III: Das Wiegen und Messen und der Staat, ed. Jean-Claude Hocquet, with Cornelius Neutsch and Karl Jürgen Roth, 1992, 203–22; Richard Hüttel, “Heilige Maße – Wegstrecken in Jerusalem und anderswo,” Ordo et Mensura III: 3. Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (1993 Trier), 1995, 300–05, as well as Thomas Lentes: “Die Vermessung des Christus-Körpers,” Glaube – Liebe – Hoffnung – Tod: Ausstellung der Kunsthalle Wien/Graphische Sammlung Albertina, ed. Christoph Geismar-Brandi, Eleonora Louis, 1995, 144–47, and the study on the culture of signs on the measurement of the side wound of Christ in various media by Christina Lechtermann, “Maßnahmen – Die Wunde zwischen Schrift, Bild und Zahl”, Vom Körper zur Schrift, ed. Maria Schnitter, Elisabeth Vavra, and Horst Wenzel, 2007, 231–52. The normed measures found in church buildings form a borderline area here, especially the question as to how far the medieval stoups and baptismal fonts were cast and used as measures (Franz German, “Ein romanischer Weihwasserkessel als zentrales Weinmaß,” Rheinische Heimatpflege 15 (1978): 283–88; Reinhold Spichal, Waren mittelalterliche Taufbecken auch verkörperte Raummaße?, 1999. In a metaphorical sense, the measuring and allocation of prayer and penance can also be included in holy measures; cf. Arnold Angenendt, Thomas Braucks, Rolf Busch, Thomas Lentes, and Hubertus Lutterbach, “Gezählte Frömmigkeit,” FmSt 29 (1995): 1–71. A further marginal area is formed by the measurement of the body; on this cf. Faith Wallis, “Counting all the Bones: Measure, number and weight in early medieval texts about the body,” Status und Poetik der Zahl. Ordnungsangebote, Gebrauchsformen und Erfahrungsmodalitäten des numerus im Mittelalter, ed. Moritz Wedell, forthcoming. The problematic area of the role of symbolic, numerically coded measurements in works of art has not been systematically and seriously developed since the seventies and the breakdown of the exaggerated interpretative approaches applied up till then. The current state of art in this research field is represented in the Lexikon der mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen, ed. Heinz Meyer and Rudolf Suntrup, 1987, while introductions are provided by Max Wehrli, “Zahlenallegorese, Zahlenallegorie,” Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter: Eine poetologische Einführung, 1984 (2nd ed. 2006), 214–35; “Zahlensymbolik,” Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 4, 1972, 560–61; Laurenz Lüt-

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teken, “Zahlensymbolik,” Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol 9, 1998, 2127–36. Other. Textile measures in France are analyzed by Simonne AbrahamThisse, “Les aunes des drapiers au Moyen Age,” Cahiers de métrologie 11/12 (1994): 385–99, and from the perspective of the history of work, Dominique Cardon, “Arachné Ligotée: la fileuse du Moyen Age face au drapier,” Médiévales: langue, textes, histoire 30 (1996), 13–22. A brooch incorporating measures is described by Niamh Whitfield, “Design and Units of Measure on the Hunterston Brooch,” Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills, 1999, 296–314. Objects containing measures from the context of various churches in the Hessian region are studied by Peter Weyrauch, “Metrologische Untersuchungen an kleinen Objekten,” Ordo et mensura VII: 7. Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (München 2001), 2002, 238–54. c. Measuring Objects Apart from the interdisciplinary summaries by Darrou and Witthöft, the description of medieval measuring objects lies above all in the field of archaeology and is only gradually coming in within the field of interest of history. Scales and Weights. The biggest group of objects are fine scales and money weights. The research is predominantly oriented to the documentation of the materiality of the objects, reflecting the subject traditions, but also their condition. A comprehensive summary, particularly concerned with surviving fine scales, is by Heiko Steuer, Waagen und Gewichte aus dem mittelalterlichen Schleswig: Funde des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts aus Europa als Quellen zur Handels- und Währungsgeschichte, 1997. Supplementary funds from eastern Europe are documented by Anna Bogumila Kowalska, “Wczesnosredniowieczne ´ wagi ze Szczecina” (“Frühmittelalterliche Waagen aus Szczecin”), Przeglad Archaeologiczny 47 (1999): 141–53; Miroslav Marcinkowski, “Wagi i odwarniki kupieckie ze Starego Miasta Elbl‰ga” (“Scales and Merchant Weights From the Old Town of Elbing”), Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej 50 (2002): 44–52, and Ján Hunka, “Vzácny nález miskovitych ´ závazí ˇ z Banskej Bystrice” (“Bowl-Shaped Weights From Banská Bystrica”), Archaeologica historica 25 (2000): 369–83. A Viking weight and its links to contemporary Islamic norms is described by Monika Maleszka, “A Viking Age Weight From Cleat, Westray, Orkney,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scottland 133 (2003): 283–91. A lead pound weight from Prague old town is described by Zdenek ˇ Dragoun, “Nález olovené ˇ Hrivny ˇ v Betezové ˇ ulici na Starém

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Mest ˇ eˇ prazském” ˇ (“The Find of a Lead Pound Weight in the Prague Old Town”), Archaeologica historica 26 (2001): 359–64. A comprehensive private collection with stone weights, which partly reaches into the medieval period is documented by Gerhard Eiselmayr, “Spätmittelalterliche und neuzeitliche Steingewichtsstücke aus Österreich,” Acta Metrologiae Historicae II: Bericht über den 4. Internationalen Kongress für Historische Metrologie veranstaltet vom Internationalen Komitee für Historische Metrologie (Linz 1986), ed. Harald Witthöft with Cornelius Neutsch, 1989, 41–66. Public Normed Measures. Darrou’s collection has not been supplemented by any over-all study on publicly displayed normed measures. Stone measures from Istria are described in Sena Seculic, “Zur Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Maße in Istrien,” Acta Metrologiae Historicae II: Bericht über den 4. Internationalen Kongress für Historische Metrologie veranstaltet vom Internationalen Komitee für Historische Metrologie (Linz 1968), ed. Harald Witthöft with Cornelius Neutsch, 1989, 227–38, and id., “‘Kamenica’ – Das Steinmaß der Burg Medvedgrad bei Zagreb aus dem 13. Jh. Jahrhundert,” Acta Metrologiae Historicae III: Das Wiegen und Messen und der Staat, ed. Jean-Claude Hocquet, with Cornelius Neutsch and Karl Jürgen Roth, 1992, 258–67. Research into the ensemble of measures at the foot of Freiburg Minster is collected in Peter Kalchthaler, “‘Dieser Zuber achtmal aufgehäuft …’: Maße und Marktinschriften am Fuß des Freiburger Münsterturms,” eichen – wiegen – messen um den Freiburger Münstermarkt (Ausstellung vom 31. Januar bis 27. April 2003), ed. Augustinermuseum Freiburg, 2003, 45–48. The significance of the surviving measuring objects in the implementation of civic norms is the subject of Sven Schütte, “Der archäologische Befund als Quelle der Verwirklichung städtischer Normen,” Die Vielfalt der Dinge: Neue Wege zur Analyse mittelalterlicher Sachkultur (Internationaler Kongreß Krems an der Donau 4. bis 7. Oktober 1994), ed. Helmut Hundsbichler, Gerhard Jaritz, and Thomas Kühtreiber, 1998, 359–73 and Lugli. E. Medieval Terminology There is no definitive monograph on medieval terminology in any language (but cf. Menninger, Zupko, and Schuppener). In a general perspective, isolated observations are offered in Jean Haudry, “Beobachtungen über die indogermanische Benennung des Messens,” Ordo et mensura II: 2. Internationaler und interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie (1991 Trier), 1993, 15–21, and Werner Besch, “… sein Licht (nicht) unter den Scheffel stellen,” Deutsche Sprache in Raum und Zeit: Festschrift für Peter Wiesinger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Ernst, Franz Patocka, 1998, 463–77. On the role of contact between languages, see Elke Grab-Kempf, “Reflexe von ar. habb

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(Koll.), habba (Nom.un) als Bezeichnungen für Maße, Gewichte, Tribute, Bruchteile, sowie als Benennung des Kleinsten und Geringsten in den iberoamerikanischen Sprachen,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 115 (1999): 464–71, and on usage in Hebrew or Welsh manuscripts cf. Magdalena Nom de Déu and Joep Ramon, “Terminología metrológica en los manuscrittos hebraicos medievales del Archivo General de Navarra,” Las abreviaturas en la enseñanza medieval y la transmisión del saber (Rubrica: Paleographica et diplomatica studia 4) 3 (1990), 273–80, and Pierre-Yves Lambert, “The Old-Welsh Glosses on Weights and Measures,” Yr Hen laith: Studies in Early Welsh, 2003, 103–34. F. Quantification of Medieval Remains The digitally supported quantitative-statistical methods do not belong to the field of historical metrology in the strict sense. Nevertheless they constitute an emerging branch of the relevant research. Digitally Supported Surveying of Buildings. A range of IT-based instruments have been developed to serve the metrological documentation of older buildings. Cf. Wiemers’s use of the instrument BMD and the introduction to the Trigomat system by Friedrich Balck (on the method, Friedrich Balck, “Computergestützte Vermessung und zeichnerische Dokumentation,” Gebäudeinformationssysteme: Abschlußbericht des DVW-Arbeitskreises 6 (Ingenieurvermessung und FIG-Symposium vom 5. bis 7. April 1995 an der Technischen Universität Braunschweig. Institut für Geodäsie und Photogrammetrie), ed. Bodo Schrader, 1995, 175–84; on its use id., “Computergestützte Vermessung der Domvorhalle in Goslar,” Ordo et Mensura IV/V: Internationaler Interdisziplinärer Kongress für Historische Metrologie: Ordo et mensura IV (1995 Schloß Hohentübingen), Ordo et Mensura V (1997 München), ed. Dieter Ahrens and Rolf C.A. Rottländer, 1998, 329–40). The topometric method, appropriated by Dieter Dirksen and others from medical techniques, which is particularly suitable for the exact measurement of surfaces (important in epigraphy) cf. Dieter Dirksen, Y. Kozlov, Gert von Bally, “Cuneiform surface reconstruction by optical profilometry,” Optical Technologies in the Humanities (Optics Within Life Science IV), ed. Dieter Dirksen, Gert von Bally, 1997, 257–59 (on its application, see Maria Shinoto, Zoltán Böröcz, Carsten Thomas, Dieter Dirksen, Joseph Maran, and Gert von Bally, “Topometrical Measurements in Tiryns, Greece. Report on a Co-Operate Project Between Physics and Archaeology,” Archaeological Informatics: Pushing the Envelope. CAA 2001 (Proceedings of the 29th conference, Gotland April 2001), ed. Göran Burenhult, Johan Arvidsson, 2002, 181–89).

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Digitally Supported Analysis of Ground Conditions, and Finds of Ceramics and Bones. The area of archeometric studies also encompasses the digitally supported methods for the assessment of excavation sites (François Djindjian, “Nouvelles méthodes pour l’analyse spatiale des sites archéologiques,” Histoire & mesure 5 (1990): 11–34) and the results of geophysical studies (Michel Magny, “Les fluctuations des lacs jurassiens et subalpins au Moyen Âge,” Histoire & mesure 8 [1993]: 5–17), as well as, most recently Cédric Panissod, Michel Dabas, “La reconnaissance des sols historiques urbains par méthodes géophysiques,” Histoire & mesure 14 [1999]: 221–48). The analysis of ceramic finds has a special place here, cf. Hugo Blake, “Sizes and measures of later medieval pottery in north central Italy,” Material Culture in Medieval Europe, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe, 1997, 221–50, further Pascal Chareille, Philippe Husi, “Méthode d’analyse quantitative et statistique de la céramique de Tours,” Histoire & mesure 11 (1996): 19–51, and Philippe Husi, Richard Tomassone, and Pascal Chareille, “Céramologie et chronologie: De l’analyse factorielle au modèle linéaire: les sites d’habitats de la ville de Tours,” Histoire & mesure 15 (2000): 3–32. Also of relevance is the nutritional history-based approach of Frédérique AudoinRouzeau, “Compter et mesurer les os animaux: Pour une histoire de l’élevage et de l’alimentation en Europe de l’Antiquité aux Temps Modernes,” Histoire & mesure 10 (1995): 277–312. Statistical Source Analysis. The theory and methodology of the digitally aided statistical text analysis also forms part of the statistical radicalization of perspectives on historical metrology (programmatic: Alain Guerreau, “Pourquoi (et comment) l’historien doit-il compter les mots?,” Histoire & mesure 4 (1989): 81–105), which has been particularly used in research into the development of social structure, trade and climate (paradigmatic: the contributions under the rubric Mesure de l’histoire in the journal Histoire & mesure.) G. Current Issues and Future Trends Metrology is integrated into a broad interdisciplinary spectrum of research interests. For that reason, historical metrological research is and will for the near future continue to be formed by the various discipline-specific desiderata. Three trends may be observed across subject boundaries: first, a stronger weight given to archeology and the interdisciplinary conversation about the transferability of archaeological data and historical methods of questioning; secondly a more precise analysis of the cultural techniques (instruments and written practices) of measurement and their integration into the history of rationalization; thirdly, a stronger emphasis on metrological perspectives in

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the commercialization of agrarian and industrial production. In the face of the increasing density of historical-metrological research, the development of new forms of chronotopographical synthesis and representation of the existing scholarship may be expected. An adequate theoretical modeling of medieval measurement practice has still not been developed, especially with regard to the spatial and temporal movement of measures. Select Bibliography Bibliographies: The first comprehensive bibliography of Historical Metrology, Bibliographia Metrologiae Historicae pro uso interno Instituti historici Academie scientiarum et artium Slavorum meridionalium, ed. Miroslav Kurelac, Zlatko Herkov, 3 vols. 1971, 1973, 1975, includes both West and East European research, in particular the older metrological literature from the 16th century onwards. Each volume is ordered alphabetically by author. The volumes of the general selected bibliography, Bibliographie zur Historischen Metrologie (Wissenschaftliche Arbeitshilfen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit 7 und 7,2), ed. Alfred Heit, Klaus Petry, 2 vols. 1992, 1995, are each divided into a systematic and a geographic section. The geographically ordered entries, in turn, are divided into German scholarhip and that of other European countires. At almost the same time, and as part of his multivolume metrological handbook, the comprehensive bibliography compiled by Harald Witthöft appeared (Deutsche Bibliographie zur historischen Metrologie: Das deutsche und deutschsprachige Schrifttum. Erweitert um ausgewählte Arbeiten zur historischen Metrologie europäischer und außereuropäischer Staaten, ed. Harald Witthöft, with Karl Jürgen Roth and Reinhold Schamberger, 1991). It aims at a complete account of German scholarship, as well as at including further selected work from other European contexts. The basic structure divides general metrology (I) from specific forms (II). The titles relating to specific territorial areas, lordship or epochs are found in a geographical section sorted, as in Heit/Petry by country, region and place (III). Further information on the French area can be found in Olivier Guyotjeannin, “Métrologie française d’ancien régime: Guide bibliographique sommaire,” Gazette des archives 139 (1987): 233–347, as well as Bernard Garnier, “La Bibliothèque de l’I.H.M.C,” Cahiers de métrologie 2 (1984): 87–111. A specialized bibliography on the history of the terminology of measures is found in Georg Schuppener, Die Dinge fassbar machen, 2002, 471–506, and the bibliography of accompaniying Pierre Portets’ Bertrand-Boysset-Edition deals with the practical-geometric and history of mathematics aspect of medieval metrology http://boysset. ifrance.com/boysset/introduc.htm (last accessed on Apr. 21, 2010). Selected references in the appendix to Jedrzejewski’s typological study guide to epistemological frameworks (Franck Jedrzejewski, Histoire universelle de la mesure, 2002, 376–414). The Chinese area is coverd by Ulrich Theobald, Hans Ulrich Vogel, with the assistence of Zhang Lihong, Zhan Xuejun, and Alexei Volkov, Chinese, Japanese und Western Research in Chinese Historical Metrology: A Classified Bibliography (1925–2002), 2004 [http://www.sino.uni-tuebingen.de/index.php?s=file_download&id=4; last accessed on Apr. 21, 2010]. Literature: Hermann von Helmholtz, “Zählen und Messen, erkenntnistheoretisch betrachtet,” Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie, ed. Moritz Schlick and Paul Hertz

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(Berlin: Springer, 1921), 99–129 (rpt. ed. Ecke Bonk, Vienna and New York: Springer, 1998); Alltag im Spätmittelalter, ed. Harry Kühnel (Graz and Vienna: Edition Kaleidoskop, 1984), 29–37; Jean-Claude Hocquet, La métrologie historique: Que sais-je? 2972 (Paris: P.U.F., 1995), 15–40; Harald Witthöft, “Maße und Gewichte,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, 2nd ed., vol. 19 (2001), 398–418; Withold Kula, Les mesures et les hommes, trans. Joanna Ritt, rev. K. Pomian et J. Revel (Paris: Edition MSH, 1984); Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, 1998; Alain Guerreau, “L’analyse des dimensions des édifices médiévaux: Notes de méthode provisoires,” Paray-le-Monial, Brionnais-Charolais: Le renouveau des études romans. IIe colloque scientifique international de Paray-le-Monial (2–3–4 octobre 1998), ed. Nicolas Reveyron, Michel Rocher, and Marie-Térèse Engel (Paray-le-Monial: Amis de la Basilique Romane, 2000), 327–35; Heiko Steuer, Waagen und Gewichte aus dem mittelalterlichen Schleswig: Funde des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts aus Europa als Quellen zur Handels- und Währungsgeschichte: Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters, supplement 10 (Cologne and Bonn: Habelt, 1997).

Moritz Wedell

Museums and Exhibitions A. Introduction The traditional form of the modern museum begins in the 18th century. A closer look at that model shows that the roots of the word, “museum,” and the phenomenon of the museum can be traced to antiquity and ancient Egypt. Geoffrey Lewis, in his History of Museums (2006), explains the etymology of “museum” and traces the word’s development through the centuries: “The word has classical origins. In its Greek form, mouseion, it meant ‘seat of the Muses’ and designated a philosophical institution or a place of contemplation. Use of the Latin derivation, museum, appears to have been restricted in Roman times mainly to places of philosophical discussion” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums: Zur Geschichte des Museums [2007], 9). Stepping forward to the Middle Ages, “The word museum was received in 15th-century Europe to describe the collection of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, but the term conveyed the concept of comprehensiveness rather than denoting a building. By the 17th century museum was being used in Europe to describe collections of curiosity” (ibd. For example, Ole Worms’ Collection in Copenhagen and John Tradescant’s Collection in Lambeth/UK – now a London borough – were such institu-

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tions). In 1677, the collection in Lambeth became property of Elias Ashmole; it was transferred to the University of Oxford, and a special building, called Ashmolean Museum, was constructed for it. “Use of the word museum during the 19th and 20th century (still) denoted a building housing cultural material to which the public had access” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, History of Museums/Geschichte des Museums [2007], 11). Researchers in the humanities began to deal with the museum phenomenon in the 18th century: “Along with the identification of a clear role for museums in society, there gradually developed a body of theory the study of which is known as museology” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 2). The particular applications of that theory – conservation and display, borrowing from other disciplines and techniques, the general requirement of the museum and its public – is called museography. It was first used in Caspar Friedrich Neickelius’s Museographie oder Anleitung zum rechten Begriff und nützlicher Anlegung der Museuorum oder Raritätenkammern (1727). The term museology was first mentioned by Philipp Leopold Martin in Die Praxis der Naturgeschichte (1869). The collections and cabinets themselves varied considerably in their approaches and concepts over the centuries. “[…] The collection of things that might have religious, magical, economic, aesthetic or historical value or that simply might be curiosities were undertaken worldwide by groups as well as by individuals” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums, 2006, 3). B. The Museum in the Middle Ages There was often a close link between the church and ruling class in the Middle Ages. “In Medieval Europe collections were mainly the prerogative of princely houses and the church,” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 18). Sea travel between the Italian peninsula, the Continent and England facilitated the movement of antiquities. “Henry of Bois, Bishop of Winchester, is reported to have bought ancient statues during a visit in Rome in 1151 […] Exotic material from other areas entering Italian ports soon found its way into royal collections, while the Venetian involvement in the Fourth Crusade early in the 13th century resulted in the transfer of the famous bronze horses from Constantinople to the San Marco Basilica in Venice” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, ibid.). Similar royal collections were also established elsewhere in Europe: “King Matthias I. of Hungary maintained his paintings in Buda and kept Roman antiquities at Szombathely Castle (West Hungary) during the 15th century. Maximilian I. of Austria acquired a collection for his castle in Vienna” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 4), in addition to his numerous other cultural activ-

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ities as Emperor. Italian noble families maintained impressive collections, as well. One of these is Cosimo de Medici’s collection in 15th-century Florence. “The collection was developed by his descendents until it was bequeathed to the state in 1743, to be accessible ‘to the people of Tuscany and all Nations’” (Geoffrey Lewis, ibid.) It is important to note that collections moved out from behind closed doors and into the public sphere. Yet, not all collections, cabinets, and museums could be available to the public at the same time. For example, there were still specialized personal natural history collections (Luca Ghini at Padua, Conrad Gesner, Felix Platter [Basel, Switzerland] and John Tradescant [London]), historical collections (Paolo Giovio, Como, Italy), the archaeological collection of Venice (these collections remained behind closed doors), and illuminated manuscripts gathered by Sir Robert Cotton in England (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 20–21). Those collections normally were known as cabinets (Kabinett, Kammer, Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Rüstungskammer, Naturalienkabinett) (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, ibid.). “For the less specialized collector, works such as Museographia by Casper F. Neickelius (1727), were generally available to aid in classification, care of a collection, and the identification of potential sources from which collections might be developed […]. Another product of the age was the learned society, many of which were established to promote corporate discussion, experimentations, and collecting” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, ibid.). Better-known societies date from the 17th century. For example, the Royal Society (London, 1660), Academy of Sciences (Paris, 1666), Society of Antiquaries (London, 1707). C. The Modern Museum The idea of the public exhibition was further developed in the late Middle Ages: The Renaissance collections were mainly open for nobles. The collections “were symbols of social prestige and served as an important element in the traditions of the nobility and the ruling families. … The new collectors, concerned with enjoyment and study and the advancement of knowledge …” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 8) wanted to transmit all this into the public domain. There were efforts in Italy in the 16th century to show private collections to a public audience but the, “first corporate body to receive a private collection, erect a building to house it, and make it publicly available was the University of Oxford. The gift was from Elias Ashmole: containing much of the Tradescant collection … The resulting building which eventually became known as the Ashmolean Museum opened in 1683” (ibid.).

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The 18th century was the founding era of the great museums, such as the British Museum in London in 1759, and the Louvre in Paris in 1793. The British Museum was based on the collections of Sir Robert Cotton, Robert Harley (first Earl of Oxford) and Sir Hans Sloane. These great museums had three basic ideas: to improve the knowledge of a broader public, and to mediate democratic ideas and national (mainly Diderot’s proposal) ideas. Consequently these museums were for many years free of charge to enable a large number of people to visit. Similar efforts can be observed all over Europe. Especially in Italy, above all Rome, the neoclassical architecture of museums (such as the Vatican) set the standard for all museums in European countries for at least half a century. The idea of national museums spread across the world. “In 1773 in the United States the Charlton Library Society of South Carolina announced its intention to form a museum … the Peale Museum was opened in 1786 in Philadelphia by painter Charles Wilson Peale” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007]: 25). The Peale Museum displayed spheres of agriculture, herbal medicine and art. Some 50 years later museums became intercultural. Asian and African collections became popular with the advent of colonialism. Some of these museums of art and culture still exist, for example the Prado in Madrid, Spain, the Alte Pinakothek (art collection of the dukes of Wittelsbach, designed by Leo von Klenze) in Munich, Germany and Museumsinsel in Berlin, Germany. The concept of national identity increased in the 19th century, influencing museums all over Europe. National and regional museums were founded from France to Hungary and Austria (Graz, Innsbruck, Salzburg 1811–1834). The most important theme in these museums was the history of the nation itself. “Increasing interest in antiquities (in connection with the national history) led to the excavation of local archaeological sites and had an impact on museum development” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 34). New museum developments were influenced by industry and science. In the 19th century, “museums were also viewed as a vehicle for promoting industrial design and scientific and technical achievement. Such a promotion was the motivation behind the precursor of the Victoria and Albert Museum,” in London (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, ibid.). Museums in the United States were held similar interests in history, society and art. “James Smithson, an Englishman … wishes to see established in the US an institution ‘for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.’ In 1846 the U.S. Congress accepted his bequest …” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, ibid.) and this Smithson’s institution exhibits, “all objects of art and curious research … natural history, plants and

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geological and mineralogical specimens,” (Historical document: Smithsonian charta 1846, § 50, 1). “It was during the second half of the 19th century that museums began to proliferate in Europe; civic pride and the free education movement were among the causes of the development. About 100 opened in Britain … while 50 were established in Germany” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 13). This boom also occurred in South America, Asia and Africa. This data shows that the development of museums is always connected with social and cultural developments, both national and international. This development of museums in quantity and quality increased in the 20th century and this development confirmed the relation between social and cultural processes. The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the end of the central-European monarchies (Germany, Austria) after World War I (1919) substantially influenced, or rather changed, cultural life. “In some countries new approaches were developed; in others museums continued to reflect their diverse ancestry … (In Russia) Not only was much of the country’s artistic, historic, and scientific heritage brought together in museums, but other types of museums emerged as well. … In Germany a large number of regional museums were established after World War I to promote the history and important figures of the homeland, and they undoubtedly encouraged the nationalistic tendencies that led to the Nazi era” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 39). “Encouragement” might lend too much honor to the museums’ influence, however the museums surely provided a confirmation of national ideas. These relationships show that museums also contain a political dimension. In the U.S. in the early 20th century there was a great desire “to establish a coherent past – a movement that was widely encouraged through private patronage. In the industrialized world new types of museums appeared” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 16). These new museums presented information about the recent past and everyday-life. Museums about everyday life were not confined to the U.S. Open-air museums first were founded in Sweden and in the Netherlands (Netherlands Openluchtmuseum, Arnheim in 1912), followed by Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia (1926), and Cardiff (1947). These tendencies increased after World War II and a third boom began in the 1970s. After 1945, “Museums became an educational facility, a source of leisure activity, and a medium of communication. Their strength lay in the fact that they were repositories of the ‘real thing,’ which – unlike the surrounding world of plastics, reproduced images, and a deteriorating natural and human environment – could inspire and invoke a sense of wonder, reality, stability, and even nostalgia. … in exhibition work, educators developed facilities for

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both students and the public, … There was a perceptible shift from serving the scholar, as befits an institution holding much of the primacy evidence of the material world, to providing for a lay public as well,” (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 41–42). The result was an increasing number of visitors. Museums and their teams consequently could generate, “a better understanding among the inhabitants of the reasons for cultural, social and environmental change,” and so, “Contemporary museum development has been much influenced by changing policies in public sector …” (ibid.) and vice versa. This new kind of museum, with its interactive museum-teaching, influenced consciousness and knowledge of the inhabitants and was advantageous for all. D. The Middle Ages in the Modern Museum The Middle Ages play an important role in the latest developments of museums, mainly in Europe and in the USA. There were an increased number of Medieval exhibitions in the 1970s, right when museums generally experienced a great boom. In her article, “Das Mittelalter – ein ideales Ausstellungsobjekt?” (Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 346–53) Elisabeth Werner discusses two of the first great exhibitions on the Middle Ages, ‘1000 Jahre Babenberger in Österreich’ (1976 in Stift Lilienfeld, Austria), and ‘Die Kuenringer: Das Werden des Landes Niederösterreich’ (1981 in Stift Zwettl, Austria). Before these two exhibitions there was a major exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1977 that focused on the Hohenstaufen dynasty (see in the list below), ‘Die Zeit der Staufer’. In the following decades, many museums and exhibitions treating Medieval topics opened their doors. These exhibits can be divided into historical and literary exhibitions. In some exhibitions and museums, the Middle Ages are only part of the whole project, and sometimes only one aspect of the Middle Ages is treated. The role and tasks of the scientists and scholars who are involved in creating the exhibitions can be different. The presentations also can be classified according to architectural aspects if they were organized in a special museum building or in an original historical building. Architecture can be considered an additional component regarding the general development of museums. According to Geoffrey Lewis, “Many buildings of historical significance have been adapted to house museums,” especially since the 1990s (Geoffrey Lewis and Gottfried Fliedl, The History of Museums [2007], 44). For this article it is not possible to provide even an approximately complete list of all museums and exhibitions dealing with the Middle Ages. Instead the reader will find a short list of types of Medieval exhibitions and

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some examples of these from recent years, including also a listing of the diverse tasks of the scholars and some examples of catalogues and literature. In general, an exhibit dealing with the Middle Ages is included in virtually all European and American (cultural) history museums, and in some national and regional art museums, for example the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Pinakothek in Munich, the Historical Museum in Vienna, and the ‘Salzburg Museum’ in Austria. Scholars of art history, history, and education are involved in these projects to design and mediate the exhibitions. A special method for presenting exhibits about the Middle Ages can be found in historical or reconstructed castles and monasteries. According to Lewis, the first museum in a castle was maintained by Princess Izabella Czartoryska near Warsaw, Poland, in Pulawy Castle-Garden in the early 19th century. In general, a medieval castle itself is a museum and includes information that presents the history of the castle and its environment (e. g., the Marienburg/Malbork, in Poland, where the Teutonic Order had its residence for three centuries). Most of the monasteries are still active, but in spite of this there are also special kinds of exhibitions in monasteries. For example, a monastery’s library and history can be presented in an exhibition area. Two outstanding examples are Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, Germany, and The Cloisters in New York. The castle of the Bavarian King Ludwig II, however, is not medieval, and only includes numerous 19th century frescoes depicting Medieval myths such as the Nibelungen, Tristan, and Parsifal (they were painted in connection with and inspired by Richard Wagner’s operas, therefore the spelling is ‘Parsifal’ instead of the Middle High German Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s text). Historians and scholars of German literature have dealt with these topics in various articles (see: Hans Dieter Mück, “Das historistische Mittelalter Ludwig II: Die Entwicklung Neuschwansteins von der Burg Lohengrins und Tannhäusers zum Gralstempel Parzivals,” Die Rezeption des Mittelalters in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jürgen Kühnel and Ulrich Müller, 1982, 195–246; Ulrich Müller, “Hohenstaufen,” Mittelalter Mythen, ed. Werner Wunderlich and Ulrich Müller, 2008, 317–32; Siegrid Schmidt, “Der Mythos in den Mauern – Zum Beispiel Burg Neuschwanstein” op. cit., 671–80; and Martin Schubert, “Disney’s Traumschlösser,” op. cit., 201–12). The Cloisters as a building, for instance, was transported from France to the USA; see below in the list of the museums.

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E. Historical Museums The Metropolitan Museum – Medieval part, New York (reconstructions of Medieval churches and knighthood). The Cloisters, New York. Bonnie Young and Malcolm Varon, A Walk through the Cloisters (1979): “The initial imagination was that of the American sculptor George Grey Barnard. Before 1914, when he lived in France, Barnard collected much of the architectural material seen in The Cloisters today, including the columns and capitals of the Saint-Guilem, Cuxa, Bennefont, and Trie Cloisters […]. The design for their structure was entrusted to Charles Collens, the architect of the Riverside Church in New York. Collens’s first consultant in the planning was Joseph Breck, Assistant Director of the Metropolitan Museum. Upon Breck’s death in 1933, the responsibility passed to his colleague James J. Rorimer. Collens and Rorimer, architect and curator, worked closely together throughout the construction period to determine the final form of the building.” “After four years of construction beginning in 1934, The Cloisters opened in 1938. It is not a copy of any particular medieval structure, but an ensemble of rooms and gardens that suggest, rather than duplicate, the European originals. The rooms and halls and chapels of the main floor are built around the largest of the four cloisters, the one from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa. On the lower floor … are the Gothic Chapel, the walls of which rise the height of the two floors, and two garden cloisters, the Bonnefont and the Trie-en-Bigorre (places in France) […]” (Geoffrey Lewis, The History of Museums [2006], 4–5). Die Zeit der Staufer: Geschichte, Kunst, Kultur, Catalogue, ed. Reiner Haussherr, vol. 1–5 (1977); 1000 Jahre Babenberger, Stift Lilienfeld, Austria, 1976, Catalogue, ed. E. Zöllner and K. Gutkas, Katalog des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums Nr. 66. (1976); Die Kuenringer: Das Werden des Landes Niederösterreich, Stift Zwettl, Austria, 1981, Catalogue, ed. H. Wolfram and K. Brunner, Katalog des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums Nr. 110 (1981); St. Peter in Salzburg: Das älteste Kloster im deutschen Sprachrraum, Salzburg, 1982, Catalogue, Schätze europäischer Kunst und Kultur, ed. Amt der Salzburger Landesregierung (1982); Wehrhafte Stadt: Das Wiener Bürgerliche Zeughaus im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Catalogue, by Günter Düriegl, 101. Sonderausstellung Historisches Museum Wien (1986); Die Ritter, Burgendländische Landesausstellung Burg Güssing, Catalogue, ed. Harald Pricker (1990); Ritterburg und Fürstenschloss, Catalogue, ed. Herbert Wurster and Richard Loibl, Archiv des Bistums Passau, vol. 1/2 (1998); Schauplatz Mittelalter, Kärntner Landesausstellung, Friesach, Catalogue, ed. Barbara Maier and Günther Hödl, vol. 1–2 (2001); Kaiser Heinrich II. 1002–1024, Bamberg, Catalogue ed. Josef Kirmeier, Bernd Scheidmüller et al. (2002); Kaiser

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Maximilian I: Bewahrer und Reformer, Reichskammergerichtsmuseum Wetzlar, Catalogue, ed. Georg Schmidt-von Rhein (2002). The following exhibits were of particular importance: Museum Judenplatz – zum mittelalterlichen Judentum, 2004, Catalogue, Museum Judenplatz, ed. Gerhard Milchram (2004). The curator commented: “Als Mitte der 90er Jahre die Wissenschaftler der Wiener Stadtarchäologie unter Dr. Ortolf Harl die Reste der mittelalterlichen Synagoge auf dem Judenplatz entdeckten und Zug um Zug freilegten, war dies für die Fachwelt nicht nur eine große Entdeckung, für manche Mittelalterforscher war es sogar ein Sensation. Die Funde bestätigten die Vermutungen der Wissenschaftler, dass sich auf dem Judenplatz eine bedeutende jüdische Ansiedlung mit einem wichtigen religiösen Zentrum befunden hat. Einer der damals bedeutendsten jüdischen Gelehrten, Isaak ben Mose, auch Or Sarua genannt, ist aufgrund der schriftlichen Quellen, die wir kennen, in Wien gewesen” (6; “When in the middle of the 1990s the scholars of the Viennese city-archaeology department, under the direction of Dr. Ortolf Harl, discovered the remnants of the Jewish synagogue and excavated them step by step, this was not only a great discovery for the discipline, but for some scholars it was a real sensation. These discoveries confirmed the assumption by some scholars that there had been a Jewish settlement and an important religious center in the Jewish Square. One of the most important Jewish scholars, Issak ben Mose, also called Or Sarua, had been in Vienna at that time, according to the available literary sources”). The basic walls of the synagogue and the reconstruction of the old settlement and its development are presented. Im Fluss – Am Fluss, 950 Jahr Stift Lambach, Jubiläumsausstellung, Catalogue, ed. Benediktinerstift Lambach (2006); Maximilian I.: Triumph eines Kaisers: Herrscher mit Europäischen Visionen, 2006; Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, Berlin and Magdeburg, 2006, Catalogue: Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, 962 bis 1806: Von Otto dem Großen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, ed. Matthias Puhle and Claus-Peter Hasse, part I, (2006). It includes a list of the most important international medieval exhibitions (603–59). This exhibition took place in two cities, in Magdeburg (treating the Middle Ages) and Berlin (treating the 19th century and the 20th until the end of the monarchy). The catalogue has three parts, two covering the exhibitions and one containing essays by various scholars: historians, art historians, architects, and philosophers. There is an additional collection of the papers that were written for a congress that was organized just before the opening of the exhibition. The main catalogue shows the numerous tasks of science and humanities in connection with such

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a great event. Cecilie Hollberg, Martina Junghans, Gabriele Köster, Heike Pöppelmann, Thilo Reichelt, and Alexander Schubert worked together on the scholarly organization. There were also educational specialists in the exhibitions (Thilo Reichelt, special part: Wolfgang Hugk, KarlHein Kärgling), for public relations specialists, (Alexander Schubert), specialists for the exhibition’s design and legends (Karin Kanter, Gabriele Köster, Sabine Liebscher, Alexander Schubert), library specialists (Helga Schettge), and a large supporting staff. The sheer manpower needed to run the exhibition provides enough proof that such an exhibition, of a topic that deals with nearly 1,000 years, is a very complex challenge. F. Medieval Literature in Musems and Exhibitions Das Nibelungenlied, Hohenems, Austria, 1979, Elmar Vonban, Nibelungenlied: Ausstellung zur Erinnerung an die Auffindung der Handschrift A des Nibelungenliedes im Jahre 1779 im Palast zu Hohenems (1979). The most important scholars dealing with the Nibelungenlied wrote articles for the catalogue (Achim Masser, Sigrid von Moisy, Hermann Reichert, and Walter Salmen). Subsequently an International Congress with well-known medivalists (Achim Masser, Ulrich Müller, Alfred Ebenbauer, Klaus Zatloukal, Peter Stein, Otfrid Ehrismann, and Walter Haug) was organized in the small town of Hohenems. It was the first time that the reception of the Middle Ages, or Medievalism, other than the traditional Nibelungen-topics, was included in a serious exhibition and in a scholarly congress. Die Neidhart-Fresken, Vienna, Austria, exhibition since 1982, Catalogue, Eva-Maria Höhle, Renata Kassal-Mikula et al., Neidhard-Fresken um 1400: Die ältesten profanen Wandmalereien Wiens (1982). It is not an exhibition in the traditional sense, insofar as visitors observe only the rooms with the frescos in the historical house in Vienna, Tuchlauben 1. Die Nibelungen: Bilder von Liebe, Verrat und Untergang, Catalogue, ed. Wolfgang Stock (1987); Wolfram Museum, Wolframs Eschenbach, Germany, open since 1994 (see the model: Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach: Kann man Literatur ausstellen? ed. Anton Seitz, 1994). This is one of the first and few museums dedicated to a single medieval author. The scholarly adviser was one of the most famous scholars of Middle High German literature of the last decades, Karl Bertau. The ideas and texts of the exhibition and of the catalogue were created by a Wolfram von Eschenbach scholar, Dietmar Peschel-Rentsch, supported by Oskar Geidner and Hartmut Beck. The artificial design for all of Wolfram’s works (Parzival, Titurel, Willehalm, and his songs) was created by Michael Hoffer with the assistance of Albrecht Gribl and Rainer Köhnlein.

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Der Gral: Artusromantik in der Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, Catalogue, ed. Reinholf Baumsterk and Michael Koch (1996). The exhibition presents a plethora of information about the Grail, and the catalogue also includes articles by scholars of Medieval literature and history, such as Ulrich Müller, Annemarie Eder, Ulrich Rehm, Michael Petzet, Oswald Georg Bauer, Debora Mancoff, and Johannes Zahlten. Vom Codex zum Computer: 250 Jahre Universitätsbibliothek Innsbruck, Catalogue, ed. Walter Neuhaus and Eva Ramminger, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum (1996); Schätze der schwarzen Kunst: Wiegendrucke,Catalogue and Exhibition by Irene Erfen, Landesarchiv Greifswald (1997); Das Buch des anonymen Dichters, Nibelungen-Museum Worms, open since 2001 (also the title of the museum guide). This is the second permanent museum in a German-speaking country that deals with a single medieval literary text and its context. The Nibelungenlied is not presented with historical items like manuscripts, but mainly by pictures from the 19th and 20th centuries. The literary material that (re)tells the story of the Nibelungen already comes to life in Worms with congresses and festivals. New dramas were written for Worms and were performed there the first time. For example, Moritz Rinkes’ play, Die Nibelungen, played first onstage at the Nibelungen-Festival in Worms in 2003. Der Turmbau zu Babel: Ursprung und Vielfalt von Sprache und Schrift, Catalogue, ed. Wilfried Seipel, vol. 1–3b (2003). The main, and perhaps unusual, topic of this exhibition was the language: presented through art and discussed with various pictures of The Construction of the Tower of Babylon. There were also pictures, sounds, texts of various languages, and information about nearly all known languages on Earth, from ancient Egyptian to modern languages and dialects. This exhibition filled a huge palace near Graz and took place in connection with ‘Graz as the Capital of Worldwide Cultural Heritage’ in 2003. Many linguistic scholars worked for this exhibition and its catalogue, for example Oswald Panagl and Hubert Haider (Salzburg). Das Nibelungenlied und seine Welt, Karlsruhe, 2003. This exhibit presented the Nibelungenlied from its literary origins to its cultural reception in the 20th century with original objects (old weapons, stones, tools of everyday life) and examples of its original language (i. e., boards with examples of Middle High German text), with reconstructions and, most notably, with the original and most important manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied and of the Klage (manuscripts A, B, C, D, and fragments). Scholars of the different aspects of the Nibelungenlied assisted with the exhibit in various capacities. For example, scholarly literature was displayed in the exhibit, for instance the visitor could have a look at these books and they could listen to interviews with

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some of theses scholars which were recorded on tapes (the catalogue gave the whole list of these works from the last 150 years). Mainly Joachim Heinzle, Lothar Voetz and Johannes Zahlten were responsible for all scholarly tasks for the exhibition. Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, Catalogue by Ulrich Montag and Karin Schneider, Bayerischer Staatsbibliothek (2005). The Bavarian State Library in Munich presents a historical exhibition with valuable manuscripts nearly every year. Select Bibliography Education in Museums: Museums in Education, ed. Timothy Ambrose (Edinburgh: HMSO/Scottish Museums Council, 1987); Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne à Vendre. Département des Aigles, Section Financière (Paris: de Musée d’Art, 1979); Die Medien der Geschichte, ed. Fabia Crivellaria, Kay Kirchmann et al. (Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004); Je näher man ein Wort ansieht, desto ferner sieht es zurück: Zur Geschichte des Museums, ed. Gottfried Fliedl (Vienna and Graz: Verlag der Museumsakademie Joaneum, 2007); Walter Grasskampf, Museumsgründer und Museumsstürmer: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Kunstmuseums (Munich: C. H Beck, 1981); Diethard Herber, Das Museum und die Dinge: Wissenschaft – Präsentation – Pädagogik (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 1996); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museum and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: The Heritage Care, 1992); Eilean HooperGreenhill, Seeing the Museum Through the Visitor’s Eyes (London: The Council for Museums and Galeries, 2002); Geoffrey Lewis, “The History of Museums,” Encyclopedia Britannica (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2006) and: http://www.muuseum.ee/ uploads/files/g._lewis_the_history_of_museum s.pdf (last accessed on Jan. 17, 2008); Thomas D. Meier and Hans R. Reust, Medium Museum: Kommunikation und Vermittlung in Museen für Kunst und Geschichte (Bern, Stuttgart, and Vienna: Verlag Paul Haupt, 2000). Bibliographies: Humboldt Universität Berlin: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/museums paedagogik/studienarchiv/studwerkz (last accessed on Jan. 30, 2009); Museumspädagogik (Teaching Museums) – Literaturliste 1990–2002 (international bibliography 1990–2002), produced by Hildegard Schmid and Ursula Köhler (Verein für Museumspädagogik Baden-Württemberg e.V., Germany, 2003).

Siegrid Schmidt

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Music in Medieval Studies

Music in Medieval Studies A. Introduction In Medieval Studies music involves various aspects of the discipline, including the practice of music in medieval institutions, music as an academic and philosophical subject, the practice of music in the church and other venues, and references to music in literature. Within those areas, music notation, the written evidence for executing compositions, has evolved from the various methods used for chant in late antiquity to more rhythmically oriented styles crucial for polyphonic compositions of the 14th century and later eras. While notation captures elements of a work so that it can be reproduced, the execution involves variables which can result in different interpretation. As one of the performing arts, the practice of music involves various traditions that have evolved over the years, and while it is possible to perform music from the Middle Ages, it is impossible to gauge precisely the resulting sounds. Performing practice, as it is called, must recreate various situations, so that modern musicians can arrive at performances that are informed through knowledge of the period. B. History of Music From the historical perspective, the medieval period in music exists between late antiquity and the Renaissance, the era concerning the 8th through 14th centuries, prior to the style shift that is perceptible between 1450 and 1550. Among the earliest to recognize the medieval era as an historic period is Filippo Valini who, in a treatise that dates to 1382, distinguished between the ancient and modern styles, with a significant era separating the two. Later commentators pointed to the period for various reasons, and it is also important to recognize in music the shift in musical style that is audible in the music itself. While the music of the Renaissance contains intervals of thirds and sixths, these were allowed less prominently in the medieval era, which broadly exhibited a preference for the perfect intervals, that is, unisons, octaves, fifths and fourths. Treatises in music of the time pointed to such choices when it came to instruction on composition, a topic that was not necessarily taught in the curriculum of the era, but certainly discussed among the cognoscenti. Such discussions point to thought more characteristic of the latter part of this somewhat broad historic period, in contrast to the more philosophically oriented ideas that emerged earlier in the era, when the influence of ancient culture is more evident. In fact, the development of musical thought within the medieval era bears further consideration from several perspectives. These include the for-

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mal study of music in the university curriculum as part of the seven liberal arts, as well as the practice of music in both the sacred and secular traditions. Music had been traditionally included in the academic quadrivium, along with arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry as the four arts that complement the trivium, which involve logic, rhetoric, and grammar, the three subjects at the core of the liberal arts. Understood in this context, music was a component in the education of an individual, alongside those other disciplines and, thus, shows the art to be an important intellectual endeavor. The precision and exactness of the art emerge when music is juxtaposed to geometry – music being continuity in motion, while geometry is continuity at rest. At the same time, the study of music involves the measurement of pitch based on the monochord and the explication of rhythm as related to poetic modes. Unlike the approaches to musical study which rely on music literature and repertoires, as occurs, perhaps, more frequently in the modern era, the orientation of writers on music in the medieval era retains a conceptual orientation. The discussions in the various treatises were related to theories of mode, mensuration, and polyphony without necessarily reference to stylistic issues or matters of affect or expression. Only in the late 19th through 20th centuries has attention been given to the repertoires of music produced in the middle ages, which encompass various genres and forms, including chant, organum, and the motet. Secular forms include monophonic and polyphonic compositions that mirror the poetic forms, as found in the ballade, virelai, and roundelay, with the element of textual repetition having an influence on those musical structures. Beyond the aspects of music that are intrinsically connected to the art is poetry, both in the verses found in the liturgical chants, including those found in the sequences, as well as in the secular sphere, where the poetic and musical forms may be seen to intersect. Of the secular music that emerged in the Middle Ages, is the Roman de Fauvel, a 14th-century work that involves verse attributed to Gervais de Bus set by the composer Philippe de Vitry in the Ars Nova style. At other levels, the links between poetry emerge with some composers, like Guillaume Machaut, who was respected for both poetic and musical works. A further aspect of medieval music involves reference to the art in literature and the graphic arts.

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C. Medieval Musical Practice At the core of medieval musical practice is liturgical chant, which was the mode of cantillating texts in the ordinary and proper of the Christian Mass. While various traditions existed well into the Middle Ages, the efforts of Pope Gregory the Great to unify practice have conveyed the eponymous term Gregorian Chant to that body of music from what has been termed the golden age of chant. In addition to such chant associated with the Mass and other services, it also involves tropes, prosulas, sequences, Latin song, and is part of liturgical drama. Those latter kinds of monophonic music are ascribed by some to the silver age of chant. Related to chant are some polyphonic works derived from chant. Firmly rooted in the tradition and practice of the time, organum and discant polyphony by necessity used chant as a point of departure, and chant serves as the cantus firmus in motets, that is, melodic formulae which are the basis for the more freely composed musical lines built around it. The corpus of chant encompassed various regional and local traditions, such that the conception of Gregorian chant, especially with reference to the Liber usualis as a repository of chant may be understood as a development of a later time. While the monophonic texture of chant may be regarded as a pervasive part of the medieval music, early polyphony emerged in the 12th century, with Aquitanian manuscripts and also in the well-known Codex Calixtinus. Polyphony may be found in various urban centers, such as Paris, where the works of the famous Leonin are found in the Magnus Liber Organi; following Leonin, Perotin, whose facility was noted in his day. Discant clausulae, that is self-contained sections of polyphony, demonstrate increasingly intricacy, as tripla and quadrupla, that is, works respectively in three and four parts were composed. While these works are part of larger structures, discrete compositions evolved in the form of conductus. Along with these kinds of works, the motet developed, including the isorhythmic motet with its intersection of sacred and secular elements that did not necessarily reflect the arbitrary distinction between such modes of expression that are more properly associated with later eras. While chant retains hegemony in sacred rites and rituals, such practice is augmented though the inclusion of the polyphonic music specifically composed and based on chant repertoire. In this context, polyphonic settings of the Mass developed, and represent efforts to pursue multi-movement formal structures, along with the various approaches taken to compose motets, multivoice compositions that involve religious texts and subjects. Works like these differ from traditional chant in being newly composed, that is, music written by individuals for use on specific occasions and preserved in writing for rep-

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etition later. The practice of writing music involved non-verbal notation that had to address the challenges of pitch and rhythm to preserve the composers’ conceptions of the sounds that would accompany the given texts. Such composition of music was an innovation that exposed the medieval world to the creation of new works as an artistic effort that stood apart from the almost spontaneous practice of performing chant as traditionally executed. Such formalization of musical thought is significant for the way in which it introduced to the Western world the idea of musical works. D. Music in Manuscripts / Music Notation The place of music in the culture of the medieval era is apparent in various ways. Beyond the extant music manuscripts and treatises that provide firsthand evidence of its presence in that period, references to music occur in the literature of the time. Beyond literary references to musical works, musicmaking, and musical instruments, pictorial allusions to music may be found in the iconography of the time, with depictions of singing and musical instruments. Music notation is also part of some dramatic manuscripts, including those associated with liturgical drama. The performance of music from the medieval period involves re-creating a tradition that has become discontinuous in modern practice. The effort to recover the music has involved the Monks of Solesmes, whose publications reproduced manuscripts that reach back toward antiquity and involve transcriptions that bring those materials into modern notation. By extension, the transcription involves some decisions that give shape to notation that is not entirely intelligible, since it is divorced from a continuous tradition of performance. Laudable as they are, the Solesmes are not necessarily the only interpretation of the notation, but remain among the best-known modern versions of early chant. At the core of the Solesmes efforts is the notational practice of the time, which involved neumes, a mode of denoting pitches with some aspects of relative duration. The notation associated with St. Gall gave way to other modes of notation, including Daseian, with systems of notation becoming during this period increasingly precise in representing the durations so that the resulting performances could be more predictably consistent. At the same time, the notation also lent itself to setting down contrapuntal textures that could be performed with accuracy. In fact, in the 14th century, the so-called mannerist composers used color to indicate various mensurations, and thus arrive at pieces that involved intricate time-values. While color notation (the second color usually being red) fell out of practice in the late Middle Ages, some aspects of the practice influenced later practices in notation. Overall,

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though, the kinds of music notation shifted, just as musical values changed, and modern performers sometimes choose to play the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in facsimile as a means of capturing the style and avoiding the editorial hand which may be part of playing from transcriptions. Within the context of what followed in the Renaissance, the medieval era was a crucial time for music, as various concepts took shape, including the concept of a musical work, systems of notation, and the development of polyphonic compositional techniques. Most importantly, the use of music shifted from its ritual use in Christian liturgy to a performing art of its own. The discipline of music as an academic pursuit also developed as philosophical stances based on antiquity gave way to increasingly detailed discussions of mensuration and other ideas essential to the medieval style, and that involved distinctions between sacred and secular styles. Those distinctions sometimes blurred in motets which used both sacred and secular texts, both of which might be constructed over a tenor part derived from a liturgical source. Such complex interactions are not unique to music, but reflect, in a sense, the culture of the period, which resulted, in part, from the tension between such perceived differences. E. History of Research Recent scholarship has involved various investigations of the conceptualizations of medieval music, which often may be seen to say as much about the times in which they emerged as the period that they concern. Katharine Bergeron’s account of the development of modern conceptions of chant offers perspectives that can be used in pursuing other kinds of medieval music. Taking a cue from Bergeron, those familiar with medieval music can point to the Solesmes efforts which began in the 1880s as a crucial unified effort to explore a body of medieval music in depth, that is, to identify the works, examine the sources, delineate the paleographic aspects of those materials, and to interpret them for modern generations. With the resulting Solesmes publications, modern culture had a new and bold reexamination of one of the crucial aspects of medieval music culture, chant, which was at the core of not just the liturgy practiced, but also the newly composed tropes, organum, clausulae, and motets. This was an important contribution to scholarship, by which Dom Guéranger attempted to restore the practice of plainsong without the accountrements of the late 19th century. Dom Guéranger was succeeded by various members of his Benedictine community, whose efforts also resulted in such practical editions of chant in the first decades of the 20th century as the Liber Usualis, the Liber Gradualis and other pre-Vatican II respositories of chant.

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While music of the Middle Ages was not ignored, studies in the first half of the 20th century were isolated. It would take the groundbreaking work of Gustav Reese (1899–1977) to shape the study of medieval music. His comprehensive study of the period in Music in the Middle Ages, 1940, was at once a summation of information on the music and conceptions of the literature, such that any new research would need to refer to Reese’s work. His study of medieval music not only summarized the entire period conceptually, but it also inspired further research for generations of musicologists. About fifteen years later the perspectives of Reese found their way into the New Oxford History of Music (NOHM, and it is significant that the subject divides between two volumes in this series. While important as a reference work, the NOHM study is a collection of articles by specialists and lacks the comprehensive vision that Reese gave to his study. Nevertheless, the detailed articles in the NOHM demonstrate the vitality of the subject in their focus on various elements of medieval music. Reese’s publisher, W. W. Norton & Co., included Reese’s Music in the Middle Ages in the period histories that were part of its Books that Live in Music series, and only in 1978 did Norton release a single volume to succeed Reese, Medieval Music by Richard H. Hoppin (1978), the first in its series entitled Norton Introduction to Music History. Hoppin’s text represents the level of scholarship three decades after Reese’s pioneering efforts and the extensive bibliography in Hoppin’s book is evidence of the flowering of research in this area. While no new repertoires were uncovered, Hoppin’s work demonstrated a stronger familiarity with the music at a time when the performance practice movement in music had some strong proponents of medieval literature, like David Munrow and others. By extension, Jeremy Yudkin’s single-volume study of Medieval Music (1989) demonstrates the importance of musicological study with music analysis with its incorporation of extensive, anthology-like examples into the text. Such familiarity may be the result of a deeper knowledge of the music of the Middle Ages through the work of publication of The Notation of Medieval Music by Carl Parrish (1957), another Norton effort. While Reese was responsible for his own examples, Parrish offered tools for scholars to examine manuscripts of medieval music in order to arrive at their own transcriptions of the works in modern notation. Parrish distinguished between notational styles, and his concepts were critical for generations of scholars to study further the sometimes challenging or otherwise ambiguous notation of the sacred and secular music in various national traditions. Written at a time when music notation was remarkably precise in giving specific instructions to performers, The Notation of Medieval Music reflects sensitivity to the ambiguities that exist with a living tradition that did not require such spe-

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cificity for performance. While most of Parrish’s efforts shed light on monophonic music, the music of the late Middle Ages benefits from the principles found in The Notation of Polyphonic Music (1953; rev. 5th ed., 1961), in which Willi Apel treats in greater details than Parrish the notation of the Ars Nova, with its use of varying mensurations and the inclusion of color to distinguish rhythmic patterns between those layers. The efforts to decipher and understand the notation of medieval music resulted in increasingly larger numbers of editions of early music in various sets and monuments. This made the music referred to in various articles and studies accessible to scholars and ultimately performers, who found inspiration in music that had lost its currency for generations. A substantial selection of medieval music was included in the Historical Anthology of Music (2 vols., ed. Archibald T. Davison and Willi Apel, 1946), and this set the tone for similar efforts by other anthologizers. One of the remarkable publications of this kind is the Oxford Anthology of Medieval Music selected and edited by W. Thomas Marocco and Nicholas Sandon (1972) which stands out because of the detailed commentary which accompanies each piece. With the foundation offered by Reese and the investigations of notation by Parrish and also by Apel, modern scholars had the tools for exploring the literature of the Middle Ages not through editions, as found with music of the Common Practice era, but firsthand, through a working knowledge of the materials in facsimile and, for those scholars who pursued it, direct studies of the sources. In a sense the efforts of musicology allowed those interested to have access to the subject by making not only the concepts comprehensible, but also opened the sources to study. The situation differs from that which existed in the late 19th century, when this was the domain of specialists. In contrast, libraries of various sizes owned not only the studies which included some facsimiles of music, but also entire volumes of medieval music in facsimile. While this was first used for study, eventually such materials found their ways into the hands of performers who played from them directly rather than rely on transcriptions. About a century after the rediscovery of medieval music, Daniel LeechWilkinson offered some sobering insights into the period in the persuasive study entitled The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (2002). If music culture by its nature is based on extant and living traditions, the study of medieval music reflects an act of intellectual recovery, rather than some sort of restoration of a practice. Leech-Wilkinson explores some of the misconceptions about Medieval practice that reflect more the period in which they were written than the realities of the Medieval, of which the extant documentation offers relatively few tangible ideas, compared to the more extensive

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documentation associated with later eras. Some of the transcriptions that circulated in histories of music and surveys of music theory, especially those of Hugo Riemann, seem closer to arrangements along the lines of Romantic practice, rather than the more diplomatic treatment of manuscript sources in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Essentially the idea of medieval music required efforts that place theory into practice, but never actually reflect the continuity which may be seen in other traditions. Much of the initiative in studies of medieval music has emerged from the German and Anglo-American sphere, and those who pursue various topics within this area of research will also find specific studies of various national repertoires in what are now Italy, France, Spain, and other areas by scholars in those countries. Moreover, the bibliographies in the various works cited below point to the intergenerational dialogue that has occurred between scholars in various traditions and also to directions that need further exploration. It is also important to consider the unique situation with music in which performance brings alive certain aspects of research. In addition to the work of David Munrow in the United Kingdom, various other performers have made contributed to the recorded history of medieval music. Among the latter are René Clemencic, who brought to performance the famous Carmina Burana; the Hilliard Ensemble, which has recorded some of the music of the Ars Nova; the Ensemble Organum, and other groups, who devote their efforts to this repertoire. In addition to Leech-Wilkinson’s important study, various other new perspectives are the result of ethnographic investigations, such as Peter Jeffrey’s Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (1995). Jeffrey’s approach offers some fine insights that should guide scholars in directions that are necessary and useful for understanding this critical period in Western culture. The questions that arise from such discussions allow for rediscovering the music of the Middle Ages and the culture in which it was created. The resulting efforts are laudable for showing the relevance of medieval music in modern culture, which has its roots in many of the ideas that emerged in this crucial period in Western civilization. Select Bibliography Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600 (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of American, 1953; rev. 5th ed., 1961); Margaret Bent, “The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis,” Tonal Structures in Early Music, ed. Cristle Collins Judd (New York: Garland Publishers, 1998), 15–59; Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Heinrich Besseler, Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance

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(Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1925, rpt. 1931); Richard L. Crocker, An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; rpt. 1995); Richard Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978); id., Medieval Music: An Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978); The New Oxford History of Music 2: Early Medieval Music up to 1300, ed. Don Anselm Hughes (London: Oxford University Press, 1954); The New Oxford History of Music 3: Ars Nova and the Renaissance 1300–1540, ed. Don Anselm Hughes and Gerald Abraham (London: Oxford University Press, 1960); Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Oxford Anthology of Music: Medieval Music, ed. W. Thomas Marocco and Nicholas Sandon (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); Carl Parrish, The Notation of Medieval Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1957; rev. ed., 1959); Gustav Reese; Music in the Middle Ages (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1940); Hugo Riemann, Studien zu Geschichte der Notenschrift (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1878); Arnold Schering, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914); Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989). Online Resources: Chant Homepage: http://www.music.princeton.edu/chant_html/ Solesmes (Gregorian Chant): http://www.solesmes.com/GB/gregorien/hist.php?js=1

James L. Zychowicz

Mysticism A. General Definition Mysticism is the belief in union with the Divine and the pursuit of such union; it manifests itself in almost all cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions (Bruno Borchert, Mysticism: Its History and Challenge, 1994). In its broadest sense mysticism refers to a belief system that recognizes occult or supernatural powers. Mircea Eliade relates its earliest manifestations to shamanism (Shamanism, 1964), and Robert Charles Zaehner posits a type of mysticism, monistic or nature-based, that is drug-induced (Mysticism: Sacred and Profane, 1957). Discussion here will focus on theistic mystical experiences in Western Christianity. Mysticism in early Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism shares features with the Western Christian mystical tradition, but the primary sources of Christian mysticism of the European Middle Ages are Greek philosophy, the Jewish tradition, and early Christianity itself (Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition. From Plato to Denys, 1981; Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, vol. 1: Die

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Grundlegung durch die Kirchenväter und die Mönchstheologie des 12. Jahrhunderts, 1990; Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991; Otto Langer, Christliche Mystik im Mittelalter, 2004). The word “mysticism” derives from the Greek noun   ‘secret’ or ‘ceremony’ and the verb  ‘to close one’s eyes (or lips).’ The Greeks characterize the mystical union as a ritual by which the initiate gains knowledge of the unspeakable secret, namely how the mortal life can unite with the life of a god. The initiate guards the secret by remaining silent and contemplates it by shutting his eyes to the world. The term “mysticism” was introduced into modern scholarship in 17th-century France (Michel de Certeau, “‘Mystique’ au XVIIe siècle: Le problème du langage ‘mystique,’” L’Homme devant Dieu: Mélanges offerts au Père Henri de Lubac, 1964, vol. 2, 267–91; Louis Bouyer, “Mysticism, An Essay on the History of the Word,” Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, 1981, 42–55). Because of the personal and individualistic nature of mysticism and the mystical experience, it is difficult to provide a comprehensive, generally accepted definition (F. Samuel Brainard, “Defining Mystical Experience,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 [1996]: 359–93). William James identifies four general characteristics of the mystical experience: 1) ineffability – it cannot be described or expressed in words; 2) noetic quality – it involves or reveals knowledge or certain truths; 3) transient nature or short duration; and 4) passivity – lack or loss of control by the individual involved (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, 380). Evelyn Underhill counters with her own set of attributes, asserting that: 1) mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical; 2) its aims are transcendental and spiritual; 3) the driving force behind mysticism is love; and 4) the union is a definite state, arrived at by a psychological and spiritual process (Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, 1911, 70–94). In his description of extrovertive mystical states of mind, Walter T. Stace presents a more comprehensive list of traits: 1) the unifying vision, expressed abstractly by the formula “All is One”; 2) the One as a living Presence; 3) the sense of objectivity or reality; 4) such feelings as blessedness, joy, happiness, satisfaction; 5) the feeling that what is apprehended is holy, or sacred, or divine; 6) paradoxicality, and 7) alleged ineffability (Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960, 79). To some degree all of the above characteristics manifest themselves in Western Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages. Attained through contemplation and love, the mystical union may reveal knowledge or ideas that are otherwise inapprehensible; frequently the experience is characterized at least in part by visual or auditory experiences, revealed only to the mystic him- or herself. The union sometimes is described

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in terms of the marriage between a human bride and the Divine bridegroom or as the emptying of the human self through a turning away from the world and a focusing on the Divine, so that the self can be filled with the Divine. The experience frequently is conceived of as a journey, which is accomplished in stages: in contemplation the soul rids itself of worldliness; in the process the soul becomes more attuned to the Divine; ultimately, union is achieved, an experience frequently characterized as ecstasy or rapture (Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism, 1992). The nature of the mystical union has been the subject of much debate, which Daniel Merkur summarizes in “Unitive Experience and the State of Trance,” Mystical Union and Monotheistic Union, 1989, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, 1989, 125–53 (republished as Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, 1996). The challenge of characterizing the mystical experience is compounded by inherent dichotomies. Speculative mysticism foregrounds the role of the intellect and knowledge, whereas affective mysticism invokes the framework of emotion and love (affect). Mystical experiences have been viewed as the intersection between the rational and the emotional (Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, 1995) as well as the rational and irrational (Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 1917; The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, 1923; Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism, 1975). For some mystics the experience is predicated upon a contemplative lifestyle, for others the experience can be reconciled with the vita activa. Stace distinguishes the extrovertive experience that seeks the Divine through the physical senses in the external world from the introvertive experience that is directed inward (The Teachings of the Mystics, 1960). Some experiences seem to occur spontaneously, whereas others are the result of an individual’s own efforts. The latter type is a part of theurgical mysticism (Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, 1995) and is associated more with the kabbalah in the medieval Jewish mystical tradition than with medieval Christian mysticism (Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 1988). Although indwelling, God also is above and separate from all works of creation – hence the theory of transcendence beside that of immanence. Since the world is created in God’s image, it must be good, yet one recognizes that the world is evil and ephemeral. (Rudolf Otto, West-östliche Mystik: Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung, 1926; Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism, 1932). God may be defined in positive terms – kataphatic mysticism – but in the Christian tradition the ineffability of the experience more often

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leads to a discussion of apophatic or negative theology, the describing of God in terms of what God is not (Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God, The Christian Contemplative Tradition, 1996). Michael Sells characterizes apophatic language as “un-saying” or “speaking-away” (Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 1994). Despite their inability to express the inexpressible, many mystics have given voice to their experiences; William P. Alston raises the question as to whether their words are to be understood literally (Divine Nature and Human Language, 1989). In an attempt to explain the unio mystica, medieval Christian mystics devoted much of their energy to resolving the paradoxes above. When successful in the eyes of the Church of Rome, like Thomas Aquinas, their teachings became doctrine; when considered in conflict with established religious tenets, they were deemed heretical, like Meister Eckhart, whose idea of an allpervasive power in which all things were one led to charges of pantheism. Whereas some mystical writings emanated from great teachers and preachers of the Middle Ages, others derived from a nun’s or layperson’s communion with the Divine, which revealed visions or truths the individual felt compelled to communicate to others. The Church sometimes acknowledged and accepted such revelations and prophecies, such as those of Hildegard of Bingen, and sometimes condemned them as heresy, as in the case of Na Prous Boneta, a Spiritual Franciscan who was burned at the stake. Extreme ascetic practices and other nonconformist behavior that fostered or accompanied the unitive experience were at times accepted or even lauded, such as Henry Suso’s great love and devotion to Christ that led him to inscribe the name of Jesus on his chest. In other situations such practices and behaviors were deemed excessive or in violation of acceptable norms: the Beguine Marguerite Porete’s characterization of a love between the soul and the Divine that necessitated no intermediary, a challenge to the Church’s role as spiritual conciliator, led to her being burned at the stake (Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, “Women, Heresy, and Holiness in Early Fourteenth-Century France,” Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 1986, 276–98). The relationship between religion and magic also manifests itself in the study of mysticism and has led to the study of the question of the Divine or diabolical origins of the mystical experience (Marcello Craveri, Sante e streghe, 1980; Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffälliger Frauen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit, 1995; Richard Kieckhefer, “The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl, 1996, 310–37; Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life

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in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 73 [1998]: 733–70; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, 2003), as well as associations between mysticism and other esoteric movements (Arthur Versluis, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esoteric Traditions, 2007). The unusual nature of the experience often brings into question the mystic’s psychological state and mental stability. Focusing on the techniques of meditation and renunciation, Arthur Deikman has posited a psychological model of the mystical experience (“Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience,” Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, 1980, 240–69). The relationship between medieval mystics’ experiences and hysteria has been studied in general (Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture, 1996; Jerome Kroll, Bernard Bachrach, and Kathleen Carey, “A Reappraisal of Medieval Mysticism and Hysteria,” Mental Health, Religion, and Culture 5 [2002]: 83–98), and with regard to specific groups, e. g., 13th-century holy women (Amy Hollywood, “Ventriloquizing Hysteria: Fetishism, Trauma, and Sexual Difference,” Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, 2002, 236–73 [241–66]), and individuals (Julia Long, “Mysticism and Hysteria: The Histories of Margery Kempe and Anna O.,” Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature, ed. Ruth Evans and Leslie Johnson, 1994, 88–111). The relationship of the mystical experience to a physiological condition has been suggested as well. Charles Singer claims that visions of Hildegard of Bingen exhibit characteristics of scintillating scotoma, a visual aura commonly associated with certain kinds of migraines (“The Visions of Hildegard of Bingen,” From Magic to Science. Essays on the Scientific Twilight, 1958), a theory revisited by Oliver Sacks (Migraine. The Evolution of a Common Disorder, 1970). B. Origins and Development of Western Christian Mysticism 1. Origins and Early Development Although many early religions and philosophies have strong elements of mysticism, most significant to the development of Western Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages are ideas found in Greek philosophy, Judaism, and early Christianity itself. The idea of deliberately shutting one’s eyes to external things in order to concentrate on the Divine knowledge, which is in reality within humans themselves, is part of Neoplatonic philosophy, and one that connects early philosophers such as Plotinus, Proclus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite with later Christian mystics (William R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1899). In order to describe the relation-

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ship between humans and the Absolute, philosophers first needed to define the Absolute, i. e., to define God. One description characterized God in terms of what God is not, the theologia negativa. (Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena, 1995). Another invoked the scala perfectionis, the ladder of perfection, by which the soul attempted to ascend (or less frequently descend) to union with God. Paths or stages of spiritual life were identified: the via purgativa, illuminativa, and unitiva; purged from worldliness, the soul is enlightened regarding Divine truth and thus prepared for union with the Divine. The 5th-century mystical writer Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite was closely associated with these descriptions (Andrew Louth, Denys, the Areopagite, 1989; McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 157–82). Philosophers also postulated where recognition of the Absolute occurred: The Neoplatonists’ intellectus agens gave rise to the apex mentis or synderesis of Bonaventure and the Fünklein of Meister Eckhart (Endre von Ivánka, “Apex mentis. Wanderung und Wandlung eines stoischen Terminus,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 72 [1950]: 129–76). Subsequent centuries witnessed the continuation and amplification of inherently Neoplatonic ideas. The most notable and influential proponent through the Carolingian era was Augustine (354–430) (John J. O’Meara, “Augustine and Neoplatonism,” Recherches augustiniennes 1 [1958]: 91–111). His ideas remained in the philosophical foreground, as other great thinkers such as Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), Alcuin (735–804), and Rhabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856) provided commentary on and amplification of his works (McGinn, “Augustine: The Founding Father,” The Foundations of Mysticism, 228–62). John Scottus Eriugena (ca. 800–ca. 877) translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin and propounded the dialectical Platonic mysticism that had a profound influence on Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa in later centuries (Alois Haas, “Eriugena und die Mystik,” Eriugena Redivivus: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte seines Denkens im Mittelalter und im Übergang zur Neuzeit, ed. Werner Beierwaltes, 1987, 254–78; Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, 1989; McGinn, “The Entry of Dialectical Mysticism: John Scottus Eriugena,” The Growth of Mysticism, 1994, 80–118). Around the year 1000 fundamentals of Scholasticism began to emerge (Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode. Nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen, vol. 1: Die scholastische Methode von ihren ersten Anfängen in der Väterliteratur bis zum Beginn des 12. Jahrhunderts, 1909). In the 12th century, the Scholastic method was fostered by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), Richard of St. Victor (died 1173), and Peter the Lombard (ca. 1100–ca. 1160) (“The Reli-

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gious World of the Twelfth Century,” Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq, 1986, 194–228; Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, vol. 1, 1990; McGinn, “The Victorine Ordering of Mysticism,” The Growth of Mysticism, 1994, 363–418). In the 13th century, the academic method was applied by Bonaventure (1221–1274), Albertus Magnus (ca. 1206–1280), and most notably Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) to the question of the relationship between reason and faith (Bernard McGinn, “Bonaventure,” The Flowering of Mysticism, 87–112). Bonaventure introduced the concepts of the apex mentis and the scintilla (synderesis); his writings had a profound influence on later preachers. Heinrich Suso Denifle successfully propounded a relation between Scholasticism and medieval German mysticism (Die deutschen Mystiker des 14. Jahrhunderts: Beitrag zur Deutung ihrer Lehre, ed. Otwin Spiess, 1951). Scholastic influence began to wane in the mid-14th century, although it was occasionally still evident, e. g., in the works of John Gerson (1363–1429). 2. Mysticism in Germany and the Low Countries The greatest number of medieval mystics resided in German-speaking territories, the first appearing in the Central Rhineland in the 12th century. Concentration along the Rhine led some scholars to adopt the term “Rhineland mysticism,” albeit in reference to the 13th and 14th centuries (Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, Master Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics, 1957; Alain de Libera, La mystique rhénane d’Albert le Grand à Maitre Eckhart, 1994). The tradition began with Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Religious thinker, prophet, reformer, correspondent with ecclesiastical and worldly leaders, healer, composer, dramatist, and poet, the Benedictine abbess was a renaissance woman in her time (Heinrich Schipperges, Die Welt der Hildegard von Bingen, 1997; The World of Hildegard of Bingen: Her Life, Times, and Visions, trans. John Cumming, 1998; Barbara Newman, Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, 1998). The sapiential and theological content of Hildegard’s writings has been examined (Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, 1987); her cosmic perspective explored (Hans Liebeschütz, Das allegorische Weltbild der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen, 1930, rpt. 1964; Peter Dronke, “The Allegorical World-Picture of Hildegard of Bingen: Revaluations and New Problems,” Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke, 1998, 1–16); her poetic texts explicated (Barbara Newman, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, 1988, rev. 1998); and her musical compositions embraced by medieval musicologists as well as New Age enthusiasts (Richard Souther, Vision: The Music of Hildegard von

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Bingen, 1994). Hildegard’s contemporary Elisabeth of Schönau (1138–1165) was known for her visionary experiences as well; Elisabeth’s works include a collection of her visions, letters, and a version of the St. Ursula legend (Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary, 1992). In the 12th century, Christocentric love mysticism emerged in contrast to the mystical tradition informed by Scholasticism. In his sermons on the Song of Songs and his treatise On the Love of God (De diligendo deo), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) described the Church as the bride of Christ, an image adopted by many mystics to characterize their own relationship with the Divine. Love mysticism (Minnemystik) or bride mysticism (Brautmystik) enjoyed particular resonance within the beguine movement (Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, 1995, 137–67). The lay urban movement of the beguines and beghards was established in the Low Countries and along the Lower Rhine (L. J. M. Philippen, De Begijnhoven: Oorsprong, Geschiedenis, Inrichting, 1918; Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene, 1954; Martina Wehrli-Johns and Claudia Opitz, Fromme Frauen oder Ketzerinnen? Leben und Verfolgung der Beginen im Mittelalter, 1998; Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565, 2001). The language of love permeated the writings of women mystics like Hadewijch of Antwerp (Paul Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer, Beguine, Love Mystic, with Elisabeth Dutton, 2004), as well as the religious women associated with the community of Helfta in Germany. The Helfta community was a center of learning and piety in the second half of the 13th century and the home to three religious women whose writings are extant: Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1210–1282), Mechthild of Hackeborn (1214–1298), and Gertrud the Great (1256–1301) (Mary Jeremy Finnegan, The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics, 1962, rev. 1991; Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother. Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, 1982, 170–262; Rosalynn Voaden, “All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta,” Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt, 1997, 72–91; Michael Bangert, “Die sozio-kulturelle Situation des Klosters St. Maria in Helfta,” ‘Vor dir steht die leere Schale meiner Sehnsucht’: Die Mystik der Frauen von Helfta, ed. Michael Bangert and Hildegund Keul, 1999, 29–47). A beguine most of her life, Mechthild of Magdeburg spent her final years at Helfta, where the last part of her Flowing Light of the Godhead (Fließendes Licht der Gottheit) was recorded; the 1990s witnessed the publication of a new critical edition (Hans Neumann and Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Mechthild von Magdeburg, ‘Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit’: nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kri-

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tischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Überlieferung, vol. I: Text, 1990, vol. II: Untersuchungen, 1993) and new English translations (e. g., Frank Tobin, trans., The Flowing Light of the Godhead, 1998). The Flowing Light describes Mechthild’s visionary experiences and characterizes the love relationship between her and Christ. Replete with love imagery from the chivalric tradition and the Song of Songs, the work mixes prose and poetry; the content as well as the evocative and erotic language account for its status as one of the most wellknown mystical texts of the Middle Ages (Frank Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes, 1995; Elizabeth A. Andersen, The Voices of Mechthild of Magdeburg, 2000). The visions of Mechthild of Hackeborn and her teachings concerning true devotion to God are chronicled in the Book of Special Grace (Liber specialis gratiae) (Alois M. Haas, “Themen und Aspekte der Mystik Mechthilds von Hackeborn,” Geistliches Mittelalter, ed. Haas, 1984, 373–91). The Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness (Legatus divinae pietatis) documents the mystical conversion experience of Gertrud the Great (Gertrud Jaron Lewis, “Gertrud of Helfta’s Legatus divinae pietatis and ein botte der götlichen miltekeit: A Comparative Study of Major Themes,” Mysticism: Medieval and Modern, ed. Valerie M. Lagorio, 1986, 58–71); Gertrud’s Spiritual Exercises (Exercitia spiritualia) relate the meditative and liturgically based life she led at Helfta (Gertrud the Great of Helfta. Spiritual Exercises, trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, 1989). The earliest women mystics were members of traditional orders, e. g., the Benedictines and the Cistercians. In the Low Countries connections between the Cistercians and the women’s communities remained in subsequent centuries (Herbert Grundmann, “Zur Geschichte der Beginen im 13. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 21 [1931]: 296–320), but in Germany the greatest number of women mystics belonged to the mendicant orders, especially the Dominican order. Herbert Grundmann’s study of the development of the new orders and their influence on and connection with religious women remains a useful resource (Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, 1935; Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, trans. Steven Rowan, 1995). The tradition of the Franciscan Armutsmystik was most prevalent in the northwest German-speaking territories and the Low Countries, whereas the Dominican influence was more pervasive further south. The mendicant influence manifested itself especially in the relationships that developed between male confessors and their female spiritual charges;

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friars as well as secular priests guided and supported religious women, and personal relationships were not infrequent. John B. Freed discusses spiritual supervision of the beguines (“Urban Development and the ‘cura monialium’ in Thirteenth-Century Germany,” Viator 3 [1972]: 311–27), and John Coakley considers the bonds between male and female religious in the mendicant orders (“Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 69 [1960]: 445–60; “Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican Hagiography,” Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, 1991, 222–46). The new monastic orders profoundly influenced prevalent religious contours and gave rise to the “New Mysticism.” According to McGinn, three developments are manifest in this movement: “1) new attitudes toward the relation between world and cloister; 2) a new relationship between men and women in the mystical path; and, finally, 3) new forms of language and modes of representation of mystical consciousness” (The Flowering of Mysticism, 12; McGinn, “Men and Women and the Origins of the New Mysticism,” The Flowering of Mysticism, 31–69; Steven Fanning, “The New Mysticism,” Mystics of the Christian Tradition, 2001, 85–94). The New Mysticism was particularly prevalent along the Rhine, especially the Upper Rhine, where remarkable mystical activity is documented. Speculation and theories abound regarding why mysticism should have flowered at this time and in this area: sociologically it allowed for expression by less educated women, philosophically it represented to some extent the popularization of Scholasticism, and literarily it offered the opportunity to relate unusual spiritual experiences in the vernacular (Joseph Bernhard, Die philosophische Mystik des Mittelalters von ihren antiken Ursprüngen bis zur Renaissance, 1922). Ernst Bergmann characterizes the mystical movement in Germany at this time as the philosophical counterpart to Minnesang, the courtly love tradition and the apex of medieval German literature (Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, vol. I: Die deutsche Mystik, 1926). In her contextualization of the development, Evelyn Underhill notes that periods of great mystical activity seem to follow immediately after periods of great artistic, material, and intellectual civilization (Mysticism, 453). In contrast Josef Quint views the circumstances in negative terms, citing cultural decline and the desire for a remedy for disharmony between God and humankind as the setting for the flowering of German mysticism (“Mystik,” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 2nd ed., 1965, vol. 2, 545). Johan Huizinga’s characterization of the 14th century as the beginning of the “waning” or “autumn” of the Middle Ages is relevant as well: the aristocratic culture was in a state of de-

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cline; secular and Church powers were battling for supremacy; natural disasters – earthquakes, the Black Death – were taking their toll. However, times were no better in other parts of Europe, and thus the question remains unanswered. The mystical writings of the 13th and 14th centuries in Germany frequently are divided into two groups: the scholarly, more philosophical works of Meister Eckhart and other adherents of speculative mysticism, and the more personal, emotional, and lyrical works, usually by female religious. Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), along with his students John Tauler (1300–1361), and Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1366) constitute the triumvirate of “great German mystics” (James M. Clark, The Great German Mystics. Eckhart, Tauler and Suso, 1949; Josef Quint, ed., Textbuch zur Mystik des deutschen Mittelalters: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Seuse, 1952; Alois M. Haas, Nim din selbes war: Studien zur Lehre von der Selbsterkenntnis bei Meiser Eckhart, Johannes Tauler und Heinrich Seuse, 1971). Their extant writings reflect the commonly perceived personality of each: Eckhart’s intellectually based, theologically charged tracts and sermons; Tauler’s practical sermons, filled with anecdotes and advice; and Suso’s florid autohagiography and poetic devotional and epistolary literature. The writings of the three Dominicans distinguish themselves not only on the basis of content and genre but also with regard to language: depending upon his audience, Eckhart wrote in Latin or in German; Tauler and Suso, writing primarily for religious women and the laity, recorded their works almost exclusively in the vernacular. Meister Eckhart was a teacher and preacher, a philosopher and a mystic (James M. Clark, Meister Eckhart, 1957; Kurt Ruh, Meister Eckhart: Theologe, Prediger, Mystiker, 1985; Niklaus Largier, Bibliographie zu Meister Eckhart, 1989). His theology, grounded in Neoplatonism and Scholasticism, is associated with the speculative tradition and champions the elevation of the mind and transcendence through the intellect (John Caputo, “Fundamental Themes in Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism,” The Thomist 42 [1978]: 197–225; Frank J. Tobin, Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language, 1986; Richard Woods, Eckhart’s Way, 1990; Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, 2001). Eckhart’s interests lie in studying the mystical union rather than attempting to attain it. According to Eckhart, humans possess their existence only in and through God. God is immanent in the soul’s ground, and the Word is born in the soul. An awareness of this point of contact between mankind and God is the fúnklin, tolde, or grunt; it is attained through contemplation, and it is the mystic’s goal to uncover and nurture it, so that God may be revealed. Eckhart’s writings exemplify the paradoxical expression inherent in the mystical experience (Cyprian Smith, The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as

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Taught by Meister Eckhart, 1987; Bruce Milem, The Unspoken Word: Negative Theology in Meister Eckhart’s German Sermons, 2002). Statements in his writings concerning matters such as the “coeternity” of God and the world, the distinction between God and the Deity, the divinization of man, and the “nothingness” of created things resulted in suspicions of pantheism and charges of heresy. Tauler spent most of his life in Strassburg and Basel, preaching to mixed lay congregations as well as Dominican women (Louise Gnädinger, Johannes Tauler: Lebenswelt und mystische Lehre, 1993; Bernard McGinn, “John Tauler the Lebmeister,” The Harvest of Mysticism, 2005, 240–96). His sermons described an experiential and practical mysticism; they inspired through their down-to-earth language, rich in imagery, and their call to the active life (Ephrem Filthaut, ed., Johannes Tauler: Ein deutscher Mystiker. Gedenkschrift zum 600. Todestag, 1961). Confessor and preacher, Suso produced the most popular meditative texts of the Middle Ages, employing a style rich in chivalric and love imagery. His Exemplar includes a third-person narrative of his life – part autobiography and part autohagiography – devotional tracts, and letters that betray homiletic characteristics (Ephrem Filthaut, ed., Heinrich Seuse. Studien zum 600. Todestag, 1366–1966, 1966; Heinrich Seuses Philosophia spiritualis: Quellen, Konzept, Formen und Rezeption, ed. Rüdiger Blumrich and Philipp Kaiser, 1994; Alois M. Haas, Kunst rechter Gelassenheit: Themen und Schwerpunkte von Heinrich Seuses Mystik, 1995). Like many in the Order of Preachers, Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso were charged with the cura monialium, the care of religious women. In the case of Eckhart, spiritual guidance extended to the beguines as well (Bernard McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, 1994; Amy M. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, 1995). Tauler and Suso also ministered to pious laypersons, the Friends of God, in the Upper Rhine region. The mystical ideas and experiences of the Dominican men were complemented by those of the religious women; the women either recorded themselves what had been revealed to them or had it recorded by others in their religious community. Among the extant works are the revelations of Margareta Ebner (1291–1351) and Christina Ebner (1277–1355), as well as nine sisterbooks (Schwesternbücher) that chronicle the lives and experiences of numerous women in communities in the Dominican province of Teutonia (Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: the Sister-Books of FourteenthCentury Germany, 1996; Ruth Meyer, Das ‘St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch’:

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Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar, 1995; Rebecca L. R. Garber, Feminine Figurae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100–1375, 2003; Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007, 231–69). The tradition of the Rhineland mystics continued with the Friends of God, a loosely organized group of religious and lay persons strongly influenced by the Dominican tradition who embraced a pious lifestyle; the most well-known was Rulman Merswin (1310–1382) (Rufus Jones, The Flowering of Mysticism: The Friends of God in the Fourteenth Century, 1939). The message of simple piety and a life of virtue founded on divine grace also was contained in the Theologia Deutsch, an anonymous tract from the 14th century to which Martin Luther made references in his writing. The term deutsche Mystik has been used for more than a century and a half primarily in reference to the tradition of the 14th century associated with Eckhart and his followers (Wilhelm Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter: Nach den Quellen untersucht und dargestellt, 3 vols., 1874–1893; Alois M. Haas, “Deutsche Mystik,” Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, III/2: Die deutsche Literatur im späten Mittelalter 1250–1370, ed. Ingeborg Glier, 1987, 234–305). The 14th century witnessed renewed interested in mysticism in the Low Countries. John Ruysbroeck (ca. 1293–1381) provided spiritual counsel and wrote of unmediated union with God (Oliver Davies, God Within. The Mystical Tradition of Northern Europe, 1988). The Brethren of the Common Life called for spiritual renewal; the disciplined life they espoused, set forth by Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) in De imitatio Christi (Imitation of Christ) and by Gerhard Groot (1340–1384), attracted religious and laity (Devotio moderna) (Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, 1972; John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages, 2008). The works of several early Renaissance figures continued the mystical tradition, among them The Vision of God by the canon lawyer Nicholas of Cusa (Clyde Lee Miller, “Nicholas of Cusa’s The Vision of God,” An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul Szarmach, 1984, 293–312; Andrew Weeks, “The Finite and the Infinite: The Humanistic Mysticism of Nicholas of Cusa,” in his German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History, 1993, 99–116). Likewise, the spiritual tradition among women persisted in early modern times (Werner WilliamsKrapp, “Frauenmystik und Ordensreform im 15. Jahrhundert,” Literarische Interessenbildung im Mittelalter. Mauracher Symposion 1991, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1993, 301–13).

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Focusing on the personal relationship between the individual and God, scholars of mysticism in the late 19th century such as Wilhelm Preger argued that late medieval German mystics were precursors of the 15th-century German Reformers (Geschichte der deutschen Mystik), a theory vehemently refuted by Heinrich Seuse Denifle (Die deutschen Mystiker des 14. Jahrhunderts). The dispute followed confessional lines. 3. The Mystical Tradition in England The mystical tradition in England flourished beginning in the 13th century (David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition, 1961; Wolfgang Riehle, Studien zur englischen Mystik des Mittelalters unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer Metaphorik, 1977, translated as The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring, 1981). Only in England did anchoritic spirituality gain widespread acceptance; rules and guides such as the Ancrene Wisse were produced for individuals, mostly women, who adopted an eremitic lifestyle (Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England, 1914; Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England, 1985). In the 14th century, a number of spiritual writings that provided spiritual instruction were penned by Richard Rolle (ca. 1290–1349), Walter Hilton (ca. 1340–1396), and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing (Phyllis Hodgson, Three Fourteenth-Century English Mystics, 1967). Hope Emily Allen was the first to draw attention to the writings of Rolle (Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for his Biography, 1927, rpt. 1966); his works are notable for their style and content, as well as what they reveal regarding the personality of the author (Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 1991). Hilton’s Scale of Perfection describes the soul’s journey along stages of spiritual development towards perfection through a life of penance; the work was a very popular piece of devotional literature among the laity before the Reformation (Joseph E. Milosh, The Scale of Perfection and the English Mystical Tradition, 1966; Gunnel Cleve, Mystic Themes in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Book I, 1989, and Basic Mystic Themes in Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Book II, 1994). Another spiritual guidebook of the period, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing has attracted scholarly attention with regard to the nature of the mysticism it espouses (William Johnston, The Mysticism of The Cloud of Unknowing, 1967, rpt. 2000), its theological underpinnings (Rosemary Ann Lees, The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology: An Approach to the Cloud of Unknowing, 1983), as well as questions concerning its authorship (Annie Sutherland, “The Dating and Authorship of the Cloud Corpus: A Reassessment of the Evidence,” Medium Aevum 71 [2001]: 82–100).

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Two of the most well-known figures associated with English mysticism are products of the 14th and 15th century: Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416) and Margery Kempe (ca. 1373–1438). Following her visionary experiences, Dame Julian adopted the life of an anchoress, taking up residence in a cell attached to the church in Norwich that now bears her name and serving as a counselor to those who visited her. Her Showings also provided guidance to others; the text, which survives in two different redactions, is remarkable for its sensual and allegorical language and its teaching on the motherhood of God (Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, 1988; Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book, 1994; Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra McEntire, 1998; Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ, 1999; The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, 2005). The Book of Margery Kempe describes the travels and mystical experiences of the Norfolk laywoman. Margery advocated and herself practiced an ascetic lifestyle; her unusual behavior, specifically her weeping, led to accusations of Lollardy and to rejection of her religious experiences as fraudulent – by her contemporaries as well as by scholars and readers today (Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe, 1983; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 1991; Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra McEntire, 1992; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 1994; Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007, 271–308). With the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1538 and 1541, members of religious orders were expelled from England. Nonetheless, writings of the 14th-century English mystics were copied and distributed on the continent, especially from the Benedictine communities at Cambrai and Paris. In England recusants continued to foster the mystical tradition (Neglected English Literature: Recusant Writings of the 16th–17th Centuries, ed. Dorothy L. Latz, 1997). 4. Medieval Mystics in Other Areas of Europe There are fewer extant records in other European countries to document a mystical tradition; however, across the continent there were several notable figures. In her writings Angela of Foligno (ca. 1248–1309) related the stages in her journal toward God; later in life she became a Franciscan tertiary (Vita e Spiritualità della Beata Angela de Foligno, ed. Clément Schmitt, 1987). Canonized in the 15th century, Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), a Dominican tertiary, received the stigmata and served as a counselor to those in the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Her letters, prayers, and dialogue with God em-

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phasized her devotion to the Sacred Heart and her concern with Church reform (Suzanne Noffke, Catherine of Siena: Vision Through a Distant Eye, 1996). Also concerned with reform was St. Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden (1302–1373), who severed her ties with the Swedish court to take up the challenge of battling corruption in Rome; her revelations revealed her devotion to and veneration of Christ and Mary (Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy, 2001). The lives and experiences of these and many other mulieres sanctae have been documented and studied (Brenda Bolton, “Mulieres sanctae,” Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard, 1976, 141–58; Valerie Lagorio, “The Medieval Continental Women Mystics: An Introduction,” An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul Szarmach, 1984, 161–93; Amy Hollywood, “The Religiosity of the Mulieres Sanctae,” in her The Soul as Virgin Wife, 1995, 26–56). In Spain, Ramon Llull (Raymond Lull, 1232–1315) abandoned life at the royal court for the religious life; his philosophical ideas were very popular, although his mystical beliefs were condemned by the pope (Joaquím Xirau, Vida y obra de Ramón Lull, filosofía y mística, 1946; Miriam Thérèse Olabarrieta, The Influence of Ramon Lull on the Style of the Early Spanish Mystics and Santa Teresa, 1963). Spanish mysticism reached its zenith in the 16th century: the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), authored his Spiritual Exercises; Teresa of Avila (1515–1581) described the inward journey toward the Divine in her Interior Castle (Santa Teresa y la literatura mística hispánica: actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Santa Teresa y la Mística Hispánica, ed. Manuel Criado de Val, 1984); and John of the Cross (1545–1591) characterized the search for God in the Dark Night of the Soul (Poesía y mística: Introducción a la lírica de san Juan de la Cruz, ed. Emilio Orozco Díaz, 1959). Spanish visionary women such as Sor Juana de la Cruz first appeared on the scene at the end of the 15th century and into the 16th century (Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia spiritual del siglo xvi, 1966; Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz [1481–1534], 1990). 5. The Medieval Mystical Tradition in Judaism The High Middle Ages was a period of diverse developments in Jewish philosophy and spirituality, including the rationalistic philosophy of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), the Ashkenazi Hasidic movement, and the kabbalah (Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1961; Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines. Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, 1994; Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism, vol. II: The Middle Ages, 1998). The collection of essays edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn

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explores some potential connections between the Jewish and Christian mystical traditions (Mystical Union). C. History of Research, Schools of Thought, Approaches An introduction to the concept of mysticism is found in all major reference works dealing with the Middle Ages (e. g., Dictionary of the Middle Ages and the Lexikon des Mittelalters) as well as philosophy and religion (e. g., the Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and The Encyclopedia of Religion). There is even a dictionary of mysticism, which focuses on the European tradition (Peter Dinzelbacher, Wörterbuch der Mystik, 1989, 2nd ed., 1998). A number of useful bibliographies have been published in recent decades. Umesh D. Sharma and John Arndt offer a listing of general titles in Mysticism:A Select Bibliography (1973). Mary Ann Bowman limits her bibliography to Western mysticism (Western Mysticism. A Guide to the Basic Works, 1978) but includes works related to the history, practice, and experience of mysticism as well as English translations of the writings of Western mystics from ancient to modern times. Gertrud Jaron Lewis provides comprehensive documentation of scholarship about German female mystics in the Middle Ages (Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters, 1989). Resources for the English mystics include: Valerie Lagorio and Ritamary Bradley, The 14th-Century English Mystics: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography (1981), and Michael E. Sawyer, A Bibliographical Index of Five English Mystics: Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, the Author of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe (1978). A number of journals focus on scholarship related to Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages. Founded in 1926, the Jesuit publication Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik became Geist und Leben: Zeitschrift für christliche Spiritualität in 1947; it maintains its focus on the Christian tradition. Studies in Spirituality, published since 1991 by the Titus Brandsma Institute in Nijmegen, promotes spirituality as a science; multi-disciplinary in its approach, the journal includes mostly articles concerned with the Judeo-Christian traditions. The Revue d’ascétique et de mystique appeared from 1920 to 1971; publication continued as the Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité but was suspended in 1977. Begun by Valerie Lagorio and Ritamary Bradley in 1974, the 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter was renamed Mystics Quarterly in 1984 and was relaunched in 2010 as the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures. Excluding occultism, magic, the esoteric, and the merely mysterious from its definition of “mystical,” the journal publishes editions as well as articles with a focus on the Western Middle Ages but broadened its focus with the most recent name

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change. The annual Studia Mystica, founded in 1978, offers articles on mysticism and visionary literature in any cultural or religious tradition, including essays that employ interdisciplinary and comparative approaches; publication ended in 2003. Vox Benedictina by Peregrina Publishing had a broader scope than its title implies; although it ceased publication in 1994, it was succeeded by Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality was begun by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2001 with the goal of encouraging research in the field of Christian spirituality as well as creative dialogue with other non-Christian traditions. Twentyfive essays from the journal have appeared in Minding the Spirit. The Study of Christian Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth Dreyer and Mark Burrows (2005). Many other useful collections of essays have been published in recent decades. Altdeutsche und altniederländische Mystik, ed. Kurt Ruh (1964) and Grundfragen der Mystik, ed. Werner Beierwaltes, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Alois M. Haas (1974), shed light on various aspects of Christian mysticism, in particular German medieval mysticism. Christian Spirituality: vol. 1: Origins to the Twelfth Century and Christian Spirituality: vol 2: High Middle Ages and Reformation (ed. Jill Raitt, 1987) appear in the series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, ed. Ewert Cousins; the volumes introduce selected aspects of Western Christian mysticism. Two recent Festschriften for Gotthard Fuchs – Gottesfreundschaft: Christliche Mystik im Zeitgespräch (ed. Dietlind Langner, Marco A. Sorace, and Peter Zimmerling, 2008) and Mystik: Herausforderung und Inspiration (ed. Thomas Pröpper, 2008) – include essays on the European Middle Ages, modern mystics, and non-Christian traditions. Several monograph series have been introduced in recent decades that serve as forums for textual editions or critical examinations of mystical texts from the European Middle Ages. Among them are the Peregrina Translation Series; the Library of Medieval Women and Studies in Medieval Mysticism, both by Boydell and Brewer; and Mystik in Geschichte und Gegenwart by Frommann-Holzboog. An overview of various mystical traditions is found in: Sidney Spenser, Mysticism in World Religion (1963), Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, Mysticism in the World’s Religions (1976), and Bruno Borchert, Mysticism. Its History and Challenge. Basic surveys of mysticism comparative in nature include those by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, 1957), Annemarie Schimmel (Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 1975), Toshihiko Izutsu (Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, 1983), and Dan and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok (Jewish and Christian Mysticism: An Introduction, 1994). The essays in Mysticism and the Mystical Experience: East and West (ed.

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Donald H. Bishop, 1995) examine various traditions; Bishop’s introduction (11–37) offers an overview of the 20th-century debate regarding the definition and nature of mysticism. William Harmless employs a case-study approach to his studies of six Christian mystics – among whom are four medieval figures: Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart – and explores mystical elements in Islam and Buddhism as well in Mystics (2008). Latin editions of works of many mystics mentioned above were published in the Acta Sanctorum Bollandiana in the 17th century or in the Patrologia Latina series, edited and published by Jacques-Paul Migne between 1844 and 1855. Critical editions of writings in Latin and in the vernacular began to appear in the 19th century. Since the 1980s English translations of key writings of Christian (and other) mystics have appeared in the Classics of Western Spirituality series. Text anthologies include those edited by Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman (Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, 1988); Harvey Egan (An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, 1991); John R. Tyson (Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, 1999); and Bernard McGinn (The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 2006). Among the earliest comprehensive chronological examinations of Christian mysticism is the incomplete study by Johann Joseph von Görres (Die christliche Mystik, vols. 1–4, 1836–1842, and vols. 1–5, 1879). The second volume of the Histoire de la spiritualité chrétienne is devoted to medieval spirituality (Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbroucke, and Louis Bouyer, La spiritualité du moyen âge, 1961). The appendix to Underhill’s Mysticism provides a brief chronological narrative of Christian mysticism from its beginnings through the 18th century; it remains a popular, readable introduction in English. Two multi-volume histories of mysticism have appeared in the past two decades, one in German and one in English. Kurt Ruh’s Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik (1990–1999) comprises four volumes: the foundations of Western mysticism from the Church Fathers through monastic theology to the 12th century; female mysticism (Frauenmystik) and early Franciscan mysticism; Dominican mysticism and its Scholastic background; and mysticism in the Low Countries from the 14th through the 16th century. Bernard McGinn’s series titled The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (1991–2005) includes: The Foundations of Mysticism (1991) from the Jewish, Greek, and Early Christian roots; The Growth of Mysticism (1994) through the 12th century; The Flowering of Mysticism (1998) from 1200 to 1350; and The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (2005) from 1300 to 1500. All four volumes also have been translated into German.

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Several histories and anthologies of European mysticism provide a bridge between medieval and modern times: Friedrich-Wilhelm Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Deutsche Mystik zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit (1943); Ray C. Petry, Late Medieval Mysticism (1957); Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History (1993). Scholars continue to debate the definition of mysticism; Steven Payne provides an overview of ongoing controversies (“Mysticism, Nature of,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, 1998, vol. 6, 627–34). The nature of mysticism has been a key issue for the last half century. Perennialists champion the idea of common features to the mystical experience across cultures and traditions (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy; Robert K. C. Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness, 1997). In contrast, constructivist theory maintains that the nature of the mystical experience is largely determined, i. e., “constructed,” by the individual’s cultural background (Ninian Smart, “Understanding Religious Experience,” and Stephen Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, ed. Katz, 1978; and three additional volumes edited by Katz: Mysticism and Religious Traditions [1983], Mysticism and Language [1992], and Mysticism and Sacred Scripture [2000]). Wayne Proudfoot maintains that religious experience cannot be viewed as distinct from either religious beliefs and practices or grammar and linguistic strictures (Religious Experience, 1985). Identifying Izutsu, McGinn, Idel, and Sells as a third group in the debate, one that distinguishes between the mystical experience and the textual account of the experience, F. Samuel Brainard reviews the issue and offers a representative bibliography (“Defining Mystical Experience”). Summaries of schools of thought, approaches, and recent scholarship can be found in several recent publications of Bernard McGinn. In “A Brief Critical Bibliography on Christian Mysticism,” which concludes The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 553–59, McGinn cites 20 classic interpretations of mysticism from 1880 to 1980 as well as 25 recent studies from 1980 to 2005. In “Theoretical Foundations: The Modern Study of Mysticism,” an appendix to The Foundations of Mysticism, 265–343, he provides a comprehensive and masterful survey of modern theories of mysticism. Noting that no general survey of modern theories of mysticism currently exists, McGinn provides what he characterizes as an eclectic and personal view. The overview consists of three sections – theological approaches, philosophical approaches, and comparativist and psychological approaches – supplemented by copious notes and an extensive bibliography. Lastly, McGinn’s brief essay on mysticism in The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality

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(ed. Philip Sheldrake, 2005, 19–25) offers a pithy chronicle of the evolution of mysticism in the Western context into the 18th century and characterizes current debates in the field. D. Current Issues and Future Trends With the editing and translating of texts in the late 19th century, interest in mysticism increased. The final decades of the 20th century witnessed renewed attention to mysticism by scholarly and lay audiences and a proliferation of editions and English translations. Previous studies often examined lives and texts from a single perspective – historical, linguistic, literary, philosophical, or theological – but current academic research regarding mysticism has become interdisciplinary and comparative in nature. 1. Women, the Feminine, and Mysticism The significance of the lives and works of medieval women mystics was reevaluated in the second half of the 20th century, and a scholarship boom in the area occurred in the 1980s, beginning with several notable introductions by Valerie Lagorio: “The Continental Women Mystics of the Middle Ages: An Assessment,” The Roots of the Modern Christian Tradition: The Spirituality of Western Christendom, vol. 2, ed. E. Rozanne Elder, 1984, 71–90, and “The Medieval Continental Women Mystics: An Introduction,” An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, 161–93. Margaret Wade Labarge devotes a chapter to women mystics in A Small Sound of the Trumpet (1986), as does Peter Dronke in Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†1310) (1984). Three volumes of Medieval Religious Women, edited by John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (I: Distant Echoes, 1984; II: Peaceweavers, 1987; III: Hidden Springs: Cistercian Monastic Women, 1995), include essays on women mystics through the 16th century. Among text anthologies are Shawn Madigan, ed., Mystics, Visionaries, and Prophets: A Historical Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Writings (1998), and Elizabeth Spearing, ed., Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (2002). Monographs have examined: female mysticism in general (Frances Beer, Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages, 1993; Peter Dinzelbacher, Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 1993); selected women mystics (Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, 1989); specific communities (Leonard P. Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal: Writings from a Medieval Monastery, 1996; Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany); and women mystics in early modern times (Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, 2004). There

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is even a bibliography devoted solely to German medieval women mystics (Gertrud Jaron Lewis, Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters, 1989). Conferences, especially in Germany, concerning women and mysticism soon followed and resulted in collections of essays edited by Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer (Frauenmystik im Mittelalter. Wissenschaftliche Studientagung der Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart 22.–25. Februar 1984 in Weingarten, 1985; and Religiöse Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter, 1988); Kurt Ruh (Abendländische Mystik im Mittelalter. Symposion Kloster Engelberg 1984, 1986); Walter Haug and Wolfram SchneiderLastin (Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang: Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte. Kolloquium Kloster Fischingen 1998, 2000); and Eva Schlotheuber and Helmut Flachenecker, Nonnen, Kanonissen und Mystikerinnen: Religiöse Frauengemeinschaften in Süddeutschland: Beiträge zur interdisziplinären Tagung vom 21. bis 23. September 2005 in Frauenchiemsee, 2007). The writings of women mystics take various forms, but descriptions of revelations and visions are the most common. Visionary experiences have been examined from a psychological, phenomenological, as well as a theological perspective (Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, 1981; Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 1986). The gendered nature of symbols has been examined most extensively in the works of Hildegard of Bingen (Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom. St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, 1987). More recent studies have identified feminine aspects of the Divine in portrayals of Mary and allegorical figures such as Caritas not only in the writings by the Benedictine abbess but also in those by other mystics (Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages, 2003; Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Feminine Symbols in Medieval Religious Literature” in her Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, 2005, 159–66). 2. Male-Female Relationships The relationship between men and women in the mystical tradition, particularly male confessors and their female spiritual charges, is significant to an understanding of the lives and writings of the medieval mystics (Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, “Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue,” Body and Soul. Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, 1994, 139–60; John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and their Male Collaborators, 2006). In some cases a genuine friendship evolved (Margot Schmidt, “An Example of Spiritual Friendship. The Correspon-

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dence Between Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaretha Ebner,” Maps of Flesh and Light. The Religious Experience of Medieval Women Mystics, ed. Ulrike Wiethaus, 1993, 74–92). Oftentimes there was a reciprocal influence on lifestyle and writing (Frank Tobin, “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?” Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney, 1999, 118–35). The male religious visited the communities in person and communicated with the women via letters, which sometimes appear as thinly veiled sermons and sometimes as expressions of the personal relationships that evolved (Wilhelm Oehl, Deutsche Mystikerbriefe des Mittelalters 1100–1550, 1931, rpt. 1972; Debra L. Stoudt, “The Production and Preservation of Letters by Fourteenth-Century Dominican Nuns,” Mediaeval Studies 53 [1991]: 309–26). The relationships also led to the composition of explicitly homiletic and other didactic works by the men as well as (auto)biographies and visionary literature, primarily by the women. Differences in writing style and spiritual content predicated upon gender continue to be examined, e. g., Theresia Heimerl, Frauenmystik – Männermystik? Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede in der Darstellung von Gottes- und Menschenbild bei Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse, Marguerite Porete und Mechthild von Magdeburg (2002), and Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and her Book. Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (2004). Poor draws attention to the term Frauenmystik itself, which has come under scrutiny (Gabriele L. Strauch, “Mechthild of Magdeburg and the Category of Frauenmystik,” Women as Protagonists and Poets in the German Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 1991, 171–86). The traditional dichotomy between speculative and intellectual forms – identified with the masculine – and affective, visionary, and ecstatic forms of mysticism – identified with the feminine – has been re-examined by Amy Hollywood in light of theories of 20th-century French intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray (Sensible Ecstasy. Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, 2002). 3. Lifestyles and Practices of the Mystics Because of the personal nature of the experience, many mystics adopted an eremitic lifestyle, isolated from society and even from others with similar experiences. Already in the 3rd century religious men and women retreated to the deserts of North Africa and Asia Minor to pursue a contemplative life. The experiences of men such as Anthony the Great (ca. 251–356), [Pachomius (ca. 290–346)], Athanasius of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, John Cassian (ca. 360–435), and Augustine of Hippo, as well as women like Matrona and Syncletica are described by Helen Waddell (The Desert Fathers, 1957), Gra-

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ham E. Gould (The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, 1993), and Laura Swan (The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, 2001). The sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers often focus on the virtues of the monastic life and resonate with later generations of mystics (Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, 1975). Although the cenobitic or monastic lifestyle became the norm in Western Europe, individual mystics throughout the Middle Ages embraced the life of solitude. Women usually were not permitted isolated confinement; the anchoresses often lived in a cell attached to a chapel or church (Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses. The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz, 2005). The practice gained currency among hermits and anchorites in England from the 12th through the 14th century (Elizabeth Robertson, “An Anchorhold of her Own: Female Anchoritic Literature in Thirteenth-Century England,” Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold, 1990, 170–83). The anonymous Ancrene Riwle or Ancrene Wisse was written as a guide for anchoresses (Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse, 1981; and Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, trans., Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, 1991). The debate concerning the extent to which spirituality of the anchorites can be classified as mysticism is summarized by Mary Agnes Edsall (“True Anchoresses Are Called Birds: Asceticism as Ascent and the Purgative Mysticism of the Ancrene Wisse,” Viator 34 [2003]: 157–86). The lifestyle itself is described in the writings of Christina of Markyate (C. H. Talbot, ed., The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse, 1987) and Julian of Norwich (Showings, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 1978). In solitude or in community, the medieval mystic focused on prayer and meditation in daily life. The practice of hesychasm began in the first centuries; in some ways like prayer and meditation practices such as yoga, in Eastern religion it has as its goal inner stillness. The stillness is achieved through the repetition of a prayer, accompanied by a certain positioning of the body or disciplined breathing patterns (Tomás Spidlik, La spiritualité de l’Orient Chrétien: manuel systématique, 1978; The Spirituality of the Christian East: A Systematic Handbook, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel, 1986). Some medieval mystics embraced the practice of prayer repetition, and prayer played a key role in the contemplative lifestyle, especially among women. Other practices are informed by recognition of the imitatio Christi and the centrality of the humanity of Christ among medieval mystics. Caroline Walker Bynum’s scholarship is pioneering in this regard (“‘… And Woman

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His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,” Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Bynum et al., Boston, 1986, 257–88). Central to the medieval mystical experience are: asceticism, including mortification of the flesh (Lerne leiden: Leidensbewältigung in der Mystik, ed. Wolfgang Böhme, 1985; Alois M. Haas, Gottleiden – Gottlieben. Zur volkssprachlichen Mystik im Mittelalter, 1989) and fasting (Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 1987); veneration of Christ, especially the Sacred Heart; and devotion to the Eucharist (Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, 1995; and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, 1991). In their recent study, Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach examine the lives of medieval holy persons, including a number of mystics, and suggest that self-injurious behaviors such as laceration of the flesh, sleep deprivation, and fasting – heroic asceticism – could produce altered states of consciousness, including the mystical state (The Mystic Mind. The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics, 2005). The corporeal nature of mystical experiences has been examined in terms of their sensual and sensory nature (Rosemary Drage Hale, “‘Taste and See, for God is Sweet’: Sensory Perception and Memory in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience,” Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett et al., 1995, 3–14; Niklas Largier, “Inner Senses-Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism,” Codierung von Emotionen im Mittelalter/Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten, 2003, 3–15). Recognition of the physicality of the experience also has led to examination of medieval (and modern) perceptions of the female body and characterizations of gender in mystical texts (Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages, Fragmentation and Redemption, 181–238; Elizabeth Robertson, “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse,” Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Janet E. Halley and Sheila Fisher, 1989, 109–34; Karma Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen, 1991, 115–40; Ulrike Wiethaus, “Sexuality, Gender, and the Body in Late Medieval Women’s Spirituality: Cases from Germany and the Netherlands,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 [Spring 1991]: 35–52; Rebecca L. R. Garber, Feminine Figurae. Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers 1100–1375, 2003).

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Although contemplation serves as a spiritual focus for most mystics, the active life is evident through some of the practices noted above. The performative nature of the practices and the significance of ritual have been reexamined (Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Ziegler, Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, 1999; Niklas Largier, “Scripture, Vision, Performance: Visionary Texts and Medieval Religious Drama,” Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel, 2005, 207–19). 4. The Mystical Text and Context Frank Tobin summarizes the scholarship on the subject of how the recorded mystical text has been understood by recent scholars (Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes, 1995, 110–33). Among Germanists the more prevalent viewpoint maintains that the texts are literary documents, written with a specific audience in mind (Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien, 1980; id., “Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Frauenmystik als wissenschaftliches Problem, dargestellt am Werk der Christine Ebner,” Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, 178–200). Historians like Dinzelbacher (Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter) posit not only the idea of literary visions (“literarische Visionen”) but also experienced (“erlebte”) ones that actually occurred. The ensuing contrast of scholarly positions between Caroline Walker Bynum and Ursula Peters, discussed by Tobin under the rubric of feminine criticism, may be viewed as a continuation of the previous debate. Historical contextualization is central to Bynum’s study Jesus as Mother; it is challenged by Peters, who questions the validity of the texts (Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts, 1988). The nexus of literature, history, and hagiography will continue to be a thorny issue for scholars of medieval mysticism. In addition to historical authenticity, authorship of texts has come under scrutiny. How are statements of spiritual unworthiness and lack of education, especially by female authors, to be understood? Who has the authority to write? (Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature, 1995; Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries, 1999; Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and her Book). The debate regarding the expression of the inexpressible and the paradoxical nature of mystical language continues as well (Jörg Seelhorst, Autoreferentialität und Transformation. Zur Funktion mystischen Sprechens bei Mechthild von Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart und Heinrich Seuse, 2003).

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5. Art and Mysticism In the first half of the 20th century Ernst Benz examined the relationship between mysticism and art (“Christliche Mystik und christliche Kunst [Zur theologischen Interpretation mittelalterlichen Kunst],” Deutsches Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 12 [1934]: 22–48). In a series of monographs Jeffrey F. Hamburger has investigated: the relationship between art and mysticism (The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland, 1990; Hamburger, ed., The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, 2005); art produced by religious women (Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, 1997); and art that inspired religious women (The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, 1998). Works of art served as manifestations of and inspirations for the mystical experience (Walter Blank, “Dominikanische Frauenmystik und die Entstehung des Andachtsbildes um 1300,” Alemannisches Jahrbuch [1964/65], 57–86; Elisabeth Vavra, “Bildmotiv und Frauenmystik – Funktion und Rezeption,” Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, 201–31). Select Bibliography Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism serves as a general introduction to the topic, and the Wörterbuch der Mystik by Peter Dinzelbacher provides additional details. The fivevolume history by Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, and the four volumes by Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism offer a comprehensive foundation, rich notes, and a wealth of bibliographical references.

Debra L. Stoudt

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N Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages A. Introduction Narratives of technological revolution in the Middle Ages are a distinctively 20th-century phenomenon. First articulated by a handful of influential French, British and American historians between the 1930s and 1950s, they can be genealogically linked to narratives of progress across a number of arts and social science disciplines which have invoked the language of revolutionary rupture to characterize a number of notable transformations in human cultures and societies between the Neolithic and modern periods. Two kinds of technological revolution have been claimed for the European Middle Ages by 20th-century scholars: an ‘agricultural revolution’ of the 6th to 9th centuries, and an ‘industrial revolution’ of the 11th to 14th centuries. Scholarly claims for both an industrial revolution and an agricultural revolution in the Middle Ages can be traced back to the 1930s, although they did not become full-blown narratives until the 1950s. Such claims have a relatively complex lineage, but are perhaps best understood as part of a western intellectual tradition going back to the Enlightenment which has sought to account for the radical social and political changes that have occurred throughout the world since industrialization with reference to the marriage of practical and theoretical knowledge characteristic of the modern period. The term ‘revolution’ gained currency and has been widely deployed during the modern period to denote a significant change in the politics, economy or culture of a given society or group of societies over a relatively short period of time. Generally speaking, revolutionary political changes have been identified with particular nations or countries, such as the French Revolution of 1789–1799, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, and are of comparatively short duration. Revolutionary cultural changes, on the other hand, such as the Scientific Revolution of ca. 1540–1690 and the Industrial Revolution of c. 1760–1850 transcend national boundaries, are generally held to be regional in character, and can occur over a period of a century or more. This essay focuses on the use of a particular style of cultural revolution narrative – that of technological revolution – in historical writings from the

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20th century about the European Middle Ages. It seeks to explain the social and political context within which such narratives first arose and how they appear to be genealogically related. The problems with and difficulties arising from individual revolutionary narratives are then flagged, with readers directed to the relevant critical literature. The article concludes with some generic observations about the use of such narratives in contemporary historiography. B. Narratives of Cultural Revolution in the History of Science and Technology Narratives of cultural revolution, particularly in relation to developments in science and technology, have been a common feature of western intellectual discourse since the early 17th century. The use of titles such as Physiologia Nova De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure by William Gilbert (1544–1603), and the Novum Organum and Instauratio Magna by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), were squarely aimed at distinguishing the intellectual contributions of these early modern scholars from their scholastic and classical predecessors, and setting themselves up as the new authorities on the subjects about which they wrote. Contemporaries of key figures in the Scientific Revolution, such as William Harvey (1578–1657) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), were already describing their contributions to natural philosophy, physiology, and the mathematical sciences as ‘revolutionary:’ not in the classical sense of an astronomical cycle or periodic return (as invoked by Renaissance humanists to describe their efforts to return to the Greek and Roman roots of European knowledge ‘purified’ of Islamic and scholastic influences), but in the sense of the overturning of traditional knowledge structures and authorities with long-term consequences. For example, a contemporary of Galileo, Raffaello Maggiotti (1597–1658), wrote to him in 1637 that Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood “will suffice to revolutionize all of medicine, just as the invention of the telescope has done for astronomy, the compass has done for commerce, and artillery has done for the whole military art” (Jerome Bylebyl, “William Harvey: A Conventional Medical Revolutionary,” Journal of the American Medical Association 239 [1978]: 1295–98). Maggiotti’s argument was a variation on those made by Bacon and others before him that “printing, gunpowder and the magnet […] have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world” (Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620, Bk. 1, aphorism 129). It was not until the Enlightenment, however, that the now widely accepted modern sense of revolution as the rapid or violent overthrow of existing

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political and cultural norms and institutions came into common usage. Contemporary historians of science such as I. Bernard Cohen, David Lindberg, and H. Floris Cohen have drawn attention to the fact that Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) consciously deployed revolutionary rhetoric to distinguish the practical mathematical and experimental orientation of 17th- and 18th-century natural philosophers from those of their medieval and even ancient predecessors (I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, 1985, 197–261; David Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield,” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westman, 1990, 6–10; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, 1994, 22–27). 19th- and 20th-century proponents of progress and modernity accepted this rhetoric as an accurate description of the radical social and intellectual transformations that occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries, repeating, reinforcing and elaborating on such claims in history, philosophy and social theory (I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science, 1985, 273–351; David Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield,” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westman, 1990, 10–13; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 1994, 21–121). Major schools of thought from Idealism and Positivism to Marxism embraced this vision of historical rupture, so much so that the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ had already entered common parlance long before it was clearly defined by Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) in a series of lectures between 1878 and 1883 (Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, 1884), as had the term ‘Scientific Revolution’ before it was first clearly defined by the historian of science, Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), in 1939 (Études Galiléennes, 1939–1940). A common feature of narratives of revolutionary intellectual and technical change during the modern period is the assumption (usually explicit but sometimes not) that earlier periods – and, in particular, the Middle Ages – were marked by intellectual sterility and scientific and technological stagnation. Indeed, modernist exceptionalists of several philosophical and political persuasions across a number of disciplines have relied on narrative forms which sharply distinguish between the modern period and the medieval and ancient periods, emphasizing discontinuity over continuity in the social, political and intellectual spheres. Thus, the Scientific Revolution marked a significant transformation in the aims, methods and techniques of natural philosophy and the physical

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sciences between the medieval and modern periods, while the British Agricultural (or Agrarian) Revolution was characterized by significant improvements in agricultural productivity and output over the essentially medieval techniques that had continued during the early modern period, thereby laying the foundations for, or occurring in parallel with, the Industrial Revolution. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution marked a period during the latter half of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries when significant advances in agriculture, transport and manufacturing were accompanied by major reorganizations of the economy and labor force. Historians of the Industrial Revolution have generally tended to argue that the industry and technology of the early modern period were in most respects a continuation of medieval trends (Peter N. Stearns, Interpreting the Industrial Revolution, 1991, chapters 1, 2, and 4). Whereas many historians and archaeologists of the ancient world accepted modernist characterizations of their chosen time period as technologically (if not intellectually) stagnant until the late 1970s, medievalists were not so obliging. In his efforts to trace the origins of modern science from an anti-positivist perspective, the French physicist, Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), inadvertently discovered that some important developments in statics and mechanics had occurred during the 14th century in the work of Jean Buridan (1300–1358), Nicole Oresme (1323–1382), and others (Études sur Léonard de Vinci: Ceux qui’il a lus et ceux qui l’ont lu, 3 vols., 1906, 1909, and 191; rpt. 1955; Le système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols., 1913–1959). Indeed, Duhem went so far as to locate the beginnings of the still-in-formation concept of the Scientific Revolution in the 14th rather than the 17th century, although he is one of the few scholars, apart from Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979), to have done so (The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800, 1949). Although a new generation of professional historians of science, from Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) and John H. Randall, Jr. (1898–1980) to Annaliese Maier (1905–1971), and Alistair Crombie (1915–1996) tended to stress the continuities between late medieval and early modern developments and downplay the discontinuities, Duhem’s work was an important point of departure from which these scholars sought to reconsider the role of medieval natural philosophy in the development of the sciences.

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C. An ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Middle Ages Around the same time as the history of science became professionalized, a number of medievalists began taking an interest in the history of technology from a social and economic perspective. In a special issue of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale published in 1935 and titled “Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie,” Marc Bloch (1886–1944), and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) put together a collection of articles outlining their views on the formation of a new discipline which they called the history of techniques. In Febvre’s introductory essay for the special edition, one of the three approaches that he recommended for the new discipline was to study the progress of techniques, whether that be slow and incremental, or rapid and precipitous: both technical ‘evolutions’ and technological ‘revolutions’ should be a focus for scholarly attention (“Réflexions sur l’histoire des techniques,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 [1935]: 533–34). Febvre’s recommendations were an expression of the revisionist historiographical aims of the Annales School, which were to move away from the 19th-century emphasis on regnal shifts and diplomatic history to a new form of history that drew on the insights of multiple disciplines to illuminate cultural mentalities, the lives of ordinary people, and medium and long duration historical processes. In Bloch’s contribution to this same edition of Annales, titled “Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau,” he sought to establish the origins and development of the watermill from Roman times to the High Middle Ages. Apparently in an effort to put Febvre’s proposal into practice about the need for historians to form empirically-grounded opinions about the relative progress of different techniques, Bloch made a novel observation: during the second half of the Middle Ages there was a rapid increase not only in the number of mills powered by water, but in the range of industrial processes to which waterpower was applied. He proposed that these developments signified a medieval revolution in the use of power technology that laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution and the transformation of European society during the modern period (“Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 7 [1935]: 538–63; trans. “The Advent and Triumph of the Watermill,” Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, 1967, 136–68). It is worth quoting him briefly on this point: The generations immediately before ours, as well as our own, have witnessed a tremendous revolution in transport, animal traction giving place to purely mechanical forms of energy. Not very different was the revolution that took place in another sphere with the coming of the watermill […] (141).

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Already convinced that the Romans had made relatively little use of watermill technology, Bloch went on to argue that “although the invention of the watermill took place in ancient times, its real expansion did not come about until the Middle Ages” (143). The rest of the paper goes on to explain why the Romans supposedly failed to exploit waterpower, and how and why this medieval expansion came about. The idea that revolutionary changes in technology had occurred during earlier periods than the Industrial Revolution had already been canvassed by V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957), John Nef (1899–1988), and Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes (1856–1936) in the 1920s and early 1930s. In Childe’s case, the concept of a ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was developed by him to denote the first of a series of major transformations in agricultural production in the Middle East that occurred roughly 12,000 to 8,000 years ago, whereas the concept of an ‘Urban Revolution’ was developed to denote the period following the Neolithic Revolution whereby small, non-literate, kin-based agricultural villages were transformed into large, literate, hierarchically-ordered urban centers: the first civilizations (New Light on the Most Ancient East, 1934; “Changing Aims and Methods in Prehistory,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 1 [1935]: 1–15; Man Makes Himself, 1936; What Happened in History, 1942). In Nef’s case, his proposal involved a reassessment of the role of coal in the growth of European industry, whereby the first of two ‘industrial revolutions’ in Britain was held to have occurred in the period from 1540 to 1640. Struck by the rapid increase in British coal output that accompanied the decline of the timber industry between the dissolution of the monasteries and the outbreak of the English Civil War, Nef sought to prove his case that these parallel developments were not simply a function of population growth. He argued, to the contrary, that they were the result of “a sharp expansion of native industrial enterprise”, and that clear evidence for this expansion could be found in the ship-building, salt, and glass industries (The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 2 vols., 1932). In Lefebvre des Noëttes’s case, he proposed that the process of technological invention proceeds by sudden leaps rather than gradual transformations, and that such ‘revolutions’ are followed by long periods of inactivity. For example, in his two-volume work De la Marine antique à la marine modern: La révolution du gouvernail, contribution à l’étude de l’esclavage, first published in 1935, he proposed that the invention of the hinged sternpost rudder in the 13th century initiated a revolution in ship design that improved oceanic navigation, enabled enormous increases in tonnage, and made possible the later European voyages of discovery. This ‘great technological leap

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forward’ was analogous to the earlier medieval technical revolution which he believed had been brought about by the invention of the horse harness, to which he had first drawn attention in La force motrice animale à travers les âges (1924) and L’attelage: Le cheval de selle à travers les âges, contribution à l’histoire de l’esclavage (1931). This latter ‘technological revolution’ provided one of the bases for Lynn White, Jr.’s later articulation of an agricultural revolution in the Middle Ages (see below). Thus, we can see how the social milieu in which western scholars were working during the Interwar Period favored conceptions of revolution and radical rupture when describing major cultural transformations in history and prehistory. Only a year before Bloch’s aforementioned paper appeared in Annales, a fellow exponent of the new sub-discipline of the history of technology, Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), had also alluded to the idea that there had been an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages based primarily upon waterpower. In his highly influential book Technics and Civilization (1934, rpt. 1963) Mumford argued in the book’s third chapter – titled “New Sources of Power” – that if power machinery is regarded as one of the primary manifestations of the new capitalist economy, “the modern industrial revolution began in the twelfth century and was in full swing by the fifteenth” (112). Like Bloch, Mumford listed the many industrial processes to which waterpower was applied in the latter half of the Middle Ages, not only grinding grain and pumping water, but pulping rags for paper, hammering and cutting iron, sawing wood, beating hides, spinning silk, felting woolen cloth, sharpening tools and weapons, pulling wire, crushing ore and powering bellows (114–15). Mumford argued that parallel developments were taking place in the application of windpower to agriculture and land reclamation between the 12th and 16th centuries, and that although the “development of wind and water power did not reach its height in most parts of Europe until the seventeenth century […] [p]lainly, the modern industrial revolution would have come into existence and gone on steadily had not a ton of coal been dug in England, and had not a new iron mine been opened” (117–18). Mumford’s views were, therefore, certainly not in agreement with those of his contemporary, Nef, for example. However, Mumford’s and Bloch’s speculations, as suggestive as they may have been, were (to quote Bloch) but “working hypotheses” (“Les ‘inventions’ médiévales,” Annales 7 [1935]: 642). In 1941, the English medievalist, Eleanora Carus-Wilson (1897–1977), provided some empirical evidence to back up Mumford’s and Bloch’s thesis. In her widely read paper “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth

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Century” (The Economic History Review 11 [1941]: 39–60) Carus-Wilson argued that during the 13th century, woolen cloth production had moved from the urban cloth manufacturing centers of England to a number of rural woolgrowing centers due to the rapid process of mechanization of the fulling process: traditional methods of fulling by hand and foot had been replaced by waterpowered fulling mills. Although she did not provide any evidence for the supposed higher profitability of mechanized fulling over manual fulling, she argued that the shift from urban manual production to rural mechanical production led to large-scale social and economic changes that were comparable to those that occurred in the English textile industry during the 18th and 19th centuries (52). She supported these observations with a clear analogy between the widespread social disruption caused by the mechanization of the English fulling industry in the 13th century, and the adverse consequences of the mechanization of the English textile industry in the 18th and 19th centuries: the [13th] century […] witnessed, in fact, an industrial revolution due to scientific discoveries and changes in technique: a revolution which brought poverty, unemployment, and discontent to certain old centres of industry, but wealth, opportunity and prosperity to the country as a whole (39).

In a later paper on the medieval woolen industry, Carus-Wilson wrote that the mechanization of fulling “was as decisive an event as the mechanization of spinning and weaving in the eighteenth century” (“The Woollen Industry,” The Cambridge Economic History, vol. II, ed. Edward Miller, Cynthia Postan, and Michael Postan, 1952, 409). Clearly, this statement was intended as further endorsement of her earlier thesis. The striking vision of medieval technological progress proposed by Mumford, Bloch, Lefebvre des Noëttes, and Carus-Wilson appears to have had a galvanizing influence on a younger generation of scholars in the emergent field of the history of technology, among the most prominent of whom were Robert J. Forbes (1900–1973), Lynn White, Jr. (1907–1987), and Bertrand Gille (1920–1980). Between the 1940s and 1960s, White and Gille articulated the outlines of a persuasive narrative about an innovative technical culture that emerged in the latter half of the European Middle Ages. In his earliest essay on the topic, the technologies invoked by White ranged across examples from the domestic and agricultural spheres, the textile industry, shipbuilding and navigation, to military and mechanical innovations, and advances in architecture and engineering (“Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15 [1940]: 141–59). In his mature work, White developed

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many of the themes and insights of this early essay into a more extended argument, focusing on advances in agricultural and mechanical technologies: the stirrup, horseshoe, horse harness, and horse collar; the heavy plough, open fields, and three-field crop rotation; water- and windpower; and the cam, crank, and clockwork (Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1962; “The Medieval Roots of Modern Technology,” Perspectives in Medieval History, ed. Katherine Drew, and Floyd Lear, 1963, 19–34; “The Expansion of Technology 500–1500,” The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, ed. Carlo Cippola, 1972, 143–71). Gille’s invocation of medieval technological innovations largely mirrored those described by White, and included “the use of hydraulic energy on a large scale, the practice of iron shoeing as well as modern harnessing, textile developments, the transformations in iron and steel making, and […] the appearance of new types of ships” (Bertrand Gille, Histoire des Techniques l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1978, trans. The History of Techniques, 2 vols., 1986, 487). White and Gille were adamant that the technological changes they described were so profound in their effects that they initiated a revolution in medieval social and economic conditions. The most compelling evidence for this medieval technological revolution was, they claimed, the rapid growth in the use of ‘non-human sources of power’ from the 10th or 11th century onward (Bertrand Gille, “Le moulin à eau: Une révolution technique medieval,” Techniques et civilisations 3 [1954]: 1–15; Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1962, 88–89). Gille developed these ideas in a number of essays between the early 1950s and late 1970s, the earliest of which was a short monograph titled Esprit et civilisation techniques au moyen âge (1952) which explicitly stated that there was a mechanical revolution during the latter half of the Middle Ages, the most striking feature of which was the widespread development and application of waterpower. White, on the other hand, appears to have first clearly articulated the notion of an industrial revolution of the Middle Ages in a 1960 essay titled, “Tibet, India and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology” (AHR 65 [1960]: 515–26). By the late 1960s, Gille, White, and their followers had fleshed out a relatively detailed account of how an ‘industrial revolution of the Middle Ages’ had unfolded, the basic elements of which appear to have been derived from Bloch. The first of these elements was that the Romans had not made any widespread use of waterpower, although they had perfunctorily deployed watermills and water-raising devices for at least half a millennium before the Empire collapsed. The second was that Christian monasteries had led the way in the reintroduction of Roman watermilling technology to

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Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The third involved an invocation of monkish inventiveness as the primary spur to the rapid growth in the use of water- and windpower from the 10th or 11th century onward. Bloch’s views on these matters can be found in the English translation of “Avénement et conquêtes du moulin à eau” titled “The Advent and Triumph of the Watermill” (Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, 1967, 141–42, 143–46, 148, 150–52, 182). Perhaps the clearest expression of this argument can be found in White’s “Cultural Climates and Technological Advances in the Middle Ages” (Viator 2 [1971]: 171–201), although it first appears in “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered” (The American Scholar Spring [1958]; rpt. Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered, 1968). Gille’s and White’s narrative appears to have been at least partially informed by the Annaliste insight that the role of longstanding cultural institutions such as the Church in historical development should receive more attention. While Bloch’s 1935 paper seems to have provided some of the major themes for the narrative framework of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages, Carus-Wilson’s work was deployed by historians of technology as an exemplar of rapid medieval industrial development and the new, positive attitude to technical activities which, they claimed, had clearly emerged by the 13th century (see, for example, Lynn White Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology, 1978, 54, 66; Bertrand Gille, “The Problems of Power and Mechanization,” A History of Technology and Invention: Progress Through the Ages, vol. I: The Origins of Technological Civilization, ed. Maurice Daumas, 1969, 456). A second key piece of empirical evidence drawn upon by proponents of an industrial revolution of the Middle Ages to support the idea of revolutionary growth in the use of waterpower was Margaret Hodgen’s calculation that 5,632 watermills are recorded in Domesday Book (“Domesday Water Mills,” Antiquity 13 [1939]: 261–79). This figure continued to be cited in the history of technology literature until the early 1990s, despite Reginald Lennard having stated that the figure was too low in the late 1950s (Rural England: 1086–1135, 1959, 278–80), and H. C. Darby and his colleagues having calculated the now accepted figure of 6,082 mills in the late 1970s (Domesday England, 1977, 361). The third, and perhaps the most widely emulated, supporting strategy deployed by proponents of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages was the creation of long lists of different types of industrial watermill, and where and when they are recorded in the manuscript sources. The most extensive of such lists was created by a student of White’s, Bradford Blaine, in his doctoral thesis titled “The Application of Water Power to Industry During the Middle Ages” (UCLA, 1966). Blaine’s work, along with that of the medieval-

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ist, Anne-Marie Bautier, was frequently cited by proponents as crucial evidential support for an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages (Anne-Marie Bautier, “Les plus anciennes mentions de moulins hydrauliques industriels et de moulins à vent,” Bulletin Philologique et Historique 2 [1960]: 567–626). This strategy, too, appears to be ultimately derived from Bloch. Thus we can see how a narrative first articulated by Bloch, and to a lesser extent, Mumford, was developed by Gille and White, and embellished with empirical evidence primarily provided by Carus-Wilson, Hodgen, Bautier, and Blaine, to create a compelling case for an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages based on waterpower. In its ‘mature’ form, the argument ran as follows: Although the verticalwheeled watermill was invented in the ancient Mediterranean, it was used exclusively for grinding grain, and then only sporadically due to the prevalence of slaves, negative attitudes toward the banausic arts, and insufficient water resources. It was medieval European ‘engineers’ (trained by, or working in traditions established by, Christian monasteries) who developed the ‘Roman’ watermill’s full potential through their ingenious incorporation into the milling apparatus of a variety of mechanical innovations, including the cam, crank and trip-hammer. The incorporation of these innovations into medieval watermills allowed them to be applied to a range of industrial processes, from fulling cloth and crushing bark and hemp, to forging iron and powering bellows, thus freeing human labor for other purposes, just as the steam engine had done in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The widespread mechanization of industry that occurred in the second half of the Middle Ages led to similar transformations in the medieval economy and society to those seen in the ‘later’ Industrial Revolution. Although White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change was instrumental in popularizing and disseminating the idea that there had been an industrial revolution in medieval Europe, it was given additional impetus by, and can in some respects be seen as culminating in, a widely read work of popular history by Jean Gimpel, La Révolution industrielle du moyen âge (first published in 1976; trans. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 1988). Although Gimpel invoked Oswald Spengler’s Der Mensch und die Technik (1931; trans. Man and Technics, 1932) as his main inspiration for the idea that “the foundations of our present technologically oriented society were laid not in the Italian Renaissance or in the English Industrial Revolution, but in the Middle Ages” (viii), the first three chapters of the book on energy, agriculture, and mining are heavily indebted to the narrative articulated by earlier social and economic historians and historians of technology, although frequently without adequate acknowledgement of that scholarly debt.

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Two other influential books that either openly or tacitly accepted the industrial revolution of the Middle Ages thesis are Carlo Cipolla’s Before the Industrial Revolution (1976; rpt. 1981, 1993), and Terry Reynold’s Stronger Than A Hundred Men (1985). The popularity and influence of the theory can still be discerned in recent publications, such as John H. Munro’s “Industrial Energy from Water-Mills in the European Economy, 5th to 18th Centuries: the Limitations of Power” (Economia e Energia, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi, 2003, 223–69). While the general scholarly reaction to the thesis appears to have been generally more positive amongst historians of technology than amongst medieval historians and archaeologists, there do appear to have been some national and theoretical divergences. Historians working in the neo-Malthusian tradition most popularly expounded by Michael Postan (1898–1981) tended to be critical or dismissive of the theory, as their assessment of medieval technological achievements was generally negative. Marxists and neoMarxists also tended to be critical of the theory, not because their assessments of medieval technical abilities were negative, but because they reacted against the theory’s lack of engagement with questions of social class and power. Perhaps owing to the stronger evidence for technological progress in medieval France and Italy, French and Italian medievalists appear to have been more receptive of the theory than were British medievalists (see, for example, Robert Philippe, “L’église et l’énergie pendant le XIe siècle dans les pays d’entre Seine et Loire,” Cahiers de Civilisations Médiévale 27 [1989]: 107–17). The more critical reactions to the theory are outlined below. D. Critiques of the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages Despite an apparent reluctance amongst historians of science and technology to explore the validity of the thesis that there was an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages until comparatively recently, critical scholarship that has exposed the weaknesses of its central claims and evidential support has grown in size and scope over the last two decades. Amongst the central claims that have been questioned and/or proven to be incorrect are: 1. technological stagnation was a characteristic of Greco-Roman civilization, along with the associated claim that Roman use of water technology was sporadic and infrequent; 2. the technological contributions of the Romans, Chinese, and/or Islamic societies to medieval European industry were not significant or comparable to those originating in Europe;

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3. Christian monasteries were primarily responsible for reintroducing Roman watermilling technology to Western Europe, and dominated the industry until well into the Middle Ages; and 4. monastic innovation can account for many of the technical advances that occurred in industry during the Middle Ages. Questions surrounding the evidential support used by proponents of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages have focused on the following issues: a.

the piecemeal fashion in which medieval European data on industrial milling was compiled by proponents, and their lack of systematic analysis of those data; b. the geographically restricted evidence for a rapid growth in the industrial uses to which waterpower was applied across most of Western Europe; and c. the geographically restricted evidence for industrial milling being a more profitable activity than grain milling. With respect to argument [1] above that technological stagnation characterized the ancient world, there is now a substantial body of evidence compiled by archaeologists such as Kenneth D. White (Greek and Roman Technology, 1984), Örjan Wikander (Exploitation of Waterpower or Technological Stagnation? A Reappraisal of the Productive Forces in the Roman Empire, 1984), and Kevin Greene (“Perspectives on Roman Technology,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 [1990]: 209–17) which supports the revisionist view that the technological achievements of the Hellenic Greeks and Romans were far more extensive and impressive than was previously accepted by scholars of the ancient world, such as Benjamin Farrington (Science in Antiquity, 1936; rpt. 1969), Moses Finley (“Technology in the Ancient World,” Economic History Review 18 [1959]: 120–25; “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World,” Economic History Review 18 [1965]: 29–45), and H.W. Pleket (“Technology and Society in the Graeco-Roman World,” Acta Historiae Neerlandica 2 [1967]: 1–25). Greene has further developed these insights in “Technology and Innovation in Context: the Roman Background to Medieval and Later Developments” (Journal of Roman Archaeology 7 [1994]: 22–33), and “Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World: M. I. Finley Re-Considered” (Economic History Review 53 [2000]: 29–59). Furthermore, Wikander (“The Watermill,” Handbook of Ancient Water Technology, ed. Örjan Wikander, 2000, 401–12) and the historian of tech-

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nology, Michael J. T. Lewis (Millstone and Hammer: The Origins of Water Power, 1997), have demonstrated that Roman use of waterpower was also far more widespread and innovative than was previously accepted, and that such use included factory-scale flour production and almost certainly some industrial applications in iron mining and stone quarrying. With respect to argument [2] above, Adam Lucas (“Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revolution in Medieval Europe,” Technology and Culture 46 [2005]: 1–30) has summarized the manuscript and archaeological evidence for the widespread use of waterpower by the Romans, Chinese, and Islamic societies, long before an ‘industrial revolution’ is supposed to have occurred in medieval Europe. His paper argues not only that the industrial use of waterpower had clear precedents in earlier civilizations, but that the mechanical innovations required for industrial milling were almost certainly conveyed from those cultures to medieval Europe via Islamic Spain or the Byzantine Empire in the 10th or 11th centuries. Lucas’s book, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technologies (2006) contains a compilation and analysis of all of the reliable manuscript and archaeological evidence for ancient and medieval industrial mills that he was able to collate at the time of publication. With respect to argument [3] above, Lucas (“The Role of the Monasteries in the Development of Medieval Milling,” Wind and Water in the Middle Ages, ed. Steven A. Walton, 2006, 89–127) has summarized the manuscript and archaeological evidence for the continuation of Roman watermilling practices in early medieval Italy and France, and for watermill usage in Ireland prior to the 7th century. This evidence strongly suggests that Christian monasteries did not, in fact, ‘reintroduce’ the watermill to Western Europe, but were, to the contrary, very much involved in the process of feudal appropriation of existing lands and watermills from communal interests and less powerful social groups. The paper also discusses the English manuscript evidence suggesting that while the Church may have held as many mills as the Crown around the time of the Norman Conquest, that was the peak of its influence, and it does not appear to have ever dominated the powered milling sector in medieval England. With respect to argument [4] above, the two aforementioned papers by Lucas examine the evidence for Benedictine and Cistercian involvement in mill innovation, and conclude that there is indeed some evidence that the Cistercians were innovators in industrial milling, as some previous scholars such as Gille, White, and Gimpel have claimed. There appears to be very little systematic research on the topic of medieval monastic innovation, however.

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The most systematic effort to address the adequacy of the evidential support used by proponents of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages (issues a, b, and c above) is by Lucas in his aforementioned paper on industrial milling, although important research examining the evidence from medieval England was undertaken by Richard Holt (Mills of Medieval England, 1988, chapter 9) and John Langdon (“Water-Mills and Windmills in the West Midlands, 1086–1500,” Economic History Review 44 [1991]: 424–44; “Lordship and Peasant Consumerism in the Milling Industry of Early Fourteenth Century England,” Past and Present 145 [1994]: 3–42). Lucas argues that a detailed examination of the manuscript evidence drawn on by proponents of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages, even when augmented by more recent systematic studies, does not warrant the conclusion that a panEuropean industrial revolution ever took place. To the contrary, the most intense areas of industrial milling activity appear to have been certain regions of what we now call France and Italy between the 13th and 15th centuries. The main industries to which waterpower was applied in these regions were cloth, hemp, leather, and timber, as well as some metallurgical processes. In the later Middle Ages, this extended to forging iron and pulverizing and polishing ores. The evidence for the relative profitability of grain milling versus industrial milling appears to have been a factor in determining the extent to which industrial milling was implemented in different regions. In England and Wales, for example, where industrial milling was largely restricted to the fulling industry, fulling mill revenues were significantly lower than those for grain mills, whereas in northern Italy, fulling mill revenues were higher than those for grain mills, and their share of the overall milling sector was significantly higher than in Britain. The generic factors which appear to have made these developments possible included already well-developed local industries in specific commodities or products which had access to regional, national and/or international markets, as well as access to plentiful supplies of running water that could be harnessed for industry. E. The Agricultural Revolution of the Early Middle Ages In a further development that was analogous to the intellectual move made by Toynbee in his invocation of an earlier Agricultural Revolution which laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution, and of Childe with his invocation of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ which laid the foundations for his ‘Urban Revolution,’ Lynn White, Jr. proposed in “Technology and Innovation in the Middle Ages” (1940) that there had been an agricultural revolution in the early Middle Ages which laid the foundations for an industrial revolution in the later Middle Ages. However, it was not until the publi-

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cation of Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) that he fully developed this theory, arguing that the revolution had occurred between the 6th and 9th centuries. The claim that there had been a major transformation, if not a revolution, in early medieval agriculture had been made by a number of medievalists between the 1890s and 1950s, the most notable of whom were August Meitzen (Siedlung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostergermanen, der Kelten, Römer, Finnen und Slaven, 1895; rpt. 1963), Marc Bloch (Les Charactères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, 1931; rpt. 1988), and Georges Duby (“La révolution agricole médiévale,” Revue de géographie de Lyon 29 [1954]: 361–66). However, according to the medievalist, Michael Toch, it was White who “presented a theory lucid enough to become part of our understanding of medieval history and sophisticated enough to explain a very complicated process spanning at least three centuries” (“Agricultural Progress and Agricultural Technology in Medieval Germany: An Alternative Model,” Technology and Resource Use in Medieval Europe, ed. Elizabeth Bradford Smith and Michael Wolfe, 1997, 158–69). Amongst the central arguments made by White in support of his theory of an agricultural revolution in early medieval Europe were: 1. the diffusion of the stirrup throughout Europe from Asia enabled the development of ‘mounted shock combat’, which in turn provided the basis for the development of ‘feudalism’ in Europe; 2. the replacement of the Mediterranean ‘scratch plow’ with the ‘heavy plow’ in Francia during the 7th century led to the development of the three-field crop rotation system, as well as open-field, communal agriculture; 3. the introduction of horseshoes and the new horse collar and harness, combined with the growing availability of horse feed, rapidly led to the replacement of less efficient oxen by horses in plow teams; and 4. the growth in the use of the plow and other farm implements (as well as weaponry) was made possible by the opening up of new iron mines in Carolingian times. White first clearly articulated his theory in the first two chapters of Medieval Technology and Social Change. Premised on an argument that appears to have been derived from Lefebvre des Noëttes (“La ‘nuit’ du moyen âge et son inventaire,” Mercure de France 235 [1932]: 572–99), White contended in the first chapter of the book that:

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Narratives of Technological Revolution in the Middle Ages [t]he stirrup, by giving lateral support in addition to the front and back support offered by pommel and cantle, effectively welded horse and rider into a single fighting unit capable of a violence without precedent. The fighter’s hand no longer delivered the blow: it merely guided it […] Immediately, without preparatory steps, it made possible mounted shock combat, a revolutionary new way of doing battle (2).

Essentially, White argued that the Franks were responsible for a “drastic shift from infantry to the new mode of mounted shock combat” in the 8th century (27), and that this transition was made possible by the invention of the stirrup. According to White, the ‘key’ to feudal institutions was the duty of knight’s service, and the primary duty of the newly created knightly class was to defend the realm through mounted shock combat (31). Apart from the influence of Lefebvre des Noëttes, white’s views about the significance of knight’s service to the ‘feudal revolution’ were also partially shaped by earlier medievalists such as H.A. Cronne (“The Origins of Feudalism,” History 24 [1939]: 251–59). Although the debate about what constitutes this ‘feudal revolution’ and whether such a revolution occurred at all, continues in the scholarly literature to this day (Thomas Bisson, “The ‘Feudal Revolution’,” Past and Present 142 [1994]: 6–42; Dominique Barthélemy, “The ‘Feudal Revolution’: I,” Past and Present 152 [1996]: 197–205; Stephen D. White, “The ‘Feudal Revolution’: II,” Past and Present 152 [1996]: 205–23), few contemporary medievalists would endorse White’s technologically deterministic view of how this revolution first came about. The reactions of some of the more prominent scholars who were critical of White’s views are detailed in the section below. Having laid the foundations, as it were, for his conception of revolutionary technological change in the early Middle Ages, White’s second chapter explores the key technological developments which he identified as constituting an agricultural revolution in early medieval Europe. White opens the chapter with an invocation of the notion of the British Agricultural Revolution as a precursor to the Industrial Revolution before stating that “northern Europe from the sixth to the ninth century witnessed an earlier agricultural revolution which was equally decisive in its historical effects” (40). He goes on to argue that the replacement of the Mediterranean ‘scratch plow’ with what he dubbed the ‘heavy plow’ in Francia during the 7th century led to the development of the three-field crop rotation system as well as open-field, communal agriculture, vastly improving productivity. Northern European farmers were subsequently able to plant oats in summer as well as spring, increasing the supply and reducing the price of horse feed, thus making horse ownership more widespread. The open-field system

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enabled the pooling of oxen and horses for plowing, increasing communal solidarity and the need for collective decision-making. The introduction of horseshoes and the new horse collar and harness, combined with the growing availability of horse feed, rapidly led to the replacement of less efficient oxen by horses in plow teams. The growth in the use of the plow and other farm implements (as well as weaponry) was made possible by the opening up of new iron mines in Carolingian times. These technical and organizational innovations vastly improved agricultural productivity and contributed to a rapid increase in northern Europe’s population, breaking the previous nexus between low agricultural productivity and low living standards. F. Critiques of the Agricultural Revolution of the Early Middle Ages Scholarly reaction to White’s thesis that there had been an agricultural revolution in the early Middle Ages was far swifter and more polarized than it was to the notion of an industrial revolution of the later Middle Ages. The less favorable pole of these reactions is represented by the earliest critique of White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change by the medievalists Peter H. Sawyer and Rodney H. Hilton in “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough” (Past and Present 24 [1963]: 90–100), while the more favorable pole can be seen in the assessment of Toch cited above, and in John Langdon’s Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation (1986), although both scholars are far from uncritical in their reassessments of White’s thesis in the light of recent scholarship. Because Sawyer’s and Hilton’s review and Toch’s aforementioned paper provide the most cogent criticisms of White’s theory, the following section summarizes the main elements of those criticisms, using a similar framework of argument to that provided in the section on critiques of an industrial revolution in the Middle Ages. In the aforementioned review of White’s book, Sawyer addressed White’s argument about the impact of the invention of the stirrup on the development of ‘feudalism’ [argument 1 in the previous section], while Hilton addressed White’s claims for an agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages [arguments 2 to 4 above]. Interestingly, neither scholar appears to have felt qualified to address the case made by White for major advances in medieval mechanical technology made in Chapter Three. With respect to argument [1] above, although continental scholars have drawn attention to the defeat of the Magyars by Otto I in 955 after spending ten years training his army for mounted shock combat (for the most recent scholarly reassessment of this literature, see Charles R. Bowlus, The Battle of Lechfeld and its Aftermath, August 955: The End of the Age of Migrations in the Latin West, 2006), Sawyer’s critique centers on the fact that mounted shock com-

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bat did not become a common Western European military tactic until the 12th century: four centuries later than that proposed by White. Amongst the weaknesses in White’s argument to which Sawyer draws attention is that although White acknowledged that the Anglo-Saxons were using stirrups prior to the Norman invasion and did not use them in battle against the Normans, he failed to account for why their use was so decisive in shaping the new feudal society on the other side of the Channel. Sawyer also points out that the Frankish evidence for the adoption of the stirrup is considerably later than that suggested by White, and that other Germanic peoples may have used the stirrup earlier, but did not develop feudal societies. With respect to argument [2] above, Hilton begins by pointing out that although it had been argued by medievalists such as Georges Duby (L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiéval, 1962; trans. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, 1968) that the population growth, urbanization, and commercial expansion of Western Europe between the 11th and 13th centuries was the result of improvements in agricultural productivity per head, Duby’s “chronology differs substantially from Mr White’s and his handling of evidence conforms to scholarly standards” (95). He then goes on to question White’s use of the terminology ‘scratch plow’ and ‘heavy plow’ to differentiate between Mediterranean and Northern European variants, and points out that the Belgic plough (a kind of heavy plow according to White’s definition) was used as early as the 1st century B.C.E., long before its supposedly widespread use in the Frankish heartland in the 7th century. Hilton also notes that open-field, communal agriculture was practiced in 7th-century England, and that White’s claim that open-field agriculture and the heavy plow were introduced to England by the Danes rests on faulty reasoning and misinterpreted evidence. Hilton argues that there was no sharp distinction between the two and three field systems, and that both practices continued simultaneously for some centuries. In support of the earlier point made by Hilton, Toch notes that the process of reshaping European agriculture through the spread of three-field rotation, grain growing, and open fields did not occur until the 11th and 12th centuries, as Duby had suggested (Rural Economy, 90–9, 103–12). This process occurred within the economic framework of the manor, and the power of lords to enforce such changes on their own and tenants’ holdings: a framework which White tended to minimize or misconstrue. Most of the improvements in productivity which occurred in later medieval agriculture can be attributed to more intensive applications of labor than to technological improvements.

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With respect to argument [3] above, Hilton points out that the Carolingian evidence indicates no significant improvement in crop yields, or that the large scale sowing of oats was intended to provide fodder for horses. He also contends that the reduction of the fallow in 13th-century England as a result of population pressure reduced feed for beasts and therefore their availability for work and manuring pastures. For example, he cites evidence from Bedfordshire that the use of oxen as draught animals remained the preference of lords, while peasants used horses. In his aforementioned paper, Toch has presented more substantial evidence, partially based on Langdon’s research, that the replacement of the ox by the plow-horse in Europe took considerably longer than three centuries and up to seven centuries in Germany. As noted previously by Hilton and demonstrated most clearly by Langdon, different regions and social groups continued to use both animals in different contexts and for different functions, depending on local environmental and economic conditions. In England, the increased use of horse power for plowing was not really evident until the 12th and 13th centuries, although the transition was somewhat quicker with respect to vehicle hauling. With respect to argument [4] above, Hilton questions White’s evidence for the opening of ‘great new iron mines’ during Carolingian times, pointing out that “there is no quantitative evidence cited from archaeological research” (96), and that the references which White did cite do not indicate what he claimed. Hilton concludes that the iron used by the Franks more likely came from the Swedes. Toch adds that there is no evidence that iron farm implements and weaponry became far more widespread during Carolingian times, and that the diffusion of improved agricultural implements did not occur until the later Middle Ages, along with a more abundant supply of iron. The current scholarly consensus on these issues is well summarized in a collection of essays edited by Grenville Astill and John Langdon titled Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe (1997). G. Conclusion From a historiographical perspective, it now seems clear that both the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution of the Middle Ages narratives were squarely aimed at recuperating the technical contributions of medieval Europe to the modern period. While their proponents accepted the traditional view that technological stagnation in the ancient world was due to the institution of slavery and unfavorable attitudes toward technical

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knowledge amongst ancient elites, they argued that technological development in the medieval West was enabled by the decline of slavery under Christianity and the marriage of contemporary practical and classical theoretical knowledge in the monasteries. In the case of the agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages thesis, the new feudal system which made improvements in agricultural production possible was founded on a number of improvements in military and agricultural technology. In the case of the industrial revolution of the Middle Ages thesis, the harnessing of ‘new sources of power’ (i. e., water, wind, and the tides) during the Middle Ages was analogous to the harnessing of coal and steam during the Industrial Revolution. White’s dual theses that an agricultural revolution in the early Middle Ages had made possible an industrial revolution in the later Middle Ages provided a complementary explanation to those revolutionary accounts of discontinuous scientific change popularized by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). White’s account is complementary in the sense that it provides an explanation for some aspects of the ‘pre-paradigm phase’ of the scientific disciplines of mechanics and statics, when certain crucial technical attitudes and developments were laid down which provided some of the foundations for the later Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. The second thesis in particular provides some evidence for the relative ubiquity of semi-automated machinery in late medieval Europe and for the beginnings of factory production. According to standard accounts of the Scientific Revolution, the social and economic changes that occurred during the Renaissance (including the rise of Protestantism, a renewal of interest in classical learning, and the invention of the printing press) weakened the authority of the Church and absolute monarchs and enabled the intellectual freedom and social mobility which led to the Scientific Revolution. A narrative accounting for the discontinuity between the medieval industrial revolution and the Scientific Revolution was available via the argument that medieval Europe failed to capitalize on its technical advances owing to the Church’s intolerance of intellectual debate and dissent, and the irrationalist tendencies of natural philosophical discourse under scholasticism. The curtailment of ecclesiastical power and authority during the early modern period provided a neat explanation for why the marriage of theory and practice that had begun under the scholastics did not bear more fruit until the 16th and 17th centuries. Such arguments can be seen as having provided a space within which it was possible for proponents of the industrial revolution of the Middle Ages thesis to avoid close scholarly scrutiny by their peers for a number of years.

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In a recent contribution to the Encyclopaedia of the Scientific Revolution, the historian of early modern science, John Schuster, suggested that evidentially challenged modernist narratives about the Scientific Revolution continue to maintain some credibility in the history of science because their postmodern competitors have been reluctant to entertain, let alone articulate, alternative ‘grand theories’ or metanarratives. To briefly summarize Schuster’s assessment of what such an alternative might look like, it would start from the assumption that “knowledge is made in evolving traditions of practice or subcultures that have their own synchronic density and diachronic dynamics” (“Internalist/Externalist Historiography,” Encyclopaedia of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Wilbur Applebaum, 2000, 334–36). In the absence of any vigorous scholarly contestation over what might constitute more historically accurate grand narratives about the unfolding of that period called the Scientific Revolution, the discipline and the wider public have lacked the conceptual tools to adequately interrogate the plausibility of these established modernist narratives. A similar case could certainly be made for the narratives of technological revolution that have been the topic of this essay. The most commonly circulated and recognized representations of premodern technology continue to be those provided by a relatively small group of post-War historians of ancient and medieval technology, despite the emergence of more sophisticated scholarship in recent years. Lewis Mumford, Robert Forbes, Moses Finley, Lynn White, Jr, Bertrand Gille, and Jean Gimpel have largely shaped the contours of scholarly awareness about premodern technology in the history of science and technology, and also to some extent in archaeology and social and economic history: an observation that can be verified by examining the work of a number of different scholars working across these disciplines during the 1980s and 1990s. The publications in which these historians’ narratives appear have, in the words of the archaeologist, Kevin Greene, had “an extraordinary influence beyond their immediate subject areas, irrespective of their changing status within academic history and archaeology,” primarily because they contained ideas that captured the public imagination and could be promoted in books for a popular or more general readership (“V. Gordon Childe and the Vocabulary of Revolutionary Change,” Antiquity 73 [1999]: 97–109). During a period in which radical political positions and revolutionary rhetoric were both intellectually de rigeur and part of everyday discourse, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of socially progressive historians should have embraced and promoted revolutionary narratives in their work. Considering the intellectual milieu of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, it should also

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not be too surprising that certain affinities of style, methods of reasoning, and explanatory schema should characterize this scholarship, and that these features should parallel developments in the history of science. At the same time, it seems clear from the previous discussion that the modernist historians of technology who articulated these narratives of medieval technological revolution were guilty of a sin that is typical of the humanities and social science disciplines: they insulated themselves from other disciplines with similar or overlapping concerns and developed their own positions on those concerns. It was left to later generations of scholars with less investment in disciplinary boundary maintenance and entrenched theoretical positions to reassess the relevant arguments and evidence. On a more general level, while the use of revolutionary terminology to describe technological change in premodern as well as modern societies has diminished in contemporary scholarship, the question of what characterizes genuinely ‘revolutionary’ change in the technological development of a given society or region, and how it should be characterized, remains as unresolved in the history of technology as it is in the history of science. As Schuster (The Scientific Revolution: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science, 1995, chapter 25) has noted, scholars will bring with them their linguistic and theoretical baggage when using the terminology of revolution to describe developments in the history of science: while political revolutions may be relatively easy to define and to identify, cultural revolutions are in the eye of the beholder. It nevertheless remains clear that there are instances in the history of human cultures when radical transformations in their ways of being and doing occur over comparatively brief spans of time, and that our theoretical constructs and language are hard pressed to the task of adequately describing, let alone explaining them. The problems for scholars attempting to grapple with these issues revolve around such epistemological concerns as the nature and availability of evidence, standards of proof, and the explanatory adequacy of theories and narratives that seek to illuminate our understanding of rapid cultural change. Although none of the key elements of the narratives of medieval technological revolution which have been examined in this essay have withstood the test of time, recent scholarship has revealed that technological development in some regions of medieval Europe during certain key periods was significant, impressive, and perhaps in some instances might even warrant the appellation, ‘revolutionary’, if suitably qualified.

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Select Bibliography Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, ed. Astill Grenville and John Langdon (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Technology and Resource Use in Medieval Europe: Cathedrals, Mills and Mines, ed. Elizabeth Bradford Smith and Michael Wolfe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Adam Lucas, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technologies (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Adam Lucas

Narratology and Literary Theory in Medieval Studies A. Definition ‘Narratology’ designates the study of narratives according to their formal structures rather than their themes or values. Modern narratology began with the Russian formalists as a method for analyzing strictly literary texts, but scholars since the peak of French structuralism do not restrict its scope to literary (fictional, aesthetically self-conscious) narratives. Rather, they understand narrative discourse to include any account of contingent events and the actions and attitudes of associated agents. In recent decades, narratology has informed the efforts of medievalists studying forms as disparate as romance, hagiography, chronicle, ballad, and pictorial narratives in books and plastic arts. Medievalists in the fields of literature and history have also enriched narratology by challenging the ahistorical assumptions that underlie its traditional structuralist mode. In a process of mutual enrichment, medievalists have fixed cultural and historical horizons constraining supposedly universal narrative structures, while the analytical approach of narratology illuminates new aspects of medieval texts. B. Origins and Forerunners: From Aristotle to Russian Formalism Tzvetan Todorov coined the term “narratology” (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969), but the field’s intellectual origins go back to such practical observations in Aristotle’s Poetics as his distinction between “diegesis” (telling, as in epic) and “mimesis” (showing, as in drama). In the modern period, the first major precursor of narratology was Russian Formalism, emerging from the Moscow Linguistic Circle of the 1910s. The Russian Formalists desired (like North America’s New Critics) to isolate ‘literary’ elements from their socio-

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historical, psychological, and philosophical context. Their works contributed several important ideas to the later development of narratology, such as the distinction between story and plot: the story comprises the ‘actual’ events in their natural temporal and causal sequence, while the plot is their artistic ordering and arrangement, including chronological displacements and alterations (Viktor Shklovskii, “On the Connection Between Devices of Siuzhet and General Stylistic Devices,” Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, ed. Stephen Bann, and John E. Bowlt, 1973, 48–72.) While Shklovskii identified plot as the organizing principle of narrative prose, Boris Eikhenbaum focused instead on the distinct discourse of the narrative voice or skaz (“The Illusion of ‘Skaz,’” Russian Literature Triquarterly 11 [1975]: 211–29). Vladimir Propp extended the formalist approach to narrative beyond strictly literary texts by proposing an elemental taxonomy of thirty-one folktales based on the functions performed by their characters (Theory and History of Folklore, 1931). Propp’s methods influenced the semiotician A.J. Greimas, who was born in Lithuania but moved to France to study medieval language and literature as an undergraduate. Greimas sought to uncover a narrative grammar by which the narrational act transforms the sign systems constituting the “discourse universe” into a temporal scheme. Through this temporal scheme, subjects experience story-events as the conflicts and transformations of desire (Sémantique structurale: Recherche de méthode, 1966). Greimas was one conduit between Russian formalism and French structuralism. Todorov, a Romanian émigré to France, was another. In association with Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette, he first made many Russian formalist works available in the West through translations and editions (Théorie de la litttérature: Textes des Formalistes Russes, ed. Todorov, 1965). Structuralists in France were receptive to Russian Formalism because they shared the goal of elucidating structural laws and patterns absolved from historical contingencies. Like the Russian Formalists, French structuralists adopted the governing premise of Saussurean linguistics – that language is a synchronic system of meaning, a network of sign-pairs distinguished by minimal differences in sensible features (e. g., the vibration of vocal chords distinguishing the letter Z from S). Unlike Russian Formalism, however, French structuralism did not distinguish artistic or literary language from other symbolic activity; if we privilege myth as having special significance, proposed Claude Lévi-Strauss, it is only because myths reveal and attempt to reconcile fundamental oppositions underwriting the symbolic system of culture (“The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 28 [1955]: 428–44). By assimilating all human activity to symbolic

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behavior, Lévi-Strauss furnished a mode of anthropological inquiry furnished out of binary oppositions such as “raw” and “cooked” which he proposed could account for the apparent superfluities of culture (Le cru et le cuit, 1964). The ferment of structuralism in the 1960s prompted Roland Barthes in 1970 to describe the humanities as being “still in awe of the prestige of linguistics” (S/Z, 1970, 7). Barthes’ own “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” examined how treating a narrative as a sentence allowed narrative to be analyzed into elementary functions and actions (trans. Lionel Disuit, New Literary History 6 [1975]: 237–272). While Barthes himself came to re-evaluate the limits of structuralism, his work, as well as Todorov’s Grammaire du decameron, inaugurated “narratology” as a distinct venture in literary theory. C. Structuralist Narratology Many of the major works most closely associated with the term ‘narratology’ were written in the milieu of structuralism in the France of the 1960s and 1970s. Narratologists like Gerard Genette (Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin, 1973), Gerald Prince (A Dictionary of Narratology, rev. ed. 2003), and Bieke Mal (Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. 1997) produced descriptive taxonomies of narrative which focused on textual structures and the relations of textual elements. These and associated works, sometimes characterized as ‘classical narratology,’ deliberately bracket contingent elements such as authors, readers, and contexts of production and reception in order to illuminates features of narrative previously overlooked or ignored; they aspire to produce an analytic taxonomy of universal applicability. This universality, however, has limits – the taxonomical schemes of classical narratology were usually developed with reference to the Realist novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Genette’s Narrative Discourse, for example, introduced a number of analytical terms of lasting currency (such as ‘focalization,’ a narrational perspective strictly distinct from the ‘person’ of the narrator) through a tour-de-force reading of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, intended, in part, to demonstrate that narratological analysis could be useful for more complex texts than myths and folktales. Gerald Prince proposed the functional category of the “narratee,” the intended listener of the narrative – real or notional, present or absent – through his reading of Guy de Maupassant (“Introduction to the Study of the Narratee,” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, 1980). A notable exception to this emphasis on Realist and Modernist prose fiction among the major works of structuralist narratology is Todorov’s Grammaire du Decameron (1969), which distills from Boccaccio’s

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story collection an “arch-nouvelle,” a set of rules for generating the stories of the Decameron. D. Historicism and Philology Despite the fact that classical narratology typically focused on Realist and Modernist novels, its ahistorical formalism was attractive to interpreters of texts for which the circumstances of production and reception are obscure, such as the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus. T.A. Shippey assessed the value of Propp’s morphology of folktales in accounting for the narrative structure of Beowulf; others followed suit (T.A. Shippey, “The Fairy Tale Structure of Beowulf,” Notes and Queries 16 [1969]: 2–11; Daniel R. Barnes, “Folktale Morphology and the Structure of Beowulf,” Speculum 45 [1970]: 416–34; Bruce A. Rosenberg, “Folklore Methodology and Medieval Literature,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13 [1976]: 311–25). In her 1988 dissertation at the University of Arkansas, “Time in Beowulf: An Application of Narratology,” Eril Hughes challenges traditional thematic readings of Beowulf that sideline its plot as loose or incoherent. Hughes argues that Genette’s taxonomy of narrative structures allows a full and non-reductive account of “the complexity of time” in Beowulf (33). Classical narratology also informs Minette Grunmann-Gaudet’s article account of a similarly legendary material in “The Representation of time in the Chanson de Roland,” (The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. M. Grunmann-Gaudet, and R. F. Jones, 1980, 77–98). This collection of work on Old French literature, including studies by Paul Zumthor, Eugene Vance, and John Grigsby, offers a focused survey of some of the earliest literary criticism to bring the methods and perspectives of structuralist and early post-structuralist literary theory to bear on medieval texts. The reception of narratology in Medieval Literary Studies, however, was inflected by methods already prevalent among medievalists for the structural analysis of narrative, including especially historicist approaches that read medieval texts through medieval categories of linguistic and aesthetic analysis derived from, among other things, grammar, rhetoric, and logic (Adeline C. Bartlett, The Larger Rhetorical Patterns of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 1939). Disciples of oral-formulaic theory found implicit formal categories in oral and semi-oral literature beyond those prescribed by ancient and medieval scholars (Constance B. Hieatt, “Envelope Patterns and the Structure of Beowulf,” English Studies in Canada 1 [1975]: 249–65). In the English-speaking world, few such advocates of this ‘old’ historicism enjoyed more influence than D.W. Robertson, who brought the vast apparatus of patristic exegesis to bear on vernacular medieval texts; Alastair Minnis, exchanging patristic for scholastic authorities, followed along these lines (D. W. Robertson,

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A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, 1964; Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 1984). More recently, Salwa Shafik-Ghaly brought this approach into dialogue with narratology, analyzing narratological concerns with time relations (order, duration, frequency) in terms of medieval dispositio, or rhetorical arrangement (“Towards a Medieval Narratology: Discourse and Narration in Chretien’s Yvain and Chaucer’s Troilus,” Ph. D. diss., University of Alberta, 1988). Another main stream of medieval literary criticism during the mid-20thcentury came out of the tradition of German philology. The philologists Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, although heirs to the diachronic linguistics of the neo-grammarians from which Ferdinand de Saussure so decisively split, nevertheless anticipated narratology’s attention to narrative’s discursive matrix. In a manner distinct from Robertson’s exegetical historicism but comparable in scale and sensitivity, Auerbach’s stylistic analysis elaborated the synthetic codes that shaped the production and reception of narrative in the Middle Ages, anticipating Barthes’ displacement of the author (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953; id., Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim, 1993). Leo Spitzer’s distinction between the ‘textual I’ and ‘empirical I’ anticipates Genette’s and Prince’s treatment of the narrator as a function of the text (“Notes on the Empirical and Poetic ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 [1946]: 414–22). E. Reception Theory and Post-Structuralism Reception theorists like Wolfgang Iser offered an approach to narrative that accounts for a text’s historically situated production and use; Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, and other “reception theorists” privileged the reader’s experience as a category of analysis, while still allowing for the degree of generality necessary to criticism by positing an “implied reader […] a counterpart to Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author as elaborated in The Rhetoric of Fiction” (Holub, 84) (Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, 1982; Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961; Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction, 1984). Structuralism fully reached the attention of medievalists (with exceptions like Zumthor) when its methods and tenets were already being challenged and revised. Critiques of narratology come as part of the more general

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critique of structuralism: it is reductionistic and overly divorced from historical context – one cannot finally abstract a ‘grammar’ of narrative from the discourse in which it is expressed, and that discourse is always implicated in its historical situation. Many of these critiques have been made by medievalists and by narratologists pointing to the ‘anomalous’ features of medieval texts. Medievalists often mounted these challenges based on peculiarities of medieval texts which resist taxonomies developed largely through the study of the Realist and Modernist novel. Criticism of narratology came as part of a two more general critiques of structuralism. The first was that it is reductionistic. Paul Ricoeur, for example, claims that its notion of story as a succession of events plotted along a timeline overlooks the way the “fictive experience of time” schematizes events as they are lived and understood (Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, and David Pellauer, vol. 1, 1984, 6). The second criticism was that any effort at an ahistorical and universal “narrative grammar” is doomed to futility; the practices of narration are inseparable from sociohistorical context and the communicative needs of individuals. Evelyn Birge Vitz’s formulates this critique in a comprehensive study (Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire, 1989). In her reading of diverse medieval texts, including Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, both parts of the Roman de la rose, and the Lais of Marie de France, Vitz challenges the subject/object relation implicit in classical narratology as “expressions of the worldview of the modern Western – secularized and highly rationalistic – culture.” (9) In Vitz’s studies, she attempts to account for the place of a medieval desire operating under different concepts of time and causality – concepts ultimately dependent on the transcendence of God (10). For Vitz, the desiring subject at the center of the narrative cannot be fully identified with its ‘hero’ or ‘protagonist’ (as does Greimas); rather, multiple desiring subjects intersect in the narrative events, including not only characters within the world of the text, but ‘transcendent’ characters: the saints, personified concepts and forces like Love or Nature, and especially God. “[…] We cannot discuss medieval plots as simple watertight units, but must be willing to encompass in our analyses both those to whom the discourse is addressed, and transcendent characters.” (3) Monica Fludernik mounts a more comprehensive and systematic effort to reformulate narratology in light of the ‘experiential’ turn in the humanities and social sciences, which “proposes to redefine narrativity in terms of cognitive (‘natural’) parameters, moving beyond formal narratology into the realm of pragmatics, reception theory, and constructionism” (Toward a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 1996). This effort provides an overview of medieval

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English literature embracing a variety of textual genres, including chronicles, saints’ lives, sermons, and verse narrative; it gives an account of romance’s development from “episodic” to “scenic” patterns, which she sees as consummated in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (150). Fludernik is not the first to describe the distinctive features of medieval romance by plotting medieval narrative on a continuum between the oral and the textual, but her analysis goes a good deal beyond Millman Parry, Albert Lord, and Walter J. Ong by drawing from empirical research on the unconscious use of narrative in everyday life (Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 1960; “Oral Composition and ‘Oral Residue’ in the Middle Ages,” Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. W. F. H. Nicolaisen, 1995, 7–29; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 2nd ed. 2002). The incorporation of discourse analysis into narratology has provided other medievalists with a way to relate philological details to the larger narrative structures of texts. Suzanne Fleischmann’s analyzes the “seemingly gratuitous alternation of past and present verb forms” in Old French romance by making use of the analysis of narrative in everyday conversation advanced by William Labov, a foundational figure in the discipline of sociolinguistics (Suzanne Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction, 1990). Gary Wayne Shawver’s 1999 University of Toronto dissertation, “A Chaucerian Narratology: ‘Story’ and ‘Tale’ in Chaucer’s Narrative Practice,” illustrates the longstanding tendency of medievalists to seek and test analogies between the analytical vocabulary of modern and postmodern literary theory and those drawn from medieval usage and commentary. Using computerized methods to carry out a lexicological analysis of Chaucer’s respective uses of ‘storie’ versus ‘tale,’ Shawver finds that “‘storie’ occurs in contexts foregrounding public memory and authority, ‘tale’ in those foregrounding private subjectivity” (130). Shawver therefore cautiously suggests an analogy between Chaucer’s functional distinction between his uses of ‘storie’ and ‘tale’ and the distinction between story and discourse posited by Genette; ‘storie’ is ‘content’ – the events, setting, and persons of a story prior to being communicated – whereas ‘tale’ corresponded to discourse: story as a particular utterance with a particular teller (131). Suggesting limitations to this analogy without specifying what they are, Shaw honors the medievalist’s temperamental caution about anachronism; nevertheless, he uses the distinction to make plausible claims about the differing conceptions of narrative as discourse in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

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F. Historiography Narratology has been adopted by medieval historians with possibly greater enthusiasm than by literary critics. Historians grew discontented with positivistic historiography as distorted and inadequate; it deliberately excluded the medieval chronicler’s free mingling of legendary and other ‘fictional’ material with factual record, and was likewise insensible to the literary selfreferentiality of medieval narrators. An important pioneer in the adoption of literary modes of analysis by historians was Hayden White; influenced (like Paul Ricoeur) by Northrop Frye, White argues that “[…] plot is not a structural component of fictional or mythical stories alone; it is crucial to the historical representations of events as well” (The Content of the Form, 1987, 51; Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957). Narratological paradigms can thus be used to analyze medieval historiography – not just to mine the ore of historical data from the dross of the ‘merely’ literary, but to see narration itself as a historical act. In this way, White argues that our understanding of history is framed both by our narrator’s and our own situated perspectives. This reflexive turn in the discipline of history continues to bear fruit. As Brian Stock puts it, “accounting for what actually happened is now recognized to be only part of the story; the other part is the record of what individuals thought was happening, and the ways in which their feelings, perceptions, and narratives of events either influenced or were influenced by the realities they faced” (“History, Literature, and Medieval Textuality,” Yale French Studies 70 [1986]: 7–17). Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (1995) brings insights from post-structuralism and Marxism to her narratological account of the ways in which Old French chronicles constitute the self-image of a dominant class in partisan and ideologically motivated ways; R. James Goldstein takes a similar approach to Scottish chronicles (The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, 1993). Responding to the work of Goldstein and Spiegel as well as Evelyn Birge Vitz, Andrew Galloway provides a useful critical synthesis of the engagement between Medieval Studies and narratology in the decades since the 1960s (“Narratology and the Pursuit of Context: Three Recent Studies of Medieval Narrative,” Medievalia et Humanistica 21 [1994]: 111–126). Like Spiegel, Monika Otter explores how elite communities represent themselves when narrating their own origins in 12th-century AngloLatin historiography (Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing, 1986). Along similar lines, Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (ed. Elizabeth Balzaretti, and Ross Tyler, 2006) collects recent narratological contributions to the study of early medieval his-

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toriography; in this collection, “Mixed Modes in Historical Narrative” by Joaquín Martínez Pizarro offers an especially sustained engagement with the legacy of narratology and literary theory. This collection follows in the wake of Walter Goffart’s examination of the situated agendas of four story-tellers on whom our knowledge of early Europe still greatly depends (The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon, 1988). Another collection, Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography (ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary, 2002) links narratology to social-scientific and linguistic study in examining how language represents the succession of past events over a wide range of medieval periods and regions. Narratology has also made inroads into medieval art history, especially book history; Mary C. Olson, for example, examines how time and sequence are represented in the pictorial elements of medieval books (“Genesis and Narratology: The Challenge of Medieval Illustrated Texts,” Mosaic 31 [1998]: 1–24). A comprehensive overview of work on narrative in medieval art history can be found in the article “Narrative” by Suzanne Lewis (A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2006, 86–105). Select Bibliography Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Kayser, Wayne C. Booth, and Philippe Hamon, Poétique du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1977); Monica Fludernik, Toward a ‘Natural’ Narratology (New York: Routledge, 1996); Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Narratology: An Introduction, ed. Jose Angel Garcia Landa, and Susana Onega (London and New York: Longman, 1996); Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977); Evely Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989); Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

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New Philology

New Philology A. Definition “New Philology” is an umbrella term used to describe a movement or attitude, primarily among American academics, toward the reading, editing, and interpretation of medieval texts. The major impetus for the New Philology was the enormous changes and pressures brought to bear on Medieval Studies by postmodern literary theory in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as by the New Historicism. Drawing on the sense of philology as the study not only of words and language but of learning and culture more broadly, practitioners of the New Philology tend to embrace the challenges which postmodernism poses to the traditional study of texts. Although it has affinities with deconstruction, reader-response theory and reception theory, the New Philology is more a general approach than a formal theory or methodology. Subject to much controversy in the 1990s, the New Philology has since that time become generally accepted as a significant presence in Medieval Studies. One of the movement’s founders, Stephen G. Nichols, describes New Philology as Medieval Studies’ “postmodern return to the origins of Medieval Studies” (“Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 [Jan. 1990]: 1–10, here 7). That is, the New Philology concerns a return to and a re-emphasis on the medieval manuscript as the focal point of study, with attention to all the elements of the manuscript – not only the text but also the manuscript’s markings, illustrations, layout, and marginalia, as well as its transmission history and treatment by readers and writers. A number of related developments also informed the New Philology, including the New Medievalism, a larger movement of which New Philology is seen as a part; the historicist re-examination of nationalist narratives embedded in textual and interpretive studies; and, particularly, advances in computing. The term and the movement gained prominence with the appearance of a special issue of Speculum in January 1990. This issue, edited by Nichols, set off a sharp debate among academics in the early and mid-nineties. However, many of the tenets of what is now called New Philology had already been established, among both text editors and social scientists, well before the special issue was published. In many respects, the waning argument between some New Philologists and their opponents may be attributed to computerbased studies as a new and increasingly sophisticated line of inquiry. Computer-based editing, as well as the arguments of the New Philology, brought what Nichols calls the “manuscript matrix” once again to the foreground in Medieval Studies.

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B. History and Background In order to understand the rise of the New Philology, it is necessary to bear in mind the limitations of editorial practice in the 19th and 20th centuries, and to recognize how radically such practices were shaken by postmodern thought. Stemmatic analysis, a 19th-century development associated primarily with the work of Karl Lachmann, sought to establish (or restore) a text as close to its archetype as possible by means of the examination of manuscript variants (a process called recensio) and assessment of their originality (examinatio). Comparison and evaluation of linguistic features and other manuscript evidence yield a stemma, or tree, of genealogical relationships among various witnesses, with the goal of determining the root of the tree – the archetype, or first version of the text, which may no longer exist. Emendatio, or emending the text with the goal of restoring the lost original, depends on the prior determination of when textual variants were introduced. Because stemmatic analysis seeks to determine whether a given reading is or is not an error, it must assume that every variant is an error; that errors, once introduced, persist; and that no copyist would have altered a manuscript intentionally. In a 1928 article on his edition of the Lai du l’ombre, Joseph Bédier repudiated the stemmatic approach, arguing that Lachmannian analysis, while purporting to be scientific, tended to create a subjective set of binaries and thus an artificially neat stemma (“La tradition manuscrit du ‘Lai de l’ombre’: Reflexions sur l’art d’editer les anciens texts,” Romania 54 [1928]: 161–96, 321–56). Bédier propounded instead what has become known as the best-text method: the editor should select the best witness from among the extant manuscripts or early printed texts, and make minimal emendations as necessary. Bédierism had its own controversies: if the best text was determined by prior stemmatic analysis, it could be subject to the same errors as the stemma; and, whether or not a stemma was constructed, the editor had to depend on his own subjective judgment and taste. Accordingly, “best texts” have been selected for apparently arbitrary reasons: because they are the oldest witness, the most regular, or the most beautiful (for example, the use of the Ellesmere rather than Hengwrt manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as the base text for the standard edition). While the approaches of Lachmann and Bédier greatly influenced the editing of medieval manuscripts, it is also important to note one later approach, primarily applied to studies of texts from the age of print. Walter W. Greg and Fredson Bowers argued for an eclectic approach to text editing: when the original text is lost, the evidence of surviving witnesses may together create a purer text, one closer to the original, than any single witness.

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Both the Lachmannian and eclectic approaches have the goal of reconstructing an ideal text, one which would reflect the original intention of the author, as contrasted with the best-text approach, which seeks to maximize the coherence of a single manuscript, selected for its intrinsic worth. Text editors, both of manuscripts and of printed works, have long been aware that traditional editorial practices were susceptible to critique. Stemmatic analysis and eclectic editing were suspect since the era of New Criticism because of their reliance on the idea of authorial intention. In stemmatic analysis, an editor who made foundational assumptions about errors and their persistence could find what he was looking for, but the theory could not be established a priori. For its part, the best-text method had a bias toward the subjective preferences of the editor, as Bédier himself acknowledged. The pressures of postmodernism, however, gave greater impetus and weight to the acknowledged problems of these methods. No complete account of postmodernism is possible within the confines of a brief article, but a few examples may illustrate how ripe was manuscript editing for a postmodern critique. Derridean thought, for example, undercuts the possibility of a fixed or stable meaning; the sign, unlinked from a signified, has meaning only in the endless succession of différance. Deconstruction examines and inverts the privileging of one element over another in any binary system (for example, speech/writing). Given that Lachmannian analysis is predicated on a manuscript reading being right or wrong, authorial or erroneous, such a method becomes a tempting target. In inverting and collapsing binary distinctions, postmodernism prizes the marginal, or the supplemental, over the center; under its critique, the best-text method seems to revere the wrong elements, and to entrust the text to an elitist arbiter as well. Moreover, postmodern thought denies determinacy and calls into question the possibility of a stable text; for editors whose lifework was to establish text, both in the sense of creating a stable, readable text and in the sense of restoring a lost original, this element of postmodernism posed a direct challenge. Structuralist and poststructuralist arguments declared the death (or irrelevance) of the author and thus of authorial intention, a most damaging declaration for a field which, in Jerome McGann’s phrase, sought to “establish a text which […] most nearly represents the author’s original (or final) intentions” (A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 1983, 15). Scholars in the social sciences were also aware of fissures in the traditional practice of philology. Clifford Geertz, in a 1980 article, cites comparative linguist Alton Becker on the “shattering of philology […] into disjunct and rivalrous specialties, and most particularly […] a division between

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those who study individual texts (historians, editors, critics – who like to call themselves humanists), and those who study the activity of creating texts in general (linguists, psychologists, ethnographers – who like to call themselves scientists)” (“Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 1986, 514–23, here 521). For his part, Becker’s calls for a “new philology” echo those of Spanish philologist José Ortega y Gasset (“The Difficulty of Reading,” Diogenes 28 [1959]: 1–17), whose “paradox of philology,” in Becker’s phrase, states that “Every utterance is deficient – it says less than it wishes to say. Every utterance is exuberant – it conveys more than it plans” (Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology, 1995, 370). C. Major Contributions Ortega y Gasset’s call for a new philology seems prescient, particularly when his idea of the “exuberant” utterance is compared with that of the “joyful excess” (33) described in Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (1989; English trans., 1999). This work, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, gave voice to the postmodern complaint against traditional editorial and philological practices. For Cerquiglini, “the author is not a medieval concept” (8); rather, the scribe is paramount: The work copied by hand, manipulated, always open and as good as unfinished, invited intervention, annotation, and commentary. Confronted with an earlier piece of writing, it constructed itself and sustained itself simply with the distance it assumed in relation to the utterance that was its basis. The scribal work was commentary, paraphrase, supplementary meaning, supplementary language, brought to bear upon a letter that was essentially unfinished (34).

Cerquiglini deplores the “religion” (1) of positivist optimism concerning the nature and reliability of text. He traces this optimism to the era of print and of the author’s proof, the mark of authenticity, in the process of typesetting. A second modern idea which he identifies is that a text, literature itself, could be property; such ideas, he claims, have little relation to medieval literature, and he hails the return of the unowned, unsigned, ever-changing manuscript to the center of scholarly study. Cerquiglini reviews the development of a French vernacular in the 12th and 13th centuries, as it broke away first from Latin and then from orality. French vernacular writing was an appropriation, in Cerquiglini’s term, of the mother tongue, an appropriation which “found expression in an essential variance, which philology, modern thinking about the text, took to be merely a childhood disease” (21). For Cerquiglini, philologists who sought to establish a text, or a work,

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were profoundly mistaken, since the very essence of the work is variation, change, and instability; the fundamental plurality of many texts (for example, of Piers Plowman) means that “every manuscript is a revision, a version” (38). In contrast, then, to the Lachmannian idea that change in manuscripts signals error or decline from a lost original, instead of a single text whose instantiations contain errors or variants, Cerquiglini proclaims that the medieval text is, itself, variance, its value lying not in a fixed meaning but in a plenitude of meanings. Traditional medieval philology, therefore, is a kind of nostalgic desire; it is “the mourning for a text, the patient labor of this mourning” (34). Although Cerquiglini recognizes the “cultural necessity” of reducing the excess of medieval textuality to the printed form (26), he objects to the “fantasy” of “the solely documentary project of fidelity to the manuscript” (22). Such a fantasy, the product of the modern print era, is the Procrustean bed onto which philologists – Cerquiglini uses the caricature of “Mr. Procrustes, Philologist” (13) – force the medieval text. Cerquiglini reviews the careers and work of Lachmann, whose methods were introduced to French Medieval Studies by Gaston Paris, Paris himself, and Bédier, and while acknowledging the immense body of work achieved by these scholars, he nontheless refers to these and other philologists as “dinosaurs” (46). According to Cerquiglini their goal of recovering or preserving a single text that never was should yield to the idea that the medieval manuscript is playful and dynamic. The computer screen, along with the computer’s ability to hold vast amounts of data on codices, paleography, and so on, provides the means of celebrating this mobile, excessive literature. Like the medieval text, according to Cerquiglini, “Computer inscription is variance” (81). Nichols’ special edition of Speculum appeared just a year after Cerquiglini’s Éloge, and his introduction repeats and amplifies some of Cerquiglini’s arguments, augmenting them through a survey of 20th-century scholars who worked in the wake of Bédier. He agrees with Cerquiglini that the practices of print culture circumscribed medieval textuality, adding that medieval philology has been marginalized as a discipline “by contemporary cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far too current” (1). Nichols calls for careful, theoretically informed study of all aspects, visual and verbal, of medieval manuscripts and their cultures, using the term “manuscript matrix.” Nichols defines this matrix, in contrast to the assembled, fixed form of the print edition, as “a place of radical contingencies,” made up of “gaps and interstices, in the form of interventions in the text made up of visual and verbal insertions which may be

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conceived, in Jacques Lacan’s terms, as ‘pulsations of the unconscious’ by which the ‘subject reveals and conceals’ itself” (8). Beginning with Siegfried Wenzel’s observations on philology’s traditional role as “handmaiden” to interpretation and to related disciplines (17), the articles in the special issue range from specific analyses to general claims. Suzanne Fleishmann’s article, “Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” brings “discourse-based linguistics to bear on the textual artifacts of medieval France” (37), building on Cerquiglini’s argument that the medieval text is not a fossilized artifact but an example of dynamic and communicative language. Two articles, R. Howard Bloch’s “New Philology and Old French,” and Gabrielle M. Speigel’s “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” are overtly concerned with poststructuralist themes and positions, while Lee Patterson’s article, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” places the New Philology in the context of Medieval Studies as an academic institution. The Speculum issue, as well as other theoretically-informed treatments of medieval manuscripts, prompted a series of objections by scholars who quickly recognized the binary of “new” and “old” philology and saw their position as the “old.” Wendell Clausen, in his brief 1990 essay “Philology,” claimed, “Anyone who speaks about philology today must be aware that it has become, for many, a pejorative term, even a term of abuse” (Special-Focus Issue: What is Philology? Comparative Literature Studies 27:1 [1990], 13). That concern also appears in Keith Busby’s collection, Toward a Synthesis? Essays on the New Philology (1993). This collection of responses to the New Philology, originally a set of conference papers, retains a flavor of lively debate at a heated time. According to Busby, the major concerns of traditionalist scholars were the false sense of crisis in the discipline; attacks made on straw men (in particular on the illusory ghosts of positivism past); the rise and fall of trends and fads; the nature and aims of text-editing, particularly the role of the new technology; the enduring need to master Old French and the dangers of ignoring its syntax, semantics, and phonology; the necessity (and desire) to revise our critical arsenal (2).

While several essays in the collection do indeed move “toward a synthesis,” others are frankly polemical. Among the strongest reactions to the New Philology was Barbara N. Sargent-Baur’s “Philology Through the LookingGlass,” which objected to Howard R. Bloch’s postmodernist musings on the Old French lai and on trahir/traïr in his Speculum article and in his 1988 Romanic Review article, “The Medieval Text – ‘Guigemar’ – as a Provocation to the Discipline of Medieval Studies” (97.1 [1988]: 63–73). Complaining that few New Philologists were themselves text editors, she declares that the

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“old-fashioned philologist – the dinosaur – does not look on words as so many serfs to be bullied or coerced. Nor does he regard texts as resources to be exploited for corrobative illustrations of a pre-conceived thesis” (114). Sargent-Baur’s language and tone – the use of masculine pronouns, a footnote reference to traditionalist E. D. Hirsch, the public scolding of a prominent scholar – may seem intentionally provocative, as may her term “agents provocateurs of the New Philology” (116). Yet some arguments put forward in the early 1990s illustrate what prompted this harsh reaction. Bloch’s Speculum article, for example, repeatedly implies that 19th-century philologists were childlike (43, 45). In his article “The Return to Philology,” The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Patterson declares, the very term philology conjures up visions of an older, sterner pedagogy, of the rote learning of linguistic detail, a positivist belief in factoids, a dismissal of interpretation as mere opinion, a celebration of the past for its very pastness, a contempt for innovation – in sum, a conservatism bristling with resentful indignation and shored up with a Luddite contempt for the brave new world of the contemporary academy (“The Return to Philology,” The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen, 1994, 231–44, here 231).

Patterson also compares philology to “a dusty closet into which only the theoretically backward and the critically obtuse are hidden away” (242). While his overall intention is to bring philological studies out of that dusty closet and establish it as theory’s “central, constitutive element” (236), it is not difficult to sympathize with those who saw their intellectual lifework being relegated to history’s dustbin. Nichols and Bloch followed up on the Speculum issue with two edited collections, The New Medievalism (1991) and Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (1996), which was concerned with professionalism and the preservation of Medieval Studies in the academy. European responses to the New Philology appeared in the late 1990s, although as Sarah Kay pointed out in 2000, the New Philology seemed “barely aware of the contemporary European scene. Conversely, responses to the New Philology have been close to non-existent in Europe” (“Analytical Survey 3: The New Philology,” New Medieval Literatures, ed. David Lawton, David, Wendy Scase and Rita Copeland, 1999, vol. III, 306). Kay ignores much of the continental response, such as Karl Stackmann’s critique of Cerquiglini in “Neue Philologie?” (Modernes Mittelalter: Neue Bilder einer populären Epoche, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1994, 398–427). She does, however, mention that Martin-Dietrich Glessgen and Franz Lebsanft’s Alte und neue Philologie (1997) assimilated Cerquiglini’s views without any “breastbeating or sense of crisis” (307). Other treatments of the New Philology appeared in German, Italian, and Norse studies in the 1990s.

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D. Current State of Research The controversy over the New Philology faded within a short time. Participants on either side of the debate quickly recognized that, as Stephen Owens put it in “Philology’s Discontents: Response,” Philology is not opposed to some of the recent movements in literary studies; philology caused them, and they are responses to that problem that inheres in the very concept of the discipline: the reflective questioning of the texts that can be at peace only when it discovers something stable, and therefore will never be at peace (Comparative Literature Studies, Special-Focus Issue: What is Philology?, 27.1[1990]: 7–87, here 77–78).

This reuniting of the painstaking work of philologists with the creative work of critics has made the New Philology a significant informing principle of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Manuscript studies, and particularly exploration of the “manuscript matrix,” now hold a prominent place in the field. Recent works on the medieval manuscript which reveal a direct Nichols influence include Andrew Taylor’s Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (2002); The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts (ed. Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, 2004); and Martha Rust’s Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (2007). Cerquiglini’s prediction that the computer screen and computer technology would provide an outlet for the “joyful excess” of the medieval manuscript has been amply fulfilled, especially in the multiform possibilities of hypertext and quickly accessible databases. Ironically, however, computer analysis as an arm of philological inquiry and editing has come full circle, to a kind of neo-Lachmannian analysis. Cladistic analysis, which classifies biological species in a manner similar to Lachmann’s stemma, has given new attention to stemmatics. The fruits of this labor can be seen, for example, in the CD-ROM productions of the Canterbury Tales Project, which produce not a single stemma but the whole series of variants found in all the Chaucerian texts. Select Bibliography Toward a Synthesis?: Essays on the New Philology, ed. Keith Busby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Betsy Wing, trans., In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999); Sarah Kay, “Analytical Survey 3: The New Philology,” New Medieval Literatures, vol. III., ed. David Lawton, Wendy Scase and Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 295–326; The New Philology, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Speculum 65.1 (Jan. 1990): 1–108.

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Numismatics A. Definition Numismatics is the study of coins and associated items such as tokens, along with their production, organization and significance. This is based primarily on close study of the objects themselves: their design, inscription, style, weight, fineness and other physical features must all be scrutinized carefully, and by piecing together information gleaned from them one can gain some impression of the coinage’s structure and internal chronology. Equally vital to this process is the provenance of a coin. Although few medieval coins have retained their provenance, every coin must have been found somewhere at some point, either as a single-find or as part of a hoard. Both types of find are important to the numismatist. Single-finds, especially when known in substantial numbers, can give an indication of coin circulation and perhaps wider patterns of trade. Hoards, on the other hand, do not always reflect the circulating medium: certain coins may have been preferred over others, or the hoard might represent ‘savings’ of parcels amalgamated into one group at widely spaced intervals. Nevertheless, hoards are contemporary evidence for which coins could be gathered together at roughly the same point – notwithstanding collections of coins clearly carried far from home by a pilgrim or merchant – and can be crucial for constructing a chronology, especially when inscriptions and other evidence for attribution is lacking on many of the coins themselves. At the same time as taking the coinage on its own terms and not being too eager to force it into any predetermined chronology or pattern derived from other sources, numismatists must keep one eye firmly on the history of the period and on any relevant numismatic texts. Ascertaining the chronology and minting patterns of even an apparently well-structured coinage is not always easy, and it can be even harder to link a relative chronology to specific dates. Relatively few medieval coins actually bear specific dates: most Islamic coins and early Byzantine bronzes do, and some late medieval coins are even dated to the year of the incarnation. Mintmarks or names were standard in many but far from all medieval coinages. In certain cases specific types or variations allow a coin to be attributed to a short period or a particular mint, but in general the situation is rather more complicated, and numismatists – working in collaboration with historians and archaeologists – face many challenges in attributing a date and place of origin to coins before even coming to address wider questions of use, production and overall significance.

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For an introduction to the techniques behind numismatics, see Philip Grierson, Numismatics (1975) (available in a number of languages); Cécile Morrisson, La Numismatique (1991); and the shorter Philip Grierson, “Numismatics” (Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James powell, 2nd ed. 1992, 103–36). Detailed guidance to specific techniques can be found in Philip Grierson’s series of five presidential addresses to the Royal Numismatic Society (all reprinted in his Later Medieval Numismatics, 1979): “Numismatics and the Historian,” Numismatic Chronicle series 7.2 (1962): i-xiv; “Coin Wear and the Frequency Table,” Numismatic Chronicle series 7.3 (1963): i–xvi; “Weight and Coinage,” Numismatic Chronicle series 7.4 (1964), iii–xvii; “The Interpretation of Coin Finds (1),” Numismatic Chronicle series 7,5 (1965): i–xiii; and “The Interpretation of Coin Finds (2),” Numismatic Chronicle series 7,6 (1966): i-xv. A very useful handbook focusing on French examples but with much general discussion of the discipline is Marc Bompaire and Françoise Dumas, Numismatique médiévale: monnaies et documents d’origine française (2000); see also Bernd Kluge, Numismatik des Mittelalters (2007); and, from an Italian perspective, Lucia Travaini, Monete e storia nell’Italia medievale (2007). General bibliographies include Philip Grierson, Bibliographie numismatique (2nd ed., 1979); Elvira Eliza Clain-Stefanelli, Numismatic Bibliography (1984); and specialist terms can be looked up in Richard Doty, The Macmillan Encyclopedic Dictionary of Numismatics (1982); and Michael North, Von Aktie bis Zoll: Ein historische Lexikon des Geldes (1995). B. Monetary History Closely allied to numismatics is monetary history: the study of the use and circulation of coinage, which is itself intimately associated with economic history. Although not always accorded prominence in numismatic publications, there are many important studies of coinage in its wider historical and economic contexts. Recent years have seen particular emphasis placed on the connections between mining and the flow of precious metals around Europe and into it from West Africa and Central Asia over the course of the Middle Ages. Of great importance, especially for the high and later Middle Ages, is Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (1988); with further development in John Munro, “The Central European Mining Boom, Mint Outputs and Prices in the Low Countries and England, 1450–1550” (Money, Coins and Commerce: Essays in the Monetary History of Europe and Asia from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. Eddy H. G. Van Cauwenberghe, 1991, 119–83). Ian Blanchard, Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages (4 vols., 2001–) is also strong on the relationship between coinage and bullion, though many of his conclusions have been challenged.

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There has also been reconsideration of how coins were used in the Middle Ages. Classics are, again, Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (1988); and also, for the earlier period, Philip Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a Critique of the Evidence” (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society series 5, 9 [1959]: 123–40). Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics (1982), includes more discussion of coinage than most studies of medieval economic history and has been influential in recent decades. For recent discussion of early medieval Italy in its wider European setting, see Alessia Rovelli, “Coins and Trade in Early Medieval Italy” (Early Medieval Europe 17 [2009]: 45–76). The place of early medieval coinage in a bullion-based economy is considered in James Graham-Campbell, “The Dual Economy of the Danelaw” (British Numismatic Journal 71 [2001]: 49–59), which includes comments of general use for other periods as well. Sections of Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A. D. 300–900 (2001), integrate coinage into a wider canvas of long-distance transactions and contacts. For similar treatment of coinage as part of a much larger later medieval economic context, see James Laurence Bolton, “Inflation, Economics and Politics in Thirteenth-Century England” (Thirteenth Century England 4 [1991]: 1–14); and Terence Henry Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the English Money Supply in the Fourteenth Century” (Edwardian Monetary Affairs [1279–1344]: A Symposium Held in Oxford, August 1976, ed. Nicholas Mayhew,1977, 96–124). For a recent view of later medieval coin use paying particular attention to new coin finds from different segments of society, see Christopher Dyer, “Peasants and Coins: the Uses of Money in the Middle Ages” (British Numismatic Journal 67 [1997]: 30–47). Related questions of circulation and the development of a ‘monetary’ economy in the 12th century and later are discussed in Medieval Money Matters (ed. Diana Wood, 2004). For further ranges of interesting studies on monetary history, particularly in the later medieval (13th to 15th centuries) period, see the collections of papers in John F. Richards, Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, (1983); John Day, Études d’histoire monétaire, XIIe–XIXe siècles (1984), and Monnaies et marchés au moyen âge (1994); Münzprägung, Geldumlauf und Wechselkurse/Minting, Monetary Circulation and Exchange Rates (ed. Eddy Van Cauwenberghe and Franz Irsigler, 1984); and Harry A. Miskimin, Cash, Credit and Crisis in Europe, 1300–1600 (1989). C. Chronological Outline At the outset of the Middle Ages, European coinage was dominated by the late Roman monetary system, which was still (at least theoretically) trimetallic, with bronze, silver and gold elements. For the late Roman currency and

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its organization, see John Philip Cozens Kent, The Roman Imperial Coinage X: The Divided Empire and the Fall of the Western Parts A. D. 395–491 (1994); Richard Reece, The Coinage of Roman Britain (2002) (a local but detailed view); Kenneth W. Harl, Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 BC to A.D. 700 (1996); and Andrew Burnett, Coinage in the Roman World (1987). However, gold dominated the early currency of the various successor states, and a particular challenge for numismatists comes in interpreting the many imitative, immobilized or uninscribed types. For general discussion of the difficulties of this period, with important references to previous scholarship, see Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, vol. 1: The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (1986). In the late 7th century, Gaul, England and other parts of northern Europe moved onto a silver currency of smaller, thicker coins widely referred to (in the English, Frisian and Danish context) as sceattas, which have been the subject of extensive research in recent decades: important discussion comes in David Hill and David Michael Metcalf, Sceattas in England and on the Continent (1984); and the standard discussion is now David Michael Metcalf, Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (3 vols., 1993–1994). Silver was to dominate western European currency until the 13th century, and the broad ‘penny’ format characteristic of the late 8th–13th centuries was achieved after coinage reforms in the time of Pippin III (751–68) and Charlemagne (768–814). This reform and the coinage of Charlemagne are discussed by Philip Grierson, “Money and Coinage under Charlemagne” (Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, ed. Wolfgang braunfels, 2 vols. 1965, vol. I, 501–36); and important catalogues of Carolingian coins include Karl Frederick Morrison and Henry Grunthal, Carolingian Coinage (1967) (extremely useful for its numerous plates, though the text is often faulty); Maurice Prou, Les monnaies carolingiennes (Catalogue des monnaies françaises de la Bibliothèque Nationale) (1896); and Ernest Gariel, Les monnaies royales sous la race carolingienne (2 vols., 1883–1884). Much important recent work on several aspects of the subject is collected in Simon Coupland, Carolingian Coinage and the Vikings: Studies on Power and Trade in the 9th Century (2007). Some of the types issued by Carolingian rulers still present thorny questions of organization and interpretation. The Christiana religio coinage of Louis the Pious (814–40), for instance, was struck without any mintmarks for almost twenty years throughout the Carolingian empire and became ‘immobilized’ in use for decades (even centuries) after Louis’ death in some locations: for an attempt to bring some order, see Simon Coupland, “Money and Coinage under Louis the Pious” (Francia 17 [1990]: 23–54; rpt. in his

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Carolingian Coinage and the Vikings: Studies on Power and Trade in the 9th Century, 2007). In general, a well-managed royal coinage in the late 8th and 9th centuries gave way – in France, Italy and parts of Germany – in the tenth and eleventh to one of poorer quality and often immobilized types, as control over minting devolved into the hands of local potentates. For the French feudal coins, key works include Faustin Poey l’Avant, Monnaies féodales de France (3 vols., 1858); Émile Caron, Monnaies féodales françaises (1882–1884); and Jean Lafaurie, Les monnaies des rois de France, vol. 1: Hugues Capet à Louis XII (1951). German coins of this period (up to the early 12th century) are surveyed in Hermann Dannenberg, Die deutschen Münzen der sächsischen und fränkischen Kaiserzeit (4 vols., 1876–1905). English coinage escaped this fate, remaining closely linked to the crown and of a relatively high metal standard. After a major reform ca. 973 it became the most sophisticated coinage in Europe, with a relatively high and constant metal standard, the name of the mint and moneyer on every coin, periodic changes of type and at times centralized die production for the whole kingdom. Although there is still a need for a single detailed account of the impressive progress made in the study of these coins since the 1950s, useful introductions include Reginald Hugh Michael Dolley, Anglo-Saxon Pennies (1964), The Norman Conquest and the English Coinage (1966), and “An Introduction to the Coinage of Æthelred II” (Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. David Hill, 1978, 115–33); and Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart, “Coinage and Recoinage after Edgar’s Reform” (Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage in Memory of Bror Emil Hildebrand, ed. Kenneth Jonsson, 1990, 455–85). The pre-reform coinage of the 10th century is thoroughly scrutinized in Christopher Evelyn Blunt, Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart and Colin Stewart Sinclair Lyon, Coinage in Tenth-Century England (1989); whilst the reform type is equally well examined in Kenneth Jonsson, The New Era: The Reformation of the Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage (1987). The late AngloSaxon and Norman coins are an important example of the problems associated with linking a relatively well-understood relative chronology with absolute dates: some of the crucial evidence for dating is reviewed in the articles above, and in Christopher Evelyn Blunt and Colin Stewart Sinclair Lyon, “Some Notes on the Mints of Wilton and Salisbury” (Studies in Late AngloSaxon Coinage in Memory of Bror Emil Hildebrand, 1990, 25–34). For surveys of the development of this system under the Norman rulers, see Mark Blackburn, “Coinage and Currency under Henry I: a Review” (Anglo-Norman Studies 13 [1990]: 49–81), and “Coinage and Currency” (The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. Edmund King, 1994, 145–205).

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Meanwhile, massive quantities of central Asian Islamic silver and, after the decline of this source ca. 970, English and German silver were imported into Scandinavia and the Baltic, with native production only reaching substantial levels in the 11th century. Again, this field has been the focus of considerable study in recent years (see the discussion of Statistics below for further references), and a good introduction to numismatics in the northern world can be found in the papers in Viking Age Coinage in the Northern Lands (ed. Mark Blackburn and David Michael Metcalf, 1981); and in Kenneth Jonsson and Brita Malmer, Commentationes de nummis saeculorum IX–XI in Suecia reppertis. Nova series 6: Sigtuna Papers: Proceedings of the Sigtuna Symposium on Viking Age Coinage 1–4 June 1989 (1990). The second half of the 12th century saw a considerable upsurge in production thanks to the output of new silver mines, well-covered once again in Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (1988). In much of Germany the 12th and 13th centuries saw the use of large, extremely thin uniface silver coins known as bracteates (from Latin bractea, ‘leaf’) which gave great scope for elegant and complex designs, though increased scale of production in the 13th century saw the bracteates become smaller and of a poorer artistic standard. There is still a need for a general study of and introduction to bracteates, but a good range of them can be seen in Frank Berger, Die mittelalterlichen Brakteaten im Kestner-Museum Hannover (2 vols., 1993–1996). The 13th century also witnessed the introduction in several parts of Europe of both larger silver denominations (e. g., the grosso in various Italian states, the French gros tournois and the English groat), fueled by further exploitation of European silver mines, and also of gold coinage: two of the first gold issues, the florin (1252)of Florence and the ducat of Venice (1284), were particularly influential (for discussion of these innovations, see Herbert Eugene Ives, The Venetian Gold Ducat and its Imitations, 1954; Nicholas Julian Mayhew, The Gros Tournois, 1997; and Jean-René De Mey, Le gros tournois et ses imitations, 1982). More denominations and mints appeared in the 14th century, though serious silver shortages led to reduced production and debasement from the late fourteenth until well into the 15th century. However, the period after 1450 saw production pick up again with the discovery of new silver supplies. At this time (in Venice and Naples from 1472) copper coinage on a substantial scale reappeared in the west for the first time since the middle ages. By about 1500, many of the features that would characterize ‘modern’ western European coinage were emerging, including realistic portraiture and base metal coinage. By necessity, this survey is very brief and selective, touching on general trends most directly concerning western Europe: there are a great many

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more areas peripheral to western medieval European numismatics. One of the most fascinating of these ‘peripheral’ coinages was that of the Crusader states, which was largely inspired by western coinages but also influenced by Byzantine and Islamic traditions (key accounts and catalogues include David Michael Metcalf, Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum, 2nd ed., 1995; and Gustave Schlumberger, Numismatique de l’Orient Latin, 2 vols., 1954). Byzantine coinage evolved from the late Roman system, retaining a strong emphasis on gold and bronze right up to the 13th century, after which production changed in nature and declined considerably (for a general introduction, see Philip Grierson, Byzantine Coins, 1982. Important catalogues include Cécile Morrisson, Catalogue des monnaies byzantines de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 2 vols., 1970; Alfred Raymond Bellinger and Philip Grierson, Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and the Whittemore Collection, 5 vols., 1966–1999; and Wolfgang R. O. Hahn, Moneta imperii byzantini: Rekonstruktion des Prägeaufbaues auf synoptisch-tabellarischer Grundlage, 3 vols., 1973–1981. There are several surveys of Byzantine monetary history, including Michael Hendy, Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire 1081–1261, 1969, and Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 300–1450, 1985). Islamic coinage belongs to a quite different tradition, and was for the most part devoid of images; however, detailed inscriptions normally indicate the exact date and mint, allowing for detailed study of the circulation of its mainly gold and silver coins. A general introduction to medieval Islamic coinage is still lacking, but for guidance see Michael Broome, A Handbook of Islamic Coins, 1985; Michael L. Bates, Islamic Coins, 1982; and Stephen Album, A Checklist of Popular Islamic Coins, 2nd ed., 1998. Standard catalogues in wide usage include Henri Lavoix, Catalogue des monnaies musulmanes de la Bibliothèque nationale, 3 vols., 1887–1896; the appropriate volumes of Stanley Lane Poole, Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum, 10 vols., 1875–1891; and the two multi-volume series Sylloge numorum Arabicorum Tübingen, 1993–; and Sylloge of Islamic Coins in the Ashmolean, 1999–. Tokens, coin-like weights and jetons (coin-like pieces intended for counting) also fall within the remit of medieval numismatics, though are relatively few in number compared to coins. Weights – often made of glass – were widely used in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, for which see Ugo Monneret de Villard, “Exagia byzantini in vetro” (Rivista italiana di numismatica 35 [1922]: 93–106); and George Carpenter Miles, Early Arab Glass Weights and Stamps (1948). In the West tokens, weights and jetons became widespread in and after the 13th century, and are discussed by Adolphe Dieudonné, Manuel de poids monétaires (1925); Jacques Labrot, Histoire écon-

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omique et populaire du Moyen-âge: Les jetons et les méreaux (1989); Thomas Sheppard and John F. Musham, Money Scales and Weights (1923); Francis Pierrepont Barnard, The Casting-Counter and the Counting-Board (1916); Henri de la Tour, Catalogue des jetons de la Bibliothèque Nationale (1897); George Berry, Medieval English Jetons (1975); Michael Mitchiner and Anne Skinner, “English Tokens ca. 1200 to 1425” (British Numismatic Journal 53 [1983]: 29–77), and “English Tokens ca. 1425 to 1672” (British Numismatic Journal 54 [1984]: 86–163). D. Recent Approaches Studies of medieval numismatics have taken many forms. General studies of medieval and modern coinage are often on a (usually modern) national basis. Thus, for England: A New History of the Royal Mint (ed. Christopher Edgar Challis, 1992); Germany: Arthur Suhle, Deutsche Münz- und Geldgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (2nd ed., 1964); France: Adrien Blanchet and Adolphe Dieudonné, Manuel de numismatique française (4 vols., 1912–1936); James N. Roberts, The Silver Coins of Medieval France, 476–1610 AD (1996); Italy: Giulio Sambon, Repertorio generale delle monete coniate in Italia (1912); southern Italy: Lucia Travaini, Medieval European Coinage, vol. 14: Italy (3): South Italy, Sicily and Sardinia (1998); the Balkans: David Michael Metcalf, Coinage in South-Eastern Europe 820–1398 (1979); Portugal: Joaquim Ferraro Vaz, Numaria medieval portuguesa, 1128–1383 (2 vols., 1960). These national studies are supplemented by a few more wide-ranging European surveys. Philip Grierson, Coins of Medieval Europe (1991), is one of the best, but see also Philip Grierson, Monnaies du moyen âge (1976; available in German as Münzen des Mittelalters; an earlier incarnation of his Coins of Medieval Europe); Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch, Esquisse d’une histoire monétaire de l’Europe (1954); Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth, Allgemeine Münzkunde und Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit (1904, 2nd ed., 1926); and the classic survey is still Arthur Engel and Raymond Serrure, Traité de numismatique du moyen âge (3 vols., 1891–1905). However, there are a number of other ways in which numismatists can and have tackled their material, especially in more recent years. Dedicated studies have been produced on a number of specific mints, often synthesizing archaeological and documentary as well as numismatic evidence to provide a very full view of production at a certain location. Good examples of this approach include Martin Robert Allen, The Durham Mint (2003); and Alan M. Stahl, Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages (2000). Because of fragmented political history, such studies are particularly popular in Italy and Germany: thus, for just a few examples, Rosaldo Ordano, La zecca di Ver-

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celli (1975); Mirco Pezzini, Zecca di Lucca: Monete dal VII al XVIII secolo (2005); Raymond Weiller, Die Münzen von Trier Erster Teil: Erster Abschnitt: Beschreibung der Münzen: 6. Jahrhundert-1307 (1988); and Walter Hävernick, Die Münzen und Medaillen von Köln (1935). For general discussion of medieval minting practices, I luoghi della moneta: Le sedi delle zecche dell’antichità all’età moderna: Atti del convegno internazionale 22–23 Ottobre 1999, Milano (ed. Rina La Guardia, 2001); and Later Medieval Mints: Organisation, Administration and Techniques (ed. Nicholas Mayhew and Peter Spufford, 1988). Assembling the numismatic remains of a particular period or reign is another common approach, and some major catalogues of this kind also contain detailed analysis. Among these catalogues and assessments are Hermann Dannenberg, Die deutschen Münzen der sächsischen und fränkischen Kaiserzeit (4 vols., 1876–1905) (a classic example); Françoise Dumas-Dubourg, Le monnayage des ducs de Bourgogne (1988); Auguste de Belfort, Description générale des monnaies mérovingiennes (5 vols., 1892–1895); Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, vol. 1: The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (1986); and Derek Chick, The Coinage of Offa and his Contemporaries (2010). Often catalogues of this form are based upon substantial individual collections, usually those contained in large museums, such as Charles Francis Keary, Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Series (2 vols., 1887–93); George Cyril Brooke, Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: The Norman Kings (2 vols., 1916); Derek Fortrose Allen, Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum: The Cross-and-Crosslets (‘Tealby’) Type of Henry II (1951); Victor Emmanuel III et al., Corpus Nummorum Italicorum (20 vols., 1910–1943) (based in large part on the collection of King Victor Emmanuel III); Maurice Prou, Les monnaies mérovingiennes (1892); and Adolphe Dieudonné, Catalogue des monnaies françaises de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Les monnaies capétiennes (2 vols., 1923–32). There are also more detailed, ongoing publications of numerous smaller collections, such as the Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (1958–), which aims to catalogue every substantial public and private collection of British coins, now running to over sixty volumes. The Medieval European Coinage (1986–), will ultimately contain authoritative discussion of all medieval coinage alongside a catalogue of the relevant coins in the very large collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, mostly formed by Philip Grierson. A welcome development is the separate and specialized publication of catalogues of hoards based on areas or periods, such as Kenneth Jonsson, Viking-Age Hoards and Late Anglo-Saxon Coins (1986); Clemens Maria Haertle, Karolingische Münzfunde aus dem 9. Jahrhundert (2 vols., 1997); Brita Malmer and Nils Ludvig Rasmusson, Corpus nummorum saecu-

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lorum IX–XI qui in Suecia reperti sunt: Catalogue of Coins from the Viking Age found in Sweden (1975–); Jean Duplessy, Les Trésors monétaires médiévaux et modernes decouverts en France, vol. 1: 751–1223 (1985); and the Checklist of Coin Hoards from the British Isles, c. 450–1180 (an online source: http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac. uk/dept/coins/projects/hoards/), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Perhaps the most revealing numismatic insight is provided by a diestudy, in which every specimen of a particular coinage is tracked down and compared so as to ascertain the number of obverse and reverse dies represented in the issue. Studies of this nature are crucial for many types of numismatic analysis (see below). Some examples of die-studies include Henry Richard Mossop, The Lincoln Mint c. 879–1279 (1970) (an ambitious attempt to cover all the coins of a major medieval English mint); Timothy Crafter, “A Die-Study of the Cross-and-Crosslets Type of the Ipswich Mint, c. 1161/2–1180” (Numismatic Chronicle 162 [1997]: 237–51); and Brita Malmer, Anglo-Scandinavian Coinage, c. 995–1020 (1997). As objects of artistic and historical interest, medieval coins have also fascinated private collectors since the 16th century and continue to fetch considerable sums at auction, though more common varieties can be very affordable. Some wealthy and diligent collectors have built up huge and very important collections, either general or focusing on a particular subject, which have rivaled even the collections of major institutions and museums. The catalogues drawn up for the sale of such collections can in themselves be considerable works of scholarship, and since the late 19th century these catalogues have also often contained photographs. In certain cases these catalogues are used as common references, or are still useful as unusually well illustrated surveys of a coinage. One example, very important for German bracteates, was the Sammlung Arthur Löbbecke: Deutsche Brakteaten (ed. Eberhard Mertens, 1974, 3. 2. 1925). For French royal coinage the Paris, Florange & Ciani 22. 11. 1927, 21. 5. 1928 and 22. 4. 1929 sales of the Marchéville collection are very useful, and for medieval English coinage, the sales of the Lockett collection (London, Glendining’s in thirteen sales 1955–61, some of the most important for English coins being 6. 6. 1955, 4. 11. 1958, 24. 4. 1960 and 17. 10. 1961) and the Grantley collection (London, Glendining’s in eleven sales 1943–45: those of English coins include 27. 1. 1944, 22. 3. 1944 and 20. 4. 1944) provide important and wide-ranging surveys. There is a short guide to important numismatic auctions in Philip Grierson, Bibliographie numismatique (2nd ed., 1979). Consulting catalogues is often troublesome because there are relatively few substantial collections and it can be difficult to track down copies of sought-after volumes. But catalogues can be highly rewarding: the history of medieval coin collecting is of much importance to

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the numismatist, and no serious study can afford to neglect completely coins in private hands that may have only been recorded in commercial catalogues. E. Statistical Analysis and Coinage Production In the 1960s it was realized that statistical calculations could be used to indicate the original size of a medieval coinage. Some early examples of such calculations include David Michael Metcalf, “Offa’s Pence Reconsidered” (Cunobelin 9 [1963]: 37–52); and Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart, “Medieval Die-Output: Two Calculations for English Mints in the Fourteenth Century” (Numismatic Chronicle series 7.3 [1963]: 97–106). Estimates of the number of dies originally used to produce a coinage were based on the number of coins struck from the same die or dies within a sample, on the understanding that many surviving coins from the same dies would reflect a small coinage produced by only a few dies. There are a number of surveys of the different proposed formulae, such as Giles F. Carter, “Comparison of Methods for Calculating the Total Number of Dies from Die-Link Statistics” (Statistics and Numismatics, ed. Charlotte Carcassonne and Tony Hackens, 1981, 204–13); Leandre Villaronga, “De nuevo la estimación del numero original de cuños de una emission monetaria” (Gaceta Numismatica 85.2 [1987]: 31–36); and Warren W. Esty, “Estimation of the Size of a Coinage: a Survey and Comparison of Methods” (Numismatic Chronicle 146 [1986]: 185–215). The formula Warren Esty created in this paper and streamlined in a handout at the International Numismatic Congress in Berlin 1997 is the formula now most widely used for die estimates, and it and certain others take into account their own margins of error with upper and lower estimates. For accounts of attempts by numismatists and monetary historians to use calculations of this kind in the well-documented case of England, see Martin Robert Allen, “The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470” (Economic History Review 54 [2001]: 595–611), and “The Volume of the English Currency, c. 973–1158” (Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. Barrie Cook and Gareth Williams, 2006, 487–523). General discussion of the problem can be found in Statistics and Numismatics (ed. Charlotte Carcassonne and Tony Hackens, 1981); and Méthodes statistiques en numismatique (ed. Charlotte Carcassonne, 1987). The estimate of the original number of dies might then be multiplied by the number of coins one set of dies could be expected to produce – typically hovering around 10–15,000 per reverse die though often vacillating considerably above and below – to give some idea of the original size of a coinage. The figures behind this estimate are derived from mint records from the 13th

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century and after, discussed in Martin Robert Allen, “Medieval English Die-Output” (British Numismatic Journal 74 [2004]: 39–49); and Christopher Edgar Challis, “Appendix I: Mint Output” (A New History of the Royal Mint, 1992, 673–98). Similar figures from the Netherlands are given in Peter Spufford, “Mint Organisation in the Burgundian Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century” (Studies in Numismatic Method Presented to Philip Grierson, ed. Christopher Brooke, 1983, 239–61). Although potentially of great significance to students of monetary and economic history as well as numismatists, calculations of this sort have often been criticised for failing to take into account all the variables which can affect the size of a coinage and its representation in the surviving material: for instance, coins of different sizes, metals and alloys probably had very different rates of production, and dies were not necessarily always used to capacity. Valuable studies of such problems from an ancient perspective containing material of general use include Theodore V. Buttrey, “Calculating Ancient Coin Production II: Why it Cannot Be Done” (Numismatic Chronicle 154 [1994]: 341–52); Adriano Savio, “La numismatica e i problemi quantitativi: intorno al calcolo del volume delle emissioni” (Rivista Italiana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini 98 [1997]: 11–48); and François de Callataÿ, “Calculating Ancient Coin Production: Seeking a Balance” (Numismatic Chronicle 155 [1995]: 289–311). More recent calculations often seek only to provide an indication of the number of dies originally used; attempts to estimate the production of each die are far more prone to uncertainty. It should also be noted that statistical analysis can be used for more than calculation of original die and coin numbers. Since a number of areas and coinages are now very well published and researched, it is possible to synthesize the evidence on a larger scale using subtle statistical techniques to ascertain patterns of circulation and production. The coinages used in Scandinavia, Russia and the Baltic region from the 9th to 11th centuries are a particularly good example: the many hoards and increasing numbers of single-finds are relatively easily accessible, and are comprised of foreign coins – mostly Arabic, German and English – that can normally be dated and localized quite precisely. Numerous scholars have taken advantage of these conditions to explore the importation and circulation of coinage in the northern lands in great detail. An important series of studies on coins in early medieval Scandinavia can be found in the presidential addresses by David Michael Metcalf in the Numismatic Chronicle ([1995–1998]: 155–58). For Arabic coins in Russia – with an overall pattern relevant to the rest of the northern lands – see Thomas Schaub Noonan, “Ninth-Century Dirham Hoards from European Russia: a Preliminary Analysis” (Viking-Age Coinage in

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the Northern Lands, ed. Mark Blackburn and David Michael Metcalf, 1981, 47–117); and two further illuminating studies on the statistics of northern coin hoards are David Michael Metcalf, “Inflows of Anglo-Saxon and German Coins into the Northern Lands c. 997–1024: Discerning the Patterns” (Coinage and History in the North Sea World c. 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, 2006, 349–88); and Jens Christian Moesgaard, “The Import of English Coins to the Northern Lands: Some Remarks on Coin Circulation in the Viking Age Based on New Evidence from Denmark” (ibid., 2006, 389–419). F. Metal Detecting Numismatists have benefited considerably from the expansion of metal-detecting since the 1970s. However, the degree of metal detecting permitted and methods of dealing with finds vary considerably across Europe: in much of Scandinavia and Italy, for instance, there are many restrictions on metal detecting and most or all finds are supposed to end up in official hands with little reward to the finder or landowner. In England the Treasure Act of 1996 gives museums first pick of purchasing new finds, but many subsequently end up on the open market. Unfortunately, many coins from all over Europe are discovered and sold under illegal circumstances, and proceed illegally to dealers and auctioneers, who sell them on to collectors, though use of online auctions such as www.ebay.com now allows some detectorists to cut out the middleman and deal directly with collectors. This is problematic for numismatists, since constant vigilance and delicate enquiries are required to prevent important new finds and their provenances from slipping away unnoticed. Much depends upon relations between detectorists, dealers, governments and scholars (archaeologists as well as numismatists). In many areas there are pressures from several quarters to alter the current system of dealing with metal detectorists and their finds. Yet despite debate on the ethics of metal detecting, there is no denying the large quantity of new numismatic material detectorists have brought to light. There are several ongoing projects to record these finds. In Britain, for example, these projects include the annual record of coin hoards in the Numismatic Chronicle; the single-finds in the Coin Register of the British Numismatic Journal since 1987; and the online records of the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/coins/emc/) based at the Fitzwilliam Museum; and the Portable Antiquities Scheme (http://www.finds.org.uk/) based at the British Museum. A similar project, NUMIS, operates in the Netherlands based at the Geldmuseum in Utrecht (http://www.geldmuseum.nl/

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museum/numis), and metal-detector finds are also recorded at the National Museum in Denmark. Thanks to the proper recording of new finds, more sophisticated analysis of circulation has been made possible. Examples can be seen in David Michael Metcalf, Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, 973–1086 (1998); and Mark Blackburn, “Coin Circulation in Germany during the Early Middle Ages: The Evidence of the Single-Finds” (Fernhandel und Geldwirtschaft, ed. Bernd Kluge, 1993, 37–54), and “‘Productive’ Sites and the Pattern of Coin Loss in England, 600–1180” (Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites, 650–850, ed. Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider, 2003, 20–36). New detector finds have also highlighted a new category of archaeological site that has produced many coins (and often other objects) in close proximity but not as a hoard: ‘productive sites’. Full understanding of such sites can only come from archaeological excavation, but productive sites are already beginning to be viewed as a grey area between hoards and single-finds proper: Julian D. Richards, “What’s so Special about ‘Productive Sites’? Middle Saxon Settlements in Northumbria” (Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 10 [1999]: 71–80); and Markets in Early Medieval Europe: Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites, 650–850, ed. Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider, 2003). Similarly, the proper identification and publication of coins from archaeological contexts can reveal much about use and circulation on a more localised level. For some examples, see Southampton Finds, vol. 1: The Coins and Pottery from Hamwic (ed. Phil Andrews, 1988); Mark Blackburn, “Finds from the Anglo-Scandinavian Site of Torksey” (Moneta Mediævalis: Studia numizmatyczne i historyczne ofiarowane Profesorowi Stanislawowi Suchodolskiemu w 65. rocznice urodzin, 2002, 89–101). General discussion of the issues at stake in a British context can be found in Coins and the Archaeologist (ed. Patrick John Casey and Richard Reece, 2nd ed., 1988). Combining these resources with more traditional study of hoards has already provided valuable new insights for many places and periods, and will continue to do so as new corpora of material are published and placed into context. G. Other Issues There are several areas in which numismatics has come into fruitful contact with other disciplines. Art history has frequently been associated with coinage, though certain areas have been overlooked or neglected. Anna Gannon, The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage (2003), for instance, was the first full-length study devoted to this important series’ artistic features, and has had significant impact on views of early English coinage and art history.

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Tuukka Talvio, “The Designs of Edward the Confessor’s Coins” (Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage in Memory of Bror Emil Hildebrand, ed. Kenneth Jonsson, 1990, 487–99), similarly touched on new areas. Those coinages which carry inscriptions sometimes attract the attention of philologists, and are especially valuable for their reasonably secure date and origin, and distinction from manuscript evidence. For Merovingian coinage studies of this kind have included Egon Felder, Germanische Personennamen auf merowingischen Münzen (1978), and Die Personnennamen auf den merowingischen Münzen der Bibliothèque nationale de France (2003). For an introduction to philological approaches to 10th- and 11th-century English coinage, see Veronica Smart, “Scandinavians, Celts and Germans in Anglo-Saxon England: The Evidence of Moneyers’ Names” (Anglo-Saxon Monetary History, ed. Mark Blackburn, 1986, 171–84); and Fran Colman, Money Talks: Reconstructing Old English (1992). A range of modern scientific analyses can be called upon to supplement the information supplied by other means, and have proved very valuable in establishing the metallurgical qualities of coinage and its relationship to other precious-metal objects. A wide-ranging mix of theoretical and applied papers can be found in Methods of Chemical and Metallurgical Investigation of Ancient Coinage: A Symposium Held by the Royal Numismatic Society at Burlington House, London on 9–11 December 1970 (ed. David Michael Metcalf and Edward Thomas Hall, 1972); Metallurgy in Numismatics (vol. 1, 1980), Metallurgy in Numismatics (vol. 2, ed. David Michael Metcalf and William Andrew Oddy, 1988); Metallurgy in Numismatics (vol. 3, ed. Marion M. Archibald and Michael R. Cowell, 1993); Metallurgy in Numismatics (vol. 4, ed. William Andrew Oddy and Michael R. Cowell, 1998). Examples of more specific studies include Sarah E. Kruse, “Metallurgical Evidence of Silver Sources in the Irish Sea Province” (Viking Treasure from the North West: The Cuerdale Hoard in its Context, ed. James Graham-Campbell, 1992, 73–88); Emil Kraume and Vera Hatz, “Silberanalysen deutscher Münzen des 10. Jahrhunderts” (Hamburger Beiträge zur Numismatik 7 [1967]: 35–8); David Michael Metcalf and Jeremy P. Northover, “Carolingian and Viking Coins from the Cuerdale Hoard: an Interpretation and Comparison of their Metal Contents” (Numismatic Chronicle 148 [1988]: 97–116), “Coinage Alloys from the Time of Offa and Charlemagne to c. 864” (Numismatic Chronicle 149 [1989]: 101–20), and “Debasement of the Coinage in Southern England in the Age of King Alfred” (Numismatic Chronicle 145 [1985]: 150–76).

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Select Bibliography Marc Bompaire and Françoise Dumas, Numismatique médiévale: Monnaies et documents d’origine française (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Catherine Eagleton et al., Money: a History (London: British Museum Press, 2nd ed. 2007); Arthur Engel and Raymond Serrure, Traité de numismatique du moyen âge (Paris: Leroux, 3 vols. 1891–1905); Philip Grierson, Numismatics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); id., Dark Age Numismatics (London: Ashgate, 1982); id., Later Medieval Numismatics (London: Ashgate, 1979); and id., Coins of Medieval Europe (London: Seaby, 1991); Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, vol. 1: The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Bernd Kluge, Numismatik des Mittelalters, 2007; Later Medieval Mints: Organisation, Administration and Techniques, ed. Nicholas Mayhew and Peter Spufford (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988); Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Rory Naismith

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Occitan Studies

O Occitan Studies A. Definition “Occitan” is the term used to describe the language of the South of France. It comprises the speakers as well as the literature produced in this language, and “Occitania” refers to the region in which it is spoken. Although a 19th-century neologism, Occitan refers to speakers who used “oc” for “yes”, as opposed to the “oïl” of Northern France. It replaces the earlier scholarly term “provençal,” which assumed a link only with the region of Provence (the area lying east of the Rhône river) rather than with the whole of the South of France (including such regions west and south of the Massif Central as Limousin and Aquitaine). Occitan did not die out with the Middle Ages: despite the force of the centralization of French culture and language, it experienced a rebirth of sorts in the 19th century, particularly with the poet Frédéric Mistral, and while there are but few monolingual speakers left, studies of the language still exists in schools devoted to the teaching of Occitan, and the French government has compiled a bibliographic list of works dedicated to teaching the language which it promotes on its website (see http://www.culture.gouv. fr/culture/dglf/lang-reg/methodes-apprentissage/Listes_d_ouvrages_d_ apprentissage/ Occitan.ht m). Standard works on the language of Modern Occitan are numerous (e. g., Pierre Bec, La langue occitane: Que sais-je?, vol. 1059, 2nd ed. 1963 [1967]; Max N. Wheeler, “Occitan,” The Romance Languages, ed. Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent, 1988, 246–77; and Georg Kremnitz, Das Okzitanische: Sprachgeschichte und Soziologie, 1981), as are studies of the grammar and orthography of Modern Occitan (see Louis Alibert, Grammatica occitana segon los parlars lengadocians, 1935; José Ramón Fernández González, Gramática histórica provenzal, 1985; and Jules Ronjat, Grammaire historique des parlers provençaux modernes, 1930–41). Dictionaries of Modern Occitan also abound (e. g., Frédéric Mistral, Lou Tresor dóu Felbrige, 1897–87; S. J. Honnorat, Dictionnaire provençal-français: Ou, Dictionnaire de la langue d’oc, ancienne et moderne, 3 vols., 1846–47; rpt. 1971; and the more recent Jules Coupier, Dictionnaire français-provençal, 1995). The literature of Modern Occitan is also the subject of scholarly research (see Robert Lafont and Christian Anatole, Nouvelle histoire de la littérature occitane, 2 vols., 1970).

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Given that this handbook is devoted to the Middle Ages, this essay will consider studies in the language and literature of Old Occitan, rather than Modern Occitan. B. Language Old Occitan is, properly speaking, a koiné, a common language that contains dialectical features of several regional dialects, including Limousin, Gascon, Languedocian, and Auvergnat as well as Provençal. Although we cannot determine the geographic boundary dividing speakers of “oc” and “oïl” in the Middle Ages with any precision, roughly speaking, Old Occitan was the language of the south of France, somewhat south of the Loire River, and in the regions between the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees, and the Alps. Old Occitan can be distinguished from Franco-Provençal (spoken in what are known today as the Rhône-Alpes), Basque (spoken in the far south-western corner of France near the Pyrenees in what is known as the Béarn, and in northern Spain), and Catalan (spoken as far north as Perpignan, and south to Barcelona). Old Occitan generally refers to the language in use between 1000 and 1500; however, scholars of the language refer to its use in 1350–1500 as Middle Occitan, since it shows marked changes from the language used prior to the 14th century. In addition, old Occitan was in many ways a literary language whose influence extended outside its geographic boundaries: poets in Poitiers, Catalonia, and other parts of Northern Spain in the 12th century, and in Italy in the 13th century, composed songs in Occitan. Medieval documents do not refer to this language as “Occitan,” however. th 13 -century Latin documents that name the “lingua de oc,” tend to refer to the region rather than the language, and the early troubadour Guilhem IX (d. 1126) calls it simply “romans.” Writers noting the vernacular also specify the dialect, using, for example, “lemozin” for the language of Limousin and “proensa” for the language of Provence. Although the earliest Occitan document dates from about 1000, Old Occitan grammars appear only in the late 12th century. The earliest, the Catalan Raimon Vidal’s Razos de trobar (1190?), provides instructions for judging poetry according in the “parladura de Lemosi” using citations of classical troubadour lyric as exempla. The Razos de trobar was adapted into verse by Terramagnino da Pisa in his Doctrina d’acort (ca. 1290), and was extended by Jofre de Foixà’s Regles de trobar (ca. 1290), written at the command of James II of Aragon, which also endeavored to provide instructions to a non-Latin speaking audience. The grammatical instruction in these works is, however, rather narrow and partial. The first full treatment of Old Occitan grammar appeared in Uc de Faidit’s Donatz Proensals, written for two Italian noblemen

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in the middle of the 13th century. The Donatz Proensals is a treatise of the metrics and the grammar of Old Occitan, containing a glossary of verbs and a dictionary of rhymes, and so treats the morphology, phonology, and lexis of the language. Like Raimon Vidals’s Razos de trobar, the Catalan Berenguer de Noya’s Mirall de trobar also uses troubadour citations as exempla in his rhetoric. Regular poetic competitions aiming at preserving the poetics of troubadour poetry called “Consistori del Gai Saber” were created in Toulouse, beginning in the second quarter of the 14th century. From these poetic competitions come the diverse versions of the Leys d’Amors (the earliest dates from ca. 1340), an academic codebook of Occitan poetics, which places poetic composition within the traditional form of a manual on grammar and rhetoric. Together, the various versions of the Leys d’Amors comprise: a history of the founding of the “Consistori”; a treatise on ethics; a grammar; an ars poetriae; and a manual on rhetoric. Although the Leys d’Amors (and notice that here “amors” here functions as a synonym for “poetry”) appears to be prescriptive rather than a reflection of contemporary language usage, it nevertheless was very influential: Raimon de Cornet’s Doctrinal de trobar (1324) presents some of its precepts in verse form, and Joan de Castellnou’s prose Glosari (1341) emends and expands the Leys. A “Consistori” similar to that of Toulouse was created in Barcelona in 1393, and from two of its founders came two important theoretical works on Old Occitan language and rhetoric: Jaume March’s Diccionari de Rims (1371) and Luid de Averçó’s Torcimany (ca. 1370–1400). C. Study of the Occitan Language Formal study of the language of Old Occitan began anew in the 19th century in the wake of the current of the study systemic philological inquiry, and two early editions devoted to the works of the troubadours reveal this philological interest in Old Occitan: Choix des poésies des troubadours (ed. FrançoisJust-Marie Raynouard, 1816–21; rpt. 1966), and Le Parnasse occitanien (ed. Henri-Pascal de Rochegude, 1819). An engagement with Latin underlies this traditional study of Old Occitan: the 19th- and early 20th-century grammars of Old Occitan assume that the student has had an extensive training in Latin morphology, phonology, and syntax (see Joseph Anglade, Grammaire de l’ancien provençal, 1921; C. H. Grandgent, An Outline of the Phonology and Morphology of Old Provençal, rev. ed. 1905). Equally historic in their presentation are grammars of the mid-20th century (C. Cremonesi, Nozioni di grammatica storica provenzale, 3rd ed. 1967; Aurelio Roncaglia, La lingua dei trovatori, 1965). More recently, however, scholars have been producing grammars that introduce students to the study of Old Occitan through descriptive mor-

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phology and historical phonology designed with non-Latinists in mind (William D. Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan, 1998). Dictionaries made in the 19th and early 20th centuries remain the foundational research tools. François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s dictionary uses a diachronic approach to Old Occitan (Lexique roman: Ou, Dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours comparée avec les autres langues de l’Europe latine, précedé de nouvelles recherches historiques et philologiques, d’un résumé de la grammaire romane, d’un nouveau choix des poésies originales des troubadours, et d’extraits de poèmes divers, 6 vols., 1844). Emil Levy and Carl Appel’s Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch: Berichtigungen und Ergänzungen zu Raynourds Lexique Roman supplemented Raynouard’s work some fifty years later (8 vols., 1894–1924). Levy’s Petit dictionnaire provençal-français, initially published in 1909, is the most accessible and economic dictionary (4th ed. 1966). 20th-century etymological dictionaries of the French language contain etymons in Old Occitan (Walther von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1925–; Oscar Bloch and Walther von Wartburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, 1932; 5th ed. 1968). The drive to create dictionaries of Old Occitan in the late 20th century has not abated, with the creation of dictionaries devoted solely to Old Occitan that attempt to compile the work of the earlier 19th-century dictionaries (Helmut Stimm and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Dictionnaire de l’occitan médiéval (DOM), 1996–). Since 1975, composed dictionaries based on how language expresses ideas, or onomasiological dictionaries, have also appeared for Old Occitan (Kurt Baldinger, Dictionnaire onomasiologique de l’ancien occitan, 1975–; Kurt Baldinger, Dictionnaire onomasiologique de l’ancien gascon, 1975–). More recently, Peter T. Ricketts, in collaboration with Alan Reed, F.R.P. Akehurst, John Hathaway, and Cornelis van der Horst, has published all the texts of Medieval Occitan written between 1000 and 1500 on CD-ROM. This concordance, The Concordance of Medieval Occitan/Concordance de l’occitan médiéval (COM) allows researchers electronic access to the complete lexicon of the language and to the meaning of items via their context. The first part contains the poetry of the troubadours (2001); the second contains narrative verse texts (2005). The scholars envision the forthcoming publication of two additional parts: prose texts and the texts of the troubadours as contained in the manuscripts. Studies on Old Occitan Language are numerous (see Simon Gaunt and John Marhsall, “Occitan Grammars and the Art of Troubadour Poetry,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, 2005, 472–95; Frede Jensen, “Language,” A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, 349–99; William D. Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan, 1998; Kathryn Klingebiel, Bibliographie linguistique de l’ancien oc-

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citan (1960–1982), 1986). The Fall issue of Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX also regularly includes an updated bibliography on scholarly works on Occitan linguistics. D. Literature Old Occitan is used in a wide variety of texts, from lyric to hagiography. The earliest literary works in Old Occitan appeared in the 11th century, including the Boeci, some 258 extant verses that loosely paraphrase Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae (ca. 1000), the hagiographic epic Chanson de Sainte-Foy d’Agen (ca. 1060–1080), and the 11th-century bilingual Latin/Occitan liturgical drama Sponsus, which also contains musical notation. Study of the language Old Occitan has been concomitant with study of the literature, and most often, the study of troubadour songs. Non-lyric texts in Old Occitan nevertheless make up an important facet of Old Occitan literature, and appear in a broad variety of texts, including: narrative chivalric adventure and romance stories written in verse (Flamenca, Blandin de Cornualha, Jaufre, Arnaut Vidal de Castelnaudrary’s Guilhem de la Barra); novas (Raimon Vidal’s Castia-gilos and Judici d’amor, and Arnaut de Carcassès’ Novas del papagai); epic (Giraut de Rossilho, Daurel e Beto, Ronsavals, Rollan a Saragossa, Canso de la crozada, Fierabras, the Roman d’Arles, fragments of Aigar e Maurin, and the Canso d’Antiocha); hagiography (Canso de Sancta Fides, Sancta Doucelina, Santa Enimia, Sant Frances, Sant Honorat, Barlaam e Josafat); religious drama (Esposalizi de Nostra Dona, Jeu de Sancta Agnes, and a Passion); didactic literature (Boeci, such ensenhamens [instructional poems] as Arnaut de Marhuelha’s Razos es e mezura, Sordel’s Aissi co’l tesaurs es perdutz, Amanieu de Sescars’ En aquel mes de mai, Raimon de Vidal’s Abril issi’ e mays entrava); encyclopedic compilations (Pierre de Corbian’s Thezaur, Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor); allegorical narratives (Chastel d’Amors, and the Cort d’Amor); treatises on the natural world (Dels auzels cassadors, Aiso son las naturas d’alcus auzels e d’aucunas bestias, Elucidari de las proprietatz de totas res naturals); and the artes poeticae discussed above (Raimon Vidals’ Razos de trobar, the Donatz proensals, the Leys d’amors, etc.). The romance texts and Giraut de Rossilho have received perhaps the most scholarly attention, and these tend to use approaches that are thematic, poetic, or intertextual in nature (e. g., Roger Dragonetti, Le Gai savoir dans la rhétorique courtoise: Flamenca et Joufroi de Poitiers, 1982; Suzanne Fleishman, “Jaufré or Chivalry Askew: Social Overtones of Parody in Arthurian Romances,” Viator 12 [1981]: 101–29; Tony Hunt, “Texte et Prétexte: Jaufre et Yvain,” The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, 1988, 2:125–41; Sarah Kay, “The Contrasting Use of Time in the Romances of Jaufre and Flamenca,” Medioevo romanzo 6 [1979]: 37–62; Douglas Kelly,

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“Exaggeration, Abrupt Conversation, and the Uses of Description in Jaufre and Flamenca,” Studia Occitanica in memoriam Paul Remy, ed. Hans-Erich Keller, 1986, 2: 107–19; Marie-José Southworth, Étude comparée de quatre romans médiévaux: Jaufre, Fergus, Durmart, Blancandin, 1973). The most famous literary works in Old Occitan are the songs composed by the troubadours in the 12th and 13th centuries. Troubadour lyric is frequently found assembled in collections of lyric poetry called chansonniers, of which there are some forty extant manuscripts dating from the mid-13th and 14th centuries, many of them produced in Northern Italy. The early scholarly work on the chansonniers centered on issues of poetics, provenance, and sources; such scholarship has recently been shown to have tied the linguistic identity of the chansonniers with strong, 19th- and 20th-century nationalistic impulses (Laura Kendrick, “The Science of Imposture and the Professionalization of Medieval Occitan Literary Studies,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 1996, 95–126). Studies on manuscript sources of troubadour lyrics and the chansonniers are abundant (see D’Arco Silvio Avalle, I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d’oc, ed. Lino Leonardi, 1961, 1993; Karl Bartsch, Grundriß zur Geschichte der provenzalischen Literatur, 1872; Clovis Félix Brunel, Bibliographie des manuscrits littéraires en ancien provençal, 1935; William E. Burgwinkle, “Chansonniers,” The Troubadours, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, 1999, 246–62; Alfred Jeanroy, Bibliographie sommaire des chansonniers provençaux, 1916; István Frank, Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours, 1953–1957, 2: 193–214; François Zufferey, Recherches linguistiques sur les chansonniers provençaux, 1987). In addition, much scholarly attention has been paid to individual chansonniers (see Giuseppina D. B. Brunetti, “Sul canzoniere provenzale T (Parigi, Bibl. Nat. F. fr. 15211),” Cultura Neolatina 50 [1990]: 45–73; Brunetti, “Per la storia del manoscritto provenzale T (Parigi, Bibl. Nat. F. fr. 15211),” Cultura Neolatina 51 [1991]: 27–41; Maria Careri, Il canzoniere H: struttura, contenuto, e fonti, 1990; Elizabeth W. Poe, Compilatio: Lyric Texts and Prose Commentaries in Troubadour Manuscript H (Vat. Lat. 3207), 2000). Three distinct periods of troubadour poetry can be determined: an early period, beginning at the end of the 11th century until ca. 1140, comprising such early poets as Guilhem IX, Jaufre Rudel, and Marcabru; a second period from roughly 1140–1250, the period richest in numbers of poets, including Arnaut Daniel, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Folquet de Marseille, Peire Vidal; and a third period, from 1250 to the end of the 13th century, including Peire Cardenal and Giraut Riquer. Two recent and good introductions to the troubadours are A Handbook to the Troubadours (ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, 1995), and The Troubadours: An Introduction

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(ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, 1999). The former offers a comprehensive, practical guide to Occitan literature, while the latter places Occitan literature within discussions of current literary theories and cultural studies. Early scholarly treatment of the troubadours resulted in myriad editions of the songs of the troubadours, as individuals or in anthology form. The standards anthologies are by Appel and Bartsch, the former of which includes narrative and didactic poetry and prose texts, the latter who includes 14thcentury texts. Editions of individual troubadour poets have changed considerably, moving from standard editing practices which privilege a certain manuscript tradition, or even a single manuscript, to editions that reflect the “mouvance” of troubadour lyric. Rupert Pickens’ landmark edition of Jaufre Rudel, which presents editions and translations of the myriad versions of Rudel’s songs without privileging one over another, demonstrates persuasively that troubadour songs circulated in many diverse forms (The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, ed. Rupert T. Pickens, 1978). Many good anthologies of troubadour lyric exist (see Provenzalische Chrestomathie mit Abriss der Formenlehre und Glossar, ed. Carl Appel, 1930, 1961; Karl Bartsch, Chrestomathie provençale (Xe–XVe siècles), 1904, 6th ed. 1973; Frank R. Hamlin, Peter T. Ricketts, and John Hathaway, Introduction à l’étude de l’ancien provençal: Textes d’étude, 1967; Los trovadores: Historia literaria y textos, 3 vols., ed. Martín de Riquer, 1975; Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours, ed. R. T. Hill and T.G. Bergin, rev. Thomas G. Bergin et al., 2 vols., 1941, 2nd ed. 1973), even as bilingual editions (see Fred Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, 1973; Troubadour Lyrics: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Frede Jensen, 1998; Alan R. Press, Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry, 1971). Scholarship on troubadour poets and their lyrics also includes important reference works (see Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours, 1933, rpt. 1968; István Frank, Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours, 1953–1957, 2: 89–192; Frank M. Chambers, Proper Names in the Lyrics of the Troubadours, 1971, 18–33; François Zufferey, Bibliographie des poètes provençaux des XIV e et XVe siècles, 1981; Robert A. Taylor, La littérature occitane du Moyen Age: Bibliographie sélective et critique, 1977; and “Bibliography,” A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. Akehurst and Davis, 467–74]. E. Genres Troubadour lyric spans a wide variety of genres, and scholarly work in the 20th century reflects an increasing interest in genre-based studies (e. g., Pierre Bec, “Le problème des genres chez les premiers troubadours,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 25 [1925]: 31–47; John H. Marshall, “Le vers au XIIe siècle: genre poétique?” Revue de langue et littérature d’Oc 12–13 [1962–63]:

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55–63; Sarah Spence, “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 164–80). Troubadour songs are alternatively called “vers” (a term typically in use before 1150) or “cansos” (a term typically in use chiefly after 1160). Medieval poets make generic distinctions even early on: in the 12th century they distinguish the planh (lament), pastorela (pastourelle), and tenso (debate poem) from love songs, and with the generic innovations of the 13th century, they make further classifications of genre, and include the sirventes (moralizing or satiric poem), the alba (dawn song), the descort (a song with irregular stanzas) and the partimen (a debate poem like the tenso) among the earlier types of songs. Because of the variety of lyric genres, scholars particularly in the 20th century have attempted to delineate and refine the parameters defining an individual genre (e. g., Martín de Riquer, Las albas provenzales, 1944; A. T. Hatto, Eos: An Enquiry Into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry, 1965; Elizabeth W. Poe, “New Light on the Alba: A Genre Redefined,” Viator 15 [1984]: 139–50; Carl Appel, “Vom Descort,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie XI [1887]: 212–30; Jean Maiilard, “Problèmes musicaux et littéraires du descort,” Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature romanes à la mémoire de d’István Frank, 1957, 399–409; Jean Audiau, La pastourelle dans la poésie occitane au Moyen Age, 1922; Maurice Delbouille, Les origines de la pastourelle, 1926; Vincent Pollina, “Word/Music Relations in the Work of the Troubadour Gaucelm Faidit: Some Preliminary Observations on the Planh,” Miscellanea di studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia a cinquant’anni dalla sua laurea, vol. 3 [1989]: 1075–90; Catherine Léglu, Between Sequence and Sirventes: Aspects of Parody in the Troubadour Lyric, 2000; John David Jones, La tenson provençale, étude d’un genre poétique, 1934, 1974). Scholarly interest in other genres related to troubadour poetry, namely the vidas (prose text recounting the life of the troubadours) and the razos (prose texts recounting the reasons for composition of an individual song) has also been manifest in recent publications. If both the vidas and the razos concern to varying degrees biography, the troubadours themselves do not make sharp distinctions between them, unlike modern critics (Elizabeth W. Poe, “At the Boundary Between Vida and Razo: The Biography for Raimon Jordan,” Neophilologus 72 [1988]: 316–19) Many scholarly treatments of the vidas and the razos centered on questions of historical accuracy, origins, authorship, and the transmission of texts (Jean Boutière and Alexander H. Schutz, Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, 1950, 2nd ed., with I.-M. Cluzel 1973; Guido Favati, Le biografie trobadoriche, 1961; Alfred Jeanroy, “Les biographies des troubadours et les razos: leur valeur historique,” Archivum romanicum 1 [1917]: 289–306, rpt. La Poésie lyrique des troubadours, 1934, 1:101–32; Bruno Panvini, Le biografie provanzali,

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valore e attendibilità, 1952; Le troubadour Folquet de Marseille, édition critique précédée d’une étude biographique et littéraire et suivie d’une traduction, d’un commentaire historique, de notes, et d’un glossaire, ed. Stanislaw Strónski, 1910, 1968). More recently, scholars have studied the vidas and razos for their value as texts that establish principles of literary criticism for the troubadours, as well as troubadour aesthetics and poetics (William E. Burgwinkle, Razos and Troubadour Songs, 1990; Elizabeth W. Poe, “Old Provençal Vidas as Literary Commentary,” Romance Philology 33 [1980]: 510–18; id., “Toward a Balanced View of the Vidas and Razos,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 1/2 [1986]: 18–28). Other scholars, also influenced by modern literary criticism, have explored the razos using a modern theoretical approach: William E. Burgwinkle’s Love for Sale: Materialist Readings of the Troubadour Razo Corpus (1997), for example, using an approach drawn from studies in materialist culture, argues that the razos reflect the changing economic conditions in medieval Occitania. F. Themes Many studies of the troubadours take a thematic approach, studying, for example, the chief thematic elements of troubadour poetry: fin’amors (courtly love), mezura (measure, balance), cortezia (courtliness), proeza (prowess, value), solatz (consolation, pleasure), joi (joy) (e. g., Peter Dronke, “Guillaume IX and Courtoisie,” Romanische Forschungen 73 [1961]: 327–38; Jean Frappier, “Vues sur les conceptions courtoises dans les littératures d’oc et d’oïl au XIIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, vol. II [1959]: 135–56; Erich Köhler, Sociologia della fin’amor, trans. M. Mancini, 1976; Moshé Lazar, “Les éléments constitutifs de la ‘cortezia’ dans la lyrique des troubadours,” Studi Mediolatini e Volgari 6–7 [1959]: 68–76; Lazar and Norris J. Lacy, Poetics of Love in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts, 1989; Leo Pollmann, “Joi e solatz: Zur Geschichte einer Begriffskontamination,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 80 [1964]: 256–68; D. R. Sutherland, “The Love Meditation in Courtly Literature,” Studies in Medieval French presented to Alfred Ewert in honor of his seventieth birthday, ed. E.A. Frances, 1961, 165–93; Leslie T. Topsfield, “Malvestatz versus Proeza and Leautatz in Troubadour Poetry and the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes,” L’Esprit Créateur 19:4 [1979]: 37–53; Topsfield, Troubadours and Love, 1975). Of these themes, the first, fin’amors, or courtly love, has generated the most scholarly interest. Early studies on fin’amors tended to read it as allegorical (e. g., C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 1936); later scholars, as sensual, erotic, and metaphoric (e. g., Moshé Lazar, Amour courtois et ‘fin’amors’ dans la littérature du XIIe siècle, 1964). More recently, scholars have taken approaches to fin’amors that are influenced by feminist

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theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, 2001; Kay, “Desire and Subjectivity,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 212–27; Marianne Shapiro, “The Provençal trobaritz and the Limits of Courtly Love,” Signs 3 [1978]: 560–71; Slavoj Mimek, “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing,” The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality, 1994, 89–112). However, it is clear that fin’amors cannot be reduced to a fixed set of traits, because the troubadours themselves treat the subject as complex. G. Metrical Structure and Poetic Style A related interest in troubadour poetics, poetic style, prosody, and versification has similarly spurred scholars in the 20th century. If the metrical structure of a canso is relatively uniform – a canso typically comprised 5 or 6 stanzas, called “coblas,” followed by a shortened stanza (or two), usually addressed to a patron, lady, or audience, called a “tornada” – the rhyme scheme can differ wildly: poems may have the same rhyme scheme, and same rhyme sounds throughout (coblas unissonans); poems may have the same rhyme scheme but alternating rhyme sounds (coblas alterandas); poems may have the same rhyme scheme but the rhyme sounds may change every two stanzas (coblas doblas) or every three stanzas (coblas ternas); poems may have the same rhyme scheme but different rhyme sounds throughout (coblas singulars); poems may be composed of single, free-standing stanzas (coblas esparsas); poems may have a rhyme scheme that changes according to an internal fixed order or pattern of permutation (coblas retrogradadas); poems may be constructed so that the last rhyme sound of the first stanza becomes the first rhyme sound of the second stanza (coblas capcaudadas), or the first line of each stanza may contain the last rhyme word of the previous stanza (coblas capfinidas). Clearly, troubadour poems are intricately made, with great attention paid to meter and rhyme. Moreover, the style of troubadour lyric also varies greatly. Troubadours name the style of their poetry but rarely; however, the meaning of these terms, while contemporary with the troubadours, has become fixed by 20th-century scholarship rather than by the troubadours themselves. Such terms as trobar clus (obscure, hermetic style), trobar leu (easy, open style), trobar ric (rich style), trobar car (precious style), and trobar brau (rough style) have, then, become somewhat useful terms for modern analyses, although the troubadours themselves treat these terms with some ambiguity. Modern scholarship has been quite fascinated with the formal composition and styles of troubadour poetry (e. g., S. C. Aston, “The Troubadours and the Concept of Style,” Stil- und Formprobleme, ed. Paul Böckmann, 1960, 142–47; Dominique Billy, L’architecture lyrique: Analyse métrique & modéli-

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sation des structures interstrophiques dans la poésie lyrique des troubadours et des trouvères, 1989; Michel-André Bossy, “The trobar clus of Raimbau d’Aurenga, Giraut de Bornelh, and Arnaut Daniel,” Medievalia 19 [1996]: 203–19; F.J.A. Davdison, “The Origins of the Sestina,” Modern Language Notes XXV [1910]: 18–20; Costanzo di Girolamo, I trovatori, 1989; Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay, 1988; Alberto del Monte, Studi sulla poesia ermetica medievale, 1953; Ulrich Mölk, Trobar clus-Trobar leu: Studien zur Dichtungstheorie der Trobadors, 1968; Linda Paterson, Troubadours and Eloquence, 1975; Elizabeth W. Poe, “‘Cobleiarai, car mi platz’: The Role of the Cobla in the Occitan Tradition,” Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context, ed. William D. Paden, 2000, 68–94; Leo Pollmann, “Trobar clus,” Bibelexegese und hispano-arabische Literatur, 1965; Alberto Roncaglia, “Trobar clus: discussione aperta,” Cultura neolatina 29 [1965]: 5–55) and versification (e. g., Frank M. Chambers, An introduction to old Provençal versification, 1985; and id., “Versification,” A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. Akehurst and Davis, 101–20; István Frank, Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours, 2 vols., 1953–1957; John H. Marshall, “The Isostrophic Descort in the Poetry of the Troubadours,” Romance Philology 35 [1981]: 130–57, Marshall, “Textual Transmission and Complex Musico-Metrical Form in the Old French Lyric,” Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T. B. W. Reid, ed. Ian Short, 1984, 119–84; and id., “Une versification lyrique popularisante en ancien provençal,” Actes du premier Congrès International de l’Association Internationale d’Etudes Occitanes, ed. Peter T. Ricketts [1987], 35–66; Margaret L. Switten, “Music and Versification,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 141–63). H. Music The scholarly interest in poetic style, and particularly in versification, is paralleled by an increasing attention to music and Old Occitan literature, and particularly, the music of the troubadours (see the introductory essays by Hendrik van der Werk “Music,” A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. Akehurst and Davis, 121–64; and M.L. Switten, “Music and Versification,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 141–63). Only one manuscript containing songs and musical notation in Old Occitan from the period of the early troubadours is extant; however, it contains religious rather than secular songs (BNF lat. MS 1139, from Saint Martial of Limoges). In addition to the Occitan (or bilingual Latin/Occitan) religious songs (of which there are some six), there are also a few examples of Occitan songs that appear with musical notation that are not strictly speaking a part of the canon of troubadour songs: a lai by Aimeric de Peguilhan, four anonymous lais and descorts, six virelais, four motets, and a 14th-century play on the life of St. Agnes, which also

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contains several songs with melodies. The first chansonnier (song book) of troubadour song dates from the 13th century, which means that we do not know exactly how the songs were performed before their preservation in writing. Moreover, there are but few melodies (roughly 10 %) preserved: only four of the many manuscripts that contain troubadour poems also contain music, including only two of the chansonniers, but not throughout. And to complicate matters further, in most sources, melodies are preserved in a square notational style (non-mensural), which conveys pitch but not rhythm; in other sources, the use of semi-mensural notion is ambiguous concerning rhythm. For the troubadour songs for which we have melodies, nearly one quarter of them present various melodic versions, either because there is more than one melody present in the manuscripts, or because the melody was used for another song (a contrafact), most often drawn from the repertory of trouvère songs. Nowhere do we have indications about whether instruments would have been used, or how, and whereas early scholars and performances of troubadour song often allowed for the use of instruments, current scholars suggest that the use of instruments was uncommon (Christopher PAGE, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300, 1986). It was only in the late 19th century that the melodies preserved in the chansonniers attracted any scholarly attention, and 20th-century scholars have thus focused on anthologizing them, although following different interpretations for the transcriptions of the musical notation (see Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta and Robert Lafont, Las cancons dels trobors, 1979; Friedrich Gennrich, Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours, 1958, 1960, 1965; Samuel L. Rosenberg, Margaret L. Switten, and Gerard L. Vot, Songs of the Troubadours: An Anthology of Poems and Melodies with accompanying CD, 1998; Hendrik van der Werf, with Gerald A. Bond, The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers, 1984). Because of the dearth of melodies and the ambiguity of the musical notational system in the Middle Ages, there is great uncertainty about the music of the troubadours, which has led to intensive scholarly debates. For but one example, modal theory – the idea that all troubadours songs are in the same rhythmic modes as motets – has been a staple of controversy for musicologists in the 19th and 20th centuries (Pierre Aubry, Les plus anciens monuments de la musique française, 1905; Aubry, Trouvères et troubadours, 1909; Johann Baptist Beck, Die Melodien der Troubadours nach dem gesamten handschriftlichen Material zum erstenmal bearbeitet und herausgegeben, nebst einer Untersuchung über die Entwickelung der Notenschrift (bis um 1250) und das rhythmisch-metrische Prinzip der mittelalterlich-lyrischen Dichtungen, sowie mit Übertragung in moderne Noten der Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvères, 1908; Beck, La musique des troubadours,

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1910; Friedrich Gennrich, Grundriss einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes als Grundlage einer musikalischen Formenlehre des Liedes, 1932; Hans Tischler, The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270), 1982; Tischler, The Montpellier Codex, 1978–1985; Tischler, The Style and Evolution of the Earliest Motets (to circa 1270), 1985; for alternate views, see Carl Appel, Die Singweisen Bernarts von Ventadorn, nach den Handschriften mitgeteilt, 1934; Hendrik van der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the Melodies and Their Relation to the Poems, poems trans. F. R. P. Akehurst, 1972). Musicologists have tended to tackle the troubadour music in terms of manuscripts and the transmission of songs, as well as its rhythm, style and structure. There have been two main schools of thought: the first, which saw melodic variants as a part of some elite literate musical culture, privileging a written transmission; the second, which saw variants as part and parcel with the gaps inherent to oral and musical transmission and the relationship between them, so that the transmission of a song from an author to manuscript would have undergone several, and especially oral, stages. The latter idea also suggests that the notion of “authorship” of a song is much more problematic and ambiguous than for literary texts; even the scribes of the music and the text would have been different individuals. That composition in the Middle Ages was essentially notation-free also means that composers and performers alike had greater freedom of improvising new and existing songs. Recent scholars have nevertheless made a case for a relationship between the poem and the melody – the text and the music – of the troubadour songs, and others treat in a detailed fashion the relationship between form and style (e. g., Elizabeth Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours [1996]; John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance, and Drama, 1050–1350 [1986]; Margaret L. Switten, The Cansos of Raimon de Miraval: A Study of Poems and Melodies, 1985; Switten, Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: A Guide to French and Occitan Song, 1100–1400, 1995). And even more recently musicologists, influenced by reception theory, have been focusing not only on the medieval reception of troubadour music on its audience and the performative context of troubadour song, but also on the post-medieval reception of troubadour song (John Dickinson Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music, 2004; Daniel Leech-Wilkonson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance, 2002).

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I. Contemporary Trends in Occitan Scholarship Recent studies on Occitan literature have very much followed trends in contemporary literary studies. Rich new avenues of research include studies that place Old Occitan literature within its social and historical contexts, and theoretical approaches drawn from literary and cultural studies, interest in gender and performance studies, and intertextuality, including non-Western influences on Old Occitan literature. Scholars have recently drawn from diverse theoretical approaches of literary and cultural studies, focusing on such subjects as the role of memory, performance, reception, and subjectivity in troubadour lyric, using psychoanalysis as a lens through which to view troubadour lyric, and even the role of urbanization and feudalism in the production of Old Occitan Literature (e. g., Rouben C. Cholakian, The Troubadour Lyric: A Psychocritical Approach, 1990; Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony, 1990; Sylvia Huot, “Visualization and Memory: The Illustration of Troubadour Lyric in a ThirteenthCentury Manuscript,” Gesta 31 [1992]: 3–14; Sarah Kay, “Desire and Subjectivity,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 212–27; Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 1990; Maria Luisa Meneghetti, Il pubblico dei trovatori: Ricezione e riuso dei testi lirici cortesi fina al XIV secolo, 1984, 2nd ed. 1992; Stephen G. Nichols, “Voice and Writing in Augustine and in the Troubadour Lyric,” Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Alger Nicholas Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack, 1991, 137–61; Linda Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–c.1300, 1993; Dorothy R. Sutherland, “L’élément théâtral dans la canso chez les troubadours de l’époque classique,” Revue de langue et littérature d’Oc 12–13 [1962–63]: 95–101; Amelia van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric, 1991). 20th-century scholars have also been long interested in the intertextuality of Old Occitan literature, and in particular, the inter-cultural relationship between Old Occitan literature and the literatures of various cultures, including Arabic, Catalan, Galician, Italian, Northern French, and Portuguese (e. g., Stefano Asperti, “Flamenca e dintorno: considerazione sui rapporti fra Occitania e Catalogna nel XIV secolo,” Cultura Neolatina 45 [1985]: 59–103; Asperti, Carlo I d’Angiò e i trovatori: Componenti ‘provenzale’ e angioine nella tradizione manoscritta della lirica trobdorica, 1995; G. Bertoni, I trovatori d’Italia, 1915; A. J. Denomy, “Concerning the Accessibility of Arabic influences to the earliest Provençal troubadours,” Medieval Studies 15 [1953]: 147–58; Jean-Marie D’Heur, Troubadours d’oc et troubadours galiciens-portugais: Recherches sur quelques échanges dans la littérature de l’Europe au Moyen-Age, 1973; A. Vallone, La cortesia dai provenzali a Dante, 1950; F. Alberto Gallo, Musica

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nel castello: Trovatori, libri, oratori nelle corti italiane dal XIII al XV secolo, 1982; Maria Luisa Meneghetti, “Intertextuality and Dialogism in the Troubadours,” The Troubadours, ed. Gaunt and Kay, 181–96; María Luisa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, 1987; A. R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry, and Its Relations with the Old Provencal Troubadours, 1946; Leo Pollmann, “Trobar clus”: Bibelexegese und hispano-arabische Literatur, 1965; Luciano Rossi, “Chrétien de Troyes e i trovatori: Tristan, Linhaura, Carestia,” Vox romanica 46 [1987]: 26–62; Salvatore Santangelo, Dante e i trovatori provenzale, 1921, 2nd ed. 1959). Gender studies and feminist theory have also prompted scholars to examine Old Occitan literature in terms of gender, and in particular, the songs of the trobairitz, or women troubadours (e. g., Michel-André Bossy and Nancy Jones, “Gender and Compilation Patterns in Troubadour Lyric: The Case of Manuscript ‘N’,” French Forum 21 [1996]: 261–80; Mathilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Songs of the Women Troubadours, 1995; id., “Fictions of the Female Voice: The Women Troubadours,” Speculum 67 [1992]: 865–91; E. Jane Burns, “The Man behind the Lady in Troubadour Lyric,” Romance Notes 25 [1985]: 254–70; Frederic Cheyette, “Women, Poets, and Politics in Occitania,” Aristocratic Women of Twelfth-Century France, ed. Theodore Evergates, 1999; Kathryn Gravdal, “Metaphor, Metonomy, and the Medieval Women Trobairitz,” Romanic Review 83 [1992]: 411–26; William D Paden, The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, 1989). One of the current trends in studies on Old Occitan literature concerns how the medieval appears in the modern: recently, scholars working in history and literary/cultural studies have focused on exploring how Old Occitan literature has been received over time, and in particular time periods. The scholars unveil the ways in which modern society has deployed Old Occitan poets and religious movements in order to interrogate contemporary issues of nation, memory, and history (e. g., Emily McCafrey, “Memory and Collective Identity in Occitanie: The Cathars in History and Popular Culture,” History & Memory 13.1 [2001]: 114–38; Roy Rosenstein, “A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.3 [1998]: 499–520; see also Lynn T. Ramey, “In Praise of Troubadourism: Creating Community in Occupied France, 1942–1943,” Filming the Other Middle Ages: Race, Class, and Gender in Medieval Cinema, ed. Lynn Ramey and Tison Pugh, 2007, 139–53). The Spring issue of Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX also includes regularly an updated bibliography of scholarly works on Occitan literature. The language and literature of Old Occitan, once regulated to a subset, even secondary, status within the field of French, thus attests to a vibrant his-

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tory, which is reflected in the fascinating and interdisciplinary scholarship produced today. Select Bibliography A Handbook to the Troubadours, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Joseph Anglade, Grammaire de l’ancien provençal (Paris: Klincksieck, 1921); Elizabeth Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996); Pierre Aubry, Trouvères et troubadours (Paris: F. Alcan, 1909); The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Moshé Lazar, Amour courtois et ‘fin’amors’ dans la littérature du XIIe siècle (Paris, Klincksieck, 1964); William D. Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan (New York: MLA, 1998); Linda Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100–c.1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933, 1968); Los trovadores: Historia literaria y textos, 3 vols., ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975).

Michelle Bolduc

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P Performance of Medieval Texts A. Modern Performance of Medieval Texts This article focuses on modern efforts and attempts to perform medieval texts today; therefore it does not deal with the problems and principles of “Performance of Medieval Texts” in general, which would be a never-ending story. B. Philology and Musicology, the Problem of Authenticity Philologists and musicologists should cooperate to present and analyze medieval texts which originally were meant to be sung (for the role of music, see Sabine Mak, Musik als ‘Ehr und Zier’ im mittelalterlichen Reich: Studien zu Musik im höfischen Leben, Recht und Zeremoniell, 1979; for ‘descriptions’ of music in Middle High German texts, see Kerstin Bartels, Musik in deutschen Texten des Mittelalters, 1997). But for decades philologists did their research in a way which a dictum of the German medievalist Helmut Lomnitzer portrayed as follows: “Close your eyes if you see musical notes;” and musicologists acted vice versa (Helmut Lomnitzer, “Liebhard Eghenvelders Liederbuch,” ZfdPh 90 [1971], Sonderheft: 214). Editions presented either the text or the melodies, but rarely a full combination of both. Only recently conditions have been changing. But still musicologists are primarily interested in the refined polyphony of the Middle Ages or in Gregorian chant, less in sung poetry whose melodies were mostly, at least for centuries, monophonic. Philologists nowadays often speak and write about principles of ‘performance,’ but what they really deal with is ‘Performanz’ (as German scholars call it), namely theory and academic rules applied to the texts of the Middle Ages, not real ‘performances’ of today. Dealing with modern performances seems to be hardly rewarding and of very little interest for scholars: Above all they stress that scientific accuracy and authenticity could not be achieved. But in general we tend to forget that real authenticity in performing medieval music cannot be obtained. Firstly, we can never reconstruct the definite sound of medieval performances. Secondly, we should keep in mind that there were different regional styles. Even the Gregorian plainchant, which used the international Latin language, was sung in more or less different ways during the centuries. Thirdly, circumstances of performing and sing-

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ing were rarely the same, and the musicians had to embrace the changing possibilities and to consider the distinct interest of their audiences. Forthly, and above all: even if there were original medieval recordings, as presented by any science fiction technology, today we could never listen to them like medieval audiences. Our modern listening to music has been trained and influenced by centuries and epochs of musical history and development, from Baroque court music to contemporary pop music, from natural voices and instruments to sounds which are created electronically. Joachim Herz, one of the leading opera producers of the late 20th century, therefore has been stressing in his lectures that authenticity can never be accomplished for music of former times. In the German-speaking countries, for example, only a few scholars have been doing academic research on real performances of medieval texts today, and elsewhere conditions do not seem to be much different. Some scholars should be mentioned: Helmut Lomnitzer (see above), Siegfried Beyschlag, Horst Brunner, Martin Elste, Robert Lug, Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Marc Lewon (see below). Effective cooperation of scholars with musicians is very rare (e. g., at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, or with scholars like Volker Mertens, Manfred Kaempfert, Ingrid Bennewitz, Franz Viktor Spechtler, Margarete Springeth, and Ulrich Müller), and likewise only some musicians can be named (among others Benjamin Bagby, Thomas Binkley, René Clemencic, Hans Hegner, Eberhard Kummer, Marc Lewon, Reinhold Wiedenmann, the ensembles “Alta Musica Berlin,” “Bärengässlin” [Michael Korth, Johannes Heimrath], “Dulaman’s Vröudenton” [led by Thomas Schallaböck], “Ensemble für alte Musik Augsburg,” “Unicorn” [led by Michael Posch], and “Tourdion.” Peter Reidemeister (Historische Aufführungspraxis: Eine Einführung, 1988, 136) characterized the situation as follows: Often “unsophisticated musicians without profound knowledge have to work with intellectual scholars who in turn have no sensibility for the special problems of the artists.” These musicians often have been using old and unreliable editions, and have prepared their performances ‘by ear,’ i. e., by hearing and imitating performances of others – a problem that still affects us considerably. C. Performance and Audience Medieval poetry was presented to the public, i. e., the auditors, spectators, and readers, by a combination of oral and written communication. Of course, today we know medieval poetry only as far as it was written down, under the auspicies of the poets or by scribes at any time later. We must assume that in the beginning all kinds of poetry, religious, ritual, and secular, were presented orally, and written down only later. For a very long time there must

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have been a combination of reciting, singing, and reading: Dramas until today are not only privately read, but staged and listened to. We cannot know how poetry in former epochs was vocally presented, i. e., how it was sung and/or recited and spoken because the possibility of technical documentations only began in the late 19th century. Rarely do examples from old and remote traditions which are still alive today give us a rough idea how it was done and how it sounded. We do not know how Greek and Latin theater plays were performed. When in Florence around 1600 intellectuals tried to revitalize the performance of classical antique plays they could not succeed, but instead ‘invented’ the genre of “opera.” Regarding medieval dramas it is relatively easy to stage and perform them today: Only the question of the exact pronounciation must be solved, otherwise the spoken parts (“dicit”) present no specific problems. Most of the religious plays also have texts which are to be sung (“cantat”); usually melodies of the Gregorian chant are inserted into the play, and more or less easily can they be taken from the tradition of liturgical singing. If we speak of “Performance of Medieval Texts,” we normally mean other genres of poetry than theater, namely (1) lyrical texts divided into stanzas, and (2) epics of all kinds, using stichic lines, or groups of rhyming verses (often couples), or strophic epics, i. e., different types of songs, courtly novels and tales, and heroic epics. D. Early “Aufführungsversuche” The musicologist Johannes Wolf (“Über den Wert der Aufführungspraxis für die historische Erkenntnis,” Kongressbericht Leipzig, 1925, 199–202; see also Stefan Kunze, “Musikwissenschaft and musikalische Praxis: Zur Geschichte eines Mißverständnisses,” Alte Musik. Praxis und Reflexion, ed. Peter Reidemeister and Veronika Gutmann, 1983, 115–24) emphasized how important modern performances are for the understanding of medieval music, and he also discussed the basic problems related to this issue. But nevertheless, until today there are only rare examples of helpful cooperation between scholars and musicians or of musicians who are also scholars (e. g., René Clemencic, Mark Lewon, and Robert Lug). As Annette Kreutziger-Herr outlines in her important monograph Ein Traum vom Mittelalter (2003), academic interest and research of ancient music (“Alte Musik”) began in Europe in the decades after 1800 (see below); often the term “ancient music” meant music of the Renaissance, not of the Middle Ages. One of the earliest concerts of medieval music was organized on November 3, 1849 by the French composer and historian Félix Clément in the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, dedicated to monophonic music of the Church

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(“musique réligieuse”), but arranged polyphonically by Clément. Several decades later, in 1914, Amédée Gastoué presented French secular music at the same church, now based on early research of medieval music which had started around 1900, primarily in France and Germany; the concert was divided into three categories which are used till today in musicology: “pièce liturgique” (1), “ars antiqua et les trouvères” (2), and “ars nova” (3). Two series of concerts which were arranged by Willibald Gurlitt, Professor at the University of Freiburg, in 1922 and 1924 in Karlsruhe and Hamburg, have been of eminent importance, just like medieval concerts in Erlangen and Tübingen (1927, Erlanger Collegium Musicum: Gustav Becking), and in Vienna (1927, “Musik der Gotik”: Rudolf von Ficker); the detailed programs, together with the sources which were used by the musicians, can be found in Kreutziger-Herr’s book. A surprising and very special case was the French chansonierre Yvette Guilbert: Around 1900 she was, together with Aristide Bruant, one of the indisputable champions of the French popular chanson in Paris, Europe and the USA (Henri Toulouse-Lautrec designed impressive drawings of both of them); later she specialized in ancient French songs of the trobadors and trouvères: She presented the songs not only as a singer, but also as an actress, and she was very successful with several concerts at the New York Columbia University (see Helmut Hanke, Yvette Guilbert: Die Muse von Montmartre, 1974, 103–34). E. After the Second World War The number of concerts of medieval (and Renaissance) music began to grow rapidly, and the new technologies (LP, CD, MP3) provided increasingly better possibilities to listen to ancient music. Of course, comparisons with ‘normal’ classical or even popular music would not have been fair, but medieval music reached a steady and dedicated audience, including more and more younger people looking for musical alternatives. Some medieval composers have become well-known, even moderately popular among habitués: Hildegard von Bingen, “Perotinus” (see Olav Rossbach, “Alte Musik und Resakralisierung,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001, Exkurs 204–16), Guillaume de Machaut, Gregorian chant in toto, several trobadors and trouvères (for example Jaufre Rudel, Marcabru, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Conon de Béthune, Gace Brulé, Colin Muset, Adam de la Halle), the Galician cantigas di Santa Maria, German Minnesänger and song-writers like Walther von der Vogelweide, Neidhart, the Monk of Salzburg and, above all, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Italian and French musicians of the polyphonic “ars nova” (Guillaume Dufay, Francesco Land-

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ini etc.); a special case is the collection of primarily medieval Latin poems and songs, which since the early 19th century is referred to as Carmina Burana (after the Bavarian abbey of Benediktbeuren where the manuscript was found: see below). F. Manuscripts and Medieval Notation The liturgical manuscripts of the Catholic Church normally transmit the Latin texts and the melodies. Like in all non-European cultures and in medieval Europe until the 11th century there was no possibility to write down melodies which would enable musicians to sing them by sight. In the early Middle Ages there were only musical signs or symbols called “neuma/ neumata” (Greek for ‘mark’): Different systems of neumata were used to present some information about the manner of singing plainchant, but they could tell nothing about the pitch of the individual musical signs, and therefore unknown melodies could not be sung by sight. When around 1030 the Italian monk and musical teacher Guido di Arezzo, living and teaching in the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa (Ferrara), added horizontal lines and combined them with a clef system, he did nothing less than to create the modern European notation system as it is used world-wide still today. Different types of notes were in use in the Middle Ages, and also the number of lines varied, but the basic pattern of this new notation system has remained the same ever since (see Ian D. Bent, David Hiley, Margaret Bent, and Geoffrey Chew, “Notation,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980, 1995, vol. 13, 333–420; Solange Corbin, Milos Velimorovic and Mireille Helffer, “Neumatic Notations,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980, 1995, vol. 13, 128–54; see also the large article “Notation” in the 2nd ed. of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, Sachteil VII [1997], 275–432, written by a group of scholars). But there is still a problem for modern performers: Medieval notation does not present any information about different voices, instruments to be used, dynamics, expression, and tempo, and for monophonic music also nothing about rhythm; mensural notation only later became necessary to write down polyphonic music. That is why modern musicians cannot perform medieval music just by reading the notes, but they have to look to other musical traditions, for example in the Arabic and Oriental countries, old European folklore, or liturgical music and singing. They must learn to improvise and to use traditional patterns of performing music. Therefore modern performances of medieval music often sound quite different, even if the musicians use the same notations and editions. As Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (“Wie überträgt man die Musik des Mittelalters?,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001,

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325) pointed out, there have been changing trends, even musical fashions, in performing ancient music (see also: Bernard D. Sherman, Inside Early Music, 1997; John W. Barker, The Use of Medieval Music and Recordings for the Teaching About the Middle Ages: A Practical Guide, with Comprehensive Bibliography and Selective Bibliography, 1988). G. Voices and Pronounciation For liturgical purposes, in church only male voices were performing, not only in the Middle Ages but also in later centuries: tenor, baritone, and basso by adult men, soprano and alto by boys. We know nothing about castratos in the Middle Ages, and as far as we know, male altos were used only later; Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages, 1986, 138, calls it a “delicate and (probably unanswerable) question of wether the falsetto voice was cultivated in the performance of troubadour and trouvère song.” We can also learn from medieval musical treatises (Johannes de Grocheio) that in the southern Romance parts of Europe light and higher voices were preferred, in the northern Germanic parts stronger baritones. Female voices, of course, could be heard with religious songs only in women’s convents, but sometimes, there might certainly have been female joglars and “spilwîp” for secular songs. A special problem for modern singers of medieval texts is pronounciation. Linguists do not agree how to exactly pronounce medieval Latin, medieval Romance, or Germanic languages. Furthermore, spelling in manuscripts was never fixed like in modern times, and the spelling which is used in academic editions also differs considerably. There have always been regional variations. The ‘guide book’ Singing Early Music – The Pronounciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (ed. Timothy J. McGee, A. G. Rigg, and David N. Klausner, 1996) for the first time tried to offer detailed rules for singers, but these rules are too specific and demanding for musicians who are not trained in philology and linguistics. A basic rule can be established: On the one hand avoid exaggerated articulation in pronouncing medieval texts which sounds too strange or exaggerated to listeners of today, but on the other hand approach, but not completely (!), modern pronounciation. A paradigm for medieval Latin could be a kind of pronounciation as it is used in Italy today or according to the rules which were proposed by humanist scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) The guidelines for Middle High German texts, presented by Peter Frenzel (Singing Early Music, 1996, 221–57) are not incorrect, but at least misleading. At German universities two traditions can be found: To pronounce Middle High German (1) in a ‘Northern’ and very precise way, or (2) to follow

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modern Southern German dialects or the dialects of Austria and Switzerland. As Middle High German literature was mainly conceived in the middle or southern parts of the German-speaking regions, a ‘Southern’ pronounciation will be much more adequate. Therefore Günther Schweikle (Die mittelhochdeutsche Minnelyrik, vol. I, 1977, 100–02) proposes the following guidelines: Pronounce /sp-/, /st/-, /sl-/ and /sw-/ like in Modern German, also w (not like an English double-u), the diphthongs /ie/, /uo/, and /üe/ as they are written, do not differentiate between /ei/ and /ai/, but do so between short and long vowels (not too expressively); finally keep in mind that /iu/ in medieval manuscripts and modern editions is always (!) the ‘umlaut’ of a long /u/ (like in German “über”), and that /z/ can mean /s/ (like in English “miss”) or the German affricative /z/ (like in “Zauber”). Schweikle concludes: “According to the mentioned problems all efforts to give the pronounciation of Middle High German an ancient sound are fruitless;” and he even adds: “Therefore MHG texts can even be recited like Modern German.” Pronounciation should always be clear and explicit, but also natural. Of utmost importance for the singer is that he/ she indicates that he/ she exactly knows what is sung and he/ she understands precisely the exact meaning of the words. H. Musical Instruments No instruments have been used in plainchant, and probably very rarely for religious texts. The basic types of medieval instruments are mentioned when the South Tyrolean singer Oswald von Wolkenstein (1386/1387–1445) enumerates his instrumenta qualifications: “I also was able to ‘fidlen, trummen, pauken, pfeifen’” [= ‘play string instruments, brass, percussion, flute-like instruments’: poem Klein no. 18 II). Robert Donington (The Interpretation of Early Music, new rev. ed., 1989; see also Christopher PAGE, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300, 1986) presents a lenghty and elaborate list of medieval and Renaissance musical instruments, and often modern musicians try to surprise and impress their audience by using many different types of old and strange-looking instruments. Some medieval instruments and many from the Renaissance have been preserved; they can be seen in museums, and might be used for modern reconstructions. Medieval miniatures also present depictions of musical instruments, above all different kinds of string instruments played with a bow or plucked. They show that singers could accompany themselves with a string instrument like an Arabic rebec, or rababa, a hurdy-gurdy, or a small harp (fiddles, i. e., violin-type string instruments, and wind instruments, of course, were not useful); sometimes a singer is supported by one or two in-

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strumentalists. The most common instrument to be combined with a singer was the fiddle. The razo, i. e., the medieval commentary of a love-song of the trobador Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (“Kalenda maya,” around 1200) provides the following information: “Two joglars from France arrived at the court of margrave [Boniface of Montserrat] who could play the fiddle very well. One day they played an estampida [a dance], which the margrave, the knights and the ladies liked very much. But Raimbaut disliked it strongly, and when the margrave saw this he said to him: ‘Sir Raimbaut, why do you not sing and enjoy yourself, when you hear such a fine melody and see such a beautiful lady like my sister, who has accepted you as her servant and who is one of the finest ladies in the world.’ And Raimbaut answered that he was not able to do so. The margrave understood the reason and said to his sister [Biatrix]: ‘Lady Biatrix, by your love for me and and these people I modestly ask you that you will beg Raimbaut that he should enjoy himself und sing for your love and your grace as he has done before.’ And Mylady Biatrix was so polite and graceful that she begged and asked him for her love, that he should again be full of joy and composed a song for her. And Raimbaut conceived the estampida ‘Kalenda maya’ – which was presented by him at the margrave’s court, certainly accompanied by the two fiddlers” (Ulrich Müller trans.) But nevertheless, we should keep in mind the argument of Hendrik van der Werf (The Extant Troubadour Melodies, 1984, 220): “It is not whether medieval singers ever sang to instrumental accompaniement. In some of the narrative literature of the Middle Ages we find clear indications that this was done, but that does not prove that the chansons of the troubadours and trouvères were accompanied too […]. We have to reckon with the possibility that medieval Western Europe […] knew many kinds of songs, popular as well as esoteric ones; some of these may habitually have been accompanied, but not necessarily all of them.” Orchestras, even small ones, were unknown. The miniature of the Middle High German singer Heinrich von Meissen, called Frauenlob in the Codex Manesse (fol. 399r; early 14th century) which depicts the singer doing something like ‘conducting’ instrumentalists is a very rare example. I. Modern Performance of Medieval Music a) Plainchant: The different kinds of plainchant, above all the catholic Gregorian chant, have a tradition extending over centuries. But Gregorian chant, the most important and nearly dominating kind of plainchant for medieval catholic Europe, had regional versions, and its style changed more or less. Its modern style of singing was renewed and modernized at the Be-

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nedictine abbey of Solesmes (Northern France) in the 19th century, and announced as follows: “To raise Gregorian chant from the abject state into which is has fallen, to pursue the work of its restoration until complete justice is done, and it has recovered its full ancient beauty which rendered it so proper for divine worship.” The main principles were: good phrasing of the Latin text, without any heavy stressing of each note, an “‘orational rhythm’ similar to that of speech, which achieves unification through respect for the Latin words and their accentuation, and balance through the proportions existing between the various divisions” (Eugène Cardine, “Solesmes,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1980, vol. 17, 452–54, here 453). The question of measure has been disputed: equal pronounciation of the Latin syllables, or rhythmic patterns, or – as it is performed today – free rhythm according to the Latin words. The first recordings of Gregorian chant in Solesmes were registered in 1930 by “His Master’s Voice” (directed by Dom Joseph Gajard). Until nowadays, there have been hundreds of recordings, with regional differences, but most of them more or less follow the Solesmes principles (see Jerome F. Weber, A Gregorian Chant Discography, 1990). But it is important to remember: “A historically authentic kind of performing is not possible” (Helmut Hucke and Hartmut Möller, “Gregorianischer Gesang,” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Sachteil III [1995], 1610–22, here 1619). In 1993, clever marketing, more or less by chance, even created a veritable Gregorian CD-hit, of which EMI sold more than 5 millions of copies: Canto Gregoriano (Martin Elste; “Mittelalter aus dem Geiste der kommerziellen Vermarktung,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001, 309–24): A more than twenty years old recording by the “Coro de monjes de Monasterio Benedictiono de Santo Domingo de Silos” (Northern Spain) was re-issued presenting an artistic quality, which was good, but not spectacular. Hildegard von Bingen has become the most popular author of medieval liturgical music on CDs, which probably have been bought and listened to not only for musical interest; instead they have appealed to a lot to feminists and New Age afficiados. Also some Gregorian crossover-productions have been very successful, for example Officium (Hilliard Ensemble, together with Jan Garbarek, jazz saxophone; ECM 1994) and a CD by “Enigma” (Virgin Records 1990: MCMXC a.D.), which present two Gregorian remixes, one of them being the really impressive and revealing “Mea Culpa Part II.” b) Carmina Burana: This collection of mostly Latin poems and songs, and some religious dramas was put into writing in the beginning of the 13th century, probably in an abbey of South Tyrol or Carinthia. The manuscript was

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discovered at the beginning of the 19th century in the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuren, and therefore the first editor of the texts, Andreas Johannes Schmeller (1847), called it “Poems from (Benedikt-)Beuren” (Latin: “Carmina Burana”). The collection contains religious and satirical poems and songs, texts about love, drinking and gambling, and several religious plays. Some of the secular songs became extremely popular, when Carl Orff in 1937 presented his oratorio Carmina Burana, with newly composed melodies – these melodies, written for opera houses and concertos, had drive, even groove, and they are something like a hit still today. Orff could not have been inspired by the original medieval melodies: The medieval manuscript has many musical notes, but only neumata without lines, which cannot be deciphered. Only later musicologists and philologists (among them Higino Anges, Walter Lipphardt, and René Clemencic, Vienna – see below) discovered some of the Carmina-Burana-texts in other manuscripts, where they come with a readable notation on lines, and they also proposed some possibilities of contrafacturas: In 1979 Clemencic et al. published a collection of all possible medieval melodies (René Clemencic, Michael Korth, and Ulrich Müller, ed., Carmina Burana: Gesamtausgabe der mittelalterlichen Melodien mit den dazugehörigen Texten, 1979). An ancient melody was even proposed for the most popular Latin song of the Middle Ages, the so-called “Confession” by the Archpoet (Archipoeta; see Ulrich Müller, “Beobachtungen zu den ‘Carmina Burana’: 1. Eine Melodie zur Vaganten-Strophe,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch XV [1980]: 104–11). Clemencic and his Consort recorded a series of LPs, which was followed by an LP registered by the Salzburg Ensemble “Bärengässlin” (Michael Korth and Johannes Heimrath) who had collaborated with Clemencic in publishing the above-mentioned edition. Some years earlier the Munich “Ensemble für Alte Musik,” founded and directed by Thomas Binkley, had presented the first LP dedicated to songs and medieval melodies of the “Carmina Burana,” some of them with such a rhythmical drive that Robert LUG calls them “nearly Beatles-compatible” (Robert Lug, “Minnesang: Zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001, 148). These LPs and the edition caused a veritable boom of Carmina-Buranarecordings on CD; but while the musicians often pretended to base their recordings on own reasearch, they mostly used the above-named edition (without mentioning it) or even did their performances by listening to earlier productions. c) Medieval lyrics: Monophonic songs of the Occitan trobadors, the trouvères from Northern France, authors from the Iberian peninsula (Catalan, Castilian/ Spanish, Galician-Portuguese), and the so-called “minnesinger” of

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the German-speaking regions are the majority of modern recordings of secular medieval music, followed by polyphonic compositions of the “Ars Nova” and the Renaissance. (It should be mentioned that the German terms “Minnesang”/ “Minnesinger”/ “Minnesänger” are used for medieval German songs in general, for love-songs of all kinds, but also for songs only about “fin amors,” i. e., unfullfilled longing for a “frouwe,” i.e., lady; the restricted meaning is the most appropriate one, but musicians prefer the general and rather inexact understanding). Robert Lug, Martin Elste (both in Übersetzte Zeit, 2001), and Annette Kreutziger-Herr (Ein Traum vom Mittelalter, 2003) have outlined and discussed the wide field of recordings of medieval lyrics. There are many ensembles, of international reputation (see also: Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 1988), but very often just regional ones, and also a lot of small and private companies; therefore it is impossible to provide a satisfactory and international survey. Robert Lug (“Minnesang: Zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001; see also: Die Musik des Mittelalters, ed. Hartmut Möller and Rudolf Stephan, 1991) devised a rather elaborate system of six paradigms with many subdivisions to categorize and describe such recordings, which will be used here for a brief survey: (1) types of texts; (2) types of melodies and their interpretations, namely regarding (3) rhythm; (4) voices; and (5) ‘character;’ and (6) use of instruments. Regarding the large number of recordings, it is understandable that Lug can apply his own system only partly, and not more can be done than mentioning several ensembles in the following paragraphs. There has never been any doubt in philology and musicology that medieval songs originally had been sung, performed by the authors themselves or by a joglar or a spilman. Many Occitan vidas and razos (= medieval biographies of trobadors and commentaries of their songs) read like short stories about ancient performances, and often perfomances are mentioned in medieval romances and novels, but unfortunately not described in detail. Although melodies had been published since the early 19th century (i. e., for the German minnesingers by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in his large Minnesinger-edition of 1838), until only recently, there was barely any cooperation between philologists and musicologists, as mentioned above. According to Lug’s outline the following types of (1) texts for performances should be distinguished: (a) medieval manuscipts; (b) modern editions; (c) reconstructions of oral versions; (d) modernized or translated texts; (e-g) different kinds of new versions of the text; and (h) instrumental variations. All of these types can be found on LPs, CDs, and in concerts (and only sometimes in printed books), also modern and new versions for example by several songwriters like the French ‘chansonnier’ Georges Brassens, the Italian

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‘cantautore’ [‘singer and author’] Angelo Branduardi, German ‘Liedermacher’ Franz Josef Degenhardt and Joanna, or Peter Blaikner (Austria: see “Mittelalter-Lieder,” Mittelalter-Rezeption III [1988], 15–31). Types of (2) melodies and music editions are: once again (a) medieval manuscripts and (b) modern editions of them, but also (c) melodies which could be reconstructed by means of contrafactura, or even (d) newly composed melodies in a socalled ‘medieval style’: The later the authors, the more melodies have been transmitted; contrafacturas are important for performances of the early German minnesang, as often French melodies had been used by the authors (see also above for the Carmina Burana); new melodies in a medieval manner which are surprisingly good have been invented by the Austrian ensemble “Dulamans Vröudenton.” A much disputed problem is (3) the rhythmic interpretation: (a) either the usual measures of European music as they can be found also in folklore was applied to monophonic songs; or (b) different free rhythms (all syllables or words more or less with the same measure, or according to the so-called natural flow of the language); or (c) the early mensural system of polyphonic music. The use of voices (4) may (a) follow the description of medieval treatises, or take still living oral traditions from folklore or from outside of Europe as prototypes. Very important are (5) the ‘character’ and style of singing which are used as models: In the beginning it was (a) the traditional ‘Lied’ (song); later (b) different kinds of folklore; (c) the plainchant of the Churches (not only the Gregorian plainchant); (d) material provided by modern musicethnology; and (e) even modern and pop-like compositions like Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” The differences between various modern singers and ensembles are sometimes striking, vacillating between a rather dry academic style and a very driving and energetic approach according to performances where the musicians are supposed to be like those of wandering medieval joglars. A powerful impression (6) is achieved by how and which instruments are used: Some ensembles (a) prefer a combination of various instruments, which sometimes are less authentic, but deliver an ancient, even exotic sound; others select only one or quite a few instruments like a fiddle, hurdy-gurdy, small harp, flute, and percussion. Quite recently (b) solo performances without instruments have become favorites, not only using the model of liturgical music and religious songs, but also of some medieval descriptions or the conservative style of the German ‘Meistersinger’ (mastersingers), who never used instruments. Both types can be very impressive, for example if you compare performances of the pastourelle “Ich waz ein kint so wolgetan” (Carmina Burana, no. 185), sung either by a man in a raucous, even wild manner (René Zosso and René Clemencic; or “Ensemble “Bärengässlin”), or – acccording to the words – by a solo

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female voice, half shamefully, half ironically (Ensemble “Dulamans Vröudenton”: Marie-Kathrin Melnitzky; see also Sigrid Neureiter-Lackner, “Die Salzburger Spielleute ‘Dulamans Vröudenton’,” Medievalism 1990/ Mittelalter-Rezeption V, ed. Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, 1996, 420–27). d) Modern ensembles of medieval songs: It is impossible, even unfair, to try to establish an exhaustive and international catalog of ensembles which present medieval songs. In the beginning of LP-recordings some companies promoted medieval music: Deutsche Grammophon-Gesellschaft (“ArchivProduktion”), Teldec (“Das Alte Werk”), EMI (“Reflexe”), Harmonia Mundi. Probably the first extant recording of a medieval song was made by the French chansonniere Yvette Guilbert (see above) in 1926 (Anonymous, “Pourquoi me bat mon mari”: see Robert Lug, “Minnesang zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001, 117–89, here 144–45, fn. 71). Early LPs were produced by Hans-Joachim Moser (see: Martin Elste, “Mittelalter auf alten Schallplatten,” Mittelalter-Rezeption III, 1988, 421–36), Safford Cape (“Ensemble “Pro Musica Antiqua,” Brussels, 1953), and Karl Wolfram (in the 1960s). In 1959, Thomas Binkley founded the “Studio der frühen Musik” (“Early Music Quartet”) in Munich. His numerous recordings (EMI “Reflexe”) presented an international repertoire (trobadors, trouvères, Minnesang, Carmina Burana, Oswald von Wolkenstein, such as: “Pop Ago,” 1973), and their vivid, often Oriental style has been a paragon for several decades; his recording of the love song “Under der linden” by Walther von der Vogelweide, sung by Andrea van Ramm became a “classic” (Robert Lug, “Minnesang zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001 2001, 117–89, here 153) – today this performance sounds over-polished, extremely suave, even misleading. Binkley (d. 1995) was also a professor at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (a very influential institution until today); in 1979 he founded the “Early Music Institute” at the University of Indiana (Bloomington). The recordings of the “Early Music Consort London” (David Munro) have also been influential, and English ensembles, orchestras, and singers are dominating models for all performances of ancient music with old instruments until today. Since 1960, an impressive boom of medieval ensembles and recordings can be observed which has never stopped. The names and labels sometimes change, therefore searching the internet is certainly the best way to get more or less reasonable information. The following survey of ensembles and singers is taken from Robert Lug, “Minnesang zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001, 117–89, which is here updated using my own experiences:

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UK: “New London Consort” (Philip Beckett), “Gothic Voices” (Christopher Page), “Martin Best Medieval Ensemble,” “Hilliard Ensemble” – France: “Ensemble de Musique Ancienne Polyphonia Antiqua,” “Ensemble Diabolus in musica,” “Ensemble Gille Binchois,” “Ensemble Perceval” (Paris), “Ensemble Venance Fortunat,” “Ferrara Ensemble,” “Heliotrope,” “La Compagnie Médiévale,” “Tre Fontane,” Jan-Maria Carlotti, Jean Luc Madier, Gérard le Vot – Spain and Portugal: “Hesperion XX,” “Musica Antigua” (Eduardo Paniagua), “Els Trobadors,” “Vozes Alfonsinas” – Czech Republic: “Ars Cameralis,” “ella,” “Kvinterna” – “Kalenda Maya” (Norway), “Joculatores Upsalienses” (Sweden) – “Schola Hungarica,” “Fraternitas Musicorum” (Hungary) – “Danceries” (Japan) – “Musica Ficta de Buenos Aires” (Argentina) – US: Esther Lamandier, Anne Azéma, “The Boston Camerata” (Joel Cohen), “Folger Consort” – Austria: “Bärengässlin” (Michael Korth, Johannes Heimrath), “Clemencic Consort” (René Clemencic), “Dulamans Vröudenton” (Thomas Schallaböck, Marie-Kathrin Melnitzky, Peter Giesmann, Andreas Gutenthaler), “Ensemble Lyra,” “Les Menestrels,” “Paul Hofhaimer Consort” (Michael Seywald), “Tandaradrei,” “Unicorn” (Michael Posch), Eberhard Kummer – Switzerland: “Schola Cantorum Basiliensis” – Germany: “Cantus Coelln,” “Capella Antiqua Munich” (Kurt Ruhland), “Capella Antiqua Bambergiensis,” “Collage – Forum für Frühe Musik Berlin,” “Condwiramurs,” “Ensemble Alta Musica,” “Ensemble für Frühe Musik Augsburg,” “Ensemble Ony Wytars,” “Estampie,” “I Ciarlatani,” “Minnesangs Fruehling,” “musica mensurata,” “Sarband” (Vladimir Iwanoff), “Sequentia” (Barbara Thornton/ Benjamin Bagby; the ensemble began to perform in Germany), “Tourdion,” “Trecento” (Mark Lewon, Knud Seckel), “Ulsamer Collegium,” “eAm” (= Ensemble Alte Musik), Hans Hegner, Knud Seckel, Walter Vogel/ Angela Sey (Walther von der Vogelweide: Würzburg). Further, with a different and more popular style: “Bluomenrot,” “Corvus Corax,” “Die Ungelichen,” “Freiburger Spielleyt,” “Fundevogel,” “Kurzweyl,” “Lismore,” “Löffelstilzchen,” “Poeta Magica,” “spielleut,” “Tanzwut,” “Vogelfrey,” “Vrouwenheide,” “Wildwuchs,” “Wünnespil,” Frank Wunderlich, Michael Hoffkamp. The repertoires, styles, and audiences of these ensembles are very different: Some of them present more or less original medieval music, others perform songs and dances just with a medieval ‘feeling,’ not only in concerts, but increasingly at so-called ‘medieval markets’ or ‘medieval festivals,’ which have recently become very popular. The repertoires contain music from religious songs drawn from ‘old,’ sometimes pseudo-ancient and pseudo-medieval folklore, and also music combined with world-music, and even jazz: It must be stressed that such performances more or less mislead the

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audience and have nothing to do with authentic performances of medieval music. One German company is primarily dedicated to medieval music of all types, especially to modern joglaresque music: Verlag der Spielleute (Reichelsheim; www.spielleute.de). In 2007 they published a very special sample: songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, performed by nearly twenty different singers and ensembles (Hans Hegner, Michael Hoffkamp, Frank Wunderlich, “Dulamans Vröudenton” [led by Thomas Schallaböck], “Anno Domini,” Violetta, “Musiktheater Dingo,” Knud Seckel, “Poeta Magica,” Jochen Faulhammer, Marcus van Langen, “Ioculatores,” “Ougenweide,” produced by Lothar Jahn). There are also several LPs and CDs which present recited MHG texts (of which the melodies are not transmitted), the most recent ones published by “Chaucer Studio” (see below), spoken by Albrecht Classen (2001), and Ulrich Müller, Margarete Springeth, and Ruth Weichselbaumer (2005). Since the late 1960s, medieval texts have been combined with modern rock music (‘Gothic rock’): in Germany above all by the Ensemble “Ougenweide,” which became extremely popular among students, later on recordings of “Elster Silberflug,” and Marcus van Langen, as well as ‘medieval pop’ of groups like “Dead Can Dance” (Australia) and “Medieval Babes” (UK): Cross-over and ‘World Music’ finally had arrived in the Middle Ages. e) Medieval epics: Heroic poetry is an important part of oral history: Heroic poetry of all times and of all parts of the world has been orally transmitted, at least originally. A singer, sometimes accompanied by one or several instrumentalists, tells his story by singing (also by reciting) in front of an audience. Such performances are depicted already in Homer’s Odyssey, in the Old English Beowulf, and also in medieval heroic epics. In the 1940s, Milman Parry and Albert Lord collected and recorded heroic songs (ballads and epics) in the southern parts of Serbia; their oral-poetry-theory stressed that those epics, like in Homeric times, were created by the singers (“guslars”) just in the moment of the performance by using tradition formulas (Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 1960; John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology, 1988; Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context, 1992; Albert B. Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition, 1995; see also John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance, 1995). See also the entry on Heroic Epics in this Handbook. Until today the singing of heroic tales and epics can be found primarily in the Arabic countries, in central Africa, or in central Asia, and even, as relics from former times, in some remote regions of the Balkan. In the Middle Ages

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heroic epics, mostly conceived in stanzas (with regular numbers of verses) or “laisses” in Northern France (with changing numbers of rhyming verses), certainly were presented by singers, for example: Scandinavian heroic songs (like the Edda ballads; dance ballads at the Feroese islands, sung till today), French heroic epics (“chansons de geste”). In the 15th century, the German poet Michel Beheim (Buch von den Wienern, Book of the Viennese) explicitely wrote at the beginning of his autograph that such epics were still sung or recited. Unfortunately most melodies of medieval epics have not be transmitted; but there are two exceptions: the melodies of the Feroese dance ballads, and several melodies of MHG heroic epics (epics in stanzas). Karl (Heinrich) Bertau, Rudolf Stephan, and Ewald Jammers were the first scholars to discuss the singing of medieval epics in detail (“Zum sanglichen Vortrag mhd. strophischer Epen,” ZfdA 87 [1956/1957]: 253–70; see also Karl Bertau, “Epenrezitation im deutschen Mittelalter,” Etudes germaniques 20 [1965]: 1–17; Ewald Jammers, several essays in Schrift, Ordnung, Gestalt: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur älteren Musikgeschichte, 1969). Siegfried Beyschlag (“Langzeilen-Melodien,” ZfdA 93 [1964]: 157–76), and Horst Brunner presented altogether eight epic melodies which survived or can be reconstructed (“Epenmelodien,” Formen mittelalterlicher Literatur: Festschrift für Siegfried Beyschlag zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, ed. Otmar Werner and Bernd Naumann, 1970, 149–78; Id., “Strukturprobleme der Epenmelodien,” Deutsche Heldenepik in Südtirol, ed. Egon Kühebacher, in cooperation with K. H. Vigl, 1979, 300–28; see also Walter Lipphardt, “Epische Liedweisen des Mittelalters in schriftlicher Überlieferung,” Deutsche Heldenepik in Südtirol 1979 [see above], 275–99). The melody of the most important MHG heroic epic, the Nibelungenlied, can very probably be reconstructed (Siegfried Beyschlag 1964 [see above]; Ulrich Müller, “Überlegungen und Versuche zur Melodie des ‘Nibelungenliedes,’ zur Kürenberger-Strophe und zur sog. ‘Elegie’ Walthers von der Vogelweide,” Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktionalität mittelalterlicher deutscher Literatur, 1984; Id., “Das Nibelungenlied: Ein Sangversepos. Mit einem Postscriptum über Nibelungen-Rezeptionen 1990,” ‘Waz sider do geschach’. American-German Studies on the Nibelungenlied. Text and Reception. With Bibliography 1980–1990/91, ed. Werner Wunderlich and Ulrich Müller, with the assistance of Detlev Scholz, 1992, 249–65). Nevertheless most philologists still neglect the musical part of this poetry. Today we are used to read epics, novels, and tales, not to listen to them. Only three modern musicians have tried to reconstruct the singing of medieval epics: Benjamin Bagby (“‘Beowulf,’ the ‘Edda,’ and the Performance of Medieval Epic: Notes from the Workshop of a Reconstructed ‘Singer of Tales’,” Performing Medieval

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Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regaldo, and Marilyn Lawrence, 2005, 181–92), Reinhold Wiedenmann (Titurel [CD], Wartburgkrieg, Winsbecke), and above all the Austrian Eberhard Kummer (Nibelungenlied, Laurin, Eckenlied, Virginal, Michel Beheim’s Book of the Viennese [all on CD] – Wiedenmann and Kummer mostly in scholarly cooperation with Ulrich Müller and Margarete Springeth (see Ulrich Müller, “Aufführungsversuche zur mittelhochdeutschen Sangvers-Epik: “Titurel,” “Wartburgkrieg,” “Winsbecke” – und “Parzival.” Ein Erfahrungsbericht über die Zusammenarbeitarbeit mit den Musikern Reinhold Wiedenmann und Osvaldo Parisi,” ‘Von wyßheit würt der mensch geert …’, ed. Ingrid Kühn and Gotthard Lerchner, 1993, 87–103; Id., “Nibelungenlied, Heldenepik, höfische Epik – gesungen: Die Aufführungsversuche des Eberhard Kummer,” Gedenkschrift für Alfred Ebenbauer, ed. Florian Kragl, and Johannes Keller [2009]. In 2007, a complete recording of the Nibelungenlied, performed and sung by Eberhard Kummer, was made by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, which was one year later published by the “Chaucer Studio” on two MP3-CDs (duration roughly 20 hours). The “Chaucer Studios” is a non-profit organization at Brigham University (Provo, Utah), which has been publishing recordings on tapes and CDs for many years, primarily of Old English and Middle English texts. There are also some reasons to assume that courtly romances by authors like Chrétien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach could have been presented by a singer (Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance, 1999). The question remains: How might it have been done? Perhaps in the style of lectures (“lectiones”) used in medieval monasteries, as it is proposed by Ewald Jammers (see above). Benjamin Bagby, Reinhold Wiedenmann, and Eberhard Kummer tried to sing such texts, but until today there are only recordings of some small excerpts (Eberhard Kummer; “Unicorn”). An inspiring monograph about “Performance in Early French Romances” was written by Evelyn Birge Vitz (see also above) (1999); she is also the coeditor of collected articles about “Performing Medieval Epics,” and co-director of an research project at the NYU (New York University: www.nyu.edu/ humanities.council/workshops/storytelling). There have been many modern efforts to perform and record medieval texts, lyrics, and epics. But it is still, at least partly, a hidden treasure, and neglected by the majority of scholars.

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Select Bibliography The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London et al.: McMillan, 1980, several reprints; paperback ed. 1995); Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 2nd ed. Ludwig Finscher, 21 vols. with supplements (Kassel, Weimar, et al.: Bärenreiter and Metzler, 1994 sqq.); Christopher Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 1100–1300 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999); Übersetzte Zeit: Das Mittelalter und die Musik der Gegenwart, ed. Wolfgang Gratzer and Hartmut Möller (Hofheim/Ts.: Wolke, 2001); Robert Lug, “Minnesang: Zwischen Markt und Museum,” Übersetzte Zeit, 2001 (see above), 117–89; Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung mittelalterlicher Musik in der Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, ed., Performing Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).

Ulrich Müller

Pharmacy A. Periodization According to the traditional historiography, pharmacy was not an independent activity in antiquity, but was included in medicine. It supposedly became an independent profession and, hence, also a discipline during the Middle Ages, specifically in the Arabo-Islamic world (see, for example, Sami Hamarneh, “The Rise of Professional Pharmacy in Islam,” Medical History 6 [1962]: 59–63; Id., “The Climax of Medieval Arabic Professional Pharmacy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 [1968]: 450–61; Glenn Sonnedecker, Kremer and Urdang’s History of Pharmacy, 1963, 27; Sami K. Hamarneh, “Development of Pharmacy, Ancient Times to Middle Ages,” Studies in History of Medicine 6 [1982]: 37–42; and, more recently, Rudolf Schmitz, Geschichte der Pharmazie, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1998, 265–73; see also Rhadi Jazi, “Contribution à l’étude de l’histoire de la pharmacie arabe: Organisation de la profession pharmaceutique, les pharmacopées, la dispensation du médicament,” Medicina nei Secoli 7 [1995]: 191–215). In the West, the so-called Constitutions of Melfi (identified as Liber Augustalis), promulgated between 1231 and 1240 by Frederick II von Hohenstaufen (1194–1250), separated the medical and pharmaceutical professions, and regulated the exercise of the latter, as well as the education in the field, mak-

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ing it necessary for aspirant pharmacists to attend a university training (see the titles 46 and 47 in Conrad von Hermann, Thea von der Lieck-buyken, and Wolfgang Wagner, Die Konstitutionen Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen für sein Königreich Sizilien nach einer lateinischen Handschrift des 13. Jahrhunderts herausgegeben und übersetzt, 1973; English trans.: James M. Powell, Liber Augustalis, or Constitution of Melfi Promulgated by the Emperor Frederick II for the Kingom of Sicily in 1231, 1971. For a specific study, see Wolfgang-Hagen Hein, and Kurt Sappert, Die Medizinalordnung Friedrich II.: Eine pharmaziehistorische Studie, 1957, especially 48–57 for the Latin text and a German trans.; and Sonnedecker, Kremer and Urdang’s History … [above], 468–69, for an English trans. For an analysis, see Id., ibid., 34–5; Clemens Stoll, Apotheker und Gesetzgebung: Ein Beitrag zur rechtsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung des Apothekerberufes in Europa, 1991; more recently: Rosalia Giovaniello, “La farmacologia medioevale, regolamentazione dell’arte farmaceutica di Federico II,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 14 [1997]: 29–39; and Ortensio Zecchino, Medicina e sanità nelle Costituzioni di Federico II di Svevia (1231), 2002). According to the same historiography, an attempt was made in the West from the late 15th century to bring to an end the pharmaceutical practices inherited from the Middle Ages. The driving force was the Ferrarese humanist physician Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524), who published the booklet usually identified as De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus (Ferrara, 1492; several re-editions, by Leoniceno or posthumous, in his works or in other volumes) in which he denounced the mistakes of the literature on materia medica (the natural products of vegetal, animal and mineral origin used as ingredients for the preparation of medicines) used at that time, particularly the Naturalis Historia by Pliny (23/24–79 C.E.) and the many works of AraboIslamic physicians and therapists known in the West thanks to their translations into Latin from the end of the 11th century on. To replace these works, Leoniceno proposed to return to Greek pharmacy, more specifically to the most important encyclopedia of materia medica of classical Antiquity, De materia medica by Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.) (below) (from the abundant literature on Leoniceno and his action, see, for example, Arturo Castiglioni, “The School of Ferrara and the Controversy on Pliny,” Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice written in Honour of C. Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols., 1953, vol. 1, 269–79; see also below). Leoniceno’s criticism of Pliny’s encyclopedia provoked a harsh polemic (see principally Pandolfo Collenuccio, Pliniana defensio adversus Nicolai Leoniceni accusationem [1493]; the polemic was studied as early as 1911–1916 by Edward C. Streeter, “Leoniceno and the School of Ferrara,” Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago 1 [1911–1916]: 18–22; more

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recently, see, for example, Roger K. French, “Pliny and Renaissance Medicine,” Science in the Early Roman Empire: Pliny the Elder, his Sources, and Influence, ed. Roger K. French, and Frank Greenaway, 1986, 252–81), which ended after the publication (editio princeps) of Dioscorides’s Greek text in 1499 by the printer, humanist and publisher Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), behind which Leoniceno probably was (on Leoniceno’s activity, see a recent synthesis in Alain Touwaide, “Leoniceno,” New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge, 2008, vol. 4, 264–67; for an in-depth study of Leoniceno’s scientific activity based on his library, see Daniela Mugnai Carrara, La biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno tra Aristotele e Galeno. Cultura e libri di un medico umanista, 1991). Almost at the same time, the city council in Florence requested a commission of physicians to review the formulas for medicines prepared by pharmacists and available on the market at that time. The reason officially put forth was that many citizens had complained to have been poisoned or injured by medicines bought on the market, when the cases were not worse and the patients died. Pharmacists were accused of ignorance (mainly because they did not use the right plants, which they were accused to not know). The commission of physicians reviewed the formulas in the pharmacies, evaluated them, selected the most reliable and efficacious, and wrote them down. The collection of selected formulas was published in 1499 (the year 1498 in the volume is based on the Florentine calendar; see Alfons Lutz below) under the title Nuovo Receptario composto dal famosissimo chollegio degli eximii doctori della rte et medicina della inclita cipta di firenze … impresso Nella inclyta Cipta di Firenze per la compagnia del Dragho adi xxi di Gennaio MDCCCCLXXXXVIII (facsimile reproduction: Ricettario fiorentino 1498: Facsimile dell’esemplare Palatino E.6.1.27 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze con una nota di Luigi Crocetti, 1968; another facsimile ed. was published in 1992 by the Institut Mèdico-farmacèutic de Catalunya), and had to be circulated among pharmacists (on the Receptario, see Alfons Lutz, “Studien über die pharmazeutische Inkunabel ‘Nuovo receptario’ von Florenz,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Heidelberg vom 7.–9. Oktober 1957, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1958, 113–28). The Receptario is usually considered by historians of pharmacy as the first pharmacopoeia (in this sense, see Glenn Sonnedecker, “The Founding Period of the US Pharmacopoeia. 1. European Antecedents,” Pharmacy in History 35 [1993]: 149–200), even though this title is claimed for the formulary of Valencia (see Pedro Vernia, La farmacopea valenciana, 1981; Id., Historia de la farmacia Valenciana, siglos XII al XVIII, 1990, and Id., Valencia, cuna de las farmacopoeas oficiales españolas, 1998).

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During the first half of the 16th century, a student of Leoniceno, Antonio Musa Brasavola (1500–1555), inspected the apothecaries of his time in order to inventory and check the medicines they were preparing, and to ascertain their composition and efficacy. As a result, he published a series of volumes listing the formulas by types (listed here in chronological order of publication): Examen omnium simplicium medicamentorum, quorum in officinis usus est …, 1536; Examen omnium syroporum, quorum publicus usus est …, 1538; Examen omnium catapotiorum, vel pilularum, quarum apud pharmacopolas usus est …, 1543; Examen omnium electuariorum pulverum et confectionum, catharcticorum …, 1548; Examen omnium trochiscorum, unguentorum, ceratorum, emplastorum, cataplasmatum, et collyriorum, quorum apud Ferrarienses pharmacopolas usus est …, 1551; and Examen omnium loch, id est linctuum, suffuf, id est pulerum, aquarum, decoctionum, oleorum quorum apud Ferrarienses pharmacopolas usus est …, 1553. Leoniceno’s influence expanded beyond the Alps and reached Germany, where it is believed to have contributed to the development of the new treatises of pharmaceutical botany (the so-called herbals) published from 1530 on (Luigi Samoggia, Le ripercussioni in Germania dell’indirizzo filologico-medico leoniceniano della scuola ferrarese per opera di Leonardo Fuchs, 1964). Furthermore, Leonhard Fuchs (1501–1566) published in 1530 a work whose title recalls Leoniceno, De Plinii et aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus and is entitled Errata recentiorum medicorum LX numero, adjectis eorundem confutationibus, in studiosorum gratian …, 1530, with an expanded edition in 1535 under the title Paradoxorum medicinae libri tres, in quibus sane multa a nemine hactenus prodita, Arabum aetatisque nostrae medicorum errata non tantum indicantur, sed & probatissimorum autorum scriptis, firmissimisque rationibus ac argumentis confutantur … Such clear-cut periodization of the history of pharmacy, with a well defined time frame of the medieval period, needs to be revised. In antiquity, indeed, there were root-cutters and providers of raw material for the preparation of medicines (see for example, Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, Book IX), and also preparers of medicines (Jukka Korpela, Das Medizinpersonal im antiken Rom, 1987, and Id., “Aromatarii, Pharmacopolae, Thurarii et ceteri: Zur Sozialgeschichte Roms,” Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context. Papers Read at the Congress Held at Leiden University [13–15 april 1992], ed. Philip van der Eijk, Hermann F. J. Horstmanshoff, and Piet H. Schrijvers, 2 vols., 1995, vol. 1, 101–18; more recently: Evelyne Samama, “Thaumatopoioi pharmakopôlai: La singulière image des préparateurs et vendeurs de remèdes dans les textes grecs,” Pharmacopoles et apothicaires: Les ‘pharmaciens’ de l’Antiquité au Grand Siècle, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2006, 7–27). This was particularly the case after the development of multi-ingredient medicines (especially the theriac) from the 1st century B.C.E./C.E. (on this

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pharmaceutical strategy, see Gilbert Watson, Theriac and Mithridatum: A Study in Therapeutics, 1966). Also, there certainly was a pharmaceutical knowledge in classical antiquity. The fundamental work in the field, was Dioscorides, De materia medica (ed. of the Greek text by Max Wellmann, Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei, De materia medica libri quinque, 3 vols., 1906–1914 [rpt. 1958]. For an English trans., see the 17th-c. version by John Goodyer [The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides Illustrated by a Byzantine A.D. 512, Englished by John Goodyer A.D. 1655. Edited and first Printed A.D. 1933 by Robert T. Gunther, 1934, with several reprints the most recent of which was published in 1968], can now be replaced with that by Lilly Y. Beck, De materia medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, 2005. For a Spanish trans., see: Dioscórides, Plantas y remedios medicinales (De materia medica). Introducción, traducción y notas de Manuela García Valdés, 2 vols., 1997. The German trans. made by Julius Berendes [Des Pedanios Dioskurides aus Anazarbos Arzneimittellehre in fünf Büchern. Übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen, 1902, with several reprints, the most recent of which was published in 1988] on the basis of the 1829 edition of the Greek text by Kurt Sprengel [1766–1833] can be replaced now with Max Aufmesser, Pedanius Dioscurides aus Anazarba: Fünf Bücher über die Heilkunde, 2002, to be complemented with Max Aufmesser, Etymologische und wortgeschichtliche Erläuterungen zu De materia medica des Pedanius Dioscurides, 2000. No comprehensive study of De materia medica was published until the last decades of the 20th century: John M. Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine, 1985, and, more recently: Alain Touwaide, “La botanique entre science et culture au Ier siècle de notre ère,” Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften in der Antike, vol. 1: Biologie, ed. Georg Wöhrle, 1999, 219–52. On Dioscorides, see the recent synthesis by Alain Touwaide, “Pedanius Dioscorides,” Brill’s New Pauly, vol. 10, 2007, 670–672). In addition, one could mention the various pharmaceutical treatises by Galen (129–after [?] 216 C.E.): De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos and per genera, as well as De antidotis (ed. by Karl Gottlieb Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera omnia, vol. 12, 1826, 378–1007, and vol. 13, 1827, 1–361; vol. 13, 1827, 362–1058; and vol. 14, 1827, 1–209, respectively. On Galen, see recently: Vivian Nutton, “Galen of Pergamum,” Brill’s New Pauly, vol. 5, 2004, 654–61). Nevertheless, such pharmaceutical knowledge did not necessarily translate into a social status of pharmacists identified as such. On the other hand, Leoniceno’s action did not necessarily bring an end to the traditional, that is, medieval, practice of pharmacy, as did not either the Receptario fiorentino and Brasavola’s publications, even though Leoniceno contributed greatly to the renewal of pharmaceutical botany. The arrival of plants and medicines from the New World did not either transform substan-

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tially the practice of pharmacy – and not even the approach to therapeutics – as the new drugs and medicines were absorbed in the contemporary system instead of provoking its revision. Actually, traditional pharmaceutical practice – that is, the practice of antiquity transmitted to the Middle Ages – was largely pursued until late in the Western world: until the 19th century according to a traditional interpretation, but perhaps as late as the early 20th century. This in spite of the development of new medicines of a pre-chemical nature by Paracelsus (1493–1541) (in fact Philip von Hohenheim, or Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim), his followers and others, and in spite of the fact that the actual therapeutic action of plants became increasingly better known and, hence, the composition of medicines was gradually transformed. After the discovery by the English physician William Withering (1741–1799) that a medicine used by a traditional healer to treat dropsy owed its efficacy to digitalis, medicines traditionally prescribed by healers were analyzed, and the plants responsible for their action were identified, as were also their active principles thanks to the development of chemical methods at that time. Even though the form of medicines changed dramatically (instead of infusions, decoctions or any other form of the plants themselves, medicines were crystallized products and other chemical extracts), the practice of pharmacy did not change substantially, and even at such a point that, late in the 19th century, Friedrich August Fluckiger (1828–1894) and Daniel Hanbury (1825–1875) published a manual of therapeutics which, in fact, was mainly devoted to the plants traditionally used for the preparation of medicines: Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin Met with in Great Britain and British India, 1874 (in this sense, see also Henry E. Sigerist, “The Latin Medical Literature of the Early Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 13 [1958]: 127–46; particularly 127: “Until the 19th century ancient medicine was still alive”). It was Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915) in the early 20th century, who proposed a new approach to pharmaceuticals that put an end to the practice inherited from the most remote past and had continued to his time under one or another form. Since no clear-cut periodization of pharmacy can be done, from either a conceptual or a practical viewpoint, the period of medieval pharmacy has to be defined conventionally. The foundation of Constantinople provides an easy and frequently accepted starting point (in the same sense, Sigerist, The Latin Medical Literature … [above], 130: “The terminus post quem is about the beginning of the 4th century”), and the period from 1492 to 1530, during which were published the first works that submitted the practice of pharmacy of that time to a critical analysis, seems to be an appropriate terminus

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ante quem (on this question of periodization in the history of pharmacy, see Die Probleme der Periodisierung in der Pharmaziegeschichte. Die “Georg-Urdang-Gedächtnistagung” im August 1960 mit dem Wortlaut der Vorträge von Otto Bessler, ed. Wolfgang Schneider, 1962). B. Creation and Organization of the History of Pharmacy Pharmacy became a field of historical enquiry almost as the same time as traditional practice was replaced by new approaches. Although some precursory essays were published as early as mid-19th century (see, for example, Paul Antoine Cap [1788–1877], Histoire de la pharmacie et de la matière médicale depuis les temps les plus reculés, tome 1, fascicule 1, 1850), the founding works were not published until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by Germanspeaking scholars. Julius Berendes (1837–1914) came first with Die Pharmacie bei den alten Kulturvölkern: Historisch-kritische Studien, 2 vols., 1891 (rpt. 1989), followed by Das Apothekenwesen, seine Entstehung und geschichtliche Entwicklung bis zum XX. Jahrhundert, 1907 (rpt. 1967). He also translated into German several classical and Byzantine pharmaceutical and medical works: Dioscorides, De materia medica (Des Pedanios Dioskurides aus Anazarbos Arzneimittellehre … [above]); the two treatises on venoms and on poisons ascribed to Dioscorides (“I. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die Gifte und Gegengifte – II. Des Pedanios Dioskurides Schrift über die giftigen Tiere und den tollen Hund,” Apotheker Zeitung 20 [1905]: 908–11, 918, 926–28, 933–35, 945–46, 952–54); the treatise on simple medicines attributed to Dioscorides (“Die Hausmittel des Pedanios Dioskurides, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 12 [1907]: 10–33, 79–102, 140–63, 203–24, 268–92, 340–50, 401–12), and Paul of Egina (“Des Paulos von Aegina Abriss der gesammten Medizin in sieben Büchern, übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen,” Janus 13 [1908]: 417–32, 515–31, 538–600, 654–69; 14 [1909]: 33–49, 124–39, 602–24, 689–707, 754–74; 15 [1910]: 9–40, 73–111, 143–73, 229–60, 462–83, 534–62, 622–49; 16 [1911]: 153–68, 381–89, 492–511, 548–65; 17 [1912]: 20–44, 93–116, 233–61, 316–47, 368–99, 448–79, 557–72, 593–609; 18 [1913]: 24–55, 121–51, 210–14, 282–97, 380–401; this translation was further reproduced in a monographic form under a new title: Paulos’ von Aegina des besten Arztes, Sieben Bücher übersetzt und mit Erläuterungen versehen, 1914). During the period covered by Berendes’s activity, Hermann Schelenz (1848–1922) published the first comprehensive history of pharmacy (Geschichte der Pharmazie, 1904 [rpt. 1962]) and, in 1910 the Swiss pharmacologist Alexander Tschirch (1856–1939) published in the second volume (1910) of his monumental and epoch-making Handbuch der Pharmakognosie, 4 vols., 1909–1925, a series of in-depth analyses of ancient, medieval, and

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Renaissance pharmaceutical treatises, including the list, identification, and therapeutic uses of medicinal plants and other pharmaceuticals. A bit later, but not less important and significant, the toxicologist Louis Lewin (1850–1929) published his still useful history of toxicology (Die Gifte in der Weltgeschichte: Toxikologische, allgemeinverständliche Untersuchungen der historischen Quellen, 1920). Once the history of pharmacy had become a scientific discipline and was recognized, numerous publications came to light. All such volumes (be they general or devoted to a specific area) included more or less detailed information on the Middle Ages. See, in chronological order of publication: Louis Reutter de Rosemont, Histoire de la pharmacie à travers les âges, 2 vols., 1931; Edward Kremers, and Georg Urdang, History of Pharmacy: A Guide and a Survey, 1940 (with a reedition in 1951); Patrice Boussel, Histoire illustrée de la pharmacie, 1949; Glenn Sonnedecker, Kremers and Urdang’s History … (above) (with several reeditions); René Fabre, and Georges Dillemann, Histoire de la pharmacie, 1963; Lydia Mez-mangold, De l’histoire du médicament, 1971; Louis Dulieu, La pharmacie à Montpellier de ses origines à nos jours, 1973; Georg Edmund Dann, Einführung in die Pharmaziegeschichte, 1975; Patrice Boussel, and Henri Bonnemain, Histoire de la pharmacie, ou 7000 ans pour soigner l’homme, 1977; Leo Vandewiele, Geschiedenis van de farmacie in België met een inleiding tot de algemene geschiedenis van de farmacie, 1981; Jean-François Angenot, La pharmacie et l’art de guérir au pays de Liège des origines à nos jours, 1983; Jean-Claude Dousset, Histoire des médicaments des origines à nos jours, 1985; David L. Cowen, and William H. Helfand, Pharmacy: An Illustrated History, 1990; Leonardo Colapinto, and Giacomo Leopardi, L’arte degli speziali italiani, 1991; Georges Dillemann, Henri Bonnemain, and André Boucherle, La pharmacie française: Ses origines, son histoire, son évolution, 1992; Franco Voltaggio, L’arte della guarigione nelle culture umane, 1992. However, the history of medieval pharmacy and medicines became a specific object of research only in recent times. This transformation is probably best represented by such work as Jean-Pierre Bénézet, Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles), 1999. Also, the history of pharmacy became quickly organized with national and international societies, scientific journals, research institutes, teaching programs, and scientific prizes. As early as 1913 the first national society for the history of pharmacy was created in France (Henri Bonnemain, “La Société d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, sa création, son développement, ses activités,” Die Vorträge des Internationalen Pharmaziehistorischen Kongresses Innsbruck 1977, ed. Kurt Ganzinger, 1979, 81–90), in 1926 an international society (which regroups the several national societies) was created, and in 1952 the

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Académie Internationale d’Histoire de la Pharmacie was founded (as a scientific society whose members are elected on the basis of their contribution to the field). Among the many national societies currently active, one could mention here, in addition to the French society (above), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Geschichte der Pharmazie, the Cercle Benelux d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, the Accademia Italiana per la Storia della Farmacia (which is the only national society identified as an academy), the Société Suisse d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, and the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy founded in 1941 by George Urdang (1882–1960) and hosted in the School of Pharmacy of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Many of these societies organize periodical meetings (monthly, for example, for the French society, quarterly for the Cercle Benelux, and yearly for the Swiss society) and the International Society holds every other year (odd numbers) a large meeting, the proceedings of which have been published for years in the form of a series under the standardized title Die Vorträge des Internationalen Pharmaziehistorischen Kongresses … (with the name of the place and the dates of the conference), in the series Veröffentlichungen der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. (with a first series and a Neue Folge). Now, however, such proceedings are usually published by the institution that organizes the conference. Several journals of history of pharmacy are published, mainly by the national societies. The oldest is the French Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie. One could mention also Pharmacy in History (published by the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy), the Atti e Memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia, the Pharmaceutical Historian (published by the British Society for the History of Pharmacy), and the Bulletin du Cercle Benelux d’Histoire de la Pharmacie. Journals of history of science with a broader scope (chronological or disciplinary) include the history of pharmacy in the range of topics they are interested in. This is particularly the case of Sudhoffs Archiv, where the history of medieval pharmacy has been traditionally present. Also, there are some series specifically devoted to the publication of monographs in the field of history of pharmacy: the Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie (which published mainly the Ph.D. theses of graduate students of the institute in Marburg [Germany] [below]), the Publications de la Société Suisse d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, the Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen, and the Würzburger medizinhistorische Forschungen (published by the institute in Würzburg, where medieval medicine and pharmacy have been particularly represented in the last decades of the 20th century). After the history of pharmacy expanded in an unprecedented way in the decades 1960–1970 (with the creation of several university chairs, research

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institutes, and, more recently, even compulsory courses in the pharmaceutical curriculum), it is currently undergoing a reduction. The centers most interested in the medieval period were those of Marburg (particularly under the leadership of Fritz Krafft and with the collaboration of Peter Dilg), and Würzburg (under the direction of Gundolf Keil), which edited the series mentioned above (for the history of the Marburg Institute, for example, see 25 Jahre Institut für Geschichte der Pharmazie der Philipps-Universität Marburg/ Lahn, 1965–1990: ein Bericht, ed. Fritz Krafft and Ulrich Stoll, 1990). Two important centers were also the Institute for the History of Arabic Science in Aleppo (Syria) and the Hamdard Foundation in Karachi (India), which publish the Journal for the History of Arabic Science and Hamdard Medicus, respectively. New centers are currently emerging, as, for example, the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Istanbul (Faculty of Cerrahpasa), ¸ where much research is done on the Seldjuk and Ottoman worlds during the 13th to 15th century under the direction of Nil Sari, including an atelier of miniature painting where artists pursue the activity of the late Süheyl Ünver (1898–1986) and reproduce the illustrations of medieval manuscripts preserved in Turkish collections, and the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (U.S.A.). Several professional historians worldwide specialized in medieval pharmacy, pharmaceutical botany, and such other related topics as toxicology, particularly Martin Levey (1913–1970), Jerry Stannard (1926–1988), and John Riddle in the USA; Pang. G. Kritikos, and Skevos Philianos in Greece; Sami K. Harmaneh, who has been in the USA, Malaysia, and Jordan; and Gundolf Keil, Peter Dilg, and Albert Dietrich in Germany. Also, many non-academic historians of pharmacy have been particularly active. One could mention here Pierre Julien in France; Ramon Jordi in Spain; Leo J. Vandewiele in Belgium; and Willem Daems, from the Netherlands, among many others who would deserve to be cited. Now that the history of pharmacy has gained wider recognition, even though such recognition does not translate any longer in academic structures, new researchers are entering the field and work on the medieval history of pharmacy taking advantage of the activity of the previous generation(s). Given the current decline in the place of history of pharmacy in university programs, such new-comers conduct their research on a personal basis, often in departments of philology (particularly classical, English, German, and Romance philology) and history (medieval history, if there are such departments) (for a recent example of the production by such young scholars, see the several essays in Pharmacopoles et apothicaires: Les ‘pharmaciens’ de l’An-

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tiquité au Grand Siècle, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama, 2006). Also, this new generation collaborates in international programs for which they are associated in a virtual global research center thanks to the development of communications technologies (see, for example, the Scuola medica salernitana project, consisting in editing the texts produced in, or related with, the supposed school of Salerno, many of which were about pharmacy, and to be edited in the so-called Edizione nazionale dei classici, published by the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. On the project, see already the several contributions to the volume La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi, ed. Danielle Jacquart, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2007). In addition to the repositories of primary sources (manuscripts) as the Biblioteca Vaticana in Rome, the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and many others worldwide, and the collections of secondary literature of which the Wellcome Library of the Wellcome Trust in London, and the History of Medicine Division in the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, are the most important, collections specialized in the history of pharmacy include the Ecole de Pharmacie in Paris, the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy in Wisconsin, Madison, and the Historia Plantarum collection specially devoted to the history of pharmacy in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Renaissance and currently located in the Department of Botany, at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Primary sources for the history of medieval pharmacy also include artefacts, drug jars, mortars and all the instrumentarium of ancient druggists, and even the furniture of apothecaries and their architectural setting. Such pieces are often preserved in historical pharmacies and hospitals, such as the HôtelDieu of Beaûne in Bourgogne, the pharmacy of Saint-John’s hospital in Bruges, or the Hospital de Santa Creu in Barcelona, to quote a few. Many of these museums, whatever their type and size, are listed in the guide by Daniela Mohr, Alte Apotheken und pharmaziehistorische Sammlungen, 1992. Guides of such museums and collections include (selection, alphabetical order of modern place names): (Barcelona) Ramon Jordi Gonzalez, Historia de una botica: La ‘Farmacia-Museo’ del Pueblo Español, 1973; (Bern) Ingrid Müller-landgraf, and François Ledermann, Medizin und Pharmazie in Bern: Eine Zeitreise, no date; (Cracow) Zdislaw Gajda, The Museum of the Faculty of Medicine at the Jagiellonian University, 2000; (Florence) Mara Miniati, Museo di Storia della Scienza, Firenze: Catalogo, 1991; (Heidelberg) Wolf-Dieter Müller-jahncke, Deutsches Apotheken-Museum im Heidelberger Schloss, 1991.

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Excellence in research on the history of pharmacy is recognized by some prizes, the most prestigious of which are the Kremers Award and the Urdang medal, both awarded by the American Institute for the History of Pharmacy and named in memory of Edward Kremers (1865–1941) and Georg Urdang, who were instrumental in the development of the history of pharmacy in the USA and created the institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1905, the German society for the history of pharmacy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Geschichte der Pharmazie) awards the Schelenz-Plakette named after Hermann Schelenz (for the recipients of the Plakette from 1973 to 2003, see Die Schelenz-Stiftung III: 1973 bis 1988, ed. Kurt Ganzinger, and Wolfgang-Hagen Hein, 1989; and Die Schelenz-Stiftung IV: 1989 bis 2003, ed. Klaus Meyer, 2004). Young scholars are eligible for the Jerry Stannard Memorial Award for an “outstanding scholarly study in the fields that Professor Stannard made his own: the history of materia medica, medical botany, pharmacy, and folklore of drug therapy before the year 1700.” Finally, the International Society for the History of Pharmacy awards every other year (actually the odd number years) a two-year research fellowship. In recent times, the recipients of such fellowship submitted research programs devoted to the medieval history of pharmacy. C. 20th-Century Research: An Overview Several encyclopedias or encyclopedic works were published during the 20th century, all of which included – though at different degrees – the history of pharmacy, pharmaceutical botany, and related topics. Thanks to an encyclopedic impetus in the 1920s two major projects were launched, whose publication was not achieved, however, until late in the 1940s-1950s: Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols., 1923–1958, and George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols., 1927–1948 (rpt. 1975). Encyclopedism was continuous during the century (see, for example, the Encyclopedia of Islam [2nd ed.; the 3rd ed. is currently in preparation] and the Encyclopaedia Iranica [now also available on the Internet in open access]), and was particularly productive toward the end of the century, with the following realizations, specifically devoted to the history of science or including it (in chronological order of publication): Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al., 3 vols., 1991; the Neue Pauly, 13 vols. with an index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003, and its English translation Brill’s New Pauly, 16 vols. and 1 supplement (published from 2002); Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005; Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006; and last, but far from the least: Encyclopedia

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of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser, and Georgia Irby-massie, 2008. In the field of the history of medieval pharmacy specifically, the several studies by such specialist as Jerry Stannard (above) have been reproduced in two volumes of collected studies edited by Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay and published in 1999 under the title of: Pristina Medicamenta; Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, and Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance. Also, John M. Riddle has regrouped some of his many works in a similar volume entitled Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992. Academic research on the history of pharmacy has been and still is – mostly based on the study of texts, while research activity by historians of pharmacy in national societies, for example, or in any other context is more often based on archives, and/or focused on material and techniques to be used for the preparation of medicines. These two complementary – rather than opposed – viewpoints are based on different methodologies and produce different results. In the field of textual studies, historians still need to rely in many cases on ancient editions and Latin translation dating back to the Renaissance, that is, on material that is not necessarily reliable for a source-based research. Many texts being still unedited and even unknown, textual studies often consist in locating still unedited texts in manuscripts and in editing them according to the best philological standards. The development of codicology during the second half of the 20th century has transformed this kind of study by introducing into history – be it of pharmacy or of any other field – the data resulting from the analysis of manuscripts themselves (for the application of this to the history of medical sciences, including pharmacy, in Byzantium, see Pedro Badenas de la Peña, “Byzantine Medical Book and the Diffusion of Byzantine Medicine in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Medicina nei Secoli 11 [1999]: 461–76, and David Bennett, “Medical Practice and Manuscripts in Byzantium,” Social History of Medicine 13 [2000]: 279–91). The major problem of this type of study is to determine if and, if so, how they make it possible to trace the practice of pharmacy. Theoretical essays have been written on this point: John Marion Riddle, “Methodology of Historical Drug Research,” in Quid pro quo … (above), no. XV, with a reply in Alain Touwaide, “Historical Drug Research: Reflexion pour une épistemologie de la recherche sur l’histoire du médicament ancien,” Nuncius 11 (1996): 319–36. More recently, see: John M. Riddle, “Research Procedures in Evaluating Medieval Medicine” and Alain Touwaide, “Byzantine Hospital Manuals (Iatrosophia) as a Source for the Study of Therapeutics,” The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice,

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ed. Barbara S. Bowers, 2007, 3–17 and 147–73, respectively; see also Alain Touwaide, “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 72–100. As for archival research, its potential has been recently illustrated by Jean-Pierre Bénézet, Pharmacie et médicament … (above). Documents taken into consideration are those traditionally used by historians, and also notarial archives, testaments, and any other form of report on the setting of apothecaries, their furnitures, instruments, or therapeutic substances, for example. To yield significant results, research on this type of material is usually made on a vast quantity of material. A question of particular interest is how the therapeutic properties of plants and other natural materia medica were discovered. Although this is out of the scope of this survey (as it is more an ethno-pharmacological topic), one essay on it has to be mentioned here as it relies among others on medieval literature: Michael McVaugh, “Foxglove, Digitalis, and the Limits of Empiricism,” Natura, scienze e società medievali: Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, ed. Claudo Leonardi and Francesco Santi, 2008, 1–17, particularly because the author refers to several medieval texts. The primary sources for the history of medieval pharmacy (often identified as herbals; on the genre, see Gundolf Keil, “Arzneibücher,” Lexikon des Mittelalters 1, 1979, 1091–94) have been listed and described by Jakob Büchi, Die Entwicklung der Rezept- und Arzneibuchliteratur, vol. 1: Altertum und Mittelalter, 1982, and partially also in Michael H. P. Freyer, Europäische Heilkräuterkunde: Ein Erfahrungsschatz aus Jahrthausenden, 1998. C. Byzantium For the Byzantine world, the authoritative history of Byzantine literature by the late Herbert Hunger (1914–2000) (Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 2 vols., 1978, vol. 2, 287–320) did not devote much attention to pharmaceutical literature, although it lists some works and provides some useful bibliographical references. The most recent history of medicine by Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine, vol. 4: Byzantine and Islamic Medicine, 2001, 147–150, is not more detailed. There is, however, a rather exhaustive, though not always philologically and historically reliable, inventory and description of the many written sources, which is largely ignored in contemporary literature on Byzantine pharmacy and medicine (perhaps because of its rarity): Pang. G. Kritikos and Stella N. Papadaki, Contribution à l’histoire de la pharmacie chez les Byzantins: Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Inter-

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nationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Athen vom 8. bis 14. April 1967, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1969, 13–78. Though often ignored and extremely difficult to find, also, but very useful in spite of its lack of critical method, is Aristoteles Eftychiades, Eisagôgê eis tên byzantinên therapeutikên, 1983, which lists and analyzes in detail the primary sources, by categories of medical specialties. The bibliography in Hunger (above) can be completed with the following specific notes (chronological order of publication): John Scarborough, “Texts and Sources in Ancient Pharmacy,” Pharmacy in History 29 (1987): 81–4, 133–39; Id., “Classical Antiquity: Medicine and Allied Sciences,” History of Medicine, ed. Rebecca Greene, 1988 (first published in Trends in History 4 [1988]): 5–36 (see especially 23–32 for Byzantium, and 29–32 for pharmacy); Alain Touwaide, “Manuscrits, histoire du texte et édition de traités médicaux et pharmaceutiques grecs et byzantins (1900–1992),” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, Supplementum bibliographicum I (1994): 310–31; and John Scarborough, “New Texts in Byzantine and Arabic Toxicology and Pharmacy,” Pharmacy in History 38 (1996): 96–99. Current bibliography is regularly included in the lists published in each of the two yearly issues of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift (see the section 11. Fachwissenschaften, subsection C. Medizin, Pharmazie; see also the editions of texts [including scientific ones] listed in the section 1 A. Hochsprachliche Literatur, with its several subdivisions: b. Literaturgattungen; c. Fortleben antiker Autoren; d. byzantinische Autoren [Ausgaben, Übersetzungen, Sekundärlitertur]). Given the limitations of the works above, the inventory of primary sources still needs to rely on the catalogue of Greek medical manuscripts edited by Hermann Diels, mainly devoted to classical and late-antique authors and not so much to Byzantine authors: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 2: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte ausser Hippokrates und Galenos, 1906 (with a reed. the same year under a slightly different title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, ed. Hermann Diels, 1906). The catalogue was followed by a supplement: Bericht über den Stand des interakadmischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und Erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 and 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. und II. Teil, ed. Hermann Diels, 1908 (the 2nd ed. of 1906 has been reprinted together with the supplement: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. I: Hippokrates und Galenos, vol. II: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte, vol. III: Nachtrag, ed. Hermann Diels, with a preface by Fridolf Kudklien, 1970). This inventory can be usefully complemented with: Mariarosa Formentin, I codici greci di medicina nelle Tre Venezie, 1978, and Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, “La trasmissione della letteratura

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medica greca nell’Italia meridionale fra X e XV secolo,” Contributi alla cultura greca nell’Italia meridionale I, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1989, 133–257, in both of which Byzantine literature is well represented. As for the analysis of the primary sources, Hunger (above) considered (304; trans. is mine) that “nobody would spend months in reading poorly written Byzantine medical manuscripts to extract one more recipe from the darkness of iatrosophia” (sic). The history by Prioreschi (above) is not much more positive, though not so negative. Despite the abundance of primary material, research on the history of pharmacy in Byzantium is still scant. The works below can be mentioned (chronological order of the Byzantine authors, and, for each one, chronological order of publication of the works quoted here [selection]): (Aetios, 6th c.) Jean Theodorides, “Sur le 13e livre du traité d’Aetios d’Amida, médecin Byzantin du VIe siècle,” Janus 47 (1958): 221–37; Gian Piero Della Capanna, Alcune ricette di Aezio d’Amida e l’ambiente superstizioso del V–VII secolo, 1969; Skevos Philianos , and H. Skaltsa-Diamantidis, “Sur les morsures et les venins d’animaux: 13ème discours d’Aetius d’Amide,” Atti e memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 10 (1993): 30–9; (Alexander of Tralles, 6th c.) Félix Brunet, Médecine et thérapeutique byzantines: Oeuvres médicales d’Alexandre de Tralles, le dernier auteur classique des grands médecins grecs de l’Antiquité, 4 vols., 1933–1937 (French translation of the Greek text edited by Theodor Puschmann, Alexander von Tralles: Original-Text und Übersetzung nebst einer einleitenden Abhandlung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Medicin, 2 vols., 1878–1879); (Stephanos of Athens or Alexandria, 6th c.) on his identity and biography, see: Wanda Wolska-Conus, “Stephanos d’Athènes et Stephanos d’Alexandrie: Essai d’identification et de biographie,” Revue des études byzantines 47 (1989): 5–89; see also the articles by the same in Revue des études byzantines 50 (1992): 5–86, and 52 (1994): 5–68; Maria Papathanassiou, “Stephanus of Alexandria: Pharmaceutical notions and cosmology in his alchemical work,” Ambix 37 (1990): 121–33; (Paul of Nicea [between the 7th and the 9th/10th c.?]) Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, Paolo di Nicea, Manuale medico: Testo edito per la prima volta, con introduzione e note, 1996; (Psellos, 11th c.) Robert Volk, Der medizinische Inhalt der Schriften des Michael Psellos, 1990; (anonymous, 14th c.?) Edouard Jeanselme, “Sur un aide-mémoire de thérapeutique byzantin contenu dans un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (Supplément grec 764),” Mélanges Charles Diehl, vol. 1, 1930, 147–70; (translations from Arabic, mainly 13th–14th c.) Alain Touwaide, Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, vol. 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997; Id., “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science,” Science and Technol-

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ogy in the Islamic World, ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; Id., “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53; Id., “Magna Graecia iterata: Greek Medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th Centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma, 2004, 85–101; id. “Arabic Urology in Byzantium,” The History of Nephrology, New Series, vol. 1, ed. Natale G. De Santo, Luigi Iorio, Spyros G. Marketos, Shaul G. Massry, and Garabed Eknoyan, 2004, 167–73; and Id., “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II: Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo and Guido Bellinghieri, 2008, 39–55; (anonymous, 14th c.) John Marion Riddle, “Byzantine Commentaries on Dioscorides,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scarborough, 1985, 95–102; (lexica of medicinal plant names, mainly 14th c.) Alain Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina: Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28. Also, two authors of uncertain time period: (Demetrius Pepagomenos, 15th c.) Maria Capone Ciollaro, Demetrio Pepagomeno, Prontuario medico: Testo edito per la prima volta, con introduzione, apparato critico e indice, 2003. Some thematic studies have been made, such as: John Scarborough, “Early Byzantine pharmacology,” Symposium … (above), 213–32; and Evangelia A. Varella, “Orientalische Elemente in der Byzantinischen Heilkunde,” Medicina nei secoli 7 (1995): 29–40. D. The Arabic World The history of pharmacy in the Arabic world has been much more investigated. Primary sources have been inventoried, with their manuscripts worldwide and the possible editions, by Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 3: Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H., and 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H., 1971; and Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, 1970, and Id., Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 1972. Primary sources and secondary literature have also been listed in the following bibliographies (in chronological order of publication): Sami Hamarneh, Bibliography on Medicine and Pharmacy in Medieval Islam. Mit einer Einführung “Arabismus in der Geschichte der Pharmazie” von Rudolf Schmitz, 1964; Otto Spies, “Beiträge zur medizinisch-pharmazeutischen Bibliographie des Islam,” Der Islam 44 (1968): 138–73; Rifaat Y. Ebied, Bibliography of Mediaeval Arabic and Jewish Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1971; and Francisca

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Segura Pérez, and Indalecio Lozano Cámara, Índices bibliográficos sobre historia de la ciencia árabo-islámica: metodología y manual de uso, 1992. A much researched topic is the translation of Greek pharmacological and pharmaceutical treatises into Arabic. Manuscripts of such translations are listed in Die Handschriften … ed. Diels (above), passim, as well as in Sezgin, Geschichte … (above), and Ullmann, Die Medizin …, and Id., Die Naturund Geheimwissenschaften … (both above). The list of Arabic manuscripts in Istanbul provided by Diels has been revised in 1934 by Hellmut Ritter (1892–1971) and Richard Walzer (1900–1975): Arabische Übersetzungen griechischer Ärzte in Stambuler Bibliotheken, 1934. An Arabic version of the Materia medica by Dioscorides was edited by César E. Dubler and Elias Terés in the 2nd volume of the work by the former, La ‘Materia Medica’ de Dioscórides, 6 vols., 1953–1957 (the 2nd volume was published in Tetuan in 1952, and in Barcelona in 1957). Also, a manuscript (Leiden, or. 289) has been studied in detail: Mahmoud M. Sadek, The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides, 1983. For a survey of the several translations of Greek pharmacological literature (including Dioscorides), see also Alain Touwaide, “L’intégration de la pharmacologie grecque dans le monde arabe,” Medicina nei secoli 7 (1995): 259–89. For Galen, more specifically, see Penelope Johnstone, “Galen in Arabic: The Transformation of Galenic Pharmacology,” Galen: Problems and Prospects. A Collection of Papers submitted at the 1979 Cambridge Conference, ed. Vivian Nutton, 1981, 197–212. Primary sources have been abundantly studied. See, for example (alphabetical list of Arabic authors according to the spelling in the publications): (abu-s-Salt) Pedro Vernia Martinez, Abu-S-Salt Umayya, 1068–1134, Tratado de los medicamentos simples, 1999; (al-Biruni) Hakim Mohammed Said, al-Biruni’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica, 2 vols., 1973 (vol. 1: Text edited with English Translation by Hakim Mohammed Said; vol. 2: Introduction, Commentary and Evaluation by Sami K. Hamarneh); Rana M. H. Ehsan Elahie, “Sources of Kitab al-Saidana of al-Biruni,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 118–21; Max Meyerhof, Das Vorwort zur Drogenkunde des Beruni, 1932; Kamal Muhammad Habib, “The Kitab al-Saidana: Structure and Approach,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 63–79; (al-Ghafiqi) Max Meyerhof, Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghafiqi, 1930; Max Meyerhof, and George P. Sobhy, The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus) Edited from the Only Known Manuscript with an English Translation, Commentary and Indices, 1932, and Id., The Abridged Version of “The Book of Simple Drugs” of Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghafiqi, by Gregorius Abu-l-Farag (Barhebraeus) Edited from the Only Two Known Manuscripts with an English Translation, Commen-

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tary and Indices, Fasc. II: Letters BA’ and GIM, 1937 (both works have been reprinted as vols. 51 and 57 [1996] in the series Islamic Medicine of the Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, published under the direction of Fuat Sezgin at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt). Three previously published studies have been reproduced in the same series under the title Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Ghâfiqî (d. c. 1165). Texts and Studies Collected and Reprinted, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996: Moritz Steinschneider, “Gafiki’s Verzeichniss einfacher Heilmittel (1873 and 1881);” Max Meyerhof, “Über die Pharmakologie und Botanik des Ahmad al-Ghâfiqî (1930);” and Id., “Deux manuscrits illustrés du Livre des Simples d’Ahmad al-Gâfiqî (1940–41)”; (al-Ghazzi) Sami K. Hamarneh, “Medicinal Plants, Therapy and Ecology in Al-Ghazzi’s Book on Agriculture,” Studies in History of Medicine 2 (1978): 223–63; (’Ali b. Ridwan) Jacques Grand’ Henry, Le livre de la méthode du médecin de ’Ali B. Ridwan (998–1067): Texte arabe édité, traduit et commenté, Tome I: Introduction-Thérapeutique, 1979, and Tome II: DiagnosticGlossaire, 1984; (al-Kindi) Martin Levey, The Medical Formulary or Aqrabadhin of Al-Kindi: Translated with a Study of its Materia Medica, 1966; (al-Samarqandi) Martin Levey, and Noury Al-khaledy, The Medical Formulary of al-Samarqandi and the Relation of Early Arabic Simples to those Found in the Indigenous Medicine of the Near East and India, 1967; (al-Zahrawi) Sami K. Hamarneh, and Glenn Sonnedecker, A Pharmaceutical View of Abulcasis Al-Zahrawi in Moorish Spain, 1963; Marianne Engeser, Der ‘Liber servitoris’ des Albukasis (936–1013): Übersetzung, Kommentar und Nachdruck der Textfassung von 1471, 1986; Luisa Maria Arvide Cambra, Un tratado de polvos medicinales en Al-Zahrawi, 1994; Ead., Tratado de pastillas medicinales según Abulcasis, 1996; (ibn abi l-bayan) José Luis Valverde, and Carmen Peña Muñoz, El formulario de los hospitales de Ibn Abi L-Bayan: Introducción, traducción española y comentarios, con glosarios, 1981; (ibn al-Baitar) Ibrahim Ben Mrad, Ibn al-Baytar (m. 646 H./1248 J.C.): Commentaire de la ‘Materia Medica’ de Dioscoride, 1990; Ana María Cabo González, Ibn Al-Baytar al-Malaqi (m. 646–1248), Kitab al-Yami li-mufradat al-adwiya wa-l-agdiya, Colección de Medicamentos y Alimentos: Introducción, edición crítica, traducción e índices de las letras sad y dad, 2002. Also the French trans. by Lucien Leclerc (1816–1893) published under the title ibn al Beithar, Traité des simples, 3 vols., 1877–1883, was reprinted twice: by the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris [1992], and by Fuat Sezgin, at the Institut für Geschichte der arabischislamischen Wissenschaften at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) in 1996. For some studies, see Rainer Degen, “Al-safarjal: A Marginal Note to Ibn al-Baytar,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 2 (1978): 143–48; Juan Luís Carrillo, and Maria Paz Torres, Ibn alBaytar y el arabismo español del XVIII: Edición trilingue del prologo de su ‘Kitab al-

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chami,’ 1982; S. M. Imamuddin, and S. M. Pervaiz Imam, “Impact of the Spanish Muslim Pharmacologist Ibn al-Baitar,” Hamdard medicus 36 (1993): 116–18; Esin Koahya, “Ibn Baitar and his Influence on the Eastern Medicine,” Actas del XXXIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Medicina: GranadaSevilla, 1–6 septiembre, 1992, ed. Juan Luís Carrillo, and Guillermo Olagüe de Ros, 1994, 401–07; (Ibn al-Nafis) Emilie Savage-Smith, “Drug Therapy in Trachoma and its Sequel as Presented by Ibn al-Nafis,” Pharmacy in History 14 (1972): 95–110; Samir Yahia El-Gammal, “Therapy and Medicaments by Ibn al-Nafis,” Bulletin of the Indian Institute of History of Medicine 2 (1992): 111–20; (ibn at-Tilmid) Oliver Kahl, The Dispensatory of Ibn at-Tilmid: Arabic Text, English Translation, Study and Glossaries, 2007; (ibn Buklaris) Ana Labarta, “La farmacología de Ibn Buklaris: sus fuentes,” Actas del IV Coloquio Hispano-Tunecino, Palma de Mallorca, 1979, 1983, 163–74; most recently: Ibn Baklarish’s Book of Simples. Medical Remedies between three Faiths in Twelfth-century Spain, ed. Charles Burnett, 2008; (ibn Butlan) Hosam Elkhadem, Le Taqwim al-Sihha (Tacuini Sanitatis) d’Ibn Butlan: Un traité médical du XIe siècle. Histoire du Texe, Edition Critique, Traduction, Commentaire, 1990; (ibn Sina) Tazimuddin Siddiqi, “Ibn Sina on Materia Medica,” Studies in History of Medicine 5 (1981): 243–77; Javed Ahmad, and Ahmet H. Farooqui, “Some Controversial Drugs from Avicenna’s ‘Canon of Medicine’: an Appraisal,” Hamdard Medicus 34 (1991): 81–87; Floréal Sanagustin, “Ibn Sina, ou la raison médicale maîtrisée,” Medicina nei Secoli 6 (1994): 393–406; (ibn Wafid) Luis Faraudo de Saint-Germain, El ‘Libre de les medicines particulars’, versión catalana trescentista del texto árabe del tratado de los medicamentos simples de Ibn Wafid, autor médico toledano del siglo XI: Transcripción, estudio proemial y glosarios, 1943; Luisa Fernanda Aguirre de Cárcer, Ibn Wafid (m. 460/1067), Kitab Al-Adwiya Al-Mufrada (Libro de los medicamentos simples), vol. 1: Edición, traducción, notas y glosarios, 1995; (Maimonides) Max Meyerhof, “Sur un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte 17 (1935): 223–35 (reproduced in Mûsâ ibn Maymûn / Maimonides (d. 1204). Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1996); Id., Sarh asma’ al-‘uqqar (l’Explication des noms de drogues), un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide: Texte publié pour la première fois d’après un manuscrit unique, avec traduction, commentaire et index, 1940 (English trans.: Fred Rosner, Moses Maimonides’ Glossary of Drug Names: Translated from Max Meyerhof ’s French, 1979); Suessman Muntner, Treatise on Poisons and their Antidotes, 1966; (Razi) Naimuddin Zubairy, Saftab Saeed, and Afzal Rizvi, “Razi’s Treatise ‘Bar-us-sa’ah’ on First Aid and Some Medicinal Plants Used to Assist Such Conditions,” Bulletin of the Indian Institute of History of Medicine 22 (1992): 121–34; (Sabur ibn-Sahl) Oliver Kahl,

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Dispensatorium parvuum: al-Aqrabadhin al-.saghir. Sabur ibn Sahl, 1994; Id., Sabur Ibn-sahl, The Small Dispensatory: Translated from the Arabic Together with a Study and Glossaries, 2003; (Sérapion) Pierre Guigues, “Les noms arabes dans Sérapion, ‘liber de simplici medicina’: Essai de restitution et d’identification de noms arabes de médicaments utilisités au Moyen Âge,” Journal Asiatique 10e série, 4 (1905): 473–546; 6 (1905): 49–112 (also published as a monograph under the same title, 1905, and reproduced in Texts and Studies on Islamic Medicine: Collected and Reprinted, vol. 5, ed. Fuat Sezgin, 1997; (Suwaidi) Albert Dietrich, “Aus dem Drogenbuch des Suwaidi,” Mélanges d’Islamologie: Volume dédié à la mémoire de Armand Abel par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis, ed. Pierre Salmon, 1974, 91–107; (Tabari) Werner Schmucker, “Die pflanzliche und mineralische Materia Medica im Firdaus al-Hikma des Tabari,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Bonn, 1969. Several analyses of the history of pharmacy in the Arabic world have been published, including the following (in chronological order of publication): Eric John Holmyard, “Medieval Arabic Pharmacology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of the History of Medicine 29 (1935–1936): 1–10; Max Meyerhof, “The Background and Origins of Arabian Pharmacology”; “Pharmacology During the Golden Age of Arabian Medicine”; and “Arabian Pharmacology in North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula,” Ciba Symposia 6 (1944): 1847–56; 1857–1867, and 1868–1872 respectively; Sami Hamarneh, “Origins of Arabic Drug and Diet Therapy,” Physis 11 (1969): 267–86; Id., “A History of Arabic Pharmacy,” Physis 14 (1972): 5–54; Id., Origins of Pharmacy and Therapy in the Near East, 1973; Martin Levey, Early Arabic Pharmacology: An Introduction based on Ancient and Medieval Sources, 1973; A. H. Israili, “Arab Pharmacology,” Studies in History of Medicine 1 (1977): 193–201; Sami Hamarneh, “Development of Pharmacy, Ancient Times to Middle Ages,” Studies in History of Medicine 6 (1982): 37–42; Hakim Mohammed Said, “Islamic Medicine and the Art of Drug-Making: a Historical Perspective,” Hamdard Medicus 33 (1990): 43–57. Arabo-Muslim Spain is a special case, which has been abundantly investigated. In addition to the editions and analyses of texts mentioned above, see, for example Max Meyerhof, “Esquisse d’Histoire de la Pharmacologie et Botanique chez les Musulmans d’Espagne,” Al-Andalus, 3 (1935): 1–41, and also, more recently, the several essays in Ciencias de la naturaleza en Al-Andaluz, Textos y Estudios, vols. 1–3, ed. Expiración García Sanchez, 1990–1994, and vols. 4–6, ed. Camilo Alvarez De Morales, 1996–2001.

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E. Late Antiquity For the Western Middle Ages, the production should be divided in a somewhat artificial way in three different periods: Late-antiquity, early Middle Ages (or Pre-Salernitan period), and Salernitan and Post-Salernitan period. For late-antiquity, the many extant texts have been listed with the references of their editions in Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, Pierre-Paul Corsetti, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, 1987, with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999, 2000. Many texts have been edited, on whose authors the entries to the Neue Pauly/Brill’s New Pauly and Keyser and Irby-Massie (above) should be consulted. A major publication was the edition of what could be called the LateAntique Corpus of pharmacy, which includes Antonius Musa, De herba vettonica; the herbal attributed to Apuleius; Sextus Placitus; and the anonymous De taxone: Ernst Howald, and Henry E. Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba vettonica liber: Pseudoapulei Herbarius, Anonymi De taxone liber. Sexti Placiti liber Medicinae ex animalibus, 1927. The whole text of the corpus as it appears in the manuscript 296 of Lucca (Italy), Biblioteca Statale, has been reproduced and translated into Spanish (with a study) in the volume of commentary that accompanies the recent facsimile reproduction of the manuscript under the title Herbolarium et materia medica (Biblioteca Statale de Lucca, ms. 296), 2007. After its edition by Howald and Sigerist, the Pseudo-Apuleius has been repeatedly investigated during the 20th century in such works as Friedrich W. T. Hunger, The Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius: From the Ninth-Century Manuscript in the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Codex casinensis 97) together with the First Printed Edition of John Phil. de Lignamine (Editio princeps Romae 1481), 1935; Erminio Caprotti, and William T. Stearn, Herbarium apulei (1481) – Herbolario volgare (1522). Introduction by E. Caprotti with an essay by W. T. Stearn, 1979; and, more recently, in the volume of commentary that accompanies the facsimile reproduction of the manuscript 296 of Lucca (above), see a pharmaceutical discussion by Alain Touwaide, “Enfermadad y curación,” 155–66. For the editions, translations, and/or studies of relevant texts, see (alphabetical order of ancient authors’ name): (alfabetum Galieni) Carmélia Halleux-opsomer, “Un Herbier médical du haut moyen âge: l’Alfabetum Galieni,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 4 (1982): 65–97; (Cassius Felix) Anne Fraisse, Cassius Félix, De la médecine: Texte établi, traduit et annoté, 2002; see also Brigitte Maire, and Anne Fraisse, Cassii Felicis libri de medicina Concordantiae … Accedunt numeri, voces Graecae Graecis Latinisque litteris scriptae, index nominum notabiliorum, index frequentiae decrescentis formarum, 2003; (Diosco-

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rides, De materia medica) the “old” Latin trans. identified as Dioscorides Longobardus has been edited by Konrad Hofmann and Theodor M. Auracher, “Der Longobardische Dioskorides des Marcellus Virgilius,” Romanische Forschungen 1 (1883): 49–105 (Book I); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337. Aus T. M. Aurachers Nachlass herausgegeben und ergänzt,” Romanische Forschungen 10 (1899): 181–247 (Book II), and 369–446 (Book III); 11 (1901): 1–121 (Book IV); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337),” Romanische Forschungen 13 (1902): 161–243 (Book V); and Id., “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Index der Sachnamen und der wichtigeren Wörter,” Romanische Forschungen 14 (1903): 601–36. Book I has been reedited by Haralambie Mihaescu, Dioscoride Latino, Materia medica, Libro primo, 1938; (Dioscorides [Pseudo-]) Hermann Kästner, “Pseudo-Dioskorides de herbis femininis,” Hermes 31 (1896): 578–636; John M. Riddle, “Pseudo-Dioscorides’ Ex herbis feminis and Early Medieval Medical Botany,” Journal of the History of Biology 14 (1981): 43–81 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. IX); (Epistula de vulture) Rainer Möhler, ‘Epistula de vulture’: Untersuchungen zu einer organotherapeutischen Drogenmonographie des Frühmittelalters, 1990; (Gargilius Martialis) John M. Riddle, “Gargilius Martialis as Medical Writer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984): 408–29 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo … [above], no. X); Brigitte Maire, Gargilius Martialis, Les remèdes tirés des légumes et des fruits: Texte établi, traduit et commenté, 2002; Ead., Concordantiae Gargilianae, 2002; (Marcellus of Bordeaux) Max Niedermann, Marcelli De medicamentis liber – Marcellus über Heilmittel, 2nd ed. by Eduard Liechtenhan, trans. by Jutta Kollesch, and Diethard Nickel, 2 vols., 1968 (includes a German trans.); (Medicina Plinii) Alf Önnerfors, Plinii Secundi Iunioris qui feruntur de medicina libri tres, 1964, with a German trans. and a study in Hans Gertler, “Über die Bedeutung der Medicina Plinii Secundi Iunioris unter Berücksichtigung ihrer hauptsächlichen Auswirkungen und ihrer Tradition, zugleich mit einer modernen deutschen Übersetzung nach der Edition von Önnerfors,” habilitation thesis, University of Erfurt, 1966; for a study, see also Alf Önnerfors, In medicinam Plinii studia philologica: De memoria et uerborum contextu opusculi, de elocutione et aetate deque iis operibus, quibus medio aeuo conceptum est, 1963. For the inventory of the materia medica in these and other works, see Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée du Ier au Xe siècle, 2 vols., 1989, with a short historical and bibliographical notice for each of the treatises included in the index.

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F. Early Middle Ages For the early-medieval or Pre-Salernitan period, Saint-Gall activity has been the object of a certain number of studies. See first Johannes Duft, Notker der Arzt: Klostermedizin und Möncharzt im frühmittelalterlichen St. Gallen, 1972. The most interesting aspect here is the herbal. The so-called Botanicus Sangallensis, which was known as early as 1928 (Erhard Landgraf, “Ein frühmittelalterlicher Botanicus,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Leipzig, 1928 [reproduced in Kyklos 1 [1928]: 114–46]), remained unpublished, however, until recently: Monica Niederer, Der St. Galler ‘Botanicus’: Ein frühmittelalterliches Herbar. Kritische Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2005. The study of the garden for medicinal plants is included in the research program conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the University of Virginia, and consisting, among others, in producing a virtual tri-dimensional reconstruction of the monastery; see Walter Horn, and Ernest Born, The Plan of St Gall: A Study of the Architecture & Economy of, & Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols., 1979 (see vol. 2, 175–209, and 300–13 for the garden, and the pharmacy, respectively). The rediscovery of the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (dating back to ca. 795) was a major event in the history of medieval pharmacy, as its text makes evident the continuity from antiquity and late antiquity to the Pre-Salernitan period, as well as the exchanges between East (that is, Byzantium) and West. In 1989, Ulrich Stoll presented a first report on the discovery of the manuscript, and a first approach to its history: “Das ‘Lorscher Arzneibuch’: Ein Arbeitsbericht”; and “Das ‘Lorscher Arzneibuch’: Ein Überblick über Herkunft, Inhalt und Anspruch des ältesten Arzneibuchs deutscher Provenienz,” Das Lorscher Arzneibuch und die frühmittelalterliche Medizin: Verhandlungen des medizinhistorischen Symposiums in September 1989 in Lorsch, ed. Gundolf Keil, and Paul Schnitzer, 1991, 29–59 and 61–80, respectively. The same year, a facsimile of the manuscript was published, with a volume of commentary: Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Faksimile der Handschrift Msc. Med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1989. The volume of commentary contains an introduction and the translation of the text: Ulrich Stoll, and Gundolf Keil, in collaboration with Albert Ohlmeyer, Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Übersetzung der Handschrift Msc. med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg. Three years later, Ulrich Stoll authored a critical edition of the text, with a German translation, and all the necessary indices and critical apparatus: Ulrich Stoll, Das ‘Lorscher Arzneibuch’: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts (Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1). Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar, 1992. This rediscovery led to a reexamination of Carolingian medicine and pharmacy, particularly monastic medicine. The symposium held in 1989

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(above) contextualized the Lorscher Arzneibuch: Das Lorscher Arzneibuch …, ed. Keil and Schnitzer (above). Among the contributions to this volume (in addition to the two by Stoll above), we can mention: (87–108) Heinrich Schipperges, “Die Medizin im abendländische Mittelalter”; (109–14) Albert Ohlmeyer, “Krankenpflege und Gesundheitsregeln nach der Weisung St. Benedikt”; (115–22) Robert Halleux, “Die frühmittelalterliche Rezeptliteratur”; (123–28) Bernhard Bischoff, “Reste einer vorkarolingischen volkstümlichen Rezeptsammlung.” Another volume published on the occasion of the rediscovery of the manuscript focused more specifically on the materia medica: Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Klostermedizin in der Karolingerzeit. Ausgewählte Texte und Beiträge, 1989. Among the original contributions, the following are relevant here: (129–47) Peter Dilg, “Materia medica medievalis: Die Arzneimittelverse des Otho von Cremona (um 1200)”; (149–218) Clemens Stoll, “Arznei und Arzneiversorgung in frühmittelalterlichen Klöstern”; (196–98) inventory and identification of the plants mentioned in the Hortulus by Walhafrid Strabo; (199–202) inventory of the plants in Würzburg collection, dating back to 840 circa. The De rerum natura by Hraban Maur was the object of history of health research with such essays as Frederick S. Paxton, “Curing Bodies – Curing Souls: Hrabanus Maurus, Medical Education, and the Clergy in Ninth-Century France,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 230–52, and a study of some of its sources: Maria Rissel, Rezeption antiker und patristischer Wissenschaft bei Hrabanus Maurus: Studien zur karolingischen Geistesgeschichte, 1976. Also, the Hortulus by Walahfrid Strabo has been approached as a document for the history of pharmacy (in chronological order of publication): Karl Sudhoff, Des Walahfrid von der Reichenau Hortulus: Gedichte über die Kräuter seines Klostergartens vom Jahre 827, Wiedergabe des ersten Wiener Druckes vom Jahre 1510, eingeleitet und medizinisch, botanisch und druckgeschichtlich gewürdigt, 1926; Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, trans. by Raef Payne, and commentary by Wilfrid Blunt, 1966; or, more recently, Hans-Dieter Stoffler, Der hortulus des Walahfrid Strabo: Aus dem Kräutergarten des Klosters Reichenau, 1978 (6th ed. 2000). Similarly, the Liber simplicis medicinae by Hildegard of Bingen was the object of a certain number of studies, particularly during the 1990s. It will suffice to mention some aspects of this production: Irmgard Müller, Die pflanzlichen Heilmittel bei Hildegard von Bingen, 1982 (re-ed. in 1993); Laurence Moulinier, “Hildegarde de Bingen, les plantes médicinales et le jugement de la postérité: Pour une mise in perspective,” Scientiarum historia 20 (1994): 77–95; Melitta Weiss Adamson, “Der deutsche Anhang zu Hildegard

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von Bingens ‘Liber simplicis medicinae’ in Codex 6952 der Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (fol. 232v-238v),” Sudhoffs Archiv 79 (1995): 173–92; more recently: Victoria Sweet, Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine, 2006. From this period also date the many antidote and recipe books (on the notion of which, see Jean Barbaud, “Les formulaires médicaux du Moyen Age: médecines savantes et médecines populaires,” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 277 [1988]: 138–53; and Robert Halleux, “Die frühmittelalterliche Rezeptliteratur,” Das Lorscher Arzneibuch …, ed. Keil and Schnitzer [above], 115–22) published by Julius Jörimann, Frühmittelalterliche Rezeptarien, 1925, and Henry E. Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur, 1923, of which the list follows (antidote and recipe books are identified by the name of the place they are usually attributed to): (Bamberg) Jörimann, 61–77; (Bamberg [2]) Sigerist, 21–39; (Berlin) Sigerist, 65–77; (Cambridge) Sigerist, 160–67; (Glasgow) Sigerist, 99–160; (London) Sigerist, 17–21; (Reichenau) Sigerist, 39–64; (Saint-Gall) Jörimann, 10–37, and Sigerist, 78–99; (Saint Gall [2]) Jörimann, 37–61. Two important contributions are Patricia Skinner, Health & Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy,1997, where the author analyzes the circulation of medico-pharmaceutical knowledge in Italy between the end of antiquity (if any) and the rise of Salerno, and the so-called THEOREMA program, consisting in inventorying all the terms of materia medica in the pharmaceutical literature prior to the 10th century, on which, see, in chronological order of publication: Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, and Louis Delatte, “Ancient Medical Recipes and the Computer: The THEOREMA Project,” Pharmacy in History 23 (1981): 87–9; Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Le traitement informatique des recettes médicales du haut moyen âge,” Actes du Congrès International Informatique et Sciences Humaines, 1981, 649–67; and Ead., “Une banque informatisée de pharmacopée ancienne: Pour une histoire quantitative du médicament,” Actes du XXVIIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de la Médecine, 1982, vol. 2, 215–19. As a result, Carmélia Opsomer published the Index de la pharmacopée … (above), which provides references according to the system created by the author, and is thus difficult to use. G. The Late Middle Ages During the next period, medicine and, even more, pharmacy were transformed as a result of the translation activity supposedly started in Salerno, with Constantine the African but most probably already started earlier, among the multi-lingual milieu of physicians in Southern Italy, on the mainland or in Sicily. The medical and pharmaceutical literature of this period is

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probably best known, possibly because of the abundance of manuscripts, their lavish illustration that catch the eye, and also the increasing presence of the vernacular. Nevertheless, manuscripts are still insufficiently inventoried in spite of the availability of such reference works as the catalogue of incipit of Latin medieval texts by Lynn Thorndike, and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 1963 (the work is now available in an expanded and updated digital version identified as ETK, which is accompanied by the so-called eVK, that is, the updated version by Linda Ersham Voigts, and Patricia Deery Kurts, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, CD-Rom, 2000). Discoveries are still possible, as was shown by the antidotarius magnus, supposedly lost: Alfonz Lutz, “Der verschollene frühsalernitanische Antidotarius magnus in einer Basler Handschrift aus dem 12. Jahrhundert und das Antidotarium Nicolai,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Dubrovnik vom 26–31 August 1960, ed. Georg Edmumd Dann, 1960, 97–133. For a research program on the manuscripts of Salernitan texts, see, La Scuola Medica Salernitana …, ed. Jacquart, and Paravicini Bagliani (above). Among the treatises that have been researched, one could quote the following (alphabetical order of names or titles): (antidotarium Nicolai) Dietlinde Goltz, Mittelalterliche Pharmazie und Medizin dargestellt an Geschichte und Inhalt des Antidotarium Nicolai, mit einem Nachdruck der Druckfassung von 1471, 1976; Gundolf Keil, “Zur Datierung des Antidotarium Nicolai,” Sudhoffs Archiv 62 (1978): 190–96; Willem F. Daems, “De Middelnederlandse Vertalingen van het Antidotarium Nicolaï,” Scientiarum Historia 3 (1961): 1–20; Pierre Boeynaems, “Een Onbekende Middelnederlandse Vertaling van het Antidotarium Nicolaï,” Scientiarum Historia 5 (1963): 118–19; (Arnau de Vilanova) Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera medica omnia, vol. 2: Aphorismi de gradibus, ed. and trans. Michael McVaugh, 1975; Arnau de Vilanova, Antidotario, ed. Pedro Vernia, 2 vols., 1994 (vol. 1 contains a facsimile of the old ed of the Antidotario, and vol. 2 a Spanish trans with a study); Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera Medica Omnia, vol. 17: Translatio libri albuzale de medicinis simplicibus, ed. José Martínez Gázquez, and Michael R. McVaugh; Abu-l-Salt umayya, Kitab al-Adwiya, ed. Ana Labarta; Llibre d’albumesar de simples medecines, ed. Luis Cifuente, 2004. See also Michael R. McVaugh, “Arnald of Villanova’s regimen almarie (regimen castra sequentium) and Medieval Military Medicine,” Viator 23 (1992): 201–13; and Michael R. McVaugh, and Luis García Ballester, “Therapeutic Method in the Later Middle Ages: Arnau de Vilanova on Medical Contingency,” Caduceus 11 (1995): 73–86; W. Braekman, “A Middle Dutch Version of Arnald of Villanova’s Liber de Vinis,” Janus 55 (1968): 96–133; (circa

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instans) Carmélia Opsomer, Livre des simples medecines: Codex Bruxellensis IV 1024, 2 vols., 1980; and Ead., Book of Simple Medicines. With a Preface by William T. STEARN, 2 vols., 1984; Le livre des Simples Médecines d’après le manuscrit français 12322 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, 1986; Nigel F. Palmer, and Klaus Speckenbach, Träume und Kräuter: Studien zur Petroneller Circa instansHandschrift und zu den deutschen Traumbüchern des Mittelalters, 1990; Leo J. Vandewiele, Een middelnederlandse versie van de ‘Circa instans’ van Platearius naar de hss Portland, British Museum ms. Loan 29/332, XIVe eeuw en Universiteitsbiblioteek te Gent Hs. 1457, XVe eeuw. Uitgegeven en gecommentarieerd, [1970]; (Gilbertus anglicus) Gundolf Keil, ‘magister giselbertus de villa parisiensi’: Beobachtungen zu den Kranewittbeeren und Gilberts pharmakologischen Renommae,” Sudhoff Archiv 78 (1994): 80–9; Marie Getz Faye, “The Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus,” Pharmacy in History 34 (1992): 17–25; (Marbode of Rennes) John M. Riddle, Marbode of Renne’s (1035–1123) De lapidibus Considered as a Medical Treatise, with Text, Commentary, and C. W. King’s Translation, together with Text and Translation of Marbode’s Minor Works on Stones, 1977; (Mesue) Ulrike Heuken, Der achte, neunte und zehnte Abschnitt des Antidotarium Mesuë in der Druckfassung Venedig 1561 (Trochisci, Pulver, Suffuf, Pillen): Übersetzung, Kommentar und Nachdruck der Textfassung von 1561, 1990; (Nicolaus praepositus) Alfons Lutz, “Das ‘Dispensarium ad aromatarios’ des Nicolaus Praepositus (richtig Prepositi) um 1490 und seine Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Pharmazie,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Rotterdam vom 17.–21. September 1960, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1965, 87–103; (receptaries) Maria Sofia Corradini Bozzi, Ricettari medico-farmaceutici medievali nella Francia meridionale, vol. 1, 1997; Anna Martellotti, I ricettari di Federico II: Dal ‘Meridionale’ al ‘Liber de coquina,’ 2005; (Roccabonella) Francesco Paganelli, and Elsa M. Cappelletti, “Il codice erbario Roccabonella (sec. XV) e suo contributo alla storia della farmacia,” Atti e Memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 (1996): 111–17 (tacuinum sanitatis) Luisa Cogliati Arano, The Medieval Health Book Tacuinum Sanitatis, 1976 (first published in Italian, 1973); Tacuinum Sanitatis: Vollständige Faksimile Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex 2396 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, with a volume of commentary by Heinrich Konrad, and Joachim Rössl, 1984; L’art de vivre au Moyen Age: Codex Vindobonensis serie nova 2644 conservé à la Bibliothèque Nationale d’Autriche, ed. Daniel Poirion, and Claude Thomasset, 1995.

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H. Topics In addition to studies on the texts and their manuscripts, research also dealt with aspects of the history of pharmacy, be they drugs, specific medicines, treatments for specific medical conditions or any other relevant element (works below are listed by topic, in alphabetical order of topics): (amber) John Marion Riddle, “Amber in Ancient Pharmacy: The Transmission of Information about a Single Drug: a Case Study,” Pharmacy in History 15 (1973): 3–17 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo …, no. V); (ambergris) John M. Riddle, “Pomum ambrae: Amber and Ambergris in Plague Remedies,” Sudhoffs Archiv 48 (1964): 111–22 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo …, no. I); (analgesics) G. Kalantzis, C. Trompoukis, C. Tsiamis, and J. Lascaratos, “The Use of Analgesics and Hypnotics in the Ancient Greece and Byzantine Era,” The History of Anaesthesia Society, Proceedings 32 (2003): 27–31; (anesthesia) Gundolf Keil, “Spongia somnifera: Mittelalterliche Meilensteine auf dem Weg zur Voll- und Lokalnarkose,” Anaesthesist 38 (1989): 643–48; (apostolicum) Erhart Kahle, “Das Apostolicum in der arabischen medizinischen Literatur,” Licht der Natur: Medizin in Fachliteratur und Dichtung. Festschrift für Gundolf Keil zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Josef Domes, Werner G. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Christoph Weisser, and Wolker Zimmermann, 1994, 239–50; (apoteca and apotecarius) Willem F. Daems, “Die Termini apoteca and apotecarius im Mittelalter,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Rom vom 6.–10. September 1954, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1956, 39–52; (Arabic materia medica in the West) Peter Dilg, “Materia Medica und therapeutische Praxis um 1500: Zum Einfluss der arabischen Heilkunde auf den europäischen Arzneischatz,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten: Kongressakten des 4 Symposion des Mediävistenverbandes in Köln 1991 aus Anlass des 1000. Todesjahres der Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Odilo Engels, and Peter Schreiner, 1993, 353–77; (Ayurveda and Arabic medicine) Abdul Wahid, and Hefazat Husain Siddiqui , A Survey of Drugs: With Particular Reference to the Arab (Unani) Medicine and Ayurveda, 1961; (balsam) Marcus Milwright, “Balsam in the Mediaeval Mediterranean: A Case Study of Information and Commodity Exchange,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 14 (2001): 3–23; Id., “The Balsam of Matariyya: An Exploration of a Medieval Panacea,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66 (2003): 193–209; (calendar for health management) Karl Sudhoof, “Medizinische Monatsregeln für Aderlass, Schröpfen, Baden, Arzneigebrauch und Auswahl der Speisen und Getränke aus einer Pariser Handschrift des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 2 (1909): 136–39; Hans-Rudolf Fehlmann, “Diätetische Monatsregeln in einem

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“Handbuch der Heilkunde” aus der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Orbis Pictus: Kultur- und pharmaziehistorische Studien. Festschrift für Wolfgang-Hagen Hein zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Dressendörfer, and Wolf-Dieter MüllerJahncke, 1985, 103–17; Ortrun Riha, “Die diätetischen Vorschriften der mittelalterlichen Monatsregeln,” Licht der Natur …, ed. Domes, Gerabek, Haage, Weisser, and Zimmermann (above), 339–64; (cancer) John M. Riddle, “Ancient and Medieval Chemotherapy for Cancer,” Isis 76 (1985): 319–30 (reproduced in Riddle, Quid pro quo …, no. XII); (contraception) John Marion Riddle, “Oral Contraceptives and Early-Term Abortifacients during Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Past and Present 132 (1991): 3–32; Id., Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992; Id., Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, 1997; (Cosmas and Damianos) Marie-Louise David Danel, Iconographie des saints Côme et Damien, 1958; Pierre Julien, Saint Côme et Saint Damien patrons des médecins chirurgiens et pharmaciens, with illustrations by Alvaro Garzon, 1980; Gerhard Fichtner, “Das verpflanzte Mohrenbein: Zur Interpretation der Kosmas-und-Damian-Legende,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 3 (1968): 87–100 (reproduced in Medizin im mittelalterlichen Abendland, ed. Gerhard Baader, and Gundolf Keil, 1982); Pierre Julien, François Ledermann, and Alain Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano dal culto popolare alla protezione di chirurghi, medici e farmacisti Aspetti e immagini, 1993; (cosmetics) John Lascaratos, Constantine Tsiamis, Gerasimos Lascaratos, and Nicholas G. Stavriameas, “The Roots of Cosmetic Medicine: Hair Cosmetics in Byzantine Times (AD 324–1453),” International Journal of Dermatology 43 (2004): 397–401; (dental drugs) Effi Poulakou-rebelakou, M. Stavrou, Costas Tsiamis, and M. Prokopidi, “Dental Drugs during the Byzantine Times (330–1453 AD),” Program Abstracts of the XXth Nordic Medical History Congress, Reyklavik, Iceland, August 10–13, 2005, no pagination; (dietetics) Luis García-ballester, “Dietetic and Pharmacological Therapy: A Dilemma Among Fourteenth-Century Jewish Practitioners in the Montpellier Area,” Clio Medica 22 (1991): 23–37; Thomas Richter and Gundolf Keil, “‘Ain bischoff und … sin bös gelüst’ : Untersuchungen zum Einfluss der Phytotherapie auf die mittelalterliche Gastronomie, dargestellt am ‘Konstanzer Kochbuch’ von 1460,” Würzburger Diözesangeschichteblätter 56 (1994): 59–66; Melitta Weiss Adamson, “Unus theutonicus plus bibit quam duo latini: Food and Drink in Late Medieval Germany,” Medium Aevum Quotidianum 33 (1995): 8–20; Ead., Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in Regimen Sanitatis Literature from 800 to 1400, 1995; (East-West relations) Albert Dietrich, “Islamic Sciences and the Medieval West: Pharmacology,” Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Intercultural Relations. Papers Presented at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Center for

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Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, ed. Khalil I. Semaan, 50–63; (England) Gösta Frisk, A Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus De viribus herbarum, 1949; Linda E. Voigts, “AngloSaxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons,” Isis 70 (1979): 250–68; Maria Amalia D’Aronco, and Margaret L. Cameron, The Old English Illustrated Pharmacopoeia. British Library Cotton Vitellius C III, 1998; Tony Hunt, and Michael Benskin, Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Language of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century, 2001; Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Herbal Remedies; The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 2002; (falsifications) Ottilia De Marco, “Le frodi e le sofisticazioni nell’Antichità classica e nel medioevo,” Atti e Memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 13 (1996): 139–50; (Fathers of the Church) Giorgio Rialdi, Introduzione allo studio della medicina nei Padri della Chiesa, 1968; (Genizah) Efraim Lev, and Zohar Amar, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah, 2008; (gender) Sandra Sabatini, “Women, Medicine and Life in the Middle Ages (500–1500 AD),” American Journal of Nephrology 14 (1994): 391–98; (headache) Cesare Colucci D’amato, “Headache and Migraine in the Scientific Traditions of the Salerno Medical School,” Acta Neurologica 14 (1992): 270–74; (khôl) M. Faure, “Le Khôl, médicament et fard oculaire, de l’Antiquité à nos jours,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 295 (1992): 441–44; (lexicon, pharmaceutical) Martin Levey, “Some Aspects of the Nomenclature of Arabic Materia Medica,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 130–38; Cristoforo Masino, Voci di spezierie dei secoli XIV–XVIII, Part 1, [1979]; Part 2 edited by Dantina Talmelli, and Giuseppe Maggioni, [1988]; Willem F. Daems, Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta: Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde, 1993; Sabine Bunsmann-Hopf, Zur Sprache in Kochbüchern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit: Ein fachkundliches Wörterbuch, 2003; (materia medica) Henry E. Sigerist, “Materia Medica in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 7 (1939): 417–23; Jerry Stannard, “Marcellus of Bordeaux and the Beginnings of Medieval Materia Medica,” Pharmacy in History 15 (1973): 47–53 (reproduced in Stannard, Pristina medicamenta …, no. VI); Id., “Aspects of Byzantine Materia Medica,” Symposium …, ed. Scarborough (above), 205–11 (reproduced ibid., IX); (materia medica, mineral) Dietlinde Goltz, Studien zur Geschichte der Mineralnamen in Pharmazie, Chemie und Medizin von den Anfängen bis Paracelsus, 1972; Marcelino V. Amasuno, La materia médica de Dioscórides en el Lapidario de Alfonso X el Sabio: Literatura y ciencia en la Castilla del siglo XIII, 1987; (opium) Selma Tibi, The Medicinal Use of Opium in Ninth-Century Baghdad, 2006; (Petrarch) Klaus Bergdolt, Arzt, Krankheit und Therapie bei Petrarca:

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Die Kritik an Medizin und Naturwissenschaft im italienischen Frühhuman«mus, 1992; (pharmaceutical forms) Liliane Plouvier, “L’électuaire, un médicament plusieurs fois millénaire,” Scientiarum historia 19 (1993): 97–112; Cristina De La Puente, Avenzoar, averroes, ibn-al-jatib, médicos de al-ándalus: Perfumes, ungüentos y jarabes, Madrid, 2003; (phytotherapy) Gundolf Keil, “Phytotherapie im Mittelalter,” Scientiarum historia 20 (1994): 7–38; (placebo effect) Judith Wilcox, and John Marion Riddle, “Qusta ibn Luqa’s ‘Physical Ligatures’ and the Recognition of the Placebo Effect, with an Edition and Translation,” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 1 (1995): 1–50; (Salerno) Andrea Russo, “La Scuola Medica di Salerno e la farmacia: nota preliminare,” Atti e Memorie della Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 12 (1995): 145–54; (social status) Rudolf Schmitz, and Mikulas Simon, “Mittelalterliche Grosshandelsaktivitäten als Determinante der sozialen Stellung Zürcher Apotheker,” Festschrift für A. Lutz und J. Büchi, ed. Hans-Rudolf Fehlmann, and François Ledermann, 1983, 7–38; (spices) Sami H. Hamarneh, “Spices in Medieval Islam: A Perspective,” Hamdard medicus 35 (1992): 82–90; (substitution) Martin Levey, Substitute Drugs in Early Arabic Medicine: With Special Reference to the Texts of Masarjawaih, al-Razi, and Pythagoras, 1971; (tax tables) Irmgard Müller, “Eine unbeachtete Speyerer Arzneitaxe des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Orbis Pictus …, ed. Dressendörfer, and Müller-Jahncke (above), 187–215; (theriac) Thomas Holste, Der Theriakkramer: Ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte der Arzneimittelwerbung, 1976; Annette I. Bierman, “Medical Fiction and Pharmaceutical Facts about Theriac,” Pharmaceutical Historian 24 (1994): 5–8; (toxicology) Moritz Steinschneider, Die toxicologischen Schriften der Araber bis Ende des XII. Jahrhunderts: Ein bibliographischer Versuch, grossentheils aus handschriftlichen Quellen, 1871; Julius Ruska, “Arabische Giftbücher: III Die Gifte im Kanon des Avicenna,” Fortschritte der Medizin 50 (1932): 794–95 (reproduced in Studies on Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and His Medical Works: Collected and reprinted, ed. Fuat Sezgin et al., 1996); Alfred Siggel, Das Buch der Gifte des Gabir ibn Hayyan: Arabischer Text in Faksimile (HS. Taymur, tibb. 393, Kairo), 1958; Martin Levey, Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of Ibn Wahshiya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts, 1966; Suessman Muntner, Maimonide: Treatise on Poisons and their Antidotes, 1966; Alain Touwaide, “Les poisons dans le monde antique et byzantin: introduction à une étude systémique,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 290 (1991): 265–81; Id., “Recherches en histoire de la médecine intéressant la toxicologie depuis 1970,” Centre Jean-Palerne, Lettre d’information, 19 (1991): 8–26, with a revised English trans.: “Studies in the History of Medicine Concerning Toxicology after 1970,” Society of Ancient Medicine-Newsletter 20 (1992): 8–33; Gerrit Bos, “The Treatise of Ahrun on

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Lethal Drugs: The Arabic Text Edited with Commentary, Indices, and Translation into English,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 7 (1991–1992): 136–71; Geneviève Sodigne-costes, “Un Traité de toxicologie médiévale: Le Liber de venenis de Pietro d’Abano (traduction française du début du XVe siècle”), Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 305 (1995): 125–36; (trade) Albert Dietrich, Zum Drogenhandel im islamischen Ägypten: Eine Studie über die arabische Handschrift Nr. 912 der Heidelberger Papyrus-Sammlung, 1954; (translation) Henri Van Hoof, “Notes pour une histoire de la traduction pharmaceutique,” Meta 46 (2001): 154–75; (Venice) Richard Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice in the Sixteenth Century,” The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear, Roger K. French, and Iain M. Lonie, 1985, 100–312. I. Pharmaceutical Instruments A special topic is pharmaceutical material. It has been intensively researched during the last decades of the 20th century as a result of an unprecedented increase in the antiquarian market, combined with a typical interest, among the historians of sciences, in scientific instruments and the practical exercise of science. Henry E. Sigerist had already studied the question of weights and measures in medicine in 1930 (“Masse und Gewichte in den medizinischen Texten des frühen Mittelalters,” Kyklos 3 [1930]: 440–44). In 1989, not only pharmaceutical weights, but also the history of metrology became the object of specific research (see also the contribution to this Handbook by Moritz Wedell): Bernard Garnier, Jean-Claude Hocquet, and Denis Woronoff, Introduction à la métrologie historique, 1989; and Daniel Vangroenweghe, and Tillo Geldof, Pondera Medicinalia: Apothecaries’ Weights, 1989. For Byzantium specifically, see also: Erich Schilbach, Byzantinische Metrologische Quellen, 1970; Id., Byzantinische Metrologie, 1970. Drug jars were abundant on the antiquarian market during this period, and were particularly studied by the Parisian pharmacist transformed into an archaeologist of pharmacy, Robert Montagut, who organized several exhibitions (in his gallery in Paris, at antiquarian fairs, or in collaboration with other antiquarians in Europe). His catalogues, lavishly illustrated and with a full description of the pieces, are reference works for any further research on the topic (references follow, in chronological order of the exhibitions): Robert Montagut, Faiences de pharmacie: Catalogue d’une collection provisoire, 1986; Galerie Robert Montagut, XIV Biennale des Antiquaires, 22 septembre – 9 octobre 1988, Grand Palais à Paris, 1988; Jan Dirven, and Robert Montagut, Pharmaceutica, 1989; Robert Montagut, Faiences: La Biennale della ceramica a Faenza, 15–23 septembre 1990, Faenza, Palazzo Esposizioni, 1990. His collection

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was sold at auction in Paris in 1992: Etude Daussy-Ricqlès, Collection Robert Montagut, Drouot-Richelieu, salle 5, Jeudi 4 juin et Vendredi 5 juin 1992. He also catalogued other collections, in collaboration with local specialists, as, for example: Anna M. Carmona Cornet, and Robert Montagut, Collecció de ceràmica de l’antiga farmàcia de l’Hospital de la Santa Creu, 1990. Other specialists included Lydia Mez-Mangold, who catalogued the collection of the pharmaceutical company Roche, in Basel (Lydia Mez-Mangold, Apotheken-Keramik-Sammlung ‘Roche,’ 1990; and Ead., Apotheken-GefässSammlung Roche in Grenzach-Wyhlen, 1992), as well as the Barcelona antiquarian Artur Ramon, who organized several exhibitions from 1988 to 1996, alone and in collaboration with Robert Montagut: Sala d’art Artur Ramon, El món de la farmàcia. In collaboration with Robert Montagut, 1988; Artur Ramon, and Robert Montagut, El món de la farmàcia, 1990; Sala d’art Artur Ramon, El món de la farmàcia (3), 1991; Sala d’art Artur Ramon, El món de la farmàcia (IV), 1993; Sala d’art Artur Ramon, El món de la farmàcia (5), 1996. Important auctions were held in Paris and New York. Their catalogues are illustrated as well and documented as those above, and constitute indispensable reference works for further research: Etude Daussy-Ricqlès, Collection de Faïences Européennes, Drouot-Richelieu, salle 3, Vendredi 18 mai 1990; Etude Daussy-Ricqlès, Pharmacie, Objets de Collection et de Curiosité, Drouot-Richelieu, salle 4, Mercredi 2 décembre 1992; Briest-guérin, Collection Louis Cotinat, Drouot Montaigne, Vendredi 20 juin 1997; in New York, the Arthur M. Sackler collection was sold: Christie’s New York, Important Italian Maiolica from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Part I), Wednesday, January 13, 1993 (the auction was postponed; the catalogue was published again: Christie’s New York, Important Italian Maiolica from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Part I), Wednesday, October 6, 1993); Christie’s New York, Important Italian Maiolica from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections (Part II), Wednesday, June 1, 1994). Pharmaceutical mortars constitute a category in itself. Some pieces appeared on the market (Robert Montagut, Mortiers, 1984), and the whole genre was the object of scientific studies, with the identification of the types, the producers, their marks, and the collections: Dirk Arnold Wittop Koning, Nederlandse vijzels, 1953, with a new edition in 1989; and, particularly: Edmund Launert, Der Mörser: Geschichte und Erscheinungsbild eines Apothekengerätes, Materialien-Formen-Typen, 1990. Last but not least, the representations of pharmacies, pharmacists in their apothecaries, and pharmaceutical material are a source for the study of the practice of pharmacy and the use of the material. Illustrated medical manuscripts have been listed in Loren Mackinney, Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965. Some representations of pharmacies have been

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collected and reproduced in Wolfgang-Hagen Hein, and Dirk Arnold Wittop Koning, Die Apotheke in der Buchmalerei, 1981. Select Bibliography Jean-Pierre Bénézet, Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999); Julius Berendes, Die Pharmacie bei den alten Kulturvölkern: Historisch-kritische Studien, 2 vols. (1891; Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Georg Olms, 1989]); Pharmacopoles et apothicaires: Les ‘Pharmaciens’ de l’Antiquité au Grand Siècle, ed. Franck Collard, and Evelyne Samama (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006); Pang. G. Kritikos, and Stella N. Papadaki, “Contribution à l’histoire de la Pharmacie chez les Byzantins,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Athen vom 8. bis 14. April 1967, ed. Georg Edmund Dann (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1969), 13–78; John M. Riddle, Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Variorium, 1992); Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, PierrePaul Corsetti, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 1987), with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999 (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 2000); George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1927–1948); Rudolf Schmitz, Geschichte der Pharmazie, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (Eschborn: GoviVerlag, 1998); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 3: Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H., and vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Jerry Stannard, Pristina medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany, and Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance (Aldershot, Hampshire, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate,1999); Ulrich Stoll, Das “Lorscher Arzneibuch”: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts (Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1). Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992); Lynn Thorndike, and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1963); Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), and Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1972).

Alain Touwaide

Philosophy in Medieval Studies A. General Definition Medieval philosophy did not fashion itself as a coherent, autonomous science, and where the term philosophia is used in medieval educational literature it generally embraces a broader and more diverse array of intellectual

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fields than its present-day English counterpart (see Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Philosophy in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,” A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. id and Timothy B. Noone [2003], 1–11). Isidore, the 7th-century Bishop of Seville, offered a convenient definition in his influential encyclopedia, the Etymologiae: “Philosophy,” he suggested, “is the understanding of human and divine things joined with the pursuit of living well” (“Philosophia est rerum humanarum divinarumque cognitio cum studio bene vivendi”) (Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 1911, 2.24; The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, 2005, 79). The reference to divine things is significant: theological knowledge was the usual object of medieval philosophical enquiry, and most of the work that would today be recognized as “philosophical” would have been done by theologians, usually in monasteries, cathedral schools or universities. Philosophy itself had no formal place within the trivium and quadrivium of the medieval educational system; the seven liberal arts served as routes or prerequisites to the attainment of philosophical wisdom, but were not conterminous with it (G. Bernt, L. Hödl, and H. Schipperges, “Artes liberales,” LexMa, 1977–1999, vol. 1, cols. 1058–63; Michele Lemoine, “Arts Libéraux,” Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvart, Alain de Libera, and Michel Zink, 2002, 93–96). Following the rise of the universities across Europe in the 12th century, theology became one of the three arts towards which an education in the liberal arts would ultimately lead, and philosophy, as an analytical accessory, necessarily accompanied it (see Ralph McInerny, “Beyond the Liberal Arts,” The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, ed. David Wagner, 1983, 248–72, who also usefully discusses Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the relationship between philosophia and the artes liberales). The relationship between philosophia and theologia, as terms and as academic disciplines, has been discussed at length in the recent literature. Especially insightful is Stephen Brown’s “Theology and Philosophy,” Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographic Guide, ed. Frank A. C. Mantello and A. George Rigg (1996), 267–87, which offers a concise discussion of the different meanings of philosophia, theologia and the related label, ancilla (“handmaiden,” a term introduced by Peter Damian to characterize philosophy’s properly ancillary relation to theological wisdom), in medieval Latin documents.

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B. Philosophy in the Christian West Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period Medieval European philosophy finds its origins in antiquity, yet the ideas of the philosophers of ancient Greece were transmitted to medieval readers only in a fragmentary, sporadic and often oblique manner. Plato was known initially only through the incomplete Latin translation of his late dialogue, the Timaeus, which was produced, together with a commentary, by the Roman author Calcidius (fl. 5th c. C.E.). The translation extended as far as 53c, just over half way through the original text (see Timaeus a Calcidio Translatus Commentarioque Instructus, ed. J.H, Waszink, 1962, for the Latin Timaeus). In the 12th century, this translation was joined by Henry Aristippus’s Latin versions of the the Phaedo (1156) and the Meno (1154–1160). Henry was a scholar of some renown in Greece (though not demonstrably of Greek birth), who also produced a translation of Aristotle’s Meteorologica. Though these translations are known to have circulated quite widely, and to have been known by a number of prominent philosophers, their influence throughout the period was seemingly minimal (Paul Vincent Spade, “Medieval Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2004 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, ; Peter Dronke, “Introduction,” Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. id., 1988, 1–18, here 2). Writers of the early Christian period therefore relied principally upon the Calcidian Timaeus for their Plato, together with the version of Platonism that was inscribed in the work of the Neoplatonists and earlier Platonic thinkers (Apuleius and Macrobius, among others). As Raymond Klibansky pointed out in his brief introductory volume to the Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi (4 vols, 1940–1962), medieval conceptions of Plato and of Platonic thought possibly relied more heavily upon these latter sources than upon any of the Latin translations of the primary texts themselves (The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages (1939; rev. ed. 1981, 22). Of the Aristotelian corpus more was known from the beginning, and so profound was Aristotle’s influence on the development of medieval logic, in particular, that its history has often been gauged according to the successive phases by which his logical works, known collectively as the Organon, were rendered into Latin. His two most fundamental logical texts, the Categoriae and the De Interpretatione, were translated into Latin by the 5th-century grammarian, rhetorician and philosopher, Marius Victorinus (fl. mid-late 5th c. C.E.). Latin translations of these texts were also produced by one of the most prodigious of late-Roman scholars, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boe-

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thius, who also translated all, or most, of the remaining texts of the Organon, together with Porphry’s Isagoge (“Introduction”), a student’s guide to the Categoriae. His translation of the Isagoge circulated with the Categoriae and the De Interpretatione throughout the Middle Ages, but his translations of the remaining logical works by Aristotle seem not to have been widely available, and these texts were effectively unknown in Europe until the 12th century. Aristotle’s two texts, together with Porphyry’s introductory commentary, therefore provided the basic metalanguage of the first evolutionary phase of medieval logic, what 12th-century thinkers would look back upon as the Logica Vetus (“Old Logic”). The partial Latin text of the Timaeus offered the medieval reader a basic cosmological plan that contrasted the physical universe, an entity of perpetual change or “becoming,” with the realm of pure being, the only domain of philosophical enquiry to which certainty and permanence could be attributed. This fundamental scheme was developed in the writing of the 3rd-century Neoplatonic thinker, Plotinus, for whom the permanent platonic reality of being was located uniquely in the One (Greek tò ‘én; Latin unum). In its simplicity, the One was incapable of division or change, which meant that the eternal forms postulated by Plato had to be relegated to an inferior but closely related level of being. Plotinus identified this as the Intellect, or Mind (Greek noûs, from noós; Latin mens). The bridging element between the physical world and the Intellect was the Soul, immediately inferior to it in metaphysical terms. These three different realities were identified by Plotinus as hypostases, which he connected together using the principle of emanation: from the One emanated the Intellect, and from the Intellect, the Soul. The work of Plotinus was edited as the Enneads (“Nines”) by his student, Porphyry, in the 3rd century, but the text was unknown in the early medieval period. Porphyry was known at first hand only through Boethius’s Latin translation of his Isagogue, an introduction to the Categoriae of Aristotle that circulated widely with this text (see below). The important influence of Neoplatonism on medieval philosophy must therefore be explained principally through mediating influences, the works of scholars who were known in the Middle Ages and who had themselves had access to Plotinus or Porphyry. Calcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus shows clear Neoplatonic influence, and is in itself a significant philosophical document. Likewise, the earlier commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis produced by Macrobius (fl. late 4th c. C.E.), who possibly drew on a lost Porphyrian source, enjoyed wide circulation. The commentary included detailed expositions of the Neoplatonic concepts of the One, the Mind and the Soul, as well as of the significance of numbers and the motions of the heavenly spheres. Macrobius refers exten-

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sively to the Timaeus, and ranges beyond the limits of Calcidius’ partial Latin translation of this text. Among early Christian thinkers the most notable to have been influenced by Neoplatonic teaching were Boethius and Augustine. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae draws on both Plato and the Neoplatonists (especially Porphyry and Proclus) in its representation of good, evil, divine and human knowledge and the relationship between time and eternity. John Marenbon, in his recent philosophical study, Boethius (2003), lists Greek Neoplatonism as one of the four “main traditions” of thought upon which Boethius drew, alongside the Latin philosophical writings, Greek Christian literature, and the writing of the Latin Church Fathers (11). Neoplatonic influence is also evident in his Opuscula Sacra. Henry Chadwick has suggested that Neoplatonic logic enables Boethius to make sense of the Trinity in the first treatise of the Opuscula, De Trinitate (“Introduction,” Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson, 1981, 1–12; Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy, 1981, 211–19). Chadwick’s book remains the most authoritative study of Boethius and his work. On the reception of Boethius and the work of influential medieval commentators such as Nicholas Trevet, see Chaucer’s ‘Boece’ and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius, ed. A. J. Minnis (1993), and Boethius in the Middle Ages: Latin and Vernacular Traditions of the ‘Consolatio philosophiae’, ed. Maarten J. F.M. Hoenen and Lodi Nauta (1997). St. Augustine, who had little knowledge of Greek (he speaks of his contempt for the language and its literature in the Confessiones, chap. 13–14), was familiar with the Latin translation of the Enneads produced by Marius Victorinus, which he studied under the guidance of the Christian scholar Simplicianus in Milan. For him, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists occupied a privileged intellectual position, and in the eighth book of De Civitate Dei he suggests that no other pagan philosophers come closer to our own Christian teaching than they (“Nulli nobis quam isti [Platonici] propius accesserunt”). Christianity, however, had already been embraced by some Middle and Neoplatonic thinkers of the Eastern Empire before Augustine’s time, but they remained largely unknown in the west until the 9th century, when they were brought into Latin by the Irish philosopher John Scotus Eriugena (see below). The leading biographical study is Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, by Peter Brown (1967, rev. ed. 2000), which also serves as a valuable exploration of the history of his thinking. The revised edition contains appendices on newly-discovered manuscript sources (the Divjak letters and the Dolbeau sermons) and on recent developments in research (which contains valuable bibliographic information). Étienne Gilson’s Introduction a l’étude de Saint

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Augustine (1921), published in English as The Christian Philosophy of St Augustine (trans. L. E. M. Lynch, 1961) remains an indispensable guide to Augustine’s thought. Henry Chadwick’s concise introductory study, Augustine (1986), offers an accurate and readable introduction to Augustine’s life and ideas, and contains a brief bibliography. Among the most impressive recent scholarly accounts of Augustine’s life and work is Augustine: A New Biography (2005) by James J. O’Donnell. As its title suggests, O’Donnell’s biography is a properly revisionist study, which raises provocative questions about Augustine’s ideas and affiliations. A short and more accessible biography, which seeks to challenge popular misconceptions about Augustine, is Garry Wills’s Saint Augustine (2005). The Hellenized Jews of Alexandria and Antioch, key intellectual centers that grew up in the east in the wake of the Jewish Diaspora, were ideally equipped to study Platonic texts in the original language. By far the most important and influential was Philo Judaeus (fl. 1st c. B.C.E.-1st c. C.E.), a gifted Alexandrine exegete whose commentaries on the Septuagint succeeded in bringing Jewish doctrine and Platonic thought into harmony. Nevertheless, he was, as the familiar epithet so often appended to his name suggests, a Judaic thinker and theologian first and foremost, who was keen to understand Greek philosophy as a derivative of, rather than as a supplement to, Jewish thinking (E.R. Goodenough, An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 1st ed. 1940; 2nd ed. 1962, 97–118). Philo produced a small number of Platonically-inflected texts on metaphysics, physics and epistemology, drawing principally upon the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. His later sources are relatively obscure, but have been traced to Antiochus and (speculatively) to Eudorus of Alexandria (John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, 1980, 114–83). He has been celebrated as a philosophical innovator, one of the first to bring Platonic ideas into the mind of God, and as a formative influence on early Christian exegesis (Henry Chadwick, “Philo,” The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, 1967, 137–57; Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de L’écriture, 1959, 1.1, 203–07; trans. Mark Sebanc, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, 1998, 1, 147–50; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 1st ed. 1941; 3rd ed., 1983, 3–8). Philo’s early Christian successors in Alexandria, Clement (d. early 2nd c. C.E.) and Origen (185–253/254 C.E.) further propagated his ideas, as well as making their own contributions to the synthesis of Christian and Middle-Platonic thinking. Chief among these Christian Greeks was the thinker mistakenly identified throughout the Middle Ages with the biblical Dionysius the Areopagite, who was reputedly converted to Christianity by St Paul (Acts 17:34). He is generally described today as Pseudo-Dionysius the

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Areopagite, or as Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. His close acquaintance with Proclus makes his equation with the Biblical figure impossible (PseudoDionysius is now thought to have been writing in the 5th or early 6th c.), but for most medieval European readers the two men were one and the same, and the philosopher was therefore held in the highest esteem. Four of Dionysius’s works survive, of which three – On the Divine Names (Peri Theion Onomaton), The Celestial Hierarchy (Peri tes Ouranias Hierarchias) and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Peri tes Ekklestiastikes Hierarchias) – are substantial treatises, and one, The Mystical Theology (Peri Mystikes Theologias), a short essay. A fifth, The Theological Representations, is mentioned by Dionysius at the beginning of On the Divine Names, and some of its contents are summarized elsewhere in this text, as well as in The Mystical Theology, but no text survives. The earliest Latin translations of the Pseudo-Dionysius’s four Greek texts were made by Hilduin of St.-Denis early in the 9th century, but they were generally of a very poor quality and were not widely circulated. It was therefore upon the slightly later Latin renderings of John Scotus Eriugena that most European readers relied throughout the high and later Middle Ages. Eriugena had translated the three longest Dionysian texts freshly into Latin at the behest of Charles the Bald, King of the Western Franks, in 858. It was to the first of these, On the Divine Names, that he devoted particular attention as a philosopher and a theologian. Here, he found Dionysius’s description of the necessarily negative (“apophatic”) nature of properties predicated of God, whose infinite nature meant that positive qualities could not be predicated of him literally. Eriugena’s Periphyseon is a vast cosmological study which, alongside Pseudo-Dionysius, also draws upon a range of Greek Neoplatonic authorities that were known to its author, such as Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa (from both of whom he had produced translations). Together with these, Eriugena also looked to some of the standard texts available in the Latin west, such as the writings of Boethius and Augustine, but was influenced especially by Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (before 439). His fundamentally Neoplatonic metaphysical system envisaged the universe as an emanation from, and ultimately a return to, the One. This model predictably gave rise to charges of pantheism, which lost him favour among some Christian readers. In spite of this, his influence in his own time was not insignificant, and he is known to have had close followers. See the final chapter of John O’Meara’s Eriugena (1988), which considers the Irishman’s immediate influence in detail (198–212). See also John Marenbon’s earlier study, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (1981). Eriugena’s influence in the longer term was seemingly far more limited, especially following the

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condemnation of his writings by Pope Honorius III in 1225. Eriugena has attracted relatively little attention from Anglophone scholars until recently. Notable early studies by continental historians include Johannes Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie im Mittelalter (1861) and Maïeul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Erigène: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Sa Pensée (1933). These volumes are now relatively difficult to obtain, and are of limited use to the non-specialist. A convenient guide to more recent scholarship is Mary Brennan’s Guide to Eriugenian Studies: A Survey of Publications, 1930–87, which replaces her two earlier, shorter bibliographic studies published in Studi Medievali (1977 and 1986, respectively). Recent studies in English include John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (1988), a revised version of his earlier study by the same name (1969), Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Deidre Carabine, John Scotus Eriugena (2000), a new addition to the Great Medieval Thinkers series. The 10th and 11th Centuries Historians of philosophy have generally had little to say about the period of roughly a century that separated Eriugena from St Anselm. Writing in the fifties, Frederick Copleston was content to describe the 10th century as the new “Dark Age” into which the Carolingian Empire had been plunged, largely by external forces such as the Nordic invasions (Medieval Philosophy (1950), 136). Almost two decades later, the same expression was used by H. Liebeschütz in an essay in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (1967), 587. Whilst it is certainly true that the unified political infrastructure that had been provided by Charlemagne’s kingdom was becoming progressively fragmented at the hands of his Frankish successors, and whilst the military campaigns of the Vikings in the British Isles and Western Europe were far from inconsequential, the period was not marked by anything approaching uniform philosophical stasis or regression. The monasteries and cathedral schools played a fundamental role in the copying and translation of philosophical texts, but whilst their reputation for preservation and consolidation was well earned, they also contributed significantly to the development of logic and to the progressive centralization of philosophy as an educational discipline. Among the most distinguished logicians of the period was Gerbert of Aurillac (945–1003), who became Pope Sylvester II in 999. He taught at the cathedral school at Rheims for almost twenty years, serving as its master from 972 until 989, and established a reputation as a gifted scholar and teacher. His logic was modeled on that of Boethius, but travel to Spain also brought him into contact with Moslem scholarship. The impact of Islamic learning on Gerbert’s thinking

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has been the subject of debate, and will continue to fuel controversy. Of the quality of his scholarship, in whatever way it might have been molded, however, there has been little room for doubt. One of the few Anglophone scholars to study him seriously has suggested that he must be ranked “among the great teachers of all times” (O. G. Darlington, “Gerbert the Teacher,” AHR 52.3 [1947]: 456–76, here 456–57). On the period generally, and its place within the broader history of monastic culture, see J. Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen-âge (1957), now better known through its English translation, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (trans. Catharine Misrahi, 1961). Many of the philosophical debates and advances that emerged out of the 11th century did so as consequence of curricular changes relating to the study of logic, which were only gradual and piecemeal. At the beginning of the 11th century, knowledge of Aristotle’s logical works was still confined to Latin translations of the Categoriae and the De Interpretatione. However, the question that was to loom largest both in logical and metaphysical debates among schoolmen had its apparent origins in Boethius, or rather, in Boethius’s commentary on Porphry’s Isagoge. This question related to the meaning of the categories themselves, and more specifically, to the reality of the substantive categories of genera and species. To declare that such categories were real was to adopt the position associated most famously with St Anselm (d. 1109), a student of Lanfranc at the Abbey of Bec in Normandy, and later his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury (see Richard W. Southern, St Anselm and his Biographer (1963), 3–26 for biographical details of Anselm’s early years and his monastic life at Bec, and 122–193 for his life as Archbishop). Anselm’s insistence on the reality of universal categories such as “human” or “man” arose out of, and was possibly exaggerated by, his opposition to the extreme opinions of Roscelin of Compiègne (an opponent he encountered relatively late in his philosophical career). Roscelin had championed an extreme form of philosophical nominalism that had reduced universals to the status of flatus vocis, the mere “puffs of air” through which spoken words were realized. He had extended his metaphysical arguments to the substance of the Trinity, suggesting that the three persons of the Godhead were necessarily identical with three separate Gods, an argument that Anselm felt to be logically inadmissible, as well as theologically fatuous. Anselm’s skills as a logician and metaphysician equipped him well to respond Roscelin’s heterodox theology, but also enabled him to formulate his most celebrated and controversial argument for the existence of God (the “ontological argument”). See Yves Cattin, La preuve de dieu: Introduction à la lecture du Proslogion d’Anselme de Canterbury (1986) for a detailed

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introductory study of Anselm’s Proslogion and its ontological argument. On Anselm’s philosophy and theology more generally, see G. R. Evans, Anselm (1989); R.W. Southern, St Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (1997). The 12th and 13th Centuries The spirit of revival that pervaded the study of logic throughout the 11th century was given new impetus in the 12th, during which the remaining texts of the Aristotelian logical corpus gradually became available. Latin translations of the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistici Elenchi began to circulate by the middle of the century, and were widely known by its conclusion. These texts represented what became known as the Logica Nova (“New Logic”), and fuelled rapid developments in philosophical enquiry. Alongside them, there appeared other important texts such as the Ciceronian Topica and the De Definitionibus of Marius Victorinus, but most notable were the Boethian commentaries on Aristotle (A. van de Vyver, “Les étapes du développement philosophique du Haut Moyen-Age,” Revue Belge de la Philologie et d’Histoire 7.2 (1929): 425–52; Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, “Nuovi impulsi allo studio della logica: La seconda fase della riscoperta di Aristotele e di Boezio,” Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 19 (1972): 743–66.) Though knowledge of Plato, by contrast, was still confined largely to the Latin Timaeus, Platonic scholarship flourished throughout the century in the celebrated cathedral school in Chartres. Among its distinguished line of scholars were Bernard of Chartres (d. 1125), Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1076–ca. 1154), Thierry of Chartres (d. ca. 1150), William of Conches (fl. mid-12th c.) and Bernard Sylvester (fl. mid-12th c.). Chartres was also the final dwelling-place of the great humanist scholar John of Salisbury, who had studied there earlier under Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches after leaving Paris. See Clement C. J. Webb’s John of Salisbury (1932), which offers a biographical account of the development of John’s philosophy, devoting particular attention to his political ideas. It has yet to be supplanted as the definitive single-volume introduction to this neglected medieval thinker, though it now inevitably shows its age. Peter Abelard (1079–1142), perhaps the most brilliant mind of 12th-century Europe, was born just a little too early to benefit from the availability of the new Aristotelian translations, but established an early reputation as a gifted logician. He was a student first of Roscelin and then of William of Champeaux, himself a former a student of Anselm, at the cathedral school in Paris. William is remembered for his philosophical realism, but Abelard, though he rejected the extreme nominalism of his earlier mentor, finally embraced what might be regarded as an attenuated form of Roscelin’s meta-

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physical position. Though evidently a quarrelsome student, Abelard later enjoyed unrivalled popularity as a teacher. Some of his teaching relating to the Trinity was condemned as heretical, and he was branded an Arian by St Bernard of Clairvaux at the Council of Sens in 1140. Kathleen Starnes devotes a chapter of her brief biographical study, Peter Abelard: His Place in History (1982), to Abelard’s philosophy. Among the most important recent authoritative studies of Abelard’s philosophy is John Marenbon’s The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (1997), which also gives ample attention to Abelard’s theology. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (2004), contains chapters by an impressive cast of scholars on most of the key domains of philosophical enquiry (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics), as well as on selected aspects of Abelard’s theology and his life and influence. The burgeoning of philosophical activity in 13th-century Europe owed its greatest debt to the rise of the universities, and to that of the University of Paris in particular. Though it did not receive its charter until the beginning of the century, Paris had existed as a centre of learning, first as a cathedral school centered at Notre Dame and later as a nascent scholarly corporation, for several centuries. Among its greatest teachers was the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus, who had studied mainly at the University of Padua, then a new institution. St Albert was indulgently Aristotelian, and eagerly took advantage of the newly-available translations; his enthusiasm was shared by many of his students, including Thomas Aquinas, who studied under his direction in Paris and then Cologne. He produced lengthy commentaries on many of the Aristotelian texts that he had scrutinized, and readily embraced insights drawn from Arabian scholarship. He did much to facilitate the assimilation of many of the new texts, both of Aristotle and of others, and it is upon this, chiefly, that his reputation rests. See the three important recent monograph studies by Alain de Libera: Albert le Grand et la Philosophie (1990), La mystique rhenane: d’Albert le Grand à Maître Eckhart (1994), and Métaphysique et noétique: Albert le Grand (2005); see also Maarten Hoenen and Alain de Libera, Albertus Magnus und der Albertismus: Deutsche philosophische Kultur des Mittelalters (1995). Albert’s younger contemporary, the Italian St. Bonaventure, treated Aristotle with greater caution. All of Bonaventure’s work was motivated by theological questions, and unlike Albert he produced no dedicated Aristotelian commentaries. Alongside Aristotle, he also drew heavily upon Augustine, and the relationship between the two authorities in his writing has been the subject of much discussion. In his metaphysics, he was a Platonist, readily embracing the doctrine of extra-temporal forms; yet in his hylomorphic account of the soul, he was very strictly Aristotelian.

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The most renowned thinker of the later medieval period is St Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274/75). Though his status as a philosopher has been much debated, most notably by no less a figure than Bertrand Russell, the place of Aquinas’s writings within the western philosophical canon seems nevertheless secure (Brian Davies, “Thomas Aquinas,” Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon, 1998, 241–68, here 242; Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1946; 2006, 247). Like his teacher Albert the Great, Aquinas was a dedicated Aristotelian, and produced comprehensive commentaries on a number of Aristotle’s works. He wrote as a theologian, and the vast majority of philosophical questions he examined emerged out of the context of theological enquiry. His longest surviving works were his two theological summae, the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologiae (which was unfinished at his death), each of which yields important insights into his philosophical method. But Aquinas also produced a highly original treatise on the nature of being: De Ente et Essentia. His metaphysical system was fundamentally theocentric, and was informed by principles that were respectively Aristotelian and Platonic: God was the primary efficient cause of all aspects of creation, but the effects of this creative cause were also seen to participate metaphysically within it by virtue of their place on an ontological continuum. Though the qualities of divine being and created being were fundamentally different, therefore, they could be described analogically using the same terms (“good,” “merciful,” “loving,” etc). Of the many influential studies of Thomas Aquinas and of Thomism that have appeared over the last century, a number deserve particular attention. Étienne Gilson authored several authoritative studies, including Le Thomisme: Introduction au système de Saint Thomas (1919), Saint Thomas d’Aquin (1925), Saint Thomas, moraliste (1974) and La philosophie chrétienne de la St. Thomas Aquinas et l’unité d’une expérience philosophique (1956), which was later published in English as The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas. F. C. Copleston produced his Aquinas, one of the earliest and most widely-used philosophical studies, in 1955. Introductory studies include G. K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas (1933), a modest but highly readable text whose stated aim is merely to persuade readers to move on towards more advanced studies of the thinker. James Weisheipl’s Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Thought, Life and Works (1974) is a detailed biographical review of the Dominican thinker’s ideas, which has yet to be supplanted by any comparable account of Aquinas’ career as a philosopher and theologian. Anthony Kenny’s Aquinas (1980) is an accessible introduction to Aquinas’ ideas, which are presented from a philosophical perspective. It says relatively little about his theology, or about the theological applications of his philosophy. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Davies (1993) offers a good sur-

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vey of Aquinas’s ideas, but is framed in theological rather than philosophical terms. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (1993), edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, brings together essays on Thomistic metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and legal philosophy by a group of leading scholars. The 14th Century The two most prominent names in historical accounts of medieval philosophy after Aquinas have generally been those of John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. 1347). Both owed a debt to Aquinas, though Scotus opposed him fundamentally in respect of his approach to theological language, arguing that predicates could be applied to divine and to human subjects univocally (rather than merely analogically). An accessible and authoritative short introduction to Scotus’s ideas is Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (1999), in the Great Medieval Thinkers series. Cross presents Scotus as a theologian, but gives particular emphasis to his natural theology, thereby offering a valuable insight into his philosophical method. Of similar length is Effrem Bettoni’s book of the same name (1961), a highly readable introductory study that is more accessible to the general reader than Cross’s. The first five and the last five chapters of The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (2003) are devoted to philosophical questions, making this among the best resources for students seeking a comprehensive scholarly guide to Scotus the philosopher. Welcome attention is devoted here, too, to Scotus’s ethics and moral philosophy. Marilyn McCord Adams’s magisterial two-volume monograph, William Ockham (1987), is the most detailed study to date of Ockham’s ideas. It is written with the philosopher, rather than the historian, in mind, and includes only a very brief discussion of Ockham’s life and career. After Ockham, philosophical debate was dominated by such figures as Walter Burley (1274/5–1344), Richard Fitzralph (d. 1360), and John Wyclif (d. 1384). Both Burley and Wyclif opposed Ockham in respect of certain logical and metaphysical issues, and were committed fundamentally to the reality of universals. On intellectual life in England during the 14th century see William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (1987); From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (1987). C. Islamic and Jewish Philosophy Like their Christian contemporaries, medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers entered readily into dialogue with the Latin and Greek texts of ancient Europe, and, through a painstaking process of translation and commentary, made philosophical advances that would benefit all three religious

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communities. Islamic philosophy (al-falsafa) was effectively defined by its ancient Greek sources, and placed reason, the guiding principle of Aristotelian enquiry, at the heart of its program. Philosophical treatises were translated from Arabic into Latin from the 10th century onwards, largely by scholars who lived or had settled in Spain during the middle stages of the Christian Reconquista. An important centre of learning during the Reconquest period was Toledo, where many of the Latin translations were produced. When the remaining texts of the Organon were translated into Latin in 12th-century Europe, therefore, the Islamic scholarship of the Arabian near east was very readily embraced by western scholars. It included a wealth of scholarly commentaries on Aristotle’s writings, and served as a new model for western philosophical enquiry. Like Islamic texts, many of the philosophical and theological writings of medieval Judaism were originally prepared in Arabic, a fact that led to some confusion as to their origins among medieval and later readers. Moses Maimonedes (1135–1204), probably the most distinguished medieval Jewish thinker, wrote his Guide for the Perplexed in this language, but it was subsequently translated into Hebrew, and thence, in Toledo in the mid-13th century, into Latin. This epistolary guide, addressed to a student, draws on both Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in its exploration of scriptural terms and related theological and philosophical questions. Islamic theology (‘ilm al-kalam) originated as a discipline distinct from philosophy, yet it was methodologically often highly philosophical. The teaching of the Mu’talizite theologians, for example, rested fundamentally on reason and on precepts derived deductively from Koranic teaching. The two great Islamic thinkers Avicenna (Ibn Rushd, d. 1037) and Averroes (Ibn Sina, d. 1198) were probably the most widely known in medieval Europe, though some of the work of the earlier Islamic scholars Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi was also translated into Latin. Avicenna, a Persian, was a prolific scholar, whose writings on medicine and the natural world remained influential for centuries after his death. Though his philosophy derives heavily from Aristotle, it bears a distinctive platonic inflection, a property that Averroes, one of his most diligent students, abhorred. Averroes himself worked in Islamic Spain for much of his life, and earned the sobriquet “the Commentator” in recognition of his scholarly commentaries on Aristotle. Muslim scholarship was held in the highest regard by medieval Christian scholars who, if conscious of alterity of Islamic culture (a culture that they often deemed “pagan”), were impressed by the merits of rational argumentation. Avicenna’s Kitab al-Shifa (“Book of Healing”) appeared in Latin at the beginning of the 13th century, the product of a collaborative effort by Dominicus Gundis-

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salinus and other translators in Toledo, and circulated widely among Christian scholars. The text derives heavily from Aristotle, but its distinctive Neoplatonic properties were as attractive to western Christians as they would have been repulsive to Averroes. Many of Averroes’s own commentaries, most of which preserved substantial portions of Aristotle’s original texts, were translated into Latin in the 13th century. The most prolific of his translators was Michael Scotus, who translated many of the commentaries into Latin whilst living in Toledo at the beginning of the 13th century. Another Toledo scholar, Hermannus Alemannus, often known as “Hermann the German” in English translation, was responsible for an incomplete Latin translation of Averroes’ “Middle Commentary” on Aristotle’s Poetics (1256) and an earlier translation of a similar commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (1240). For a comparative account of the three main philosophical traditions see Medieval Philosophy: The Christian, Islamic and Jewish Traditions, ed. Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh (1967; 2nd ed. 1983). On medieval Jewish philosophy, see Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Medieval Jewish Philosophy: An Introduction (1996). See also The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (2003). A good collection of recent essays on Arabic Philosophy, in the same series, is The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor. Especially relevant are the chapters on Arabic Neoplatonism (by Christina d’Ancona), Al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes (by Peter Adamson, Robert Wisnovsky and Richard Taylor, respectively), and the translation of Arabic texts into Latin (by Charles Burnett). For a concise survey of the different phases of translation from Arabic into Latin and from Hebrew into Latin, see Deborah L. Black’s “Medieval Translations: Latin and Arabic” and Charles H. Manekin’s, “Medieval Translations: Latin and Hebrew,” Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (1996), 723–27 and 713–17, respectively. D. Texts and Editions of Philosophical Works The study of medieval philosophy owes its greatest debt to the science of diplomatics, the systematic scrutiny of ancient documents that was given its name by the 17th-century French scholar, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). It was Mabillon who coined the phrase res diplomatica, but though it was he who established systematic procedures for the analysis of manuscript records, his own work owes a great debt to his Maurist peers. In 1664, Mabillon became a disciple of Lucas d’Achéry, himself a prodigious scholar, in the Abbey of StGermain-des-Prés, where he produced many of the scholarly editions for which he is remembered. Though none of these editions was specifically

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philosophical in character, Mabillon’s robust and precise editorial method paved the way for the later collation and editing of philosophical manuscripts. He is remembered for what was and is his most influential work, De Re Diplomatica Libri Sex (1681; 2nd ed. 1709), which contained valuable information about the nascent field of diplomantics, as well as detailed notes on closely related areas such as paleography. Though Mabillon could not easily have known it, his work made possible much of the scholarly editing of philosophical texts that took place later in the century of his death, at the hands of such skilled scholars as Victor Cousin. The French Revolution of 1789 had an important if ambiguous influence on the study of the history of philosophy in France and elsewhere. French philosophy in general, guided at least in part by the Enlightenment politics of the philosophes, a self-styled group of intellectuals dedicated to rational enquiry, became less dependent upon church teaching, devoting itself instead to a new kind of natural theology. But as Edward Synan has pointed out, the revolutionary political vigor of the 18th and early 19th centuries did not quell the French patriotic pride in its medieval philosophical inheritance (“Latin Philosophies of the Middle Ages,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (2nd ed. 1992). Born shortly after the Revolution, the scholar Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–1875) is probably the most renowned editor to have emerged from France. His monumental Patrologia Latina, which runs to 217 volumes, contains editions of theological and ecclesiastical texts dating from the 5th century until the early 13th. The importance of Migne’s editions can be gauged by the fact that a very significant number of them are still used by scholars of the present day, and by the recent decision of the publisher ChadwykHealey to make them available, by subscription, in full-text electronic form (http://pld.chadwyck.com/). Though Migne’s editions of the writings of major figures such as Augustine and Peter Lombard have since been supplanted by more recent, fully critical ones, and though the quality of Migne’s editing is not always reliable, the Patrologia Latina remains a valuable resource. The 19th century witnessed a frenzy of editorial activity in Germany in particular, culminating in the publication, in 1826, of the first volume in the Monumenta Germaniae Historia series, which continues to produce scholarly editions of medieval German texts – both in Latin and the vernacular – to the present day. The Monumenta were one of the products of post-Enlightenment historicism (historismus), which gave rise to a renewed interest in the history and evolution of the German nation, its language and its historical records and literary products. Fundamental to German historical method was its organicism, a guiding assumption that the languages and texts of a nation, like members of a family or race, might be traced organically to their ancestors.

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The organic metaphor was prevalent in linguistic and philological research, as well as in the emergent science of stemmatics, which played a fundamental role in German and European textual critcism from the early 19th century onwards. Alongside the Monumenta editions, which range across a number of fictional and non-fictional genres, and some of whose texts are of significant interest to the historian of philosophy, the 19th century saw the publication of the first edition in the important series Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (“Contributions to the History of Medieval Philosophy”) in 1892. Like the Monumenta, this series includes editions of a number of important philosophical texts, as well as scholarly studies of medieval themes and figures. Unlike the Monumenta, however, as their name suggests, the Beiträge are dedicated solely to philosophical material. The early 20th century saw the publication of several significant scholarly editions of medieval philosophical texts and translations, many not previously edited. The Bibliothéque des Textes Philosophiques, established in 1932, contains some editions of Latin philosophical texts within its series, as does the slightly earlier Études de Philosophie Médiévale (begun in 1922). The Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi (1939–) was the earliest attempt to make available the Latin translations of Plato and Aristotle that were used by medieval scholars (Aristoteles Latinus, ed. Georges Lacombe et al., 1939–); Plato Latinus, ed. Raymond Klibansky et al., 1940–). Franciscan Institute Publications introduced its Text Series in 1951, and has published editions of the works of some important medieval thinkers. Shortly afterwards, in Germany, there emerged Mittellateinische Studien und Texte, which began publishing editions of medieval Latin texts and scholarly essays in 1965. The appearance of the first volumes of the Corpus Christianorum in 1953 (the Series Latina), and the extension of the series into the medieval period shortly afterwards (the Continuatio Mediaevalis, 1966–), made available new editions of many of the patristic and medieval Latin texts originally edited by Migne, as well as many others (the chronological scope of the Corpus extends as far as the 15th century). (M. Lamberigts, “Corpus Christianorum (1947–1955): The Laborious Journey from Dream to Reality,” Sacris Erudiri 38 [1998]: 47–73). Editions from the Corpus Christianorum are now available on line via the Library of Latin Texts (Brepols). E. Histories of Medieval Philosophy The synoptic study of medieval philosophy finds its origins in a small number of highly detailed studies dating from the first quarter of the 20th century. Widely regarded as one of the foundation stones of medieval philosophical historiography is Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode by

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Martin Grabmann, published in two volumes between 1909 and 1911. This was the first of Grabmann’s many major publications on medieval philosophy, and was followed by two further contributions to intellectual historiography (Geistesgeschichte): Die Philosophie des Mittelelaters (1921) and Mittelalterliches Geistesleben (1926–1956). The most important early survey in English, roughly contemporary with Grabmann’s German text, was Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Medieval Mind (1st ed. 1911; 4th ed. 1938), a two-volume study that established many of the narrative paradigms of Anglophone medieval intellectual historiography. Though ranging beyond the narrow focus of medieval philosophy, Taylor’s study offers a compelling and accessible introduction to many of its major themes and personalities. In the second half of the 20th century, many highly influential singlevolume and multi-volume studies appeared, some by historians of medieval philosophy, and others by philosophers. The existential philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) published the first of a projected four volumes of Die großen Philosophen, an introductory portrait of the leaders and founders of western and eastern philosophical thinking, in 1957. When he died in 1969, he had completed the second volume, but had left notes relating to the other two. The narrative that runs through the first two volumes is not a strictly chronological one, but proceeds rather as a sequence of vignettes, organized into three thematic sections. Listed alongside Plato and Augustine as a fortzeugende Gründer des Philosophierens, therefore, we find a much later figure, Immanuel Kant. Jaspers’s two volumes were translated into English as The Great Philosophers by Ralph Mannheim in 1966. In France, Étienne Gilson published numerous general introductions to medieval philosophy, alongside more specific studies and studies of particular philosophers, many of which remain in use today. La philosophie au Moyen-âge, he suggests in his introduction to the text, was not written with the specialist reader in mind. Yet this lengthy study, originally running to two volumes (1922), and in its second edition occupying a single volume of almost 800 pages (1944), has something to offer specialists and non-specialists alike. In 1931 and 1932, Gilson was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and these were published as a monograph, L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale (1932), shortly afterwards. The first English translation was published four years later. In attempting to arrive at the “spirit” of medieval philosophical thought, Gilson here concludes by highlighting its Christian purpose (something that clearly distinguished it from the philosophy of the ancients). In his later study, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (published in English in 1955), which was based on a course he convened at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, he explores the relationship be-

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tween western philosophy and Christianity more extensively, and this book, though some of the ideas within it have been deemed eccentric, remains an important resource for scholars working in this area. The same is true of Gilson’s Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne (1960). A recent, highly readable history in French is Alain de Libera’s La philosophie médiévale (1993). Among single-volume studies, this offers the most detailed analysis of Islamic philosophy (in the west as well as the orient), Jewish philosophy, and the neglected philosophy of Byzantium. It also contains a helpful political and philosophical chronology. Gordon Leff’s Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham (1957) is a very concise study of a very long episode in European intellectual history. Its division into three parts, relating respectively to European thought after the fall of the Roman Empire, the “triumph” of scholasticism between the beginning of the 11th and the end of the 13th century, and to 14th-century scepticism, attracted predictable charges of over-simplification following its publication. Moreover, subsequent research has rendered questionable some of Leff’s broad conclusions (e. g. about the prevalence of “scepticism” in 14th-century thinking). Yet this remains a very readable and compelling introduction to medieval philosophy. In the United States in 1946, the English scholar Father Frederick Copleston produced the first volume of his History of Philosophy. Twenty-eight years later, he completed the eleventh and final volume in the series. Medieval philosophy is the province of his second and third volumes, and is afforded a very comprehensive treatment. Though some of Copleston’s broad conclusions might today appear rather misguided (as subsequent research has revealed), his subtle, and at times provocative discussion of the relationship between philosophy and theology is highly engaging. Published shortly after Copleston’s two volumes, again in the United States, was Armand Maurer’s Medieval Philosophy (the second volume in a four-part series edited by Étienne Gilson). This detailed and scholarly survey has become a classic of its kind. Dom. David Knowles published his widely-used Evolution of Medieval Thought in 1962. Acknowledging his debt to Ehrle, Bauemker, Grabmann, and Gilson, Knowles offers an analysis of what he perceives to be the “main currents” of medieval philosophy (ix). However problematic his guiding biological metaphor may appear today, this remains an authoritative and highly readable study. Recent philosophical studies are very numerous, and it must suffice to mention only the most significant here. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by A. H. Armstrong (1967), and The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (1982), are each indispensable reference

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works. The former offers detailed studies of the development of Neoplatonism, Augustinian thought, Christian thinkers from Boethius to Anselm, and has an especially useful section on early Islamic philosophy. The latter works primarily with sub-disciplines of philosophy rather than with authors or schools (though an appendix offers summary biographical details of over 140 late-medieval thinkers), and is confined principally to western philosophy. There are extensive chapters on logic and its development, metaphysics and epistemology, political philosophy, ethics and natural philosophy. Each of the volumes has a very distinguished array of contributors, and will remain a resource of the first resort. Peter Dronke’s edited volume, A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy (1988; paperback, 1992), addresses a period in the history of philosophy that its editor perceives to have been largely neglected. Historians from Geyer and Gilson to the contributors to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, as Dronke rightly suggests, have paid scant attention to the 12th century. John Marenbon’s two companion volumes, Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An Introduction (1983; 2nd ed. 1988) and Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction (1988) have established themselves as reliable scholarly guides, and range far beyond the level of an introduction. They have recently been rewritten and published as a single-volume history, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (2006). This new guide incorporates changes in approach and perspective that occurred in the preparation of the second volume (such as a radical reassessment of the category “philosophy”), and to which Marenbon also gestured in his introduction to the second edition of the first volume. It contains a lengthy chapter on philosophy outside the universities, a neglected area to which the original volumes devoted little attention. Michael Haren’s Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century (1985; 2nd ed. 1992) is the most detailed and the most challenging single-volume survey in English, and his extensive annotated bibliographies (revised and updated for the 2nd ed.) are excellent. B. B. Price’s Medieval Thought: An Introduction (1992) is presented in an attractive and innovative way, but has been criticized by reviewers for factual errors and inaccuracies. The most conspicuous of these are mistranslations of Latin and grammatical infelicities in the reproduction of titles of Latin texts (the number that appear in Appendix 7 alone is nothing less than alarming). This is unfortunate, as this volume otherwise has much to recommend it. Two more recent single-volume studies are C. J. F. Martin’s An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy (1996) and David Luscombe’s Medieval Thought (1997). The former begins at a very basic level, but includes helpful dis-

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cussions of key concepts such as authority and tradition, and of analytical procedures and conventions such as the quaestio. Nevertheless, Martin’s crude characterization of the 14th century as a period of philosophical decline that followed from the celebrated Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason has attracted justified criticism. Luscombe’s study is more advanced, but does not assume any prior acquaintance with medieval culture, and helpfully deters its reader, at the outset, from identifying “medieval thought” with an ordered, homogeneous body of concepts or writings. Two newer and more substantial edited volumes are From Aristotle to Augustine, edited by David Furley (1997; paperback ed. 2003) and Medieval Philosophy, edited by John Marenbon (1998; paperback ed. 2003), which respectively constitute volumes 2 and 3 of the Routledge History of Philosophy. The two volumes, which contain detailed essays by established, principally philosophical scholars, address themselves, as the series editor’s introduction suggest, both to the specialist and the general reader. Each volume contains a helpful glossary of technical terms, as well as a chronology. The most recent single-authored synoptic account of medieval philosophy is volume 2 of Anthony Kenny’s four-volume A New History of Western Philosophy (2005; paperback ed. 2007). Kenny, a philosopher who enjoyed the patronage of Frederick Copleston as a student in Rome, shares his mentor’s commitment to a belief in the significance of medieval philosophy within the broader history of the discipline. This volume, like the three others in the series, ambitiously seeks to combine an historical with a thematic approach to the development of philosophical ideas, offering concise historical surveys of approaches to central areas of philosophical enquiry: logic and language, knowledge, physics, metaphysics, mind and soul, ethics and God. Select Bibliography The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; rpt. 1970); Michael Haren, Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1985; 2nd ed. 1992); The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzman, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); L. M. de Rijk, La philosophie au Moyen Age (Leiden: Brill, 1985); Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); John Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy: 480–1150 (London: Routledge, 1983; 2nd ed. 1988); id., Later Medieval Philosophy: 1150–1350 (London: Routledge, 1991); G. R. Evans, Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers (London: Routledge, 2002); Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone, A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)

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Political Theory in Medieval Studies A. Definition As J. H. Burns has suggested in his introduction to The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 250–c. 1450 (1998) within the medieval context discussion of “political theory” is problematic for at least two reasons. First, not only was the term “political” in its original Greek sense irrelevant and, indeed, foreign to the experience of virtually all medieval commentators and thinkers, but it is at best debatable to attribute to any medieval writer a political theory even in its broader sense of a theory of the “state.” Second, medieval authors were disinclined to view the “political” as a sphere separate and apart from morals, religion, or natural philosophy. Hence, even the most illustrious contributors to the Western tradition of political theory, such as Aquinas, Ockham, Marsilius, directed themselves to issues that were only at best tangentially related to the modern notion of “political,” and few writers, particularly in the early middle ages, explicitly addressed issues political in nature at all. Nonetheless, if one accepts a definition of political as comprising those manipulable interrelationships in a particular area of life involving power, authority or influence, it is clear that even in the early Middle Ages theory was implicit in the institutions and procedures of society. B. Heritage of Late Antiquity The 4th and 5th centuries provided the West with two contrasting and yet equally influential interpretations of history with significant repercussions for political theory. The first of these was the Eusebian vision of a Christian Roman Empire as God’s providential plan for the regnum Christi through the person of the emperor. This view would predominate in the writings of Ambrose of Milan, who continued to equate pax Augusta with pax Christi. Despite his conflicts with Valentinian and Theodosius I, most notably disciplining the latter as filius ecclesiae, Ambrose’s end was the final triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, as described twenty years later in the Contra Symmachum of Prudentius. If this were not clear enough from his episcopal actions, his clerical enchiridion, De officiis ministrorum, modeled after Cicero’s De officiis, manifests clearly Ambrose’s equation of the classical res publica with the Corpus Christi, the congregatio fidelis: indeed, the bona fides Cicero described as the very foundation of justice, Ambrose turns to faith in Christ. Along these same lines, the commentaries on the Pauline epistles attributed to Ambrosiaster are notable for their attribution of political authority to divine and natural law, the latter already losing some of its stoic character in favor of an

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increased Biblicism, and the insistence on the emperor as God’s earthly vicar. Ambrosiaster also equates rule with the image of God, the emperor being most possessed of this quality, woman, lacking rule altogether, being totally devoid of the image of God. Leo the Great in mid-5th century took for granted the equation of plebs romana and plebs Dei, characterizing Peter and Paul as the Romulus and Remus of a Roman palingenesis. The issue addressed by the predecessors of Gelasius I, therefore, was the proper distribution of power and authority within a Christian Rome. Gelasius’ famously ambiguous sententia, Duo est, in its definition of the spheres of auctoritas sacrata pontificum and regalis potestas, while directed at disabusing the notion of sacral kingship, left open to future debate whether these two powers were separate and complimentary, or whether the secular was subordinate to the clerical. In either case, all these authors presupposed a single political-religious structure. The major dissenting voice from this vision of a unified church and empire was that of Augustine of Hippo whose reappraisal, along with the dispensationalism of Orosius, was stimulated by the reversal of Roman fortunes circa 400. In the City of God, Augustine defined all human social structures as a mixture of those faithful to the City of God with those whose loyalties belonged to the earthly City. Hence, Augustine rejected the Ciceronian formulation of the res publica because true justice or righteousness was beyond the capacities of any human society. Rather, social arrangements between these two groups was possible only in achieving intermediate goals such as security, material necessities, and internal order, elements of “earthly peace”, none of which are abrogated by the heavenly city so long as they do not impede true religion. The purpose of government was to facilitate such earthly peace by mitigating at least some of the consequences of sin. While the Empire is open to both groups, the Church, even though in the present dispensation comprising both elect and reprobate, was not. Hence, coercion of members by the Church was considered indispensable to the pastoral function, even though civil authorities qua members of the Church imposed that coercion. Outside the Church, coercion was justified internally or externally in terms of the maintenance of minimal order necessary to preserve “earthly peace” (for a fuller discussion, see Robert Austin Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, 1970, which retains a place of distinction amid the plethora of Augustinian literature.) Through most of the Middle Ages, Augustine’s mature views on the nature of civil society would prove the less influential of the two perspectives. Indeed, Gregory the Great in his Moralia would redefine Augustine’s two cities in terms of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. For Gregory, ecclesiastic and secular sphere have melded, and according to the Regula pastoralis,

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rule in either sphere was a ministry designed to profit the subordinates, as it was in the Benedictine Regula monachorum. This same position is reflected in the writings of Isidore of Seville, but without any presumption of political universalism; a universalism which though belied by the existence of multiple barbarian kingdoms, nonetheless, at least outside the Visigothic kingdom, maintained currency if only “imaginarie” as Jordanes would say in his Romana. C. Formative Period (750–1160) During the formative period, the foregoing authors, in addition of course to the Old and New Testaments, and pre-Justinian Roman law, were the best and most widely known works of political relevance. The Republics of Plato and of Cicero were not available, and of Aristotle’s Politics was known only his division of practical philosophy through Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore. Yet, wanting models for systematic and speculative political theory, this period saw a rash of didactic literature and instructive correspondence by such clerics as Agobard of Lyons, Jonas of Orléans, Hincmar of Rheims, Rabanus Maurus, Florus Magister of Lyons, Smargardus, and Sedulius Scotus, who in addressing practical issues likewise concerned themselves with the nature and extent of authority, the relations of sacerdotium and saeculum, and the meaning of law. The problems addressed by these clerics were, naturally, much affected by the historical contingencies and the peculiar institutions of the period. First among these was the displacement of the enfeebled Merovingian dynasty by its majores domo, and the establishment of the Carolingian dynasty by Pippin III with the blessing of Popes Zacharias and Stephen II, who sought protection from the Lombards and subsequently, the Byzantines; an arrangement of mutual legitimization culminating in Charlemagne’s coronation by Leo III signaling renovatio romani imperii, a concept of empire that was henceforth to share the stage with the notion from the barbarian kingdoms of empire as rule or hegemony over kings. Second was the collapse of that same system as public authority fragmented and devolved into the hands of large landholders. The third was a medieval tendency, already apparent before the collapse but gaining momentum thereafter, to control real property and its occupants by retaining title, restricting alienability and conferring only ususfructus upon recipients. This tendency is manifest in the evolution of seigneurie fonciere into seigneurie banale and/or justiciere; the less universal development of feudalism; and the notion of the Eigenkirche.

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The consequence of these developments was a power-sharing in which rulers were compelled to seek accommodation with aristocracy and Church, and failure to govern by concensus commonly resulted in breaches of the peace. Indeed, it is during this period that the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals appeared, exalting the papacy in the interest of suffragan bishops as against the power of metropolitan, synod or secular ruler. For nearly three hundred years, from the late ninth to the mid-12th century, these false decretals would be freely borrowed by polemicists and canonists for their own purposes and collections, some four hundred finding their way into Gratian’s Decretum. In particular, the reformists of the 11th century would reinterpret these to accord with a definition of privilegium Romanae ecclesiae hinging on papal supremacy and obedience to Rome, and further reinterpreting the Gelasian formula to assert the supremacy of sacerdotium over regnum or as the Decretum would phrase it: Regum et principum patres et magistri sacerdotes esse censentur. Although the investiture controversy spurred the palingenesis of Roman law and corresponding efforts to compile and digest canon law, as well as to distill the feudal law, the pamphleteering on the relations of regnum and sacerdotium began to wane in the 12th century, and as suggested by Charles Homer Haskins in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), failed to keep abreast of praxis. Although many officials continued in the earlier genre of didactic treatises, specula principis, including Walter Map, Peter of Blois, Gerald of Wales, inter alia, the most notable efforts at political theory were the Policraticus of John of Salisbury and De consideratione of Bernard of Clairvaux. The former, a rambling didactic treatise directed to courtiers and rulers urging them to reject Epicureanism in favor of law, education and Christian philosophy, adopts an organic view of the state and justifies in principle tyrannicide. The latter was a letter in five books written over a decade to Eugenius III, from his election in 1145 to the failure of the Second Crusade, expressing at once an ambidexterity reminiscent of Gregory’s Regula pastoralis, and simultaneously asserting with vigor the Hildebrandine agenda of papal plenitudo potestatis (Elizabeth T. Kennan, “The De Consideratione of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Papacy in the Mid-Twelfth Century: A Review of Scholarship,” Traditio 23 [1967]: 73–115). Despite the scarcity of specifically theoretical treatises, the 12th century witnessed developments that significantly tilled the ground for subsequent political exposition and speculation. Not least among these was the increasing complexity of society. Carolingian authors could describe a simple society of three orders: a military nobility, the clergy and the peasantry. Gratian could describe in the Decretum a society composed simply of two orders: clergy and laity. Hugh of St. Victor and Alan of Lille sought correspondence

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between the more numerous orders of angels and earthly professions. Already in the 11th century in his Elucidarium, Honorius Augustodunensis adds to the “three orders” townsmen, and the growth of semi-autonomous cities and towns, would, with other new associations, spur the growth of corporate theories in law and government. Likewise, both the importation of Arabic and Greek science and the study of classical sources, particularly Cicero and Seneca, as well as Calcidius’s translation and commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, proved an impetus to view nature as normative: or in Seneca’s words: propositum nostrum est secundum naturam vivere. This nature of William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, Alan of Lille, John of Salisbury, and so many other writers of the period, was a creative nature, advised by divine reason; and hence, it was with little effort that Gratian could equate natural and divine law. But this view of nature also permitted the conceptualization of a res publica as a natural entity shaped by the ius positivum, the rational regulation of human affairs cooperatively with nature and consistent with nature’s law. D. High and Late Middle Ages (1160–1450) The tendencies already noted toward burgeoning complexity of social and governmental relationships, the growing importance of Roman law and those trained therein, from the 12th century onward increasingly in universities which were themselves an example of the growing sophistication of Roman-law corporate concepts, combined with the political realities of emerging territorial states and the availability of Latin translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by Robert Grosseteste, ca. 1246 and the Politics by William of Moebeke, ca. 1260, on which Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Auvergne, and Bartholomew of Bruges would write commentaries (Pavel Bla zek, ˇ Die mittelalterliche Rezeption der aristotelischen Philosophie der Ehe, 2007) to engender a theoretical multifariousness previously unknown in the West. For while states were emerging, they were not states in the modern sense of possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, but continued to share jurisdiction with church, and to various degrees depending on location, with aristocratic feudatories, communes, etc., as a consequence of which theocratic, hierocratic and feudal theories maintained currency. Furthermore, the Aristotelean naturalistic approach itself insofar as seen in conflict with Christian revelation, would give rise to both opposition and efforts at synthesis, some Thomistic attempts at which would be condemned along with Averroism in 1277 at both Paris and Oxford. Hence, the 13th and 14th centuries represent a period of extended debate on approaches and underlying assumptions, in addition to practical concerns. Indeed, some authors can

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be found to take different positions in different treatises, such as Giles of Rome who adopts an Aristotelian approach based on regnum mixtum in De regimine principum and a hierocratic approach in De ecclesiastica potestate; while William Durant the Younger supported princely sovereignty in the paréage of Mende, but republicanism in the Tractatus Maior, advocating transfer of supreme legislative authority in the Church to general councils (Constantin Fasolt, Council & Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger, 1991). The Aristotelian logical approach also greatly influenced legal scholars, beginning at Orleans with notables such as Jacobus de Ravannis and Petrus de Bellapertica, and thence to Montpellier and Toulouse. This method characteristic of the so-called Commentators, or Post-glossators, would be carried to Italy by Cynus de Pistoia, who taught Bartolus of Sassoferrato, who taught Baldus de Ubaldis, and which late scholastic style would become identified with the mos italicus in jurisprudence. The methodological advances of the civilians likewise influenced the canonists, and commentators on the canon law in the 14th and 15th centuries including Johannes Andraea, Baldus himself on the Liber extra, Franciscus Zabarella on the Liber extra and the Clementinae and Nicholas de Tudeschis, known as Panormitanus, on the entire Corpus Iuris Canonici. Indeed, for the jurists Aristoteleanism was largely a question of method rather than substance, although the canonist Johannes Monachus cites Aristotle more than once in his gloss to Rem non novam, a decretalis extravagans of Boniface VIII (Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition, 1993). And while Aristoteleanism from the Politics and the Ethics could lead to a notion of popular sovereignty, no case being more famous than that of Marsilius and the Defensor Pacis, although interpretations of Marsilius vary considerably (cf., Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua – The Defender of Peace, 2 vols., 1951, 1956; Jeanine Quillet, La philosophie politique de Marsile de Padoue, 1970; Cary J. NEDERMAN, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padus’s ‘Defensor Pacis’, 1995; Georges De Lagarde, La naissance de l’ésprit laïque au déclin du moyen âge, vol. 2: Marsile de Padoue ou le premier theoricien de l’Etat laïque, 1934, 2nd ed. 1948), Roman law could provide a separate avenue to a similar result, as it did for Bartolo and Baldo (Cecil N. Sidney Woolf, Bartolus of Sassoferrato: His Position in the History of Medieval Political Thought, 1912; Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis, 1987). And it was always possible to interpret Aristotle in a manner leading not to representative institutions, but single universal monarchy, as did Dante in the Convivio and the Monarchia.

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Other thinkers wrote treatises adopting the language of regnum mixtum: John of Paris, De regia potestate; Pierre d’Ailly, De materia, comparing the Pope and council to King and parliament. But D’Ailly at heart believed that the law proceeded from will, not reason, and the constitutional role of council or college as but an institutional brake on the Pope’s abuse of discretion, as detailed by Francis Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (1964). D’Ailly’s exemplum is borrowed by Jean Gerson for much the same point. Avowedly hierarchical in his view of the Church, and no Marsilian or Ockhamist, his concern was that the Pope together with other members of the hierarchy protect divine truth in the world, and should Pope refuse the advice of a general council, then that council may lawfully correct or act against him. The indispensable work on Gerson’s Ecclesiology remains Guillaume H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, Jean Gerson – Apostle of Unity: His Church Politics and Ecclesiology (1999). For these writers, as subsequently for Nicholas of Cusa, author of De concordantia catholica, the issue was never popular sovereignty, but a strong executive in conjunction with a corporate council as the agent for reform of the Church in head and members. Hence, Cusanus, who witnessed the degeneration of the Council of Basel into a populist body lacking the unity, will or resources to carry out a program of reform within an orthodox framework, could shift from a posture of conciliarism to an advocate of papal absolutism (Paul F. Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought, 1963). In fact, one justification for 1450 as an ending date, as artificial as all periodization may be, is the 1449 vote dissolving the rump session of the council of Basel, following the decision in 1448 of the Reichstag and princes to support the papal side which Cusa himself argued. The waning of conciliarism within the Church is explainable in part because Marsilius in his view of the General Council as representative of the congregatio fidelium is distinctly in the minority. The majority of conciliarist churchmen, far from this republican position, view the council as in fact constitutive of the Church; or in the case of Gerson and to some extent Cusa, given their pseudo-Dionysian affinities, the council is a mimesis of the mystical body constituting the true church. On the other hand, Nicole Oresme, much impressed by Marsilius and his republican views, brought Aristotle to the French vernacular in Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote, and after Marsilius, maintained that the legislative power was vested in the people as a whole, since they alone could judge the final good. The same point could be arrived at by John Fortescue in De laudibus legum Anglie without resort to either Roman law or Aristotle, based upon the practice of law and government, and a social contract that made England dominium politicum et regale superior to the French dominium regale.

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Finally, mention need be made of those thinkers owing little to Aristotelianism. Foremost among these are the Franciscans, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The former in particular harks back to an Augustinianism in which government is remedium peccati, and the state is essentially a pact to live in the least bad circumstances by combining their separate dominia. They are not, however, constituent parts of a greater whole, but personalities of which the community is an aggregate: Ad personalitatem requiritur ultima solitudo, sive negatio dependentiae actualis et aptitudinalis ad personam alterius naturae. Ockham continues in this vein when he recognizes: Aliquid est unum improprie et large, sicut regnum dicitur unum, vel populus unum et mundus unum. On the other hand, the result of this approach, which would suggest that election and consent are the raison d’etre of political community, is interpretable in a fashion seemingly consistent with Marsiglian theory. Thus, from 1940–1960, Ockham has been interpreted variously as a radical reformer, a constitutional liberal and a non-political theorist, which analytic fashions are discussed by Takashi Shogimen in Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (2007). Also reaching Marsiglian conclusions, particularly on the issue of subordination of clergy to king, was John Wyclif. Wyclif presumed a natural communism, all post-lapsarian dominium being remedium peccati conditioned upon grace, the latter being a doctrine derived from the Augustinian Richard Fitzralph in De pauperie salvatoris, directed against the mendicants (Gordon Leff, Richard Fitzralph Commentator of the Sentences: A Study in Theological Orthodoxy, 1963). But since only God knows who is in a state of grace, all dominium is ultimately in the disposition of the civil authorities, i. e., the king, earthly rulers being unquestionably ordained of God. Tractatus de civili dominion; Tractatus de officio regis; De dominio divino libri tres. Wyclif’s posture justified a reform of the Church from above, although its implications for legal reform were broader, as detailed at length in W. Farr, John Wyclif as Legal Reformer (1974). E. Historiography Two tendencies can be identified in the modern systematic study of medieval political theory. The first is a heavy emphasis on law, and the reader is encouraged to consider the entries in this volume on Law in the Middle Ages to garner a more complete appreciation of this topic. Let the preliminary observation suffice that a disproportionate number of the scholars producing classic seminal works in the field were trained in the law, including von Gierke, Maitland, Lagarde, and Ullman. The second trend, visible particularly in the work of German scholars and their English cousins, but accepted however tacitly by many other scholars of the first half of the 20th

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century such as Lagarde, was the dichotomization of political thought, usually into some opposing categories such as “corporate” vs. “individual,” or “ascending” vs. “descending,” but which even the most superficial reading readily reveals to be thinly veiled shorthand for “Germanic” vs. “Romanist,” perhaps not surprising for work rooted in the social and intellectual concerns of late 19th-century Europe. Indeed, it can be argued that the modern study of medieval political thought begins with Otto von Gierke and his Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (3 vols., 1868–1881). Concerned with the law of “associations,” and hence transcending the middle ages, the third volume in particular so struck F.W. Maitland that he translated and published it under the title Political Theories of the Middle Age (1900). While its corporatist thesis has been increasingly questioned, the argument of the third volume that Roman concepts of Herrschaft ultimately displaced traditional and more “democratic” notions of German Genossenschaft influenced several generations of medieval scholars, while its scholarship introducing a wealth of primary sources reflective of social thought in the middle ages proved attractive to functionalists such as Maitland. At about the same time as Maitland’s translation of Gierke appeared, Robert Warrand and Alexander James Carlyle completed the first of what stretched to six volumes of A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (1903–1936). Periodically reprinted, this work remains a valuable reference partly due to its copious notes with extensive Latin quotations, partly due to its consistent topical framework, e. g., “The source of law,” “The source and nature of the authority of the ruler,” “Representative institutions,” etc. Finally, the Carlyles emphasized what might be considered the “primacy of law” in medieval thought: the notion that in many important respects, law preceded and legitimized government, rather than vice versa. The corporatist sympathies of the foregoing works were not without influence on Georges de Lagarde, who in 1932 commenced work on what would become his six-volume La naissance de l’ésprit laïque au declin du Moyen Age (1932–1946). In his search for the roots of the modern “lay spirit” in the theological literature of the Middle Ages, Lagarde, however, embraced the very tendencies toward individualism that von Gierke lamented. While some of Lagarde’s conclusions have been questioned by subsequent scholars, particularly the location of the notion of subjective rights in the early moral theories of Ockham, his detailed discussions of Ockham and Marsilius, as well as his discussion of their 13th-century predecessors, continue to hold value for scholars of intellectual opposition to the medieval institutional Church.

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Ernst H. Kantorowicz, who hardly began his academic career at Frankfurt in 1930, then found himself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, on the other hand celebrated the organic wholeness he found in medieval political thought, as evidenced in his Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (1946). In 1957, he published the classic work of Staatstheorie, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (see also the entry on “Kantorowicz” in this Handbook). In that work, really formally a set of interrelated studies on kingship and corporate theory, the author locates the foundation of the modern secular state in the political theology of the king’s mystical body. This was undoubtedly the most important work on medieval kingship since Fritz Kern’s Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter, translated and published as Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (1939), which focused on contrasting Germanic and ecclesiastic conceptions of order. This latter dichotomy, running through so many of the classics, particularly those of German authorship, became the central frame of reference for Walter Ullman, beginning at least with his Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (1949). As he would say concerning the theory of “ascending” and “descending” theories of authority, the former deriving from the “people”, the second proceeding from God: “The history of political ideas in the Middle Ages is to a very large extent a history of the conflicts between these two theories of government” (A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, 1975 [1965], 13). Although overly simplistic sounding, Ullmann understood this theme within a juridical context from his earliest work, The Medieval Idea of Law as Represented by Lucas de Penna: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Legal Scholarship (1946), and fully understood that both populist and theocratic theories could be derived from the common, i. e., Roman and canon, law (Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 1961). Therefore, while some of Ullmann’s most prominent students may have broken with his framework, it is not difficult to see a continuity with Ullmann’s primacy of law. In particular, Brian Tierney has variously located within canon law, long prior to Ockham and Marsilius, the source of conciliarism, in Foundation of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (1955; rev. 1998); and individual rights, in The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (1997). And Ullmann’s concern with the evolution of “papalism” as a political idea was continued by Tierney in Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150–1350: A Study on the concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (1972); and another student, Anthony J. Black, in Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430–1450

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(1970). The latter is also the author of Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (1992), that treats political theory thematically and in terms of polyvocality: i. e., theological, native, juristic, Ciceronian and Aristotelian. Still a third student of Ullman, Joseph Canning, has written A History of Medieval Politcal Thought 300–1450 (1996), which, while short, gives particular attention to the history of the jus commune. In addition to these latter general works the Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350 – c. 1450 (ed. J. H. Burns, 1988), comprised of 19 articles by leading scholars, contains in addition to a biographical appendix presenting notes on the principle medieval authors, excellent bibliographies. As a departure from either typical constitutional history or Roman and canon law approaches to governance in the middle ages, particularly with respect to governance in stateless societies, Otto Brunner’s controversial 1939 classic Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, translated by Howard Kaminsky, and James Van Horn Melton as Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (1992), remains thought provoking in its conception of the Land as Genossenschaft, albeit not Gierke’s imperfect forerunner of the “corporation.” Some of his themes have been addressed recently by Benjamin Arnold in Count and Bishop in Medieval Germany: A Study of Regional Power, 1100–1350 (1992) and Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (1991). While the foregoing represents the mainstream of modern research into medieval political theory in the purest sense of the term, another approach of considerable significance has been to study the social basis of power, and how that power is reflected in social thought or symbolic expression. In particular, the classic work by John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter & his Circle (1970), provides insight into the medieval political milieu. From the standpoint of the Annales school and mentalities as relates to kingship, Marc Bloch’s 1924 classic Les rois thaumaturges: Etude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, translated by J. E. Anderson as the Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (1973), is valuable for its insights into the contemporary understanding of sacral kingship. A more recent work dealing with mentalities is Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (1992). Finally, the collection of articles included in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe (ed. Thomas N. Bisson, 1995), approaches the issue from the standpoint of power and power relationships, and their actual and symbolic manifestations. More, the conference engendering the papers brought together the prominent Annales historian George Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire

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du feodalisme (1978), with Benjamin Arnold, whose roots lay in part at least with Gierke by way of Brunner, suggesting the intersectional nature of these two lines of inquiry. Select Bibliography Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Robert Warrand and Alexander James Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 6 vols., 1903–1936); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Walter Ullman, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages: An Introduction to the Sources of Medieval Political Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London: Methuen, 1949).

Scott L. Taylor

Popes and Papacy A. Introduction The pope is the bishop of Rome, and the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The word pope comes from the Latin papa for ‘father’ and the term ‘papacy’ denotes the office of the pope. The first bishop of Rome was St. Peter, the foremost of the twelve Apostles. Peter is thought to have travelled to the city, and to have been martyred in the Vatican circus together with St. Paul sometime in the mid-60s AD during the persecutions of the Christians under the Emperor Nero (54–68). He is believed to be buried under the altar of St. Peter’s basilica in the Vatican, one of the four cathedral churches of Rome. Although the details of Peter’s earliest successors remain uncertain, the Church claims an unbroken succession of popes covering two thousand years, from St. Peter to the present pope, Benedict XVI (2005–). The papacy is thus the longest running surviving institution in history. The pope’s precedence over the Church is based on Rome’s link to the body and heritage of St. Peter. St. Matthew’s Gospel records that Christ gave Peter a special mission, granting him the keys of heaven and making him the head of the Christian Church. The relevant text is written around the inside of the dome of St. Peter’s, above the main altar and the apostle’s body; “Tu es

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Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum” (“Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church and I will give to thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” Matthew 16:18–19). As bishop of Rome, the pope is thus the heir of St. Peter and the Petrine office, the Vicar of Christ and ruler of the entire Church. During the medieval period, the universal jurisdiction and authority of the papacy, advanced as early as the 2nd century, was deeply contested and the pope’s claim to precedence was secured only very gradually. The Church suffered extensive persecutions during the 3rd century, and many early popes were martyred. The conversion of the Emperor Constantine (306–337) to Christianity, along with his construction of several great basilicas in and around Rome and immense donations of land, gave the Roman church a new wealth and security, and lent the popes a new prominence in the city. The pope’s metropolitan authority over Italy was secure; less so over other parts of the West. Beyond Italy, the pope had to struggle to assert his moral authority over the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and especially Constantinople or ‘New Rome’, who directly administered the church in their own regions. An extremely significant figure in papal history, Pope Leo the Great (440–461) consistently reinforced Roman primacy through the direct identification of the pope with St. Peter. During the late 5th and 6th centuries, with Italy under the control of the Arian Gothic kings, the popes steadfastly insisted upon their pre-eminent position as heads of the Church and protectors of orthodoxy. Pope Gelasius (492–496), in what would become with hindsight an extremely significant letter, asserted his divine authority over the eastern emperor as a secular ruler. As the period progressed relations with Constantinople began to fray. Theological disagreements divided east and west, and relations were deeply strained by the Monophysite debate on the nature of Christ. The Gothic wars and the imperial re-conquest of Italy in the second half of the 6th century, closely followed by Lombard invasions, brought death and plague to the peninsula, and poverty to Rome. Gregory the Great (590–604), considered the greatest of the early medieval popes, devoted boundless energy to his office, bringing new life to the papacy during this period of immense need. He expanded the papacy’s pastoral role, reorganized the papal administration and landholdings, and steadily upheld Roman primacy. Relations with Constantinople declined further under Gregory’s successors during the 7th century, as Byzantine control over Italy decreased. Over the course of the 8th century, the threatening increase in Lombard power in the peninsula, coupled with imperial weakness and further doctrinal dispute over the issue of Iconoclasm, encouraged the papacy to shift its focus away from the east

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and towards the west, to the Frankish empire. Papal appeals for aid to the Frankish Carolingian rulers resulted in the conquest of the Lombard kingdom of Italy by Charlemagne (768–814) in 774, and the initiation of a dramatic but close and respectful alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty. Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III (795–816) in St. Peter’s in the year 800, and his successors remained closely linked to the papacy. The second half of the 9th century is sometimes erroneously regarded as the start of an especially bleak period of papal history, covering the 10th and 11th centuries. The Carolingian Empire came to an end, the Italian peninsula was subjected to attacks from Saracen pirates, and the bishopric of Rome was mercilessly exploited by the city’s aristocratic factions. A particularly low moment was the exhumation and post-mortem trial of Pope Formosus (891–896) by his successor Pope Stephen VI (896–897) in 897. This was certainly a challenging time for the papacy, but this ‘dark’ phase has often been over-simplified and under-estimated by historians. The papacy was to emerge from this period, however, fuelled by an enthusiasm for reform. Alongside the Clunaic reform of the monasteries, from the mid-11th century onwards the popes undertook the reform of not only the papal office but also the western Church. Especially under the energetic Pope Leo IX (1049–1054), the papacy actively condemned lay investiture, simony, and clerical marriage in an effort to lessen secular control over the Church, and to ensure the purity of those that served in it. Toward the end of the century, papal aspirations reached their height under Gregory VII (1073–1085) with the Investiture Controversy. Gregory’s explosive papal memorandum, the Dictatus Papae, asserted that the pope could depose emperors, and involved Gregory in a bitter struggle with the German Emperor Henry IV (1084–1105). At the end of the century, Urban II (1088–1099) preached the First Crusade, promising remission of sin to all participants. Papal prestige increased, and the 12th century witnessed the steady growth of papal monarchy. During this period, the papacy began to identify itself as the direct Vicar of Christ, rather than of St. Peter. The international character of the Church was stressed as the papacy increased its administrative and financial potential, and emphasized its role as a European court of appeal. Simultaneously, however, the papacy began to lose the traditional loyalty of the Romans themselves. The power of the cardinals grew, as did the study and significance of canon law together with the involvement of monks in the developing papal Curia. The medieval papacy reached a peak under Innocent III (1198–1216) both in terms of papal reform initiatives and international power and influence.

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Throughout the course of the 13th century, the papacy struggled against the secular powers of Europe for the right to control both ecclesiastical and imperial appointments. The end of the imperial Hohenstaufen dynasty saw the papacy shift toward a French orbit. Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) announced a Jubilee year in 1300, and Rome was flooded with pilgrims, but his involvement in higher secular politics was less successful. The increasing gap between the theory and reality of papal claims came to a head in the 1303 ‘Outrage of Anagni’ when Boniface VIII was mobbed in his papal palace at Anagni by the soldiers of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), king of France. For the majority of the 14th century the papacy resided at Avignon. Clement V (1305–1314) elected by a pro-French party, keen to promote his relationship with Philip and wary of Roman and Italian politics, moved the papacy to Avignon in 1305. The Avignon papacy lasted until 1377 and developed a strong French identity. It stressed its centrality to international canon law rather than its association with St. Peter. An attempted move back to Rome in 1378 resulted in the Great Schism, with two popes being elected, one residing at Rome, the other at Avignon. The split would last until the Council of Constance in 1414–1418, which deposed the rival popes, elected an alternative candidate, Martin V (1417–1431), and declared that even the pope himself could thus be judged. The 15th-century papacy had been greatly weakened, and the claims to papal supremacy were ended. The resulting age of Conciliarism argued that the supreme power lay in the Church as a whole, not in the individual person of the pope (Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 1997; Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy, 1972; Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy, 1968). B. History of the Popes The literature on the popes is vast. From the 19th century onwards, German, French, Italian and British scholars have consistently studied all aspects of the medieval papacy. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, Horace Mann’s great 18-volume Lives of the Popes (1906–1932) was the first of the great modern general histories of the papacy, beginning with St. Peter and finishing in 1304. This was followed by two important mid-century German histories, Franz Seppelt’s Geschichte der Päpste (1954–1950) and Johannes Haller’s Das Papsttum: Idee und Wirklichkeit (1965), and more recently, by Horst Fuhrmann’s Von Petrus zu Johannes Paul II (1984). Richard Krautheimer’s magisterial study Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 appeared in 1980, and studies the art and architecture of the Roman See in the context of papal history. Significant recent general contributions include Eamon Duffy’s popular and learned Saints and Sinners (1997), John Kelly’s Oxford

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Dictionary of the Popes (1986), and Phillipe Levillain’s The Papacy: An Encyclopedia (2002). The theology of the papacy has also long been a major subject of papal historiography. 19th-century studies began with Robert Carlyle’s great six-volume A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (1903–1936). Later important contributions include Trevor Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy (1944); Friedrich Kempf’s Sacerdozio e Regno da Gregorio VII a Bonifacio VIII (1954); Walter Ullmann’s The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (1955); and more recently, Klaus Schatz’s Der päpstliche Primat (1990). Studies of the early Church have often focused on the early history of the papacy. Louis Duchesne, one of the foremost scholars on the papacy, published his seminal Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise in 1906–1910. Considered too modernist by the Church itself, the work is nonetheless a crucial study (Duchesne also produced the standard edition of the Liber Pontificalis, a collection of papal biographies and one of the most important papal sources, in 1886–1892). This was followed by Erich Caspar’s seven-volume Geschichte des Papsttums (1930–1933), and together with Duchesne’s, the two studies are standard works on the early papal period. Important contributions in English include Hector Burn-Murdoch’s The Development of the Papacy (1954); Robert Markus’s Christianity in the Roman World (1974); and Henry Chadwick’s The Early Church (1993). Peter Brown’s work on the context of Christianity and the Roman Empire has been extremely influential, including The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and The Rise of Western Christendom (1996). Peter Lampe’s recent study From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (2003) is the most significant recent contribution to the genre. Constantine’s relationship with Christianity and the early popes has also received a great amount of scholarly attention, with significant contributions including Norman Baynes’ Constantine the Great and the Christian Church (1929); Arnold Jones’ Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (1962); and Ramsey Macmullen’s Constantine (1970). Leo I, the great late antique pope, is the subject of Trevor Jalland’s key biography The Life and Times of Leo the Great (1941). General histories on the early medieval papacy again begin with Louis Duchesne and his Les premiers temps de l’état pontifical (1904). Other important early contributions include Hans Von Schubert’s Geschichte der christlichen Kirche im Frühmittelalter (1921); and Henry Moss’ The Birth of the Middle Ages (1935). Later eminent general histories include The Medieval Papacy (1968) by Geoffrey Barraclough; A Short History of the Papacy (1974) by Walter Ullmann; The Popes and the Papacy (1979) by Jeffrey Richards; and more recently The Papacy (1992) by Bernhard Schimmelpfennig; and Rome in the Dark Ages (1993) by Peter Llewellyn. Relations with Byzantium and

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theological disputes are popular aspects of the early medieval papacy, studied by Duchesne and others. Gregory the Great has received a great amount of scholarly attention, beginning with Frederick Dudden’s Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought (1905); and more recently, Robert Markus’ From Augustine to Gregory the Great (1983) and Gregory the Great and His World (1997). Franco-papal relations have also been much studied. Significant early contributions included Erich Caspar’s Pippin und die römische Kirche (1914); Das Papsttum unter fränkischer Herrschaft (1956); and Thomas Noble’s 1984 work on the development of the papal state The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 remains outstanding. Herman Geertman’s More Veterum: Il Liber Pontificalis e gli edifice ecclesiastici di Roma (1975) studies the 8th- and 9th-century papal administration and its building activity. The principal early work on the period of the reform papacy, Gregory VII, and the Investiture Controversy is that of Augustin Fliche, La Réforme grégorienne published in three volumes from 1924 to 1937. Gerd Tellenbach ’s Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (1936) and The Church in Western Europe From the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Centuries (1993) established him as one of the foremost medieval scholars. Other principal works include Richard Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970); Ian Robinson’s The Papacy 1073–1198 (1990) and Authority and Resistance in the Investiture Controversy (1978); Colin Morris’ The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (1989); and Herbert Cowdrey’s recent Pope Gregory VII (1998). The principal scholars on the 12th- and 13th-century papacy begin with the great German Johannes Haller, whose Papsttum und Kirchenreform appeared in 1903. Important studies also include Robert Bretano’s Rome before Avignon (1974); Agostino Bagliani’s Il trono di Pietro: L’universalità del papato da Alessandro III a Bonifacio VIII (1996); and Keith Pennington’s Pope and Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (1984). Anders Winroth’s recent book The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (2000) provides a fundamental re-appraisal of 12th-century Canon Law. Innocent III is the focus of several critical works beginning with Achille Luchaire’s six-volume Innocent III (1905–08); and Friedrich Kempf’s Papsttum und Kaisertum bei Innocenz III (1954). He is the subject of a recent modern biography by Helene Tillmann, Pope Innocent III (1980). The major works on the Avignon papacy are in French, including Yves Renouard’s La papauté a Avignon (1954); and Bernard Guillemain’s La cour pontificale d’Avignon 1309–1376 (1962); followed by Guillaume Mollat’s The Popes at Avignon 1305–1378 (1963). Similarly, the essential early works on the Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement are also in French, by Noël Valois, including

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La France et le grand schisme (1896–1902) and Le pape et le concile, 1418–1450 (1909). Later eminent works on the subject include Ernest Jacob’s Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (1943); Walter Ullmann’s The Origins of the Great Schism (1948); Étienne Delaruelle’s L’église au temps du grand schisme et la crise conciliaire (1952–1955); Brian Tierney’s Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (1955); and John Smith’s The Great Schism, 1378 (1970). Other areas of papal historiography include the papal state, covered in Louis Duchesne’s The Beginnings of the Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes AD 754–1073 (1908); Peter Partner’s The Lands of St. Peter (1972); and Thomas Noble’s above-mentioned The Republic of St. Peter (1984). The fundamental early works on canon law include Johann Von Schulte’s Geschichte und Literatur des canonischen Rechts von Gratian bis auf die Gegenwart (1875); and Paul Fournier’s and Gabriel Le Bras’s Histoire des collections canonique en occident (1931–1932). Papal finances are studied by William Lunt in works such as Papal Revenues in the Middle Ages (1934). Studies of the papal chancery include Reginald Poole’s Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery (1915); and Christopher Cheney’s The Study of the Medieval Papal Chancery (1966). A major area of future study will be the letters of the medieval popes, of which there is no full or satisfactory edition. In addition, there is a growing attraction to and re-interpretation of early medieval Italian history in general, which will stimulate interest in the corresponding often misinterpreted ‘dark’ period of papal history. Select Bibliography Erich Caspar, Geschichte des Papsttums von den Anfängen bis zur Höhe der Weltherrschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1930–1933); Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); Louis Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’église (Paris: Fontemoing & Co, 1906–1910); John Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentius: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (London: T & T Clark, 2003); The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Peter Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages (London: Faber, 1971); Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe From the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Centuries, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1972)

Frances Parton

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Popular Religion / Spirituality in Medieval Studies A. Definition Studying popular religion and/or spirituality in Medieval Studies is rendered more difficult by the lack of a cohesive or all-encompassing definition. In the Middle Ages, sources for spirituality were often the same as for philosophy and for what is now termed literature in the modern sense of the word. In the middle of the 20th century, however, a proper discipline called “history of spirituality” came into being, thanks to the scholars mentioned below. The problem is exacerbated when the qualifier “popular” is applied, since we often lack sources of “popular” practice: most surviving documents belong to official circles, i. e., monasteries, cathedral schools, and the like. Because one could extend the study of such a field into dozens, perhaps hundreds of directions, it might be prudent to review the general literature before addressing one area that has seen the some of the most energetic work in the last few decades: medieval women’s spirituality. B. General Writings on Popular Religion and Spirituality Under the heading of popular religious and general spirituality, one might include anything from liturgies, liturgical commentaries, Biblical exegesis, and Latin hymnody. Of course, this would include material from hundreds, if not thousands, of medieval codices and modern publications. A good primer might be Rosalind and Christopher Brooke’s Popular Religion in the Middle Ages: Western Europe 1000–1300 (1984) and their excellent bibliographical note at the end of the work. After that, of course, one can always have recourse to the Lexikon des Mittelalters and the entries under “Geistliche Dichtung,” and, for primary sources, the Corpus Christianorum (1954ff.). Much early work was published in German, including that of Theodor Kolde, Die deutsche Augustiner-Congregation und Johann von Staupitz (1879) and Das religiöse Leben in Erfurt beim Ausgange des Mittelalters (1898). Georg Kaufmann then published his two-volume (which contained the material he had originally intended for three) Deutsche Geschichte bis auf Karl den Grossen, 1880–1881, as well as his Von dem römischen Weltreiche zu der geistlich-weltlichen Universalmonarchie des Mittelalters: 419–814, 1881. Shortly thereafter, Robert Stroppel contributed to the field his Liturgie und geistliche Dichtung zwischen 1050 und 1300: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Mess- und Tagzeitenliturgie (1927, rpt. 1973). Because for these early scholars, spirituality was often impossible to divorce from more philosophical tendencies, one finds early around the same time in the 20th century works such as Bernhard Geyer, Die

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patristische und scholastische Philosophie (1928), and Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, the first volume of which was edited and published by Clemens Bäumker and Georg von Hertling beginning in 1891. Upon the work of these early sources, both European and American scholars have made many contributions at a time when the field was still intimately linked with philosophy. Sydney Herbert Mellone published Western Christian Thought in the Middle Ages in 1935, for which he relied on the philosophical work of Etienne Gilson and also The Legacy of the Middle Ages, ed. Charles G. Crump and Ernest Fraser Jacob (1916), and John Arnott MacCulloch’s Medieval Faith and Fable (1931). Shortly thereafter, Gilson, in addition to his many philosophical works, published, La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (1934) and Théologie et histoire de la spiritualité (1943). In that same year, he and André Combes co-founded the scholarly journal, Études de théologie et d’histoire de la spiritualité. Furthermore, upon assuming the chair of the History of Spirituality at the Institute Catholique in Paris, he delivered and published an inaugural lecture entitled, Théologie et histoire de la spiritualité (1943). In 1958, he published La philosophie franciscaine. In the 1950s, two eminent scholars in the field, one on the continent and one in Anglo-American circles, began their work upon spirituality proper, no longer linking it absolutely with philosophy. The former was that paragon of scholarship in medieval spirituality: Jean Leclercq. Any study of spirituality must begin (some might say end) with La spiritualité du Moyen Age (1961), co-authored by Jean Leclercq, François Vandenbroucke, and Louis Bouyer. This volume is the second in the multi-volume compendium, Histoire de la spiritualité chrétienne. The tome is divided into three unequal parts: the first, by Leclercq, is entitled “De Saint Grégoire à Saint Bernard, du VIe au XIIe siècle” and treats by and large monastic spirituality. Vandenbroucke contributes the second part, “Nouveaux milieux, nouveaux problèmes, du XIIe au XVIe siècle,” which begins with Scholasticism, runs through the mendicant orders as well as the rise of lay orders in the Late Middle Ages, and into the Protestant Reformation and Catholic CounterReformation. Finally, Louis Bouyer offers a short appendix, “La spiritualité byzantine.” In addition to his editorial collaboration noted above, Leclercq has made several fundamental contributions to the field. His work, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques de moyen âge (1957), is a classic in the field of medieval spirituality. Besides introducing readers to the great monastic figures of the Middle Ages – Benedict, Gregory, inter alia – he provides very useful comments on monastic textual genres, the poetics of the liturgy, and an epilogue on “Literature and the Mystical Life.” After this

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early work, he penned L’idée de la royauté du Christ au Moyen Age (1959); Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-historical Essays (1979); Aspects of Monasticism (1978); A Second Look at Bernard of Clairvaux (1990); as well as many articles in journals and collections such as the one he co-edited with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff: Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century (1985). While Leclerc was working in French, another scholar in the AngloAmerican arena, Giles Constable, began his career with Monastic Tithes: From their Origins to the Twelfth Century, a two-volume edition begun in 1952 and published in 1964. The publication sparked a brilliant career in medieval religious thought and spirituality. In 1967, he offered readers The Letters of Peter the Venerable, and then Libellus de Diversis Ordinibus et Professionibus Qui Sunt in Aecclesia (1972), Religious Life and thought (11th–12th centuries) (1979), and Renaissance and Renewal in the Tweflth Century (ed. with Robert L. Benson and with the aid of Carol D. Lanham in 1982). In Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (1995), Constable reflects on “The Interpretation of Mary and Martha,” “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” and, returning to familiar territory for this historian, “The Orders of Society.” The volume includes a 43-page bibliography of secondary works, something that complements an earlier bibliographical effort on his part: Medieval Monasticism: A Select Bibliography (1976). Then, in 1996 appeared Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe, a collection of essays previously from 1983 to 1994 across the globe on such varied topics as preaching, ceremonies and symbolism of entering religious life, and liturgical prayer. Beside these monographs and multi-volume tomes, other collections of essays appeared, such as the one edited by E. Rozanne Elder (introduction by Leclercq) entitled Spirituality of Christendom (1976). This collection contains essays focused by and large, but not exclusively, on spiritual personalities of the Middle Ages and early modern period from Augustine to Calvin. These essays are built largely on primary sources but also on secondary works such as W. A. Schumacher, Spiritus and Spiritual (1957); Vernon J. Burke, Augustine’s View of Reality (1964); Jean Daniélou, The Theology of Jewish Christendom (1964); and Marjory Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (1969). André Vauché wishes to take a step beyond a simply typological view of medieval spirituality in his La spiritualité du Moyen Age occidental: VIIIe–XIIe siècles (1975; revised in 1994). Vauché seeks to measure the impact of these systems had on society at large. As a result, he must rely less on primary documents than on the synthetic studies of scholars who published before him. In particular, he relies on the work of Etienne Delaruelle, La piété populaire

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au Moyen Age (1975) and L’idée de croisade au Moyen Age (1980); volume one of the Histoire de la France religieuse, completed under the direction of Jacques Le Goff and R. Rémond and entitled, Des dieux de la Gaule à la papauté d’Avignon (1988); Georges Duby, Le temps des cathédrales. L’art et la société, 980–1420 (1976), L’an Mil (1967), and Saint Bernard: L’art cistercien (Paris, 1976); and on his own previously published works, notably, volumes four and five of the Histoire du christianisme, the first of which he edited with G. Dagron and Pierre Riché and entitled Evêques, moines et empereurs, 610–1054 and Apogée de la papauté et expansion de la chrétienté, 1054–1274 (1993), respectively Les laïcs au Moyen Age. Pratiques et expériences religieuses (1987); and La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age (1994). Around the same time that Vauché was working, other European scholars were active in the field. Raoul Manselli delivered a number of lectures under the auspices of the Conférence Albert-le-Grand at the Institut d’études médiévales de Montréal. These lectures were then published as La Religion populaire au moyen âge: Problèmes de méthode et d’histoire and were built upon Manselli’s previous thirty years of research in popular religious movements, both orthodox and heretical. These include his collaboration with Paolo Lamma and Alfred Haverkamp on Beiträge zur Geschichte Italiens im 12. Jahrhundert (1971); Studi sulle eresi del secolo XII (1953); La ‘Lectura super Apocalipsim’ di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi; ricerche sull’escatologismo medioevale (1955); and Spirituali e Beghini in Provenza (1959). Since the publication of those lectures in Montreal, he has published St. Francis of Assisi (1988). Meanwhile, Peter Dinzelbacher published Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, an important monograph on visionary literature in 1981, the same year that his shorter monograph appeared entitled Revelationes. In each of these books, Dinzelbacher covers previous scholarship, puts forth a definition of the field, and extensively discusses themes, types, and subgenres in vision literature. Then in 1990, he edited a series of articles entitled Volksreligion im hohen und späten Mittelalter, and in 1998 he published a very extensive biography of Bernard de Clairvaux and an analysis of his religious thought: Bernhard von Clairvaux: Leben und Werk des berühmten Zisterziensers. More specific contributions to the field continued to appear in both North America and Europe, especially on the theme of death. In 1994, proceedings of a conference held at the Universidad de Zaragoza in 1990 were published as Muerte, religiosidad y cultura popular, siglos XIII–XVIII, ed. Eliseo Serrano Martín. The 26 contributions to the tome are organized thematically by session: “Muerte, religiosidad y cultura popular: encrucijadas”; “Retazos de religiosidad”; “El sueño eterno: actitudes, ritos y sentimentos”; and “La muerte representada: Imagen, verso, ‘tempo’.” As contributions to the

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study of popular culture, the individual essays discuss attitudes and beliefs related to death in the high to late Middle Ages and build upon Roger Chartier, El mundo como representación. Historia cultural: entre práctica y representación (1992); Keith Thomas Religion and the Decline of Magic (1991); Philippe Ariés, L’homme devant la mort (1977); and the collaborative three-volume work entitled La religiosidad popular (1989) ed. Álvarez Santalo, Carlos León, and Maria Jesús Buxó Rey. Most recently in Germany, Bettina Spoerri has offered Der Tod als Text und Signum: der literarische Todesdiskurs in geistlich-didaktischen Texten des Mittelalters (1999). Last, but by all means not least, one must recognize the current work of Bernard McGinn, who may be the leading historian of Christian spirituality at this time. He has authored the multi-volume work, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. In volume 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (1991), McGinn offers suggestions on how to read and interpret mystics’ theological endeavors. Volume two, entitled The Growth of Mysticism: 500 to 1200 A.D. (1996) includes careful studies of Gregory the Great and Bernard de Clairvaux while the third volume, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (1998), focuses on Francis of Assisi. C. Medieval Women’s Spirituality When discussing medieval women’s spirituality, one must include works that address the common or popular experience of women in their spiritual lives, including works on medieval women’s religious orders. However, of course, readers must also look to the extraordinary women of medieval spirituality: the mystics. Although an economic historian, Eileen Powers must be credited with some of the earliest work in women’s spirituality and recognized as the driving force behind so much later work in the field. She published a threepart article very early on in her career, “The Cult of the Virgin in the Middle Ages” (Cambridge Magazine 28 April, 5 May, 9 June 1917; rpt. in Medieval Women, ed. Michael Mohissey Postan, 1975) and then a book not long afterward: Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922). From her own interest in medieval women, an entire avenue of scholarship on medieval women’s spirituality could continue. Scholarship on medieval women’s spirituality just before and after World War II continued, but one particular event marked an upswing in interest in one particular medieval woman’s spirituality. The Book of Margery Kempe was made widely available in 1940 thanks to the editorial efforts of Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen in The Book of Margery Kempe: the

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Text from the Unique Ms. Owned by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon. Once the text was available, studies began appearing regularly in scholarly journals as well as in monograph form as in Martin Thornton’s 1960 Margery Kempe: an Example in the English Pastoral Tradition and the very influential book by Louise Collis, Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: the Life and Times of Margery Kempe (1964; rpt. in 1983). Soon more and more books focused on mysticism and women’s voices as examples of feminine agency began to appear in, for example, Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and the World of Margery Kempe (1983); John C. Hirsh, The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England (1989); Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (1991); Sandra J. McEntire, Margery Kempe: a Book of Essays (1992); and Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (1994). Feminist scholarship during this time studied more than just this one figure. Building upon important work such as that of Eileen Power and Michelline de Fontette, Les religieuses à l’âge classique du droit du droit canon, recherches sur les structures juridiques de branches féminines des ordres (1967), scholars began to uncover hitherto unexplored avenues of women’s spiritual history and women’s spiritual writings – one of the only spheres in which women’s thoughts survive in such abundance. In 1973, a significant book was published that spurred on feminist critics in their investigations: Joan Morris, The Lady Was a Bishop: The Hidden History of Women with Clerical Ordination and the Jurisdiction of Bishops. By uncovering evidence that women played important pastoral and spiritual functions in the first centuries of Christianity, Morris encouraged scholars, especially women scholars, saw new avenues of research in the history of female spirituality. A particularly important scholar of general and female spirituality was undergoing her training at Harvard University and beginning her career when this research was being accomplished: Caroline Walker Bynum. In 1979, she offered her first monograph, Docere Verbo et Exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality, before publishing her groundbreaking Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1982). She continued to focus on women and gender studies in her career in publications such as Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (ed. with Stevan Harrell and Paula Richman in 1986); Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987); Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (l991); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (l995); and Body-Part Reliquaries (ed. with Paula Gerson as a special isssue of Gesta in l997). Through her work in body politics, she became increasingly interested in blood, especially that of Jesus: Metamorphosis and Identity (2001); “Das Blut und die Körper Christi im Mittel-

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alter: Eine Asymmetrie,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg Haus 5 (2001): 75–119; “Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 30 (Spring, 2002): 3–36; “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71.4 (2002), 685–715; “The Power in the Blood: Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Substitution in Late Medieval Soteriology,” The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ, (2004), 177–204; and “Bleeding Hosts and Their Contact Relics in Late Medieval Northern Germany,” The Medieval History Journal (2004): 227–41. With the publication of this last article, she continued to work on Northern Germany: “A Matter of Matter: Two Cases of Blood Cult in the North of Germany in the Later Middle Ages,” Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy du Quesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie Hayes, 2 vols. (2005), vol. 2, 181–210; “Formen weiblicher Frömmigkeit im späteren Mittelalter,” Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenklöstern, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger and Robert Suckale (2005), 118–29; and especially Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (2007). Using the work of critics like Bynum Walker, scholars then began to mine primary sources in order to conceive of a feminine or proto-feminist spiritual discourse. In 1979, a collection of some of the best female and feminist Church historians and theologians appeared, entitled Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Reuther and Eleanor McLaughlin. The very same year, the same two editors offered Mothers of the Church: Ascetic Women in the Late Patristic Age. In 1985 Peter Dinzelbacher presented a collection of essays that he had edited, entitled Frauenmystik in Mittelalter, and Barbara J. MacHaffie published Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition a year later. Then, in 1988 a very important collaborative enterprise between Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser was published: the two-volume A History of their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present. In volume I, Anderson and Zinsser cover women’s spirituality in a number of sections, including goddess religions in the first section, “Traditions Inherited: Attitudes about Women from the Centuries before 800 A.D.” In their third section, “Women of the Churches: The Power of the Faithful,” the co-authors address the role of women’s spiritual authority within and outside of the institutional church. Later scholars have built upon this work, such as Jo Ann Kay McNamara, who published Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia in 1996. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker co-edited Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity in 1998, the same year that saw the publication of Patricia Ranft’s Women and Spiritual Equality in Christian Tradition.

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During these years, in addition to these more general works, more specialized studies began to appear, notably, Andrea Lebers’ study of Engelhard von Langheim, ‘Eine Frau war dieser Mann’: die Geschichte der Hildegund von Schönau, 1989; Angela Muñoz Fernández, Las mujeres en el cristianismo medieval: imágenes teóricas y cauces de actuación religiosa, 1989; the collaborative work of Daniel Ethan Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, Mistiche e devote nell’Italia tardomedievale in 1992; Elizabeth Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, 1994; Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, 1995; Ronald E. Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila, 1995; Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, 1997; The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena, translated with introduction, notes, and interpretive essay by Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez, 1998; and Georges Didi-Huberman, Die Ordnung des Materials (Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus), 1999. Of course, where there were female mystics and visionaries, there were accusations of witchcraft and heresy. Much of the groundwork for this field was laid by Lynn Thorndike in her 8-volume The History of Magic and Experimental Science published from 1923 to 1958. During that same period, Francophone readers could turn to Robert-Léon Wagner’s ‘Sorcier’ et ‘magicien’: Contribution à l’histoire de la magie (1939). In the 1970s, scholarly work on the subject flourished in wide-sweeping contributions such as Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (1972); Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1973; rpt. 1993; revised 2000); David Carroll, The Magic Makers: Magic and Sorcery Through the Ages; Richard Cavendish, A History of Magic (1977); and Franco Cardini, Magia, stregoneria, superstizioni nell’Occidente medievale (1979). More recently, interested readers have found the work of Richard Kieckhefer particularly rich. His 1989 publication, Magic in the Middle Ages, is quickly becoming a seminal work in the field, and his Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (1997) brings forth an edition of a little studied Latin text preserved in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Finally, in the 21st century, Michael D. Bailey’s Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (2003) ensures that work will continue apace in the field in the foreseeable future. As scholars made their way into the third millennium, contributions on female spirituality as a distinct field of study make clear that field’s fertility. In 2000, Katherine Ludwig Jansen published The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. A year later, in 2001, C.J. Mews offered Listen Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Re-

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ligious Women in the Middle Ages, and Shulamith Shahar, Women in a Medieval Heretical Sect: Agnes and Huguette the Waldensians. Having come a long way from its roots in economic history and the history of philosophy, the study of spirituality, especially women’s spirituality, continues to be a thriving discipline in many branches of the humanities, including cultural studies (now see Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007). Select Bibliography Louis Bouyer, Jean Leclercq, and FrançoisVandenbroucke, La Spiritualité du Moyen Age (Paris: Aubier, 1961); Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Etienne Gilson, La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (Paris: J. Vrin, 1934); id., Théologie et histoire de la spiritualité (Paris: J. Vrin, 1943); Jean Leclercq, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques de moyen âge (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1957); Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

Daniel E. O’Sullivan

Post-Colonialism in Medieval Studies A. Definition The interaction of two or more cultures often produces a literary response in which the encountered culture is fictionalized according to its perceived differences. This fictionalization enforces simultaneous perceptions of selfsuperiority and idealized alterity – a process clearly visible and first noted in the literatures of the early modern colonial period. Inevitably, a period of assimilation occurs in which this literature of colonization gives way to the rising voices of the colonized who have appropriated to a lesser or greater degree the literature of the colonizer and its implicit conceptions of inferiority and disenfranchisement. The term ‘Post-Colonial’ pertains expressly to this subsequent literature in which the colonizer and the colonized have come together in an uncomfortable relationship of mutual appropriation in the person of the writer. The study of how differing literatures portray alterity and exclude necessarily the voices of the ‘Other’ thus pertains closely to postcolonialism, but the delimited scope of the term itself remains under scrutiny (Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?,” Textual Practice 5 [1991]: 399–414; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pit-

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falls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’,” Social Text 31–32 [1992]: 84–98). Postcolonial theory primarily focuses on identity and the production of literature in the context of conflicted cultural perceptions (Patrick Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean, 2000). The post-colonial writer must attempt some kind of reconciliation of the dominant fiction of the colonizer with the resistant, but compromised voice of the colonized. Such a reconciliation, as Georg Gugelburger points out in “Postcolonial Cultural Studies” (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 1994), entails a rearrangement of perceptions which, based on constituent ideas of social and cultural majority established by the dominant fiction, do not reflect that society’s reality but nevertheless inform the writer’s work and identity. B. Post-Colonial Theory and the Middle Ages For current writers working in post-colonial countries like the United States, Canada, Ireland, India, and Africa, the question is immediately pertinent to the resolution of very real and continuing social conflict, but the question has a different set of subsequent problems for the medievalist. On the one hand, the medievalist must appropriately position particular authors in their proper context and according to the record of their extant literary voices in order to properly recount how the interactions of their cultural particulars define the conflicts, however subtle, present to them. Suzanne Akbari, for example, gives an overview of the specific literary moments that define a medieval perception of an alien, pagan East and the resulting selfperception of “a cold (because northerly) European West,” (“From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation,” The Post-Colonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 2000). On the other hand, the medievalist must also be consistently aware of modern perceptions which may inhibit an appropriate analysis and subsequent representation of the authors and scribes who produced the surviving textual record. If not, the modern academic essentially ‘colonizes’ the past and establishes yet a further fictionalization of the medieval period and its inhabitants. To some degree, the medievalist has always been aware of the problems addressed by post-colonial theory, through the continued influence and absence of imperial Roman culture and authority. Both Edward Gibbon’s (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1788) and R. W. Southern’s (The Making of the Middle Ages, 1965) foundational works recognize the legacy of the Roman Empire as a defining characteristic of the Middle Ages with its various implications for linguistics, literature, art and politics. The advent of post-colonial theory in literary analysis provided a set of defined terms and paradigms with which

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scholars like Michael Warren (“Making Contact: Post-Colonial Perspectives through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanie,” Arthuriana 8.4 [1998]: 115–34) could continue and refine their work. C. Said’s Orientalism The seminal work on post-colonial literature was Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which sought to illuminate the way in which Near/Middle Eastern and Western literatures perpetuated a process of mutual fictionalization. Said’s model and approach have since undergone considerable scrutiny, but his description of how cultures fictionalize one another remains central to the work of post-colonial analysis. Despite the significance of Orientalism, post-colonial theory and analysis did not gain widespread academic popularity until after 1989, when Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tifflin defined and established the analysis of postcolonial literatures by publishing The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. In subsequent years, the field of post-colonial analysis gained momentum with the work of Homi Babha (“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration, 1990; The Location of Culture, 1994) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, ed. Sarah Harasym, 1987; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999; Death of a Discipline, 2003). The literary theory appropriate to problems of post-colonial identity proved appropriate also to the study of gender, particularly in a post-imperial context (Gillian Whitlock, The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography, 2000; Women and the Colonial Gaze, ed. Tamara Hunt and Micheline Lessard, 2002), and in Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd Pender’s Her Master’s Tools: Feminist and Postcolonial Engagements of Historical-Critical Discourse (2005), feminist and post-colonial theory were unified in a re-evaluation of Biblical scholarship and the academy. Changing political circumstances and pressure from increasingly theory – rather than text – driven scholarship necessitated, as Igor Maver states in his “Post-Colonial Literatures in English ab origine as futurum” (Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies, ed. Igor Maver, 2006, 11), a redefined “academic theoretical discourse analyzing the practice of post-colonial literary representation, that is, the process of construction of the cultural Other” with an increasing degree of interdisciplinary analysis. Post-Colonial Theory Among Medievalists: The call for a redefined discourse, characterized by an increased degree of interdisciplinary scholarship, had already been made and answered to some degree by the community of medievalists by the year 2000. In that year, the question of how post-colonialism specifically related to scholarship on the Middle Ages was addressed

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expressly in The Post-Colonial Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, with a resulting insistence on rethinking appropriate terms (such as ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ ‘translation,’ and even terms central to the discipline itself, e. g., ‘middle,’ and ‘period’). The book also demanded a re-evaluation of the divisions between disciplines and likewise the determinants of identity, increasing focus on non-Christian groups, and otherwise removing the boundaries set on medieval Europe – temporally as well as geographically – by the modern academic community. The destabilization of the “middleness” of the Middle Ages through terms and methods defined by post-colonial theory was further undertaken by the contributing scholars of Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren’s Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (2003); and John Ganim in his Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (2005). Over the twenty-five years prior to these books, the question of colonialism during the Middle Ages had been discussed by scholars like Joshuah Prawer (The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonization in the Middle Ages, 1972); Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983); Kathleen Biddick (“The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet,” Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, 1998, 268–93); and Kathleen Davis (“National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 [1998]: 611–37), the debate steadily appropriating post-colonial terms and methods. If medievalists had already been dealing unconsciously with the issues inherent to post-colonialism prior to The Empire Writes Back, they gained from post-colonial discourse a further dimension in the critical examination of the politics and difficulties inherent to medievalism itself in the process of, as Stephen Nichols put it in his introduction to Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (ed. R. Howard Bloch and Nichols, 1996), “wallowing in the question of its origins.” Kathleen Biddick further treated this question in The Shock of Medievalism (1998) as did Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Speigel in “Medievalisms Old and New: The rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies” (AHR 103 [June 1998]: 677–704) through the examination of late 20th-century interest in the medieval “grotesque.” Approaching the issue more broadly, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, 2005) drew from the extensive interdisciplinarity of both Medieval Studies and post-colonialism in order to target specifically the post-colonial moments of medieval Europe’s ever shifting contexts of cultural production and interpretation.

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Select Bibliography Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, ed. Eugene Benson, and L.W. Conolly (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Post-Colonial Literatures in English: General, Theoretical, and Comparative 1970–1993, ed. Alan Lawson, Leigh Dale, Helen Tiffin, and Shane Rowlands (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997); The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2006); John Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

James Tindal Acken

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Q Queer Theories in Medieval Studies A. Definition Queer Studies developed in part from the feminism movement but came into its own during the late 1980s and early 1990s especially with the works of Judith Butler. It is still a growing school of thought in relation to modern literature, and therefore few theorists have applied much of this critical approach to Medieval Studies. However, this is not to say Queer Studies has not begun finding ground in its concern over identity formation and identity politics during the Middle Ages. The aim is less about discerning an author’s meaning or intention behind the manner that certain characters or situations are represented, but instead, to show how these characters or situations exemplify the social formation of identity and the interactions between the different identity roles during that period. Identifying texts that demonstrate how society molds and enforces these various identity roles and relationships therefore reinforces the argument of many queer theorists over the artificiality of identity as opposed to any sort of natural or inherent gender and sexuality. Because this is still a developing field, there are many facets of Queer Studies still emerging, however, the primary focus of this selection will be that of how it relates to identity formation and identity politics. B. Terminology Queer Studies finds its roots in post-structuralism, and its primary purpose is to open the discourse to the needs and interests of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities. Because these needs and interests continue to change and grow, this field of studies is still in a state of self-determination. Michel Foucault (“Lecture 7 Jan 1976,” Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended, 2003, 1–24) describes an “insurrection of the subjugated knowledges,” and Queer Studies is certainly one example of where a marginalized population has is made itself known (6–12). Queer Studies centers itself in identity formation and attempts to explore the methods by which individuals are labeled as men and women, masculine and feminine, as well as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. It acts as a force of resistance

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against essentialist views as it explores the ways socially constructed beings interact with one another. Not surprisingly, Queer Studies has much in common with other forms of identity theory such as Feminism and Gender Theory from which it developed. The writings of feminists, gender theorists, and pioneering Queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler provide much of Queer Studies’ understanding of identity formation. Eve Sedgwick (“Epistomology of the Closet,” Epistomology of the Closet, 1990, 27–35) makes the distinction between “sex, gender, and sexuality […] three terms whose usage relations and analytical relations are almost irremediably slippery” (27). She contends these words are often equated when in fact they possess distinct meanings. According to Sedgwick, each person born has one of two biological possibilities for sex – male or female. She refers to this binary option of sex as chromosomal sex, viewing it as “immutable, immanent in the individual, and biologically based” (28). Generally, chromosomal sex is “the relatively minimal raw material on which is then based the social construction of gender” (27). That is, society places the individual into a given gender, masculine or feminine, based on an examination of the individual’s physical body in Sedgwick’s account, correlated with chromosomal sex, and not an examination that individual’s behaviors. Having demonstrated that gender is not the same as biological sex, Sedgwick next clarifies gender “as [being] culturally mutable and variable, [and] highly relational” (28). The dominant culture is informed by the individual’s chromosomal sex when determining that person’s gender. This same culture is also responsible for constructing the codes of masculine and feminine gender-behaviors the individual performs. In this sense, gender is not a flexible aspect of one’s identity – one is either masculine or feminine. The individual achieves self-definition “primarily by its relations to the other” as part of this binary relationship of the masculine male and feminine female (28). Each member of society defines their conception of self based upon the reactions of those around them. A man knows he is a masculine based on his reception and acceptance by other men. This same man reinforces his self-conception of manhood through the same validation by women through their desire of him. Failure to achieve this validation can call the man’s gender identity into question. This relational method of selfconceptualization links gender and sexuality as influencing aspects of identity formation. The groundwork for understanding the social construction of identity arises from recognizing society’s inflexible method of gender identification forced upon each individual from birth. As difficult as it is to untangle our understanding of “sex” and “gender,” sexuality “is virtually impossible to set on a map” (Sedgwick, 29). Never-

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theless, Sedgwick still provides such preliminary boundaries as starting with the procreative sexual act and those actions associated with it. The difference lies in sexuality having a far greater potential for rearrangement when compared to chromosomal sex and gender. One could both be genetically male and demonstrate a masculine gender yet still possess a sexual desire for a variety of other chromosomal and gender types. Sedgwick asserts that while biology dictates one of two possible chromosomal sexes, and society prescribes one of two possible genders, there is less basis for determining sexuality despite the procreative preliminaries she initially establishes. For simplicity’s sake, however, we can narrow the conception of sexuality down to three classifications: heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality, which account for the multiple sexualities possible. Judith Butler (“Subversive Bodily Acts,” Gender Trouble, 79–141) refines this idea of gender identity performance when she describes those behaviors that “produce the effect of an internal core or substance […] on the surface of the body” (136). These behaviors constitute a performance as the body producing these signs conveys a message to society about itself. Creating and acting out these signs expresses particular facets of the body’s identity, highlighting the performative aspects of identity. There is no natural or inherent self the individual discovers through self-examination or any other means. These actions inscribed upon the body serve as externalized signs of the self that the individual wants to present publicly (136–38). Butler continues to explore the meaning of gender by applying a similar argument that Sedgwick uses to describe the problem of demarcating the boundaries of sexuality. She argues the performance of gender, as one aspect of the individual’s identity, also proves difficult to map. Because language and physical actions allow individuals to represent themselves in ways they want, there is room in this paradigm for the possibility of self-determination. For example, a person can possess the body of a male and yet desire to represent himself in a feminine manner. It is possible through communicating (orally and physically) the learned language of feminine behaviors for any person to perform a feminine gender script. In this way, neither chromosomal sex or social determination dictates the individual’s gender; instead the individual manufactures and enacts gender (Butler, 139–41). C. History of Research, Schools of Thought, Approaches Jacques Derrida’s post-structural writings from the 1970s (“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, 1997, 115–20) provide a foundation for Queer Studies in the decades to follow. Thus, the deferment of meaning in language parallels Queer

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Studies’ assertions that gender and sexuality are never fully present in the individual, but exist only in varying degrees at different times and therefore cannot be fixed (Derrida, 112). In the same way a word’s meaning will invariably change with time and context, the concepts of gender and sexuality are never wholly emblemized by any one individual, and here we see Derrida’s fingerprint on Queer Studies. During the 1980s, Foucault (“The Repressive Hypothesis” The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 1978, 15–50) also helped set the stage for the development of Queer Studies in The History of Sexuality with his notion of how institutions exercise power through individuals thereby making them subjects to those establishments. The individual acted in accordance to the rules and guidelines of their specific role, and he later explains how sodomites had only been temporary in nature until they were broken down into various categories such as homosexuals clearly illustrating identity as a preconceived notion and society fitting its members into rigid and often fixed roles (Foucault, 15). Only in recent times were individuals who performed acts of sodomy labeled as homosexuals, and it raises the question of the artificiality and need for labels such as heterosexual and homosexual. During the 1980s and early 1990s, critical theorists such as Adrienne Rich, Bonnie Zimmerman, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick began their work in Queer Studies branching out from the feminist movement, as a result of the rising awareness of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities as well as the onset of the AIDS epidemic. The term “Queer Studies” actually came about during this time period in the writings of Teresa de Laurentis. During the early 1980s, there was a public misconception that this disease originated from within the homosexual community, and critics from outside the community began crying out that homosexuality was a leading source of the disease pointing to its supposed fatalistic nature that lead one to eventually contract HIV/AIDS. These critics failed to focus on the unsafe actions performed by individuals (including heterosexuals) as a cause for this disease, instead of labeling certain groups of individuals as being responsible for the epidemic. This further marginalization and misunderstanding of the LGBT communities lead to the rise in these individuals’ need to speak out against such unfair treatment especially when it became clear that there were other behaviors responsible for the disease and that it was not limited only to the LGBT community. In the 1990s, Judith Butler focused on this notion of self-realization as key to understanding an individual’s identity. Like Sedgwick, she contends that gender is mutable and not a fixed concept determined by genetics. Butler initially concerns herself with challenging the accepted binary ap-

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proach to gender, that is, the socially normative convention of being only masculine or only feminine, along with the accompanying system of thought that allows only these two gender choices (109–11). She argues against society’s use of chromosomal sex in its determination of gender and sexuality of the individual. The problem with this system can be seen, for example, when a male child slowly develops a sexual preference for other males (that is, a manifestation of sexuality) and demonstrates behaviors characteristic of femininity (emblematic of his gender preference). This presents only one of many possible variations in sexuality and gender. The individual possesses the genetic makeup of a man, yet he displays gender and sexual preferences outside the framework aligning male chromosomes with masculine gender and heterosexual preference. In similar fashion, how does one label a woman who does not adhere to feminine tastes and opts for more masculine behaviors? This illustrates the possibility for the rearrangement of gender and sexuality not taken into account by the hegemonic construction of gender identity. Looking closely at cross-dressers, or drag queens, we can see begin to see this rearrangement of gender and sexuality. Butler uses the example of Divine (born Harris Glenn Milstead), a 300-pound cross-dresser who performed in a number of John Waters’ movies, such as Hairspray (Butler, X–XI). Butler makes a compelling argument when she posits the ways “drag [is] the imitation of gender,” or it highlights the performative aspects to those “signifying gestures through which gender itself is established” (X). Drag queens demonstrate one of two possibilities: first, that they are simply imitating the socially traditional understandings of gender, or secondly, they illustrate the possibility that all methods of self-identification are performances. If we believe the second claim, as Butler does, then we must accept that the idea of any sort of natural, inherent gender is a fantasy. Drag replicates and mocks the gender role being performed, thereby exemplifying the continued deconstruction of the binary system of gender. In revealing the performative nature of gender, drag underscores the performative and non-inherent aspects of identity as a whole (X–XI). One of the significant problems of socially constructed identities lies at the margins of the social group, with those individuals whose behaviors do not fit in perfectly with the mainstream. Because we see “all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and that all margins are considered dangerous,” Butler (“Interiority to Gender Performatives,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism) argues societies tend to label those individuals as marginal and polluted since they no longer fit into the mainstream (Douglas quoted in Butler, 2493). Taking Mary Douglas’s idea of the marginal

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being, Butler links this socially polluted individual to homosexuality. Anal and oral sex create “certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic order” which identifies individuals participating in these marginal activities as dangerous and polluted (2493). Those homosexual bodies found on the margins deviate from the sanctioned norm of malefemale sexual orientation. The appearance and behaviors of these marginal members disqualifies them from the mainstream, and the majority of society drives them from the social group to these outer boundaries. Preceding Sedgwick and Butler, Monique Wittig (“One Is Not Born A Woman,” The Straight Mind, 1992, 9–20) discusses the relationship between identity construction and identity oppression. Although Wittig does not specify gender as a qualifier of identity, she contextualizes her argument with gender-specific arguments. For this reason, this specification has been made when representing her arguments. Wittig argues that the lesbian community should refuse to participate in the heterosexual construction of gender. As she explains, the dominant paradigms construct women according to a particular social relationship with a man, a relationship that “we have previously called servitude,” citing marriage, child production, and other domestic activities traditionally delegated to women (20). Accordingly, when society labels individuals with certain gender roles, a form of oppression has taken place because those labels force the individuals into roles with these expectations of performance. Thus, Wittig rejects the notion of a natural gender identity, saying, “we have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call ‘natural’” (9). It can be inferred from Wittig that there is no natural or original gender identity; “man” and “woman” are socially constructed identities pushed upon each person throughout history. Recognizing oppression is important to Wittig, “for once one has acknowledged oppression, one needs to know and experience the fact that one can constitute oneself as a subject […] that one can become someone in spite of oppression, that one has ones own identity” (15). Simple recognition of this method of oppressing identity does not equate to freedom of self-conceptualization. Individuals must actively cast aside those signs used in their previous portrayals of self, through their actions and clothing, and must create new signs to define themselves. Although Wittig calls for the outright destruction of the masculine, heterosexually generated signs, her idea of self-reinterpretations opens the door to Marvin Carlson’s notion of the management of signs nearly twenty years later.

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Additional insight into Queer Studies can be gained through an examination of how its understanding of identity performance relates to the theater and the performing arts. In the late 1990s, Marvin Carlson (Performance: A Critical Introduction, 1998) provided a three-part working definition of performance that involves the public display of a “recognized and culturally coded pattern of behaviors” where the “success of the activity” is judged in view of “some standard of achievement” (4–5). An act taking place on stage is considered performed and the same action off-stage is “merely done,” yet both are presented to the public (4). Every performance is public requiring recognition and validation of the performer by the audience. Carlson diverges from most gender performance theorists, however, when he argues that the “recognition that our lives are structured according to repeated and socially sanctioned modes of behavior raises the possibility that human activity could potentially be considered ‘performance’” (4). He further clarifies the focus of the argument by suggesting “at least all activity carried out with a consciousness of itself […] when we think about them […] gives them the quality of performance” (4). While most Queer theorists would not argue against the first part of his argument, the concept of performance only taking place when the individual is aware of it places him in opposition to many. He does seem willing to commit to the conscious construction of identity, but does not address how unconscious behaviors relate to performance. This fails to take into account either those behaviors individuals may not be aware of what they are doing or the reasons individuals act in ways that contribute to the performance of identity. Carlson’s point is worth considering, however, because sometimes the individual makes a decision to carry out an act and the performed behavior may eventually become an unconscious repetition. Carlson’s argument for the conscious decision to perform is still valid despite appearing to overlook the unconscious aspects of performance. There is an interesting addition to Butler’s dialogue about drag in Carlson’s discussion of the 1970s “Roberta Breitmore” character. Actress Lynn Hershman embodies Queer Studies’ notion of identity performance in her portrayal of a female exploring various aspects of real life, from joining a mundane Weight Watchers group to participation in a prostitution ring. “Roberta” had her own bank account, a driver’s license, fictional background, as well as a therapist she regularly saw until her eventual “death” when Hershman completed her experiment in 1978 (Carlson, 152). This suggests that drag, as Butler discussed it, is simply an extension of the very theatrical performance Carlson discusses. Hershman’s drag accomplishes two things: first, it doesn’t necessarily mock those presented aspects of identity Butler asserted were characteristic of drag, but it does illustrate the

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performative nature of identity. Secondly, it shows that individuals can conduct a drag performance of characters of the same sex with purpose of exploring “many of the personal/ daily conflicts […] faced” in day-to-day experience (152). There is also the issue of the individual’s deliberate manipulation of these signs – those acts and behaviors indicative of a specific script – that illustrate the performative aspect of identity. Some signs considered emblematic of one stigmatized script can be associated with a second script of a different sort: Those attempting to direct attention from their stigma may present the sign of their stigmatized failing as the signs of another stigma […] [Oscar Wilde] managed the stigma of homosexuality through claiming an identity built upon secondary signs (Carlson, 154).

Carlson draws the comparison of Oscar Wilde’s public claim to be a dandy – the foppish socialite sharing some feminine characteristics – as a means to avoid the stigma of homosexuality. There were certain signs of Wilde’s behavior indicative of either a homosexual or a dandy. Individuals can demonstrate both awareness of the public’s perception of themselves as well as their ability to manipulate that public perception through the management of their identity signs. Wilde illustrates this point as his awareness of how the public perceived him allowed him to redirect this perception from the stigmatized homosexual to that of the less stigmatized dandy. D. Current Issues and Future Trends Although Queer Studies originated at the end of the 20th century, one can still apply this contemporary critical approach to older texts without falling into anachronism. Robert Sturges (Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse, 2001) uses identity performance theory to better analyze medieval characters, such as the Pardoner from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Without going in significant detail, Sturges implements this notion of individuals behaving in ways both masculine and feminine. He points to the Pardoner’s male and female bodily descriptions, masculine and feminine behaviors, and ambiguous sexual preferences in relation to his relationship with the Summoner. These clues give credibility to the case for applying Queer Studies to centuries-old texts to better understand identity formation. In his examination of the problematic gender of Chaucer’s Pardoner, Sturges reinforces Sedgwick’s notions of sex, gender, and sexuality in differentiating between what he calls “sex acts […] anatomical sex […] and gender performances” (27). Sturges agrees with Sedgwick’s point of not

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addressing the individual’s gender by chromosomal sex as well as ruling out the adherence to the binary choices of labeling someone as only one gender or another. Borrowing heavily from Judith Butler, Sturges advocates blending the two gender identities where the vehicle for this hybridization of the genders is performance. No individual demonstrates wholly masculine or wholly feminine behaviors, thereby making the binary relationship Sedgwick questions even more problematic. The contemporary example of the “metrosexual” illustrates this point. These individuals are heterosexual males, and yet do not wholly demonstrate behaviors commonly believed characteristic of the heterosexual male demographic in contemporary America. This particular group of people display interests in activities stereotypically seen as feminine, such as participating in spa treatments, dressing in the latest fashions, and being overly attentive to personal appearance. This highlights the difficulty in mainstream America’s (and by extension, contemporary culture) use of the binary concept of gender. Susan Crane (The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, 2002) continues bridging the gap between this 20th- and 21st-century discussion of identity performance theory and 15th-century England. Crane adds both to Butler’s concepts of identity performance and inscriptions on the body as well as to the larger discussion of Queer Studies. She explores the use of clothing and personal accessories as extensions of the body in identity performance contemporary to Malory. Crane defines performance in her work as “the heightened and deliberately communicative behaviors, public displays, that use visual as well as rhetorical resources” (3). She continues to say that “public appearance and behavior are thought not to falsify personal identity, but on the contrary, to establish and maintain it,” thereby demonstrating the means by which clothing and other accessories serve to aid in identity performance (3). This places Crane within the same scope of thought as Butler in her understanding of the performative construction and maintenance of identity. While Butler focuses on more modern manifestations in her critical approach, Crane examines the 15th century with her understanding of performance theory, paying particular attention to the role clothing played in the body’s presentation of self. Performance-driven identity found its basis “in social performance,” and was widely accepted as “the conviction of medieval elites” (Crane, 5). Referring to the poem “Roman de Fauve” which makes use of the social performance of self, Crane supports this argument by showing how “courtiers wear masks of peasants, fools, and animals but also take care to remain recognizable to one another. Rather than concealing a prior identity, they seek a dynamic simultaneity, between that prior self and the supplementary iden-

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tity of their costume” (6). The mask represents a desired signification or cosmetic representation different from that of the noble’s physical body freeing the body from social expectations otherwise placed on the unmasked body. The body is the vehicle for communicating signs, but for Crane (and unlike Butler) “clothing, not the skin, is the frontier of the self,” acting as the sign that communicates the different meanings or characteristics of identity. Crane supports her argument by stating that “clothing mark[s] social position, age, gender, season, and even time of the day” (6). Only knights were found wearing armor astride a horse, and nobility were easily identified by the family coat of arms they wore. Both upper and lower classes lived under “sumptuary legislation [that] assigned clothing significant social weight […] [and] restricted various fabrics, furs, and ornaments to the use of specific ranks and income levels” (11). These examples provide concrete evidence of the significance of clothing in the social construction of identity in 15th-century England. In this way, Crane demonstrates how Queer Studies’ contemporary understanding of identity performance applies to the late medieval period in a relevant manner. Dorsey Armstrong (Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, 2003) breaks new ground when she ties Queer Studies and identity performance to Le Morte d’Arthur – a text previously unexamined by other Queer theorists. Taking Judith Butler’s understanding of drag as a performance of self, Armstrong makes the argument that knighthood is itself a form of drag. The individual puts on an identity through the adherence to a rigid code of conduct and wearing such accoutrements such as armor and a coat of arms (Armstrong, 68). Drag often serves as a disruptive force among socially expected gender roles in modern society. Since Lancelot adopts the script of the madman and causes a significant disruption wherever he goes, Armstrong’s connection of this contemporary theory to Malory’s text appears to be a logical one. One of the most clear-cut examples of identity’s social formation is seen in “The Book of King Arthur” when the Knightly Code is established. Armstrong notes how Arthur helps create a society that imprints upon each individual an identity script dependent such factors as gender and the socioeconomic class. Once the individual is properly identified, there is a cultural expectation that the individual performs this role to a satisfactory degree. She points out Arthur’s establishment of Knight’s Code from “The Tale of King Arthur” as an example of such societal identity formation: “[…] than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghtes and gaff them rychesse and londys; and charged them never to do outerage nothir mourthir, and allwayes to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy, upon payne of forfiture

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[or their] worship and lordship of kynge Arthure for evermore; and allwayes to do ladyes, damsels, and jantilwomen and wydowes [socour:] strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never to enforce them, upon payne of dethe. Also, that no man take no batalyes in a wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis. So unto thys were all knyghtis sworne of the Table Rounde, both olde and younge, and every yere so were the[y] sworne at the hyghe feste of Pentecoste” (Malory 75–6).

This code serves as an excellent example of a society constructing and enforcing the performance of identity – at least, the identity of those who would claim knighthood. Arthur’s code clearly establishes the knight’s role and identity. There is little ambiguity with Arthur’s expectations for the members of his court as he defines his vision for the interactions between his knights and ladies, damsels, gentlewomen, widows, and with each other. Arthur classifies each of the different roles of men and women at this time in relation to their class and specific to women, their marital status. This code provides individual nobles with a clearly laid out set of social expectations to uphold. Malory depicts a society where identity is both constructed and enforced. Because failure on the part of a knight to adhere to this identity code would call Arthur’s authority into question, it would directly violate the king’s command. Likewise, failure to enforce this rule would call Arthur’s role as king into question. To emphasize the significance of these sorts of crimes associated with the Knightly Code, the code prescribes penalties for violations ranging from the loss of the king’s favor (to include the “rychesse and londys”) to death. Lancelot and the other knights affirm their identity through “the repetition of the behavior itself” rather than a “masculine knightly behavior” indicating some sort of “inherent masculinity” (Armstrong, 73). Malory clearly lays out the guidelines for the way he envisions how culture shapes an individual’s identity. In addition to Malory, other texts reinforce our sense that the efficacy of identity performance was recognized during the Middle Ages. For instance, many guidebooks or “speculum principis” detail the offices of knighthood and nobility during Malory’s day (Armstrong, 76). These guidebooks served as a means for public discourse where writers commented on “the concerns of the times” and the need for reinforcement of social behaviors and expectations (77). From the 15th century, Lull’s Libre laid out expectations that all knights maintain and defend the holy catholic faith, and secondly, maintain and defend women, widows, orphans, and sick men (80). In the 14th century, Geoffrey de Charney’s Livre de Chevalrie emphasized the knight’s obligation to religious devotion, providing alms to those in need, as well as bringing together the “concepts of courtesy, loyalty, and prowess with piety” (80). What makes Malory unique from these didactic texts, according to

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Armstrong, is that he presents these knightly scripts over an extended period of time, so that their “sustained deployment and exploration […] eventually makes clear the structured failings of the code” and by extension the tensions within any socially imposed identity (78). While Malory is not alone in depicting some of the ways society has acted in the creation of the identity roles, the lasting endurance of Le Morte d’Arthur speaks to the level of his contribution to the discourse of identity formation. The last difference Armstrong makes between Malory and his predecessors is his inclination to depict a culture of chivalry where the masculine is completely subservient to the feminine: knights were tasked to aid all women of every social station. This is a drastic change from Lull and de Charney who both advocated courtly relationships of mutual benefit to both the man and woman (84). Malory’s reinterpretation of courtly love carries an underlying implication that all women need the aid of a man in all matters. This implication suggests when the woman does not need the man’s aid, the man’s identity is called into question. Armstrong states “the feminine represents the perpetual opportunity for positive construction and refinement […] [and] to admit the possibility that the feminine need not always be helpless and vulnerable would be to admit to a potential threat to the idealized stable gender system” (82). Men repeatedly performing masculine behaviors reinforce both their roles as men and the women’s place in society. Women who are able to help themselves leave little for men to accomplish. For this reason, we see a further breakdown of Malory’s vision of the chivalric community when women act outside of their given roles. E. Summary Every individual has various identity scripts written on their bodies that help determine whether the body can be identified as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, aristocratic or peasant. The body performs these signs through performing actions or clothing itself with accessories. Cultures imprint these identity scripts on the body of every individual through the ages, leading to the misconception that this established practice is a natural and real standard for the individual to meet. Queer Studies shows that each person forms a composite of these various scripted identities, with the end result the construction of an individual public persona. When individuals act out these respective scripts be they male or female, masculine or feminine, or some differing form of sexual orientation, they demonstrate both a conscious and an unconscious performance. When the individual performs consciously, this demonstrates the notion of performance and is as close to self-representation as is possible.

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Select Bibliography Elizabeth Allen, “The Pardoner in the ‘Dogges Bour’: Early Reception of the Canterbury Tales,” False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: MacMillan, 2005), 111–32; Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Studies: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction,” Differences 3.2 (1991): III–XVIII; Carolyn Dinshaw, “Got Medieval,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10.2 (2001): 202–12; Lisa Duggan, “The Discipline Problem: Queer Studies Meets Lesbian and Gay History,” GLQ 2.3 (1995): 179–91; Tison Pugh, “Queering Harry Bailey: Gendered Carnival, Social Ideologies, and Masculinity Under Duress in the Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 39–69; Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (1980): 631–60; James Schultz, “Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.1 (2006): 14–29.

Forrest C. Helvie

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R Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages A. Introduction Several factors have influenced the relatively recent interest in applying concepts of race and ethnicity to the study of the Middle Ages. Conceptualized by anthropologists beginning with Franz Boas (Race, Language and Culture, 1940) and utilized in postcolonial studies, use of these concepts by medievalists has also been influenced by an abiding interest in the status of the marginalized other in the Middle Ages and the relationship between the culturally marginalized and the center. Study of the other itself arose from feminist and queer theory that has transformed Medieval Studies over the last thirty years or so. The interest in applying concepts of race and ethnicity to the Middle Ages, however, is also strongly tied to the often catastrophic dissension arising from ethnic and/or racial confrontations in the modern world. Since these issues are so dominant in modern culture, it is necessary to be cautious of our assumptions about and obsessions with nationality and physical traits in regard to the delineation of cultural difference, especially when seeking the origins of our own problems in the past. The transformations of Europe brought about by the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, the aftermath of two world wars, the dissolution of the U.S.S.R, and modern patterns of immigration have given rise to ethnic unrest (Robert Bartlett, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, 2002), As discreet ethnic and/or religious groups came to find themselves trapped within nation states in which the majority group, in an attempt to achieve a mythical purity, works to suppress or even eliminate the identity of minority groups, scholars, journalists and others have attempted to trace the origins of modern ethnic groups and of the modern phenomenon of racism as far as possible into the past. These origins have been sought particularly in the Middle Ages which has often been portrayed idealistically as an era of racial and religious purity (John Ganim, “Native Studies: Orientalism and Medievalism,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen, 2000). Such attempts to link past and present on the part of modern and early modern scholars (for example: Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, 1996; and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the

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Color, 2000) have thus led to distortion of the medieval context (Lisa Lampert, “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo) Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3 [2004]: 391–421). Some medievalists have questioned the wisdom of exploring issues of race and ethnicity in studies of the Middle Ages, considering them to be intrusive or irrelevant, while others welcome these concepts not only for their potential ability to bring new insights to their own field, but also for the hope that studies of medieval concepts of cultural and religious difference will serve to remind their modernist colleagues that such concepts are always historically constructed and eminently mutable (Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 20 [2001]: 1–37). The following article will be concerned with how these two categories of inquiry have been applied by medievalists solely to the Middle Ages and how their use has already called into question traditional assumptions regarding the mechanisms of cultural, and even individual, interaction in the medieval period. B. Definition Race has long been thought of as somatic, a natural and immutable collection of physical characteristics that categorize human difference. Recently, however, geneticists have denied the validity of racial categories claiming not only that race is useless for categorization of human difference as there is more difference between individuals than between so-called races, but also that biological races do not exist at all (Joseph L. Graves, Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the New Millennium, 2001). From the 19th century, however, cultural characteristics have been assigned to various groups of people based on the assumption of the reality of race that has persisted in the public mind despite scientific denials. Investigation into the malleable representations of race in the Middle Ages may help disseminate the findings that race is indeed a cultural and historical construction and not a biological imperative. Ethnicity, a term used more commonly with regard to the early Middle Ages than race, has a somewhat different history. It is applied particularly to the migration period and was first introduced to Medieval Studies by Reinhard Wenskus (Stammesbildung und Verfassung, 1961). The concept has been used increasingly by medieval scholars such as Herwig Wolfram (The History of the Goths, 1988; The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap, 1997, from Das Reich und die Germanen, 1990); Ian Wood (The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450–750, 1984); Walter Goffart (Barbarians and Romans,

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AD 415–585, 1980); Walter POHL and Helmut Reinitz (The Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, 1998), and Walter POHL (“Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, 1998, 15–24), Peter Heather (The Goths, 1996); and Patrick Geary (Before France and Germany, the Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World, 1988). Defining ethnicity is not an easy task. More often it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. Patrick Geary calls ethnicity a “situational construct” (“Ethnicity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 [1983]: 15–26). Of the many ethnic affiliations available to the people of early medieval Europe, the one or two or three with which an individual chose to identify depended on the circumstances of their own particular situation. Such choices could be influenced by many factors: for example, in resisting an invading force an individual or a group of individuals might adhere to their pre-invasion identity as a symbol of their attempt, or intent, to subvert the new order; on the other hand, someone who desired to be successful in the new society of the conquerors would adopt the characteristic rituals, traditions, and myths of the conquering group. It is likely, however, that many people would end up affiliated with both cultural groups, the conqueror and the conquered, and with other smaller subgroups as well. Ethnicity is also historically constructed; whole groups can be born and can come to an end; they can change their composition, and are influenced by political, cultural, and economic factors in the context of their time and place (Walter Pohl, “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, 1998, 15–24; Peter Heather, “Signs of Ethnic Identity: Disappearing and Reappearing Tribes,” Kingdoms of the Empire, ed. Walter Pohl, 1996, 95–111). Although there is an ongoing debate among anthropologists about whether ethnic identities are part of an individual’s nature or are culturally constructed, most scholars today believe that “social and cultural traits and identities respond to the contingencies of everyday life and entire categories of people become submerged or transmute into something new” (Hal B. Levine, “Reconstructing Ethnicity,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 [1999]: 165–80). There are two approaches within this new understanding of ethnicity. The first is the instrumentalist point of view according to which the ethnic identities of large groups were chosen and accepted by the individuals within them. These identities are not inherent and immutable, but subject to change: Sometimes, they spring from ideologies deliberately promoted by elites in order to bind together disparate groups by instilling a sense of

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solidarity in order to achieve the goals, particularly military goals, of those elites (Peter Heather, The Goths, 1996). The second approach posits that cultural differences such as language, values, history, and practice can solidify, denying individuals the choice of changing their identity over the course of time. Along with this comes the proposition that cultural characteristics such as those mentioned above mold the behavior of the individual because they are programmed into the unconscious in early childhood (Peter Heather, The Goths, 1996). Peter Heather believes these two approaches to be compatible as both stress that identity is based on perception and that the identity of the group is composed of individuals who believe the narrative of that group’s history and accept the group’s traditional social norms (Peter Heather, The Goths, 1996, 5). These latter two elements are known in anthropological jargon as the myth/ symbol complex. In addition, Peter Heather sees these two approaches as “… opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities” (Peter Heather, The Goths, 1996, 5–6) within which an individual can assume a variety of positions simultaneously as well as individually. He concludes that both lines of inquiry define identity as based on who an individual claims to be, according to his or her life experiences, especially childhood experiences, and the willingness of others to support and recognize the individual’s claim. An important element of an individual’s claim to ethnic identity is always the validation of that identity by others. Both terms, race and ethnicity, can define common identities based on cultural elements such as language, law, custom, and religion that had meaning to and bore identifying information for the peoples of the Middle Ages in ways that modern markers, such as skin color and hair type, could not, therefore the terms can be considered synonymous (Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 39–56). In medieval sources, however, scholars must deal with different terminology: peoples, gens, tribes, the Irish túathe, stock, family, and even natio can all express concepts that can be translated as race or ethnicity, but have nuanced meanings that complicate such straightforward interpretations (Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 39–56). How the people of the Middle Ages conceived of these terms in specific instances, how they would have identified themselves in an ethnic or racial context, and how these identifications affected interaction between cultures and individuals are all legitimate questions with which to explore the past in order to understand it and not to feed the discontent of the restless tribes of modern Europe.

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C. Early Middle Ages/Migration Period The Continent Much of the work that’s been done on early medieval ethnicity has focused on the barbarian peoples of the migration period on the continent. Large amorphous groups such as Goths, Franks, and Huns were created from coalitions of small ethnic groups in what is called ethnogenesis, the study of which has engaged a number of modern scholars (Typen der Ethnogenese unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bayern, ed. Herwig WOLFRAM and Walter POHL,1990, in which see particularly: Ian N. WOOD, “Ethnicity and the Ethnogenesis of the Burgundians” (53–69); Walter POHL, “Verlaufsformen der Ethnogenese – Awaren und Bulgaren” (113–24); Fritz Losek, “Ethnische und politische Terminologie bei Jordanes und Einhard” (147–52); and Michel ROUCHE, “Peut-on parler d’une ethnogenése des Aquitans?” (45–51). Also see, Wilhelm Muhlmann, “Ethnogonie und Ethnogenese,” Abhandlungen der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 72 [1985]: 9–38; Peter Kivisto, The Ethnic Enigma: The Salience of Ethnicity for European Origin Groups, 1989; Eugene E. Roosens, Creating Ethnicity: The Process of Ethnogenesis, 1989.) It is interesting that, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated that ethnicity is an historical construct, such seemingly biological terms as ethnogenesis continue to be used (Walter Pohl “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Barbara H Rosenwein and Lester K. Little, 1998, 39–56). Possibly this is an indication of the imprecise nature of the concept itself as well as the relative newness of the application of this concept to the medieval field (see also Walter Pohl, Die Völkerwanderungszeit: Eroberung und Integration, 2002). Our sources of information about the ethnicity of the barbarians of the migration period are mainly textual, archaeological, and linguistic. These sources have not changed in the recent past, but our interpretation of them has. The textual sources are from Greek and Roman ethnographers, such as Tacitus, Ptolemy, and Pliny, and from barbarian scholars such as the Goth Jordanes who wrote his history of the Goths, Getica, in the 6th century. In the past, such accounts that confidently classified ethnic groups and their characteristics were accepted at face value, but it has become evident that the Greek and Roman scholars were describing barbarians in accordance with their own categories of social practice and understanding and not that of the peoples they were describing. These authors were firmly rooted in their own experience and imposed their cultural norms on the peoples they studied distorting their findings. Their descriptions of different barbarian groups thus tended to sound very much alike (Patrick Geary, Before France and

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Germany: the Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World, 1988). Moreover, ethnographers like Tacitus obtained much of their information from the peoples themselves and therefore repeated origin myths and cultural ideologies that also misrepresented the history and ethnic makeup of these groups. Jordanes, for example, perpetuated the ‘myth/symbol complex’ of the Goths. In this way, he was participating in the creation of an ethnic identity rather than describing the reality of the multi-ethnic history of his people. Such repetition of a ‘history’ that emphasizes the cohesion and shared traditions and values of a large group was often in the best interests of the elites whose aim was usually to create a large band of ethnically mixed warriors and their followers who would help the ruling classes acquire more land and wealth (Anthony D. Smith, “War and Ethnicity: The Role of Warfare in the Formation, Self-images and Cohesion of Ethnic Communities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 [1981]: 375–97). It is only the elites who cared about creating such overarching ethnicities. The ethnic identity of the common people was based on local and/or familial or cultic affiliations. Therefore, forming a band of mixed warriors “… always meant setting off an ethnogenesis; only ethnic bonds, supported by traditional myths and rites, could be strong enough to hold such a group together, to give it a structure that could resist failure” (Walter Pohl, “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, 1998, 15–24). Ethnic solidarity was created through the constant repetition of myths and symbols, a constant reproduction of the commonality that would hold the group together, or, in Walter Pohl’s term, “ethnic practice … in the political sphere, this means political actions and strategies that we can partly reconstruct from literary sources, on a cultural level, it denotes a rich variety of objects and habits that serve as expressions of ethnic identity” (Walter Pohl “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, 1998, 15–24). In addition to Roman and Greek authors and to works such as Getica, ethnic information can sometimes be obtained from laws, place names, and naming patterns (Patrick Amory, “The Meaning and Purpose of Ethnic Terminology in the Burgundian Laws,” Early Medieval Europe 2 [1993]: 1–28; Patrick Amory, “Names, Ethnic Identity and Community in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Burgundy,” Viator 25 [1994]: 1–30; Margaret Gelling, Signposts to the Past: Place Names and the History of England, 1978). The archaeological interpretation of cultural artifacts has also undergone tremendous changes in the wake of new theories of ethnicity. Traditionally, artifacts have been grouped according to certain correspondences of style which in turn were thought to correspond to particular cultures. It is

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now believed, however, that elements of one material culture were transmitted to other cultures through trade, borrowing, imitation, or through participation in shared religious/cultic ritual by those who did not necessarily also share an ethnic bond. Migration is one element in the spread of particular styles, but it can no longer be said that a particular style is the hallmark of a specific culture. Archaeological remains, however, can in some cases be associated with the “… spread of customs expressing social norms … and even belief systems …” (Peter Heather, The Goths, 1996, 23). Language, too, has been used as an identifier of ethnic boundaries (John Hines, “The Becoming of the English: Identity, Material Culture and Language in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 7 [1994]: 49–59; Margaret Gelling “Why aren’t we speaking Welsh?” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 6 [1993]: 51–6). Germanic peoples were so called because it was thought they spoke a Germanic language. It has been shown, however, that peoples grouped under such large linguistic headings actually spoke a variety of often mutually unintelligible languages (Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap, from Das Reich und die Germanen, 1997). Therefore, much of what we thought we knew about the identity of the peoples of early medieval Europe has been called into question (now see Lynette Olson, The Early Middle Ages: The Birth of Europe, 2007, 11–26). Misapplication of ethnic names to the wrong groups also added to the confusion (Roland Steinacher, “Studien zur vandalischen Geschichte: Die Gleichsetzung der Ethnonyme Wenden, Slawen, und Vandalen vom Mittelalter bis ins 18. Jahrhundert,” Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2002). What we are left with is a great variety and multiplicity of ethnic identities whose relationship to each other and to supergroups, such as the Goths, is often unclear. The Romans have provided us with a plethora of tribal names, but no other really useful information about them. The Franks, as Patrick Geary tells us, have been called a ‘tribal swarm;’ small tribal units that sometimes came together for military purposes, both offensive and defensive, and, when they did so, called themselves Franks (Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany, the Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World, 1988). These coalitions represent the ethnogenesis of the Frankish people, a process that was repeated throughout the barbarian world. The role of the Roman Empire in these ethnogeneses was extensive. Through military service and alliances, many barbarians were introduced to Roman wealth and culture through which the barbarian elites realized the benefits of creating kingships by unifying ethnicities and ideologies in order to exercise power over large groups of multi-ethnic people. Others formed alliances among the various tribes in resistance to Roman aggression or in attempts, some-

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times successful, to take Rome and all it stood for by force (Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, AD 415–585, 1980). The work that has been done on these continental barbarian groups has greatly increased our understanding of the nature of ethnicity and the process of ethnogenesis. The people of the British Isles underwent similar changes during this same period and the transformation that took place there also owes much to Rome. The British Isles The many invasions, raids, and settlements that took place in the British Isles during the early Middle Ages have long been thought to have caused massive disruptions and dislocations with large groups moving in and displacing other groups entirely. However, archaeologists have recently argued that their evidence demonstrates that the history of the British Isles in this period is more one of continuity than disruption, invasion, and displacement of peoples, thus adding to the complexity of the ethnic picture (Simon James, “Celts, Politics, and Motivation in Archaeology,” Antiquity 72 [1998]: 200–09). In accordance with what has been learned about the barbarian cultures on the continent, it is probable that individual ethnicity would have a similar pattern in that it would be rooted in complex local regional or familial groups, but that, when need arose, the individual might identify with a larger group defined in opposition to another invading or otherwise antagonistic group. In his description of the new view of early medieval Britain, Simon James states that “emphasis is, then, increasingly placed on a multiplicity of strongly distinctive regional traditions, or better complex hierarchies of local and regional variation with an almost fractal quality, probably reflecting a mosaic of identities and ethnicities.” He concludes that this has been the condition in the British Isles from Roman times to the present (Simon James, “Celts, Politics, and Motivation in Archaeology,” Antiquity 72 [1998]: 200–09). A group of major importance in the early medieval British Isles is classified under the broad label of Celts: a term fraught with ambiguity and contention. Although most scholars agree that the Celtic paradigm is no longer useful in examining the ethnic make-up of the British Isles, nothing has been found to replace it as yet (Simon James, as above). The Celts may have been a small group of warrior elites who came to Britain and Ireland, divided the land, the people, and the power amongst themselves, and, eventually, imposed their language on the indigenous population (Donnchad O’Corráin, “Prehistoric and Early Christian Ireland,” The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster, 1989, 1–43). While they may have dominated militarily and linguistically, they were rapidly assimilated to the pre-existing material culture (Barry Raftery, “The Early Iron Age,” Irish

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Archaeology Illustrated, ed. Michael Ryan, 1994, 1–35). Despite seemingly similar elements among the Celtic peoples of the Isles, such as their agrarian and/or pastoral way of life, their hierarchical social structure, and their complex legal systems, the designation ‘Celtic” depends entirely on language (Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain, 1986; Helmut Birkhan, Kelten, 1999). Both the linguistic and ethnic history of these areas are far more complex than previously assumed even though the Celts are one of the most relentlessly studied population groups (Patrick Sims-Williams, “Genetics, Linguistics, and Prehistory: Thinking Big and Thinking Straight,” Antiquity 72 [1998]: 505–27). Some of this ethnic complexity is explored in an article on “Ancient Celts and Modern Ethnicity,” by J. V. S. and M. R. Megaw who define ethnicity as a landscape of the mind both of the individual and of the others whom that individual encounters (“Ancient Celts and Modern Ethnicity,” Antiquity 70 [1996]: 175–81). In this article, too, the authors claim that English archaeologists deny that Celts ever existed anywhere in Europe, a stance that is countered by Simon James (as above), demonstrating the volatility of this field at the present time when conclusions drawn from new findings are challenging long-held beliefs. Hal B. Levine states that ethnicity should be sought in the “… active interface between the mind, society and culture” (167) His basic definition of ethnicity, however, is that “… ethnicity is that method of classifying people (both self and other) that uses origin (socially constructed) as its primary reference” (Hal B. Levine, “Reconstructing Ethnicity,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 [1999]: 165–80). As groups of people moved and resettled around the Irish Sea, concepts of what we would call ethnic identities were constantly being redefined around the base of beliefs regarding origin or familial ties, although that base was constantly being manipulated to fit new circumstances. For example, the coming of Christianity elicited a group of texts, such as the 12th-century Irish Book of the Taking of Ireland (Lebor Gabála Érin) that created Biblical origins for whole peoples. Encounters with other groups also played a large part in establishing ethnic identities. The Picts are a case in point. Ptolemy, the Roman geographer who accompanied Agricola in his 1st-century campaign against Scotland, estimated that there were thirteen separate Pictish peoples at that time (Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain, 1986). In the 2nd century, Dio Cassius claimed that the peoples north of the Forth Clyde line, i. e., the Picts, were called the Caledonii and the Maeatae; two groups that probably represent confederations of the smaller tribes formed to defend the Pictish frontier. In 368, Ammianus Marcellinus identified these groups as the Dicalydones and the Verturiones. These tribal federations undoubtedly came together to form what

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outsiders saw as the ‘Picts’ in order to combat first the Romans, later the Scots and Angles as well (Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain, 1986). This scenario is reminiscent of Frankish ethnogenesis and demonstrates the role of Rome in creating the identity of the Picts who vehemently fought against the Roman threat to the south. Caledonii is itself a tribal name, but Verturiones is probably a forerunner of the name for the later Scottish kingdom of Fortriu, a designation that could be applied to areas of northern Scotland, but could also indicate various larger areas including Pictland as a whole (Alfred P. Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men, Scotland AD 80–1000, 1984). An individual Pict, therefore, undoubtedly espoused multiple identities some of which had been provided by outsiders. Another challenge to previously accepted ethnic evaluations comes from what is now Argyll where Dál Riada, a kingdom of Irish Gaelic-speaking, immigrant Scotti, was located. It has long been believed that Dál Riada had been founded by an Irish dynast from the east coast of Ulster in Ireland who had invaded and settled in Scotland with his family and retainers sometime between 450 and 500 (John Bannerman, Studies in the History of Dalriada, 1974). This dynasty managed to maintain control of both its Irish and Scottish territories until the 8th century when they had to let go of their Irish lands. Nevertheless, they remained in control of their land on the east coast of the Irish Sea until their 9th-century king conquered the Picts and founded the kingdom of Scotland. This scenario has been turned on its head recently, as, based on a lack of typically Irish archaeological remains, Ewan Campbell has suggested that the migration and settlement actually went the other way; from Scotland to Ireland (Ewan Campbell, “Were the Scots Irish?” Antiquity 75 [2001]: 285–92). So we may conclude that, despite the fact that archaeology and language have proven to be inadequate ethnic identifiers, they are still being used to trace ethnic origins as we have nothing to replace them. The British/Celtic inhabitants of the area we think of as England, Wales, and Cornwall, were heavily influenced by the Roman Empire which occupied most of its territory for over three centuries. Hugh Kearney, however, posits a division along ethnic and geographic lines within this territory into northern Britain which retained many so-called Celtic characteristics and southern Britain which was heavily Romanized (Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: a History of Four Nations, 1989). The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries makes it even harder to delineate ethnic boundaries. It has become evident that earlier models claiming that the coming of the Anglo-Saxons constituted a massive and traumatic invasion are not supported by the evidence (Dominick Powlesland, “Early Anglo-Saxon Settle-

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ments, Structures, Form and Layout,” The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, ed. John Hines, 1997, 101–24). The ethnic model of the Anglo-Saxons themselves is changing as well. Ian Wood has suggested that the migration probably included more Germanic tribes than just the traditional Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. He states that the fluidity of such tribal identities in the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries makes it difficult to distinguish among them. However, Franks, Frisians, Thuringians, and Danes had both the opportunity and the motive, provided by rising sea levels, to cross the channel. He also reminds us that there would have been a good many British of all types within the Germanic settlements (Ian Wood, “Before and After the Migration to Britain,” The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century, ed. John Hines, 1997, 41–54). It is interesting to note that, while the British Christian church seems to have disappeared during this period, Lucas Quensel-von-Kalben contends that Christianity surviving in the western and northern portions of England may have served as a focus for the identities of those involved in the British resistance to the AngloSaxon invasion (Lucas Quensel-von-Kalben, “The British Church and the Emergence of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 10 [1999]: 89–97). This may be an example of how religion participates in the formation of ethnicity as well as of a failed attempt on the part of a few, possibly elites, to create a unifying British identity in opposition to the Saxon presence. The next group to raid and settle in the British Isles was the Vikings whose activities met with varying degrees of resistance and assimilation in the various regions of the islands. Previous studies of Scandinavian settlement have focused on the scale of settlement and not its context (Dawn M. Hadley, “Viking and Native: Re-Thinking Identity in the Danelaw,” Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 45–70). Recently scholars of the Viking era have called for the modernizing of Viking studies especially with regard to the kind of focus on ethnicity that has informed and transformed Anglo-Saxon studies (Simon Trafford, “Ethnicity, Migration Theory, and the Historiography of the Scandinavian Settlement of England,” Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, ed. Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D. Richards, 2000, 17–39). Dawn M. Hadley points out that the impact of Scandinavian settlement on England was not uniform and issues of ethnic identity only came up sporadically. She urges, therefore, that other contextual elements such as politics, gender, and lordship be considered along with ethnicity (Dawn M. Hadley, “Viking and Native: re-thinking identity in the Danelaw,” Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 45–70). The two sides of the argument as to the severity or lack thereof of the Norse impact on Ireland

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is discussed by Harold Mytum. He states that ethnicity played an important role in relations between Vikings and natives in Ireland, pointing out that “there are three interrelated aspects of the definition of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that are relevant for group identity: ethnicity, kinship, and religion” (Harold Mytum, “The Vikings and Ireland: Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture Change,” Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: the Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, 2003, 113–37). He states that the Scandinavians who came to Ireland were themselves ethnically mixed, being composed of groups from both Norway and Denmark, but that they were all called Norse due to the ethnicity of their rulers. Once the Norse had settled on the coasts of Ireland, assimilated to the customs, laws, and language, married into the population, and converted to Christianity, those same three elements mentioned above that marked group difference also served to facilitate integration (Harold Mytum, “The Vikings and Ireland: ethnicity, identity, and culture change,” Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: the Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, 2003, 113–37). In England, integration also resulted from cultural interaction as Northumbrians, Angles, and Danes fused into one group which Robert Bartlett has called an ethnogenesis (“Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 39–56). This group had barely completed their integration when the Normans arrived and instigated a new ethnic/cultural conflict. According to Hugh Thomas, the English and the Normans were each acutely aware of their own ethnicity and, although the English and the Normans had much in common, the differences were of sufficient import to seriously complicate acculturation. He cites these differences as: first, and most basic, their homeland or place of origin, a difference that translated over time into a difference in ancestry; second is what Thomas calls political affiliation determined by ethnicity which formed a basis for rebellions; third, the fact that the Normans were elites, for the most part, and that many Anglo-Saxon elites had been destroyed, displaced, or reduced to impotence, allowing the Normans to take over the political, financial, and legal infrastructure was a major cause of friction; and last, differences of language and customs played a large part (Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans; Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity 1066–1220, 2003). The eventual assimilation of English and Norman was aided by shared elements such as Christianity, but the process often took strange turns (Diane Peters Auslander, “Victims or Martyrs: Children, Anti-Semitism, and the Stress of Change in Medieval England,” Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2005, 104–34).

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D. The High and Later Middle Ages In dealing with the time period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the First Crusade to North Africa in 1095, we find the term race used more frequently by scholars of the Middle Ages. Race also becomes more securely entangled with religion as, for the peoples of medieval Europe, concepts of biological origins stem from the singular figure of Adam, thus all concepts of racial difference were based on the belief that all humans shared a common descent and that difference constitutes an historic development. In addition, the multiplicity of human languages was thought to have been divinely ordained at Babylon. For this reason, Henry of Huntingdon in the 12th century was more dismayed at the loss of the Pictish language than of the Picts as a population group (Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 39–56). Yet, according to Len Scales, “all the strongest impulses in medieval culture were towards the view that the mixing of races was dangerous, and their segregation natural and desirable.” The origin myths of this period describe the taking of land for settlement by means of violent conflict with other ethnic groups thus tying ethnicity to land in medieval minds, although it was evident that the policies of rulers and the exigencies of time and violence could change the relationship of particular groups with their territories (Len Scales, “Medieval Barbarism? (ethnic strife in the Middle Ages),” History Today 10 [1999]: 21–46). Len Scales states that medieval doctrine and biases with regard to ethnicity had more in common with the 20th century than many believe, but other considerations of race in a variety of medieval sources provide a more nuanced view. We return to the Normans for examples of encounters between different cultures in more than one area of Europe. Their takeover of Southern Italy and Sicily has heretofore been thought to have resulted in the absorption of the many smaller ethnic groups of the region. New work, however, shows that the multiple ethnic identities of the area were maintained through resistance to such cultural absorption (Joanna H. Drell, “Cultural Syncretism and Ethnic Identity: the Norman ‘conquest’ of Southern Italy and Sicily,” Journal of Medieval History 25 [1999]: 187–202). Due to the nature of Italy’s particular development, however, many Italian scholars focus their exploration of these issues on an identity extrapolated from evidence of civic pride and the city state as incipient nation (Maria Orselli, L’idea e il culto del Santo Patrono Cittadino, 1965; Federico Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascimento, 1967; Paolo Brezzi “La coscienza civica nei comuni medievali italiani,” Il ‘Registrum Magnum’ del comune di Piacenza, ed. Ettore Falcone and Roberta Peveri, 1985, 169–83; Gina Fasoli, “La coscienza civica

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nelle laudes civitatum,” La coscienza cittadina nei comuni italiani del Duecento, 1972, 35–51). Returning to the Normans in England, Thomas Hahn cites texts composed in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest that indicate awareness of multiple ethnicities; not just English and Norman, as we saw above, but French and Danish as well, all enclosed within the borders of England. Hahn states that the privileged position of the Norman race was upheld by laws. As mentioned earlier, blood and descent were believed to be the fundamental mark of difference and the Normans were heavily committed to such a belief (Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 39–56).Yet within three generations, one medieval author is able to write that intermarriage had effectively equalized the races (Thomas Hahn, “The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 1–37). As noted, however, religion played a part as well. In accordance with Norman policy, from the very beginning of Norman occupation, Anglo-Saxon saints and religious history were idealized by authors of the post-conquest period and manipulated to form part of both state-wide and local identities (Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, 2005). In the 12th century, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Gerald of Wales’s texts on Ireland and Wales create what Thomas Hahn calls “a powerful myth and a critical framework for racial discourse” (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 1–37). Gerald of Wales in particular provided a framework for rhetoric denigrating the Irish both for their social customs and their practice of Christianity. His work is a fascinating example of the way in which textually manipulated identities can support hierarchical relationships between cultures as well as of the beginnings of colonial attitudes toward cultural difference (Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223, 1982; R. R. Davies, The First English Empire, Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343, 2000). These colonial attitudes undoubtedly helped fuse the English and Normans in opposition to others such as the Irish or the Scots. Contact with the Muslims of North Africa raised issues of ‘the Other’ in both religious and racial terms and created new attitudes toward Jews who were the most accessible racial and religious others to Europeans (Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 2000). As in the 20th century, Jews were forced to wear badges in the 12th and 13th which Thomas Hahn relates to the discrimination against the English in the laws of Norman England

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(“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 1–37). Skin color and physical features also begin to play a role in this period. Lisa Lampert examines encounters between blacks and whites in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and the early 14th-century King of Tars. She finds that biological or racial differences are bound up in ideas about religious difference, white being the color of salvation while black signifies pagans and demons. She asserts that Christian use of color in denoting difference between Christian and pagan, good and evil, has contributed to the “image of normative, Christian whiteness that is an integral part of the imaginative ‘making of Europe’” (“Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo) Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3 [2004]: 391–421. See also Albrecht Classen, “Multiculturalism in the German Middle Ages? The Rediscovery of a Modern Concept in the Past: The Case of Herzog Ernst,” Multiculturalism and Representation, ed. John Rieder and Larry E. Smith, 1996, 198–219; Peter Hoppenbrouwers “Such Stuff as People are Made on,” The Medieval History Journal 9 (2006): 195–242; Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden, “Black and White: Contact with the Mediterranean World in Medieval German Narrative,” The Medieval Mediterranean: Cross Cultural Contacts, ed. Marily Joyce Segal Chiat and Katherine L. Ryerson (1988), 112–18; and Sharon Kinoshita “The Romance of Miscegenation: Negotiating Identities in La fille du Comte de Pontieu,” Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle Warren, 2003, 111–31). Thomas Hahn points out that visual images of Africans in medieval texts denote the exotic, but he also notes the strong ties between racial difference and religion, demonstrating that conversion can turn a black person white both figuratively and physically. He encourages further exploration of these issues in works by authors such as Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 1–37). These medieval concepts of race appear to be fluid, cultural constructs; malleable and responsive to historical and cultural circumstances (Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe; Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350, 1993). Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen protests that the conclusions of Robert Bartlett and others are flawed due to their focus on Christianity as a mark of physical identity. He focuses instead on what he sees as rigid categories of identities assigned to the body of European Christians versus the body of African pagans by white Christian ideology. These categories amount to what we would call racial stereotypes akin to those we see developing in the work of Gerald of Wales (Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment; Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,”

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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 [2001]: 113–46). The varying views of both medieval authors and visual artists on racial difference seems to indicate that they were still trying to fit visible cultural difference, so much more apparent in the later Middle Ages than in the early period when ethnic differences were based more on language, law, and custom than on physical appearance, into both their cultural map and their Christian history. See the following articles in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002: Albrecht Classen, “Introduction: The Self, the Other and Everything in Between; Xenological Phenomenology of the Middle Ages” (xi–xxvi); Lisa Weston, “The Saracen and the Martyr: Embracing the Foreign in Hrotsvit’s Pelagius” (1–10); Michael Goodich, “Foreigner, Foe, and Neighbor: The Religious Cult as a Forum for Political Reconciliation” (11–26). Later medieval literature has also been used by French scholars who, while not heavily engaged in the use of ethnicity as a tool of inquiry, have published some interesting studies on the origins of the French state (Colette Beaune, Naissance de la Nation France, 1985; Colette Beaune, “L’utilisation politique du mythe des origines troyennes en France a la fin du Moyen Âge,” Lectures Médiévales de Virgile, Actes du colloque organisé par l’École Francai ¸se de Rome, 1982, 331–55; Patrick Gilli, “L’histoire de France vue par les Italiens à la fin du quattrocento,” Histoires de France, historiens de la France, 1994, 4–90). This overview of work that has been done on issues of race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages is heavily weighted toward the early medieval period, especially in the British Isles. This reflects not only my own scholarly interests, but also the fact that the use of these issues as tool of inquiry into the Middle Ages is relatively new. Select Bibliography Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Culture, 950–1359 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jeremy Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, special issue, “Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages,” ed. Thomas Hahn, 2001; The Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800, ed. Walter Pohl and Helmut Reinitz (New York: Brill, 1998); Walter Pohl, “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 15–24.

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Rediscovery of the Middle Ages (Late 18th Century / Turn of the Century) A. General Definition The interest in the Middle Ages around 1800 (also called the ‘classical romantic period’) has often been described as a ‘Rediscovery.’ This, if taken literally, seems to imply that there had previously been a discovery, or, in this case, that something had been buried and unrecognized for a long period, and then rediscovered. However, this is misleading. The Middle Ages were never forgotten or repressed in the previous eras (16th to 18th centuries) (summarized in Johannes Janota, “Zur Rezeption mittelalterlicher Literatur zwischen dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James F. Poag und Gerhild Scholz-Williams, 1983, 37–46; see also Albrecht Classen, “Literarhistorische Reflexionen in der Barockliteratur: Interesse an und Widerstand gegen das Mittelalter als Medium der poetischen Selbstidentifikation im Werk von Lohenstein und Hoffmannswaldau,” Etudes Germaniques 63.3 [2008]: 551–70). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that at the end of the 18th century, a definite change took place in attitudes to the intellectual phenomena of the Middle Ages, whether of literary, cultural, or artistic nature. This new kind of approach consisted, first of all, of an effort to win back the so-called ‘old German’ (altdeutsch) past for various purposes: as an attempt to show the present a different view of the world, which offered an alternative or parallel refuge to antiquity (Ernst Behler, “Gesellschaftskritische Motive in der romantischen Zuwendung zum Mittelalter,” Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James F. Poag and Gerhild Scholz-Williams, 1983, 47–60); or as method and assistance in the formation of a new national literature (Gerard Koziełek, “Ideologische Aspekte der Mittelalterrezeption zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Mittelalter-Rezeption Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 119–32); or in a dehistoricized reappraisal which gave medieval literature and art an autonomous aesthetic dimension which totally misunderstood its real character. Different to the 18th century, in this case, is the differentiation and division of approaches to the Middle Ages into various areas, which were clearly defined by the end of the century (art history, historicalphilosophical, poetic and academic). B. Chronological Definition In the introduction (by Joachim Bumke) to the section ‘Phases of Reception of the Middle Ages’ in the conference volume Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Sympo-

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sion (1986), the Romantic period forms one of the chronological foci in the description of the recovery. In the same volume, however, Gerard Kozie ek stresses that a foundational periodization of the reception of the Middle Ages still needs to be achieved by scholars. In any case, it is advisable to take as the ‘turn of the century’ not the whole Romantic period – the late period almost imperceptibly blending in to Biedermeier and early Realism – but to concentrate on the time from the middle of the 1790s (Wilhelm H. Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders appeared in 1796/1797) until around 1815 (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s edition of Hartmann’s Der arme Heinrich). This restriction seems reasonable not merely because it covers the early and high Romantic period, but because with the end of the Napoleonic era came the disappointment of the patriotic movements for German unification, after which the general interest in the Middle Ages perceptibly ebbed away, to be replaced by an academic interest which reached its first high point in 1826/1827 when Lachmann’s revolutionary editions (the Nibelungenlied, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, Walther von der Vogelweide’s poetry) signaled the beginning of a new age. C. The Term ‘Middle Ages’ Around 1800 Several expressions existed in German around 1800 for the modern term ‘Middle Ages:’ ‘old German period’ or ‘German antiquity,’ ‘middle time’ or ‘middle times,’ with German often actually meaning an ill defined ‘Germanic’ or ‘Nordic’ in all its vagueness, and the temporal spectrum broader than that used today. Indeed, the first beginnings of the romantic reception of the Middle Ages was an interest in the so-called ‘Dürerzeit,’ which would not be counted as medieval today. The two variations on German middle times also betray a double conception: on the one hand, ‘German Antiquity’ was imagined as an other, non-classical antiquity, with the accent on the national past. On the other, the ‘middle time’ bears witness to a view of history inherited from the renaissance, positing a (less valuable) period of transition between antiquity and the present. This middle period, however, was no longer judged dismissively, but viewed either as a middle kingdom, the dawn of a new age (Novalis), or even as a integral epoch of world history (Friedrich Schlegel). Occasionally the term ‘Swabian period’ was used, an expression inherited from Bodmer, which related to the era of the Hohenstaufen emperors. The language use of the early romantic period even went as far as to describe the literature of this ‘Swabian period’ as the “flowering of romantic poetry” (Ludwig Tieck).

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D. History of Philosophy and the Middle Ages The poetical rhetoric of Novalis’ Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799) has often been taken as evidence of a paradigm shift (Helmut Schanze, “‘Es waren schöne glänzende Zeiten …’ Zur Genese des ‘romantischen’ Mittelalterbildes,” Studien zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, ed. Rudolf Schützeichel, 1979, 760–71). This was not published at the time, first appearing in a posthumous edition in 1826, but nevertheless had a decisive influence on the other early romantics. What earlier critics (beginning with Rudolf Haym [1870], continuing with Claus Träger [1961] until roughly Hannelore Link [1971]) condemned as a one-sided glorification of the Middle Ages was in fact a political utopia which conjured up the united, Christian Europe of the “truly Catholic” ages as a model for the future; they were drawing an idealized picture, a society in which religion, art and science formed a unity (Kasperowski, 1994). In Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (published posthumously in 1802), the period of transition between the raw, barbarian times and our present age was described as a “profound and romantic time,” a fermentation in which renewal was brewing; a triadic scheme of history pointing to the coming of a new golden age. The emphasis changes in Friedrich Schlegel’s middle period (Reise nach Frankreich, 1803), to the point that the present is viewed as the real Middle Ages (in the sense of a period of transition) whereas the actual Middle Ages (from Charlemagne to Frederick II) were possessed of an individuated, fixed character. Later, Jacob Grimm depicted the Middle Ages as a process of increasing decadence, from a German-heathen paradise to a state of clerical alienation. (Wilhelm G. Busse, “Jacob Grimms Konstruktion des Mittelalters,” Mittelalter und Moderne: Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt: Kongressakten des 6. Symposions des Mediävistenverbands in Bayreuth 1995, ed. Peter Segl, 1997, 243–51). E. Art History Following the precedent set by the positive reappraisal of “old German” or Gothic art in Sturm and Drang from the Enlightenment reproach of barbarism, and the various ways in which the English Gothic Revival influenced Germany, the new turn toward the Middle Ages began, chronologically, in the field of art history. Wilhelm H. Wackenroder’s essay Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1796/97, expanded by Tieck 1814), written under the influence of impressions from a study trip to South Germany (Bamberg, Nuremberg), raised art to the language of God, developed an anticlassicism based on Christian religiosity, and claimed to have discovered in the so-called ‘Dürer period’ an epoch in which art was distinguished by

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simplicity, piety, self-sufficiency and independence from commerce. Similar views can be found in Ludwig Tieck’s “Bildungsroman” Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. Eine altdeutsche Geschichte (1798). A direct line can be drawn between this idealization of an allegedly deeply Christian, disinterested school of painting and Friedrich Schlegel’s glorification of Gothic as the epitome of Christian-medieval architecture (Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich, 1806), which had been prefigured by the Jacobist Georg Forster (Ansichten vom Niederrhein, 1790). Even Goethe went through a period, from 1810 to 1815, of renewed interest in the Gothic (Berta Raposo, “Bajo el signo de la contradicción: Goethe y la Edad Media en el espejo de la arquitectura gótica,” Encuentros con Goethe, ed. Luis A. Acosta 2001, 389–400), inspired by the activities of the brothers Boisserée (to whom F. Schlegel had given private lectures in Paris in 1802/ 1803), which in the long term led to the reconstruction of Cologne Cathedral and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Berlin Neo-Gothic. Wackenroder and Tieck’s ideas were largely realized in artistic practice by the “Society of Luke” (Lukasbund), an emphatically Catholic art group named after the patron saint of painters, and who – after their move to Rome – became known as the “Nazerenes” (among their number: Friedrich Overbeck, Peter Cornelius, Philipp Veit and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld). The Protestants Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich kept their confessional ties in the background, (CarstenPeter Warncke, “Die deutsche Malerei der Romantik,” Romantik-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Schanze, 1994, 392–406), although the latter often made use of Christian-medieval elements (Kreuz und Kathedrale im Gebirge, Die Kathedrale, Kreuz im Walde, Das Kreuz im Gebirge, Winterlandschaft mit Kirche, Abtei im Eichwald, Klosterruine Oybin). F. Literature According to Friederich Schlegel’s poetological conceptions (chiefly formulated in the Athenäums-Fragmente, 1799–1800, and also in the Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800), romantic literary ideals were prefigured in the Middle Ages and its depiction of ‘chivalry’ and love. Despite this, the actual reception and reworking of texts and matter by romantic writers was relatively insignificant in comparison to the theoretical interest. While it should not be overlooked that a positive conception of the Middle Ages had already appeared in the 18th century, thanks to Ossian and the Gothic novel, which the romantics could build on, this remained for the most part restricted to popular literature, where many medieval traditions subliminally continued (Markus Reisenleitner, Die Produktion historischen Sinnes: Mittelalterrezeption im deutschsprachigen historischen Trivialroman vor 1848, 1992). Ludwig Tieck’s Minnelieder

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aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter (1803) took the middle way between populism and scholarship; he modernized poems from Bodmer’s collection as far as was necessary for a minimal understanding of the language of the texts, but kept, thanks to the preservation of the lyric form, a patina of antiquity and an alienating effect of artifice (Brinker-Gabler, 1980). His version of Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst (1812), took a similar approach, but met with greater success from the public. His so-called Heldenbuch project remained fragmentary (a revision of parts of the Nibelungenlied and König Rother), and his methods were not uncontroversial (Brinker-Gabler, 1980; see also Ingrid García-Wistädt, “Ludwig Tieck y sus intentos de renovación de la literatura medieval alemana,” Estudios Filológicos Alemanes 13 [2007]: 329–36). It is open to question whether Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s folk song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806) can be counted as reception of the Middle Ages (it mostly contains material from the 16th and 17th centuries), but in any case Arnim’s essay Von Volksliedern, which was attached to the collection, was included by Gerard Koziełek in his anthology Mittelalterrezeption as a witness to the same mass pedagogical ambition which can be seen in Görres’ introduction to Die teutschen Volksbücher (1807); the democratization of culture which both aspired to was only possible with a revival of ‘old German’ literature. The Zeitung für Einsiedler (1807/1808), edited by Achim von Arnim, was intended to act as the organ and the medium of this democratization (Renate Moering, “Die Zeitung für Einsiedler: Programm und Realisierung einer romantischen Zeitschrift,” Romantik und Volksliteratur: Beiträge des Wuppertaler Colloquiums zu Ehren von Heinz Rölleke, ed. Lothar Bluhm, Euphorion-Beihefte 33 [1999]: 31–48). The controversy about the relationship between the minnesingers and the mastersingers fought by Jacob Grimm on the one side and von der Hagen, Bernhard Joseph Docen, and Johann Gustav Büsching on the other is particularly illuminating for the Heidelberg Romantics’ concept of ‘folk poetry.’ Although von der Hagen and Docen saw a fundamental difference, based on the very different socio-cultural background, between the two forms, Grimm viewed them as both identical in their artificiality and formality and in having their ultimate origin in folksong, (Koziełek, 1977) like the folk tale and the saga, both of which he and his brother Wilhelm published in famous collections shortly thereafter (Kinder- und Hausmärchen 1812; Deutsche Sagen 1816/1818). G. Academy A differentiation between the literary and the scholarly approach is one of the chief characteristics of the romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and also the foundation on which modern German studies, the scholarship of

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German language and literature, was erected. In the 18th century the medieval editions of Bodmer, Myller etc. had met with no success worth the name (Bernd Neumann, “Die verhinderte Wissenschaft: Zur Erforschung altdeutscher Sprache und Literatur in der ‘vorwissenschaftlichen’ Phase,” Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 105–18), and in consequence, poets and scholars like Ludwig Tieck, von der Hagen, and, later, Ludwig Uhland attempted to popularize ‘old German’ texts with a new conception for their edition and treatment; it was, as a consequence of the politically volatile situation of the Napoleonic occupation, connected to a program of popular education. On the other hand, a strict scholarly line developed around George Friedrich Benecke, the brothers Grimm and Karl Lachmann, which won the public debate because it attributed a quasireligious importance to old language and old texts, and could thus justify the soundness of its scholarly treatment (Lothar Bluhm, “Anmerkungen zur Entstehung einer Wissenschaft: Zur Deutschen Philologie im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Eine Skizze,” Metapher und Modell. Ein Wuppertaler Colloquium zu literarischen und wisenschaftlichen Formen der Wirklichkeitskonstruktion, ed. Wolfgang Bergen et al., 1996, 161–72). However, that led to a sharp division between the academy and the wider public which was to have considerable consequences for the future, not to speak of the vulnerability of such a concept of scholarship to ideological takeover (Rüdiger Krohn, ‘… daß Alles Allen verständlich sey …’ Die Altgermanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts und ihre Wege in die Öffentlichkeit,” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann und Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 264–333). Between the two extremes lay the activity of August Wilhelm Schlegel, who had argued for ‘old German’ studies on the model of classical philology, but in his Berlin lectures in 1803 he enriched its scholarly claims with the tools of critical investigations, without which any fruitful development of national literature would be impossible. This ideal of scholarship is based on the triad of grammar, criticism, and hermeneutics. The addition of criticism, i. e. critical interpretation, makes the cross-fertilization of poetry and philology possible, as his brother Friedrich also stressed (Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalterrezeption der Brüder Schlegel, 2000), which would be impossible for the dry philology of a Lachmann. H. Individual Authors and Works The Nibelungenlied, for both literary and socio-political reasons, was the favorite subject and figurehead of the romantic reception of the Middle Ages. All the famous scholar-poets of the period (August Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, Hagen, Zeune, Jacob Grimm) attempted translations or reworkings (collec-

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tion of source material in Otfrid Ehrismann, 1986; cf. ‘Waz sider da geschach’: American-German Studies on the Nibelungenlied, ed. Werner Wunderlich and Ulrich Müller, 1992). Compared with this, the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Arthurian epics played a less important role, as they offered little nationalist-political ammunition (cf. Claudia WasielewskiKnecht, Studien zur deutschen Parzival-Rezeption in Epos und Drama des 18.–20. Jahrhunderts, 1993). Ursula Schulze (“Stationen der Parzival-Rezeption: Strukturveränderung und ihre Folgen,” Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986) and Ulrich Müller (“Mittelalter-Rezeption in Europe and America: Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal,” Mittelalter-Rezeption V. Year’s Work in Medievalism 5: Gesammelte Vorträge des V. Salzburger Symposions [1990], ed. Ulrich Müller und Kathleen Verduin, 1996, 24–45) begin their overviews of the Parzival reception with Wagner. The most up-to-date overview of the reception of the Arthur material is given by Albrecht Classen (“History of Scholarship on Medieval German Arthurian Literature,” History of Arthurian Scholarship, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 2002, 122–39), who stresses the role of the Schlegel brothers in the appreciation of the ideals and fantasy of this genre. According to Ursula Rautenberg (Das ‘Volksbuch vom armen Heinrich’: Studien zur Rezeption Hartmanns von Aue im 19. Jahrhundert und zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Übersetzung Wilhelm Grimms, 1985), Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich forms a special case, having been edited by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1815 in patriotic enthusiasm and in a pre-scholarly manner. Brinker-Gabler shows how unbroken and strong the interest in minnesang was (1980); however, attention was only paid to Walther von der Vogelweide after Ludwig Uhland’s monograph Walther von der Vogelweide, ein altdeutscher Dichter (1822; see Roland Richter, Wie Walther von der Vogelweide ein ‘Sänger des Reiches’ wurde, 1988). Additionally, the complex around the ‘Sängerkrieg’ (battle of the bards) was particularly popular because of the connection to themes of poetry and the existential struggle for life and death, and was the subject of stories of dramas from such varied authors as the ‘unmedieval’ E. T. A. Hoffmann (Der Kampf der Sänger, 1819) and the chivalryobsessed Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué (Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, 1828) (see Johannes Rettelsbach, “Heinrich von Ofterdingen zwischen Dichtung und Philologie,” Archiv für das Studium der neuen Sprachen und Literaturen 236, 151. Jg., [1999, 1. Halbjahresband]: 33–52). From the Sturm und Drang period on, not only the German but also the Nordic Middle Ages had exercised the strongest fascination. The Brothers Grimm and von der Hagen were rivals in the edition of the lyrical Edda (Lothar Bluhm, “compilierende oberflächlichkeit gegen gernrezensierende Vornehmheit: Der Wissenschaftskrieg zwischen Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen und den Brüdern Grimm,” Ro-

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mantik und Volksliteratur: Beiträge des Wuppertaler Colloquiums zu Ehren von Heinz Rölleke, ed. Lothar Bluhm, Euphorion-Beihefte 33 [1999]: 49–70), and in the same period Wilhelm Grimm published Altdänische Hedenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (1811). Siegfried Grosse and Ursula Rautenberg have compiled a comprehensive bibliography of witnesses to the reception of the Middle Ages in German literature from the mid-18th century on (Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher deutscher Dichtung, 1989). I. Other Countries The turn toward the Middle Ages in France was different to that in German speaking lands, both in character and in volume, for which both literary and non-literary factors were responsible. Despite Chateaubriand’s apology for the Christian Middle Ages in Génie du Christianisme (1802) and Les Martyrs (1809), classical tastes and a negative reaction to the Middle Ages lasted particularly long in France, until around 1830 (Michel Olsen, “Gibt es eine Mittelalterrezeption in der französischen Romantik?,” The Medieval Legacy: A Symposium, ed. Andreas Haarder et al., 1982, 133–48). Disregarding a few exceptions, such as Jean-Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813) and Jean Baptiste Bonaventure de Roquefort’s Glossaire de la langue romane (1808) or the editions Fabliaux et contes (1808) and the Roman de la Rose (1814) by M. Méon, editorial activity concerning medieval texts only began their decisive development late in the 19th century (Robert Baudry, “Avatars du Gral en littérature française des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Moderne Artus-Rezeption 18.–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Kurt Gamerschlag, 1991, 23–50). Interest in medieval literature, where it existed at all, arose rather around Italian and Spanish texts. The existential meaning which the national past had for the German speaking lands was lacking in France, which had never felt its national identity threatened, even after the defeat of Napoleon. The situation in Britain was different as the society there had never quite shaken off its medieval characteristics in the time following the end of the medieval period proper. (Leslie J. Workman, “Modern Medievalism in England and America,” Mittelalter-Rezeption V. Year’s work in medievalism 5. Gesammelte Vorträge des V. Salzburger Symposions [1990], ed. Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, 1996, 1–21; The Middle Ages after the Middle Ages in the English-Speaking World, ed. Marie-Françoise Alamichel and Derek Brewer, 1997). Reprints and reworkings of Thomas Malorys Le Morte Darthur (particularly from 1816) and the historical novels of Walter Scott formed the foundations of British ‘medievalism,’ which, as Workman emphasizes, was generally equated with Romanticism.

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In North America, on the other hand, medieval literature, especially the myths of King Arthur and of the Grail, have had a tremendous influence, both in literature and in the arts, both in the modern film industry and in popular culture (Andrew E. Mathis, The King Arthur Myth in Modern American Literature, 2002). The heroic, that is, the Nordic, tradition has also exerted deep influence, as numerous entries in The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Francis G. Gentry, Winder McConnell, et al., 2002, 267–76, attest. Winder McConnell has repeatedly emphasized the significant role of the author Robinson Jeffers in the reception of the Nibelungenlied in North America (see his entry here, and also in Von Mythen und Mären, ed. Gudrun Marci-Boehncke and Jörg Riecke, 2006). In fact, this epic enjoyed tremendous respect and since 1848 has been constantly translated and retranslated into English (Albrecht Classen, “Das Nibelungenlied in Amerika,” ibid., 307–21). The number of modern films based on medieval themes is legion, as Kevin J. Harty’s survey (The Reel Middle Ages, 1999) indicates (see also John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies, 2003; Mittelalter im Film, ed. Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, 2006). Though for entirely different reasons compared to England, Spain too had remained largely ‘medieval,’ for which reason an interest in the Middle Ages is hardly present in the beginnings of the 19th century, and only began as Spanish romanticism – later than else where in Europe – became established. The meager Spanish reception of the Middle Ages thereafter is connected to the conservative tendencies of this variety of romanticism. Agustín Durán published single volumes of a collection of romances between 1828 and 1833; between 1849 and 1850 it appeared in full under the title Romancero general. This was partly based on the collection Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas (Hamburg, 1821–1825), made by a German resident in Spain, Nikolaus Böhl von Faber, who himself had been inspired by Jacob Grimm’s Silva de romances viejos (1815). On Durán and the Spanish Romantics see Ermanno Caldera (Primi manifesti del romanticismo spagnuolo, 1962) and David T. Gie, (Agustín Durán: A Biography and Literary Appreciation, 1975). J. Looking Ahead From 1815 onwards, literary interest in “old German” literature dropped off perceptibly. The prolific work of a writer like Fouqué, more popular than literary in character, was exemplary here (Berta Raposo, “Spätromantisches in Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqués Parcival: Ein Rittergedicht,” Estudios Filológicos Alemanes 2 [2003]: 301–11). He wrote a myriad of chivalric novels and dramas, which met with short-lived success in the first two decades of the 19th century, only to fall prey to oblivion or the mockery of contemporaries.

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Because of the material he chose (the Nibelung trilogy Der Held des Nordens, 1808, based on Nordic rather than Middle High German sources; Eine rheinische Sage in Balladen on Lohengrin, 1816; Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, 1828; Der Parcival: Ein Rittergedicht, 1833) he has often been regarded as a precursor of Richard Wagner (first by Friedrich Panzer, “Richard Wagner und Fouqué,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstiftes [1907]: 157–94; most recently by Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqués Nibelungentrilogie ‘Der Held des Nordens’: Studien zu Stoff, Struktur und Rezeption, 2000). Ludwig Uhland achieved a much more solid degree of popularity, working on songs and ballads along similar poetic-scholarly lines to Tieck, and with the same mass educational ambition as the Heidelberg Romantics in the ‘restoration period’ after the fall of Napoleon; Hans-Joachim Behr describes his work as a dramatist (“Das alte gute Recht: Das Idealbild mittelalterlicher Reichsgewalt und die Realität des Württembergischen Verfassungsstreites in Ludwig Uhlands Ernst Herzog von Schwaben,” Mittelalterrezeption [I]: Gesammelte Vorträge des Salzburger Symposions ‘Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Dichter und ihrer Werke in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts’, ed. Jürgen Kühnel et al., 1979, 213–24) and Jürgen Schröder, “Die Freiheit Württembergs: Uhlands Ernst, Herzog von Schwaben (1818): Geschichtsdrama – politisches Drama – Psychodrama,” Ludwig Uhland: Dichter, Gelehrter, Politiker, ed. Hermann Bausinger, 1988, 107–33). In the field of academic history, this period saw the beginnings of the source-critical study of the German Middle Ages in the series Monumenta Germaniae historica, founded by Freiherr vom Stein, as well as the emergence of the genre of the historical saga with Arnims Die Kronenwächter (1817); cf. Paul Michael Lützeler (“Die Kaisersage bei den Romantikern der Napoleonischen Ära,” Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James F. Poag und Gerhild ScholzWilliams, 1983, 74–86). K. History of Scholarship Although, since the beginning of the 20th century, countless investigations have been made into the so-called revival of the Middle Ages in the Romantic period (Rudolf Sokolowsky, Der altdeutsche Minnesang im Zeitalter der deutschen Klassiker und Romantiker, 1906; Gottfried Salomon, Das Mittelalter als Ideal in der Romantik, 1922), research into the reception of the Middle Ages only began on a large scale in the 1970s, i. e., shortly after the reception theory of the Constance school came to prominence. Hans Robert Jauss (Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1956–1976, 1977) saw the alterity of medieval literature as its “possible meaning(s)” for us today; the history of its transmission, which is also the history of its recep-

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tion, provides an example of the process of the formation, reformation, consolidation and renewal of the aesthetic canon. The meaning discovered through aesthetic experience is the result of this process. Helmut Brackert was one of the first to use the term ‘reception of the Middle Ages,’ in connection with the reception of the Nibelungenlied around 1800 and Goethe’s rejection of the nationalist appropriation of older literature by some of the Romantics (“Die ‘Bildungsstufe der Nation’ und der Begriff der Weltliteratur: Ein Beispiel Goethescher Mittelalter-Rezeption,” Goethe und die Tradition, ed. Hans Reiss, 1972). However, the ambitious research was particularly inspired by the so-called medieval renaissance or nostalgia of the 1970s, (shown, among other things, by the epoch-making success of the Hohenstaufen exhibition in Stuttgart in 1977) and gave itself the task of documenting and exploring the presence of the Middle Ages in all its forms of appearance (literature, art, music, film, the new media). This was to a great extent self-justification on the part of German medievalists, who had been very unsettled by the theoretical discussions arising from the revolutionary movements of 1968, and were determined to show their subject as anything but anachronistic and socially irrelevant, but rather as important and fundamental to the development of European culture. The conference volumes of the Salzburg symposia published by Ulrich Müller et al. (1979, 1982, 1986), the Symposia in Lausanne 1989 (ed. Irene von Burg et al., 1961) and at Burg Kaprun 1990 (ed. Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, 1996), the three collected volumes edited by Rüdiger Krohn, Forum: Materialien und Beiträge zur Mittelalterrezeption (1986, 1992), as well as Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski (1986) also pursue this line of research (see also Ulrich Müller’s contribution to this Handbook, “Middle Ages Today”). On further conference reports and essay collections, cf. Ulrich Müller (“Mittelalter-Rezeption in Europe and America: Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal,” Mittelalter-Rezeption V: Year’s Work in Medievalism 5. Gesammelte Vorträge des V. Salzburger Symposions [1990], ed. Ulrich Müller and Kathleen Verduin, 1996, 24–45). These are all characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. On collections of source material, see the previously mentioned volume by Grosse and Rautenberg (1989). L. Conclusion This all relates to medieval reception on a large scale, from the early modern period to the 20th century. Recently there has been a dearth of larger works taking an overview of the period around 1800, although, as described above, a number of larger monographs had appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, and Wolfram von den Steinen (“Mittelalter und Goethezeit,”

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Historische Zeitschrift 183 [1957]: 249–302) dedicated an essay to this topic. One sign of this lack of interest is the fact that in the standard work, Mittelalter-Rezeption. Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski (1986), only one essay (Kozie ek) deals with the treatment of the Middle Ages by the Romantics. Larger works of a recent date deal with the medieval interests of individual authors. Thus Gisela Brinker-Gabler writes about Luwig Tieck’s activities as editor and re-worker of “old German” literature, and the intended function of the reception, but forgoes an analysis of the socio-historical and cultural circumstances of the romantic “apotheosis of the Middle Ages” (though she admits its necessity), and confines herself to illuminating Tieck’s contribution in “a consolidatory re-working” and thereby finds a “regressive turn” which wins relevance for the “function of reception;” because of its broken relationship to the present, the Middle Ages is given an exemplary function. Ira Kasperowski starts with Novalis’s philosophic and poetological program, and embeds it in the early Romantic reception of the Middle Ages, which still needs to be separated from the prejudices surrounding it. On the basis of sources used by Novalis, she shows how strongly his interest in the Middle Ages was influenced by an approach from the history of mentality influenced by Herder. According to Edith Höltenschmidt, the Schlegel brothers’ interest in the Middle Ages is a result of their universal poetic perspective, and not vice versa (XXI); they were equally interested in the literature of Classical antiquity, the (early) modern (Shakespeare and Goethe), and even of the Orient. As far as the assessment of the whole period is concerned, it has apparently taken an extremely long time to neutralize Heinrich Heine’s fatal equation, Romanticism = a return to the Middle Ages (Die romantische Schule, 1835). Most researchers felt, and sometimes still feel, obliged to stress that the discovery of the Middle Ages and an interest in it did not begin in 1800. While this consensus has dominated for a significant period, opposing points of view are not rare in the appraisal of Romantic reception of the Middle Ages. Gerard Koziełek sees it not as escapism, but as a recovery of German literature with the aim of democratizing literature (“Einleitung,” Mittelalterrezeption. Texte zur Aufnahme altdeutscher Literatur in der Romantik, ed. id., 1977, 1–43), which can be seen, above all, in the Heidelberg Romanticism of Arnim, Brentano and Görres. Rüdiger Krohn casts doubt on the alleged medieval enthusiasm of the Romantic period and points to the low enthusiasm of the public for medieval editions and adaptations, as is shown in sales figures. (“Die Wirklichkeit der Legende. Widersprüchliches zur sogenannten Mittelalter-’Begeisterung’ der Romantik,” Mittelalterrezeption II. Gesammelte Vorträge des 2. Salzburger Symposions, ed. Jürgen Kühnel et al.,

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1982, 1–29). Previously, he had pointed to the socio-historical, that is, early bourgeois background, to the ‘ur-German virtues’ which the early Romantics valued in the Hans Sachs and Dürer period (Rüdiger Krohn, “Die Rückkehr des Bürgerpoeten: Aspekte der Hans-Sachs-Rezeption in der literarischen Frühromantik,” Mittelalterrezeption [I]. Gesammelte Vorträge des Salzburger Symposions ‘Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Dichter und ihrer Werke in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,’ ed. Jürgen Kühnel et al., 1979, 80–106), i. e., a period which has not been regarded as medieval for some considerable time. Christoph Schmid (Die Mittelalterrezeption des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik, 1979) argues that the affirmative medieval reception from the beginning of the Middle Ages meant a narrowing of the ideological view compared with the open horizon of the Enlightenment and the Pre-romantic period; this affirmative reception turned into a ferment of nationalist and reactionary pedagogical policy. Ernst Behler (1983) instead places stress on the elements of social criticism intended to create a counterweight to the present time, pessimistically viewed by Tieck and Wackenroder, but progressively viewed by the Schlegel brothers. Wolfgang Beutin (“Contraria contrariis curantur? Über die Interdependenzen von Mittelalter-Rezeption und Renaissance-Rezeption von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart,” Mittelalter-Rezeption, ed. Ulrich Müller et al., 1996, 46–61) sees medieval reception in a dialectic relationship with the Renaissance reception and views the use which the Romantics put the Middle Ages to as a small-bore weapon against modernization and for the restoration of the old order. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser (“Mittelalter als Wissenschaftskonstruktion und Fiktion der Moderne,” Mittelalter und Moderne: Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt: Kongressakten des 6. Symposions des Mediävistenverbands in Bayreuth 1995, ed. Peter Segl, 1997, 237–41) stresses the “enormously broad effect” of a construction of the Middle Ages at the beginning of the 19th century, which – like all descriptions of an epoch – has fictional characteristics. Most recently Edith Höltenschmidt (2000) once again dismantled the apparently ineradicable identification of the Romantic period with an enthusiasm for the Middle Ages by showing that the Romantics were not solely, or even chiefly, interested in the Middle Ages.

Select Bibliography Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Poetisch-wissenschaftliche Mittelalter-Rezeption: Ludwig Tiecks Erneuerung altdeutscher Literatur (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1980); Otfrid Ehrismann, Nibelungenlied 1755–1920: Regesten und Kommentare zu Forschung und Rezeption (Giessen: Schmitz, 1986); Siegfried Grosse und Ursula Rautenberg, Die Rezeption mittelalter-

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licher deutscher Dichtung: Eine Bibliographie ihrer Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989); Ira Kasperowski, Mittelalterrezeption im Werk des Novalis (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994); Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalterrezeption der Brüder Schlegel (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000).

Berta Raposo

Religious Studies (The Latin West) A. Introduction Although I am convinced that very often the really substantial standard works on the varieties of medieval religion, orthodox and otherwise, have already been written during the 19th and earlier 20th century, and although I know from experience that many recent studies are rather modernistic adaptations of already well known historical facts and conditions so as to fashion ‘post- etc. theories,’ I will deal here almost exclusively with some of the latest trends in the field in question. Nevertheless, I will begin with a brief discussion of some of the fundamental older studies, which have simply not been superseded until today because of their authors’ extensive knowledge of the sources. Notwithstanding many newer local histories of the Church, there is no fuller analysis of the history of Christianity in medieval Germany than Albert Hauck’s six-volume Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands (1887–1920). An institution of considerably more importance for the formation of a Christian people than even experts are often aware of, were the synodi parochiales (Sendgerichte), the function of which was to punish all deviations from the Church’s norms, based on the enforced denunciations by members of the same parish. Here we still rely mostly on Albert Michael Koeniger, Die Sendgerichte in Deutschland, vol. I (1907). Most recently, cf. Wilfried Hartmann, “‘Sozialdisziplinierung’ und ‘Sündenzucht’ im frühen Mittelalter? Das bischöfliche Sendgericht in der Zeit um 900,” Jahrbuch des historischen Kollegs (2005): 95–119. Koeniger also wrote Die Militärseelsorge der Karolingerzeit, 1918, which is still the only monograph on this today nearly completely neglected subject. Finally, the four volumes of G[eorge] G. Coulton’s Fife Centuries of Religion (1923–1950) are completely indispensable for anyone who wants to gain a real understanding of how the monasteries, this central religious, cultural, and political institution of the Papacy worked in practice (and this perhaps in contrast to countless pious medieval authors of treatises and to apologetic chronicle-writers who until today determine our views of

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monasticism). Coulton is perhaps more often belying than confirming the idealized picture regularly transmitted by ecclesiastical chroniclers. Only a very few publishing houses have realized the importance of these older but seminal studies and have made available reprints (e. g., the 11 volumes of Christian W. F. Walch, Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Kezereien [sic!], Spaltungen und Religionsstreitigkeiten, bis auf die Zeiten der Reformation, 1762–1785, rpt. 2003–2007, which is the fullest treatment of heresies in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages up to date). It is impossible to cover in these pages monographs on historical personalities or on individual places (churches, monasteries) of importance for medieval Christianity; they are legion, and not few of them have hardly added anything substantial to our knowledge, as can easily be illustrated by the wave of publications on the occasion of certain more recent jubilees, such as of Constantine I and Charlemagne. Although publications of a more comprehensive character, belonging to other disciplines, such as those focusing on the history of Latin and vernacular literatures and on the history of medieval art and music, contain much information on sources important for the religious mentalities, I will mostly disregarded them for practical purposes. Given that theology, based primarily on Biblical Exegesis, is treated in another entry here, I will not consider it either in this article. More innovative than many recent ecclesiastical histories of a certain region (e. g., Walter Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, I, 1999; Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, ed., Handbuch der Mainzer Kirchengeschichte, I, 2000), which repeat a lot of already well known material, would be investigations of the “religion vécue” of the Middle Ages à la Jean Delumeau (ed., Histoire vécue du peuple chrétien, 1979). Though in that age, religion undoubtedly was not only one sector of life, but an all-pervasive lifestyle, for the purpose of the analytical description the methodological approach of religious phenomenology still seems to be the most lucid one (see the Handbuch by Dinzelbacher in the bibliography). Certainly, the division between popular and learned piety being not so obsolete as some would have it, the introduction of the concept of “religion prescrite” vs. “religion vécue” promises a clearer picture (Dinzelbacher, Mentalität, 2003). Also, ‘domestic religion’ as contrasted with official and collective rites, might be considered a more useful terminology (cf. the Quaderni di storia religiosa 8 [2001], dedicated to Religione domestica). It deserves mention that also in our field (as generally in recent historiography) a certain revival of the narrative discourse can be observed in the vein of storytelling, increasingly putting aside the critical analysis. Many important questions thus remain unanswered.

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How, for example, did the so often retold Gregorian reform movement influence concretely the lives of women? (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Kirchenreform und Frauenleben im Hohen Mittelalter,” MIÖG 113 [2005]: 20–40). What did, for instance, a late-medieval cardinal really do in order to guarantee that he would escape Hell in his afterlife? (see, e. g., for instance, Kerstin Merkel, Jenseits-Sicherung: Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg und seine Grabdenkmäler, 2004). As we have to deal with newer currents in our field only, we will not consider the lot of publications which, often in a very qualified way, are continuing traditional efforts, such as – of primary importance, of course – the editing of medieval texts (it is astonishing how many works even of the 12th century still are unprinted or can be used only in less than satisfactory critical editions, like those in the Patrologia Latina; see, e. g., the autobiographical meditations of Reinerus of Liège, etc.). But most often the real interest of the editors especially of texts in the vernaculars lies in the philological work, not in the texts’ religio-historical significance. The understanding of the sources, however, will always require both an intensive knowledge of the language and sufficient familiarity with the history of the subject in question, thus combining a linguistic-literary approach with a specialized historical one (see the articles on Prayer Books and Religious Lyrics in this handbook). And sometimes a study of écriture and reécriture, often but a methodological exercise, can indeed open a new understanding (Florence Chave-Mahir and Olivier Legendre, “Les possédées de Lodi: Parcours de deux témoignages exceptionnels sur l’exorcisme au XIIe siècle,” Revue Mabillon NS 18 [2007]: 133–61). B. Ecclesiastical Law It does not need to be repeated that the study of ecclesiastical law remains of utmost importance – not only of the norms, but rather of the practices (Sascha Ragg, Ketzer und Recht, 2006; Lotte Kéry, Gottesfurcht und irdische Strafe: Der Beitrag des mittelalterlichen Kirchenrechts zur Entstehung des öffentlichen Strafrechts, 2006). This is quite true for other disciplines as well; in Religious Studies it is of more relevance to occupy oneself with, say, the use of the psalterium (Klaus Schreiner, “Psalmen in Liturgie, Frömmigkeit und Alltag des Mittelalters,” in id., Der Landgrafenpsalter: Kommentarband, ed. Felix Heinzer, 1992, 141–83) than with the textual variations of its transmission. The juridical norms and usages of any society tell us more about its mentality than the non-specialist would suspect. Strange to notice that in the very same 13th century which saw the abandonment of ordeals (a Germanic institution practiced with the help of the Christian priest), the first animal

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trials (mostly brought to ecclesiastical courts) are documented (Peter Dinzelbacher, Das fremde Mittelalter: Gottesurteil und Tierprozess, 2006). C. Sociological Approaches Many scholars pursue rather traditional sociological analyses of the clergy, regional structures of the Church, biographies of more or less important prelates, and so on. They are helpful, but there is neither need nor room for quoting several examples, even if they are models of painstaking, highly specialized and scholarly work like the studies by Giles Constable (Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, 1995), a must for everyone dealing with our subject. It is, however, regrettable that promising attempts to explain the socially relevant sides of religion, developed by scholars adhering to Historical Materialism, have been neglected after the fall of the corresponding political systems (especially the Soviet Union), given that religion is undoubtedly, beneath everything else it may be, an extremely strong instrument for social control and for privileging one class of society, that of ecclesiastical functionaries. Once we have put aside, of course, the purely ideological parts of such publications, they still can be read with profit by those interested in the more earth-bound aspects of a transcendental weltbild (Ernst Werner and Martin Erbstösser, Ketzer und Heilige: Das religiöse Leben im Hochmittelalter, 1986). But questions of that couleur seem to have rather faded out of fashion today. Nonetheless, an interesting analysis of the inextricable combination of belief and economy deserves to be mentioned, viz. Robert B. Ekelund et al., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm, 1996. All justified criticism of singular points set aside, the authors are right in their assumption that it is important to understand the Catholic Church as an institution that sold “insurances” for a secure place in the other world in exchange for mundane money and gifts of land. It was this construction, or rather its rejection, which initiated, among other causes, the Protestant Reformation. D. Central Topics Turning to the core of our essay, we need to examine some selected themes in Religious Studies in the narrower sense of the term. Several items seem to be of special interest nowadays, depending, on the one hand, on the curiosity of the general public (as it is the case with magic and witchcraft), and on the other on certain academic schools which dominate the field even if their preferred subject is already dealt with excessively (paradigmatically: the memoria of the dead, e. g., Roland Rappmann and Alfons Zettler, Die Reichenauer Mönchsgemeinschaft und ihr Totengedenken im frühen Mittelalter, 1998).

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Considering the highlight of the “saecula spiritualia,” viz. mysticism (cf. also the articles Sisterbooks and Visionary Texts), one will be confronted with legions of literary-historical publications (indispensable, however: Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, 1990–1999; From a theological standpoint, see also Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 1991ff., which focuses, however, mostly on well-known individuals of great fame). Given that both most of the medieval mystics and the medievalists interested in them today are females, feminist statements about them enjoy paradigmatic function; there is, on the contrary, not much done to understand mysticism as a historical phenomenon coming into existence in the post-antique Latin Church not before the end of the 11th century (Peter Dinzelbacher, Christliche Mystik im Abendland: Ihre Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1994). Whence the late-medieval blossoming of this form of religious ‘peak experiences’? Why the prevalence of the female faithful? The pious answer “spiritus flat ubi vult” will not do; instead there are investigable socio-historical conditions (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Zur Sozialgeschichte der christlichen Erlebnismystik im westlichen Mittelalter,” Wege mystischer Gotteserfahrung, ed. Peter Schäfer, 2006, 113–28). In fact, it is not only not impossible, but rather necessary to analyze the asceticism and unifying ecstasies of these individuals via modern psychological explanations (Ralph Frenken, Kindheit und Mystik im Mittelalter, 2002. Cf. also Wolfgang Beutin, Anima, 3 vols., 1997–1999). E. Magic and Miracles Magic and superstition (the latter a term used only reluctantly today) attract not only academic investigators, but also the general public, and one finds sufficient literature for both of them (see Christa Habiger-Tuczay, Magie und Magier im Mittelalter, 1992; and Franco Cardini, Demoni e Meraviglie:. Magia e stregoneria nella società medievale, 1995, who offer the basic evaluation; specialized publications are, e. g., Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 1991, or Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the 15th Century, 1998). There is no longer any doubt that miracles and magic events are but variants of the same complex (Lothar Kolmer, “Heilige als magische Helfer,” Mediaevistik 6 [1993]: 153–75; Torsten Fremer, “Wunder und Magie: Zur Funktion der Heiligen im frühmittelalterlichen Christianisierungsprozeß,” Hagiographica 3 [1996]: 15–88; J.-M. Sansterre, “Attitudes occidentales à l’égard des miracles d’image dans le Haut Moyen Âge,” Annales E.S.C. 53 [1998]: 1219–241), and that some characteristics of the saints (like ecstatic experiences, too, as rec-

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orded by Bridget of Sweden, Francesca Romana, Dionys the Carthusian, and many others) are not so far away from shamanism. Scholars have sensed a certain ambivalence regarding female mystics: were they God’s flutes or the fiend’s trumpets? Consequently ecclesiastics could call the same woman to trial, condemn her, and later sanctify here (or the other way around; see Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffälliger Frauen, 1995, last. ed. 2004). The same structural ambivalence may be observed when reading benedictions, incantations, and similar formulae (see Wolfgang Beck, Die Merseburger Zaubersprüche, 2003; Elena Cianci, Incantesimi e benedizioni nella letteratura tedesca medievale (IX–XIII sec.), 2004; Don C. Skemer, Binding Words, 2006). But there are also quite different approaches as in the study of saints’ miracles and their sanctuaries according to the social-geographical distribution (see the collection of articles in Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 29 [2003]: 213–386), in the analysis of the saints, and their relics (Arnold Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, 1994; Anton Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklärung, 1995; ‘Ich armer sundiger mensch’: Heiligen- und Reliquienkult am Übergang zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Andreas Tacke, 2006), then of the psychology of those who beg for supernatural help (Maria-Elisabeth Wittmer-Butsch and Constanze Rendtel, Miracula: Wunderheilungen im Mittelalter, 2004), and finally of the learned hagiography (the most recent studies are Guy Philippart and Michel Trigalet, Latin Hagiography before the Ninth Century: The Long Morning of Medieval Europe, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormck, 2008, 111–30; Th. Head, “The Early Medieval Transformation of Piety,” ibid., 155–62; Hagiographies, ed. Guy Philippart, 1994, still in progress, provides the fullest overview), etc. Of course, today the non-purely spiritual dimensions of this complex often stand in the foreground (E. Bozóky, La politique des reliques de Constantin à Saint Louis, 2006). As the fascinosum of evil – correctly – forms part of our image of those centuries, also devils and demons defend their places in the publishers’ book lists (Claude Lecouteux, Démons et génies du terroir au Moyen Age, 1995; Demons: Communicating with the Spirits, ed. Gabor Klaniczay and Edith Pócs, 2005) – as do the otherworldly regions of eschatology. It does not come as a surprise that their angelic counterparts are not forgotten either (Andrea Schaller, Der Erzengel Michael im frühen Mittelalter, 2006). F. Monasticism Certainly the virtuosi of religion, monks and nuns, shaped the ‘epoch of faith’ to a high degree, but let us set aside their importance for the general history of Western culture (Kulturgeschichte der christlichen Orden, ed. Peter

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Dinzelbacher and James Hogg, 1997; a valuable publication series, titled “Vita regularis,” also deserves to be mentioned here). It is remarkable how many secular historians nowadays deal with this institution beside the official historians of the individual orders. There are whole libraries on the origin (García M. Colombás, El monacato primitivo, 1998), blossoming, and decay of the anachoretic and communitarian ways of retirement from the bad ‘saeculum.’ Of all medieval communities, the Cistercians represent the one monastic order, in whom the general public is obviously most interested in. Think, e. g., of the exhibition “Saint Bernard et le monde cistercien” in 1990/1991 (with a splendid publication with the same title by Léon Pressouyre and Terryl N. Kinder, 1990). G. Children A rather recent topic of investigation is the role of children within religious organizations, the main item being, of course, the oblation (Valerie L. Garver, “The Influence of Monastic Ideals upon Carolingian Conceptions of Childhood,” Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2005, 67–85; Joachim Wollasch, “Anmerkungen zum Thema: Kinder im Kloster,” Wirtschaft – Gesellschaft – Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von Rolf Sprandel, ed. Hans-Peter Baum, 2006, 659–82). Though the relevant studies belong more to the history of childhood, they are most important for our understanding of the pious mentality of the adults who sacrificed their offspring, forcing them into an inescapable and life-long existence behind the walls of a monastery. One should not forget, however, the importance of indoctrination in that age, the teaching of Christian norms being a must in the education both at home and at school (Eugen Paul, Geschichte der christlichen Erziehung, vol. I, 1993). The theories of psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), who describe the formation of a life-long weltbild in the earliest years of childhood, should be applied in this regard. H. Deviance of Faith Of course, also deviances of faith continue to be studied, mostly by secular historians and in the sphere of local historians (cf. especially the dissertations by pupils of Agostino Paravicini Bagliani printed in the Cahiers lausannois d’histoire médiévale). It goes without saying that the problem of the deformations and one-sidedness of the sources remains especially grave here (a good example is presented by the impressively researched book by Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Arnold von Brescia im Spiegel von acht Jahrhunderten Rezeption, 2007).

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Anthropological studies: The inexactness of the term “anthropological” as a discipline within cultural studies, we will subsume here those publications that come from an academic area background that some years ago would have been called folklore, ethnology, and science of extra-European religions, combined with religious sociology (though the question of how to discriminate diverse styles of piety does not seem to have been very successfully answered, cf. the volume Frömmigkeitsstile im Mittelalter, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 20.80 (1990). The analysis of medieval faith and faith-based practice not by the confessionally committed church-historian, but by an anthropologist who ex professione would not put dogmatics or spiritual valuations in the foreground, has proved to be fed by the most innovative access to our field. The history of mentalities, as introduced by Jacques Le Goff, Jean-Claude Schmitt, and Aaron Gurjevitch, has demonstrated how much religion and magic in traditional or archaic societies must be regarded as part of the fundamentally inherent belief and value system, and not just as one sector among many components of life (others being economy, law, education etc., see Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Plädoyer für eine historische Anthropologie des Mittelalters,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 38 [2004]: 1–16). Much interest focuses on rituals of all kinds (see De betovering van het middeleeuwse christendom: Studies over ritueel en magie in de Middeleeuwen, ed. Marco Mostert and A. Demyttenaere, 1995), even if there is a marked tendency to exaggerate their weight. Generally these impulses from France were received with much interest in the Dutch-speaking world and Italy, and with some interest in the Anglophone world as well, but they did not develop many roots in Germany and Scandinavia (dominated by their unbroken preponderance of traditional political history). I. The Body and Feminism Studies on the body in religion are en vogue, see my introduction to Körper und Frömmigkeit (see the bibliography). As an eternal topic of interest within this subject one must consider the relations of the holy with sexuality. The craving for a sacrality unstained by blood and sperm was, of course, an ideal derived from Biblical Judaism, very intensive during the early Middle Ages, but later as well, e. g., in the visions of Hildegard of Bingen (Annette Höing, ‘Gott, der ganz Reine, will keine Unreinheit’: Die Reinheitsvorstellungen Hildegards von Bingen aus religionsgeschichtlicher Perspektive, 2000). This craving went so far that even wedlock with its Biblical task of producing offspring could be idealized as an institution of sexual abstinence (Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock, 1993).

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Logically, heretics used to be accused exactly of the contrary, which is why the few descriptions of orgies that we have from that period put them into a religious context and come from authors who deliberately regarded some group or other as deviants from Catholicism (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Gruppensex im Untergrund: Chaotische Ketzer und kirchliche Keuschheit im Mittelalter,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2008, 405–28). The inclusion of the norms from the Old Testament concerning the interdiction of several types of food into the penitentials, would be another example for the craving for holy cleanness (Josephus Maria Dominicus de Waardt, Voedselvoorschriften in boeteboeken: motieven voor het hanteren van voedselvoorschriften in vroeg-middeleeuwse Ierse boeteboeken 500–1100, 1996), as are the rites that had to be fulfilled during the atonement (Robert Meens, “The Frequency and Nature of Early Medieval Penance,” Handling Sin, ed. Peter Biller, 1998, 36–61; Cyrill Vogel, En rémission des péchés: Recherches sur les systèmes pénitentiels dans l’eglise latine, 1994). Innovative strength in scholarship focused on the humanities is often credited in our days to Feminist Studies, and often rightly so. The intensified attention women in history generally enjoy nowadays has shown how onesided the picture created by older mediaevalists used to be (which would be a certain qualification of the initial statement, see above). Consequently much important serious work has been done recently on religious (and by analogy semi-religious, i. e., Beguines, penitents, and similar groups) women in the Middle Ages, too. High standards have been set in this field, among others, by Italian scholars such as Anna Benvenuti (In ‘castro penitentiae’: Santità e società femminile nell’Italia medievale, 1990). I will turn to mysticism below. Following in the wake of this research orientation, also other figures mentioned not seldom within the ecclesiastical radius but unexplored until recently find interest, even if being male, such as the forerunners of the sexton, e. g. (Alfredo Lucioni, “… inservit huic ecclesiae …,” Quaderni di storia religiosa 14 [2007]: 61–95). But replacing history by ‘herstory,’ instead of considering both genders equally, cannot lead to more authentic views of the past phases of Christianity. There is a very problematic tendency in ‘feminizing’ that epoch when a growing number of not so few modern scholars try to adapt the medieval sources to their feminist theories, seeing their subject rather in an isolated perspective, ignoring other moments, thus repeating – this time the other way round – the lack of balance of the older studies who had nearly nothing to say about the female conditions in that time. If, e. g., an otherwise competent portrayal of the female believers in the Cathar society of Southern France intentionally gives the impression that they had their own independent

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ways, then this is just a projection of present-day ideals into the medieval world (see, for example, Daniela Müller, ‘Ketzerinnen’ – Frauen gehen ihren eigenen Weg, 2004). Actually their faith depended as much on the teachings of the male “perfecti” as did the faith of Catholic women on the teachings of the priests. Such narrow and erroneous perspectives can as easily be proven wrong as the ideal of a general sisterhood between all females is presented as an allegedly historical fact. Not even the women saints gave somehow preference to read their own gender when working miracles (Hans-Werner Goetz, “Heiligenkult und Geschlecht: Geschlechtsspezifisches Wunderwirken in frühmittelalterlichen Mirakelberichten?,” Das Mittelalter 1 [1996]: 89–112). J. Practical Mysticism Today the notion of practical mysticism is nearly identical with that of female mysticism, a topic which attracts many writers. Since the mystics have been treated elsewhere in this handbook, suffice it here to hint at the impressive scholarship of Bardo Weiss who in a very few years published about 2500 pages on the German visionaries of the 12th and 13th centuries which are the indispensable basis for all further efforts in this field (his most recent book is the publication Die deutschen Mystikerinnen und ihr Gottesbild, 3 vols., 2004). After the mystics, the Beguines (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Religiöse Frauenbewegung und städtisches Leben im Mittelalter,” Id., Körper, cit. 225–58), are often regarded as examples of female strength. It is, however, neither true that they were independent because they were all, without exception, under the observance of male priests, nor that their main interest was to form an exclusively one-gendered circle. The sources prove that their first aim was a devotional life, and later, also an economically acceptable life. Thus the main motivational drive for this movement originating in the 12th century was a religious one, not somehow feminist. K. Queer Studies and Religion Queer studies have done much to unearth the history of homosexuality, but have not had much impact on religious history (see, however, Albrecht Diem, “Organisierte Keuschheit: Sexualprävention im Mönchtum der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters,” Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 3 [2001]: 8–37), with the exception of that of heresy insofar as sodomy was punished sometimes as a deviation from the Catholic faith. Fortunately, because this research orientation is one simply reflecting an actual ideology, playing with elements from the Middle Ages to construct a completely ‘unmedieval’ history, but certainly not employing a serious his-

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torical method, there are, until now, no attempts worthwhile to mention to ‘queer’ medieval religion. L. Art and Religion But perhaps some art-historical works ought to be mentioned in this context which, sensitized by Leo Steinberg’s attempt to project modern ideas of sexuality into Gothic and Renaissance objects of cult and devotion (The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 1983, 2nd ed. 1997), underscore the subconscious sexual function that religious art might have had for male believers. For them, the side-wound of Jesus is said to have triggered via its vagina-shaped form the wish to make Him a sexual object (e. g., Michael Camille, “Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the Late Middle Ages: A Double-Sided Panel by Meister Francke,” The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. Alasdair A. Macdonald, Bernhard Ridderbos, and Rita M. Schlusemann, 1998, 183–210). But occasionally female artists in the Middle Ages focused on that wound as well and sometimes projected it as the orifice through which they could climb into Christ’s body (Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 1997). Especially fruitful seems to be, however, a combination of art-historical methods with the study of the liturgy, as the analysis of the sacrality of space in the perception of medieval people suggests. Following several studies by Friedrich Möbius (“Zur Anthropologie des mittelalterlichen Kirchenraums,” Mediaevistik 6 [1993]: 189–200), an overview was recently offered by Michele Bacci, Lo spazio dell’anima: Vita di una chiesa medievale, 2005 (cf. also Gabriella Signori, Räume, Gesten, Andachtsformen: Geschlecht, Konflikt und religiöse Kultur im europäischen Mittelalter, 2005). There is also a recent volume on the secular uses or abuses of sacred rooms, The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places in Late Medieval Towns, ed. Paul Trio and Marjan De Smet, 2006; cf. also Sandra Viek, “Der mittelalterliche Altar als Rechtsstätte,” Mediaevistik 17 [2004]: 95–183). Ecclesiastical buildings thus are studied not only from the perspective of art history, but also from that of their functions for the faithful, their emotional associations, giving new insights into “la religion vécue.” Seeing the objects of figural art not primarily as stylistic expressions, but understanding their raison d’être as Kult- and Andachtsbilder in their originally pious context, as Hans Belting proposed some 20 years ago (Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, 1990), is equally welcome (see, e. g., Images of Cult and Devotion, ed. Sören Kaspersen, 2004) – and we should not forget the function of pious paintings as apotropaia which can still be found on some late medieval houses in the Alpine districts (S. Boscani Leoni, Essor et fonctions des images religieuses dans les Alpes, 2008).

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Iconography, however, is not a matter of artistic traditions extending from antiquity and Byzantium to the western Middle Ages only, especially if we consider the many innovative configurations characteristic of Gothic art. The late-medieval reactivation of the Old Testament imagery of the Lord killing his creatures by arrows and sword, the so-called Pestbilder, e. g., must be understood as a consequence of the crisis of that period, especially the Black Death. The same is true of the creation of a “religion and art of Death” with the invention of the macabre. As these motives stress the moment of dying here and now – and not the life in the other world – they prove at the same time how the secular existence came into the foreground subconsciously, hinting at the rise of a Renaissance mentality (Peter Dinzelbacher, Angst im Mittelalter: Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung: Mentalitätsgeschichte und Ikonographie, 1996). All that notwithstanding, at the end of the Middle Ages these images kept their function for devout meditations on the ‘memento mori.’ Though rather underestimated or not admitted by traditional historians, psychological explanations of human behavior in former times, religious and otherwise, are needed very much and seem to be the only really innovative approach discussed here. It is not very satisfying to read a whole volume on medieval emotions (Émotions médiévales, Critique 63, 716/717 Jan.Fév. [2007]) when the contributors claim to understand them without the methods of modern depth psychology. However, most of the few studies of this couleur published until now have been written by psychoanalysts (the best-known of whom is Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood, 1974) and usually show, promising as they are nonetheless, grave historical lacunae and misunderstandings. Therefore, only the collaboration of professional medievalists with professional psychologists will proffer serious results (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Psychohistorie aus der Sicht des Historikers,” Id., Körper, cit. 335–47). The peculiarities of medieval mentalities can be understood only, I believe, if we know enough about the ways people were treated during the first years of their lives (Ralph Frenken, ‘Da fing ich an zu erinnern …’: die Psychohistorie der Eltern-Kind-Beziehung in den frühesten deutschen Autobiographien (1200–1700), 2003). Would it be imaginable, for instance, that the discovery of erotic love around 1100, both between men and women, in lyric poetry and romances, and the sentimental love shown synchronically toward Jesus in the writings of the mystics, should have developed ex nihil – or rather as the consequence of a new relationship between parents and children? To find out whether the handling of babies changed at that time, which could be done by comparing synchronically the information contained in hagiography (not all are topoi!), might be of special value for the history of religious and mundane mentalities.

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M. Conclusion As a conclusion, some indications of the latest newer tendencies in the three traditional chronological fields of Medieval Studies, presented from a bird’s eye’s view, may be helpful. For the early Middle Ages, in Religious Studies the unrivalled central topic remains the conversion of the continent to Christianity (for introductions, see Richard E. Sullivan, Christian Missionary Activity in the Early Middle Ages, 1994; Ian Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050, 2001; Lutz von Padberg, Christianisierung im Mittelalter, 2006). A matter of much importance already for the ‘grandfathers’ of medieval Religious Studies, such as Jacob Grimm, was the persistence of older belief systems after the Christianization (the pagan survival; see, for instance, Pierre Boglioni, “Le sopravvivenze pagane nel medioevo,” Traditions in Contact and Change, ed. Peter Slater and Donald Wiebe, 1983, 347–59; above all, Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature, 2005, is to be recommended). Though not limited to the Middle Ages only, Erika Timm’s thoughtful combination of philological and other evidence concerning the ‘goddesses’ Frau Holle and Frau Percht should be mentioned here because of her highly methodological approach and religious-historical results (Frau Holle, Frau Percht und verwandte Gestalten, 2003). Though often not accepted by recent scholars for ideological reasons (because this term was abused also by Germanophile propagandists before 1945), there seems to have occurred a kind of ‘Germanization’ of the new faith during that period (as there had been a Romanization of the Celtic belief systems before, etc.). Ignorant of the use of this expression in the 19th and early 20th centuries, unsuspecting Anglophone scholars now have rediscovered that process (see, for example, G. Ronald Murphy, The Saxon Savior. The Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand, 1989; James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, 1994). Also, we cannot deny a priori the influence of ideas and convictions dating back to the Celtic culture on the Christian practices of medieval France and Britain (Philippe Walter, Mythologie chrétienne: Rites et mythes du Moyen Age, 1992). Much better documented is of course the Christianization of older rites, such as those pertaining to the life-cycle, which had to be made into ceremonies of the new religion (e. g., Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods, 1994). Whereas the religiosity of the Merovingian epoch was treated in an extremely optimistic way by Yitzak Hen (Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, 1995), who excessively minimized the pre-Christian influences, we are most obliged to Jean Chélini for his excellent and

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balanced overview of the following centuries (L’aube du Moyen Age: Naissance de la chrétienté occidentale, 1991). A correlated subject is that of syncretism (Rudi Künzel, “Paganisme, syncrétisme et culture religieuse populaire au Haut Moyen Age,” Annales E.S.C. 47 [1992]: 1055–69). Despite its title, we don’t find much information about this topic in Ludo Milis et al., De heidense middeleeuwen, 1992), which the aggressive methods of the Christian missionaries did not tolerate, though this phenomenon did not simply disappear altogether (e. g., in the Scandinavian viks). The fact that there were more people than we might assume today who espoused a faith which merged two religions, should not only be studied for Scandinavia alone (Torsten Capelle, Heidenchristen im Norden, 2005). There were practically no heretics after the age of Migration and before the 11th century, though we know of some cases, apart from the notorious Gottschalk the Saxon (De Constantino a Carlomagno: Disidentes, heterodeoxos, marginados, ed. Francisco Javier Lomas Salmonte and Federico Devos Márquez, 1992). For modern scholars, the absolutely preferred type of sources elucidating the early Middle Ages remains the written text; so a truly productive way to scrutinize religious mentalities consists of analyzing religious vocabulary, which is much too often disregarded by generalists, although a new synopsis of the religious vocabulary of the ancient German dialects is available (Martin Fuss, Die religiöse Lexik des Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen, 2000). But the visual arts must also be considered in this regard, and likewise the archaeological evidence (Bernd Thier, “Religiöse Praktiken des Alltags im archäologischen Befund,” Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich 14 [1998]: 85–104). Fortunately, it is unnecessary to underline the ever growing importance of that kind of data (Franz Glaser, Frühes Christentum im Alpenraum, 1997; Paul Gleirscher, “Frühmittelalterlicher Kirchenbau zwischen Salzburg und Aquileia,” Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich 22 [2006]: 61–80), and in this context we should keep in mind some of the most interesting works written not by mediaevalists, but by experts of ancient history (e. g., Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, 1997). The fashionable word ‘acculturation’ has found its way from the specialists of the Great Migration to scholars of the Middle Ages, appearing now in publications on post-antique subjects, too (Heinrich Schmidt, “Heidnisch-christliche Akkulturation im frühmittelalterlichen Sachsen und Friesland,” Tätigkeitsfelder und Erfahrungshorizonte des ländlichen Menschen in der frühmittelalterlichen Grundherrschaft, ed. Brigitte Kasten, 2006, 217–32). This aspect is still much discussed in Scandinavian Studies, with the impact of archaeological evidence growing steadily (see, for in-

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stance, Møtet mellom hedendom og kristendom i Norge, ed. Hans Emil Lidén, 1995). Another prominent issue precisely concerning that period, which has created much interest proves to be the by now very well examined function of “memoria,” a field dominated by Patrick J. Geary’s important research (Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, 1994) and Gerd Althoff (“König Konrad I. in der ottonischen Memoria,” Konrad I.: Auf dem Weg zum ‘Deutschen Reich’, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz, 2006, 317–28). By contrast, only few scholars focus on the religiosity of women of that period as there do not seem to be examples of proto-feministic thinking or behavior. The didactic manual of Dhuoda in which she completely concentrates on her son and his education, or the religious plays and legends by Hrotsvita of Gandersheim (with their literary motifs borrowed from earlier religious narratives), have sometimes been read as early indications of radical women’s struggle for independence already in the early Middle Ages. But the piety of noble ladies was usually so much in conformity with the ecclesiastical norms of their days that it seems not too attractive to modern feminist investigators either. The spirituality of the High Middle Ages has been examined thoroughly so far; it has more in common with that of the following periods than with that of the earlier generations. If we call the time from the late 11th to the early 13th century an achsenzeit of European history, we would only repeat a communis opinio that is today no longer questioned. From the growth of the economy and population to the most subtle innovations in the intellectual area, everywhere the situation experienced a thorough transformation (Peter Dinzelbacher, Europa im Hochmittelalter, 2003). The development of prayers focusing on Jesus and the Virgin Mary and corresponding devotion (Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200, 2002) which was much more personal than in the preceding centuries, but then also the personification of death, to quote some examples, can be acknowledged as keys to understand momentous aspects of the emotional condition of that time, viz. fear and compassion (Peter Dinzelbacher, Angst im Mittelalter: Teufels-, Todes- und Gotteserfahrung. Mentalitätsgeschichte und Ikonographie, 1996). As important works of Greek and Roman philosophers became accessible during the so-called Renaissance of the 12th century, not only orthodox scholasticism emerged, but also deviant teachings based on the rational analysis of the dogmas of the Church leading to the discovery of some of their inner contradictions. This brought about, at least occasionally, a form of radical pantheism approaching atheism (Olaf Pluta, “Atheismus im Mittelalter,” Umbrüche: Historische Wendepunkte der Philosophie von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Kahnert and Burkhart

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Mojsisch, 2001, 113–30; Peter Dinzelbacher, Unglaube im Zeitalter des Glaubens, 2009). The new ideal of poverty, a protest reaction to the immense wealth of churches and monasteries, created both new orders, such as the mendicants (Franciscans and Dominicans), and new deviating groups, such as the Waldensians (Peter Dinzelbacher, “Die Achsenzeit des Hohen Mittelalters und die Ketzergeschichte,” Id., Körper, cit. 197–224). One of the most spectacular new developments of that time were the holy wars, i. e., the crusades, deeply inspiring and motivating both the great lords and the common people (of more interest than the endlessly repetitive histories of the crusades are some new readings by Scandinavian scholars, see, for instance, from the North: Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen et. al., 2005) and the less known conversion by sword in the North-East about 1200 (Barbara Bombi, Novella plantatio fidei: Missione e crociata nel Nord Europa, 2007). See now the new journal Crusades, launched by Ashgate Publishing in 2002. In that connection, knights created military orders based on the ideal of fighting and achieving thereby martyrdom – extremely different both from the passive martyrdom of the Old Church and from the typical Benedictine monk who was not even allowed to touch a weapon (Alan John Forey, “The Emergence of the Military Orders in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 [1985]: 175–95). Even if during the late Middle Ages we see so much continuation in the institutions, the practices, and the overall belief-system, there is, on the other hand, also much evidence that from the late 13th to the 15th century the unity of Europe’s religion increasingly experienced a disintegration process, which, without favoring any teleological standpoint, led to the division of the continent into several different confessions. Suffice here to mention the papal Schisms, the conflicts between a monarchical and an oligarchic ideal manifesting itself in Conciliarism, the growing of many heresies as well as the quietist tendencies of mysticism. A new aspect of the papal Schism from 1378 to1417 was unearthed by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 2006, who analyzed the positions of individual poets and mystics who disseminated with their writings the praise of one or the other of the competing popes. Movements of popular devotion, not all of them completely determined and supervised sufficiently by the clergy, multiplied (see, e. g., the increasing number of pilgrimages, cf. Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. by Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, SB 592, 1992). The legion of late-medieval heresies, too, has offered many an occasion for more extensive investigations, beginning

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with the questions how censure at the universities worked, such as in 1277 and beyond (Kurt Flasch, Aufklärung im Mittelalter? Die Verurteilung von 1277, 1989; Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris 1200–1400, 1998), and ending with how radical and aggressive movements like the Bohemian Adamites functioned. Since the times of Henry Charles Lea (A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols., 1887). Scholars studying papal inquisition, explicitly established against such deviants, have concentrated on the Ordo Praedicatorum (Dominicans), which indeed provided the gross of its executors (cf. Emil van der Vekene, Bibliotheca bibliographica historiae sanctae inquisitionis: Bibliographisches Verzeichnis des gedruckten Schrifttums zur Geschichte und Literatur der Inquisition, vols. 1–3, 1982–1992), Lately also the contribution of the Ordo Minorum has found due attention, cf. Frati Minori e inquisizione, 2006. Finally, I would like to recommend three books which do not deal directly with the Middle Ages, but which are, as I believe, nonetheless of basic importance for everyone devoting him/herself to the scholarly study of religion. One is the work of a famous, but too little read philosopher, the other that of a pastor and psychoanalyst, the third that of a specialist of ancient history. Among the publications of Ludwig Feuerbach, his Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, ed. Wilhelm Bolin, 1908, is probably the most readable, containing nonetheless the core of his still most valuable analysis of that phenomenon. In Das Christentum und die Angst, 1985, the theologian Oskar Pfister tells us very much about that main concern of this religion especially in the 16th century, which can be applied convincingly to medieval religiosity, too. An explanation why religion has been developed by mankind and what its social and psychic functions are, is given by Walter Burkert, using ancient sources, which find many parallels and continuations in the later epochs: Kulte des Altertums: Die biologischen Grundlagen der Religion, 1998. That is certainly a personal choice, but based on nearly four decades of studying medieval religiosity. Select Bibliography Arnold Angenendt, Das Frühmittelalter: Die abendländische Christenheit von 400 bis 900 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1990); Id., Geschichte der Religiosität im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997); Antonio Blasucci et al., La spiritualità del medioevo (Rome: Borla, 1988); Guseppe Cremascoli and C. Claudio Leopardi, ed., La bibbia nel Medio Evo (Bologna: Dehoniane, 1996); Peter Dinzelbacher, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000–2010 [Frühmittelalter and Hoch- und Spätmittelalter respectively]; Id., Körper und Frömmigkeit in der mittelalterlichen Mentalitätsgeschichte (Paderborn: Schöning, 2007); Id., Mentalität und Religiosität des Mittelalters (Klagenfurt: Kitab, 2003); Id., Von der Welt durch

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die Hölle zum Paradies – das mittelalterliche Jenseits (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008); Laurent Feller, Église et société en Occident, VIIe–XIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004); Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Eglise au Moyen Age (v. 800–v. 1200) (Paris: Seuil, 2006); Jean-Marie Mayeur, ed., Die Geschichte des Christentums (1990; Freiburg i. Br.: Herder 1994 sqq.); Francesca Sautman, La religion du quotidien: Rites et croyance populaires de la fin du Moyen Age (Florence: Olschki, 1995); Robert N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); François Vandenbroucke, La spiritualità del medioevo (Bologna: EDB 1991); André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen Age: Pratiques et expériences religieuses (Paris: Cerf, 1987).

Peter Dinzelbacher [The colleague who had committed to write this article withdrew his collaboration in the last minute, so there was not enough time to find a scholar willing to provide a more substantial substitution. The subject, however, was too important to neglect it in our Handbook. As editor, I am most grateful to Peter Dinzelbacher for his heroic and outstanding efforts to fill this lacuna to the best of his ability in the shortness of time.]

Research Institutes, Archives, and Libraries for the Middle Ages A. Introduction In Europe most non-university academic research institutions are called “Academies of Sciences.” These academies were generally founded in the 17th and 18th centuries. The oldest still existing society is the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603 in Rome. The society was split into the Pontificia Academia Scientiarum and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1870. The German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (Schweinfurt, Germany), the Royal Society, the Académie Française, and the Académie des Sciences, all still existing today, were founded in the second half of the 17th century as places for scholars and scientists to exchange ideas and carry out joint research projects. Unfortunately, there is no national academy in Germany today. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BBAW) in Berlin was founded in 1700 as the Prussian Academy of Sciences (Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften); the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BADW) was founded in Munich in 1759; other Academies were founded in Göttingen in 1751; in Leipzig in 1846; in Heidelberg in 1909; in Mainz in 1949; and

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the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy was established in Düsseldorf in 1970. An academy was founded in Hamburg in 2004, but it is currently still in status nascendi (http://www.akademienunion.de). The institution of the academy originally consisted of two divisions, the Class for History (Historische Klasse) and the Class for Philosophy (Philosophische Klasse); natural sciences, including mathematics and physics, were thought of as part of the Class for Philosophy. Today the academies are still divided into two classes, but the classes now comprise the Class for Philosophy and History (which also includes the humanities and social sciences) and the Class for Mathematics and the Natural Sciences. Academies of sciences and humanities offer institutional fellowships to scholars who are elected for distinction and achievement in their disciplines. The academies have always been committed to a founding idea of assembling the country’s most eminent scientists and scholars for the purpose of interdisciplinary discussion and independent research. Academies have been both scholarly societies in the traditional sense and modern non-university research establishments to this day. They organize conferences and public lecture series, and they promote young scientists through special programs. An academy’s legal status is that of a public corporation. The Academies have established commissions and committees that are in charge of long-term editing of sources (for an excerpt, see http:// www.badw.de). Academies also have ordinary, corresponding and honorary fellows. Ordinary fellows of the academies must have attained distinction in their branches of scientific study to hold a title. The academies appoint scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledge within their subject areas. B. Individual Academies Today The following overview focuses on research facilities which aim to accomplish remarkable achievements in Medieval Studies. It seems most reasonable to allow the individual institutes to speak for themselves for introductory purposes, hence relevant descriptions from the institutions’ websites are given here along with their corresponding URLs. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BADW (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities). In the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities modern research in Medieval Studies is carried out in the Class for Philosophy and History, mainly in “The Historical Sciences” and “Philology and Literature.” Again, the brief descriptions of the research goals of each Committee will be borrowed from their own Websites (http://www.badw.de).

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One of the most important historical research institutions is the Committee for the Publication of the Documents of Emperor Friedrich II, focusing on the “edition of the documents of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa which has now been completed in Vienna. Its materials are scattered from Malta to Stockholm, from London to Moscow. The project will contribute to legal and constitutional history, particularly that of Germany – in the sense of the old Empire – Italy and southern France, and also to general history, and the history of chancellery and administrative systems in the first half of the 13th century” The Committee for the Publication of the Corpus of Greek Documents of the Middle Ages and the Recent Period: was set up by the founder of Byzantine studies, Karl Krumbacher. “Since 1900 it has been collecting and interpreting Greek documents of the Middle Ages (C.E. 330–1453). From the outset the Commission has devoted its “attention to imperial documents as the most important category. These were dealt with systematically in five volumes of regesta (1924–1995; some parts have appeared in a second, corrected edition). At present this stage of the work is being completed with a revision of the first volume of regesta. The Commission possesses a unique photographic archive containing, as well as imperial documents, a wealth of diplomas of clerical and lay officials and even private papers” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for the Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi “participates in the edition of a research guide for medieval studies which has been developed in international cooperation and has been published in Rome since 1964: the Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, a comprehensive directory of sources concerning mediaeval history. The project, established in 1954 by agreement of learned institutions from nearly all European countries, revises and renews an originally German publication: the Bibliotheca Historica Medii Aevi, published by August Potthast (1824–1898) in 1896, which is a guide to narrative sources of the European Middle Ages from 375–1500. For each work and author, the ‘Repertorium’, also referred to as the ‘New Potthast’, provides the dates of textual transmission, publication history and critical modern editions, followed by further items such as translations, facsimiles and current research literature. The ‘Repertorium’ is published in Latin. While the printed ‘Repertorium’ includes all-European data up to the date of publication (2007 completed up to the letter “T”), some countries with extensive historical sources have set up an accompanying computerbased service which updates information on the respective country’s own historical sources and is published in the national language. The German subproject of the ‘Repertorium’ which is supervised by the committee prepares an up-to-date version and is currently working at the electronic publi-

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cation of historical sources from the German Middle Ages (‘Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters’). Since March 2006 this project is being published on the committee’s own website: www.repfont.badw.de. The Committee for the Study of the Ancient City “studies the archaeology of city life in Greek and Roman antiquity. Its main aim is to reconstruct cultural relationships; the ancient city is understood in all its visible forms as a reflection but also as an element of political and social structures and processes. With this purpose in mind, the Commission supports research projects and publications which seek answers to these questions through excavation, the cataloguing of monuments and experimentation with interdisciplinary methods. It also arranges colloquia on particular research projects, which bring together specialists from the various disciplines of ancient studies” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for the Comparative Archaeology of the Roman Alpine and Danube Regions “does research on the beginning and close of Roman government in the Alpine and Danube regions which were focal points of ethnic contacts and mutual exchanges of ideas. Apart from written testimonies, there are sources such as material findings which, in field studies, can be gathered in rural settlements, urban areas, military estates, religious institutions, and tombs, and analyzed for their cultural historical meaning. The publications of the Committee appear in the book series Münchner Beiträge zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte (abbreviated MBV, 55 volumes up to date). A second series, entitled Frühgeschichtliche und provinzialrömische Archäologie. Materialien und Forschungen (abbreviated FPA, 7 volumes up to date) publishes editions of historical sources and research on adjoining cultural regions and ages.” The Committee for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (CVA) began its work in 1921. It publishes the holdings of ancient Greek and Italian pottery vessels in German museums. “Vessels illustrated with scenes taken from everyday life, myth, religious observance, the theater, or historical events are important sources for the history of religion, society, art, popular beliefs and other aspects of the ancient world. The vessels themselves, irrespective of their illustration, form a material basis for research into the history of trade and technology as well as archaeometry”. The Committee for the History of Music supervises, the Lexicon Musicum Latinum, “a dictionary of Latin technical terms used in music during the Middle Ages down to the end of the 15th century. It encompasses the broad literature of medieval music theory, which is a central source for the understanding of medieval culture and the development of Western music. The vocabulary of these works has to some extent been preserved in musical terminology down to the present day. In contrast to general dictionaries, the articles of the

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Lexicon Musicum Latinum place greatest emphasis on factual explanation and the establishment of the sense of a word in various contexts of musical theory. Supplementary studies and editions of medieval treatises on music appear in a series of their own” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for the Publication of German Inscriptions of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period “has the task of recording and preparing scholarly editions of the inscriptions found in Bavaria. The material, published in numerous registers, comprises all writings older than 1650 on durable materials, such as stone, metal, wood, glass, leather, etc. having a generally monumental character in form and content. The aims of the project are principally philological, the establishment and publication of critical texts with commentary as source-materials for almost all branches of history, ethnography, and many other subjects. It is of value in the conservation of historical monuments; it also contributes to a better understanding of the development of epigraphic styles, which may one day be reflected in a textbook of German epigraphy or, in the more distant future, of European epigraphy in general. […] Inscriptions are a cultural asset particularly threatened by environmental factors. By undertaking photographic documentation as part of the recording process the Commission is performing an increasingly important role in their protection and preservation” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for the Publication of the Medieval Library Catalogues of Germany and Switzerland works with medieval manuscripts, “the most important carriers of the literary, religious, and scholarly production of the Middle Ages and of the ancient and early Christian foundations of European learning. Extant manuscripts, however, represent only a fraction of what once existed and are very unevenly distributed. Therefore medieval library catalogues and similar documents are extremely valuable as an extra source of information. For countless places they provide a direct insight into the accessibility of education and intellectual training as well as the range and intensity of study; they illustrate different phases in the development of thought; and they help to solve problems of literary history. The collection and publication of such first-class sources is an indispensable step toward quantifying and evaluating the cultural significance of the medieval intellectual heritage” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for the Publication of the Works of Johannes Kepler, founded in 1935 as part of Physics and Engineering Sciences,”is responsible for the annotated historical and critical edition of the printed works, correspondence, and most of the scientific manuscripts of the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). The edition includes a general index and a catalogue of the manuscripts. Up to 2000, 22 volumes have been published; two vol-

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umes with editions of manuscripts and the index volume are still to come” (http://www.badw.de). The Commission for Dialect Research “publishes a Bayerisches Wörterbuch (Bavarian Dictionary) covering the vocabulary of the Bavarian dialects from the early Middle Ages down to the present day. While past forms of speech are attested by literary sources, present-day Bavarian usage is ascertained largely by putting written questions to dialect speakers. In an operation designed to supplement and correct material gathered between the two World Wars, about 500 dialect speakers in Upper and Lower Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate are at present supplying information on the use, meaning and cultural background of words and phrases. The first fascicule of the dictionary appeared in 1995” (http://www.badw.de). The Commission for Semitic Philology supports the Wörterbuch der Klassischen Arabischen Sprache (Dictionary of Classical Arabic), published by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) and by the Commission for Semitic Philology, which registers and presents in the form of a thesaurus the vocabulary of classical Arabic from pre-Islamic times to the early Islamic Middle Ages. The Commission also publishes Beiträge zur Lexikographie des Klassischen Arabisch, which appear as “Reports of the Philosophical and Historical Class of the Bavarian Academy” (http://www.badw.de). The task of the Committee for Medieval German Literature “is to survey the transmission of German medieval literature. A series entitled “Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in which more than 110 volumes have appeared since 1960, makes available editions and studies of texts, genres and topics which up to now have received too little attention or none at all. There are research projects dealing with general themes and bodies of texts: a catalogue of religious plays and the Laments of the Virgin Mary in the German language, published in 1986; a catalogue of all illustrated medieval manuscripts written in German, arranged by subject matter, of which two volumes and three further fascicles have appeared since 1986; and medieval poetry. Until now ninety texts have been published, more than 10 percent are accessible as online-texts (http:// www.badw.de). Another important task is the edition of Middle High German Literature in the series Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters” (http://www.badw.de). The Committee for Research into Cuneiform Writing and the Archaeology of Western Asia: The Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RlA) “is dedicated to the cultures and peoples of the ancient Near East – the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Urartians, Elamites and many others – who have left us hundreds of thousands of texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets. Geographically the area of ‘cuneiform culture’ effec-

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tively embraces the whole of the Near East from Anatolia and Syria, through modern Iraq into Iran and the region of the Persian Gulf. Ancient Mesopotamian culture begins before 3000 BC with the invention of writing, and ends with the conquest of Mesopotamia by Alexander the Great, around 330 BC” (http://www.badw.de). Committee for the Publication of a Dictionary of Old Occitan: In the Middle Ages Old Occitan (formerly known as Old Provençal) was a language of literature and culture influential far beyond its geographical boundaries in southern France (see the entry for Occitan Studies here in this Handbook). It was also the language of the troubadours, whose songs were decisive in shaping the love lyric of the great medieval European literatures. The only existing work which gives a comprehensive view of the vocabulary of Old Occitan, François Raynouard’s Lexique Roman in six volumes, was written in the first half of the 19th century (1834–1845). Between 1894 and 1924, it was supplemented by Emil Levy’s Provenzalisches Supplementwörterbuch in eight volumes. For a long time linguists, literary scholars, and historians throughout the world have felt the need for a dictionary of Old Occitan which would satisfy modern standards and reflect the advances in scholarship made during the last hundred years. Publication of the new Dictionnaire de l’occitan médiéval (DOM) began at the end of 1996 and has been supervised since 1997 by the Commission for the Publication of a Dictionary of Old Occitan” (http://www.badw.de). Committee for the Publication of German Inscriptions of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period – Munich Section: “The aims of the project are principally philological, the establishment and publication of critical texts with commentary as source-materials for almost all branches of history, ethnography and many other subjects. It is of value in the conservation of historical monuments; it also contributes to a better understanding of the development of epigraphic styles, which may one day be reflected in a textbook of German epigraphy or, in the more distant future, of European epigraphy in general” (http://www.badw.de). Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BBAW (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Reconstituted after the German re-unification in 1992, BBAW originates from the Kurfürstlich Brandenburgische Sozietät der Wissenschaften (Electoral Brandenburg Society of Sciences and Humanities), founded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1700. The BBAW’s main focus is on research projects reconstructing cultural heritage through long-term ventures rich in tradition, such as dictionary projects, editions, documentations, and bibliographies; on interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary projects devoted to the identification and tackling of scientific and

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social problems of the future; and on promoting the dialogue between the scientific community and the general public. Together with the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the BBAW has founded the Junge Akademie, which provides unique support to excellent junior scientists, even compared to international standards. “A major contribution in the fields of Medieval Studies is the compilation of the inventory of medieval glass paintings, the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, in the ‘new’ federal states of Germany in cooperation with the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz (Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften, ADWM). The Research Center’s work is dedicated to the study of medieval stained glass preserved in German churches and museums of the former Federal Republic of Germany. These monuments of art, endangered by natural decay and pollution, are documented in photographs as well as drawings and published according to the guidelines of the international CORPUS VITREARUM / CORPUS VITREARUM MEDII AEVI (CVMA). Founded in 1952, the international CORPUS VITREARUM was the first research enterprise of art history to be formed at an international level. It was placed under the patronage of the Comitée International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), the UNESCO, and the Union Académique International (UAI). Its goal is to support the totality of research work, the edition of all medieval stained glass in one complete work, and scientific exchanges across national borders. Today, the CVMA has thirteen member countries in Europe, the United States, and Canada, united in the International Board. Since 1975, the Research Center in Freiburg has been placed under the administrative authority of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. The Center has a specialized library containing a great number of books on medieval stained glass and photo archives with approximately 33000 large-sized black and white negatives and 60000 color transparencies of stained glass located in Germany and parts of France (Alsace and Lorraine). At present, the Research Center’s team is comprised of four art historians, a photographer, a draughtsman, and a secretary” (excerpt, cp. http://www.bbaw.de). Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, HAW (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). The HAW was created in 1909 in the tradition of the Electoral Palatine Academy of Sciences, which had been founded by Elector Carl Theodor in 1763 (http://www.haw.baden-wuerttemberg.de). The Heidelberg academy is home to a broad range of research projects. Under the supervision of the Philosophical-Historical Section is for example, the publication of dictionaries. The Historical German Legal Dictionary is concerned with the compilation of an historical dictionary of the legally relevant vocabulary

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of western German language varieties and their different historical stages from the beginning of written records to about 1800, based on an archive of some 2.5 million references. At the same time it provides full-text access to the entire dictionary in database form and a series of machine-readable sources.” Other dictionaries are: Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, Etymological Dictionary of Old French, Dictionary of Old Gascon, and Old Occitan. The Research Project dealing with the Edition of Reuchlin’s Correspondence was established in 1994 to produce a complete critical edition of Johann Reuchlin’s correspondence (1455–1522) (http://www.haw.badenwuerttemberg.de). The aim of the Melanchthon Edition is a complete critical, annotated edition of Melanchthon’s correspondence. “With a total of 9,722 items, the correspondence of the Humanist and Reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) is one of the most extensive in the European history of ideas” (http://www.bbaw.de). “The edition of Martin Bucer’s writings in German is the German branch of an international project designed to produce the first complete historicalcritical edition of the works of Martin Bucer (1491–1551). The other two sections of the edition (Bucer’s works in Latin and his correspondence) are taking shape at the Universities of Strasbourg (with the assistance of an international team of editors) and Erlangen. The edition of Martin Bucer’s writings in German is one of the most important ongoing projects relating to the entire Reformation period” (http://www.bbaw.de). “The Luther Index: Both in scale and significance, the writings of Martin Luther assembled in the 70 text volumes of the Weimar Edition represent the most important oeuvre produced by a German author prior to Goethe. Their national and international impact extends far beyond ecclesiastical and theological history and has a major bearing on the history of ideas and culture. No writer before or after Luther has had a comparable influence on the development of the German language. However, the scope and diversity of his work makes it difficult to obtain an overall view of it. The indexes provide access to the abundance of texts by this highly prolific author both for theologians and for philologists, philosophers, historians, experts in legal, social, literary, scientific and art history and not least for representatives of ecclesiastical, cultural and political life and other sectors of the public domain. After the index of place names (1986) and personal names (1987) the five volumes comprising the Latin subject index appeared between 1990 and 1999. The German subject index, of which two volumes have already been published (2001/2003), will also extend to five volumes” (http://www.bbaw.de). The German Inscriptions of the Middle Ages (Epigraphic Database Heidelberg, EDH) prepares basic research in antique and medieval times:

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“The aim of the project EDH is to integrate Latin inscriptions from all parts of the Roman Empire into an extensive database. Since 2004 Greek inscriptions from the same chronological period are also being entered. It consists of three databases: the Epigraphic database, the Epigraphic Bibliography, and the Photographic Database. It exists at an international level alongside other database projects, which serve as a working tool for the swift and simple collection, viewing, supplementing, and interdisciplinary analysis of epigraphic material. Furthermore it is possible to create KWIC indices and to combine the stored information as freely as possible. At present, the Epigraphic database contains over 40000 inscriptions and thus includes most of the especially noteworthy inscriptions published outside the main editions. The database presents revised and often corrected versions. It is not confined to the mere texts, but links them to all the available bibliographical data and information on the inscriptions proper and on the monuments or objects they are inscribed upon. The revision of the inscriptions proceeds from a cardindex in which the relevant literature is collected. The bibliography is stored in a separate database, the Epigraphic Bibliography. The existence of drawings and photographic documentation, e. g., from the collection of the Photographic Library, widens the source of information, which may be made use of. In many cases autopsy offered a direct approach to the original monument and its inscription. With the help of other similar projects, which are supported by Heidelberg, a basis for this has already been created. There is, for instance, the new edition of the inscriptions from the Hispanic provinces: CIL II2: fasc. 5 Conventus Astigitanus; fasc. 7 Conventus Cordubensis (both volumes are mainly the work of Dr. Armin U. Stylow [Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik des DAI München]); fasc. 14 Pars meridionalis conventus Tarraconensis) and the supplements to the main collection of inscriptions from Rome (CIL VI: fasc. 8,2 Tituli imperatorum domusque eorum; fasc. 8,3 Tituli magistratuum populi Romani). Since September 2002 the Epigraphic Database, the complete contents of database including all available information on the monuments or on the inscriptions forming part of them, is accessible online at: http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/ sonst/adw/edh/index.h tml.en” (see also the entry on “Epigraphy” here in this Handbook). Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften ÖAW (Austrian Academy of Sciences). The Austrian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1847. It is remarkable that the academy in Vienna was one of the latest foundations of the former empire. Earlier foundations were in Brussels (1769), Prague (1776), Budapest (1825), and Zagreb (1836).

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz suggested an Academy of Sciences be established in Vienna in 1713 on the model of the Royal Society in England and the Académie des Sciences in France. Several further attempts were made under Empress Maria Theresa to establish an academy (inter alia by J. C. Gottsched in 1750), but only in 1837 did 12 scholars file a petition to initiate the long negotiations that finally led to the foundation of the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien by Imperial Patent on May 14, 1847. The academy, which represented as a “learned society,” a stronghold of scientific freedom, was granted the use of the old university in the center of Vienna in 1857 as its permanent headquarters. The academy soon produced initial research achievements in the humanities and natural sciences. In the humanities, the academy began researching and publishing important historical sources about Austrian history (e. g., the Archive of Austrian History, the source edition Fontes rerum Austriacarum (from 1849 onwards), or the Biographisches Lexicon des Kaisertums Österreichs [by C. Wurzbach]). The Austrian Academy of Sciences edited the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in cooperation with the academies in Munich and Berlin starting in 1875. Research trips were conducted to Asia Minor, Southern Arabia, and Nubia. Archaeologists started to investigate the Roman border fortifications (limes) along the Danube in Upper and Lower Austria (Carnuntum, Mautern), and began excavations in Egypt and Turkey around the turn of the century. Linguistic research was also undertaken in the Balkans and Near East. The humanities and social sciences were newly constructed in 2006; the center’s formation induced various synergistic effects. The newly created Center for Medieval Studies at first consisted of the Institute for Realia of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period” (Krems, Lower Austria). The aim of the institute was to conduct research into the everyday life of the Middle Ages and early modern period (until c. 1630), based on aspects of material culture. This research interest is connected with the term Realia and follows a concept of materiality, in which objects by themselves do not constitute any meaning but are only perceived as meaningful in the course of the communication processes that allowed them to become Realia. In that way, Realia are also given their functions, values, and meanings. A Realia is to be seen as a communication medium in any everyday performances “in the midst of things.” The research field of Realienkunde includes multilevel networks of relations between humans and objects, and the patterns of meanings that are constructed in those relations. Archaeological evidence and other material objects, as well as images and texts, represent the source corpora that are analyzed. Such a variety of sources (for example, panel paintings, poetry, nonliterary prose, and archaeological findings) makes interdisciplinary ap-

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proaches necessary (at the moment, archaeology, German studies, history, and art history are studied by scholars at the institute). A central aim of the Institute is the systematic documentation of past societies’ material traces of the life. A principal focus of this documentation is a concentration on the photographic collection of visual sources and artefacts. The source analysis is determined by the interest in object- and space-related structures as well as patterns of signs and actions in everyday life. One of the main activities of the Institute is the quantitative and qualitative extension of the image database REALonline by the regular addition of new images and the improvement of their digital presentation. In the years 1998–2000 a database for literary texts was generated. The base texts were the songs of Neidhart, manuscript c (mgf 779). In 2002 the “Veilchenschwank” (Sterzinger Neidhartspiele) at St. Stephen Cathedral in Vienna was performed publicly (direction: Gertrud Blaschitz; see also Neidhartrezeption in Wort und Bild, ed. ead., 2000). In 2004, the experiences with web-based research led to the beginning of the international and interdisciplinary internet-project “Medieval Animal Database” (MAD) in cooperation with scholars at ELTE and CEU (Budapest), and at the universities of Cambridge and Durham. The aim of the project is the use of the internet for the creation of networks of expert knowledge concerning the multiplicity of source information about animals (archaeo-zoological evidence, different texts, images). Thus, the comparative approach to the variety of medieval animal worlds should be facilitated. Along those lines, Peter Dinzelbacher published a collection of articles dealing with animals in the European history of mentality (Mensch und Tier in der Geschichte Europas, 2000). See now also Tiere als Freunde im Mittelalter, selected and trans. by Gabriela Kompatscher together with Albrecht Classen und Peter Dinzelbacher (2010). In the archaeological research field, the sensational thirteenth-century “Hoard of Fuchsenhof” (Upper Austria) – the discovery of a medieval treasure (coins, jewelry, buttons, etc.) in 1997 – was analyzed in cooperation with the Upper Austrian Landesmuseum” (www. schatzfund-fuchsenhof.at). In the field of Castle Studies, comprehensive source material concerning the daily life in castles has been collected and analyzed. In the framework of the EU-program “Culture 2000” the castles in the Rhine/Danube-area (Germany, Austria, Hungary) have been examined. In cooperation with the Medieval Center at the University of Bergen and the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest) the analysis of the supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary with regard to the history of daily life was started (the edition of the material for the germanophone areas of medieval Europe has already reached volume 6). The

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main interest lies in the role of the Penitentiary in local contexts and in problems of clerical mobility. Literary and iconographic constructions of reality are the topic of two book projects that are analyzing the spatial and social relations of phenomena dealt with in these sources to medieval everyday life. The project “The Road” is dealing with patterns of mobility in German literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Those patterns had mainly symbolic and didactic function. They used the daily situations on the road but certainly did not mirror them. The project “Gender Encounters” led to similar results concerning everyday reality. The focus of the project is on friendship, love, power, and violence in visual and textual sources. New activities of the Institute were also established in 2003/04 with the development of virtual possibilities for the dissemination of historical information in schools and museums: The multimedia-presentation of regional history in the Lower Austrian Landesmuseum was further developed, and eLearningmodules for Austrian schools were created (http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at). The Commission for Paleography and Codicology of Medieval Manuscripts in Austria (Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters) is involved in nearly all manuscript cataloguing projects in most libraries in Austria. Special catalogue types were created to cover the special and individual research goals: the project groups “illuminated manuscripts” or “manuscripts in German in Austrian Libraries,” as well as the “Generalkataloge” (general catalogues) giving detailed information about content, codicology, history and illumination of all manuscripts in a collection (project group is “Manuscripts in Austrian Libraries”). Additionally monographs have the goal to allow the publication of more detailed research on particular questions. Completed research results are usually published in the printed series “Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters,” but more and more the internet is used as the medium of publication especially to house broad databases of images of medieval manuscripts” (http://www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at). The Institute of Byzantine Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is engaged in basic and advanced Byzantine studies, concerning the systematic research of the historical geography of the Byzantine Empire, research on manuscripts, texts and small objects as well as the evaluation of these objects and texts, and is editing the results in studies, catalogues, lexicons and editions. The scientific focal points are: An atlas of the Byzantine Empire (TIB) for the period between the beginning of the 4th century and the 15th century, in other words from late antiquity up to the Turkish conquest in 1453, with main maps for all regions drawn to a scale 1:800000.

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A critical edition of the Registrum Patriarchatus Constantinopolitani from the manuscripts Cod. Vind. Hist. gr. 47 and 48 (1315–1402) with translation, short commentary and diplomatic glossary. The Repertorium of Greek Scribes, which records all Greek manuscripts in the libraries of Europe from 800 to 1600. A project on Byzantine Lead Seals in Austria with detailed descriptions of lead seals and with (cultural) historical comments. A Dictionary of Byzantine Greek, which is published in fascicles at intervals of about two years. A project on Byzantine Epigrams in Non Literary Transmission with an edition and analysis. A research unit on Diplomacy, which examines and reexamines documents of the Byzantine imperial chancellery and other groups of documents (http://www.oeaw.ac.at/byzanz). The Institute for Medieval Research (Vienna): In accordance with the research strategy employed by the Institute, it combines long-term projects to document, edit, and analyze sources of medieval history with new approaches to interpreting these sources and answering the methodological challenges of the day. Thus, the Institute combines two strengths, namely a long experience in the technicalities of dealing with the sources, and a vibrant international network involved in current debates and methodologies. Since its foundation in 1998, the Institute has been the home to three major edition projects which proceed at a considerable pace. The Viennese branch of Diplomata edition of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica is in charge of the diplomas of King Philippe of Swabia, a key source for his much-contested reign at the beginning of the 13th century. The second large-scale program is the Austrian section of the Corpus of Medieval and Early Modern Inscriptions. The third long-term program are the Regesta Imperii, edited by the Austrian Academy in collaboration with the Academy at Mainz and offering well-documented short summaries of all charters and acts of government by the medieval emperors. Edition projects are also run by the Early Medieval Research Group. One of them is the facsimile edition of the 9th-century charters of St Gall, a unique corpus of hundreds of early-medieval originals, for the Chartae Latiniae Antiquiores. In 2006, the first of 12 planned volumes has come out. Work has also progressed on the comparative electronic edition of three manuscript books of Frankish history from the ninth century and on the study of the manuscript transmission of the Annales Fuldenses. The question of early medieval ethnic identities is central to the institute’s early medieval research. Such research has far-reaching implications, even for the problems of nations and nationalism in the contemporary

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world. The significance of this research was recognized by the awarding of the Wittgenstein Prize to Walter Pohl in 2004; the prize money has allowed to start a large-scale project that delved deeper into the meaning of ethnicity and the construction of identities in early medieval Europe and beyond. At the core of the project is the relationship between Christian and ethnic discourse, between the establishment of ethnically-defined states and the institutional growth of the Church, sketching a new paradigm for the understanding of the Occident. This conceptual frame has so far been presented at several occasions, in Vienna, Leeds, Leipzig, Padua, and Glasgow, and is being attended to by several young researchers who work, among other things, on hagiography, sermons, exegesis, inscriptions, perceptions of time, and monastic communities. Research at the Institute is conducted in the context of an international network, which is reflected, among others, in a number of conferences and workshops, and the resulting conference proceedings (http://www.oeaw.ac.at/ gema). C. Research Institutes Outside of the Academy Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH). In the group of non-universityresearch institutes, the MGH, based in Munich, deserves particular mention. The MGH is a collection of medieval documents which were assembled by the concerted efforts of notable historians and form the principal source of our knowledge of German medieval history. The idea of this documentation originated with Freiherr vom Stein, who to this end founded the Gesellschaft für Deutschlands ältere Geschichtskunde in 1819. The enterprise was planned in detail by G. H. Pertz, who had directed its extensive publications until 1873. The Society was 1937 integrated into the Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde. A further reorganization took place in 1946, taking the title Monumenta Germaniae Historica since 1959 (http:// www.mgh.de/geschichte/geschichte-allgemeines/). Nowadays most of the projects mentioned above are supervised by freelancers (“freie” Mitarbeiter), who are engaged mostly at universities. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, MPG (Max Planck Society). The MPG was founded on February 26, 1948, and is the successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science. The society defined itself as a research organization that enjoys autonomy to perform basic research at a high international standard. The first president was Otto Hahn, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. The Max Planck Society had 25 institutes and a budget of approximately DM 7 million (3 3.6 million) in 1948. The number of

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research institutes increased to 52 in 1966. At the start of the 1970s the MPG employed 8,000 people, including roughly 2,000 scientists. The budget of the MPG grew to more than DM 400 million (3 204.5 million) in 1970. As a result of the growth, consolidation and quality management that occurred in the 1990s after the German Reunification, a new program ran from 1990–1996 and pursued the goal of strengthening the universities in the eastern states by establishing 27 working groups, two branches of institutes as well as the supervision of seven centers for the humanities. At the same time there was a long-term program to found new institutes: 18 institutes, one sub institute as well as a research unit were established in the eastern states in 1998, which also meant that the pressure to save money grew in the western states. In the summer of 1996 a simultaneous build-up and cutback began, which led to an intensified consolidation in the western states; four institutes were closed (cell biology, the Gmelin Institute, behavioral physiology, and biology) and astronomy was partially closed. The states in eastern Germany were generously supported during this reorganization process. (http://www.mpg.de/english/aboutTheSociety/aboutUs/history/ index.html). In March 2007, the famous Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen (Max Planck-Institut für Geschichte zu Göttingen, MPI für Geschichte) was closed and reestablished as the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften). The book series of the MPI für Geschichte are: Veröffentlichungen des MaxPlanck-Instituts für Geschichte, Germania Sacra, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Neue Richtungen der Geschichtswissenschaft (in Russian), Sovre menn«e napravleniѕ v istoriљesko“ nauke (na russkom ѕz«ke) Gertrud Blaschitz

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S Scripts A. Definition Writing throughout history has taken on many different forms. It includes alphabets, syllabaries, and pictograms; it can be produced with a chisel, a brush, or a pen; it can be written on stone, paper, parchment, wax, or bark. And, of course, it can be written with and on many other things as well. In the context of the Medieval West, writing constitutes the communication of information using an alphabet and was normally produced with a pen and ink, or by scratching into a surface such as wax with a stylus, or by inscribing stone with a chisel or something similar. However, writing is not an innate activity: it must be learned and therefore must be taught. One important consequence of this is that methods of writing are transmitted from teacher to student, and innovations by a master were often adopted by his or her pupils. In this way, different styles of writing developed at different dates and at different places, and these different ways of writing are broadly classified into scripts. Furthermore, as Stanley Morison (Politics and Script, 1972) and others have emphasized, different scripts were also developed for different purposes at the same time and place. Terminology differs, but the discussion here will follow that articulated by Malcolm Parkes: script is “the model which the scribe has in mind’s eye when he writes,” and hand “what he actually puts down on the page” (English Cursive Book Hands, 1969, xxvi). Scripts are therefore defined to be the styles of writing, with more or less formalized principles in the formation of letters and the range of letterforms available to a scribe or writer. A script is a somewhat abstract concept, whereas a (scribal) hand is the physical manifestation of that script by a human writer. Thus a scribe in England toward the end of the 10th century may have tried to write the script which scholars today call Caroline minuscule, but his hand might show features of another script, for example Square minuscule. B. Writing-Systems Most writing-systems in the world can loosely be classified as alphabetic, syllabic, or logogrammatic (but see Peter T. Daniels “The Study of Writing Systems,” The World’s Writing Systems, ed. id. and William Bright, 1996,

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3–10). A syllabary is a system where each symbol represents a distinct syllable, although some additional symbols are often allowed to modify the sounds involved; the best-known examples are the katakana and hiragana in modern Japanese. In logogrammatic systems each symbol represents a distinct word or morpheme without necessarily reflecting the sound in any way; the best-known example is Chinese, although not all Chinese writing is strictly logogrammatic. Alphabets, in contrast, typically employ far fewer symbols but allow combinations of symbols to represent a given sound. Such systems were used almost universally throughout the medieval and modern West and include the Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, Runic, Ogham, Semitic, and Arabic alphabets. Systems of shorthand or abbreviations, such as the Tironian nota, fall slightly outside this scheme, insofar as these symbols often represented syllables and often could not be combined to produce new sounds (an important characteristic of an alphabet not true of a syllabary). Of the alphabets, the Latin came eventually to dominate writing in all the languages of Western Europe, although some letters from other systems were sometimes retained for writing in the vernacular (for example the 6 and q in both Old English and Modern Icelandic). This article is limited to the scripts used to write the Latin alphabet throughout the Middle Ages in Western Europe, although some of the principles are equally applicable to other forms of writing. C. Paleography The study of medieval handwriting is known as paleography, but the precise meaning of this term is itself contentious. In the narrow sense, paleography is the study of “old” writing, namely the handwriting of the Classical and Medieval periods, and it has been concerned primarily with the identification of scribal hands, and especially the dating and localization of such hands. It is also often restricted to writing with ink or paint, or scratching into wax, and specifically not encompassing inscriptions, the study of which is known as epigraphy. Sometimes also writing on papyrus has been separated off into a different study known as papyrology. However, particularly in the 20th century, some scholars have argued that one cannot study script in isolation, and therefore that paleography should encompass all aspects of writing and book-production: not only the script but also decoration, pagelayout, binding-structures, materials, and provenance; not only writing with pen and ink but also inscriptions. This has resulted in debate about the nature of manuscript-studies and its various specializations (Jean Mallon, “Qu’est ce que la paléographie?,” Paläographie 1981, ed. Gabriel Silagi, 1982, 47–52; Albert Derolez, “Codicologie ou archéologie du livre?,” Scriptorium

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27 [1973]: 47–49, responding to Albert Gruijs, “Codicology or the Archaeology of the Book? A False Dilemma,” Quaerendo 2 [1972]: 87–108; see also Pavel Spunar, “Définition de la paléographie,” Scriptorium 12 [1958]: 108–10). Some scholars have take this even further to argue that study should focus on the social element of script-history and therefore not on writing itself (Attilio B. Langeli, “Ancora su paleografia e storia della scrittura,” Scrittura e Civiltà 2 [1978]: 275–94; Alessandro Pratesi, “Paleografia in crisi?,” Scrittura e Civiltà 3 [1979]: 329–37). However, most scholars now tend to use paleography to mean the study of scripts, and codicology or archaeology of the book to describe study of the physical book including its manufacture and construction, and to use book history or manuscript studies to refer to the field as a whole. This more clearly delineated terminology will be used throughout this discussion. D. Script-Systems Writing in Western Europe is almost universally based on the Latin alphabet which was spread by the Romans until the fall of the Roman Empire. The scripts have been classified into broad groups based on the periods during which they were written. The earliest of these is the Late Antique script-system which was written until the fall of the Roman Empire. These scripts have received a good deal of scholarly attention, despite the fact that relatively few examples survive. This attention is at least partly because of their historical position as the basis on which all later Western writing developed. Discussions of the Late Antique script-system can be found in many manuals of Latin paleography (Edward M. Thompson, Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, 1912; Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, 1990). Late Antique scripts have been divided into two groups, majuscule and minuscule. The exact definitions of these terms vary, but majuscule scripts are formal, normally carefully written, and with the letters falling between two (theoretical) horizontal lines; they therefore lack ascenders and descenders, that is, strokes which extend above and below the body of the letters (like that of d and p in modern type). Minuscule writing is often (but not necessarily) more rapid and less formal than majuscule, with more joins between different strokes, and the script is “four-line” in that ascenders and descenders rise above and below the bodies of letters. These definitions of majuscule and minuscule are somewhat problematic: majuscule letter-forms can be written with cursive elements, and Elias A. Lowe referred consistently to the fourline Insular Half-uncial script as “majuscule” (Codices Latini Antiquiores II, 2nd ed. 1972, esp. xv-xvi; for criticism see T. Julian Brown, A Palaeographer’s View, 1993, 201). The main majuscule scripts of the Late Antique period have been

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classified as Square Capitals (capitalis quadrata), Rustic Capitals (capitalis rustica), and Uncial (uncialis). Examples of minuscule script from the same period are Old Roman cursive, New Roman cursive, and Half-uncial. The “Old” and “New” systems of Roman script have been the subject of extensive discussion, most notably by Jean Mallon (see especially his Paléographie romaine, 1952), who overturned the received view by arguing that the New Roman system did not develop directly from the Old but rather from a change of writing-angle in bookhand. Mallon’s work was extremely influential; he has been described as a “pioneer” whose work “has been universally recognized as revolutionizing the study of early Latin writing” (Alan Bowman and David Thomas, Vindolanda: The Latin Writing Tablets, 1983, 55), and he and Robert Marichal between them largely represent the so-called “French School” of paleography (Pavel Spunar, op. cit., 108; for the term compare also Emanuele Casamassima and Elena Staraz, “Varianti e cambio grafico nella scrittura dei papiri latini: Note paleografiche,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 [1977]: 9; and Jan-Olof Tjäder, “Die Forschungen Jean Mallons zur römischen Paläographie,” MIÖG 61 [1953]: 385–96). Some of Mallon’s conclusions were challenged by Giorgio Cencetti (“Ricerche sulla scrittura latina nell’età arcaica I: Il filone corsivo,” Bullettino dell’‘Archivio paleografico italiano’ new series 2–3, pt. 1 [1956–57]: 175–205), who emphasized the importance of “everyday writing” (scrittura usuale) and hypothesized an otherwise unknown “unofficial cursive” (scrittura normale) to explain the development, an explanation which has since proved popular in Italian scholarship. The debate has been continued since with important contributions from JanOlof Tjäder (op. cit.), Emanuele Casamassima and Elena Staraz (op. cit.), and others. After the fall of the Roman Empire, different parts of Latin Europe continued to use majuscule scripts but developed their own distinct styles of minuscule which are known collectively as pre-Caroline or National scripts. These emerged out of the Late Antique script-system and are probably based primarily on New Roman Cursive but with admixture of forms from other scripts. The most important of these pre-Caroline scripts are the Insular, Merovingian, Luxeuil, Corbie “ab”, Visigothic, and Beneventan minuscules. The Insular system of scripts incorporated the full range of writing from formal majuscule to current minuscule and included the first use of minuscule as a formal bookhand. The script-system has been characterized most fully by T. Julian Brown (A Palaeographer’s View, 1993, esp. 201–20). He used this term to refer to writing in the British Isles up until the first Viking Age in England circa A.D. 850; he identified five distinct grades of Insular script, and his classification has received wide acceptance (ibid.; compare also Michelle P.

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Brown, A Guide to Western Scripts, 1990; David N. Dumville, Palaeographer’s Review, 1999; Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500, 2005). Nevertheless, many details of Brown’s argument have been contested by David Dumville (op. cit.), and both positions in turn draw on work by Elias A. Lowe (Codices Latini Antiquiores II, 2nd ed. 1972) and Ludwig Bieler (“Insular Palaeography, Present State and Problems,” Scriptorium 3 [1949]: 267–94), amongst others. The next minuscule to develop as a formal bookhand was probably Luxeuil minuscule. Its place of origin had been debated, despite the name, until Elias A. Lowe’s seminal article in which he demonstrated the script’s origin and practice at Luxeuil and not Northern Italy (Palaeographical Papers II, 1972, 389–98). Although Lowe argued for the influence of local charter-scripts, he also acknowledged features of Insular script in the Luxeuil type, and since him scholars have debated aspects of the script including its relationship to the Insular minuscules; this debate was intensified by a fragment now in Durham which was written in an early Insular script but which contains a section, probably by the same scribe, in what appears to be a variant of Luxeuil minuscule (William O’Sullivan, “The Palaeographical Background to the Book of Kells,” The Book of Kells, ed. Felicity O’Mahony, 1994, 181; id., “Insular Calligraphy: Current State and Problems,” Peritia 4 [1985]: 352; David Dumville, Palaeographer’s Review, 1999, 29–31). Elias A. Lowe and Bernhard Bischoff have considered Merovingian scripts and particularly a group of manuscripts with important parallels to the so-called Corbie “ab” script (Bernhard Bischoff, Mittelalterliche Studien I, 1966, 31–34; Elias A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores VI, 1953, xxi–xxvi). Lowe was also the first to comprehensively treat Visigothic minuscule, a script which was practiced in Spain from the 8th to the 13th century and which has since been the subject of more extensive discussion (Elias A. Lowe, Palaeographical Papers I, 1972, 2–65, and II, 459–65; Agustin Millares Carlo, Tratado de paleografía española, 3rd ed. with José Manuel Ruiz Asencio, 1983). Indeed, Elias A. Lowe remains one of the primary authorities on Visigothic script, although some of his conclusions have since been questioned (Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, 1990 [German original 1979], 100 n. 29). One debate surrounding Visigothic script is its origin: it is usually thought to have developed directly and exclusively from changes in local writing (Luigi Schiaparelli, “Intorno all’origine della scrittura visigotica,” Archivio storico italiano, 7th ser. 12 [1929]: 165–207), but the discovery of closely related script apparently produced on Mount Sinai prompted Bernhard Bischoff to suggest influence through North Africa (op. cit., 97–98; referring to material previously discussed by Elias A. Lowe, Palaeographical Papers II, 1972, 417–40 and

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520–74). This view has by no means always been accepted (Jan-Olof Tjäder, “Latin Palaeography, 1977–79,” Eranos 78 [1980]: 74). Particularly closely associated with Elias A. Lowe and subsequently Virginia Brown is the Beneventan script of southern Italy which was practiced from the eighth until the early 13th century. Lowe’s comprehensive study has been updated in some of its detail but it remains the primary authority on this script (The Beneventan Script, 1914; 2nd ed., 2 vols., prepared and enlarged by Virginia Brown, 1980; see also Virginia Brown, “A Second New List of Beneventan Manuscripts,” Medieval Studies 40 [1978]: 239–89 and 50 [1988]: 584–625). The next major phase of writing in Western Europe is the Caroline, a script which is associated with the court of Charlemagne. Leopold Delisle, amongst others, emphasized the script’s origin in Antique Half-uncial and cursive (“Memoire sur l’école calligraphique de Tours au IXe siècle,” Memoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 32/1 [1885]: 29–56); Elias A Lowe tended to emphasise the so-called “Maudramnus” script of Corbie (Codices Latini Antiquiores VI, 1953, xxiv); but the most authoritative argument today is probably that of Bernhard Bischoff who identified different stages of development. According to his account, the first stage occurred simultaneously in different centers from about the 780s; these developments spread first through the Carolingian heartland and then, from about the second decade of the 9th century, throughout the rest of the empire (Mittelalterliche Studien III, 1981, 1–4; Latin Palaeography, 1990 [German original 1979], 112–18). In addition to Bischoff’s scholarship, an important earlier synthesis of Caroline script was produced by Giorgio Cencetti (“Postilla nuova a un problema vecchio,” Nova Historia 7 [1955]: 1–24), and a useful historiography and analysis has been published by David Ganz (“The Preconditions for Caroline Minuscule,” Viator 18 [1987]: 23–43). Caroline minuscule represents a new approach to writing in its attempts to improve legibility by eliminating most abbreviations and ligatures, by changing some of the letter-forms, and by standardizing the script. The spread of this script was rapid, both because of its practical virtues and because of Charlemagne’s political influence, and it moved into most areas of Western Europe by the mid-9th century. There were exceptions, however. T. Alan Bishop (English Caroline Minuscule, 1971) and David Dumville (English Caroline Script, 1993) have treated the introduction of Caroline script into England, an introduction which did not occur until the late 10th century. As noted above, Beneventan and Visigothic minuscules were practiced until the 13th century, and the papal chancery did not adopt Caroline script until the 12th century. The letter-forms of the Insular scriptsystem were retained in Ireland with only minimal change until the 20th century; this script still awaits thorough treatment but discussions include

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those by Ludwig Bieler (id. and James Carney, “The Lambeth Commentary,” Ériu 23 [1972]: 1–55; id. and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, “Fragment of an Irish double psalter with glosses,” Celtica 5 [1960]: 28–39) and William O’Sullivan (“Notes on the Scripts and Make-Up of the Book of Leinster,” Celtica 7 [1966]: 1–31; “Manuscripts and Palaeography,” A New History of Ireland I: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, 2005, 511–48). Caroline script underwent a significant change from the late 11th century, with the most obvious difference being greater angularity and lateral compression. The precise reasons for this change have been debated at some length. Olga Dobiache-Rojdestvenskaja had argued that the script-system resulted from Beneventan influence (“Quelques considérations sur les origines de l’écriture dite gothique,” Mélanges d’histoire du moyen âge offert à Ferdinand Lot, 1926, 691–721); her work was influential at the time but is no longer accepted (Luigi Schiaparelli, Note paleografiche, 1969, 437–62). Other prominent suggestions include a change in the cut or type of pen, economic constraints, legibility, or aesthetic taste, but none of these suggestions is now widely supported (Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, 2003, 68–70). Whatever the cause, it is now generally accepted that this change began in the late 11th century, starting probably in England and Northern France but under Anglo-Saxon influence. The most authoritative discussion of this Anglo-Norman script in England, and therefore by implication the origin of Gothic script, is that by Neil R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (1960). Neil Ker did not refer explicitly to Gothic script as such; indeed the change in writing-style took place over some two hundred years, and this gradual process has also lead to difficulties in terminology (T. Alan Bishop, Nomenclature des écritures livresques, 1954, 7–14), but the eventual outcome is universally recognized. Perhaps the best-known and most characteristic phenomenon in the Gothic script-system is that of ‘biting curves’ which arose toward the end of the 12th century and which were first characterized by Wilhelm Meyer (Die Buchstabenverbindungen der sogenannten gotischen Schrift, 1897). More recently this script-system has become associated with Gerard Lieftinck and his students, particularly J. Peter Gumbert. Gerard Lieftinck argued for a deliberate system of scripts of varying degrees of formality which he classified largely on the basis of stylistic features such as the treatment of serifs and the use of loops (Manuscrits datés conservés dans les Pays-Bas I, 1964, xiii-xvii; Nomenclature des écritures livresques, 1954, 15–34). This classification has been largely accepted, although many minor alterations and refinements can be found in the literature (for two see Michelle P. Brown, A Guide to Western Scripts, 1990, 80–81, and Albert Derolez, op. cit., 20–27). Perhaps the most substantial

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contribution to our understanding of lower-grade English Gothic scripts is that by Malcolm Parkes with his characterization of Anglicana (English Cursive Book Hands, 1969; compare also T. Alan Bishop, Scriptores Regis, 1961). Most recently, the script-system as a whole has been treated in depth by Albert Derolez in a book which is already proving influential (The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, 2003). Albert Derolez has largely preserved Gerard Lieftinck’s classification but has included a fairly detailed review of it and its reception and has surveyed some of its more widely accepted modifications. In 14th-century Italy, Humanism was underway, and with it an interest in Classical texts and their transmission. Along with this is evident an intolerance for the Gothic script which by this time was often very difficult to read, mostly because of its compression and extensive abbreviations. Poggio Bracciolini therefore developed a new script in Florence toward the end of the 13th century for the benefit of Coluccio Salutati, the Chancellor of this city who had himself experimented with new styles of writing, and Bracciolini’s script spread further when he became a papal scriptor in 1404 and retained this post for half a century. Similarly, Niccolo Niccoli also contributed to the development of the book script at this time and invented Humanistic cursive (also known as Italic script). Important studies of Humanistic script include Berthold L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanist Script (1960); James Wardrop, The Script of Humanism (1963); A. C. de la Mare, “Humanistic Script” (Das Verhältnis der Humanisten zum Buch, ed. Fritz Krafft and Dieter Wuttke, 1977, 89–110); S. Zamponi, “La scrittura umanistica” (Archiv für Diplomatik 50 [2004]: 467–503). The cursive script spread from Italy, gradually replacing the informal secretary hands, while the higher-grade Humanist bookhands were themselves replaced by print. E. History of Research The detailed study of script began in the context of diplomatics as the need arose to establish the authenticity or otherwise of documents or charters. The person credited with first doing so and described as the “father of palaeography” is Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), a Benedictine of the congregation of St Maur at the abbey of St-Germain-des-Pres. Mabillon’s palaeographical work was published as De re diplomatica in 1681 with a second edition in 1709; it included not only a discussion and characterization of scripts but also a large number of reproductions of extant documents. Approximately contemporary with Mabillon was Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726) who was active at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and later as Keeper of the Library for Robert Harley and then Robert’s son Edward.

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Wanley sought to bring a more scientific approach by systematically studying and cataloguing many hundreds of manuscripts, an approach most evident in his catalogue of ancient Western manuscripts (Librorum Veterum Septentrionalium Catalogus, 1705). He is also credited with the principle of dating by comparing an unknown hand with similar examples of known date and especially the surviving documents (for his methods see especially the Letters of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Peter Heyworth, 1989; and The Diary of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Cyril E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 1966). Other early important figures of the 18th century include Scipione Maffei (Istoria diplomatica, 1727), René Prosper Tassin, and Charles François Toustain (Nouveau traité de diplomatique, 1750–65). The 19th century saw important figures in English paleography such as Edward A. Bond and Edward M. Thompson, joint founders of the Palaeographical Society and producers of important facsimiles and handbooks (Edward A. Bond et al., Palaeographical Society Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, 2 series, 1873–94; Edward M. Thompson et al., New Palaeographical Society Facsimiles of Manuscripts and Inscriptions, 2 series, 1903–1930; Edward M. Thompson, Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography, 1912). F. The “New Paleography” Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, paleography was considered a Hilfswissenschaft, a “helper-study” which was auxiliary to history, philology and diplomatic, and which was best suited to people who were incapable of socalled “higher” pursuits. This began to change with the work of Leopold Delisle and continued with Ludwig Traube and the “New Palaeography.” In Julian Brown’s terms, Traube brought new methods and new purpose to the field (“Latin Palaeography since Traube,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 [1959–63]: 361–81). By incorporating the study of scripts into the broader study of language and culture, Ludwig Traube demonstrated that this study was a valid end in itself. In addition, he also brought new standards of comprehensive and objective analysis. He recognized the need to study all examples of a particular script, and he emphasized Mabillon’s principle that all aspects of a book must be considered together, not just its script. This more scientific approach was continued by his pupil, Elias A. Lowe (spelled Loew until 1918). Lowe began his doctoral work in philology but recognized that such work was impossible until the manuscripts were fully understood, and so he began work which resulted in the first systematic study of all surviving script from Benvento (The Beneventan Script, 1914; 2nd ed., 2 vols., prepared and enlarged by Virginia Brown, 1980). This study has since been heralded as a landmark in paleography for its compre-

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hensiveness and attention to detail. Indeed, such was the combined effect of Traube and Lowe that William Lindsay described the former as having “made a new epoch in Latin Palaeography,” and one of the latter’s books as “the first fruits of the New Palaeography” (“The New Palaeography,” The Classical Review 28 [1914]: 209–10). Indeed, William Lindsay himself was to follow a similar vein. Ludwig Traube had demonstrated the importance of abbreviations in paleographical study in a book which Julian Brown described as “the greatest single advance in technique that has been made since the discipline of palaeography was founded,” and Lindsay took this approach yet further in a monumental study of his own (T. Julian Brown, “Latin Palaeography since Traube,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 [1959–63]: 361–81, referring to Ludwig Traube, Nomina Sacra, 1907; William M. Lindsay, Notae Latinae, 1915, suppl. by Doris Bains, 1936). Lowe also continued to apply the new method in his later work on Uncial script which revealed a pre-existing lack of objective criteria for the dating and localization of such hands, a lack which he sought to fill (see especially his English Uncial, 1960, as well several of his Palaeographical Papers, 1972). His systematic approach then culminated in Codices Latini Antiquiores, published in eleven volumes and a supplement from 1934 to 1971 with a second edition of volume 2 published in 1972. These volumes contain photographs and descriptions of some 1811 manuscripts, the objective being to include all surviving Latin literary manuscripts from before A.D. 800. G. Models of Script-Development Another recurring question in paleography is what model best represents the development of new scripts. Indeed, an important component of scripthistory is the way in which writing changes and in which one script emerges out of another, and perhaps the best-known voice in this field is that of Jean Mallon. Mallon has been credited with giving the study of scripts even greater importance than Ludwig Traube did, the latter viewing paleography as a discipline within the context of philology, but the former recognizing the need not only to describe scripts but also to explain them (Pavel Spunar, “Définition de la paléographie,” Scriptorium 12 [1958]: 108–9). In this way Jean Mallon and Robert Marichal, as representatives of the so-called “French School” of paleography, produced a series of important and influential studies which show almost more interest in the process of writing than in the product (see especially Jean Mallon, Paléographie romaine, 1952; and Jean Mallon, Robert Marichal, and Charles Perrat, L’écriture latine de la capitale romaine à la minuscule, 1939). These scholars focused on the development of the New Roman script-system, as discussed

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above. However, although each script is the product of the unique historical and cultural circumstances in which it is born, nevertheless certain common factors can be identified in the models for their development, and these factors can often be applied to different scripts from very different times. One such model is based on the interaction between formal bookhands and informal cursive scripts. Thus Bernhard Bischoff suggested that innovations in formal script, particularly for Roman and early (pre-Caroline) medieval writing, often result from scribes’ efforts to minimize the differences between those scripts and informal writing, and that new features which had been introduced into the informal scripts were later canonized in the formal writing (see especially Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, 1990 [German original 1979], 52–53; Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, 2003, 5). Similar in direction, although different in detail, is the suggestion that cursive scripts were sometimes formalized and “upgraded” into bookhands. This “bottom up” movement, or ones similar to it, have been suggested to explain several scripts including the entire Insular script-system (T. Julian Brown, A Palaeographer’s View, 1993), the development of Uncial (Bernhard Bischoff, op. cit., 66), and Anglicana Formata (Malcolm B. Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands, 1969, xvi–xviii). However, in at least some of these cases, an alternative model has been suggested. In this scenario the development is from higher grade scripts “down” to lower-grade ones. Thus Elias A. Lowe and Bernhard Bischoff both argued that the Insular minuscule scripts developed out of late Antique Half-uncial (Codices Latini Antiquiores II, 2nd ed. 1972, xv; Bernhard Bischoff, op. cit., 84), and Jan-Olof Tjäder suggested that Uncial developed from capital scripts (“Latin Palaeography, 1977–79,” Eranos 78 [1980]: 73). Related is the model of a “debased” script which is reformed back “up” by a prominent individual; scripts considered in this way include Roman Revived Uncial (Armando Petrucci, “L’onciale romana,” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 12 [1971]: 75–134), and Humanistic minuscule (Berthold L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanist Script, 1960); in these cases a significant element was also the desire to recover elements from earlier writing. Elias A. Lowe also emphasized the role of prominent scribes, arguing that “style is invariably the creation of a single master” and that this style then becomes a type, or script, if that master has sufficient followers (Palaeographical Papers II, 1972, 389–90); similar models have been suggested or demonstrated for the origin of a late style of English Caroline minuscule (T. Alan Bishop, English Caroline Minuscule, 1971; David Dumville, English Caroline Script, 1993), as well as Humanist script as just noted.

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H. Aspect, Ductus, and Morphology Just as there are competing (and complementary) models for script-development, so are there for the analysis and discussion of particular scripts. Montague R. James declared that he depended on the aspect, or general impression, of a page more than its minutiae (Richard W. Pfaff, “M.R. James on the Cataloguing of Manuscripts,” Scriptorium 31 [1977]: 104). Related to this is the notion that paleography is an “art” which must be acquired by experience, rather than a science which can be taught: the former view was also articulated by James (ibid.) and other highly respected paleographers (Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, 1990 [German original 1979], 3; Françoise Gasparri, Introduction à l’histoire de l’écriture, 1994, 96). Others have questioned this view (Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, 2003, 1–2) but disagree as to the preferred alternative. One such alternative is to consider writing as a physical process and therefore that the basic element in handwriting is the sequence of strokes used to construct a letter. This sequence of strokes is usually called ductus, although the term is problematic and “structure” or “tratteggio” have been used instead (cf. Jean Mallon, Paléografie romaine, 1952, 22–25; Léon Gilissen, L’expertise des écritures médiévales, 1973, 40–1; Armando Petrucci, Breve storia della scrittura latina, 1989, 22–23; Bernhard Bischoff, op. cit., 51 n. 4; Michelle P. Brown, A Guide to Western Scripts, 1990, 3; for discussion of these see Albert Derolez, op. cit., 6–7). Although ductus is generally recognized as important when establishing the development of handwriting, some have questioned its usefulness in describing scripts (Léon Gilissen, “Analyse et évolution des formes graphiques,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 21 [1992]: 323–46, supported in this respect by Jan-Olof Tjäder, “Latin Palaeography, 1975–77,” Eranos 75 [1977]: 157–58). An alternative to ductus is therefore morphology, the examination of the shapes of letters independently of their construction, and this has been used both to describe hands and also to establish typologies of script (Albert Derolez, op. cit., esp. 6–9; J. Peter Gumbert, “A Proposal for a Cartesian Nomenclature,” Miniatures, Scripts, Collections: Essays presented to G. I. Lieftinck IV, ed. J. Peter Gumbert and Max J. M. de Haan, 1976, 45–52; Gerard Lieftinck and J. Peter Gumbert, Manuscrits datés conservés dans les Pays-Bas II, 1988, 22–35; Neil R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, 1957; David N. Dumville, English Caroline Script, 1993). However, this approach has itself been criticized for ignoring the physical processes which underlie writing and which themselves influence script, and the study both of ductus and of morphology is beset with problems of inconsistent nomenclature and subjective analyses.

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I. Nomenclature This difficulty of inconsistent nomenclature has been the subject of discussion almost since the beginning of the discipline itself, with that proposed by Jean Mabillon (De re diplomatica, 1681, 2nd ed. 1709) being criticized by Scipione Maffei (Istoria diplomatica, 1727), and with a so-called “Linnaean” system proposed instead by René Prosper Tassin and Charles François Toustain (Nouveau traité de diplomatique, 1750–1765). Much variance is still evident in the literature today despite many calls for and proposals of uniform systems (as well as those cited below see also Giorgio Cencetti, “Vecchi e nuovi orientamenti nello studio della paleografia,” La Bibliofilia 50 [1948]: 4–23; Franco Bartoloni, “Paleografia e diplomatica III,” Relazioni del X Congresso internazionale di scienze storiche I, 1955, 434–43; Françoise Gasparri, “Pour une terminologie des écritures latines,” Codices Manuscripti 2 [1976]: 16–25). This difficulty is all the greater when crossing language barriers as an established term in one language may receive different translations in another. It is partly for this reason that the Comité International de Paléographie was founded in 1953, seeking to establish an authoritative standard terminology and classification (Bernhard Bischoff, Gerard I. Lieftinck, and Giulio Battelli, Nomenclature des écritures livresques, 1954). In practice the Comité has enjoyed only limited success so far, as the difficulties are considerable, but some classifications of script are now widely accepted (some responses to Nomenclature are by L. M. J. Delaissé, Scriptorium 9 [1955]: 290–93; Georges Despy, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 34 [1956]: 174–81; Alessandro Pratesi, La Bibliofilia 58 [1956]: 44–47; Pavel Spunar, Eunomia 1 [1957]: 35–40, and 95–97; Emmanuel Poulle, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des chartes 123 [1965]: 558–61; for further comment on the book and its reception see also Albert Derolez, op. cit., 22). Perhaps the most successful of these classifications is that of the Gothic script-system. This is most closely associated with Gerard I. Lieftinck (Nomenclature des écritures livresques, 1954, 7–14; Manuscrits datés conservés dans le Pays-Bas I, 1964, xiii–xvii) and has been accepted by most scholars, although sometimes with modification. Also fairly well established is the system of scripts used in the late Antique period, as is Caroline minuscule and the broad categories of the so-called national or early medieval scripts of Western Europe. However, finer distinctions within those categories are much less widely accepted. Some scholars have used descriptive terms which incorporate elements of geography (Ernst Crous and Joachim Kirchner, Die gotischen Schriftarten, 1928, described as a “trend-setter” in this respect by Derolez, op. cit., 16); some have used chronology (David N. Dumville, “English Square Minuscule Script,” Anglo-Saxon England 16 [1987]: 147–79; and 23 [1994]: 133–64);

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some “extra-paleographical” features; and many have used national designations; but others have rejected all of these as overly prescriptive except in particular and unusual cases (Derolez, op. cit., 13–17). Similarly, some scholars have striven for very precise terminology with many narrow categories (for example David Dumville, op. cit.), whereas others have used far fewer and much looser categories for the same material (for example Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writing Up To 1500, 2005). J. Reproductions and Facsimiles An important development in the study of scripts, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards, has been a steady improvement and increase in photographic reproductions. Such reproductions have been used in paleography since the field’s inception, as demonstrated by the engravings in the fifth book of Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (1681; 2nd ed. 1709), and by those prepared by Humphrey Wanley for his Librorum Veterum Septentrionalium Catalogus, 1705. However, such engravings were expensive to produce and were dependent on the accuracy or otherwise of the engraver. Since the mid-19th century, entire volumes and even series of facsimiles have been issued (Leonard Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeography, 1984, 23–66). The importance of such facsimiles both for teaching and research is hard to overstate as they allow access to a large quantity of material, thereby allowing students to gain experience with a variety of different manuscripts (for the importance of which see Montague R. James, in Richard W. Pfaff, op. cit.), allowing scholars to view otherwise inaccessible collections (Elias A. Lowe, Palaeographical Papers II, 1972, 575–76), or allowing the study of entire corpora of widely dispersed material (Elias A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, 11 vols. plus supplement, 1934–71; Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, ed. Albert Bruckner et al., 1954–; and the many different volumes of the Dated and Datable Manuscripts [Manuscrits datés] produced under the auspices of the Comité Internationale). As well as a steady increase in the quantity of material thus reproduced, so there is also an increase in the quality as new technologies are developed. Engravings were replaced by photographic reproductions and in some cases by full color. Microfilm, although poorer in quality than a good printed facsimile, has nonetheless resulted in great improvements by way of reduced cost and improved portability (one example among many is the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile series, 1994–). Most recently, manuscripts are also being digitalized and published electronically. One of the earliest and perhaps the best-known of these is Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf (2000); this was very influential in its time but was produced before the technology was sufficiently mature (Manfred Thaller, re-

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view of Electronic Beowulf, The Medieval Review 01.02.09 [2001], online). Photographic and display technology is now much improved and much cheaper, and so a large number of manuscripts are now available as CD-ROM editions with integrated text, commentary, and images (the Bodleian Digital Texts series; the Scholarly Digital Editions series), and libraries are increasingly publishing on-line photographs of entire manuscripts or even collections with minimal or no annotation (Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis, www.ceec.uni-koeln.de; Codices Electronici Sangallenses, www.cesg.unifr.ch; Irish Script on Screen www.ibos.ie). Indeed, this has led to discussion of the theory and practice of representing text and image on the screen (for example the Occasional Papers of the Canterbury Tales project, edited by Norman Blake and Peter Robinson). Facsimiles in any format certainly open up what was once a rather closed and specialized field (Raymond I. Page, “On the Feasibility of a Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Glosses: The View from the Library,” Anglo-Saxon Glossography, ed. René Derolez, 1992, 77–96) by granting wide access to high-quality images, but they do come with some risks. Both scholars and librarians are sometimes guilty of treating a facsimile as an adequate substitute for the original manuscript: scholars to avoid the trouble of seeing the original, and librarians as an excuse to restrict access to the same. However, photographic reproductions capture only limited codicological information about a given manuscript, and finer details of the script – including ink color – are lost in all but the very best photographs. Thus tension remains between the need to preserve manuscripts and the desire to consult them, and it seems unlikely that this difficulty will be fully resolved for some time yet. K. Quantitative Methods The increase in reproductions, and particularly digital images, alongside the difficulties in nomenclature and in subjective responses to script has led to debate over the role of quantitative methods in the field. One of the first and best-known proponents of purely quantitative analysis is Léon Gilissen who constructed a “typical” alphabet on the basis of extensive measurements of scribal hands (L’expertise des écritures médiévales, 1973). His method was largely rejected as impractical and flawed and has generally fallen out of favour (Alessandro Pratesi, “A proposito di tecniche di laboratorio e storia della scrittura,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 [1977]: 199–209; Bernhard Bischoff, op. cit., 44[–45] n. 48; J. Peter Gumbert, “Commentare ‘Commentare Bischoff’,” Scrittura e Civiltà, 22 [1998]: 402–03). However, the movement toward more objective measures had begun, as Bernhard Bischoff noted in 1979 (op. cit., 3). Bischoff’s comments sparked a furious debate over the

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role of objective measurement in modern paleography. On the one side are Bischoff, Alessandro Pratesi and others who argued against the application of rigid mechanical methods to a fluid, “human” process (Alessandro Pratesi, op. cit., 199–209; see also the debate by Giorgio Costamagna et al., “Commentare Bischoff,” Scrittura e Civiltà 19 [1995]: 325–48; 20 [1996]: 401–07; and 22 [1998]: 405–08). On the other hand are Gilissen, J. Peter Gumbert, and others; these include Albert Derolez who has criticized the tendency of paleographers to make subjective assertions and thereby produce “an authoritarian discipline, the pertinence of which depends on the authority of the author and the faith of the reader” (op. cit., 9; see also J. Peter Gumbert, op. cit.; and rebuttal by Alessandro Pratesi, “Commentare Bischoff: un secondo intervento,” Scrittura e Civiltà 22 [1998]: 405–08). Nevertheless, it is still unclear even among proponents of the quantitative approach how best to implement such a procedure. One possibility, used by Gumbert amongst others, is to count the frequencies of different letter-forms, to compare which letter-forms were used by which scribes, and to use this information to group like hands with one another on a statistical basis (see especially Anscari M. Mundó, “Méthode comparative-statistique pour la datation des manuscrits non datés,” Paläographie 1981, ed. Gabriel Silagi, 1982, 53–58; and compare J. Peter Gumbert, “A Proposal for a Cartesian Nomenclature,” Miniatures, Scripts, Collections: Essays presented to G. I. Lieftinck IV, ed. J. Peter Gumbert and Max J. M. de Haan, 1976, 45–52; Gerard Lieftinck and J. Peter Gumbert, Manuscrits datés conservés dans les Pays-Bas II, 1988, 22–35; Bernard J. Muir, “A Preliminary Report,” Scriptorium 3 [1989]: 273–88). However, a statistical approach requires a large volume of data taken from a large set of samples, and this in turn demands much tedious effort from the paleographer. This tedious effort could in principle be obviated by feeding digital images into a computer for analysis, and it seems likely that such methods will prove valuable provided that sufficient caution is exercised in interpreting the results. Such approaches are presently in their infancy, but are now beginning to receive increased attention (Arianna Ciula, “Digital Palaeography,” Digital Medievalist 1 [2005], online; Peter A. Stokes, “Palaeography and Image Processing: Some Solutions and Problems,” Digital Medievalist 3 [2007/8], online; M. Rehbein et al., eds., Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter, 2009).

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Select Bibliography Elias A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores, 11 vols. plus supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–71; 2nd ed. of vol. 2, 1972); Jean Mallon, Robert Marichal, and Charles Perrat, L’écriture latine de la capitale romaine à la minuscule (Paris: Arts et métiers, 1939); Giorgio Cencetti, “Vecchi e nuovi orientamenti nello studio della paleografia,” La Bibliofilia 50 (1948): 4–23; Bernhard Bischoff, Gerard I. Lieftinck, and Giulio Battelli, Nomenclature des écritures livresques du IXe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1954); T. Julian Brown, “Latin Palaeography since Traube,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1959–63): 361–81; Berthold L. Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanist Script (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960); Elias A. Lowe, Palaeographical Papers 1907–1965, 2 vols., ed. Ludwig Bieler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Leonard E. Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. by Daíbhí Ó Cróinín and David Ganz (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; rev. imp. 1991; German original 1979); T. Julian Brown, A Palaeographer’s View: Selected Writings of Julian Brown, ed. Janet M. Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts (London: Harvey Miller, 1993); Albert Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Peter A. Stokes

Semiotics of Culture A. Definition Modern semiotics, sometimes called sign theory, has had a transformative impact on linguistic, literary, and cultural studies through the 20th century, despite resisting clear definition or forming a truly coherent discipline. For Medieval Studies in the 21st century, its lasting effect has been on the shape and methodology of research orientation: as the profession has shifted from the recovery and editing of texts and artifacts to the interpretation of those materials, semiotics has influenced the development of a critical attitude focused on investigating how symbols, images, cultural details, and social situations signify together in a text through networks of references and associations that may no longer be obvious to readers removed in time and place. This essay will survey briefly some of the key terms and models associated with modern semiotics, examine some modifications by medievalists, and then look to the sign theories espoused by medieval writers themselves and how they have been utilized in connection with trends in critical theory.

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The second half surveys some examples of recent studies in medieval culture employing semiotic methods. Semiotic analysis has been applied to such fields as linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and literary, aesthetic, and media theory. In Medieval Studies, it has been utilized in textual, philosophical, artistic, and codicological analyses, all of which contribute to the study of medieval culture in different ways. Semiotics has not been widely institutionalized as an academic field in its own right. Umberto Eco at the University of Bologna could be cited as a rare exception, holding a chair in Semiotics there since 1971 (following a stint as Professor of Semiotics at Milan beginning in 1966). Lund University in Sweden has a Department of Semiotics, as does the University of Tartu in Estonia. Semiotics could be defined briefly as the study of “semes” or signs, the smallest units of meaning, deriving from the Greek  « (semeiotikos) signifying an interpreter of signs. However, semioticians have not come to universal agreement in defining exactly what constitute “signs,” nor in adopting a single specific theoretical orientation or methodology. Many simply recognize “signs” intuitively, and concentrate on the complex ways that signs interact in order to produce meaning in a society. The earliest use of the term, “techne semieotike,” connoting medical symptomatology or “the craft of signs,” dates to at least five centuries B.C.E in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor. The term “semeiotics” (synonymously “semeiology” and “symptomology”) became associated with the fields of medicine, chemistry and physics in the 16th century in Latin and French texts, describing the diagnostic branch of medicine and the interpretation of symptoms. In English, Henry Stubbes first employed the term in 1670 in a treatise on the science of interpreting signs. John Locke then treated “semeiotic” as one of three categories in the compass of human understanding, calling it the “doctrine of signs” that links knowledge of the nature of things and rational actions that must be taken in the pursuit of any ends (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, book 4, chapter 21). The founding of modern semiotics is generally attributed to two thinkers working independently of one other in the late 19th century. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) defined what he called “semiology” as a “science which studies the role of signs as part of social life” (Course in General Linguistics [manuscript dated 1894, published posthumously 1916], trans. Roy Harris, 1983, 15–16). He is considered the founder of modern linguistics as well as co-founder of semiotics. The American pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Saunders Peirce (1839–1914) defined “semiotic,” using Locke’s term, as the “formal doctrine of signs” (Collected

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Writings, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, 1931–1958, 2.227). The rather fragmented reflections of these two thinkers have been much elucidated and adapted by subsequent theorists. From Peirce and Saussure, modern semiotic inquiry branches out along numerous different lines. Establishing the “Copenhagen School,” Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1966) was most influenced by Saussure, and in turn influenced the Lithuanian-French linguist Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) who established the “Parisian School” of semiotics, which included Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and film critic Christian Metz (1931–1993) (Greimas, incidentally, also authored several dictionaries of Old and Middle French). Semiotics was coupled with structuralism for many French theorists and those who followed them. It was also important for the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), who subscribed more to the Peircean line of thought. He helped found the “Moscow School” in the 1910s and the “Prague School” in the 1920s, and was involved with the Copenhagen School during the 1940s. His structuralism influenced the Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–1990), and also French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and theorist Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), whose “post-structuralist” work impacted French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930– 2004), the Bulgarian-French psychoanalayst and feminist Julia Kristeva (1941–), as well as the American feminists Judith Butler (1956–) and Jane Gallop (1952–), and many others. Other Peircean semioticians include the American philosopher Charles William Morris (1903–1979), whose starting point was pragmatism, and who later engaged in the movement of logical positivism; the Englishmen Ivor A. Richards (1893–1979), and Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) whose jointly published The Meaning of Meaning (1925) was one of the founding documents of the New Criticism in literary studies; and Hungarian-American Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001), who coined the terms “zoosemiotics” and “biosemiotics,” examining nonhuman use of signs. The Italian medievalist and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–) is noteworthy for bridging the structuralist and Jakobsonian traditions in his work. B. Theoretical Models of the Sign, Its Value and Functions The beginning point of semiotic analysis for both Saussure and Peirce is a model of the sign. Saussure’s dyadic model hypothesizes two components of any sign: the “signifier” (French signifiant), or the “sound pattern” (image acoustique) or, more precisely, the hearer’s psychological impression of the sound, given by the evidence of the senses; and the “signified” (signifié), the

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concept, the more “abstract” (or “immaterial,” as Saussure preferred) element. It is the association of both signifier and signified that produces the sign. The sign results from the combination of the whole; it does not function if the signifier is meaningless, or the signified formless. Saussure emphasized that this conception of meaning was structural and above all relational, rather than referential: the sign has no absolute “value” independent of context, but rather depends on the whole system of interrelated signs, what he called “language” (langue). In this conception, signs do not “stand for” or “reflect” reality: they are arbitrary with respect to reality, and indeed “construct” reality. This caveat has been integrated into the critical theory of the later 20th and 21st centuries, in Medieval Studies particularly with recent trends in philology in which the complexities of semiosis take precedence over the notion of a more transparent “mimesis,” a methodology that treats texts as reflecting the reality of a “people.” This stance was espoused by many 19th-century medievalists such as Gaston Paris, and to some degree persists in the discipline (see the series of articles in Speculum 65.1 [1990]). Lévi-Strauss nuanced this notion of the arbitrariness of the sign noting that while the sign is arbitrary a priori, it ceases to be so a posteriori: once the sign comes into historical existence it cannot be changed arbitrarily (Structural Anthropology, 1972, 91). This distinction is important for scholars such as medievalists studying historical sign systems, in contrast to modern media scholars studying signs in the context where they are being produced and received. Peirce, meanwhile, was formulating a triadic model of the sign: 1) the “representamen,” being the form which the sign takes, i. e. the material or immaterial thing that “addresses” someone to stand for something, creating 2) the “interpretant,” the sense made of the sign; and finally 3) the “object” to which the sign refers. Peirce emphasizes, like Saussure, that it is not these components alone that matter but rather their interaction, which is what he specifically called “semiosis.” Peirce’s “representamen” is akin to Saussure’s “signifier,” but his “interpretant” diverges from the “signified,” being itself a sign in the addressee’s mind. Peirce emphasized that semiosis was a process, a view that contrasts with Saussure’s presentation of semiology as structural. Saussure has been criticized for being too synchronic in this regard, not allowing interpretation over time into his equations. Peirce’s model comprises a notion of “unlimited semiosis,” basically the idea that a sign could lead to an infinite number of successive interpretants, as each representation of a sign can itself be nothing but a representation, a notion elaborated by Eco (see Opera Aperta, 1962) and also critiqued as ulti-

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mately having limits (The Limits of Interpretation, 1990). For later theorists such as Eco and the founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Yuri Lotman (Universe of the Mind, 1990), it follows that semiotics confirms indeterminacy of meaning by privileging interpretation, at the same time that it seeks to reduce indeterminacy (one might even use the term “relativity,” as so much modern theory developed alongside the popularization of Einstein’s revolutionary notions of physics) through the activity of explanation. Another important model is the “semiotic square” (Greimas’s term) or chiasmus, adapted from the “logical square” of scholastic philosophy and from Jakobson’s notions of contradiction and contrariety in language, with important contributions from Fredric Jameson’s ideological criticism. The procedure takes a set of binary opposites, such as light/dark or public/ private, and to make the square opposes each term to its “absence”: i. e. not light/not dark. Aristotle’s Metaphysics presents several such pairs, adopted as canonical opposites in the later commentary tradition: form/matter, natural/ unnatural, active/passive, whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/ not-being. The four elements and humors of ancient and medieval medicine are also treated as pairs set in a square, and also expanded in the twelve-point circle of the zodiac: fire/air/earth/water, sanguine/choleric/melancholic/ phlegmatic. One can then examine the choices made: what is present in the text, what has been omitted, and what “goes without saying”? The square has been used to analyze the “superficial” structures (“syntagms”) of language that compose texts, as well as the “deep structures” of narrative (“paradigmatic analysis”). F. R. P. Akehurst applied the semiotic square to the troubadour’s traditional position of supplication towards the “Domna” (lady) in “The Bottom Line of Love: A Semiotic Analysis of the Lover’s Position” (Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, Proceedings of the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, The Netherlands, 1986, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper, 1990, 1–10). Observing that the troubadour normally remains poised between hope and fear, Akehurst found that the semiotic square added another dimension: instead of the polarity of love-hate (for example), the four poles could shade the lady’s indifference: love – not hate – not-love – hate. He critiqued this model, however, for remaining completely static, illustrating only a status quo. For that further dimension of movement, he found in analyzing the lyric lexicon that the frequently used term “merce” (mercy) offered “the way off the bottom line” of “not hate – not-love.” The semiotic square thus offered an appealingly clear and teachable tool for analysis, but one that presented distinct limitations in its neatness.

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C. Signs, Texts, and Media Signs can take such forms as words, images, sounds, and other sensory experiences such as odors, textures, and flavors. All thoughts are signs; but nothing is a sign until it is interpreted as “signifying something” other than itself, according to Peirce. This is the crux of the work of semiotics: how are signs interpreted meaningfully? Modern semiotics has concentrated most on “texts,” which can be verbal or non-verbal and can exist in any “medium,” but in general they are understood to be recorded in some way. The term “medium” refers to the way signs and texts are communicated: they way they are recorded (print, manuscript, email, film, painting), the way they are transmitted (live performance, telephone, newspaper, taped recording …), or the sensory “channels” employed (visual, aural, oral, tactile …). Every medium imposes its own constraints on expression, being uniquely suited to communicating certain information, and inherently failing to communicate other things. The facilities and constraints of different media may be studied under the rubric of genre theory, which often shares some of the concerns of semiotics, but remains a distinct methodology. Media studies has become its own branch of modern semiotics, championed by theorists such as Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980). In works such as Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), and The Medium is the Message (1967) he argued that the means by which people have communicated through history have determined their thoughts, actions, and lives. He located a major shift in human consciousness with Gutenberg and the invention of print technology, leading ultimately to the even greater shift of the advent of the electronic age in the 20th century. He was not a historian per se, but rather drew much of the historical basis for his arguments from Eric Havelock (1903–1988), a British classicist who broke from standard views of Greek antiquity as a continuous tradition to argue there was a radical shift between the 6th and 4th centuries B.C.E., with the transition from oral to literate culture. With McLuhan’s student Walter J. Ong (1912–2003), Havelock is credited with foundational work in orality studies, which have been important for medievalists, who like classicists deal with fragmentary texts that hint at oral forerunners, and who have been concerned with finding authentic “original” versions through webs of intertextuality. Mary J. Carruthers (1941–) refutes Ong and McLuhan’s notion that “post-Gutenberg” culture organizes language and memory visually in a way that “pre-Gutenberg” culture did not, demonstrating that antique and medieval models of the mind’s organization were spatial and visual, and indeed that the lay-out of the memory was a chief concern of medieval education (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Cul-

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ture, 1990, 32). This contradicts the notion that language is oral, rather than written, an idea that became canonical with the work of Saussure, LéviStrauss, and others. This is an example of how medievalists’ careful examination of texts can offer necessary nuance and revision to the universalizing tendencies of theorists (particularly such as Saussure, Greimas, and many of the structuralists). D. Symbols and Other Modes Saussure differentiated between linguistic signs, which he considered arbitrary, and “symbols,” never wholly arbitrary. Peirce, in contrast, defines symbols as signs that refer to the object they denote by an association of general ideas, which is then interpreted according to a rule or habitual connection (Collected Writings, 2.292–97). He classified words, sentences, and books as “symbols,” because they are constructions based in convention. The symbolic mode is one of three modes of interpretation of signs discussed by Peirce. In the “iconic” mode a sign represents its object “by its similarity.” Icons are not necessarily visual, although he said that all pictures are icons: they resemble what they represent, but never in every respect. In the “indexical” mode, an index “indicates” something, generally with a real, contiguous, or direct physical connection. Examples include a clock indicating the time, or a photograph being used as forensic evidence. The index is neither defined by similarity or analogy nor by an intellectual operation. Peirce observed that a sign can be simultaneously a symbol, an icon, and an index, or any combination thereof, depending on how the sign is used. Historical evidence shows a tendency for signs to progress over time from indexical and iconic forms to symbolic forms. Lévi-Strauss expressed this in terms of progression from motivation to arbitrariness in the conceptual schemes of a given culture. Among medievalists, Michel Pastoureau has distinguished himself as scholar of symbols, going so far as to propose that the history of symbols should be one of the disciplines of the future. He has studied a broad range of categories, from colors (notably in Bleu: Histoire d’une couleur, 2000), clothing (particularly with his case study of stripes, L’étoffe du diable, 1991), and heraldry (e. g., his thesis Le bestiaire héraldique médiéval, École des Chartes, 1972; Figures de l’héraldique, 1996, and other works) to flora and fauna, to literary characters. In his Une histoire symbolique du Moyen-Age occidental (2004, 11–25), he reflects that the symbolic sensibility was so habitual for medieval authors that they hardly experienced the need to alert readers of their semantic or didactic intentions, or indeed to define the terms they use. This presents lexical problems for historians of symbols: modern languages lack the precision,

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diversity, and subtlety for rendering effectively symbolic vocabulary of Latin and the medieval vernaculars. The modern term “symbol” collapses the different Latin terms signum, figura, exemplum, memoria, similitudo; the modern “signify” similarly can correspond to the Latin array of denotare, depingere, figurare, monstrare, representare, and indeed significare, each of which has its own nuanced sense. Pastoureau argues that for medieval thinkers Saussure’s concept of the arbitrary sign would be utterly foreign: for them, all signs were motivated. He proposes three codes or processes by which signs were produced and interpreted in the European Middle Ages: 1) etymology, 2) analogy, and 3) certain types of what could be called semiology. Etymology is possibly the most important as well as easiest point of entry for defining and characterizing medieval signs. “Ontological truth” was understood as expressed by words, as words. Medieval practices of etymology often clash with more modern humanist conceptions of an evolution of languages: Pastoureau notes that one must keep in mind that the medieval etymological exercise was often speculative, ignorant, inane, or even humorous, as in the case of Isidore of Seville, who sometimes amused himself at the exercise, but whose work was nonetheless generally accepted as authoritative. Knowing the origin of a word was seen as permitting a deep understanding of the nature of the thing it signified. Analogy was the main form of medieval sign construction, based on the resemblance between two objects, notions, or words. Whether in medieval theology, mirabilia, or daily life, such correspondences are frequently drawn between deceptive appearances and hidden truths, and they are often understood to function on multiple levels and through different modes. Modern science and beliefs often impede comprehension of the original logic and meaning of medieval signs. He gives the example of colors, which modern readers generally interpret through the rules of the color spectrum. But whereas the spectrum indicates that blue is a cold color, in medieval culture blue was hot, being the color of the sky. Pastoureau divides the semiological sign processes into three subcategories. In “divergence” (écart), a character, object or animal exactly resembles all the others in its group, with the exception of a single detail, and it is precisely that detail which imparts its signification. Examples include Moses, whose horns (originating in the mistranslation of the Hebrew) make him all the more holy because horns are normally associated with things bestial and diabolical. Another example is vermillion (red) clothing and arms, generally worn by challenging or upsetting knights, who appear from another world to provoke the hero; yet in Chrétien de Troyes’ telling, when young Perceval defeats the Vermeil Knight

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and seizes his arms, he himself becomes a red knight: the inversion of the code sets him apart as an extraordinary hero. Related to this kind of divergence is the “meeting of extremes”: for instance, in many painted representations, Judas is shown with red hair, a sign of his treachery; but in scenes of the kiss of betrayal, Christ is shown with a red beard. The executioner and his victim are symbolically united by color. The third semiological symbolic process is what Pastoureau calls “pars pro toto,” the part for the whole. This is based on the understanding of relations between macrocosm and microcosm, and the scholastic principle that the human realm is a model of the celestial realm in miniature. A prime example of the pars pro toto process is the cult of relics: a bone fragment represents the saint. This is not merely abstract: the lord’s seal was accepted as the lord’s person, and the castle WAS the land conceded as fief. Pastoureau underlines the importance how the medieval symbol was stronger and more real than the person or notion it was designed to represent because truth was situated outside of reality, and superior to it. Pastoureau posits that medieval symbols are better characterized as “modes of intervention” than as having a particular, static signification. His examples of how to interpret colors are particularly useful. Red should not be treated as a consistent signifier of passion or sin, but rather as an indicator of violent intervention: red means sudden change, for better or for worse. Green is not automatically envy, springtime, or decay, but rather cause of rupture and disorder, to be followed by rebirth. He argues that the current methods of analyzing medieval symbols are often anachronistic because they are too “rational,” dependent on our own constructs of truth and logic. He argues, contrary to the hopes of the structuralists, that there are no universal symbols. It should be noted that Kristeva used the term “semiotic” (without the ‘-s’) in a unique application, set in opposition to what she calls the “symbolic” to characterize two constituents of the signifying process of language. The two forces are in constant dialectic, theoretically, and it is this that determines the type of discourse produced (e. g. narrative, theory, poetry); the subject would be always both semiotic and symbolic. She associated the “symbolic” with patriarchy, God, and the Law of the Father, and the “semiotic” with the pre-Oedipal drive, the drives and pulsions of the mother’s body, rhythms and flows, contradiction, and heterogeneity. She proposed that the semiotic was potentially revolutionary because it could disrupt the symbolic order, and thereby the patriarchy (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974; Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 1980). Others such as Butler have challenged this treatment of the term as subversive for privi-

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leging the patriarchy as bound to permanent dominance (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990). E. Semiotics in Medieval Studies The early 1960s saw a rise in popularity of semiotics and general linguistics among scholars across the disciplines and specialities. Eugene Vance has analyzed this trend as a response to students’ need to challenge dominant models of historicism, whose teleological views of historical progress could not be disassociated from the horrors of recent events such as World War II. The semiotic approach was exciting in that it was novel, sophisticatedly technical, and also transhistorical and transcultural, offering the possibility of eluding the determinations of national language and culture. By the 1970s and 80s, the optimism for the transhistorical potential of semiotic discourse had waned, although to some degree Greimas’s principle of antihistoricism endured as one of the movement’s legacies (“Chaucer’s Pardoner: Relics, Discourse, and Frames of Propriety,” New Literary History 20.3 [1989]: 723–24). By the late 1970s and 1980s, a generation of medieval scholars trained in the close reading methods of the New Criticism was coming of age, and consciously seeking to apply new critical methodologies such as semiotics to a variety of texts and problems. In these years Hans Robert Jauss remarked that older interpretive methodologies such as positivism or the idealistic approach that treated texts as directly mirroring medieval life were exhausted, but that the “highly touted modern methods” of structural linguistics, semiotics, and phenomenological or sociological literary theory had not yet gelled into paradigms (“The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,” New Literary History 10.2 [1979]: 181–229, 182; orig. German in Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur, 1977). The use of semiotic approaches met with debate and resistance. Some traditional philologists viewed the imposition of modern theories on medieval documents with skepticism, critiquing it as anachronistic. Semiotic methods involved a cumbersome baggage of neologisms, such that articles and papers seeking to apply semiotic argument were heavily front-loaded with theory and definitions of terms, leaving little space to discuss the texts in question themselves. Jonathan Evans (whose 1984 Indiana University dissertation was A Semiotic of the Old English Dragon) characterized this period of the 1980s as a “pre-paradigm phase,” marked by debates concerning legitimate methods serving to define a new school of thought rather than produce agreement (“A Consideration of the Role of Semiotics in Redefining Medieval Manuscripts as Texts,” Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature, ed. Mikle Dave Ledgerwood, 1998, 3–38).

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By the beginning of the new millennium, the paradigm shift would appear to have been effectuated. Explicit reference to semiotic or structuralist apparatus is now rarely foregrounded. It can be said, however, that numerous scholarly efforts now devote themselves to exploring the complex ways medieval objects and symbols signify as systems. F. Medieval Semiotics In his 1978 presidential address to the Medieval Academy, Gerhart B. Ladner addressed how advances in the study of signs over the preceding hundred years might be related to the study of medieval symbols. Like many medievalists of these decades, spurred by the institutional pressures to “modernize” by adopting the critical theories of structuralism, Ladner turned instead to antique and medieval theories of the nature and functioning of symbols rather than directly apply the structures posited by Saussure, Peirce, or one of their epigones: he saw that a medieval sign theory already existed. He discussed the classical Greek notion of the “symbolon” as literally a “drawing together,” such as the contributions of different persons to a shared meal or a contract. The two main meanings attached to symbols as they are now understood date to the Church Fathers. Symbols were a “drawing together” of the main truths and doctrines of Christianity, enunciated through the Symbols and Creeds of the Apostles of the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, which would become the basis of theology and liturgy. Another sense of “symbol” brought it closer to that of the sign, connoting a sign with deeply spiritual and even mystical meaning. Origen uses the term to discuss the problems of Biblical exegesis: whatever happens in an unexpected or strange way in Holy Scripture is a sign or symbol. The writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite explained that the divine and the heavenly appear in the guise of such symbols in his treatise On the Heavenly Hierarchy (c. 500). Hugh of Saint-Victor in the 12th century explained similarly, “a symbol is a collecting of visible forms for the demonstration of invisible things.” From these mysterious symbols, medieval culture created “signa data:” fixed insignia, objects that signified rulership or office (e. g. crowns, scepters, or mantles). Augustine distinguished between signa propria, such as words, and more complex signa translata, which combined primary and secondary significations to function more like tropes (e. g. the ox who toils and should therefore be fed, which signifies the spiritual man who deserves to be supported for his labors). To illustrate the “overwhelming richness of medieval symbolism” Ladner offered a case study of trees, looking at the mythology of Tree of Life in various cultures, and then the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil of Genesis and Revelations, which furnished wood for the

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Holy Cross, and which furnished a model for consanguinity trees in legal documents. Ladner observed, following Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1970), that much of the medieval attitude toward signs continued into modern times, only becoming problematic in the later 19th century when the old signs had gradually lost their validity as developments in industry and science transformed modes of thinking. Ladner hypothesized that the Symbolist movement in art and poetry punctuated the new sense of the alterity of medieval symbols, even as it sought to revive them. He critiqued Saussure’s arbitrary model of the sign for representing language as a structure of differences, “yes-no” decisions, which reduced language to a system of binary opposites. For the Christian Middle Ages, the universe was exemplarist and anagogical as well as analogical, hierarchical as well as gradualist: it was in no way a structure of irreducible opposites. (“Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison,” Speculum 65.2 [1979]: 223–56). Stephan Meier-Oeser has traced “Medieval Semiotics” through the patristic and scholastic commentary traditions. While he cautions that there was no unified, precisely defined discipline of semiotics in the Middle Ages, there was certainly a complex field of elaborate reflections on the concept of sign, its nature, function, and classification. Much of it took the form of the commentary tradition, beginning principally with Aristotle’s introductory chapter of On Interpretation. Highly influential were Augustine’s De Dialectica, which modified the abstract Stoic concept of the sign, defining a sign instead as “something that shows itself to the senses and something other than itself to the mind”; and Boethius’ 6th-century commentaries on Aristotle’s Peri Hermaneias which study the interrelations between the four elements of linguistic semeiosis mentioned by Aristotle: external objects or things (res), mental concepts or representations (passiones, intellectus), spoken words (voces), and written words (scripta), which compose what Boethius called the “order of speaking” (ordo orandi) (see John Magee, Boethius on signification and mind, 1989). In the late 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) revived the Aristotelian idea of “mental words” (verbum mentis) which are identical for all humans, and “similitudes” of mental things. Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was a major theorist of logic and linguistic signification, which he recognized as unable to account for all the different kinds of sign production in his De Dialectica. As the university of Paris and other schools grew in the 13th century, teachers of the “trivium,” the first three of the seven traditional Liberal Arts (grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric) were concerned with developing a science of grammar either starting from the general concept of sign, as was the case for Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1293, the most import-

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ant medieval sign theorist) and the unknown author now known as Ps.-Kilwardby (active 1250–1280); or taking grammar as a theory reflecting on the fundamental structure of sign systems (the grammatica speculativa of the University of Paris, ca. 1270; and Thomas Erhart, ca. 1300). In the theologicophilosophical tradition, semiotic discussions are most prominently featured in the Commentaries on the Book of Sentences (Liber Sententiarum) of Peter Lombard, particularly those on book 1, distinctions 1, 3, and 27 on signs as subjects in general, and book 2.10 and 4.1 on angelic and sacramental signs. (“Medieval Semiotics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL = ). The volume Archéologie du signe (ed. Lucie Brind’amour, and Eugene Vance, 1983) assembled articles originally presented in 1977 at a colloquium on theories of language and signification from Augustine to the scholastic thinkers. The volume represents an effort among medievalists typical of a number of such initiatives of that time to reconnect semiotics with its intellectual heritage, generally neglected by contemporary theorists. The articles focus for instance on medieval theorists of meaning such as Roger Bacon (Thomas Maloney, “Roger Bacon on the Significatum of words,” 187–211, and “The Sumule dialectices of Roger Bacon and the Summulist form,” 235–49), and William of Ockham (Claude Panaccio, “Guillaume d’Occam: Signification et supposition,” 265–86). Another center of both medieval and modern semiotic debate was the problem of falsehood and dissimulation (Marcia Colish, “The Stoic Theory of Verbal Signification and the Problem of Lies and False Statement from Antiquity to St. Anselm,” 17–43; François Recanati, “Une solution médiévale du paradoxe du Menteur et son interêt pour la sémantique contemporaine,” 251–64), and also judicial proof (R. Howard Bloch, “Merlin and the Modes of Medieval Legal Meaning,” 127–44). Also discussed is the problem of meaning (“sens”) for vernacular authors such as Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris, and particularly developed in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, a dream vision whose “senefiance” the authors promise to gloss, and in which figures such as Reason, Nature, and Genius argue over the split between words and their meanings (Daniel Poirion, “De La Signification selon Jean de Meun,” 165–85) (it is worth observing that “senefiance” became a by-word for Romance language medievalists, notably becoming the title of the journal published by the Center for Medieval Studies at Aix-en-Provence). Jonathan Evans, in an article arising from a 1987 colloquium on semiotics and medieval textuality, expresses the obligation of medieval se-

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miotics as threefold: 1) to search for explicit theories of the sign and signification in medieval learning itself; 2) to extricate implied or embedded theories from medieval cultural materials; 3) to apply modern semiotic theory to the analysis and criticism of cultural artifacts from the Middle Ages. (“A Consideration of the Role of Semiotics …,” 7–8). These goals have been realized at least to some degree. However, critical theory, semiotics included, continues to be a point of tension between medievalists and their modernist colleagues. As Stephen G. Nichols has observed, medievalists are frequently viewed by modernists as hostile or indifferent to contemporary theory, as medievalists have claimed that modern theories are anachronistic, or superfluous to the theories employed by medieval thinkers (“The New Philology, Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 [1990]: 1–10). Conversely, it might be ventured that contributions by medievalists to discussions of modern theory have often been ignored. Certain theorists have performed readings of medieval texts (for instance Lotman’s Universe of the Mind looks at the semiotics of Dante’s Divine Comedy; Eco’s Opera Aperta examines Dante’s Thirteenth Epistle; Kristeva muses on the meaning of love for Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, the troubadours, and in medieval representations of the Virgin in Tales of Love, 1987), but these have not made it into the mainstream academic bibliographies on these figures. In short, a divide remains, and likely will persist. G. Medieval Aesthetics and Umberto Eco Umberto Eco deserves a special place of his own in the discussion of semiotics and Medieval Studies. He began his career as a medievalist philosopher, with his 1954 dissertation at the University of Turin dealing with the problem of esthetics in Thomas Aquinas. Although he was initially inspired by spiritual aspects of Aquinas’ work, as he wrote he gradually removed himself from them, finding himself left with a formation in the scholastic methodology. His many subsequent projects have been heterogeneous, to the point of playfulness, a mark of his approach, but have often incorporated medieval topics in unexpected ways. He studied the medieval features of James Joyce’s esthetics (The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, 1982; trans. Ellen Estrock, 1989), a study also ranging to the logic of symbols of 15th-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa and Renaissance writer Giordano Bruno. In his analysis of how different texts create a system of reading instructions intended for collaboration by “model readers” in The Limits of Interpretation, he observed that medieval interpreters looked for a plurality of meanings while always maintaining an identity principle (tending toward unified meaning, with no contradiction possible), while for the Renaissance reader the ideal text would

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allow the most possible contradictory readings (coincidentia oppositorum). Two of his best-selling novels have medieval settings: The Name of the Rose (1980; trans. William Weaver, 1983) plays on medieval rose imagery with its title. The wit and philosophy of William of Ockham appear in its Franciscan-detective hero William of Baskerville. Its plot centers on a lost (hypothetical) text of Aristotle on comedy, repressed by a monk who fears that laughter would open the holy orders to derision. This weaves in theological debate over humor in the 13th century, in which Aquinas distinguished good disposition to happiness (eutrapelia) from the immoral bolomachia. Baudolino (2000; trans. William Weaver, 2002) takes place in the 12th century at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Its hero is the clever polyglot and renowned liar Baudolino, who narrates his own story, which includes fabrication of travels to the Orient, a journey in search of the mythical Prester John, and encounters with the monsters featured on maps at the edges of the world, all themes tying medieval and post-modern concerns. Eco is a remarkable figure for his successful bridging of many binary terms: medieval/modern, academic/popular, erudite/playful. H. The Semiotics of Gender, Genre, and the Body While semiotics has largely failed to become institutionalized in its own right, its influence on the successfully institutionalized Feminist, Gender, and Queer Studies has been marked. The contributions are too numerous to be listed comprehensively here, but of note are the works of Caroline Walker Bynum, which study how gender and the human body signify through medieval religious and literary representations (see Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrel, and Paula Richman, 1986; Fragmentation and Redemption, 1991; Metamorphosis and Identity, 2001). Some studies of representation of gender by number of leading scholars are collected in Constructing Medieval Sexuality (ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, 1997). Simon Gaunt deals in Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (1995) with some medievalists’ concerns in adopting semiotic and structuralist theory and applying a constructionist concept such as “gender” to medieval texts where it is absent, but agrees with Carolyn Dinshaw that it is important for post-modern literary scholars to ask the questions of their generation of literary texts, and also that “our present-day critical concerns turn out to be quite medieval” (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 1989, 17). Like Gaunt and others mentioned here, Sarah Kay has studied how constructions of literary genres and gender are intertwined, and represent semiotic explorations of problems of status and power (e. g., in The Chansons de Geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions, 1995).

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I. From Feminism to Material Culture In the 1980s, Georges Duby assembled the work of a number of cultural historians in the multi-volume History of Private Life (see particularly vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 1988). This project typifies an emerging approach: amid a recognition that much historical evidence was the product of limited group of educated men in the service of men in power, feminist scholars were interested in other voices, those neglected or repressed in the dominant types of records. One approach to reconstituting that neglected history was to turn away from the “public life” represented in official chronicles to examine “private life,” such as it might be gleaned from details in literature, art, and the archeological record. Danielle Régnier-Bohler surveyed topics such as the meaning of the use of space (solitude, sociability), types of architecture (tower, orchard, hall, chamber), dining and feasting, games and courtly activities, lovers’ secret signs (gifts, messages, mirrors, purses, combs, rings), courtly love (gossip and jealousy), family relations, women and marriage, hygiene, and clothing (“Imagining the Self: Exploring Literature,” 312–93). Another important study of how objects and notions in courtly culture create complex meaning is Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (trans. Thomas Dunlap, 1991; orig. German, 1985). The topics listed here remain of strong interest to medieval scholars, and continue to generate studies that both openly and implicitly employ semiotic strategies. Kathryn Gravdal’s Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Medieval Texts: A Study of Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (1989) explicitly proposed a semiotic theory of transgressive medieval parody, redefining the parodic genre in terms of a triple mode of textual production (text, intertext, and interpretant), and using that formal model to show that the representation of upheaval in social classes does not necessarily constitute a direct commentary on medieval society. Her work Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (1991) moved away from explicit formal semiotic models, but ultimately asked a semiotic question: what do representations of rape signify? Indicative of the newer direction in scholarship is the approach extending the study of meaning from the confines of one type of text (i.e. vernacular fiction) to law, moralists’ sermons, and other types of discourses. E. Jane Burns’ notion of “Bodytalk” proposed a strategy for interpreting the female body as it has been encoded within male-authored medieval literary texts, and a way of hearing medieval heroines speak within and against the social and rhetorical conventions used to construct them (Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature, 1993). She further extends

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the enquiry to women’s clothing and needlework in Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Literature (2002). The key word is “through:” to appreciate the signs constituted by representations of women’s bodies and garments, one must read through the many filters and mutations wrought by stereotypes, fetishes, fantasies, social norms and misogynist traditions. Burns did not use explicitly semiotic or structuralist apparatus, but draws on feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and Kristeva. J. Semiotics of Clothing and Material Culture Certain works from the heyday of the trend in modern semiotic theory demonstrate the unique utility of sign theory for “decoding” the complex language of dress, but also show the limitations of that application. An early structural ethnographic attempt to “catalogue” the costume of a particular culture, Petr Bogatyrev’s The Function of Folk Costume in Moravian Slovakia (1937; trans. Richard G. Crum, 1991), was influential for folklorists, structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss, and semioticians such as Sebeok, Barthes, and Jakobson with whom he collaborated on other publications. Bogatyrev establishes costume’s function as the expression of the attitudes of its wearers, a key assumption in later work on dress and consumption. In sorting through the vast and often contradictory data on Moravian folk dress, he discovered not so much clear rules as a number of unconscious patterned regularities, which moreover were highly unstable over time. This established the fundamental complexity and ambiguity of studying the meaning of costume. Barthes, in the preface to his Système de la Mode (1967), called his work a relic from the era of the discovery of semiology, already dated at the time of its publication. The semiological project the book describes, a study of the relation between real clothing and “written” clothing, was modified at midcourse, as the author realized that while clothing does constitute a code, it remains an ambiguous object, resisting attempts to document and classify it by both linguistics (verbal signs) and semiology (objectal signs). Barthes uses the term “shifters” to describe the discontinuous, elliptical movement from real garment to fashionable description, by way of technical patterns and specifications, with much information lost along the way (what type of zipper? How does it look from the back?), and only key details retained, leaving a fashionable proclamation, e. g. “polka dots for spring.” One of the lasting lessons that remains from this study is that in the cultural system that is fashion, it is not the clothing itself that matters, but how words exchanged regarding the item make it desirable or undesirable. For historians of cul-

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ture, this equates to an imperative to privilege texts as records of attitudes and desires, rather than treat them as mere descriptions, or use to attempt to correlate them to contemporary images to create constructions resembling modern fashion magazine plates and commentaries (see Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, 2007). In The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (2002) Susan Crane probes how Maytime and Charivari costumes, chivalric insignia, and the cross-dressing of Joan of Arc manipulate complex cultural codes of gender, social status, rhetoric, and morality to both create and disrupt courtly decorum. In 2005, Robin Netherton, and Gale Owen-Crocker began publishing the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles in response to the increasing interest in these aspects of material culture at the annual medieval congresses. Clothing, once dismissed as a frivolous topic not worthy of serious study, relegated to the realm of antiquarian curiosities and the “minor arts”, had come of age. Articles include strictly descriptive and technical studies, as well as some that could be classified as descendants of the semiotic approach which look at how particular garments, colors, dyes, textiles or styles “signified,” whether in textual or artistic representations or artifacts, and often a combination thereof. The assemblage of studies from many disciplines – history, art history, literary studies, fashion technology – effectively mirrors the cross-disciplinary impact of semiotics. In an editor’s essay, drawing together the diverse articles in an anthology titled Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture (2001), “Robes, Kings, and Semiotic Ambiguity” (379–85), Stewart Gordon addressed the complex array of meanings that could be associated with gifts of clothing, a practice in Semitic, Persian and Central Asian tradition (termed khil’at in Arabic) and practiced with some similarities and many differences in the medieval West. He used the term “rich semiotic ambiguity” comfortably, without recourse to definitions or theoretical apparatus, to conclude that robing might have been part of a larger ceremonial metalanguage in use from Eastern Europe to China and Japan employed in political diplomacy, and certainly not to be dismissed as “mere spectacle,” as well as to underline that its use remains complex and problematic. K. Semiotics of Other Aspects of Medieval Culture The paradigm of semiotic ambiguity can be observed in many types of studies that involve the rethinking of the historical meaning of objects and how they are used in texts. David Cowling addresses the question of why nearly all medieval and early modern descriptions of buildings and architec-

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ture read more like the jeweled city of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelations than realistic depictions of contemporary Gothic structures, concluding that such descriptions are not meant to be mimetic, but rather a signal to the reader to read allegorically (Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France, 1998). Cowling’s approach is primarily rhetorical; there is nothing explicitly semiotic in it. The broader impulse is to open up the interpretation of an object to a range of possible, complexly referential significations, drawing on the tools of a variety of disciplines and methodologies. Further examples could be drawn from recent interest in medieval and early modern medicine. Heather Webb attempts to transcend modern reader’s assumptions about the organ called the “heart” to better interpret how that term signifies complexly in “Catherine of Siena’s Heart” (Speculum 80.3 [2005]: 802–17), as the saint brings the technical medico-theological debate of the encyclopedists of her time to the service of her own discourse of sanctity. Debra Higgs Hassig (later, Strickland) took a semiotic approach to the shifts in meaning between images and texts in medieval bestiaries (Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, 1995). She uses semiotic methods to uncover ideologically oriented meaning generated by the images, looking particularly at the signifying potential of the aesthetic code (e. g., color, line, composition, spatial arrangement, size, framing elements and other nonmimetic devices). She applied a similar approach to representations of humans, marginal to European society in Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003). Deriving in part from gender and “queer” studies, monsters as creatures at the limits of human signification has been a prominent topic of late, notably in the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Medieval Identity Machines, 2003; see the contributions in his edited volume, Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 1996). The medieval drama is fruitful area for the application of semiotic methods, as Sunhee Kim Gertz has observed, particularly for analyzing how performance creates meaning. The evidence regarding medieval performance is sketchy, and medievalists must rely on texts more than scholars of later periods, so semiotics offers an approach to what fragments are extant. Gertz argues that semiotic density informs basic framework of the play, examining the case of the Digby Magdalene play in which the eponymous heroine is a sign signifying Everyperson. The staging itself is a synecdoche of the world. Rather than offering a purely modern semiotic reading, Gertz integrates antique and medieval theory into her interpretative strategy, saying readers must respond to the play in Augustinian terms: the world is God the Author’s text; humans are instances of God’s words, and they

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can be redeemed through redirection to God. The staging of the active Christian life as pilgrimage through perspective of Augustinian semiotics should neither be read as merely figurative nor entirely literal: mortals are instances of God’s words. In this medieval semiotic system, what is figurative to mortals is literal to God. The wine scenes during banquets demonstrate the abuse of God’s formerly univalent signs by worldly uses and mortal language, but also the possibility of redemption by the return to God. Mortal commands in the play are weak, but Christ’s word “revertere” is all-powerful. (“The Drama of the Sign: The Signs of the Drama,” in Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature, ed. Mikle Dave Ledgerwood, 1998, 85–104). Early 21st-century dissertations explicitly applying semiotic methods to medieval drama include Andrea R. Harbin, Space and Movement on the Medieval English Religious Stage (Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 2006) and Brian Conin, ‘With seven sadde beset’: The Iconography of the Deadly Sins and the Medieval Stage (2005). L. Directions As the reader may sense from this survey, semiotics are everywhere and nowhere in 21st-century Medieval Studies. The terminology of Peircean, Saussurean, and Greimassian semiotics, heavy with neologisms and definitions, is hard to find, and may indeed doom a piece to obscurity, rejected as anachronistic, theory-bound, or outmoded. The notion that objects and ideas must be handled with a careful respect for their ambiguity in the context of a broad social matrix of meaning has, in contrast, been assimilated, and characterizes the best of recent scholarship. It is difficult to find a study dating any later than the 1980s featuring a purely semiotic approach. However, many scholars have come to view studies that do not incorporate notions of signification and representation as inferior. In an attempt to define the semiotic approach to textual analysis, Daniel Chandler contrasts it with rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and content analysis (Semiotics: The Basics, 8). In Medieval Studies, unlike modern media studies perhaps, the four types of analysis he distinguishes often overlap and complement one another, particularly in more sophisticated and developed work. Broad undertakings such as “a semiotics of medieval dress” are not the order of the day; more promising are closely focused studies that examine a single topic or a category in as many types of sources as are available – and that examine absence as well, when the item is not represented.

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Selected Bibliography Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002), an evolving online version of the text is available at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/Documents/S4B/; History of Semiotics, ed. Achim Eschbach and Jürgen Trabant (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983); Christina Farronato, Eco’s Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); A. J. Greimas and François Rastier, “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,” Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 86–105; Gerhard Ladner, “Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison,” Speculum 65.2 (1979): 223–56; Michel Pastoureau, Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Âge occidental (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

Sarah-Grace Heller

Slavic Studies A. Definition One of the defining aspects of Slavic medieval scholarship is its division into two areas of research: Slavia Orthodoxa and Slavia Romana. These terms were coined by the philologist Riccardo Picchio in the middle of the 20th century to create a framework for understanding the distinctive cultures of the Slavs (Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, 1984). The word “Slav” was first used by chroniclers in the 6th century to refer to the tribes with whom the Byzantine Empire came into contact in Southeastern Europe. The late documentation of the history of these peoples is due in part to the fact that the Slavs were migratory tribes, who had an oral, rather than written, culture. As a result of the lack of a recorded history, evidence of a “medieval period” of Slavic history appears far later than it does in the West. It is uncertain where the geographical homeland of the Slavs was, but it is assumed that the Slavs were ethnically related tribes that migrated from Central Asia sometime between the 2nd and 6th centuries A.D. and settled in the Danube region of Europe before dispersing north into Russia and south into the Balkan lands in the early Middle Ages. The original Indo-European language from which all Slavic languages descend is Proto-Slavic. This in turn developed into Common Slavic, the language of the early Middle Ages, and finally into the individual Slavic languages around the 12th century (Terence R. Carlton, The Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic Languages, 1991). By the 6th century, the Slavs encompassed an enormous swath of territory, extending from Russia in the north to Macedonia in the South and from

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portions of what is today modern Germany in the West and to Ukraine in the East. There is evidence of a large community of Slavs in Bithynia (in Asia Minor) as well. These Slavs were forcibly resettled by the Emperor Justinian II in the 7th century, and, it is presumed, played a role in the cultural exchanges that took place in the 9th and 10th century between monasteries and scriptoria in Byzantium and Bulgaria. Because of this vast geographic territory, the Slavs fell under the political influence of either the Byzantine Empire (Slavia Orthodoxa) or the Latin West (Slavia Romana). Those Slavs who lived in Eastern Europe (the Russians, Eastern Ukrainians, Bulgarians, and Serbs) adopted the Cyrillic alphabet and after the schism of 1054 became part of the Eastern Orthodox Christian church; the Slavs in the West (the Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Poles, and Western Ukrainians), often under intense pressure from Rome, adopted the Latin alphabet in place of the Slavic Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts and became part of the Roman Catholic Church. The history of Slavia Romana is intertwined with that of Western Europe, whereas that of Slavia Orthodoxa runs parallel to that of the Byzantine Empire. The educated poets, scientists and scholars of the Western Slavic territories were often bilingual, with Neo-Latin serving as the language for intellectual discourse. There are many Slavic Latinists (among them Marko Marulic,´ Cosmas of Prague, and Nicholas Copernicus) whose works played an important role in the development of Western European culture. These Slavs had a distinctively Western intellectual tradition as well. Prague University in the Czech Republic was founded in 1348, Krakow’s Jagiellonian University in Poland in 1364, and Zadar University in Croatia in 1396. These institutions were closely tied to the Western European idea of the “universitas.” For the Slavs of Slavia Orthodoxa, however, the primary literary language was Old Slavic and, in the earliest stages of the Middle Ages, Byzantine Greek. The orientation of these scholars was towards monastic centers such as Mt. Athos. Indeed, monasteries, particularly in Bulgaria, were involved in vast translation projects from Greek. This transference of intellectual knowledge has led medieval Slavia Orthodoxa to be viewed as a “Graeco-Slavic” culture. After the fall of Constantinople, Moscow, in fact, was regarded as a successor to the Byzantine Empire and referred to as the “Third Rome.” An important focus of Byzantine-Slavic research, thus, is on shared hagiographical and other texts, the development of Bulgarian hesychasm, and the influence of South Slavic stylistics (the Second South Slavic Influence) on Russian literature and language (Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras).

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B. The Development of the Slavic Literary Culture The study of Slavic medieval culture is further complicated by the fact that these ethnic groups shared a pan-national literary tradition as well as their own tribal folklore. Thus, although there are folk works that are specific to an individual culture (for example, the circa 12th century Ukrainian-Russian epic the Igor’ Tale and the 14th-century Serbian epic of Prince Marko), there are many works that are transnational. Unlike other ethnic groups in Europe, the Slavs did not have their own written language until the late 9th century A.D. Slavic Medieval Studies only really begins with the start of that literary culture in 863; the other evidence of their existence has been determined largely through either archaeological or secondary (non-Slavic) sources, such as the Vita Constantini cum translatione s. Clementis. 863 A.D. was the year in which the Byzantine missionaries, Sts. Cyril and Methodius, created the first Slavic alphabet and translated portions of Greek Biblical literature into a language that is known today as Old Church Slavic, the Macedonian dialect of Slavic with which they were familiar. Because Slavic literature originated from this same ecclesiastical literature, all of the national literatures have common antecedents. Slavic medieval national literatures are commonly referred to as Church Slavonic or Church Slavic, and all look to the founding of their cultural heritage in the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition. The Slavic languages fall into three language groups: eastern (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian), Western (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and various extinct languages), and South Slavic (Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian) (see Terence R. Carlton, Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic Languages, 1991). In the early and mid-20th century, the French scholars Antoine Meillet and André Vaillant codified their research into the shared origins of these languages in the brilliant work Le Slave commun (1934). Much of the reconstruction of Common Slavic has been done using 10th- and 11th-century manuscripts that constitute the oldest Glagolitic and Cyrillic manuscripts, the Marianus, Zographensis, Assemanianus, and Suprasliensis Codices, and the Savvina Kniga (Carlton, Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic languages, 40). This rigorous early scholarship is perhaps one for the reasons why a major approach to literary scholarship even today is textual and employs a historical-philological method. Other texts that medieval Slavs share are narratives that recount the deeds of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, who are credited with establishing a native Slavic literary tradition. These works form the basis of one of the earliest and most fruitful branches of Medieval Slavic scholarship, CyrilloMethodian Studies.

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C. What Constitutes Slavic Medieval Studies? Equally distinctive to Slavic Medieval Studies (again due to the broad geographical regions that the Slavic territories encompassed) is the disagreement among historians as to what constitutes the Middle Ages. In Slavia Romana the Middle Ages generally are seen as beginning in the 5th century and ending in the late 14th century, an approach favored by medievalists in Western European Studies. In the Eastern Slavic lands, in particular Russia, the Middle Ages are seen as lasting until the eighteenth century. The Medieval period encompasses the founding of the early Russian states and principalities, among them, Kievan Rus’ and Novgorod, the rise of Muscovy, and the emergence of imperial Russia – a far later chronology of events than in the West. Lastly, Medieval Studies is approached very differently as a discipline in Slavic countries than in non-Slavic ones. Slavic nations obviously regard their own Middle Ages as a historical continuum – art, culture, literature, music, and so forth are taught as part of a national curriculum. At the same time, for much of the 20th century, research in the communist countries of the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union used a Marxist methodology; it was only after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the political changes in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, that scholarship was free to develop in a more organic manner. In the West, Slavic Medieval Studies are largely the domain of two academic departments, Slavic Languages and Literatures and History. Because of the emphasis on Russian history, literature, and culture (Russia is largest of all the Slavic nations), much of the attention focuses on this region of the world, and, as a result, Slavic scholarship often assumes a Russo-centric approach. D. History of Scholarship The discipline of Slavic Medieval Studies can be said genuinely to have begun in the mid-19th century. The previous century had seen the publication of important national works, but these were largely descriptive in their nature. Bishop Adam Stanisław Naruszewicz (1733–1796) wrote the first medieval history of Poland; Václav Fortunát Durych (1735–1802), a Czech Latinist, published his investigations into Slavic (Czech) philology and cultural history; and Mikhail Shcherbatov (1733–1790) published a monumental work, The Russian History from the Most Ancient Times. However, the mid-19th century coincided with the discovery and analysis of the earliest Slavic manuscripts and the collection and publication of oral folk tales from the rural regions of Russia and Eastern Europe. These discoveries opened up a new, historical-cultural avenue for research, which held much promise for such

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fields as anthropology and ethnology. Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750), perhaps the most important early ethnographer, wrote Russian History Dating Back to the Most Ancient Times. In the early 19th century August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) published a five-volume study of the first Russian Chronicles. The early 19th century saw the first publications of anthologies of folk literature. The Kirsha Danilov collection of byliny (epic folk songs) was published first in 1806 and then in a more complete edition by Kalaidovich in 1818. In the 1860s P. N. Rybnikov published his massive collection of Russian epic folk songs, which was supplemented in 1873 by A. F. Gil’ferding (Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Terras, 66). These byliny may date to as early as the 10th and 11th century and are an important source for multidisciplinary research. This interest in early Slavic cultures was not confined to Russia alone. The Serbian philologist Vuk Karadzi c´ (1787–1864) collected South Slavic folksongs and folklore that are found in the four-volume Srpske Narodne Pjesme. Nearly 150 years later, the American scholars Albert Bates LORD (1912–1991) and Milman Parry (1902–1935) would prepare their own compilations of South Slavic epics and examine the connection of these works to an older Homeric tradition, pointing to the continuing importance of field work within the discipline. Also of significance for Russian Medieval Studies was the publication of the Slovo o polku Igoreve (the Igor’ Tale) in 1800 in Moscow. The Igor’ Tale is perhaps the most controversial of all the early Slavic texts and one of the most studied. The original manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1812 during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, and throughout its history its origins have been source of great contention. The latest contribution to this debate is Edward L. Keenan’s monograph Josef Dobrovsky´ and the Origins of the Igor’ Tale (2004), which suggests that Dobrovsk y, ´ a well-known Bohemian philologist, invented the tale himself. Dobrovsk y´ (1753–1829) who helped establish the field of comparative Slavic linguistics, systematized early scholarship on Czech and Old Church Slavonic literature. Keenan’s viewpoint, while in the minority, points to the volatility within the field concerning the “canon” of Slavic medieval literature. There is, in fact, a disagreement within the field as to whether a core group of common texts actually exists and if they can be studied as such. This skepticism has been applied to another well known and equally controversial text, the Vita Constantini (the Life of St. Cyril of the Slavs). The hagiography, which at one time was thought to have little historical significance, was eventually proven, through the pioneering work of the historian Francis Dvorník, to contain important factual data, and is, in fact, used today as a primary document in Photian Studies.

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The growth of medieval scholarship coincided with the emergence in the early 19th century of Pan-Slavism in the South Slavic and Western Slavic lands and what is called Slavophilia in Russia. Pan-Slavism, which arose as a response to the Slavs’ position as subjugated ethnic minorities within the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, was essentially a Romantic movement that harkened back to the transnational heritage that the Slavs shared. In much the same manner, Slavophilia focused on the distinctiveness of Russian culture and its independence from Western civilization. The early 19th century also was dominated by the vision of a national revival, in particular among the South Slavs. This cultural reawakening was accompanied by an interest in “native” literature, folklore, and culture. Important medievalists from the 19th century include Vatroslav Jagi c´ (1838–1923), who investigated the early grammar and morphology of the Slavs and contributed to the emerging field of Slavic linguistics; Marin Drinov (1838–1906), who established the field of Bulgarian historiography; Frantisek ˇ Palack y´ (1798–1887) who wrote D ˇejiny národu ceského, a monumental history of the Czech lands; Pavel Fafa rík ˇ (1795–1861), a philologist who published Slovanské starozitnosti ˇ (1837), and Geschichte der südslawischen Literatur (1864); Aleksei Shakhmatov (1864–1920), whose work led to a reconstruction of the Rus’ Primary Chronicle; and Vasilii Vasil’evskii (1838–1899), a prominent historian, who shaped the direction of Byzantine Studies in Russia. The onset of the 20th century and the massive disruptions caused by the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, and the establishment of an “Eastern Bloc” determined the direction of Slavic medieval literary scholarship, and, in particular, its internationalization. Many prominent Slavic scholars left their countries of origin or, if they stayed, were compelled to use a Marxist theoretical framework. A prime example of this is the career of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), who spent the mid-portion of the century as a political refugee. Born in Russia, Jakobson helped found the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which was associated with the literary movement known as Russian Formalism. In the 1920s he left for Prague, where he received his doctorate and contributed to the Prague Linguistic Circle. He spent much of the war in Scandinavia and in 1941 immigrated to the United States, where he held joint positions at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The breadth of his medieval scholarship, which was only one of his interests, included extensive work on the Igor’ Tale, Cyrillo-Methodiana, Slavic morphology, medieval hymnody, and Czech medieval literature. His research, which sits on the cusp of literary theory and linguistics, heavily influenced the post-World-War scholars who followed him (Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Terras, 207–210). Equally representative is the

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career of Dmitrii Likhachev (1906–1999). Likhachev, who was perhaps the most important scholar of Old Russian literature and culture in the 20th century, spent four years in a labor camp before becoming a professor of history at Leningrad State University. He was the author of many books, among them, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, Poetics of Old Russian Literature, and Development of Old Russian Literature: Epochs and Styles. E. Modern Literary Theory and Slavic Studies In general, literary theory of the 20th century, including formalism, poststructuralism, and semiotics, had an enormous impact in shaping how medieval literature and culture were taught in Western Europe and in the United States. In the Soviet Union, however, much of the theoretical underpinnings of this research was generated at home. While ostensibly a work of formalist analysis, Vladimir Propp’s 1928 Morphology of the Folktale dramatically influenced cultural anthropology and the study of folklore. In the 1960s, Iurii Lotman (1922–1993), Vyacheslav Ivanov (b. 1929), and Vladimir Toporov (1928–2005) founded the Tartu-Moscow School in Estonia. These theoreticians used the then new field of semiotics, or the study of sign systems, as their overarching theoretical model, and examined the broad interconnections among all aspects of human civilization. “Culturology” has had an impact on subsequent medieval scholarship. For example, works of Boris Uspenskii such as Linguistic Situation in Kievan Rus’ and Its Importance for the Study of the Russian Literary Language and The Semiotics of the Russian Icon are informed by this literary approach. By the late-1980s, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, semiotics and cultural history became established frameworks for research. The field of medieval Slavic history was equally affected by the postWorld-War-II migration of Slavic (often Russian) scholars to the West. These scholars contributed to the prestige and growth of the academic departments they became associated with. Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001), who was born in St. Petersburg, went on to a career at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. His most important work, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, focuses on the Byzantine Slavic cultural inheritance. Another émigré, the Moravian priest Francis Dvorník (1893–1975), who was affiliated for much of his career with Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., also focused on the “Graeco-Slavic” world, in particular on the historical and religious significance of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission. George Vernadsky (1887–1973), who emigrated after the Russian revolution to Prague and later to the United States, was a specialist in Kievan Rus’ at Yale University.

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F. Archeology and Slavic Studies Archaeological research has had an impact as well on the development of the field. The 1951 discovery of birch-bark letters in Novgorod, Russia and the surrounding area that dated from the 11th to the 15th century substantially have changed the way medievalists view early literacy and family life. These letters, which number in the thousands, are still being analyzed for their cultural and linguistic value. Equally important are excavations of early Rus’ settlements, Muscovite monasteries, and archaeological digs at Lake Lednica, Poland, Brno, Czech Republic, Nin and Galovac, Croatia and elsewhere that have added to our physical knowledge of the Slavic Middle Ages. A number of investigative studies into the culture of medieval Rus’ were published in 1974 in Kultura srednevekovoi Rusi: Posviashchaetsia 70-letiiu M. K. Kargera. G. Centers of Medieval Slavic Studies Perhaps one of the most striking observations about Medieval Slavic Studies is that there is no one research community, a situation that may change in the coming years with the maturation of the Internet, the building of large electronic national textual databases, and improved communication among all scholars through the use of email, the newsletters of the Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) and Slavonic and East European Mediaeval Studies Group (SEEMSG), and the listserve, H-EarlySlavic, affiliated with the H-Net project (http://www.h-net.org/ess/). Of most promise is the work being done with computer imagining: for example, the Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters (a joint project of David J. Birnbaum of the University of Pittsburg and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), the optic-electronic research and modeling of Greek, Slavonic and Russian (Denis Tsypkin of the Laboratory for Codicological Research and Scientific Expertise of the Manuscript Department at National Library of Russia), and online repositories such as the Croatian National Corpus. These developments are only just beginning, however, to shape the direction of future research in the field. H. Key Journals Much of the research in Medieval Slavic Studies continues to be published in two traditional formats: the peer-reviewed journal and the monograph. A review of citations in the International Medieval Bibliography for the past twentyfive years show the key journals indexed in Slavic Studies for this period. These journals are in alphabetical order, the Slavic publications, Acta Poloniae Historica, Byzantinoslavica, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, Kritika, Otechestvennaia

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istoriia, Przegl‰d Historyczny, Rossiskaia arkheologiia, Srednie veka, Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury, Voprosy istorii; and the Western European and U.S. publications, Analecta Bollandiana, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, Canadian American Slavic Studies, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Journal des savants, Onomastica, Oxford Slavonic Papers, Russian History, Russian Review, Revue des Études Slaves, Scando-Slavica, Slavic Review, Social History, Ukrainian Quarterly, Ukrainian Review, and Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A review of the last twenty-five years of journal articles and conference proceedings indexed in the International Medieval Bibliography shows that the focus of this scholarship has been overwhelmingly on medieval Russia. The six broad areas of research – anthropology, archaeology/architecture, economics, history, literature, and religion – are rooted in disciplinary norms, and if they have changed over time, they have done so in tandem with scholarly developments in the respective fields. Traditional Slavic medieval scholarship has always been to a large degree cross-disciplinary; 20th- and 21st-century trends, thus, have focused on the application of current literary, historical, and political theory to current problems of interest. I. Current Research Historical research has focused on Russian expansion during the early to late Middle Ages, its relationship to the other civilizations and peoples – the Mongols, the Vikings, the Byzantines, the Poles, and so forth, historiography based on the chronicles and other quasi-literary documents, and works about the rulers and statesmen of the period. Of particular interest is the work that has been done in terms of what can be called “economics and cultural anthropology.” Research has focused on taxation in Russia, Old Russian monetary markets of the 10th century, land ownership, property patterns, the formation of urban centers, and trading and commercial relationships. Diverse anthropological topics include the life of women, family, settlement studies, and fertility cults. The fields of “linguistics and literature” have focused largely on key medieval texts, often viewed in a cross-disciplinary context. Research has focused on the Russian chronicles, epics, folktales, and hagiographies, devotional literature, the relationship of St. Stephen of Perm, and national languages, the impact of the Greek language on the culture of Rus’, travel accounts, and scribal activities. Scholars in the related fields of “architecture and archaeology” have written on urban studies, the archaeological reconstructions of medieval towns, chamber graves and their objects, and wall paintings, icon painting, and church architecture.

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Lastly, scholars of “religion” have examined the relationship between secular and canon law, the impact of the Bulgarian Church on the Russian Church, paganism, the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, heresies such as the Strigol’niki, and the Russian reception of Christianity. A sampling of English language monographic titles of the late 20th century shows an equal diversity of subject matter. Titles that address religious studies include Paul Bushkovitch’s Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1992); Paul Meyendorff’s Russia, Ritual and Reform: the Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the Seventeenth Century (1991); and Samuel H. Baron’s and Nancy Shields Kollmann’s Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (1997). In historical and economic studies one can include Thomas S. Noonan’s The Islamic World, Russia and the Vikings, 750–900: The Numismatic Evidence (1998); George P. Majeska’s Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1984); Donald Ostrowski’s Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (1998); and Richard Hellie’s The Economy and Material Culture of Russia 1600–1735 (1999). In linguistics and literature one can place Terence Carlton’s Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavs (1991); Alexander M. Schenker’s The Dawn of Slavic: An Introduction to Slavic Philology (1995); and Gail Lenhoff’s The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Social-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts (1989). Lastly, in Cultural Studies, we can find Henrik Birnbaum’s and Michael Flier’s Medieval Russian Culture (1984); and Eve Levin’s Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (1989). J. Conclusion While this brief overview gives only a glimpse of the wide variety of topics that have been addressed by late 20th-century scholarship, it is perhaps instructive to look at the focus of some of the most recent work being produced. In the 21st century, philologists are studying cross-cultural text transmission, with Ruthenia (Ukraine/Belarus) as the place of contact for a number of traditions. Moshe Taube of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been reconstructing the transmission of a Jewish Aristotelian corpus to the East Slavs, and Julia Verkholantsev of the University of Pennsylvania works on the transmission of a western Catholic corpus into East Slavic via Bohemian channels. Both scholars are represented in Speculum Slaviae Orientalis (UCLA Slavic Studies IV, ed. Vyacheslav Ivanov and J. Verkholantsev, 2005). Scholars have been reevaluating the impact of Byzantine learning on the organization of text and knowledge in Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy, and offer-

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ing a more nuanced assessment. Ingunn Lunde’s Verbal Celebrations: Kirill of Turov’s Homiletic Rhetoric and its Byzantine Sources (2001) demonstrated the learnedness of Kirill of Turov’s rhetoric, and the forthcoming annotated translation of Nil Sorskii’s writings by David Goldfrank (Georgetown) shows that Nil assimilated a sophisticated body of ascetic-philosophical thought. The history of private life has found a response in Serbian scholarship in the recent Privatni zivot ˇ u srpskim zemljama srednjeg veka (2004). Priscilla Hunt’s work on the Novgorod Wisdom icon, opens up new paths for reading and understanding the icon. The western discipline of the history of the book is starting to make inroads into the field as well. Contributions include Simon Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 (2002), which is informed by orality-literacy theory and the history of material texts, and Robert Romanchuk’s Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North (2007), which is positioned within the history of reading and textual interpretation. The recent publication of P. M. Barford’s The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (2001) is another notable inclusion, as is Marshall Poe’s ethnographic study A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (2001). Recent scholarship on Muscovite history has focused on four broad areas: social elites and court and administrative life, social groups and their interactions, the application of theoretical models such as semiotics to a wide variety of social and cultural activities, and popular culture (Robert O. Crummey, “The Latest from Muscovy,” The Russian Review 60.4 [October 2001]: 474–86). Select Bibliography P. M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Terence R. Carlton, Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic Languages (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1991); Francis Dvornik, The Slavs in European History and Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962); D. S. Mirsky and Francis J. Whitfield, A History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings to 1900 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Reader’s Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature, ed. Robert B. Pynsent and S. I. Kanikowa (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt, Aspects of the Slavic Language Question, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT, and Columbus, OH: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies; Distributed by Slavica Publishers, 1984); Slavonic Encyclopaedia, ed. Joseph S. Rou cek ˇ (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949); Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

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Social Constructionism A. Definition Many scholars credit the notion of social constructionism to the work of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966). In their work, the authors looked at the way individuals acting in certain roles form systems and then those systems in turn become part of an institutional structure or paradigm. Reality itself becomes a social construct over time, and as such, often moves to the level of the unconscious to the extent that it becomes naturalized. In essence, people do not see reality as a social construct, but social constructionists argue that indeed it is. From the 1970s and 1980s to the present, scholars in the humanities, drawing on the works of Foucault, Derrida, and sociologists in particular, have begun to critique the master narratives of history and culture. They have found in these discourses, emblems of social construction that were previously understood to be “natural” or a product of biology, theology, or law. In a real sense, social constructionism treated in any period of scholarly inquiry reflects an attempt to raise questions about the “natural versus the unnatural” and “essentialism versus constructionism.” In Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (1989) Diana Fuss observes that “Constructionism, articulated in opposition to essentialism and concerned with its philosophical refutation, insists that essence is itself a historical construct. Constructionists take the refusal of essence as the inaugural moment of their project and proceed to demonstrate the way previously assumed selfevident kinds (like ‘man’ and ‘woman’) are in fact the effects of complicated discursive practices” (2). Even in the Middle Ages, where the concept of biology as destiny was the clear assumption, Joyce Salisbury (“Gendered Sexuality”) has shown that biology turned into an ideology by a body of texts from physicians, philosophers, and theologians, who actually created that notion of biology as essential (Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 1996). Thus social constructionist critics assume that deep-seated ideologies drive hegemonic discourse that scholarship must unpack. B. Historical Developments/Trends in Scholarship With respect to Medieval Studies, the notions of social constructionism are so pervasive in scholarship on history and literature that a survey of the topics explored across the disciplines would be almost impossible. At the same time, the most significant work in social constructionism has been its

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challenges to the established domains of gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, and the definition of humanity itself. This volume includes a survey of scholarship on feminism and masculinity studies in Medieval Studies. Clearly these studies look at the way gender roles were constructed by particular social classes and in light of geographical location. At the same time, some of these studies also focus on the notion that even gender is not a fixed element, an aspect particularly noted in masculinity studies that examine the hegemonic paradigms that were certainly in place in the larger medieval culture. Studies of sexuality, including those that have used queer theory, have noted that even sexuality itself, while certainly rooted in the materiality of body, is also a construct. Originally the attempt in queer studies was to find a space for same-sex desire in cultural and literary practices. More recently, queer studies has challenged the constructed quality of heterosexuality in medieval literature. With respect to race/ethnicity, studies have examined the way in which the West, the East, Jewishness, Muslims, and the geographical other have been constructed. Postcolonialist studies have contributed much to uncovering the surface and latent colonial ideologies present in medieval texts. Finally, even the concept of what it means to be human has been the focus on social constructionist scholarship. In a very real way, social constructionism has challenged the current and future academy by questioning older historical and literary paradigms. C. Social Constructionism and Topics in Medieval Studies C.1. Gender and Sexuality Perhaps no area of Medieval Studies has seen a more significant output of scholarly production than have gender and sexuality. In this volume, there are essays on the scholarship particularly devoted to feminism, masculinity, and queer studies. Here the purpose is to examine how social construction is functional in medieval conceptions of gender and sexuality in broad terms. Joan Cadden (Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture, 1993) sets out in great detail the medical and theological texts that were used to construct particular notions of the body, including its management. Central to her argument is the importance of particular characteristics of each sex. She calls into question the work of Thomas Laqueur and the single-sex notion of the body (Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990). In keeping with Cadden’s study is the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 1996). In addition to defining “norms” of sexual behavior and gender awareness among males and females, some of the essays also examine variances from those

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norms. The intention of the essays is to draw questions relative to natural/ unnatural boundaries, based on evidence of practice. While biology is certainly important, biology or sex itself is also a social construct. The first and second wave of feminism whose implicit message was that the relationship between men and women was more a matter of social conditioning than biology had an impact on the study of women in medieval literary texts and history. Implicit in these studies is a point made in the “Introduction” by Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski in their edited volume Women and Power in the Middle Ages (1988). They write that “We read a series of texts – social and written – to gain an understanding of experience. Literature shapes a culture’s sense of itself; similarly, history, in being filtered through individual consciousnesses, is created by them and cannot accurately be described as objective” (13). Thus texts are themselves constructions of social environments and even those social circumstances are social constructs. The April 1993 issue on feminism in Speculum, a very traditional medieval journal, has been hailed as a significant defining moment for social constructionism in Medieval Studies, not just because it identifies and challenges the hegemonic versions of masculinity, but because it introduces a greater sense that even the literary critic is a social construction. Building on all of these ideas was Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (ed. Claire Lees, Thelma Fenster, and Jo Ann McNamara, 1994). In the “Introduction,” Claire Lees notes that “There are, of course, many ways of studying men and many different male experiences that still need to be recovered” (xvi). The volume sees the study of men and women as being directly connected, thus offering a correction to earlier versions of feminism that treated maleness in a monolithic way and all males as spokesmen for patriarchy. If both the categories of sexuality and gender and of males and females were understood as social constructs in scholarship, it is only natural that once the boundaries had been established that scholars would look for the blurring of sexuality. Queer studies of medieval texts began to surface and challenge the dominant versions of the historical and literary narrative, even those that were treated as social constructions along natural/unnatural lines by previous scholars. Premodern Sexualities (ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 1996) draws heavily on the sexual constructions of Michel Foucault and examines a number of medieval texts for sexual expressions that prefigure the modern and in some way provide evidence for critique of modern practices and prejudices. Carolyn Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (1999), contends with the master narratives of history and beings the task of writing a queer history – a project

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that just begins with this book. Queering the Middle Ages (ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, 2001) continues Dinshaw’s intention and specifically challenge heteronormative readings of texts that are themselves the product of social constructionism of medieval times as well as the modern critic. Tison Pugh’s Sexuality and its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature: The New Middle Ages (2008) provides a study of medieval texts with an eye to challenging the representation of heterosexual masculinity. Similar studies of the constructedness of heterosexuality can be found in the medieval romance. Louise M. Sylvester, in Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (2008), challenges the very fabric of gendered fiction of males and females in the romance genre and suggests that our quest for paradigms is illusive. Heterosexual relations in the romance itself are a construct. Social construction in studies of gender and sexuality has moved from identifying what those particular constructions were to an examination of the underlying assumptions that were a part of the constructions. Without question, studies of gender and sexuality have been highly impacted by the ideology of social construction. In fact, it is omnipresent. C.2. Race and Ethnicity Most of the studies that have been fostered by the notion of social construction have been keenly focused on the attempts of a medieval European world to define itself against the backdrop of what was known about other parts of the world. Among the earliest studies that became foundational in this effort to examine the creation of master narratives of race and ethnicity is Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993). Central to his examination is the notion of how race is linked to matters of linguistic, legal, and social relations to define a cultural group. His study examines the way that Europe itself was viewed as a constructed identity. The postcolonial turn has itself provided some intriguing studies of the notion of race and ethnicity. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s edited collection entitled The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), a part of The New Middle Ages Series, provided an important gathering point of scholarly foment on these topics as well as suggesting important departures to follow. In his introductory essay, he suggests five key areas of departure undertaken in the study: a continual reexamination of the vocabulary for describing experience; the connections between history and “truth;” questioning hegemony relative to race, nationality, gender, etc.; the role of Christian and its connection with pre-Christian elements; and a “decentering” of Europe as the locus of attention (“Introduction: Midcolonial,” op.cit., 1–17). Essays in the collection examine concepts such as racial purity and the reality of West/East

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interactions, the connections between borders and identities, the Jewish presence in England and Europe, and the presence of the “alien” among the European. All of these essays assert that medieval Europeans were attempting to socially construct themselves. Perhaps more important as an attempt to examine the white-black dichotomy in the Middle Ages is the work of Thomas Hahn (“The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 [Winter 2001]: 1–37). Avoiding potential charges of “presentism” in his method, Hahn demonstrates the continual shifting of racial identity across a variety of literary texts and artistic spectrums in the high and late Middle Ages relative to earlier mythic topoi. Lisa Lomparis (“Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3 [2004]: 391–421) provides a critique of the methodologies used by both medievalists and nonmedievalists relative to race and argues that studies must go beyond the construction of prejudice. Her call might strike some readers as usual because she is connecting the world of scholarly endeavor to social action. While studies of ethnicity have tended to focus on Europe as a construct, much of the scholarship, growing out of English studies, has actually been in studies of English/British literature. In Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipaelago, Island, England (ed. by Jeffery Jerome Cohen, 2008; a part of The New Middle Ages series) the authors attempt to look at the social construction of identity through a different lens. They examine the use of other identities to form an English cultural identity in texts. Thus rather than identifying English identities – or European ones – as self-contained, the essays attempt to examine the role of the “subterranean” of other cultures within England. There is no question that England has a unique place in Western Europe and that its particular status as malleable to other cultural voices changes the perception of the construction of race and ethnicity in a variety of canonical and non-canonical medieval texts. All studies of race and ethnicity as a social construction reveal important elements about the national and ethnocentric status of Europe, but in more recent studies, there has been less of a tendency to see the binaries noted in earlier studies, but now to examine the influences and borrowings that seem to undercut what can be seen as racial and ethnic stereotyping. C.3. Defining Humanness In a sense, it may be somewhat surprising to view humanness as a social construct, but as a number of scholars have shown, the body was itself a social construct in the Middle Ages that connected the male body and the undifferentiated body with the cosmos. Without question, there are a number of

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medieval texts that treat the conflation of human and animal forms, and historical-critical scholarship has investigated those along with medieval attempts to describe the human-like creatures that lived beyond the bonds of Western Europe. Using the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen provided one of the most significant reexaminations of the medieval body ever undertaken (Medieval Identity Machines, 2003). In this study, Cohen examines the way in which chivalry invests the body with meaning, particularly with the fusion of horse and man, with each contributing to the identity of the other. He also challenges traditional understandings of the body and boundaries in his examination of Lancelot and the negotiation of dominance and submission in Chretien’s romance, the embodied voice of Margery Kempe, and the racial body. Many later studies credit this work by Cohen as the genesis of a new approach to the human body and to the meaning of humanness. Since the world of the monstrous and the human are so closely related in medieval texts, a number of scholars have taken their departure from Cohen’s work. The Monstrous Middle Ages (ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills, 2003) contains a series of essays, drawing of the work of Cohen, John Friedman, and Caroline Walker Bynum, that examine the way in which the monstrous was constructed with respect to non-Western, hence non-Christian cultures. Since the traditional association of the monstrous have been destructive and prejudicial, essays is this collection attempt to reclaim the monstrous as not the fearful other. A study more historical in nature, The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages (2005), by Lisa Verner, presents a historical assessment of the topic beginning with thinking of the ancient world, particularly Aristotle, and moves into the Middle Ages with a close examination of texts. Most revealing is the role of the monstrous as a divine agent early on and its subsequent transformation into a more fluid status. In “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds” (Folklore 117.2 [2006]: 190–206) Peter Dendle suggests that there is a bridge between modern attempts to find existing species that are not known and the medieval attempt to catalog such images in bestiaries and in the Old English Wonders of the East. Most interesting is his assertion that more that simply the moral lessons that bestiaries were to present, they were to provides images of human behavior that has been rejected, and as such, they held in check certain “sublimated anxieties” (194). The monstrous thus served an important element in constructing humanity. This study provides a survey of the range of studies that are the outgrowths of social constructionism. From these studies, several key principles emerge. First, all aspects of life in the Middle Ages were subject to a socially

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constructed vision of reality. In fact, there is no reality apart from a socially constructed one. Second, social construction trumps the kind of thinking about humanity that was present even in medieval times. The extent to which destiny was determined by biology is one of the medieval period’s clearest examples of the social construction of reality. Third, social constructionism, both as a practice of medieval writers and thinkers as well as their modern critical investigators, permeates the entire enterprise in such a way that to critique medieval constructionism is also to critique its modern offspring. Select Bibliography Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996); Joan Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (London: Duke University Press, 1999); Louise M. Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (New York and London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008).

Daniel F. Pigg

Social and Economic Theory in Medieval Studies A. The Debate on the Dynamics and Crisis of Feudalism The first major debate regarding the economic and social forces that shaped the dynamic of the feudal system was initiated with an article by Robert Brenner (“Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 [1976]: 30–75). It presented an argument that was inspired by Marxist theory and came to challenge Michael M. Postan’s population-resources or Neo-Malthusian argument. Postan responded, with John Hatcher (“Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society,” Past and Present 78 [1978]: 24–37) follow this model. The interest sparked by this exchange continued with a number of additional contributions, including a final response by Brenner (“The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present 97 [1982]: 16–113). The latter, along with the two original articles, were published as a collection of essays (The Brenner

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Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Trevor H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, 1987). A third interpretation was formulated by Bruce Campbell in a series of publications, beginning in the 1990s, that came to be known as the Commercialist or Thunenesque approach. The review that follows will provide a critical summary of these three competing theoretical paradigms by contrasting their claims against the existing empirical evidence. B. The Neo-Malthusian Argument Certain themes of what came to be known as the Neo-Malthusian argument were stressed by earlier historians (William Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888; Lord Ernle [formerly R. Prothero], English Farming, Past and Present, 1912). But it was Michael M. Postan and some of his pupils and followers that developed the argument in a comprehensive analytical framework. (The best representation of Postan’s argument is his “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England,” The Cambridge Economic History of England, vol. 1: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. Michael M. Postan, 2nd ed. 1966, 549–632; also Michael M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 1972). This argument bears a striking intellectual affinity to the Malthusian theory of population, as modified by the Ricardian theory of differential fertility and diminishing returns (David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed., Piero Sraffa, 1951; Robert Thomas Malthus, First Essay on Population, 1926. The two works were first published in 1817 and 1798 respectively. A comprehensive outline of these theories can be found in Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, 1962). In the Ricardian model land is treated as a productive factor that is fixed in supply, containing many plots with a wide range of output capacities and locational characteristics that provide limited choices for alternative uses; perhaps most important of all, land is considered a non-reproducible factor. In essence, this is a theory of marginal productivity; it claims that economic agents will push the intensive and extensive margins of cultivation to the point where the value of the marginal product will be equal to the marginal cost, at which point the next plot will come into use. The least fertile land, whose product determines the market price does not generate any rent and thus rent is not one of the components of market price; rent is generated proportionately in land of higher fertility, and takes the form of a residual. For Malthus it was an easy step to conclude, although it took more the form of an implicit assumption than a full-blown analytical scheme, that unchecked population growth would lead to the cultivation of additional, and poorer,

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pieces of land. Needless to say, this process is self-defeating because the supply of land is fixed. Ricardo and Malthus presented to Postan and his followers an irresistible conceptual framework for interpreting the empirical evidence concerning the state of medieval technology and the overall crisis of feudalism, its English version in particular. By the end of the 13th century population reached an unprecedented plateau facing increasing constraints with regard to its food supply, which was reflected in static or even declining yields. The “truly historical, time conditioned” cause of this chain of events, Postan suggests, was the exhaustion of the soil after the centuries-long process of uninterrupted cultivation, especially within the heartland of English manorialism, that is, in the midlands and the southern counties. In this context, a prominent role was played by the inferior responses that producers used in addressing basic technical needs, as manifested in the “low quality of seed, the shallow plowing, the absence of proper underdraining of the heavier and more fertile soils, the inability of the fallowing routine to deal properly with weeds, and […] the insufficiency of manure” (Michael M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, 1973, both quotes from p. 62). The extension of the margin of cultivation was the only viable response left, a fact that Postan was the first to point out and systematically describe. But what precise role does technological change play in these narratives? For Ricardo, along with Malthus and other contemporary writers such as West and Torrens (Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, 1962), the answer was an obvious one: the progress of technology in agriculture could not compare with the impressive achievements of the division of labor and the use of machinery in industry, and thus it was incapable of reversing the progressive deterioration of land fertility. Technical change in their model is nearly static and, in essence, is merely an assumption, a given, playing no role in determining the direction of systemic dynamics and the end result of the accumulation process. Notwithstanding the complex details of late feudal England, Postan’s theoretical account is strikingly similar to its classical predecessors, especially when it comes to the absence of a cumulative process of invention; in his words, this absence was reflected in the “insufficient supply of new technological possibilities” (Postan and Hatcher, “Population and Class Relations,” The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin, 1987, 77). The development of new techniques “remained remarkably static for the whole of the Middle Ages,” and he adds that, throughout the period, their importance was “not quite so fundamental as it is sometimes assumed” (Michael. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Econ-

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omy, 1973, 17). The lack of inventions can be amply clarified by the investment behavior of the upper classes (Postan’s, along with Hatcher’s, view on the investment behavior of landlords is summarized in their “Population and Class Relations” [1978]). Landlords spent modest portions of their revenues on building barns or adding to their livestock wherever the territorial balance of arable land and pasture allowed and, at best, supplemented these small investments with administrative innovations, better marketing of the produce, and slight alterations in the rotation patterns of crops. Efforts like these would increase the output of individual manors, but could provide little leverage in reversing the imbalance between demographic growth and static food supplies for the country as a whole. Those limited investments suggested to Postan not only a qualitatively poor technical base, but also the failure to utilize already existing techniques, that, is, an imperfect process of technical diffusion. Drawing his evidence again from the behavior of the ruling class, he noted the inevitable extension of the margin of cultivation, as demonstrated by the large reclamation movement, a form of investment that adds precious little to the longterm productive capacity of a society. Postan observes that this apparent miscalculation made sense from the point of view of landlords because the size of their holdings was the main indicator of their hierarchical status and could lead to a series of privileges such as the acquisition of a standing army, religious salvation through land endowments, and powerful alliances with other members of the baronial class through the marriage of family members. In general, Postan’s account points to the lack of any new independent inventions and the underutilization of existing technology, attributing these to the value system of the ruling class. The impression we are left with is that medieval technological changes were external and minor “injections,” causing only temporary disturbances in production functions and, in the end, failing to lead England on a path of dynamic and cumulative adjustment. The pace of technological change failed to catch up with population growth, thus leading to the unfolding of the Malthusian scenario. There is one last point that needs to be emphasized. From the Ricardian proposition that rent does not enter into price, it follows that the existence of landlords is entirely irrelevant to the outcome of his gloomy scenario. Even if landlords had decided suddenly to give up their property rights over the land, and withdraw into the realm of social irrelevance, the mechanism that reproduces the unequal race between human procreation and food supplies would still be left intact; the price of agricultural products and the marginal cost would remain the same, as well as the pattern of demand (since Ri-

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cardo considered the demand of grains to be inelastic). The key element in this scheme is the insufficient generation of inventions. It follows that the law of diminishing returns would have worked with iron necessity regardless of any considerations about the class structure of a society. Following the Ricardian logic, income distribution in Postan’s argument is determined by the relative scarcity of land vs. labor and the extent to which diminishing returns have crept into agricultural production; in other words, it depends on economic-biological factors. This thesis was stated in the most unambiguous terms by Le Roy Ladurie, another prominent supporter of this argument: “it is in the economy, in social relations and, even more fundamentally, in biological facts, rather than in the class struggle, that we must seek the motive force of history” (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “L’ Histoire immobile,” Annales E.S.C. 29 [1974]: 673–92; see also his Les paysans de Languedoc, 1966, published later on as The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. J. Day, 1974). An illustration, according to Postan (and Hatcher), of the powerful role of market forces was the fact that entry fines (charged upon taking up of land by a new tenant) fluctuated based on the scarcity of land unless restrained by customary law; but even in this case it was the vilain that was able to benefit from the inflexibility of this, and other, charges particularly when land values were rising during the 13th century (Postan and Hatcher, “Population and Class Relations” [1978]). Overall, there is a compelling simplicity in this Neo-Malthusian model, with its mechanistic logic, which apparently succeeds in encompassing and simultaneously determining a whole array of variables. Based on the unequal rates of growth between output and population, and assuming technical change to be almost static, it explains the declining productivity of the land and leads to the two most basic predictions of the Ricardian model: a) the rapid rise in food prices during the century preceding the Black Death; and b) the proportional increase in rents and entry fines. Furthermore, if we extend our scope to the middle of the 14th century and thereafter, the model provides us with a reason for the onset of the crisis and disruption, and also the reversal of the pre-plague trends as reflected in stagnating or falling rents and food prices due to the alteration of the ratio between land and labor. A closer examination of the Neo-Malthusian model, however, reveals certain weaknesses in its treatment of medieval technology and its, by and large, failure to negate the impact of demographic forces (Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Technological Change in Medieval England: A Critique of the Neo-Malthusian Argument,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144 [2000]: 397–449; John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development, 2001, 21–65).

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Technological change becomes implicitly a critical variable both in the classical account and in Postan’s because, in the absence of a significant role played by foreign trade, it provides the only mechanism that can keep marginal revenue above marginal cost and thus prevent an economy from reaching its Malthusian ceiling. Nevertheless, this theory fails to draw a sharp distinction between the innovation of new technologies and the diffusion of existing ones; the absence of the former during the crucial period 1200–1500 led Postan and his followers to largely disregard the latter. It was a small step, therefore, to accept the Ricardian proposition that technical change in agriculture cannot match the equivalent process in industry. Having excluded technology from its theoretical framework, the research agenda of the NeoMalthusian school was bound to ignore both the temporal and regional manifestations of technological diffusion. Virtually every student of the period will agree with Postan that the performance of late feudal England, and Europe in general, in generating new technologies was very poor. But he never seriously asked: what prevented the rapid and universal diffusion of already existing technologies? The law of diminishing returns in agriculture has a logical appeal when we consider the case of two variable factors (capital and labor) exploiting a fixed quantity of a constant factor (land) under conditions of static technology. But there is no good reason why technological diffusion should operate under an equivalent law of diminishing or even constant returns, especially in the context of the economies of medieval Europe. A second issue that needs to be addressed is the failure of this model to discern regional differences in terms of technological responses, particularly when it comes to manorial estates, to the growing scarcity of resources. The majority of manorial estates did behave according to the Neo-Malthusian account, but there was also a progressive segment that did not conform to the norm. In terms of the former, it is true that the members of the ruling class shared a set of values that favored the ever-increasing acquisition of land and territorial expansion for the reasons Postan had cited. But why should this aim be promoted to the exclusion of investment “in depth?” Are these two ways of increasing wealth necessarily contradictory? The Neo-Malthusian historians did not provide a link between regional differences in the power of seigneurial prerogatives and the pace of technological diffusion and thus did not probe the potential of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.

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C. The Marxist Argument It was this crucial but still unexplained failure of technology to lift Europe from the Malthusian trap that prompted Marxist historians to challenge the existing orthodoxy. In the words of the main figure promoting this alternative argument “the problem […] was not, as Postan and Hatcher contend, the ‘insufficient supply of new technological possibilities,’ but rather the feudal economy’s inability to make use of possibilities which existed” (Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]: 33). The central element of the Marxist argument is the thesis that medieval peasants were not free agents and their relationship to landlords was not strictly economic but political. It was the latter element that was the primary determinant of the distribution of income and wealth, and the presence of seigneurial prerogatives that acted as the main impediment to economic growth. Such prerogatives diminished the incentives on the part of landlords to adopt innovative responses to the growing scarcity of resources during the pre-plague period, instead focusing on extravagant levels of consumption; and the same prerogatives diminished the ability of peasants to act likewise. It is this fact that explains the low levels of capital formation and the slow process of technological diffusion, especially before the Black Death, which led to attempts in dealing with the demographic upswing by pushing the extensive, as opposed to the intensive, margin of cultivation. One method used by Marxist historians to prove the validity of this hypothesis was to engage in a regional contrast exploring the relationship between seigneurial prerogatives and the type of production choices made by manorial estates. One region where the manorial element established a strong foothold were the southern and eastern counties of England, up to a line drawn from Boston to Gloucester. In a seminal study of over 900 estates (both secular and monastic) spread throughout the country, Howard. L. Gray concluded that labor services, the most notable indicator of seigneurial power, were the least commuted within this region, with Kent and some pockets along the southeastern coastline providing some exceptional cases. Gray’s study referred to the early 14th century and came a few years later to be supplemented by an analysis of the Hundred Rolls from the late thirteenth century undertaken by Evegnii A. Kosminsky. Kosminsky’s analysis drew a sharp distinction between this part of England and the rest of the country by concluding that vilain labor services accounted for approximately 24 % of total tenant payments in certain southern counties, reaching all the way up to forty percent in large parts of the East Midlands, the Home Counties, and East Anglia (Evgenii A. Kosminsky, “Services and Money Rents in

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the Thirteenth Century,” Essays in Economic History, vol. 2, ed. Eleanora M. Carus-Wilson, 1966, 21–48; Howard. L. Gray, “The Commutation of Villein Services in England Before the Black Death,” English Historical Review 116 [1914]: 625–56). The significance of these findings is that, as Kosminsky’s research implies, the level of labor services is an excellent indicator of the size of total payments since the two were locked in a direct relationship. Regional studies have established the fact that this classic model of seigneurial power was widely duplicated across the channel, from areas north and east of Paris where seigneurial obligations were well-entrenched by the late Middle Ages but intensified during the 13th century, to countries like Bohemia, Hungary and Poland where feudalism failed to establish in its classic form until the thirteenth century; once it did, however, it came to resemble western forms of feudalism with each manor consisting of a network of tenancies for the distinct purpose of collecting rents. And increasingly this power came to be concentrated to the point that by ca. 1440 around forty percent of Hungarian villages were owned by the sixty most powerful landlords (Zsigmond P. Pach, “The Development of Feudal Rent in Hungary in the Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 19 [1966]: 1–14; Marian Malowist, “The Problem of the Inequality of Economic Development in Europe in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 19 [1966]: 15–28; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” [1976]). Using political power as an instrument of wealth appropriation, this type of estates lacked any strong incentives towards increasing their levels of productive efficiency and thus “feudal development tended to take inwardlooking forms – forms of redistribution of wealth, rather than its creation” (Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]: 37). The well-documented case of the manors belonging to the bishopric of Winchester exemplify the classic picture of medieval economic stagnation by adopting extensive forms of field systems, low ratios of livestock per arable acre, lack of integration of the two forms of husbandry for the maximum utilization of manure, and limited quantities of leguminous crops. Values of arable land in southeastern England suggest that despite the demographic pressures of the 13th century extensive forms of husbandry remained the norm, notwithstanding isolated parts of Norfolk and Kent, coastal Sussex, and the Soke of Peterborough. In an age lacking an experimental philosophy used in the validation of knowledge, inefficient methods of production may be partly attributed to ignorance. But multiple instances of pure indifference can also be documented. As an illustration, experts such as Walter of Henley urged manorial officials to buy seed in order to avoid the risk of crop diseases. Nevertheless, there

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are only intermittent examples of estates engaging in the exchange of seeds and of some resorting to the market for its purchase, the majority using their own supplies. This indifference towards productive improvements is also reflected on the fact that “there was no idea of increase or profit-directed investment in the economic ideology of that period,” as Bois and other economic historians have pointed out (Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984; Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450, 2000; Jan Z. Titow, Winchester Yields: A Study in Medieval Agrarian Productivity, 1972; Jan Z. Titow, English Rural Society, 1200–1350, 1969). But the most sinister reason for seigneurial prerogatives acting as an impediment to growth was the diversion of funds away from productive investment among peasant holdings (e. g., purchase of livestock and thus access to more manure) towards military adventures and conspicuous consumption. The draining of peasants’ monetary and labor resources could be potentially large and hinged mainly on the legal status of the tenant. Despite Postan’s and Hatcher’s attempts in emphasizing the importance of customary law in preventing the rise of money rents during the 13th century, the fact remains that vilain rents were three to four time higher compared to those of free tenants and could absorb up to fifty percent of the value of a serf’s annual output, according to Postan’s own admission. Discussions of the material aspects of peasants’ lives and detailed reconstructions of their annual budgets have shown that during the century leading to the Black Death half of the English peasantry lived at or below the brink of subsistence (Evgenii A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, 1956; Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]; Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Standards of Living and Capital Formation in Pre-Plague England: A Peasant Budget Model,” Economic History Review 53 [2000]: 237–61; Christopher C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1500, 1989). Seigneurial prerogatives were responsible not only for weakening the diffusion of individual technologies in regions of strong manorialism but also in the formation of field systems that combined techniques in a suboptimal fashion. In an account that is sympathetic to the Marxist argument, particularly Bois’s version of it (see below), Kitsikopoulos has provided a synthesis of various interpretations about the evolution of rigid common-fields which is based on three factors: ecological profiles, demographic growth, and the power of manorialism. The starting point of this argument, dating back to the early Middle Ages, is the presence of consolidated holdings cultivated under an infield-outfield arrangement. As population grew during the centuries leading to the Black Death and land resources became scarce,

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powerful landlords, particularly ecclesiastical estates, led an effort to reorganize fields from flexible and irregular rotations toward geometrical and functional symmetry in the context of common and subdivided fields to rationalize the use of grazing grounds and control the recycling of manure. This type of scenario, particularly noticeable in regions of fertile soils such as the southeastern part of England, led eventually to rigid rules locked into the system and limited the scope for innovation due to the lack of flexibility regarding the roles of tillage and animal husbandry. Campbell noted that “regular commonfield systems inhibited adoption of the more flexible and intensive mixed-farming systems, especially those practicing a form of convertible husbandry” (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 179; Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Urban Demand and Agrarian Productivity in PrePlague England: Reassessing the Relevancy of von Thunen’s Model,” Agricultural History 77 [2003]: 506–11). This conjectural interpretation regarding the evolution of commonfields may be plausible but is still missing a comprehensive explanation of the attitudes of lords and peasants towards this system as it went through its evolutionary formation. Such an account was provided by Richard C. Hoffmann. According to him, the formation of rigid common-fields was a response to population growth by attempting to impose and formalize social control. The enforcement of seigneurial prerogatives relied on the discipline and conformity of the peasantry which is precisely the sort of behavior common-fields perpetuate. Any deviation from the existing common routine was bound to play havoc on the functionality of the system; for instance, when a peasant decides to graze his beasts in the midst of unfenced strips belonging to his neighbors who choose to crop at that time. But by enforcing these rules, landlords opted for social conservatism at the expense of innovation. Hoffmann provided also an excellent account of how resource constraints faced by peasants shaped their behavioral patterns and attitudes towards the system. The presence of limited resources and static technology forces a peasant to seek the maximum output out of his holding even at the point the labor of his family members face substantial diminishing returns. In trying to maximize output, however, the goal was to maximize it not based on its cash value but in terms of producing a bundle of products that would ensure the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency. It is from this point of view that we can appreciate the presence of common-fields as an institution aimed at minimizing risk, the orientation of the system towards crop production, as opposed to animal husbandry (since the former provides more calories per unit of land compared to the latter), and the poor integration of animal husbandry within the overall production routine (Richard

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C. Hoffmann, “Medieval Origins of the Common Fields,” European Peasants and their Markets, ed. William N. Parker and Eric L. Jones, 1975, 23–72). In contrast to regions of Europe where the manorial element was deeply entrenched, there were others in which serfdom was never introduced (e. g., Sweden), made only partial inroads (e. g., some areas of England along the southeastern coastline and others in the north and west of the country), or was in a process of retreat during the 12th and 13th centuries as was the case in large parts of Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Zealand, Normandy, Picardy and Denmark). There was a considerable amount of freedom in these regions coupled with a low level of seigneurial extractions. In the western and northern counties of England commutation of labor services was quite advanced and the value of the remaining ones comprised twenty percent of total payments in the former and considerably less than ten percent in the latter. Despite some regional exceptions, French serfs had to surrender, on average, only about ten percent of the value of their annual output (according to an estimate by Bois), whereas the various types of seigneurial dues in the Flemish royal estates are estimated to have absorbed about a third of the tenants’ gross grain yields. Marxist historians have pointed out the causal relationship between the lack of an effective appropriation mechanism in these cases and the incentives it provided to manorial estates in seeking wealth by elevating their efficiency, with Flemish estates exemplifying this argument the best. Freedom from heavy extractions also afforded to peasants greater flexibility in production decisions. Under such conditions of relative prosperity it became much easier to deal with the epidemics of the 14th century. Far from creating a social crisis, the Black Death gave the final blow to demesnial farming in Denmark and the subsequent transformation of tenures led to commercially oriented peasant farming, especially in the western regions, exporting both grains and livestock to the Dutch and the German Hansa towns (Kosminsky, “Services and Money Rents,” Essays in Economic History, ed. Eleanor M. Carus-Wilson, vol. 2, 1962, 31–48; Rodney H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, 1966; Gray, “The Commutation of Villein Services in England Before the Black Death,” The English Historical Review 29.16 [1914]: 625–56; Jan A. van houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 800–1800, 1977; Janken Myrdal, “The Agricultural Transformation of Sweden,” Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, ed., Grenville astill and John L. langdon, 1997, 147–71; Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” [1976]; brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]; Eddy van Cauwenberghe and Herman van der Wee, “Productivity, Evolution of Rents and

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Farm Size in the Southern Netherlands Agriculture from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” Productivity of Land and Agricultural Innovation in the Low Countries, 1250–1800, ed., id., 1978, 125–62; Erik Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’: Agricultural Technology in Medieval Flanders” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Astill and Langdon, 1997, 69–88; Bjorn Poulsen, “Agricultural Technology in Medieval Denmark,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Astill and Langdon, 1997, 115–46). One of the main elements that allowed these progressive areas to achieve higher levels of efficiency was their differentiation in terms of field systems. According to the aforementioned explanation pertaining to England, the prevalence of flexible field systems was either due to poor ecological profiles which induced lower levels of population growth and hence rendered landlords indifferent towards regularizing existing land resources (e. g., large areas in the northern and western counties); or, ecological conditions may have been favorable supporting high population densities, nevertheless, landlords failed to impose a scheme of regular common-fields and/or heavy extractions (e. g., in parts of Norfolk, Kent and Sussex). Demesnes and peasant holdings in these cases were either consolidated and enclosed or, if subdivided, there was still a considerable amount of individualistic practices by placing temporary hurdles which allowed tillage to take place in severalty, removing them after the harvest to allow collective grazing (e. g., in Sussex). Depending on local population densities, such arrangements could accommodate a flexible but extensive form of land use, such as an infield-outfield system, or more sophisticated forms such as convertible husbandry and the “round-course” system (Kitsikopoulos, “Urban Demand,” [2003]: 506–11; Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Land, Labour, Livestock, and Productivity Trends in English Seignorial Agriculture, 1208–1450,” Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity, ed. id. and Mark overton, 1991, 144–82). In the end, by emphasizing the role of class relations, the Marxist interpretation provided the missing explanation of developments taking place during the late Middle Ages that the Neo-Malthusian argument was simply describing. According to Brenner, “reproduction by the lords through surplus extraction by means of extra-economic compulsion and by peasants through production for subsistence precluded any widespread tendencies to thorough specialization of productive units, systematic reinvestment of surpluses, or to regular technical innovation” (Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” [1982]: 17). By analyzing the role of this factor in terms of determining medieval economic growth, Marxist historians provided a more meaningful context in terms of analyzing the impact of extra-

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economic factors, such as the epidemics of the 14th century. “Let us not deny the ‘accidental’ aspect inherent in any such phenomenon of contamination or pollution […] But the effects of external attack are generally a function of the condition of the attacked so the consequences of a cyclone are less disastrous in Florida than in Bengal” (Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 288). It is important to emphasize, however, that there is a deep disagreement among Marxist historians about the extent to which elements of the NeoMalthusian argument ought to be incorporated into their analysis in explaining the crisis of feudalism. The disagreement stems from two traditions within Marxism when it comes to explaining historical change. One tradition emphasizes class struggle as the dominant instrument of historical change and rejects the relevance of demographic and commercial factors. According to this view, exemplified by Robert Brenner, “changes in relative factor scarcities consequent upon demographic changes exerted an effect on the distribution of income in medieval Europe only as they were, so to speak, refracted through the prism of changing social-property relations and fluctuating balances of class forces.” Such property relations “once established, tend to impose rather strict limits and possibilities, indeed rather specific long-term patterns, on a society’s economic development; […] as a rule, they are not shaped by, or alterable in terms of changes in demographic or commercial trends” (Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” [1976]: 31; id., “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]: 21). In referring, for instance, to the different paths taken by eastern and western Europe during the post-plague period (i. e., growing enserfment in the former vs. emancipation in the latter), Brenner argues that there was a certain degree of indeterminacy in terms of these outcomes conditioned by relative levels of “power, indeed of force.” A series of factors unique to each country played a role such as different levels of solidarity among peasants, their organizational skills, their ability to build alliances with urban groups and the state (i. e., whether the latter developed as a competitor to landholding elites in terms of appropriating peasant surpluses); and, finally, the extent to which seigneurial power was fragmented at the local level allowing peasants to resist more effectively, as was the case in the newly colonized regions of eastern Europe. The convergence of all these unique factors shaped particular class struggles and made the difference between the early retreat or absence of serfdom in places like the Low Countries and Scandinavia, the abolition of its most onerous obligations by the late 15th century in England or Catalonia, and its survival well into the 18th century in Bohemia and other parts of eastern Europe (Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” [1976]; Arnold Klima, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in

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Pre-Industrial Bohemia,” The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin, 1987, 192–212; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]). The second tradition within Marxist theory looks at the concept of the mode of production and emphasizes the friction that occurs at some point in the history of a system between the relations and the forces of production. According to this view, exemplified by Guy Bois, another participant in the Brenner debate, Brenner’s approach, by focusing on class struggle, disassociates the analysis from all other objective contingencies, in the end presenting a “voluntarist vision of history.” Referring to the emphasis of the Neo-Malthusians on the demographic cycle, Bois asks: “By what strange perversion of Marxism is it possible to refuse to take such firm data into account on the absurd pretext that another theoretical construction rests upon it? […] Postan or Le Roy Ladurie should not be criticized for giving too much importance to the demographic factor. They should on the contrary be criticized for stopping themselves in mid-stream and for not integrating the demographic factor into the all-embracing whole that is the socio-economic system” (Guy Bois, “Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy,” The Brenner Debate, ed. Aston and Philpin, 1987, 116–17). Bois’s comment raises a legitimate point of criticism. For an interpretation that uses the single factor of class struggle to explain events from 13th-century England to 18th-century Bohemia, Brenner’s account seems to lack analytical sophistication. Did an English serf of the pre-plague period exhibit a sense of class consciousness when he performed labor services inefficiently? If so, why his reaction toward seigneurial power fell short of the peasant revolts of the post-plague period? The crucial intervening event was obviously the Black Death and the radical transformation it brought to the land:labor ratio. Accepting the significance of this extra-economic and accidental event, something that Brenner rejects, in terms of altering the balance of power between landlords and peasants is not to deny the crux of Marxist argument, i. e., that class relations were at the heart of the feudal crisis. In conclusion, Marxist historians have the potential of offering a more credible account compared to the Neo-Malthusian argument in terms of incorporating into their analysis economic and demographic factors, as well as extra-economic events, while retaining the primacy of class relations. In fact, the argument will acquire even more analytical sophistication if it extends to taking into account the role of ecological variations in shaping regional patterns of technological diffusion and economic growth. To provide an illustration, the Marxist interpretation has argued that the absence of strong seigneurial prerogatives in some parts of Europe induced local landlords to innovate and allowed peasants to do the same. That was clearly the case in the

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adoption of flexible field systems. Nevertheless, at least in the case of England, there was not always a direct correlation between these flexible arrangements and productivity, measured by grain yields, despite the fact they achieved a better integration of the two husbandries and thus a more efficient utilization of manure. According to a study that compared two large samples of manors both before and after the Black Death, convertible husbandry demesnes achieved, on average, about the same level of productivity compared to commonfields. Two reasons were mainly responsible for this surprising result. First, the fact that convertible husbandry was adopted primarily on light/sandy soils prone to excessive leaching and poor retention of nutrients; the second reason applies particularly to the pre-plague period and relates to population growth and the need to raise grain calories, resulting at extending the length of tillage at the expense of leys and hence compromising the beneficial effect of the latter in terms of nitrogen injections. Nevertheless, if other things were equal, that is, if landlords did not impede the diffusion of convertible husbandry in regions with more favorable ecological profiles, it has been estimated that this system had the capacity to raise output net of seed to 10–15 bushels per acre, from nine bushels which was the norm in England. The significance of ecological factors in allowing flexible systems to raise the level of yields has also been documented in the case of Flanders. Flexible arrangements were widespread throughout the country and practices such as stallfeeding and spreading farmyard manure allowed leaseholders to achieve a more balanced agrosystem to the benefit of cereal yields; nevertheless, the level of yields improved progressively from the coastal areas with access to poor soils towards the southern region which was located on very fertile soils (Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields: A Model on the Relative Efficiency of Medieval Field Systems,” Journal of Economic History 64 [2004]: 462–99; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’”). It becomes apparent that it was variations in seigneurial power that played the primary role in determining the regional distribution of convertible husbandry and other such flexible systems; at the same time, it was the impact of demography on existing land resources and ecological factors which explain the failure of such systems in reaching their full productive potential in some regions, especially during the pre-plague period. D. The Commercialist Argument The last interpretation regarding economic growth in the late Middle Ages appeared since the 1990s, and is mainly the brainchild of a single individual, Bruce Campbell, although some of his work is the product of collaborative

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efforts with other historians. It is different compared to previous interpretations in two important respects: first, unlike the Neo-Malthusian and Marxist arguments that emphasize the primacy of supply-side factors, Campbell’s thesis adds to them the role of markets and aggregate demand and, in fact, assigns the primary role to them; and, second, it adopts an optimistic approach by denying the notion of a structural crisis during the preplague decades, instead attributing the eventual demise of the system to exogenous factors, that is, adverse weather conditions and the Black Death. The starting point of Campbell’s thesis, which focuses exclusively on England, is the expansion of population during the century leading to the Black Death and the parallel rise of the urbanization rate which he estimates it to have been about one-fifth of the population by ca. 1300. These developments, however, were mostly limited to the southeastern arc of the country where London, with a population of 60,000–80,000 souls, dominated raising a substantial level of demand for grains and livestock products. A few other provincial towns within this arc generated a similar, albeit smaller, effect on their hinterlands. Echoeing Adam Smith’s theory of economic growth which emphasizes the role of the “extent of the market,” Campbell (along with Britnell) argued that the ensuing “commercialization was not merely an aspect of growth, it helped to make expansion possible in the first place” (Richard H. Britnell and Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Introduction,” A Commercialising Economy: England 1086 to c. 1300, ed. id., 1995, 4). Several benefits, including institutional changes, sprang out of these developments: the growth of freedom and the transformation of feudal socio-property relations; the growth of commodity markets; and the establishment of factor markets in land, labor, and capital that helped bring down transaction costs. Persson, an economic historian with views sympathetic to Campbell’s, added to the list certain benefits referring to technological changes: “1) substitution of labor, implements (capital), and manuring for land, 2) technological changes with a land-saving bias such as the suppression of the fallow, intensified land use by means of irrigation and improved quality of land by means of leguminous crops (adding nitrogen), improved rotation schemes, better strains, new plants and an improved match between crops, soils and climate induced by trade and regional specialization, and 3) technological changes with a labour-saving bias embodied in new implements, such as spades and ploughs” (Karl G. Persson, Pre-Industrial Economic Growth: Social Organisation and Technological Progress in Europe, 1988, 78). This sort of developments, which can be documented to one degree or another for other parts of Europe (e. g., around the urban cluster of Ypres, Bruges and Ghent) led, according to Campbell, to raising the productivity of medieval agriculture,

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to the growth of output which was able to sustain population growth, and even raised GDP per capita (Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’” [1997]). In elaborating his analysis, Campbell (and some of his collaborators) argued that London’s concentrated demand generated certain production patterns that followed the logic of a model developed in the early 19th century by the German agricultural economist Johann von Thunen. Treating transportation cost as the only variable and holding everything else constant, the model argues that economic rent (the difference between the price of a product and the total amount of payments made to the various factors of production) is the main determinant of production decisions, resulting specifically in the following patterns: 1) the degree of commercialization increases among producers as the location of farms is closer to the town; 2) the choice of crops is affected by distance and transportation cost with crops generating the highest economic rent being located at a distance and those with lower one being closer to the town; 3) the intensity of cultivation, manifested on the cost of individual technologies, diminishes as one moves away from the town, and 4) field systems alternate, with the more intensive ones being closer to the town, specifically following the sequence of round-course, convertible husbandry, three-field system (Johann von Thunen, The Isolated State, ed. P. Hall, 1966; Bruce M. S. Campbell et al., A Medieval Capital and its Grain Supply: Agrarian Production and Distribution in the London Region c. 1300, 1993, 4–8). Campbell acknowledges that these patterns did not acquire in the London region the same degree of clarity evident in von Thunen’s model because the metropolis was still fairly small by later standards and thus in the process of raising economic rent; in this sense, production patterns in its hinterland simply anticipated more radical changes when London’s population reached 400,000 souls in the 17th century raising the level of economic rent to the point of justifying high factor costs, intensification of farming, and widespread adoption of individual technologies. Nevertheless, the level of aggregate demand in the London region was still well above that prevailing in northern and western counties where population and urbanization rates were lower. Producers in the latter regions had to cope with higher transportation costs and lower economic rents given the more anemic size and thinner distribution of urban markets (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 275, 302–03, 364, and 425–27). Overall, it was not the lack of technological opportunities that led to the demise of feudalism, according to Campbell. To a limited extent the problem lied with the ignorance of producers in dealing effectively with pests and

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pathogens and the backwardness of some manorial officials given a wide variety of managerial responses to particular challenges. Certain supply-side factors, relating mainly to ecological and institutional aspects, also acted as impediments to growth: the prevalence of communal property rights, as opposed to enclosures that would have promoted a more intensified type of husbandry through greater inputs of labor and capital per unit of land; the low productive potential of seed and livestock; the presence of heavy clays in many parts of the country which presented difficult problems in terms of tilling and drainage; the nature of seigneurial prerogatives which determined the composition of labor supply in terms of using the more productive hired labor vs. the indifferently performed customary labor. The influence of some of these factors in affecting the diffusion of individual technologies could not have been altered; for example, the adoption of horses vs. oxen was sitespecific conditioned by local ecological profiles, particularly soil types. But the impediments imposed by some other supply-side factors could have been overcome if urbanization rates and aggregate demand were more robust and more uniform across the country. “The central problem of medieval agricultural production was therefore as much a deficiency of demand as an inelasticity of supply;” nevertheless, in the sense that the growth of demand had the potential of removing impediments on the supply side, it played the primary role in shaping growth patterns. In the end, the crisis of the 14th century was not an inevitable event, according to Campbell. The growth of trade in London’s hinterland was in the process of promoting specialization and raising efficiency standards and it was a matter of time before these benefits would spread to the rest of the country. But even if commercial expansion was more robust “it could not have withstood the massive demand shock inflicted by the succession of exogenous environmental setbacks which began with the Great European Famine and culminated with the Black Death” (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 428, and 440). Campbell’s participation to the ongoing debate has resulted in two very important contributions: first, his decades-long research projects have produced a very extensive and organized analysis of primary sources referring to the economic behavior of manorial estates; second, his interpretation of economic growth in the late Middle Ages has encompassed a wider variety of factors and, in this sense, has provided a more sophisticated basis for discussion. His account, however, is not free of criticism. Despite the admission of one of his associates that markets in London’s hinterland were “partially or imperfectly integrated,” Campbell has argued that the degree of commercialization around the metropolis was quite substantial in light of the fact that 38 percent of grain output (net of tithe

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and seed) was sold during the period 1288–1315, based on a sample of 190 manors. His figure, however, is somewhat exaggerated because his sample includes a disproportionately high number of the most commercialized estates. If the figure was lower in the most commercialized part of the country (and certainly even lower elsewhere) and if we account for the fact that half of the peasantry, managing four-fifths of the land, were living at or below the subsistence level, then the degree of commercialization of English agriculture c. 1300 does not appear terribly impressive (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000; Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Measuring the Commercialisation of Seigneurial Agriculture c. 1300,” A Commercialising Economy, ed. Britnell and Campbell, 1995, 132–93; James A. Galloway, “One Market or Many? London and the Grain Trade of England,” Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration c. 1300–1600, ed. James A. Galloway, 2000, 36). But aside of the degree of commercial activity in the London region, the most controversial aspect of Campbell’s argument is his statement that the expansion of markets was the primary factor, among a host of others (including institutions, ecological profiles, etc.), in determining economic growth and that it played a corrosive role in removing certain impediments to growth imposed by feudal institutions. This claim runs into two kinds of problems. The first one is that it contradicts the empirical record. Postan’s research concluded, based on the study of a very large manorial sample that the rise of a money economy, commercialization and growing urbanization during the 13th century coincided with an intensification of labor services, as opposed to a reversal of this trend. Kosminsky’s classic study also concluded along similar lines, that is, “the feudal exploitation of the unfree peasant is heaviest in the regions of the greatest development of money-commodity relations.” According to Postan, this trend came about because as demesnial cultivation expanded in the age of high farming there was not a concomitant increase of tenancies subject to vilain labor, hence the effort to fully utilize labor obligations of existing unfree tenancies (Michael M. Postan, “The Chronology of Labour Services,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 [1937]: 169–93; id., “The Rise of a Money Economy,” Economic History Review 14 [1944]: 123–34; Evgenii A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England, 1956; Hatcher and Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, 2001, 121–73). The second problem with Campbell’s argument is of a conceptual nature. Demographic growth during the pre-plague period brought a growing demand for foodstuffs. In a capitalist economy, this growth of demand would have created backward pressures that, through a Smithian scenario, would have resulted in revolutionizing the forces of production, although

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the degree may have differed in regional terms based on particular ecological endowments. But in medieval England it was impossible for such a scenario to unfold in its full potential. “Since the essence of serfdom was the lord’s ability to bring extra-market pressure to bear upon the peasants in determining the level of rent […] it is hardly surprising that fluctuations in trade, indeed of market forces of any type, were not in themselves enough to determine the dissolution of serfdom.” Consequently, feudal property relations stifled innovation “by making direct producers, both lords and peasants, independent, to an important degree, from the imperative to respond to market opportunities by maximizing returns from exchange […] In general, peasant producers possessed (more or less) direct, non-market access to their means of subsistence (land, tools). This meant that they were not compelled to sell on the market to acquire the means to buy what they needed to subsist and to produce. In consequence, they did not have to deploy their means of production so as to compete most effectively with other producers […] Similarly, since the lords had immediate access to their peasants’ surplus, thus direct access to their means of reproduction, they were under no direct economic compulsion to produce competitively on the market and therefore were relieved of the direct pressure to cut costs” (Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure,” [1976]: 44; id., “The Agrarian Roots,” [1982]: 34). This viewpoint should not be interpreted as to suggest that lords and peasants were completely indifferent to market opportunities, particularly the former who had access to substantial surpluses and thus the need to dispose them. Instead, it is meant to imply that the expansion of these surpluses did not have to rely on maximizing productive efficiency but on intensifying the level of extractions. The growth of population and demand could have had a long-lasting impact only in the context of a mechanism of wealth distribution that allowed tenants to retain a larger portion of their annual output and, simultaneously, forced landlords to innovate in order to expand their wealth. But for something like this to have taken place, landlords would have had to surrender their prerogative over the land and its output; that is, they would have had to give up their preeminent source of power and prestige. Of course, Campbell has never argued that feudal lords acted as protocapitalists, in fact, he clearly stated that “lords certainly do not appear to have been so consciously entrepreneurial, for in managing their estates they were as much concerned with considerations of status and patronage as they were with profit” (Campbell, “Measuring the Commercialization of Seigneurial Agriculture,” [1995]: 191). But if the profit motive does not emerge as the primary determinant of production and disposal decisions, in fact the notoriously meticulous manorial accounts reveal a nearly complete absence of such

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notions, then Campbell’s attempt to use von Thunen’s model to explain certain production patterns in London’s hinterland appears to be misguided. Von Thunen’s notion of economic rent presupposes a clear notion of profit, the ability on the part of producers to engage in fairly sophisticated calculations of it, and an entirely different institutional setting. Kitsikopoulos has raised several objections in this regard. For instance, cropping choices among manorial estates in the London region did not follow a profit-maximization principle as dictated by von Thunen’s model. Also, contrary to the expectation that patterns of intensity are supposed to be stronger as one comes closer to an urban center, the level of intensity of land use remained low both in the London region and the country as a whole with only sixty percent of the arable being sown leading Campbell to admit that “early fourteenth century England remained a country more extensive than intensive and more conservative than innovative in its demesne cropping systems,” a fact reflected on low to moderate grain yields. Manors practicing intensive forms of husbandry were often at considerable distance from London (e. g., eastern Norfolk), whereas others closer to the metropolis exhibited low levels of productive intensity. Moreover, commercial orientation and productive intensity (reflected on operating costs per sown acre) do not always correlate, nor the provisioning of a central household necessarily implies low intensity. Data suggest that investment in capital and labor inputs in manors that acted as home farms were often high, as opposed to manors that were highly commercialized but failed to invest adequately. Similar doubts have been raised when it comes to the location of field systems which, according to von Thunen’s model, ought to start with a “round-course” system closer to an urban center, followed by convertible husbandry and the three-field system. Instead, the first two systems were found mostly at some distance from London (e. g., Sussex, Kent, and East Anglia), whereas the two- and three-course variations of common-fields predominated everywhere else in the region and particularly close to the metropolis (Kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields,” [2004]; Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 274; Kitsikopoulos, “Urban Demand,” [2003]; Kitsikopoulos, “Manorial Estates as Business Firms: the Relevance of Economic Rent in Determining Crop Choices in London’s Hinterland c. 1300,” Agricultural History Review 56 [2008]: 142–66). “The stock of knowledge only represents a potential for technological progress while realized technological progress is determined by how much and how fast the stock of knowledge is put into practice, i. e., the rate of diffusion […] The rate of diffusion is […] linked with the social relations of

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production. It is important that the direct producers, who discern and record the new knowledge, have incentives to remember it as well as power and opportunities to implement it” (Karl Persson, Pre-Industrial Economic Growth, 1988, 127–28). This remark, made by someone who is actually sympathetic to Campbell’s argument, lies at the very heart of the criticism against the latter’s account of medieval economic growth. It was the lack of incentives on the part of landlords and of opportunities on the part of peasants in adopting existing technologies that brought feudalism into a phase of crisis; the famines and the epidemics of the 14th century exposed and over-determined this crisis but did not cause it in the first place. Campbell’s optimistic perception of events springs from the fact that he spends little time and effort in considering the role of social relations in imposing disincentives to the process of technological diffusion. Market expansion stimulated by population growth, his main explanatory tool, does have the potential of acting as an engine of economic growth. But it does so only after the removal of such supplyside disincentives. In medieval Flanders, a society characterized by freedom, low seigneurial extractions, and a minimum of institutional impediments in the utilization of land, regional specialization and economic growth commenced prior to the growth of urbanization in the second half of the 11th century. Urbanization accelerated the process of specializing in animal husbandry along the coast, in the production of ale made of oats in the sandy soils of central Flanders, and wheat production on the loamy soils of the south. But the benefits of specialization were already visible prior to the growth of urban centers precisely because Flanders was exceptional due to the weakness of the manorial element compared to other parts of Europe (Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’,” [1997]). Select Bibliography The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Trevor H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bruce M. S. Campbell et al., A Medieval Capital and its Grain Supply: Agrarian Production and its Distribution in the London Region c. 1300 (Lancaster, UK: Historical Geography Research Series 30, 1993); Christopher C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: the History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Standards of Living and Capital Formation in Pre-Plague England: A Peasant Budget Model,” Economic History Review 53 (2000): 237–61; Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields: A Model on the Relative Efficiency of Medieval Field Systems,” Journal of Economic History 64 (2004): 462–99; Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Manorial

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Estates as Business Firms: the Role of Economic Rent in Determining Crop Choices in London’s Hinterland c. 1300,” Agricultural History Review 56 (2008): 142–66; Evgenii A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Kelley & Millman, 1956); The Cambridge Economic History of England, vol. 1: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. Michael M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1966); Michael M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Michael M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

Harry Kitsikopoulos

Social History and Medieval Studies A. Sources There are three types of limitations regarding sources about economic and social life in the Middle Ages. The first one is chronological in that the first systematic records appear in the 13th century. A second problem emanates from the fact that the bulk of the records comes from demesnial accounts, few peasants having left any written evidence. That imposes a serious limitation since in the case of England, to cite an example, only between a quarter and a third of the land was demesnial and after accounting for leasing parts of it, the true figure is about one-fifth; these figures are typical of the preplague period and become even lower after the great epidemic (Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450, 2000, 26–54). The final limitation is of a geographical nature. England offers the best documentary evidence with the first demesnial accounts dating back to the very beginning of the 13th century. However, other countries lack the extent and continuity of the English series. In Flanders, for example, demesnial accounts start in the 13th century but due to a wave of leases by the end of it, few accounts survive until the late 14th century. To compensate somewhat for the scarcity of manorial evidence, there is more information on small farms, the evidence coming from, among other sources, short-term contracts entered by institutions taking care of the inheritances of orphans and lessees (Erik Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’: Agricultural Technology in Medieval Flanders,” Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, ed. Grenville Astill and John Langdon, 1997, 69–71). Other countries have even more limited records. In Denmark and Sweden de-

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mesnial accounts are few because this practice was slow to develop there, whereas peasant inventories appear in the post-medieval period. Because of these problems, other sources have been used, like archeological finds and illustrations, despite their own limitations (Bjorn Poulsen, “Agricultural Technology in Medieval Denmark,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Astill and Langdon, 1997, 118–19; Janken Myrdal, “The Agricultural transformation of Sweden, 1000–1300,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Astill and Langdon, 1997, 148–51). B. The Early Middle Ages Economic growth through Roman times is thought to have reached its apogee during the 2nd century A.D., followed by a subsequent contraction carried well into the Middle Ages reaching its nadir between the 8th and 10th centuries. It was during this period of commercial stagnation and political instability that the institution of the manor takes its classic form and lords succeed in establishing their economic and political prerogatives: “For centuries kings, great nobles and abbeys had owned vast lands, and the struggle among Charlemagne’s descendants, like the Norman invasion, allowed the large owners to acquire more because their less powerful neighbors had to cede their land in exchange for protection. The peasants themselves lived mostly in a state of personal subjugation which required them to render their lord various services” (Jan. A. Van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 800–1800, 1977, 9). It was also during this period that the distinction between free tenants and serfs emerges, with the latter’s lineage being traced back to the time when slavery was practiced. Seigneurial obligations, particularly among serfs, developed in a diverse mosaic of manifestations contributing to this diversity: the distance of a manor from an urban center which offered a potential refuge to a serf; the proximity of a manor to a household (the closer it was, the more various obligations, particularly labor services, were safeguarded); and the degree of willingness on the part of monarchies to help solidify the institution of serfdom, often not forthcoming since the prerogatives of landlords and the king were in a clashing trajectory. Not only the judicial and political outlines of the manorial system are shaped during these centuries of stagnation, but also the economic structure of the manorial system through the emergence of common-fields. The system was established initially in the core of the oldest-settled areas of feudalism (the Allemannic region along the upper Rhine and the Frankish lands of the northern French-Flemish area), a process that can be documented for the early 8th century, although it was most certainly earlier. The system diffused towards the periphery during the 9th and 10th centuries, particularly in areas

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of Franconia, Hesse, Dijonnais, Artois, the Paris basin, and eventually came into England through the Norman invasion. In the last stage of the system’s diffusion, beginning in the 12th century or somewhat earlier, waves of migration brought it into Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavia. For instance, common-field arrangements (particularly the two-field system) spread into the eastern parts of Denmark and Sweden between 1000 and 1200–1300, with the infield-outfield system and convertible husbandry predominating in the western parts of Jutland and Norway and the northern and southern parts of Sweden. By that time, common-fields came to dominate the northern European landscape. The process was driven by population growth and mediated through cultural exchanges. By the time its diffusion was fairly complete it had pushed more individualistic forms of husbandry to the fringe of marshes, forests and other “marginal” areas. It is important to point out that, at least in the case of England, it was landlords that took the initiative in regulating practices in the context of the system (Richard C. hoffmann, “Medieval Origins of the Common Fields,” European Peasants and their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History, ed. William N. parker and Eric L. jones, 1975, 23–72; Poulsen, “Agricultural Technology in Medieval Denmark,” 1997, 119–20; Myrdal, “The Agricultural Transformation of Sweden,” 1997, 148–51; Mats Widgren, “Fields and Field Systems in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. astill and langdon, 1997, 173–92). At the level of individual technologies, no spectacular improvements are recorded during this phase of economic stagnation. Better designs in relation to harvesting and plowing implements takes place (e. g., the longer scythe), and the use of iron parts becomes more common. These developments resulted in improvements in labor productivity and may have been triggered by a speculated decline of population in the 6th century. C. The Late Middle Ages: the Pre-Plague Period There is general consensus that the medieval economy entered a period of recovery driven by population growth at the beginning of the 11th century. Precise figures regarding the demographic profiles of various countries are obviously impossible to come by but the most reliable, albeit still speculative, estimate suggests that the English population increased from 2.0–2.25 mil. in 1086 to 4.0–4.25 mil. in ca. 1300, a 94 percent increase. Population growth was also evident in Normandy during the 13th century, adding ten percent during the second half of it, and similar developments have been documented for Sweden. The most typical response to this trend was the welldocumented process of land reclamation through the utilization of marginal

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areas. The combination of declining real wages and transport costs along with rising grain prices led to a shift away from animal husbandry towards cereal production. This process made sense not only in terms of economics but also in terms of calorific output since the latter provides more calories per unit of land compared to the former. Study after study (referring to England, Sweden, Normandy, and Flanders, among others) has documented the shrinkage of grazing grounds and of the fallow within arable areas, the decline of livestock ratios, and the rising values of grassland and meadowland. The scarcity of pastures was particularly pronounced in the English midlands, especially the eastern section, whereas nationally the value of meadow was four- and five-fold that of arable. These developments involved the utilization of the extensive margin of cultivation. Intensification practices are also recorded in some places such as scattered areas along the southeastern coastline of England and parts of Flanders. Such practices took the form of stall-feeding of cattle, systematic application of fertilizers, thorough weeding, high seeding rates, and the reduction or even elimination of the fallow and its substitution with legume cultivation; from a sample of manors in Flanders, albeit small, it appears that legumes occupied proportionally more acreage there compared to the most innovative region of England, eastern Norfolk (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture; Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 20–133; Janken Myrdal, Medieval Farming in Sweden: Technical Change AD 1000–1520, 1986; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’,” 1997). The exceptional cases of few innovators could not have had a decisive weight in determining the overall pattern of economic growth which entailed a number of contradictions and limitations. The increasing utilization of marginal lands and the expansion of arable at the expense of pastoral husbandry which diminished the supply of manure and thereby of nitrogen, was bound to have negative repercussions for the level of yields and mean output per worker. Lack of exact data on aggregate output and labor force participation rates does not allow us to calculate the latter, but there is enough documentation when it comes to land productivity which is measured in two ways: seed/yield ratios and bushels per acre. English manorial estates, having generated records unmatched in their extent and continuity in the rest of Europe, reveal that seed/yield ratios were about 1:4 and output per acre net of seed was close to nine bushels. This level of productivity, not much cause for envy, established a norm that was repeated in the majority of cases across the European landscape. Swedish agriculture was somewhat less productive with seed/yield ratios around 1:3, according to some estimates, whereas France matched the performance of English agriculture, although some ex-

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ceptional deviations from the norm (up to 1:13 for wheat and 1:6.7 for oats) have been recorded. There were only two countries that succeeded in moving away from the norm. The first one was Netherlands where the typical yield was about 11 bushels per acre (with seed/yield ratios of 1:8–13 for wheat and 1:4–7 for oats). But it was Flanders that achieved the most remarkable record: winter grains recorded ratios of 1:20–30 and yields per acre in the range of 13–33 bushels (Myrdal, Medieval Farming in Sweden; Eddy van cauwenberghe and Herman van der wee, “Productivity, Evolution of Rents and Farm Size in the Southern Netherlands Agriculture from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” Productivity of Land and Agricultural Innovation in the Low Countries, 1250–1800, ed. Herman van der wee and Eddy cauwenberghe, 1978, 125–39; Georges Comet, “Technology and Agricultural Expansion in the Middle Ages: The Example of France North of the Loire,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Grenville astill and John langdon, 1997, 15–20; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’,” 1997, 79–81). It becomes apparent that medieval economies responded to demographic growth in a conservative way and this is reflected in only minor modifications of their technological infrastructures. The reclamation movement that began in the 11th century brought with it a horizontal expansion of existing technologies, albeit with some variations given differences in climatic and ecological factors. Swedish agriculture, for instance, witnessed the adoption and spread of the two-field system, the introduction of watermills and windmills, horse-shoes, and the use of the heavy plough in its western regions (with ards and spades still being prominent in eastern parts of the country). Improvements on existing technologies are also recorded but they were limited to the few progressive parts of Europe. In Flanders, for instance, the faster horse was increasingly used since the 12th century; the Flemish hook or “pick” and the scythe superseded the sickle and the cultivation of cereals in narrow, high-backed ridges facilitated drainage. Most importantly, Flanders was at the forefront of innovations when it comes to field systems. In the southern part of the country a nominally open-field system, known as Flurzwang, was practiced but without a rigid form of management. Fields were fragmented based on a number of natural boundaries, such as brooks and roads, creating a patchwork that gave producers a substantial degree of flexibility. In central Flanders the infield-outfield system was prevalent with the inner core organized under a three-field system. Most importantly, convertible husbandry, the most efficient field system known in the Middle Ages, was also practiced in enclosed farms, appearing mainly in areas of recent reclamations. But these were exceptions that verified the rule. In England, for instance, flexible field systems exhibited a pattern of spor-

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adic diffusion but with rigid forms of open-fields prevailing in the heartland of English manorialism, the southeastern parts of the country (Widgren, “Fields and Field Systems in Scandinavia,” 1997; van houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries; Myrdal, Medieval Farming in Sweden; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’,” 1997, 74–81; Myrdal, “The Agricultural Transformation of Sweden,” 1997; Harry kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields: A Model on the Relative Efficiency of Medieval Field Systems,” The Journal of Economic History 64 [2004]: 462–99). It is very difficult to come up with precise generalizations in terms of how these events played out at the aggregate level. Campbell estimates that the size of arable land in England increased from 5.75–6.0 to 10.5 mil acres between 1086 and c.1300. These figures amount to a 79 percent increase in the size of arable, compared to his own estimate of 94 percent in terms of population growth. Campbell believes that the levels of consumption did not suffer as much as these figures suggest based on his speculation that grain output grew marginally faster than the arable area. He concedes some decline in living standards, although the extent of it was likely to have been more severe than he claims, given the static nature of technology and the increasing utilization of marginal lands (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 386–410). There is a substantial amount of literature suggesting that a sizeable portion of the population, particularly the peasantry, found itself in a state of crisis as the 13th century progressed. According to a study that combines existing empirical evidence with some reasonable extrapolations and assumptions, the minimum size of holding in England needed to sustain a minimum level of subsistence was 18 arable acres. Contrasting this figure with Kosminsky’s study of 35,000 peasant holdings in southern England (1279), which finds the average size of holding at only 14.8 acres, and extending this sample to other parts of the country, leads to the conclusion that approximately half of the peasant population was at or below the threshold of 18 acres. Having access to supplementary sources of income, hired employment being the most common one, was the key for the survival of this segment of the population. We can only speculate on peasant diets that were probably inadequate and lacking diversity but there are records testifying to the lack of basic resources such as animals and basic implements and tools. Bois portrays an almost identical picture in Normandy. “Demographic saturation and land division had been taken to their limit. M. M. Postan’s terrible diagnosis of the English case can be applied to Normandy without the slightest hesitation: half the peasantry lacked the bare minimum needed

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to support a family.” As noted, smallholders could hire themselves out and buy the extra grains they needed but real wages were low and grain prices high. It is not clear what the condition was of the peasantry in other parts of the continent. In the rest of France, the Low Countries, and West Germany the typical size of holdings during the three centuries leading to the Black Death was oscillating in the range of 10–15 acres, that is, somewhat below English figures. In the Low Countries, given the smaller size of families and the higher productivity of the arable sector, the aforementioned figures may have been sufficient to ensure subsistence for a sizeable portion of the population but these relatively favorable parameters were not shared by the peasantry elsewhere (Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Standards of Living and Capital Formation in Pre-plague England: A Peasant Budget Model” Economic History Review 53 [2000]: 237–61; Christopher C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1500, 1989; Mark Bailey, “Peasant Welfare in England, 1290–1348” Economic History Review 51 [1998]: 223–51; Evgenii A. kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, 1956; Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 162–63; Van Cauwenberghe and Van Der Wee, “Productivity, Evolution of Rents and Farm Size in the Southern Netherlands Agriculture”). Landlords, on the other hand, were able to take advantage of the shifting demographic and economic configurations. The value of money rents dwindled and the reevaluation of rents in kind did not fully compensate for this loss. Landlords reacted to this revenue loss in two different ways. Some, notably those in Normandy and England, became actively involved in the direct management of their demesnes in light of high grain prices and low wages. In a second possible reaction, observed in a limited number of cases (particularly in Flanders), landlords opted to engage in extensive leasing of their lands, a process that started in the 12th century, accelerating thereafter, leading eventually to a social structure that was characterized by a considerable amount of freedom. Flexible tenurial arrangements rendered this strategy a viable alternative in the case of Flanders since it allowed the adjustment of rent based on market forces and, at the same time, provided landlords with some flexibility in terms of provisioning their households with basic products and luxuries (Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 215–37; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’”). The aforementioned developments in Western Europe were duplicated, granted local particularities, in Eastern Europe. Between the 10th and 13th centuries economic development was uneven, at best, with Bohemia and south-western Russia achieving the best results. Urban centers did exist but the majority of them were small in size and the functional role of their inhab-

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itants, craftsmen and traders, was to cater to the needs of the ruling elite. As a result, use of money was quite limited and the role of trade in boosting agrarian growth was very marginal, evident in the lack of the widespread use of techniques such as triennial rotation and iron ploughs. During this time serfdom was not particularly prevalent. The fluid situation caused by external invasions allowed peasants the opportunity to flee the lands of overdemanding lords. But the growth of population, coupled with the presence of rich mineral deposits and the infusion of this region with German merchants and artisans, created a premium on the exploitation of existing resources and initiated a phase of economic growth, especially in Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. The benefits of this growth, however, were not distributed evenly across the population. Instead, it triggered a seigneurial reaction in the 13th century which led to the imposition of feudal norms similar to those in western Europe to the detriment of the local peasantry (Marian Malowist, “The Problem of the Inequality of Economic Development in Europe in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 19 [1966]: 15–28). Medieval Europe ushered the 14th century resembling a train bound for derailment in a seemingly triumphant verification of Malthusian dynamics. The demographic factor may have produced growth at the aggregate level but, given the merely horizontal expansion of existing technologies coupled with their incomplete process of diffusion, it was bound to result in the unfolding of the law of diminishing returns and a decline of land and labor productivity. Furthermore, growth was unbalanced with the majority of the population lacking the ability to cope effectively with the growing scarcity or resources. Europe was in a fragile state when adverse weather conditions, beginning in 1315, brought about a couple of successive famines. The population of Ypres declined by 10 percent during those famines and large number of deaths were recorded at Bruges, Louvain, Brussels, and elsewhere (Van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 1977, 60–61). And then the Black Death came and gave the final blow. But it is very important to stress that microbes simply exaggerated a crisis that was already underway but they did not create it in the first place. D. The Late Middle Ages – The Post-Plague Period The great epidemic was an event of unparalleled proportions. Campbell estimates that the English population declined from 4.0–4.25 mil. ca. 1300 to 2.25–2.5 mil. by the 1370s when successive epidemics came to a halt. The degree of devastation was even more severe in Normandy where half of the population was decimated due to the epidemics but economic life was further disrupted due to the looting, pillage, and heavy taxes associated with

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the English occupation. At the trough of the crisis population was brought down to one quarter of its level in the early 14th century both due to the death toll and the fleeing of peasants (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 402; Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism). In terms of its economic impact, the demographic catastrophe brought about a devastating blow to the interests of the ruling class. The death of tenants translated to a sharp decline in seigneurial dues. Total seigneurial receipts in the county of Tancarville (Normandy) declined in the order of 70–75 percent during the period 1315–1460 and started recovering only at the latter date. But, in addition, manorial estates were affected in terms of their role as production units given adverse developments in factor and product markets. The decline in the demand for grains brought a proportional decline in supply and led to a stagnation of prices. Wages, on the other hand, were kept at steady levels due to state regulation (Statute of Laborers in England), but not for long. Peasant discontent, culminating in the revolt of 1381, lifted artificial controls in the labor market leading to a marked increase of wages that lasted throughout the 15th century (Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 256; Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 3–10; Van Cauwenberghe and Van Der Wee, “Productivity, Evolution of Rents and Farm Size in the Southern Netherlands Agriculture”). Manorial estates attempted to react to these adverse conditions in a number of ways. Those with access to heavy labor services attempted to hold on to practices of the past, albeit at a reduced level of intensity. Customary labor services, however, were performed at a notoriously low level of productivity. This widely held, but unsubstantiated until recently, belief was finally empirically verified in the case of Wisbech Barton manor: customary tenants performing labor services took 37 percent more time to weed one acre and 11 percent more time to reap and bind grains compared to hired labor. In addition, labor services were not entirely cost-free given the custom or providing meals to customary tenants. But the alternative of utilizing hired labor was an even less desirable option. In the very same manor of Wisbech Barton the proportion of hired labor used in mowing/haymaking fell from an average of 30 percent of the labor force before the epidemic to virtually nothing subsequently. Manorial estates were faced with only two viable alternatives. The first one was to convert from corn to horn. The decision made sense on the supply side because it avoided high wage bills but it was an equally sensible decision when viewed from the demand side of the market given the stagnation of grain prices and the shifting dietary habits of the population, from pottage and grains to ale and meat. The mean sown acreage in a large sample of manors across England fell from 189 acres during the second half

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of the 13th century to 143 acres by the first half of the 15th century. The second viable alternative was to give up production altogether and engage in a massive leasing of demesnial land, an option many estates chose to take up. The combined effect of these developments was a drastic decline in the size of arable land; in the case of England it has been estimated that about a quarter of the arable land was given up by ca. 1375, that is, from 10.5 mil acres ca. 1300, down to 8.0 mil. acres shortly after the great epidemic (Myrdal, Medieval Farming in Sweden; campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture; David stone, “The Productivity of Hired and Customary Labour: Evidence from Wisbech Barton in the Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 50 [1997]: 640–56). There is fairly little doubt that the adverse economic conditions of the post-plague period failed to impact negatively the peasant sector of the economy given its self-sufficient nature. In fact, quite the contrary – demographic factors relating to the decline in the size of families and political ones relating to the decline of seigneurial dues most likely led to a considerable improvement in the standard of living of the peasantry. A comprehensive reconstruction of the annual budget of a typical English peasant has shown that the size of the holding necessary to ensure subsistence declined from 18 arable acres down to half-virgate (15 acres). Given the abundance of land and scarcity of tenants, it would seem reasonable to assume that a sizeable majority of the population reached this threshold. Peasants had three interrelated options in terms of disposing their ensuing gains: improve their diets, accumulate land, and build up their animal resources. It is impossible to document peasant diets for this period but related evidence supports the speculation of considerable improvement. Transaction records of the land market, as well as evidence regarding stints for grazing grounds, heriots (a death tax in the form of the best beast), and a few surviving peasant inventories clearly indicate an augmentation of land and animal resources. It is very important to stress, however, that the limited scope of markets and familial labor supplies, coupled with the high price of hired labor, were bound to impose limits on the process of land accumulation, whereas the supply of good grazing grounds created similar limitations when it comes to animal resources. Nevertheless, it is very likely that these developments led to improvements in land productivity, particularly due to increased quantities of manure. Labor productivity also improved in contrast to the pre-plague period when larger families in the context of fragmented holdings did not allow an efficient use of labor; it has been estimated that agricultural output per head doubled in Aliermont between 1397 and 1467. These developments were not a uniquely English phenomenon. Bois’s research, for instance, has produced

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identical conclusions for Normandy, although in this case the full realization of these benefits were postponed until the middle of the 15th century due to the economic havoc played by the English occupation (Harry Kitsikopoulos, “The Impact of the Black Death on Peasant Economy in England, 1350–1500,” Journal of Peasant Studies 29 [2002]: 71–90; Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 138–59). All in all, it becomes apparent that the demographic changes and their impact on economic variables had quite different effects across the social ladder and that makes it difficult to provide an assessment about how overall productivity was affected during this period; geographical limitations in terms of surviving records coupled with the retrieval of estates from the direct management of their demesnes translate to a more limited manorial database. Despite these caveats, the existing evidence points to no significant changes compared to the pre-plague period when it comes to the level of yields. In the better documented case of England different methodologies have led some economic historians to argue for a decline of yields per seed and per acre (e. g., Campbell), while others have argued in favor of a stagnation thesis (e. g., Kitsikopoulos). Records on Danish yields are very poor but the existing ones point to a seed:yield ratio of 1:3.5, as was the case in a manor in southwest Jutland (1388), and in line with the English level of productivity. Somewhat more extensive data, but still quite intermittent, suggest that productivity in the Low Countries remained above average, with seed:yield ratios ranging from 4.3–8 for wheat, 6.64–9.7 for rye, and 8.4 for oats. At the top of the productivity pyramid, Flanders still comprised an exceptional case (e. g., with yields per acre for oats reaching the spectacular level of 28–34 bushels) (Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 2000, 370–85; Kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular CommonFields;” Van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 1977, 69–72; Thoen, “The Birth of ‘the Flemish Husbandry’;” Poulsen, “Agricultural Technology in Medieval Denmark”). Poorer, compared to the pre-plague period, as the manorial record on yields may be, it is still preferable to the virtually non-existent evidence on peasant holdings. That is a truly serious caveat given the retrieval of demesnial cultivation to the benefit of peasant holdings. It is very likely that land productivity among peasant holdings improved given the greater access to animal resources and the more efficient utilization of labor supplies in the context of larger holdings but this is more of a reasonable speculation rather than a documented conclusion. If rising yields among peasant holdings did lift the overall level of postplague productivity it was certainly not due to any radical transformation of the “technological paradigm” of medieval agriculture since no new technol-

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ogies appear after the epidemic. Instead, it must have been the more efficient utilization of existing technologies, especially on the part of peasants. In some cases, like the Netherlands, there is a continuation of past practices such as the adoption of convertible husbandry, the substitution of fallow with legumes, the stall-feeding of livestock and the spread of their manure along with the waste of urban areas. If the Netherlands, along with Flanders, were the ideal types, other countries in the economic periphery of Europe were trying to close the gap. Laggards like Sweden, however, had still a way to go, despite the slow progress made in the diffusion of basic technologies such as the use of ploughs which started spreading from western Sweden to other parts of the country and the inroads made by 1500 in the use of iron harrows (Myrdal, Medieval Farming in Sweden; Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Agricultural Production and Technology in the Netherlands,” Medieval Farming and Technology, ed. Astill and Langdon, 1997, 89–114). In the end, social and economic life may not have been radically different for those that were resilient enough to survive the devastating blow of microbes across the European continent. But it was not the same either. The lifting of the enormous pressure on existing resources allowed a sizeable portion of the population to enjoy basic material comforts that lacked in previous decades. The erosion of seigneurial power contributed also to this improvement in material prosperity but, most importantly, signified the beginning of more revolutionary changes which, however, lied well into the future. The preconditions for growth were in place, although, if economic progress is path dependent, regional particularities were relevant in terms of the timing factor. The triad of plagues, famines, and the Anglo-French conflict postponed the recovery in France until the second half of the 15th century. But elsewhere, in Flanders and Brabant most notably, the heritage of innovation and the stimulus provided by the rise of the textile industry by the 1420s, both in agrarian and urban settings (e. g., Bruges), brought the recovery earlier (Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism, 1984, 261–368; Van Cauwenberghe and Van Der Wee, “Productivity, Evolution of Rents and Farm Size in the Southern Netherlands Agriculture”). Select Bibliography Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, ed. Grenville Astill and John L. Langdon (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Mark Bailey, “Peasant Welfare in England, 1290–1348,” Economic History Review 51 (1998): 223–51; Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Christopher C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Harry

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Kitsikopoulos, “Standards of Living and Capital Formation in Pre-plague England: A Peasant Budget Model,” Economic History Review 53 (2000): 237–61; Harry Kitsikopoulos, “Convertible Husbandry vs. Regular Common Fields: A Model on the Relative Efficiency of Medieval Field Systems,” Journal of Economic History 64 (2004): 462–99; Evgenii A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, trans. R. Kisch, ed. Rodney H. Hilton (New York: Kelley & Millman, 1956); Marian Malowist, “The Problem of the Inequality of Economic Development in Europe in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 19 (1966): 15–28; Jan. A. Van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 800–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977); Productivity of Land and Agricultural Innovation in the Low Countries, 1250–1800, ed. Herman Van Der Wee and Eddy Van Cauwenberghe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1978).

Harry Kitsikopoulos

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Technology in the Middle Ages

T Technology in the Middle Ages A. Definition Technology is defined as tools and concepts that are utilized in the transformation of natural resources. It is a mental process, not a mechanical one. Medieval historians of technology have been interested primary in technologies of agriculture and construction, energy-converting devices (in particular, watermills), craft technologies, and military technology. The most critical methodological problem confronting the history of medieval technology is the extreme dispersion of sources. There is comparatively little in the way of treatises devoted to any one technique. Rather the method of research usually consists in reading through masses of documents that are likely to present some evidence of a technique in use. The problem then is to be able to draw inferences from instances of practice about the nature of the implement or application described. Archeological evidence is useful although comparatively infrequent except in specific instances such as pottery or the building trades, where the remains are extremely long lasting. Some techniques in particular lend themselves to typological organization. Pottery is one; another is agricultural implements (e. g., the tendency of common instrument like plows, hoes, shovels, scythes, etc., to present themselves in graded series, which may or not correspond to an identifiable historical or geographical sequence: Frantisek Sach, “Proposal for the Classification of Pre-Industrial Tilling Implements,” Tools and Tillage 1 [1968]: 3–27). B. Historical Development There is a long tradition of descriptive and historical accounts of machines, for example, Jacob Leupold, Theatrum Machinarum Generale (1724); José María Lanz and Agustín de Betancourt, Ensayo sobre la composición de la máquinas (1808) (a precocious attempt to present a typology of machines); and Thomas Ewbank (1792–1870), A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other Machines for Raising Water (1842). Abbott Payson Usher (A History of Mechanical Inventions, 1929) may have been the first modern economist to write in this vein.

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The proximate roots of the contemporary historiography of medieval technology came not from mechanical technology, however, but from rural economic history and agrarian technology, the locus classicus being Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes, L’attelage et le cheval de selle à travers les ages (1931), whose subject was the inefficiency of Roman harnessing compared to medieval practice based on the horse-collar. Lefebvre’s solution was only partially correct, but his study demonstrated how a multiplicity of sources, particularly iconographical ones, could lead to new proposals towards the solution of old conundrums. Directly in this line was Lynn White, Jr., who, in 1940, adumbrated a new approach to medieval technology, based on bringing the widest range of evidence to bear on hypotheses developed to explain central issues of medieval history: “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages” (Speculum 15[1940]: 141–59). A comparative view of harnessing in Europe and the Islamic world is Richard Bulliett, The Camel and the Wheel (1975) (a particularly successful use of a typological method). White investigated three problems: first, the technological roots of the agricultural revolution of the middle ages; second, the possibility of a medieval industrial revolution based on water power; third, the relationship of feudalism and military technology, in particular the stirrup. The first argument was based on the arrival in western Europe around the year 1000 of disparate elements of agrarian technology, including the padded horse collar, the nailed horseshoe, and the discovery of springcorn (oats, peas, beans, and barley) which led to a shift from two to three-course rotations. The main problem with the hypothesis is the uneven adoption of the techniques, both spatially and chronologically (John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and technological Innovation, 1986), but the overall dynamic has stood the test of time and has been immensely successful in generating new research. The most controversial of White’s proposals was that regarding the stirrup and the origins of feudalism. The foot stirrup, which reached Latin Europe from Central Asia sometime in the 7th century, made it possible for a rider to deliver a lance thrust with the power of the horse joined to that of his own body. This innovation set off an arms race that led to heavy armor, which required capital investment on the part of knights that was supplied via the granting of fiefs. The thesis is still attacked (Bernard S. Bachrach, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 [1970]: 49–75), and defended (Alex Roland, “Once More into the Stirrup,” Technology and Culture 44 [2003]: 574–85), but, from a historiographical perspective the centering of the debate on the processes of technological adaptation transcends the specific issue of the emergence of feudalism.

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Feudalism is also at the center of the wider debate over water mills. Guy Bois (La mutation de l’an mil, 1989; Eng. trans. 1992) contends that the emergence of a class of comparatively affluent peasant farmers, who built and owned water-driven grist mills collectively, created the wealth that incipient feudal lords found worth seizing in the first place. The obligation of peasants to grind their wheat at the lord’s mill became the key feudal monopoly. Watermills are also the focal point of the notion of a medieval industrial revolution, first argued by Eleanora Carus-Wilson in “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century” (English Historical Review 11 [1941]: 39–60), and later taken up by Jean Gimpel in The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1977). The success or failure of the argument is vitiated by an inability to arrive either at a definition of the phenomenon or an effective economic standard for evaluating it. C. Watermills Marc Bloch had proposed that although the Romans were familiar with watermill technology, they did not use such mills owing to the plentiful supply of slave labor and that, therefore, they only appeard in Europe in great numbers (8th century) after rural slavery had ceased to exist (“Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau,” Annales ESC, 7 [1935]: 538–63; Eng. trans. in Bloch, Land and Work in Medieval Europe, 1967, 1935). Classical archeologists, however, by focusing on household space rather than that of work, failed to turn up remains of Roman mills until relatively recently, when the number of known sites increased considerable (Orjan Wikander, Handbook of Ancient Water Technology, 2000). Watermills were the most important sources of industrial power in the Middle Ages. Northern European mills were of two types, known as horizontal and vertical. The horizontal mill where water is delivered under pressure to a paddlewheel, has a vertical axle joining the waterwheel to the runner stone; it required no gearing, and could be built by a village carpenter. The vertical mill which has a horizontal axle sometimes driving cam-mounted hammers, required gearing and was more costly to build. In Castilian documents, horizontal mills were called molendinum, molino, vertical mills, azeña, aceña, etc from Arabic saniya, water wheel, making it possible to identify the machine by the word used to represent it. Elsewhere in Europe, however, both types were called molendinum in Latin; therefore identifying the mill type requires additional information. In Mediterranean Europe and the Arab world there was a third type: a horizontal mill powered up by a vertical storage tank that delivered water under pressure, called arubah in Arabic, molino de cubo in Castilian), molí de cup in Catalan, and so forth, in romance vernacular languages.

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The vertical mill (called “Vitruvian” because it had been described by Vitruvius, De arquitectura, ca. 30 C.E.), originated in the Near East around the 2nd century B.C.E. and then diffused westward to Europe and eastward to China simultaneously. In China, the device was used for a variety of manufacturing procedures, whenever a raw material had to be milled before it could be made into a finished project: thus rice-husking mills, paper mills, sugar-cane mills, and fulling mills all diffused from China westward as discrete technological packages, the paper mill arriving in eastern Persia in the late 8th century along with techniques of paper-making themselves. Paper and sugar processing were completely new industries in the Arab world. The sugarcane package also included irrigation techniques, necessary to water the cane under semi-arid conditions. The irrigation package included a number of Indian (rice, sugarcane, old world cotton, watermelon, oranges and lemons) and Persian (eggplant, artichoke) cultivars, which diffused along with the know-how associated with their cultivation, such as the qanat (filtration gallery) and the noria (water-lifting wheel). The entire package was known as Indian agriculture (Arabic, filaha hindiyya) (Andrew Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Technique, 1983). D. Military Technology In the course of the Middle Ages, weapons tended to become larger and more powerful, which in turn required an augmentation of defensive emplacements. The English were famous for their longbowmen, but hundreds were needed to breach enemy infantry lines. Siege engines, such as trebuchets and ballistas, based on Roman designs, grew larger and there was a tendency for crank-operated gears to replace human power. The crossbow, a modified ballista, was unrelated technically to the longbow and much more powerful. Medieval military technology was metallurgical in nature, whose central problems were dealing with the impure ore that made iron implements brittle and breakable and the difficulty of making steel (Alan Williams, The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages and early Modern Period, 2003). True guns emerged in China from the fire-lance, a flame-throwing device, in the second half of the 13th century. The Arabs certainly knew of the fire-lance around this time. The first European visual representations of guns date to 1326. The army of Nasrid Granada apparently had guns at the siege of Elche in 1331, after which bombards became a common siege weapon in western Europe. The diffusion of the technique was so rapid that it may be that guns were brought directly from China to Europe by travelers.

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Bombards were iron instruments, made by blacksmiths using wrought iron. Later, forged iron was used and the bombards grew in size but then hit a technological dead end in the mid-15th century, replaced by cast bronze canons and smaller handguns (see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. V, part VII: The Gunpowder Epic, 1986; David Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom, 1956; Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics, 1997). Whether trebuchets or canons were used, parabolic ballistics was not understood till the 17th century. E. Diffusion Technological diffusion is one of the primary motors of economic growth. In medieval historiography of technology, however, to illustrate it presents numerous methodological challenges. Robert Creswell has shown that it is impossible to trace historical genealogies of diffusion based on physical and design characteristics only; thus, neither traditional Moroccan watermills nor the blades of horizontal waterwheels in the Mediterranean basin, display any “grouping that could explain their historical or geographical background” (“Of Mills and Waterwheels: The Hidden Parameters of Technological Choice,” Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Culture since the Neolithic, ed. Pierre Lemmonnier, 1993, 181–210). Needham, whose multi-volume work on Science and Civilisation in China (1954–) is in fact as much about technology as it is about science, was able to see similar artifacts in operation both in China and Europe and to infer a historical connection between them, especially when corroborated by documentation. Whenever artifacts and ideas traverse linguistic boundaries, etymologies are frequently helpful; but this method means being able to control the languages involved. Two examples of diffusion-based studies are Bulliet’s account of the bimodal diffusion of two styles of equine and camel harnessing, whose typology he established by structural features of the equipment, and studies by numerous historians and archeologists on the diffusion of filtration galleries (qanats) as an appurtenance of irrigation from a Persian hearth, across North Africa, into al-Andalus, and then across the Atlantic to Mexico and Peru. The old world origin of Mexican galerías and Peruvian puquios was resisted by New World archeologists until a combination of historical, archeological, linguistic and design factors established their provenance. There was also a distinctive genre of mechanical engineering treatises which diffused from the Islamic world to the Latin west. The Arabic genre of ‘ilm al-hiyal (science of devices), exemplified by The Book of Knowledge of Ingeni-

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ous Mechanical Devices by al-Jazari (1136–1206), presented complex machinery with segmental gears, crankshafts, escapements, and so forth, whose purpose, however, was to illustrate points of theoretical mechanics, not to build machines. The tradition continued in Alfonso the Wise’s Libro de relojes (book of clocks). Select Bibliography Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe, ed. Grenville Astill and John Langdon (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997); Miquel Barceló, “The Missing WaterMill: A Question of Technological Diffusion in the High Middle Ages,” The Making of Feudal Agricultures?, ed. M. Barceló and François Sigaut (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 255–314; Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1992); John Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy, 1300–1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Adam Lucas, Wind, Water, Work: Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Paolo Squatriti, Working with Water in Medieval Europe: Technology and Resource-Use (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000); Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

Thomas F. Glick

The Term ‘Middle Ages’ A. Time A.1. Time I: Discussing the Period As any other historical period, the time span called “the Middle Ages” is designated by certain dates of beginning and end created by historians and common historical sense. The literature discussing the arbitrariness of (any) periodization is huge, but hardly any scholar will seriously confute its basic heuristic usefulness (for a broad set of specialized perspectives cf. The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence L. Besserman, 1996; for a broad overview, see Johan Hendrik Jacob van der Pot, Sinndeutung und Periodisierung der Geschichte: Eine systematische Übersicht der Theorien und Auffassungen, 1999). The Middle Ages, however, being a comparatively large time span which comprises a wide set of characteristics attached to it affirmed “medieval,” are more easily subject to discussion than

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shorter periods arising from more definitive historical sub-disciplines or perspectives, such as “the Cold War” or “the Industrialization.” Most scholars consent on defining the Middle Ages as the time period between ca. 500 and 1500 CE. But when it comes to the very marking points of beginning and end, temporal limits can vary broadly (a useful collection of essays – in German language – still is: Zur Frage der Periodengrenze zwischen Altertum und Mittelalter, ed. Paul Egon Hübinger, 1969; a useful overview is provided by Michael Kulikowski, “Drawing a Line Under Antiquity: Archaeological and Historical Categories of Evidence in the Transition from the Ancient World to the Middle Ages,” Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Celia Martin Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz, 2007, 248–70). This is especially true for the line between antiquity and the Middle Ages which is as bold as roughly two hundred years. Some dates suggested are: x

x

x x

x x

the rule of Constantine the Great, sole reign since 324 (“Edict of Tolerance,” 311) the beginning of the barbarian migration, beginning with the Huns in 375/76 the division of the Roman Empire in 395 the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, hence the end of the Roman Empire, in 476 the founding of Montecassino, the first Christian monastery, in 529 the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens, also in 529

Hence, this line is especially permeable for a variety of cultural, political, and economic phenomena which scholars of both antiquity and the Middle Ages claim as their field – or sometimes collectively neglect, claiming not to be responsible for it (for the troubles scholars of ancient history have in conceptualizing the border to the early Middle Ages cf. Arnaldo Marcone, “La tarda antichità o della difficoltà delle periodizzazioni,” Studi storici 45 [2004]: 25–36). Though more or less condensed within a span of only one hundred years, the same is basically true for fixing points that mark the end of the Middle Ages, including dates such as: x x x x

the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire in 1453 the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg ca. 1450 the discovery of America in 1492 Luther’s 95 theses, published in 1517

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However, historians have come to accept appointing an epochal change once a variety of incisive events or trends culminate within a certain time frame (cf. Josef Fleckenstein, “Ortsbestimmung des Mittelalters: Das Problem der Periodisierung,” Mittelalterforschung, ed. Ruprecht Kurzrock, 1981, 9–21; Leonida Pandimiglio, “‘L’idea di Medio Evo’ e la periodizzazione,” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università di Cagliari 57 [2002]: 301–46; William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” Journal of World History 3 [1992]: 13–53; Christian van Kieft, “La periodization de l’histoire du Moyen Âge,” Les categories en histoire, ed. Chaïm Perelmann, 1969, 41–56; Hans-Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik: Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung, 1999, 36–46). And so have medievalists. That is why the conventional marker “ca. 500–1500 CE” (with a range of ca. one hundred years plus and minus) still dominates in academe. Tendencies to prolong the Middle Ages until far into what is commonly perceived as “the early modern period,” though getting louder within the last decades, still rather remain at the margins of historiographic discourse. However, scholars of French Annales historiography, namely Jacques LeGoff (“Pour un long moyen âge,” L’imaginaire médiévale: Essais, 1985, 7–13; also cf. Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Das Andere, die Unterschiede, das Ganze: Jacques Le Goffs Bild des europäischen Mittelalters,” Francia 17.1 [1990]: 141–58), have argued for long, indeed “very long” (LeGoff, L’imaginaire médiévale, loc. cit., XII), Middle Ages, comprising a period of roughly the 3rd to the late 18th or even early 19th century (the latter being commensurable with Reinhard Koselleck’s concept of a “Sattelzeit”; cf. “Einleitung,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1, ed. Otto Brunner et al., 1979, XV). LeGoff’s concept shares certain vertexes with those of Dietrich Gerhard (Old Europe: A Study of Continuity 1000–1800, 1981), Otto Brunner (“Das ‘ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische ‘Ökonomik’,” Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 3rd ed. 1980, 1st ed. 1968, 103–27), and Peter Blickle (Das Alte Europa: Vom Hochmittelalter bis zur Moderne, 2008) who have – though with differing time spans – brought up the idea of an “old European” epoch, bonding the Middle Ages (or at least parts of) with the early modern era – and even Mediterranean antiquity, as is the case with Brunner. Though the interdisciplinary exchange between scholars of the Middle Ages and those of early modern times is at its heights since the last decades (cf., amongst others, Continuities and Disruptions Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Charles Burnett et al., 2008), these epochal cross-over is still observed with reservation in large parts of the academe.

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A.2. Excursus on Periodization: The Pierenne-Thesis Still, some debates touch more than general accounts towards the signification of epochal terms but rather eminent issues of historical interpretation. Closely attached to the question about the end of the ancient period and the beginning of the Middle Ages is one of the probably most discussed historical theories of the 20th century, known as “the Pirenne thesis” (for an overview cf. Carl August Lückerath, “Die Diskussion über die PirenneThese,” Historische Debatten und Kontroversen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Elvert and Susanne Krauss, 2003, 55–69; Georges Despy, La fortune historiographique des thèses d’Henri Pirenne, 1986; Adriaan Verhulst, “Conclusion: l’actualité de Pirenne,” Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, spec. no., 28 [1986]: 149–53; The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision, ed. Alfred F. Havighurst, 1969). It traces back to Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s study Mahomet et Charlemagne, posthumously published in 1937 (first deployments of his thesis: “Mahomed et Charlemagne,” RBPh 1 [1922]: 77–86; and “Un contraste économique: Mérovingiens et Carolingiens,” RBPh 2 [1923]: 223–35). In this book, Pirenne confutes the thitherto common assertion that the cultural and economic unity of the ancient Mediterranean was destroyed by the migration of barbarian tribes. Rather, he argued, it collapsed only in the 7th and 8th centuries with a deep depression, the breakdown of orient trade and of credit economy alongside with the expansion of the Islam. Already soon after the publication of Mahomet et Charlemagne, Pirenne’s thesis was heavily debated. Scholars such as Amelio Tagliaferri, Eliyahu Ashtor, and Heinrich Dannenbauer advocated his findings, while the most prominent among his earlier opponents were Hermann Aubin, Erna Patzelt, and Maurice Lombard. Still today debates have not settled, including voices from all diverse disciplines, such as history (Cinzio Violante, Uno storico europeo tra guerra e dopoguerra, Henri Pirenne (1914–1923), 1998; Bernard S. Bachrach, “Pirenne and Charlemagne,” After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History, ed. Alexander Callander Murray, 1998, 214–31), archaeology (Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis, 1983; Richard Hodges, “Henri Pirenne and the Question of Demand in the sixth century,” The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, ed. Richard Hodges and William Bowden, 1998, 3–14), and Oriental studies (cf. Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz, “Another Orientalist’s Remarks Concerning the Pirenne Thesis,” The Expansion of the Early Islamic State, ed. by Fred M. Donner, 2008, 101–12). Some aspects seem commonly accepted by now, namely the economic depression of the 7th century which Pirenne had diagnosed, although scholars tend to put it into perspective

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today (cf. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900, 2001, 118–19). Still, the highlighted role of the Islam as a reason for the collapse of the ancient world seems widely rejected today, even though John Moorhead has stated lately that “the Pirenne thesis largely works” (The Roman Empire Divided, 400–700, 2001, 255). For a variety of more recent perspectives on a “long early medieval period” cf. the papers edited by Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, 2008). A.3. Time II: Sub-Periodization Discussing the beginning and the end of the Middle Ages can also be performed in national, regional or disciplinary terms (cf. Hermann Heimpel, “Über die Epochen der mittelalterlichen Geschichte,” Die Sammlung 2 [1946/47]: 245–62; Ángel A. Castellán, “Proposiciones para un análisis crítico del problema de la periodización histórica,” Anales de historia antigua y medieval 9 [1957/58]: 7–48; Sentimento del tempo e periodizzazione della storia nel Medioevo, ed. Ovidio Capitani, 2000). In disciplinary terms, this seems most evident for the different periodizations of scholars of history and those of literary history (cf., for instance, Hermann Heimpel, “Das Wesen des deutschen Spätmittelalters,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 35 [1953]: 29–51; Joachim Heinzle, “Wann beginnt das Spätmittelalter?,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 112 [1983]: 207–23; Erich Meuthen, “Gab es ein spätes Mittelalter?,” Spätzeit: Studien zu den Problemen eines historischen Epochenbegriffs, ed. Johannes Kunisch, 1990, 91–135; or from a hispanist’s perspective: Francisco Abad Nebot, “Problemas de periodización y caracterización en Historia de la lengua literaria española,” Epos: Revista de Filología 14 [1998]: 493–513), but it is true for most historical disciplines, such as legal (cf. Hans Hattenhauer, Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, 3rd ed. 1999, 1st ed. 1992) or economic history (cf. Herbert Heaton, “Criteria of periodization in economic history,” The Journal of Economic History 15 [1955]: 267–72) as well. In geographical terms, certain events or developments may be ascribed the quality of “turning points” in national or regional history. German historiography, for instance, tends to see the administrative, legal, and military reform projects of Maximilian I. (“Reichsreform,” at its heights in 1495) as an important marker (amongst others) for the transformation of the medieval into the early modern Holy Roman Empire. The same project, of course, seems evanescently relevant for the periodization of English, French or Eastern European history (cf. Stephan M. Horak, “Periodization and Terminol-

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ogy of the History of Eastern Slavi: Observations and Analyses,” Slavic Review 31 [1972]: 852–62). On the other hand, the “great turning point” (Eduard A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, vol. 1, 1867, 1) of 1066 is an important, even epochal, date for English and French history, but it is not even noticed in many contemporary German chronicles (cf. Michaela Pastors, “1066 – ein ‘großer Wendepunkte in der Geschichte Englands?’,” Quodlibet: Bochumer Arbeiten zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, ed. Hiram Kümper and Michaela Pastors, 2005, 7–29). The latter also indicates that what seems evident for the beginning and end of the period, is even more relevant for the respective subdivisions of the roughly one thousand years the Middle Ages comprise. The dates given here vary even more between and even within different national historiographies or historiographic cultures. This table shows a selection of a number of such different subdivisions compiled from textbooks and internet resources of the respective nation or language area: Angloearly Middle Ages american (ca. 400–1000)

high Middle Ages (ca. 1100–1300)

late Middle Ages (ca. 1300–1500)

Island

hámiqaldir (1066–ca. 1300)

síqmiqaldir (ca. 1300–1550)

Denmark tidlig middelalder højmiddelalder (ca. 500–1000) (ca. 1000–1300)

senmiddelalder (ca. 1300–1500)

Sweden

tidig medeltid (ca. 500–1000)

senmedeltid (ca. 1300–1500)

Norway

tidleg mellomalder høgmellomalderen (ca. 500–1000) (ca. 1000–1300)

seinmellomalderen (ca. 1270–1500)

Netherlands

vroege middeleeuwen (ca. 330–950)

hoge middeleeuwen (ca. 950–1270)

late middeleeuwen (ca. 1270–1500)

German Frühmittelalter speaking (ca. 500–1050)

Hochmittelalter (ca. 1050–1250)

Spätmittelalter (ca. 1250–1500)

French haut moyen âge speaking (ca. 500–750)

moyen âge moyen bas moyen âge inférieur âge superieur (ca. 1250–1500) (ca. 750–1000) (ca. 1000–1250)

armiqaldir (ca. 470–1066)

högmedeltid (ca. 1000–1300)

Italy

alto medioevo (ca. 400–1100)

basso medioevo/ tardo medioevo (ca. 1100–1500)

Spain

alta edad media (ca. 400–1100)

baja edad media (ca. 1100–1500)

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It is far from being comprehensive. Even within national historiography we will find an abundance of divisions and differentiations, even though mostly different in details only. Some, however, have become more commonly accepted. Traditional French historiography, for instance, does also know a twofold division between “haut moyen âge” and “bas moyen âge” in accordance to those common in Spanish or Italian scholarship. B. Space The core of the common concept of “the Middle Ages” is deeply Eurocentric, with a specific focus on Western and Central Europe (with, incidentally, medieval roots; cf. Piotr Kochanek, Die Vorstellung vom Norden und der Eurozentrismus: Eine Auswertung der patristischen und mittelalterlichen Literatur, 2004; Jerold C. Frakes, “Vikings, Vínland and the discourse of Eurocentrism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 [2001]: 157–99). Though last decade’s boom of intercultural and/or interreligious studies has broaden our knowledge of non-Christian societies immensely, this had only little effect on the basic definitions of the Middle Ages still enrooted in historical developments, structures, and phenomena drawn from what is labeled as “Occident,” “Latin Christianity” – or mostly “Europe.” With good reason Timothy Reuter has argued that Europe – a notion in itself as problematic as “the Middle Ages” – is too conventionalized “to be of much use in any dialogue between medievalist of different parts of the globe” (“Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?” The Medieval History Journal 1 [1998]: 25–45, here 25; also cf. the lucid preliminary research survey by Klaus Oschema (“Europa in der mediävistischen Forschung – eine Skizze,” Europa im späten Mittelalter: Politik – Gesellschaft – Kultur, ed. Rainer C. Schwinges et al., 2006, 12–32). Since Max Weber’s theses on the development of occidental societies the latest, it has been a vital branch of 20th-century historiography to trace the European “Sonderweg” and its early paths (amongst others cf. Michael Mitterauer, Warum Europa? Mittelalterliche Grundlagen eines Sonderwegs, 2005; and the critical statements of Michel Pauly, “Quelle Europe est née au Moyen Âge?” Francia 32.1 [2005]: 157–65; also cf. Michael Borgolte, “Die Anfänge des mittelalterlichen Europa, oder Europas Anfänge im Mittelalter?,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55 [2007]: 205–19). Especially post-war-historiography had developed a strong interest in the political implications of a common European past (Michael Borgolte, “Europa im Bann des Mittelalters: Wie Geschichte und Gegenwart unserer Lebenswelt die Perspektiven der Mediävistik verändern,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 6 [2005]: 117–35). More recent research has elaborated both the intractable interdependences of Central European Christian societies with Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine cul-

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tures (cf., for instance, Michael Borgolte, Christen, Juden, Muselmanen: Die Erben der Antike und der Aufstieg des Abendlandes, 300–1400 n. Chr., 2006; Unaufhebbare Pluralität der Kulturen? Zur Dekonstruktion und Konstruktion des mittelalterlichen Europa, ed. Michael Borgolte, 2001; The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans, ed. Florin Curta, 2007) as well as sometimes profound regional differences in development. C. Unity? Hence, the alleged unity of the epoch, both diachronically and synchronically, is largely a question of structural presumptions. For long, one of these structural umbrella terms has been “feudalism.” Only in the second half of the 20th century, the reduction of the concept “feudalism” within non-Marxist medievalists from a holistic label for the occidental medieval societies to a rather small bundle of phenomena (military organization, certain power delegation etc.) became largely accepted. Some following this direction, such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown (“The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” AHR 79 [1974]: 1063–88]), even argued against the general consistency of such very basic patterns across time and space commonly labeled as “medieval.” This argument has more recently been taken up again by Susan Reynolds’ widely recognized study Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994). Lately, American medievalist Kathleen Davis (Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, 2008) has proposed that the historical construction of the concept “feudalism” mediated the conceptualization of sovereignty and the social contract, hence also of its defacements, such as colonialism and slavery. Feudalism is but one example for conceptual criticism towards the alleged unity of the medieval period (for a wider range cf. Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Harris, 2008). Critics recruit especially from the newly emerging fields of Medieval Studies informed by the humanities’ theoretical developments within the last decades. Feminist scholarship, for instance, has indicated that medieval history not only in practice but foremost in its structural and theoretical presumptions is profoundly men’s history and that a periodization of women’s history might look fairly different (cf. Silvana Seidel Menchi, “The Girl and the Hourglass: Periodization of Women’s Lives in Western Preindustrial Societies,” ed. Anne Jacobson Schuette et al., Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, 2001, 41–74; also cf. the entry on “Gender Studies” in this Handbook). After all, the prior question towards the justification of the traditional concept of the epoch remains: What is so medieval about the Middle Ages?

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D. History When taking into account its emergence and early history (cf. Peter Schaeffer, “The Emergence of the Concept ‘Medieval’ in Central European Humanism,” Sixteenth Century Journal 7 [1976]: 21–30; Nathan Edelman, “The Early Uses of Medium Aevum, Moyen Age, Middle Ages,” RR 29 [1938]: 3–25; Ingrid Kasten, “Eine europäische Erfindung: Das Mittelalter,” Estudios Filológicos Alemanes 8 [2005]: 73–88) it is no wonder the construction of the Middle Ages is a Eurocentric one. Medieval people surely did not think of themselves as living in some “Middle Ages” between an epochally distinct past and a more or less distinct future. But as soon as in the 14th century, with Renaissance humanism on its rise, growing groups of intellectuals and cultural elites began to see themselves reaching a new era that was both familiar with the ancient cultures of Rome and Greece and distinct from the younger past – a dark past which they believed had interposed between themselves and the antiquity they so much admired. That is why the term “Middle Ages” from its early beginning on also had, and still has today, a pejorative dimension to it (cf. Arnold Esch, “Das ‘finstere’ Mittelalter: Zur Genese und Phänomenologie eines Fehlurteils,” Saeculum 32 [1981]: 287–300; in 2008, webicon Marina Orlova has broadcasted a four-minute-video on the proposed etymological origin of “medieval” in “middle” and “evil” at http://www.hotforwords.com/). One of the first to articulate this idea was Francesco Petrarch (1340–1374). What makes him different from the 15th-century humanists to follow was that he felt his own time to be a sort of middle age (“medium aevum”) of chaos (“turpia tempus”) between a fortunate age (“felicius aevum”) and a hopefully also fortunate future. But soon the object of depreciation moved from contemporary times to the nearer past. Already in 1469 a tribute to Nicolaus of Cusa printed as a preface to the Roman edition of Apuleius says that “This man, unexpectedly versed in Latin eloquence to the extent that one rarely encounters among Germans, knew by heart all the histories not only of ancient times but of the intervening period [“medie tempestatis”], the older as well as the more recent, down to our present age.” (cit. Schaeffer, Emergence, 1976, 26). Though quotations of the term proliferate in the following centuries, it still oscillated in different geographic and thematic contexts so much that it is hard to purport a reasonably fixed concept of “the Middle Ages” before the age of “Enlightenment (see the entry in this Handbook) The nowadays common tripartite scheme of époques was introduced in 1688 by Christoph Cellarius with his three-volume “Historia tripartita.” But even that was still far from inventing the Middle Ages as a common term in historiographic chronology which for the most part stuck to the epochal

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scheme of the four biblical monarchies or the more pragmatic annalistic orientation alongside rulers, popes, and events until far into the 17th century. For France (Jürgen Voss, Das Mittelalter im historischen Denken Frankreichs: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalterbegriffs und der Mittelalterbewertungen von der zweiten Hälfte des 16. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1972) and for Germany (Uwe Neddermeyer, Das Mittelalter in der deutschen Historiographie vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert: Geschichtsgliederung und Epochenverständnis in der frühen Neuzeit, 1988) there are book-length studies in the history and use of the term and concept “Middle Ages.” A more general European approach is followed by Giorgio Falco (La poelmica sul medioevo, 1974; also cf. Usages et Mésusages du Moyen Age du XIXe au XXIe siècle, ed. János M. Bak et al., 2009). Select Bibliography Sentimento del tempo e periodizzazione della storia nel Medioevo, ed. Ovidio Capitani (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2000); Giorgio Falco, La poelmica sul medioevo (Naples: Guida, 1974); L’imaginaire et les conceptions modernes de la société médiévale, ed. Natalie Fryde (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Jacques LeGoff, “Pour un long moyen âge,” L’imaginaire médiévale: Essais (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 7–13; Christian van Kieft, “La periodisation de l’histoire du Moyen Âge,” Les categories en histoire, ed. Chaïm Perelmann (Brussels: Edition Université libre de Bruxelles, 1969), 41–56; Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?” The Medieval History Journal 1 (1998): 25–45.

Hiram Kümper

Text and Image in Medieval Literature A. General Outline The study of the verbal arts – texts – has generally been separate from the study of the visual arts – images – as far back as either art has been studied. Even in the modern, contemporary academy, where considerable attention is given to the idea of interdisciplinarity, art historical and literary scholarship have generally maintained their separateness, each sometimes interested in the other, but the two rarely really working together. However, sporadic efforts over the last century, and especially over the last half century or so, have coalesced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries into a field variously labeled “Bild und Text,” “word and image,” “text and image,” and the like. The field has attracted an increasing number of medievalists, but still often enjoys – or

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suffers from – a sort of outsider status vis-à-vis both literary studies and art history. Nonetheless, the field has already become difficult to delineate in a short article, not least because of the diversity of approaches. The present article cannot hope to account exhaustively for everything done in the field, but will attempt to develop a working definition and provide an overview and introduction. For a start, we may say very generally that the scholarly approaches to be discussed here represent the endeavor to bring the study of visual materials together with the study of verbal materials in order to deepen our understanding of medieval culture. A definition this broad can only be a starting point. Attempts have been made to be more precise. Michael Curschmann, one of the pioneers in the field, has recently suggested that “word and image” – in North America, at least – designates research that involves more general issues, such as the semiotics of various media, the philosophical discussion of pictures as the “literature of the laity,” the possibility of visual narrative, and the relationships between the media in general terms, while “text and picture” means the study of more specific, concrete relationships among particular images and particular texts (“Wolfgang Stammler und die Folgen,” Das Mittelalter und die Germanisten: Zur neueren Methodengeschichte der Germanischen Philologie: Freiburger Colloquium 1997, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz, 1998, 115–37, here 119). Whether or not these definitions are universally understood or accepted throughout the very broad field of text and image studies, the proposal certainly reflects an ongoing concern within the field that the field itself has not been properly defined. Norbert Ott, another pioneer, expresses this concern acutely in a recent article, “Word and Image as a Field of Research: Sound Methodologies or Just a Fashionable Trend? A Polemic from a European Perspective” (in Starkey and Wenzel, 15–32). As is clear from the title, Ott is concerned that much work in the field indeed invokes fashionable labels while investigating certain text-image connections in “hazily defined” and methodologically unsound ways (esp. 18). For present purposes, however, we must be concerned more with what is done in the field than what should be done, and we must employ a rather broad definition, one that encompasses both “word and image” and “text and picture.” B. Definition At first glance, it may sometimes appear that the types of things done under the rubrics of “text and image” and the like are so diverse and the ways in which the field defines itself so varied, that the field, as a method susceptible of precise definition, might seem not to exist at all. Nonetheless, it would

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appear, on a purely phenomenological level, that the field of “text and image studies” must exist, because, after all, quite a lot of work is done that involves medieval texts and images and calls itself something like “text and image studies.” The field certainly does not have a single controlling methodology. Maybe there is no reason to think it should. Literary studies does not: perhaps it once did, in some prelapsarian phase of philology before the New Criticism, Structuralism, etc. In art history, any such original unity has long since been shattered by the various “new art histories” (see Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, 2001). So why should “text and image” have a unifying methodology if its older sibling disciplines do not? If the field has no single dominant method, it also has no single history. If we say, for a working definition, that “text and image studies” exists between traditional art history and traditional literary studies, and tries to find ways to study relationships between texts and images in medieval culture, then we may say that the field has several points of origin. C. History of Research One starting point for text and image studies is the exploration of “wechselseitige Erhellung” or “reciprocal illumination of the arts”. Beginning around 1900, a number of scholars – mostly German – began to consider whether and to what extent concepts and terminology developed for one art might be transferable to the study of another. Oskar Walzel, for example, argued that literary history had much to learn from the art history of the day, especially Wölfflin’s “principles of art history.” These efforts had significant consequences, including the concept of a Baroque period in German literature, developed by Fritz Strich, Walzel, and others, through the application of Wölfflinian principles to literature. However, these efforts did not generally explore relationships between verbal and visual versions of one material, and did not lead in any direct way to the “text and image” research of several decades later, although they did help to open the door to such interdisciplinary research. (On “reciprocal illumination,” see Oskar Walzel, “Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste: Ein Beitrag zur Würdigung kunstgeschichtlicher Begriffe,” Philosophische Vorträge 15 [1917]: 5–92. For a brief discussion, fuller than is possible here, see Rushing, Images of Adventure 5–6. A full account of these efforts is provided by Jost Hermand, Literaturwissenschaft und Kunstwissenschaft: Methodische Wechselbeziehungen seit 1900, 1965, 2nd ed., 1971). More recent, and at the exegetical level more productive, have been various efforts to use texts to explain pictures (such as Panofskian iconology) or

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pictures to explain texts, two examples being the extensive use of images to support exegetical positions in D. W. Robertson, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, 1962) and among the Robertsonians who followed; across the Atlantic, the school of studies in medieval “Bedeutungsforschung” around Friedrich Ohly. (On these developments, see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 4; Curschmann, “Wolfgang Stammler,” 123–24). Some such endeavors have been extremely important, but at this point, like the best insights of the “wechselseitige Erhellung” efforts, they may be to some extent taken for granted. It is no longer controversial, and it is perhaps surprising today that it was ever controversial, that many analytical tools can be applied to multiple arts, or that the various arts of a given epoch reflect broadly similar concerns and attitudes. Still, early 20th-century efforts in “reciprocal illumination” and mid-century attempts to explain pictures through texts and texts through pictures provided, in a way, the general justification for more recent work in “image and text.” Wolfgang Stammler is often regarded as the founder of the modern “school” of text and image studies, at least where German scholars are concerned (see Curschmann, “Wolfgang Stammler”), but his essay “Schrifttum und Kunst im deutschen Mittelalter” failed to anticipate the longer term future of the discipline when it outlined three ways in which art history and literary history could contribute to each other: texts to explain pictures, pictures to explain texts, and “reciprocal illumination” (Stammler, “Schrifttum und Kunst im deutschen Mittelalter,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, ed. Stammler, vol. 3, 2nd ed., 1962; orig. 3 vols., 1952–57, 613–98, here 689). Indeed, Stammler’s importance, as described by Curschmann in the historical essay “Wolfgang Stammler und die Folgen,” was primarily to make text and image studies “presentable” (“hoffähig”) within medieval German Studies (119). That interdisciplinary work on texts and pictures had to be made “presentable,” and that it continues to exist in a sometimes inhospitable border region has to do with the degree to which academic borders have always been defended. We have come a long way from statements like that of Ernst Robert Curtius that “die Literatur [ist] Träger von Gedanken, die Kunst nicht” (“literature is the medium of ideas, art [is] not”) (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948/1954, 24; European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask, 1973, 14) or Erwin Panofksy’s remark to Curschmann that art history was represented at the Institute1 for Advanced Study while literary studies were not “because we have a method and you don’t” (quoted, along with Curtius, in “Wolfgang Stammler,” 116). The general problem today is not such arrogance or simple turf defense, but that scholars approach the “text and image” area from so many different

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directions. The methodological models and scholarly forerunners that will influence a “text and image” scholar may differ significantly depending on whether the scholar’s primary training has been as a Germanist, a Romanist, an Art Historian, etc., as well as the scholar’s country of origin and even his or her university. This is a problem insofar as it may lead people to feel that they have to “reinvent the wheel” because they are unaware of work done in some other corner of the text and image world, and because it may mean that important work does not always have the impact that it should across the field as a whole. Curschmann discusses, for example, how long it took the work of the Loomises to become known in Germany, and how ignorant the Ohlyians and the Roberstonians were of each other (“Wolfgang Stammler,” 119–20 and 124). That national and disciplinary – and indeed linguistic – border fences remain high today is reflected, for example, in the fact that although Michael Camille and Curschmann both contributed seminal articles to the text and image field in the mid-1980s, Camille is cited much more frequently by North American art historians, who seldom cite Curschmann, while text and image scholars rooted in German Studies, especially those trained in Germany, cite Curschmann and rarely Camille. Such examples could be expanded indefinitely. The multiplicity of approaches and the impossibility of seeing the entire field from any one vantage point do not make text and image studies different from art history or literary studies themselves, as noted above. In fact, it might be better to regard the bewildering diversity of approaches to “text and image” not as a problem (except for those who try to write the field’s history!), but as a strength. Many different types of questions can be meaningfully asked about medieval text-image connections, and thus there are multiple methods and multiple histories of text and image studies. One particularly important starting point for text and image studies has been the discussion of orality and literacy. This branch of text and image scholarship begins with the recognition that, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, literacy in the West was highly limited and exclusively Latin, and vernacular culture was more or less exclusively oral. Early medieval thinkers themselves defined a great cultural divide, as one sees in the oft-quoted letter of Pope Gregory the Great, opposing the “legentibus” (“those who read”) and the “idiotis” (“the illiterate”), who are assumed to be identical with the “gentibus” (“the common people”) (Pope Gregory I, Registrum Epistolarum [=MGH: Epistolarum 2], ed. Ludwig Hartmann, 1899, 270). A slightly different description of roughly the same opposition is that of Alcuin, who urges that the clerics of Lindisfarne should not indulge their interest in Germanic heroes (“Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?” – “What is Ingeld [a now little-

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known Germanic hero] to Christ?”), and should listen to the “lectorem” (“reader”) not the “citharistam” (“harpist”) (Alcuin, “Epistola 124” in MGH: Epistolae 4, Karolini Aevi 2, ed. Ernst Duemmler, 1895, 181–84, here 183). From Gregory, Alcuin, and similar sources, we get the sharp opposition between two cultures, one literate, Latinate; the other oral and vernacular. Alcuin warned the monks against dabbling in vernacular culture – “Angusta est domus: utrosque tenere non poterit” (“The house is narrow, and there is not room for both”). But it is clear that from an early medieval beginning where the two cultures existed side by side but not together, they quickly began to interact. Not long after Alcuin had scolded the monks of Lindisfarne for their interest in Germanic heroic songs, two monks in Fulda were interested enough in that genre that they wrote or copied one of their own, the Hildebrandslied. Over the next hundred years or so came phenomena like Otfrid’s German gospel book and Ekkehard’s Latin Walther epic. For the rest of the Middle Ages, one of the most important narratives in medieval cultural history was that of the competition, interaction, and eventual merging of these two cultures. That the visual arts would have a role to play in this merging was predicted, in a sense, by Gregory (as cited above), who defended church art against the iconoclastic bishop of Marseilles by arguing that what books are for the literate, pictures are for the illiterate, “Aliud est enim picturam adorare” – “for it is one thing to adore a picture” (which would be forbidden by the first commandment), “aliud picturae historia, quod sit adorandum, addiscere” – “and another thing to learn from the story in a picture what is to be adored” (of the considerable literature on Gregory’s formulation, see Michael Curschmann, “Pictura laicorum litteratura?”: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Bild und volkssprachlicher Schriftlichkeit im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter bis zum Codex Manesse,” Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter: Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, ed. Hagen Keller, et al., 1992, 211–29; Lawrence Duggan, “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?” Word and Image 5 [1989], 227–51). According to Gregory, pictures can mediate between the two spheres, and the role of images in this merging of the two cultures has been one of major topics of text and image studies since at least the mid-1980s, when a cluster of seminal works appeared, most notably Curschmann’s “Hören – Lesen – Sehen” (1984), and Michael Camille’s “Seeing and Reading” (1985). Around the same time, Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1983), though not specifically dealing with images, made its own contribution to the discussion by describing medieval culture as neither oral nor literate but “textual,” meaning that written texts are crucially important in the culture, but very few people have

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direct access to them. Also around the same time, Stephen Nichols discussed the symbolic value of narratives, including images, in Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (1983). Not long after, Mary Carruthers (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990) described medieval culture as neither oral nor literate but “memorative,” and stressed that in that culture “Looking at pictures is an act exactly like reading … because it is a rhetorical activity” (222, Carruthers’s emphasis). Carruthers’s work is less useful as a model for how to study specific images or their relation to specific texts, than it is as a contribution to the general recognition of the importance of images in a culture that was neither oral like its Germanic and Celtic antecedents nor literate like its classical antecedents and its modern descendants. What emerges from all these works and becomes fundamental to a certain type of text and image studies is the recognition that the scholarly and aesthetic values and assumptions of the high print era are not applicable to the Middle Ages. By “high print era” I mean that period running from around 1500 to some time in the later 20th century, during which literate people assumed more or less without question that the printed word was the most privileged mode of communication. The printed book was seen as the goal of the creative process and the beginning of the interpretive process, as well as an object of value in and of itself. All other forms in which a text, a story, or a character may exist – manuscripts, typescripts, serial versions of novels, illustrations, film adaptations, operas, and so forth, are seen as subservient to and / or derivative from the printed text – perhaps sometimes of great scholarly interest or entertainment value, but in every case less important – in some sense less valuable – than the printed text. The recognition growing out of the works of Curschmann, Camille, and others, was that this assumption – whatever its value and validity for the print era – is neither valuable nor valid for the eras before printing. For the Middle Ages, for any given literary material, written texts, oral performances, primary and secondary oral traditions, and various depictions in the visual arts may all be equally valid, equally important manifestations. Thus Curschmann speaks of “das um 1300 noch ganz selbstverständliche In- und Nebeneinander von Bild und gesprochenem Wort als primäre Vermittler sinnlicher Wahrnehmung von Bildungsinhalten und der Schrift, des geschriebenen Wortes, als einer dritten, nach beiden Richtungen hin wirksamer Kraft” (“the co-existence and interaction – still taken for granted around 1300 – of the image and the spoken word as the primary means of conveying intellectual materials to the senses, and of writing, the written word, as a third power, reaching out in both directions”) (“Hören – Lesen – Sehen,” 219). And

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Camille argues that “much of the visual art of the twelfth century was not so much an expression of the visual world, as of the spoken word in a still predominantly oral society” (27), that “text and image are secondary representations, external to, but always referring back to the spontaneous springs of speech” (31–32). The essential general point emerging from these works of the 1980s – the non-privileging of the written word – remains among the crucial bases for text and image studies. A narrower point, the role and importance of images in the medieval merging of cultures and the creation of a vernacular literature, has been the subject of important works such as Sylvia Huot’s From Song to Book, which traces “a series of developments in Old French literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” culminating in “the establishment of a writerly poetics” in which “songs destined for performance [and a genre originally consisting almost entirely of oral performance] are written down, and books are compiled and treated as unified works of art” (328) – a development in which images, as Huot extensively demonstrates, play a crucial role. Curschmann has traced with great erudition “die Rolle, welche die bildende Kunst in einer Vielzahl von Gattungen und Medien bei der Konstitution eines deutsch-volkssprachigen Schrifttums spielt” (“the role played by the visual arts in a number of genres and media in the creation of a German vernacular literature”) (378) in the long essay “Wort – Schrift – Bild” (1999) and contributed numerous other articles on the topic. Rushing’s Images of Adventure attempted to show, with reference to the visual forms of the Ywain material, not only the frequently astonishing independence of images from “their” texts in high medieval culture, but also the role of such images as “participant[s] in the literarization of vernacular narrative,” with each image or image cycle “embodying an independent attitude toward the story, the character, and the idea of romance adventure” (264). Rushing’s Images of Adventure appeared in 1995, the same year as at least two other important text and image books: Suzanne Lewis’s Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (1995) and Susan Smith’s The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (1995). What these efforts of the early 1990s all had in common was the recognition that visual materials were not mere appendages to texts, but independent participants in the development of medieval culture. Lewis sets out to consider not “questions of how an image might reflect or even represent a text but … how it constructs a new ‘text,’ often subverting and diverting meaning into alternative channels of comprehension or cognitive exchange” (xxi-xxii). Smith, writing about the relationship between texts about gender and the images that she studies, notes that texts “illuminate

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the manner in which their analogues in visual art acquired meaning, though not through any one-to-one correspondence between text and image that a traditional iconographer might expect” – instead, “visual images in the Middle Ages played their own role in the process of communication … and … artists were remarkably inventive about manipulating the resources peculiar to their medium to communicate their own meanings” (xiii). The recognition thus grew that images participated in medieval culture in ways often strikingly independent of the texts to which they were related. Establishing the independence – but also the interdependence – of text and picture has been and remains one of the main tasks of text and image studies. To discuss one example, the diversity of approaches within the relatively small set of art works related to the story of the Arthurian knight Ywain (Yvain, Iwein) reveals fundamental aspects of how medieval visual artists and their audiences related to materials that modern readers and scholars tend to define in terms of texts. The story takes its canonical textual form in the works of Chrétien de Troyes (Yvain) and Hartman von Aue (Iwein). It also exists in four narrative picture cycles and a number of non-narrative images. The early 13th-century mural cycle at Rodenegg in the South Tyrol, for example, focuses exclusively on the first part of the Ywein story, in which the hero kills Ascalon / Esclados. (Four scenes from the Rodenegg cycle are viewable at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iwein.) In its scene selection, its iconography, and its layout, the cycle seems to oppose the apparent glory of knightly adventure to the death and grief that such adventure causes. The central scene in the cycle is the death of Ascalon in his wife’s arms, a scene strikingly reminiscent of Lamentation iconography. The cycle thus at least sharply questions the gloriousness of knightly adventure. On the other hand, the roughly contemporaneous, more extensive cycle of wall paintings at Schmalkalden in Thuringia presents knightly adventure as a sort of game, the subject of courtly leisure and perhaps, indeed, of courtly narrative (one scene is viewable at http://www.thueringen-tourismus.de/files/ images/ObjekteLandkreisSchmalkalden_Meiningen/Iwein_Malereien_rdax_ 286x200.jpg). (On Rodenegg and Schmalkalden, see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 30–132; on Rodenegg also Volker Schupp and Hans Szklenar, Ywain auf Schloß Rodenegg: Eine Bildergeschichte nach dem “Iwein” Hartmanns von Aue, 1996, with excellent color photographs; Michael Curschmann, Vom Wandel im bildlichen Umgang mit literarischen Gegenständen: Rodengg, Wildenstein und das Flaarsche Haus in Stein am Rhein, 1997.) The two sets of illuminations in manuscripts of Chrétien’s Yvain also reflect nearly opposite concerns. Like the Schmalkalden paintings, the illustrations of Princeton, University Library, Garrett 125 (viewable online

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through the Index of Christian Art) deproblematize the story, presenting it as a simple set of courtly adventures undertaken in the service of a wife, while the illuminations of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 1433 (viewable at the library website; search for “Yvain” at http://images.bnf.fr/jsp/index.jsp) reflect the bipartite structure of the story as we know it from Chrétien and Hartmann. Though not reproducing that structure in detail, they generally reflect the idea that Yvain’s early success is ethically flawed, and his true happiness is not possible until he has undertaken a second, ethically superior set of adventures. (On the two Yvain manuscripts, see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 133–197; all images are reproduced in Busby, et al., Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes / The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, 2 vols., 1993]; on BN fr. 1433, see also Lori Walters, “The Creation of a ‘Super Romance’: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 1433,” Arthurian Yearbook 1 [1991]: 3–26). Although these particular interpretations may all be debated, it is clear that none of the artists creating visual narrative based on the Ywain material have attempted to recreate a text in pictures. Instead, they have all pursued their own artistic and thematic goals – inspired by the canonical story, but ultimately independent of any particular version of it. This applies even to the pictures that are embedded in texts. These, of course, could be viewed differently by different audiences – by skilled readers who would encounter the pictures in the course of private reading, by those who would see the pictures in the course of hearing the text read aloud, or by those who would look at the pictures as a substitute for reading the text. These are the general possibilities for pictures in medieval books, and one of the major tasks for text and image studies is developing a clearer understanding of which illustration types match which needs, and how the various uses of illustration evolved in connection with the evolution of medieval literacy and reading (one of the most comprehensive efforts is Curschmann, “Wort – Schrift – Bild”). The point to be made about the Yvain illuminations is that even though both the illustrated manuscripts follow the pattern most strongly associated with private reading – the scattering of a relatively small number of illuminations through the text – both display marked independence from the text in determining which thematic aspects to stress, and both thus have the potential to guide a reader’s thematic understanding of the text. A reader of Garrett 125 will be steered toward regarding Yvain’s story as an ethically uncomplicated example of knightly adventure; a reader of fr. 1433 will be guided toward understanding the story as an ethically more complicated example of how a knight cannot achieve true happiness until he has undertaken more selfless adventures. By showing Yvain’s despair, but not his wedding, in the middle of the story, and not showing

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him with his wife until the very end, the pictorial narrative of fr. 1433 actually stresses this point more heavily than the text (Rushing, Images of Adventure, esp. 193–194). That neither the Yvain illuminations nor Rushing’s interpretation of them are unique or idiosyncratic emerges, for example, from Walworth’s careful study of the Munich Tristan illuminations (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, cgm 51), which shows that this picture cycle (much more extensive and independently narrative than either of the French Yvains) sets markedly different thematic emphases from either Gottfried von Strassburg’s text or Ulrich von Türheim’s continuation, generally treating the lovers’ frequent success in duping Mark and besting their enemies as “a series of Schwank- [fabliau-]like adventures,” presenting a narrative that “differs markedly from Gottfried’s self-consciously sophisticated work and from Ulrich’s more critical attitude towards the lovers” (48–49). Non-cyclical, non-narrative visual responses to the Ywain material reflect other aspects of the medieval culture of images. Both the Ywain scenes of the early 14th-century Malterer embroidery (Freiburg, Augustinermuseum; one scene viewable at http://wwwg.uni-klu.ac.at/kultdoku/kataloge/ 06/html/610.htm) and the Ywain figures at Castle Runkelstein near Bozen/ Bolzano (http://www.runkelstein.info/runkelstein_en/triades.asp) reflect the power of the topoi to remake materials that they incorporate. The Malterer embroidery brings Ywain into the topos variously known as “slaves of love” or “power of women,” which catalogs men who, despite wisdom, strength, virtue, etc., were disgraced or destroyed by women. Based on the texts of Chrétien and Hartmann, Ywain does not really seem to belong here, in the company of Samson, destroyed by Delilah despite being strong enough to kill a lion with his bare hands, along with Aristotle and Virgil, who despite their wisdom were humiliated by women in well-known medieval stories. And yet here he is, first, at the height of his powers, defeating Ascalon, then kneeling before Laudine, the knight brought down by love or by woman. Early interpreters of the embroidery were puzzled by the Ywain scenes, because the second one, in particular, did not seem to fit very well with a specific moment in the text and because efforts to associate it with a textual moment led to enormous difficulties in fitting it into the topos. However, the problems disappear when one realizes that it is not necessary to match the scene precisely with a moment in a text, nor to force the canonical Ywain story in its entirety into the topos. The topos is Procrustes: it thoughtlessly eliminates the parts of the story that it does not need. (On the Malterer embroidery, see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 219–44, and Smith, 152–68.) Similarly, at Runkelstein, the entire story of Ywain is reduced to a single image of a knight, one of the “three greatest knights of the Round Table” in

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the Runkelstein “triads,” a massive expansion of the Nine Worthies topos (see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 245–56). Another group of Ywain images attests to the power of visual traditions to develop and exist independently. Five misericord carvings in English churches show the scene in which Ywain’s horse is caught and cut in half by the falling portcullis, as the knight pursues Ascalon into the castle (Rushing, Images of Adventure, 198–218). With slight variations, all five show the scene from behind, so that the viewer sees perhaps a foot or part of the leg of the knight, but primarily the rear end of the horse. The image seems to be a visual joke: superficially out of place in the choir stalls of a church, but not really surprising among the great variety of motives carved on English misericords. The interesting point, from the “text and image” perspective, is how completely this visual tradition seems detached from the texts and even the story of Ywain. It seems to exist on its own, completely separate from its origins. An additional example of the potential independence of a visual tradition is the so-called Orchard Scene from the Tristan story. In Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (14583–14940), the story is that King Mark, led, as so often, to suspect that Tristan and Isolde are betraying him, hides in a tree with the dwarf Melot to catch the adulterers, who are expected to meet there. However, Tristan notices the men’s shadows on the ground and manages to alert Isolde to the danger, so that the lovers only talk about the terrible rumors and lament that Mark does not trust them. Mark is again convinced that his wife and nephew are faithful. In the visual arts, the scene is enormously popular as a stand-alone image, appearing some thirty times in noncyclical works. Tristan and Isolde stand or sit on opposite sides of a pool or fountain, separated by a tree, in which the head or face of Mark (and often the dwarf) is visible. The scene appears in a variety of media, including textiles, boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, misericords and other wood carvings, and so forth, usually either alone or with other pairs of lovers. The standard depiction of the scene, and also its popularity, are clearly influenced by the iconography of the Fall of Man. But the functional contexts in which the scene appears – generally the personal affects of ladies, the types of objects that might be given as gifts from husbands or lovers, even, most intriguingly, shoes from the Low Countries, of a type often given as wedding gifts from grooms to brides – suggests that the scene is not being understood as an icon of undetected adultery but as an icon of love. It is an excellent example of the independence of pictorial traditions from textual ones, but also of the way in which a pictorial tradition can take on new, independent meanings and a life of its own (on the orchard scene, see especially Michael

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Curschmann, “Images of Tristan,” in Gottfried von Strassburg and the Medieval Tristan Legend, ed. Adrian Stevens and Roy Wisbey, 1990, 1–17). The general, and crucial, point at the heart of text and image studies is that images must be understood in substantive independence from the texts that they are associated with, that images could function independently, could narrate independently, could develop lives of their own as visual topoi. This is, probably more than anything else, what separates text and image from art history that uses texts or literary history that uses images. D. Current Issues and Future Trends More than twenty years after the seminal works of the mid 1980s, some 50 years after the path-breaking work of Wolfgang Stammler, around a century after the main activity of the “wechselseitige Erhellung” scholars, the field of text and image studies still seems in many ways a young, emerging field. For one thing, a great need still exists for basic cataloging and publication of the primary materials. For the study of texts, the medieval canon is well established, and scholars can rely on some two centuries of editorial efforts, as well as extensive catalogs of the manuscript holdings of libraries. For Christian art, scholars can turn to the great Index of Christian Art, with its 28,000 subject terms and its 80,000 work of art records searchable online (see http://ica.princeton.edu/). For secular subjects in the visual arts, nothing of the sort exists (although the Index can be of some value in searching for secular topics). The difficulty of cataloging a particular theme is inherent both in the nature of the medieval evidence, and the history of modern scholarship. The images associated with a given material may appear in a wide variety of media – not only manuscripts and early printed books, but also in wall paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, and a great variety of decorative arts. Moreover, philologists have traditionally been rather uninterested even in manuscript illuminations: library catalogs and manuscript descriptions in editions cannot be counted on to mention illustrations or to describe them in any detail even if they are mentioned. At the same time, art historians have traditionally been rather uninterested in most of the art works depicting motives from secular literature, either because the works are regarded as being of inferior quality or because they are found in the decorative arts, or both. Thus medieval images, especially those associated with vernacular and secular literary materials, are very far from being well studied even at the most basic level. Some materials, to be sure, are relatively well cataloged. The pioneering research of Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis produced

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Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (1938), still a model work for its broad coverage, detailed descriptions, and extensive reproductions of images, but markedly dated in its approach to understanding the images (which is not surprising after more than 70 years). However, it can no longer be considered a complete catalog of the visual responses to the various tales of Arthur and Arthurian romance. Alison Stones (“Arthurian Art Since Loomis,” Arturus Rex, ed. Willy Van Hoecke, et al., 1991, 21–78) offers a useful update; see also, for images from the German-speaking regions, Rushing, “The Pictorial Evidence,” (in Silvia Ranawake and Harry Jackson, ed., The Arthur of the Germans, 2000, 257–279). Another of the best catalogued subjects is the vast material associated with Roland, brought together in the appropriately massive work of Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, La légende de Roland dans l’art du Moyen Âge. Likewise, the Tristan material – though only that which does not appear in books – is well catalogued by Ott (“Katalog der Tristan-Bildzeugnisse,” Hella Frühmorgen-Voss, Text und Illustration im Mittelalter: Aufsätze zu den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Literatur und bildender Kunst, ed. Norbert H. Ott, 1975, 140–171). (For illustrations from the French prose Tristan, see Jacqueline Thibault Schaeffer, “The Discourse of the Figural Narrative in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Tristan [ca. 1230–1475],” Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. Keith Busby, 1996, 174–202.) Space does not permit me to mention all the materials that have been more or less well catalogued, but the critical point is that so many have not. Another approach is to catalogue a definable and manageable corpus of works in a certain medium, regardless of subject. For example, German-language manuscripts with pictures in them are slowly and massively being cataloged in the Katalog der deutschsprachigen illustrierten Handschriften des Mittelalters. The project was begun by the late Hella Frühmorgen-Voss in 1963 and taken over after her death by Norbert H. Ott; its first fascicle appeared in 1986, and publication of the catalog, organized into 141 “Stoffgruppen” (“subject groups”), has now reached the letter H. Some 3500 manuscripts will eventually be included. But such projects are long-term, to say the least. A similar example is Raymond Köchlin’s catalogue of medieval ivories, though it is naturally no longer up to date (Les ivoires gothiques français, 1924). Moreover, such medium-specific catalogues do not solve the fundamental problem faced by anyone who sets out to study the visual manifestations of a particular subject: the subject may appear in any of a number of media, from book illustration to wall painting to all sorts of decorative arts. Sometimes a work of art is known to specialists in a particular medium, but not to the broader community of text and image scholars. Studying visual materials related to Ywain in the late 1980s and early 1990s,

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for one example, led to the discovery that one misericord carving (at Enville), though known to specialists in English wood carving, was not included in any lists of Ywain images (see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 200 and 205–208). The rather mysterious Tristan illuminations in the miscellany that is British Library Add. 11619 had been mentioned in the library’s catalog (http:// www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/DESC0010.ASP), but scholars studying Tristan images were unaware of them until Tony Hunt’s publication (“The Tristan Illuminations in Ms. London B.L. Add. 11619,” in Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romances and Lyric Poetry of Mediaeval France: Essays Presented to Kenneth Varty on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Peter V. Davies and Angus J. Kennedy, 1987, 45–60). Yet another approach is to catalogue the illuminated manuscripts of one particular work or one particular author, as has now been done for Chrétien de Troyes, with publication of all the images and full discussions of all the manuscripts in Busby, et al., Les Manuscrits (cited above). Works of medieval visual art continue to be discovered and identified. Art historians knew, for example, that a room in the castle at Rodenegg contained fragmentarily visible medieval wall paintings. The nature of the visible fragments led to the room being identified as the castle chapel and the paintings being assumed to have a religious theme. Restoration in 1972–73, however, revealed the stunning early 13th-century Ywain cycle, and the painting that had been thought to be a crucifixion turned out to be the death of Ascalon, though clearly influenced by Lamentation iconography (see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 30). The rather sensational discovery of the Rodenegg paintings provided considerable impetus, at least among Germanists and German-speaking art historians, for the broader study of text and image. Other relatively recent discoveries include the Tristan shoes from the Low Countries (Herbert Sarfatij, “Tristan op vrijersoeten? een bijzonder versieringsmotief op Laat-Middeleeuws schoeisel uit de Lage Landen,” Ad fontes: opstellen aangeboden aan prof. dr. C. van der Kieft, 1984, 371–400), and the Erec crown (see Joanna Mühlemann, “Die ‘Erec’ Rezeption auf dem Krakauer Kronenkreuz,” PBB 122 [2000]: 76–101). One problem for text and image studies is that it is not always obvious what certain images are meant to represent. The main figures at Rodenegg are labeled “YWAIN, LAVDINA” and so forth, and even if they were not, the topic would be rather easily identifiable by canonical scenes such as the encounter with the wild man, the portcullis falling on the horse, the presentation of the magic ring. But it is not always so obvious what an image was meant to mean. The couple on the “Forrer casket,” an early 13th-century ivory work probably from Cologne, now in the British Museum, has long

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been identified as Tristan and Isolde (for example, by Loomis and Loomis, 43), but Ott very reasonably places question marks after almost all the scene identifications (“Katalog der Tristan-Bildzeugnisse,” 158–159; the British Musuem currently identifies only the scene on the lid with Tristan and Isolde – see http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/c/carved_bone_casket_with_romanc.aspx). Some of the earliest “Roland” images may be identified as such “only with a good deal of wishful thinking” (Rushing, “Images at the Interface,” 123), such as the hornblowers and knights at Conques (claimed as the beginning of Roland iconography by Lejeunne and Stiennon [70], persuasively rejected as Roland by D. J. A. Ross, “The Iconography of Roland,” MAevum 27 [1968]: 46–65, here 46). Such examples could be multiplied, and the general trend is probably that the earlier scholars were more aggressive in their identifications, while more recent scholars are more cautious. Uncertainty will surely always remain in some cases. In addition to the need for basic research and cataloguing, there is still a great need for careful analysis of individual works and small groups of works, which is probably where some of the best work is being done at this stage. Analysis of pictorial narrative, for example, or of text-picture relationships within medieval books, must be approached through close readings of actual works, before further theoretical generalizations may be attempted. Some important recent works include the following – the list has no pretension to completeness. Manuela Niesner’s Das Speculum Humanae Salvationis der Stiftsbibliothek Kremsmünster (1995) is both an edition of the German verse translation of the Speculum and a careful, detailed study of the relationships among the Latin text, the German text, and the extensive picture cycle in Stiftsbibliothek Kremsmünster Codex 243, a 14th-century manuscript. Kathryn Starkey’s Reading the Medieval Book (2004) carefully examines not only the picture cycle but also the entire (reconstructed) manuscript and its version of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm text, from the point of view of studying oral performance, medieval reading, and image-text relations in the highly unusual Munich/Nuremberg Willehalm manuscript. Julia Walworth studies two related manuscripts, primarily using the Willehalm von Orlens manuscript (cgm 63) as a “foil” (xxii) to the primary manuscript of her study, the Tristan manuscript cgm 51 (see above). An exemplary study of a small group of works is Sarah Randles’s dissertation, The Medieval Tristan Legend in Medieval Narrative Embroidery (Australian National University, 2007), surely the best work yet on the Tristan embroideries. Moving beyond such close studies, some of the broader questions for text and image studies in the realm that Curschmann would call “word and

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image” include the nature and possibility of visual narrative, the role of images in the history of medieval and early modern literacy and reading (as already discussed above), and the often intriguing question of why some materials seem more attractive to the visual arts than others. As far as pictorial narrative is concerned, the study of whether and how images can narrate is at the same time a part of text and image studies and also a broader field with its own long history and literature. The most basic question is “can pictures tell stories without either using words or relying on spectators to have learned certain crucial information from words in order that they may understand the pictures?” And the answer given is often “no” (see Lewis, “Narrative,” 87). The negative answer comes from scholars like Duggan, who asked “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?” (see above), and answered that it could not really have been, because, quoting E. H. Gombrich “language can form propositions, pictures cannot.” Avril Henry, in a study of the “paupers’ bibles,” likewise noted that “two selfconsciously naked people picking fruit” will be understood as “applegathering nature worshippers” unless viewers have already learned from written or spoken words that these are Adam and Eve (Henry, Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition, 1987). Against such statements it may be pointed out that the statement “Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit” will be essentially meaningless to people who can understand it as an English sentence, but have not learned who Adam and Eve were and why it matters that they ate from a certain tree, yet no one asserts that this proves that language cannot communicate complex ideas (see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 9–10). In practice, it seems clear that some picture cycles, such as the Rodenegg Ywain, do succeed in telling stories without words, although a viewer who brings language-based knowledge to the viewing may certainly understand the narrative somewhat differently from one who does not. At the same time, it is clearly the case that not all “narrative” cycles narrate with equal independence: some narrate “actions,” in Wolfgang Kemp’s term – that is, what Roland Barthes calls “sequences” – while others depict what Kemp calls “acts,” in other words, isolated moments that might not connect to each other very clearly if a viewer did not know the story in advance (Wolfgang Kemp, Sermo Corporeus: Die Erzählung der mittelalterlichen Glasfenster, 1987; Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath; rpt. in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, 1982, 251–95; see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 66–78, for analysis of the Rodenegg cycle along these lines, also 122). Highly independent narratives like the Rodenegg Ywain may be somewhat exceptional, or may be limited mainly to certain periods. Kemp (146) found that the greatest period

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for independent pictorial narrative in French stained glass was about 1160–1220, which was also the period of the greatest expansion of vernacular poetry in France (Kemp 146; see also Rushing, Images of Adventure, 19). On the other hand, as Marilyn Lavin pointed out in a study of wall painting in Italian churches, even when pictures are telling a story that is well known from texts, they do not necessarily tell it in the same way that it is told in texts; they may well create new meanings, even for viewers who know the story in advance and know it well (Marilyn Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431–1600, 1990; see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 18 and 14). This certainly appears to be true for the Ywain narratives studied in Images of Adventure: some narrate more independently than others, but all, even those embedded in texts of Yvain, create their own emphases, reflect their own independent understandings of the story and the character. For text and image studies, the works of Kemp, Lavin, and others – including Otto Pächt (The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England, 1962) – who have grappled with the ways in which visual narratives create meaning, remain of more immediate importance than oft-quoted historical pathbreakers like Wickhoff or Weitzmann, who attempted to establish a typology of visual narrative, but whose analysis was highly formal (see Rushing, Images of Adventure, 17; Lewis, “Narrative,” 88), and far too reliant on the assumed primacy of the text (Franz Wickhoff, “Der Stil der Genesisbilder und die Geschichte seiner Entwicklung,” Die Wiener Genesis, ed. Wilhelm Ritter von Hartel and Franz Wickhoff, 1895, 1–96; Kurt Weitzmann, Illustration in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin und Method of Text Illustration, 1947, 2nd ed., 1970). The works of classical art historians like Richard Brilliant on pictorial narrative, on the other hand, are probably not brought into the medievalist discussion often enough (e. g., Brilliant, Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art, 1984). The question for text and image studies is no longer so much “can pictures narrate?” as “how do images narrate, often in interaction with, but also often in substantive independence from their texts?” As to the question of which materials are adopted into visual media, certain patterns do seem to exist. For example, in the early and high Middle Ages, works like heroic epics that belong very strongly to the “oral” culture, and likewise works that belong very strongly to the literate culture are rarely illustrated. It appears to be at the “interface” between the oral/vernacular and the literate/Latinate that images are created most often. We see this, for example, with the Charlemagne / Roland material, where the pseudo-oral Chanson de Roland is never illustrated, and the Latin Pseudo-Turpin very rarely is, but the German Rolandslied, which seeks to make literature out of

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the French oral epic, and stresses its own bookishness in various ways, was elaborately illustrated very early in its manuscript tradition, probably from the very beginning. Likewise, vernacular translations / adaptations of the Pseudo-Turpin are illustrated about ten times as often as the Latin text. (See James A. Rushing, Jr., “Images at the Interface: Orality, Literacy, and the Pictorialization of the Roland Material,” in Starkey and Wenzel, 115–134.) Curschmann makes a similar point with regard to a variety of texts in the 14th and 15th centuries, when texts from the Latinate sphere are generally illustrated only when they are translated (“Wort – Schrift – Bild,” 444). One textual tradition that needs considerable further study is that of the Aeneid: before the 14th century, the Latin text is very rarely illustrated, but its vernacular adaptations are illustrated early and often and elaborately. (For preliminary findings on the Aeneid material, see Rushing, “More Images at the Interface,” Kulturen des Manuskriptzeitalters, ed. Arthur Gross and Hans-Jochen Schiewer, 2004, 299–320.) The questions of what gets into pictures, and why, and how that changes over time, will remain an important subject for text and image studies. Since text and image studies exists in the interdisciplinary space between studies of texts and studies of images, it is perhaps inevitable that it should frequently involve itself with other interdisciplinary endeavors. Indeed, as we have already seen, the history of one of the main lines of text and image research emerged from the study of orality and literacy, and has been inextricably linked to the study of the history of the book. Recently, the line has sometimes become blurry between text and image studies and other, broader endeavors such as the study of visual culture. For some practitioners, such as Starkey, the term “image” no longer means just works of visual art, but also metaphorical images, ekphrasis and other evocations of image in texts, spatiality in literature, performance, and so forth (Reading the Medieval Book, 13–15). For others, such as Jeffery Hamburger (e. g., in Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, 1997), the emphasis is less on relationships between specific books and specific texts than on the idea of a culture of images. Here text and image studies merges with the relatively new field – newer, in some ways, than text and image studies itself – of visual culture or visual studies, a field that may be defined as a very broad study of “images, objects, and performance and the processes of visually perceiving them” (Starkey, “Visual Culture of the German Middle Ages,” 3; for a fuller introduction, see Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, 2005). The study of visual culture has the advantage of recognizing that, as Hamburger establishes in great detail for the late medieval nuns of St. Walburg in Eichstätt, “the conventional categories of

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art history and the fine arts … were not those of the [medieval makers and users of images] themselves” (Nuns as Artists, 20). In the case of the nuns Hamburger studies, the images were “organized according to overarching patterns of piety and paraliturgical performance, [and …] images interacted with one another in a larger theater of devotion” (Nuns as Artists, 20). Similar conclusions can be drawn about many medieval images. Works that study images as part of visual culture or that define image to include metaphors, performances, and depictions of space in literary texts may, for all their richness, no longer belong to “text and image studies” as that field has been defined up until now. When “text and image” merges with “visual culture,” it may lose its identity. Saying that is not meant to question the validity or importance of such studies, but only as an attempt to establish the definitional boundaries of “text and image.” It is to the definitional question that we must return, by way of summary. E. Summary If the field of “text and image” can be defined at all, perhaps we might say that “text and image” refers to the study of actual images, concrete works of visual art, which depict characters, stories, or ideas that originated in the verbal arts. It focuses on works of visual art, but it is not traditional art history: it is not focused on tracing the development of styles, or in assigning dates and places and artists to works of art. These things may be important for a “text and image” approach, but they are not the primary goals. Likewise, “text and image” involves texts, but it is not traditional literary history: it is not primarily concerned with making arguments about the meanings of texts (although such arguments may certainly be part of the background to a “text and image” approach). It is not a form of art history that uses texts to explain pictures, nor a form of literary history that uses pictures to explain texts. “Text and image” recognizes and respects both the interdependence and the independence of text and image. Medieval artists and viewers, in creating and consuming works of art that we today might regard as “based on” a text, did not necessarily have the same knowledge of the text in question that a modern scholar would take for granted. They may have read or heard the text, but in many cases, they may have not known the text at all, but known the story or the character from secondary oral traditions, from hearsay. But even if they did know the text directly, they did not necessarily base their creation or their understanding of their images directly on the text as a modern philologist might. “Text and image” understands this, and seeks to understand what was done with texts and pictures in the medieval contexts within which they were produced and consumed.

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Select Bibliography Michael Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8 (1985): 26–49; Michael Curschmann, “Hören – Lesen – Sehen: Buch und Schriftlichkeit im Selbstverständnis der volksprachlichen literarischen Kultur Deutschlands um 1200,” PBB 106 (1984): 218–57; Michael Curschmann, “Wort – Schrift – Bild: Zum Verhältnis von volkssprachigem Schrifttum und bildender Kunst vom 12. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert,” Mittelalter und frühe Neuzeit: Übergänge, Umbrüche und Neuansätze, ed. Walther Haug (=Fortuna Vitrea 16) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), 378–470; Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, La légende de Roland dans l’art du Moyen Age (Brussels: Arcade, 1966); Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (New York: Modern Language Association, 1938); James A. Rushing, Jr., Images of Adventure: Ywain in the Visual Arts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Kathryn Starkey, Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ‘Willehalm’ (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Julia C. Walworth, Parallel Narratives: Function and Form in the Munich Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Tristan’ & ‘Willehalm von Orlens’ (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2007).

James Rushing

Theology (Christian) A. General Definition Etymologically, “theology” is discourse about God, sometimes construed as the “science” of God (scientia Dei). The most influential definition of Christian theology is the phrase of Anselm of Canterbury: fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, i.e., reflection on the meaning and truth of Christian faith in relation to God, human existence, and the cosmos. Ancient and medieval usage of the term “theologia” often differed from modern uses. Greek patristic writers understood theologia to refer to the inner triune mystery of God, in contrast to economia, the action of God in the history of salvation; this usage influenced Byzantine Orthodox theologians throughout the medieval period. Augustine understood theologia, as used by the pagan author Varro, to refer to the various accounts of the gods, mythological, physical (i.e., philosophical) and civil (De Civitate Dei 6.5). For his own programmatic work on interpreting the Christian scriptures in relation to clas-

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sical culture, Augustine chose the title, De Doctrina Christiana, which has been variously translated as On Christian Doctrine or Teaching Christianity (Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr., 1958; Saint Augustine, Teaching Christianity: De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle, 1996). This book was the decisive influence shaping early medieval approaches to theology in the West until the 12th century (the classic work on this topic is Henri Irénée Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique [1938; 2nd ed., enlarged with a Retractatio, 1949]). Aristotle had used the term theologia as a synonym for metaphysics or first philosophy, which proceeds through the power of reason alone (Metaphysics 1026 a 19–22). Thomas Aquinas accepted this usage as legitimate, and he distinguished it from the theologia that is part of sacra doctrina (sacred doctrine or teaching), proceeding from divine revelation (Summa Theologica 1.1.1.2). For Aquinas, the theologia of sacra doctrina is a subalternate science that takes its principles from revelation and uses philosophy as a handmaid to develop a coherent understanding of what is believed through faith (ST 1.1.2; 1.1.3; 1.1.5.2); even though humans cannot define God conceptually, theology uses the effects of God, both in nature and in supernatural grace, in place of a definition. Earlier scholarship on medieval Christian theology often focused its attention on the technical discourses of the Latin scholastics; contemporary scholarship understands theology to include not only scholastic theology, but also the writings of medieval monks, women, and mystics, who wrote in a variety of literary genres. B. Monastic Theology Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., wrote the classic portrait of the theological style of the monastic writers, who dominated theology from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the twelfth century (L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du moyen âge, 1957; trans. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi, 1961, 2nd rev. ed., 1977). In addition to the Bible, the early church fathers and church councils, monastic theologians drew inspiration from the literary heritage of Latin antiquity, especially Cicero and Ovid. Writing in the literary genres of sermon, public letter, dialogue, and scriptural commentary, the monks sought to enrich their experience of faith by exploring the soul in relation to God, sacred history, and the mystery of Jesus Christ. The distinction between monastic and scholastic theology should not be applied too rigidly, since the monk Anselm prepared the way for scholasticism and Peter Abelard combined elements of both worlds; nonetheless, it remains an important reminder of the varied contexts in which theology was done.

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The two most influential monastic theologians were Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux. Richard William Southern wrote a major study of Anselm’s theology in light of his monastic context (Saint Anselm: Portrait in a Landscape, 1990); and Étienne Gilson wrote a classic study of the very influential Cistercian theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux (La Théologie mystique de Saint Bernard, 1934; trans., The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes, 1940; rpt., 1990). For more recent studies of Bernard’s theology, see La dottrina della vita spirituale nelle opera di San Bernardo di Clairvaux, Atti del Convegno Internazionale. Rome, 11–15 settembre 1990, Analecta Cisterciensia 46 (1990); Gillian Rosemary Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard (1983); and John R. Sommerfeldt, ed., Bernardus Magister: Papers Presented at the Nonacentenary Celebration of the Birth of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1992). C. Scholastic Theology A new form of theological reflection developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the urban context of the cathedral schools established by bishops and in the new universities. In contrast to the literary approach of the monastics, scholastic theology sought a more technical understanding of Christian faith as scientia through the application of abstract principles of logic, often coming from Aristotle. Scholastics cultivated the art of making careful distinctions in order to unite different projects, categories and levels of being, e. g., distinguishing various theological tasks in order to do each in a more adequate manner. Marie-Dominique Chenu presented the classic study of the growth of scholastic theology in relation to the broader changes in society and culture, especially the growth of cities, in the 12th and 13th centuries (“La théologie comme science au XIIIe siècle,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 2 [1927]: 31–71; 2nd ed., rev., 1942; 3rd ed., rev. and expanded, 1957]; see also Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der Scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (1909); Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der katholischen Theologie seit dem Ausgang der Väterzeit (1933); and Richard William Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (1995; rpt. 1997). In a very influential essay, Bernard Lonergan argued that the key development in the growth of scholasticism was the clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders by Philip the Chancellor between 1218 and 1230 (Bernard Lonergan, “St. Thomas’s Thought on Gratia Operans,” TS 2/3 [1941]: 289–324).

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D. Theology by Women There are relatively few writings by Christian women before the twelfth century, and earlier scholarship largely neglected women’s voices in favor of male scholastic theologians. Recent years have seen fresh translations and studies of figures such as Hildegard of Bingen (Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, 1987), Hadewijch (The Complete Works, trans. with introduction by Mother Columba Hart, 1980), Marguerite Poreta (Le mirouer des simples âmes, ed. Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyn, 1986; trans. The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. with introduction by Ellen L. Babinsky, 1993), and the Beguines (Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua [d. 203] to Marguerite Porete [d. 1310], 1984; Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 1986; Andrew Kadel, Matrology: A Bibliography of Writings by Christian Women from the First to the Fifteenth Centuries, 1995; Gertrud Jaron Lewis, Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters: Mit einem Anhang zu Beatrijs van Nazareth und Hadewijch von Frank Willaert und Marie José Govers, 1989). E. Mystical Theology Early in the 20th century, Joseph Maréchal published an important study of mystics (Études sur la psychologie des mystiques, 2 vols., 1924–1937; partial trans.: Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics, trans. Algar Thorold, 1964), in which he argued that mystics have a direct, unmediated experience of the Absolute. Bernard McGinn is presenting a major, multi-volume history of Christian mysticism, with four volumes published to date covering the patristic and medieval period (The Presence of God: A History of Christian Mysticism, vol. 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 2, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, vol. 3, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), vol. 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500), 1991, 1994, 1998, 2005). The meaning of “mysticism” has been much debated; for McGinn, “the mystical element in Christianity is that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God” (Foundations, xvii). Peter Dinzelbacher has also studied medieval mysticism, as well as medieval claims of special revelations received through visions, dreams, appearances, and auditions (Christliche Mystik im Abendland: Ihre Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters, 1994; id., Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, 1981; id., ‘Revelationes’. Typologie des sources du Moyen Age Occidental 57, ed. L. Genicot, 1991).

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F. Byzantine Orthodox Theology For Byzantine Orthodox theology in the Middle Ages and beyond, theologia was inseparable from theoria (contemplation), finding its origin in the visionary experiences of the saints and its climax in theiosis, the experience of becoming one with God (Vladimir Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église de l’Orient, 1944; trans.: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 1957; rpt., 1976). Orthodox theology developed in a style very different from the Latin scholastics. John Meyendorff wrote the classic study of Byzantine theology (Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 1st ed. 1974; 2nd ed. 1979; 3rd rpt. 1983; see also John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975, 2nd printing 1987). Earlier Protestant and Catholic scholars in Western Europe and North America traditionally neglected or ignored medieval developments in Orthodox theology, frequently deprecating Eastern Christians for not developing creatively beyond the patristic period. Deliberately challenging this assumption, Jaroslav Pelikan dedicated one volume of his magisterial history of Christian doctrine to Eastern Christian theology (The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700), 1974; Phoenix edition, 1977). Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote an important study of Maximus the Confessor (Kosmische Liturgie: das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners, 1941; 2nd ed. 1961). For a survey and bibliography, see Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (1959). G. Christian Theology in Asia Scholarship of the medieval period has largely ignored the developments in the Church of the East (inaccurately called the “Nestorian” Church – Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was not even a member of the Church of the East), which developed in the Sassanid Empire, spread across Central Asia along the Silk Road and entered China at the latest in 635 C.E. Central and East Asian Christians wrote a number of works presenting Jesus in images and terms derived from Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. The monk, and possibly bishop, Alopen, brought these documents to Tang Dynasty China in 635 C.E., where he received a warm welcome from the Chinese Emperor. Japanese scholar P. Yoshiro Saeki translated these documents into English (The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, 1937; 2nd ed., rev., 1951; see also Arthur Christopher Moule, Christians in China Before the Year 1550, 1930; rpt. 1977). More recently, a UNESCO team led by Martin Palmer has published a new translation of these texts as the “Jesus Sutras,” with extensive commentary on the background (Martin Palmer, with Eva Wong, Tjalling Halbertsma, Zhao Xiao Min, Li Rong Rong, and James Palmer,

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The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, 2001); Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1500, 1992; rev. and corrected ed. 1998; Li Tang, A Study of the History of Nestorian Christianity in China and Its Literature in Chinese: Together with a New English Translation of the Dunhuang Nestorian Documents, 2002; 2nd ed., rev. 2004). H. Dissent and Heretical Theology In recent years there have been a number of attempts to understand sympathetically Christian movements that were judged heretical in their time. See Robert Ian Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (1977); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (1965; rpt. with a new preface, 1982); Richard Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (1979); James Fearns, ed., Ketzer und Ketzerbekämpfung im Hochmittelalter (1968); Gordon Leff, Heresy, Philosophy, and Religion in the Medieval West (2002); and Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller, ed., Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (2003). For bibliography, see Carl T. Berkhout and Jeffrey B. Russell, Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography 1960–1979 (1981); and Herbert Grundmann, Bibliographie zur Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters, 1900–1966 (1967). I. History of Research For most of the last two centuries, the study of Christian theology in the medieval period has been closely related to contemporary theological debates, often linked to partisan, doctrinal feuds between Roman Catholics who idealized the period, finding the 13th to be “the greatest of centuries” (James Joseph Walsh, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries, 1907; rpt. 1952), and Protestants, who sharply criticized Catholic and Orthodox theology and looked for proto-Protestant figures who prepared the way for Martin Luther and John Calvin (e. g., Ferdinand Christian Baur, Martin Werner, and Adolph Harnack, discussed below; more recently, Heiko Augustinus Obermann, ed., Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought, Illustrated by Key Documents, 1966). Roman Catholic and Byzantine Orthodox scholars usually studied the period with an eye to developing their contemporary theological positions; Protestants often studied the period looking for fatal errors in the development of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches or for anticipations of the Reformation.

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a. Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Protestant Scholarship 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant scholarship on medieval theology was often shaped by broad, overarching theories of the development of Christian doctrine, which were polemically oriented against the Catholic Church and the Byzantine Orthodox family of churches. Ferdinand Christian Baur, one of the first scholars to apply the historical critical method to the development of Christian theology, rejected both traditional Christian supernaturalism and Enlightenment rationalism. He took inspiration from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy and interpreted the development of Christian theology as the exposition of the idea of God, the completion of the self-evolution of the divine Spirit. Baur was immensely influential on later Protestant scholars both positively for introducing historical critical scholarship and interpreting Christianity as an historical phenomenon, but also negatively as an example of a speculative hermeneutic to be rejected. He strongly influenced later Protestant historians by claiming that the central problem of early church development is the rise of the Catholic Church (Die christliche Kirche des Mittelalters in den Hauptmomenten ihrer Entwicklung, ed. F. F. Baur, 1861; 2nd ed.: Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, vol. 3, 1869; rpt. 1969; Die Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtsschreibung, 1852; rpt. 1962; trans. Ferdinand Christian Baur on The Writing of Church History, ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson, 1968). Martin Werner interpreted the history of Christian theology in light of the theory of “Thoroughgoing Eschatology” of Albert Schweitzer, for whom Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected a radical transformation of the world in the near future; when Jesus failed to return on the clouds of heaven, the church “de-eschatologized” the earliest Christian teachings, rejected the teaching of Paul, and developed a new theology in light of Hellenistic religious philosophy. For Werner, this transformation shaped the entire medieval period in a negative manner (Martin Werner, Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas; trans., The Formation of Christian Dogma, 1957). The extremely influential Adolph Harnack wrote a landmark study of the History of Dogma, proposing the famous thesis that Catholic dogma and theology represent a gradual Hellenization of the gospel of Jesus and are a fundamental betrayal of the Gospel of Jesus; for Harnack, the medieval period is an extension of the fateful decisions of the early church, which must be rejected by modern Protestants. He argued that medieval Catholic theology was at root mystical, leading to pantheism and divinization of the self (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 5 vols., 1885–1890; trans.: History of Dogma, trans. from 3rd German ed., Neil Buchanan, 7 vols., 1899, 1900; rpt. in 4 vols., 1961; for his critique of medieval Catholic theology, see esp. vol. 6: 100–106; see also the influential Protestant scholar Reinhold

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Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 1st ed., 2 vols., 1895, 1898; 2nd ed., 1920; 3rd ed. 5 vols. published 4, 1930–33; trans. Textbook of the History of Doctrines, trans. Charles E. Hay, 1956). b. Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Catholic Scholarship From the beginning of the 19th century until well into the 20th century, Catholic scholarship on the topic largely continued the abstract, neo-scholastic approaches that had been developed in the Baroque period in polemical response to the Reformation. Sharply challenging this approach in a landmark work in 1812, Johann Sebastian Drey called for a revision of Catholic theology through a return to the mystical theology of the Middle Ages; he was inspired in part by the Romantic appreciation of the medieval period and was also aware of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s call to accept historical criticism into Protestant theology. In opposition to the reigning neo-scholasticism, Drey insisted upon the necessity of interpreting medieval theology in terms of its own time and culture (“Revision des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der Theologie,” Archive für die Pastoralkonferenzen in den Landkapiteln des Bistums Konstanz 1 [1812]: 3–26; rpt., Geist des Christentums und des Katholizismus: ausgewählte Schriften katholischer Theologie im Zeitalter des deutschen Idealismus und der Romantik, ed. Joseph Rupert Geiselmann, 1940, 85–97; id., Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie mit Rücksicht auf den wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt und das katholische System, ed. F. Schupp, 1819; rpt. 1971; trans.: Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology: With Reference to the Scientific Standpoint and the Catholic System, trans. Michael J. Himes, 1994). His call, however, was not widely heeded in Catholic circles until the beginning of the 20th century. Pope Leo XIII gave a major impetus to Catholic study of medieval theology in his 1879 encyclical, Aeterni Patris (“Encyclical Letter on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy according to the Mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor,” trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Preface to St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1947, vii-xvi; see James Hennessey, “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival: A Political and Philosophical Event,” Journal of Religion 58, supplement [1978]: 185–197). Faced with the challenges of modern atheism, rationalism, and materialism on the one hand and the option of fideism on the other, Pope Leo urged Catholics to follow the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas, who carefully distinguished and related the boundaries and roles of faith and reason so that they could work together in harmony. This led to a substantial concentration on Thomas in Catholic circles, which in turn spurred Franciscan scholars to study their own patron, Bonaventure, in greater detail.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant Catholic understanding of medieval theology was still an abstract neo-scholastic model that was detached from the concrete movement of history; Reginald GarrigouLagrange, who would mentor the doctoral dissertation of the future Pope John Paul II, was a major representative of this approach (La synthèse thomiste, 1946). In contrast, French Dominican scholars, Ambroise Gardeil and Pierre Mandonnet, pioneered in introducing historical critical methodology into Catholic scholarship (André Duval, “Aux origines de l’Institut Historique d’Études Thomistes du Saulchoir (1920 et ss.),” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 75 [1991]: 423–448; Saint Thomas au XXe siècle: colloque du centenaire de la ‘revue thomiste’ (1893–1992), 1994). Their work was continued and developed further by Marie-Dominique Chenu, who was influenced by the French Annales School and who would become a leader in applying historical critical methodology to Catholic theology. He insisted on examining medieval theologians and their use of langue in light of their social contexts (Marie-Dominique Chenu, Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1950; 2nd ed., 1954; trans.: Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. of the original ed. with Authorized Corrections and Bibliographical Additions, A.-M. Landry, O. P. and D. Hughes, O. P., 1964; id., St. Thomas d’Aquin et la théologie, 1959; trans.: Aquinas and His Role in Theology, trans. Paul Philibert, O.P., 2002). Chenu also pioneered in the study of the twelfth century, exploring its symbolic mentality and its sense of history (La théologie an douzième siècle, 1957; partial trans: Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, 1968). Even though he was censured by Vatican authorities in 1942, in time Catholic historical scholarship would more and more follow his lead and would demonstrate the diversity and variety of medieval Christian theology. These developments contributed to the demise of the abstract neoscholastic synthesis. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the major counterpoint to the model of Aquinas in Catholic medieval studies was the Augustinian tradition represented by Bonaventure (for an overview of his works and their context, see Jacques Guy Bougerol, Introduction à l’étude de Saint Bonaventure, 1961; trans.: Introduction to the Works of Bonaventure, trans. José de Vinck, 1963; San Bonaventura 1274–1974, 5 vols., 1974; Francisco de Asis Chavero Blanco, ed., Bonaventuriana: Miscellanea in onore di Jacques Guy Bougerol, ofm, 2 vols., 1988). Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) published an important study of Bonaventure’s perspectives on history (Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura, 1959; trans.: The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes, 1971, 1989; on Bonaven-

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ture’s Christology, see Zachary Hayes, The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure, 1981, and Werner Hülsbusch, Elemente einer Kreuzestheologie in den Spätschriften Bonaventuras, 1968). A number of French scholars, known as the movement “La nouvelle théologie,” turned to patristic and pre-Thomistic medieval theologians for fresh resources for addressing contemporary concerns. One of the most important was Henri de Lubac, who was eventually named a Cardinal in the Catholic Church. He authored a monumental study of medieval interpretations of the Bible (Exégèse médiévale, 4 vols., 1959–63). On medieval biblical interpretation, see also Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1952; rpt. 1983). J. Current Research Since the Second Vatican council (1962–1965), the ecumenical climate between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians improved considerably; the partisan reading of medieval theology declined and was progressively more discredited; and sympathetic studies across ecumenical lines increasingly appeared. Jaroslav Pelikan set a new standard for histories of Christian doctrine through his ecumenical tone, by acknowledging the continuing importance of Eastern Christian theology throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and also by proposing that the major shift in the periods of Christian doctrine should be placed at 1300 rather than 1500 (The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700); vol. 3, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300); vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700); vol. 5, Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (Since 1700), 1971, 1974, 1978, 1984, 1989; Pelikan was a Lutheran at the time he wrote the history of doctrine; he later converted to Orthodox Christianity). Protestant historian Justo L. Gonzalez published a multi-volume history of Christian thought that is also much more sympathetic to Catholic and Byzantine Orthodox developments than most earlier Protestant discussions had been (A History of Christian Thought, 3 vols., 1970–1975; rev. 2nd ed., 1987; id., Christian Thought Revisited: Three Types of Theology, 1989; rev. 2nd ed., 1999). In the Catholic world after Vatican II, Thomas Aquinas ceased being the dominant model of medieval theology and become one respected mentor alongside of others. In a very influential book, David Burrell interpreted Aquinas through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analysis of the use of language, stressing the apophatic dimension of Thomas’s approach (Aquinas: God and Action [1979]). Here Aquinas appears not as the constructor of a metaphysical doctrine of God based on an intuition of being but rather as the good

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language-user who offers a philosophical grammar of divinity, seeking to articulate “what God is not,” while remaining faithful to biblical revelation. Burrell has also studied Aquinas in the context of medieval interreligious exchanges, as a dialogue partner with Moses Maimonides (Rabbi Moses) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas, 1986). Accompanying the development of more positive interreligious relationships among the Abrahamic traditions, there have been conversations comparing Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theological perspectives during the Middle Ages (David B. Burrell and Bernard McGinn, ed., God and Creation: An Ecumenical Symposium, 1990; Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, ed., Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, 1989). With Thomas Aquinas no longer dominating the field of medieval theology, recent years have seen a fresh appreciation for the neo-Platonic tradition, from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Andrew Louth, Dionysius the Areopagite, 1989) to John Scotus Eriugena (Werner Beierwaltes, Eriugena: Grundzüge seines Denkens, 1994; Paul Rorem, Eriugena’s Commentary on the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, 2005, Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena; A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages, 1989, Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Eriugena, 1991); to Meister Eckhart (Frank Tobin, Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language, 1986; Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Theology of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing, 2001); and Nicholas of Cusa (Johannes Wolter, Apparitio Dei: Der theophanische Charakter der Schöpfung nach Nikolaus von Cues, 2004; Inigo Bocken, ed., Conflict and Reconciliation: Perspectives on Nicholas of Cusa, 2004). Alan B. Wolter did important work on the achievement of John Duns Scotus (The Philosophical Achievement of John Duns Scotus, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams, 1990). There has also been new interest in the theology of the later Middle Ages, freed from the neo-scholastic negative stereotype of a “fall” from the achievement of Aquinas and inspired by fresh awareness of the many continuities between late medieval, Reformation, and early modern theology (Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, 1963; rpt. 1983; id., The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought, 1985; Steven E. Ozmont, ed., Reformation in Medieval Perspective, 1971; Steven E. Ozmont, The Age of Reform (1250–1550): An Intellectual and Religious History Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 1980). In a very influential work, Louis Dupré argued that the decisive shift in the development of modernity came not in the Enlightenment but with the intellectual revolution of the late medieval period (Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture, 1993).

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Select Bibliography Primary sources Jacques-Paul Migne published a vast array of patristic and medieval theological texts, though not in critical editions (Patrologia cursus completus. Series Latina, 221 vols., ed. J. P. Migne [Paris: Jacques-Paul Migne, 1844–1855; many subsequent rpts., including Paris: Garnier Frères, 1958–]; Series Graeca, 161 vols., ed. Jacques-Paul Migne [1857–1866]). For a critical evaluation of the authenticity of these texts, see Palémon Glorieux, Pour revaloriser Migne [Cahier supplémentaire of Mélanges de science réligieuse, 1952]. Sources chrétiennes, originally edited by Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, presents a series of nearly 500 critical editions of patristic and medieval texts, with French translations and notes; it remains a standard reference point (1941–). Since 1953, Corpus Christianorum has been publishing excellent critical editions of Christian texts from late antiquity with notes and supplements; in 1966 it launched Continuatio Mediaevalis to extend its range to include the medieval period. Secondary sources For a bibliographical survey of earlier developments, see Bulletin de théologie ancienne et médiévale 1 (Louvain: Abbaye de César, 1929–1932); Rassegna di Letteratura tomistica [Naples: Edizioni Domenicane Italiane, 1969–]. For an overview of various approaches to historical theology, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine New York: Corpus/Philadelphia: Westminster/ London: Hutchinson, 1971). For extensive bibliographies on the development of medieval Christian doctrine and mystical theology, see Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vols. 1–4 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971, 1974, 1978, 1984, 1989); and McGinn, The Presence of God, vols. 1–4 (New York: Crossroad, 1991, 1994, 1998, 2005).

Leo D. Lefebure

Time Measurement and Chronology in Medieval Studies A. General Definition In a field itself defined by periodization, research on time and chronology in the middle ages concerns nearly all aspects of medieval history. Modern scholarship on time and chronology has extended into religious, cultural, and economic contexts, reflecting the breadth of interest and approaches taken to the subject in recent years. The wide-ranging body of scholarship itself reflects the diversity of medieval sources related to time and chronology. Writers in both periods have produced a particularly concentrated body of work on the computi, or calculation tables used for determining the date of the moveable feast of Easter. Modern studies on the medieval computus reveal

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a dating system central not only to the liturgical calendar, but to mathematics, astronomy, and the medieval sense of temporality (Arno Borst, Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas, 1990). In general terms, medieval time reflected a shift from cyclical conceptions of time in the classical period to an idea of linear, Christian time, which featured distinct creation and end points (Bernard Guenée, “Temps de l’histoire et temps de la mémoire au Moyen Âge,” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 1976–1977 [1978]: 25–35; Charles Pietri, Gilbert Dagron, and Jacques Le Goff, ed., Le temps chrétien de la fin de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge, 1984; Robert Hannah, Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Classical World, 2005). Within the lived experience of medieval culture, though, a plurality of “times” existed. Sources reveal not only contemporary consciousness of a linear, Christian cosmology, but also a diversity of temporal cycles, such as the liturgical calendar and the agricultural seasons (Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Temps linéaire, temps circulaire et écriture Romanesque, XXIIe–XIIIe siècles,” Le temps et la durée dans la littérature au Moyen Âge [1976]: 7–21; Anne Higgins, “Medieval Notions of the Structure of Time,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 [1989]: 227–50; Stephen Russell, “Sub specie aeternitas: Time, Sequence, and Cycle in Medieval Popular Literature,” MedPers 3 [1991]: 200–10). In addition to ecclesiastical and agricultural time, Jacques Le Goff, Jean Leclerq and others have identified monastic time, political time, feudal time, historical time, legal time, time of the body, rhythmic time of life and natural cycles, urban and merchant’s time, and times of labor and rest. These categories themselves share fluid boundaries, such as the seasonal cycles of sowing and harvesting, and penitence and celebration (Le Goff, “Le temps du travail dans la ‘crise’ du XIVème siècle,” Le Moyen Age LXIX [1963]: 597–613; Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident, 18 essais, 1978; “Au Moyen Age: Temps de l’église et temps du marchand,” Annales ESC [1960]: 417–33; Horst Wenzel, “Zur Mehrdimensionalität der Zeit im hohen und im späten Mittelalter: Von Bauern und Geistlichen, Rittern und Händlern,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 6 [1996]: 9–20; Le Goff, “Temps,” Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Occident Médieval [1999], 1113–22). These categories of temporality presuppose research on the medieval notion of time itself, and the ways in which individuals and communities experienced time (Wesley M. Stevens, “A Present Sense of Things Past: “Quid est enim tempus?” Time and Eternity: the Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2000, 9–28). Underlying his argument for a shift in the perception of time from the high to the late Middle Ages, Jean Leclerq characterized time in the former period as imprecise,

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sacred, clerical, natural, rural, and subjective, and in the latter as precise, profane, popular, mechanical, urban, and objective (Jean Leclerq, “Experience of Time and its Interpretation in the Early Middle Ages,” Studies in Medieval Culture V [1972]: 9–20; Leclerq, “The Experience of Time and Its Interpretation in the Late Middle Ages,” Studies in Medieval Culture 8–9 [1976]: 137–50). The characterization of medieval time as imprecise remains a point subject to debate within recent historiography. While certain aspects of medieval conceptions of time were distinct from our own, we cannot dismiss them as entirely inconsistent with modern temporality. Several constructs of time found in German literary sources, for example, challenge the argument that the medieval sense of time would be foreign and unrecognizable to individuals in the modern world (Albrecht Classen, “The Experience of and Attitude Towards Time in Medieval German Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Centuries,” Neohelicon XXXVI [1999]: 135–54). Because our own sense of time informs our perception of history, historians must diligently avoid reading modern temporality into their sources. As Ad Putter has advised, “Since time also passes in the fictional worlds of medieval literature, literary critics risk making comparable mistakes when they impose their own sense of time on that implied by the medieval text” (Ad Putter, “In Search of Lost Time: Missing Days in Sir Cleges and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and William. M. Ormrod, 2001, 119–36). Although several scholars have addressed medieval time measurement and chronology in broad contexts, research has more frequently focused on narrower subtopics, including methods of calculating dates, representations of time in literary sources, and scholastic discussions of time and eternity. Further specialization has followed, according to interest in religious, monastic, agricultural, legal, economic, political, or regnal “time.” Following historiographical trends in other fields, scholars have increasingly approached time and chronology as human, cultural, and social constructs, and let the sources themselves define their concepts of time without anachronistically imposing modern categorizations (Aron J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, orig. 1972, trans. G. L. Campbell, 1985). As historians have more closely examined time within social and cultural contexts, their work has understandably overlapped with research on medieval technology, urbanization, and memory. B. Background and Status of the Field The study of time measurement and chronology is not, of course, peculiar to medievalists nor to the disciplines of history, literature, language, or history

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of science. A survey of research on medieval time measurement must take into account several works by philosophers, cultural anthropologists, and others on time in the context of being, temporality, and subjective human consciousness (Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1927; Richard Swinburne, Space and Time, 1968; W. H. Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time, 1980; Julius T. Fraser, The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities, 1st ed. 1966, 2nd ed., 1981; Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, 1983–1985; Norbert Elias, Über die Zeit, 1984; Christopher Gosden, Social Being and Time, 1994; David Cockburn, Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present, and Future, 1997). Several general works on the history of time and horology cover medieval timekeeping technology and systems of dating (Eric Bruton, Clocks and Watches 1400–1900, 1967; Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700, 1967; Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa, 1980; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, 1983; Philippe Ariès, Le temps de l’histoire, 1st ed., 1954, 2nd ed., 1986; Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum, L’histoire de l’heure: L’horlogerie et l’organisation moderne du temps, 1992; Francesco Maiello, Storia del calendario: la misurazione del tempo, 1450–1800, 1994; Trude Ehlert, ed., Zeitkonzeptionen, Zeiterfahrung, Zeitmessung: Stationen ihres Wandels von Mittelalter zur Moderne, 1997; Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Stevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning, 1999; Peter Burke, “Reflections on the Cultural History of Time,” Viator 35 [2004]: 617–26). As the second millennium approached, the field benefited from several conferences and lecture series on medieval time. The breadth of material covered by each reflects the increasing diversity of approaches taken by historians from a variety of backgrounds (Carol Poster and Richard Utz, ed., Disputatio Vol. II: Constructions of Time in the Late Middle Ages, 1997; Ricardo Capasso and Paulo Piccari, ed., Il tempo nel Medioevo: Rappresentazioni storiche e concezioni filosofiche. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Roma, 26–28 novembre 1998, 2000; Tempus aevum aeternitas. La concettualizzazione del tempo nel pensiero tardomedievale. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Trieste 4–6 Marzo 1999, 2000; Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and William M. Ormrod, 2001; Pasquale Porro, ed., The Medieval Concept of Time: The Scholastic Debate and Its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, 2001; Robert N. Swanson, ed., The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History: Papers Read at the 1999 Summer Meeting and the 2000 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2002; Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, ed., Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, 2003).

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C. Surveys and Reference Works Several works offer introductions or overviews of medieval time measurement and chronology, including a number of early but fundamental surveys (Reginald L. Poole, Medieval Reckonings of Time, 1918; Poole, Studies in Chronology and History, ed. Austin L. Poole, 1934; Bruno Krusch, Studien zur christlich-mittelalterlichen Chronologie, 1938; Henri Platelle, “La mesure du temps au Moyen Âge: techniques et mentalités,” Bulletin de la Commission historique du département du Nord 39 [1975]: 5–25; Anne Higgins, “Medieval Notions of the Structure of Time,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 [1989]: 227–50; Bernard Ribemont, ed., Le temps: Sa mesure et sa perception au Moyen Âge, 1991; R. Dean Ware, “Medieval Chronology: Theory and Practice,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, 1st ed. 1976, 2nd ed. 1992, ed. James M. Powell, 252–77; John Hines, Karen Høilund Nielsen, and Frank Siegmund, ed., The Pace of Change: Studies in Early – Medieval Chronology, 1998; Robert Favreau, “La datation dans les inscriptions médiévales françaises,” Construire le temps. Normes et Usages chronologiques du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Marie-Clotilde Hubert, 2000, 11–39; Anna-Dorothee Von Den Brincken, Historische Chronologie des Abendlandes: Kalenderreform, und Jahrtausendrechnungen, 2000; Katherine Barker, “Anni Domini computati or Counting the Years of the Lord 998–1998: The Sherborne Benedictine Millennium,” St. Wulfsige and Sherborne: Essays to Celebrate the Millennium of the Benedictine Abbey, 998–1998, ed. Katherine Barker, David Hinton, and Alan Hunt [2005], 40–52). Entries in reference works range from concise overviews (“Chronologie” [1189–92], “Zeit” [1334–34], “Zeitberechnung im Kirche” [1334–35], and “Zeitrechnung” [1338–39], Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Josef Hofer and Karl Rahner, 1965; “Chronologie” [II, 2035–48], “Zeit” [IX, 500–514], and “Zeitmessung, Zeitmeßgeräte,” LexMA, vol. IX, 1993, 515–17; “Temps,” Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Occident Médiévale, ed. Jacques Le Goff et al., 1999, 1113–21) to brief definitions of terms related to medieval time and chronology, including entries on the computus, indiction, calendars, etc. (“Chronicle” [192], “Chronology, Christian” [193], “Clock” [201]; “Computus” [209], and “Indiction” [382], Joseph H. Dahmus, ed., Dictionary of Medieval Civilization, 1984; “Calendars” [67], “Easter, Date of,” “Chronicles” [87–88], “Clocks” [94], Henry R. Loyn, ed., The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopedia, 1989; “comput” [57], “epacte” [75], Vocabulaire historique du Moyen Âge, ed. François-Olivier Touati, 1995; “Computus,” Medieval Wordbook, ed. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, 1996; “Calendar” [223], “Calends” [223–24], “Computus, Ecclesiastical” (347), “Indiction,” “Time” (1441), “Time, Measurement of” [1442], Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, ed. André Vauchez, 2000; “Calend-

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rier” [207–8], “Comput” [320], “Datation” [389–390], “Horlage” [691], and “Temps” [1370–71], Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvard et al., 2002). D. Calendars and Date-Reckoning Translation and paleography notwithstanding, foremost among the challenges presented by medieval texts are the plurality of complex dating systems and calendars. The Julian calendar remained in use until 1582, but coexisted with the Christian liturgical calendar, as well as with systems of political and notarial date-reckoning and varying local customs throughout Europe. Fortunately, an extensive body of secondary literature exists to aid in navigating medieval calendars and dating controversies. These works focus on technical chronology, defined as being “not concerned with dates, per se, but rather with theoretical constructs by which dating is effected,” (R. Dean Ware “Medieval Chronology: Theory and Practice,” Medieval Studies, ed. James Powell [1992]: 252–77). Computus: The most immediate concern for the Christian calendar was the dating of Easter, a moveable lunar feast set by the Council of Nicea to fall on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (Faith Wallis, “Images of Order in the Medieval computus,” Ideas of Order in the Middle Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg, Acta 15 [1990 for 1988]: 45–68; Werner Bergmann, “Easter and the Calendar: the Mathematics of Determining a Formula for the Easter Festival to Medieval Computing,” Journal of General Philosophy of Science: Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 22 [1991]: 15–41; Benoît-Michel Tock, “Calendrier,” Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvard, 2002, 207–08). Works on the computus paschalis, or calculation table for determining the date of Easter and the rest of the church’s calendar, often begin with Dionysius Exiguus, his Easter tables, and the introduction of the Anno Domini system (Emmanuel Poulle, “Deux mille ans, environ,” Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres: Comptes-rendus des séances, 1999, 1225–38; Georges Declercq, Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era, 2000; Daniel P. McCarthy, “The Emergence of Anno Domini,” Time and Eternity: the Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2000, 31–53). Bede’s texts on time and dating, the Liber de temporibus and De temporum ratione, adopted and built on Dionyius’ work (Charles W. Jones, ed., Bedae Opera de Temporibus, 1943; Bede, The Reckoning of Time, trans. Faith Wallis, 1999; Masako Ohashi, “Sexta aetas continet annos praeteritos DCCVIIII: Bede, De temporibus, 22: a Scribal Error?,” Time and Eternity: the Medieval Discourse; ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2000, 55–61).

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Arno Borst has written prolifically on the history of the computus, particularly in the Carolingian era where, among other developments, he cites the integration of late antique philosophical and scientific texts into computus studies (Arno Borst, Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas, 1990; Borst, Die karolingische Kalenderreform, 1998; id., Der Streit um den karolingischen Kalender, 2004). A significant number of medieval texts on computi and treatises on calendars have survived, allowing research on several individual figures’ contributions, primarily from the early middle ages through the 11th century, including the works of Cassiodorus, Rabanus Maurus, Eric of Auxerre, Abbo of Fleury, Gerbert of Aurillac, Robert Grosseteste, and Alexander de Villa Dei (The Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, ed. Sigmund Eisner and Gary Maceoin, 1980; Borst, Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas, 1990; Laurel Braswell-Means, “‘Ffor as moche as yche man may not haue 6e astrolabe’: Popular Middle English Variations on the Computus,” Speculum 67 [1992]: 595–623; The Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. Linne R. Mooney, 1998; Peter Verbist, “Abbo of Fleury and the Computational Accuracy of the Christian Era,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2003, 63–80). Debate exists over computi attributed to Robert Grossete (Richard Dales, “The Computistical Works Ascribed to Robert Grosseteste,” Isis 80 [1989]: 74–79; Jennifer Moreton, “Robert Grosseteste and the Calendar,” Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship, ed. James McEvoy, 1995, 77–88). Chaucer also wrote a treatise on astrolabes, arguably one amenable to popular audiences (George Ovitt, Jr., “History, Technical Style, and Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe,” Creativity and the Imagination: Case Studies from the Classical Age to the Twentieth-Century, ed. Mark Amsler, 1987, 34–58). E. Calendars and Date-Reckoning Although much of the scholarship concerning medieval calendars specifically addresses the liturgical calendar (see “Ecclesiastical and Liturgical Time Measurement” below), a number of key works approach calendars broadly (Calendriers: leurs enjeux dans l’espace et dans le temps, colloque de Cerisy, du 1er au 8 juillet 2000, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Jean Lefort, and Perrine Mane, 2002; Diana Greenway, “Dates in History: Chronology and Memory,” Historical Research 72 [1999]: 127–39; Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, “Year-Dates in the Early Middle Ages,” Time in the Medieval World,” 2001, 5–22). Related work has examined reform and control of the calendar (Jennifer Moreton, “Before Grossseteste: Roger of Hereford and Calendar Reform in Eleventhand Twelfth-Century England,” Isis 86 [1995]: 562–86; Borst, Die karolingi-

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sche Kalenderreform, 1998). Though at the end of the medieval period, much of the literature covering the Gregorian calendar reform addresses date-reckoning in the medieval period as background (Peter Archer, The Christian Calendar and the Gregorian Reform, 1941; Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England, 1998). Along with the Julian calendar, the Roman tradition of dating according to calends, nones, and ides continued into the medieval period, as did dating according to regnal years, and also according to indiction, a system of fifteenyear cycles beginning in 312 (Olivier Guyotjeannin, “Indiction,” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, ed. André Vauchez, 2001, vol. 1, 722–23). F. Time Indicators and Markers Medieval timekeeping devices included water clocks, sundials, astrolabes, and mechanical clocks. By the late Middle Ages, the latter varied in form from public town clocks to private clocks and watches. Several means of tracking time remained in use from the ancient period; technological improvements on water clocks, for example, continued throughout the medieval period. While older scholarship traced the development of clocks, astrolabes, and other timekeeping devices, more recently scholars have examined these objects within their broader social contexts, clarifying misconceptions and revisiting traditional assumptions about their use. Sandglasses were used to keep time for specific events (Anthony J. Turner, “The Accomplishment of Many Years: Three Notes Towards a History of the Sand-Glass,” Annals of Science [1982]: 161–72; Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum, L’histoire de l’heure: L’horlogerie et l’organisation moderne du temps, 1992). The astrolabe offered additional uses beyond timekeeping; scholars have approached its complex history from within the context of monastic and intellectual traditions, and as evidence of the transmission of technology from east to west (Marcel Destombes, “Un astrolabe carolingien et l’origine de nos chiffres arabes,” Archives internationales d’histoire des science 15 [1962]: 3–45; Arno Borst, Astrolab und Klosterreform an der Jahrtausendwende, 1989; Edgar Laird, “Astrolabes and the Construction of Time in the Late Middle Ages,” Disputatio 2 [1997]: 51–69). Both the astrolabe and clock were of primary use in measuring the liturgical day and marking the monastic hours. Scholarship on the origins of the clock has accordingly examined the use and development of timekeeping technology within monastic communities (John D. North, “Monasticism and the First Mechanical Clocks,” The Study of Time II, ed. Julius T. Fraser and Nathaniel M. Lawrence [1975], 381–98; Stephen C. McCluskey, “Gregory of Tours, Monastic Timekeeping, and Early Christian Attitudes to Astronomy,” Isis 81 [1990]: 8–22). The mechanical clock emerged during the

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late 13th and early 14th century and miniature timekeeping devices appeared at the end of the medieval period, making timekeeping portable (Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, 1962; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, 1983). As part of his comprehensive study of the reciprocal significance of clocks for the development of Christian western culture, David Landes has argued that the “miniaturization” of turret clocks into watches and other personal timekeeping devices represented the privatization and personalization of time (Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, 1983). Landes also discusses clocks as cultural symbols, including memento mori. G. Urban and Economic Time Modern scholarship on medieval clocks as physical, mechanical timekeeping objects is strongly tied to the historiography of urbanization, medieval city life, and the medieval economy. Technological developments in medieval timekeeping are often most effectively surveyed within the context of corresponding social change (Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum, Die Geschichte der Stunde: Uhren und moderne Zeitordnung, 1992; Pre-Industrial Cities and Technology, ed. Colin Chant and David Goodman, 1999; Chris Humphrey, “Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England,” Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and Mark Ormrod, 2001, 105–17). The mechanical clock made possible the division of time into equal units, independent of measurement according to daylight. Clocks accordingly measured not only time, but periods of labor; clocks thus tied time to income and pay, and clock-measured units of time to the growth of the money economy (Le Goff, “Au Moyen Âge: temps de l’église et temps du marchand,” Annales ESC [1960]: 417–433). These connections have prompted scholars to ask if perceptions of time shifted according to the structure of local economies (Alexander Callander, “Time and Money,” The Work of Jacques Le Goff and the Challenges of Medieval History, ed. Miri Rubin, 1997, 3–27). While scholars have argued the mechanical clock transformed the structure and rhythm of daily life (Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, 1983; Helmut Flachenecker, “Mechanische Uhren,” Euopäische Technik im Mittelalter, 800 bis 1400: Tradition und Innovation, ed. Uta Lindgren, 1996, 391–98), they have also nuanced the clock’s influence on the establishment of a system of equal hours (Emmanuel Poulle, “L’horlogerie a-t-elle tué les heures inégales?,” Construire le temps: Normes et usages chronologiques du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Marie-Clotilde Hubert, 2000, 137–56). Clocks, and clock bells, were significant not only as technological developments, but as evidence of urban communities’ interest

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in standardizing the structure and measurement of time in their daily lives (Chris Humphrey, “Time and Urban Culture in Late Medieval England,” Time in the Medieval World, 2001, 105–18). A correlation has also been suggested between the development of proportional units of time and currency and shifts in 14th-century scholastic discussions of natural philosophy (Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, 1998). H. Ecclesiastical and Liturgical Time Measurement The months, days, and hours of medieval time were marked according to the customs and rituals of the church, aspects of which nevertheless varied by location and tradition (Irénée Henri Dalmais, Pierre Jounel, Aimé Georges Martimort, La liturgie et le temps, 1983). In 664, the Synod of Whitby confirmed the orthodoxy of the Roman liturgical calendar over the Celtic, although local liturgical customs, including the later Sarum rite, complicate modern scholars’ picture of the liturgical year in Britain and on the continent (Thomas Talley, “Liturgical Time in the Ancient Church: The State of Research,” Studia Liturgica [1982]: 34–51; Nigel Morgan, “The Introduction of the Sarum Calendar into the Dioceses of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Thirteenth Century England, VIII: Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 1999, ed. Michael Prestwich, Richard H. Britnell, and Robin Frame, 2001, 179–206). The monastic hours marked the passage of time each day, both within and beyond monastic communities (Leclerq, “Prayer at Cluny,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 [1983]: 651–65). Saints’ and other feast days marked the passage of the months (Christopher R. Cheney, “Rules for the Observance of Feast-Days in Medieval England,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 34 [1961]: 117–47; Jean-Michel Matz, “Le calendrier et le culte des saints: l’Abbaye Saint-Aubin d’Angers, XIIe-début XVI siècle,” Revue Mabillon 7 [1996]: 127–55). Similar to feast days, the church’s celebration of jubilee years traced its origins to earlier traditions of commemoration (Diana Greenway, “Dates in History: Chronology and Memory,” Historical Research 72 [1999]: 127–39). In addition to liturgical texts, scholars have depended heavily on medieval literary sources to communicate the ways in which time was measured within religious space. References to, and descriptions of, feast days and other events offer a more dynamic picture of the calendar in medieval daily life and thought than liturgical sources (Philippe Walter, La mémoire du temps: fêtes et calendriers de Chrétien de Troyes à ‘La Mort Artu,’” 1989; Ute Lim-

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acher-Riebold, “L’importance du calendrier dans le roman de Flamenca,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2003, 109–126). I. Agricultural and Domestic Time At the most physical level, time was marked and measured according to cycles of daylight, the agricultural seasons, and the labors and pastimes associated with each. Iconic representations of the “Labors of the Months” frequently appear in texts of the central and late middle ages (Bridget Ann Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year, 1999). Medieval books of hours featured images of domestic and agricultural activities as representations of the passing year, such as those in the Très Riches Heures (Frederick P. Pickering, The Calendar Pages of Medieval Service Books: An Introductory Note for Art Historians, 1980; Povl Skårup and Erik Dal, The Ages of Man and the Months of the Year: Poetry, Prose and Pictures Outlining the Douze Mois Figurés Motif Mainly Found in Shepherds’ Calendars and in Livres d’Heures (14th to 17th Century), 1980; Georges Comet, “Le temps agricole d’après les calendriers illustrés,” Temps, mémoire, tradition au Moyen-Âge, ed. Bernard Guillemain, 1983, 7–18). Depictions of daily activities and occupations in imagery and sculpture not only reveal contemporary representations of time and the seasons, but offer case studies of artistic innovations and developments within these themes over time (Time in the Medieval World: Occupations of the Months and Signs of the Zodiac in the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane, 2007). The natural cycles and stages of life, including birth and death, were themselves interpreted as markers of time, both real and symbolic (Philippe Ariès, L’ homme devant la mort, 1977). J. Legal Time The connections between time and memory are perhaps most explicitly stated in scholarship on time measurement in the context of medieval law. In the sense that legal claims and legal jurisdiction often depended on collective community memory, legal rights existed in a temporal context. Rights themselves could be defined as memory, when memory of how long a claim had been held was measured in time, or time immemorial (Paul Brand, “’Time out of Mind:’ the Knowledge and Use of the Eleventh and TwelfthCentury Past in Thirteenth-Century Litigation,” Anglo-Norman Studies XVI [1994]: 37–54; Brand, “Lawyers’ Time in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Time in the Medieval World, 2001, 73–104).

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K. Christian Chronology, Apocalypticism and Eschatology In the Confessions and the City of God, Augustine set human time and chronology within the broader scope of linear Christian history and cosmology, and in so doing distinguished between human and divine time (Henri-Irénée Marrou, L’ambivalence du temps de l’histoire chez saint Augustin, 1950; Robert Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine, 1970; Richard Landes, “The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern,” Speculum 75 [2000]: 97–145). Augustine shaped not only later medieval understanding of the Christian past and future, but also the sense and experience of time (Oscar Cullmann, Christus und die Zeit, 1st ed. 1946, 3rd ed. 1962; Henri Bourgeois, Pierre Gibert, and Maurice Jourjon, L’expérience chrétienne du temps, 1987; The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History: Papers Read at the 1999 Summer Meeting and the 2000 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed., Robert N. Swanson, 2002). Time itself represented the medium through which scriptural prophecies would be fulfilled. Within the early church, tension arose between scripture and what the passage of time revealed. Robert Markus (“Living within Sight of the End,” Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey [2001], 23–34) looks at the ways in which Augustine, Bede, Gregory the Great, and others spoke of the apocalypse, and the ways in which each addressed the sense of imminence surrounding the end times, as well as the uncertainty and indifference that arose as time passed without evidence of prophesied events. Modern scholarship on apocalypticism, eschatology, and on figures and texts associated with apocalypticism and millenarianism has thus overlapped considerably with discussions of medieval chronology (Claude Carozzi and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, La fin des temps: Terreurs et prophètes au Moyen Âge, 1982; Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Chronography 100–800 CE,” The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen, 1988, 137–211; Claude Carozzi, Eschatologie et au-delà. Recherches sur l’Apocalypse de Paul, 1994). L. Scholastic Discussions of Time Medieval theological and philosophical discussions of time focused on several questions arising from Aristotelian and Augustinian thought, notably questions concerning divine time, the continuum, infinity, duration, the eternity of the world, related questions on time with regard to motion and on the characteristics of time’s existence (Piero Ariotti, “Celestial Reductionism of Time. On the Scholastic Conception of Time from Albert the Great and

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Thomas Aquinas to the End of the Sixteenth-Century,” Studi internazionali di filosofia 4 [1972]: 91–120; Norman Kretzmann, “Incipit/Desinit,” Motion and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull, 1976, 101–36; Infinity and Continuity in Ancient and Medieval Thought, ed. Norman Kretzmann, 1982; Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 1983; Richard C. Dales, “Time and Eternity in the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas XLIX [1988]: 27–45; Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and his Contemporaries, 1990; The Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas and His Contemporaries, ed. Jozef B. M. Wissink, 1990; Pasquale Porro, Forme et modelli di durata nel pensiero medievale. L’aevum, il tempo discreto, la categoria ‘quando,’ 1996; Cecilia Trifogli, Oxford Physics in the ThirteenthCentury (ca. 1250–1270): Motion, Infinity, Place, and Time, 2000; John North, Time and the Scholastic Universe, 2003; Rory Fox, Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought, 2006). In the Physics, Aristotle defined time as the measure of motion. Augustine’s body of work was informed by his thought on time and eternity (Jean Guitton, Le temps et l’éternité chez Plotin et Saint Augustin, 1st ed. 1933, 3rd ed. 1959) and without exception, his discussion of the human soul (Kurt Flasch, Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo, das XI. Buch der Confessiones, 1993). Scholastic writers consequently addressed the tension between Aristotelian and Augustinian conceptions of time with regard to movement and the soul (Udo Reinhold Jeck, Aristoteles contra Augustinum: Zur Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Zeit und Seele bei den antiken Aristoteleskommentatoren, im arabischen Aristotelismus und im 13. Jahrhundert, 1994; Ruedi Imbach, “Temps,” Dictionnaire du Moyen Âge, ed. Claude Gauvard, 2002, 1370–71). Earlier historiography includes fundamental contributions by Anneliese Maier, Pierre Duhem, and Augustin Mansion, as well as several works on general topics in scholastic thought that include research on time (Augustin Mansion, “La théorie aristotélicienne du temps chez les péripathéticiens médiévaux: Averroès, Albert le Grand, Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Néoscolastique de Philosophie 36 [1934]: 275–307; Anneliese Maier, “Scholastische Diskussionen über die Wesenbestimmung der Zeit,” Scholastik 26 [1951]: 361–98; Anneliese Maier, Metaphysische Hintergründe der Spätscholastischen Naturphilosophie, 1955; Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, VII, 1956; Anneliese Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, 1958; Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle, 1968). Building on these studies, several scholars have set the medieval philosophical discourse on time within broader contexts, both thematically and

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chronologically (Horst Günther, Le temps de l’histoire. Expérience du monde et categories temporelles en philosophie de l’histoire de saint Augustin à Petrarque de Dante à Rousseau, 1995; Il tempo in questione. Paradigmi della temporalità nel pensiero occidentale, ed. Luigi Ruggiu, 1997; Filosofia del tempo, ed. Luigi Ruggiu and Luigi Alici, 1998; Il tempo nel Medioevo: Rappresentazioni storiche e concezioni filosofiche. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Roma, 26–28 novembre 1998, ed. Ricardo Capasso and Paulo Piccari, 2000; Tempus aevum aeternitas. La concettualizzazione del tempo nel pensiero tardomedievale. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Trieste 4–6 Marzo 1999, 2000). One of the most wide-ranging studies, The Medieval Concept of Time: The Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro, 2001, for example, resulted from a conference encompassing all aspects of the medieval scholastic discourse on time, ranging from its Neoplatonic inheritance to its influence on early modern discussions of time. Scholastic interest in time also included questions on usury and concerns over the selling of time (Jacques Legoff, “Au Moyen Âge: temps de l’église et temps du marchand,” Annales ESC [1960]: 417–433; Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money, and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200–1350, 1992; Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, 1998). Recent scholarship on individual 13th and 14th-century authors is vast, but a sampling of work would include key studies on Peter of John Olivi, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Kilwardby, Giles of Rome, William of Alnwick, William of Ockham, Thomas Wylton, Peter Auriol, Jean Buridan, and others (John M. Quinn, “The Concept of Time in Giles of Rome,” Augustiniana 29 [1979]: 5–42; Robert Kilwardby, On Time and Imagination: ‘De Tempore.’ ‘De Spiritu Fantastico,’ ed. P. Osmund Lewry, 1987; Niklaus Largier, Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit: Ein Aufriss des Zeitproblems bei Dietrich von Freiberg und Meister Eckhart, 1989; Tiziana Suarez-Nani, Tempo et essere nell’autunno del medioevo: Il ‘De tempore’ di Nicola di Strasburgo e il dibattito sulla natura ed il senso del tempo agli inizi del XIV secolo, 1989; Cecilia Trifogli, “Il problema dello statuto ontologico del tempo nelle Quaestiones super Physicam di Thomas Wylton e di Giovanni di Jandun,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 1 [1990]: 491–548; François X. Putallaz and Ruedi Imbach, “Olivi et le temps,” Pierre de Jean Olivi (1248–1298): pensée scolastique, dissidence spirituelle et société, ed. Alain Boureau and Sylvain Piron, 1999; Roland J. Teske, “William of Auvergne on Time and Eternity,” Traditio 55 [2000]: 125–41; Henryk Anzulewicz, “Aeternitas-Aevum-Tempus: The Concept of Time in the System of Albert the Great,” The Medieval Concept of Time:

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The Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro, 2001, 83–129; Dirk-Jan Dekker, “Buridan’s Concept of Time: Time, Motion, and the Soul in John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s Physics,” The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan, ed. Johannes M.M.H. Thijssen, 2001; Guido Alliney, Time and Soul in Fourteenth-Century Theology: Three Questions of William of Alnwick on the Existence, the Ontological Status, and the Unity of Time, 2002; Chris Schabel, “Philosophy and Theology across Cultures: Gersonides and Auriol on Divine Foreknowledge,” Speculum 81 [2006]: 1092–117). M. Time Measurement and Chronology in Chronicles and Literary Sources Chronicles Several genres of medieval writing dealt explicitly with time and chronology. Of foremost relevance were the treatises on calendars and computi. In addition, works on political, monastic, and world chronicles have offered scholars a more contextualized view of medieval attitudes towards chronology, record-keeping, and documentation of past events (Louis Green, Chronicle into History: an Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-century Chronicles, 1972; Joëlle Beaucamp, “La chronique pascale: le temps approprié,” Le temps chrétien de a fin de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge IIIe–XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean-Marie Leroux, 1984; La chronique et l’histoire au Moyen Âge, 1984; J. W. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought, 1986). The temporal structure of chronicles speak to contemporary consciousness of time (Hans-Werner Goetz, “The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and the Twelfth Centuries,” Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary, 2002, 139–65). The passage of time was also marked in necrologies, cartularies, and martyrologies (Jean Becquet, “Le commencement de l’année en Limousin au XIIe siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartres [1993]: 161–69; Peter Verbist, ‘Reconstructing the Past: The Chronicle of Marianus Scottus, Peritia 16 [2002]: 284–334). Medieval chroniclers’ and historians’ temporal unity with the past distinguishes the medieval sense of history from the modern (Bernard Guenée, “Temps de l’histoire et temps de la mémoire au Moyen Âge,” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France [1976–1977]: 25–35; id., Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval, 1980; Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness, 1991). Distinctions between chronicles and histories notwithstanding, scholarship on history in the Middle Ages directly pertains to studies of time and chronology (Matthew Innes and Rosamund McKitterick, “The Writ-

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ing of History,” Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamund McKitterick,1994, 193–220; McKitterick, “Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of the Royal Frankish Annals,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society [1997]: 101–30; Gerd Althoff et al., ed., Medieval Concepts of the Past, 2002), notably the ways in which individuals and communities associated people, events, and circumstances from the past with the present (Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, 1969; and id., “The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin,” Time in the Medieval World, 2001). For medieval chroniclers and historians, the time of modernity was the time informed by memory, arguably the memory of time within their own century (Bernard Guenée, “Temps de l’histoire et temps de la mémoire au Moyen Âge,” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France [1976–1977]: 25–35). For this reason, much work done in the subfield of memory in the middle ages (see entry on “Memory” in this volume) complements studies on time (Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories. Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past, 1992; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 1990; Legoff, Histoire et mémoire, 1988; Bernard Guillemain, ed., Temps, mémoire, tradition au Moyen Age, 1983; Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 1st ed. 1979, 2nd ed. 1993; Patrick Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium, 1994). N. Time in Medieval Literature Analysis of the way time was conceptualized and employed in literary sources has led to broader understanding of time as a cultural reference (Le temps et la durée dans la littérature au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bellenger, 1985; Richard Lock, Aspects of Time in Medieval Literature, 1985; Peter W. Travis, “Chaucer’s Chronographiae, the Confounded Reader, and Fourteenth-Century Measurements of Time,” Disputatio 2 [1987]: 1–34; Stephen Russell, “Sub specie aeternitas: Time, Sequence, and Cycle in Medieval Popular Literature,” MedPers 3 [1991]: 200–10; Linne R. Mooney, “The Cock and the Clock: Telling Time in Chaucer’s Day,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society 15 [1993]: 91–109; Albrecht Classen, “The Experience of and Attitude Towards Time in Medieval German Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Centuries,” Neohelicon XXXVI [1999]: 135–54; John D. Grosskopf, “Time and Eternity in the Anglo-Saxon Elegies,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño [2003], 323–30). Research approaches include representations of time in specific texts (Janet M. Bateley, “Time and the Passing of Time in The Wanderer and Related OE Texts,” Essays

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and Studies 37 [1984]: 1–13), as well as the conceptualization of time characteristic of individual writers (Philippe Ménard, “Le temps et la durée dans les romans de Chrétien de Troyes,” Le Moyen âge 73 [1967]: 375–401; Italo Sciuto, “Eternità e tempo in Dante,” Tempus aevum aeternitas: La concettualizzazione del tempo nel pensiero tardomedievale, ed. Guido Alliney and Luciano Cova, 1999, 1–20; Solveig Malatrait, “Zeitlose Märchen? Anmerkungen zur Zeit in den Lais der Marie de France,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 51 [2000]: 108–27). Interest has extended to time and timekeeping in several genres of literary work, including the study of dates in late medieval riddles (Marjolein Kool, “Raden of rekenen?” Hoort wonder Opstellen voor W.P. Gerritsen bij zijn emeeritaat, ed. Bart Besamusca, Frank Brandsma, and Dieuwke Van Der Poel, 2000; Martin Camargo, “Time as Rhetorical Topos in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook, ed. Scott D. Troyan, 2004, 91–107). O. Imagery of Time in Medieval Art Scholars have also examined temporality and representations of time and chronology in medieval art (Peter Nesteruk, “When Space is Time: The Rhetoric of Eternity: Hierarchy and Narrative in Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño [2003], 403–25). Beyond discussing the imagery and symbolism of time, scholars have considered how images and objects functioned as chronological and commemorative markers (Kim Bowes, “Ivory Lists: Consular Diptychs, Christian Appropriation and Polemics of Time in Late Antiquity,” Art History 24 [2001]: 338–57). Similarly, clocks and other timekeeping instruments themselves functioned as symbols of order in the late medieval and early modern period (Samuel L. Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos: Time in Western Life and Thought, 1980; Otto Mayr, “Die Uhr als Symbol für Ordnung, Autorität und Determinismus,” Die Welt als Uhr: Deutsche Uhren und Automaten, ed. Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr, 1980, 1–9). P. Time and Chronology in Medieval Judaism and Islam Although much of the research within the broad category of medieval time and chronology in the west includes references to, and in several cases, extensive coverage of these themes within medieval Judaism and Islam, differences among the religious calendars in each tradition necessitate specialized studies. The Hebrew calendar depends on both lunar and solar cycles, and dates years according to the traditional date of creation. The Muslim lunar calendar dates from the year of the Hijra, or 622 in the western calendar (Greville S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The Muslim and Christian Calendars, 1st ed., 1963, 2nd ed., 1977; Steven L. Goldman, “On the Beginnings and

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Endings of Time in Medieval Judaism and Islam,” The Study of Time, vol. IV, ed. Julius T. Fraser, 1981; David A. King, “Time and Space in Islam,” The Story of Time, ed. Kristen Lippincott [1999], 56–59; “The Rabbinic Concept of Time from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2003, 129–45). One of the most prolific scholars of medieval Islamic technology, David King, has argued for the study of Islamic astronomy, timekeeping, and other aspects of scientific thought within the context of Islamic history, beyond earlier studies which privileged the West’s reception of Eastern technology (David A. King, Islamic Astronomical Instruments, 1987; Edward S. Kennedy, “Two Medieval Approaches to the Equation of Time,” Centaurus 31 [1988]: 1–8; King, Astronomy in the Service of Islam, 1993; King, In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization, vol. 1: The Call of the Muezzin, 2004; vol. 2: Instruments of Mass Calculation, 2005). As one example of incongruity, Western clocks were traded within the Islamic world, although they were valued more as luxury gifts and status symbols than functional timekeeping devices (Otto Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East, 1975). Despite differences between Christian and Islamic methods of date-reckoning and timekeeping, though, research on astronomical timekeeping frequently encompasses both cultures, particularly with regard to the development of horological technology (Donald Hill, “Islamic Fine Technology and its Influence on the Development of European Horology,” Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology, ed. David A. King, 1998, 9–28). Historiographical overlap occurs more frequently within treatments of medieval philosophical works on time. Jewish and Islamic scholars, including Maimonides, Gersonides, al-Ghazali, and Averroes, addressed many of the same tensions in Aristotelian thought as Christian writers over the nature of time and the eternity of the world (Tamar M. Rudavsky, Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 2000; Rudavsky, “Time and Cosmology in Late Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2003, 147–62). As with the history of medieval law and technology, the transmission of Islamic philosophical texts into the West in the central Middle Ages greatly influenced thought in the West, particularly the work of Thomas Aquinas and other late 13th-century and 14th-century writers (Cecilia Trifogli, “Averroes’s Doctrine of Time and Its Reception in the Scholastic Debate,” The Medieval Concept of Time, ed. Pasquale Porro, 2001, 57–82; Oliver Leaman, An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy,

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1st ed., 1985, 2nd ed., 2002; Oliver Leaman and Daniel H. Frank, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, 2003; Muhammad Ali Khalidi ed., Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writing, 2005). (See works listed in “Scholastic Discussions of Time” above). Select Bibliography Bernard Ribemont, ed., Le temps: Sa mesure et sa perception au Moyen Âge (Caen: Paradigme, 1992); R. Dean Ware, “Medieval Chronology: Theory and Practice,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, 1st ed. 1976, 2nd ed., 1992, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 252–77; Horst Wenzel, “Zur Mehrdimensionalität der Zeit im hohen und im späten Mittelalter: Von Bauern und Geistlichen, Rittern und Händlern,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 6 [1996]: 9–20; Carol Poster and Richard Utz, ed., Disputatio, vol. 2: Constructions of Time in the Late Middle Ages (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997); Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2001); The Medieval Concept of Time: The Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro, 2001; Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2003); Anne Higgins, “Medieval Notions of the Structure of Time,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19 [1989]: 227–50; Jacques Legoff, Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occident, 18 essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); and Construire le temps: Normes et usages chronologiques du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Marie-Clotilde Hubert (Paris: Champion, 2000).

Camarin M. Porter

Transfer of Knowledge A. Classical vs. Multi-Cultural Transfer of knowledge played a fundamental role in the construction of medieval science and culture, with exchanges that were not limited to the translation of Greek science and philosophy into Arabic from the 9th century, and of Arabic science into Latin from the 11th century, but also included the translation of Greek philosophical and scientific literature into Latin in late antiquity, and of Arabic medical and astronomical treatises into Greek in Byzantium, perhaps as early as the 10th century and certainly during the late 13th century and the 14th, as well as transfers of techniques, products, and other goods between the several groups of different origins, languages, and religions who inhabited the Mediterranean and European areas during the Middle Ages. The assimilation of allogen elements (whatever their nature

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and origin) was not always free of problems, starting with the development of a new lexicon, had different consequences on the receiving culture, and generated different dynamics according to the places and periods, the sources and destinations of these exchanges, or the groups and, within them, the several strata of populations that received these new elements. As a field of scientific research, transfer of knowledge was slow to emerge in Western scientific and scholarly circles. As early as the late 15th century, indeed, the effects of the transfer of data from the Arabic World to the West were vigorously opposed by the physician, philologist and humanist Nicolao Leoniceo (1428–1524) (on him, see recently Alain Touwaide, “Leoniceno,” New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge, 2008, vol. 4, 264–67). In a small book usually identified in current scholarship as De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus (Ferrara, 1492; several re-editions, in Leoniceno’s own life time or posthumously, in his works or in other volumes), Leoniceno denounced the mistakes in the literature on materia medica used at that time, not only the Naturalis Historia by Pliny (23/24–79 C.E.), as often claimed in contemporary literature (from the abundant literature on this question, see, for example, Arturo Castiglioni (1874–1952), “The School of Ferrara and the Controversy on Pliny,” Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice written in Honour of C. Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols., 1953, vol. 1, 269–79), but also if not more the many works by Arabo-Islamic physicians and pharmacists that had been translated into Latin and were more or less assimilated into Western science from the 11th century on. To replace these works, Leoniceno proposed to return to Greek scientific literature (for an in-depth study of Leoniceno’s scientific thinking based on his library, see Daniela Mugnai Carrara, La biblioteca di Nicolò Leoniceno tra Aristotele e Galeno. Cultura e libri di un medico umanista, 1991). Leoniceno’s program was embraced by the publishers and printers of that time who contributed to the reintroduction of classical, that is, Greek, philosophical and scientific literature. After a corpus of treatises by Galen (129–after [?] 216 C.E.) was published in Latin translation in 1490, the whole collection of treatises by Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) then available in the West was published in Greek in five massive volumes (1495–1497) in Venice by Aldo Manuzio (1449–1515), including Theophrastus (372/370–ca. 288/286 B.C.E.), Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantarum (of which a Latin translation had already been published by Theodoros of Gaza [1400–ca. 1476] in 1483 [Treviso]). In 1498, a Latin translation of a corpus of Greek philosophical and scientific works was published by Giorgio Valla (ca. 1447–1500) in Rome, and, the following year, De materia medica by the Greek Dioscorides

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(1st c. C.E.) came out of Aldo Manuzio’s printing press. In 1501, the immense encyclopedia of science compiled by Giorgio Valla and containing the Latin translation of a whole range of Greek scientific treatises from mathematic to medicine and botany was published in Venice (Aldo Manuzio) under the title De expetendis et fugiendis rebus. In 1516–1518, several editions, translations, and commentaries on Dioscorides’s De materia medica were published in Venice, Florence, and Paris, and, to quote just a few, in 1525 and 1526 the heirs of Aldo Manuzio published the Greek text of the treatises by Galen and Hippocrates (465–between 375 and 350 B.C.E.) known at that time. Such massive transfer of knowledge was not seen as the introduction of allogen elements into Western science and culture, but rather as a re-appropriation of the knowledge that created Western identity in Antiquity and that had been further overshadowed by the subsequent assimilation of heterogeneous elements, namely Arabic science and culture. This movement received a theoretical justification with the French Symphorien Champier (1471–1538), according to whom the diseases of French people had to be cured with plants growing in France, and with the German Paracelsus (1493–1541) (in fact, Philip von Hohenheim, or Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim), who made a similar consideration, applying the principle to the Germans. In this view and in the context of this movement of reappropriation of the body of knowledge supposedly at the origin of Western science, 16th century botanists, the so-called German Fathers of modern Botany (among others Otto Brunfels [ca. 1488–1534] and Leonhart Fuchs [1501–1566]), tried to identify the local species corresponding to the plants mentioned in the works by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Galen. Apparently contradicting this return to the sources of Western identity, Giorgio Valla published in his 1498 volume above a Latin translation of the treatise On Smallpox and Measles by the Arabic physician Razi (865–925 C.E.). Significantly, however, he did not translate the original Arabic text, but its Byzantine translation, attributed in 20th-century scholarly literature to the 11th-century Byzantine Symeon Seth (Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, “Le traducteur grec du traité de Rhazès sur la variole,” Storia e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del II Convegno Internazionale Paris 24–26 maggio 1994, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jounanna, 1996, 99–111). This translation was neither a programmatic, nor an ideological reaction to Leoniceno’s proposal, but rather a response to the medical situation of that time, characterized by the diffusion of syphilis, as the remedies prescribed by Razi to treat smallpox seemed to be applicable to this apparently new medical condition. Fifty years later, the French humanist physician Jacques Goupyl (ca. 1525–1564) edited the treatise of Razi, On Smallpox and Measles, together with the much larger

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medical encyclopedia of the Byzantine physician Alexander of Tralles (6th c.) (Paris, 1548, editio princeps for both works). The version of Razi’s treatise that was edited was not the original Arabic text or a Medieval Latin translation, but the Byzantine one that had already been translated into Latin by Giorgio Valla. This edition did not necessarily result from a deliberate choice or a special interest in Arabic medicine, the treatment of syphilis, or the transfer of knowledge, but may have been made for the simple reason that the text of the Byzantine translation of Razi’s work was included in the manuscripts containing Alexander of Tralles’s encyclopedia that were used as sources for the edition of this treatise (on these manuscripts, see Christian Förstel, “Alexandre de Tralles, Thérapeutique,” Byzance retrouvée. Erudits et voyageurs français (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), Chapelle de la Sorbonne-Paris, 13 août-2 septembre 2001, 2001, 27–30). While humanist scientists rejected Arabic science, their contemporaries were both interested in, and curious about the polity that replaced the Arabic World, that is, the Ottoman Empire. Fear was also intertwined in their interest, as Soliman the Magnificent (1494–1566) was expanding the territory of his empire and besieged Vienna as early as 1529, with a renewed attack in 1532. Western ambassadors to Istanbul had a multifacetted mission: not only representing their country to the Sultan, but also if not above all observing, and reporting about, the military forces of the Sultan, their equipment, and movements. Even though Ottomans were felt as a threat, such an ambassador of Charles V (1500–1558) as Ogier Ghislan of Busbeq (1532–1592) was seduced by them, and described their uses in the letters he sent to Western addressees (first edition of the first letter in 1581, Anvers; first edition of his four letters in 1589, Paris; English translation: Edward Seymour Forster (1897–1950), The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador in Constantinople 1554–1562: Translated from the Latin of the Elzevier Edition of 1633, 1927). If he acquired books in the Ottoman Empire, these were not Arabic or Turkish ones documenting any aspect of life, culture or science of the Arabic or Ottoman worlds, however, but Greek manuscripts that were among the holdings of libraries in Constantinople when the Ottomans took the city on 29th of May 1453. By eliminating the data introduced by means of a process of transfer of knowledge out of its culture, the West altered the image of the role that the Arabic World had in its history. Instead of a major contributor to its science, medicine, philosophy, and culture, it reduced it to a geographical area, which was then a source of antiquities from, and curiosities about, the cultures from which the West wanted to be considered an heir. Nevertheless, Arabic medicine was applied in contemporary practice during the 18th cen-

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tury. The therapeutic methods described by Razi were used by such English physicians as John Freind (1675–1728) and John Mead (1673–1754) to treat smallpox. After a long scientific polemic, the Arabic text of Razi was edited and translated into Latin in 1766, and into French in 1768, and the Latin version was included in the Artis medica principes of Albrecht Haller (1708–1777) published in 1772 (vol. 7, 211–70). During the same period, a first approach to the process of transfer of knowledge was made by the philologist Johannes Stephanus Bernard (1718–1793). In 1749, Bernard published in Amsterdam and Leiden a Greek text entitled De febribus, which he attributed to a Synesius who was not the homonym author of Cyrene (ca. 370–ca. 413) (Johannes Stephanus Bernardus, Synesius de febribus, quem nunc primum ex codice MS. Bibliothecae Lugduno Batavae edidit, vertit, notisque illustravit. Accedit Viatici Constantino Africano interprete lib. VII, 1749). In the same volume, Bernard included a Latin text that was very similar to the Greek one and came from the Viaticum by Constantine the African (d. before 1098–99), as he saw the similarity between the two texts. Bernard suspected that they went back to a common source. With the help of the Arabist Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–1774) he was able to identify that shared source as the zâd al musâfir wa qût al hâdir of the Arabic physician ibn al-Jazzâr (d. 979/980 or 1010), on whom he wrote a long chapter in the De febribus. However meticulous he was in his analysis, Bernard does not seem to have understood that what he thought to be a text by a Synesius based on ibn al-Jazzâr’s work was in fact a chapter extracted from the Byzantine translation of ibn al-Jazzâr’s work, that is, the so-called Efodia tou apodêmountos made in Sicily probably in the 11th century. It was the merit of the French historian of medicine Charles Daremberg (1817–1872) to better investigate the Greek text first studied by Bernard, to compare its Greek and Arabic versions in order to show that the former was a translation of the latter, and to bring to light in this way a process of transfer of knowledge from Arabic to Greek (Daremberg’s work was first published in the Archives des Missions scientifiques et littéraires VII, VIII, and IX, 1851, and I, 1852, under the title Notices et extraits des manuscrits médicaux d’Angleterre; then it was published as a monograph under a new title: Notices et extraits des manuscrits médicaux grecs, latins et français, des principales bibliothèques de l’Europe, vol. 1: Manuscrits grecs d’Angleterre suivis d’un fragment de Gilles de Corbeil et de scolies inédites sur Hippocrate, 1853). In the growing field of Oriental studies and particularly in Germany, Arabic medicine was properly studied (see Ferdinand Wüstenfeld [1808–1899], Geschichte der arabischen Aerzte und Naturforscher nach den Quellen bearbeitet, 1840 [rpt. 1978), including the translation of Greek medical and

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scientific texts into Oriental languages. In response to the question posed by the Academy of sciences in Göttingen, Joannes Georgius Wenrich (1787–1847) published in 1842 an essay entitled De auctorum graecorum versionibus et commentariis, Syriacis, Arabicis, Armeniacis, Persicisque commentatio quam proposita per Regiam scientiarum societatem quae Gottingae floret quaestione. French Orientalism was also rising, and included the history of medicine in its program. Among others, Gustave Dugat (1824–1894) studied the Arabic treatise of which the Efodia are a translation (“Etudes sur le traité de médecine d’Abou Djafar Ahmad, intitulé Zad al Moçafir (“la provision du voyageur”),” Journal asiatique série V, no.1 [1853]: 289–353). Slightly later, the French physician and historian of medicine Lucien Leclerc (1816–1893) paid great attention to the process of transfer in his history of Arabic medicine, as the title announces (Histoire de la médecine arabe: Exposé complet des traductions du grec. Les sciences en Orient, leur transmission à l’Occident par les traductions latines, 2 vols., 1876). In the introduction, he immediately set the tone, with considerations that are the direct reflection of the epoch: (2–3) Ce peuple [that is, the Arabo-Islamic World] que le fanatisme fit le conquérant de la moitié du monde, prit aussitôt pour maîtres les chrétiens ses vaincus. Il mit à s’assimiler leur science un tel enthousiasme et une promptitude si merveilleuse, déployant des aptitudes qui semblaient étrangères à la race, qu’il eut bientôt dépassés … il rendit à ses antagonistes barbares [= the West] les services qu’il avait reçus … il leur transmit les sciences … Pendant la seconde moitié du moyen-âge, la science arabe défraya l’Occident. Quand vint la Renaissance, l’admiration fit place à l’ingratitude et au dénigrement … (13) … nous ferons l’histoire de la médecine arabe en Occident, c’est-à-dire que nous parlerons des traductions qui se sont faites de l’arabe dans les langues modernes et surtout en latin, en même temps que nous signalerons l’influence de la science arabe sur le développement de la science européenne au moyen-âge. Nous donnerons la biographie des traducteurs, et pour être complet, nous étendrons nos investigations sur les traductions ayant trait non seulement à la medecine, mais à toutes les branches de la science … L’Orient rendit ainsi aux chrétiens d’Europe le serrvice qu’il avait reçu des chrétiens d’Asie …

Leclerc concluded the introduction (14) with the announcement of a more general work on Arabic science in the West for which he had already gathered all the necessary data, but which he does not seem to have published, however. The border-crossing approach that was developing among Orientalists was paralleled in the history of Greek medicine. The Athenian physician and historian of Greek medical texts Georgios Costomiris (1849–1902) listed, indeed, the manuscripts of the Greek version of ibn al-Jazzar’s work in the Etudes sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs that he published in several issues of the French Revue des Etudes Grecques from 1889 on (Georges A.

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Costomiris, “Études sur les écrits inédits des anciens médecins grecs, Troisième série: Alexandre (Sophiste et Roi), Timothée, Léon le Philosophe, Théophane Nonnos, les Ephodes,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 4 [1891]: 97–110). Also, the Italian Arabist Giuseppe Gabrieli (1872–1942) devoted a long article to a copy of the Greek text of the Efodia (Giuseppe Gabrieli, “Il ‘Zâd al Musâfir’ di Ibn al Gazzâr in un ms. greco Corsiniano (EFODIA TOU APODÊMOUNTOS),” Rendiconti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche series V, no. 14 [1905]: 29–50). In the same vein, but on a different text, Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940) published as early as 1904 the lexicon of the 14th-century Constantinopolitan monk, philosopher and probably physician Neophytos Prodromenos that contains Arabic plant names transliterated into Greek alphabet (“Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 [1903–1904]: 129–155). A setback followed, however: neither the Efodia nor all the Byzantine works that resulted from the translation of Arabic medical treatises into Greek or were influenced by Arabic science such as Neophytos’ lexicon were included in the catalogue of Greek medical works and manuscripts published in 1906 by the German Academy of Sciences under the direction of Hermann Diels (1848–1922) (Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, vol. 2: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte ausser Hippokrates und Galenos, ed. Hermann Diels, 1906, with a second edition the same year under a slightly different title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, ed. Hermann Diels, 1906. A supplement was published in 1908: Bericht über den Stand des interakademischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und Erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 und 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, I. und II. Teil, ed. Hermann Diels, 1908. The second edition of 1906 was reprinted together with the 1908 supplement under the following title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. Hippokrates und Galenos; II. Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte; III. Nachtrag, ed. Hermann Diels, with a preface by Fridolf Kudlien, 1970). This omission reveals a classicizing approach, further confirmed by the fact that many Byzantine treatises were not included in the catalogue. The translations of the treatises by – or attributed to – Hippocrates and Galen into Oriental languages – that is, into Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew – and into Latin were mentioned, however, in the first part of the catalogue (devoted to Hippocrates and Galen), together with their manuscripts. They were not the object of a specific interest in the process of transfer of knowledge, but were included as they complemented the range of the sources to be used to edit classical texts. In some cases, they were even the only available version of works of which the Greek original text had not been preserved because of the accidents of textual tradition and book history.

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Innovative work in the field of transfer of knowledge did not come out until 1930. The Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) edited a Byzantine lexicon containing Arabic plant names transliterated in Greek alphabet (Armand Delatte, “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus Graecus 2419,” Serta Leodensia ad celebrandam patriae libertatem iam centesimum annum recuperatam composuerunt philologi leodenses, 1930, 59–101). Then, in 1939, he edited other similar lexica (Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2: Textes grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim), and the Greek physician and historian of Byzantine medicine Aristoteles Kouzes (1872–1961) published a pioneering article on the Greek translations of Arabic medical treatises (“Quelques considérations sur les traductions en grec des oeuvres médicales orientales,” Praktika tês Akadêmias Athênôn 14 [1939]: 205–20). World War II interrupted scholarly activity, and it was not until 1952 that another original contribution was made. The Belgian classical philologist and historian of Greek astronomy Joseph Mogenet (1913–1980) identified, indeed, in a marginal note in manuscript Vaticanus graecus 1594 (Ptolemy, Almagest, 9th c.) the most ancient trace of an Arabic influence on Byzantine astronomy (Joseph Mogenet, “Une scolie inédite du Vat. gr. 1594 sur les rapports entre l’astronomie arabe et Byzance,” Osiris 14 [1952]: 198–221). Although the note was written in the 12th century, it reproduced a model dating back to ca. 1030. B. Major 20th-Century Research Programs Since then, the transfer of knowledge in the Middle Ages has been an increasingly growing field of research (not only from Greek to Arabic and conversely, but also from Greek into Latin and from Latin into Greek, although the latter was rarer), which evolved in different directions, from an ancillary role – explicitly stated and even theorized – for classical philology in the edition of Greek scientific texts (see for example: Jacques Jouanna, “Remarques sur la valeur relative des traductions latines pour l’édition des textes hippocratiques,” Le latin médical: La constitution d’un langage scientifique. Réalités et langage de la médecine dans le monde romain. Actes du IIIe Colloque international ‘Textes médicaux latins,’ Saint-Etienne, 11–13 septembre 1989, ed. Guy Sabbah, 1991, 11–26; and, more recently: Rita Masullo, “Il contributo della letteratura medica araba al testo di Filagrio,” Koinonia 23 [1999]: 5–13), to globalization and post-modernist deconstructivism, also including the analysis of the transformations undergone by philosophical concepts in the process of translation (together with misunderstandings and the non-translations represented by transliterations), and the theory of “Clash of Civilizations” defended by Samuel P. Huntington in 1992, for example.

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Encyclopedic literature evolved from a static presentation of the different cultural areas in such a panoramic work as George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols., 1927–1948 (rpt. 1975) to a more dynamic vision, including specific entries on translation, in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 12 (1989), 126–42, where different linguistic areas are distinguished: Robert Browning (1914–1997), “Translation and Translators, Byzantine,” 126–27; George Saliba, “Translation and Translators, Islamic,” 127–33; Benjamin Z. Richler, “Translation and Translators, Jewish,” 133–36; and Charles S. F. Burnett, “Translation and Translators, Western European,” 136–42. This is also the case of the more recent volume Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, in which known translators are the object of a specific entry (on translators, see mainly the entries on Alfred of Sareshel, Arnau of Vilanova, Bartolomeo de Messina, Burgundio of Pisa, Domingo Gundisalvo, Gerard of Cremona, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, James of Venice, Mark of Toledo, Michael Scot, Niccolò da Reggio, Pietro d’Abano, Robert Grosseteste, Sergius of Ra’s al-‘Ayn, and William of Moerbeke), as well as the translation itself (with such entries as Arabic, Astronomy, Bayt al-Hikma, Cultural Exchange, Libraries, Mathematics, Medical literature [with the different languages], Scholars, Science, Syriac, and Translation). In this view, see also the Neue Pauly, 13 vols. with a volume of index and 5 supplements, 1996–2003, and its English translation Brill’s New Pauly, 15 vols. (+ 5 vols. on the Classical Tradition) and 3 supplements (published from 2002), both of which also include The Classical Tradition; more recently see also Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols., ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006. Increasingly frequent also, publications on the process of transmission of which the following is just an example: Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science held at the University of Oklahoma, ed. Jamil F. Ragep, Sally P. Ragep, and Steven Livesey, 1996. Scientific journals have been created on the specific topic of intercultural relationships between medieval communities: Medieval Encounters Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue, devoted, according to its explicit presentation, to “… the period from the fourth through the sixteenth C.E. … exploration of more indirect interactions and influences … to permit examination … on a comparative basis”; Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain, which is much more focused; and, more general instead, Early Science and Medicine. A Journal for the Study of Science, Technoloy and Medicine in the Pre-Modern Period, whose objective is defined as follows:

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… continued importance of ancient sources throughout the Middle Ages … low degree of specialization and the high degree of disciplinary interdependence characterizing the period before the professionalization of science … the Western, Byzantine and Arabic traditions … particularly … emphasizing these elements of continuity and interconnectedness …

Major research projects were launched during the 20th century, mainly on philosophy, from the Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi (with two series, Plato Latinus and Plato Arabus) started in the 1930s, to the most recent Avicenna Latinus (undertaken in the 1960s), passing through the Aristoteles Latinus (which also began in the 1930s) and the Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, which was initially a part of the former and was separated from it in 1971. The volumes published in the Corpus Platonicum are the following (by series [Latinus et Arabus] and by number within each series) (I reproduce the actual titles of the volumes, in Latin, as they define with great exactness the contributions of the possible several authors to each volume): Victor Kordeuter (edidit), and Carlotta Labowsky (1905–1991) (recognovit et praefatione instruxit), Meno, interprete Henrico Aristippo (Plato Latinus, 1), 1940; Laurentius Minio-Paluello (1907–1986), Phaedo, interprete Henrico Aristippo (Plato Latinus, 2), 1950; Raymundus Klibansky (1905–2005), and Carlotta Labowsky (ediderunt et praefatione et adnotationibus instruxerunt), Parmenides usque ad finem primae hypothesis nec non Procli commentarium in Parmenidem pars ultima adhuc inedita interprete Guillelmo de Moerbeka (Plato Latinus, 3), 1953; Jan Hendrik Waszink (1908–1990), and Paul Johannes Jensen, Timaeus, a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus (Plato Latinus, 4), 1962; Paulus Kraus (1904–1944), and Richardus Walzer (1900–1975) (ediderunt), Galeni compendium Timaei aliorumque dialogorum synopsis quae extant fragmenta (Plato Arabus, 1), 1951; Franciscus Rosenthal (1904–2003), and Richardus Walzer, Alfarabius de Platonis Philosophia (Plato Arabus, 2), 1943; Franciscus Gabrieli (1904–1996) (edidit et Latine vertit), Alfarabius compendium legum Platonis (Plato Arabus, 3), 1951. The volumes in the Aristoteles Latinus series are the following (in chronological order of publication; I reproduce the actual titles as above): Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), Categoriae vel Praedicamenta: Translatio Boethii, Editio Composite, Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka, Lemmata e Simplicii commentario decerpta, Pseudo-Augustini Paraphrasis Themistiana (Aristoteles Latinus, I, 1–5), 1961; Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), and Bernard Geoffrey Dod (adiuvante), Categoriarum supplementa: Porphyrii Isagoge, Translatio Boethii, et Anonymi Fragmentum vulgo vocatum “Liber sex principiorum” (Aristoteles Latinus, I, 6–7), 1966 (the Liber sex principiorum is a 12th-century anonymous Latin writing); Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), De interpretatione vel Periermenias: Translatio Boethii.

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Gérard Verbeke (1910–2001) (edidit), and Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (revisit), Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, II,1–2), 1965; Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), Analytica priora: Translatio Boethii (recensiones duae), Translatio anonyma, Pseudo-Philoponi aliorumque Scholia (Aristoteles Latinus, III, 1–4), 1962 (reprinted with a supplement by James Shiel, 1998) (includes an anonymous 12th-century trans. of Aristotle’s logic); Lorenzo MinioPaluello, and Bernard Geoffrey Dod, ed., Analytica posteriora: Translationes Iacobi, Anonymi sive ‘Ioannis’, Gerardi et Recensio Guillelmi de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, IV, 1–4), 1968 (parts IV, 2 and IV, 3 were originally edited by L. Minio-Paluello in 1953 and 1954 respectively) (contains the trans. by Jacobus de Venetiis [floruit 1128–1136]; an anonymous 12th-century translation attributed to a certain “Ioannes”; the Arabo-Latin version by Gerard of Cremona [below]; and the revision of Jacobus de Venetiis by William of Moerbeke [below]); Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), and Bernard Geoffrey Dod (adiuvante), Topica: Translatio Boethii, Fragmentum Recensionis Alterius et Translatio Anonyma (Aristoteles Latinus, V, 1–3), 1969 (the anonymous trans. is a 12th-century version); Bernard Geoffrey Dod (edidit), De sophisticis elenchis: Translatio Boethii, Fragmenta Translationis Iacobi et Recensio Guillelmi de Moerbeke (Aristoteles Latinus, VI, 1–3), 1975 (the vulgate text is by Boethius; the fragments have been attributed to Jacobus de Venetiis [above]; William of Moerbeke revised Boethius’ translation); Fernand Bossier (d. 2006), and Jozef Brams (1937–2003), ed., Physica: Translatio Vetus. Auguste Mansion, Translatio Vaticana, 2 vols. (Aristoteles Latinus, VII, 1–2), 1990 (VII, 2 was first published in 1957) (trans. by Jacobus de Venetiis [above], and the so-called Translatio Vaticana, which might have had its origins in the circle of Stephen of Antioch [early 12th c.]); Joanna Judycka, ed., De generatione et corruptione: Translatio Vetus (Aristoteles Latinus, IX, 1), 1986 (the two versions in the same text are probably by Burgundio of Pisa [below], who read the Greek text in manuscript Laurentianus graecus 87.7); William Laughton Lorimer, ed., and Lorenzo MinioPaluello (revisit), De mundo: Translationes Bartholomaei et Nicholai (Aristoteles Latinus, XI, 1–2), 1965 (first published by William Laughton Lorimer (1885–1967), 1951) (two medieval translations whose chronology is unclear: one by Bartholomeo at the court of Palermo; one by Nicholas of Sicily, who probably helped Robert Grosseteste with his translations of Greek texts); Pieter Beullens, and Fernand Bossier, De historia animalium: Translatio Guillelmi de Morbeka, vol. 1: lib. I–V (Aristoteles Latinus, XVII, 2, I, 1), 2000; Hendrik J. Drossaart-Lulofs (1906–1998) (edidit), De generatione animalium: Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, XVII. 2. V), 1966; Gudrun VuilleminDiem (edidit), Metaphysica, lib. I–IV.4: Translatio Iacobi sive ‘Vetustissima’ cum Scholiis et Translatio Composita sive ‘Vetus’ (Aristoteles Latinus, XXV, 1–1a), 1970 (the so-

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called Translatio Vetustissima is ascribed to Jacobus de Venetiis [above], and the Translatio Vetus is a revision of the former); Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (edidit), Metaphysica, lib. I–X, XII–XIV: Translatio Anonyma sive ‘Media’ (Aristoteles Latinus, XXV, 2), 1976 (trans. by the same author as the Translatio Vaticana of the Physics); Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (edidit), Metaphysica, lib. I–XIV: Recensio et Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka, 2 vols. (Aristoteles Latinus, XXV, 3), 1995 (trans. by William of Moerbeke [below] on the basis of manuscript Vindobonensis graecus 100); René Antoine Gauthier (1913[?]–1999) (edidit), Ethica Nicomachea: Translatio Antiquissima libr. II–III sive ‘Ethica Vetus’, Translationis Antiquioris quae supersunt sive ‘Ethica Nova’, ‘Hoferiana’, ‘Borghesiana’, Translatio Roberti Grosseteste Lincolniensis sive ‘Liber Ethicorum’ (Recensio Pura et Recensio Recognita), 5 vols. (Aristoteles Latinus, XXVI, 1–3), 1972–1974 (contains among others two early versions by Burgundio of Pisa [below] made on the basis of manuscript Laurentianus graecus 81.18, and a revision of Grosseteste’s translation by William of Moerbeke [below]); Pierre Michaud-Quantin (d. 1972), ed., Politica (libri I–II.11): Translatio prior imperfecta interprete Guillelmo de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, XXIX, 1), 1961 (first, partial trans. by William of Moerbeke, who further revised and completed it when he came across a copy of the entire text); Bernd Schneider, ed., Rhetorica: Translatio Anonyma sive Vetus et Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, XXXI, 1–2), 1978 (the anonymous Translatio Vetus was made by a scholar belonging to the circle of Bartholomeo of Messina, and the most widespread trans. is by William of Moerbeke [below], who made two chronologically distinct versions); Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (edidit), De arte poetica: Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka (Aristoteles Latinus, XXXIII), 1968 (the text was first ed. by Erse Valgimigli (1909–1940) with a revision by Aetio Franceschini (1906–1983), and Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, 1953). The volumes in the Avicenna Latinus are mentioned loco opportuno. C. Greek into Latin In chronological order of the processes under study, the transition from Classical Antiquity to the late-antique World has been much investigated. As early as 1942, the late Joseph Thomas Muckle (1887–1967) published a first inventory of Greek works translated into Latin (“Greek Works Translated Directly into Latin before 1350. Part I: Before 1000,” Mediaeval Studies 4 [1942]: 33–42, and 5 [1943]: 102–14). Conversely, Elizabeth Fisher studied the Greek translations of Latin works made during the 4th century (“Greek Translations of Latin Literature in the Fourth Century A.D.,” Yale Classical Studies 27 [1982]: 173–216.). Several translations by Boethius have been published in the Aristoteles Latinus (above). Also to be mentioned here, the “old” Latin translation of

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Dioscorides, De materia medica, identified as Dioscorides Longobardus, which was edited by Konrad Hofmann and Theodor M. Auracher, “Der Longobardische Dioskorides des Marcellus Virgilius,” Romanische Forschungen 1 (1882), 49–105 (Book I); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monancensis 337. Aus T. M. Aurachers Nachlass herausgegeben und ergänzt,” Romanische Forschungen 10 (1897), 181–247 (Book II), and 369–446 (Book III); 11 (1899), 1–121 (Book IV); Hermann Stadler, “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337),” Romanische Forschungen 13 (1902): 161–243 (Book V); and Id., “Dioscorides Longobardus (Cod. Lat. Monacensis 337). Index der Sachnamen und der wichtigeren Wörter,” Romanische Forschungen 14 (1903): 601–36. Book I has been reedited by Haralambie Mihaescu (1907–1985), Dioscoride Latino, Materia medica, Libro primo, 1938. Particular attention was devoted to medicine, with a first general study in 1930 (Walter Puhlmann, “Die lateinische medizinische Literatur des frühen Mittelalters,” Kyklos 3 [1930]: 395–416), and more specific studies later on, especially on the Corpus Hippocraticum. Pearl Kibre (1900–1985) listed the manucripts of its Latin translations in several issues of the journal Traditio (“Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages,” Traditio 31 [1975]: 99–126; 32 [1976]: 257–92; 33 [1977]: 253–95; 34 [1978]: 193–226; 35 [1979]: 273–302; 36 [1980]: 347–72; and 37 [1981]: 267–89; 38 [1982]: 165–92; later published as a monograph under the title Hippocrates latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic writings in the Latin Middle Ages. Revised edition, 1985). Also more punctual studies were made, on specific treatises (Manuel Enrique Vázquez Buján, “La antigua traducción latina del tratado De natura humana del Corpus hippocraticum,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 12–13 [1982–1983]: 387–96) or on the whole corpus of Hippocratic treatises translated into Latin (Innocenzo Mazzini, “Caratteri comuni a tutto l’Ippocrate latino tardo-antico e considerazioni su alcuni emendamenti al testo,” I testi di medicina latini antichi: Problemi filologici e storici, ed. Innocenzo Mazzini, and Franca Fuso, 1985, 63–74; and, more recently: Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, “Zu des Hippokrates Reich gedeckter Tafel sind alle eingeladen: Bemerkungen zu den beiden vorsalernitanischen lateinischen Aphorismenkommentaren,” Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter: Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung, ed. Wilhelm Geerlings, and Christian Schulze, 2002, 275–313). Special attention was devoted to lexical issues (Manuel Enrique Vázquez Buján, “Aspectos lexicos de los textos médicos tardolatinos: La traducción de los ‘Aforismos’ hipocráticos y su comentario altomedieval,” Voces 4 [1993]: 9–20), including the process of adaptation (Manuel Enrique Vázquez Buján, “Compréhension, traduction, adaptation: De Caelius Aurélianus aux traductions littérales du VIe siècle,” Le Latin médical …, ed.

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Sabbah [above], 1991, 87–97), and influence on later production (Maria Franca Buffa Giolito, “Tracce di medicina pseudoippocratica in due trattati fitoterapici tardolatini: Polibo di Kos,” Koinonia 23 [1999]: 39–54). The institutional context of early Latin translation was investigated. Already in 1932 Henning Mørland identified Ravenna as a translation center (“Die lateinischen Oribasiusübersetzungen,” Symbolae Osloenses Suppl. 5 [1932]: 43–51). In 1958, Henry E. Sigerist (1891–1957) defined the city as a “Western Roman Alexandria” (see “The Latin Medical Literature of the Early Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 13 [1958]: 127–46; see especially 135 for the quotation), and Augusto Beccaria studied Hippocratic and Galenic texts in relation with Ravenna (“Sulle tracce di un antico canone latino di Ippocrate e Galeno,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 2 [1959]: 1–56; 4 [1961]: 1–75, and 14 [1971]: 1–24). In 1981, Leendert Gerrit Westerink (1913–1990) and Nicoletta Palmieri returned to this question independently from each other (Leendert Gerrit Westerink et al., Agnellus of Ravenna, Lectures on Galen’s De sectis, 1981, and Nicoletta Palmieri, “Un antico commento a Galeno della scuola medica di Ravenna,” Physis 23 [1981]: 197–296). Five years later, Nicoletta Palmieri and Innocenzo Mazzini summarized the data available at that time about this supposed school in Ravenna (Innocenzo Mazzini, and Nicoletta Palmieri, “L’école médicale de Ravenne: Programmes et méthodes d’enseignement, langue, hommes,” Les écoles médicales à Rome: Actes du 2e Colloque international sur les textes médicaux latins antiques (Lausanne, septembre 1986), ed. Philippe Mudry, and Jackie Pigeaud, 1991, 285–310). In 1989, Nicoletta Palmieri edited the text of the ancient Latin translation of Galen, De sectis (L’antica versione latina del ‘De sectis’ di Galeno (Pal. Lat. 1090, 1989); in 1990, Manuel Enrique Vázquez Buján examined the commentaries on Hippocrates attributed to the school (“El Hipócrates de los comentarios atribuidos al Círculo de Rávena,” Tratados hipocráticos: Estudios acerca de su contenico, forma y influencia. Actas del VIIe Colloque international hippocratique (Madrid, 24–29 septembre 1990), ed. Jose Antonio Lopez Ferez, 1992, 675–85), and, in 1994, Nicoletta Palmieri analyzed a Ravenna commentary on Galen (“Il commento latino-ravennate all’Ars medica di Galeno e la tradizione alessandrina,” Tradición e innovación de la medicina latina de la Antiguëdad y de la Alta Edad Media, ed. Manuel Enrique Vázquez Buján, 1994, 57–75). The relations between Byzantium and the West were explored in 1964 by Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965), (“Relation between Byzantine and Western Science and Pseudo-science before 1350,” Janus 51 [1964]: 1–48), and later by Gerhard Baader (“Early Medieval Latin Adaptations of Byzantine Medicine in Western Europe,” Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, ed. John Scar-

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borough, 1985, 251–59). The historian Michael McCormick analyzed the economy of early medieval Europe, particularly the exchanges between the several polities overlooking the Mediterranean, and he proposed an interpretation fairly different from the theory of rupture between East and West proposed by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) (“Byzantium and the Early Medieval West: Problems and Opportunities,” Europa Medievale e Mondo Bizantino: Contatti effettivi e possibilità di studi comparati (Tavola rotonda del XVIII Congresso del CISH – Montréal, 29 agosto 1995), ed. Girolamo Arnaldi, and Guglielmo Cavallo, 1997, 1–17, and, more recently: Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900, 2002). A further sign of the contacts and transfer of knowledge between the two empires East and West of the Mediterranean was provided by the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (of the late 8th c.) recently rediscovered, reproduced and edited, in which Greek medicine is present, including the new patrons of medicine, the Saints Cosmas and Damianos (Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Faksimile der Handschrift Msc. Med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1989. The volume of commentary contains an introduction and the translation of the text by Ulrich Stoll, and Gundolf Keil, in collaboration with Albert Ohlmeyer; see also the critical edition of the text, with a German translation, and all the necessary indices and critical apparatus: Ulrich Stoll, Das ‘Lorscher Arzneibuch’: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts (Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1). Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar, 1992). Greek was not absent in the world of Charlemagne as the following works show: Bernice M. Kaczynski, Greek in the Carolingian Age: The St. Gall Manuscripts (1988); and Walter Berschin, “Griechisches in der Klosterschule des alten St. Gallen,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84/85 (1991/1992): 329–40. D. Oriental Languages In the Eastern Mediterranean, exchanges with the many local populations have been long studied. It will suffice to mention here some more recent works: Henri Hugonnard-Roche, “Les traductions du Grec au Syriaque et du Syriaque à l’Arabe,” Rencontres de cultures dans la philosophie médiévale: Traductions et traducteurs de l’Antiquité tardive au XIVe siècle. Actes du Colloque international de Cassino 15–17 juin 1989 organisé par la Société Internationale pour l’étude de la philosophie médiévale et l’Università degli Studi di Cassino, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, and Marta Fattori, 1990, 131–47; Gotthard Strohmaier, “Der syrische und der arabische Galen,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II, vol. 37/2, ed. Wolfgang Haase, 1994, 1987–2017, and Siam Bhayro, “Syriac Medical Terminology: Sergius and Galen’s Pharmacopia,” Aramaic Studies 3 (2005): 147–65.

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The transfer of Greek science to the Arabic World has been the object of a thesis by Max Meyerhof (1874–1945) according to which Greek philosophy and science migrated from Alexandria to Baghdad passing through Antiochia and Harran (“Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern,” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse, 1930, 389–429). The thesis has been recently reexamined: Joep Lameer, “From Alexandria to Baghdad: Reflections on the Genesis of a Problematical Tradition,” The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism: Studies on the Transmission of Greek Philosophy and Sciences, dedicated to H. J. Drossaart Lulofs on his ninetieth Birthday, ed. Gerhard Endress, and Remke Kruk, 1997, 181–91. Also the supposed existence of an academy in Gondishapur (see Heinz Herbert Schöfler (1921–2003), Die Akademie von Gondishapur: Aristoteles auf dem Wege in den Orient 1979, and Id., “Zur Frühzeit von Gondischapur,” Gêlerter der arzeniê, ouch apotêker: Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Willem F. Daems, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1982, 35–50) has been revised and might result from an incorrect interpretation of textual evidence (see Vivian Nutton, “Jundîshâbûr,” À l’ombre d’Avicenne: La médecine au temps des califes. Exposition présentée du 18 novembre 1996 au 2 mars 1997, Institut du monde arabe, 1997, 22). Much literature has been devoted to the translation of Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. The list of manuscripts containing Arabic translations of treatises from the Corpus Hippocraticum, and of Galen provided by Diels (above) has been revised for Istanbul by Helmut Ritter (1892–1971), and Richard Walzer, Arabische Übersetzungen griechischer Ärzte in Stambuler Bibliotheken, 1934. The primary sources for science have been listed, together with their manuscripts in Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 3: Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Thierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H., 1970, and vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H., 1971; also: Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, 1970, and Id., Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 1972. Among the many analyses of this transfer of knowledge, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early cAbbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries), 1998, stressed the Persian component in the rise of Arabic culture, whereas Gotthard Strohmaier, “La ricezione e la tradizione: La medicina nel mondo bizantino e arabo,” Storia del pensiero medico occidentale, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (1924–2000), vol. 1: Antichità e medioevo, 1993, 167–215 (English trans.: “Reception and Tradition: Medicine in the Byzantine and Arab World,” Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek, 1998, 139–69), characterizes both Byzantine and Arabic science as lacking originality. More recently,

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George Saliba opposed what he called the traditional narrative about the rise of Arabic science, and proposed a new reading of the development of the translation activity, in which the desire to secure a job – or to keep it in a time when it was threatened by a change in the administration – was an important factor (Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 2007). The culture resulting from this movement of transfer of knowledge had a textual character that was fundamentally Greek (Alain Touwaide, “Le paradigme culturel et épistémologique grec dans la science arabe à la lumière de l’histoire de la matière médicale,” REMMM 77–78 [1995]: 247–73) and this Greek imprint contributed to the self-identity of the Arabic empire until late (Id., “Persistance de l’hellénisme à Baghdad au début du XIIIeme siècle: Le manuscrit Ayasofia 3703 et la Renaissance Abbasside,” Erytheia 18 [1997]: 49–74). Many Arabic (or Hebrew) translations of Greek scientific texts have been published, principally in the Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts series, the Supplementum Orientale of the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, and the Aristoteles Semitico-latinus (including the edition of a work originally written in Greek [Galen, On my Own Opinions] in which all the current known fragments of the so-called Oriental translations of the text are included, whereas the Greek original text has not been entirely preserved) (works below are listed in chronological order of publication; title of series [if any] is included for clarity; titles here reproduce actual titles in the volumes as they clearly indicate the work performed by the author[s]): Malcolm C. Lyons, Galeni in Hippocratis De officina medici commentariorum versionem arabicam, quod exstat, ex codice Scorialiensi et excerpta, quae ‘Ali ibn Ridwan ex eis sumpsit, ex codice Cantabrigensi edidit et in linguam Anglicam vertit (Corpus medicorum graecorum, Supplementum orientale, 1), 1963; Malcolm C. Lyons, Kitab tadbir al-amrad al-hadda li-buqrat (Hippocrates, Regimen in Acute Diseases). Edited and Translated with Introductions, Notes and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 1), 1966; John Nicolas Mattock, Maqala tashtamil ‘ala fusul min kitab al-hayawan li-Aristu (Tract Comprising Excerpts from Aristotle’s Book of Animals), Attributed to Musa b.‘Ubaid Allah al-Qurtubi al-Isra’ili. Edited and Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 2), 1967; John Nicolas Mattock, Kitab buqrat fi habl ’ala habl (Hippocrates, On superfoetation). Edited and Translated with Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. Malcolm C. Lyons, Kitab buqrat al-ma’ruf biqatitriun ay hanut al-tabib (Hippocrates, In the Surgery). Edited and Translated with Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 3), 1968; John Nicolas Mattock, and Malcolm C. Lyons, Kitab buqrat fi tabi‘at al-insan (On the Nature of Man). Edited and Translated, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 4), 1968; John Nicolas Mattock, and Malcolm C. Lyons, Kitab buqrat fi’l-amrad al-biladiyya. Hippocrates, On

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Endemic Diseases (Airs, Waters and Places). Edited and Translated with Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 5), 1969; Galen, On the Parts of Medicine; On Cohesive Causes; On Regimen in Acute Diseases with the Theories of Hippocrates. First Edition of the Arabic Versions by Malcolm C. Lyons; the Latin Versions of On the Parts of Medicine edited by Hermann Schoene, and On Cohesive Causes edited by Karl Kalbfleisch (1868–1921), reedited by Juta Kollesch, Diethard Nickel, and Gotthard Strohmaier (Corpus medicorum graecorum, Supplementum orientale, 2), 1969; Gotthard Strohmaier, Galen, Über die Verschiedenheit der homoiomeren Körperteile in arabischer Übersetzung, zum erstenmal herausgegeben, übersetzt und erläutert (Corpus medicorum graecorum, Supplementum orientale, 3), 1970; John Nicolas Mattock, Kitab Buqrat fi’l-akhlat (Hippocrates, On Humours); and Kitab al-ghidha’ li-Buqrat (Hipocrates, On Nutriment). Edited and Translated with Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 6), 1971; Malcolm C. Lyons, An Arabic Translation of Themistius Commentary on Aristoteles De anima (Oriental Studies, 2), 1973; Hans Daiber, Ein Kompendium der aristotelischen Meteorologie in der Fassung des Hunain Ibn Ishaq (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, Prolegomena et Parerga, 1), 1975; Malcolm C. Lyons, and John Nicolas Mattock, Kitab al-ajinna li-Buqrat. Hippocrates, On Embyros (On Sperm and On the Nature of the Child). Edited and Translated with Introduction, Commentry and Glossary (Arabic Technical and Scientific Texts, 7), 1978; Remke Kruk, The Arabic Version of Aristotle’s Pars of Animals, Book XI–XIV of the Kitab al-Hayawan. A Critical Edition with Introduction and Selected Glossary (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus), 1978; Malcolm C. Lyons, Aristotle’s Ars rhetorica. The Arabic Version. A New Edition with Commentary and Glossary, 2 vols., 1982; Albert Z. Iskandar, Galen, On Examinations by which the Best Physicians are Recognized. Edition of the Arabic Version with English Translation and Commentary (Corpus medicorum graecorum, Supplementum orientale, 4), 1988; Hendrik J. Drossart Lulofs, and E. L. J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus “De plantis”. Five Translations (Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus) 1989; Gerrit Bos, Aristotle’s De anima Translated into Hebrew by Zerahyah ben Isaac ben Shealtiel Hen. A Critical Edition with an Introduction & Index (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 6), 1994; Paul Lettinck, Aristotle’s Physics and its Reception in the Arabic World, with an Edition of the Unpublished Parts of Ibn Bajia’s Commentary on the Physics (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 7), 1994; Resiane Fontaine, Otot haShamayim Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew Version of Aristotles’ Meteorology. A Critical Edition, with Introduction, Translation, & Index (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 8), 1995; Rüdiger Arnzen, Aristotle’s De anima: Eine verlorene spätantike Paraphrase in arabischer & persischer Überlieferung. Arabischer Text nebst Kommentar, quellengeschichtlichen Studien & Glossaren, 1997; Vivian Nutton, Galen, On my Own Opinions (Corpus Medicorum Graecorum V, 3, 2), 1999; Paul Lettinck, Aristotle’s

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Meteorology and its Reception in the Arab World. With an Edition and Translation of Ibn Suwar’s Treatise on Meteorological Phenomena and Ibn Bajja’s Commentary on the Meteorology, 1999; Lou S. Filius, The Problemata Physica Attributed to Aristotle. The Arabic Version of Hunain ibn Ishaq and the Hebrew Version of Moses ibn Tibbon, 1999; Hidemi Takahashi, Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Books of Mineralogy and Meteorology, 2004; N. Peter Joosse, A Syriac Encyclopaedia of Aristotelian Philosophy. Barhebraeus (13th c.), Butyrum sapientiae, Books of Ethics, Economy, and Politics. A critical Edition, with Introduction, Translation, Commentary, and Glossaries (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 16), 2004; Anna A. Akasoy, and Alexander Fidora, The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics. Edited, with an introduction and annotated translation by Douglas M. Dunlop, 2005; John W. Watt with assistance of Daniel Isaac, Julian faultless, and Ayman Shihadeh, Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric, 2005. A much studied question is the so-called Alexandrian Summary, that is, the summary of Galenic medicine made in late-antique Alexandria, which is known only through Arabic sources. An important study was Albert Z. Iskandar, “An Attempted Reconstruction of the Late Alexandrian Curriculum” Medical History 20 (1976): 235–58, and the most recent approach is by Peter E. Pormann, “The Alexandrian Summary (Jawamic) of Galen’s On the Sects for Beginners: Commentary or Abridgment?” Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and Martin W. F. Stone, 2 vols., 2004, vol. 2, 11–33. E. Al-Andalus Al-Andalus is a special case in the medieval process of transfer of knowledge, as it received material from both the Eastern part of the Arabic empire and from Byzantium. The Andalusian botanical tradition dates back to the early time of the Arabo-islamic presence in the peninsula, which included the transfer and naturalization of Eastern plants. Also, in the 10th century, local scientists who had received the Arabic translation(s) of Dioscorides, De materia medica, made in Baghdad in the 9th century, as well as a Greek manuscript offered to the Sultan by a Byzantine emperor not necessarily well identified, worked in collaboration with a Byzantine in order to improve the Arabic text (on this, see Juan Vernet, La cultura hispanoárabe en Oriente y Occidente, 1978 [French translation referred to here: Ce que la culture doit aux Arabes d’Espagne, 1985, 81–85], and, more recently, Julio Samsó, Las ciencias de los antiguos en Al-Andalus, 1992, 20–22 and 110–16). Among the abundant scientific publications on the topic of Andalusian Arabic transfer of knowledge and culture, we shall cite only the following

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titles here as we shall return below to the translation from Arabic to Latin. For a synthesis on Andalusian Arabic culture, there has been: The legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 2 vols., 1994. For the several populations in the Iberian Peninsula and the processes of interaction between them, see (in chronological order of publication): Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict, 1994, and, more recently: María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, 2002. For medicine, specifically, see the many publications by Luis García Ballester (1936–2000) some of which have been gathered in the following volume: Luis García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222–1610, 2001. Particularly significant, for example: Luis García-Ballester , and Concepción Vazquez de Benito, “Los médicos judios castellanos del siglo XIV y el Galenismo árabe: El Kitab altibb al-astali al-maluki (Libro de medicina castellana regia) (c. 1312),” Dynamis 42 (1990): 119–147, and Luis García-Ballester, “The Circulation and Use of Medical Manuscripts in Arabic in 16th Century Spain,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 3 (1979): 183–199. For a more philologically oriented analysis, see Concepción García-Ballester, and Maria Teresa Herrera, Los arabismos de los textos médicos latinos y castellanos de la Edad Media y de la Modernidad, 1989. F. From Arabic to Greek As I have mentioned, a reverse process of transfer of knowledge took place from the Arabic world to Byzantium. The circumstances, motivations, and actors differed according to the places and periods. In Sicily, it resulted from the multi-ethnic nature of the population as the examples of alphabet transfer from on language to another suggests. For a case, see the recent contribution by Barbara Zipser, “Griechische Schrift, arabische Sprache und graeco-arabische Medizin: Ein neues Fragment aus dem mittelalterlichen Sizilien,” Mediterranean Language Review 15 (2003/2004): 154–66. On the Greek translation of ibn al-Jazzâr, zâd al musâfir wa qût al hâdir, which was most probably made in Sicily or in the South of the mainland, see, in addition to the literature above: Charles Daremberg (1817–1872), and CharlesEmille Ruelle (1833–1912), Oeuvres de Rufus d’Ephèse: Texte collationné sur les manuscrits, traduit pour la première fois en français, 1879, 582–96, and, more recently, for the manuscripts of Italian provenance: Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, “La trasmissione della letteratura medica greca nell’Italia meridionale fra X e XV secolo,”Contributi alla cultura greca nell’Italia meridionale I, ed. Antonio Garzya, 1989, 133–257 (see especially 221–23).

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In the Byzantine Empire, theology was the field in which the transfer of knowledge from the Arabo-islamic world was most important. It has been constantly present in Western theological literature after the Fall of Constantinople from, for example, the Letter to Muhammad by pope Pius II (1405–1464) (Aeneaus Sylvius Piccolomini) (the Letter was printed as early as 1470 and critically edited several times; see recently: Reinhold F. Glei, and Markus Köher, in collaboration with Beate Kobush, Pius II. Papa, Epistola ad Mahumetem: Einleitung, kritische Edition, Übersetzung, 2001) to the major syntheses by Adel-Théodore Khoury, Der theologische Streit der Byzantiner mit dem Islam, 1969; Id., Les théologiens byzantins et l’Islam: Textes et auteurs (VIIIe– XIIIe s.), 1969, and Polémique byzantine contre l’Islam (VIIIe–XIIIe s.), 1972. In the sciences, the German historian of medicine Georg Harig (1935–1989) studied in 1967 the Arabic sources of the treatise on the dietetic properties of food (De alimentorum facultatibus) by the 11th-century Byzantine physician Symeon Seth: Georg Harig, “Von den arabischen Quellen des Simeon Seth,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 2 (1967): 248–68. More recently, a first survey of the Arabic medical literature in Byzantium was made by Alain Touwaide, Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, vol. 1: Manuscrits et textes, 1997, with a first attempt for a synthesis in Id., “Arabic Medicine in Greek Translation: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 1 (2002): 45–53. More specifically on botany, see recently Id., “The Jujube-Tree in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Case Study in the Methodology of Textual Archaeobotany,” Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. Peter Dendle, and Alain Touwaide, 2008, 72–100; on materia medica: Id. “Un manuscrit athonite du Traité de matière médicale de Dioscoride: L’Athous Magnae Laurae  75,” Scriptorium 45 (1991): 122–27; and Id., “Arabic Materia Medica in Byzantium during the 11th Century A.D. and the Problems of Transfer of Knowledge in Medieval Science, Science and Technology in the Islamic World,” ed. S. M. Razaullah Ansari, 2002, 223–47; for urology, see Id., “Arabic Urology in Byzantium,” The History of Nephrology New Series, vol. 1, ed. Natale G. De Santo, Luigi Iorio, Spyros G. marketos, Shaul G. Massry, and Garabed Eknoyan, 2004, 167–73 (the works by Mario Lamagna, “La recensio amplior inedita del De urinis di Avicenna,” Trasmissione e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: Atti del IV Convegno Internazionale, Parigi 17–19 maggio 2001, ed. Antonio Garzya, and Jacques Jouanna, 2003, 271–80, and “La recensio amplior del De urinis di Avicenna: Lo stato della tradizione manoscritta,” Ecdotica e ricezione dei testi medici greci: Atti del V Convegno Internazionale Napoli, 1–2 ottobre, ed. Véronique Boudon-Millot, Antonio Garzya, Jacques Jouanna, and Amneris Roselli, 2006, 321–44, are of a strictly philological nature and are interested only in the Greek text [without comparing it

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to the Arabic original] and its manuscript tradition; they are not interested in the process of transfer of knowledge and do not provide any material for such a study of the text under study). Finally, on Sicily – most probably Palermo – , see Alain Touwaide, “Magna Graecia iterata: Greek medicine in Southern Italy in the 11th and 12th centuries,” Medicina in Magna Graecia: The Roots of our Knowledge, ed. Alfredo Musajo Somma, 2004, 85–101; Id., “Medicina Bizantina e Araba alla Corte di Palermo,” Medicina, Scienza e Politica al Tempo di Federico II: Conferenza Internazionale, Castello Utveggio, Palermo, 4–5 ottobre 2007, ed. Natale Gaspare De Santo, and Guido Bellinghieri, 2008, 39–55. The sector of scientific activity in Byzantium in which the transfer of knowledge has been most studied recently is astronomy. As I have mentioned above, Joseph Mogenet made ground-breaking work. He was followed by Paul Kunitzsch, “Das Fixsternverzeichnis in der “Persischen Syntaxis” des Georgios Chrysokokkes,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 57 (1964): 382–411; David Pingree (1933–2005), The Astronomical Work of Gregory Chioniades, vol. 1 (in two parts): The Zij al-‘Ala’i, 1985–1986, and particularly Anne Tihon, who published several essays on this specific topic: Anne Tihon, “Les tables astronomiques persanes à Constantinople dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle,” Byzantion 57 (1987): 471–87; Ead., “Tables islamiques à Byzance,” Organon 24 (1988), 89–108; Ead., “Sur l’identité de l’astronome Alim,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 39 (1989): 3–21; Ead., “Les textes astronomiques arabes importés à Byzance aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Occident et Proche-Orient: Contacts scientifiques au temps des Croisades. Actes du colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve, 24 et 25 mars, ed. Isabelle Draelants, Anne Tihon, and Baudouin Van Den Abeele, 2000, 313–24; and Ead., “Un texte byzantin inédit sur une horloge persane,” Festschrift für den Arabisten Paul Kunitzsch zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Menso Folkerts, and Richard Lorch, 2000, 523–35 (many of her works above are reproduced in Anne Tihon, Études d’astronomie byzantine, 1994). See also Anne Tihon, Régine Leurquin, and Claudy Scheuren, La version grecque du Traité sur l’astrolabe du Pseudo-Messahalla, 1998. In the field of mathematics, see for example André Allard, “Le premier traité byzantin de calcul indien: Classement des manuscrits et édition critique du texte,” Revue d’Histoire des Textes 7 (1977): 57–107, and Paul Kunitzsch, Astronomy and Mathematics in the Medieval Arab and Western Worlds, 2004, which reproduces several studies by the author on topics related to transfer of knowledge in the field of astronomy and mathematics. Of interest also here, the Byzantine translation of the Book of Dream interpretation by Achmet, whose Greek text was editied by Franciscus Drexl, Achmetis Oneirocriticon, 1925, and has been translated into German by Karl Brackertz, Der Traumbuch des Achmet ben Sirin. Übersetzt und erläutert, 1986,

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and into English by Steven M. Oberhelman, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams, 1991. A study was made by Maria Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and Its Arabic Sources, 2002 G. Arabic to Latin Transfer of knowledge from the Arabic world was mostly done toward the Medieval West. The relations between the Arabic and Medieval worlds is too vast a question to be specifically dealt with here. Nevertheless, in addition to the rupture theory of the Mediterranean by Pirenne, we need to mention Braudel’s work (Fernand Braudel [1902–1985]) or the recent revision of Pirenne’s thesis on the economy, trade, and circulation in the Mediterranean by McCormick, Origins of the European Economy … (above). We can also mention Claude Dahen, “Commercial Relations Between the Near East and Western Europe from the VIIth to the XIth Century,” Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Intercultural Relations. Papers Presented at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, ed. Khalil I. Semaan, 1980, 1–25, and, more recently and of a broader scope (in chronological order of publication): Aslauddin Samarrai, “Arabs and Latins in the Middle Ages: Enemies, Partners, and Scholars,” Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Perception of Other, ed. David R. Blanks, and Michael Frassetto, 1999, 137–45; Christopher J. Walker, Islam and the West: A Dissonant Harmony of Civilisations, 2005, and Stephen O’Shea, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World, 2006. The question of the relations between the West and the Arabo-Islamic world needs to be framed in a wider context, and not necessarily bipolarized. Such a broader study is Patricia Skinner, Health & Medicine in Early Medieval Southern, 1997, which considers the multiple elements – among others the several linguistic groups – that were involved in the transmission of classical medicine in Southern Italy. Among the phenomena that contributed to the transfer of knowledge, there were the embassies (Telemachos C. Lounghis, “Die byzantinischen Gesandten als Vermittler materieller Kultur vom 5. bis ins 11. Jahrhundert,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten: Kongressakten des 4. Symposions des Mediävistenverbandes in Köln 1991 aus Anlass des 1000. Todesjahers der Kaiserin Theophanu, ed. Odilo Engels, and Peter Schreiner, 1993, 49–67), travels (Krijnie N. Cigaar, Western Travellers to Constantinople: The West & Byzantium, 962–1204, 1996), and the Crusades (for example, East and West in the Crusader States: Context-Contacts-Confrontations, II. Acts of the congress held at Hernen Castle in May 1997, ed. Krijnie Ciggaar, and Herman Teule,

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1999; Sophia Menache, “The Crusades and their Impact on the Development of Medieval Communication,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident, Alltag und Sachkultur: Internationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau, 6–9 Oktober 1992, ed. Helmut Hundsbichler, 1994, 69–90), and, following the Crusades, the long-term presence of foreign groups in the East (for example, the Venetians on whom see recently Eric R. Dursteller, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 2006). Politics played also an important role in the transfer of knowledge as the case of Frederick II von Hohenstaufen (1194–1250) shows. Among the many studies on him and the process of transfer of culture, see Le scienze alla corte di Federico II, 1994; Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II, ed. William Tronzo, 1994; and Federico II e le nuove culture: Atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale, Todi, 9–12 ottobre 1994, 1995. For the religious and cultural components of transfer of knowledge, see the studies on the knowledge of Islam and the Coran in the West by MarieThérèse d’Alverny (1903–1991), “Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyen Age,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 16 (1948): 69–131 (reproduced in Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, La connaissance de l’Islam dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Charles Burnett, 1994, no. I); Ead., “La connaissance de l’Islam en Occident du IXe au milieu du XIIe siècle,” Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioeveo, 12: L’occidente e l’Islam nell’alto medioevo, Spoleto, 2–8 aprile 1964, 1965, vol. 2, 577–602 (reproduced in Ead., La Connaissance de l’Islam … [above], no. V); and Ead., “La connaissance de l’Islam au temps de saint Louis,” Septième centenaire de la mort de saint Louis: Actes des colloques de Royaumont et de Pais, 21–27 mai, 1970, 1976, 235–46 (reproduced in Ead. , La connaissance de l’Islam …, VI). More recently, see Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560, 2007. For philosophy, the two major scholars were Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny (some of her numerous contributions were collected in the volume Avicenne en Occident, 1993) and Simone Van Riet (1919–1993), the major author of the Avicenna Latinus (for the several volumes, see [I reproduce the actual titles of the several volumes in their original language, as they clearly indicate the work done by the possible several authors]: Avicenna Latinus: Codices. Codices descripsit Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny. Addenda collegerunt Simone Van Riet et Pierre Jodogne [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 9], 1994, and the following editions [chronological order of publication]: Simone Van Riet, Avicenna Latinus. Liber de Anima seu Sextus de Naturalibus. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Introduction sur la doctrine psychologique d’Avicenne par Gérard Verbeke, Partes I–III [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 1], 1972; Ead., Avicenna Latinus. Liber de Anima seu Sextus de Naturalibus. Edition critique de la traduction

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latine médiévale. Introduction sur la doctrine psychologique d’Avicenne par Gérard Verbeke, Partes IV–V [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 2], 1968; Ead., Avicenna Latinus: Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke, Tractatus V–X [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 4], 1980; Ead., Avicenna Latinus. Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke, Tractatus I–X [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 5], 1983; Ead., Avicenna latinus. Liber tertius naturalium de generatione et corruptione. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 6], 1987; Ead., Avicenna Latinus. Liber quartus naturalium de actionibus et passionibus qualitatum primarum. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale et lexiques. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 7], 1989; Ead., Avicenna Latinus. Liber primus naturalium de causis et principiis naturalium. Edition critique de la traduction latine médiévale. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke [Avicenna Latinus, 1, 8], 1992; Simone Van Riet, Jules Janssens, André Allard, Avicenna Latinus, Liber primus naturalium. Tractatus secundus de motu et de consimilibus. Edition critique. Introduction doctrinale par Gérard Verbeke [Avicenna latinus, 1, 10], 2006. The most studied field has been science. A synthesis was proposed by Derrick Melville Dunlop (1902–1980), Arabic Science in the West, 1958; see also Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Translations and Translators,” Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson (1925–1996), and Giles Constable, 1982, 421–62. For specific programs, see the series Aristoteles Semitico-latinus of which I have mentioned above the volumes on the translation from Greek into Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. Others contain editions from Arabic into Latin (chronological order of publication; exact reproduction of the actual titles [above]): Aafke M. I. Van Oppenraaij, Aristotle, De animalibus. Michael Scot’s Arabic-Latin translation, 3 vols. (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 5), 1992–1998; Pieter L. Schoonheim, Aristotle’s Meteorology in the Arabo-Latin tradition. Critical Edition of the Texts, with Introduction and Indices (Aristoteles Semitico-latinus, 12), 2000; E. L. J. Poortman, Petrus de Alvernia, Sententia super librum ‘De vegetabilibus et plantis’, 2003; Oliver Gutman, Pseudo-Avicenna, Liber Celi et Mundi. A Critical Edition with Introduction, 2003. Among the many other fields and works, one could mention here mathematics and, among others: Menso Folkerts, “Arabische Mathematik im Abendland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Euklid-Tradition,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten …, ed. Engels and Schreiner (above), 319–31; or, more recently: Roshdi Rashed, “Fibonacci et les mathématiques arabes,” Le scienze alla corte di Federico II (above), 145–60; astronomy and such work as David A. King, “Astronomical

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Instruments between East and West,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident …, ed. Hundsbichler (above), 143–51; or agriculture and the analysis by Andrew M. Watson, “The Imperfect Transmission of Arab Agriculture into Christian Europe,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident …, ed. Hundsbichler (above), 199–212. See also below, on the major translators. Medicine has probably been more studied than any other field of science, and the supposed school of Salerno has been considered as a major factor in the process of transfer of knowledge from the Arabic world to the West. Translation activity in the area may have continued the practice of transcultural contact in the multi-ethnic society present in Southern Italy, on the mainland as well as in Sicily, as the activity of bishop Salerno Alfanus of Salerno (d. 1085) (on whom see Anselmo Lentini, “Alfano,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 2 [1960], 253–57) may suggest (for his translation of Nemesius from the Greek, see Carolus Burkhard, Alfanus, Nemesii Episcopi Premnon Physicon Peri fuseôs anthrôpou liber a N. Alfano achiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum translatus, 1917; for the Greek text of Nemesius, see Moreno Morani, Nemesius, De natura hominis, 1987). In spite of this, the starting of the translation activity from Arabic into Latin in the West has often been – and still is – attributed to Constantine known as the African (d. before 1098/99). For his biography, see the elements recently brought to light and/or summarized by Raphaela Veit, “Quellen zu Leben und Werk von Constantine the Africa,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 59 (2003): 121–52, and Monica H. Green, “Constantine the African,” Medieval Science …, ed. Glick, Livesey, and Wallis (above), 145–47. Whereas Constantine has always been considered to have been interested in Arabic medicine in itself, Danielle Jacquart, “Le sens donné par Constantin l’Africain à son oeuvre: Les chapitres introductifs en arabe et en latin,” Constantine the African and cAli ibn al-cAbbas alMagusi: The Pantegni and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett, and Danielle Jacquart, 1994, 71–98, has shown that he was actually interested in recovering Greek medicine through its Arabic translations. The chapter On fever from Constantine’s Viaticum was edited in 1749 by Johannes Stephanus Bernard (above). More recently, some of his works have been edited and/or translated (in chronological order of publication): Marco Tullio Malato, and Umberto De martini, L’arte universale della medicina, Pantegni, parte I, libro I: Traduzione italiana e commento, 1961; Eugenio Fontana, Il libro delle urine di Isacco l’Ebreo tradotto dall’arabo in latino da Costantino Africano: Testo latino e traduzione italiana, 1966; Karl Garbers, Maqala fi l-malihuliya (Abhandlung über die Melancholie), Ishaq ibn ‘Imran und Constantini Africani libri duo de melancholia: Vergleichende kritische arabisch-lateinische Parallelausgabe, deutsche Übersetzung des arabischen Textes, ausführliche Einleitung und arabischer wie lateinischer drogenkundlicher Apparat,

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1977. For 20th-century analyses of Constantine’s activity, see for example (chronological order of publication): Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938), “Die medizinischen Schriften, welche Bischof Bruno von Hildesheim 1161 in seiner Bibliothek besaß, und die Bedeutung des Konstantin von Afrika im 12. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 9 (1916): 13–198; Charles Singer (1876–1960), “A Legend of Salerno: How Constantin the African brought the Art of Medicine to the Christians,” Johns Hopkins Bulletin 28 (1917): 64–69; Rudolf Creutz, “Der Arzt Constantinus Africanus von Monte Cassino,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 47 (1929): 1–44; Hermann Lehmann, “Die Arbeitsweise des Constantinus Afrikanus und des Johannes Afflacius im Verhältnis zueinander,” Archeion 12 (1930): 272–81; Karl Sudhoff, “Konstantin der Afrikaner und die Medizinschule von Salerno,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 23 (1930): 113–98; Hermann Lehmann. “Zu Constantinus Africanus,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 24 (1931): 263–68; Rudolf Creutz, “Addimenta zu Constantinus Africanus und seinen Schülern Johannes und Atto,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens 50 (1932): 420–42; Karl Sudhoff, “Constantin, der erste Vermittler muslimischer Wissenschaft ins Abendland und die beiden Salernitaner Frühscholastiker Maurus und Urso, als Exponenten dieser Vermittlung,” Archeion 14 (1932): 359–69; Boubaker Ben Yahia, “Les origines arabes du De melancholia de Constantin l’Africain,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 7 (1954): 156–62; Gerhard Baader, “Zur Terminologie des Constantinus Africanus,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 2 (1967): 36–53; and, more recently, the contributions to the volume Constantine the African … , ed. Burnett, and Jacquart (above); Raphaela Veit, “Al-Magusi’s Kitab al-Malaki and its Latin Translation ascribed to Constantine the African: The Reconstruction of Pantegni, Practica, Liber III,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 16 (2006): 133–68. The process of transfer of medicine from the Arabic to the Latin world has been analyzed in detail by Heinrich Schipperges (1918–2003) in three publications (in chronological order of publication): “Die frühen Übersetzer der arabischen Medizin in chronologischer Sicht,” Sudhoffs Archiv 39 (1955): 53–93; Die Assimilation der arabischen Medizin durch das lateinische Mittelalter, 1964; Arabische Medizin im lateinischer Mittelalter, 1976; and, more recently, by Danielle Jacquart, and Françoise Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’occident médiéval, 1990. For some works translated from Arabic into Latin, see Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera medica omnia, vol. 2: Aphorismi de gradibus, ed. and transl. Michael McVaugh 1975; Ulrike Heuken, Der achte, neunte und zehnte Abschnitt des Antidotarium Mesuë in der Druckfassung Venedig 1561 (Trochisci, Pulver, Suffuf, Pillen): Übersetzung, Kommentar und Nachdruck der Textfassung von 1561. Mit einem

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Geleitwort von Rudolf Schmitz (1918–1992), 1990; and Raphaela Veit, Das Buch der Fieber des Isaac Israeli und seine Bedeutung im lateinischen Westen: Ein Beitrag zur Rezeption arabischer Wissenschaft im Abendland, 2003. For some aspects of the transfer of knowledge from the Arabic world to the West, see, for instance (alphabetic order of topics): (etiology) Danielle Jacquart, “The Introduction of Arabic Medicine into the West: The Question of Etiology,” Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell, Bert Hall, and David Klausner, 1991, 186–95; (pharmacology) Albert Dietrich (1913–2001), “Islamic Sciences and the Medieval West: Pharmacology,” Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Intercultural Relations. Papers Presented at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, ed. Khalil I. Semaan, 1980, 50–63; (pharmacy) Peter Dilg, “Arabische Pharmazie im lateinischer Mittelalter,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten …, ed. Engels, and Schreiner (above), 299–317; (surgery) Friedrun R. Hau, “Die Chirurgie und ihre Istrumente in Orient und Okzident vom 10. bis 16. Jahrhundert,” Kommunikation zwischen Orient und Okzident …, ed. Hundsbichler (above), 307–31. H. Schools and Translators For the several schools and translators, see, for Palermo, Roshdi Rashed, “Les traducteurs,” Palerme 1070–1492: Mosaïque de peuples, nation rebelle. La naissance violente de l’identité, ed. Henri Bresc, and Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, 1993, 110–19. For Michael Scot (ca. 1175–ca. 1234), see Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot, 1965; Charles Burnett, “Michael Scot and the Transmission of the Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen,” Le scienze alla corte di Federico II (above), 101–26; Danielle Jacquart, “La physiognomie à l’époque de Frédéric II: Le traité de Michel Scot,” Ibid., 19–37. For Toledo, see Charles S. F. Burnett, “The Institutional Context of Arabic-Latin Translations of the Middle Ages: A Reassessment of the School of Toledo,” Vocabulary of Teaching and Research between Middle Ages and Renaissance: Proceedings of the Colloquium London, Warburg Institute, 11–12 March 1994, ed. Olga Weijers, 1995, 214–35; and Id., “The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century,” Science in Context 14 (2001): 249–88. On Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187), see Karl Sudhoffs, “Die kurze ‘Vita’ und das Verzeichnis der Arbeiten Gerhards von Cremona,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 8 (1914): 73–82; Paul Kunitzsch, “Gerhard von Cremona und seine Übersetzung des Almagest,” Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten …, ed. Engels, and Schreiner (above), 333–40; Hubertus L. L. Busard, The Latin Translation of the Arabic Version of Euclid’s

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Elements Commonly Ascribed to Gerard of Cremona, 1984. On Marc of Toledo (documented between 1193–1216), see Heinrich Schipperges, “Zur Rezeption und Assimilation arabischer Medizin im frühen Toledo,” Sudhoffs Archiv 39 (1955): 261–83 (reproduced in Medizin im Mittelalterlichen Abendland , ed. Gerhard Baader, and Gundolf Keil 1982, 151–76); Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Marc de Tolède,” Estudios sobre Alfonso VI y la reconquista de Toledo 3: Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Estudios Mozárabes, Toledo 20–26 Mayo 1985, 1989, 25–50 (reproduced in Ead., La Connaissance de l’Islam … [above], no. VII); and Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, and Georges Vajda (1908–1981), “Marc de Tolède, traducteur d’Ibn Tumart,” Al Andalus 16 (1951): 109–15; 259–307; 7 (1952): 1–56 (reproduced in Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, La connaissance de l’Islam … [above], no. II). On Alfred of Sareshel (12th/13th century), who was in contact with the Toledan school, if he did not spend some time there, see Clemens Baeumker (1853–1924), Des Alfred von Sareshel (Alfredus Anglicus) Schrift De motu cordis zum ersten Male vollständig herausgegeben und mit kritischen und erklärenden Anmerkungen versehen, 1923; James K. Otte, Alfred of Sareshel’s Commentary on the Metheora of Aristotle: Critical Edition, Introduction, and Notes, 1988; R. James Long, “Alfred of Sareshel’s Commentary on the Pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis: A Critical Edition,” Mediaeval Studies 47 (1985): 125–67; Elizabeth A. Fisher, “Manuel Holobolos, Alfred of Sareshel, and the Greek Translator of Ps.-Aristole’s De Plantis,” Classica et Mediaevalia 57 (2006): 189–211. On Barthelemy of Messina (activ 1258–1266), see Elisabeth Dévière, “Barthélémy de Messine, traducteur d’Aristote: Les mots de la famille de pneuma et leurs équivalents latins,” Filologia mediolatina: Studies in Medieval Latin Texts and their Transmission 14 (1007): 221–244. I. Greek into Latin An important translation activity consisted in Latinizing Greek works directly from the original text. A major translator was the judge Burgundio of Pisa (ca. 1110–1193), on whose biography see Peter Classen (1924–1980), Burgundio von Pisa: Richter, Gesandter, Übersetzer, 1974. A much debated question is his relation with the Greek copyist Iôannikios, whose manuscripts Burgundio annotated and used for his translations; on this point, see the following two essays by Nigel W. Wilson, “New Light on Burgundio of Pisa,” Studi italiani di filologia classica Terza serie, 1 (1986): 113–18; and “Ioannikios and Burgundio: A Survey of the Problem,” Scritture, libri e testi nelle aree provinciali di Bisanzio: Atti del seminario di Erice (18–25 settembre 1988), ed. Guglielgmo Cavallo, Gisuseppe De Gregorio, and Marilena Maniaci, 1991, 447–55. New material was brought to light by Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, and Marwan Rashed, “Burgundio de Pise et ses manuscrits d’Aristote: Laur.

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87.7 et Laur. 81.18,” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 64 (1997): 136–98. For a critical edition of scientific translations by Burgundio, see Richard J. Durling (1932–1999), Burgundio of Pisa’s Translatio of Galen’s PERI KRASEÔN ‘De complexionibus.’ Edited with Introduction and Indices, 1976; and Id., Burgundio of Pisa’s Translatio of Galen’s PERI TÔN PEPONTHOTÔN TOPÔN ‘De interioribus.’ Edited with Introduction and Indices, 2 vols., 1992. For his translations of philosophical treatises, see the Aristoteles Latinus above. Many studies have been devoted to a philological analysis of Burgundio’s translations; for a recent synthesis and a bibliography, see for example Pieter Beullens, Medieval Science …, ed. Glick, Livesey, and Wallis (above), 104–05. Guillaume de Moerbeke (ca. 1215–1286) is better known. For his translations, see, in addition to the Aristoteles Latinus above, Marschall Clagett (1916–2005), Archimedes in the Middle Ages, vol. 2: The Translations from the Greek by William of Moerbeke, 1976; and recently: Fernand Bossier, in collaboration with Christine Vande Veire, and Guy Guldentops, Simplicius, Commentaire sur le traité du ciel d’Aristote. Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, vol. 1, 2004. Similarly, Pietro d’Abano (1257–ca. 1315) has been pretty much studied. On his translations, see the two following articles: Lynn Thorndike, “Translations of works of Galen from the Greek by Peter of Abano,” Isis 33 (1942): 649–53; and Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, “Pietro d’Abano traducteur de Galien,” Medioevo 11 (1985): 19–64. On Niccolò da Reggio (ca. 1280–ca. 1350), see Lynn Thorndike, “Translations of Works of Galen from the Greek by Niccolo da Reggio (c. 1308–1345),” Byzantia Metabyzantina 1 (1946): 213–35; Robert Weiss, “The Translators from the Greek of the Angevin Court of Naples,” Rinascimento 1 (1950): 195–226 (reproduced in: Id., Medieval and Humanist Greek, 1977, 108–33); Carlos J. Larrain, “Galen, De motibus dubiis: Die lateinische Übersetzung des Niccolò da Reggio,” Traditio 49 (1994): 171–233; Michael McVaugh, “Niccolò da Reggio’s Translations of Galen and their Reception in France,” Early Science and Medicine 11 (2006): 275–301; and, for a recent synthesis with the previous literature, see Alain Touwaide, “Niccolò da Reggio,” Medieval science …, ed. Glick, Livesey, and Wallis (above), 367–68. The Crusades led to scientific exchanges, as some recent works have shown; see, for instance, the several contributions in Occident et ProcheOrient …, ed. Isabelle Draelants, Anne Tihon, and Baudouin Van Den Abeele (above), 2000. Such exchanges may have taken very different forms, from oriental physicians to the court of Westerners (Françoise Micheau, “Les médecins orientaux au service des princes latins,” Occident et ProcheOrient … , ed. Draelants, Tihon, and Van Den Abeele [above], 95–115) to the copy of manuscripts preserved in Constantinopolitan libraries made

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by, or for, Westerners during the Latin occupation of the city (see Alain Touwaide, “Latin Crusaders, Byzantine Herbals,” Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1500, ed. Jean Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide, 2007, 147–73). J. The Vernacular Though mainly made into Latin, transfer of knowledge was also made into the vernacular, among others French, Dutch, English, and German. For some studies, see the following examples for French: Colette Jeudy, “Traductions françaises d’oeuvres latines et traductions médicales à la bibliothèque cathédrale de Reims d’après l’inventaire de 1456/1479,” Scriptorium 47 (1993): 173–85; and An Smets, “Les compétences linguistiques des traducteurs des traités de fauconnerie: Etude des traces latines dans les textes en ancien et en moyen français,” La traduction vers le moyen français: Actes du IIe colloque de l’AIEMF, Poitiers, 27–29 avril 2006, ed. Claudio Galderisi, and Cinzia Pignatelli, 2007, 337–52; for Dutch: Leo J. Vandewiele (1910–2004), De Grabadin van Pseudo-Mesues (XIe-XIIe eeuw), en zijn invloed op de ontwikkeling van de farmacie in de zuidelijke nederlanden, 1962; and Willem F. Daems (1911–1994), Boec van Medicinen in dietsche: Een middelnederlandse compilatie van medisch-farmaceutische literatuur, 1967; for German: Mechtild Habermann, Deutsche Fachtexte der frühen Neuzeit: Naturkundlich-medizinische Wissenvermittlung im Spannungsfeld von Latein und Volkssprache, 2001. The transfer of knowledge to the English-speaking world has been – and still is – much studied. It will suffice to single out here four publications, each of which illustrates an aspect of the research made – or being made – on the topic. For a synthesis on translation, see Robert Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England, 2002; for a specific work coming from Classical Antiquity, see Maria Teresa tavormina, “The Middle English Letter of Ipocras,” English Studies 88 (2007): 632–52; for a study of the intermediaries between Classical Antiquity and England, see Maria Amalia d’Aronco, “Le conoscenze mediche nell’Inghilterra anglosassone: Il ruolo del mondo carolingio,” International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. Michele Dallapiazza, Olaf Hansen, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, and Yvonne S. Bonnetain, 2000, 129–46; and, for an evaluation of the importance of the material tranferred to, and integrated into, English scientific culture, see Maria Amalia d’Aronco, “How ‘English’ is Anglo-Saxon Medicine? The Latin Sources for Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts,” Britannia Latina. Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, and Nicholas Mann, 2005, 27–41.

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Whereas only rare studies have been devoted to the process of translation as a specific field of scientific activity (see, for example and recently: Henri Van Hoof, “Notes pour une histoire de la traduction pharmaceutique,” Meta 46 [2001]: 154–75), there is an increasing number of analyses of the methods of translation (for instance, see the several contributions to the volume Les traducteurs au travail: Leurs manuscrits et leurs méthodes. Actes du Colloque international organisé par le “Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture” (Erice, 30 septembre-6 octobre 1999, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, 2001), including the question of the repeated translations of a work by the same translator (for some examples, see above the translations by William of Moerbeke, Aristotle, Politica [Aristoteles Latinus, XXIX, 1], 1961, and Aristotle, Rhetorica [Aristoteles Latinus, XXXI, 1–2], 1978). On this question, see for example Farid Sami Haddad, “Latin Translations of Arabic Medical Texts That Went Through More Than One Edition,” Proceedings of the XXXIInd International Congress on the History of Medicine, Antwerp, 3–7 September 1990, ed. Eric Fierens, Jean-Pierre Tricot, Thierry Appelboom, and Michel Thiery, 1991, 697–706). Select Bibliography Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, PierrePaul Corsetti, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 1987) with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: Antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999 (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 2000); Danielle Jacquart, and Françoise Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’occident médiéval (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990); Heinrich Schipperges, Die Assimilation der arabischen Medizin durch das Lateinische (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1964); Id., Arabische Medizin im lateinischen Mittelalter (Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer, 1976); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 3: Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H., and vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Alain Touwaide, Medicinalia Arabo-Byzantina, vol. 1: Manuscrits et textes (Madrid: The Author, 1997); Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, and Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1970 and 1972).

Alain Touwaide

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U Utopias / Utopian Thought A. Definition Utopias are literary, philosophical or political designs for a better world, in particular of the perfect state. They each construct, in their own way, an ideal society and way of life, in which all people may equally enjoy prosperity, health, justice, liberty and happiness. Many utopias locate their plans for society in another time or a special place, such as an ideal city or a distant island. By contrast to religious visions of the future (‘the new Jerusalem,’ etc.), utopias are this-worldly constructs based on reason, which are imagined to arise without the assumption of a world to come, or divine intervention in the course of history. Utopias are the expression of a feeling of lack. They transcend reality by transforming that in it which is perceived as negative and unfulfilled into the positive, wish-fulfilling dreams of a better, happier, existence. Utopias create visions of a harmonic, peaceful world free from suffering, in which everything which only exists in potential in the real world comes to fulfillment. Their appellative character cuts against the grain of the real circumstances in society, and thus indirectly contributes to its alteration. They depart from the world as it is for an ideal, future goal, and thus can give impulse to the reform of contemporary societies and political states. The term ‘Utopia’ was coined by Thomas More, whose work De optimo reipublica statu, deque nova insula Utopia (1516) developed the blueprint from an ideal state, influenced by Plato’s Politeia without private property or war. Etymologically, it is a compound of the Greek words ou (‘no, not’) and topos (‘place’). A utopia, then, describes a (ideal) place which does not (yet) exist. Works such as Johann Valentin Andreae’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio (1619), Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis (1623) and Francis Bacon’s Nova Atlantis (1627) laid the foundations of the genre in the 17th century. It continues – if often in its negative form, the dystopia – until today in science fiction and the novel of the future. Utopian thought, however, can become manifest not only in literature and philosophy, but also in art, music, and architecture. It is expressed in all technical and artistic plans for other ways of life, which arise from the longing for a better, fulfilled life.

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German philosophers and sociologists have been particularly interested in developing a comprehensive theory of the utopia (cf. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1959; Norbert Elias, Thomas Morus’ Staatskritik, 1982; Max Horkheimer, Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, 1930; Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, 1952). B. History of Research Older scholars, e. g., Johan Huizinga in his seminal Herfsttij der middeleeuwen (1919, Engl. Waning of the Middle Ages), denied the Middle Ages a utopian consciousness altogether. They still assumed that utopias could only arise in a dynamic social structure and on the basis of a developed, progress-oriented conception of history. The medieval estates, with their social stasis, their dependence on authorities of the past and their belief in ordo, was, historians judged, hostile to utopia. Medieval society had not innovation and change but tradition and steadfastness for its core values, and in any case the only prospect of fulfillment, after the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise was the fulfillment of salvation history in the Second Coming of Christ at the end of days. It is telling that summaries of the history of Utopia generally begin with the authors of the 16th and 17th centuries. Even the comprehensive article on utopia in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie (vol. 34, 2002, 464–85) totally ignores the Middle Ages. The lemma ‘Utopia’ does not appear in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (ed. Strayer) at all. The widespread scholarly opinion that utopias were an invention of the early modern is now viewed as out-dated. For medieval society was far more dynamic, both socially and economically, than older scholars assumed, and it has since become plain that even the prevalent assumption of an inescapable, closed Christian worldview of medieval intellectuals, under the all-pervading dominance of the church is too absolute to do justice to the historical reality. Modern scholarship sees the social, academic and artistic culture of the Middle Ages as indeed heterogeneous, dynamic and complex, and “wishful spaces” and “wishful times” (Alfred Doren, Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten, 1927) had their places as counterpoints to an imperfect reality. The medieval philosophers and poets were already dreaming beyond their epoch, and created – independent of Christian eschatology – earthly realms of fulfillment and happiness. Modern scholarship, then, does not date the emergence of utopian thought in cultural history from Thomas More’s Insula Utopia, but credits the Middle Ages with the capacity to a way of thinking which leaves reality in the direction of a longed-for, ideal world. In the last decades of the 20th century, historians and philosophers have paid increasing attention to this mode of thought. They were able to show

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that the Middle Ages was already rich in utopian worlds. These, admittedly, are based on a different kind of rationality compared to that of the Early Modern utopian and, despite their secular content, often remain linked to the religious, particularly to Biblical depictions of paradise and the imagery of the Apocalypse. These utopian designs include the fabulous empire of the Indian priest-king, Prester John, or the Grail Company in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1200/10) (cf. Marie-Paule Caire-Jabinet, “La lettre du prêtre Jean,” En quête d’utopies, 2005, 111–33). These are ideal commonwealths, under the special grace of God, and exemplary in their richness and moral values. The medieval Brendan legends tell of islands where a state of paradise exists. The Tristan complex, above all in the famous version of Gottfried von Strassburg (ca.1210) constructs a code of love, which – in the utopian spirit – attempts to reconcile the individual lover’s desires with social norms. The “wishful place” in Tristan is the minnegrotte, the lovers’ grotto. Arthurian romance, too, contains a utopian moment, inasmuch as it not only depicts the court around King Arthur as an ideal society, but also describes the maturation of an individual knight, which results in a higher, better situation for the world, in which all conflicts and crises with which the novel began are resolved. The expansive descriptions of feasting in high medieval romance may be interpreted as utopian, as they imagine a state of general joy and happiness. The French poet Christine de Pizan created a fictional city of women (Le Livre de la cité des dames, 1404/05). And the Italian Cistercian Abbot Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202) uses his Dispositio novi ordinis to develop a perfect order, whose goal is this-worldly perfection and resembles the New Jerusalem. Many other “visions of an optimal form of life” (Tomas Tomasek, Zur Poetik des Utopischen im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, 2001/2002, 190) are viewed by modern medievalists as the medieval form of utopianism. However, a systemization and documentation of the utopian texts of the Middle Ages and their individual wishes and ideals, which always say something about contemporary perceptions of the deficits of the real world, remains a task for future scholars. C. Major Contributors Alfred Doren deserves the credit for developing the terminological tools which made it possible to investigate the Middle Ages, rather than merely the modern, with regard to forms of utopian thought. He describes utopias in general terms as “wishful spaces” and “wishful times” in which all suffering and contradictions of the current world order are removed, and a stable time of general happiness, justice, and freedom begins (Doren 1927). This allowed him to free the term ‘utopia’ from the classical utopian states of the

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Early Modern, and opened it to broader concepts of ideal worlds which can also be found in earlier epochs. He found utopias already existent in Greek antiquity (Plato), the hope for redemption of the Old Testament prophets (the hope of the Messiah) and Dante (the coming of an emperor of peace) in the form of a forthcoming eschatological period of happiness and good fortune. Besides Doren, Ferdinand Seibt was one of the first to allow the Middle Ages a concept of utopia. He showed that the classical utopia à la Thomas More had its roots in medieval thought, and that the dream of an earthly paradise was by no means an invention of the Renaissance and the humanists (Ferdinand Seibt, Utopica: Modelle totaler Sozialplanung, 1972; id., Utopie als Funktion abendländischen Denkens, 1982). He even held the culture of the monasteries, planned in every detail, the rational power structures of Charlemagne, the idea of an ideal emperor chosen by God, the functional town architecture to be manifestations of utopian thought in the sense of a perfect organization of life. The impulse towards planning which arises in the High Middle Ages hid, so Seibt, strongly utopian tendencies, in that it changed reality with the goal of order and based on historical optimism, and saw itself as moving towards a better future. Joachim of Fiore’s expectation of a third era of the Holy Spirit, which would replace the earlier periods of the Old and New Testament, and, he thought, would bring in a time of peace and salvation within his lifetime (Concordia novi et veteris Testamenti), ought, according to Seibt, to be viewed as a three-stage utopian model of history, even though it is clearly rooted in Christian spirituality and was thus labeled by him as a “monkish utopia” (Seibt 1972, 47). Janet Coleman (The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages: A Reassessment, 1982) joined Seibt in ascribing a utopian dimension to medieval monastic culture, in particular the Benedictine Rule, as it aimed to realize a perfect common life in the context of Christian millenarianism, and which promised its members the reward of “citizenship with Christ in the eternal city” (7). She read Odo of Cluny’s Occupatio mentis (924) as the manifesto for a perfect monastic life, which offered a foretaste of the eternal link to Christ in heaven. She counts both Joachim of Fiore with his projected Third Age and St. Francis, with his radical concept of the imitatio Christi in “poverty, simplicity and humility” (18) as utopians. Jean Servier pointed to the utopian content of the Augustinian ‘city of God’ (Jean Servier, Histoire de l’utopie, 1967). In De Civitate Dei (ca. 413/426) Augustine developed a conception of history in which the next-worldly city of God and the this-worldly city of the world stand in antithesis to each other. In earthly reality, the two cities are still involved in each other, and will only

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be permanently separated at the Last Judgment. The goal of history is eternal peace. Servier described the city of God as a medieval utopia: a pacified world filled with brotherhood, justice and love, from which evil has been banned for ever. The best overview of forms of utopian thought in the Middle Ages currently available is that by Tomas Tomasek (Zur Poetik des Utopischen im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter, 2001/2002). He was able to show that while there was undoubtedly utopian thought in the Middle Ages, it was characterized by a specific combination of rational concept and mythic or salvation-history oriented symbolism. The sources for medieval utopias were, among others the Old Testament’s depictions of paradise, the classical idea of a coming ‘Age of Gold’ (Vergil) and the Revelation of John with its vision of a thousand years of a peaceful empire. Tomasek added a third category to Doren’s “wishful space” and “wishful time,” that of the “wishful person.” For him the Middle Ages had an ideal conception of a new, perfect human (Alanus ab Insulis), who would revive the ‘paradisiacal’ nature of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Tomasek’s overview, which included saints’ lives and garden allegories as well as travel reports and love- and classical romances, showed that medieval literature had already developed a rich stock of images of an ideal form of life, which, even though it consists of motifs from salvation history, used its utopian other-worlds as a way to aim at improvements in this world. Tomasek’s valuable sketch could form a basis for further specialist studies. The current start of the discussion of the theme is concisely described in the Lexikon des Mittelalters in the article “Utopie” by Otto Gerhard Oexle (vol. 8, 1345–48). Oexle points out, correctly, that the answer to any question regarding a medieval utopian consciousness will depend on the respective definition of utopia used, as well as the definition of ‘the Middle Ages’, as an epoch, and its relation to the Modern. Following Mannheim, Seibt and Doren Oexle postulates a broad definition of utopia, which makes it possible, for example, to describe the medieval conception of distant islands of good fortune (insulae fortunatae) or Arcadian landscapes in the bucolic poetry of the Middle Ages as utopias. Oexle, too, describes the adequate study of the various forms of European medieval utopias as a task which scholars have yet to complete. His essay “Utopisches Denken im Mittelalter: Pierre Dubois” (1977) is itself an important step in that direction. In it, Oexle picked up Doren’s concept of the “wishful space” and with its help analyzed De recuperatione et reformatione et conservatione Terre Sancte (1306) by the royal jurist Pierre Dubois (ca. †1321). In it, Dubois reflects on the reconquest and social restructuring of the Holy Land. In particular, he was interested in questions of education and law, and he suggested a new social order for the Holy

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Land. For this reason, Oexle described Pierre Dubois’ work as a remarkable example of a medieval social utopia. Michael Winter has produced a comprehensive repertorium of utopian texts from antiquity to the 18th century (Compendium Utopiarum: Typologie und Bibliographie literarischer Utopien, 1978). His catalogue offers an overview of central texts with utopian content – in the broadest sense – from antiquity on. The articles give information on sources and editions of individual key texts, describe the content of individual utopias and place them in the context of intellectual history. Winter lists many medieval authors, including Augustine, Al-Farabi, Presbyter Johannes, Joachim of Fiore, Alanus ab Insulis, Ramon Llull, Pierre Dubois, Johannes von Winterthur, the Taborites, Leon Battista Alberti, and Hans Böhm. In the late Middle Ages in particular, utopian thought was often linked to chiliastic ideas and to the expectations that the thousand years of the Kingdom of God promised in the Revelation to John would soon begin. D. Current Research Interdisciplinary medievalist inquiry into utopias can hardly be said to seriously exist at present. There has been a notable decline of interest in the reconstruction of historical utopias, following a number of innovative research projects in the nineteen seventies and eighties. It appears that, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist states in Eastern Europe, the longing for counter-worlds to a dangerous reality has died away, and with it the impetus of researchers to concern themselves with documenting and analyzing utopian thought in the earlier phases of cultural history. Medievalists currently generally concern themselves only with the utopian as it impinges on the margins of their various projects, though a group of French scholars recently explored the meaning of utopian thinking in the Middle Ages (En quête d’utopies, ed. Claude Thomasset and Danièle JamesRaoul, 2005). With a few exceptions, however, most contributors stretch the notion of a utopia to apply to all kinds of ideas about otherness (giants, Mongols, wild men, etc.). Globally speaking, there are five thematic areas within which medieval forms of utopian thought may be discussed: 1. Cartography Many researchers claim a utopian dimension for the medieval mappae mundi. For the maps locate paradise within contemporary geography, and draw it, in the Far East, as part of the real world. Although humanity, according to the account in Genesis, had been driven from Paradise, medieval scholars believed that the Garden of Eden continued to exist, and was a “wishful space”

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of salvation, which remained part of the world as a kind of mythic place, and whose recovery was longed for (Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps, 1991, 19–37; Oexle 1999, 1347; Tomasek 2001/02, 181–82; Ingrid Baumgärtner, “Visualisierte Weltenräume: Tradition und Innovation in den Weltkarten der Beatustradition des 10. bis 13. Jahrhunderts,” Tradition, Innovation, Invention: Fortschrittsverweigerung und Fortschrittsbewusstsein im Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Joachim Schmidt, 2005, 231–76). 2. Urban Planning Researchers have also considered late medieval area and town planning as an aspect of utopian thought. In the designs of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) and Antonio Filarete (* ca. 1400) for ideal urban spaces, they glimpse the forerunners of utopia. Alberti and Filarete designed fictitious ideal towns, for which they planned not only architectural forms, but also a specific way of life and the manner of government (Seibt 1972, 17; Hubertus Günther, “Sforzinda: Eine Idealstadt der Renaissance,” Alternative Welten in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Ludwig Schrader, 1988, 231–58; Virgilio Vercelloni, Atlante storico dell’idea europea della città ideale, 1994; Oexle 1999, 1347). 3. Gardens Medieval gardens, especially those of monasteries and the late medieval courts, maybe viewed as utopian inasmuch as the choice of plants and forms often attempted to imitate paradise. They are “wishful spaces” for a life of beauty, security, and harmony, images of a redeemed world. The symbolic power of imaginary, paradisiacal gardens is attested not merely by the lovegardens (loci amoeni) in courtly romance, but also the countless depictions of gardens or garden allegories in medieval art (Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters: Am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie, 1982; Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth B. Macdougall, 1986; Tomasek 2001/02, 184). 4. Philosophy of History Questions of utopian thought keep arising in conjunction with research into medieval apocalypses and eschatology (Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 1957, 2nd ed. 1970; Reinhold R. Grimm, Paradisus Coelestis – Paradisus Terrestris: Zur Auslegungsgeschichte des Paradieses im Abendland bis um 1200, 1977; Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, 1979; Ende und Vollendung: Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter, ed. Jan A.

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Aertsen and Martin Pickavé, 2002; see also the contribution on “Eschatology” to this handbook by Peter Dinzelbacher). The fear of the coming end of the world, the expectation of a thousand year empire of peace, the hope of entry into the Heavenly Jerusalem etc., is seen by many scholars as not merely elements of a religious, next-worldly eschatology, but also as a stimulus to secular and political fantasies. For these apocalyptic ideas also provided content for conceptions of a better earthly life, and gave revolutionary movements (Jan Hus, Thomas Müntzer) powerful images of a redeemed future. To this extent, even Christian depictions of the end and perfection of the world at the Last Judgment have a utopian quality, for they partly motivated and strengthened concrete social upheaval in the Middle Ages. But the ideal type of government, in a utopian setting, had already been outlined by the philosophers and theologians Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon (Isabelle Vidrenne-Fajolles, “Du régime idéal selon Thomas d’Aquin et Roger Bacon,” En quête d’utopies, 2005, 15–58). 5. Courtly Society Medieval literary scholarship has been able to show that the social concepts which appear in the Arthurian and Grail romances often depict utopias of an idealized aristocratic way of life. Literature is of course per se a medium of fantasy which transcends reality. Courtly romances continually produce images of a harmonic life, ultimately freed from social conflict, in which the tension between God and the world, knighthood and courtly love, individual and society, is largely resolved. In this context we must place the Arthurian and Grail worlds, but also those which are finally redeemed and liberated after struggle and battle in the Alexander and Aeneas romances. The idealized figures who appear in them (Arthur, Charlemagne, Gawain, Willehalm, etc.) may be viewed as literary utopias of ideal princes and knights, through whom the medieval nobility was supposed to receive a leadership ethic which would guide their behavior. (Joachim Bumke, “Die Utopie des Grals: Eine Gesellschaft ohne Liebe?,” Literarische Utopie-Entwürfe, ed. Hiltrud Gnüg, 1982, 70–79; Tomas Tomasek, Die Utopie im ‘Tristan’ Gotfrids von Straßburg, 1985; Gert Kaiser, “Alternative Lebenswelten in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Alternative Welten in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Ludwig Schrader, 1988, 161–75; Walter Blank, “Die positive Utopie des Grals: Zu Wolframs Graldarstellung und ihrer Nachwirkung im Mittelalter,” Sprache – Literatur – Kultur: Festschrift für Wolfgang Kleiber, ed. Albrecht Greule and Uwe Ruberg, 1989, 337–53; Albrecht Classen, “Die Suche nach der Utopie in der Gralswelt: Albrechts (von Scharfenberg) Der jüngere Titurel,” Parzival: Reescritura y Transformación, ed. Berta Raposo Fernández,

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2000, 133–56; id., “The Crusader as Lover and Tourist: Utopian Elements in Late Medieval German Literature: From Herzog Ernst to Reinfried von Braunschweig and Fortunatus,” Current Topics in Medieval German Literature: Texts and Analyses, ed. Sibylle Jefferis, 2008, 83–102). Select Bibliography Alternative Welten in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Ludwig Schrader (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1988); Wolfgang Biesterfeld, Die literarische Utopie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974, 2nd ed. 1982); Janet Coleman, “The Continuity of Utopian Thought in the Middle Ages: A Reassessment,” Vivarium 20 (1982): 1–23; Dictionary of Literary Utopias, ed. Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson (Paris: Editions Champion, 2000); Alfred Doren, “Wunschräume und Wunschzeiten,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924/25 (Leipzig, Berlin: Teubner, 1927), 158–205; Götz Müller, Gegenwelten: Die Utopie in der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989); Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Utopie,” LexMA, vol. 8 (1999), 1345–48; id., “Utopisches Denken im Mittelalter: Pierre Dubois,” HZ 224 (1977): 293–339; Ferdinand Seibt, “Utopie im Mittelalter,” HZ 208 (1969): 555–94; id., Utopica: Modelle totaler Sozialplanung (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1972); id., “Utopie als Funktion abendländischen Denkens,” Utopieforschung 1982, vol. 1, 254–79; Jean Servier, Histoire de l’utopie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967); Tomas Tomasek, “Zur Poetik des Utopischen im Hoch- und Spätmittelalter,” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 13 (2001/02): 179–93; Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1966); Utopie: Begriff und Phänomen des Utopischen, ed. Arnhelm Neusüss (Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1968, 3rd ed. 1986); Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, ed. Wilhelm Vosskamp, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982); Michael Winter, Compendium Utopiarum: Typologie und Bibliographie literarischer Utopien, vol. 1: Von der Antike bis zur deutschen Frühaufklärung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978).

Heiko Hartmann

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Welsh Studies

W Welsh Studies A. Definition Welsh is a Celtic language. It is most closely related to Breton, Cornish, and Cumbric; more distant relatives are Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. The last of these died out in the 20th century, Cornish in the 18th, and Cumbric (spoken in what is now northwestern England and southern Scotland) in the 12th; yet Cumbric is here of special importance, since the oldest surviving ‘Welsh’ poetry was composed in north Britain by bards like Taliesin and Aneirin, active about the year 600, whose verse was originally in Cumbric but survives only in much later Welsh copies. B. Outline of the Subject Medieval Wales had a rich and varied literature. The poetry includes heroic verse and eulogies by Taliesin and Aneirin, and (in the 14th century) lyrics of love and nature by Dafydd ap Gwilym. For prose there are narrative, religious, historical, legal, geographical, medical, and even scientific texts; but the high point is the collection of tales, dating from the 11th century to the 13th, which are known as the Mabinogion. Research has, with reason, concentrated mainly on poetry and the eleven stories in the Mabinogion, and what has been discovered on them may interest even those who care little for Celtic Studies. The recovery of a whole literature from the past is a remarkable achievement by any reckoning, since it is a story of industry, cogent reasoning, and scholarly integrity. C. The Major Scholars More than for most literatures, a convenient approach is provided by consideration of the academics, mostly Welsh but with some from elsewhere, who have made advances possible. Amongst the most significant are Sir John Rh ys, ˆ Sir John Morris-Jones, W. J. Gruffydd, Sir Ifor Williams, Professor Henry Lewis, R. S. Loomis, Sir Thomas Parry, Kenneth Jackson, Sir Idris Foster, J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Rachel Bromwich, and, in our own time, Thomas Charles-Edwards, David Dumville, Patrick SimsWilliams, Oliver Padel, Sioned Davies, Dafydd Johnston, and John T.

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Koch. Their writings take in most of what has been considered worth thinking about medieval Welsh literature. Before them, like a preface to a book, is the figure of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), the English poet, critic, and inspector of schools. He did not know the Celtic languages and cheerfully admitted his ignorance of them; yet his Oxford lectures on their literatures, published as On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), sent out shock-waves that can still be felt. By the time his book appeared the Celtic nations had felt the potent charms of romantic nationalism, begetting a new interest in and discovery of the medieval past. Of the political consequences of that for Ireland nothing need be said here. But for Wales it led to new perceptions of Welsh poetry and legend, particularly the Mabinogion. These tales had been made known thanks to Charlotte, Lady Guest (1812–1895), daughter of an earl, wife of a millionaire, and gifted writer, whose edition and translation (the latter often reprinted) appeared as The Mabinogion (1838–1849). Her attitude to the tales was pre-Romantic, unlike that of Arnold himself, a poet who saw in them (or thought he saw) the obscure images of mythologies almost hidden by the mists of transmission. In a passage too famous not to quote, Arnold said of their protagonists: These are no medieval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world. The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the medieval storyteller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus, or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely – stones ‘not of this building,’ but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the medieval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.

Arnold’s lectures have had long-lasting effects. In 1877, they included the founding of the chair of Celtic Studies at Oxford, first held by John Rh ys ˆ (1840–1915), a schoolmaster from near Aberystwyth who had attended Arnold’s lectures. He is the first modern scholar of Welsh. Apart from publications on Welsh and Gaulish philology and Celtic folklore, Rh ys’s ˆ importance lay in two directions: the editing of early Welsh manuscripts, and the training of young scholars. In the first he was aided by a troublesome genius, the palaeographer John Gwenogvryn Evans (1852–1930), whose gifts were unfortunately blighted by a passion for the wildly illogical on matters literary, philological, and historical. However, this did little damage to Evans’s substantial catalogues of Welsh material at London, Oxford, Cardiff, and elsewhere, published as Reports on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language

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(1898–1910), or to his equally substantial editions of Wales’s oldest manuscripts. The latter (all privately printed) include, from the Red Book of Hergest, The Text of the Mabinogion (1887); The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv (1893); The Black Book of Carmarthen (1906); The White Book Mabinogion (1907); The Text of the Book of Aneirin (1908); The Text of the Book of Taliesin (1910); and The Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest (1911). Thanks to Evans’s painstaking toil (in part aided by Rh ys), ˆ philologists and literary historians had accurate and reliable texts at their disposal. Amongst Rh ys’s ˆ pupils were John Morris-Jones (1864–1929), later Professor of Welsh at Bangor in North Wales, and W. J. Gruffydd (1881– 1954), later Professor of Welsh at Cardiff. Morris-Jones was a good poet and a good scholar; Gruffydd was a good poet and a bad scholar. With the former, Rh ys ˆ produced The Elucidarium and Other Tracts in Welsh (1894), an edition of religious texts in the Book of the Anchorite, a manuscript copied in 1346 at Llanddewifrewi (in south-west Wales), and including mystical works and the Welsh life of St David. Morris-Jones went on to publish A Welsh Grammar (1913), which is still the main work on the literary language, although professional linguists tend to be curt on its Indo-European aspects. Morris-Jones then dropped a bombshell with his monograph Taliesin, published as volume 22 of Y Cymmrodor (1918). In it he argued that (together with much later religious and legendary material) a few poems in the 14thcentury Book of Taliesin really are by Taliesin, writing in north Britain before the year 600. Some scholars are cautious even now about accepting the authenticity of those poems, as also the elegies attributed to the slightly later Aneirin; though others think the case for their being genuine is strong. W. J. Gruffydd was a talented writer and major figure in Welsh cultural life, at least; and in his last years he was Member of Parliament for the University of Wales (a seat long abolished). Yet his work on the Mabinogion, particularly on the sequence of tales called the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, shows the perils of romanticism: for poetry, a good servant; for scholarship, a bad master. Gruffydd swallowed hook, line and sinker the hypothesis on mythological origins so coaxingly peddled by Matthew Arnold. It led him to make the most magnificent speculations on the myths supposedly behind the Four Branches, which are embodied (perhaps not the right word for notions so wispy and elusive) in his Math vab Mathonwy (1928) and Rhiannon (1953). Even at the time of publication there were those, like Sir Ifor Williams, who thought the volumes useless, since what they claimed could not be proved. We shall see below how Gruffydd’s work came under riddling fire from Kenneth Jackson in 1961. Yet their tendency to vague surmise still has unfortunate effects. Amongst those affected was the American scholar

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Roger Sherman Loomis, who showed himself all too ready a disciple of Gruffydd in his Wales and the Arthurian Legend (1956), but who left a truer memorial by editing Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (1959), where he directed an international team to provide a survey that remains valuable. After W. J. Gruffydd, we come to a very fine scholar indeed: Professor Sir Ifor Williams (1881–1965), who spent his whole life in or near Bangor, and his entire career in its university department of Welsh. Yet there was almost nothing provincial about his talents. Williams devoted himself to the investigation of the vocabulary of early Welsh, and to superb editions of early texts, casting broad beams of light on what had been obscure. So much does Williams stand above most Celticists that it is possible to think he was too good a scholar, so that more recent writers have difficulty in persuading the Welsh that he was neither omniscient nor infallible. His warm patriotism and love of his native tongue impelled him to write mainly in Welsh. His most important publications are: Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (1930), an edition of the Four Branches; Canu Llywarch Hen (1935), containing tragic saga-poems from the 9th or 10th century, in which Llywarch figures as a senile militarist; Canu Aneirin (1938), elegies by Aneirin on heroes of the Gododdin (of southeast Scotland) and their gallant but doomed 7th-century raid on the English at Catterick (in modern Yorkshire); Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (1944); Armes Prydein (1955), the Prophecy of Britain, a poem written in the year 940 and calling for an international final onslaught on the English (it never occurred); and Canu Taliesin (1960), editing the handful of poems taken as the work of this 6th-century bard. Williams produced wonderfully full and clear editions of medieval Welsh texts. Not their least virtue is that their comprehensive analysis of early Welsh vocabulary means that they can, even now, be used as a research tool for that language. Williams wrote one important work in English, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, setting out in lucid and eloquent prose the fruits of his investigations into Welsh heroic and elegiac verse. However, many of his other books can now be read in English versions. Canu Taliesin thus appears as The Poems of Taliesin (1968), effectively a translation by J. E. Caerwyn Williams (1912–1999). In 1969, Kenneth Jackson’s The Gododdin (discussed below) gave the substance of Canu Aneirin. In 1972 Armes Prydein was re-edited by Rachel Bromwich, who also published Williams’s collected papers as The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry (1972). His Canu Llywarch Hen appears, greatly amplified, in Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry (1990). Sir Ifor Williams dominates the study of early Welsh literature. His understanding of it will be an everlasting influence, like that of Scaliger or Bentley, even where later generations may correct him.

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Under the cloak of Sir Ifor Williams may be mentioned two pupils from Cambridge University, Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson and Rachel Bromwich, and one from Bangor, Sir Idris Llywelyn Foster. Jackson (1909–1991) trained as a classicist when A. E. Housman was still to be seen in Cambridge. Like him, Jackson was a man of penetrating and caustic intellect, who did not love the company of fools. Amongst his many publications are Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry (1935); A Celtic Miscellany (1951); Language and History in Early Britain (1953), well described as a ‘national monument’ of British scholarship that has never quite had its due; The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition (1961); and The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (1969), the subtitle of which brought protests from Professor David Ellis Evans (born 1930) of Oxford and other Welshmen on what they had always patriotically taken as a Welsh poem. The penultimate volume demolishes almost everything said by W. J. Gruffydd on the Four Branches of the Mabinogi; the last one, however, got Jackson into hot water by maintaining that the Gododdin as we have it is substantially the 7th-century work of Aneirin, when it survives (heavily modernized) in two versions in the 13th-century Book of Aneirin at Cardiff. Nevertheless, many agree with Jackson, if only because it is hard to see why any later bard should want to eulogize the heroes listed in this collection, when almost all of them are otherwise unknown. As for Rachel Bromwich (born 1915), her most useful publications are two editions: the indispensable Who’s Who of medieval Welsh tradition in Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (3rd ed. 2006); and, with D. Simon Evans (1921–98), Culhwch and Olwen (1992), the earliest Arthurian tale and oldest tale of the Mabinogion. With the third of Ifor Williams’s pupils we have a problem. Sir Idris Foster was Professor of Celtic at Oxford from 1947 to 1978. He authored no book; he never completed his edition of Culhwch and Olwen; and his teaching, as students found to their cost, was worthless. Yet on the centennial of the Jesus Chair of Celtic in 1977 he was dubbed knight: an instance of the British establishment’s superstitious regard for the decimal system, and disregard for actual research. With glorious incongruity, Foster was presented with a Festschrift, Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd: Studies in Old Welsh Poetry, ed. Rachel Bromwich and R. Brinley Jones (1978), which contains important papers by R. Geraint Gruffydd, T. M. Charles-Edwards, and Brynley F. Roberts. The minimal nature of his real contribution to the subject is proved by Early Welsh Poetry: Studies in the Book of Aneirin, ed. Brynley F. Roberts (1988), where (despite a slavish dedication to him) his work is mentioned, once, in one sentence, in a paper by David N. Dumville. Foster was a Dickensian character – like the employer of Tom Pinch.

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Fortunately, there remained scholars of caliber in Wales and elsewhere. Here is a magnificent seven of them. At Dublin was Professor John LloydJones (1885–1956), who compiled single-handedly Geirfa Barddoniaeth Gynnar Gymraeg (1931–1963), a massive (though still incomplete) glossary of early Welsh poetry and beyond. At Swansea was Professor Henry Lewis (1889–1968), author of Datblygiad yr Iaith Gymraeg (1931), and editor of Brut Dingestow (1942), a medieval Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Lewis’s writing is always useful, but he has suffered in Welsh nationalistic ideology by allowing the sacking from his department of Saunders Lewis (1893–1985), poet, dramatist, romantic nationalist, and erratic literary historian. (Saunders Lewis had in 1936 set fire to a British military bombing school in north-west Wales, after which he was imprisoned for nine months.) At Cardiff was G. J. Williams (1889–1963), who in 1926 unmasked the inventions of the notorious literary forger Edward Williams (1747–1826), alias ‘Iolo Morganwg’. Williams’s methodical researches on the poetry and prose of Glamorgan are summarized in Ceri W. Lewis, ‘The Literary Tradition of Morgannwg,’ Glamorgan County History: The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh (1971), 449–554. At Bangor and then Aberystwyth was Sir Thomas Parry (1904–1985), who served many Welsh institutions, amongst them the National Library of Wales, of which in 1953 he became Librarian (= Director). He was the editor of Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym (1952), an epoch-making edition of Wales’s greatest poet. It gave for the first time a critical text of all Dafydd’s poems and separated the authentic ones from those by later imitators (some of them as brilliant as the real thing). Parry also wrote (in Welsh) the standard history of Welsh literature, usually read as A History of Welsh Literature (1955), translated by Sir Harold Idris Bell (1879–1967), who had been keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum. At Aberystwyth was Thomas Jones (1910–1972), who produced admirable editions of Welsh historical literature, such as Brut y Tywysogyon: or The Chronicle of the Princes (1952). With Professor Gwyn Jones (1907–1999) of Aberystwyth, Thomas Jones brought out an excellent translation of the Mabinogion (1949). At Cardiff was A. O. H. Jarman (1911–1998), who knew more of the legend of Merlin than anyone else. His ‘The Legend of Merlin and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy’ is republished in Merlin: A Casebook, ed. Peter H. Goodrich and Raymond H. Thompson (2003), 105–30. At Lampeter was D. Simon Evans (1921–1998), whose A Grammar of Middle Welsh (1964) is the authority on the medieval language. Yet perhaps the most useful aspect of scholarship in Wales at this period is Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (1950–2002), in four volumes and 3897 pages. Wales once had gold mines, providing wedding rings for British

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royalty. The mines have long gone. Yet Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru is another Welsh gold mine, which yields endless profits and will never close. After the spectacular achievements of between the 1890s and the 1960s, there have been changes of direction. The age of heroes is past. It has been followed by an era of consolidation, with emphasis on re-editing, critical studies, and works of reference. Here a prominent organ for research is the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, established in 1985 at Aberystwyth. Amongst other projects it has produced (in Welsh) an edition in many volumes of the ‘Poets of the Princes,’ active from the 12th century to the early 14th. A team there is now (re-)editing their successors, the ‘Poets of the Gentry’ writing from the 14th century to the early 16th. The first director of the Centre was J. E. Caerwyn Williams, whose most lasting benefit for medieval Welsh was the dull but necessary one of providing editions of religious prose. The investigation at Aberystwyth is complemented on the other side of the Atlantic by the Harvard Celtic Colloquium and UCLA. In summing up the researches of recent years, eight scholars may be mentioned: Patrick Sims-Williams, Helen Fulton, Marged Haycock, Oliver Padel, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Dafydd R. Johnston, John T. Koch (from the USA), and Sioned Davies. Professor Sims-Williams of Aberystwyth is the founder of Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies (founded 1981), now Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, which maintains high standards. Professor Helen Fulton of Swansea has published Dafydd ap Gwilym and the European Context (1989); an educational volume, as it shows how not to write a book on this poet. Dr Marged Haycock of Aberystwyth has edited Blodeugerdd o Ganu Crefyddol Cynnar (1994) and Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (2007), both important collections. Oliver Padel has produced a sober account of the Arthurian legend, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (2000). It provides reasons for believing that Arthur, like Paul Bunyan, never existed at all. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, formerly of the National Library of Wales, has written much on medieval prose. Her ‘Gender and Violence in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi,’ in 150 Jahre ‘Mabinogion’: Deutsche-Walisische Kulturbeziehungen, ed. Bernhard Maier and Stefan Zimmer (2001), 67–78, appearing with contributions by T. M. CharlesEdwards, Sioned Davies, Ian Hughes of Aberystwyth, and Patrick SimsWilliams, discusses a fashionable subject; although to informed observers the book in which it figures will have the spooky look of a 1960s symposium on Minoan scripts, in which no contributor ever mentions Michael Ventris, or the proposition that Linear B is Greek. Dr Lloyd-Morgan has in addition edited Arthurian Literature XXI: Celtic Arthurian Material (2004), a revealing collection. It (rightly) decries R. S. Loomis’s theories of origins, myths that

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are a long time a-dying. Less desirably, it brings out the inward-looking nature of much recent research in Wales, because much of it says nothing at all. In contrast is the imposing Llên yr Uchewyr: Hanes Beirniadol Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg 1300–1525 (2005), a monograph of some 500 pages by Professor Dafydd Johnston, a Yorkshireman who has Celticized his first name and now directs the Aberystwyth Centre. John T. Koch has organized contributors to bring out, in California, Celtic Culture (2006), a sizeable volume in which American publishing technology sets out an admirable diversity of information. With her The Mabinogion (2007), Professor Sioned Davies of Cardiff offers a major translation. It sums up progress made on these tales by United States scholars, particularly Patrick K. Ford, Andrew Welsh, John Bollard, and Catherine A. McKenna (now Professor of Celtic at Harvard). They, together with Brynley F. Roberts and others, emphasize the qualities of artistry in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a collection which is properly seen, not as the ruins of old mythologies, but as an outstanding series of narratives by a writer of genius. D. The Future We may be optimistic. Wales has a rich medieval literature: the possibilities for researchers, especially in the United States, are thus almost infinite, where they will be aided by the penchant of the Welsh for hiding lights under bushels by publishing in their native tongue. Merely assembling and making this secondary material known in a global language is thus a task for investigators. As regards primary material, Wales has wealth of poetry of which only a tiny amount has been translated. For prose the most exhilarating challenge is in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. These await an editor who can take on board advances made since Ifor Williams’s edition of 1930. He or she may also provide answers to the debate (still raging in Wales) on whether these tales really are the work of a woman of royal blood, who was born in northwestern Wales in the late 11th century, and who in January 1136, in a field some miles from Carmarthen, died a violent death at the hands of the Norman invaders. Select Bibliography The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991); Andrew Breeze, Medieval Welsh Literature (Portland: Four Courts, 1997), id., The Origins of the ‘Four Branches of the Mabinogi’ (Leominster: Gracewing, 2009); Celtic Culture, ed. John T. Koch (Santa Barbara: ABCClio, 2006); Kenneth H. Jackson, The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961), id, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969); The Mabinogion, trans. Sioned Davies

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(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads, ed. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 3rd ed. 2006); The Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales, ed. John Davies, Nigel Jenkins, Menna Baines, and Peredur I. Lynch (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008); Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944), id., The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972).

Andrew Breeze

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Important Terms in Today’s Medieval Studies

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Aesthetics

A Aesthetics A. General Definition As has often been noted, the Middle Ages had no concept of “aesthetics” nor of “fine art” (Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (Part I),” Journal of the History of Ideas 12.4 [1951]: 496–527; id., “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (Part II),” Journal of the History of Ideas 13.1 [1952]: 17–46; Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, 2001). Modern aesthetics began with the 18th-century application of secular and scientific approaches to the nature and perception of beauty, problems that during the Middle Ages belonged to the realm of theological speculation. “Art” in the Middle Ages referred to any body of knowledge or set of rules for intellectual or physical making, as opposed to the modern notion of ars gratia artis. Nonetheless, there is a substantial corpus on beauty from the Middle Ages, and though integrally bound with religious thought, this corpus is far from rigidly doctrinal or conceptually monotonous. Whereas modern theorists often treat aesthetics as an abstraction or detached form of experience, concepts about aesthetics and art in the Middle Ages were essentially applied philosophy, since their raison ’être was to help articulate the relationship between man and God. As a result, medieval civilization offers many examples of the interplay between aesthetic theory and its practical expression in objects, texts, and social experience. B. Aesthetics in Theory Aesthetic problems – How does God’s beauty manifest itself in the visible universe? Can humanity even perceive and understand this beauty? – recur throughout medieval philosophy, and the answers that philosophers found in the Greco-Roman and Biblical traditions were often difficult to harmonize. Genesis says that God made the world, but how should this be squared with the Platonic notion – highly respected for its mystical quality – that creation was but a pale reflection of the Ideal? Medieval theologians faced a seeming paradox when writing about creation as a manifestation of divine beauty, since this same creation was inferior to the spiritual realm, and ultimately to be eschewed and transcended; its beauty was illusory, and yet it was

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a necessary starting point for any attempt to attain union with God. There was also the aesthetic problem of intellect: how could we trust our perceptions, mediated as they were by the senses? Was the mind even capable of grasping the ordering principles of the universe? Underlying medieval aesthetic thought were ancient ideas that divine beauty was perceptible in proportion and in light. Numerous Biblical passages (the order of creation in Genesis, the construction in Exodus, Wisdom 11:21) demonstrated that God had structured the universe according to number. These passages fused with Pythagorean notions about the music of the spheres, which echoed visibly in the cycles of the seasons and rhythms of life; and with Platonic ideas about the soul’s pleasure at perceiving right proportions when contemplating the cosmos. Boethius’ disquisitions on musical congruence provided an important link between Greco-Roman aesthetic thought and that of the Middle Ages, as did Augustine’s recurring discussions of proportion and number as keys to understanding the material world (De ordine), music (De musica), and the Trinity (De Trinitate). Medieval aesthetics also emphasized the importance of luminosity, which is a principal sign of divinity and of God’s connection to mankind in the Bible. Equally important was the Platonic theory of the Forms as transmitted by Plotinus, for whom light became the essential substance by which the human intellect may contemplate the Nous (universal spirit or intelligence) (André Grabar, Les origines de l’esthétique médiévale, 1992). The Platonic aesthetics of light was Christianized in the late 5th-century work of PseudoDionysius, for whom the cosmos results from the outpouring of divine light by the Christian God. This emphasis on light – and thus on the visible – profoundly shaped the Western medieval appreciation of art objects. The 9th century witnessed the first appearance of sustained inquiry into the nature of beauty in the medieval West, as is evidenced by the translations of Pseudo-Dionysius made by Hilduin (832) and John Scottus Eriugena (ca. 862). Eriugena’s treatises are particularly noteworthy, for he attempted to take abstract and mystical ideas about divine beauty and transpose them into a rationalist account of creation and human nature. For Eriugena, humanity is blinded to its true nature as the image of God by the physical universe and the senses. Yet even this fallen world manifests God’s love and beauty, which may be perceived through intellectual contemplation and spiritual illumination. Eriugena’s work was condemned in the 13th century for its overly close association of God with creation, but it anticipated later medieval theorists who focused on cognition as necessary to apprehending divine order. The rise of the schools in the 12th century marked the next major chapter in medieval aesthetic theory. Hugh of Saint-Victor was emblematic of his

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time in emphasizing the symbolic essence of physical creation, which was “referable to invisible significations and statements,” therefore, “visible beauty is an image of invisible beauty” (In Hierarchiam Coelestem [PL, 175, col. 949]). Aesthetics was also deeply implicated in the 12th-century debates between Nominalists and Realists, since they revolved around the degree to which mental images corresponded to things in nature. If the mind were capable of forming universal concepts from its experience of individual things, as Realists such as Abelard contended, it would mean the intellect was designed to know divine beauty and not merely imagine it. In the 13th century, several phenomena gave a new impetus to the study of divine beauty and human perception of it. Alexander of Hales, expressing new concerns with individual intentionality and sin, insisted upon the distinction between the good, which concerned a thing’s purpose, and the beautiful, which concerned how its form was perceived. Robert Grosseteste, influenced by the fight against dualist heresies and the newly available Aristotelian corpus, melded Platonic and Aristotelian ideas into a theory of corporeal light. For Grosseteste, matter resulted from the mathematical ordering of divine light rather than, as the Cathars claimed, an absence of light. Albertus Magnus argued for a divine “organizing activity” expressed in beautiful form, thus rejecting Hales’s notion that perception was necessary to beauty. Most important in this era was the work of Aquinas, whose notion of visio, or disinterested judgment of beauty undisturbed by affect or the senses, laid the foundations for the scientific method and, ultimately, modern aesthetics. Late-medieval aesthetics witnessed a reaction against Scholastic rationalism and categorization. William of Ockham returned to a Nominalist position that rejected the existence of universal order and insisted upon the need to evaluate entities individually. Nicholas d’Autrecourt, who was condemned by the Church in 1347, held that there was no objective hierarchy by which to judge perfection in things. And mystics, writing in the vernacular and refusing learned discourse and analysis, evoked intensely personal visions of divine beauty that made it seem accessible to anyone. Yet they often insisted on the need to follow a specific revelatory praxis, thereby perpetuating the ancient notion that mystical contemplation had aesthetic structure (Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism [1200–1350], 1998).

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C. Aesthetics in Practice For Augustine, art is “imitatio cum ratione” (De musica, 1.1.4); for Theophilus too, the “useful occupation of the hands” is a product of reason, a gift from God that allows us to avoid idleness and sin (An Essay Upon Diverse Arts, Book I); for Aquinas, “art operates on material furnished by nature” (De anima, II, 1 218). Encompassing a vast semantic field in the Middle Ages, the word ars, at its core, signified the application of knowledge to a task, whether manual, mental, or spiritual. Significantly, ars also evoked the conceptual union of aesthetics and ethics, since one should always strive to make something beautiful, i.e. pleasing to God and in accordance with the principles regulating creation. Art in the Middle Ages therefore carried a heavy moral charge and intersected in manifold ways with theological and social concerns (The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, 2005). The centuries-long aesthetic and ethical debates over art largely arose from the Western medieval tradition’s insistence upon art’s didactic and devotional functions. Plotinus’ philosophy justified the work of art insofar as it was an instrument for projecting deeper realities into the mind. Over the centuries, a chorus of luminaries – Gregory the Great, the Council of Nicea, Walafrid Strabo, the Synod of Arras, Honorius of Autun, Durandus – affirmed the role of the image in education and devotion with striking consistency (Herbert L. Kessler, “Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, 2006; Jean-Claude Schmitt, “La Culture de l’imago,” Annales 51.1 [1996]: 3–36). This emphasis on visual didacticism explains the importance of imagery in ecclesiastical settings (Madeline Harrison Caviness, Stained Glass Windows, 1996; Thomas E. A. Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities and Phantasms in the Cloister of Saint-Michel de Cuxa,” Art Bulletin 83.3 [2001]: 402–36; Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, 1997; Stephen Murray, A Gothic Sermon: Making a Contract with the Mother of God, Saint Mary of Amiens, 2004). It also explains why images were so prominent in devotional books made for the laity, or even for those with clerical training (Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, 1998; Cynthia J. Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of the Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century, 2001; Jonathan Harthan, Books of Hours and their Owners, 1977; Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours, 2003; Roger Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life, 1988).

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The application of number and proportion to art is another example of the overlap between aesthetic theory and practice in the Middle Ages. Following Pythagoras, certain musical intervals were understood to reflect universal ratios, which gave music special status both in the quadrivium and as the matrix for the liturgy (Herbert M. Schueller, The Idea of Music: An Introduction to Musical Aesthetics in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 1988; Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination, 1989). The writings of Vitruvius and Vincent of Beauvais, the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, and the layout of Gothic cathedrals reveal a similar attentiveness to meaningful proportion in graphic and architectural design (Carl F. Barnes, Jr., The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt: A New Critical Edition and Color Facsimile, 2008; Nigel Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder: Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Cathedrals, 2000; Stephen Murray, Notre-Dame, Cathedral of Amiens: The Power of Change in Gothic, 1996; Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark, Medieval Architecture, Medieval Learning: Builders and Masters in the Age of Romanesque and Gothic, 1992; Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 1956; MarieThérèse Zenner, “Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe,” A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2006, 531–56). The treatises of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Poetria Nova) and Eustache Deschamps (Art de dictier) show that this concern with number also applied to the use of poetic form (Rüdiger Brandt, Kleine Einführung in die mittelalterliche Poetik und Rhetorik, 1986; Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose, 1991; Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English artes dictandi and Their Tradition, ed. Martin Camargo, 1995). Like that of proportion, the aesthetics of light and color straddled theory and practice in significant ways. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the accounts of Abbot Suger about the building of Saint-Denis, which suggest a direct relationship between the Neo-Platonic preoccupation with divine light and the expanded glazing of Gothic architecture (Abbot Suger and SaintDenis: A Symposium, ed. Paula Gerson, 1986; Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 1946). In literature one finds the constant evocation of bright and primary colors, a preference materialized in heraldry, manuscript illumination, tapestry, murals, metallic vessels for court and church, and painted sculpture (Michel Pastoureau, Figures et couleurs: Etudes sur la symbolique et la sensibilité médiévales, 1986). It is important to note that an opposite tendency also existed: the mystical conception of God dwelling in darkness found artistic expression in texts and images that employed obscurity to impel contemplation (Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 1998; Douglas Kelly, “Obscurity

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and Memory: Sources for Invention in Medieval French Literature,” Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin, 1984, 33–56). Several aesthetic theories and practices came together in the arts of memory. Following Quintilian, numerous medieval writers exhorted the use of well-lit architectural frames for the placement of memory images, thereby combining the fundamental aesthetic categories of light and proportion. Others suggested using bizarre, violent, or monstrous images, thus applying theories about the efficacy of mental impressions made by dissimilarity (Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 1990). An aesthetic approach to mnemonics was also visible in manuscript design, with the ordinatio of the page understood as contributing to legibility and memorability (M. B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, 1976, 115–41). Though aesthetics was primarily explored by theologians, aesthetic concerns were also a central factor of secular court life. Theology may even have influenced the ethos of courtly love, since the cult of the Virgin – the most perfect, and therefore beautiful, human – and the concept of fin’amors appeared at roughly the same time and fed off of each other (Reto R. Bezzola, Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident [500–1200], 1944–1963). Of course, court life itself was highly aestheticized. Décor and material culture were integral to the aesthetic fashioning of noble identity: from monumental objects such as tapestries and murals, to personal items such as mirrors and combs, the physical environment of the court was an extension and reflection of noble superiority (Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter, 1986; Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI, ed. Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, avec la contribution de François Avril, 2004; Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court, 2001). Even the noble body was understood as a work of art to be crafted and displayed in dance, song, dress, speech, and combat (The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation, ed. and trans. Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy, 1996; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War, 2002). The nobility’s emphasis on personal appearance was one aspect of a central aesthetic issue throughout the Middle Ages – how to represent the human body. Crucifixion imagery demonstrates a gradual movement from highly stylized and impassive to anatomically accurate and psychologically expressive figures (Paul Thoby, Le crucifix, des origines au Concile de Trente: Etude iconographique, 1959). This trend mirrors that leading from the Vitruvian notion of the homo quadratus, according to which the human form is a

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mirror of universal order, to the late medieval emphasis on bodily excretion and putrefaction as expressed in the danse macabre, sermons, and visionary literature. Among the many factors underlying these developments, two major ones were the aforementioned privileging of perception by theologians and of personal devotion by mystics, which led to increasingly intimate and individualized representations of Christ, the Virgin, and the deceased (Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation, 1996; James Midgley Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 1950; Elina Gertsman, “Pleyinge and Peyntinge: Performing the Dance of Death,” Studies in Iconography 27 [2006]: 1–43; Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong, Une histoire du corps au moyen âge, 2003). As with proportion and light, corporeal representation shows how aesthetic theory and practice overlapped in the Middle Ages. The application of medieval aesthetic values to art objects was not the only force that determined how objects looked. Indigenous styles going back to antiquity – such as Celtic interlace patterns in the British Isles, France, and Spain – held on for centuries in many parts of Europe (Ruth and Vincent Megaw, Celtic Art: From its Beginnings to the Book of Kells, 2001). Occasional renascences of ancient art – during the Carolingian period, in the 12th century in Italy, in the early 13th century in France – led to new visual vocabularies (Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 1960; Veronika Wiegartz, Antike Bildwerke im Urteil mittelalterlicher Zeitgenossen, 2004). Then there was the influence of “foreign” art – from Byzantium, the Islamic realms, and Slavic lands (The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500–1200, ed. Jerilynn Dodds, 1993; Byzantinischer Kunstexport: Seine gesellschaftliche und künstlerische Bedeutung für die Länder Mittel- und Osteuropas, ed. Heinrich L. Nickel, 1978; The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, 1997). Stylistic choices, far from being made unreflectively, were often motivated by clear aesthetic and ideological designs. This is clearly true of objects that imitate Roman art, and thus evoke the legitimacy of imperial heritage; and of Byzantine-inspired art, which signified the Holy Land and the origins of Christianity (Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick, 1994). One last point should be made: paradoxical though it may seem, unease with and outright resistance to art was also an important aspect of medieval aesthetic thought and practice. Though the medieval West never experienced iconoclasm on the scale that the East did, there was a long western tradition against art that, like other aesthetic concepts, derived from both the Bible and Greco-Roman philosophy. In the Middle Ages, Old Testament injunctions against idolatry combined with Platonic and Stoic traditions

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exhorting detachment from worldly objects. As a result, there developed an extensive literature against the negative effects of curiosity, in the etymological sense of an excessive care for or attentiveness to materiality and sensual pleasure (Curiositas: Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Krüger, 2002; Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, 2007). The most forceful medieval statement against art was Saint Bernard’s Apologia, in which he decried the size of monastic churches and the use of images in monasteries (Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art, 1990). Bernard’s attack had important artistic implications, as it led the Cistercians to privilege non-figurative art and contributed greatly to the widespread use of grisaille. But concerns about excessive display, curiosity, and the sins they lead to were far from restricted to the monastic sphere. Sumptuary laws, manuscript illumination, architectural design, and numerous other medieval activities all bear the marks of this distrust of the image. D. History of Scholarship The study of medieval aesthetics can be said to begin during the blurry transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The very idea of the medium aevum as an interruption in history represents an aesthetic evaluation of the period – it is the product of a differentiating analysis, the same one that produced notions of “barbarian” invasions and “Gothic” architecture. In this sense, figures such as Du Bellay (with his famous dismissal of medieval literature in the Défense et illustration de la langue française) and Vasari (with his references to “the almost forgotten art of painting” in the time of Cimabue and to other medieval artistic failings in his Vite) may be counted among the first students of medieval aesthetics, since they were crucial to establishing the Middle Ages/Renaissance dichotomy (Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture, 1992). The modern interest in medieval art dates to the 18th century, when nationalistic impulses inspired rediscovery of the native past, and Romanticism fueled fascination with an age deemed innocent, spontaneous, and mysterious. In the 19th century, medievalism bloomed as numerous architects, artists, writers, and scholars all over Europe devoted their careers to unearthing, studying, copying, and publicizing medieval art. The first two generations of medieval art specialists sprang from and reacted against this culture. The work of Alois Riegl, Emile Mâle, Johan Huizinga, Henri Focillon, and Erwin Panofsky, all of whom were born before 1900, signaled a new, scientific approach that paid greater attention to the contemporary at-

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titudes and conditions that had shaped medieval art than had their predecessors. Yet the work of these art historians was not focused solely on aesthetics. Indeed, while medievalism until the mid-20th century – whether practiced by specialists or non-specialists – necessarily implied a consideration of medieval aesthetic attitudes, the study of medieval aesthetics per se, as a phenomenon independent of medieval art, has a relatively short history. The first comprehensive work devoted to the topic was Edgar De Bruyne’s Etudes d’esthétique médiévale (3 vols., 1946). Though it had been preceded by studies that had treated narrower issues in medieval aesthetics, De Bruyne’s study established the subject as a legitimate field of inquiry and launched a wave of research that continues to this day. Umberto Eco began his academic career with a dissertation on aesthetics in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Il problema estetico in Tommaso d’Aquino, 1956), which he followed with Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale (1959; translated as Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 1986). Other early proponents of the study of medieval aesthetics were Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz (Historia estetyki, 1960–67; translated as History of Aesthetics, 1970–1974), and Rosario Assunto (La critica d’arte nel pensiero medioevale [1961]; Die Theorie des Schönen in Mittelalter [1963]). Since the 1960’s, as the preceding overview demonstrates, scholars have pursued a wide variety of topics in medieval aesthetics both theoretical and applied, establishing this as a major field in Medieval Studies. Select Bibliography Artistes, artisans et production artistique au Moyen Age: Colloque international, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université de Rennes II, Haute-Bretagne, 2–6 mai 1983, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet (Paris: Picard, 1986–1990); Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin et al. (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1990); Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Jèssica Jacques Pi, La estética del románico y el gótico (Madrid: Antonio Machado Libros, 2003).

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Allegory A. A Protean Subject Since the late 1950s and 1960s, when concern with hermeneutics saw a “rehabilitation of allegory” – it is a figure for the transmission of tradition in Hans-Georg Gadamer – and when the status of rhetoric was enhanced in post-structuralist circles, leading to the interest in allegory especially in Paul de Man, research on allegory remains of abiding relevance. Today, there are wide-ranging studies of relevant texts and of the allegorical mode in medieval theology, literature, and art. However, one fundamental methodological problem seems to remain unsolved: instead of providing a precise set of heuristic tools, every consideration of medieval allegory requires not just care in order to preserve its specificity which delimits it to modern theories; difficulties are also caused by the historically determined fuzziness of the terminology as well as the heterogeneity and complexity of the field of investigation, which make attempts at systematization intricate, but also continue to raise new questions. A survey of medieval sources reveals a remarkably rich variety of different allegorical concepts and functions. The technique is used – to name only a few central fields of interest – in the context of Biblical exegesis, with regard to the interpretation of pagan authors and myths, in philosophy and literary aesthetics, and is also discussed in relation to the appropriate modes of Christian interpretation of the world and medieval sign theory in general. Allegory, according to its formal definition, means in the first instance a rhetorical figure, by which the literal level of meaning of a word or discourse is transformed into a second meaning, aut aliud verbis aliud sensu ostendit, aut etiam interim contrarium, as the influential statement of Quintilian (Inst. VIII 6,44) or that of the Auctor ad Herennium, oratio aliud verbis aliud sententia demonstrans (IV 46), put it. The idea that a text possesses further dimensions of meaning beyond the literal is pursued by medieval rhetorical schemes, where allegory, along with metaphor, irony, and the riddle is classed as a trope. However, allegory is taken beyond that, and became a comprehensive technique by which linguistic, visual or material signs were used to point to a second, often hidden, spiritual sense, as well as a mode by which abstract figures of thought, which were otherwise impossible to put into words, could be imagined, such as ethic models like the struggle between the virtues and the vices, the divine plan for salvation and redemption, or the doctrines of courtly love. Allegory, in its rhetorical-expressive form, which illustrates intellectual concepts which are in themselves resistant to visualization, runs

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in parallel and in mutual dependency with the exegetical-hermeneutic practice of allegoresis. Medieval allegoresis, the working out of multiple layers of meaning, was initially applied to the interpretation of the Scripture, then to secular texts and finally expanded to make creation ‘readable.’ Thus, not only texts and pictures, but also things belonging to the visible world and their qualities are given meanings which point to a metaphysical reality. Allegory, with its particular referential structure, which sets a distance, requiring interpretation, between the literal and spiritual sense, between the level of image and meaning, is a specific expression of Christian understanding of language and the world, which is interested in the relationship between Scripture or the visible world and the invisible, transcendent dimensions of reality, between time and eternity, earthly life and salvation history. The interrelation between the sign and the sphere of religious entities is never direct, but has to be made accessible indirectly, which resulted in allegory gaining its over-arching status as the leading thought- and art-form of the Middle Ages. Thanks to its status as the fundamental method of seeking the truth, the embodying of spiritually abstract ideas, of gaining understanding and communicating faith, but also thanks to its creative, imaginative potential, which results from the multilayered references of the signs and the imagery of the literal level, allegory became a point of convergence for varying discourses and kinds of knowledge. The term ‘allegory’ thus designates a net of complex relationships, which changes according to period or to the theological, philosophical and literary context. There is much interaction between diverse terminologies and traditions in the theoretical writings and allegorical practice of the Middle Ages. New approaches were continually being made and picked up, combined with other approaches, played off against each other in controversial discussions and changed by fine adjustments. The difficulties arising from these conditions have been repeatedly treated in studies of allegory, which have sought possible methods of systematization and categorization. In terms of current positions in scholarship and its ability to inspire further research, an essay by Christel Meier, “Überlegungen zum gegenwärtigen Stand der Allegorie-Forschung: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Mischformen,” FMSt 10 (1976): 1–69, is of great significance. Meier demanded careful attention to historical differences, and to the variety of forms and functions of allegorical discourse and understanding. She showed, through the critical exploration of modern, antithetical categories of distinction, of which the opposition hermeneutics and illustration is the most productive, that the sources contain no homogenous fields which would allow a distinction between, for example, religious versus secular allegory, or theology versus poetry. Instead, there is usually intel-

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lectual, conceptual and pragmatic interpenetration, overlap, and transition. Meier argued that it is precisely this process of ‘mixing’ (‘Vermischung’) which constantly renews the poetic potential of allegory, which decisively contributed to its great prevalence and diversification. A survey of current research with the aim of developing a new concept of allegory can be found in the monumental essay collection edited by Walter Haug, based on a Wolfenbüttel symposium, Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie, 1979. Excellent contributions, which reassess the historical terminology and explore the various types of allegory, their modifications and the tendencies of their development in the context of contemporary horizons of knowledge and expectation, stress the aesthetic potential of allegorical forms. The essays are not confined to one epoch, and resist the assumption of a caesura at the Reformation, thus paying attention to the continuity of medieval allegorical forms as an important basis of early modern formulation and decoding. Armand Strubel has recently published a monograph which is intended as an overview of medieval concepts and the various research approaches of the 20th century, “Grant senefiance a”: Allégorie et littérature au Moyen-Âge, 2002. Rhetorical definitions, philosophical, theological and poetological approaches are discussed, and above all the origins of a “forme littéraire” in French literature, with the aim of a new classification of allegorical writing. Synoptic tables of allegorical works from the 13th to the 15th century accompany the volume, as does a comprehensive bibliography. B. History of Research Academic interest in allegory, which had existed sporadically in the 1930s and 1940s, became strongly present from the 1950s. Biblical hermeneutics formed a first important field of research. An early special case, which was not merely of importance to literary critics, can be found in Erich Auerbach’s essay “Figura” (Archivum Romanicum 22 [1939]: 436–89, rpt. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie, 1967, 55–92), to which scholars are indebted for a new understanding of the figural structure in medieval literature. Auerbach is, here, close to the typological or figural mode originating in St. Paul’s method of relating persons and events of the Old and New Testament to each other in a scheme of prophecy and fulfillment, imago and veritas, which can be contrasted to the tendency of radical spiritualization of the Biblical text. The latter was characteristic first for the Alexandrine school around Philo, and then above all for the allegorical techniques developed by Origin. In distinction to a spiritualized, mysticizing allegory, which neglects the literal sense in favor of arbitrary interpretations, the cultural-historical importance of which is relativized by Auerbach, he sees figuralism, in its

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concentration on historical and reality-based dimensions of meaning, as not merely providing the basis for medieval interpretations of history, but also as the precondition for the comprehension and depiction of concrete, thisworldly, everyday realities in European literature. Although the sharp distinction between typology and allegory, though reviving patristic and medieval controversies, cannot be maintained today, Auerbach’s essay in literary history retains its relevance, and not merely for the interpretation of Dante’s Commedia. Shortly after, the problem of typology was discussed with theological focus by, on the Protestant side, Gerhard von Rad, and then by Jean Daniélou in the context of the Nouvelle Théologie (see Sacramentum futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique, 1950; From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, 1960). Important studies on Biblical exegesis appeared with Beryl Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 1941, or Ceslas Spicq’s Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse latine au moyen-âge, 1944. However, for the understanding of the history of spiritual exegesis Henri de Lubac’s studies, which were rich in material, are of particular relevance (see Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols., 1959–1964). Lubac, for whom typology and allegory interact, dealt with the beginnings of Christian biblical interpretation. He analyzed St. Paul’s interpretation of Old Testament words and events, but above all proved the elaboration of multiple layers of meaning and typological relationships in the patristic writers, whose interpretative practice he considered as exemplary. He traced the further development in the Middle Ages in its most subtle branches and transformations, and followed vestiges of allegory in less well known authors as well. Exegetical theory and practice as a whole is, for Lubac, the centre of Christian spirituality; it synthesizes all the moments of Christian self-reflectivity on the basis of revelation, and goes beyond simple exegesis to dogmatics, Christian ethics and moral theology, eschatology and ecclesiology (further studies on this field of sholarship: Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle, 1957; Hans-Jörg Spitz, Die Metaphorik des geistigen Schriftsinns: Ein Beitrag zur allegorischen Bibelauslegung des ersten christlichen Jahrtausends, 1972; Hans-Joseph Klauck, Allegorie und Allegorese in synoptischen Gleichnistexten, 1978; Neue Richtungen in der hoch- und spätmittelalterlichen Bibelexegese, ed. Robert E. Lerner, 1996; Gilbert Dahan, L’exégèse chrétienne de la bible en Occident médiévale: XIIe–XIVe siècle, 1999). While Lubac stressed the specificity of Christian exegesis, and clearly distinguished it from the interpretative traditions of pagan antiquity, Jean Pépin pointed to a process of transition and adaptation, in which Christian allegory took over important elements of the pagan interpretation of mythology (see Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chré-

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tiennes, 21976 [11958]; La tradition de l’allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à Dante: Études historiques, 1987). Pépin investigated the response of Christian theologians of the first centuries to the models of interpretation of mythology which were known to the Greek philosophers and were received in Alexandrine-Jewish cultural circles. Thanks to this, allegorical techniques developed by the Stoics and Neo-Platonist influenced early interpretations of the Holy Scripture. To transfer the technique was easy, among other reasons, because myths and biblical texts, which equally require interpretation, are linked by the mystery of religious truth, whose clear understanding is hindered by ambiguity and resists attempts to fix it. Pépin’s comparative analyses revealed analogies in the methodology and conceptualization of allegoresis, for example in the early Christian treatment of Moses and the manner in which Greek philosophers down to Porphyry dealt with Homer, or using the writings of Philo, who compared reading the Bible to celebrating the Mysteries. Allegory has gained a prominent place since the sixties, and still more since the seventies, in the field of medieval ‘significs,’ which Friedrich Ohly conceived as a central area of mediaevalism and an inter-disciplinary research task. Significs, which aims to determine a comprehensive medieval system of signs, directed its attention to the whole field of the allegoricalspiritually interpreted and identified the hermeneutic process of the spiritual interpretation of the world, the Bible, and history as a fundamental mode of understanding which applied to all areas of knowledge. The method of allegoresis, in this perspective, was the precondition for every kind of mimesis in literature and art, accompanying the illustrative allegory and always connected to it. Ohly, who worked on the exegetical tradition of the Song of Songs early in his career (Hohelied-Studien: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200, 1958), first defined the area of significs in his inaugural lecture in Kiel in 1958 “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter,” then, in a preliminary survey, in the introduction to his collected essays Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung, 21983 [11977]. In his publications, which showed among other fields of interest, how the figural interpretative scheme of biblical exegesis was made productive in secular literature from the early Middle Ages on, Ohly stressed that the understanding of historic significs is a necessary prelude to every reading of medieval texts. The project inspired congresses (“Probleme mittelalterlicher Bedeutungsforschung,” FMSt 6 [1972]: 67–492; particularly important Verbum et Signum: Beiträge zur mediävistischen Bedeutungsforschung, ed. Hans Fromm, Wolfgang Harms, and Uwe Ruberg, 2 vols., 1975; Bildhafte Rede in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit: Probleme ihrer Legitimation und ihrer Funktion, ed.

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Wolfgang Harms and Klaus Speckenbach, 1992) and series of individual projects with broad thematic concerns. Among Ohly’s pupils, but also independently and beyond, contributions appeared on the allegoresis of numbers, things, and qualities (Heinz Meyer, Die Zahlenallegorese im Mittelalter: Methode und Gebrauch, 1975; Lexikon der mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen, ed. id. and Rudolf Suntrup, 1987; Ulrich Ernst, “Kontinuität und Transformation der mittelalterlichen Zahlensymbolik in der Renaissance: Die ‘Numerorum mystica’ des Petrus Bungus,” Euphorion 77 [1983]: 247–325; Mensura: Maß, Zahl, Zahlensymbolik im Mittelalter, 2 vols., ed. Albert Zimmermann, 1983/84; Christel Meier, “Das Problem der Qualitätenallegorese,” FMSt 8 [1974]: 385–435; ead., Gemma spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, vol. 1, 1977; ead. and Rudolf Suntrup, “Zum Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter: Einführung zu Gegenstand und Methoden sowie Probeartikel aus dem Farbenbereich ‘Rot’,” FMSt 21 [1987]: 390–478; Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter, ed. Christel Meier-Staubach and Rudolf Suntrup, forthcoming), on the meaning given to natural processes (Ohly, Diamant und Bocksblut: Zur Tradition und Auslegungsgeschichte eines Naturvorgangs von der Antike bis in die Moderne, 1976), to animals (Dietrich Schmidtke, Geistliche Tierinterpretation in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des Mittelalters (1100–1500), 1968), liturgical gestures (Rudolf Suntrup, Die Bedeutung der liturgischen Gebärden und Bewegungen in lateinischen und deutschen Auslegungen des 9. bis 13. Jahrhunderts, 1978), and on the encyclopedias and dictionaries in which the Middle Ages preserved its knowledge of the various dimensions of meaning (Reinildis Hartmann, Allegorisches Wörterbuch zu Otfrieds von Weißenburg Evangeliendichtung, 1975; Heinz Meyer, “Zum Verhältnis von Enzyklopädik und Allegorese im Mittelalter,” FMSt 24 [1990]: 290–313). A concise overview of the various areas of medieval significs, rich in contemporary material and insightful analysis, can be found in Hennig Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, 1980. While significs tries to locate an all-embracing medieval horizon of thought and knowledge in allegory, a central field of research focused on the role of allegory in the literary aesthetics and artistic self-understanding of the Middle Ages. In addition to the fundamental question, to what extent – if at all – secular and religious allegory differ from each other, and in which reciprocal relation theology, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts stand in which historical and intellectual constellations, scholars have investigated, for example, the development and spread of allegorical personification, the development of allegorical poetry in various genres and the theory of the integumentum, i.e., the assumption that the veil of fiction conceals a

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Christian truth. C. S. Lewis’s study The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936) was groundbreaking, and is frequently reprinted. Lewis, working from the perspective of intellectual history, showed how the allegorical mode became the dominant form of expression in vernacular poetry. He traced how the allegorical mode, which made the immaterial-abstract visually imaginable, began with the active personifications in Roman epic, for instance in Statius, was then adapted in late antiquity especially in the concept of the psychomachia which was formed by Prudentius, as well as in the pagan epithalamia. Hans H. Glunz, too, produced an early work in the field, Die Literarästhetik des europäischen Mittelalters: Wolfram, Rosenroman, Chaucer, Dante, 1937 (rpt. 1963) showing the importance of allegory for medieval literature, while Edgar de Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale (3 vols., 1946, rpt. 1998) placed it in the wider context of medieval aesthetics. The fundamental aesthetic reassessment of allegory since the beginning of the 1960s has been chiefly indebted to Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss appreciated the contributions that recent research on Christian theological allegory as the basis of new beginnings in literary scholarship had produced. He reflected the particular valences of secular allegorical forms, which constituted themselves by taking over and developing theological ideas of allegory, and in a dialogue with them which took different forms in different historical contexts. Thus the allegorical modus dicendi is uniquely able to make invisible things visually comprehensible. This still leaves open the question if and to what extent allegory as a literary depiction of the non-visual, which in the Middle Ages primarily belonged to the religious category, began to make possible a subject-oriented mode of reception, which Jauss later called aesthetic experience. Important studies examined individual areas of the increasingly literary nature of allegory: Jauss investigated, for example, the influence of the Christian allegory of the bellum intestinum, the striking visualization of invisible powers and ethical ideas, as exemplified in the writings of Prudentius (“Form und Auffassung der Allegorie in der Tradition der ‘Psychomachia’,” Medium Aevum Vivum: Festschrift für Walther Bulst, ed. id. and Dieter Schaller, 1960, 179–206; cf. Reinhart Herzog, Die allegorische Dichtkunst des Prudentius, 1960; on representative modes of pictorial art cf. Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art: From Early Christian Times to the 13th Century, 1939, rpt. 1968); he showed the transition from the allegorical appropriation of classical myths and fables to a remythologization of internal psychological forces, such as erotic passion, which eventually resulted in a new mythology, e.g. the depiction of the otherworldly kingdom of Amor, and considered the particular characteristics of the allegorical poetry of Brunetto Latini and its possible

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influence on Dante’s Commedia. Beside the ‘serious’ didactic-moral form ofmedieval allegory, Jauss demonstrated that a tendency to humor and comedy can also be found in allegory, which, according to him, does not so much satirize Christian doctrine but the claim to reveal a higher truth (“Allegorese, Remythisierung und neuer Mythos”; “Brunetto Latini als allegorischer Dichter”; “Ernst und Scherz in mittelalterlicher Literatur” – essays collected and rpt. in Jauss, Alterität und Modernität der mittelalterlichen Literatur: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1956–1976, 1977; on the allegorical-mythic representation of love, cf. also Doris Ruhe, ‘Le Dieu d’Amours avec son paradis’: Untersuchungen zur Mythenbildung um Amor in Spätantike und Mittelalter, 1974, as well as the criticism and re-determination of the function of various personifications of love in Rüdiger Schnell, Causa amoris: Liebeskonzepte und Liebesdarstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, 1985). A preliminary synthesis, rich documentary sources, and a systematic approach can be found in the ambitiously conceived chapter on allegorical literature which Jauss and Uda Ebel wrote for the Grundriss der Romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters (Jauss, “Entstehung und Strukturwandel der allegorischen Dichtung,” GRLMA VI,1 [1968]: 146–81; 215–44; Ebel, “Die literarischen Formen der Jenseits- und Endzeitvisionen,” GRLMA VI,1 [1968]: 181–215; Ebel, “Didaktische und allegorische Literatur der Dante-Zeit,” GRLMA X,2 [1989]: 129–78). As a result of this tendency, apparent since the 1970s, to give allegory a heightened importance, there has been a remarkable profusion of specialized investigations of allegory in particular authors, in individual works, in various genres, as well as in the developments of allegorical literature in France, Germany, Italy, England, and Spain (cf., e. g., Walter Blank, Die deutsche Minneallegorie, 1970; Marc-René Jung, Études sur le poème allégorique en France au Moyen Age, 1971; Ulrich Ernst, “Gottfried von Straßburg in komparatistischer Sicht: Form und Funktion der Allegorese im Tristanepos,” Euphorion 70 [1976]: 1–72; Hartmut Freytag, Die Theorie der allegorischen Schriftdeutung und die Allegorie in deutschen Texten besonders des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, 1982; Ingeborg Glier, “Allegorien,” Epische Stoffe des Mittelalters, ed. Volker Mertens and Ulrich Müller, 1984, 205–28). One important field of research is, like the French Roman de la Rose (cf. the bibliography in: Strubel, op. cit. 374–95), Dante’s concept of allegory. Dante allegorizes his ownpoetry in form of a narrative – as in the Vita nova – or in form of a commentary – as in the interpretation of individual canzones in the Convivio –, discusses the relationship between poetic and theological allegory (cf. Conv. II,1) and, in the letter to Cangrande della Scala, whose authenticity is admittedly questioned today, and which has been recently attributed to Boccaccio, expounds the technique of multiple levels of meaning as an adequate

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method of understanding the Commedia. Inspired by Dante’s own statements, a differentiated debate has evolved among researchers (Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies, 2 vols., 1954/1958; John Freccero, Dante: Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff, 1986; Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, 1969; id., Dante’s Epistel to Cangrande, 1994; Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition allégorique, 1970; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the ‘Divine Commedy’, 1979; Klaus W. Hempfer, “Allegorie und Erzählstruktur in Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’,” DDJb 57 [1982]: 7–39; Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi, ed. Michelangelo Picone, 1987; Otfried Lieberknecht, Allegorese und Philologie: Überlegungen zum Problem des mehrfachen Schriftsinns in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, 1999; Andreas Kablitz, “Poetik der Erlösung: Dante’s ‘Commedia’ als Verwandlung und Neubegründung mittelalterlicher Allegorese,” Commentaries – Kommentare, ed. Glenn W. Most, 1999, 353–79; see further the chapter on “Ästhetisierung des vierfachen Schriftsinns bei Dante,” Patricia Oster, Der Schleier im Text: Funktionsgeschichte eines Bildes für die neuzeitliche Erfahrung des Imaginären, 2002). The central debate between those who view Dante under the aspect of medieval alterity and those who claim a ground-breaking (pre-)modernity, is still undecided. The crucial question whether, or to what extent, the complex system of reference in the text plays theological and literary allegory off against each other and what level of reference each allegorical sign points to refuses a straight answer. One discussion that is at the heart both of the history of allegory itself and of the history of research into it, and which seeks to deal with the transitions between an integration into theology and the relative autonomy of the apparently fictive, deals with the so-called integumentum theory, that is, the question whether it is possible to communicate Christian truth under a veil of pictures and fiction – sub integumento or sub involucro – and, generally, what place should be given to the classical authors and pagan myths, as well as secular imaginative literature in terms of theories of cognition and ethics (see Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, op. cit., 169–98). Besides specialist studies on the allegoresis of mythology, which can only be mentioned here in passing (Die Allegorese des antiken Mythos, ed. Hans-Jürgen Horn and Hermann Walter, 1997; Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature, 1997; Luca Marcozzi, La biblioteca di Febo: Mitologia e allegoria in Petrarca, 2002), the use of the terminology and interpretative concepts have been investigated (Édouard Jeaneau, “L’usage de la notion d’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 24 [1957]: 35–100), as have the literary forms and tech-

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niques associated with the idea of integumentum (Hennig Brinkmann, “Verhüllung (‘integumentum’) als literarische Darstellungsform,” Der Begriff der Repraesentatio im Mittelalter: Stellvertretung, Symbol, Zeichen, Bild, ed. Albert Zimmermann, 1971, 314–39). A precise distinction between the integumentum model and the Biblical-hermeneutic theory of the multiple senses of scripture can, however, only be found in a few sources; rather, there are productive transitions (see Meier, “Überlegungen,” op. cit.). The assumption that the implications of the integumentum theory were chiefly literary, as it allows literature an independent way to truth and thus legitimates it, has been relativized by Frank Bezner’s intellectual-historical study, Vela Veritatis: Hermeneutik, Wissen und Sprache in der ‘intellectual history’ des 12. Jahrhunderts, 2005. Bezner attempted to show the complex ‘genealogy’ of the concept of the ‘veiled truth’ in different fields of discourse which were, however, in dialogue with each other. According to him, in the 12th century the thought-figure of ‘integumental hermeneutics’ can only be understood in the context of a wider discussion, which was concerned with the need to order and clarify threatened cognition perspectives and with the ambivalent role of language as a medium of knowledge. In considering current research trends, the most prominent appears to be a further diversification of areas which have already been defined. A need remains for further discussion on various fields as shown by the most recently published volumes of essays (L’allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance, ed. Brigitte Pérez-Jean and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, 2004; Allégorie des poètes, allégorie des philosophes: Études sur la poétique et l’herméneutique de l’allégorie de l’Antiquité à la Reforme, ed. Gilbert Dahan and Richard Goulet, 2005). The shape which allegory took, and its functions are understood as indicators of cultural change and alterations of semiotic systems, and questions of cultural transfer as they relate to medieval Islamic and Jewish allegoresis are considered (Interpretation and allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman, 2000). However, in place of a concern with single problems across various periods, to which essay collections tend in general – as, unfortunately, the particular examples referenced above do to varying extents – a stronger conceptual concentration and a clearer but narrower focus would be desirable. Changed investigative techniques and new problematizations of allegory may, as, for instance, Bezner’s book shows, take the form of cultural or intellectual history. Equally relevant is the neighboring area of topoi research, but also the varying field of research into the role of ritual and symbolism in the Middle Ages. Interest in allegory regarding questions about the specificity of medieval aesthetics has remained strong, and related research into religious drama should be noted, where in addition to the allegorical-

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liturgical function to illustrate salvation history, there is a new focus on the aesthetic attraction of the plays. However, the most promising area, opening the widest perspectives, is the concern with the theory, perception, and function of the image in the Middle Ages, which is currently a prominent subject of academic discourse. In this domain, continuities and alterations in the configuration and reference of signs into the modern period can be observed, above all in the field of emblematics. Select Bibliography Richard Glasser, “Abstractum agens und Allegorie im älteren Französisch,” ZRPh 69 (1953): 43–122; Reinhart Hahn, “Die Allegorie in der antiken Rhetorik,” Ph.D. diss. Tübingen 1967; Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Wolfgang Harms, Homo viator in bivio: Studien zur Bildlichkeit des Weges (Munich: Fink, 1970); Ulrich Krewitt, Metapher und tropische Rede in der Auffassung des Mittelalters (Ratingen et al.: Henn, 1971); Dietrich Schmidtke, Studien zur dingallegorischen Erbauungsliteratur des Spätmittelalters am Beispiel der Gartenallegorie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982); Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Paul Michel, Alieniloquium: Elemente einer Grammatik der Bildrede (Bern et al.: Lang, 1987); Allegoresis: The Craft of Allegory in Medieval Literature, ed. J. Stephen Russell (New York and London: Garland, 1988); Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. Alastair J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Walter Haug, Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts (1985; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992); Wiebke Freytag, “Allegorie, Allegorese,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik I, ed. Gert Ueding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 330–93; Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Bettina Full

The Author in the Middle Ages A. Introduction Broadly speaking, there is a diachronic development in the conception of the author in the Middle Ages. Beginning with the hermeneutic tradition of the study of Latin auctores in the academic prologues written to introduce authoritative works (scriptural and secular) in the early Middle Ages, the human

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aspect of authorship is increasingly studied in the 12th century. In the 13th century, the introduction of the Aristotelian prologue leads to a multiple conception of authorship. And finally, these Latin notions of authorship are transferred to vernacular writers in the 13th and 14th centuries. The conception of the author in the Middle Ages is while derived from patristic sources, fluid rather than fixed. Even the etymological development of the word manifests the flexibility of the notions underlying its terminology (see Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Auctor, Actor, Autor,” Bulletin du Cange: Archivium Latinitatis Medii Aevi 3 [1927]: 81–86, and his Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes [1963], 126–55). The term “author” in Latin (sg. auctor, pl. auctores) derives from the interrelated terms auctor, actor, and author. For the Romans, an actor (from the verb ago, to do or perform), like an auctor (from augeo, to produce), was a person who took the initiative in a juridic act such as selling property, or someone who simply produced something. While the term auctor was broad enough to encompass any human activity, actor, on the other hand, referred specifically to someone who had produced a book. B. Author and Authority In the Middle Ages, auctor became etymologically and figuratively linked to two important ideas: authenticity and authority. The significance of the first in authorship can be seen in the development of the third term author, which was used along with auctor and actor to denote authorship. With its clear etymological links to authenticity (authenticus), author highlights the believability and trustworthiness of the author and his work. Despite what may seem to us to be simple and arbitrary variations in spelling, medieval grammarians were quite intentional in their use of the terms auctor, author, and actor (Chenu, “Auctor, Actor, Autor”). The second foundational idea, authority (auctoritas), is also noteworthy for understanding the conception of the author in the Middle Ages. Like auctor, the etymology of the term auctoritas also develops in a metonymic fashion. Deriving from the juridic act described above, auctoritas initially stands for the guarantee – the mark of trust – between the respective parties. An auctoritas is technically a specific quotation from the work of an auctor; in the larger sense, it is the quality of authoritativeness which imbues the writings of an individual auctor. The dignity ascribed to auctoritas, infused in the Middle Ages with theological ideals and language, soon extends first to the person himself and then to his actions, and thus to his writing and the text itself. This early transposition of legitimacy from the person to the written text in the etymological development of both auctor and auctoritas reveals a

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blurring of the two, so that auctores possess both authority and authenticity; they were, by traditional definition, the ancient and trusted authorities. The auctores were, then, ancient rather than contemporary; indeed, in the 13th century Roger Bacon was outraged at the authoritative status accorded to his contemporaries Albert the Great and Alexander of Hales (Gérard Paré, Le Roman de la Rose et la scolastique courtoise [1941] 23–25). Moreover, the term auctores itself referred as much to authoritative writers as to their writings (and the commentary tradition associated with them). As a result, the most authoritative writings are Scriptural, the first and principal author, God himself. For Bonaventure (d. 1275), for example, God was the source of authority and inspiration for the human author (Bonaventure in Friedrich Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi [1950–; hereafter RBMA], t. 2, 1777). C. The Canon of Authors The typical course of study required the study of the auctores, even in the early Middle Ages (Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 [1994]). Each area of study had auctores specific to their discipline: Priscian and Donatus for grammar; Cicero for rhetoric; Galen for medicine, for example (Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages [1984], 13). While scholars have identified three paradigmatic types of academic prologue analyzing the auctores (R. W. Hunt, “Introduction to the Artes in the Twelfth Century,” Studia medievalia in honorem R.M. Martin, O.P. [1948], 85–112; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 15–28), it is clear that one (identified by Hunt as “C”), predominated. In this type of prologue, the student or commentator would treat, sequentially, the title of the work, the author’s name and his intention, the subject-matter of the work as well as its methodology, organization, and utility, and finally, the discipline to which the work belonged. Faced with Scriptural texts, this type of prologue had to be modified somewhat: the human auctor was clearly less important than the Biblical truth and authority he related (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 40–72). Nevertheless, the commentary tradition of the accessus ad auctores in the 12th century did entail the study of authorial intention, which anticipates the increasing interest in the multiple roles inherent to authorship later in the Middle Ages. In the 13th century, the Aristotelian scheme of the four “causes” created different, more complex levels of authorship. As a result, it is not uncommon to see a doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled understanding of “author” in the High Middle Ages (Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. [1941; 1983], 296–98; id. “A Commentary on Isaias by Guerric of St.

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Quentin, O. P.,” Studi e Testi 121 [1946]: 383–97. See also Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 75–84). To take but one example: the duplex causa efficiens ascribes two levels of authorship: divine (moving) and human (operating), so that such a writer as Robert Holcot (d. 1349) views the author of the Book of Wisdom as dual: firstly Wisdom itself (i. e. God), and secondly the wise Solomon; Nicholas of Lyre (d. 1349) too names God and Hieronymus as the first and second authors of Ecclesiastes (See Robert Holcot in RBMA, t. 5, 7416; Nicholas of Lyre in RBMA, t. 4, 5871). If human authorial activity was secondary relative to God, medieval exegetes nevertheless found the myriad human facets of textual production noteworthy. Medieval commentators analyzed both the literary and moral activity of the human author (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 94–112). Indeed, although Bonaventure saw God as the foremost author, his description of the four ways to make a book, contained in the prologue to his commentary of Peter Lombard’s Libri sententiarum, clearly distinguishes multiple authorial roles in the production of the text: he names author, scribe, compiler, and commentator (Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi Proemio 4, Quest. 4 in Opera Theologica Selecta, ed. L.M. Bello [1934–1964], vol. 1, 12). The multiplying of authors apparent in Bonaventure’s prologue also suggests that medieval authorship can be considered as a collation of authorial identities. In fact, for Bonaventure an author was someone who, while incorporating others’ words as confirmation, used primarily his own words (Bonaventure, Commentaria Proemio 4, Quest. 4). This notion of an authorial collatio of material had the practical function of blurring the boundaries between authors, allowing a medieval exegete to construct his authorship from the reworking of others’ works, which he collated into a new composition (Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture [1990], 199). In addition, the authorship of an individual writer was also determined by the generic and disciplinary categories attributed to his work. In other words, a medieval author drew authority from the type of text he composed, rather than simply the materia he collated Bernard of Utrecht (ca. 1080), for example, categorizes authorship according to the different types of writing and texts, distinguishing authors from poets, prophets, and commentators (Bernard d’Utrecht, Commentum in Theodolum, in Accessus ad auctores; Bernard d’Utrecht; Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens [1970], 27–37). Similarly, Conrad of Hirsau (d. 1150) begins his Dialogus super auctores with the different categorizations of literature, indicating how different types of writing had different kinds of authors (Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus super auctores, in Accessus

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ad auctores; Bernard d’Utrecht; Conrad d’Hirsau, ed. R. B. C. Huygens [1970], 44–59, 133–49). D. The Author in the Later Middle Ages In the later Middle Ages, the transposition of legitimacy from the person to the written text offered writers an elastic definition of literary authority. Because authority could be attributed to a literary text as well as to the person responsible for its composition, in the later medieval period we see the possibility that auctoritas, whether person or text, at times resided outside the standard, exegetical conception. Indeed, even theological citations of authority were heterogeneous, and at times dialectical or simply ornamental (Chenu, Toward Understanding, 133). As Alan de Lille so vividly describes, “an authority has a wax nose, which means that it can be bent into taking on different meanings” (Alan de Lille, De fide catholica, li. I, c. 30 in PL 210, 333A). The flexibility in the citation of authorities is yet another indication of the inherent elasticity in the medieval concept of authorship. The medieval definition of author was, then, even for the Latin exegetical author, pliable, and vernacular authors of the 13th and 14th centuries make good use of the malleability and elasticity of the Latin conception of authorship. Translation becomes an important site and concept for vernacular authorship. Indeed, translatio literally and figuratively provokes a powerful shift, so that a vernacular translation, and its vernacular author, may displace and appropriate the authority of its Latin model (Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts [1991]). If translatio, auctoritas, and conjointure appear as critical modes of cultural transmission, they become the tools by which auctoritas may itself be transferred (Daniel Poirion, “Ecriture et ré-écriture au moyen âge,” Littérature 41 [Feb. 1941]: 109–18). The prose vidas (lives of the troubadours) and razos (reasons for composing specific songs), which provide biographical and often legendary details of the lives of the troubadours, serve as vernacular counterparts to the Latin accessus ad auctores (William E. Burgwinkle, Razos and troubadour songs [1990]). Similarly, Boccaccio posits such a contemporary writer as Dante (secular, contemporary, writing often in the vernacular), as an auctor: his short treatise in praise of Dante in the 14th century clearly draws on the model of Latin authorship, but translates this concept for a contemporary and vernacular audience (Trattatello in laude di Dante in Giovanni Boccaccio, Opere, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci, vol. 3 [1965]). The idea that vernacular writers can attain auctoritas is an important and influential shift in the development of medieval authorship. Increasingly in the High Middle Ages, vernacular writers are considered to be auctores

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(Michelle Bolduc, The Medieval Poetics of Contraries [2006]). The troubadours, for example, are frequently cited as authoritative authors in numerous vernacular prose works (Françoise Veilliard, “Auteur et autorité dans la littérature occitane médiévale non lyrique,” Auctor et auctoritas, 375–89; Michelle Bolduc, “Naming Names: Matfre Ermengaud’s Use of Troubadour Quotations,” Tenso: Bulletin de la société Guilhem IX 22:1–2 [2007]: 41–74). In fact, vernacular writers of the later Middle Ages often turn to other vernacular writers as models of authorship, a relationship that has been described as a literary genealogy by more than a few scholars. Christine de Pizan, for example, legitimizes her authorial voice by placing it within a literary genealogy which derives, but which is also demarcated, from Jean de Meun and Dante (Kevin Brownlee, “Le moi lyrique et la généalogie littéraire: Christine de Pizan et Dante dans le Chemin de long estude,” Musique naturele: Interpretationen zur französischen Lyrik des Spätmittelalters, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel [1995], 105–39). This type of authoritative vernacular genealogy also produces the concomitant notion of vernacular authorship as continuation: numerous writers continue “unfinished” vernacular works, and thus create the innovative identity of the author-continuator: witness Jean de Meun as the author-continuator of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose (David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose [1986]). E. Visualizing the Author Throughout the Middle Ages, authorship has a strong visual aspect. Portraits of the evangelists as authors at work appear in even early manuscripts of the Gospels, such as the Lindesfarne Gospels, and portraits of later authors, and particularly of Dante holding the Commedia, appear with singular frequency. Painting an author surrounded by books becomes in the Middle Ages a favorite iconographic trope; indeed, the image of a table of books itself becomes a visual marker of medieval authorship, just as the lily functions as an attribute of the Virgin Mary (Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France [1996], 103). Strikingly, author portraits appear regularly in vernacular codices, even in works composed by authors utterly unknown to us: the portrait of one Heldris of Cornüalle, “author” of the late 13th-century Roman de Silence, appears at the beginning of this unusual romance, and numerous portraits of Chaillou de Pesstain, author-continuator of the Roman de Fauvel, appear in the celebrated early 14th-century manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France fr. 146.

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F. History of Research Research on the medieval conception of authorship has been heavily influenced by trends in literary theory. In its definitions of “author”, modernity swings between two poles, moving from a perspective privileging the biographical, even autobiographical, influence of the author on the text, to a post-structuralist notion that the author is textually non-existent. Not surprisingly, scholarship on medieval authorship reflects these changing notions. In the first half of the 20th century, under the influence of the Saussurian textual web, scholars tended to deemphasize medieval authorship: certain scholars saw an author’s self-naming as simply an aspect of the humility topos, a gesture of intercession in which the author prays readers and God for forgiveness (Julius Schwietering, “The Origins of the Humility Formula,” PMLA 69.5 [December 1954]: 1279–91). Others viewed the use of the narrative first person “I” as an expression of a universal rather than individual subject (Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22). Others still considered authorial selfnaming as dependent upon genre, and enumerated numerous appearances of the author’s name appearing in medieval texts, especially those of the 12th century (Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [1948; 1953], 515–18). More recently, postmodern schools of thought have had widespread influence on scholarship of authorship in the Middle Ages. Certain postmodern theories have pushed the author from a linguistic figure to a trace, or for Barthes, a non-existent entity. Foucault’s famous essay, “What is an Author?” posits, for example, that medieval authorship was discursive, and thus unnamed and absent; he sees traces of a pre-modern but still dialogic authorial agent only in scientific texts (Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert et al. [1994], vol. 1. 789–821). Despite Barthes’s claim that the author is dead, postmodern theories of authorship and the nature of texts have nevertheless been fruitful lenses through which to view authorship in medieval literature. Postmodern theories have easily lent themselves to the creation of the idea of author as textual figure. For example, the influence of Barthesian and Derridean thought – that the meaning(s) of a text extends beyond any authorial intention, the importance of which is denied (Roland Barthes, “La Mort de l’auteur” Le bruissement de la langue, [1984]; trans. Richard Howard as “The Death of the Author” in The Rustle of Language [1986], 49–55; Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la difference, [1967]; trans. Alan Bass as Writing and Difference [1978]) – finds a counterpart in Paul Zumthor’s seminal concept of “mouvance”

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(Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale [1972]; “De la circularité du chant,” Poétique 2 [1970]: 129–40). “Mouvance” describes the understanding of the fluidity of meaning compelled by the myriad and often disparate versions of medieval texts in a manuscript world. Further, the deconstructive notions of the trace and the signature have had influence on recent scholarship on medieval authorship (Laura Kendrick, Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance [1999]; Laurence De Looze, “Signing off in the Middle Ages: Medieval Textuality and Strategies of Authorial Self-Naming,” Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Alger N. Doane and Carol B. Pasternack [1991], 162–82; Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern [2002], 40–73). The postmodern idea that the meaning of any particular text derives not from the author but rather from the ever-changing relationship between text and reader has also found expression in the many new semantic terms to describe the reader of a medieval text as its re-creator, including Carruthers’ “re-author” and Cerquiglini’s “récriture” (Carruthers, Book of Memory; Jacqueline Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle [1985]; John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor [1994], 22–24; see also Roger Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt [1989], 154–75; and id. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer [1995]). Despite the influence of various theories and the plethora of disparate ideas, there are two seminal works on the author in the Middle Ages: MarieDominique Chenu’s relatively brief but foundational “Auctor, Actor, Autor,” and Alastair Minnis’s comprehensive The Medieval Theory of Authorship. Chenu’s work argues for an etymological understanding of the root word “author,” and provides a lexical history of the use of the related terms “author,” “authority,” and “authentic” from the Romans through the Middle Ages. Minnis, on the other hand, examines the glosses and commentaries on the authoritative Latin writers studied in medieval schools and universities. Minnis argues that these prologues are useful for understanding medieval literary theory, particularly, the literary theory particular to the Middle Ages that was based on the related notions of auctor and auctoritas. Other scholarship has taken a generic approach to medieval authorship. Although the term ‘autobiography’ itself is a 19th-century neologism, autobiography has been a useful generic category for understanding medieval narratives and lyrics that utilize the first-person personal pronoun “I,” and thus, such related notions as authorship and subjectivity. Despite the

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weight of historical uncertainty which, as Paul Zumthor claims, prevents most medieval narratives from being considered autobiographical (Paul Zumthor, “Autobiography in the Middle Ages?” Genre 6.1 [March 1973]: 29–48), scholars have nevertheless used autobiography as a model to underscore medieval subjectivity, both grammatical and psychological (Eugene Vance, “Augustine’s Confesssions and the Grammar of Selfhood,” Genre 6.1 [March 1973]: 1–28; Albrecht Classen, “Autobiography as a Late Medieval Phenomenon,” Medieval Perspectives 3.1 [Spring 1988]: 89–104; see also his monograph Autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters [1991]; Evelyn Birge Vitz, “Type et individu dans l’autobiographie médiévale,” Poétique 24 [1975]: 426–45). Others, developing a new category based on autobiography, namely the pseudo-autobiography, have usefully explored the ambiguity and conflation of authorial and narrative voices (Lawrence De Looze, Pseudo-autobiography in the fourteenth century: Juan Ruiz, Guillaume de Machaut, and Geoffrey Chaucer [1997]). In addition, many scholars in the last two decades have made compelling arguments for the association between authorship and subjectivity, most especially in terms of medieval lyric (Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages [2004]; Olivia Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book [2000]; Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry [1990]; Michel Zink, La subjectivité littéraire autour du siècle de St. Louis [1985]). Just as the medieval notion of the auctores expanded in the High Middle Ages to include new categories of authorship, many recent studies of medieval literature propose expanding the modern canon of revered authors, so as to include women and spiritual and mystic writers alongside such icons as Jean de Meun and Dante (e. g., Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority [2004]; Julia Dietrich, “Women and Authority in the Rhetorical Economy of the Late Middle Ages,” Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations, ed. Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles [2005], 21–43; Maureen Quilligan, “The Name of the Author: Self-Representation in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames,” Exemplaria 4:1 [Spring 1992]: 201–28; Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the invention of authority [1991]) even when the relationship between subjectivity, agency, and authority is shown to be problematic (Sara Beckwith, “Problems of Authority in Late Medieval Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 4:1 [Spring 1992]: 171–99). Queer theory has also invited new perspectives on medieval authorship: in one instance suggesting that the influence of Aristotelian causality on the accessus ad auctores instituted a heterosexual normativity on the concept of authorial activity (Susan Schibanoff, “Sodomy’s Mark: Alan of Lille, Jean

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de Meun, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger [2001], 28–56). And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the notion of the author as textual has compelled an increasing awareness of the importance of consulting manuscripts rather than relying upon editions. Scholars of medieval literature now often focus on authorship in terms of manuscript codicology, especially compilation and rubrication (John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading; David Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies; Sylvia Huot, “‘Ci parle l’aucteur’: The Rubrication of Voice and Authorship in Roman de la Rose Manuscripts,” Substance 56 [1988]: 42–48; Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry [1987], among others). Our understanding of the author in the Middle Ages is, as we have seen, often influenced by contemporary notions of authorship and textuality. The recent attention to codicological evidence seems to be a very fruitful avenue of current research on the topic. For in the Middle Ages, writers and book makers were intensely interested in the creation, preservation, and reception of authorship: the auctores represented not only tradition, authority, and Truth, but also, because of the inherent malleability of the paradigm, a flexible model for innovative types of literary authority, secular and vernacular. Select Bibliography Marie-Dominique Chenu, “Auctor, Actor, Autor,” Bulletin du Cange: Archivium Latinitatis Medii Aevi 3 (1927): 81–86; Alastair J. Minnis, “The Author’s Two Bodies? Authority and Fallibility in Late-Medieval Textual Theory,” Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers: Essays presented to M.B. Parkes, ed. P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), 259–79; Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar, 1984); Marjorie Reeves, “The Bible and Literary Authorship in the Middle Ages,” Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. Stephen Prickett (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 12–63; the essays in Auctor et auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale. Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université de Versailles-SaintQuentin en Yvelines, 14–16 juin 1999, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 2001); and the essays in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Hanover, NH: Published for Dartmouth College by University Press of New England, 1989).

Michelle Bolduc

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B The Body A. General Definition Defined narrowly, the body is the material organism, parts, and physical properties that comprise the human physical form. But a definition of the body should also include how cultural, social, political, and historical influences control, restrict, and define the physical body. The body is socially constructed through a variety of media such as language and images, making it a product of discourse. As a cultural construct, the body can be interpreted, which means it is not a singular concept, but a plural one, reflecting an endless array of bodies at any given point in history. The body is a historical object, subject, and process; it represents a source of knowledge about the everchanging image of the self and society (Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols., ed. Michel Feher et al., 1989; The Body, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, 2005, 1–42). This aspect of the body includes the Middle Ages insofar as the depiction of the body is found in a wide variety of sources such as literary and non-literary texts, images, coins, seals, sculptures, and tapestries. Documents from the Middle Ages offer a glimpse into medieval perceptions of the body as compared to and in continuity with today, revealing how central the body is to identity, whether as the site for cultural norms or the marginalized Other on the basis of age, race, class, sexuality, or gender (Fremdkörper, Fremde Körper, Körperfremde, ed. Burkhardt Krause, 1992). The medieval court and church, for instance, used the symbolic and metaphorical function of the body to maintain their social authority (Joachim Bumke, “Höfischer Körper – Höfische Kultur,” Modernes Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1994, 67–102; Harald Kleinschmidt, “The Body,” Understanding the Middle Ages, 2000, 62–88). The medieval body was communicative and performative; it was an important medium of cultural and ideological expression. By analyzing the depiction of medieval bodies, one can gain insight into medieval social mores, customs, rituals, behavior, gestures, sexuality, gender roles, physical ideals, religious beliefs, ethics, and attitudes towards health and disease (Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 1994; The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton, 2000).

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B. Seminal Research Reference works like the Lexikon des Mittelalters and Dictionary of the Middle Ages do not offer entries on the “body,” although both do discuss a central theological issue of the Middle Ages, the relationship between the body and soul (see also Karen Gloy, “Leib und Seele,” TRE, vol. 20, ed. Gerhard Müller, 1990, 643–49). Early studies deal with body-related issues such as emotions, gestures, and social customs (Carol K. Bang, “Emotions and Attitudes in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and Hartmann von Aue’s Êrec der Wunderaere,” PMLA 57 [1942]: 297–326; Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter, 1973; Dietmar Peil, Die Gebärde bei Chrétien, Hartmann und Wolfram, 1975; A History of Private Life, vol. 2, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 1988 [1985]), but it was not until the 1980s that the body became a specialized topic in Medieval Studies. Influential to the proliferation of body studies at this time was the pioneering work by Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1979 [1975]; The History of Sexuality, 1976–1984) and Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 2002 [1966]; Natural Symbols, 1970). Research on the body in the Middle Ages became popular when Caroline W. Bynum (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987), Peter Brown (The Body and Society, 1988), and Jacques Le Goff (“The Body,” The Medieval Imagination, 1988 [1985], 83–103) published their seminal studies. C. Rhetorical Tradition Scholars of rhetoric were the first to focus on the body. As Hennig Brinkmann showed in Zu Wesen und Form mittelalterlicher Dichtung (1928), the medieval poets of the high to late Middle Ages productively used the rhetorical strategies for describing the body developed in late antiquity (see also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1990 [1948]). This type of descriptio includes the formal portrait tradition, which typically depicts the body from head to toe, often with the aid of rhetorical devices such as simile, metonymy, or synecdoche (Alice Colby, The Portrait in TwelfthCentury French Literature, 1965). In this tradition the body became a medium by which the medieval poets portrayed social types and propagated cultural ideals, often exalting the nobility, particularly through the beauty of the courtly lady (Puella bella, ed. Rüdiger Krüger, 1986; Helmut Tervooren, “Schönheitsbeschreibung und Gattungsethik,” Schöne Frauen – Schöne Männer, ed. Theo Stemmler, 1988, 171–98). But descriptions of the body were not limited to beautiful bodies. The ideal medieval body was often contrasted with other less-valued bodies, thereby highlighting its societal worth (Henrik Specht, “The Beautiful, the Handsome, and the Ugly: Some Aspects of Character Portrayal in Medieval Literature,” Studia Neophilologica 56

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[1984]: 129–46; Wolfgang Brandt, “Die Beschreibung häßlicher Menschen,” GRM 35 [1985]: 257–78; Shulamith Shahar, “The Old Body in Medieval Culture,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 1994, 160–86). D. Metaphorical Function In the Middle Ages the physical body was a productive metaphor for social, political, religious, and cosmic order. Both the medieval church and state turned to the physical body to legitimate political and cultural power. As Ernst H. Kantorowicz demonstrates (The King’s Two Bodies, 1957), each cultural institution created body politics by transferring the Pauline notion of Christ’s two bodies to the pontiff or king, with the pope’s or king’s natural body embodying the church or state (see also Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 1993). John of Salisbury formulates this idea in his Policraticus (1159), describing medieval social hierarchy in anthropomorphic terms, whereby higher body parts are designated “noble” and lower limbs “common” members of the social body (Jacques Le Goff, “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages,” Fragments for a History, vol. 3, ed. Michel Feher et al., 1989, 13–26). Echoes of the body politic metaphor are also found in literary texts, often underscoring the importance of medieval ordo to the wellbeing of society (Scott E. Pincikowski, Bodies of Pain, 2002, 133–56), highlighting the significance of territory to the nobility’s sovereignty (Burkhardt Krause, “‘er enpfienc diu lant unt ouch die magt,’ die Frau, der Leib, das Land: Herrschaft und body politic im Mittelalter,” Verleiblichungen, ed. id. and Ulrich Scheck, 1996, 31–82), or emphasizing the role of the male body in the preservation of the body politic (D. Vance Smith, “Body Doubles: Producing the Masculine,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 1997, 3–19). The body as metaphor extended well beyond social bodies, and was commonly used in medieval cosmology and theology to explain the relationship of man to the universe and God (Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, 1975; Michael Camille, “The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 1994, 62–99). E. Demonstrative Function The body in medieval culture was an important medium for communicating social status and identity. As the contributors to Höfische Repräsentation (ed. Horst Wenzel and Hedda Ragotzky, 1990) and Gerd Althoff (“Demonstration und Inzenierung,” Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 1997 [1993]; id., Die Inszenierte Herrschaft, 2003) have demonstrated, non-verbal com-

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municative strategies were integral to medieval self-representation, political authority, and rule of law (Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, “Gebärdensprache im mittelalterlichen Recht,” FMSt 16 [1982]: 363–79). These strategies were symbolic in nature, requiring the courtly individual to master a wide range of performative behaviors such as gestures and rituals (Dietmar Peil, Die Gebärde bei Chrétien, Hartmann und Wolfram, 1975; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison de gestes dans l’Occident médiéval, 1990; Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale, 2003), which were important to ceremony but also communicated emotions such as anger, love, mourning, and happiness (A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 1991; Anger’s Past, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein, 1998). Whatever the context, however, the members of the court scrutinized the courtly individual’s outward appearance, behavior, and visibility in the public sphere, which explains the importance of visual and audio perception to the maintenance of the nobility’s political hegemony (Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, 1995; for a more general study on vision and the body see Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 2002). The sociologist Norbert Elias also deserves mention here. In his Civilizing Process (1997 [1939]), he posits that civilized societies require the refined and disciplined training of the body (for critical reevaluations of Elias’s work see Norbert Elias und die Menschenwissenschaften, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, 1996; Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 1997; Michael Hinz, Der Zivilisationsprozess: Mythos oder Realität?, 2002). A number of studies have deciphered the signification system of the courtly individual’s body, showing that its demonstrative function also included its physical extensions and outlining how the nobility set themselves apart from other social groups through hair style, weaponry, coat of arms, and clothing (Evan J. Jones, Medieval Heraldry, 1983 [1943]; Gabriele Raudszus, Die Zeichensprache der Kleidung, 1985; Jane E. Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 2002). Central to this methodology is the idea that medieval society was transitioning from an oral- to a written-based culture in the high Middle Ages. This idea explains why the demonstrative function of the physical body and the audio-visual strategies of noble representation were recreated in a large number of chronicles, courtly romances, love lyrics, and heroic epics (see the essays in ‘Aufführung’ und ‘Schrift,’ ed. Jan-Dirk Müller, 1994, 141–316). The noble body, therefore, existed in a multimedial cultural matrix that relied on the staging of its representational authority in speech, texts, and images (Haiko Wandhoff, Der epische Blick, 1996; Horst Wenzel, Höfische Repräsentation, 2005).

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F. Religious Function The physical body is as communicative in the religious context as it is in the secular, possessing symbolism that underscores medieval religious beliefs regarding damnation and salvation. According to theology of the high to late Middle Ages, the individual consisted of two bodies, a physical one and a second “soul body” that occupied the first. Moreover, the condition of the physical body closely reflected the condition of the soul, with physical suffering and disease indicating sin and moral decay (Peter Dinzelbacher and Rolf Sprandel, “Körper und Seele: Mittelalter,” Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher, 1993, 159–79), an idea that also found resonance in the spectacle of medieval punishment (Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen, ed. Klaus Schreiner and Norbert Schnitzler, 1992; Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 1999). Paradoxically, physical pain was also considered a productive means by which the sinner could pursue repentance and redemption of the soul. For instance, Job’s patient embrace of his leprous suffering held a prominent position in the medieval cultural imagination (Saul N. Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 1974; Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 1979). Indeed, as Giles Constable (Attitudes toward Self-inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages, 1982), Caroline W. Bynum (Holy Feast, 1987), and Piero Camporesi (The Incorruptible Flesh, 1988) have shown, ascetics, mystics, and martyrs turned to physical pain to express devotion to God, expiate sins, and express spiritual joy in the search for salvation. Hagiography attests to the medieval belief that the painful discipline of the body, including fasting, flagellation, hermitage, and pilgrimage, purified the corrupt body of the sinner. Central to this belief was the veneration of Christ through self-mortification, the practice of imitatio Christi (Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 1984). The medieval belief in the power of the body to redeem the sinner also finds expression in the cult of relics. In this tradition, the body parts of saints were enshrined in reliquaries so that the religious community could profit from the saints’ supernatural power after death (Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints, 1975; Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra, 1990 [1978]; Arnold Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien, 1994). The fundamental reason for the immense amount of cultural energy medieval society spent on the body and pain was the overriding concern with the individual’s fate at death and in the afterlife (Caroline W. Bynum, “Why all the Fuss about the Body?: A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 [1995]: 1–33). As the contributors to Last Things (ed. Caroline W. Bynum and Paul Freedman, 2000) have illustrated, medieval imaginations of the resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the afterlife were realized in physical terms.

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The medieval individual’s concerns and hopes were explored through a wide variety of texts and images, all offering the Christian three different eschatological choices for the somatomorphic soul: the cathartic suffering of purgatory, the fiery torments of hell, or the eternal bliss of heaven (see also Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 1984 [1981]; Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven, 1988, 69–110; Caroline W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 1995). G. Gendering the Body Medieval society considered woman to be an imperfect man. This belief was grounded in theology and science, which associated women with the irrational weaknesses of the flesh and men with the rational strength of the soul (Vern L. Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views toward Women,” Viator 4 [1973]: 485–501; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 1990; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 1993). Medieval images and texts often construct an image of the female body as Other, a means by which male identity could be fashioned by contrasting it to the inferior woman. Because of this othering, female identity was essentialized, whether as a beautiful and exalted object of desire or as a site of male anxieties, as Joan M. Ferrante (Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, 1975), Margaret R. Miles (Carnal Knowing, 1989) and the contributors to Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, 1993) have shown. But even with essentializing views of medieval women that propagated limited female gender roles such as mother, wife, healer, and mourner (Marty N. Williams and Anne Echols, Between Pit and Pedestal, 1994), the female body could communicate other things that at least appeared to conform to how the male gaze wanted to perceive it. Caroline W. Bynum, for instance, has shown how female ascetics created body symbolism that adhered to their gender roles, affording them enough agency to show devotion physically and imitate Christ on their own terms (Holy Feast, 1987; id., “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the later Middle Ages,” Fragments for a History, vol. 1, ed. Michel Feher et al., 1989, 174–219; id., Fragmentation and Redemption, 1991). Kathleen Biddick has criticized Bynum’s approach as naturalizing in itself (“Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible,” Speculum 68 [1993]: 389–418; see also Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Views of Women and Female Spirituality in Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings”, Feminist Approaches, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, 1993, 142–67), which has led to more radical readings of the female body. As E. Jane Burns (Bodytalk, 1993) has argued, the female body may actually “talk” out of turn, creating bodily subtexts that break female

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silence within patriarchal-dominated narratives (also see the essays in Gender and Text, “Speaking the Body,” ed. Jane Chance, 1996, 237–330). The study of masculinity is essential to rethinking female gender and fully understanding medieval gender, a point Allen J. Frantzen has argued (“When Women Aren’t Enough,” Speculum 68 [1993]: 445–71). Research on medieval manhood in literature has not, like earlier studies, simply focused on masculinity in isolation, but has explored how the relationship between male and female gender fashions male identity (Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley, 1999). This focus has reconfirmed male gender attributes such as aggression and heroism, while recovering other, less-studied images of medieval masculinity: the bachelor, castrate, confessor, and husband (Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees et al., 1994; Susan Tuchel, Kastration im Mittelalter, 1998). Moreover, as the essays in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, 1997) have highlighted, medieval masculinity is not singular or static, but represents a process of becoming predicated upon changing notions of male sexuality, social status, and the Other, whether that otherness is based upon gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or homosexuality (also see the essays in “The Construction of Manhood in Arthurian Literature,” The Arthurian Yearbook 3 [1993]: 173–225; Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities, ed. Jacqueline Murray, 1999; Ruth M. Karras, From Boys to Men, 2003). Approaches that emphasize the instability of either masculinity or femininity were made possible by Judith Butler’s seminal study, Gender Trouble (1990), which introduced the idea that gender is not fixed to the sexed body, but rather is something individuals “perform,” consisting of behavior that adheres to or subverts cultural notions of masculinity and femininity (for a groundbreaking work on this process in courtly literature see James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality, 2006). Indeed, many studies have shown how medieval gender roles were variable and unstable (see Genderdiskurse und Körperbilder: Eine Bilanzierung nach Butler und Laqueur, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz and Ingrid Kasten, 2002), revealing that what is publicly seen is often planned in private or secretly staged (Joan Ferrante, “Public Postures, Private Maneuvers: Roles Medieval Women Play,” Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, 1988, 213–29; Horst Wenzel, “Geheimnis und Gender,” Höfische Repräsentation, 2005, 246–92). The frequency of cross-dressing in medieval texts attests to the fact that medieval society, in literature at least, considered the possibilities that gender performance afforded both men and women (Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Cross Dressing and Social Status in the Middle Ages,” Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, 1993, 45–73;

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Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man, 1996; Manlîchiu wîp, wîplîch man, ed. Ingrid Bennewitz and Helmut Tervooren, Beihefte zur ZfdPh 9 [1999]; Erika E. Hess, Literary Hybrids, 2004). H. Queering the Body Similar concerns inform the queer study of the body. As the essays in Queering the Middle Ages (ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, 2001) demonstrate, queer theory reacts against the heteronormative bias of traditional scholarship, attempting to recover excluded bodies that existed outside of accepted medieval and modern sexual categories. For example, in the same volume Michael Camille (57–86) examined how past scholarship “erased” the homosexual body in Dante’s work. Whether as a result of intolerant research or not, part of the difficulty of analyzing medieval homosexuality is that it was not recognized as a concept in the Middle Ages and was designated a “silent” and heretical sin against nature (Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 1997; Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Sodom und Gomorrha, 2001 [1998]). Queer scholarship therefore locates moments in which homoeroticism and same-sex desire, ranging from affection to sexual acts, might be discernible in texts and images. This interpretative move has opened up readings of texts and images that resist the heteronormative view of the Middle Ages (Bruce W. Holsinger, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,” Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 1996, 243–74; for a critical response to such approaches see Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet, 1998). As Richard E. Zeikowitz has shown, homoerotic desire is often an integral component of chivalry in late medieval literature (Homoeroticism and Chivalry, 2003). For his part, Tison Pugh (Queering Medieval Genres, 2004) has argued that the queer, although not disruptive to the dominant ideology of medieval Christianity, is often found just under the surface of narratives in medieval genres like lyric, the fabliaux, tragedy, and Arthurian romance (see also Anna Kłosowska, Queer Love, 2005). And for Carolyn Dinshaw queer theory endeavors to collapse historical difference, partially connecting medieval and modern homosexuals (“Chaucer’s Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer,” Exemplaria 7 [1995]: 75–92; id., Getting Medieval, 1999). As Robert Mills argues (Suspended Animation, 2005), this involves studying unorthodox body-related topics like hanging, flaying, and sodomy through modern concepts such as pornography and masochism. He emphasizes that, like gender, the concept of the Middle Ages may be unstable and plural and could include subversive forms of medieval queer identities (see also Carolyn Dinshaw, “Getting Medieval: Pulp Fiction, Gawain, Foucault,” The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores W. Frese

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and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 1997, 116–63; Rhonda Knight, “Procreative Sodomy: Textuality and the Construction of Ethnicities in Gerald of Wale’s Descriptio Kambriae,” Exemplaria 14 [2002]: 47–77). Select Bibliography Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols., ed. Michel Feher et al. (New York: Zone Books, 1989); Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

Scott Pincikowski

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C Chivalry A. Definition and Usage Although the French term for knight (chevalier) is quite tangible, the abstraction “chevalerie” and its English counterpart, “chivalry”, belong to that category of medieval constructs that were, and remain, nebulous in meaning. Modern scholarship has tended to adopt three relatively specific definitions of “chivalry” from medieval sources. Thus, the word can refer to 1) the martial skills necessary for mounted combat, 2) the social group possessing these skills (“those who fight,” or the bellatores of Gerard of Cambrai), or 3) the rules and ideals governing the behavior of that social group. “Chevalerie,” which overlaps but does not occupy the semantic space of the English term, has traditionally tended towards the second definition. Many scholars working on the subject tend to focus on the third definition of chivalry, the ideal, as a means of understanding the motivations of the group to whom those ideals belonged. B. The 18th and 19th Centuries Studies of chivalry in the 18th and 19th centuries tended to possess three separate traits. Firstly, they were often produced by writers, poets, or translators. Secondly, they would romanticize the subject, using the imagined ethos of the Christian warrior as a yardstick against which to measure the failures of the contemporary world. Finally, early scholarship was traditionally divided along national or contemporary political lines. In one of the earliest British examples, Richard Hurd (“Letters on Chivalry and Romance,” Moral and Political Dialogues with Letters on Chivalry and Romance, vol. 3 [1788]) set the birth of chivalry in 1066 in France. Hurd described chivalry as a European social system necessitated by the violence of the feudal state and characterized by “the splendour of equipages” and “the pride they took in redressing wrongs” to name but two traits (203–04). An exception to the general standards of early scholarship, Sir Walter Scott’s well-known “An Essay on Chivalry” (first published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1818; also found in On Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama [1834]: 1–126), is both wide-ranging in its treatment of Continental sources, and relatively objective in its analysis

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(cf. Peter D. Garside, “Scott, the Romantic Past, and the Nineteenth Century,” The Review of English Studies 6 [1972]: 147–61; for a general analysis of early conceptions of chivalry, see Michèle Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44 [2005]: 312–29). More in line with national studies is William P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1896), who saw chivalry as a creation born of romance’s supplanting of epic. Like Hurd, Ker argued that the romance as a genre did not exist before the Battle of Hastings. One of the earliest voices to criticize chivalry was that of Charles Plummer, who, in his edition of Sir John Fortescue’s The Governance of England (1885), referred to the late Middle Ages as a period of “pseudo-chivalry” (15) which adopted chivalric ritual and code to mask a darker brutality. Despite Plummer’s work, the romantic vision of chivalry remained quite popular in England until after the First World War. France’s greatest contribution to the field in the 19th century was Léon Gautier’s La Chevalerie (1884), a text that contributed greatly to the popular modern conception of chivalry. Although a work which provides a wideranging appraisal of earlier scholarship, Gautier’s work has also been recognized for its failure to consider the historical record objectively despite the author’s background as a paleographer and editor of medieval texts. Gautier explicitly discounts much of the Arthurian canon as well as any discussion of courtly love, preferring to focus on what he saw as pure expressions of chivalry, the chansons de geste and Germanic warrior ethos. According to his thesis, the foundations of chivalry were the Germanic heroes of old, an ancient and noble warrior class. Additionally, Gautier stressed an egalitarianism and holiness within chivalry that was not based on any historical material, but rather on his own impressions of the period. This bias is most clear in his systemization of chivalry, a unified ethos that he believed spanned cultures and centuries, as in his “La Code de Chevalerie” (For a further discussion of Gautier’s biases, see Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, “Modern Views of Medieval Chivalry,” The Study of Chivalry, ed. Howell Chickering and Thomas H. Seiler, 1988, 41–89). In opposition to Gautier’s theory of an ancient chivalric lineage, Paul Guihiermoz (Essai sur l’Origine de la Noblesse en France au Moyen Age, 1902) traced the origins of the knightly class to Roman roots rather than Germanic ones, seeing the barbarian mercenaries to the emperor, the body of men surrounding the Merovingian kings, and the cavalrymen and vassals of the Carolingians as predecessors to the knightly nobility of the High and Late Middle Ages. Guihiermoz’s theory was quite influential, with adherents such as Maurice Powicke (“The Angevin Administration of Normandy,” EHR 21 [1906]: 625–49 and 22 [1907]: 15–42)

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and Charles H. Haskins (“Knight-Service in Normandy in the Eleventh Century,” EHR 22 [1907]: 636–49, among others). Germany and Italy, both of which experienced the codification of a chivalric ethos somewhat later than either France or England, also produced comparatively less on the subject in the 19th century. Franz Kottenkamp (Der Rittersaal: Eine Geschichte des Ritterthums, seines Entstehens und Fortgangs, seiner Gebräuche und Sitten, 1842), a scholar of English literature, produced one of the first German-language studies of chivalry and, much like his French and British counterparts, tended to focus on evidence of tournaments and other ritualized performances to create a highly organized evolution of the ideal. In 1878, the Italian poet and scholar Giosuè Carducci (“I trovatori e la cavalleria,” Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Giosuè Carducci, vol. 9, ed. id., 1943, 19–47) had begun his own systemization of chivalry, tending to criticize what he saw as a harmful Germanic individualism contrary to the Italian communal ideal (cf. Julius Giuntoni, “The Reaction of Giosuè Carducci to Romanticism,” Italica 8 [1931]: 9–12). Unlike Gautier, Carducci was interested in the themes of courtly love and the romance tradition, a theme he developed in “Galanterie cavalleresche del secolo XII e XIII” (Nuova Antologia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2 [1885], 5–24). C. The First and Second World Wars The interwar period produced a number of notable studies on chivalry, including a collection edited by Edgar Prestage, Chivalry: A Series of Studies to Illustrate its Historical Significance and Civilizing Influence (1928), which still serves as an excellent primer to the critical debates of the period, discussing both historical and literary records from across Europe, as well as addressing the conclusions of Gautier and Ker. The most influential study by far of this period was Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen [1919] (translated into English as The Waning of the Middle Ages by Frederick Hopman in 1924; see the entry under Figures). Perhaps influenced by the high-minded attitudes of war and battle he witnessed in his own time, Huizinga was highly critical of not only the chivalric ideal, but indeed many of the formalized structures of the later Middle Ages, which he argued were designed to mask the pessimism and fierce violence of the period (for a fuller analysis of Huizinga and his works see Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages,” Speculum 74 [1999]: 587–620). Although such practices seemed to be signs of a despairing civilization to Huizinga, his research, which viewed chivalry through an art-historical lens, set the pace for much of the scholarship to come after him. Huizinga accepted Gautier’s thesis that chivalry evolved

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from earlier heroic ideals, but also stressed that this warrior ideals like chivalry were not exclusive to Europe, but could be found throughout the world, the Japanese bushido being one example among many. Huizinga’s tendency towards the general came under criticism: he tended neither to differentiate between the Early and Late Middle Ages, nor between various cultures, and preferred description over explanation (cf. Robert Anchor, “History as Play: Johan Huizinga and His Critics,” History and Theory 17 [1978]: 63–93). Huizinga’s theory of decline was supported by Raymond L. Kilgour (The Decline of Chivalry as Shown in the French Literature of the Late Middle Ages, 1937). Kilgour, in a slightly more romantic view, brought into the mainstream the idea that a 12th- and 13th-century golden age of chivalry was supplanted by a 14th- and 15th-century decline (cf. Sidney Painter’s review of Kilgour’s text in Speculum 12 [1937]: 526–27). This line of scholarship was continued on into the Second World War by Kenneth Bruce McFarlane (“Bastard Feudalism,” BIHR 20 [1945]: 161–80), who, like his countrymen Plummer and Kilgour, argued that any chivalric ideal had faded by the 14th and 15th centuries, replaced by a capitalistic and mercenary attitude towards social bonds. While the situation was presented in rather bleak terms in the Low Countries and only slightly better in Britain, there were optimistic voices during this period as well. In Germany, Hans Naumann (Höfische Kultur, 1929; Deutsche Kultur im Zeitalter des Rittertums, 1938) insisted that a study of ideals need not require a record of failures to achieve them, and that chivalry was in many ways a unifying system that transcended the dualism inherent in spiritual and mundane goals. Meanwhile, the application of sociological method to historical study was promoted by Norbert Elias’s study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939, translated into English as The Civilizing Process by Edmund Jephcott in 1978). By tracing the history of etiquette and arguing for a general shift from outside influences on behavior (Fremdzwang) to interior selfcontrol (Selbstzwang), Elias’s work proved to be particularly important to the study of chivalry; Elias himself touched on the subject in describing an evolution of behavior through the Middle Ages. In his view, whereas in earlier times, knights determined social standing through individual combat, in later periods, the importance of social relations grew and the sanction of violent retribution reduced, thus leaving a courtier, dependent on a lord’s graces, battling verbally. Marc Bloch’s groundbreaking La société féodale (1939–1940) came out in the same year, and supported the theory that the noble class was created in the 11th and 12th centuries, and agreed with Guihiermoz in giving it Romanic, rather than Germanic, origins. As well, Bloch supported Elias’s conception of the Middle Ages as one lacking

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emotional restraint (for a further discussion of Bloch’s ideas see Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger,” Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein, 1998, 127–31). However, Elias’s work has found some criticism not fully addressing the limiting effects of chivalry, royal authority, and nationalistic pride, all of which were thought to be representative of growing attempts to channel aggression and emphasize self-control (see George Mosse’s review of Elias’s text in New German Critique 15 [1978]: 178–83, for one example). Additionally, in his efforts to trace an evolution of civility, Elias has been accused of not noting the many cases in which civility and violence can co-exist easily. Stephen Jaeger (The Origins of Courtliness, 1985), although an adherent to the construction of the civilizing process, has argued that the “mannering” of society took place in the late 10th and early 11th centuries; this view unintentionally rejects Elias’s evolutionary thesis by leaving the violence of the later medieval period unexplained. Daniela Romagnoli (“La courtoisie dans la ville: Un modèle complexe,” La ville et la cour: Des bonnes et des mauvaises manières, ed. Romagnoli, 1995, 25–87) argued against Elias’s theories by identifying courtly and mannered literature in the 6th century, and claimed that far from following a pattern of evolution, increases in civility of cultures follow a discontinuous path. The scholarly response to Elias’s work has been reviewed by Barbara Rosenwein (“Worrying about Emotions in History,” AHR 107 [2002]: 821–45), who, while identifying some of its problems, particularly its use of a rather simplistic timeline maintained that it was still useful for literary historians, who are more comfortable dealing with grand narrative generalities. Gerd Schwerhoff (“Zivilisationsprozeß und Geschichtswissenschaft: Norbert Elias’ Forschungsparadigma in historischer Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 266 [1998]: 561–605) has also written a longer study on the reaction to Elias; Schwerhoff provides a critical approach of his own, insisting on a critique of Elias through comparison with various historical social constructs, including chivalry, and observing that Elias was unable to see beyond his own negative view of the Middle Ages. Finally, Martin Dinges (“Formenwandel der Gewalt in der Neuzeit: Zur Kritik der Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias,” Kulturen der Gewalt, ed. Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger, 1998, 171–91), while agreeing on the datedness of his theory, also identified the importance of it in light of both the questions Elias raised, and the research he inspired. One of the first American contributions to the study of chivalry, Sidney Painter’s French Chivalry (1940), came out the next year. Painter’s text acted in many ways as an amalgam of the previous sixty years of scholarship. He followed in the footsteps of Gautier in producing a list of five virtues

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central to chivalry, and tending to portray a universal chivalric ideal across various cultures. He adopted some of the pessimism of Huizinga, claiming (antecedent to McFarlane) that the knight was often motivated by material gain, and that the later Middle Ages witnessed a tarnishing of a once golden ideal. Finally, in tracing an evolution through feudal, religious, and courtly chivalries, he accepted (though perhaps not directly) Elias’s theory on the development of external to internal social controls. D. Scholarship Following the Second World War Through the 1950s, little was produced to advance the study of chivalry, leaving the sense of a period of assimilation in light of the previous twenty years of scholarship. The subject was revisited only in 1960, with the publication of Arthur Ferguson’s The Indian Summer of English Chivalry. Ferguson expanded on Kilgour’s golden age thesis by claiming that 14th- and 15th-century criticisms of contemporary knighthood, particularly those of Malory and Caxton, were evidence not only of an earlier period of true chivalry, but also of an attempt to restore the ideal in their own time for the benefit of the English Commonwealth. Although Ferguson concluded that that these attempts to better society ultimately failed, his work remains in many ways a challenge of Huizinga’s theory of a pessimistic society. Shortly after, Joachim Bumke (Studien zum Ritterbegriff im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 1964; translated into English as The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages, 1982) produced one of the best-known German works on chivalry, which took special care to analyze German chivalric terms (principally Höflichkeit and Rittertum) whose meanings differed significantly from their French and English counterparts, and which had until this point remained relatively opaque to non-German speakers. This study is also notable for its efforts to understand chivalry purely as a social construct by avoiding discussion of the ideal. This methodology, which until the 1960s had often been overshadowed by literary analyses, was strikingly influential, and encouraged the work of Georges Duby, who remains until today one of the most significant scholars of chivalry. Duby had first entered the field of study with his 1964 article “Au XIIe siècle: les ‘jeunes’ dans la société aristocratique dans la France de nord-ouest” (Annales 19: 835–46; translated into English as “The ‘Youth’ in Aristocratic Society” by Frederic Cheyette, in his Lordship and Community, 1968, 198–209). In this early work, Duby presented a synthetic analysis on the origins of knighthood, accepting both the theories of Guihiermoz and Bloch of a Roman lineage, but also providing support of Gautier’s theories of a Germanic conception of ancient nobility. Duby went on to refine his ideas

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by tracing the lineage of thirty-four Mâconnais families in his “Lignage, noblesse, et chivalerie dans la région mâconnaise” (Annales 27 [1972]: 803–23). His research was finally fully compiled and recast in Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (1978; translated into English as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined by Arthur Goldhammer in 1980). In this study, he argued that the knighthood was consciously promoted as one (noble) part of the tripartite division of society as part of an Angevin propaganda campaign designed to sway the lower French aristocracy from Capetian royal authority to an independent nobility. Duby’s theory was nothing less than commanding in the study of chivalry, and the scholarly tradition it founded cannot adequately be covered here (for some indication of his influence see, however, Jean-François Lemarignier, La France médiévale: institutions et société, 1970; Erich Köhler’s Marxist interpretations of Duby’s system in Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der höfischen Epik, 1970; Franco Cardini, Alle radici dela cavalleria medievale, 1981; Jean Flori, L’essor de la chevalerie, XIe–XIIe siècles, 1986). German scholarship on the origins of the knightly class continued in this period through the efforts of Karl Schmid (“Über die Struktur des Adels im früheren Mittelalter,” Jahrbuch für fränkischen Landesforschung 19 [1959]: 1–23), Karl Werner (“Bedeutende Adelsfamilien im Reich Karls des Großen,” Karl der Große, ed. Helmut Beumann, 1965; among others), and Franz Irsigler (Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der frühfränkischen Adels, 1969; see also John B. Freed’s review of German scholarship, “Reflections on the Medieval German Nobility,” American Historical Review 91 [1986]: 553–75). Arno Borst’s Das Rittertum im Mittelalter (1976) also provided a muchneeded synthesis of the new scholarship that had appeared up to that point. In a consideration of the knightly class in the Low Countries, Johanna Maria van Winter (“De middeleeuwse ridderschap als ‘classe sociale’,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 83 [1970]: 262–75), while agreeing with much of Duby’s general thesis, questioned the seeming rigidity of social classes and class identity for the medieval knighthood. E. Studies in Chivalry from the 1980s until Today The frenzy of scholarship inspired by the works of Ferguson, Bumke, and Duby had set a new tone, and the 1980s were a period of reassessment and reevaluation of these new schools of thought. Whereas much of the 1970s had been devoted to a study of the knightly class as a social group, the 1980s heralded a return to an examination of the ideals of that class. British scholars in particular began a synthesis of older studies through new theories, beginning with Malcolm Vale’s War and Chivalry (1981), which reconsidered Huizinga’s premise of a late medieval decline in light of Ferguson’s more

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optimistic and contended that chivalric ideals were in touch with reality until the end of the Middle Ages. Juliet Vale’s Edward III and Chivalry (1982), by considering a wide array of interdisciplinary material including historical records as well as literary and artistic works, similarly argued for a continuity of chivalric behavior through the Middle Ages. Larry Benson and John Leyerle’s collection of essays by North American scholars, Chivalric Literature (1980), provided a number of different appraisals of the scholarship of the 1970s, and were organized thematically around Leyerle’s thesis that chivalry blossomed in the 14th and 15th centuries, a challenge to the longstanding assumptions of Huizinga and Ferguson. The most prominent English-language study of chivalry of the decade was Maurice Keen’s Chivalry (1984), which is notable for its far-reaching consideration of all the major scholarship of the previous century. Among many conclusions, Keen explicitly confronted Duby’s notion of a specific knightly class, arguing that knights likely had no class identity, particularly in the later Middle Ages. Additionally, Keen maintained that chivalric ideals were both sincerely valued and pursued in the 14th and 15th centuries, effectively dismissing Huizinga’s conclusions. Finally, Keen insisted that chivalry was centered on the preparation of knights for battle, and that the centrality of war to chivalry was a source of tension within the ideal, both constraining and encouraging chivalric behavior. This final hypothesis of Keen has faced some challenges in its assumption that war is an accidental state that comes into being without choice by human participants (see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 1991, chapter 3; “The Knight’s Tale and the Crisis of Chivalric Identity,” 165–179). Howell Chickering and Thomas H. Seiler’s collection of essays, The Study of Chivalry (1988) also addressed new approaches to chivalry in view of Keen’s signal text. In the same year, Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey published another collection, The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood (1988). The topics are interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in their topics and assessment of earlier scholarship, Jane Martindale’s “‘Cavalaria et Orgueill’: Duke William IX of Aquitaine and the Historian” (87–116), which supports Leyerle’s thesis on the later medieval golden age of chivalry, being but one example. The 1990s produced an even greater number of studies of chivalry both as an ideal and as a reality. Thorough the decade, Richard Barber’s works (Tournaments, Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages,1989 [with Juliet Barker]; The Knight and Chivalry, 1995; and “Chivalry and the Morte Darthur,” A Companion to Malory, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, 1996) not only considered chivalry within literary and ritual contexts, but also presented a synthesis of

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prior scholarship in a very accessible fashion. John Gillingham (“1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England,” Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. George Garnet and John Hudson, 1996, 31–55) returned in a roundabout fashion to the thesis of Richard Hurd in discussing the birth of English chivalry following the Battle of Hastings. In the same year, Richard Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy produced an edition and translation of a chivalric book of instruction (The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation, 1996); in the introduction to the text, Kaeuper discussed the biography of Charny and looked to the knight’s life for evidence into his reception of the chivalric ideal. Shortly thereafter, Kaeuper looked deeper into chivalric romances and other contemporary examinations of the chivalric ideal in his Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999). Drawing in part on the traditions of Huizinga and Elias, as well as Keen, Kaeuper concluded that despite a recent swing towards a more romantic vision of the chivalry, the period was still a violent one as identified by Huizinga. From this, he argued that the brutality of the later Middle Ages and the lofty ideals of chivalry could only be reconciled if one assumes that a glorification of ritualized violence and brutality (or, more gently “prowess”) was one of the paramount features of the chivalric ideal. Work on continental chivalry also continued through the late 1990s, with an English-language contribution by Constance Brittain Bouchard (Strong of Body, Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France, 1998) providing a view of knightly social networks though literary sources and an assessment of new scholarship through the lens of Duby by Jean Flori (Chevaliers et chevalerie au Moyen Age, 1998). Josef Fleckenstein (Vom Rittertum im Mittelalter: Perspektiven und Probleme, 1997) provided a similar and much-needed analysis on the study of chivalry from a German perspective, while Will Hasty (Art of Arms: Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry, 1999) used German literary sources to identify, in line with Kaeuper’s theories, a complicit relationship between courtliness and violence. Recent years reveal continued signs of re-evaluation of older scholarship, a trend that will likely continue: Craig Taylor will respond to both the romanticism of Kilgour and the exaltation of violence seen by Kaeuper in his forthcoming Chivalry and Martial Culture in France During the Hundred Years War. At the same time, a multiplicity of new paths for and approaches to study of chivalry have appeared, ranging across multiple disciplines with a variety of new theoretical approaches. The following list cannot hope, therefore, to provide a full description of these paths that have yet to be proven, but instead can only give some idea of the vast breadth of new scholarship.

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Alex Davis (Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance, 2003) has re-examined the conclusion that chivalry as a defining ethos was moribund by the Early Modern period, and argued instead for a continued vitality in the chivalric ideal into the 18th century. Eva Belén Carro Carbajal, Laura Puerto Moro, and María Sánchez Pérez’s collection Libros de caballerías (de ‘Amadís’ al ‘Quijote’) (2002) provides a concise appraisal of scholarship on Spanish chivalric literature. Katie Stevenson has studied the role of chivalry in relationships between the Stewart kings and the knightly class in Scotland (Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513, 2006). Amedeo Quondam has meanwhile produced a study of Renaissance chivalry through the study of armor (avallo e cavaliere: l’armatura come seconda pelle del gentiluomo moderno, 2003). Finally, Alan J. Frantzen (Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War, 2003) studies the Crusades and the Hundred Years’ War to discuss the origins of the chivalric ideal and how that ideal was used through the First World War as consolation for grieving survivors. Select Bibliography Joachim Bumke, Studien zum Ritterbegriff im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1964; The Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages, trans. W.T.H. Jackson and Erika Jackson [New York: AMS Press, 1982]); Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du feodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978; The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980]); Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk, 1919; The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. Frederik Hopman [London: E. Arnold Press, 1924]); Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); The Study of Chivalry, ed. Howell Chickering and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamzoo: Western Michigan University, 1988).

John A. Geck

Comic A. Definition Comic messages in medieval dramatic and literary texts extend to social, sexual, scatological, corporeal, psychological, political, religious, literary, and even culinary discourse. Though the alterity of time and distance may separate the modern reader from medieval audiences, studies on medieval literary humor and comedy have attempted to unpack complex texts to begin to

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answer the question, what was funny in the Middle Ages? From witty puns and sexual innuendos to food fight scenes and the slapstick actions of clumsy knights, topics that were considered funny or comic in the Middle Ages were varied, and their usage complex. In exploring the comic, it is necessary to keep in mind Aristotelian notions of comedy that may have been at stake in medieval comedy. Aristotle defines drama as imitating either superior or inferior action; comedy is the representation of inferior action. Aristotle characterizes the comic as the Ridiculous, a subset of the Ugly, with actions akin to mistakes or errors that may incite laughter or provide emotional relief through comic catharsis. For Aristotle, the comic is opposed to tragic, a term applied to non-dramatic literature as well in the Middle Ages. Comedy was not limited to drama in this period, though the concept of the comic was borrowed from the analysis of comedy and drama found in Aristotle’s Poetics. B. History of Research Turning to a brief review of other perspectives on the comic that have been useful to medievalists over the past century of scholarship, French philosopher Henri Bergson, Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1940), famously defined the comic in part as an impulse of social life and a type of automatism, “Le rire? Du mécanique plaque sur le vivant …” Bergson’s concept of laughter picks up where character and personality studies leave off. The comic has for a social purpose the possibility of “snubbing” or “correcting” individuals through laughter. The object of comedy focuses on familiar character types or sometimes creates new ones. While tragedy centers on the individual, Bergsonian comedy represents a departure from the human and the individual which results in laughter. The works of Bergson and of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin on comedy in the 1940s were an invitation for literary historians to consider humor more seriously. Bakhtin’s concept of “carnival” focuses on early modern comedy, fairs, and street theatre, but has also been applied to medieval forms of play and humor, as seen in Rabelais and His World (1941, trans. 1965). Carnival, whether literary and mimetic or real-life, is essentially statesanctioned disorder or humor that serves as acceptable catharsis or permissible satire and social criticism in a given society. He sees a plurality of possible comic voices in carnival. Conventional morality and social institutions may be criticized through carnival. Bakhtin’s theory has been applied to Rabelais and fabliaux humor. Thomas J. Farrell, ed. Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (1995), shows that the theory of carnival is not limited to early modern texts or culture; this edited volume begins with a discussion of liminality and

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what happens when we cross the line of societal expectations, covering comic and carnival, heteroglossia, dialogism, and polyphony in, for example, the Smithfield Decretals, Helmbrecht, the sottie and epic genres, Chaucer, and Robert Mannyng. Humanist medievalist Ernst Robert Curtius also made contributions to the study of the comic and other related terms, such as hagiographical and liturgical ‘jest,’ through his comprehensive pan-European scholarly landmark on medieval world view, rhetoric, and poetics: Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter / European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (1948, trans. 1953). An important essay by another Germanist, on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s humor, that also provides a typology of hagiographical humor, is Max Werhli, “Christliches Lachen, christliche Komik?” (From Wolfram and Petrarch to Goethe and Grass: Studies in Honour of Leonard Forster, ed. D. H. Green, L.P. Johnson, and D. Wuttke, 1982, 17–31). Robert Levine, “Wolfram von Eschenbach: Homo Ludens” (Viator XIII [1982]: 177–201), also considers comic, ironic, parodic, and satirical elements in a similar vein in the same year. In response to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (see entry on Huizinga), which shows humor and social satire as essential parts of the medieval world view, is Werhli’s exploration of poetry and art as play and as satirical social commentary in the German romance tradition Max Wehrli, “Poeta Ludens: Zum Spielelement der mittelalterlichen Literatur” (Variorum mundera florum, 1985, 193–203; see also his chapter “Komik in christlicher Kunst,” id., Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter, 1984, 163–81). Hans Fromm’s work on German devotional musical genres, such as his Deutsche Balladen (1965) and Der deutsche Minnesang (1966) also treats comic themes in some comic song tradition from the perspectives of music history and poetics. Humor is also the subject of his study “Komik und Humor in der Dichtung des deutschen Mittelalters” (1962; id., Arbeiten zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1989, 24–42), in which he observed the important tensions between internal and external motifs and the protagonists’ actions as underlying much medieval comic discourse. From the early Middle Ages, laughter was subject for religious debate and literary revelry alike; laughing could be viewed as a dangerous sin tantamount to gluttony in monastic life; in some monastic rulebooks both overeating and the laughter of within the sacred space of the monastery were sometimes forbidden as sinful and excessive, as studied recently by the contributors to Risus Medievalis: Laughter in Medieval Literature and Art (ed. Herman Braet, Guido Latré and Werner Verbeke, 2003), the product of an international symposium on medieval comic tales held in 1998. Paradoxically,

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however, literary texts seem to encourage laughter to serve entertaining, didactic, or critical purposes. To generalize, studies on the comic in the Middle Ages have revealed that social satire and humorous criticism of social institution and societal norms were often the butt of many literary jokes. Several studies on humor in the European literary tradition have explored how physical and verbal humor in literary texts invite laughter through witty word play, comic stock characters, or nearly slapstick situations. Medieval world views, social satire, and literary parody (see entry on parody) are revealed through the use of the comic in literary and dramatic texts. From the Goliardic tradition to manuscript miniature sotties, to mock sermons and popular drinking songs, to the scatological Old French fabliaux to the erotic German maeren to the late medieval farce, daily life is seen in a comic light in the abundant comic genres of the Middle Ages. Late 20th-century and early 20th-century North American scholarship has provided the largest number of significant studies on medieval humor and comedy, engaging in a dialogue with important contributions by European scholars as well. Louis Cazmian, The Development of English Humor: Part I (1951), is an early literary analysis and cultural study of medieval humor, which includes chapters on: humor and the English temperament, Old French humor, English humor before Chaucer, humor in Chaucer, and medieval English and Scottish humor after Chaucer. The seminal study on Medieval European humor, one of the first to demonstrate the comic as a valuable subject of literary analysis, is the very wide-ranging study by French philologist Philippe Menard, Le rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au moyen âge: 1150–1250 (1969), exploring examples of what might be considered funny in close readings of texts ranging from Old French chanson de geste to romance to fabliaux. In the 1970s the texts chosen for inclusion in the translated Rickard anthology covering comic texts from French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Medieval Latin, Italian and Middle English by Peter Rickard, Alan Deyermond, Derek Brewer, David Blamiris, Peter King, and Michel Lapridge, trans., Medieval Comic Tales (1973, rev. 1996) helped further define which texts would be considered comic and encouraged study of comic sexual and anticlerical themes in these texts particularly by North American scholars and students. Norris J. Lacy, “The Comic Spirit in Medieval France” (L’ésprit créateur 16 [1976]: 39–45), along with the other articles in this important special issue on medieval French comedy (by L. C. Porter, Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., Nancy Freeman Regalado, Jean Charles Payen, and Alan E. Knight) launched a continuing critical dialogue on what was considered comic in medieval literature and which satirical or parodic purposes such comedy and humor might serve, notably in the French fabliaux and romance

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traditions. This special issue validated humor as an important arena of critical inquiry in Medieval Studies. A year later, the edited volume of Paul G. Ruggiers, Versions of Medieval Comedy (1977) provided a broad theoretical framework and a more pan-European exploration of the comic in medieval fiction; Ruggiers begins with a review of theoretical considerations on medieval comedy, followed in the volume by genre studies and studies from across several language traditions, including comedy in Roman and 12th-century Latin texts, the fabliaux and the grotesque in the Old French tradition, Dante, Italian romances, Chaucer, and English mystery plays. Germanist Dennis Howard Green, Irony in Medieval Romance (1979), deals with irony and the literary themes of love and chivalry, irony and narratology, as well as verbal, dramatic, and structural irony, often related to comic scenes or comic effects in the inherent ambiguities of the romance genre in Chrétien, Wolfram, Gottfried, Hartmann, and other examples. From the field of rhetoric comes the important contribution on comic devices and techniques as well on the role of the comic in the medieval literary world view in general, Joachim Suchomski, “‘Delectatio’ und ‘Utilitas:’ Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur” (Speculum 53.1 [1978]: 195–97). After a few such important rhetorical studies, several subsequent Germanist studies on the comic in the 1980s focused on the parodic, ironic, and humorous treatments of the theme of chivalry, particularly in the 13th century, such as Carolyn Dussère, “Humor and Chivalry in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst and Gerhart Hauptmann’s Ulrich von Liechtenstein” (Colloquia Germanica: Internationale Zeitschrift für germanische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 16.4 [1983]: 297–320). Also an exploration of humorous representations of chivalric convention is Gerhild Scholz Williams, “License to Laugh: Making Fun of Chivalry in Some Late Medieval Texts” (Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Literatur 78.1 [1986]: 26–37). Following in this vein was a study on fools, or jesters, whose role was to make court-condoned comic satirical commentary, Rolf R. Mueller, “On the Medieval Satiric Fictions of Neidhart and Wittenweiler: Fools for their Theme, Let Satire be their Song” (In hôhem prîse: A Festschrift in Honor of Ernst S. Dick, ed. Winder McConnell, 1989, 295–305). The comic is approached today through several different theoretical frameworks, for example through feminist theory with Lisa Perfetti’s Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature (2003). This is a 13th- through 16th-century comparatist study of medieval heroines who laugh and who speak up looking at laughter associated with the body, gender, and sexuality with a feminist critical approach. Perfetti’s volume provides a wide-ranging comparative consideration of the comic, from the humor surrounding

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modesty in Boccaccio’s Décameron, to the Wife of Bath’s comic bawdy tone, to funny literary representations of medieval conventions of marriage and household interactions in English, German, and Arabic traditions (see also Perfetti’s “The Lewd and the Ludic: Female Pleasure in the Fabliaux,” Comic Provocations, ed. Holly A. Crocker, 2006, 17–31). Over the last several decades, many studies on the comic have focused on a single genre. Much of the genre-based scholarship advancing the application of humor theory and humor studies in medieval literary studies has focused on the short comic texts of the Old French fabliaux in particular (see entry on fabliaux). The volume edited by Benjamin L. Honeycutt and Thomas D. Cooke, The Humor of the Fabliaux (1974), began to define as burlesque and parodic the Old French fabliaux. The Honeycutt and Cooke volume launched the fabliaux into the forefront of Medieval Humor Studies, with essays that shed new light on different aspects of the fabliaux: parody of courtly convention, humorous criticism of morality or chivalry, sexual humor and use of obscenity, including Paul Theiner’s contribution to this volume, “Pornography, the Comic Spirit, and the Fabliaux” (137–62), followed by Thomas Cooke’s “Modes of Signification and the Humor of the Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux” (163–96). Though today most scholars no longer refer to the fabliaux as obscene pornography as the have become more accepted as an integral part of the Old French verse corpus, both of these essays focused on the shock or the laughter a modern audience might experience at the sexual imagery or sexual language found in the fabliaux. Studies such as these enabled marginal texts like the fabliaux to begin to be included in studies of comedy in canonical medieval literature, and enabled scholars to begin to ask new questions about medieval perspectives on sexuality, on the body and bodily functions, and on everyday life in a non-courtly setting. Other notable studies that aim at mapping the comic in the fabliaux appeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Cooke’s next book-length study on humor took a comparative approach (see entry on “Intertexuality and Comparative Approaches”) to the techniques and effects of humor in French and English short verse fiction, The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A study of their Comic Climax (1978). In response to such studies, which highlight the shocking scatological and sexual motifs of these texts, R. Howard Bloch created scholarly waves with The Scandal of the Fabliaux (1986), which demonstrates that the power of the fabliaux lies in the scandal of their own composition and literary production more than in the obscenity of their language or shocking narratives, showing the fabliaux as using humor to test the limits of literary production and the limits of audiences alike. Also in the 1980s was an important colloquium on functions of the comic in the Old French Roman

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de Renart cycle and the fabliaux, drawing many parallels between the comic genres of the beast epic and the fabliaux in their social satire and literary parody Comique, satire et parodie dans la tradition renardienne et les fabliaux: actes du colloque des 15 et 16 janvier 1983 (ed. Danielle Buschinger and André Crépin, 1983). Brian J. Levy’s The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (2000) provided a landmark typology for this comic genre, exploring various aspects of the fabliaux comic universe, from recurrent animal or herbal motifs, to portrayals of sexuality and illness, to the role of the devil. Levy focuses on notions of play, word play, comic situations, and comic inversion. A related study, Adrian Tudor, A. Hindley, and Brian J. Levy, Grant risee?: The Medieval Comic Presence – la présence comique médievale: Essays in Memory of Brian J. Levy (2006), is a posthumous tribute to the scholarship on the comic in the Old French tradition that Brian J. Levy contributed to the field throughout his life. The beginning of the 21st century has seen a rebirth in interest in the fabliaux, attracting more medievalists to the study of literary humor in these short texts, with the number of articles, critical editions, and edited volumes on the fabliaux unparalleled since the study of the fabliaux first came into fashion in the 1970, for instance: Comic Provocations (ed. Holly A. Crocker, 2006), consisting in part of essays by the participants of an NEH summer seminar on the fabliaux, and The Old French Fabliaux: Essays on Comedy and Context (ed. Kristin L. Burr, John F. Moran, and Norris J. Lacy, 2007); both cover a range of varied aspects of fabliaux comedy. Studies on the fabliaux have broadened the horizons of literary history and critical theory alike. C. Humor in Chaucer Chaucerian scholars have also greatly contributed to our notions of what was considered funny in the Middle Ages. Studies on humor in Chaucer have focused primarily on rhetorical word play, the theory of play, and social satire, for example, Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (1988). The consideration of social class humor in Chaucer was introduced previous to that volume by Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (1973). Particular tales, such as the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” or the “Physician’s Tale,” have been studied as essentially comic in form and content, for example D. W. Robertson, Jr. “The Physician’s Comic Tale” (Chaucer Review 23 [1988]: 129–39). The extensive study of Jean Jost, ed., Chaucer’s Humor (1994), has also proven a comprehensive reference in thematic studies and close textual analysis of Chaucerian comedy. Focusing on form rather than content, motifs, or thematic elements, one of the central

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articles on the poetics of Chaucerian comedy is Howell Chickering, “Comic Meter and Rhyme in the Miller’s Tale” (Chaucer Yearbook: A Journal of Late Medieval Studies 2 [1995]: 17–47). Bakhtinian theoretical analyses of the use of carnival humor in Chaucer have grown in numbers over the years, as for example in Heather Masri, “Carnival Laughter in the Pardoner’s Tale” (MedPers 10 [1995–1996]: 148–56). D. Humor in Arthurian Literature In addition to Chaucer studies, the field of Arthurian studies has been instrumental in the rise of studies on medieval literary humor. Keith Busby and Roger Dalrymple, ed., Arthurian Literature XIX: Comedy in Arthurian Literature (2002), present fourteen essays selected from special sessions on humor at the International Arthurian Society 1999 conference in Toulouse, France; ranging from early medieval to modern medievalist literary production across Europe (including Irish, Scottish, French, and other literatures), several of the essays focus on the Arthurian romance tradition and elements of parody or overturning of romance convention with the aim of showing that Arthurian texts previously thought lacking in humor have a strong comic element that often serves parodic or satiric functions in their literary and historical context. Pan-European approaches, such as that taken by the edited volumes of Busby and Dalrymple or Perfetti (see above) have become more popular in the 1990s and 2000s. As part the historical background in a larger study on a national humor, John Parkin, ed. French Humor: Papers Based on a Colloquium Held at the University of Bristol (1996), includes two essays that draw on modern critical theory in a discussion of laughter and social satire: Alison Williams and John Parkin, “Feminin Wiles and Masculine Woes: Sexual Dynamics in Les Quinze joies de marriage” (21–37), and Michael Freeman, “Laughter in the Waning of the Middle Ages” (39–59). As for Iberian humor, a broad historical survey of Spanish literary humor includes essays on medieval humor, picaresque humor and the humor of Cervantes, considering the roles of humor in the text and the importance of the audience, including the essay by Ismael El Outmani, “El humorismo medieval: la litteratura andalusi” (El Humor en España, ed., Harm Den and Fermín Sierra Boer, 1992, 27–54). E. Humor in International Medieval Literature Studies on medieval literary comedy have not been limited to European texts. In the Asian tradition, we have for example the early critical edition of comic dramatic works: Oswald T. Ruck, Some Comic Medieval Plays of Japan, Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society 21 (1924). The late 1980s and

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1990s saw a rise in the number of studies on Asian medieval literature at North American Universities, as for example the Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation of Virginia S. Skord, The Comic Consciousness in Medieval Japanese Narrative: Otogi-zoshi of Commoners (1987), an attempt to explain Japanese class-based humor. In the Persian tradition, works by Nizam al-Din Ubayd Zakani, texts similar to the Old French fabliaux and German maeren, which demonstrate unabashed sexual and social humor, have begun to be explored, for instance in the University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation by Paul Richard Sprachman, The Comic Corks of ’Ubayd-I Zakani: A Study of Medieval Persian Bawdy, Verbal Aggression, and Satire (1981). F. Humor in Non-Literary Works In the discipline of art history, comic medieval images in manuscript miniatures or marginalia have begun to be explored more closely in the early 21st century, with studies such as Christa Grossinger, Humour and Folly in Secular and Profane Prints of Northern Europe, 1430–1540 (2002). Though not common, a few interdisciplinary studies of medieval comedy have appeared, such as Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall, which covers satire of social institutions, hierarchies and notions of sovereignty from Roman, Byzantine, Anglo-Saxon, and Carolingian cultures in a variety of texts, including epics, chronicles, and riddles (2002). Specific aspects of medieval daily life in medieval comedy have been explored in a new trend in scholarship that combines literary analysis with cultural history of consumption and material culture, looking closer at humor surrounding the human body. Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (2006), investigates food humor across several genres, at the intersection of the two human universals of eating and laughing. Chaucerian Valerie Allen’s On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (2006) also focuses on corporeal humor, in this case particularly scatological comedy surrounding flatulence, excrement, and other bodily functions, or what might be termed ‘toilet humor’ in today’s language. Laughter based on the body language and on transgression can be found in many late-medieval short narratives, such as Till Eulenspiegel (1510), as studied by Albrecht Classen, “Transgression and Laughter, the Scatological and the Epistemological: New Insights into the Pranks of Till Eulenspiegel” (Medievalia et Humanistica 33 [2007]: 41–61), and id., “Laughter as the Ultimate Epistemological Vehicle in the Hands of Till Eulenspiegel” (Neophilologus 92 [2008]: 417–89).

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G. Humor on the Stage Turning back to the stage, where the Aristotelian notions of comedy and the comic began, from English Everyman plays to urban French farce in the late Middle Ages, medieval theater was often characterized by the performance of comic social satire (see entry on Drama). Comedy and satire in medieval dramatic texts are brought together by the study of the theatrical genre of comedy and theories of the comic in W. D. Howarth, Comic Drama: The European Heritage (1979). Howarth includes essays on the origins of English comedy as well as a comparative survey of French, Italian and Spanish commedia and other English traditions. Recent studies on dramatic texts have focused on the concept of carnival. For instance Warren Edminster, The Preaching Fox: Festive Subversion in the Plays of the Wakefield Master (2005), views Christ as a comic figure in English mystery plays and focuses on the ‘festive’ as an anticlerical comic element that may be used to subvert religious institutions and criticize kings and clergy member alike. The power of the comic as a subversive and critical force, as well as a means of entertainment, has only begun to be explored by medievalists. Select Bibliography Risus Medievalis: Laughter in Medieval Literature and Art, ed. Herman Braet, Guido Latré, and Werner Verbeke (Leuven:Leuven University Press, 2003); Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter / European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (Bern: Francke, 1948; trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton, University Press, 1953); Sarah Gordon, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature (Purdue: Purdue University Press, 2006); Chaucer’s Humor, ed. Jean Jost (New York: Garland, 1994); The Comic Spirit in Medieval France, special issue of L’ésprit Créateur, ed. Norris J. Lacy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1976); Philippe Ménard, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au moyen âge 1150–1250 (Geneva: Droz, 1969); Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Lachgemeinschaften: kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).

Sarah Gordon

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Contrafacture A. General definition The setting of a new text to an existing melody, which is the technical definition of contrafacture, was noticed early on in medieval lyric scholarship. The cultural significance of the phenomenon is still subject of much study and debate. From arguments concerning the very definition of contrafacture and the manner by which contrafacta may be discerned to wider cultural ramifications, work on the question has been considerable for well over a century. With questions of melodic borrowing come questions of shared metrical schemes, simplified or purposely complicated rhyme schemes, and semantic motivic borrowing and variation. B. History of Scholarship The fundamental work on contrafacture remains Friedrich Gennrich’s Die Kontrafaktur im Liedschaffen des Mittelalters (1965). The work represents the culmination of Gennrich’s work of the preceding decades, which was built upon his own first-hand experience with primary sources in various national traditions (“Der deutsche Minnesang in seinem Verhältnis zur Troubadourund Trouvère-Kunst,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung 2 [1926]: 536–66, 622, 632; “Internationale mittelalterliche Melodien,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 11 [1929]: 321–48; Grundriss einer Formenlehre des mittelalterlichen Liedes, 1932; “Lateinische Kontrafakta altfranzösischer Lieder,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 50 [1930]: 187–207; Lateinische Liedkontrafaktur: Eine Auswahl lateinischer Conductus mit ihren volkssprachigen Vorbildern, 1956; and “Liedkontrafaktur in mittel- und althochdeutscher Zeit,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 82 [1948]: 105–41, and revised in Der deutsche Minnesang: Aufsätze zu seiner Erfoschung, ed. Hans Fromm, 1961, 330–77). A contemporary of Gennrich, Hans Spanke, also worked on the question (“Das öftere Auftreten von Strophenformen und Melodien in der alfranzösischen Lyrik,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 51 [1928]: 73–117; “Romanische und mittellateinische Formen in der Metrik von Minnesangs Frühling,” Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 49 [1929]: 191–235, rpt. in Der deutsche Minnesang, ed. Hans Fromm, 1961, 254–329). Gennrich’s main interest in contrafacture lay in the typological: he wished to identify the various techniques of contrafacture and discover, where possible, which melodies were reused and sung to which texts. In the field of troubadour lyric, he had published what he deemed to be accepted contrafacta in his Der musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours (1958–1960). In Die

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Kontrafaktur, he explains more explicitly the criteria by which he judged, delineating various categories of contrafactum such as those that share melody and rhyme scheme with their models (“reguläre Kontrafaktur”); those that show some variation (“irreguläre Kontrafaktur”); etc. Gennrich backs up his categorizations with copious examples from the French, Latin, Occitan, Spanish, German, Dutch, and English traditions. Gennrich’s research offered both contemporaries and scholars who came after him the tools to continue his mainly typological work. Even before the publication of Die Kontrafaktur, István Frank saw the possibilities of contrafacture as a helpful tool in discussing possible influence and published his Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours (2 vols., 1953–1957). Guiseppe Tavani followed suit in 1967 with his Repertorio metrico della lirica galego-portoghese, as did Ulrich Mölk and Friedrich Wolfzettel in 1972 with their Répertoire métrique de la poésie lyrique française des origines à 1350. Scholars working on a given text in each of these traditions could consult one of these books and discover which other songs used the same metrical scheme and might be therefore evidence of contrafacture. J. H. Marshall is careful to point out that identical metrical schemes do not automatically indicate contrafacture as other criteria such as musical evidence and the rarity of the scheme in question must be considered (“Imitation of metical form in Peire Cardenal,” Romance Philology 32 (1978): 18–48; “Pour l’étude des contrafacta dans la poédie des troubadours,” Romania 101 [1980]: 289–335). Hans Tischler considered just those very questions in his Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition (1997). He orders song texts according to the melodies to which they were sung and includes song texts from other traditions, notably Latin, Occitan, and German, when evidence points to a melody being borrowed across a linguistic border. In the wake of these typological works, more recent studies of contrafacture have been undertaken on a smaller, more focused scale, especially in regard to Occitan lyric and its relationship with other traditions. This is undoubtedly because Occitan lyric flourished so early among the vernacular traditions. William D. Paden has recently published studies of contrafacture that relate Occitan lyric to Galician-Portuguese lyric (“Contrafacture between Occitan and Galician-Portuguese,” Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature, 26 [1998]: 49–63 and “Contrafacture between Occitan and Galician-Portuguese: The Case of Bonifaci Calvo,” TENSO: Bulletin of the Societe Guilhem IX. 13 [1998]: 50–71). Similarly, Paolo Canettieri has offered “Para un Estudio Histórico-Xeográfico e Tipolóxico da Imitación Métrica na Lírica Galego-Portuguesa: Recuperación de Textos Trobadorescos e Troveirescos,” Anuario de Estudios Literarios Galegos, 1994, 11–50. In regard to

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Catalan lyric, Dominique Billy takes up the question of troubadour influence in “Contrafactures de modèles troubadouresques dans la poésie catalane” (Le rayonnement des troubadours, ed. Anton Touber, 1998, 51–74), as has Volker Mertens in regard to German song (“Kontrafaktur als intertextuelles Spiel: Aspekte der Adaptation von Troubadour-Melodien im deutschen Minnesang” (also in Le rayonnement des troubadours, 269–83). Medieval treatises such as the Doctrina de compondre dictats stipulate that certain lyric forms normally used existing melodies such as the sirventés and cobla. As true as that may be, the repertory that lies heavily on contrafacture and has provoked the most scholarly discussion is that of religious lyrics. It was often, but not always, the case that the melody of a secular love song was put to a new religious text, often Marian in nature. Paul Meyer discussed the question explicitly in an early, short study entitled “Types de quelques chansons de Gautier de Coinci” (Romania 17 [1888]: 429–37) in which Meyer called on philologists to consider publishing the 13th-century Miracles de Nostre Dame which contains, depending upon the manuscript, well over a dozen medieval Marian songs. Many of Gautier’s Marian songs were contrafacta, so once work began on his songs, it did not take long for others to broaden the focus of religious lyrical contrafacture. Edward Järnström made particularly pertinent observations in the critical apparatus to the first volume of his Recueil de chansons pieuses du XIIIe siècle (1910). The exchange of materials among secular and religious lyrics through contrafacture and, by extension, lyric citation, where not only formal properties but also semantic motifs are exchanged has led to a good deal of discussion about the cultural relevance of contrafacture. In his book, La lyrique française au moyen âge (1977), Pierre Bec posits that religious lyric, precisely for its use of contrafacture and lyric citation, belongs to a “parasitical” lyric register (“registre parasite”). Scholars since then, however, have taken issue with such a summary judgment of contrafacture as a process used only by composers who lacked originality. Again, in the case of Gautier de Coinci, Anna Drzewicka argues convincingly in her article “La fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci” (subdivided into two parts within volume 91 [1985] of Le Moyen Age, 33–51 and 179–200) that Gautier intentionally borrowed elements meant to highlight his new conception of “bone amor” (“good love”) for the Virgin Mary over human women. Kathryn Duys takes this line of argument a step further in her Ph.D. dissertation, “Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci” (New York University, 1997), in which she explores how techniques of contrafacture and lyric citation were used to serve sophisticated programs of compilatio. Finally, Daniel

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O’Sullivan (Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, 2005) discusses contrafacture more widely in the French tradition and even touches upon its use across national boundaries (Latin and German) in a discussion of Jacques de Cambrai’s lyrics. O’Sullivan discusses more particularly the performative aspects of contrafacture: in many instances, melodies were used and reused for several songs, both secular and religious, which results in a densely allusive semantic fabric whose significance would vary from listener to listener, depending upon a given listener’s own experience with lyric performance. In German studies, in addition to work on Minnesinger, studies of the poetry by Oswald von Wolkenstein has brought to light later medieval poets’ use of earlier poetic sources and use of common melodies. In the late 20th century, Albrecht Classen was especially productive in this area, not only in the pages he dedicates to Oswald in his Autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters (1991), but also in several journal articles, such as “Giannozzo Sacchetti’s Mentr’io d’amor pensava as a Source for Oswald von Wolkenstein’s Song-Poetry,” Monatshefte 80 (1988): 459–68, and “French and Italian Sources for Oswald von Wolkenstein’s Onomatopoetic Lyric Poetry,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 15 (1989): 93–105. Before Classen, Herbert Löwenstein had shown that Oswald tended to use common melodies among songs that share a mood or tone (Wort und Ton bei Oswald von Wolkenstein, 1932). Select Bibliography Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart toGuillaume de Machaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Friedrich Gennrich, Die Kontrafaktur im Liedschaffen des Mittelalters (Langen near Frankfurt: 1965); id., Lateinische Liedkontrafaktur: Eine Auswahl lateinischer Conductus mit ihren volkssprachigen Vorbildern. Musikwissenschaftliche Studien-Bibliothek, no. 11, ed. Friedrich Gennrich (Darmstadt: 1956); Robert Falck, “Parody and Contrafactum: a Terminological Clarification,” The Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 1–21; John H. Marshall, “Pour l’étude des contrafacta dans la poédie des troubadours,” Romania 101 (1980): 289–335; Daniel O’Sullivan, Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

Daniel E. O’Sullivan

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Curialitas (Courtliness) A. General Definition Curialitas, from Latin curia (court), is a postclassical neologism that dates to the middle of the 11th century (Peter Ganz, “curialis/ hövesch,” Höfische Literatur, Hofgesellschaft, Höfische Lebensformen um 1200, ed. Gert Kaiser and JanDirk Müller, 1986, 39–56). While it is an easy enough task to translate it as modern English “courtliness,” and construe it generally as a measure of decorum in speech and behavior, its connotative overlap with the ideals of chivalry, its relationship to earlier Roman ethical codes and class formations, its reception by various segments of medieval society, and its vernacular cognates pose complexities that modern scholarship has not yet fully resolved. A.1. Curialis/Curiales As a class, the medieval curiales share a title with the late-antique Roman curiales, unlanded aristocracy charged with civic administration and tax-collection, whose members comprised local city senates (curia). Between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, the curiales came under increasing financial pressure to raise taxes whose shortfalls they were expected to make up out of their own pockets. Whipsawed between class and financial obligations, they took flight into the Church and Imperial aristocracy, and by the late 6th century were extinct (J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the the Roman City, 2001). The only resemblance between the late antique and the high medieval curialis was that the latter’s status as ministerial class straddled the porous boundary between secular and ecclesiastic hierarchy. Judging by the example of Thomas Becket, a product of the French lower nobility who served Henry II first as chancellor and aide and then, after his investiture as Archbishop of Canterbury, as antagonist, the social status of the medieval courtier was located somewhere between the cleric and the literate, lay nobility, a position confirmed by the semantic proximity of the terms curialis, capellanus, and clericus (C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness, 1985, 14–16). Much of the value of the curialis to ecclesiastical and secular potentates was their legal training which gave such courtiers as Thomas or Pierre de Flotte, chancellor to Philip IV (le Bel), a formidable diplomatic authority beyond their modest station. The sharp, even arrogant tongue of the courtier, as exemplified by Pierre’s famous rebuke to Pope Boniface VIII, “Vestra [potestas] verbalis; nostra autem realis” which preceded Boniface’s immurement at the hands of Philip, is indicative of their rhetorical facility and political influence.

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A.2. Curialitas-Urbanitas If the historical affiliation of curialitas to the Roman social class system is tangential, its relationship to traditional Roman ethical values (mos maiorum) and cosmopolitan protocols of behavior is more direct. Gustav Ehrismann (“Die Grundlagen des ritterlichen Tugendsystems” (ZfdA 56 [1919]: 137–216; id., Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1927, vol. 2.2/1, 19–24) was the first to argue that the system of chivalric values was based on a tripartite distinction in Cicero (via Aristotle) of the highest good (summum bonum), moral good (honestum), and the useful (utile) which develop, mutatis mutandis, into medieval septenary catalogues of virtues and vices. While Ernst Robert Curtius justifiably rubbished Ehrismann’s tripartition as a gross misrepresentation of Cicero and his secondhand relationship to Aristotle (European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, 1953 [orig. 1948], 519–37), other scholars have more reliably established medieval curialitas as an ideology of cultivated speech and manners that duplicated and eventually supplanted classical urbanitas, which Quintilian (Institutio oratoria, 6. 3.17) discusses in opposition to rusticitas (Henri Bléry, Rusticité et Urbanité Romaines, 1909; Edwin Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement, 1973). By the 14th century, the link between courtliness and exclusively urban social values (as distinct from the wider ranging values of chivalry that include military and physical culture) had been codified in a list of seven curialitates: sobrietas, hilaritas, affabilitas, benignitas, liberalitas, dapsilitas, and stabilitas (Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “Curia and curialitas: Wort and Bedeutung im Spiegel der Lateinischer Quellen,” Curialitas: Studien zu Grundfragen der höfisch-ritterlichen Kultur, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1990, 16–17). A.3. Pejorative Connotations (12th century) Curialitas seems to have had its inception as a vice rather than a virtue in 12th-century clerical accounts of the court, especially that of Henry II. In the anti-curial Latin satire of Walter Map (De nugis curialium), the political writing of John of Salisbury (Policraticus, sive ne nugis curialium), and polemical tracts critical of secular influence upon theology among such writers as Archbishop Lanfranc (De corpore et sanguine Domini [PL 150: 414C]), Peter of Blois (‘Quales sunt’ P.L. 207: 1005) and Nigel of Canterbury (Contra curiales et officiales clericos), curialitas designates a range of ills associated with worldliness: hypocrisy, sophistry, cupidity. Vernacular critiques of courtliness of this period can be found in the works of Marie de France, Helinand of Froidmont, and Heinrich of Melk (Gerhild Williams, “Against Court and School: Heinrich of Melk and Hélinant of Froidmont as Critics of 12th-century Society,” Neophilologus 62.4 [1978]: 513–26).

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A.4. Civilitas Although curialitas appears generally as term of derogation until the 13th century, some clerics sought to rehabilitate the concept by realigning it ideologically with standards of civility (civilitas morum) whose roots John of Salibury locates in Luke 14:8–10 (Policraticus, ed. Webb, vol. 2, 279ff.). In ascribing to curialitas a Christian origin, John shifted its ethos toward an etiquette of humility whence it became a term of approbation in hagiography and romance (Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtier Books and the Gawain Poet, 1985). A.5. Vernacular Counterparts The Old French and Provençal cortoisie, cortesia derive from Middle Latin cortis, a servant attached to a large household. They appear in the latter third of the 11th century in various genres of literature – Chanson de geste, chivalric romance, roman d’antiquité, and troubadour lyric – and modern scholars have stressed the importance of recognizing the vernacular terminology of courtliness as belonging primarily to literary rather than social history (Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture, 1991, 59). Cortoisie, cortesia describe kinds and qualities of courtly literary production and literary character or littérature courtoise as Reto Bezzola popularized the notion (Les origines et formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident, 1963). It follows that the social values courtoisie/cortesia exemplify should stand in close correlation to the genre in which they are employed. In the Chanson de Roland, which provides the earliest attestation of vernacular courtliness (ca. 1090), cortois appears almost exclusively in varieties of the adverbial expression curteisment dire designating formal speech to a social superior which would seem to reflect the etymological origins of courtliness in the service culture of noble households. In Provençal lyric, by contrast, cortes seems to be inextricable from love: a courtier is effectively a synonym for a lover, whence Marcabru’s “cortesia es d’amar” (Marcabru: A Critical Edition, ed. Simon Gaunt et al., 2000, 200). In the Romans d’antiquité and Romans d’aventure, courtoisie governs a large range of behavior and appearance, from speech, male and female, to comportment in combat, to physical beauty, but always as an activity of display. Recent scholars have observed that courtoisie seems to exist primarily as a standard of behavior reserved for feasts and formal occasions rather than as a fully internalized code (Ulrich Mölk, “Curia und curialitas – Wort und Bedeutung im Spiegel der romanischen Dichtung: Zu fr. cortois(ie)/pr. cortes(ia),” Curialitas: Studien zu Grundfragen der höfisch-ritterlichen Kultur, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1990). Hövescheit is a Middle High German calque of the Old French courtoisie (C. J. Wells, German: A Linguistic History, 1985, 120) that first appears as the

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adjective hövisch and verb höveschen in the mid-12th century epic Kaiserchronik. It covers a semantic range similar to its Old French etymon – suited to the court, well-educated and mannered, beautiful (whence the Modern German hübsch) – and defines itself ideologically in opposition to rusticity, insensitivity, fleshliness (Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, ed. Georg Benecke et al., 1854). Although courtoisie in its French vernacular usage is unequivocally positive, hövescheit, seems to have been influence by 12th-century clerical satire of curialitas. Judging by in its early use in both the Kaiserchronik and the works of Heinrich of Melk, it appears in pejorative synonymy with rape and sexual license (Peter Ganz, “‘hövesch’/‘hövescheit’ im Mittelhochdeutschen,” Curialitas, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1990, 40–42). B. History of Research The history of research into curialitas is the history of its recognition as an historical, as opposed to literary, phenomenon. The romance of medieval knighthood from which the scholarly study of the chivalry and “courtly love” has suffered for two centuries has its roots in the anachronisms and methodologies of the 18th-century scholar-diplomat Lacurne de Saint-Palaye (Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, 1759). The flamboyant aristocrat pioneered the use of literary texts as the fount of courtliness from which he drew a portrait of a noble knighthood dominated by aristocratic niceties reflecting more the manners and socio-political dynamic of his own age than that of medieval knighthood at its inception. On the coattails of Lacurne, scholars tended to premise their notion of courtliness upon the assumption that the medieval knightly class was noble in origin rather than servants to nobility, an assumption corrected by, among others, Hans Georg Reuter (Die Lehre vom Ritterstand zum Ritterbegriff in Historiographie und Dichtung vom 11. bis 13. Jahrhundert, 1971). The main obstacle to any historical treatment of courtliness remains the paucity of primary evidence. Modern scholarship is beginning to redress this problem by recovering alternative sources, textual and non-textual, to the medieval romance or love lyric, and cultivating more stringent historiographical methodologies. The first and most important innovator in the study of historical courtliness was Norbert Elias, whose groundbreaking history of manners, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939), vanished into oblivion for a generation, resurfacing to acclaim in the 1960’s renaissance of sociology. Synthesizing Weber’s definition of the state as a “monopoly of force” (Politik als Beruf, 1919, ed. W. Mommsen, 1992), Freud’s “superego” as exerting a similar coercive function upon the individual, and Kant’s antinomy of culture and civilization as respectively internalized belief and external-

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ized behavior (“Ideas on a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” [1784], Kant on History, trans. Lewis White Beck et al.,1963), Elias posits that medieval courtliness is a political and ethical mechanism in the service of absolutism. Its role is to enable a centralization of power in the monarch, thus constituting the first step in the formation of the modern state. Beyond methodology, Elias innovated in source material. Courtesy books furnish the evidence of sociogenesis in the rhetoric by which they condition the reader’s responses to power. These same sources and lines of argument are developed and refined in his study of aristocracy Höfische Gesellschaft (1969). Some of the most interesting lines of modern socio-historical research have followed in this vein, including Rita Gomes’s The Making of a Court Society: King and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (2003) which investigates the culture and power dynamic of the court through a close prosopographical and genealogical study of affiliated nobles. Other cultural historians have used Elias’s paradigm of social constraint as the basis of the relatively new field of history of emotions (Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90 [1985]: 813–36). Elias’s influence upon the study of courtliness, while decisive, has undergone critical revision in recent years that will no doubt drive future lines of investigation. C. Stephen Jaeger notes, for example, his superficial canvassing of medieval sources and overreliance on Freudian psychogenic theory that tends to locate the mechanics of social change in preconscious precincts inaccessible to historical ratification (The Origin of Courtliness, 1985, 5–8). While accepting the courtesy book as an essential measure of societal pressure to conform, Rüdiger Schnell finds problematic the complete absence of fiction from the study of social coercion; more significant still is the absence of the discussion of courtesy books for women and analysis of gender in constructions of this coercion (“Kritische Überlegungen zur Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias,” Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Rüdiger Schnell, 2004, 21–84). Jaeger, for his part, is an intellectual historian who treats for the first time Latin ecclesiastical sources as the foundation of curialitas in a seminal study that has opened up a line of research yet to be further exploited (see Sexuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2008). By contrast, Joachim Bumke approaches historical curialitas from the perspective of material culture, that is the physical remains and actuarial records of courtly life lived in the everyday, unvarnished and unromanticized (Courtly Culture, 1991).

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Select Bibliography Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im Hohen Mittelalter (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986); Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 2 vols. (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939); Josef Fleckenstein, Curialitas: Studien zu Grundfragen der höfischen-ritterlichen Kultur (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990); C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origin of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals: 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

Gregory Heyworth

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D Discourse A. Definition and Background Defined most concisely as “language in use,” discourse as a term of art has gained wide currency in the humanities and social sciences since the mid20th century. Descended from discurrere (Latin, “to run back and forth”), discours has historically had varied meanings (See B. Hodge, “Historical Semantics and the Meanings of ‘Discourse’,” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 2 [1984, 124–23]). Since the 1960s, several disciplines have adopted the terms discourse, discourse theory, and discourse analysis; along with this technical status has come a number of discipline-specific denotations and related practices, to which hundreds of books and articles on the subject attest. Additionally, the study of discourse as a complex cognitive and social phenomenon has often involved cross-disciplinarity, resulting in considerable cross-pollination: in addition to parallel developments in different disciplines (e. g., anthropology and history) that can be traced to a common founder or theoretical precursor, there are borrowings, adaptations, innovations, overlappings, and re-borrowings. As the definitions, theories, and methodologies that have resulted from these reticular filiations have subsequently been adopted and applied to medieval languages, texts, and culture, they have continued to evolve in a web-like pattern, or alternatively as two overlapping and expanding constellations. The following technical definitions of discourse and discourse analysis constitute a guide to the main ways in which discourse is defined, interpreted, and deployed in Medieval Studies. B. Descriptive Linguistics, Structural Linguistics, and Narratology Growing out of the traditional fields of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, and, subsequently, studies in linguistics, poetics, stylistics, and semiotics, the simultaneously developing fields of Descriptive Linguistics and French Post-Saussurean Structural Linguistics focused on natural language. Following the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, these early linguistic investigations were influenced by Russian Formalism, the Moscow Linguistic Circle, and the Prague School, especially through the work of Roman Jakobson, and

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through work in ethnography and anthropology, especially that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Additionally, in the last half of the 20th century exchanges among linguists were accelerated by increased accessibility to international conferences and meetings. Beginning with Zellig Harris’s 1952 essay, “Discourse Analysis” (Language 28, 1–30), Anglo-American Descriptive Linguistics began to investigate language at the suprasentential level. Roughly coeval were the Birmingham School’s work on language exchanges in classroom settings, M.A.K. Halliday’s work on functional grammar and cohesion, John Searle’s and J. L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory, and the development of Pragmatics. In early studies of medieval languages, scholars often sought evidence of “oral” language, speech acts, and pragmatics-based clues (i. e., interactional meaning) recorded in medieval documents. For overviews of the evolution of Pragmatics and Historical Discourse Analysis, see Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English, ed. Andreas H. Jucker (1995); Historical Dialogue Analysis: Pragmatics and Beyond, ed. Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz, and Franz Lebsanft (1999); and Laurel J. Brinton, “Historical Discourse Analysis,” HDA (2001, 138–60). An example of the application of historical pragmatics to discourse is Dagmar Neuendorff’s investigation of the politeness strategies for greeting and receiving guests in Wolfram of Eschenbach’s Parzival: “Das Gespräch zwischen Parzival und Trevrizent im IX. Buch von Wolframs Parzival. Eine diskursanalytische Untersuchung,” Neophilologica Fennica, ed. L. Kahlas-Tarkka (1987, 267–94). Historical dialogic language use, defined as “textual interaction between text participants in constructing and negotiating meaning in discourse,” continues to be of scholarly interest (cf. Dialogic Language Use/Dimensions du dialogisme/Dialogischer Sprachgebrauch, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä, and Jarmo Korhonen [2006]). Deploying the empirical descriptive linguistic tradition, scholars also began to explore such subjects as discourse types, macro- and microstructures, cohesion, fixed phases and clauses, and boundary marking in medieval discourse. An early example is Harro Stammerjohann’s investigation of cohesion in La Chanson de Roland, which establishes a typology of discourse connectives: “Hiérarchie des connecteurs dans la Chanson de Roland,” Opérateurs syntaxiques et cohésion discursive, ed. Henning Nølke (1988, 63–74). Another area of continuing interest in connection with medieval languages is “discourse markers” which foreground and structure information, mark boundaries, and establish or maintain rapport with an audience. See, for example, Laurel J. Brinton, Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions (1996).

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The structuralist linguistic theories of Emile Benveniste have deeply influenced discourse theory and its applications to medieval languages, especially Old and Middle French. In contrast to langue as a “système de signes,” Benveniste establishes language as an “instrument de communication, dont l’expression est le discours.” Langue is converted into discourse by means of the énonciation: “la mise en functionnement de la langue par un acte individuel d’utilisation” (“the causing of language to function through an act of individual use”). It is through language and discourse that “man constitutes himself as a subject,” for “I and you exist only as they are constituted in an instance of discourse,” and this “momentary reference” is marked by deixis: pronouns, demonstratives, spatio-temporal adverbs and adjectives. Of fundamental importance also is the concept of intersubjectivity: the ‘I–you’ polarity is essential, for “neither term can exist without the other.” Each énonciation presupposes an interaction between a “locuteur” and an addressee, the former having the intention of influencing the other in some way (Problèmes de linguistique général, vol. 1 [1966, 220–62], vol. 2 [1974, 80]). Outlining the advent of Structuralist discourse linguistics in connection with Old and Middle French, Suzanne Fleischman argues that, when viewed in the context of spontaneously produced vernacular language, linguistic features that have often resisted traditional grammatical analysis can be explained. Invoking Benveniste, she points out that studies based on his principles of énonciation illuminate medieval French discourse, where the act of writing has not eradicated the traces of the “locutionary activity (énonciation) that produced them”: “connections to a speaker, a context, and the locutionary act that produced them” (“Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” Speculum 65 (1990, 19–37). For pioneering studies in this vein see Bernard Cerquiglini, La parole médiévale (1981); Christiane Marchello-Nizia, Dire le vrai: L’adverbe ‘si’ en français médiéval” (1985); Michele Perret, Le signe et la mention: Adverbes embrayeurs ‘ci,’ ‘ça,’ ‘la,’ ‘iluec’ en moyen français, XIVe-XVe siècles (1988); Barbara Wehr, Diskurs-Strategien im Romanischen: ein Beitrag zur romanischen Syntax (1984); and Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity (1990). Linguistic analysis has long considered narrative in naturally occurring languages, as in the work of Dell Hymes and William Labov. Adopting the fabula/sjuzet distinction, Structuralist theories of narrative and narratology (like those of Tzvetan Todorov, and especially, Gérard Genette, and later Roland Barthes) applied the concepts of “histoire et discours” to medieval literary texts. Focusing on features of “narrative discourse,” these studies examined tense and deixis, direct and indirect discourse, and narrative voice.

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Examples include Duncan Robertson, “Epic Direct Discourse,” Pacific Coast Philology 20 (1985, 70–74); Andreas Fischer, “Story and Discourse in Sir Gawain and ‘The Franklin’s Tale’,” Anglistentag 1989 Würzburg: Proceedings, ed. Rüdiger Ahrens (1990, 310–19); Alexandra Stein, ‘Wort unde werc’: Studien zum narrativen Diskurs im ‘Parzival’ Wolframs von Eschenbach (1993); and Sophie Marnette, Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: Une approche linguistique (1998). Influenced by Jakobson, Benveniste, Lévi-Strauss, Genette, Barthes, and Kristeva, Paul Zumthor’s Essai de poétique médiévale (1972) elaborates a theory and taxonomy of medieval vernacular discourse types based upon enunciative distance. One of his classificatory principles is “personal discourse” (i. e., it instills immediacy, at least fictively: “the presence of an ‘énonciateur,’ an ‘I’, and reference to a ‘hic et nunc’”) and “impersonal discourse,” which has the characteristics typically assigned to “histoire.” For Zumthor, “The poet is situated in his language rather than his language in him” (170–72). Approaching “discours” from the perspective of “énonciation,” Zumthor argues that the poetic voice – singing or reciting – constitutes a site of encounter between self and other, and “takes on a cohesive and stabilizing function which the social group needs for its continued existence as such.” This essential orality, or vocality, is connected to generating new works through ‘intervocalité’ and “discourse fragments”, a process that can lead to the creation of a monument. The goal of the “oralist” scholar, then, is “to distinguish in the continuous stream” of these “discourses,” which are “messages in the making and not finalized statements” (Paul Zumthor, “The Text and the Voice” New Literary History 16 [1984, 67–92]; La lettre et la voix: De la littérature médiévale [1987]). On the place of Zumthor in the context of Marie de France scholarship, see: In Quest of Marie de France, a TwelfthCentury Poet, ed. Chantal Maréchal, 1992, 1–27. As the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle (much of it produced in the 1920’s and 30’s) became known in France and subsequently in the United States, the related body of theory entered laterally into on going discussions by Structuralists and Poststructuralists. Bakhtinian concepts linked to the Russian term slovo (which has a broader semantic field than its French or English counterparts, being translated as word, utterance, or discourse); in addition, Julia Kristeva equated that and other Bakthinian terms with Benvenistean concepts of “discours,” “énoncé,” and “énonciation” (“Bakhtine: le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique 239 [April 1967, 438–65]. The result is an enriching and complicating of discourse theory.

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In addition to his discourse typology, a signal contribution is Bakhtin’s emphasis on the social context and implications of language, richly diverse and nuanced by interactions between speakers and interlocutors: “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon – social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors […]. The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideologically consciousness around the given object of utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue” (“Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, 1982, 259–422). Among the early appearances of Bakhtinian concepts – “discursive complexity,” “polyphony,” “heteroglossia,” and “dialogical interplay of voices” – in medieval scholarship are Kathleen Ashley, in “Renaming the Sins,” SSD (1989, 272–93), and Peggy Knapp in “Robyn the Miller’s Thrifty Work,” SSD (1989, 294–308). See also, Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas J. Farrell (1995). C. Poststructuralism and Discourse Theory With Poststructuralism, theory flourished: deconstruction, decentering the subject, language’s role in constructing knowledge, and power dynamics. The social sciences, as well as the humanities, adopted and modified earlier concepts of discourse, extending it beyond the confines of language to broader social practices and phenomena. In the case of medieval scholarship, as elsewhere, it is significant that in applying Poststructural discourse theory, scholars often interlace discourse concepts from more than one theoretical source (e. g., Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Gramsci, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu). In this context, medieval historian Gabrielle M. Spiegel offers an overview of the effects of the “Discursive Turn” on Historiography in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (2005). Some of the earliest considerations of Poststructuralist discourse theories by medievalists appear in collections of essays such as Kevin Brownlee and Stephen Nichols, ed., Images of Power: Medieval History/Discourse/ Literature. Yale French Studies 70 (1986). As the introduction explains, the collected essays (which resulted from the 1983 international conference at Dartmouth) explore Poststructuralist approaches in connection with medieval literature to “suggest new lines of inquiry”: the “historical, political, and economic implications of the discourse modes developed between 1000 and 1500,” the role of “medieval discursive systems” as “dynamic codes” with “gaps and inadequacies,” the question of the “inscription of paradigmatic

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‘hypertexts’ or ‘architextes’ that controlled the form taken by discourse in given works, thus generating generic transformations in the Bakhtinian sense.” The aim of the collection is to “suggest that theory can resituate us in history, while avoiding the futile nostalgia for a universal model.” Among these essays is Bernard Cerquiglini’s “The Syntax of Discursive Authority: The Example of Feminine Discourse” (183–98), which combines Bakhtinian theory and structuralist linguistics to explain the discursive function of Old French adverb mar (“in vain”). The most influential Poststructural theorist on discourse, Michel Foucault, has had a considerable impact on medieval studies both at a conceptual level and in connection with his commentaries on the Premodern period, his terms and concepts being widely adopted. In his well-known definition (L’Archéologie du savoir, 1969), Foucault concedes that he uses the term discours in various ways: “Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word ‘discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements” (Foucault, AK, 80). Elsewhere Foucault explains his definition more fully: (1) In the context of the “general domain of all statements,” le discours is “un ensemble d’énoncés” (“an aggregation of statements”) that constitutes subjects and objects, that which counts in the domain of knowledge. According to Foucault, a statement cannot exist in isolation; it “belongs to a discursive formation as a sentence belongs to a text.” Additionally, the statement is not the same kind of entity as the sentence, the proposition, or the speech act; rather it is a function enabling all of these to count as having meaning. (AK 116, 86–87). (2) For Foucault, “individualizable discourses” or “groups of statements” (e. g., economics or medicine) “give rise to certain organizations of concepts,” especially those of institutional authority (AK 64, 80). (3) As a “regulated [discursive] practice,” discourse comprises a complex of “autonomous, historical rules” that accounts for a limited number of statements which “belong to the same [discursive] formation.” This complex of “rules” permits or excludes, within a given discourse, a certain number of statements. Significantly, in Foucault’s theory of discourse, the subject is neither a “transcendental subject” nor a “psychological subjectivity,” nor a grammatical subject, but a position constituted through discourse (AK 116–117, 55). In this discursive system the “archive” and the “episteme” function as follows: The archive consists not of “the mass of texts” that has been col-

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lected at a given period, but of “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.” “It is the first law of what can be said”: the system of rules which at a given period and for a definite society defines and limits forms of “enunciative possibilities.” The episteme constitutes the knowledge system of a particular historical epoch (AK 129–30, 191–92). Not only Foucault’s theories of discourse but his observations about discursive formations (e. g., madness, punishment, and sexuality), which he linked to the Middle Ages, captured the attention of medievalists. In Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique (1961), Foucault depicted a brief idealized portrait of medieval responses to madness.” While these observations have been largely rejected, his work inspired subsequent studies of the topic, such as Jean-Marie Fritz (Le discours du fou au Moyen Âge, 1992) observes that Foucault’s conclusion – that madness at that time was not a political or epistemological problem – deterred him from a thorough study. Fritz expands the inquiry with a multidisciplinary investigation of madness: its discursive field, the rules pertaining to the discursive formation, “interdiscursive refutations,” the nature, places of production, and functions of discourse. Similarly, scholars have sought to identify other discursive constructions in the Middle Ages. Early on, in Le champion des femmes (1977), Marc Angenot demonstrated that the “slow discontinuous evolution of the discursive ensemble” illustrates that the counter example of woman’s virtues is itself embedded in the dominant discourse of antifeminism. See also R. Howard Bloch, “The Discourse of Misogyny in the Middle Ages,” Odense Studies in Medieval Culture (1986, 87–117); and R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (1991). Medievalists have also explicated what Foucault terms “individualizable discourses” that give rise to certain organizations of concepts (e. g., law, economics, medicine). See H. Beneviste’s “Les enlèvements: stratégies matrimoniales, discours juridique and discours politique en France à la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue Historique 283 (1990, 13–35). In Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (1998), Fiona Somerset considers the effects of translating learned Latin materials into English in the late 14th century. Studies of medical discourse may be found in Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, ed., Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (2004); and Irma Taavitsainen, “Medical Discourse: Early Genres, 14th and 15th Centuries,” Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Keith Brown (2006, 688–94). Foucault’s concepts of “archive” and “episteme” remain of continuing interest: for example, Martin Irvine combines Foucault’s concept of the archive with theories of Bakhtin and Jauss to explicate the cultural signifi-

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cance of medieval compilations and glosses (“Medieval Textuality and the Archaeology of Textual Culture,” Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. J. Allen Frantzen, 1991, 181–210); and Philip W. Rosemann argues that the the scholastic episteme underwent an essential transformation, which was manifested in the witch-hunt (The Scholastic Episteme: Understanding Medieval Thought With Foucault, 1999, 165–72). Linking knowledge and power through discourse, Foucault emphasized the role of the Middle Ages. For Foucault, “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Surveiller et punir, 1975, 27). Concomitantly, truth is not universal and objective; indeed, there is no truth outside of or beyond power/knowledge itself (DP, 1977, 27). Foucault characterizes one form of medieval power as control over the physical body in the form of ritualized public torture and execution, a form that is later replaced with a transition to a disciplinary society, which employs different forms of punishment to gain control over the individual mind (DP, 18). Similarly, in Histoire de la sexualité (1976), he returns to the Middle Ages, locating the origins of “sovereign power” and the “juridico-discursive” concepts of law and right in the formation of European monarchy, beginning in the 12th century: “The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages – monarchy, the state with its apparatus – rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior (often conflicting) powers […] and to a certain extent in opposition to them.” These institutions succeeded in “present[ing] themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to the boundaries and a fixed hierarchy” (HS, 86–87). Drawing on these Foucauldian concepts, Scott Pincikowski explores the Speculum Principis in connection with discourse of sovereign power over the body as depicted by Hartmann von Aue, arguing that it was through such means that “the social body of the nobility was able to maintain political hegemony” (Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue, 2002, xxiv). Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité (vol. 1: La volonté de savoir, 1976) has had an even stronger impact on medieval scholarship. Sketching out the construction of sexuality, he alludes to the Middle Ages, where he locates the relationship between sexuality and confession, the dominant shaping discourse of the period (especially after the Lateran Council of 1215 [HS 58]). Again the historical gaps in Foucault’s analysis of the discursive formation were expeditiously filled by subsequent works (cf. Danielle Jacquart and

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Claude Thomasset, Sexualité et savoir médical au moyen âge, 1985, and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 1990). Additionally, Foucault contended that after the Middle Ages sexuality began to be shaped by multiple discourses, an idea developed in connection with sex and desire by John W. Baldwin who represents several “discourses” (e. g., clerical and medical) with a “voice” (The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France about 1200, 1994). In a Foucauldian-inspired analysis of confession in connection with medieval ecclesiastical discourse, John H. Arnold analyzes the way in which the “confessing subject” is produced through discourse. The idea of autonomous confession lies at the heart of the Inquisition’s claim to be an authoritative producer of “truth.” Moreover, the confessing subject “is above all a textual subject, constructed within a particular discourse.” “The confessing subject was not her or his own self: he or she was also subject of and subject to the inquisition” (Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc, 2001). For examples of the numerous surveys of ways in which Foucault’s ideas on the discursive formation of sexuality have influenced scholarship on medieval sexuality, see Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, James A. Schultz, and Peggy McCracken (1997), and Louise O. Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “Introduction: The Pleasures of History,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4 (1995): 371–84. For much of the later 20th century, considerations of Diskurs in German scholarship have been placed in a pragmatic, communicative context. Here, Jürgen Habermas’s theories of “communicative action” and the role of discourse in the public sphere, as set forth in his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981) and other works, have influenced medieval scholarship. For Habermas, Diskurs is a reflective form of communicative activity (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1990, 201–202). In Habermas’s theoretical writings, Diskurs specifies “a type of interaction that is coordinated through speech acts and does not coincide with them” (TCA 1, 101); it has a specialized sense of rule-based speech or argument in quest of consensus based on reason (TCA 1, 42). According to this view, the individual self is perceived as a member of a community, where social order depends on the members’ capacity for and cooperation in communicative action and moral argumentation. For Habermas, discourse entails conditions for comprehensibility, truth, rightness, and truthfulness, and it is defined in terms of an ideal communication situation – an exchange among equals, rational beings who cooperatively test the validity claims for the purpose of resolving differences. In discussing the importance of discourse in the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas focuses on its emergence in the 18th century. However he

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discovers its precursors in the Middle Ages with sovereign power and the formation of the state, where society became a private realm (James Finlayson, Habermas, 2005). Among scholars who have implemented this approach to discourse and communication in early German works, Albrecht Classen has explored the implications of Habermasian theory in the Hildebrandslied, where he finds “the consequences of failed communication, and its causes: a lack of rationality and a failed sense of communality” (“Why Do Their Words Fail? Communicative Strategies in the Hildebrandslied,” Modern Philology 93 [1995, 1–22]. See also id., Verzweiflung und Hoffnung: Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 2002). In recent years there has been growing interest among German scholars in the theories of Foucault; for instance work in the social and cultural sciences by Siegfried Jäger and Jürgen Link focuses on present-day discourse and “the effects of their power as revealed in language-based and iconographic modes.” Here, Diskurs is connected to the “institutionally consolidated concept of speech inasmuch as it determines and consolidates action and thus already exercises power”; so too, it is “the flow of knowledge through all of time” that determines the individual and collective doing and/or formative action that shapes society thus exercising power.” (Siegfried Jäger, “Discourse and Knowledge: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of a Critical Discourse and Dispositive Analysis,” MCDA [2001, 32–62]). A notable recent addition in the medieval context is Gert Hübner’s Introduction to Old German Literature, which contains a chapter on “Diskurs und Diskursanalyse,” where he defines several central Foucauldian concepts and applies them to significant medieval German works (Gert Hübner, “Diskurs und Diskursanalyse,” Ältere deutsche Literatur: Eine Einführung, ed. id. [2006, 232–59]). D. The First Decade of the 21st Century As discourse studies have become more interdisciplinary, the investigation of discourse has been increasingly integrated into Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis, which overlaps Cultural Linguistics, Cultural Criticism, and French Discourse Analysis, has been defined as research on “ways in which social power, abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political contexts.” Analysts “take an explicit position and thus want to understand, expose and ultimately resist social inequality” (Teun van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” HDA [2001, 352–72]). German Critical Discourse Analysis, as noted, is strongly influenced by Foucauldian theory, and French Discourse

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Analysis is characterized by a philosophical and psychoanalytic base; attention to language, especially enunciative linguistics; social contextualization of the énoncé; and a technological, informatics orientation. Often focused on present-day issues of gender, class, and race, these methodological approaches combine social or ideological concerns with linguistic and sometimes nonlinguistic elements; these methodologies are also applied to the past. An example is Joannah L. Wood’s application of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis framework to the 15th-century letters written to and by Margaret Paston (“A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach to Margaret Paston,” Letter Writing, ed. Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen [2007, 47–71]). Discourse analysis has also become an integral part of fields like Cultural, Feminist, and Postcolonial Studies, whose theories and methods are applied to Premodern texts and culture. In such analyses, discourse methodologies are often blended with the theories of Michel de Certeau, Michel Pecheux, Slovoj Mi zek, ˇ Antonio Gramsci, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. See Emmanuel Filhol, “L’image de l’autre au Moyen Age: La représentation du monde rural dans le Guide du Pèlerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle,” Cahiers d’histoire 3 (2000, 347–62); David Hanlon, “Islam and Stereotypical Discourse in Medieval Castile and Leon,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000, 479–504). Examples of Postcolonial analyses that demonstrate various hybrid discourses in competing with master discourses include Paul Goetsch, “Der koloniale Diskurs in Beowulf,” New Methods in the Research of Epic/Neue Methoden der Epenforschung, ed. Hildegard Tristram (1998, 185–200); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (2003); and Alice Sheppard, Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (2004). As technology is increasingly employed to aid in investigating discourse, medieval scholars have joined in large-scale long-term collaborative projects with international contributors. Technologically grounded projects that explicitly address discourse analysis include: The Base de Français Médiéval (BFM), founded by Christine Marchello-Nizia (1989), is a three-millionword corpus of Old and Middle French: it is morphologically tagged and encoded for text or discourse type, discursive domain, and particular semantic and linguistic features (e. g., demonstrative adjectives). (http://w3.ens-lsh.fr/ egerstenkorn/bfm2/). The Parzival-Projekt, an electronic edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s work based at the Universities of Bern and Basel, is designed to “tally with” new developments in “historiographical scholarship,” and in discourse analysis (http://www.parzival.unibe.ch).

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Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), part of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, contains a 500000-word corpus illustrating the “evolution of medical writing within the variationist framework of stylistics and discourse analysis.” (Middle English Medical Texts. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen. CD-ROM, Amsterdam, 2005, http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/scientific%20thought.html). Select Bibliography Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; London: Tavistock, 1972); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975: London: Allen Lane and New York: Pantheon, 1977); Michel Foucault, Folie et Déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: Introduction (1976; New York: Vintage, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I (1981; Boston: Beacon, 1984); The Discourse Reader, ed. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Jørgen Dines Johansen, Literary Discourse: A Semiotic-Pragmatic Approach to Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. D. Schiffrin et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Teun van Dijk, 4 vols. (New York: Academic, 1985); Discourse Studies, ed. Teun van Dijk, 2 vols. (London: Sage, 1997); Glyn Williams, French Discourse Analysis: The Method of Post-Structuralism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage, 2001).

Karen K. Jambeck

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F Fictionality A. Introduction The development of fiction in the Middle Ages dove-tails the emergence of modern historiography and distinctions between story and history, which are still contested today. As Hayden White has pointed out, most notably in his work The Content and the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987), “The distinction between discourse and narrative is, of course, based solely on the analysis of the grammatical features of two modes of discourse in which the ‘objectivity’ of the one and the ‘subjectivity’ of the other are definable primarily by a ‘linguistic order of criteria’ […] every great historical narrative is an allegory of temporality” (3). Despite the enormous amount of discussion and debate the emergence of fiction in the Middle Ages has generated over the past decades, upon close inspection there is more agreement on this topic than on most others. Almost all of the attempts to approach the phenomenon hold the following three attributes in common: 1) Twelfth and early Thirteenth Century Romance remains the primary and almost exclusive subject of study. 2) During this period, imaginative literature, historiography, and the hermeneutics of Biblical exegesis interacted to produce both a new literary and a new historical consciousness beginning in France (see Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance, 1992). 3) Fictionality depends upon a new relationship between the audience and the material. D. H. Green’s definition remains the most succinct and coincides with most of the major positions, “Fiction is category of literary text which, although it may also include events that were held to have actually taken place, gives an account of events that, although possible, did not take place, and which, in doing so invites the intended audience to be willing to make-believe what would otherwise be regarded as untrue” (The Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 2002, 4). Walter Haug’s numerous essays on the topic of medieval fictionality constitute among the most exhaustive contested bodies of work on the subject, yet Haug’s own definition coincides with the one here by Green (see Die Wahrheit der Fiktion, 2003; Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter, 1985).

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B. Categories of Narration Medieval rhetoricians and grammarians recognized three basic categories of narration: fabula, argumentum, and historia. For medieval authors, the category fabula relates the impossible or improbable and is wholly contrived. The argumentum is also invented but can be distinguished from the fabula by its level of verisimilitude. The events of an argumentum did not happen but they could happen. Historia faithfully recounts the truth of actual historical events. This system of classification can already be found in Cicero’s De inventione (ca. 60 B.C.E.), in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 60 B.C.E.), and in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (ca. 630 C.E.) (see Hennig Brinkmann, Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik, 1980; Päivi Mehtonen, Old Concepts and New Poetics: Historia, Argumentum, and Fabula in the Twelfth- and Early Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetics of Fiction, 1996). Since the communication of “truth” constituted a consistent claim of almost all narratives, historia ranked as the highest and most worthwhile form of literature. However, the establishment of truth was not based on the corroboration of verifiable facts but rather on the extent to which the narrative was seen to comply with or demonstrate an ideological truth. Christian theological concerns determined conventions for establishing truth, usually through attribution to scripture or a canonical authorship. These criteria introduced a considerable amount of ambiguity into any attempt to categorize a given narrative. As Alastair J. Minnis notes in his Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middles Ages, 1984, “Two criteria for the award of this accolade [auctor] were tacitly applied: ‘intrinsic worth’ and ‘authenticity’. To have ‘intrinsic worth’, a literary work had to conform, in one way or another, with Christian truth. […] To be ‘authentic’, a saying or piece of writing had to be the genuine production of a named auctor” (11). This meant that most major literary endeavors, like the romances, made claims of being transmitted from an accepted authority. In addition, the inevitable encroachment of Biblical exegetical practice into the reception and production of extra-Biblical texts enabled what modern readers would consider fiction to be distributed as historia. Medieval litterati also sought spiritual senses in profane texts, with, for example, the Chartrian notion of the integumentum. The integumental method allowed for the attribution of figurative truth to invented narrative, but medieval authors did not need the concept of the integumentum to assert the figurative meaning of their narratives as long as these were transmitted and received as authentic histories (Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres, 1972).

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C. Medieval Historiography and Fictionality Medieval literate culture located the “truth,” or value, of any given text on several possible levels as a general rule and routinely practiced the exposition and extrapolation of the deeper significance of historical events, even those recorded outside the Bible. Openness to the deeper significance of a given historical event was an integral part of any general reception of historical narrative or auctorial text. In general, the romancers of the late 12th and early 13th centuries participate in the hermeneutic model inherent in medieval historiography. Medieval historiographic practice already allowed for an expansion of the number of possible “truths” that could be found in an extraBiblical text as long as the material was considered to communicate an actual historical occurrence that could be understood as an expression of the will of God. Within these bounds, the investigation of the real import of historical events continually expanded the allowable range of interjection and invention (see Peter von Moos, “Poeta und Historicus im Mittelalter: Zum MimesisProblem am Beispiel einiger Urteile über Lucan,” PBB 98 [1976]: 93–130). Medieval historiography afforded and even obliged historians to recount history with a certain amount of poetic license. Although the historical subject was traditionally limited to well-documented and established material, the tolerance of authorial invention creates a seeming incongruity: the truth of the historia is not exclusively located in nor limited to the literal historical facts (see Fritz Peter Knapp, “Historische Wahrheit und poetische Lüge: Die Gattungen weltlicher Epik und ihre theoretische Rechtfertigung im Mittelalter,” DVjS 54 [1980]: 581–635). The added endorsement of poetic expression as a means of communicating and uncovering deeper philosophical truths encouraged the extension of historical extrapolation to the point of fictional representation that culminated in the invention of the romance. Bishop Otto von Freising’s (ca. 1112–1158) Gesta Frederici (1156–1158), for example, depicts Frederick Barbarossa as heir to Constantine, legitimating the Emperor both politically and soteriologically. In his prologue, Otto describes his historiographic practice. He contends it is in keeping with the nature of his work that he should vary his diction and shift from the plana hystorica dictione to a loftier, philosophic style of poetry. Otto places his history in the same category as the works of Lucan and Virgil, observing that these two authors employ poetry to present intima phylosophiae secreta. Affirming the philosophical depth of poetry, Gunther the Poet versified the Gesta Frederici in his Ligurinus (1188) in order to communicate these truths in a more pleasing manner. Of course, this move demonstrates that the Platonic rejection of poetry as mendacious, which had held sway in the question West throughout the early Middle Ages, was now, through the influence of authors like Ovid,

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Lucan, and Virgil, was slowly transforming into an estimation more akin with the Poetics of Aristotle, although that work itself would not be known in the West for almost a century after this process had already taken place. History provides fiction with a context and correlation to reality that enables the audience to relate to the story (see Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Authorizing History in the Vernacular Revolution. 1999). The adaptation of historical forms locates the Arthurian Romances within the bounds of appreciable communication, even though they lack the vital Latin sources of the romans d’antiquité. As Hans Robert Jauss (“Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti [1982]) remarks that any new generic form must borrow from previous genres in order to be understood (76–82). For Romance, the previous genre was history. As Robert M. Stein, in his book Reality Fictions: Romance, History and Governmental Authority 1025–1180, comments, “it is impossible to draw a firm line between historiography and romance” (106). D. The Role of the Audience The Arthurian Romance achieves a true revolution by demanding complicity in the fraud on the part of the audience (see Walter Haug, “Die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität,” Die Wahrheit der Fiktion, 2003, 131). A willingness on the part of the audience to accept the fictional communication as meaningful, i. e., a willingness to accept fiction as significant and worthwhile, is the most important and uncontested component of medieval fictionality. As histories, the Arthurian romances are freed from the purely didactic horizon of expectations associated with fabula and exempla. Moreover, as histories without authentic and well-known sources, the Arthurian romances were not burdened with the prescribed interpretations applied to the canonical Latin histories informing the romans d’antiquité. Walter Haug sees this as the defining moment of what he calls the fictive experiment. In the absence of an interpretive scheme, the authors and the audience a like take part in the experience which is necessarily subjective and open (id., “Autorität und fiktionale Freiheit”, Die Wahrheit der Fiktion, 2003, 126–27.) With this assertion, Haug subverts the didactic aspect of chivalric fiction that has been a cornerstone of reception from the inception of the drama, though this aspect of his theory has been widely rejected (see C. Stephen Jaeger, “Book-Burning at Don Quixote’s: Thoughts on the Educating Force of Courtly Romance,” Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz, 2004, 17). Nonetheless, Haug’s assertions are made in the context of specific works and as such will remain a primary locus for discussion on this topic.

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The tacitly unauthentic versified Arthurian histories lead to gradual reception of verse as the genre of subjective narrative and prose as the genre of objective narrative. In her books Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (1993) and The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (1999), Gabrielle M. Spiegel has charted the emergence of a “objective” historiography at the beginning of the 13th century. In her article, “Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17.2 (1987): 129–148, Spiegel asserts that “by about 1200, a new popular demand for historical works in prose began to make itself felt. Little by little, vernacular prose, until then confined to translations of biblical or homiletic texts, becomes the preferred form of history” (130). Select Bibliography J. Alexander Bareis and Lars-Åke Skalin, Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness: The Narrative Turn and the Study of Literary Fiction (Oerebro, Sweden: Oerebro University Press, 2008); Dennis H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction: 1150–1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Walter Haug, Die Wahrheit der Fiktion: Studien zur weltlichen und geistlichen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003); id., Strukturen als Schlüssel zur Welt: Kleine Schriften zur Erzählliteratur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989); id., Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts, Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985); Fritz P. Knapp, Historie und Fiktion in der mittelalterlichen Gattungspoetik: Sieben Studien und ein Nachwort (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997); Caroline A. Jewers, Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000); Franco Moretti, The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Stephen Mark Carey

Frontier, Transgression, Liminality A. General Outline of Topic Academic interest in frontiers and thresholds, including transition theory, originated in (religious) ethnology. The phenomena and terminology entered literary theory from this perspective, given additional impetus by the so-called cultural turn in the 1980s.

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B. Terminological Definition In 1909 Arnold van Gennep divided the observable rites which constitute magic and religion into three categories: rites of separation (rites de séparation), rites of liminality (rites de marge), and rites of incorporation (rites d’agrégation). Together, the three make up the class of rites of passage. Their purpose is to enable the transition of an individual from one precisely defined situation to another, equally defined situation (Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, 1909; French reprint 1981; trans. into German with the title Übergangsriten, 1986; Studienausgabe 1999, here 15). In 1964 Victor Turner developed the middle phase further (Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between; The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” Proceedings of the 1964 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. June Helm, 1989, 4–20) and turned his observations into a political theory of society in his major work five years later (Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969; German: Das Ritual: Struktur und Anti-Struktur, 2000). Between the initial and final state which, according to van Gennep, are clearly defined, Turner placed a phase of liminality, i. e., indefiniteness, at best ambiguity, in which the threshold crosser no longer possesses the characteristics of the phase he has left, but has not yet acquired those of the phase he is entering. This liminal phase is not confined to individuals; societies can also undergo it, being then (for a period of time) neither structured nor differentiated nor, for example, ordered hierarchically or according to a spatial Above or Below; Turner refers to this threshold state as Communitas (2000, 96f.). C. History of Research (and Current Issues) In the U.S.A. where Turner taught from 1964 on until his death in 1983 (initially at Cornell, then at the University of Chicago, and finally at the University of Virginia); publications on his liminality theory, as he had applied it to drama, appeared from the year 1990 on; see: Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology, ed. Kathleen Ashley, 1990). Within German-language scholarship, Turner and van Gennep’s theories influenced mediaevalists earlier than they did modernists, because the rituals and ceremonies connected to the transitions were perceived as central to mediaeval poetics and communication (cf. Gerd Althoff’s works; and further Jaritz’s article on “Ritual and Performance” in this Handbook). However, this influence was generally not shown in explicit reference to Turner and van Gennep but rather either to unexplained “liminal states,” or a merely common-sense use of “threshold states, spaces or places.” Turner’s theory deals primarily with changes of social context. For that reason, it is unsurprising that most of the studies examining liminality deal

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with the protagonists of medieval courtly romances. The knightly vita activa proceeds from an initiation (dubbing, belting with the sword) via adolescence and crisis to maturity and lordship (coronation), and can therefore be read as a succession of transitions. Furthermore, the concept of the doublecycle now so familiar to scholars – the hero must ride into the world twice, once to win land and lady, and a second time after failure and crisis, to win back both – also lends itself to interpretation via liminality. Inasmuch as – in the broadest sense – psychological (maturation) processes are portrayed in mediaeval literature with the aid of changing spatial descriptions, such as the transition from the castle or court to the forest, a border between culture and nature, mediaevalism chiefly recognises liminal places (cf. Christian Schmid-Cadalbert, “Der wilde Wald: Zur Darstellung und Funktion eines Raumes in der mittelhochdeutschen Literatur,” Gotes und der werlde hulde, ed. Rüdiger Schnell, 1989, 24–47). Major impetus towards the examination of borders (and hence differentiation) was given almost simultaneously by Albrecht Koschorke in his Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (1990). Via a second category pair, interior-exterior, the interest in borders and liminality has spread to further themes and disciplines. Skin is now regarded as a liminal organ, which stands between the ego/body and the exterior world, of interest not merely in psychology (with regard to binding – separation – reintegration) and perception/cognitive theory (with regard to subliminal perception which lies below the threshold of consciousness but can be observed galvanically in skin). In Mediaeval Studies which understand the body as a socially and culturally generated bearer of symbolism the academic stock of skin contact and tactility is currently rising (Christina Lechtermann, Berührt werden: Narrative Strategien der Präsenz in der höfischen Kultur um 1200, 2005). Equally, a connection between visual perception and liminal locations can be conjectured (Jerold. C. Frakes, “The Female Gaze and the Liminal Window in Medieval Epic,” ‘De consolatione philologiae:’ Studies in Honor of Evelyn S. Firchow, ed. Anna Grotans, Heinrich Beck, and Anton Schwob, 2000, 85–100). The interior-exterior dichotomy also underpins all the studies concerned with the concept of secret-public and with the borders between intimate/private and official/public actions. Aleida Assmann (Schleier und Schwelle, vol. 1, Geheimnis und Öffentlichkeit, 1997) pointed the way; a little bit earlier, and dealing with the Middle Ages is Horst Wenzel (“Ze hove und ze holze – offenlîch und tougen: Zur Darstellung und Deutung des Unhöfischen in der höfischen Epik und im Nibelungenlied,” Höfische Literatur: Hofgesellschaft: Höfische Lebensformen um 1200, ed. Gert Kaiser and Jan-Dirk Müller, 1986, 277–300). Finally, emotion research in medieval

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studies takes on some theorems from liminality theory insofar as it addresses transfer problems and answers the question of how emotions are transported in literature by pointing to visualizing ritualization. However, such rituals are originally always considered to be markings of borders, breaks or thresholds (cf. Ingrid Kasten, Jutta Eming, Elke Koch, and Andrea Sieber, “Zur Performativität von Emotionalität in erzählenden Texten des Mittelalters. Eine Projektskizze aus dem Berliner Sonderforschungsbereich ‘Kulturen des Performativen’,” Encomia-Deutsch. Sonderheft der ICLS, 2000, 42–60). By no means of least importance is the possibility of understanding the whole medieval period as a liminal epoch of transition which medieval scholarship frequently focuses on the transition from an oral to a written culture. Inasmuch as writing can be defined as a frozen memory in material form, then the wheel turns full circle back to van Gennep’s fieldwork on rites of passage, for those also serve the visualisation (for instance through the stigmatisation of the physis) of things which are “written” in collective memory. D. Future Trends Inasmuch as a trend in scholarship in German can be established, then it appears to consist not of a preoccupation with spatial or temporal crossing of a border or transition, but rather with the phenomenon of transformation which is implicit in every transition. The key word is “metamorphosis”, but it goes beyond a purely physical transformation (cf. for instance Kevin Brownlee, “Mélusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis,” Yale French Studies 86 [1994]: 18–38. Currently the International Research Centre: Metamorphic Changes in the Arts (IRCM) at the University of Salzburg, Austria, is being established with six interdisciplinary axes, including “corporeal transformations,” and “reception as metamorphosis.” Select Bibliography Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage (1909; rpt. Paris: E. Nourry, 1981; trans. into German as Übergangsriten, Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1986); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, Edison, NJ: Aldine Press, 1969; trans. into German as: Das Ritual: Struktur und Anti-Struktur, Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2000); Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter, ed. Ulrich Knefelkamp and Kristian Bosselmann-Cyran (Salzburg: Akademie Verlag, 2007).

Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler

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G Game A. Introduction The concept of game and the concept of play are closely related, but a distinction has been drawn between the two since ancient times. One of the earliest distinctions between game and play was provided by Plato (Phaedrus), who asserted that game (ludus) possesses moves, rules and goals that are arrived at through reason, play (paedia) however lacks rules, goals or structured moves. Game is thus intentional and rational, although like play subject to effects of chance. This distinction began to enjoy critical scrutiny in the 18th century, and today critical approaches to game theory have come to influence the study of mathematics, politics, philosophy, economics, theatre, theology, literature and sports. Contemporary theories of game most relevant for medieval studies base themselves on the consideration of Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Bakhtin, Gadamer, Barthes, and Foucault among others. One of the significant and widely referenced theoretical treatments of game in the field of Medieval Studies has proved that of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky [rejected dissertation title Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i renessansa {The work of François Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance}], 1940; first published in 1968) and his treatment of game in late medieval and Renaissance carnival as a form of social play and game that became the forum for an encoded protest of authoritarian constructs distinguishable as such only to the initiated who were conditioned to recognize the parody, satire and allusion of transgressive and subversive forms of performance and public representation. Another significant field of medieval studies in which Game theory has been well received is that of literary criticism under the influence of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, where game and play are postulated as capable of undermining hierarchies and traditional authoritarian positions of understanding. Derrida, too, makes a distinction between game and play, with game providing structure and credence to the established reification of belief systems, social structures etc; and play representing the absence of goals and

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lack of structure. Play has the ability to alter the rules of the game if sufficiently developed. As Gordon E. Slethaug (“Game Theory,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irina Makaryk, 1993, 64–69) comments, “While Derrida’s critique of metaphysics may not immediately change the power structure, it has the potential for altering it over time or at least of making people aware of the privileged games of the past and the conditions for winning” (67). Adaptations of this deconstructive theme can be found in the literary criticism of Barthes and Foucault. Further important contributions to Game theory can be found by Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. The former discusses elements of play in game itself, be the “game” a literary, political, social or philosophical one, among others, which are marked by a non-utilitarian, playful, and voluntary quality. Caillois expanded on Huizinga’s discussion of game for practical socio-political purposes, in doing so he identified four game types, here as explained by Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (2005): “agôn: where competition is dominant (cf. antagonism): pitting one person or team against another (e. g., football, tennis, chess); alea: where chance is dominant: submitting oneself to fate or fortune (e. g. roulette, the lottery, spinning a coin); mimicry: where simulation is dominant: assuming the personality or taking on the role of another (e. g. role-play, charades, ‘pretend’); ilinx: where vertigo is dominant: aiming at giddiness or, in extreme cases, ecstasy (carousels, driving fast, raves)” (120). As a consequence, should these aspects of game be taken into account when treating a piece of literature, it entails that focus of the study shifts in part away from the work itself, to the social environment within which it was created and the rules and institutions that govern that environment (in terms of social mores, normative pressures, laws etc.) and how it was received by the audience. B. Game Theory and Games in Medieval Studies The concepts of game and play have had and continue to exert a significant impact on medieval studies, primarily in the study of theater, social studies and literature. The brief overview provided here is intended only to provide a glimpse at the treatment and discussion of game in the various disciplines and discourses. In many instances, the works provided here are interdisciplinary in nature and transcend the scope of a single discipline. Similarly, the concept of game in its most diverse sense is reflected through both the treatment of game from an abstract (theoretical) and/or concrete (material culture) perspective. The treatment of courtly love as a form of game and/or play in medieval and especially courtly literature can also be seen to exert a prominent influence in literary studies.

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Medieval English Studies have seen a wide variety of treatments of game and play, a significant portion of which have focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the anonymously composed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Heather Masri, “Carnival Laughter in the Pardoner’s Tale,” Medieval Perspectives 10 (1995): 148–56, Richard Green, “Troilus and the Game of Love,” Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 201–20; Tison Pugh, “Christian Revelation and the Cruel Game of Courtly Love in Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 39 (2005): 379–401; Elizabeth McCormick, “It’s How You Play the Game: Christine and Chaucer Debate ‘Woman’,” Ph.D. diss. Claremont (2006); Gloria Torrini-Roblin, “Gomen and Gab: Two Models for Play in Medieval Literature,” Romance Philology 38 (1984): 32–40; John Finlayson, “Sir Gawain, Knight of the Queen, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” English Language Notes 27 (1989): 7–13; Setsuko Haruta, “Sir Gawain and the Grisly Game,” Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of Tadahiro Ikegami. ed. Masahiko Kanno et al.,1997, 283–96; Jefferey H. Taylor, “Semantic Social Games and the Game of Life in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Arrow-Odd’s Saga,” Medieval Forum 6 (2007), online: http://www.sfsu.edu/ medieval/Volume6/taylor.html. The field of Medieval German Studies has seen considerable discussion on courtly love as a social and poetological game, among others: Albrecht Classen, “Das Spiel mit der Liebe: Leben als Spiel: Versuch einer Neuinterpretation des Moriz von Craûn,” GRM 40 (1990): 369–98; Otto Neudeck, “Das Spiel mit den Spielregeln: Zur literarischen Emanzipation von Formen körperhaft-ritualisierter Kommunikation im Mittelalter,” Euphorion 95 (2001): 287–303; Volker Mertens, “Das ‘Spiel der höfischen Liebe’ bei Walther von der Vogelweide,” Jahrbuch für Finnisch-Deutsche Literaturbeziehungen: Mitteilungen aus der Deutschen Bibliothek 27 (1995): 178–92; Helmut Tervooren, “Das Spiel mit der höfischen Liebe: Minneparodien im 13.–15. Jahrhundert,” Schoeniu wort mit süezeme sange: Philologische Schriften, ed. Helmut Tervooren et al., 2000, 73–95; Mireille Schnyder, “Glücksspiel und Vorsehung: Die Würfelspielmetaphorik im ‘Parzival’ Wolframs von Eschenbach,” ZdfA 131 (2002): 308–25. Medieval French studies have provided a broad and varied discussion of game, the primary focus of which has been in troubadour literature: Stephen Manning, “Game and Earnest in the Middle English and Provençal Love Lyrics,” Comparative Literature 18 (1966): 225–41; Robert E Chumbley, “Game Models for French Literature, 1100–1300: An Exercise in Relational Criticism,” Ph.D. diss. Yale (1972); Laura. Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay, 1988; F. R. P. Akehurst, “Courtly Love as Zero-sum and Non-zero-sum Game,” RLA 6 (1994): 1–5; Françoise Guichard-Tesson,

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“Jeux de l’amour et jeux du langage,” Moyen Français 38 (1996): 21–44; Melanie Gibson, “Lyonet, Lunete, and Laudine: Carnivalesque Arthurian Women,” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, 2001, 213–27; Elizabeth Zegura, “True Stories and Alternative Discourses: The Game of Love in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron,” Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 351–68; William Calin, “Intertextual Play and the Game of Love: The Belle Dame sans mercy Cycle,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 31 (2006): 31–46. Medieval Italian Studies treating game and play focus to a large extent on Boccaccio and Dante: Franco Masciandaro, “La violenza e il giuoco nella novella di Martellino (Decameron II, 1): La problematica dell’improvvisazione,” Italian Culture 8 (1990): 39–52; Richard Green, “Le roi qui ne ment and Aristocratic Courtship,” Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby, 1990, 211–25; Edoardo Crisafulli, “The Adequate Translation as a Methodological Tool: Dante’s Onomastic Wordplay in English,” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies 13 (2001): 1–28; Franco Masciandaro, “Madonna Isabella’s Play and the Play of the Text (Decameron VII.6),” MLN 118 (2003): 245–56. Medieval Spanish Studies have also tended to focus on the aspect of game in social enactments of love: Edith Rogers, “Games of Muscle, Mind, and Chance in the ‘Romancero’,” Hispania 55 (1972): 419–27; Louise Vasvari, “The Two Lazy Suitors in the ‘Libro de buen amor’: Popular Tradition and Literary Game of Love,” Anuario Medieval 1 (1989): 181–205; Ian Macpherson, “The Game of Courtly Love: Letra, divisa, and invención at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs,” Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General, ed. Michael Gerli and Julian Weiss (1998): 95–110; Nathalie Kasselis, The Game(s) of Love and Language in Antón de Montoro, Rodrigo de Cota and Fernando de Rojas, Ph.D. diss. Michigan State University, published in Spanish translation by María Ferrer-Lightner (2000, trans. 2004); Nancy Marino, “Fernando de la Torre’s ‘Juego de naipes’, A Game of Love,” Corónica 35 (2006): 209–47. Aside from the study of medieval languages and literatures, the treatment of game, play and the role they played in medieval Theater Studies has also proven popular, frequently in light of Bakthin’s theoretical considerations: Konrad Schoel, Das komische Theater des französischen Mittelalters: Wirklichkeit und Spiel, 1975; Clifford C. Flanigan, “Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama,” Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism. ed. Kathleen Ashley, 1990, 42–63; Kristina Simeonova, “The Aesthetic Function of the Carnivalesque in Medieval

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English Drama,” Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects, ed. David Shepherd, 1993, 70–79; André Lascombes, “Revisiting The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Spectacle and the Other’s Voice,” European Medieval Drama 2, ed. Sydney Higgins, 1998, 261–75; Lee Templeton, “Cast Them in Canvas: Carnival and the Second Shepherd’s Play,” Medieval Perspectives 16 (2001): 151–64; Greg Cavenaugh: “Flesh and Spirit Onstage in Medieval English Theatre,” Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies 57 (2004): 1–25. Similarly, medieval Social Studies have investigated the aspects of game and play in medieval festive culture: Lawrence M Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, 2001; Neil Carlidge, “The Battle of Shrovetide: Carnival Against Lent as a Leitmotif in Late Medieval Culture,” Viator 35 (2004): 517–42; Christopher Whyte, “Bakhtin at Christ’s Kirk: Carnival and the Scottish Renaissance,” Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993): 178–203; Nicholas Orme, “Child’s Play in Medieval England,” History Today 51 (2001): 49–55. Related but listed separately here is the treatment of game in relation to Sports History: Ruth Huff Cline, “The Influence of Romances on Tournaments of the Middle Ages,” Speculum 20 (1945): 204–11; Barbara Hanawalt, “Men’s Games, King’s Deer: Poaching in Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988): 175–93; William Sayers, “Games, Sport, and Para-Military Exercise in Early Ireland,” Aethlon 10 (1992): 105–24; Gregory Semenza, “Historicizing ‘Wrastlynge’ in the Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 38 (2003): 66–82. Finally, the consideration of Material Culture and the role of game(s) therein can be found in discussions of manuscripts which provide games or discussion thereof (card games, board games), and especially the role of the game of Chess (including its influence on courtly literature, education and symbolic value within literature): Ernst Voss, “Aus den Schätzen der herzoglichen Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel,” Modern Philology 26 (1929): 477–80; George R Stephens, “A Mediaeval Game in Use Today,” Speculum 12 (1937): 264–67; Richard Eales: “The Game of Chess: An Aspect of Medieval Knightly Culture,” The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey, 1986, 12–34. Eric Anderson, “Game and Reality in Medieval and Renaissance English Outlaw Narratives,” Aethlon 8 (1991): 73–88; L. M. Eldredge, “Four Medieval Manuscripts with Mathematical Games,” Medium Ævum 68 (1999): 209–17; Sonja Golladay, “The Illuminated Microcosm of Alfonso X’s Book of Games,” Art and Culture Magazine 13 (2004): 56–75; Catherine Batt, “Recreation, the Exemplary and the Body in Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse,” Ludica 2 (1996): 27–44; Karina van Dalen-Oskam, “The Flying

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Chess-Set in the Roman van Walewein,” King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries, ed. Geert Claassens and David Johnson, 2000, 59–68; Kathleen Kennedy, “Hoccleve’s Dangerous Game of Draughts,” Notes and Queries 53 (2006): 411–14. Select Bibliography Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Zurich: Beacon, 1955); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference: A Translation of Eight Essays from L’Ecriture et la difference by Jacques Derrida, with Introduction and Additional Notes. trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); James A. G. Marino: “An Annotated Bibliography of Play and Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 12 (1985): 306–58; Herbert De Ley: “The Name of the Game: Applying Game Theory in Literature,” SubStance 17 (1988): 33–46; Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker, ed. R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; orig. 1967–1980); Stefan Matuschek: Literarische Spieltheorie: Von Petrarca bis zu den Brüdern Schlegel (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1998); Roger Caillois: Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961; orig. 1958).

Maurice Sprague

Gestures A. Definition and Early Research The study of gesture, defined as a semantically charged “movement of the body” (motus corporis), has acquired greater prominence recently, due to an increased interest in the history of the body and communication as well as the development of a renewed cultural history. Medievalists, however, have been aware of the communicative and symbolic value of body-based systems of expression for a considerable time. Early research from the end of the 19th century has focused on legal history and the history of literature, while the concentration of general history on constitutional and political questions prevented most authors from analyzing the phenomenon of gestures. An exception are “cultural histories” in specialized areas, e. g. the idea and concept of chivalry, like Charles Mills’s The History of Chivalry or Knighthood and its Times (1825), Siméon Luce’s Histoire de Bertrand du Guesclin et de son époque (1876), and Hans Prutz’s Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzüge (1883). In this context the use of allegedly archaic or primitive gestures was described frequently in an anecdotal manner. Karl Lamprecht, who

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propagated a “new cultural history” around 1900, did not reserve a systematic place for gestures in his works, although he pointed out their importance (Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 3, 1893, 196). B. Legal History, Literature and Art History in the First Half of the 20th Century The distinction between gesture and ritualized behavior is hard to draw, especially in legal contexts: Heinrich Siegel thus analyzed handshake and oath in combination (Der Handschlag und Eid nebst den verwandten Sicherheiten für ein Versprechen im deutschen Rechtsleben, 1894). Like Siegel, Karl von Amira (Die Handgebärden in den Bilderhandschriften des Sachsenspiegels, 1905) concentrated his analysis of the iconography of Sachsenspiegel-manuscripts on the judicial relevance of gestures used before courts and in legal contexts. His inclusion of iconographic material was an innovation in comparison to hitherto text-centered approaches. He systematically distinguished gestures accompanying speech (Redegebärden) from demonstrative gestures (hinweisende Gebärden), imitative gestures (darstellende Gebärden), and gestures of contact and seizure (Tast- und Greifgebärden), proposing a catalogue of symbolic gestures and their use in the highly codified legal culture of the later Middle Ages. Von Amira was conscious of methodological problems and underlined the difficult distinction between the legal symbolism of gestures applied in real life and iconographic conventions or preferences of the illustrator – a debate which is still open today (see Norbert H. Ott, “Der Körper als konkrete Hülle des Abstrakten,” Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen, ed. Klaus Schreiner and Norbert Schnitzler, 1992, 223–41). He also combined references to the conventional and the affective nature of gestures, thus evoking the image of a legal culture that was at once highly stylized and extremely emotionally charged. Legal historians tended to underline the traditional, culturally determined meaning of gestures, referring only secondarily to their value as expressions of the analyzed peoples‘ “psychology” (cf. Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 1900). Literary historians, like Eberhard Lommatzsch (System der Gebärden, 1910), on the other hand, concentrated on the use of gestures as a vehicle for the expression of emotions. In spite of historical and cultural variability, the artistic value of literary works was frequently judged (amongst other criteria) by the author’s capacity to use the description of particular gestures in order to enliven his narrative (cf. Barry Windeatt, “Gesture in Chaucer,” Medievalia et Humanistica 9 [1979]: 143–61; or Robert G. Benson, Medieval Body Language, 1980). The underlying idea of a stable sense of a given gesture implicitly relied on biological and philosophical reasoning about the nature of emotion and its expression (for a recent overview

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see Adam Kendon, Gesture, 2004), although this theoretical dimension has been rarely explored explicitly. In Art History, Aby Warburg and his circle occupy an important place for the analysis of gesture, although they tended to ignore the Middle Ages, due to Warburg’s prevalent interest in so-called “pathos formulae” – iconographic structures that represented a given emotion in the densest possible manner, thus creating an ahistorical ideal. From this perspective, the period between Antiquity and the Renaissance was considered to be of minor importance, since it was characterized by a decline of artistic proficiency. C. Early Impact of Sociology and the History of Mentalities Although the cultural formation of bodily expression and its symbolism have been discussed early in the development of the Social Sciences by Marcel Mauss (“Les techniques du corps,” Journal de Psychologie 22 [1936]: 271–93) and Robert Hertz (“La prééminence de la main droite,” Revue philosophique 68 [1909]: 553–80), medievalists‘ contributions were rare. The period as such was referred to by the German sociologist Norbert Elias, who proposed the model of a Civilizing Process (orig. 1939), as follows: through the development of refined social conventions and manners, the body’s role in social interaction and communication would have been suppressed steadily. Elias describes the accompanying modifications in cultural structures and is interested in the mechanisms that allowed this process to impose itself: the evolution of courtly society and the use of the court as a strategic instrument. The resulting attitudes would then have been stabilized by a growing awareness of social behavior which led to mechanisms of “self-disciplinization” (Selbstdisziplinierung); a process, Elias dates to the early-modern period, but his model and periodization have been subject to criticism since the 1970s (cf. Rüdiger Schnell, “Kritische Überlegungen zur Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias,” Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Rüdiger Schnell, 2004, 21–83; Albrecht Classen, “Naked Men …,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. id., 2008, 143–70). In the 1920s, the French historian Marc Bloch developed a different perspective on the basis of sociological theory. Inspired by Emile Durkheim, he analyzed the mental structures behind the monarchical authority of the Rois thaumaturges (1924): according to popular belief, the kings of England and France could heal the “king’s evil” (scrofula) by touching its victims. Although this observation remains inspiring, its impact was limited at first: Bloch’s work was not translated with undue haste (English 1973, German 1998). Most studies on the symbolism of rulership concentrated on the material aspects of regalia, as can be seen in the contributions of Percy Ernst Schramm

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(Kaiser, Könige und Päpste, 4 vols., 1961–1974) and his students. Schramm repeatedly pointed out the importance of gestures in this context and regretted the absence of relevant studies for the Middle Ages. But although he and, for example, Reinhard Elze worked intensively on material that could have been fertile ground for such an approach (e. g. the coronation ordines), their analyses focused on the intellectual aspects of this material. The same is true for Ernst Kantorowicz (Laudes regiae, 1946), whose student Ralph E. Giesey was innovative in the analysis of public ritual in his work on royal funeral ceremonies in late-medieval and early-modern France (The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, 1960). D. Theoretical Turns and Methodological Progress Until the 1970s, gestures remained a subject of minor importance, frequently mentioned only in the context of liturgical studies, legal history and the analysis of folkloristic traditions (rich material is available in the German Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols., ed. Hanns BächtoldStäubli, 1927–1942). Here, as in the presentation of liturgical history (cf. Thomas Ohm, Die Gebetsgebärden der Völker und das Christentum, 1948), the approach remained anecdotal or of antiquarian interest, with the aim being to establish an inventory of individual gestures and their conventional meaning, or a description of their use in a historical dimension. Important methodological innovations came from literary history, particularly in the works of Lutz Röhrich (Gebärde, Metapher, Parodie, 1967), who analyzed the relation between physical gestures and figures of speech. He underlined the chronological delay between these, pointing out that the figurative use of certain gestures in speech does not constitute a proof for their practical use. Alongside this important methodological caveat (which equally applies to iconographic sources), further changes were caused by new research interests and related theoretical frameworks. The work of French philosopher Michel Foucault led to the analysis of the human body and the surrounding discourse from the perspective of the establishment and stabilization of power, while sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reflected on the strategies of social reproduction and the expression of social hierarchy by means of physical inscription and behavioural strategies (cf. Le dictionnaire du corps, ed. Bernard Andrieu, 2006; Histoire du corps, ed. Alain Corbin et al., 3 vols., 2005–2006). Medieval Studies were equally inspired by ethnology and anthropology, thus developing a new perspective on ritual and gesture, which could now be approached from the perspective of cultural structures and historically varying symbolic systems.

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The fertility of this approach in the context of political and social history has been demonstrated by Jacques Le Goff in his study of the “rituel symbolique de la vassalité” (Pour un autre Moyen Age, 1977, 349–420). Le Goff interprets the act of homage as a semiotic system, in which the mutual relationship between lord and subject is expressed and reinforced through symbolically charged verbal utterances, gestures and objects. From his (structuralist) perspective, the bodies of the participants acquire a particularly important role, becoming the centre of a symbolic system, a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss) – hence the kiss of lord and follower, the ritual osculum with which the two parties conclude the relationship of loyalty and mutual obligation, refers to a broad range of fundamental ideas of medieval socialization, from love and peace between Christians to the symbolic equality of the involved persons. This can be complemented by functional and structural consequences: the public display of the relationship serves to strengthen the mutual obligation while it evokes at the same time the image of an intimate personal union (cf. Klaus Oschema, 2006, 601–608). This perspective already transcends the fields of enquiry of the preceding periods: physical expression of emotional states, gesture as a means of communication and gestures as part of the biological “nature” of humans (cf. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Introduction and General Bibliography,” History and Anthropology 1 [1984]: 1–23). An increasing number of studies from the 1970s onwards have deepened our understanding of each of these aspects, but overviews offering a synthesis are still lacking. The first steps towards the production of such a synthesis were innovative in the attention they drew to the new object, but their interpretative framework remained conventional. Hence Heinrich Fichtenau (Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts, 1984) stressed the importance of gestures for social display and the establishment and conservation of social hierarchies in the 10th century. He presented a rich collection of material, but the interpretation remains superficial. Gestures in political contexts are part of ritualized public communication (cf. Formen und Funktionen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Gerd Althoff, 2001), but their transmission through mainly hagiographical, historiographical, and literary texts necessitates an approach which is conscious of their use as narrative device (see John Burrow, 2002, and Jan-Dirk Müller, “Visualität, Geste, Schrift: Zu einem neuen Untersuchungsfeld der Mediävistik,” ZfdPh 122 [2003]: 118–32). In Art History, considerable efforts of systematization have been made by François Garnier who presented a catalogue of individual gestures (Le langage de l’image au moyen age, 2 vols., 1982–1989), thus contributing to a paralinguistic understanding of gestures and their iconographic representation.

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Although such a project could help to amend the shortcomings of studies which concentrate on a clear-cut range of gestures (cf. Moshe Barasch’s controversial The Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art, 1976), it also has disadvantages: in an historical perspective, the meaning of a given gesture cannot be analyzed sufficiently without its context (for a recent overview from the perspective of Art History and further references see Mrass, 2005). E. Current Trends in Research Inspired by sociological works on the habitus and the body as a medium for the physical inscription of social structures, gestures have now become an important category for the interpretation of pre-modern cultures. Jean-Claude Schmitt (Schmitt, 1990) presented a wide-ranging synthesis on the subject from the perspective of historical anthropology, focusing mainly on the clerical and liturgical context until the 13th century. He outlines the importance of gestures in the context of public and individual ritual (religious, legal, political), as well as their use in rhetoric and non-verbal communication. Schmitt innovates particularly by complementing the hitherto communication-centred approaches (on the development of the idea of gestures as a possibly universal language, see Anne-Marie Drouin, Gestes et physionomie, 1989) with didactic and ethical considerations, stressing the important and morally charged distinction between ordered gesture and disordered gesticulation: gestures not only express, but they can also be effective, due to their performative nature in public contexts (cf. Gerd Althoff, “Inszenierung verpflichtet,” FMSt 35 [2001]: 61–84) and the close connection between body and soul that is a common assumption in medieval thought (Jérôme Baschet, “Âme et corps dans l’occident médiéval: une dualité dynamique, entre pluralité et dualisme,” Archives de Sciences sociales des Religions 112 [2000]: 5–30). As a consequence, the abundant use of gestures and ritualized behaviour in public contexts can not be qualified as dysfunctional or even “primitive”. It rather reflects the necessities and conditions of pre-modern politics and its unwritten “rules” (cf. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter, 1997), particularly in the early and high Middle Ages. In the context of politics, gestures furnished a highly visible means to negotiate and demonstrate mutual relationships, while at the same time being malleable and flexible through their polyvalence. They allowed not only the clarification of hierarchy and rank, but could also maintain a level of uncertainty through the use of gestures of intimate physical proximity in public contexts, e. g. sleeping in one bed (cf. Klaus van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens zum systematisierten Konflikt, 2002). Depending on the setting, this gesture could lose

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its sexual implications while keeping its value as a demonstration of trust and harmony. Recent studies mainly focus on gestures of social interaction (for greeting rituals, cf. Horst Fuhrmann, “Willkommen und Abschied,” Mittelalter, ed. Wilfried Hartmann, 1993, 111–39), which can, in the case of particularly polyvalent gestures like the kiss, serve as the starting point for the analysis of an entire system of cultural values (cf. Yannick Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Âge, 1992, and Kiril Petkov, The Kiss of Peace, 2003). The inclusion of a broad variety of source material as well as intercultural comparisons in recent approaches (cf. the contributions in Bremmer and Roodenburg [ed.], 1992) has highlighted the cultural specificities of a given gesture in its particular setting. The analysis of gestures as expressions of emotion is particularly problematic from a methodological viewpoint, due to intercultural and historical variability (cf. the brief discussion of Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” AHR 107 [2002]: 821–45). In comparison with earlier tentative approaches (J. Russell Major, “‘Bastard Feudalism’ and the Kiss,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 [1986–87]: 509–35), recent contributions are more conscious of methodological pitfalls and try to establish the analysis of gestures as a means to contextualize theoretical discourses on socio-political ideals with their practical application (Nicolas Offenstadt, Faire la paix au Moyen Âge, 2007, and Oschema, 2006). The significance of gestures for public performances by minstrels, but also in other social and cultural contexts, has been investigated by Maria Dobozy (Re-Membering the Present, 2005, 92–109), who confirms Schmitt’s insights into the major role the major role played by the proper body control and the specific utilization of gestures in scholastic debates of a man’s harmony of body and mind (Hugh of St. Victor) from this specific perspective. Select Bibliography A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Riten, Gesten, Zeremonien, ed. Edgar Bierende et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008); John A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Le geste et les gestes au Moyen Âge (Aixen-Provence: CUERMA, 1998); Marcus Mrass, Gesten und Gebärden: Begriffsbestimmung und -verwendung in Hinblick auf kunsthistorische Untersuchungen (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2005); Klaus Oschema, Freundschaft und Nähe im spätmittelalterlichen Burgund (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006); Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, “Gebärden,” HRG 21, 1954–69; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

Klaus Oschema

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I Images A. Introduction The importance of visual images for the historical disciplines has increased considerably in recent years. From the exclusive domain of art historians and from a mere medium illustrating the analysis of the written word by other fields of historical research they have developed into sources that also in medieval studies receive similar consideration and critical approaches as texts. On the one hand, this has to be seen in context with the role that images play in today’s society, in which they have often taken over from the written word (Ernst Gombrich, “The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication,” The Image and the Eye, 1982, 137–61). On the other hand, the important role and influence of pictures as media of medieval communication and as carriers of different messages has now been recognized. Thus, they express cultural, religious, ideological, popular, social, and economic ideas and functions, among others, which often cannot be separated from each other. Moreover, images are highly ritualized products of medieval culture. Of specific interest are the medieval discourses referring to the use and misuse of images that can be traced in a large number of textual sources (Władisław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics II: Medieval Aesthetics, 1970). As particularly important and as a basis for any research into the role of images in the Middle Ages, one has to understand the literatura illiteratostatement that became a topos of nearly all the remarks and discussion about their function, starting with the letter of Pope Gregory the Great to Bishop Serenus of Marseille (ca. 600) until post-medieval times (Lawrence G. Duggan, “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?” Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication, ed. Mariëlle Hageman and Marco Mostert, 2005, 63–107). Images have to be closely ‘read’, which today also has become a commonplace in medieval studies (Elizabeth Sears, “‘Reading’ Images,” Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, 2002, 1–7). Images consist of many layers and levels. The varieties of direct and indirect contexts and connections of visual images and written texts have taken on great relevance (see, e. g., Horst Wenzel,

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Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild, Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter, 1995; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, 1992). With regard to these contexts of images and texts the questions that Roland Barthes had already posed in 1969 in his contribution “Is Painting a Language?” (English version in id., The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 1991, 149–52) certainly maintains its importance also for Medieval Studies: “What is the connection between the picture and the language inevitably used in order to read it – i. e., in order (implicitly) to write it? Is not this connection the picture itself?” B. History of Research For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and his Aesthetics images served as evidence of various historical and cultural contexts and processes. His ideas spread widely and influenced many historians of art and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Jacob Burckhardt’s (1818–1897) cultural historical masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay (1860), lacks illustrations and the author also only rarely referred to the visual arts, which he himself saw as “the greatest gap in it.” Thus, he intended to add an additional volume only treating the history of Renaissance art, which, however, was never published. Only the 15th edition of Civilization (1926; English version 1929) contained the first images that were selected by an assistant in Art History at the University of Leipzig. Nevertheless, as Francis Haskell emphasized (History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past, 1993), “the principal insights “of Burckhardt’s study” are based directly on the love and study of art.” In that, Civilization also strongly influenced the Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919; English trans. 1924 as The Waning of the Middle Ages; 1996 as The Autumn of the Middle Ages) of Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), who saw Burckhardt as “the wisest man of the nineteenth century.” Huizinga, mainly interested in the Flemish-Burgundian art of the 15th century, represented the opinion that with the help of images one saw the past more clearly and more historically. Thus, he himself influenced a number of medievalists of the following generations, but was also confronted with a variety of criticisms (Francis Haskell, “Art and History: The Legacy of Johan Huizinga,” History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, 3–18). Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and his school moved to approaches that often showed the fuzziness of the borderline between art history and cultural history. He stressed that images could only be seen in the context of the environments in which they were produced. The academic study of the meaning of pictures also started in the 19th century, in particular with Émile Mâle (1862–1954), for instance, in his L’art

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religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (1899, English trans. 1910: Religious Art in France: The Thirteenth Century). The most influential paradigm for this approach in art history was then offered by Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), especially in his Studies in Iconology (1939) and Meanings in the Visual Arts (1955). He stressed the importance of ‘disguised symbolism’ in early Netherlandish art in which ‘things’ signify and support or elaborate the meaning. The time from the 1970s onwards has been significant for important studies on the social and cultural function of images and art (e. g., Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 1972; id., Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, 1985), on questions of their perception and the response towards them (e. g., David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, 1989; Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation, 1989; Hans Belting, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, 1990; id., Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 1994), and on problems of images and ritual (e. g., Staale Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual: A Study of Analytical Perspectives, 1984). Other studies concentrated on the role that pictures played for the history of mentalities (e. g., Iconographie et Histoire des Mentalités, ed. Michel Vovelle et al., 1979), for the history of daily life and material culture (e. g., Pictura quasi fictura: Die Rolle des Bildes in der Sachkultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, 1996), and for gender history (e. g., Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart, 2003). Since the 1980s, the creation and development of large digital image corpora and the possibilities of accessing them on the World Wide Web have offered new opportunities for the analysis of medieval visual evidence (e. g., the database of the Princeton Index of Christian Art: http://ica.princeton.edu/; the digitized collections of medieval French manuscript illuminations: http:// www.manuscritsenlumines.eu/; the database for the history of medieval daily life and material culture: http://www.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/realonline; and the collection of Danish wall paintings: http://www.kalkmalerier.dk). Such projects have not only supported more qualitative and interdisciplinary analyses of images, but have also led to an increase of quantitative approaches (e. g., Jérome Baschet, “Pourquoi élaborer de bases de données d’image? Propositions pour une iconographie sérielle,” History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley, 2003, 59–106). The 1990s saw a number of developments that occurred partly independent from each other but initiated a particular increase for the relevance of

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images and visual culture in medieval studies. New approaches to the theory and methodology of art history (e. g., Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, 1994; Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 1996) showed the necessity of broader interdisciplinary and comparative research and this also influenced medievalists. Historians, in particular, have stressed the necessity of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches in history and art history (Der Blick auf die Bilder: Kunstgeschichte und Geschichte im Gespräch, ed Erich Oexle, 1997; Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, 2001; Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Images and the Historian,” History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley, 2003, 19–44). Many new approaches toward images, also in Medieval Studies, have been influenced by the “pictorial turn, […] the moment when the icon takes on a body or becomes a frame,” that W. J. Thomas Mitchell made a plea for at the beginning of the 1990s (“The Pictorial Turn,” Art Forum 30 [1991/92]: 89–94). For him, the necessary study of visual culture has to encompass on the participation of many disciplines: “From the standpoint of a general field of visual culture, art history can no longer rely on received notions of beauty or aesthetic significance to define its proper object of study” (Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture,” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from Outside, ed. Irving Lavin, 1995, 207–17). This statement led, on the one hand, to vehement critiques (see Keith Moxey, “Nostalgia for the Real: The Troubled Relation of Art History to Visual Culture,” History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, 2003, 45–55). On the other hand, a larger number of contributions, at least partly following Mitchell’s demand for such broader approaches towards visual culture, have also been published in Medieval Studies (e. g., Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel, 2005; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle au Moyen Âge, 2002; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 2007). Select Bibliography Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002); History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication, ed. Mariëlle Hageman and Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

Gerhard Jaritz

Laughter

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L Laughter A. General outline of topic Laughter never appears as a subject of inquiry in its own right, but is rather of interest in connection with other concepts. The connection most frequently made is that between laughter and comedy (for example, in the Historischen Wörterbuch zur Philosophie the lemmas “Das Komische”/“Das Lachen” are treated together in a single article by Werner Preisendanz, vol. 4, 1976, col. 889–93). Henri Bergson’s early work, le rire, which quickly became a classic (see bibliography), too, deals solely with the characteristics of the comic. As a rule, this results from the assumption of a causal relationship: that comedy evokes laughter (and where there is comedy, there is laughter). However, the reverse: where there is laughter, there is comedy, is not always true, the relationship indeed shows to be problematic. Hans Blumenberg demonstrated this, using as his example an incident which stands at the anecdotal beginnings of philosophy and the development of scientific theory. Thales of Miletus falls, while star gazing, into a well, and a passing maid laughs at him. “Philosophie ist jenes Denken, womit man wesensmäßig nichts anfangen kann und worüber die Dienstmägde notwendig lachen.” (“Philosophy is that manner of thought which serves no practical purpose and about which the servants must laugh;” Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin: Eine Urgeschichte der Theorie, 1987, here 150, italics his.) The reverse, however, that laughter always unmasks a servant in the eyes of the philosopher, is obviously not, or not always, true. For that reason, Walter Haug has demanded that the phenomenon of laughter not be understood via an analysis of comic structure, but that a theory of laughter is instead a precondition for an understanding of what appears to be comic or funny (“Schwarzes Lachen: Überlegungen zum Lachen an der Grenze zwischen dem Komischen und dem Makabren,” Semiotik, Rhetorik und Soziologie des Lachens: Vergleichende Studien zum Funktionswandel des Lachens vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Lothar Fietz et al., 1996, 49–64, cf. 50). The close connection, however, between laughter and the comic is maintained (On the different models of comedy, whose methodical approach to laughter varies accordingly, from speech act theory to dialogue analysis to narratology to psychoanalysis see Sylvie

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Roman and Alexander Schwarz: “How to do funny things with words,” ‘Ist mir getroumet mîn leben?’ Vom Träumen und vom Anderssein: Fs. für Karl-Ernst Geith zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. André Schnyder et al., 1998, 325–43 [Text in German]). The Thales example, as Blumenberg also points out, implies other relationship forms. The (Thracian) maids (i. e., slaves) cannot only laugh at the (Greek) philosophy (of free men). There is a social gradient, regional, ethnic and cultural differences exist, and ‘gender trouble’ is the order of the day. These kinds of difference, which are expressed in laughter, can be better described via the phenomenon ‘humor’ (and/or ‘jokes’), for which reason the connection between laughter and humor is another important method of approach. The subversive aspect of laughter, too, has found space in laughter theory thanks to the widely known joke-theory of Sigmund Freud (laughter as a defense against unpleasant concepts and feelings; see Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905; recently, compare Witz und Psychoanalyse: Internationale Sichtweisen – Sigmund Freud revisited, ed. Karl Fallend 2006, which includes [87–94] an article on medieval poetry: Irmgard Gephart, “Halbe Birnen und sonstige Lustbarkeiten: Zur mittelalterlichen Schwankerzählung von der ‘Halben Birne’ des Konrad von Würzburg.”) There is, indeed, now even a branch of medicine and psychology, gelotology, the study of laughter, which gives particular emphasis to the healing and therapeutic potential of laughter in its positive somatic effects – a function which is also attributed to laughter in fiction. B. Terminological definition One of laughter’s peculiarities results from the fact that it is the result of a communicative process, and depends on an act of interpretation. Laughter in literature is a communicative special case; that is when it is depicted in a work and is aesthetically or poetically – or rather poetologically – generated. The lowest common denominator of the by now rich crops of laughter theory is, therefore, that in laughter (as in the joke) a connection is produced between things or situations which are very different in character, but are similarly structured. This connection may act, particularly in medieval literature, as a source of community or identity, for instance as a communicative form of reception by an audience (Werner Röcke refers to ‘laughter communities’ [Lachgemeinschaften], Lachgemeinschaften: Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten, 2005). Laughter in literary representation, so a further consensus, is the result of an affective, artificial and serious creative act (‘staging’), in which the creator by no means participates –

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a comedian makes others laugh, but does not do so himself. A third consensus on the attempt to define laughter by exact description is found in its transgressive character. Laughter is seen as an act of crossing boundaries, by which hierarchies are suspended and existing systems of order are broken open and questioned, even, in certain circumstances, portrayed as meaningless. Beyond these three defining basics, a wide field opens for terminological variation, which can be best dealt with under the following three (overlapping) categories: function, genre, gender. (1) Function: what the laughter of a literary figure, or in some cases the laughter which can be presumed in the recipients, triggers or should express, allows a further differentiation. Laughter can be classed as cheering, relaxing, releasing, as solving conflicts or averting violence, there is revealing, uncovering, identifying, knowing, prophetic laughter, or laughter which is triumphant, disrespectful, blasphemous, mocking, malicious, devilish (on the first group, cf. Werner Röcke, “Scherzkommunikation und Gewaltvermeidung: Rituelle Funktionen des Gelächters im europäischen Mittelalter,” Szenarien von Theater [und] Wissenschaft:Festschrift für Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed. Christel Weiler und Hans-Thies Lehmann, 2003, 32–42; Id. “Der zerplatzte Enterich und der Koch als Rollbraten: Gelächter und Gewalt in Wolframs ‘Willehalm’,” ZfGerm N.F. 11 [2001]: 274–91. Looking beyond the medieval period, see also Stefan Busch: Verlorenes Lachen: Blasphemisches Gelächter in der deutschen Literatur von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, 2004). The peculiar characteristic of medieval laughter, however, should not be forgotten in this plethora of attributes: lachen, laughter, covers both loud, open laughter as well as calm, quiet smiles. Given this lack of semantic precision, particular care should be taken in the development of grand theories of laughter in the middle ages. (An alteration has taken place, largely unnoticed, in the reception of the anecdote of the laughing serving girl, the ur-story of laughter – the title of Hermann Wiegmann’s study refers to smiling: Und wieder lächelt die Thrakerin: Zur Geschichte des literarischen Humors, 2006. Gerd Böttcher remarked in this connection in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 8. 10. 1998, how laughter separates, creates distance, and marks, but by contrast smiling creates allies through identification, integrates that which laughter had rejected as foreign, and so can dissolve shame, embarrassment, etc. Gradated variations of laughter are also observed, see Gerd Althoff, “Vom Lächeln zum Verlachen,”Lachgemeinschaften ..., 2005 (see above), 3–16.) (2) Genre: the function of laughter alters, depending on who is laughing in which context, and in what surroundings laughter appears, for example the court or the cloister. For that reason, laughter has most often been the sub-

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ject of genre-specific studies, with religious drama featuring significantly often. There one finds the so called ‘Easter laughter’ or devilish laughter, that is on the one hand (and overlapping with a definition via function) schalc-like, that is villainous, malicious laughter of the devil, and on the other triumphant laughter which transcends the earthly, such as that of the martyr in the face of torture and approaching redemption (cf. Klaus Ridder, “Erlösendes Lachen: Götterkomik – Teufelskomik – Endzeitkomik,” Ritual und Inszenierung: Geistliches und weltliches Drama des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Hans-Joachim Ziegeler, 2004, 195–206). At the same time, and as a counter-position to the extreme transcendence of divine or saintly laughter, it is often emphasized how earthy, indeed, bodily laughter is. Laughter releases the body from the control of the ego, brings the transcendent to the corporeal and in laughter (following Nietzsche in Zarathustra), the human becomes totally body. Within Medieval Studies, the connection between the body and laughter is demonstrated by studies on jesters and fools (see Hans Rudolf Velten, “Komische Körper: Zur Funktion des Hofnarren und zur Dramaturgie des Lachens im Spätmittelalter,” ZfGerm N.F. 11 [2001]: 292–317). An almost natural, unmeditated closeness to laughter and comedy is ascribed to the genre of fabliaux/Schwank/maere (Klaus Grubmüller, “Wer lacht im Märe – und wozu?,” Lachgemeinschaften ..., 2005 (see above), 111–24), as well as to the early modern picaresque (e.g., “Till Eulenspiegel”). (3) Gender: It makes a great difference, and not merely with regard to mediaeval didacticism, which held that a woman or a young girl should not laugh loud or long, whether a male figure laughs, a collective (Hans Rudolf Velten, “Text und Lachgemeinschaft. Zur Funktion des Gruppenlachens bei Hofe in der Schwankliteratur” Lachgemeinschaften ..., 2005 (see above), 125–43), or a single female figure. The subversive nature of laughter, its ability to strike against norms (and men) is particularly prominence in women’s laughter, and here a correspondence between gender and genre, courtly epic, can be observed (cf. Sebastian Coxon, “do lachete die guote: Zur literarischen Inszenierung des Lachens in der höfischen Epik,” Wolfram-Studien 18 [2004]: 189–210). A frequently, but not yet exhaustively, studied instance of a laughing woman is Cunnewâre in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parzival.” Kurt Nyholm (“Cunnewâres Lachen: Überlegungen zum Parzival 151,11–19,” Laughter Down the Centuries, vol. 3, ed. Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen, 1997, 167–79) points to the fairy-tale motif which lies behind this episode, with a change of emphasis consequent on an alteration of function from Chrétien’s, away from female prophecy to a sign of the election of the male hero. In the same year, Waltraud Fritsch-Rössler (“Lachen

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und Schlagen. Reden als Kulturtechnik in Wolframs ‘Parzival’,” Verstehen durch Vernunft: Festschrift für Werner Hoffmann, ed. Burkhardt Krause, 1997, 75–98) saw Cunnewâre’s laughter – the scene in Wolfram, in contrast to Chrétien, is absolutely not comic – as a form of female satirical discourse against the chivalric moral complex and an attack on male, bodily êre, which is expressed accordingly, that is corporeally, but which is – of necessity – misunderstood by Keie. Katharina Philipowski (“Das Gelächter der Cunnewâre,” ZfGerm N.F. 13 [2003]: 9–23) understands laughter as a gesture, and attempts, based on recent gesture-definitions, to show Cunnewâre’s laughter not as an expression of subjectivity, but as a textual process which motivates the plot. C. History of Research Two of the earliest, slender works on laughter in mediaeval (English and Latin) literature date from the immediate post-war period: J.S.P. Tatlock: “Medieval Laughter,” Speculum 21.3 (July 1946): 289–94; and in the following year Helen Adolf, “On Medieval Laughter,” Speculum 22.2 (April 1947): 251–53. While English literary history at least concerns itself with investigations of laughter and the comic in Chaucer, interest in this subject appears much later in the romance languages, with studies of 16th- and 17th-century literature, most frequently on Rabelais, Molière and “Don Quijote”. The accent lies on smaller genres which are defined as being comic per se, and on comedy or the forerunner of drama, the religious drama (for example Lisa Perfetti, Women and Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, 2003; Stephen G. Nichols, “Four Principles of Laughter in Medieval Farce,” Lachgemeinschaften, 2005 (see above), 191–207). Studies of laughter within Germanlanguage medievalism show, in addition to a clear tendency toward model and theory building, two continuous influences: that of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, as well as a definitive characterization from the theories of Michail Bakhtin (1895–1975), although these only became widely known posthumously: Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur; a compilation of his books on Rabelais (Russ. first publication 1965) and Dostoyevsky (1929; 2nd edition 1963). Bakhtin sketches a specifically mediaeval culture of laughter, culminating in carnival as a phenomenon based on ritualized laughter: during this sharply defined time, the “holy is united, mixed with and married to the profane, the high with the low” (German edition, 1969, 49), in the form of a temporary, socially tolerated breach of taboo (laughter at the expense of authority), which embraces all social classes. Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘carnivalesque’ only achieved a wider reception following the new editions of his work in the late eighties, and was sometimes

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the object of serious criticism from both German and English speaking scholars (cf. B. Peter L. Berger’s much quoted, though arguably in some respects not literary-critical study, Redeeming Laughter, 1997, German translation by Joachim Kalka, Erlösendes Lachen: Das Komische in der menschlichen Erfahrung, 1998, 99–101). Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s work moved laughter beyond both the individual-psychological Freudian tendency, which until then had dominated, and the anthropological interests of Plessner (laughter as a universal of the human condition), to add a sociological context which politicizes and historicizes laughter. This coincided with the ‘cultural turn’ in literary criticism, and as a result gave a special impetus to a concern with laughter in mediaeval studies. Select Bibliography Henri Bergson, Le rire, trans. into German Das Lachen, 2nd ed. (Jena: Diederichs, 1921); Michail Bachtin, Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur (Munich: Hanser, 1969 [2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990]); Helmuth Plessner, Die Frage nach der Conditio humana: Aufsätze zur philosophischen Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976 [id., Title essay, op. cit., 7–81; id., “Verkörperung II: Lachen, Weinen, Lächeln,” op. cit., 70–74]); Sprachspiel und Lachkultur. Beiträge zur Literatur- und Sprachgeschichte: Rolf Bräuer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Angela Bader et al. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1994); Laughter down the Centuries, 3 vols., ed. Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen (Turku/Åbo: Turun Yliopisto, 1994–1997); Komische Gegenwelten: Lachen und Literatur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Helga Neumann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999); Werner Röcke: “Teufelsgelächter. Inszenierungen des Bösen und des Lachens in der Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) und in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus,” Der schöne Schein der Kunst und seine Schatten, ed. Hans Richard Brittnacher and Fabian Stoermer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000), 345–365; Werner Röcke, “Inszenierungen des Lachens in Literatur und Kultur des Mittelalters,” Kulturwissenschaften: Cultural Studies: Beiträge zur Erprobung eines umstrittenen literaturwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas, ed. Peter U. Hohendahl and Rüdiger Steinlein (Berlin: Weidler, 2001), 73–94; Il riso: Atti delle I giornate internazionali interdisciplinari di Studio sul Medioevo: “Homo risibilis”: Capacità di ridere e pratica del riso nelle civiltà medievali (Siena, 2–4 Ottobre 2002), ed. Francesco Mosetti Casaretto (Alessandria/Italia: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2005); Lachgemeinschaften. Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Hans Rudolf Velten (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Lachen: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Psychoanalyse, vol. 25, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Joachim Pfeiffer (Wuerzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006); Sebastian Coxon, Laughter and Narrative in the Later Middle Ages: German Comic Tales c. 1350–1525 (Oxford: Legenda, 2008); Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).

Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler

Memory

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M Memory A. Definition of the Term Infused with a socio-cultural, literary and scientific history stretching from antiquity to the most recent work in cognitive neuroscience, the English word “memory” is dense with meanings and associations. While the ProtoIndo-European base of “memory” (*men-/*mon- “think”) reflects an active sense, in quotidian use “memory” refers to both the mechanism for remembering, and the remembered, and thus it appears strangely as both subject and object, active and passive. In contrast, the modern French, following the Old French, distinguishes between “mémoire” (the mental capacity, the memory) and “souvenir” (that which is remembered, a memory). From Latin “memoria,” and adopted into English through the Anglo-Norman ca. 1250, “memory” refers variously to the memory of individuals and groups, from historical, social, cultural and psychological perspectives, as well as to memorization in rhetoric and mnemonics. While memory is often implied through its absence in discussions of forgetfulness, I refer only briefly in what follows to forgetfulness. The semantic duality of memory as both active and passive is a useful point of departure for an overview of “memory” in the Middle Ages, and in medieval scholarship, since throughout history, memory is both. From Plato’s description of memory as a wax tablet imprinted with impressions, and remembering as a task comparable to midwifery, to theories of engrams and false memories in modern neuroscience, the question of whether memory creates, or retrieves, returns repeatedly to discussion. B. Memory in the Middle Ages Memory is centrally important in rhetoric, theology, monastic practice, and literature in the Middle Ages. Indeed Mary Carruthers (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 1990) has argued that the culture of the Middle Ages was “memorial.” Starting with rhetoric, “memoria” as one part of a five part system of rhetoric (the others being invention, arrangement, style and delivery) is the single most important skill, on which the other parts depend. “Memoria” as

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a rhetorical concept is known to the Middle Ages through Cicero’s De oratore (Book II, 350–60), Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Book XI) and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (Book III), composed during the 1st century B.C., and attributed at that time to Cicero. While the Middle Ages did not produce any new arts of memory, the manuscript and commentary traditions attest to interest in those of antiquity. In particular, an extensive commentary tradition on the Rhetorica ad Herennium appears in the 12th century. The principal mnemonic art of antiquity and the Middle Ages consists of “locational memory,” attributed to the poet Simonides, which is based on placing images of the things to be remembered against a background. This is also known as “architectural,” “artificial,” or “Ciceronian” memory. During the Middle Ages the architectural art of memory extends beyond rhetoric into what modern science would term the “distributed” memory systems of libraries and manuscripts, in a simultaneously oral and literate culture. Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory, 1966, was the first modern study in English of memoria in the rhetorical tradition, and is largely responsible for initiating interest in memory in current scholarship (Yates’s book was preceded by Helga Hajdu’s Das mnemotechnische Schriftum des Mittelalters, 1936). Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory ..., 1990 (see above), and The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. with Jan M. Ziolkowski, 2002, continue and extend Yates’s work and have also been extremely influential in promoting research into memory in the Middle Ages. The Book of Memory includes translations of three little known memory treatises: Hugh of St. Victor’s “De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,” Albertus Magnus’s De bono, Tractatus IV, Quaestio 11 “De Partibus Prudentia,” and Thomas Bradwardine’s “De Memoria Artificiali.” The later Middle Ages produced arts of memory independently of rhetorical treatises. However, these later scholastic ars memorativa treatises no longer treat memory as a component of rhetoric, but as a part of ethics. While the arts of memory are central to organizing knowledge, speeches, even libraries and manuscripts in the Middle Ages, memory was also a key consideration in theology and especially in the monastic tradition. Jacques Le Goff has detailed the “Christianization” of memory (History and Memory, 1992) focusing on the memorial aspects of the liturgy, and of the ecclesiastical calendar with its commemoration of saints. Jacques Le Goff attributes the beginnings of this Christianization of memory to Augustine of Hippo, who writes about memory in Books X and XI of his Confessions. For Le Goff Augustine’s influence continues well beyond the Middle Ages: “With Augustine memory sinks into the interior man, into the heart of that Christian dia-

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lectic between the inside and the outside from which will come the examination of conscience, introspection, and even perhaps psychoanalysis” (71). In the monastic tradition, the association between the liturgy, prayer and memory was strong. Monks placed on the altars of their chapels “libri memoriales” in which were inscribed the names of the dead for whom they prayed. However, the most significant monastic practice involving memory was the “lectio divina” which was a form of meditation during which monks internalized sacred scripture and saints’ lives with the goal of self-improvement and advancement towards God (Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images 400–1200, 1998). The ethical importance of memory in the monastic tradition can be traced back to Aristotle’s contention that good character was founded on the memory of virtuous actions from the past. In the literature of the Middle Ages, there is an abiding interest in remembering and, interestingly, especially in forgetting. In exordia and prologues, authors invoke a creative impulse motivated by the will to remember, or not to forget. Thematically memory is investigated through numerous characters in romances who suffer some form of forgetfulness. Most notably, Perceval in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Conte du Graal falls into a state of forgetfulness, which apparently lasts for five years. In the Lais of Marie de France, memory is important both structurally and thematically (Logan Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, 2008). C. Memory in Medieval Scholarship Scholarship relating to memory is as diverse as the multiplicity of meanings and concepts associated with the word. In addition to the works mentioned above which deal with the history of memory in rhetoric and mnemonics, there is a rich body of scholarship on historical, social and cultural memory, as well as a number of distinguished books dealing with questions of orality and literacy, both in relation to history in general, and to literary traditions in particular. I include a brief overview of the scholarly work on orality and literacy here for the following three reasons: a) the oral culture is often called a memorial culture; b) memory is central to discussions of orality and literacy, and c) the theoretical work on social and cultural memory is inevitably informed by scholarship on orality and literacy. Starting with the terms “historical, social and cultural memory” which are used by historians and literary critics alike, it is useful to delineate the differences between the terms. While “historical” memory may pretend to objectivity, social memory refers to the shared beliefs of the group, and includes such material as folk-tales. “Social” or “collective” memory describes

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the remembering of a group and stands in contrast to “individual” memory. “Collective” memory is often a politicized form of remembering. The historian Peter Burke considers the relationship of history to social memory in his 1988 Wolfson College lecture (“History as Social Memory,” Memory: History, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler, 1989, 97–113). He argues that social memory in the form of images, memorials, and rituals is more than a re-enactment of the past, since it imposes interpretations of the past and shapes memory. The term “social memory” originates with medievalists James Fentress and Chris Wickham (Social Memory, 1992), who use it instead of Maurice Halbwachs’s “collective memory” (Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925; On Collective Memory, 1992, published posthumously and includes translations of Les cadres sociaux and La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte) to emphasize its separation from historical memory. While “social memory” and “collective memory” are public and shared, and describe how a group constructs the past, “individual memory” relates to personal histories and identities. Jan Assmann further differentiates in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (1992) by discussing “cultural memory” and “communicative memory” which describes the social aspect of Halbwachs’s individual memory (Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 2006). Paul Connerton has pushed the idea of collective memory even further to suggest that the ultimate human collective, the human body is a locus for memory, and that memories are encoded in our gestures, our expressions, our rituals (How Societies Remember, 1989). This idea of embodied memory subtends Jody enders’s The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence (1999). Central to this scholarship are historical, but also literary texts, as well as non-written ways of remembering and commemorating the past. Scholars have considered not only how the past was preserved, but the ways in which it was transformed to serve contemporary, political concerns, and how it was sometimes effaced. In Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (1994), Patrick J. Geary examines how 11th-century individuals appropriated the past of the Carolingian empire. His work collapses the sharp distinctions between individual and social memory, as he demonstrates how the individual, through writing, for example, can influence social memory as much as he is shaped himself by social memory. Geary states that the 11th century is a particularly interesting period to observe because it was during this century that many documents were being transferred from oral into written records. Emphasizing the importance

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of memory to institutions, he examines memory in monastic and legal contexts, as well as in familial settings, where, for example, women commemorated the dead through prayer. But what is forgotten or effaced is as important as what is remembered and this is keenly felt in Susan L. Einbinder’s No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (2008). Einbinder examines the effacement from written memory of the expulsion of the Jews by King Philip from royal France in 1306. While Jewish literature in the 14th century was flourishing, she finds no explicit references to the expulsion in the contemporary works. However, Einbinder does uncover traces of commemorative intent in a range of texts from lyric to medical texts and astronomical charts. Recently, scholars have focused on particular instances of writers reconfiguring the past, and influencing collective memory for political reasons. For example, Catherine Jones makes a case study of Philippe de Vigneulles (1471–1527), who translated the epic Lorraine cycle into Middle French prose (Philippe de Vigneulles and the Art of Prose Translation, 2008). While most writers involved in the mise-en-prose of the Old French chansons de geste were working under noble patronage, Philippe de Vigneulles was a cloth merchant working in Metz, who recast the Lorraine cycle, and the history of Metz’s past to reflect the concerns of the merchant class. The scholarly work on historical, social, and cultural memory has built upon the work of scholars such as Michael Clanchy and Brian Stock who have traced the evolution of medieval society through orality and literacy, and subtly corrected a simplistic, popular apprehension of a dichotomous history of an oral culture superseded by a written culture. Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (1979) is a history of literacy and record-keeping in medieval England, which ties literacy to medieval state formation. However, in the second edition (1993) of the book especially, Clanchy emphasizes growing literacy in everyday settings, while contending that “innovation often originates at the peripheries and makes its way to the centre where it is monopolized and redirected” (16). Brian Stock considers the question of the shift from orality to literacy from the opposite direction, by showing how increasing literacy created a new interdependence between the oral and the written which brought about changes in social organization and thought (The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, 1983). He describes “textual communities” which are influenced by shared knowledge of texts, even in the absence of the texts themselves. Recent work has emphasized that memorization and oral performance extend into the 14th century and beyond, and that while texts were written

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down, they were read aloud in a performative, group context. Joyce Coleman in Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (1996), challenges the assertions in Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982), and makes a convincing case that both in Britain and in France from the midfourteenth to the late 15th century, the literate preferred public reading to private reading. In literary studies, the discussion of memory takes yet another direction when questions of transmission arise. Scholarship on orality and literacy has produced a vast bibliography of books and articles, which all relate, however tangentially, to memory, since an oral tradition is clearly circumscribed by the limits of memory and speech. The pioneers of research on the oral epic, Milman Parry (The Making of Homeric Verse, 1971) and his student Alfred Lord (The Singer of Tales, 1960) proposed the theory of oral-formulaic composition to explain how formulaic construction aided the memories of epic poets during improvisational composition in performance. Parry and Lord’s work on the Homeric texts, and epics from the Balkan region had a huge influence of subsequent work on epics and other oral texts. For example, John Miles Foley has extended the comparative analysis of oral traditions beyond the Homeric and Slavic epic. His analysis of Beowulf in Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croation Return Song, 1999, will be of particular interest to medievalists. In the area of Old French epic studies, and again influenced by Parry and Lord, Joseph J. Duggan has analyzed the formulaic content of the Chanson de Roland; The “Song of Roland”: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft, 1973. While scholarship such as that discussed above focus on the medium of composition, and thus on the texts contained within manuscripts, to discern whether they are the products of oral or written composition, other studies have moved the discussion into the area of manuscript studies, where the mnemonics of formulae and motifs are replaced by formatting, punctuation, illuminations and decorated initials. The first volume of Keith Busby’s twovolume Codex and Context, 2002, describes how manuscript conventions serve as mnemonics to readers performing the text aloud. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, 1993) has elucidated a two-tier system of oral and visual mnemonic in Anglo-Saxon England for Old English verse on the one hand, and Latin verse on the other. She writes about “transitional literacy,” demonstrating that the scribes who punctuated the Latin verse with visual mnemonic devices did not initially apply the same techniques when copying Old English verse. She argues that this suggests that readers of Old English verse brought to the manuscript their knowledge of the orally performed verse.

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In the first decade of the 21st century, there is renewed interest in citation studies, in relation to intertextuality and memory, in contrast to previous work on citations and authority. In January 2009, the University of Exeter held a conference on “Citation, Intertextuality, Memory in the Middle Ages: Text, Music, Image” as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project “Citation and Allusion in the Ars nova French Chanson and Motet: Memory, Tradition, and Innovation” lead by Yolanda Plumley. D. Neuroscience, Cognitive Literary Theory and the Middle Ages At a considerable remove from the Middle Ages is the work of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, who use brain imaging techniques such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scans to probe the biology of memory. The pioneering psychologist in memory studies whose research was foundational to current work in the field was Frederic Bartlett (Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, 1932). Bartlett’s innovation was to recognize that remembering is a reconstructive process rather than a process of retrieval. He rejected the idea that memories were “traces” to be recovered from particular localized areas of the brain. His work anticipates the 20th- and 21st-century theories of Gerald Edelman (Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, 1987) and Daniel Schacter (Stranger Behind the Engram: Of Memory and the Psychology of Science, 1982; Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, 1996; The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, 2001) who highlight the importance of neuronal plasticity in memory function, through which the neurobiology of the brain is changed by experience. In spite of the centuries which separate the Middle Ages from the 21st century, there are striking points of comparison between ancient and medieval perspectives on memory, and the most recent theories in the sciences. Kurt Danziger’s history of memory (Marking the Mind: A History of Memory, 2008) traces continuities from ancient and medieval memory theories to modern psychology and neuroscience. A more general study which draws comparisons between medieval and modern theories is Simon Kemp’s Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages, 1996. In Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past, 1992, Janet Coleman states that her book is “an indirect attempt to re-examine ancient and medieval theories of remembering in order to evaluate whether modern psychological and neuropsychological theories of remembering have superseded past accounts as they affirm” (xv). Coleman concludes that modern scientific studies reformulate “issues and some answers, which were already at the heart of medieval discussions” (xvii).

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One of the most apparent continuities is that during the Middle Ages memory was considered to be a creative, active faculty, closely aligned in rhetoric to inventio, and in monastic meditation to access to the divine. Even in the Middle Ages memory was not understood simply in terms of retrieval of stored information, although the retrieval model was a concurrent proponent of a sophisticated, global theory. Neuroscience and cognitive psychology meet the Middle Ages in cognitive literary studies. Cognitive literary theory, which approaches literary analysis with the tools of cognitive science, is relatively new to Medieval Studies, although it first garnered attention about thirty years ago (Reuven Tsur, What is Cognitive Poetics?, 1983). One of the first studies to bring medieval literature and cognitive science together was written not by a medievalist, but by the psychologist David Rubin (Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes, 1995). Rubin’s book re-addresses memory in the context of the oral epic with the tools of cognitive science. The first sessions on Cognitive Approaches to Medieval Literature at the International Congress of Medieval Studies were held in 2008. Select Bibliography Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Kurt Danziger, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York, Columbia University Press, 1992); David Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-Out Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Daniel L. Schacter, Stranger Behind the Engram: Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1982).

Paula Leverage

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Mouvance A. Introduction Etymologically and ideologically, the modern French critical term mouvance is yet another label to be placed within the long tradition of the mutability topos. Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s formula panta rhei (“all is flux”) inherited from Plato (Theaetetus 182c3–4), has been widely influential since classical times. The Heraclitan dictum that “You cannot step twice into the same river” insisted on the radical fluidity of all matter and the irreversibility of becoming. In the dynamics of process, every momentary phase will be transformed by successive changes assuring qualitative difference, if not opposition or contradiction. At the same time, Heraclitus himself with his river simile might seem to point equally to an ordered flux when he says that “it is in changing that things find repose” (Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus, 1988, 29). In sum, everything changes except change itself. According to the modern French proverb: “plus ça change – plus c’est la même chose” (Alphonse Karr, Les guêpes, 1853, 428). Again, says famously Lampedusa’s 19th-century Sicilian Prince in the novel The Leopard, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” for perhaps the only thing that is immortal is immortality itself. In its various forms the mutability commonplace – that our world is unstable and in perpetual flux – flourished throughout Classical times (e. g., Marcus Aurelius), the Middle Ages (e. g., Chaucer) and across the Renaissance (e. g., Spenser) and into the 17th century, when the classical French dramatist Corneille spoke of transiency, mirroring the fluvial waters of Heraclitus with his own tidal image of change: “Le flux les apporta, le reflux les remporte.” For the 19th century, too: “Tout passe,” “Tout change,” affirmed poets and aesthetes Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. More specifically and more recently, the term mouvance has been proposed as a modern variation on variation itself (French variance) to acknowledge and address the proliferation of textual and performative variants in medieval literature but also later in subsequent transcriptions of it. Mouvance at once identifies the intrinsic instability of medieval textuality and problematizes its importance in the context of modern criticism and editing of that same (yet ever-fluctuating) corpus. This essay presents the principle of mouvance as elaborated since 1972 and then the practical consequences which theory has provoked in the representation and interpretation of medieval monuments, each no longer perceived as monolithic because now revealed to crumble into a seemingly endless chain of sometimes incompatible

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documents. Any work is multiple because it itself consists of multiple versions, arguably themselves independent works. As if anticipating modern authors from Montaigne to Whitman, today the medieval text re-affirms its right to be diverse: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)” (Whitman, “Song of Myself”). B. The Coming of Mouvance: Zumthor In 1972, Swiss-born scholar Paul Zumthor, transplanted from the University of Amsterdam to Montreal, launched in his Essai (1972, 505) the term mouvance, an old word (roughly equivalent semantically to fiefdom) for a new context. His usage seemed based on the Modern French mouvant, from Old French movant, earlier used in a similar sense by Jean Rychner and Martín de Riquer, as noted by Speer (1980, 317). Also employed by Rychner, muance is the most common among the large variety of related Old French words including mue, muage, muement, movement, mouveure, mutacion, mouveté, muableté, movableté, and muabilité, these last from Latin mutabilitas. In recycling instead the old feudal mouvance to refer now to the potential or real textual mutability in any work surviving in more than a single manuscript (unicum), Zumthor redefined it as “the character of a work which, […] before the age of printing, is a relative abstraction, given that the concrete texts which actualize it will present, through the interplay of variant readings and reworkings, […] a ceaseless vibration and a fundamental instability” (1972, 507; in the glossary of the French original, not included in the published English translation). In thus envisioning the particular, almost particulate movement of the text, here defined as subject to a kind of Brownian motion in its “incessante vibration,” Zumthor echoes the Heraclitan quarrel with those who maintained that the vehicle itself was immutable despite the reality of its motion. For Zumthor as for Heraclitus, the very matter itself is subject to change, not simply movement. Textual mouvance is more than movement, for it chronicles fundamental discontinuity and disjuncture over time and space. As Zumthor wrote later, more explicitly and more universally, “Le texte est ‘mouvance’: fragment de soi, et jamais le même, mutabilité fondamentale que camoufle à peine un masque d’organicité’ (“Médiéviste ou pas,” Poétique 31 [1977]: 306–21, here 319). Mouvance soon became all-important in the definition of medieval literary genres and texts, whose very literarity is defied by their relative orality: “la plus ou moins grande amplitude de leur mouvance … ne serait jamais nulle” (“Intertextualité et mouvance, “Littérature 41 [1981]: 8–16, here 16). In identifying mouvance as particularly characteristic of medieval texts, Zumthor rejected the 19th-century classicists’ positivism which had run

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against the Heraclitan flow in a doomed attempt to return upstream to a single original exemplar or Platonic Ur-Text. Earlier generations of text-editors (Zumthor himself did not practice the art, a criticism often leveled at theorists) had been confident in the recoverability of an authorial or similar archetype despite the frequent absence of a holograph in the author’s hand or indeed of any contemporary manuscript. But at the same time, Zumthor also implicitly rejected the self-sufficiency of a so-called best manuscript that might accurately reflect a single highpoint in the early textual tradition. In forsaking the possibility of reconstructing a unique original text but equally abandoning a preference for any one surviving textual witness, Zumthor affirmed the pertinence of the sum total of all versions, ultimately including not only those surviving from medieval times but the more modern editions and transpositions: both the Bédierist best (or worst) manuscript and the multiple attempted Lachmannian reconstructions, to boot. In this way, the original one-author exemplar became just one, if presumably the earliest among many versions, but no less subject to arbitrariness or error or hypercorrection than its successors. That is, the mirage of an authorial ipsissima verba was no longer pursued and if accessible would be no more favored than the versions of any other scribe or performer, and sometimes less. The debate coincides with parallel arguments around Classical Greek or Old Spanish non-lyric texts: Was Homer a man or a legendary figure? Is the medieval epic Cantar de Mio Cid the product of an author or of a committee? Do we follow the individualist theory, which is monogenetic, or a collectivist alternative, where many hands have amalgamated our text across the generations? The primary version that was the author’s cut – be it imaginary, reconstructed, or surviving – no longer has priority, still less holds a monopoly: any and all alternate versions, including post-medieval and now postmodern remakes, are considered by Zumthor or his followers to be potentially comparable in documentary value in the ongoing accretion of a “text in the act of making itself” (1972, 73) through performance and transcription across the centuries. Mouvance was the logical next leap to be taken in confiscating the legacy of the author after his long-awaited and much-touted death. Not only is the creator no longer the sole arbiter of a work’s intentionality and meaning but even its conception and creation are no longer credited to that one formerly “onlie begetter” (a poet is etymologically a maker). Instead, the post-authorial written tradition constitutes the work’s ongoing creation, in which by now the long dead and buried author is denied authority and authorship. Heraclitus’s river flows ahead impassibly and the text is swept ever onward amid a sea of change.

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C. Critical History: Post-Zumthor As Zumthor later recalled (Parler du Moyen Age, 1980, 69), his coinage provoked extended critical activity around the concept of mouvance and its implications for the understanding of medieval vernacular literature. Zumthor himself suggested that he might have gone too far, “generalized too quickly.” Rather, he affirmed, one must study the mouvance of an individual work’s various manifestations to determine its common features and perhaps only then judge the nature of the medieval oeuvre. But the usage he had introduced took on a life of its own as “a term which has unfortunately become a cliché” (John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, 2004, 2). Like formalism a few years earlier, following Tzvetan Todorov’s presentation of that Russo-Czech critical school in France, mouvance could not be recalled after its release among not only medievalists and other scholars globally but the general public, too. It had simply become a part of what a post-Franco Spaniard might call “la movida”; that is, it was “dans le vent,” i. e., dynamic and popular. For example, medievalist Betsy Bowden extended the idea of performative mouvance to characterize Bob Dylan’s songs in concert and recordings compared to the relative uniformity (but ambiguity) of the published versions (Literature in Performance 3 [1982]: 35–48). Most recently, Zumthor’s model of mouvance has been applied in classical Greek (Homer) and Persian (Ferdowsi) (see Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond, 1996, Chapter 1; and Olga M. Davidson, “The Text of Ferdowsi’s ‘Shahnama’ and the Burden of the Past,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118 [1998]: 64–68). Predictably, there has also been a backlash against mouvance and its believers’ refusal to subscribe to the post-medieval humanist idealization – since Petrarch and later Erasmus – of the philologically established base text. In 1981, for the inaugural issue of Text, distinguished Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller railed against “the rise of neo-romantic and radical attitudes and of various literary and intellectual fads that are fundamentally opposed to reason, to history, and to scholarship” (“The Lachmann Method: Merits and Limitations,” Text 1 [1981]: 11–20, here 12). But mouvance had come to stay and Zumthor was prominent in the second issue of the competing journal Texte, with his own article on “L’intertexte performanciel” (Texte 2 [1983]: 49–59). The outspoken and acknowledged champion of mouvance was Bernard Cerquilini, another critic and the editor of Le roman du Graal: manuscrit de Modène in Zumthor’s series, the Bibliothèque Médiévale, published in the 10/18 collection. Long after the unitarianism of Lachmann or Bédier, Cerquilini’s polemical booklet entitled Eloge de la variante accused philologists of deliberately amputating the native variance of medieval letters to fit

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a Procrustean editorial and hermeneutic bed. A corrective was needed to the categorical dismissiveness of Cerquilini and the ensuing extreme iconoclasm of others like him, such as R. Howard Bloch in “New Philology and Old French” for a special issue of Speculum 65,1 (Jan. 1990, 38–58) entitled The New Philology, ed. by Stephen G. Nichols. A relative balance was achieved in the more nuanced essay by Rupert Pickens, himself a text editor, unlike Bloch and Nichols, but an ardent advocate of mouvance. Pickens cites early multi-text editions and the concurrent recognition of the diversity of readings implied by mouvance “as a positive, not a destructive, force in medieval textual transmission” (“The Future of Old French Studies in America: The ‘Old’ Philology and the Crisis of the ‘New’,” The Future of the Middle Ages, ed. William D. Paden, 1994, 53–86, here 61). When in 1992 the Essai was translated into English, twenty years after its original publication, Zumthor penned a new introduction in which mouvance appears accurately translated as mutability although his neologism had by then long been naturalized in the critical vocabulary of both languages (xiv). In his update he admitted some shifts and re-orientations, mostly in renouncing the “impenetrable jargon” of generativist structuralism and in respecting “the historical dimension of knowledge.” But above all he reaffirmed the essential continuity in his thought even if some of the formal terminology had changed: in short, mouvance still characterizes the world of medieval literature but not the unchanging thought of Zumthor, who acknowledged that he (like troubadour Arnaut Daniel) was “swimming against the tide [la marée, or better le courant, i. e., the current]” in holding to “a theoretical position similar to that [he] occupied when conceiving” his book of two decades earlier (xvi). For his immobility he was taken to task by Roger Pensom in a review-article of the English edition which attacked Zumthor with other critics “of the Zumthorian confession” who “prioritize [textual] tradition and processes of transmission at the expense of the text and thus call for the throwing-out of the hermeneutic baby with the Lansonian bathwater” (Medium Aevum 62 [1993]: 294). André Martinet observed in his memoirs how the rise of universals in linguistic scholarship was the cause of the collapse of the science of linguistics, until then based on the studied classification and differentiation of languages but now replaced by their leveling to a possible least common denominator without the benefit of solid philological scrutiny and comparison (Mémoires d’un linguiste: vivre les langues, 1993, 349–50). Similarly, to mouvance might well be ascribed the beginning of what Michelle R. Warren has labeled post-philology and others like Pickens have derided as pseudo-philology (“Post-Philology,” Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. Patri-

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cia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 2003, 19–45; Pickens, 1994, 68–69). The danger is that there is now no hierarchy, no best text, no better text, no good or even bad text, just texts and aporia. “[Y]oung, incomplete, and mangled artifacts become as intriguing as old and lavishly illustrated ones. Even printed and electronic editions become objects of study” (Warren, 27). D. Editorial Practice: Pickens The practical application of mouvance was not stalled by the on-going theoretical debate but was soon promoted and introduced into text-editing as a largely new methodology. Pace Cerquiglini, even Gaston Paris in his 1872 edition of La Vie de St. Alexis “accounts for every version of the poem known to him” (Pickens, 1994, 82, n. 20) and Alfred Jeanroy “prints the complete texts of separate versions of Guillaume […] and occasional whole stanzas for Jaufré poems” (Les chansons de Jaufré Rudel, 1915, 2nd edition, ed. Alfred Jeanroy, 1924, rpt. 1965; Speer, 1980, 313, n. 5). It was the 12th-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel who would become the subject of the first and to date the only fully mouvance-inspired synoptic edition of a medieval poet attested in many manuscripts. No other author, dead or alive, has enjoyed the editorial attentions Pickens showered on one troubadour. Among the half-dozen editions of the same poet published concurrently or subsequently, all others are essentially single-text and one is virtually single-manuscript. As noted by Maria Luisa Meneghetti, the editing of this exemplary troubadour now became the touchstone not simply for critical theories on the troubadours but also for the pragmatics of text-editing in the wake of mouvance (“L’art d’éditer Jaufré Rudel,” CCM 34 [1991]: 167–75). Pickens announced his edition with a prolegomenon in which he categorized variants not as careless errors but as attempted improvements (1977). He taxed his predecessor Jeanroy with providing artificial, hybrid texts attested nowhere but in his edition, which Pickens’s was conceived to supplant in publishing all surviving medieval versions separately rather than conflated into one à la Lachmann. Pickens had himself initially projected a Lachmannian edition, only to decide that it would be impossible to reconstruct a 12th-century text from sixteen 13th- and 14th-century witnesses. Pickens’s edition was generally heralded as giving new stability to Jaufré Rudel’s songs by transcribing their various states for comparison. Yet the critics were divided. Most, including Philippe Menard (AdM 94 [1982]: 111–12), applauded the corpus of data thus made available and welcomed a worthy if not conveniently usable successor to Jeanroy. But Occitan text editors who reviewed Pickens were not uniformly satisfied. In their book

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reviews, Ulrich Mölk (ZfrP 96 [1980]: 447–49), Frank M. Chambers (RPh 34 [1981]: 222–31), and John Marshall (MLR 77 [1982]: 195–96) were more skeptical, the last doubting especially whether even “Rudel the poet has been well served.” Mary Speer (1980, 323) studied Pickens’s edition and concluded that “in the face of mouvance, we need to reaffirm the validity, for many works, of the traditional notions of author and scribe.” In a review-article marked by its own typographical errors, Roy Rosenstein, a fellow editor of Jaufré Rudel, contested the documentary value of Pickens’s edition. He cautioned that editors may themselves partake of mouvance when in failing to transcribe accurately the mass of variant readings they themselves willy-nilly create previously unattested texts. Pickens is yet another Jeanroy but with more numerous inauthentic, post-medieval versions. When editors do not neutrally transcribe an existing stock of versions as intended in order to bring their mouvance to an end, they contribute instead to its incremental progression in an infinite because still growing repertory. When the editor becomes a scribe, he runs the risk of illustrating the process of mouvance rather than halting it. “The not always perfect modern editor strikingly resembles the often imperfect medieval scribe […] Mouvance lives, and through it so does medieval literature” (Rosenstein, 1989, 170). That is, as Mary Speer also reminds us in a later study, “Pickens’ edition […] proves dramatically that texts are inevitably messier than theories and resist neat applications” (“Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: Theory and Practice,” RPh 45 [1991]: 7–43, here 10). In this polarized climate, neo-Bédierists again accused the Lachmannians of being overly dismissive of “dumb scribes” when they confidently reconstructed an archetype, while the neoLachmannians retorted that the Bédierists were themselves “lazy editors” for relying on one flawed “best” manuscript. E. Subsequent History: Post-Pickens Pickens’s uniquely mouvance-driven edition was heralded by its publisher as definitive. But that marketing ploy has not obviated the need for more manageable and more accurate versions of the same corpus. 1978 also saw the re-edition of Jeanroy, with Spanish translation by Luis Alberto de Cuenca and Miguel Angel Elvira (Guillermo IX Duque de Aquitania y Jaufre Rudel: Canciones completas). Giorgio Chiarini’s neo-Lachmannian edition began to appear in the journal Paradigma also in 1978 and has since been published as a book in four slightly different forms, most recently in 2006 (L’amore di lontano: Edizione critica, con introduzione, note e glossario). George Wolf and Roy Rosenstein published a new edition with composite texts

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in 1983 (The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel). In 1992 Robèrt Lafont for his Italian edition followed more closely than Jeanroy the same principal manuscript, C (Jaufré Rudel: Liriche). Chiarini’s texts also appeared in 1996 with a Catalan translation by Victoria Cirlot (Las cançons de l’amor de lluny de Jaufré Rudel). Finally, in 1997 Pickens posted on the University of Kentucky website a first installment of a work in progress called Jaufre Rudel: Second Edition, which provided a diplomatic transcription of the Rudelian corpus in manuscripts A, B, and C only, followed by a critical edition of each of those three. At the time the present essay was written, Pickens’s revised versions were no longer accessible on-line. Critics have not missed the opportunity to compare the service or disservice done one poet by the proliferation of radically divergent editions. Noting that the small corpus of Rudel’s songs has long been a consistent launching pad for the conflict among theories of troubadour poetry, Meneghetti observes that this poet’s oeuvre is also the appropriate mouvancemined field in which the several schools of textual editing might joust. She establishes the parameters of modern and post-modern textual editing in juxtaposing the “extreme agnostic” Pickens, the “moderate Bédierists” Wolf and Rosenstein, and the “neo-Lachmannian” Chiarini. Her preference goes to her Italian colleague’s edition as the most traditionally palatable for its stemmatics while rejecting the first as expanding the perspective to provide all possible and even impossible readings (“même manifestement mauvaises”) and the second as over-simplifying the wealth of data by reducing each work to a single best-manuscript version with some varia lectio for classroom use (“scolaire”). In a comparative evaluation of the same three independent editions, but from a different position, William D. Paden finds a compromise in recommending Chiarini as the most readable, Wolf and Rosenstein as most faithful to the manuscript tradition, and Pickens as “the whole truth” (Paden, RPh 44 (1990): 113–17). Finally, when in his book review Michael Heintze undertook a detailed confrontation of Chiarini with Wolf and Rosenstein, he barely referenced Pickens at the outset of his comparison (ZfrP 107 [1991]: 242–46). Chiarini’s edition in its fifth transmogrification in 2006, modified yet again in title and presentation after the death not only of the author but now of the editor in 1995, seems to have won almost universal suffrage. That edition has been on the market in variously mutating forms of transmission for thirty years. It is revealing that, as Meneghetti also remarks, Chiarini is the shortest and most compact of the three modern editions. (None could vie with the minimalism of Ernesto Monaci’s twelve-page student edition of 1903: Poesie e vita di Jaufre Rudel). In its relative brevity Chiarini resembles

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closely the classic, wafer-thin Jeanroy paperback which, despite its failings – including various typographical errors for which Meneghetti similarly criticizes Chiarini – long remained handy and readable. Pickens, because of medieval and modern mouvance the heftiest, the most expensive, and the most error-ridden edition ever given Jaufré Rudel, offers as many as eleven often imperfect transcriptions of one song. F. Mouvance Now What then remains of mouvance today? Following Zumthor and Pickens, Hubert Heinen undertook to present up to four texts for each of the many surviving multi-version Middle High German lyrics in his Mutabilität im Minnesang, 1989. Since then, the long-awaited analysis of this wealth of data in his promised two-volume Minnesongs in Motion has not yet appeared. From the other side of the fence, a neo-traditionalist disciple of Erich Auerbach, William Calin, ruled provocatively on the question in trumpeting that “the worst development in Medieval Studies in the 20th century was the coming of mouvance.” While not all would subscribe to this bias denying all validity to mouvance, the long-term usefulness of the concept has certainly been compromised in the decades since 1972. Indeed, the debate seems to have slowed to a stalemate. Yet its influence is nonetheless felt. Mouvance has implicitly authorized the publication of single-manuscript editions of multi-manuscript texts, such as Lafont’s comparatively faithful transcription of C for Jaufré Rudel. The explanation for generalizing this approach might stem from the relative neglect of some manuscripts or the market competitiveness of several publishers around a deservedly popular text or the perceived ease of preparing a critical edition of a single manuscript. When such editions proliferate, it can be useful to juxtapose the variant treatments of the major manuscripts of Chretien de Troyes’ romances, for example. On the other hand, sometimes a late or idiosyncratic manuscript will be the base for the sole edition of a major narrative text available in print, such as Aimé Petit’s Roman d’Eneas in the Lettres gothiques series. In extreme cases, key passages or entire episodes familiar from other editions and perhaps better manuscripts might no longer be present. For examples of near-exclusive attention to individual manuscripts when the texts sometimes also exist in other exemplars, see Mouvances et jointures: du manuscrit au texte médiéval, ed. Milena Mikhailova, 2005.

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G. Conclusion In sum, as the reactions to Pickens’s edition confirm, the preparation or simply the consultation of a mouvance-inflected edition is an ambitious agenda impracticable in the case of any author whose complete works number more than six or seven lyrics in multiple manuscripts. It is perhaps equally unmanageable for a poet even with so microscopic a corpus as Jaufré Rudel. Mouvance remains valid as principle, in theory, but impractical as textual methodology. In hermeneutics, however, it continues to define our conception of medieval textuality. Mouvance serves as a critical tool to be applied sparingly in recognizing and confronting the complex representation and interpretation of individual medieval works which are so rarely fixed in a single textual form other than as an always artificially reconstructed, pseudo-authorial archetype or as a sometimes arbitrarily selected, nominally best manuscript. For those who want “the whole story until now,” mouvance alone can accurately tell the tale through its ideal of respect for the multiple textual versions of a work in progress with all their variants, medieval and post-medieval, modern and now post-modern. Select Bibliography Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Rupert T. Pickens, “Jaufré Rudel et la poétique de la mouvance,” CCM 20 (1977): 323–37; The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, ed. id. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1978); Roy Rosenstein, “Mouvance and the Editor as Scribe: Trascrittore Traditore?” RR 80 (1989): 157–71; Mary B. Speer, “Wrestling with Change: Old French Textual Criticism and Mouvance,” Olifant 7 (1980): 311–26; Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972; trans. Philip Bennett, Towards a Medieval Poetics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

Roy Rosenstein

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P Parody A. Introduction Parody remains a problematic, nuanced, and malleable term in any time period. The techniques of literary or artistic parody entail imitation, with intentions ranging from silly spoof to biting criticism to respectful homage. It is a form of imitation, a form of dialogue with the past that can tell us a great deal about the reception of a text. In ancient Greek, the term parody denotes a song that is both “next to” and “opposite” and Frederick W. Householder’s landmark study (“Parodia,” Classical Philology 39 [1944]: 1–9) relates this etymological origin to the process of parody as a form of “critical ridicule.” A similar perspective was adopted throughout most of the 20th century by medievalist literary historians. In an historical and theoretical overview of parody from classical drama to postmodern production, Margaret Rose provides the definition of parody as the “comic refunctioning of preformed material” (Parody//Meta-Fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the Writing and Reception of Fiction, 1979). Such definitions, along with the general notion of parody as any composition that simultaneously imitates and mocks prior works, reinforces and disrupts order, has been applied fruitfully to medieval literary studies In the Middle Ages, when borrowing from various sources, recycling existing texts, and making allusion to oral traditions provided material for literary creation, authors sought different levels of critical distance or comic rewriting through their imitations of prior texts. Many techniques of parody employed by authors in the Middle Ages remain in use today. Medieval parodists revisit the familiar subjects and representations treated by their predecessors, but with criticism and irony. B. Research History The scholarship on medieval parody by Paul Lehmann, Martha Bayless, Kathryn Gravdal, Alice Elizabeth Cobby, and Tony Hunt is representative of studies on medieval literary parody over the 20th century, as shown in the summary of their work below. Paul Lehmann and Martha Bayless provide definitions for parody and trace its development in the Middle Ages,

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focusing on the Latin tradition, while Cobby, Gravdal, and Hunt have focused on defining parody and exploring examples of literary imitation in the Old French genres of epic, romance, fabliaux, and chantefable. We turn first to Hunt’s discussion of the term parody, which was aimed at clarifying the term and how parody may be differentiated from other forms of imitation. Medieval parody may be defined in terms of what it is not, first by distinguishing it from satire or pastiche, for instance, as demonstrated by Tony Hunt as part of his answer to a long-standing scholarly debate over the nature of the only existing Old French chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette, with the conclusion that is more a pastiche than a parody (“La parodie médiévale: le cas d’Aucassin et Nicolette,” Romania 100 [1979]: 341–81). This study provides a definition of medieval parody and a typology of other forms of imitation. The debate over Aucassin is central to the study of medieval parody. Hunt was the first to distinguish medieval parody theoretically from satire or pastiche, providing not only insight into the nature of this complex text, but also a terminological framework useful to medievalists in decades to come. Moving beyond the earlier technique of a source study, he also provides a survey of medieval parody scholarship and redefines the term. In general, here parody is defined as targeting a specific literary text, satire as mocking social institutions, and pastiche as imitating several different texts or genres. Parody must thus be differentiated from related techniques such as allusion, homage, social criticism, or imitation of multiple sources. The problem of precise terminology needed to categorize and understand 13th-century derivative works is most pronounced in a scholarly debate surrounding Aucassin et Nicolette. This critical controversy, still not completely resolved in the eyes of all scholars, is about whether to label Aucassin a parody, a pastiche, a burlesque, or something else; the debate over the labeling of Aucassin touches on defining the very nature of medieval literary parody. Scholars Barbara Sargent Baur, June Hall Martin, and Mario Roques referred to Aucassin as parody, whereas Hunt, along with Alexandre Micha and Mariantonia Liborio, consider it pastiche. Alternatively, D. D. Roy Owen has called it burlesque because of its ridiculously unlikely scenes, including a food fight and a king giving birth. Philippe Ménard, partially agreeing with Hunt that the poem imitates several sources and thus does not fit most definitions of parody, calls it both pastiche and burlesque. Scholars also frequently remark upon the “world upside down” nature of the poem, and some, like Kathryn Gravdal, consider Aucassin et Nicolette a parody for this reason, despite the fact that it does not correspond to strict definitions of a parody according to Hunt. Most scholars agree that Aucassin is not without extratextual referents. Because it targets several texts and genres, from epic to courtly

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romance to lyric poetry, Hunt concluded that Aucassin et Nicolette may be viewed as a pastiche, imitating many sources and conventions, rather than a parody which would have targeted one recognizable text. Predating scholarly efforts to define the nature of the imitation and mockery present in problematic comic Old French texts such as Aucassin et Nicolette, German medievalist Paul Lehmann’s work on parody in the Middle Ages (Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 1922 [rpt. 1963] and Parodistische Texte: Beispiele zur lateinischen Parodie im Mittelalter, 1923), treats primarily Latin texts and ecclesiastical parodies, with a definition of parody that focuses on literary parody as the transformation of a specific text with comic use of recognizable themes, motifs, styles, and characters. Lehmann underlines the fact that parody is an act of imitation that is comic in effect, intentional in its origin, and recognized as by the audience in its reception. In opposition, he proposes nichtparodistische, or non-parodic, imitation. He then divides the study of parody into two named categories: first critical parody “Die kritisierende, streitende und triumphierende Parodie” and second, humorous or amusing parody, “Die heitere, erheiternde, unterhaltende Parodie.” Lehmann also demonstrates that halbparodistische, or partially parodic, imitations exist in medieval genres. Later theorists, such as French critic Gérard Genette, also begin to distinguish between ludic and non-ludic parody (Palimpsestes: la littérature au seconde degré, 1982). Lehmann applies the above terminological distinctions to a wide range of ecclesiastical and liturgical imitations and parodies, including mock sermons, prayers and masses. He explores parody in the Goliardic tradition, as well as in a broad selection of texts from love lyrics to didactic texts to social satire. Martha Bayless’s well-documented study on Latin Parody (Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition, 1996) extends beyond Lehmann’s work in the area of Medieval Latin parody. Her study defines textual parody broadly as: […] an intentionally humorous literary (written) text that achieves its effect by imitating and distorting the distinguishing characteristics of literary genre, styles, authors, or specific texts […] (Bayless, 3).

For Bayless medieval literary parody is then an act of distortion, or an act of transformation, that distinguishes parody from other techniques of imitation. Bayless points out certain aspects of parody unique to medieval texts, showing that medieval parodists relied primarily on familiar authors and sources of material, such as the Bible or romances. In addition, Bayless endeavors to show that medieval parodists were less concerned with minor or more individualistic texts, because

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Medieval parody, for instance, imitates a much different kind of text than those discussed in modern studies. Instead of relying on the eccentricities of highly individualistic texts to ensure reader recognition, medieval parodists took as their models the most widely known texts, the Bible foremost among them. In short, the Middle Ages parodied the classic and the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic and the avant-garde (Bayless, 6).

Bayless’s examples are literary and liturgical parody, and range from mock sermons, saints lives, litanies and secular centos to humorous drinkers’ masses. One major contribution is that she demonstrates, paradoxically, that pious clerical culture also valued humor, combining devotion and parody in their spoofs of familiar liturgical texts and genres. She covers the Old French fabliaux and Chaucer and other forms of literary parody and satire. This study includes a lengthy appendix with a useful handlist of Medieval Latin parody, providing twenty important parodic texts in the original Latin and in translation. In one of the two existing general book-length studies focusing on Old French parody, Kathryn Gravdal approaches the origin of parody through a Marxist and Bakhtinian perspective, as being essentially based on socioeconomic class difference (Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, 1989). Gravdal’s study crosses generic lines and finds parody and comedy in the incongruity of the binary oppositions of vilain et courtois, the clash between high and low, between the base and the courtly. Her examples of parody include the Roman de Fergus and Aucassin et Nicolette. In Gravdal’s eyes, medieval parody can be detected when an author imitates an aristocratic or courtly style, but places the material in a more popular context. Anne Elizabeth Cobby (Ambivalent Conventions: Formula and Parody in Old French, 1995) revisits with a fresh perspective the question of how Old French texts toy with generic formulae calling into question the conventions of genres that may be characterized by their commonplaces and recurring themes, motifs, characters, and topoi. Differing from Hunt, here Cobby defines the term parody broadly and allows for the idea of parody of an entire genre. Cobby’s analysis investigates the spoofing of courtly convention found in the Old French fabliaux corpus, revisits imitation in Aucassin et Nicolette, and considers Le pèlerinage de Charlemagne as an example of medieval parody of genre, mocking epic form, romance tradition, and religious texts.

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Select Bibliography Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (1922, rpt. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1963); Tony Hunt, “La parodie médiévale: le cas d’Aucassin et Nicolette,” Romania 100 (1979): 341–81; Kathryn Gravdal, Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literatur e of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Anne Elizabeth Cobby, Ambivalent Conventions: Formula and Parody in Old French (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1995); Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

Sarah Gordon

Prosopography (Christian) A. Definition Prosopography is nowadays a widely-used tool or method for the study of social history of all periods; it can be used alone, or in combination with other methods. It has evolved over the past century, with recent and future developments strongly linked to the use of computers and the increasing importance of sociology and its methods for historians. It overlaps with biography, genealogy, onomastics, demography and sociography, but is distinct from them. By contrast, the development of prosopography – in the sense of writing about social groups, rather than the collective study of social groups (Chase Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 2003, xxv) – occurs as an integral part of Islamic historiography from the late 8th-early 9th century. B. Terminological Definition The word, derived from the Greek “prosôpôn-graphia” (  - φ‘), has the literal meaning of “description of the external/material individual characteristics of a living being”. It first occurs in the 16th century, when it had the more restricted meaning of “description of persons by physical characteristics or character traits” (Timothy Barnes, “Prosopography Ancient and Modern,” Prosopography Handbook, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, 2007, 71–82), and was applied to works in which authors assembled material for short biographical studies of a number of illustrious or remarkable persons in order to point to some exemplary characteristic or characteristics. As such, it ressembled properly so-called collective biography, though much unnecessary confusion has resulted from its use in recent decades as a synonym for prospography (see Keats-Rohan, “Biography, Names Identity,” Proso-

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pography Handbook, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, 2007, 139–46). This early use is the antithesis of the modern use of the word, which has evolved over the past century from the work of German Ancient Historians. As practiced now, prosopography examines a group of people – the “population” – that shares one or more characteristics. The population is isolated from source material according to carefully defined criteria – the “questionnaire” – and the data concerning it are collected and modelled according to equally carefully defined criteria – “variables.” The modelling is done according to the principles of a relational database; most prosopography is now done using such software from the start. The variables sought are mainly data relating to the life of each individual in the population – name, parentage, career structure, places and groups to which s/he was connected, and so on. Whilst it is necessary to isolate every individual among the subject population, the focus is not on the individual per se but upon the total collection of individuals in aggregate. Analysis is thus based on the whole group considered with reference to its constituent parts; the object is to examine the interplay between a set of variables in order to understand the formation and function of specific groups, and the nature of political, social, economic and cultural change over time. The twin strengths of the approach are both to enhance the value of scarce or fragmentary data, and thus to help overcome the perennial problem of the inevitably unconvincing “case study” approach, and also to permit the interrogation of variables so as to reveal hitherto hidden or unsuspected trends. It is normal to provide brief summary “biograms” (a term I have recently suggested to replace its many verbose synonyms, Keats-Rohan, “Biography,” 151) for each person, summarizing in natural language the biographical data gleaned in what is usually a lengthy and demanding process. These can form a stand-alone product of the work – a biographical register of the total population – or it can be regarded as a first stage, preliminary to a multi-variate analysis of the whole, which at its simplest means examining the variables for constants and exceptions. More sophisticated statistical techniques can be used where there are plentiful data; this “mass” prosopography (Lawrence Stone, “Prosopography,” Daedalus 100 (1971): 46–79) is normally only possible for late or post-medieval sources. A major defining feature of historical prosopography is that it is source driven, requiring a profound and intense scrutiny of the primary sources; by contrast modern sociological prosopography (below) is question driven.

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C. History of Research, Schools of Thought, Approaches The earliest prosopographies were monumental biographical registers of all individuals in a total population, starting with Prosopographia Imperii Romani (PIR), first published in 1897–1898; work on the second edition was completed in 2007. Initially an antiquarian approach that gathered all material on all persons considered important in the period ca 100 B.C.E.–284 C.E., it achieved a firm chronology of the period by identifying sequences of office holders (“prosopographie sérielle,” Mireille Corbier, “Pour une pluralité des approaches prosopographiques,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Moyen Age-Temps Modernes, 100.1 [1988]: 187–97). The workings of Roman imperial government were shrouded in secrecy, being confined to the emperor and an inner circle of confidants. By analysing the PIR, Matthias Gelzer (Die Nobilität der römischen Republik, 1912; The Roman Nobility, English translation 1969) was able to show that political power was monopolized by a small group of families, the nobiles, and operated by the formation of bonds between them. This insight, that family ties were usually a determining influence in personal advancement, and that the links thus formed played an equally crucial role in the operation and mediation of political power structures, whether of Imperial Rome, or the successor states of medieval Europe, both lay and ecclesiastic, forms the basis of so-called elite prosopography (Stone, 1981), which informed and continues to inform medieval prosopography as practised by modern historians. The elite approach was so successful that it has been succeeded by: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (260–641), ed. A. H. M. Jones and J. R. Martindale, 1971–1972; Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire (I. Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne [303–533], ed. A. Mandouze, 1982; II Prosopographie de l’Italie chrétienne [313–604], ed. Charles and Luce Pietri, 1999); Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit: Erste Abteilung (641–867), ed. F. Winkelmann, Ralph Johannes Lilie et al, 7 vols., 1998–2001; and The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire I (641–867), ed. John R. Martindale, published on CD-ROM, 2001. Smallerscale studies include: Horst Ebling, Prosopographie der Amtsträger des Merowingerreiches: Von Chlothar II. (613) bis Karl Martell (714), 1974; and Philippe Depreux, Prosopographie de l’entourage de Louis le Pieux (781–840), 1997. Medieval prosopography outside Byzantium began with German scholars investigating the episcopy of Francia and Germania (J. Simon, Stand und Herkunft der Bischöfe der Mainzer Kirchenprovinz im Mittelater, 1908). A series of investigations of the higher clergy of later medieval England began with M. Gibbs and I. Lang, Bishops and Reform 1215–1272 (1934); the trend still continues (Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury: c.1066–1540, 1997). The French have been similarly

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important, with the ongoing project Fasti ecclesiae Gallicanae: Répertoire prosopographique des évêques, dignitaires et chanoines de France de 1200 à 1500 (ed. Hélène Millet and P. Desportes, 1996–), and the recent monument of traditional scholarship, Véronique Gazeau, Normannia Monastica (2007). The study of political elites – the families surrounding kings and princes – began most notably in Germany with Gerd Tellenbach (Königtum und Stämme in der Werdezeit des deutschen Reiches, 1939), whose work was profoundly influential on the works of Karl Schmid, Horst Ebling, Edouard Hlawitschka, Jörg Jarnut, and Karl Ferdinand Werner, among others. Tellenbach referred to prosopography as the process of collecting and organizing data (in the biographical register), leading to a secondary, analytical stage called Personenforschung (research into persons). This division has been challenged by Neithard Bulst (“Objet et méthode,” 1988), who pointed out that the assumptions which underlay the collection and registering of data are the essential substructure which subsequent analysis depends upon and is thus part of the same process of prosopography. Bulst has been important in promoting the use of prosopography and in formalizing it through dedicated conferences and attendant publications (Medieval Lives and the Historian: Studies in Prosopography, ed. Niethard Bulst and Jean-Pierre Genet, 1986), and has been an advisory editor of the sole journal in the field, Medieval Prosopography, established at Michigan State University, Kalamazoo, by Americans Joel Rosenthal and George Beech, in 1980. More recent trends include the meeting of elite studies with major onomastic projects such as Nomen et Gens (Nomen et Gens: Zur historischen Aussagekraft frühmittelalterlicher Personennamen, ed. Dieter Geuenich, W. Haubrichs, et al., 1997) with studies of monastic Libri Vitae and necrologies, which have provided important insights into the formation of sometimes temporary, sometimes enduring political alliances, not always dominated by family (Gerd Althoff and Johannes Wollasch, “Bleiben die Libri Memoriales stumm? Eine Erwiderung auf H. Hoffmann,” DA 56 [2000]: 33–35). Alfred B. Emden produced his Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500 between 1957 and 1959, and its counterpart for Cambridge in 1963 (see Ralph Evans, “The analysis by computer of A. B. Emden’s Biographical Registers of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,” Medieval Lives and the Historian: Studies in Medieval Prosopography, ed. Bulst and Genet, 381–94). Latterly Dutch and Belgian scholars have led the way in the development of the prosopography of medieval education, which overlaps with that of clerics; examples include C. Renardy, Les maîtres universitaires du diocèse de Liège: Repertoire biographique 1140–1350 (1981), Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, “Possibilités de carrière et de mobilité sociale des intellectuels-universi-

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taires au moyen âge” (Medieval Lives and the Historian, ed. Bulst and Genet, 343–56). Such studies have helped to broaden the approach of prosopography and to have opened up historians more to the ideas and methods of anthropology and sociology, and hence taken them further from the “elite,” politics-based, approach. Kinship, for example, has long been of interest to social scientists, who have explored its cultural and juridical aspects, which have been of increasing interest to prosopographers since the 1980s (see Andrejs Plakans, Kinship in the Past, 1984). Since the 1960s a new type of prosopography, so-called French or Bourdieusian prosopography has developed, based upon the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his collaborators. They were primarily concerned with contemporary society, but their aim is to uncover the structures of different fields, such as the religious field or the educational field. The idea is that human action takes place within social fields, which are arenas for competition for resources. Success within the fields depends upon one’s “capital,” whether economic, cultural or symbolic, as well as “habitus,” or system of acquired dispositions forming the organizing principles of action education (Donald Broady, “French Prosopography: Definition and Suggested Readings,” Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts 30 [2002]: 381–85). These ideas are investigated through data collection of carefully defined variables, leading to a more quantitative, question-driven approach than is the norm for pre-modern history. Nevertheless, it has been used in a study of Roman businessmen Koenraad Verboven, “The associative order, status and ethos of Roman businessmen in Late Republic and Early Empire” (Athenaeum [2007]: 861–93) and has the potential to be of use in medieval prosopography. D. Current Issues and Future Trends The tremendous increase in the use of prosopography of recent years, which began in the late 1970s and has produced a torrent of outputs large and small, is partly due to greater awareness of social theory, and to the increasing use of the computer. Both have contributed considerably to the development of prosopography as a method (i. e., an organized and regular way of doing something) and to the range of its application. It is now possible to code statistics-based documents of the later Middle Ages for exploitation with a range of techniques, including prosopography, as has been shown by David Herlihy’s work on the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (David Herlihy and Christiane klapisch-zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427, 1985). The development of the use of computers by historians in general has not been uncontroversial. In prosopography the advent of the desktop relational database has been the biggest single advance

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in the power and possibilities of the approach, but there was plenty of debate about the suitability of a relational database, with its atomized data normally intended by statistical analysis, for modeling medieval sources, which are amongst the least standard texts on the planet (Ralph Mathisen, “Where are all the PDBs? The creation of prosopographical Databases for the Ancient and Medieval Worlds,” Prosopography Approaches, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, 2007, 95–126). Modern software, including database management systems allowing quantitative analysis (statistics based) and qualitative data analytical software (text based), and programming languages such as XML has allowed much greater flexibility in database design, with the potential to incorporate or being built around texts with relative ease. This in turn has led to developments in modeling, such as the “New Prosopography” pioneered by the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire and Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England projects (see www.pase.ac.uk) which make individual source statements the building blocks of the prosopography – rather than persons. These source statements, or “factoids,” can make different and often contradictory statements about an individual but in this approach none is given the status of “fact” (John Bradley and Harold Short, “Using formal structures to create complex relationships: The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire – A case study,” Resourcing Sources, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, 2002, 3–21). This approach is complex and beyond the reach of most in terms of finance and organization, but has introduced some interesting new ideas. Much current focus is upon presenting prosopography as a web-based resource for the wider world. There are major and yet unresolved issues about sustainability of websites, as well as the issue of technological transfer for projects published or maintained digitally in general. E. Summary The ever-increasing use of prosopography has already transformed understanding of the medieval world and its Roman precursor: a full bibliography would require a volume of its own. The pioneering “elite” studies established the foundations with regard to political elites, whilst the newer, more sociological approaches are looking more at intellectual and economic groupings. With greater understanding of individuals as members not just of one or two groups but a network of multiple groups the potential for prosopography to incorporate Social Network Analysis is growing – something also being pioneered by Ancient Historians (Shawn Graham and Giovanni Ruffini, “Network Analysis and Graeco-Roman Prosopography,” Prosopography Handbook, 325–36; G. Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Eygpt, 2008). Prosopography as practiced by historians is dependent upon its sources which are

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finite and often unsatisfactory, but the better they are understood the more they have to tell. This is one of prosopography’s strengths, as are its increasingly interdisciplinary nature and its enthusiastic embrace of technology. All this will ensure that it will continue to develop and make important contributions to our understanding of medieval history well into the future. Select Bibliography George T. Beech,, “Prosopography,” Medieval Studies: An Introduction, ed. James Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1976), 151–84; Karl Schmid, “Zur Problematik von Familie, Sippe und Geschlecht: Haus und Dynastie beim mittelalterlichen Adel,” Zeitschrift Geschichte des Oberrheins 105 (n. s. 66) (1958): 1–62; id., “Über die Struktur des Adels im früheren Mittelalter,” Jahrbuch für fränkische Landesforschung 19 (1959): 1–23; Gerd Tellenbach, Königtum und Stämme in der Werdezeit des deutschen Reiches (Weimar: Böhlau, 1939); id., Zur Bedeutung der Personenforschung für die Erkenntnis des früheren Mittelalters (Freiburg: H. F. Schulz, 1957); Neithard Bulst and Jean-Pierre Genet, Medieval Lives and the Historian: Studies in Prosopography (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986); Neithard Bulst, “Objet et méthode de la prosopographie,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Moyen Age-Temps modernes, 100/1: La prosopographie: problèmes et méthodes (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome 1988), 467–82; Hélène Millet, “Notice biographique et enquête prosopographique,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Age-Temps modernes, 100/1: La prosopographie: problèmes et méthodes (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome 1988), 87–111; Jörg Jarnut, Prosopographische und sozialgeschichtliche Studien zum Langobardenreiche in Italien (568–774) (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1972); K.S.B. Keats-Rohan and Katharine S. B., Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066–1166 ; I: Domesday Book; II: Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999, 2002); id., “Biography, Names and Identity,” Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, ed. id. (Oxford: Linacre College, 2007); Dion Smyth, “Prosopography,” The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Karl Ferdinand Werner, “Untersuchungen zur Frühzeit des Französischen Fürstentums (9.–10. Jahrhundert),” Die Welt als Geschichte 18 (1958): 256–89; 19 (1959): 146–93; 20 (1960): 87–119.

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R Ritual and Performance A. Introduction Since the 1970s, many disciplines have turned to the analysis of rituals, which has emerged as a broad field covering many aspects of cultural and social studies. In the context of this development, ritual has been defined so variously “that it means very little because it means so much” (Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual. Writings on Culture and Performance, 1993, 228). Such scepticism was already expressed in 1977 by Jack Goody, who stated that the concept had become global in a way which made it rather unusable (“Against Ritual: Loosely structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic,” Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Meyendorff, 1977, 25–35). One of the most frequently used definitions explains ritual as “behavior that is formal, stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped, performed earnestly as a social act” (Conrad Kottak, Cultural Anthropology, 1st ed., 1975, 12th ed., 2008, 228). For Medieval Studies, the definition by Gerd Althoff has proved influential (“The Variability of Rituals in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff et al., 2002, rpt. 2008, 71–87, here 71). He has recognized rituals as “chains of actions of a complex nature [that] are repeated by actors in certain circumstances in the same or similar ways, and, if this happens deliberately, with the conscious goal of familiarity.” Ritual and performance are closely connected. Without performance there is no ritual. In historical studies, the “performative turn” came to the fore in the 1990s (Geschichtswissenschaft und ‘performative turn’: Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold, 2003), following the trend of the 1970s and 1980s in anthropology, when Victor Turner created the sub-discipline of the “anthropology of performance” (The Anthropology of Performance, 1986; cf. Dwight Conquergood, “Poetics, Play, Process, and Power: The Performative Turn in Anthropology,” Text and Performance Quarterly 1 [1989]: 82–95). Particularly in anthropology, however, the analyses of rituals have decreased in recent years (Geoffrey Koziol, “The Dangers of Polemic: Is Ritual still an Interest-

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ing Topic of Historical Study?” Early Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 367–88, here 367). This is not the case with regard to the historical disciplines and Medieval Studies. There, the relevance of rituals and their analysis is still prevalent. B. History of Research The development of modern theories of ritual began around 1900; initial interest in the field of rituals arose in Religious Studies. The work of Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, 1st French ed. 1912, new trans. 1995) can be seen as the starting point of serious studies into ritual, and it also influenced the historical disciplines. Even today, the sphere of religion represents one of the most important areas of research, although the range of ritual has been broadened to the secular sphere and even to daily life. Also Arnold van Gennep’s (1873–1957) famous anthropological study on The Rites of Passage (1st French ed. 1909) has had strong influence on later theories and research, especially on Victor Turner’s theory of ritual. Turner (1920–1983) was the author of the most influential general work on ritual in the second half of the 20th century (The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969, rpt. 1995), which also had an important impact on the historical disciplines. From a mainly religious emphasis rituals developed, also in medieval studies, to a field of cultural study covering more or less any aspect of human life (Gerd Althoff, “The Variability of Rituals in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff et al., 2008, 71–87). Although he avoided the use of the term “ritual,” the works of Percy Ernst Schramm (1894–1970) from the 1920s onwards (particularly his Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik, 3 vols., 1954–1956) may be seen as a forerunner of modern ritual studies in medieval history. This is also the case for Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) and his Autumn of the Middle Ages (1st Dutch ed., 1919), and for Marc Bloch’s (1886–1944) Les rois thaumaturges (1st ed., 1924). The current interest of medievalists in rituals and performances did not so much arise out of considerations regarding the theory of performance, but was mainly influenced by ethnological studies on oral societies. Three groups of studies have become relevant: (1) the analysis of individual rituals or specific conduct actions; (2) studies that start from the goals of communication and deal with the various rituals and conduct actions which communicate these goals; (3) research into the way in which rituals and performances were represented in texts (Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold, 13–15).

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Representatives of the historical disciplines have regularly applied anthropological, ethnological, sociological, and systems theoretical models to their analyses of rituals (e. g., Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, “Mittelalterliche Rituale in systemtheoretischer Perspektive: Übergangsriten als basale Kommunikationsform in einer stratifikatorisch-segmentären Gesellschaft,” Geschichte und Systemtheorie: Exemplarische Fallstudien, ed. Frank Becker, 2004, 108–56). Such a development of ritual studies, of the applied approaches and the concepts behind them, have occasionally been criticized. Philippe Buc (The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory, 2001) emphasized that historians have used sociological and ethnological models uncritically and overenthusiastically in their studies of medieval rituals, assigning to them a central position that they do not deserve. He stressed that misinterpretations of medieval documents could easily occur in applying 20th-century theories and models (Buc, “Political Ritual: Medieval and Modern Interpretations,” Die Aktualität des Mittelalters, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz, 2000, 255–72, here 255). Buc’s critique itself has been heavily criticized; he has been accused of arguing too polemically by making unproved generalizations, and of not offering any alternatives (Koziol, “The Dangers of Polemic,” 367–88). Since the 1970s and 1980s analyses of rituals, mainly initiated by American researchers, may be found in Medieval Studies in a large number of fields and on an international level: in the history of religion (e. g., Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent, 2006); the history of theater and drama (e. g., Francis Edwards, Ritual and Drama: The Medieval Theatre, 1976; Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Laurie Postlewate and Wim Hüsken, 2007); the history of art (e. g., Staale Sinding-Larsen, Iconography and Ritual. A Study of Analytical Perspectives, 1984); the history of literature (e. g., Christiana Witthöft, Ritual und Text: Formen symbolischer Kommunikation in der Historiographie und Literatur des Spätmittelalters, 2004; Corinna Dörrich, Poetik des Rituals: Konstruktion und Funktion politischen Handelns in mittelalterlicher Literatur, 2002); the history of music (e. g., Jane Morlet Hardie and David Harvey, Commemoration, Ritual and Performance: Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Music, 2006); economic history (e. g., Kathryn Reyerson, “Rituals in Medieval Business,” Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan, ed. Joëlle RolloKoster, 2002, 81–103); legal history (e. g., Les rites de la justice: Gestes et rituals judiciaries au Moyen Age occidental, ed. Claude Gauvard et al., 2000); the history of gender and family (e. g., Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, 1985; Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Child-

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hood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe, 1998 [1st ed. 1984]); the history of magic (e. g., Claire Fanger, Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, 1998); the history of gestures (Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident medieval, 1990; Kiril Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West, 2003), the history of emotions (e. g., Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes au Moyen Âge: Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution (Ve–XIIIe siècle), 2000); the history of dress (e. g., Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War, 2002); and so on. The Journal of Ritual Studies, founded in 1987, deals with ritual in all its aspects and has also published some contributions on medieval topics. The most interest in symbolic communication and rituals developed in two fields of Medieval Studies: urban history (e. g., Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Medieval Venice, 1981; Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent, 1996; Symbolic Communication in Late Medieval Towns, ed. Jacoba van Leeuwen, 2006), and political history, particularly connected to rulership (e. g., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price, 1987; Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual, ed. János M. Bak, 1990; Rituals of Power from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, ed. Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson, 2000; Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter, 2003). Multi- and interdisciplinary studies have dealt with the transformation and change of ritual practices during the Middle Ages and stated that rituals and their performativity are to be seen as a process (e. g., The Appearances of Medieval Ritual: The Play of Construction and Modification, ed. Nils Holger Petersen et al., 2004; Visualizing Medieval Performance, ed. Elina Gertsman, 2008). The German Sonderforschungsbereich (Collaborative Research Center) 619, “Ritualdynamik” (“Ritual Dynamics”), was founded at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 and has been the largest interdisciplinary research collective worldwide dealing exclusively with rituals, their transformation, and dynamics. Its medieval branch has concentrated on “Politik und Ritual – Herrschertreffen als Handlungsform politischer Praxis im Spätmittelalter” (“Politics and ritual – rulers’ encounters as procedures of political practice in the late Middle Ages”). Another German Sonderforschungsbereich, 447, founded in 1999 at the Free University of Berlin, has concentrated on “Performing Cultures,” that is, examining and comparing the function and significance of performance in the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and modernity. Other comparative approaches have become relevant concerning different cultures and geographic areas (e. g., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial

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in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price, 1987; Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan, ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster, 2002) as well as periods (e. g., L’audience: Rituels et cadres spatiaux dans l’Antiquité et le haut Moyen Age, ed. Jean-Pierre Caillet and Michel Sol, 2007). Generally, it can be stated that for modern medieval studies the attractiveness of research strategies concentrating on performance and ritual lies in the opportunity to apply sometimes entirely new approaches to sources that have been well known for a long time (Frank Rexroth, “Rituale und Ritualismus in der historischen Mittelalterforschung: Eine Skizze,” Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Stand und Perspektiven der internationalen und interdisziplinären Mittelalterforschung, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut, 2003, 391–406, here 403). Select Bibliography Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York et al.: Oxford University Press, 1997); Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social ScientificTheory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Riti e rituali nelle società medievali, ed. Jacques Chiffoleau et al. (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1994); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [1st ed., 1997]); Inszenierung und Ritual in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Düsseldorf: Droste-Verlag, 2005); Visualizing Medieval Performance, ed. Elina Gertsman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Gerhard Jaritz

Space and Nature A. General Definition Our understanding of the medieval idea of space (and that of nature as space, in contrast to “human nature”) has undergone substantial transformations in the last few decades. The former Euclidean concept of space as a measurable, but empty background for human endeavor has evolved into a rich and varied entity, imbued with great cultural, metaphysical, sociological, economic and other significances. No longer can one speak of a generalized “space” any more than one can speak of the “town” or the “farm” and cover all possibilities; instead, critics have traced more discernable and demonstrable scien-

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tific, social, political or economic forces that have created notions of space, and have brought them to the forefront of the discussion. The following article attempts to present aspects of the idea of space as it has been explored in the critical literature that reflect the range of the discussion: indeed, the complexity and breadth of this topic are immense. However, some specific areas of recent interest may be identified as follows. Cosmic Space According to Edward Grant (The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts, 1996), medieval cosmology remains the dominant scientific paradigm until as late as 1687. The central concepts forming the backbone of this perspective proceed from Aristotelian premises of an ordered universe that is essentially finite, although according to the medieval overlay of Christianity, the infinite Being who created the universe essentially out of nothing, God, inhabits and sustains it. The space of the cosmos, conceived of as a geocentric sphere filled with matter, was divided into as many as eleven concentric subspheres, which carried the moon, the known planets Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and the fixed stars. Beyond this was the all-encompassing heaven, where the souls of redeemed Christians enjoyed the beatific vision of the Almighty. One could further distinguish between the celestial spheres and the terrestrial region, consisting of orbs corresponding to the four elements. The celestial spheres were not vacuums, but rather were filled with a kind of ether, possessing unique properties of uniform movement and incorruptibility. Medieval scientific philosophers considered the celestial regions nobler than their terrestrial counterparts, which resulted in the view that influences rained down from above, but did not rise from below. The issue of “place” bears some influence on the notion of space, and its revision became important after the condemnations of Aristotelianism in 1270 and 1277 (David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to AD 1450, 1st edition 1992 [2nd edition 2007], 246–60). Aristotle had defined place through reference to one body containing another; thus, if the outermost cosmic body is contained by a finite container, what specifically is this container? Such arguments encouraged attempts to redefine place by reference to the contained body, or to refine the notion of the cosmos to include various kinds of outer shells that might accommodate such logical paradoxes. Conceptions of terrestrial space were represented by mappaemundi, simple and highly abstract maps of the world, which geographers drew most

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commonly as a “T” (corresponding to bodies of water that separate the three known continents, Europe, Africa and Asia) inscribed within an “O” (denoting the earth) (Lindberg, 280–81). Other such “maps” included representations of the earth’s climatic zones and portolan charts, based upon actual maritime experience. As these became more detailed over time, and as their value as navigational aids increased, mariners grew ever bolder in venturing beyond the limits of their familiar geographical spaces. (See also Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature, 2006). Secular Space – Courtly and Urban In the preface to the second volume of his monumental Histoire de la vie privée: de l’Europe féodale à la Renaissance (1985), Georges Duby sketches some of the most significant developments that have provided us insights into the private and domestic lives not only of aristocrats but also of middle and lower class individuals. An increasing availability of documents from this period, the stark reduction in population due to plague, a shift in development from France to Spain, Italy and Northern Germany, a greater appreciation for the material world, an easing of the earlier medieval contemptus mundi revealed especially in the plastic arts, and a profusion of materials available to archeologists after the middle of the 14th century – all of these give better evidence to the kinds of lives led behind castle walls and within private domiciles across Europe during the later Middle Ages. Objects that filled the rooms and buildings of private life indicate to us how one perceived and used the spaces, and what a person considered important entered into the language of wills, marriage documents and inventories from this period, thus enriching our pool of information. Space at the Court The space at court was the arena of power; hence, courtly objects of beauty, elegance and richness appropriately enhanced the power of the ruler and preserved the hierarchy that structured courtly activity. Essentially, power defined social and political relationships in medieval Europe, and the residences and fortresses of the aristocracy concretized this value. Architecture and material culture at court became a visual language of lordship: the majesty of the ruler was reflected in the richness of her or his domus and in the strength of the adjoining donjon, the site of defense against invasion and the expression of the ruler’s half of the feudal bargain: the protection of one’s liegemen. While political power is usually contained within the person of the ruler, and the space around her or him (hence the term pax regis in reference to the

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body and immediate vicinity of the king), majesty extends that power to loci within the realm, especially to the persons and surroundings of the ruler’s allies. Thus, early in the medieval period there begins the significant practice of granting immunities, that is, the guarantee that the safety and security of an individual or community within a particular space will be guaranteed, under threat of harsh punishments for transgressors (Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe, 1999). Initially this practice forges especially strong alliances between courts and monasteries, which enjoy safety in return for their support of the ruler, while they maintain power over their own space. Later, through the addition of stipulations, called tuitio, secular authorities at court begin to exert controlling influence in monastic affairs, rendering monastic territorial autonomy ever less effective. Urban & Domestic Space Henri Lefebvre (La production de l’espace, 1974, 253–65) maintains that the most significant evolution in spatial conceptions during the later Middle Ages was linked with the rise of towns. Before the 12th century, Christian Europe had been fascinated with the artistic symbology of death, and sepulchers, catacombs, graves and crypts served to mark the continent’s holiest places – for Lefebvre, the process forced an “encryption” of meaning. But after 1300, surplus production in the countryside made it possible to support urban populations with food and raw materials, and thus began the crystallization of political and economic power in the towns. The pilgrim’s path – to pay homage to a saintly grave – was replaced by the merchant’s travel route as the most significant road through the late medieval landscape. No longer was religious authority empowered to the extremes the earlier medieval period had witnessed. Towns rose up, with new architectural marvels that towered over marketplaces and Romanesque churches, liberating the European consciousness from the crypt and creating a vertical dimension of diffuse meanings, power and possibilities. Gothic cathedrals stretched high up to a luminous space that opened thought and belief to the light, making the very secrets of creation available to human vision. Research on medieval urban space has recently expanded profusely, and the following pieces indicate some of the most significant turns it has taken (see the introduction and contributions to Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2009). The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (Poétique de l’espace, 1957), attempting to identify the archetypal feeling evoked by the poetic image of the house, comprehends it as vertical space, in which one feels sheltered and can dream – granting the individual the in-

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terior space for self-awareness and self-determination. Peter Arnade, Martha C. Howell, and Walter Simons emphasize the diversity of urban space in the later Middle Ages, and the “revolutionary” role these various, specific spaces played as agents of change (“Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 [2002]: 515–48). The literature of the late medieval period also bears the clear marks of this transition. For example, William F. Woods, in Chaucerian Spaces: Spacial Poetics in Chaucer’s Opening Tales (2008), relates Chaucer’s tale-tellers to their characteristic spaces and vice-versa. Culminating with the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” he demonstrates this inner sensibility of self, not only a turning inward reflected in the character, but also a new sense of domesticity in the character’s intimate space (see also Chiara Frugoni, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. William McCuaig, 1983, 1991). Sacred Space As Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (“Defining the Holy: the Delineation of Sacred Space,” Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 2005, 1–23) have pointed out, the etymological origins of “sacred” and “profane” are both rooted in spatial categories: sacer referred to objects and locales, but profanus denoted the area outside a holy place (sacrum), and referred to the location of things beyond the limits of sanctity. One of the most important works on the subject of what constitutes sacredness, Mircea Elaide’s The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (1959), employs spatial discourse, that is, the locus of contact between heaven, earth and hell, in defining the term “hierophany,” or the cultural-religious representation of the divine. Sacred space can be thought of as a cultural area reserved for religious ritual, the purpose of which is to encounter a divine presence. For Christianity during the Middle Ages, such spaces were manufactured and separated from secular space by elaborate artifice, such as the walls of a cathedral or church. The most important artists and craftsmen of the social community then decorated the space both externally and internally in an appropriate manner. The sanctity of space was signaled by various sensual signs: visually through architecture and art, aurally through the ringing of bells and through the olfactory sense with the burning of incense (Hamilton and Spicer, 7–8). At times, such space had been appropriated from earlier religions, but more often the space was taken from a central point within communities, settlements, or towns. John Howe (“Creating Symbolic Landscapes: Medieval Development of Sacred Space” Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, 2002, 208–23) argues that the sacred medieval landscape

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includes elements of Ernst Robert Curtius’s (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948 [trans. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1967]) locus amoenus and locus horribilis, and combines them into a concept of “Sacred Center,” “a symbolic physical point with its associated social and religious constructs,” drawing both pilgrims and crowds of worshipers. These grew into the more urban forms – the cathedral or the parish church – that sacred space acquired in the Middle Ages. The primary locus of sacred space in medieval Europe was, of course, the cathedral. In The Gothic Enterprise: a Guide to Understanding the Gothic Cathedral (2003), Robert A. Scott demonstrates that to the medieval mind sacred space had to be created and that it demanded the highest forms of artistic expression on the part of the best craftsmen of a community. This resulted from the pervasive feeling that the divine was not in the raw materials constructing the space of the cathedral or church, but that at some point, usually after a ritual of sanctification, the divine entered into the objects. Thus, the inner spaces of the church imitated the imagined forms of heaven, thereby welcoming divinity while at the same time introducing the religious community to the beauty of heaven. Sacred places had to be clearly separated off from secular space, and they had to be substantial and solid, since durability and permanence were required to greet and to retain the divine presence. The sacred objects and artwork within were constantly subjected to daily, weekly and yearly cycles of ritual in order to maintain the concentrated sanctity of the space. Furthermore, the church protected them from damage or desecration, and if the holy objects were removed, for example, on Palm Sunday, it was only to represent vulnerability, i. e., the dangers Christ encountered before his crucifixion, in order to stir interest and excitement among pious observers. Gendered Space One of the most significant ways in which autonomy manifests itself is in one’s ability to gain entry to space. The ability to restrict the access of another is a hallmark of power and subjugation. The spaces of medieval Europe were not as open to females as they were to males, and a woman’s transgression of the rules governing access could be dangerous. Barbara A. Hanawalt (“Medieval English Women in Rural and Urban Domestic Space,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 [1998]: 19–26) reveals that, in rural regions, women were relegated to areas “inside,” whereas men dominated “outside,” where women sought safety through company. A woman alone, out in the fields of rural England, for example, was in potential danger of rape and injury. In urban spaces, even “outside,” men and women mixed company in most mercantile

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situations; however, any woman unaccompanied by a man who would dare enter into a tavern would run the risk of possible violence – minimally, her reputation would suffer severely. Thus, men were able to exercise social control over women by defining acceptable spaces for them, specifically the home, the village and most spaces of urban commerce. At the borders of, or beyond, these areas, women were easily marginalized as socially unacceptable and dishonored, and, in extreme cases, preyed upon. The issues around gender and space become particularly complex when women enter the sacred space of the church. For example, a very broad range of diverse topics is presented in a volume of essays edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church (2005), where many of these complexities are examined as aspects of the general themes of spatial control of women by men, and of the body as a spatial metaphor of subjugation. While one cannot deny the prominence of the cathedral during the Middle Ages, nevertheless it was the parish church that played the central religious role with the great majority of medieval Christian women, articulating in an essentially religious space the psychological and material demands of community and thereby representing as space the predominant political and economic attitudes toward women. The parish churches as well as the medieval monasteries were social constructions that provided an arena for the interaction of community rituals of practice. Women’s access to privileged space depended upon several factors, each of which could be cited for the purpose of exclusion; thus the chancel, considered the “head” of the parish, barred women, while the “body” was formed by the space of the church to which both men and women had access. Religious buildings were designed for ritual cultural performance (e. g., the mass), and therefore they offer a clearer perspective on medieval spatial practices than most other kinds of space. In the medieval epic, the process of creating a space for the characters to move across or through, “spatialization,” allows a negotiation of gender roles (Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 1994), which has important implications for both politics and power. Movement across medieval literary spaces creates encounters with “others” who initiate change, a “becoming.” Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand (Topographies of Gender in Middle High German Arthurian Romance, 2001) asserts that the spatialization that is represented in the medieval German epic creates a “topography” of becoming male, female, king, queen, etc. through power and gender negotiations, the result of which is a mapping, in the mind of the reader, of a path reflecting the character’s progress.

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Nature An important, exceptional example of space in the Middle Ages was the idea of nature. While the space beyond the area under the protection of the court, the forests and fields of medieval Europe, provided sustenance and adventure to the nobility, it was also a locus fraught with danger. Jacques LeGoff (La civilisation de l’occident medievale, 1st edition 1964, rev. edition 1982) gives a comprehensive description of how the medieval world felt about the area outside of the court. The forest was the border of the civilized, courtly realm, where the clearings and roadsides edged up against the unknown and formed the border that isolated and restricted human consciousness. To the medieval psyche, it was the realm of wolves, wild boars and monsters. In the Tristan epics, the hero, as a young boy set ashore on the coast of Cornwall after his abduction and release, confronts the frightening prospect of finding his way alone through the wilds. At the same time, the forest presents the challenges the medieval hero was forced to overcome. Because he knew how to properly slaughter a deer and present it to the court, Tristan befriends King Mark’s hunting party that leads him back to civilization, his uncle and family. Later, he would vanquish the dragon in the forests of Ireland, thereby gaining Isolde; and discover the cave of the lovers (in Gottfried’s version of the tale) where he and Isolde would live on love (Ingrid Hahn, Raum und Landschaft in Gottfrieds Tristan: ein Beitrag zur Werkdeutung, 1963). Nature, as space, confronted the medieval individual with the trials and rewards of an authentic kind of experience, in which such an individual struggles for life against death on a razor’s edge, and where dangers were most extreme but the rewards of success were most sublime. Ernst Robert Curtius (Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948) describes the idealized space of medieval literature as a manufactured landscape consisting primarily of a number of topoi woven together through the progress of the characters’ actions. As Sterling-Hellenbrand points out, this composite is further modified by medieval narrators in order to complete an image of the particular world each describes in her or his particular work; the recognition that authors superimposed topographies on the idealized space of the Middle Ages yields a rich and multifaceted, cross-disciplinary potential for new research on medieval landscape. Several noteworthy examples of such work in literary criticism include: Woods’s Chaucerian Spaces; G. A. Knott, “‘Une question lancinante’: Further Thoughts on Space in the Chansons de Geste,” Modern Language Review 94 (1999): 22–34; Catherine Léglu, “Place and Movement in the Old French Chanson de Toile,” Paregon 24 (2007): 21–39; Vicent Martines, “Tiempo y espacio en la versión Catalana de la Queste del Saint Graal,”

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Hispanic Review, 64 (1996): 373–90; and Der Wald in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Josef Semmler, 1991. Early Christianity originated in more arid climes, and monasticism was born in Egypt and Syria; therefore the desert acquired an exotically spiritual significance. Even before the onset of the medieval period, the desert had become a goal that drew some extremely zealous Christians to a life of physical hardship, corporal self-denial and religious contemplation. But most importantly, cartography of that period reveals the core medieval Christian concept that Jerusalem marks the center of the world, hence of the universe, and thus the desert occupies a privileged position of the highest spiritual values in European thought. By the end of the 11th century, European Christianity considered the desert regions of the Middle East to be occupied religious space, and unleashed the ultimately disastrous series of Crusades against the Muslim peoples who had found their home there, in an attempt to reclaim that space and reassert there the domination of the Roman Catholic Church. See James E. Goehring, “The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (2003): 437–51. The Garden The garden provided the inhabitants of the court, the monastery or the town (particularly after the rise of urban wealth and prominence in the later medieval period) with a natural space that could be controlled and made productive, either for the purposes of raising food or for “pleasure” (Phillipe Contamine, “Peasant Hearth to Papal Palace: the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Histoire de la vie privée, ed. Georges Duby, vol. 2, 1985, 435–36, 441–42), and thereby giving the courtier, the monk or the Bürger an opportunity to enjoy a tamer and more rationalized natural experience. Often enclosed behind high walls, it marked off a space for the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, as well as the herbs for which the medieval pharmacy has gained ever greater appreciation (among the profuse number of works treating the medieval garden, please see John Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens, 1981; Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden, 1996; Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, 1986; Jerry Stannard, Richard Kay and Katherine E Stannard, Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 1999; Élisabeth Zadora-Rio, “Garden,” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, ed. Andre Vauchez, vol. I, 2000, 588; Christopher Thacker, “Gardens, European,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, vol. 5, 1985, 358–65; Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens, 1979, 81–93).

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In most parts of Europe three types of gardens can be distinguished by size (see Landsberg, 11–44): the “herber,” a small enclosed garden of less than an acre, would provide both sensual beauty and practical use; often these were planted with a variety of aromatic herbs and an abundance of flowers, thus offering medicinal materials, visual relaxation and olfactory pleasure. Next larger was the orchard, of one to four acres, with regularly arranged rows of trees, bounded by a ditch or a growth of hawthorn, and yielding a supply of fruit as well as shade for strollers and privacy for lovers. The pleasurable aspects of such a garden were enhanced through a variety of fruit and aromatic trees. Particularly in the midsized gardens of high lords one might find fishponds and fountains and, for exotic animals and birds, menageries or aviaries, but relatively few statues such as those gracing gardens of classical antiquity (Thacker, “Gardens, European,” 363). The largest garden was the pleasure park, somewhat smaller than the hunting park, and populated with similar animals and birds for the viewing pleasure particularly of kings and high lords. Within these general types, there were also gardens serving specific functions. For example, where climate permitted the cultivation of grapes, vineyards became a significant gardening space; in England, many previously flourishing vineyards disappeared in the 14th century due to the cooling English climate, while in Bordeaux at the same time climatic change established the region as one of the best wine-producers in Europe. The kitchen garden also grew to be an important garden space, dedicated to the production of plant materials for food, medicine or household use. In such spaces one was likely to find hyssop, parsley, sage and other herbs, as well as colewort, leeks, garlic, and root vegetables. These gardens also provided materials for suppressing insects and for covering floors. Monastery gardens became centers of horticultural science, and monks contributed greatly to knowledge of growing plants and tending gardens. The cloister garth, an area of turf next to the church at the center of the monastery compound, furnished a relatively austere outdoor area for the monks to walk, ponder and pray. The infirmary garden enabled the monastery to provide for the needs for its members’ health, such as geriatric care, hospital care and convalescence from blood-letting, and other physician’s directives. Other monastic gardens included the private obedientiary gardens of high ranking officials, the cellarer’s garden that supplied food for the monks, the day laborers and the poor, and the often expansive vineyards, from which monastery wine and liqueurs were produced. In a great number of medieval literary works, gardens play a central role, and the critical literature on them is profuse. For example, please see

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Thacker, “Gardens, European,” in regard to the Decameron and the Romance of the Rose, among others; Laura L. Howes, Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention (1997); and Karen Sullivan, Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (2005). B. History of Research Earlier treatments of space were structured around Aristotelian philosophical categories of cosmos or universe; medieval philosophy attempted to grapple with the logical problems presented by the presence of God in a finite universe. Pierre Duhem’s massive Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernicus, 10 vols., (1913–1959) – tracing the developing intellectual conception of the universe from Plato to Copernicus – contributed an important part of the discussion for most of the 20th century. Duhem presents medieval scientific perspectives in the contextual space of religious belief, showing again and again how cosmic questions posed by medieval science are tempered by theology. He suggests a continuity between the medieval and later theories of universe, asserting connections that his predecessors had considered untenable. Alexandre Koyré becomes Duhem’s most prominent critic; in his From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), he insists that there is no such continuity, and that the revolution in world view, where the medieval cosmology of an ordered, closed unity is smashed apart by the new understanding of an undetermined, infinite universe, presented Europe with a crisis in consciousness. The modern view of medieval map drawing, perhaps one of the most significant indications of spatial concepts, has also undergone a great evolution (J. B[rian] Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987). For many years geographers, particularly those writing in the later 19th century, considered the medieval mappaemundi to embody a naïve perspective on spatial realities; however, this attitude has begun to change and modern critics are granting an ever more developed geographical understanding to medieval cartography. David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 510–21, describes several variations of the maps, and suggests that they were created for functions other than those of current maps, that is, other than Euclidean spatial representations. For example, the situating of Jerusalem at the center of the earth, a common practice during the late medieval period, reflects a religious-pedagogical map function, to educate the faithful to the central role of faith in their lives and to convey the spiritual history of the Christian world, rather than to establish a scientific truth (Jon Stone, “The Medieval Mappaemundi: Toward

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an Archaeology of Sacred Cartography, Religion 23 [1993]: 197–216). The more than one thousand extant mappaemundi cover a broad variety of such functions and defy the constraints of easy categorization (see Margriet Hoogvliet, Pictura et scriptura: Textes, images et herméneutique des Mappae Mundi [XIII-XVI siécles], 2007; Leif Søndergaard and Rasmus Thorning Hansen, Monsters, Marvels and Miracles: Imaginary Journeys and Landscapes in the Middle Ages, 2005; and Brigitte Englisch, Ordo orbis terrae: Die Weltsicht in den Mappae mundi des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, 2002). Particularly since the publication of Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace in 1974, and its translation into English (finally accomplished in 1991), space is no longer conceived of as a uniformly empty and undifferentiated commonality, or a monolithic backdrop to all human experience. Nor is it restricted to the idealized landscapes and personifications, such as one encounters in Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948). From his neo-Marxist point-of-view, Lefebvre claims that “every society […] produces a space, its own space” (31) and shows how it is conditioned by economic (and other) forces. Gaston Bachelard’s Poétique de l’espace (1957) moves the focus of attention onto domestic space as phenomenon, whose quality conditions human reactions to it: hence, the house becomes the defining psychological borderline for the dialectic between intimacy and universe, wherein one finds a “nest” for dreaming and a shelter for imagining. For Bachelard, space becomes a conduit granting the human psyche access to meaning and symbolism. Following in this tradition, several more recent critics have emphasized the productive character of space, that is, the tendency of perceived and framed space to influence what transpires within it. Subsequent research has derived much of its impetus from these sources, and has exploded exponentially as a result of cross-disciplinary efforts over the past two decades. Philosophers, geographers, physicists, astronomers, historians, and literary critics, to name but a few, are combining their intellectual resources to redefine the way in which space is appreciated. Several collections of these essays have profoundly important implications for the future understanding of space in the medieval world, two of the most notable of which are Raum und Raumvorstellung im Mittelalter, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, 1998; and Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, 2000.

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Select Bibliography Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society: 1250–1600 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300–1300, ed. Wendy Davies et al. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006); Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Edward Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (London et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Howe, “Creating Symbolic Landscapes: Medieval Development of Sacred Space,” Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), 208–23; Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, ed. Laura L. Howes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007); Uwe Ruberg, Raum und Zeit im Prosa-Lancelot (Munich: Fink, 1965); Uomo e spazio nell’alto Medioevo: 4–8 aprile 2002, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 50. Spoleto (Perugia): Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto: CISAM, 2003); Paul Zumthor, La mesure du monde: Représentation de l’espace au Moyen Age Poétique (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1993).

Christopher R. Clason

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T Text A. General Definition Broadly speaking, the textualist approach analyzes cultural products – including written works, oral traditions, performances, rituals, and visual art – as signifying acts that operate through the combination of different expressive elements or situations. In this conception of culture, even non-written and non-verbal phenomena can be interpreted as “texts” – as meaningful systems or arrangements of signs created by an author (an individual, community, institution, or abstract forces such as economic structures or ideology) for a reader who may likewise be an individual, or communal, or even absent (ancestors, the divine). To analyze something as a text may involve examining the processes by which it is produced, the ways its elements interrelate to achieve cultural expressiveness, and the manner in which it is conveyed to and understood by its public. A key tenet of textualism is that no text, object, or activity has a single or transparent meaning, but that meaning is instead the product of intersecting discourses, intentions, authorities, and interpretive schemes. One of textualism’s goals is to elucidate the ways in which these elements express themselves in cultural products, even though they may be occulted, repressed, or distorted. Whereas medievalism until the Second World War generally focused on official history, theology, philology, and the iconography of high art, textualism opened a space for the introduction of new questions and methodologies. A striking result of this interpretive reconfiguration is that subjects once considered vulgar or irrelevant have become the focus of scholarship in the past forty years. Two striking examples are comic literature and manuscript marginalia, which have received serious analyses devoid of the condescension of earlier generations (Lillian Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts, 1966; R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, 1986; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge, 1992; Andrew Cowell, At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages, 1999; Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, 2007). Textualism also validated a move away from official history to considerations of non-noble and marginal groups such as urban laborers (Antony black, Guilds and Civil

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Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, 1984; Richard MacKenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250–c. 1650, 1987; Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, 1991), peasants (Robert Fossier, Paysans d’Occident (XIe–XIVe siècles), 1984; Werner Rösener, Bauern im Mittelalter, 1985; William H. Tebrake, A Plague of Insurrection: Popular Politics and Peasant Revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328, 1993), and the poor (Michel Mollat, Les pauvres au moyen âge, 1978; Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor, 2002). A chief concern of textualism is the ways in which authorities seek to control, define, and represent identity, which has had a profound impact on medieval studies. This is evident in the numerous studies devoted to issues of gender, sexuality, and the body (Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, 1982; Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, 1982; Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 1989; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, 1991; Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance, 1993; Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 1996; Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, 2001; Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, 2001; Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn, 2001). A similar interest in the effect of authority on cultural notions of normalcy is visible in studies on the relationship between literature and the law (R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, 1977; Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law, 1991; Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, 1999), on magic and heresy (Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law, 1978; James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550, 1979; Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, 1989; Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, 2006), on madness (Jean-Marie Fritz, Le discours du fou au moyen âge: XIIe–XIIIe siècles: Étude comparée des discours littéraire, médical, juridique et théologique de la folie, 1992), and on foreignness and monstrosity (Debra Higgs Strickland, Demons, Saracens, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, 2003; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 1993; Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, 2006). Postcolonial studies have shown how western European culture and identity were altered

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by the very civilizations Europeans sought to conquer (Sahar Amer, Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité, 1999; The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 2000; Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, 2005; Sylvia Huot, Postcolonial Fictions in the Roman de Perceforest: Cultural Identities and Hybridities, 2007). The ways in which cultural products intersected with the rigid social hierarchies of medieval society provide another defining framework for textualist studies. The influence of political and social ideology on medieval literature, history writing, and visual culture has received much attention (Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France, 1985; Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the ‘Grandes chroniques de France’, 1274–1422, 1991; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 1991; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in ThirteenthCentury France, 1993; Sarah Kay, The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions, 1995; Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180, 2006). Medieval social hierarchies were also maintained by class mythologies that drew on and shaped many different media and rituals (Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350, 1982; Louise O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland, 1991; Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England, 1998; Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War, 2002; Andrew Cowell, The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred, 2007). The textualist concern with uncovering the competing discourses within cultural products is matched by an interest in the processes that lead to these products’ creation and reception. Textualism breaks with traditional evaluations of documents and objects as fixed receptacles of meaning that the scholar is to discover and extract; similarly, it breaks with the notion of the author or artist as the controlling force behind an artifact (Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England, 1993; R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France, 2003). The turn to text is marked by an interest in the multiple ways by which things signify – not only inscription, but inscribing; not only the record of a play, but its performance contexts and history; not only the political reasons for a battle, but the social and material factors that made its conception and execution possible. The term “performance” has come to encompass this understanding of materiality, process, and reception as constitutive of the meaning of a cultural production (see Gerhard Jaritz’s entry, “Rituals and Performance,” in

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this Handbook). The interest in performance, not surprisingly, has renewed the study of dramatic spectacles by bringing many more disciplines and perspectives to bear on them (Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, 1992; Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, 1997; Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence, 1999; Mark Trowbridge, Art and ‘Ommegangen:’ Paintings, Processions, and Dramas in the Late-Medieval Low Countries, NYU Ph.D. thesis, 2000; Jody Enders, Death by Drama and other Medieval Urban Legends, 2002; Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church, 2002; Darwin Smith, Maistre Pierre Pathelin: Le miroir d’orgueil: Avec l’édition et la traduction de la version inédite du Recueil Bigot (XVe siècle), 2002; New Approaches to European Theater of the Middle Ages: An Ontology, ed. Barbara I. Gusick and Edelgard E. Bubruck, 2004; Véronique Dominguez, La scène et la croix: Le jeu de l’acteur dans les passions dramatiques françaises (XIVe–XVIe siècles), 2007; Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras, 2007). Moreover, the conceptual and methodological approaches offered by performance may be applied more broadly than just to forms traditionally defined as dramatic, as evidenced by studies on folk festivities (Rolf Johannsmeier, Spielmann, Schalk und Scharlatan: Die Welt als Karneval: Volkskultur im späten Mittelalter, 1984; Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, 2001), gesture (Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval, 1990), processions (Marialuisa Angiolillo, Medioevo: Lo spettacolo dei religiosi e dei giullari, 1994; City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson, 1994), and preaching (Michel Zink, La prédication en langue romane avant 1300, 1982; Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric, 1986; D. L. D’Avray, Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350, 1994). Performance has also transformed the understanding of literary transmission, of the relationship between orality and literacy, and of the role of images in oral culture (Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (England, 1066–1307), 1979; Manfred Günter Scholz, Hören und Lesen: Studien zur primären Rezeption der Literatur im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 1980; Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinctions, 1982; Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages, 1982; New Literary History 16.1 [1984]; Paul Zumthor, La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, 1984; Michael Camille, “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Art History 8/1 [1985]: 26–49; D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800–1300, 1994; Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse,

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1995; Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France, 1996; Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance, 1999; Stephen Murray, A Gothic Sermon: Making a Contract with the Mother of God, Saint Mary of Amiens, 2004; Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz et al., 2005). As with the study of theater, the textualist concern with how discourses shape the form and transmission of cultural products has also transformed another established discipline, codicology. Whereas the study of book structures traditionally focused mainly on cataloguing and style analysis, textualism examines how the material design of the book inscribes the presence of authority and voice in order to persuade, inspire, educate, and capture the imagine. This interpretive codicology understands the book’s physical form and extra-textual elements – folio size, ruling, illumination, picture placement, rubrication – as inherent to its meaning (Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry, 1987; John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor, 1994; Joan Holladay, Illuminating the Epic: The Kassel ‘Willehalm’ Codex and the Landgraves of Hesse in the Early Fourteenth Century, 1997; Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, 2002; Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and their Readers, 2002; Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othea,’ 2003; Kathryn Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours, 2003). A final characteristic of the textualist approach is that it is self-aware and self-interrogating. Just as textualism seeks to reveal and understand the forces and factors underlying cultural production, so does it also examine its own motivations and goals. The result has been a surge of works devoted to the history and practice of medievalism as a way of uncovering the unspoken presumptions that have driven and continue to drive the field (Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 1984; The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee et al., 1991; Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen, 1991; R. Howard Bloch, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne, 1994; Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, 1994; Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman BRYSON et al., 1994; Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 1996; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, 1997; The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Per-

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spectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham et al., 1998; Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, 2005). B. History of Scholarship At the beginning of the 20th century, medieval studies was marked by a confidence in the ability of philologists to reconstruct and interpret texts, of iconographers to decipher the meaning of images, and of historians to evaluate documents and the motivations of those who produced them. This confidence was shaken by the profound epistemological and methodological transformations that appeared in every branch of the humanities and social sciences in the postwar period. Out of this crisis arose the textualism that influences so many studies to this day. There is no single textualist approach, largely because textualism derives from two different critical tendencies. The first, broadly speaking, is deconstruction, according to which all signs refer to other signs so that there is no fixed meaning, only a fluid and indeterminate play of signification within texts (Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966; Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1967). Extrapolated to the level of culture, deconstruction means that there can be no origin or intentionality behind a cultural product because all such products are based on others in an infinite regression. What’s more, any attempt to find a stable meaning risks being naïve or, worse, reinforcing traditional power structures by positing an authoritative source of signification. Following deconstruction’s caveats, a textualist approach is wary against deterministic interpretation and aware of its own limitations and motivations, which may also become objects of study. On the other hand, textualism also inherits a great deal from anthropology, specifically the understanding that all cultural products are meaningful, and that the scholar’s task is to seek the processes permitting this creation of meaning in social relationships (Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 1973; Claude Lévi-Strauss, La fonction symbolique: Essais d’anthropologie, 1979). Textualism inherits from anthropology the tendency to situate artifacts within signifying networks – to look to multiple cultural spheres for those references and situations that endow an object or performance with meaning. As a result of this intellectual parentage, textualism offers scholars many different strategies when approaching culture as “text.”

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Select Bibliography Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Roger Chartier, L’ordre des livres: Lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Alinea, 1992); Paul V. Rockwhell, Rewriting Resemblance in Medieval French Romance: ‘Ceci n’est pas un grail’ (New York: Garland, 1995).

Mark Cruse

The Transcendental A. Definition The term ‘transcendental’ neighbors with notions like supernaturalism, spiritualism, and the speculative. Firstly, it refers to a relation of transcendence and immanence where the former signifies whatever possesses a higher level of existence. Thus, humans transcend animals as to reason. God is the absolute transcendent and yet immanent in the Creation, a tensionprovoking position for the conceptual intelligence. The theory of medieval transcendence is crystallized in the late medieval theory of transcendentals though no limited into it alone. The theory of the transcendentals states that the notions of ‘one’, ‘good’, ‘true’ and ‘being’ are super-categorial predicates that nevertheless apply to every being. The origin of this theory goes back to the Platonic theory of transcendental forms, to Aristotelian essentialism and to the Neo-platonic conceptions of gradual levels of reality. Religious thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita or St. Augustine introduced forms of philosophical transcendence into their conception of divinity. More concretely, the medieval transcendence into its more official expressions was restrictive because it entailed a very close relation between transcendence and immanence. The transcendental of the Middle Ages conformed to a type of likeness with the immanent, an affinity that in Western thought was defined under the term ‘analogy of being’ (analogia entis). The notion of ‘analogy’ stands for a likeness that however close it will never be total and thus there will always remain a difference between the transcendental and the immanent being. Of course, not every likeness between the two leads to a theory like the analogy of being. There can be an ecstatic approach to likeness

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as it happens with different forms of medieval mysticism or in theological traditions like that of Byzantium that aims at the experience of the divine. Also, there is a form of naturalistic monism that appears in various expressions of Islamic philosophy that proclaim the conception of truth in a double manner. The medieval theory of the transcendentals states specifically that: (1) being qua being has certain attributes; (2) being qua being and its attributes are transcendentals; (3) the attributes of being qua being are convertible with it. Such transcendentals were the being (ens), the one (unum), the true (verum), the good (bonum). The primordial transcendental was that of being. Sometimes, other transcendentals were added in the list like the ‘something’ (aliquid) and the ‘thing’ (res) by Thomas Aquinas or even the ‘beautiful’ (pulchrum). Transcendentals were supra-categorial notions, in the Aristotelian sense of a category, and not just simple ways of speaking and dealing with reality. They were the philosophical implications of Christian Theology and the products of theorizing about statements like: ‘I am who I am’ (ego sum qui sum) in Exodus 1:34. The transcendentals were for Duns Scotus the object of metaphysics (see Jorge J. E. Gracia, “The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,” Topoi 11 [1992]: 113–20). If Duns Scotus appears as the first scholastic to have suggested that metaphysics is the science of the transcendentals (transcendentia) it is not until Chrysostomus Iavellus (ca. 1470–1538), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), and other late scholastics of the 16th and 17th centuries that we see this early intuition, in itself an expression of a general medieval transcendentalism, translated into something that resembles a philosophical system. Francisco Suárez’s Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) moves forward on the path opened by Scotus. By the same, Suárez delimits the final question concerning the transcendental: it refers to the mind or to reality? Is it an expression of mentalism or of metaphysical realism? (see Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Suárez and the Doctrine of the Transcendentals,” Topoi, op. cit., 121–33). B. Modern to Contemporary Research: the Transcendental and Historicity The medieval transcendental lost in radiance partly because of the underestimation of medieval philosophy and spirit and partly because of the harsh critique of metaphysics that culminated largely in the 20th century. There is a total undermining of the medieval transcendentals prevailing since Enlightenment and David Hume more precisely amidst a constant evolution from a religiously oriented philosophy to a value-neutral approach. All the transcendentals are now degraded or denied. We have plurality instead of the

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one; taste instead of the beautiful; morality instead of the good; epistemology instead of the true. It is the slicing of medieval transcendentalism into philosophical sciences like metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, or aesthetics. In the thought of Renaissance, the idea of likeness between the transcendental and the immanent was transformed in a way that the human factor would become now the central one. The interest is focused on experience rather than ontology and the Ciceronian rhetoric takes the place of Aristotelian metaphysics (see Charles Trinkaus, in Bibliography). In a text by Lorenzo Valla, we see a metaphor of the analogy of being where man is the critical element of the analogical relation. As the sun paints its image in polished and smooth things and does not receive their images in itself, so the soul, advancing into exterior things by its own light, projects and depicts a certain image of its memory, intellect and will (Repansinatio philosophiae et dialecticae, quoted in Trinkaus, 344).

In René Descartes (1596–1650) the institution of the transcendence is made through the ‘ego’ and not through the ‘being’. For some scholars, Cartesian philosophy constitutes a kind of return back to Augustine since in Descartes like in Augustine the essences of things continue to be dependent on God, known through the mediation of things and finally, no distinction can be in God between contemplating the essences and creating God (see Zbigniew Janowski, Augustinian-Cartesian Index, 2004). Furthermore, the Cartesian philosophy of nature is primarily directed not against scholasticism but against a philosophy that was itself a reaction against scholasticism, i. e. the renaissance naturalism that promoted the unity and dynamism of the natural realm. Descartes’s system persisted in preserving the dialectics between the natural and the supernatural that was a central theme of medieval philosophy, of course in a quite different light (mechanicism). The historian of medieval philosophy Étienne Gilson insisted on the medieval roots of the Cartesian philosophy (see É. Gilson, 1913 and 1930). Roger Ariew supports the idea of a clear relation between Descartes and the Scotists but with no reference to the question of transcendentals except in regard to Descartes’s Jesuit education (Descartes and the Late Scholastics, 1999). It is in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) that we see a clear reference to the transcendentals. In Kant survives a trace of the medieval usage of the transcendental not as a form of knowledge of transcendental objects but as conditions of possible experience. The system of the concepts which constitute a priori knowledge may be described as transcendental philosophy. Thus for Kant transcendentals are on the side of knowledge and not on that of general

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metaphysics or ontology. Furthermore, he distinguishes between the transcendental and the transcendent. This latter is the term used to describe those principles which ‘profess to pass beyond’ the limits of experience, as opposed to immanent principles ‘whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience’ (Critique of Pure Reason A 296/B 352; see Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 1995, 399). Kant’s reference to the medieval theory of the transcendentals is made in the following passage: “In the transcendental philosophy of the ancients there is included yet another chapter containing pure concepts of the understanding which, though not enumerated among the categories, must, on their view, be ranked as a priori concepts of objects … They are propounded in the proposition, so famous among the Schoolmen, quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum … These supposedly transcendental predicates of things are in fact, nothing but logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of things in general, and prescribe for such knowledge the categories of quantity, namely, unity, plurality, and totality” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 12, transl. by Norman Kemp Smith, 1958, 118, cit. in John P. Doyle, 783).

As to the sources of Kant’s relation to the theory of the transcendentals, Hans Leisegang (“Über die Bedeutung des scholastischen Satzes: ‘Quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum’ und seine Bedeutung in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” Kant-Studien 20/4, 1915, 403–21) has showed some continuity from the Medievals to Kant. The philosophical link between them was according to Leisegang, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and his Ontologia and Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) and his Metaphysica. Norbert Hinske (Kants Weg zur Transzendentalphilosophie, 1970) thinks that it was rather Wolff than Baumgarten that influenced Kant while Ignacio Angelelli (“On the Origins of Kant’s Transcendental,” Kant-Studien 63, 1972, 117–22) points more to Baumgarten. For Cornelio Fabro (“Il transcendentale moderno e il transcendentale tomistico,” Angelicum 60, 1983, 543–58) the precise enumeration of transcendentals goes back to late scholastic philosophy of modern era, to Suárez then and not to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas. A special theme in the research on the survival and the evolution of medieval transcendentals is the following: Modern times saw the introduction of the notion of ‘supertranscendentals’; by this it is implied the notion of ‘impossible objects’ like the imaginary beings or the fictions. We perceive this and relevant notions in Francisco Suárez, in Thomas Compton Carleton S.J. (1591–1666), and also in Domingo Soto O.P. (1495–1560), Pedro da Fonseca S.J. (1528–1599), the Calvinist Clemens Timpler (1568–1624),

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and John Baptist Clauberg (1622–1665), also a Calvinist. A logical use of the term is made in the Dominican John of St Thomas (a.k.a. John Poinsot, 1589–1644); other uses in Sebastian Izquierdo S.J. (1601–1681), Antonio Bernaldo de Quiros S.J. (1613–1668), Silvester Mauro S.J. (1619–1687), Luis de Lossada S.J. (1681–1748), André Semery S.J. (1630–1717). It is not claimed that supertranscendentalism influenced Kant, but there are reasons to make us believe that supertranscendentality theories might have constituted the ‘missing link’ between medieval philosophy and Kant on transcendentals (see J. P. Doyle, in Bibliography). The philosophy of the Protestants (“Protestantische Schulphilosophie”) made various contributions to the study of the transcendental: Rudolph Goclenius (1547–1628) spoke about the ‘transcendens physicum’ which is neither a logical nor a metaphysical supra-categorial notion; Christoph Scheibler (1589–1653) delimited the “transcendentia” according to their nobility, the divine ones being the highest; Johann Scharf (1595–1660) and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1689) adopted a mixed philosophical and theological view and Johann Adam Scherzer (1628–1683) the theory of ‘supertranscendentals’; Abraham Calovius (1612–1686) and Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731) related more clearly the transcendental to ontology. Apart from these protestant attempts, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) insisted that the transcendental must be detached from the idea of First Philosophy while the study of transcendentals as mere concepts is put forward by Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld (1605–1655), Joachim Jungius (1587–1657), and John Wilkins (1614–1672), and their conceptual ambivalence is assessed by Étienne Chauvin (1640–1725). The degree of our understanding of medieval transcendentalism is also due to the question of the scope of the medieval philosophical historiography. It is commonly believed that the renewal of interest in medieval thought, and in particular Neo-Thomism, is related to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) although the Dominicans Antonio Goudin (1639–1685) and Charles-Rene Billuar (18th century) had preceded in their writings the papal encyclical. It was over a century since the Historica Critica Philosophiae (1742–1767) by Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), a history of philosophy that was emblematic of Enlightenment, had consumed the separation between philosophy and theology stating that the scholastics dogmatized with only the appearance of philosophy. The virtue of such a schematic position is that it leaves open a problem that will constitute a challenge. The challenge was met in Germany by scholars like the Catholic Romantic Joseph Görres (1776–1848) and the Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) who in his Philosophie der Vorzeit (1860–63) defended the philosophical value of the medi-

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evals, notably of Aquinas. Alasdair MacIntyre (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 1990) perceived in Kleutgen’s version of medieval philosophy a degree of Kantism. Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) and his Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (1864–1866) saw the historical problems of medieval transcendentalism through the conceptual tandem of faith and reason. Maurice de Wulf (1867–1947) and his Histoire de la philosophie médiévale (1900) will consecrate this approach. According to Inglis, the work of Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (ed. Norman Kretzmann et al., 1988) conform also to this model (J. Inglis, in Bibliography). For Fernand van Steenberghen (1904–1993) (Introduction à l’étude de la philosophie médiévale, 1974, 46ff.), there are two main approaches to the history of medieval philosophy: the rationalist approach and the theological one (often Neo-thomist but not only). Thus the medieval transcendental is to be seen through the conceptual framework of faith and reason. Even analytic philosophy approaches the medieval transcendentality through the conceptual tandem of faith and reason (see Faith and Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. A. Harris, Chr. J. Insole, 2005). For a series of religious thinkers, the transcendental is seen as complete otherness. For instance, Karl Barth (1886–1968) condemned the notion of the analogy of being following in that Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) for whom divine transcendentality is complete otherness. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), in advancing counter-privacy, i. e., the impossibility of epistemic privacy, may be seen as possibly contributing to an ecstatic disposition toward religious transcendence. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) holds an interesting position due to the fact that he inherits both the kierkegaardian heritage and the historiographical one. His habilitation thesis was on the theory of categories in Duns Scotus (Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 1916) (see Ruedi Imbach, “Heidegger et la philosophie médiévale,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 49 [2002]: 426–34). As to transcendentality, Heidegger, in contrast to Kant, focuses on ontology rather than epistemology and on the difference between casual being (Dasein) and Being. The question of the medieval transcendentals may be seen as part of the Heideggerian history of the oblivion of being, a history that coincides with the full evolution of Western metaphysics since Plato. This evolution is defined as ‘ontotheology,’ a term that we find also in Kant. Ontotheology refers to a theology of being that we may find in the Scholastics and which is more or less identified with pure metaphysics. In an attempt to escape the overwhelming transcendental of being, there is an effort to turn to the study of henology and the question of the one (from the Greek hen=one; see W.J. Hankey, “Aquinas’ First Principle, Being or Unity?,” Dionysius 4 [1980]:

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133–72). The Heideggerian influence is combined with poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches. Thus, the transcendentals, in Thomas Aquinas in particular, are seen as part of a dialectics of the same and the other: “For a being to be some ‘thing’ (res) and ‘one’ thing (unum), it must leave itself behind and affirm itself as ‘other’ than another (aliud quid), thereby returning to itself” (see Philipp W. Rosemann, 136). It is an effort to escape ontotheology by discerning parallel ways of thinking in medieval transcendentality. Postmodernism, situated beyond faith and reason, is open to the question of the historical a priori of the medieval transcendental and to its transcultural dimensions. Select Bibliography Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996); John P. Doyle, “Between Transcendental and Transcendental: The Missing Link?,” Review of Metaphysics 50 (June 1997): 783–815; Ludger Honnefelder, “Metaphysics as a Discipline: From the ‘Transcendental Philosophy of the Ancients’ to Kant’s Notion of Transcendental Philosophy,” The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory: 1400–1700, ed. R. L. Friedman and L. O. Nielsen (Berlin: Springer, 2003), 53–74; Étienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930); Étienne Gilson, Index scolastico-cartésien (Paris: Alcan, 1913); Jorge J. E. Gracia, “The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,” Topoi 11 (1992): 113–20; Jorge J.E. Gracia, “Suárez and the Doctrine of the Transcendentals,” Topoi 11 (1992): 121–33; John Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Jeff Malpas, From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental (New York and London: Routledge, 2003); Philipp W. Rosemann, Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999); Charles Trinkaus, Italian Humanism and Scholastic Theology (Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999), 327–48; Allan B. Wolter, The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1946).

George Arabatzis

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Typology

Typology A. Definition The term ‘typology’ refers to a central theological concept of the Middle Ages, which was taken up with enthusiasm in medieval art, architecture and literature. Against the background of the conviction of medieval scholars that the Bible was the Word of God whose various parts formed a unity, and that the Old and New Testaments could only give the history of the saving actions of God when read together, the two great textual corpora of Holy Scripture were linked in a typological interpretation. The Old Testament was viewed as the ‘type’, that is, an imperfect pre-figuration of the New Testament, which was at once the fulfillment and perfection of the Old Covenant and its expression in a higher form. The Old Testament was read in terms of Christ, and searched for motifs, scenes and figures which could be interpreted as pre-figurations of the events of the New Testament. Equally, connections between scenes from the history of Israel and New Testament incidents were used to make the aspect of salvation history more apparent in the latter. Each Testament cast light on the other: they merely represented two different ‘eras’ in the history of the people of God (‘Law’ and ‘Grace’). However, as salvation history was understood as a process of the growth and maturing of the Body of Christ, the typological interpretation of the Bible always implied a denigration of the Hebrew Bible, because from the perspective of Christian exegetes, salvation was only imperfectly present within it and still required perfection in Christ. The intellectual model of typology not merely contrasted ‘pre-figuration’ and ‘fulfillment’, but also regarded the latter motif of each pair as superior, as the New Testament was ultimately viewed as the more important and valid revelation. The foundations for typology, as an intellectual construct, were laid by Paul. His epistles contain many contrasts between Old Testament ‘types’ and New Testament ‘anti-types:’ Christ is seen as the new, ‘better’ Adam, the saving baptism of Christ in the Jordan linked to Noah’s rescuing ark, and Jonah’s captivity in the belly of the whale compared with Christ’s three day rest in the grave. These classic typological pairs, which played an important role in theology and art throughout the Middle Ages were thus already available in the New Testament itself. In the writings of the Fathers, among them Origen, Ambrose and Augustine, the typological model underwent extensive further development in which they identified numerous contrasting Biblical pairs, for instance the sacrifice and rescue of Isaac and Christ, Daniel in the lions’ den and the death and resurrection of Christ, the Mosaic Law and

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the Gospel, the bronze snake and the Cross, Eve and Mary, etc. These pairs of motifs do not merely appear in the Biblical commentaries, but appeared in art and literature. Medieval stained glass and illumination brought the artistic representation of typological motifs to a high pitch, and they remain present in hymns, religious instruction, and sermons even today. Famous examples of medieval art with typological content include the Bernward door at Hildesheim cathedral, the Biblia Pauperum, the Klosterneuburg Altar, and the Bible moralisée. To this day, the Roman Catholic church teaches the validity of the interpretation of the Old Testament as the imperfect pre-figuration of the New. B. History of Research Older scholarship centered on the investigation and description of the methods of typological exegesis in the patristic and medieval periods, and in the interpretation of individual works of art using typological motifs. For a considerable time, typology was chiefly a topic of interest for biblical scholars, and also art historians and church historians. Of the German theological studies, those by Goppelt (Typos: Die typologische Deutung des Alten Testaments im Neuen, 1939) and von Rad (Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1957–1960) stand out. The discussion as to the legitimacy of typological exegesis cuts to the heart of Christian theology, involving as it does reflection on the appropriate hermeneutic method for the interpretation of the central revelation, as well as the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. von Reventlow gives a systematic review of the introduction of typological interpretation by the church fathers in his ground-breaking work Epochen der Bibelauslegung (1990–2001). The monumental account by Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’Écriture (1959–1964) remains unsurpassed and authoritative for the understanding of medieval exegesis; it describes the typological method in detail and with countless examples. A foundational introduction can also be found in Beryl Smalley (The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 1952). The article on “Typologie” in the Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie by Peter Bloch (1972) is relevant to typology in medieval art. The most substantial and comprehensive lexicographic account of typological exegesis and its history (with a detailed theological literature review) can be found in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie, by Stuart George Hall (2002). C. Major Contributors The question as to whether it is methodologically permissible and historically appropriate to apply typological structures, that is, the relation in terms of salvation history of prophecy and fulfillment to non-Biblical cases, par-

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ticularly in the secular narratives of the Middle Ages, remains controversial. The first person to apply typology to courtly romance in the field of German studies was Julius Schwietering (Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung, 1925). He was of the opinion that certain poets and their works, such as Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneas and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, existed in a typological context, and contrasted classical and Arthurian chivalry in the sense of preparation and perfection. Wolfram’s Christian heroes, he argued, exceeded and replaced the pagan-classical protagonists of Veldeke. Schwietering’s pupil Friedrich Ohly then developed and systematized this approach (Synagoge und Ecclesia: Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung, 1966; Halbbiblische und außerbiblische Typologie, 1976; Typologie als Denkform der Geschichtsbetrachtung, 1988). He viewed, for example, the stories about the protagonists’ parents in Parzival and in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan as imperfect pre-figurations of the main narrative and its protagonists, and saw the literature of the Middle Ages as fundamentally informed by the mode of thought and structure of progression (“Steigerung”) from a preceding state of the world by a later. Therefore, he classes numerous examples from art and literature as typology if they included a moment of ‘progression,’ even if they did not contain identifiable directly Biblical aspects. Many literary critics accepted this significant expansion of the typology concept, but others did not. Particularly vehement opposition came from Werner Schröder (Zum Typologie-Begriff und Typologie-Verständnis in der mediävistischen Literaturwissenschaft, 1977). He believed that the term typology should not be used in literary criticism, unless the place in question explicitly referred to Biblical motifs or figures, and a moment of progression relating to salvation history could be clearly seen. He therefore recommended dispensing with the term entirely where secular narrative was concerned, and that the structures of medieval novels be more suitably described using established philological categories and termini. D. Current Research Although the Roman-Catholic church continues to hold to the concept of typological exegesis and its influence is felt in liturgy and catechesis, academic Biblical scholars are now somewhat more cautious in its use. While no theologian would deny that large parts of the New Testament were written typologically and can only be understood with reference to the Old, other approaches, such as the historical-critical or the structuralist, are treated as equally valid. Modern theology is particularly concerned to avoid the downgrading of the Old Testament or the treatment of Judaism as a deficient precursor of Christianity, which tends to be implicit in typology (cf. Wilfried

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Härle, Dogmatik, 2000, 124–27). Literary critics and art historians, too, are more cautious with the term than was the case some years ago. As a consequence of the debate around the subject, the standard of proof of typological relationships is higher than formerly. In German studies, narratology and its concepts and terminology has largely replaced typological approaches, particularly in the great courtly romances. However, the discussion about the appropriateness of typological categories in philology did not just lead to a more precise analysis of textual structures, but also produced several important research projects. In particular, the school around Friedrich Ohly produced important work in which the concept of typology in medieval literature is described, and offers helpful catalogues of motifs on the allegorical and typological meanings of scenes and figures but also of objects and things such as stones, animals, colors, and numbers. Select Bibliography Julius Schwietering, “Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung,” Vom Werden des deutschen Geistes: Festgabe für Gustav Ehrismann, ed. Paul Merker and Wolfgang Stammler (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1925), 40–55; Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: Die typologische Deutung des Alten Testaments im Neuen (Guetersloh: Bertelsmann, 1939); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952); Gerhard von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2 vols. (Munich: Kaiser, 1957–1960); Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–1964); Friedrich Ohly, “Synagoge und Ecclesia: Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung,” Judentum im Mittelalter: Beiträge zum christlich-jüdischen Gespräch, ed. Paul Wilpert in collaboration with Willehad Paul Eckert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966), 351–69; Peter Bloch, “Typologie,” LCI 4 (1972): 395–404; Friedrich Ohly, “Halbbiblische und außerbiblische Typologie,” Simboli e simbologia nell’alto medioevo, Ventitreesima settimana di studio, Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (Spoleto: Presso La Sede del Centro, 1976); Werner Schröder, “Zum TypologieBegriff und Typologie-Verständnis in der mediävistischen Literaturwissenschaft,” The Epic in Medieval Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values, ed. Harald Scholler (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977), 64–85; David C. Fowler, “Bible,” DMA 2 (1983): 212–15; Friedrich Ohly, “Typologie als Denkform der Geschichtsbetrachtung,” Typologie, Internationale Beiträge zur Poetik, ed. Volker Bohn (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 22–63; Henning Graf Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung, 4 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990–2001); John E. Alsup, “Typology,” ABD 6 (1992): 682–85; Josef Engemann, “Typologie,” LMA 8 (1999): 1133–35; Wilfried Härle, Dogmatik (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2nd rev. ed. 2000); Stuart G. Hall, “Typologie,” TRE 34 (2002): 208–24.

Heiko Hartmann

1593

Violence

V Violence A. General Definition Violence is the intentional use of force against people or property. It is an expression of power that may also be interpreted as aggression, the physical and non-physical violation of self or society (Heinz-Horst Schrey, “Gewalt/ Gewaltlosigkeit I: Ethisch,” TRE, vol. 13, ed. Gerhard Müller, 1987, 168–78). All human history has been marked by violence, including violent acts such as assault, rape, torture, murder, combat, warfare, and genocide. The practice of violence in the Middle Ages has been preserved in a wide variety of sources: chronicles, behavioral manuals, legal treatises, heroic epics, courtly romances, paintings, and tapestries. By analyzing these sources, the causes of violence, its consequences, and the critique of its abuse in the Middle Ages can be observed. Scholars can also gain insight into the customs, rituals, religious beliefs, and cultural attitudes that not only validated its use, but also endeavored to limit its scope and provide prescriptions for its prevention and peaceful resolution (Peter Dinzelbacher, Mentalität und Religiosität des Mittelalters, 2003, 403–28; Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004; A Great Effusion of Blood?, ed. Mark D. Meyerson et al., 2004; William H. Jackson, “Court Literature and Violence in the High Middle Ages,” German Literature of the High Middle Ages, ed. Will Hasty, 2006, 263–76). Most often the medieval church and state determined which forms of violence were legitimate or illegitimate, sanctioning violence that upheld their cultural dominance, maintained social hierarchy, protected land and territory, and preserved law and order, while condemning violence that undermined their authority (Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter, 1996; Guy Halsall, “Introduction,” Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. id., 1998, 1–45; Gewalt und ihre Legitimation im Mittelalter, ed. Günther Mensching, 2003). B. Seminal Research Neither the Dictionary of the Middle Ages nor the Lexikon des Mittelalters offer an entry on “violence,” but both do provide discussions of crime and medieval jurisprudence. Early studies comment on issues related to medieval violence

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such as the violent tenor and impulsive nature of the Middle Ages, warfare, and feudalism (Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1989 [1919]; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 1961 [1939/1940]; Jan F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, 1997 [1954]; Georges Duby, The Three Orders, 1980 [1978]). However, the study of medieval violence as a specialized topic did not truly begin until the 1990s. Influential to the increase in scholarly interest in violence at this time was Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking Discipline and Punish (1975), the rediscovery of Norbert Elias’s seminal Civilizing Process (2000 [1939]) in the 1980s, and René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1988 [1972]). Research on violence in the Middle Ages began in earnest after Christiane Raynaud published her La violence au Moyen Âge (1990; see also David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 1996; The Final Argument, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon, 1998; Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1999). C. Combating Violence Violence was considered a legitimate form of conflict resolution and articulation of political and social power in the Middle Ages, of which warfare and warrior ethos were two of its starkest expressions (Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, 1984 [1980], Medieval Warfare, ed. Maurice Keen, 1999; Helen J. Nicholson, Medieval Warfare, 2003). But contrary to the popular image of the Middle Ages as an era defined solely by unrestrained and barbaric violence, there were many efforts by the church and nobility to regulate, minimize, and avoid violence. Princes’ Mirrors, legal and religious texts, and political treatises such as John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159) attest to the importance medieval society placed upon the regulation of violence (Udo Friedrich, “Die Zähmung des Heros: Der Diskurs der Gewalt und Gewaltregulierung im 12. Jahrhundert,” Mittelalter, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller and Horst Wenzel, 1999, 149–79). As the essays in Conflict in Medieval Europe (ed. Warren C. Brown and Piotr Górecki, 2003) illustrate, medieval conflict resolution took many forms, including judicial courts, penalties, retribution, and settlements (see also Peace and Negotiation, ed. Diane Wolfthal, 2000). In fact, mediation and arbitration carried out by kings, queens, princes and bishops were integral to resolving conflict in a non-violent manner, as Gerd Althoff (“Genugtuung [satisfactio]: Zur Eigenart gütlicher Konfliktbeilegung im Mittelalter,” Modernes Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1994, 247–65) and Hermann Kamp (Friedensstifter und Vermittler im Mittelalter, 2001) have shown (see also Träger und Instrumentarien des Friedens im hohen und späten Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried, 1996). And even when violence was unavoidable, accords like the Peace and Truce of God reform

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movements in the 11th century and the Landfrieden (territorial peaces) in the 12th and 13th centuries attempted to control aggression. These peaces intended to check the rampant violence of feuds, protect property, provide immunity for non-combatants, and create conventions limiting battle (Joachim Gernhuber, Die Landfriedensbewegung in Deutschland bis zum Mainzer Reichslandfrieden von 1235, 1952; The Peace of God, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes, 1992; Dominique Barthélémy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu, 1999). A number of studies have explored the importance of ritual to the regulation of violence in the Middle Ages. Gerd Althoff’s work has been particularly important to this approach (Die Macht der Rituale, 2003). His Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter (1997) demonstrates how ritual functioned as a form of restraint that allowed for peaceful conflict resolution, even after violent disputes (see also the essays by id. and Hanna Vollrath in Medieval Concepts of the Past, ed. Gerd Althoff et al., 2002, 71–110). Significantly, ritual also justified violence, propagating the idea that the nobility were sanctioned to use violence, while attempting to limit the impact of violence on that very same group (Scott E. Pincikowski, “Violence and Pain at the Court,” Violence, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 97–114). For instance, tournaments and knightly competitions such as the bûhurt, which had strict rules of engagement, provided the nobility a safer outlet to prove their honor (William H. Jackson, “Zank und Zwist bei Waffenspielen,” bickelwort und wildiu mære, ed. Dorthee Lindemann et al., 1995, 408–23; Juliet Vale, “Violence and the Tournament,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard Kaeuper, 2000, 143–58). Moreover, rituals evolved in battle so at least members of the nobility had a better chance of surviving conflict. As Christoph Huber’s and Martin H. Jones’s contributions to the volume on Spannungen und Konflikte menschlichen Zusammenlebens in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (ed. Kurt Gärtner et al., 1996, 59–90) demonstrate, the ritual of granting mercy to a defeated opponent depended on the opponent’s social status and provided a means by which the victor could win honor without killing. The predominant theme of unrestrained violence in medieval literature may point to another, albeit futile, attempt to regulate violence in medieval society. Jan-Dirk Müller shows how the Nibelungenlied is an unusual heroic epic, depicting the negative consequences for society when limits on violence break down and unrestrained violence becomes epidemic (Spielregeln für den Untergang, 1998). Albrecht Classen concentrates on communication in epics, poems, and romances, showing how good communication deters violence, whereas failed communication leads to disastrous violence (Verzweiflung und Hoffnung, 2002). For Richard W. Kaeuper, the ambivalent nature of violence in English and French courtly literature reveals that literary depic-

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tions provide prescriptions for the proper use of violence rather than descriptions of historical reality (Chivalry and Violence, 1999). In fact, even as the courtly poets idealize combat (Martin H. Jones, “Chrétien, Hartmann, and the Knight as Fighting Man,” Chrétien de Troyes and the German Middle Ages, ed. id. and Roy Wisbey, 1993, 85–109; Thomas Bein, “Hie slac, dâ stich!: Zur Ästhetik des Tötens in europäischen Iwein-Dichtungen,” LiLi 28 [March 1998]: 38–58), they cannot conceal the destabilizing potential violence had for the nobility’s hegemony, explaining why the negative effects of violence appear amidst the refinement of the court (Scott E. Pincikowski, Bodies of Pain, 2002). But the critique of violence did not remain at the subtle level of symbolism in literature. There are many examples for medieval poets criticizing armed conflict and advocating for peace (Stefan Hohmann, Friedenskonzepte, 1992; Albrecht Hagenlocher, Der guote vride, 1992). D. Violence and Civilization Norbert Elias has been highly influential in the study of medieval violence. In his Civilizing Process (1997 [1939]) he posits that the centralization of political power at the courts of the 16th and 17th centuries created a monopoly of violence, decreasing the need for physical force as an expression of power and emphasizing instead refined behavior and the restrained use of violence (for critical evaluations of Elias, see Hans Peter Duerr, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß, 5 vols., 1988–2002; Norbert Elias und die Menschenwissenschaften, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, 1996; Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, 1997; Michael Hinz, Der Zivilisationsprozess: Mythos oder Realität?, 2002; Albrecht Classen, “Naked Men in Medieval German Literature,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. id., 2008, 143–69). Elias suggests that the Middle Ages were less civilized than the early modern period and Medieval Studies have fruitfully responded to his theory, searching for the roots of courtly behavior and evaluating violence in medieval culture. C. Stephen Jaeger (The Origins of Courtliness, 1985) identifies the beginning of the civilizing process at the German imperial courts of the 10th through the 12th centuries. And there is plenty of textual evidence that shows the integral role that self-control played in the development of medieval courtly culture. Fictional works such as the anonymous Ruodlieb and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival emphasize the importance of self-restraint as much as medieval education and etiquette manuals such as Hugh of St. Victor’s De institutione novitiorum and Thomasin von Zirclaere’s der Welsche Gast do (Joachim Bumke, “Höfischer Körper – Höfische Kultur,” Modernes Mittelalter, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1994, 67–102). However, self-control does not eliminate violence; social conventions may actually modify its use for politi-

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cal or social purposes, making violence an integral part of the civilizing process. As the essays in Anger’s Past (Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., 1998) demonstrate, violent emotions like anger are as symbolic and ritualized as other forms of courtliness (see also Irmgard Gephart, Zorn der Nibelungen, 2005). Moreover, as William H. Jackson (Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Germany, 1994) and Richard W. Kaeuper (Chivalry and Violence, 1999; id., “Chivalry and the ‘Civilizing Process’,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. id., 2000, 21–35) show, chivalric modes of behavior promote the use of violence, connecting prowess in battle to honor and glory (see also Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 1984). Will Hasty’s analysis of German courtly literature in Art of Arms (2002) confirms these observations by demonstrating how violence is a constitutive part of courtliness and knightly identity. E. Religious Violence Christianity spawned many forms of violence in the Middle Ages. Medieval mystics and ascetics, for instance, turned to self-inflicted violence to repent and show devotion to God by imitating Christ’s suffering (Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages, 1982; Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 1984; Niklaus Largier, Lob der Peitsche, 2001). Moreover, violence inflicted by others often held an uneasy and sometimes positive position within Christian belief. The extreme tortures endured by martyrs were often reinterpreted as a sign of devotion and spiritual purity (Caroline W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 1991; Sarah Kay, “The Sublime Body of the Martyr,” Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper, 2000). At the same time, violence against Christians could be used as a means to redirect violence at groups perceived to be a threat to Christianity, explaining why medieval images and texts often depict violence committed by pagans, Muslims, and Jews as unusually cruel (Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty, 2003). Indeed, the righteousness of medieval Christian monotheism incited zealous violence against the religious Other (Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 2007 [1987]), whether that violence was directed outward against Muslims during the Crusades or inwards against Jews or other Christians as during the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), with both types of violence often occurring simultaneously (Religious Violence between Christians and Jews, ed. Anna S. Abulafia, 2002). In fact, throughout the Middle Ages, church authorities sacralized violence in order to protect the church from external threats and establish peace between Christians in Europe (Tomazˇ Mastnak, Crusading Peace, 2002; Leo D. Lefebure, “Authority, Violence, and the Sacred at the Medieval Court,” Violence, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 37–66). Examples for this sacralization

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include the following: the church’s invocation of the concept of the Holy War to justify the Crusades (The Holy War, ed. Thomas P. Murphy, 1976); medieval commentators’ use of Saint Augustine’s definition of a just war in his City of God to legitimize killing in battle; and the transformation of secular soldiers into militia Christi (soldiers of Christ) during the High Middle Ages with the promise of indulgences for killing heathens or dying in the Crusades (James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, 1969). Sacralized violence was also propagated in literature, including crusade lyrics and the chanson de geste genre such as the Old French Chanson de Roland and the Middle High German Rolandslied by Priest Konrad (Friedrich W. Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Kreuzzugsdichtung, 1960; Ulrich Ernst, “Kollektive Aggression in der Chanson de Roland und im Rolandslied des Pfaffen Konrad,” Euphorion 82 [1988]: 211–25; D. A. Trotter, Medieval French Literature and the Crusades, 1988). F. Gendered Violence A hierarchy of violence existed in the Middle Ages. In many cases, free noblemen were afforded the authority to inflict violence in public and private spheres, whereas common men were mostly limited to the family. Noble- and common women were more restricted in their use of violence than men. They were limited to expressions of violence that adhered to their gender roles and did not disturb the status quo. Acceptable violence for women was self-inflicted. Cultural ideals centered around the ability of women to endure pain and suffering while showing devotion to God or mourning for a loved one (Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987; Urban Küsters, “Klagefiguren: Vom höfischen Umgang mit der Trauer,” An den Grenzen höfischer Kultur, ed. Gert Kaiser, 1991, 9–75; Scott E. Pincikowski, Bodies of Pain, 2002, 91–132). Moreover, medieval women were often the objects of male violence. In the medieval family, for example, the husband possessed the right to inflict corporal punishment on his wife, children, and servants if they transgressed his absolute authority (Andreas Roth, “Züchtigungsrecht,” HRG, vol. 5, 1998, 1781–84). Medieval legal texts, chronicles, epics, romances, and farces indicate that domestic and marital violence were problems in medieval society and held an uneasy position within the medieval cultural consciousness. There are discernible moments of critique, narratives that upend the hierarchy of violence, but most often these texts reinforce the status quo (Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury et al., 2002; Sara M. Butler, The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England, 2007). As the essays in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts (Anna Roberts, ed., 1998) demonstrate, popular narratives

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perpetuated misogynistic societal tendencies while also normalizing violence against women (see also Elisabeth Lienert, “Zur Diskursivität der Gewalt in Wolfram’s Parzival,” Wolfram-Studien XVII [2002]: 223–45; Robert Scheuble, mannes manheit, vrouwen meister, 2005). Nowhere is this normalization more evident than by sexual violence (Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking, 1989; Representing Rape, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, 2001). Rape was considered a serious crime and sin in medieval society, a legal issue tied to male property rights or a religious issue connected to the cultural ideal of virginity. But as Kathryn Gravdal (Ravishing Maidens, 1991) argues, rape is a constitutive narrative device in legal and literary texts, a discourse defined by men that reinforced male domination and female subordination through either eroticization or minimization of the violent act. Corinne J. Saunders (Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England, 2001) criticizes Gravdal for over-generalizing, arguing that while misogynistic attitudes toward rape were prevalent, other more critical discourses existed in medieval culture (see also Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England, 1999), often centering on the crucial issue of consent (Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou, 1993, 223–89). Diane Wolfthal makes a similar argument in her pioneering Images of Rape (1999), showing that the valorization of “heroic rape” in medieval art represents but one mode of cultural expression and that “alternative” depictions of rape existed which condemned sexual violence. G. Pedagogic and Mnemonic Violence Pedagogy and violence were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Not only was violence considered an acceptable means of disciplining children, it was also important part of medieval education. As Jody Enders shows in Medieval Theater of Cruelty (1999), violence and the threat of violence, the so-called “rule of the rod,” was believed to keep students focused and help them memorize grammar rules, liturgy, and even musical scales (Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 2001, 259–92). Violence and mnemotechnics are therefore interlinked. As Enders’s studies demonstrate (see also id., “Rhetoric, Coercion, and the Memory of Violence,” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland, 1996, 24–55; id., “Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence,” Theatre Survey 38 [1997]: 139–60), the rhetorical tradition of the art of memory emphasized the recollective and inventive power of violence. For rhetoricians believed that bloody and shocking images leave lasting impressions upon the reader, viewer, and listener, making it easier to recall the image and the message that image meant to convey, whether for didactic, ideological, or political pur-

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poses (Marjorie C. Woods, “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” Criticism and Dissent, ed. Rita Copeland, 1996, 56–86; Mary Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book,” The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores W. Frese and Katherine O’Brian O’Keeffe, 1997, 1–33). Eugene Vance, for instance, illustrates how violent textual images may have functioned as important memory aids in the performance of oral epics, while also commemorating the fallen hero (“Roland and the Poetics of Memory,” Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari, 1979, 374–403). In a similar interpretative move, Urban Küsters (“Narbenschriften: Zur religiösen Literatur des Spätmittelalters,” Mittelalter, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller and Horst Wenzel, 1999, 81–109) demonstrates how the depiction of Christ’s broken body in texts and images act as memoria, a means to remember Christ’s suffering by invoking different moments of the Passion through specific wounds and scars. This type of remembrance is also what informs different forms of imitatio Christi. As flagellants violently whipped their own bodies, they invoked the memory of the scourging of Christ (Robert Mills, Suspended Animation, 2005, 145–76), which suggests that rhetorical violence sometimes prefigured real violence, providing the script for the violence of religious expression, pedagogy, and torture. H. Judicial Violence Violence was one means by which legal disputes were settled and justice enforced in medieval society. In the early Middle Ages, the feud was an accepted custom or legal means to resolve disputes and repair injured honor, whereby compensatory justice could take the form of vengeance. Either more violence or the threat of violence then ended the dispute or led to another form of legal compensation such as wergild (William I. Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 1990; Paul R. Hyams, “Feud in Medieval England,” The Haskins Society Journal 3 [1992]: 1–21; Antje Holzhauer, Rache und Fehde, 1997; Guy Halsall, “Introduction,” Violence and Society, ed. id., 1998, 19–29). In the early to High Middle Ages, courts used the irrational proof of unilateral ordeals, such as trial by fire or water, and bilateral ordeals, such as trial by combat, to resolve disputes caused by sexual transgression, treason, murder, robbery, and heresy. In the Christian form of the ordeal, the immanent justice of God would intervene on behalf of the innocent and condemn the guilty party, whereas judicial duels did not depend upon divine intervention (Vickie L. Ziegler, Trial by Fire and Battle in Medieval German Literature, 2004, 1–19). As the use of the unilateral ordeal gradually decreased in the 12th century, resulting from either social change or clerical opposition (for representative sides of this debate see Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural:

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A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104 [1975]: 133–51; Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 1986), the medieval church and state turned to the inquisitorial procedure and the proof of confession obtained through torture (Henry C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition, vol. 1, 1955 [1887]; Edward Peters, Torture, 1996 [1985], 40–73; Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects, 2001, 1–24). Medieval punishment was in its own right often tantamount to torture, with judicial violence mirroring the type and extremity of the crime and creating a spectacle meant to deter future crime (Hubert Drüppel, “Körperverletzung,” LMA, vol. 5, 1991, 1447–48; Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 1999). Select Bibliography Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998); Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).

Scott Pincikowski

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Textual Genres in the Middle Ages

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Adversus-Iudaeos Literature

A Adversus-Iudaeos Literature A. Early Christian Roots Tertullian’s (ca. 165–235 C.E.) tract Adversus Iudaeos stands at the anacrusis of a topically broad and wide-spread anti-Judaic literature, from late antiquity through early modern times. Still, it draws on earlier prototypes from the Greek, such as the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin’s Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon. Tertullian’s key position in anti-Judaic literature is due to his broad reception by the church fathers (cf. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Adversus Judaeos Tradition in the Church Fathers: the Exegesis of Christian AntiJudaism,” Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, 1979, 27–50; Michelle Murray, Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries CE, 2004), such as Hippolyt of Rome (Demonstratio adversus Iudaeos: PG 10, 787–94), Cyprian of Carthago (Testimoniorum libri adversus Iudaeos, CCL 3, 1–179), pseudo-Cyprian (Adversus Iudaeos, CCL 4, 265–78; De montibus Sina et Sion, CSEL 3/3, 104–19, and Ad Vigilium episcopum de iudaica incredulitate, CSEL 3/3, 119–32 – cf. also Hieronymus in PL 26, 386–89), as well as by Novatian (De Trinitate, CCL 4, 1–78, and De cibis Iudaicis, CCL 4, 89–101 – cf. also Hieronymus in De viris illustribus, cap. 70), Commodian (Instructiones 24, 37–40, ed. Ernst Ludwig, 1878), and other influential writers. These late antique theologians, including the wide-spread writings of Augustine (cf. Bernhard Blumenkrantz, “Augustine et les Juifs, Augustine et le Judaïsme,” Recherches augustiniennes 1 [1958]: 225–41), form the sediment medieval Adversus-Iudaeos-literature could build upon. Hence, Byzantine treatises share common roots with the Western tradition as well (cf. Maryse Waegeman, “Les traités Adversus Judaeos. Aspects des relations judéochrétiennes dans le monde grec,” Byzantion: Revue internationale des études byzantines 56 [1986]: 295–313; Andreas Külzer, Disputationes Graecae contra Iudaeos: Untersuchungen zur byzantinischen antijüdischen Dialogliteratur und ihrem Judenbild, 1999 – for an important critique, cf. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 98 [2005]: 133–35).

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B. Adversus-Iudaeos-Literature and Religious Encounter If we believe writers such as Johannes Chrysostomus and their preaching against Judaizing (PG 48, 843–942), Judaism still must have been attractive for many Christians in the 4th century. Adversus-Iudaeos-treatises, so scholars have argued for long, might have taken up anti-Judaic tendencies of Christian parenesis, but their main intent was to provide material against those, who could interpret the Scriptures in a different way. This, they argued, might have worked against Jewish accounts as well as still existing pagan criticism, and was felt especially necessary to repudiate Christian beliefs as mere renegades from Judaism. While not wholly dismissing this dimension of Adversus-Iudaeos-literature, recent scholarship has accentuated reading these works as evidences of Jewish-Christian contact. They have characterized most of the earlier medieval texts as more admonitory against iudaizantes and homiletic rather than missionary with direct appeal to Jewish communities (Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au Moyen Âge, 1990, 426). After all, for the later Middle Ages they seem to have figured as “a basic medium for Christian self-expression” (Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity [1999], 13) rather than following the ostensible aim of conversion which gains weight again during the reformation. C. Medieval Material The most comprehensive collection of Adversus-Iudaeos-literature (in regestae), plus an extensive study of anti-Judaic iconography is provided by Schreckenberg’s four volumes (1994ff; cf. below). More recent publications can be found via the Index of Articles in Jewish Studies (Jerusalem), the yearly bibliographic references in the Revue des Études Juives and the Jewish History, or via the IMB. Most writings commonly assumed as Adversus-Iudeaos-literature share a significant amount of material, though each author chooses his own set of texts and topics. The basis of all argumentation is the spiritual blindness of the Jews who – in the eyes of their Christian opponents – find themselves unable to correctly interpret the Old Testament. The literary tradition of Adversus Iudaeos can be traced from the early through the later Middle Ages, which saw a renaissance of such works throughout Europe (in general: Amos Funkenstein, “Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 2 [1971]: 373–82; cf. for Germany: Manuela Niesner, “Wer mit juden well disputiren”: Deutschsprachige Adversus-Judaeos-Literatur des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2005; see also her edition of a treatise from ca. 1400, “Über die Duldung der Juden in der

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christlichen Gesellschaft,” Mediaevistik 20 [2007]: 185–214; for England: Renate Bauer, Adversus judaeos: Juden und Judentum im Spiegel alt- und mittelenglischer Texte, 2003; for Portugal: Maria de Lourdes Sirgado Ganho, “Uma obra de teologia Adversus judaeos de um anónimo português de meados do século XIV,” Pensamiento medieval hispano 2 [1998]: 1543–50; for Spain: María L. A. Núñez-Castelo, “La literatura adversus iudaeos: obras de polémica religiosa (un manuscrito del siglo XV),” Edición y anotación de textos, ed. Antonio Chas Aguión et al., vol. 1, 1998, 97–102; for Russia: Alexander I. Pereswetoff-Morath, A Grin without a Cat: Adversus Iudaeos Texts in the Literature of Medieval Russia (988–1504), 2002). One of the particular new aspects in later medieval Adversus-Iudaeos-treatises is the sporadic reception of Rabbinic material, as for instance by the Catalan Dominican Raymond Martini (cf. Görge K. Hasselhoff, “Some Remarks on Raymond Martini’s (ca. 1215/1230–ca. 1284/1294) Use of Moses Maimonides,” Trumah 12 [2002]: 133–48). Until now, there is no fixed taxonomy of the genre, which comprises theological treatises of all sorts in both Latin and the vernacular as well as sermons, dialogues or alleged public debates and, on its periphery, several other forms of pre-modern anti-Judaic literature (cf. Gérard Nahon, “Adversus Judæos: Sources hébraïques et latines sur la Première Croisade,” Problèmes d’histoire des religions 7 [1996]: 83–95). Select Bibliography Jean Juster, Les juifs dans l’Empire Romain: leur condition juridique, économique et sociale, vol. 1 (Paris: Geuthner, 1914), 53–76; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld, 3 vols., 4th ed. (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Peter Lang, 1994–1999) (1st ed. 1982ff); James Carleton Paget, “Adversus Judaeos literature,” A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, Edward Kessler and Neil Wenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6–8.

Hiram Kümper

Art Manuals A. Introduction Medieval manuals on art or artists’ materials are a valuable literary source for the study of painting in particular and material culture in general. When placed alongside the surviving visual evidence – from panel painting to

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stained glass, and from manuscript illumination to metalwork – the written record casts light on the richly articulated workshop practices of the craftsman and the conventions associated with the design and execution of the artefact. Originating from technical rather than theoretical issues, the surviving manuals stress the importance of the work of art as the product of a particular craft, and the artist as an exponent of a particular technological process. Among the relevant texts are recipe collections, practical treatises, and technical handbooks; some survive as short sections within manuscripts containing miscellaneous texts while others have come down to us as independent books. B. Corpus of the Surviving Key Texts and the Related History of Scholarship The oldest and among the most widely disseminated texts on the practical arts of the Middle Ages is a compendium of recipes for, among other things, the production and application of dyes and pigments known as the Compositiones variae or Compositiones ad tingenda musiva (Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare, cod. 490) of the late 8th or early 9th century (Hjalmar Hedfors, Compositiones ad tingenda musiva, 1932) and the Mappae clavicula, which survives in many copies with considerable variation (Cyril Smith and John Hawthorne, “Mappae clavicula: A Little Key to the World of Medieval Techniques,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 64 [1974]: 3–122). The latter would appear to derive from the former (Rozelle Johnson, Compositiones variae, from Codex 490, Biblioteca Capitolare, Lucca, Italy: An Introductory Study, 1939) or from a common source in Greek alchemist texts of the 4th century C.E. (Robert Halleux and Paul Meyvaert, “Les origines de la Mappae Clavicula,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-Âge 54 [1987]: 7–58). It has also been proposed that the Lucca Manuscript depends upon a Spanish text dating from 725, which in turn has its roots in earlier Greek writings (John Burnam, A Classical Technology edited from Codex Lucensis 490, 1920). The earliest fragments of the Mappae clavicula date from the 9th or 10th century, but the most complete copy is a 12th-century manuscript in Corning, New York (Museum of Glass, Phillipps ms. 3715), first published in 1847 (Thomas Phillipps, “Letter from Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart, F.R.S., F.S.A., Addressed to Albert Way, Esq., Director, Communicating a Transcript of a MS. Treatise on the Preparation of Pigments, and on Various Processes of the Decorative Arts Practised during the Middle Ages, Written in the Twelfth Century, and Entitled Mappae clavicula,” Archaeologia 32 [1847]: 183–244). Another compilation of technical recipes with general information concerning the materials of the medieval artist is De coloribus et artibus Roman-

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orum, which is attributed to Heraclius or Eraclius, although the proposal has been questioned (Albert Ilg, Heraclius, von den Farben und Künsten der Römer: Original-Text und Übersetzung, 1873). The work now exists in three books: I and II are in verse and in one hand; III is in prose and the work of more than one hand. De coloribus can be considered an attempt to revive antique technical traditions for work with ivory, glass, dyes, and gems. Scholarly disagreement surrounds its date of execution and localization, however, and a recent proposal (I colori e le arti dei romani e la compilazione pseudo-eracliana, ed. Chiara Garzya Romano, 1996) places the writing of Books I and II in Italy around the 8th century and Book III in France or England in the 12th or 13th century. De coloribus has been seen to contain among the earliest references to the use of oil as a tempering medium for paint (Rudolph Raspe, A Critical Essay on Oil-painting; Proving that the art of painting in oil was known before the pretended discovery of J. and H. van Eyck, 1781; Charles Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting, 1847) and is therefore central to debates around the supposed development of the medium in the Middle Ages. The manuscript traditions of the Compositiones, the Mappae clavicula, and De coloribus pave the way for the fullest and best known account of the working methods of the medieval artist in northern and central Europe, De diversis artibus or Schedula diversarum artium by Theophilus (Presbyter). The work is divided into three books: the first on painting, the second on glassmaking, and the third on metalworking; the writing in all three is informed by the author’s direct practical experience of the techniques. In many respects the text is characterized by a fresh approach to the subjects treated and has been seen to lie outside the literary tradition of the old recipe collections in its emphasis upon critical enquiry and instruction (John Hawthorne and Cyril Smith, ed., Theophilus, On Divers Arts, 1963, 1979). The author’s name is a pseudonym and since 1874 (Albert Ilg, Schedula diversarum artium: I Band, revidirter Text) has been associated with the goldsmith monk Roger of Helmarshausen (fl. early 1100s), who probably came from the Mosan region. Although the proposal was challenged in 1928 (Hermann Degering, “Theophilus Presbiter qui et Rugerus,” Westfälische Studien: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Westfalen, Alois Börner zum 60. Geburtstag gewidmet, 248–62), all the available evidence strongly supports the argument in favor of the historical Roger (Peter Lasko, “Roger of Helmarshausen, Author and Craftsman: Life, Sources of Style, and Iconography,” Objects, Images and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy, ed. Colum Hourihane, 2003, 180–201; Werner Jacobsen, “Roger von Helmarshausen: ein Künstler verliert seine Werke; aus Anlaß des Symposiums ‘Roger von Helmarshausen’ am 17.–18. 11. 2005 im Paderborner Diözesanmuseum,” Kunstchronik

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59 [2006]: 273–76). As for the chronology, the internal evidence weighs in favor of a date in the first half of the 12th century (Charles Dodwell, ed., De diversis artibus: The Various arts, 1961, 1986), even though arguments have been advanced for the 9th century (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Vom Alter der Oelmalerey aus dem Theophilus Presbyter, 1774; now available in modern editions of the complete works of this famous German enlightened author, philologist, and librarian), 10th century (Degering, 1928; Wilhelm Theobald, ed., Technik des Kunsthandwerks im zehnten Jahrhundert des Theophilus Presbyter Diversarum Artium Schedula in Auswahl neu herausgegeben, 1933), and the first half of the 11th century (Robert Hendrie, Theophili qui et Rugerus … libri III. de diversis Artibus, seu diversarum artium schedula, 1847). Many critical editions of the work have been published and, since the second half of the 20th century, it has appeared in new translations in English (Hawthorne and Smith, 1963; Dodwell, 1961, 1986), French (André Blanc, ed., Essai sur divers arts: en trois livres, 1980), German (Erhard Brepohl, ed., Theophilus Presbyter und das mittelalterliche Kunsthandwerk: Gesamtausgabe der Schrift ‘De diversis artibus’ in zwei Ba·nden, 1999), and Italian (Adriano Caffaro, ed., Le varie arti: manuale di tecnica artistica medievale, 2000). While Theophilus may have mentioned the techniques of manuscript illumination, the most important source for the craft is the anonymous manual known today as De arte illuminandi, which was probably written at the end of the 14th century in southern Italy (Demetrio Salazaro, ed., L’arte della miniatura nel secolo XIV: codice della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli messo a stampa, 1877). Well organized and practical in approach, the text affords focused insights into the art of the illuminator – from the preparation of pigments to the application of gold leaf (Daniel Thompson and George Hamilton, ed., An Anonymous Fourteenth-century Treatise, ‘De arte illuminandi’: The Technique of Manuscript Illumination, 1933). The 15th-century Portuguese Livro de como se façen as cores in Hebrew (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, De Rossi ms. 945) is similar in content but ultimately derives from a 13th-century work (David Blondheim, “An Old Portuguese Work on Manuscript Illumination,” Jewish Quarterly Review 19 [1928–1929]: 97–135). Marked by a different approach, however, is the Göttingen Model Book (Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, ms. Uffenb. 51): it was written and decorated in Germany in the 15th century and is unique in so far as manuals on miniature painting techniques are concerned because it features both text and image (Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, ed., The Göttingen Model Book: A Facsimile Edition and Translations of a Fifteenth-century Illuminator’s Manual, 1972, 1978). The tradition of compiling recipe books for the manufacture of pigments and other techniques of the illuminator’s craft was carried on by

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Johannes Alcherius (fl. 1382–1411), who lived in Paris but traveled to Italy on a number of occasions between 1382 and 1410. Alcherius’s De coloribus diversis modis tractatur and De diversis coloribus were copied out by Jehan Le Bègue (fl. 1368–1431) into a collection of texts entitled Experimenta de coloribus, which includes a glossary of terms (Bianca Tosatti, “La ‘Tabula de vocabulis sinonimis et equivocis colorum,’ ms. lat. 6741 della Bibliothèque Nationale di Parigi in relazione a Giovanni Alcherio,” Acme 34 [1983]: 129–87) and was first published in 1849 by Mary Merrifield (see bibliography, 258–91). The clear expression, practical manner, and logical structure of De arte illuminandi are qualities that also characterize the writing and approach of Il libro dell’arte of the late 14th or early 15th century by the Tuscan painter Cennino Cennini (fl. 1370–1440). The most important manual on late medieval painting techniques, it is the first of its type in Italian and, as such, was clearly composed for disseminating information and teaching the painter’s craft rather than stimulating theoretical speculation among the learned, even though Cennini saw his art as the equal of the ancient liberal arts. Il libro dell’arte is distinguished from most other medieval writings on art by its relatively non-derivative character and, like Theophilus’s work, by its originality. In fact, Cennini’s text has been seen to anticipate the Renaissance concern with the artist’s autonomy and the nature of artistic creation (Charles Hope, “‘Composition’ from Cennini and Alberti to Vasari,” Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, ed. Paul Taylor, 2000, 27–44). He is believed to have composed the work in Padua as it contains many Venetian terms and includes a dedication to Saint Anthony (Silvia Isella Brusamolino, “‘Il Libro dell’arte’ di Cennino Cennini tra Toscana e Veneto,” Storia della lingua e storia dell’arte in Italia: dissimmetrie e intersezioni, ed. Vittorio Casale, 2004, 297–318). First published in 1821 (Giuseppe Tambroni, Di Cennino Cennini Trattato della pittura messo in luce la prima volta con annotazioni dal cavaliere Giuseppe Tambroni), the handbook has been the focus of many detailed critical editions ever since (see most recently Fabio Frezzato, ed., Il libro dell’arte, 2003, 2008), including translations into English (Daniel Thompson, ed., The Craftsman’s Handbook, 1933, 1960), French (Colette Déroche, ed., Le livre de l’art, 1991), and German (Willibrord Verkade, ed., Des Cennino Cennini Handbüchlein der Kunst, 1916). C. Recent Research and Scholarly Trends The efforts of scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries were mostly directed towards identifying and publishing critical editions of the key contributions to craft literature, paying particular attention to questions of philology, transmission, and transformation. More recent developments have built

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upon these findings and examined the written evidence for the significance of color in the Middle Ages, including symbolism (Il colore nel Medioevo: arte, simbolo, tecnica, 1–4, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2009), chemical properties (Pigments et colorants de l’Antiquite’ et du Moyen Âge: Teinture, peinture, enluminure; études historiques et physico-chimiques, 1990), and the tradition of the recipe (Robert Halleux, “Recettes d’artisan, recettes d’alchimiste,” Artes mechanicae en Europe me’die’vale, ed. Ria Jansen-Sieben, 1989, 25–49). The practical nature of the writings of Theophilus and Cennini in particular has stimulated research into the character of specific pigments (Adam Raft, “About Theophilus’ blue color, ‘Lazur’,” Studies in Conservation 13 [1968]: 1–6; Edgar Denninger, “What is ‘Bianco di San Giovanni’ of Cennino Cennini?,” Studies in Conservation 19 [1974]: 185–87; Lorenzo Appolonia et al., “‘Della natura del bianco sangiovanni:’ un pigmento e la lettura delle fonti,” Colori, coloriture, restauro: studi su sgraffiti, intonaci e coloriture architettoniche, 1985, 63–74). As recent research has demonstrated, most medieval art manuals are not only of historical value but are of practical use today: Cennini’s description of the materials and the processes of making a panel painting have been united with the results of modern X-radiography and infra-red reflectography in an investigation of the early Italian paintings in the National Gallery, London (David Bomford et al., Italian Painting Before 1400, 1989); Theophilus’s comments have contributed to recent discussion about the oil medium (Paola Del Vescovo, Il trattato di Teofilo e il problema dell’origine della pittura ad olio, 2006) and enamel (David Buckton, “Theophilus and Enamel,” Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture: Presented to Peter Lasko, ed. David Buckton and Thomas Alexander Heslop, 1994, 1–13); and the sources of the illuminator’s craft have yielded fresh insights into the associated practices of miniature painting (Charles Dodwell, “Techniques of Manuscript Painting in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” Artigianato e tecnica nella società dell’Alto Medioevo occidentale, 1971, 643–62) and tooling (Mojmír Frinta, Punched Decoration on Late Medieval Panel and Miniature Painting, 1998). Of equal value to the conservator, restorer, and art historian are studies of the more general processes of design as attested by the technical literature. Again, Cennini’s thorough instructions have focused critical attention upon such topics as modeling (Norman Muller, “Three Methods of Modelling the Virgin’s Mantle in Early Italian Painting,” Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 17 [1978]: 10–18), the properties of light and shade (Mary Pardo, “Giotto and the ‘Things not Seen, Hidden in the Shadow of Natural Ones’,” Artibus et Historiae 18 [1997]: 41–53), the role and function of drawing (Joanna Woods-Marsden, “‘Draw the irrational animals as often as you can from life:’ Cennino Cennini, Giovannino de’ Grassi, and Antonio Pisanello,” Studi

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di Storia dell’Arte 3 [1992]: 67–78; Ugo Procacci, “Disegni per esercitazione degli allievi e disegni preparatori per le opere d’arte nella testimonianza del Cennini,” Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, ed. Irving Lavin, 1977, 352–67), and wider issues about style and authorship, including the plausible identification of his own work as a painter (Fantasie und Handwerk: Cennino Cennini und die Tradition der toskanischen Malerei von Giotto bis Lorenzo Monaco, ed. Wolf-Dietrich Löhr and Stefan Weppelmann, 2008). Finally, recent scholarship has shed light upon the broader cultural and social contexts in which medieval art manuals were written and read. Theophilus’s book, though not overtly concerned with intellectual questions, does express an awareness of contemporary theological debates (John Van Engen, “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology,” Viator 11 [1980]: 147–63) and theoretical problems (Marco Collareta, “Teofilo, ‘qui et Rugerus:’ artista e teorico dell’arte,” Artifex bonus: il mondo dell’artista medievale, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo, 2005, 50–55). Cennini’s handbook, meanwhile, has been considered a precursor of the Renaissance treatise on art in its apparent interest in verisimilitude (Andrea Bolland, “Art and Humanism in Early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio and Petrarch on Imitation,” Renaissance Quarterly 49 [1996]: 469–87). Select Bibliography Franco Brunello, ed., De arte illuminandi: e altri trattati sulla tecnica della miniatura medievale (1975; Vicenza: Pozza, 1992); Mary Merrifield, Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to XVIIIth Centuries on the Arts of Painting, in Oil, Miniature, Mosaic, and on Glass (1849; Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999); Salvador Muñoz Viñas, “Original Written Sources for the History of Mediaeval Painting Techniques and Materials: A List of Published Texts,” Studies in Conservation 43 (1998): 114–24; Heinz Roosen-Runge, Farbgebung und Technik frühmittelalterlicher Buchmalerei: Studien zu den Traktaten ‘Mappae Clavicula’ und ‘Heraclius’ (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1967); Julius Schlosser Magnino, La letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte moderna, rev. Otto Kurz. 3rd ed. (1st German ed. 1924; 1st Italian ed. 1935–1937; Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964); Daniel Thompson, “Trial Index for Mediaeval Craftsmanship,” Speculum 10 (1935): 410–31; Silvia Tosatti, Trattati medievali di tecniche artistiche (Milan: Jaca Book, 2007).

Flavio Boggi

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Autobiography and Biography A. Introduction The medieval autobiographical and biographical textual tradition encompasses materials typically shared by historians and literary historians. These textual sources might more aptly be gathered under the umbrella term “life writing,” as the generic labels biography and autobiography are of more recent invention. The term biography was seldom used in the Middle Ages, and texts conforming to modern standards of autobiography are extremely rare. Studies of medieval autobiography and biography have thus been dependent not only on texts that are (auto)biographical in the modern sense, but also on hagiographic texts and on biographical, autobiographical, or pseudo-autobiographical details inserted in chronicle, poetry, and romance; the pseudo-historiographic roots of romance and epic are also a ripe field of inquiry. B. History of Research 19th- and early 20th-century studies of (auto)biographical materials were dominated by historicist tendencies. Following Leopold von Ranke’s 1824 Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, which drew in part upon memoirs and other autobiographical and personal documents, (auto)biographical texts were routinely used as tools to reconstruct the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it really was). Benedetto Croce’s pioneering work on the history of historiography, notably in Teoria della storia e della storiografia (1917), offered an alternative to this positivist model. Although still heavily leaning on a positivist approach to autobiographical writing, Georg Misch’s monumental Geschichte der Autobiographie (orig. 1907–; 3rd rev. ed. 1949–1969; transl. numerous times) represents the most comprehensive overview, covering the time from antiquity to the Baroque. Mid-20th-century surveys of medieval historiography, such as James Westfall Thompson and Bernard J. Holm’s A History of Historical Writing, vol. 1 (1942), consider lives alongside chronicles, yet seek to maintain a clear distinction between “literary” and “historical” content. Indeed, it is in the first third of the 20th century that biographical writings gain a more prominent place in literary studies. But early 20th-century studies of the history of biography, including Wilbur Cross’s An Outline of Biography from Plutarch to Strachey (1921) and Donald Stauffer’s English Biography Before 1700 (1930) largely ignore the medieval period; according to Stauffer, “biography as an art was static in the Middle Ages” (3).

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The 1940s saw renewed interest in medieval (auto)biography, particularly on the part of scholars in the United States and in Germany. Josiah C. Russell’s “An Introduction to the Study of Medieval Biography” (Modern Language Quarterly 4 [1943]: 437–53) reintroduced the topic to American readers. Jan Romein’s De Biografie, een Inleiding (1946) provides an overview of the history of European biography, including a substantial treatment of medieval texts, at the beginning of his study of the methods and structures of biography; the chief biographical forms Romein considers are hagiography, secular vitae, and Byzantine imperial memoirs. Paul Kirn, on the other hand, relies primarily on court biographies in Das Bild des Menschen in der Geschichtsschreibung von Polybios bis Ranke (1955). With few exceptions, studies of this period focus on biography to the exclusion of autobiography, as medieval autobiographical materials are typically less easily classified as historical or literary in nature. In the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of post-structuralist theory, autobiographical texts gain new prominence. In Design and Truth in Autobiography, Roy Pascal reflects on autobiography as a labor of self-reconstruction; while Pascal is invested in the term “autobiography” and in determining what would constitute a “true” model autobiography, his awareness that all autobiography is a rewriting of one’s perceptions is already moving toward a more “post-structuralist” model questioning generic distinctions. In the wake of the post-structural movement the distinction between historical writing and fiction is significantly blurred, allowing for greater scholarly attention to the problematic categories of autobiography and biography. Psychoanalytic theory has also had a significant impact on studies of medieval biography and autobiography, as these life-texts are mined for their insights into medieval selfhood. Jean Leclerq’s “Modern Psychology and the Interpretation of Medieval Texts” (Speculum 48 [1973]: 476–90) considers a wealth of (auto)biographical materials, as do more recent articles such as Nancy Partner’s “The hidden self: psychoanalysis and the textual unconscious” (Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner, 2005, 42–64) and Richard Lawes’s “Psychological disorder and the autobiographical impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve” (Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, 2000, 217–43).

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C. Overviews and Recent Trends General overviews of these genres, and especially of autobiography, have continued to appear: representative examples include Horst Wenzel, Die Autobiographie des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1980; Heinz Hofmann, “Autobiografisch schrijven in de middeleeuwse Latijnse literaatuur,” Over de autobiografie, ed. Els Jongeneel, 231, 104–22; and Albrecht Classen, “Autobiography as a Late Medieval Phenomenon,” Medieval Perspectives 3 [1988]: 89–104; a number of these studies situate medieval autobiography in relation to the more familiar autobiographical tradition of the Renaissance. Classen’s monograph Die autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters (1991) discusses autobiographical elements in lyric poetry by Hugo von Montfort (Styria), Oswald von Wolkenstein (South Tyrol), Antonio Pucci (Italy), Thomas Hoccleve (England), Michel Beheim, Hans Rosenplüt (both Germany), and Charles’ d’Orléans (England and France). Contemporary approaches to medieval autobiography and biography tend to use these texts as a means of exploring the construction of subjectivity. In addition to psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches, other dominant trends include gender studies and feminist criticism; (auto)hagiography and antihagiography; cultural history and the politics of (auto)biography; romance, pseudo-autobiography, and autofiction; revisiting generic distinctions; and comparative studies of nonwestern texts (especially Arabic, Indian, and Japanese) written during periods corresponding to the European Middle Ages. In recent decades feminist critics and historians have turned their attention to women’s spiritual autobiographies: Kate Greenspan’s “Autohagiography and Medieval Women’s Spiritual Autobiography” (Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance, 1996, 216–36) provides a representative overview of this trend. Biographical and autobiographical elements in the writings of female authors, notably Christine de Pizan, have also been of interest to feminist scholars. The implications of self-writing as a form of autohagiography are explored by Carlo Delcorno in “Biografia, agiografia, autoagiografia” (Lettere italiane 2 [1999]: 173–96). In recent years, a particular form of biography, namely antihagiographic lives of the prophet Mohammed, has received renewed attention: see John V. Tolan’s articles “Antihagiography: Embrico of Mainz’s Vita mahumeti” (Journal of Medieval History 22 [1996]: 25–41) and “Rhetoric, polemics and the art of hostile biography: portraying Muhammad in thirteenth-century Christian Spain” (Pensamiento medieval hispano: Homenaje a Horacio Santiago-Otero, ed. José María Soto Rábanos, 1998, 1497–1511). Recent studies of autobiography and biography also tend to blur the distinctions between fact and fiction, historiography and literature. Evelyn

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Birge Vitz, in “Type et individu dans l’ ‘autobiographie’ médiévale” (Poétique 24 [1975]: 426–45), addresses the fictionalized elements of life-accounts that Laurence De Looze would later refer to as pseudoautobiography. Other notable studies that question the disciplinary boundaries of history and literature are Ruth Morse, “Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature” (Modern Language Review 80 [1985]: 257–68), Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative” (Viator 25 [1994]: 95–113), and Katherine Lewis, “Women, Testamentary Discourse and Life-Writing in Later Medieval England” (Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noël James Menuge, 2000, 57–75). Nonwestern autobiography and biography, as well, are increasingly recognized as offering valuable insights into European life-writing of the Middle Ages. Islamic prosopography (Claude Gilliot, “Prosopography in Islam: An Essay of Classification,” Medieval Prosopography 23 [2002]: 19–54) and medieval Indian biography (Phyllis Granoff, “Sarasvati’s Sons: Biographies of Poets in Medieval India,” Asiatische Studien 49 [1995]: 351–76) are of interest, while Japanese memoirs and autobiography have more often been read in conjunction with Western texts: notably by Edith Sarra in Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs (1999), and in the essays collected by Barbara Stevenson in Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays in Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers (2000). This revisiting of established boundaries between the domains of history and literature, or between distinct cultural and linguistic traditions, has led to a mounting interest in the problematics of medieval (auto)biography in the last decade of the 20th century and at the dawn of the 21st. Select Bibliography Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974); Laurence DeLooze, Pseudoautobiography in the Middle Ages (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, vol. III: Das Mittelalter, part 2: Das Hochmittelalter im Anfang (Frankfurt: G. Schulte-Bumke, 1959); Gerald Prince, ed., Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Brill, 1968); Jay Rubenstein, “Biography and Autobiography in the Middle Ages,” Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22–41.

Julie Singer

Ballads, Songs, and Libels

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B Ballads, Songs, and Libels A. Definition of the Genre The aim of this article is to produce a fresh perspective on a group of historical texts often implicitly regarded as a genre. Literary scholars and historians highlighted the defamatory function of songs and ballads. Ballads and libels are categories of action. This communicative function is the main criterion to synthesize a genre. The evidence suggests that there were diverse literary forms that influenced the political culture since the late Middle Ages, whereas defining the genre by strictly formal means has proved to be problematic, witness to the heterogeneous empirical basis. The main focus must therefore be strictly on what these texts intended to do and by what means. Ballads, songs, and libels are not covered entirely in the given space. Rather than that, this article sketches the qualities they share. Some introducing remarks are therefore necessary. Ballads and songs are – although sometimes seen as popular ballads – somewhat established categories of historical poetological consideration. Different European languages place the genre “ballad” in different traditions, such as the Italian balata, French courtly literature, or the modern German derivate Ballade. The literary category this article outlines is different. Speaking of libels seems problematic with respect to a clear-cut definition that includes, say, the history of their legal restriction or disseminating media. Ballads, songs, and libels coincide in belonging potentially to pragmatic contexts, forming a distinct communicative (rather than a poetological) genre. There is broad evidence of songs and ballads since the 15th century; case studies describe increases of production and promulgation during war times, libels often aiming at individuals to discriminate his political party or social group. The earliest broadside prints in the 15th century were revolutionary both with respect to quantity and quality of multiplication of popular songs; they were soon affordable to broader layers of society. This had an innovative effect on the political culture of the time. The popular literary world became a fore-runner of the modern public sphere. The public voice (Gemain Sag, publique voix, vox populi) was considered to be a political arbiter and could serve political viewpoints in both affirm-

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ative and destructive ways. An important tradition across European literatures more generally was the “Pasquino” dialogue, hence the genre of “small Pasquinos,” i. e., “pasquills,” dealing with controversial matters of their time (Günter Hess, “Pasquill,” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller, 2003, vol. 3, 31–34); the nature of pasquills in this sense remains a matter of debate. There seems to be consensus regarding cultural exchange from Italy throughout Europe around 1500; whether by way of transfer or productive apprehension, there was a European tradition of dialogue literature and facetiae on which, say, vernacular pasquills relied. All these literary forms relied on communicative practices in the premodern face-to-face society, including marketplace performances with minstrels. The strength of the media of libellous communication is mirrored by the continuous need to regard anonymous communication as criminal. The main criterion to integrate and distinguish the genre is that these texts were acting in social contexts with literary means. These could even be extreme literary forms, as the cases of defamatory scatological marginalization suggest, see the catalog in Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung: Untersuchungen zu den Schmähbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ca. 1350 bis 1600), 2004. In a peculiar way, historiography of the genre has stood in the way to define it in an appropriately consistent way. Recent and historical scholarship regarding the long Middle Ages, i. e., bridging the threshold of 1500 by way of systematic questions including the study of the 16th century, are therefore the main reason for the synthesis undertaken here. Despite the somewhat blurred view there is evidence that suggests main currents in diverse disciplines that shall be summarized here in a methodologically useful way for further research in cultural history of political communication by literary means. B. Historical Background The knowledge of the historical background of the genre is limited by the sources that often mediate their objects. When 15th- and 16th-century chronicles narrate tumultuous uprisings that were accompanied by ballads, libels, and songs, they are far from impartial; manuscripts of songs do not provide the origin and degree of popularity of the songs nor do they offer much other meta-data. Medievalists have marked this problem thoroughly, see Frieder Schanze, “Überlieferungsformen politischer Dichtungen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter: Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff, 1999, 299–331, esp. 303. When songs and libels were archived at

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all, the object was necessarily mediated by interests, time-bound world view or distance of time to the events itself. The sensibilities of Victorian culture, for instance, seem to have moderated Francis J. Child’s collection, see Richard Firth Green, “F.J. Child and Mikail Bakhtin,” The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures, ed. Philip E. Bennett and Richard Firth Green, 2004, 123–34; for a catalog of different historical perspectives, see already Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Deutsche Volkskunde zwischen Germanistik und Sozialwissenschaft, 1969. Defamatory pieces were of course likely to be destroyed by the addressees, while songs mostly escaped archival documentation or merely reached it in few late forms of their usual variations; the variability of the performed songs was so high that exemplary cases of developments of meaning are known (for the problematic concept of “Zersingung,” see Norbert Mayer-Rosa, Studien zum deutschen Tagelied: Untersuchungen zur Gruppe ‘Tagelieder’ in Uhlands Sammlung ‘Alte hochund niederdeutsche Volkslieder’, 1958, 153, or the examples in Selma Hirsch, Das Volkslied im späten Mittelalter: Zwanzig spätmittelalterliche Balladen und Lieder aus ihren zersungenen Formen wiederhergestellt und erläutert, 1978, 57–94). Although different mediating factors can be distinguished, the problems the sources confront their interpreter with are more complex. Knowledge of how to perform songs was – in substance – lost in the process of textification (Aleida Assmann, “Schriftliche Folklore. Zur Entstehung und Funktion eines Überlieferungstyps,” Schrift und Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation, ed. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Christof Hardmeier, 1998, 175–93). It remains a matter of debate whether songs were only put into writing after they had left the realm of oral knowledge and whether the process of writing had a mediating impact or even filtered the evidence by interests of a particular elite or social group. These mediating factors, it seems, made different interpretations of medieval cultures, i. e., ballads, songs, and libels, possible. Although these types of texts seem distinct, they have qualities in common that integrate them to a communicative genre. Put in terms that need further specification, all these texts focus on conflicting historical perceptions that are useful sources to understand the past. The empirical basis includes works from musicology, literary studies as well as ethnological studies. This interdisciplinarity builds bridges toward the study of culture in a more general, comprehensive sense, see Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Andreas C. Bimmer, and Siegfried Becker, Einführung in die Volkskunde / Europäische Ethnologie: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2003, 192–204.

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B.1. Ballads The popular ballad is a hybrid genre that is conceived as a European phenomenon including Eastern Europe, see the articles in Balladenforschung, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel, 1997, 77–154. The European field of medieval balladesque poetry has been divided into seven circles: Scandinavian as the richest, besides the English, German, Romanic, Balkan, West-Slavic, and Greater Russian ballads that are conceived as distinct areas of influence, see Gottfried Weissert, Ballade, 1980, 52, but, nevertheless, as a common European context. The following list acknowledges that the terminology was ‘loosely’ and ‘indiscriminately’ applied as described by Arthur K. Moore, “The Literary Status of the English Popular Ballad,” Comparative Literature 10.1 (1958): 1–20, esp. 2. The German Volksballade (popular ballad) is a longer text with several stanzas that was sometimes sung. Popular ballads were distributed in manuscript or broadside print form, topics of this 15th- and 16th-century genre were mainly love, family life, and social problems. The content was influenced by historical and epical figures, such as in the Hildebrandslied (for John Meier’s classical collection, see below) that is seen by some as one of the only remaining German examples; epical topics reach the German popular ballad, the Heldenzeitlied, only when it is received by the lower social strata, see Walter Hinck, “Volksballade – Kunstballade – Bänkelgesang,” Balladenforschung, Walter Müller-Seidel, 1980, 61–76, esp. 61, see also Albrecht Classen, “The Jüngeres Hildebrandslied in Its Early Modern Printed Versions: A Contribution to Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Reception History,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95 (1996): 359–81. The term covers mainly the medieval liet and maere and intends to distinguish it from the modern artificial ballad. The character of the popular ballad, its age, and author(s) are a matter of debate. What is agreed upon is the attachment of the popular ballad to singing and performing, the potential variability of the songs and the perseverance of mediating factors, the existence of typified expressions in these songs as well as the transnationality of certain motives, see Weissert, 1980, esp. 53. Scottish ballads were collected since the 17th century, the most important early collection being Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany, 1723–1737, followed by Thomas Percy’s collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, 1765. Based also on field studies of oral tradition, and implying a longe durée of preserving treasures of popular literature, is Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802–1803. This editor’s conjectures have been regarded as influenced by Romantic ideas but also as deeply knowledgeable. The first comprehen-

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sive edition of English-Scottish ballads with ‘academic’ intentions is the third improved edition of Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882–1898. These examples are landmarks in the field of ballad scholarship and were followed by different other editions. For these, see Wolfgang G. Müller, Die englisch-schottische Volksballade, 1983, 17–26, 212–19; David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, 1972. The term ballad was derived from the French courtly literature, but early English “ballads” included street, broadsides, and news ballads; for later receptions, see Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany, 1992, 17–26. In the Irish periphery of Europe, the “drama and song-and-dance” model of ballads was also assumed, see Hugh Shields, Narrative Singing in Ireland: Lays, Ballads, Come-All-Yes and other Songs, 1993, 41. Medieval Danish ballads were collected by Grundtvig, an adviser of Child, see Svend Grundtvig, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, 1853–1976. Throughout the Middle Ages, ballads continued to express “popular beliefs about the Past”; these perceptions could conflict as well, and a major quantitative change in this regard took place after printing had become a generally affordable means of distribution of information, see Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past. English Historical Culture 1500–1700, 2003, esp. 333, 340–44. Ballads could also invent historical events, apart from providing narrative accounts far from impartiality, for a saturated account of the poetical material see, Alfred Adler, “Die politische Satire,” La littérature didactique, allegorique et satirique, ed. Hans Robert Jauss, 1968, 146–244, 275–314, and 304–05. The material suggests the hybrid character of the popular ballad genre, but it was left to the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga to declare that popular ballads were pivotal elements of late-medieval mentality; for a critical assessment see Christoph Strupp, Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte, 2000, esp. 115–20. It is an achievement of his study on medieval France and the Netherlands to include ballads among other genres, styles, and social strata of literature in a cultural historiography of the Middle Ages. For Huizinga, ballads were an integral part of a historical culture; his mode of writing cultural history places the imagination of the past higher than consistent categorizations of the sources involved. From this point of view, popular ballad means popular culture in a romantic sense of rough humor, authentic emotions, deep-felt lust for life and joy, frequently combined with dances; thereby folklore is attributed a high value as mirror of popular “authentic sources of beauty,” see Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der middeleeuwen. Studiën over levens- en gedachtenvormen der vertiende en vijftiende

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eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden, 1919, passim. The genre seems to preserve notions of the late Middle Ages that have not found their way into the artifacts of elite literature of the time. Huizinga characterizes laughter as a natural expression of life; medieval folk had the strongest desire to soothe the hardship of their destiny and wanted to be entertained by an authentic culture, as well as be assured of salvation in diverse official and popular literary forms. Huizinga argues for a novel quality of life that emerged at the end of the medieval period. The image of the ballad culture is strongly formed by the interests of scholars, editors, and the cultural values of a particular present; besides positive medievalisms there could also be phenomena like suppressed ballad traditions, see Philip E. Bennett, “The Suppression of a Ballad Culture: the Enigma of Medieval France,” The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures, ed. Philip E. Bennett and Richard Firth Green, 2004, 105–22. In the British context, to be “balladed” remained a serious threat for anyone, especially after the ‘written hand literacy’ increased, see Adam Fox, “Ballads and Libels,” Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, ed. id., 2000, 299–334, esp. 303, 316, 321. Such powerful ballads were often intended as libels. B.2. Libels Libels were mostly anonymous accusations in the urban context. In Italian cities, there were specific walls where such short texts could be affixed and read; in Rome in particular, there was a tradition of talking fountains and statues, of which the Pasquino was the most famous, see Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication, 1987. Libels were prerequisites for (as well as weapons against) social status, see contributions about the European context in Ex Marmore: Pasquini, pasquinisti, pasquinate nell’Europa moderna, ed. Chrysa Damianaki, Paolo Procacioli, and Angelo Romano, 2006. Papal conclaves were principal occasion for the production of such satires; comprehensive editions are comparably recent, such as Pasquinate romane des Cinquecento, ed. Valerio Marucci and Antonio Marco, 1983. French evidence suggests intensive cultural transfer from Italy to France since 1500 in the light of satirical libelling, see Chiara Lastraioli, “Die ‘Pasquini’ – ein europäischer lieu de mémoire?,” Kulturtransfer: Kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfgang Schmale, 2004, 299–314. In the Dutch culture the crisis of the 16th century was suspended by laughing and the enemy was at least symbolically overwhelmed, see Markus Völkel, “Historiker oder Narr: Das Lächerliche in Theorie und Praxis frühneuzeitlicher Geschichtsschreibung

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(16. und 17. Jahrhundert),” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 21.4 (1994): 483–511, esp. 505. Individuals were ridiculed in libels by drawing exempla to extremes, see Heinz-Günter Schmitz, Physiologie des Scherzes. Bedeutung und Rechtfertigung der Ars Iocandi im 16. Jahrhundert, 1972, here 34. Legal regulations throughout the Middle Ages until the modern period regarded any anonymous text, image or combination a libel if it hurt the honor of the addressee. The libelli famosi-tradition could take any form of written communication, see Günther Schmidt, Libelli famosi: Zur Bedeutung der Schmähschriften, Scheltbriefe, Schandgemälde und Pasquille in der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, 1985, 146. The genre of defamatory pictures, by contrast, was not anonymous, but affected the honor of a person in a somewhat legal, contracted way; scatological images insulted the person with a visual rhetoric involving sodomite actions with the person’s seal. It is obvious why only few examples of these sources survived, the remaining evidence is catalogued in Lentz (2004). Similar scabrous assaults were hauled upon “materia giocosa,” i. e., social groups or more general entities (the world, women) by early Tuscan poetry that – in consequence – was often clandestine, see Dietmar Frenz, Kunstvolles Schmähen: Frühe toskanische Dichtung und mittellateinische Poetik, 2006, 5. Satire, parody, and libel were frequent in Italian poetry and extended to confessional matters, see Marianne Albrecht-Bott, Die bildende Kunst in der italienischen Lyrik der Renaissance und des Barock: Studien zur Beschreibung von Portraits und anderen Bildwerken unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von G. B. Marinos ‘Galleria’, 1976, 90–98. Any communicative act could be perceived as libelous, especially in the case of blasphemy, see Gerd Schwerhoff, Zungen wie Schwerter: Blasphemie in alteuropäischen Gesellschaften 1200–1650, 2005, esp. 281–89. Christian-Jewish relationships were accompanied by libellous polemics from both sides, including cases of self-censorship since the early Middle Ages. Satirical commentaries on the gospel and the life of Jesus in particular circulated in prints throughout Europe and the Mediterranean area, but archival evidence is restricted to manuscripts; another clandestine technique besides destroying the evidence was cryptifying the names of Christian holy places, rituals, and values, a reaction to the missionary pressure of the majority culture, a comprehensive account in Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, 2nd ed. 2003 [orig. 1998], 133–35. During the Reformation period, controversial publishing was frequently regarded as libellous, see Hans Peterse, Jacobus Hoogstraeten gegen Johannes Reuchlin: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antijudaismus im 16. Jahrhundert, 1995, as well as Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, 2005. Farce-literature, dialogues, and assaults in the form of songs could be re-

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garded as libellous, such as in the context of anti-Judaism, see e. g. Matthias Schönleber, “‘der juden schant wart offenbar’: Antijüdische Motive in Schwänken und Fastnachtsspielen von Hans Folz,” Juden in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Religiöse Konzepte – Feindbilder – Rechtfertigungen, ed. Ursula Schulze, 2002, 163–82; for the spectrum of genres involved, see Martin Bauer, Die ‘Gemain Sag’ im späteren Mittelalter: Studien zu einem Faktor mittelalterlicher Öffentlichkeit und seinem historischen Auskunftswert, 1981. B.3. Songs Songs are not sharply distinguishable from ballads and libels, because the mode of delivery is the distinguishing trait. In addition to the logical problem, there are problems generated by the ambivalent research history. The Historisches Volkslied-terminology remains a disputed category; medieval songs could be subject to – say 17th-century – medievalisms. Collections were based on selections, for example based on anti-papal preferences, see Leopold Schmidt, Volksgesang und Volkslied: Proben und Probleme, 1970, 62. Few collections are contemporary, Liliencron’s collection informs us about a number of its sources (Rochus von Liliencron, Die historischen Volkslieder der Deutschen vom 13. bis 16. Jahrhundert, 5 vols., 1865–1869), early collections were probably overshadowed by Herder’s hypostatic re-evaluation of the material, a part of the reception that is best summarized in Leopold Schmidt, “Das Volkslied in der Wissenschafts- und Sammlertätigkeit der Volkskunde,” Handbuch des Volksliedes. vol. 2: Historisches und Systematisches – interethnische Beziehungen – Musikethnologie, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, 1975, 9–24. There were collections with confessional bias, but usually following Romantic ideals during the 19th century, see the sources section in Dietmar Sauermann, Historische Volkslieder des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Volksliedforschung und zum Problem der volkstümlichen Geschichtsbetrachtung, 1968. Luther’s songs are a perfect example of songs promulgated in their own times, being popular at the time and bringing messages across to the audience and thereby forming identity, not exclusively during the Reformation period, see Pettegree (2005). Major song collections are those of Leonard von Soltau, of Ferdinand Rochus von Liliencron, as well as of C. C. van de Graft, Middelnederlandsche historieliederen, omgewijzigde herdruk der uitgrave van 1904, 1968; for more specific classifications of songs (i. e., conflicts between established social groups with other groups and marginalization processes of Jews, heretics, and criminals), see Steinitz’s collection; John Meier collected the material in the Freiburg archive, see Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Melodien, ed. Deut-

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sches Volksliedarchiv, 1935ff. For comprehensive bibliographical information see Dietmar Sauermann, “Das historisch-politische Lied,” Handbuch des Volksliedes. vol. 1: Die Gattungen des Volksliedes, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, 1973, 293–322, here 322; Ernst Klusen, “Das sozialkritische Lied,” Handbuch des Volksliedes. vol. 1: Die Gattungen des Volksliedes, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, 1973, 737–60, here 739; Bibliographie der Literatur zum deutschen Volkslied: Mit Standortangaben an den wichtigsten Archiven und Bibliotheken der DDR, ed. Jürgen B. Wolff and Erik Kross, 1987. Scholars with regional focus collected material and thereby demonstrated how much the historian of songs relies on secondary sources, such as chronicles, translations and so on that imposed their particular political point of view on the material presented, see, for example, Werner Schwarz, Pommersche Musikgeschichte. Historischer Überblick und Lebensbilder. Teil 1: Historischer Überblick, 1988, 233–69. C. Research History Our knowledge of relevant texts and their tradition highly depends on the history of research. Both have often proven somewhat hypothetical, nevertheless there are several editions. French pamphlets before 1601 have not been collected comprehensively until recently (French Vernacular Books, ed. Andrew Pettegree, 2007, 2 vols.); reasons for the reluctance of research are not always as obvious as in the case of pornographic libels in the Holy Roman Empire, see also Matthias Lentz, “Defamatory Pictures and Letters in Late Medieval Germany: The Visualisation of Disorder and Infamy,” The Medieval History Journal 3.1 (2000): 139–60. There was of course a confessional interest by contemporaries in the 16th century (as well as throughout the early modern and modern periods) to further their confessional party in the light of historical texts; the confessional element seems to have dominated research until the interest in culture evolved in the 18th century, probably first in the case of European border region that had for long not been deeply Christianized in daily practices and therefore showed folkloristic practices and superstitions that could appear to observers like Herder as specifically original, see Weber-Kellermann, Bimmer, and Becker (2003), 9–20. After Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld (1604), the political lyrical literature has not been dealt with in comprehensive historical perspective until Wilhelm Schlegel’s selective edition of Gedichte auf Rudolf von Habsburg von Zeitgenossen, 1812. The 19th century experienced political instrumentalization of medieval political lyrics, according to the premises of movements like liberalism, confessional debate about ultramontanism and

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national identification, see Ulrich Müller, Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 1974, vol. 1, 29–37. Jacob Burkhardt’s historiography about the evolving state in Italian city republics interpreted clandestine libellous communication as a disturbance of the emerging public order, see Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860, 167–79 et passim. Following this negative appreciation of clandestine communication, Bakthin declared the existence of a popular (vs. a serious elite) culture of laughter, see Michail M. Bakhtin Rabelais and His World, 1993. Medievalists opposed this creative theory and rendered it absurd, lacking of medieval archival evidence, e. g., Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, “Lachkultur des Mittelalters? Michael Bachtin und die Folgen seiner Theorie,” Euphorion 84 (1990): 89–111. Nevertheless, historians have frequently highlighted the relevance of laughter and humor for the understanding of historical cultures, sometimes highlighting literary sources, see Johan Verbeckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands, 1999; Olle Ferm, Abboten, bonden och hölasset: Skratt och humor under medeltiden, 2002; sometimes concentrating on political protest, see recently Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, “Introduction: Humour and History,” A Cultural History of Humour from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 1997, 9–17; Marjolein t’Hart, “Humour and Social Protest: An Introduction,” Humour and Social Protest, ed. Marjolein t’Hart and Dennis Bos, 2007, 1–20. A second, substantially similar scholarly approach to humor and laughter existed but was not nearly as intensively received by Western scholarship, see Dmitrij S. Pancenko and Aleksandr M. Lichacev, ‘Smechovoj mir’ drevnej Rusi, 1976. Recent studies of humor as a medium of critical or libellous expression seem to be supported by emotional history, see Peter Burke, “Is There a Cultural History of the Emotions?,” Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine, ed. Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, 2005, 35–49; Rüdiger Schnell, “Historische Emotionsforschung: Eine mediävistische Standortbestimmung,” FMSt 38 (2004): 173–276. Although relevant historiographical genres were hard to categorize, humor was seen as definitely involved in historical imagination, see Völkel (1994) and Woolf (2003), here 302. The term Historisches Volkslied was first coined by Leopold von Soltau [Leopold von Soltau, Ein Hundert deutsche historische Volkslieder, 1836] and made popular by von Liliencron, who saw the original mentality of the German people at work; according to his narrative, singing Germans overcame ‘decadent’ Burgundian court culture until 1530, fighting “intellectual wars of liberation,” see Rochus von Liliencron, Deutsches Leben im Volkslied

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um 1530, 1884. In a way, the aura of popular culture and the notion of a historical subject “Volk” remained intact even in some of the best of recent scholarhip, whether in the form of ‘popular’ resistance or in explicit words such as “helle Lache des Volkes,” see Donald J. Ward, “Scherz- und Spottlieder,” Handbuch des Volksliedes. vol. 1: Die Gattungen des Volksliedes, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, 1973, 691–736 and 734, or in the distinction of historically authentic and artificial folk music in the late Middle Ages, see Walter Salmen, “Das gemachte ‘neue Lied’ im Spätmittelalter,” Handbuch des Volksliedes. vol. 2: Historisches und Systematisches – interethnische Beziehungen – Musikethnologie, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Lutz Röhrich, and Wolfgang Suppan, 1975, 407–20. The Reformation period showed more than others how widely songs circulated; they were taken in ‘public ownership’ and openly perceived, as frequent cases of contra-facture of these literary products demonstrate; songs were distributed by way of colportage, semi-professional singers on marketplaces, and single-leaf publishing; a hybrid form of up-to-date information, entertainment, and commercial interest was the news song (Zeitungslied) that highlighted somewhat topical content as recent, see Hartmut Braun, Einführung in die musikalische Volkskunde, 1985, 84–5. The terminology of the popular historical song was misused by extreme approaches to folk music under fascist and nationalist regimes in the 20th century, incorporating ethnical, political, and geographical interests into the legitimizing research of popular music as a key to the ‘original’ historical life of a people as represented in ballads and songs still sung at the time of the research. The Freiburg Volksliedarchiv was a central institution, see Otto Holzapfel, Das Deutsche Volksliedarchiv Freiburg i. Br., 1989, but was in close touch with provincial archives like that of Pomerania, see Schwarz (1988), 267; for the involvement of John Meier see also Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaft. Personen – Institutionen – Forschungsprogramme – Stiftungen, ed. Ingo Haar and Matthias Berg, 2008, 21. The most comprehensive and influential collection remained Liliencron’s. It conceived historical popular songs as anonymous, popular and broadly disseminated. Scholarship has shown obvious inconsistencies in Liliencron’s collection of songs. Quantitative approaches with fixed criteria revealed how Liliencron’s influential collection bridged several empirical gaps across separate genres, harmonized differences of archival evidence and poetological distinctions between libellous and erotic contents, see Ulrich Müller, “‘Historisches’ Volkslied: Überlegungen zu einem verfehlten Terminus,” Historische Volksmusikforschung: Bericht über die 4. Arbeitstagung der Studiengruppe zur Erforschung und Edition historischer Volksmusikquellen im Inter-

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national Folk Music Council vom 7. bis 12. April 1975 in Kazimierz Dolny, ed. Alois Mauerhofer, Wolfgang Suppan, and Ludwig Bielawski, 1979, 111–21, 114. In East Germany until 1989, folklorist studies were given high priority. Under the uncompromising premise of historical progression in the sense of Marxist ideology, song collections in high technical quality appeared in print, see Wolfgang Steinitz, Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten, ed. Hermann Strobach, 1978. Despite apparent continuities in the terminology from the 19th century, new political elements were implemented into the heuristic framework, for examples see Geschichte der deutschen Volksdichtung, ed. Hermann Strobach, 1981. Ideological reinterpretations must have been a reaction to the Fascist instrumentalization of “the folk” in an ethnic sense of the term. Priorities were now differently set for a similar object; e. g., anarchical satire was systematically cast out to further an image of the past as permanent ‘serious’ class struggle, see Eckhard John, “Die Entdeckung des sozialkritischen Liedes: Steinitz als Wegbereiter eines neuen ‘Volkslied’-Verständnisses,” Die Entdeckung des sozialkritischen Liedes: Zum 100. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Steinitz, ed. Eckhard John, 2006, 13–25, here 19. Probably more than other fields, European Ethnology is currently in transition to create a reflected history of the discipline’s political involvement, see e. g. Weber-Kellermann, Bimmer, and Becker (2003), 123–36. Medievalist scholarship has first commented on the desirable clarification in the use of terms, see Müller (1974), vol. 1, 26–28, a tendency that was generally supported and extended by historical scholarship, see Schanze (1999); archival tradition as well as other forms of tradition had a mediating impact on the material. Recent discussions argue for a comprehensive empirical context, but nevertheless seem somewhat precedented by the thorough case study of Kieslich; its focus is on communicative aspects of folk songs, a term already put into quotation marks to identify the relation to the dominant conception of that ‘genre’ dating from the 19th century. Kieslich distinguishes what different songs were ‘doing,’ i. e., whether they stimulated or settled conflicts, or stabilized the existing political order; his distinctions are in substance pragmalinguistic ones, see Günter Kieslich, Das ‘Historische Volkslied’ als publizistische Erscheinung: Untersuchungen zu Wesensbestimmung und Typologie der gereimten Publizistik zur Zeit des Regensburger Reichstages und des Krieges der Schmalkaldener gegen Herzog Heinrich den Jüngeren von Braunschweig 1540–1542, 1958. Some of the best of recent scholarship in textual linguistics has argued quite similar if not identical to Kieslich that the action intended by the text

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or its author should be the main criterion to classify genres, see Oskar Reichmann, “Autorenintention und Textsorte,” Textarten im Sprachwandel – nach der Erfindung des Buchdrucks, ed. Rudolf Grosse and Hans Wellmann, 1996, 119–34. Much of the research history regarding ballads, libels, and especially songs can be read as a possibly unintended extrapolation from the principle to appreciate the text’s or its author’s intention to act in social contexts. On a comprehensive scale, applied to the entirety of all medieval texts, this pragmalinguistic approach may seem too generalistic to be useful for the historian working in a particular empirical context, see the empirical breadth of text in categories such as “texts that inform,” “texts that entertain,” or “texts that legitimate” in Frühneuhochdeutsches Lesebuch, ed. Oskar Reichmann and Klaus-Peter Wegera, 1988, 26–51, 147–69, 170–90. The basis of the conceptual framework is, nevertheless, the most convincing to date. Traces of it can be found in the several different approaches of scholarship to interpret the poetologically inconsistent material; these include the topics of the public sphere, gender, honor, laughter as well as the field of historical anthropology more generally. Scholarship on public sphere has become more attentive to elements of reciprocal communication, rather than exclusively focusing on the dawn of modernity around 1800, see Andreas Gestrich, “Politik im Alltag: Zur Funktion politischer Information im deutschen Absolutismus des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts,” Alltag in der Zeit der Aufklärung, ed. Klaus Gerteis, 1990, 9–28. The Reformation is seen as a period of intensified public communication, when the literary market, one-leaf printing, and singing became strong means of influence. A translation of “publica voce” (Machiavelli) could therefore remain ambivalent, until studies of public opinion showed the need for revision of the first half of the structural change of the public as outlined in Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, 1962. Uprisings throughout the later Middle Ages demonstrate that communication and even representation were far more reciprocal than expected; “fama publica” was not a static entity but the result of continuous communication, both apologetic and critical, for “geschrey” see Bauer (1981); Gerd Schwerhoff, “Öffentliche Räume und politische Kultur in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt: Eine Skizze am Beispiel der Reichsstadt Köln,” Interaktion und Herrschaft: Die Politik der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt, ed. Rudolf Schlögl, 2004, 113–36, 127. While the concept of public opinion seems to be a project of the Enlightenment, there was a disposition in the medieval audience of ballads, libels, and songs to perceive and judge their living and imagined world; “Pas-

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quini” (rather than the Roman statue “Pasquino”) developed into a European literary genre that resembled a public sphere in its declared thrive for truth. Songs as well as ballads were part of partial and unfair discussions, as a case study of the Cities’ War by mid-15th century shows. Kellermann deals with the Volkslied by way of induction, see Karina Kellermann, Abschied vom ‘historischen Volkslied’: Studien zu Funktion, Ästhetik und Publizität der Gattung historisch-politische Ereignisdichtung, 2000, 49, and derives the genre of “historisch-politische Ereignisdichtung,” defined by the content that is dominated by political conflict. She regards the boundary to the “historical ballad” as blurred, since the legitimative purpose (rather than poetological patterns of form) ruled the application of literary means. Ballads in Kellermann’s sense are never impartial, but libellous. Although ballads were always attached to particular political situations, this quality might be staged by the producers or be the result of performative mediation. Subtly modifying, partially highlighting, leaving away or deceiving, agitating openly all belonged to the repertoire of political lyrics. The year 1517 constitutes a break, because political lyrics in the Reformation period were confessionally based, in addition to a quantitative gap of public communication extending to a first ‘public sphere.’ The 15th-century public, Kellermann argues, was more occasionistic and depended on the polarizing impact of political lyric on group identities, see Kellermann (2000), 51, 57–58, 363. The 15th and 16th centuries can be distinguished by quantitative differences, also marked by years like 1524, the ‘year of singing’ (‘Liederjahr’), when Luther became increasingly active as composer and musician and added further strength to the Reformation’s (not exclusively Protestants’) media concert that penetrated the society through the diffuse powerful channels of informal and intensive oral communication, see Johannes Burkhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert: Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung 1517–1617, 2002, 58. Libellous literature was interpreted as a form of honor communication as well. In early medieval Ireland individuals were afraid to lose their faces by songs of jocular nature aimed at their honor; this was a typical shame culture that more and more developed into a guilt culture that internalized the sense of honor, see Ward (1973), 696. During the early Middle Ages, certain topics like sodomy, pederasty, and cowardliness dominated the public forms of communication; there was a superstititional element in these songs that could repeat the name of the insulted person, and curse it (“Fluch-/Schadenzauber”); magical connotations of songs have especially been preserved in carnivalesque singing, see Felix Hoerburger, Musica Vulgaris: Lebensgesetze

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der instrumentalen Volksmusik, 1966, 77–80, in analogy to libellous portraits, see Franco Sacchetti, “Das Porträt auf dem Kopf: Schandmalerei, Ironie und forensische Praxis (ca. 1392),” Porträt, ed. Rudolf Preimesberger, Hannah Baader, and Nicola Suthor, 1999, 195–200, esp. 199. The evidence shows continuous emergence of genres like “Schimpfliet,” “Twingliet,” “Scheltliet,” and “Rüegeliet,” often categorized by editors as Sangspruch, see Ward (1973), 703. In the light of the scarce evidence of jocular songs, interpreters seem somewhat free to see courtly and popular literature intertwined. Most songs relied on oral tradition because they were attached to the time structure of urban life as well on the dispersion of information, see Wolfgang Suppan, Deutsches Liedleben zwischen Renaissance und Barock: Die Schichtung des deutschen Liedguts in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1973, 13; the ethnological perspective has long explained that written sources are a mediated substrate of oral communication, the anthropology of media has shown the analogy of oral communication during the late Middle Ages and the age of print. The concept of a ‘Great Divide’ around the late 18th century is critically reassessed in Peter Burke and Asa Briggs, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2002, esp. 13; for the impact of the increase in literacy on the singing culture see Suppan (1973), 37. Recent approaches to premodern media interpret historical theories of the media, including theological connotations of images and texts and show that concepts of media theory must be re-examined to shed light on performance and reception practices. The topic of honor comes up beyond sheer situational criticism. Several songs deal critically with the ambition of young women to social advancement, see Ward (1973), 716; Schmidt (1985), 180. Several trades like millers, shepherds, or rich farmers are criticized for stereotypical reasons, such as cheating, sodomy, and unfairness in social relations with their inferiors; clerics or minorities could be hit by such assaults, see Klusen (1973), 745. The history of early modern women has been considered as part of the history of “street literature” in the sense of clandestine and popular texts, see for ballads, pamphlets, jestbooks, and the like Wiltenburg (1992), 30–34, 100, et passim. In a cultural transfer from Italy to France, during the years following 1500, satirical libel called “pasquinati” were translated from Italian and French and made the honor of individuals a matter of public debate, see Lastraioli (2004). Blasphemic libel received a new interpretation beyond a merely religious debate; blasphemers were very much acting in their social contexts, therefore a pragmalinguistic approach is needed to interpret ballads and libel, see Francisca Loetz, “How to do Things with God: Blasphemy

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in Early Modern Switzerland,” Ways of Knowing. Ten Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Mary Lindemann, 2004, 137–52; Schwerhoff (2005), esp. 281. The political context is increasingly interpreted as reciprocal communication, a formerly underestimated paradigm in urban history, see Robert Jütte, “Sprachliches Handeln und kommunikative Situation: Diskurs zwischen Obrigkeit und Untertanen am Beginn der Neuzeit,” Kommunikation und Alltag in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Hundsbichler, 1992, 159–81. D. Conclusion The object of this article is presented in the form of a working-definition. Even if one follows one of the different approaches to communication in ballads, songs, or libel specifically, parallels cannot be overlooked. Although there are many open questions and a need for further research, there are, nevertheless, main currents of interest in research equally regarding ballads, songs, and libels. Relevant texts like rhymed historical political narratives, satires, and defamatory literary forms were often at the borderline of clandestine and officious, and critical and affirmative communication. The emphasis is on the political, the “field of textual political communication”: for an overview of useful or necessary limits of this field see Frieder Schanze, “Überlieferungsformen politischer Dichtungen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter: Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff, 1999, 299–331, esp. 301. Their potential communicative function is often described by more or less implicitly positioning them in a particular set of dichotomies. Ballads, songs, and libels are discussed with regard to the learned or popular, as well as the oral or written, textual or plurimedial (images/music) realm. Was their intended role in communication rather affirmative, agitative, or destructive? Can political and religious, serious and humorous or political and consolatory discourse be sharply distinguished? Most examples can be comprehensively described by an entire set of the given categories. This is not to say that there was no change of manuscript communication after the production of printed material became more affordable. Historical description adds to these questions, because the empirical basis was in most cases synchronically selected. To summarize the history and the current state of research, one may extrapolate that researchers’ interest in communication has continuously grown during the last decades, including debates regarding established questions such as what impact popular media had in a world possibly domi-

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nated by elite culture. The interpretation of media and media practices yield insights into dialogical reciprocal interaction of different social groups. Further studies in this field will elucidate further political communication and culture throughout the premodern period. Select Bibliography David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972); Chiara Lastraioli, “Die ‘Pasquini’ – ein europäischer lieu de mémoire?,” Kulturtransfer: Kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfgang Schmale (Vienna: Studien-Verlag, 2004), 299–314; Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung: Untersuchungen zu den Schmähbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ca. 1350 bis 1600). Mit einem illustrierten Katalog der Überlieferung (Hanover: Hahn, 2004); Francisca Loetz, “How to do Things with God: Blasphemy in Early Modern Switzerland,” Ways of Knowing. Ten Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Mary Lindemann (Boston: Brill, 2004), 137–52; Oskar Reichmann, “Autorenintention und Textsorte,” Textarten im Sprachwandel – nach der Erfindung des Buchdrucks, ed. Rudolf Grosse/Hans Wellmann (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), 119–34; Frieder Schanze, “Überlieferungsformen politischer Dichtungen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter: Erfassen, Bewahren, Verändern, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff (Munich: Fink, 1999), 299–331.

Christian Kuhn

Bestiaries, Aviaries, Physiologus A. Introduction Scholarly interest in the relationships between humans and beasts and birds has expanded greatly from the late 19th century to the present, and studies concerning these relationships specifically within the medieval period are common. Within this broader field of animal studies, a more specific interest in bestiaries and aviaries exists, and has developed in tandem with an interest in the relationship of these genres to their classical sources. The bestiary (book of beasts) is a book or manuscript that presents images of birds, animals, or other creatures, actual or imagined, along with interpretive and moralizing narratives that reflect the human world and simultaneously promote Christian doctrine. The aviary (book of birds), which similarly presents didactic morals through its catalogue of winged beings, is often included as a category within bestiary texts, but it also appears on its own. Both the bestiary and the aviary, genres that blossomed in the late Middle Ages, primarily

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in Latin and French, are descendants of the Greek Physiologus, a primarily theological work comprised of approximately twenty to fifty moralized animal tales that articulate Christian themes and concerns. B. Physiologus One of the earliest trends in scholarship on the Physiologus was the publication of annotated editions. During the late 19th century, no less than seven versions of the Physiologus were published, and a few editions appeared in the mid- to late 20th century. Francesco Sbordone’s Physiologus (1936) is considered the authoritative edition of the Greek text, although others precede it, such J. B. Pitra’s Spicilegium Solesmense (1855) and Friedrich Lauchert’s Geschichte des Physiologus (1889), or follow it, such as Dimitris Kaimakis’s Der Physiologus nach der ersten Redaktion (1974). Although Sbordone’s text supersedes Lauchert’s as the authoritative edition, the latter’s study is still considered the most comprehensive to date, and it set an early precedent for subsequent studies. Lauchert provides details on the individual Physiologus legends, including information on the dates, origins, and sources of each legend, as well as similar information on the texts and manuscripts overall. In addition, he provides information on the later histories of the Latin and vernacular translations of the Greek text as well as on the Physiologus’s influence on trends in visual art forms, a field of study that extends to bestiaries and aviaries. Later scholars, such as Nikolaus Henkel (Studien zum Physiologus im Mittelalter, 1976) and Francis Klingender (Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages, 1971), continued this avenue of inquiry, and have completed examinations of the animal forms within the Physiologus within the broader field of art history. Following Lauchert’s example, Sbordone’s edition, which is based upon the data gathered from his study of over seventy manuscript variants, provides extensive details on the analogues and sources of the Greek text. As Michael J. Curley notes in Physiologus (1979) – his modern translation of the Latin texts edited by Francis J. Carmody (Physiologus Latinus: Éditions préliminaires, versio B, 1939, and “Physiologus Latinus, versio Y,” 1941) – some of these sources include Aristotle’s On the History of Animals, Pliny’s Natural History, and Aelian’s History of Animals, as well as non-literary sources such as folklore and legend from eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Sbordone’s study also continues the debate concerning the possible authorship of the Greek text, noting that the Byzantian recension of the Physiologus identifies Solomon and Saint Basil as the pagan and Christian authors respectively. Here, Sbordone is influenced by Karl Ahrens, who, in Zur Geschichte des sogenannten Physiologus (1885), theorized that the Greek Physiologus was actually

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a composite of two separate pieces, with legends written by a pagan author comprising the first part, and exegesis written by a Christian author comprising the second part. Not all scholars support this view, however. Max Wellman, for instance, argues that the author was a disciple of the Greek church father Origen (“Der ‘Physiologus,’ Eine religionsgeschichtlichnaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung,” Philologus, Supplementband 22.1 [1930]: 1–116), a view that has been commented upon by Sbordone (Ricerche sulle fonti e sulla composizione del Physiologus greco, 1936) and refuted by Ben E. Perry (“‘Physiologus,’” Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft [1941]: 1074–129). In fact, the debate over authorship can be traced back as far as the 4th century AD, to the Syrian translation of the Greek text. As Curley notes, the Syrian text, edited by J. P. N. Land (Anecdota Syriaca, 1874), attributes authorship to St. Basil in its opening title, “liber Physiologi sive verba facientis de naturis, et compositus est a S. Basilio, cum theoria sive expositione ex illis deprompta” (Physiologus, 1979, xxvii). Since then, numerous other well-known names have been attached to various Physiologus texts as potential authors, including Peter of Alexandria, Ambrose, Jerome, and John Chrysostom. More recently, Beryl Rowland returned to the question of St. Basil’s authorship and argued that the Saint’s allegorical style has very little in common with the extended allegorizations of the Physiologus (“The Relationship of St. Basil’s ‘Hexameron’ to the ‘Physiologus,’” Epopée animale, fable, fabliau, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat, 1984, 489–98). Similar debates surround the Physiologus’s composition date and origins. Sbordone draws upon data from his extensive study of the Greek manuscripts and concludes that the original text was composed ca. AD 200, a view similar to that of Lauchert, although Lauchert argues for the possibility of a date as early as AD 140. Contrarily, scholars such as Ahrens and Wellman suggest that the text was written considerably later, probably during the 4th century. Yet, despite their disagreement over specific composition dates, scholars generally concede that since translations of the Greek text appear in the early 5th century, first in Ethiopian, and then in Syrian and Armenian, the Physiologus must have been in circulation by the 4th century. Studies of early translations such as these provide insight not only to the Greek text’s transmission but also to its origins because they display a high degree of fidelity to the original. For example, Fritz Hommel, in his edition of the Ethopian translation, Die aethiopische Übersetzung des Physiologus (1877), posits that the Greek original has specifically Alexandrian origins, an argument that Emma Brunner-Traut reinforces in her study of Egyptian myths within the text (“Altägyptische Mythen im ‘Physiologus,’” Antaios 10.2 [July 1968]: 184–98).

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Early publications of translations of the Greek text have also led to specific trends in research. The Old English translation, which was originally edited and then translated by Albert. S. Cook (The Old English Elene, Phoenix and Physiologus, 1919, and The Old English Physiologus, 1921), was recently reedited by Ann Squires (The Old English Physiologus, 1988). This re-edition coincided with a revival in critical attention, much of which concerns the generic nature and religious significance of the Old English text. In particular, parallels have been drawn between the Physiologus of the Exeter Book and other Old English poems. Douglas R. Letson, for instance, compares the text to homilies (“The Old English ‘Physiologus’ and the Homiletic Tradition,” Florilegium 1 [1979]: 15–41), as does Andrea Rossi-Reder, who expands this argument to suggest that the Old English text is complete rather than fragmentary, and that it is an Easter poem similar in nature to the homilies, one that leads its Christian readers through the rituals of Lent and that helps them prepare for Judgement (“Beasts and Baptism: A New Perspective on the Old English ‘Physiologus,’” Neophilologus 83.3 [July 1999]: 461–77). Studies concerning the role of the Physiologus in religious narratives are not exclusive to the Old English text. Curley has also written on the Physiologus’s author’s ability to infuse pagan tales with Christian morals through animal symbolism, and suggests that the Greek text is an early and influential contributor to the field of Christian allegory (“‘Physiologus,’ Fysiologia and the Rise of Christian Nature Symbolism,” Viator 11 [1980]: 1–10). Indeed, manuscripts and translations of the Physiologus survived precisely because they could be used by church fathers (classical and medieval) as rhetorical models in monastic classrooms and as didactic examples for sermons; the beasts and birds within the text operated as exemplars for their human (and Christian) audiences. C. Bestiaries and Aviaries In the 12th century, Latin versions of the Physiologus were expanded through the inclusion of new chapters on various birds and animals as well as through the integration of material from encyclopedic works such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, especially material from Book 12 (“Concerning Animals”), and Ambrose’s Hexameron. These expanded versions (which became known specifically as bestiaries) divided the Physiologus and additional materials into zoological categories, expanded upon the exegetical commentaries, and added coordinating illuminated figures or images. Ultimately, these new texts – the bestiaries – had a greater popularity than the earlier Physiologus. Over forty Latin Bestiaries are extant, most of which were produced in England between the 12th and 14th centuries. Some

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of the more renowned Latin bestiary manuscripts are available in facsimile, but only a few are available in translation. The Bodley Bestiary is available as a facsimile, edited by Christopher de Hamel (The Book of Beasts: A Facsimile of MS. Bodley 764, 2008), and in a translation by Richard Barber (Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M. S. Bodley 764 with All the Original Miniatures Reproduced in Fascimile, 1992). Similarly, the University Library Cambridge bestiary is available as a facsimile, edited by Montague Rhodes James (Bestiary: Being a Reproduction in Full of MS. Ii 4. 26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from Other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of the Latin Bestiary as Current in England, 1928), and in a translation by T. H. White (The Book of Beasts, 1954). One of the most persistent areas of study concerning the bestiary is, of course, its relationship to the Physiologus. The earliest and most significant study in this area is James’s Bestiary: Being a Reproduction in Full of MS. Ii 4. 26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from Other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of the Latin Bestiary as Current in England, 1928. In this study, James identifies four basic categories, or “families,” which group together manuscripts with similar content. The first family includes all of the variant Latin Physiologus manuscripts, all of which were produced on the continent between the 8th and 10th centuries and which also are typically organized into three groups or versions: version Y (extant in three separate manuscripts: Munich, Lat. 19417; Munich, Lat. 14388; and Bern Lat. 611), version B (Bern, Lat. 233), and version C (Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Lat. 318). The second family includes bestiary manuscripts in which the Physiologus text has been expanded with extra material from Isidore, Abmrose, and/or other sources. The third and fourth families include larger bestiaries, with a greater number of entries drawn from Isidore’s Etymologies and a greater number of entries and illustrations of fish, invertebrates, and birds. Many of the bestiaries in these latter two families also have remarkably similar illustrations of animal and bird forms. In Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (1959, 1962), Florence McCulloch modifies James’s system. She breaks the manuscript “families” into smaller groups (“sub-families”), and includes a number of manuscripts overlooked by James. For example, in the first family, she includes a 10th-century composite of Physiologus, version A (Brussels, Bibl. Roy. 10074). She also includes the De bestiis et aliis rebus, a text erroneously attributed to Hugh of Saint Victor, and discusses, albeit briefly, the first book of this text, which is comprised entirely of birds and is known as the Aviarum. McCulloch also introduces a new category of “transitional” manuscripts (manuscripts that have similarities with other texts in more than one group or family), and refers to

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these manuscripts as the B-Is (B for the B version of the Physiologus, I for content that derives directly from Isidore). She includes in her study the fragmented and non-allegorical Glossary of Ansileubus, which includes twenty-two entries from the Physiologus, and two manuscripts that she refers to as other “principal” texts, the Physiologus of Theobaldus and the Dicta Chrysostomi (a text erroneously attributed to John Chrysostom). McCulloch also extends her study to include vernacular bestiaries in French from the 12th and 13th centuries, specifically those of de Thaon, Gervaise, Guillaume le Clerc, and Pierre de Beauvais. Although she does not place these new listings within the family system, she does examine their relationship to the Physiologus. A number of scholars have followed her example in this area of study. Xenia Muratova has written numerous journal and book articles over the last thirty years concerning the relationship between the Physiologus and its vernacular translations (see, for example, “Problèmes de l’origine et des sources des cycles d’illustrations des manuscrits des bestiaires,” Epopée animale, fable, fabliau, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat, 1984, 383–408, and “Aspects de la transmission textuelle et picturale des manuscrits des bestiaires anglais à la fin du XIIe et au début du XIIIe siècle,” Comprendre et maîtriser la nature au Moyen Age: Mélanges d’histoire des sciences offerts à Guy Beaujouan, 1994, 579–605), as have F. N. M. Diekstra (“The ‘Physiologus,’ the Bestiaries and Medieval Animal Lore,” Neophilologus 69.1 [Jan. 1985]: 142–55) and J. Holli Wheatcroft (“Classical Ideology in the Medieval Bestiary,” The Mark of the Beast, ed. Debra Hassig, 2000, 141–54). The system suggested by James and revised by McCulloch persists in much of the extant bestiary scholarship, although it is frequently modified when used. However, it is certainly not the only methodology employed by scholars, especially in more recent studies. Many of the recent studies are concerned with questions of textual transmission, but not just those arising from the relationship between bestiaries and the Physiologus. Attention has turned, instead, to the questions of textual transmission, translation, and adaptation that arise from the movement of texts from the secular to the vernacular languages, and from the monastic to the lay audiences. Other recent trends reflect the frequent overlap bestiary studies experience with studies on animals and animal symbolism in the Middle Ages. Commentary on the bestiary tradition appears, for instance, in studies such as Joyce E. Salisbury’s The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (1994), which focuses on the interaction between humans and birds and animals (domestic and wild), as well as in studies concerning the human interpretation and representation of other species in, for example, art and architecture. Two such articles ap-

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pear in the volume edited by L. A. J. R. Houwen, Animals and the Symbolic in Medieval Art and Literature (1997), one by Jan. M. Ziolkowski (“Literary Genre and Animal Symbolism,” 1–23), the other by Masuyo Tokita Darling (“A Sculptural Fragment from Cluny III and the Three-Headed Bird Iconography,” 209–23). A large part of the recent criticism on bestiaries also examines the genre’s influence on other literary forms such as love poetry, psalters, Books of Hours, and medieval romance. For instance, both Gabriel Bianciotto (“Sur le ‘Bestiaire d’amour’ de Richart de Fournival,” Epopée animale, fable, fabliau, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto and Michel Salvat, 1984, 107–19) and Jeanette Beer (Master Richard’s ‘Bestiary of Love’ and Response, 1986, and Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’Amour and A Woman’s Response, 2003) examine how Richard de Fournival, in his mid-13th-century Bestiary of Love, reworked bestiary materials and juxtaposed them to materials derived from the traditions of love literature, especially from courtly love poetry. Similarly, Michelle Bolduc explores the relationship between the bestiary tradition and the beasts or animal characters in the French medieval romance, Le Roman de Silence (“Silence’s Beasts,” The Mark of the Beast, ed. Debra Hassig, 2000, 185–209). A number of key volumes reflect these trends, all of which have been published within the last twenty years. Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and its Legacy (1989), edited by Willene B. Clark and Meradith R. McMunn, includes articles by scholars such as Curley, Rowland, Guy R. Mermier, and Beer, and covers topics ranging anywhere from manuscript production to the role of memory in bestiary lore and use. In contrast, Wilma George and Brundson Yapp, in The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (1991), take a zoological approach and examine bestiaries and aviaries as evidence of medieval and classical awareness of knowledge of natural history. Yet another avenue of study is explored both by Debra Hassig (Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology, 1995), who examines how the content of medieval bestiaries reflected and/or commented upon contemporary issues related to both religious doctrine and secular matters, and by Ron Baxter (Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages, 1998), who draws upon narrative theory and reexamines how, precisely, bestiaries were used and disseminated during the Middle Ages. Two later volumes, both from 2000 (The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Hassig, and Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores), continue to expand the critical realm through their inclusion of articles on topic such as the relationship between bestiaries and art and architecture, depictions of sexual relations and lust within the bestiaries, social taboos, and manuscript marginalia.

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Manuscripts dedicated entirely to birds (aviaries), both plain and illuminated, also survive, and, like bestiaries, have received considerable attention. Most proliferate is the late twelfth-century De avibus, attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy, of which there are over forty extant manuscripts. A modern edition of Hugh’s text (The Medieval Book of Birds: Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarum), edited and translated by Clark, was published in 1992, but the text also appears, in its entirety or in fragments, in numerous medieval bestiaries. Clark’s edition is a pivotal text in aviary studies not only because it examines Hugh’s text in its entirety but also because it includes a detailed catalogue and analysis of all of the extant manuscripts. Like Clark, Rowland makes a significant contribution to aviary studies, especially through her book on the role of birds in human thought and memory (Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism, 1978). Yapp, however, is the most prolific writer on aviaries. He has produced numerous articles on birds in architecture and manuscripts over the last thirty years, and, like Rowland, he dedicates an entire book to the subject (Birds in Medieval Manuscripts, 1982), in which he examines aviary entries from the perspective of a zoologist or an art historian. More importantly, Yapp suggested further revisions to the “family” system established by James and modified by McCulloch. He created a set of sub-families within the second family (much like McCulloch created sub-families within the first family), and he reorganized manuscript groups in order to reflect the amount of materials they included that derive from Hugh of Fouilloy’s Aviarum (“A New Look at English Bestiaries,” MAevum 54.1 [1985]: 1–19). Recent studies of bestiaries, aviaries, and the Physiologus, then, are diverse in their approaches and in their focuses. They demonstrate, overall, a move away from pure textual studies and towards, instead, considerations of the texts within broader cultural contexts. Yet, new editions of many key texts are needed, as are continued discussions on relationship of the texts to other cultural artifacts and practices. The steady growth of scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the present, indeed, the explosion of critical works in the last three decades, suggests that there is still much more work to be done in this field. Select Bibliography Friedrich Lauchert, Geschichte des Physiologus (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1889); Physiologus, ed. Francesco Sbordone (Milan: Dante Alighieri-Albrighi, 1936); Michael J. Curley, trans., Physiologus (Austin and London: University Press of Texas, 1979); The Bestiary: Being A Reproduction in Full of Ms. Ii 4. 26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from Other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of the Latin Bestiary as Current in England, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1928); Florence McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, rev. ed. (1959;

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Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962); Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy, ed. Willene B. Clark and Meradith T. McMunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Wilma George and Brunsdon Yapp, The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary (London: Duckwork, 1991); Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton, 1998); Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000); Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Garland, 1996).

Renée Ward

Bibles (Popular) A. General Definition By this concept is not meant a particular Bible or translation, but rather the presentation and reception of Biblical themes to a wider, non-clerical public in vernacular prose, verse or (later and more vigorously) drama, as well as in iconography. The focus is upon the relationship between the Biblical stories as presented and the actual Biblical text. Selected scenes are expanded or given a particular interpretation which may be based upon various sources. Assertions of authority attached to non-Biblical additions may also give the impression to the (unlettered) recipient that what is being presented is genuinely scriptural. Expansions to the Biblical texts are linked most frequently to the literal or historical sense of medieval Scriptural interpretation: thus the identification of the serpent in Eden with the devil belongs to popular Biblical tradition, and a New Testament example is the visit to the infant Christ by three (named) kings, based upon Gospel references to unspecified wise men bearing three gifts. Further, the acceptance of the fructus of Genesis III as an apple depends upon an allegorical Latin reading in which malum links “apple” and “evil,” and important typological parallels (such as the sacrifice of Isaac as a type of the Crucifixion) influence the selection of elements in the popular Bible. Text-types which provide evidence of the medieval popular Bible include the following (editions with source-notes are cited): vernacular presentations of Biblical stories such as the German Historienbibeln; moralizing treatises containing Old and New Testament plus legendary narratives (such as The ME Prose Translation of Roger d’Argenteuil’s Bible en François, ed. Phyllis Moe,

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1977); sermons and sermon collections; vernacular metrical adaptations of the Bible, such as the English Cursor Mundi (ed. Richard Morris, 1874–1893, rpt. 1961–1966), the French rhymed Bibles (such as La Bible de Macé de la Charité, I. Genèse, Exode, ed. J. R. Smeets, 1967), the Irish Saltair na Rann, the Middle Franconian Rhymed Bible, or Jacob van Maerlant’s Rijmbijbel; verse adaptations of individual books or episodes (the Altdeutsche Genesis, the Spanish Coplas de Yocef, Passion-poems in many languages); prose or verse world chronicles such as those by Rudolf von Ems, Jans Enikel (Weltchronik, ed. Philipp Strauch, 1891–1900), Heinrich von München, Ranulph Higden (ed. Churchill Babington and Joseph R. Lumby, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden … with the English translation of John Trevisa etc., 1865–1886), the Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn (ed., trans. R. A. S. Macalister, 1938–1956), or the Spanish General Estoria; and the drama, such as the mystery plays preserved in many European languages. Most medieval religious texts, however, contain evidence of the popular reception of individual Biblical motifs. See also Hans Vollmer, Materialien zur Bibelgeschichte und religiösen Volkskunde des Mittelalters (1912–1938). Iconographical reflections may be in manuscript (the Holkham Bible Picture Book, large historiated Bibles), as well as wall-paintings, carvings, glass or tapestry. Typologically arranged sequences of Bible scenes are found in the so-called Biblia Pauperum and parallel traditions (see as a brief but useful introduction M. R. James, “Pictor in carmine,” Archaeologia 94 [1951]: 141–66). B. Development of Research Scholarship is both broad and fragmented, given the very wide range of languages and materials involved, especially in Western Europe; Greek, Slavonic or Near-Eastern traditions of Bible interpretation are often separate, may or may not overlap with those in the West, and are less frequently taken into account. Even the Latin Vulgate is variable (see Samuel Berger, L’histoire de la Vulgate pendant les premiers siècles du Moyen Age, 1893, rpt. 1976; H. H. Glunz, History of the Vulgate in England, 1933), and sometimes an early text might even reflect the Old Latin versions. The principal source for the augmentations which constitute popular Biblical tradition, however, is Latin exegesis in the writings of the Church Fathers, either directly, or more often by means of compendia of commonplaces (much-repeated interpretations) like the Glossa Ordinaria (and its interlinear and marginal forms, the parva glossatura; see Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria, 1480/1481, ed. Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson, 1992), or through widely-known works like the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor. The availability of such sources has been an ongoing process since the publication of major collections such as the Patrologia Latina in the mid-19th century and its successors.

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See on the background Ceslas Spicq, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse latine au moyen âge (1944); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1952, 3rd ed., 1983); E. Friedrich Ohly, “Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter,” ZfdA 89 (1958): 1–23; Robert E. McNally, The Bible in the Early Middle Ages (1959); Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catherine Misrahi (1960; 1962) and Geoffrey W. H. Lampe, The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. II: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (1969). Much exegetical material comes via sermons into vernacular traditions: see texts such as the preacher’s handbook Fasciculum Morum, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel, 1989. Early and often neglected sources for Scriptural expansion are the numerous apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the two Testaments. Although the deuterocanonical books in the Protestant tradition are also termed apocrypha, here the term refers to works linked with the Bible by theme or ascription. Recent collections are: James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983–1985); H. F. D. Sparks, The Apocryphal Old Testament (1984); Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal New Testament (1924; rpt. 1975), new edition by J. K. Elliott (1993); and see also Wilfried LechnerSchmidt, Wortindex der lateinisch erhaltenen Pseudepigraphen zum Alten Testament (1990). Works include the Infancy Gospels, developing incidents from the early life of Christ, or the ramified Adam-books, expanding the brief narrative in Genesis. Linked with the latter is the legend-cycle of the Holy Rood, which is also integrated into medieval narratives as if it were Biblical. Other enlargements of the New Testament narrative includes apocryphal/legend material on the fates of Judas and of Pilate. Some reflections are found in compilations such as the Gesta Romanorum or the ramified hagiographic Golden Legend, and vernacular writers adapt these writings independently, or more usually merge (without comment) apocryphal and Biblical material (the Saltair na Rann is an example). Since Biblical augmentation may have many different sources, reference must be made, finally, to such general studies as Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1948; trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953, rpt. 1979, 1983, and 1990. Earlier scholarship frequently applied a positivist Quellenforschung to individual texts which could be misleading. An early study of Otfrid’s Old High German Gospel-book considered that the poet’s additions all derived specifically from the Glossa Ordinaria, which is now known to postdate the German work (A. L. Plumhoff, “Beiträge zu den Quellen Otfrids,” ZfdPh 31 (1899): 404–96 and 32 [1900]: 12–35). However, the derivative nature of the Glossa means that the thrust of the work was not entirely misplaced (see Donald A. McKenzie, Otfrid von Weissenburg: Narrator or Commentator?, 1946).

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Bibles (Popular)

It is rarely possible to pinpoint a specific source, but it is important to be aware that the popular Bible depends almost exclusively on usually widelyknown sources rather than on individual imagination. The background is discussed in the debate on “Patristic Exegesis in the Evaluation of Medieval Literature,” especially “The Defense” by R. E. Kaske, in Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (1960), 1–82. See also Brian Murdoch, “Theological Writings and Medieval German Literary Research,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 66–82. C. Current Scholarship Recent theoretical studies are those by Pim Valkenberg, “Readers of Scripture and Hearers of the Word in the Medieval Church,” The Bible and its Readers, ed. Wim Beuken (1991), 47–57 and John Morgan-Guy, What Did the Poets See? A Theological and Philosophical Reflection (2002). The great diversity of the theme is illustrated by the collection Metamorphosen der Bibel, ed. Ralf Plate and Andrea Rapp (2004). General and theoretical studies remain concentrated on a particular part of the Bible (Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible. Medieval Adaptations of Genesis, 2003); on a particular source (James H. Morey, “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible,” Speculum 68 [1993]: 6–35); on a particular vernacular tradition (David C. Fowler, The Bible in Early English Literature, 1977, and The Bible in Middle English Literature, 1984; Achim Masser, Bibel- und Legendenepik des deutschen Mittelalters, 1976); or on a particular Biblical theme – an earlier example is Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah (1949, rpt. 1963), with a further limitation to a particular vernacular or genre as well in works like Paul Schwarz, Die neue Eva: Der Sündenfall in Volksglaube und Volkserzählung (1973), or Gabriel Viehhauser, Die Darstellung König Salomos in der mittelhochdeutschen Weltchronistik (2003). The most common approach to the popular Bible, however, is by way of individual texts. Modern editions have often supplemented earlier ones without source-notes, such as the partial text of the Saltair na Rann: The Irish Adam and Eve Story from Saltair na Rann, I, ed. and trans. David Greene and Fergus Kelly; II, Commentary by Brian Murdoch (1976). Recent studies of prose vernacular Biblical adaptations cover a wide variety of languages: John J. Thompson, The Cursor Mundi: Poem, Texts and Contexts (1998); Jaap van Moolenbroek and Maaike Mulder, Scholastica willic ontbinden. Over de Rijmbijbel van Jacob van Maerlant (1991); David Wells, The Central Franconian Rhyming Bible (Mittelfränkische Reimbibel) (2003). Similar examples relating to chronicles are: Monika Schwabbauer, Profangeschichte in der Heilsgeschichte: Quellenuntersuchungen zu den Incidentien der ‘Christherre-Chronik’ (1996) or R. Graeme Dunphy, Daz was

Bibles (Popular)

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ein michel wunder: the Presentation of Old Testament Material in Jans Enikel’s Weltchronik” (1998). Interest has grown in the role of pseudepigrapha and related legends. General investigations include Michael Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (1992), and Stone in particular has bridged the gap with Eastern traditions in studies such as: “Jewish Tradition, The Pseudepigrapha and the Christian West,” The Aramaic Bible: Targums in Their Historical Context, ed. D. R. G. Beattie and M. J. McNamara (1993), 431–49. Individual new editions include Mary-Bess Halford, Lutwin’s Eva und Adam. Study. Text. Translation (1984) and The Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve. The Canticum de Creatione and the Auchinleck Life of Adam, ed. Brian Murdoch and J. Tasioulas (2002); for studies, see Esther C. Quinn, The Quest of Seth for the Oil of Life (1962), Achim Masser, Bibel, Apokryphen und Legenden. Geburt und Kindheit Jesu in der religiösen Epik des deutschen Mittelalters (1969), and the collection Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Kathryn Powell and Donald Scragg (2003). There have been several studies on the Gospel of Nicodemus in various languages. Studies of the biblical aspects of medieval drama are extremely numerous; beside bibliographies like The Bible in English Drama, an annotated list compiled by Edward D. Coleman (to 1931) and updated by Isaiah Sheffer to 1968 (1968), representative studies include Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays (1961), W. Noomen, Het middeleeuwse bijbelse drama in Frankrijk (1964), Brian Murdoch, “The Mors Pilati in the Cornish Resurrexio Domini,” Celtica 23 (1999): 211–26. There is a good general study by Peter Meredith, “The Direct and Indirect Use of the Bible in Medieval English Drama,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 77 (1995): 61–77. Iconographic studies continue to examine either single motifs (such as Ruth Mellinkoff, The Mark of Cain, 1981) or may be very extensive, such as Hans Martin von Erffa’s two-volume Ikonologie der Genesis (1989–95), which considers thoroughly the interface of art and writings of all kind through the whole of Genesis. Select Bibliography Hans Martin von Erffa, Ikonologie der Genesis (Stuttgart: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1989–1995); David C. Fowler, The Bible in Early English Literature (London: Sheldon, 1977); David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984); James H. Morey, “Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible,” Speculum 68 (1993): 6–35; Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003).

Brian Murdoch

1647

Books of Hours

Books of Hours A. General Definition Medieval Books of Hours emerged as a genre in the 13th century, and were conceived as private prayer books, more often than not small and portable. Among the earliest known is The de Brailes Hours (Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford, 1991). Although initially based on Hours of the Virgin – a 9th-century compilation of prayers and psalms – the books were soon expanded to include Church year calendars, excerpts from the Gospels, additional prayers to the Virgin, the seven Penitential Psalms accompanied by a Litany, and the Office of the Dead. In order to exercise their private devotions, the owners of the Books of Hours would open the volume eight times a day: at Matins (midnight), Lauds (3 a.m.), Prime (6 a.m.), Terce (9 a.m.), Sext (noon), None (3 p.m.), Vespers (6 p.m.) and Compline (9 p.m.). In illuminated manuscripts, beginning with Matins, each hour was associated, respectively, with the image of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Adoration of the Kings, the Presentation in the Temple, the Flight into Egypt and the Coronation of the Virgin, which accompanied Compline (James Thorpe, Book of Hours: Illuminations by Simon Marmion, 1976, 2f). The readings for these canonical hours varied, but all comprised a hymn, a psalm, a capitulum, and a prayer, punctuated throughout by antiphons, versicles and responses. In other words, the Books of Hours were lay equivalents to Breviaries, only considerably shortened and considerably more varied: in addition to the above texts, we find Books of Hours that include, among others, Hours of the Holy Ghost, Hours of the Cross, and Suffrages of the Saints (Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1994, 176). Although written entirely in Latin, some Horae began including excerpts in the vernacular after about 1400, the exception being the Dutch Books of Hours that, from the 14th to the 16th century, appeared almost exclusively in Dutch, in Geert Grote’s translation (Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers. The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art, 1997, 10). What set Books of Hours apart from other medieval books was their demotic appeal; acquired by individuals and families, a Book of Hours may have been the only book possessed by a household. It could be used to record births and deaths, and could function as a primer to teach children (A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Philip Ariès and George Duby, 1988, 530). It was also a book that was often highly individualized, not strictly codified as those books that played a role in the services of the

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Church. Prayers included in these books varied according to the owner and his or her concerns, while dates important to the family that owned the book (such as births and deaths) were continuously added to the calendars. Usually, Books of Hours were decorated, some more lavishly than others, and the lavish ones were commonly associated with courts; invariably, these Books of Hours were personalized. For instance, the Book of Hours illuminated by Jean Pucelle around 1325, which belonged to the last Capetian queen of France, Jeanne d’Evreux, features an image of Jeanne enclosed within the initial D (Domine labia mea aperies) of the Annunciation miniature. It has been argued that the sentinel guarding Jeanne outside the initial, along with the frightening grotesques populating the entire book, was meant to keep the queen’s attention on her devotions (Madeline Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum 68.2 [1993]: 333–62). Moreover, the book, decorated in delicate grisaille and punctuated with splashes of color throughout the miniatures, features, in addition to the Office of the Virgin, the Hours of St Louis, the Capetian family saint whose presence underscores the intensely personal nature of the manuscript and re-asserts the attribution of its ownership to Jeanne d’Evreux (John Harthan, The Book of Hours, 1982, 74). Similarly, The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke de Berry, an avid collector and patron of the arts, introduces the Duke’s portrait in the January miniature of the book’s calendar. Illuminated between 1411 and 1416 by the Limbourg brothers (and finished between 1485 and 1490, long after Jean’s death, by Jean Colombe), the book is famous precisely for this splendid Calendar that features different castles and fields associated with the Duke (Millard Meiss, “Preface,” The Très Riches Heures, ed. Jean Longnon and Raymond Cazelles, 1989, 10). Owner portraits, too, mark the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, illuminated ca. 1477 by Claes Spierinc and Liétard van Lathem (Eric Inglis, comm., The Hours of Mary of Burgundy: Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 1995). On its pages, the wife of Archduke Maximilian of Austria appears repeatedly, immersed in her devotions, so much so that she often becomes an active protagonist in her own visions (on portraiture in Books of Hours see Joan Naughton, “A Minimally-Intrusive Presence: Portraits in Illustrations for Prayers to the Virgin,” Medieval Texts and Images, ed. Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir, 1991, 111–206). The very visual format of the book may be a witness to Mary of Burgundy’s changing fortunes: initially conceived as a “mourning book of hours” – to commemorate the death of Mary’s father – the manuscript was partially stained black, but Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian rendered such mourning inappropriate: beginning with folio 35, all the pages remain white (for a

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study of black Books of Hours see the commentary to the facsimile of Morgan Library Ms. M. 493, Das schwarze Stundenbuch, ed. Bernard Bousmanne and William M. Voelkle, 2001). The Books of Hours lost their personal nature at the end of the 15th century, when the Horae began appearing in printed format. Paper soon replaced vellum, and woodcuts, often colored by hand, took the place of illuminated miniatures; these Books of Hours began including new stock iconographies, both in full-page images (such as David and Goliath and the Tree of Jesse) and in border decorations (such as the Dance of Death and the Prodigal Son). Among the most important publishers of these printed books, Antoine Vérard and Simon Vostre must surely be mentioned. Despite the change in medium, the Books of Hours nonetheless retained their primary function to encourage pious contemplation, to guide the reader in his or her devotions, and so to help the devout to achieve inner peace through prayer. B. History of Research The first to have catalogued the Books of Hours, and described their general format was Victor Leroquais (Les livres d’heures manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et Supplément, 1927–43). However, the Books of Hours were not given serious consideration until 1972, when L. M. J. Delaissé’s “The Importance of Books of Hours for the History of the Medieval Book” appeared (posthumously) (Gatherings in Honor of Dorothy E. Miner, ed. Ursula E. McCracken, Lilian M. C. Randall, and Richard H. Randall, Jr., 1974, 203–25). A lavishly illustrated selection from different Books of Hours – from The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux to the printed Horae – was compiled and introduced by John Harthan (1982), followed closely by Robert G. Calkins, Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages (1983) and Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (1985). Roger Wieck’s Time Sanctified: the Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (1988), a catalog for an exhibition that was held at the Walters Art Gallery, offers a comprehensive overview and a sophisticated introduction to the medieval Books of Hours, and includes an excellent bibliography. Exhibition catalogs, in general, provide very useful introductions to the format, both visual and textual, of the lay prayer books. They also often allow for the localization of the Book of Hours in a particular part of Europe, more often than not England, France, Flanders, Netherlands, and Italy (German, Spanish and Portuguese Books of Hours are rare). So, The Golden Age of Dutch Manuscript Painting (Henri L. M. Defoer et al, 1990) explores visual and devotional particularities of Dutch Books of Hours, and is a welcome addition to A Century of Dutch Manuscript Illumination, by L. M. J. Delaissé (1968). Similarly, “Flemish Manuscript Illumination, 1475–1550” from the Renais-

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1650

sance Painting in Manuscripts, Treasures form the British Library catalog (T. Kren, 1983, 3–85) and Vlaamse Miniaturen voor Van Eyck (ca. 1380–ca. 1420) include important discussions of Flemish illuminated Books of Hours, and the same is done for French Horae in Francois Avril’s and Nicole Reynaud’s Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (1993), and especially in Mya Dickman Orth’s and Thierry Crépin-Leblond’s Livres d’heures royaux: La Peinture de manuscrits à la cour de France au temps de Henri II (1993). Aside from exhibition catalogs, important treatments of decorated Books of Hours have appeared in studies concerned with medieval manuscript painting in general, such as Millard Meiss’s multi-volume study French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry (1967–1974) as well as an excellent introduction to Books of Hours in the chapter entitled “Books for Everybody” by Christopher De Hamel (see above). Additionally, surveys of holdings in particular libraries and museums regularly provide valuable overviews of collections’ Books of Hours, in manuscript and/or printed form. A case in point is a magisterial multi-volume study by Lilian M. C. Randall, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery (1989–), and a catalog compiled by Paul Lacombe, Livres d’heures au XVe et au XVIe siècle conservés dans les bibliothèques publiques de Paris (2003; 1907). Finally, studies on particular books are plentiful. The number of facsimiles, accompanied by in-depth introductions or commentaries, is too vast to consider here, but among the most useful and beautifully published are The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (John Plummer, 2002; 1966), Les belles heures du Duc de Berry (2003) and Das Berliner Stundenbuch der Maria von Burgund und Kaiser Maximilians, which both include commentaries by Eberhard König, The Hastings Hours (D. H. Turner, 1983). Some books draw the attention of scholars over and over: the splendid Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, has been published and commented upon multiple times, most recently by Jean Dufournet (2002), Raymond Cazelles and Umberto Eco (2003), and François Autrand et al, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry et l’enluminure en France au début du XVe siècle (2004). In addition, a number of studies that focus specifically on Books of Hours created for women, offer invaluable insight into works of art commissioned by female patrons: Susan Groag Bell’s “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” Signs 7.4 (1982): 742–68, focuses particularly on the Books of Hours commissioned, owned, and used by wealthy women, while Joan Holladay’s “The Education of Jeanne d’Evreux: Personal Piety and Dynastic Salvation in Her Book of Hours at the Cloisters,” Art History 17.4 (1994): 585–611, analyzes the Book of Hours made for the last Capetian queen as a guide for behavior and devotions. Two recent studies focused on Books of

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Books of Hours

Hours produced for women in England: Art, Identity and Devotion in FourteenthCentury England by Kathryn A. Smith (2003), and a selection from AngloNorman, Latin, and Middle English Books of Hours edited and commented by Charity Scott-Stokes (Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England, 2006). Additionally, a substantial part of Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1575 (2006) is dedicated to the discussion of women owners of the Books of Hours. For an overview of the subject, see Kathryn A. Smith’s “Books of Hours” entry in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: an Encyclopedia, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard, Thomas Izbicki, and Margaret Schaus, 2006, 89–91. Select Bibliography Roger Wieck, Time Sanctified: the Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. 2nd ed. (1988; New York: G. Braziller in association with the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, 2001), John Harthan, The Book of Hours, 2nd ed. (1977; New York: Park Lane, 1982), Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 2nd ed. (1986; London: Phaidon Press, 1994, 168–99). For a recent survey, see Albrecht Classen, “The Book of Hours in the Middle Ages,” Futhark 2 (2007): 111–29.

Elina Gertsman

Islamic Calendars

1652

C Islamic Calendars A. General Definition The Islamic calendar par excellence is the pure lunar calendar starting from the Hijra, i. e., the “Emigration” of the Prophet Muhammad b. Abi Talib from Mecca (see below). This is the calendar normally used by Muslim peoples: nowadays only for religious purposes, but in the past for approximately all the exigencies of historical chronology. However, one may consider “Islamic” any calendar starting with this era. B. Solar Islamic Calendars Many forms of calendar starting from the Hijra developed in the countries of the Islamic world during different period of its millenary history, such as the numerous solar calendars elaborated for administrative (fiscal) or agricultural purposes. Two calendars of this kind are in use today in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan respectively. Historically, alongside the Hijri era and the Arabic lunar calendar, we have specific forms of calendars that seem to be the product of combining the Muslim era with the solar years and months of different national or religious traditions existent in the territories subjected to Islamic rulers. These were helpful especially for financial needs and show different forms in various countries of the Islamic world, such as the financial solar calendars of Abbasid times or the still not well-known sursana of Moghul India. About the origin of the Persian fiscal era the question is still open. For instance, see Reza Abdollahy, “Calendars – II. The Islamic period,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. IV, 1990, 669–70 (a summary of his “Taqwim-e ä araji,” Na ˇsriya-ye dane ˇskada-ye adabiyat wa ^olum-e ensani-ye Esfahan, II-1 [1361s/1982–83)]: ˇ 37–58), who hypothesizes a starting point of that era in pre-Islamic times, and Simone Cristoforetti, Izdilaq: miti e problemi calendariali del fisco islamico (Izdilaq: calendrical myths and problems of Islamic public revenue), 2003, 89–118, who summarizes the different opinions about this topic and proposes an analysis of the persistent monetary crisis during Omayyad and Abbasid Chalifates in the light of calendrical facts. In addition, in many texts one may find dates calculated according to solar calendars and different eras, especially for astronomical

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Islamic Calendars

needs. For example, years may be reckoned according to the Seleucid era and the Syrian solar calendar (in Christian authors), or the so-called “era of the martyrs” and the Coptic solar calendar, according to the era of Yazdegard and the Persian solar calendar (in Persian authors), the Julian calendar (Greek, Orthodox and Spain), the Jalalian calendar (in astronomic works), or the Zoarian cycle of the twelve animals with various eras (in the countries occupied by Mongols). All necessary information on the different Christian calendars will be found in Victor Grumel, Traité d’études byzantines (1955) ed. by P. Lemerle, vol. I, La chronologie (1958). Material on the Persian calendrical system and the calendars in the Turkic world is available respectively in Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, “Various Eras and Calendars Used in the Countries of Islam,” B.S.O.(A.)S., IX-4 (1937–1939): 903–922 (Part I.), B.S.O.(A.)S., X-1 (1939–1942): 107–32 (Part II), an abridgment of its masterly Gah ˇsomari dar Iran-e qadim (The Time-Reckoning in Ancient Iran), Tehran, 1316s/1937–1938, ˇ written in Persian language, and in Louis Bazin, Les systèmes chronologiques dans le monde turc ancien (Bibliotheca Orientalis Hungarica, XXXIV), 1991. On the Ottoman financial calendar see Joachim Mayr, “Das türkische Finanzjahr,” Der Islam 36 (1961): 264–68. The establishing of chronologies is made difficult by the variety of methods of dating in use in the East. The following articles are of the greatest importance to a general view on calendars and eras during Islamic times: “Ta’rikh I. – Dates et ères dans le monde islamique,” Encyclopédie de l’Islam2, vol. X (2002): 277–90, by François C. de Blois, B. van Dalen, and “Calendars (Islamic period),” op. cit,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 668–74, by R. Abdollahi. In the last case, it is necessary to pay attention to the given conversion formula for the Zoarian cycle with solar Hijri era – used in Ilä anid age and in modern Iran until 1343 (1304s)/1925 ˇ – because a mistake occurred. For a correct version of it see S. Cristoforetti, Forme ‘neopersiane’ del calendario ‘zoroastriano’ tra Iran e Transoxiana (‘New-Persian’ Forms of the ‘Zoroastrian’ Calendar between Iran and Transoxiana),” Eurasiatica n. 64 (2000): 94–98. C. The Lunar Hijr ¯ı Calendar In September 622, the Prophet Muhammad fleeing Mecca, after some days’ travelling, reached the oasis of Ya©rib (later called al-Madina, i. e., “the City” par excellence). This event – which occurred in the Arab month of Rabi^ Ist – is the Hijra, the basis of Islamic chronology. After an initial period of about 17 years in which the dates were reckoned by counting the months from Rabi^ Ist, under the second caliph ^Umar ibn al-Ä attab (13–23/634–644) the fixing of the beginning of the new Islamic era took place. Then, the term Hijra, that in Arabic was used to denote the Emigration of the Prophet from Mecca to

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Medina, was also applied to this era (Hijri, i. e., “of the Hijra”). In spite of the opinion of the Prophet’s cousin, ^Ali ibn Abi Talib, who preferred to reckon from the first day of the month Rabi^ Ist, the caliph ordered that the year start with the 1st of Muharram – the first month of the Arabic traditional calendar – in that lunar year corresponding to 15th/16th of July 622 in the Julian calendar (R. Abdollahy, “Calendars …,” op. cit. 668). The choice of Muharram as the first month of the year instead of Rabi^ Ist or Ramadan (the month of the first Coranic revelation) reveals the greater importance attributed to the traditional (pre-Islamic) starting point of the year and to the social and economic relevance of that moment (end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca). In the preference given to the year of the Hijra as the first year of the new Islamic era it is possible to see the prevalence of some politico-social issues (e. g., severance of relations between Muhammad and his clan and the following alliance with the people of Medina) over purely religious events (e. g., God’s call to Muhammad) or hagiographical facts (e. g., the Prophet’s birth) (S. Cristoforetti, Forme ‘neopersiane’ …, op. cit., 14). The incertitude between 15th and 16th of July concerns the beginning of the day (nychtemeron) in Arabic custom. Still today, for religious purposes, the day is considered to start after the sunset. Then, for example, Monday night for the Muslims is the night between Sunday and Monday and not that between Monday and Tuesday. For this reason the beginning of the Hijri era is Friday 16th July in civil usage, or Thursday 15th July in the common astronomic (and religious) usage. The lunar Hijri calendar was based on the synodic month (29,53 days approximately), reckoned from one sighting of the new moon to the next (on the matter see Miquel Forcada, “L’Expression du cycle lunaire dans l’ethnoastronomie arabe,” Arabica 47 [2000]: 37–77; Jan P. Hogendijk, “Three Islamic Lunar Crescent Visibility Tables,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 19 [1988]: 29–44). This could have caused a one- or two-day discrepancy between the effective sighting of the new moon and the start of the corresponding month in civil usage (the latter constitutes the basis on which all the tables for converting dates are elaborated). In such cases, any presence in the sources of indications on the position of the days in the week may be of the greatest importance for the reconstruction of the exact date. For example, the existence of a double recording system of lunar months is clearly documented in Somalia. There it was normal usage to distinguish al-sana al-qamariyya (“lunar year”) – reckoned on the basis of months corresponding to the effective sightings of the new moon – from al-sana al-ta’riä iyya (“civil year”) – reckoned according to the written Islamic calendar (Enrico Cerulli, Somalia: Scritti vari editi ed inediti, vol. I, 1957, 185). For many years the most trustworthy work for help in establishing concordances between the official Is-

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lamic calendar and the Julian and Gregorian has been Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, Vergleichungs-Tabellen der muhammedanischen und christlichen Zeitrechnung (1854), third edition revised by Bertold Spuler in collaboration with Joachim Mayr (1961), which also gives a table for converting the Ottoman financial (solar) years. Nowadays, in addition to Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, Calendrical Tabulations 1900–2200, 2002, many conversion programs are easily available on-line. D. History of Research The knowledge of different calendarical systems is basic for astronomers. Normally a section on calendars is present in ancient astronomic Arabic works; see for example the section entitled De Arabum, Romanorum, Coptorum et Persarum aevis atque de alia in aliam convertenda in Carlo Alfonso Nallino’s annotated Latin translation of Zij al-Sabi’ by the famous astronomer of 9th –10th century Abu ^Abdallah Muhammad al-Battani (al-Battani, sive Albatenii opus astronomicum, Milano, 1899–1907: vol. I, 66–71 [rpt. 1977]). One of the most ancient and important sources on different calendars used in the Islamic world is the masterpiece of the great man of science Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (362–440/973–1048) translated by C. E. Sachau, The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-ul-Bâkiya of Albîrûnî, or ‘Vestiges of the Past,’ Collected and Reduced to Writing by the Author in AH 390–1, AD 1000, 1879; rpt. in 1998. In Europe the knowledge of Hijri lunar calendar keeps up with the translations of Arabic astronomical writings (on the topic see Bruce S. Eastwood, “Astronomy in Christian Latin Europe,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 28 [1997]: 235–58; José Maria Millás i Vallicrosa, “Las primeras traducciones cientificas de origen oriental hasta mediados del siglo XII,”, Nuevos estudios sobre la historia de la cienca española, ed. id. 1960, 79–115). A good example of it is John Greaves’s Epochæ celebriores, astronomis, historicis, chronologis, Chataiorum, SyroGræcorum, Arabum, Persarum, Chorasmiorum, usitatæ ex traditione Ulug Beigi … (1650), i. e., “The most famous eras […] according to tradition by Ulug Beg,” Timurid ruler (850–853/1447–1449) and astronomer, author of an important astronomic treatise. A more specific interest in the lunar Arabic calendar develops during the later 17th and 18th centuries (Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville, Bibliothèque orientale, ou dictionaire universel contenant generalement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l’orient, 1697, 444–45, 857; William Marsden, “On the Era of the Mahometans, called the Hejerà,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 78 [1788]: 414–32). Old studies of great importance for research on the calendars used in the Islamic world are to be found in the fundamental miscellany edited by Fuat Sezgin,

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Calendars and Chronology in the Islamic World: Texts and Studies I, 1998. All the writings by Christian Ludwig Ideler on the matter are reprinted in it (“Über die Zeitrechnung der Araber,” first published in AKAWB 1812/13, Hist.-phil. Kl. (1816): 97–120 [= Sezgin: 103–126]; “Über die Zeitrechnung der Perser,” first published in AKAWB 1814/15 Hist.-phil. Kl. (1818): 259–289; [= Sezgin: 127–157]; “Über die bei den morgenländischen Völkern gebräuchlichen Formen des julianischen Jahrs,” first published in AKAWB 1816/17, Hist.-phil. Kl. (1819): 215–262 [= Sezgin: 159–206]) along with some other important works, such as that by Franz Xaver Freiherr von Zach, “Über den Kalender der Türken,” first published in Zeitschrift für Erd-, Völker- und Staatenkunde 2 (1825): 64–69 [= Sezgin: 234–239]. The abovementioned miscellany also contains studies on conversion systems (for example: J. B. Navoni, “Rouz-namé, ou calendrier perpétuel des Turcs, avec les remarques et des exemples sur la manière de compter les lunaisons, et avec des tables pour trouver la correspondance des dates entre l’ère turque et l’ère vulgaire,” first published in Fundgruben des Orients 4 (1814): 38–67, 127–53, 253–77 [= Sezgin: 1–92]; Ch. L. Ideler, “Über die Vergleichung der muhammedanischen und christlichen Zeitrechnung,” first published in Fundgruben des Orients 4 (1814): 299–308 [= Sezgin: 93–102]) and important writings on the pre-Islamic form of the Arabic lunar calendar (Mahmoud Pacha al-Falaki, “Mémoire sur le calendrier arabe avant l’islamisme, et sur la naissance et l’âge du prophète Mohammad,” first published in Journal asiatique, sér. 5, 11 (1858): 109–192, already rpt. in Mémoires couronnés et mémoires des savants étrangers, publiés par l’académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 30, Classe des lettres (1861): 1–45 [= Sezgin: 251–336]). On this topic and in particular on the nasi[’] (the pre-Islamic “intercalation”), in addition to the old works by Armand-Pierre Caussin de Perceval, “Mémoire sur le calendrier arabe avant l’islamisme,” Journal asiatique, ou recueil de mémoires, d’extraits et de notices relatifs à l’histoire, à la philosophie, aux langues et à la littérature des peuples orientaux, sér. 4, 1 (1843): 342–79 (an English translation is available [by L. Nobiron], “Notes on the Arab Calendar Before Islam,” Islamic Culture 21 [1947]: 135–53), and by Aloys Sprenger, “Über den Kalender der Araber vor Mohammad,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 13 (1859): 134–75, see C. A. Nallino, Raccolta di scritti editi e inediti, vol. V, 1944, 152–71, who translated some important passages from Arabic sources. A more recent contribution on the matter is the work of F. A. Shamsi, “The Meaning of Nasi: An Interpretation of Verse 9:37,” Islamic Studies 26 (1987): 143–64. The most important sources on Islamic calendars are available in F. Sezgin, Calendars and Chronology in the Islamic World: Texts and Studies II, 1998. Unfortunately an organic and com-

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prehensive work on the history of calendrical systems in Islamic world is still needed. Select Bibliography R. Abdollahy, “Calendars – II. Islamic period),” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. IV (London and New York: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 1990), 668–74; L. Bazin, Les Systèmes chronologiques dans le monde turc ancien (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, and Paris: CNRS, 1991); Elias Joseph Bickerman, “Time-Reckoning,” The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. III-2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 778–91; F. C. de Blois and B. van Dalen, “Ta’rikh I. – Dates et Ères dans le Monde Islamique,” Encyclopédie de l’Islam2 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 277–90; Friedrich Karl Ginzel, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906–1914, rpt. 1958 and 2007); V. Grumel, Traité d’études byzantines, ed. by P. Lemerle, vol. I, La chronologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958); F. Sezgin, Calendars and Chronology in the Islamic World: Texts and Studies I (Frankfurt a. M.: Institute for the History of ArabicIslamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1998); F. Sezgin, Calendars and Chronology in the Islamic World: Texts and Studies II (Frankfurt a. M.: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 1998); S. H. Taqizada (= Taqizadeh), Gah ˇsomari dar Iran-e qadim (The Time-Reckoning in Ancient Iran) (Tehran: Majles’ Editions, 1316s/1937–1938); ˇ S. H. Taqizadeh, “Various Eras and Calendars Used in the Countries of Islam,” B.S.O.(A.)S., IX-4 (1937–1939): 903–22 (Part I), B.S.O.(A.)S., X-1 (1939–1942): 107–32 (Part II).

Simone Cristoforetti

Cantigas de Amigo (“Songs of the beloved”) A. Introduction The earliest known examples of traditional Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry, essentially those brought together in three medieval cancioneiros (“songbooks”), dating approximately from the late 13th century to the early 14th, plus early fragments and some later copies (Lanciani and Tavani, 113–26, 132–39, 627–32). The cantigas de amigo appear in these MSS, together with two other contemporary poetic genres, both rather less oral or traditional in character and more learned in origin: cantigas de amor (“songs of love”) and cantigas de escarnho e maldizer (“insulting and scandalous songs”). In the cantigas de amor, the author, influenced by the Provençal lyric, writes of his own amorous sentiments; in cantigas de escarnho (from the same Germanic root as English scorn), the poet singles out some contemporary enemy – or perhaps only a supposed enemy – as an object of total ridicule and not infrequently of

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obscene sexual mockery. In the cantigas de amigo, where a young girl gives voice to her sorrow or disillusionment regarding an absent or neglectful lover, we are inevitably reminded of identical or at least very similar sentiments and situations, in two other types of medieval Iberian Frauenlieder: Mozarabic kharjas and Castilian villancicos (q.v.). Even though, in the cantigas de amigo, a learned male poet usually claims authorship and is pretending to express a girl’s sentiments, the motifs, topoi, and formulaic diction, shared with kharjas and villancicos, are too similar and too numerous to be attributed to chance. First of all, the amigo and the mother-as-confidante, in the cantigas, clearly correspond, in identical situations, to the habib (“friend, lover”) and the mamma in the kharjas and to the same figures present also in the villancicos. In a pathfinding study, published immediately after the discovery of the Hebrew-letter kharjas, Dámaso Alonso already brought to our attention a number of thematic parallels between the three genres. James Monroe’s comparative study (1975) is likewise indispensable in this regard. Parallelisms between motifs and formulas shared by cantigas de amigo, kharjas, villancicos, and other medieval European forms of the traditional lyric were systematically studied and compared by Martha Schaffer in 1987. Basing her work on Nunes’s collection, striking parallels came to light: Among other formulaic elements, the girls’ invocations of friends or sisters are known in both kharjas and cantigas, as are the motifs of dying of love and such rhetorical questions as que farei? and que será de mi? (What will I do? What will become of me?). Typical of the cantigas de amigo’s metrical form are parallel couplets which reiterate, in different rhymes, the song’s central concerns. In the following song, by Martin Codax (mid-13th c.), the girl, sadly yearning for her absent lover, addresses the sea, asking for news: “Ondas do mar de Vigo, / se vistes meu amigo! / e ai Deus, se verrá cedo! // Ondas do mar levado, se vistes meu amado! / e ai Deus, se verrá cedo! / Se vistes meu amigo, / o por que eu sospiro! / e ai Deus, se verrá cedo! / se vistes meu amado, por que ei gran ciudado! / e ai Deus, se verrá cedo!” (Waves of the sea of Vigo: Have you seen my beloved? Oh God! May he come soon! Waves of the rising sea: Have you seen my friend? Have you seen my friend, for whom I am sighing? Have you seen my beloved, for whom I am deeply worried?; Nunes, no. 491; Jensen, 65). The dominant sentiment in these songs is saudade (“yearning”) and these distressed girls cannot help but remind us of the lonely, worried, distraught young ladies of the Mozarabic kharjas. The parallelistic couplets, however, so typical of the Portuguese songs, seem to be relatively rare among the medieval Castilian villancicos. Here is one example from the Cancionero musical de Palacio: “Al alba venid, buen amigo, / al alba venid. // Amigo, el que yo más quería, / venid al

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alba del día. // Amigo, el que yo más amaba, / venid a la luz del alba. // Venid a la luz del día, / no trayáis compañía. // Venid a la luz del alba, / no traigáis gran compaña” (Come at dawn, good friend, / come at dawn. / Friend, whom I love most of all, / come at the dawning of day. / Friend, whom I love best of all, / come at the light of dawn. / Come at the light of day; / and don’t bring company. // Come at the light of dawn, / don’t bring many companions; Frenk, Lírica española de tipo popular, 1990, no. 110). In line with the villancico’s more ample and usually more cheerful perspectives, here there is no distress, but rather eager and joyously erotic anticipation. But the seeming rarity of such parallelistic couplets in the early villancicos may well be more apparent than real. In a pathfinding survey of the modern tradition, including previously unedited material collected from oral tradition, José Manuel Pedrosa has discovered ample evidence of the existence of similar parallelistic rhyme patterns in traditional songs from Trás-os-Montes and the Algarve (in Portugal) and from Asturias, Burgos, Soria, and La Rioja (Spain), as well as in the JudeoSpanish traditions (“Reliquias de cantigas paralelísticas de amigo … en la tradición oral moderna,” Lírica popular / Lírica tradicional: Lecciones en homenaje a Don Emilio García Gómez, ed. Pedro M. Piñero, 1998). B. Development of Research From the pathbreaking 19th-century investigations of Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos down to the present, the three major cancioneiros (Ajuda, Biblioteca Nacional, Vaticana) and other sources have been the subject of extensive investigations (Lanciani and Tavani loc. cit. and pp. 654–56). Concerning cantigas de escarnho, see Manuel Rodrigues Lapa, Cantigas d’Escarnho e de Mal Dizer, 1965; Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Las lecturas del deán de Cádiz en una cantiga de mal dizer,” Studies on the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria,’ ed. Israel J. Katz et al., 1987, 329–54; Graça Videira Lopes, A Sátira nos Cancioneiros Medievais Galego-Portugueses, 1994; and Benjamin Liu, 2004. The standard collection of cantigas de amigo is that of José Joaquim Nunes, 1973; an extensive anthology: Kimberley S. Roberts, An Anthology of Old Portuguese, 1956, 149–273; indispensable studies are: Manuel Rodrigues Lapa, Das Origens da Poesia Lírica em Portugal na Idade-Media, 1929; Stephen Reckert and Helder Macedo, Do Cancioneiro d’Amigo, 1976; Frede Jensen, 1978; Rip Cohen, Thirty-two Cantigas d’amigo of Dom Dinis, 1987; for the crucial relationship to the kharjas: Dámaso Alonso, “Cancioncillas ‘de amigo’ mozárabes (Primavera temprana de la lírica europea),” Revista de Filología Española 33 (1949): 297–349; Jole Scudieri Ruggieri, “Reflessioni su kharge e cantigas de amigo,” Cultura Neolatina 22 (1962): 5–39; James T. Monroe, “Formulaic Diction and the Common Origins of Romance Lyric Tradi-

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tions,” Hispanic Review 43 (1975): 341–50; and Martha E. Schaffer, “The Galician-Portuguese Tradition and the Romance Kharjas,” Portuguese Studies 3 (1987): 1–20. For a useful and well-written translation of representative cantigas de amigo, see Barbara H. Fowler, Songs of a Friend, 1996. Select Bibliography Frede Jensen, The Earliest Portuguese Lyrics (Odense: Odense University Press, 1978); Dicionário da Literatura Medieval Galega e Portuguesa, ed. Giulia Lanciani and Giuseppe Tavani (Lisbon: Caminho, 1993); Benjamin Liu, Medieval Joke Poetry: The Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004); José Joaquim Nunes, Cantigas de Amigo, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Centro do Livro Brasileiro, 1973).

Samuel G. Armistead

Ceremonial Texts A. Introduction Ceremonies as signifiers of the movement and acts of a ruler have always been a demonstration of the political, social and religious rules. Ceremonies have a high symbolic content, and express the ideology and anthropology (position of different dignitaries) of a certain period. Ceremonials, such as coronation documentation, were trasmitted in several ways, such as notitia, memoranda, protocols, reports, letters, historical records and, above all, ordines. There is no exact definition of an ordine, which creates a fixed norm of the order of ecclesiastical ceremonial acts and informs readers about the liturgical wording. All such acts, texts and insignia of ceremonies should always be seen in a particular social and political context. B. Byzantine Empire Old rites fell away with the progress of Christian elements, just as triumphal arches disappeared after the 5th century. The ceremonial of the state had been expanded in the 3rd century by consolidating the emperor’s dignity, majesty and stability. Royal insignia, such as the crown and purple robe, were used, audiences and banquets arranged, and legislation codified (Codex Theodsianus, Iustinianus). The ceremonies in the palace demonstrated closeness with the élite, but ceremonial manifestations in town, such as processions, demonstrated the relationship of the ruler to the people. Victory celebrations

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from the late antiquities until the 11th century offered a complex picture of this. The fundamental work on triumphal entries assembled by Constantine VII Porhyrogenitus (De ceremoniis) had its sources in the 6th century. Medieval Byzantine rulers selected favored elements of old ceremonies, adapting them to the current situation. Great processions of liturgical feasts, characterized by well-organized chants for imperial victory, and secular celebration of the Hippodrom in the form of a demonstration of military victory, lost the character of mass rallies in the 7th and 8th centuries. Celebrations in which the order of precedence was very important were concentrated in the palace, and liturgical celebrations were celebrated in the Hagia Sophia. Constantine VII asked for a revision of the Ceremony Book because he wanted to restore neglected traditions and hand them down to his successors. During his plans for restoration, Manuel I extended the ceremonial as an important facet of his power. The ceremonial was shorter in the late Byzantine period, when this celebration was extended to the court, and also to religious feasts, like imperial funerals. In his comprehensive study of the triumphal rulership from late antiquity onward, McCormick pointed to the continuity of the ritual elements of late antique state symbolism and its significant changes in the 7th and 8th century. Constantine’s idea of reform was conditioned by the decay of and disorganization in the preceding period’s rituals. His purpose was to restore neglected traditions, such as the renewal of imperial robes and regalia. This reform was in effect for at least two decades. Jacobus Goar, Euchológion, sive Rituale Graecorum, copmplectens ritus et ordines divinae liturgiae …, 1730; Constantini Porphyrogeniti imperatoris De cerimoniis avlae byzantinae libri duo graece et latine, ed. Weber, 1829–1830; Excerpta historica iussu imp. Constantini Porphyrogeniti, 1903–1906; John Bargnell Bury, “The Ceremonial Book of Constantine Porphyrogennetos,” English Historical Review 22 (1907): 209–27, 417–39; Otto Treitinger, Die oströmische Kaiserund Reichsidee nach ihrer Gestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell 1938, 3rd ed. 1969); Cornelius Adrianus Boumann, Sacring and Crowning: The Development of the Latin Ritual for Anointing of Kings and the Coronation of an Emperor before the Eleventh Century, 1957; Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West, 1986. C. Kingdom of Jerusalem The pecularity of the coronation custom in the Holy Land was the laying of the crown into the rocky dome of Jerusalem – templum Domini – and then its repurchase. The coronation meal and the celebration service corresponded to the occidental customs. One exception was the coronation of heiress Sibille

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by the patriarch in 1186. She crowned herself, then her husband, who was afterwards anointed by the patriarch; this act provoked an opposition. The coronation was celebrated after the occupation of Jerusalem in Tyrus – during the same time the Staufer received the title “Kings of Jerusalem” through the wedding of Friedrich II with Isabella II. The patriarch kept a French-style pontifical with the Fulrad-Ordo in the cathedral of Tyrus. The indication of the coronation in Johann von Ibelin’s book of law corresponded to the Ordo. The oldest order of coronation for the Latin emperors in the Latin Patriarchate is recorded in two pontificals, which had been already mentioned by Edmont Martène in his study of the ancient ecclesiastical rites. Elze drew in his investigation attention to the coronation of Balduin of Flandern, which observed the Venetian patternand had some likeness to the Burgundian Order, – already mentioned by Martène – and that of Reims. Balduin’s unction, and the coronation performed by all present bishops was done according to the French model. Later coronations, particularly the vestments, were influenced by the Byzantine tradition. Here, the Latin Patriarch was the consecrator and the Venetian component became more prominent. The exception – as demonstrated by Percy Ernst Schramm – was the third coronation, of Peter of Courtenay, performed by Pope Honorius III in the Roman basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura in April 1217. Elze questioned the existence of a tradition and definite order. But the “Order of Constantinopel” explicitly refered to the Roman Pontifical as model of the imperial coronation. Indeed, the “Order of Constantinopel” can be characterized as an enlarged version of the oldest Roman imperial coronation, the order of Cecius I. Reinhard Elze, “Die Krönung der lateinischen Kaiser,” Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis sechszehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Percy Ernst Schramm, vol. 3 (1954–1956): 839–44; Hans Eberhard Mayer, “Das Pontifikale von Tyrus und die Krönung der Lateinischen Könige von Jerusalem, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Forschung über Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 21 (1967): 142–232. D. Imperial Coronation The Order (Ordo) of imperial coronation is recorded, for the most part in pontificals, in more than 200 manuscripts from the 10th century through the 15th century, but these manuscripts are only a small portion of those existing during that period. These manuscripts do not only contain all liturgical instructions, which clerics followed, but also various events that applied in the Roman Church, such as consecration and coronation of popes and emper-

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ors. Michel Andrieu presented a historical survey and a comprehensive compilation of these pontificals in Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen Age, citing many of the copies of imperial pontifical kept in European libraries. Andrieu pointed to the importance of the Ottonian Pontifical of Mainz (960), which arrived in Rome in the 10th century and was adapted there. Andrieu studied the development of the Roman Pontifical in the 13th century and that of the canonist Gulilelmus Durandus (1292/96). The Orders (Ordines) of the imperial coronation transmitted in these Pontificals have their origins in ceremonies of the Ottonian or Roman coronations, but often did not follow the model word-by-word. In addition to these liturgical texts, there are other records of papal ceremonies: the so-called Ordines Romani. The Benedicine scholar Jean Mabillon was the first to collect and describe the early and medieval versions of these records. This section of his Museum italicum was, for a long time, the only estensive reseach into this field and was edited by Jacques-Paul Migne, PL 78 (1862): 937ff. The importance of these early texts and their presentation was discussed by Joseph Kösters in his Studien zu Mabillons römischen Ordines. Michel Andrieu studied the later period, beginning in the 12th century, in his Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age, 1886–1956 (re-ed. 1961–1974). Here Andrieu presented an excellent survey of the source materials and dating in connection with a critical edition of several ordines. Although all of these texts can be designated as curial ceremonial books, they are really just a collection of different ordines for different occasions. The three oldest of these are closely connected with the Apostolic Chamber, as demonstrated by Pierre Fabre in his study of the Liber Censuum. At the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, the cardinals Jacobus Gaetani Stefaneschi and Napoleon Orsini initiated a substantial compilation of ceremonial books with varying contents and structures. Most of these books also contain orders for imperial coronation. The books’s present form mostly dates from the 15th century, when the compilation was completed. The contents of several of these books were published by Giovanni Battista Gattico in his study of ecclesiastical ceremonies in 1753. Gattico also intended to complete Mabillon’s edition. A new form of the presentation of the ordines was created by Blasius de Cesena for Charles V’s coronation in Bologna in 1530. De Cesena also compiled a nez compendium, the so-called diaries, in which he entered all records of the coronation celebrations. At the end of the 19th century, when the historical studies of sources developed further, the first critical investigation of the sources was published by Georg Waitz (Die Formeln der deutschen Königs- und römischen Kaiserkrönung, 1872). Waitz’s research concentrated on the ordines of coronation between the 10th and 12th centuries, and he was determined to discover the time and

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origin of the ordines’s compilation. Nearly 10 years later, Waitz’s suggested dating was criticized by Joseph Schwarz (“Die Ordines der Kaiserkrönung,” Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte 22 [1882]: 159–212), who prepared the first index of all medieval imperial coronations and the history of the coronation ceremony. All news about coronations was collected by Anton Diemand, who tried to make these records accessible as historical sources. Diemand did not only examine the Ordines but also of all complementary information. (A discussion of the dating and connection of some ordines to a particular coronation never stops. For example, a discussion continues of the oldest and most detailed ordine, the Order Cencius II, for which the dating is still controversial. The bulk of Eduard Eichmann’s 1912 dating and tradition investigation slowly transformed from source research to a wider discussion as he was forced by those critical of his research to defend in his findings in several articles. Eichmann’s many and diverse investigations, published in 1942, are indispensable because he took ecclesiastical law, politics, and liturgy into consideration. One of the most important contributions to recent studies on ordines is presented by Percy Ernst Schramm, Die Ordines der mittelalterlichen Kaiserkrönungen (1930). With this and several other important articles, Schramm proposed basic principles for the research of ordines and considerably increased the database of source materials. But Schramm was not able to draw the obvious conclusion from his enormous body of research and its result, shown in his last articles. Cornelius Adrianus Boumann and Carl Erdmann were the first to regard the Ordines consequently as a component of medieval liturgical literature. Liturgy was much more important in medieval times and could be easily compatible with political action. Therefore these liturgical texts can be considered estimable sources of information. Reinhard Elze completed an extensive and profound study. In his introductions he presented the development of the ordines during nearly 500 years – from the Ottonian period until the compilation and transmission of the new ceremonial book at the end of the 15th century – as well as the problems of researching them. In addition to the edition of the main texts, Elze also indicated all manuscripts recording ordines of coronation. It seems there was no record of the order (Ordo) of imperial coronation in the first period, because no trace has been found belonging to the period of time from Charlemagne (800) through Berengar I (915), during which 11 emperors were crowned. The transmission of ordines began with the renovation of the imperial dignity by Otto I (962) and ended with the last imperial coronation performed by Pope Clement VII in 1530, when Karl V was crowned in Bologna. The authors of the ordines, of which a differentiation of similar

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texts is possible only by its handwritten records, are mostly unknown. The oldest ordines are very short and have been collected in the written Ottonian Pontifical of Mainz (960). The Roman Order (Ordo I) was probably compiled some years earlier than the pontifical, using the consecration of popes as a model. The Western Order (Ordo II) repeated an older order for kings with small changes in the text. The Benedicito Reginae was derived from the same West Franconian model as the Order of the Seven Formulas, which the editor of the Pontifical of Mainz had added to the early German Order. The ordines that followed until the 12th century were only completions to Ordos I and II, adapting the different conditions. The first took the Roman background into consideration; Ordo V was certainly written in Rome around 1000, but it had no particular influence on the following imperial ordines. The three written ordines in the 11th century were widespread, but did not greatly influence future developments. The Ordo of Arras (Ordo IX) has been considered a production outside the imperial ordines. The order of the Roman Pontifical of the 12th century and the Ordo Cencius I (Ordo X) transmitted in the Liber Censuum of Cencius Camerarius (later Honirus III), were models with large significance for later ordines. The Liber Censuum is a collection of papal documents which were used in curial administration. The original of 1192 is conserved in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 8486). Both the order (Ordo XI) compiled for a Spanish king’s mid-12th-century coronation in Southern France and the very similar order probably written in Apulia (Ordo XII) were an attempt to arrange the ceremonial of the older orders but without any larger influence for future orders. The procedure of the imperial coronation at the time of the Salier is the only text without any liturgical references. It contains the imperial coronation outside the clergy and had no practical value, but has been an important testimony for historians. The four Roman ordines of the 12th century have become particularly significant for the history of the imperial coronation. They show the tendency to reduce the possibility of improvisation offered by the older ordines through a larger written concentration on the details, and also reveal the basic principles of the later ordines too, in which nothing was changed of the ceremonial, fixated in its form since that time.The oldest of these orders is the controversal Ordo Cencius II (Ordo XIV), which was compiled in the first half of the century and at the century’s end much changed by the author of the Ordo of the Staufer (Ordo XVII). The Ottonian and Roman pontificals of the 12th century became established in the Ordo of Constantinople, the earlier version of which referred to the 13th-century Pontifical of the Roman Curia and was also used in Spain for the imperial coronation in Toledo. The Ordo of

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Apamea (Ordo XV) had no great influence on the following order (Ordo XVI). The last Ordo and the XVII was used at the beginning of the 13th century for the compilation of the Ordo of the Curia (Ordo XVIII), the principle version of the Pontifical of the Roman Curia. This Ordo was finally included in the curial books of ceremonies. Some attempts to improve the text of this ordo (Ordo XIX–XXIV) were unsuccessful; Ordo XVIII was decisive for the papal ceremonies in the ceremonial books until the end of the 15th century. The pontificals in which the Ordo XIX–XXIV were collected, however, never have been obligatory for the pope. The are two editions of the Pontifical of the Roman Curia; the first was compiled in the middle of the 13th century and the second, the more important one, the Ordo (Ordo XX) of Durandus (the jurist and the liturgist Guillelmus Durandus) was written between 1292 and 1296. The Ordo XXIII, which had been a compilation of the Ordo XVIII and XIX, is conserved in one manuscript. The manuscript was used at the imperial coronation of Karl IV on April 5, 1355. The papal ceremonial masters Augustinus Patricius Piccolomini and Johannes Burckard, who worked out the new ceremonial for the papal liturgy, created a new Ordo for emperors by using and completing the Ordo XVIII – including aspects of Friedrich III’s coronation (March 19, 1452). Remarks on the coronation of emperors in the pope’s presence and the coronation of empresses were collected in Ordo XXV and in several parts of the Pontifical of the Dominican Alberto Castellani near 1520 (Ordo XXVI). The papal ceremonial master Blasius de Cesena wrote a compendium (Ordo XXVII) for the last imperial coronation, that of Charles V on September 3, 1539, based on the order of imperial coronation conserved in the ceremonial of 1488 but adapted to the practical situation. Some changes were necessary because the coronation took place in Bologna and not in Rome. The compendium became established in Ordo XXVIII A. These records were presented in the form of a diary, in which there were registered both the ordines and descriptions of particular celebrations. Beside the Roman Pontifical and the Pontifical of Mainz, there were also others which prescribed local rites outside Rome. The later ordines were collected in the ceremonial books, the oldest of which – that of the canon Benedikt of St. Peter (1140) – did not take any consideration of imperial coronation. The collection of the Cardinal Albinus (1189), the so-called Ordo Cencius I (Ordo X), was not included in the Liber Censuum of 1192, but was inserted into the more detailed Ordo Cencius II between 1195 and 1198. During the residence of the popes in Avignon, some cardinals performed the coronation of Heinrich VII (June 29, 1312) and Karl IV (April 5, 1355) in the order of the pope. An order of coronation found by the notaries in the ecclesiastical archives was issued in the bull Rex regum of Clement V – instruc-

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tions for the cardinals – and has been equal to the Ordo of the Staufer. The bull Speciosus forma of Innocent VI for coronation was quite similar to the former bull and contained the same Ordo, and was included in the Johannes Porta de Annoniaco’s report about Cardinal Bishop Peter of Ostia’s coronation journey. In some non-liturgical manuscripts, ordines of imperial coronation have also been transmitted, such as chartular of Aachen (ca. 1200), which contains the German king’s Ordo, the coronation of queens, and the ordines of coronation for the Ottonian Pontifical (Ordo I and II). Ordines I and XI can be verified in a 13th-century manuscript, probably of Venetian origin, conserved now in Dresden. Konrad von Mengenberg inserted and explained fully the Ordo XIX in his Oeconomica in the middle of the 14th century. The testimony of the only non-litugical Ordo (Ordo XIII) can be found in the chronicon maius of the Dominican of Milan, Galvaneus Flamma. Flamma’s source, a cronica kalendaria of the 11th century, unfortunately was lost. The oldest ordines have been very short because the celebrating popes or bishops enjoyed privileges to arrange services. The model for the older ordines of imperial coronation was the Sacramentaries and Benedicitionals, and for the more recent ordines – beside one or more ordines of emperors – the ordo of kings is considered the model. In the meantime the ordines got longer and included rules to guarantee the uniformity of rites for the whole church. Two groups of texts could be distinguished in the ordines: spooken formulars (prayers, benedictions, songs, and oaths) and connecting rubrics. The first group has depended on written submissions and the second group could be liberally arranged. The text of the first prayers also could be verified similarly in the Franconian Sacramentaries (8th and 9th centuries) and the Benedicitionals of the following century. The songs derived from liturgical sources, such as Antiphonaries or Responsories, conformed to the text of the Vulgata. The oaths were a strange part of the liturgical ordines. The oldest imperial oaths – probably used in the imperial coronation of Karl the Bald (December 25, 875) – did not change in the written edition until the 12th century. It seems the text was transfered without any consideration of contemporary wording. The so-called “Roman Oath,” certain rights guaranteed to the Romans by the emperor, was written in the 12th century. Only a written model of the oldest imperial ordo, the Roman Ordo of the Ottonian Pontifical, has been discovered. It was an old Ordo that was handed down for papal consecration from the 9th century on. It was translated into a longer version in the Ottonian Pontifical. Later ordos have been directly or indirectly based on this version. Le Liber censuum de l’Eglise romaine, ed. Pierre Fabre, 1905; Richard Salo-

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mon, Iohannis Porta de Annoniaco Liber de coronatione Karoli IV. imperatoris, 1913; Jean Mabillon and Michel Germain, Museum italicum seu collectio veterum scriptorum ex bibliothecis italicis, 2 vols., 1687–1689, vol. II: 3–554; Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 1931–1961; Michel Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen Age, 1938–1941; Cornelius Adrianus Boumann, Sacring and Crowning: The Development of the Latin Ritual for Anointing of Kings and the Coronation of an Emperor before the Eleventh Century, 1957; Eduard Eichmann, “Die Ordines der Kaiserkrönung,” ZRG, Kan. Abt. 2 (1912): 1–43; Eduard Eichmann, Die Kaiserkrönung im Abendland: ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des kirchlichen Rechts, der Liturgie und der Kirchenpolitik, vol 2, 1942; Reinhard Elze, “Der Liber Censuum des Cencius (Cod. Vat. lat. 8486) von 1192 bis 1228,” Bolletino dell’Archivio paleografico italiano, Nuova Serie II–III (1956–1957): 251–70; Reinhard Elze, “Eine Kaiserkrönung um 1200,” Adel und Kirche: Festschrift Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1968, 385–73; Reinhard Elze, Die Ordines für die Weihe und Krönung des Kaisers und der Kaiserin, 1960; Johannes Haller, “Die Formen der deutsch-römischen Kaiserkrönung,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 33 (1944): 49–100; Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler Worship, 1958; Hans-Walter Klewitz, “Papsttum und Kaiserkrönung: Ein Beitrag zur Frage nach dem Alter des Ordo Cencius II,” Deutsches Archiv für die Geschichte des Mittelalters 4 (1941): 412–43; Joseph Kösters, Studien zu Mabillons römischen Ordines, 1905; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Die Krönung in Deutschland bis zum Beginn des Salischen Hauses (1028),” ZRG, Kan. Abt. 24 (1935): 184–332; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Ordines-Studien I: Die Ordines der mittelalterlichen Kaiserkrönung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kaisertums,” Archiv für Urkundenforschung 11 (1930): 285–390; Percy Ernst Schramm, Kaiser Rom und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Erneuerungsdenkens vom Ende des Karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit, 1929; 3rd ed. 1975; Joseph Schwarz, “Die Ordines der Kaiserkrönung,” Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte 22 (1882): 159–212; Georg Waitz, Die Formeln der deutschen Königs- und römischen Kaiserkrönung (1872). E. France Several editions of ceremonial texts were published in the 17th century. Immediately after his appointment to “Historiograph de France,” in 1619, Théodor Godefroy published his Cérémonial français. With this text, Godefroy passed on an important aid to the absolute kingdom and the world of scholarship. This publication, in which Godefroy unified all the historical

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information about coronation he found in the currently discovered ordines, was important to members of the court for its preservation and also for scholars as information about traditional costume. This edition was so successful that his son, Denys Godefroy, who had taken over his father’s position, published a larger re-edition in two volumes in 1649. The first of these volumes discussed coronation; the second volume handled state ceremonies. Through these volumes, France had a comprehensive description of its ceremonials. Guillaume Marlot had compiled all of the important coronation records for Reims some years earlier, but without considering the records’ source material. Jacques Sirmond studied the early Carolingian period during the time of Godfroy’s edition, and his book is the only reference for the oldest Ordo (the coronation of Judith in 856), because the original manuscript was lost. There always have been published texts for special coronations, in which traditional ceremonies were repeated without any criticism. Nearly 100 years later, Edmond Martène published some unknown ordines; He verified, for example, the Ordo of the Capetingians in the Pontifical of Sens, but there is no direct connection to Sens. The dating proposed by Godfroy in the 18th century for some ordines was, for some time, considered doubtful. Two German scholars, Hans Scheuer and Max Buchner, tried at the beginning of the last century to figure out the characteristics of these coronations and suggested possible dates for them. The history of the French coronation published by George Péré in 1921 did not fulfill the hopes placed in it to have a solution for unanswered questions. This book did not consider the already printed ordines and was not interested in their dependance on one another. Some years later, Marc Bloch noted on the lack of critical classification of the French coronation. In the introduction of his comprehensive study, in which he principally followed the available text editons and manuscripts, Percy Ernst Schramm indicated that the 20 described ordines are the main texts, and that many ordines without any practical importance – such as those that owe their creation to the editing of a pontificale or of another kind of liturgical handbook – existed which had not been accepted for use and survived only on parchment. The pre-condition of a critical history of French coronations is doubtless the distinction of the valid and not valid ordines. Aside from their collection and the reconstruction of their transmission, Schramm tried to discover the ordines’ dependance on and their connections with texts from other countries, because most ordines of the western world were more or less similar. Sometimes it is very difficult to determine which texts were the models and which were based on them. Schramm expressed hope that his present study would easily make a critical edition, thanks to the latest scientific research.

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The oldest Ordo is that of the coronation of Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald (October 856). The text of the lost manuscript of St. Laurent in Liège had been edited by Jacques Sirmond, Karoli Calvi et successorum aliquot Franciae regum capitula in diversis synodis ac placitis generalibus edita …, 1623, 498ff. Some formulas used in it were adopted by the Anglo-Saxon Dunstan-Ordo. The first Ordo created solely for coronation was that of the coronation of Charles the Bald as king of Lorraine (September 869). This Ordo’s text was preserved in the same lost manuscript, but the bishops’ previous speeches – the most important testimonies of that time – are found in several manuscripts (such as Reg. lat. 291, f. 120v) and in the Annales Bertiniani of Hinkmar of Reims. The Ordo of the Ludwig II’s coronation (December 877), which was based on the previous Ordo (869), was also contained in the manuscript of Liège as well as in the Annales Bertiniani. The Ordo of Ludwig’s second coronation (September 878) by Pope John VIII is preserved in the manuscript of Reims 214. The “Erdmannsche Ordo” (about 900), which is found in a copy of a lost codex of Sens in Paris, Bibl. Nat. Baluze 379, f. 86r-v, was consulted in Germany and England at that time – and probably in France as well – until the coronation of 1059. This text is the Westfranconian Ordo of that time, used for nearly two centuries. The Erdmannsche Ordo is quite similar to that of 877. The wording came from different 8th-and 9th-centuries sacramentaries, from enlargements around Hinkmar, and from the so far not identified scriptorium where the Ordo was compiled. The Fulrad Ordo drawn up by the abbot of the monastery Saint Vaast at Arras (c. 900) has been used in France since 1108. This Ordo, which was transmitted in several manuscripts (e. g., Paris and Brussels), was influenced by the English Dunstan- and Edgar-Ordines and the German Ordo. The Ordo of Arras (c. 1000) was found in chapter 141 of the Cologne cathedral library’s pontifical, became important for the Lombardian coronation of kings in the 14th century. The Ordo of Reims, contained in the manuscript of Reims, was a completion of the compilation of 1200 and was written at Ludwig IX’s court. This Ordo is quite different from the previous one, which indicated each word but gave very short instruction about the situations in which these formulas were used. The Ordo of Reims instead assumed the familiar wording and ordered the performance of single ceremonial acts. The indications for the anointing of the king were taken from the Ordo of Mainz and those for the king’s oath were taken from the Fulrad Ordo and the Anglo-Saxon Edgar Ordo. The French translation was probably the Ordo of the coronation of

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Saint Ludwig IX, and could be verified in the Gesta Ludiwici IX of Guillaume de Nangis, in the 1737 burnt Registers of the Chambre des comptes of Paris, and in some manuscripts such as those found in the British Library, Cottanian Mss. Tiberius B. VIII. The 1300 compilation was probably the Ordo of the coronation of Ludwig VIII (1223). This text became known to Godefroy, who awarded the formula of coronation to Ludwig VIII. The text also was republished by Martène in the manuscript Paris, Bibl. Nat. 4464. Instructions for the girding on the sword were also taken from the Ordos of Mainz and Reims, and from former ordines – but the rest of the Ordo was compiled based on the Fulrad and Edgar Ordos, as well as the 10th-century German Ordo. The last Ordo of the Capetingians (Ordo of Sens) was written between 1300 and 1320. This ordo used as models the Fulrad and Reims Ordos, the compilation of 1300, the Ordo of Mainz, and the Edgar Ordo. The author, probably a Reims cleric, based the 1300 compilation on a synthesis of the 1200 compilation with the Ordo of Reims – adding missing parts and verifying suspicious ones from the older Fulrad Ordo.This newer Ordo was used as a base for the coronation of the first Valois, Philipp VI, in 1328. The following Ordos were based on this one, and it was still observed in the 15th century because the text was more detailed and better arranged than previous ordines. The French translation resulted from the fact that laymen’s understanding of the text in the national language was considered important. In 1365, King Charles V ordered an Ordo for library be written and illustrated (manuscripts now in Paris and London). This was more than an official Ordo, as the king wanted a splendidly illustrated manuscript. The king was, therefore, more involved in this Ordo’s compilation than any of his predecessors were with previous ordines. Undoubtedly, Charles had different models used in his Ordo (last Capetingian and Fulrad Ordo and the Ordo of Pedro IV of Aragon), including the pontifical with the Ordo of Mainz and that of Wilhelm Durandus. Particularities which were not recorded in the text were shown in the illustrations. The Carmelite Jean Golein (Goulain) wrote a commentary on this Ordo in his translation of the Pontifical of Wilhelm Durandus (1372). This chronicle and the description of the coronation were more detailed than any had been since the time of Charles V. In his treatise on the coronation, Jean Foulquart described the procureur syndic of the lay judges of Reims and their tasks during coronation. Aside from information on local history, Foulquart worked out the most important aspects of coronation, including the expenses. The report for Charles VIII’s coronation in Reims (1484), which Godefroy had already mentioned, was more than a simple description. It was an

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explanation of protocol because all facts and participants were exactly registered. This report did not create a model that was decisive for future ceremonies. From this time on, the Ordo did not change but the course of events became more splendid and the dignities changed each time. Théodore Godefroy, Le cérémonial de France ou Description des cérémonies, rangs, et séances observées aux couronnemens, entrées, et enterremens des roys et roynes de France …, 1619 (expanded ed. 1649; see. Paris, Bibl. Nat. 4411–28); Guillaume Marlot, Théâtre d’honneur et de magnificence préparé au sacre des roys, auquel il est trité de l’inauguration des souverains, du lieu où elle se fait et par qui, de la vérité de la Sainte Ampoule des roys qui en ont été sacrez, du couronnement des reynes, des antrées royales et cérémonies du sacre, 1643; Nicolas Menin, Traité historique et chronologique du sacre et coronnement des rois et des reines de France depuis Clovis I jusqu’au présent et de tous les princes souverains de l’Europe augmenté de la relation exacte de la cérémonie du sacre de Louis XVI, 1723; Edmond Martène, De antiquis Ecclesiae ritibus libri quatuor, 3 vols., 1700–1702, rev. ed. 1736–1738; PonsAugustin Alletz, Cérémonial du sacre des rois de France …, 1775; Charles Joseph de Bevy, Histoire des inaugurations des rois, empereurs et autres souverains de l’univers …, 1776; Georges Péré, Le sacre et le couronnement des rois de France dans leurs rapports avec les lois fondamentales, 1921; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Ordines-Studien II: Die Krönung bei den Westfranken und Franzosen,” Archiv für Urkundenforschung 15 (1938): 3–55; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Der König von Frankreich: Wahl, Krönung, Erbfolge und Königsidee vom Anfang der Kapetinger (987) bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters I,” ZRG, Kan. Abt. 25 (1936): 222–354, II. 26 (1937): 161–284. F. England Records, memoranda and acts of the Court of Claims, as well as the Ordines, should be consulted for information about the English coronations. The oath of coronation of kings, to which the “Charters of liberty” is similar, has many times been recorded and transmitted separately. All these texts, however, can not be seperated from the Ordines as they have been passed on together and complement each other. An enormous number of official and private descriptions deal with coronation, which is why constitutional literature has been engaged in its study since the time of the Tudors, and liturgical research has taken interest in coronation since the 19th century. The value of these texts is quite different, as some records were drawn up by experts who discussed particular events, and other records fell back on historical facts. John Neville Figgis’s study for the 16th century used the constitutional literature of the time on a large scale. Selden, Thomas Milles and William Prynne’s investigations and research in the following century contain im-

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portant information and source material about coronation ceremonials. In the first half of the 18th century, Thomas Rymer produced a broad, comparative study of English rites and ceremonies, including papal, imperial and other royal courts’s ceremonies. Some historical books with important references for this field, such as those of Goffrey of Monmouth, should be mentioned alongside the great number of publications about the English constitution and the history of the following time. The facts and source materials published by Leopold George Wickham Legg, presented in two books dealing with coronation and its ceremonies, are fundamental for further investigations. The summary of Reginald Maxwell Woodley’s book of coronation rites is very useful, but some completations and corrections to this book should be taken into consideration. The specialist in medieval European coronation ceremonies, Percy Ernst Schramm, devoted a great deal of his time to studying the English rites. Gaining insight from earlier studies by English specialists, Schramm proved that most of the English texts can be adapted with a definite concept of specification that relates the texts to continental versions. He showed that the Westfranconian Order, which he carefully studied and which had not been known to English scholars, represented a solution for the textual development in Britain. Schramm’s proposal of a distinction between adapted and non-adapted Ordines is only aplicable in the early period, because in modern times the Ordines varied from one ceremony to another. Records in different forms of several offices must therefore be included in such an investigation. For a reconstruction of the historical tradition, Schramm collected information on officials and the purpose of some ceremonial acts from literary sources and library catalogues. These facts could also be useful for a new edition of the English “Coronation Record.” In this manner, Schramm’s edition can be a helpful completion to Leopold George Wickham Legg’s famous book as an enlargement of the most important texts – taking account of all records and compositions of the original version and at least a characterisation of elder and different models – that were consulted. Wickham Legg’s intention was to provide perspective on this wide field of records, some of which have not yet even been discovered. The Judith Ordo is that of the coronation of Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald (October 856 – Westfranconian Ordo); the text of the lost manuscript of St. Laurent in Liège has been published by J. Sirmond (manuscript is lost, text has been preserved only through the printed edition by Sirmond); the Dunstan Ordo I (960–973), preserved in the manuscript of the Bodleian Library (579), was written on the continent with 10th- and 11th-century editions completed in England; the Dunstan Ordo II (960–973 “Egbert”

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review), contained in Paris Bibl. Nat. 10575 was wrongly attributed to Archbishop Egbert of York. This Ordo continued to have an effect later in Hungary and Poland, and on the coronation of German rulers and Italian kings in the 11th century (Lombardian Ordo); the Edgar Ordo (May 973) was based on the Dunstan Ordo II and used the Ordo of Karl the Bald (869) and that of Mainz. The Erdmannsche Order was prepared for the coronation of King Edgar. This Ordo was taken as the model in France and England, and has come down to us in seven manuscripts (Paris, London, Cambridge, Rouen). A description of the coronation of Edgar (May 973) by a Ramsay monastery monk was included in the Vita S. Oswaldi (995–1005) and contained in a manuscript in the London British Library. A translation of the oath of the coronation of Aethelreds II (April 978) took the Edgar Ordo as model. Laudes for William the Conqueror as Duke of Normandy, which were destined for religious festivals, were copied in a manuscript now found in the Rouen public library. A copy of the Laudes for the coronation of Mathilde, William the Conqueror’s wife (May 1068), was damaged by a fire in 1731 but is preserved in the Pontifical of Winchester, preserved today in the British Library. These and previous Laudes that were performed on feast days are reminiscent of the coronation, as had been custom in Normandy. The Wilhelm Ordo English period of William the Conqueror (1066–1087) is contained in a pontifical found today in the Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. This text is richer than the Edgar Ordo because of the carefully considered alternation of prayers, especially the antiphons. The Coronation Charter of Henry I (1100) has been preserved in various manuscripts, from which printed editions have been published. The charter had been very important for the history of the Magna Carta. The Anselm-Ordo was an adaptation of the Edgar Ordo and was used from 1154 until the beginning of the 14th century. This text was copied in several 12th-century manuscripts. All sections of this text, which differs from those of Anglosaxon origin, follow the German customs which were then considered universally valid. The most important combination of the two versions is that from the German Ordo that included the questioning of the people; this means that there was a restoration of the old law, in which election was the most natural matter. The Anonymous Treatise of York was a comparison of the King Ordo and the ordination (beginning of the 12th century). This work is unique in its time because the result of the comparison of the consecration and symbols of kings and priests was that the king was not disrespected. Coronation ideals contained in Goffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 Historia regum Britanniae include some instructions for festival coronations taken from the English court, as well as a description of the coronation of King

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Arthur – a ceremony influenced by Celtic nationalism; the Coronation Charter of Henry II (1154) was used for the Magna Carta; the protocol of Richard I’s coronation (September 1189) was important for a new type of text used in future ceremonies. Four chroniclers recorded the coronation of Richard (Gesta Ricardi). The Ordo of the secondo coronation of Richard I (April 1194) was difficult to realize because it was the secondo one. Richard wanted to reestablish his honor when he arrived in England after being held captive by the emperor. The coronation ceremony created difficulties as, for example, the anointing could not be repeated because of its sacramental character. The Ordo of the coronation of Edward II (February 1308), which has been preserved in many mansuscipts and chronicles (Oxford, London) in a short (which is the older version and based on the Anselm-Ordo) and a long version (based on protocol 1189, Ordo of Reims, Fulrad-Ordo king’s and papal documents and Roman-German Pontifical), presented an important stage in the English coronation. The longer version was written in Westminster Abby in 1377. This is where the abbot Nicholas Lytlington ordered a Missal to be written that has been the textual testimony of the younger version. It is possible that the revision of the Ordo took place in view of Richard II’s coronation in July 1377. The French translation of the oath of Edward’s coronation (1308) was added as a “Memorandum” to the Close Rolls. The coronation of Richard II was also described by Thomas Walsingham in his Historia Anglicana. The oath of the memorandum of the coronation of Edward III (1327) which took as its model the Ordo of 1308, was directly noted on the roll and inserted in the Close Rolls. Beside the Lytlington Ordo can be found a treatise Forma regum et reginarum coronacionis Anglie in several manuscripts, which was a recording of the ceremonies in a functional and chronological manner worked out by an officer of the court. A series of indications, such as poetic works for coronation, reception of the king in a church, and Ordo for a king’s funeral (de exequiis regalibus), were also noted. Memorandum of the coronation of Henry IV (October 1399): In this document, preserved in the Public Record Office, there is the decision of the Claims and no indication of the coronation. This coronation was connected to a new version of the legend of S. Thomas, who received oil from the heavens for the coronation. Little divice for the coronation of Richard III and his wife (1485): This text, preserved in several manuscripts, began with the dates and details of the coronation, then changed to the format of an Ordo (mainly based on the Lytlington Ordo); the words of the prayers were only implied, whereas the Ordo itself is determined by the ceremony of the court and not by liturgical ceremonies. This document stands at the door of a new period, in which paper took place of

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parchment and printing had been invented. Thus, there was an extensive documentation of the following coronations, along with the official versions. Thomas Milles, Catalogue of Honor or Treasury of Nobility, 1610; John Selden, Titles of Honor, 1614; William Prynne, The Signal Loyalty and Devotion of Gods true Saints and pious Christians towards their King, 1660; A Complete Account of the Ceremonies observed in the Coronations of the Kings and Queens of England, 1727;Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literae et cuiuscunque generis Acta publica inter Reges Angliae et alios quos vis Imperatores, Reges, Pontifices, Principes, vel Comunitates … ab anno 1101 ad nostra usque tempora habita aut extracta; … 20 vols., 1704–1732; Goffrey of Monmouth, The British History in twelf books translated from the Latin by A. Thompson, 1842; William Maskell, Monumenta ritualia ecclesiae Anglicanae, 3 vols., 1846–1847, 2nd ed. 1882; John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, 1896, 2nd ed. 1914; Mode Violet Clark, Medival Representation and Consent, 1936; Eleanore Cosntance Lodge and Gladys Amy Thornton, English Constitutional Documents, 1307–1485, 1935; Heinrich Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie im XI. und XII. Jahrhundert: eine historische Studie, 1899, rpt. 1980; Leopold George Wickham Legg, English Coronation Records, 1901; Leopold George Wickham Legg, A History of the English Coronation, 1937; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Ordines-Studien III: Die Krönung in England,” Archiv für Urkundenforschung 15 (1938): 305–91 (special studies 306–09). G. Roman Curia The ceremonial master Agostino Patrizi compiled the first edition of ecclesiastical rites at the beginning of the 16th century; during that time he worked on the composition of the ceremonial book of the Roman Curia, which had been obligatory for a long time. Nearly 100 years later, Edmond Martène published research covering the study of ancient rites. This work was soon republished with different supplements. One of the first edition of the Ordines Romani was created at the end of the 17th century by Jean Mabillon. The presentation of this important collection of source materials, which had much influence on later investigations, was prepared by Josph Kösters and was not satisfactory because of its lacking consideration of manuscripts and the included attempts to uncover archetypes. Many useful indications of old liturgical manuscripts can be found in the liturgy of the Roman popes published by Domenico Giorni in the middle of the 18th century. For his investigations of ceremonies undertaken nearly at the same time, Giovanni Battista Gattico mainly used manuscripts preserved in the Vatican Library. An account of the solemn procession from the Vatican Basil-

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ica to St. John in Lateran following the coronation of a pope, a tradition that lasted for nearly 1000 years (from Leo III [795] to Pius VII [1801]), was written by Francesco Cancellieri. In this body of research, Cancellieri tried to classify and compile detailed information from unknown documents. Unfortunately, the investigation of the textual history of ceremonial books done by Franz Ehrle some years earlier focused only on the 14th century and remained incomplete. In an introduction to his edition of the order under Innocent VIII, Joaquim Nabuco wrote an incomplete survey of the development of the papal ceremonial during and after the pontificate of Nicolaus V. The most substantial and comprehensive study of the recent past is that of Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, a specialist of ceremonies and their transmission, who reconstructed the papal ceremonial by using important texts preserved in manuscripts from various European libraries. Schimmelpfennig also wrote an extensive exploration of the ceremonial of the Curia and its tradition. The indications of different copies of texts concerning the original are certainly a theoretical foundation for further investigations. Schimmelpfennig subdivided the history of the ceremonial books into four phases. The Ordines Romani were collected in the first period (from the 8th to the th 10 century) from the early 9th century onward and were included in the Roman German Pontifical of Mainz. The tradition of ceremonial books of the Curia began in the middle of the 12th century, when different ceremonial occasions were described and characterized by the service of patriarchical and stational Roman churches. The oldest collection, the Liber politicus, was drawn up by Canon Benedict between 1140 and 1143, then edited by Mabillon as Ordo Romanus XI. Benedict used liturgical books, sacramentaries, Ordines Romani, and different models for peculiarities of S. Peter’s in Rome for his compilation, which followed the course of the ecclesiastical year. At the end of the 13th century, different, smaller liturgical collections, that referred to the 12th century, came into being. The papal liturgy of this period was also preserved in a manuscript from Basel, which is similar to Benedict’s work, but shorter, and in the collections of cardinals Albinus and Cencius (Liber Censuum). The description of this second group is more detailed, but there were fewer feast days described than in Benedict’s version. The collections of Basel, Albinus and Cencius were transmitted in an Ordo for the election, consecration and coronation of the pope. Since the pontificate of Innocent III, who reformed the service, there was better information about liturgical books used in the papal chapel because Cardinal Gil Albornoz had ordered that a copy be made in 1365. The model of this copy, which included notes about events under Gregory IX, Innocent IV, Urban IV and

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Boniface VIII, was probably written under Innocent III. There are three comparable groups of texts from the 13th century. They are the liturgical testimonies of the Franciscans (Breviary of S. Francis and S. Clara) written between 1215/1220 and 1231/1234 outside the Roman Curia. There are four manuscripts in the second group: two missals written in the scriptorium of S. Maria Maggiore, and two Sacramentaries which indicated Roman attitudes. These manuscripts contained details about the papal liturgy, particularly in the two Missals that concentrated on the ceremonies of the three last days of the Holy Week.The different versions of the Pontifical of the Roman Curia also contained texts from Maundy Thursday to Holy Saturday. The ceremonial book of the 13th century, preserved in the papal library in Avignon, is a compilation of texts, probably done under Boniface VIII by comparing the ceremonial with pontifical texts. The compilation of the Ordo Romanus XIII, which should settle procedures of the election and consecration of popes, also recorded the events following the election and took into consideration all possible eventualities – a sort of desciption of the whole ecclesiastical year. This Ordo considerably expands the Ordo of Cencius. During the period when the papal court was in Avignon until the end of the schism, the ceremonial became more concentrated on the papal palace and was less public, as only a few ceremonies took place outside the palace. Under John XXII, who resided in Avignon most of the rites were celebrated in the cathedral and some churches. Benedict XII ordered construction of a new papal palace with more chapels inside (the capella parva was preserved for the private service and the capella magna for high feasts assumed the position of the Roman patriarchial churches), which brought about a concentration of the ceremonies at the papal palace. The mid-14th-century compilations could be related with the Ordo Romanus XIV. The text of manuscript 1706 in the Avignon public library, discovered by Franz Ehrle, contains, besides the Order, a lot of various news pertaining to the papal ceremonial. For example, the Holy Week texts were followed by those of the funeral of Benedict XI, nominations of prelates, and canonizations, coronation and deaths of kings. The three recorded Ordines of kings’s coronations are connected with the Sicilian kings Charles II and Robert the Wise, based on the Ordo of imperial coronation, propably transmitted in a pontifical. The Ordo Romanus XIV exists in different versions and is preserved in several manuscripts; it is one of the best-known source texts of Avignon ceremonials. Texts of the pope’s election and coronation, of papal service, of celebrations during the ecclesiastical year, order of councils, appointments creations of cardinals and their nominations as legates, and smaller supplements and glosses of several hands have also been preserved.

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The compilation of Bindo Fesulani – the original started with Whit Sunday 1377 and its copy was begun in September of the same year – described the different forms of the papal service and liturgy of the main feasts. The socalled Ordo Romanus XV edited by Mabillon is dated in the late 14th century, and most of its sections are based in the middle of the century. Petrus Amelii’s compilation (since Gregory XI became a member of the papal chapel) included the most important feast days, rubrics of the brevary devided by months, instructions for the illness and death of a pope and conclave, and texts from the time of Boniface IX. Supplements to this text were done by Amelii’s nephew, Petrus Assalbiti, who was an Augustinian hermit. A manuscript in the library of Eichstätt contains an Ordo of the consecration of popes, references to the death of Innocent VII, and the coronation of Gregory XII, along with a detailed description of the procession to the main altar of St. Peter for the coronation. François de Conzié used an older model for his compilation of texts about the coronations of popes and cited two manuscripts in his glosses. In his records about the journey of Benedict XIII (1406–1408), de Conzié described the events at the papal court, as later on did Johannes Burckard in his diary. His description is contained in two manuscripts of the 15th century. But this text had no influence on future ceremonial books. The ceremonial book of the time of Benedict XIII, written by ceremonial clerks, was excerpted and transformed during the time of Agostino Patrizi, and was probably a model for the new ceremonial book. The ceremonial collection has only been enlarged by glosses and supplements as an adaption to the current situation during the 15th century. The arrangement of some pontificals has shown that the ceremonial of the Curia influenced other churches of bishops. These ceremonies were grandiosely updated until the time of Innocent VIII, when two ceremonial masters, Agostino Patrizi Piccolomini and Johannes Burckard, compiled the ceremonial book which was decisive for centuries until the second Vatican Council. For the new compilation, Patrizi Piccolomini described all ceremonies by analyzing the traditional ceremonies and examing their importance. His opus was hardly changed, only completed by commentaries and the diaries of Johannes Burckard. Agostino Patrizi Piccolomini, Rituum ecclesiasticorum sive sacrarum ceremoniaum S.S. Romanae Ecclesiae libri tres non ante impressi …, 1516; Edmond Martène, De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus libri quatuor …, 1700–1702; Le Liber pontificalis, texte, introduction et commentaire par l’abbé Louis Duchesne, 1955–1957; Jean Mabillon and Michel Germain, Museum italicum seu collectio veterum scriptorum ex bibliothecis italicis, 2 vols., 1687–1689, vol. II, 3–554;

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Domenico Giorgi, De liturgia Romani Pontificis in solenni celebratione missarum, 3 vols., 1731–1744; Giovanni Battista Gattico, Acta selecta caeremonialia Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae, ex variis mss. codicibus et diariis saeculi XV. XVI. XVII., 1753; Francesco Cancellieri, Storia de’ solenni possessi de’ sommi pontefici detti anticamente processi o processioni dopo la loro coronazione dalla basilica vaticana alla lateranense, 1802; Franz Ehrle, “Zur Geschichte des päpstlichen Hofceremoniells im 14. Jh.,” Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 5 (1889) 565–602; Joseph Kösters, Studien zu Mabillons römischen Ordines, 1905; Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense. Études et documents, vol. 2 (1931–1961): 23f, 28f; Michel Andrieu, Le Pontifical Romain au Moyen Age, 1938–1941; Joaquim Nabuco, Le cérémonial apostolique avant Innocent VIII. Texte du manuscrit Urbinate Latin 469, 1966; Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, Die Zeremonienbücher der römischen Kurie im Mittelalter 1973; Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, “Die Bedeutung Roms im päpstliche Zeremoniell,” Rom im hohen Mittelalter. Studien zu den Romvorstellungen und zur Rompolitik vom 10. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert. Reinhard Elze zur Vollendung seines siebzigsten Lebensjahres gewidmet, ed. id. and Ludwig Schmugge, 1992, 47–61; Joaquim Nabuco, Le cérémonial apostolique avant Innocent VIII, 1966; Marc Dykmans, L’œuvre de Patrizi Piccolomini ou le cérémonial papal de la première Renaissance, 1980–1982; Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Il corpo del Papa, 1994; Gerit Jasper Schenk, Zeremonielle und Politik: Herrschereinzüge im spätmittelalterlichen Reich, 2003, Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, Das Papsttum von der Antike bis zur Renaissance, 5th ed. (1st ed. 1984), 2005; Jörg Bölling, Das Papstzeremoniell der Renaissance: Texte – Musik – Performanz, 2006. H. Sicily and South Italy Schramm mentioned in his research that the symbols of power used in Sicilian coronations had taken imperial emblems as their model. Elze’s research shows how the historical background and political problems influenced ceremonies in the Kingdom of Sicily. Roger II took the Roman imperial court as a model and transferred its customs to the Norman court in Sicily. Four manuscripts from the Sicilian kingdom contain the Ordo of 1130, which conserved a version of the “Mainzer Ordo” in the Roman-Germanic Pontifical as its model. Only two Ordos – the copy of Monreale (Vat. lat. 6748) and of Messina (Madrid, Bibl. Nac. 678) – presented the Ordines of the coronation in their original order; the manuscript of Montecassino (Casanatense, 614) kept only the old imperial Mass. The text of the Ordo of Coronation in all four manuscripts was changed in view of the situation in 1130 (Pope Anaklet guaranteed Roger the crown of Sicily, Calabry and Apuly, if the king created

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an archbishop of his realm for his coronation and if the king became a papal vassal, treating the pope with fidelity). The Montecassinian manuscript, with its inclusion of the coronation of the queen, was probably already being used at Roger’s second or third wedding. Roger’s grandson, the Staufer Friedrich II, kept the Norman traditions. Reinhard Elze, “Zum Königtum Rogers II. von Sizilien,” Festschrift für Percy Ernst Schramm: zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag von Schülern und Freunden zugeeignet (1964), 102–16. I. Spain Karl Schwarz’s historical study of the court and offices at the court of Aragon is a description of the six orders of the court from Pedro I – whose orders were very detailed – until Pedro IV, whose perfectly thought-out system was first conceived in the strict ceremonial of Majorca. The uniqueness of this order can be seen in a common interest and repeated publications of it. Schwarz demonstrated, for example, the parallels to France in the three main functions of the court clerics: chaplains of the court, responsiblity for alms, and confessors of the ruler. The only diffence was in Aragon, where the clerics were subordinated under the chancellor, and in France they were counted among the members of Chambre le roy. This jurisdiction, which was, in Majorca, in the hands of the maggiordomus, and was exercised in Aragon by a particular official. Olivetta Schena’s book about the Palatine laws of Pedro IV begins with a detailed list of the manuscripts kept in libraries in Spain, Paris and Cagliare. Schena took into account different versions and records of text with explanatory notes and text passages. Schramm’s two studies discuss the historical background for the development of ceremonies on the peninsula. The Liber ordinum of the Westgothians was handed down for a long time on the Peninsula. In the Northwestern part of the Peninsula, this Ordo was practiced by anointing the king since the 9th century, and from 905 on the royal title was introduced, and probably because of Franconian influence, the anointing was connected to an ecclesiastical coronation. As a reaction to the coronation of 1204, which was performed by the pope in Rome in St. Pancratii (because St. Peter was reserved for popes and emperors), Pedro III crowned himself. This demonstration that the crown did not come from the pope was taken as a model by following Castilian kings. The Ordo of Pedro (1276 Ordinamentes de senyor rey en Pere el Gran) has survived since then, but it is not certain if this text was drawn up for the coronation or afterwards in connection with Pedro’s court etiquette. The self-coronation can be found earlier in orders of early Carolingian times, when the king himself put on the

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symbols of power. The prayers of the Ordo of Pedro, whose origin was a Burgundian Ordo of the 12th century, and some parts of the Roman German Pontifical, were written in Latin. The rest of the text was, however, written in the languages of the countries. As a result of the conquest of Mallorca, Pedro IV took over its court etiquette (Leges Palatinae – the detailed ceremonal was concentrated on the palace and the chapels of the kingdom, and thereto were fixed all actions of the court and its servants), transforming it for his own court. Pedro IV ordered the compilation of a new Ordo, based on the Ordo of his grandfather, Pedro III. This new Ordo included a revision of the prayers that were used in the Pontifical of Guillelmus Durandus, and began with a theological prologue. This new Ordo also included the coronation of the queen, based on those of previous empresses. The author of the order, who had been chancellor since 1338, had studied the sense of the coronation symbols in De regimine principium, which was a valuable completation of the Ordo. The protonotary Miguel Clemente wrote a Castilian version of this ceremonial in 1562 by order of the infante Don Carlos. Diego de Valdés, Praerogativa Hispaniae hoc est, De dignitate et praeminentia regum regnorumque Hispaniae, & honoratiori loco ac titulo eis eorumque legatis à Conciliis, nec non Romana sede iure debito, tractatus eximius …, 1626; Esteban Garibay y Zamalloa, Los qvarenta libros del compendio historial de las chronicas y vniuersal hiftoria de todos los reynos de Espana, 1628; Juan Francisco Andrés de Uztarroz, Coronaciones de los Sereníssimo Reyes de Aragón …, 1641; Prospero de Bofarull y Mascaró, Colleccion de documentos inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, …, vol. 1, 1847–1859; Mario Férotin, Le liber ordinum en usage dans l’église wisigothique et mozarabe d’Espagne du cinquième au onzième siècle, 1904; Le leggi palatine di Pietro IV d’Aragona, ed. Olivetta Schena, 1983; Karl Schwarz, Aragonische Hofordnungen im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Geschichte der Hofämter und Zentralbehörden des Königreichs Aragon, 1914; Ferran Valls i Taberner, “De regimine principum,” Estudis Franciscans 38 (1926): 432–50; Percy Ernst Schramm, “Die Krönung im Aragonischen Königreich,” Kaiser Könige und Päpste: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. IV, 1, 1970, 352–71. J. Scandinavia Coronation conferred by an ecclesistical leader was introduced in Denmark and Norway at about the same time (mid-11th century), and with christianization, each country got a patron saint. The position of the king was strengthened by christianization (anointing and coronation). It seems that the German coronation Ordo was used in Sweden and Denmark. A mirror of princes giving guidance for the conduct of a king, Kronung Skuggsjá, was

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drawn up in Norway in 1260. This novel had German and Christian origins, with a description of the ceremonials of the court. There are only a few descriptions of the ceremonies in the Northern countries, for example Saxo Germanicus or Helmold of Bosau. Walter Holzmann, a specialist in Northern countries, showed the connection of the oath of coronation (1164) in Norway with the canon law and decretales recorded in manuscripts, explaining this to be the result of a synod after the coronation, probably proposed by the papal legate. Erich Hoffmann proposed (after an investigation of early medieval times through the mid-16th century) the coronation of Waldemar I (1170) as a turning point in Denmark. With the anointing and coronation, the king received his position by “Dei gratia,” and with the elevation of his son to regent, he safeguarded his succession. An important fact in this development is the canonization of Knut. In this way the German kingdom was brought closer to West European realms. Select Bibliography Walter Holzmann, “Krone und Kirche in Norwegen im 12. Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv, 2 (1938): 341–400; Erich Hoffmann, Königserhebung und Thronfolgeordnung in Dänemark bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976).

Christine Maria Grafinger

Chansons de geste A. Introduction The chansons de geste, or “songs of [heroic] deeds,” constitute the body of epic poems encompassed by the so-called matière de France or Matter of France. Produced primarily between the 11th and 15th centuries, originally in French, these poems were adopted, from the 12th century on, into almost every linguistic tradition in Europe. The bulk of the material draws on the history of France during the 8th and 9th centuries, primarily dealing with Charlemagne as well as Charlemagne’s grandfather (Charles Martel) and son (Louis the Pious). The written transmission of the poems, beginning in the late 11th century, coincides with the age of crusades. The poems extrapolate and exaggerate relatively minor border clashes from the 8th and 9th centuries to provide contemporaries with stories of monumental conflicts with the Moors and Saracens, which catered to the crusading fervor. Accordingly, in later poems, the Orient and the fantastic play ever greater roles, with one cycle

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actually devoted to the First Crusade and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Similar to the Arthurian Romances, the chansons de geste also express the ambitions of the courts of the lesser nobility, who produced and consumed these texts. The first chansons de geste consisted of ten-syllable lines (decasyllables) grouped in assonated stanzas called lassies. In each line of the stanza, which vary in length, the last stressed vowel repeats but the last consonant varies. Stanzas too are of variable length. Later chansons are composed in monorhyme stanzas, in which the last syllable of each line rhymes fully throughout the stanza. As the form developed, lines were expanded to twelve-syllable alexandrine lines instead of ten. The poems are often quite repetitious, lending credence to theories that the written forms, which begin to appear in 12th century, grew out of oral tradition as initially proposed by Gaston Paris in Histoire poétique de Charlemagne, 1865. That notwithstanding, certainly, as the work of Joseph Bédier has shown, Légendes épiques, recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste, 1914, the written works were crafted and (re) composed to serve the intentions of the 12th-century authors, which included establishing and advertising pilgrimage sites and routes. B. Medieval Categorization In his own chanson de geste, Chanson de Saisnes (before 1200), Jean Bodel (1165–1210), provides three categories into which the French romances, by far the most influential of the Middle Ages, are divided: “N’en sont que trois materes a nul home entendant / De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant / Ne de ces trois materes n’i a nu le semblant. / Li conte de Bretaigne s’il sont vain et plaisant / Cil de France sont voir chascun jor aparant” (Jean Bodel, La Chanson des Saisnes, ed. Annette Brasseur, 1989, 6–10; The well educated person recognizes three bodies of literary material, that of France, that of Brittany and of the great Rome. There are no other similar bodies of work. Just as the tales of Brittany [of Arthur] are fantastic and enjoyable, those of France are, as clear as day, true) (trans mine). Bodel’s categories remain current today and also testify to the perceived historical veracity of the Matter of France. In the introduction of the chanson de geste, Girart de Vienne (ca. 1200), Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube (ca. 1170–1220), divides the Matter of France into three main cycles: A Seint Denis, en la mestre abaie,/ trovon escrit, de ce ne doute mie, / dedanz un livre de grant encesorie, / n’ot que trois gestes en France la garnie; / ne cuit que ja nus de ce me desdie. / Des rois de France est la plus seignorie, / et l’autre après, bien est droiz que jeu die, / fu de Doon a la barbe florie, / cil de Maience qui molt ot baronnie (8–16); … La tierce geste, qui molt fist a prisier, / fu de Garin de Monglenne au vis fier (46–47);

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At Saint-Denis, in the great abbey, we find it written (of which I do not doubt) in a book of noble ancestry that there have been only three families in mighty France (I think no-one will disagree). The noblest is that of the kings of France (Cycle du roi). The next after it, I quite rightly claim, was that of Doon Whitebeard of Mainz who had many fiefdoms (Cycle de Doon de Mayence) […] The third, which was very praiseworthy, was that of Garin de Monglane of the fierce countenance (Cycle de Garin de Monglane) (trans mine, see also Michael A Newth, trans., The Song of Girart of Vienne by Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube: A Twelfth-Century Chanson de Geste, 1999).

The three cycles are, therefore, Cycle du Roi, Cycle de Doon de Mayence, and the Cycle de Garin de Monglane. Scholarly opinion diverges as to the origins of this categorization, but most believe that Bertrand did not simply invent this himself and that it must have had some basis in contemporary reception of the works. Moreover, modern scholarship ascribes several works to the genre of chanson de geste that are not in these cycles and, at the very least, two additional cycles, Cycle de la Croisade and Geste des Lorrains, are often included. C. Cycle du Roi The geste du roi, or “the deeds of the king,” form the core of the Matter of France and include the most famous chansons de geste. Charlemagne or one of his immediate successors serves as the unifying figure, but does little else as one of the champions associated with court defends Christianity against the Muslims. The first and most famous poem in this cycle is the Chanson de Roland or “Song of Roland.” Of the nine extant Old French manuscripts, the oldest, the Oxford manuscript in Anglo-Norman, dates between 1140 and 1170 as asserted by Ian Short, La Chanson de Roland: présentation et traduction (1997, 5). The actual poem and story are clearly much older. A Latin prose version, Historia Caroli Magni (The Pseudo-Turpin) was composed around 1100. The Middle High German Rolandslied (Song of Roland) by Konrad the Priest (1170) is a relatively faithful retelling of the original song and appears shortly after the canonization of Charlemagne in 1165. The Old Norse version, Karlamagnús saga (Saga of Charlemagne) (ca. 1300), is divided in ten chapters and includes many different stories from the Cycle du Roi, some of them no longer extant in any language. The chapter which treats The Song of Roland, Af Runzival Bardaga, remains relatively true to the Oxford manuscript. Versions of the Song of Roland can be found in almost every European tradition, see Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, The Legend of Roland in the Middle Ages (1971). Almost from the beginning, the Cycle du Roi also included works that could be interpreted as satirical. Le pèlerinage de Charlemagne or Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople (Pilgrimage of Charlemagne or Charlemagne’s Voyage to Jerusalem and Constantinople) (ca. 1150) is a comic tale of a

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fictional expedition by Charlemagne and his knights to the Levant (The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne (Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne), ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Anne Elizabeth Cobby, 1988). The origin story Chanson d’Aspremont (ca. 1190) tells the story of an equally fictional battle in Africa against the Muslims and how the young Roland saved Charlemagne’s life and won the sword Durendal. See Michael A. Newth, The Song of Aspremont (La Chanson d’Aspremont), 1989. Another major work in the cycle, Fierabras (ca. 1170), introduces two motifs that re-appear in the Cycle de Garin de Monglane. See Fierabras: Chanson de geste du XIIe siècle, ed. Marc Le Person, 2003; and Marianne J. Ailes, “The Date of the Chanson de Geste Fierabras,” Olifant: A Publication of the Société Rencesvals, 19.3–4 (1994–1995): 245–71. The first is that of the giant Saracen, here the titular hero, Fierabras, who after battling against the Christians converts and gains a new name, here Florien. The second is the theme of the Saracen princess who falls in love with a Christian knight, converts, marries and becomes a Christian queen. In this poem, it is Floripas, Fierabras’ sister, who performs this role (Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Woman as Mediator in Medieval Depictions of Muslims: The Case of Floripas,” Medieval Constructions in Gender and Identity: Essays in Honor of Joan M. Ferrante, ed. and introd. Teodolinda Varolini, 2005, 151–67; and Hans-Erich Keller, “La belle Sarrasine dans Fierabras et ses dérivés,” Charlemagne in the North, ed. Philip E. Bennett, Anne Cobby, and Graham A. Runnalls, 1993, 299–307). There are English versions of this popular work, for example, Sir Ferumbras (ca. 1300) (Sir Ferumbras, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, 1966), and even a Middle Irish version, Stair Fortibrais (ca. 1350) (The Irish Version of Fierabras, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes, 1898). Fierabras was also widely disseminated and translated into several European traditions in the early days of printing, see Elio Melli, “Les versions en prose de Fierabras: Nouvelles recherches,” L’épopée romane, I–II, ed. Gabriel Bianciotto, Claudio Galderisi, and Bernard Guidot, 2002, 611–15. Other works associated with the Cycle du Roi include, among others: the brutal and bloody Garin le Loherain (ca. 1180), Jehan de Lanson (before 1239), and Berthe aux Grands Pieds (ca. 1275) by Adenet le Roi (1240–1300). The later chansons, Hugues Capet (ca. 1360) and Galiens li Restorés (ca. 1490), are also included in the Cycle du Roi. The tale of Huon de Bordeaux (ca. 1260–1268), introduces a number of fantastic and other-worldly elements to the cycle du roi and constitutes its own cycle within the cycle (Huon de Bordeaux: Chanson de geste du XIIIe siècle, publiée d’après le manuscrit de Paris BNF fr. 22555, P, ed. William W. Kibler and François Suard, 2003; and Huon de Bordeaux: chanson de geste; publiée pour la première fois d’après les manuscrits de Tours, de Paris et de Turin, ed. François

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Guessard and Charles Loizeau de Grandmaison, 1860). The tale is sometimes counted among the Cycle des barons révoltés as well. Huon kills Charlemagne’s son Charlot but instead of being executed, he is sent on a suicide mission to Babylon. To reconcile with the Emperor, he must return with a handful of the Emir’s hair and teeth, kill the Emir’s best knight, and kiss Esclarmonde, the Emir’s daughter, three times. The fairy king Oberon aids Huon and the hero accomplishes each task. As Irena Prosenc notes (“Le merveilleux dans Huon de Bordeaux,” Acta Neophilologica 31 [1998]: 35–49), many of the fantastic element already existed within the tradition. However, the introduction of elf Alberich from Germanic mythology as the Fairy King Oberon begins with Huon de Bordeaux and thus earns the poem a place amongst the most influential works of the Western Literary tradition. Huon de Bordeaux inspired several continuations which were produced shortly thereafter in the 13th and early 14th centuries. The Chanson d’Esclarmonde tells of how Huon saves Bordeaux and his wife after the powerful Emperor from Germany, Raoul, besieges the city in an attempt to win Esclarmonde for himself. The Chanson de Clarisse et Florent tells of the courtship of the Huon’s daughter. The Chanson d’Yde et d’Olive, which treats Clarisse’s daughter Yde, is a fantastic medieval reworking of the Greek myth of Iphis and has been the focus of studies on the presentation of gender and sexuality in the chansons (Diane Watt, “Behaving like a Man? Incest, Lesbian Desire, and Gender Play in Yde et Olive and Its Adaptations,” Comparative Literature 50.4 [1998]: 265–85). The Chanson de Godin tells the tale of Huon’s son and the Roman de Croissant, which only exists in prose form, relates the adventures of his grandson. The Roman d’Aubéron provides a lengthy and detailed prologue for the entire cycle. The Turin Manuscript (1311) (Torino, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, L. II. 14, f. 297–354v) contains the full cycle, and the only copy of the Chanson de Godin and Roman d’Aubéron. Almost all of the poems in Huon de Bordeaux cycle were reproduced in prose from the 15th century on and are represented in almost every European linguistic tradition. (Michel Jean Raby, Le Huon de Bordeaux en prose du XVème siècle, 1998). A Dutch Huge van Bordeeus appears in 1490 (see Mieke Lens, “Huge van Bordeeus,” Olifant: A Publication of the Société Rencesvals, Spring-Summer, 23.1 (2004): 79–93, and Maria Johann Lens, Huge van Bordeeus: Een Ridder van Karel de Grote op Avontuur in het Oosten: Onderzoek naar de Middelnederlandse Versfragmenten en Prozaroman, 2004) and the English version in 1534, see John Bourchier Berners, The Boke of the Duke Huon of Burdeux (1534) ed. Sidney Lee, 1882–1887.

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1688

D. Cycle de Doon de Mayence The cycle, also known as the Cycle des barons révoltés (the cycle of the rebellious barons), contains epic poems treating barons who rebel against Charlemagne. In as far as the cycle has a basis in history, it constitutes adaptations of real events to the historical-fictional scheme. Similar schemes were adopted in several other European literary traditions and are understood as expressions of the ambitions and frustrations of the lesser nobility which both question and confirm the power of the Emperor. The cycle, which includes over 60 poems, has no central figure. The fictional Doon of Mainz had twelve sons: Gaufrey de Danemarche, the father of Ogier the Dane, Doon de Nanteuil, whose son Gamier married Aye d’Avignon, Griffon d’Hauteville, father of the treacherous Ganelon, Aymon de Dordone or Dourdan, the father of Renaud, Richard, Alard, and Guiscard, Beuves d’Aigremont, and his sons Maugris and Vivien de Monbranc, Sevin or Seguin, the father of Huon of Bordeaux, and Girart de Roussillon. The main figures of the cycle are Girart de Roussillon, Raoul de Cambrai, and Renaut de Montauban. The poems surrounding Girart de Roussillon demonstrate both contradictory historical transmission and the liberties that poets took with the material. The tradition provides us with two versions of Girart de Roussillon (ca. 810–878), who is not from Roussillon, and is therefore also called Girart de Vienne and Girart de Fraite; see Jean Misrahi, “The Origin of ‘De Roussillon’,” PMLA 51.1 (1936): 8–12, and René Louis, Girart, Comte de Vienne, dans les chansons de geste: Girart de Vienne, Girart de Fraite, Girart de Roussillon, 1947. In the northern tradition, including the Vita Girardi de Roussillon (La légende de Girart de Roussillon, ed. Paul Meyer, Romania 7 [1878]: 161–235) and Girart de Roussillon, see Girard de Roussillon, ed. Paul Meyer, 1970. Girart appears as the son of Doon and these works are counted among the Cycle de Doon de Mayence. The southern tradition identifies Girart as the son of Garin de Monglane and is included in the Cycle de Garin de Monglane as treated in Girart de Vienne by Bertrand de Bar-sur-l’Aube. The poem of Raoul de Cambrai, a fragment of 8,542 decasyllable verses dating from about 1200, stands as one of the bloodiest chansons de geste, see Raoul de Cambrai: chanson de geste du XIIe siècle, ed. and trans. Sarah Kay and William W Kibler, 1996; Jessie Crosland, trans., Raoul de Cambrai: An Old French Feudal Epic, 1966, and Raoul de Cambrai: Chanson de geste. Texte original en ancien français, manuscrit 2493f. fr. BNF, ed. Jean Touzot, 2008. The story revolves around the feud over the fief of Vermandois instigated by Raoul in defiance of the king. The poem provides a morbidly realistic picture of medieval warfare, including a battle in which Raoul more or less loses his entire army and a scene in which the mother of the hero, Bernier, is burned alive

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with all the nuns in the church at Origny. The poem participates in a critique of contemporary feuding, see Dominique Boutet, “Le roi Louis et la signification politico-historique de Raoul de Cambrai,” Romania 118.2 (2000): 315–35. Renaut de Montauban is the hero of one of the longest chanson de geste, the late 12th-century poem, Quatre Fils Aymon or The Four Sons of Duke Aymon (Renaut de Montauban: édition critique du manuscrit Douce, ed. Jacques Thomas, 1989). In the poem and the cycle that developed over time, the rebellious barons are portrayed as protagonists, who do their best to maintain honor in the face of imperial tyranny and excess, see Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancer, Raoul de Cambrai: l’impossible révolte, 2000. The poem contains fantastic elements like the magical horse Bayard and the sword Froberge given to Renaud by his brother Maugis the sorcerer, who was raised by the fairy Oriande. Renaud also makes pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to reconcile with the Emperor, a theme seen in the poem Huon of Bordeaux and one that reappears in similar poems across Europe (Bernard Guidot, “La géographie de l’imaginaire dans Renaut de Montauban,” Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie 103.3–4 [1997]: 507–26). The poems of the sub-cycle, sometimes called “Renaud de Montauban cycle” appear in the 13th century and include Maugis d’Aigremont and the Mort de Maugis. These poems describe the youth and death of Maugis respectively. The rather short and unpopular poem treating yet another of Aymon’s sons, Vivien de Monbranc features further escapades of Maugis as well as the titular hero’s pugnacious steed, Passavant. A chanson devoted to the proud father of the brood and brother to Girart de Roussillon and Doon de Nanteuil, Beuve d’Aigremont as well as those devoted to Ogier the Dane (Ogier le Danois), Enfances Ogier (1275) of Adenes le Rois (1240–1300), and the Chevalerie Ogier de Dannemarche (ca. 1192–1200) of Jean d’Outremeuse are sometimes included in this cycle but also included in the Cycle du Roi. Variants of the Renaud story spread throughout Europe. Already in the 14th century, there was an Italian prose and a verse version of the story, Rinaldo, and this hero would go on to become one of the most important characters of Italian Renaissance literature in works such as Luigi Pulci’s (1432–1484) poem about the giant Morgante (1483), Matteo Maria Boiardo’s (1434–1494) Orlando Innamorato (1495), and, of course, Orlando Furioso (1532) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). The prose Ystoire de Regnault de Montauban (1480) was generally printed as Les quatre fils Aymon, and was among the most popular romances in the late 15th and first half of the 16th century in Europe. It was published in English by William Caxton (1422–1492), who published prose versions of several chansons de geste (The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, 1488) and it appeared in Dutch (Historie van den vier Heemskinderen, 1508) and German (Heymonskinder, 1531) as well.

Chansons de geste

1690

Gormont et Isembart is, along with the Chanson de Roland and Chanson de Guillaume, one of the three oldest chansons de geste, and it is the oldest poem of the Geste de Doon de Mayence Cycle. The oldest fragment of 611 lines is dated to the 11th century (see Alphonse Bayot, Gormont et Isembart: fragment de chanson de geste du XIIe siècle, 1914, and Nathalie Desgrugillers-Billard, Gormont et Isembart: Chanson de geste: cycle des barons révoltés, 2008). Philippe Mousket’s 13th-century rhyme chronicle, which contains a complete version, ascribes the poem to the cycle of the rebellious barons (see Chronique rimée de Philippe Mouske, ed. Baron Frédéric-Auguste-Ferdinand-Thomas de Reiffenberg, 1836–1838). Another version is found in the 15th-century German text by Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken, Loher und Maller (ed. Ute von Bloh, 1995) The story tells the tale of Isembart, who, after being mistreated, betrays his uncle King Louis and goes into exile in England. There Isembart renounces Christianity and joins the heathen King of Cirencester, Gormont, in his attacks against France. Louis eventually defeats Isembart and Gormont. The mortally wounded Isembart converts back to Christianity on his deathbed. The invasion and burning of Abbey of Saint-Riquier in February 881 by Norsemen, who were subsequently defeated by Louis III at Saucourten-Vimeu, is generally held to supply the historical background for the story (see Theodor Fluri, Isembart et Gormont: Entwicklung der Sage und historische Grundlage, 1895). E. Cycle de Garin de Monglane or Le cycle de Guillaume d’Orange The Cylce of Garin de Monglane, or Montglane, often also referred to as the Cycle de Guillaume after the protagonist, Saint William of Gellone (Guillaume d’Orange) (755–814), stands unto itself as one of the most influential bodies of literature in the Middle Ages. The namesake of the cycle, Garin de Monglane, however, has rather obscure origins. As mentioned above, Garin de Monglane is identified as the progenitor of the lineages involved in the cycle in Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube’s Girart de Vienne (ca. 1200). Garin also appears in the late 13th-century German romance, Gauriel von Muntabel oder der Ritter mit dem Bock by Konrad von Stoffel (see Der Ritter mit dem Bock: Konrads von Stoffeln Gauriel von Muntabel, ed., introd., and commentary by Wolfgang Achnitz, 1997). On a very basic level, the cycle chronicles the exploits of the knights made landless by the prima genitor. The cycle includes the chansons of Girart de Vienne, Aimeri de Narbonne, and Guillaume. The cycle, relative to other two major cycles, was, although extremely popular and influential in the High Middle Ages, relatively ignored and did not enjoy wide transmission in the Early Modern Period. Joseph Bédier’s study, mentioned above, inaugurated serious scholarly engagement with the cycle and Jean

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Frappier’s monumental Les chansons de geste du cycle de Guillaume d’Orange, 1955–1983, established a baseline for further research. The poems constitute episodes of the same grand narrative and are less independent than the poems of other cycles, and were often collected as a unit. The foundations of manuscript studies for the cycle were laid by Madeleine Tyssens in her La Geste de Guillaume d’Orange dans les manuscrits cycliques, 1967. Garin de Monglane had four sons: Hernaut, Girart de Vienne, Renier, and Milon. Hernaut’s son Aymeri de Narbonne marries Hermanjart and has seven sons and five daughters. Guillaume d’Orange is the third oldest son. (Due to this lineage, the Guillaume cycle is sometimes referred to as La geste des Narbonnais). Several different events involving Umayyad incursions into southern Gaul and Frankish expansion into the Umayyad Caliphate in Iberia form the basic historical background of the cycle. The cycle draws from events beginning with the Battle of Tours (October 10, 732), and the remaining campaigns of Charles Martel (688–741), including the battles of Avignon, Narbonne, the River Berre and Nimes 737, continuing with the capture of Narbonne by Pepin III (714–768), through the reign of Charlemagne (742–814) and the Frankish conquest of Catalonia under Louis I (788–840). Several historical precedents for Guillaume have been suggested, however, William I of Provence (950–993), who was victorious against Saracen pirates at the Battle of Tourtour in 973 and ended his life in a cloister, remains the most convincing. The general historical background of the cycle is, however, an anachronistic amalgamation of figures and events from the 8th and 9th centuries. Given the greater historical reliability of the sagas, it is not surprising that in the Karlamagnús saga Guillaume appears in his proper historical environment, as a chief under Charlemagne, but even this text departs from the historically possible and we find Guillaume interacting with Louis the Pious as emperor after 813, the year after Guillaume’s death (see Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Die Karlamagnús-Saga I und ihre altfranzösische Vorlage, 2008). Although the cycle contains twenty or more contingent poems, six are generally held to form the core of the cycle: Les Enfances Guillaume, Le Couronnement de Louis, Le Charroi de Nîmes, La Prise d’Orange, Le Moniage Guillaume, and La Chanson de Guillaume. The latter poem does not appear in any of the collections of the other poems and tells portions of the tale covered in the other five poems central to the cycle, Les Enfances Vivien, La Chevalerie Vivien, Aliscans, La Bataille Loquifer, and Le Moniage Rainouart. The Les Enfances Guillaume (The Youth of Guillaume), typical of enfances, is much younger than the rest of core cycle and dates from the 13th century. The poem establishes the youthful Guillaume as superior to his siblings. The bulk of the short poem (ca. 3126 lines)

Chansons de geste

1692

treats the wooing of Orable / Guibourc (see Les Enfances Guillaume: chanson de geste du XIIIe siècle, ed. Patrice Henry, 1935, and Anna P. Carney, “A Portrait of the Hero as a Young Child: Guillaume, Roland, Girard and Gui,” Olifant 18.3–4 [1993–1994]: 238–77). The Couronnement de Louis (Li coronemenz Looïs) treats, obviously, the coronation of Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne but is actually focused on Guillaume (see Karina H. Niemeyer, “Le Couronnement de Louis et le mythe de Guillaume,” Societe Rencesvals pour l’etude des epopees romanes, ed. Jean Subrenat, 1975, 639–50). Louis is presented as a weak figure (see Jean Frappier, “Les thèmes politiques dans le Couronnement de Louis,” Melanges de linguistique romane et de philologie medievale offerts a M. Maurice Delbouille, ed. Jean Renson and Madelaine Thyssens, 1964, 635–52), and the poem seems to highlight the steadfastness and loyalty of Guillaume (see Alfred Adler, “The Dubious Nature of Guillaume’s Loyalty in Le Couronnement de Louis,” Symposium 2 (1949): 179–94, and Carol A. Kent, “Fidelity and Treachery: Thematic and Dramatic Structuring of the Laisses in an Episode of the Couronnement de Louis (Laisses 43–54),” Olifant 19. 3–4 [1994–1995]: 223–38). In this poem, Louis is raised at Guillaume’s court and accompanies the hero on a pilgrimage to Rome. They find the city under siege. Guillaume challenges the Saracen hero, the giant Corsolt, to a duel and although he wins, Guillaume has the tip of his nose cut off in the fight and gains his nickname “au court nez” (short nose) (see F. M. Warren, “The Giant Corsolt,” Modern Philology 28.4 [(1931]: 467–68). The poem is dated to the 1130s in the circle of the abbey of SaintDenis and sometimes attributed to Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube (see Le Couronnement de Louis [Li coronemenz Loois], ed. Ernest Langloi, 1888). The Charroi de Nîmes (The Caravan of Nîmes) has no historical basis and many critics even read it as a comic interlude (see Jean Charles Payen, “Le Charroi de Nimes, comedie epique?,” Melanges de langue et de litterature du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance offerts a Jean Frappier, 1970, 891–902, and Lisa R. Perfetti, “Dialogue of Laughter: Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival and the Charroi de Nîmes,” Olifant: 17.3–4 [1993–1994]: 177–95). The poem serves as a bridge narrative connecting Le Couronnement de Louis and La Prise d’Orange. Louis slights Guillaume and fails to reward him with a fief for his service. Louis then grants Guillaume the rights to Nîmes, if he can conquer it. In a Trojan horse scenario, Guillaume disguises himself and his army as merchants and by this ruse they gain access to the city, which they then take. The tale was composed in the latter half of the 12th century and was extremely popular (see Anthonij Dees, “La tradition manuscrite du Charroi de Nîmes,” Moyen Français 44–45 [1999]: 129–89). William Jonckbloet’s edition of the text inaugurated modern engagement with the Cycle de Guillaume d’Orange (see

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W. J. A. Jonckbloet, Guillaume d’Orange. Chansons de geste de XIe et XIIe siècles, 1854). The Prise d’Orange (Conquest of Orange) chronicles Guillaume’s conquest of the city of Orange from the Saracens as well as his marriage to their queen, Orable, renamed Guibourc. This poem was written around 1190 and draws on a now lost Siège d’Orange which was based on a Vita sancti Wilhelmi (1125) (see Raymond Weeks, “The Primitive Prise d’Orange,” PMLA 16.3 [1901]: 361–74). This adventure lends Guillaume his byname. Guillebert de Laon escapes from Saracen-controlled Orange and arrives at Guillaume’s court at Nîmes with news of the beautiful Queen Orable and the magnificent city of Orange. Guillaume sets out to take them both. Guillaume and his companions Guillebert and Guielin are captured and at the mercy of Orable, who rules in the absence of her husband Thibaut. Guillaume woos Orable and after several adventures, he and his companions send to Nîmes for help. Guillaume’s nephew Bertrand leads an army against the city. The Christians win the battle and the city. Guillaume weds Orable, who is baptized in a mosque converted to a Christian church and takes on the Christian name of Guibourc (see Charles A. Knudson, “Le thème de la princesse sarrasine dans La prise d’Orange,” Romance Philology 22 (1969): 449–62, and Sharon Kinoshita, “The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d’Orange and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen,” Romanic Review 86.2 (1995): 265–87; cf. also Albrecht Classen, “Confrontation with the Foreign World of the East: Saracen Princesses in Medieval German Narratives,” Orbis Litterarum 53 [1998]: 277–95). The tale represents a fusion of courtly narratives: the chanson de geste epic tradition and bridal quest narratives. It stands as one of the most influential and most widely imitated narratives of the cycle (see Claude Régnier, La Prise d’Orange: chanson de geste de la fin du XIIe siècle, 1966). Le Moniage Guillaume (The Monking of Guillaume) is the crowning tale of the cycle (see Nelly Andrieux-Reix, Le Moniage Guillaume, 2003). There are two redactions of the poem, the shorter incomplete Moniage I (934 verses) which postdates the much longer Moniage II (6,629 verses) (see Les deux rédactions en vers du Moniage Guillaumer, ed. Wilhelm Cloëtta, 1906–1911). The life Guillaume of Toulouse, who lived out his final days in the monastery of Gellone, provides the basis for the tale (see Norval Lee Bard, Changing Orders: The Poetics of the Old French Epic Moniages, 1997). The poem opens with Guillaume taking the vow to become a monk after the death of Guibourc and a comic juxtaposition of monastic life and the voracious warrior appetites of the aging hero ensues (see Jean Larmat, “Manger et boire dans le Moniage Guillaume et dans le Moniage Rainouart,” Manger et boire au moyen âge, ed. Denis Menjot, 1984, 391–404, and Bernard Guidot, “Vieillesse, fontaine de Jou-

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vence: L’âge d’or du héros épique d’après le Moniage Guillaume,” Sénéfiance 19 [1987]: 112–32). However, the monks prove to be less than virtuous and after killing the prior, Guillaume sets out to found his own hermitage (see Jean Subrenat, “Moines mesquins et saint chevalier: A propos du Moniage de Guillaume,” Mélanges de philologie et de littératures romanes offerts à Jeanne Wathelet-Willem, ed. Jacques de Caluwé, 1978, 643–65, and André Moisan, “L’abbé Henri et ses moines dans le Moniage Guillaume et le Moniage Rainouart ou la perfidie dans l’état monastique,” Sénéfiance 37 [1995]: 435–47). This movement from the monastery at Aniane to Gellone mirrors exactly the path of Saint Guilhem-le-Désert, who entered the abbey at Aniane in 806 and later founded and died at the abbey in Gellone in 812. Although Guillaume unceasingly strives to lead the life of a monk, the Church and France continually call for his skills as a knight to save them; this tale even includes a battle with yet another heathen Giant, Ysoré. The tales ends on a more saintly note, as the hero wrestles with and defeats the Devil himself. Le Moniage Guillaume provides a fitting end to the cycle as it merges hagiography with the epic and comic elements found in the rest of cycle. In terms of the cycle, the Anglo-Norman Chanson de Guillaume (Chançun de Willame) is actually a composite text which is both central and marginal (see François Suard, La chanson de Guillaume, 2008). The text does not appear in any of the cyclical manuscripts nor in the eponymous Geste de Guillaume d’Orange. It was discovered in 1903, well after the establishment of a modern critical reception of the cycle. The first part of the poem deals with Guillaume ‘al curb nés’ (‘Hooknose’) and his nephews, the brothers Vivien and Gui and the battle at L’Archamp. This first part is often dated at 1150 but elements have also been dated as far back as 1080, which would make this one of the oldest chansons de geste and the oldest fragment of this cycle. The second half of poem deals with exploits of Guillaume’s brother in law, the brother of Orable / Guibourc, the giant Rainouard (Rennewart). These episodes are largely based on the poem Aliscans (ca. 1170) (see Aliscans, ed. Claude Régner, 2007) and The Song of Aliscans, trans. Michael A. Newth, 1992). Aliscans tells the story of defeat of the Christians at the hands of Orable /Guibourc’s betrayed husband Desramé and of the death of Guillaume’s sororial nephew Vivien in that battle. It is generally assumed to represent the battle of Villedaigne and named after a cemetery outside of Arles, Les Alyscamps (Champs-Élysées or Elysian Fields). Early studies suggested that the story is based on a battle near the Archant in Spain, near Vivien’s headquarters at Tortosa (Raymond Weeks, “The Boulogne Manuscript of the ‘Chevalerie Vivien’” Modern Language Review 5.1 [1910]: 54–67). However, contemporaries like Wolfram von Eschenbach,

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who mentions the tombs on the battlefield in his Willehalm (ca. 1217) (Wh. 386: 2–7; 394: 20–22; 437: 20–25), seem to have thought the battle took place at the cemetery, Les Alyscamps (see Wolfram von Eschenbach, Willehalm, ed. Werner Schröder and trans. and ed. Dieter Kartschoke, 1989). After the failure of the first battle, in which Guillaume’s nephew Vivien dies, Guillaume finds Rainouard as a servant in Louis’s kitchen at Laon. The slapstick surrounding Rainouard influenced the kitchen-humor which became standard in later chansons and romances. Rainouard also fights with the massive wooden pole (tinel) that he had been using to carry water buckets to the kitchen. Medieval continuations based on Rainouard include Le Moniage Rainouart (ca. 1190) (see Le Moniage Rainouart I: publié d’après les manuscrits de l’Arsenal et de Boulogne, ed. Gérald A. Bertin, 1973, and Le Moniage Rainouart II et III, ed. Gérald A Bertin, 1988). The most memorable medieval adaptation of the figure Rainouard is found in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm, which was based largely on the Bataille d’Aliscans. The figure of Wolfram’s Rennewart was so popular that Ulrich von Türheim also produced a German continuation (see Ulrich von Türheim. Rennewart, ed. Alfred Hübner, 1938). By virtue of the tremendous fighting power of Rainouard, Guillaume finally defeats Desramé and his armies. Rainouard is revealed to be the brother of Orable /Guibourc, he is baptized, and marries Guillaume’s niece, the princess Aelis. F. La geste des Lorrains The Lorraine cycle is composed of four main branches: Garin le Loherain, Hervis de Metz, Gerbert de Metz and Anseïs fils de Girbert, of which Yon ou La Vengeance Fromondin is an abridged version. The cycle deals with the Dukes of Lorraine (the Lotharingians) and their feud with the Dukes of Bordeaux (the Bordelais) during the reign of Pépin le Bref or Pepin III, the Short (751–768). The events are roughly based on feuds that accompanied the emergence of the Carolingian Dynasty but have no exact historical correlation in the period and may have been inspired by a war of succession over the control of the Vermandois between Philip of Alsace, the Count of Flanders (1143–1191) and Philip II (Augustus) of France (1165–1223) that raged from 1180–1186. The cycle shares many features with the Cycle des barons révoltés but unlike those poems, the feud between the lesser nobility remains the principal focus. Episodes of treachery at the court of Pepin represent one of many narrative elements which advance that theme. The central poem of the cycle, Garin le Loherain (1180–85) presents the initiation of the feud and the ensuing calamity that overtakes two generations of Lotharingians (Garin le Loherenc, ed. Anne Iker-Gittleman, 1986,

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and Bernard M. Pohoryles, “Sur la datation de Garin le Loheren et Gerbert de Mez” XIV Congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza, ed. Alberto Varvaro, 1981, 333–42). At the urging of Hardré, of the house of Bordelais, Pepin refuses to send aid to vassals besieged by Umayyad forces in the South of France. Initially, Garin’s father, Hervis de Metz, attempts to provide aid with the assistance of Ansis of Cologne, and although the army he raises repels the invaders, Hervis dies in the battle. Later, Pepin fails to honor his commitments towards Thierry, king of Morianel (Tierri de Morïane). Even Hardré’s own son, Fromont de Lenz, is appalled and he joins Garin. The Loherain and Bordelais ride together to aid Thierry. However, the treacherous Fromont refuses to send his forces into battle. The Christians are victorious and in gratitude, from his death-bed, Thierry offers Garin the hand of his daughter Blanchefleur. When Garin pursues the matter at court, Fromont challenges him for Blanchefluer’s hand. A brawl erupts in which Garin kills Hardré. A short time later, Hardré’s position at court is occupied by Archbishop Henri (also a Bordelais), who convinces Pepin to pursue marriage with Blanchefleur. A parallel narrative involving Garin’s brother, Bégon, begins to intertwine with the main story. Bégon, a favorite of Pepin’s, had been appointed Duke of Gascony at the beginning of the poem, thereby gaining control over Bordelais lands and instigating the antagonism between the two houses. After Fromont entraps Garin in a plot to gain Blanchefluer, Bégon exonerates his brother from the subsequent accusations of treachery by defeating Isoré in a trial by combat. Bégon also marries into the house of Blaye, gaining even more disputed lands. Animosities cool down for a period but after Blanchefleur becomes the wife of Pepin and Bégon is accidentally slain as a poacher during a hunt on the border between Bordelais and Loherain lands, the feud reignites. The death of Bégon is considered to be one of the most dramatic scenes of the cycle, see Catherine M. Jones, “The Death of Bégon,” Por le soie amisté: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones, 2000, 235–46. The Lotharingians attack and sack the city of Bourges. Pepin puts his full support behind the Bordelais. The disgraced Garin is eventually overcome and slain by Fromondin (alternately Fromont’s son or nephew) in Val Gelin near Metz (alternately in a hermitage or in open battle). In the former scenario, the death blow is delivered by Bishop Guillaume de Monclin, in the latter by Fromondin. The poem, from beginning to end, stands as a spectacular admonition against feuding. In the sequel, Gerbert de Metz (ca. 1200), the feud continues with a new generation as Garin’s son Gerbert, along with his cousins, the Lotharingians Hernaut and Gerin, seek revenge for the murder of their father and uncle (Gerbert de Mez, Chanson

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de Geste du XIIe siècle, ed. Pauline Taylor, 1952 and Bernard Guidot, “Continuité et rupture: L’univers épique de Garin le Lorrain et Gerbert,” Olifant 13 [1988]: 123–140). The narrative paints an all too realistic picture of the brutality of feuding. Great effusions of blood abound as hacked limbs fly, corpses are torn from the grave and children are taken hostage or worse (see Catherine M. Jones, “L’enlèvement dans Garin le Lorrain et Hervis de Metz,” Plaist vos oïr bone cançon vallant?: Mélanges offerts à François Suard, ed. Dominique Boutet, Marie-Madeleine Castellani, Françoise Ferrand, and Aimé Petit, 1999, 455–63.) This aspect of the poem should not obscure the great literary quality of the poem, which keeps the audience engaged with twists and turns. At one point the two families seems to be reconciled and even join the King of France in repelling an attack of Saracens led by Fromont. However, after defeating Fromont, Gerbert serves wine to his guests from the skull of Fromont, re-igniting the feud in a most gruesome manner. Fromondin responds in kind by promptly smashing the heads of Gerbert’s children against the marble pillars in the hall. Fromondin is able to flee, but later in the narrative Gerbert and Geren stumble upon him in hermitage while on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Fromondin’s identity is betrayed and the kill him. There are two versions of the sequel to Gerbert de Metz, each bearing an alternate name for Gerbert’s son, Anseïs de Metz (ca. 1230) (Anseÿs de Mes according to ms. N. (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 3143) Text, ed. Herman J. Green, 1939) and Yon, ou La vengeance Fromondin (ca. 1220) (Yon or la Venjance Fromondin, ed. Simon R. Mitchneck, 1935). Both poems relate the murder of Gerbert at Gironville. In these poems, Gerbert’s demise mirrors in several aspects the story of Fromondin found in Gerbert de Metz. Further literary overlap resides in the borrowing of over 750 lines directly from the chanson Raoul de Cambrai. Both Yon and Anseïs relate the acts of retaliation that follow Fromondin’s death as well as the murder of Gerbert de Metz. The Anseïs is the younger and longer of the two poems and it continues with tales of the exploits of Gerbert’s sons. The cycle also includes the prequel Hervis de Metz (ca. 1200), the patriarch of the Lotharingians (Hervis de Mes: Chanson de Geste Anonyme, ed. Jean-Charles Herbin, 1992). The work was composed after Garin le Loherain but before the sequels. As the poem deals with a hero who dies before the feud begins, it stands out in the cycle as having the most in common with courtly romance and even includes a bridal quest of sorts. 16th-century prose versions of the Lorraine Cycle such as those by Philippe de Vigneulles and the fragments in Middle Dutch evidence its popularity (La chronique de Philippe de Vigneulles, ed. Charles Bruneau, 1927–1933).

Chansons de geste

1698

G. The Crusading Cycles The crusading cycles are divided into those that attempt to retell historical events and those that recount more fabulous and fantastic events (see Anouar Hatem, Les poèmes épiques des Croisades: Genèse – Historicité – Localisation, 1932). The works, also, of course, served as crusading propaganda (Robert Francis Cook, “Crusade Propaganda in the Epic Cycles of the Crusade,” Journeys Toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade. ed. Barbara N. SargentBaur, 1992, 157–75) but also aspired to historiography (see Jeanette Beer, “Heroic Language and the Eyewitness: The Gesta Francorum and La Chanson d’Antioche,” Echoes of the Epic, ed. David P. Schenck and Mary Jane Schenck, 1998, 1–16) and Sarah-Grace Heller, “Surprisingly Historical Women in the Old French Crusade Cycle,” Women and the Medieval Epic, ed. Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman, 2007, 41–66). Research on the cycle has been greatly enhanced by Jan A. Nelson and Emanuel J. Mickel’s tenvolume series The Old French Crusade Cycle (1977–2003). The primary historical poems include La Chanson d’Antioche, La Chanson de Jérusalem, La Chanson de la croisade Albigeoise and Les Chétifs (The Little Ones), which tells of the exploits of Richard de Chaumont, Baudouin de Beauvais and Haripin de Bourges after the Battle of Antioch. An early version of the Chanson d’Antioche is presumed to have been authored by Richard le Pèlegrin (Richard the Pilgrim) in the early part of the 12 th century. However, the revised version by Graindor de Douai (ca. 1198–1218) forms the basis for the current edition and serves as the source for the expanded version from the 14th century (La Chanson d’Antioche, ed. Jan A. Nelson, 2003). Graindor de Douai also incorporates most of Les Chétifs (see Les Chétifs, ed. Geoffrey M. Myers, 1980). La Chanson de Jérusalem also only comes down to us in a 13th century revision but is believed to be based on an older poem (Le Chanson de Jérusalem, ed. Nigel R. Thorp, 1992). La Chanson de la croisade Albigeoise treats the brutal extermination of the Cathars in the Languedoc (1209–1229) and was composed in two phases. Guillaume de Tudèle (1199–1214) wrote the first 2772 verses between 1209–1212 and an anonymous continuation of 6800 lines covers the period between 1213–1218 (La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, ed. Eugène Martin-Chabot, 1957–1961; Guillaume de Tudèle, The Song of the Cathar Wars: A History of the Albigensian Crusade, trans. Janet Shirley, 1996, and Jean-Marie d’Heur, “Sur la date, la composition et la destination de la Chanson de la Croisade albigeoise de Guillaume de Tudele,” Melanges d’histoire litteraire, de linguistique et de philologie romanes offerts a Charles Rostaing, ed. Jacques De Caluwe, Jean-Marie d’Heur, Rene Dumas, Charles Senninger, Jean Subrenat, Andree Subrenat, and Rene Jouveau, 1974, 231–66).

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The main protagonist of the more fantastic chansons of the crusading cycle is a real historical figure, Godfrey of Bouillon (1058–1100), also connected with the legend of the Swan Knight through this cycle. These songs were often collected separately from the more historical chansons. There are three separate branches of the Swan Knight tales, composed between 1170 and 1220 by anonymous poets. Le Chevalier au Cygne (1192) tells the story of Godfrey of Bouillon’s grandfather Elias and may be based on Johannes de Alta Silva’s tale of the seven sages, Dolopathos, sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus (ca. 1190), see also Emanuel J. Mickel, “The Latin Visions of Calabre and Ida and the Origins of the Initial Branches of the Old French Crusade Cycle,” Neophilologus 88 [2004]: 181–88. The tale is expanded in the prequel, La naissance du Chevalier au Cygne (The Birth of the Swan Knight) and sequel, La fin d’Elias (The Death of Elias) (La naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, ed. Geoffrey M. Myers, Emanuel J. Mickel, and Jan Nelson, 1977), and Le Chevalier au Cygne and La fin d’Elias, ed. Jan Nelson, 1985). The material was received in almost every European linguistic tradition, most famously in the German tradition of Lohengrin. The cycle is rounded out with Les Enfances Godefroi de Bouillon (The Youthful Exploits of Godefroi de Bouillon) (ca. 1200) and La Mort de Godefroi de Bouillon (The Death of Godefroi de Bouillon) (see Les Enfances Godefroi and Le retour de Cornumaranted, ed. Emanuel J. Mickel, 1999) and La prise d’acre: La Mort Godefroi, and La Chanson des rois Baudoin. ed. Peter R. Grillo, 1989). A 15th-century prose summary of the cycle, Godefroi de Buillon, has also come down to us as well (see Godefroi de Buillon, ed. Jan Boyd Roberts, 1995). The material surrounding Godfrey culminates in the epic poem by Torquato Tasso, completed in 1575 and originally entitled Il Goffredo, it appeared in 1581 as the now famous La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme liberata), ed. and trans. Max Wickert, 2009). Select Bibliography Norval Lee Bard, “Changing Orders: The Poetics of the Old French Epic Moniages,” Ph.D. thesis Pennsylvania State University 1997; Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancer, Raoul de Cambrai: l’impossible révolte (Paris: H. Champion, 2000); Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Die Karlamagnús-Saga I und ihre altfranzösische Vorlage (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008); Joseph Bédier, Légendes épiques, recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste (Paris: H. Champion, 1914); Philip E. Bennett, The Cycle of Guillaume d’Orange or Garin de Monglane: A Critical Bibliography (Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2004); Theodor Fluri, Isembart et Gormont: Entwicklung der Sage und Historische Grundlage (Basel: E. Birkhäuser, 1895); Jean Frappier, Les chansons de geste du cycle de Guillaume d’Orange (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1955–1983); Anouar Hatem, Les poèmes épiques des Croisades: Genèse, Historicité, Localisation (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1932; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973); W. J. A. Jonckbloet, Guillaume d’Orange.

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Chansons de geste de XIe et XIIe siècles (La Haye: M. Nyhoff, 1854); Richard W Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon, The Legend of Roland in the Middle Ages (New York: Praeger, 1971); André de Mandach, Naissance et développement de la chanson de geste en Europe (Geneva: E. Droz, 1961); Gaston Paris, Histoire poétique de Charlemagne (Paris: A. Franck, 1865); Jean Rychner, La chanson de geste, essai sur l’art épique des jongleurs (Geneva: E. Droz, 1955).

Stephen Mark Carey

Charms and Incantations A. Introduction Although certain well-known charms and incantations (among them the Irish “St. Patrick’s Lorica,” the Old English “Æcerbot” and the Old Icelandic Völuspá) are distinctive in form and content, it is difficult to arrive at clear definitions that give comprehensive coverage of the very extensive array of candidate texts. Scholarly recourse to the term “charm” is in itself a potentially distorting factor (Lea Olsan, “Latin Charms of Medieval England,” Oral Tradition 7 [1992]: 116–42). Other medieval terms, among them OE gealdor and its cognate Old Icelandic galdr, point to a much wider semantic and performative range (cf. John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature, 1999). B. Attestations and Corpus Relevant texts are so widely scattered in time, space, and manuscript provenance that the coverage here can only be indicative rather than comprehensive. Future research will be facilitated by a database currently being compiled (Suzanne Sheldon Parnell and Lea Olsan, “The Index of Charms,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 6 [1991]: 59–63). Numerous texts in Latin and the vernacular are extant from England, Germany (Adolf Spamer, Romanusbüchlein: Historisch-philologischer Kommentar zu einem deutschen Zauberbuch, 1958), Iceland, Denmark (Ferdinand Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler, 1921), the Netherlands (Jozef Van Haver, Nederlandse Incantatie literatuur, 1964), and Ireland. The Russian corpus, though mostly recorded from oral transmission, also has medieval origins (Viljo J. Mansikka, Die Religion der Ostslaven. I: Quellen, 1922; Robert Mathiesen, “Magic in Slavia Orthodoxa: The Written Tradition,” Byzantine Magic, ed. Henry Maguire, 1995, 155–77).

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Earlier scholars tended to assign charm texts very early datings (Richard Paul Wülker, Geschichte der englischen Litteratur von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, 1896). To many present-day scholars the more interesting aspect is their tenacious survival, whether piecemeal in manuscript marginalia or collectively in manuals (Cyril E. Wright, Bald’s Leechbook: British Museum Royal Manuscript 12D xvii, 1955) and Hausrezeptbücher (books of household recipes), often with striking analogues in early modern and modern texts. The shift from oral culture to literacy has also been traced in these texts (Mare Kõiva, From Incantations to Rites, 1995). C. Definitions and Distinctive Features The texts are often linguistically mixed, usually between Latin and the vernacular (cf. Bernhard Bischoff, Anecdota Novissima, 1984, 258), but with Arabic, Greek, or Hebrew making occasional appearances as well. Texts in runes and gibberish texts have caused particular difficulties (Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern and John Miles Foley, “Power of the Word: Healing Charms as an Oral Genre,” Journal of American Folklore 91 [1978]: 903–24; Ivar Lindquist, Religiosa runtexter I. Sigtunagaldern, 1932). Another focus of study has been the non-verbal element. An intermediate category between text and action extensively canvassed in recent decades is the speech act. Attention is now also being paid to the instrumentality of the physical medium, as in the case of the “textual amulet” (Audrey L. Meaney, Anglo-Saxon Amulets and Curing Stones, 1981; Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages, 2006). The form may be variously verse, prose, and prosimetrum. Ivar Lindquist sought to trace the Scandinavian verse-form galdralag back to Germanic origins (Galdrar, 1923). Eduard Sievers posited an ancient form intermediate between verse and prose (Deutsche Sagversdichtungen, 1924). An alternative mode of explanation sees the verses as typical of popular vernacular styles (Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 1977). In a reaction against this emphasis on poetic form, the placement of metrical texts in separate editions from prose texts, as in Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie’s The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (1942), has been widely criticized (Charles J. Singer, From Magic to Science, 1928). Genre is another elastic feature. At one extreme, charms are close to hymns (Eleanor Hull, “The Ancient Hymn-Charms of Ireland,” Folklore 21 [1910]: 417–46), and for practical pedagogical purposes they lend themselves to comparison with prayers (Albrecht Classen, “Zaubersprüche, Beschwörungen und andere Formen des ‘Aberglaubens,’” Unterrichtspraxis 29, 2 [1996]: 231–39). At the other extreme, they have been confused with medi-

Charms and Incantations

1702

cal recipes (Patrizia Lendinara, “Gli incantesimi del periodo anglosassone,” Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli Filologia germanica 21 [1978]: 299–362). Scholars in the New Critical tradition have attempted to forge links with more literary kinds (Morton W. Bloomfield, “The Form of Deor,” PMLA 79 [1964]: 534–41). The structure of charms varies greatly. While some are as brief as a single word or sentence, a great many are bipartite, with a narrative section (the “epic introduction” or historiola) preluding the active part of the charm (Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England, 1990). Analyses of structure are often difficult because of multiple uncertainties of interpretation (Kenneth Northcott, “An Interpretation of the Second Merseburg Charm,” Modern Language Review 54, 1 [1959]: 45–50). D. Charms as a Body of Knowledge In the attempts to identify a body of knowledge underpinning the various corpora, Romantic nostalgia for nativism and ‘paganism’ and Marxist disapproval of religion, superstition, and magic have acted as powerful distractants (Brian Murdoch [Review of The Beginnings of German Literature by Cyril Edwards] MLR 99, 1 [2004]: 237–38; Mihály Hoppál, ed., Schamanen und Schamanismus, 1994; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, 1997). Most recent scholars favor an eclectic three-way combination: 1) vestiges of ancestral systems of belief; 2) Christian tenets and narratives, both canonical and apocryphal; and 3) generalized superstition, popular medicine, and magic. John D. Niles (“The Æcerbot Ritual in Context,” Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays, ed. John D. Niles, 1980, 44–56) and Felix Grendon (“The Anglo-Saxon Charms,” Journal of American Folklore 22 [1909]: 105–237) link the OE material with early modern customs. Similarly, the OHG charms are seen as drawing eclectically on both learned and popular culture (Cyril Edwards, “German vernacular literature: a survey,” Carolingian Culture, ed. Rosamond McKitterick, 1994, 141–70) and as constituting a key point of contact between religious and lay cultures (Wolfgang Haubrichs, Von den Anfängen zum hohen Mittelalter, 1984). The “medicine wand” from Ribe (Denmark) has been explained as yoking Christian and ancestral beliefs (Erik Moltke, Runerne i Danmark og deres oprindelse, 1976; Britt-Mari Näsström, Fornskandinavisk religion, 2002). Charles J. Singer posits a body of “native Teutonic magic and medicine” (“Early English Magic and Medicine,” Proceedings of the British Academy 9 [1920]: 341–74), Patrick Sims-Williams an “indigenous British magic tradition” (Religion and Literature in Western England 600–800, 1990), and Nigel F. Barley a nexus of international ideas and beliefs (“Anglo-Saxon Magico-Medicine,” Journal

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of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 3 [1972]: 67–76). Charles H. Talbot would place more importance on classical medicine (“Some Notes on AngloSaxon Medicine,” Medical History 9 [1965]: 156–69). Beyond these possibilities, scholars have attempted a variety of comparative studies, often based on rather arbitrary reconstructions of key texts (e. g., Willy Krogmann, “Phol im Merseburger Pferdesegen,” ZfdPh 71 [1951–52]: 152–62). In a search for common European origins, similarities between Old English, Old Irish, Icelandic, and German texts have been highlighted (Herbert Pilch and Hildegard Tristram, Altenglische Literatur, 1979). Franz Rolf Schröder looked to Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and traditional Ukrainian analogues (“Erce und Fjørgyn,” Erbe der Vergangenheit, 1951, 25–36). In studies of possible culture contacts, Wilfrid Bonser (“Magical Practices against Elves,” Folklore 37 [1926]: 350–63) and Reidar Th. Christiansen (Die finnischen und nordischen Varianten des zweiten Merseburger Zauberspruches, 1914) posit influence from Finnish magic, possibly mediated via Scandinavia. In considering the performers of charms (Lea Olsan, “The Inscription of Charms in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,” Oral Tradition 14 [1999]: 401–19), earlier scholars were wont to dismiss the notion of a special vocation (George K. Anderson, Old and Middle English Literature from the Beginnings to 1485, 1950) but the trend now is towards envisaging specialist exponents of some kind. A much-discussed descriptor is Old Icelandic/Danish qulr and OE qyle (Russell Poole, “Qulir as Tradition-bearers and Prototype Saga-tellers,” Creating the Medieval Saga, ed. Judy Quinn, in press). Links have been made with shamanism (Stephen Glosecki (Shamanism and Old English Poetry, 1989), but, less romantically, the documentary record shows monastic leeches as prominent users of charms (Austin E. Fife, “Christian Swarm Charms from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American Folklore 77 [1964]: 154–59). Penitentials and other records have been used to demonstrate practice outside the monastery amongst “leches, bonesetters, toothe-drawers, midwives, treaclers, blodleters, herbalists, ‘wise women,’ and quacks” (Huling E. Ussery, Chaucer’s Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England, 1971). Modes of performance have also been much studied. Surprisingly, such Anglo-Saxon magico-medical texts as Bald’s Leechbook and Lacnunga, with their detailed rubrics, can be more informative than modern field recordings (Jonathan Roper, “Towards a Poetics, Rhetorics and Proxemics of Verbal Charms,” Folklore [Tartu] 24 [2003]: 23–49). Icelandic texts (among them Völuspá, Darra6arljó6, Hyndluljó6, and Eiríks saga rau6a) contain detailed descriptions of gathering of herbs, casting of spells, and séances, but remain hard to evaluate (Timothy R. Tangherlini, “Some Old Norse Hang-ups:

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Ritual aspects of Hávamál 134,” Mankind Quarterly 31 [1990]: 87–108; Judy Quinn, “‘Ok ver6r henni ljó6 á munni’ – Eddic Prophecy in the fornaldarsögur,” alvíssmál 8 [1998]: 29–50; Richard Perkins, “Potenti murmure verborum grandia cete maris in littora trahunt,” Studien zur Isländersaga, ed. Heinrich Beck and Else Ebel, 2000, 223–30; Olof Sundqvist, “The Problem of Religious Specialists and Cult Performers in Early Scandinavia,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 1 [2003]: 107–31). Charms have been interpreted as directed against a wide variety of afflictions – ranging from external conditions such as fire, lightning, thieves, noxious animals, and the evil eye to internal conditions such as epilepsy, tooth-ache, headache, bleeding, fractures, and sprains. Some texts have been explained as primarily prophylactic (Stephanie Hollis, “Old English Cattle Theft Charms,” Anglia 115 [1997]: 139–64), others as providing treatment for harm or hardship already incurred (Brian Murdoch, “Peri hieres nousou: An Approach to the Old High German Medical Charms,” Mit regulu bithungan, ed. J. L. Flood and D. N. Yeandle, 1989, 142–60). There has been debate as to whether some of the afflictions mentioned in charms, such as captivity in fetters, should be taken literally or figuratively (Susan D. Fuller, “Pagan Charms in Tenth-Century Saxony?,” Monatshefte 72 [1980]: 162–70). Some texts have been analyzed as applying to a series of events, e. g., pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing (L. M. C. Weston, “Women’s Medicine, Women’s Magic,” Modern Philology 92 [1995]: 279–93). It is also becoming recognized that charms can be multi-purpose (Joseph L. Conrad, “Russian Ritual Incantations,” Slavic and East European Journal 33 [1989]: 422–44) and that their meaning and application may have varied, depending on the manuscript context (Raymond J. S. Grant, Cambridge Corpus Christi College 41, 1978). Incantations of a prophetic or vaticinatory kind are amply attested in early Celtic and Scandinavian traditions (T. M. Charles-Edwards, “Geis, prophecy, omen, and oath,” Celtica 23 [1999]: 38–59; Michael J. Enright, Lady with a Mead Cup, 1996). The 10th-century Welsh Armes Prydein and later political prophecies have been a focus of interest for historical and cultural studies (Margaret E. Griffiths, Early Vaticination in Welsh with English Parallels, 1937; Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin, 1983). The internal logic and efficacy of charms also present challenges to scholarship. Sometimes the principle can be clearly identified as a type of sympathetic magic recognizable from comparative ethnography (Joseph Harris, “Cursing with the Thistle,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 76 [1975]: 26–33). With the transition from medieval to early modern texts, magical elements such as enigmatic words or symbols have to be given more importance. The historiola has been variously explained as working by means of the

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power of the myth it embodies (Edina Bozoky, “Mythic Mediation in Healing Incantations,” Health, Disease and Healing in Medieval Culture, ed. Sheila Campbell et al., 1992) or, more pragmatically, as having psychological effects (Gerardus Van der Leeuw, “Die sogenannte ‘epische Einleitung’ der Zauberformeln,” Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie 6 [1933]: 161–80), perhaps by soothing or placating the patient (Theodor von Grienberger, “Die ‘Merseburger Zaubersprüche’,” ZfdPh 27 [1895]: 433–62). Assessment of the efficacy of the various ingredients, using modern pharmaceutical principles, has been attempted (Malcolm L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 1993). Winfried Nöth had dismissed such criteria as inapplicable (“Semiotics of the Old English Charm,” Semiotica 19 [1977]: 59–83) but more recent work has shown that Augustine, among other authorities, took efficacy into account in determining which remedies were compatible with Christian doctrine (Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, 1991). Pragmatic explanations have also been attempted for other types of charm (Henk Jongeboer, “Der Lorscher Bienensegen und der ags. Charm wiq ymbe,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 21 [1984]: 63–70). To what extent vaticinations were thought to have perlocutionary power remains unclear; thus, for example, some scholars have seen the Old Icelandic Darra6arljó6 as primarily descriptive of an ensuing battle, others as determining its outcome (Russell Poole, Viking Poems on War and Peace, 1991). Select Bibliography Anne Van Arsdall, ed. and trans., Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (London: Routledge, 2002); J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine (London: Oxford University Press, 1952); Irmgard Hampp, Beschwörung, Segen, Gebet (Stuttgart: Veröffentlichungen des staatlichen Amtes für Denkmalpflege, 1961); Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1948).

Russell Poole

Charters

1706

Charters A. Definition of the Genre Charters (cartae, chartae, cartulae) played an instrumental role in economic and social life of the Middle Ages. They were legal documents recording a juridical act, such as financial or commercial transaction, property transfer, quitclaim, receipt, acknowledgement, constitution, privilege and mandate. We are to distinguish between several, sometimes overlapping, types of charters: private deeds, documents issued by a private person; chirographs, contracts written in two copies on the same sheet, to be distributed among two parties after the conclusion of a transaction; final concordances, agreements between a plaintiff and a defendant; institutional charters, issued by a certain institution, such as monastery, Cathedral, university, guild and financial corporation; and charters given by rulers, either temporal or religious. Roughly speaking, a charter has two main components: text and protocol. The former was a formulaic, unchanging part, including different diplomatic formulae, such as greeting, invocation, notification, disposition, renunciation, location, condition, compensation, guarantee and dating clauses. The latter, on the other hand, was a dynamic part, recording the names of the participants, their titles, sums of money, exact locations, dates, witness names and signatures. As a rule, private charters were composed by either a professional notary, or clerk. Those documents issued by institutions or rulers were compiled by chancellors. The vast majority of medieval charters were written on a small parchment sheet, to which a private or corporate was attached. Some early medieval documents, however, were recorded on papyri, while from the 14th century onwards, we witness more and more deeds written on paper. Many institutional charters, and especially the ecclesiastical ones, came down to us preserved in special copybooks, known as cartularies (cartularia, chartularia), which copied earlier documents into a single source. In England, some deeds were also abridged and enrolled into special rolls. Besides originals and copies, charters could also be drafts, which, however, did not have full legal force. B. Historical Background The vast majority of early medieval charters were written in Latin, which was the language of law and administration. The exception was pre-Conquest England, were both Latin and Old English was used. The Anglo-Saxon charters (over 1,800 in number) have been dated, catalogued and described by Peter Sawyer (Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, 1968), while their facsimile edition was prepared by Simon Keynes (Facsim-

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iles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, 1991). There are close to two hundred surviving royal charters from Merovingian Germany and France (ca. 481–754) (Theo Kölzer et al., ed. Die Urkunden der Merowinger, in MGH, 2001). In Lombard Italy, the situation was somewhat different. Between ca. 613 and 774, we find there as much as over 370 ‘private’ charters, alongside with just thirtythree (excluding over 150 perished) royal and 83 ducal diplomas. The Lombard repertoire has been edited and printed in Codice Diplomatico Longobardo (in Fonti per la storia d’Italia series, vols. 62–65, 1929–2003). No royal charter survives from Visigothic Spain; on the other hand, there are over a hundred extant Episcopal and private deeds, dating between ca. 500 and 704 (Angel Canellas-Lopez, ed., Diplomática Hispano-Visigoda, 1979). The Carolingian era (ca. 750–900) saw a pronounced rise in literacy, on the one hand, and improvements in administration and bureaucracy, on the other hand. As the result, it appears that the amount of charters compiled in that period is unparalleled by Merovingian epoch. Again, most charters were either royal (imperial), or ecclesiastical. The monastery of St Gall alone has produced as many as 839 charters between ca. 700 and 920. The St. Gall chapters have been edited by Hermann Wartmann (Urkundenbuch der Abtei St Gallen (700–920), 1863) and revised by Michael Borgolte (AfD 24 [1978]: 54–202). The royal (imperial) diplomas are found, as individual volumes, in Die Urkunden Pippins, Karlmanns und Karls des Grossen; Die Urkunden Lothars I und Lothars II, all in MGH, Die Urkunden der Karolinger (1906–1966); MGH, Die Urkunden der burgundischen Rudolfinger (1977); and MGH, Die Urkunden der deutschen Karolinger, I–IV (1934–1963). The use of charters was not confined to the magnates only: there is a compelling evidence for the existence of private, lay archives, both in the western and eastern parts of Carolingian Empire (Warren Brown, in Early Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 337–66). From the 11th century onwards, charters become more prolific and plentiful. This is to be explained by the re-emergence of towns with archives and notaries, rise of centralized governments with developed chancelleries, omnipresence of feudal holdings and manorial economy, growth of population and improvements in literacy. Monastic houses, as well as noble families and urban institutions often copied documents pertaining to their property to cartularies (cartulaires, Urkundenbücher), copybooks. Hence, many charters came down to us as copies. Godfrey Rupert Davis listed 1,344 cartularies from England (Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain, 1958), while Henri Stein mentioned as many as 4,522 cartularies from or related to medieval France (Bibliographie générale des cartulaires français, 1907; see also Isabelle Vérité, Répertoire des cartulaires français: provinces ecclésiastiques d’Aix, Arles, Embrun, Vienne, Diocèse de Tarentaise, 2003), but there likely to have been more.

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In a meantime, the production of charters expanded eastwards and northwards, to the periphery. Thus, from ca.1150, we find charters produced in Poland (Zofia Kozłowska-Budkowa, Repertorium polskich dokumentów doby piastowskiej, 1937), Bohemia, Hungary (Iván Nagy et al. (ed.), Hazai oklevéltár 1234–1536, 1879), and Scandinavia (Nanna Damsholt, Medieval Scandinavia 3 [1970]: 78). There are about 1,500 extant crusading charters compiled between 1097 and 1291 (Reinhold Röhricht, Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani, 1893–1904). A comparative study of charters from different countries is yet to be undertaken. From the 13th century onwards, we see vernacular charters, written in Old French, Middle-High-German, Castilian, Catalan and Middle English, appear by the side of the Latin ones. Never constituting majority, vernacular deeds were issued, as a rule, by secular grantors. The Jewish tradition of the charters, shetaroth goes back to the Talmud, which contains some formulas and contracts (Asher Gulak, Das Urkundenwesen im Talmud im Lichte der griechisch-aegyptischen Papyri und des griechischen und römischen Rechts, 1935). Later on, the shetaroth appear (in Arabic and Aramaic) in the Geonic literature, which attempted to codify their basic structure (Asher Gulak, Otsar ha-shetaroth ha-nehugim be-Israel, 1925). The major figures here were Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon (882/892–942) Rabbi Hai ben Sherira Gaon (969–1038). The earliest surviving Hebrew shetaroth in Europe were compiled at Lucena, Southern Spain, between 1005 and 1020 (Yosef Rivlin, Shetare kehilat Alisanah min ha-meah ha-ahat ’esreh, 1985). The tradition spread quickly to Northern Spain, in particular to Catalonia and Léon (Elka Klein, Hebrew Deeds of Catalan Jews, 1117–1316, 2004). The Sephardic tradition penetrated fairly quickly to France and from there to England. There are over two hundred extant Hebrew and bilingual (Hebrew-Latin) shetaroth from 12th- and 13th-century England (Myer David Davis, Shetaroth: Hebrew Deeds of English Jews before 1290, 1888; there is a forthcoming critical edition prepared by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, to appear in 2010). What differs the English shetaroth from their French, German, Austrian and Spanish counterparts is the fact the they were heavily influenced by Latin formulas and terminology, especially in the second half of the 13th century. Other Ashkenazi communities remained faithful to the traditional, rabbinic formulas. It is important to distinguish between authentic and forged charters. Fabricating legal documents from the past has always been a common phenomenon, especially in monastic houses. For example, Christ Church Cathedral of Canterbury and Battle Abbey forged a series of charters in the late 11th and 12th centuries, to justify its property claims after the Norman Conquest (Eleanor Searle, “Battle Abbey and Exemption: the Forged Charters,” Eng-

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lish Historical Review 83 [1968]: 449–80). Similarly, the rivaling abbeys of Glastonbury and Westminster fabricated several diplomas to prove the antiquity of their communities. But this phenomenon was not limited to monasteries only. The famous charter of privileges issued by Baldwin I of Jerusalem to the Pisans and Genovese is believed, by some authorities, to be a forgery (Hans Eberhard Mayer and Marie L. Favreau-Lilie, “Das Diplom Balduins I. für Genua und Genuas Goldene Inschrift in der Grabeskirche,” QFIAB 55–56 [1976]: 22–95). Authenticity of charters can be determined by the presence of original seals or signatures, by complementing historical sources, by codicological and paleographical analysis, or by the presence of certain diplomatic formulas, peculiar to certain periods (Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongreß der Monumenta Germaniae Historica München, 16.–19. September 1986, parts III–IV: diplomatische Fälschungen, 1988). From the 12th century onwards, and especially in England, the term charter started acquiring a festive connotation, associated with royal privileges and acknowledgements. One such type was charters granted to towns. According to these diplomas, the King granted various liberties and exemptions to urban communities, acknowledged their governing council and regulated their customs and dues. This was an important step in the path of towns toward the autonomy. Ecclesiastical lords, on the other hand, were rather reluctant in granting similar charters to their boroughs. Another type was associated with charters granting and defining rights and liberties of the entire kingdom. The most famous one was the Magna Carta, granted by King John in June 1215. C. Research History 1. Early Studies The study of charters as a genre commenced with the publication of Jean Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica (1681), where he laid rules for analyzing and verifying authenticity of charters and surveyed the development of Latin script throughout the Middle Ages. Mabillon was followed by a number of 18th century scholars. In France, Charles-François Toustain and RenéProsper Tassin published between 1750 and 1765 their Nouveau traité de diplomatique, which relied on documents from French repositories. While in England, the pioneering scholars of diplomatics were Thomas Madox (Formulare Anglicanum, 1702) and Thomas Ryder (Foedera, 1704–32). These studies, however, were rather superficial and generalizing in their nature; it was not until the second half of the 19th century that a profound research, based on a solid documentation, began. The main trend of pre-World

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War I scholars was to provide general introductions to the study of charters, based mainly on diplomas issued by rulers of their patriae. This went hand in hand with the influence of Leopold Ranke’s ideas about the importance of political history, on the one hand, and nationalist tendencies, on the other. In Germany, the first scholar to be mentioned was Theodor Sickel (Beiträge zur Diplomatik, 1861–1882), who was preoccupied with early medieval diplomas from German lands. He stressed the importance of philology in the study of charters, and he dealt mostly with local varieties in formulas and chronological developments in the language of diplomas. Sickel was followed by Julius Ficker (Beiträge zur Urkundenlehre, 1877–1878), who dealt mostly with dating and formulaic issues, distinguishing between royal and private charters, issued in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Gustav von Buchwald’s work was preoccupied with diplomas of regional bishops and princes in High Medieval Germany (Bischofs- und Fürsten-Urkunden des XII und XIII Jahrhunderts, 1882). A truly significant contribution, however, was the study of Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien (1889). In the work, Bresslau described the history of chanceries and diplomas in Germany and Italy, respectively; in addition, he listed main repositories of charters pertaining to these regions. Bresslau’s work serves as an important guide until today and it was translated into Italian in 1998. In 1913, R. Thommen published another introductory study on medieval royal charters in Germany (Grundbegriffe Königs- und Kaiserurkunden). The first detailed study on private charters was Oswald Redlich’s Die Privaturkunden des Mittelalters (1911), in which he followed the history of private documents from the Late Roman times down to the Late Middle Ages. Another significant scholar of private documents was Harold Steinacker (Die antiken Grundlagen der frühmittelalterlichen Privaturkunde, 1927), who found the roots of early medieval private charters in late antiquity. The German diplomatic scholarship declined with the rise of the Nazis. French scholarship showed a similar development. In his Manuel de diplomatique (1894), Arthur Giry provided a comprehensive introduction to the study of charters. He discussed various aspects, including diplomatic parts and clauses and differentiated between originals and copies, Latin and vernacular charters, parchment and paper materials. In addition, he described the history of royal chanceries in different realms. He consolidated his study with a solid bibliography of the existing studies. The interest in royal charters and chancelleries is reflected in two further studies. The one was Octave Morel’s La grande chancellerie royale (1900), an important contribution on French royal diplomas and scribes in the 14th century. Morel was followed by Eugène Déprez, who wrote, albeit somewhat superficial, introduction to

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royal English charters, between 1272 and 1485 (Études de diplomatique anglaise, 1908). Here he concentrated mostly on changes in formulas and terminology and stressed the difference between Latin, Middle French and Middle English documents. Around the same time, Henri Stein published his extensive catalogue of all known French cartularies, over 4,500 in total (Bibliographie générale des cartulaires français, 1907). A voluminous work of Alain de Boüard (Manuel de diplomatique française et pontificale, 1929–1948) attempted to cover various subjects pertaining to the history of French charters from late Roman times throughout the Middle Ages, including changes in the language of documents, their redaction by clerks, the genesis of public notaries and juridical function of charters. In England, the first significant contributor was Hubert Hall (Studies in English Official Historical Documents, 1908), who studied the history of charters from the Anglo-Saxon times down to the 17th century and analyzed both paleographical and linguistic developments within the period. Fourteen years later, F. M. Stenton published an important contribution to the study of English private deeds, where he distinguished between characteristics of earlier charters and those of later documents (Transcripts of Charters Relating to the Gilbertine Houses of Sixle, Ormsby, Catley, Bullington and Alvingham, 1922). In Italy, the scholars concentrated on editing charters, rather than studying them. The most prominent editors were Luigi Schiaparelli and C. Manaresi. The first is also to be credited with a series of important articles on Italian charters, written between 1896 and 1934, assembled and printed in his Noti de Diplomatica (1972). The first scholar to write a systematic introduction to Italian diplomatics was Pietro Torelli. In his Studi e ricerche di diplomatica comunale (1911–1915), he researched the juridical aspect of charters and other documents from medieval Italian communes. In his Diplomatica (1942), Marco Modica looked at language, style and diplomatic parts of medieval Italian diplomas, distinguishing between communal, private and ecclesiastical documents, on the one hand, and originals and forgeries, on the other. The Hebrew charters, shetaroth, did not receive nearly as much attention as the Latin counterpart did. The only full-scale study on the topic was Asher Gulak’s Otsar ha-shetaroth ha-nehugim be-Israel (1925), in which he attempted to list every formula found in medieval Hebrew deeds from various diasporas. 2. Scholarship after the Second World War By the end of the Second World War it seemed that the era of general studies and introduction was over. More detailed studies addressing specific issues and problems were needed. One such topic was the history of handwriting.

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The advent of reproduction devices allowed the scholars to include facsimiles of charters, carrying distinctive scribal characteristics from different periods and geographic regions. In 1954, Albert Bruckner of the University of Basel, initiated a massive project Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, which attempts to reproduce facsimiles of various pre-9th century Latin charters. Until today, as many as one-hundred and two volumes have been published. At Oxford, Terence A. M. Bishop published two studies, in which he attempted to identify the hands of English royal scribes, with a help of facsimiles (Facsimiles of English Royal Writs, to A.D. 1100, 1957 (with Pierre Chaplais); Scriptores Regis, 1961). Around the same time, L. C. Hector published a study on the development of the handwriting of English documents, which contains thirty two facsimiles. In a meantime, Godfrey Rupert Davis published his Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain (1958), still an indispensable tool for any student of English charters. Another topic which preoccupied post-war scholars was authenticity of charters. In 1959, L. C. Hector published a concise, yet most valuable introduction to Late Medieval forged documents (Palaeography and Forgery). The English scholarship especially concentrated on forged charter production in post-Conquest monasteries, in their attempt to protect their properties after 1066. In 1958, Richard W. Southern published a study on Canterbury forgeries (“The Canterbury Forgeries,” English Historical Review [1958]: 193–226). Eleanor Searle dealt, in a detail, with some fake charters from Battle Abbey (“Battle Abbey and Exemption: the Forged Charters,” English Historical Review 73 [1968]: 449–80) and she was followed by Antonia Gransden (“Baldwin, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, 1065–1097,” Anglo-Norman Studies 4 [1981]: 65–76) and Nicholas Vincent (in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser, 2001, 264–86). Durham, too, had similar forgeries, studied by David R. Bates (in Anglo-Norman Durham, ed. David Rollason et al., 1994, 111–24). The forgeries of Worcester attracted, most recently, the attention of Julia S. Barrow (“The Chronology of Forgery Production at Worcester from c. 1000 to the Early Twelfth Century,” St. Wulfstan and His World, ed. Julia S. Barrow and N. P. Brooks, 2005, 105–122). In 1999, David Howlett published another important study on pre-1100 Insular charters (Sealed from within. Self-Authenticating Insular Charters). These are but few examples of studies on monastic forged charters in medieval England. One witnesses similar tendencies in the German-speaking world. The bulk of studies is too vast to be summarized here. Some sixty studies are assembled in two-volume proccedings of the MGH conference on medieval forgeries (Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongreß der Monumenta

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Germaniae Historica München, 16.–19. September 1986, parts III–IV: Diplomatische Fälschungen, 1988). The question of authenticity of charters is closely connected with the problem of their dating. In a series of articles, Michael Gervers established chronological characteristics of different diplomatic parts and showed that some formulas appear only in specific timeframe (in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard O. Boyle, O. P, ed. Jaqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman, 1997, 455–504; Dating Undated Medieval Charters, ed. Michael Gervers, 2000, 13–35). Gervers is also a founder and director of the DEEDS Project (University of Toronto), which is a computer-assisted database containing over 9,000 dated private charters from medieval England (http:// www.utoronto.ca/deeds/). Since the publication of Michael Clanchy’s monumental work on literacy in medieval England (From Memory to Written Record, 1979), more and more scholars study the charters in a wider context of literacy. Rosamond McKitterick published her Carolingians and the Written Word in 1989, in which she stated that issue and uses of charters represent an important evidence on the literacy of Carolingian communities (ibid, 77–134). McKitterick was followed by her student, Nicholas Everett, who established similar arguments regarding Lombard Italy (Literacy in Lombard Italy, ca. 568–774, 2003, 197–234). In 2000, a collection of articles on the connection between charters and literacy in medieval Europe came out, covering thirteen studies on various regions, from Poland to Scotland (Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker, 2000). The scholars of the later generation have a clear advantage over their predecessors, thanks not only to the technological innovations, which enabled them to reproduce, digitalize and process the documents, but also to the impressive amount of material available in print. These advantages led some scholars to question the efficiency of some earlier authorities and publish updated introductory studies on charters and diplomatics. Diplomatique médiévale, written in 1993 by Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and BenoîtMichel Tock, presents such survey. Unlike earlier introductions, however, this work is consolidated by an extensive bibliography and solid statistical analysis. In 1994 Maria Milagros Cárcel Ortí published a general introduction to diplomatic formulas (Vocabulaire international de la diplomatique, 1994); unlike her predecessors, the author relied on vast documentation, from virtually every region in Europe. More recently, a collection of valuable studies on the production and preservation of charters and cartularies in the medieval West has came out (Charters, Cartularies and Archives: The Preservation

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and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth, 2002). Select Bibliography Harry Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien (Leipzig: Veit, 1889); Henri Stein, Bibliographie générale des cartulaires français (Paris: Picard, 1907); Godfrey Rupert Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain (London: Longman’s Green, 1958); Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and Benoît-Michel Tock, Diplomatique médiévale (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993); Maria Milagros Cárcel Ortí, Vocabulaire international de la diplomatique (Valencia, 1994); Charters, Cartularies and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 2002).

Philip Slavin

Chronicles A. Survey of the Genre The medieval chronicle is a highly flexible genre which in its multifarious guises is the centerpiece of medieval historical writing. It is closely related to a number of other historical forms, principally annals, biography and genealogy, and the boundaries are often indistinct. Though definitions of a chronicle are more elusive than one might think, we might start by identifying as the basic characteristic of the genre a desire to communicate wider historical contexts in a narrative form, arranged chronologically. Whereas annals have entries for years, as do diaries for days, and like diaries they are in the ideal case written as regular entries recording current events, chronicles cover broader sweeps of history retrospectively, and usually attempt to tailor this history to a historiographical agenda. Ideally a chronicle is conceived as an integrated whole, though the continuatio, a postscript by a later writer bringing the history up to date, is a standard feature. However, the definition is not fixed, and there is a growing view among scholars in the field that a distinction between chronicles and annals is not terribly meaningful. The beginnings of medieval historical writing may be seen in the attempts of Jerome, Eusebius and Sextus Julius Africanus, Orosius and Augustine (3rd-5th centuries), to understand the Fall of Rome and the rise of the Church in terms of a Christian systematization of the historical continuum. Although they drew on the rich tradition of the classical historians, their his-

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toriography (that is, the theoretical basis of their construction of history) was strikingly different: Christian history is linear and providential, the story of God’s steering of human affairs from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with the Bible providing much of the narrative and the Incarnation marking the central point around which everything else revolves. Two separate, though not necessarily incompatible conceptual frameworks were developed to allow a more specific alignment of the key-points of world history with Christian ideas: Jerome’s system of four empires based on Daniel’s dream, and Augustine’s schema of six ages, sex aetates mundi. Much work was done on chronology, with Bede ultimately perfecting the system of dates. The chronicles of Isidore and Bede (7th –8th c.) were the principal models for the explosion of chronicles in the subsequent centuries. Like all intellectual traditions, historical writing in the Christian West was at first exclusively Latin. Among the most influential Latin chronicle writers of the 9th –13th centuries were Marianus Scotus, Otto of Freising, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gottfried of Viterbo, William of Malmesbury, Matthew Paris and Martin of Opava (Martinus Polonus). The shift to the vernacular began tentatively with such early works as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in the 9th century. By the 13th century, however, most countries with vernacular literatures were also producing historical writing in the local languages, often by writers who were also successful in other genres, like the German courtly poet Rudolf von Ems. There are Old Church Slavonic chronicles from the 10th century, Norse, Portuguese and Dutch from the 13th, and Welsh from the 15th. But Polish chronicles remained in Latin until modern times. Some Latin chronicles received vernacular translations; John Trevisa’s English version of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon is a famous example, and Martin of Opava was rendered into most vernaculars. Vernacular chronicles are frequently in verse, such as the Middle Dutch works of Jacob van Maerlant, though the major chroniclers in Old French, Jean Froissart and Jean Molinet, used prose. From the late 15th century, we also begin to see chronicles composed for print: the Nuremberg chronicle of Hartmann Schedel is among the earliest (500 Jahre Schedelsche Weltchronik: Akten des interdisziplinären Symposions vom 23./24. April 1993 in Nürnberg, ed. Stephan Füssel, 1994; Christoph Reske, The Production of Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, 2000). The majority of chronicles, especially in the early period, were world chronicles, also known as universal chronicles, which attempted to cover the whole of history from the creation to the date of writing in a single sweep. This is the most fundamentally theological subgenre, and its principal purposes were apologetic and didactic, defending and teaching the Christian world view, drawing moral lessons from the past, but frequently also under-

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lining the legitimacy of ecclesiastical or secular power structures by rooting them in history. The encyclopedic nature of world chronicles leant itself to combination with geographical or cosmological surveys, the idea being to locate the Christian world simultaneously in time and space. The Imago mundi of Honorius Augustodunensis (ca.1110), for example, is divided into three books, the first on the physical nature of the world, including the heavenly bodies and the nations of earth, the second on the nature of time and the third on the events of historical time; Honorius was so influential that chronicles which combine history and cosmography in equal measure are known as the imago mundi type. But even chronicles which are more specifically focused on history often have a geographical excursus, typically inserted after the Tower of Babel story, for obvious reasons. From the 13th century, with the rise of secular historiography, town chronicles become an important form. Prominent examples are Giovanni Villani of Florence (ca. 1276–1348), the Viennese Jans der Enikel (ca. 1240–1302), or Robert Fabyan of London (d. 1513). Those parts of Europe which began to develop a sense of nationhood at an early stage saw the emergence of national chronicles such as the history of Spain by Alfonso X of Castile and León. Town and national chronicles often show a new interest in political and military history, and may also have legal significance, recording prerogatives and precedents. The necessity of contextualizing law historically is seen in a special class of chronicles which were appended to such legal handbooks as the German Schwabenspiegel. About the same time, chronicles of religious orders, monastic chronicles and foundation histories were in vogue: the Teutonic Order, for example, produced many. From the 15th century, family chronicles, which chart the genealogy of a noble dynasty in narrative form, become increasingly popular. All of these non-universal subgenres, which for want of a better word we might tag “thematic chronicles”, serve as their primary purpose the development of a group identity. The chronicle tradition of Eastern Christendom shows many parallels to that in the West. Early works were deeply concerned with time, fixing the date of Easter and anticipating the Second Coming, so “Chronicles from Adam” were a favored Byzantine genre, expounding the continuum from Creation to the Parousia in simple koine Greek; early exponents were Sokrates, Sozomen, Zosimus, and Malalas (5th –6th c.). This was complemented by more philosophical works in atticising Greek with Thucydidean historiography, seeking to explain the ‘whys’ of historical development. Eusebius of Caesarea (4th c.) combined these two traditions in his Ecclesiastical History and Life of Constantine. Prokopios of Caesarea (6th c.) was one of the most important of all patristic historians, and is often held to be the last historian of late antiquity. Key

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names in the subsequent tradition (9th –13th c.) include Theophanes, Theophanes Continuator, Skylitzes and Psellos, Komnene and Niketas Choniates. B. Islamic Chronicles The chronicle genre was likewise popular in the Islamic world. Here too we have both universal histories from Creation and works limited in scope to specific dynasties, geographical areas or cities. Arabic and Persian are the most important languages, the latter including Mongol chronicles, which bridge the gap to the cultures of the Far East. Arguably the Middle Ages continued longer in the Islamic world than in the West, in which case Turkish also becomes relevant; however only a few anonymous chronicles exist for the early Ottoman period. Islamic chronicles are mostly in prose, but may also contain extensive fragments of poetry, or rhymed prose. One of the most influential Arab historians was al-Tabari (ca. 839–ca. 923), whose universal history continues to be reprinted. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a pioneer of historiography and social sciences, describes the spread of Islam in North Aftica, discerning a rise and fall of civilisations influenced by such factors as geography and climate. By far the most important Persian chronicle is the Shahname (‘Book of Kings’) of Abu ’ol-Qasem Mansur, better known as Firdawsi (ca. 940–ca. 1020). Still the national epic of Iran, it combines pre-Iranian legends and epic with Islamic elements in more than 60,000 lines of verse. C. Jewish Chronicles The Jewish chronicle tradition begins tentatively in the 9th century with the Seder ’olam zuta, written in Palestine, and the Seder tannayim ve amorayim of Jacob ben Mordechai. Though medieval Jewry produced relatively little historical writing, important names of the subsequent centuries included Nathan ben Isaac, known as “the Babylonian” (10th c.), Josef ben Gurion (Italy, 10th c.), and Abraham ibn David (Spain, 12th c.). In 12th-century Germany, a group of works known as Jewish crusade chronicles were penned by such authors as Eliezer bar Nathan and Salomo bar Simson of Mainz. These texts attempt to understand the pogroms in Central Europe during the Crusades and the Jewish martyrological responses, and thus shed unexpected light on the crusader movement in European cities. There is a debate among Hebrew medievalists about whether such works really conform to the genre, with some authorities claiming that a Jewish historiography only emerges in the 16th century. Possibly, this results from a tendency to take the Christian world chronicle as the yardstick. However the broad definition of a chronicle which is necessary for intercultural comparisons would certainly include many medieval Jewish texts.

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D. Research History The chronicle was one of the first medieval literary genres to be researched by the scholarship of the Early Modern Period. Humanist antiquarians like André du Chesne (1584–1640), Marquard Freher (1565–1614), Heinrich Meibom (1590–1655) and Claude Saumaise (or Salmasius, 1588–1653) saw medieval chroniclers not only as their primary sources but also as the esteemed antecedents of their guild – though they could be vitriolic in their condemnation of what they saw as monkish incompetence. Almost all the great Latin chronicles, and many hundreds of minor ones, had enjoyed an editio princeps by the end of the 17th century. These were studied intensively as the nascent discipline of historical science began to catalogue data from its sources. In the 19th century, many chronicles were given their first critical editions, often in the context of such massive projects as the Rolls Series (1858–1896), a collection of English historical sources in over 250 volumes founded by the Master of the Rolls, the even vaster Monumenta Germaniae Historica (begun 1826), which focuses on the Empire but goes far beyond Germany, and is still growing, or the Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae (1828–1897). Although the methodology of producing a text with critical apparatus was developed for the philologies, the editing of chronicles remained mostly the province of historians. While some 19th-century editions, such as Honorius’ Imago mundi in the Patrologia Latina (vol. 172, 115–87), were woefully inadequate, many remain sound scholarly tools. The scholarship of the 20th century has pushed this work forward on many fronts. One of the great difficulties is the sheer vastness of the field, encompassing literally thousands of works often of formidable length. Studies such as that of Antonia Gransden (Historical Writing in England, vol. 1, 1974; vol. 2, 1982) on English historical writing, or of Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken (Studien zur lateinischen Weltchronistik bis in das Zeitalter Ottos von Freising, 1957) on Latin world chronicles have sought to bring system and order into our understanding of the genre, and have become standard works. Gradually, general works on medieval writings have begun to include chronicles, such as the Manual of Writings in Middle English, which has a volume by Edward D. Kennedy on Chronicles and Other Historical Writing (Albert E. Hartung, A Manual of Writings in Middle English, vol. 8, 1989). One important development of the later 20th century has been that Western scholarship has noticed Jewish and Islamic chronicles and attempted to see them as part of the same picture as the Christian traditions. A general survey of Jewish chronicles will be found in Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 1982. In 2005, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica began for

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the first time to edit chronicles in Hebrew with Eva Haverkamp’s edition of the German Jewish records of the pogroms connected with the first crusade (Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des ersten Kreuzzugs, 2005). There have been a number of good general introductions to chronicles. Beryl Smalley’s Historians in the Middle Ages (London 1974) is regarded as a classic, while Denys Hay’s, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the VIIIth to the XVIIIth Century (1977) has proved popular with non-academics. Introductions to individual countries or regions include Ugo Balzani, Le cronache italiane del medioevo (1909, 1973), Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (1980), Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (1966), and the second volume of Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner (1978). E. Chronicles in Interdisciplinary Research The traditional focus of this scholarship has, logically enough, been on the importance of the chronicle for historical study. However, chronicles are extremely important sources for all the medieval disciplines. Although linguistic scholarship was analyzing vernacular chronicles in the 19th century, it is really only since the mid-20th century that researchers in English, French, German, Slavic or Byzantine studies have looked seriously at the texts as literature. The focus is frequently different: historians are primarily interested in chronicles as sources for the history they record; literary scholarship is interested in them as sources for the intellectual history of the circles in which they were written. Thus, whereas a historian may regard an untypical, wayward chronicler as an unreliable source to whom less attention need be given, a literary scholar is likely to see precisely this idiosyncrasy as the value of the text. Many chronicle manuscripts are richly illustrated, but art historians have only relatively recently begun to look closely at these, and a co-operative approach between art history and literary scholarship is very much in its infancy. Chronicles can also be important for scholars of medieval theology, philosophy, law, music, cartography or fashion. The potential for interdisciplinary work has barely been tapped. F. Recent Approaches to Chronicles However, an awareness of this potential has sparked a veritable explosion in chronicle research which can be dated perhaps from the 1980s. A key forum for this has been the foundation of the Medieval Chronicle Society with its series of triennial conferences inaugurated in Utrecht in 1996. The volumes of proceedings of these conferences have since evolved into the yearbook

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entitled The Medieval Chronicle, edited by Erik Kooper (1999–; vols. 1–3 are volumes of proceedings; from volume 4 it becomes a yearbook). A number of important recent projects have emerged from the society. An on-line catalogue of all known Latin chronicle manuscripts is currently being assembled by Dan Embree and his team (Repertorium Chronicarum, https://library. msstate.edu/chronica/), and an Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, with articles on some 2500 chroniclers, the first installment of which is due to appear in 2010 (ed. Graeme Dunphy). Another recent example of interdisciplinary work on chronicles is Deborah Deliyannis’s handbook on historiography (Historiography in the Middle Ages, 2003), a collection of essays on many aspects of the genre. The number of monographs on individual works and subtopics appearing in recent years is breathtaking, and it is impossible to do more here than hint at the breadth of this with some random examples. Jörn-Uwe Günther’s commentated catalog of German-language chronicle manuscripts (Die illustrierten mittelhochdeutschen Weltchronikhandschriften in Versen, 1993) and Martine Meuwese’s study of Dutch manuscripts of Jacob van Maerlant (Beeldend vertellen: De verluchte handschriften van Jacob van Maerlants Rijmbijbel en Spiegel Historiael, 2001) both typify the new work by art historians. Chris Given-Wilson’s survey of English chronicles (Chronicles: the Writing of History in Medieval England, 2004) and Gabrielle Spiegel’s on France (Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, 1993) both have a regional focus, while Norbert Kersken’s study of national chronicles (Geschichtsschreibung im Europa der ‘Nationes’: Nationalgeschichtliche Gesamtdarstellung im Mittelalter, 1995) and Gerhard Wolf’s study of the family chronicles of the lower nobility in Germany (Von der Chronik zum Weltbuch: Sinn und Anspruch südwestdeutscher Hauschroniken am Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2002) are good examples of a generic focus. Examples of monographs on particular chroniclers include Robert Stein on the circle of Brabantine chroniclers (Politiek en Historiographie: Het ontstaansmilieu van Brabantse kronieken in de eerste helft van de vijftiende eeuw, 1994), Peter Ainsworth on Froissart, or Ralf Plate on the Christhere-chronik (Die Überlieferung der ‘Christherre-Chronik,’ 2005). Elizabeth Freeman (Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220, 2002) has written on Cistercian Chronicles in England, James Goldstein on chronicles of Scotland (The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, 1993). Annotated editions designed for students are still relatively new, but a volume in the TEAMS series shows a classroom-oriented approach (Graeme Dunphy, History as Literature: German World Chronicles of the Thirteenth Century in Verse, 2003).

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G. Resources The most comprehensive reference work for information on individual historical sources (not only chronicles) from the whole of Europe is the 11-volume Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, produced by the Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo (begun in 1967), often abbreviated RepFont. Written entirely in Latin, it gives a quick orientation and basic bibliography for each work, and has become the first port of call when trying to find one’s way through the confusion of alternative work titles found in older literature. Its system of alphabetization is not always user-friendly, but an on-line search facility (lemma list only) makes it easy to find relevant articles (http://www. isime.it/repertorium/indexrep.htm). Volume 1 provides a vast bibliography of relevant published material. By contrast, the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (EMC) is generically more narrowly focused and is more discursive, showing something of the interest and color of the works. Unlike the RepFont it covers the Islamic, Jewish, and Eastern Christian traditions, it includes thematic and overview articles, and it roots its discussion of each work in the manuscript tradition and transmission process. Both the RepFont and the EMC should be available in full electronic versions in due course. For particular languages and countries, other reference works give a good overview: for German works those seeking a literary scholar’s perspective are well served by the Verfasserlexikon; for the Low Countries the on-line Narrative Sources project is invaluable (http://www.isime.it/repertorium/indexrep.htm); Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam (new edition 1960–2005) covers many of the Islamic chroniclers; and for most countries there are comprehensive guides to primary sources written by and for historians (Alphons Lhotsky’s Quellenkunde zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte Österreichs, 1963, might serve as a random example). The Lexikon des Mittelalters is relatively weak on individual chronicles, but has very substantial general articles on “Annalen” (1, 657–61) and “Chronik” (2, 1954–2028), “Chronologie” (2, 2035–48) and “Historiographie” (5, 45–54). Select Bibliography Ugo Balzani, Le cronache italiane del medioevo (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1973); Dorothee von den Brincken, Studien zur lateinischen Weltchronistik bis in das Zeitalter Ottos von Freising (Düsseldorf: Triltsch, 1957); Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, ed. Graeme Dunphy (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974 and 1982); Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the VIIIth to the XVIIIth Century (London: Methuen, 1977); Repertorium Fontium Historiae Medii Aevi, ed. Augusto Potthast (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo, 1967–); Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974); Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: the Writing of History in Medieval England (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004).

Graeme Dunphy

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Cookbooks A. Introduction The study of material culture has become a compelling trend in recent years not only in medieval studies, but in the humanities at large. Publications such as Thomas M. Wilson’s Food, Drink and Identity in Europe (2006) and a volume co-edited by myself and Juliann Vitullo, At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2007), suggest to what extent the study of food and foodways exemplifies this trend. An important facet of material culture, cookbooks in particular offer a complex terrain for the medieval studies scholar which invites and in fact demands multiple methodologies: from codicology to readership, from culinary history to geography, from identity politics to public pageantry, from social status to literary language, linguistics and beyond. As curiously complex textual artifacts, medieval cookbooks have helped to create and dispel a number of suppositions about the medieval world. It is hoped that future scholarship in medieval studies will continue further inquiry into one of the key unheralded realms of the Middle Ages. B. Early Pioneers For the past few decades, scholarship on medieval food has enjoyed, if the reader will forgive the term, a renaissance of sorts. Up until this period, rare medieval cookbooks were for the most part coveted among 19th-century bibliophiles. Indeed, two French bibliophiles from this period may perhaps be credited with the birth of early cookbook studies. Jérôme Pichon’s edition of the 14th-century household manual and cookbook Le Ménagier de Paris (1846) followed up by Georges Vicaire’s authoritative Bibliographie gastronomique (1890), made available to scholars heretofore untapped sources and inspiration for research. Just over a century later, scholars began the arduous process of making food and cookbook studies a legitimate field of academic study. In the 1960s, the Annales school of history and the journal Annales E.S.C., began serious study of food practices. Fernand Braudel (“Vie matérielle et comportements biologiques,” Annales E.S.C. 16, 1 [1961]: 545–49) had opened the latter mode of inquiry within the history of nutrition, which was seen as a major contributor to the vie matérielle of France. Such longue durée research culminated in the 1970 collection of essays, Pour une histoire de l’alimentation, edited by Jean Jacques Hémardinquer. As a contributor and successor to the Annales tradition, Jean-Louis Flandrin served up inspiration in the early 1980s for the next generation of food studies scholarship that moved

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from the long term study of grain consumption and economics to the more short term study of particular culinary practices and texts, most notably cookbooks. It is to Flandrin and his successors that we owe much of the present methodology for understanding and interpreting cookbooks. C. Modern Cookbook Editions Prior to Flandrin’s work, a number of medieval cookbook editions surfaced but did not initially generate an enormous amount of scholarship. For England, Thomas Austin edited a collection a 15th-century English cookbooks based on a number of manuscript sources (Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books, first published in 1888, rpt. in 1964). In terms of medieval Italian cookbooks, Emilio Faccioli published one of the first modern editions of the 15th-century Libro de arte coquinaria attributed to Maestro Martino (Arte della cucina, 1966). A more recent edition with English translation was published in 2005 (The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, ed. Luigi Ballerini, Jeremy Parzen, Stefania Barzini). Shortly after Faccioli’s edition of Martino, Mariane Mulon published an edition of the earliest medieval Italian cookbook, the Liber de coquina, which was composed around the beginning of the 13th century (“Deux traits inédits d’art culinaire médiéval,” Bulletin Philologique et Historique du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques [1971]: 396–420). In terms of the Germanic tradition, one of the most widely known medieval German cookbooks, the mid-14th century Daz Buch von gutter spise by the poet König Vom Odenwald, was first edited anonymously in 1844, but came out in subsequent modern editions in 1964 (ed. Hans Hajek) and 1976 (ed. Gerold Hayer; see also the trans. and commentary by Reinhard Olt, 1988). Melitta Weiss Adamson published a modern critical edition with English translation in 2000 (Daz buch von guter spise [The book of good food]: A Study, Edition and English Translation of the Oldest German Cookbook). During the last two decades of the 20th century, the appearance of modern cookbook editions from other European traditions would spark a markedly growing scholarly interest in the cuisine of the past. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an explosion of research on the cuisine of the Middle Ages. Throughout the first of these decades, we see published critical editions of the most prominent medieval cookbooks. In 1979, Rudolf Grewe published an edition of the first medieval Catalan cookbook, the Libre de sent soví, which would be found to share many characteristics with other continental cookbooks and cuisines. Shortly thereafter, Grewe began work on the only known medieval Danish cookbook, the Libellus de arte coquinaria, which dates from the beginning of the 13th century (“An Early XIIIth Century Northern-European Cookbook,” Current Research in Culinary History:

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Sources, Topics, and Methods [1986]: 27–45). The critical edition of this cookbook by Grewe was completed posthumously by Constance B. Hieatt and published in 2000 (Libellus de arte coquinaria: An Early Northern Cookery Book). Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier brought out an updated edition of the Ménagier de Paris in 1981 to take the place of the out-of-print Pichon edition. The very next year, another medieval Catalan cookbook appeared, the Libre del coch by Roberto de Nola (ed. Veronika Leimgruber, 1982). Though known only from its editio princeps (Barcelona, 1520), it is presumed to have been composed during the late 15th century. In 1985, Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler put forward their collection Curye on Inglysch which encapsulates a number of 14th-century English culinary manuscripts, particularly the well-known Forme of Cury. A few years later in 1988, Terence Scully issued a comprehensive edition of all the known manuscripts of the Viandier, a veritable ‘bestseller’ among medieval French cookbooks (The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of all Extant Manuscripts). D. Key Cookbook Scholars In addition to the scholars mentioned above, it would be remiss not to mention a number of others who may not have produced critical editions of cookbooks, but who have contributed enormously to scholarship on them. This list is by no means exhaustive nor does it include the many scholars who have studied medieval cuisine in its larger sense. In Germany, in addition to Melitta Weiss Adamson, Trude Ehlert (Das Kochbuch des Mittelalters: Rezepte aus alter Zeit, 1991), and Alix Prentki (particularly her contributions to the lists of medieval culinary manuscripts in Du manuscrit à la table, 1992) have done crucial work. As for the Low Countries, the editors of De Keuken van de late middeleeuwen: een kookboek uit de Lage Landen, 1989, Ria Jansen-Sieben and Johanna Maria van Winter along with Bi Skaarup (“Sources of Medieval Cuisine in Denmark,” Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert, 1992, 39–43) have all made substantial contributions. Regarding Italian cookbooks, Allen Grieco (“From the Cookbook to the Table: A Florentine Table and Italian Recipes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Du Manuscrit à la table, 29–38) and Odile Redon (“Les livres de cuisine italiens des XIVe et XVe siècles,” Archeologia medievale 8 [1981]: 393–408) have done pioneering work on a number of Italian sources. Mary Ella Milham has contributed much on the highly influential 15th-century dietetic cookbook De honesta voluptate et valitudine by Platina, particularly her modern critical edition of the text (On Right Pleasure and Good Health, 1998). With respect to France, Carole Lambert has contributed significant scholarship, such as the editing of Du manuscript à la table (1992), which

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includes essays (in French and English) from many of the scholars named thus far. This work is also of particular value to scholars in that it contains a comprehensive list of manuscripts throughout Europe that contain culinary recipes. In addition to many other things, Philip and Mary Hyman have done ground breaking work on early printed French cookbooks, in particular the Viandier and later Renaissance cookbooks (see in particular “Les livres de cuisine et le commerce des recettes en France aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert, 1992, 59–68). Finally, a former student and colleague of Flandrin, Bruno Laurioux has contributed one of the most comprehensive studies on medieval cookbooks, encompassing virtually every culinary tradition in Europe (Le règne de Taillevent: Livres et pratiques culinaires à la fin du Moyen Age, 1997). His work is a model of rigor both in codicology and cookbook methodology. E. Curious Objects of Study The relatively recent flowering of cookbook scholarship which has been described thus far is all the more attuned to its object in that cookbooks as texts are truly late bloomers. As we can deduce from the preceding exposition on cookbook scholarship, the first cookbooks in almost all countries of Western Europe do not begin to appear until around 1300. Given their relative late appearance on the stage of history, cookbooks remain curious objects indeed. To adequately define just what a medieval cookbook is would require many more pages than what is allotted here. If we define such a text as a unified collection of recipes with a clear title, author, and provenance, many texts that we might consider as cookbooks would simply not fit the bill. The earliest manuscript collections of recipes are often short, often lack a clear title or clear divisions and rubrics, and are often inserted within codices having no other relevance to food and cuisine. Moreover, isolated recipes or short lists of recipes appear within a variety of other written genres that on the surface would not be considered culinary. Cookbooks, dietetic treatises, natural histories, and literary texts often contain or evoke recipes and recipe titles. Furthermore, the recipes tend to be recycled and recopied among a number of different collections and often translated from one language to another. In their study of early printed cookbooks, the Hymans observe a “commerce of recipes” through which cookbook producers often recycle recipes from a variety of sources (“Les livres de cuisine et le commerce des recettes en France aux XVe et XVIe siècles,” Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert, 1992, 59–68). This commerce of recipes extends to other culinary discourses as well. Some cookbooks append dietetic advice to recipes; dietetic treatises often transcribe recipes; morality plays and other literary texts enu-

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merate specific recipe names; natural histories occasionally provide culinary advice and reproduce menus taken from cookbooks. A key related strand of scholarship centers round readership, authorship, and the language of cookbooks. Most culinary historians would concur that, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the culinary arts were practiced by those for whom reading was not essential. Culinary skills were generally learned and transmitted among professional cooks via oral apprenticeships in which the memorization of a finite number of simple recipes counts far less than keen observation and repeated hands-on manipulation of foodstuffs. If such cooks could not or did not need to read, why would cookbooks have ever appeared and for whom would they be destined if not for the very cooks who presumably already possessed the implied knowledge contained within them? Laurioux offers several hypotheses to explain the readership of cookbooks, but he remains committed to the idea that they did not come about with a view to training future cooks, but rather to disseminating their knowledge outside the kitchen (Le règne de Taillevent, 1997, 227-28). However, the laconic written style of these early cookbooks suggests that they would be virtually unreadable by the uninitiated to whom they were presumably addressed. As such these books could not have been written for cooks because cooks would not need them, yet they could not really have been written for those outside the kitchen because lay readers would generally lack the specialized vocabulary and technical savoir-faire necessary to understand and enact even the most rudimentary recipes. As Flandrin opines, the circulation of cookbooks during the late Middle Ages is somewhat “paradoxical” (Fêtes gourmandes au Moyen Age, 1998, 8). Yet, what interest would the base business of cookery hold for the uninitiated, outside the confines of the kitchen? We do know that almost all of these early cookbooks derive from the tables and kitchens of the nobility. For royalty and the high nobility, having highly trained cooks write or dictate their best recipes could certainly be seen as political propaganda championing the accomplishments – culinary and otherwise – of a sovereign lord. Such a projected use of a cookbook can be seen in particular in the late 15th-century De fait de cuisine by Chiquart (ed. Terence Scully, 1985). If such writings merely transcribed the menus of a cook’s best banquets held at court, this hypothesis would certainly seem plausible. However, would any sovereign lord truly feel aggrandized by being associated with his cook’s favorite recipe for hare pâté? If cookbooks were not actually used by experienced cooks, they may have targeted other members of a royal or bourgeois household such as household

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managers in charge of general provisioning and the surveillance thereof. For such household managers, the details gleaned from cookbook collections might help them not just to maintain the necessary provisions in food, but also to assure the proper and economic production of household cuisine. Their cookbook reading would furthermore put them in a position to judge the success of the final product. By reading the text of a recipe, even if the language was somewhat laconic and the tours de main remained implicit, household managers would still find practical knowledge about what a dish should or should not be. Such texts thus offer instruction for both the theoretical and the practical arts of the table. One other key contribution of medieval cookbooks studies has been to the history of taste. Flandrin has led the way in this realm by making a distinction between the physiological necessity of food (represented by the amount of food produced and sold) and the cultural aspect of food preparation (represented by culinary practices described in cookbooks). In a pioneering article on the history of fats (“Le goût et la nécessité: Sur l’usage des graisses dans les cuisines d’Europe occidentale [XIV–XVIIIe siècle],” Annales E.S.C. 2 [1983]: 369–401), Flandrin argues that changes in cuisine cannot be fully explained by statistical studies of food consumption. Rather, these changes are equally subject to a history of taste. Though Flandrin remains committed to the kinds of statistical analyses employed by the Annales school, he thereby demonstrates how cookbooks can illustrate changes in the use of fats, spices, and other foods. Grieco, among others, cautions reliance on cookbook evidence alone, arguing that such data need to be corroborated from other sources such as menus and household account books (“From the Cookbook to the Table: A Florentine Table and Italian Recipes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert, 1992, 29–38). Clearly, such questions only scratch the surface of what medieval cookbooks have to offer modern scholars. F. Future Directions New editions of cookbooks continue to appear, most recently by C. Hieatt (A Gathering of Medieval English Recipes, 2008). With such a wide variety of cookbook sources now readily available in modern critical editions and with such auspicious beginnings in scholarship on this relatively neglected genre, medieval cookbook studies are poised to address and answer ever more complex questions about the medieval world. The questions of recipe recycling among texts and culinary influences among budding nations could be fruitfully explored by putting in place a comprehensive, searchable database of all known cookbook manuscripts and recipes. Limited attempts on this score

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have already been made (by Flandrin and his team at the EHESS and more recently by Thomas Gloning and his web site of digital cookbooks: http://www.uni-giessen.de/gloning/kobu.htm), but a concerted international effort is in order. Many other questions remain to be fully addressed, notably those on representations of class, gender, and national/regional identity within cookbooks as well as the relationship between cookbooks and other written genres such as literary texts. On these points and others, it is hoped that modern medievalists will continue to take up the interpretive challenges posed by cookbooks to further our knowledge of this increasingly fascinating field. Select Bibliography Histoire de l’alimentation, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (Paris: Fayard, 1996); English trans., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Du manuscrit à la table: Essais sur la cuisine au Moyen Age et répertoire des manuscrits médiévaux contenant des recettes culinaires, ed. Carole Lambert (Montréal and Paris: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal and ChampionSlatkine, 1992; Bruno Laurioux, Le règne de Taillevent: Livres et pratiques culinaires à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997).

Timothy J. Tomasik

Courtesy Books A. Definition and Development of the Genre The term courtesy book is applied frequently to a textual tradition which follows early modern treatises on the manners and education of the ideal courtier, the best-known examples of which comprise Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortigiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa’s Il Galateo (1558) (Harry Berger Jr., The Absence of Grace, 2000). From the perspective of medieval studies, however, the genre is constituted by a different corpus of texts, which can be distinguished from those later and more elaborate treatises, although the attribution of individual texts to the category is often problematic. The English notion courtesy book appears in the 15th century, when it is applied to brief, pragmatic texts, often in rhyme, which contain educational advice for children, particularly rules of behavior at table and manners in public situations. Although those texts were interconnected to a great extent

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with further moralizing and educational genres (mirrors of princes, treatises on virtuous behavior, courtly literature in general), they developed as an identifiable genre from the 12th century onwards. Their earliest forerunners can be seen in the latin Facetus: cum nihil utilius, presenting itself as a supplement to the widespread Disticha Catonis, Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis (early 12th c.; ch. 26: De modo comedendi), and Stans puer ad mensam (first half 13th c.), a text attributed to Robert Grosseteste (Servus Gieben, “Robert Grosseteste and Medieval Courtesy-Books,” Vivarium 5 [1967], 47–74). Other Latin works, like John of Garlandia’s Morale Scholarium (mid-13th c.) equally contained advice on table manners and conduct. The 13th century witnessed a rapid propagation of related texts in Latin and in vulgar languages, especially in Germany (Thomas of Zirklaria, Der welsche Gast, 1215/16; Tannhäuser, Hofzucht, mid-13th c.) and France (Robert of Blois, Chastoiement des Dames, mid-13th c.). The earliest English courtesy book, written in Latin, is the Urbanus Magnus (13th c. ca.), attributed to Daniel of Beccles. The earliest English texts date from the 15th century (cf. lists in Nicholls 1985, 191–195, and Hartung, ed., 1993, 3002–07; for a broader overview on related treatises on “savoir-vivre,” see Montandon, ed., 1995). The unifying characteristics of these texts can be seen in their concentration on concrete prescriptions for practical behavior in a courtly (or public) context, which largely lack the moral dimension of older works that came mostly from a clerical background. This pragmatic orientation equally allows them to be distinguished from more elaborate and broader didactic genres like treatises on chivalry and courtly love, which usually comment more extensively on moral aspects. Apparently the need for written advice on behavior at court was felt as early as in the 12th and 13th centuries, but the question of the concrete use of courtesy books in this time remains open, since the Latin texts could only be accessed by a restricted number of educated readers; one possible explanation is their use in an educational (school) context. Later translations and original texts in the vernacular could, however, be read by a broader public: due to the sociolinguistic situation in latemedieval England, French and Anglo-Norman texts are likely to have been sufficient until the 15th century. English texts appeared in this time and were printed early on (e. g., Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, ca. 1477; Lytylle Childrene, 1497). The most successful work in the canon is probably Eramus’s De doctrina puerilium (1530), which sums up most of the preceding material and marks the elaborate climax of the medieval development of the genre.

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B. Early Editions and the Cultural History of Education Although a large number of courtesy books were edited in the 19th and early 20th century (Furnivall, ed., 1868, id., ed., 1931, Smyly, ed., 1939), historians and literary historians showed little interest in the genre considered in the more restricted sense. While elaborate texts, such as Thomas of Zirklaria’s Der welsche Gast, contained sufficient material for the analysis of what has been described as the “chivalric system of virtues” (cf. the debate documented in Günter Eifler, ed., Ritterliches Tugendsystem, 1970), most courtesy books appear to have been perceived as too laconic in the presentation of their teachings and equally too poor in their literary quality. Hence their neglect or reluctant inclusion in older literary histories: “Their merits as poetry are non-existent: …” (H.S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, 1958, 156) As a consequence, texts of the courtesy book type have only rarely been analyzed, except in older cultural histories, where they served as raw material for a mostly uncritical interpretation. Alwin Schultz saw the defense of certain actions as proof for their general existence in less refined social groups (Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger, 1879). Although he collected abundant material, his use of the cited texts is considered today to be methodologically problematic as it lacks reflection on the conditions of the texts’ creation and application. In this sense, Charles-Victor Langlois’s work (La vie en France au moyen âge, vol. 2, 2nd ed., 1926) marked a certain degree of progress, although it retained a mainly descriptive approach. Further works of this period equally lacked a theoretical framework which would have enabled more intensive consideration of the relationship between normative texts, which belong to an idealizing discourse, and social realities. Hence, John E. Mason contented himself in his study on early modern courtesy books (Gentlefolk in the Making, 1935) with the collection of the available texts and the detailed presentation of the developing contents. Globally, works on courtly culture tended to concentrate on the elaborate genres in order to reconstruct the moral and ideological background of behavior. More specific contributions on the tradition of table manners, like Stefan Glixelli’s (“Les contenances de table,” Romania 47 [1921]: 1–40) or H. Rosamond Parsons’s (“Anglo-Norman Books of Courtesy and Nurture,” PMLA 44 [1929]: 383–455), concentrated on the philological interrelations between texts that belonged to the genre, restricting their material analysis to the practical circumstances behind the necessity of individual rules.

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C. The Evolution of Manners Table manners and manuals of behavior have been approached systematically by Norbert Elias in his Civilizing Process (orig. 1939). Elias interpreted the changes in manners and their perception from the late middle ages to the early modern period as a side-effect of profound modifications in the social structure of the concerned societies. In spite of several shortcomings in his treatment of the historical material which he analyzed as a sociologist, his model of a long-term evolution towards refined manners that were no longer perceived as a characteristic of an aristocratic ruling class, but as a distinguishing sign of broader elitist groups, including the rising bourgeoisie, proved to be very fertile (for a critical appraisal cf. Rüdiger Schnell, “Kritische Überlegungen zur Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias,” Zivilisationsprozesse, ed. Rüdiger Schnell, 2004, 21–83). Although Elias’s work was only poorly perceived at the time of its first publication, it had enormous influence when re-published in German in 1969. The overarching theory of social change and an evolutionary process that influenced the perception of codes of behavior was considered inspiring in the context of current trends in historical research that were highly influenced by sociological theory. In the wide and overarching perspective of the “civilizing process”, courtesy books and similar material included in other textual genres could become the basis for a detailed analysis of the creation and modification of first “courtly”, then “civilized” or “urban” behavior as an ideal of social interaction. This wide-ranging theory created a new set of questions which transcended the interpretation of courtesy books on a purely material level: treatises on manners could now be apprehended as the codification of social conventions which were part of the mechanisms of social control. Seen from this perspective of a constant evolutionary movement, the history of courtly culture itself became more relevant, since it furnished the starting point – and for a long time the most important motor – of what was to become the modern, western code of behavior. The importance of sociological theory for medievalists’ works became immediately noticeable. Diane Bornstein, who published one of the first syntheses on Mirrors of Courtesy (1975), mainly drew on the reflections of Georg Simmel and interpreted courtesy books and chivalric manuals as reflecting mechanisms of social distinction. More recent contributions, like Anna Bryson’s From Courtesy to Civility (1998), tend to refer to Elias’s theoretical framework, underlining the change from “courtesy books” to more elaborate “manuals of civility” in the late medieval and early modern period. Even critical assessments of this periodization refer to this model: C. Stephen

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Jaeger demonstrated that The Origins of Courtliness (1985) could be traced back to the 11th century, when clerical members of the developing courtly societies would have distinguished themselves through a system of refined manners that could be opposed to the warlike behavior of their lay counterparts. While Jaeger’s analysis was based on descriptions of bishops’ lives, John Gillingham (2002) recently used the early tradition of courtesy books in order to point out the shortcomings of Elias’s periodization. According to Gillingham, the evolution of a code of courtly (or later on civil) behavior must be antedated to at least the 12th century when the first examples of courtesy books were produced. This critique rests, however, in the framework of Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” and mainly modifies its chronological limits. More far-reaching observations figure in Nicholls’s analysis of The Matter of Courtesy (Nicholls 1985) which is currently the most complete study on the courtesy book tradition in the more restricted sense, and which presents the monastic as well as the lay origins of the refined behavioral codes, thus partly invalidating the idea that their invention would have been primarily a consequence of the social structure of aristocratic courts. D. New Approaches to the Literature on Conduct Recent approaches to the interpretation of courtesy books reflect the theoretical and methodological development of medieval studies in general. The gender-biased distribution of didactic literature has been noted already by older studies – most courtesy books imply a male teacher addressing a male pupil; the texts written for young women can be singled out as a special subset of the genre (Alice A. Hentsch, De la Littérature didactique du moyen âge s’adressant spécialement aux femmes, 1903). In the context of gender studies, this particular level has been scrutinized more intensively (Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A. Clark, 2001), leading to new insights into intertextual interdependencies: hence Kathleen M. Ashley (“Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct,” The Ideology of Conduct, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 1987, 25–38) demonstrated how the ideal of female behavior, as it is expressed in courtesy books, converged with the practical demonstrations in dramatic texts. At the same time, didactic literature played an equally vital role in the construction of ideals of manhood (cf. Ruth Weichselbaumer, Der konstruierte Mann, 2003). Advice for male and female pupils have in common, however, the ideal of behavioral restraint. Ruth M. Karras thus underlined that the codes of courtly behavior could, towards the end of the middle ages, be perceived as non-virile (in the sense of the warrior-ideal) without becoming effeminate (From Boys to Men, 2003).

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Alongside gender theory, recent approaches also include the perspectives of pragmatic writing and pragmatic linguistics. Gabriele Oberhäuser (e. g., “With cortays speche: Verbale Höflichkeit in den mittelenglischen Courtesy Books,” Pragmatische Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur, ed. Christel Meier et al., 2002, 211–31), sees the dialogical form of courtesy books as a means to approach the oral dimension of the “language of courtesy”, which appears in passages of direct speech as well as theoretic advice on the appropriate use of the spoken word (politeness). Concerning pragmatic writing, Oberhäuser interprets the development and apparent success of courtesy books in the 14th and 15th centuries as a sign of modified socio-cultural circumstances: whereas earlier courtly literature would have relied on a predominantly oral background, courtesy books now became an autonomous means for the acquisition of courtly techniques outside of the social circles in which they were cultivated. This leads to the question of education and childhood in general (Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2005): Nicholas Orme (From Childhood to Chivalry, 1984) underlined that courtesy books were less concerned with the tradition of knowledge, but rather the formation of behavioral codes. The latter must nowadays be interpreted in a broader perspective, since the ideals they express not only applied to a courtly context, but equally to wider social settings in which “urbanitas” (cf. Thomas Zotz, “Urbanitas. Zur Bedeutung und Funktion einer antiken Wertvorstellung innerhalb der höfischen Kultur des Mittelalters,” Curialitas, ed. Josef Fleckenstein, 1990, 392–451) and elegant behavior could be valorized. This also explains the renewed interest in texts like the 12th-century “Urbanus magnus”: Frédérique Lachaud refers to its use in aristocratic as well as in a broader school environment (“L’enseignement des bonnes manières en milieu de cour en Angleterre d’après l’Urbanus magnus attribué à Daniel de Beccles,” Erziehung und Bildung bei Hofe, ed. Werner Paravicini and Jörg Wettlaufer, 2002, 43–53), thus reflecting the need to enlarge the perspective of social setting in order to achieve an appropriate appraisal. Select Bibliography Editions: Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Early English Meals and Manners (London: EETS, 1931 [orig. 1868, rev. ed.]); Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., Caxton’s Book of Curtesye (London: EETS, 1868); Josiah G. Smyly, ed., Urbanus Magnus Danielis Becclesiensis (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1939). Literature: Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur. Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (8th ed., München: dtv, 1997); John Gillingham, “From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England,” TRHS 12 (2002), 267–289;

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Albert E. Hartung, ed., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, vol. 9 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993); Alain Montandon, ed., Bibliographie des traités de savoir-vivre en Europe du moyen âge à nos jours, 2 vols. (ClermontFerrand: Association des publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1995); Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy. Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1985); Zivilisationsprozesse: Zu Erziehungsschriften in der Vormoderne, ed. Rüdiger Schnell (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2004).

Klaus Oschema

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D Debate Poetry A. Introduction This genre flourished throughout the medieval period in most regions of Europe, including in Latin. Its forms range from lyric poems to debates occurring within narrative verse. The standard treatment of the genre’s corpus in Latin remains Hans Walther’s Das Streitgedicht in der Lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (1920). Debate poems began to appear in Latin during the Carolingian period. The first extant example is the debate, Conflictus Veris et Hiemis (Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini Medii Aevi: I [now online at http://www.mgh.de/]), commonly attributed to Alcuin. Verse debates originated as a transformation of the classical eclogue, according to James H. Hanford (“Classical Eclogue and Mediaeval Debate,” RR 2 [1911]: 16–31, 129–43). However, in “The Bucolics and the Medieval Poetical Debate” (Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 75 [1944]: 47–67), Betty N. Hedberg finds origins of the medieval Latin conflictus in the long tradition of verse debate of classical Latin literature. F. G. E. Raby (A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages [1967]) contends that even modern poetry, not to mention the medieval debate genre, has its source in the poets of classical antiquity. Traditional topics include knight and cleric, wine and water, winter and summer, and, the largest group by number of extant examples, body and soul debates, studied by Théodor Batiouchkof (“Le débat de l’âme et du corps,” Romania 20 [1891]: 1–55, 513–78) whose treatment of this particular subset remains standard. Many other studies have intervened including that of Michel-André Bossy who argues against Batiouchkof’s categorization of the body and soul debates (“Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” CL 28.2 [1976]: 144–63) and for reading them as a cohesive, intertextual comic genre (155). Another example of the genre is the Disputatio inter Cor et Oculum, which exists in numerous manuscripts (Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, Notices et extraits de quelques manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque Nationale [1890–1898]), but represents the earliest formal debate on a topic subsequently widely treated in medieval literature (The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. Thomas Wright [1841]). James H. Hanford (“The Debate of Heart and

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Eye,” MLN 26.6 [1911]: 161–65) examines the theological implication for sin of the link between eye and heart, which argument for a connection to church teaching receives confirmation by Carleton Brown (“A Homiletical Debate between Heart and Eye,” MLN 30.6 [1915]: 197–98]). The production of debate poetry in Latin continues apace in the 12th and th 13 centuries: Altercatio Yemis et Estatis, Conflictus Hyemis et Estatis, Altercatio Carnis et Spiritus, Altercatio Fortune et Philosophie, Altercatio Vini et Cervisìe, etc. (see Walther). Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1165–1236) produced a body of debates in both Latin and French. Many of his works appear in the Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi (ed. Guido M. Dreves, Clemens Blume, and Henry M. Bannister [1886–1922] vol. 21, all of whose volumes are being digitized in a freely accessible form (http://www.erwin-rauner.de/). However, only since the 1980s have scholars begun to recognize the importance of Philip’s work to the Notre Dame school of music (The Montpellier Codex, ed. Hans Tischler [1985]). At the end of the period, Alain Chartier (15th c.) still divides his production between Latin and French, an example of which in Latin, Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis super deploracione gallice calamitatis (1426–1427) (André du Chesne, Les Oeuvres de Maistre Alain Chartier [1617]; The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. J. C. Laidlaw [1974] who discusses the manuscripts with Chartier’s Latin works). B. France The debate genre received enormous extension in Occitan and French. As an example of the great variety of the genre everywhere in Europe, its development in French territory serves to illustrate its multifaceted nature elsewhere. From the 12th century through the 15th century, and some would argue beyond, the case of France exemplifies the forms and themes that the genre takes in the vernacular languages. Beginning in the 12th century with the emergence of troubadour poetry one of the genres in France will be that of tenso or debate. The tenso evolves in counterpart with independent strophes that reply to one another known as coblas. Later it becomes the jeu parti in northern France and the partimen in southern France. They all take as their form that of the son or chanson and thus musically fit the strophic format of all troubadour/trouvère poetry. In these forms, each character argues one side of a question, often that of love, though other subjects are possible. Laura Kendrick (The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay, 1988) analyzes this genre as one aspect of the game of words where poets choose sides in order to gain advantage or prestige (184). There are 194 examples of dialogue genres written in Occitan language out of 2,500 extant troubadour poems (John D. Jones, La tenson provençale:

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Etude d’un genre poétique, suivie d’une édition critique de 4 tensons et d’une liste complète des tensons provençales, 1934, and István Frank, Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours, 1953–1957); while there are 182 jeux partis associated with 207 individual melodies just in the 13th-century trouvère repertory, signs of interest in this genre in northern France (Michelle F. Stewart, “The Melodic Structure of Thirteenth-Century Jeux-Partis,” Acta Musicologica 57 [1979]: 86–107). A standard source for jeux partis is Samuel N. Rosenberg’s and Hans Tischler’s Chanter m’estuet: Songs of the Trouvères (1981), including those with the feminine voice. Pierre Bec’s La joute poétique: De la tenson médiévale aux débats chantés traditionnels (2000) studies both the troubadour and trouvère debate genres. Gaucelm Faidit, Guiraut de Borneil, Peire Rogier, and Raimbaut d’Orange are among the early practitioners of the tenso (ca. 1160–1180) while Jean Bretel and Adam de la Halle figure among the later trouvères to use the jeu parti. Thibaut de Champagne makes noticeable use of the genre with nine extant pieces (Arthur Långfors, Recueil général des jeux-partis français [1926], with 172 poems). A lexical concordance exists to mine the jeux partis in the Långfors edition through Georges Lavis’s and Micheline Stasse’s Lexique des jeux-partis: Concordances et index (1995), but still only by the microfiches and not CD-ROM. Interest in the use of the debate genres by trobairitz and female trouvères is reflected in the studies of Matilda T. Bruckner, “Debatable Fictions: The Tensos of the Trobairitz,” Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, 1994, 19–28), Eglal DossQuinby, “Roland, de ceu ke m’avez / parti dirai mon samblant: The Feminine Voice in the Old French jeu-parti” (Neophilologus 83 [1999]: 497–516), and of Angelica Rieger, Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik: Edition des Gesamtkorpus (1991). Critical reception of the troubadour/trouvère debate genres has changed dramatically. Alfred Jeanroy (La poésie lyrique des troubadours [1934]) and Ernest Hoepffner (Les troubadours dans leur vie et dans leurs œuvres [1955]) initiated the autobiographical approach to the troubadours/trouvères and this genre was no exception. Because these debate forms took commonplaces as their starting point, Hoepffner found confirmation of existing “information” about the poets in the vidas and razos as well as other poems, even while the debate poems provided further “autobiographical” details about the two voices of the debate. Jeanroy, for whom the critical construct of “sincerity” was paramount, especially devalued the tenso and jeu parti because of the artificial and constrained nature of the interchange. Erich Köhler

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used troubadour/trouvère debate forms to situate and elaborate the nature of the society that produced them (Trobadorlyrik und höfischer Roman, 1962, and “Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poésie des troubadours,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 7 [1964]: 27–51). Paul Zumthor moved completely away from the historical and personality currents of literary criticism in order to study the self-referential nature of the text, especially those of the trouvères (Essai de poétique médiévale [1972]). An interesting critique of this viewpoint on the troubadours’ use of the debate genre occurs in Sarah Kay (Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, 1990). Her treatment of the tenso of Peire Rogier, as an example, sees it as not a dialogue per se, but a representation of it (70). Using as an example two of the four extant tensos of Bernart de Ventadorn, John H. Marshall (“Dialogues of the Dead: Two Tensos of Pseudo-Bernart de Ventadorn,” The Troubadours and the Epic: Essays in Memory of W. Mary Hackett, ed. Linda M. Paterson and Simon B. Gaunt, 1987, 37–58), argues that one tenso refers to texts assigned to known poets while the other uses two stereotypes as the foundation of the debate. Neither of the tensos appears to correspond to the usual picture of Bernart de Ventadorn’s subject matter nor manner. For Marshall these two particular tensos are 13th-century fabrications. Georges Lavis makes a similar claim about the jeu parti as the site where two poetic subjectivities confront one another (“Le jeu-parti français: jeu de réfutation, d’opposition et de concession,” Medioevo romanzo 16 [1991]: 21–128). One can also view the tenso used as examples here and as well as the other troubadour/trouvère debate forms as the site of contrafacta, both literary and musical, due to the technique of structural imitation (William Paden, Tilde Sankovitch and Patricia H. Stäblein, The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, 1986, 45; Frank M. Chambers, An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification, 1985; John H. Marshall, “Pour l’étude des contrafacta dans la poésie des troubadours,” Romania 101 [1980]: 289–335; Hendrik Van Der Werf, The Chansons of the Troubadours and the Trouvères, 1972). Contemporary medieval declarations of this principle stem from commentary on the sirventès: see the Doctrina de compondre dictats by Jofre de Foixà (John H. Marshall, The ‘Razos’ de Trobar of Raimon Vidal and Associated Texts, 1972), the Leys d’Amors (ed. Adolphe-Félix Gatien-Arnoult, Monuments de la littérature romane, 1841–1843, vol. I), and the prose and verse Las leys d’amors: Manuscrit de l’Académie des jeux floraux (ed. Joseph Anglade, 1919–1912, vol. II). In the late 13th century, developments in the jeu parti include the musicodramatic Jeu de la Feuillée by Adam de la Halle (1245–1285?) who uses it as the basis for the construct of the play (Marc Benson, “L’aspect musical du ‘Jeu de la Feuillée’,” Romania 106 [1985]: 510–18). The poetic school of Arras (second

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half of the 13th c.) represents a corpus of 125 jeux partis, proof of its local popularity wherein the tautological character of the genre is manifest and courtly and prosaic discourse blend (Michèle Gally, “Disputer d’amour: Les Arrageois et le jeu-parti,” Romania 107 [1986]: 55–76). In the 14th century, the jeu parti appears in Froissart’s Chroniques (Peter F. Ainsworth, “Collationnement, montage et jeu parti: Le Début de la campagne espagnole du Prince Noir (1366–67) dans les chroniques de Jean Froissart,” Moyen-Age 100, 3–4 [1994]: 369–411). Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377), Christine de Pisan (1365–1430), and Alain Chartier (1392–1430), all practice forms of extended debates within their narrative works. Major poems within this genre include Machaut’s Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Le Jugement du roy de Navarre (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 1908, The Judgment of the King of Bohemia, 1984, and The Judgment of the King of Navarre, 1988, ed. and trans. R. Barton Palmer; Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and Remède de Fortune, ed. James I. Wimsatt and William W. Kibler, 1989), Christine’s work, Le Débat des Deux Amants (Œuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, ed. Maurice Roy, 1886–1896, vol. II), and Chartier’s, Le Débat des Quatre Dames (The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. J. C. Laidlaw, 1974); Poèmes par Alain Chartier, ed. J. C. Laidlaw, 1988). Barbara K. Altmann and R. Barton Palmer define the genre and study five major love debates by Guillaume de Machaut, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, and Geoffrey Chaucer in An Anthology of Medieval Love Debate Poetry (2006). Altmann previously produced a critical edition of three of Christine’s love debate poems: “Le Livre du débat de deux amants,” “Le Livre des trois jugements,” and “Le Livre du dit de Poissy” (The Love Debate Poems of Christine de Pizan, 1998). In Altmann’s opinion these three poems, which often appear together in manuscripts, form a debate among debates (27–28). On the basis of examination of Behaigne manuscripts, Wimsatt and Kibler question the theory of Machaut’s authorial supervision of his manuscripts (13). They therefore propose an early and a late tradition among the manuscripts. William Calin maintains that the aim of Machaut in Le Jugement du roy de Navarre was not so much to debate, but to create characters and an intradiegetic world (“A Reading of Machaut’s ‘Jugement dou roy de Navarre,’” The MLR 66 [1971]: 294–97). Douglas Kelly’s thesis concerning the works of Machaut focuses on the Remède de Fortune as a work where hope predominates over love and then uses this insight to interpret the Jugement du roy de Navarre as a contradiction of the Jugement du roy de Behaigne (Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love, 1978).

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Chartier’s work within the debate genre permeates his texts. Important examples in French whose title indicates their inclusion within this category include the Débat patriotique (1421–25) and Débat des deux fortunés d’Amour (1425). However, other important works also exemplify Chartier’s fondness for dialogue and dispute: the Livre des quatre dames (1416), Quadrilogue invectif (1422), and Livre des trois vertus (1428). Finally, his most well known work, La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424) created a long extradiegetic debate concerning the import of his poem, part of a milieu of collaborative debating (Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context, 2006). William Kibler sees the works of Chartier on the whole as a means of encouraging the return to the idealized feudal order and underscoring the loss of feudal morality (“The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy,” The French Review 52 [1979]: 714–23). Building upon readings like Kibler’s, Leonard W. Johnson in Poets as Players: Theme and Variation in Late Medieval French Poetry (1990) interprets La Belle Dame as play on meaning and conventions, both thought and behavior (163). C. The Debate Genres Elsewhere: England and Germany as Further Examples 1. England In England the first appearance of a dialogue genre occurs in the Old English poems in the Vercelli and Exeter Books, the address of the soul to the body (George P. Krapp, The Vercelli Book, 1932); Max Förster, Die VercelliHomilien, Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Prosa, 1889), vol. 3; The Exeter Book, ed. George P. Krapp, Elliott V. K. Dobbie, 1936, and searchable online at http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/ exeter). Douglas Moffat recently edited and translated from both manuscript sources in The Old English ‘Soul and Body’ (1990), preceded by his The Soul’s Address to the Body: The Worcester Fragments (1987). Major works in the debate genre in Middle English are: The Owl and the Nightingale (ca. 1200) (the standard edition by Eric G. Stanley, 1960; rev. ed. 1972; the newest edition from 2001, The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation, ed. Neil Cartlidge; and online, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AnoOwlJ.html); Wynnere and Wastoure (A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster, ed. Israel Gollancz, 1921; Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg, 1990; online http://www.soton.ac.uk/ wpwt/trans/winner/winner.htm); and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foulys (ed. Derek S. Brewer, 1960; and online http://omacl.org/Parliament/). As the recent editions of these works make clear, including their accessibility through the internet, an enormous amount of interest has been brought to

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bear on English works, including debate poetry. One important anthology which introduces the genre’s production in English is John W. Conlee’s Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology (1991). Two representative studies are Thomas L. Reed’s Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (1990) and Alan J. Fletcher’s essay, “Middle English Debate Literature” (Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne, 2005, 245–54). 2. Germany In Germany the existence of the multi-faceted manuscript called the Carmina Burana (ca. 1230) gives researchers of debate poetry opportunities to engage in not only literary and cultural history, but musical and artistic investigation at the same time. This opportunity also includes cross-cultural and inter-linguistic study of the French, German, and Latin lyrics contained within it (Bernard Bischoff, Carmina Burana: Facsimile and Introduction, 1967–1971). Hartmann von Aue (active ca. 1180–ca. 1220) wrote an allegorical debate poem, Klagebüchlein (ca. 1180), edited by Ludwig Wolff as Das Klagebüchlein Hartmanns von Aue und das zweite Büchlein (1972). The writings of women mystics offer different material within this genre, i. e., dialogues with those beings encountered in their visions: Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1207–ca. 1282), Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit (Mechthild von Magdeburg: Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, ed. Gisela Vollmann-Profe, 2003), and Mechthild von Hackeborn (1241–1298), Liber specialis gratiae, edited as part of Revelationes Gertudianae ac Mechtildianae by Ludwig Paquelin (1877) (see also Margot Schmidt, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., ed. Kurt Ruh, 1987). Streitgedichte are also to be found in the vernacular from Frauenlob (ca. 1260–1318) (Frauenlobs Streitgedicht zwischen Minne und Welt: Text und Untersuchungen, Alexander Hildebrand, 1970) to the 15th century in Michel Beheim’s work, for instance, “Wie de gerechtikait und die parmherczikait, der friden und die warhait mit ain ander kriegen” (Die Gedichte des Michel Beheim, ed. Hans Gille and Ingeborg Spriewald, 1968–1972). There remains much more to be said about the genre inasmuch as it proliferated both in Latin and the vernacular, as independent poems and as incorporated into larger works. As further avenues of research, significant traditions of debate poetry exist in both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. Select Bibliography Jeni Williams, Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and Histories (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Il genere ‘tensonze’ nelle letterature romanze delle origini (Atti del convegno di Losanna, 13–15 novembre 1997), ed. Matteo Pedroni, Antonio Stäuble

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(Ravenna: Longo: 1999); Karen Gasser, Resolution of the Debate in the Medieval Poem The Owl and the Nightingale (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1999); Rosemary Greentree, The Middle English Lyric and Short Poem (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2001); Emma Cayley, Sleepless Knights and Wanton Women: An Anthology of Late Medieval French Debate Poetry (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008); Emma Cayley, Sleepless Knights and Wanton Women: Constructing Relationships in Late Medieval French Debate Poetry (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming 2009/2010).

Patricia E. Black

Dictionaries/Glossaries A. Definition of the Genre Throughout the Middle Ages, numerous writers put together word lists, either in the form of separate glossaries/dictionaries, or as explanatory notes for individual texts, especially the Bible (glosses, or glossed texts). The gamut of glossaries ranges from glossae collectae drawn from interlinear and marginal glosses, to glossaries that comprise word lists (sometimes alphabetized), to extensive handbooks with large number of glosses that already resemble encyclopedias. Whereas this article (Albrecht Classen) will deal with the large corpus of diverse glossaries, the entry on ‘glosses’ will cover specifically glossed manuscripts, i. e., texts with interlinear or marginal glosses that explicate words in the text (Franz van Liere). A certain degree of overlap of both articles will be unavoidable, but it will also allow more light to be shed on the complex nature of this vast topic. B. Historical Background Verrius Flaccus was the first to put together a Latin lexicography (55 B.C.E.– 20 C.E., De Verborum Significatu), followed by Aulus Gellius (2nd c. C.E., Noctes atticae), Sextus Pompeius Festus (2nd c. C.E., epitome of Flaccus’s work, offering the etymology and meaning of each word), and Nonius Marcellus (4th c. C.E., De compendiosa doctrina). In the early Middle Ages, individual authors began to write glossaries based on the marginal glosses of manuscripts both for simple pedagogical purposes and to make available linguistic resources for writers. In the early 9th century, two short dictionaries were composed for the study of Old German by Romanic speakers, the first the so-called Kasseler Glossen, compiled in the vicinity of Regensburg – they were

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more glosses instead of making up a real glossary – and the other, the Altdeutschen or Pariser Gespräche. The first collection focused on subject matters, such as body parts, farm animals, buildings, clothing, etc., and the latter offers whole sentences for a basic conversation, grouped according to specific topics, perhaps typical of fully-fledged glossaries (Wolfgang Haubrichs, Die Anfänge [Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit], 1988, 196–98). The Reichenauer Glossare (ca. 800; also more glosses than a real glossary) provide explanations of difficult Latin terms, and often these explanations reveal vernacular features of Old French (Hans-Wilhelm Klein, André Labhardt, and Manfred Raupach, Die Reichenauer Glossen, 1968). The Old-High German Abrogans (ca. 790–800) is a translation of an alphabetically arranged Latin dictionary of synonyms (Albrecht Classen, “Abrogans,” German Writers and Works of the Early Middle Ages, ed. Will Hasty and James Hardin (DLB, 148), 1995, 150–54). The first major compilation was the early-9th-century Liber glossarum, which in turn became the basis for the Elementarium erudimentum doctrine, ca. 1053, by the Lombard Papias. He drew most of his word material from Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636), Priscian (fl. 500; Institutiones grammaticae), and others. Especially Isidore’s Etymologiae, a vast compendium of classical knowledge (more than thousand manuscripts), became a central source for medieval glossary authors. But it took almost another hundred years until the first dictionary determined by an interest in the etymology of words appeared, Osbern of Gloucester’s Liber derivationum (ca. 1150). He lists, for every letter, the word families, offering explanations about the words’ derivation, but not necessarily their etymology; instead he was interested in a word’s grammatical function. Again about hundred years later, Hugutio of Pisa made the next effort with his Magnae derivationes (late 12th c.), exploring the etymology of the words. He placed considerably less emphasis on the meaning of words and their factual information and often explained individual terms through a reference to a Latin proverb. The drawback to his dictionary was his disregard of the alphabetical order; instead he put together words according to related groups (Claus Riessner, Die Magnae Derivationes des Uguccione da Pisa, 1965). Hugutio’s Magnae derivationes almost entirely replaced Osbern’s and Papia’s works because of its popular appeal far until the end of the 15th century (ca. 200 manuscripts). But Hugutio did not dominate the genre altogether. In 1286, the Dominican Giovanni Balbi of Geno published his Catholicon, in which he rearranged Hugutio’s material in complete alphabetical order (Georg Goetz, De glossariorum latinorum origine et fatis, 1923, 215–17), similarly as the Summa Britonis (ca. 1260) by the Franciscan William Brito, a Bible dictionary. The Catholicon has also survived in ca. 200 manu-

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scripts and was one of the first books printed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1460. Throughout medieval Europe Hebrew scholars made great efforts to provide their students with glossaries, facilitating their translation of the Torah and other sacred texts, as reflected by the Glossaire hébreu-français du XIIe siècle (ed. Mayer Lambert and Louis Brandin (1905; rpt. 1977). See also the Hebrew glossary in the University of Basel Library, Hs. 23 (see the Corpus glossariorum Biblicorum Hebraico-Gallicorum Medii Aevi, 1972). We also know of Hebrew-English glossaries (N. R. M. De Lange, Hebrew Scholarship in the Medieval World, 2001), One of the best known scholars in this regard was Raschi (Rabbi Schelomo ben Isaac from Troyes, 1040–1105 (see Les gloses françaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Raschi, ed. Arsène Darmesteter; D. S. Blondheim, 2 vols., 1929–1937). An anonymous German scholar wrote in the last quarter of the 14th century the Vocabularius Brevilogus (Wilhelm Padberg, “Der Vocabularius Breviloquus,” Ph.D. Munich 1912), which intended, once again, to facilitate the study of the Latin Bible (Vulgate) in a most pragmatic fashion, dividing his glossary into nouns, verbs, and non-declinable words. More or less contemporaneously, at the end of the 14th century, a Latin-French dictionary was published (ed. Mario Roques, Recueil général des lexiques français du moyen âge, 1936–1938; here vol. 2), and also a Latin dictionary, the Vocabularius Lucianus, which contains already a few German terms (Klaus Grubmüller, Vocabularius Ex Quo, 1967, 39). Italian, if not primarily Venetian, merchants who were intensively engaged in trade with German businessmen, could rely on a German-Italian dictionary by Georg of Nuremberg, first published in 1424 (three manuscripts, Vienna, Munich, and Heidelberg). Interestingly, the anonymous scribe must have been of Italian origin because of consistent mistakes in the German (Georg Pausch, ed., Das älteste italienisch-deutsche Sprachbuch, 1972, 78; Albrecht Classen, Zur Rezeption norditalienischer Kultur, 1987, 35; the latest research is assembled in a volume edited by Helmut Glück and Bettina Morcinek, Ein Franke in Venedig: das Sprachlehrbuch Georg von Nürnbergs und die Folgen, 2006; the contributions focus on the implied methods of teaching a foreign language [Jochen Pleines]; the grammatical structures in Georg’s dictionary [Friederike Schmöde]; parallel dictionaries for Catalan-German [Bettina Morcinek] and Polish-German [Ingrid Maier]; and other languages). This dictionary first offers terms for God and the Creation, followed by sections on weather, water, time calculations, the human body, clothing, and hygiene, the house and its furniture, numbers, foodstuff, metals, jewels, money and weights, etc. In a second, major, section the author included lists

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of verbs, idiomatic sentences, and finally concludes with short dialogues and phrases pertinent for trade. Here Georg employed only terms already known from the previous sections (Carolin Wirtz, Köln und Venedig, 2006, 266–68). The difference to the medieval tradition of glossaries and related dictionaries could not have been bigger because only here do we first encounter a systematic list of words, followed by verb conjugations and short dialogues and idiomatic statements (Pausch, 41). Even more interestingly, this dictionary shares few similarities with the oldest Latin-Italian glossaries, such as the ms. B 56 in the city library of Perugia (14th c.), the Cod. Magliabechiano I 72 in the Florentine National Library by Gherardo de Casulis, or Gasparino Barzizza’s (1359–1431) Vocabolario breve and its numerous imitations and copies (Ornella Olivieri, “I primi vocabolari italiani fino alla prima edizione della Crusca,” Studi di filologia italiana 6 [1942]: 64–192). Numerous other ItalianGerman glossaries existed, but Georg von Nuremberg’s publication seems to have been the most popular and most pragmatic one (Pausch, 42–48). The British Museum holds a number of late-medieval Latin-English dictionaries under the title Medulla Grammatice in its collection of Harleian manuscripts (Harl. Ms. 1738, Harl. Ms. 2181, Harl. Ms. 2257, Harl. Ms. 2270, and there is another copy in St. John’s College, Cambridge (Ms. 72 (c. 22), to which can be added an early-modern print by Wynke de Worde, edited in 1500 (G. 7620, British Museum). The oldest Medulla Grammatice was written ca. 1440, representative of Anglo-Norman, Eastern, and Northern parts of England. There are also some Greek words which are transliterated into Latin, with a definition given in Latin, not to forget a few Hebrew words handled in the same fashion (Florent Tremblay, A Medieval Latin-English Dictionary, 2005). As a general rule, most dictionaries and glossaries depended on each other, as Goetz (“Glossographie,” Realenzyklopädie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften 7, 1 [1910]: 1454) confirmed early on, pointing out that Johannes de Janua drew most of his material from Hugutio, and the latter relied heavily on Osbern. Osbern, in turn, compiled his information from Priscian, Paulus, Isidor, and other sources. The major differences rested in the selection of special terms, or lexicographical categories, such as Hugutio’s preference to explain Hebrew words. Papias and Osbern had available major glossary sources from previous times, such as the Liber glossarum and the Abavus maior, and also the so-called Derivationes, collections of base words with their extensive lexicographic derivations, which had been written since the 11th century. The true heyday of dictionaries, however, did not begin until the end of the 15th century, when Johann Reuchlin published his Breviloquus (1475), Ambrogio Calepino his Ambrosii Calepini Bergomatis Eremitani dictionarium (1502), and Robert Estienne his Thesaurus linguae Latine (1531). On a prag-

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matic level, members of the aristocracies tended to own dictionaries in order to facilitate their communication with courtiers and diplomats at other courts using a different language. Paula de Gonzaga, for instance, who had married Leonhard von Görz in 1478, owned a Latin-German glossary (Christina Antenhofer, Briefe zwischen Süd und Nord, 2007, 169). C. Research History Whereas the Lexikon des Mittelalters covers our topic under the heading of ‘Glossaries’ (vol. IV, 1508–15 [M. Lapidge, A. Glier, Ch. Hannick]), the Dictionary of the Middle Ages treats it under the heading of ‘Encyclopedias/Dictionaries’ (Traugott Lawler, vol. IV, 447–50, 1984), but the Lexikon offers considerably more information, subdividing the fairly large field into Latin glossaries (M. Lapidge), German glossaries (P. Schmitt), Romance glossaries (A. Gier), English glossaries (H. Gneuss), and Slavic glossaries (C. Hannick), each of whom also provides a list of the relevant research literature. Early philologist such as Hoffmann von Fallersleben (“Aus einem Glossarium des XV. Jahrhunderts,” Anzeiger 1 (1832): 211), Wilhelm Wackernagel (Vocabularius optimus, 1847), and Franz Joseph Mone (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der teutschen Litteratur und Sprache, 1830) brought to light a number of glossaries, but did not comment on them in any significant manner. Lorenz Diefenbach (Glossarium latino-germanicummediae et infirmae aetatis, 1857) compiled an extensive Germany glossary organized according to Latin lemmas, as he had found them in manuscripts, incunabula, and early-modern prints, but he did not examine the genre itself and used often rather flimsy scholarly criteria, pursuing highly random selection criteria and committing grave mistakes in the identification of manuscripts. Adolf Mussafia was the first to discuss at great length the genesis of Italian-German dictionaries (“Beitrag zur Kunde der norditalienischen Mundarten im XV. Jahrhundert,” Denkschriften der Akademie Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse 22 [1873]: 103–228), but only Scandinavian scholars such as Poul Høbye (“Meister Jörgfra Nürnberg,” Festskrift til Christen Møller, 1957, 205–21) reawakened modern interest in this particular subgroup of late-medieval dictionaries. It took more than ten years thereafter until Italian scholars finally caught up and comprehensively dealt with the history of Italian-German dictionaries from the late Middle Ages (Alda Bart-Rossebastiano, “Dizionari a stampa italiano-inglesi-tedeschi-fiamminghi del Quattrocento e del Cinquecento,” Ph.D., Turin, 1969, ead., ‘Introito e Porta’: Vocabolario italiano-tedesco, 1971). Gustav Loewe compiled a survey of the monolingual Latin dictionaries from the earliest time until the9th and 10th centuries (Prodromus corporis glossariorium latinorum, 1876), followed

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by Georg Goetz (Corpus glossariorum latinorum, 1888–1930) and Samuel Berger (De glossariis et compendiis exegeticis quibusdam medii aevi, 1879). The first comprehensive collection of Old English glosses, especially of interlinear glosses, was published by Henry Sweet in 1885 (The Oldest English Texts), who included the Corpus Glossary, the Epinal Glossary, the Erfurt Glossary, and the Leiden Glossary, the latter of which received its first careful analysis by J. H. Hessels in his A Late Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Glossary (1906) and by R. Sauer in his Zur Sprache des Leidener Glossars (1917). One of the greatest philologists working in the field of medieval Latin glossaries was W. M. Lindsay who published significant studies during the time of the First World War (“The Abolita Glossary,” Journal of Philology 34 [1915–18]: 267–82; “The Philoxenus Glossary,” Classical Review 31 [1917]: 158–63), and, together with H. J. Thomas, in 1921 his Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries; amazingly, also in the same year, he edited, together with Helen McM. Buckhurst, The Corpus Glossary (1921), contained only in an 8th-century manuscript, Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (no. 144), which in turn had drawn material from the Abstrusa Glossary (by a French [?] writer), the Abolita Glossary (by a Spanish writer), the Hermeneumata from ca. 200 C.E., and the Philoxenus Glossary, a Latin-Greek compilation from a range of other sources (W. M. Lindsay, “The Philoxenus Glossary,” Classical Review 31 [1917]: 158–63). Noteworthy were also the profound monographs and articles on individual glossaries and glosses by Aristide Marigo (I codici manoscritti delle ‘Derivationes’ di Uguccione; 1936); Patrizia Lendinara (“The Third Book of the Bella Parisiacae Urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and its Old English Gloss,” Anglo-Saxon England 15 [1986]: 73–89; see also her Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Glossaries, 1999); and A. C. Dionisotti (“Greek Grammars and Dictionaries in Carolingian Europe,” The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks, ed. Michael W. Herren, 1988, 1–56). The Old-High German Abrogans (ed. Georg Baesecke, 1931) was the topic of much debate since the 19th century, but Georg Baesecke’s Der deutsche Abrogans und die Herkunft des deutschen Schrifttums (1930), like his Der Vocabularius Sancti Galli in der angelsächsischen Mission (1933) can be considered landmarks of glossary scholarship. His survey of the glossary literature in early-medieval literature, Frühgeschichte des deutschen Schrifttums (ed. Ingeborg Schröbler, 1953, 2 vols.) proved to be the capstone of his work on this topic (see also his Verzeichnis der althochdeutschen und anglosächsischen Glossenhandschriften, 1973). The Schlettstadter Glossary (12th c.) was studied in detail by Joseph Fasbender (Die Schletstadter Vergilglossen und ihre Verwandten, 1908) and Carl Wesle (Die althochdeutschen Glossen des Schlettstadter Codex, 1913); and Pekka Katara carried out a careful analysis of the Trier collection of 11th- and 12th-century glosses (Die

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Glossen des Codex Seminarii Trevirensis R. III. 13, 1912). The best collection of OldHigh German glosses was published by Elias von Steinmeyer and Eduard Sievers (Die althochdeutschen Glossen, 1879–1922), but Rolf Bergmann offered a thoroughly updated listing in his Verzeichnis der althochdeutschen und altsächsischen Glossen (1973), and most recently in his Katalog der althochdeutschen und altsächsischen Glossenhandschriften, published together with Stefanie Stricker (2005), he added the critical research tool to identify the relevant manuscripts (5 vols.). Bergmann’s 1966 Mittelfränkische Glossen, which was based on his Ph.D. thesis, also deserves mention here. For the latest introductory survey, see Brian Murdoch’s article “Old High German and Continental Old Low German” in Early Germanic Literature and Culture (ed. id. and Malcolm Read, 2004), 235–61. Erik Rooth investigated a Latin-Low German vocabulary in the Stockholm imperial archive (Niederdeutsche Mitteilungen 1 [1945]), and Pekka Katara analyzed a similar dictionary in the city archive of Reval/Talinn (Estonia) (“Ein lat.-nd. Vokabular des Stadtarchivs zu Reval,” Niederdeutsche Mitteilungen 1 [1945]: 35–55). The (Fritsche) Closener ms. in Freiburg was the object of Theodosius Leuthardt’s doctoral dissertation (Freiburg [Switzerland], 1949, partly printed in 1958), but he ignored that several older manuscripts contained the same material, as Jacques Gény had observed as early as 1887 (“Die Glossarien von Königshofen und Closener,” Bulletin ecclésiastique de Strasbourg 6 [1887]). In his study of the Engelhus glossary, Gerhardt Powitz demonstrated that the author’s German-Latin glossary, the fourth part of his dictionary, represented a shortened version of another Low German-Latin work fairly well disseminated in the first quarter of the 15th century (“Zur Geschichte der Überlieferung des Engelhus-Glossars,” Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 86 [1963]: 83–109). Most of the attempts to come to terms with this genre within the German-speaking areas have been thwarted, however, because we know so little about the relationship of the individual glosses to each other (Klaus Grubmüller, Vocabularius Ex quo, 1967, 10; for an early survey, see D. H. G. Bellaard, Gert van der Schuren’s Teuthonista of Duytschlender, 1905). Whereas Arno Schirokauer argued, for instance, that Conrad Zeninger printed the first Vocabularius teutonico-latinus in 1482 in Nuremberg (“Die Anfänge der neuhochdeutschen Lexikographie,” Modern Language Quarterly 6 [1945]: 71–75), Fritsche Closener’s dictionary can be dated prior to 1384, and the Engelhus glossary at ca. 1400; the Stralsund dictionary (Archivbibliothek, cod. mscr. NB 27) was probably written at about the same time (Klaus Grubmüller, Vocabularius Ex quo, 1967, 11f.). Louis de Man edited three encyclopedic glossaries of Dutch and West-German provenance, which are based on the Liber ordinis rerum (Middelleeuwse systematische glossaria, 1964). The most popular Vocabularius Ex quo, that has survived in more than 250 manuscripts

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from 1410 to 1502 and in more than 40 early-modern prints, primarily served as a reference work for the study of the Bible and other Latin texts, comprising a generalizing lexicon both for exotic and rather common words as could be found in Latin manuscripts (discarding the etymological principal for the explanation of complex and difficult words, as is the case in the Vocabularius Brevilogus, published only briefly prior to the Vocabularius (‘Vocabularius Ex quo’, ed. Klaus Grubmüller, Bernhard Schnell et al., 1988). J. L. G. Mowat published the Sinonoma Bartholomei, a 14th-century dictionary/glossary in the library of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1882, which focuses especially on plants and medical terms. He was followed by Thomas Wright with his much broader Anglo-Saxon and Old-English Vocabularies (1883; 2nd ed. together with Richard Paul Wülcker, 1884). We also need to consider John Henry Hessel’s edition of a 14th-century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (1906), housed in the Leiden University Library (Voss. Qo, Lat. No. 69). Louis Goossens published Old English glosses contained in a Brussels manuscript (The Old English Glosses of ms. Brussels, Royal Library, 1650 [Aldhelm’s De laudibus virginitatis], 1974). In the last few decades, several authors have attempted to summarize older research and to outline a history of the genre under investigation, such as James A. H. Murray (The Evolution of English Lexicography, 1970), and Gabriele Stein (The English Dictionary Before Cawdrey, 1985). Most recently, Martina Backes investigated how much French was known among the intellectual elite in late-medieval Germany, and offered a comprehensive overview of how individuals learned French and what dictionaries they had available according to 15th- and 16th-century documentary evidence (Fremde Historien: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte französischer Erzählstoffe im deutschen Spätmittelalter, 2004). And Peter O. Müller presented in-depth research on 16th-century lexicography (Konzeptionen und Funktionen frühneuzeitlicher Wörterbücher, 2001). Select Bibliography Richard H. Rouse, The Evolution of English Lexicography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900); Richard Rouse, “La diffusion en Occident au XIIIe siècle des outils de travail facilitant l’accès aux textes autoritatifs,” Revue des études islamiques 44 (1967): 115–47; Klaus Grubmüller, Vocabularius Ex quo (Munich: Beck, 1967); id. and Bernhard Schnell, ed., Vocabularius Ex Quo: überlieferungsgeschichtliche Ausgabe, 6 vols. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988); Gabriele Stein, The English Dictionary Before Cawedrey (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985); Eckhard Meineke, Einführung in das Althochdeutsche (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2001); Mittelalterliche volkssprachige Glossen, ed. Rolf Bergmann, Elvira Glaser, and Claudine Moulin-Fankhänel (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001).

Albrecht Classen

Didactic and Gnomic Literature

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Didactic and Gnomic Literature A. Definitions and Corpus Didactic and gnomic literature is an elusive body of work to define, but it aims to teach (hence the term “didactic”) and at its heart lie pronouncements about conduct and morals, about skills and resources, and about nature and the environment. Typical statements about human beings are “Werig scealc wiq winde roweq” (“A weary servant rows against the wind”); “Byr6i betri/ ber-at ma6r brautu at/ en sé mannvit mikit” (“No better load does a man carry along the way than great wisdom is”); “Meccid llvwyr llauer kyghor” (“A coward fathers many counsels”). Typical statements about other facets of nature are “Fyr [sceal] wudu meltan” (“Fire must consume wood”); “Valr flygr ´ várlangan dag ok standi honum beinn byrr undir bá6a vængi” (“The falcon flies through the Spring-long day and may the following wind stand under both its wings”); “Bit wenn gwylyan” (“Let the gull be white”). The individual gnome (also termed maxim or aphorism) can be difficult to distinguish from the proverb but as a general rule the gnome, e. g., “the cock’s comb is red”, is literal, whereas proverbs (“a stitch in time saves nine”) have extended and often figurative application. The main literary traditions to consider are those of early medieval England, Scandinavia, and Wales. The following related genres, which are treated elsewhere in this handbook, will be excluded: Allegorical poems; Bestiaries, Aviaries, Physiologus; Charms and Incantations; Courtesy Books; Debate Poems; Exempla; Hagiographical texts; Herbal books; Lapidaries; Medical Treatises; Mirrors for Princes; Philosophical Treatises; Political Treatises; Proverbs and Riddles; Schoolbooks; Scientific Texts; Sermons; and Travelogues. B. Anglo-Saxon England Maxims I and II are the principal gnomic texts. Related are the didactic texts The Fortunes of Men, The Gifts of Men, Precepts, and the Rune Poem. Close to this genre are poems, such as Widsi6 , that devote themselves to lists rather than narrative. Most texts are presented by Tom Shippey in Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English, 1976 and all can be found in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records edition (The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, 1936; The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. E. Dobbie, 1942). The structure and aesthetics of these texts have posed conundrums on several different levels, beginning with discussions of the status of the gnome as a purported minimal unit of utterance. An alternation of two char-

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acteristic verbs, “bi6” (“is”) and “sceal,” where “sceal” can fluctuate in meaning between “ought to be” and “is characteristically,” has been taken as pointing to a native system of classification (Hector Munro Chadwick and Nora Kershaw Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, vol. I: The Ancient Literatures of Europe, 1932; Patrick L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric, 1966). In defining larger poetic forms, Andreas Heusler distinguishes between “Spruchhaufen,” accumulations of maxims, and “Sittenlehren,” more coherently organized admonitory texts (Die altgermanische Dichtung, 1923). Tom Shippey notes that many texts are around a hundred lines long and contain a thinly-characterized teacherly persona who speaks directly to the audience or engages in dialogue with another similar figure (Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English, 1976). Another formal type is list and catalogue poetry, to which Andreas Heusler applies the term “Merkdichtung” (Die altgermanische Dichtung, 1923) – exemplified in Old English by the Rune Poem. Animated scholarly debates have centered upon the structure and integrity of Maxims I and II (Charles W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 1943; Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature, 1986; Elaine Tuttle Hansen, The Solomon Complex, 1988). Nicholas Howe seeks to demonstrate that Maxims I and II are compilations of originally free-standing dicta (The Old English Catalogue Poems, 1985; cf. Charles L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature, 1967). Dawson R. McGregor argued that often the items are sequenced associatively rather than logically (“The Structure of the Old English Gnomic Poems,” JEGP 61, 1 [1962]: 14–22). Elizabeth Jackson sees Christian doctrine as providing a central reference point (“From the Seat of the Qyle? A Reading of Maxims I, Lines 138–40,” JEGP 99, 2 [2000]: 170–92). The other poems also present challenges (cf. Richard H. Dammers, “Unity and Artistry in The Fortunes of Men,” American Benedictine Review 27 [1976]: 461–69). C. Medieval Scandinavia Most of the relevant Scandinavian poems, such as Alvíssmál, Grímnismál, Hávamál, Sigrdrífumál, Vafqrú6nismál and Völuspá, are principally mythological or legendary in content but incorporate gnomic and didactic material along the way (cf. Christopher Hale, “The River Names in Grímnismál 27–28,” Edda. A Collection of Essays, ed. R. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason, 1983, 165–86). The 13th-century Hugsvinnsmál is a loose translation of Disticha Catonis (Jan De Vries, Altnordische Literaturgeschichte, 1941–1942). All the above texts appear in Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern, ed. Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn, 1983. A related skaldic text is Málsháttakvæ6i (Roberta Frank, Sex, Lies and Málsháttakvæ6i, 2004). Trygg6amál is

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a legal formula, preserved in Grettis saga (ed. Gu6ni Jónsson, 1936) and Hei6arvíga saga (ed. Sigur6ur Nordal and Gu6ni Jónsson, 1938). The structure of Hávamál has proved especially problematic (Ivar Lindquist, Die Urgestalt der Hávamál, 1956; Klaus von See, Die Gestalt der Hávamál, 1972; David Evans, ed., Hávamál, 1986). From the Humanist period onwards, the vernacular term qula has been associated by scholars with texts incorporating lists, with partial medieval warrant for this in Buslubœn (Andreas Heusler and Wilhelm Ranisch, Eddica minora, 1903). The so-called qulur incorporated in redactions of Snorra Edda, e. g., kvenna heiti (“words for women”), are of uncertain origin and date but may represent a form of poetic training (Elena A. Gurevich, “Qulur in Skáldskaparmál: An Attempt at Skaldic Lexicography,” ANF 107 [1992]: 35–52; Elena A. Gurevi c, ˇ “Zur Genealogie der qula,” alvíssmál 1 [1992]: 65–98). The Old Icelandic form greppaminni (“poets’ tradition”) is thought to have served the same purpose (Vésteinn Ólason, “Greppaminni,” Afmælisrit Jóns Helgasonar 30. júní 1969, ed. Jónas Benediktsson et al., 1969, 198–205). D. Medieval Wales Among the relevant Welsh texts, one prominent group, probably from the 9th century, is attributed to the 6th-century warrior-aristocrat Llywarch Hen (Canu Llywarch Hen, ed. Ifor Williams, 1935; Patrick Ford, The Poetry of Llywarch Hen, 1974; Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 1990). Examples of the constituent poems are “Gnawt gwynt” (“Familiar is the Wind”), “Bit goch crib keilyawc” (“The cock’s comb shall be red”), “Kalangaeaf kalet” (“The Kalends of winter”), and “Gorwyn blaen onn” (“Very white are the tops of the ash-trees”). Other poems are: “Englynion y Clyweid” (“The Sayings of Wise Men”), “Ymddiddan Arthur a’r Eryr” (“Dialogue of Arthur and the Eagle”), “Tri Thlws ar Ddeg Ynys Prydain” (“The Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain”), and “Englynion Y Bedeu” (“Verses of Graves”). Texts partly in verse and partly in prose include the various list-like compilations of archaic lore known as “Trioedd Ynys Prydein” (“Triads of the Island of Britain”), on which the standard reference is Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 1961. Many of these texts appear with translations in Joseph P. Clancy, The Earliest Welsh Poetry, 1970. The classic study of the Welsh bardic traditions is Gwyn Thomas, Y Traddodiad Barddol, 1976 and the standard general literary history is A Guide to Welsh Literature, ed. A. O. H. Jarman and Gwilym Rees Hughes, 1976. The texts have presented scholars with formidable textual and philological difficulties, with Ifor Williams as one of the foremost editors and explicators. Definitional difficulties also remain to be resolved. A vernacular

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word which apparently relates to gnomes is “gnawd,” meaning variously “typical, usual” as an adjective and “custom, nature” as a noun, hence the use of the term “gnodiau” for such texts. Sarah Lynn Higley points out that while some individual statements concern human nature and the environment in general others appear to relate to specific situations and contexts, approaching narrative form or the sort of nature description seen in medieval Irish, French and other European traditions (Between Languages, 1993). Whereas some scholars have seen the gnomic passages as sententious interpolations (J. Glyn Davies, “The Welsh Bard and the Poetry of External Nature,” Transactions of the Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion [1912–1913]: 81–128), others have regarded the gnomic or aphoristic content as primary and the description or narrative as secondary (Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, 1970). Gwyn Williams contends that these texts lack a thematic centre and depend upon implicit and often highly indirect and obscure associations between one item and the next (The Burning Tree: Poems from the First Thousand Years of Welsh Verse, 1956). Kathryn A. Klar would explain this type of poetry as intended for the teaching of metrics and prosody (“What are the Gwarchanau?” Early Welsh Poetry, ed. Brynley F. Roberts, 1988, 97–137). E. Studies of Analogues and Social Function Hugo Müller was in tune with many 19th-century scholars in proposing that texts from these three traditions, as also from Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Sanskrit, hark back to an archaic stage of society and culture (Über die angelsächsischen Versus Gnomici, 1893). Carolyne Larrington posits “a body of folk-wisdom [that] can be sensed as a living, pulsing, gnomic background to all Germanic poetry” (A Store of Common Sense, 1993). Scholars have traced some specific types of texts back to the Indo-European stage, e. g., Grímnismál (Calvert Watkins, Language of Gods and Language of Men, ed. Jaan Puhvel, 1970). Hector Munro Chadwick and Nora Kershaw Chadwick (The Growth of Literature. I. The Ancient Literatures of Europe, 1932) attempted comparison across a variety of “heroic age” societies, essaying an Aristotelean definition of the “gnome” and postulating ancient genres; thus a type of poetry on “ways of death,” with ancient Greek analogues, underlies both The Fortunes of Men and The Gifts of Men. James E. Cross preferred to look to the New Testament and homiletic writings (“The Old English Poetic Theme of ‘The Gifts of Men’,” Neophilologus 46 [1962]: 66–70), though with some qualification from Geoffrey Russom, who saw the latter poem as embodying aristocratic Germanic values (“A Germanic Concept of Nobility in The Gifts of Men and Beowulf,” Speculum 53 [1978]: 1–15).

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To mention a few other specific cases, Helmut Arntz was among numerous scholars to trace the OE Rune Poem and its Icelandic and Norwegian counterparts back to a Germanic original (Handbuch der Runenkunde, 1944) but skepticism has been expressed by Margaret Clunies Ross (“The AngloSaxon and Norse Rune Poems,” Anglo-Saxon England 19 [1991]: 23–39), among others, and Maureen Halsall proposes analogues among alphabetic poems in Latin (The Old English Rune Poem, 1981). To what extent the Maxims embody material from an ancestral system of belief has been a point of dispute. Blanche Colton Williams and other scholars sought to edit out Christian elements (Gnomic Poetry in Anglo-Saxon, 1914) and, more recently, John D. Niles has pointed to traces of animistic belief (“Pagan Survivals and Popular Belief,” The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 1991, 126–41). By contrast, Benno J. Timmer argued that Christian material cannot simply be removed to disclose an originary text (“Heathen and Christian Elements in Old English Poetry,” Neophilologus 29 [1944]: 180–85; cf. Eric G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, 1975). Thomas D. Hill identifies source-materials in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus (“Notes on the Old English ‘Maxims’ I and II,” Notes and Queries 215 [1970]: 445–47) and Gerd Wolfgang Weber in Boethius (Wyrd: Studien zum Schicksalsbegriff der altenglischen und altnordischen Literatur, 1969). Kenneth Jackson argues that the gnomic observation of the seasons in Maxims II can be paralleled in Irish texts (Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 1935) and Patrick L. Henry seeks to show that influence occurred from both the Irish and the Welsh traditions (The Early English and Celtic Lyric, 1966) but such connections across an evidently formidable language barrier have yet to find full conviction. Opinion continues to fluctuate as to whether Precepts has its basis in ancestral traditions (Alois Brandl, Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur, 1908) or in Latinity such as the Disticha Catonis (Bernhardt A.K. Ten Brink, Geschichte der englischen Literatur, 1877). Elaine Tuttle Hansen seeks to situate the poem in an “instruction genre” with analogues in ancient Near Eastern and Old Irish literatures (“Precepts: An Old English Instruction,” Speculum 56 [1981]: 1–16). Nicholas Howe draws attention to Proverbs as the most important source, supplemented by encyclopedic literature (The Old English Catalogue Poems, 1985) and Sandra McEntire sees the speaker as a Christian religious rather than a literal father (“The Monastic Context of Old English ‘Precepts’,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 91 [1990]: 243–51). M. P. Alekseev speculates that Precepts may have itself influenced the Poucheniie (“Instruction”) attributed to Vladimir Monomakh (1053–1125) (“Anglo-Saksonskaia parallel’

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k Poucheniiu Vladimira Monomakha,” Trudy Otdela drevne-russkoi literatury: Institut Russkoj Literatury 2 [1935]: 39–80). Morton W. Bloomfield ascribed very profound social functionality to this type of poetry, as ensuring the continuance of life (“Understanding Old English Poetry,” Annuale Mediaevale 9 [1968]: 5–25). Barbara Raw sees it as embodying consensual understandings of both nature and human behavior (The Art and Background of Old English Poetry, 1978). Kenneth Jackson views gnomic poetry as “the beginning of science” (Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 1935). By contrast, Susan Deskis observes a besetting scholarly ambivalence as to the meaningfulness of the texts, beyond a certain generalized sententiousness (Beowulf and the Medieval Proverb Tradition, 1996). Some scholars have argued that they functioned not as poetry per se but as a kind of “commonplace book” that poets could avail themselves of in composing elegies and narratives (Kenneth Jackson, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 1935). Select Bibliography Hector Munro Chadwick and Nora Chadwick, The Growth of Literature. I. The Ancient Literatures of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); Andreas Heusler, Die altgermanische Dichtung (Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademie Verlag Athenaion, 1923); Sarah Lynn Higley, Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English (Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 1993); Nicholas Howe, The Old English Catalogue Poems (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde, 1985); Russell Poole, Old English Wisdom Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998); Tom Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: Brewer, 1976).

Russell Poole

Dits A. Definition of the Genre A complex genre to define, the dit has been characterized by scholars as a catch-all label, as a moral and didactic tale, or as an inventive form of subjective first-person poetry (Monique Léonard, Le dit et sa technique littéraire, 1996). The LexMa classifies the dit as a form of narrative poetry popular in the 13th –15th centuries that dealt in various ways – didactically, satirically, allegorically, or comically – with a variety of topics, including occupations, town and rural life, female behavior, and religious parables (M.-R. Jung). Spoken

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rather than sung, the dit developed in the 12th century and shifted its focus over time from the didactic to the personal. Major authors of the 13th –15th centuries include Rutebeuf, Jean de Condé, Watriquet de Couvin, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan (Michel Stanesco, “Dit,” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2000, 439). B. Research History Over the last 150 years, scholars have differed on the definition of the dit as a literary genre. Vague early definitions categorize the dit as a type of discourse or poetry (Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Dictionnaire historique de l’ancien langage françois, ed. Léopold Favre, 1875–1882; Jean-BaptisteBonaventure de Roquefort, Glossaire de la langue romane, 1808; Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, 1880–1902). An even more comprehensive definition suggests that medieval authors used the label dit in a haphazard manner to cover a large variety of works (Paul Zumthor, Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale, 1954). In an effort to distinguish the dit from other genres with which it was at times conflated, some scholars use its didactic and moral content as a means of separating it from the fabliau in particular (Charles Aubertin, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature françaises au Moyen Age, 1876–1878; Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux, 1893; Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française des origines à 1900, 1896; Per Nykrog, Les fabliaux, 1957). Jacques Ribard (Un ménestrel du XIVe siècle, 1969) formulates a more focused definition of the dit in his investigation of the works of Jean de Condé, who used the term to refer to shorter works of a didactic or moralizing nature that were not sung. Pierre Le Gentil (La littérature française du Moyen Age, 1963) maintains that the dit is a lyrical-narrative genre distinguished by the fact that it was not accompanied musically, as does Paul Zumthor (Essai de poétique médiévale, 1972), who adds that the dit’s demonstrative or deliberative lyricism differentiated it from courtly lyricism. The complexity of this debate is illustrated by Daniel Poirion’s question in his article on the dit (Encyclopœdia Universalis, 1974): “Is the dit a literary genre?” One affirmative response holds that the specificity of the dit as genre is its lack of any specificity at all (Anthime Fourrier, Dits et débats de Jean Froissart, 1979). A negative response is offered by Armand Strubel, who suggests that, despite the link between the dit and allegory, the medieval use of the term dit is too fluid for authors of the time to have had any precise idea of the genre (La Rose, Renart, et le Graal, 1989). Other scholars have defined the dit as a moral or didactic tale, using the etymology of the term dit (from dictum) to categorize the genre as one including short poems intended to instruct (Paulin Paris, Histoire littéraire de la

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France, 1856). The dits are short works that are often allegorical and that teach morality and dogma, although some are merely descriptive and entertaining in nature (Gaston Paris, Littérature française au Moyen Age, 1888). Tracing the relationship between medieval dits and Latin didactic poems of the 12th century, some scholars note that, toward the end of the 13th century, the dit expanded to include topics other than moral teachings (Gustav Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, 1902; James Coveney, Édition critique de la légende de l’empereur Constant, 1955). Hans-Robert Jauss agrees that the term dit broadened its application over time, but argues that it developed originally as a means of distinguishing an allegorical tale that conveyed a hidden truth from a purely fictional conte (“La transformation de la forme allégorique,” L’humanisme médiéval dans les littératures romanes, ed. Fourrier, 1964, 118–30). A correlation has also been drawn between the dit and the exemplum: the dit is a type of versified moral discourse designed to teach (Jean-Charles Payen, “Jean de Condé, Alard de Cambrai et les sources du ‘dit,’” Le Moyen Age 78 [1972]: 523–36; “Dit,” Dictionnaire international des termes littéraires, 1989). Poirion makes a significant contribution by maintaining that in the 13th century, the dit contrasted with the chant, but that its use changed in the 14th and 15th centuries; Machaut and Froissart used the term dit to encapsulate the concept around which they built their texts, relying on amorous themes and the use of allegory as influenced by Le Roman de la Rose (“Traditions et fonctions du dit poétique au XIVe et XVe siècle,” Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, 1980, 147–50). A third critical perspective presents the dit as a form of first-person poetry which allowed for the expression of subjectivity. Edmond Faral espouses a tripartite division of dits which includes not only occupational dits and satirical dits, but also a group of short poems that were not didactic, but rather amorous in nature (Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Age, 1910). Dits which focus on the daily life of a social class are, according to Gustave Lanson, a kind of personal poetry based on real life and on the narrator’s experiences (Histoire illustrée de la langue française, 1923); they are half-narrative, halfdidactic, transforming the poet into a teacher (Pierre-Yves Badel, Introduction à la vie littéraire au Moyen Age, 1967). A major contributor to the discussion of the dit, Jacqueline Cerquiglini, draws upon the dits of the 14th and 15th centuries to establish a clear distinction between that genre and the other literary genres of medieval French literature, identifying three criteria essential to the definition of the dit as the conscious and voluntary poetic word: the dit exemplifies the art of division and ordered digression; the dit arises from the expression of an “I” and of a present moment; the dit teaches (“Le clerc et l’écriture: le Voir dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la définition du

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dit,” Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, 1980, 151–68; “Le dit,” GRLMA, vol. 8, 1988). Michel Zink also explores the subjectivity of the dit, emphasizing that the dit is defined by the presentation of an “I” to others and to the world; thus, a revelatory if fictional theatricality serves as the unifying factor that makes the dit a genre, despite the diversity of the dits themselves (La Subjectivité médiévale, 1985; “Dit,” Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises, 1992; Jean-Pierre Bordier, “Le jeu dramatique,” Précis de littérature française, ed. Poirion, 1983, 306–35). Several recent volumes have been dedicated entirely to an investigation of the dit’s literary significance. Bernard Ribémont has collected a number of significant articles on various dits (Écrire pour dire: Études sur le dit médiéval, 1990). In his introduction to this volume, Ribémont envisions the dit as a compromise between the heaviness of didactic treatises and the lyricism of courtly poetry, making ambiguity inherent to the genre. Monique Léonard (Le dit et sa technique littéraire, 1996) presents an extensive analysis of 684 dits, relying on medieval uses of the term to label certain texts instead of on modern definitions. Using computer technology to conduct a synchronic and diachronic study of the dit, Léonard concludes that, before 1340, the dit was not a literary genre as such, but rather a term used to describe spoken, versified works that resemble the modern concept of poetry as a form of personal expression. Ignacio Iñarrea Las Heras concurs that classifying the dit is problematic, drawing a distinction between moral dits (early 14th century) and lyric dits (14th and 15th centuries); a literary genre, the moral dit incorporates the didactic rhetoric of the artes praedicandi, since most authors of dits were clerics with a common intellectual formation whose works were clearly intended to teach (Poesía y predicación en la literatura francesa medieval: El dit moral en los albores del siglo XIV, 1998). The conversation on the definition of the dit as a genre constitutes one part of the scholarly investigation of this research area. Critical editions and interpretations of dits form another important component of this ongoing discussion (for instance, Philippe Ménard has edited and published a number of shorter dits). The following are only a few of the numerous areas of inquiry involved in studies of the dit. C. Editions The dits of Watriquet de Couvin were edited by Auguste Scheler (Dits, 1868; Charles H. Livingston, “Manuscrit retrouvé d’œuvres de Watriquet de Couvin,” Mélanges M. Delbouille, 1964, vol. 2, 439–46) and have been closely studied by Ribard (“Littérature et société au XIVe siècle: le ménestrel Watriquet de Couvin,” Court and Poet, ed. Burgess, 1981, 277–86), among

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others (Payen, “Le Dit des VII. Vertus de Watriquet de Couvin et le Livre de philosophie d’Alard de Cambrai,” Romania 86 [1965]: 386–93; Marie-Françoise Notz, “Le mot de la fin; le Dit et sa définition chez Watriquet de Couvin,” Écrire pour Dire, ed. Ribémont, 1990, 49–66; Ribémont, “Jeu de signes, jeu de couleurs: Le Dit des VIII. couleurs de Watriquet de Couvin,” Senefiance 24 [1988]: 345–58; Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, “Publishing Watriquet’s Dits,” Viator 32 [2001]: 127–75). Reference continues to be made to Fourrier’s 1979 edition of Froissart’s Dits et débats by scholars who analyze Froissart’s works in light of several different issues. Dietmar Rieger uses Froissart’s Dit dou bleu chevalier to discuss the definition of dit: while the genre as a whole cannot be defined, this dit of Froissart’s permits the prediction of a set of textual dynamics which create a realistic symbolism (Chanter et dire: Études sur la littérature du Moyen Age, 1997). Other critics have focused on this same dit to investigate historical and literary matters (James I. Wimsatt, “The Dit dou Bleu Chevalier: Froissart’s imitation of Chaucer,” Mediaeval Studies 34 [1972]: 388–400; Susan Crane, “Froissart’s Dit dou Bleu Chevalier as a Source for Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” MÆvum 61.1 [1992]: 59–74; Rupert T. Pickens, “History and Narration in Froissart’s Dits: The Case of the Bleu chevalier,” Froissart Across the Genres, ed. Donald Maddox, 1998, 119–54). D. Critical Issues The centerpiece of dit criticism remains Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit (ed. Paulin Paris, 1875; ed. and trans. Paul Imbs, 1999). Scholars have debated whether the exchange of letters in the work is historical or fictional (Georg Hanf, “Über Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 22 [1898]: 145–96; Walter Eichelberg, Dichtung und Wahrheit in Machauts ‘Voir Dit,’ 1935; William Calin, A Poet at the Fountain, 1974; Jeanette Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth, 1981). Other fundamental studies include those of Poirion (Le Poète et le prince, 1965), Cerquiglini (‘Un Engin Si Soutil’: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle, 1985) and Imbs (Le voir-dit de Guillaume de Machaut: Étude littéraire, 1991); shorter seminal essays were recently collected and edited by Denis Hüe (‘Comme mon cœur désire’: Le Livre du Voir Dit, 2001). Robert S. Sturges has also produced an analysis of scholarly discussion of Machaut (“The Critical Reception of Machaut’s Voir Dit,” French Forum 17 [1992]: 133–51). Current studies focus primarily on textual and intertextual aspects of the Voir Dit (Sylvia Huot, “Allegory and Irony in Machaut’s Voir Dit,” Chaucer’s French Contemporaries, ed. R. Barton Palmer, 1999, 47–69; Helen Phillips, “Machaut, Chaucer, and the Intertextual Dit,” Nottingham French Studies 38.2 [1999]: 120–36; Catherine Attwood, “Fortune,

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Fiction, and Femininity in the Livre du Voir Dit,” Nottingham French Studies 38.2 [1999]: 137–49; Sylvie LeFèvre, “De la lettre close à la lyrique dans le Voir Dit,” Romania 120.1–2 [2002]: 226–34). Recent treatments of Christine de Pizan’s dits focus on aspects of gender and societal studies (Kathleen E. Kells, “Christine de Pisan’s Le Dit de Poissy: An Explanation of an Alternate Life-Style for Aristocratic Women in Fifteenth-Century France,” New Images of Medieval Women, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck, 1989, 103–19; Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, “Springtime, Solitude, and Society in the Dit de Poissy,” RLA 2 [1990]: 153–60; Lori Walters, “Fathers and Daughters: Christine de Pizan as Reader of the Male Tradition of Clergie in the Dit de la Rose,” Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards, 1992, 63–76; Iñarrea Las Heras, “Mujer, independencia, y soledad: Le dit de la pastoure de Christine de Pizan,” Epos 18 [2002]: 257–68) and on narrative analysis (Barbara K. Altmann, “Diversity and Coherence in Christine de Pizan’s Dit de Poissy,” French Forum 12.3 [1987]: 261–71; Liliane DuLac, “Le Livre du dit de Poissy de Christine de Pizan,” Écrire pour Dire, ed. Ribémont, 1990, 9–28). Select Bibliography Daniel Poirion, “Traditions et fonctions du dit poétique au XIVe et au XVe siècle,” Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1980), 147–50; Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Le clerc et l’écriture: le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut et la définition du dit,” Literatur in der Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, ibid., 151–68; Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Le dit,” GRLMA, vol. 8 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1988), 86–94; Écrire pour dire: Études sur le dit médiéval, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Klincksieck, 1990); Monique Léonard, Le ‘dit’ et sa technique littéraire des origines à 1340 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996).

Steven Millen Taylor

Drama A. Definition of the Genre As noted by Lawrence M. Clopper (Drama, Play, and Game, 2001), the definition of “drama,” like that of its companion, “theater,” is problematic, primarily because of a semantic shift in the terms between the Middle Ages and today. Drama is now generally considered to be any prose or verse literature presented through action, dialogue, or pantomime; theater is the location

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wherein such performances take place. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, drama was a rhetorical mode in which the poet or author does not speak, differentiating it from those in which a narrator is present, and thus independent of a fixed location. Theater, or theatrum, was associated with pagan spectacle and ludi inhonesti. By its very nature, the theatrical was both frivolous and immoral, and inapplicable to those religious performances, which are now evaluated by modern scholars in terms of dramaturgy, stagecraft, and theatrics. Despite the censure of reforming clergy, it is known now that theater of one form or another flourished throughout the Middle Ages, covering diverse entertainments including ludi (actual plays as well as wrestling matches, musical performances, and general celebrations), histriones (minstrels), and mimi (actors or players). Alongside these more secular entertainments were elaborate Latin liturgical music-drama, saint’s lives, farces, moralities, and a plethora of other genres which appear to have thrived from the 14th century onwards. B. Early Research History Some of the earliest scholarly work on medieval drama began in England, largely due to the Romantic Revival (Glynne Wickham, “Introduction: Trends in International Drama Research,” The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. Eckehard Simon [1991], 1–18). Among these works are Joseph Strutt’s The Sports and Pasttimes of the People of England (1801), and William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described (1823). These works although keeping with the general tendency of the period and presenting medieval drama largely as a curiosity, nevertheless led the way for later research, including the publishing of edited volumes by groups such as the Early English Text Society. By the end of the 19th century, similar endeavors appeared in France (L. Petit de Julleville, Les mystères, 1880; Gustave Cohen, Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du moyen âge, 1906), Italy (Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 1891), and Germany (Wilhelm Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, 1893). In their attempts to deal with gaps in the historical record, these later works (as well as Sir Edmund Chamber’s The Mediaeval Stage, 1903), used overarching theories to explain the development of medieval drama. Darwinian principles in particular were employed to describe a new non-Roman drama born out of the liturgy in the 10th century, particularly in liturgical elements such as the Vistitatio Sepulchri (Carl Lange, Die lateinischen Osterfeiern: Untersuchungen über den Ursprung und die Entwicklung der liturgisch-dramatischen Auferstehungsfeier, 1887). From the 10th to the 12th century, this Latin liturgical drama was presumed to have then become increasingly elaborate in dialogue, characters, and narrative until the local church

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was no longer large enough to contain it, requiring an outdoor location. Alongside this movement came the incorporation of vernacular languages into the plays, which heralded a transition of authority and responsibility for the plays from the clergy to the laity, a transition that heralded the large cycle plays of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. At this point, the drama was alleged to have collapsed under the weight of its own complexity, and to have been dispensed with in favor of Renaissance drama (Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1933). C. Research after the Second World War The Darwinian theory of drama, despite its scholarly flaws, remained fashionable until the mid-20th century; it was accepted unreservedly by Hardin Craig (English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages, 1955). During this period, however, 19th-century tradition also began to face some critical challenges, initially by British and American scholars. Father Harold Gardiner (Mysteries’ End, 1946) argued against both the secularization of religious drama and its decay in the 16th century, claiming instead that medieval drama, though still flourishing, was crushed by outside forces, namely the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In light of Gardiner’s thesis, Glynne Wickham (Early English Stages, 1959) insisted on a reappraisal of the evidence – or lack thereof – to confirm whether medieval drama died naturally or faced outside elements hostile to it. O. B. Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, 1965), though speaking primarily of liturgical drama, accused late 19th- and early 20th-century scholars of secular bias for minimizing the role of liturgical elements in their analyses, and also argued that vernacular drama was a tradition entirely separate to, though conceivably influenced by, liturgical drama. Alongside this push to question the conclusions of earlier scholars, there was a movement towards examining drama in situ: George Kernodle (From Art to Theatre, 1944) employed an aesthetic approach to analyzing medieval and Renaissance stage design in light of the historical record. Arnold Williams (The Drama of Medieval England, 1961), while addressing a general audience, considered medieval drama according to its literary merit, humor, and style. Eleanor Prosser (Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays, 1961) insisted that the themes of the plays could be understood better if viewed through the lens of the original audience, rather than in any attempt to force the material to correspond to a universal theory. Despite the salvo of new scholarship, the earlier critical tradition was still accepted without much question by non-specialists; this acceptance was encouraged by Craig’s dismissive reviews of Wickham, Williams, and Prosser (Speculum 34 [1959]: 702–05; 36 [1961]: 695–98;

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37 [1962]: 295–98, respectively). Literary analysis of the plays was continued by Rosemary Woolf (The English Mystery Plays, 1972), whose work is still considered one of the most comprehensive analyses of the genre. Richard J. Collier (Poetry and Drama in the York Corpus Christi Play, 1977) closely examined the versification and language of the York cycle and provided a needed reevaluation of the conclusions made by 19th-century scholars. From the 1970s onward, research on English drama has multiplied so rapidly that a complete review would be impossible here, although bibliographies on the subject have been compiled by Sidney Berger (Medieval English Drama: An Annotated Bibliography of Recent Criticism, 1990) and John Cavanagh (British Theatre: A Bibliography, 1901–1985, 1981). Some of the more prominent publications in recent years, however, include Marianne Briscoe and John Coldewey’s Contexts for Early English Drama (1989), Richard Beadle’s The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (1994), Peter Happé’s English Drama Before Shakespeare (1999). A re-evaluation of medieval French drama was spurred by Grace Frank (The Medieval French Drama, 1954), Halina Lewicka (La langue et le style du théâtre comique français des XVe et XVIe siècles, 1960 and 1968), and Barbara Bowen (Les caractéristiques essentielles de la farce française et leur survivance dans les années 1550–1620, 1964); these studies also encouraged the focus on the farce as a national dramatic genre. In regard to other types of plays, it has been a standard of criticism since Petit de Julleville’s work to assert that medieval French drama was vague in its distinctions between genres, lacking the strong distinction between cycle and morality, religious and secular, or historical and biblical which is present in other national dramas. In response to this, Alan E. Knight (Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama, 1983), arguing that modern distinctions cannot be applied to medieval works, divided the plays between historical (biblical, hagiographical, and secularhistorical) and fictional (moralities and farces). More recently, Jody Enders (Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, 1992; The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty, 1999; Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends, 2002), keeping with the theory that liturgical ritual was a major influence on drama, has sought to place theatrical productions within several other social constructs, especially legal discourse, rhetoric, and ritual. In German-speaking areas, scholarship retained a strong distinction between religious and secular drama, largely the result of an earlier focus on Shrovetide and Eastertide drama (Adalbert von Keller, Fastnachtspiele aus dem fünfzehnten Jahrhundert, 1853; Joseph Eduard Wackernell, Altdeutsche Passionspiele aus Tirol, 1897). Scholarship on medieval drama fell off in the early 1930s, only to begin again in the 1960s, following a program of re-cata-

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loguing and inventory to determine losses through World War II (Hansjürgen Linke, “Germany and German-Speaking Central Europe,” The Theatre of Medieval Europe, 207–24). This renewed scholarship began with a reappraisal of earlier scholarship, notably through the reports of Wolfgang F. Michael (“Das deutsche Drama und Theater vor der Reformation: Ein Forschungsbericht,” DVjs 31 [1957]: 106–53; 47 [1973 Sonderheft]: 1–47) and Karl K. Polheim (“Neue Forschungen zu den Oster- und Passionsspielen des deutschen Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 68 [1972]: 242–56; id., “Weitere Forschungen zu den Oster- und Passionsspielen des deutschen Mittelalters: Ein Bericht,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 94 [1975 Sonderheft]: 194–212). These efforts to compile have been continued by Bernd Neumann (chiefly his Geistliches Schauspiel im Zeugnis der Zeit: zur Aufführung mittelalterlicher religiöser Dramen im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 1987). Manfred Brauneck (Die Welt als Bühne, particularly the first volume, Antike, Mittelalter, Humanismus und Renaissance, 1993) has produced an expansive history of drama, paying special attention to those trends which span from Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Employing a variety of approaches including dialectology, computerassisted analysis, and dramaturgy, Max Siller has extensively researched Austrian plays of the later Middle Ages and the works and productions of Vigil Raber in particular (Vigil Raber. Zur 450. Wiederkehr seines Todesjahres, 2002; “Religions- und Kirchenkritik in den Tiroler Fastnachtspielen der Frühneuzeit,” Kirche, religiöse Bewegungen, Volksfrömmigkeit im mittleren Alpenraum, ed. Rainer Loose, 2004, 93–112; and “Die Lokalisierung der mittelalterlichen Spiele mit Hilfe der (historischen) Dialektologie,” Ritual und Inszenierung, ed. Hans-Joachim Ziegeler, 2004, 247–54). As with France, there has been a sustained scholarly interest in German drama by British and American scholars, who have produced several notable English-language studies. Marshall Blakemore Evans (The Passion Play of Lucerne: an Historical and Critical Introduction, 1943) was among the first to turn his attention to the subject; John E. Tailby (chiefly “Lucerne Revisited: Facts and Questions,” Essays in Honour of Peter Meredith, ed. Catherine Batt, LSE 29 [1998]: 347–58); also “Drama and Community in South Tyrol,” Drama and the Community, ed. Alan Hindley, 1999, 148–60) has advanced research in more recent years. Literary studies of Italian drama came slightly later, and tended to focus on liturgical drama: Paolo Toschi (Origini del teatro italiano, 1958) was one of the first to challenge the evolutionary theory posited by D’Ancona almost seventy years earlier. Studies of non-liturgical Italian drama were fostered by the Federico Doglio’s creation of the Centro Studi sul Teatro Medioevale e Rinascimentale in 1976. Although the Centro’s first conference was devoted to liturgical drama, the second (1977) and third (1978) investigated secular

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drama; Doglio went on to produce a wide-ranging study of European drama (Teatro in Europa: Storia e documenti, 1982; for a full discussion of Doglio and the Centro, see Sandro Sticca’s “Italy: Liturgy and Christocentric Spirituality,” The Theatre of Medieval Europe, 169–88). English-language studies in the past two decades have tended to focus on the activities of the lay confraternities, which were a major force in medieval Italian theater. Western Michigan University’s Early Drama, Art, and Music Monographs series has produced several notable publications, including Cyrilla Barr’s The Monophonic Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the Late Middle Ages (1989), Konrad Eisblicher’s edited volume Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities (1991), and Timothy McGee’s Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2003). D. Non-Literary Records The analysis and editing of sources, mentioned above, also continued unabated through the 20th century. One major shift in scholarship began with the investigation of non-literary sources, including public and private records of performances. The importance of records was first realized in 1959 through the work of F. M. Salter (Medieval Drama in Chester, 1955). Salter’s research was quickly followed by the Malone Society’s Collections, with Giles Dawson’s Records of Plays and Players in Kent (1965) and Stanley Kahrl’s Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire (1974). By far the largest continuing compilation and editing of British records, however, was begun in 1975 by Alexandra Johnston with the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project. To date, twenty-six volumes of records compiled by region have been published (the first being York, ed. Alexandra Johnston, 1979; the latest Wales, ed. David Klausner, 2005). Although the range of similar collections on the continent is limited, Jean Jacquot’s Collection le Choeur des Muses (chiefly his Fêtes de la Renaissance I, 1956) is one useful resource. The more recent Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History by Cambridge University Press (chiefly The Medieval European Stage, 500–1550, ed. William Tydeman, 2001) is likewise valuable, although it provides only selected translations of documents. One of the more prominent publications of the last five years is Eckehard Simon’s Die Anfänge des weltlichen deutschen Schauspiels, 1370–1530: Untersuchung und Dokumentation (2003), which expanded prior work with a wide-ranging catalogue of sources for drama, focusing on records found in the local German archives (Simon also discusses his approaches in “Reconstructing Medieval Theater from Local Records,” Harvard Library Bulletin 6 [1995]: 14–19).

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E. Modern Re-Creation Along with the reevaluation of earlier scholarship came a renewed interest in re-creation and performance. Modern revivals of medieval plays first appeared in 1901, with the Elizabethan Stage Society, founded by William Poel, putting on Everyman. The practice continued in England, leading to full-scale performances of the York and Chester cycles in 1951, as well as the formation of student theater groups such as The Medieval Players at the Universities of Cambridge and London in the 1970s. At the start of the 20th century, revivals also began on the continent; in 1906, Gustave Cohen formed the Sorbonne group Les Théophilians, which performed a variety of French medieval drama, while Max Reinhardt first produced a version of Jedermann in Salzburg in 1912. This interest in re-creation spread to North America somewhat later, resulting in the formation of the University of Toronto’s Poculi Ludique Societas (PLS) under John Leyerle in the 1960s. In their efforts to follow the original stage directions, these student groups have been invaluable for scholarly research into medieval production. Glynne Wickham’s Early English Stages, mentioned above, and Richard Southern’s The Medieval Theatre in the Round (1953) were among the first considerations of medieval drama as performance pieces, taking into account staging and performance challenges, which could not have been fully realized, were it not for modern re-creations. The 1977 production of the York Cycle by PLS and REED in particular produced a flurry of scholarship. The use of pageant wagons and the proximity of the audience to the action resulted in a re-evaluation of previous theories about the actors’ proficiency and conceptions of space and staging (see David Perry’s “The York Mystery Cycle at Toronto, 1977,” and Philip Butterworth’s “The York Mercers’ Pageant Vehicle, 1433–67: Wheels, Steering and Control,” MET 1 [1979]: 19–31 and 72–87, respectively, as well as Stanley Kahrl’s “The Staging of Medieval English Plays,” The Theatre of Medieval Europe, 1991, 130–48). Select Bibliography The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama, ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Drama and the Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

John A. Geck

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Encyclopedias

E Encyclopedias A. Definition of the Genre Although the term “encyclopedia” – first Latinized from the Greek egkuklios paideia (“circle of education [necessary to all youth]”) by Vitruvius (De Architectura, 1.1, 6) (40 B.C.E.) and Quintilian (De Institutione Oratoria, I.10.1) (96 C.E.) – was never used in the Middle Ages (not attested until 1531), scholars have come to define medieval encyclopedias as instructive compendia of all known natural phenomena and the liberal arts, or at least spanning several diverse fields of knowledge, first for clerics, then for laypeople. Because of their plenitude, breadth and uniqueness, medieval encyclopedias are now considered the second of the three main phases in encyclopedic evolution, with antiquity being the first and the 18th century emerging as the third. A distinctive feature of medieval encyclopedias is that, even when treating non-theological subjects, they tend to perceive natural phenomena allegorically as well as physically. Many medieval encyclopedias would come to follow a hexameral scheme, based on the Six Days of the Creation, in treating the natural sciences, just as in Biblical commentary. Both genres, along with another type of compendium, preachers’ manuals, contained abundant exempla. Some encyclopedic works called themselves specula (“mirrors”), since they purported to reflect either universal structures of the world or specific topics; or elucidaria (master-pupil dialogues “shedding light” on a subject); other titles simply began with De (“On/Concerning”) before the topic name, the most ambitious often titled de natura rerum. Bestiaries and lapidaries either stood alone (e. g., Jacques Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes dans le monde médiéval: le bestiaire des clercs du Ve au XIIe siècle [2000]; Marbode of Rennes’s De lapidibus, ed. John M. Riddle, 1977 – considered a medical treatise in the 11th century) or were incorporated into more comprehensive works. By the later Middle Ages, “encyclopedism” would characterize the growing tendency toward amplificatio – in which the sheer volume of words and pages – and universalism – marshaling as many learned or artistic realms as possible to illustrate a point – guaranteed a certain authority in practically all domains, even lyric love poetry.

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B. Historical Background Some influential ancient models include: Aristotle’s works – especially his Nicomachean Ethics, the De motu and De progressu animalium, and Problemata – as disseminated by Latin and vernacular commentators and translators; a major scientific source, Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis (1st c. C.E.) (37 books), was adapted for the Middle Ages by Solinus, a 3rd-century abbreviator, whose Collectanea rerum memorabilium accentuated the magical dimension in Pliny’s work, itself to be combined with Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (early 7th c.) and De natura rerum by the Venerable Bede (early 8th c.); while Varro’s Disciplinarum libri novem (50 B.C.E.) inspired Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (ca. 420 C.E.). Other antique encyclopedic works were Suetonius’s Prata, or De Variis Rebus (1st c.-2nd c.; now lost) and Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (2nd c.), the latter especially oft-excerpted into the Renaissance. In fact, translation and transmission govern the first of two principal phases of medieval European encyclopedic production as identified by current historians such as Benoît Beyer de Ryke (see Bibliography below). This first phase (6th through 13th c.), was initiated by St. Augustine who, in his De doctrina Christiana (4th c.), centered all human learning, much of which came from pagan Greco-Roman culture, upon Christian faith, while bolstering the vocabulary of Christian theology, again borrowing heavily from Classical antiquity. Overall, this primal phase was more omnivorous than selective. Following Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, in his De institutis litterarum sacrarum (ca. 565), was perhaps the first Christian to use the term “seven liberal arts”, in keeping with Augustine’s belief that these arts were “perfect and immutable archetypes of knowledge.” After Cassiodorus came the overwhelmingly more widespread and enduring Etymologiae rerum sive origines of Isidore of Seville (†636; then completed by his friend Braulio, bishop of Saragossa; † ca. 651). Its 20 books examine notions of fallen and original nature via word origins and permutations, many of which, like Varro’s, et al., are rather fanciful in modern terms. In Christianizing Pliny’s pagan-antique masterwork, Isidore first treats the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), then quadrivium (arithmetic, music, astronomy, geometry) – the first author to distinguish the two groups –, medicine, law, scripture and liturgy; God and the angels, the Church (and synagogue, schism, heresies, pagan gods); human languages, parts, ages, portents and mutations; zoology; topography and geography; government; geology; botany; warfare and weaponry; sports, spectacles and theater; games; ships; textiles and clothing; tools; and furnishings. Encyclopedists like Isidore strove to preserve knowledge from the ravages of war and general benightedness of the times. After Isidore set

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this standard, no encyclopedia of comparable worth appeared before ca. 1240. The next significant compiler, Rabanus Maurus, at Fulda, then Mainz, owes much to him, while intensifying the Christian allegorical layering and using the hexameral structure, in his 22-book De rerum naturis or De universo (ca. 842) to enlighten readers farther north, in Germanic Francia. The 12thcentury “renaissance” spawned Honorius of Autun’s Elucidarium (ca. 1100) and Imago mundi (ca. 1110) – the latter inspired by Bede’s De natura rerum (pre-731). Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon (ca. 1130) merged Aristotelian science with theory, theological exegesis, and the more practical mechanical arts and logic (encompassing the trivium). Richard of Saint Victor’s manual to Holy Scripture, the Liber exceptionum (ca. 1150) would borrow significantly from this fusion, while Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber floridus (ca. 1120) concerned itself more with Christian religious symbolism, as did abbess Herrad of Hohenburg/Landesberg’s immense Hortus Deliciarum (1159–75). By contrast, another illustrious 12th-century abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, produced a medical encyclopedia, the Physica, or Subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum libri novem (ca. 1150). The second phase of encyclopedic evolution occurred during the 13th century. This period was dubbed the “golden age of medieval European encyclopedism,” by Michel de Boüard (“Encyclopédies médiévales: Sur la ‘connaissance de la nature et du monde’ au Moyen Âge,” Revue des questions historiques 112 (1930): 258–304) and Maurice de Gandillac (La pensée encyclopédique au Moyen âge, 1966), to be reaffirmed by Jacques Le Goff, “Pourquoi le XIIIe siècle a-t-il été plus particulièrement un siècle de l’encyclopédisme?” L’enciclopedismo medievale, ed. Michelangelo Picone, 1994, 23–40). Thanks to their precursors’ output, the encyclopedists of this phase could afford to be more selective, benefiting from the simultaneous glory days of scholastic philosophy (also inherited from the 12th-century Renaissance) and of the universities in general. Moreover, virtually all the authors of this period belonged to the Mendicant orders thriving via their skilled preachers and instructors. First among the greatest examples of this golden age was the English-born Augustinian canon Alexander Neckham (Nequam)’s De naturis rerum (late 12th c.), soon to be eclipsed by his compatriot, the Franciscan Bartholomeus Anglicus’s 19-book De proprietatibus rerum (ca. 1230–40), which, thanks to many late-14th-century translations, such as those by Jean Corbechon (French) and John of Trevisa (English), would reach an ever-expanding readership, beyond Bartholomeus’s originally-intended audience of preachers, well into the printing era as the most popular encyclopedia since Isidore’s Etymologiae, his principal source along with Aristotle. Yet Bartholomeus’s was nowhere as ambitious as the Dominican Vincent of

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Beauvais’s Speculum majus (ca. 1240–1260), composed for clerics and school teachers, and divided into 3 sub-“mirrors”: on nature, the sciences, and history. A fourth section, the Speculum morale (ca. 1280), has since been deemed apocryphal. By another Dominican, from Louvain, Thomas of Cantimpré’s 19-book De natura rerum (ca. 1230–1240) likewise believed in examining all of the known natural world as an essential prerequisite to sacred learning. Among lesser-known but influential examples was Germany’s Christianizing naturalist Arnoldus Saxo’s Liber de floribus/finibus rerum naturalium (ca. 1225). Gossuin de Metz’s French didactic verse Image du monde (ca. 1246), based on Honorius of Autun’s Imago mundi, was the first vernacular encyclopedia (translated 15th c. by William Caxton as Mirrour of the World); that the Florentine Brunetto Latini composed his very widely-read Livres dou Tresor (ca. 1266) in French rather than Italian reflects France’s supremacy as a learned yet accessible language just prior to Italy’s humanistic takeover of Europe in both Latin and the vernacular. These works, along with various anonymous works in several languages derived from the pseudo-Aristotelian (actually, a 10th-century Arabic text, the Kitâb Sirr al-’asrâr) treatise tradition known as the Secretum secretorum, and those 13th-century works based on Aristotle’s natural philosophy (Sidrac [prose] and Placides et Timéo [prose dialogue]), helped to fuel such omnivorous poets as Jean de Meun (Roman de la rose, late 13th c.), Dante Alighieri (†1321) and Christine de Pizan (early 15th c.), as well as such later pure encyclopedists as Pierre Bersuire, who moralized Bartholomeus in his Reductiorum morale (ca. 1340) and Pierre d’Ailly’s cosmographical treatise (Imago mundi, ca. 1410) read by Columbus, among others. Spain itself would yield no major encyclopedist after Isidore until the 16th century, except possibly Berengarius of Landorra’s Lumen Anime (early 14th c.: 3 versions, 200 mss.), whose author made his career among the English Dominicans. Some noteworthy non-Western examples emerged from the Arab world and China during the European Middle Ages. While European encyclopedias were compiled by academics and preachers, Islamic and Chinese encyclopedias were written by and for government functionaries. Some major Islamic encyclopedists include: Qudâma ben Ja ’Far (†337/948), an Abbasid state official, in his Kitâb al-kharâj wa-sina at al-kitâba (“The Book of Land-Tax and the Craft of Writing”); Ibn Qutaybah (†276/889), whose ’Uyun al-akhbar (“Choice Reports”) consists of ten books treating lordship, war, nobility, character, science and eloquence, asceticism, friendship, requests, food and women, with many illustrations from history, poetry, and proverbs; and Ibn ’Abd Rabbihi († 328/940), author of Al-Iqd al-farîd (“The Unique Necklace”), although the latter two more closely resemble courtesy manuals/mirrors for

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princes. In addition, the well-traveled Persian-born historian and commentator al-Tabarî (†310/923), settling mainly in Baghdad, wrote what might be considered a vast Islamic analogue to Vincent’s Speculum historiale, but more extensively interweaving legal-historical documentation, political reflection, and Islamic religious principles; Ibn Khurdâdhbhi, a high-ranking postal worker († ca. 272/885) supplied an Islamic Imago mundi and more, since it was one of the earliest departures from Ptolemy’s model; while the Hadîth – a supplement to the Qur’an recording Muhammad’s sayings after his death (10–11/632) – also by court officials, thus served as an authoritative reference for jurisprudence. Later came a rather different work, the Manâhij alFikar (“Encyclopedia of Four Natural Sciences”), by Jamâl al-dîn Watwât (†718/1378). China’s earliest encyclopedia, the Huang Ian (“Mirror for the Emperor”) (220 B.C.E.) is now lost; later ones from the 6th and 7th centuries exist only in fragments. Its most renowned encyclopedia was Yung-lo ta-tien (“The Great Collection of Documents of the Yong-lo Emperor”), and perhaps the world’s largest compendium (11, 095 vols. incorporating some 800 pre-existing books), on topics ranging from philosophy, classics and the arts to farming. Completed in 1408 by 2000 scholars under the direction of Ming-dynasty Emperor Pinyin Yong lo (Chu Ti), its volumes were bound in yellow silk. Housed at the Hanlin yuan, China’s leading academy, this work, preserved in only 2 copies, was mostly destroyed by two fires (16th and 17th centuries) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) before it could be printed. Its remaining approximately 400 volumes are currently scattered in libraries throughout the world though 62 are at Peking’s National Palace Museum. C. Research History The above survey attempts to summarize the findings of many scholars in both identification and systematic understanding of this genre. The first scholar to recognize medieval encyclopedias as such was Luigi M. Capelli, Primi studi sulle enciclopedie medioevali: 1. Le fonti delle enciclopedie latine del XII secolo (1897). After him came Charles-Victor Langlois, La connaissance de la nature et du monde au moyen âge d’après quelques écrits français à l’usage des laïcs (1911). The American Lynn Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols., 1923–1958), first 4 vols., was a long esteemed source in the field. Michel de Boüard, in such essays as “Encyclopédies médievales” (see above) during the 1930s, identified the principal stages in encyclopedic evolution and rediscovered forgotten works, for example, the Compendium philosophiae, a late 13th-century Aristotelian natural history attributed to the German Dominican and disciple of Albert the Great, Hugh of Ripelin, which

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de Boüard also edited (Une Nouvelle encyclopédie médiévale, le “Compendium philosophiae” [1936]). Maurice de Gandillac reprinted de Boüard’s seminal works, while authoring a defining essay himself, joining those by other eminent scholars (Jacques Fontaine, Jean Châtillon, Johann Gründel, and Pierre Michaud-Quantin), in La Pensée encyclopédique au Moyen Âge, special issue of Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9.3 (1966; rpt., 1966). Encyclopedic hexameral structure was examined by Johannes Zahlten, Creatio mundi: Darstellungen der sechs Schöpfungstage und naturwissenschaftliches Weltbild im Mittelalter (1979). Nine years later, Michael W. Twomey’s “Appendix: Medieval Encyclopedias,” served as a milestone in the field within a still very useful guidebook: Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation, ed. Robert E. Kaske, et al. (1988), 182–215. Another seminal work from this era was Maria Teresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli’s Le enciclopedie dell’Occidente medievale (1981). Since the mid-late 1980s, the most prominent researchers appear to hail from these countries: In France, where encyclopedic and translation efforts were so fruitfully encouraged by King Charles the Wise (†1380), Annie Becq edited the papers of a pivotal conference in L’encyclopédisme: Actes du colloque de Caen, 12–16 janvier 1987 (1991). Bernard Ribëmont has been a dynamic force as editor and researcher (De Natura Rerum: études sur les encyclopédies médiévales, 1995; Les origines des encyclopédies médiévales: d’Isidore de Séville aux Carolingiens, 2001; ed., Vulgariser la science: les encyclopédies médiévales, special issue of Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales, 6, 1999), particularly on Bartholomeus Anglicus’s world and work, which he translated into modern French: Le Livre des propriétés des choses, une encyclopédie du XIVe siècle (1999). Françoise Féry-Hue’s insightful articles on encyclopedic subjects often contain exceptional bibliography (e. g., “Brunetto Latini,” “Secret des Secrets,” “Sidrac,” Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises: Le Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, 1992, 213–15, 1366–70, 1385–87). Claude Thomasset has produced numerous works on the natural sciences in medieval learning and letters (including an edition of the Placides et Timéo [1980] and commentary [1982]), and, in conjunction with Danielle Jacquart, on medieval science and sexuality (Sexualité et savoir médical au Moyen âge [1985]). Vincent de Beauvais has received ample attention from his modern compatriots via Vincent de Beauvais, intentions et réceptions d’une œuvre encyclopédique au Moyen Âge, ed. Serge Lusignan, Alain Nadeau, and Monique Paulmier-Foucart (1990), and Lector et compilator, Vincent de Beauvais, frère prêcheur, un intellectuel et son milieu au XIIIe siècle, ed. Serge Lusignan and Monique Paulmier-Foucart (1997). One of the most useful, far-ranging resources is the Paris-based but very international, Menestrel site: http://www.ext.upmc.fr/urfist/menestrel/medencmd.htm –

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an online bulletin of medieval-encyclopedic research, online since 2003, listing scholarship and medieval encyclopedic texts available online, plus links to related projects. Belgian and Netherlands scholars have also become pre-eminent, especially Benoît Beyer de Ryke, at Brussels (“Le miroir du monde, un parcours dans l’encyclopédisme médiéval,” RBPh 81 [2003]: 1243–75; see also Bibliography, below); while the Université catholique de Louvain group: Godefroid de Callataÿ (Islamic Studies), Baudoin van den Abeele (bestiaries and hunting; Islamic sources; Bartholomeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus rerum, ed. and reception, 2005), and others, have also contributed greatly. In Germany, Christel Meier has studied lapidaries (Gemma spiritalis. Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese …, 1977), Brunetto Latini (“Cosmos politicus,” FMSt 22 [1988]: 315–56), encyclopedic illustration (“Illustration und Textcorpus,” FMSt 31 [1997]: 1–31), and has produced groundbreaking analyses of the evolution of medieval encyclopedias: “Grundzüge der mittelalterlichen Enzyklopädik. Zu Inhalten, Formen und Funktionen einer problematischen Gattung,” Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und die Reformationszeit: Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1981, ed. Ludger Grenzmann and Karl Stackmann (1984), 467–500; and as editor, Die Enzyklopädie im Wandel vom Hochmittelalter bis zur frühen Neuzeit (2002). She has also co-edited Bartholomeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus rerum (2007), whose Latin text is accompanied by critical matter in various languages. There is also the fine study by Iolanda Ventura, “Die moralisierten Enzyklopädien des späteren Mittelalters: ein Überblick unter Berücksichtigung der Fallbeispiele des Lumen Anime, des Liber de exemplis et similitudinibus rerum und des Liber Similitudinum Naturalium,” Reti medievali 4 (2003) [online:http://www.dssg.unifi.it/ _RM/rivista/saggi/Ventura.htm]. Among recent US scholars, Michael C. Seymour et al., have expanded the former’s earlier pioneering work on Bartholomeus Anglicus (1975–88) in Bartholomeus Anglicus and his Encyclopedia (1992), the first full-length, detailed study of the De proprietatibus rerum. Stephen A. Barney, with Muriel Hall, translated Isidore’s Etymologiae into English (2006); Spurgeon Baldwin considerably updated Francis J. Carmody’s 1948 commentary and edition of Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou Tresor with Paul Barrette (Brunetto Latini, ‘Li Livres dou Tresor’ [2003]), both scholars having already translated it into English (1993); while noted art historian Lucy Freeman Sandler edited, and thus uncovered, the 14th-century Omne bonum, based on the British Library MSS Royal 6 E VI – 6 E VII (Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, 2 vols., 1996). Christopher D. Johnson at Harvard incorporates Spanish encyclopedism from a comparative literary perspective

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up through the Renaissance, in his book Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Early Modern Literature and Thought (2010). Among important researchers on non-Western encyclopedias, prior to the likes of Godefroid de Callataÿ and Baudoin van den Abeele (see above), are, for the Chinese encyclopedias, M. J. Hagerty (“Two Unlisted Chuan of the Yung lo ta tien,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 52 [1932]: 179–81); Allen Kent, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (1968), 161f.; Wolfgang Bauer, “The Encyclopedia in China,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9 (1966): 665–91. For medieval Hebrew, see Steven Harvey, ed., The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy: Proceedings of the Bar-Ilan University Conference (2000). In the domain of Islamic encyclopedism, beyond relevant articles in the enormous Encyclopedia of Islam (new ed. Peri J. Bearman, et al., 2000, for vols. 1–9), see Paul L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization (2002): though defining the notion of encyclopedia more narrowly than European scholars, he provides many insights into the development of Islamic encyclopedism, its intended audience and goals, as well as detailed bibliography and notes to this complex area of encyclopedic specialization. Although most scholarship has dealt with the genre in medieval Europe and England, Arabic and Chinese encyclopedias receive increasing attention thanks to expanded interest in non-Western cultures, particularly since scholars have come to consider medieval encyclopedias as key “vectors of exchange” – to use the term forged by Benoît Beyer de Ryke and his contemporaries – between Eastern and Western cultures, especially between Europe and the Islamic world. Diachronically, the Australian scholar Richard Yeo (Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture, 2001, 5–7) situates medieval encyclopedias within the development of those in the 18th century in such a way as to invite further connections between the two periods. Select Bibliography Discours et savoirs: Encyclopédies médiévales, ed. Bernard Baillaud, Jérôme de Gramont, and Denis Hüe, special issue of Cahiers Diderot 10 (1998); Benoît Beyer de Ryke, “Encyclopédisme,” Dictionnaire du Moyen âge, ed. Claude Gauvard et al. (Paris: PUF, 2002), 476f.; Benoît Beyer de Ryke, “Les encyclopédies médiévales, un état de la question,” Pecia 1 (2002): 9–42 [extended version of the previous article with more complete notes and bibliography of primary and secondary sources]; La transmission des savoirs au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, ed. Pierre Nobel, vol. 1: Du XIIe au XVe siècle (Besançon: Presses Universitaires du Franche-Comté, 2005).

Nadia Margolis

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Financial and Tax Reports

F Financial and Tax Reports A. Definition of the Genre and General Outline Research on the relation between written and oral textual tradition in the Middle Ages has recently also looked at economic activities. Financial transactions as such do not need written texts. The need to keep long-term records also in this area of life, however, meant that a whole range of documents was created in the Middle Ages. Tallies are one example, even though they are not really written documents. Their use was particularly widespread in English financial administration. Not many records have survived from the time before paper as a cheap material to write on was available since the 14th century. We have to assume that before that most accounts were written on wax tablets. Scholars have defined four text types: 1. property registers documenting the charges and services to be rendered by the lords of the manor (urbar, censier, terrier, polyptichon, platea, survey, rental), 2. commercial accounting, 3. urban accounting, and 4. other administrative accounting. Particularly the distinction between the last two text types is rather a result of the history of research than based on formal properties, as initially accounts were of interest as records illustrating developments in constitutional history and as providing information on individuals and events. The relationships between these genres have still to be discussed. B. Polyptychs and Rentals The first period from which we still have a large number of property registers is the period between 750 and 950. These rentals from the Carolingian period are normally called “polyptychs.” Jean-Pierre Devroey (Le polyptyque et les listes de cens de l’Abbaye de Saint-Remi de Reims (9e–11e siècles), 1984), Andriaan Verhulst (“Das Besitzverzeichnis der Genter Sankt-Bavo-Abtei von ca. 800 (Clm 6333),” FMSt 5 [1971]: 193–234), and Dieter Hägermann (Das Polyptychon und die Notitia de Areis von Saint-Maur-des-Fossés: Analyse und Edition, ed. Dieter Hägermann and Andreas Hedwig, 1990; Das Polyptychon von Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ed. Dieter Hägermann, 1993) have published editions of important examples. A direct link to ancient methods

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can not be proven (summary by Wolfgang Metz, “Zur Geschichte und Kritik der frühmittelalterlichen Güterverzeichnisse Deutschlands,” AfD 4 [1958]: 183–206). The relatively large number of polyptychs from the period 750 to 950 led researchers to assume that they were created on direct instructions from the Carolingian rulers (Karl Lamprecht: Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 1885, vol. II, 657–75; Émile Lesne: L’inventaire de la propriété, églises et trésors des églises du commencement du VIIIe à la fin du XIe siècle, 1936, 1–30). Research in England also focused on the role of a central authority: here we find consistent manorial property registers as early as the 12th century. These were discovered as a source at the beginning of the 20th century (Nathaniel J. Hone: The Manor and Manorial Records, 1906). Paul D.A. Harvey (Manorial Records of Cuxham, 1976; Manorial Records, 1906, 21999) believes that they were created on the initiative of the royal administration. From the 13th century onwards they partly develop into manorial records, which in addition to surveys (the debit registers similar to a rental) include legal files and accounts, so that the standardization initiated by the royal administration is gradually lost. The main reason, however, to look at the text type “rental” is their value as a source for studies in social and economic history. Particularly Richard Smith and Zvi Razi (Medieval Society and the Manor Court, 1996) discussed manorial records in order to determine their value as a source for demographic studies. On the continent the emergence of – both ecclesiastical and secular – manorial systems in the early Middle Ages was a major reason to take a closer look at rentals. Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg (“Über Urbarien und Urbarialaufzeichnungen,” Archivalische Zeitschrift 2 [1887]: 26–52; id., Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte I, 1879, 21906) believed the general growth of particularly ecclesiastical manorial systems to be the reason for the emergence of such property registers. According to Charles-Edmond Perrin, the new forms of manorial rule in the high Middle Ages are the reason why we have only few rentals from the 10th century and why this text type became more widespread from the 11th century onwards (Recherche sur la seigneurie rurale en Lorraine d’après les plus anciens censiers (9.–12. siècle), 1935; La seigneurie rurale en France et en Allemagne, vol. 1, 1952). This re-emergence of rentals could also be a result of the more widespread use of written documents in the legal system (Rober Fossier, Polyptyques et censiers, 1978, 33–37). Roger Sablonier and his collaborators have recently highlighted functions of late medieval rentals that go beyond their legal and administrative functions and described how they can be a symbol of power (“Verschriftlichung und Herrschaftspraxis,” Pragmatische Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Schriftkultur, ed. Christel Meier et al., 2002, 91–120; Gregor Egloff, “Das Urbar als Werkzeug historischer

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Erinnerung und Legitimation,” Wirtschaft und Herrschaft, ed. Thomas Meier and Roger Sablonier, 1999, 371–96). From the high Middle Ages onwards researchers are confronted with a wealth of different forms and therefore find it difficult to give an overall picture. Fossier’s (Polyptyques et censiers, 1978) overview followed a typologybased approach describing three phases: Carolingian documents, the mixed property and levies registers of the 11th and 12th century, and the separation of these registers from documents relating to regular administration, from accounts, personal copies kept on current etc. – from the 13th century onwards developing definite and clearly defined forms that are the basis for the rentals of the early modern age. Gregor Richter (Lagerbücher- oder Urbarlehre: Hilfswissenschaftliche Grundzüge nach württembergischen Quellen, 1979) chose an approach based on diplomatics and tried to determine the formal characteristics and the process of creation of late medieval rentals. As he over generalized his mostly early modern material his systematic approach came in for some criticism because of the unquestioned use of analysis models from diplomatics. The approach, however, of determining the formal properties of registers – without the narrow restrictions imposed by diplomatics – has been successfully applied to territorial and tax accounts (Mark Mersiowsky, Die Anfänge territorialer Rechnungslegung im deutschen Nordwesten, 2000; Georg Vogeler, “Spätmittelalterliche Steuerbücher deutscher Territorien,” AfD 49 [2003]: 165–295 and 50 [2004]: 57–204) and currently seems to be a promising method for the analysis of rentals. The Domesday Book, created in 1085, is unique because of its symbolic significance for the emergence of an English national identity (David Roffe, 2000, 1–10). In addition, it is the earliest secular property register in Europe and a complete inventory of the population of England in the high Middle Ages. For a long time, the edition by Abraham Farley and Henry Ellis (Domesday-Book 1783–1816) remained the benchmark edition, but this role now has been taken over by John Morris’s new edition (Domesday Book, 1974–1992). Vivian H. Galbraith’s work (“The Making of Domesday Book,” English Historical Review 57 [1942]: 161–77; id., The Making of Domesday book, 1961) made an essential contribution towards understanding how this book was created. He and others (Sally P. J. Harvey, “Domesday Book and its Predecessors,” English Historical Review 86 [1971]: 753–73; id., “Domesday Book and Anglo-Norman Governance,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society [1975]: 175–93; id., “Recent Domesday Studies,” English Historical Review 95 [1980]: 121–33; J. C. Holt, 1086, Domesday Studies, ed. id., 1987, 41–64) interpret the book as a register of fiefs, in clear contrast to the as-

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sumption made by Horace Round (Feudal England. Historical studies on the XIth and XIIth centuries, 1895, 1–146) and Frederic William Maitland (Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897), as well as others (Nicholas J. Higham, “The Domesday Survey: Context and Purpose,” History 78 [1993]: 7–22; Robin Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law, 1998), that the fiscal aspect was more important. C. Commercial Accounting A comparison of commercial accounting in the Middle Ages with today’s complex accounting systems is still a matter of great interest today. Research on commercial accounting in the Middle Ages therefore often concentrates on the emergence and use of double-entry bookkeeping and on its efficiency. Fabio Besta started historical research on this question in 1890 (La ragioneria); he found the oldest records of double-entry bookkeeping in the urban accounts of Genoa 1340, in the Tuscan ledgers at the end of the 14th century, and in Venetian ledgers from 1406 onwards. The research on economic history made essential contributions to the understanding of commercial accounting (Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 1924, vol. 1, 296 sq. and vol. 2, 110 sq., esp. 118), seeing double-entry bookkeeping as an integral part of the emergence of capitalism. In line with this tradition, Frederigo Melis proved in 1950 (Storia della ragioneria, 1950) that double-entry bookkeeping was already widely used before its systematic explanation in the works of Luca Pacioli in 1494 (Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita). He believed that double-entry bookkeeping started in Tuscany in the second half of the 13th century. Although his studies are clearly influenced by Sombart’s ideas of “early capitalism,” it is generally accepted today that double-entry book-keeping started in the 1st half of the 14th century at the latest (G. A. Lee, “The Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of 1299–1300,” Accounting Historians Journal [Fall 1977]: 79–95). Basil S. Yamey, however, the most prominent figure in the field of accounting history (“Notes on the Origins of Double-Entry Bookkeeping,” Accounting Review July [1947]: 263–72; “Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism,” Economic History Review N.S. 1 [1949]: 99–113; “Accounting and the Rise of Capitalism: Further Notes on a Theme by Sombart,” Journal of Accounting Research 2 [1964]: 117–36), and Kenneth S. Most (“Sombart’s Propositions Revisited,” Accounting Review 47 [1972]: 772–34) emphasized the fact that the assumption made by Sombart and Melis that doubleentry bookkeeping was a prerequisite for capitalism (and vice versa) is clearly refuted by the large number of capitalist enterprises not using double-entry bookkeeping at all. A case in point are the southern German account books (Wolfgang von Stromer, “Das Schriftwesen der Nürnberger Wirtschaft

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vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert,” Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Nürnbergs, vol. 2, 1967, 751–99). It has yet to be determined how widespread the use of double-entry bookkeeping in Italy actually was. Raymond de Roover (“New Perpesctives of the History of Accounting,” Accounting Review 30 [1955]: 405–520) was one of the first to consider formal elements as being the reason for the emergence of double-entry bookkeeping, and today research in the field of commercial accounting has begun to take a new direction. In his most recent study, Franz-Josef Arlinghaus (Von der Notiz zur Bilanz, 2000) believes that more pragmatic reasons led to the emergence of commercial accounting. Instead of a capitalist interest in profit he emphasizes the need to use written documents as a means to remember information and as a tool to be able to check transactions at a later point in time. D. Urban Accounts Urban accounts are an excellent opportunity to illustrate how closely the research history of a type of source is linked to its edition history. At first, historians were interested in urban accounts as collections of information. Older studies of urban accounts either focus on the history of urban financial institutions (Leo Schönberg, Die Technik des Finanzhaushalts der deutschen Städte im Mittelalter, 1910) or on the value of urban accounts as a source i. e. the individual pieces of information in them (Armin Tille, “Stadtrechnungen,” Deutsche Geschichtsblätter 1 [1899]: 65–75; Wybe Jappe Alberts, “Mittelalterliche Stadtrechnungen als Geschichtsquellen,” Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter 23 [1958]: 75–96). Richard Knipping’s edition of the urban accounts of the city of Cologne (Die Kölner Stadtrechnungen des Mittelalters mit einer Darstellung der Finanzverwaltung, 1897–1898) is the first to break with this tradition. His edition summarizes the income in tabular form making the figures contained in the accounts easily accessible. Currently, however, editions tend to focus more on the traditional text-oriented way of editing. The opportunities offered by a digital edition, which has great advantages particularly when doing research on accounting, have not yet been sufficiently discussed. Since the middle of the 20th century, town historians have highlighted the significance of urban accounts as an independent source for studies on urban finances. This happened mainly at two conferences: the conference on urban history in Blankenberge 1962 (Finances et comptabilité urbaines du XIIe au XVIe siècle, 1964) organized by the international organization for research on urban history, and its German counterpart in 1973 (Haushaltungs- und Rechnungswesen, ed. Erich Maschke, Jürgen Sydow) both looked at urban accounts from a financial perspective. A particularly good example of this approach

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are Josef Rosen’s studies (Finanzgeschichte Basels im späten Mittelalter, 1989) on the urban budget of Basle between 1360 and 1535, which look at the medieval accounts from the perspective of modern economics. He tries to assign the bookkeeping entries to modern categories in order to be able to check if the urban financial budgeting was sound and what budgetary decisions were taken. This automatically leads to the question why urbanities did not use modern budgeting methods and particularly why in the Middle Ages and the early modern era they did not use a written budget to plan income and expenditure. To date no answer to the question has been found (Bernhard Kirchgässner, “Zur Frühgeschichte des modernen Haushalts,” Städtisches Haushalts- und Rechnungswesen, ed. Erich Maschke and Jürgen Sydow, 1977, 9–44; Gerhard Fouquet, Rechnungswesen im späten Mittelalter, 2001 (only available online at: http://online-media.uni-marburg.de/ma_geschichte/ computatio/Kiel-2001/Kiel-2001-Fouquet.html; last accessed on Jan. 27, 2009). As illustrated above, it has been proven that in Italian cities urban accounting adopted the methods of commercial accounting. As far as other countries are concerned, however, this connection is rather alleged than proven. The social background of urban accounting was illustrated by Ingo Schwab (“Städtische Kassenführung und revolutionäre Rechnungsprüfung,” AfD 136 [1990]: 169–86). He shows that there is a connection between the revolutionary events in the towns of the 14th century and the methods of urban accounting. E. Administrative Accounting In his studies published at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which are motivated by research on regional and social history, Karl Lamprecht also included administrative accounts of princes (Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 1885–1886). Similar to the development of research on urban accounts he mainly focused on constitutional and institutional aspects. Elisabeth Bamberger’s (“Die Finanzverwaltung in den deutschen Territorien des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 77 [1922/1923]: 168–255) overview of the research done in Germany until then shows that researchers generally believed that the tight financial situation of princes in the 14th century was a result of poor financial management and especially the lack of a unique central cash office and a budget. In contrast to urban accounts the interest of financial historians in the accounting of the states only revived in the last third of the 20th century. The English pipe rolls are a treasure for research on English history that is gradually raised by the work of the Pipe Roll Society founded as early

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as 1883 (Pipe Roll Society: Introduction to the Study of the Pipe Rolls, 1884). It is widely believed that the early beginnings and the continuity of the pipe rolls are a result of the organizational strength of the Norman state in England. An accounting document unique in the high Middle Ages is the “Dialogus de scaccario” (Dialogus de Scaccario, text and transl. by Charles Johnson, 1983) written between 1177 and 1179 by Richard of Ely, the treasurer of Henry II. The document clearly shows that these accounts are not budgetary records but records of the management of finances by the sheriffs. There also is a very early textual tradition from the manorial area in England, which led to a discussion about the function of these accounts as a “management” tool (Paul D. A. Harvey, “The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England,” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 27 [1974]: 345–59; Edward Stone, “Profit-and-Loss Accountancy at Norwich Cathedral Priory,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 12 [1962]: 25–48; Walter of Henley and other Treatises on Estate Management and Accountancy, ed. Dorothea Oschinsky, 1971; Edmund King, “Estate Management and the Reform Movement,” Harlaxton Medieval Studies, ed. W.M. Ormrod, vol. 1, 1992, 1–14). Administrative accounts in France and Burgundy were studied by Monique Chauvin-Lechaptois (Les comptes de la châtellenie de Lamballe, 1387–1482, 1977), A. Van Nieuwenhuysen (Les finances du duc de Bourgogne Philippe le Hardi, 1384–1404, 1984), and Jean Rauzier (Finances et gestion d’une principauté au XIVe siècle, 1996). After initial research carried out by Gérard Sivéry (“L’évolution des documents comptables dans l’administration hennuyère de 1287 à 1360,” Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire 141 [1975]: 133–235), researchers worked on a typology of the material in the 1990s (Jean-Louis Gaulin, Christian Guilleré, “Des rouleaux et des hommes,” Études savoisiennes 1 [1992]: 51–108; Werner Paravicini, “L’embarras de richesses,” Académie royale de Belgique: Bulletin de la classe des Lettres, 6e sér., 7 [1996]: 21–68). While viewing accounts from the perspective of financial history these French studies and the overview by Jean Favier (Finance et fiscalité au bas Moyen Âge, 1971) followed an approach oriented towards institutional history and studied who created what kind of account at what point in time, more recent studies e. g. by Walter Ziegler (Studien zum Staatshaushalt Bayerns in der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, 1981) in Germany or by Wim Blockmans (“Finances publiques et inégalité sociale dans les Pays-Bas aux 14e-16e siècles,” Genèse de l’état moderne, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet, 1984, 77–90), and J. A. M. Y. Bos-Rops (Graven op zoek naar geld, 1993) in the Netherlands focus on social and economic history and on statistics. They study the amounts recorded in the accounts.

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Although questions of institutional history, particularly the question about the modernity of the French and English state from the 13th century onwards, have already been dealt with (Bryce Lyon and Adriaan Verhulst, Medieval Finance, 1967) research on institutional history has covered a lot of ground over the last few decades, particularly in Germany (Johannes A. E. Kuys, “De financiele instelling van het hertogdom Gelre,” Van hertogdom Gelre tot provincie Gelderland, ed. Frank Keverling Buisman, 1990, 27–51; Heinrich Dormeier, Verwaltung und Rechnungswesen im spätmittelalterlichen Fürstentum Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 1994; Dietmar Willoweit, “Die Entwicklung der spätmittelalterlichen Landesherrschaft,” Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, ed. Kurt G. A. Jeserich et al., vol. 1, 1983, 66–143, esp. 137f.). Using a formal approach based on diplomatic methods, Mark Mersiowsky’s fundamental study (Die Anfänge territorialer Rechnungslegung, 1999) points out that administrative accounting of the princes also did not have a stable form but underwent drastic changes. It remains to be seen if the development phases defined in his study can also be transferred to other regions and other fields of accounting. Other important editions of administrative accounts of princes besides the comprehensive series of pipe rolls include editions by Adriaan Verhulst and Mauritz Gysseling (Le compte général de 1187 connu sous le nom de ‘gros brief’ et les institutions financières du comté de Flandre au 12e siècle, 1962), for Flanders; for France, see Robert Fawtier (“Comptes du trésor (1296, 1316, 1384, 144), 1930; “Un Compte de Menues Dépeses de l’Hôtel du Roi Philippe VI de Valois pour le Premier Semestre de l’Année 1337,” Bulletin Philologique et Histoire du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques 1928/29 [1930]: 183–239) and together with Ferdinand Lot (Le premier budget de la monarchie française, 1932); for Tyrol, see Christoph Haidacher (Die älteren Tiroler Rechnungsbücher (IC. 277, MC. 8), 1993; Die älteren Tiroler Rechnungsbücher (IC. 278, IC. 279 und Belagerung von Weineck), 1998); for Savoy, see Maria Chiaudano (Il più antico rotolo di rendiconti della finanza sabauda 1257–1259, 1930); for the Teutonic Knights, see Walther Ziesemer (Das Ausgabebuch des Marienburger Hauskomturs für die Jahre 1410–1420, 1911; Das Marienburger Ämterbuch, 1916; Das große Ämterbuch des Deutschen Ordens, 1921). From the 14th century onwards different types of accounts of principalities start to develop. The oldest texts are often accounting notes within the context of rental records or charters. Later different types of accounts develop e. g. accounts of princely courts (Holger Kruse, Hof, Amt und Gagen, 1996; Les comptes de l’argentier de Charles le Téméraire duc de Bourgogne, ed. AnkeÉmilie Greve et al. 2001–2002; Brigitte Streich, “Vom ‘liber computacionum’ zum Küchenbuch,” Vorträge und Forschungen zur Residenzfrage, ed. Peter

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Johanek, 1990, 121–46) or war accounts. The form of these special types of accounts (beyond their content) has been studied only in the last few decades. Tax lists, which are both an inventory of the property (like a land register) and accounts of tax collections (Vogeler 2003 and 2004, loc. cit.) clearly show how these special types become account types in their own right. In Italian city states we find systematic inventories of the population and of property for tax purposes as early as the late Middle Ages. The analytical potential offered by such a “catasto” becomes evident in the demographic and social history studies done by Charles Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber on the Florentine cadastre of 1427 (Les Toscans et leur familles, 1978; Online Catasto of 1427. Version 1.3, together with R. Burr Litchfield and Anthony Molho, 2002). Because of the high degree of bureaucratization of the papal curia its surviving accounts have become a field of research in its own right. After the overview (with a protestant focus) of the papal financial administration by Philipp Woker (Das kirchliche Finanzwesen der Päpste, 1878) mainly the editions by Emil Göller (Die Einnahmen der apostolischen Kammer unter Johann XXII., 1910; Die Einnahmen der apostolischen Kammer unter Benedikt XII., 1920), Karl Heinrich Schäfer (Die Ausgaben der Apostolischen Kammer unter Johann XXII. nebst den Jahresbilanzen von 1316–1375, 1911; Die Ausgaben der apostolischen Kammer unter Benedikt XII., Klemens VI. und Innozenz VI., 1914), Ludwig Mohler (Die Einnahmen der apostolischen Kammer unter Klemens VI., 1931; Die Ausgaben der apostolischen Kammer unter den Päpsten Urban V. und Gregor XI., 1937), and Hermann Hohberg (Die Einnahmen der Apostolischen Kammer unter Innozenz VI., 1955 and 1972) continued the research on the available material. In the 1960s the material was also analyzed from the perspective of financial history (Jean Favier, Les finances pontificales à l’époque du grand schisme d’occident 1378–1409, 1966). More recently, we find increasingly analytical studies about the popes’ possibilities to get information about their financial situation (Fausto Piola Caselli, L’evoluzione della contabilità camerale nel periodo avignonese, Aux origines de l’état moderne, 1990, 411–37; Stefan Weiss, Rechnungswesen und Buchhaltung des Avignoneser Papsttums (1316–1378), 2003). Select Bibliography Finances et comptabilité urbaines du XIIe au XVIe siècle, acte du colloque international de Blankenberge, 6–9. septembre 1962, (Bruxelles: Pro Civitate, 1964); Robert Fossier, Polyptyques et censiers (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978); Axel Grandell, Karvstocken: en förbisedd kulturbärare(Ekenäs: Ekenäs tryckeri, 1982); Nathaniel J. Hone, The Manor and Manorial Records (London: Methuen, 1906; 3rd ed. 1925, reissued Port Washington, NY: Kennekat Press, 1971); Federigo Melis, Storia della Ragioneria: Contributo alla conoscenza e interpretazione delle fonti più significative della storia economica (Bologna: Zuffi, 1950); Mark Mersiow-

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sky, Die Anfänge territorialer Rechnungslegung im deutschen Nordwesten: Spätmittelalterliche Rechnungen, Verwaltungspraxis, Hof und Territorium (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2000); Gregor Richter, Lagerbücher- oder Urbarlehre: Hilfswissenschaftliche Grundzüge nach württembergischen Quellen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1979); David Roffe, Domesday: The Inquest and the Book (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000); Williard E. Stone, “The Tally: An Ancient Accounting Instrument,” Abacus 11.6 (1975): 49–57; Basil S. Yamey, Essays on the History of Accounting (New York: Arno Press, 1978).

Georg Vogeler

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G Glosses A. Definition The term “gloss” denotes both a short explanatory note to a text, as well as a commentary added in the margin (marginal gloss) or between the lines of a text (interlinear gloss). The practice of glossing texts was ubiquitous throughout the Middle Ages. Glosses were provided to explicate the text, give grammatical or stylistic analysis, offer a translation, or supply further commentary and references to authors and other texts. The transition from gloss to commentary was gradual, as reflected in the terminology that medieval authors used: the terms vary from glosa or glossa (which was used both to indicate individual notes as well as whole glossed texts such as the biblical Glossa ordinaria) and libri glosati (books with marginal or interlinear notes added), to notulae, adnotationes, or expositiones for anything ranging from short collections of glosses to lengthier commentaries (The Vocubulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, ed. Mariken Teeuwen, 2003). Many glosses circulated independently from the text they were elucidating as so-called “glossae collectae,” and some of these glosses, most notably linguistic glosses, could be alphabetized into “glossaries” or lexica; other extracted glosses were arranged by topic (see also the entry “Dictionaries”). Glosses probably reflect the practice and interests of the medieval classroom. The textual transmission of glosses should make us wary of identifying glosses too immediately as recorded classroom notes or spontaneous reader’s notes, however (Michael Lapidge, “The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England. The Evidence of Latin Glosses,” Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, 1982, 99–140). It is more likely that early medieval glosses functioned as teaching tools, rather than aids for textual comprehension (Gernot R. Wieland, “The Glossed Manuscript: Classbook or Library Book?” Anglo-Saxon England 14 [1985]: 153–73). Because of the low authorial profile of the glosses, authors often felt no inhibition about altering glosses or adding to them, while they copied them, which complicates their textual history.

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B. History Glossing found its roots in the practice of the antique scholia (L. D. Reynolds and Nigel G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 1974, 10 and 46). The school of Canterbury, under the direction of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus (d. 690) and his companion Hadrian in the early Middle Ages, developed into an important center for the glossing of the Bible; several early medieval sets of biblical “glossae collectae” that were disseminated on the Continent in monastic centers such as Saint Gall, Werden, and Reichenau are related to these Canterbury glosses (Elias Steinmeyer, “Untersuchungen über die Bibelglossare,” Die althochdeutschen Glossen, ed. Elias Steinmeyer and Eduard Sievers, 1922, 108–516; Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, ed. Bernhard Bischoff and Michael Lapidge, 1994; CCCM, 189A-B). Some of these glosses are closely related to and possibly the source for topical or alphabetical glossaries such as the Leiden, Erfurt-Epinal, or Saint Gall glossaries, and the Kasseler Glossen. The Bible was not the only text to be glossed in the early Middle Ages; school texts and classical texts received considerable attention as well. In the 9th century, Boethius’ Consolation was frequently glossed and annotated, and batches of glosses were often exchanged between major centers of learning; the glosses that circulated at the court of King Alfred of Wessex are, for instance, closely related to the Boethius glosses from the monastery of Saint Gall as well as those ascribed to Remi of Auxerre (d. 908) (Pierre Paul Courcelle, Étude critique sur les commentaires de la Consolation de Boèce (IXe–XVe siècles), 1939; Margaret T. Gibson, Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence, 1981). In addition to Boethius, school texts such as Priscian, Donatus, and Martianus Capella were intensely glossed from the 9th to the 12th century; the latter by Carolingian authors such as Remi of Auxerre, Martin of Laon (d. 875), and Johannes Scottus (d. 877) (Claudio Leonardi, “I codici di Marziano Capella,” Aevum 33 [1959]: 443–89 and 34 [1960]:1–99, 411–524). There are extensive glosses on classical authors such as Servius and Orosius (Herbert Thoma, “Orosius-Glossen,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 88 [1967]: 384f.), but also on Christian authors such as Prudentius (Sinéad O’Sullivan, Early Medieval Glosses on Prudentius’ ‘Psychomachia’, 2004). Schools like Laon, and especially Auxerre, grew into important centers of learning, producing glosses on the Bible, Boethius, and Martianus Capella by scholars such as Haimo (d. 855), Heiric (d. 876), and Remi of Auxerre (John J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850–930: Its Manuscripts and Masters, 1978; L’école Carolingienne d’Auxerre, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Colette Jeudy, and Guy Lobrichon, 1991). Philosophical texts were glossed as well; Plato was extremely popular in the 12th-century school of Chartres,

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and was glossed, for instance, by William of Conches (d. 1154) (Edouard Jeauneau, “Gloses et commentaires de textes philosophiques (IXe–XIIe siècle),” Les genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales, 1982, 117–32), while texts of Porphyry and Aristotle were frequently glossed in this period as well (John Marenbon, “Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts, before c. 1150 AD,” Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts, ed. Charles W. Burnett, 1993, 77–127). Linguistic vernacular glossing of the Bible peaked in 10th and 11th-century England, where Anglo-Saxon word glosses were often added to older Bibles, such as the Vespasian Psalter (Philip Pulsiano, “The Originality of the Old English Gloss of the Vespasian Psalter and Its Relation to the Gloss of the Junius Psalter,” Anglo-Saxon England 25 [1996]: 37–62; Old English Glossed Psalters. Psalms 1–50, ed. Philip Pulsiano, 2001) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (Michelle Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels. Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, 2003), or produced alongside new Bibles, such as the Canterbury Psalter (The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury, ed. Margaret T. Gibson, T.A. Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff, 1992; Phillip Pulsiano, “The Old English Gloss of the Eadwine Psalter.” Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan, 2000, 166–94). Vernacular glossing did not only occur in Anglo-Saxon England; it was prevalent on the Continent as well (Althochdeutsche Glossen zum Alten Testament, ed. Herbert Thoma, 1975). Word glosses of this kind could surface in regular commentaries as well; the Jewish exegete Rashi (d. 1105), for instance, used vernacular glosses in French (so-called La’azim) to elucidate the Hebrew Bible (Menahem Banitt, “The La’azim of Rashi and the French Biblical Glossaries,” World History of the Jewish People: Second Series: Medieval Period, vol. 2: The Dark Ages, ed. Cecil Roth and I.H. Levine, 1966, 291–96). This use finds a parallel in the French vernacular word explanations given in the Latin commentaries of, for instance, Andrew of Saint Victor (d. 1175) (CCCM, 53–53G). The standard continuous gloss on almost all books of the Bible, the Glossa ordinaria, was the product of the 12th-century northern French cathedral schools. This gloss combined a marginal commentary that surrounded the central biblical text with interlinear glosses featuring short explications (Lesley Smith, The glossa ordinaria; The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, 2009; see also the entry: “History of Biblical Exegesis”). Even though the Glossa ordinaria quickly gained authoritative status in the medieval schools and universities, this was not the end of glossing. School texts like Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica were frequently glossed (Tony Hunt, “Vernacular Glossing and Clerical Instruction,” Journal of Medieval Latin 9 [1999]:

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41–45), and scholastic exegesis produced a large number of commentaries and lexicographical tools for biblical interpretations. One of the most widespread of the latter was the Mammotrectus, by the Italian Franciscan Marchesino of Reggio (fl. 1280), which was written as a grammatical and lexicographical companion volume for the reading of the Latin Bible. With the appearance of the printed editions of the Vulgate in the 15th century, it went through a renewed surge of popularity (Frans van Liere, “Tools for Fools: Marchesinus of Reggio and his ‘Mammotrectus’,” MedPers 18 [2003]: 246–62). The ubiquity of glosses as representing the scholastic method of authoritative interpretation incurred the criticism of scholars like John Wycliffe (Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts, 2002) and later Protestant reformers, who were adamant about the need to rid the Bible of “frigid petty glosses” (Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England, 1993, 11). Ironically, the Wycliffite Bible as well as many of the Reformation’s Bibles soon acquired their own sets of interpretive glosses (H. Hargreaves, “The Wycliffite Glossed Gospels as Source: Further Evidence,” Traditio 48 [1993]: 247–51). The Corpus Iuris Civilis received its standard gloss, or Glossa ordinaria, in the mid-13th century, after a process of glossing by legal scholars at Bologna, starting with Irnerius (d. 1125) in the 11th century and ending with the completion of the gloss by Franciscus Accursius (d. 1263) (Hermann Kantorowicz, William W. Buckland, and Peter Weimar, Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law, 1969). Canon law texts such as Gratian’s Decretum were glossed in the same period (Rudolf Weigand, Glossen zum Dekret Gratians: Studien zu den frühen Glossen und Glossenkompositionen, 1991). The advent of printing brought the edition of many medieval glosses, such as the Glossa ordinaria on the Bible (Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria. Anastatical Reproduction of the First Printed Edition: Strassburg, c. 1480 [Adolph Rusch?], ed. Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson, 1992; Karlfried Froehlich, “An Extraordinary Achievement: The Glossa Ordinaria in Print,” The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions, ed. Paul Henry Saenger and Kimberly Van Kampen, 1999, 15–21), and the Corpus Iuris Civilis (Corpus Glossatorum Juris Civilis, 1487–89, rpt. 1966–73). In addition, some medieval commentaries were now printed as marginal glosses for the first time. In later editions of the biblical Glossa ordinaria, for instance, the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), with the additions of Paul of Burgos (d. 1435) and the comments on these additions by Matthias Döring (d. 1469), were printed in the margin alongside the Gloss. The format of the printed Glossa ordinaria may have inspired the creation of a similar glossed Hebrew Bible with Hebrew commentaries, the Mikra’ot gedolot, first printed in Venice in 1516/1517. Sev-

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eral augmented editions and reprints followed; a critical edition is currently underway (Mikra’ot Gedolot Ha-Keter, ed. Menachem Cohen, 1992–). The Babylonian Talmud was printed for the first time in Venice in 1520 with Rashi’s commentary in the margin, as well as glosses to Rashi by the so-called Tosafists (from Tosafot, additions). C. History of Research Because of their anonymous character, uncertain authorship, or complicated textual tradition, medieval glosses have only rarely received modern editions. When they did, it was often for their lexicographical value for the study of vernacular linguistics. Many 19th-century editions are selective and inadequate. Early medieval glosses often form a valuable early source for early medieval vernacular languages, such as Irish, (Gordon E. Quin, “The Irish Glosses,” Irland und Europa / Ireland and Europe. Die Kirche im Frühmittelalter / The Early Church, ed. Próinséas Ni Chathain and Michael Richter, 1984, 210–17; Karl Horst Schmidt, “Die altirischen Glossen als sprachgeschichtliches Dokument,” ZCPh 52 [2001], 137–53), Anglo-Saxon (Patrizia Lendinara, Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Glossaries, 1999), or Old High German (Rolf Bergmann, Verzeichnis der Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen Glossenhandschriften, 1973; Rolf Bergmann, “Ansätze zu einer Typologie der Althochdeutschen Glossen- und Glossarüberlieferung,” Theodisca: Beiträge zur althochdeutschen und altniederdeutschen Sprache und Literatur in der Kultur des frühen Mittelalters, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs, 2000, 77–104). Likewise, the vernacular glosses and glossaries on the Hebrew Bible often form a valuable source for the development of Old French (Banitt, Menahem. L’étude des glossaires bibliques des Juifs de France au Moyen Age: méthode et application, 1967). A recent conference volume was aimed at bringing together current research (Mittelalterliche volkssprachige Glossen, ed. Rolf Bergmann, Elvira Glaser, and Claudine Moulin-Fankhänel, 2001). Bernard Bischoff was the first to discover the importance of the school of Hadrian and Theodore for early medieval Bible glosses (“Wendepunkte in der Geschichte der lateinischen Exegese im Mittelalter,” Sacris Erudiri 6 [1954]: 189–281). Since then, these glosses have received not only editions, but also a large amount of scholarship (Michael Lapidge, “The School of Theodore and Hadrian.” Anglo-Saxon England 15 [1986]: 45–72; J. D. Pheifer, “The Canterbury Bible Glosses: Facts and Problems,” Archbishop Theodore; Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence, ed. Michael Lapidge, 1995, 281–333). The study of Carolingian glosses owes much to the work of John Contreni (“The Biblical Glosses of Haimo of Auxerre and John Scottus Eriugena,” Speculum 51 [1976]: 411–34; Glossae Divinae Historiae. The Bibli-

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cal Glosses of John Scottus Eriugena, ed. John J. Contreni and Pádraig P. O’Néill, 1997). Scholarship on the Glossa ordinaria is rich. Both Lobrichon and Smalley have examined the position of the Glossa ordinaria in relation to previous glossed Bibles (Guy Lobrichon, La Bible au Moyen Age, 2003, 158–72; Beryl Smalley, “Les commentaires bibliques de l’époque romane: glose ordinaire et gloses périmées,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 4 [1961]: 15–22). Lesley Smith’s book, mentioned above, gives a good overview of historiography on the Glossa. The status quaestionis of the Glossa ordinaria on the Corpus Iuris was discussed in a recent conference volume; especially of interest are the contributions of Gero R. Dolezalek (“Research on Manuscripts of the Corpus Iuris with Glosses Written during the 12th and Early 13th Centuries: State of Affairs,” El Dret Comú i Catalunya, ed. Aquilino Iglesia Ferreirós, 1991, 17–45) and Giovanni Diurni (“La Glossa Accursiana: stato della questione,” ibidem, 68–93). While Friedrich Stegmüller (Repertorium Biblicum, 1950–1980) offers a good guide to the manuscripts of biblical glosses, and Paul O. Kristeller (Catalogus translationum and commentariorum, 1960–2003) does the same for classical texts, bibliography on individual glossed texts may be hard to find. A good resource, however, is the annual bibliography Medioevo Latino (1980–), which has headings for the “Fortleben” of authoritative and classical texts. Select Bibliography Samuel Berger, De glossariis et compendiis exegeticis quibusdam medii aevi (Paris: BergerLevrault, 1879); Peter Bierbaumer, “Aspekte der altenglischen Glossenforschung,” Festgabe für Hans Pinsker zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Richild Acobian (Vienna: Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1979), 33–50; Claudio Leonardi, “I commenti altomedievali ai classici pagani: da Severino Boezio a Remigio d’Auxerre,” Medioevo Latino: La cultura dell’Europa cristiana (Florence: SISMEL – Edizioni del Galuzzo, 2004), 155–87; Les manuscrits des lexiques et glossaires de l’antiquité tardive à la fin du Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque international organisé par le ‘Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture’ (Erice, 23–30 Septembre 1994), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1996).

Frans van Liere

1791

Gospel Harmonies

Gospel Harmonies A. Definition Gospel harmonies are retellings of the four Gospels which combine the sometimes divergent reports in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a homogenous account of the actions and preaching of Christ. The genre continues to produce work down to the present day. They frequently reduce the complexity of the multiple voices of the Gospel texts, smooth out inconsistencies, remove repetitions, and present the events of salvation history as described in the New Testament in a coherent story. Gospel harmonies have long played an important role in the defense of Christianity, catechism, mission and liturgy. Over and above that, they are often narrative based forms of exegesis and verbal artistry, which do not just faithfully retell the Gospels, but give them literary treatment with relative freedom from their sources. They are evidence for the fact that Christianity has had recurrent problems with the heterogeneity and multi-vocality of its foundational revelation, the New Testament, throughout the history of the church. The methods of harmonization can be very different in each surviving text. The authors may, if they are aiming at a complete version of the Biblical historia, combine the Gospels, possibly retaining the original text as well as content, chronologically so that the new text offers all the variants. Or they may, using one Gospel as a preferred ‘leading text,’ make selections from the Gospels and add the passages and details which the principal text lacks, so that, rather than a bald summation, a new composition based on deliberate decisions is produced. Such ‘integrating’ harmonies often exhibit a greater degree of freedom with regard to the biblical text. For instance, they may combine several of Jesus’ sermons into one. Not only the history of medieval Gospel harmonies and their uses, but also the typology of the texts and their specific harmonization techniques, remains an unfulfilled task for researchers. The genre originates with a Syrian work, Tatian’s Diatessaron (ca. 172), which was widely used in Syrian churches, but which does not survive, except indirectly through the commentary of Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306–373). The Diatessaron is the source, among other things, for the Codex Fuldensis, a Latin Gospel harmony, which was composed in the 6th century for Bishop Victor of Capua. This is the basis for the Old High German Tatian, a line-by-line translation into the vernacular made in the 9th century in the monastery of Fulda under the supervision of Hrabanus Maurus. The Old Saxon Heliand (ca. 840), as well as Otfrid of Weißenburg’s Evangelienbuch (ca. 870), are also

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viewed as German-language Gospel harmonies. In parallel, we possess Latin Gospel harmonies from the 12th century and anonymous harmonies in German, Dutch, English and Italian from the 13th to the 15th century which are based on the Diatessaron (possibly in an old Latin translation). The Middle Ages did not produce new Gospel harmonies independent of Tatian. A new flourishing of the genre could only take place thanks to humanism and the Reformation (e. g. Johannes Gerson, Monotessaron, ca. 1420). The genre was not only well adapted to summarizing the biblical philology of the humanists and reflecting it in a closed text, but was also used in connection with the 16th-century theological disputes to prove the coherent nature of scripture, which was deemed to be without contradiction. More than 40 comprehensive Gospel harmonies survive from the 16th century alone (e. g., Andreas Osiander, Harmonia evangelica, 1537; Cornelius Jansen, Concordia evangelica, 1549; Martin Chemnitz et al., Harmonia IV evangelistarum, 1593–1626). B. History of Research Research into the medieval Gospel harmony, considered as a genre, is still in its infancy. When theologians examine Gospel harmonies, they usual do so because they are interested in examining the problem of the formation of canon and its consequence, or to reconstruct medieval reception of the Bible, and philologists often principally use the texts as sources for studies of the history of language or dialectology. Up till now, research has concentrated on the textual and reception history of the Diatessaron, as well as studying the vernacular works which depended on it in the various national literary traditions (Ulrich Schmid, “Lateinische Evangelienharmonien: Die Konturen der abendländischen Harmonietradition,” Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters, ed. Burger, den Hollander, Schmid, 2004, 139–50). By contrast, the history of Gospel harmonies in the early modern period has been thoroughly studied (Dietrich Wünsch, Evangelienharmonien im Reformationszeitalter: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Darstellungen, 1983; Petra Hörner, Zweisträngige Tradition der Evangelienharmonie: Harmonisierung durch den ‘Tatian’ und Entharmonisierung durch Georg Kreckwitz u.a., 2000). The most important works on medieval Gospel harmonies are dominated by four central problems; a consensus on them has yet to develop, and they have been treated very differently in the relevant theological and literary historical lexica: It is not clear how exactly the term ‘Gospel harmony’ should be understood. The definition is unstable, and the genre boundaries may be drawn more or less tightly. As a result of this, the corpus of texts on which individual researchers base their studies (an overview can be found in Ulrich

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Schmid, “Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters: Forschungsgeschichtliche und systematische Aspekte,” 2004, 16f.) varies considerably. Some count, for example, Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch as a Gospel harmony, others do not. Differentiation between the harmony and the ‘Biblical narrative’, the ‘life of Christ’ genre and the ‘Bible synopsis’ is also difficult. The criterion of the integration of the narratives of the four Gospels into one text is clearly not enough to constitute a precise definition of the genre of ‘Gospel harmony’. Newer studies have at least reached the consensus that a Gospel harmony must have the following characteristics: a. It gives text from all four Gospels in a logical order. b. It aims to give a full account of the life and teachings of Jesus. c. Its sources are exclusively the Gospels, and it largely follows them verbally. d. The author exhibits consciousness of the problem of differences between the Gospels, and attempts to show that they are actually in harmony (concors diversitas) (Wünsch 1983, 4–10; Hörner 2000, 24–53; Schmid, “Lateinische Evangelienharmonien,” 2004). Various judgments have been made about how freely a text may treat the Gospels and still count as a harmony. Thus Petra Hörner excludes the Old Saxon Heliand and Otfrid’s Old High German Evangelienbuch from the corpus of Gospel harmonies, because they make relatively free paraphrases of the Gospel texts, i. e. do not adhere closely enough to the words of the Bible, and do not explicitly mention the problem of the multiplicity of the Gospels (Hörner 2000, 34). She speaks instead of ‘Gospel narratives’ (‘Evangeliendichtungen’). As valuable such considerations of genre questions are in tightening and sharpening the terminology used, it is equally necessary to warn against making the criteria too exclusive, and establishing the corpus of medieval Gospel harmonies along all too formalistic lines (Wünsch 1983, 10), for such genre debates were alien to the Middle Ages. The clerical authors were primarily interested in communicating the life and teachings of Jesus in a coherent (vernacular) text which was suitable for private or public (e. g., liturgical) reading. They were interested, above all, in proclaiming the message of the Gospel. Even if some of the surviving texts only contain a modest amount of reflection on their methods and aims, they should not be hastily excluded from the category ‘Gospel harmonies’ if a general authorial aim to make a coherent text out of the sometimes differing accounts in the four Gospels can be ascertained. Following on from this, the criteria of the fusion of the four Gospels should be considered of more importance than closeness to the verbal form or the structure of the biblical source. Justice cannot be done to medieval literature without using relatively broad genre definitions. A further debate revolves around the question of what ‘harmony’ actually means, or indeed what methods medieval writers adopted in harmon-

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izing the Gospels. The literary techniques used in producing a Gospel harmony are most precisely worked out by Petra Hörner (2000, 42–53). According to her study, there are three main techniques: a. Exclusion. The author chooses one version from among its parallel passages, integrates it into his texts, and rejects the others. b. Contamination. The writer combines the parallel accounts into one new text which includes the variations of all individual versions. This integration can follow very different methods linguistically and structurally. c. Separation. The writer offers parallel Gospel accounts separately, that is he gives the same report repeatedly with the variations of each Gospel, without integrating them into a single text. This may involve grouping related accounts together, or placing them in different places within the Gospel harmony. A third major theme is the question as to the Gospel harmonies’ audience. Very different publics can be assumed according to the period and writers. In the Carolingian period (Heliand, Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch), the prologues indicate that the texts had not only a monastic audience, but an aristocratic one outside the monasteries. These Gospel harmonies were written by clerics who wanted to convey the life and teaching of Christ, and as much for personal edification and meditation as for (liturgical) public use (Dieter Kartschoke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im frühen Mittelalter, 1990, 138–61). The Old High German Tatian was probably also intended for use in school, for the purposes of teaching Latin (Wolfgang Haubrichs, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit, Vol. 1/1, 1988, 260–63). Gerson’s Monotessaron was meant, among other things, as an aid to contemplation (Marc Vial, “Zur Funktion des ‘Monotessaron’ des Johannes Gerson,” 2004). The Middle Dutch Gospel harmonies of the Late Middle Ages, too, demonstrably had both a meditative and a liturgical function (August den Hollander, “Mittelniederländische Evangelienharmonien – Form und Funktion: Eine erste Orientierung,” 2004). It is therefore to be remembered that the medieval Gospel harmonies were less academic texts than intended for religious practice, and served the realization of the life and suffering of Jesus Christ, that is they were primarily aids to evangelization. In a period of Latin literary culture, in which there were no complete translations of the Bible into the vernacular, the vernacular Gospel harmonies in particular played an important role in the religious instruction of readers and listeners un- or barely educated in Latin. Finally, a fourth theme of research is the question as to the history of the reception of the Diatessaron in Europe. For instance, there is a debate as to whether the Codex Fuldensis is directly derived from Tatian’s Diatessaron, and equally unclear to what extent the Codex served as an ‘archetype,’ a source for

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other medieval Gospel harmonies, such as Heliand or Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch. Some researchers suspect that there was a Classical Latin translation which formed an intermediary stage between the Diatessaron and its European versions, from which later texts, such as the Codex Fuldensis, descend. Further, it is not even clear whether all medieval Gospel harmonies are ultimately descended from the Diatessaron, or whether there was a parallel tradition independent of Tatian (Schmid, “Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters,” 2004). Petra Hörner has shown the existence of two traditions in the Middle Ages: one group of texts follows the intention of Tatian’s Diatessaron precisely. The early and high medieval Gospel harmonies integrate the versions of the evangelists into a homogenous text with the goal of producing a non-contradictory account of the life of Christ. Uniformity matters more to them than completeness. The theological legitimization for this project came from, among others, Origin and Augustine, with their teachings on the un-contradictory and uniform nature of Scripture. By contrast to these harmonizing Bible writings, Hörner identifies a second group of texts, which appears in the 13th/14th century, values the completeness of the biblical texts higher than its unity, and places contradictory statements from the Gospels side by side, without any attempt to harmonize them. The variations are offered as parallels, and they do not produce a Gospel harmony. The chief methods are addition and separation (see above). Hörner sees one of the cultural historical grounds for this striking change to Gospel harmonies in late medieval nominalism. Fidelity to the words of the Gospel, even if contradictory, was now more important than a univocal biblical account. From this point, it is not far to the Bible synopses, which came into use from the 16th century (Hörner 2000, 281–333). C. Major Contributors Research into the medieval Gospel harmonies can only succeed on the basis of texts, that is, only with the help of reliable editions. In this sense, the new definitive edition and commentary of the Diatessaron by Christian Lange (Ephraem der Syrer, Kommentar zum Diatessaron, 2008) is a milestone for scholarship. But other Gospel harmonies are now available in reliable editions (eg. Heliand, ed. Otto Behaghel, 9th ed. revised by Burkhard Taeger, 1984; Otfrid von Weißenburg: Evangelienbuch, ed. Wolfgang Kleiber and Ernst Hellgardt, vol. 1, 2004; Erasmus Alber, Evangelienharmonie, ed. Petra Hörner, 2009). Countless important medieval representatives of the genre still require a critical edition, e. g., Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi (ca. 1348) or Clemens of Llanthony’s Unum ex quattuor (12th century), for without a reliable edition, further study of these texts will be very difficult.

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The most important monographs on the European harmony tradition, in particular that of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern, have been produced by Dietrich Wünsch (1983) and Petra Hörner (2000). Wünsch investigated the Gospel harmonies of the Reformation, but also reconstructed their medieval prehistory. Andreas Osiander’s Harmonia evangelica (1537) is at the center of his book. Wünsch showed that Osiander was primarily interested in proving the agreement between the four Gospels. Osiander saw himself as a tool of the Holy Spirit. His Harmonia evangelica gives the accounts of the Gospels, sometimes more than once – for instance, he has three cleansings of the Temple – as he saw every variation of the evangelists as inspired by God and therefore independent reports of different incidents, which ought not to be suppressed. Osiander’s Gospel harmony, in which the integrated Bible passages are precisely identified by a differentiated system of classification marks, was extremely popular and widely read. His method was often adopted and developed in the 16th century. Petra Hörner’s important monograph (2000) is not just a further contribution to the debate on genre, but also creates a new system for classifying the traditions of the Gospel harmonies according to their content. She was able to show that there is one tradition, which she calls the “harmony of unity” (“Harmonie der Einheit”), and another, which she calls the “harmony of diversity (“Harmonie der Vielheit”), which draws attention to the divergences between the Gospels. The centre of her study is the previously unedited, anonymously transmitted Gospel harmony by the Silesian priest Georg Kreckwitz (ca. 1394–1422), and she depicts his methods of contamination and separation in detail. Kreckwitz and other authors, bit by bit, untangle the harmony, and begin a process which would lead, in the 16th century, to the replacement of the harmonic method to the synoptic accounts. In terms of handbooks and dictionaries, the best current treatment of the genre’s transmission, function and research history is the comprehensive article “Evangelienharmonie” by Dietrich Wünsch in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie (vol. 10, 626–36). There is a good selective bibliography on the theme in the collection of essays Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters (ed. Burger, den Hollander, Schmid, 2004, 139–50). The volume also contains helpful report on the state of scholarship by Ulrich Schmid (“Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters,” 1–17; “Lateinische Evangelienharmonien,” 18–39) as well as valuable studies of individual Gospel harmonies, e. g., Gerson’s Monotessaron (Marc Vial, “Zur Funktion des ‘Monotessaron’ des Johannes Gerson,” 40–72) and on the Middle Dutch Gospel harmonies of the late Middle Ages (August den Hollander, “Mittelniederländische Evangelienharmonien,”

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89–108). Furthermore, Ulrich Schmid has published a reconstruction of the Latin Diatessaron-tradition in the European Middle Ages (Ulrich B. Schmid, Unum ex quattuor: Eine Geschichte der lateinischen Tatianüberlieferung, 2005). D. Current Research Today, scholars are chiefly concerned with producing editions of the most important medieval and early modern Gospel harmonies, in order to have a solid textual basis from which further research into the genre will be possible. The lack of reliable editions for the European witnesses is the biggest problem facing contemporary scholars. At least not only is the edition of Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch about to be continued (ed. Kleiber and Hellgardt), but a new edition of the Old Saxon Heliand (ed. Sahm) is in preparation. Recently, the first edition of Erasmus Albers’ Evangelienharmonie (ed. Hörner) appeared. However, editions of surviving texts remain to be made for all other countries, including the British Isles. At the moment, important research into Gospel harmonies is being carried out at the “Netherlands Research School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion Sciences (NOSTER).” There, for instance, August den Hollander is preparing the reconstruction of a Middle Dutch harmony which survived in the Utrecht manuscript Ms. 1009, but vanished in the Second World War. When, in future, important textual witnesses are edited, functions and methods of the productive textual genre will be investigated anew, and the medieval Gospel harmonies will be much more securely classified in terms of theological and literary history, and it will be possible to describe them as a European phenomenon. Select Bibliography Udo Borse, “Evangelienharmonie,” LThK, vol. 3 (1995), 1030; Ephraem der Syrer: Kommentar zum Diatessaron, ed. Christian Lange, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); Evangelienharmonien des Mittelalters, ed. Christoph Burger, August den Hollander, and Ulrich Schmid (Assen: van Gorcum, 2004); Birgit Gansweidt, “Evangelienharmonie,” LexMA, vol. 4 (1999), 130–31; Petra Hörner, Zweisträngige Tradition der Evangelienharmonie: Harmonisierung durch den ‘Tatian’ und Entharmonisierung durch Georg Kreckwitz u.a. (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Olms, 2000); Stephen J. Patterson, “Harmony of Gospels,” ABD, vol. 3 (1992), 61; William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Ulrich B. Schmid, Unum ex quattuor: Eine Geschichte der lateinischen Tatianüberlieferung (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2005); Dietrich Wünsch, “Evangelienharmonie,” TRE, vol. 10 (1982), 626–36; Dietrich Wünsch, Evangelienharmonien im Reformationszeitalter: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Darstellungen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983).

Heiko Hartmann

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H Hagiographical Texts A. Definitions and Contexts In the simplest terms, hagiography (from Greek hagios, “holy,” and graphe, “writing”) is the study of saints’ lives. However, over the years it has come to include a broader range of literature concerning saints, including biographies, legends, miracle tales, canonization inquests, visions, relic translations, saints’ cults, and so forth. Hagiographies date from the 1st century through the present day, and encompass all of Christianity: Latin, Celtic, and Orthodox. Although hagiography includes all of these types of literatures, it is still primarily concerned with the studies of saints’ lives. There are two main types of saints, confessors (those who died peacefully of natural causes) and martyrs (those who died violently in defense of their faith). Correspondingly, there are two main types of saints’ lives – the vita and the passio. Vita is always singular because the saint is considered to have lived one sacred life in God even if there are numerous versions of the actual biography. In fact, the exact details of saints’ lives hardly mattered, and hagiographic narratives lack individuality, distinctiveness, and even veracity. Instead, hagiographies are quite obviously formulaic. These conventional forms allow for a common purpose: to prove the worthiness of the individual in question, and to provide a guidebook for future Christians on how to live a good life. In Moralia in Job, Gregory the Great supported this formulaic production in his belief that the “active” earthly life of the saint was merely a representation of the saint’s true goal. Most hagiographies are considered to be part of the imitatio tradition – the pious were to emulate the saints, just as the saints emulated Jesus. Embellishments were anticipated and expected – how better to illustrate the supremacy of faith than to present a young woman, for instance, capturing and slaying a demon? Or to show a bishop bravely withstanding the emperor’s minions? And if the formula proves worthwhile once, then it could prove useful again and again. The vita formula more closely follows the ideal of the confessor. A standard vita concerns a person of noble birth who experiences miraculous signs

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and other portents of sanctity as a child or youth. Quite often the individual is well-educated and attractive in addition to being wealthy. At some point in his or her life, the individual rejects the world, abandoning secular life for the path of holiness. He or she then lives a model Christian life of renunciation and prayer, often rising to a position of leadership within the church (e. g., abbot, prioress, bishop, etc.). Posthumous miracles are recorded, relics are sought after, and the reputation for sanctity spreads. The passio outlines the typical martyr hagiography. Set in the age of persecution, a noble Christian refuses to renounce his or her faith, is subjected to bloody and extreme torture, and is eventually executed, usually by beheading. A great many of these hagiographies involve the “virgin martyrs,” which can be seen as a subset of the more general tradition. In these stories, young beautiful women convert to Christianity against the wishes of their fathers, defy their families, refuse both marriage and conversion, are subjected to graphic (and usually sexual) torture, and are eventually beheaded. Although hagiography continues to be the term most commonly used today, some scholars have disagreed with its usage (Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biographies: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages, 1988), citing the problematizing of the term as being associated with pious fictions, or exercises in the panegyric. Instead, some scholars feel that terms such as “sacred biographies,” or “records of saint cults” are more accurate because they reflect the wishes of a community of believers, rather than purely reproducing the authoritative hierarchy of the Church. Indeed, the very formulaic nature of hagiographies demonstrated the ideals of a holy life as portrayed by the Church and/or a community, rather than serving to immortalize the details of an individual’s life. This distinction between community ties and universal appeal can be tied to the history of the canonization process. Many trace the origin of Christian hagiography to the Greco-Roman tradition of apotheosis (glorification of an individual to the point of near-deification). The earliest saints were martyrs and a few strict ascetics (“bloodless martyrs”), with confessors entering the ranks around the 4th century. In the Patristic era, canonization was a “grass roots” type of movement, where sanctity was declared by popular acclaim and cults were determined by community acceptance or by local episcopate approval. In 993, John XV issued the first bull of canonization for Bishop Ulric of Augsburg, but this did not become a widespread process. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the papacy attempted to reserve the power of canonization for itself, and by the Fourth Lateran Council, with its attempts to centralize and regulate, this goal was nearly accomplished, although the

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issue remained fraught for many years. In 1634, Urban VII published a bull that reserved the exclusive right of canonization for the Holy See, which also made the veneration of saints universal instead of local. This step necessitated the clarification of beatification and canonization, with beatification being permission to venerate an individual locally, and canonization being a universal precept. Beatification thus can be seen as the step before canonization, although that is not necessarily the case. B. Primary Texts and Medieval Anthologies The tradition of hagiography dates back to the Patristic era. One of the earliest known hagiographers was Athanasius who collected lives of the Desert Fathers. The 6th century brought Gregory of Tours who wrote a wide variety of hagiographies, primarily about male clerics, ranging from bishops and abbots to monks and hermits. He also practiced self-insertion, meaning he often included a character in the legends that resembled himself, if he did not directly insert himself into the scene. The majority of hagiographic texts was, however, anonymous, and in many cases legendary. A 10th-century Byzantine monk, Simeon Metaphrastes, is sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of the medieval hagiographic anthology. His catalog of saints became the standard for all such collections, Eastern and Western, and shifted the tone to include a moralizing outlook. This shift may be due to the relatively post-conversion world in which Metaphrastes wrote. His collection, and the ones that followed, expanded to include preChristian stories adapted to fit Christian rhetoric, as well as parables and anecdotes. Later, in the 11th century, when the Kievans converted to Orthodox Christianity, monks began producing records of their own native saints, collecting them into anthologies that also included princely biographies and miracle tales. Ælfric of Eynsham composed almost two thirds of the 103 surviving Old English prose saints’ lives no later than 998 CE. Several more vernacular verse legends were composed by a mysterious figure named Cynewulf, about whom very little is known beyond his name. As before, the majority of hagiographic texts continued to be composed anonymously (D. G. Scragg, “The Corpus of Anonymous Lives and Their Manuscript Context” in Szarmach, 209–30). The Gilte Legende (Golden Legend) is the Middle English version of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, a vast collection of saints’ lives, legends, and other tales. De Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, compiled his text 1260–1275 CE, but arguably both can be likened to Metaphrastes’s work. Almost 900 manuscript versions of the Latin text still survive, along with numerous ver-

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nacular versions in various European languages. From its first printing in 1483 by William Caxton, who also translated it into English, to the upswing of the Reformation, around 1530, it was the most printed book in Europe. The Gilte Legende was also influenced by the French version, Legende Dorée. Outside of Northern Europe, the most prominent late-medieval Byzantine hagiographers included Metropolitan Cyprian (ca. 1330–1406), Epiphanius the Wise (late 14th c.), and Pachomius the Logothete, who was commissioned to record the lives of holy men around Moscow, while in Italy, Boninus Mombritius (Bonino Mombrizio) produced the two-volume effort, Sanctuarium, seu Vitae sanctorum, ca. 1477. The 17th-century Counter Reformation saw the reestablishment of hagiography on both a local and a universal scale, predominantly through numerous anthologies. Though beyond the scope of this handbook, it is worth noting that the Acta sanctorum (Deeds of the Saints) began in 1643 under the direction of the Jesuit Jean de Bolland (1596–1665), which was an extension of the work started by Héribert Rosweyde (1569–1629), Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliotecis manuscriptae (Deeds of Saints whose Manuscript Lives are in Belgian Libraries) in 1607. As well, the Russian Orthodox hagiographic collection Velikiye chet’yi-minei (Grand Monthly Readings) was correlated, first under the supervision of Metropolitan Macarius, and later refined by Dimitry of Rostov in 1684–1705. C. Translations and Modern Anthologies A great deal of energy has been devoted to recovery and exposure. Since most hagiographies are written in languages now considered inaccessible by modern standards, scholars have invested time and research into translating these texts and compiling them into modern anthologies, although individual lives continue to be translated as slim volumes, companion sets, and, particularly, in journal articles. This is especially true for Byzantine hagiographies. Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a distinct rise in editions and translations. Among the early scholars to contribute to this tradition are Walter Skeat (Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS 1881–1900) and Bertram Colgrave (various editions). The EETS also undertook editions of the Golden Legend and various individual hagiographies, such as Seinte Katerine. Within all of these collections a general trend is revealed: hagiographies tend to fall into two categories no matter their literary origin. The first group consists of stories of early martyrs or other stalwart founders; the second set is comprised of local saints. This demonstrates the historic tension between centralization of canonization and local control of sanctity, while opening the avenue for social investigation through hagiographic study. One of the

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most important modern anthologies – especially in this regard – is Thomas Head’s Medieval Hagiography (1999), which endeavors to represent most European traditions together, providing a broader social commentary of the Middle Ages. Speaking to just that – the intersection of cultural studies and religious studies – a proliferation of specialized anthologies appeared during the 1990s, focusing on eras (Christianity and Paganism, 350–750: The Conversion of Western Europe, ed. Jocelyn Hillgarth, 1977), military saints (Soldiers of Christ: Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Noble and Thomas Head, 1995), and especially women (e. g., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. Elizabeth Petroff, 1986), among other such groupings. Frankish (Gaulish) hagiography also saw a rise in recovery works with a number of anthologies, many of which combine different hagiographic discourses (Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul, 1993), explore social constructions (Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography: 640–720, ed. Paul Fouracre and Richard Gerberding, 1996), or, as with the others, focus on female saints (Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, ed. Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg, with E. Gordon Whatley, 1992). Anglo Saxon works enjoyed modern renditions by Hugh Magennis (various Old English lives), Jonathan Wilcox (Ælfric’s works), and Elaine M. Treharne. As well, the majority of the Latin works composed in Anglo Saxon England are now available in translated collections (e. g., Saints’ Lives and Chronicles in Early England, ed. and trans. C. W. Jones, 1947). When anthologized and translated into English, the texts from the Byzantine traditions are often reduced to excerpts (e. g. Cyril A. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources and Documents, 1986), though that is not always the case (The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. Herbert Musurillo, 1972). However, even as short pieces, these collections are crucial to understanding the Eastern Church of the Middle Ages, and there are increasingly more collections and individual translations available (see http://www. doaks.org/translives.html). Some of these are further subdivided by topic, such as a German website, “Kommentar,” that focuses on Coptic texts featuring female representations (see http://www.koptische-frauendatenbank.de/). Even the smaller Orthodox churches, like the Ethiopian Christian Church, have been mined for their hagiographic contributions (Steven Kaplan, “Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia,” History in Africa 8 [1981]: 107–23). Celtic hagiography has, unfortunately, not fared as well in the resurgence of anthologies. Many of the Irish and Scottish saints’ lives have been collected and translated into modern English; however, the editions are seri-

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ously dated (e. g. Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, ed. Whitley Stokes, 1890; Ancient Lives of Scottish Saints, trans. W. W. Metcalfe, 1895). However, the recent trend towards investigating social conditions through hagiography has made inroads into Celtic studies, particularly in women’s spirituality (e. g. Lisa Bitel, Isle of the Saints, 1991), and in connections between Celtic settlements in Ireland and in Gaul (Julia Smith, “Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles, and Relics in Brittany, c. 850–1250,” Speculum 65 [1990]: 309–43). D. Scholarly Reception As with the majority of other medieval literature, most early scholarship was devoted almost entirely to recovery work, although the introductions to these editions retain vast treasure troves of early scholarly perspectives. Hippolyte Delehaye’s 1907 work The Legends of the Saints, for instance, has an extensive preface that attempts to define hagiography, and, more importantly, the work of a hagiographer. From there, he engages in a discussion about the classification systems of various materials, basing this on their degree of truth and historic value. In doing so, he was one of the first to link spiritual hagiographies with popular literature such as romances and other imaginative works. There are a number of important resources that provide outlines for the study of hagiography and connected materials. These “manuals” provide overviews of traditions, cults, saints, and methodology, and cover a wide range of historical periods, geographic locations, and local traditions. Of these numerous sources, however, there are several that are indispensable. The best introduction to hagiographic study is neither written in English, nor available in translation (Jacques Dubois and Jean-Loup Lemaitre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale, 1993). Another vital work is René Aigrain’s L’hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire, 1953), which was recently reprinted by the Bollandists (Subsidia hagiographica 80, 2000). Though somewhat dated now, this text features the most comprehensive overview of hagiographic materials, including such things as relic translation and calendars as well as standard legends and tales, and background information on early scholarship. For other continental traditions, an essential text is Réginald Grégoire’s, Manuale de agiologia. Introduzione alla letteratura agiografica (1987), but a more recent work, Charles Mériaux’s, Gallia Irradiata: saints et sanctuaires dans le nord de la Gaule du haut Moyen Âge (2006), is also an impressive contribution to hagiographical method. Since the mid-20th century, hagiographies have been seen as an important source of socio-cultural information, and Central Europeans have paved

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the way. The famous Czech Marxist, Frantisek ˇ Graus, especially in his book Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit (1965), challenged scholars to use hagiography, a relatively under-studied genre at the time, as a source for the social history of Western Christianity. Unfortunately, this great classic is not available in English. André Vauchez’s work takes up the socio-cultural challenge in productive ways in his Vita perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (1982) and Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (1981; trans. 1997), which relies a great deal upon formal canonization records. Vauchez has also been supremely interested in how canonization and hagiographic sources were produced, and the varying degrees of papal control over the processes. A trend that saw popularity in the early 1980s depended upon quantification of evidence derived from hagiographic sources. Michael Goodich (“A Profile of Thirteenth Century Sainthood,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 [1976]: 429–37) contributed to this type of study, but the most popular work of this kind was Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1500 (1982) by Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell. Quantification provided a good starting place for later cultural studies, especially gender-based inquiry; however, the exacting nature of this methodology waned as interest in cultural, feminist, and gender-based approaches grew. A growing trend has been to link hagiography with popular culture and popular religion. An important voice in Central European hagiographic studies is Gábor Klaniczay, a pioneer in the field of anthropological hagiography. His work focuses on European popular religion, investigating the intersection of the supernatural – both divine and demonic – with other social structures, such as the monarchy (e. g., Az uralkodók szentsége a középkorban. Magyar dinasztikus szentkultuszok és európai modellek, 2000; trans. as Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe by Éva Pálmai, 2002.) There is also a growing scholarly emphasis on the interconnections between visual culture and hagiography. Artists in the Middle Ages were often concerned less with representing the appearances of things than with depicting concepts. Moreover, the majority of the general population was illiterate. Combined, these two factors led to the dominance of visual representations of saints over literary texts. Church wall paintings, sculptures, altars, and even architectural structures contributed to this conversation (see John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c.300–1200, 2000). Combining approaches to visual culture and art history with other theoretical positioning has furthered these investigations. For instance, studying the cults of saints and pilgrimages in conjunction

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with visual and popular culture has resulted in both comprehensive studies (Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century, 2001) and focused explorations (Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe, 2004). Combining gender studies with visual culture is a rising trend that will surely continue into the foreseeable future. One of the most important scholars in this area, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, focuses on medieval Germany, especially convents (The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, 1998). Though critical source studies, editions, and translations of saints’ lives have dominated the field for decades, the recent burgeoning of gender and sexuality studies has generated considerable interest. In part, this may be traced back to the work of Peter Brown in the early 1970s. Although Brown is more concerned, at least originally, with antiquity, he was one of the first to take sources literally, which included connections with cults and expressions, such as relics, and thus inevitably connections with the body. Caroline Walker Bynum combined recovery, translation, and a feminist focus in her groundbreaking volume on women’s spirituality – Holy Feast & Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) – a practice she has continued throughout her career. Bynum is at least partially responsible for the increased interest in women’s mysticism, a field that intersects with hagiography in unique and interesting ways. Similarly, Suzanne F. Wemple used hagiography to forward the study of women in early Gaul (Women in Frankish Society, 1981), though not in such a sensationalistic manner. Other scholars combine gendered approaches with more traditional methodology. Sofia Boesch Gajano, for example, has written extensively on the history of sanctity, with special emphasis on gender and historiography (e. g., Santità, 1998). The articulation of female sanctity and subjectivity in the vitae of female saints and the negotiation of transvestism and transsexuality in the lives of cross-dressing saints, in particular, have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention – and with it, important debates about autonomy, agency, and authority in these hagiographic texts have arisen. The titillatingly transgressive aspect of these stories of female empowerment and gender ambiguity may explain why they have been popular among contemporary audiences and modern scholars. E. Future Directions The most important ongoing recovery work is being conducted in Belgium by Guy Philippart, who is collecting a series of surveys of medieval hagiographic sources and the scholarly study of them, which will eventually be the

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most comprehensive guide to hagiographic scholarship. This study, Histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire en Occident des origines à 1500 [Hagiographies: an international history of the Latin and vernacular literature of hagiography in the West from its origins to 1500], has resulted in four volumes so far, with more to come (1994–present). Another ongoing Belgian project is Hagiographie, which is sponsored by the Faculté Universitaire Notre-Dame de la Paix at Namur, the most comprehensive corpus of saints’ lives up to 1500 (see http://www.fundp.ac.be/ philo_lettres/histoire/h221.htm). As well, many of the universal European biographical collections are being usurped by individual national ones, which are currently in varying stages of completion. Where those are not sufficient, numerous cataloging projects are attempting to fill in the gaps, with far-reaching efforts in a number of languages and cultures. Recovery work is also the focus of a new series of works on medieval Gaul, which are meant to enhance the Bollandist endeavors: Sources hagiographiques narratives composées en Gaule avant l’an mil, ed. François Dolbeau, Martin Heinzelmann, and Joseph-Claude Poulin (published mainly in Francia). Aside from Analecta Bollandiana (1882–present), there is another journal devoted to the study of hagiography, Hagiographica. Rivista della Società internazionale per lo studio del Medioevo latino, which began its circulation in 1994, and continues to this day. Critically, it is safe to say that the feminist and gender studies trends will likely not die out anytime soon, and those areas seem to have the most potential for future scholarship. However, other valuable areas of inquiry are found in multidisciplinary approaches – in particular connections to literature (especially romance and epic), social sciences (political and personal conduct manuals), architecture and archaeology (geographic and spatial approaches), religious studies (didactic guides, rituals, and traditions), languages (translation work), art (images and relics) and history (cultural recovery). Crossover works combining multiple approaches and theories result in groundbreaking new studies that approach hagiography holistically. Queer Theory is particularly useful in this regard, resulting in studies that unravel disciplinary categories and even conventional historical periodization (see, for instance, Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture, 2005). Clearly, hagiography continues to be considered an ill-defined genre that can assimilate most anything connected to saints and holy people; therefore the possibilities for future scholarship remain wide open.

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Select Bibliography Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); John Fennell, A History of the Russian Church to 1448 (New York: Longman, 1995); Joseph-Claude Poulin, L’ideal de sainteté dans l’Aquitaine carolingienne d’après les sources hagiographiques (750–950) (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1975); A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. Sarah Salih (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006); Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Age (Ecole française de Rome, 1988); Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Michelle M. Sauer with Sarah Aleshire and Christopher Lozensky

Heroic Epics and Sagas I. Heroic Epics A. Preliminary Question: What Is A Hero? “The word ‘hero’ stands for a bundle of concepts, whose scope varies according to context.” (Hermann Reichert in Heinrich Beck, Hermann Reichert and Heinrich Tiefenbach, “Held, Heldendichtung und Heldensage,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 14, 1999, 260–82; 262). Until a few decades ago, the heart of the concept and its point of origin was still, as in the 19th century, believed to be the brave, experienced warrior (Moriz Heyne, “Held,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 10, 1877, 930–34). Against this, a productive discussion has developed, chiefly characterized by the opposing versions of concept formation used by Gerd Wolfgang Weber and B. O. Murdoch. Gerd Wolfgang Weber (“‘Sem konungr skyldi.’ Heldendichtung und Semiotik,” Helden und Heldensage: Festschrift für Otto Gschwantler, ed. Hermann Reichert and Günter Zimmermann, 1990, 447–81) regards the ‘hero’ as a primarily literary concept: “Hektor, Achill, Iring, Gunnar und Gu6rún, CuChulainn, Roland, Igor, El Cid – Heroic saga is constituted, first and foremost by its protagonists themselves … The heroic phenotype, the hero as such … could therefore be derived from a historically and ethnically differentiated phenomenology of the epic (Heldendichtung).” For Weber, ‘the heroic’ is not a concept drawn

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from social reality, but rather the “Reflex einer Form und Aussage gewordenen gesellschaftlichen Realität” (the ‘reflex of a social reality, which has transformed into a form and a statement,’ Weber [as above], 1990, 447). By contrast, for Brian O. Murdoch (The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early Medieval Poetry, 1996, 1ff.) the exemplary ‘hero’ is Leonidas, a historically attested figure, King of Sparta, who held the pass at Thermopylae against a vastly greater Persian force, and fell with all his men in 480 B.C. Although Herodotus’s account (VII, 202–38) contains conflicting details and sometimes lacks clarity, and perhaps the period of time for which he held up the Persian force was not a decisive factor in the defence of Greece, still, for Murdoch, Leonidas and every one of his companions, whose names are forgotten, was a ‘hero.’ For Murdoch, then, the basis of the concept formation is a real person, who transcends his own limitations. Weber places the concept formation of the heroic in literature. However, a bipolar view, which does not completely separate the two approaches, but sees them as two extremes of a mode of thought where any point on the continuum is conceivable will probably prove most productive for a consideration of the phenomenon of the ‘hero.’ The greatest divergence of opinion can be found in the question as to what ethos, what heroic values defined the hero. Andreas Heusler saw their admirable disposition as crucial: “Courage, pride, steeliness, loyalty to his own honor, his lord, and his comrades” (Andreas Heusler, Die altgermanische Dichtung, 1923; 21941; 1967, 164). Klaus von See (Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe, Probleme, Methoden. Eine Einführung, 1971; 21981) decisively rejected the exemplarity of the epic: in it, the figures act as no-one could in real life. The effect was achieved by the brutality of their actions. Wolfgang Haubrichs attempted to mediate between the two positions (Von den Anfängen zum hohen Mittelalter, part 1: Die Anfänge: Versuche volkssprachlicher Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter (ca. 700–1050/60). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Joachim Heinzle, 1988; 21995; 80ff.): the epic gives form to the traditions of ruling noble families, rather than the morally or politically exemplary actions of individuals; the cruelty of the epic reflects the normal practice of the nobility; the Carolingian and Ottonian reception of the epic is particularly characterized by conflicts of values, for instance the Hildebrandslied, with its opposition of tribal bonds and the honor of the individual warrior. Walter Haug (“Die Grausamkeit der Heldensage: Neue gattungstheoretische Überlegungen zur heroischen Dichtung,” Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker, 1994, 303–26) describes all these interpretations as questionable, and sees the roots of the epic in the “history shock” which all peoples endure on entering history:

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this brings the experience of violence which seems to have no meaning and is regarded as a threat, and the hero experiences the other, the foreign, as threatening and monstrous. Joachim Heinzle (“Heldendichtung,” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft 2, 2000, 21–25) sees the subject of the epic in events which are believed to be meaningful for the development of a community; individual, exalted figures with extraordinary physical, but also intellectual or moral capabilities appear as the actors. Using the Nibelungen saga, Heinzle demonstrated that even for the poet of the Nibelungenlied, who was working in a literary rather than oral context, the traditions were not entirely his to play with, but remained a “Gestalt der Vorzeitkunde” (“matter of ancient folklore”), and the written work, too, served the memorial culture (“Zur Funktionsanalyse heroischer Überlieferung: Das Beispiel Nibelungensage,” New Methods in the Research of Epic, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, 1998, 201–21). However, precisely with regard to Heinzle’s examples in the Nibelungenlied, it can be asked if, even in a genre which was recognized as fiction by the author, the wish to unite contradictory elements from various traditions which found favor with the public perhaps led him to place them together, just skirting open self-contradiction. Given that the author allows what are obviously the remnants of older conceptions to remain visible, it ought not necessarily be concluded that he ‘wasn’t free enough’ to eliminate contradictory structures of motivation. B. Epic and History Following Andreas Heusler, poetry which praises the deeds of the living is referred to as “laudatory poetry” (Preisdichtung) (Die altgermanische Dichtung, 1923; 21941; 1967); Heusler restricts the term ‘heroic epic’ to poetry dealing with the deeds of the deceased, whether they actually lived, or whether they are invented, but portrayed by the poet as if they really had existed (summary of the problem and the current state of scholarship: Alfred Ebenbauer, “‘Heldenlied’ und ‘Historisches Lied’ im Frühmittelalter – und davor,” Heldensage und Heldendichtung im Germanischen, 1988, 15–35). In the latter case, the term ‘pseudo-historical’ is more appropriate than ‘fictitious’ or ‘fictional.’ The distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘pseudo-historical’ literature is fluid, as ‘pseudo-history’ frequently uses the names of real people, but attributes deeds to them which they did not perform, and often obviously could not have done (eg. because they lived in a different period to the opponent that the poem gives them). The Middle Ages held that it was intrinsic to poetry – and not merely a matter of the poet’s licentia – that events were not depicted strictly in accordance with reality. The departures from truth were not seen as faults, but as a kind of ‘elevation’ necessary to raise the

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subject to poetry. The medieval debate was based on the interpretation of Martial’s biting criticism of Lucan’s Pharsalia, which Servius integrated into his commentary of Virgil. Martial had written (Epigr. 14, 194): Lucanus: sunt quidam, qui me dicant non esse poetam. Sed qui me vendit bybliopola putat (“Lucan: There are people who say I am no poet. But the bookseller who sells me believes it.”). Servius (ad Aen. 1, 382) interprets this as follows: “Lucanus … ideo in numero poetarum esse non meruit, quia videtur historiam composuisse, non poema” (“Lucan did not deserve to be counted as a poet, inasmuch as he clearly wrote history, not poetry”); Isidore of Seville took this as a criticism of Lucan for neglecting the duties of a poet (Orig. 8, 7, 10). By contrast, Jordanes quotes the same passage as evidence for the historical reliability of Lucan (Getica V, 43). According to the authors of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, then, what is praise of an historian is blame of a poet. The ancient and medieval conceptions of the difference between historic heroic deeds and poems about heroes of the past are based on a similar model to that of euhemerism in Religious Studies: it is the nature of literature to exaggerate, and every new generation of poets has as its source not reality, but the already exaggerated descriptions of their predecessors, which they take for truth, and therefore try to exceed through further exaggerations. Thus, over a few generations, a portrayal emerges which raises the heroes far above normal human possibilities. When we interpret a work dealing with ages past, and which claims to use as sources older poems, possibly ones which existed orally and were never written down, and we have evidence witnessing to the existence of such poems, then the question arises: to what extent did the poet in question believe that he was writing about real events, and to what extent did he know that most of what he knew from his source, including the events, was in essence unhistorical and that not merely the greatness of the deeds was exaggerated? When we can trace remains of older versions of a saga, then it often becomes apparent that the individual poet has made radical changes: Thidreks saga, a Norwegian translation made, probably around 1250 from older German texts, used a literary German source on the “Fall of the Nibelungen” which, according to common opinion, was used, and even quoted word-forword in places by the Nibelungenlied. In it, the death of Kriemhild (forms of names are given following the Nibelungenlied) occurs when Dietrich of Bern is ordered by Etzel, Kriemhild’s second husband, to kill her, because she killed her brother Giselher with her own hands. In the Nibelungenlied Etzel only regrets that Hagen, the greatest of heroes, fell at the hand of a woman. He himself also wanted Hagen’s death, but would have wished him an honorable death at the hand of a hero. At this, Hildebrand strikes her down. Dietrich is not just inactive, but had previously delivered Gunther and Hagen over to

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her. In a Scandinavian version, she even survives a suicide attempt and after trying to drown herself in the sea, is washed up on a foreign shore and becomes the wife of a third king. That is, the saga did not alter gradually and mostly without the knowledge of the poet, rather he knowingly made major alterations to the plot, and in his assurances of truthful repetition, he played with the audience. The alterations to the plot can be explained with reference to the conception of the poem as a whole: the Nibelungenlied does not want merely to condemn a ‘devilish’ woman, as the older poetry, close to popular literature, did, but rather to explore the complex distribution of guilt and complicity among several figures. Later treatments of the Nibelung material, which aimed at an audience-friendly unmistakable identification of good and bad, were able to completely exonerate Kriemhild and portray Hagen as the sole villain of the piece. Apart from the individual, often large and conscious changes made by poets to the saga from stage to stage, the phenomenon of ‘elevation’, on which Isidore in particular lays such stress, and according to which actions are described in literature with fundamentally different methods to those used in eye-witness accounts, should be considered. An example of how this worked in early medieval epic (as opposed to the allegorising ancient epic of which Isidore was thinking) can be found in Beowulf. There (v. 867ff.), an unnamed scop appears, who is a member of the warrior band. This scene in the literary epic reveals a little about pre-literary poetry; in particular, that the poet did not require any knowledge of what had actually happened: Beowulf had spent the night alone in the hall, waiting to ambush the monster, Grendel. Therefore, the fight in which Beowulf tore out Grendel’s arm, who then fled leaving a trail of blood, had no witnesses. The next morning, the court appear and see the ghastly claw and the blood. A modern reader would expect that Beowulf would begin by explaining what had happened, but the epic chooses a different order of events. First of all, the scop sings in praise of Beowulf’s deed, but what he performs is not a description of the conflict – after all, he does not yet know what happened –, instead he chooses the old saga of Sigmund’s fight with the dragon: “the man began to cleverly retell Beowulf’s journey and to express himself successfully, skillfully varying the words of the story. He related everything he had heard tell of Sigmund, of deeds of strength, much that was unknown” (Beowulf 871–875). That is, a poet does not need to know about the historic event to praise a deed, but rather to know old sagas: he takes an old song about the saga hero Sigmund as his model for the praise of Beowulf. This poem is more important to the society at court than the hero’s report of ‘how it was’, which is only delivered thereafter (Hermann Reichert in Heinrich Beck and Hermann Reichert

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and Heinrich Tiefenbach, “Held, Heldendichtung und Heldensage,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 14, 1999, 260–82; 268–69). Erich Heintel emphasizes playing on a dictum by Leopold von Ranke, that the historian, too, can never grasp ‘how it really was’ (“Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,” Erkenntnis und Verantwortung, Festschrift Theodor Litt, ed. J. Derbolav et al., 1960, 207–30; 207ff.). As Jacques Le Goff stresses, written literature is no longer the “collective memory of the peoples” (Geschichte und Gedächtnis, 1992; 21999, 86ff.; Storia e memoria, 1986; History and Memory, 1992; 2004), but neither is oral epic ‘memory’ in the sense of trying to record actual events as they happened. Because of the broad and varied traditions in which its material is transmitted, the Nibelungenlied makes a useful case-study for the investigation of lost earlier stages of surviving epics: Joachim Heinzle (“Wiedererzählen in der Heldendichtung: Zur Fassung n des Nibelungenliedes,” Retextualisierung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 124: Sonderheft, ed. Werner Besch et al., 2005, 139–58; 143–51) shows correspondences between the Thidreks saga and the late medieval manuscript n of the Nibelungenlied. Thidreks saga threads strongly contradictory part-sources in a string of individual sections. However, all these sources represent versions of the Nibelungensaga which are in their central elements older than the Nibelungenlied, which was probably composed shortly after 1200 (before 1205) and, before 1250, were scarcely influenced by it. This implies that the saga versions which were translated into Norwegian were still popular in Germany after the Nibelungenlied appeared, even though there are only meager written traces of them in Germany itself. In the investigation of the popularity of a work, then, a purely arithmetical count of surviving manuscripts tends to favor the versions of a tale which were popular in sections of society which could commission expensive manuscripts: handsome manuscripts often survive when the interest in their content has evaporated. Cheap manuscripts, such as traveling storytellers (minstrels) might have read from, reached a much larger audience during their active life than the magnificent manuscripts which were often created for one individual, but when they were worn out, they went for binding fragments. This seems to have been particularly the case with popular epics. For a broad overview, intended primarily for teaching, see Victor Millet, Germanische Heldendichtung im Mittelalter, 2008. a) Orality The discussion as to whether the great heroic epics of the European cultures were based on oral precursors, and how poets who lacked the written medium could create and transmit large-scale works, continued in the first half of the

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20th century along the influential lines laid down in England by W[illiam] P[aton] Ker (Epic and Romance, 1897; 21908; 1931) und H[ector] Munro Chadwick (The Heroic Age, 1912; 1967) and, for German speaking scholars, Andreas Heusler (Lied und Epos in germanischer Sagendichtung, 1905; 1956). A new approach was made possible by the research of Milman Parry and his pupil Albert B. Lord. Lord’s theses (The Singer of Tales, 1960) were initially accepted and further developed by many scholars; later came a critical reaction, and the limits of the Parry-Lord method became visible. They worked on the basis of observations of illiterate Serbo-Croat Guzlar singers, who performed short epics of up to several thousand verses, and who were capable, should enough time and money be available, of creating works of the length of the Odyssey. Because the singer could not learn a work of that length by heart, he had to re-compose it as he sang; no performance was ever identical. So as to produce metrically correct texts during the performance, a slow recitative, the singer would use formulae. That is, he knew particular sequences of words, oral formulae, which fit the meter of particular parts of a line, and which he could often repeat or vary. So as not to lose track of the content while performing, he would also use structural formulae; for instance, in introducing a new hero, he would immediately refer to his bravery. These poems lived in a culture which had no use for literacy; when Parry and Lord wrote down the Guzlar’s performance of his poem, it changed culture, and versions were conserved which would only have existed for a moment in the culture they came from. The thesis that the Homeric epics, Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied could have entered the written world in a similar process (Francis P. Magoun, “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” Speculum 28 [1953]: 446–67) is no longer believed. Attempts to count the formulae in poems and thus to determine how near or far they are from an original oral version are also doomed to failure; not merely because even advocates of this method cannot agree on what can be counted as a ‘formula.’ A more fundamental objection is that the supporters of the method do not consider that a poet who has used literacy in the composition of his works, supporting his memory, and supplementing his recollection and his imagination with written sources, is nevertheless capable of formulating himself so that the audience who hear the finished work read still has the impression that it is listening to a purely oral performance. Even today, many literary genres adopt an ‘oral style.’ There are admittedly differences in degree between medieval and modern reception, as most books today are read silently by individuals, i. e., the normal organ of reception is the eye. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, however, someone who could read and write and was part of written culture, would engage a reader and invite friends to

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listen to the performance; if he created his own work, he would hire a scribe to take dictation – not because he was illiterate, but on grounds of class pride and comfort. Even works which are inconceivable without literacy, such as the academic treatise, were generally created and received acoustically. Many accounts describing reading aloud, reading to an audience, dictation, etc., survive from antiquity; for instance Pliny Minor on his uncle Pliny Major, or in Augustine; in the Middle Ages Wace records the higher social prestige of a poet who can afford a scribe. It is therefore appropriate to the character of the work – and helps its comprehension! – to read medieval poetry aloud, even if only to ourselves. Reference to the ‘formulaic’ nature of a work can therefore be helpful, if one is clear about what is meant by ‘formulae’ in describing its style; it does not, however, provide any evidence that is was composed in a comparable way to the Guzlar epics. Cecil Maurice Bowra (Primitive Song, 1962, 26f.) uses the working hypothesis that the ‘primitive song’ of pre-literate cultures was similar to the ‘primitive song’ of modern primitive cultures, or that the characteristics common to the various poetic modes of modern primitive cultures probably also were present in the earlier cultures of which we have no evidence. One indication that this belief is over-simplified is the fact that early poems recorded in writing are very different from what happens when modern ‘primitive cultures’ come into contact with written culture. Pre-literate poetry is lost forever. We can only draw any conclusions about the nature of pre-literate poetry if it is reflected in works of contemporary literature. An important structural question in that respect is how much an individual epic points beyond itself to a broader constellation of sagas. The earliest example of this is in Homer (Odyssey 8, 74–75); he has the singer Demodokos “sing from the song (lit.: of the song [«]), whose fame had then reached the heavens, the quarrel of Odysseus and the Peleiad Achilles, how they once quarreled violently with each other at the festal meal of the gods.” From this, we may discover the relationship that the individual epic work or heroic song has to the saga cycle within which it exists. The result is that that culture did not see the song as a single entity in a saga cycle made up of many units, but that the saga cycle is seen as the unity, and any given song as a small excerpt from the whole. In the verses from the Odyssey just quoted, the singular  (“song”) is used for the whole tradition of the Trojan War, from which the singer has chosen a small extract for the current situation. (Hermann Reichert “Autor und Erzähler im Nibelungenlied,” Helden und Heldensage: Festschrift für Otto Gschwantler, ed. Hermann Reichert and Günter Zimmermann, 1990, 287–327; 295). The quarrel which Demodokos records, which must have taken place at the

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start of the Trojan War, is unknown to us; it lies before the events of the Iliad. Even long works like the Iliad and the Odyssey are only relatively short excerpts from a greater whole; no different from heroic songs about single events. Demodokos sings a second heroic song, which offers another small section of the events of the Trojan War; the story of the Trojan Horse, which occurs after the events of the Illiad. It is important to note that Homer does not regard this song as a separate work; Odysseus praises Demodokos Od. 8, 489vv., for singing the whole Trojan War so   (“exactly according to its order”), and asks him to continue the story of the War with Odysseus building the wooden horse. The whole story existed in the consciousness of the audience as a unity, and was still not regarded as a plurality of single works when no one comprehensive work containing it all existed. This way of looking at things, and therefore the terminology, has changed – each of the poetic works treats only a segment of the story, but we regard each of these segments as a complete work, not as a mere part of a (non existant) greater one. Speculating as far back as possible on the poetry and story of epochs for which we have no written evidence was not a goal of the 19th century alone, as when Adalbert Kuhn recognized in 1853 that, given the changes in phonology, the Vedic áksiti ´srávah was exactly equivalent to Ν « “unfading fame.” The demand of many philologists in the last decades, that rather than studying the unrecorded precursors of the poems we have, attention should shift to those poems themselves, was greeted with general but not universal acceptance, since cultural historical investigations of centuries where remains of material culture, but no literature, has survived profit from reconstructions which, as in the example given, show that in the period of the Indo-European language, a form of poetry existed in which words from the vocabulary of fame played an important role, and which lived on into the time of the surviving Ancient Greek and Old Indian literature. Further turns of phrase were discovered in the intervening period, and critically examined by Rüdiger Schmitt (Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit, 1967); a short excerpt from them appears in “Indogermanische Dichtersprache,” Europäische Heldendichtung, ed. Klaus von See, 1978, 41–44). Further methodical questions are posed by Helmut Humbach (“Indogermanische Dichtersprache?” Europäische Heldendichtung, ed. Klaus von See, 1978, 45–52): using correspondences in words and metaphors in Homer and Beowulf, he discusses the question which of these commonalities are really evidence of an inherited poetic diction, which of them are merely an inherited court language existing independently of poetry, and which metaphors appear in the heroic epic of various peoples, without any common de-

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scent from the Indo-European, such as ‘shepherd of the peoples’ for ‘prince,’ which also appears in inscriptions of Hammurabi. How is the material of ‘heroic poetry’ portrayed within the poems themselves? In Homer, it is an element of the entertainment at court, which has both an athletic component in the contests, as well as a poetic one; ‘heroic poetry’ is a significant part of this. The only other genre mentioned in the scenes from the Odyssey discussed here is a light-hearted mythological song: during a dance, Demodokos sings of the love of Ares and Aphrodite, the wife of Hephaistos, and the revenge of the deceived husband; apart from this, heroes are at the centre of poetry and conversation. At times the professional singer Demodokos is active, at times Odysseus, who relates his fate, and at times the king acts as conversation partner. That is, several people have a say in choosing and framing what is heard about the heroes, not just the professional poet. The whole society carries the material of the poetry, even if the poet has the decisive part in their formulation, and the king’s wishes are most important on the side of the audience. The social place of the singer is made clear in that Demodokos initially has sits at a humble place at table, but is honoured by Odysseus, who calls him to a better place. It is impossible that the poet of the Nibelungenlied knew this passage when he has Hagen say of Volker “Mich riuwet âne mâze”, / sô sprach Hagene, // “daz ich ie gesaz in dem hûse / vor dem degene.” (‘“I repent without measure”, said Hagen, “that I ever sat at table at a better place than this hero.”’). It seems to be a general characteristic of heroic epic (and probably also of real life) that the social order is sufficiently permeable that a social ascent, reflected in the seating order at table, is possible both through heroic deeds or through extraordinary artistic achievements. A further example can be found in Scandinavian culture: the Nornagests qáttr, written around 1300, is the fictitious autobiography of a minstrel who is said to have died around 1000 and claims to have lived 300 years (so that he can maintain that he was an eyewitness of the sagas he relates). Nornagest, the narrator, describes how he played pieces at the court of Olaf Tryggvason which are referred to as the ‘Gunnarsslag’ (the Atlaqvi6a reports that Gunnar played the harp with his toes when Atli threw him, bound, into a pit of snakes) and Gu6rúnarbro˛ g6 in fornu (‘The Old Lay of Gudrun’; the meaning of brag6 here is unclear), that is, short excerpts from the Nibelung saga (presumably Nornagest sang them to his own accompaniment). Nornagest also recites long texts during his stay at the royal court, and of these the Qáttr records a form of the Sigurd saga, transformed into a first person narrative. Old Germanic poetry has not survived, presumably because – judging by what Tacitus records in Germania 2, 2 – there was a close connection between

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historical and religious poetry. Almost 700 years later, around 797, in a letter to the monastery at Lindisfarne, Alcuin calls the citharista (meaning the Germanic professional singer, O.E. scop or O.N. skald, who, like the fictitcious Nornagest sang accompanied by a harp) heathen and asks rhetorically “Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?” This shows that Alcuin did not see the epic as secular in opposition to the religious, but as heathen rather than Christian. In the adoption of themes from the heathen past, as in the Hildebrandslied and Beowulf, the moral-cultural context underwent a decisive alteration. The matter has been particularly controversially discussed with regard to Beowulf; there is an important summary based on Beowulf’s last words in Constance B. Hieatt (“Beowulf’s last words vs. Bothvar Bjarki’s: How the Hero Faces His God,” Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period. Studies in Honour of Jess B. Bessinger, ed. Helen Damico, 1993, 403–24). Alois Wolf arrives at a very late date for Beowulf (Heldensage und Epos. Zur Konstituierung einer mittelalterlichen volkssprachlichen Gattung im Spannungsfeld von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, 1995). He takes into consideration that the Beowulf saga is mentioned in no other work (neither the Old Norse skalds or Widsith know it), that Beowulf is not a historic personality, but that Beowulf served as a platform transforming several heroic poems into a long epic. For that reason Wolf calls his chapter on Beowulf “Episches Bemühen um die heidnische Vorzeit” (epic consideration of the heathen past), while the poet of the Waltharius, which Wolf believes is as old, if not older, used the existing Walther and Nibelung sagas. Wolf stresses the influence of Romanesque culture, particularly during the Carolingian period, on heroic poetry; with regards to the ideology of loyalty in the Battle of Maldon (which was presumably composed shortly after the historical events it describes in 991, and thus following Wolf’s dating would be not much younger than Beowulf), he sees no reason to take the description of the old Germanic loyalty to a lord in Tacitus as a comparison; he sees the Carolingian-Roman patria ideal of the chanson de geste as a more immediate parallel, and this is not the only point at which Wolf wishes to bring the Germanic ‘heroic epics’ closer to the chanson de geste. This has increased interest in Germano-Romanesque cultural contacts, but most scholars hesitate to go as far as Wolf. Considering the function of written records, Herwig Wolfram places Beowulf in the context of the origo gentis literature, which was connected to the nobility of a gens and therefore needed the deeds of heathen ancestors (Herwig Wolfram, “Origo Gentis: The Literature of Germanic Origins,” Early Germanic Literature and Culture, ed. Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read, 2004, 39–54).

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b) National and Epochal Genre Boundaries Although the term ‘hero’ can be used for a broad spectrum of literary figures in various genres, the expression ‘heroic epic’ describes a particular literary genre, and therefore is only suitable for certain kinds of heroic poetry. ‘Heroic sagas’ develop national characteristics which create the effect of independent literary genres; the Russian Bylina or the French chanson de geste are different genres. Roland and Guillaume are heroes, but their deeds are not told for their own sake: it is more important to their political-propaganda effect that they were in the service of Charlemagne and directed against the heathens; in the first line, the Chanson de Roland glorifies dulce France. While this is not true of all chansons de geste, they share several common features when compared to the Germanic heroic epic. For this reason, the chanson de geste has its own entry in this handbook. Spanish literary history, too, gives the El cantar de mio Cid a separate status by calling it a cantar de gesta. The collection of essays Europäische Heldendichtung (ed. Klaus von See, 1978) includes, not counting the literature of antiquity, medieval heroic sagas of the Germanic, French, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, Russian and Celtic heroic poetry. There are no contributions on other national forms, such as the high-medieval Greek heroic sagas. Medieval ‘heroic epics’ can also be found outside Europe, e. g. the old Indian Ramayana of “Valmiki”, spread over large tracts of Asia, and an illustration of it can be found on a relief frieze on the Prambanan on Java, dating to around the 10th century. The state of research on the origins of the individual parts of the Ramayana are described by Renate Söhnen-Thieme (“Rahmungsstrukturen in der altindischen Epik: Valmiki und das Ramaya6a,” New Methods in the Research of Epic, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, 1998, 105–23). The incompleteness of even the available overviews on medieval heroic sagas is justified inasmuch as the size and diversity of the field is such that not only can no one author, but no one publisher can hope to cover it. Even comprehensive works like Cecil Maurice Bowra, Heroic Poetry (1952; 1965), are in the end eclectic. While only the medieval Germanic heroic epic can be treated here, it should not be thought that this model can be applied to the heroic epic of other peoples, just as we have refused to apply the model of ‘oral poetry’ derived from 20th-century Serbian epic poetry to medieval Germanic heroic epic. As an example of an important branch of the ‘heroic epic’ which cannot be treated here, see the rich discussion of Greek heroic epic, in particularly the epic Digenis Akrites, which can be seen in the bibliography of Elizabeth Jeffreys’ edition (Digenis Akritis, 1998). That the same term, ‘heroic epics’, is used for ancient epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey and for Germanic heroic epic is the result of a misunderstanding which persisted until the 19th century. While modern scholarship

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continues to use the traditional, homonymous labels, it is conscious of the fact that this results from historic causes rather than suggesting a meaningful correspondence between the genre of the Homeric epics and the Germanic epics which concern us here. Beowulf is not a ‘short Odyssey’, and the Nibelungenlied no ‘German Iliad’. Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied do share, in addition to various other similarities, a common debt to the ancient Latin epics, as is shown in particular by Theodore Andersson (A Preface to the Nibelungenlied, 1987, 17ff.). The articles in Europäische Heldendichtung (ed. Klaus von See, 1978) make it particularly apparent that even the terminology, as a result of different traditions, varies from nation to nation: for the study of Germanic cultures, the ‘heroic epic’ is basically a genre label which must be marked off against the ‘heroic lay’ and the ‘courtly romance’; in Russian literature, Dietrich Gerhardt (“Russland und sein Igorlied,” Europäische Heldendichtung, ed. Klaus von See, 1978, 428–45) can talk of the Igorlied in his title, only to refer to it in his opening sentence as “the Old Russian proseepic.” The more problematic genre terminology in the Germanic field is a result of the fact that the old Germanic heroic lay, as it only survives in the Hildebrandslied, is not simply the precursor of the great heroic epics, Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied: the written epics have multi-cultural ancestors, including Vergil and the epics of late antiquity, siblings like the Latin Waltharius manu fortis, probably written in the 10th century in Southern Germany, and distant – in terms of genre – relatives like the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (completed before 1220) or Thidreks saga. The Klage, written down with the Nibelungenlied, continues the events of the longer work, and its mattter obviously belongs to the heroic sagas; but for all that it is not heroic epic. Michael Curschmann memorably said in a discussion of the Klage’s genre, that it is not a heroic poem, but it is “about heroic poetry” (“Nibelungenlied und Nibelungenklage: Über Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Prozeß der Episierung,” Deutsche Literatur im Mittelalter. Kontakte und Perspektiven. Hugo Kuhn zum Gedenken, ed. Christoph Cormeau, 1979, 85–119; 86). c) “Old Germanic Heroic Lays” as the Precursor of “Heroic Epics”? We do not know what the old Germanic heroic lay looked like. Andreas Heusler (Lied und Epos in germanischer Sagendichtung, 1905; 1956) saw the Hildebrandslied and the Older Atlilied as the only two genuinely old Germanic surviving heroic lays, and build his model of the old Germanic heroic lay upon them. But in the process, he obscures grave differences. The Poetic Edda contains two Greenland Atli songs; it calls one the Atlaqvi6a, the other Atlamál. The older and more famous of the two is the Atlaqvi6a. Consider this description of the Atlaqvi6a in Klaus von See (Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe,

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Probleme, Methoden. Eine Einführung, 1971; 21981, 97), who follows Heusler in this respect: “terse and straight to the point, with quick changes of scene and without calm pictures of states of being: 2 strophes (of 8 lines) are enough to describe the situation, there is no mention of how the hall is furnished, those present are not listed, the single word dróttmegir (‘followers’) is enough, and their activities are described with the formula drekka vín (‘Wein trinken’) … in these economical words …” But against this it must be said that here the wish to construct a unified genre of the ‘Germanic heroic lay’ was the father to the thought that found the stylistic similarities with the Hildebrandslied. The description would indeed be terse for a novel, but for a heroic lay it is rich: benches round the hearth, followers drinking wine, horses chewing their bits – that is rhetorical ornament and not necessary to the fable. The description is formulaic rather than realistic; in that von See is correct. But precisely that is what makes them identifiably decoration, in contrast to the bare / simple / undecorated style of the Hildebrandslied. Before the death of Ho˛ gni, one of the protagonists, whose heart is cut out of his breast, and never trembles, even when it is cut out, comes the death of the coward Hjalli, whose heart still trembles on the plate. This heightening is also a stylistic technique which contradicts the law of terseness: in plot terms, the Hjalli story is unnecessary. I doubt that Ho˛ gni really appears “particularly brave” as a result; someone who is already known to be brave is not made to look more so by a contrast with a coward, but rather with another brave man. But the heart which never trembles, even in death, is certainly effective. It can therefore be conjectured: the Atlaqvi6a consists of a straightforward and consistent account ancient, but one ornamented with minor characters and epithetic adjectives, especially participles; also elements of landscapes (the dark wood, Myrkvid, through which the heroes ride), buildings; two whole strophes describe the anticipated guest gifts, etc. The use of the epithetical adjectives comes from the learned tradition of antiquity; indirectly, they come from Homer: the horses chewing their bits in Myrkvid correspond well to the formula “horse-feeding Argos” (Ilias 9, 946). Considering all that, the usual dating of the Atlaqvi6a, which is generally described as very old, and is often placed as early as the 9th century, becomes dubious. The sole manuscript dates from around 1270. It is more than unlikely that the poem should have been transmitted, unaltered, for over 400 years, and the style, which is more ballad-like than ‘old Germanic’, suggests that the concept of the poem was completely rethought around 1200. Unfortunately, clues as to how old a poem was when it was written down can only be subjectively assessed. The Hildebrandslied, on the other hand, is, thanks to its early date (written down before 840), closer to old Germanic poetry. As it is a fragment, it is im-

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possible to draw any conclusions about the length of a heroic lay. However, it is stylistically distinctive in that every kind of epic breadth is absent, it is not even said – and scholars still argue about it – whether if, when the opponents meet ‘between two armies’, it is meant that both forces are near by, or if they are at a great distance, and the two meet having been sent out as scouts, as Hugo Kuhn suggests (“Hildebrand, Dietrich von Bern und die Nibelungen,” in Kuhn, Text und Theorie, 1969, 126–40; 129). There is neither ornamental use of epithetic adjectives nor expansion through sub-plots. What has been added, here and later in Beowulf, by contrast to the lost Old Germanic poetry, is the Christian perspective which appears when Hildebrand calls on the waltant got. Medieval heroic epic liked to draw on Old Germanic matter; here there was continuity. But the picture of the world was altered by Christianity; and yet the heroic epic of the Middle Ages integrated elements of the heathen poetry into its picture of the world. Here there was, if only partly and contingently, continuity. The question of why the Fulda monks wrote the Hildebrandslied down has often been debated. Albrecht Classen (“Der Verlust von Sprache: Generationskonflikt und Mißkommunikation im Hildebrandslied und in anderen mittelalterlichen Heldengedichten,” in Classen, Verzweiflung und Hoffnung: Die Suche nach der kommunikativen Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 2002, 1–52) reviews the divergent opinions and directs his attention to the failure of communication between the father and son, which is an important theme of the theological texts in the codex. Here connections can be made between the Old Germanic world and the Christian. If we examine poetry with regard to the history of genre, we find by contrast little continuity between the written long epics which we refer to as ‘heroic epics’ and their (hypothetical) Old Germanic predecessors, and rather a lot with the Christian continuations of ancient epics. Here there was no Germanic continuity. The conclusion from this, that medieval heroic epic can only be seen as a continuation of Old Germanic poetry to a very limited extent, was drawn by Werner Hoffmann (Mittelhochdeutsche Heldendichtung, 1974), in that his survey of thematic groups included only those which appear in middle High German literature proper, not those for which Old Germanic precursors can be postulated. Hence, he defined five ‘matters’ of Middle High German heroic epic: the Nibelungen; Walther and Hildegund; Kudrun; Ortnit and Wolfdietrich; and Dietrich of Bern. This resulted in him finding a close connection between heroic epic and the ‘Spielmannsepen’; Ortnit is described by him as a heroic epic whose atmosphere most closely resembles a goliardic epic on a crusading theme, (“Spielmannsdichtung mit Kreuzzugshintergrund,” 137).

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d) The Subject Matter of Germanic Heroic Epic The answer to the question as to the subject matter of Germanic heroic epic which is still considered valid today was given by Klaus von See (Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe, Probleme, Methoden. Eine Einführung, 1971; 21981). The events which the Germanic heroic sagas relate all occured in the “Völkerwanderungszeit” (migration period, 375–568) or shortly before or after. This chronological limit is not coincidental; all these heroes were perceived as contemporaries of a heroic age, even if in fact Ermanaric died in 375, Attila in 453 and Theoderic only in 526. However, von See sees the most significant similarities not in these historical events, but in the way in which the subjects are treated: the heroic sagas are generally about situations of human conflict, for example the conflict between fidelity to a treaty and the will for revenge, between honor and filial love, the political need for fraternal murder, treason against the king. In this, von See contradicts the old view that the hero was seen as a hero because he acted in an exemplary manner, and states that rather “the attraction of the heroic saga was that the protagonists act in a way that was neither possible nor permissible in real life” (Klaus von See, Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe, Probleme, Methoden. Eine Einführung, 1971; 21981, 11). The question as to what extent even the excessive crimes of an individual could after all be viewed as exemplary in some respects, if not in the sense that it was advisable to imitate them in real life, has been discussed ever since, without arriving at a generally recognized and accepted conclusion. B. Research Trends of the Last 20 Years The overwhelming scholarly personality of Andreas Heusler, especially his Lied und Epos in germanischer Sagendichtung (1905; 1956) had a long influence on the study of the heroic sagas of the Germanic peoples. His thesis “heroic saga is literary history” forms the foundation of the Hermann Schneider’s standard work (Germanische Heldensage 1–3, 1928–1934; 1, 21962). In the introduction to the otherwise unaltered 2nd edition (1962), Schneider rejected this basic hypothesis, but death prevented him from developing a new version. It is certain that heroic sagas were not formed by a handful of poets, so that Heusler’s views must be corrected. Hans Kuhn (“Heldensage vor und außerhalb der Dichtung,” Edda, Skalden, Saga: Festschrift für Felix Genzmer, ed. Hermann Schneider, 1952, 262–78) was the first to show that other forms of transmission than poetry must have been significant for the heroic sagas. The resulting scholarly discussion fills volumes and was collected and summarized by Heinrich Beck (“§ 9: Forschungspositionen,” in Heinrich Beck, Hermann Reichert and Heinrich Tiefenbach, “Held, Heldendichtung und Heldensage,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 14, 1999, 260–82;

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276–82). There are important contributions to the subject in Heldensage und Heldendichtung im Germanischen (ed. Heinrich Beck, 1988) and Europäische Heldendichtung (ed. Klaus von See, 1978). In the Germanic field, the term “heroic epics” is more usually used for discussions of genre, while subject matter is treated under the heading of “Heroic Poetry”. Outside Germanic studies, or in older works on Germanics, the distinction between the terms varies in thoroughness. Yet even today there are very different approaches. In the Motif-Index of German Secular Narratives from the Beginning to 1400, vol. 4: Heroic Epic, Maere and Novellas (ed. Helmut Birkhan et al., 2006) the rubric ‘Heroic Epic’ covers not just works which obviously belong here, such as the Nibelungenlied, Kudrun and the Dietrich epics, but also works which are very remote in genre terms, such as Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst. The boundaries between ‘epic’ and ‘romance’ were constantly redefined, relativized, put entirely into question, and then revived again. People found romance-elements in the Odyssey, and the Nibelungenlied can be understood as an answer to the courtly romance. This does not, however, make it impossible to find defining characteristics for epics and romances, such as the stronger individuation and characterization of the romance. This has the consequence that controversial questions, such as whether the Nibelungenlied is an epic or a romance, are connected to the question of whether there is believable characterization, which has received various answers both with regard to the Nibelungenlied and many other works. Werner Hoffmann describes the debate and attempts to give a reconciling answer (Mittelhochdeutsche Heldendichtung, 1974, 60–63). In the last decades, scholarship has kept returning to the matter of models for dating. Using Beowulf as an example, Theodore M. Andersson (“Die Oral-Formulaic Poetry im Germanischen,” Heldensage und Heldendichtung im Germanischen, ed. Heinrich Beck, 1988, 1–14) regards dates from the 7th to the 10th century as possible. Newer contributions to the debate, which can only be objectively limited by fact that the manuscript was written around 1000, come from Michael Lapidge (“The Archetype of Beowulf,” Anglo Saxon England 29 [2000]: 5–40), who assumes, on the basis of the scribal errors in the manuscript, a written exemplar from the period before 750, and from Dennis Cronan (“Poetic words, conservatism and the dating of Old English poetry,” Anglo Saxon England 33 [2004]: 23–50), who deduces, given the presence of words in Beowulf which are only found in one or two other works, a linguistic relationship to works probably created in the 8th century, in particular ‘Genesis A’. Andersson suggests that the epic could have arisen from oral-formulaic poetry, but that this is a “dispensable concept” (“entbehrliches Konzept”). The scale of the epics (Beowulf, Nibelungenlied) is not in-

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spired by oral-epic predecessors, but by written models in the form of ancient epic. Their predecessors, short songs, could be considered and composed by poets, – and learned by heart by the poets and the audience and transmitted by memory. Andersson believes that the festa ‘make fast (in memory)’ which Egils saga (13th c.) uses for the memorizing of a skaldic poem by the poet before he performs it for the first time, could refer to a technique, by which the heroic songs were also fixed in the mind of the poet in their composition. However, as Andersson admits, festa is also used for the fixing of poetry in writing, in the prologue to the Thidreks saga. Joseph Harris (“Die altenglische Heldendichtung,” Europäisches FrühMittelalter. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft 6, ed. Klaus von See, 1985, 237–76) stresses that even before Britain was settled by the Anglo-Saxons, that is, from the 5th century, a syncretism between Germanic, Celtic and Mediterranean cultures is apparent; he calls the surviving English heroic poetry “post-heroic.” The other known Old English epic other than Beowulf, which probably exceeded the length of a heroic lay, is the Waldere (in the language of the 10th century). However, only two leafs survive, and its length can only be conjectured with the aid of the parallel scenes in the (Southern German, Latin-language) Waltharius (probably 10th c.), which is 1456 hexameters long: Hildegy6’s rambling speech in the first fragment (it is not clear who is speaking in the second) suggests that the Old English version was not much shorter. Harris sees a “graduated scale” from the terseness of the heroic lay, via longer songs like the Finnsburg Fragment to short epics, such as – probably – Waldere, to Beowulf and its 3182 lines. Attempts to replace Heusler’s model, some of whose premises are known to be false, with a more accurate one, have been made by Theodore Andersson (The Legend of Brynhild, 1980), but are doomed to failure (Hermann Reichert, “Rekonstruierte Nibelungendichtung,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik 35 [1992]: 7–20). Walter Haug (“Andreas Heuslers Heldensagenmodell: Prämissen, Kritik und Gegenentwurf,” ZfdA 104 [1975]: 273–92) developed a new approach, under the misleading subtitle “A Revision of Heusler’s Nibelung Model,” (Walter Haug, “Normatives Modell oder hermeneutisches Experiment: Überlegungen zu einer grundsätzlichen Revision des Heuslerschen Nibelungen-Modells,” Hohenemser Studien zum Nibelungenlied, ed. Achim Masser. Montfort: Vierteljahresschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwart Vorarlbergs 32 [1980]: 212–26) which, as such, has nothing in common with the Heusler model and cannot be seen either as a competitor to or a revision of it. Haug, rather, is looking for structural patterns which make it possible for humans to find sense in history. In the literary structural pattern of the wooing, he sees “every stepping beyond

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the self, every approach to the strange and its assimilation” (“jedes Hinaustreten aus sich selbst, jedes Zugehen auf das Fremde und dessen Anverwandlung”) as “profit and loss, both an extension and an alienation of the self” (“Gewinn und Verlust, zugleich Selbsterweiterung und Selbstentfremdung” Haug 1980 [as above], 215). He is not interested in “the poet’s vision … but rather a particular literary configuration” (“die Konzeption des Dichters … sondern um eine bestimmte literarhistorische Konstellation”), a pattern of structure which he also discovers in the Cymric Mabinogi of Branwen, in which, as in the Nibelungenlied, an “inverted bride-wooing” (the hero does not undertake a wooing expedition, but a woman from his group is married off to an outsider) forms the main plot, and in which there are a number of striking correspondences with the works of the Nibelung saga in small details, such as that the younger son of the heroine married off in Ireland refuses to greet her wicked half-brother, when her brothers visit her from Wales, and he throws the child into the fire, whereupon a fight breaks out between the Irish and the Welsh; similarly, in Thidreks saga the young son of Grimhild and Attila strikes Hogni, who in some parts of the Thidreks saga is called halfbrother of Gunarr and Grimhildr, in the face, whereupon Hogni kills him, precipitating the massacre at Attila’s court. Apart from the discussion of dating and development models, the last decades have seen a strengthening of comparative study of the development of genres during the period where epics were being written down, where the history of the genre can be studied in the surviving works. Joachim Heinzle’s study of the later Dietrich epics was a milestone in this regard (1978). The interest in the Dietrich epics, which was stimulated by Heinzle’s study, produced a more precise documentation of the extant traditions, the fruits of which can be seen in Heinzle’s latest book on the subject (Joachim Heinzle, Einführung in die mittelhochdeutsche Dietrichepik, 1999). Elisabeth Lienert’s editions of the pseudo-historical Dietrich epics Dietrichs Flucht, Rabenschlacht and Alpharts Tod (2003–2007) take the new demands on editions into account; in the process, it becomes apparent that the ‘Leithandschrift’ principle, advocated by many from 1980 on, cannot be usefully applied to every work. For instance, the manuscript situation forced Lienert to change leithandschrift in the edition of ‘Dietrichs Flucht’. A clear apparatus is the best solution to the dilemma, as not every research interest finds the same information relevant, and an editor may not dictate the interests with which later scholarship will approach a text. A model example of a different editorial technique may be found in Joachim Bumke’s synoptic edition of the Nibelungenklage, which takes into account a very different transmission situation, i. e., the existence of several, partly equally legitimate versions.

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II. Sagas: Trends in modern scholarship A. Definition of the Genre The word ‘saga’ comes from the Middle Ages, which was not interested in a strict genre terminology. For that reason, the term’s definitions vary in broadness today. Kurt Schier (Sagaliteratur, 1970) contents himself with sketching a maximal and a minimal meaning: in the narrowest sense, ‘saga’ denotes narrative, entertaining (i. e., not academic) prose works, which are not translations. As such, Schier lists: Íslendingasögur, Konungasögur, Fornaldarsögur, Byskupasögur. Even with this minimalist definition, problems arise: for instance, one of the most important Fornaldar sagas, the Volsunga saga, contains passages which are based fairly directly on translations from German, and hence does not fully meet the definition. It can also be problematic to distinguish between ‘prose texts with scattered verse’ and ‘verse narratives with scattered prose elements’, when one considers the possibility that the “Saga of Sigurd Fáfnisbani” mentioned in chapter 6 of Nornagests qáttr (around 1300) means the Sigurd lays of the Edda. In Old Norse, only the skaldic poetry has its own distinct designations, even distinct termini for different strophic forms and the elements of the strophes. Everything consisting of pure prose or a mixture of prose with verse was called either saga by the Scandinavians, or, if it were on the shorter side, qáttr. Even within longer sagas, the independent elements are called saga if they are reasonably long, and qáttr if they are shorter. In this, Old Norse behaves like Middle High German, in which mære could describe the Nibelungenlied, Wolfram’s Parzival, any oral message brought by a messenger, news, or even a rumor. Despite this, modern scholars’ wish for a clearer terminological division is justified: every epoch and every branch of scholarship may direct what it thinks are the most significant questions at a text, even if they are anachronistic for the period in which the text originates; one must merely be conscious of it, and differentiate clearly for the reader between the treatment of questions arising from the horizon of understanding of the author or the original public, and those from our horizon of understanding. The terminologies of the 19th to the 21st centuries were created from varying standpoints, in order to meet different needs. Depending on what a scholar wishes to study, it may be meaningful to draw boundaries based on content or on formal criteria (verse or prose; its extent; complexity of the work’s structure). Despite the medieval lack of concern for precise terminology, the characteristics of the various genres were observed. Today, then, individual genres are determined based on their essential characteristics, even if some works cannot be precisely allocated to a genre, and even if various schemes of division are possible. The most com-

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mon scheme of division is based on content, that is into: Konungasögur, Íslendingasögur, Fornaldarsögur, Sturlunga saga, Byskopasögur, as well as those which deviate heavily from these groups: Riddarasögur, Lygisögur and, though these are hardly ever counted as sagas today, hagiographic legends and historical, translated literature. The most widely recognized genre is the Íslendinga saga (‘Icelandic saga’). Other genres, too, can be well defined, such as the Fornaldar saga or the Riddara saga, even if there are always a few works which do not fit any one category clearly. The names are sometimes misleading; for example, Icelanders appear outside the Íslendingasögur. The allocation of individual works to each subgenre is not universally the same, as there are no clear genre boundaries: for example, Torfi H. Tulinius (The Matter of the North. The rise of literary fiction in thirteenth-century Iceland, 2002, 17f.) lists 25 longer and 8 shorter works as Fornaldarsagas; Kurt Schier (Sagaliteratur, 1970, 86–91) only counts 28 titles, of which some, however, cannot be found in Tulinius. It follows that 13th-century prose authors did not feel obliged to follow an existing norm. At times they created new forms, which were either accepted and used or adapted for later works, or they were not; in the latter case, the un-imitated work remained singular. Where medieval writers did introduce further genre labels, they are not at all helpful in categorization: the Old Swedish translation of the Thidreks saga calls itself Didrikskrönikan, although it has nothing to do with our modern conception of the chronicle genre, and was probably not regarded as similar to a monastery chronicle by contemporary readers. a) The Prehistory of the Sagas The prehistory of the surviving Icelanders’ Sagas is unknown. Previously, the argument between the older free prose school, which assumed an earlier, oral tradition (e.g. Andreas Heusler, Die Anfänge der isländischen Saga, 1913 and Knut Liestøl, “Der Ursprung der Isländersagas,” Die Isländersaga, ed. Walter Baetke, 1974, 137–64) and the book prose school, which is chiefly based on Icelandic scholarship around 1950, often led to extreme positions being adopted (for a radical rejection of Heusler, see, for example, Sigurdur Nordal, “Sagalitteraturen,” Litteraturhistorie B: Norge og Island ed. Sigur6ur Nordal, 1953, 180–273; 233). Gísli Sigur 5 sson attempts to bridge the gulf between the two fronts (The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, 2004) inasmuch as he sees – like almost every scholar today – the Icelandic sagas as the written product of the Sturlungen period (end of the 12th c.– 1300), but also revives the oral tradition; not, however, in the form of an ‘urform’ of the sagas, as the old free prose scholars did, but only for their sources, which he sees as being at least partly oral.

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A minor consequence of this debate is that since Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Dating the Icelandic Sagas. An Essay in Method, 1958), scholars have interested themselves in finding a more exact method for determining the surviving text, rather than confining themselves to its prehistory. b) The Legendary Sagas Torfi H. Tulinius (The Matter of the North. The rise of literary fiction in thirteenthcentury Iceland, 2002, 12) compares the Fornaldarsagas (legendary sagas) to the Íslendingasögur and studies them 1. as “works of literature,” 2. to “put them in the context of a cultural evolution common to all Christendom,” 3. “to try to profit from these two approaches in order to understand the significance these sagas had for their authors and audience.” He pays particular attention to the ways in which sagas construct the past. Ideology can be more effectively transported in the depiction of fictional events in the past than in genres nearer to reality: for example “legitimacy of power in society, the distribution of wealth, the relation to the opposite sex” (Tulinius [as above], 40). His emphasis on the Icelandic elements of the Fornaldarsagas is in the mainstream of modern scholarship. Thidreks saga, too, which originates in Norway, is being studied for its connections to other Norwegian (and Icelandic) literature (in particular: Susanne Kramarz-Bein, Die Qi6reks saga im Kontext der altnorwegischen Literatur, 2002), although it reflects, down to stylistic characteristics and the spelling of names, its direct written German models, which were translated into Norwegian and redacted into one work. One of the most important Fornaldarsagas, the Volsunga saga, also contains many inclusions from southern writings, most noticeably a scene ultimately derived from a French anecdote, and a description of Sigurd from the Heldenschau, a German source which was also used for the Thidreks saga, as well as a ‘falcon dream’ of Gudrun, which is modeled on a version, not preserved in the German original, of Kriemhild’s ‘falcon dream’ in the Nibelungenlied, which took the motif more from der von Kürenberg’s Falkenlied than from any of the surviving German versions of the Nibelungenlied. Theodore M. Andersson (The Legend of Brynhild, 1980) and Hermann Reichert (“Die Brynhild-Lieder der Edda im europäischen Kontext,” Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Atti del 12 congresso internazionale di studi sull’Alto Medievo. The Seventh International Saga Conference, Spoleto 4–10 September 1988, 1990, 571–95) attempt to return attention to the use of the German exemplar. Theodore M. Andersson (“An Interpretation of Qi6reks saga,” Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, ed. John Lindow et al., 347–77) revives the question, controversial since the 19th century, as to whether the Thidreks saga is a translation of a written German original, or a written record made in Norway of oral Ger-

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man poetry. Andersson was able to show that a written German exemplar existed for at least parts of the saga. Hermann Reichert (Heldensage und Rekonstruktion. Untersuchungen zur Thidrekssaga, 1992) went further in identifying the stylistic characteristics of various, obviously German part-sources and shows that it is likely that some of the parts of the saga which are told more than once arose because the same German story was translated twice into Norwegian, apparently by different people; the Thidreks saga therefore apparently has written German part-sources, but not from one unified German book, but rather individual booklets, which were first redacted into one work in Norway. This is further demonstrated by a part which reached Iceland and also Sweden, outside the context of the Thidreks saga, the so-called Heldenschau: the description of Sigurd in the Volsunga saga was plainly not taken from the Thidreks saga, but from a version of the Heldenschau which had not yet been integrated into the Thidreks saga. Further, the translator of the Thidreks saga into Swedish knew a German version of the Heldenschau which did not correspond to the Norwegian manuscript he used as his main exemplar. c) Icelanders’ Sagas Recent research on the Icelanders’ sagas has tended to place studies of individual works in the foreground; in particular on Njáls saga, Laxdœla saga and Grettis saga. The work of Lars Lönnroth (Njáls saga, 1976) inspired further research into Njáls Saga, which can be found in the contributions to Introductory Esssays on Egils Saga and Njáls saga (ed. John Hines and Desmond Slay, 1992) as well as in Anne Heinrichs’s study (“Hallger6rs Saga in der Njála: Der doppelte Blick,” Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker, 1994, 327–53). The debate as to whether the description of the arson and murder in Njáls saga is based on an actual fire and murder which occurred on Iceland in 1253 plays a role in the question as to whether the Icelanders’ Sagas, though they are products of the 13th century, attempt to introduce local color from their historic setting, as Bar6i Gu 5 mundsson (“Der Verfasser der Njála,” Die Isländersaga, ed. Walter Baetke, 1958; 1974, 336–51) believed he could demonstrate. There are great differences of opinion as to how much knowledge of the saga age the authors of the 13th century could have had in the first place. Jón Vi6ar Sigur 5 sson (Chieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth. Odense 1999; 28ff.) argues that they were “relatively well informed” and that above all, the information about families and relationships was accurate. Attention has also been paid to the principles on which the sagas are composed; in particular, the way in which incidents which are irrelevant

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to the plot of the story are woven in, or the narrator specifically states that he is omitting other events of the year he is writing about, because they do not belong to the events of his saga. This ‘open composition’ creates the impression that they are not fictional narrative, but works of history; Carol Clover (“Open Composition: The Atlantic Interlude in Njáls saga,” Sagas of the Icelanders: a Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker 1982; 1989, 280–91) demonstrates this using the digressions in Njáls saga. Since Andreas Heusler labelled Njal’s saga “the lawyers’ saga,” the author’s interest in justice and law has been repeatedly pointed out. William Ian Miller adds new dimensions to our understanding of this side of the text, by pointing to the structural integration of the principles of law and feud (William Ian Miller “The Central Feud in Njáls saga,” Sagas of the Icelanders: a Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker 1983; 1989, 292–322). A further focus of research is the variation in transmitted traditions in the period the sagas were written: Gu6rún Nordal (Ethics and Action in Thirteenth-Century Iceland, 1998, 11): Sturla Qór6ason’s Íslendinga saga (1214–1284) only survives in the compilation Sturlunga Saga which Qórdr Narfason created c. 1300; Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar in sérsterka, by contrast, survives both in the original version and in Qórdr’s reworking. Gu6rún Nordal uses the evidence of the changes Qórdr made here to conjecture what alterations he might have made to the Íslendinga saga. The traditional values of the saga heroes have met with less attention, but Theodore M. Andersson (“The Displacement of the Heroic Ideal in the Family Sagas,” Sagas of the Icelanders: a Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker, 1970; 1989, 40–70) does reveal new aspects of the saga’s concept of honour; he observes, building on Vilhelm Grønbech (Vor Folkeæt i Oldtiden, 1909–1912; 1955; The Culture of the Teutons 1931) that the honor, which is central to every form of heroic literature, in many sagas no longer merely consists of being known after one’s death as someone who did not fear death and who avenged very slight to his honor by killing his opponent (the so-called heroic ideal). Other moral characteristics were seen by society as honorable, too. Select Bibliography Heinrich Beck, Hermann Reichert and Heinrich Tiefenbach, “Held, Heldendichtung und Heldensage,” Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 14 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 260–82; Europäische Heldendichtung, ed. Klaus von See (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978); Early Germanic Literature and Culture, ed. Brian Murdoch and Malcom Read (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2004); Walter Haug, “Normatives Modell oder hermeneutisches Experiment: Überlegungen zu einer grundsätzlichen Revision des Heuslerschen Nibelungen-Modells,” Hohenemser Studien zum Nibelungenlied, ed. Achim Masser (Montfort: Vierteljahresschrift für Geschichte

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und Gegenwart Vorarlbergs 32 [1980]: 212–26; Joachim Heinzle, Mittelhochdeutsche Dietrichepik: Untersuchungen zur Tradierungsweise, Überlieferungskritik und Gattungsgeschichte später Heldendichtung (Munich: Artemis, 1978); Helden und Heldensage. Festschrift für Otto Gschwantler, ed. Hermann Reichert and Günter Zimmermann (Vienna: Fassbaender, 1990); Heldensage und Heldendichtung im Germanischen, ed. Heinrich Beck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988); Brian O. Murdoch, The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early Medieval Poetry (London: Hambledon Press, 1996); New Methods in the Research of Epic, ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram (Tübingen: Narr 1998); Sagas of the Icelanders: a Book of Essays, ed. John Tucker (New York and London: Garland, 1989); Klaus von See, Germanische Heldensage: Stoffe, Probleme, Methoden. Eine Einführung (1971; Frankfurt am Main: Athenaion, 21981); Gísli Sigur 5 sson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, ed. John Lindow et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986); Torfi H. Tulinius, The Matter of the North: The Rise of Literary Fiction in Thirteenth-Century Iceland (Odense: Odense University Press, 2002); Alois Wolf Heldensage und Epos: Zur Konstituierung einer mittelalterlichen volkssprachlichen Gattung im Spannungsfeld von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen: Narr, 1995).

Hermann Reichert

Historical Romances A. Introduction Romance’s history is integrally bound up with the creation of elite lay culture in courts and wealthy household throughout the European Middle Ages. However, romance narratives are rarely simple reflections of curtly ideals. Romances of all national origins are remarkable for their authors; capacity to remake their shared stories anew in different contexts and to reposition their ethical systems as they respond to particular audiences, in distinct geographic locations and social context – often with a critical perspective that calls social ideals or practices into question (Roberta L. Krueger, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, 2000). B. Historical Background The term “romance,” used today to refer to the narratives of chivalric adventures that were first encountered in medieval courts, derives from the Old French expression “mettre en romanz,” which means “to translate into the vernacular French” (Roberta L. Krueger; Barbara Fuchs, Romance, 2004; Paul Strohm, “The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romance,” Genre 10 [1977]: 1–28; John Finlayson, “Definitions of Middle English Ro-

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mance,” Chaucer Review 15 [1980–1981]: 44–62, 168–81; Matilda T. Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Krueger, 13–28; Nathaniel Griffin, “The Definition of Romance,” PMLA 38.1 [1923]: 50–70). Romance, of course, has no beginning, no identifiable moment or text in which it is possible to say, here is the location of the origin. Before the Middle Ages, and the first usages of the Old French grapheme, “romanz” to signify an expanding category of fabulous narratives of a literary kind, something, we feel, existed that was already romance-like, that preceded the medieval concretions (Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic, 2003). Romance is notoriously difficult to define, largely because there is so much of it that it spills over and needs subcategories and overflow tanks. The central medieval sense is of narratives of chivalry, in which knights fight for honor and love, but it also has to serve as a term for historical adventures in a courtly setting, tales of recovery of lost fortune and of virtues tested but in the end triumphant over evil (Tony Davenport, Medieval Narrative, 2004). Before the Middle Ages, there was not a term to designate the romance as a genre. Greeks used a number of terms, but these applied only to some aspects or could be used of other genres as well (Robert J. Morgan, “Make-Believe and Make Believe: The Fictionality of the Greek Novels,” Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher Gill and Timothy P. Wiseman, 1993, 175–229). French romanz meant at first any work translated from Latin into a Romance vernacular, and came only later to denote a work of narrative literature, including not only the romance, but several other genres (Paul Voelker, “Die Bedeutungsentwicklung des Wortes Roman,” Ph.D., dissertation, Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1887). The spread of different genres covered by the term romanz includes religious works (Proverbs, Song of Songs, a saint’s vita), history (Livi, Dares, Wace’s Roman de Rou), a bestiary, ethics (Disticha Catonis), philosophy (Boethius), chansons de geste, and the Arthurian romance. Conversely, other nonspecific terms such as conte, estoire, oevre, livre could be used of the romance (Jean-Charles Payen and Frans N. Diekstra, Le Roman, 1975). Whereas in the past, scholars set out to define romance (Nathaniel A. Griffin, “The Definition of Romance,” PMLA 38 [1923]: 50–70), Dorothy Everett, Essays on Middle English Literature, ed. Patricia Kean, 1955, recent writers are more apt to say, for example, “the category of ‘romance’ is loose and fuzzy at the edges” (Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, 2000, 1). The difficulty in placing the innovation in an acknowledged theoretical framework is reflected in terminology: first, in that antiquity, although

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developing a range of possibilities, possessed no word corresponding exclusively to fiction, whilst for the Middle Ages, Fritz Knapp has spoken of a “terminologischer Notstand” (terminological emergency); Wesley Trimpi, “The Quality of Fiction: The Rhetorical Transmission of Literary Theory,” Traditio 30 [1974]: 1–118; Heinrich Kuch, “Die Herausbildung,” Der antike Roman, ed. Kuch, 1989; Denis C. Feeney, “Epilogue,” Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, 1993, 230–44; Walter Haug, “Der Teufel und das Böse im mittelalterlichen Roman,” Seminar 21.3 [1985]: 165–91; Fritz Peter Knapp, “Wahrheit und Fiktion: Der Status der Fiktionalität in der Artusliteratur des 12. Jahrhunderts,” GRM 48.2 [1998]: 241–44. Second, in that the failure to cope with this novelty meant that there was no term to designate the romance as a genre. The position was no clearer in the Middle Ages. French romanz meant at first any work translated from Latin into a Romance vernacular, and came only later to denote a work of narrative literature, including not only the romance, but several other genres. German lacked a corresponding term, so that words like liet, âventiure, rede, and maere are all used of works that we should describe as romances, whilst even the potentially most promising of these, âventiure, was also applied to genres other than the romance (Klaus Düwel, Werkbezeichnungen der Mittelhochdeutschen Erzählliteratur, 1983). Matilda T. Bruckner uses the term “romance fictions” to include both romances as normally designated and the short stories, contes and lais, such use the same kinds of materials and operate in the same context for medieval writers and their public (Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions, 1993). Both types of narrative are clearly perceived as fictions, unbounded by certain principles of reality and yet related in some way to the lived experiences of their public (Jean-Charles Payen, Le fabliau. Lai narratif, 1975). The romance follows the fictional principle of the fairy tale, that in the adventure no occurrence may be like reality; and yet the courtly narrator presents the claim of discovering a sensus moralis in the res ficta (Hans Robert Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans., Timothy Bathi, 1982, 76–109). Romance may seem to some as too frivolous, too fictional, to offer a real view of social history. Maurice Keen considers and rejects romances as a source of information for his inquiry into the social reality behind that evocative work, “chivalry”: “An ideal of knighthood culled from what appears so often to be essentially a literature of escape is scarcely a promising model for a social historian to make much of” (Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 1984). Yet it may not be romance’s obviously fictional trappings that pose the problem, so much as the way we read them to see where history and fiction intersect. (Eugene Vance, “Signs of the City: Medieval Poetry as Detour,”

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New Literary History 4 [1973], 557–74). Romance fictions thus allow a kind of free space for experiments – in forms and ideas – that may function as a way to redirect and change the society it mirrors. Neither simply mimetic, nor dynamically cut off from real life, romance is an integral part of the dialectic of history (Peter Haidu, “The Hermit’s Pottage,” The Sower and His Seed, ed. Rupert Pickens, 1983, 127–45). This book chapter also appeared in RR 74.1 [1983]: 1–15. William J. Barron has claimed that “at the heart of the romance mode in all its manifestations” is a constant concern with “the same essential experiences: love, honour, valour, fear, self-knowledge”; and in medieval romances it is often the case that the first four experiences are constructed, in part at least, as means leading to the goal of self-knowledge (an obvious example here is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Similarly, John Stevens based his study of medieval romance on a set of interconnected concerns (Man and Woman/Society/God, etc.), whose central question, what is Man?, is addressed in “Man and Superman: the Romance of the Self,” id., Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches, 1973, 72–95. For refutation of the view proposed by some renaissance historians that individual subjectivity as characterized by “interiorized self-recognition” does not predate the age of Shakespeare, see David Aers, Culture and History, 1350–1600, 1992. However, few romances written for English readers present the search for an answer through the quest of a self-conscious hero who (like Sir Gawain or Chrétien de Troyes’ heroes) is enabled to know himself in a final meaningful encounter (Stevens, 1973). Such fundamental questions are frequently addressed in insular romances, both Middle English and Anglo-Norman, but obliquely, through narrative process and in the developing presentation of the hero in action (Phillipa Hardman, The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, 2002). C. Classification Readers of medieval romance have long been accustomed to the classification of texts according to broad divisions of historical/national/cultural/ geographical character: the Matter of Troy, or Rome, or of Antiquity; the Matter of France, and of Britain; or the Matter of England, for example. This very impulse to classify indicates a concern with the question of identity, a desire for clear, stable categories under which heterogeneous texts may be assembled and identified; although the identity of romance itself as a stable generic classification has often been contested (Phillipa Hardman, The Matter of Identity, 2002; Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights, 1990). Romance is, by its nature, a protean narrative form one that can undergo significant changes and still remain true to itself. It has survived a shift from

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poetry to prose; it can support allegory (as in the Roman de la Rose), politics (Faerie Queene), sentimentalization (Amadís de Gaula), and burlesque or parody (Don Quixote). It can end in rejoicing or tragedy. The only strategy that defies romance’s essential adaptability is the total rejection of its idealistic ethos based on chivalry (Theresa Ann Sears, “Squaring the Round Table: Time, Hierarchy, and the Fall of Camelot,” RR 96.1 [2005]: 3–18). Knapp has argued similarly that the medieval romance could not be accommodated within the traditional scheme of poetics (Historie und Fiktion in der mittelalterlichen Gattungspoetik, 2005; Denis Feeney, “Epilogue”; Robert Morgan, “MakeBelieve and Make Believe” and Christopher Gill, “Plato on Falsehood – Not Fiction,” Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher Gill and Timothy Peter Wiseman, 1993, 38–87). Early verse romances were composed in writing but intended for public reading, and they often display their author’s sense of both literary aesthetics and oral performance. Drawing their materials from a broad range of sources that included oral folktales, vernacular epics and saints’ lives, curtly lyrics, classical Latin literature and contemporary chronicles, romances authors self-consciously blended ancient and contemporary stories into new shapes, created characters who appealed to the sentimental, moral, and political concerns of their audience, and drew attention to their own art as they did so (Krueger, 2000). The authors of these earliest romances were engaged in a task of twofold translation: vernacularizing their Latin sources, but also transmitting classical learning to laymen deprived of it by illiteracy (Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 1993). Classical themes provided greater narrative freedom than native epic material by virtue of their greater remoteness in time and space. Because a lay audience would have been less versed in the details of classical themes than of native ones, authors were not bound by conventional expectations and were thus free to invent (Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique, 1992, and Spiegel, 1993). The difference between these two types of romance is clear: the antique model finds room at the most for what I have termed episodic fiction within a given overall plot that cannot be changed in its outlines, whilst the Arthurian model is bound to no traditional plot and therefore disposes freely of its material (Fritz Peter Knapp, “Überlegungen,” 2000, 119). D. Structure The form and content of the medieval romance have been explored throughout the 20th century, and scholars continue to investigate the usefulness and limitations of “romance” as a generic designation (William J. Barron, English Medieval Romance, 1987; Margaret Doody, The True Story of The Novel,

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1996; Hans Robert Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff, 2000, 127–47; Kelly H. Ansgar, “Interpretation of and by Genres in the Middle Ages,” Interpretation: Medieval and Modern, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, 1993, 107–22). As with most such labels, the term “romance,” used to designate a generic reference, implies an evaluation of both form and content. Scholars of the Old French romance often focus on the narrative forms associated with the romance genre, such as octosyllabic rhyming couplets, use of the vernacular, and length. In opposition to formal aspects, scholars also explore the themes or style found in many romances (Lynne Dahmen, “Sacred Romance: Silence and the Hagiographical Tradition,” Arthuriana 12.1 [2002]: 113–22). The self-reflexivity of romance form calls our attention to the way stories are put together in writing by authors who enjoin the reader to admire the work’s shape, its conjointure, as a source of pleasure, but no less as a source of meaning (Matilda T. Bruckner, “The Shape of Romance in Medieval France,” 2000, 13–28; Dennis Howard Green, “Finding a Place for Fiction,” ed. id., The Beginnings of Medieval Romance, 2002, 26–34). Middle English romances in general, and individual translated texts in particular, have often been described as less sophisticated and less “courtly” than their French and Anglo-Norman counterparts. The term is sometimes used as if it were self-explanatory, which is unfortunate, for “courtly” means different things to different people. When used of Middle English romance it usually seems to imply some or all of the following: the English authors and translators are impatient with lengthy descriptions of opulent courtly settings and elaborate ceremonies; they are not too preoccupied with matters of love in general and erotic casuistry in particular, consequently, they are reluctant to allow their heroes and heroines too much self examination and agonized soliloquizing; they are predominantly interested in action for action’s sake and likely to excise material that gets in the way of the relentless cataloguing of the hero’s demonstrations of martial prowess. All of this is substantially true, especially if Middle English romances as a corpus are juxtaposed with the works of Chrétien de Troyes and some other continental French narratives. However, if we compare them with Anglo-Norman romances (from which they often derive), we find that nearly all insular texts of this kind tend to be less “courtly,” whether written in French or in English (Ivana Djordjevi c, ´ “Translating Courtesy in a Middle English Romance,” Studia Neophilologica 76.2 [2004]: 140–51). Despite the precarious conditions of manuscript culture, large numbers of romances have survived. Over 200 romances are extant in French, over 100 in English, over fifty in Spanish, well over fifty in German, and around 100 in

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Italian, including the cantari (short verse narratives composed for singing); each romance is often preserved in multiple manuscripts. Such abundance reflects not only the long-lived appeal of their intriguing stories, but also the protean ability of romance narratives to adapt to the new contexts in which they found themselves transposed. E. New Themes Toward the end of the Middle Ages, as the resources of noble families were sapped by the Hundred Years War in France and England, after the Black Death had ravaged Europe, and as cultural production moved increasingly from courts to urban centers of bourgeois households, the themes of romance began to outgrow their original, chivalric molds, and their offspring took a variety of new shapes. The advent of print culture, the second Renaissance of Classical learning, the intellectual and political battles of the Reformation, the discovery of a “real” new world, and the busy commerce of merchants, artisans, and other workers whose activities were far removed from courts and tournaments – these changes demanded new forms. What was once the new literature for a young noble society in effervescent transformation was discarded as the vestige of a class whose privileges were perceived, by some, as beginning to outlive their social utility. Spanish romance developed more independently of French courtly models. From the outset, its stories possessed an extra-textual historical dimension that reflected, in part, the Reconquest, the 700-year struggle against the Moors. The earliest romances, adaptations of the tales of Alexander and Apollonius, were strongly didactic, and Arthurian themes arrived relatively late in Spain (and sometimes through Italian intermediaries). The relative autonomy of Spanish romance from French sources and its tendency to critique courtly conventions may have helped pave the way for the bold initiative of Cervantes, whose sophisticated juxtaposition of romance and realism in Don Quixote launched a new literary adventure, that of the European novel. For an elite minority, romances were a vehicle for the construction of a social code – chivalry – and a mode of sentimental refinement – which some have called “courtly love” – by which noble audiences defined their social identities and justified their privileges, thus reinforcing gender and class distinctions. From the beginning, however, the tension between courtly ideals masks it. To be sure, the genre includes many texts that boldly celebrate the prowess and independence of knights on horseback, record the glorious past of a family’s lineage, or soberly examine the ethical and religious responsibilities of noble men and women. But alongside these, we find

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ironic romances that poke gentle fun at chivalric pretensions and others that raise voices in opposition to purely secular aristocratic ideals, as do some of the romances centered on the Grail quest. From the 13th century onward, there emerged a new strain of “realistic” romances whose heroes or heroines travel to contemporary towns or cities and devise clever solutions to ordinary problems centered on marriage and the family. Indeed, as romance-writing spread to more modest noble courts and households, and eventually to bourgeois venues, and as tensions increased between the different orders of feudal society with the emergence of new commercial and political interests, chivalric fiction presented itself less as a panel for the advertisement of social ideals than as a forum for the construction and contestation of social identities and values (Krueger, 2000). Contemporary critics have viewed romance as a mode that attempts to embellish social reality and escape from history, as one that explores the sacred mysteries of birth, death, and the quest for identity with secular optimism, or as one that sets up a binary opposition between good and evil to protect an elite society from the “Other.” (Erich Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans., Willard Trask, 2003; Northrup Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, 1976; Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History 7.1 [1975]: 135–63). For elements of female doubling and male identity in Medieval Romances see: Morgan Dickson, “Female Doubling,” The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Phillipa Hardman, 2002, 59–72; Dickson, “Verbal and Visual Disguise: Society and Identity in Some Twelfth-Century Texts,” Medieval Insular Romance, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows, and Morgan Dickson, 2000, 41–54; Pierre Jourde and Paolo Tortonese, Visages du double: Un thème littéraire, 1996; Toril Moi, “She Died Because She Came Too Late,” Exemplaria 4 [1992]: 105–33.

Select Bibliography Geraldine Barnes, Counsel and Strategy in Middle English Romance (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1993); Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987); Derek Brewer, Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991); Ivy A. Corfis, Corpus of Hispanic Chivalric Romances (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2005); Michelle Reichert, Between Courtly Literature and al-Andalus: Matière d’Orient and the Importance of Spain in the Romances of the Twelfth-Century Writer Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Routledge, 2006); Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Donald B. Sands, Middle English Verse Romances (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986); Derek Pearsall, “The Develop-

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ment of Middle English Romance,” Medieval Studies 27 [1965]: 91–116; A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. J. Burke Severs, vol. I: Romances (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967); Dick Davis, Panthea’s Children: Hellenistic Novels and Medieval Persian Romances (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2002).

Jaime Leaños

Kharjas

1840

K Kharjas A. Introduction The earliest examples of a literary genre written in any Hispano-Romance language, the kharjas are brief lyric poems, in the Mozarabic dialect, appearing as the final strophes of learned poems written either in Classical Arabic or in Hebrew, known as muwaffahas (sing. muwaffah, pl. muwaffahat), composed in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), between approximately 1040 and 1330. There is also a rich corpus of kharjas written in Colloquial Hispano-Arabic and likewise appended to the same genre of learned poems in Classical Arabic or Hebrew. In the case of the Mozarabic kharjas, they embody, in many instances, a mixture of Romance and Colloquial Arabic. The Mozarabic dialect, which was spoken alike by Christians, Muslims, and Jews in southern Spain, derives independently from Vulgar Latin, as also did its northern relatives: Castilian, Aragonese, Leonese, and Galician-Portuguese. Catalan, though also classified as Hispano-Romance, owes much of its linguistic heritage to early southern French (Provençal-speaking) invaders and settlers. Mozarabic, which, with the Christian Reconquest of al-Andalus, largely died out in the 1300s, probably shared archaic features with the lost Romance dialect of North Africa, which gradually became extinct following the Muslim conquest of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco in the 7th century (Tadeusz Lewicki, “Une langue romane oubliée de l’Afrique du Nord: Observations d’un arabisant,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny [Krakow] 17 [1953]: 415–80). Concerning the Mozarabic dialect, see Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, Dialectología mozárabe, 1983. The term kharja reflects the Arabic verb kharaja ‘to go out’; cf. khuruj ‘exit’. The kharjas denote, then, an abrupt change of tone; they provide a surprising, shocking, amusing, occasionally even obscene ‘exit,’ a ‘departure’; they are colloquial street-language punchlines to learned poems written in either of two exquisite, cultured, literary languages, with religious implications as well: Classical Arabic or literary Hebrew.

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B. Development of the Research, Terminology The muwaffaha (from wifah ‘a multicolored, ornamental women’s sash’), as a poetic genre, is said to have been invented in al-Andalus around 900 by a Hispano-Muslim poet and the kharja is an essential, integral part of these poems. The kharjas are important for a number of reasons: They represent, as we have seen, the earliest known poetry in any Hispano-Romance language, antedating even the Castilian epic poem, Cantar de Mio Cid, by fully a century, if not more. The kharjas embody very obvious thematic, formulaic, and metric parallels with such early oral lyric poetry as the Castilian villancicos and the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo (q.v.). The kharjas also parallel such even older lyric currents, as can be indirectly attested in Vulgar Latin and in Ancient Greek. Similar women’s lyric songs (Frauenlieder) can also be documented in other Romance languages (Old French, Italian, Provençal, Catalan), as well as in contemporary North African traditional poetry. Despite the kharjas’ indisputable genetic connections with other forms of traditional Hispanic lyric poetry, it is important to bear in mind that not all kharja texts were necessarily taken from oral tradition. A good number were probably composed by the Muslim and Jewish authors of the muwaffahat to which they are appended. In some cases, such texts can easily be identified. For example, a kharja may specify the name of the patron who is being praised in the muwaffaha, in which case, very obviously, the kharja would certainly not have originated in oral tradition. However, other kharja texts must certainly have their origin in traditional songs known to the Romance-speaking population of al-Andalus. In taking over such traditional verses as punchlines for their learned compositions, Muslim and Jewish authors – folklorists avant la lettre – were highly selective. They were particularly – and almost exclusively – interested in only one of the numerous formulaic topoi characteristic of early Pan-Hispanic lyric poetry: The girl who has been betrayed or abandoned by her lover or who is, at very least, uncertain concerning his affection and who seeks her mother’s advice in facing her grave emotional problems. A great majority of the kharjas exemplify this very popular lyric motif, while only a very few attest to other traditional topoi. But the traditional triangle, enamored girl + counseling mother + absent lover, is the great favorite of the Romance kharjas. Thus, in one of the Hebrew-letter kharjas, the girl asks: “¿Ké farai, mamma? / Meu al-habib est’ad yanna” (What shall I do, mother? / My lover is at the door). The situation is exactly paralleled – and with the same á-a assonant rhyme – in a Castilian villancico from the early 1600s: “Xil González Dávila llama a la aldaba. / No sé, mi madre, si me le abra” (Gil González D’Avila is knocking at the door. / I don’t know, mother, if I should let him in; Margit Frenk, Nuevo Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica, 2 vols.,

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2003, no. 189). The girl + mother + lover was also a great favorite of the early Castilian lyric (villancicos). In Lope de Vega’s play La Niña de Plata (circa 1610–12), one of the characters observes: “Sin niña y madre, no hay letra” (You can’t have a song without a girl and her mother). The Muslim and Jewish muwaffaha writers seem only interested in the girls’ erotic lamentations, while the early Castilian lyric embodies a rich diversity of human situations and emotions. It is probable, we can assume, that the Mozarabic lyric may also have been similarly diverse, but the muwaffaha poets knew what they wanted and consequently we are restricted to their preferences. The distinctive metrical form of the Arabic (and Hebrew) muwaffahat is also of great interest to Hispano-Medievalists. Classical Arabic poems usually embody a single rhyme scheme throughout and their prosody is quantitative, depending on contrasting combinations of long and short syllables. On the other hand, the muwaffahat attest to a strophic structure and their prosody is stress-syllabic. The same is also the case with the zajals (Ar. sing. zajal; pl. azjal), a popular relative and very possibly a traditional antecedent of the learned muwaffahat. Unlike the muwaffahat, zajals were composed in Colloquial rather than in Classical Arabic. Identical in form are the medieval Castilian zéjeles, which can be documented in Spanish and in Galician-Portuguese, as well as in medieval Hispano-Hebraic poetry (Frenk, Estudios sobre lírica antigua, 1978). Given the eclectic, multilingual, multicultural character of al-Andalus, numerous scholars who have worked with the muwaffahat and their kharjas have seen, in at least some of these little poems, the impact of a distinctive Hispano-Romance culture that developed in al-Andalus and influenced the Arabic poetry written in southern Spain and its departure from the prosodic norms of Classical Arabic poetry. In the kharjas, then, we see the very origins of Hispanic literatures as a product of close collaboration between the three religious communities that coexisted in medieval Iberia: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, a collaborative coexistence which presages the constant interaction, both hostile and creative, of these three religious groups during later stages in the development of Hispanic culture and literature. C. History of Scholarship: Major Contributors The complexity of cultures, literatures and languages inherent in the kharjas would seem to suggest a field of investigation ideally suited for cordial international collaboration between Romanists, Arabists, Hebraists, folklorists, musicologists, and comparativists. Very unfortunately, such has not been the case at all. From its very inception in 1948, with Samuel Stern’s pathfinding edition of most of the Hebrew-letter kharjas, pertinent scholarship

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has been characterized by bitter ongoing polemics, involving national and personal rivalries and long-cherished pet theories, which often had – and have – little or nothing to do with the problems at hand and have, occasionally and inexcusably, descended to the level of acrimonious ad hominem insults. In addition, some earlier critics’ hand-wringing lamentations concerning the supposed insurmountable difficulties involved in reading the kharjas (especially the Arabic-letter texts) are simply untenable. There can be no doubt that such difficulties do indeed exist, but the kharjas’ paleographic difficulties (involving a first cousin of still spoken, modern Hispano-Romance languages and dialects and written in two perfectly known alphabets – Arabic and Hebrew – still in use today) pale to insignificance when compared to the successful decipherment of such originally impenetrable textual problems as were, for example, involved in reading Hittite (and other extinct Anatolian languages) or the Archaic Greek of Linear B. It is, then, very much to be hoped that kharja scholars may soon attain to a more realistic view of the paleographic problems involved in the study of their prime materials. Select Bibliography The most recent and most exhaustive bibliography is the monumental volume by Henk Heijkoop and Otto Zwartjes, Muwaffah, Zajal, Kharja (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004). – Crucially important editions and studies of the kharjas are: Dámaso Alonso, “Cancioncillas de amigo mozárabes,” Revista de Filología Española 33 (1949): 297–349; Ramón Menéndez Pidal, “Cantos románicos andalusíes,” España, eslabón entre la Cristiandad y el Islam (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1956), 153–61; Klaus Heger, Die bisher veröffentlichten Hargas ˇ und ihre Deutungen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1960); Samuel M. Stern, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, ed. L. Patrick Harvey (Oxford: University Press, 1974); Margit Frenk, Las jarchas mozárabes y los comienzos de la lírica románica (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1975); James T. Monroe, “Formulistic Diction and the Common Origins of Romance Lyric Traditions,” Hispanic Review 43 (1976): 341–50; Carlos Alvar and Angel Gómez Moreno, “El problema de las ‘jarchas’,” La poesía lírica medieval (Madrid: Taurus, 1987), 26–38, 143–44; Samuel G. Armistead, “Brief History of Kharja Studies,” Hispania 70 (1987): 8–15; Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, Las jarchas mozárabes: Forma y significado (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994); Federico Corriente, Poesía dialectal árabe y romance en Alandalús (Cejeles y xarajat de muwaffahat) (Madrid: Gredos, 1998) (note, however, that Corriente, who sees no relationship between the kharjas and other manifestations of the early lyric, cites only those critics who agree with his theories); S.G. Armistead, “Kharjas and Villancicos,” Journal of Arabic Literature 34, 1–2 (2003): 3–19; S.G. Armistead, “El problema de las jarchas,” Dejar hablar a los textos: Homenaje a Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ed. Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2005), 57–64.

Samuel G. Armistead

1845

Lapidaries

L Lapidaries A. Definition and Historical Background Lapidaries (Stein-Bücher, gr. Lithika) are encyclopedic compendia about gems from the late antiquity and the Middle Ages: they list the names, identify the origin, and describe the properties of gems in natural science; they describe the alleged magical and religious virtues attributed to gems and depict their medicinal uses in lithotherapy. More broadly speaking, lapidaries contain lists of stones and descriptions of minerals based on the natural sciences and religion, supplemented by magical elements, allegorical treatises and medical works of antiquity, Islam and the Middle Ages. Of pagan origin, medieval lapidaries integrate pagan and Christian ideas, magic, religion, medicine, astrology, mineralogy, and myth. Lapidaries have an important function in a world that is infused with the purpose of teaching one how to live as a microcosm in tune with the macrocosm, where from the smallest stone to the grand motions of the celestial bodies, it is the grand design of the cosmos to explain through correspondences the divine purposefulness (Bert Hansen “The Complementarity of Science and Magic before the Scientific Revolution,” American Scientist 74 [1986]: 128–36). While the essential content of lapidaries remains largely pagan, its reception in the Christian medieval world is assured through the addition of Christian rituals and symbols, such as the application of the crucifix, blessings, prayers and consecrations. In their mixture of science and magic, lapidaries demonstrate the alterity of the approaches (including wonder drugs) in the Middle Ages (Francis B. Brévart, “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion: Wonder Drugs in German Medico-Pharmaceutical Treatises of the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries,” Speculum 83 [2008]: 1–57). There are basically two approaches to the use of stones: one being allegorical in nature focusing on stones in so far as they served the purpose of exegesis and allegory, the other being scientific and magical in nature, with a focus on healing properties or magical powers. Although it is often impossible to separate the scientific, medicinal aspects from magical ones, many

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treatises (Evans, Riddle, Brévart,) focus on three approaches: scientific, Christian, and magical with astrological associations. B. Allegory In spite of negative Christian views of precious stones because of their magical uses and luxury unbecoming Christians, their use in the Bible, (e. g., the Ten Commandments were written on tablets of stone by the finger of God, Deut. 9:10; twelve stones appeared on the high priest Aaron’s breast plate, Exod. 28:15–21), their appearance in spiritual buildings (the heavenly Jerusalem and ecclesia) and the description of Christ as living stone (lapis vivus) led to their appearance in allegory beginning with the early Christian Apocalypse of Hermae Pastor (140 C.E.) and the depiction of the temple of wisdom at the conclusion of the Psychomachia of Prudentius (348–405). Specific major Biblical sources of allegory were the recurring numerical patterns of twelve stones (Exod. 28:17–21), precious stones on priestly robes, the symbolism of individual stones, and the symbolic heavenly correspondences established. Using the interpretation of Epiphanius, Jerome developed the tropological meaning of stones based on their characteristic virtues. Medieval writers approached lapidaries conservatively, preserving their classical content, while adding Christian symbolism. All this is solidly discussed by Christel Meier, Gemma Spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, part 1, 1977, who has written the most important scholarly work on the subject. Before presenting her survey of the allegorical tradition of precious stones, which begins with the Biblical tradition and extends to the 18th century, she elucidates the allegorical method as developed by Origines and hermeneutically supported by Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana, which took as its point of departure the allegorical interpretation of the Bible; St Augustine had identified gems in the theological world as holdovers from Paradise, brought into the world by the four paradisiacal rivers. As milestones in the development of allegorical interpretation, Meier points to the works of Xenokrates of Ephesus, and Pliny, especially the last book of his Naturalis historia and the works of his redactors, C. Julius Solinus (Collectanea rerum memorabilium) and Isidore of Seville, in whose 16th book of the Etymologiae (chap. vi: De gemmis) as well as in his allegorical work De natura rerum, Christian stone allegory was introduced and codified. While Isidore’s work became important during Carolingian times, the Latin Damigeron attained great influence in the high Middle Ages in large part through Marbode of Rennes, as both Meier and Elena di Venosa (Deutsche Steinbücher des Mittelalters: Magische und Medizinische Einblicke in die Welt der Steine, 2005) and John

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M. Riddle “Lithotherapy in the Middle Ages … Lapidaries Considered as Medical Texts,” Pharmacy in History 12.2 [1970]: 39–50) affirm. Of great importance in the history of allegory Meier considers the Physiologus, an allegorical book on nature with Bible commentaries and a lapidary, in which stones are given a personal and a Christological interpretation, as well as Gregory the Great’s allegorical interpretation of the twelve stones on Aaron’s breast plate (Ex 28:17–20, 39:10–14), the foundations of the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev. 21:9–21), and the stones of Eden (Ez 28: 13). In the New Testament, the stone imagery is further developed in connection with the construction of the church of living stones (1 Cor. 3.11, Eph. 2, 20; 1 Pet.2, 4–6). These passages constitute the Biblical nucleus of the medieval allegory of gems; in this vein Marbode of Rennes writes his short prose lapidaries on the 12 gems that form the walls of the heavenly city of Jerusalem, according to John M. Riddle, Marbode of Rennes’ (1035–1123) De lapidibus, Considered as a Medical Treatise, with text, commentary and C. W. King’s translation, together with text and translation of Marbode’s minor works on stones, 1977. The church building became a metaphor for the Holy Church, and King Louis VII placed his stones constructing the walls of St. Denis, according to Abbot Suger (1140), chanting Lapides preciosi omnes muri tui (All Thy walls are precious stones; see Wolfram Koeppe and Annamaria Guisti, Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe, 2008. C. Scientific-Medicinal-Magical Compendia Latin compendia, as Richard Beinert (Windows on a Medieval World: Medieval Piety as Reflected in the Lapidary Literature of the Middle Ages, 2003), Meier and Di Venosa explain, begin with the mineralogy of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historiae, in which he describes both the physical characteristics of gems and their magical powers that had been transmitted through Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian practices. Meier details how Solinus and Isidore integrate this tradition into the Christian context; adding prayers, blessings, the sign of the cross and inscriptions, and in so doing merge medicine and magic with the Christian faith and practices. Di Venosa places Arab science into Europe before the crusades, via Spain and Sicily, supported by Otto I, translated from Hebrew and Arabic at Cordoba and Toledo; she explains how Hippocrates, Galen and Constantinus, but most importantly the lapidary of the Pseudo Aristotle (5th–9th c. AD) attributed to Aristotle, and Averroes make their way to Christian Europe. Arnoldus Saxo becomes a bridge between the Arab tradition and the West to whom both Albertus Magnus and Vincent of Beauvais turn as a source. The Secretum secretorum, a work which purports to be advice from Aristotle to Alexander the Great that had been transmitted from

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Arabic into Latin, is translated into MHG prose (1282). The translation, which was originally attributed to the Cistercian nun Hiltgart von Hürnheim, is now considered anonymous by Reinhold Möller, Hiltgart von Hürnheims mittelhochdeutsche Prosaübersetzung des Secretum secretorum, 1963. Alfonso the Wise (1221–1284) documents in his lapidaries the learning transmitted by Arabs and Jews on gems, talismans and astrology. According to Di Venosa, scientific thinking begins at the cathedral schools in France in the late 10th and 11th centuries, where Marbode of Rennes, head of the School of Angers, composed De lapidibus, the most important and most imitated work on gems in Europe, which shows how medicine was practiced at the time (Francis B. Brévart, “Between Medicine, Magic, and Religion …,” 28). He evokes the Arab tradition with a letter of the Arab king Evax to Emperor Tiberius (14–37 AD), sharing the secrets of gems. Making use of Solinus and Isidore, he also composes an allegorical lapidary, but separates magical properties of gems from their medicinal ones, according to John M. Riddle, who identified 125 manuscripts from the 11th to the 15th centuries as Marbode of Rennes’ De lapidibus, most of them in Latin. In his critical introduction to Marbode’s work, considered the most important lapidary of the Middle Ages (Robert Earl Kaske, Arthur Groos, and Michael W. Twomey, Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation, 1988), Riddle sorts out the different manuscripts, focuses on the actual scientific and medical practices described in this work and shows how the practical utility of knowledge of stones becomes important, as lapidaries attain widespread popularity and knowledge of the virtues of stones is understood as a useful tool in wielding power over men. His focus on the mystical and practical virtues of stones, and his separation of the medical properties of stones from their other virtues, place Marbode into the scientific line of development that links him to Albert the Great’s De mineralibus and to Georg Agricola’s De re metallica, according to Riddle. Interestingly, no German translation of Marbode is extant. Cathedral schools of the cities and monasteries participate in the conflict during the 12th-century Renaissance between reason and faith. The discourse shapes the thinking and the approaches to gems, according to Di Venosa, as becomes evident in her discussion of St. Hildegard. a) Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), abbess of the Benedictine monastery Rupertsberg, is receptive to numerous influences and transforms these into a symbiotic relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm, where a spiritual significance attends every aspect of the relationship. Manifestations of the outer universe, the macrocosm, she held to be related to the

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inner universe, the microcosm, the human body. A dualism between logic and theology, and between practical and theoretical approaches emerges in her works, including the Liber simplicis medicinae, called Physica, a cosmological-pharmacological work, in which the medicinal qualities of plants, animals stones, and metals are found. In De lapidibus: Das Buch von den Steinen (trans. Peter Riethe, 1979), Hildegard is the first in German-speaking lands to show how the Arab tradition, as well as classical and medieval theories merge; in book IV of her Physica she discusses the magical powers of minerals in relation to their pharmaceutical use. In her preface she associates gems with the fall of Lucifer, rather than with Adam and Eve. By arranging the scientific discussion of stones in the middle of her text and placing Lucifer on both sides, she forces the reader to connect the scientific study with its moral and religious implications. Stones, she believes, take their origin from the four elements, specifically from fire and water; she believes that gems contain the dynamic energy of primordial matter because they have locked the four elements within. Properties are linked to the creation of the stones: colors come from the time of day the stone turned solid, rather than from admixtures, as Alfred the Great had held. Locked into the stones and available for release, according to Hildegard, are their energy and brilliance. She discusses 22 gems in terms of how their power can affect diseases, mentioning the rituals and magical formula that can protect man from diabolical influences (Gottfried Hertzka and Wighard Strehlow, Die Edelsteinmedizin der heiligen Hildegard, 1985). She may owe her theory of humors to Hippocrates and the theory of the four elements to the Pseudo-Aristotle; the oral tradition as well as compendia like Isidore’s are thought to have influenced her views. In discussing Biblical stones, she mentions the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem and the stones of which they are made (Rev. 21:12–21), as well as the breastplate of the high priest Aaron (Exod. 28, 15–21); see Rudolf Creutz, “Hildegard von Bingen und Marbodus von Rennes (1035–1123) über die Heilkraft der Edelsteine,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens 49, Neue Folge 18 [1931]: 291–307. To the mineralogical descriptions she adds many of her own observations, making the identification of specific source texts difficult (Di Venosa, 23; Beinert, 77–81; see also Priscilla Throop, Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing, 1998, 137–56). b) Das Prüler Steinbuch, ca. 1175 C.E., is the first lapidary to be written in German. It is found in a codex in Munich (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and consists of four fragments. Part I contains excerpts of philosophical and scientific Latin texts; part II contains Latin and German medical texts,

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among them the lapidary. In its transmission it is paired with the Prüler Kräuterbuch, which also focuses on vegetable wonder drugs. It begins with a Latin text, turns to a description of the twelve stones of Revelations (21:19), cites Beda’s hymn Civis superne patria and Marbode’s poem De lapidibus, and repeats the twelve biblical stones of the apocalypse, except that the chalcedon is replaced by the onychinus. The work begins in Latin, but switches almost immediately to German and continues in German. Medicinal and magical qualities of stones are listed. The gem jasper is treated at length, other stones receive less attention. The text demonstrates that the German language was developing a technical medicinal and scientific vocabulary (Di Venosa 28ff.). The work shows also an interest in the development of artes literature which develops separately from the theological tradition. Addressing not only the spiritual concerns of clergy but also secular concerns, Sachprosa begins to speak to the needs of lay practitioners, who have need of pharmaceutical instruction, while the study of the natural sciences continues to call for believers to attain a deeper understanding of God’s creation. (Bernhard Dietrich Haage and Wolfgang Wegner, Deutsche Fachliteratur der Artes in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, 2007). c) The Lucidarius or Kleine Cosmographia, from the end of the 12th century, is a German translation of the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, a monk from Regensburg, who had also composed the Imago mundi at the beginning of the 12th century. Sponsored by a royal court rather than a monastery, (possibly Henry the Lion or his son), the translation of these two works shows the growing interest in scientific learning at the courts; the theological treatise was abridged in this translation, placing more attention on the cosmological scientific parts (Di Venosa, Deutsche Steinbücher des Mittelalters: Magische und medizinische Einblicke in die Welt der Steine, 2005, 29; VL, vol. 5, 1985, 939–47; Georg Steer, “Der deutsche Lucidarius – ein Auftragswerk Heinrichs des Löwen?,” DVjS 64 (1990): 1–25; Der deutsche ‘Lucidarius’, vol. I: Kritischer Text nach den Handschriften, ed. Dagmar Gottschall and Georg Steer, 1994; vol. III: Kommentar by Marlies Hamm, 2002). Later encyclopedias turn from the Latin tradition of lapidaries to a greater incorporation of Arabic sources. Among these are Jacob de Vitry (1170–1254), who writes in 1218 Orientalis et occidentalis historia. Thomas of Cantimpré, a pupil of Albertus Magnus, composed the Liber de natura rerum, a broadly conceptualized influential cosmological work devoted to man, animals, plants, the four elements and planets. Chapter xiv, De lapidibus pretiosis et eorum virtutibus offers allegorical treatments of gems, but focuses on the utility of the observation of nature. Vincent of Beauvais (1190–1264) composed

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the largest medieval encyclopaedia, Speculum quadruplex or Speculum maius. Part I: Speculum naturale, is based on Thomas of Cantimpré’s work. Like Marbode, Vincent separates the magical properties of stones from their medicinal uses. The Dominican Albertus Magnus, bishop of Regensburg and teacher of Thomas of Cantimpré, writes Mineralium, which became the standard text for the Middle Ages. Book I covers shape, color and origin of stones; book I deals with virtues of seals and gems. Supporting an Aristotelian observation of natural phenomena, Albert believes that minerals originate from physical influences, especially of different mixtures of earth and water. Unlike Aristotle, he does not believe that stones have souls (Urban T. Holmes, “Medieval Gem Stones,” Speculum 9 [1934]: 195–204). Encyclopedias go hand in hand with the spread of universities in the 12th and 13th centuries (Italy, France, England), the reception of Arab philosophy through Spain and the production of commentaries on Aristotle and Averroes. In 12th-century Germany, it is the imperial court (now sedentary) that supports learning, cultural performance and the dissemination of literature in the vernacular, although historical writing continues to make use of Latin. The increasing secularization taking place at courts and in cities means that literacy and access to literacy was becoming assumed in cities and courts, and that bilingualism in Latin and the vernacular was prevalent among the literate. d) Der Stricker, first half of 13th century, a professional writer, active at Austrian courts, composed no compendium but a satire on gems, Von Edelsteinen, in which he pokes fun at those who believe in miraculous cures and the magical powers of stones. He attacks those who deceive a gullible public with tales of magic (Karl A. Hahn, ed., Kleinere Gedichte von dem Stricker 1839, 44–52; Ulrich Engelen, Die Edelsteine in der deutschen Dichtung des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, 1978). e) Volmar’s Steinbuch has an uncertain date of composition, perhaps 1236 or 1260–1270 (ed. Hans Lambel, Das Steinbuch: Ein altdeutsches Gedicht von Volmar. Mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen und einem Anhang, 1877). Thomas F. Glick and Steven J. Livesey, Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, 2007, 307) suggest that his work, like those of the other great encyclopedists of the 13th century (Arnoldus Saxo, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Vincent of Beauvais), is greatly indebted to Pliny, Isidore and Marbode. It is possible that Volmar comes to the defense of gems to rebut Stricker’s attack on them in a counterattack, which helps date the work. He names him-

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self as writer and cites Albertus Magnus. Di Venosa suggests that he may be a cleric or even a goliard who appeals to the desire of the urban burghers to increase their status through the possession of gems, in the hope of acquiring virtue, honor, dignity and wealth. He attributes qualities to gems that would appeal to the interests of the urban burghers: security of his home, a high position in society, the protection of mother and child during childbirth, etc. The text appears to have been popular among noble families who used its promises to rationalize their lavish spending. The number of manuscripts and their dissemination suggest that the work was at home among the nobility, rather than among the medical bourgeois community of the cities, as medical issues are treated without the customary termini technici of medicine. For the wondrous properties of stones to become effective, Volmar requires stones to be placed on the altar during mass and to be blessed (in Latin). Twenty-two manuscripts are known of Volmar’s Steinbuch, including two incunabula (Di Venosa, 36–50; William Crossgrove, Die deutsche Sachliteratur des Mittelalters 1994, 64–65.) In the 14th century, the vernacular is used not only for literary production, but also for scientific treatises. The lay culture in the vernacular goes hand in hand with the rise of German universities. Compendias are produced for an increasingly literate bourgeoisie that could not afford specialized libraries; translations of scientific texts (e. g., Thomas von Cantimpré’s) are very popular; f) Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur is the most popular translation of Thomas of Cantimpré’s work, Liber de natura rerum, being transmitted in 150 mss. Konrad translates the Latin text but adds allegorical interpretations and information gleaned from his own observations and other sources, e. g., Albertus Magnus. He adds 16 stones to the 66 minerals listed in Thomas’s work and concludes his work with a treatise on double seals. This “buch von den naturlichen dingen,” has been described as the first German compendium about nature (Georg Steer, VL, vol. V, 231–34; Franz Pfeiffer, Das Buch der Natur von Konrad von Megenberg: Die erste Naturgeschichte in deutscher Sprache, 1861, rpt. 1962). It appears to have found a strong following among the lay public, while its effect on the clergy appears to have been minute; however, the history of the reception of this work has yet to be written. Konrad attributes the marvelous properties of stones to heavenly influences, but he also requires sacred words of ritual be spoken over them. His text ends with a prayer that asks for a renewal of God’s blessings on stones so as to rejuvenate their magic powers that have become weakened through original sin. Such Steinsegen are also found in Arnoldus Saxo and Thomas

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of Cantimpré as well as in the later St. Florianer Steinbuch (Traude-Marie Nischik, Das volkssprachliche Naturbuch im späten Mittelalter: Sachkunde und Dinginterpretation bei Jacob van Maerlant und Konrad von Megenberg, 1986). g) The Steinbuch of the Salzburger MS. M III 3 (about 1460) is one of the largest compendia of the science of healing in the German Middle Ages. It contains Thomas of Cantimpré’s work as well as Albertus Magnus’s Mineralium Book II, treatise ii. It is the first and only translation into German of Albertus Magnus’s De lapidibus pretiosis et eorum virtutibus, book 2, second tractate. Stones are organized alphabetically; engraved seals are listed at the end. h) The St. Florianer Steinbuch is one of the last major lapidaries in German in which the magical and scientific tradition coexist. It establishes links with the Damigeron’s magical tradition by beginning with the letter King Evax allegedly sent to Emperor Nero; like Volmar’s Steinbuch, it offers a description of biblical stones. The lack of specialized terminology suggests that the work was addressed to an urban public of secular burghers. Both healing properties of stones as well as their magical powers are described. Depicted as immortal, stones are given divine attributes. In his exemplary treatment of German Steinbücher, Francis B. Brévart finds that there are fewer references to medicinal properties of gems than to their magical, apotropaic effects, such as reconciling husband and wife, making a woman submissive to a man’s wishes, protecting a bearer from storm and fire or from enemies, assuring marital fidelity, etc. Das Steinbuch. Ein altdeutsches Gedicht, ed. Heinrich Lambel, 1877 (pp. 95–125). The 16th century shows greater interest in separating magical treatments of stones from scientific treatments. The discovery of precious ores in the Saxon-Bohemian Erzgebirge led to the first book on mining (1505). Paracelsus’s (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1490–1541, Liber mineralium) discovery of physical and chemical components of minerals led to the exploration of new scientific treatments. Georg Agricola (1493–1541, De re metallica) turns to mining as scientific endeavor. Observation is linked to empirical studies; others follow this scientific tradition. D. Historical Development of Research Scholars have followed Joan Evans (Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance particularly in England, 1922) and George Sarton (Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols., 1927–1948) in the division of lapidary texts. Evans connects the first group, medieval popular lapidaries, to Marbode; the second group of Christian symbolic lapidaries that explore the theological sig-

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nificance of stones to the church; and the third group of medieval scientific lapidaries that reflect speculations of scholastic philosophers on nature and virtue of stones, to the universities. As a fourth group she establishes astrological lapidaries, which she frames with engraved gems. In the Middle Ages no such clear cut distinctions existed; writers generally attempted to synthesize the different traditions. While Sarton focuses exclusively on content of lapidaries, Evans focuses on the dissemination of manuscripts and their content. Much of the research, and this is borne out by the VL has focused on the description, manuscript transmission and influences of lapidaries. Essential remains the work of Alios Closs, “Die Steinbücher in kulturhistorischer Überschau,” Graz Landesmuseum Johanneum Mineralogisches Mitteilungblatt 8 (1958): 1–34; Lynn Thorndike, “De Lapidibus,” Ambix 8 (1960): 6–23, surveys the contents of important European lapidary manuscripts. His monumental work, The History of Magic and Experimental Science, begins with Vol. 1 in 1923 and continues to Volume V on the Thirteenth Century in 1939. It presents a broad and far reaching historical overview of the development of thinking about magic and religion; it charts intellectual and cultural trends, interrelates ideas, and portrays the development of experimentation and scientific thinking. Appendices introduce major text, footnotes and indexes are profuse and meticulous. St. Hildegard von Bingen is the one author writing in German whose work and place in medieval intellectual history and the development of science are discussed in a separate chapter. Elena Di Venosa, Die deutschen Steinbücher des Mittelalters, stands out as the major contributor to the field. In a compact, detailed exposition, Di Venosa uses the history of lapidaries to trace the development of secular, scientific thinking, the uses of lapidaries and the social history of the acquisition of literacy by various groups in the Middle Ages. Cognizant of intellectual developments (e. g., France in the 11th century as the cradle of scientific study), she presents a comprehensive picture of intellectual trends, describing historical influences on and major characteristics of each text cited, locating each within its monastic, courtly, university, urban milieu, identifying its alchemical, magical, medicinal, allegorical, scientific properties, content and outlook, identifying the significance, impact and international influences of manuscripts, characterizing its place in the development of secular learning and literacy among the laity. She comments on international influences, the symbiotic relationship of the rise of universities abroad and the resulting production of scientific compendia, the profound effect courtly culture in Germany had on the interest in gems, but also on the importance of the development of an educated urban lay population as a public that was receptive

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to monastic writers who wrote scientific encyclopedic compendia in the vernacular to compensate for the lack of libraries in the cities. Her outline of broad intellectual and social movements as seen through the lens of lapidaries is masterful, as is her deft tracery of the rich multicultural backgrounds of medieval lapidaries. For each text discussed she provides a discussion of major manuscripts, their interrelationships, content, divergences, as well as the reception of the work, citations from it, and its inclusion in collections of manuscripts. For authors who are known, such as Thomas of Cantimpré or Konrad von Megenberg, who translated Thomas into German, she provides a short but informative biography. For each stone listed she mentions historical citations and describes virtues ascribed to it by different writers, interesting etymological facts, properties and alleged effects. While she illuminates the growth of the secular, scientific tradition and individuals that stand out within it in an exemplary manner, one wishes that in future discussion of the artes writing by clergy she will find it possible to focus more on the interconnections between monasteries, religious orders and their role in the formation and transmission of scientific thinking. The following works deal more generally with early mineralogy, the history of medicine, magic, gems and the transmission of thought: William Jones, Precious Stones: Their History and Mystery, 1880, rpt. 1968, introduces the cultural folklore about gems in a rather unscientific manner, but piques the curiosity through the fascinating information he presents that draws freely for illustration on the collections of the British Museum and other museum collections in Great Britain. In the introduction he appeals to the mysterious power of gems in the possession of King Solomon and Queen Sheba, and to the fascinating stone lore among the Jews and the Arabs. Chapter II turns to the Middle Ages, the Gesta romanorum, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, as well as the travels of Sir John Mandeville to the Chan of Cathay. Chap. III brings in the philosophy of stones, with allusions to Plato. Chap. IV discusses jewels in ecclesiastical settings, beginning with the breastplate and the robes of the High Priest Aaron, and continuing with jewels in churches, shrines, and cathedrals. Chap. V describes robberies and heists of jewels, while Chap. VI attends to the vicissitudes related to historical events involving precious stones. A final chap. VII discusses the British royal families of the Tutors and Stuarts, their avarice, collections of gems and robes, regalia, and inventory; the chapter concludes with a mention of Queen Elisabeth’s passion for pearls. Greater organization, precision, an index and footnotes would have enhanced the value of the work. Hanns Bächthold Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols, 1927–1942. The encyclopedia of 10 vols. meets its two modest goals

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admirably: to make accessible at one site all dispersed sources about the transmission of superstition; and to elucidate the origin and the significance of beliefs and superstitions as far as possible. The compilation facilitates research greatly, because bibliographic sources are cited carefully and regions, in which superstitions are found, are documented geographically. Superstition is broadly defined, applied to custom and usage as well as to festivals that go back to ancient cults and rites, to beliefs about topics, such as popular medicine, that have arisen outside scientific research and to; legends about beliefs are cited. Organized around 2500 key terms, the lexicon was written by scholars recognized in their fields. By using the term “superstition” rather than “popular belief” in the title, the attempt was made to stay clear of topics involving the Christian faiths. For instance, beliefs about “stones” tell of their plantlike growth, of their secret, invisible powers to heal, the strength they allegedly give; the magical healing they promote through magical transfer, the victory they give in duels, the protection they offer against mishap, bad luck and black magic, the fertility and good harvests they procure, especially in arbors, the outcome of illness they foretell through prophetic qualities, the success of journeys they assure, the doom their sudden movement predicts (e. g., judgment day), and the special communication their perspiration indicates. Legends of saints and the devil are linked to particular stones; many of them show diabolical or divine marks or shapes; strange shapes have been linked to living stones (e. g., stone lions roaring at specific times); other stones served as pagan altars or sites of ritual cults; to many stones miraculous, healing qualities have been attributed, often accompanied by rituals, prayers, and writing; still other stones functioned as objects of contagious magic in fertility rituals. A special section deals with the philosopher’s stone, the stone of the wise, or the lapis philosophorum that has been regarded as a cure all, a panacea for all ills, and a means of rejuvenating the old and infirm. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 1989. Descriptive rather than analytical in its approach to magic, religion and science in the Middle Ages, this work focuses on magic at the crossroads of medieval thinking. Etymologically, magic is linked to the Zoroastrian magi, whose acts were considered “magical.” Kieckhefer takes a sweeping historical approach to the classical heritage; topics addressed include the difficulty of distinguishing between magic and religion and natural and demonic magic, its pagan survivals in Norse and Irish culture, the common traditions of medieval magic, the romance of magic in courtly culture, the transformation of European culture through Arabic learning and the occult sciences, necromancy in

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the clerical underworld, and the adoption and institution of law to regulate, prohibit, condemn and prosecute certain magic. Gems are discussed in connection with magic at courts and as part of courtly culture, for the wealth required for the acquisition of gems was concentrated at court. Whereas herbal lore was available to the poor, the medicinal and magical powers of precious stones were of interest to the powerful and rich courtly class, as well as in to the clergy. Kieckhefer suggests that even monarchs like Alfonso the Wise of Castile and León, who was engaged in the production of lapidaries, had only a limited number of stones available of the many described in these compendia, from which Kieckhefer deduces, that lapidaries, while not distinctly a courtly genre, were valued at courts as much for the entertainment the awe inspiring virtues (powers) of stones afforded (e. g., prophecy, strength, invisibility, proof of chastity, etc.), as for the medicinal and apotropaic qualities ascribed to gems. Precious stones and jewels were also used with relics, where miraculous effects called for belief as well as the suspension of disbelief. Kieckhefer describes the courtly culture through its romances, such as Wigalois, where the hero, protected by a slip of parchment with a prayer written on it, is called on to defeat the pagan magician Roaz of Glois, who has given himself to the Devil. The manuscript of this romance was copied and illustrated in 1372 by a Cistercian monk under the patronage of the Duke of Brunswick-Grubenhagen. Both the church and court were involved in the construction of magical and religious lore, but also in the infusion of Arabic learning that significantly altered Western notions of philosophy, science, magic and entertainment and placed magic at the crossroads of medieval thinking. Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, 1990. Siraisi researches the history of medicine for parallel developments in history and the progress of medicine. Specifically, she explores how changing notions of history affected the literature of medicine and she clarifies how the transformation of medicine in the 12th and 13th centuries occurred through the reception of Greek science, Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian logic, epistemology, cosmology and physics. She connects profusion of encyclopedias in the 13th century to the impetus they received from this learning and from new views. In a parallel manner, Isabelle Draelants argues in “Encyclopédies et lapidaires médiévaux: La durable autorité d’Isidore de Séville et de ses Étymologies,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes: Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 16 (2008) [online crm. revues.org/index10672.html; last accessed on May 1st, 2010] that the new encyclopedias departed from Isidore’s earlier etymological approach challen-

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ging the auctoritas of Isidore the naturalist, relying on the new paradigm of Aristotelian science. Siraisi describes medicine as a discipline and skilled occupation that illuminates broad social and cultural patterns of the period. Medical practitioners, she points out, engaged in medical humanism, which involved them in intensive philological study, editing, and the translation of ancient Greek medical texts. Medical practitioners like Dr. Hartmann Schedel, published the great 15th century chronicles: the Nürnberg Chronik (the Chronicon Carionis, written by Johann Carion, Melanchthon and Caspar Peucer, and Paolo Giovio’s, 1483–1552, Histories of His Own Times to 1547). Medicine participated in the Western medieval recovery of Greek and the reception of Arabic learning, embraced high culture and techniques, and numbered among its practitioners men and women, laity and clergy, learned scholastics and illiterate herbalists. Siraisi affirms that institutions connected with medicine included guilds and universities; the attitudes to medicine she describes reveal fundamental cultural assumptions about the human body, illness and wellness and characteristics of people from the cradle to the grave. Siraisi gives a chronological survey of the formation (including ancient and Islamic antecedents) of western medieval medicine, practitioners and conditions of practice, medical education, physiological and anatomical knowledge, disease and treatment, and of surgeons and surgery. She mentions generally the use of lithotherapy among herbal and mineral remedies that involved magic and astrology, as celestial forces were believed to assist therapy in determining when the optimal celestial alignment would aid gathering medicinal plants, the administration of medicines, or performance of phlebotomies (see also John M. Riddle, “Lithotherapy in the Middle Ages … Lapidaries Considered as Medical Texts,” 1970: 41–43, who argues that lithotherapy is principally a late-11th-century development.) Whereas the poor received herbal remedies, the rich received exotic drugs, gold, or precious stones in their remedies. Whether they were more effective was not established. Her work attends to the social setting of medical practice, of health conditions, the experience of patients, the academic world of which medical learning formed a part, and the ideology and religious belief used to establish the context for the practice of medicine. E. The History of the Allegory of Gems The interpretation of lapidaries as allegories begins with F. D’Ayzac, “Symbolique des pierres prècieuses ou tropologie des gemmes,” Annales Archéologiques 20 (1846): 216–30 with a survey of the twelve Biblical stones and a

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discussion of relevant medieval texts and commentaries. Joseph Sauer correlates the study of gems with the symbolism of church buildings (Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters, 1902), and other works that followed it, such as Erwin Panofsky’s studies on iconology (Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art, 1955). Using the symbolic approach practiced by Honorius Augustudensis, Sauer analyzed the function of each part of the medieval church building, providing a symbolic interpretation of each in terms of its function in the Christian faith. He likened the gothic cathedral to the heavenly Jerusalem. Later studies focused on specific stones, such as Theodore Ziolkowski’s essay on the carbuncle (“Der Karfunkelstein,” Euphorion 55 [1961]: 298–326); and Klaus Schreiner’s study of the emerald and its allegorical significance (“Venus and virginitas: Zur Symbolik des Smaragds und zu seinen ‘virtutes’,” Mlat Jb 5 [1968]: 18–23) and Friedrich Ohly’s allegorical studies of the pearl (“Die Geburt der Perle aus dem Blitz,” Strukturen und Interpretationen: Festschrift Blanka Horacek zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Alfred Ebenbauer, Fritz Peter Knapp, and Peter krämer, 1974, 263–78) and of the diamond (“Diamant und Bocksblut: Zur Traditions- und Auslegungsgeschichte eines Naturvorgangs von der Antike bis in die Moderne,” Wolfram-Studien 3 [1975]: 77–188). The most comprehensive historical work on the use of gems in allegory remains Meier’s Gemma spiritalis (1977). Using a comparative, historical systematic approach and interdisciplinary methods, she presents meticulous research in this, her first of two projected volumes. In part I she presents the theoretical scaffolding underlying the medieval allegory of gems and provides a summary of classical lithology. The work traces major steps in the history of Christian allegory from the Biblical sources and the Christian fathers (the first being Epiphanius of Salamis, 4th c., to its destruction by the enlightenment beacon of reason. Two lines of historical transmission of lapidaries are singled out: the first starting with Pliny, leads to Isidore; the second, identified with Damigeron, leads to Marbode. Part II turns to the comparative description of properties of gems. Eighteen different properties that played a role in allegorical interpretation (e. g., color, transparency, luminosity, opaqueness, odor, taste, medicinal/ magical properties, gender, etc.) are described, researched and documented thoroughly. Her interdisciplinary research on stones in art history, natural science, theology and mineralogy shows that mineralogy served as handmaiden to theology. Most impressive is the data and the mass of erudite footnotes she compiles. She masterfully proves her thesis that the Judeo-Christian allegorical tradition integrated classical rhetorical features. Any interpretation of the Christian symbolism of stones must start with her first rate work. What is missing

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from this volume has been promised for volume II: a diachronic study of texts from Bede to the 18th century and depictions in literature and art of the heavenly Jerusalem constructed of gems. Scholars working in literature, visual arts, and cultural studies will have cause for celebration when the second volume appears. My essay is greatly indebted to Christel Meier’s work. The most comprehensive textual and literary study to date that supports the examination and interpretation of specific stones in literature and art from allegorical, mythical, historical and other perspectives is Ulrich Engelen, Die Edelsteine in der deutschen Dichtung des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, 1978. Engelen surveys the use of gems in religious and secular literature, but also in visual art. He presents texts dealing with gems systematically, allowing the reader to reach informed interpretations based on comparisons of texts and multitudes of significant – sometimes contradictory – allusions. Engelen’s many cross-indexing devices (including an index of stones and an index of texts), his extensive catalog of gems and their changing significance in various religious and secular texts as well as in Fachprosa and art, make it possible for researchers to interconnect a wide range of works, ideas, historical backgrounds, religious and magical allusions and to trace tradition, change and opposition. Most valuable is the broad textual data base that allows the reader to compare continuously various texts and (allegorical) frameworks in which gems function as carriers of deeper meaning and to apply this information to the analysis of sermons, hymns, objects of art, relics, manuscripts, texts, as well as ceremony and ritual. Engelen quotes from about one hundred authors and works. The section of essays on particular stones, consisting of longer essays on each stone, should be cross-indexed with Christel Meier’s allegorical and genetical account of each stone. While there is noticeable overlap, the more textually based, literary and visual approach of Engelen should aid the interpretation of both courtly literature and religious texts. F. Mineralogical Work In the 16th century, the scientific study of lapidaries and gems was separated increasingly from the magical and medicinal use of stones and became part of the study of mineralogy under Georgius Agricola (De re metallica) in connection with mining. Under Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), empirical observation and experimentation in mines replaced the classical transmission of knowledge of the medicinal qualities of minerals. Agricola, De natura fossilium, 1546; Handbuch der Mineralogie, ed. Fritz Kraft, trans. Georg Fraustadt, 2006; Paracelsus: Selected Writings, ed. Jolande Jacobi, trans. Norbert Guterman, 1951; rpt. 1995; Paracelsus, Die große Wun-

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darzney, Ulm, 1536 (see Udo Benzenhöfer, Studien zum Frühwerk des Paracelsus im Bereich Medizin und Naturkunde, 2005). G. Current Research Methods, Approaches, Interpretations Topics and approaches being investigated currently deal on the whole less with lapidaries than with Sachprosa and the rise of urban material culture, or the symbolic significance of special stones, such as the grail stone (G. Ronald Murphy, Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival, 2006). The study of Fachprosa and Schriftlichkeit that spread from the monasteries to the courts and to urban centers has been championed by Gerhard Eis (cf. Mittelalterliche Fachliteratur). Bernhard Dietrich Haage and Wolfgang Wegner, with G. Keil and Helga Haage-Naber in Deutsche Fachliteratur der Artes in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, 2007, pay scant attention to lapidaries and lithotherapy (216–17), yet they acknowledge the contemporary currency and esteem lapidaries enjoyed in the culture of the court, as documented in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, XVI, 790, 27; XVI, 792, 5. Research is focusing on the reception encyclopedic works experienced among different social groups that were either literate or had access to literacy. Lists of stones and their visualization, as for instance the image of the high priest with his breastplate showing gemstones symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel (Marbode of Rennes, De gemmarum, 1539) need to be studied as mnemonic tropes that fostered the ability to remember synoptically large amounts of materials. Such mnemonic devices that helped to integrate the visual, textual and oral culture are significant to the development of literacy in the convent, the court, the cathedral and the city. Social, urban, monastic and material history expressed in cultural practices involving lapidaries and gems, and in power relationships in courtly and urban settings that involve precious stones need further interdisciplinary investigation; as model one might look to Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages, ed. Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel, 2005. The study of Mentalitätsgeschichte in connection with cultural practices involving gems would be another field open to such an approach, as Richard Beinert demonstrated in Windows on a Medieval World …, 2003. Correlations between texts and philosophical issues and beliefs of the past, as Francis Brévart stipulated in his article on Wonder Drugs (2008), touching on the relationship of magic and science need further exploration and articulation.

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Select Bibliography John M. Riddle, Marbode of Rennes’ (1035–1123) ‘De lapidibus’, Considered as a Medical Treatise (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977); Elena Di Venosa, Deutsche Steinbücher des Mittelalters: Magische und medizinische Einblicke in die Welt der Steine (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 2005); Christel Meier, Gemma Spiritalis: Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, part 1 (Munich: Fink 1977); Ulrich Engelen, Die Edelsteine in der deutschen Dichtung des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink l978); Francis B. Brévart, “Between Medicine, Magic and Religion: Wonder Drugs in German Medico-Pharmaceutical Treatises from the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries,” Speculum 83 (2008): 1–58; Isabelle Draelants, “Encyclopédies et lapidaires médiévaux: La durable autorité d’Isidore de Séville et de ses Étymologies,” Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes: Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 16 (2008) [online crm.revues.org/index10672.html, last accessed on May 1st, 2010].

Rosmarie Thee Morewedge

Last Wills A. Introduction A person’s last will is an individual document deliberately written with the explicit purpose of stating a personal status quo (of belongings, intentions etc.) and preserving or forming it for the future, for and within a specific social group. It is therefore of interest to medievalists as possibly both a personal ego-document (on this aspect, cf. Mirella Ferrari, “Testamento come autobiografia,” Scripturus vitam: Lateinische Biographie von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Dorothea Walz, 2002, 1049–55; Katherine J. Lewis, “Women, Testamentary Discourse and Life-Writing in Later Medieval England,” Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noel James Menuge, 2000, 57–75) and/or the expression of norms and social customs. The roots of the legal institution lie in Roman law (Institutiones, II 10 pr.: “Testamentum ex eo appellatur, quod testatio mentis est.”), widely unknown to the Germanic tradition (Tacitus, Germania, cap. XX: “Heredes tamen successoresque sui cuique liberi, et nullum testamentum”). It is therefore a quite common phenomenon in Italy (cf. the pertinent study of Giulio Vismara, Storia dei patti successori, 1941, 379–743 [rpt. with a register in 1986]) and Southern France already in the 11th century, but rather seldom north of the Alps before the 13th century. Here and there it competes, collides, and often mixes with the other two major institutions of inheritance law (succession and contractual bequest) and traditional forms of bequea-

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thing, such as donations at death with the reservation of life-long exploitation rights (‘donatio reservato usufructu’) or other gifts at death that excluded certain goods from the general legacy (cf. Martha C. Howell, “Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai,” Past and Present 150 [1996]: 3–45; Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, ‘D’abord il dit et ordonna …’ Testaments et société en Lyonnais et Forez à la fin du Moyen Age, 2007; for the earlier Middle Ages, cf. Dominic T. S. Janes, “Treasure Bequest: Death and Gift in the Early Middle Ages,” The Community, the Family and the Saint: Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Joyce Hill, 1998, 363–77; on the impugnment of last wills, cf. Thomas Kuehn, “Law, Death and Heirs in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 45 [1992]: 484–516). B. Last Wills as Diplomata Consequently, since the early Middle Ages, last wills have come down to us in various forms (cf. Ulrich Nonn, “Merowingische Testamente: Studien zum Fortleben einer römischen Urkundenform im Frankenreich,” AfD 18 [1972]: 1–129; Goswin Speckelmeyer, “Zur rechtlichen Funktion frühmittelalterlicher Testamente,” Recht und Schrift im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Classen, 1977, 91–113; Michael M. Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England from the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to the End of the Thirteenth Century, 1963). Canon law developed probably the most important influence on testamentary law until the later middle ages (cf. Brian Edwin Ferme, Canon Law in Late Medieval England: A Study of William Lynwood’s Provinciale with Particular Reference to Testamentary Law, 1996, and Richard C. Trexler, “The Bishop’s Portion: Generic Pious Legacies in the Late Middle Ages in Italy,” Traditio 28 [1972]: 397–450). Scholars of the ‘Annales’ tradition (cf. the accordant paragraph below) and others have also pointed at the importance of the mendicant orders in this respect (cf. Antonio Rigon, “Influssi francescani nei testamenti padovani del Due e Trecento,” Le Venezie francescane, N.S. 2 [1985]: 105–19, with further references). Still, traditional laws and local customs shaped the testamentary practices until along with the reception of the learned laws Roman institution began to prevail. In diplomatic terms, medieval wills make up for a specific type of charter. Beside the more standard diplomatic elements (‘invocatio’, ‘arenga’, ‘intitulatio’, ‘dispositio’) they usually included a declaration of full mental health (“sana mente [integroque consilio]”) and often also a codicillary clause for the case of formal errors (“si non valeat iure testamenti”) both deriving from the Roman law. In British common law, the legal distinction between ‘will’ (a last declaration on bequeathing property) and ‘testament’ (on all sorts of moveable goods) has developed, but seems of hardly any relevance for

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the medieval and most of the early modern period when both terms appear practically synonymic (Sheehan, The will in medieval England, loc. cit, 1963; id., “English Wills and the Records of the Ecclesiastic and Civil Jurisdictions,” The Journal of Medieval History 14 [1988]: 3–12). Last wills usually required a certain personal along with its actual testator, such as attestors, an executor (cf. Corp. Iur. Canon. X 3, 26 c. 13), and often a scribe or solicitor. Therefore, last wills touch basic venues of research in writing, orality, and the medieval notary (cf. Marco Folin, “Procedure testamentarie e alfabetismo a Venezia nel Quattrocento,” Scrittura e civilitá 14 [1990]: 243–70; Katalin Szende, “Testaments and Testimonies: Orality and Literacy in Composing Last Wills in Late Medieval Hungary,” Oral History of the Middle Ages: The Spoken Word in Context, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter, 2001, 49–66; Marie-Therese Lorcin, “Un Temps pour tester, un temps pour mourir: du testament oral au testament public dans les campagnes foréziennes a la fin du Moyen-Âge,” Revue historique 607 [1998]: 489–514; Enzo Mattesi, “Scrittura femminile e riscrittura notarile nella Perugia del Quattrocento: le due redazioni del testamento di Maddalena Narducci (1476),” Contributi di filologia dell’Italia mediana 10 [1996]: 81–167; Robert I. Burns, The Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250–1350, 1996; Andreas Meyer, “Hereditary Laws and City Topography: On the Development of the Italian Notarial Archives in the Late Middle Ages,” Urban Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2009, 225–43). Somehow akin to such questions, a small group of scholars has worked on the medieval last will as a text, hence as a source for lexicographic and historical linguistic research (cf. Marguerite Gonon, La vie familiale en Forez au 14e siècle et son vocabulaire d’après les testaments, 1961; Andreas Bieberstedt, Textstruktur, Textstrukturvariation, Textstrukturmuster: Lübecker mittelniederdeutsche Testamente des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts, 2007). C. Testamentary practices: Family, Memoria and Piety Not all wills were made in a haste, right from the death-bed (on those – and on matters of source criticism – cf. Herbert E.J. Cowdrey, “Death-Bed Testaments,” Fälschungen im Mittelalter, ed. Horst Fuhrmann, vol. 4, 1988, 703–24). Scholars working on a vast chronological and geographical scope have pointed out that it was a common practice among medieval people to often explicitly bequeath individual objects to friends or relatives during their lifetime, and hence distribute, piecemeal, their belongings among them (Philippe Godding, “La pratique testamentaire en Flandre au 13e siècle,” Tiidschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 58 [1990]: 281–300; Steven Epstein,

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Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–1250, 1984; Howell, Fixing Movables, loc. cit., 1996 – for the case study of Douai and Genoa cf. also the comparative study of Ellen E. Kittell, “Testaments of Two Cities: a Comparative Analysis of the Wills of Medieval Genoa and Douai,” European Review of History 5 [1988]: 47–82). This pattern remains observable in later periods as well. Frequently, more than one will was prepared and former documents were supplemented or replaced (cf. Lothar Sickel, “Die Testamente des Fra Mariano Fetti,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 84 [2004]: 497–508; Leo F. W. Adriaenssen,” De zes testamenten van Anneken Jan Simons,” De Brabantse leeuw 53 [2004]: 119; Mattesi, Scrittura femminile, loc. cit., 1996). But medieval wills not only provide information concerning succession and family structures (Diane Owen Hughes, “Struttura familiare e sistemi di successione ereditaria nei testamenti dell’Europa medievale,” Quaderni storici 33 [1976]: 929–52), but figure as important indicators for identities of and social value ascribed to the family as well (cf. Brigitte Pohl-Resl, “Vorsorge für die Hinterbliebenen als Verpflichtung: Zu einschlägigen Aussagen bürgerlicher Testamente des späten Mittelalters,” Du guoter tôt: Sterben im Mittelalter. Ideal und Realität, ed. Markus Wenninger, 1988, 181–202; Julia C. Crick, “Posthumous Obligation and Familiy Identiy,” Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, ed. William O. Frazer and Andrea Tyrrell, 2000, 193–208). One special aspect touches on testators with no children or other relatives to take care of their ‘memoria’ and of their legacy (cf. Gabriela Signori, Vorsorgen – Vererben – Erinnern: Kinder- und familienlose Erblasser in der städtischen Gesellschaft des Spätmittelalters, 2001; Monika M. Schulte, “Sterben ohne Erben: Das Testament der Mindener Bürgermeisterswitwe Margarethe van Lethelen (1527),” Jahrbuch für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 99 [2004]: 33–68; there is also a valuable chapter on single men and women as well as childless couples in Epstein, Wills and Wealth, loc. cit., 1984). When such heirs were missing, sometimes the ‘state’ or a comparable public entity (king, seigneur, town etc.) where legitimate as the very last heir (‘ultimus haeres’). Such practice is still common in some modern states, such as the United Kingdom (cf. Francis Lyall, An Introduction to British Law, 1st ed. 1994; 2nd ed. 2002, 278). A second vast field of testament research is concerned with questions of piety (from the nearly unmanageable amount of regional studies cf. for instance Jamieson Floyd Weetman, Testamentary Piety and Charity in London, 1259–1370, 2003, or Maria Giuseppina Meloni, “Pratiche devozionali e pietà popolare nei testamenti cagliaritani del Quattrocento,” El món urbà a la Corona d’Aragó del 1137 als decrets de Nova Planta, vol. 2, 2003, 229–50; also cf. Clive

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Burgess, “Late Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered,” Profit, Piety and Profession in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks, 1990, 14–33). The focus here is on medieval people’s provision of their ‘memoria’ by deeds of piety beneficial for their salvation or beneficences explicitly founded for their remembrance (cf. Jacques Chiffoleau, “Pour une histoire de la religion et des institutions médiévales du XIe au XVe siècles,” Cahiers d’histoire 36 [1991]: 3–21; Michel Lauwers, La mémoire des ancêtres: Le souci de mortes. Mortes, rites et société au Moyen âge (diocèse de Liège, XIe–XIIe siècles), 1997; Carlo Moggia, “Media vita in morte sumus: le pratiche testamentarie bassomedievali ‘pro remedio animae’ a Genova e nel Genovesato (sec. XIII),” Annali dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici 19 [2002]: 79–96; Johannes A. Mol, “Frieze en het hiernamaals: Zieleheilsbeschikkingen ten gunste van kerken, kloosters en armen in de testamenten uit Freisland, 1400–1580,” In de schaduw van de eeuwigheid: Tien studies over religie en samenleving in laatmiddeleeuws Nederland aageboden aan A. H. Bredero, ed. Nico Lettinck and J. J. van Moolenbroek, 1986, 28–64). Tightly linked to the general question of piety are the more specific ones about preparation for or concrete situations of dying (for a good survey cf. Marie-Therese Lorcin, “Le testament,” A reveiller les morts: La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident medieval, ed. Daniele Alexandre-Bidon and Cecile Treffort, 1993, 143–56; cf. also Roger C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley, 1980, 40–60), as well as for attitudes toward death and afterlife which frequently appear through medieval wills (cf. Gabriella Severino Polica, “Morte e cultura ecclesiastica nel Duecento,” Studi Storici 21 [1980]: 909–14 – cf. also the paragraph on the ‘Annales’ school and their critics, below). Research in the latter area also has a strong Spanish/Catalonian tradition that tends to be overlooked by scholars of the Anglo-American or German-speaking countries (cf. José Miguel Andrade Cernadas, “Los testamentos como reflejo de los cambios de actitud ante la muerte en la Galicia del siglo XIV,” Semata. Ciencias socias e humanidades 17 [2006]: 97–114; Rafel Sánchez Sesa, “La imagen de la muerte en los testamentos de prelados y eclesiásticos de la Baja Edad Media peninsular (s. XIX–XV),” Iglesia y religiosidad en España. Historia y archivos, vol. 2, 2002, 715–40; Angeles García de la Borbolla García de Paredes, “El recurso a la intercesión celestial en la hora de la muerte. Un estudio sobre los testamentos navarros,”Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 26 [2005]: 151–68). Another trend in more recent historiography tries to embed testament studies in wider questions about medieval people’s mentality. A number of studies, for instance, have drawn conclusions about

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the impact of the plague from testamentary sources (e. g. Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Changes in the Testamentary Practices at Montpellier in the Era of the Black Death,” Church History 47 [1978]: 253–69; Samuel Kline Cohn, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death. Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy, 1992; id., “The Place of the Dead in Flandres and Tuscany: Towards a Comparative History of the Black Death,” The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, 2000, 17–43; Shona Kelly Wray, Last Wills in Bologna During the Black Death, 1999; Anna Vallaro, “Il significato religioso dei testamenti sangimignanesi in tempo di peste,” Studi medievali, ser. 3, 41 [2000]: 369–408). D. Last Wills and Material Culture A large branch of medieval testament research focuses on late medieval town’s material culture. In the 1980s, Ahasver von Brandt’s groundlaying studies (Mittelalterliche Bürgertestamente: Neuerschlossene Quellen zur Geschichte der materiellen und geistigen Kultur, 1973, and id., Regesten der Lübecker Bürgertestamente des Mittelalters, 2 vols., 1964/1972) were taken up by a number of scholars from Germany (both the Federal Republic of Germany and especially the German Democratic Republic) and Austria (such as Urs Martin Zahnd, “Spätmittelalterliche Bürgertestamente als Quelle zu Realienkunde und Sozialgeschichte,” MIÖG 96 [1988]: 55–78; Gerhard Jaritz, “Österreichische Bürgertestamente als Quelle zur Erforschung städtischer Lebensformen des Spätmittelalters,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus 8 [1984]: 249–64; Paul Baur, Testament und Bürgerschaft: Alltagsleben und Sachkultur im spätmittelalterlichen Konstanz, 1989; Johannes Schildhauer, “Tägliches Leben und private Sphäre des spätmittelalterlichen Bürgertums. Untersuchungen auf der Grundlage Stralsunder Bürgertestamente,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 36/37 [1988]: 608–14; Lothar Kolmer, “Spätmittelalterliche Testamente: Forschungsergebnisse und Forschungsziele. Regensburger Testamente im Vergleich,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 52 [1989]: 475–500 – on the Regensburg sources, cf. also Thomas Paringer and Olivier Richard, “Die Testamente der Reichsstadt Regensburg aus Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit: Entstehung – Überlieferung – Quellenwert,” Archivalische Zeitschrift 87 [2005]: 197–234). This went hand in hand with the newly arising interest in material culture (‘Realienkunde’), particularly fostered by the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Krems). This scholarly tradition has not faded yet, and within German scholarship remains especially vital among scholars of Hanseatic history (cf. among others Hans-Dieter Loose, Hamburger Testamente 1351–1400, 1970; Susanne Mosler-Christoph, Die materielle Kultur in den Lüneburger Testamenten 1323

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bis 1500, 1998; Kerstin Dronske, “Lübecker Testamente als Quellen zur Kulturgeschichte des Spätmittelalters,” Beiträge zur hansischen Kultur-, Verfassungs- und Schiffahrtsgeschichte, ed. Horst Wernicke and Nils Jörn, 1998, 61–66; Marie-Luise Favreau-Lilie, “Die Pilgerfahrt nach Santiago de Compostela: Perspektiven hansestädtischer Testamente,” Der Kult des Apostels Jakobus d.Ä. in norddeutschen Hansestädten, ed. Hewdig Röckelein, 2005, 27–48; Stephanie Rüther, “Zwischen Stand und Geschlecht: Weibliches Selbstverständnis im Spiegel lübeckischer Testamente des Spätmittelalters,” Der Blick auf sich und die anderen: Selbst- und Fremdbild von Frauen und Männern in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Sarnowsky et al., 2007, 67–93; Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt, “Das Testament des hamburgischen Protonotars Johannes Kloth vom 17. Januar 1538,” ibid., 223–35). Still, such enterprises are certainly no German ‘Sonderweg’, but are being undertaken from scholars all over the globe (cf. amongst others, Karine J. Dauteuille, Household Materials and Social Networks in Norwich 1371–1500: a Study of Testamentary Evidence, 2005; Antonius Cornelis Marie Kappelhof, “Testamenten als bron voor de materiële cultuur,” Van bos tot stad. Opgravingen in ’s-Hertogenbosch, ed. Hans L. Janssen, 1983, 184–87; Bronnen voor de geschiedenis van de materiele cultuur: staten van goed en testamenten, ed. Frank Daelemans, 1988; Kathleen M. Ahsley, “Material and Symbolic Gift Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills,” Medieval Fabrications. Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and other Cultural Imaginings, ed. Jane Burns, 2005, 137–46). For the last decades, there are also notably increasing efforts in testament research from and about Eastern Europe (cf. especially Pozdne stredoveké testamenty v ceskych ´ mestech: Prameny, metodologie a formy vyuzití ˇ [Late medieval wills from Czech towns. Sources, methology, and modes of usage], ed. Katerina Jí sová ˇ and Eva Dole zalová, ˇ 2005; moreover: Rafal Kubicki, “Testamenty elblaskie z XIV-poczatków XVI w. Charakterystyka wraz z lista; testatorów w ukladzie chronologicznym [Last wills from Elbing, 14th –16thc. Characteristics and a chronological list of testators],” Rocznik elblaski 20 [2006]: 199–208 – cf. also the noteworthy survey for early-modern history by Václav Bu zek, ˇ “Nachlaßinventare, Testamente, Heiratsverträge: Wege zur bürgerlichen Alltagskultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der tschechischen Geschichtsforschung,” Tallinna Linnavalitsus 16 [2005]: 205–27). E. Groups of Testators Emerging from the increasing interest in questions of women’s and gender history, from the 1970s onwards there has been a vivid research on female property and devotion in last wills (Thelma Jexlev, “Wills, Deeds and Charters as Sources for the History of Medieval Women,” Aspects of Female

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Existence, ed. Birte Carle, 1980, 28–40; Linda Guzzetti, “Women’s Inheritance and Testamentary Practices in Late Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Venice and Ghent,” The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries, ed. Ellen E. Kittell and Mary Ann Suydam, 2004, 79–108; Maria Luisa Lombardo, Mirella Vitali Morelli, “Donne e testamenti a Roma nel Quattrocento,” Donna a Roma tra medioevo e età moderna N.S. 25/26 [1992/93]: 23–130; Stefanie Rüther, “Spiegel der Frömmigkeit: Die Testamente bürgerlicher Frauen der Stadt Lübeck in vorreformatorischer Zeit,” Otium 4 [1996]: 39–48; Elena Brizio, “La dote nella normativa statuaria e nella practica testamentaria senese (fine sec. XII-metà sec. XIV),” Bullettino senese di storia patria 111 [2004]: 9–39), including also the last wills of servant women (Giovanna Benaduis, “Investing the riches of the poor: servant women and their last wills,” AHR 109 [2004]: 805–26). Last years also have seen an increasing interest among scholars for Jewish (Noël Coulet, “Testaments juifs d’Aix-en-Provence (1400–1450),” Minorités juives, pouvoirs, littérature politique en péninsule ibérique, France et Italia au Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-Pierre Barraqué and Véronique Lamazou-Duplan, 2006, 295–307; Pietro Zorattini, “‘Raccomando prima l’anima mia all’infinito et omnipotente Iddio de Israel …’ Morte e testatori ebrei a Venezia nell’età moderna,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 40/41 [2004]: 129–58; Burns, The Jews in the Notarial Culture, loc. cit., 1996; extensive bibliography is provided by David Malkiel, “Jews and Wills in Renaissance Italiy: a Case Study in the Jewish-Christian Cultural Encounter,” Italia: Studi e ricerche sulla storia, la cultura e la letteratura degli ebrei d’Italia 12 [1996]: 7–70) and – albeit to a much lesser extent – Muslim testamentary practices (cf. Ignacio Ferrando Frutos, “Testamento y compraventa en Toledo (años 1214 y 1215): dos documentos árabes de los mozárabes de Toledo,” Collectanea christiana orientalia 4 [2007]: 41–54). Ultimately, last wills of monarchs and other rulers form a very specific type of source (until far into the modern era) which has regained attention within the last years (cf. Peignot, Choix de testamens, loc. cit., 1829, 293–302; Josiane Barbier, “Testaments et pratique testamentaire dans le royaume franc (VIe-VIIIe siècle),” Sauver son âme et se perpétuer. Transmission du patrimoine et mémoire au haut moyen âge, ed. François Bougard et al., 2005, 7–79, and now, from multiple perspectives both geographically and systematically, Herrscher- und Fürstentestamente im westeuropäischen Mittelalter, ed. Brigitte Kasten, 2008).

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F. ‘Histoire serielle’ – the Impact of the Annales While in earlier accounts usually individual wills caught scholarly interest (a noteworthy collection in this respect is Gabriel Peignot, Choix de testamens anciens et modernes, remarquables par leur importance, leur singularité ou leur bizarrerie, 1829), more recently their serial analysis has come to count among the prime sources for many demographic (e. g., Pierre Dubuis, “Testaments et réprise démographique à la fin du Moyen Âge dans un pays de montagne: le Valais (Suisse) aux XIVe-XVIe siècles,” Annales de démographie historique [1991]: 221–38; Michel Vovelle, “Un préalable à toute histoire serielle: la representativité sociale du testament (XVI–XIX siècles),” Actes notaries: Source de l’histoire social XV–XIX siècles, ed. Bernard Vogler, 1979, 257–77) and – to a lesser extent – prosopographic enterprises within the medieval and early modern period (Wolfgang Reinhard and Mark Häberlein, Augsburger Eliten des 16. Jahrhunderts: Prosopographie wirtschaftflicher und politischer Führungsgruppen 1500–1620, 1996; Jenny Kermode, “The Merchants of Three Northern English Towns,” Profession, Vocation and Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. Cecil H. Clough, 1982, 7–51. Still, prosopographic questions are usually raised with individual wills, e. g., Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, “Il testamento del notaio papale Isembardo da Pecorara (†1279): Note di prosopografia curiale duecentesca,” Palaeographica diplomatica et archivistica studi in onore di Giulio Battelli, ed. Scuola Speciale per gli Archivisti e Bibliotecari, vol. 2, 1979, 219–51). Research in medieval and early-modern wills – especially those searching for contemporary mentalities – has been enduringly fertilized by the post-war ‘Annales’ school (cf. amongst others Vovelle, “Un préalable à toute histoire serielle,” loc. cit., 1979; Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen âge, vers 1320-vers 1480, 1980, and id., “Pour une histoire de la religion,” loc. cit., 1991; Pierre Chanu, La Mort à Paris, XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIe siècles, 1978), although at the same time valuable research has been published from other sides (e. g., Marie Simone de Nuce de Lamothe, “Pieté et charité publique à Toulouse de la fin du XIIIe au milieu du XVe siècle d’après les testaments,” Annales du Midi 76 [1964]: 5–39) which is sometimes overlooked due to the massive publication of ‘Annales’ historians in this field. From the later 1970s onwards, increasing criticism has been raised against the ‘Annales’’ approach, namely for disregarding the family and heirs over the importance of bequests in favor of the ‘memoria’ (cf. John Macmanners, “Death and the French historians,” Mirrors of Mortality Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley, 1980, 106–30; Luigi Donvito, “Ricerche e discussioni recenti in Francia su un tema di storia della mentalità: gli atteggiamenti

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collettivi di fronte alla morte,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 13 [1977]: 376–89; Burgess, “Late Medieval Wills,” loc. cit., 1999). G. Getting Started Useful insight in medieval testament research is provided by the collected conference papers entitled Nolens intestatus decedere: Il testamento come fonte della storia religiosa e sociale (1985), vols. 59–62 of the Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin (entitled Actes à cause de mort, 1992–1994), and more recently, Seelenheil und irdischer Besitz: Testamente als Quellen für den Umgang mit den ‘letzten Dingen’, ed. Markwart Herzog and Cecilie Hollberg, 2007, both comprising a wide range of the diverse interests scholars may have in medieval last wills. Only Danish historiography by now has come up with an edition of a rounded corpus of medieval last wills (Kristian S. A. Erslev, Testamenter fra Danmarks Middelalder indtil 1450, 1901) while for the English tradition Jeremy S. Gibson’s repertorium (Wills and where to find them, 1974; also cf. Michael M. Sheehan, “English Wills and the Records of the Ecclesiastical and Civil Jurisdictions,” The Journal of Medieval History 14 [1988]: 3–12) provides a handful tool, and Martin Bertram (“Mittelalterliche Testamente: Zur Entdeckung einer Quellengattung in Italien,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliothek 68 [1988]: 509–45) has given a comprehensive survey on the Italian sources and their respective editions. Select Bibliography. Martin Bertram, “Mittelalterliche Testamente: Zur Entdeckung einer Quellengattung in Italien,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliothek 68 (1988): 509–45; Ahasver von Brandt, Mittelalterliche Bürgertestamente: Neuerschlossene Quellen zur Geschichte der materiellen und geistigen Kultur (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1973); Actes à cause de mort, 4 vols. (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1992–1994); Marie-Therese Lorcin, “Le testament,” A reveiller les morts: La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident medieval, ed. Daniele Alexandre-Bidon and Cecile Treffort (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1993), 143–56; Linda Guzzetti, “Testamentforschung in Europa seit den 1970er Jahren: Bibliographischer Überblick,” Seelenheil und irdischer Besitz. Testamente als Quellen für den Umgang mit den ‘letzten Dingen’, ed. Markwart Herzog and Cecilie Hollberg (Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2007), 17–33; Werner Ogris, “Testament,” Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Dieter Werkmüller et al., 1st ed. [rev. ed. forthcoming], vol. 5 (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1998), 152–65.

Hiram Kümper

Latin Comedies

1872

Latin Comedies A. Introduction The 21 Latin Comedies of the Middle Ages are a hybrid of short narratives told predominantly through monologue and dialogue. They are often sexually explicit, deliberately titillating, and scabrous. The majority of their plots are bawdy, concerned with cuckolded husbands, raped virgins, tricky servants, unscrupulous go-betweens, grossly ugly workers, brawls, a man who urinates on another man, and other fabliau-style subject matter. The Latin Comedies pre-date the fabliaux, however; the fabliaux date from the 13th century (Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux, 1986, 4), while the earliest of the Latin Comedies dates from late in the 11th century (Peter Dronke, “A Note on Pamphilus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 [1979]: 225–26) and the majority of them were written in the mid-12th century. Similar as the Latin Comedies are to the Old French fabliaux in subject matter, they are altogether different in style. They are full of mythological references, elaborate word play, and rhetorical devices, and are told in self-consciously clever Latin, in elegiac distichs for the most part (two are in hexameters). Since they first became an object of scholarly study, the major questions about them have been: were they written to be performed theatrically, and what is their relationship to the fabliaux. B. Initial Investigations Although several comedies were published in the late 19th century, serious scholarly study of them began in the 1920s, first with Edmond Faral’s path-breaking “Le fabliau latin au moyen âge” (Romania 50 [1924]: 321–85). Faral discussed 11 of the comedies, summarizing their plots, analyzing their relationship to late classical Latin works, considering their dates and authorship, and describing their style. These are narratives, improperly termed comedies, he argued, contending that none of them could be performed, not even those that contained the most monologue and dialogue. Faral saw these works as an outgrowth of Roman comedy and the product of the interest in rhetoric in the cathedral schools of the Loire valley. Although he did not claim outright that the Old French fabliau had arisen from these Latin works, he maintained that in spirit and by the nature of their subjects, once divested of the deceptive ornaments of their style, the Comedies were in fact Latin fabliaux. Two years later, in 1926, Joachim Rolland followed Faral’s article with bibliographical accounts of 14 of the Comedies (Le théâtre comique en France avant le XVe siècle: essai bibliographique, 1926). For

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each, Rolland listed and described manuscripts, editions, imitations, translations into various languages, and bibliography. Gustave Cohen made available the first collection of Comedies, 15 edited texts with facing-page French translations (La ‘comédie’ latine en France au XIIe siècle, vol. 2, 1931). Cohen collaborated with 13 individual editors and translators, a separate editor for each work (Paul Maury and Alphonse Dain each edited two). Cohen’s learned and substantial introduction to the collection established the nature of the Comedies and the important points about them that scholars would emphasize and debate for the next 75 years. Although, like Faral, the majority of Cohen’s collaborators did not believe that the Comedies they edited were written for performance, Cohen argued that the amount of monologue and dialogue in them indicates that they were performed. One, Babio, is made up entirely of dialogue, and another, Pamphilus, contains only one line of narration. Cohen suggested that the Comedies may have been publicly recited by students or enacted by a jongleur who played all the characters himself. Cohen also discussed the Comedies’ heavy use of classical myth and colors of rhetoric, analyzed the correctness of their scholastic Latin – it is highly correct – described their prosody, gave examples of scholarly jokes that would appeal to students, acknowledged that these works belong to the cult of the flesh and voluptuousness, and discussed the scholarly milieu in which they were generated and the ecclesiastical importance of their authors. In particular, Cohen insisted that these Comedies were the product of the Loire valley, and that even Babio, whose manuscripts were probably all from England, was French. C. Genre: True Plays or Narratives? Not until 1979, when Dronke pushed the dating of the comedies back to the late 11th century, did anyone suspect how early some of these works were written. Cohen had dated the earliest Comedies in the second half of the 12th century. Frederic J. E. Raby identified the comedies as “the last fruit of twelfth-century humanism on its literary side” and published plot summaries of all those that Cohen had collected (History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages 2, 1934, 69). Raby dismissed out of hand Cohen’s idea that the Comedies were to be performed, saw the amount of dialogue in them as “accidental artifice,” and argued that two of the works were English. Gustavo Vinay, building on Faral’s article and Cohen’s introduction, continued the genre discussions of the Comedies (“La commedia latina del secolo XII,” Studi medievali N.S.18 [1952]: 209–71). In 1957 Per Nykrog, as part of his dramatic reevaluation of the audience of the fabliaux (Les Fabliaux, xlix-lii), denied Faral’s 1924 suggestion that the Old French fabliaux grow

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out of the Latin comedies. While Nykrog acknowledged that the themes, sources of comedy, and general spirit of the two genres are all analogous, he contended that they developed side by side, the two languages producing similar grotesque comedy, rather than the one genre’s developing from the other. The French fabliau lacks just the traits that most distinguish the Latin comedies, Nykrog argued: tricky slaves, names derived from classical literature, and heavy use of the poetical arts of the school of the Loire. Nykrog accepted that the Comedies began in the mid-12th century with Geta, a work derived from Plautus, and he was particularly insistent that the fabliau spirit not be seen as imitation of Plautus. Dronke’s dating of De nuntio sagaci in 1080 does away with the urgency of Nykrog’s argument. In 1969, Jürgen Beyer continued the discussion of genre in a chapter on the elegiac Comedies where he debated again whether they are true plays or fabliaux in Latin (Schwank und Moral: Untersuchungen zum altfranzösischen Fabliau und verwandten Formen, 18–33). In 1975, Joachim Suchomski discussed sequentially the works Cohen had published, emphasizing the education and sophistication of the audience for which they were intended (‘Delectatio’ und ‘Utilitas’: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur, 110–157). Suchomski followed this book with facing-page text translations into German of seven comedies: De tribus sociis II, De clericis et rustico, Geta, Aulularia, Alda, Babio, and Lidia (Lateinische Comediae des 12. Jahrhunderts, 1979). D. Editions and Translations Further editing and translating of the comedies followed Cohen’s important edition. Cohen’s editors had translated 15 Comedies into French. Faral re-edited and re-translated one of the 15 (De Babione, 1948). With his translation and text, Faral included a discussion of Babio’s style and argued, in opposition to Cohen, that Babio is English in origin. Malcolm M. Brennan published Faral’s text with an English translation in Babio, A Twelfth Century Profane Comedy (1968), and, in support of Cohen, argued in favor of its status as a play written for performance. In 1973, Claude-Alain Chevallier included a French translation of Babio in Théâtre comique du moyen-âge, suggesting further acceptance of these works as plays. Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson published an English translation of Lidia (The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux, 1971, 206–33). The adulterous wife in Lidia who tricks her husband into watching her having sex with his squire while the husband believes he is seeing an illusion may have been a source for Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. In 1974, Bruno Roy added an important element to the arguments about the theatricality of the Comedies (“Arnulf of Orleans and the Latin

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‘Comedy’,” Speculum 49 [1974]: 258–66). Roy presented a gloss on Ovid’s Remedia amoris that suggests that Arnulf of Orleans, the glosser, writing in the second half of the 12th century, thought of Pamphilus as a theatrical performance. Keith Bate (Three Latin Comedies, 1976) produced an edition of Geta, Babio, and Panphilus to introduce them to university students studying medieval Latin. He edited each comedy from a single manuscript and furnished each with an introduction and notes, but minimal textual apparatus. Geta, written by Vitalis of Blois, is based on Plautus’s Amphytruo. Bate argued that Vitalis knew that Plautus was a playwright and “knew enough about theatre to write a play if he wanted to.” A good case can be made that Geta is a play, Bate says, “so long as we realize that medieval stages and stage conventions were not the same as ours.” Supporting Cohen’s arguments, Bate specifies the inclusion of ‘narrative’ which could be spoken by a narrator, and of verbs of speaking such as inquit which can also be found in religious drama. Bate pointed out Vitalis’s topical adjustments to his Roman original to make it more appealing to his audience. To ridicule the philosophy taught in Paris, for instance, Vitalis turns his major figure, Plautus’s Roman general, into a scholar too blind to reality to recognize his wife’s adultery. Ian Thomson introduced English readers to the Comedies in an overview article which discussed the major issues raised by earlier scholarship (“Latin ‘Elegiac Comedy’ of the Twelfth Century,” Versions of Medieval Comedy, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers, 1977, 51–66). For readers unfamiliar with the Comedies, Thomson gives several brief plot summaries and includes a substantial, richly illustrated section concerning rhetorical embellishments. Thomson dismissed both Faral’s argument that the comedies led to the fabliaux and Cohen’s argument that these are plays, contending that “it is impossible to imagine these histriones, mimi and ioculatores staging a full-length comedy in Latin hexameters or elegiac couplets.” Thomson concluded his overview, however, by envisaging students giving dramatic readings of the comedies, or a single reader changing voices to change characters. In a major contribution for English readers, Alison Goddard Elliott published translations of Cohen’s editions of Pamphilus, Geta, Aulularia, Babio, Alda, Lidia, and The Three Girls (Seven Medieval Latin Comedies, 1984). Elliott introduced her translations with a lengthy updated overview of the issues Cohen had raised, stressing the comedies’ combination of philosophy and obscenity and their parodying of scholasticism and the medieval philosophical schools. She pointed out that the authors, “men of great learning and high position,” had used Ovid’s Art of Love and Amores, as would be expected, but also his Heroides. By 1984, more and more scholars were arguing the posi-

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tion Cohen had originally taken, that the comedies were works for the stage. Although Elliott still said that not many commentators agreed that these works were theatrical, she herself, building on the work of Richard Axton (European Drama of the Early Middle Ages, 1974), argued that several of the comedies could be stage plays and that Pamphilus, the most famous of them, shows lots of evidence of being a drama. Elliott argued in particular for the possible contribution of miming to these works, citing medieval descriptions in which mimes danced and represented action through gestures. She also cited condemnation of miming by ecclesiastical authorities and described the usefulness for Geta, Babio, and Alda of the large phalluses carried by classical mimes. Elliott accompanied her translations with a substantial, briefly annotated bibliography. E. Eight-Volume Collection of Texts The most important of all the translations and publications of texts of the comedies, the 8 volume Commedie Latine del XII e XIII Secolo, under the general editorship of Ferruccio Bertini, appeared between 1976 and 2000. The first six volumes present 21 comedies (one appears in two versions), edited by separate scholars. The final two volumes offer a concordance to the entire collection. Each volume begins with an analysis and overview of the criticism and commentary that appeared since the previous volume was published; these introductions are written by Bertini. Each volume concludes with a bibliography concerning the works included. Each newly edited text is separately introduced by its editor with a summary of its story and a discussion of the specific issues it raises. All texts are matched with Italian facing-page translations. This major scholarly achievement adds 6 comedies to Cohen’s original collection and provides definitive texts with full scholarly apparatus for all 22 works. F. Pamphilus The most famous and literarily the most important of the comedies is Pamphilus, one of the very widely read texts of the Middle Ages. It has survived in 170 manuscripts from throughout the continent, was widely cited in florilegia, quoted or alluded to by a large number of authors including Chaucer, Gower, and Skelton, and the word “pamphlet” derives from it (Elliott, Seven Comedies, 1984, xxxiii; Stefano Pittaluga, ed., Pamphilus, Commedie Latine del XII e XIII Secolo, 3, 1980, 41–44; Joseph de Morawski, ed., Pamphile et Galatée, 1917, 13–20). Most important of all, Pamphilus served as a significant source for Le Roman de la rose, Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and La Celestina (Ernest Langlois, Origines et

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sources du Roman de la rose, 1891, 27; Thomas Jay Garbáty, “The Pamphilus Tradition in Ruiz and Chaucer,” PQ 46 [1967]: 457–70; Morawski, ed., Pamphile). Garbáty provided the first English translation of Pamphilus in support of his argument that Chaucer had used it as a source (“Pamphilus, de amore: An Introduction and Translation,” Chaucer Review 2 [1967]: 108–34). G. Misogyny in the Comedies Current commentary on these stories of lust, sexual trickery, and sexual violence now asks the socially oriented and contextual questions earlier scholars had avoided, in particular questions about the Comedies’ misogyny. Pamphilus, the story of a rape, was used as a basic school text (Das Registrum multorum auctorum des Hugo von Trimberg, ed. Johannes Huemer, 1888, cited in Marjorie Curry Woods, “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland, 1996, 56–86; Anne Howland Schotter, “Rape in the Medieval Latin Comedies,” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson, Christine M. Rose, 2001, 241–53). Its Latin was simpler than Ovid’s and it was probably studied just before his poetry. Woods argues for the place of the rape within the heroic and seductive classical traditions of rape, but Elliott argues for the realism of Pamphilus’s portraits and the emotion generated when Galatea is raped (Elliott, Seven Comedies, 1984, xxix). Anne Schotter analyzes the interplay of language and force as instruments of power in the context of gender in Pamphilus, and she writes that “In giving voice to a female rape victim, the poem counters the solipsism of male courtly love rhetoric” by exposing actual male/female power relations (“Rhetoric versus Rape in the Medieval Latin ‘Pamphilus’,” PQ 71 [1992]: 243–60). Gretchen Mieszkowski analyzes the misogynistic interactions between go-betweens and women in five of the Comedies (Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, 2006, 20–38). Select Bibliography Ferruccio Bertini, general ed., Commedie latine del XII e XIII secolo, 8 vols. (Genoa: Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medievale, 1976–2000); Gustave Cohen, general ed., La ‘comédie’ latine en France au XIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Société d’édition “Les belles-lettres,” 1931); Alison Goddard Elliott, ed. and trans., Seven Medieval Latin Comedies. (New York: Garland, 1984); Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Gretchen Mieszkowski

Legal Texts

1878

Legal Texts A. Texts and the Written Law For the Middle Ages the generic term “legal texts” comprises at least four major concepts of normative text genres, given that it necessarily includes a certain dimension of prescriptivity and excludes all forms of individual, written legal act between single legal subjects (cf. Digestae 1.3.8), such as contracts: (a.) law in a narrow sense, as given by a state-like or deliberative authority (cf. Armin Wolf, Gesetzgebung in Europa 1100–1500. Zur Entstehung der Territorialstaaten, 1996; Léopold Genicot, La loi, 1977), (b.) records or codifications of customary law or legal customs (cf. Gewohnheitsrecht und Rechtsgewohnheiten im Mittelalter, ed. Gerhard Dilcher et al., 1992), (c.) juridical texts, which in most cases appear as interpretation or application of the previous two, but do unfold long-termed, more or less autonomous normative influence (cf. John Gilissen, La coutume, 1982). Besides, these secular phenomena of legal writing expands (d.) the large and diverse sphere of Canon law (for good introduction: James Brundage, Medieval Canon Law: An Introduction, 1995; also cf. Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, 7 vols., 1935ff.), which by its reception blends not only into secular legal texts (cf. Jacques Berlioz et al., Identifier Sources et Citations, 1994, 145–189), but also into penitentials and other catechetic writings for its specific nearness to religious norms and values. Furthermore, in some ways all these four concepts may relate to or even blur into each other, especially on their respective peripheries. B. Legal History: General Approach and Research Aids Traditionally, legal history approaches the horizon of European medieval law and legal thinking by contrasting two developments. From the rise of the Bologna law school (il miracolo di Bologna) in the 12th century on, the ius commune, the further development of Roman law (corpus iuris civilis, plus their scholarly glossae and commentarii) and its conjunction with elements of Canon law (together addressed as the so-called “learned law”) enfolded its influence as a groundwork in normative, systematic, and terminological respect throughout Europe (with the British Isles being a particular case; cf. Richard Henry Helmholtz, The Ius Commune in England: Four Studies, 2001). The last decades have brought up a variety of thorough introductions and research aids on the history of European ius commune (e. g., Eltjo Schrage and Harry Dondorp, Utrumque Ius: Een inleiding tot de bestudering van de bronnen van het middeleeuwse geleerde recht, 1987 [Germ. trans. 1992];

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Jacques Berlioz et al., Identifier sources et citations, 1994). Most relevant for all questions concerning medieval Roman law remains Helmut Coing’s Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte (1973) and the book series Ius Romanum Medii Aevi (57 vols., 1961–1981) offering a rich fund of both sources and literary erudition on its reception and further development, lately accompanied by the two volumes of Maximiliane Kriechbaum and Hermann Lange (Römisches Recht im Mittelalter, 1997/ 2006; also cf. Das römische Recht im Mittelalter, ed. Etljo Schrage, 1987). For immanent questions concerning the Corpus iuris civilis not only the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Roman Law (1958), but also educational handbooks of the 19th and earlier 20th century still can be especially helpful. The useful Romeinsrechtelijk Handwoordenboek (ed. J. Ankum and A. Hartkamp, 1973) unfortunately is only available in Dutch. Latest political developments of our times toward an increasingly coalescing Europe have truly fertilized studies on its “common legal roots” again (Manilo Bellomo, L’Europa del diritto comune, 6th ed. 1993, 1st ed. 1979 [Engl. trans. 1995, German trans. 2005]; Maurizio Lupoi, Alle radici del mondo giuridico europeo. Saggio storico-comparativo, 1999 [Engl. trans. 2000]; Kultur- und rechtshistorische Wurzeln Europas, ed. Jörg Wolff, 2006). The idealistic contrast to the catholicity of the ius commune is provided by national, regional, and local laws or legal customs (ius proprium), which moreover were – again in contrast to the learned law – no subject of university teaching (cf. Manilo Bellomo, “‘Ius commune’ e ‘ius proprium’: Riflessioni su tendenze e aspetti della storiografia giuridica europea sul medioevo,” Excerptiones iuris: Studies in Honor of André Gouron, ed. Bernard Durand, 2000, 35–47). These of course can only be adequately examined in studies of more focused perspective, and are usually subject to national handbooks in legal history, while those with a European coverage in most cases exemplarily restrict themselves to spotlights on the Italian or French (= early reception of Roman law), the German (= late and fragmented reception) and English (= less and complex reception) development (An Introduction to European Legal History, ed. O. F. Robinson et al., 1985; Hunt Janin, Medieval Justice: Cases and Law in France, England, and Germany, 500–1500, 2004; Hans Hattenhauer Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, 4th ed. 2005, 1st ed. 1998). Nowadays it is widely unquestioned that the systematic distinction between ius proprium and ius commune, as a concept enfolded chiefly within the normative hierarchies of early modern jurisprudence, can only very inadequately picture the vast variety of coeval concepts of “law” in the Middle Ages (Rechtsbegriffe im Mittelalter, ed. Bernd Kannowski and Albrecht Cordes, 2002; Rechtsveränderung im politischen und sozialen Kontext mittelalterlicher Rechtsvielfalt, ed. Stefan

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Esders and Christine Reinle, 2005), yet seems indispensable under certain pragmatic circumstances in absence of alternative descriptive concepts to get a grip on these common legal roots. Still, this specific approach necessarily focuses on the Western Latin tradition masking out the Byzantine, Jewish, and Islamic legal culture. C. Byzantine, Jewish, and Islamic Law Byzantine Law shares basis with the Western ius commune in the Justinian Corpus iuris civilis, but developed rather independently by patriarchal legislation, codification of legal customs (such as the nomos rodion nautikos), imperial codifications (ekloge et al.), as well as legal handbooks and similar elaborations. The best introduction to Byzantine Law and its literature still is Peter E. Pieler’s (“Byzantinische Rechtsliteratur,” Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 2, ed. Herbert Hunger, 1978, 343–480), while most of its sources are compiled in the series Jus Graecoromanum (ed. D. Zepos, 8 vols., 1931) and Fontes minores (ed. D. Simon, 11 vols., 1976ff.). Medieval Jewish law (usually being distinguished from Roman, Canon and secular law) has since the beginning of the 20th century become an own vivid field of research (cf. Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, 1997). In contrast, the study of medieval Jewish law (halakhah), which does not exactly know any distinction between sacral and profane (hence God is the source of all kind of law), but in its concrete implementation owes much to authoritative rabbis’ responsa on legal and religious prescriptions, remains an orchid in the fields of medieval history (cf. Arieh Grabois, Les sources hébraïques médiévales, vol. 1, 1987), although many thousands responsa have derived from the Middle Ages and Jewish civil law has been undergoing diverse changes during the post-Talmudic period (cf. Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 1964, rpt. 1972; Neil S. Hecht, An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, 1996). Medieval Islamic law (shari^a) is based upon four basic pillars: (a.) the Koran (quar#an) as the word of God as the basis of all law, (b.) the example of authorities (sunna), (c.) consensus (igma^) of juridical and religious savants (faqih), and (d.) analogy (qiyas) to deduce a new solution (far^) from one already being agreed upon (asl). For the latest, Shiite doctrine draws on one’s own opinion (ra#y) and ratio (^aql) instead. Basic information on the formation, system, and intellectual background of Islamic law is provided by Joseph Schacht’s (An Introduction to Islamic Law, 1966) classic introduction, lately being accompanied by Wael B. Hallaq’s (A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 1997) history of legal ideas. Kevin Jacques’ (Authority, conflict, and the transmission of diversity in medieval Islamic law, 2006) thorough study on diversity in

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Islamic jurisprudence includes bibliographical references to current titles on more specific matters. D. Getting Started Good starting points for an outline of medieval legal texts including all the diverse aspects previously mentioned provide the respective articles in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (ed. Strayer, vol. 7, 1986, 388–528) and the more specific Grand dictionnaire de droit du moyen âge (ed. Balon 1972) as well as the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, revised edition (5 vols., 2004ff.). Yet, for contemporary legal history “legal texts” have currently moved slightly from the center of interest compared to matters of crime and deviance, pre- or extra-legal regulation of legal conflicts, and the consensual dimension of law and jurisdiction, trying to situate its concrete role in the process of normative foundation (cf. Claude Gauvard et al., “Normes, droit, rituels et pouvoir,” Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Âge en France et en Allemagne, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle and Jean-Claude Schmitt, 2003, 461–92). Select Bibliography. Manilo Bellomo, L’Europa del diritto comune (6th ed., Roma: Il cigno Galileo Galilei, 1993); Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, vol. 1: Mittelalter (1100–1500), ed. Helmut Coing (Munich: Beck, 1973); John Gilissen, Introduction historique du droit (Brussels: Bruylant, 1979); Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Charta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Armin Wolf, Gesetzgebung in Europa 1100–1500: Zur Entstehung der Territorialstaaten (Munich: Beck, 1996).

Hiram Kümper

Letters A. Introduction In a sense all medieval letters were written documents addressed to absent persons or groups. This definition was part of the medieval discourse of the art of writing letters, but despite this explicit definition interpreters are confronted with what a medieval letter meant to contemporaries and what preoccupied them, for a distinction of discourse, practice and historical interpretation in this context see Martin Camargo, “Where’s the Brief? The Ars Dictaminis and Reading/Writing Between the Lines,” The Late Medieval

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Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz. Vol. 1 of: Disputatio. An International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages, 1996, 1–18. Throughout the Middle Ages, different forms of letters coexisted and there was also structural change in the diachronical perspective. Letters in a more general sense of ‘short book’ (brevis libellus, vulg.-lat. breve scriptum) could be more or less artificial private or public documents in Latin or vernacular languages aiming at reciprocal exchange. Letters (lat. breve, litterae, epistola, charta) could signify and convey juridical meaning. Until the turn of the 13th century, the mostly Latin letters were undated artefacts. The rhetorical technique of writing letters was strongly influenced by letters of ancient authors that were preserved and studied in collections. Letters could also be intended for publication. The conservative discipline of epistolography (lat. ars dictaminis) taught writers to be attentive to social hierarchies in formulas of address, salutation and protocol more generally. Writing letters was dedicated to following the rules and imitating, achieving or even exceeding earlier examples. The predominant tendency to rhetorical aemulatio reduced leeway for expressing feelings in individual ways. Letters follow strictly a protocol on the level of expressions and composition. Communication by letters was mainly restricted to the court and other centers of professional literacy, although since the 14th century there is evidence for increasing communication by letters within families and merchant companies. Researchers frequently highlight the enormous gap between unedited source material and the material available in regests or editions for research; another factor is the notorious geographical diversity of letters that allows only comparatively short and exemplary studies. While an increase in quantity of letters, due to increasingly intensive written culture, must be admitted, overall quantitative approaches would lack the necessary empirical basis (Bernd Schneidmüller, “Briefe und Boten im Mittelalter,” Deutsche Postgeschichte: Essays und Bilder, ed. Wolfgang Loetz, 1989, 10–23, esp. 11). While the main focus is on European letters, there is also much research on other cultures, see the relevant articles in Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978, 199–242. B. Historical Background Several excellent comprehensive summaries regarding the history of the genre of letters exist (F. J. Schmale, “Brief, Briefliteratur, Briefsammlungen,” LexMA 2, 648; R. M. G. Nickisch, “Brief,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gerd Ueding, vol. 2, 1994, 60–86, esp. 70–72). Overviews are available from mediaevalists like James Murphy and Giles Constable, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory From

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Saint Augustine to the Renaissance, 1974, 194–268; Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections, 1976. A number of disciplines have studied letters in the light of their specific interest in theology, historical law, private, religious life or economic activities as well as regarding the topics on which letters were written and how these determined the social context in which letters were written and exchanged. For bibliographical overviews in the contexts of matter like writing techniques and materials, letters in the context of the economy, politics, religion, women, private or even love letters in the context of different European nations see Janet Luehring and Richard J. Utz, “Letter Writing in the Late Middle Ages (ca. 1250–1600): An Introductory Bibliography of Critical Studies, 191–229,” The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz. Vol. 1 of: Disputatio: An International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages, 1996, 123–46. What is now needed is an account pointed toward the heuristic potential of letters in the light of current research and its position in research history. Not all letters were letters in the direct sense of the word. Humanists like Poggio communicated in letters publicly, for them letter-writing was a sort of pamphleteering, see Helene Harth, “Überlegungen zur Öffentlichkeit des humanistischen Briefs am Beispiel der Poggio-Korrespondenz,” Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann, 1998, 127–33. More on the political scene, open letters were pragmatical literary means to build counter-publics, see Erdmann Weyrauch, “‘Offene Briefe’ im 16. Jahrhundert. Bemerkungen und Beispiele,” Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann, 1998, 191–204 (see also the entry on “Communication” in this Handbook). Many developments in letterwriting and publication of collections express historical interests and attempted to copy historical styles conceived as higher; this was the case when Petrarch discovered Cicero’s familiar letters, other humanists had been inspired by newly discovered antique examples as well, see Peter L. Schmidt, “Die Rezeption des römischen Freundschaftsbriefes (Cicero – Plinius) im frühen Humanismus (Petrarca – Coluccio Salutati),” Der Brief im Zeitalter des Renaissance, ed. Franz Josef Worstbrock, 1983, 25–59. Petrarch’s familiar letters were inspired by the antique examples, for a recent edition see Pétrarque, Lettres familières, 4 vols., 2002–2004, here esp. vol. 1, 2002. Among the humanists’ letter-writing manuals, the instruction Erasmus gave was the most comprehensive one, see Kurt Smolak, “Einleitung,” Erasmus von Rotterdam, De conscribendis epistolis. Anleitung zum Briefschreiben (Auswahl), ed. Kurt Smolak, 1980, IX–LXXXVI, here XXXI–XXXIII, and for other humanists’ work, XLIII–LIX. The more than 80 editions until 1600, as well as the 30 edi-

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tions until Erasmus’s death in 1536, demonstrate that he was received by teachers of letter-writing or, in the light of selected editions, by students. Letter-collections are often used to create an image of persons (Heinz Becker, “Die Briefausgabe als Dokumentenbiographie,” Probleme der Brief-Edition, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Walter Müller Seidel, 1977, 11–26). The life of Erasmus is read by biographers in his letters, see Alois Gerlo, “Erasmus von Rotterdam: Sein Selbstporträt in seinen Briefen,” Der Brief im Zeitalter der Renaissance, ed. Franz Josef Worstbrock, 1983, 7–24. In the case of Annaeus Seneca’s letters exchanged with St. Paul, fictitious letters served the purpose to characterize the philosopher as Christian, see Der apokryphe Briefwechsel zwischen Seneca und Paulus: Zusammen mit dem Brief des Mordechai an Alexander und dem Brief des Annaeus Seneca über Hochmut und Götterbilder, ed. Alfons Fürst, 2006. Regarding the social standing of letter writers, reading medieval letters is comparable to reading antique examples; Cicero’s Ad familiares, e. g., is one of the few letter collections to individuals where the letters were not mainly selected by the high standing of the interlocutors. The history of letter-collections more generally has not been written, yet, see Siegfried Sudhoff, “Brief und Gegenbrief als Problem der Brief-Edition,” Probleme der BriefEdition, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Walter Müller Seidel, 1977, 27–40, here 28. The heuristic relevance of how letters were selected has, nevertheless, recently been highlighted, see Barbara Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft, 2006. The vast numbers of letters were subject to different filters: as a rule, the more concrete and recent in character letters were, the less likely were they to be saved. Several neighboring genres are a corollary of the medieval production and reception of letters, i. e., collections of letter concepts and formulas, see Friedrich Riederer, Spiegel der wahren Rhetorik, 1492, or Heinrich Bebel, Commentaria epistularum conficiendariam, 1516 (first in 1506). Especially in judicial contexts, such formulas helped the writer in standard situations to create effective texts by variating a given set of formulations. Letters show a high degree of alterity in comparison to modern examples: salutatio, exordium, narratio, petitio, and conclusio were not equally charged with communicative function; in the light of a more normative point of view of Frankg’s letter writing manual, the petitio was the most important part, taking into service all others parts, see Fabian Frankg, Ein Cantzley und Titel büchlein darinnen gelernt wird wie man sendebriefe förmlich schreiben und einem j(e)dlichen seinen gebürlichen Titel geben sol (…), 1531, rpt. 1979, fol. VIII. The professionalization helped to raise intellectual efficiency. These were not those letters that were collected by monastic institutions and copied in manuscripts during the

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Carolingian period, such as those of Alkuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Hinkmar von Reims, Bonifatius, Lul. Some collection mirror the intellectual level and geographical breadth of letter transfer, such as Gerbert of Reims’ (the later Pope Silvester II) collections that included letters from John of Canterbury, Ivo of Chartres, John of Salisbury, Hildebert of Lavardin, Gervasius of Prémontré. This is just to give a couple of examples of how broadly the historical field of medieval letters would have to be described by a comprehensive account. Historical variation is especially large, when the entire period 500–1500 is considered. Major continuities were the general disposition of letters that was in parts strictly structured by rhetorical teaching: while the text body was more flexible to be adapted according to specific communicative needs, the salutation and conclusion were strictly regulated according to the social status or degree of familiarity. On the diachronical basis, there was a remarkable shift around the turn of the 12th to the 13th century, when vernacular languages were increasingly used in letters. Before this time, letter writing had been restricted to those who could afford (besides the expensive writing material) to employ writers and messengers, as well as interpreters of Latin, i. e. graduates of the education system dominated by the Christian church or alumni of the artes liberales. Throughout this development, reading was considered a technique easier to learn than the art of writing. Nevertheless, teaching writing was still confined to Latin examples of rhetorical, linguistic and orthographical patterns. In the following account, the focus is on letters of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance Period. These have recently received special attention and were reevaluated. In contrast to the not-so-densely populated early Middle Ages, the 14th and 15th centuries experienced new expedients of letters such as more urban and princely chancelleries. The increase in written culture soon let not suffice the informal transport of letters with merchants, but made an entire messenger-system necessary. Growing mobility also helped to spread news even faster and further, merchants, students, but also minority groups made interregional and transnational experiences and knowledge a more common phenomenon. The increase in written communication, consequence of growing intensity of bureaucracy, did not necessarily diminish the immense impact of oral communication as practiced with messengers, who could still carry secret information or be instructed by the spoken word only. There are innovative aspects in writing letters, as studies inspired by recent topics in cultural history have shown (Alain Boureau, “The Letterwriting Norm, a Mediaeval Invention,” Correspondence. Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, 1997, 24–58).

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Even with the field narrowed here primarily to the late Middle Ages, there is the need for an analytical approach according to what letters intended to do, see Oskar Reichmann, “Autorenintention und Textsorte,” Textarten im Sprachwandel – nach der Erfindung des Buchdrucks, ed. Rudolf Grosse, and Hans Wellmann, 1996, 119–34. The focus here will be on recent perspectives and problems involved in studying letters, namely in categories of what letters intended to do and by what means. It seems that implicitly, much current research is on track for such a pragmatical turn in studies of the premodern period more generally, the medieval period specifically. While some categorizations are directed towards different “thèmes” as the basis of ordering the evidence, the basis of this is often an interest in the pragmatical context and the intentions of these letters, such as “informer”, “demander”, “conseiller”, “polémiquer et se defendre”, “réconforter”, see Matthieu Arnold, La correspondence de Luther: Étude historique, littéraire et théologique, 1996, 12. To categorize letters by their intentions is an alternative to following categories of medieval (or even ancient) rhetoric like that of familiar and official letters, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance, 1974, 194–268. While such knowledge is useful to gain a historically informed understanding of the material, this would not suffice to overcome positivistic historicism. The following categories are categories of action. Firstly, letters conveying order in, say, judicial contexts are highlighted. The transmission and spread of papal letters from the 4th to 9th centuries and their relevance to medieval Canon Law is described in Detlev Jasper and Horst Fuhrmann, Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages, 2001. The urban correspondences in medieval cities have been edited in some small parts. The early medieval judicial intentions were transported by “missi dominici” throughout the new founded empire in the Carolingian period; like evidence from the later period of intensification these sources are often studied by law historians. Besides such formal examples, illustrated letters were also used to injure the honor of particular persons in cases of unpaid credits, see Matthias Lentz, “Defamatory Pictures and Letters in Late Medieval Germany: The Visualisation of Disorder and Infamy,” The Medieval History Journal 3.1 (2000): 139–60. In a similar way, but only loosely attached to the specific genre of letters, were one-leaf-prints of the Reformation period that could denounce entire social groups like the Jews, see Thomas Kaufmann, “Luther and the Jews,” Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett, 2006, 69–104. The open letter, that some of the “Flugschriften” resemble, had already been a powerful instru-

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ment of conflict between church and Empire of which Petrus Abaelard offers an example in his Historia Calamitatum. When judged by the intentions, even the cultural criticism of the Dunkelmännerbriefe was similar to post-Reformation open letters like those that demonstrate Luther’s polemical energy in smaller prints in the style of (open) letters showing deliberately inappropriate salutations to his opponents like “Wider das Papstumb from Teuffel gestifftet”, see the useful summary of Luther’s repertoire in Luther-Handbuch, ed. Albrecht Beutel, 2005, here 277–94. Letters in this broader sense were media to communicate rules as well as to establish order themselves. Luther’s letters are directed to individuals and groups of different social status and at different occasions (directory of correspondents in WAB 16, 115–49). He was obsessed with writing letters, as especially the evidence of his exiles at the Wartburg 1521–1522 and the Veste Coburg 1530 suggest. Autographs have not survived for all of his letters; our sources are therefore secondary in the sense of unavailability of documents handwritten by him. Especially in letters geared towards more theological topics, questions of authorship have been raised in the light of those usually thought to have cooperated with Luther, Johannes Bugenhagen or Philipp Melanchthon. Letters that conveyed order could be legitimized by their religious qualities. Decretals or other genres used by the church relate to letters of St Paul, the apostle prefigured in part the content and the form of communication in letters of the church, as was shown for letters of Yves of Chartres by Alain Boureau, “The Letter-Writing Norm, a Mediaeval Invention,” Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, 1997, 24–58, here 31. Church-fathers sent letters in the shadow of the Biblical missionary letters; like these earlier examples of say Augustine, some letters took the liberty to extend the letter-genre in the direction of a “liber”, “tractatus”, or a sermon, see Winrich Löhr, “Die Briefsammlung,” Augustin Handbuch, ed. Volker Henning Drecoll, 2007, 416–20, 419. While Luther established his theology by applying it in letters directed to individuals in grieve, his arguments were highly indebted to the medieval “officium consolandi,” see Ute Mennecke-Haustein, Luthers Trostbriefe, 1989, 19. Emphasized by contemporary humanism, the antique tradition and secular duty of consolation were given a new Biblical meaning, derived from St. Paul’s rule to “flere cum flentibus” (Rom. 12,15). Luther’s concept of the human language is two-fold, both capable of expressing divine inspiration and needs of earthly creatures; this lies at the heart of the spiritual poetics (“geistliche Poetik”) of Luther’s consolatory letters, see Ute Mennecke-Haustein, Luthers Trostbriefe, 1989, 273. Luther attempts to unify the Consolandus with God, metaphors like

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‘writing to move someone’s heart’ highlight this concept of evangelical consolation, for innovative traits of Luther’s language concept see Birgit Stolt, Martin Luthers Rhetorik des Herzens, 2000. Letters that were categorized by research as socializing in the sense of forming, expressing, and sustaining relationships within families and among different families, seem to incorporate more autobiographical elements than others. There are some positions claiming that ‘private’ letters are elements of individual emotional feelings, see Matthias Beer, Eltern und Kinder des späten Mittelalters in ihren Briefen: Familienleben in der Stadt des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Nürnbergs (1400–1550), 1990. It seems that Ozment was mainly sharing assumptions but put them to work in a different type of publication, an undoubted achievement that is nevertheless precarily standing between comment, analysis and edition, see Steven Ozment, Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany, 1999. Personal emotional elements had been a literary technique already in learned and spiritual letters of the early Middle Ages, especially Abaelardus promoted this art. This is not without relevance to our judgment of research positions in the reign of “historische Verhaltensforschung” (August Nitzschke). Such concepts were – at the time they were written – probably stating what was commonly believed of some letters in comparison to others. In a sense, there are parallels to the questions of a pioneer of cultural history, Georg Steinhausen (1866–1933). The material of family archives from the nobility and urban elites is quite remarkable in the breadth of contents and the density of the evidence, sometimes conveying insights into family life by supplying entire letter exchanges or even examples of letters written by their author’s own hand; qualities like these seemed to invite observations of mentalities and psychological developments, but even these examples have their very limits, see the critical approach by Cordula Nolte, “‘Pey eytler finster in einem weichen pet geschrieben’. Eigenhändige Briefe in der Familienkorrespondenz des Markgrafen von Brandenburg (1470–1530),” Adelige Welt und familiäre Beziehung: Aspekte der ‘privaten Welt’ des Adels in böhmischen, polnischen und deutschen Beispielen vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann, 2000, 177–202. Even pornographical episodes in letters directed by noble males to wives or female audiences (and vice versa) share qualities with comical literature of their time, see Jérôme Hayez, “Un facteur siennois de Francesco de Marco Datini: Andrea di Bartolomeo di Ghino et sa correspondance (1383–1389),” Bollettino / Opera del Vocabolario italiano, 10 (2005): 204–397. Personifications of genitals, statements regarding the sexually insatiable nature of women, as well as sexual methods regarded unnatural can be traced to the “Schwankliteratur” of their time, i. e., to texts that intended

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to make courtly audiences laugh, see Cordula Nolte, “Verbalerotische Kommunikation, ‘gut schwenck’ oder: Worüber lachte man bei Hofe? Einige Thesen zum Briefwechsel des Kurfürstenpaares Albrecht und Anna von Brandeburg-Ansbach 1474/75,” Das Frauenzimmer: Die Frau bei Hofe in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini, 2000, 449–62. Probably the most important paradigm of interpreting letters is one geared towards the “informal sociability” of letters and their role in social networks, see Simon Teuscher, “Bernische Privatbriefe aus der Zeit um 1500. Überlegungen zu ihren zeitgenössischen Funktionen und zu Möglichkeiten ihrer historischen Auswertung,” Mittelalterliche Literatur im Lebenszusammenhang: Ergebnisse des Troisième Cycle Romand 1994, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz, 1997, 359–86, here 362. Teuscher argues that these letters were not intended to be archived or published, and therefore social relations could be observed more directly; later archival selection was not a formative factor and the image is therefore more representative of the use (rather than only the production) of letters in social relations. While the famous gentry letters of the Paston family were the result of systematic collection, most family archives appear to have been subject to more or less rigorous cassation. In the case of the Bern material, the communicative interaction by letters could be interpreted comprehensively. Letters were also an expression of social order or deviated with regard to the social order purposefully. The general image is one that is dominated by regularity of both letter dispositions and emotional expressions. Epistolography has been an extremely conservative rhetorical discipline, see Reinhard M.G. Nickisch, Brief, 1991, 76–82; one of its main rules could be one given by a late 16th-century handbook of letter-writing, “Varietas delectat, sed non prodest”, Heinrich Fabri and Abraham Saur, Rhetorica vnd Epistel Büchlein Deutsch vnd Lateinisch: Darin Begriffen Allerhand Missiuen vnd Sendbrieffen […], 1593 [VD16-F145], XXII, permanent link http://digi.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/fabri1593/0022. Training intended to make letter-writing more reliable, which is especially evident from intergenerational correspondences (and the corresponding chapters in letter-writing manuals) as well as from the production process of nobles’ letters with its total lack of individual formulations, see Ebba Severidt, Familie, Verwandtschaft und Karriere bei den Gonzaga. Struktur und Funktion von Familie und Verwandtschaft bei den Gonzaga und ihren deutschen Verwandten (1444–1519), 2002. There are certainly feelings expressed with regard to situations that had an impact on the individual; there is also not even a material basis to argue against emotional individualism of medieval and Renaissance letter writers and readers, see Hans

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Medick and David Sabean, “Emotionen und materielle Interessen in Familie und Verwandtschaft: Überlegungen zu neuen Wegen und Bereichen einer historischen und sozialanthropologischen Familienforschung,” Emotionen und materielle Interessen: Sozialanthropologische und historische Beiträge zur Familienforschung, ed. Hans Medick and David Sabean, 1984, 26–54. When emotional passages in letters are compared with letter writing manuals, the attribution from epistolary emotion and emotional feeling is confronted with a methodological problem. The “ars dictaminis” tradition suggests detailed expressions and even synonyms to communicate properly what is expected even in challenging situations like birth, death or other forms of hardship. On a more abstract level, emotions expressed in letters are emotions-in-text and were therefore mediated with regard to the rules valid for the medium; in the case of Gonzaga correspondence, the writing of letters had even been delegated to a scribe according to particular intentions, see Ebba Severidt, Familie, Verwandtschaft und Karriere bei den Gonzaga. Struktur und Funktion von Familie und Verwandtschaft bei den Gonzaga und ihren deutschen Verwandten (1444–1519), 2002. When sons of patricians wrote to their fathers, they were bound to fulfill the pattern as well as they could and the huge family archives give room for assumptions about the value attributed to these letters by the fathers. Letter collections in family contexts could carry historiographical meaning, in the sense of monumental remembrance and identity construction, see Barbara Schmid, Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft. Deutsche Autobiographik in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 2006. Letters could arrange their disposition to serve the spiritual or psychological needs of their recipients. Medieval learned clerics, church authorities practiced letter-writing as a literary art and studied ancient collections of, say, Ambrosius, Augustinus, Hieronymus, Gregor the Great. Letters could grow to become explanatory or even a tractato. Collections of the 8th to 13th centuries were those of Bonifatius, Alkuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Froumund of Tegernsee, Hilderbert of Lavardin, and Bernhard of Clairvaux, collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Patrologia Latina editions. In a general way, the letters in the New Testament added religious meaning to the genre and opened the form of literature to kerygmatic communication; the letters to the Corinthians were written in homiletic style, the letters to the Hebrews were written in the antique admonitory style. The early Christian letter was perceived as an exclusively religious, Christian genre because there are no letters in the Old Testament, see Karl Dziatzko, “Brief,” Paulys Realencyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaften, ed. Georg Wissowa, vol. 5, 1897, rpt. 1970, 836–44. The letters in the canon of the Bible are not letter exchanges. They are not part of a conversation that is not possible in

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presence but replace homiletic address, see Peter L. Schmidt, “Brief,” “Der Neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, vol. 2, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, 1997, 771–75. In the context of tradition and variation of letter patterns, Luther’s letters are of special interest. While addressees include popes, cardinals, bishops, clerics, monks, kings, children, and his wife, his personal style is most unique even when Luther is only varying, extending or denying the classical disposition and repertoire appropriate to letters at his time. He sends a letters to his wife Katharina “to her hands and feet”, and takes liberty to address Albrecht of Brandenburg as “Abgott”. But Luther’s creativity exceeds his outstanding polemical talent. His letters reflect his theological thought and ambition to influence human lives. Topics of his vernacular letters include all turning points of life, like birth, baptism, education, schooling, marriage, dying, and death. His letters support suffering individuals, families, and groups in times of hardship; his consolatory letters intertwine different philosophical traditions and represent these thoughts with a rhetoric that appears manifold, varied, and unique, see the contextualization in the medieval tradition in Ute Mennecke-Haustein, Luthers Trostbriefe, 1989. These qualities of Luther’s letters guaranteed empathical understanding among contemporaries, but made distanced readings of Luther’s letters so hard for later interpreters. The strong confessional bias in the writing of church history has not made it easier to historicize statements of Georg Steinhausen, for whom Luther has “brought the letter to a supreme expression of his thoughts and feelings,” see Georg Steinhausen, Deutsche Privatbriefe des Mittelalters, 1907, here 112–13. Despite the confessional partiality of academic disciplines besides theology, Luther’s letters are remarkable, his letter to his 4-year-old son Johannes is only one example how the art of letter-writing was innovatively mastered. The sheer wealth of evidence makes these letters an important historical source for the development of the Reformation and its perception by one of its protagonists. Contemporary interpreters do not seem to have reliably distinguished Luther’s intentions and his technique to express them; his style must have invited the identification of Luther’s character and temperament with the published works. The historical assessment of his letters by church theologians was not freed from the spell of confessionalized mentalities. Letters could influence social cohesion in many more ways. When women wrote letters, this could possess emancipatory qualities, see Albrecht Classen, “Female Explorations of Literacy: Epistolary Challenges to the Literary Canon in the Late Middle Ages,” The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz. Vol. 1 of: Disputatio: An International Transdisciplinary Journal

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of the Late Middle Ages, 1996, 123–46. The example of 15th-century merchant women must be seen before the background of historical studies often hesitating to deal with ‘female’ letters; if there is a valid reason for this then it is the dominance of male discourse in the evidence. These letters were often written by male scribes and in a formally gendered world, the letters therefore offer a rather indirect image of female activity. A genre often strictly styled according to literary genres were love-letters, often versed but also in prose form, see Christine Wand-Wittkowski, Briefe im Mittelalter: Der deutschsprachige Brief als weltliche und religiöse Literatur, 2000, 87–174. These were not pragmatic texts in the usual sense but artefacts; they were nevertheless important instruments in the social contexts of alliance building. Letter archives could substantiate claims for power, like in the case of the Medici family, see Heinrich Lang, “Power in Letters. Political Communication and Writing in the Medici Letters,” Text und Macht: Politische Kommunikation und Schriftlichkeit in der vormodernen Stadt (12.–18. Jahrhundert), ed. Rudolf Schlögl, forthcoming. A more basic intention of letters can only be distinguished analytically, that is to communicate in the sense of informing. Merchant networks like that of the Datini family were based on letters, for this particular example see Iris Origo, ‘Im Namen Gottes und des Geschäfts’: Lebensbild eines toskanischen Kaufmanns der Frührenaissance Francesca di Marco Datini 1335–1410, 1985, and Jérôme Hayez “La gestion d’une relation épistolaire dans les milieux d’affaires toscans à la fin du moyen âge,” La circulation des nouvelles au moyen âge, 1994, 63–84. In a plain sense, letters could have been intended to educate, see Christine Wand-Wittkowski, Briefe im Mittelalter. Der deutschsprachige Brief als weltliche und religiöse Literatur, 2000, 314–18. Secondary to education were letters from students to their families, see Matthias Beer, “‘Et sciatis nos fortiter studere.’ Die Stellung des Jugendlichen in der Familie des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit,” Das andere Wahrnehmen: Beiträge zur europäischen Geschichte. August Nitschke zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. Martin Kintzinger, Wolfgang Stürner, and Johannes Zahlten, 1991, 385–407. What such letters really meant is a question of the individual archival context such as in family archives. In the humanistic tradition, familiar ‘private’ letters were transformed into a medium of academic communication; with Cicero in mind, Petrarch, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, and Erasmus von Rotterdam addressed particular friends, individuals, but indeed meant followers of a particular idea. Letters could also dedicate literary works to a specific audience. In such cases of paratextual use, letters were directed to the reader to interpret the text it introduced in a specific way, for the somewhat open but useful concept

1893

Letters

of paratextual communication see Gerard Genette, Seuils, Paris 1987. While most humanists preferred to write in Latin, Nicolas Wyle supported translations of humanist teachings into vernacular languages in his Colores rhetoricales and the Translations, printed 1478; Wyle’s collection of prose vernacular letters is exceptional in that it has a programmatical aim and use dedicatory letters to explain these, see Christine Wand-Wittkowski, Briefe im Mittelalter: Der deutschsprachige Brief als weltliche und religiöse Literatur, 2000, 294–301; for paratextual forms of letters, see Bärbel Schwitzgebel, Noch nicht genug der Vorrede: Zur Vorrede volkssprachiger Sammlungen von Exempeln, Fabeln, Sprichwörtern und Schwänken des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1996. Letters intended to establish or destroy social cohesion. Expecially fictive letters like the satirical Dunkelmännerbriefe (Epistolae obscurorum virorum), a satirical collection of letters, addressed to the scholastic scholar named Gratias (1480–1542), while indeed denying the medieval standards of science. The dispute was triggered by the Pfefferkorn/Reuchlin-debate, an exchange of views about the value of the Talmud for Christian belief. The 42 Briefe were first published 1515 in Hagenau, some 7 letters were added in 1516 in Cologne as well as a second collection of 62 letters by Ulrich von Hutten 1517. The letters are an artefact that mixes German language vocabulary with Latin, expressing irony and cynicism, especially in the second part, were more direct polemics against hypocrisy and immorality of the – scholastic – “viri obscuri” dominated. The letters were criticized by Luther and Erasmus as well as 1517 by the Pope, but remained a landmark of literary satire, see Helmuth Rogge, “Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515/17),” Fingierte Briefe als Mittel politischer Satire, ed. Helmuth Rogge, 1966, 15–24; for the distinction of private and public order displayed by letters see R. Kölm, “Dimensionen des Öffentlichen und Privaten in der mittelalterlichen Korrespondenz,” Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Gerd Melville and Peter von Moos, 1998, 309–51. C. Research History Research history begins with letter collections contemporary to the medieval or early modern letters. The process of archival selection is not limited to the 17th and 18th centuries, when patrician merchant families experienced social identity crises and tried to appear historically noble by destroying entire letter archives, see Hans Hubert Hoffmann, “Nobiles Norimbergenses. Beobachtungen zur Struktur der reichsstädtischen Oberschicht,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 28 (1965): 114–50. Even earlier starting points of perception might be seen in the familiar letters of Petrarch, but such a philosophically reflected approach would not be feasible in this context.

Letters

1894

There were approaches such as those of Ludwig Rockinger (1824–1914) and Wilhelm Wattenbach (1819–1897) that were accompanied by critical editions of letters. For a comprehensive account on 19th-century research history see Heinz-Dieter Heimann, “Mittelalterliches Briefwesen und moderne Schreibmedienkultur – Praxis und Perspektiven der Tagungsthematik,” Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. Heinz-Dieter Heimann, 1997, 11–12, offering a list of older and more recent editions. In the context of cultural history, Georg Steinhausen interpreted letters as the mirror of cultural realities of the German people in his book Geschichte des deutschen Briefes: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes, Berlin 1889–1891, for an account of Steinhausen’s contribution to cultural history see Jürgen Herold, “Georg Steinhausen und die Kulturgeschichte,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 85.1 (2003): 29–70. Steinhausen argued that, beginning in the 14th century, an intensive exchange of letters developed. Letterwriting flourished in the 16th century, before it came under foreign influence in the 17th century. This type of cultural analysis was strictly anachronistic by applying the stylistic ideals of 18th-century letters to medieval evidence. Steinhausen’s narrative sketched a development of letter culture towards free, unconventional communication. Nevertheless, the author relates to 14th-century letters as free and poetical writing. Comparable to Rochus von Liliencron’s (1820–1912) appreciation of the authentic nature of the people as portrayed by folk song, Steinhausen envisages the people to ‘awaken’ to cultural expression in Minnesang and mystical letters. This freedom slowly succumbed to Latin patterns that dominated the European letter culture. His particular interest in emotional expression stimulated Steinhausen’s remarkable exploration of female letters, while he seems to ignore questions regarding emancipation of women almost entirely, despite contemporary gradual emancipation, see Georg Steinhausen, “Frauenbriefe aus dem endenden Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte 3 (1896): 213–16; Georg Steinhausen, “Sechzehn deutsche Frauenbriefe aus dem endenden Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte 1 (1894): 92–111. Steinhausen was applauded by historians as well as by literary scholars, some of his editions have stimulated historical imagination until more recently, see Steven Ozment, Magdalena & Balthasar: Briefwechsel der Eheleute Paumgartner aus der Lebenswelt des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1989, witness to the fascinating surface qualities of the sources (re)discovered. Letters of women were soon perceived as a new discursive practice, although most of these letters communicate social status, rather than being predominantly gender-related, see Ann Crabb, “‘If I could write’: Mar-

1895

Letters

gherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385–1410,” Renaissance Quarterly 4 (2007): 1170–206. In a gender perspective, letters offer evidence for female activity both in more private and political matters, see Cordula Nolte, Familie, Hof und Herrschaft: Das verwandtschaftliche Beziehungs- und Kommunikationsnetz der Reichsfürsten am Beispiel der Markgrafen von Brandenburg-Ansbach (1440–1530), 2005, 37. Linguistic studies have described increasing female involvement in letters around the beginning of the 16th century, a process taking place much earlier in Italy, see Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, “Form and Persuasion in Women’s Letters 1400–1700,” Women’s Letters Across Europe 1400–1700. Form and Persuasion, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, 2005, 3–20. The use of the text-sort appears to have been remarkably genderrelated. Current fields of research are centered around problems like the following ones. The history of letters is no longer written as the history of the medium. Currently, there is a shift to analyse how letters were implemented in communication in all its social and cultural context, see for a synthesis of theoretical approaches and their implications Volker Depkat, “Kommunikationsgeschichte zwischen Mediengeschichte und der Geschichte sozialer Kommunikation. Versuch einer konzeptionellen Klärung,” Medien der Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Karl-Heinz Spie , 2003, 9–48, here 11. Reconstructing social networks and commercial exchanges in the light of correspondence remains an important topic due to the wealth of still unedited material. Editing the material is highly problematic, as well as determining the dates or authenticity of letters. The inventories of letter archives are another heuristical problems, because the historian must estimate what letters are lost and for what reasons the present collection was installed in its specific form. The communicative role of the messenger could be so dominant that the letter he carried consisted only of formalities and was more or less free of distinguishable content, for 13th-century examples, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307, 1979, 263. Another field of intensive research is the problem of emotions in texts. When Luther appears as a uniquely personal letter-writer, soothing sorrow or aggressively putting forward theological viewpoints, he is always working within limits predetermined by rhetorical traditions, as rich and innovative as his use may have been. In the case of Luther, there is a link from the problem of emotions-in-text to the more basic questions arising in the light of secondary tradition of his letters. In the course of the history of editions of Luther’s letters the criteria of selection and presentation of the material (out of which original empirical basis) remain disputable, starting with the earliest edition of Luther’s letters by Aurifaber 1565/1566 that was not

Letters

1896

pointedly polemical or followed other obvious goals (Luther-Handbuch, ed. Albrecht Beutel, 2005, 344). The ways of tradition might have shaped the basis of any further analysis through the material. Letters have a paradox nature, because they give specific information as well as use a premeditated, highly topical language. Put in other words, the “epistolary situation” is not entirely decodable by studying the literary rules stated by the ars dictaminis. What is needed is a literary study of letters that goes beyond the study of schematic remarks regarding disposition, expressions and their appropriate situation. Composition was always a pragmatical situation, a communicative act that posed a heuristical threshold for the interpreter, see for the distinction Martin Camargo, “Where’s the Brief?: The Ars Dictaminis and Reading/writing Between the Lines,” The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz. Vol. 1 of: Disputatio. An International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages, 1996, 1–18, here 14. Few empirical studies have found solutions to this problem, such as Natalie Zemon Davies’s study of frequent literary qualities of letters of submission, topical themes that served the end of reducing the blame and balancing the juridical guilt attributed on family members by the authorities in 16th-century France, see Natalie Zemon Davies, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, 1987. Supplications often used the argument that a person was too old or sick to be punished like she or he would normally be. Both writing about another person and writing about oneself were socially institutionalized forms of self-comment. In this empirical example, the subjects claim agency in a situation of subordination, see Stefan Kleinschmidt, “‘ein fast abgemergekten man, der nurmehr uf seiner gruben gehet’. Der kranke Körper als Begnadigungsinstrument,” Körper Macht Geschichte – Geschichte Macht Körper: Körpergeschichte als Sozialgeschichte, ed. Susanne Conze, 1999, 222–47. In a more general sense, self-representation is always an act of narration directed to certain ethical ends; see the main theses in Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre, 1990. In a way, this seems to be the framework for letter research and questions regarding the nature of the subjectivity as delivered in letters, see François Riigolot, “L’émergence de la subjectivité littéraire moderne: les Epîtres de l’Amant vert de Jean Lemaire de Belges,” The Late Medieval Epistle, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz. Vol. 1 of: Disputatio: An International Transdisciplinary Journal of the Late Middle Ages, 1996, 153–59. Many characteristics are somewhat blurred: traits like private or public, ‘secondary,’ non-verbal, or super-textual qualities in the context of trustcommunicating, are all issues that are pivotal to the pre-modern economy. Letters bridged oral and written culture, see for instance the role of separate,

1897

Letters

more discrete (but not necessarily emotional) notes added to letters that were expected to be read publicly, see Simon Teuscher, “Bernische Privatbriefe aus der Zeit um 1500: Überlegungen zu ihren zeitgenössischen Funktionen und zu Möglichkeiten ihrer historischen Auswertung,” Mittelalterliche Literatur im Lebenszusammenhang. Ergebnisse des Troisième Cycle Romand 1994, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz, 1997, 359–86, 373. The social dimension of letters (questions like who could write to whom and how it mattered) was central and remains implicit for the interpreter today. The differentiation of “eigentliche” (actual) and “uneigentliche”(not actual) utilization of letters, i. e., sending a letter to inform and so on or writing one to let the message or action look like a letter, see Reinhard M.G. Nickisch, Brief, 1991, 93–106, appears ahistorical and analytical. The primary use and secondary archiving remains a useful distinction. In the light of recent research, late medieval letters especially could be read more properly if the heuristic approach was kept flexible enough to register the historical breadth in the sense of synchronic diversity of letter-types as well as diachronic changes. Paradigms such as linear processes towards more individuality expressed in letters until the Renaissance will now be doubted. Rather than substituting conversation, letters were part of complex communication processes that included symbolic implications of the letter, or provocation of oral communication as well as readings of the letter in broader social contexts. Letters could break or sustain existing social hierarchies. All these qualities let them not substitute conversations, as the classical definitions have made interpreters believe and as seems so convincing, see Jürgen Herold, “Empfangsorientierung als Strukturprinzip. Zum Verhältnis von Zweck, Form und Funktion mittelalterlicher Briefe,” Medien der Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. Karl-Heinz Spie, 2003, 265–88, 272–73; rather than a replacement, letters were a supplement to other ways of communication. Select Bibliography Alain Boureau, “The Letter-Writing Norm, a Mediaeval Invention,” Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 24–58; Martin Camargo, Ars dictaminis, ars dictandi (Turnhout: Brepols 1991); Martin Camargo, The Middle English Verse Love Epistle (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1991); Albrecht Classen, “Female Epistolary Literature from Antiquity to the Present,” Studia Neophilologica 60 (1988): 3–13; Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout: Brepols 1976); Marco Mostert, “A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication,” New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. id. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 193–297.

Christian Kuhn

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

1898

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium) A. Research Topic and Context The great majority of transmitted medieval Latin letters and Byzantine letters are copies in letter collections; only a small number of originals or independent copies has been preserved: approximately 200 Latin letters for the period until around 1200 (Rolf Köhn, “Zur Quellenkritik kopial überlieferter Korrespondenz im lateinischen Mittelalter, zumal in Briefsammlungen,” MIÖG 101 [1993]: 284–310; Mark Mersiowsky, “Regierungspraxis und Schriftlichkeit im Karolingerreich: Das Fallbeispiel der Mandate und Briefe,” Schriftkultur und Reichsverwaltung unter den Karolingern, ed. R. Schieffer, 1996, 109–66; Armando Petrucci et al., Lettere originale del medioevo latino (VII–XI sec.), I: Italia, 2002); there are no exact figures for the following centuries. We also do not have exact figures for the number of surviving originals from the complete Byzantine period; however, the number is surely higher than for the West (Franz Tinnefeld, “Zur Entstehung von Briefsammlungen in der Palaiologenzeit,” POLYPLEUROS NOUS, ed. Cordula Scholz und Georgios Makris, 2000, 365–81; Adolf W. Ziegler, “Vier nicht veröffentlichte griechische Briefe Isidors von Kijev,” ByzZ, 44 [1951]: 570–77; Eduard Rein, Die Florentiner Briefsammlung (Codex Laurentianus S. Marco 356), 1916; Gustav H. Karlsson-Georgios Fatouros, “Aus der Briefsammlung des Anonymus Florentinus,” JÖBG 22 [1973]: 207–18; Michael Grünbart, “L’epistolografia,” Lo spazio letterario del medioevo. La cultura bizantina, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 2003, 352–58). Such letter collections have a diverse content, structure, and volume, varying between only a few to several hundreds of letters. As for the Latin West, dozens of collections have been preserved with in total thousands of letters, the majority stemming from the 9th century, the ‘long 12th century’ (the ‘Age of epistolography’; the enormous growth in the number of letter collections coincides in this case with the development of the genre ‘ars dictaminis’) and the late 14th and 15th centuries; general repertories of all existing letter collections are not at hand, and neither do sound estimates on the number of letters preserved in this way (limited overviews can be found in Hermann Oesterley, Wegweiser durch die Literatur der Urkunden Sammlungen, 1885–1886; János M. Bak et al., Mittelalterliche Geschichtsquellen in chronologischer Übersicht: nebst einer Auswahl von Briefsammlungen, 1987; Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, III, 1931; Carl Erdmann, “Briefsammlungen,” Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter. 1: Deutsche Kaiserzeit. Die Zeit der Sachsen und Salier, ed. Wilhelm Wattenbach, Robert Holtzmann and Franz-Josef

1899

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

Schmale, 1938, 1967–1971, 415–42, Histoire de la littérature latine du Moyen Age, ed. Franz Brunhölzl et al. Turnhout, Brepols, 1990–1991 (1974 German ed.); Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises. Le Moyen Âge, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, 1992 [entirely rev. ed. from 1964]). We have adequate documents on the surviving material from the period until the 11th century, but because of the exponential growth of sources in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, our information for that period is certainly incomplete. The number of Byzantine collections is estimated at about 150, with the most preserved material from the 4th, 11th and 12th centuries; the total number of letters preserved in this way is estimated at about 15000, however, here as well there are no comprehensive repertories, lists or overviews (Nikolaos B. Tomadakes, Byzantine epistolographia, 1955; Jean Darrouzès, “Inventaire des épistoliers byzantins du Xe siècle,” REB, 18 [1960]: 109–35; Valentin A. Smetanin, Epistolografiia, 1970; Valentin A. Smetanin, Vizantijskoe obschestvo XIII–XV vekov po dannym epistolografii, 1987; Elizabeth M. Jeffreys and Alexander Kazhdan, “Epistolography,” Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991, 718–20; Margaret E. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid: Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop, 1997). A considerable amount of medieval Latin letters written by women is preserved, but most of them only in collections made by or referring to male clerics, such as those exchanged with St. Boniface, see Albrecht Classen, “Frauenbriefe an Bonifatius: Frühmittelalterliche Literaturdenkmäler aus moderner mentalitätsgeschichtlicher Sicht,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 72.2 [1990]: 251–73, and Joan Ferrante, To the Glory of Her Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts, 1997; the number of extensive collections attributed to women is particularly scarce (best known examples are Hildegard of Bingen and the ‘nun’s lettercollection of Admont’; Hildegardis Bingensis epistolarium, CCCM XCIa-XCIb, ed. Lieven Van Acker, 1991–2001; Lieven Van Acker, “Der Briefwechsel der heiligen Hildegard von Bingen: Vorbemerkungen zu einer kritischen Edition,” RB 98 [1988] and 99 [1989]; Alison I. Beach, “Voices from a Distant Land: Fragments of a Twelfth-Century Nun’s Letter Collection,” Speculum 77 [2002]: 34–54). From the later medieval period on, an increasing amount of female epistles in the vernacular has been preserved (general remarks and bibliographical references in Peter Dronke, Women Writers of The Middle Ages, 1984; Albrecht Classen, “Female Epistolary Literature from Antiquity to the Present: An Introduction,” Studia Neophilologica, 60 [1988]: 3–13; Dear Sister. Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, 1993; Letters of Medieval Women, ed. Anne Crawford, 2002).

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

1900

B. Letters vs. Letter Collections The study of medieval letters which are preserved in letter collections requires a more different approach than the study of letters which survived separately (as originals or odd copies), or in association with or embedded in other works (cartularies, non-epistolary collections, narrative sources …). Letter collections are composed with particular objectives and considerations, which implies that they cannot be studied as a “neutrally” transmitted collection of letters. It is necessary to take the specific problems of using such a collection into account. The study of medieval letters preserved in a letter collection, from whatever perspective, always has to start by answering a priori a set of methodological questions characteristic to these sources or these kinds of sources, before the actual content research can be started. These questions are all related to the exact way in which the letter collections evolved (the processes to be distinguished are ‘collecting’ the material on the one hand and ‘editing’ the material on the other hand) and their specific context of origin; in summary, the following should be taken into account: 1) the nature of the collected material (drafts, originals, copy of originals), 2) the way in which this material was preserved before it became part of the collection, 3) the way in which it was collected, by whom, when and why, 4) by whom, when and why the decision was taken to start a collection, 5) what criteria were used to select the material, 6) in what way the material was organized in the collection and what criteria were used for this, 7) if and in which way the letters were revised (stylistically) for the collection, 8) if greetings and rubicks were added or deleted systematically, 9) when and why a collection was copied, and 10) to what extend it was revised or reorganised (Franz-Josef Schmale, “Brief, Briefliteratur, Briefsammlungen. IV. Lateinisches Mittelalter,” LexMA II (1983), 648–682; Rolf Köhn, “Zur Quellenkritik kopial überlieferter Korrespondenz im lateinischen Mittelalter, zumal in Briefsammlungen,” MIÖG 101 [1993]: 284–310; Hans-Martin Schaller, Stauferzeit. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 1993; Richard W. Southern, “Review of The Letters of John of Salisbury. Vol I: The Early Letters (1133–1161), ed. Christopher N.L. Brooke, William J. Millor and Harold E. Butler,” EHR 72 [1957]: 493–97; Walter G. Ysebaert, “Literaire collecties, registers of dictamina Middeleeuwse brievencollecties als organische en meervoudig gelaagde constructies,” Millennium, 21 [2007]: 1–24); Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval Letters and Letter Collections as Historical Sources: Methodological Questions and Reflections and Research Perspectives (6th –14th centuries),” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 50 [2009]: 41–73. Case-studies show that letter collections of one and the same author can change or transform significantly during the course of several decades (e. g.,

1901

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

Peter of Blois, Stephen of Orléans, Yvo of Chartres). Having attention for the above mentioned questions and for the manuscripts helps to understand these changes; they reveal that letter collections of one author could be used as models for letter-writing, manuals for teaching (artes liberales, canon law), literary memorials, biographies or other genres or literary and administrative forms. The study of the (transformation of) letter collections (and their manuscripts) thus can contribute fundamentally to our understanding of the organisation of educational structures and knowledge and to the history of the transformation of mentalities. C. History of Research Unlike the research in the field of the genre of the individual mediaeval Latin or Byzantine letter, the number of methodological and critical studies specifically on letter collections as a separate genre or separate source, in which each of these questions are dealt with systematically, is very limited (or even non-existing), especially with regard to Byzantine letter collections. However, the attention for this topic has increased the last decades, with the discussion of specific questions and problems both in case studies and in introductory considerations for new editions. C1. Latin West Roughly speaking, we can distinguish two important phases in the study of letter collections: a first phase at the beginning of the 20th century and a second phase since the 1970s. In general we can say that three main aspects have been studied in depth already, namely the typology of or the different kinds of collections which can be distinguished in relation to their context of origin and/or content characteristics, the nature of the material they contain and the variety in structure and diversity in content clusters. Pioneering research was done by Bernhard Schmeidler (“Über Briefsammlungen des früheren Mittelalters in Deutschland und ihre kritische Verwertung,” Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund Årsbok (Yearbook of the New Society of Letters at Lund) [1926]: 5–27) and Heinz Zatschek (Studien zur mittelalterlichen Urkundenlehre: Konzept, Register und Briefsammlung, 1974 [1929]), which was mainly centered on the questions how, where and on the basis of what material the collections were composed, with the focus on the difference between registers (‘Register,’ ‘Briefbuch,’ ‘Konzeptbuch’) and copy-books (‘Copialbuch’), and by Carl Erdman, who very clearly showed the tension between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality,’ between the literary and the historical character of a letter collection (Studien zur Briefliteratur Deutschlands im elften Jahrhundert, 1938). Subsequently, the research of Giles Constable was very innovative (summary in Letters and

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

1902

Letter-Collections, 1976) for the first time a clear overview was given of the problems concerning the study of letter collections. In this work, a typology is used in which a distinction is made between the ‘registers,’ referring to a registering or archiving activity that can take place in both the archives of the sender or the recipient (e. g., the collection of Wibald of Stavelot, see Timothy Reuter, “Gedenküberlieferung und -praxis im Briefbuch Wibalds von Stablo,” Der Liber Vitae von Corvey, ed. Karl Schmid and Joachim Wollasch, 1989), the actual letter collections, referring to collections which have been composed mainly for literary reasons (and which usually bear the name of one author; think about authors such as Alcuin of York, Bernard of Clairvaux or Peter of Celle) and the so-called didactic collections, referring to mostly anonymous collections of model letters that accompanied the artes dictandi or which originated independently, as an illustration of the ars dictaminis. These last collections were composed because of the style and structure of the letters and had administrative and/or didactic purposes: they contain more fictitious than real letters and have not been investigated thoroughly yet; the letters of the literary letter collections, however, have been studied much more. More recently, it has become clear that this distinction cannot be followed strictly either, given that the different collections have characteristics which strongly overlap. For instance, so-called literary collections have characteristics which refer to an administrative-didactic and a literary or even a registering context (Gunnar Teske, Die Briefsammlungen des 12. Jahrhunderts in St.Viktor/Paris, 1993); they consist of diverse material and can be composed of several subcollections which could be collected for other motives (Birger Munk-Olsen, “L’édition d’un manuscrit d’auteur: les lettres de Gui de Basoches,” Revue des études latines, 49 [1971]: 66–77; Jean Leclercq, “Lettres de S. Bernard: Histoire ou littérature?” Jean Leclercq, Recueil d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits, 1987, 125–225; Rolf Köhn, “Zur Quellenkritik kopial überlieferter Korrespondenz im lateinischen Mittelalter, zumal in Briefsammlungen,” MIÖG 101 [1993]: 284–310; Ivan Boserup, “A FrenchDanish Letter Collection – and some Danish Diplomataria. Historical and Literary Remarks on the Epistulae of Abbot William of Æbelholt,” Living Words & Luminous Pictures, ed. Erik Petersen, 1999). It is also clear that there is no uniformity in the material. Letter collections did not only just originate form different material that was preserved (papyri, wax tablets, drafts, finished concepts or originals); it is also possible that some of this material was revised before it was included in the collections and both the author or other persons could be responsible for this (examples in Giulio Augusto Levi, “Sullo stile latino delle ‘epistole’ del Petrarca,” Atene e Roma, vol. III/6 [1938]; Ezio Raimondi, “Correzioni medio-

1903

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

evali, correzioni umanistiche e correzioni petrarchesche nella lettera VI del libro XVI delle Familiares,” Studi petrarcheschi 1 [1948]: 125–33; Adrian Morey and Christopher N.L. Brooke, Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, 1965; Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter The Venerable, 1967; Birger MunkOlsen, “L’édition d’un manuscrit d’auteur: les lettres de Gui de Basoches,” Revue des études latines 49 [1971]: 66–77; Frederick Behrends, The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, 1976; Jean Leclercq, “Lettres de S. Bernard: histoire ou littérature?,” Jean Leclercq, Recueil d’études sur Saint Bernard et ses écrits, 1987, 125–225). Moreover, besides real letters, fictitious letters or style exercises could be included (examples in E.S. Cohn, “The Manuscript Evidence for the Letters of Peter of Blois,” EHR 41 [1926]: 43–60; Friedel Peeck, Die Reinhardsbrunner Briefsammlung, 1952; Helmut Plechl and Werner Bergmann, Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung des 12. Jahrhunderts, 2002). All these questions help to determine the value of the preserved letters, and therefore the value of the conclusions that can be drawn on their literary and historical context. C2. Byzantium The same questions and problems arise when studying Byzantine letter collections, but the historical research in this field has only just started and much work remains to be done (Peter Hatlie, “Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography,” BMGS 20 [1996]: 213–48). Most attention is given to the individual letters and the approach still has a literary character (Antony Littlewood, “SO Debate”, SO 73 [1998]: 40–42; see, e. g., the contributions in Michael Grünbart and Wolfram Hörandner, L’épistolographie et la poésie épigrammatique, 2003), only in the 1990s, letter collections were finally studied as a whole, taking into account their context of origin, motive of collection, and organizational structure and the resulting implications for the historical and literary value of the letters (Margaret M. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid, 1997; Franz Tinnefeld, “Zur Entstehung von Briefsammlungen in der Palaiologenzeit,” POLYPLEUROS NOUS, ed. Cordula Scholz and Georgios Makris, 2000); good overviews are given in Michael Grünbart, “L’epistolografia,” Lo spazio letterario del medioevo. La cultura bizantina, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 2003, 345–78. An example of systematized research is Michael Grünbart, Formen der Anrede im byzantinischen Brief von 6. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert, 2005, an analysis of how people are addressed in Byzantine letters from the 6th to the 12th century (see also Michael Grünbart, Epistularum Byzantinarum Initia, 2001, containing the incipits of about 15,500 letters).

Letter Collections (Latin West and Byzantium)

1904

Select Bibliography Giles Constable, Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 67 [Typologie des sources du Moyen Age Occidental, vol. 17]; Peter Hatlie, “Redeeming Byzantine Epistolography,” BMGS 20 [1996]: 213–48; Rolf Köhn, “Zur Quellenkritik kopial überlieferter Korrespondenz im lateinischen Mittelalter, zumal in Briefsammlungen,” MIÖG 101 [1993]: 284–310; Michael Grünbart, “L’epistolografia,” Lo spazio letterario del medioevo, vol. 3,1: La cultura bizantina, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, 2003, 345–78; Walter Ysebaert, “Medieval Letters and Letter Collections as Historical Sources: Methodological Questions and Reflections and Research Perspectives (6th–14th Centuries),” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 50 [2009]: 41–73.

Walter Ysebaert

1905

Minnereden

M Minnereden A. Definition The term ‘Minnerede’ is used to denote a genre of medieval German poetry which didactically treats the topic of love between the sexes. Minnereden (pl.) are primarily composed in rhyming couplets, but some texts take stanza form (Albrecht Classen: “Wolframs von Eschenbach Titurel-Fragmente und Johanns von Würzburg ‘Wilhelm von Österreich’: Höhepunkte der höfischen Minnereden,” ABäG 37 [1993]: 75–102); as such they are frequently considered a subgenre of the short epic (in German Kleinepik). This genre is represented by approximately 550 different texts from the medieval Dutch and German poetic traditions (Wolfgang Achnitz: “Minnereden,” Forschungsberichte zur germanistischen Mediävistik, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Jochen Schiewer, 2002, 197–255, here 198) ranging from under 50 to over 5000 verses in length. This genre is considered to have its beginning in the late 12th century and to have reached its close in the course of the 16th century. The modern term ‘Minnerede’ as it is understood today was not utilized as a textual genre category during the Middle Ages and is the product of modern philology; the first approximate usage of the term ‘Minnerede’ appears in the 15th century in a single title line: Ain mynn red von hertzen vnd von leib (Tilo Brandis: Mittelhochdeutsche, mittelniederdeutsche und mittelniederländische Minnereden: Verzeichnis der Handschriften und Drucke, 1968, Nr. 425). Characteristics considered typical of the Minnerede genre are: 1. the treatment of love in a didactic manner, 2. an introduction composed as a framing narrative and 3. a first person narrator. The framing narrative often takes the form of a dream, a solitary journey through natural surroundings or how the narrator witnessed an event. The internal treatment varies considerably, ranging from internal monologues treating love and/or virtue, lamentations about lost or unattainable love, scenes of courtship and wooing, disputes about the nature or relative worth of love, didactic dialogues, love letters, panegyric or encomium of the lover, cases in the court of love or encounters with the beloved and/or the hypostasis of love. A minority of Minnereden assume an allegorical form. In most instances, the Minnereden appear as individual free-standing episodes divorced from a larger context in which the scenario is rapidly

Minnereden

1906

sketched before preceding to the issue at hand, namely the reflection upon – and discussion of – love; this contextual ambiguity enables a high degree of flexibility in the depiction of the actual story itself that frees the author from the audience’s expectations and enables a discussion of love without the realization of fulfillment or consequences (Rüdiger Schnell: “Grenzen literarischer Freiheit im Mittelalter. I. Höfischer Roman und Minnerede,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 218 [1981]: 241–70, here 265). Minnereden are generally to be found in manuscript compilations with texts of a related thematic, including Mären, Bispeln, debates, letters or short epic narratives. They can appear as free-standing entities, or as integrated parts of larger epic narratives (e. g., Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauenbuch). B. Historical Background The Minnerede likely rises to become a prominent poetic form during the decline of the late courtly Minnesang. The genre itself is influenced by the popular literary forms that preceded it, including courtly epic and love poetry from the Latin and vernacular traditions (e. g. Minnesänger, Troubadors). The inspirational point of origin for such texts in the German speaking realm is considered to be found in the theoretical treatments of love as presented in the excursus of epic texts (e. g., Gottfried von Strasbourg’s Tristan, ca. 1210). A majority of the Minnereden that have come down to us today were composed by authors whose identities remain unknown. The Minnereden appear in a relatively rapid evolutionary process that branched off from the epic and poetic forms mentioned above, and as a genre is considered to find its first progenitors in Der heimliche Bote (late 12th century), Hartmann von Aue’s Klage (Das erste Büchlein, ca. 1205), Das zweite Büchlein (ca.1220?), Stricker’s Frauenehre (ca. 1230), Diu Mâze (ca. 1250) and Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauenbuch (1257) and established itself as an independent genre by the time of the late courtly epic (Rüdiger Schnell: “Ovids Ars amatoria und die höfische Minnetheorie,” Euphorion 69 [1975]: 132–59; here 158–59). The broad spectrum of literary motifs and rhetorical elements drawn from the source material of the epic and vernacular poetry of preceding generations that was distilled and adapted to the tastes of the audience ensured the success of the Minnerede in the Late Middle Ages. It is considered that these short poetic forms enabled the minor nobility to participate in the cultural milieu of the greater courts, within which the discourse on the nature of love was an integral part. Love itself, it is postulated, was such an important aspect of this courtly culture because – as a collective symbol capable of subsuming various methods of discourse – it enabled the articulation of disparate perspectives but contributed to the establishment of a community of

1907

Minnereden

interlocutors (cf. Ralf Schlechtweg-Jahn: Minne und Metapher. Die Minneburg als höfischer Mikrokosmos, 1992, here 212). The function of the Minnerede for the medieval audience has been discussed as being either one that points towards a utopic realm of possibility or that reaffirms and stabilizes the status quo. C. Research History The term ‘Minnerede’ as a genre marker was first used in Kurt Matthaei: Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden (1913), VII. Until recently, Minnereden have not attracted considerable attention in the realm of Medieval Studies, which Ingeborg Glier, Artes Amandi. Untersuchung zu Geschichte, Überlieferung und Typologie der deutschen Minnereden (1971), has attributed to three factors: 1. the sheer quantity of material (some 550 texts totalling more than 150,000 verses) – “Die Masse des Überlieferten ist sehr viel größer als in anderen spätmittelalterlichen weltlichen Gattungen” (The mass of transmission is much greater than in other late medieval secular genres); 2. the spatial and temporal dispersion which hinders a comprehensive view – “Minnereden sind […] so weit und so kontinuierlich bis in die Anfänge des 16. Jhs. verbreitet, daß man aus den verschiedensten Perspektiven immer wieder nach möglichen Zusammenhängen zwischen einzelnen Autoren oder Gedichten fragen muß, um wenigstens noch Andeutungen von dem weitgespannten Netz literarhistorischer Beziehungen zu erkennen, das einmal bestanden hat” (Minnereden are […] so widely and continuously dispersed until the beginning of the 16th century, that one must continually speculate from various vantage points about possible connections between individual authors or texts in order to gain at least an inkling of the broadly laid net of literary and historical relationships that once existed); and 3. the monochromatic nature of the genre and its aesthetic mediocrity – “Die Minnereden galten – nicht ganz zu Unrecht! – in vieler Hinsicht als eine ästhetisch reizlose Gattung” (Minnereden were considered – and not completely without justification! – in many respects as a genre devoid of aesthetic appeal) (1–8). Wolfgang Achnitz adds to this consideration that Minnereden have yet to achieve their deserved role in the study of medieval German literature due to “[…] die nach wie vor mangelhafte Editionslage […] Zwar liegt, wie Glier betont, ‘das meiste gedruckt vor’, aber vieles eben auch heute noch ‘an abgelegenen Stellen und […] nach strengeren editorischen Maßstäben recht unzulänglich’ (Artes Amandi, 4) […] vor allem fehlt eine kritisch edierte Bestandsaufnahme der vielen anonymen Werke in Form einer Anthologie” (226–27; (due to […] the enduring imperfect state of affairs in terms of editions […] true, as Glier emphasizes, ‘most texts have been published,’ but

Minnereden

1908

much of which is to this day ‘in remote locations and […] of little use in keeping with strict editorial standards […] what is lacking most is a critical edition of the numerous anonymous works in the form of an anthology). As Achnitz (“Minnereden,” 2002) discusses in detail, the engagement of the field of Old German Philology with the Minnerede genre can divided into three stages: 1. sporadic attempts to collect and order the texts from the beginnings of German philological study until the end of WWII, 2. from the mid 1950s until the beginning of the 1970s, and 3. since the beginning of the 1980s until the present day. Whereby the number of researchers working in this field remains modest, it demonstrates considerable promise for increasing our understanding of the Middle High German poetic environment. Stage 1 The publication of the texts themselves begins in the 18th century with Christoph Heinrich Myller, Samlung teutscher Gedichte aus dem 12., 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (1782–1785), and continues in the 19th century with Joseph Freiherr von Lassberg, Lieder Saal, 3 vols. (1820–1825, rpt. 1968), and Carl Haltaus, Liederbuch der Clara Hätzerlin (1840). Editions of the epics into which Minnereden are incorporated, as well as complete editions of individual authors have also been released in relatively regular intervals. The first edition to focus exclusively on Minnereden was released by Kurt Matthaei, Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden, 2 vols. (1913, 1938, rpt. 1967); the second was Wilhelm Brauns and Gerhard Thiele, Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden II. Die Heidelberger Handschriften 313 und 355; die Berliner Handschrift MS. Germ. Fol. 922 (1938, rpt. in Matthaei 1967). Heinrich Niewöhner, “Minnereden und -allegorien,” Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon1, vol. 3 (1943), 404–24, was among the first in the field to articulately codify the substance and function of the Minnerede as it had been discussed to date: “Minnerede ist nicht nur Belehrung […] auch nicht lyrische Einzelklage oder Lob der Frauen und Betrachtung über Wesen und Wert der Minne, sondern zu einem wesentlichen Teile höfische Gesellschaftsdichtung” (413) and serves as the capstone to the first stage of study. Stage 2 The second stage is dominated by the works of Arend Mihm, Überlieferung und Verbreitung der Märendichtung im Spätmittelalter (1967); Tilo Brandis, Mittelhochdeutsche, mittelniederdeutsche und mittelniederländische Minnereden. Verzeichnis der Handschriften und Drucke (1968); Walter Blank, Die deutsche Minneallegorie: Gestaltung und Funktion einer spätmittelalterlichen Dichtungsform (1970), and Ingeborg Glier, Artes Amandi: Untersuchung zu Geschichte, Überlieferung und

1909

Minnereden

Typologie der deutschen Minnereden (1971). Despite numerous smaller contributions to the topic since, the major references for this field of research at the turn of the 21st century are still those provided during this stage. Mihm provided the foundation for advanced study by presenting a study to the transmission history of the smaller narrative poems of the German Middle Ages. This was followed by Brandis’s critical inventory of all German Minnerede [including title, author, provenience, date, opening and closing verses, summary, variants, bibliography] based on a broad definition of the genre known until the date of publication, and which still contains the majority of known texts. This was supplemented by Melitta Rheinheimer, Rheinische Minnereden: Untersuchungen und Edition (1975), and an expanded inventory was provided by Jürgen Schulz-Grobert, Deutsche Liebesbriefe in spätmittelalterlichen Handschriften: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung einer anonymen Kleinform der Reimpaardichtung (1993). Eberhard Lammert, Reimsprecherkunst im Spätmittlelalter: Eine Untersuchung der Teichnerreden (1970), offered an investigation into the works of the Teichner, wherein he provides an index of conventional literary forms that appear in the works of the Teichner and that can to a great extent be carried over to other Minnereden (Lämmert, 204–93). That same year, Walter Blank, Die deutsche Minneallegorie: Gestaltung und Funktion einer spätmittelalterlichen Dichtungsform (1970), released his study on allegory in the German speaking realm, which treated the internal structures and descriptive elements and provided considerable insight into the genre as a whole. An important study was published by Ingeborg Glier (1971) that provided a loose definition of the genre in respect to its structural and formal elements and utilized a flexible schema of typological delineation which enabled a differentiated view of the Minnerede: “Um […] eine gewisse Beweglichkeit zu bewahren, sollen […] unter verschiedenen Aspekten typologische Querschnitte, die nach mehreren Richtungen aufschlüsseln, durch den bekannten Textbestand gelegt werden. Damit war wohl auch der Differenzierung und Variabilität innerhalb der Minnereden und der Beziehung zu anderen Gattungen und Typen besser beizukommen” (394; In order to preserve a certain flexibility, typological cross-sections under various aspects, which open in numerous directions, should be established based on the available corpus. This would enable a better comprehension of the differentiation and variability within Minnereden and in relation to other genres and types), this typological delineation was composed of three axes: Inszenierung (simple or epic), Significatio (exemplary-, hypostatic-, typical-, and allegorical figures) and Didaxe (maxims, texts with discursive character, and compendiums). Melitta Rheinheimer discusses the important regional role of the Netherlands in the transmission and reception of the Old French

Minnereden

1910

love casuistic by the courtly environment along the Rhine. During this stage, additional editions were released, increasing the accessible material for further study, among others Rosmarie Leiderer, Zwölf Minnereden des Cgm 270 (1972); Melitta Rheinheimer (1975) and Maria Schierling: Das Kloster der Minne: Edition und Untersuchung. Anhang: Vier weitere Minnereden der Donaueschinger Liedersaal-Handschrift (1980). Stage 3 Ronald Schmidt, Studien zur deutschen Minnerede. Untersuchungen zu Zilies von Sayn, Johann von Konstanz und Eberhard von Cersne (1982); and Christelrose Rischer, Zur Gebrauchssituation höfischer Literatur im 15. Jahrhundert. Die Minnereden Hermanns von Sachsenheim,” IASL 7 (1982): 21–64, treat the socio-historical milieu and the relationship between author and audience and examine the popularity of the Minnereden. Hans-Joachim Ziegeler, Erzählen im Spätmittelalter: Mären im Kontext von Minnereden, Bispeln und Romanen(,1985) draws a line between Minnereden and Mæren by the strict observance of the first person narrator, and recommends a further subdivision of the genre between ‘proper’ and ‘narrative’ Minnereden. Katharina Wallman, Minnebedingtes Schweigen in Minnesang, Lied und Minnerede des 12. bis 16. Jahrhunderts (1985), investigates the silence caused by love, and Ziegeler (1985) discusses the diverse methods of narration in Minnerede, Bispel and Roman. Various perspectives have been expressed in regards to the role of the speaker, be it that of a first person narrator, an assumed role, or a combination of the two (cf. Peter Strohschneider, Ritterromantische Versepik im ausgehenden Mittelalter, 1986). Anja Sommer, Die Minneburg: Beiträge zu einer Funktionsgeschichte der Allegorie im späten Mittelalter: Mit der Erstedition der Prosafassung (1999), calls attention to the fact, especially in the realm of allegorical Minnereden, that “mit verschiedenen gleichzeitig aktualisierten Bedeutungen eines Bildes zu rechnen [ist]” (186; the differing and simultaneous active meanings of an image must be accounted for). Achnitz (“Minnereden,” 2002) provides an excellent in-depth overview to the genre and its research history and includes considerations of related research that is relevant for the genre (epic poetry, Mæren, and Minnesang); he also pithily details the necessary work yet to be done, including a comprehensive categorization of subgenres, a chronological overview of the development of the genre, focused studies on individual texts and additional research into the context of performance and socio-historical function. Recent contributions to the study of Minnereden can be found in the collection of articles Triviale Minne?: Konventionalität und Trivialisierung in spätmittelalterlichen Minnereden, ed. Ludger Lieb and Otto Neudeck (2006). The most significant task that lies ahead is the

1911

Miracle Narratives

preparation of critical editions that provide a firm foundation for further research. The most promising project to address this last aspect is the forthcoming Handbuch Minnereden ed. Jacob Klingner and Ludger Lieb. vol. 1: Einführung und Auswahledition. vol. 2: Repertorium (2010?). Select Bibliography Wolfgang Achnitz: “Minnereden,” Forschungsberichte zur germanistischen Mediävistik, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 197–255; Triviale Minne?: Konventionalität und Trivialisierung in spätmittelalterlichen Minnereden, ed. Ludger Lieb and Otto Neudeck (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006).

Maurice Sprague

Miracle Narratives A. General Definition Miracle narratives recount the miracles purportedly performed by saints, especially the Virgin Mary, when they intervene in human affairs. They can be in verse or prose, Latin or the various vernaculars. Work in miracle narratives has explored mainly two avenues and mainly along disciplinary lines. Cultural historians have read tracts of medieval miracle narratives as evidence of cultural attitudes held in regard to various sectors of society, especially children – often the victims in need of miraculous intervention – and Jews – often the accused perpetrators who are the victimizers. This research is tied to work in hagiography, as the process of canonization relied on the documentation of miracles performed by the saint in question. Literary scholars, on the other hand, have studied miracle narratives, in both Latin and the vernaculars, for their literary merit and often folkloric qualities. The amount of work has varied from tradition to tradition, with notable interest in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese traditions. By and large, work on the English tradition has focused primarily on the dramatic, not the narrative tradition. B. History of Scholarship An excellent resource and starting point for either avenue of research is Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s A Dictionary of Miracles Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic with Illustrations (1884; rpt. in 1966). Brewer’s tome distinguishes three categories of miracles. The first, “Miracles of Saints in Imitation of

Miracle Narratives

1912

Scripture Miracles,” provides a concordance of biblical passages and those extrabiblical writings, often saints’s lives, which provide parallel miracle narratives. In “Realistic Miracles,” Brewer provides shorter biblical crossreferences for miracles such as “Beasts Submissive to Saints” or “Bodies of Saints Incorruptible.” The last and shortest part, “Miracles to Prove Church Dogmas,” contains miracles dealing with celibacy, Mary’s qualities, and other such dogmatic teachings. Two dictionaries of miracles of lesser value preceded Brewer’s work: Abbé de Romagne, Dictionnaire historique des miracles, qui prouvent la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1824); and Auguste François Lecanu and J.-P. Migne, Dictionnaire des prophéties et des miracles (1866). Recent updates to Brewer’s research have come in Igor Tsarev, Entsiklopediia chudes, 1998, and Patrick Sbalchiero, Dictionnaire des miracles et de l’extraordinaire chrétiens, 2002. In regard to miracle narratives as historical documents, valuable research tools and primary sources include the following: The Chronicle of William de Rishanger, ed. J.O. Holliwell, The Miracles of Simon de Montfort, 1840; Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archibishop of Canterbury, Canonized by Pope Alexander III, A.D., 1173, vols. 1–6, ed. James Craigie Robertson, and vol. 7, ed. Robertson and J. Brigstocke Sheppard, 1875–85; Thomas of Monmouth’s ‘The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich,’ ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James, 1896; Actes anciens et documents concernant li Bienheureux Urbain V Pape, ed. J.-H. Albanès, 1897; The Canonization of St. Osmund: from the Manuscript Records in the Muniment Room of Salisbury Cathedral, ed. Arthur R. Malden, 1901; Edmond Albé, Les miracles de Notre-Dame de Roc-Amadour au XIIe siècle, 1907; Charters and Records of Hereford Cathedral, ed. W. Capes, 1908; “Vie et miracles de S. Lauren archevêque de Dublin,” ed. Charles Plummer, Analecta Bollandiana 33 [1914]: 121–86; Henrici VI Angliae Regis Miracula Postuma, ed. Paul Grosjean, in Subsidia Hagiographica 22, 1935; Sankt Nikolaus av Linköping kanonisationsprocess, ed. Tryggve Lundén, 1963; Enquête pour le procès de canonisation de dauphine de Puimichel contesse d’Ariano, ed. Jacques Cambell, OFM, 1978; Die Akten des Kanonisationsprozesses Dorotheas von Montau von 1394 bis 1521, ed. Richard Stachnik et al., 1978; Il processo di canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco, ed. Enrico Menestò, 1984; and Il processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola de Tolentino, ed. Nicola Occhioni O.S.A., 1984. Most recently, Klaus Herbers, Lenka Jirou sková ˇ and Berhard Vogel have produced Mirakelberichte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (2005), which presents a substantial introduction on the material conditions and cultural import of miracle narratives for understanding medieval mentalities, followed by a series of Latin miracle texts with facing page translations in German.

1913

Miracle Narratives

Work that examines these primary source materials includes most recently a collection of essays proceeding from a conference and edited by Martin Heinzelmann, Klaus Herbers, and Dieter R. Bauer: Mirakel im Mittelalter: Konzeptionen – Erscheinungsformen – Deutungen, 2002. These essays are organized according to three “problem areas”: theological and intellectual conceptions, definition and specification of the type, function, contexts, and interpretation, and finally, chronological and regional developments within individual miracle stories. Ronald C. Finucane has been pursuing the question for over thirty years now and has most recently offered The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles, 1997, which builds on past sociohistorical work on miracles narratives such as his own Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England, 1977, rpt. 1995; Paolo Golinelli, Città e culto dei santi nel medioevo italiano, 1991; Jürgen Jansen, Medizinische Kasuistik in den ‘Miracula Sancte Elyzabet’: Medizinhistorische Analyse und Übersetzung der Wunderprotokolle am Grab der Elisabeth von Thüringen, 1985; Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 1992; Christian Krötzl, Pilger, Mirakel und Alltag: Formen des Verhaltens im skandinavischen Mittelalter, 1994. For an interdisciplinary study that incorporates art history, see Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign & History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy, 1999. Other recent contributions include Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215, 1982, which contains an excellent bibliography of primary sources; Pierre-André Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale, XIe–XIIe siècle, 1985; Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation, 1995; and Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: a Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages, 2004. A work dedicated to miraculous healing waters comes in Gudrun Theresia Stecher’s Von den wunderleichen prunnen: wundersame Gewässer in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1999. Scholarship on vernacular miracle narratives in Portuguese has focused by and large on Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa Maria. Much of the early bibliography on Alfonso is contained in Silvio Pellegrini’s Repertorio bibliografico della prima lirica portoghese, 1939. Walter Mettman published what is still considered the standard edition in four volumes, 1959–1972. John Esten Keller offers a good overview in Pious Brief Narrative in Medieval Castilian & Galician Verse: from Berceo to Alfonso X, 1978 (trans. into Spanish in 1987). Much work on the cantigas has focused on the representation of Jews and other minority figures, such as women: Albert Ian Bagby’s “The Moor and the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X, el Sabio,” Ph.D. diss., 1968; Vikki Hatton and Angus MacKay, Anti-Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa Maria,

Miracle Narratives

1914

1983; Connie L. Scarborough, Women in Thirteenth-Century Spain as Portrayed in Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, 1993; Dwayne E. Carpenter, “Minorities in Medieval Spain: The Legal Status of Jews and Muslims in the Siete partidas,” Romance Quarterly 33 (1986): 275–87, and “Tolerance and Intolerance: Alfonso X’s Attitude Towards the Synagogue as Reflected in the Siete partidas,” Romance Quarterly 31 (1984): 31–39, and “Jewish-Christian Social Relations in Alphonsine Spain: A Commentary of Book VII, Title xxiv, Law 8 of the Siete partidas,” Florilegium Hispanicum: Medieval and Golden Age Studies Presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, ed. John S. Geary et al., 1989. Cebría Baraut undertakes a comparative approach with contemporary Catalan literature in Les cantigues d’Alfons el Savi i el primitiu Liber miraculorum de Nostra Dona de Montserrat, 1949–1950. Berceo’s Milagros de Santa María composed in the 13th century in Castilian has also garnered considerable attention, but it has been less politically charged than in the case of Alfonso, with the notable exception of the 2004 Ph.D. dissertation by Patricia Lee Timmons, Law, Sex, and Anti-Semitism in Gonzalo de Berceo’s ‘Milagros de Nuestra Señora’. An important research tool for linguistic work on the Milagros comes in José Baró, Glosario completo de ‘Los milagros de Nuestra Señora’ de Gonzalo de Berceo, 1987. Juan Manuel Rozas undertakes a generic approach in Los milagros de Berceo, como libro y como género, 1976. Several other literary studies focused on style, structure, and function have also appeared: Carmelo Gariano, Análisis estilístico de los ‘Milagros de Nuestra Señora’ de Berceo, 1971 (2nd ed.); Josefina Albert Galera, Estructura funcional de los ‘Milagros’ de Berceo, 1987; René Pellen and Claudio García Turza, ‘Los milagros de Nuestra Señora’ de Berceo (c. 1255): étude linguistique et index lemmatisé: d’après l’édition de Claudio García Turza, 1993–1997; Juan Carlos Fernández Pérez, El estilo de Berceo y sus fuentes latinas: la ‘Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos’, los ‘Milagros de Nuestra Señora’ y los ‘Himnos’: análisis comparativo, 2005; and Elizabeth M. Deeter’s 1996 M.A. thesis, “An Analysis of the Literary Manifestations of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Gonzalo de Berceo’s ‘Milagros de Nuestra Señora’”. In the Old French tradition, Gautier de Coinci holds pride of place. The standard edition of his Miracles de Nostre Dame remains V. Frederic Koenig, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, 4 vols., 1966–1970. Olivier Collet completed Koenig’s original enterprise with his Glossaire et index critiques des œuvres d’attribution certaine de Gautier de Coinci, 2000. Collet also published Gautier’s Vie de Sainte Christine in 1999. The seminal codicological work on Gautier is Arlette Ducrot-Granderye, Etudes sur les ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame’ de Gautier de Coinci: Description et classement sommaire des manuscrits. Notice bibliographique, 1932. Koenig updates her work in his edition and Kathryn A. Duys extends

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that work even further in her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, Books Shaped by Song: Early Literary Literacy in the ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame’ of Gautier de Coinci. Only one monograph has been undertaken on Gautier: Brigitte Cazelles’s La faiblesse chez Gautier de Coinci, 1978. A considerable number of book chapters and articles, however, have been done. Daniel E. O’Sullivan studies Gautier’s fusion of vernacular and paraliturgical poetic and musical forms in Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric, 2005. Michelle Bolduc takes up a similar, but more antinomical approach in The Medieval Poetics of Contraries, 2006, building on her earlier “The Poetics of Authorship and Vernacular Religious Devotion,” Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. and introd. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, 2003, 125–43. Kathy M. Krause has been particularly active in reading Gautier for attitudes vis-à-vis women in “Virgin, Saint, and Sinners: Women in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame,” (Reassessing the Heroine in Medieval French Literature, ed. and introd. Kathy M. Krause, 2001, 26–52) as has Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski in “Sexual and Textual Violence in the ‘Femme d’Arras’ Miracle by Gautier de Coincy,” Translatio Studii: Essays by His Students in Honor of Karl D. Uitti for His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al., 2000, 51–64. Comparative studies come in the following: Mercedes Brea, “El milagro de Teófilo: Texto dramático y texto narrativo,” Medioevo y literatura, I, ed. Juan Paredes, 1995, 415–28; Elvira Fidalgo Francisco, “La abadesa preñada (Berceo 21): Seis versiones románticas y tres en latín,” Medioevo y literatura, II, ed. Juan Paredes, 1995, 329–44; Jean Dufournet, “Rutebeuf et le Miracle de Théophile,” Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Alice Planche, ed. Maurice Accarie and Ambroise Queffélec, 1984, 185–97. Most recently, Kathy Krause and Allison Stone have offered a collection of essays that take an interdisciplinary tack: Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts (2006). Select Bibliography Martin Heinzelmann, Klaus Herbers, and Dieter R. Bauer, Mirakel im Mittelalter: Konzeptionen – Erscheinungsformen – Deutungen (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2002); E. Cobham Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic with Illustrations (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1884; republished by Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, 1966); John Esten Keller offers a good overview in Pious Brief Narrative in Medieval Castilian & Galician Verse: from Berceo to Alfonso X (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978; Spanish translation, Madrid: Ediciones Alcalá, 1987).

Daniel E. O’Sullivan

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Mirrors for Princes (Islamic) A. Introduction The “Mirrors for Princes” or “Fürstenspiegel” genre in Islamic cultures owes much to the Sasanian pre-Islamic literary genre known as andarz, which in great part delivered advice and injunctions on proper behavior regarding matters of state, everyday life and religion. Pragmatic andarz include instruction manuals, popular gnomes and special manuals for the education of princes. Themes from this genre manifested themselves in the Islamic period in New Persian under the designations: pand (maxim), andarz (counsel), nasihat (advice), wasiyat (testament), wasaya (instruction), maw^iza (exhortation), or hikmat (wisdom, proverb). B. Historical Survey Islamic “Mirrors for Princes” have a long and very rich tradition stretching from the 8th century up through the early 20th century. These works were written throughout the Islamic world from Andalusia in Medieval Spain to India in a variety of languages, the main ones being Persian, Arabic and Turkish. The genre was centered round the original concept of Persian kingship which was concerned with justice and social harmony. However, some time was needed before these concepts could be fully integrated and made compatible with Islam. As prose belles lettres (adab), they were full of anecdotes and stories which conveyed political ideals. Often writers of this genre were somewhere in-between legal theory and philosophy, having to integrate Islamic law, ethics, morals and politics. The authors of many of these “Mirrors for Princes” dealt with real world kingship and were written by viziers and secretaries. Similar adab collections were written specifically for viziers, such as Jahshiyari’s Kitab al-wuzara#, or for judges, such as Mawardi’s Adab al-Qadi, or numerous works written for secretaries. Due to the nature of the subject matter, it is common to find elements of the genre in legal and philosophical works as well as in administrative manuals. In some cases, as with the Siyasatnama of Nizam al-Mulk (1018 or 1019–1092), the work is transgeneric, being both an administrative handbook as well as a borderline Mirror for Princes. C. Development of the Genre The earliest works of this genre were the Kitab al-Sahaba, the Adab al-Kabir and the Adab al-Saghir all written in Arabic by the Persian vizier to the caliph Mansur, Ibn al-Muqaffa^ (d. 757). Ibn al-Muqaffa^ utilized Pahlavi sources for his works. The Kitab al-Sahaba is closer to a manual, while the other two works are

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mirrors, which discuss the problems of kingship. Ibn al-Muqaffa^ in these early works elaborated on the closeness of kingship and religion but not specifically on Islamic ethics. He described a kingship based on religion, a political will and personal desires. It was not until the anonymous mid-9th century Kitab al-Taj, (in Arabic) that traditional Sasanian kingship theory was tied together with Quranic precepts. Kings were entrusted by God with ensuring the happiness of the people. The king was the shepherd and his subjects were the flock that owed him their obedience. 1. Early Works In the late 11th century, the first Persian mirror, the Qabüs-nama (1082) was written by the Ziyarid king Kay Ka#us ibn Iskandar for his son. It covered all matters of state and advocated for justice. It included advice on how to conduct oneself concerning the matters of everyday life. Of the same time period was the Siraj al-Muluk written by al-Turtushi in Muslim Spain. However, alTurtushi was an ascetic and consequently his emphasis in his work was on the covenant between God and kings and the king’s responsibilities to his subjects to provide them with justice and equity and to ensure their wellbeing and prosperity. Two famous works, the Siyasat-nama (Book of Government), and the Nasihat al-muluk (Advice for rulers) were written during the Great Seljuk period (1038–1157). The first work was completed in 1092 by the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk for the Seljuk ruler Malikshah (d. 1105) in Khurasan. Although it is more correctly a manual for administration, it contains large amounts of advice to rulers. The second work, the Nasihat al-muluk (circa 403/ 1109–10) was written by the equally famous philosopher-theologian, alGhazali (d. 1111). He emphasized that the king was the Shadow of God on earth, chosen by him and that likewise it was incumbent upon the people to obey and not to rebel against their rulers. Al-Ghazali set forth the proper cyclical order of things that is commonly referred to as the Circle of Justice.” In this order, the king upholds religion [Islam], the army maintains the king, and the army is maintained by the wealth generated by the land worked by the people. This prosperity is achieved through justice. The anonymous Persian Bahr al-Fawa^id (mid-12th c.) synthesized political and ethical thought and was clearly written based on Islamic law (shari^a). A contemporary Arabic encyclopaedia entitled Mufid al-ulum wa-mubid alhumum, is very close to the Bahr in content. The mirror tradition remained strong throughout the medieval period and included a number of other works worthy of note such as the Dhakhirat al muluk by Sayyid ’Ali Hamadhani (d. 1385), the Nasa^ih-i Shahrukhi (1411) by Jalal al-Din Zakariyya’ Qaz-

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wini for the Timurid ruler Shahrukh and the Suluk al-muluk of Fadl Allah Ruzbihan Khunji (d. 1521). 2. Indo Persian Works A substantial corpus of Indo-Islamic Mirrors for Princes began to emerge on the subcontinent at the beginning of the 13th century. Fakhr-i Muddabbir’s Adab al-muluk wa kifayat al-mamluk (Rules for kings and the welfare of the subjects) or Adab al-harb wa al-shuj^a (Rules of warfare and bravery) was written to assist the Dehli Sultanate (1206–1555). Additionally, Muhammad Baqir Najm-i yani (d.1637) who wrote the Muw^izah-i Jahangiri (Advice on the Art of Governance) for the emperor Jahangir (1605–1627). The Maw^izah was one of three mirrors written for Jahangir. In conclusion, writings of the Mirrors for Princes or Fürstenspiegel genre had a long and rich tradition in the broad spectrum of Islamic cultures and languages. Due to the inseparable nature of government and religion, Muslim mirrors predominantly reflect aspects of Islamic law and ethics to some extent. However, the overwhelm theme of Islamic kingship emphasizes the necessity for justice and social harmony and equilibrium. D. History of Scholarship The body of literature associated with the Mirrors for Princes genre in Islamic literature is large, varied and written in many languages. Because of these characteristics, this body of literature has been studied by modern medievalists from a number of different perspectives and different disciplines. Modern scholarly methodologies were only truly adopted in the Muslim world in the second quarter of the 20th century. As a result of this, many critical editions of important works were first collated and published in Europe. Additionally, modern political theory was not integrated into Middle Eastern curriculums until the second half of the 20th century. Consequently, Middle Eastern litterateurs primarily focused on the language and style of these works and their importance as belles letters (adab prose), while tacitly acknowledging the western categorization of a “Mirrors for Princes” genre. Modern Iranian scholarship benefited greatly from European efforts to collect and collate manuscripts and publish them. One such example is Charles Schefer’s edition of the Siyasat-nama (Book of Government), by Nizam al-Mulk first published in Paris in 1891. The Iranian scholar and poet laureate Muhammad Taqi Malik al-Shu^ara# Bahar noted this in his seminal work on the development of the Persian language, Sabk shinasi (Stylistics). Bahar and other Iranian scholars limited themselves in their research of such works as the Qabüs-nama and the Siyasat-nama, to an analysis of the evol-

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utionary development of vocabulary and grammar, as well as, an appreciation of the aesthetics of the language and style. The concentration of western scholarship has mainly included studies and/or translations of individual works or a focus on political theory or ethics. The first work to critically analyze this body of literature as a whole and categorize it was Gustav Richter’s study of the genre entitled, Studien zur Geschichte der älteren arabischen Fürstenspiegel (1932). He traced the development of the genre in Arabic and Persian literature and indicated their indebtedness to each other. He included a section on Greek influences that were adopted from philosophical and ethical works. Additionally, he recognized the fact that works that were exclusively Mirrors for Princes were relatively few in number. Three works that meet this classification have been translated into English and commented on have been examined specifically for historical or literary reasons. The first was a letter from Tahir b. al-Husayn to his son. It was translated and analyzed by C. E. Bosworth. His article entitled “An Early Islamic Mirror for Princes: Tahir Dhu al-Yaminain’s Epistle to his Son,” JNES 29 (1970): 25–41, examined this letter for historical and political insights into 9th century eastern Iran. Bosworth extensively researched the early Islamic dynasties that rose up in eastern Iran and Central Asia, particularly the Tahirids (821–873 A.D.) and the Ghaznavids (977–1186 A.D.). The second work is M. Nazim’s translation and notes on “The Pand-Namah of Subuktigin,” JRAS (1933): 605–28. This is another letter attributed to a father to his son. Nazim’s motivation for its translation was his historical studies of the Ghaznavids. Bosworth critically examined this letter as well and cast doubt on its authenticity for historical reasons. The third work, the Qabus-Namah was quite popular. It was translated into English by Rubin Levy and published as, A Mirror for Princes (1951). Levy as a professor of Persian literature approached the work from a purely literary perspective. The best critically edited and annotated Persian edition was done by Ghulam Husayn Yusufi and published in Tehran in 1967 (Majmu^a-yi mutun-i Farsi, 34, edited by Ihsan Yarshshatir). Ann K. S. Lambton’s research of this genre within the context of Persian political theory has been very extensive. Her studies have focused mainly on the Seljuk (1038–1194 A.D.) and the Il-Khanid (1256–1353 A.D.) periods. She has been particularly interested in proving the links of later kingship theory with early Sasanian (205–651 A.D.) traditions. Her premise is that kingship is based on justice. In her works she has followed changes in this concept over time. She has analyzed the various elements of the Siyasatnamah, the Nasihat al-muluk and the Bahr al-fawa^id. Her paper entitled “Islamic Mirrors for Princes” presented in Rome in 1971 is still the best developmental study of political theory of this topic.

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Charles-Henri de Fourchécour’s Moralia: Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle (1986) provides a fuller treatment of this genre by presenting a very detailed background study of wisdom literature from the ancient Persian and Greek traditions and into the Muslim traditions. His emphasis is on the development of ethical and moral traditions. The long chapter on Mirrors for Princes complements the earlier works of Richter and Lambton and builds on their studies. This study is the most comprehensive of any written. Unfortunately, it is primarily limited to Persian literature and it only covers the period through the 13th century. Additional scholarly works of note consist of collated texts of manuscripts of individual works and then a translation accompanied by extensive annotations. Three works of outstanding merit are Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig) by Yusuf Khass Hajib A Turco-Islamic Mirror for Princes by Robert Dankoff (1983), The Sea of Precious Virtues, Bahr al-Fawa^id: A Medieval Islamic Mirror for Princes, translated, edited and annotated by Julie Scott MEISAMI (1991), and Advice on the Art of Governance (Maw^izah-I Jahangiri of Muhammad Baqir Najm-i yani: An Indo-Islamic Mirror for Princes, translated with notes by Sajida Sultana Alvi (1989). Three other studies should be mentioned. They are Kanz al-muluk fi kaiffiyyat al-suluk: The Treasure of Princes on the Fashion of Behavior Ascribed to Sibt ibn al-Djauzi, edited with an introduction and critical philological and historical notes by Gosta Vitestam (1970), and an article “Mirror for Princes or Vizor for Viziers: The Twelfth-Century Arabic Popular Encyclopedia ’Mufid al-^ulum and Its Relationship with the Anonymous Persian ’Bahr al-fawa^id’,” by Geert Jan van Gelder in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 64.3 (2001): 313–38. Lastly, Linda T. Darling’s article “Do Justice, Do Justice For That is Paradise: Middle Eastern Advice for Indian Muslim Rulers,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22.1 & 2 (2002): 3–19. Select Bibliography Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, Moralia: Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle (Paris: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1986); Ann K. S. Lambton, “Islamic Mirrors for Princes,” La Persia nel Medioevo (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1971), 419–42; Stefan Leder, “Aspekte arabischer und persischer Fürstenspiegel: Legitimation, Fürstenethik, politische Vernunft,” Specula principum, ed. Angela De Benedictis (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 46–50; Louise Marlow, “Advice and Advice Literature,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. 2009; Gustav Richter, Studien zur Geschichte der älteren arabischen Fürstenspiegel (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1932); Franz Rosenthal, “From Arabic Books and Manuscripts, XVI: As-Sarakhsi (?) on the Appropriate Behavior for Kings,” JAOS 115 (1995): 105–09.

Mark David Luce

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Mirrors for Princes (Western) A. Definition “Mirrors for princes” were didactic writings intended to serve the moral, religious, and political education of future kings and princes. Also known as specula (from the Latin word for “mirror,” speculum), they were usually practical textbooks which instructed rulers on how to conduct their life and govern their country, or literary texts which presented the image of an ideal king worthy of imitation – hence the idea of the mirror. Although the origin of the phrase “mirror for princes” is still debated (see section B of this article), most critics agree that the first speculum was Godfrey of Viterbo’s Speculum regum, written around 1180. After the 12th century, mirrors for princes became increasingly popular all over Europe (e. g., the Scandinavian Konings-Skuggsjá in 1260, the Mireoirs aus princes by the French poet Watriquet de Couvin in 1327, the Speculum regis Edwardi by Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Speculum regum by the Spanish canonist Alvarus Pelagius in 1341–1344). Mirrors continued to be written throughout the Renaissance, but the genre entered a period of decline (and transformation) starting with the 17th century (see section E). There are diverging opinions on whether or not specula constitute a distinct genre. For instance, Pierre Hadot, author of a seminal article on this topic (“Fürstenspiegel,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 8, 1969, 555–631), presents the specula as a separate genre which had its roots in ancient panegyrics and manuals on government, flourished during the Middles Ages and disappeared after the Renaissance. Other critics, such as William Berges and Michel Senellart, tend to consider the mirrors as a branch of the larger transhistorical genre of parenetics (see Berges’s fundamental work Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, 1938; see also Michel Senellart’s remarks on “parénétique” in his book Les Arts de gouverner: Du ‘Regimen’ médiéval au concept de gouvernement, 1995, 45). Parenetics, from the Greek parainesis (“exhortation”) is a type of discourse which prompts the reader to lead a virtuous life. In this line of interpretation, mirrors for princes are not a distinct genre but a subgenre of parenetics, and more specifically of royal parenetics. The latter subgenre includes – but is not limited to – books that address specifically princes and kings and generally bear titles such as speculum, liber de regimine, de institutione, or de instructione principum. This article offers a historical overview of the mirror genre from its ancient sources to the Renaissance and serves as a guide to the status of research on this topic. However, due to the space limitations of this article, we

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will present only a few essential parenetical texts (whether they bear the title of speculum or not) belonging to the Judeo-Christian and European civilization. At the end of the article, readers will also find a comprehensive list of the works that belong to the mirror genre. B. Origin of the Phrase The exact origin of the phrase “mirror for princes” remains unknown, although the roots are clearly Roman. Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), for instance, compares the prince to a mirror in his De re publica, in a dialogue between Laelius and Scipio: tum Laelius: ‘video iam, illum quem expectabam virum cui praeficias officio et muneri.’ ‘huic scilicet’ Africanus ’uni paene – nam in hoc fere uno sunt cetera –, ut numquam a se ipso instituendo contemplandoque discedat, ut ad imitationem sui vocet alios, ut sese splendore animi et vitae suae sicut speculum praebeat civibus. (De re publica, ed. and trans. C.W. Keyes [1928], II, 69) (“Lœlius: – I now see the sort of politician you require, on whom you would impose the office and task of government. Scipio: – He must be a very choice and distinguished individual, for the task I set him comprises all others. He must never cease from cultivating and studying himself, that he may excite others to imitate him, and become, through the splendor of his talents and enterprizes, a living mirror to his countrymen,” The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero: Comprising his Treatise on the Commonwealth; and his Treatise on the Laws, ed. by Francis Barham, 1841–1842, I, ii, 69)

However, Senellart ([1995], 47–48) rightly suggests that there is no allusion to a “mirror for princes” in this paragraph. In fact, Cicero’s prince does not even need to look in a mirror to better himself, for he is the mirror. Like for the ancient Greeks, Cicero’s prince represents the very embodiment of law, whom ordinary citizens need to obey, revere and imitate (see Lester K. Born’s article on the connection between Cicero’s political ideas and the Greek notion of the king as nomos empsychos, or animate law, “Animate Law in the Republic and the Laws of Cicero,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 64 [1933]: 128–37; see also Erwin R. Goodenough, “The Political Philosophy of Hellenistic Kingship,” Yale Classical Studies I [1928]: 55–102; Lucien Cerfaux and Julien Tondriau, Un concurrent du Christianisme: Le culte des souverains dans la civilisation gréco-romaine, 1957; Fritz Taeger, Charisma: Studien zur Geschichte des Antiken Herrscherkultes, 1957–1960; for more on Cicero’s political ideas, see Ettore Lepore, Il Princeps Ciceroniano e gli ideali politici della tarda repubblica, 1954; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age, 2007, 435–93).

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According to Hadot (1969, 556) and Senellart (1995, 47–48), it is actually Seneca (4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.) who uses for the first time the image of the mirror in relationship to a book – his own De clementia: Scribere de clementia, Nero Caesar, institui, ut quodam modo speculi vice fungerer et te tibi ostenderem perventurum ad voluptatem maximam omnium. (“I have undertaken, Nero Caesar, to write on the subject of mercy, in order to serve in a way the purpose of a mirror, and thus reveal you to yourself as one destined to attain to the greatest of all pleasures,” On Mercy, in Moral Essays, ed. and trans. by John W. Basore, 1928–1935, I, I, i)

Further in the book, however, Seneca seems to fall back on the idea of the prince perfect by nature and worthy of imitation (“Caesaris prima tempora loquitur nec, quod te imitari velit, exemplar extra te quaerit,” I, vi). Is therefore Seneca’s book really useful, since Nero is already endowed with all the virtues required for a king? Yes, Seneca argues, for De clementia will help Nero transform a natural predisposition (impetus) into conscious behavior (fiat judicium). The author seems therefore to suggest that mirrors for princes can only reinforce the prince’s good – though unconscious – manners, but it is actually hard to say whether Seneca’s argument is serious or mere flattery. At any rate, Seneca’s treatise became extremely influential in the Middle Ages, especially for the authors of the first medieval specula, Alcuin and Jonas of Orleans (see section IVa). For more on Seneca’s political ideas see Marion Altman, “Ruler Cult in Seneca,” CP 33.2 (1938): 198–204; Anton Sipple, Der Staatsmann und Dichter Seneca als politischer Erzieher, 1938; for more recent research, see Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age (2007), 535–44. C. The Pre-History of the Mirrors One of the most thorough introductions to the pre-history of the mirrors can be found in Pierre Hadot, “Fürstenspiegel,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 8 (1972), 555–631. According to Hadot, the image of the ideal prince remained essentially unchanged from the time of the Pharaos to Charlemagne. Until the 9th century C.E., he claims, kings and princes continued to be seen as God’s deputies on earth, and the ethical ideals that informed the representation of the ideal ruler were basically the same from antiquity throughout the early Middle Ages (“Es zeigte sich, dass das Herrscherideal von den Pharaonen bis zu den Karolingern in im Grunde identischer Weise aufgefasst wurde. Sowohl die metaphysischen Voraussetzungen [der König als Stellvertreter Gottes auf Erden] wie der ethische Gehalt der Vorstellung vom Idealherrscher bleiben beinahe unverändert,” 1969,

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623–24). Hadot is certainly right to point out that there are numerous similarities between certain ancient and early medieval mirrors. However, as the following pages will show, the image of the ideal ruler in the pre-history of the specula is far from monolithic. C1. The Bible Deuteronomy 17:14–20 from the Old Testament is undoubtedly one of the most significant texts in the pre-history of the specula. This passage is important mainly for two reasons. First of all, in terms of content, it is clearly a mirror for princes. Secondly, as Michel Senellart (1995, 103) points out, it shows how problematic the idea of kingship was in the history of Israel. This passage has indeed little in common with the typical idealized representations of kingship that one can find in most Hebrew texts – including certain parts of the Old Testament – and the political literature of the ancient Middle East (for more on this topic, see Franz M. Th. Boehl, Der babylonische Fürstenspiegel, 1937; Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East, 1943; see also these excellent works published in the 1950s and 1960s: Jean De Fraine, L’aspect religieux de la royauté israélite: L’institution monarchique dans l’Ancien Testament et dans les textes mésopotamiens, 1954; Aubrey R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel, 1955; Geo Widengren, Sakrales Königtum im Alten Testament und im Judentum, 1955; Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed. Samuel H. Hooke, 1958; The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the VIIIth International Congress for the History of Religions, 1959; Karl Heinz Bernhardt, Das Problem der altorientalischen Königsideologie im Alten Testament, 1961; Hadot, 1969, 555–64). The representation of human kingship in Deuteronomy 17:14–20 is, as a matter of fact, an extremely severe one: When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother. But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: for as much as the Lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: and it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or

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to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:14–20, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, King James Version, 1611/1999)

This passage needs to be understood in its historical context: after captivity in Egypt and the first conquests under the command of Joshua, the people of Israel had been lead by judges (Gedeon, Samson, Samuel) directly appointed by God. This was mainly a time of turmoil, violence and anarchy, and at the end of Samuel’s period in office, the people of Israel demand that a king be chosen: Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. (1 Samuel 8:4–8, King James)

Thus, the king is presented here as one of the people of Israel’s demands, and not as a gift from God. In fact, this request is part of a long series of rebellions against God’s will (“they have forsaken me”). Furthermore, the people of Israel want to have a king “like all the nations,” thereby forgetting their own distinct identity. Nevertheless, God grants Israel their demand, although he does warn them about the tyranny of a human ruler: And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11–18, King James)

Thus, as Senellart points out (1995, 105), the Old Testament presents the idea of an earthly king as a necessary evil that was asked for by a sinful humankind and granted by a merciful and forgiving God, and it also establishes

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a clear difference between the divine regnum and the human dominatio that is about to come. However, the request for a king remains nonetheless a sign of Israel’s secret desire for servitude. For more on this topic, see Kurt Galling, “Das Königsgesetz im Deuteronomium,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 76 (1951): 133–38; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au MoyenAge (2007), 669–73. Deuteronomy 17 played in important part in the political thought of the Middle Ages. According to Senellart (1995, 105), it may have been one of the sources of Augustine’s idea that humans secretly long for coercion (see III a). Deuteronomy 17 became even more popular in the 12th century. John of Salisbury, for instance, opposed the idea that the prince was above the law (legibus solutus). Quite the contrary, John argues in his Policraticus (IV, 4–7), the prince should learn to fear God and, quoting from Deuteronomy 17:16, he should not “multiply horses for himself.” As for the New Testament, Hadot (1969, 610–12) shows that it has a strong anti-political stance as well. In the gospels, Jesus announces God’s reign over the world (Mark 1:15; 4:11; Luke 4:43; 6:20; John 3:3). In contrast, earthly kingdoms continue to be seen as something nearly diabolical (Matthew 4:8; Luke 4:5; Revelation 11:15) which have nothing in common with the kingdom of Jesus (Acts 8:12; 28:31; Revelation 12:10). In the New Testament, God’s kingdom comes to be identified more and more with Christ’s reign (Revelation 11:15; Luke 22:30, Ephesians 5:5) – a reign that is moral rather than political. As a result, although human kingship retains a negative image, it can now redeem itself through the imitation of Christ (see Gerhard Kittel, Christus und Imperator, 1939; Jean Leclercq, L’idée de la royauté du Christ au Moyen Age, 1959; Per Beskow, Rex Gloria: The Kingship of Christ in the Early Church, 1962; Hans Windisch, Imperium und Evangelium im Neuen Testament, Kieler Universitätsreden 14, 1931; Otto Kaiser, Der Gott des Alten Testaments, 1998). Michel Banniard (Genèse culturelle de l’Europe: Ve–VIIIe siècle, 1989, 75) is right to point out that there is a paradox in the political destiny of Christianity, which was initially a deeply anti-political religion and eventually became the official state religion of most of medieval Europe. The first step in this direction was the legalization of Christianity in 313 through the Edict of Milan by Constantine the Great (272–337 C.E.) and the co-emperor Licinius (250–325 C.E.). The Edict legalized Christianity together with other religions, restored property seized during Diocletian’s persecution, rejected religious persecution, and accepted religious plurality. Constantine soon became a very popular ruler among Christians, whose anti-imperial attitude started to change. Thus, in 336, Eusebius of Caesarea pronounced the tricen-

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tennial speech (triakontaerikos), in which he presented the emperor Constantine as a mirror of God’s virtue. Then, like in a speculum, Eusebius goes on to list the duties of the ideal ruler: he should be a philosopher who despises earthly things; he should also be God-fearing and not rely exclusively on his army, for the strength of a ruler is moral rather than military. Furthermore, the emperor is presented here as an instrument of God (see Hans Eger, “Kaiser und Kirche in der Geschichtstheologie Eusebs von Casarea,” Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 38 [1939]: 97–115; F. E. Cranz, “Kingdom and Polity in Eusebios de Caesarea,” Harvard Theological Review 45 [1952]: 107–32; Hadot [1969], 614–5; Michael J. Hollerich, “Religion and Politics in the Writings of Eusebius,” Church History 59.3 [1990]: 309–25). The second step was the reign of Theodosius (347–395), who declared Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. It was also during Theodosius’s reign that the Emperor came to be seen as a divine Pantokrator, in line with Eusebius of Caesarea’s ideas from the tricentennial speech. Thus, the early Byzantium revived the hierocratic image of the king that had been prevalent in the ancient world (see Louis Brehier, “L’origine des titres impériaux à Byzance,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 15 [1906]: 161–78; Kenneth F. Setton, The Christian Attitude Towards the Emperor in the Fourth Century, 1941; Kurt Aland, “Kaiser und Kirche von Konstantin bis Byzanz,” Berliner Byzantinistische Arbeiten 7 [1957]: 188–212; J.B. Aufhauser, “Die sakrale Kaiseridee in Byzanz,” Sacral Kingship [1959]: 531–42; for more recent research, see Dimiter Angelov, Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204–1330, especially pp. 184–97 on Byzantine specula). What were the main implications of this new alliance between politics and Christianity for the future evolution of the mirror genre? The Bible does indeed contain a great number of royal figures to which future Christian kings and emperors could – or aspired to – compare themselves: the humble King David, the wise Solomon and, though not a king, the patient Job. Furthermore, Christ’s figure inspired a great deal of specula, for whose authors the main duty of a king amounted to an imitatio Christi. Thus, the Bible became one of the major sources – if not the main source – of inspiration for the mirror genre in the Middle Ages. For more on the influence of the Bible on the political philosophy of the Middle Ages, see Walter Ullmann’s seminal work, “The Bible and Principles of Government in the Middle Ages,” Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo (1963), 181–227; see also Percy-Ernst Schramm, “Das Alte und das Neue Testament in der Staatslehre und Staatssymbolik des Mittelalters,” La Bibbia nell’alto medioevo (1963), 229–55.

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C2. Augustine and Gregory the Great Augustine (354–430 C.E.) was a prolific author, and the list of his works consists of nearly a hundred titles (De Beata Vita, Contra Academicos, De Libero Arbitrio, De Magistro, Confessiones, to quote just a few). Most of Augustine’s political philosophy, however, is concentrated in the fifth book of his De civitate Dei, written between 413–427 C.E. (for short introductions to Augustin’s political ideas, see Paul Weithman, “Augustine’s Political Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine [2001], 234–52 and Benoît Beyer de Ryke, “L’apport augustinien: Augustin et l’augustinisme politique,” Histoire de la philosophie politique: Naissances de la modernité, II [1999], 43–86; for more indepth readings, see Gustave Combes, La doctrine politique de Saint Augustin, 1927; Etienne Gilson, Les métamorphoses de la Cité de Dieu, 1952; Herbert Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of Saint Augustine, 1963; see also Norman H. B. Baynes’s seminal book The Political Ideas of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, 1968; for more recent research, see Peter D. Bathory, Political Theory as Public Confession: the Social and Political Thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, 1981; Eugene Tesselle, Living in Two Cities: Augustinian Trajectories in Political Thought, 1998; Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody et al., 2005; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age, 2007, 749–62). Of particular importance for our topic is chapter XXIV of De civitate Dei, which is in part a mirror for princes. At first, Augustine analyzes the title of felix which used to be added to the name of Roman emperors since Commodus and Caracalla. Then, he asserts that the felicitas of a ruler is not the result of luck or hazard, but the consequence of the king’s virtue and love of God: But we say that they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, worship God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, ready to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and defence of the republic, and not in order to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that iniquity may go unpunished, but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate with the lenity of mercy and the liberality of benevolence for whatever severity they may be compelled to decree; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been unrestrained; if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer. (De civitate Dei/The City of God, vol. V, ed. and trans. by Eva M. Sanford and W.M. Green, 1965)

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With these criteria in mind, Augustine proposes emperors Constantine and Theodosius as epitomes of the ideal ruler (V, XXV–XXVI). Although chapters V, XXI–XXVI are representative of Augustine’s ideas on the perfect prince, Senellart (1995, 75–83) is right to argue that his political philosophy runs much deeper than this. According to Senellart and other critics, Augustine’s political views derive in fact from his philosophy of sin and free will. The idea of an autonomous individual, endowed with the freedom to govern himself (autexousia) was inherited by Christianity from the stoic philosophers. In the first centuries of the Christian era, the Church had even used the concept of autexousia to justify its own autonomy from the pagan Roman Empire. Augustine, too, admits that humans are endowed with free will, but at the same time he points out that our very flesh and its libido are a negation of absolute human freedom. Then, he goes on to argue that if our body – and especially our genital organs – can react independently from our will (erubescentia), humans are in fact not entirely free. In conclusion, humans cannot govern themselves by their free will, and therefore some form of coercion is needed in order to govern people according to God’s will. But, who has the moral authority to coerce people into abiding by God’s law? Augustine’s answer is the Church, which explains why the doctrine that earthly governments should be subordinated to the ecclesiastical authority came to be known as political Augustinism (cf. Henri-Xavier Arquilliere, L’augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen Age, 1933; for a different view of political Augustinism, see John Von Heyking’s book, Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, 2001, which contends that Augustine’s ideas are a continuation of Plato and Aristotle’s political thought, and not, as most critics claim, an anti-political theology). However, Hans Liebeschuetz argues that Augustine is only a precursor, while the actual father of this doctrine is Gregory the Great (cf. H. Liebeschuetz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Works of John of Salisbury, 1950, 35). Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604) became Pope Gregory I in 590. That same year, he completed his Liber Regulae Pastoralis (The Book of the Pastoral Rule, ed. and trans. George E. Demacopoulos, 2007), which focuses on the office of episcopacy in general and, more specifically, on the bishop’s duties. The book could be seen as a “mirror for bishops” but it is actually more than that because according to its author, the nature of the epsicopal office is both spiritual and political (he refers to it as locus regiminis and culmen regiminis). While subtly politicizing the bishop’s duties, Gregory also suggests the primacy of the Church over the powers that be. As servus servorum Dei (“servant of the servants of God”), the bishop is the only one who can rule over the souls of

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his people and guide them in the right direction – that is to be their Christian rector. The concept of the Christian rector appeared for the first time in the 4th century in the writings of Gregory of Nazianz (330–389 C.E.), cf. Robert A. Markus, “Gregory the Great’s Rector and His Genesis,” Grégoire le Grand, 1986, 136–46 (see also his article “Gregory the Great on Kings: Rulers and Preachers in the Commentary on I Kings,” The Church and Sovereignty, c. 590–1918, ed. by Diana Wood, 1991, 7–21). Gregory of Nazianz argued that the Church represents the “body of Christ” and, by analogy with the anatomical body in which certain limbs are subordinated to others, all the priests and clerks have to obey the head of the Church, i. e., the bishops or rectores. Thus, Gregory the Great probably inherited this concept from his Nazienzene predecessor. However, it is also possible that he adapted it from the imperial judicial vocabulary, which equated rector to rex (“king”), and transformed it into a synonym for pastor, sacerdos or episcopus (see Senellart, 1995, 85–90). For more on Gregory the Great’s life and works, see Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, 1988, and R. A. Markus’s seminal book Gregory the Great and His World, 1997. On Gregory’s political thought, see David Hipshon, “Gregory the Great’s ‘Political Thought,’” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50.3 (2002): 439–53, as well as his thesis The Theology of Secular Rule: Ambrose and Gregory, 1999. Gregory’s idea of the Christian rector and his treatise were extremely influential during the Middle Ages. In 597, Gregory sent his book with Augustine of Canterbury to the Kingdom of Kent, which made the Liber very popular in England. In the 9th century, Alfred the Great translated it into English as part of a project to improve education in England. The king wanted all of the bishops in his kingdom to have a copy of the book, which proves that Gregory’s writing was still seen as a fundamental text for pastors. Across the Channel, the Regulae were also recommended to Charlemagne’s bishops at a few councils held in 813, and a letter of Hincmar of Rheims (see D1) even notes that a copy of it, together with the Book of Canons, was given to the bishops before the altar at their consecration. D. Medieval Mirrors Medieval specula can be grouped in two main categories: i) Carolingian mirrors (D1), which usually draw inspiration from the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, and ii) late medieval mirrors (12th century and beyond, D2), which incorporate Aristotle’s ideas, thereby laying the foundations of a new type of political philosophy.

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D1. Carolingian Mirrors: from Alcuin to Hincmar of Rheims A former student of Egbert of York, Alcuin (735–804) became the foremost scholar at Charlemagne’s court in the 780–790s. A prolific writer, Alcuin was without doubt one of the artisans of what is often called the Carolingian renaissance (for an introduction to Alcuin’s life and works, see two books written in the 50’s: Eleanor S. Duckett, Alkuin, Friend of Charlemagne, 1951, and Luitpold Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature, 1959; for more recent works, see Donald Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation, 2004, and Albrecht Classen, “Alkuin und Hrabanus Maurus: Zwei Gelehrte der Karolingischen Renaissance,” Künstler, Dichter, Gelehrte, ed. Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, 2005, 805–24). It is also thanks to Alcuin that the metaphor of the mirror, probably through Seneca’s De clementia, became popular during the Carolingian period. Alcuin used it in his De virtutibus et vitiis (Patrologia Latina 101, 613–38), written around 799–800 for the count Wibo of Bretagne. In chapter V, Alcuin writes that we can examine ourselves through the Scriptures, like in a mirror (“in his enim quasi in quodam speculo homo seipsum considerare potest”). The mirror allows us to see what the human being is (“qualis sit”) and what it needs to do in life (“quo tendat”). Although the image of the mirror appears here in association with another text, Alcuin says in chapter XXXVI that he wrote his own book so that Wibo would be able to use it as a manual (“quasi manualem … libellum”) and to learn what he should do or avoid doing (“et in quo possis teipsum considerare, quid cavere, vel quid agere debeas”). Thus, Alcuin creates a subtle parallel between the Scriptures and his book, which now appears to be a mirror itself. As for the count’s duties, Alcuin suggests that the he should behave according to the Christian moral code. Thus, like Augustine and Gregory the Great, Alcuin puts a sign of equality between “perfect king” and “Christian king.” Although Alcuin is just as important in the history of the mirrors for princes as Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, Jonas of Orleans, Sedulius Scotus or Hincmar of Rheims, his political thought has been somewhat neglected. Here are some important articles on Alcuin: Lester K. Born, “The Specula Principis of the Carolingian Renaissance,” RBPh 12 (1933): 583–612; Luitpold Wallach, “Alcuin on Virtues and Vices: A Manual for a Carolingian Soldier,” Harvard Theological Review 48.3 (1955): 175–95, and also “The Political Theories of Alcuin” and “The Via Regia of Charlemagne: The Rhetoric of Alcuin as a Treatise on Kingship” in Wallach’s book Alcuin and Charlemagne (1959), 5–96; Alain Dubreucq, “Autour du De virtutibus et vitiis d’Alcuin,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 111.3 (2004): 269–88; see also Senellart (1995), 49–50.

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For more on Carolingian mirrors in general, see these two fundamental books: Hans Hubert Anton, Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit, 1968, and Walter Ullmann’s seminal work, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, 1969. The image of the mirror reappears in the works of Jonas of Orleans (760–841). Jonas was initially a cleric serving at the court of Louis the Pious, ruler of Aquitaine during the reign of his father Charlemagne. In 817, Louis established his son Pippin as King of Aquitaine, and Jonas became Pippin’s adviser. A mere year later, Jonas was appointed Bishop of Orleans. Among his writings, two of them deserve to be mentioned here: the De Institutione laicali (rules of Christian life for laymen) and the De Institutione regia (rules of Christian life for princes, Jonas d’Orléans, Le métier de roi/De institutione regia, ed. by Alain Dubreucq, 1995). The first book, which draws inspiration from the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, was written for count Matfrid of Orleans. The second book, written around 831, had no original title but was appropriately called De institutione regia by the French Benedictine Lucas d’Achéry (1609–1685). The book is written in the same vein as the Institutione laicali, to which it seems to be a sort of appendix, and it is also a mirror for princes destined for Pippin of Aquitaine. As Jonas points out, Pippin was supposed to read it quasi in quodam speculo in order to learn what he should do or avoid doing during his reign (Jonas uses here Alcuin’s very words from De virtutibus et vitiis). The first two chapters of De institutione regia are dedicated to the mission of the church. These introductory chapters are followed by six chapters which elaborate on the mission of the king and his authority, and then by seven other chapters dedicated to the moral and spiritual duties of the king’s subjects. As for the final chapter, it is almost entirely a commentary of a quotation on the perfect emperor from Augustine’s De civitate dei. Like Augustine, Jonas describes the mission of the king terms of Christian ministry (ministerium sacerdotum). Jonas’s ideas, however, are not absolutely identical to Augustine’s, for they should be understood in the political context of the 9th century. The political power of the Carolingians was in a time of crisis, and it needed the backing of the bishops. In conclusion, Jonas’s work is an expression of the relative strength of the church over the royal institution, as well as a project of cooperation between the auctoritas of the Church and the potestas of the king. For more on Jonas’s work, see Jean Reviron’s book Les idées politico-religieuses d’un évêque du IXe siècle: Jonas d’Orléans et son De institutione regia, 1930; Etienne Delaruelle, “En relisant le De institutione regia de Jonas d’Orléans,” Mélanges L. Halphen (1951), 185–92 and “Jonas d’Orléans et le moralisme carolingien,” Bulletin de la litérature ecclésiastique 55 (1954): 129–43; Senellart,

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1995, 50–51; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age (2007), 783–87. Hincmar of Rheims (806–882) was educated in the Benedictine monastery of St. Denis under abbot Hilduin. The abbot became Louis the Pious’s chancellor in 822 and took young Hincmar with him to the court. In 840, Charles the Bald acceded to the throne and took Hincmar into his service. A few years later, in 845, Hincmar obtained the archbishopric of Rheims through the support of Charles. He had good relationships with Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald and Carloman, crowned several Carolingian queens, and, more importantly, wrote several parenetical texts. The first such text, De regis persona et regio ministerio (Patrologia Latina, 125, 0833–0856D), is a mirror for princes written for Charles the Bald. The book is divided into thirty-three chapters which focus on i) the royal person and the royal institution (ch. 1–15); ii) the discretion to be shown in the administration of justice (ch. 16–28); iii) the duty of a king to punish rebels against God, the Church and the State (ch. 29–33). The text is quite obviously a compilation of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers (Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great). Hincmar’s vision of politics is essentially Augustinian (De Civitate Dei is indeed the text that he quotes the most) in its belief that a king cannot be happy unless he abandons the pursuit of earthly glory and turns his hopes towards God. The qualities that Hincmar would like to see in a king are moral rather than political: piety, humility, charity, mercy, justice, and the pursuit of peace. His moral vision of politics is also noticeable in his De cavendiis vitiis et virtutibus exercendio (Patrologia Latina, 125, 0857–0930D). This is another treatise written at the request of Charles the Bald, who had asked Hincmar to send him the letter written by Gregory the Great to king Reccared, a recent convert to Catholicism. Thus, Hincmar’s text is a sort of appendix to Gregory the Great’s letter. Like Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis, it is also an analysis of the virtues that all Christians – including kings – must pursue, and of the vices that they have to avoid. Finally, in 882, Hincmar wrote another mirror for princes, De ordine palatii, based on a (now lost) treatise by Adalard of Corbie, which is very similar in substance to his previous specula. For more on Hincmar’s life and work, see J. C. Pritchard, The Life and Times of Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, 1849; Carl Von Noorden, Hinkmar, Erzbischof von Reims, 1863; H. H. Anton (1968), 281–354; Heinrich Schroer, Hinkmar, Erzbischof von Reims, 1884; Jean Devisse, Hincmar, archevêque de Reims, 1975. For Hincmar’s political thought, see Janet Nelson, “Kingship, Law and Liturgy in the Political Thought of Hincmar of Reims,” EHR 92 (1977): 241–79; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen-Age (2007), 793–94. Unfortunately, like in the case of Jonas and of

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many other Carolingian scholars, Hincmar’s political thought has not been sufficiently researched. That is why we believe that Carolingian mirrors for princes constitute a promising field for future research. D2. Late Medieval Mirrors: John of Salisbury and Giles of Rome The late Middle Ages, in particular the 12th and 13th centuries, represents the Golden Age of the mirror genre. In this chapter, we will focus on two fundamental texts, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Two essential texts about mirrors for princes in general are Wilhelm Berges’s book Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters, 1952, and, on a different scale, Lester K. Born’s article “The Perfect Prince: A Study in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Ideals,” Speculum 3 (1928): 470–504. For more on other medieval mirrors from various areas of the world, see Friedrich Von Stromer-Reichenbach, Der deutsche Fürstenspiegel, 1925; Wilhelm Kleinecke, Englische Fürstenspiegel vom Policraticus Johanns von Salisbury bis zum Basilikon Doron König Jakobs I, 1932; Gustav Richter, Studien zur Geschichte der älteren arabischen Fürstenspiegel, 1932; Josef Roeder, Das Fürstenbild in den mittelalterlichen Fürstenspiegeln auf französischem Boden, 1933; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, 1957; Dora M. Bell, L’idéal ethique de la royauté en France au moyen âge d’après quelques moralistes de ce temps, 1962; Ann K. S. Lambton, “Islamic Mirrors for Princes,” Persia nel Medioevo: Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma, 31 marzo– 5 aprile 1970 (1971), 419–42; Herbert Grabes, Speculum, Mirror und LookingGlass: Kontinuität und Originalität des Spiegelmetapher in der Buchtiteln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, 1973; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1978; Jacques Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du Moyen-Age (1380–1440), 1981, and also L’empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France (XIIIe–XVe siècle), 1993; for more recent research, see Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, 2000; Ulrike Grassnick, Ratgeber des Königs: Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spätmittelalterlichen England, 2004; Jocelyne Dakhlia, “Les miroirs des princes islamiques: une modernité sourde?,” Annales 57.5 (2002): 191–206; Istvan P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages (1200–1500), 2007; Frédérique Lachaud and Lydwine Scordia, Le prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne, 2007. John of Salisbury (1120–1180). Born in Salisbury, John crossed the Channel to France in 1136 to study in Paris under the direction of Pierre Abélard, William of Conches and Gilbert de la Porrée. Later, he attended the council of Rheims, where Bernard de Clairvaux probably introduced him to Theobald,

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the archbishop of Canterbury. Theobald appointed John as his secretary and took him back to England around 1150. Theobald later sent John to the continent on various missions, mainly to Rome. It is during this period, in 1159 to be more precise, that John wrote his Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium et de vestigiis philosophorum (Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. Cary J. Nederman, 1990). For an introduction to John’s life and work, see Clement C.J. Webb, John of Salisbury, 1932; Hans Liebeschuetz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury, 1950; for more recent works, see The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael J. Wilks, 1984, and Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury, 2005. The word Policraticus in the title of the book means “manual of government,” which clearly indicates that it is a mirror for princes. However, the latter part of the title (de nugis curialium et de vestigiis philosophorum) made H. H. Anton argue that the Policraticus is not exactly a mirror (“Fürstenspiegel,” LexMA, vol. IV, 1989, col. 1045). Georges Duby has a more nuanced opinion when he says that the Policraticus is also a speculum curiae or “mirror of the court” (“Le miroir qu’il fabrique n’est pas tendu vers le prince, ni vers tous les laïcs. Il s’agit plutôt d’un speculum curiae, d’un miroir de la cour, lieu d’une démultiplication – polycratique – du pouvoir,” Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme, 1978, 321). Indeed, the first part of the Policraticus (books I–VI) analyzes the futility of the court society, whereas the second part (books VII and VIII) does the same in a more abstract manner. Nevertheless, the central chapters of the Policraticus (books IV–VI) can be considered without doubt a mirror for princes. As Senellart (1995, 130) points out, this central part of the book has a binary structure, for it is influenced by the Deuteronomy 17:14–20 and by the Institutio Trajani, falsely attributed to Plutarch (see Hans Liebeschuetz, “John of Salisbury and Pseudo-Plutarch,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 [1943]: 33–39, and Max Kerner, “Randbemerkungen zur Institutio Traiani,” The World of John of Salisbury [1984], 203–6). Thus, book IV focuses on the difference between just princes and tyrants, whereas books V and VI elaborate on the organization of the body politic. In the opening lines of Book IV, John mentions the traditional opposition between just princes and tyrants. A just prince, John writes, is a prince who obeys the law of the country and tries to be helpful to each and every one of his subjects (in utilitate singulorum et omnium). To be more precise, a prince has – according to the Institutio Trajani – four main responsibilities: to revere God, love his subjects, be self-disciplined, and educate his officials. John claims that the prince needs to subjugate his will to the will of God and also to the collective will of his subjects (IV, 5, 40). Then, John insists

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on the idea of self-discipline and on the moderate use of coercive force by princes, for those who make excessive use of it can easily become tyrants (for more on John of Salisibury’s ideas on tyrants and tyrannicide, see Cary J. Nederman, “A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” RP 50 [1988]: 365–68; Jan Van Laarhoven, “‘Thou shalt not slay a tyrant!’: The So-Called Theory of John of Salisbury,” The World of John of Salisbury, 1984, 319–41). Finally, the prince needs to educate his officials because due to the prince’s lack of time or remoteness from various areas of his kingdom, justice is often exerted by his representatives. Therefore, a virtuous prince is not always enough for the good governance of a country. Further in the book, John uses an organic metaphor to describe the State and writes that the prince is the head at the top of the body politic (see Cary J. Nederman, “The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” History of Political Thought, vol. 8, 1987, 211–23, and Tilman Struve, “The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury,” The World of John of Salisbury, 1984, 303–17). However, the decisions of a head of a state – no matter how virtuous – are not automatically respected by all the parts of the body. John’s subtle idea of the relative insufficiency of virtue in political matters represents a fundamental shift from previous mirrors for princes, in which good morals were almost always synonymous with good government. Of course, we are still very far from Machiavelli, but John of Salisbury’s Policraticus is nonetheless symptomatic for this shift that will become even more visible in Giles of Rome’s work. For further reading on John of Salisbury, see John Dickinson, “The Mediaeval Conception of Kingship and Some of Its Limitations, as Developed in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury,” Speculum 1 (1926): 308–37; Wilhelm Berges (1938), 40–71. For more secondary literature on John of Salisbury, see David Luscombe, “A Bibliography, 1953–82,” The World of John of Salisbury (1984), 445–57, and Cary J. Nederman, John of Salisbury, 2005. Giles of Rome (1243–1316), also known as Ægidius Romanus or Egidio Colonna, was one of the most famous disciples of Thomas Aquinas. He was also the first member of the Augustinian Order to be appointed to teach at the University of Paris. In 1292, he became superior-general of his order, and in 1295, he was appointed by Pope Boniface VIII as Archbishop of Bourges. For good introductions to Giles’s life and works, see Richard Scholz, Ægidius von Rom, 1902; John R. Eastman, “Die Werke des Aegidius Romanus,” Augustiniana 44. 1–2 (1994): 209–31; Senellart, 1995, 180–205; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2000), 64–71.

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Giles became famous not just as a churchman but also as an intellectual, especially for his commentary on Aristotle’s Organon and, most importantly, for his De regimine principum (for his complete works, see Aegidii romani Opera omnia, ed. by Francesco Del Punta, 1985–; the best works on the De regimine remains Charles F. Briggs’s Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, 1999). The De regimine principum was commissioned by Philip the Bold for his son (the future Philip the Fair) and written around 1277–1279. Giles’s book is probably the most successful mirror for princes of the Middle Ages, as it was transcribed in over 300 manuscripts and translated in various European languages (see, for instance, Li livres du gouvernement des rois: A XIIIth-Century French Version of Egidio Colonna’s Treatise ‘De regimine principum’, ed. by. Samuel P. Molenaer, 1899; ‘De regimine principum’: Eine mittelniederdeutsche Version, ed. by Axel Mante, 1929; Charles F. Briggs, The English Manuscripts of Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’ and Their Audience, 1993; The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the ‘De regimine principum’ of Aegidius Romanus, ed. by David Fowler et al, 1997; for Giles’s translations beyond Europe, see Abraham Melamed, “The Anonymous Hebrew Translation of Aegidius’ De Regimine principum: An Unknown Chapter in Medieval Jewish Political Philosophy,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale V, 1994, 439–61). Giles’s work is considered one of the most successful attempts to introduce Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy to Western Europe. In his work, Giles does indeed make copious use of quotations from the Nichomachean Ethics, the Politics and the Rethoric (see Roberto Lambertini, “Philosophus videtur tangere tres rationes: Egidio Romano lettore ed interprete della Politica nel terzo libro del De regimine Principum,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale I, 1990, 277–325, “Il filosofo, il principe e la virtù: Note sulla ricezione e l’uso dell’Etica Nicomachea nel De regimine principum di Egidio Romano,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale II, 1991, 239–79, and “The Prince in the Mirror of Philosophy: About the Use of Aristotle in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum,” Moral and Political Philosophies in the Middle Ages, 1992, 1522–34; Franz-Bernhard Stammkoeter, “Der Konflikt zwischen aristotelischer und augustinischer Ethik bei Aegidius von Rom und Gregor von Rimini,” Analecta Augustiniana 59 [1996]: 293–311; Lidia Lanza, “La Politica di Aristotele e il De regimine principum di Egidio Romano,” Medioevo e Rinascimento XV [2001]: 19–75; Christoph Flueler, “Politischer Aristotelismus im Mittelalter: Einleitung,” Vivarium 60 [2002]: 1–13). In fact, however, Thomas Aquinas’s Sententia libri Politicorum, De regno, Summa Theologiae – never quoted in the De regimine – were probably just as influential for Giles’s thought.

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The De regimine principum is subdivided into three books: ethica, oeconomica and politica. The first part teaches the king how to behave as an individual; the second teaches him how to conduct family matters, whereas the third contains teachings regarding the government of the kingdom (regarding the oeconomica, see Heinz Gottwald, Vergleichende Studie zur Ökonomik des Aegidius Romanus und des Justus Menius, 1988, and Lambertini, “A proposito della costruzione dell’Oeconomica in Egidio Romano,” Medioevo XIV [1988]: 315–70). The very structure of the book seems therefore to suggest that something has changed in the vision of a king’s duties and responsibilities, and that ethics and politics are no longer perfect synonyms. Politics, Giles argues, is about reigning over other people (aliorum directivus, I, 1, 5), which is very different from behaving, that is, governing oneself. Reigning is also different from managing one’s own house or family. The kingdom (regnum) and the house (domus) are two different things, for a pater familias may own his house, whereas in a kingdom the king does not own everything. Giles also argues that those who govern through violence will be unable to stay in power for very long. Apparently, Giles uses here the classical distinction between tyrants who reign by force and just princes who obey the laws of the country. Beyond the cliché, however, one can sense Giles’s concern for the duration of a king’s reign, which can be shortened by reckless use of violence. Thus, the main concern of a king is now the preservation of power for an indefinite period of time, and not the salvation of the soul, as in the early Middle Ages. For more on Giles of Rome’s political ideas, see Ugo Mariani, Il ‘De regimine principum’ e le teorie politiche di Egidio Romano, 1926; Berges, 1938, 121; Nicolai Rubinstein, “The History of the Word politicus in Early-Modern Europe,” The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, 1987, 41–56; Graham McAleer, “Giles of Rome on Political Authority,” JHI 60.1 (1999): 21–36; Robert W. Dyson, Giles of Rome on Ecclesiastical Power, 1986, and Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Giles of Rome, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Marsilius of Padua, 2003. E. The Post-Medieval Transformation of the Mirror Genre More than 250 mirrors for princes were written between the 13th and the 17th century, according to Herbert Grabes (Speculum, Mirror und Looking-Glass: Kontinuität und Originalität des Spiegelmetapher in den Buchtiteln des Mittelalters und der englischen Literatur des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, 1973). Yet, these 250 mirrors were not equally distributed over the centuries. The Middle Ages represented the golden era of the specula, whereas the Renaissance marked a sharp decline of the genre, culminating with its near-extinction in the 17th century.

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However, Michel Senellart (1995) rightly argues that the eventual “decline” of the specula should be seen rather as a process of transformation which had already started in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the success and respectively the decline/transformation of the specula also reflect the fundamental shifts that occurred in political thought between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. According to Senellart, the three major concepts that define the political thought of the Middle Ages and the early modern period are i) corriger (“to correct”), ii) diriger (“reign” or “direct”), and iii) calculer (“calculate”). i) Corriger (Senellart [1995], 65–110). As we noted earlier, the early Middle Ages were dominated by political Augustinism, which viewed the king as an instrument of God. The king’s role on earth is therefore ministerial, rather than purely political. Thus, the king is supposed to be a rector animarum, who guides the souls of his people and teaches them to behave. Acting properly – recte agendo – is actually the expression from which Isidore of Seville thought that the word “king” (rex) was derived (Etymologiae, IX, 3). Should deviations from the right path occur, the king must step in to “correct” them because, as Isidore puts it, a king who doesn’t correct his people cannot reign: non autem regit, qui non corrigit (Etymologiae, IX, 3). For more on this topic, see J. Balogh, “Rex a recte agendo,” Speculum 3 (1928): 580–82. ii) Diriger (Senellart, 1995, 111–210). Starting from the 12th century, medieval political thinkers tend to emphasize the king’s political duty to reign. Although moral duties are never forgotten, late medieval political thinkers will nevertheless shift their attention to the more mundane aspects of government. In this new line of thought, kings are to reign not over souls, but over subjects, territories, and economies. The widening gap between moral and politics generates a new type of political thought, which views the preservation of political power – and not the salvation of the soul – as the king’s main duty. iii) Calculer (Senellart, 1995, 211–78). The above-mentioned shift is also reflected by the emergence at the end of the Middle Ages of a new kind of political literature which aims to provide the king with the secrets of power (arcana imperii), instead of moral instruction. From now on, the king’s duty is, as Senellart puts it, to calculate and dissimulate. This new sort of monarch is fundamentally different from the image of the ideal king that was offered in the specula. Of course, the ideal of a morally perfect ruler lived on – and it is without doubt still alive – but starting from the Renaissance, the rex optimus starts to be overshadowed by the ideal of an efficient king (rex utilis). Thus, rulers need less and less to look at themselves in the mirror, or draw moral lessons from it – hence the decline of the specula, and their subsequent evol-

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ution into manuals which aim to teach monarchs how to acquire, perpetuate and use power for maximum effect. Of all the Renaissance texts that deal with the duties of the ideal king (e. g. Erasmus’s Institutio principis christiani, Thomas More’s Utopia and Guillaume Budé’s De l’institution du Prince, all written in 1516 – to cite just the most important), we will focus only on the most influential one: The Prince by Machiavelli. For an introduction to the post-medieval life of the mirror genre, see also Berges (1938), 126 et sqq., as well as Quentin Skinner’s essential book, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I (1978), 116–28 and 213–43 (see also the secondary literature after the concluding remarks of this article). F. The Machiavellian Moment There is an abundant (if not overwhelming) amount of secondary literature about Niccolò Machiavelli (May 3, 1469–June 21, 1527) and his famous book Il principe (see Silvia Ruffo-Fiore, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship, 1990). One of the best and most concise works ever written about the Florentine thinker remains Quentin Skinner’s Machiavelli, 1981. Machiavelli’s public career started after Savonarola’s fall from power and the dismissal of the latter’s supporters from the positions they held. Thus, when Alessandro Braccesi (head of the second chancery of Florence) was dismissed, he was replaced by the twenty-nine year old Machiavelli. As a secretary of the first chancellor and member of the Ten of War (office for diplomatic relations), the young Machiavelli soon became a very skilled diplomat. Between 1499 and 1512, he participated in various diplomatic missions to the courts of Louis XII in France, Ferdinand II of Aragón, and the Vatican. Between 1502 and 1503, Machiavelli became very close to Cesare Borgia, whom he somewhat admired for his style of government – a fascinating mixture of audacity and prudence, secrecy and self-reliance, firmness and cruelty. From 1503 to 1506, he was responsible for the militia in charge with the defense of Florence. Skies started to darken for Machiavelli from August 1512, when the Medici defeated the Florentine forces at Prato. Consequently, the Florentine ruler Soderini resigned and went into exile, and the Republic of Florence was dissolved. A year later, Machiavelli was dismissed from office and arrested on the ground of conspiracy. After his release, Machiavelli retired to his estate in Sant’Andrea near Florence to start working on his masterpiece, The Prince (published only in 1532). For other good introductions to Machiavelli’s life and work, see Maurizio Viroli’s excellent books Machiavelli, 1998, and Niccolò’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli, 2000.

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See also Federico Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance, 1958; Martin Fleischer, Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, 1972; John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 1975; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 1983; Sebastian De Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 1989; Senellart, Machiavélisme et raison d’état: XVIe–XVIIe siècle, 1989; Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 1995; Senellart, 1995, 211–30; Markus Fischer, Well-Ordered License: On the Unity of Machiavelli’s Thought, 2000; Machiavel: Le prince ou le nouvel art politique, ed. Yves-Charles Zarka et al., 2001; Philippe Nemo, Histoire des idées politiques aux temps modernes et contemporains (2004), 45–71; Jacob Soll, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism, 2005. G. The Prince Is Machiavelli’s Prince an actual mirror for princes, as Allan Gilbert suggests in his book Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ and Its Forerunners: ‘The Prince’ as a Typical Book ‘De Regimine Principum’ (1938)? This question will hardly admit a yesor-no solution, and a sound answer can only be nuanced. As Constantino Triantanafillis (Niccolò Machiavelli e gli scrittori greci, 1875) pointed out, Machiavelli’s dedication to Lorenzo Medici is an imitation of the Address to Nicocles by Isocrates, which is itself a mirror for princes. The very first chapter of Machiavelli’s Prince seems however to point in a different direction: “All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities. Principalities are either hereditary, in which the family has been long established; or they are new …” (The Prince, ed. by W. K. Marriott, 1908, ch. I). Machiavelli focuses here on principalities, not on princes, which is probably why the original title of his book was De principatibus. This hypothesis was proposed by Friedrich Meinecke in his introduction to a German translation of the Prince (Machiavelli, Der Fürst, “Klassiker der Politik” VIII, 1923). Although this theory was opposed by Federico Chabod (“Sulla composizione de Il Principe di Niccolò Machiavelli, Archivum Romanicum XI [1927]: 330–83), Meinecke’s idea is corroborated by a letter that Machiavelli sent to his friend Francesco Vettori on December 10, 1513, in which he writes: “I have composed a treatise De principatibus in which I enter as deeply as I can into the science of the subject, with reasonings on the nature of principality, its several species, and how they are acquired, how maintained, how lost” (Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, 1996, 262–65; our italics). Further in his introduction, however, Meinecke suggests that his theory applies not to the entire book but only to its first eleven chapters. Consequently, what follows after chapter XI are in fact later additions. Chapters

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XII to XIV, for instance, deal with military affairs, whereas chapters XV–XIX are, in terms of content (“De his rebus quibus homines et praesertim principes laudantur aut vituperantur,” “De liberalitate et parsimonia,” “De crudelitate et pietate; et an sit melius amari quam timeri, vel e contra”; “Quomodo fides a principibus sit servanda,” “De contemptu et odio fugiendo”), an actual speculum. As a matter of fact, the very first sentence of chapter XV signals a reorientation of the text towards the image of the prince: “It remains now to see what ought to be the rules of conduct for a prince towards subject and friends.” Yet Machiavelli suggests almost immediately that his “mirror” will be very different from traditional specula: And as I know that many have written on this point, I expect I shall be considered presumptuous in mentioning it again, especially as in discussing it I shall depart from the methods of other people. But, it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of the matter than the imagination of it (…).

Felix Gilbert is right to assert that “[i]n this passage Machiavelli succinctly summarizes the methodological principles underlying the argument of The Prince and later of the Discorsi, and draws a firm and definite line of demarcation between himself and his “idealist” predecessors, who sought to adapt and subordinate political theory to a theological or metaphysical pattern” (Felix Gilbert, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and the Prince of Machiavelli,” Journal of Modern History 11.4 [1939]: 449–83). Thus, Machiavelli was entirely aware of the fact that he was getting involved in a highly controversial argument, and that his political realism clashed with the idealism of earlier mirrors. However, Machiavelli had already expressed unorthodox opinions about the relationship between ethics and politics, and his iconoclast attitude in chapter XV allows him to link thematically his “mirror” to the rest of the book. In the above-quoted article, Gilbert describes very well the process that lead to the creation of the “mirror” and the place that it occupies in the general framework of the book: Having completed working out his original idea in the first eleven chapters, Machiavelli proceeded to revise and amplify his work. In the course of this revision he added a more detailed account of his favorite subject, the art of war. He then felt impelled to examine his work from the point of view of the problems dealt with in the writings of his humanist predecessors, and was thus induced to write a polemical reply to the tradition catalogues of virtues.

In the following pages, we will briefly analyze Machiavelli’s own catalogue of virtues, as well as his new interpretation of the duties of the prince.

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G1. The Prince’s Reputation Chapter XV deals with the reputation of the prince. Traditionally, fama was considered directly dependent on the prince’s virtue. However, Machiavelli points out that it is impossible for a prince to have all the qualities (generosity, compassion, faithfulness, boldness, bravery, affability, chastity, sincerity, gravity, piety) that everyone – including the authors of traditional mirrors for princes – would like to see in him. According to Machiavelli, what really matters is that the prince should only seem to have theses qualities. For more on this chapter, see Thierry Menissier, “Chapitre XV du Prince: la vérité effective de la politique et les qualités du prince,” Machiavel: Le Prince ou le nouvel art politique (2001), 105–31. G2. Liberality and Meanness Machiavelli’s text often functions as a polemical reply to the common ideas of traditional mirrors for princes. His work usually follows the following pattern: “I know others say that … I, on the other hand, believe that …” This is also visible in the beginning of chapter XVI: “Commencing then with the first of the above-named characteristics, I say that it would be well to be reputed liberal. Nevertheless, liberality exercised in a way that does not bring you the reputation for it, injures you …” (our italics). Excessive liberality, Machiavelli contends, makes princes look weak and forces them to levy ever higher taxes. Thus, Machiavelli goes against his predecessors by suggesting that is wiser for a prince to be considered miserly than being too generous. G3. Cruelty and Clemency Chapter XVII functions according to the same pattern: “Coming now to the other qualities mentioned above, I say that every prince ought to desire to be considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he ought to take care not to misuse this clemency …” (our italics). Machiavelli seems to be constantly looking for aurea mediocritas, a middle ground for his ideal prince who should avoid the possibility of being taken advantage of due to his clemency. This discussion leads Machiavelli to a related yet somewhat different question: is it better for a prince to be loved or feared? “It may be answered,” he writes, “that one should wish to be both,” but since this is difficult to achieve, it is probably better for the prince to be feared. G4. The Prince’s Faith Is it important for a prince to be religious? Before attempting to answer this question, Machiavelli reiterates that “it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to

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have them” (ch. XVIII). Then, Machiavelli repeats that “a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion.” In conclusion, Machiavelli contends that faith is almost irrelevant in political matters – an idea which obviously runs against the tradition of the mirrors for princes. G5. Avoiding Contempt and Hatred Chapter XIX is the concluding chapter of Machiavelli’s “mirror,” and as such it is longer than the previous chapters. Here, Machiavelli seems to feel compelled to tie the loose ends of his arguments and to conclude his speculum. He therefore returns to the more traditional style of the mirror, with its lists of virtues and vices: [H]e should endeavour to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude; and in his private dealings with his subjects let him show that his judgments are irrevocable, and maintain himself in such reputation that no one can hope either to deceive him or to get round him.

After this enumeration, Machiavelli reiterates that virtuous princes usually make bad politicians (Marcus Aurelius, Pertinax, and Alexander). True, the reigns of the more vicious leaders (Commodus, Severus, Antoninus Caracalla, and Maximinus) did not have happy endings either, but that is only because they did not know how to avoid hatred. The lessons that a “new” prince should draw from the historical examples are the following: i) he should not be afraid of conspiracies when he is held in high esteem by his people; however, when he is hated, he should be afraid of everything and everyone; ii) he should avoid public hatred more than anything else. For more on this chapter, see Christian Lazzeri, “Chapitre XIX du Prince: de la manière de fuir le mépris et la haine,” Machiavel: Le Prince ou le nouvel art politique (2001), 133–68; see also Mary Deitz, “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception,” APSR 80 (1986): 777–99. G6. From Virtue to Virtù The concept that best expresses the radical changes that have occurred in the political philosophy and the mirror genre during the Renaissance is undoubtedly Machiavelli’s virtù. Of course, this Italian word could normally be translated as “virtue,” but under Machiavelli’s pen it has taken entirely different meanings which hardly ever connote moral goodness. In the first place, it should be noted that Machiavelli deprives the word of its moral aura and gives it a sociopolitical meaning, as Harvey Mansfield contends in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue ([1996], 20):

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Machiavelli’s discussion of the moral virtues in The Prince deals with the prince’s relationship with others, not with his own perfection. (…) [F]or Machiavelli, the virtues are social without qualification or exception; they are about how the prince appears to and deals with “subjects and friends.”

Thus, virtue in its traditional sense (which Machiavelli calls bontà in his Discorsi, I, 55) is almost irrelevant, as long as the prince can fake it. Secondly, the meaning of the word itself has changed and acquired a myriad of connotations. As John Plamenatz noted in his article “In Search of Machiavellian Virtù,” The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, 1972, 157–78), virtù could be translated as “valor,” “vigor,” “ability,” “merit,” “courage,” “foresight” or “prudence.” Most importantly, however, a prince’s virtù denotes, according to Plamenatz, “the capacity to form large and difficult purposes, and to act resourcefully and resolutely in pursuit of them. Virtù, in this (heroic) sense, is imagination and resilience as well as courage and intelligence.” This concept refers therefore to a large range of qualities that the prince needs in order to “maintain his state” and preserve power. But, since the pursuit of success can also involve morally questionable actions on the part of the prince, does that mean that virtù can include even evil acts? In other words, can virtù become the complete opposite of virtue? Machiavelli’s position is somewhat ambiguous on this issue. In chapter VIII, for instance, he discusses the case of Agathocles, a potter’s son who managed to become tyrant of Syracuse: … it cannot be called virtue (virtù) to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. Still, if the courage (virtù) of Agathocles in entering into and extricating himself from dangers be considered, together with his greatness of mind in enduring overcoming hardships, it cannot be seen why he should be esteemed less than the most notable captain.

Why is it that in the first situation Machiavelli refuses to associate the concept of virtù with Agathocles, and then contradicts himself by speaking of the tyrant’s virtù in the very next sentence? Is this a mistake or revelatory slip of the pen? At any rate, it is quite obvious that Machiavelli’s “virtuous” prince possesses a strong will-to-power, as well as the ability to adapt to various circumstances. Thus, this new kind of virtù is the cornerstone of political success, just like “virtue” used to be the nexus of moral goodness in traditional mirrors for princes. It should also be remembered that the concept of virtue in the specula was closely associated with the Bible and the figure of the Christ. In The Prince, the situation is somewhat different, as his virtù works in correlation not with God but with fortuna. Here too, Machiavelli twists the word to give it

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a slightly different meaning. If fortuna (usually translated as “fortune”) used to perceived as a form of perpetual – yet mostly benign – change, in Machiavelli’s books, fortuna is usually represented as a malignant force and an enemy to the established order. In chapter XXV, for instance, Machiavelli compares it to a natural disaster: I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place (…); and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defences and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous.

Machiavelli’s perspective is therefore not entirely pessimistic, in the sense that virtù can curb the evils caused by fortuna. Moreover, humans need to be proactive in their rapport with it: [F]ortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.

The idea of virtù is taken to its utmost extreme here, for it is portrayed as a violent response to – nearly a “rape” of – the unfavorable circumstances engendered by fortuna (see Cary J. Nederman, “Amazing Grace: God, Fortune, and Free Will in Machiavelli’s Thought,” JHI 60 [1999]: 617–38; Miguel E. Vatter, “Chapitre XXV du Prince: l’histoire comme effet de l’action libre,” Machiavel: Le Prince ou le nouvel art politique, 2001, 209–45). Thus, the Machiavellian representation of virtù shows once more the enormous gap that has arisen between the political thinking of the Renaissance and medieval mirrors. Despite Machiavelli’s tremendous influence on early modern and modern political philosophy (see Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, 1957; Josef Macek, Machiavelli e il Machiavellismo, 1980; Giuliano Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età moderna, 1990; Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the CounterReformation to Milton, 1994), it would nonetheless be erroneous to believe that he managed to wipe out entirely the tradition of medieval mirrors. As we mentioned earlier (introductory part of chapter E), mirrors for princes tended to evolve into other political genres after the Renaissance. Finally, as Raymond Darricau noted in one of his articles (“Miroirs des princes,” DSAM 10.68–69 [1979]: 1303–12), mirrors for princes continued to exist in various forms until the 18th –19th centuries (e. g., Jean Bodin, Les Six livres de la République, 1576; Robert Bellarmin, De officio principis christiani, 1619; Lu-

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dovico Antonio Muratori, Della publica felicità, oggetto de i buoni principi, 1749). For more on mirrors for princes of and after the Renaissance in various countries, see Bruno Singer, Die Fürstenspiegel in Deutschland im Zeitalter des Humanismus und der Reformation, 1981; Isabelle Flandrois, L’institution du prince au début du XVIIe siècle, 1992; Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II, 1999; Le savoir du prince: Du Moyen Age aux Lumières, ed. Ran Halevi, 2002; Princes and Princely Culture, 1450–1650, ed. Martin Gosman et al, 2003; Frédérique Lachaud and Lydwine Scordia, Le prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne, 2007; Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince, 2007. H. List of Mirrors for Princes The following is an exhaustive (although incomplete) list of the most important texts that are or could be considered mirrors for princes. This list owes a great deal to Lester Born’s article “Erasmus on Political Ethics: The Institutio Principis Christiani,” Political Science Quarterly 43 (1928): 540–43. England: John of Salisbury, Policraticus (1159); Giraldus Cambrensis, De principis instructione (1217); John of Wales, Breviloquum (ca. 1303); John Gower, Confessio amantis (ca. 1390); Thomas Hoccleve, De regimine principum (1411– 1412); John Fortescue, The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy (ca. 1471); Edmonde Dudley, The Tree of the Commonwealth (1509–1510); Thomas More, Utopia (1516); Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531); Thomas Starkey, The Dialogue (1538); James I, Basilikon doron (1603). France: Thomas Cantipratensis, Bonum universale de apibus (1258–1261); Gilbert of Tournai, Eruditio regum et principum (1259); Jean de Launha (or de Limoges), Somnium Pharaonis (ca. 1250); Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, De Institutione Principum, and De Eruditione Filiorum Regalium (13th c.); Guillaume Perrault, De regimine principum (ca. 1275); Giles of Rome/Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum (ca. 1285); Jacques de Cessoles, De moribus hominum et oficiis nobilium (ca. 1300); Jean d’Anneaux, De regimine principum (early 14th c.); Anonymous, De informatione principum (ca. 1314); Durand de Champagne, Speculum dominarum (ca. 1371); Pierre Salemon, Dialogues and Letters to Charles VI (ca. 1422); Philippe de Maizières, Le songe du vieil pelerin (1389); Louis XI (actually written by Pierre Chayanet, from Louis XI’s court), Rosier des guerres (1461); Guillaume Budé, De l’institution du prince (1516); Innocent Gentillet, Discours d’estat sur les moyens de gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume et un principauté contra Nicol. Machiavel (ca. 1576); Jean Bodin, De institutione principis aut alius nobilioris ingenii (ca. 1596); Pelletier, La leçon du prince: L’instruisant des vertus plus nécessaires à bien et heureusement gouverner ses peuples (1608); Abraham de la Faye, Miroir des actions vertueuses d’un jeune prince, représentées en forme

Mirrors for Princes (Western)

1948

de dialogues (1613); Pierre Nicole, De l’éducation d’un prince (1671); Anthony Varillas, La pratique de l’éducation des princes (1684); Anonymous (during the reign of Louis XIV), L’Art d’élever un prince (1688); de Fontenay, Lettres sur l’éducation des princes (17th c.); Louis XIV, Letters to his grandson (1700). Italy: Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum (1265); William of Prato, De eruditione principum (ca. 1284); Bruneto Latini, Trésor (ca. 1294); Dante, De monarchia (ca. 1310); Marsilio of Padua, Defensor pacis (ca. 1324); Leonardo Bruni, De studiis et litteris, for Battista de’ Malatesti of Urbino (ca. 1444); Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Letter to Sigismund of Tirol (1443), and De liberorum educatione, for Ladislaus of Hungary (1449); Francesco Filefo, De morali disciplina, and Letter to Giovan Sforza (ca. 1481); Baptista Saccus Platina, Principis Diatyposis (ca. 1481); Francesco Patrizi, De regni et regis institutione, and De institutione reipublicae (ca. 1494); Lippo Brandolini (while at the court of Hungary’s King Mathias), De comparatione reipublicae et regni (ca. 1497); Joannus Jovianus Pontanus, De principe liber (ca. 1503); Bracciolini Poggio, De oficiis principis (1504); Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (1513); Augustineo Nifo, Libellus de his que ab optimis principibus agenda sunt (1521); Balthasar Castiglione, Il Cortegiano (1528); Membrano Roseo da Fabriano, La institutione del principe Christiano (a translation of Guevara’s work; 1543); Faustus Longianus, De instituendo principis filio, a decennio usque ad annos iudicii (ca. 1550); Hieronymus Cagnolus, De recta principis institutione liber (ca. 1551); Albericus Gentilis, Regales disputationes (late 16th c.); Roberto Bellarimo, De officio principis christiani (late 16th c.); Francesco Piccolomini, Breve discorso della instituzione di un principe (ca. 1604); Giovanni Botero, Della riputazione del principe (1601); Marcus Antonius Natta, De doctrina principum (early 16th c.); Pierre Aldobrandini, De perfecto principe apothegmata (1608); Tomaso Tomasi, The Learned Prince (1643); Marco Aurelio Severino, La filosophia overo il perche degli Scacchi (ca. 1656); Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, An princeps debeat esse literatus (ca. 1667). Germany: Engelbert of Volkersdorf, De Regimine Principum (ca. 1327); Ingold, Das goldene Spiel (late 15th c.); Friederich Lant, Kaiser Sigismunds Rath (ca. 1452); Jacob Wimpheling, Agatharchia (1498); Urbanus Regius, Handbüchlein eines christlichen Fürstens (1536); Georg Lauterbeck, Regentenbuch aus vielen trepplichen alten und neuen Historien zusammen gezogen (1537); Reinhard Lorich, De institutione principum loci communes (1538); Elizabeth von Braunschweig, Eine Ordnung und Unterweisung zu künftiger und angehenden Regierung …, for her son (1545); Wolfgang Sedelius, Wie sich ein Christlicher Herr, so Landt und Leut zu regieren unter ihm hat, vor schedlicher Phantasey verhüten soll (1547); Philip Melanchthon, Institutio Joanni Friderici Ducis Pomeraniae (1560); Anna Maria von Brandenburg, Fürstenspiegel, for her son Albrecht Friederich (1563); Conrad Heresbach, De educandis erudiendisque principum liberis, etc. (1570); Johann Lau-

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Mirrors for Princes (Western)

terbach, Princeps christianus (1597); Bernard Nüssler, Princeps litteratus (1618); Sylvester Kundtmann, Schola principum iuniorum (1631); Maximilian of Bavaria, Der Christliche Fürst oder Vätterliche Ennahnung, etc. (1640); Heinrich zu Limpurg, Thesaurus paternus (1667); Athanasius Kircher, Principis christiani archetypon politicum (1672); Christian Thomasius, Introductio in philosophiam aulicam (1688); Gottfried Leibnitz, Projet de l’éducation d’un prince (1693). Spain: Alvaro Pelyo, Liber amplus … de perfecto et christiano regimine principum (1334); Don Juan Manuel, Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (1337); Francisco Ximenes, Regiment de princeps (14th c.); Antonio de Guevara, Horologium principum (1529); Sebastianus Foxius Marzillus, De regni regisque institutione (1566); Pedro de Rivandeiro, Tratado de la religion y virtudes que debe tener el principe para gobernar y conservar sus estados (late 16th c.); Juan Mariana, De rege et regis institutione (1599); Diego de Saavedra, Idea de un principe politicochristiano (1640); Pedro Gonçalez de Salcedo, Nudricion real (1671). Portugal: Jerome Osorio, De regis institutione et disciplina (ca. 1580). Bohemia: Michael (Vicar of St. Maria near Prague), De regimine principum (ca. 1401); John Dubrava, De regiis praeceptis (1520). Poland: Stanislaus Orichovius Roxolanus, Fidelis subditus sive de institutione regia (ca. 1561); Laurentius Grimalius Goslicius, De optimo senatore (ca. 1600). Switzerland: John Calvin, Institutiones (1536). Holland: Philip of Leyden, De reipublicae cura et sorte principantis (ca. 1380). Belgium: Humbert Leonhard, De regimine principum (ca. 1490). Sweden: Anonymous, Kununga og höfdinga styrilse (Regum principumque institutio) (1669). Select Bibliography Hans Hubert Anton, “Fürstenspiegel,” LexMA, vol. IV (Munich/Zürich: Artemis, 1989), col.1044–1048; Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1938); Raymond Darricau, “Miroirs des princes,” DSMA 10.68–69 (1979): 1303–12; Eugen Ewig, “Zum christlichen Königsgedanken im Frühmittelalter,” Das Königtum: Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 7–73; Pierre Hadot, “Fürstenspiegel,” Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 8 (1969), 555–631; Frédérique Lachaud and Lydwine Scordia, Le prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne (Rouen: Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2007); Michel Senellart, Les arts de gouverner: Du ‘Regimen’ médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen and Co, 1961).

Cristian Bratu

Notarial Literature

1950

N Notarial Literature A. Notarial Activity in General One of the most important figures in the society of the late Middle Ages in southern Europe was the notary. Notaries produced much of the source material in numerous forms for the functioning of these societies and for our study of them. They were descended from and based upon the classical Roman ideas of the activities of the tabellio, the tabularius, and the notarius and had combined all of their roles by about 1250. People from all levels of the society of southern France, Iberia, Italy, and several regions and town around the Mediterranean dealt with a notary on a regular basis. Notaries wrote almost all the documents of government practice and profoundly influenced the development of the organs of these governments. They were also the principal guarantors of these documents that then became useful for preventing the appropriation of rights and properties. The standard introductions to the study of documents do examine the evolution of the notarial art (Alain de Boüard, Manuel de diplomatique française et pontificale, vol. II: L’acte privé, 1929–1948, 2.151–292; Arthur Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, 1894; rpt., 2003, 824–62; Paolo Cammarosano, Italia medievale: strutture e geografia delle fonti scritte, 1991, 268–317). Over the last fifty years, notarial material in its large array of forms has formed the basis for the evolving study of economic and social history (Vito Vitale, Vita e commercio nei notai genovesi dei secoli XII e XIII, Parte prima: la vita civile, 1949; Robert S. Lopez, “The Unexplored Wealth of the Notarial Archives in Pisa and Lucca,” Mélanges d’histoire du Moyen Age dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen, 1951, 417–32; Diane Owen Hughes, “Toward Historical Ethnography: Notarial Records and Family History in the Middle Ages,” Historical Methods Newsletter 7 [1974]: 67–72). For both church and state notaries wrote the compilations of laws and statutes, correspondence (Vincenzo Federici, La scrittura delle cancellerie italiane dal secolo XII al XVII, 1964), the deliberations of the councils or committees (Massimo Sbarbaro, Le delibrere dei Consigli dei Comuni cittadini italiani (secoli XIII–XIV), 2005), judicial records from the initial inquisitions or collections of information through hearings in criminal and civil courts (Vito Piergiovanni, ed. ‘Hinc publica fides’, il notaio e

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l’amministrazione della giustizia [Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi storici: Genova, 8–9 ottobre 2004], 2006), to the final sentences, financial and fiscal lists, and legal agreements governing everyday life of everyone (Jean Claude Maire-Vigueur, “Révolution documentaire et révolution scripturaire: le cas de l’Italie médiévale,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 153 [1995], 177–85). At the same time these public persons or scribes produced written private documents with a legal validity, while at the same time they influenced the wider culture of the later Middle Ages. With the growth of the economy and credit practices compounded with the need for more sophisticated government practices, notaries and their ability to record accurately and in more permanent written form grew more appreciated and cultivated (Kathryn L. Reyerson, The Art of the Deal, 2002, and Notaires et crédit dans l’Occident méditerranéen médiéval, ed. François Menant and Odile Redon, 2004). From at least the 13th century, notaries wrote legal documents for public officials or corporate bodies and for private persons and most importantly could give them legal authority enforceable in the courts of law. Many notaries worked in the households of public authorities such as kings, nobles, popes, bishops, emperors, civic officials such as podestà, and urban and regional bureaucracies. They did this on a paid and contractual basis as chancellors or scribal employees who were to produce official or public documents. For private matters they were hired or called for a fee to do this by the parties involved. For their clientele they wrote contracts on all sorts of matters such as business arrangements, loans and repayments, trade deals, financial exchanges, rentals, or sales, family matters, marriage agreements, arbitrations of conflicts, and wills and last testaments. Where the ideas and practices of the new juridical culture of the revived Roman law held sway or influenced the canonistic practices of the Church, they could testify in courts to the legality of all sorts of arrangements. Their copies of written acts on individual parchments or pieces of paper (instrumentum/a or actum/a) or their collections of acts in registers or cartularies or chartularies could serve as legal proofs and had a juridical efficacy independent of the actors in themselves. At the intersection of the public and the private, notaries were recognized public persons who in effect served as judges recognizing the authenticity and validity of the desires or objectives of participants or actors for all sorts of transactions. This juridical validity was, moreover, affirmed by inclusion of the correct legal formula, the attachment of their individual signs (signum/a) and along with a listing of witnesses. As professionals recognized by an authority such as the emperor, the city-state, or ecclesiastical officials, they gave these arrangements a faith to the public (fides

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publica) that did not have on their own. Notaries were the recorders for the social and economic memories of these societies. Notaries creatively produced or devised the legal arrangements desired by the parties to an act that were possible or conceivable given the customs, statutes, and legal practices of the local context (Julius Kirshner, “Some Problems in the Interpretation of Legal Texts Regarding Italian City-States,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 19 [1975]: 16–27). They came to be governed by guilds recognized by civil authorities themselves with certain expectations for their professional training and competency in Latin and the local law (Ezio Barbieri, Notariato e documento notarile a Pavia, 1990; Giuliano Catoni, ed. Statuti senesi dell’arte dei giudici e notai del secolo XIV, 1972; Nicoletta Sarti, Gli statuti della società dei notai di Bologna dell’anno 1336, 1988; Giuseppe Scarazzini, ed. Statuti notarili di Bergamo [secolo XIII], 1977). Their usual way of writing the documents involving private persons were a first draft or breve or nota done with the contracting parties often of a scrape of paper or parchment (for a general diplomatic method for analyzing documents see Leonard E. Boyle, “Diplomatics,” Medieval Studies, ed. James Powell, 1976, 69–101). This was the core of what was to be done and reflected the particulars of the actors or parties, monies, promises, conditions, sanctions, witnesses, or properties involved. Although based on the concepts of classical Roman, Adolf Berger has produced a dictionary that can help in understanding the phraseology of notarial documents (Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, 1953, while Florence Edler has identified many business terms (Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business: Italian Series, 1200–1600, 1934). The notary then drew up a more formal copy of this instrument for his own register or abbreviatura. This copy contained more of specific legal terminology and abbreviated references to the clauses or exceptions from Roman law on which the validity of deal might depend. By the 13th century, such notarial registers had a legal authority on their own. The parties might eventually ask for an even more formal copy or carta for their own records, so they would pay the notary to write a complete description of the instrument with a minimum of abbreviation of clauses and written in a usually more readable hand on parchment. Until the 11th century, these parchments still had to be testified to by the notary or witnesses. It was not yet taken on its own as an independent form of proof. B. Fundamental Works and Figures of the Notarial Art Besides it eminence for civil and canon law education, Bologna had become the center of education in the notarial art or technology. The key and most influential figure in this development was Rolandino Passegieri (1215–1300).

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There are three fundamental publications on him, his career, and publications, and his role (G. G. Cencetti, “Rolandino Passaggeri dal mito alla storia,” Rivista del notariato 4 [1950]: 201–15, and two collections edited by Giorgio Tamba, Rolandino, 1215–1300: alle origini del notariate moderno, 2000, and Rolandino e l’ars notaria da Bolgona all’Europa, 2002). Rolandino’s ideas and guidelines were to be at the very core of the elaboration of notarial work and its growing importance in the business of society. They were widely circulated during his life time, especially his Summa totius artis notariae, later edited at Venice in 1546 and reprinted in 1977. One of his other major works has been published as Contractus by Roberto Ferrara in 1983. Other useful editions of medieval notarial handbooks and documents for the notarial art have been done (Gianfranco Orlandelli, ed. Salatiele: ars notarie, 1961; Roberto Ferrara, ed. Zaccaria di Martino: Summa artis notarie, 1993; Due formulari notarili cremonesi, ed. Ettore Falconi, 1979; and two editions of documents edited by Gino Masi, Formularium florentinum artis notariae [1220–1242], 1943, and Collectio chartarum pacis privatae Medii Aevi ad regionem Tusciae pertinentium, 1943). Two of the most famous notaries of the 13th and 14th centuries have had work done on their biographies (for Brunetto Latini: Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, 1993, and for Coluccio Salutati: Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1983). Witt is especially useful on Salutati’s intellectual life. C. Notarial Activity in Italy Italian notaries and their art have been the subjects of two fundamental works (Armando Petrucci, ed., Notarii: documenti per la storia del notariato italiano, 1958, and more recently and with corrections to the analysis of Petrucci, Attilio Bartoli Langeli, Notai: scrivere documenti nell’Italia medievale, 2006). Giorgio Tamba has published collections of exemplary documents with reproductions of the originals written by notaries in Bologna, the great seat of the notarial art (Una corporazione per il potere: il notariato in età comunale, 1998; note especially the reproductions, analysis, and transcriptions in “Cornice e quadro,” 57–171). David Herlihy has produced a good introduction to the activities and role of the notary in the society of a particular city, Pisa (Pisa in the Early Renaissance: A Study of Urban Growth, 1958; especially “The Notarial Chartulary,” ibid., 1–20). There are other excellent studies of notaries in various cities (Giorgio Costamagna, Il notaio a Genova tra prestigio e potere, 1970; Petra Schulte, ‘Scripturae publicae creditor’: Das Vertrauen in Notariatsurkunden im kommunalen Italien des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, 2003; Andreas Meyer, ‘Felix et inclitus notarius’: Studien zum italienischen Notariat vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert, 2000; see also his study “Hereditary Laws and City Topogra-

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phy: On the Development of the Italian Notarial Archives in the Late Middle Ages,” Urban Space in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2009, 225–43). Odile Redon has done a detailed study of how a notary worked in the countryside around Siena in the 13th century (“Quatre notaries et leurs clientèles à Sienne et dans la campagne siennoise au milieu du XIIIe siècle (1221–1271),” MEFRM 85 [1973]: 79–141). Pierre Toubert, in his monumental study of the countryside near Rome between the 9th and the 12th centuries, has explicated and explained the models in using notarial material and understanding their techniques in an early period (Les Structures du Latium médiéval, 1973, especially 1.95–134). D. Cultural and Literary Contributions Scholars have also been coming to realize the importance of notaries and their less legal writings in cultural change and the promotion and survival of particular forms of literature, especially poetry (Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, 2000; Il notaio nella civiltà fiorentina (secoli XIII–XVI): XVII Congresso internazionale del notariato latino, ed. Arnaldo D’Addario et al., 1984; Justin Steinberg, Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy, 2007). Other historians and literary scholars have studied their roles in the writing of communal histories and the elaboration of political rhetoric (Marino Zabbia, I notai e la cronachistica cittadina italiana nel Trecento, 1999, and his “Formation et culture des notaries (XIe–XIVe siècle),” Cultures italiennes (XIIe–XVe siècle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, 2000, 301–24; see also Massimo Giansante, Retorica e politica nel Duecento: i notai bolognesi e l’ideologia comunale, 1998). E. Notaries and the Notarial Art and the Church The administration of the papacy was heavily dependent on notaries for its proper functioning, with some notaries rising to powerful positions in the wider administration and judicial system of the Church itself (Geoffrey Barraclough, Public Notaries and the Papal Curia: A Calendar and a Study of a ‘Formularium notariorum’ Curie from the Early Years of the Fourteenth Century, 1934). Leonard E. Boyle has written a fundamental introduction to the Vatican Archives that explains the working of the papal bureaucracy and its use of notaries (A Survey of the Vatican Archives, Revised edition, 2001). David Foote has shown that by notarizing for the episcopal memory a bishop could protect the rights of his diocese or his besieged local church from predatory nobles or communes (“How the Past becomes Rumor,” Speculum 75 [2000]: 794–815). Another example of the importance of the use of notaries in a more religious aspect of the life of the Church was their role in

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recording canonization proceedings (Raimondo Michetti, ed. Notai, miracoli e culto dei santi: pubblicità e autenticazione del sacro tra XII e XV secolo, 2004). In more general terms a recent collection of essays on the Church and notaries appeared in print (Chiese e notai (secoli XII–XV), Quaderni di storia religiosa, 2004). There was always, however, considerable suspicion about members of the clerical orders actually being notaries who might function in more explicitly secular affairs (Giorgio Cracco, “Relinquere laicis que liacorum sunt: Un intervento di Eugenio IV contro i preti-notai di Venezia,” Bolletino dell’Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano 3 [1961], 179–89). F. France and Northern Europe Notarial practices and their value for the preservation of past activities in order to protect interests of all kinds were brought to England and other parts of northern Europe by the administrators of the Church when they came north as envoys or as the holders of benefices (C. R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, 1973). At the same time Italian merchants brought notaries in their train to deal with their business in the north. Again once seen, people in the Low Countries as an example began to employ the notarial system to record all kinds of transactions (James M. Murray, Notarial Instruments in Flanders between 1280 and 1452, 1995). G. Notaries in France Southern France was dependent on the notarial system (for an inventory of notarial documents in southern France, see Robert-Henri Bautier and Janine Sornay, ed. Les sources de l’histoire économique et sociale du Moyen âge, v. 2. Archives ecclésiastiques, communales et notariales. Archives des marchands et des particuliers (Paris, 1968–). That system has been studied in its legal aspects in great detail by Roger Aubenas (Cours d’histoire du droit privé [anciens pays de droit écrit], 7 vols, 1954–61, and his Documents notariés provençaux du XIIIe siècle, 1935). Jean Hilaire has recently brought this more general approach up to date (La science des notaires: une longue histoire, 2000). John H. Pryor has done a model edition of a notarial cartulary from southern France (Business Contracts of Medieval Provence: Selected ‘Notule’ from the Cartulary of Giraud Amalric of Marseilles, 1248, 1981, note especially the excellent glossary on pages 249 to 280). Kathryn L. Reyerson and Debra A. Salata have translated a selection of representative documents from a southern French notarial register (Medieval Notaries and Their Acts: The 1327–1328 Register of Jean Holanie, 2004). Daniel Lord Smail and John Drendel have written informative articles on notarial local practice in rural and urban France and their roles in the legal system of that

Numismatic Literature

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region (Kathryn Reyerson and John Drendel, ed. Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France, 1998). Daniel Lord Smail has used notarial documents to devise cartography of Marseille that could be a model for such attempts (Imaginary Cartographies, 1999). H. Notaries, Civil Society, and Wider Culture(s) Responding to Robert Putnam’s ideas about creating a civil society in medieval and Renaissance Italy, Edward Muir has pointed out that notaries in their daily practices could be factors in pacifying or arbitrating local conflicts – thus fostering a more civil society (“The Sources of Civil Society in Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 [1999]: 379–406). Kathryn Burns has tracked notarial technology to the Spanish Empire in Latin America (“Notaries, Truth, and Consequences” The American Historical Review, 110 [2005]: 350–79). Select Bibliography Paolo Cammarosano, Italia medievale: strutture e geografia delle fonti scritte (Rome: La nuova Italia scientifica, 1991); Jean Hilaire, La science des notaires: une longue histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000); Attilio Bartoli Langeli, Notai: scrivere documenti nell’Italia medievale (Rome: Viella, 2006); Andreas Meyer, ‘Felix et inclitus notarius’: Studien zum italienischen Notariat vom 7. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000); Armando Petrucci, ed., Notarii: documenti per la storia del notariato italiano (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1958); Giorgio Tamba, ed., Rolandino, 1215–1300: alle origini del notariate moderno (Bologna, Museo civico medievale, 12 ottobre–17 dicembre 2000) (Bologna: Museo civico medievale, 2000).

Edward D. English

Numismatic Literature A. Outline and Definition Medieval written sources pertaining to coins and minting are scattered relatively thinly and unevenly. Most relevant texts are either very short or mention coinage only in passing, often in the context of weights and measures or other privileges being granted: a reminder that coinage was a relatively minor matter to medieval rulers and administrators, and also that much could be accomplished without leaving any paper trail. Studies of numismatic texts have thus usually been quite specific, often in the context of a

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particular mint or coinage, and the only general survey of numismatic texts in the Middle Ages is Wilhelm Jesse, Quellenbuch zur Münz- und Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters, 1924. There is a short discussion of the material in Philip Grierson, “Numismatics,” Medieval Studies: an Introduction, 1992, 103–36, whilst more specific discussion (though still of general use) can be found of the Netherlands in Joseph Ghyssens, Choix de textes antérieures à 1400 relatifs aux monnaies des Pays-Bas du Sud, textes utiles au numismate du Moyen Age, 1997, and French documents are discussed in Marie-Thérèse Kaiser-Guyot and Reinhold Kaiser, Documentation numismatique de la France médiévale: collections de monnaies et sources de l’histoire monétaire, 1982. There is also a chapter concentrating on French documentary material in Marc Bompaire and Françoise Dumas, Numismatique médiévale: monnaies et documents d’origine française, 2000. B. History of Research and Approaches Texts which discuss coinage vary hugely in form and reliability. Particularly important are those extended prose texts which include lengthy discussion of coinage. These are rare, and the best-known examples are Nicholas Oresme’s De moneta, a piece of formal and learned advice on coinage and economic theory for King John I of France (1350–1364); a series of short documents detailing English mint practice and organization in the 13th century (edited together in Charles Johnson, The ‘De Moneta’ of Nicholas Oresme and the English Mint Documents, 1956); and the late 12th-century Dialogus de scaccario by Richard Fitz Nigel, which discusses the various duties of officials in the English exchequer, and includes an account of a formal assay of the coinage related to the later Trial of the Pyx (Charles Johnson, Dialogus de scaccario: the Course of the Exchequer, rev. ed., 1983). A large number of texts of a literary or historical nature have been noted for their less extensive numismatic information, though they can be difficult to interpret, and rarely contain very much discussion of coinage outside a particular context or event. Only a few examples can be given here. Paul the Deacon in the late 8th century described in detail the large gold coins or medals sent to the Franks from the Byzantine emperor Tiberius II (578–582) (Historia Langobardorum III.13); there is a vita of the 7th-century Bishop-moneyer Eligius (discussed by Jean Lafaurie, “Eligius monetarius,” Révue numismatique, series 6, 19 [1977], 111–51); a 12th-century dispute over minting in Canterbury was recorded in 13th-century chronicles (Timothy Crafter, “Henry II, the St Augustine’s Dispute and the Loss of the Abbey’s Mint Franchise,” Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. 500–1250, 2006, 601–16); Raymond of Aguilers mentions the preferred coinages of the First Crusade (David Michael Metcalf, Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East, 2nd

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ed., 1995); a 13th-century chronicle is the only text to mention the major reform of the Anglo-Saxon coinage ca. 973 (Reginald Hugh Michael Dolley, “Roger of Wendover’s Date for Eadgar’s Coinage Reform,” British Numismatic Journal 49 [1979]: 1–11); and there are occasionally even more unusual contexts for written information on coinage, such as the poem by Theodulf of Orléans Contra iudices, which casually mentions the use of Arab gold coinage in the south of France: MGH Poet. I, 493–517, ll. 167–76. The majority of numismatic texts belong to the administrative sphere and are often very brief. Among the most important and detailed examples are mint records: documents from a mint detailing its activities, organization and expenditure. Where these include levels of production, there can be great scope for calculating volume of currency, production per die and other pieces of important information. The best-known such sets of records – and among the most detailed – were kept in the accounts of several mints in England from the 13th century onwards: Martin Robert Allen, “Medieval English Die-Output,” British Numismatic Journal 74 [2004], 39–49; Christopher Edgar Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint, 1992, 673–98; Martin Robert Allen, The Durham Mint, 2003; and John D. Brand, “The Shrewsbury Mint, 1249–50,” Mints, Dies and Currency: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Albert Baldwin, 1971, 129–50. Examples of similar accounts can be found discussed in Peter Spufford, Monetary Problems and Policies in the Burgundian Netherlands 1433–96, 1970. There also exist medieval accounts of the administration of the mint: the English mint documents have already been mentioned; from Florence an administrative account of the mint from the mid-13th century onwards survives in the Libro della zecca: Mario Bernocchi, Le monete della Repubblica fiorentina, vol. 1: Il libro della zecca (1252–1533), 1974; and another administrative record of the mint in Florence is a set of moneyers’ guild regulations (Piero Ginori Conti, Constitutum artis monetariorum civitatis Florentie, 1939). The largest category of numismatic texts consists of longer or shorter mentions in other, more general administrative documents such as charters, capitularies and law-codes, and might regulate minting rights and revenues, circulation, organization of mints and legal practice relating to coins. Often these texts exist because of the need to specify what type of coin was to be used in a particular set of circumstances (such as payment of a fine). Documents of this type begin early on, with details of payments and penalties in a number of law-codes from the 5th century onwards (Georges Depeyrot, “Les monnaies des lois barbares,” Acta Numismatica 21–3 [1991–1993], 315–28). More extensive documentation only appears under the Carolingians in the 8th century, when coinage, weights and minting were mentioned

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in several capitularies and charters. There is a collection of these documents in an appendix to Ernest Gariel, Les monnaies royales sous la race carolingienne, 2 vols., 1883–1884, and contemporary documentation from Italy is also relatively substantial: Alessia Rovelli, “Usi monetari nell’Italia altomedievale: l’esempio della documentazione farfense,” Rivista italiana di numismatica 95 (1993): 547–56, and “La moneta nella documentazione altomedievale di Roma e del Lazio,” La storia economica di Roma nell’Alto Medioevo alla luce dei recenti scavi archeologici, 1993, 333–52. More scattered references to coinage from Anglo-Saxon legal texts are discussed in Ronald Stuart Kinsey, “Anglo-Saxon Law and Practice Relating to Mints and Moneyers,” British Numismatic Journal 29 (1958–1959): 12–50. From the post-Carolingian period come a number of documents from France and Germany granting control of minting to local rulers. A survey is in Reinhold Kaiser, “Münzprivilegien und bischöfliche Münzprägung in Frankreich, Deutschland und Burgund im 9.–12. Jahrhundert,” VSWG 63 (1976): 289–338; and also of use is Wolfgang Hess, “Zoll, Markt und Münze im 11. Jahrhundert: Der älteste Koblenzer Zolltarif im Lichte der numismatischen Quellen,” Historische Forschungen für W. Schlesinger, 1974, 171–93. Occasionally one finds more detailed information, such as that contained in Domesday Book from 11th-century England, and for a good example of how this information can be exploited, see Martin Biddle and Derek J. Keene, “Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: an Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, 1976, 241–448. From around the 12th century, official records start to become more numerous and are generally organized on a national level based on centralized – often royal – archives, typically edited in the 19th century. Thus for France: Louis Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, Recueil de documents relatifs à l’histoire des monnaies frappes par les rois de France depuis Philippe II jusqu’à François I, 4 vols., 1879–1892; Paul Guilhiermoz, “Avis sur la question monétaire donnés aux rois Philippe le Hardi, Philippe le Bel, Louis X et Charles IV le Bel,” Révue Numismatique, 4th series, 25 (1922): 73–80 and 173–210; 27 (1924): 109–28; 28 (1925): 90–101 and 212–37; and Scotland: Robert William Cochran-Patrick, Records of the Coinage of Scotland, 2 vols., 1876. There are also several sets of papal records which detail the types of coins used to make certain payments. From 1180 comes the Liber censuum (Paul Fabre and Louis Duchesne, Le ‘Liber Censuum’ de l’église romaine, 2 vols., 1889–1905); and a series of 14th-century documents have been assessed in Karl-Heinrich Schäfer, Die Ausgaben der Apostolischen Kammer unter Johann XXII. nebst den Jahresbilanzen von 1316–1375, 1911.

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Another important category of written sources for the numismatist comprises merchants’ handbooks, notebooks, accounts and mathematical lists or tracts based on weights, coins and their alloys. A problem they present is that often the material in the lists substantially predates the alleged date of composition, as can be determined from careful study of the coin types listed. The classic example is the 14th-century handbook of Francesco Pegolotti, though it is known that some of his numismatic information dates from the latter part of the 13th century (Allan Evans, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti: La Practica della Mercatura, 1936). A dozen further Italian lists and notebooks from the 13th to the 15th century are edited and extensively discussed in Lucia Travaini, Monete Mercanti e Matematica. Le monete medievali nei trattati di aritmetica e nei libri di mercatura, 2003; and a great deal of information, culled from lists and documents of this kind, is contained in Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 1986. Another important text of this kind is the account of Bishop Wolfger of Passau (d. 1218) and his household, who travelled to Rome in 1204 and kept unusually detailed accounts of their transactions along the way, often specifying the type of coin used at each stage of the journey: Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle, ed., Reiserechnungen Wolfger’s von Ellenbrechtskirchen, Bischofs von Passau, Patriarchen von Aquileja, 1877 (which lamentably lacks any numismatic commentary). C. Current Issues In a number of cases, it has been noted that the information of written sources clashes with the material numismatic record. Deciding which authority to trust is not always easy: whilst the surviving coins may not be representative, there are also possibilities of corruption and misinterpretation when dealing with texts. Some of the difficulties of reconciling written and numismatic sources are discussed in Anna M. Balaguer, “The Use of Documentary Sources in Monetary History,” Problems of Medieval Coinage in the Iberian Area 2, 2 vols., 1986, 325–35. One particular problem arises in dealing with terms in documentation that could be applied to both a coin and a weight of uncoined metal, underlining medieval views on the relationship of coin and precious metal bullion, one of the features that underpinned the reliability of coinage. Thus it can be difficult to ascertain if particular figures from a mint represent a weight or value of metal struck into coin, or uncoined metal or other goods to the same value. This factor was not noted in the earliest publications of English mint accounts (in which the sums of silver coined often refer to weight rather than value) such as Charles George Crump and Charles Johnson, “Tables of Bullion Coined under Edward I, II and III,” Numismatic Chronicle, series 4, 13 (1913): 200–45; and George Cyril

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Brooke and Ethel Stokes, “Tables of Bullion Coined from 1377 to 1550,” Numismatic Chronicle, series 5.9 (1929), 27–69, thus vitiating many early attempts at die calculation, like Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart, “Medieval Die-Output: Two Calculations for English Mints in the Fourteenth Century,” Numismatic Chronicle, series 7, 3 (1963), 97–106; and M. Mate, “Coin Dies under Edward I and II,” Numismatic Chronicle, series 7, 9 (1969), 207–18; this problem was noted and tackled in Martin Robert Allen, “Medieval English Die-Output,” British Numismatic Journal 74 (2004), 39–49. Similar questions surround the early medieval (8th- to 12th-century) term mancus, the origins of which are disputed but probably related to an Arabic word meaning ‘struck.’ For the history of this debate, see Philip Grierson and Mark Alistair Sinclair Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, vol. 1: the Early Middle Ages (5th –10th Centuries), 1986, Appendix 1, citing in particular Philip Grierson, “Carolingian Europe and the Arabs: the Myth of the Mancus,” RBPh 32 (1954): 1059–74; and Ulla S. Linder Welin, “Some Rare Samanid Dirhams and the Origin of the Word ‘Mancusus’,” Congresso internazionale di numismatica, Roma 1961, II: Atti, 1965, 499–508. Mancus was used in the west to refer to both gold coins – particularly (but not only) Arabic gold dinars – and to a roughly commensurate weight of gold, and even occasionally for silver coins: distinguishing between these usages is often impossible, but serves to highlight the unusual position of gold coinage in this period. For lists of relevant finds and documentary attestations, Jean Duplessy, “La circulation des monnaies arabes en Europe occidentale du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle,” Révue Numismatique, series 5.18 (1956): 101–64; Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce A.D. 300–900, 2001; and Mark Alistair Sinclair Blackburn, “Gold in England During the ‘Age of Silver’ (Eighth-Eleventh Centuries),” Silver Economy in the Viking Age, 2006, 55–98. Cases also occur of extensive documentary attestation of coin use which is not reflected by the known finds – sometimes drastically so. One of the most striking examples is that of Byzantine gold coins in 12th- and 13th-century England: whilst there are relatively numerous written references to their circulation, no examples have yet been found in England: see Barrie Cook, “The Bezant in Angevin England” Numismatic Chronicle 159 (1999), 255–75. Select Bibliography Marc Bompaire and Françoise Dumas, Numismatique médiévale: monnaies et documents d’origine française (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Philip Grierson, “Numismatics,” Medieval Studies: an Introduction, ed. James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University

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Press, 1992), 103–36; Wilhelm Jesse, Quellenbuch zur Münz- und Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters (Halle: Münzhandlung A. Riechmann & Co., 1924); Charles Johnson, The ‘De Moneta’ of Nicholas Oresme and the English Mint Documents (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1956); Marie-Thérèse Kaiser-Guyot and Reinhold Kaiser, Documentation numismatique de la France médiévale: Collections de monnaies et sources de l’histoire monétaire (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1982); Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986); Lucia Travaini, Monete, mercanti e matematica. Le monete medievali nei trattati di aritmetica e nei libri di mercatura (Rome: Jouvence, 2003).

Rory Naismith

1963

Papal Bulls

P Papal Bulls A. Definition Papal bulls must be considered from the point of view of formal diplomatics, as the material of canon law, and for their contents. Various types of ‘papal bulls’ with distinctive features of formulary and layout developed in the course of the Middle Ages: privileges with ‘rota,’ monogram and cardinals’ subscriptions, letters of grace sealed with the lead bull hanging on silk threads, letters of justice with the bull on a cord of hemp, later on ‘bulls,’ in diplomatic terms standing between privileges and letters of grace, ‘brevia,’ and letters issued ‘motu proprio’. The contents range from grants and confirmations of liberties, rights and possessions, indulgences and provisions with benefices, to theological or judicial decisions, mandates and political matters (Thomas Frenz, “Papsturkunden,” LexMA, vol. VI, 1993, 1688–91). The greatest part was issued after supplications of the recipients and not by papal initiative, so great care must be taken when using them to interpret papal policy and intentions. They usually follow closely the text of the supplications adapted to chancery rules, and only an arsenal of elaborate formulas of precaution protected against fraud. It is vital to understand the subtle meaning behind the seemingly simple formulas (Othmar Hageneder, “Päpstliche Reskripttechnik: Kanonistische Lehre und kuriale Praxis,” Stagnation oder Fortbildung? Aspekte des allgemeinen Kirchenrechts im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Bertram, 2005, 181–96). Papal bulls of lasting importance were kept and copied by the recipients. For centuries, only a small part of those issued were entered into the papal registers, but their percentage began to rise steeply in the 14th century. The use of registers is known from Late Antiquity onwards, but only fragments survive from earlier than 1198 when their almost unbroken series, later split up into different sub-series, begins. Canon law was chiefly case law, and bulls (decrees) considered to be of legal importance were collected, edited and arranged systematically in decretal collections to be used in law-courts and ecclesiastical administration, and discussed and commented on by canon lawyers. The two most successful collections, known as the Decretum Gratiani (12th c.) and the Liber Extra (1234), were accepted and the latter officially approved by the papacy and formed,

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with later additions, the core of Canon Law until 1918 (James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law, 1995). B. Research Decretals by Pope Innocent III defined criteria to detect forgeries of papal bulls, and chancery rules laid out how to make them (Emil von Ottenthal, Regulae cancellariae apostolicae, 1888, rpt. 1968), but historical research on them started much later. Jean Mabillon (De re diplomatica libri sex, 1681) included examples from papal bulls in his system of diplomatic formulas, but did not dedicate an own section to them. In the same way, the great diplomatic compendia of Harry Bresslau (Handbuch der Urkundenlehre für Deutschland und Italien. 2 vols. and Register, 1889; 2nd and 3rd ed. 1912–1960; transl.: id., Manuale di diplomatica per la Germania e l’Italia, 1998), and Alain de Boüard (Manuel de diplomatique française et pontificale 1. Diplomatique générale, 1929) discussed them together with imperial resp. French royal diplomata. In contrast, the Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique (vol. 5, 1762, 78–338) reserved a section for them, as did Bresslau’s contemporary Ludwig Schmitz-Kallenberg (“Die Lehre von den Papsturkunden,” Grundriss der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Aloys Meister, 1906, 172–230). Lists of papal bulls before and after 1198(–1304) respectively (Philipp Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd ed., 2 vols., 1885–1888, rpt. 1956; August Potthast, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2 vols., 1874–1875, rpt. 1957) and the canon law edition by Aemilius (Emil) Friedberg (Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols., 1879, rpt. 1955) are still indispensable tools for research. The opening of the Vatican archives after 1879 (Leonard E. Boyle, A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of Its Medieval Holdings. 2nd ed., 2001, 12) eased and spurred research, on the one hand on the vast series of papal registers, on the other hand on the papal bulls before 1198 to be searched all over Europe. The need to detect forgeries, to evaluate mutilated and defective copies and to understand the working of the papal chancery led to highly specialized studies on various aspects down to chancery marks on the dorse of the bulls (e. g., Wilhelm Diekamp, “Zum päpstlichen Urkundenwesen des XI., XII. und der ersten Hälfte des XIII. Jahrhunderts,” MIÖG 3 [1882]: 565–627; id., “Zum päpstlichen Urkundenwesen von Alexander IV. bis Johann XXII. [1254–1334],” MIÖG 4 [1883]: 497–540). National organizations to edit or to extract the registers were established (Surveys: Raoul C. van Caenegem, Introduction aux sources de l’histoire médiévale, 1997: 286–94, 346–48, 418, and Olivier Poncet, Les entreprises éditoriales liées aux archives du Saint-Siège: Histoire et bibliographie [1880–2000], 2003). Throughout the 20th century, the mostly under-funded edition projects continued, and detailed research produced specialized studies, often compiled

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in conference papers and edited volumes. Surveys of the register series and finding aids were published (Martino Giusti, Inventario dei Registri Vaticani, 1981; Germano Gualdo, Sussidi per la consultazione dell’Archivio Vaticano, 1989; Schedario Baumgarten: Descrizione diplomatica di bolle e brevi originali da Innocenzo III a Pio IX, ed. Giulio Battelli, 4 vols., 1965–1966). The important issue whether the registers were contemporary to the letters or later copies has been settled in favor of the first solution (Othmar Hageneder, “Papstregister,” LexMA, vol. VI, 1993, 1687–88). C. Contributors The foremost task has been and is to collect and make accessible the enormous numbers of papal bulls in their various forms, and to make sense of the evidence. Research on them depends on time-taking study of seemingly small matters. Consequently, there are few sweeping and path-breaking monographs, but many narrowly focused papers, providing solutions for single problems but necessary for the whole picture. In an early seminal study Léopold Delisle (“Mémoire sur les actes d’Innocent III.,” BEC 19 [1858]: 1–73) thoroughly characterized the bulls of one pontificate. Men like Theodor Sickel, Paul F. Kehr, Leo Santifaller, all of them writing important studies, stand out even more important as great organizers of research on papal bulls and the chancery. Sickel, who edited the early medieval papal formula collection (Liber diurnus pontificum Romanorum, 1889), guided research in Rome (id., Römische Erinnerungen, ed. Leo Santifaller, 1947). Kehr in 1896 launched a still active all-European project to collect and eventually print all papal bulls earlier than 1198 (Hundert Jahre Papsturkundenforschung: Bilanz – Methoden – Perspektiven, ed. Rudolf Hiestand, 2003). Santifaller, together with Franco Bartoloni, started the collection of original papal bulls after 1198, with special attention to chancery marks as a source for the making of the bulls (Leo Santifaller, “Der ‘Censimento’ der spätmittelalterlichen Papsturkunden,” MIÖG 72 [1964]: 135–41). Bartoloni had shown the way with a pilot edition of original supplications and the resulting papal bulls (id., “Suppliche pontificie dei secoli XIII e XIV,” BISI 67 [1955]: 1–188). The approach allowed to scrutinize the makers, i. e., the chancery personnel (Bernard Barbiche, “Diplomatique et histoire sociale: Les ‘scriptores’ de la chancellerie apostolique au XIIIe siècle,” Atti del III Congresso internazionale di Diplomatica, Roma 1971: Relazioni e comunicazioni, 1972, 117–29; id., “Les scribes de la chancellerie apostolique aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles: sources et méthodes d’une enquête prosopographique,” Le statut du scripteur au moyen age, ed. Marie-Clotilde Hubert, et al., 2000, 69–75). Chancery practice of a single pontificate was systematically explained (Javier

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Serra Estelles, Los registros de súplicas y letras pontificias de Clemente VII de Aviñón [1378–1394], 1988). The most important French contribution is the edition of the registers from Gregory IX onwards (Bruno Galland, “La publication des registres de lettres pontificales par l’École française de Rome,” BEC 154 [1996]: 625–34), spawning sometimes hard to detect studies (Robert Fawtier, “Introduction,” Les registres de Boniface VIII, vol. 4, 1939, v-cvi). Christopher Cheney made use of his wide knowledge on papal bulls and decretals to the benefit of English history (id., The Papacy and England, 12th–14th Centuries, 1982; id. and Mary G. Cheney, ed., The Letters of Pope Innocent III [1198–1216] Concerning England and Wales, 1967). The attempt to downplay the part of the popes and their chancery in the drafting process was critically reviewed (Ernst Pitz, Papstreskript und Kaiserreskript im Mittelalter, 1971; cf. MIÖG 80 [1972]: 445–49; ZRG, Kan. Abt. 59 [1973]: 441–45). The inseparability of papal diplomatics and canon law studies is evident in the work of Geoffrey Barraclough (Papal Provisions, 1935), Walther Holtzmann (Studies in the Collections of Twelfth-Century Decretals: From the Papers of the Late Walther Holtzmann, ed. Christopher R. Cheney, and Mary Cheney, 1979) and Peter Herde (Audientia Litterarum Contradictarum, 1970), but the outstanding spiritus rector of canon law remains Stephan Kuttner with his manuscript studies (id., Repertorium der Kanonistik [1140–1234], 1937; Peter Landau, “Stephan Kuttners wissenschaftliches Werk,” RIDC 7 [1996]: 13–20). A most useful guide through the labyrinth of late medieval register series was written by Hermann Diener (“Die großen Registerserien im Vatikanischen Archiv (1378–1523). Hinweise und Hilfsmittel zu ihrer Benutzung und Auswertung,” QFIAB 51 [1971]: 305–68). Venturing into the 15th century as well, Thomas Frenz (Die Kanzlei der Päpste der Hochrenaissance [1471–1527], 1986) investigated the working of the chancery. D. Current Research Recent interest in papal bulls puts them in various contexts instead of isolating them. In diplomatics, their influence on episcopal charters was outlined (Olivier Guyotjeannin, “L’influence pontificale sur les actes épiscopaux français,” L’église de France et la papauté, ed. Rolf Grosse, 1993, 83–102) and their impact compared throughout Europe (Papsturkunde und europäisches Urkundenwesen, ed. Peter Herde, and Hermann Jakobs, 1999), while Othmar Hageneder (“Kanonisches Recht, Papsturkunde und Herrscherurkunde,” AfD 42 [1996]: 419–43) has shown how fruitfully the study of their formulary can be applied to vernacular royal/imperial charters. But the influence of the recipients’ diplomatic practice and their specific needs on papal bulls is evident as well (Hans-Henning Kortüm, Zur päpstlichen Urkundensprache im

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frühen Mittelalter: Die päpstlichen Privilegien 896–1046, 1994; Jochen Johrendt, Papsttum und Landeskirchen im Spiegel der päpstlichen Urkunden [896–1046], 2004). The layout has been compared with that of books (Matthias Kordes, Der Einfluß der Buchseite auf die Gestaltung der hochmittelalterlichen Papsturkunde, 1993). A new approach regards papal bulls as material objects. Frank M. Bischoff (Urkundenformate im Mittelalter: Größe, Format und Proportionen von Papsturkunden in Zeiten expandierender Schriftlichkeit [11.–13. Jahrhundert], 1996) measured the size and thickness of the parchment and obtained insights in the work of the chancery clerks. Studies on the practice of the chancery, its dealings with the petitioners, and on their social history, continue notably in the works of the French editors of the registers (Anne-Marie Hayez, Jeanine Mathieu, and Marie-France Yvan, “De la supplique à la lettre: le parcours des graces en cour de Rome sous Urbain V [1362–1366],” Aux origines de l’état moderne: le fonctionnement administratif de la papauté d’Avignon, 1990, 171–205), of Patrick Zutshi (“‘Inextricabilis Curie Labyrinthus’: The Presentation of Petitions to the Pope in the Chancery and the Penitentiary During the Fourteenth and First Half of the Fifteenth Century,” Päpste, Pilger, Pönitentiarie. Festschrift für Ludwig Schmugge, ed. Andreas Meyer et al., 2004, 393–410; id., “Innocent III and the Reform of the Papal Chancery,” Innocenzo III – Urbs et Orbis, ed. Andrea Sommerlechner, 2003, 84–101), and of the prosopographically focused German team editing the Repertorium Germanicum, recently computerized (Brigide Schwarz, “Das Repertorium Germanicum. Eine Einführung,” VSWG 90 [2003]: 429–40; id., “Vom Nutzen des Vatikanischen Archivmaterials für die Landesgeschichte, dargestellt an sächsischen Beispielen,” Diplomatische Forschungen in Mitteldeutschland, ed. Tom Graber, 2005, 197–235; Andreas Meyer, Arme Kleriker auf Pfründensuche, 1990). ‘Eastern’ Europe has joined the ranks again (cf. the contributions of Zdenka ˇ Hledíková, Alesˇ Po rízka ˇ and Jan Hrdina, Bollettino dell’Istituto Ceco di Roma 4 [2004]: 31–36, 91–114, 125–34). The newly accessible registers of the Penitentiary brought forth a new edition series, the Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum (ed. Ludwig Schmugge et al., 1996sqq.), with databases allowing quantitative studies (Illegitimität im Spätmittelalter, ed. Ludwig Schmugge, 1994; id., “Regestenschuster 2004,” Vom Nutzen des Edierens, ed. Brigitte Merta, et al., 2005, 117–29). They shed some light on society in ‘marginal’ countries poor of sources (The Long Arm of Papal Authority: Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and Their Communication with the Holy See, ed. Gerhard Jaritz, Torstein Jørgensen, and Kirsi Salonen, 2004). In canon law, studies on the collection, transmission and contemporary discussion of decretals are conveniently assembled in the volumes derived from the International Congresses of Medieval Canon Law, founded by Stephan Kuttner

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and recently edited by Kenneth Pennington. A path-breaking study by Anders Winroth (The Making of Gratian’s Decretum, 2000) proves the complicated genesis of this fundamental corpus of canon law. Select Bibliography Paulus Rabikauskas, Diplomatica Pontificia (Praelectionum Lineamenta), 5th ed. (1964; Rome: Editrice pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1994); Thomas Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000), trans. id., I documenti pontifici nel medioevo e nell’età moderna, ed. Sergio Pagano (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1989); Giulio Battelli, Acta Pontificum, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Vaticana, 1965); Reginald L. Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery Down to the Time of Innocent III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915).

Herwig Weigl

Penitentials and Confessionals A. Penance (Confession) Confession has been a troubled sacrament from the inception of the Church. Very early on, remission of sins occurred through a once-in-a-lifetime combination of baptism and what would later become confession. Unfortunately, this meant that any sins committed after confession were unavoidably retained by the individual; therefore, quite often, Christians would “save” their confession experience until they approached their deathbed (paenitentia in extremis). Unlike later ceremonies, women held significant positions within this very early penitential framework. After the 5th century, this process became a more formalized ritual. The more serous sins committed after baptism could then be cleansed in a ceremony whereby the penitent was temporarily excommunicated from the community, fasted and prayed during Lent, and was readmitted on Maundy Thursday. Another such public ritual, exomologesis, required the sinner to appear in penitential garb, publicly declare his/her sins and acknowledge guilt, and beg forgiveness of all gathered. These public acts of forgiveness evolved into the private acts of absolution and penance of later confession. Private penance arose from the monastic practices followed in Ireland and Scotland. Celtic Christianity espoused a strong sense of asceticism, which in turn led to the development of penitential handbooks used as per-

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sonal guides for private ascetic practices. This sense of personal penance was furthered by the ascetic perspective of peregrinatio, or voluntary pilgrimage in God’s service, either literally, through travel to a holy destination, or spiritually, through inner devotions. These small books became the forerunners of the popular penitential handbooks; the private ascetic devotions became the basis of private penance. The practice of private penance spread under Hiberno-Frankish monasticism despite not being endorsed under canon law. In 589, the Third Council of Toledo condemned private penance and reaffirmed the supremacy of public rites. Nevertheless, by the 9th century, private penance was the norm in Spain, Italy, Gaul, and the Rhineland, and these practices, in turn, became the basis for later (11th c.) Continental rites. After the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which mandated yearly confession for all Christians, the theologian Thomas of Chobham identified tripartite confession: private penance, solemn public penance, and non-solemn public penance. The latter two were organizational categories that served aesthetic value but little theological function. Solemn penances required penitents to be expelled from the Church on Ash Wednesday and readmitted on Maundy Thursday much like the early practices of the Patristic church. Thomas’s work combines Canon law, theology, and practical advice, and had a large impact on late medieval confessional practice. His best-known work is Cum miseratione domini, a Summa de penitentia (Thomae de Chobham Summa Confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, 1968). By the 13th century, public penance remained only for public sins, while private penance became the standard practice, as most sins were deemed “private” (see Mary Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France, 1995). Penance and confession became a serious arena of contention on the eve of the reformation. Aside from the widespread Church problems of pluralism, simony, nepotism, and absenteeism, participation in penance also suffered from the problem of stigmatizing the participant and the rise in lay devotion. Ironically, practices connected to penance and confession, such as pilgrimage, indulgences, and private prayer, also led to its incipit demise by minimizing the priest’s role in the remission of sins. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1515) clearly acknowledged the need for reform, but also inadvertently increased dissatisfaction with penitential practice, as suggested reforms were clearly a long way from being put into practice. The period immediately after the Reformation witnessed a severe decline in confessional practices even by still-loyal Catholics because of ignorance and suspicion. In order to counteract these problems, as well as the growing threat of Protestantism, the Church increasingly stressed individual guilt rather than com-

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munal violation, but also, in a similar manner to earlier Byzantine focus, emphasized the consolatory aspect of confessional practice. Increased intimacy between confessor and confessant and stricter requirements regarding priestly confession added to the new ideal of confession as counseling. For a clear overview on the changing social significance of penance, see John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation” (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 25 [1975]: 21–38). In general, the Byzantine Church followed a path similar to the Western Church. Until the 9th century, confession was considered a monastic principle, not a lay one, though it was often recommended, but not required, for the laity. The most significant Byzantine text regarding penance dates to this century, Kanonarion, supposedly written by a monk named John with the authority of St. Basil. It contains a brief history of the salvation of humankind, which is followed by a catalogue of sins that are accompanied by descriptions of penances, and concludes with a ritual of absolution. This work – like almost every later penitential work – claimed to be dependent upon the text attributed to Patriarch John the Faster from the late 6th century. A similar text for nuns, also dating to the 9th century, Nomo canon, was directly attributed to John the Faster. The debate between public and private also plagued the Byzantine church, but the more serious controversy concerned where the authority to remit sins lay – with monks, priests, or bishops? Eventually a compromise was reached, and confession became mainly the province of hieromonks (priest-monks). The major difference between Byzantine practices and Western practices, however, was confessional intent and purpose. Byzantine theology stressed the necessity of the confessor’s benevolent attitude towards penitents so as to inspire confidence and honest answers in response to gentle, yet firm and direct, questioning. Moreover, penance was viewed as a healing practice, meant to reincorporate the penitent into the church community, rather than as a punitive practice meant as payment for one’s sins. B. Penitentials The first penitentials likely had their origins in two main sources, the Canonical Letters of the Greek fathers and the various conciliar decisions and papal decrees of the first five centuries. From these, monks created their own series of disciplines, written down in small books that contained lists of fasts, prayers, days of abstinence, and appropriate tariffs. These were the forerunners of the penitentials. Increasingly after the 5th century, the shift not only occurred from public to private confession, but also there was a similar change from a monastic

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focus to a lay focus. When private lay confession became the standard practice, priests needed a way to keep track of the sins, the appropriate penalties, and the varying rituals. Penitentials, libri poenitentiales, were small portable handbooks, usually written in Latin, although sometimes translated into the vernacular, that were carried by priests in early medieval Europe. Confessors read these penitentials aloud to sinners as a series of questions, to which the answers were expected. Originally, these texts often contained an introduction and conclusion for the instruction of the confessor, covering such topics as the varying rituals, the purpose of the penitential, the demeanor of the confessor, and so on. However, these gradually became more perfunctory as the increasing demand for confession required penitentials to be brief enough to be memorized. Ultimately, the material became reduced to lists of questions to ask penitent with the accompanying tariffs. These lists of sins and the corresponding penances (tariffs) are often graded according to severity, and to a certain degree, these manuals served as works of reference that classified types of sin, the sinful circumstances, and the various penances to impose. The most common tariffs reflected a direct correlation between the severity of the sin and the duration of the penance, which usually consisted of fasting, but sometimes also included reciting psalms, pilgrimage, or almsgiving. These lists of tariffs were supposed to be confined to sins and not extended to social infractions since issues of legality and issues of sinfulness were not always the same thing. Yet, everyone in Western Christendom was at least nominally bound by the rules of the Church, and there was a great deal of overlap between secular and ecclesiastical law. Sexual offenses constitute the largest single category the penitentials treated: prominent offenses were against martial fidelity, the conjugal debt, or those who offended God. Many scholars argue that the penitentials reflected proper methods for channeling and controlling sexual impulses, and that their purpose, at least in part, was to guide lay spirituality in a manner similar to the guidance the early monks derived from their personal penitential manuals. Alongside actual penitential manuals, the rise of annual, required confession led to the emergence of “confessional literature” (works using the tropes and methods of the confessional to structure narrative), which in turn led to ways of understanding the self (e. g., vulnerability to sin, both from without and from within). In turn, this penitential literature played an instrumental role in the shift from public to private as it made clear that private recompense for public sins was just as crucial as public recompense for private sins. Moreover, the rise of lay devotion led to devotional literatures on the subject of confession being akin to a type of monastic hours for the laity as

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a way to assist people in developing a sense of true Christian purpose and being. C. Early Collections The earliest extant penitential is attributed to Finnian in the late 6th century, with another being attributed to Columban (late 6th c.). These two undoubtedly had a strong influence on the Frankish tradition. A later penitential by Cummean (7th –8th c.) was more localized. Other early Celtic collections included the Canones Hiberniae (ca. 675), the Collectio canonum Hibernenses (ca. 725), and the Old Irish Penitential (ca. 780). The Anglo-Saxon penitentials drew their inspiration from these as well as older Latin sources. The earliest of these, attributed to Theodore of Canterbury (ca. 700), also provided source material for later penitentials, especially the Confessional Pseduo-Egberti (which Frantzen dubs the Scriftboc), the Pseudo-Egbert Penitential (which Frantzen calls the Old English Penitential), and a couple attributed to Bede. A few Continental offerings existed prior to the Carolingian reforms, including the Bigotianum (ca. 700–725) and the Hubertense (ca. 750), most strongly influenced by the Celtic works. D. Reform Penitentials Unauthorized penitentials were condemned at both the council of Châlon (813) and the council of Paris (829). As a result, new reform penitentials were composed in the mid-9th century by Carolingian bishops such as Halitgar of Cambrai (Der Quadripartitus: ein Handbuch der karolingischen Kirchenreform, ed. Franz Kerff, 1982) and Hrabanus Maurus (Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum, ed. Aloisius Knoepfler, 1900). The reform penitentials were designed to solve the problem of anonymous penitentials that appeared with contradictory penances for the same sins. However, the older penitentials continued to be popular, and remained in use alongside these newer versions. Another result of the reform movement was the shift towards penitentials as questionnaires – lists of questions incorporated into more liturgical practice and context. Perhaps the best known of these interrogatory versions is Corrector sive Medicus, which is Book 19 of Burchard of Worms’s early 11thcentury Decretum (ca. 1023). As well, canonical collections began to integrate penitentials. For instance, the early 10th-century north Italian Paenitentiale Vallicellianum I is found in both liturgical and canonical manuscripts. Though no definitive modern edition of this text exists, a modern study by Günter Hägele (Das Paenitentiale Vallicellianum I: Ein oberitalienischer Zweig der frühmittelalter-

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lichen kontinentalen Bussbücher. Überlieferung, Verbreitung und Quellen, 1984) paves the way for such with a comprehensive review of scholarship and a careful comparison of all available manuscripts, including a comparison of the order of canons. Other canonical collections to include penitentials are Regino of Prüm’s Libri due de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclisiasticis (906) and Anselm of Lucca’s collection (ca. 1081–1086). E. Modern Collections The first authoritative edition of medieval penitentials was F. W. H. Wasserschleben’s, Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirchen, 1851; rpt. 1964. This volume reflects painstaking research and exacting scholarly methods, and the result is a comprehensive and accessible collection. Another early anthology was H. J. Schmitz’s Die Bussbücher und die Bussdisciplin der Kirche, 1883; rpt. 1958, which is slightly less precise, but nonetheless valuable both in scope and in access. Most scholars now agree that the standard authoritative edition of medieval penitentials in translation is Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales, ed. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, 1938; rpt. 1990. It is also becoming more common to include excerpts from penitentials in student anthologies, either reproduced from McNeill and Gamer or original translations. Although not strictly an anthology, Jean Delumeau’s Le péché et la peur; La culpabilisation en Occident XIII–XVIII siècles, 1983, discusses contents of sermons, confessors’ manuals, and publications for priests that were designed to instruct; however, his work – like others of this nature – covers both preand post-Reformation practices, and as such is deeply affected by the Council of Trent (1545–1563). A good source for early Byzantine practices is Karl Holl, Enthusiasmus and Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mönchtum, 1898, while Venance Grumel’s, Les regestes des actes du patriarcat de Constantinople, vol. 1: Les regestes de 381 à 715, 1932; 2nd ed., 1972, covers a great deal of the later Byzantine works and theological debates. Celtic works are collected in The Irish Penitentials, ed. and trans. Ludwig Bieler, 1963. Solid Continental resources include Paenitentialia minora Franciae et Italiae saecule VIII–IX (ed. Ludger Körntgen and Ulrike Spengler-Reffgen, 1994), and J. D. Mansi’s Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 31 vols., 1759– 1782. The early medieval Spanish church presents a more difficult case due to the 7th-century Muslim incursions. All of the manuscripts that preserve early Spanish traditions date to the 10th and 11th centuries despite reflecting practices from the 6th and 7th centuries, a situation that lends itself to scholarly debate regarding authenticity. Nevertheless, an excellent version is avail-

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able: Le liber ordinum en usage dans l’église wisigothique et mozarabe d’Espagne du cinquiéme au onzième siècle, ed. Mario Férotin, 1904. F. Scholarly Reception Very early scholarship was generally divided into two categories: emphasis on the analysis of the transmission of texts and/or of manuscript evidence, and research into the identity of the author and/or of the associated religious communities involved. While the authorship studies have not continued, the ongoing recovery work of manuscripts and editions is vital to today’s scholarship. However, the most significant trend in modern scholarship has been the idea that medieval texts are not only reflections of ethnic, social, and cultural identities, but also as vehicles of social practice, and were often intended to directly or indirectly inspire, guide, change, or prevent action. In this viewpoint, the penitentials are rhetorical documents not transparent records. Conversely, this inspires the position that the penitentials are just that – documents – and today’s scholars cannot be certain that they reflect enforcement instead of idealized standards. One of the most prominent scholars of penitentials in the early 20th century was Thomas P. Oakley, who investigated both the relationship between sacred and secular laws, and the contribution of penitentials to modern understanding of medieval history. From there, other critics explored connections between the Hiberno tradition and the Continental tradition, both as a monastic endeavor, and in terms of folklore (John T. McNeill, “FolkPaganism in the Penitentials,” The Journal of Religion 14 [1933]: 450–56). This subject is revisited in late 20th-century feminist criticism, related to women’s participation in such practices, usually in conjunction with reproductive issues such as abortion and contraception, or with emotional issues such as love potions (see, for example, Lisa Bitel, Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender in Early Ireland, 1996). In the late 20th century, a new avenue of scholarship opened up regarding the interconnectedness of the secular legal system and the ecclesiastical penitential system. Of supreme importance in this debate is Franz Kerff, who was the first to challenge the notion that penitentials were used predominantly for pastoral ministry, especially since they tend to be found in canon law collections. Kerff argues that these manuals were related to Episcopal control and used for discipline (see “Libri paenitentiales und kirchliche Strafgerichtsbarkeit bis zum Decretum Gratiani: Ein Diskussionsvorschlag,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 75 [1989]: 23–57). This argument spawned a great deal of discussion and debate, with some scholars directly opposing Kerff (Raymund Kottje, “Buße

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oder Strafe?” Zur “Iustitia” in den “Libri paenitentiales,” La giustizia nell’alto medioevo, 1996, 443–68), and others challenging his ideas, especially based on the manuscript evidence, but building on his investigation of episcopal links (Robert Meens, “Penitentials and Practice of Penance in the 10th and 11th Centuries,” Early Medieval Europe 14 [2006]: 7–21). The debate regarding public and private penance resurfaces in early 21st century scholarship, in varying contexts and cultures such as episcopal (Catherine Cubitt, “Bishops, Priests and Penance in Late Saxon England,” 2006), liturgical (A. H. Gaastra, “Penance and the Law: The Penitential Canons of the Collection in Nine Books,” Utrecht, 2006), and legal (Sarah Hamilton The Practice of Penance 900–1050, 2001). The Russian scholar, Aron Iakovlevich Gurevich, explores the place of the penitentials in medieval popular culture, or “folk Christianity,” Problemy srednevekovoi narodnoi kul’tury [Problems of Medieval Popular Culture], 1981, where he concludes that they do indeed reflect actual problems the Church was trying to punish, on both social and religious levels. In a modern echo of the medieval subject matter, scholarship on penitentials – like the tariffs contained in the books themselves – has focused predominantly on sexuality studies. Moreover, with but a few exceptions, this scholarship tends towards examinations of male homosexuality. Early work by sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis, often vaguely referred to the penitentials (see, for instance, Ellis’s discussion of sodomy in Sexual Inversion, 1897). This is a trend continued in later 20th-century discussions about the history of homosexuality: Derrick Sherwin Bailey makes minimal mention of penitential literature in his Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, 1955; rpt. 1975, while John T. Noonan, Jr. treats penitential evidence with slightly more care in his survey of Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists (1965). For its readability and its discussion of penances pertaining to both sexual and non-sexual sins, The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall, 1979; rpt. 1993 and 2004, is a notable, yet often overlooked, piece. Michael Goodich’s study, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period, 1979, also utilizes an overview of the penitentials to conclude that prior to Church reforms of the 10th and 11th centuries, the early Middle Ages was a time of sexual tolerance. This conclusion has been the source of ensuing scholarly debate, as many argue that the penitentials clearly show that sexual sins were not tolerated, and were certainly punished. One text that seemingly upholds Goodich’s perspective is a book considered one of the benchmarks in the study of the history of homosexuality: John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to Fourteenth Century,

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1980; rpt. 2005. Boswell’s time line differs considerably from Goodich’s – he locates the period of sexual tolerance between the late 1000s and early 1100s, and the intolerance as escalating after the High Middle Ages – but his conclusions are strikingly similar. According to Boswell, the penitentials are unreliable in regards to sexuality studies because they are too “pop culture” – both too readily available and too easily dismissed. Again, numerous scholars have challenged this position in subsequent work. Indeed, within five years, both Allen J. Frantzen (The Literature of Penance in Anglo-Saxon England, 1983; trans. Michel Lejeune as La littérature de la Pénitence dans l’Angleterre Anglo-Saxonne, 1991) and Pierre J. Payer (Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550–1150, 1984) challenged positions like Boswell’s and Goodich’s. Payer, who assumes the penitentials were used in actual pastoral ministry, contends that they served as the “principal agent in the formation and transmission of a code of sexual morality” throughout modern Europe (5). The comprehensive nature of penitential literature made it an essential part of day-to-day Church life. If Payer’s work has a weakness, it is due to the study’s focus on a particular subject matter rather than a holistic approach, which in turn causes him to utilize (modern) English words for Latin terms. Nevertheless, this text provides the impetus for later scholars to view the penitentials as important sources for social as well as legal and clerical information. Frantzen’s book is less solely directed towards sexuality studies, although ultimately he does end up investigating such ideas quite thoroughly. His work traces the history of Irish, AngloSaxon, and Frankish penitential handbooks, using the sources themselves within various contexts, and makes assertions about what they imply about larger, more relevant, issues such as the nature of the individual and his/her relation to society and the general life of the early medieval church. He avoids the standard critical assessment of addressing one aspect of society while ignoring others, and challenges the superficial assumptions made by many previous scholars. Frantzen further makes the claim that the didactic purpose of penance unifies Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, and that penitentials were important for an attitudinal conversion (private penance – self-expression), not merely as an adherence to regulatory functions (administration). The proliferation of studies about the history of sexuality led to a spate of examinations of penitential literature, particularly in regards to homosexuality, though these approaches tend to be limited to male homoerotic experiences. David F. Greenburg’s The Construction of Homosexuality, 1988; rpt. 1990, both synthesizes and critiques the principle studies, while offering an intriguing discussion of penitential handbooks as a “grassroots” phenomena. His study, however, ignores woman-woman eroticism. In Law, Sex,

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and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 1987, James A. Brundage provides a useful overview of penitential literature (see especially Appendix 1, table 4.2 for a catalogue of major penitential collections and modern editions thereof, and table 4.3 for a list of penances for select sexual offenses). Jeffrey Richards effectively utilizes penitential evidence in his chapter on “homosexuals” in Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages, 1991; rpt. 1994, 1995, 2002, as does Mark D. Jordan in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, 1997, though neither study is without its critics. In Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America, 1998, Allen J. Frantzen offers both a superb review of the main book-length studies of medieval sexuality and a powerful reading of female and male homosexual acts in the Latin and the Old English penitentials, though the focus is definitely on male homosexual acts. One glaring – and consistent – oversight in these studies is a true exploration of female homosexuality in regards to the penitentials. To date, no such comprehensive study exists; however, a few scholars have redressed the situation. In particular, Karma Lochrie has taken on this male presumption in more than one setting. For instance, in “Presumptive Sodomy and Its Exclusions” (Textual Practice 13.2 [1999]: 295–310), she critiques Brundage’s misunderstanding of female sodomy in the penitentials and Jordan’s work for its casual acceptance – and redoubling – of medieval misogyny. Similarly, she takes on male bias in “Sodomy and Other Female Perversions,” the fifth chapter of her Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (1999). Still, few have used the penitentials to support examinations of female homosexuality in the Middle Ages. A notable exception can be found in Michelle M. Sauer’s “Representing the Negative: Positing the Lesbian Void in Medieval English Anchoritism,” (thirdspace 3.2 [March 2004]: 70–88; ). Related to scholarship directly on the penitentials themselves are studies about the practices of confession, which just as often center on sexuality studies, but also inform the ongoing debates about the history and formation of the self as subject. One of the most influential works in this regard is Michel Foucault’s La volonté de savoir (1976; The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 1990), which underscored the role of confession in the formation of modern notions of sex and sexuality, but also explored the power dynamics found within the confessional. In response, Karma Lochrie’s “Desiring Foucault” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 [1997]: 3–16) criticizes Foucault’s understanding of confession, and Stuart Elden (“The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,” Journal for Cultural Research 9.1 [2005]: 23–42)

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critiques his examination of medieval power structures. Building on Foucault’s ideas, Jeremy Tambling addresses the role of confession in the formation of subjectivity (Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject, 1990). Another related area is the burgeoning interest in medieval sermon studies and other preaching tools, which covers penitentials and confessional literature. These texts become increasingly important as scholars examine the social context of penance and confession, particularly in light of “counseling” or selfformation. A pioneer in this area is Siegfried Wenzel, who has investigated both individual sins (e. g., The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, 1967) and the discipline as a whole (e. g., Summa virtutum de remediis anime, ed. 1984; Fasciculus Morum, a Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans., 1989). Finally, though it focuses almost exclusively on constructions of heterosexual sin during the Spanish Inquisition, Stephen Haliczer’s Sexualidad en el confesionario: un sacramento profanado (1998; Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned, 1996), relies on pre-Reformation resources to establish background and context. G. Future Directions It is clear that the main future of scholarly work on the penitentials will continue to examine them in relation to the history of sexuality and that a great deal remains to be explored in this area. Valuable studies, such as Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, ed., 1998) continue to examine the various sexual nuances found within penitential literature on a regular basis. There are also a number of recent investigations into the idea of confession and subjectivity, especially in regards to literary endeavors, and this is an area that will likely continue to produce scholarly results. In particular, the concepts broached by Foucault – not just the power dynamic, but also the idea that the sinner constructs him/herself as a sinning subject – has led to a number of investigations into literary subjectivity as a product of confession (e. g. Jerry Root, Space to Speke: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature, 1997; Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England, 2006). Other attempts might be made into explorations of genre – a troubled question in regards to the penitentials, which are between liturgical and canonical texts, but can also be considered documents of historical, social, and even literary creation. Allen J. Frantzen, among others, has begun investigations in this regard by exploring the “literariness” of the penitentials with particular attention paid to whether or not they are oral or written texts and/or products of performance (either the priest’s, the penitent’s, or both).

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Select Bibliography E. H. P. Anciaux, La théologie du sacrement de pénitence au XIIe siècle (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1949); Robert Meens, Het tripartite boeteboek (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994); Thomas Pollock Oakley, English Penitential Discipline and Anglo-Saxon Law in Their Joint Influence (1923; Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2003); Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Cyrille Vogel, La discipline pénitentielle en Gaule des origines à la fin du VIIe siècle (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1952).

Michelle M. Sauer with Sarah Aleshire and Christopher Lozensky

Pharmaceutical Literature During the period from the 4th to the 16th centuries, pharmaceutical literature in Byzantium, the Arabo-Islamic World, and the West was made of a wide spectrum of different genres of works, from encyclopedias on the natural substances to be used for the preparation of medicines (materia medica) to tables of taxes on medicines and their ingredients promulgated by cities and/or states. According to the historian of medieval medicine Henry E. Sigerist (1891–1957) (“The Latin Medical Literature of the Early Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 13 [1958]: 127–46; see 144), earlymedieval Western pharmaceutical literature was made of four main types of works: 1. Materia medica; 2. Collections of recipes; 3. Hermeneumata; 4. Treatises on weights and measures. However exact this categorization might be for the early-Middle Ages, it expanded over time during the Middle Ages, particularly in the West. In the East (be it the Byzantine or the AraboIslamic worlds), indeed, pharmaceutical literature perpetuated the categories of classical Antiquity in a more traditional way, even though it gradually included new types of works, resulting from transformations in pharmaceutical techniques and, hence, in the practice of the pharmacy, of the process of transfer of knowledge, and, also, of changes in the place and role of pharmacy among the medical sciences.

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A. An Understudied Field of Research Generally speaking, little attention has been devoted to pharmaceutical literature in medico-pharmaceutical historiography. No monograph has been planned in the Typologie des sources du moyen âge, be it for the field as a whole or for any of the several genres that contributed to the field. The fact is that history of the pharmacy, whatever the period it deals with, is a relatively recent field of scientific investigation (research did not start before the early-20th century, not without some exceptions, however), which has not necessarily a well defined space in the current organization of the academia. After a certain period of expansion during the last quarter of the 20th century, research on the history of medieval pharmacy is currently done in departments of philology (because it relies on primary sources that require specific linguistic aptitudes) where it is normally not a component of such departments, being more often linked with the personal research activity of their members. To this contextual problem, one could add that, in spite of all the achievements of the 20th century, particularly during the last decades, much work still needs to be done before any generalization can be made on the different pharmaceutical genres. Many collections of original documentation (manuscripts and archival pieces) still need to be properly inventoried and catalogued; their texts require to be identified and edited (possibly with a translation into a modern language), preferably on the basis of an exhaustive heuristic of the manuscripts, their accurate examination and description, and a systematic comparison of the text under study in all of them; and analytical studies scrupulously made on such editions, adhering as closely as possible to the text and respecting it deeply, though forcing it to tell as much as possible of what it was supposed to tell, if not more, are still too rare. A program for a systematic analysis of manuscripts and texts was planned by Sigerist for early-medieval literature (“The Latin Medical Literature” [above]: 130). It should have proceeded in three phases: 1. an exhaustive inventory of manuscripts (“with long Incipits and Explicits”); 2. on this basis, a collection of critical editions of previously unpublished or “inadequately” published texts; 3. writing of the history of pharmaceutical literature. In the 1930s Sigerist traveled in Switzerland, France, and Belgium, and visited libraries whose collections included relevant items. He created an archive of 1,154 photographs of manuscripts hosted since then at the Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine (for an inventory, see Walton Schalick, “The Henry E. Sigerist Medieval Manuscript Reproduction Collection: A Finding Guide,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71 [1997]: 305–15). However, because of World War II, Sigerist could not achieve this program and,

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when better times came, he was engaged in other research activities (Sigerist, “Latin Medical Literature” [above]: 130). It is not sure, however, that, when the circumstances would have enabled Sigerist to conduct the research, he would have produced a typology of the pharmaceutical literature of the early Middle Ages. Although his program seems objective and well built, it was biased by a classical – if not classisizing – viewpoint. As it is described in the article above, Sigerist’s research program does not seem, indeed, to have aimed to study pharmaceutical literature per se, with the objective of defining the several genres, reconstructing their possible evolution (if any), and identifying the driving forces behind possible transformations. As Sigerist himself put it, indeed, the objective of the program “was to show how the Greek medical tradition survived the centuries of the Early Middle Ages until the Arabic influence set in” (Sigerist, “Latin Medical Literature” [above]: 130). Nevertheless, some works have been made, which certainly contribute to the definition of at least some pharmaceutical literature. As early as 1904 Vilhelm Lundström (1869–1940) published a critical edition of the botanical lexicon by the 14th-century Constantinopolitan monk, Neophytos Prodromenos (Vilhelm Lundström, “Neophytos Prodromenos’ botaniska namnförteckning,” Eranos 5 [1903–1904]: 129–55). He was followed, from 1930, by the Belgian philologist Armand Delatte (1886–1964) who edited several botanical lexica and texts on plants: “Le lexique de botanique du Parisinus Graecus 2419,” Serta Leodensia, 1930, 59–101, and Anecdota Atheniensia et alia. Tome II. Textes grecs relatifs à l’histoire des sciences, 1939, passim. Also, Margaret H. Thomson edited some Byzantine lexica in 1955 (Textes grecs inedits relatifs aux plantes, 1955). Finally, Alain Touwaide published a list of Byzantine botanical lexica (“Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” in Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano, 1999, 211–28). No explicit theoretical study of the genre was made, however, on the type of lexica that Sigerist identified as Hermeneumata. Margaret H. Thomson also inventoried the Greek manuscripts with botanical contents (including pharmaceutical botany) in the collection of the (now) Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (“Catalogue des manuscrits de Paris contenant des traités anonymes de botanique, “Revue des Etudes Grecques 46 [1933]: 334–48). On this basis, she published later a critical edition (with a French translation) of some of the texts she had identified in the manuscripts: Textes grecs inédits relatifs aux plantes (above), and another text of a particular type: Le jardin symbolique: Texte grec tiré du Clarkianus XI, 1960, without giving a definition of the several genres of botanico-pharmaceutical

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1982

texts she identified in the Parisian manuscripts, and not either of the literature on garden symbolism. In their presentation and analysis of the history of Byzantine pharmacy, Panagiotis G. Kritikos and Stella N. Papadaki, “Contribution à l’histoire de la pharmacie chez les Byzantins,” Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Athen vom 8. bis 14. April 1967, ed. Georg Edmund Dann, 1969, 13–78, do not study the genres of pharmaceutical literature in Byzantium, as did not either Herbert Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, 1978, vol. 2, in the chapters on Byzantine medical and natural sciences. The work by Aristotelous Eftychiadou, Eisagôgê eis tên byzantinên therapeutikên, 1983, is more original from this viewpoint, as it discusses the Byzantine medical literature by medical specialties. Nevertheless, there is no explicit definition and discussion of the textual genres that went together with the several specialties in the work, which is unfortunately pretty rare. The inventories of Arabic primary sources, together with their manuscripts, by Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, vol. 3: Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H., and vol. 4: Alchemie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H., 1971; and Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam, 1970, and Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, 1972, though of an encyclopaedic nature, do not formulate any general consideration on the material they present. The same is valid for the reference works on the medical and pharmaceutical literature of the Western Middle Ages. For late antiquity, the many extant texts have been listed with the references of their editions in Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge, ed. Guy Sabbah, Pierre-Paul Corsetti and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, 1987, with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999, 2000, and Michael H.-P. Freyer, Europäische Heilkräuterkunde: Ein Erfahrungsschatz aus Jahrtausenden, 1998. B. Available Studies and Reference Works Some research was done, however, to approach pharmaceutical literature, to identify and define its categories, to list the treatises that best illustrate each (or some of) these genres, to highlight the major characteristics of such genres and their antecedents and sources, to follow possible evolution processes (if any) and, if so, to identify the factors that determined these transformations, and to evaluate the impact of these new forms. This was the ob-

1983

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jective of Sigerist’s pioneering article cited above, which listed several of the treatises of the four main genres of pharmaceutical literature identified by him. Some to the treatises listed in the article had been published, and other were still unpublished, but were referred to through the manuscripts containing their text, which Sigerist had discovered during his exploratory research stays in European libraries. The more recent work by Jakob Büchi, Die Entwicklung der Rezept- und Arzneibuchliteratur, part 1: Altertum und Mittelalter, 1982, offers a contrasted contribution: on the one hand, indeed, it lists the works in a traditional chronological way; but, on the other hand, it also group them by types. Even though it does not go as far as one would wish, it lays down solid basis for a further analysis of the literature by genres, as does also, though not in such a systematic way, Freyer, Europäische Heilkräuterkunde (above). Another significant contribution is by Ortrun Riha, Wissenorganisation in medizinischen Sammelhandschriften: Klassifikationskriterien und Kombinationsprinzipien bei Texten ohne Werkcharacter, 1992, where the author studies the definition of the terms used for some genres. Of a different nature are the recent entries “Herbals” and “Pharmaceutical Handbooks” by Alain Touwaide in Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas Glick, Steven J. Livesey, and Faith Wallis, 2005, 218–20 and 393–94 respectively. They characterize, indeed, these two genres, trace their classical antecedents, describe their features in medieval manuscripts, and identify their function in the exercise of pharmaceutical practice, thus being both descriptive and functionalist. In the absence of specific instrumenta studiorum, research on medieval pharmaceutical literature can take advantage of inventories of pharmaceutical and medical works and, in some cases, also of inventories of manuscripts, which, however, do not necessarily list the works and their manuscripts in a organic way, by genres. For Greek medical texts, together with their Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin translations, Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, ed. Hermann Diels, Part II: Die übrigen griechischen Ärzte ausser Hippokrates und Galenos, 1906 (with a reedition the same year under a slightly different title: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung, ed. Hermann Diels, 1906). The catalogue was followed by a supplement: Bericht über den Stand des interakademischen Corpus Medicorum Antiquorum und erster Nachtrag zu den in den Abhandlungen 1905 and 1906 veröffentlichten Katalogen: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte. I. und II.Teil, ed. Hermann Diels, 1908 (the second edition of 1906 has been reprinted together with the supplement: Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: I Hippokrates und Galenos. II Die übrigen griechische Ärzte. III Nachtrag, ed. Hermann Alexander Diels. Mit einem Vorwort von Fridolf Kudklien, 1970). This inventory can be usefully completed with: Mariarosa

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1984

Formentin, I codici greci di medicina nelle Tre Venezie, 1978, and Anna Maria Ieraci Bio, “La trasmissione della letteratura medica greca nell’Italia meridionale fra X e XV secolo,” Antonio Garzya (ed.), Contributi alla cultura greca nell’Italia meridionale, 1989, 133–257, in both of which Byzantine literature is well represented. Useful also is Gerhard Fichtner, Corpus hippocraticum. Verzeichnis der hippokratischen und pseudohippokratischen Schriften and Corpus galenicum: Verzeichnis der galenischen und pseudogalenischen Schriften, produced at the Institute für Geschichte der Medizin at Tübingen and first published in 1985 (with several subsequent versions). A collection of data is also offered by the inventory of incipit of Latin scientific texts (including botanical) published as early as 1937 with a second edition in 1963 by Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965) and Pearl Kibre (1900–1985), A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 1963. The work is now available in an expanded and updated digital version identified as ETK, which is accompanied by the socalled eVK, that is, the updated version by Linda Ersham Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurts, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, CD-ROM, 2000, which makes possible to search the data so as to identify, for example, all the works of a certain type. Finally, two other reference works can be used in the perspective here: Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée du Ier au Xe siècle, 2 vols., 1989, which lists all the works on materia medica edited and available when the index was being prepared. On a different topic, the list of treatises and manuscripts on gynecological literature published as an appendix by Monica H. Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West, 2000 (Appendix: Medieval Gynecological Literature: a Handlist). Finally, useful also here, Loren Mackinney (1891–1963), Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts, 1965, which lists the illustrated manuscripts and identifies their texts by means of key words that define their literary genre. The index lists all such manuscripts by key word, and thus provides a basis for a research on the definition of the genres of which these texts are examples. C. The Several Genres and Their Historiography Medieval pharmaceutical literature was a conglomerate of different types of works, which constituted sometimes independent manuals and sometimes were parts of larger and all encompassing medical treatises. As a general rule, medieval pharmaceutical works were more of a practical nature, and covered all the aspects of the preparation of medicines, from the selection of materia medica to price tables. Over time, however, they tended to be more diversified and specialized, following the transformation of pharmaceutical practice, more so in the West than in Byzantium and the Arabo-Islamic worlds, which perpetuated more the ancient tradition, even though there, too, phar-

1985

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macy underwent several transformations. Given the current state of research on this topic it is not possible to fully describe each genre here, but only to provide examples of current research. In the list below, titles are grouped by literary genres identified according to the medieval titles, the standard designation in contemporary bibliography, or any other appropriate way. Sections are listed in alphabetical order of the terms used to identify the genres. Amulets Vitalien Laurent, “Amulettes byzantines et formulaires magiques,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 36 (1936): 300–15; Campbell Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets Chiefly Graeco-Roman, 1950; Zoltan Kadar, “Bemerkungen über byzantinische Amulette und magische Formeln,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 10 (1962): 403–11; Vivian Nutton, “From Medical Certainty to Medical Amulets: Three Aspects of Ancient Therapeutics,” Clio Medica 22 (1991): 13–22; Jeffrey Spier, “Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and their Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 25–62. Animals (as materia medica) In addition to De taxone (edition in Ernst Howald (1887–1967) and Henry E. Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba vettonica liber. Pseudoapulei Herbarius, Anonymi De taxone liber. Sexti Placiti liber Medicinae ex animalibus, 1927), see, for example, Rainer Möhler, ‘Epistula de vulture’. Untersuchungen zu einer organotherapeutischen Drogenmonographie des Frühmittelalters, 1990. Antidotarium See De antidotis, and also: Dietlinde Goltz, Mittelalterliche Pharmazie und Medizin: dargestelt an Geschichte und Inhalt des Antidotarium Nicolai: mit einem Nachdruck der Druckfassung von 1471, 1976; Pedro Vernia, Arnau de Vilanova, Antidotario, vol. I: Facsímil, vol. II: Traducción y estudio, 1994. aqra¯ba¯dhı¯ in Arabic adaptation of the Greek term grafidion (short book, actually collection of formulae for medicines). For two examples, see Martin Levey, The Medical Formulary or Aqrabadhi n of al-Kindi translated with a Study of its Materia Medica, 1966; Oliver Kahl, Dispensatorium parvuum: al-Aqrabadhin al-saghir. Sabur ibn Sahl, 1994.

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1986

Arzneibuch Works on materia medica, compendia (see those terms), or other forms of texts on therapeutics. For a general presentation, see Gundolf Keil, “Arzneibücher,” LexMA, vol. 1.6 (1979), 1091–94. For some examples: Christoph Ferckel, “Zum Breslauer Arzneibuch,” Mitteilungen zur Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaft 13 (1914): 560–64; Gundolf Keil, “Das Arzneibuch Ortolfs von Baierland,” Sudhoffs Archiv 43 (1959): 20–60; Agi Lindgren, Ein Stockholmer mittelniederdeutsches Arzneibuch aus der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts, 1967. Astrological Herbals For the Greek manuscripts, see the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum (20 vols., 1898–1953) published at the initiative and, for a certain period of time, under the direction of Franz Cumont (1868–1947), by two different publishers: Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, 20 vols., in Aedibus Henrici Lamertin (with vols. 5.4 [1940], 9.1 [1951], and 9.2 [1953]: in Aedibus Academiae), 1898–1953. See also Armand Delatte (1886–1964), “Le traité des plantes planétaires d’un manuscrit de Léningrad,” Annuaire de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 9 (1949): 145–77; Adalberto Pazzini (1898–1975), Virtù delle erbe secondo i sette pianeti. L’erbario detto di Tolomeo e quelli di altri astrologi (Cod. Vat. 11423), 1959; Charles Burnett, “Astrology and Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 37 (1985): 16–18. Calendars Gundolf Keil, “Das Regimen duodecim mensium der Düdeschen Arstedie und das Regimen sanitatis Coppernici,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung (Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch) 81 (1958): 33–48; Id., “Eine lateinische Fassung von Meister Alexanders Monatsregeln,” Ostbairische Grenzmarken 4 (1960): 123–38; Id., “Die Grazer frühmittelhochdeutschen Monatsregeln und ihre Quelle,” Fachliteratur des Mittelalters: Festschrift Gerhard Eis, ed. Gundolf Keil, Rainer Rudolf, Wolfram Schmitt, and Hans Josef Vermeer, 1968, 131–46; Id., “Die Grazer frühmittelhochdeutschen Monatsregeln und ihre Quellen,” Fachliteratur des Mittelalters: Festschrift (above), 131–46; Agi Lindgren, “Eine altschwedische Fassung von Meister Alexanders Monatsregeln,” Gelêrter der arznîe, ouch apotêker: Beiträge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Willem F. Daems, ed. Gundolf Keil, 1982, 301–21; Frank-Dieter Groenke, Die frühmittelalterlichen lateinischen Monatskalendarien: Text-Übersetzung-Kommentar, 1986; Faith Wallis, “Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts,” Manuscripts Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. Margaret R. Schleissner, 1995, 105–43.

1987

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Charms See amulets. Commentaries On the genre, see the series being currently published: Wilhelm Geerlings and Christian Schulze, Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter: Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung, 2 vols. published so far (2002 and 2004). The first deals specifically with medical texts and offers an inventory of the medical commentaries written in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: Sibylle Ihm, Clavis Commentariorum der antiken medizinischen Texte, 2002. For a specific case, see, for example, the alphabetical version of Dioscorides, De materia medica, commented on by Pietro d’Abano and printed in 1478: Explicit dyascorides quem petrus paduanensis legedo correxit et exponendo quae utiliora sunt in lucem deduxit. For a study of another commentary, see Willy Louis Braekman, “Een Gecommentarieerd Antidotarium en de Circa instans van Platearius in een Oostmiddelnederlandse Bewerking,” Scientiarum Historia 9 (1967): 182–210. A commentary of a special kind is on botanical lexicology, which was often aimed to properly identify the plants of one or more earlier treatise(s). The best examples of this kind of works are the Arabic commentaries edited by the late Albert Dietrich (1913–2001): Dioscurides triumphans: Ein anonymer arabischer Kommentar (Ende 12. Jahrh. n. Chr.) zur Materia medica: Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung. 1. Teil: Arabischer Text; 2. Teil: Übersetzung und Kommentar, 1988; Die Dioskurides-Erklärung des Ibn al-Baitar: Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Pflanzensynonymie des Mittelalters: Arabischer Text nebst kommentierter deutscher Übersetzung, 1991. Compendium See, for example, Rudolf Laux, “Ars medicinae. Ein frühmittelalterliches Kompendium der Medizin,” Kyklos 3 (1930): 417–33; or, more recently, the so-called Lorsch Arzneibuch: Gundolf Keil (ed.), Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Faksimile der Handschrift Msc. Med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, 1989. The volume of commentary contains an introduction and the translation of the text: Gundolf Keil (ed.), Das Lorscher Arzneibuch: Übersetzung der Handschrift Msc. med. 1 der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg by Ulrich Stoll und Gundolf Keil, together with Altabt Albert Ohlmeyer. Three years later, Ulrich Stoll authored a critical edition of the text, with a German translation and all the necessary indices and critical apparatus: Ulrich Stoll, Das “Lorscher Arzneibuch”: Ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts (Codex Bambergensis medicinalis 1): Text, Übersetzung und Fachglossar, 1992.

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1988

Compound Medicines The prototypes of this genre are the pharmaceutical treatises by Galen (C.E. 129-after 216 [?]): De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos (edition by Karl Gottlieb Kühn (1754–1840), Claudii Galeni Opera omnia, vols. 12 [1826], 378–1007, and vol. 13 [1827], 1–361), and De compositione medicamentorum per genera (edition Id., ibid., vol. 13 [1827], 362–1058). On these medicines, see also De gradibus. De alimentorum facultatibus See the work by Galen (edition by Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera [above], vol. 14 [1827], 1–209, and an English translation by Owen Powell, Galen, On the Properties of Foodstuffs [De alimentorum facultatibus], 2003). See, for example, Innocenzo Mazzini, De observantia ciborum: traduzione tardo-antica del Peri diaites pseudoippocratico I. II. Introduzione, testo critico ed index verborum memorabilium, 1984. Also: Mark Grant, Anthimus, De observatione ciborum-On the Observance of Foods, 1996. De antidotis The prototype of this type of text is Galen, De antidotis (edition by Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera [above], vol. 14 [1827], 1–209). The formulae for antidotes developed greatly during the period 1st cent. B.C.E./1st cent. C.E. and evolved from their original use (toxicology) to a general one (medicines for a broad spectrum of medical conditions). On the development of this type of medicines, see Gilbert Watson, Theriac and Mithridatum: A Study in Therapeutics, 1966. De gradibus Works on the determination of the therapeutic property (or properties) of compound medicines. See, for example: Arnaldi de Villanova (ca. 1240–1311), Opera medica omnia, II: Aphorismi de gradibus. Ed. and transl. Michael McVaugh, 1975. De ponderibus et mensuris See Weights and measures. De simplicibus medicinis In addition to Dioscorides (see under Materia medica), the prototype is Galen, De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus (edition in Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera [above], vol. 11 [1826], 379, and vol. 12 [1826], 1–377). See also, the treatise De remediis parabilibus ascribed to Dioscorides (on its attribution, see Max Wellmann (1863–1933), Die Schrift des Dioskurides peri aplôn far-

1989

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makôn: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Medizin, 1914; edition in Id., Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei, De materia medica libri quinque, 3 vols., 1906–1914, vol. 3, 149–326), and De remediis parabilibus by Galen (edition by Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera [above], vol. 14 [1827], 311–581). For an example, see José Martínez Gázquez et Michael R. McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera Medica Omnia, vol. XVII: Translatio libri albuzale de medicinis simplicibus; Ana Labarta, Abul-Salt umayya, kitab al-Adwiya; Luis Cifuente, Llibre d’albumesar de simples medecines, 2004. De succedaneis The archetype of the genre is the Pseudo-Galenic treatise edited by Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera (above), vol. 19 [1830], 721–47. For an example with an analysis, see Martin Levey (1913–1970), Substitute Drugs in Early Arabic Medicine: with Special Reference to the Texts of Masarjawaih, al-Razi, and Pythagoras, 1971. De venenis See Toxicology. Diet Among the many examples of this genre, see (in chronological order of publication): Heather Stuart, “A Ninth Century Account of Diets and Dies Aegyptiaci,” Scriptorium 33 (1979): 237–44; Hans-Rudolf Fehlmann, “Diätetische Monatsregeln in einem Handbuch der Heilkunde aus der Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Orbis Pictus: Kultur- und pharmaziehistorische Studien. Festschrift für Wolfgang-Hagen Hein zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Dressendörfer and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, 1985, 103–17; Ortrun Riha, “Die diätetischen Vorschriften der mittelalterlichen Monatsregeln,” Licht der Natur: Medizin in Fachliteratur und Dichtung: Festschrift für Gundolf Keil zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Josef Domes, Werner G. Gerabek, Bernhard D. Haage, Christoph Weisser, and Wolker Zimmermann, 1994, 339–64; Melissa Weiss Anderson, Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in Regimen Sanitatis Literature from 800 to 1400, 1995. Electuary Liliane Plouvier, “L’electuaire, un médicament plusieurs fois millénaire,” Scientiarum historia 19 (1993): 97–112.

Pharmaceutical Literature

1990

Formulary Jean Barbaud, “Les formulaires médicaux du Moyen Age: médecines savantes et médecines populaires,” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 277 (1988): 138–53; Martin Levey and Noury Al-Khaledy, The Medical Formulary of alSamarqandi and the Relation of Early Arabic Simples to those Found in the Indigenous Medicine of the Near East and India, 1967. Glossary See, for example, Max Meyerhof (1874–1945), “Sur un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte 17 (1935): 223–35 (reproduced in Fuat Sezgin [ed.], Mûsâ ibn Maymûn / Maimonides (d. 1204). Texts and Studies. Collected and Reprinted, vol. 4, 1996); Id., Sarh asma’ al-’uqqar (l’explication des noms de drogues), un glossaire de matière médicale composé par Maïmonide. Texte publié pour la première fois d’après un manuscrit unique, avec traduction, commentaire et index, 1940 (English translation: Fred Rosner, Moses Maimonides’ Glossary of Drug Names: Translated from Max Meyerhof’s French,1979); Richard J. Stracke, The Laud Herbal Glossary, 1974; Hans-Rudolf Fehlmann, “Hochmittelalterliche Heilpflanzen-Glossare: Eine Übersicht eigener Arbeiten,” Gelêrter der arznîe, ed. Gundolf Keil (above), 387–401. Glosses Wilem F. Daems (1911–1994), “Die Mnl. Macerglossen in MS. 6838 A der Nationalen Bibliothek zu Paris”, Janus 53 (1966): 17–29. Gout (De podagra) A Byzantine writer of uncertain epoch wrote a treatise De podagra. See: Gudrun Schmalzbauer, “Medizinisch-diätetisches über die Podagra aus spätbyzantinischer Zeit,” JÖBG 23 (1974): 229–43. On the topic see: Edouard Jeanselme (1858–1935), “La goutte a Byzance,” Bulletin de la Société française d’histoire de la médecine 14 (1920): 137–64, and, more recently: Dieter Paul Mertz, Geschichte der Gicht: Kultur- und medizinhistorische Betrachtungen, 1990. grabadin Latin adaptation of the word aqra¯ badhiin (above). See Leo J. Vandewiele (1910–2004), De grabadin van Pseudo-Mesues (XIe-XIIe eeuw) en zijn invloed op de ontwikkeling van de farmacie in de zuidelijke Nederlanden, 1962.

1991

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Herbals On the origin of the herbal, see Ernest Wallis Budge (1857–1934), HerbDoctors and Physicians in the Ancient World: The Divine Origin of the Craft of the Herbalist, 1928 (with several reprints, such as 1978); Warren Royal Dawson (1888–1968), “Studies in Medical History, a) the Origin of the Herbal, b) Castor-Oil in Antiquity,” Aegyptus 10 (1929): 47–72. On the herbal in antiquity: Charles Singer (1876–1960), “The Herbal in Antiquity,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 47 (1927): 1–52. On medieval herbals, see Jerry Stannard (1926–1988), “Medieval Herbals and their Development,” Clio Medica 9 (1974): 23–33 (reproduced in Id., Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Age and the Renaissance, ed. Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay, 1999, no. III, pp?). On the transition from medieval herbalism to Renaissance botany, see Agnes Arber (1879–1960), “From Medieval Herbalism to the Birth of Modern Botany,” Science, Medicine, and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientific Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of C. Singer, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood, 2 vols., 1953, vol. 1, 317–36. On Renaissance herbals, see Eadem, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution. A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670, 1912 (with several re-editions and reprints). For some important medieval herbals, see Howald and Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba (above); Friedrich W. T. Hunger (b. 1874), The Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius: from the Ninth-Century Manuscript in the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Codex casinensis 97) together with the First Printed Edition of John Phil. De Lignamine (Editio princeps Romae 1481), 1935; Erminio Caprotti and William T. Stearn (1911–2001), Herbarium Apulei (1481) – Herbolario volgare (1522). Introduzione di E. C. e un saggio di W. T. S., 1979. For the study of the text, see Henry E. Sigerist, “Der Herbarius Apulei,” Janus 29 (1925): 180–82; Id., “Zum Herbarius Pseudo-Apulei,” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 23 (1930): 197–204; Linda Erhsam Voigts, “The Significance of the Name Apuleius to the Herbarium Apulei,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 214–27; Maria Franca Buffa Giolito and Gigliola Maggiulli, L’altro Apuleio: Problemi aperti per una nuova edizione dell’Herbarius, 1996. The text has been recently translated into Spanish in the volume of commentary that accompanies the recent facsimile reproduction of the manuscript 296 from the Biblioteca Statale in Lucca, under the title Herbolarium et materia medica (Biblioteca Statale de Lucca, ms. 296), 2007. Among the other herbals, see, for example, the so-called curae herbarum, whose test was edited by Sofia Mattei, “Curae herbarum,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Macerata, 1995, with the subsequent study of a passage by Annalisa Bracciotti, “Nomen herbae selenas: Un passo bilingue delle Curae herbarum,” in Renato Oniga (ed.), Il plurilinguismo nella tradizione letteraria latina,

Pharmaceutical Literature

1992

2003, 213–53; and Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, “Las Curae herbarum y las interpolaciones dioscorideas en el Herbario del Pseudo-Apuleyo,” Euphrosyne 32 (2004): 223–40. See, also, the so-called alfabetum Galieni studied by Carmélia Halleux-Opsomer, “Un herbier médical du haut moyen âge: l’Alfabetum Galieni,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 4 (1982): 65–97; and Gargilius Martialis, first studied by John M. Riddle, “Gargilius Martialis as Medical Writer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984): 408–29 (reproduced in Id., Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs, 1992, nr. X), and recently edited by Brigitte Maire, Gargilius Martialis, Les remèdes tirés des légumes et des fruits, texte établi, traduit et commenté, 2002; see also the concordance by the same, Concordantiae Gargilianae, 2002. See also Leo J. Vandewiele, “Den Herbarius in Dyetsche en de verwantschap met Herbarius latinus en Herbarius in Latino cum figuris,” Jaarboek Dodonaea 33 (1965): 419–511; and Jürg Blome, “Fachnomenklatorische Untersuchungen zu einem der ältesten bebilderten Kräuterbücher Mitteleuropas,” in Keil (ed.), Gelêrter der arznîe (above), 551–88. Hieras A formula for a medicine, on which see Philippe Mudry, Le médecin félon et l’énigme de la potion sacrée (Apulée, “Métamorphoses” 10,25), in Danielle Gourevitch (ed.), Maladie et maladies – Histoire et conceptualisation: Mélanges en l’honneur de Mirko Grmek, 1992, 109–21. Hortus On Pre-Salernitan gardens, see Carmélia Opsomer-Halleux, “The Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine,” in Elizabeth B. Macdougall (ed.), Medieval Gardens, 1986, 93–114. The most significant was at Saint Gall Abbey. See Erhard Landgraf, “Ein frühmittelalterlicher Botanicus,” Ph.D. thesis, 1928 [reproduced in Kyklos, 1 [1928]: 114–46]), and, more recently, Monica Niederer, Der St. Galler ‘Botanicus’: Ein frühmittelalterliches Herbar. Kritische Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 2005. Relevant also, the Hortulus by Walahfrid Strabo (ca. 808–849), repeatedly studied during the 20th century: Karl Sudhoff, Des Walahfrid von der Reichenau Hortulus: Gedichte über die Kräuter seines Klostergartens vom Jahre 827, Wiedergabe des ersten Wiener Druckes vom Jahre 1510. Eingeleitet und medizinisch, botanisch und druckgeschichtlich gewürdigt, 1926; Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, translation by Raef Payne; commentary by Wilfrid Blunt (1901–1987), 1966; or, more recently, Hans-Dieter Stoffler, Der hortulus des Walahfrid Strabo: aus dem Kräutergarten des Klosters Reichenau, 1978.

1993

Pharmaceutical Literature

Hospital formularies See, for example, Edouard Jeanselme, “Sur un aide-émoire de thérapeutique byzantin contenu dans un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (suppl. gr. 674),” Mélanges Charles Diehl, 2 vols., 1930, vol. 1, 147–70. More recently, David Bennett, “Medical Practice and Manuscripts in Byzantium,” Social History of Medicine 13 (2000): 279–91. Iatrosofia Alain Touwaide, “Byzantine Hospital Manuals (Iatrosophia) as a Source for the Study of Therapeutics,” in Barbara S. Bowers (ed.), The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice, 2007, 147–73. Legal texts The most representative legal document is the so-called Constitutions of Melfi (identified as Liber Augustalis) promulgated by Frederick II von Hohenstaufen (1194–1250) between 1231 and 1240. See Conrad von Hermann, Thea von der Lieck-Buyken, and Wolfgang Wagner, Die Konstitutionen Friedrichs II. von Hohenstaufen für sein Königreich Sizilien: Nach einer lateinischen Handschrift des 13. Jahrhunderts herausgegeben und übersetzt, 1973; English translation: James M. Powell, Liber Augustalis, or Constitution of Melfi Promulgated by the Emperor Frederick II for the Kingom of Sicily in 1231, 1971. For a specific study, see Wolfgang-Hagen Hein and Kurt Sappert, Die Medizinalordnung Friedrichs II.: Eine pharmaziehistorische Studie, 1957, especially 48–57 for the Latin text and a German translation; and Glenn Sonnedecker, Kremer and Urdang’s History of Pharmacy, 1976, 468–69 for an English translation. For an analysis, see Id., ibid., 34–5; Clemens Stoll, Apotheker und Gesetzgebung: Ein Beitrag zur rechtsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung des Apothekerberufes in Europa, 1991, and, more recently: Rosalia Giovaniello, “La farmacologia medioevale, regolamentazione dell’arte farmaceutica di Federico II,” Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia Italiana di Storia della Farmacia 14 (1997): 29–39; Ortensio Zecchino, Medicina e sanità nelle Costituzioni di Federico II di Svevia (1231), 2002. Lexica Sigerist, “The Latin Medical Literature” (above), 144, call them hermeneumata and defines such works as “glosses meant to explain drugs or merely give a synonymous term”. For Byzantine lexica, see Lundström, “Neophytos Prodromenos,” (above); Delatte, “Le lexique de botanique,” (above), and Id., Anecdota Atheniensia (above), passim; also Thomson, Textes grecs inedits (above), and Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina,” (above).

Pharmaceutical Literature

1994

Magics A fundamental work is Armand Delatte, Herbarius: Recherches sur le cérémonial usité chez les anciens pour la cueillette des simples et des plantes magiques, 1960. For later examples of texts, see Giuseppe Rinaldi and Mariella Crosio, Alcune ricette di Aezio d’Amida e l’ambiente superstizioso del V-VII secolo, 1969; Hans Biedermann, Medicina magica: Metaphysiche Heilmethoden in spätantiken und mittelalterlichen Handschriften, 1972. Materia medica The prototype of these works of a general nature, covering the whole sector (thus including vegetals, animals, and minerals) is Dioscorides (1th c. A.D.), De materia medica. Edition of the Greek text by Max Wellmann, Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei, De materia medica libri quinque, 3 vols., 1906–1914 (reprint: 1958). For an English translation, the 17th-century version by John Goodyer (1592–1644) (The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides Illustated by a Byzantine A.D. 512, Englished by John Goodyer A.D. 1655. Edited and first printed in 1933 by Robert T. Gunther (1869–1940), 1934, with several reprints the most recent of which was published in 1968), can now be replaced with that of Lilly Y. Beck, De materia medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, 2005. For a Spanish translation, see: Dioscórides, Plantas y remedios medicinales (De materia medica). Introducción, traducción y notas de Manuela García Valdés, 2 vols., 1997. The German translation by Julius Berendes (1837–1914) made on the 1829 edition of the Greek text by Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) (Des Pedanios Dioskurides aus Anazarbos Arzneimittellehre in fünf Büchern: Übersetzt und mit Erklärungen versehen, 1902, with several reprints, the most recent of which was published in 1988), can be replaced now with Max Aufmesser, Pedanius Dioscurides aus Anazarba: Fünf Bücher über die Heilkunde, 2002. Studies of the work include John M. Riddle, Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine, 1985, and, more recently: Alain Touwaide, “La botanique entre science et culture au Ier siècle de notre ère,” Geschichte der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaften in der Antike, I. Biologie, ed. Georg Wöhrle, 1999, 219–52. See also above, De simplicibus medicinis. Some treatises deal only with one plant. For example, De herba vettonica, edited by Howald and Sigerist, Antonii Musae De herba (above), 1927. For a recent example, see Volker Zimmermann, “Der ‘Rosmarin-Traktat’ in Handschrift b. VI 35 der Erzabtei St. Peter zu Salzburg,” in Keil, Gelêrter der arznîe (above), 523–32. Also: Gösta Brodin, Agnus Castus: A Middle English Herbal, 1950.

1995

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Minerals For a case of lapidary, see John M. Riddle, Marbode of Renne’s (1035–1123) De lapidibus Considered as a Medical Treatise, with Text, Commentary, and C. W. King’s Translation, together with Text and Translation of Marbode’s Minor Works on Stones, 1977 (see also the contribution on lapidaries by Rosmarie Morewedge). Miracles (Therapeutic), Lives of Saints With the diffusion of Christianity, a new genre of therapeutic literature developed: the reports of therapeutic miracles (particularly those performed by the prototypes of this medical activity of a new genre, Cosmas and Damianos), and the lives of healing saints. On the former, see Pierre Julien (1921–2007), Saint Côme et Saint Damien patrons des médecins chirurgiens et pharmaciens, imagé par Alvaro Garzon, 1980, and Pierre Julien, François Ledermann and Alain Touwaide, Cosma e Damiano. Dal culto popolare alla protezione di chirurghi, medici e farmacisti. Aspetti e immagini, 1993. On the lives of saints, see for example: Harry J. Magoulias, “The Lives of Saints as Sources of Data for the History of Byzantine Medicine in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 57 (1964): 127–50. Mithridaticum For a general study of the development of this type of medicines, supposedly developed by Mithridates Eupatôr (132; king 120–63 B.C.), see Watson, Theriac and Mithridatium (above), 1966. For this medicine in the Arabic world, see Erhart Kahle, “Das Mithridatikum in der arabischen medizinischen Literatur,” in Keil, Gelêrter der arznîe (above), 371–85. Monastic Rules and Pharmacy For an analysis of the prescriptions on health and therapeutic in Byzantine monastic rules, for example, see Robert Volk, Gesundheitswesen und Wohltätigkeit im Spiegel der byzantinischen Klostertypika, 1983. Pharmaceutical Forms In addition to electuaries (above), see, for example, Ulrike Heuken, Der achte, neunte und zehnte Abschnitt des Antidotarium Mesuë in der Druckfassung Venedig 1561 (Trochisci, Pulver, Suffuf, Pillen): Übersetzung, Kommentar und Nachdruck der Textfassung von 1561, 1990.

Pharmaceutical Literature

1996

Pharmacopoeia Traditionally, the first pharmacopoeia is considered to be the so-called ricettario fiorentino, that is: Nuovo Receptario composto dal famosissimo chollegio degli eximii doctori della arte et medicina della inclita cipta di firenze impresso Nella inclyta Cipta di Firenze per la compagnia del Dragho adi xxi di Gennaio MDCCCCLXXXXVIII (facsimile reproduction: Ricettario fiorentino 1498. Facsimile dell’esemplare Palatino E.6.1.27 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze con una nota di Luigi Crocetti, 1968. Another facsimile edition was published in 1992 by the Institut Mèdico-farmacèutic de Catalunya). Though dated 1498, it was actually published in 1499 as the date on the frontispiece is based on the Florentine calendar (see Alfons Lutz (1903–1985), “Studien über die pharmazeutische Inkunabel ‘Nuovo receptario’ von Florenz,” in Georg Edmund Dann [ed.], Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie e. V. während des Internationalen Pharmaziegeschichtlichen Kongresses in Heidelberg vom 7–9 Oktober 1957, 1958, 113–28). The title of the first pharmacopoeia is claimed, however, for the formulary of Valencia (see Pedro Vernia, La farmacopea valenciana, 1981; Id., Historia de la farmacia Valenciana, siglos XII al XVIII, 1990; and Id., Valencia, cuna de las farmacopoeas oficiales españolas, 1998). Poisons (De venenis) See Toxicology. Products Some pharmaceutical products are the object of specific treatises studied in such works as: Wilem F. Daems, “Ein mittelniederländisches Fragment des Liber de Vinis des Arnaldus de Villanova,” Janus 47 (1958): 87–100, and Gundolf Keil,“Der deutsche Brantweintraktat des Mittelalters: Texte und Quellenuntersuchungen,” Centaurus 7 (1960–1961): 53–100. quid pro quo See above, De succedaneis. Recipes For a general presentation, see Henry E. Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur, 1923, which includes the edition of seven antidotaria from 9th- and 10th-century manuscripts; Otto Zekert, Das ärzliche Rezept, 1960, and, more recently: Robert Halleux, “Die frühmittelalterliche Rezeptliteratur,” in Gundolf Keil and Paul Schnitzer (ed.), Das Lorscher Arzneibuch und die frühmittelalterliche Medizin: Verhandlungen des medizinhistorischen Symposiums in September 1989 in Lorsch, 1991, 115–22. For early medi-

1997

Pharmaceutical Literature

eval texts, see Sigerist, Studien und Texte (above), and Julius Jörimann, Frühmittelalterliche Rezeptarien, 1925; see also Gundolf Keil, “Ein Rezept mit dem Namen Karls des Großen,” ZfdPh 81 (1962): 329–37. Also, for several recipe books, in Latin or in the vernacular, see (in chronological order of publication): Gottfried Müller, Aus mittelenglischen Medizintexten: Die Prosarezepte des Stockholmer Miszellankodex X 90, 1929; Charles H. Talbot, “The Accumulationes receptarum of Joannes Piscis,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 34 (1960): 123–36; R. Peeters, “Vijftiendeeuwse geneeskundige Recepten,” Taxandria 33 (1961): 161–72; Clovis Brunel, “Recettes pharmaceutiques d’Avignon en ancien provençal,” Romania 87 (1966): 505–42; Maria Sofia Corradini Bozzi, Ricettari medico-farmaceutici medievali nella Francia meridionale, vol. 1, 1997; Tony Hunt and Michael Benskin, Three Receptaria from Medieval England: The Language of Medicine in the Fourteenth Century, 2001; and Anna Martellotti, I ricettari di Federico II. Dal “Meridionale” al “Liber de coquina,” 2005. Regimen sanitatis Among the many examples of this type of literature, see recently (in chronological order of publication): Christa Hagenmeyer (1936–2000), Das Regimen Sanitatis Konrads von Eichstätt, 1995; Luis García-Ballester and Michael McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera Medica Omnia, vol. X.1: Regimen sanitatis ad regem aragonum, 1996; and Dulce Maria Gonzalez Doreste, Maria Pilar Mendoza Ramos, El régimen del cuerpo de Aldebrandin de Siena. Traducción, 1997; and recently: Marilyn Nicoud, Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge. Naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale (XIIIe-XVe siècle), 2 vols., 2007. Symbolism of plants See, for example, Margaret H. Thomson, Le jardin symbolique , above. Synonyms In addition to the lexica, see for example J. L. G. Mowat, Sinonima Bartholomei. A Glossary from a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript in the Library of Pembroke College, 1882. Tacuinum sanitatis For a general presentation with a synoptic table of several manuscripts, see Luisa Cogliati Arano, The Medieval Health Book Tacuinum Sanitatis, 1976. See taqwim al-sihha, from which the Tacuinum sanitatis derives. Several manuscripts have been published in facsimile edition since then and some previously unknown manuscripts came up in the antiquarian market.

Pharmaceutical Literature

1998

taqwı¯ m al-sihha Presentation of the genre and edition of the treatise by ibn Butlan: Hosam Elkhadem, Le Taqwim al-sihha (Tacuini sanitatis) d’Ibn Butlan: un traité médical du XIe siècle, 1990. See Tacuinum sanitatis. Taxes Among the several examples of this type of document, see Irmgard Müller, “Eine unbeachtete Speyerer Arzneitaxe des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Dressendörfer and Müller-Jahncke, Orbis Pictus (above), 187–215. Theriac For a general presentation of the development of this medicine, see Watson, Theriac and Mithridatium (above). The prototypes are De theriaca ad Pisonem by Galen (edition by Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera [above], vol. 14 [1827], 210–94) and the Pseudo-Galenic, De theriaca ad Pamphilianum (edition: Id., Ibidem, 295–310). For a specific treatise, see Michael McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera Medica Omnia, vol. III: Tractatus de amore heroico, Epistola de dosi tyriacalium medicinarum, 1985. For historical studies, see Thomas Holste, Der Theriakkrämer: Ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte der Arzneimittelwerbung, 1976; Thomas Holste and Gundolf Keil, “Ein Strassburger aldeutscher Theriaktraktat,” in Keil, Gelêrter der arznîe (above), 511–22; Annette I. Bierman, “Medical Fiction and Pharmaceutical Facts about Theriac,” Pharmaceutical historian 24 (1994): 5–8. Toxicology For an analysis of the contents, structure, and methods of treatises on venoms and poisons, see Alain Touwaide, “Les poisons dans le monde antique et byzantin: introduction à une étude systémique,” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 290 (1991): 265–81. For inventories and some examples of treatises, see (in chronological order of publication): Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Die toxicologischen Schriften der Araber bis Ende des XII. Jahrhunderts: ein bibliographischer Versuch, grossentheils aus handschriftlichen Quellen, 1871; Julius Ruska (1867–1949), “Arabische Giftbücher: III Die Gifte im Kanon des Avicenna,” Fortschritte der Medizin 50 (1932): 794–95 (reproduced in Studies on Ibn Sina (d. 1037) and His Medical Works. Collected and reprinted by Fuat Sezgin et al., 1996); Alfred Siggel, Das Buch der Gifte des Gabir ibn Hayyan: arabischer Text in Faksimile (HS. Taymur, tibb. 393, Kairo), 1958; Martin Levey, Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of Ibn Wahshiya and its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts, 1966; Suessman Muntner, Maimonide, Treatise on Poisons and their Antidotes, 1966; Gerrit Bos, “The Treatise of Ahrun on Lethal Drugs:

1999

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The Arabic Text Edited with Commentary, Indices, and Translation into English,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 7 (1991–1992): 136–71; Geneviève Sodigne-Costes, “Un traité de toxicologie médiévale: le Liber de venenis de Pietro d’Abano (traduction française du début du XVe siècle),” Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie 305 (1995): 125–36. For an inventory of scholarly literature published on this topic during the years 1970–1990, see Alain Touwaide, “Recherches en histoire de la médecine intéressant la toxicologie depuis 1970,” Centre Jean-Palerne, Lettre d’information 19 (1991): 8–26, with a revised English translation: “Studies in the History of Medicine Concerning Toxicology after 1970,” Society of Ancient Medicine-Newsletter 20 (1992): 8–33. Weights and Measures (de ponderibus et mensuris) For an overview of the early-medieval literature, see Henry E. Sigerist, “Masse und Gewichte in den medizinischen Texten des frühen Mittelalters,” Kyklos 3 (1930): 440–44; and also: Bernard Bischoff, “Maße und Gewichte zur Zeit Papst Hadrians I (772–795),” Anecdota novissima. Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1984, 169–70. Women’s Health For a list of treatises and manuscripts, see the Appendix: Medieval Gynecological Literature: A Handlist published by Green, Women’s Healthcare (above), 2000. Women’s Diet in Pregnancy General presentation in Melitta Weiss-Amer, “Medieval Women’s Guides to Food during Pregnancy: Origins, Texts, and Traditions,” Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 10 (1993): 5–23. Select Bibliography Jakob Büchi, Die Entwicklung der Rezept- und Arzneibuchliteratur. Part 1: Altertum und Mittelalter (Zürich: Juris Verlag, 1982); Julius Jörimann, Frühmittelalterliche Rezeptarien (Zürich: Topos Ruggell, 1925); Loren MacKinney, Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts (Publications of the Wellcome Medical Library, New Series 5; London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965); Carmélia Opsomer, Index de la pharmacopée du Ier au Xe siècle, 2 vols. (Alpha-Omega, Reihe A, 105; Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1989); Guy Sabbah, Pierre-Paul Corsetti, and KlausDietrich Fischer (ed.), Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge (Université de Saint-Etienne, Centre Jean-Palerne, Mémoires, 6; Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 1987), with a supplement by Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Bibliographie des textes médicaux latins: antiquité et haut moyen âge. Premier Supplément 1986–1999 (Université de Saint-Etienne, Centre Jean-Palerne, Mémoires, 19; Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 2000); Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. vol. 3:

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2000

Medizin, Pharmazie, Zoologie, Tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Id., Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums. vol. 4: Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971); Henry E. Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur (Leipzig: Barth, 1923); Id., “The Latin Medical Literature of the Early Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 13 (1958): 127–146; Margaret H. Thomson, “Catalogue des manuscrits de Paris contenant des traités anonymes de botanique,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 46 (1933): 334–348; Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Mediaeval Academy of America, Publication 29; Cambridge (Mass.): The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1963; Alain Touwaide, “Lexica medico-botanica byzantina. Prolégomènes à une étude,” Tês filiês tade dôra. Miscelánea léxica en memoria de Conchita Serrano (Manuales y Anejos de “Emerita,” 41; Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999), 211–28; Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Handbuch der Orientalistik. Erste Abteilung. Der nahe und der mittlere Osten, Ergänzungsband 6, Erster Abschnitt; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970); Id., Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1972).

Alain Touwaide

Political Treatises A. Introduction The significance of the legacy of classical political ideas for the evolution of political thought in the medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions constitutes one of the most intriguing questions in the history of political ideas. The present essay aims at offering a panoramic account of the historiography in the fields of medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian political philosophy by focusing on the relationship between the works of some seminal political theorists of the Middle Ages and those of their ancient predecessors (Plato, Aristotle and Cicero). The term “political treatise” when applied to the study of medieval political ideas refers to a variety of works, extending from commentaries, questions (quaestiones) and quodlibeta to mirrors of princes and treatises of a strong programmatic character and intent that were designed for and addressed to various audiences (rulers, students at medieval universities etc.). This article is intended as a guide to the status of research on the ways some core questions of classical political philosophy were discussed in the medieval world as well as on the importance of medieval political thought as a channel for the transmission of classical political ideas to the modern period.

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B. The Islamic and Jewish Traditions Although the bulk of Aristotle’s philosophical corpus was translated into Arabic and occupied a dominant position in the studies curricula of the medieval Islamic world, Muslim thinkers had no access to the entire text of the Politics and relied on Plato’s Republic and Laws and to a certain extent on the Nicomachean Ethics. Shlomo Pines, “Aristotle’s Politics in Arabic Philosophy,” IOS 5 (1975): 150–60, and “La loi naturelle et la société: la doctrine politico-théologique d’Ibn Zur’a, philosophe chrétien de Bagdad,” SH 9 (1961): 154–90 [both rpt. The Collected Works of Shlomo Pines, vol. 3: Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy, ed. Sarah Stroumsa, 1996, 251–61 and 156–92], argued for the existence of an Arab translation of the Politics, a view that was challenged by Rémi Brague, “Note sur la traduction arabe de la Politique d’Aristote, derechef, qu’elle n’existe pas,” Aristote Politique: Etudes sur la ‘Politique’ d’Aristote, ed. Pierre Aubenque and Alonso Tordesillas, 1993, 423–33. For discussion of this topic and new evidence on the transmission of Aristotle’s political ideas in the medieval Persian and early modern Indo-Islamic traditions, see Vasileios Syros, “A Note on the Transmission of Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Persian and Early-Modern India: Was There Any Arabic or Persian Translation of the Politics?,” BPM (2008): 303–10. Cf. also Francis E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus: the Oriental Translations and Commentaries on the Aristotelian Corpus, 1968. The transmission of Plato’s political philosophy in the medieval Islamic world is traced by several interesting essays in The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought: Proceedings of the Conference held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 16–27 June 2003, ed. Emma Gannagé et al., 2004, as well as Massimo Campanini, “La tradizione della Repubblica nei falâsifah musulmani,” I Decembrio e la traduzione della Repubblica di Platone tra Medioevo e Umanesimo, ed. Mario Vegetti and Paolo Pissavino, 2005, 31–81; Gotthard Strohmaier, “Platon in der arabischen Tradition,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft, Neue Folge 26 (2002): 83–99; David C. Reisman, “Plato’s Republic in Arabic: A Newly Discovered Passage,” ASP 14 (2004): 1–56; Richard Walzer, “Some Aspects of Platonism in Islamic Philosophy,” Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique, vol. 3: Recherches sur la tradition platonicienne, 1957, 203–24 [rpt. id., Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy, 1962, 236–52]; Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, 1975; id., “On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World, with Addenda,” IC 14 (1940): 387–422 and 15 (1941): 396–8; Arthur J. Arberry, “Some Plato in an Arabic Epitome,” IQ 2 (1955): 86–99. The Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics is available in The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, English Translation by Douglas M. Dunlop, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander

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2002

Fidora, 2005. A useful index of some fundamental philosophical terms in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin is found in Lawrence V. Berman, Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the Hebrew Version of Samuel ben Judah, 1999. For detailed comparisons between the classical, Islamic and Jewish notions of good life, indispensable are Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, “The Concept of eudaimonia in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy,” Storia della Filosofia Antica e Medievale, 1960, 145–52 [rpt. id., Studia semitica, vol. 2: Islamic Themes, 1971, 127–34]; Massimo Campanini, “Felicità e politica in Al-Fârâbî e Avempace (Ibn Bâjjah),” Le felicità nel medioevo, ed. Maria Bettetini and Francesco D. Paparella, 2005, 297–312. Although there is a good deal of literature on the reception of ancient Greek works of political philosophy in some of the main representatives of medieval Islamic philosophy, Ibn Khaldun’s (1332–1406) use of classical sources in his Muqaddimah (Introduction) awaits systematic study. Ibn Khaldun, one of the most original political thinkers of the Islamic Middle Ages, offers an intriguing account of the history of Arabs and Berbers that serves him as a starting point for an elaborate inquiry into the origins of social life and the root causes of social change that is strongly reminiscent of Aristotle’s discussion of constitutional change and the means for ensuring the stability of the political community, as developed in the fifth book of the Politics. Cf. on this Abdesselam Cheddadi, “La tradition philosophique et scientifique gréco-arabe dans la Muqaddima d’Ibn Khaldun,” The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought (cited above), 469–97. For occasional comparisons between Ibn Khaldun and Aristotle, see Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: a Study in the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of Culture, 1957. Alfarabi. A decisive role in the diffusion of Plato’s political thought in the Arab world was played by Alfarabi (ca. 870–ca. 950), a prolific and highly influential thinker who undertook to harmonize Plato’s ideas with the precepts of Muslim religion and to articulate a model of the founder and ruler of the ideal city on the basis of the Platonic notion of the philosopher-king. A milestone in the research on Alfarabi’s political philosophy was the edition and translation of his magnum opus, Al Farabi on the Perfect State = Abu Nasr alFarabi’s “Mabadi’ ara’ ahl al-madina al-fadila.” A revised text with introduction, translation, and commentary by Richard Walzer, 1985. This work is accompanied by a detailed commentary that provides intriguing insights into the ties between Alfarabi’s and Plato’s political ideas. The question whether Alfarabi had access to a translation of Plato’s Laws when writing his Summary of the Laws, has attracted intense scholarly interest. Leo Strauss, “How Fa-

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rabi Read Plato’s Laws,” Mèlanges Louis Massignon, 1959, 319–44 [rpt. id., What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies, 1959, 134–54] argued that Alfarabi has access to the text of the Laws or, at least, the first nine books of it. Muhsin Mahdi, “The Editio princeps of Farabi’s Compendium Legum Platonis,” JNES 20 (1961): 1–24; and Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws,” 1995, pointed out that Alfarabi had access to a Greek or Syriac translation of the text. For a similar point see Thérèse-Anne Druart, “Le Sommaire du Livre des Lois de Platon (—awami’ Kitab al-Nawamis li-Aflatun) par al-Farabi, édition critique et introduction,” BEO 50 (1998): 109–55. In contrast, according to Steven Harvey, “Did Alfarabi Read Plato’s Laws?” Medioevo 28 (2003): 51–68, id., “Can a Tenth-Century Islamic Aristotelian Help us Understand Plato’s Laws?” Plato’s Laws: From Theory into Practice, ed. Samuel Scolnicov and Luc Brisson, 2003, 320–30; and Dimitri Gutas, “Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fârâbî’s Talkhîs,” The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism: Studies on the Transmission of Greek Philosophy and Sciences Dedicated to H. J. Drossaart Lulofs on His Ninetieth Birthday, ed. Gerhard Endress and Remke Kruk, 1997, 101–19 [rpt. id., Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition, 2000]; id., “Farabi’s Knowledge of Plato’s Laws,” IJCT 4 (1998): 405–11, Alfarabi relied on a summary or a paraphrase of the Laws, most probably produced by Galen. Christopher A. Colmo, Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder, 2005, makes a case for a new reading of Alfarabi’s political philosophy as a project whose primary goal was to uphold politics as an autonomous sphere with its own principles, free from the dictates of philosophy which in this perspective represents a radical break with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. A recent study that casts important light on Alfarabi’s views on democracy is Muhammad Ali Khalidi, “Al-Farabi on the Democratic City,” BJHP 11 (2003): 379–94. Alfarabi’s use of the Nicomathean Ethics is discussed in Rafael Ramón Guerrero, “La Ética nicomaquea en el mundo árabe: El Kitab al-Tanbih ’ala sabil al-sa’ada de al-Farabi,” Actas del II Congreso Nacional de Filosofía Medieval, ed. Jorge Manuel Ayala Martínez, 1996, 417–30; id., “La ética a Nicómaco en la obra de Alfarabi,” Ética y sociología: estudios en memoria del profesor José Todolí, O. P., ed. Luis Méndez Francisco, 2000, 201–12. On Alfarabi’s political ideas in general, one may consult Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity, 2003; Philippe Vallat, Farabi et l’école d’Alexandrie: des prémisses de la connaissance à la philosophie politique, 2004; Muhsin S. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, 2001; Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: the Political Philosophy of Alfarabi, 1990; Ann K. S. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam, 1981; Hans Daiber, The Ruler as Philosopher: a New Interpretation of al-Farabi’s View, 1986; Georges Tamer, “Monotheismus

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und Politik bei Alfarabi,” Monotheistic Kingship: The Medieval Variants, ed. Aziz Al-Azmeh and János M. Bak, 2004, 191–214; Farouk A. Sankari, “Plato and Alfarabi: a Comparison of Some Aspects of their Political Philosophies,” Vivarium 8 (1970): 1–9; Joep Lameer, “The Philosopher and the Prophet: Greek Parallels to al-Fârâbî’s Theory of Philosophy and Religion in the State,” Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique grecque, ed. Ahmad Hasnawi et al., 1997, 609–22; Richard Walzer, “Aspects of Islamic Political Thought: Al-Farabi and Ibn Xaldun,” Oriens 16 (1963): 40–60; Yusuf K. Umar, “Farabi and Greek Political Philosophy,” Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies under the Upas Tree, ed. Anthony J. Parel and Ronald C. Keith, 1992, 185–216; Fawzi M. Najjar, “The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi as a Rationalistic Interpetation of Islam” Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 1954. Ibn Bajja (Avempace). Ibn Bajja (known as Avempace in the Latin West, d. 1138) advocated a vehement rejection of any political commitments whatsoever of the philosopher. Starting from Platonic premises, Ibn Bajja goes in his Guide of the Solitary beyond Plato in setting forth the view that persons aspiring to moral perfection need to isolate themselves in light of the degeneration prevailing in human societies. Philosophers are in Ibn Bajja’s mind different from the other members of the political community and akin to “weeds.” See on this the insightful discussion by Steven Harvey, “The Place of the Philosophers in the City according to Ibn Bâjjah,” The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, ed. Charles Butterworth, 1992, 199–233, as well Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, “The Place of Politics in the Philosophy of Ibn Bajja,” IC 25 (1951): 187–211 [rpt. id., Studia semitica, vol. 2: Islamic Themes, 1971, 35–59]; id., “Politische Gedanken bei Ibn Bagga,” MGWJ 81 (1937): 153–68; and Joaquin Lomba Fuentes, “Lectura de la ética griega por el pensamiento andalusí. Ibn Bayya,” Al-qantara 14 (1993): 3–46. Ibn Bajja’s ideas had a powerful echo in Ibn Tufayl’s (Abubacher, before 1110–1185) philosophical tale Living Son of the Vigilant, where the philosopher sees himself compelled to return to the desert island where he grew up after abortive efforts to live in a political community founded on revealed religion. On this see Michael E. Marmura, “The Philosopher and Society: Some Medieval Arabic Discussions,” ASQ 1 (1979): 309–323 [rpt. id., Probing in Islamic Philosophy: Studies in the Philosophies of Ibn Snia, al’-Shazali and Other Major Muslim Thinkers, 2005, 409–425)]; and, more generally, The World of Ibn Tufayl: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hayy Ibn Yaczan, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad, 1996.

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Ibn Rushd (Averroes). A central figure in the history of medieval Islamic political thought is Ibn Rushd (known as Averroes in the Latin West, 1126–1198), author of a number of commentaries on many of Aristotle’s works as well as on the Republic, which is extant only in a Hebrew translation. Averroes agrees with several of the precepts of the Republic. He elaborates on Plato’s image of the philosopher-king in sketching the profile of the exemplary ruler as epitomizing the functions of a king, philosopher, prophet and imam. The standard edition of the Hebrew translation of Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic is the Commentary on Plato’s Republic, ed. with an introd., transl. and notes ed. by Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, 1956, compare Averroes on Plato’s Republic, transl., with an introd. and notes, by Ralph Lerner, 1974 as well as Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, “Der Kommentar des Averroes zur Politeia Platons,” ZP NF 5.1 (1958): 38–51. Essential for a closer examination of Averroes’s reception of Plato’s political philosophy are: Friedrich Niewöhner, “Polis und Madina: Averroes’s Platon-Lektüre,” Von Athen nach Baghdad: Zur Rezeption griechischer Philosophie von der Spätantike bis zum Islam, ed. Peter Bruns, 2003, 76–91; Michael Jainzik, “Zwischen nomos und schari’a – Staatsverständnis und Staatsvision bei Averroës anhand seines Kommentars zu Platons Staat,” CMA 5 (2002): 143–86; Rémi Brague, “Averroés et la République,” Images de Platon et lectures de ses œuvres. Les interprétations de Platon à travers les siècles, ed. Ada Neschke-Hentschke, 1997, 99–114, Francisco Pérez Ruiz, “Averroes y la República de Platón,” Pensamiento 50 (1994): 25–46; Louis Lazar, “L’éducation politique selon Ibn Roshd (Averroës),” SI 52 (1980): 135–66; Oliver Leaman, “Averroes’ Commentary on Plato’s Republic, and the Missing Politics,” Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: Trade, Politics and Religion, 650–1450, ed. Dionisius A. Agius and Ian R. Netton, 1997, 195–203. See also the following studies by Charles E. Butterworth: Philosophy, Ethics and Virtuous Rule: a Study of Averroes’s Commentary on Plato’s “Republic, 1986; “Ethics and Classical Islamic Philosophy: A Study of Averroes’s Commentary on Plato’s Republic,” Ethics in Islam, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (1985), 17–45; “L’éducation aristotélicienne des philosophes-rois de Platon dans le Commentaire sur la République d’Averroès,” Internationale de l’Imaginaire, Special Issue, Le choc Averroès, comment les philosophes arabes ont fait l’Europe, 17–18 (1991), 147–52; “Averroes’s Platonization of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric,” La Rhétorique d’Aristote, traditions et commentaries, de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle, ed. Gilbert Dahan and Irène Rosier-Catach, 1998, 227–40; “The Political Teaching of Averroes,” ASP 2 (1992): 187–202; “Averroes on Law and Political Well-Being,” Enlightening Revolutions: Essays in Honor of Ralph Lerner, ed. Svetozar Minkov, 2005, 21–28; “Averroes: Politics and Opinion,” APSR 66 (1972): 894–901; “La valeur philosophique des commentaries d’Averroès sur les

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œuvres d’Aristote,” Multiple Averroès, ed. Jean Jolivet, 1978, 117–126; “The Greek Tradition in Ethics and its Encounter with Moral Wisdom in Islam,” Moral and Political Philosophies in the Middle Ages, ed. B. Carlos Bazán et al., vol. 1, 1995, 125–35. A comparison between Alfarabi’s and Averroes’s political ideas appears in Muhsin Mahdi, “Alfarabi et Averroes: Remarques sur le commentaire d’Averroes sur la République de Platon,” Multiple Averroès, 91–101. A study concerned with Averroes’s and Ibn Khaldun’s use of Plato’s ideas about the degeneration of the ideal regime is Majid Fakhry, “The Devolution of the Perfect State: Plato, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldun,” Arab Civilization: Challenge and Response, ed. George N. Atiyeh and Ibrahim M. Oweiss, 1988, 88–97 [rpt. id., Philosophy, Dogma and the Impact of Greek Thought in Islam, 1994)]. For a discussion of Averroes’s view of the ruler as a lawgiver, as expounded in his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, and its reception in medieval Europe, see Christoph Kummerer, Der Fürst als Gesetzgeber in den lateinischen Übersetzungen von Averroes, 1989. Cf. also Jerzy B. Korolec, “Le commentaire d’Averroès sur l’Ethique à Nicomaque” BPM 27 (1985): 104–107. Moses Maimonides. The most comprehensive treatments of the reception of Plato’s political ideas in medieval Jewish political philosophy can be found in Abraham Melamed’s The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought, 2003; id., “Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Philosophy,” History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, 1997; Oliver Leaman, “Plato’s Republic in Jewish Philosophy,” I Decembrio e la traduzione della Repubblica di Platone tra Medioevo e Umanesimo, ed. Mario Vegetti and Paolo Pissavino, 2005. In his essay “Is There a Jewish Political Thought? The Medieval Case Reconsidered,” HPS 1 (2005): 24–56, Melamed offers a cogent overview of previous scholarship on medieval Jewish political thought. He argues for the necessity of exploring medieval Jewish political philosophy as a part and parcel of the medieval Jewish tradition and not in terms of the classical tradition. Julius Guttmann, “Philosophie der Religion oder Philosophie des Gesetzes,” PIASH 4 (1974): 3–28, argued for the existence of a distinct Aristotelian tradition inside medieval Jewish philosophy that was anchored on the Nicomachean Ethics. Moses Maimonides’s (1135–1204) use of Aristotle’s moral philosophy has been the subject of several studies, the most prominent of which are the following: Daniel H. Frank, “Humility as a Virtue: A Maimonidean Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics,” Moses Maimonides and His Time, ed. Eric L. Ormsby, 1989, 89–99; Steven Harvey, “The Sources of the Quotations from Aristotle’s Ethics in the Guide of the Perplexed and the Guide to the Guide,” JSJT 14 (1998): 87–102 [in Hebrew]; Raymond L. Weiss, Maimonides’ Ethics:

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the Encounter of Philosophic and Religious Morality, 1991; Jonathan Jacobs, “Aristotle and Maimonides: the Ethics of Perfection and the Perfection of Ethics,” ACPQ 76 (2002): 145–63; Steven S. Schwarzschild, “Moral Radicalism and ‘Middlingness’ in the Ethics of Maimonides,” SMC 11 (1978): 65–94 [rpt. The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, ed. Menachem Kellner, 1990, 137–60]. The relationship between Maimonides’s and Aristotle’s notion of the mean is discussed at length in Marvin Fox, “The Doctrine of the Mean in Aristotle and Maimonides: A Comparative Study,” Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History: Presented to Alexander Altmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe, 1979, 93–120 [rpt. Marvin Fox, Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy, 1990, 93–123]; Herbert A. Davidson, “The Middle Way in Maimonides’ Ethics,” PAAJR 54 (1987): 31–72. Finally, for a useful comparison between Plato’s, Alfarabi’s and Maimonides’s political ideas, see Jeffrey Macy, “The Rule of Law and the Rule of Wisdom in Plato, al-Farabi and Maimonides,” Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions: Papers Presented at the Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies, Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver, ed. William M. Brinner and Stephen D. Ricks, 1986, 205–32. Joseph Albo and Don Isaac Abravanel. According to Abraham Melamed, “Aristotle’s Politics in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought,” Pe’amim 51 (1992): 27–69 [in Hebrew], medieval Jewish political philosophy received Aristotle’s political ideas via Scholastic sources. This was the case with Joseph Albo (between 1360 and 1380–1444), the first Jewish writer to cite the Politics, but only once in his Book of Principles and in connection with his critique of Plato’s philosophy. Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) relied on ideas derived from the Politics in buttressing his antimonarchist reading of Samuel I. A closer scrutiny of Abravanel’s text shows, however, that Abravanel did not have direct access to the Politics, but rather received Aristotle’s political thought most probably via Thomas Aquinas and Paul de Burgos – on this Abraham Melamed, “Isaac Abravanel and Aristotle’s Politics: A Drama of Errors,” JPSR 5 (1993): 55–75. Leo Strauss and Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy. In order to gain a full picture of the status of scholarly research on medieval Islamic and Jewish political philosophy, it is useful to dwell shortly on the works of Leo Strauss (1899–1973). A controversial historian of political thought, Strauss proposed in his Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952, a reading of the great works of political philosophy that was premised on the view that important

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philosophers were aware of the detrimental effects which their ideas might have on the many and resorted to riddles, myths and obscure language, in order to hide their real thoughts and avoid persecution. Hence, a number of major philosophical works contain an exoteric or public teaching intended for the masses and an esoteric or private teaching geared towards the select few. Strauss’s interpretation had a considerable following among students of medieval Islamic and Jewish political philosophy, is exemplified by a number of his studies dealing with the way Al-Farabi and Maimonides read the classics, e. g., “Farabi’s Plato,” Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, 1945, 357–93 [rpt. Essays in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, ed. Arthur Hyman, 1977, 391–427]. A stimulating investigation of Strauss’s reading of medieval Islamic philosophy can be found in Georges Tamer, Islamische Philosophie und die Krise der Moderne: das Verhältnis von Leo Strauss zu Alfarabi, Avicenna und Averroes, 2001. Cf. also Rémi Brague, “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss’s ‘Muslim’ Understanding of Greek Philosophy,” Poetics Today. Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange II, 19, 2 (1998): 235–59; and Hillel Fradkin, “Philosophy and Law: Leo Strauss as a Student of Medieval Jewish Thought,” RP 53 (1991): 40–52. The shortcomings of Strauss’s approach of the study medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy in general are discussed by Dimitris Gutas, “The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy,” BJMES 29 (2002): 5–25. C. The Christian/Western Tradition Aristotle’s Politics does not seem to have attracted the interest of Byzantine commentators in general. The sole exception is Michael of Ephesos (12th c.) who wrote comments (scholia) on the Politics which are probably an abridgment of a longer commentary on that work. On this see Dominic J. O’Meara, “Spätantike und Byzanz: Neuplatonische Rezeption – Michael von Ephesos,” Politischer Aristotelismus: Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Politik von der Antike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Christoph Horn and Ada NeschkeHentschke, 2008), 42–52; and Dimiter G. Angelov, “Plato, Aristotle and Byzantine ‘Political Philosophy,’” The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought (cited above), 499–523. Political writers in the Latin West had no access to Plato’s Republic or Averroes’s commentary on this work. The translation of Aristotle’s Politics in the 1260s by William of Moerbeke marked a new period in the history of medieval political ideas: it gave rise to a rich literature that includes commentaries on the Politics, questions, commentaries on the Sentences, quodlibeta etc. and was produced by many important thinkers, such as Albert the Great

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(ca. 1207–1280), Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274), Giles of Rome (d. 1316), Peter of Auvergne (1240s-1304) and Marsilius of Padua (1270/1290–1342). The fortunes of the Politics in the Latin West attracted special interest already in 19th-century scholarship. The earliest discussions on this theme can be found in Charles Jourdain, Geschichte der Aristotelischen Schriften im Mittelalter. Forschungen über Alter und Ursprung der lateinischen Übersetzungen des Aristoteles und über griechische und lateinische von den Scholastikern benutzte Commentare, 1831; Mathias Schneid, Aristoteles in der Scholastik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philosophie im Mittelalter, 1875; Georg von Hertling, “Zur Geschichte der Aristotelischen Politik im Mittelalter,” RhM 39 (1884): 446–57 [rpt. id., Historische Beiträge zur Philosophie, 1914]; Marie Luise Bulst, Aristoteles im Mittelalter, 1932, 20–31]. Subsequent scholars devoted their energies to the study of late-medieval commentaries on the Politics, beginning with M. Grabmann, “Die mittelalterlichen Kommentare zur Politik des Aristoteles,” Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München. Philos.-hist. Abt. 1941, II [rpt. id., Gesammelte Akademieabhandlungen, vol. 2 (1979)] – cf. also id., “Studien über den Einfluss der aristotelischen Philosophie auf die mittelalterlichen Theorien über das Verhältnis von Kirche und Staat,” Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philos.-hist. Klasse 2 (1934): Grabmann’s works were followed by the doctoral thesis of Franz E. Cranz, “Aristotelianism in Medieval Political Theory: a Study of the Reception of the Politics,” Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1938, and Connor Martin, “The Commentaries on the ‘Politics’ of Aristotle in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century, with Reference to the Thought and Political Life of the Time,” Dr. phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1949 – for a summary of the results of the latter work, see id., “Some Medieval Commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics,” History n.s. 36 (1951): 29–44. Cf. further Lowrie J. Daly, “Medieval and Renaissance Commentaries on the Politics of Aristotle,” DR 13 (1968): 41–55. A useful survey of some late medieval commentaries and questions on the Politics is the two-volume study by Christoph Flüeler, Rezeption und Interpretation der aristotelischen “Politica” im späten Mittelalter, 1992 – compare id., “Mittelalterliche Kommentare zur Politik des Aristoteles und der Pseudo-Aristotelischen Oekonomik,” BPM 19 (1987); “Die Rezeption der Politica des Aristoteles an der Pariser Artistenfakultät des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts,” Das Publikum politischer Theorie im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Miethke, 1992, 127–38; and “Einfluss der aristotelischen Politica auf die philosophische Begründung von politischer Herrschaft,” Gewalt und ihre Legitimation im Mittelalter: Symposium des Philosophischen Seminars der Universität Hannover vom 26.–28. Februar 2002, ed. Günter Mensching, 2003, 65–78, as well as: Joachim Söder, “Autorität und Argument.

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Zur Aristoteles-Rezeption im Mittelalter,” Autor-Autorisation-Authentizität, ed. Thomas Bein et al., 2004, 389–96; Salvador Rus Rufino, “Significado e importancia de la Política de Aristóteles en la Europa medieval y moderna,” PM 26 (2005): 3–30; Roberto Lambertini, “La diffusione della Politica e la definizione di un linguaggio politico aristotelico,” QS 102 (1999): 677–704; Gianfranco Fioravanti, “La réception de la Politique d’Aristote au Moyen Âge tardif,” Aspects de la pensée médiévale dans la philosophie politique moderne, ed. Yves C. Zarka, 1999, 9–24; id., “La Politica aristotelica nel Medioevo: linee di una ricezione,” RSF n.s. 52 (1997): 17–29; David Luscombe, “Commentaries on the Politics: Paris and Oxford, XIIIth-XVth centuries,” L’enseignement des disciplines à la Faculté des arts (Paris et Oxford, XIIIe–XVe siècles, ed. Olga Weijers and Louis Holtz, 1997, 313–27; Francisco Bertelloni, “Zur Rekonstruktion des politischen Aristotelismus im Mittelalter,” Was ist Philosophie im Mittelalter?, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (1998), 999–1011; id., “Presupuestos de la recepción de la Política de Aristóteles,” Aristotelica et Lulliana, ed. F. Domínguez, et al., 1995, 35–54; Jürgen Miethke, “Politische Theorie in der Krise der Zeit, Aspekte der Aristotelesrezeption im früheren 14. Jahrhundert,” Institutionen und Geschichte. Theoretische Aspekte und mittelalterliche Befunde, ed. Gert Melville, 1992, 157–86; Jeannine Quillet, “Présence d’Aristote dans la philosophie politique médievale,” RPA 2 (1984): 93–102. A brief examination of the impact of Aristotle’s political ideas on Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri is offered by Gert Sørensen, “The Reception of the Political Aristotle in the Late Middle Ages (from Brunetto Latini to Dante Alighieri). Hypotheses and Suggestions,” Renaissance Readings of the Corpus Aristotelicum, ed. Marianne Pade, 2001, 9–25; Politischer Aristotelismus und Religion in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Alexander Fidora et al., 2007. On the significance of Giles of Rome’s (ca. 1247–1316) De regimine principum (written between 1277 and 1280), the most popular mirror of princes in the entire Middle Ages, for the dissemination of Aristotle’s moral and political ideas in the Latin West, see Roberto Lambertini, “A proposito della costruzione dell’Oeconomica in Egidio Romano,” Medioevo 14 (1988): 315–70; and id., “The Prince in the Mirror of Philosophy. About the Use of Aristotle in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum,” Moral and Political Philosophies in the Middle Ages, ed. B. Carlos Bazán et al., 1995, 1522–34; as well as Lidia Lanza, “La Politica di Aristotele e il De regimine principum di Egidio Romano,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 15 (2001): 19–75. On Ptolemy of Lucca’s (ca. 1236–1327) use of the Politics see James M. Blythe, “Aristotle’s Politics and Ptolemy of Lucca,” Vivarium 40 (2002): 103–36. There is a large body of literature in the form of both books and articles on medieval debates on the guiding questions and leading tenets of Aris-

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totle’s political thought. James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages, 1982, is a fundamental reference for medieval views on the Aristotelian notion of mixed constitution. Cary J. Nederman, “Mechanics and Citizens: The Reception of the Aristotelian Idea of Citizenship in Late Medieval Europe,” Vivarium 40 (2002): 75–102, makes fruitful suggestions concerning the fortunes of Aristotle’s definition of the “citizen” in late medieval political writing. See also Ulrich Meier, Mensch und Bürger: Die Stadt im Denken spätmittelalterlicher Theologen, Philosophen und Juristen, 1994; and id., “Burgerlich vereynung. Herrschende, beherrschte und ‘mittlere’ Bürger in Politiktheorie, chronikalischer Überlieferung und städtischen Quellen des Spätmittelalters,” Bürgerschaft: Rezeption und Innovation der Begrifflichkeit vom Hohen Mittelalter bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Klaus Schreiner, 1994, 43–89. The same topic has been studied by Mario Grignaschi, “La définition du ‘civis’ dans la scolastique,” Recueils de la Societé Jean Bodin pour l’Histoire comparative des Institutions 24 (1966): 71–100. An interesting outline of late medieval discussions on the role of the multitude in a well-organized polity that were based on Aristotle’s discussion of the role of freemen inside the “state” is Jean Dunbabin, “The Reception and Interpretation of Aristotle’s Politics,” The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann et al., 1982, 723–37 – cf. Vasileios Syros, “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the Multitude in the Works of Marsilius of Padua, Peter of Auvergne and Some Other Aristotelian Commentators,” The World of Marsilius of Padua: the Life and Work of a Medieval Political Theorist, Gerson Moreno-Riaño, 2006, 227–48, as well as the older article by Friedrich von Bezold, “Die Lehre von der Volkssouveränität während des Mittelalters,” HZ 36 (1876): 1–49. Karl Ubl and Lars Vinx, “Zur Transformation der Monarchie von Aristoteles bis Ockham,” Vivarium 40 (2002): 41–74, map out the various interpretations of the Aristotelian idea of absolute monarchy in the Late Middle Ages. Marco Toste, “Virtue and the City: The Virtues of the Ruler and the Citizen in the Medieval Reception of the Politics,” Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500, ed. István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, 2007, 75–100, deals with medieval discussions on the virtues and qualities of the ideal ruler. Special mention for exploring the use of the Politics in political debates that took place in Late Medieval France should be made of Thomas Renna, “Aristotle and the French Monarchy, 1260–1303,” Viator 9 (1978): 309–24. This matter is considered also in Lidia Lanza, “I commenti medievali alla Politica e la riflessione sullo stato in Francia (secoli XIII–XIV),” Il commento filosofico nell’Occidente latino (secoli XIII–XV), ed. Gianfranco Fioravanti et al., 2002, 401–27. Cf. in the same context Wolfgang Brückle, Civitas terrena:

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Staatsrepräsentation und politischer Aristotelismus in der französischen Kunst 1270–1380, 2005. On the impact of Aristotle’s teleology on some 14th-century commentaries on the Politics, consult Lidia Lanza, “Il ‘finis hominis’ nell’Etica e nella Politica di Aristotele. Note su alcuni commenti del secolo XIII,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 12 (1998): 143–81 – this topic is discussed in Anthony Celano, “The ‘finis hominis’ in the Thirteenth-Century Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” AHDLMA 53 (1986): 23–53. A good exposition of the views of some medieval commentators vis-a-vis Aristotle’s ideas on war and peace can be found in Lidia Lanza, “Guerra e pace in Aristotele: alcune riflessioni sui commenti medievali alla Politica,” Pace e guerra nel basso Medioevo. Atti del XL Convegno storico internazionale. Todi, 12–14 ottobre 2003, 2004, 53–77. On the reception of Aristotle’s teaching on natural slavery, see Theodor W. Köhler, “Gleiche Menschennatur – naturgegebene soziale Unterschiede. Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Lehre vom physei doulos,” Politik – Religion – Philosophie: Mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Interpretationen und Kontroversen im Anschluss an die aristotelische Philosophie, ed. by Alexander Fidora, et al., 2007, 47–64; and Gianfranco Fioravanti, “Servi, rustici, barbari: Interpretazioni medievali della Politica,” aristotelica,” ASNSP (CLF), ser. III, 11 (1981): 398–429. A work essential for understanding the way in which the evolution of moral philosophy on the basis of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics contributed to the reception of the Politics is Georg Wieland, Ethica – Scientia practica: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Ethik im 13. Jahrhundert, 1981. Finally, on the ways medieval political thinkers, notably Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, perceived Aristotle’s critique against Plato, see Stefano Perfetti, “Immagini della Repubblica nei commenti medievali alla Politica di Aristotele: i casi di Alberto Magno e Tommaso d’Aquino,” I Decembrio e la traduzione della Repubblica di Platone tra Medioevo e Umanesimo, ed. Mario Vegetti and Paolo Pissavino, 2005, 83–98. There still remains a need for a detailed analysis of Moerbeke’ translation of the Politics given its many deviations from the Greek original and the problems linked to the rendering of Greek terminology into Latin. This type of research is exemplified by the essays of Nicolai Rubinstein, “The History of the Word ‘politicus’ in Early Modern Europe,” The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, 1987, 41–56 [rpt. id., Political Thought and the Language of Politics: Art and Politics, ed. Giovanni Ciapelli, 2004]; Peter Hallberg and Björn Wittrock, “From koinonìa politikè to societas civilis: Birth, Disappearance and First Renaissance of the Concept,” The Languages of Civil Society, ed. Peter Wagner, 2006, 28–51; and Francsisco Bertelloni, “Nähe und Distanz zu Aristoteles: Die neue Bedeutung von civitas

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im politischen Denken: zwischen Thomas von Aquin und Nikolas von Kues,” University, Council, City: Intellectual Culture on the Rhine (1300–1550), ed. Laurent Cesalli et al., 2007, 323–47. It is also vital to address further the repercussions which the medieval thinkers’ lack of an adequate knowledge of the historical and political conditions that obtained in classical Greece had on their approach to Aristotelian thought. Moreover, it is worth discussing the factors that facilitated the spread of Aristotle’s political ideas in late-medieval Europe. For instance, the fact that the political organization of the Italian city-states displayed close resemblances to that of classical Athens, which Aristotle had in mind when writing his Politics, contributed to a large extent to the dissemination of Aristotle’s political ideas in medieval Italy. It is noteworthy in this connection that the Politics served a number of Italian writers of the late 13th century as a source of observations on civil strife and constitutional change as well as of clues for detecting the causes for the downfall of the communal regime and of the gradual rise of the signoria. Cf. on this, e. g., Ulrich Meier, “‘Molte rivoluzioni, molte novità’: Gesellschaftlicher Wandel im Spiegel der politischen Philosophie und im Urteil von städtischen Chronisten des späten Mittelalters,” Sozialer Wandel im Mittelalter: Wahrnehmungsformen, Erklärungsmuster, Regelungsmechanismen, ed. Jürgen Miethke and Klaus Schreiner, 1994, 119–76. A desideratum for a fuller appreciation of the fortuna of Aristotle’s Politics in the world of the Italian city-states is a comprehensive study of the diffusion of Aristotle’s political thought in Padua’s prehumanist circle as reflected e. g. in the chronicle De Traditione Patavii ad Canem Grandem anno MCCCXXVII and the dialogue De lite inter Naturam et Fortunam of Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), the famous Paduan poet and statesman. Preliminary research in this area was pursued by Nicolai Rubinstein: “Some Ideas on Municipal Progress and Decline in the Italy of the Communes,” Fritz Saxl 1890–1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England, ed. Donald G. Gordon, 1957, 165–83; “Marsilius of Padua and the Italian Political Thought of His Time,” Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. John R. Hale et al., 1965, 44–75; “Marsilio da Padova e il pensiero politico italiano del Trecento,” ACIMP 1 (1979): 143–62; “Political Theories in the Renaissance,” The Renaissance: Essays in Interpretation, ed. André Chastel (1982), 153–200. The same applies to the florilegium Epytoma Sapientie of Geremia da Montagnone (1250/60–1320–21), another leading member of the circle of Padua’s Prehumanists. Geremia’s Epytoma is a patchwork of citations from various works of Aristotle, among which the Politics. A good starting point for future research can be found in Paolo Marangon, Alle origini dell’aristotelismo padovano (sec. XII–XIII), 1977, and “Marsilio tra preumanesimo e cultura

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delle arti. Ricerca sulle fonti padovane del I discorso del Defensor pacis,” Medioevo 3 (1977): 89–119 [rpt. id., Ad cognitionem scientiae festinare: gli studi nell’università e nei conventi di Padova nei secoli XIII e XIV, ed. Tiziana Pesenti, 1997, 380–410]. One of the questions that has prevailed in recent research on the rediscovery and assimilation of Aristotle’s political philosophy in late Medieval Europe concerns the existence of a so-called “Political Aristotelianism” as a distinct trend in the history of political ideas. An informative synopsis of the main lines of the literature on the reception of Aristotle’s Politics in late Medieval political thought, on which the following account partly relies, is found in Christoph Flüeler, “Politischer Aristotelismus im Mittelalter. Einleitung,” Vivarium 40 (2002): 1–13. Consult also Cary J. Nederman, “What is Dead and What is Living in the Scholarship of Walter Ullmann,” PPM 2 (2004): 11–19. The “Political Aristotelianism” hypothesis found its most ardent proponent in Walter Ulmann (1910–1983), a prominent historian of political and legal thought at Cambridge. A controlling assumption in Ullmann’s work is that the history of political ideas from the 6th to 16th century is characterized by two phases, a “descending” and an “ascending” one. The hallmark of the latter period is that governing authority and law-creating competence reside with the community or the populus and ascend from the broad base in the shape of a pyramid, although the people delegate specific powers to certain organs for a limited period of time. According to the descending conception of government and law, on the other hand, governmental authority and law-creating power emanate (“descend”) from a single supreme organ, i. e., God, and are distributed downwards in the shape of a pyramid by a vice-regent whom God has appointed on earth – Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 1961, 20–21; Ullmann’s views on the “descending” and “ascending” periods in the evolution of political thought were presented in nuce in RHD 26 (1958). Further, Ullmann considered that the recovery of the Politics in the 13th century heralded a profound conceptual revolution that marked the dividing line between the Middle Ages and the modern period. In this sense, the emergence in the 13th century of the term “political” as well as the notion of “state” denoting a body of citizens possessing independence, self-sufficiency and autonomy and living in conformity with their own laws were immediate results of the recovery of Aristotle’s political ideas – A History of Political Thought: the Middle Ages, 1970, 17, 159ff. In Ullmann’s eyes, medieval thinkers espoused the salient principles of Aristotle’s political philosophy: the notion that the state constitutes the highest community of citizens and is an outcome of natural laws and not of any agreement, contract or convention; the view of the quali-

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tative superiority and hence the supremacy of the majority over the few best; and the conceptual distinction between a man and a citizen – A History of Political Thought: the Middle Ages, 167–70. Ullmann’s theses stirred up scholarly debates on the effect which the Politics had on the evolution of late medieval political philosophy. His pattern of explaining the development of political ideas in terms of “descending” and “ascending” phases has been the object of sustained critique. Jürgen Miethke, De potestate papae: Die päpstliche Amtskompetenz im Widerstreit der politischen Theorie von Thomas von Aquin bis Wilhelm von Ockham, 2000, highlights the role played by the universities in the evolution of medieval political thought. Roberto Lambertini, “Lo studio e la ricezione della Politica tra XIII e XIV secolo; Da Egidio Romano a Giovanni da Parigi, da Dante a Marsilio: fautori ed oppositori della teocrazia papale agli inizi del Trecento; Crisi istituzionali e rinnovamenti teorici al declino del Medioevo,” Il pensiero politico. Storia, idee, dottrine, vol. 1: Età antica e medioevo, ed. Carlo Dolcini, 1999, 145–173, 209–299, challenged Ullmann’s thesis about the importance of Artistotle’s political thought as a source of medieval political writing. Cary J. Nederman, “Aristotelianism and the Origins of ‘Political Science’ in the Twelfth Century,” JHI 52 (1991): 179–94, challenged Ullmann’s ideas on the Aristotelian provenance of the medieval concept of state as a natural product by pointing to a number of texts (Cicero, Seneca etc.) that held similar views and were available to medieval authors from the 12th century onwards. According to Nederman, “The Meaning of ‘Aristotelianism’ in Medieval Moral and Political Thought,” JHI 57 (1996), 563–85. In this way, Aristotle’s doctrines were often combined or amalgamated with ideas deriving from other sources of moral and political thought, e. g., Stoicism, Roman law and the Christian teaching. Nederman set forth the definition of “Aristotelianism” in medieval political and moral thought as a fundamental structure that paved the way in which questions related to political and moral problems were raised and discussed. The key feature of the medieval “Aristotelian” tradition was the belief in the practical value of the study of politics and ethics that could serve as a guiding principle of human actions. Equally problematic is Ullmann’s notion that the circulation of the Politics served as a catalyst for a conceptual revolution. Recent research has brought out the importance of the translations of Aristotle’s writings from the Arabic in the 12th century and Dominicus Gundissalinus’s Divisio scientiae as major sources proclaiming the scientific character of politics and offering thus a theoretical underpinning to the status of the “scientia politica” which existed already before the Latin translation of the Politics. On this see notably the following studies by Cary J. Nederman, “Aristotle as Authority: Alter-

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native Aristotelian Sources of Late Medieval Political Theory,” HEI 8 (1987): 31–44, Francisco Bertelloni, “Die Rolle der Natur in den Commentarii in Libros Politicorum Aristotelis des Albertus Magnus,” Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter, ed. Albert Zimmermann and Andreas Speer, 1992, 682–700; “Politologische Ansichten bei den Artisten um 1230/1240. Zur Deutung des anonymen Pariser Studienplans Hs. Ripoll 109,” Theologie und Philosophie 69 (1994): 34–73; “Überlegungen zur Geschichte der dreigliedrigen ‘philosophia practica’ vor der mittelalterlichen Rezeption der aristotelischen ‘libri morales’,” Von der Suche nach Gott, ed. Margot Schmidt and Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, 1998, 267–387. It is also worth remarking that a number of treatises that were produced in the Faculty of Arts in Paris during the first half of the 13th century ascribed a prominent status to political science. The authors of these works were not acquainted with the Politics and relied on various writings of Aristotle that contained references to political science as well as other sources, such as Avicenna’s and Cicero’s works and civil and canonical law. More on this in Christoph Flüeler, “Die Rezeption der Politica des Aristoteles an der Pariser Fakultät im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert,” Das Publikum politischer Theorie im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Miethke, 1992, 127–38. On this subject, see also Péter Molnár, “Science politique au Moyen Age avant la redécouverte de la Politique d’Aristote,” Ph.D. diss. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 1998. Finally, in his Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450, 1992, Anthony Black, Ullmann’s former student at Cambridge, maintained that medieval political theorists made use of the Politics and Ethics as vehicles for expressing their own views and adopted the terminology and central questions of these works, without necessarily aiming at a deeper understanding of the texts. Platonic Sources. One of the earliest studies seeking to identify sources other than Aristotle’s works (Plato’s Timaios etc.) that influenced Late Medieval political thinking and/or served as a supplement to the Politics is Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, Public Law and the State, 1100–1322, 1964. Cf. on this also Gian Carlo Garfagnini, “Platone politico, ovvero il sogno di uno stato ‘divino’,” I Decembrio e la traduzione della Repubblica di Platone tra Medioevo e Umanesimo, ed. Mario Vegetti and Paolo Pissavino, 2005, 99–125; David Luscombe, “City and Politics before the Coming of the Politics: Some Illustrations,” Church and City, 1000–1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. David Abulafia et al., 1992, 41–55; and more generally Annabel S. Brett, “Political Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. Arthur S. McGrade, 2003, 276–99. On the fate of the Timaios in the Latin West see Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Pla-

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tonic Tradition during the Middle Ages together with Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as in Platons Timaios als Grundtext der Kosmologie in Spätantike, Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Thomas Leinkauf and Carlos Steel, 2005. Cicero. A detailed and lucid account of the influence exerted by Cicero’s works on the views of several medieval political writers regarding the genesis of political community and the significance of rhetoric in that process is given in Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Justice, and Duty in the Defensor Pacis: Marsiglio of Padua’s Ciceronian Impulse,” PT 18 (1990): 615–37; “The Union of Wisdom and Eloquence Before the Renaissance: The Ciceronian Orator in Medieval Thought,” JMH 18 (1992): 75–95; “Nature, Sin, and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought,” JHI 49 (1988): 3–26. Cf. also José Martínez Gázquez and Miguel Hurtado, “El De officiis de Cicerón en el Defensor Pacis de Marsilio de Padua,” Cicero and the Middle Ages, ed. Alexander Fidora and Jordi Pardo, 2001, 87–90. Special mention should be made here of the studies by Janet Coleman, “Some Relations between the Study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century University Arts Courses and the Justification of Contemporary Civic Activities (Italy and France),” Political Thought and the Realities of Power in the Middle Ages/Politisches Denken und die Wirklichkeit der Macht im Mittelalter, ed. Joseph Canning and Otto Gerhard Oexle, 1999, 127–53; as well as Virginia Cox, “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Late Medieval Italy: The Latin and Vernacular Traditions,” The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition, ed. Virginia Cox and John O. Ward, 2006, 109–36; id., “Ciceronian Rhetoric in Italy, 1260–1350,” Rhetorica 17 (1999), 239–88. In general, see also Matthew Kempshall, “De republica I.39 in Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought,” Cicero on the Republic, ed. Jonathan G. F. Powell and John A. North, 2001, 99–135. Marsilius of Padua. A prominent place in the history of the influence of Aristotle’s political ideas in Late Medieval Europe is due to Marsilius of Padua’s magnum opus, the Defensor pacis (The Defender of Peace) that appeared in 1324 in Paris. Marsilius studied medicine and theology, served as a rector and taught as a master of arts in Paris. In the Defensor pacis he set out to identify the key factors disrupting peace and tranquility in his own day. The first dictio of this treatise is replete with references to and quotations from the Politics and served Marsilius as a foundation for a strident polemic against the efforts of the Pope to interfere in temporal affairs that reaches its climax in

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the second dictio (a closer scrutiny of the relationship between the two parts of the Defensor pacis still needs to be undertaken). Far from being a typical commentary on Aristotle’s Politics the Defensor pacis mirrors the impact of the Parisian university milieu of the 13th and 14th centuries. At the same time, it constitutes an important historical document that was written in the aftermath of the emergence of the signorial regime in most of the city-states of central and northern Italy and resonates with contemporary debates on the future of communal government. Research interest in Marsilius’s thought has intensified during the recent years and manifested itself in a number of scholarly investigations and major international conferences. An extensive treatment of the relationship between Marsilius’s and Aristotle’s political philosophy can be found in Vasileios Syros, Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua: Eine Untersuchung zur ersten Diktion des Defensor pacis, 2007; Dolf Sternberger, Die Stadt und das Reich in der Verfassungslehre des Marsilius von Padua, 1981 [rpt. id., Die Stadt als Urbild: sieben politische Beiträge, 1985, 76–142], laid a strong emphasis on Marsilius’s debts to Aristotle and subscribed to the view of Marsilius as a political writer who closely followed in the footsteps of Aristotle and adopted some of the core ideas of the Politics. Sternberger overlooked, however, a number of crucial differences between Marsilius and his Greek predecessor. For an overall assessment of Sternberger’s ideas, see Jörg Pannier, Das Vexierbild des Politischen: Dolf Sternberger als politischer Aristoteliker, 1996; id., “Zur Friedenslehre des Marsilius von Padua nach Dolf Sternberger,” ZP 48 (2001): 189–217. There is a plethora of studies pleading for a more nuanced picture of Marsilius’s reception of the Politics. Of particular note in this context are the following: Jürgen Miethke, “Marsilius von Padua: Die politische Philosophie eines lateinischen Aristotelikers des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Lebenslehren und Weltentwürfe im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: Politik – Naturkunde – Theologie, ed. Harmut Boockmann et al., 1989, 52–76; Georg Wieland, “Die Rezeption der aristotelischen Politik und die Entwicklung des Staatsgedankens im späten Mittelalter: am Beispiel des Thomas von Aquin und des Marsilius von Padua,” Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie des Mittelalters, ed. Erhard Mock and George Wieland, 1990, 67–81; Jeannine Quillet, “L’aristotélisme de Marsile de Padoue,” Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter, ihr Ursprung und ihre Bedeutung, ed. Paul Wilpert, 1963, 696–706; Mario Grignaschi, “Le rôle de l’aristotélisme dans le Defensor pacis de Marsile de Padoue,” RHPR 35 (1955): 301–40; Cesare Vasoli, “La politica di Aristotele e la utilizzazione de parte di Marsilio da Padova,” ACIMP 1 (1979): 237–59; Georges de Lagarde, “Une adaptation de la politique d’Aristote au XIVe siècle,” RHDFE

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ser. 4, 11 (1932): 227–69; M. Guggenheim, “Marsilius von Padua und die Staatslehre des Aristoteles,” HVh VII (1904): 343–62. A significant impetus to modern research on Marsilius’s political philosophy was given by Alain Gewirth’s pioneer study Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy, 1951. Gewirth offered an in-depth analysis of Marsilius’s thought against the background of Aristotelian and medieval political philosophy (Augustine, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, John of Paris, Giles of Rome, Ptolemy of Lucca etc.). On this work, cf. the review by Peter Munz, Speculum 33 (1958): 284–93, who made the case for downplaying the importance of Marsilius’s departures from Aristotle. Other works include Cary J. Nederman, Community and Consent: the Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor pacis, 1995; Jeannine Quillet, La philosophie politique de Marsile de Padoue, 1970; and Hermann Segall, Der Defensor Pacis des Marsilius von Padua: Grundfragen der Interpretation, 1959. There is also a wealth of literature examining the relationship between Marsilius and Aristotle with regard to specific questions. An instructive comparison between Marsilius’s notion of regnum and Aristotle’s idea of polis is provided in Enrico Berti, “Il regnum di Marsilio tra la polis aristotelica e lo Stato moderno,” ACIMP 1 (1979): 165–82. Guido Kisch, “Die Aequitaslehre des Marsilius von Padua,” AHVKB 44 [Festschrift für Hermann Reenfahrt], 1958, 413–22 [rpt. id., Erasmus und die Jurisprudenz seiner Zeit, Studien zum humanistischen Rechtsgedanken, 1960, 434–46)] maintains that Marsilius’s notion of equity is closer to that of the medieval jurists than to the Aristotelian teaching. Luigi Olivieri, “Teoria aristotelica dell’opinione e scienza politica in Marsilio da Padova,” ACIMP 1 (1979): 223–35, inquires into the methodological premises of Marsilius’s “political science” with reference to Aristotle’s theory of knowledge. The use of Aristotle’s moral psychology in the Defensor pacis is explored in Cary J. Nederman, “Character and community in the Defensor pacis: Marsiglio of Padua’s Adaptation of Aristotelian Moral Psychology,” HPT 13 (1992): 377–90. In her essay “L’aristotélisme de Marsile de Padoue et ses rapports avec l’averroïsme,” Medioevo 5 (1979): 81–142, Jeannine Quillet followed Shlomo Pines in the assumption that Marsilius was influenced not by Averroes, but rather by Al-Farabi’s lost Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, which had been translated into Hebrew in 1321 by Samuel ben Judah. For a fresh discussion of the ties between Marsilius’ and medieval Islamic political thought, see Antony Black, The West and Islam: Religion and Political Thought in World History, 2008. Cf. Shlomo Pines, “La philosophie dans l’économie du genre humain selon Averroès: une réponse à al-Farabi?,” Multiple Averroès, ed. Jean Jolivet, 1978, 189–207; id., “The Limitations of

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Human Knowledge according to Al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, and Maimonides,” Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature vol. 1, ed. Isadore Twersky, 1979, 82–109; rpt. in id., Collected Works, vol. 4: Studies in the History of Jewish Thought, ed. Warren Zev Harvey and Moshe Idel, 1997, 404–31. It is highly unlikely, though, that Marsilius had access to Al-Farabi’s Commentary on the Ethics. For a long time the authorship of the Defensor pacis has been attributed to both Marsilius and John of Jandun (ca. 1286–1328), his close associate and professor at the University of Paris, with whom he fled to the court of Louis of Bavaria. John produced various treatises on a number of Aristotle’s works drawing heavily on Averroes’s commentaries and has often been regarded as the head of the Latin “Averroists,” which led to the conclusion that Marsilius’ political theory owes a great deal to Averroes’s political philosophy – cf. on this Noël Vaois, “Jean de Jandun et Marsile de Padoue auteurs du Defensor pacis,” HLF 33 (1906): 528–623, and Ludwig Schmugge, Johannes von Jandun (1285/89–1328): Untersuchungen zur Biographie und Sozialtheorie eines lateinischen Averroisten, 1966. However, many studies have pointed to striking differences between Marsilius’ ideas and the philosophy of John of Jandun and Averroes himself. On this see Alan Gewirth, “John of Jandun and the Defensor Pacis,” Speculum 23 (1948): 267–72; and Carlo Dolcini, “Marsilio da Padova e Giovanni di Jandun,” Storia della chiesa vol. 9: La crisi del Trecento e il papato avignonese, 1274–1378, ed. Diego Quaglioni, 1994, 435–46. For a convincing refutation of the idea of the existence of a so-called “political Averroism,” see Gregorio Piaia, “‘Averroisme politique’: Anatomie d’un mythe historiographique,” Orientalische Kultur und europäisches Mittelalter, ed. Albert Zimmermann and Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg, 1985, 288–300; id., “L’averroismo politico e Marsilio da Padova,” Saggi e ricerche su Aristotele, Marsilio da Padova, M. Eckhart, Rosmini, Spaventa, Marty, Tilgher, Omodeo, metafisica, fenomenologia ed estetica, ed. Carlo Giacon, 1971, 33–54. Recent research has brought out some affinities between Marsilius and medieval Jewish philosophy. Lawrence V. Berman, “φ and E   in Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew: The Case of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and Its Middle Commentary by Averroes,” Orientalische Kultur und europäisches Mittelalter, ed. Albert Zimmermann, 1985, 274–87, pointed to intriguing parallels between Marsilius’s and Samuel ben Judah’s interpretation of the Bible. Vasileios Syros in Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua: Eine Untersuchung zur ersten Diktion des Defensor pacis (cited above) and “Did the Physician from Padua Concur with the Rabbi from Cordoba? Marsilius of Padua and Moses Maimonides on the Political Utility of Religion,” RÉJ (2010), highlights a number of overlaps between Marsilius and Moses Maimonides, whose

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major work, the Guide of the Perplexed, found its way into the medieval West in a Latin translation under the title Dux neutrorum from the mid-13th century onwards. Select Bibliography Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450, ed. James H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles E. Butterworth, “Ethical and Political Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 266–86; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, vol. 2: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2000); Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Menachem Lorberbaum, “Medieval Jewish Political Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 176–200; Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: an Introductory Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

Vasileios Syros

Prayer Books A. General Definition Medieval prayer books have a long and complex history. Both liturgical and lay books were created to contain prayers, although the former were certainly among the earliest ones. Initially, the order of prayers that was to be said by the priest during Mass was recorded in Ordo (also called Directorium). In turn, Sacramentaries contained prayers specifically related to the consecration of the Eucharist. The Sacramentary, the Lectionary and the Cantatorium were combined during the 11th and 12th centuries into Missals, which therefore contained, under the same cover, readings, sung items, and prayers (Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office, 1982, 118). The main focus of this essay is on prayer books that belonged to individuals, and were meant to be used as instruments of private devotion. Such prayer books appeared as early as the 8th century: Bernard J. Muir lists at least five such insular manuscripts, and claims two of them – the so-called Royal prayer-book (London, BL MS Royal 2. A. XX) and the Harley fragment (London, BL MS Hrl. 7633, formerly BL Add. MS 5004) – to be the

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oldest extant prayer books in Europe (“The Early Insular Prayer Book Tradition and the Development of the Book of Hours,” The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship, ed. Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir, 1998, 12f.). Carolingian prayer books, the so-called libelli precum (livrets), bear a strong resemblance to these early English manuscripts; indisputable connections exist between the two (André Wilmart, Precum libelli quattuor aevi Karolini, nunc primum publici iuris facti, cum aliorum indicibus, 1940; Pierre Salmon, “Livrets de priers de l’époque carolingienne,” Revue bénédictine LXXXVI–VII [1976–1977]: 218–234; Thomas Bestul, “Continental Sources of AngloSaxon Devotional Writing,” Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Paul Szarmach, 1986, 103–26; Bernard J. Muir, ed., A Pre-Conquest English Prayerbook, 1988). These were miscellanies, compilations of devotional texts, intimately connected with the liturgy, and often excerpted from the psalms; these books were rarely illustrated, and the illustrations belonged to stock imagery (Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “A Liber Precum in Sélestat and the Development of the Illustrated Prayer Book in Germany,” The Art Bulletin LXXIII, 2 [1991]: 209f.). Among notable exceptions to this rule is the Prayer Book of Charles the Bald, lavishly and inventively illuminated (R. Deshman, “The Exalted Servant: the Ruler Theology of the Prayer Book of Charles the Bald,” Viator XI [1980]: 385–417). Early miscellanies point to the importance of the Psalter in the development of a medieval prayer book. Often, Psalms were broken down to reflect the divisions of the Divine Office: so, liturgical – as opposed to Biblical – Psalters divided the Psalms at numbers 1, 26, 38, 52, 68, 80, 97 and 109 (Hughes, 226f.). The Psalter was recited weekly in monasteries, forming a part of daily services, and verses from the Psalms were integrated into prayers. Frequently, Psalters contained additional texts, and these included prayers. Perhaps one of the most striking 12th-century examples is the St Albans Psalter (Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Ms St Godehard 1). Associated with Christina of Markyate and Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans, the Psalter includes a calendar, a great number of illuminated initials, a series of full-page miniatures that includes an illuminated cycle from the Life of Christ, Psalms proper, the Vie de saint Alexis (in French), a letter of Pope Gregory the Great (in French and Latin), a discourse on Good and Evil, and a series of non-liturgical texts – canticles, creeds, litanies and prayers (Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate, 2005). The images, as varied as the texts, were completed by a number of different artists, the principal one nicknamed the Alexis Master (Otto Pächt, C. R. Dodwell, and Francis Wormald, The St. Albans Psalter [Albani Psalter], 1960, 100–125). Christina’s Psalter presages later prayer books in that the manuscript features details in the Cal-

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endar, the Psalter and the miniature cycle intimately connected with Christina, such as the insistent emphasis on the figure of Magdalene whom Christina identified with (Magdalena Carrasco, “The Imagery of the Magdalen in Christina of Markyate’s Psalter [The St Albans Psalter],” Gesta 37 [1999]: 67–80), as well as Christina’s appearance in the initial C to Psalm 105, where the recluse is depicted as an intercessor on behalf of monks. In the next two centuries, the Psalter transformed into a lay prayer book: so, the 14th-century Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg, also called the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg (Cloisters 69.86), features, in addition to the Psalter and the Calendar, the canticles, the Te Deum, the Athanasian Creed, a Litany, and a series of devotional texts and prayers, both in Latin and in French (William G. Land, The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg: the Personal Document, 1984, 24); it is worth noting that in at least one instance the devotional text appears to enter into an affective dialogue with the prayer as in the case of the “Complaint of the Crucified” and the prayer to Christ’s wounds that follows it (Margaret M. Manion, “Women, Art and Devotion: Three French Fourteenth Century Royal Prayer Books,” The Art of the Book, loc. cit., 38, and F. Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” Women and the Book, ed. L. Smith and J. H. M. Taylor, 1997, 211f.). Like the Psalter, another kind of prayer book, the Breviary, originally belonged not to laymen but to monks and priests, and its function as a prayer book for the aristocracy only developed in the later Middle Ages. Breviaries were structured around the daily offices, and included “hymns, readings, Psalms, anthems and other prayers” (Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 1994; 1986, 214). Although Breviaries illuminated for aristocratic patrons were usually intended for use in royal chapels, images in these books sometimes betray a close association between the Breviary and its patron. Such is the case of the Breviary of Charles V (Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 1052), executed by Jean le Noir: the in-text illustration to Psalm 109 (Dixit Dominus), instead of the customary representation of the Trinity, features God inviting the kneeling king to approach, underscoring, thereby, the privileged position of Charles V in the eyes of God (François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court of France: the Fourteenth Century, 1978, 112). Related to Breviaries, and similarly structured around the Divine Office, are the Books of Hours (Horae), which nonetheless were never meant to be official Churchservice volumes, but were created for laity to be used at home. Since their emergence in the 13th century, these private prayer books, although they varied in content, generally included the Hours of the Virgin, Church year calendars, Gospel readings, prayers to the Virgin, the Penitential Psalms accom-

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panied by a Litany, and the Office of the Dead; some also comprised Hours of the Holy Ghost, Hours of the Cross, and Suffrages of the Saints (De Hamel, 176). In its emphasis on personal prayers and particular private devotions, the Book of Hours was the prayer book par excellence (for an extended discussion of these books see the “Books of Hours” entry). Medieval prayer books contain some of the most arresting images to be found in illuminated manuscripts, and this is true of Jewish as well as Christian books. Among the most frequently illustrated medieval Hebrew manuscripts are mahzorim, festival prayer books that contained prayers for Holy Days, including the Sabbath (Evelyn M. Cohen, “The Decoration of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts,” A Sign and a Witness: 2000 Years of Hebrew Books and Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Leonard Singer Gold, 1988, 52–53). Imagery in these books could be figurative or ornamental, and sometimes consisted of micrography (see Leila Rachel Avrin, “Micrography as Art,” Etudes de paléographie hébraïque, 1981). Oversize Mazhorim, like the Leipzig Mahzor (Universitätbibliothek, Leipzig, Ms. 5 1102/1–2), are very large, indicating the fact that they were used not privately but in the synagogue (Machsor Lipsiae: 68 Faksimile-Tafeln der mittelalterlichen hebräischen illuminierten Handschrift aus dem Bestand der Universitäts-Bibliothek Leipzig, ed. Elias Katz, 1964). Often, the same texts were accompanied by stock imagery associated with a specific reading (for instance, Moses Receiving the Tablets of Law usually accompanies the text for the first morning of Shavuot), and some include recognizable Christian motifs, such as Labors of the Month (Cohen, 58–59). Another type of Hebrew prayer book – Siddur – contained Sabbath and weekday prayers. B. History of Research Bibliography on different kinds of prayer books is vast. For general overviews, see Franz Unterkircher, Das Stundenbuch des Mittelalters (1985), Joachim M. Plotzek, Andachtsbücher des Mittelalters aus Privatbesitz (catalogue, 1987), and, especially, a very useful comprehensive study by Gerard Achten, Das christliche Gebetbuch im Mittelalter: Andachts- und Stundenbücher in Handschrift und Frühdruck (1987). In addition, the exhibition catalogue edited by Hans-Peter Geh and Gerhard Römer, provides an excellent introduction to different kinds of medieval prayer books: Mittelalterliche Andachtsbücher: Psalterien, Stundenbücher, Gebetbücher: Zeugnisse europäischer Frömmigkeit (1992). For the development of an illustrated prayer book in Germany, and the role of female monastics and the importance of affective prayer in this development, see Jeffrey Hamburger (Liber Precum, 209–236). Facsimiles and overviews of specific prayer books allow for the examination of textual and visual structures of their recorded devotions: see, for instance, Hildegard-Gebetbuch:

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Faksimile-Ausgabe des Codex-Latinus monacensis 935 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (1987) and Das Gebetbuch der Margarete von Rodemachern, eine Bildfolge aus der Pergamenthandschrift Q 59 in der Zentralbibliothek der deutschen Klassik zu Weimar (ed. Konrad Kratzsch, 1973). For the bibliographic discussion of Horae, refer to the “Books of Hours” entry. Psalters have a special place in the development of the medieval prayer book. The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture in the Middle Ages edited by Nancy Van Deusen (1999) positions the Psalter within the rich fabric of medieval cultural discourse, and one essay in particular, Joseph Dyer’s “The Psalms in Monastic Prayer” addresses the importance of the Psalms in monastic devotions. On additional texts included in Psalters, see Victor Leroquais, Les psautiers: manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France I (1940–1941, v–lxxxv); abbreviated Psalters are discussed in Pierre Salmon “Libelli precum du VIIIe au XIIe siècle,” Studi e testi CCLXXIII (1974): 67–119. For a collection of studies that tackle various approaches to illustrated medieval Psalters’ iconographies, see The Illuminated Psalter: Studies in the Content, Purpose and Placement of Its Images, ed. F. O. Büttner (2004). As demonstrated by the brief discussion of the St Albans book, in-depth studies of illustrated Psalters often stress the importance of patronage in the iconographic programs of these manuscripts: so, Lucy Freeman Sandler examines the Lichtenthal Psalter within the context of other manuscripts commissioned by one particular family in The Lichtenthal Psalter and the Manuscript Patronage of the Bohun Family (2004), while Michael Camille’s Mirror in Parchment: the Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (1998) examines the Psalter images as social documents that reflected, shaped and structured the world of the book’s patron (see also Janet Backhouse, Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter, 2000). De Hamel points to the fact that more late medieval Psalters hail from England than the continent (218); among the most celebrated illuminated English Psalters are The Winchester Psalter discussed by Francis Wormald (1973) and Kristine Edmondson Haney (The Winchester Psalter: an Iconographic Study, 1986), The Harley Psalter, published by William Noel (1995), and the Psalter of Robert de Lisle (Sandler, 1983). For an overview of the development of Hebrew prayer, which includes a discussion of medieval Jewish worship, see Stefan C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer: New Perspectives on Jewish Liturgical History (1993). Facsimiles, in addition to the Leipzig Machzor, include The Rothschild Mahzor (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, Mic. 8892), introduced by Evelyn M. Cohen and Menahem Schmelzer (1983) and The Worms Mahzor (Jewish National and University Library, Ms. Heb. 4 781/1), edited by Malachi Beit-Arié (1985).

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Select Bibliography Gerard Achten, Das christliche Gebetbuch im Mittelalter: Andachts- und Stundenbücher in Handschrift und Frühdruck (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1987); Hans-Peter Geh and Gerhard Römer, Mittelalterliche Andachtsbücher: Psalterien, Stundenbücher, Gebetbücher: Zeugnisse europäischer Frömmigkeit (Karlsruhe: Badische Landesbibliothek, 1992); A Sign and a Witness: 2000 Years of Hebrew Books and Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Leonard Singer Gold (New York: New York Public Library, Oxford University Press, 1988); Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

Elina Gertsman

Proverbs A. Definitions, Subject Matter, Introduction General knowledge about life and behavior, religious knowledge linked to the Bible, and wisdom transmitted from ancient authors was commonly expressed in the Middle Ages in pithy proverbs and maxims (sententiae) of high formulaic density, rhyme, rhythm, ellipsis, parallelism, antithetical structure, assonance, and alliteration. Thematically proverbs intone life experience, legal domains, religion (Bible, books of wisdom), agriculture, weather, and work. Whereas sententiae usually attribute authorship, age, distribution, and authority (Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive originum II, xi, xxi, 1911; Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, 1960, I, §872–79, 431–34) – the proverb (proverbium) was transmitted anonymously; it always invoked the spoken community, and was associated strongly with the oral tradition. Proverbs were known in medieval German texts as “altsprochen wort, gemeines wort, spruch, bîspruch, bîscaft, bîwort, bîspel, vielgesprochenes Wort” (Lexer, BMZ, Manfred Eikelmann, “altsprochen wort: Sentenz und Sprichwort im Kontext der mittelalterlichen Gnomik,” JOWG 11 [1999]: 299–315). Maxims (sententiae) of classical origin and transmitted as part of the classical literary tradition, were initially transmitted in Latin and were used in instruction in the schools. They were collected and disseminated widely both orally and in writing. Chief sources for the collections were popular traditions, the Bible and classical literature. Literacy generally, albeit not always, implied bilingualism in Latin and the vernacular (Gabriele von Olberg, “Der Umgang mit Wissen. Ausgewählte Beispiele zum Übersetzungsproblem lateinischer

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und deutscher Sprichwörter,” Das Mittelalter: Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 2 [1997]: 69–70). Archer Taylor refused to define the proverb (The Proverb and an Index to The Proverb, 1962), saying that it comprised “The wisdom of many and the wit of one” (Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes, The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb, 1981, 3–9). Mieder has provided a flexible, open-ended definition of proverbs “Sprichwörter sind allgemein bekannte, festgeprägte Sätze, die eine Lebensregel oder Weisheit in prägnanter, kurzer Form ausdrücken”. (Proverbs are generally well known, firmly established sentences, which express a maxim or wisdom in striking, short form. Lutz Röhrich and Wolfgang Mieder, Sprichwort, 1977, 3.) Friedrich Seiler, Deutsche Sprichwörterkunde, 1922, 1–8, defines the proverb as “im Volksmund umlaufende, in sich geschlossene Sprüche von lehrhafter Tendenz (earlier: ‘von lehrhaftem Charakter’) und gehobener Form” (formulaic sayings having a didactic penchant [previously, a didactic character] and elevated form that circulate orally among the people). He separates between three layers of proverbs or proverbial expression: on the lower and middle level are proverbs, on the highest are maxims and gnomes (Denkspruch). While he links proverbs that occupy the highest level with the literary language, the relations and interactions of the three remain imprecise. The middle level of proverbs is said to have originated from a time when the thinking and expression of the people was unified (einheitlich), before class divisions occurred in society. The highest maxims are said to have come from literature, not from the “Volk,” (“people”) implying thereby that literature is divorced from the “Volk.” Singer does not explain how the “Volk” constitutes the origin of the common, non-literary proverb, other than to claim that every proverb was once a “geflügeltes Wort” (“a winged word,” cf. Homer) (see Georg Büchmann, Geflügelte Worte, 1956 and many times thereafter) and created by an individual, rather than by a community or a nation. André Jolles, Einfache Formen, 1930, rpt. 1968, describes the proverb as a simple form, enclosing in nuce a formulation of wisdom gained from experience in a maxim or “Spruch” in which all parts retain their empirical value and remain separate syntactically (as asyndeton) and stylistically, preventing generalization and abstraction. He argues that proverbs are expressions of common experiences and that they are not didactic. Gero von Wilpert defines the proverb as “im Volksmund verbreiteter, volkstümlich und leicht faßlich formulierter Spruch von kurzer, geschlossener, oft durch Rhythmus, Alliteration oder Reim gebundener und über die Alltagssprache erhobener Form zum Ausdruck, e. allg. anerkannten Lebens-

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lehre, -weisheit und -erfahrung oder eine Sittenlehre in bildstarkem sprachlichem Gleichnis, das die Schärfe direkter Aussage mildert und den sinnlichen Einzelfall dem gegenständlichen Denken einfügt (Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, 5th ed. 1969, 729): A popular saying that is expressed in a memorable way and preserved by oral tradition, elevated above common speech by its pithy, precise, rhythmical, alliterative, rhymed, closed form to express generally accepted practical morals, wisdom, experience or ethics in a visually striking simile, which reduces the sting of direct expression and incorporates the concrete instance into ideas about the representation of life. In the Middle Ages proverbs infused every-day experience with wisdom that was sanctioned by authority and grounded in tradition. Found in collections, they were used in the schools to instruct pupils, including lay persons, in ethics, morality and the auctores; part of the civilizing process, they were present in teaching and preaching, and in literature. The fable, the Reynart the Fox cycle, but also poetry and epics were favorable literary climates for proverbs and maxims, which, like other micro-texts (Kleinstformen der Literatur, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, 1994) are characterized by distinctness, brevity, and modularity and offer commentary, reflection, summary, and interpretation; their intertextuality, special reception, transmission, adoption, adaptability and stability form the subject matter of the collection of essays. Typical yet flexible milieux, functions and classifications are generally associated with their use (Wachinger, “Kleinstformen der Literatur: Sprachgestalt-Gebrauch-Literaturgeschichte,” Kleinstformen der Literatur, ed. Haug and Wachinger, 1994, 1–37). Proverbs are also found in didactic, religious, legal (Sachsenspiegel), and encyclopedic texts. Taught as part of rhetorics, proverbs were considered by Aristotle to be probationes inartificiales (natural proofs) and maxims (sententiae) probationes artificiales (artificial proofs) attached to the inventio of an argument. Later assigned to style (elocutio), they became part of the dispositio (the organization of arguments). Geoffrey of Vinsauf recommends their inclusion especially in introductions and conclusions of literary compositions. Cf. Hennig Brinkmann, “Der Prolog im Mittelalter als literarische Erscheinung,” WW 14 (1964): 1–21; Paul Zumthor, “L’épiphonème proverbial,” Revue des sciences humaines 41 (1976): 313–28. See also Walter Haug, Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts. Eine Einführung, 1985, 118–30. A maxim is a saying drawn from life, which shows specifically what happens or ought to happen in behavior (Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan, 1954, iv. 17.24. p. 288). If a person appears in a maxim or gnome, it becomes an anecdote; the proverb is also closely related to the exemplum: “An example is a saying or deed of some authoritative person that is worthy

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of imitation” (Parisiana poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. John T. Lawler, 1974, 11). Klaus Grubmüller, “Fabel, Exempel, Allegorese: Über Sinnbildungsverfahren und Verwendungszusammenhänge,” Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, 1991, 58–76, has explored the close relationship between the exemplum, the proverbium and the fable; he notes that genre distinctions between these microforms are often absent and that the terminology is often imprecise. In Biblical language, proverbium and parabola refer to both proverb and parable. The fluidity of terminology in paremiology is confirmed for Europe as a whole in the Middle Ages by Vilmos Voigt, “Alte Namen für ‘alte Wörter’: Historische Bezeichnungen der europäischen Sprichwörter,” Res Humanae Proverbiorum et Sententiarum, ed. Csaba Földes, 2004, 365–78. Proverb collections in Latin were used by Notker III Labeo for his classes at St. Gall in the 11th century. From the 13th century on, collections were used primarily in sermons and the education of youth. B. Historical Development of Research Early research in Germany begun by Wilhelm Grimm, on Freidank’s Bescheidenheit (Vridankes Bescheidenheit, 1834) was positivistic, concerned mainly with establishing bodies of knowledge, editing texts, listing the content of collections, identifying, collecting, organizing and indexing proverbs, maxims, gnomes, adages and aphorisms. Theoretical approaches to proverb scholarship (Jolles, Bausinger, Haug, Wachinger) built on the early work and made use of findings of research on the oral formulaic tradition (Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 1960; Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale, 1983, Franz H. Bäuml (see his numerous publications on the implications and consequences of medieval literacy and illiteracy, e. g.,“Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55 [1980]: 237–65); Ursula Schaefer, Vokalität: Altenglische Dichtung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, 1992). They stimulated a considerable body of interpretations and analyses of the context, function, and reception of proverbs and proverbial expressions in particular literary works. Research on the intertextual relationship of proverbs, maxims (sententiae) and proverbial expressions as micro-forms in medieval literary texts is contributing promising scholarship in MHG courtly literature, but there is also evidence that it is producing theoretical advances and new interdisciplinary approaches in related fields. Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander (1867–1880), Das Sprichwort, betrachtet nach Form u. Wesen, für Schule u. Leben, als Einleitung zu einem grossen volksthümlichen Sprichwörterschatz 1836, rpt.1983, ed. Wolfgang Mieder. Wander

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explains his theoretical perspectives about proverbs: the necessity of collecting proverbs, the difficulty of classifying them, and the analysis of related genres, such as the commonplace, maxim, gnome, etc. He lists various proverb definitions from classical antiquity to the 19th century and deals extensively with the content, origin and sources of proverbs, as well as with their metaphorical nature and form. The work was meant to change teaching in Volksschulen (primary schools), as he intended to use proverbs to inculcate in pupils moral and spiritual values and to introduce them to citizenship and political consciousness. Wander viewed proverbs as “mental gymnastics” preferable to the “famine of grammar.” Mieder recognizes him as the most important German lexicographer of proverbs. Wander, Das Deutsche Sprichwörterlexikon: Ein Hausschatz für das deutsche Volk, 5 vols. 1867–l880, rpt. 1964. Constituting an impressive collection of German proverbs and a historical overview based on major collections, the lexicon establishes criteria that continue to hold for current research on proverbs. As his sources, Wander cites prior collections, literature and the “Volksmund” (the popular oral tradition). The orality of proverbs was an important criterion for their selection, so much so, that he claimed to have developed a “Sprichwörterohr” (an ear for proverbs). Professors and teachers in all regions in Germany actively contributed proverbs they had heard in their communities; newspapers and journals constituted additional sources. He viewed his work as a validation of the German language as powerful bond in the formation of the nation and as a patriotic endeavor in helping Germans experience the feeling of nationhood through a common language and culture. Wolfgang Mieder considers this work the beginning of modern German paremiological research. Friedrich Seiler, Deutsche Sprichwörterkunde, 1922, is an excellent standard reference work on proverbs. He defines proverbs, maxims, sententious remarks, proverbial expressions and formulae; he analyzes the origin of German proverbs and studies their sources in folk speech, German literature and collections. He organizes proverbs into the following categories: Proverbs that were borrowed, shared proverbs (“gemeinsame Sprichwörter”), literary proverbs, and real (eigentliche) “Volkssprichwörter.” Subsequent research has challenged the criteria for these categories; however, Seiler’s evaluation of medieval proverb collections and his valuable commentaries on proverbs used by Geiler von Kaisersberg, Hans Sachs, and other late-medieval writers continue to be useful. Ignaz Zingerle, Die deutschen Sprichwörter im Mittelalter, 1864, rpt. 1972. Although not comprehensive and antiquated, it is a useful research tool, since it is alphabetically organized, listing terms from “Abendroth” to

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“Zweig.” Zingerle continues Wilhelm Grimm’s work until 1834 on MHG proverbs. He stresses literature of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries; for the 15th century, he includes Fastnachtspiele, the writings of Hans Vintler, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Muscatblüt as well as the Liederbuch der Clara Hätzlerin and the Kolmarer ms. of songs. He concludes his work in the 16th century with the Ambraser Heldenbuch and J. Nas, on the assumption that the well-known collections by Antonius Tunnicius from 1514, 1534, by Agricola from 1528, and by Sebastian Frank from 1541, can stand on their own. The proverbs listed by Zingerle became part of Wander’s Sprichwörterlexikon, where Wander expressed the hope, that the MHG corpus of proverbs would continue to be expanded. Zingerle is supplemented by Carl Schröder’s notes “Hundert niederdeutsche Sprichwörter,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen XLIII (1868): 411–20; “Aber hundert niederdeutsche Sprichwörter,” ibid. XLIV (1869): 337–44. Early dissertations on MHG proverbs are listed by Archer Taylor and Wolfgang Mieder, Selected Writings on Proverbs, 1975, 188–89, but they lamented the relative absence of paremiological studies of MHG authors and the paucity of studies of early modern authors, of which they cite the following (ibid., 192): Franz Lauchert, Sprichwörter und sprichwörtliche Redensarten bei P. Abraham à Santa Clara, 1893; Karl F. Wander, Abrahamisches Parömiakon, 1838; Martha Lenschau, Grimmelshausens Sprichwörter und Redensarten, 1924; J. A. Heuseler, Luthers Sprichwörter aus seinen Schriften gesammelt, 1824; Franz Sandvoss, Sprichwörterlese aus Burkhard Waldis mit … einem Verzeichniss von Melanchthon gebrauchter Sprichwörter, 1866; August Stöber, “Sprichwörter und sprichwörtliche Redensarten aus Johann Michael Moscherosch,” Alsatia (1868–1872): 319–38, Anna Risse “Sprichwörter und Redensarten bei Th. Murner,” Zeitschrift für den deutschen Unterricht XXXI (1917): 214–27, 289–303, 359–69, 450–58; Charles H. Handschin, Das Sprichwort bei Hans Sachs, I: Verzeichnis der Sprichwörter, 1904; Charles Schweitzer, “Sprichwörter und sprichwörtliche Redensarten bei Hans Sachs,” Hans Sachs Forschungen, ed. A. L. Stiefel, 1894; now see also Reinhard Dithmar, Martin Luthers Fabeln und Sprichwörter, 1989. Taylor and Mieder observe that Martha Lenschau’s collection of Grimmelshausen’s proverbs is a model for later works. C. Sources for Medieval European Proverbs in the Vernacular Before discussing Singer’s work (which culminates in the great TPMA; see below) and continuing my discussion of German scholarship, it is necessary to look briefly at the history of scholarship on proverbs in Western Europe, as proverbs in German speaking countries flourished as part of this civilization.

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After glancing at the classical Latin foundation, I shall begin with current scholarship in France and then turn to England, all the while affirming the European continuum and spirit. All work with medieval Latin sources of proverbs begins with the collection by Hans Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 9 vols., 1963–1986. For classical Latin proverbs, one should also consult August Otto, Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Römer, 1890; the research then was extended by Morris C. Sutphen, A Collection of Latin proverbs, 1902 = American Journal of Philology XXII (1901): 1–28, 121–48, 241–60, 361–91, and by Victor Szelinski, “Nachträge und Ergänzungen zu Otto, Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Römer,” Ph.D. diss. Jena 1892. For medieval Latin proverbs, the most extensive collection from manuscripts is Jakob Werner, Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sinnsprüche des Mittelalters, 1912. In her seminal essay, “The Paremiological Tradition in Medieval Culture,” Proverbium 17 (2000): 349–68, Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker paints in large brush strokes a picture of medieval culture mediated through the schools that resulted in a merger of classical and Christian learning as revealed in European proverb collections, of which she analyzes four collections produced from 875 to 1150. Masterfully she assembles a continuum of European civilization and a shared world view in which the monastery schools become the foundation and meeting place of classical and Christian culture, transmitting to pupils secular antique learning, beginning with Cato’s Distichs (continuing with Latin and Greek authors) and Biblical learning, starting with “Psalms” (see her essay, “Des Disticha Catonis en Espagne, Italie et France,” Europhras 88 [1987]: Phraséologie contrastive: Actes du colloque international Klingenthal-Strasbourg, 12–16 mai 1988, ed. Gertrud Gréciano, 421–30. Proverbs become the universal language of culture by which literati express themselves. Relying on the linguistic issues expressed by Jolles, the lexicological scholarship of Algirdas Greimas (“Idiotismes, proverbs, dictons,” Cahiers de Lexicologie 2 [1960]: 41–60), the analytical examination of linguistic structures used by Eckhard Rattunde (Li Proverbes au Vilain: Untersuchungen zur romanischen Spruchdichtung des Mittelalters, 1966), the rhetorical deftness of Lausberg, and Edmond Faral (Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, 1924), and the study of orality by Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy, 1982) and Zumthor (La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, 1984), Schulze-Busacker blends together these pieces of a complex contemporary picture of the paremiological landscape. She highlights in this picture the medieval emphasis of pairing visual and aural stimuli in instruction; nevertheless, her portrayal dovetails closely with Singer’s chronological

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presentation earlier in the century of the development of medieval paremiology, as well as with Barry Taylor’s description of the European milieu in “Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 [1992]: 19–35). Schulze-Busacker, Singer, and Taylor – three eminent paremioligists – find in the medieval school curriculum and its ideology (viewing the school as the guardian of secular and religious learning) the soil out of which initially Latin proverb collections emerge; however these are followed soon by both bilingual collections in Latin and in the vernacular and, in time, by collections that make exclusive use of the vernacular. Medieval educational ideology viewed proverbs and sententiae as the ideal instrument to teach grammar, but regarded grammar as the foundation of theological and ethical training; auctores, florilegia, and collectanea were used to teach ethics, rhetorics and dialectics. Using four major medieval proverb collections, Schulze-Busacker demonstrates the continuity in educational approaches from the early to the late Middle Ages. The first, the Collectanea of Heiricus of Auxerre of 875, displays the rhetorical and theological culture of its author, but reveals also its classical cultural background; it incorporates Greek and Latin authors, stressing “the ancients.” The second, by Othlo of St. Emmeram, composed in 1062, seeks to balance classical writings with Christian doctrine, replacing pagan authors with more than 1300 proverbs taken from the Bible. Third, there is Egbert of Liège (Lüttich), who published his Fecunda ratis at the same time as Othlo. He relies on classical and Biblical proverbs and excerpts church fathers, but he introduces 200 proverbs from vernacular sources marked “vulgo dicitur,” showing that vernacular material has attained the status of didactic material (Schulze Busacker, 357) Fourth, there is Serlo of Wilton, an Englishman educated in Paris who taught rhetoric in Paris around 1150–1170 and composed a collection of 60 proverbs with commentary and translation in Latin, as well as a series of Latin, French, and English additions (Serlo of Wilton, Proverbia, ed. Jan Öberg, 1965). Instead of using the traditional texts of Cato et al., he incorporates 20 vernacular French or Anglo-Norman proverbs, whose origin Singer assumes to be contemporary with Serlo. At the beginning of the 13th century, Serlo’s collection becomes a model for Anglo-Norman England and France as Proverbia magistri Serlonis (the substratum of known French-Latin anthologies); the Proverbes au vilain becomes the other model, which Antoine Le Roux de Lincy (Le livre des proverbes français, II, 376–85, 1842) published among other historical collections. Joseph Morawski (Proverbes français antérieurs au XVe siècle, 1965) researched published collections (starting with Le Roux de Lincy), as well as published and unpublished manuscripts for proverbs and proverbial expressions. His exten-

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sive notes and learned commentaries on manuscript variants show how the two models compete with and influence each other, resulting in large compilations known as Proverbes rurauz et vulgauz. Schulze-Busacker traces the continuing development of the vernacular proverb in medieval northern France and in Anglo-Norman England through Wace and Chrétien. This later literary tradition is the subject of Grace Frank, “Proverbs in Medieval Literature,” MLN 58 (1943): 508–15; she demonstrates in a rather uneven examination of Jean de Meun, Villon, Rutebeuf, Christine de Pisan, and others that medieval literature cannot be properly understood without an understanding of proverbs that are an integral part of it. The lasting value of her work is not her polemic against those who derided proverbs, but her wonderful edition (with Dorothy Miner) of Proverbes en rimes: Text and Illustrations of the Fifteenth Century from a French Manuscript in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, produced in 1937. An early, well introduced, philologically exacting publication, it makes evident the paired visuality of text and image in the production of late-medieval vernacular texts that has become part of education, entertainment and the means of producing other European texts. Barry Taylor takes great pains to emphasize the continuity of the classical, the Biblical, and the popular traditions, which he finds revealed in proverb collections throughout the Middle Ages in all of Europe. Regardless of whether collections were published in Latin, bilingual, or in vernacular format, he affirms that in addition to law, proverb collections continued to serve three basic purposes: education (in rhetoric or poetics), preaching, and instruction in epistolary composition (“Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 [1992]: 19–35, here 32). He examines a great many collections in order to prove his point that the Distichs of Cato and the wisdom books of the Bible continued to have the greatest impact on proverbs, with Cato, in his opinion, being even more important than the Bible because of the formal and informal training Cato provided in eloquence and composition. Looking at paired oppositional themes of national/domestic, religious/secular, popular/learned, Taylor finds that the secular is often made religious and the popular often learned, but not vice versa. The domestic is often interspersed with the national, where even in mirrors for princes, the father – son instructional model introduced by Cato and the Proverbs of Solomon (Prov.1:1; 2:1; 3:1; ibid.) is upheld. Other important scholarly work, much of it comparative on chiefly French, but also English proverbs, deserves mention. Richesse du proverbe, vol. I: Le proverbe au moyen âge, ed. François Suard and Claude Buridant, 1984, is a collection of essays situating the proverb

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among literate French society of the Middle Ages and within French medieval literature (Anne-Marie Bautier), relating it to sermons and preaching (Claude Buridant), drawing on comparative medieval French and English paremiology focusing on the proverbs of Hendyng (called the son of Marcolf), linking it to ballads (Pierre Demarolle), and analyzing proverbs within literary medieval works of Bertrand du Guesclin (Jean-Claude Faucon), le Roman de la Rose (Eric Hicks), Girart d’Amiens (Antoinette Saly), Chansons de geste (François Suard), le Mystère de S. Didier de Langres (Alain-Juilien Surdel). James Woodrow Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases, 1982, interconnects well with Bartlett Jere Whiting, the great English paremiologist of European stature, in presenting proverbs from about 100 medieval French texts from 1300–1515. He does not clearly define what he means by a “sentence,” probably because of the fluid nature of his sources, many of which Whiting put at his disposal. He provides an excellent paremiological introduction on his scope, sources, definition, classification of proverbial materials and the composition of the dictionary. Hassell follows the conceptual model which Whiting established in his many English proverb collections, confirmed by Susanne Schmarje (Das sprichwörtliche Material in den Essais von Montaigne, 1973, 2 vols., see 2, chpt. III), using the following subcategories: 1. the proverb (das Sprichwort); 2. the proverb bound to space/and or time, e. g., “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” (das gebundene Sprichwort); 3. the narrative proverb (das erzählende Sprichwort); 4. the proverbial discourse (das sprichwörtliche Gespräch); 4a. the proverbial dialogue (der sprichwörtliche Dialog); and 4b. the proverbial monologue or wellerism (a comparison comprising a well-known quotation followed by a facetious sequel, e. g., “Mary, could I see it, quoth blind Hugh,” published by John Heywood in 1533, quoted in deproverbio.com “wellerism”) (der sprichwörtliche Monolog); 5. the proverbial commentary (der sprichwörtliche Kommentar); 6. the proverbial expression (der sprichwörtliche Ausdruck); 6a. the proverbial phrase (die sprichwörtliche Redensart); 6b. the proverbial modifier (die sprichwörtliche Bestimmung); 6c. the proverbial combination (die sprichwörtliche Verbindung); 6d. the proverbial comparison (der sprichwörtliche Vergleich); 6e. the proverbial metaphor (die sprichwörtliche Metapher). In addition, he also identifies the comparative proverbial metaphor, the metonymical proverbial metaphor and the periphrastic proverbial metaphor (see also Wendy Pfeffer, Proverbs in Medieval Occitan Literature, 1997, 3). Ample quotations are listed from these works. The alphabetical organization of key words under lemmas makes comparative studies possible between English and French texts. Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker, Proverbes et expressions proverbiales dans la littérature nar-

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rative du Moyen Age français: Recueil et analyse, 1985, is a comprehensive, exemplary scholarly literary study of proverbs and proverbial expressions in medieval French literature of the 12th and 13th centuries. The introduction focuses on the nature of the literary proverb and methods of approaching it; it is followed by a historical survey of French medieval literature, in particular of courtly literature (Chrétien de Troyes), but also of Gautier d’Arras, Hue de Rotelande (12th c.), and the anonymous Li Proverbes au vilain (12th c.) and additional works of Robert Wace, the fabliaux, and other medieval French literary texts. There is a thematic contextually organized and annotated proverb index of all texts. Wendy Pfeffer reviews theoretical approaches grounded in past scholarship, but focuses on a careful definition and description of the body of troubadour poetry based on new editions and recent scholarship on orality, literacy, and social history. She views the complex interweaving of proverbs and proverbial expressions in poetry as indications of the sophistication of the audience, of its mentalité, of the fact that proverbs must be viewed both as compositional tools and subjects of analysis, and of the literary and cultural milieu of the time. She relies substantively on the excellent work done by Eugen Cnyrim, Sprichwörter, sprichwörtliche Redensarten und Sentenzen bei den provenzalischen Lyrikern, 1888, but updates and extends it in her erudite presentation of the work of major troubadour poets, in whose poetry proverbs are important elements. For a basic overview of French proverbs and proverbial expressions of all periods, one should turn to Jacques Pineaux, Proverbes et dictons français, 1956, who provides not only copious alphabetically organized proverbs, but reviews major French proverb collections and the work of early paremiologists, such as Henri Estienne (1431–1598), Etienne Pasquier (1529–1615), and, above all, Antoine Jean Victor Le Roux de Lincy (1806–1869); he also describes the use of literary proverbs from the Middle Ages on of major authors, such as François Rabelais, Mathurin Régnier, Jean de la Fontaine and Jean Baptiste Molière. Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, Le livre des proverbes français, 1842, 2nd ed. 1859, remains the classic work in French paremiology that surveys the entire field. Early dissertations on medieval French proverbs are listed by Archer Taylor and Wolfgang Mieder, Selected Writings on Proverbs, 1975, 188–89. Although this essay stresses the development of the paremiological tradition in the Western European continuum, basic works on Iberian proverbs should receive at least a brief mention. The major overview of Spanish paremiology is provided by Louis Combet, Recherches sur le ‘refranero’ castellan, 1971. Still useful is the compilation by Ida von Düringsfeld and Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Sprichwörter der germanischen und romanischen

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Sprachen, 2 vols., 1872–1875, rpt. 1973. A handicap is that only one source is listed per proverb. For medieval proverbs, see Eleanor S. O’Kane (Sister M. Katherine Elaine C.S.C), Refranes y frases proverbiales españolas de la edad media, 1959. A multicultural perspective with an introduction in Italian is found in Augusto Arthaber’s Dizionario comparato di proverbi e modi proverbiali italiani, latini, francesi, spagnoli, tedeschi, inglesi e greci antichi con relativi indici sistematico-alfabetici, 1929, rpt. 1981. The standard dictionary of Catalan proverbs is J. Musso di Fontes, Diccionario de las … refranes de la lengua catalana, 1876; but very important is also Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales y otras formulas communes de la lengua castellana. 1627, 1906, 1924 2nd ed., Louis Combet, 1967, rev. Robert Jammes and Maite Mirandreu, 2000; see also Louis Combet, “Lexicographie et sémantique: Quelques remarques à propos de la réédition du ‘Vocabulario de refranes’ de Gonzalo Correas,” Bulletin Hispanique 71 (1969): 231–54; see also Francisco Rodríguez Marín, Mas de 21,000 refranes castellanos no contenidos en la copiosa collección del maestro Gonzalo Correas, 1926, and 12,600 refranes mas, 1931. Important from the comparative and theoretical perspectives is Julia Sevilla Muñoz, Hacia una aproximación conceptual de las paremias francesas y españolas, 1988. José M. Sbarbi, El refranero general español, parte recopilado, y parte compuesto, 1874–78 reprints manuscripts and older books of proverbs. See also José M. Sbarbi, Monografía sobre los refranes, adagios y proverbios castellanos, 1891. Tomás Antonio Sánchez lists “Proverbios morales del rabbi Sem Tob” in his anthology, Poetas castellanos anteriores al siglo XV, 1864 cont. by Pedro José Pidal (pp. 331–72). The JudeoArab tradition is represented by Raphael Benazeraf, Recueil de ‘refranes’ (proverbes) judeo-espagnols du Maroc (hakatía), 1978. The Libro de los buenos proverbios attributed to Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-’lbadi (Arabic, 9th c.) was translated into Spanish; it was edited by Harlan Gary Sturm in a critical edition in 1970. There are also the Moral Proverbs of Santob de Carrión, ed. T. Anthony Perry, 1987, offering Jewish wisdom in Christian Spain; Jane Cheryl Block published An Annotated Bibliography of Romance Poetry of Medieval Spanish, Jewish and Converso Authors, 1997. Specialized regionally is Alonso de Barros, Refranero espagnol: colección de ocho mil refranes populares, ordenados, concordados y explicados, precedida del Libro de los proverbios morales, 1961. The proverbs of Cervantes have been extracted by U. R. Burke, Sancho Panza’s Proverbs and Others Which Occur in Don Quixote, 1892, and by José Coll y Vehi, Los refranes del Quijote, 1874. Portuguese proverbs are listed and discussed in Pedro Chaves, Rifoneiro Português, 1928. Italian proverbs find consideration by: Antonio Alfani, Proverbi e modi proverbiali scelti ed annotati da A. Alfani, 1882, 2nd ed. 1890; Gui-

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seppe Giusti, Raccolta di proverbi toscani publicata da Gino Capponi, 1852, rpt. 1926; and Paolo Roos, Sentenza e proverbio nell’antichità e i ‘Distici di Catone’: Il testo latino e i volgarizzamenti italiani, 1984. Turning from the Romance language tradition to English proverbs, it is advisable to begin with the general overview provided by F. Edward Hulme, Proverb Lore: Being a Historical Study of the Similarities, Contrasts, Topics, Meanings, and Other Facets of Proverbs, Truisms, and Pithy Sayings, as Expressed by the People of Many Lands and Times, 1902, rpt. 1968; but one should proceed immediately to the sine qua non of research tools, namely The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. F. P. Wilson, 3rd ed. 1979. Wilson’s introduction cites William Caxton’s first dated publication as Dictes and the Sayings of the Philosophers, 1477. It situates the proverbs in the schools and the impact of classical learning achieved in the Renaissance as made evident in works, such as Erasmus’ Adagia (1500) While the Introduction focuses on later proverb collections and manuals of rhetoric, Shakespeare and Chaucer are singled out, and early modern proverb collections, including the Durham proverbs, are listed and described. The dictionary is especially rich in Shakespeare’s proverbs based on common life. To show how important proverbs were to 17th-century English writers, the dictionary annotates a list of 21 proverb collections published in London from 1640–1670. The bibliographical essay begins with an analysis of form, meaning, content of proverbs, and ends with a discussion of various classification models. For every expression and proverb included, the date at which it is first documented in a work or collection is given. For many proverbs a long history of analogues is cited, beginning with Latin classical sources. Taylor and Mieder (Selected Writing on Proverbs, 1975) also mention the continuing importance of the more generalized work of W. Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1869, 2nd ed. 1882 and 3rd ed. 1907, a work that still deserves our respect, although it does not focus specifically on the Middle Ages. For medieval English proverbs, a good source is George Latimer Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary, 1929, rev. 2006, ed. Martin H. Manser and Stephen Curtis, It is an offshoot of the Oxford English Dictionary, designed to trace as far as possible English proverbs and proverbial phrases in English use. It lists more quotations from early sources than the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, including the so-called Proverbs of Alfred (ca. 1270) and the Proverbs of Hendyng (ca. 1320). Proverbs are grouped alphabetically and by subject with copious cross-referencing throughout, easing access. In addition, Archer Taylor and Wolfgang Mieder, Selected Writings on the Proverb, 188, mention Walter W. Skeat’s work

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Early English Proverbs: Chiefly of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries with Illustrative Quotations, 1910. Taylor recognizes the work as important, but reports that Skeat provides only cursory notes rather than full explanations. For specific collections and examinations, we begin with the Durham Proverbs, ed. Olof Arngart, Speculum 56 (1981): 288–300. Arngart provides an edition of 46 Latin and Anglo-Saxon proverbs contained in a Durham cathedral ms. of the 11th century; see also his earlier edition of the Durham Proverbs, 1956. Since the ms. includes some maxims that are unique to this ms., they are considered the bridge between the oldest Anglo-Saxon gnomic verses and the Middle English version. Arngart edited also The Proverbs of Alfred: An Emended Text, 1978. Blanche Colton Williams ed., Gnomic Poetry in Anglo Saxon, 1914, rpt. 1966, is useful for finding AngloSaxon sources on wisdom proverbs. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, The Solomon Complex: Reading Wisdom in Old English Poetry, 1988, begins her study from the perspective of Zumthor’s question of the “way of knowledge that we can adopt in the 1980’s with respect to the object we propose to study” (182). Her focus is on the model of parental instruction modeled by Cato and by Solomon, which she finds represented in an amazing number of OE texts from Precepts to Solomo and Saturn II, which dramatizes competitive possibilities of pupil and teacher, speaker and listener, riddler and riddle solver, poet and audience. Stanley B. Greenfield, “Lore and Wisdom,” A Critical History of Old English Literature, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder with a Survey of Anglo-Latin Backgrounds by Michael Lapidge, 1996, 253–79, focuses in his comprehensive analysis of wisdom poetry on runes, charms, gnomes, proverbs, riddles, and homiletic Christian poems dealing with rules for conduct; in his readings of poems he stresses their mnemonic characteristics and their function in a largely oral society. We turn now to Bartlett Jere Whiting, the acknowledged master paremiologist. Already in his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, “Studies in the Middle English Proverb,” 1932, where Bartlett Jere Whiting begins his life long work of studying Old and Middle English proverbs in a comparative manner, starting with the English adaptations of the sententious Latin Disticha Catonis (11th c.), he considers both Middle English romances as well as the early English drama, and concludes through paremiological comparisons that there was great borrowing from French sources, but also strong reliance on English parallels, adaptations and sources. Following the methodology of Morris Palmer Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950), he made great advances in theoretical analysis, as well as in collecting, archiving, comparing, and interpreting proverbs, as for instance in Chaucer’s

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Use of Proverbs, 1934, rpt. 1973, and Proverbs in the Earlier English Drama with Illustrations from Contemporary French Plays, 1938, rpt. 1969. The study that he published with Helen Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500, 1968, has become an exemplary research tool in medieval paremiological studies, as it establishes a classification system for paremiographers working in the Middle Ages. Whiting has demonstrated the usefulness of this historical model in his many proverb collections: it has been adopted successfully by other researchers, such as James Woodruff Hassell who strove to establish national proverb compendia based on historical principles. See also Whiting’s explanation of this model in “A Model for a Scientific Proverb Edition,” Proverbium 25 (1975): 995–96. Susan E. Deskis, Beowulf and the Medieval Proverb Tradition, 1996, deserves mention as well. She examines the form, function, and place of individual proverbs within the larger corpus of early medieval proverbs; she treats sententiae as discrete units, covers in this work 31 proverbial and sentential passages, grouped in transitions, beginnings, and summaries; functionally she sees proverbs in explanatory and summary roles and compares their appearance to semantic knots in which individual and communal experiences intertwine. Johanna Kramer published “The Study of Proverbs in Anglo-Saxon Literature: Recent Scholarship, Resources for Research, and the Future of the Field”, English Studies 89.3 (2008): 263–72. This work focuses on scholarship of the last 15 years and discusses the major research tools available for the study of medieval vernacular Anglo-Saxon and Latin proverbs. Kramer advocates a bi-focal approach to the understanding of proverbs: they should be studied contextually (in terms of their history, reception, and transmission), but also in isolation. Her scholarship is a promising contribution to future studies of proverbs in Anglo-Saxon literature. To fill in the West- and North European continuum, it would be appropriate to list briefly general sources for proverb collections containing proverbs from the Middle Ages; the sources are taken largely, but not exclusively, from Taylor and Mieder, ibid., 190–92. Danish: Edvard Mau, Dansk ordsprogs-skat, 2 vols., 1879. Dutch: Pieter J. Harrebomée, Spreekwoordenboek der nederlandsche taal, 1853–1870; Antonius Tunnicius, Die älteste niederdeutsche Sprichwörtersammlung 1513; trans. into High German, ed. and intr. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 1870; Richard Jente, Proverbia Communia: A 15th Century Collection o f Dutch Proverbs Together with the Low German Version, 1947. Finnish: Väinö Solstrand, Finlands svenska folkdiktning,vol. III: Ordstäv, 1923.

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Icelandic: Finnur Jónsson, Íslenskt málsháttasafn, 1920; Carolyn Larrington, A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry, 1993. Irish: Thomas F. O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs, 1922. Norwegian: Ivar Aasen, Norske ordsprog 1856, 2nd. ed. 1881; Reidar T. Christiansen, Gamle visdomsord, 1928; rev. 1992. Scotch (Gaelic): Alexander Nicholson, A Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases, 1881, 4th ed. 1996 Malcolm Macinnes and Ian Macdonald. Swedish: Fredrik Ström, Svenskarna í sina ordspråk, 1926. Swiss: Samuel Singer, “Alte schweizerische Sprichwörter,” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde XX (1916): 389–419. But let us turn away from regional North and West European collections of proverbs and redirect our attention to scholarship that reflects to a greater degree the European medieval continuum: Grace Frank, “Proverbs in Medieval Literature,” MLN 58 (1943): 508–15, writing contemporaneously with Singer, surveys briefly the West European proverb tradition and demonstrates through an examination of French literature, specifically Jean de Meun, Villon, Rutebeuf, and Christine de Pizan, that medieval literature cannot be properly understood without an understanding of contemporary medieval proverbs. The lasting value of her work is not her polemic against those who derided the preponderance of proverbs in the Middle Ages, but her wonderful edition (with Dorothy Miner) of Proverbes en rimes: Text and Illustrations of the Fifteenth Century from a French Manuscript in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, produced in 1937. An early, well introduced, philologically exacting publication, it allows us to realize the visuality of text and image in the production of late medieval vernacular texts that have become part of education, entertainment, and the production of other texts. Scholarship of the broad common European proverb tradition begins properly with the great paremiologist Samuel Singer and culminates with the Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medii Aevi (TPMA) directed by Ricarda Liver, for which Singer prepared the foundation through his work, Sprichwörter des Mittelalters (3 vols., 1944–1947), which constitutes the best comparative study of medieval German and Romance proverbs and proverb collections. His efforts and the spirit in which he collected proverbs are clearly at odds with the nationalistic, patriotic impulse that guided K. F. W. Wander in 1866. Working during World War II under the most difficult circumstances, resisting both fascism and nationalism, his underlying purpose was to affirm

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and demonstrate the cultural continuities in European civilization, to which proverbs and maxims in Germanic and Romance languages bear witness. He describes the evolution of medieval German collections of proverbs, which take their point of departure from the Dicta Catonis, rendered into the vernacular by Notker III. of St. Gall in the 11th century. Using a European comparative framework, Singer begins his erudite treatment as a prolegomena to a work on proverbs in the Middle Ages from 500 to 1500, for which he collected 80,000 proverbs and proverb-like idioms in 3 vols. He discusses several of the most important European early proverb collections in Germany, France and England in detail in terms of their content, intertextual relations, style, influences, sources, functions, purposes, and actual uses. Vol. I begins with the Germanic traditions of the Havamal and Heusler’s scholarship, before turning to the Hildebrandslied and the Salomo and Marcolf dialogues. Directed at pupils in monastery schools, Egbert von Lüttich’s Fecunda ratis (1030) is discussed as the first work produced in Germany in Latin that contains classical proverbs, citations from the fables of Avian, proverbs from German popular sources, and proverbs from the dialogues of Salomo und Marcolf. Cato provided the model for the rhymed form in distichs; the instructional purpose introduced by Cato influenced the instruction of the pupils in the monastery schools who were to be educated in morals and life. Egbert compares writing to guiding a ship through choppy waters; he views his work as a moral guide to help his students chart safely through the high seas of life. Singer concludes the volume with Ysengrimus and a list of proverbs and bibliography. In vol. II, he describes the French tradition (incl. Flemish) of the Proverbia rusticorum and the Proverbes au vilain, as well as Freidank’s Bescheidenheit (discretio). He calls this work neither a collection of proverbs nor a didactic poem, but a collection of aphorisms, which are often formulated in the first person in “the confessional mode.” Using Freidank’s proverbs, he documents medieval thinking, literacy, and familiarity with contemporary and earlier German works of literature, as well as Latin literature and the Bible. In vol. III he continues his discussion of 13th-and 14th-century collections, focusing on Freidanks Bescheidenheit and the proverbs of Hendyngs in Old English. Viewing his work as a thesaurus of medieval proverbs, Singer lists amazing medieval and classical literary parallels, analogues, sources, variants in the Latin, some Greek, German, French, and English collections. At his death in l948, he left 35 vols. of collected proverbs. His work has been continued and expanded into the Thesaurus proverbiorum medii aevi: Lexikon der Sprichwörter des romanisch-germanischen Mittelalters, 13 vols. plus 1 vol. on sources under the direction of Ricarda Liver by the Kuratorium Singer der

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Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften and published in l995–2002; it constitutes the most important source for proverbs and proverbial expressions in the Latin and German Middle Ages and the most important interdisciplinary research tool in European medieval paremiology. No other bibliographic work comes close to displaying the rich interlinkage of proverbs in the common European intellectual tradition. Proverbs are listed by key terms/topics, and organized within each topic by numerically identifiable thematic categories. Proverbs with one segment are listed once; those with additional segments or parts have additional entries under each part. Languages of the Middle Ages in which proverbs are documented range from Greek, Latin (incl. Classical), French, Provencal, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Norse (Icelandic, Swedish, Danish), English, Dutch and German (an astounding total of 12 or 14 languages, depending on how one views Old Norse). Translations are provided into modern German (except for proverbs found in early New High German). Biblical sources are cited in the Vulgata version, translated into the Luther version; within categories, chronology dictates the arrangement of sources. Among the work of other European paremiographers with international proverb collections, one should cite the following: Leading a group of international scholars, Matti Kuusi prepared the Proverbia Septentrionalia: 900 Balto-Finnic Proverb Types with Russian, Baltic, German and Scandinavian Parallels, 1985. Synchronic and comparative, the work lists common proverbs of Balto-Finnic regions that form a linguistically and geographically unified group among the Scandinavians, Balts, and Russians, according to Mieder, Proverbs, 123. Kuusi provided also a theoretical foundation to international scholarship in his short monograph, Parömiologische Betrachtungen, 1957, in which he reviews studies carried out by major European and American paremiologists and proposes a series of methodological principles for various paremiological problems. See also Outi Lauhakangas’s application of Kuusi’s work, The Matti Kuusi International Type System of Proverbs, 2001. Mieder confirms the value of Gyula Paczolay’s European Proverbs in 55 Languages with Equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese (1997), particularly for citing 106 monographs that provide proverbs in their original languages with English translations. Emanuel Strauss produced a massive compilation of proverbs in 3 vols. of his Dictionary of European Proverbs (1994) with 1804 proverbs in major European languages. Another early collection is F. Edward Hulme’s Proverb Lore: Being a Historical Study of the Similarities, Contrasts, Topics, Meanings, and Other Facets of Proverbs, Truisms, and Pithy Sayings, as Expressed by the People of Many Lands and Times, 1902 rpt. 1968.

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D. Analyses and Theoretical Modern Works Having glanced at the European continuum, we return to theoretical modern works that have advanced scholarship on medieval paremiology in the vernacular MHG tradition and begin with Mathilde Hain, Sprichwort und Volkssprache: Eine volkskundlich-soziologische Dorfuntersuchung, 1951. In Hain’s sociological investigation, the proverb becomes the instrument of studying the values of society; according to Hain the language of proverbs reveals the dualism between values of those who live in the city and country; she studies the traditional ethical norms of farmers, the more utility-oriented language of city burghers, and she analyzes important sociological norms. Her findings point to the orality of proverbs as the milieu in which they thrive. She finds that proverbs in society reveal binding values and claims that they are used to teach values, ethics and norms. Those who use proverb most frequently tend to be distributed in more advanced age groups, and their use is didactic. Her work has demonstrated the closeness of the proverb to the riddle in “Sprichwort und Rätsel,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, 2nd ed., vol. III, 1962, col. 2727–42. She suggests that the functional use of proverbs needs to be established for different professions, age groups and urban-rural populations. Hermann Bausinger, Formen der “Volkspoesie” (1968; see “Redensart und Sprichwort,” 90–106), begins his analysis by discussing “Volkspoesie” as an historical creation of Johann Gottfried Herder and scholars around him and shows how differently Herder and the Brothers Grimm understood and situated the concept. After taking a critical position toward Jolles’s concept of “einfache Formen,” which he sees as an outgrowth of the romantic conception of nature and formal creativity, Bausinger introduces his own conception of the formulaic nature of language which underlies all human interaction and literary productivity and all domains of human knowledge and activity, such as play. Proverbs he regards as a “partiell gültige Lebensregel” (a partially valid rule of life”), formulated not as a rule, but as a commentary or an indication of lawfulness or regularity, a guide to how people should live. His examination of legal proverbs and those linked to weather (as well as wellerisms seen as folk humor and playfulness in speech, as for instance by Eulenspiegel, 103) is especially insightful. He notes the one-sidedness of proverbs, which often leads to their contradictory nature; the established authority of proverbs underlines their didactic function. Paul Zumthor, “L’épiphonème proverbial,” Revue des sciences humaines 41.163 (1976): 313–28, investigates the rhetorical use of French medieval proverbs in literary sources. Upon describing and surveying Old French prov-

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erb collections (Proverbes au vilain) and late-medieval collections (Proverbes en rimes) he shows that various terms were used to describe proverbs; he points out their common popular European origins and their derivation from the oral tradition, and he distinguishes between the proverb and sententiae (maxims) associated with literary, often classical (Biblical) sources. Zumthor surveys the treatment of proverbs in books of rhetoric, before analyzing proverbs in late-medieval French works e. g., the Roman de la Rose moralisé of the rhetorician Jean Molinet (1435–1507), examining the style, meter and rhyme of proverbs and maxims, showing also the relationship of image and text, as well as the placement of the proverb in Proverbes en rimes. In his work of 1987, La lettre et la voix: De la “litterature médiévale”, his focus is on the instability (mouvance) of texts that incorporate both the oral and the written tradition. The use of proverbs and sententiae is linked to the ordo of the society, as common values shared by the narrator and the listener are evoked through the sententiae and their focus on memory, truth and auctoritas. In public performance as well as in silent reading, this auctoritas is evoked in performance that affirms the cohesiveness of the group. E. Major Contributors to German Scholarship on Paremiology Major contributors to the field of paremiology have contributed to theoretical issues as discussed above, shaping the definition of the proverb and the maxim, and setting out approaches to it in terms of its history, usage, function, distribution, orality, literariness, traditionality, innovation, metaphor, visuality, anonymity, specificity, discourse community, intertextuality, centricity, centrifugality, structure, distinctness, relatedness to other genres, etc., but they have also amassed dispersed collections that call for new documentation, organization, presentation, focus, vitality, and materiality. The work of giants in the field has already been listed above; their formative imprint on the field is indelible. Georg Benecke’s, Wilhelm Müller’s (and Friedrich Zarncke’s) Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (BMZ), 3 vols., 1854, rpt. 1963, remains unsurpassed as a source of proverbs and sententiae from MHG texts. Equally important is Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 3 vols., 1869–1872, rpt. 1970 (both are now available online as well: http://germazope.uni-trier.de/ Projects/MWV/wbb (last accessed on March 15, 2009). Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm shaped the field of paremiology through their recognition of the importance of folk speech, their knowledge of important collections, and their focus on proverbs in many of their seminal publications. Wilhelm Grimm’s study of Freidank’s Bescheidenheit (1834) was to have been a cornerstone of his collection of MHG proverbs. Jakob Grimm

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published his essay “Von der Poesie im Recht” (1815), citing some of the many legal proverbs that were explained in Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, 1828. Their Deutsches Wörterbuch (DW) 1854–1863 is a treasure chest of proverbs and proverbial expressions. The various editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen from 1812 on contained increasing numbers of proverbs, reflecting the interest of the Brothers Grimm in folk speech. Wolfgang Mieder pays a tribute to their work in paremiology in Findet so werdet ihr suchen! Die Brüder Grimm und das Sprichwort, 1986. André Jolles, Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz, 1930, rpt. 1968. Jolles theorizes about the relationship of form and the linguistic impulse, out of which simple forms “Gestalten” emerge necessarily, and give order to the types of human confrontations with the world through the medium of language. He addresses the origin of proverbs, defines them, and argues that they are not didactic. For him, proverbs point to an experience with the world, where the outcome is formulated in the proverb. Proverbs look back on experience with a tone of resignation. “Every proverb puts the lid back on the well, but only after the child has drowned” (159). Jolles focuses on the proverb as one of his simple forms and structure; and criticizes sharply Seiler’s concept of “Volksläufigkeit”; according to Jolles, proverbs focus on particular asyndetically formulated experiences, rather than on generalized processes and uphold the importance of hindsight. For an application of this theory, see Walter A Koch, ed. Simple Forms: An Encyclopaedia of Simple Text-Types in Lore and Literatur, 1994. Archer Taylor, The Proverb, 1931; rpt. 1962, is the basis of scholarly, worldwide research on proverb studies. It begins with an erudite discussion of the origins of proverbs, definition, metaphor, proverbial expressions, proverbs in narratives, literature, loan translations, biblical and classical proverbs, style of proverbs, and review of proverbs in European literature. For all of the proverbs cited, he published An Index in l934. The Proverb and its companion volume have become the sterling standard on proverb scholarship. It has been updated, so to speak, by Wolfgang Mieder’s work of the same title: Proverbs: A Handbook, 2004. Wolfgang Mieder is, by general consent, the most erudite and productive active scholar who is currently working on proverbs on the international and historical horizon. He specializes in paremiology in German speaking lands, but works with equal creativity and expertise on Yankee proverbs. Together with Lutz Röhrich he has published the insightful and informative reference work on proverbs: Sprichwort, 1977; he is also responsible for the International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography vol. I (1982);

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vol. II = Supl. I (1800–1981), 1990; vol. III = Supl. II (1932–1991), 1993. My essay is deeply indebted to this reference tool. He also published the International Bibliography of Explanatory Essays on Individual Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions, 1977, and Proverbs in World Literature: A Bibliography, 1996. Of seminal importance has been his work, Proverbs in Literature: An International Bibliography, 1978. In this work, he indexes scholarly monographs, dissertations and articles that treat proverbs and proverbial expressions in literature. The bibliography is divided into a general and substantial specific sections, arranged alphabetically. Erudite in all historical and contemporary areas of German proverb scholarship as well as in comparative American and British paremiological studies, he has provided amazing insight and information on medieval proverbs from the Ambraser Liederbuch, “Sprichwort und Volkslied: Eine Untersuchung des Ambraser Liederbuches vom Jahre 1582,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 22 (1977): 23–35; “liebe und leide. Sprichwörtliche Liebesmetaphorik in Gottfrieds Tristan,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung, 2 (1997): 7–20; “Als man daz golt sol liutern in der esse: Sprichwörtliche Ironie und Didaktik in Hartmanns von Aue Erec,” MlatJb 36 (2001): 45–76; “‘To Pay the Piper’ and the Legend of the ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’,” Proverbium 2 (1985): 263–70 [n.b., the journal Proverbium is the most important journal devoted to paremiological scholarship]; “Eulenspiegel macht seine Mitbürger durch Schaden klug: Sprichwörtliches im ‘Dil Ulenspiegel’ von 1515,” Eulenspiegel-Jahrbuch 29 (1989): 27–50, where he interprets Eulenspiegel’s proverbs essentially as “Anti-Sprichwörter” [he annotates 111 proverbial texts and provides important bibliographical information]; Martin Luther (“Wes das Herz voll ist, des geht der Mund über,” Sprachspiegel 39 [1983]: 66–74), to modern innovative political proverbial usage and Antisprichwörter. His scholarship and that of his colleague and frequent collaborator Lutz Röhrich have been most important contributions to the study of proverbs and proverb-like expressions in the 20th century; Mieder has continued to be in the vanguard of changing approaches to scholarship, exemplifying the best. His most recent work in medieval German proverb research has dealt with communicative modes that are established or interrogated through proverbs. He has also published a collection of texts dealing with German proverbs, proverbial expressions, and wellerisms: Deutsche Sprichwörter und Redensarten, 1979. Lutz Röhrich, Das grosse Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten, 3 vols., 1991. As eminent folklorist and Director of the Institut für Volkskunde at the University of Freiburg, Röhrich has compiled an important sourcebook and research tool in German and international paremiology. He discusses definitions, variants, origins, imagery, form and content of proverbial ex-

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pressions; his collection documents proverbs from the Bible, law, social classes and professions, and he analyzes proverbs based on customs, superstitions and folk tales. F. Current Research, Approaches, Methods, Interpretations Older research stressed positivistic methods of compiling, identifying and commenting on proverbs or maxims in literary texts. The analysis of vernacular literature took as its guide the Latin tradition with its emphasis on rhetorics; studies, such as Henning Brinkmann, Zu Wesen und Form mittelalterlicher Dichtung (1928, nd ed. 1979), which focused on the concentration of proverbs in prologues and epilogues. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, less attention was paid to the literary tradition than to the innovative potential of texts and to the self-consciousness of authors; the study of proverbs and maxims was marginalized during this time. Subsequent historical and sociological studies have attempted to understand the literacy of different levels of society and the function of proverbs in the communication of these different groups. Whereas proverbs in French medieval texts were considered in terms of rhetorical modes, meaning, authority, voice, orality and literacy, and in terms of the communicative meaning of performance, it is only recently that the function and meaning of proverbs, maxims and of micro-texts in medieval German epics have been raised in terms of issues related to orality and the written tradition, intertextuality and the linkage of micro-texts to larger literary texts and discourse traditions (see Haug and Wachinger, Kleinstformen der Literatur). Recent scholarly work has reflected on the historical transformation of the meaning of micro-texts and historical changes in the uses and functions of proverbs in these texts. As a result, the study of microtexts has been proceeding historically; the point of departure for these studies being the traditions, horizons of expectation, horizons of knowledge and contexts that govern the of purposes that have been carried out by proverbs and maxims in texts at a particular historical moment. The scholarship that revolves around their use is attempting to create a new poetic for proverbs and micro-forms in the literary tradition; it is understood that such a poetics must be based on the study of the actual textual uses to which the proverbs are put. Manfred Eikelmann has been one of the leading scholarly voices in recent paremiological scholarship in Germany; since his dissertation of 1994 (Studien zum deutschen Sprichwort im Mittelalter), he has participated in the paremiological discourse in a leading capacity, offering scholarly comprehensive, yet detailed, evaluative surveys (“Sammelhandschriften von Sprichwörtern,” VL, 9, 2002, 169–183) and solidly argued and well supported inter-

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pretations of proverbs and sententiae in literary works as well as in related genre. His erudition in the courtly literature of the 12th and 13th centuries will be evident in the eagerly awaited reference work he is publishing with a group of scholars (including Heike Bismark and Tomas Tomasek) Handbuch der Sentenzen und Sprichwörter im höfischen Roman des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts: Artusromane nach 1230, Gralsromane und Tristanromane, 2009. The work is to highlight the position of proverbs at the transition from orality to literacy; apart from noting the distribution of proverbs, it will examine major works for proverbs and sententia, documenting parallel occurrences, networks of sententiae, and the mediation of knowledge of the world through orality. The work is to provide the foundation for the development of a new poetic founded on the intertextuality and newly recognized intermediality of proverbs and sententiae in a largely bilingual society where auctoritas validated orally mediated knowledge of the world and was in turn validated by orally transmitted communally shared knowledge. In an essay, “Das Sprichwort als Sammlungskontext: Beobachtungen zur Überlieferungsweise und kontextuellen Einbindung des deutschen Sprichworts im Mittelalter” (Kleinstformen der Literatur, ed. Haug and Wachinger, 1994, 91–116), Eikelmann asks how the meaning of a proverb is changed by different textual environments in which it may appear. By showing the presence of different horizons of expectation as a condition of its historical existence in different textual milieux, Eikelmann is able to establish a historically mediated understanding of genre and its function. He suggests that the transmission of proverbs be studied contextually, but that “Gattungsnachbarn” in collections be carefully identified and studied as part of a network of genre relationships. Eikelmann tackled the problem of auctoritas in the use of proverbs and sententiae in the courtly epic in his article, “Autorität und ethischer Diskurs: Zur Verwendung von Sprichwort und Sentenz in Hartmanns von Aue Iwein” (Autor und Autorschaft im Mittelalter, ed. Elizabeth Andersen, Jens Haustin, Anne Simon, and Peter Strohschneider, 1998, 73–100). In this essay he uses the concept of auctoritas validated by the author on the one hand, but by the literary tradition in which the work is situated, on the other. Courtly epics establish the authority of the writer through exemplary figures, creation myths, sources, origins and exemplary figures, but they also do so through citations, proverbs and sententiae, where the context in which these traditional devices are embedded is as important as the tradition. While texts have been approached from this perspective in French literature by Elizabeth Schulze-Busacker, MarieLouise Ollier, and Paul Zumthor, in German scholarship this perspective is relatively recent. Scholars like Manfred Eikelmann, Tomas Tomasek,

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Wernfried Hofmeister, and Silvia Reuvekamp have introduced complex intertextual questions of interpretation into MHG literature based on the function of these micro-forms and the values medieval society set for essentially bilingual readers/listeners attuned to orality, literacy and intermediality. Wernfried Hofmeister, Sprichwortartige Mikrotexte: Analysen am Beispiel Oswalds von Wolkenstein, 1990, undertakes a comprehensive study of proverbs and proverbial expression of the entire poetic corpus of this important medieval German poet. Hofmeister seeks to forge a usable model with objective criteria by which the proverbiality in texts of medieval literature, e. g., Oswald von Wolkenstein’s opus, can be identified, so that these proverbs and proverbial expressions, which he calls “Sprichwortartige Mikro-Texte” (micro-texts that resemble proverbs) can be analyzed. He posits philological and analytical criteria which allow him to conceptualize, understand and analyze the intertextuality of the 104 micro-texts he analyzes within the larger poetic work. He argues that a sentence must meet at least some of the following essential criteria to be called a proverb: closed form, anthropocentricity, experiential grounding, the possibility of generalizing, the presumed lexical familiarity of the public, sententiousness and brevity. He also posits optional characteristics, such as the use of the present tense, the indicative, the lack of a predicate, the use of the comparative or superlative, etc. In his interpretation of micro-texts he considers how they can function within the work. His findings are summarized in tables of proverbs, on which he comments using transgeneralization or intergeneralization. In addressing issues of intertextuality, he establishes a communicative perspective that heeds both the poetic voice and the public addressed. A carefully annotated index of proverbs helps the reader locate new proverbs in Oswald von Wolkenstein’s lyric poetry. Finally, a useful bibliography documents work on proverbs in German, focusing especially on the 1970’s and 1980’s. Olga Trokimenko is a medievalist who applies recent research findings in paremiology in her interpretation of MHG texts, in particular to Hartmann’s von Aue works; see, for instance, her articles: “Der saelden strâze: Sprichwörter in Hartmanns von Aue Gregorius,” Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 18 (2001): 329–51; and in “daz guot und weltlich êre und gotes hulde mêre zesamene in ein herze komen: Sprichwörter in Hartmanns von Aue Der arme Heinrich,” Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 17 (2000): 387–408; “Gedanken sint frî? Proverbs and Socialization of Genders in the Middle High German Didactic Poems Die Winsbeckin und der Winsbecke,” Res humanae proverbiorum et sententiarum. Ad honorem

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Wolfgangi Mieder, ed. Csaba Földes, 2004, 327–50. In analyzing Hartmann’s argumentation, Trokimenko uses prior positivistic scholarship productively in the identification of proverbs, their description, transmission, and in their comparison with French textual traditions, but she studies carefully the functions proverbs had within their textual milieu, focusing on their use and contextual meaning within Hartmann’s critique of the Arthurian world and its ideas of guot, êre and âventiure. In her study of Der Winsbecke and Die Winsbeckin she examines attitudes to gender through proverbs, concluding that for women moral qualities are ranked above intellectual qualities; in agreement with Bumke, she finds that it is the purpose of women to become “höfisch” and “gefuoc,” but that it is the purpose of men to become “wise.” Again, through an examination of the micro-structures within the larger whole, Trokimenko is able to show that the daughter compensates for her lack of experience with book learning and reliance on authority revealed in the proverbs: the use of proverbs, she concludes, is gendered. Manfred Eikelmann has compared and contrasted the literary and extra-literary use of proverbs. In a similar vein Silvia Reuvekamp carries out an analogous study in Sprichwort und Sentenz im narrativen Kontext: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik des höfischen Romans, 2007. Her analysis of proverbs and sententiae used in the courtly novel shows that these have been carefully culled from learned literary discourse environments to intensify the complexity of the written text through indirect or multi-vocal speech of great semantic density. She affirms that micro-forms bring to texts their own discourse history and their ability to create intertextual relationships; a horizon of knowledge is evident not only on the part of the writer or composer of the text, but for the audience that was asked to respond to the text in terms of the aesthetics of reception. Reuvekamp argues that complex micro-texts from different realms of knowledge presuppose an educated, intellectually demanding audience that was ready to understand these proverbs and sententiae as building blocks in the creation of a new, innovative genre that was to be viewed against an older tradition. The self consciousness of writers and their public in the collaborative enterprise called for by the creation of a new literary endeavor in the vernacular is revealed, according to Reuvekamp through the use of micro-forms. This collaboration between author and audience calls for an activation of the audience/reader response that is programmed into the work through the employment of micro-forms that assume a horizon of knowledge for both the author and the sophisticated medieval audience. Reuvekamp finds that this horizon of knowledge shows that a number of writers were steeped in medieval learning: in patristic studies, the canon, historiography, moral philosophy, etc., but that this horizon of knowledge

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also testifies to an educated public that was aware of the relationship of writing in the vernacular to the Latin tradition. Reuvekamp requires us to rethink the horizon of learning of the medieval audience that was requisite to the development of a new poetic in vernacular literature. G. Directions Current Research on Medieval Paremiology is Taking x The place of proverbs in the cultivation of the brain in building mnemonic skills in medieval society with minimal access to writing is receiving attention from both paremiologists and neuropsychologists, who are looking at features of the proverb, such as its brevity, structure, and striking imagery, that made it an ideal tool in the service of medieval educational aims regarding the correct acquisition, retention and retrieval of information and ideas. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966; Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. 1977; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 1990; Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past, 1992, Patrick H. Hutton, “The Art of Memory Reconceived: From Rhetoric to Psychoanalysis. Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 371–92; Mary Louise Serafine, “Cognitive Experiments on the Relationship between Melody and Text,” Ars Lyrica 4 (1989): 29–36; Betsy Bowden, “A Modest Proposal, Relating Four Millennia of Proverb Collections to Chemistry within the Human Brain,” JAF 109 (1996): 440–49. x Bilingualism (and its implications) Bilingualism was strengthened through collections of proverbs and maxims and was assumed in the use of micro-forms. See Eikelmann, “Das Sprichwort im Sammlungskontext …,” Kleinstformen der Literatur, 91–116. x Translation theory: the closeness and the divergence in the translation of proverbs and the relevance of context have become important subjects of study. Cf. G. v. Olberg, “Der Umgang mit Wissen: ausgewählte Beispiele zum Übersetzungsproblem lateinischer und deutscher Sprichwörter,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 2 (1997): 69–80 x Genre distinctions and genre relations between the proverb, the proverbial phrase, the anecdote, maxim, parable, fable, and exemplum in wisdom literature are explored. Did preferred genre neighborhoods exist? (Barry Taylor, “Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 19–35 (concerning genre parallels between fable and proverb). Cf. Ysengrim – Reynard the Fox and the proximity between the exemplum

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and the proverb; see also Proverbia in Fabula: Essays on the Relationship of the Fable and the Proverb, ed. Pack Carnes, 1988. Linguistic analysis of the influence of phraseology and the role of paremiology in linguistics is understood in new ways (Gertrud Gréciano: Signification et dénotation en allemand: La sémantique des expressions idiomatiques, 1983. Philological/ analytical study of micro-texts is taking place following the model and the categories established by Wernfried Hofmeister, Sprichwortartige Mikrotexe. Analysen am Beispiel Oswalds von Wolkenstein, 1990. Archiving and indexing of proverbs and maxims of 12th- and 13thcentury courtly romances are being undertaken at the Universities of Bochum and Münster. See Tomas Tomasek, Heike Bismark, Kerstin Rüther, Jan Hallmann, Daniela Riegermann, and Manuela Schotte. Handbuch der Sentenzen und Sprichwörter im höfischen Roman des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Artusromane nach 1230 – Gralsromane – Tristanromane, vol. 2, 2009. Density studies of proverbs in different parts of the work of art are occurring in the prolog and epilogue, in narratorial asides, dialogues, etc. Examined are also special textual commonplaces for assumptions regarding tradition vs. innovation, reliance on traditional sources vs. the use of new approaches, etc. (see Betsy Bowden, “A Modest Proposal: Relating Four Millennia of Proverb Collections to Chemistry within the Brain,” JAF 109 (1996): 440–49. Frequency studies of proverbs and sententiae and the significance of the findings for views on auctoritas are occurring. See Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, Kleinstformen der Literatur, 1994, regarding microtexts and their intertextuality, as well as the relationship of micro-text to larger literary themes, topics, genre and meaning; The aesthetics of reception and the changing nature of the horizon of expectation of the audience are receiving attention. See Margaret Sullivan, “Bruegel’s Proverbs: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance,” Art Bulletin 73 (1997): 431–66. General knowledge/ Literacy research is being reassessed. What was “jedermanns Wissen,” i. e., the literacy of readers to whom texts were addressed? How do proverbs and maxims address and engage (bilingual) readers/listeners with presumed levels of literacy or with access to (bilingual) literacy? See Silvia Reuvekamp, Sprichwort und Sentenz im narrativen Kontext. Ein Beitrag zur Poetik des höfischen Romans im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 2007.

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Issues of authority are being addressed through the use of proverbs and sententiae; this investigation has taken place in related fields; however, Eikelmann has placed it right on the agenda in medieval German paremiology. See also A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. 1988. Cf. Marie-Louise Ollier, “Proverbe et sentence: Le discourse d’autorité chez Chrétien de Troyes,” Revue des sciences humaines 163 (1976): 329–57. Complex models of literary communication are being introduced that turn on orality and literacy and the knowledge of proverbs and maxims medieval readers/listeners shared with the author. How did texts provoke a reader response by relying on proverbs and maxims that constituted the reader’s horizon of expectation; e. g., Horst Wenzel, Die Zunge der Brangäne oder die Sprache des Hofes,” Sammlung-DeutungWertung: Ergebnisse, Probleme, Tendenzen und Perspektiven philologischer Arbeit. Festschrift Wolfgang Spiewok, ed. Danielle Buschinger, 1988, 357–67. Cultural codes of linguistic communities are being reconstructed that are evident in a medieval work as accessed through proverbs. Cf. Aleksandr K. Zholkovsky, “At the Intersection of Linguistics, Paremiology and Poetics: On the Literary Structure of Proverbs,” Poetics 7 (1978): 309–32. The intermediality, iconography and visuality of proverbs are being addressed from new perspectives. In addition to the intertextuality of proverbs, there is the aspect of intermediality, that is significant for paremiology and will need to be investigated. Text and image in manuscripts need to be explored jointly, but this goes also for wood cuts and their composition, inasmuch as they bring together proverb, situation and image, performance, and orality (voice in performance). What is the place of proverbs and sententiae in the medieval visual culture? What is the place of metaphor in the language of proverbs? Art historians have been ahead of scholars in literary studies in exploring the visual turn or the visuality of some proverbs, notably Bruegel’s. See David Kunzle, “Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down,” The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 197–202; Alan Dundes and Claudia A. Stibbe, The Art of Mixing Metaphors: A Folkloristic Interpretation of the ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1981; Mark Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ and the Practice of Rhetoric, 2002; Malcolm Jones, “Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art: Proverbial Follies and Impossibilities,” Folklore 100.2 (1989): 201–17; Alison G. Stewart, Before Bruegel: Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery, 2008; Birgit Ulrike Münch, “Gnomisches Wissen im Raum der Bilder: Die Visualisierung

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von Sprichwörtern in der Kunst des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit,” an ongoing research project at the University of Trier. See also Brigitte Janz, Rechtssprichwörter im Sachsenspiegel: Eine Untersuchung zur TextBild-Relation in den Codices picturati, 1989. Note finally Wolfgang Mieder and Janet Sobieski, Proverb Iconography: An International Bibliography, l998. Select Bibliography Brigitte Janz, “Parömiologische Untersuchungen zu Kontext und Funktion: Eine Einführung in die Fragestellung,” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 2 (1997): 3–6; Kleinstformen der Literatur, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1994); Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991); Silvia Reuvekamp, Sprichwort und Sentenz im narrativen Kontext: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik des höfischen Romans (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007); Manfred Eikelmann, Heike Bismark, and Tomas Tomasek, Handbuch der Sentenzen und Sprichwörter im höfischen Roman des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts: Artusromane nach 1230 – Gralsromane – Tristanromane, vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).

Rosmarie Thee Morewedge

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R Religious Lyrics A. Introduction Great monuments of scholarship have been produced in medieval religious Latin lyrics, but in the vernacular traditions, activity has been uneven across disciplines and over time. A general, but fundamental, work on the subject remains Bruce Wardropper’s Historia de la poesia lírica a lo divino en la cristiandad occidental (1958). Patrick S. Diehl provides a much-needed update in The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica (1985). Diehl offers an analysis of religious lyrics from most, but not all, European traditions. Latin and Greek are both covered, as are Catalan, Old and Middle English, Old and Middle High German, Old French, Italian, Old Norse, Portuguese, Provençal (Occitan), and Spanish. This “ars poetica” – he states in his introduction that the obsolete term is used deliberately – offers penetrating analyses of matters that relate only secondarily to content and focus instead on functions, genres, forms, structures, and rhetorical style. He also insists that questions of religiosity must be addressed in any treatment of medieval religious literature, given that medieval theocentric society differs so markedly from our human-centered one. B. Source Traditions: Religious Lyrics in Latin and Greek In Latin studies, work has been considerable. The great survey of religious Latin lyrics comes in F. J. E. Raby’s A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (1927; 2nd ed.1953). Raby’s survey takes the reader chronologically through centuries of Latin religious lyrics, beginning with Prudentius through the Carolingian period and into the High Middle Ages with consideration of the differences among repertories produced in different parts of Europe. Raby’s bibliography as well as that of his later work, A History of Secular Latin Poetry (2nd ed., 2 vols., 1957), remain the main bibliographical sources for publications prior to the 1950s. Many have continued to work on Latin religious lyrics after Raby, but one name stands out in particular: Josef Szövérffy. His article, “L’hymnologie médiévale: recherches et méthodes” (Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 4 [1961]: 389–422) provides a fine, but brief, survey of the hymn as does his

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later introduction in English, simply titled, Latin Hymns (1989). However, a much more complete treatment can be found in his monumental enterprise, Die Annalen der lateinischen Hymnendichtung (2 vols., 1964–1965). In volume one, he examines the themes and forms of hymns from Ambrose up to the end of the 11th century. In volume two, still within a chronological framework, he reads hymns also according national tradition and even individual personality (i. e., those attributable to Peter of Cluny or Thomas Aquinas, etc.). Subsequently, Szövérffy has made tremendous contributions to the field by offering individual book-length studies of hymns in a given form, tradition, or individual’s repertory: Huesca et les hymnes de Saint Pierre (1956); A Mirror of Medieval Culture: Saint Peter Hymns of the Middle Ages (1965); Iberian Hymnody: Survey and Problems (1971); Hymns of the Holy Cross: An Annotated Edition with Introduction (1976); Marianische Motivik der Hymnen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der marianischen Lyrik im Mittelalter (1985); Marienhymnen in Österreich: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Dichtkunst Österreichs im Mittelalter (with Paul Klopsch, 1987); Sequenzen in Österreich (1990); and, most recently, Lateinische Conductus-Texte des Mittelalters (2000). Greek religious lyric has received less attention, due mostly to its more specialized nature and the fact that much early Greek hymnody is lost to us. The best overview comes in Egon Wellesz’s A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (2nd rev. ed., 1961). More specialized studies focus on one particular figure, Romanos, who is associated with the kontakion: Kariophiles Metsakes’s The Language of Romanos the Melodist (1967); William Lawrence Petersen’s The Diatessaron and Ephrem Syrus as Sources of Romanos the Melodist (1985); and R. J. Schork’s Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit: Romanos the Melodist (1995) figure among the bibliography on the subject. Here too, Szövérffy has made his presence felt with A Guide to Byzantine Hymnography: A Classified Bibliography of Texts and Studies (with Eva Topping, 1978) and volume 5 of David Campbell’s Greek Lyric (1982) contains some anonymous hymns. C. Religious Lyric in the Germanic World: Anglo-Saxon, Medieval German, and Old Norse If there is little by way of religious lyrics in Anglo-Saxon, insular poets more than make up for it during the Middle English period. One well-known Anglo-Saxon religious lyric is Caedmon’s hymn, and Daniel Paul O’Donnell’s Caedmon’s Hymn: A Multi-media Study, Edition, and Archive (2005) provides an excellent treatment of the work as well as an ample bibliography. In Middle English studies, good short introductions and bibliographies come in George Kane’s Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the

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Religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman (1951) and Douglas Gray’s A Selection of Religious Lyrics (1975). Earlier, more specialized studies include Theodor Wolpers, “Geschichte der englischen Marienlyrik im Mittelalter” (Anglia 69 [1950]: 7–88); Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious ‘Lyric’ in the Middle Ages (1968); and Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (1972). More recently, Christiania Whitehead’s chapter, “Middle English Religious Lyrics, (A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas G. Duncan, 2005, 96–119) provides an excellent, up-to-date discussion and bibliography on the subject. In the Germanic traditions of Old High German, Middle High German, and Old Norse, there is little to say of the first and last, but much to say about the second. There was precious little in Old High German by the way of religious lyrics, and in the Old Norse tradition, where pagan poetry remained dominant until around 1350, the main contributions are Wolfgang Lange’s Christliche Skaldendichtung (1958) and Studien zur christlichen Dichtung der Nordgermanen: 1000–1200 (1958); Frederik Paasche’s Kristendom og Kvad (1914); and Paul Lehmann’s Skandinaviens Anteil an der lateinischen Literatur und Wissenschaft des Mittelalters (1936 and 1937). In Middle High German lyrics, one sees a rise of Marian lyrics in the mid-12th century, and the religious Spruch forms the bulk of religious lyrics in this tradition in the 13th and 14th centuries which becomes fodder for the work of the Meistersinger in the later Middle Ages. An excellent, coherent account of the tradition comes in Richard Kienast’s article, “Die deutschsprachige Lyrik des Mittelalters,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, 1958, cols. 1–131). An earlier comparative account of Spruchdichtung can be found in Hugo Moser’s “Die hochmittelalterliche deutsche ‘Spruchdichtung’ als übernationale und nationale Erscheinung” (Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 76 [1957]: 241–68). For Marian lyrics in particular, see Gerhard M. Schäfer, Untersuchungen zur deutschsprachigen Marienlyrik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (1971), and for work on the Meistersang, one should begin with Bert Nagel, Meistersang (1962). Additionally, for the uses to which German religious lyrics were put, see Johannes Janota, Studien zu Funktion und Typus des deutschen geistlichen Liedes im Mittelalter (1968). D. Religious Lyrics in the Romance Languages If some scholars find the overtly doctrinal content of religious lyrics off-putting, nowhere is this more strongly felt than in Old French studies. In the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, scholars such as Richard Otto and Alfred Jeanroy worked on religious lyrics (examples of their work are, respectively, “Altlothringische geistliche Lieder,” Romanische Forschungen 5 (1890):

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583–618; and “Les chansons pieuses du ms. fr. 12483 de la Bibliothèque Nationale” (Mélanges de philologie romane et d’histoire littéraires offerts à Maurice Wilmotte à l’occasion de son 25e anniversaire d’enseignement, 1910, 245–67). The same year of Jeanroy’s piece saw the publication of volume one of Edward Järnström’s Recueil de chansons pieuses du XIIIe siècle (1910). In 1927, Järnstrom published volume two with Arthur Långfors. Although these scholars made known the existence and provided editions of Old French religious lyrics, few scholars studied them throughout the 20th century. Neglect turned into disdain when Pierre Bec relegated Old French religious lyrics to a “parasitical register” (“registre parasite”) due to the thematic and formal borrowings from secular lyrics that characterize them. Bec’s contention met opposition when Anna Drzewicka published her article “La fonction des emprunts à la poésie profane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci” (subdivided into two parts within volume 91 (1985) of Le Moyen Age: 33–51; 179–200) that showed how composers of religious lyrics, here Gautier de Coinci, intentionally borrowed elements meant to highlight his new conception of “bone amor” (“good love”) for the Virgin Mary over human women. Daniel E. O’Sullivan widened the field by studying religious lyrics throughout the 13th century, showing how, far from being parasitical, religious lyrics typified the dynamic interplay among religious and secular elements in medieval society (Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century Lyric, 2005). Most recently, Kathy Krause and Allison Stone have offered a collection of essays on the first Old French devotional poet, Gautier de Coinci, in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts (2006). Scholarship on religious lyrics composed on the Iberian peninsula have focused by and large on Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa Maria, the Milagros de Santa Maria by Berceo, and the cancioneros of the 15th century. Much of the early bibliography on Alfonso is contained in Silvio Pellegrini’s Repertorio bibliographico della prima lirica portoghese (1939). Walter Mettman published what is still considered the standard edition in four volumes (Coimbra, 1959–1972). Higini Anglès took up the question of the music in the cantigas in his multi-volume work, La música de las Cantigas de Santa Maria (Barcelona, 1943–1964). As for Spanish lyric, the two principal anthologies of religious lyrics appeared in the middle of the 20th century, more for private devotion than for scholarly study: Roque E. Scarpa, Poesía religiosa española (2nd ed., 1941) and José M. Peman and Miguel Herrero, ed., Suma poética (2nd ed., 1950). The major cancioneros were published first in the late 19th or early 20th century, and then again some decades later: Cancionero general de Hernando del Castillo (1st ed., 1511; ed. José de Balenchana as Cancionero general de Hernando del Castillo según la edición de 1511, con un apéndice de lo añadido en las de 1527,

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1540 y 1557, 2 vols., 1882; edited again by Antonio Rodriguez-Moñino, also in 2 vols. (1958–1959); Raymond Foulché-Delbosc, ed., Cancionero castellano del siglo XV, 2 vols., (1912–1915). The Cancionero general has garnered the most attention: among the many article-length studies, one finds Fransico Cantera’s monograph, La canción mozárabe (1957). In regard to Occitan and its related language, Catalan, work has been sparse, owing primarily to the emphasis placed on the poetry of fin’amors produced by the troubadours. Work on religious lyrics in Occitan comes primarily in one work: Francisco J. Oroz Arizcuren’s La lírica religiosa en la literatura provenzal antigua: edición crítica, traducción, notas y glosario (1972). In Catalan studies, some work on religious lyrics can be found in texts that take a broader view of medieval Catalan literature: Arthur Terry, Catalan Literature (1972); Martín de Riquer, História de la literatura catalana, part antigua, 3 vols. (1964); and his later publication, Literatura catalana medieval (1972). Finally, considerable work on the Italian lauda spiritual has been undertaken, although much of it is concerned with post-medieval studies as laudae remained popular throughout the 19th century. Blake Wilson provides an extensive bibliography of the editorial and scholarly work on the genre from 1621 to 1999 in his article on the lauda in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, ed. Stanley Sadie (1980; 2nd ed. 2001), vol. 14, 367–74. Select Bibliography Patrick S. Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric: An Ars Poetica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Oroz Arizcuren, Francisco J. La lírica religiosa en la literatura provenzal antigua: edición crítica, traducción, notas y glosario (Pamplona: Aranzadi, 1972); Daniel E. O’Sullivan. Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century Lyric (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); F. J. E. Raby, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927; 2nd ed. 1953); Bruce Wardropper, Historia de la poesia lírica a lo divino en la cristiandad occidenta (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1958).

Daniel E. O’Sullivan

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S Schoolbooks A. Definition The term schoolbook is taken from everyday speech and has to be specified in scholarly use. This specification is a desideratum: not least because schoolbooks only can be studied extravagating the limitations of all disciplines dealing with medieval knowledge in regard to its transmission, and because a systematic interdisciplinary approach is missing. In addition, medieval Latin (Mariken Teeuwen, The Vocabulary of Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages, 2003) and vernacular (cf., e. g., Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, vol. II, col. 822, s. v. schuolbuoch) terms have not yet been studied systematically; so it is a moot question whether they could give further orientation. The definitions of recent pedagogy by all means lack a historical basis (Helmut Puff, ‘Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica,’ 1995, 23–28). Thus current studies in general refer to a common modern prior understanding (cf., e. g., Deutsches Wörterbuch XV, col. 1869, s. v. Schulbuch: “buch zum gebrauch in der schule”), and the current concept of schoolbook is often based just on the lowest common ground of a relational term: “a schoolbook is a book related to school in some way”. But the elements constituting this relation then differ from case to case: sometimes the author of the text is meant (if wellknown as composer of didactic texts), sometimes the usage by a teacher or a pupil, sometimes the teacher or the pupil or a library as possessors, sometimes the way of distributing the book, the content of single texts, or the preparation of the text (by glosses and commentaries), or the form offering the content to the reader (layout). B. Relevant Studies The amount of relevant studies contributed from several disciplines – e. g., the history of linguistics, of rhetoric and philosophy, of mathematics, theology, medicine and law – can hardly be reviewed by a single person. At present it becomes apparent that a comprehensive approach might best be obtained with a pragmatical view on communication in school and the evolution of its media. From this perspective both a systematic conceptualization seems obtainable and core characteristics of medieval schoolbooks become apparent:

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Manuscript vs. Print: The main morphem -book covers both handwritten and printed media. Drawing a distinction between manuscript and print reveals limitations and potentials of providing lessons with texts by using different types of media (Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit, 21998, 217–26). The impacts of printing are far reaching – amongst other things the term ‘schoolbooks’ turns out to be a reflexive. The printed schoolbook aims at a market of anonymous purchasers, and its relation to the teaching-lesson no longer is based already on the context of its production. This significant difference to handwritten stuff in the long term forces to expose the intended use: woodcuts on title-pages in incunables often imagine a didactic situation (cf. Wilhelm Ludwig and Paul Heitz, Die deutschen ‘Accipies’ und Magister cum discipulis-Holzschnitte als Hilfsmittel zur Inkunabel-Bestimmung, 1908; Sabine Kirk, Unterrichtstheorie in Bilddokumenten des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, 1988), and subtitles like “ad usum scholarum” come up in the 16th century. On the other hand research has always noticed the difference between the (printed or handwritten) book and preceding “minor” forms. Already medieval terms distinguish media serving ephemeral recordings in preparatory lessons for beginners – although these terms are not limited to educational contexts (e. g. tabula/tabella [cerata/cerea] or c[h]arta in Latin: cf. engl. wax-tablet/hornbook, or German Wachstafel: Élisabeth Lalou, “Inventaire des tablettes médiévales et présentation générale,” Les tablettes à écrire de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne, ed. ead., 1992, 233–85; Caroline Bourlet, “Les tabletiers parisiens à la fin du moyen âge,” ibid., 323–42; Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “The Vocabulary of Wax Tablets,” Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au moyen âge, ed. Olga Weijers, 1989, 220–30; Wilhelm Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 1st ed. 1871, 31896, 51–89). Medieval terms for written media serving advanced studies of grammar often name just the works read (Donatus, Psalter) – a fact concealed by modern equivalents, such as English primer or German Fibel or Erstlesebuch (Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1989, 142–61 [“Learning the ABCs with Hornbook and Primer”]). School vs. Lesson: The determining morphem school- presupposes an already stable institutional context of using manuscripts and books. Taking into account the historical development of the institution “school” we see the rise of the cathedral school complementing the older monastic school of the cloister, the formation of the university and – in the late Middle Ages – the new non-monastic convent school, the parochial school and the urban grammar school. But new institutions do not only build up a broader spectrum of types of schooling with different functions. Functional differentiation also consolidates the core event of teaching, the didactic interaction in

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the lesson itself, by transferring proven practice in a stabilized framework. Therefore the endeavor to conceptualize the subject schoolbook should, instead of looking at the relation of the written source to the institution school, primarily be based on the relation consisting between the written medium and the face-to-face interaction in the teaching lesson itself (Michael Baldzuhn, “Avian im Gebrauch,” Der Codex im Gebrauch, ed. Christel Meier, Dagmar Hüpper, and Hagen Keller, 1996, 183–96). Consequences of such an approach are on the one hand a certain awareness of the methodological problems analyzing and interpreting the sources: auxiliary means in written form have for the most part been used up throughout the Middle Ages; the sources preserved are representative only to a very limited extent (Arnold Esch, “Überlieferungschance und Überlieferungszufall als methodisches Problem des Historikers,” Historische Zeitschrift 240 [1985]: 529–70). On the other hand it becomes apparent that the process of institutionalization leads to rising standardization of teaching media: since the high Middle Ages the structure and content of the manuscripts to a greater extent reflect standards of schooling going beyond sporadic and occasional practice. This process is the precondition to refer to the medieval schoolbook in a strict sense, whereas – in addition – the single exemplar preserved may now be analyzed without the need for having been used in a concrete lesson. In addition, drawing a distinction between lesson and school also contours the particular profile of written media that had to serve forms of teaching with a lower degree of literacy than lessons visited by clerical, Latin-speaking, male and literate attendants: e. g. manuscripts used for teaching noblemen (cf. the survey of Nicholas Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry, 1984; facsimiles of prominent manuscripts: Libri per una educazione rinascimentale, ed. Giulia Bologna, 1979; Ein Lehrbuch für Maximilian I., ed. Otto Mazal, 1981; Die ‘Seligenstädter Lateinpädagogik,’ ed. Monika Asztalos et al., 1989) or for teaching only vernacular languages (cf. for the German area Hartmut Bleumer, “‘Deutsche Schulmeister’ und ‘Deutsche Schule’,” Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter, ed. Klaus Grubmüller, 2000, 77–98), or in nunneries (Eva Schlotheuber, Klostereintritt und Bildung, 2004), or for the instruction of craftsmen (Elementarbildung und Berufsausbildung 1450–1750, ed. Alwin Hanschmidt and HansUlrich Musolff, 2005). Orality vs. Literacy: The every-day use of the term presupposes a close functional linkage of the manuscript/book and school as place of their use. Thus, one may expect, that the pragmatic purpose of a manuscript can be read off from its design without doubt. But assuming that the use is determined by the written conception implies an already extensive use of writing in a twofold sense. Firstly, one has to presume a highly differentiated reser-

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voir of written forms and procedures to present and adapt a text, and these forms are thought to be typical for schooling and thought to differ from other forms of text-presentation. But although glosses and commentaries as instruments opening up texts are already known in antiquity, their application must not be taken for granted on all levels of teaching and forms of medieval learning (Michael Baldzuhn, “Schriftliche Textauslegung und mündlicher Unterricht. Handschriften- und Textbefunde zur Pragmatik der älteren lateinisch und volkssprachlich glossierten Aviane [9.–11. Jh.],” Mittelalterliche volkssprachige Glossen, ed. Rolf Bergmann, Elvira Glaser and Claudine Moulin-Fankhänel, 2001, 485–512 – referring to the question brought up by English scholars whether glossed manuscripts always have been designed for teaching purposes: Michael Lapidge, “The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England [1]. The Evidence of Latin Glosses,” Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, ed. Nicholas Brooks, 1982, 99–140). Moreover, gloss and commentary are widespread forms and have throughout the Middle Ages been used beyond learned schooling. Secondly teaching in all types of school always remains bound to oral face to face communication: medieval teaching is strongly linked to orality (Jürgen Miethke, “Die Universitäten und das gesprochene Wort,” Historische Zeitschrift 251 [1990]: 1–44; Bernd Michael, “‘Textus’ und das gesprochene Wort,” ‘Textus’ im Mittelalter, ed. Ludolf Kuchenbuch and Uta Kleine, 2006, 179–206). Therefore, the medieval schoolbook only can be identified as a schoolbook and be described in its functions with respect to the recent degree of literacy in a wider social context. Schoolbook vs. Schooltext: Little research has been done on the relation between schoolbook and schooltext. Written teaching instruments are usually referred to as books without explicit reason – although they contain texts. The relation book/text is complex and deserves further study. The tabula used for reading instruction amongst others contains sets of letters and syllables not yet establishing a written text in a strict sense. On the subsequent level of instruction, common books contain single texts (Donatus) or just pairs of texts (widespread in Europe up to the 12th century: Disticha Catonis / Fabulae Aviani). Considerable sets come up in the 13th century, but they remain an overall rare phenomenon (prominent: the French Liber Catonianus and the prints of the Auctores octo). Sets which also include vernacular texts seem to be missing up to the 14th century (Michael Baldzuhn, “Textreihen in der Mitüberlieferung von Schultexten als Verschriftlichungsphänomen,” Erziehung, Bildung, Bildungsinstitutionen, ed. Rudolf Suntrup, Jan Veenstra, and Anne Bollmann, 2006, 19–54 [but with respect only to the situation in Germany]). In general, alliances of texts in manuscripts much less frequently

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reflect a steady curriculum going beyond the individual than individual biographies of education (Vademecum) – or the set of texts establishes an individual “reference library” in a single book (Manuale) or it has to represent, particularly with regard to the needs of a library, entire fields of learned knowledge (e. g., grammar, rhetoric, logic). Texts read in school often derive from antiquity and never have been designed for learned teaching, so they had to be adapted to the needs of medieval schooling by oral or written means. The basic text and its equipment then represent a new functional unity. In the 12th century, the production of commentaries considerably increases (Nikolaus M. Häring, “Commentary and Hermeneutics,” Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham, 1982, 173–200; Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller et al., 1960sqq.), and the corpus of antique texts increasingly gets enriched by new schooltexts from medieval authors. The latter are neither collected nor has their structure overall been studied in detail. New types of texts like the Libri/Summae pauperum abbreviating whole sectors of learned knowledge come into being (Franz Josef Worstbrock, “Libri pauperum,” Der Codex im Gebrauch [see above], 41–60), but the verse supporting the learning by heart (Paul Zumthor, “Le rôle de la mémoire dans l’enseignement médiéval,” Jeux de mémoire, ed. Bruno Roy and P. Z., 1985, 133–48) maintains its overall importance. However, the abridging versifications may reach a level of compression making it impossible to comprehend the basic text without gloss and/or commentary accompanying them, so that the versificator already must have taken these additions into account (Bernhard Papst, “Text und Paratext als Sinneinheit?” Text und Text in lateinischer und volkssprachiger Überlieferung des Mittelalters, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz, 2006, 117–45; cf. also the articles on the ‘Speculum grammatice’ of Hugo and Konrad Spechtshart of Reutlingen in Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter [see above]). Individual memory (verse) and written media (prose commentary and gloss) are entangled in a new way here. Distribution: The recent concept of schoolbook often loses sight of a practical problem in the background of the medieval schoolbook that must have highly been visible in a manuscript culture: to produce a great number of identical copies. The formation of well-regulated lessons forces to organize the production and distribution of schoolbooks. To this end lending systems (Malcom B. Parkes, “Buchversorgung und Buchgebrauch in den Ordenshäusern der Oxforder Universität,” Der Codex im Gebrauch [see above], 109–26) and the petia system are established (Karl Christ, “Petia. Ein Kapitel mittelalterlicher Buchgeschichte,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 55 [1938]: 1–44), or the pupils and students had to manufacture their own copies via dictation

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in particular lessons (Gerhard Powitz, “‘Modus scolipetarum et reportistarum,’” Scrittura e civiltà 12 [1988], 201–11; Jaqueline Hamesse, “Le vocabulaire de la transmission orale des textes,” Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au moyen âge, ed. Olga Weijers, 1989, 168–94). But oral distribution via dictation demands revision of the text with respect to a structure and layout of the text suitable for accurate re-oralization; the fragmented glossing above all posed particular problems and required new solutions (Michael Baldzuhn, “‘dem selbigen glosiert er allwegen in die feder,’” Texttyp und Textproduktion in der deutschen Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters, ed. Elizabeth Andersen, Manfred Eikelmann, and Anne Simon, 2005, 415–35). The impacts of a well-regulated distribution of schooltexts on the structure and layout of main text and gloss/commentary merely have been studied rudimentary. C. Recent Studies Studies dedicated to the schoolbook as a type of manuscript/book sui generis and as well based on representative corpora systematically acquired still are rare (Michael Baldzuhn, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, 2009), related studies mainly focus on heuristics (Paul F. Gehl, “Latin Readers in Fourteenth-Century Florence,” Scrittura e Civiltà 13 [1989], 387–440). However, in recent years several branches of research have contributed remarkable studies, especially if the approach stays close to manuscript tradition and if larger amounts of sources are consulted. In the first instance, the history of schooling and education deserves mention (e. g., Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, 2001; Grendler, Schooling [see above]). Relevant contributions also are supported by historians working on the history of institutions; commonly, the history of universities has been studied superior to pre-university schooling (La production du livre universitaire au moyen âge, ed. Louis J. Bataillon, Bertrand G. Guyot, and Richard H. Rouse, 1988; Giovanna Murano, Opere diffuse per exemplar e pecia, 2005; Olga Weijers, Le maniement du savoir, 1996). Research on the increase of literacy in medieval society also has to be considered, in particular if the foundation of this wide ranging process in school is taken into account (Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter [see above]; Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, 1994). Amongst the textual genres included in schoolbooks classical works from Antiquity, their tradition and reception, frequently have been studied in detail (Birger Munk Olsen, I classici nel canone scolastico altomedioevale, 1991; Birger Munk Olsen, L’étude des auteurs classiques latins au XIe et XIIe siècles, 1982–89; Ralph J. Hexter, Ovid and the Medieval Schooling, 1986). Numerous contributions derive from the history of

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linguistics; they deserve mention in particular because they often focus on sources used for teaching languages, especially latin (Marina Passalaqua, I codici di Prisciano, 1978; Geoffrey L. Bursill-Hall, A Census of Medieval Latin Grammatical Manuscripts, 1981; Manuscripts and Tradition of Grammatical Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Mario De Nonno, Paolo De Paolis, and Louis Holtz, 2000). Furthermore several interdisciplinary studies aim at literary forms widespread in schooling – for example Latin and vernacular glosses (Katalog der althochdeutschen und altsächsischen Glossenhandschriften, ed. Rolf Bergmann and Stefanie Stricker, 2005; Neil R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, 1957), commentaries (Catalogus translationum et commentariorum [see above]) or literal genres like Artes dictandi (Franz Josef Worstbrock, Monika Klaes, and Jutta Lütten, Repertorium der Artes dictandi des Mittelalters, 1992), vocabularies (Klaus Grubmüller, Vocabularius Ex quo, 1967; ‘Vocabularius Ex quo’. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Ausgabe, ed. Bernhard Schnell et al., 1988–2001) or works on vernacular grammar (Claudine Moulin-Fankänel, Bibliographie der deutschen Grammatiken und Orthographielehren, 1994–97). The increasing interest in the contact of learned – and that always means: Latin – forms of teaching to the vernacular has also been very fruitful (Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, 1991; Nikolaus Henkel, Deutsche Übersetzungen lateinischer Schultexte, 1988; David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts, 1979). Realizing that layouts always manage the practical use of a text several essays deal with the mise en page of, amongst others, schooltexts (Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, “Statim invenire. Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,” Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, and Carol D. Lanham, 1982, 201–25; Louis Holtz, “La typologie des manuscrits grammaticaux latins,” Revue d’histoire des textes 7 [1977], 247–69; Nikolaus Henkel, “Printed School Texts,” Renaissance Studies 9 [1995]: 212–27). Approaches focusing in particular on the question of a canon of texts read and its transformation (Günter Glauche, Schullektüre im Mittelalter, 1970; Josef Dolch, Lehrplan des Abendlandes, 31971) lose importance. Monographic studies on single major schooltexts which do not only deal with the original itself, but also consider the instruments opening up the text and its ongoing transmission and use still are rare (Anne Grondeux, Le ‘Graecismus’ d’Évrard de Béthune à travers ses gloses, 2000). The poetics and structure of texts designed for teaching from the outset overall deserve further studies (Puff [see above]; Thomas Haye, Das lateinische Lehrgedicht im Mittelalter, 1997). Two of the most important publication series with a great amount of relevant studies and meeting papers are connected with the names of Louis Holtz and Olga

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Wejers: Studia Artistarum, ed. Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Paris) and Constantijn Huygens Instituut (The Hague); Civicima. Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du moyen âge, ed. Comité international du vocabulaire des institutions et de la communication intellectuelles au moyen âge. D. Perspectives of Research Research on medieval schoolbooks benefits from the interest in the reception of literature (Rezeptionsästhetik): it draws attention to every single exemplar of a text and its specific preparation for a suitable use. Research on the subject furthermore is encouraged by the attention to the so called Gebrauchsschrifttum (i. e., especially late-medieval texts demanding less originality; cf. Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Prosaforschung, ed. Kurt Ruh, 1985). Studies on the history of mentalities (e. g., on childhood or on the intellectuals in the Middle Ages) have not yet been very conducive. The cultural science up to date hitherto has not yet established new approaches. A main task remains to provide further investigation with a basic fundament of sources both representative and obtained methodically. Current insights often depend on prominent but exceptional manuscripts and texts of arguable representativeness. Giesecke’s remarks on the effects of the printing press on teaching, for example, strongly need revision; the studies of Jürgen Leonhardt (“Gedruckte humanistische Kolleghefte als Quelle für Buch- und Bildungsgeschichte,” Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 29 [2004], 21–34; cf. also the case study of Regina Toepfer, “Von der öffentlichen Vorlesung zur Privatlektüre,” Offen und Verborgen, ed. Caroline Emmelius et al., 2004, 269–85) on printed books lead to much more differentiated results. Promising approaches could be developed on the basis of a census and analysis of manuscripts and books produced and used at a particular place or school for a certain time (Ulrike Bodemann and Christoph Dabrowski, “Handschriften der Ulmer Lateinschule,” Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter [see above], 11–47), on the analysis of appropriate oeuvres of single authors (Udo Kühne, Engelhus-Studien, 1999), on corpora of manuscripts definitely written by pupils (colophons), corpora of manuscripts produced in a typical way (dictation), of manuscripts containing special genres of texts or of widespread teaching-texts well established. As a precondition, future studies will have to keep in mind the different forms of presenting and opening up the basic texts, the evolution of these forms in the course of several centuries, and, because they are not bound to school-use alone, not least a certain variety of their functioning.

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Select Bibliography Michael Baldzuhn, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Die Verschriftlichung von Unterricht in der Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte der ‘Fabulae’ Avians und der deutschen ‘Disticha Catonis’ (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009); Schulliteratur im späten Mittelalter, ed. Klaus Grubmülller (Munich: Fink, 2000); Helmut Puff, ‘Von dem schlüssel aller Künsten / nemblich der Grammatica’. Deutsch im lateinischen Grammatikunterricht 1480–1560 (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 1995).

Michael Baldzuhn

Scientific Texts: Artes Liberales and Artes Mechanicae (with Emphasis on Anglophone Research) A. General Definition The terms artes liberales and artes mechanicae require some definition first. In linguistic terms, they can be loosely and fairly easily translated as the ‘liberal arts’ and the ‘mechanical arts’; contemporaneously, however, both the individual definitions and the distinction between the two would have been much more complex and subtle. Traditionally, and prior to the 12th century, the artes liberales are strictly categorized, consisting of the trivium, the linguistic component (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium, the scientific component (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). The fundamentals of classical and Christian education, students were expected to master the trivium prior to concentrating on the quadrivium. In the 12th and 13th centuries, sustained translation activity, particularly from Arabic and Greek into Latin, allowed new texts to circulate and led to the development of new knowledge and authority, as well a broadening of the concept of philosophy (in the sense of ‘knowledge’). The artes mechanicae were much less rigidly realized; the first recorded usage is generally taken to be John the Scot’s 9th-century Annotationes in which, referring to Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, he mentions (but fails to enumerate) seven mechanical arts which, as distinct from the liberales (originating in the soul), arise from “some imitation or human devising” (Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity Through the Thirteenth Century, 1990, 70). Rather then a strict distinction, artes mechanicae as a concept included, by the later medieval period, practices as diverse as shoemaking, armaments, commerce, tailoring, navigation, music, alchemy, astrology and astronomy, medicine, and so on (Steven Walton,

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“An Introduction to the Mechanical Arts in the Middle Ages,” Association Villard de Honnecourt for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, 2003, 1–7). Thus the distinction between the two can be roughly measured as theoretical versus material (or practical), albeit there is much common ground between the two. Transmitted from classical learning, and preserved by the renaissance and scholasticism of the 12th century, the liberal arts were seen as superior to labor of the hands; Augustine believed that the mechanical arts attempted to control nature, thereby perverting God’s work (Walton, “Introduction,” 2). The artes mechanicae were, however, championed by the medieval monasteries as well as the guilds, and with the rise of literacy and spread of practical and instructional texts from the late-13th century onwards, the widely copied, disseminated, and translated. The seven liberal arts, for similar reasons, found their way outside of the universities and reached a wider audience in the later medieval period. B. History of Research The medieval textual traditions of artes liberales and artes mechanicae are vast and complex, in many cases still not fully catalogued, critically edited or discussed; this is due in no small way to the difficulties inherent in the identification and classification of texts which tend to have diverse manuscript contexts. As mentioned above, the less than precise ordering system which we impose on non-literary texts surviving from the European Middle Ages, and the frequent absence of contemporary classifications, means that there will be considerable overlap and similarities (both here and elsewhere in this volume) between these apparently discrete categories of writing. Many important studies, including the major reference work Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, 5 vols. (1933–1955), survey literatures in many languages (German and Latin in this case) and advocate a broad view of ‘literature,’ including historical, medical, technical and scientific works. This brief survey will concentrate, however, on the history of the editing and selection of these texts, many of which have only received critical attention over the last thirty years. Despite the existence of continental European-based studies, such as the Verfasserlexikon, which treats of texts relevant to the artes liberales and mechanicae, and the appearance of important survey studies dealing with the relevant resources, like the study by Bernhard Dietrich Haage and Wolfgang Wegner, Deutsche Fachliteratur der Artes in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (2007), this review will be limited primarily to English-language publications and studies.

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In terms of identification of texts that can be categorized as either liberales or mechanicae, the main advances in scholarship came at the beginning of the last century with the publication of catalogues of and finding aids to texts which were translated from Arabic and Classical languages in the early Middle Ages, and thenceforth were adapted, amended and widely-disseminated in and from the thriving centers of manuscript production all over Europe and later had lives in printed form too. Because many of these texts ended up as part of compendia, encyclopedias, and handbooks or miscellanies, extracting them or identifying a particular text with a tradition of writing or genre has been problematic; such difficulties are likely, however, to lessen as more sophisticated editions of texts and finding aids continue to appear. Consequently, the number of surveys and reliable works published to date, particularly on medieval technology, are few, and frequently those that do exist fail to accurately detail source material, and many are unreliable. There is also a bent toward texts concerned with astronomy and, frequently, music, in the history of research. Taken individually, the history of research into the seven liberal arts and the mechanical arts would take too long to survey, so this piece will necessarily be limited, focusing only on the most important treatments of textual traditions in terms of both liberales and mechinache. Early and influential survey work was carried out by Lynn Thorndike, whose Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century: Studies in the History of Medicine and Surgery, Natural and Mathematical Science, Philosophy and Politics (1929) was based, in large part, on unpublished and manuscript authorities. Thorndike’s influence cannot easily be measured; his mammoth History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–1958) is enumerative as opposed to interpretive, yet it skillfully maps certain strands of experimental scientific thought in Europe and connects it to the development of magic and the occult arts in eight volumes. Thorndike’s other contribution is to the history of textual scholarship in the medieval sciences and in the closely related liberal arts. His Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, co-authored with Pearl Kibre (1937), paved the way for the identification and editing not only of Latin works, but of European vernacular treatises translated out of Latin. Thorndike’s studies were certainly influential, but not unprecedented; research into the medieval sciences and scientific texts was busily being conducted at the beginning of the 20th century by Pierre Duhem. Duhem’s text-based research uncovered manuscript material that convinced him that scientific enquiry was already rigorous and relevant in the European Middle Ages (David C. Lindberg, “Preface,” Science in the Middle Ages, 1980, vii]) producing, perhaps most notably, Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmo-

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logiques de Platon à Copernic (10 vols.; 1913–1959). Duhem also importantly made texts by Oresme, Buridan, and others available. Georges Sarton’s field-defining work culminated in his Introduction to the History of Science which runs to the 14th century (3 vols., 1919–1948). The standard reference work in terms of medieval technology must remain, however, Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor Williams (ed.), A History of Technology vol. II, The Mediterranean Civilisations and the Middle Ages (1957). In recent years, emphasis has been placed on the social and cultural (as opposed to material) impact of technological advances and developments; an influential series of essays published in 1995, edited by Robert Fox and entitled Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, conflates work by scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds. The medieval section consists of only two papers, but one, “Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change After Thirty Years,” (Bert Hall, 85–102) is an interesting exercise in historiography and is in itself a useful survey of 20th-century research into technology. As regards the liberal arts, much research of the 20th century has been concerned with their role in intellectual development and education, and their deployment as part of the cathedral school curriculum. Early studies on extant texts include Paul Abelson, The Seven Liberal Arts: A Study in Mediaeval Culture (1906). R. R. Bolar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (1954), stated the case for the dispersal of the seven liberal arts throughout Europe as each cathedral school became known for a specific aspect of the arts (194); for example, Reims and Chartres for science, Salerno for medicine and Bologna for literary studies and law. Much later Edward Grant argued that, although the European cathedral schools taught the trivium and the quadrivium, the “fare would have been modest indeed, since there was virtually no Euclidean geometry … before the mid-twelfth century, and the astronomical texts that were available … did not apply geometry, the language of technical astronomy since Greek antiquity, to astronomical problems” (God and Reason in the Middle Ages, 2001, 27). Arithmetic, Grant asserts, was dependent on Boethius’s On Arithmetic and On Music (27). Nicholas Orme’s studies tend to be Anglo-centric, but offer some valuable insights into the influence of the liberal arts on education; see in particular his recent Medieval Schools (2006) and his earlier English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973). Some important recent work includes Edward Grant’s The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (1996), which examines the spread of texts, handbooks and compendia through the West from the Hellenistic period onward. Astronomy in the Middle Ages is treated of by Stephen C. McCluskey in Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (1998).

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The finding aids that prove so useful when searching for or defining scientific texts have been steadily issued since Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre’s A Catalogue … (1937). The Middle English tradition has recently been particularly well-served by George Keiser’s contribution to A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500 (vol. x: Works of Science and Information; 1998) and by the continued publication of volumes of The Index of Middle English Prose by D. S. Brewer. A recent CD-Rom has also proved a valuable tool for the location and identification of texts: Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English (Linda E. Voigts and Patricia D. Kurtz; 2000). As with many diverse and difficult to define branches of Medieval Studies, debate and discussion has historically found a ready platform in serial publications. More recently, a special issue of Annals of Scholarship: Studies of the Humanities and Social Sciences (4.3 [1987]) devoted to both of our subjects has papers by Elspeth Whitney (“Crafts, Philosophy and the Liberal Arts,” 11–56) and an historiographical paper by Judith Wilcox (“Our Continuing Discovery of the Greek Science of the Arabs,” 57–74). Annals of Science have also sought to advance scholarship through the publication of checklists and finding aids, most notably S. A. Jayawardene’s “Western Scientific Manuscripts before 1600: A Checklist of Published Catalogues” (ibid. 35.2 [1978]: 143–72). C. Major Contributors The work by Lynn White, Jr. was central to the expansion of research in the area of technological arts. Both his seminal study, “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15.2 [1940]: 141–59, and his later Medieval Technology and Scientific Change (1964) are important for their acknowledgement that a holistic approach to the historical study of technology – inclusive of archaeological evidence as well as visual and written source materials – gives a more accurate account of attitudes to and awareness of technological advances and theories in the European Middle Ages White’s research allows for a broader perspective on ‘technology’ as we define it today; this influence is discernible in recent studies, such as Medieval Science and Technology: An Encyclopaedia, ed. Thomas F. Glick, Steven J. Livesey and Faith Wallis (2005). An excellent handlist for primary texts, Edward Grant’s A Sourcebook in Medieval Science (1974) is still highly relevant, and for theories one of the early trend-setters, still recommendable, is Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (1980). The influence of White’s widening of perspectives can be most keenly perceived in recent decades, when the terms ‘science’ and ‘information’ have increasingly been used to describe texts that can be broadly slotted into either the liberal or mechanical arts. In the area of Middle English texts,

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these words are used in the title of George R. Keiser’s volume of the Manual of the Writings in Middle English X (1999), which has quickly become the standard reference work for students of this wide textual distinction. Indeed, the broad terms in which we now understand artes liberales and mechanicae are particularly evoked in their absence from Keiser’s distinctions. His major groupings include Science; Lapidaries; Cookery, and Household Books; Technology, Crafts, Weights and Measures; Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine; Hunting, Fishing and Hawking; Heraldry; and Education; subdivisions include Arithmetic; Geometry; Music; Building and Masonry; Grammars; Dictionaries; and Language Teaching. In the preface to the work, Keiser admits that, even as the demand for scientific and practical texts in the English language “became urgent” in the second half of the 14th century (3595), a similar explosion in interest in these works, in the form of both “specific studies and editions of the Middle English writings and the catalogues of major manuscript collections” (3593), occurred from the late 1980s onwards. Part of that interest in the liberal and mechanical arts arose from a renewed appreciation for works in prose; A. S. G. Edwards’s Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres published in 1984, and its updated companion, A Companion to Middle English Prose (2004) have significant sections on both texts and traditions in Middle English. Equally, some contributions figure the textual tradition more strongly than may be immediately obvious. Such works make their focus more theoretical, whilst simultaneously drawing on the significant texts of a genre or type; for example Rita Copeland’s important and provocative work, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (1991) examines rhetoric as a critical practice, discernible in its own right from grammar. Using Todorov’s model she demonstrates that rhetoric was concerned with the totality of a text, that is, audience, speaker, language, meaning, and persuasion or effect, whilst structure alone is a function of grammar (5). Despite her theoretical focus, she demonstrates the influence of Classical rhetorical, and grammatical tracts on Western Latin and vernacular traditions of writing (and on French and English texts in particular), using specific case studies to trace textual development. Details of grammatical texts in English can be found in David Thomson’s Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts (1979) and are edited in his An Edition of the Middle English Grammatical Texts (1984). As we have known for a long time, but now also according to a recent edition, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius dominated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages, being translated widely into Old English (by Alfred), German and French, and immeasurably influential (ed. P. G Walsh;

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1999), and well surveyed and edited by modern scholars. His scholastic works have been arguably less well served, albeit having been just as influential; his tracts on music (notably the De musica), logic and mathematics were extant in manuscript – and later in print – to the 16th century. Some important studies and editions include: Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (1981), which has essays on “Boethius in the Medieval Quadrivium” (Alison White, 162–205) and “Boethius and the Study of Logic” (Jonathan Barnes, 73–89); Boethius, the Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower, ed. Claude V. Palisca (1989); and Michael Masi’s Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica, Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. 6 (1983). As always, general scholarly introductions and surveys are useful for simplified concepts, editions of primary texts, and bibliographies. Some key studies include: David Leslie Wagner, The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (1983); G. H. Allard and Serge Lusignan, Les arts méchaniques au moyen âge (1982); Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (1979); and Elspeth Whitney, Medieval Science and Technology (2004). D. Current Position of Research It has been widely acknowledged that much work remains to be done in the large field of medieval science and technology. New studies continue to be published, many of which broaden our terms considerably; among them the volume of essays edited by Grenville Astill and John Langdon, Medieval Farming and Technology (1997). In an essay in that very volume, Georges Comet articulates the state of research: “Given the relative youth of the study of medieval technology, and the difficulties in drawing together diverse and often contradictory sources of evidence, both caution and imagination must be used to draw out patterns that often only become clear over centuries” (33). This volume makes its focus northwestern Europe, but is the first in a planned trio of studies that will survey advances from A.D. 600 across the Continent. Important here too is Langdon’s Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: The Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066–1500 (1986) who notes (amongst other issues) the problems of translation of agricultural and technical terms from Latin and Anglo-Norman (293) and provides a comprehensive glossary. As we might expect, many recently published studies tend to be either text-based / editions, or surveys based on historical records; Roberta Magnusson’s book is an example of the latter. Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Johns Hopkins History of Technology Series, 2001) treats Europe as a whole, but is a historical

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survey and not concerned with enumerating or surveying relevant contemporary practical writings. By contrast slightly earlier studies such as that of W. L. Braekman, Of Hawks and Horses: Four Late Middle English Prose Treatises (1986) and his earlier study of Nicholas Bollard’s Book of Planting and Grafting (Studia Neophilologica 57 [1985]: 19–39) make the medieval texts the focus of the work, and much published work, similarly, is concerned to make previously unedited texts accessible to the scholarly community. Other relevant pieces of information on texts are swallowed up into longer treatments or studies. For example, Ruth J. Dean’s (with Maureen Bolton) exemplary 1999 publication, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts for the Anglo-Norman Text Society has sections on Science and Technology and Medicine. Similarly, Medieval German Literature: A Companion (ed. Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson), which has, for example, short sections on lay literature (55 and following) and fachliteratur (420). There has been recent interest in texts that deal with the artes liberales in general; for example Marcellus Capella’s treatise, which figures the arts as females, was written in the 5th century, but enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the European Middle Ages and attracted attention from Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Bernard Silvestris, among others. A newly-released two set volume collection both reprints and editions of Capella’s work and commentaries on same (Ilaria Ramelli, Marziano Capella: Le nozze di Filologia e Mercurio [2001], and Tutti i commenti a Marziano Capella [2006]). In order to facilitate new studies, texts – especially those concerned with technology – need to be made available in reliable, scholarly editions. An ideal template is Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages: The Writings of Al-Kindi, ed. Charles Burnett (2000). Burnett allows a comprehensive picture to form, mapping not just the relationship between Arabic, Greek, and Latin texts, but the intersection of cosmology, meteorology, and astrology. Publications such as L.M. Matheson’s Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England (1994) emphasize, too, the intertextual nature of many later treatises on cosmology, weather, and medicine, say, providing analysis, background, and editions of shorter tracts. The pan-European span of many texts can be discerned from the in-depth research of scholars such as Linne Mooney, whose edition of and commentary on a Middle English text on the seven liberal arts is comprehensive and weighty (Speculum 68 [1993]: 1027–52). This is the kind of research that will be encouraged by the continued updating of catalogues and finding aids. Moreover, one of the sources for Mooney’s text – Robert Grosseteste’s treatise De artibus liberalis – is an example of a text that will benefit from re-examination; the edition cited is Ludwig Baur (ed.), Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste (1912).

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Select Bibliography Edward Grant, A Sourcebook in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980); A History of Technology, ed. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams, vol. II: The Mediterranean Civilisations and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957); Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1937); Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity Through the Thirteenth Century, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 80 (1990).

Carrie Griffin

Sermons A. General Definition Medieval Sermon Studies have experienced considerable growth in the last thirty years. The investigation of preaching and the medieval sermon is an activity of enormous importance as the “sermon represented the central literary genre in the lives of Christians and Jews during the Middle Ages. It provided the primary medium for Christian clergy to convey religious education to lay audiences, and it played an important role in the liturgy and life of the religious order” (The Sermon, directed by Beverly M. Kienzle, 2000, 142). Since the preacher was considered to be the intermediary between God and man, the sermon served as an oral or written representation of the will of God. It was also the primary way that heretical doctrine was disseminated. The sermon, although often theoretical in nature, also provided a valuable mirror of contemporary events. For Jews the sermon was an ancient tradition in Jewish life, and a customary feature of religious life meant to address the intellectual and spiritual needs of the audience (Marc Saperstein, “The Medieval Jewish Sermon,” The Sermon, 175; Mark Saperstein, Jewish Preaching 1200–1800: An Anthology, 1989). In a primarily oral culture, during a period prior to the invention of printing, the sermon served as an agent of mass communication. The sermon is defined as an oral discourse, based on a sacred text, addressing an audience to instruct them in matters of faith and morals. The Sermon, 151. Despite its fundamentally oral nature, sermon literature was also used for private reading and study. Unlike texts such as

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treatises on virtues and vices or collections of canon law, the sermon, revised and written down, and often containing some artistic value, is considered to be a literary genre. While most sermons are prose, some are written in verse (Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric, 1986). While fundamentally non-fictional in nature, the sermon often contains fictional components such as drama and poetry, and therefore it has proven useful to study this genre in relation to other contemporary types of literature. Medieval Sermon Studies cuts across numerous other disciplines, such as theology, Biblical exegesis, liturgy, hagiology, literary criticism, musicology, art history, social and cultural history, Crusade Studies, and heresy. Hence it lends itself to interdisciplinary scholarship and diversity of approaches, yielding rich perspectives on the medieval period. The roots of medieval preaching lie first of all with the preaching of Christ, derived fundamentally from the oral nature of contemporary Jewish liturgy, with its reading and interpretation of scripture. It is important to note that this oral communication was meant to be shared with the entire community rather than with the tiny elite who would form the audience of a Cicero. Christ himself, as related in the Synoptic Gospels, enjoined his disciples to preach the word. Besides scripture, classical texts as well as patristic texts from east and west served as models for early medieval sermon writers. The influential De Doctrina Christiana of Augustine and Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great contained both scriptural and classical models (see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 1982, 90–97, and James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 1974, 269–300). When studying the early medieval sermon it has become customary to differentiate between the Biblical exegesis associated with homilies, and the moral and doctrinal instruction which served as the focus of the sermon. It was the sermon form that held sway in the monasteries by the 12th century. Besides the monastic variety, sermons were also used for catechetical public preaching. A reformer such as Caesarius of Arles labored for a regular program of preaching to the laity, and Carolingian sermons exhort their audience to forsake pagan practices (Thomas N. Hall, Sermon Studies, 211, 228–29). That this program was necessary is reflected in the common notion, that most early sermons were produced for a clerical or monastic audience, often not delivered orally but, rather, prepared for the private reading of a monastic audience (R. Emmet McLaughlin, “The Word Eclipsed? Preaching in the Early Middle Ages,” Traditio 46 [1991]: 77–122). Nevertheless Carolingian legislation emphasized the need to provide the laity with sound doctrine, while propounding proper liturgical observance and exhortation to virtue. Reflecting reverence for tradition, early sermons utilized the patristic model. Beginning with the Carolingian

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period, it is possible see sermon authors moving away from this pattern. The year 1200 marked a turning point in the history of the sermon. From this time preaching becomes most commonly associated with the new orders of Friars, although monks and secular university clerics continue to make important contributions. Structure was also defined. B. History of Research The modern interest and study of medieval sermon literature began in the second half of the 19th century, with the general studies of such as Louis Bourgain (La chaire française au XIIe siecle d’apres les manuscrits, 1879); Albert Lecoy de la Marche (La chaire française au moyen age, specialement au XIIIe siecle d’apres les manuscrits contemporains, 1886, 2nd ed.); Felix R. Albert (Die Geschichte der Predigt in Deutschland bis Luther, 1892–1896); Rudolf Cruel (Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter, 1879); Anton Linsenmayer (Geschichte der Predigt in Deutschland von Karl dem Grossen bis zum Ausgange des 14 Jahrhunderts, 1886); and continued later in England with Gerald R. Owst (Preaching in Medieval England, 1926, and Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed., 1961). There were confessional reasons that lay behind some of the early research as it was discovered that, against common opinion, the pre-Reformation church had not been silent. The early students of the genre were aware of the use to which sermons could be put to help gain insight into a number of areas of Medieval culture and society, religious and social practice, clerical behavior, theology, language (Latin) ideas and attitudes, popular religion, even superstition. Knowledge could also be gained concerning student life and the nature of and preparation for university examinations (“The University of Paris in the Sermons of the XIIIth Century,” AHR 10 [1904]: 1–27). A considerable amount of this information could be gleaned from Exempla, illustrative stories or examples which were often added to sermons for a dramatic or entertaining effect. There were medieval compilations of these stories produced as an aid to preachers. Exempla was a subject for early study (see Thomas F. Crane, “Mediaeval Sermon-Books and Stories,” PAPS XXI [1883]: 49–78, and “Mediaeval Sermon-Books and Their Study Since 1883,” PAPS 56.5 [1917]: 369–402). The focus of early students of the genre was on the history of preaching. This approach dominated sermon studies until the 1970s. Stress was placed on the relation of extant sermons to the Artes Praedicandi, the new rhetoric of preaching which developed in the middle ages (Phyllis B. Roberts, “The Ars praedicandi and the medieval sermon”, in Preacher, Sermon, 42). For an early example, see Harry Caplan, “Rhetorical Invention in Some Mediaeval Tractates of Preaching,” Speculum 2.3 (1927): 284–95. Sermons were also related to the narrative sources and

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studied for the light they might shed on religious attitudes and social attitudes and practices (Preacher, Sermon Audience, 13); see Gerald. R. Owst (Preaching in Medieval England, 1926; Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd rev. ed., 1961) for social life and thought. A major focus was on theology as scholars studied sermon literature for the light it could shed on dogma (John W. O’Malley, S.J., “Introduction: Medieval Preaching,” De Ore Domini: Preacher And Word In The Middle Ages, ed. Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green, and Beverly M. Kienzle, 1989, 1). The early studies were circumscribed by a lack of access to the main corpus of sermons which remained unpublished. This gap was filled by the publication of Schneyer’s eleven-volume Repertorium, beginning in 1969 (Johannes B. Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1150–1350, 11 vols. 1969–1990). The publication of the Repertorium was a watershed event. Schneyer catalogued some one hundred thousand Latin sermons together with lists of manuscripts and printed sources in which they appear. Where possible, Schneyer also included a reference to the subject and occasion of the sermon. Later scholars have made additions to Schneyer’s work and corrected inaccuracies inevitable in a work of this magnitude. (See a list to correct the errors in, Louis-Jacques Bataillon, “Complements au Repertorium de Schneyer I,” MSST 44 (2001): 15–36; and II, MSST 45 (2001): 11–39. The publication of the Repertorium was responsible for a widespread surge in research. During the 1970s, a change in sermon studies took place. Rather than concentrating on the history of preaching, the focus would now be on sermon texts, especially those in manuscript, with a particular emphasis placed upon structure and transmission (Preacher, Sermon Audience 13). This new focus stimulated an interest in particular types of preaching. In 1980 an important methodological essay was published by Louis-Jacques Bataillon (“Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons,” LSE, n.s. [1980]: 19–35). It had originally been delivered at the first Medieval Sermon Studies Symposium held in Oxford in July 1979. This was an attempt at classification. No matter the specialization or interests of the scholar, there are some basic general questions that must be asked about each of the texts under study: authorship, date and provenance. These are to be followed by more specific questions concerning such problems as liturgical practice or doctrine. Bataillon argued that unless a sermon is isolated in order to be used as an historical source, a sermon had to be understood within the collection in which it is contained. Has the collection been put together for a particular congregation or occasion? What is the function of the sermon within that collection? Bataillon also focused on the relation between the preserved written version and the original oral speech. Was the written sermon

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ever actually preached? What is the relation between the actual sermon and the reportatio, the notes taken by an auditor. Questions of Latin versus vernacular versions are also problematic, as well as the related problem of the possible determination of audience. Bataillon finally identifies structure and style as an aid in classifying sermons. The concerns of this essay are still fundamental to the study of medieval sermons. In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of studies on Mendicant preaching in discreet geographical areas were published, led by David D’Avray in an important work, The Preaching Of The Friars: Sermons Diffused From Paris Before 1300 (1985). D’Avray, using Schneyer as a resource, concentrates on model sermon collections, diffused from Paris, that aided the mendicant preachers. These sermons disclose some of the popular beliefs of the age, serve as a form of medieval mass communication and reveal the importance of Paris as a major center for both theology and popular preaching. During the late 1970s, an informal network of international scholars was erected which would coalesce after a symposium at Dijon in 1988 into the International Medieval Sermon Society, whose journal is the major resource for continuing sermon studies. The Society has been the sponsor of symposia and conference panels biennially at Oxford, Dijon, Assisi, Dublin, Erfurt, and Louvain-la-Neuve, and the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, itself a complement to the Medieval Sermon Studies conference held at Oxford from 1979–1986. These have yielded a number of significant publications: De l’homilie au sermon: Histoire de la predication medievale, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, Xavier Hermand, 1993; De Ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages, ed. Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green, and Beverly M. Kienzle, 1989; Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons, ed. Beverly M. Kienzle, 1996; Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse, 1998. A conference held at Downside Abbey in 1997 yielded Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Meussig, 1998. In the preface to De Ore Domini, the editors of this volume acknowledged the importance of growing international collaboration and communication for the development of the work (De Ore, IX). According to Phyllis B. Roberts, this is one of the most consequential recent developments in sermon studies (“Sermon Studies Scholarship: the Last 35 Years,” MSST 43 [1999]: 9–18). Thus the seventeen essays written in French and English found in De l’Homelie au Sermon (1993) cover a diversity in historical periods, as well as geography and methodology. Similarly, the thirteen essays, from the pens of scholars from Europe and North America, in De Ore Domini (1989), concerned

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with the history of preaching, cover the period from Bede to the 16th century, and provide important analyses of various genres, sermon sources and the work of individual preachers in diverse geographical locations. Significantly, most of the authors of these essays were involved in the editing of their sources, thus reflecting the contemporary movement toward new editions and source criticism. These activities have greatly increased knowledge while also revealing the underlying complexity of the field De Ore Domini XII. One of the keys is the variety of both preachers, styles and methods revealed by these studies. The essays also illustrate new methodologies and interests in the study of medieval sermons. They reflect a shift in recent decades from a previous limited focus on doctrinal content to one that recognizes that preaching is part of general culture. The oral nature of preaching was recognized, with the result that scholars were compelled to address topics as audience, setting, variety of forms, purposes, political, ecclesiastical and cultural influences, homiletical tradition, preaching aids, and understanding of scriptural exegesis. The scholar is compelled to contribute to and to utilize the methodologies and discoveries of such disciplines as exegesis, liturgy, theology, social history, cultural history, literary criticism, and textual criticism as articulated by John W. O’Malley, SJ (“Introduction Medieval Preaching,” De Ore Domini, 1989, 2.) The twenty-one essays in Medieval Sermons And Society: Cloister, City, University (1998), just as the studies in De Ore, make previously inaccessible material available. They also help reveal the inaccuracy of the usual conception of seeing the medieval sermon as chronologically and geographically uniform. It has been a characteristic criticism of medieval sermons that the topoi and exempla of these works change little during the centuries, thus mitigating their historical value. Essays in Medieval Sermons demonstrate that even preachers utilizing traditional materials were often able to transform them to meet contemporary needs. Sermons are shown to reflect changes in European life. Medieval Monastic Preaching covers the period from ca. 1135 to 1500 and geographic areas from England through France, the Low Countries, Germany and Italy. The collection helps redress the balance of those sermon studies focused on the work of the mendicant orders. The essays exhibit the considerable variety of preaching by the regular clergy, often reflecting the tension between the active versus the contemplative life, including nuns and hermits, during this period. Examples include preaching against the Cathars, preaching to the wider Christian community both the secular clergy and the laity, even sermons preached by secular clerics to monastic audiences.

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Another important collaborative effort, one of the major productions of the contemporary field of Sermon Studies is The Sermon: Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, Fasc. 81–83. Directed by Beverly M. Kienzle, 2000, a work described by Louis-Jacques Bataillon as “sans doute la publication la plus importante dans le domaine depuis le Repertorium de Schneyer” (“Chroniques de doctrines médiévales: Etudes récentes sur les sermons,” RSPT 88.4 [2004]: 279). It is a work of nearly one thousand pages concerned with defining the genre of sermon as well as the role of the preacher. Utilizing the expertise of thirteen of the most respected scholars of the medieval Sermon, The Sermon extensively covers both Latin sermons from the early medieval period through the 12th-century monastic sermon, the 12th-century canons, sermons after 1200, preaching in Italy from 1200–1500, vernacular sermons in Old and Middle English, Old Norse-Icelandic, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. There is also a chapter on Jewish preaching. Each chapter has a similar arrangement: a definition of a sermon genre, i. e., content and purpose, setting, intended audience, from a specific period or group. This is followed by a section detailing the development of the structure, style and content of the genre; thus, monastic sermons produced by authors who had contact with the schools tend toward more complex structure and theological arguments. Each chapter describes how and to what extent the sermons literature spread in its particular milieu. Problems of interpretation are discussed as well as the interest these works hold for historians. Each chapter has an important catalogue of collections, editions and manuscripts. Sample texts are also provided. One important lacuna in this study, 14th- and 15th-century Latin sermons from England, has been filled by Siegfried Wenzel (Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif, 2005). In her lengthy introduction, the editor, Beverly M. Kienzle, defines the sermon as a genre. The normal designation “written work” must be expanded to cover the oral nature of the sermon. The medieval sermon developed from the religious and social life of the medieval period (146). It is a literary work that can have artistic merit. It has links to other genres (poetry, drama, the exemplum, political speech). Kienzle identifies three essential characteristics of a sermon: its oral nature addressed by a preacher to an audience; secondly, its didactic and hortatory mode; finally, the instruction or exhortation is based upon a sacred text and concerns a matter of faith or morals. Other topics include sermons and texts providing evidence of preaching, the sermon as utterance authorized by the church, and the role of lay preaching. Kienzle also makes the point that the sermon was a fluid genre related to letters, commentaries, treatises and other genres which were also often

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written by sermon authors. Also the important point is made that the written text of the sermon is not a perfect replication of the preaching event. Thus a central problem of sermon studies: determining and analyzing what relation if any existed between written and oral performance. The introduction discusses the important topic of determining the function of sermon collections, as well as the nature of a sermon’s transmission. In the conclusion to the volume, Kienzle summarizes material presented in the individual essays pertaining to problems in the interpretation of sermons and to the interest of the sermon to historians. The sermon is a mirror of medieval society. According to Kienzle, “Since the sermon provided the principal means for carrying out religious education in the Middle Ages, the lessons it taught illuminate medieval life and thought in multiple aspects that interest scholars in religious, intellectual, social and political history, as well as in other fields” (978). The text of The Sermon is accompanied by a bibliography extending to 123 pages. The work is an outstanding scholarly achievement, and is an indispensable introduction and guide to the study of the medieval sermon. Work is also being done to provide information about sermons written in the vernacular. In 1999, the first two volumes of a Repertorium were published which contained descriptions of more than fourteen hundred vernacular sermons found in manuscripts in Berlin libraries (Repertorium der ungedruckten deutschsprachigen Predigten des Mittelalters: Der Berliner Bestand, ed. Volker Mertens, Hans-Jürgen Schiewer, et al., vol. 1, parts 1–2: Die Handschriften aus dem Strassburger Dominikanerinnenkloster St. Nikolaus in undis und benachbarte Provenienzen, ed. Volker Mertens, Hans-Jürgen Schiewer, et al., 1999). The SERMO group, a Europe-wide collaborative organization of scholars was founded in Berlin by Hans-Jürgen Schiewer and Volker Mertens in 1996, with the aim of publishing Reportium-like catalogues for sermons in all the vernacular languages. The first such Repertorium, was published in 2003 (Repertorium van Middelnederlandse preken in handschriften tot en met 1550/ Repertorium of Middle Dutch Sermons Preserved in Manuscripts from before 1550, 3 vols., ed. Maria Sherwood-Smith and Patricia Stoop, 2003). See the report of the conference marking the publication of this volume in MSST 4 (2003): 61–78, also including the English introduction of the volume. Thus, there are two fundamental aspects of Sermon Studies as a field. One must understand the continuing international efforts to catalogue, analyze, and publish texts, making them available to a wider scholarly community. One must also take stock of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The latter characteristic is well represented by (Speculum Sermonis, ed. Georgiana

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Donavin, Cary J. Nederman, and Richard Utz, 2004). The subtitle, Interdisciplinary Reflections On The Sermon, reflects this focus. This is an interdisciplinary anthology, interested in the different contexts of the sermon, and utilizing the perspectives of scholars from North America, Europe and Australia from the Patristic period through Bernardo of Siena, from sermons by Augustine to Middle English, French, German, East Slavic and Middle Dutch. The essays bring together insights gleaned from methodologies developed in the study of art, architecture, archaeology, drama, music, political theory, liturgy and religious history. Evidence is demonstrated in sections of essays for the way sermons reflect their world, reflect upon their world, and how they are reflected in other literary genres. Work has been done on the relationship of Latin to the vernacular, oral versus written sermons, the sermon as performance, the accuracy of reportationes, audience reception. Despite the fact that the mendicant orders were the most celebrated medieval preachers, they were hardly the only ones. Scholars have noted the role played by bishops and even monks as disseminators of religious truth. The debate over preaching authority has figured prominently. Research has also taken account of lay preaching, the preaching of heretics and women. Among the newer methodologies employed are those derived from drama studies, women’s studies and performance theory. The close relationship of sermons to their society has also been studied, yielding insights into the inculcation of beliefs and values, social attitudes and assumptions such as attitudes toward women and the role played by preaching in the launching of the crusades. And the horizon of medieval sermon studies continues to widen. This horizon now includes the Muslim sermon. See Johannes Pedersen, “The Islamic Preacher, Wa ’iz Muddhakkir, Qass,” (Ignace Goldhizer Memorial Volume, part I, ed. David Samuel Löwinger and József Somogyz, 1948); Merlin L. Swartz, “Arabic Rhetoric and the Art of the Homily in Medieval Islam,” Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam, ed. Richard G. Hovanissian and Georges Sabagh, 1999; Jonathan P. Berkeley, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East, 2001. Also, vol. 50 [2006] of Medieval Sermon Studies contains that journal’s first article analyzing medieval Islamic preaching (Linda G. Jones, “Ibn ’Abbad of Ronda’s Sermon on the Prophet’s Birthday Celebration: Preaching the Sufi and Suni Paths of Islam,” 31–49). Much work remains to be done. Jones points out that, “no attempt has been made to identify systematically and catalogue individual sermons or sermon collections or to devise a typology of medieval preaching” (32). Jones also informs us that her unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Boundaries of Sin and Communal Identity: Muslim and Christian Preaching and the Transmission of Cultural Identity in Medieval Iberia and

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the Maghreb (12th to 15th Centuries), 2004, aimed in part to fill the lacuna in medieval Muslim sermon studies concerning liturgical rather than popular preaching. Jewish studies have been enriched by an interest in sermons and Jewish preaching. Leopold Zunz began the study of Jewish preaching in his work Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden historisch entwickelt, 1832. Despite its age, it remains the fundamental bibliographical resource for printed Jewish sermons. However, Zunz’s primary purpose was to document the early existence in Jewish worship of preaching in the vernacular rather than to analyze the structure and content of the sermons themselves. Israel Bettan’s Studies in Jewish Preaching: Middle Ages, 1939, republished in 1987, was a biographical, bibliographical, historical and analytical study of seven individuals. As Marc Saperstein tells us, his Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800, 1989, fills in the lacunae in Bettan by expanding the number of preachers included and through annotation of texts. Saperstein also goes beyond Bettan’s reliance on 19th-century published manuscripts to present sermons that remain in manuscript, are newly published, or whose sole publication dated from the 16th century. Saperstein also focuses more closely than had Bettan on actual preaching and on individual sermons rather than edited collections. Select Bibliography Louis-Jacques Bataillon, “Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. (1980): 19–35; The Sermon, directed by Beverly M. Kienzle (Turnhout, Brepols, 2000); Carolyn Muessig, “Sermon, Preacher and Society in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History (2002): 73–91; Phyllis B. Roberts, “Medieval Sermon Studies: the Last 35 Years,” Medieval Sermon Studies 43 (1999): 9–18; Johannes B. Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1150–1350, 11 vols. (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969–1990).

Robert W. Zajkowski

Short Verse Narratives A. Introduction Short verse narratives are ubiquitous in the Middle Ages, occurring in Latin and in all the vernaculars. The definition of the form is particularly difficult: how short must it be? And can it be a short narrative inserted into a frame

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such as the Canterbury Tales? The question of length has no clear answer, particularly because many scholars accept, for example, the French Trubert, a humorous verse narrative of about 3000 lines, as a fabliau (and thus, by definition, as a short verse narrative), whereas a number of works no longer than Trubert are routinely identified as romances and are not normally treated alongside fabliaux, lais, and other forms. Identifying texts as “short narratives” is a natural approach and a practical necessity, but ultimately it is no more helpful than choosing to study “long novels” as a distinct group; yet scholarly efforts to ascribe certain common traits to brief narratives have been numerous and usually fruitless. Beyond the obvious (relative brevity and, consequently, the restricted number of episodes and limited character development), the fact is that the texts in question may have little in common. A related point is that the taxonomic distinctions made by scholars to distinguish one kind of short narrative from another are fluid and problematic, in large part because medieval authors themselves appear, for the most part, unconcerned about such distinctions. For present purposes, short verse narratives will include in particular apologues, fabliaux, lais, cantari, and mæren, with the reiterated caveats that the terminology is uncertain and that the forms frequently overlap with others. For example, texts that we may consider fabliaux may call themselves contes, aventures, fables, or dits, all of which may well have meant, to the medieval audience, little more than “stories.” B. Propp and Typology In 1928, Vladimir Propp published his effort to devise a typology of the Russian fairy tale. His The Morphology of the Folktale proved extremely influential in France in particular and, once it was translated into English, among Anglophone scholars. Propp analyzed the folktale and devised a series of functions or “narratemes,” defined as a kind of action (e. g., “the hero leaves home”) or a type of character. He discerned that there were thirty-one functions; furthermore, although only a certain number of these could be found in a particular tale, those that were present invariably occurred in the same order. Propp’s influence on narratology led scholars and students to apply his method to other forms, including longer narratives, where the system has generally proved unworkable. It has been applied with somewhat more success by scholars dealing with other short narratives such as the fabliaux. One of the more successful efforts is The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception (1987) by Mary Jane Stearns Schenck, though her study illustrates both the utility and the limitations of Proppian analysis, suggesting that the system drawn

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from the Russian fairy tale may be reliably applicable only to that form. Nonetheless, the importance of his seminal work is such that it must be included in any discussion of short medieval narratives. C. Fables and Lais Fables held great appeal for medieval audiences. The fables thought to be from Aesop – whence the label “Isopets” or “Ysopets” attached to several French collections – but actually attributable to Phaedrus and known to medieval audiences through Latin adaptations and vernacular versions of them, some in verse, others in prose. Of the numerous collections of medieval fables, the best known are those of Marie de France (late 12th century). Her fables number roughly one hundred. Many of them, but not all, feature animals or even inanimate objects endowed with the power of speech. Marie, claiming an English source that may have been her fabrication, uses the fable form to endorse justice and fairness but also to advance a conservative social and political point of view. To Marie is attributed also a collection of twelve lais, short verse narratives that generally treat the pleasures and especially the pains of love. For some of these texts, attribution is less than certain: only a single manuscript transmits all twelve, preceded by a prologue. Again the question of definition is problematic. Emanuel J. Mickel, in Marie de France (1974) notes that lais and fabliaux share many features, whereas Willem Noomen, in “Qu’est-ce qu’un fabliau?” (Atti of the XIV congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza, 1981, 431) remarks that the terms “lai” and “fabliau” appear to be mutually exclusive terms. Among the most important studies of Marie’s lais is Glyn S. Burgess, The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Context (1987), particularly notable for the close analysis of Marie’s vocabulary of love, honor, and service, as well as her treatment of female protagonists. The last of those subjects is treated also by June Hall McCash in “Images of Women in the Lais of Marie de France,” Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 96–112. Given the paucity of biographical information concerning Marie, R. Howard Bloch, in The Anonymous Marie de France (2003), seeks internal evidence of her poetic persona and argues that she was a sophisticated and self-conscious author concerned with the processes of writing and with memory, translation, and performance. The subject of memory is further explored in detail by Logan E. Whalen in Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory (2007). Aside from the lais attributed to Marie, there exist eleven anonymous Breton lais. The critical attention they have received has been sparse and unsystematic, despite their availability in an edition by Prudence Mary O’Hara

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Tobin: Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1976). A new edition with facing English translations has been produced by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook; their volume, published by D. S. Brewer (2007), offers an extended introduction and a thorough critical study of each lai. D. Fabliaux Fabliaux – the form is a diminutive of fable – are short, mostly comic narratives in verse. Some purists insist that the fabliaux are by definition French, though scholars of Middle English routinely refer to several of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (e. g., “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Merchant’s Tale”) as fabliaux. Owing to the application of varying definitions, the number of extant French fabliaux varies from about eighty to 160. Although many were published as early as the 18th century, the editorial attitude was sometimes apologetic, and scholarly discussion of the genre lagged far behind publication of the texts. The reason for that lag is obvious: the fabliaux often treated erotic or scatological themes. The first great monument of fabliau scholarship is Joseph Bédier’s Les fabliaux: études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (1893; 6th ed., 1964). A hugely influential work, this study molded scholarly attitudes toward the fabliaux for a half-century. The book offers a multitude of perceptive analyses and observations, but the single point that most readers noted and retained was the contention that the fabliaux were bourgeois literature. That notion was based both on the nature of the fabliaux and on a striking coincidence: the birth of the genre, about 1200 C.E., coincided generally with the growth of cities and the increasing importance of the middle class. Bédier’s thesis was rarely questioned until 1957, when Per Nykrog published his equally influential study, Les fabliaux, in which he refuted Bédier’s notion that, just as the nobility had its literature (romances, lyric, etc.), the bourgeoisie now had its own (fabliaux). Nykrog demonstrated that many fabliaux depend for their comic effect on themes, terms, and formulae that could be fully appreciated only by an audience thoroughly familiar with courtly literature. Further nuances were soon added to this question by Jean Rychner, in his Contribution à l’étude des fabliaux, 2 vols. (1961). He examined fabliaux that exhibited striking differences from manuscript to manuscript and demonstrated that, drawing from the stock of available stories, some redactors prepared fabliaux for a more cultivated audience whereas others, using the same narrative line, were content to draw their comic effect from coarser language and an unadorned directness in the depiction of even the most indelicate subjects. Philippe Ménard’s Les lais de

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Marie de France: contes d’amour et d’aventure au moyen âge (1983) is a general study that, like Bédier’s, offers a broad survey of the genre, dealing with audience, with the social situation of authors and readers, with comic techniques and the language of fabliaux. All the while, a debate has continued over the very definition of “fabliau,” despite what should by now be recognized as both a vain effort and one that does not correspond to a medieval awareness of generic borders. Bédier’s famous formula is still quoted in every book and most articles on the fabliaux; for him, fabliaux were “des contes à rire en vers” (comic stories in verse). Other scholars limit their list of fabliaux to the seventy or so that are “selfnominated,” that is, they explicitly identify themselves as fabliaux. Still other scholars, attempting to be as specific and comprehensive as possible, offer cumbersome definitions. Omer Jodogne’s, for example, is “un conte en vers où, sur un ton trivial, sont narrées une ou plusieurs aventures plaisantes ou exemplaires, l’un et l’autre ou l’un ou l’autre” (“a verse narrative presenting, in a familiar style, one or several adventures that are amusing or exemplary or both,” 23). Despite the necessity of such efforts, it appears unlikely that the medievalist community will accept any single definition without serious caveats and exceptions. Meanwhile, fabliau scholarship of the later 20th century turned especially toward the question of the artistry demonstrated by the authors of many fabliaux – and the clear absence of artistry shown by others. A number of studies, including The Old French Fabliaux by Charles Muscatine (1986), Reading Fabliaux by Norris J. Lacy (1993), and The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (2000) by Brian J. Levy have set the fabliaux into a broader context, dealing with publics, themes, and comic techniques. A series of articles by Roy J. Pearcy offers a consistently perceptive and authoritative study of a number of fabliaux and fabliau problems; see for example “Modes of Signification and the Humor of Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin L. Honeycutt (1974), 163–96. Pearcy’s recent book Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux (2007) offers important narratological studies of the genre and of individual texts. The uses (and misuses) of language have attracted the attention of a number of scholars, though nowhere as much as in R. Howard Bloch’s The Scandal of the Fabliaux (1986), which posits the inadequacy of language to treat fabliau themes thoroughly. Two additional foci in particular have engaged scholars at the end of the 20th century and in early 2001. First, there is quickening interest in codicological matters, as witness Keith Busby, “The Scandal of the Fabliaux Manuscripts,” Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript (2002), 437–63. And fin-

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ally, both theoretical and practical questions of fabliau performance have begun to yield studies such as Brian J. Levy’s “Performing Fabliaux” (Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence, 2005, 123–40). E. Cantari In Italy, the short verse narrative is best represented by cantari, which, as the term suggests, were stories sung in public. They were popular from the second half of the 13th century through the Middle Ages. Most were 400 lines or shorter, though some were longer compositions divided into sections that could be presented in “serialized” fashion. An example of the latter is La struzione della Tavola Ritonda or the Chantari di Lancelotto, consisting of seven sections recounting the fall of Camelot and adapted from the French La Mort Artu. French themes and motifs were commonly treated, with Arthuriana particularly popular. In some instances, such as Liombruno, the cantari relied heavily on magic and fantasy. See I cantari, struttura e tradizione, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Olschki, 1984) or Elisabetta Benucci, R. Manetta, and Franco Zabagli, Cantari novellistici dal Tre al Cinquecento, 2 vols. (2002). F. Mæren Mæren are German narratives that, to a considerable extent, parallel the fabliaux in form and content. Some scholars have argued that a good many mæren were directly influenced or inspired by fabliaux, though others, including Hanns Fischer (Die deutsche Mærendichtung des 15. Jahrhunderts, 1966; 2nd ed. 1983) have been less than convinced by such arguments. Similarly, the thorny question of genre identity and definition has plagued scholarship on the mæren no less than on the fabliaux, or Versnovellen. Among the most influential studies of mæren – and no doubt the most influential attempt to define them – was the study by Hanns Fischer (see supra), who described them as verse narratives, varying from 150 to 2000 lines in length and offering fictional accounts of characters who are, in nearly every instance, humans. This last criterion establishes a distinction between mæren and fables, and Fischer further insists that mæren present a secular rather than a religious point of view. Although Fischer identifies four kinds of mæren, the vast majority – some 80 % – are similar in intent and subject to the French fabliaux as described by Bédier. A good many scholars have responded to Fischer’s seminal work, though a number of those responses turn on the question of taxonomy; that is, not only on the nature of the texts but specifically on the accuracy of the

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term mære. Some scholars have rejected the term as a 19th-century creation. Karl-Heinz Schirmer preferred a middle ground, rejecting mære but describing these works as Middle High German Versnovellen (novellas in verse). Jöelle Fuhrmann, in La représentation de la femme dans le ‘nouvelle’ allemande du moyen âge tardif, 2 vols. (1996), has argued strenuously for the term nouvelle (novella), a label that has been resisted by those who point out that that it has already been attached, from the 19th century on, to another form. The taxonomic problem persists, even though the most practical solution, for mæren, fabliaux, and other short forms, may have been offered as early as 1961, when H. Tiemann referred to them simply as Kurzerzählung – simply “short narratives.” (See Hermann Tiemann, Die Entstehung der mittelalterlichen Novelle in Frankreich, 1961.) Major contributions both to theory and to practical analysis of mæren have been made by scholars individually and collectively. Concerning the latter, see Walter Haug, “Entwurf zu einer Theorie der mittelalterlichen Kurzerzählung,” Kleinere Erzählformen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. W. Haug and Burghart Wachinger (1993), 1–36. Other studies in this volume deal with the element of the grotesque, with aggression, with eroticism, and additional themes. Fuhrmann (see supra) deals extensively if somewhat unsystematically with gender issues and the presentation of women. Individual journal articles have also contributed important analyses of comedy, style, or characteristic themes in single or several mæren. Among the many prominent examples are Albrecht Classen, “The Fourteenth-Century Verse Novella Dis ist von dem Heselin: Eroticism, Social Discourse, and Ethical Criticism,” Orbis Litterarum, 60.4 (2005): 260–77, and Mark Chinca, “The Body in Some Middle High German Mæren: Taming and Maiming,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (1996), 187–210. Finally, the multi-volume reference work, Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Kurt Ranke (1977–), is an indispensable source of information on the genre (and far beyond). Kurt Grubmüller made available an excellent selection of mæren in his Novellistik des Mittelalters, ed. Grubmüller (1996), offering detailed discussions of manuscripts, source material, subject matter, and social-historical and literary references. He provided a cumulative overview of the genre of mæren in his Die Ordnung, der Witz und das Chaos (2006), whereas Albrecht Classen examined a number of individual mæren as to their comments on marriage, love, sexuality, communication, and old age (“Gender Conflicts, Miscommunication, and Communicative Communities in the Late Middle Ages,” Speaking in the Medieval World, ed. Jean E. Godsall-Myers, 2003, 65–92; “Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: Discourse, Communication, and Social Interaction,” Discourse

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on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 289–312; “Die Heidin, A Late-Medieval Experiment in Cultural Rapprochement Between Christians and Saracens,” Medieval Encounters 11, 1–2 [2005]: 50–71; and “Erotic Symbolism, Laughter, and Hermeneutics at Work in Late-Medieval mæren. The Case of Das Häslein,” Mediaevalia et Humanistica, NS. 34 [2008]: 87–104; see also his volume with English translations, Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany, 2007; 2nd ed. 2009). The genre itself has been discussed from many different perspectives, as reflected by the numerous contributions to Kleinere Erzählformen im Mittelalter, ed. Klaus Grubmüller et al. (1988), and Kleinere Erzählformen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (1993). A comprehensive structural analysis of the German corpus of mæren was presented by Hans-Joachim Ziegeler in his Erzählen im Spätmittelalter: Mären im Kontext von Minnereden, Bispeln und Romanen (1985), whereas Karl-Heinz Schirmer, in his Stil- und Motivuntersuchungen zur mittelhochdeutschen Versnovelle (1969), had already examined the rich variety of motifs and stylistic features. Select Bibliography Joseph Bédier, Les fabliaux: études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (1893; 6th ed., Paris: Champion, 1964); Glyn S. Burgess, The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Context (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Hanns Fischer, Die deutsche Mærendichtung des 15. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 1966; 2nd ed. 1983; see 280–437 for the most extensive bibliography on mæren); Per Nykrog, Les fabliaux (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1957; new ed. Geneva: Droz, 1973); Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1928; 2nd English ed., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968); Kurt Ranke, ed., Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–).

Norris J. Lacy

Sisterbooks A. Introduction The Sisterbooks (Nonnenbücher, Schwesternbücher, Nonnenviten, Convent Chronicles) refer to nine collections of spiritual biographies, convent histories and anecdotes compiled by nuns of the Order of Preachers from the lives of exemplary sisters, beginning in the 14th century and continuing throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The women’s communities that generated and continually

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revised these collections included the convents of Adelhausen, Engelthal, Gotteszell, Katherinenthal (Dießenhofen), Kirchberg, Oetenbach, Töss, Unterlinden, and Weiler, all of which were located in the Dominican province of Teutonia, today’s Alsace, Switzerland, Swabia, and Bavaria. The principal literary models were the widely-circulated compilation of lives of Dominican brethren, the Vitae fratrum, commissioned by the Order in 1256, completed in 1260 under the direction of Gerard de Frachete and completely revised between 1265 and 1271; and popular collections of hagiography, of which vernacular compilations such as the Legendar des Marquard Biberli emerged in every greater numbers in the 14th century (Marianne Wallach-Faller, “Ein mittelhochdeutsches Dominikanerinnen-Legendar des 14. Jahrhunderts als mystagogischer Text?,” Abendländische Mystik im Mittelalter: Symposion Kloster Engelberg 1984, ed. Kurt Ruh, 1986, 388–401). A powerful 15th-century reform movement motivated the renewed redaction and re-distribution of several Sisterbooks under the direction of the Basel Dominican Johannes Meyer (Werner Fechter, “Johannes Meyer,” Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, vol. VI, cols. 474–89); hereafter: VL. Siegfried Ringler characterizes the sisterbook-genre as “a compilation of shorter nuns’ lives from one particular convent presented in the form of a chronicle by members of subsequent generations” (Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien, 1980, 4). The vitae fall into two basic types: 1) vignettes with generic introductions where the focus is on one revelation, vision, or miracle, in which the sister sometimes even remains anonymous. 2) more extensive spiritual biographies with a hagiographical structure which often include accounts of the sister’s childhood, her conversion, virtues and revelations in the context of her spiritual journey and not infrequently the sister’s death and subsequent miraculous events. In some cases, a history of the convent’s founding or a general description of the earlier sisters’ devotional lives and virtues à la the Vitae fratrum is also appended. As sources the authors used their convents’ oral histories and frequently added already-existing vitae from their own libraries. The individual narrative elements tend to be interchangeable, as in most hagiography, although more structure is imposed in the Sisterbooks revised by Johannes Meyer. B. Brief Portraits of the Sisterbooks Adelhausen (ASB). Anna von Munzingen, thrice documented as prioress of the Freiburg convent, compiled the chronicle of Adelhausen in 1318, including examples of “special grace,” mystical experiences, visions, and extraordinary ascetic acts. Three MHG adaptations of the ASB survive, including an

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excerpt to which in 1481 Johannes Meyer appended an alphabetical list of Adelhausen sisters known to his time. The ASB is notable as the work of a single woman author originally composed in Latin. The spiritual biography of Else von der Neustatt is the one exception to the vignette-dominated format of the chronicle and probably constitutes an independent work that the prioress added to the compilation (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Adelhausen,” ead., By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-books of Fourteenth-Century Germany, 1996, 10–12; Walter Blank, “Anna von Munzingen,” VL, vol. I, cols. 365–66). Engelthal (ESB). Incorporated into the Order of Preachers in 1248, the convent of Engelthal in Franconia became renowned as a center of spirituality through the lives and works of Christine Ebner (1277–1356) and Adelheid Langemann (1306–1375). The ESB was compiled by Christine Ebner in the third decade of the 14th century and consists of a chronicle followed by brief entries recounting extraordinary experiences and acts of nearly fifty sisters. More elaborate spiritual biographies of Adelheid von Trokkau, Diemut Ebnerin, Anna von Weitersdorf, and Elsbeth Meierin are thought to be previously written pieces that Christine incorporated into her text. (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Engeltal,” ead., By Women, 1996, 18–19; Siegfried Ringler, “Christine Ebner,” VL, vol. II, cols. 297–302; Leonard P. Hindsley, The Mystics of Engelthal. Writings from a Medieval Monastery, 1998). Gotteszell (GSB). Long thought a part of the Kirchberg Sisterbook, with which it was transmitted, or else attributed to a convent near Ulm, the GSB has been shown to be the separate work of the Dominican convent of Gotteszell near Schwäbisch Gmünd, the cloister of which still stands. Composed after 1330 in MGH by an anonymous sister with good knowledge of Latin, the GSB devotes almost half of its content to the vita of Adelheit von Hiltegarthausen, followed by ten shorter Gnadenviten of famous sisters and a collective biography of many other nuns. The GSB concludes with two desiderata attributed to later compilers. The most conventional of the sisterbooks, both in its content and in its language, the GSB offers the most outstanding example of a Sisterbook as a practical guide to spiritual life (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Gotteszell,” ead., By Women, 1996, 16–17; Siegfried Ringler, “Ulmer Schwesternbuch, besser: ‘Gotteszeller Schwesternbuch’,” VL, vol. IX, cols. 1233–36). Katharinenthal (KSB). Written in MHG with a composition similar to that of the ASB, the KSB survives in four medieval manuscripts, transmitted together with religious songs, with didactic, religious allegories such as Christus und die minnende Seele, and in a Meyer redaction along with the TSB and the OSB (1454). Its home convent began with the settlement of a group of

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Winterthur Beguines in Dießenhofen on the banks of the Rhine, found security with incorporation in 1245 under the spiritual direction of Konstanz Dominicans, and prospered greatly in the 14th century with the support of patrician and noble families of Villingen, Schaffhausen, and Konstanz. The Meyer variant includes a forward and afterward, the history of the convent’s founding and an elaborate vita of Elsbeth von Villingen (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Diessenhofen,” ead., By Women, 1996, 28–29; Ruth Meyer, Das ‘St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch’: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar, 1995). Kirchberg (KiSB). The convent of Kirchberg in Sulz on the Neckar experienced an early apogee in the 13th century following its incorporation into the Order of Preachers in 1245, when it boasted over eighty nuns. Like the USB, the KSB is the carefully compiled product of one sister, in this case Elisabeth of Kirchberg, “whom God took from the Jews.” Her works include an extensive spiritual biography of the Kirchberg mystic Irmgard, which survives in three variants, and the KSB itself, in which an account of the cloister chaplain Walther and the concluding spiritual biography of Mechthild von Waldeck are the exceptional elements (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Kirchberg,” ead., By Women, 1996, 19–21; Siegfried Ringler, “Elisabeth von Kirchberg,” VL, vol. II, cols. 479–482; Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien, 1980, 175–205). Oetenbach (OSB). The founding and development of the convent of Oetenbach in 1231 is carefully chronicled in the OSB, dated to ca. 1340, when anonymous compilers combined the detailed history of its founding with five extended spiritual biographies. The conversion and spiritual trials of the rich widow Ita von Hohenfels, whose support apparently ensured the convent’s prosperity, play a particularly prominent role. The long missing second part of the OSB, consisting of the “Life and Revelations of Elsbeth von Oye,” whose revelations comprise the oldest surviving autograph manuscript in MHG, along with the vitae of Adelheit von Freiburg, and Margarethe von Stülinger, was discovered in Wrocław, Poland, in 1996 by Wolfram Schneider-lastin. The lives of the final three sisters were originally independent compositions, added to the OSB, which found its final form under the direction of Johannes Meyer in the 15th century (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Oetenbach,” ead., By Women, 1996, 25–28; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Oetenbacher Schwesternbuch,” VL, vol. VI, cols. 170–72; Wolfram SchneiderLastin, “‘Oetenbacher Schwesternbuch’, Fortsetzung,” VL, vol. XI, cols. 1113–15); Barbara Helbling, ed., Bettelorden, Bruderschaften und Beginen in Zürich. Stadtkultur und Seelenheil im Mittelalter, 2002). Töss (TSB). The convent of Töss in Winterthur near Zurich evolved out of a Beguine community that adopted the rule of St. Augustine, much like

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Katharinenthal. Officially incorporated into the Order of Preachers in 1245, Töss housed up to 100 women in the 14th century. Although both Henry Suso’s vita and the TSB name the nun Elsbeth Stagel as author, Klaus grubmüller has argued convincingly for several phases of authorship, having established that most references to Stagel in the TSB were taken verbatim by Johannes Meyer from Seuse’s vita (Klaus Grubmüller, “Die Viten der Schwestern von Töss und Elsbeth Stagel,” ZfdA 98 (1969): 171–204; see also Albrecht Classen, “From Nonnenbuch to Epistolarity: Elsbeth Stagel as a Late Medieval Women Writer,” Medieval German Studies. Proceedings from the 23rd International Conference, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, ed. id., 1989, 147–70). The TSB includes thirty-three extended spiritual biographies of sisters from the time period 1250–1350, including those of seven lay sisters, of which the vitae of Sophie von Klingnau and Mechthild von Stans are especially notable. The vita of Elsbeth von Cellikon may well have been added by Stagel; that of Elisabeth von Ungarn is almost certainly a later addition. Remarkable both for its more sophisticated MHG style and differentiated descriptions of exemplary lives, the Meyer redaction of the TSB opens with an account of the convent’s founding (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Töß,” ead., By Women, 1996, 21–25; Alois Haas, “Elsbeth Stagel,” VL, vol. IX, cols. 219–25). Unterlinden (USB). Composed in exquisite Latin by Katharina von Gebersweiler, documented as prioress of the convent of Unterlinden in Colmar (Alsace; 1330?), the USB survives in two 15th-century Latin manuscripts and a precise MHG translation by Elisabeth Kempf, prioress from 1469–1485. It consists of a prologue strongly influenced by Gerard de Frachete and Dietrich of Apolda; eight introductory chapters concerning life in the convent and forty-two spiritual biographies. Five additional biographies were later appended, the final one by Elisabeth Kempf herself. Remarkable for its subtly differentiated portraits of illustrious sisters, the USB survives as the oldest, complete Latin compilation of nuns’ lives (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Unterlinden,” ead., By Women, 1996, 13–15; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Katharina von Gebersweiler,” VL, vol. IV, cols. 1073–5); Karl-Ernst Geith, “Elisabeth Kempf,” VL, vol. IV, cols. 1115–17). Weiler (WSB). The first Dominican convent in the diocese of Constance, founded in 1230 near Esslingen on the Neckar, Weiler had attracted more than 130 sisters when the Order restricted membership to seventy in 1362. The WSB is preserved in three MHG manuscripts, all copies made in Dominican convents in the second half of the 15th century. Probably the last of the nine Sisterbooks, the WSB is composed of brief chapters framed by a modest prologue and epilogue. Of the twenty-nine nuns profiled, only the first

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six are accorded spiritual biographies, with the remainder of the WSB consisting of brief anecdotes and vignettes. The pedestrian style and repetition of motifs make the WSB stylistically among the less interesting Sisterbooks (Gertrude Jaron Lewis, “Weiler,” ead., By Women, 1996, 29–31; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Weiler Schwesternbuch,” VL, vol. X, cols. 801–03). C. Scholarship on the Sisterbooks Initial research on the Sisterbooks as a genre was the product of three dissertations, the work of Georg Kunze in Hamburg (1952), Hester Reed Gehring at the University of Michigan (1957) and Walter blank at the University of Freiburg (1962). They deserve credit for doing the “spadework” on texts that most medievalists at the time dismissed as derivative and unworthy of serious study. Modern scholarship on the Sisterbooks began with Siegfried Ringler’s edition and study of the Codex Scotensis Vindobonensis 308, including the spiritual biography of Adelheid Langemann of Engelthal, and the Engelthal and Kirchberg Sisterbooks, along with the spiritual biography of the Engelthal chaplain, Friedrich Sunder (Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur, 1980). The question of the Sisterbooks’ historicity provoked a vehement but also productive theoretical debate between Ringler and the Peter Dinzelbacher. For example, when Katharina of Unterlinden reports seeing the Virgin Mary appearing to the sisters assembled for prayer in the choir and giving the Baby Jesus to each nun to hold, should this vision be read as a fictional construct drawn from hagiography and visionary literature, as Ringler asserted, or is it impossible to rule out the possibility that Katharina, who is documented in the convent necrology, actually had such a vision, as Dinzelbacher argued? (Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur, 1980, especially 13–17 and 375–80; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Zur Interpretation erlebnismystischer Texte des Mittelalters,” ZfdA 117 [1988]: 1–23). The Germanist consensus after ten years of debate fell in favor of Ringler. As Frank Tobin concludes, “Literary traditions and the structure specific to each genre determine … what is required by the genre as to content and form, what is usual, and what is at all possible” (Frank J. Tobin, “The Dispute about the Reality of Visions,” Mechthild von Magdeburg: A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes, 1995, 115–22). Questions of feminine authorship and the possibility of reconstructing women’s voices took center stage in three cases where first-person accounts have survived alongside the third-person reports of the Sisterbooks: Elsbeth Stagel and Henry Suso; Christine Ebner, Konrad von Füssen, and the anonymous confessor and scribe of her autobiographical accounts; and, finally, Els-

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beth von Oye and her anonymous Dominican redactor. While Grubmüller celebrates relegating Elsbeth Stagel to the margins of authorship in the case of the TSB, Tobin finds it impossible to rule out her collaboration in the writing of Henry Suso’s Exemplar (Klaus Grubmüller, “Die Viten der Schwestern von Töß und Elsbeth Stagel,” ZfdA 98 [1969]: 171–204; Frank Tobin, “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?” Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney, 1999, 118–35). Ursula Peters provides an interesting summary of the complex relationships between historical figures and fictional constructs in the two conflicting first-person accounts of Christine Ebner’s life (Ursula Peters, “Christine Ebner und der schreibende Bruder: die Verschriftlichung eines Gnadenlebens,” ead., Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. and 14. Jahrhunderts, 1988, 155–76). Ulrike Wiethaus reads the Suso-Stagel relationship much more critically, concluding that Suso’s Exemplar “present[s] Stagel’s voice and authorial authority as inferior, private, enclosed … and mystical rather than intellectual,” seeing Stagel’s persona as modeling obedience and subservience (“Thieves and Carnivals: Gender in German Dominican Litearture of the Fourteenth Century,” The Vernacular Spirit. Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al., 2002, 209–38, here 222). In general, she argues that “medieval men and women, no doubt unequal in their relationship to each other, stood united when it came to the persecution and destruction of the inferior Other” (212). With access to the rediscovered conclusion of the Oetenbach Sisterbook, Wolfram Schneider-Lastin has determined that a Dominican must have drawn from sources beyond Elsbeth von Oye’s one surviving autograph manuscript in order to have completed her vita and, further, that many of the erasures and emendations in her revelations are probably the product of her own hand. (Wolfram Schneider-Lastin, “Das Handexemplar einer mittelalterlichen Autorin. Zur Edition der Offenbarungen Elsbeths von Oye,” Editio 8 [1994]: 53–70; and “Die Fortsetzung des ‘Ötenbacher Schwesternbuchs’ und andere vermisste Texte in Breslau,” ZfdA 124 [1995]: 201–10). When feminist approaches to medieval history and literature transformed medieval studies beginning in the late 1970s, the Sisterbooks appeared to offer a window on the experiences of medieval women long marginalized and ignored. Appealing to early feminists were the attested existence of semi-autonomous, relatively well-educated communities of noble and patrician women celebrating what they viewed as heroic lives lived in service to God and the world by compiling the deeds and miraculous experiences of illustrious sisters. In convent documents, as in the Sisterbooks, feminists could

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study medieval women living, governing, disciplining, producing, writing and editing in Latin and in the vernacular; and in at least one case recording their great deeds both in text and in image. Gertrude Jaron Lewis’s By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany, 1996, presents the most forceful voice in favor of reading the Sisterbooks both as literary works and as artifacts of the nuns’ devotional existence. In her monumental Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelalters, 1989, a collaboration with Frank Willaert, and Marie-José Govers, Lewis had already compiled all known primary and secondary sources related to women mystics of the Middle Ages, including several nuns celebrated in the Sisterbooks. In By Women she surveys previous research, summarizes the principal narrative structures and themes, and includes a microfiche of all texts not available in modern editions. Although the lack of critical attention to questions of historicity debated by dinzelbacher and ringler undercut its thesis to some degree, Lewis’s magisterial compendium remains one of the truly essential contributions to scholarship on the Sisterbooks (see also Rebecca L. Garber, Feminine Figurae, 2003; Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice, 2007). Also indispensible to the study of the sisterbooks are the annotated glossaries of key terms, elucidated in the context of Dominican convent culture, included in the editions of Siegfried Ringler (Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur) and his student Ruth Meyer (Das Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch). Peter Dinzelbacher paints an unforgettable portrait of the impact that charismatic women’s spirituality had on theologians and church officials of the 13th and 14th centuries in his “Rollenverweigerung, religiöser Aufbruch und mystisches Erleben mittelalterlicher Frauen,” id., Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, 1993, 27–77. Otto Langer develops the most accurate and comprehensive model of the sisters’ spirituality, including their devotion to asceticism, poverty, virginity, visions, and mystical ecstasy in “Die mystische Lebenslehre der Nonnenviten,” id., Mystische Erfahrung und spirituelle Theologie: Zu Meister Eckharts Auseinandersetzung mit der Frauenfrömmigkeit seiner Zeit, 1987, 47–100. Working primarily with 15th- and 16th-century sources, Jeffrey Hamburger has produced a series of insightful studies concerning the influence of the nuns’ art on their spirituality. (Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, 1997; and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, 1998). Three more recent studies seek to place the Sisterbooks in the context of late-medieval women’s writing. Rebecca Garber explores the exemplary function of texts composed by medieval women visionaries from Hildegard of Bingen to Adelheid Langmann within their respective religious commu-

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nities (Feminine Figurae: Representations of Gender in Religious Texts by Medieval German Women Writers, 1100–1375, 2004). Her chapter on the sisterbooks is especially innovative in relating the descriptions of official functions within the convents as described in the Ämterbücher (Books of Offices) to the spiritual experiences depicted in the convent chronicles. One can only question the inclusion of Hildegard’s Latin texts in studies of what were otherwise vernacular products of Dominican convent culture (Kirsten Christensen, The Medieval Review, 2005, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/baj9928.0508.013). In her Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, 2004, Anne Winston-Allen extends the scope of chronicle studies beyond the Order of Preachers when she explores the roles women “Observants” played in the reform attempts in several orders from the 13th through the 16th centuries. Most recently, Albrecht Classen, makes a convincing case for understanding the Sisterbooks as “remarkable, highly powerful, eloquent, certainly literary, and in a way also learned documents by a large groups of late-medieval women writers” (“Reading, Listening, and Writing Communities in Late Medieval Women’s Dominican Convents. The Mystical Drive Toward the Word. The Testimony of the Sisterbooks,” The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures, 2007, 231–69, here 268). Looking to the future, much paleographical groundwork remains. We lack modern critical editions of six of the nine Sisterbooks. Scholars are eagerly awaiting the completion of Schneider-Lastin’s critical editions of the complete OSB and the revelations of Elsbeth von Oye, supposedly imminent. My own study of asceticism in Dominican convent culture has been accepted for publication and should appear in 2010 (David F. Tinsley, The Scourge and the Cross. Studies in Asceticism of the Later Middle Ages). There can be no doubt that the Sisterbooks will remain a rich source for anyone studying late-medieval women’s spirituality and the literature that the Dominican women created for themselves in the 14th and 15th centuries. Select Bibliography Siegfried Ringler, Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters: Quellen und Studien (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1980); Ruth Meyer, Das ‘St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch’: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995); Gertrud Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of FourteenthCentury Germany (Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996); Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

David F. Tinsley

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T Travelogues A. Definition of the Genre Many travel reports were disseminated throughout the Middle Ages. One of the most famous is the travelogue (1356) of Sir Jean de Mandeville, an English gentleman whose purported travels lead him to the Holy Land, Africa and the farthest regions of Asia. His travelogues melted together realistic and fictional elements. More than 500 travel accounts in Latin, German and other vernacular languages in manuscripts or early prints were produced, showing the attractiveness of this kind of literature. In Mandeville’s desktop-travelogue, the diversity of this genre, which contains fictitious and nonfictitious writings, is reflected. Travelogues comprise, in a wider sense, all literature dealing with travel (Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, 2001, 676, Sabine Heimann-Seelbach, Subjektivität, 2003, 109). Travelogues contain writing based on real experiences, like guide books or travel guides giving (pilgrim) travelers advice and information, or more academically oriented travel descriptions about special even pharmaceutical information, like that of Leonhart Rauwolff. A medical doctor, Rauwolff began his four years of travel in 1573 and gave exact information about the flora of the countries he visited. A distinction between guide books and travel descriptions or travel reports can be drawn by the more or less dominant role of the author in the travelogue, whereas both subgenres are frequently intermingling (Ursula Ganz-Blättler, Andacht und Abenteuer, 1990, 106). Another term meshing with travelogue is the notion of itinerary (A. Heit, LexMa, vol. 5, 773–74), enclosing route descriptions or preparing chronologically oriented travel reports. These documents blend with travel guides and travel reports which may offer personal experiences as well. Another subgenre is formed by the so-called Hodoeporica of the 16th century, which describe travels in Latin (Hermann Wiegand, Hodoeporica, 1984, 317). Apodemica arose in the 1570s, providing a theory and dealing with the art of traveling (Justin Stagl, Apodemiken, 1983, 356–57; Uli Kutter, “Der Reisende ist dem Philosophen, was der Arzt dem Apotheker – Über Apodemiken und Reisehandbücher,” Reisekultur, ed. Hermann Bausinger et al., 1999, 38–39). Otherwise, numerous fictitious literary works, aiming to entertain, deal with travels and describe

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experiences in foreign countries. Their origins can be traced back to Homer’s Odyssee or Xenophon’s Anabasis (4th c.). Similar features can be observed also in numerous courtly and sentimental romances, like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival or in goliardic epics like Herzog Ernst (both early 13th c.) in the Middle Ages, when travel became a major element of the narrative structure. As a matter of fact, some poems also can be regarded as travel literature, for example several songs by Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/1377–1445). Utopian novels, allegorical travels or travels to the netherworld form another part of this genre. Travelogues, in a narrower sense, as will be the focus here, may be defined as descriptions or reports providing information about specific destinations and which merge the writer’s own observations with traditional formats (Norbert Ott, “Reisebeschreibungen,” LexMa, vol. 7, 678–79). Travelogues reflect authors’ intentions and therefore distinguish the travel’s purposes, for example pilgrimage, commerce, diplomacy, tour de chevalier, or some kind of Bildungsreise. B. Historical Background Early travelogues in this narrower sense, which were not dominated by fiction, can be traced back to the 6th century B.C.E., when Skylax of Karyanda traveled by order of the Persian King along the coast of India to Suez. Only a compilation under his name is available from the 4th century. Another famous traveler in antiquity was Pytheas of Massilia, who gave a report of the Shetland and Orkney islands. Unfortunately, except for Pausanias’s work (2nd c. B.C.E.), none of the so-called Periegeses were preserved. They described countries, places and objects of interest, or mirabilia. Not all information in travelogues seemed credible to contemporaries. Not surprisingly, parodies of them were written, for example one by Lucian in the 2nd century C.E. (Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch, 2001, 676). The phenomenon of pilgrimage was known in Greek and Roman antiquity and can be observed in every major religion, for example, in Judaism and in Christianity. In Christianity, travel or pilgrimage to the Holy Land as the place where Christ lived and died gained particular interest. Pilgrim reports show the early veneration of these places but also how much pilgrims, particularly those to the Holy Land, had to add to the genre of travelogues, in which they are a major part. Two pilgrim reports, the itinerary of the pilgrim of Bordeaux Itinerarium Burdigalense (ca. 333) and the one of the noble, probably Spanish or Gallic, lady Egeria or Aetheria, Peregrinatio Egeriae (ca. 400), bear the earliest testimony to this fact. Even the church father Jerome wrote in this tradition. In his letter to Eustochium (404), Epitaphium S. Paulae, epis-

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tula 108 ad Eustochium, Jerome included a pilgrimage account of the Holy Land. Within another context, however, he warns: “Non Ierosolymis fuisse, sed bene vixisse laudandum est / Not having travelled to Jerusalem but to have lived righteously, has to be praised.” By that he shows himself as being one of the earliest critics of Christian pilgrimages. Moreover, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, built under the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, became major attractions and enhanced Christian pilgrimages beginning at the end of the 4th century. Whereas Jerome’s letter tends toward the genre of biography as well, other travelogues use retrospective as means of representation, for example the pilgrim of Piacenza, Antonii Placentini Itinerarium (ca. 570). Second-hand information is given by Adamnanus, abbot of Iona, who refers to bishop Arculf’s accounts, Adamnani de locis sanctis libri III (ca. 680). In Adamnanus’s travelogue, special emphasis is placed on architecture, and sketches of important buildings like the Holy Sepulchre are provided. The crusades would soon change the character of travelogues by infiltrating them with war motives. Seen under the perspective of armed pilgrimages, crusade reports may be counted as travelogues as well, for example the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorium Hierosolymitanorum from the first crusade. In the 13th century (1283), Burchardus de Monte Sion wrote Descriptio terrae sanctae. This text shows the routes through the Holy Land and the region of Jerusalem. Buchardus’s description became very popular and formed part of later emerging travel descriptions or pilgrim reports. Among the famous pilgrims to the Holy Land in the 14th century were Wilhelm of Boldensele (1334–1336), Ludolf of Sudheim (1336–1341), and Jacopo da Verona (1335). Organized tours to the Holy Land, which began in Venice, were offered starting in the 14th century. These tours promoted an extended quantity of pilgrims, which led to an increasing number of pilgrim reports – especially in the 15th century. The pilgrimage to the Holy Land was expensive and therefore mostly affordable only for clerics, patricians, and nobleman. Noblemen could receive knighthood in Jerusalem and become Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrimage, and therefore also travel reports, seem to form part of a family tradition, like in the families Pfintzing, Rieter, or Tucher in Nuremberg. A well-known account of the 15th century is the travelogue of Hans Tucher (1479/1480), whose report was printed several times. The Peregrinatio in terrram sanctam (1486) by the Deacon of Mainz, Bernhard of Breydenbach, illustrated with woodcarvings by the Danish artist Erhard Reuwich, is considered the first illustrated travel report. The illustrations are also notably the first largesized ones. The incunabulum was a bestseller, was reprinted more than 10 times and was translated into several European vernacular languages. Pil-

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grim accounts were written by the travelers themselves or by noblemen’s attendants, such as the Dominican monk Felix Fabri. Fabri wrote his German account, Eigentliche beschreibung der hin unnd wider farth zu dem Heyligen Lanndt gen Jerusalem, for his aristocratic companions. Most impressive is Fabri’s Evagatorium, which is presumably the largest existing pilgrim account. This extensive, but also diverting, description of the Holy Land intends to be most complete and contains geographical and cultural observations, personal and spiritual reflections, and reveals thereby an encyclopedic character. Chivalric or knightly pilgrim travels were common in the 15th and 16th centuries, for example those of Arnold of Harff (1496–1498), who belonged to the few pilgrims who were able to visit all peregrinationes maiores (Jerusalem, Rom, Santiago). Their goal was the knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre. Harff’s pilgrim account shows joy in adventures and experiencing foreign countries. Even traces of a kind of Bildungsreise or educational trip can be observed in it, with report-like features of a grand tour as well, combined with numerous word lists for the various languages that he had encountered. Georg von Ehingen went further in choosing the title Itinerarium, das ist […] raisen nach der ritterschafft (1454–1458) for his travel report about his travel to the Holy Land. In the 16th century, the Holy Land travels, as reflected in travelogues, showed an increasingly secular character. Personal elements increased in the texts, for example those of Gabriel of Rattenberg (1527), Johann Helffrich (1565), the Lutheran pilgrim Samuel Kiechel (1585–1589), and Leonhard Rauwolff (1572–1576).Travel reports always existed during the Middle Ages, presenting more personal and individual elements, for example, the most influential Hegumen Daniel of the Russian abbot Daniel (1106–1108), the Liber peregrinationis of the German cleric Thietmar (1217), and the Itinerarium of the Italian Dominican monk Ricoldo of Montecroce (1290–1300). One of the most outstanding, and perhaps the most popular, travel report is that of Jean de Mandeville, whose identity has not yet been confirmed. In all likelihood only a virtual traveler, Mandeville compiled travel information from Wilhelm of Boldensele and Odericus of Pordenone. Originally written in French and without a title (1356), Mandeville’s travel account contains a description of pilgrim routes to Jerusalem and the Near East. Another, more fictitious, section of the travelogue includes fantastic episodes describing regions in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Isles, China and the Empire of Priest John. Widely spread throughout Europe in more than 280 manuscripts, numerous prints and translations, Mandeville’s travel account proved to be a bestseller, probably because of its entertaining character as a mélange of real elements and fiction. Regardless of this character, the ac-

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count was used by Felix Fabri. Even Christopher Columbus was inspired and encouraged by the geographical information Mandeville imparted. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani, written between the 7th and 10th century, tells of the holy monk Brendan and his 17 confreres as they travel to the Isle of the Blessed. The account blends fiction and realistic elements. The Navigatio shows connections to old Irish travel accounts but also to the Greek or Latin genre of vitae and to apocryphal literature. The Navigatio is often claimed to bear traces of an Irish discovery of the New World. Francesco Petrarca’s Itinerarium ad sepulcrum Domini (1358) belongs to early Humanism. This work is a pilgrim or educational guide to the Holy Land and its main focus is on ancient Italian history. One example of an outstanding female travel report is that of Margery Kempe. This travelogue, related in the The Book of Margery Kempe, represents a merging of the genres of travel report and vision. After having been married about 20 years and having realized a special spiritual call, Kempe undertook travels and pilgrimages within Europe and to the Holy Land (1413–1415). Among the famous non-realistic, allegorical travel accounts are Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme (1355/1358) and Philippe de Mézières’ Songe du Vieil Pèlerin (1389). In the 13th century, Bonaventura described the soul’s way to God as through the heavenly Jerusalem (Itinerarium mentis in deum, 1259). Felix Fabri’s Sionpilger (1492) is a spiritual guide as well, but more oriented toward real, yet still virtual travel. Sionpilger is written for people, especially Dominican nuns, who were not able to travel to the Holy Land or other major pilgrim centers. The guide allowed them to imitate the pilgrimage in spirit. Rome and Santiago de Compostela were favored long-distance targets for pilgrims, aside from Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The Mirabilia urbis Romae provided an orientation for pilgrimages to Rome. Its oldest version was written by the canon Benedict in Rome around 1143, and described in particular pagan monuments which were combined with Christian legends. This synthesis can also be found in the Graphiae aureae urbis Romae, which recounted a legendary history from Noah to the Romans, and the Libellus de cerimoniis. The Indulgentiae urbis Romae discussed the Roman churches, their relics and various indulgences. The existing versions are not standardized but have gained importance since the 14th century. As the center of the Latin Church, a pilgrimage to Rome could easily be combined with diplomatic or church affairs. Beginning in the 10th century, non-Spanish pilgrimages to the shrine of St. James in Santiago de Compostela became popular as well. The most famous pilgrimage guide, giving advice for the way to Santiago de Compostela, is the fifth book of the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This collection itself

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was written in the 12th century. Along with this Latin guide, several guides in native tongues were also written, for example that of Hermann Künig of Vach (1495). Travels to Near East and the farther regions of Asia were not only undertaken by Christians. Already the Navarrese Jew Benjamin of Tudela had begun his travel to the Holy Land in 1159 (to 1172/73), and he reached Persia and perhaps more easterly regions. In his Voyages of Benjamin or Masa’ot Binyamin, Benjamin not only gives information on geography and ethnography, but also on existing Jewish communities. A decade later, Petahya of Regensburg undertook the same journey. Ibn Battuta, a Berber scholar, can be regarded as the most famous Muslim traveler. After a pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca, which he started in 1325, Battuta continued his travels to Asia Minor, central Asia and China, went to Africa, crossed the Sahara Desert, and reached Niger. He is one of the first travelogue writers to describe the fabulous Timbuktu, located in modernday Mali. Contrary to traditional Arabian travel reports, Battuta’s account provides not only observations, but also personal experiences. Beside pilgrimage reports, other kinds of travelogues offer information on foreign people and culture, for example Liutprand of Cremona’s famous embassy report, Relatione de legatione Constantinopolitana (968). Other sources about significant travels are accounts from Christian missionaries, such as Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii (9th c.) or Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (11th c.), in which the Vikings are mentioned as the first to have discovered America. Particularly in the 13th and 14th centuries, Franciscan friars rendered outstanding documents about the exploration of Asia. In 1245, Joannes de Plano Carpini travelled to the East as a papal legate. Within one and a half years of traveling, he reached the supreme khan in Mongolia. Carpini’s report is preserved in the Ystoria Mongolorum quos nos Tartaros appellamus. Some years later, Wilhelm of Rubruck undertook this same long travel to the Great Khan at Karakorum. Wilhelm’s mission was carried out by order of the pope and the French King Louis IX in 1253 for religious and presumably diplomatic reasons. His experiences are described in the Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratia 1253 ad partes orientes, which provides the reader with much information, for example, studies on different religions and ethnographical descriptions. Again another Franciscan friar, Odoric of Pordenone, reached Bombay in 1322 and continued his travels to China, passing through Sumatra. In Beijing he spent three years at the court of the Great Khan. In 1330 he returned to Padua. Odorico’s well-written report was used by Jean Mandeville, who frequently cited it indirectly in his own travel descriptions. Another travel re-

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port to Asia experienced an outstanding dissemination: the Venetian Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde or Il Milione. Polo had travelled in 1271 with his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo to the Great Khan. The pope had assigned them to convert the Grand Khan and win him as an ally against the Islamic forces. They spent 17 years in China at the court of the Khan, for whom Polo carried out diplomatic missions. Although in his time and even now the veracity of Polo’s account is doubted, his narration describing foreign manners and customs was extremely popular and translated into many languages (U. Tucci, LexMA, vol. 7, 71–72; Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannuci, 2008). Another merchant, Niccolò de’ Conti, left Venice for the East in 1419. He presented himself as a Muslim and travelled from Damaskus to India, then to Java and Vietnam, and returned to Italy in 1444. His travel account was recorded by Poggio Bracciolini in De varietate fortunae. The Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator enhanced future explorations and discoveries in the 15th century. In his service, the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto explored the Atlantic coast of Africa. Cadamosto was the first European to describe the Southern Cross and the only one in Prince Henry’s service to record his experiences in travel reports (1454–1455). Although religious motives still existed, mercantile interests and exploration fostered new discoveries, partly caused by the political situation in the Near East. The discovery of America shifted Europe’s attention to the West. The so called Columbus-letter (1493) attributed to Christopher Columbus was translated many times into different European languages. Parts of Columbus’s logbook are transmitted in a copy by Bartolomé de las Casas. Another letter that highly influenced the picture of the Americas was that of Amerigo Vespucci, addressed to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici. Travel reports were also often written by scribes like Pêro Vaz Caminha, who reported Pedro Álvarez Cabral’s 1500 expedition that included the discovery of Brazil. The Cartas de relación of Hernán Cortés gained great attention as well. In German-speaking lands, information about South America was disseminated by the writings of Nikolaus Federmann (Indianische Historia, 1557), who served the Welser family (Augsburg) in Venezuela, or Ulrich Schmidel, who is counted among the founders of Buenos Aires. Hans Staden’s report, Warhafftig Historia, 1557, became very popular in Europe as well. Staden described in this report his adventures as a captive of the Tupinambá-tribe in Brazil. We learn of extraordinary experiences also in the account by Álvar Núñez Capeza de Vaca, a chief officer of the Narváez expedition who crossed parts of North America under extreme conditions after being shipwrecked in 1528 off the coast of what is now Texas (Relación/Naufragios, 1542). The peculiar interest in travels in the

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16th century is documented by printed travel collections such as those published by Valentin Fernandez (1502), or the collection of Montalboddo Fracan, Paesi novamente retrovati (1507), Novus Orbis (1532 by Simon Grynaeus, trans. by Michael Herr, 1534), the Navigationi et Viaggi (1550) collected by Gian Battista Ramusio, the collections by Siegmund Feyerabend in Frankfurt (Weltbuch, 1567, Reyssbuch des heyligen Lands, 1584), or later again in Frankfurt, by Theodor de Bry. De Bry published reports in Latin and German of the West Indian travels and East Indian travels since 1590. These travelogues are decorated by magnificent engravings and are now united in a special collection called, Collectiones peregrinationum in Indiam Orientalem et Indiam Occidentalem XXV partibus comprehensae. C. Research History Important impulses for the consideration of travelogues as a literary genre were given in the first half of the 20th century. The main steps were done in the 19th century to draw attention to travelogues as a means for gaining historical information. As the majority of travelogues from the Middle Ages can be regarded as pilgrimage accounts, scholarly discussion focused mostly on them. Today even the pilgrimage accounts are regarded as a unique literary genre among the travelogues. In the following remarks, scholarly research on fictive travel literature will not be considered. Informative research surveys including fictitious literature regarding pilgrims and pilgrimage are given in Carmen von Samson-Himmelstjerna’s Deutsche Pilger des Mittelalters, 2004, and Dietrich Huschenbett’s “Jerusalem-Fahrten in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” Fernreisen im Mittelalter, ed. Folker Reichert, 1998, 141–60. A select bibliography on travel literature is provided by Folker Reichert, “Fernreisen im Mittelalter,” Fernreisen im Mittelalter, ed. id., 1998, 3–18. In the early stages of German Studies, travelogues in the narrow sense did not attract any attention. Scholarly research centered on poetry in the first half of the 19th century. Travelogues, mostly numbered among prose literature, were not yet a focus of interest, as there had been a distinction between literary and non-literary forms of travelogues (e. g., Peter Brenner, Der Reisebericht, 1990, 20). Only Jean Mandeville’s travel report had attracted interest and was discussed by Joseph Görres in his Teutschen Volksbüchern (1805). Görres studied the sources of Mandeville’s travels and their parallels to other works. Later, in Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s history of German literature (1835–1842), the travellers Hans Schiltberger, Hans Tucher, Bernhard of Breydenbach, and Felix Fabri are mentioned. Franz Pfeiffer, Johann A. Schmeller, Ferdinand Deycks, and Anton Birlinger started

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to edit famous travelogues, like those of Leo of Rozmital ˇ (1844), and of Ludolf of Suchem, or Sudheim (1851), or Felix Fabri’s rhymed pilgrim book (1867) in the Bibliothek des literarischen Vereins Stuttgart (Christiane Hippler, Reisen nach Jerusalem, 1987, 14–28). Pilgrim and travel literature became more attractive parallel to the promotion of Biblical archaeology, Bible and Palestine Studies in the context of Oriental studies. This development was caused by politics and church conflicts. In 1857, the Protestant Jerusalem Association established the journal “Neueste Nachrichten aus dem Morgenlande,” whereas the Catholic “Verein vom heiligen Grabe” was the first Palestinian society intended to arouse interest in the Holy Land. This was to be achieved by disseminating descriptions and the history of the Holy Land. Titus Tobler’s (1806–1877) work was decisive for the detection of pilgrim reports as sources for further studies. Tobler was inspired by the writings of the American Protestant theologian and archaeological explorer of the Holy Land, Edward Robinson (1794–1863). Tobler traveled four times to the Holy Land and edited several bibliographies of historical and topographical studies about holy sites. His Bibliographia geographica Palaestinae (1867) and Bibliographia geographica Palaestinae ab anno CCCXXXIII usque ad annum (1875) remained standard reference works for Holy Land literature for a long time. He was the first researcher who attempted to edit pilgrim reports, not always using a strict philological-critical method. Beside other editions, one fruit of his studies was the Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae ex Saculo VIII. IX. XIII et XV (1874). Tobler’s work encouraged more editions of pilgrim accounts, as did Carl Ludwig Grotefend in 1852 (Wilhelm of Boldensele, 1334) and Johann Kamann in 1880 (Jörg Pfintzing, 1436). In doing so, emphasis was placed on texts seen as having historical value. Visits of prominent statesmen to the Holy Land impacted further research. Examples of such accounts are the travels of the Prince of Wales (1862), Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, Prince Otto of Bavaria, and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (all 1869). Just as in other countries, a German society was founded in 1877, the Deutsche Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas. In France, Count Paul Riant founded the Societé de l’Orient Latin in 1875, which later published the Archives (1881–1884) and then the Revue de l’Orient Latin (1893–1911), whereas the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, established in London, began publishing its twelve volumes in 1884 (Hippler, Reisen nach Jerusalem, 1987, 24–25; Ganz-Blätter, Andacht und Abenteuer, 1990, 24). Decades before, in 1846, the Hakluyt Society was founded and began publishing travelogues and historical texts from the Age of Discovery. As recently as 1996, a sister organization, The American Friends of the Hakluyt Society, was established. Among German scholars, Reinhold Röhricht and

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Heinrich Meisner were most prominent and produced outstanding work. Together they published a large number of pilgrimage accounts and historical descriptions of the Holy Land, such as the Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem Heiligen Land (1880). Even today this book is considered a fundamental study, containing 23 pilgrimage accounts and a historical study on pilgrimage. Röhricht and Meisner’s motivation was to establish a Palestinography as a field of study parallel to Classical Philology. On top of their more historically oriented approach, philological studies of travelogues appeared. Röhricht and Meisner’s main focus was the sources of diverse accounts, likewise studies by Ferdinand Deycks (on Ludolf of Sudheim, 1848), Albert Boenschen (on Mandeville, 1880), and Max Häussler (on Felix Fabri’s Evagatorium, 1914). Martin Sommerfeld (“Die Reisebeschreibungen der deutschen Jerusalempilger,” DVjS 2 [1924]: 816–51), was the first to establish an overall view of literary structures in pilgrimage accounts. His conclusions led to an understanding of pilgrimage accounts as a unique literary genre (Marjetta Wis, “Zur Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Palästina-Pilgerberichte,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen [1965]: 273–97; Anne Simon, Sigmund Feyerabend’s ‘Das Reyßbuch deß heyligen Lands,’ 1998, 202). Sommerfeld also noticed an increasing epic structure, a disposition providing tension, and growing emphasis on the writer’s own experiences and subjective perspectives. He saw the secularization in pilgrims’ motivation and their accounts in analogy with a growing interest in foreign countries. Although Sommerfeld examined only seven texts, his study was a decisive step for literary history. In 1935 Gustav Ehrismann offered an extensive account of the already-published pilgrimage reports and referred to scholarly literature (id., Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 1935). Later, Marjetta Wis was able to show the influence of pilgrimage and travel reports on poetry, providing as an example the travel reports of Hans Tucher and Bernhard of Breydenbach, which were used by the author of the proto-novel Fortunatus, printed in 1509 (ead., “Zum deutschen Fortunatus,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63 [1962]: 5–55, or ead., “Nochmals zum Fortunatus-Volksbuch,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 66 [1965]: 199–209). Peter Assion turned the attention to hagiographical literature and its interaction with pilgrim reports (id., Die Mirakel der Hl. Katharina von Alexandrien, 1969). Reiner Moritz, like Marjetta Wis, discussed the influence of travelogues belonging to the artes-literature on fictitional literature, with travel as means of representation (id., Untersuchungen zu den deutschsprachigen Reisebeschreibungen, 1970, 20–27). In the same year, Hans Rupprich also differentiated between religious and secular travelogues. The latter type, such as those of Mandeville or Marco Polo, provided information especially on regions of the Orient (Hans Rupprich, Die deut-

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sche Literatur vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Barock, 1970, 159–61). Similar to Moritz, Diane Summerhays Strachan analyzed travelogues other than pilgrimage accounts, and detected as characteristics of travelogues a cyclic structure consisting of journey, itinerary, and return journey, references to authentic experience, and a mostly complete identity of hero and author (ead., “Five Fifteenth Century German Reisebeschreibungen: a Study in Genre,” Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1979, 168–69). In analyzing Felix Fabri’s Evagatorium, Herbert Feilke tried to detect in pilgrimage literature features of Fabri’s actual time and literary influences (id., Felix Fabris Evagatorium über seine Reise in das Heilige Land, 1976). In 1981, Claudia Zrenner studied 14 pilgrim descriptions. Suggestions that Zrenner made concerning ongoing research are the difference between reports of noble and non-noble travelers, and how the accounts can be regarded in the context of political power and society in the 14th and 15th centuries (ead., Die Berichte der europäischen Jerusalempilger, 1475–1500, 1981). Christiane Hippler, closely following Martin Sommerfeld, examined the structures of pilgrimage accounts concerning formal and subject-matter criteria, and argued to have them labeled as a specific genre with a singular tradition and particular development. Hippler observed a change in structure toward the end of the 14th century; travel itself, and its stations, gained interest. The schema of describing indulgences, same stations, and sight seeing monuments is opened by representations of circumstances and hardships of travel. Hippler also addressed the issues of these travelogues’ function in their authors’ lives. More features of individuality can be observed in the travelogues of the 16th century. The schemata of late-medieval travelogues results from their function as means of memoria regarding pious knighthood, and also as spiritual reports and accounts parallel to mercantile book-keeping. The travelogues show affinities to family and house books in style, structure and function (Christiane Hippler, Die Reise nach Jerusalem, 1987, 37–38, 211–13). Most important for the discussion of travelogues as a genre is the research report of Peter Brenner, mainly dealing with the research from 1970 to 1989. Concentrating on German travelogues up to the present, Brenner does not omit glances at other philologies and emphasizes the importance of complementary studies in cultural history, especially sociology, in dealing with travelogues. He laments, however, the lack of critical awareness regarding problems of genre. Regarding the discussion of generic characteristics he mentions Manfred Link’s dissertation from 1963, which counts among travelogues works representing neither pure fiction nor pure information (Peter J. Brenner, Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur, 1990, 3, 21, 40). Uwe Ebel observes a point of distinction between travelogues and fictitious lit-

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erature in the claim on authenticity (id., Studien zur skandinavischen Reisebeschreibung, 1981, 304–05). Thomas Bleicher considers different literary aspects of travel. Travel may function as a literary element giving structure to the text, or as a topic and observable as a problem of style or genre. A constitutive element for travelogues is represented in the opposition between foreign and native (id., “Elemente einer komparatistischen Imagologie,” Komparatistische Hefte 2 [1980]: 12–24). Hugo Dyserinck, Peter Boerner, Michael Harbsmeier, or Alois Wierlacher stand for a series of scholars in this field. Wierlacher, founder of the discipline of intercultural German Studies, recognizes the travelogue’s position being in tension between one’s own and a foreign culture (id., “Mit fremden Augen,” Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 9 [1983]: 1–16). In analyzing literary discussions of foreign cultures we can observe different models of how to perceive the foreign worlds, predetermined by the author’s cultural background and social status (Egon Schwarz, “Die sechste Schwierigkeit beim Schreiben der Wahrheit,” Die USA und Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen, 1976, 13–20). Therefore, travelogues indirectly also and most significantly reflect the author’s own culture (Michael Harbsmeier, “Reisebeschreibung als mentalitätsgeschichtliche Quellen,” Reiseberichte als Quellen europäischer Kulturgeschichte, ed. Antoni Maczak and Hans Jürgen Teuteberg, 1982, 1–31, here 2). Attempts to arrange or systematize travelogues can be observed starting in the 16th century when collections of travelogues were edited by publishers such as Sigmund Feyerabend or Theodor de Bry. The promotion and support of the English settlement of North America was a topic of Richard Hakluyt’s travelogue-collections (1582 Divers Voyages and 1589 in second edition, 1598–1600 the Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation). Hans-Joachim Lepszy studied 25 travelogues, among them accounts of the New World (such as Staden, Federmann and Schmiedel), and observed an increasing subjective element in their representations (Hans-Joachim Lepszy, Die Reiseberichte des Mittelalters und der Reformationszeit, 1952, 62–64, 78–80, 93; Urs Bitterli, Die Wilden und die Zivilisierten, 1976, 2nd ed. 1991, 240). New stimuli were given by Huschenbett (id., “Die Literatur der deutschen Pilgerreisen nach Jerusalem im späten Mittelalter,” DVjS 59 [1985]: 29–46) who presents a history of research on this genre, discusses the special difficulties in analyzing pilgrimage accounts, and points at research desiderata. Some years later he pointed out a lack of missing research on concepts of space and space itself in distinguishing between travel and pilgrim literature (Dietrich Huschenbett, Reisen und Welterfahrung in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1991, 5). The challenge of filling that void was accepted by Bernhard Jahn, who analyzed this concept in

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pilgrimage accounts from the late Middle Ages, reports of the New World from the 15th and 16th centuries, and in fictional prose (Bernhard Jahn, Raumkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit, 1992). Since the 1990s, research on travelogues has continued to boom. Although early travel accounts are still attractive (Carmen Arias Abellán, Itinerarios latinos a Jerusalém y al orient cristiano: Egeria y el Pseudo-Antonino de Piacenza, 2000), the focus of scholarly research rests on the late Middle Ages and early modern times. Travels within Europe, to Asia, and the New World by Christian, Jewish and Muslim travelers are the current focus of interest. As the pilgrimage accounts by Christian travelers form a major part of the transmitted reports, they are primarily in the center of this research. Beside studies of social, cultural, and mental aspects, or elements of poetry and structure, of printing history and the reading audience, the relationship between text and illustrations meets new attraction. This is witnessed by the numerous published collected volumes of critical studies, such as those of Reisen und Welterfahrung in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, Dietrich Huschenbett and John Margetts, 1991; Reisen und Reiseliteratur im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff and Dieter Neukirch, 1992; Fremdheit und Reisen im Mittelalter, ed. Irene Erfen, 1997; Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reise- und Länderberichte, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff, 1998; Reisekultur: Von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus, ed. Hermann Bausinger et al., 1999; Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reise- und Länderberichte, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff, 2000; Gutenberg und die Neue Welt, ed. Horst Wenzel, 1994; Fernreisen im Mittelalter, ed. Folker Reichert, 1998; Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002; Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt: Zur Poetik der Reise- und Länderberichte, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff and Gerhard Giesemann, 2003; Itineraria Posoniensia, ed. Eva Frimmová, Elisabeth Klecker, 2005; Fra Roma e Gerusalemme nel Medioevo, ed. Massim Odoni, 2005; Barbara Haupt and Wilhelm G. Busse, Pilgerreisen in Mittelalter und Renaissance, 2006; and Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers 1050–1550, ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004. The articles contained in these volumes reflect the variety of this genre and deal not only with real but also with fictional travelogues. Moreover, many scholars published important editions of travelogues, such as Nine Robijntje Miedema, Die ‘Mirabilia Romae’: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Überlieferung mit Edition der deutschen und niederländischen Texte, 1996; Gerhard Neweklowsky, Curipeschitz, Benedict: Itinerarium oder Wegrayß Küniglich Mayestät potschafft gen Constantinopel zu dem Türckischen Keiser Soleyman. Anno 1530, 1997; Fünf Palästina-Pilgerberichte aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Randall Herz et al., 1998; Felix Fabri. Die Sionpilger, ed. Wieland Carls, 1999; Die Reise ins ‘Gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren, ed. Randall Herz, 2002; Achim Thomas Hack,

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Ein anonymer Romzugsbericht von 1452 (Ps-Enenkel) mit den zugehörigen Personenlisten, 2007); Othere’s Voyages: A Late 9th-Century Account of Voyages Along the Coasts of Norway and Denmark and its Cultural Context, ed. Janet Bately and Anton Englert, 2007; Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio vrbis Romae), ed. Mario Carpo, Francesco Furlan et al., 2001. Similarly diverse monographs on travel literature would have to be mentioned: Frauke Gewecke, Wie die neue Welt in die alte kam, 1986; Wolfgang Neuber, Fremde Welt im europäischen Horizont: Zur Topik der deutschen Amerika-Reiseberichte der frühen Neuzeit, 1991; Klaus Ridder, Jean de Mandevilles ‘Reisen’: Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der deutschen Übersetzung des Otto von Diemeringen, 1991; Barbara Korte, Der englische Reisebericht: Von der Pilgerfahrt bis zur Postmoderne, 1996; Michael Herkenhoff, Die Darstellung außereuropäischer Welten in Drucken deutscher Offizinen des 15. Jahrhunderts, 1996; Randall Herz, Studien zur Drucküberlieferung der ‘Reise ins gelobte Land’ Hans Tuchers des Älteren, 2005; Andres Betschart, Zwischen zwei Welten: Illustrationen in Berichten westeuropäischer Jerusalemreisender des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, 1996; Beate BorowkaClausberg, Balthasar Sprenger und der frühneuzeitliche Reisebericht, 1999; Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West, 1999; Nicole Chareyron, Pélerins de Jérusalem au moyen âge, 2000; Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, 2000; Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 2001; John Larner, Marco Polo and the Medieval Discovery of the World, 2001; Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, 2002; Ernst Bremer, Jean de Mandeville in Europa. Part 1: Überlieferungsgeschichte, 2004; Elka Weber, Traveling through Text: Message and Method in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts, 2005; Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, 2006; F. Thomas Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery, 2007. Prominent in research on Santiago de Compostela are the numerous studies of Klaus Herbers (Nach Santiago zogen sie: Berichte von Pilgerfahrten ans ‘Ende der Welt,’ ed. id. and Robert Plötz, 1996; id. and Manuel Santos Noia, Liber Sancti Jacobi, trans., 1998). A bibliographical compendium for European travelogues was initiated by Werner Paravicini, giving information about authors or travelers, editions, publications etc. (id., Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters 1994–2001). In an earlier study, Paravicini differentiated among accounts of battles against pagans, about pilgrimages and knightly travels, and Kavalierstouren (grand tour) by nobles. Knightly travel can also be regarded as a kind of tournament. It includes the element of courts as a new type of destination. The grand tour contains elements of court visits as well as scholarly education representing the new type of learning associated with universities. Early traces of this type of travel, intended for edu-

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cation, can be observed in the 14th century (Werner Paravicini, “Von der Heidenfahrt zur Kavalierstour: Über Motive und Formen adligen Reisens im späten Mittelalter,” MVGN 84 [1997]: 91–130). Huschenbett and his research group in Würzburg cited the great impact these tours had on the genre of pilgrim reports. A repertorium for the Holy Land accounts from their beginnings until 1500 was published in Würzburg from 1990 to 1994. Another project on German and Dutch pilgrim accounts was launched a little later (Ulrike Bausewein et al., “Deutsche und niederländische Pilgerberichte von Palästina-Reisenden im späten Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” MVGN 84 [1997]: 131–55). In view of the exploding research on travel and travelogues, discussion of the classification of various kinds of travelogues into genre and subgenres has not yet faded away. Ernst Bremer proposes a new approach stressing more the historical functions of the genre (id., “Spätmittelalterliche Reiseliteratur – ein Genre? Überlieferungssymbiosen und Gattungstypologie,” Reisen und Reiseliteratur im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff and Dieter Neukirch, 1992, 336–37). Beate Borowa-Clausberg locates the travelogue as a genre between fiction and non-fictional literature, and regards it as a social and a literary phenomenon. She states that travelogues are now an established research object in literary research but are not yet as widely discussed as they were in the 1980s (e. g., Wolfgang Neuber, Friederike Hassauer). The subject matter of this genre reveals a clear focus on the more or less objective reality. Beside this they can reflect social and cultural memory (Beate Borowa-Clausberg, Balthasar Sprenger und der frühneuzeitliche Reisebericht, 1999, 157–71). Nevertheless, some scholars continue to search for further criteria for subgenres. In his introduction to the edition of five pilgrim accounts, Dietrich Huschenbett discusses the problem of pilgrimage guide and pilgrimage account and their relationship to each other by reflecting upon the current scholarly debate just as Ursula Ganz-Blättler does (ead., Andacht und Abenteuer, 1990, 105). Huschenbett denies the existence of an inflexible pilgrim guide prototype and stresses the positive function of schemata that help to express new experiences. As a basic structure for Holy Land accounts, he observes an itinerary divided into three parts. It may contain also catalogues or addenda (Fünf Palästina-Pilgerberichte aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Randall Herz et al., 1998, XIII, XV, XVII). Again in 2000 Huschenbett pointed out the missing reflections on and lacking attention to the inner structure of the genres of “pilgrimage account,” “travelogue,” and “pilgrimage guide.” Anne Simon, who is connected to the Würzburg research group, regards pilgrimage literature as a separate genre although it incorporates features from other genres, such as the novel and the autobiography. Thus

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pilgrimage travelogues include elements borrowed from popular prose literature as well as historical elements. These texts entertain, edify, and contain educational elements (id., Sigmund Feyerabend’s ‘Das Reyßbuch deß heyligen Lands’: A Study in Printing and Literary History, 1998, 200–02). Again in 2000, Huschenbett (‘Diu vart hin über mer,’ Beschreibung der Welt, ed. Xenja von Ertzdorff 2000, 144) argued for the identification of all these texts as a specific genre, “Palästina-Pilgerberichte,” that evolved from the knowledge of the Holy Land through travels and then was transmitted in reports composed in Latin and in the various vernaculars. Here we find realistic and fictitious elements intermingle to a considerable extent (id., 146). As the scholarly discussion shows, one of the difficulties of defining travelogues exactly is the blending of semantic and stylistic aspects in them. Some concrete results, however, can be observed. Whereas subgenre questions still arise, the question whether travelogues are a literary genre is no longer a cause for scholarly debates, as may be observed by the numerous authors of travelogues that are included in lexica, such as in the Verfasserlexikon or in the Lexikon des Mittelalters. Select Bibliography Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae: Chronologisches Verzeichnis der von 333 bis 1878 verfassten Literatur über das Heilige Land mit dem Versuche einer Kartologie (Berlin: Reuther, 1890; improved and expanded new ed. rpt. ed. David H.K. Amiram, Jerusalem: Universitas Booksellers 1963); Reinhold Röhricht, Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem Heiligen Lande (Innsbruck: Wagner 1900; rpt. Aalen: Scientia 1967); Nathan Schur, Jerusalem in Pilgrims and Travellers’ Account: A Thematic Bibliography of Western Christian Itineraries 1300–1917 (Jerusalem: Ariel Publ. House 1980); Peter J. Brenner, Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur. Ein Forschungsüberblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte (Tübingen: Niemeyer 1990); Werner Paravicini, Europäische Reiseberichte des späten Mittelalters: Eine analytische Bibliographie Part 1: Deutsche Reiseberichte, ed. Christian Halm (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Peter Lang, 1994; 2nd rev. ed. with an appendix 2001); Part 2: Französische Reiseberichte, ed. Jörg Wettlaufer and Jacques Paviot (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Peter Lang 1999); Part 3: Niederländische Reiseberichte, on the basis of preparations by Detlev Kraack ed. Jan Hirschbiegel (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Peter Lang 2000); Josephie Brefeld, A Guidebook for the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages: A Case for Computer-Aided Textual Criticism (Hilversum: Verloren 1994); Ursula Ganz-Blättler, Andacht und Abenteuer: Berichte europäischer Jerusalem- und Santiago-Pilger (1320–1520) (Tübingen: Narr 1990); Linda K. Davidson and Maryjane Dunn-Wood, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide (New York and London: Garland, 1993); Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages, ed. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (New York and London: Garland, 2000).

Maria E. Dorninger

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Trobadors, Trouvères, Minnesinger (Occitane, French, Middle High German) A. Introduction In a broader sense the three terms connote more or less the same type of medieval authors, namely poets of songs who conceived the texts of their poems using one of the vernacular dialects, who combined them with a melody (mainly an own, i. e., new one, sometimes also an existing one), and who were mostly the first performers of their songs; sometimes and later the songs were also presented by professional singers (“joglars,” “spilman”: Edmond Faral, Les jongleurs en France au moyen âge, 1910/1964; Walter Salmen, Der Spielmann im Mittelalter, 1983; Antonie Schreier-Hornung, Spielleute, Fahrende, Aussenseiter. Künstler der mittelalterlichen Welt, 1981; John Southwark, The English Medieval Minstrel, 1989; Wolfgang Hartung, Die Spielleute im Mittelalter, 2003). The main topic, but not the only one, was love, passion, and problems of everyday life, no more God-oriented and religious as usually before. One may say that they re-invented love poetry in the European literature, which had its first appearance in ancient times of the Greek and Latin poets and had vanished, at least officially, under the influence of the Christian church. The sources of such a new love poetry are discussed till today: Arab love poetry from the Muslim Iberian peninsula and perhaps from Sicily, Latin religious songs, or popular folk-songs (which were not written down); see: Reto Raduolf Bezzola, Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200), 1958–1960, rpt. 1966–1968; Wilibald Schrötter, Ovid und die Troubadours, 1908, rpt. 1980; Lawrence Ecker, Arabischer, provenzalischer und deutscher Minnesang: Eine motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung, 1934, rpt. 1978; Käte Axhausen, Die Theorien über den Ursprung der provenzalischen Lyrik, 1937, rpt. 1974; Alfred Pillet, Zum Ursprung der altprovenzalischen Lyrik, 1928, rpt.1995; Alois Richard Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relation with the Old Provençal Troubadours, 1946; Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 1965–1966, rpt. 1999. The first poets of this kind were the trobadors in Southern France, then the trouvères in Northern France, and both of them influenced the German minnesingers; the period of these authors begins in the 12th century, whereas the end is open (1300 to early 15th c.). One would need dozens of books to describe and analyze these poets and their songs, and they have been one of the main topics of medieval philology; at least a two-volumes-survey, including medieval lyrics in Middle Latin, Occitane, Old French, Middle High German, and Middle English should be mentioned, Lyrik des Mittelalters, ed. Heinz Berg-

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ner (1983). Unlike in other articles, the following paragraphs can only present a short resumee, without many details and only a restricted bibliographical selection of academic works. B. Trobadors The medieval name is derived from occitane “trobar”, which means ‘to find,’ ‘to invent,’ in modern French “trouver” (the origin of the word “trouvère”); “trobador” is used until today in modern French (“troubadour”) or Italian (“trovatore”). “Occitane”: That means the regions of the “langue d’oc”, i. e., Southern France, of which Provençal is only a part; there “hoc est” was the word for ‘yes,’ which became “oc.” In Northern France, people mostly said “hoc ita est” which became Old French “oeil” and modern French “oui.” therefore this part of France was called the regions of the “langue d’oeil (Guy Raynaud de Lage, Introduction à l’ancien français, 1958/2000; Pierre Bec, La langue occitane 1967; Lothar Wolf, Werner Hupka, Altfranzösisch – Entstehung und Charakteristik: Eine Einführung, 1981. The first trobador whom we know by name was one of the most powerful princes in France, Duke William IX of Aquitaine (Guilhelm IX, 1071–1126), and his probably eleven songs present most of the topics of the love poetry of the future trobadoresque tradition. The war against the Albigensians (1209–1229), a Christain war against Christians who were denounced as being heretics, ruined and finally destroyed the flowering Occitane culture and poetry; Guiraut de Riquier (before 1254–1292) is called the last Occitane Trobador, but in Northern Italy and Northern Spain, the Occitane tradition of love poetry lasted for more than a hundred years longer. The love poems of the Scuola Siciliana, of the North Italian Dolce stil nuovo (so called by Dante, Purgatorio 24, 57), of Dante himself (La vita nuova, end of 13th c.) and Petrarca (Canzoniere, around 1350) belong into the same tradition. The texts of roughly 2600 trobador songs from the 12th and 13th centuries are transmitted, and at least 260 melodies, and we know the names of about 450 poets: Nearly all of them and their songs are listed in the encyclopedian thesaurus of Pillet-Carstens (Bibliographie der Troubadours, 1933); there are hundreds of text editions and anthologies, often with modern translations, and all existing melodies were published in two collections (Cançons dels Trobadors, ed. Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta and Robert Lafont, 1979; and The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars, ed. Hendrik van der Werf and Gerald A. Bond, 1984). Higly reliable information about all these poets, their work and the editions can be found in the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le moyen Age, revised and edited by Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (1964).

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We know more about the trobadors than about the trouvères and minnesinger due to two genres of texts which are only transmitted regarding the trobadors: the “vidas” and “razos,” i. e., biographies (“vida” from Latin “vita,” ‘life’) and interpretations (“razo” from Latin “ratio[nem]”) These mostly anonymous texts, always in prose, were written in the 13th century, and they present a lot of information about the poets and several of their poems – the information they give for about 100 poets are not always reliable and might even sometimes be fictional, but nevertheless they are a treasure regarding the possible living conditions (‘raisons vivantes’) of these authors, their songs, their patrons, and the circumstances of composing and performing songs. The texts were collected by Jean Boutière, Alexandre Herman Schutz, and Irenée-Marcel Cluzel (Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, 1973; English translation: Margarita Egan: The vidas of the Troubadours, 1984; see also Id., The Old Provençal Vidas: A Textual Analysis, 1980). There is nothing comparable in Northern France or the German-speaking area, with the exception of Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s autobiographical novel Frauendienst (Service for the Ladies, mid-13th c.), perhaps Guillaume de Machaut’s Le voir dit (mid-14th c.), and some commenting headlines of Middle High German poems in the late Middle Ages (Monk of Salzburg, Michel Beheim). C. Trouvères The innovative poetry of the trobadors influenced poets in Northern France around 1160 who were called trouvères (Guiot de Provins, Huon d’Oisy, Chrétien de Troyes; see: Pierre Aubry, Trouvères et troubadours, 1909; Alfred Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France). The court of Marie de Champagne (†1198) was one of the leading centers for poetry: Marie, daughter of Eleonore/Aliénor of Aquitaine (daughter of Duke William IX., first married with the French King Louis VII., since 1152 with the Norman King Henry II. Plantagenet, also mother of Richard I. Lionheart 1157–1199) became the patroness of several poets, among them Chrétien de Troyes, the author of the first Arthurian courtly romances. The names of the singers and their songs until 1300, i. e., ca. 200 authors and roughly 2100 songs, are enlisted in the thesaurus of Raynaud-Spanke (Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes, 1955), and reliable information, including editions, can again be found in the Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le moyen Age, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (1964); many songs were transmitted anonymously. There are later poets like Christine de Pizan (1365–1429/30; “virelais, lais, rondeaux, épîtres, dits,” etc.) and Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465: “ballades, rondeaux”) who somewhat belong into the

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tradition of the trouvères, and even François Villon (probably 1431 to after 1463: “ballades”) should be mentioned in this context. If the trouvères etc. were not noblemen, we known very little about their lives because no “vidas” or “razos” have survived in Northern France. D. Minnesinger The German minnesinger (also called “minnesänger”) have been equivalents of the trobadors and trouvères, and some of them were in the beginning influenced by the former (see Joachim Bumke, Die romanisch-deutschen Literaturbeziehungen im Mittelalter: Ein Überblick, 167; about Minnesang in general: Olive Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric 1150–1300: The Development of Its Themes and Forms in their European Context, 1982; Günther Schweikle, Minnesang, 1989). But there are some problems with this term: Unlike ‘trobador’ and ‘trouvère,’ the term ‘minnesinger’ does not identify the poets by their ‘profession’ but by the content of their works. There are several meanings of the modern word ‘Minnesang’ (from Middle High German “minnesanc”): These love-songs might be poems about love in general, but also poems about a particular kind of love; therefore the nomen agentis “Minnesinger” might have different meanings. MHG “minne” simply meant ‘love,’ but in the later Middle Ages it became more and more a vulgar word and then vanished; the word was revitalized at the end of the 18th century, then meaning mostly, but not always, the kind of love which many philologists supposed to be typically medieval, i. e., courtly love, “fin amors” (= cultivated and elegant love), or unfulfilled love characterized by longing, lamenting, and hopeless passion (often called “hohe minne”). I would suggest to differentiate between MHG love songs in general on the one hand, and Minnesang about unfulfilled, unfortunate love, on the other. There are some good collections of articles about Minnesang: Hans Fromm ed., Der deutsche Minnesang. Aufsätze zu seiner Erforschung I, II, 1961/1972, and 1985; Minne ist ein swaerez spil: Neue Untersuchungen zum Minnesang und zur Geschichte der Liebe im Mittelalter, ed. Ulrich Müller, 1986; Peter Wapnewski, Waz ist minne: Studien zur mittelhochdeutschen Lyrik, 1975/1979; Wolfgang Mohr, Gesammelte Aufsätze II: Lyrik, 1983; Günther Schweikle, Minnesang in neuer Sicht, 1994; see also the above mentioned introduction by Olive Sayce, and also Günther Schweikle, Minnesang, 1989. But there is a second problem: trobadors and trouvères conceived not only love-songs, but also discussed political topics, the right or wrong ways to live, their own daily-life problems, and also God and religion. So did the German singers. Since the early 19th century, German medievalists have distinguished ‘real Minnesang’ (or love songs) and songs with other topics; these were erroneously called “Spruch” (‘spoken poems’) by Karl Simrock

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(Walther von der Vogelweide, Gedichte, 1833). Meanwhile we know that these poems were sung like all the others, and therefore most medievalists today use the somewhat bizarre word “Sangspruch” (i. e., a poem, in former times erroneously called a spoken text, but in reality sung); see Hugo Moser ed., Mittelhochdeutsche Spruchdichtung, 1972; Helmut Tervooren, Sangspruchdichtung, 2001). It would be more adequate to differentiate between love poems, political poems, poems about right and wrong ways to live (‘ethical and moral songs’), and religious songs – but we know that nothing is as durable as a popular word, even if it is misleading (Ulrich Müller, “Ein Beschreibungsmodell zur mittelhochdeutschen Lyrik – ein Versuch,” ZfdPh 98 [1979]: 53–73; Untersuchungen zur politischen Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters, 1974). The first German-speaking love poet whose name we know is the Austrian Der von Kürenberg (probably from the Danube region around Linz). The end of the minnesinger period is again open, perhaps around the first decades of the 14th century. But there were, of course, love poets later, and often the South-Tyrolean nobleman Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/ 1377–1445) is used to be called the ‘last minnesänger.’ The most reliable information about the German-speaking authors of songs, again including editions, can be found in the second edition of the 14-volume Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon (1978–2007; see the introduction to this Handbook of Medieval Studies). E. The Poets To conceive and sing love songs was part of courtly and chiveralesque living, mostly of males, like dancing, hunting, and jousting (not writing or reading!); in Southern France there were also around twenty female singers (called “trobairitz”), very few in Northern France (Christine de Pizan), but – as far as we know – none in the German-speaking regions (there might be some examples in the very late Middle Ages, see Albrecht Classen, Deutsche Frauenlieder des fünfzehnten und sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1999; Id., “Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century German Women Scribes, Women Editors, and Women Poets,” AbäG 56 [2002]: 199–222). Many noble men, even princes and kings, composed love songs: the Hohenstaufen Emperor and King Henry VI, and King Konrad IV, King Richard Lionheart, then many dukes (like William IX. of Aquitaine), and counts. There were singers from all social classes, but we have very often no information about the social rank of the many other poets, among them certainly many professional artists who made their living by composing and presentings songs of all kinds (Joachim Bumke, Ministerialität und Ritterdichtung: Umrisse der Forschung, 1976). One of the best known until today is Walther von der Vogelweide (around 1200; see the mono-

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graphs, all entitled Walther von der Vogelweide, by Horst Brunner et. al. 1996/2008, Thomas Bein 1997, Manfred Günter Scholz 1999/2005, Otfrid Ehrismann 2008; also Manfred Günter Scholz, Bibliographie zu Walther von der Vogelweide 1969, Walther-Bibliographie 1968–2004, 2005). Normally the noble singers composed just love songs, whereas the professionals treated also other topics, among them those regarding their own social problems. Later, in several cities of Northern France and Germany, bourgeoise craftsmen created organisations to perform songs (“Puys” [from Latin “podium”] in Arras, Amiens, Douai, Rouen, Valenciennes, 13th to 16th century; ‘Meistersang’ in Mainz, Nürnberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Ulm, Steyr, Breslau, and other German cities; see Frieder Schanze, Meisterliche Liedkunst zwischen Heinrich von Mügeln und Hans Sachs, 2 vols., 1983/1984). It should not be forgotten that there were also poems and songs about the same topics written in Latin (Medieval Latin, or Middle Latin), the ‘father language’ of the Western Middle Ages. These works were actually international because they could be understood by everybody in Western Europe who had learnt Latin, normally in a monastery or, later, in a Latin school of a city (Frank Anthony Carl Mantanello and A.G. Ricci, ed., Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, 1996; Karl Langosch, Lateinisches Mittelalter, 1963; Franz Brunhölzl, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1975, and 1992; see also Ernst Robert Curtius: Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948/1978, English translation: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1955/1990). The authors of the songs were clerics, clerks, scholars, magistri, and students (sometimes rather unprecisely also called “vagantes” or even “goliards,” i. e., wandering folks, well educated, but mainly interested in drinking and games, at least according to the statements in their own songs (Helen Wadell, The Wandering Scholars, 1927, rpt. 1989). There are numerous Middle Latin lyrics, and one of the most famous collections of such poems are the Carmina Burana. i. e., ‘Songs from the Monastery of Benediktbeuren, Bavaria,’ where the manuscript was found in the early 19th century (now: Bavarian State Library Munich, clm 4660/clm 4660a: first edition by Johann Andreas Schmeller, 1847, rpts.; now in modern critical editions: Alfons Hilka, Otto Schumann, Bernhard Bischoff 1930–1971; Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, 1987; melodies by René Clemencic et al., 1979); unique in this manuscript is the combination of Latin and MHG stanzas (see Ulrich Müller, “Mehrsprachigkeit und Sprachmischung als poetische Technik: Barbarolexis in den ‘Carmina Burana’,” Europäische Mehrsprachigkeit: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Mario Wandruszka, ed. Wolfgang Pöckl, 1981, 87–104; Olive Sayce, Plurilingualism in the Carmina Burana: A Study of the Linguistic and Literary Influence on the Codes, 1992).

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There are, of course, many songs in Medieval Latin about love, but mostly not about courtly “fin amors,” or “hohe mine;” instead often and explicitely about love-making and even sex: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” F. The Poems The poems of the trobadors, trouvères, and minnesinger were transmitted in manuscripts, mostly only the texts, but also several hundreds of melodies. Only in the late Middle Ages can we find manuscripts with texts and melodies. Authentic manuscripts or autographs are very rare (for example: Hugo von Montfort [1357–1423], Oswald von Wolkenstein [1376/77–1446], and Michel Beheim [1416–ca. 1474], the first author of songs of whom we have several autographs; about the authors, see Verfasserlexikon). The majority of these poems were songs, i. e. “lieder,” consisting of a series of stanzas identical in the metrical pattern and all sung to the same melody. Therefore at that time there were hundreds, even thousands of different types of stanzas and melodies, like never before and also probably never later (see István Frank, Répertoire de la poésie des troubadours, 1953–1957, rpt. 1966; Anthonius Hendrikus Touber, Deutsche Strophenformen des Mittelalters, 1975; regarding the songs of the trobadors and trouvères see Grundriss der romanischen Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. II (Erich Köhler, Les genres lyriques, 1980, VI 1/2, Hans-Robert Jauss, La littérature didactique, allégorique et satirique, 1970). Regarding the Middle High German songs of the 13th and early 14th centuries, see Hugo Kuhn, Minnesangs Wende, 1952. The trobadors had developed a special genre of songs, called “descort,” a song discussing different arguments and using different forms of stanzas and melodies, i. e., songs about “descordia” (= incongruous understanding). The German “leichs” of the minnesinger had a similar form (not content); “leichs” are poems of considerable size, built also of different forms of stanzas (called ‘versiculi’) and melodies, and possibly influenced by the Latin “sequentia (see Karl Bertau, Sangverslyrik: Über Gestalt und Geschichtlichkeit mittelhochdeutscher Lyrik am Beispiel des Leichs, 1964). By far most of the songs were about love, love in the broadest and most different sense. The trobadors called them “canso” (from Latin “cantio,” ‘song’); it must be mentioned that the modern German term “Kanzone” has a totally different meaning, namely not regarding the topic, but the structure of the stanzas (three parts: AAB). Alfred Jeanroy, La poésie lyrique des troubadours 1934, rpt. 1973) divided the medieval love songs into the “genre subjectif,” i. e., reflective songs, and the “genre objectif,” i. e., songs which tell a story like ballads: the most popular genres objectifs were the Occitane and French “pastorelas” (= songs about meeting a “pastoral,” i. e., a young and

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attractive shepherdess) and the German “tageliet” (= Occitan “alba,” Old French “aube”), about the parting of two lovers in the early morning to avoid danger for life and reputation, because their love is illicit. About “pastorelas,” see The Medieval Pastourelle, trans. and ed. by William D. Paden, 2 vols., 1987; Sabine Brinkmann; Die deutschsprachige Pastourelle, 1985; a comprehensive collection of songs from all over the world, about lovers’ partinges at dawn, was published by Arthur T. Hatto (EOS: An Enquiry into theTheme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn, 1965); for monographs about “albas”, “aubes,” and “tageliet,” see Jonathan Saville, The Medieval Erotic Alba: Structure as Meaning, 1972; Friedrich Nicklas, Untersuchungen über Stil und Geschichte des deutschen Tageliedes, 1929, rpt. 1967; Herta Ohling, Das deutsche Tagelied vom Mittelalter bis zum Ausgang der Renaissance, 1938; Alois Wolf, Variation und Integration. Beobachtungen zu hochmittelalterlichen Tagelieder, 1979; Gerdt Rohrbach, Studien zur Erforschung des mittelhochdeutschen Tageliedes: Ein sozialgeschichtlicher Beitrag, 1986. Many, though not all, medieval love songs were about illicit, even adulterous love, never about the love of a married couple; only from the beginning of the 15th century there are some examples of love songs which mention the spouse or wife of the singer (for example Hugo von Montfort and Oswald von Wolkenstein; see Albrecht Classen, Der Liebes- und Ehediskurs vom hohen Mittelalter bis zum frühen 17. Jahrhundert, 2005, 262–65). It is difficult to explain why noblemen and noblewomen were so eager to listen regularly to songs which depicted something which was strictly prohibited by the Church and, above all, by feudal tradition and law (see for example: René Nelli, L’érotique des troubadours: Contribution éthno-sociologique à l’étude des origines sociales du sentiment et de l’idée d’amour, 1974; also Herbert Kolb, Der Begriff der Minne und das Entstehen der höfischen Lyrik, 1958; Rüdiger Schnell, Causa amoris: Liebeskonzeption und Liebesdarstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, 1985). The love songs from Southern and Northern France were often much more explicit than the German ones, where, for example, adultery or an unloved husband is never specifically referred to. For a long time medievalists concentrated on fin amors and hohe mine, whereas the often very erotic ‘contre-textes’ were neglected (see Pierre Bec, Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours: Pour une approche du contre-texte médiéval, 1984). Many trobadors address their patrons and sometimes also tell a name of their beloved lady, but never use a real name, but only a pseudonym (called: “senhal;” regarding the patrons, see William C. McDonald with the collaboration of Ulrich Goebel, German Medieval Patronage from Charlemagne to Maximilian I.; and Joachim Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter. Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höfischen Literatur in Deutschland 1150–1300, 1979).

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Normally medievalists believe that the male “I” of these songs is a persona, not the author himself; but many texts from the Middle Ages suggest that the audience then could have understood the songs as partly autobiographical, framed by a more or less considerable degree of traditional motifs and stylization – not very different from the poems by Goethe, for example. There are dozens of theories about the origins and meanings of those lovepoems (begging for indulgence, I would just like to mention additionally my own publications: Ulrich Müller, “Die Ideologie der Hohen Minne: Eine ekklesiogene Kollektivneurose? Überlegungen und Thesen zum Minnesang.” Minne ist ein swaerez spil, 1986, 283–315; Id., “Minnesang – eine mittelalterliche Form der Erlebnislyrik. Essai zur Interpretation mittelalterlicher Liebeslyrik.” Literarisches Leben, ed. Matthias Meyer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer, 2002, 597–617; id., “‘L’auteur est mort, vive l’auteur’: Love in Poetry and Fiction,” Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2004, 181–88). A smaller number of the songs deals with politics, moral questions, problems of the living of the poets, and religious topics. Such poems were called by the trobadors “sirventes” (from “sirven,” derived from Latin “servus,” ‘servant’), wheras the German term “Spruch” in “Spruchlied” was, as mentioned above, an invention by modern philologists (see: Wilhelm Nickel, Sirventes und Spruchdichtung, 1907). The German “Meistergesang” was a late off-spring of that type of songs. G. The Melodies The songs of the trobadors, trouvères and minnesinger were meant to be sung, but they were written down early to preserve the texts. It is not known why much less melodies were copied: Some medievalists persume that the singers did not need notations, because they knew how to sing – a theory which is not very convincing. The case of the German poet Neidhart (early 13th c.) demonstrates that the melodies did not actually get lost because many of them were written down only in the late Middle Ages. Only then, often though not always, the texts and melodies were written down in the same manuscript (for example: Monk of Salzburg, Hugo von Montfort, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Michel Beheim). Usually the melodies were monodic, although polyphonic compositions were known in France since the end of the 12th century. In the beginning, some German minnesinger used the forms and melodies of several singers of Southern and Northern France (“contrafattura;” see István Frank and Wendelin Müller-Blattau, Trouvères und Minnesänger, 2 vols., 1952–1956). Usually a trobador, trouvère, or minnesinger, and later a “joglar,” or “spilman” performed a song and,

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accompanied him (sometimes also her)self mostly with an instrument (harps, string instruments, and sometimes there were some extra instrumentalists). The first German-speaking poets we know of who wrote polyphonic songs were the Monk of Salzburg (late 14th c.) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/77–1445); former ‘classical’ melodies were used by the urban meistersinger (Horst Brunner, Die alten Meister: Studien zur Überlieferung und Rezeption der mittelhochdeutschen Sangspruchdichter, 1975; facsimiles of most of the melodies of the meistersang can be found in: Die Töne der Meistersinger: Die Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg Will III. 792, 793, 794,´795, 796, ed. Horst Brunner and Johannes Rettelbach, 1980; see also Horst Brunner and Burghart Wachinger, Repertorium der Sangsprüche und Meisterlieder des 12. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, 1986 sqq.). Today there are many facsimilia of the relevant manuscripts, either printed or more and more digitalized, hence available as CD-ROMs or in the Internet. Nearly all poems of any importance were edited, in very different ways, sometimes with commentaries, and increasingly they have also been translated into modern languages (see for detailed information Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink, Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le moyen Age, 1964, and Verfasserlexikon, 1978–2007). There are many singers and ensembles today that try to perform medieval songs (see: “Performance”) Select Bibliography Lyrik des Mittelalters. Probleme und Interpretationen, ed. Heinz Bergner, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Reclam 1983) [Medieval Latin, Occitane, Old French, MHG, Middle English]; Jean Boutière and Alexandre Herman Schutz, Biographies des Troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIe et XIVe siècles. Traductions françaises par Irenée-Marcel Cluzel (Paris: Nizet 1973); Las Cançons dels Trobadors, ed. Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta and Robert Lafont (Tolosa: Institut d’estudis occitans; 1979); Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Âge. Edition entièrement revue et mise à jour, sous la direction de Geneviève Hasenohr et Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard 1964); Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle: Niemeyer 1933; rpt. New York: Franklin 1968); Hans Spanke, G. Raynauds Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes neu bearbeitet und ergänzt, vol. I: Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes (Leiden: Brill 1955); The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and Scholars, ed. Hendrik van der Werf and Gerald A. Bond (Rochester, N.Y.: van der Werf, 1984); Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al., 14 vols. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1978–2007).

Ulrich Müller

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V Villancicos A. Introduction Villancicos constitute the earliest known examples of traditional lyric poetry in the Castilian language, first documented in the mid-1400s, in early cancioneros (‘songbooks’; without music), later, with musical notations, in vihuelista treatises (guitar manuals), and even down to the present day, by occasional, but very rare survivals in modern tradition (though such instances are comparatively infrequent, in contrast to the massive, modern survival of early narrative ballads: romances). Unlike the kharjas (q.v.), where 11th- to 14thcentury Arabic and Hebrew poets chose – almost exclusively – to select a single traditional topos: the female protagonists’ lonely, sad, even desperate amorous problems, the villancicos, by contrast, evoke a vast and variegated panorama of erotic sentiments, from lonely depression to amorous exultation and fulfillment; from abrupt rejection to joyous acceptance. As also in regard to the kharjas, a great majority of the villancicos are Frauenlieder; typically they are voiced by women and almost exclusively reflect women’s concerns. Only very occasionally do we hear a man’s voice: “D’aquella morica garrida, / sus amores dan pena a mi vida” (That elegant little Moorish girl: / For love of her, I am suffering; Margit Frenk, Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica, 1987, no. 497A). Even rarer are poems concerning armed conflict. The following verses, about the defeat of the famous Muslim leader, Almanzor, in 998, are first documented in Lucas de Tuy’s Latin chronicle (1236): “En Calatañazor / perdió Almanzor / su atamor” (At the Castle of the Eagles, / Almanzor lost / his drum; see my note, “Almanzor’s Lost Drum,” La Corónica, 8, 1 [1979–1980]: 199–203). Aside from their obvious, inherent esthetic attractions, with their suggestive, intuitive, even mysterious style, why should such minimal evocations of the supposed emotional life of Castilian peasants have come into style precisely in mid-15th- and early 16th-century songbooks? The question clearly has numerous valid answers. Obviously, multiple causality must come into play in the study of most, if not all, human phenomena. But yet another explanation, suggested by Américo Castro’s (q.v.) pathfinding reevaluation of medieval Spanish life, literature and history, is the popular identification of Spanish peasantry as the only Spanish social

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class that supposedly remained authentically “Old Christian,” free from and “untainted” by Jewish or Muslim ancestry, as opposed to the increasingly impoverished nobility, who not infrequently improved their financial status by marrying the beautiful daughters of a prosperous, often “New Christian,” middle class. Such a view of Spanish peasantry, though widely held, was, of course, almost totally mythical: Many Jews lived as peasants in country villages, far from urban centers, and the same can also be said of many Hispano-Muslims, especially during the late stages of the Reconquest and even more so after 1492. Note, for example, the Hispano-Arabic toponym, Aliud (= Arabic al-yihûd ‘the Jews’), in Soria Province, far distant from any large town. (Note also Cervantes’ exquisitely perceptive characterization of Sancho Panza and his family, as “pure blooded” Old Christians, in D. Quijote.) B. Development of Research, Including Major Contributors Study of the villancicos has been incalculably less fraught with the bitterly ad hominem, nationalistic polemics and unwarranted methodological quarreling characteristic of kharja research. Though there was some early and very minor terminological vacillation (villancico, villancete), the genre’s existence was generally recognized and accepted ab initio and continued to be well known to Spanish writers (Santillana, J. del Encina, for example), throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. By contrast, the kharja and its interdisciplinary and plurilingual problems suddenly burst upon the world only in 1948, stirring up a hornet’s nest of ongoing problems, to the great detriment of subsequent research. Of course, the paleographic and linguistic problems involved with the villancicos were negligible when compared to those of the kharjas, but, all the same, this does not excuse the generally overwrought reaction of most Romanists and Arabists, regarding the Mozarabic primitive lyric. Villancico studies have been characterized, first of all, by the publication of ever more refined, more rigorously edited and richly documented collections. Julio Cejador y Frauca’s vast Verdadera poesía castellana (orig. 1921–30; reprinted, 10 vols. in 9, 1987), is subjectively put together, poorly documented and should never be cited alone, but, all the same, Cejador’s work continues to be a very useful reference. With Dámaso Alonso’s and José M. Blecua’s Antología de la poesía española (1956, 1969) and Margit Frenk’s Lírica hispánica de tipo popular (1956; Lírica española …, 1990), villancico anthologies enter a world of impeccable modern editorial norms and exacting textual accuracy. The same can just as well be said of José María Alín’s excellent Cancionero español de tipo tradicional (1968). With Margit Frenk’s incomparable Corpus (1987; 2383 items) and Nuevo Corpus (2003; 2685 items), we are now privileged to have at hand a massive, near definitive and exhaus-

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tively documented treasury, to which all subsequent work must now refer. M. Frenk’s Estudios sobre lírica antigua (1978), among numerous other splendid contributions, and Antonio Sánchez Romeralo’s equally indispensable study, El villancico (1969) should also be starting points for all future work. Though already fully taken into account in M. Frenk’s publications, the Spanish classical theater (comedia) must also be mentioned here as a crucial source for the study of the early lyric: Lope de Vega, Gil Vicente, Tirso de Molina, Calderón, among other dramatists, all had extensive knowledge of the popular lyric and, consequently, repeatedly used it to enliven their plays. For one case in point, see José María Alín’s and María Begoña Barrio Alonso’s richly documented Cancionero teatral de Lope de Vega (1997). For a thoroughly excellent villancico study in English, see John G. Cummins’s Spanish Traditional Lyric (1977). The early Catalan lyric belongs to a category all its own. As we would expect, there are important semi-learned influences from the Provençal lyric, but there are also numerous agreements in terms of themes, motifs, and traditional topoi, between the Catalan and Castilian popular lyric. Josep Romeu i Figueras’s Corpus d’antiga poesia popular (2000) is the crucial reference. His superb earlier edition of the Cancionero musical de Palacio (1965) must also be cited here, for its rigorous edition and massive introductory study of the Castilian villancicos. As in the case of the kharjas – and the traditional epic and earliest ballads – the villancicos are anisosyllabic, combining a rich variety of verses, each with a different number of syllables. Such variability of form supports, perhaps, the immense thematic diversity of these early Castilian songs. The kharjas’ radically limited and often repetitive, poetic world suggests that the Mozarabic poemlets may be more interesting philologically than esthetically. By contrast, the villancicos’ thematic range, their vast panoply of variegated erotic themes, take us into a poetic world of almost limitless emotional diversity. While one girl joyously exults in her own unrivaled beauty: “Que yo, mi madre, yo, / que la flor de la villa me so …” (It is I, mother, I, / who am the prettiest in all the town!; Frenk, Lírica, no. 184), another mourns for her murdered beloved: “En Ávila, mis ojos, / dentro en Ávila. / En Ávila del Río, / mataron mi amigo. / Dentro en Ávila” (In Ávila, by my very eyes! / In Ávila by the River, / they killed my beloved, / in Ávila; Frenk, Lírica, no. 320). And who can penetrate the deep sadness of this girl meditating beside the sea? “Miraba la mar, / la malcasada, / que miraba la mar, / cómo es ancha y larga” (The unhappily married girl / looked at the sea; / she looked at the sea / so wide and so vast; Alín, Cancionero, no. 628). Who can know? The song invites our collaboration in imagining the girl’s emotional world.

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Perhaps the most striking of all are those little songs – masterpieces of intuitive style – that oblige us to wonder what exactly is going on, songs that bid us to wonder, to imagine, to construct, to create our own poetic explanations of what has been left unsaid: “Velador, que el castillo velas, / vélalo bien y mira por ti, / que velando en él me perdí” (Watchman, who keeps watch in the castle, / watch carefully and take care, / for watching there was my own undoing; Alín, Cancionero, no. 436). What tragic mystery lies behind the singer’s warning? We can never know, but the song invites us to dream. Select Bibliography John G. Cummins, The Traditional Spanish Lyric (Oxford: Pergamon, 1977); Margit Frenk, Nuevo Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2003); Margit Frenk, Poesía popular hispánica: 44 estudios (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006); Josep Romeu i Figueras, Corpus d’antiga poesia popular (Barcelona: Barcino, 2000); Antonio Sánchez Romeralo, El villancico (Madrid: Gredos, 1969).

Samuel G. Armistead

Visionary Texts A. General Definition A strict definition of visionary texts would include only those texts which describe an event or series of events where a protagonist perceives, by visual means, a supernatural experience during which he or she is granted some prophetic or revelatory knowledge. Such events usually take place during sleep or whilst in some abnormal physical state, such as coma, trance, or temporary ‘death’. However, many texts are generally considered to be ‘visionary’, which in fact describe full sensory experiences or even physical journeys to an otherworldly realm (Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante, ed. Eileen Gardiner, 1989). One standard form of this genre describes a journey through hell and heaven undertaken by the visionary under the guidance of a saint, angel or other supernatural being; this topos was popular from the early Middle Ages to the end of the thirteenth century. Another type of visionary text became widespread from the twelfth century onwards; that is, texts in which the visionary received a supernatural visitation, rather than making an otherworldly journey themselves (Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter, 1981). Many visionary texts describe the

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experiences of mystics, although it should be noted that not all mystics were visionaries (Frank Tobin, “Medieval Thought on Visions and its Resonance in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead,” Vox Mystica, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett, 1995, 41–53; Kevin J. Magill, Julian of Norwich: Mystic or Visionary?, 2006). Likewise many, but not all, visions are apocalyptic (David Hellholm, “Methodological Reflections on the Problem of Definition of Generic Texts,” Mysteries and Revelations. Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium, ed. John J. Collins and James H. Charlesworth, 1991, 135–63). Our definition of the genre would also include texts which describe encounters with apparitions (William A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain, 1981; Ronald C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts, 1982; Aline G. Hornaday, “Visitors from Another Space: the Medieval Revenant as Foreigner,” Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2002, 71–96). On definitions of, and theoretical approaches to, visionary literature see Barbara newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash Between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 [2005]: 1–43. B. History of Research Much scholarly research into visionary texts has been predicated on the idea that they are, to varying extents, accounts of real historical events. Therefore scholars have attempted to explain visionary phenomena in terms of psychiatric disorders, hallucination or ‘near-death experience’ (Ernst Benz, Die Vision: Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt, 1969; Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, “Visions and Psychopathology in the Middle Ages,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 170 [1982]: 41–9; Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come. Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope, 1996). Scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have commented on the conjunction between susceptibility to visions and conditions such as self-harm and anorexia (Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, 1987). Carolly Erickson suggested that medieval men and women were quite simply more receptive to visual sensation (The Medieval Vision. Essays in History and Perception, 1976). However, Siegfried Ringler has argued that visionary texts come down to us only in a ‘received’ form and thus do not represent an original experience (“Die Rezeption mittelalterlicher Frauenmystik als wissenschaftliches Problem, dargestellt am Werk der Christine Ebner,” Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer, 1985, 178–200). Ringler stresses that it is discovering the intention of the author that is of critical importance, rather than any attempt to elucidate the authenticity of the visionary experience (Viten- und Offenbarungsliteratur in

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Frauenklöstern des Mittelalters, 1980). Early literary criticism of visionary texts, though often highly perceptive and still useful to the modern scholar, was generally limited by hindsight, seeing early medieval visions within a linear tradition that reached its zenith with Dante’s Divine Comedy (Marcus Dods, Forerunners of Dante, 1903; C. S. Boswell, An Irish Precursor of Dante, 1908). More recent scholars viewing visionary texts in literary terms have highlighted the complexity of individual texts on their own terms. The otherworldly journey element of visionary literature has been interpreted variously as a metaphor for conversion, pilgrimage (Yolande De Pontfarcy, “Introduction,” The Vision of Tnugdal, ed. J. M. Picard, 1989, 11–106), exile (Elizabeth Boyle, “Stranger in a Strange Land: An Irish Monk in Germany and a Vision of the Afterlife,” Quaestio Insularis 6 [2005]: 120–34), repentence and redemption (Thomas Owen Clancy, “Subversion at Sea: Structure, Style and Intent in the Immrama,” The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Jonathan M. Wooding, 2000, 194–225). The evidence of visionary texts was critical to Jacques Le Goff’s influential study of the development of the idea of purgatory (La naissance du purgatoire, 1981); and a number of important studies trace the development of the imaginative geography of the Christian afterlife as perceived by medieval visionaries (Claude Carozzi, “La géographie de l’au-delà et sa signification pendant le Haut Moyen Age,” Settimana di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 29 [1983]: 423–81, 483–85). C. Political Contexts The nature of visionary texts is such that they confer authority on their authors because his or her knowledge was revealed through divine means. This authority, many scholars argue, gave the authors of visionary texts a certain license which enabled them to remark on political matters, either secular or ecclesiastical (Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Visions and Schism Politics in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard of Bingen, John of Salisbury and Elisabeth of Schönau,” Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip, 2005, 173–87). A. B. van OS noted that the particular sins that are punished in visions of hell, and the nature of the saintly figures encountered in paradise, reveal much about the political concerns of the author or visionary (Religious Visions: the Development of the Eschatological Elements in Medieval English Religious Literature, 1932). The visionary genre was also parodied; such texts were often biting satires, with explicit political or reforming agendas (D. D. R. Owen, The Vision of Hell. Infernal Journeys in Medieval French Literature, 1970).

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D. Sources and Influences Historians have traced specific and direct routes of textual influence from non-Christian traditions through early Christian visionary literature to later medieval texts. For Jewish influences see Susan Niditch, “The Visionary,” Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism. Profiles and Paradigms, ed. John J. Collins and George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1980, 153–79, and Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature, 1983. The essays in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed. David Hellholm, 1983, discuss influences from Judaism as well as from Zoroastrianism. There are numerous studies of Islamic influences and parallels (Leonardo Olschki, “Mohammedan Eschatology and Dante’s Other World,” Comparative Literature 3 [1951]: 1–17; Apocalypses et Voyages dans l’Audelà, ed. Claude Kappler, 1987; David J. Halperin, “Hekhalot and Mi’raj: Observations on the Heavenly Journey in Judaism and Islam,” Death, Ecstasy and Other Worldly Journeys, ed. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane, 1995, 265–88). For early Christian and Gnostic influence see Elaine Pagels, “Visions, Appearances and Apostolic Authority: Gnostic and Orthodox Traditions,” Gnosis: Festschrift für Hans Jonas, ed. Barbara Aland, 1978, 415–30. Richard Bauckham has noted the relative lack of biblical precedent for visions of the Christian afterlife, and treats Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic vision literature as a single continuous tradition (The Fate of the Dead. Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, 1998). The first chapter in this book cites many other Middle Eastern parallels to the topos of the journey through hell. However, scholars have also noted that authors were wary of incorporating potentially heretical non-Christian images or motifs into the Christian visionary tradition (Fritz Graf, “Saint Antony: Deconstructing a Visionary,” Theologische Zeitschrift 62 [2006]: 293–300). E. Female Visionaries Visionary texts written by, or on behalf of, women – which survive in much greater numbers than they do in almost any other genre – have provided important material for scholarly debates on gender (Rosalynn Voaden, “All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta,” Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt, 1997, 72–91; Mary Suydam, “Hadewijch of Antwerp’s Dark Visions of Hell,” Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, 2000, 119–41), the education of women (Jane Duran, “Mechthild of Magdeburg: Women Philosophers and the Visionary Tradition,” New Blackfriars 87 [2006]: 43–9), and female monasticism (The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, 2003). For an introduction

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to female visionary literature see Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Consolation of the Blessed, 1979; eadem, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, 1986. A good overview of the shifting scholarly perceptions of female visionaries can be found in Frank Tobin, Mechthild von Magdeburg. A Medieval Mystic in Modern Eyes, 1995. One of the central issues in feminist readings of visionary texts is whether the genre gave women a voice and authority that they did not otherwise possess in medieval society or whether the masochism inherent in female mysticism confirmed and reinforced the subjection of women (Karma Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” Speaking Two Languages. Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen, 1991, 115–40). Select Bibliography Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1981); Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys. Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Eileen Gardiner, Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell. A Sourcebook (New York and London: Garland, 1993).

Elizabeth Boyle

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W World Maps A. Definition of World Map (Mappamundi; plural Mappaemundi) The term mappamundi (or mappa mundi, plural mappaemundi / mappae mundi) stems from the Latin mappa (cloth, napkin) and mundus (world). The expression goes back to the 11th century and could be applied to any map of the world, to a geographical text of a similar nature, an encyclopedia or a diagram depicting heavenly spheres, and in the 13th and 14th centuries, mappamundi could also refer to a portolan chart. Today, the use of this term is restricted to a certain genre of world maps, namely those which show the whole earth, the visible part of the globe (hemisphere maps) or the inhabited part of the globe, as far as it is known to the Christian west (oekumene maps). They are geometric in shape (usually circular, or oval, some rectangular, mandorla) and often schematic, with roots in classical tradition without being drawn to scale. Most of the mappaemundi are orientated (show east on top), some are rather detailed, and still their primary purpose was not to deliver a geographically true rendering of the physical world, but to instruct the faithful Christian by presenting space and time in harmony and by locating important events within God’s creation. B. History of Research In its beginnings, the study of medieval maps had to face severe basic problems concerning the indispensable tools of study: incomplete records of the sources, scattered literature from many fields that first had to be compiled, and high costs of the publication of catalogues and facsimile atlases. The first person to undertake a general study of mappaemundi was Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa, Viscount of Santarém (1791–1856), whose work included a facsimile atlas of 117 mappaemundi and remained the essential study up to the 20th century (Essai sur l’histoire de la cosmographie et de la cartographie pendant le moyen-age et sur les progrès de la géographie après les grandes découvertes du XVe siècle, 3 vols., 1849–1852, and Atlas composé de mappemondes, de portulans et de cartes hydrographiques et historiques depuis le VIe jusqu’au XVIIe siècle, 1842–1855). Other early contributors to the field of study were Edme-François Jomard (1777–1862), who published a facsimile atlas that contained 30

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medieval mappaemundi (Les monuments de la géographie; ou, Recueil d’anciennes cartes européennes et orientales, 1842–1862), Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861), whose work also included a facsimile atlas (Géographie du Moyen Age, 4 vols. and epilogue, 1852–1857), and Marie Armand Pascal d’Avezac-Macaya (1799–1875) (articles, among others on the Hereford map) (cf. David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987, 292–93). The next landmark study after Santarém was provided by Konrad Miller (1866–1944) (Mappaemundi: Die ältesten Weltkarten, 6 vols., 1895– 1898), which quickly became the standard work of reference. At the same time, Charles Raymond Beazley prepared a major work on the history of geography (The Dawn of Modern Geography. A History of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Conversion of the Roman Empire to A.D. 900, 3 vols., 1897–1906), including descriptions of most of the mappaemundi of the period. Another important edition is Youssouf Kamal, Monumenta cartographica Africae et Aegypti, 5 vols. in 16 parts, 1926–1951, compiled by Frederik Caspar Wieder (1874–1943). As part of a larger project, a general listing of medieval maps, a vol. about mappaemundi was published by Marcel Destombes (Mappemondes A.D. 1200–1500: Catalogue preparé par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l’Union Géographique Internationale, 1964). C. Classification Systems Neither Santarém nor Miller or Beazly made any attempts to classify the corpus of mappaemundi. The first to do so were Théophile Simar (1912), Michael Andrews (1926) and Richard Uhden (1931), all of which proposed a threefold classification (Roman – Late Greek – intermediate), the latter two with different subgroup definitions. Destombes (1964) adopted Andrews’s classification, singling out a fourth category (“D,” i. e., detailed ecumenical maps with more geographical information). Arentzen (1984) simplified the categorization by establishing only two main categories – oekumenical maps, depicting the inhabited world as viewed in late Roman time, and world maps based on Greek tradition, showing a terrestrial hemisphere including the unknown south. Nearly simultaneously, Woodward (1987) and Simek (1988) offered alternative classifications. Simek differentiated mainly according to schematic division, shape of landmasses and contents, and listed 12 types. Woodward modified Andrews’s system, ending with four categories: tripartite, zonal, quadripartite, and transitional maps. The tripartite type (= ecumenical, T-O [in some cases Y-O]) represents the inhabited world as perceived in Late Roman times, in a circular shape, orientated to the east, with the three continents Asia (upper half), Europe (bottom left) and Africa (bottom right). The landmasses are divided by water: Europe and Asia

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by the Tanais (the Don), Africa and Asia by the Nilus, the Nile, and Europe and Africa by the Mare Magnum, the Mediterranean Sea. This type is again subdivided into two groups, schematic vs. non-schematic maps, the latter containing more information. The zonal type ( Andrews: hemispheric) is orientated to the north or the south and shows the Greek climata or latitudinal zones (5 or 7): Uninhabitable are the two frigid zones in the polar regions and the torrid one at the (equatorial) Ocean River; two are temperate and inhabitable, one in the north, where the oecumene is situated, the other in the south, conceptualized as either de facto uninhabited or as inhabited by the Antipodeans. The quadripartite type (Andrews: intermediate) combines characteristics of the tripartite (concerning the Northern hemisphere) and the zonal type (the Ocean river and a fourth continent in the south are depicted). The transitional type is a product of the Late Middle Ages (14th and 15th c.), showing influence from portolan charts, from contemporary explorations and later also from Ptolemy’s Geography. The major part of mappaemundi belongs to the first two categories, the tripartite (numerous) and the zonal maps (less numerous). With the exception of the transitional type, mappaemundi do not show similarities in form or function with other contemporary types of maps such as regional, topographical or cadastral maps or portolan charts (cf. David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987; Rudolf Simek, “Mappae mundi,” Archiv der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften 22/23/24 [1988]: 1061–91) D. Periodization Four main periods of mappaemundi have been observed, the first being the late Greco-Roman and patristic period (ca. 400–700), characterized by the main sources which have been used, Macrobius, Orosius, and Isidore. Isidore maps form an important and widespread group of mappaemundi, the socalled T-O maps (schematic tripartite, see below). The term T-O-map seems to go back to late-medieval times, namely to Leonardo Dati (La sfera, ca. 1425 – “Un T dentro ad un O mostra il disegno / Come in tre parti fu diviso il Mondo”). The second period (ca. 700–1100) sees an increasing number of artefacts, connected to what is usually called the Carolingian renaissance and to clerks such as Bede, Beatus of Liebana, and Lambert of Saint-Omer – “the golden age of Church cartography” (Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton, trans. D. L. Paisey, 1964: 42). Mappaemundi are found in theological, historical, geographical and computistical texts and encyclopedical manuscripts, partly also as separate entities and sometimes attached to other media than parchment manuscripts. The third period (ca. 1100–1300) distinguishes itself by the reception of the newly translated

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Greek and Arabic works, esp. the Almagest, and the growth of interest in the physical nature of the world in Western Europe. Famous maps are found in this period (e. g., the Ebstorf map [the largest of the mappaemundi], the Vercelli map and the Hereford map). The fourth, transitional period (ca. 1300–1460), is characterized by the amalgamation of the conceptual framework of mappaemundi with features of the portolan chart, the Ptolemaic coordinate system, and new discoveries in Asia and Africa, see, e. g., the Fra Mauro map (cf. David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987; Tullia Gasparrini Leporace (ed.), Il mappamondo di Fra Mauro, 1956; Evelyn Edson, The World Map 1300–1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, 2007). E. Construction of the Geographical Framework The well-established scholarly ideas about the concepts due to which detailed non-schematic mappaemundi were drawn were challenged by Brigitte Englisch. In her study Ordo orbis terrae. Die Weltsicht in den Mappae mundi des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, 2002, she explained at length what she perceived as the principles of an intricate geometrical construction of mappaemundi, an argumentation based on her interpretation of an early medieval mappamundi in the Vatican Isidore-ms. Vat. Lat. 6018. This map serves as a methodological test case; she regards it as a prototype that could reveal the construction of all later detailed non-schematic mappaemundi. Several reviewers have rejected her theory as pure speculation (cf. e. g., Johannes Fried, in HZ 277 (2003): 714–19, here 719: “der Irrlauf einer fixen Idee”). Some Latin descriptions on how to draw a mappamundi had been known for a long time, e. g., the Descriptio mappe mundi (Patrick Gautier Dalché, ed., La ‘Descriptio mappe mundi’ de Hugues de Saint-Victor, 1988). In 2001, Gautier Dalché announced the discovery of an unknown text, Expositio Mappe Mundi. This text, preserved in two manuscripts, explains both the textual content and the spatial arrangement of a mappamundi and has to be regarded as “the most significant analogue – a witness to a missing source – known to exist for the Hereford Map” according to Scott D. Westrem (The Hereford Map. A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary, 2001: xxxiv; cf. also Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Maps in words. The Descriptive Logic of Medieval Geography, from the Eight to the Twelfth Century,” The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context, ed. Harvey, 2006, 223–42). Concerning concepts of the shape of the earth: The modern misunderstanding that the world would have been imagined as a flat disk in medieval times has been addressed by Arentzen (1984) and several other scholars (Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt, 2007). The circular

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shape of most mappaemundi has to be seen as a two-dimensional rendering of the three-dimensional globe: Tripartite and zonal maps are found side by side; some depict Antipodeans, and medieval geographical or cosmological literature exclusively conceives of the earth as being spherical (cf. Rudolf Simek, “The shape of the Earth in the Middle Ages and Medieval Mappaemundi,” The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context, ed. Harvey, 2006, 293–303). F. Function An issue still debated and researched is the question to what extent the nature of mappaemundi is to be regarded as realistic or symbolistic. Realistic, in this context, means intended to be geometrically accurate in the rendering of proportions, positions etc. of geographical features. In the early phase of research on mappaemundi, the maps were seen in the light of geographical utility and within a non-reflective and anachronistic ideology of technical progress. Beazley, thus found harsh words of criticism for some of the most elaborate mappaemundi: “the non-scientific maps of the later Middle Ages […] are of such complete futility […] that a bare allusion to the monstrosities of Hereford and Ebstorf should suffice” (Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, 3:528, cf. Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987, 288). An important change in the perception of mappaemundi was achieved by historians of science: a shift in focus from geometric accuracy towards the principles of medieval cosmological concepts (Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols., 1913–1959); John Kirtland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe, 1925). Still, Gerald Crone has shown that the scribe of the Hereford map (ca. 1300) made use of what was available, lists of place names and itineraries, thereby providing contemporary geographical information, and Gautier Dalché, explicitly naming Crone, refutes “the false (in my opinion) idea that medieval mappaemundi cannot be of a geographical nature,” as they show locations of geographical entities and thereby represent geographical space (Gautier Dalché, “Maps in words,” see above, 2006: 223–242: 224). The historical or narrative function of mappaemundi was the theme of an important study by W. L. Bevan and H. W. Phillott (Mediæval Geography: an Essay in Illustration of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, 1873, rpt. 1969), a thread Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken took up a century later and has been following since, starting with her article “Mappa mundi und Chronographia” (DA 24 [1968]: 118–86): Mappaemundi function as storehouses of knowledge, their layout depending on the actual focus on what kind of

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knowledge should be envisaged. Consequently, some T-O-maps are used as a frame which contains mere lists of names. The historical function of mappaemundi is to show “the places, where the events happened,” and these places are centers of Christianity (Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, etc.), those of historical interest (e. g., Olympus, Pergamon) and those of contemporary interest (e. g., Kiev, Novgorod). Mappaemundi serve a didactic moralizing purpose, partly by providing a simple structure to be grasped immediately for complicated matters, partly through their symbolic function. The more elaborate mappaemundi can be seen as a kind of narrative painting with mnemonic functions, in some cases they contain texts of variable length, transforming the map into a condensed encyclopedia. In this context, not geographical accuracy was the primary function of mappaemundi but rather the projection of secular and religious history, including marvels and legends within a geographical framework. The religious aspect is inherent in the symbolic orientation towards the east, where paradise is located; sometimes this concept is stressed by depicting Christ himself as “Christ in Glory,” pointing to the Last Judgment. Thus, the foundation pillars of the Christian world view – creation, salvation, and doomsday are represented (cf. Hugh of Saint Victor’s De arca Noe and Libellus de formatione arche [ed. Sicard, CCCM 176, 2001]; Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago Mundi Cartographica […], see below, 1984; David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 1987; Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm, 2001). The past 30 years saw a gradual shift in focus toward the symbolic layers and narrative functions of mappaemundi and since the 1990s, towards theory of cartography concerning early maps in general (conc. the latter cf. Matthew H. Edney, “Theory and the History of Cartography,” Imago Mundi 48 [1996]: 185–91). To this day, language problems have hampered a vivid exchange of ideas between N-American / N- vs. S-European and especially between Western and Eastern research – to a great extent, relations between medieval Islamic and Christian cartography remain unclear (cf., though, David A. King, “World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca: Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science,” Islamic philosophy, theology and science 36, 1999; Evelyn Edson and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos, 2004, enl. German ed. 2005; Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri, 2006).

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Select Bibliography Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago Mundi Cartographica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenekarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984); Peter Barber, “Medieval maps of the world,” The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context (London: British Library, 2006), 1–44; Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines terrae: Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten (Hanover: Hahn, 1992); Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed their World (London: British Library, 1997); Birgit Hahn-Woernle, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Ebstorf: Kloster Ebstorf, 1989); John Brian Harley, “The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–42; Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map, ed. Paul D. A. Harvey (London: British Library, 1996); The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and their Context, ed. id. (London: British Library, 2006); Margriet Hoogvliet, Pictura et scriptura: Textes, images et herméneutique des mappae mundi (XIIIe-XVIe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols 2007); Ein Weltbild vor Columbus: Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte: Interdisziplinäres Colloquium 1988, ed. Hartmut Kugler and Eckhard Michael (Weinheim: VCH, 1991); Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. Hartmut Kugler, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 2007); Rudolf Simek, Erde und Kosmos im Mittelalter: Das Weltbild vor Kolumbus (Munich: Beck, 1992); Jürgen Wilke, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, 2 vols. (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2001); David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, vol. 1 (see above) 1987, 286–370; The History of Cartography, vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. id. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Key Figures in Medieval Studies from ca. 1650 to 1950 (selection)

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A

Adler, Guido (November 1, 1855, Eibenschitz [Ivancice], ˇ Moravia – February 15, 1941, Vienna), Austrian Musicologist. A. was one of the founders of modern musicology. He was the first to develop a methodological framework for musicological research in which empirical research ideally leads to historically defined ‘laws’ and concepts of style. A.’s historicism and focus on stylistic analysis – reducing the importance of biography to the benefit of underlying trends and principles – had a lasting impact on 20th-century musicology. Concerning medieval and Renaissance polyphony (up to the 15th century), A. was the first to study thoroughly techniques such as gymel and fauxbourdon, and his editorial and organizational activities gave important impulses to early music scholarship. A. was born in Eibenschitz. He moved to Vienna in 1864, where he studied at the Gymnasium and the Conservatory. At the University of Vienna, he obtained a degree in law (1878) and a doctorate in musicology (1880) with Hanslick; in 1881, his habilitation was published. In 1882, A. represented his country at the International Congress for Liturgy in Arezzo, which gave new impulses to the performance and study of plainchant; he published a Memorandum for the government on the results of this meeting. In 1884, A., Spitta and Chrysander founded the quarterly Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft (VFM). In 1885 A. became professor of musicology at the German University in Prague and in 1898 he became Hanslick’s successor at the University of Vienna, where he established the Musikhistorisches Institut, which he directed until 1927. A. was a gifted coordinator, and he organized several festivals and congresses and he presided over the committee which founded the International Musicological Society in Basel in September 1927. A. published his autobiography Wollen und Wirken in 1935. In 1938, A.’s publications were banned because of his Jewish descent. After his decease, A.’s library was handed over to the Institut für Musikwissenschaft in Vienna, while his personal archive was deposited at Georgia University Library (USA) by his son Hubert Joachim (Edward Reilly, The Papers of Guido Adler at the University of Georgia: A Provisional Inventory, typescript,

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1975). Apart from A.’s own works, these papers contain lists of editions of early music, a vast array of notes on chant and modes, and hundreds of samples of medieval and Renaissance music, theory, and notation. Among A.’s earliest publications on medieval music are a number of conference reports on plainchant (Aiguebelle, 1879; Arezzo, 1882) and reviews on medieval music (Hucbald, palaeography). In the report of the Arezzo conference (Vaterland, Sept. 21, 1882; Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung [AMZ], nos. 49–51, 1882), A. comments on the reprint of the Medicaean Gradual by the Regensburg publisher Pustet, on organ accompaniment, and on the possibilities of reconstructing chant. In 1885, A. published “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (VFM 1 [1885]: 5–20], an article that, as all literature on A. acknowledges, laid the conceptual foundations both for A.’s own career and, to a large extent, modern musicology. A.’s view of musicology as the scientific and autonomous study of music was modeled on the natural sciences and was influenced by the views of the philosopher Alexius Meinong (correspondence ed. by Gabriele Eder, 1995). Musikwissenschaft consists, according to A., of a historical and a systematical component. In addition, ethnomusicology (Musikologie) is described as “ein sehr dankenswerthes Nebengebiet” of systematic musicology. In spite of this well-balanced scheme, A.’s own research was dominated by a historical focus. In his dissertation (“Die historischen Grundclassen der christlichenabendländischen Musik bis 1600,” AMZ 15 [1880]: 689–93, 705–09, 721–26, 737–40), then in his habilitation (“Studie zur Geschichte der Harmonie,” Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften 98 [1881]: 781–830), and in a number of subsequent articles, A. studied the early history and development of polyphony. He labeled the earliest medieval polyphony “in ihren ersten Phasen regelloser Behandlung” Heterophonie (“Über Heterophonie,” Jahrbuch Peters 15 [1908]: 17–27). In contrast to modern views, A. and his contemporaries took this term, which was coined by Plato (Laws, 812d-e), to signify multi-part singing and applied it to medieval music as well as to folk music of Icelandic, Asian and Russian origin. A. further distinguished between contrapuntal (discantus) and harmonic (fauxbourdon and gymel) techniques, and he concluded that “harmony” developed autonomously and parallel to contrapuntal writing (“Studie zur Geschichte der Harmonie”; “Wiederholung und Nachahmung in der Mehrstimmigkeit,” VFM 2 [1886]: 271–346). Aside from discussing the “high art” repertory and theorists such as Walter Odington, Johannes de Muris, Johannes de Garlandia, and Guilhelmus Monachus, A. was interested in remnants of (improvised) folk repertory (exemplified, in A.’s view, by the English rota

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Sumer is icumen in, songs from the Vienna-Mondsee song book, Oesterr. Nationalbibl., Vind 2856, and Alpine Jodelgesang). Parallels between “art” repertory, theory, and “folk” music led A. to formulate his “hypothesis of the folk song origin of harmony”. From 1911, A. defined music history as style-history, in which “style” is defined by specific features and “laws” (Kunstgesetze) of the music in a given period. Music analysis and history were to be conducted in an exchange of inductive and deductive methods, defining time, place, and author of unknown compositions. A.’s style concept is fairly flexible, allowing for mixtures and influences of style, as in his illustrations (Stil in der Musik I, 1911, 30–42) of Stilübertragung (e. g., contrafacting), Stilkreuzung (e. g. Meistergesang), and Stilmischung (e. g., the Catholic mass, combining chant with polyphony), and in drawing attention to the possibility of archaisms: “Es wird also in einem solchen Falle zwischen der Zeit der factischen Entstehung und der der eigentlichen Zugehörigkeit des Werkes unterschieden werden müssen” (“Umfang, Methode und Ziel,” 7). However, A.’s concept of style as the leading principle of music history is not without its methodological problems; his reduction of works of art to mere samples of a certain style is one of the most prevailing criticisms of his “method.” (Wolfgang Dömling, “Musikgeschichte als Stilgeschichte: Bemerkungen zum musikhistorischen Konzept Guido Adlers,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 4 [1973]: 41–45). A.’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924, sec. ed. 1930) was one of the first music histories written by a team of specialists. By working with a group of no less than 48 scholars, A.’s purpose was to achieve an overview that would reflect the latest state of the art. Apart from a statement on the “Periodisierung der abendländischen Musik,” A. did not contribute to the sections on medieval or Renaissance music. The framework A. provided for the Handbuch, however, significantly reflects his views on (early) music history and should not be left out of this discussion. A. stressed the importance of writing music history according to internal musical developments. While acknowledging parallels between the development of the various arts, A. strongly advised against a periodization solely along the lines of general or art history: “Nicht einmal bei der Abgrenzung des Mittelalters von der Neuzeit herrscht Übereinstimmung unter den Historikern. Der Musikhistoriker kann sich an die Abscheidung um 1500 halten, ohne sie absolut gelten zu lassen” (Handbuch, 19302, 69). According to A., music history up to 1600 can be divided in two stylistic periods: the first (up to 1000) is dominated by monophonic chant, while the second period saw the origins and development of polyphony. Unlike many of his predecessors and followers in music his-

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toriography, A. did not restrict his overview of monophony to Western plainchant; the first period in the Handbuch also covers Byzantine, East-European, Russian, and Jewish chant. For these chapters, A. engaged prominent scholars such as Peter Wagner, Egon Wellesz, and Abraham Idelsohn. (A.’s interest in European and Asian ethnomusicology is also apparent from his own work, see his discussion of Jodelgesang in “Die Wiederholung und Nachahmung;” cf. also A.’s short article on the songs of the fishermen of Sokotra (“Sokotri-Musik,” in David Heinrich Müller, Die Mehri- und Soqotri-Sprache, 1905, 377–82). The chapters on polyphony in the Handbook were written by eminent authors, such as Friedrich Ludwig and Alfred Einstein. As to the terminus ad quem of the second period, A. argues that polyphony and notation both developed further well into the 16th century before being superseded by the dominance of monody since ca. 1600, which marked the inception of Renaissance. As A. had remarked in a paper of 1903, “Die Musik der Renaissancezeit ist nicht identisch mit der Renaissance in der Musik” (“Die Anfänge der Renaissance in der Tonkunst,” publ. in V. Kalisch, Entwurf einer Wissenschaft von der Musik: Guido Adler, 1988, 323). A.’s interests extended to later periods of music history as well; his publications include books on Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler, and also articles on the Viennese classics, Schubert, and Brahms. Apart from his writings, A. made an important contribution to medieval and Renaissance scholarship as editor of the journal VFM (1885–1894), the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ; 83 vols. from 1894–1938), and the associated series Beihefte der DTÖ (Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, 1913–1938). In the VFM, medieval and Renaissance music were given as much attention as music from other periods and systematic disciplines such as music psychology, and ethnomusicology. Seminal studies on the Middle Ages, such as Franz Xaver Haberl’s monograph on Dufay, appeared in the journal (1 [1885]: 397–530). DTÖ made a significant contribution to the knowledge of European music from the late Middle Ages to the classical period. Two volumes, edited by A. and Oswald Koller, were dedicated to the set of six Trent Codices (Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciale, Trent 1374–79, olim 87–92), one of the most important collections of sacred and secular music of the 15th century. A. was instrumental in bringing these codices, discovered by Haberl in the 1880s, to the Vienna Hofbibliothek in 1892, where they remained until 1918. A.’s edition of selected compositions from the codices (DTÖ 14–15 and 22) contains the first complete edition of a Dufay mass (Missa Se la face ay pale), and a full incipit catalogue of the 1585 compositions in the codices. Four further volumes (DTÖ 38, 53, 61 and 76)

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were published under A.’s editorship of the series, including a number of compositions from a seventh codex (Biblioteca capitolare, Trent ‘Trent 93’), discovered in 1920 (DTÖ 61). Concerning the performance practice of this music, A. was critical of instrumental participation in the polyphony from the codices (“Über Textlegung in den Trienter Codices,” Festschrift Riemann, 1909, 51–54). In 1918, A. was given a manuscript Festgabe: Musikgeschichtliche Studien, presented by colleagues and students on the occasion of his 20th year as Ordinarius and the publication of the 25th DTÖ volume (never published). Among the contributions were articles on Dufay’s Salve Regina and on the Christ ist erstanden-variants in the Trent Codices. In 1930, Studien zur Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Guido Adler was published in honor of A.’s 75th birthday; about half of the articles were dedicated to medieval and Renaissance music. Since the 1980s, there has been a revival of musicological interest in A.’s work. In 1986, Josef-Horst Lederer, together with Rudolf Flotzinger and Franz Födermayr, published a Gedenkschrift Guido Adler (Musicologica Austriaca, 6), and in 1988, Volker Kalisch wrote a dissertation on A.’s methodological approach to musicology (Entwurf einer Wissenschaft von der Musik: Guido Adler, 1988). Recently, studies on A.’s relationship with the philosopher Alexius Meinong (Alexius Meinong und Guido Adler: eine Freundschaft in Briefen, ed. Gabriele J. Eder, 1995) and the composer Gustav Mahler (Edward R. Reilly, Gustav Mahler und Guido Adler: zur Geschichte einer Freundschaft, 1978) appeared in print. Select Bibliography Works: Complete publication list in Kalisch 1988, 328–51; Der Stil in der Musik, II. Stilperioden, was written, but never published, the manuscript is kept in the Adler Papers at Georgia University Library; Methode der Musikgeschichte (1919). Literature: Extensive bibliography in Kalisch 1988, 352–68; Studien zur Musikgeschichte: Festschrift für Guido Adler (Vienna: Universal, 1930, 19712); Volker Kalisch, “Unmaßgebliche Bemerkungen zu einem maßgeblichen Konzept: Guido Adlers Musikwissenschaftsentwurf,” Musikwissenschaft – eine verspätete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen Fortschrittsglauben und Modernitätsverweigerung, ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 69–85; Pieter Mannaerts, “Guido Adler en de herontdekking van het gregoriaans,” Tijdschrift voor gregoriaans 32 (2007): 136–46 and 33 (2008): 12–16.

Pieter Mannaerts

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Árni Magnússon (Latin.: Arnas Magnæus, Danish: Arne Magnusson), November 13, 1663, Kvennabrekka, Dalasysla, ´ Iceland – January 7, 1730, Copenhagen, Denmark), major Icelandic/Danish Philologist, Paleographer, Antiquarian and Book and Manuscript Collector. Á.’s most valuable and lasting accomplishment was the collection and preservation in Copenhagen of what remained of medieval Icelandic manuscripts. Apart from some exceptions, the manuscripts survived the devastating fire that burnt to ashes a great part of central Copenhagen in 1728 and destroyed most of Á.’s likewise outstanding collection of printed books, younger manuscripts, his material concerning Icelandic literary history, biographical annotations, copies of medieval letters, etc. Á. was a brilliant paleographer and established new standards in source criticism concerning the historiography of the Nordic countries. Á. bequeathed his collection and other possessions to the University of Copenhagen, creating a foundation which still exists. Á. was born in Western Iceland, in Dalasysla ´ (Dale District) on a farm called Kvennabrekka. His father, Magnús Jónsson (d. 1684), was the clergyman in charge of the district, as had been Á.’s paternal grandfather, Jón Ormsson. His mother was Gu6rún Ketilsdóttir (d. 1690), the daughter of the erudite Reverend Ketill Jörundsson (or Jörundarson, 1603–1670), a dean occupied with, among other things, antiquarian studies and poetry, and one of the central figures in 17th-century intellectual life in Iceland. Á. had been taken into the household of his maternal grandfather Ketill at Hvammur, Dalasysla ´ sometime between the ages of 0 and 3. He was therefore not affected by difficulties arising from his father’s dismissal from his job after well-founded accusations of adultery. Á. grew up in a learned environment and became familiar with foreign languages, all kinds of books and old manuscripts, which were to fascinate him throughout his life. He was taught by Ketill until the latter’s death, then by his likewise learned uncle, the Reverend Páll Ketilsson (ca. 1644–1720). According to Á.’s brother, Jón Magnússon, Á. had already learned to read Icelandic before he took up Latin at the age of six. As a ten year-old, he also learned some Greek, and later got instruction in other subjects as well. At the relatively late age of seventeen, he was sent to the cathedral school of Skálholt where he studied for three years and graduated in spring 1683. Á. was enrolled in the University of Copenhagen in Sept. 1683 and took up theology, in which he received a degree (attestatus theologiae) two years

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later. The first and obviously most important scholars Á. mentions in his short Latin autobiography are the polyhistorian, botanist and chemist Ole Borch, dean of the philosophical faculty and Á.’s personal tutor, the physician and mathematician Rasmus Bartholin, and Thomas Bartholin the Younger (1659–1690). Á. became an employee of the latter, his first benefactor, who was appointed the position of Royal Antiquary in 1684. After Bartholins death, Á. again enjoyed the patronage of an important person, Matthias Moth (1649–1707), the brother of the King’s mistress who held a position as chief secretary in the Danish Chancellery. Á. spent one and a half years in Germany. After his return to Denmark, Á. became a professor designatus in 1694, and archival secretary (Archivist in the Secret Archives) in 1697 – though without salary during the first two and a half years. In 1701, he became professor of Danish Antiquities (philosophiae et antiquitatum Danicarum) at the University of Copenhagen, being the first Icelander to assume a chair in Denmark. In 1702, he was ordered by the King to travel to Iceland as Royal Commissioner and to give a full account of the country’s conditions. The main task of Á. and his colleague, the lawman Páll Vídalín (1667–1727) was to write a detailed register of all the land-owners’ property including e. g. information about the worth of the land, and taxes and debts on property. They were also to make a census of Iceland. The task occupied Á. for 10 years; during a break in Denmark 1708–1709, he married Mette Fischer (d. 1730), the wealthy widow of the King’s saddler. Á. used both the money which followed his marriage and the opportunity of travelling in Iceland to collect every ancient manuscript he could. In 1721, he was appointed professor of history and geography. Á. was a passionate collector of medieval Icelandic manuscripts throughout his life, thereby securing this heritage for posterity. Except for lawbooks, most of the vellum codices were defective, and Á. collected every fragment he could get his hands on: unbound, brown and worn-out remnants of unspectacular codices, single vellum leaves and even tiny strips thereof. He had a habit of commenting and inserting pieces of paper in the manuscripts he had purchased or received, stating every item’s provenance and other information. A great number of these notes and commentaries are extant, and they are of the highest value – especially for modern approaches such as New Philology. Á.’s notes are a major source in relocating and reconstructing the context in which the individual manuscripts originated, where they had been kept, who had owned them, etc. Á. established a more critical approach toward the medieval Icelandic sagas as historical sources: he thought the legendary sagas to be unreliable

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and invented stories and therefore regarded them to be of lesser historiographical value than e. g. the king’s sagas written by Snorri Sturluson – at a time when the legendary sagas were used in historiography by both Swedish and Danish scholars. Á. assisted Thomas Bartholin in collecting and copying documents. These transcriptions survived the Copenhagen Fire of 1728, as the 25 socalled “Bartholin Volumes” (now Royal Library in Copenhagen). Nine of these were partly or completely written by Á. He also contributed significantly to Bartholins Antiquitatum Danicarum de Causis Contemptæ a Danis Adhuc Gentilibus Mortis Libri Tres […] (1689). Á.’s editing, or rather rewriting, of Thormod Torfæus’s (qormó6ur Torfason, 1636–1719) Series Dynastarum et Regum Daniæ was another important task which he carried out meticulously. He discarded some suspicious material before the work was published: The many letters that had been written by Á. and Torfæus reflect this discussion. His models for a modern scientific method in historiography were European scholars, especially French Benedictines such as Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). He observed how they worked with their sources and adopted their critical approach for his own historical research. Á. did not publish much under his own name – only two volumes appeared in print while he lived: 1) Incerti Auctoris […] Chronica Danorum, et Praecipue Sialandiæ […] (1695), and Testamentum Magni Regis Norvegiæ […] (1719). Anonymously, he published Kort og sandfærdig Beretning, om den viitudraabte Besettelse udi Tistæd […], a small work on a witch-trial in Jutland based on documents he excerpted and compiled. His time-consuming work on the General Cadaster of Iceland, the Royal Survey, was first published in the 20th century: Jar6abók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalíns, 13 vols. (Copenhagen & Reykjavík 1913–1990). Á. died childless, and he bequeathed his collection to the University of Copenhagen. His estate and other possessions were turned into a foundation which should pay for two Icelandic students. It was their task to make copies and publish decent editions of the Icelandic works. Today, the collection is split up and kept at two institutes that bear Á.’s name: the Árni Magnússon Institute in Reykjavík and The Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen. Select Bibliography Works: Incerti Auctoris […] Chronica Danorum, et Praecipue Sialandiæ […] (1695); (anon.) Kort og sandfærdig Beretning, om den viit-udraabte Besettelse udi Tistæd […] (1699); Testamentum Magni Regis Norvegiæ […] (1719); Jar6abók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalíns, 13 vols. (1913–1990)

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Literature: Arne Magnusson 1663–1963: Udstilling i Det kgl. Bibliotek November, december 1963 (Copenhagen: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1963); Arni Magnussons levned og skrifter, ed. Finnur Jónsson(København: Gyldendal, 1930); Hans Bekker-Nielsen and Ole Widding: Arne Magnusson: Den store håndskriftsamler, vol. I: 300-året for hans fødsel (1963), trans. Arne Magnusson. The Manuscript Collector (1972); Ole Widding, “Árni Magnússon and his Collection: An Appreciation on the Tercentenary of his Birth,” Scandinavica 2 (1963): 93–107. In the novel Íslandsklukkan (1946, Iceland’s Bell) by the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, a key character, Arnas Arnaeus, is modelled upon Á. – [Gu 5 brandur Vigfússon, ed.], Sturlunga saga […], ed. Gudbrand Vigfusson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878): vol. 1, cxlvii-cli; Gu 5 var 5 ur Már Gunnlaugsson, “Lei6beiningar Árna Magnússonar,” Gripla 12 (2001): 95–124 (with Engl. summary); Jón Helgason, “Athuganir Árna Magnússonar um fornsögur,” Gripla 4 (1980): 33–64; Már Jónsson, Árni Magnússon: Ævisaga. (Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1998); Ólafur Halldórsson, “Árni Magnússon (1663–1730),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York, London: Garland, 1998): 33–43; Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, “Árni Magnússon och hans handskriftsamling,” Scripta Islandica 33 (1982): 45–59.

Jens Eike Schnall

Auerbach, Erich (November 9, 1892, Berlin – October 13, 1957, Wallingford, Conn.), German Philologist. A. is considered, along with Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer, one of the greatest German literary scholars of the 20th century, concentrated on Romance philology. His main contribution to research was to analyze and synthesize the relationship between textual expression (i. e. style) on the one hand, and on perception of reality on the other. He considered both as a time-bound complex. A.’s philological method is indebted directly to historicism, especially to Giambattista Vico. He interprets Vico emphasizing the element of historical relativism and perspectivism, when looking on different literary periods. A. argues that each specific era bears particular qualities in its thought and concepts of reality. These unique traits are reflected in the literary style. In what is usually regarded his masterpiece, Mimesis, A. spans the entire European literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf in case studies. These highlight stylistic specificities in order to reconstruct historical forms of representations of reality. According to the diachronic basis, A. emphasizes stylistic diversity. Nevertheless, he argues for an underlying unity of European literature, signified by a serious representation

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of the earthly or – in modern, secular times – of everyday life. To describe variation, hybridization, and innovation, he relates to the classical theory of the three style levels. In the history of style, one of the major innovations of writing was owed to Christianization. In its sway, the dominant style of narration was simplified in the sense of “sermo humilis” as proclaimed and exemplified by Augustine and the Church Fathers. This humble, lowly style can also refer to sublime subjects like the mysteries of incarnation, a novel quality with regard to antiquity. Another main topic of A. is the specific of medieval Christian culture. He polarizes abstract-spiritualistic allegoresis and the exegetical “figura”-concept in which he sees the underlying basis for any understanding of medieval literature. A. uses the complex implications of figural interpretation also to re-evaluate Dante’s Commedia, especially to explain why the characters of the Christian other world remain empirical historical individuals. Seen in the light of a figural interpretation, the poetological program of the Commedia connects human existence with eternal divine order. A. was born in Berlin on November 9, 1892, into an assimilated Jewish merchant family. In 1910 he graduated there from the prestigious Französisches Gymnasium. The same year, he began to study law at Berlin and continued his studies at Freiburg, Munich, and Heidelberg, where he earned his Doctor of Laws degree in 1913 with a thesis concerning the problem of guilt by association with regard to the imminent and controversially discussed reform of the German penal code. After participating as combatant in the First World War, he studied Romance philology at Berlin with Heinrich Morf, Erhard Lommatzsch, and Max Leopold Wagner, taking also classes in philosophy with Ernst Troeltsch, to whom he owed the impulse for his livelong reflecting on Giambattista Vico, and in classical philology with Eduard Norden. In 1921 he received his Ph.D. in Romance philology at the University of Greifswald, presenting a study on the Italian and French ‘novella’ of the early Renaissance. Since 1923, A. worked as a librarian at the Prussian State Library in Berlin. During this period he published a German version of Vico’s Scienza Nuova in 1924 and his first own book Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt in 1929, which he submitted, the same year, successfully as habilitation to the University of Marburg. At Marburg, he succeeded Leo Spitzer, who went to Cologne, as chairman of the Department of Romance philology in 1930. Under the racial laws of the Nazi-regime and the decree depriving Jews of civil service positions, A. was dismissed in October 1935. The following year, in the context of the modernization of the Turkish society initiated by the politics of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, A. was appointed to the Chair of Western European Literature at Istanbul, vacated by Leo

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Spitzer who had left Germany in 1933. There A. was also charged with organizing the teaching of Western languages. While advancing the subject – e. g., he wrote an Introduction aux études de philologie romane (1943) for Turkish students – A. suffered in his own research from the lack of books and journals. At Istanbul, he wrote his important essay “Figura” (1938) and his most famous book, Mimesis (1946). He emigrated to the United States in 1947, to receive his first appointment as visiting professor at Pennsylvania State University. After a short interlude at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he inaugurated the “Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism” with lectures on Pascal, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, he was called to Yale in 1950, which named him Sterling Professor in 1956. A. taught Romance philology at New Haven until his death in 1957, offering courses devoted to medieval subjects and finishing his last book, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958). A.’s scholarship, monographs and essays (cf. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanischen Philologie, 1967, with a bibliography of A.’s writings), seems to be very consistent in that both the individual character of epochs and styles are analyzed as well as their place in European literature as a whole. Perception of reality and its relation to literary technique, the central issue of A.’s work, is present in his doctoral dissertation Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich (1921). Rather than reflecting on sources and comparing different topics or emanations of the stories, A. discusses the composition of individual and collected novellas in the specific way of formal-critical analysis. Already in this early piece, A. stresses the cohesion of this genre’s narrative with reality. The aim of the novella is to present human existence and secular culture (“die Form der Diesseitigkeit, die wir Kultur nennen”), or even an imaginative correlate of the world (“ein Bild der Welt”). Probably influenced by Jacob Burckhardt, A. suggests that the reference to human experience and norms of civil life were a specific feature of the early Renaissance. Nevertheless, he regards Dante whose Commedia – according to A.’s interpretation – passionately describes earthly life, as the main source of influence for the vivid narratives of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Narrative structure and societal form are closely intertwined for A., a parallel to A.’s interest in Vico’s concept of historical relativism. A. translated Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1924), and then also Croce’s monograph on Vico (1927). The hypothesis that human phenomena reflect their epoch and can only be interpreted according to their historical context, underlies A.’s well received study on Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929). By characterizing Dante’s poetic principle as stylistically differentiated representation of the variety of earthly life, A. conceives a strong current of occidental aesthetics

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that is parallel to the idealism that Erwin Panofsky studied in Idea (1924). Moreover, A. positions the Commedia in a different way than the theological interpretations the text had found until then. A. differed also from contemporary scholarship: Karl Vossler (Die Göttliche Komödie: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Erklärung, 2 vols., 1907–1910, 21925) had appreciated Dante’s art not because of, but despite the political and historical contents; in contrast to A., Vossler had a separate view of poetical text and history. In his book on Dante, A. was still strongly influenced by Hegel. In his essay “Figura” (Archivum Romanicum 22 [1938]: 436–89) he developed a novel heuristic instrument for what he had found in Dante. The figural scheme is indebted to the thinking of Saint Paul; Paul had first transformed the Old Testament as the law and history of the Jews into prefigurations of Christ and salvation. Historically, the figural interpretation was later refined by the Church Fathers: Persons and events of the Old Testament remain historic entities that are connected to counterparts in the New Testament. Like for example Moses and Christ, the dialectic relationship is that of prophecy and fulfilment, umbra/imago and veritas, mystification and revelation. A. distinguishes figura sharply from the concept of allegory. Classically conceived by Origines, an allegoric sense of the Old Testament would be entirely abstract and only carry an ethical meaning; in consequence, the historical content would vanish. A. emphasizes that figural interpretation had a realistic layer of meaning. Several re-evaluations in the tradition of hermeneutical thought were necessary: Tertullian’s concept of prophecy and fulfilment had also a significant time-bound dimension that highlighted historical realism. Augustine extends the two poles (figure, fulfilment) by a scheme in three stages: “the Law or history of the Jews as prophetic figura for the appearance of Christ; the incarnation as fulfilment of this figura and […] as a new promise of the end of the world;” the Last Judgement as the “ultimate fulfilment.” Figura is the key instrument to understand the providential world order in the Christian concept of history. It explains also the hybrid character of medieval art that combined realistic and spiritual elements: Life in the earthly world can now be seen as a prefiguration of the spiritual fulfilment in the future that is – while invisible to humans – already present in divine providence. For A., Dante’s Commedia is exemplary in that it presents less the allegorical or symbolic forms that empty the narrated object from its individual sensual qualities. On the contrary, visionary truth is genuinely linked to concrete earthly proceedings and individual fates. On the one hand, the aim of A.’s essay “Figura” is an exegetic scheme for medieval literature or even the entire European understanding of history and reality; on the other hand, the essay shows signs of a time-bound politi-

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cal subtext. In 1938, A. was also writing against the current anti-Judaism when he identified the Old Testament, law and history of the Jews, as an essential prerequisite of Christian religion and its historical imagination. A. avoids any superficial polemics or dogmatism; nevertheless, an awareness of the political situation is present in subtle, highly reflected remarks such as at the beginning of his most famous book Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946). Written during his exile at Istanbul, it starts with a quote from Andrew Marvell (“Had we but world enough and time …”) while on the verso of the title page A. records the dates of composition: May 1942 – April 1945. The first chapter is then a stylistic comparison of the recognition scene in Homer’s Odyssey (Eurykleia recognizes Ulysses’s scar) and the sacrification of Isaac. In 19 chapters, A. analyzes European literature according to the rhetorical scheme of three style levels, also in medieval texts like Gregory’s of Tours Historia Francorum, the twelfth century’s Jeu d’Adam, Chrétien’s de Troyes Yvain, and Dante’s Commedia, which is, also in the overall composition of Mimesis, a climax. A. argues that Dante is exemplary for the fact that his interest in the earthly world results from eschatological considerations, while modernity erases the Christian substrate, leaving a sober view of human everyday life. In Mimesis as a whole, fascinating particular insights are intertwined with larger cultural and sociological connections; this chef-d’œuvre forms a coherent picture of European civilization. A.’s last, posthumously published book Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958) was intended as a supplement to Mimesis. It fills a gap concerning the early Middle Ages. In the introduction, A. highlights Vico’s historicism and goes on to make his own method – as followed in his former studies – more explicit. A. prefers an inductive procedure over the adaption of fixed and absolute categories in understanding a text, a scheme that would falsify and destroy the particular phenomena. His starting point are characteristic particulars of each text that make “key problems” apparent, which “open up a knowledge of a broader context and cast light on entire historical landscapes.” Inductive style analysis is connected with philological synthesis. The general object of such a philology is not abstract theory, but the unity of the cultural entity Europe, and – even broader – “a certain pattern of human destiny.” The book spans from late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages and is concerned with literary style and reading culture. The latter is also dealt with in the book Das französische Publikum des 17. Jahrhunderts (1933), where the sociological aspect of the reading audience is given emphasis. In the 1958 book, a systematic overview of the development of style is given, starting with the “sermo humilis” tradition. Regarded in pejorative ways by classical antiquity, writing lowly or humbly

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would usually have been used for lower subject matter. The new Christian appreciation is caused by the simplicity of Biblical text in the Vetus latina tradition; another reason is that the life and the passion of Christ are adequately expressed. In the incarnation, the splendor of divinity approaches human perception; the “humilitas Christi” refers to a deeper, hidden sublimity. The humble style becomes therefore the medium of sublime mysteries. These specific values of medieval Latin prose must be valorized, as A. emphasizes, independent of humanistic criteria of taste. The Carolingian reform is therefore not a rebirth of the classical Latinity but a loss of lively experience, because literary language and contemporary life diverge. A style that is comparable to the sublime style of antiquity is only found in the vernacular Italian poetry of the 13th century, the Dolce stil nuovo. While the objects and forms of this style are still rather limited (love; canzone/sonnet), Dante’s Commedia creates poetry in sublime style according to an innovative world view. The development of style is accompanied by a change of the learned audience; the well-off elites with classical erudition were gone at the end of the 5th century, only in the 12th century a new reading audience develops, followed by the learned laic public of 13th and 14th century patriciates. A. here combines the aesthetics of production and reception of literary texts. A.’s life and work was and is the subject of continued concern. There is an obvious interest in the significance of his experience as a German-Jewish emigrant in Turkish exile and implications for his research. More persistently, there were methodological interests although under changing perspectives. A. is thought to be a pivotal literary historian, an ingenious interpreter, and a brilliant literary critic, as scholars from Europe, USA, and Latin America agree. Discussions have often been directed to his Mimesis that had been – from the moment of its publication – immediately successful and was often reviewed. Critics were in praise of his exemplary readings, in which, e. g., the New Critics sensed a strong sensibility of observation; the lack of an explicit and clear theoretical framework is sometimes criticized, as well as the lack of explicit criteria for the selection of texts. Leo Spitzer felt that A. had overestimated the historical and not given enough attention to the esthetical. In “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (RF 65 [1953]: 1–18) A. defended his views, in particular against Ernst Robert Curtius. While Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), also written during war years, utilizes topoi and stresses their fixed and timeless nature in an effort to establish the continuity of European culture, A. emphasizes once again a historical relativism which denotes the particularities and variability of literature. During the 1950s Mimesis was received in the USA as a unique introduction into European literature, but was also valorized in innovative com-

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parative contexts. Since the 1970s, A.’s texts are continually discussed with regard to one of the main problems of New Historicism, whether and how historical reality can be (re-)constructed and what the relationship between fiction and reality is (see, e. g., Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography After Hegel, 1992; Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, 1999). The 1980s saw an intensified reception of A. (Green), also in the new field of cultural studies. Edward Saïd refers to Mimesis and A.’s article “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (in: Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich, 1952, 39–50) to give room to a postcolonial inspired criticism of nationalism in order to define a new perspective for comparative studies (see, e. g., Newman and Lindenberger in Barth and Treml). In the 1990s, A.’s life and work was seen “from the angle of a ‘mutual clarification’”, in front of the background of the hazardous academic situation in Nazi-Germany (Gumbrecht in Lerer), to which the history of the discipline has also paid differentiated attention (Hausmann). Conferences attributed A.’s epistemological premises, his methodology, place of history and politics in philological practice a new relevance (Lerer); there were also new evaluations and re-readings of Mimesis (Busch and Pickerodt; Scholz), some of them severely criticized (Schulz-Buschhaus). A.’s European perspective is of the highest relevance to contemporary critical thinking, in medieval Romance Studies, but also in other disciplines such as philosophy, history, religious and – currently – cultural studies (Barck and Treml). Select Bibliography Literature: Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Erich Auerbach. 5o Colóquio Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, ed. João Ceza de Castro Rocha (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1994); Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Wahrnehmen Lesen Deuten: Erich Auerbachs Lektüre der Moderne, ed. Walter Busch and Gerhart Pickerodt (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1998); Mimesis: Studien zur literarischen Repräsentation, ed. Bernhard F. Scholz (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 1998); Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, “Erich Auerbach und die Literaturwissenschaft der neunziger Jahre,” Sprachkunst 30 (1999): 97–119; Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Vom Strudel der Ereignisse verschlungen”: Deutsche Romanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2000); Erich Auerbach: Geschichte und Aktualität eines europäischen Philologen, ed. Karlheinz Barck and Martin Treml (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007).

Bettina Full

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Baer, Yitzhak (Fritz) (December 20, 1888, Halberstadt, Germany – January 20, 1980, Jerusalem), German and Israeli Medievalist. B. (pronounced Ber) was a pioneering scholar and author of over 260 items, books, articles, reviews and encyclopedic entries, dealing with different aspects of Jewish life from the Late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages. His two monumental works, however, are dedicated to a subject most dear to him: the history of the Jews in medieval Spain. In Die Juden im christlichen Spanien (1929–36; Jews in Christian Spain) B. edited and analyzed over a thousand hitherto unpublished and largely unknown documents pertaining to the matters Jewish, from various Spanish archives. His second magnum opus was Toledot ha-Yehudim bi-Sefarad ha-notsrit (A History of the Jews in Christian Spain: first published in Hebrew, 1945 (from an unpublished German original of 1938); English version, 1961–1966; Spanish version, 1981). B. was born into an assimilated, middle class Jewish family of Halberstadt (southeast of Brunswick, Germany). As a child, he received traditional Jewish education from local rabbis. Later, he was sent to a local gymnasium, where, apart from general education, B. acquired and excelled in his study of Classical and modern languages. Having received a gymnasium diploma, B. pursued his academic studies, first in Berlin, then in Strasbourg, and finally in Freiburg. Besides medieval history, B. also studied classical philology and philosophy: the two disciplines he has always regarded as auxiliary to historical research. While in Berlin, B. studied with Eugen Täubler (1879–1953), an important authority in both classics and Jewish studies. In 1913, B. saw the completion and immediate publication of his doctoral thesis Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im Königreich Aragonien während des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Studies on the History of Jews in the Kingdom of Aragon during the 13th and 14th Centuries), written under the supervision of Heinrich Finke (1855–1938). His research was hindered by the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914, B. was recruited into German artillery forces, and during his service on the Eastern front he came into contact with many eastern European Jews – an experience which strengthened his national awareness, as he himself

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recalled. Shortly after his return to Berlin, B. joined the nascent Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for the Study of Jewry), established in 1920 and directed by Täubler. In 1922, B. published his monograph Die Geschichte der Landjudenschaft des Herzogtums Kleve (History of Rural Jewry in the Duchy of Cleve), a general introduction to the history of the Jews in a northern German duchy, between the 16th and 18th centuries. Afterwards he decided to return to his initial research project, the history of the Jews in Spain. Between February 1925 and February 1926, B. undertook three trips to Spain, studying in various archives and copying numerous documents pertaining to his study. This led to the publication of his first magnum opus (1929–1936; see above). At the same time he wrote copious entries for the German Encyclopaedia Judaica. The publication of the first volume of Die Juden im christlichen Spanien impressed many scholars around the world and led the authorities of thennascent Hebrew University of Jerusalem to offer B. a lectureship position there (1930). In the same year, the History Department was founded where B. joined Richard Koebner and Avigdor (Victor) Tcherikover. The three are rightfully regarded as the founding fathers of Israeli historical science. As a lecturer at Hebrew University, B. experienced a number of difficulties, linguistic and cultural alike. Despite his monotonous lecturing style, however, B. acquired profound admiration from his students, whom he had always approached with respect. B.’s willingness to accept the Jerusalem cathedra and to remain in Palestine reflects his profound belief in Zionist ideals. After two subsequent trips to Germany (summer of 1933 and summer of 1938), where he could witness pronounced anti-Semitic tendencies, B. became convinced that the Jews could avoid the approaching catastrophe only by immigrating to Palestine. The denial of the galut, that is, the notion that the Jews ought to live in exile before the coming of the Messiah, is reflected in his 1936 study Galut (German original, 1936; English version, 1947; Hebrew version, 1980). In this short book, B. traced the history of the concept of the galut, from Hellenism to Moses Mendelssohn, stating in the epilogue that ‘all that we did on foreign soil was a betrayal of our own spirit.’ In the same year, the second volume of Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, covering Castile and inquisition acta appeared. Two years later, B. concluded the writing of his new book, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, which was to be published in German. The German edition, however, has never been published. Instead, B. was persuaded by his friend, Berl Katzenelson, an important Zionist activist, to translate his book into Hebrew. The Hebrew version was published in 1945 after seven years of translation. B. was also one of the founders of and editor-in-chief of the quarterly Zion (1935).

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In 1948, the year of the establishment of the State of Israel, B., now sixty years old, turned, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, to an entirely new field of research: Hellenistic Jewry. Undoubtedly, this reflects his tendency to see the history of the Jews as a single and uninterrupted unit as well as his profound interest in theological and legal sources of medieval Judaism. B. published some dozen articles related to the Jews and Judaism in the Late Antiquity, but not a single monograph on the subject. Although himself aware of the fact that he lacked a sufficient background to study antiquity, he aptly criticized other scholars of Hellenistic Jewry for their tendency to produce, to his mind, somewhat superficial studies, without addressing and solving some essential problems. The only exception, in his view, was Gedalia Alon (1901–1950). He continued studying and publishing long after his retirement. His last article (on harvest reaping during the ’omer period) appeared in press a short time after he died (1980). He was ninety-one years old then. B.’s work and personality earned him profound appreciation among his colleagues, students and wider circles of the Israeli society. In 1958, he received the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies. He is not unjustly regarded as one of the fathers of modern Jewish history scholarship, along with Heinrich (Zvi) Graetz (1817–1891) Simon Dubnov (1860–1941), and Ben-Zion Dinur (Dinaburg) (1884–1972). The images of the four appear on postage stamps issued by the Israel Postal Authority. He is also to be credited with educating and bringing up the first generation of medievalists and scholars of Jewish history, at Hebrew University in particular, and in Israel, in general. The most prominent figure among them was Joshua Prawer. Most of B.’s work, written mostly in Hebrew, concentrated on medieval Spanish Jewry. His History of the Jews in Christian Spain is a monumental study of encyclopedic proportions, covering virtually every aspect of the subject, from demography to philosophy. He strongly stressed the economic, social and cultural contribution of the Jews to the development of Iberian Kingdoms. In the period of the Christian Reconquest, he argued, the Jews played a particularly important part as colonizers and defenders of frontier zones. Unlike in other parts of Europe, the Jews of Spain were also involved in agricultural activities, besides trade and crafts. In an earlier period, the relationship between the Jews and their Gentile neighbors were harmonious. It was the Church, he argued, that played a crucial part in worsening these relationships and provoking anti-Jewish animosity among the Christians. The conditions of the Jews became especially bad in the late 14th century, when both the Church and Crown stood behind the pogroms of 1391. He equally blamed the Church for forced conversions to Christianity, some of which gave birth

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to generations of anti-Jewish converts. They were especially instrumental in theological disputations, the most significant of which was that of Tortosa (1413–14). The culmination of these anti-Jewish tendencies was the Expulsion. B.’s work on the book coincided with the Nazi regime in Germany. Observing the tribulations of his Jewish ex-compatriots he must have drawn certain parallels between what he observed and studied. For him, all chapters of Jewish history were related and organically connected. The state of exile, galut, and the dissemination of the Jews among other nations is an unnatural condition, argued B., since every nation has a strong connection to its native land. Here he reflects classical European nationalism of the 19th century. At the same time, however, B. realized that nationalism can develop into violent forms and hence, he denied any similarity between Zionism and European nationalism. As opposed to the latter, Jewish nationalism is an attempt to return home, to Erets Israel (Land of Israel), to the natural condition. B. was also critical of some other Jewish scholars writing on the history of their people. He especially criticized the apologetic element in their writing. The romantic, national narrative was visible, but never dominant in his writing. The other writing persona of B. was that of a severe, detailed, accurate and non-compromising German scholar. He was much influenced by the philosophy of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and advocated faithful representation of facts and details only, without exposing personal, often biased views. Following the Prussian school of historiography, B. saw history as a single, universal arrangement, predetermined from the onset. He believed that a careful study and faithful representation of facts will lead to the exposure of truth. His edition of the documents pertaining to the Jews of Spain, although not flawless, resembles, in many ways, some contemporary diplomatic editions of Monumenta Historiae Germanica. Apart from his monumental monographs, B. published a large number of articles on various subjects. One such subject was the Expulsion of 1492 (appeared in the periodicals Ahdut ha-’avodah [1932]: 298–307 and Be-sa’ar [1944]: 119–32). Intellectual life of the Spanish Jews was yet another aspect that brought forth a number of studies (Zion [1940]: 1–44; Tarbits [1940]: 188–206; Qiriyath Sefer [1940]: 302–12; Sefer ha-ziqaron le-Asher Gulak (Memorial Volume for Asher Gulak), 1942, 28–49; Tarbits [1958]: 278–89). In addition, he showed a particular interest in two Jewish masterpieces of the Late Middle Ages: Sefer ha-hasidim (The Book of the Pious) of Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (Zion [1938]: 1–50; also in the festschrift Mehqarim baqabalah u-vetoledot ha-datot mugashim le-Gershom Sholem (Studies on the Cabbala and History of Religion for Gershom Scholem, 1968, 47–62) and Sefer shevet

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Yehudah (The Book of the Tribe of Judah) of Rabbi Solomon ibn Virga (Tarbits [1935]: 152–79; also in the preface to an edition of the book: Sefer shevet Yehudah, ed. Azriel Shohat, 1947, 7–16). His later switch to the Hellenistic Jewry brought forth a number of valuable studies, particularly on Jewish eschatology (Zion [1958]: 3–34, and [1959]: 141–65), the historical sources of the halakhah (Luakh ha-arets [1951]: 130–48; Zion [1952]: 1–55 and [1962]: 117–55), on Jerusalem during the days of the Jewish War (Zion [1971]: 127–90) and on the Jewish-Roman-Early Christian relationships (Zion [1956]: 1–49; Scripta Hierosolymitana [1961]: 79–145). B. was preceded by some earlier students of the topic, such as José Amador de los Rios (1818–1878), Fidel Fita (1835–1917), Joaquín Miret y Sans (1858–1919), Antonio Rubio i Lluch (1856–1937), Francisco Bofarull y Sans (1843–1936) and Jean Régné (1883–1954). Unlike his predecessors, however, B. relied on vast documentation, either unknown or unutilized by them, that enabled him to uncover many facts and details regarding the Jews of medieval Spain, their everyday life, social and economic activities, cultural and religious aspects, ambivalent relationships with the Gentile neighbors, ever-growing hostility of the Church, which ultimately led to the violent pogroms of the 14th century and the subsequent expulsion in 1492. B. was the first scholar to treat the history of different Jewish communities of Spain as a single unit, regardless of period and geographic region. His accurate edition of the documents from Spain opened the doors for further studies on Spanish Jewry in particular and medieval Iberia in general. Furthermore, it prepared the ground for some later editions of Jewish documents from the Iberian Peninsula, such as the Navarra Judaica series. Select Bibliography Works: Fritz Baer, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im Königreich Aragonien während des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (1913); Die Geschichte der Landjudenschaft des Herzogtums Kleve (1922); Die Juden im christlichen Spanien; (as Yitzhak Baer) Galut (1947); Yisrael ba-’amim (Israel among Nations) (1955); A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (1961); Mehqarim u-masot be-toledot ’am Yisrael (Studies in the History of the Jewish People) (1985). Literature: Samuel Ettinger, “Yitzhaq Ber zikerono li-verakhah (1888–1980)” (Yitzhak Baer of Blessed Memory, 1888–90), Zion 44 (1979): 9–20; Pinkhas Rosenblitt, “Gishato shel Yitzhaq Ber la-hevrah vela-historiyah,” (Yitzhak Baer’s Approach to the Society and History), Hevrah ve-Historiyah (Society and History), Yehezqel Cohen, ed. (Jerusalem, 1980), 302–315; Samuel Ettinger, “Yitzhaq Ber Zikhrono li-verakhah (Yitzhak Baer of Blessed Memory),” Le-zikhero shel Yitzhaq Ber (In Memoriam Yitzhak Baer), (Jerusalem, 1984), 7–12; Hayim Beinart, “Yitzhaq Ber ve-terumato la-heqer toledot yehadut Sefarad” (Yitzhak Baer and His Contribution to the Study of the History of the Jews of Spain), ibid., 13–23; Yaaqov Katz, “’Al Yitzhaq Ber”

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(On Yitzhak Baer), ibid., 24–28; Joshua Prawer, “Devarim le-zikhero shel Yitzhaq Ber” (Words in Yitzhak Baer’s Memory), ibid. 29–40; Ariel Rein, “Historiyah kelalit vehistoriyah yehudit: ba-meshutaf o be-nifrad?” (History and Jewish History: Together or Separate?), Toledot ha-Universitah ha-’Ivrit bi-Yerushalayim (The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), vol. 1, ed. Saul Katz and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem, 1997), 516–40; Michael M. Myer, “Two Persistent Tensions within Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 24.2 (2004): 105–19; Yitzhak Conforti, “Alternative Voices in Zionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4.1 (2005): 1–12.

Philip Slavin

Barbi, Michele (February 19, 1867, Taviano di Sambuca Pistoiese – September 23, 1941, Florence), major Italian Philologist and Dante Scholar. B. was central to the development of Dante studies in Italy during the first half of the 20th century. More than any other critic of his time, B. defined the norms of modern Italian philology and the methodology of editing texts – the theoretical principles of which he established in The New Philology and the Edition of Our Authors from Dante to Manzoni (La nuova filologia e l’edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante al Manzoni, 1938. He rejected the notion of absolute editorial impartiality in the field of philology, according to the principle of the uniqueness of each text, and insisted that the reconstruction of a text required the critical examination of all available linguistic and historical information. So great was the influence of his method that it came to be known as the “New Philology” (Nuova filologia). The twelfth child of Francesco Barbi and Caterina Borri, B. received his secondary education at the Liceo Forteguerri in Pistoia. He enrolled in the Facoltà di Lettere at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa where in 1889 he received the degree in Italian literature and in 1890 published his doctoral dissertation on Dante’s fortune in the 16th century (Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI), written under the direction of the Italian critic and writer Alessandro D’Ancona. B. taught at the universities of Pisa, Messina, and Florence, but he began his career as a teacher in the ginnasio (middle school) at Terni in October 1889. He occupied the post for a few months, until he won a scholarship to attend advanced courses under the supervision of Pio Rajna at the Istituto di Studi Superiori in Florence. In February 1893, B. was appointed assistant librarian at the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana in Florence and in

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less than a year became librarian. He also served as the director of the Bullettino, the early journal of the Società Dantesca Italiana, from 1893 to 1905, editing the annual bibliography. In 1895 he moved across town to assume the position of curator of manuscripts at the Biblioteca Nazionale, but he left after about a year upon receiving the appointment as professor of the history of Italian literature at the University of Pisa. The proximity of the two Tuscan cities allowed him to teach in Pisa while pursuing his research in the Florentine libraries. B.’s scholarly work is in fact based on textual, codicological, and philological analysis. This productive period for research and publications came to an end in January 1901 when he moved to Sicily, where he had been named professor of Italian literature at the University of Messina. The period in Messina – which lacked the opportunity to consult manuscript and archival materials that B. required – was not his most productive. Some of the projects he began there remained incomplete, such as the volume on literary and cultural movements in 18th- and 19th-century Italian literature. The earthquake that devastated Messina in 1908 contributed to his relative inactivity. The difficulty of conducting research and of directing the Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana from Messina convinced B. to relinquish the direction of the journal (1905). From October 1912 until 1922, B. was assigned by the Italian government to a post in Florence at the Accademia della Crusca, the most ancient Italian academy, whose mission was to preserve the purity of the Italian language. In the following year he was appointed chair of Italian literature at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero in the University of Florence, a post he held from 16 December 1923 until his retirement on 29 October 1937. Although B. was offered the chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna (where he would have followed in the footsteps of his friends Giosué Carducci and Giovanni Pascoli) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (where he would have assumed the chair of his own master, Alessandro D’Ancona), he declined both invitations in order to continue his research in Florence. In retirement B. maintained his scholarly activity until the end of his life. Before his death, he was preparing to complete his work on St. Francis. B. died in his home in Piazza d’Azeglio in Florence on 23 September 1941, at the age of seventy-four. B.’s position between 19th- and 20th-century critical thought secured his place in the development of medieval and philological studies in Italy. B. was not only a meticulous textual critic, but also a defender of a new philology that allowed the subjectivity of the editor some leeway in construing a critical text and fostered the study of the language and the times, arguing that every work requires its own approach, that there is no single orthodox method. B. in fact was alarmed by the problems inherent in the editorial

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principles of Karl Lachmann and his school, and by the dangers of Joseph Bédier’s more conservative method of text editing, focusing on a single manuscript representative of the best tradition (the codex optimus). B. applied his method of systematic recensio and mechanical scrutiny of variants to the critical editions of the Vita Nuova (1907, 1932) and Dante’s lyric poetry (Rime, 1921) which remained fundamental contributions to Dante studies. He was in fact an editor of the major critical editions of Dante’s works (Le Opere di Dante, 1921, 2nd ed. 1960), sponsored by the Società Dantesca Italiana, which was founded in 1888 in Florence by the Accademia della Crusca. The first of B.’s major contributions to Dante scholarship was the 1907 critical edition of the Vita Nuova that differed only slightly from his 1932 revised edition. In the process of recension leading to the establishment of the text, B. evaluated virtually all of the manuscripts to determine their value as witnesses to the tradition. B. insisted upon imposing artificial chapters on the text of the Vita Nuova in order to standardize a system of reference for its sections. His numbering of the Vita Nuova carries such a considerable weight for the reader that it became shorthand for referring to some locus of Dante’s libello. B.’s explanation of his method should have been heeded by later critics who, treating his numbering as Dante’s, have fashioned a host of “numerologically oriented” misinterpretations of the Vita Nuova. B. worked for most of his life on the edition and commentary on Dante’s Rime. One of the most salient characteristics of B.’s 1921 edition is its insistence upon making the results of its scientific research manifest. The contribution of B.’s new philology established an authoritative reading which resolved ambiguity on the interpretative controversies on ordering Dante’s lyric poems. B.’s edition of the Rime for the Società Dantesca Italiana forms the textual nucleus of the posthumous edition with commentary published by the two students he chose to complete his work, Francesco Maggini and Vincenzo Pernicone. B.’s broad critical interests are reflected in his 1934 collection of early essays, Problemi di critica dantesca: Prima serie (1893–1918). His most accessible work was his magisterial study of Dante’s life and works for the Enciclopedia italiana (1931, later appearing in book form). B.’s introduction was the fruit of years of archival research on the poet, his time and his later reception and reviews the textual situation and editorial history of the works and suggests future research projects. Although most of B.’s work was on Dante, he made contributions towards the textual criticism of other medieval authors as well, such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Franco Sacchetti. In addition to his work on medieval literature, B. published on Italian writing of later periods, such as the Pistoian poet Francesco Bracciolini (1566–1645), and he planned and directed the National Edition of the complete works of

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Ugo Foscolo and Alessandro Manzoni. B. also promoted the study of popular and folk culture collecting materials and writings concerning songs and popular poetry in the central regions of Italy. B.’s method always emphasized the importance of determining meaning on the basis of the close study of the text, within its literary and cultural context. His investigations illuminated the historical and linguistic context of medieval Italian literature and established the textual basis for the works of Dante and other authors. Active from his early university days in the study of the life, works, and influence of Dante Alighieri, B. was named secretary of the Società Dantesca Italiana in 1894 and vice-president in 1936. He was elected as a corresponding member of the R. Deputazione di Storia Patria per la Toscana e l’Umbria on 2 April 1902 and became, on 14 December 1922, a socio ordinario (permanent member). He was a fellow or member of the Accademia Peloritana in Messina (1905), the Regium Collegium Lucense (1912), the Accademia delle Scienze in Turin (1918), the Accademia degli Arcadi (1925), the Società Pistoiese di Storia Patria (1927), and the Accademia delle Scienze in Bologna (1928). He was named a corresponding fellow of the distinguished Accademia della Crusca in 1909 and became a fellow in 1928, the same year he was selected for membership in the Accademia dei Lincei. He also took on political charges: he was elected senator of the Kingdom of the Italy on 20 October 1939, and participated in the “Commissione dell’educazione nazionale e della cultura popolare” from 1940 until his death. B. was awarded the Premio Gautieri by the Academy of Science in Turin (a prize he shared with Francesco Torraca, 1908), the Premio Reale per la Filologia (Royal Prize for Philology) by the Accademia dei Lincei (1914), the Salvatore Besso Prize by the Casa di Dante in Rome (1921), the Mussolini Prize by the Accademia d’Italia for achievement in linguistics and philology (1935), and the Gold Medal for distinguished achievement in Italian education (1941). Upon his retirement from the university a prize in his honor was established for excellence in Dante studies, the Premio Michele Barbi per gli Studi Danteschi, even though B. confided that he would have preferred the prize to bear Dante’s name, not his own. Although B. never married, he had a large and devoted family of students and colleagues who worked with him. He studied with two of the most important Italian scholars of the 19th century, Alessandro D’Ancona and Pio Rajna. Among the colleagues, students and collaborators whose scholarship he influenced were distinguished Italian scholars, such as Mario Casella, Fausto Ghisalberti, Francesco Maggini, Ernesto Giacomo Parodi, Giorgio Pasquali, Vincenzo Pernicone, Aurelio Roncaglia, Vittorio Rossi, Luigi Russo, Alfredo Schiaffini, and Giuseppe Vandelli. His

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nephew Silvio Adrasto Barbi was himself a commentator on the works of Dante, and he edited a bibliography of B.’s contributions in his Commemorazione di Michele B. B. collected funds for the benefit of Italian soldiers in World War I and he distributed the monetary benefits of the Mussolini Prize (1935) to younger scholars who were to carry on the editorial projects he had begun. In order to encourage philological research, B. left his books and papers to the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, including his collection of materials concerning popular and folks poetry and songs. Select Bibliography Works: “Della pretesa incredulità di Dante,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 13 (1889): 37–69; Della fortuna di Dante nel sècolo XVI (1890); “Bibliografia dantesca dell’anno 1889,” Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana (March 1890): 37–67; (September 1890): 43–99; (December 1890): 27–90; “Gli studi danteschi e il loro avvenire in Italia,” Giornale dantesco 1 (1893): 1–19; Notizia della vita e delle opere di Francesco Bracciolini (1897); ed., La Vita nuova: edizione critica, by Dante Alighieri (1907; 2nd rev. ed. 1932); “Per la storia della poesia popolare in Italia,” Studi letterari e linguistici dedicati a Pio Rajna (1911), 87–117; Studi sul Canzoniere di Dante, con nuove indagini sulle raccolte manoscritte e a stampa di antiche rime italiane (1915); ed. with E. G. Parodi, F. Pellegrini, E. Pistelli, P. Rajna, E. Rostagno, G. Vandelli, con indice di Mario Casella, Le opere di Dante. Testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana (1921; 2nd ed. 1960); “Dante Alighieri,” Enciclopedia Italiana, vol. 12, 1931, 327–47, printed separately as Dante: vita opere e fortuna, con due saggi su Francesca e Farinata, 1933; trans. as Michele B.’s Life of Dante by Paul G. Ruggiers, 1954; “Prefazione” and “Introduzione,” Il Convivio, by Dante Alighieri, ed. Giovanni Busnelli and Giuseppe Vandelli, vii-lxviii; Opere di Dante, Nuova edizione, 2 vols. (1934); Problemi di critica dantesca: prima serie (1893–1918) (1934); La nuova filologia e l’edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante al Manzoni (1938); Problemi di critica dantesca: seconda serie (1920–1937) (1941); ed. with Fausto Ghisalberti, I promessi sposi e Storia della colonna infame, by Alessandro Manzoni (1942); Problemi fondamentali per un commento della Divina Commedia, ed. Mario Casella (1955); ed. with Francesco Maggini, Rime della ‘Vita nuova’ e della giovinezza, by Dante Alighieri, Opere di Dante, vol. 2 (1956); ed. with Vincenzo Pernicone, Rime della maturità e dell’esilio, by Dante Alighieri, Opere di Dante, vol. 3 (1969). Literature: Richard Lansing, “Barbi, Michele, The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 83–84; Christopher Kleinhenz, “Michele Barbi (1867–1941),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 325–38; John R. Woodhouse, “Vincenzio Borghini, Michele Barbi e la nuova filologia,” Atti: Società Dantesca Italiana, Firenze: La Società Dantesca Italiana 1888–1988. Convegno internazionale (Firenze 24–26 novembre 1988), ed. Rudy Abardo (Milan: Ricciardi, 1995), 191–206; Cesare Segre and Gian Battista Speroni, “Filologia testuale e letteratura italiana del Medioevo,” Romance Philology 45 (1991): 44–72; Maurizio Ferrari, “Michele Barbi e il suo tempo,” Farestoria 1–2 (1988): 19–30; Vittore Branca, “Barbi, Michele (1867–1941): Barbi e la nuova filologia italiana,” id., Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 1 (Turin: Unione Tipografica-Editrice

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Torinese, 1974), 199–207; Pier Giorgio Ricci, “Michele Barbi,” Letteratura italiana: i critici. Per la storia della filologia e della critica moderna in Italia, ed. Gianni Grana (Milan: Marzorati, 1969), vol. 1, 675, 690; Francesco Mazzoni, “Michele Barbi,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 6, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1964), 190–93; Aldo Vallone, “L’edizione critica delle opere di Dante” and “La scuola italiana di filologia testuale ed il Barbi,” La critica dantesca contemporanea (Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1953), 143–55, 156–63; Paolo Toschi, “Michele Barbi, maestro di studi di poesia popolare,” Lares 12 (1941): 323–29, rpt. ‘Fabri’ del folklore: ritratti e ricordi, ed. Paolo Toschi(Rome: Signorelli, 1958), 98–103; Giuseppe De Robertis, “Un maestro,” id., Studi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1944), 169–177; Silvio Adrasto Barbi, “Bibliografia degli scritti di Michele Barbi,” Commemorazione di Michele Barbi, ed. id. (Florence: Sansoni, 1943), 37–70; Giorgio Pasquali, “Commemorazione di Michele Barbi,” Rendiconti dell’Accademia d’Italia. Classe di scienze morali e storiche, serie 7, vol. 4 (1942), 67–83, rpt. in Stravaganze quarte e supreme (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1951), 209–29; Luigi Russo, “Michele Barbi,” Annali Manzoniani 3 (1942): 5–30, originally published as “Discorso commemorative;” Silvio Adrasto Barbi, Commemorazione, ibid., 11–36. H. D. Austin, “Michele Barbi” (1867–1941),” Italica 18 (1941): 177–78; Giulio Bertoni, “Michele Barbi,” Giornale della letteratura italiana 118 (1941): 215–16; Luigi Pietrobono, “Michele Barbi,” Giornale dantesco 42 (1941): 169–71; Natalino Sapegno, “Michele Barbi,” Studi medievali 14 (1941): 186–91.

Beatrice Arduini

Bédier, Joseph (January 28, 1864, Paris – August 29, 1938, Grand-Serre), French Literary Historian. The figure of B. clearly dominates medieval French literary studies in the first half of the 20th century. Trained under Gaston Paris, the founding father of the discipline in France, B.’s critical acumen and his intellectual independence often led him to elaborate bold new theories that forced scholars to thoroughly reevaluate previously held positions, and that often decisively reoriented research in the field. Much of his most innovative work revolves around a radical critique of the notion of origins: B. minimized the importance of primitive Celtic elements in the Tristan legend, rejected the theories that attributed oriental origins to the fabliaux and popular, oral origins to the epic, and blasted editorial methods that attempted to reconstruct the author’s original text. Abandoning the comparative and folkloric approaches of his predecessors, B. emphasized the artistic unity of literary works as well as the importance of the individual poets who created them and the society for which they were produced. Because of this shift from the historical per-

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spective of his predecessors to a more literary one, B. is often credited with having laid the foundation for modern scholarship on medieval French literature. Born Charles Marie Joseph Bédier, the young B. spent his childhood on the French island of La Réunion, before moving to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then the École normale supérieure. It was at this time that his interest in romance philology brought him into contact with Gaston Paris, whose public classes he attended and from whom he also received private lessons. After obtaining his agrégation (1886) and briefly pursuing his studies under Herman Suchier at the University of Halle (1887–1888), B. began his academic career as full professor of French literary history at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1889. He taught there for two years, then returned to France, where he had been appointed maître de conférence at the University of Caen. Following the successful defense of his doctoral dissertation on the fabliaux and secondary thesis in Latin on the poet Colin Muset at the Sorbonne in 1893 (jury: G. Paris, L. Petit de Julleville, F. Brunot, S. Lévy), he took up a professorship at the École normale, where he would continue to teach authors from all periods of French literature for the next ten years. It was only in 1903, when B. was elected to the chair of medieval French language and literature at the Collège de France (thus succeeding his mentor, G. Paris), that he strictly confined himself to the medieval period. During his long tenure there (1903–1936), B.’s courses largely centered on the chanson de geste, lyric poetry, and problems of editing medieval texts. In addition to his teaching and research, B. also wrote a series of anti-German pamphlets for French military information services during World War I, traveled widely delivering lectures and promoting the study of French abroad, and served as director of the Collège de France (1929). Over the course of his long and distinguished career, B.’s work was recognized by many institutions: he was member of the Académie française (inducted in 1921), president of the Fondation Singer Polignac (1932–38) and of the Alliance française (1934–37), officer of the Légion d’honneur (1912; Grand Officier, 1932; Grand Croix, 1937), fellow of the academies of Copenhagen (1913), Dublin (1918), Bucharest (1919), Marseille (1922), Christiana (1922), Rome (1924), and Boston (1929), corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1927), member of the American Philosophical Society (1937), and doctor honoris causa of Harvard (1909), Groningen (1914), Louvain (1927), and Oxford (1929). Though B.’s research touched on a wide variety of texts and subjects, his most important contributions to scholarship bear on the fabliaux, the Tristan legend, Old French epic poetry, and textual editing. In all these fields,

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B. developed original views that he exposed with persuasive clarity and force. This is evident from the start: his doctoral dissertation, published the year of its defense (Les fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge, 1893; 2nd ed. 1895), opens with a lengthy examination of contemporary theories on the origins of the fabliaux and a critique of their methods – in particular the theory of Oriental origins advocated by G. Paris. Maintaining that the genre needed to be understood as an artistic product of medieval French society, B. went on to examine their literary merits, ‘comic spirit,’ and place in medieval literature and concluded that they were created by the bourgeois class, for the bourgeois class (Les fabliaux, 371). The study won almost unanimous acclaim and secured B.’s reputation as a major figure in French Medieval Studies. His authority continued to increase with his work on the Tristan legend. Starting from Thomas’s Old French romance, B. went on to compare the various European versions in an attempt to reconstruct the lost common ancestor of the fragmentary French texts. This led not only to important scholarly publications – the imposing edition and study of Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas (2 vols., 1902–1905), and editions of Les deux poèmes de la Folie Tristan (1907) – but also to the appearance of Le roman de Tristan et Iseut renouvelé (1900), his elegant modern French rendition of the primitive legend, which became an immediate popular success and has never gone out of print. In 1908, B. published the first volume of his monumental Légendes épiques (4 vols., 1908–1913; 3rd ed. 1926–1929). Like his thesis on the fabliaux and his later reflections on textual editing, his work on the chansons de geste represents a critique and rejection of previous theories based on a complete review of the evidence and a fundamental mistrust of attempts to hypothesize distant origins and originals. Opposing the ‘traditionalist’ theory of the rise of French epic poetry, according to which the extant texts were based on anonymous, popular creations that were transmitted orally for centuries, he contended that they were original works composed by individual poets no earlier than the late eleventh century; he further maintained that the songs were composed along the pilgrimage routes to Compostela by poets who worked from learned Latin sources in collaboration with churchmen. The Légendes épiques, which B. always considered his greatest achievement, were preceded and often accompanied by preparatory publications. At the same time, B. was also elaborating his radical critique of contemporary editorial practices. Early in his career, B. had adopted the ‘Lachmannian’ editing principles introduced into the romance field by G. Paris; however, his own experience and his combined reflection on the manuscript traditions of the Chanson de Roland and the Lai de l’ombre led him to condemn

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as illusory attempts to reconstruct the medieval author’s original text. Clearly expressed in his 1912 article on the Chanson de Roland (“De l’autorité du manuscrit d’Oxford pour l’établissement du text de la Chanson de Roland,” R 41 [1912]: 331–45), this view was argued at length and put into practice for the first time in his groundbreaking second edition of the Lai de l’ombre (1913), brilliantly illustrated in his edition (1921) and commentary (1927) of the Chanson de Roland, then forcefully defended against objections in his famous 1928 article: “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre: Réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes” (R 54 [1928]: 161–96 and 321–56; cf. also his lengthy “De l’édition princeps …”). B.’s rejection of Karl Lachmann’s method rested mainly on two arguments: first, that stemmata drawn by editors of Old French texts were almost invariably two-branch stemmata, which meant that texts could not be mechanically reconstructed (by the agreement of two or more branches against another); and, secondly, that various factors made the establishment of a single, indisputable stemma nearly impossible (difficulty of identifying common errors and of determining relationships between manuscript families; possible multiple authorial redactions). In such circumstances, the editor who established his critical text by combining lessons from diverse manuscripts simply created a new version of the medieval work without any guarantee of approximating the author’s lost original. In order to avoid such questionable manipulation of historical documents, B. argued that it was the editor’s duty to reproduce the text of the best manuscript and to abandon its lessons only in cases of absolute necessity. Though such an editorial stance was not revolutionary in and of itself, B.’s critique of Lachmann’s method was the first serious attack on prevalent practices and would send a shock wave through editorial circles. In his final active years, B. spent much time reassessing and reinforcing the bold positions he had taken in earlier works. Shortly before his death, he had turned his attention to Marie de France and was working on a critical edition of her work. Through the originality of his theses, and the force and elegance with which he exposed and defended them, most of B.’s ideas won immediate and widespread acceptance in scholarly circles. While not all are accepted today, he remains one of the great scholars in the field and has had a lasting impact on the discipline. His early work on the fabliau is perhaps most important for its rejection of the folkloric approach and its plea for a synchronic literary and social appreciation of the genre. Subsequent research has followed his lead and shown the fecundity of this approach (e. g., Philippe Ménard, Les fabliaux, 1983; R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, 1986; Norris Lacy, Read-

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ing Fabliaux, 1993). His severe judgment of the genre’s value, however, has been overturned, and his principle thesis that the fabliaux were of bourgeois origin – based on a facile equation of literary tastes with social class – has been revised: unquestioned for a long time, it was first challenged by Per Nykrog (Les fabliaux, 1957), who argued to the contrary that it was an aristocratic genre; three years later, Jean Rychner offered a much more nuanced vision by showing that the texts could be, and in fact were adapted to different audiences and tastes (Contribution à l’étude des fabliaux, 1960). Although his critical texts of the Tristan legends have lost ground to more recent editions, his work on the transmission of the legend in his monumental edition of Thomas’s romance laid the groundwork for modern research and remains valuable. His hypothesis that all known versions go back to a single version, written by a “great poet” (ed., II, 168–319), has been abandoned in favor of a more fluid conception of early legends (in part., Alberto Varvaro, “La teoria dell’archetipo tristaniano,” R 88 [1967]: 13–58), but his analysis of the relationships between texts and his distinction between the common and courtly versions, which have since been nuanced and corrected, have formed an important part of our understanding of the tradition (e. g., Jean Frappier, “Structure et sens du Tristan: Version commune, version courtoise,” Ccm 6 [1963]: 255–80 and 441–54; see also, Tony Hunt, “The Significance of Thomas’s Tristan,” RMS 7 [1981]: 41–61). B. is most remembered, however, for his work on the chansons de geste and his reflections on textual editing, as well as the animated debates they sparked. The ideas he defended in the Légendes épiques were quickly adopted and dominated the field for nearly half a century. As early as the 1920s, however, the French historian Ferdinand Lot seriously questioned the solidity of B.’s. theses: his work showed, in particular, that while the sanctuaries along pilgrimage routes may be important, they could not be considered the origin of the genre (art. in Romania 1926–1928; repr. as Études sur les légendes épiques françaises, 1970). In the 1950s, B.’s exaltation of the individual poet and his rejection of the oral tradition met with strong opposition. Particularly important are Jean Rychner’s La chanson de geste. Essai sur l’art épique des jongleurs (1955), which offered penetrating analyses of the style and composition of extant texts and argued that minstrels actually created or recreated the traditional epics orally, and Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s La Chanson de Roland y el neotradicionalismo (1959), which squarely countered B.’s individualist arguments with a cogent and influential reaffirmation of the traditionalist position. The heated debate over the origins has since subsided – or shifted focus to the question of oral vs. written – and most critical views are now largely based on Menéndez Pidal’s neotraditionalism. Although B.’s

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major theses have been abandoned, his Légendes épiques remain valuable for their analyses of individual texts. His contribution to textual criticism is perhaps his most profound and enduring legacy. The critique of the stemmatic method in his 1913 edition of the Lai de l’ombre prompted a reaction from the French biblical scholar Dom Henri Quentin (Essais de critique textuelle, 1926), but B.’s rebuttal and his renewed call for best-manuscript editions in his 1928 article have had a lasting impact on the editing of Old French texts. Shortly thereafter, B.’s editorial method was adopted by the majority of editors and in 1939 Eugène Vinaver further refined it by establishing a typology of purely mechanical scribal errors intended to offer objective grounds for correcting (“Principles of Textual Emendation,” Studies in French Language and Mediaeval Literature presented to Mildred K. Pope, 351–69). While acceptance of B.’s conservative editing principles has been widespread, it has not been unanimous: rather than abandoning the Lachmannian method, Italian scholars thoroughly reevaluated and sought to refine it (beginning with the seminal works of Giorgio Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo [1934] and Michele Barbi, La nuova filologia [1938]); opposition in other countries has been less systematic, but growing dissatisfaction with excessively conservative editorial practices has provoked some strong reactions (e. g., J. Rychner, “La critique textuelle de la branche III (Martin) du Roman de Renart et l’édition des textes littéraires français du Moyen Age,” BIRHT 15 [1967–68]: 121–36; T. B. W. Reid, “Chrétien de Troyes and the Scribe Guiot,” MAevum 45 [1976]: 1–19). For opponents, the major flaw in B.’s method is that it gives undue preference to the text of one scribe (the copyist of the base MS) over that of the author. The acrimony of the debate has waned in recent years as editors have taken more flexible and varied approaches to editing, but B.’s best-manuscript method, which largely dominated in Old French textual criticism of the 20th century, is still favored by some critics. Select Bibliography Works: “La mort de Tristan et d’Iseut d’après le manuscrit fr. 103 de la Bibliothèque Nationale comparé au poème allemand d’Eilhart d’Oberg,” R 15 (1886): 481–510; “La composition de la chanson de Fierabras,” R 17 (1888): 22–51; “Les commencemens du théâtre comique en France,” RDM, 3rd ser., 99 (1890): 869–97; “Le fabliau de Richeut,” Études romanes dédiées à Gaston Paris (1891), 23–31; “Les Lais de Marie de France,” RDM, 3rd ser., 107 (1891): 835–63; “Fragment d’un ancien mystère,” R 24 (1895): 86–94; “Les fêtes de mai et les commencemens de la poésie lyrique au Moyen Age,” RDM, 4th ser., 135 (1896): 146–72; “Specimen d’un essai de reconstruction conjecturale du Tristan de Thomas,” Festgabe für Hermann Suchier (1900), 75–114; Études critiques (1903); “Sur deux chansons de croisade,” R 35 (1906): 379–93; “De la formation des chansons de geste,” R 41 (1912): 5–31; “L’art et le métier dans la Chanson de Roland,” RDM, 6th ser., 13 (1913):

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292–321; “Les assonances en -é et en -ié dans la Chanson de Roland,” R 47 (1921): 465–80; “L’esprit de nos plus anciens romans de chevalerie,” Revue de France 1 (1921): 88–108; (with Paul Hazard, ed.) Histoire de la littérature française illustrée, 2 vols. (Paris: Larousse, 1923–1924); “Remarques sur vingt passages difficiles de la Chanson de Roland,” Mélanges Ferdinand Lot (Paris: Champion, 1925), 25–40; La Chanson de Roland commentée (1927); “De quelques-unes des assonances réputées fautives de la Chanson de Roland,” Mélanges Antoine Thomas (1927), 15–24; “Les chansons du Comte de Bretagne,” Mélanges Alfred Jeanroy (Paris: Droz, 1928), 477–95; “La poésie en France aux jours de la Première Croisade,” RDM, 8th ser., 36 (1936): 809–22; “De l’édition princeps de la Chanson de Roland aux éditions les plus récentes: Nouvelles remarques sur l’art d’établir les anciens textes,” R 63 (1937): 433–69 and 64 (1938): 145–244, 489–521. Editions: Le lai de l’ombre by Jean Renart (Fribourg: L’œuvre de Saint-Paul, 1890; 2nd ed. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1913); De Nicolao Museto (gallice Colin Muset) franco gallico carminum scriptore (Paris: Bouillon, 1893); Colin Muset, Chansons (Paris: Champion, 2nd ed. 1912; 3rd ed. 1938); (with J. L. Weston) “Tristan ménestrel: Extrait de la continuation de Perceval par Gerbert,” R 35 (1906): 497–530; (with P. Aubry) Les chansons de croisade (Paris: Champion, 1909); La chanson de Roland (Paris: Piazza, 1921; 6th ed. 1937); La châtelaine de Vergy, conte du XIIIe siècle (1927). Literature: Alain Corbellari, Joseph Bédier. Écrivain et philologue (Geneva: Droz, 1997); Joan Tasker Grimbert, “In Bédier’s Shadow: French Prose Retellings of the Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1937–1985),” Tristania 18 (1998): 77–91; William Kibler, “Joseph Bédier (1864–1938),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998), 253–66; Philippe Ménard, “Les méthodes de Gaston Paris et de Joseph Bédier,” L’histoire littéraire à l’aube du XXIe siècle: Controverses et consensus, ed. Luc Fraisse (Paris: PUF, 2005), 98–110.

Craig Baker

Benecke, George Friedrich (June 10, 1762, Mönchsroth bei Dinkelsbühl, Bavaria – August 21, 1844, Göttingen), German Medievalist. B.’s name is intimately connected with the beginning of studies on German language and literature at universities. It was he who founded academic teaching and research in Middle High German literature. He is supposed to have been the first scholar who taught Old and Middle High German grammar and semantics, the study of meaning. He was recognized as a major figure with his editions of Middle High German Literature and appendices

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of relevant vocabulary (Editionen mit Wörterbüchern). What distinguished B.’s work from all previous editions was the accuracy with which he dealt with the texts. He regarded texts as linguistic monuments (Sprachdenkmal), and his editorial method was based on the disciplines of classical philology. His credo was “daß für das gründliche Studium unserer alten vaterländischen Literatur nichts erspriesslicher seyn kann, als wenn wir uns die genaue critische Sorgfalt zum Muster nehmen, die man mit so vielem Scharfsinn und unermüdet fortgesetztem Fleisse auf die Schriften der Griechen und Römer verwandt hat. Je sorgfältiger der Acker bestellt wird, desto erfreulicher wird die Ernte seyn.” His literary remains were a fundamental contribution to the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch which Wilhelm Müller and Friedrich Zarncke published between 1854 and 1861. It has still not been superseded. B. attended grammar school at Nördlingen and Augsburg and moved to Göttingen in 1780. There he studied theology and attended lectures on classical literature held by Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812). Following his family’s wishes, he returned to Mönchsroth in 1784 to take the job of a country parson. But he returned very soon to Göttingen and lived there for five years as an independent scholar. He earned his livelihood by giving German and English lessons and by translations from English into German. In 1789, on Christian Gottlob Heyne’s recommendation, he gained a permanent position at the university library, today known as the Göttingen State and University Library. He held a number of different positions there: secretary, curator, junior librarian and, from 1836, senior librarian. In 1829, he helped Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) get positions at the Göttingen State and University Library which they held until 1837, when seven professors (“Die Göttinger Sieben”) were fired after a formal protest against a constitutional violation by Ernst August, King of Hannover. In 1805, B. was nominated extraordinary professor of German philology and in 1813 full professor at the Faculty of Humanities (Philosophische Fakultät) at the University of Göttingen. At the same time, he began to lecture on Middle High German literature. The series of lectures, Anleitung zur Kenntniß der ältern Deutschen Literatur, und zum Verständnisse der besonders aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter übrigen Gedichte, he held from 1806 until 1843 was a novelty. He was a pioneer and brought out many works on linguistics, folklore and medieval studies. His most important student was Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). Besides his job at the Göttingen University and Library, he was responsible for reviews in the “Old German” section of the journal Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen. Thus he had great influence and control over the publishing

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activities of the first generation of German literary scholars, e. g., he reviewed the publications of the Grimms very positively. These reviews also put him in contact with the philologist Moriz Haupt (1808–1874), a student of Karl Lachmann, who thanked him in 1839 for announcing his edition of Hartmann von Aue’s Erec. B. founded the discourse on Old and Middle High German Literature. From 1807 he kept up intensive correspondence with Jacob Grimm (1785– 1863) and (less actively) with Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859). Matters under discussion were methods of editing old texts, principles of etymology, historical grammar and lexicography. Their exchange took the form of the socalled “Adversarien” (1819–26), an exchange of letters, in which B. noted his questions on the left hand side of the page and Jacob Grimm replied on the right hand side. B.’s first scholarly work, an edition of medieval lyrics (Beyträge zur Kenntnis der Altdeutschen Sprache und Litteratur Teil 1 and 2, 1810, 1832) was published for beginners, but although this was for scholars starting in the field, he offered – in contrast to his predecessors – a high level of transparency in textual criticism. The edition of Der edelstein getihtet von Bonerius, aus Handschriften berichtigt und mit einem Wörterbuch versehen came out in Berlin 1816 with the appropriate dictionary as appendix. Although he indicated in the title that he had prepared the text from handwritten works, in fact he had access to only four handwritten texts from Wolfenbüttel (preface p. ix f). With the edition of Wigalois von Wirnt von Gravenberch, in 1819, B. established the scientific discourse on medieval literature. Taking note of all transmitted manuscripts, he chose the oldest manuscript as the guiding text (“Leithandschrift”), in the belief it was the most authentic. In the preface he described the manuscripts and established that the two main codices belonged to the same family. All of this work was done without any proper works of reference. Following strict philological principles, he recognized shifts in meaning as the biggest problem in hermeneutics. Having recognized the need for an explication of many words which had undergone such a shift in meaning, he annexed to the medieval text a dictionary, dealing with vocabulary which still existed in modern German. B.’s “Wörterbuch zum Wigalois” (Wigalois – Dictionary, 1819) was a pioneering achievement in Middle High German lexicography. It is a selective dictionary of continuing validity. In 1827, in cooperation with Karl Lachmann, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein was edited. The preparation of the medieval text was Lachmann’s job and most of the explanatory commentary was written by B.; six years later the Iwein dictionary came out. The rigidly scientific character of Lachmann’s method became apparent for the first time. Both applied strict rules of tex-

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tual criticism and phonetic and metrical principles of Middle High German in a manner which marked a distinct advance in that branch of investigation. B.’s three selective dictionaries (the Wigalois, Boner, and Iwein dictionaries) were the basis of the later Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, edited between 1854 and 1866 by Wilhelm Müller and Friedrich Zarncke. Müller and Zarncke followed B.’s etymological principle of word families: the radical (strong verb) defines the word order. The verbs were put in the 1st person singular. Only such a principle is appropriate to the “being and the dignity of an original language” (B., Wigalois, preface, lxxx). B. is a figure of considerable importance in the history of German philology (see Rudolf von Raumer, Geschichte der germanischen Philologie, 1870, 455squ.). During his lifetime he received significant honors. In 1807, the University of Göttingen conferred a doctorate on B. At almost the same time he was elected as honorary member of the “Frankfurtischer GelehrtenVerein für teutsche Sprache.” He was also a member of the “Berliner Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache” and from 1830 member of the “Königliche Societät der Wissenschaften in Göttingen” and the “Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in München.” In 1820, he was appointed “Hofrat,” and in 1842 he was given the “Guelphenorden 4. Klasse.” On the occasion of B.’s 80th birthday, Jacob Grimm wrote the festschrift Frau Aventiure klopft an Beneckes Thür. Already for his contemporaries, his work, with that of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Karl Lachmann, marked the beginning of Middle High German textual criticism. In Karl Lachmann’s opinion, B. was the first philologist whose real achievement was the preparation of medieval texts with textual criticism. His predecessors and contemporaries were amateur collectors and dilettantes. Up to that point Middle High German texts were only collected and disseminated without critical scholarship. Reviewing the Wigalois edition, Lachmann bemoaned B.’s principle of using the oldest manuscript and not reconstructing by Emendatio the best text (Wolfram preface p. i). For Rüdiger Krohn (“‘… dass Alles Allen verständlich sey …’. Die Altgermanistik des 19. Jahrhunderts und ihre Wege in die Öffentlichkeit,” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 264–333), and Birgit Wägenbaur (“Ein vergessener Gründervater,” 2003, 348) B.’s work was pivotal in the proper scholarly approach to these texts. Both respected his desire to provide editions for educated readers rather than for patriotic antiquarians. Wilhelm Scherer assessed B.’s achievements in lexicography thus: “almost all of his lexical analysis can be said to be the definitive version” (ADB 2 [1875]: 324).

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The edition of Hartmann’s Iwein is still in constant use. It was welcomed euphorically by Karl Schmeller, ed. “Bayerisches Wörterbuch” (1827–37), at that time assistant professor (Privatdozent) in Munich, who praised the application of the critical method developed in Classical and Biblical Studies to medieval texts (Bluhm, 1997, 188). Select Bibliography: Reviews: in “Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen,” 1794–1843. Editions: Beyträge zur Kenntnis der Altdeutschen Sprache und Litteratur Teil 1 und 2 (1810, 1832); Der edelstein getihtet von Bonerius, aus Handschriften berichtigt und mit einem Wörterbuch versehen” (1816); Wigalois von Wirnt von Gravenberch (1819); Iwein, der Riter mit dem Lewen, getihtet von dem Hern Hartman Dienstman ze Ouwe. Herausgegeben von G. F. Benecke und K. Lachmann (1827). Dictionaries: Wörterbuch zu Hartmanns Iwein von G. F. Benecke (Göttingen: Dieterich: 1833). Literature: Magdalene Lutz-Hensel, “Prinzipien der ersten textkritischen Editionen mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung,” Philologische Studien und Quellen 77 (Berlin: Schmidt, 1975); Lothar Bluhm, “Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie,” Spolia Berolinensia 11 (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1997), 182–214; Lothar Bluhm, “Georg Friedrich Benecke,” IGL, vol. 1 (2003), 131–33; Birgit Wägenbaur, “Ein vergessener Gründervater: Georg Friedrich Benecke und die Anfänge der Germanistik,” IGL, vol. 1 (2003), 335–56; Birgit Wägenbaur, “Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762–1844),” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Portraits, ed. Christoph König, Hans-Harald Müller, and Werner Röcke (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000), 1–10; Yoshihiro Yokoyama, “Beneckes Wörterbuch zum Wigalois und die Lexikographie des Mittelhochdeutschen,” ZfdPh 117 (1998): 1, 55–74; Wilhelm Scherer, “Georg Friedrich Benecke.” ADB, vol. 2 (1875), 322–24; Andreas Michael Schaffry, “An der Schwelle zur Wissenschaft” (Munich: Iudicium 1995), 169–74.

Gertrud Blaschitz

Besseler, Heinrich (April 2, 1900, Dortmund-Hörde – July 25, 1969, Leipzig), German Musicologist. Together with Friedrich Ludwig, B. was one of most important early music scholars of the first half of the 20th century. His significant contributions to our knowledge of medieval and Renaissance music include studies on the

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early motet (13th–14th century), and 15th-century Burgundian polyphony, in particular the rise and use of fauxbourdon and the life and works of Guillaume Dufay. B. relied on a varied spectrum of historical and ‘systematic’ methodologies, the latter partly influenced by his philosophy teacher and friend, Martin Heidegger. B. studied natural sciences, mathematics, and philosophy (with Heidegger) in Bonn and Freiburg im Breisgau, where he took part in Wilibald Gurlitt’s Collegium musicum from 1920. After interrupting his studies in Freiburg to study in Vienna with Guido Adler, Wilhelm Fischer, and Hans Gál, B. returned to Freiburg to write his dissertation on the Stilgeschichte der deutschen Suite im 17. Jahrhundert in 1923. In 1922 and 1924, he was actively involved in performing medieval music in Karlsruhe and Hamburg (“Musik des Mittelalters in der Hamburger Kunsthalle,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7 [1924–1925]: 42–54; “Erläuterungen zu einer Vorführung ausgewählter Denkmäler der Musik des späten Mittelalters,” Wilibald Gurlitt, ed., Bericht über die Freiburger Orgeltagung 1926, 141–54). Subsequently, he studied with Friedrich Ludwig in Göttingen; he completed his habilitation, Die Motettenkomposition von Petrus de Cruce bis Philipp von Vitry (published as “Studien zur Musik des Mittelalters,” AfMw 7–8 [1925–1926]: 167–252, 131–258) in Freiburg in 1925. At the age of 28, B. became professor in Heidelberg. A few years later, B.’s monumental study Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance [MA&R] (Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, vol. 2, 1931) established his international reputation. From 1935–1939, B. was secretary of the Reichs-Denkmäler-Unternehmen at the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, where he was responsible for series such as Das Erbe Deutscher Musik, and journals such as Archiv für Musikforschung and Deutsche Musikkultur. After WW II, B. resumed his academic career as professor of musicology in Jena (1950–1956) and Leipzig (1956–1965). He also became the general editor of the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae (CMM), and of the journal Archiv für Musikwissenschaft. He was elected a member of the Instituto Español de Musicología, the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis and the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and received awards such as the Nationalpreis der DDR (1960), and an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Chicago (1967). B.’s Schriftbild der mehrstimmigen Musik [Musikgeschichte in Bildern [MiB], vol.III/5, 1973) and the revised edition of his Bourdon und Fauxbourdon (1974) were published posthumously by Peter Gülke. B.’s edition of the songbook of Hartmann Schedel still awaits publication (Das Liederbuch des Dr. Hartmann Schedel, ed. Peter Gülke [from B.’s notes]. Das Erbe Deutscher Musik, 74–75; Abteilung Mittelalter, 12 [forthcoming]).

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However large and varied B.’s output, a number of themes persist throughout his work. L. Lütteken has remarked that B. tended to stress the continuity of (music) history, which he claimed to be interrupted only by the ‘correcting’ initiatives of individuals such as Philippe de Vitry, Johannes Ciconia, and Dufay (“Das Musikwerk im Spannungsfeld von ‘Ausdruck’ und ‘Erleben’: Heinrich Besselers musikhistoriographischer Ansatz,” Musikwissenschaft – eine verspätete Disziplin?, ed. Anselm Gerhard, 2000, 213–32). In his habilitation, B. demonstrated this continuity in French motet composition, from the Notre Dame epoch up to de Vitry. De Vitry was singled out as the creator of the isorhythmic Ars nova motet, which became, according to B., a genre of ‘individual,’ singular compositions, not reduceable to their social or liturgical contexts. This promoted de Vitry to a representative of the Early Renaissance, and his music to the first instance of an autonomous musical art. B. was one of the first to emphasize the importance of Ciconia (early 15th century), and, in contrast to received wisdom, to reduce that of Matteo da Perugia (“Hat Matheus de Perusio Epoche gemacht?” MF 8 [1955]: 19–23). B. saw Ciconia as the composer who introduced free imitation in the motet, and replaced the chant cantus firmus in the tenor voice with a free melody ‘carrying the harmony’ (Harmonieträger), which contributed to the evolution toward ‘tonal’ harmony. If B. was prompted to term the period ca. 1400–1430 as the Epoche Ciconia, it was because these developments led to a new model of unity and homogeneity in polyphonic music, which was relatively widely disseminated in Ciconia’s works (“Johannes Ciconia, Begründer der Chorpolyphonie,” Atti Congresso Internazionale Musica Sacra Roma 1950, 1952, 280–83). Another key figure of the 15th century, Dufay, became almost ubiquitous in B.’s early music research. Working with archival documents, epigraphy, and stylistic analysis, B. strove to establish a more precise chronology and identification of Dufay’s works (“Neue Dokumente zum Leben und Schaffen Dufays,” AfMw 9 [1952]: 159–76), and he showed that important changes toward ‘tonal’ harmony (Bourdonharmonik) took place in Dufay’s writing style between 1430–1440; after 1440, contrapuntal writing would prevail (“Dufay in Rom,” AfMw 15 [1958]: 1–19). An important element in the evolution toward ‘euphonic counterpoint’ was the fauxbourdon technique, created by Dufay, according to B., and thus brought about by a deliberate act rather than by a gradually evolving polyphonic improvisational practice (“Dufay Schöpfer des Fauxbourdons,” Acta Musicologica [AcM] 20 [1948]: 26–45). B. identified the communion Vos qui secuti estis me of Dufay’s Missa Sancti Iacobi as the first occurrence of fauxbourdon, both as a technique and as a canonic indication. Henceforth, B. considered fauxbourdon as a res facta, and concluded that the term implies the absence of a harmonic foun-

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dation and thus designates the unwritten countertenor part. In contrast to English discant, an improvisational practice with the plainchant cantus firmus in the lowest voice, the continental fauxbourdon has the chant melody in the upper voice. Dufay’s music prompted B. to an editorial innovation as well: from 1922, B. used barlines between, rather than on, the staves (Mensurstriche) to indicate the different metrical properties of polyphony (“Grundsätzliches zur Übertragung von Mensuralmusik,” Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 25 [1962]: 31–38). To counterbalance his emphasis on individuals, B. also discussed the sociological stratifications of (early) music. Already in MA&R, B. discussed the music from the 12th century onwards in terms of the social classes to which they pertained, supported by classifications such as that of Johannes de Grocheo (musica vulgaris and composita) (“Zur ‘Ars musicae’ des Johannes de Grocheo,” MF 2 [1949]: 229–31). While the conductus was the new genre of the clergy and the songs of troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesänger belonged to the nobility, civic circles increasingly cultivated the monophonic song (Meistersänger), the motet, the rondellus, and instrumental music. The social use of music was often substantiated by music iconography, both in its historical and symbolic aspects. B. played a crucial part in establishing musical iconography as a separate discipline, which led to his co-editorship of the series MiB, in which European and world music of all periods are depicted (with Marius Schneider & Werner Bachmann, 8 v., 1962–69). Iconography furnished data on the participation of musical instruments in (civic) musicmaking as well. Contrary to the majority of recent research, B. held that instrumental participation was a common practice in many periods and genres of early music. Even though he criticized François-Auguste Gevaert (MA&R, 34) for connecting antiphonal psalmody with citharody, B. still held that pieces such as tropes or sequences might have been performed with instrumental accompaniment on the cithara (MA&R, 61–2). B. attributed a prominent role to the trombone in the performance and development of 15th-century polyphony (“Die Entstehung der Posaune,” AcM 22 [1950]: 8–35). In his comments on the social context of Italian Trecento music, B. remarked that “dieser Luxuskunst einer kleinen Oberschicht fehlte jedoch das Entscheidende, die Begründung und Rechtfertigung durch eine Idee” (MA&R, 163). As this quote suggests, B. promoted a conceptual approach to music (history), which is reflected in numerous neologisms (Stimm- and Klangstrom, Singstil, Isoperiodik, Tenorlied). His evaluations of the aesthetics and social uses of (early) music were influenced by Heidegger and tended to stress the ‘Lebensverbundenheit der Kunst’ (Gülke). Most influential was B.’s distinction between Umgangs- and Darbietungsmusik, with the former (later

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termed Gesellschaftsmusik) designating the use of music in a social context where a distinction between or separation of performers and listeners is absent or weak, the latter referring to the concert setting in which the audience has a merely passive role (“Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” Jahrbuch Peters 32 [1925]: 35–52; “Umgangsmusik und Darbietungsmusik im 16. Jh.,” AfMw 16 [1959]: 21–43). Importantly, B. applied this distinction both to contemporary circumstances and to historical trends and the corresponding modes of listening. B. often stressed that most polyphony was intended as Umgangsmusik, as dienende Kunst in the service of liturgy. From the early Middle Ages on, the church was not only the religious Daseinsmitte of music; according to B., it was equally a center of Stilwillen that gave decisive impulses to new stylistic developments. Innovative trends also came from outside the church: B. described the introduction of modal rhythm, a major change in European music history, in terms of the “Austausch mit lebensverbundener volkstümlicher Spielmannsmusik,” being convinced of the relationship between modal rhythm and folk-like dance and instrumental music. B. also attempted to explain phenomena such as polyphony beyond their historical development and techniques; thus he felt that an Erklärung of Renaissance polyphony should also take into consideration its symbolic character, reminding the faithful of the transcendency of Revelation. Surpassing the level of mere bibliography, B. took into account the reception of medieval and Renaissance music history by previous generations. In MA&R (1–24), B. was one of the first to discuss the reception history of ‘early music’ in the 19th century, from the restoration of plainchant to the ‘medieval’ aspects of compositions by Liszt and Wagner. B. completed the Machaut edition started by Friedrich Ludwig (Messe, Hoquetus und Lais. Musikalische Werke, 4; 1943) and unmasked the treatise De cantu fractabili as a text by Hugo Riemann, though it had been acknowledged as an authentic 14th-century text by scholars such as René Leibowitz and Johannes Wolf (“Ugolino de Maltero Thuringi ‘De cantu fractabili’: Ein scherzhafter Traktat von Hugo Riemann,” AcM 41 [1969]: 107–08). Aside from music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, B. had always maintained a fairly large chronological spectrum in his work, which reached to the classical era and Schubert. After WWII, B. increasingly directed his attention to slightly earlier periods and to J. S. Bach in particular. In 1961, B. was offered a Festschrift for his 60th birthday by scholars and former students; about half of the articles dealt with aspects of medieval and Renaissance music (Festschrift Heinrich Besseler, ed. Eberhard Klemm). B. was recognized as one of the most important and influential musicologists of the 20th century, especially for his contribution to historical musicology;

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a number of his neologisms have become standard terminology. Present musicology has benefited from further reflection on B.’s contribution to musical aesthetics and systematic musicology, but it is mainly his editorial work, the six-volume Dufay edition in particular (Opera omnia, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, I/1–6) (1951–66), that continues to serve as a point of reference for scholars. A revised edition of the sixth volume was published by David Fallows in 1995. In the last decade, B.’s work has been read as representative of pre-war musicology (Lawrence Bernstein, “Ockeghem the Mystic: a German Interpretation of the 1920s,” Johannes Ockeghem, Actes du Xle Colloque international d’études humanistes, Tours, 3–8 février 1997, ed. Philippe Vendrix, 1998, 811–41; Rob C. Wegman, “‘Das musikalische Hören’ in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Perspectives from Pre-War Germany,” Musical Quarterly 82 [1998]: 434–54), and as an exemplification of Heideggerian influence (Lütteken). Furthermore, B.’s role in the musical life of the Third Reich has been the subject of closer investigation (Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich, 1998; Thomas Schipperges, Die Akte Heinrich Besseler: Musikwissenschaft und Wissenschaftspolitik in Deutschland 1924–1949, 2005). Select Bibliography (Partial publication list in Klemm 1961; complete list in Peter Gülke and Zofia Lissa, “Heinrich Besseler,” Jahrbuch der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, 1969–70, 1972, 57–58, 337–43.) Articles: Selected articles in Heinrich Besseler. Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. Peter Gülke (1978); “The Manuscript Bologna Bibliotheca Universitaria 2216,” Musica Disciplina 6 (1952): 39–65; “Das Neue in der Musik des 15. Jahrhunderts,” AcM 26 (1954): 75–85; “Das Renaissanceproblem in der Musik,” AfMw 23 (1966): 1–10. Editions: Altniederländische Motetten von Johannes Ockeghem, Loyset Compère und Josquin des Prez (1929, 2nd ed. 1942, 3rd ed. 1956); Das Chorwerk, v. 4, 10, 19 (1930–32); Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, 8 v. (1932–39); Musik und Bild. Festschrift Max Seiffert zum 70. Geburtstag (1938); Capella: Meisterwerke mittelalterlicher Musik, v. 1–2 (1950–51). Literature: Heinz-Otto Korth, “Der Fauxbourdon in seinem musikgeschichtlichen Umfeld,” Guillaume Dufay, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Text und Kritik, 1988), 74–96.

Pieter Mannaerts

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Bezzola, Reto Raduolf (September 13, 1898, Schlarigna, Switzerland – January 7, 1983, Samedan), Swiss Literary Historian. The festschrift presented to B. on his 80th birthday lists 169 works by him, ranging from book reviews, to newspaper articles, to his monumental, multivolume study Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200) (1944, 1960, 1963). This immense body of work subdivides into three general subject areas: Rhaeto-Romanic language, literature, and culture; Italian literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; and Medieval French literature. B.’s contribution to each field was significant to say the least, but his influence is felt most strongly in Medieval French studies, to which he devoted the most work (though not the greatest number of actual publications). His most important studies within this field are Les origines, the first study to examine the evolution of courtly literature in such depth and breadth, and Le sens de l’aventure et de l’amour (Chrétien de Troyes) (1947), a study of symbolism in the work of Chrétien de Troyes that anticipated the widespread movement to apply medieval hermeneutics to romance. B. was born to a merchant in the canton of Grisons, to which he would show a profound attachment for the rest of his life, as his considerable bibliography on Rhaeto-Romanic culture and his annual months-long stays there attest. His gymnasium study of classics was followed by university studies in Geneva, Zurich, Florence, and Paris. At Zurich he studied Romance philology with Louis Gauchat and Jakob Jud, who directed his dissertation on gallicisms in Medieval Italian. He received his Ph.D. in 1922 from the University of Zurich, and published his thesis as Abbozzo di una storia dei gallicismi italiani nei primi secoli (750–1300) two years later. He was named Privatdozent at Zurich in 1929, extraordinary professor in 1938, and ordinary professor in 1945, occupying a chair in “Geschichte der französischen, besonders älteren, italienischen und rätoromanischen Literatur” until his retirement. B. was an active figure within the university, within Swiss society more broadly, and within the international medievalist community. His teaching, like his research, covered a vast array of subjects within the orbis romanus from antiquity to the 20th century, and he directed close to fifty dissertations. From 1950 to 1952, he was dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. Outside the university, his social and cultural engagement was evident in the numerous articles he wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Romansh newspapers Fögl d’Engiadina and Fögl Ladin. It is significant that his first and one of his last publications were both written in Rhaeto-Romanic, with many others in be-

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tween. These pieces, along with articles in French, German, Italian, and English on Rhaeto-Romanic, attest to his lifelong advocacy for Romansh language and culture. For twenty-one years he chaired the “Commission Cantonale de Maturité” (responsible for university admissions), and throughout his career he was a member of or delegate to numerous other bodies, including the “Commission Suisse pour la Télévision,” the “Commission Suisse pour l’Unesco,” the “Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique,” and the “Union Académique Internationale.” B. even helped give rise to an enduring international institution within medieval studies, for his work was the direct inspiration for the creation of the International Courtly Literature Society in 1973. He and Peter Dronke were the invited speakers at the Society’s first triennial congress in 1974, and the Society’s international scope is a direct embodiment of B.’s own vision of courtly literature as an essentially panEuropean phenomenon. After retiring from Zurich in 1968, B. remained a prolific and active scholar, attending conferences, writing articles and reviews, and publishing the third volume of Litteratura dals Rumantschs e Ladins (1979). The festschrift published for him in 1978 contains one of the most eclectic gatherings ever produced for such a volume, and is a testament to the exceptional range of B.’s interests and to the number of admirers he had within the medievalist community. The work which B. is best known for is Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200), published in three phases in 1944, 1960, and 1963. As its title and publication history suggest, this is one of the most ambitious works of medievalism ever undertaken, with many arguments pursued simultaneously. Though no summary can convey its plenitude or subtlety, its analyses conform to a straightforward dialectical structure: Roman traditions combined with indigenous cultures to produce the particularized “national” cultures of the Middle Ages; ascetic mysticism combined with poeticized sensuality to launch the troubadors; clerical learning combined with warrior values to produce courtly literature. Moreover, for B., all of these phenomena are different facets of a larger civilizational development – the rise of the individual who is both “penseur et homme d’action,” the “héros du roman courtois” who in later centuries becomes the “cortegiano de la Renaissance italienne, l’‘honnête homme’ du XVIIe siècle français, le gentleman des temps modernes” (xx). In other words, B.’s project is no less than a cultural history of the Western male self. Three aspects of B.’s study stand out. The first is the ecumenical literary corpus that he gathers. To show where the “courtly literature” that first appears in the late 11th and early 12th century comes from, he begins with an

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examination of a vast array of texts produced for Western European courts starting in late antiquity, not all of which could be considered literary. This approach leads to striking juxtapositions that give a rich sense of cultural dialogue, as when, in discussing Charlemagne’s court, B. moves from poetry on friendship, to Alcuin, to occasional verse. B.’s willingness to consider courtly textual production in toto both respected and defied traditional generic categories, and illuminated the hybrid traditions from which romance sprang and whose characteristics it retained. The second striking aspect of Les origines is an intellectual and disciplinary inclusiveness that mirrors that of the textual corpus. B. integrates discussions of devotional practice, political ideology, education, philosophy, gender roles, intellectual debates, monasticism, translation, nationalism, and the crusades into his analysis of courtly writing culture. That the relationship between these phenomena and courtly literature is taken for granted today is due in no small part to B.’s study. Finally, Les origines stands out in the way that it defines courtly literature as a pan-, and even extra-, European patrimony. As B. sees it, the political fragmentation of the Roman Empire could not efface the cultural traces the empire left across Europe through the Church, which transmitted them into the courts; while medieval imperialism and the crusades subsequently carried Western court culture to Sicily and the Levant. As a result, though each court might have its own local or national literary practices, a common cultural fund – combined with contact among elites – meant that influences were easily transportable. The enduring legacy of B.’s capacious approach is evident in the ever growing body of comparative studies of courtly literature and culture, not to mention the International Courtly Literature Society, with its branches and correspondents in fifteen countries on five continents. B.’s other major contribution to the study of medieval French literature, Le sens de l’aventure et de l’amour (Chrétien de Troyes), contrasts Chrétien’s use of symbols, which B. defines as objects or gestures that are more mysterious invitations to interpretation than clearly defined signs, with the rigid semiosis of allegory, which can have only one meaning. For B., Chrétien’s oeuvre marks a high point of medieval literature and anticipates Dante (a discussion of whom takes up the book’s first chapter), while the allegorical impulse of the 13th century is an unfortunate – and for poetry, a contradictory – lapse into logic. As in Les origines, B. moves between detailed textual analysis and larger considerations of medieval interpretative practice. He understands symbolism as crucial to Chrétien’s underlying project, which is to recount the social initiation of his knightly protagonists through a progression leading from exile to social integration. Symbols like the blood in the snow in Perceval place the reader in a position akin to that of the hero, imbuing the narrative with

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mystery and pointing to a hidden meaning to be decoded. In emphasizing the progressive nature of adventure, and in applying medieval hermeneutics to the interpretation of Chrétien’s romances, B. again anticipated approaches that would become habitual for later scholars. The critical response to each volume of Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200) was overwhelmingly positive, though the project’s gigantic scope meant that the normal tendency of reviewers to comment on their own areas of interest and expertise, and ignore other key points, was considerably amplified. There is unanimous praise for the first volume’s textual “inventory [which] alone is enough to establish this book as a useful work of erudition” (Sidney Painter, Modern Language Notes, Nov. 1946, 491), an opinion repeated for the later two volumes. In general, reviewers were also impressed by B.’s analysis of his corpus which, in the words of one (writing of volume II), is “always impressive, frequently provocative, and, in one section at least, brilliant” (Norman B. Spector, Modern Philology, May 1963, 281). Inevitably for a study of this size, there were also many criticisms large and small. Reviewers objected to B.’s inadequate treatment of Anglo-Saxon England; to his inclusion of liturgical poetry among courtly texts; to his neglect of English and American scholarship; to the amount of space devoted to social and political history; to his tendency to overgeneralize and make value judgments; and to the importance that he gave to the cult of the Virgin as an impetus to courtly love. Le sens de l’aventure et de l’amour (Chrétien de Troyes), which in many ways is a more subjective and even idiosyncratic work, received a more mixed reception. Reviewers appreciated the originality of B.’s readings, which one reviewer characterized as “brilliant, if to me unsound” (William A. Nitze, Speculum, April 1948, 291), and another as fresh and persuasive, though it “does not quite avoid every pitfall” (Theodore Silverstein, Modern Philology, August 1948, 63). The qualifications stemmed from the feeling that the book was not scholarly enough, but too much like an extended explication de texte; that B. did not take enough account of Chrétien’s Celtic sources; and that he misapplied 12th-century exegetical models. B.’s impact on future research can be seen, for instance, in Joachim Bumke’s repeated reference to him in his own Die Blutstrophen im Schnee (2001).

Select Bibliography: Works (A complete bibliography can be found in Orbis Mediaevalis: Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Reto Raduolf Bezzola à l’occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire, ed. Georges Güntert, Marc-René Jung, Kurt Ringger, 1978, 9–21): Abbozzo di una storia dei gallicismi italiani nei primi secoli (750–1300): Saggio storico-linguistico

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(1924); Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200). 1ère Partie: La tradition impériale de la fin de l’Antiquité au XIe siècle (1944); Le sens de l’aventure et de l’amour (Chrétien de Troyes) (1947); Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200). 2ème Partie: La société féodale et la transformation de la littérature de Cour (1960); Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200). 3ème Partie: La société courtoise: littérature de cour et littérature courtoise (1963). Literature: C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210, 1985; Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (Munich: DTV, 1986); Portraits de médiévistes suisses (1850–2000), ed. Ursula Bähler and Richard Trachsler (Geneva: Droz, forthcoming).

Mark Cruse

Billanovich, Giuseppe (August 6, 1913, Cittadella, Padua – February 2, 2000, Padua), Italian Medievalist. B. was a philologist and paleographer of medieval and early humanist texts, primarily working on Petrarch and the classical tradition in 14th-century Italy. His philological analysis was never presented outside a larger cultural or interpretative context. His first studies dealt with the history of Italian literature between the 12th and 16th century. He soon began to follow the traditions of Petrarch’s works and of those works that Petrarch owned and studied. His study of Petrarch led him to larger explorations into the history of medieval and humanist culture and education. He was especially interested in the tradition and reception of classical and patristic texts during this period. One of his earliest editions remains one his most important: the Rerum memorandarum libri of Francis Petrarch, the critical edition of which he published in 1945 for the Italian national edition of Petrarch’s works. His studies on the libraries of Petrarch and Boccaccio (Restauri Boccacceschi, 1947, and Petrarca letterato, 1947) continue to represent the most complete research on the subject, more than fifty years after their composition. His radical reconsideration of Petrarch’s autobiographic self-presentation as a fiction left to posterity has become the foundation for all study of the poet’s career and works. In addition, his study of the role of Livy in the medieval origins of Humanism and on the manuscript tradition of Livy and other Roman authors is the foundation for research on the cultural, historical, and literary background of Italian Humanists.

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B. was born in Cittadella in the Italian province of Padua. He completed his laurea in letters at the University of Padua in 1934 and in 1937 his diploma at that university’s Scuola di perfezionamento storico-filologico. In 1935, he became a teacher of Italian and Latin literature at the liceo classico, first in Bassano del Grappa, then in Padua. In 1938, he left his teaching position in order to dedicate himself to the edizione nazionale of Petrarch’s works. From 1940 to 1943 he served in the military on the Russian front, and in 1944 completed his doctorate (libera docenza) in Italian literature. From 1946 to 1948, he was Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples. During the period 1948–50 he lived in London as a Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute, which he left in order to become a tenured professor of Italian literature at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland). From 1954, he was Professor of Medieval and Humanistic Philology at the Catholic University of Milan, where he remained for the rest of his career. At various times during his career he collaborated closely with American medievalist Ernest H. Wilkins on essays regarding Petrarch’s reception. In 1965 he received the Premio Feltrinelli per la Filologia from the Accademia dei Lincei, of which he was a socio corrispondente. He was recognized during his lifetime by the Warburg Institute, the Medieval Academy of America, and numerous Italian academic societies for his contribution to research. He was co-director of the annual review “Italia Medioevale e Umanistica” and of the series “Medioevo e Umanesimo” and “Thesaurus Mundi,” for which he founded the Paduan publishing house Antenore. In 1984 the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento published a volume of essays in his honor (1984), and in 2004, the same institute published a two-volume anthology collecting his most important essays (2004). B.’s first study, Petrarca letterato (1947), illustrates Petrarch’s reading habits and the roots of his philological enterprise to restore the classical tradition. He recognized Petrarch’s pioneering role in the creation of modern philology and was one of the first to suggest that Petrarch presented his life in an overtly fictional manner. He applied this awareness to interpreting Petrarch’s philology and history of the classical tradition, arriving at a more complete critical understanding of the artist and man than ever before. B. was one of the forefathers of the new philology in Italy, which sought to incorporate philological analysis of a text with the history of a text’s tradition. He was a paleographer who rooted his analysis of a manuscript in the cultural and personal origin of the material document. The study of the cultural and literary heritage “rediscovered” and collected by Petrarch occupied much of his career, from his first volume to one of his last collections of revised essays, Petrarca e il primo umanesimo (1996). These studies, mostly philological essays

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on Petrarch, other humanists of his time, and on the manuscript tradition inherited by them have been and still are the foundation for the understanding of Italian Humanism’s roots in the Middle Ages and of the nature of its cultural inheritance from antiquity. Although B.’s edition of the Rerum memorandum is the only major critical edition he published during his lifetime, he spent much of his career publishing substantial philological or paleographical essays, which are normally followed by unpublished letters or fragments, such as “Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy” (Itinera, 1–101). These studies and the methodology employed in them are B.’s academic legacy. In addition, B’s study of early Humanism led him more and more to the study of the Latin manuscripts of the later Middle Ages. His studies on Livy and the manuscript tradition of the Ab urbe condita, such as “Dal Livio di Raterio (Laur. 63, 19) al Livio del Petrarca (B.M., Harl. 2493)” (Itinera, 103–75) or “Il Livio di Pomposa” (Itinera, 177–99), are still as relevant as they were when they were written. There is very little research dedicated to B. as of the end of the 20th century. His recent passing has given rise to the republication in two volumes of many of his essays on early humanism and especially on the manuscript tradition of Livy in the late medieval period (2004). Given his importance and the honors bestowed on him during his lifetime (such as the volume Vestigia, 1984) he will no doubt soon be studied alongside the best in the tradition of Italian philologists. Select Bibliography Works: Petrarca letterato. I. Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (1947); Gli inizi della fortuna di Francesco Petrarca (1947); Prime ricerche dantesche (1947); Restauri boccacceschi (1947); Tra don Teofilo Folengo e Merlin Cocaio (1948); I primi umanisti e le tradizioni dei classici latini (1953); Petrarca e Padova (1976); La tradizione del testo di Livio e le origini dell’umanesimo. 2 vols. (1981); Petrarca e il primo umanesimo (1996); Dal medioevo all’umanesimo: la riscoperta dei classici, ed. Paolo Pellegrini (2001); Maestri Italiani a Friburgo: da Arcari a Contini e dopo (1998); Itinera: Vicende di libri e testi, 2 vols., ed. Mariarosa Cortesi (2004). Editions: Francesco Petrarca, Rerum memorandum libri. Edizione critica (1945); Pomposia monasterium modo in Italia primum (1994). Literature: Rino Avesani et al., ed., Vestitgia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984); Mariarosa Cortesi, “Vitalità di una ricerca,” Itinera: Vicende di libri e di testi, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), xi–xvi; Francisco Rico, “Giuseppe Billanovich,” AEM 9 (1974/1979): 641–56; “Giuseppe Billanovich,” BBAL (Roma: Accademica nazionale dei lincei, 1976), 741–43.

David Lummus

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Bischoff, Bernhard (December 20, 1906, Altendorf, Thuringia, Germany – September 17, 1991, Munich), German Paleographer. B. was one of the most outstanding characters of the 20th century to wrest paleography from the shadowy role of a prerequisite for philology to a modern historical science. Together with his predecessors on the Munich chair for Medieval Latin, he formed what became known as the “Munich school” of paleography (1988). There is only sparse information on the biography of B., who, according to the commemoration of his friends and students, was very secretive about himself and felt uncomfortable being in the spotlight. He was born as the son of a local governmental tenant in Altendorf (district of Altenburg, Thuringia), attended high school (Gymnasium) in Züllichau and took up studies in several fields of interest at Munich in 1925. When he was still a student, he already published smaller editions and studies, then graduated with his Dr.phil. in 1933 (Literarisches und künstlerisches Leben in St. Emmeram [Regensburg] während des frühen und hohen Mittelalters; only partly printed) under the auspices of Paul Lehmann, beside whom particularly Rudolf von Heckel had great impact on B.’s characteristic approach of emphatic analysis. From 1933 on, B. more than “assisted” Elias A. Lowe († 1969) in the compilation of the Codices latini antiquiores (12 vols.), which records all preserved Latin manuscripts prior to the year 800. It was at that time, during his extensive travel through European archives and libraries, that he began collecting material for his later Katalog der festländischen Handschriften. Lowe then became professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, where B. was appointed to a professorship in 1960 as well, but rejected this offer. Before that, he had already rejected a call to Frankfurt a. M. in 1951. Instead, after a cumulative state doctorate (Habilitation) on Carolingian Latinity in 1943, B. spent his time as an academic teacher in Munich, where he started lecturing in the summer of 1947 and followed the retiring Lehmann on the chair for Medieval Latin in 1953. In the very same year he was elected to the editorial department of the “Monumenta Germaniae Historica” and was appointed member of the “Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.” Among various other decorations, B. received four honorary doctorates (Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge, Milan), the “Pour la mérite” and the “Bundesverdienstkreuz,” and was corresponding member of a good dozen of academies and societies. After his retirement in 1974, B. remained active in both research and extensive correspondence. He died in 1991 in consequence of a traffic accident. His

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scholarly bequest, including his extensive photographic collection, is available to research at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich). B.’s bibliography counts more than 250 titles, covering the wide timespan between the 4th and the 16th century and a thematic range between the history of medieval education, liturgical questions, and Latin poetry (e. g., vol. 3 of Hilka-Schumann’s standard edition of the Carmina Burana, 1970; facsimile of the Benediktbeuren ms., 1967). His Anecdota Novissima (1984) and his collective essays (Mittelalterliche Studien, 3 vols., 1967–1981), which compile the most important of his numerous contributions in journals and collective volumes, all thoroughly revised by the author, bear impressive witness of B.’s wide-spread fields of studies. Some of those minor works, for instance, “Die Entstehung des St. Gallener Klosterplanes in paläographischer Sicht” (1962, in: Mittelalterliche Studien, vol. 1, 1967, 41–49), in which he not only located its origin in the abbey Reichenau, but also drew connection to the prominent Reichenau librarian and teacher Reginbert, became turning-points for research on their respective matter. The short contribution on the Walahfrid-autographs, “Eine Sammelhandschrift Walahfrid Strabos” (Cod. Sangall. 878), had a similarly fundamental impact (1950, in: Mittelalterliche Studien, vol. 2, 34–51). The most well-known of his works still is the handbook Paläographie des römischen Altertums (1979). Its tripartite composition (Palaeography – History of Scripture – Scripture in Cultural History) mirrors the distinct approach of the “Munich School,” which already his predecessors Traube and Lehmann had established. When B. died in 1991, his lifetime project, the Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts, had only partly been finished. Proof-prints were already set for vol. 1, listing ca. 2000 mss. between Aachen and Limbach, while B. left only the manuscript for vol. 2 (Laon-Paris, ca. 2350 mss.) and unsorted notes for vol. 3 (Paris-Zwettl). A late example of B.’s analytic talent can be found in his much valued Südostdeutsche Schreibschulen und Bibliotheken in der Karolingerzeit (2 vols., 1940/80). However, his subcutaneous contribution to the knowledge of medieval manuscripts can hardly be overestimated. That becomes not only visible in the case of the Codices latini antiquiores, where B.’s name does not appear on any of the title pages, or several Poetae-editions of the MGH, but is especially true for the innumerable insights others owed to his generous information on thousands of requests. B.’s works still are respected as those of one of the most prolific and reliable characters in medieval paleography, having profited from his enormous, seemingly photographic memory for the most subtle paleographic details, and his pronounced sense for accuracy. His Paläographie, translated multiple times (French 1985; English 1990; Italian 1992), remains the most

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prominent handbook on the subject and has now, three decades after its first publication, lost only little of its timeless value. The last observation is true for many of B.’s other works as well, which still are held to be essential in their respective fields. The process of the posthumous edition of his Katalog is observed with interest by many scholars of various medieval disciplines. There is no flowery pathos in the words of Hugo Kuhn, when on the occasion of B.’s 70th birthday he called him “the paleographer” of his times. Select Bibliography Works: Die südostdeutschen Schreibschulen und Bibliotheken in der Karolingerzeit, 2 vols. (1940, 1980); “Paläographie (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Kulturgebietes),” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, ed. Wolfgang Stammler (1951), col. 379–452; Paläographie des römischen Altertums (1979, 3rd ed. 2004); Mittelalterliche Studien, 3 vols. (1966–81); Anecdota Novissima. Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (1984); Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen), part 1 (1998). – Cumulative Bibliography (ca. 250 titles!): Sigrid Krämer, Bibliographie Bernhard Bischoff und Verzeichnis aller von ihm herangezogenen Handschriften (1998) Literature: Johanna Autenrieth, “Die Münchener Schule. Ludwig Traube, Paul Lehmann, Bernhard Bischoff,” Un secolo di paleografia e diplomatica (1887–1986), ed. Armando Petrucci and Alessandro Pratesi (Rome: Gela ed., 1988), 99–130; Bernhard Bischoff (1906–1911) (Munich: MGH, 1992); (necrologies): Orden pour le mérite für Wissenschaft und Künste. Reden und Gedenkworte 23 (1993): 159–61; HJb 112 (1992): 296–301; MlatJb 26 (1991): 1–4; DA 48 (1992): 411–413; Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1992): 224–29.

Hiram Kümper

Bloch, Marc (Léopold Benjamin) (July 6, 1886, Lyon – June 16, 1944, Saint-Didier-de-Formans), French Medieval Historian. B. wrote seminal, innovative works on French medieval and Ancien Régime history and historiography and co-founded a highly influential movement, the Annales School. Decorated for valor in World War I, then fearless chief organizer and pamphleteer for the French Resistance during World War II, B. exemplifies the heroic warrior-scholar. Descended on both sides from assimilated, successful Alsatian Jews, B. was the son of an eminent ancient historian at Lyon, then the Sorbonne,

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enabling B. to enjoy the benefits of a Parisian childhood during the Third Republic, France’s modern golden age of cultural prestige. Jewish intellectuals like B. were further reassured by the final, just outcome of the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1904) that had divided the country and almost destroyed an innocent, dedicated Jewish officer because of anti-Semitism and corruption in the French government and army. Yet these same problems would recur to haunt B. in later life. Pursuing the most elite academic track, B. took his baccalauréat from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and his agrégation in history at the École Normale Supérieure (1908) where he studied under Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois, both of whom were seeking a historical method mid-way between those of the Romantics and the “scientific” historians, while also interweaving social, economic and cultural aspects, as advocated by another teacher, the sociologist Émile Durkheim. Another mentor, though not an historian, Henri Berr, unified and fostered this method in his new journal, the Revue de synthèse historique. A few months’ additional study at Berlin and Leipzig further broadened B.’s training. By the age of 28, he had studied several languages and their literatures, the physical sciences, philosophy, religion and law, along with the social sciences – all designed to enable B. to hone his method in searching for the truth via as many types of primary sources as possible. When at this point World War I erupted, B. fought in some of the fiercest battles: the Marne, Argonne Forest and Somme, plus the Algerian desert; surviving typhoid to return to help liberate Alsace from the Germans (1918). Thus returned to French control, the University of Strasbourg appointed B. to his first teaching post. During his 17 years at Strasbourg, B. flourished amidst the university’s outstanding library, its distinct curriculum emphasizing the above-described “spirit of synthesis,” and supported by high-caliber colleagues like Christian Pfister and Lucien Febvre– as well as by his own genius. Through his teaching, research, and publications, B. became reputed as one of the most esteemed medievalists of the continent. In 1919, he married Simonne Vidal (1894–1944), with whom he would have six children. She would also function indispensably as his secretary and proofreader throughout his career. To secure his professorship at Strasbourg, in 1920 Bloch obtained his Sorbonne doctorate in history at top speed – facilitated by certain dispensations allowed by his war-veteran status – by defending the requisite two theses: his principal one, Rois et serfs: un chapitre d’histoire capétienne, and his complementary thesis, “Les formes de la rupture de l’hommage dans l’ancien droit féodal,” based on his similarlytitled article of 1912. With Febvre, B. founded the groundbreaking journal, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, in 1929. In that same year his lectures at the University of Oslo would later form the basis for another important

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book, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931). B.’s list of respected publications grew so that he was offered the chair of economic history at the Sorbonne (1936), which recompensed his being refused a place at the Collège de France for political (including anti-Semitism) and economic reasons four years earlier. Unfortunately, the Second World War broke out but three years later. B. donned a uniform once again, only to see his country fall to the Germans (1940), despite his valor and that of others, because of the French leadership’s underestimation of the enemy and failure to understand history – as he deplored in Étrange défaite, published posthumously in 1946. Despite the Occupation, B’s ambivalence about leaving France and difficulties in obtaining visas for his family caused him to miss his chance to obtain sanctuary via a post offered by the New School for Social Research in New York. His eminence spared him the Vichy government’s anti-Jewish statute, thereby enabling him, though under surveillance, to continue teaching at the University of Strasbourg-in-exile at Clermont-Ferrand and at the University of Montpellier. Yet he did suffer removal as a “non-Aryan” from the editorship of Annales, while the Nazis pilfered his library and papers back in Paris. Joining the French underground in Lyon to help liberate France, B. died by firing squad in 1944, uttering “Vive la France!” B.’s research, although unorthodox, easily found prestigious publishers in France during his lifetime and even more so afterward, in several languages. In general, he knew how to shine without alienating colleagues, which attests both to his personality and to the enlightened atmosphere of Strasbourg and Paris between two atrocious wars. His first book, L’Île-deFrance (les pays autour de Paris) (1913), an essay on that area’s human geography laced with linguistic and architectural observations across the centuries, first appeared separately in Berr’s Revue de synthèse (1912–1913) and later regional history series (vol. 9, 1913), and was preceded by two articles: one of which (“Les formes de la rupture …”) became his complementary doctoral thesis. But it was his next book, Rois et serfs, his 1920 principal thesis, that launched him as a Medievalist to be reckoned with. Though narrower in scope than in his original plan – a study of rural life and the eradication of serfdom in the Île-de-France – Rois et serfs nonetheless heralded several key areas for his future research. Focusing on two well-known emancipation ordinances – those of Louis X (1315) and Philip V (1318) – B. refuted previous historians’ reading of them as Capetian endorsements of human freedom by showing their true meaning to lie in the tension between the political-theoretical ideal of natural equality and the reality of social hierarchy. He also revealed these ordinances’ limitations by proving that royal enfranchisement of serfs had been initiated more broadly a century earlier. Les rois thaumaturges

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(1924), a more mature work, displays his masterful command of a broad range of varied sources to illuminate the notion of the king’s healing touch and its effect on royal power in France and England, 11th through 19th centuries. B.’s and Febvre’s journal Annales was later re-subtitled Économies, sociétés, civilizations, and nurtured their “comparatist” “synthesis” approach to history on an international level, reflecting the trans-national vision of Henri Pirenne and tempered by World War I’s devastation. The Annales method seeks to investigate pivotal moments in history as case studies, rather than recounting them as mere chronological narrative. It favors the use of archives and social sciences methodologies while avoiding received ideas, nationalism and other temptations into false interpretations of human history. As a provocative exemplar of this methodology, B.’s Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931) profoundly analyzes French agrarian culture from ancient through modern times. His monumental and best-known study, La société féodale (1939–1940), defines and divides feudalism’s development into two main phases, then examines and compares different European social systems, whether feudal or non-feudal, from 800 through 1200. B. sought the truth even more than most modern historians, partly because of his military experience, which also intensified his interest in the common man, not in a romanticized way, but as a source of historical truth more elusive but equal in importance to the histories of nobles and officials. Incorporating his trademark preoccupations of synthesis and comparativism, B’s dedication to the art of teaching history equaled his commitment to its research and writing; all comprised his calling as historian, as he passionately elucidates in his posthumously-published Apologie pour l’histoire, ou métier d’historien, penned in 1941. Though not without his critics, in general, B.’s renown as an historian, bolstered by his Resistance writings and scholarship published by his son, Étienne, has risen to near deification, especially over the 1990s-2000s, as evidenced, for example, by Jacques Le Goff (current editor of Annales) in his book of notable lives for all time, in which B. figures with the Buddha, Abelard, St. Francis, and Michelet (2001). There are also the Cahiers Marc Bloch series, a dazzling website (http://www.marcbloch.fr/), and the fact that his students and their academic progeny constitute much of the most productive and influential wave of historians in Europe and the United States to this day. Select Bibliography Works (For a more complete list, see the bibliographies and commentary in Carole Fink’s studies, infra; most of the following have been translated into English and other languages]: Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Métier d’historien, ed. Lucien Febvre (1949;

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rpt. 1997); Correspondance [with Lucien Febvre and Henri Pirenne], vol. 1: La naissance des Annales (1928–33), ed. Bertrand Müller (2003); La France sous les derniers capétiens, 1223–1328 (1958); Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931; rpt. 2006); L’étrange défaite (1946; rpt. 2000); “Les formes de la rupture de l’hommage dans l’ancien droit féodal,” Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger 36 (1912): 141–77; L’Île-de-France (les pays autour de Paris) (1913); Rois et serfs: un chapitre d’histoire capétienne (1920; rpt. with other works on serfdom, 1996); Les rois thaumaturges (1924; rpt. 1983); La société féodale, 2 vols. (1939–1940; rpt. 1994). Literature: Bianca Arcangeli, La storia come scienza sociale: letture di Marc Bloch (Naples: Guida, 2001), Hartmut Atsma and André Burguière, ed., Marc Bloch aujourd’hui. Histoire comparée et sciences sociales. (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1990); Pierre Deyon et al., ed., Marc Bloch, L’historien et la cité (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997); Olivier Dumoulin, Marc Bloch (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2000); Carole Fink, “Marc Bloch (1886–1944),” Medieval Scholarship. 1: History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (New York and London: Garland, 1995); Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Susan W. Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jacques Le Goff, Cinq Personnages d’hier pour aujourd’hui (Paris: La Fabrique, 2001); Massimo Mastrogregori, Introduzione a Bloch (Rome: Laterza, 2001); Ulrich Raulff, De l’origine à l’actualité: Marc Bloch, l’histoire, et le problème du temps présent, trans. Marie-Lys Wilwerth (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1997); Ulrich Raulff, Marc Bloch: un historien au XXe siècle, trans. Olivier Mannoni (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2005) [orig. Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995)]; Massimo Mastrogregori, “Marc Bloch (1886–1944),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 117–48; François-Olivier Touati, Marc Bloch et l’Angleterre (Paris: Boutique de l’Histoire, 2007).

Nadia Margolis

Bodmer, Johann Jakob (July 19, 1698 – January 2, 1783), German Medievalist. During his long career, B. served as a proponent of the Hohenstaufen dynasty’s influence on the German poets and published thereto his Von den günstigen Umständen für die Poesie unter den Kaisern aus dem schwäbischen Hause (1742). He considered the didactic aspects of early German literature as morally and ethically beneficial and capable of improving aesthetic sensibility. Thereto he released several first editions of MHG poetry, including: Proben der alten schwäbischen Poesie des Dreyzehnten Jahrhunderts. Aus der Manessischen Sammlung

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[Samples of Old Swabian Poetry of the Thirteenth Century. From the Manesse Collection] (1748), Parzival (1753), Fabeln aus den Zeiten der Minnesinger [Fables from the Era of the Minnesingers] (1757), Chriemhilden Rache, und die Klage; zwey Heldengedichte aus dem schwaebischen Zeitpuncte. Samt Fragmenten aus dem Gedichte von den Nibelungen und aus dem Josaphat [Chriemhild’s Revenge, and the Lament; Two Heroic Poems from the Swabian Era] (1757) and Sammlung der Minnesinger [Collection of Minnesingers] (1758 and 1759). Although not met with commercial success, these works established a strong precedent for further study of medieval German literature and provided inspirational materials for the authors and artists of the Romantic, making B. one of the founding fathers of German Philology (Albert Debrunner: Das güldne schwäbische Zeitalter. Johann Jakob Bodmer und das Mittelalter als Vorbildzeit im 18. Jahrhundert, 1996). B. was the son of the Protestant parish priest Hans Jakob and his wife Esther in Greifensee (canton Zurich). Influenced by his humble origins, B. is said to have loved nature and enjoyed a simplicity of manners. He pursued his education at the Collegium Humanitatis and then at Collegium Carolinum in Zurich until 1718. Originally, he was to study theology but turned his mind first to mercantilism before pursuing more scholarly pursuits. He returned to Zurich following a short period as a merchant in Italy (1718–1719) with the intent of reviving medieval German literature as a means to improve the moral qualities and aesthetic appreciation of art among his countrymen. He served as a volunteer for the Zurich government starting in 1719, where, having no specific duties, he turned his attention to studying Helvetic history and the Swiss Confederation. Together with his friend Johann Jakob Breitinger, he founded the Gesellschaft der Mahler (1720) and the Helvetische Gesellschaft für vaterländische Historie Zürich (Helvetic Society for the Native History of Zurich) (1727). He was appointed administrator of the Department for Helvetic History at the Collegium Carolinum (1725–1731) before being invested with a professorship which he held for 44 years (1731–1775). In 1735, he was appointed member of the Grosser Rat (Advisory Council), in 1737 he joined the Deutsche Gesellschaft Leipzig (German Society). B. retired in 1775, the same year he established the Historisch-Politische Gesellschaft (Historical and Political Society) in Zurich, but remained active in Zurich until his death in 1783. His friendship with Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1774) served to establish a dynamic duo the likes of which can only be compared to the remarkably productive Brothers Grimm, who both viewed the editions released by B. as indispensable for the study of early German literature. Breitinger, a Professor of Greek in Zurich, is credited as the organizational tal-

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ent of the two friends, whose selfless cooperation and originality ensured the success of many of B.’s endeavours. “Die Erscheinung kommt auf litterarischem Gebiete kaum zum zweiten Male vor, daß der seinere, scharfsinnigere und gründlichere Arbeiter seinem Mitgenossen in solchem Grade sich bei und unterordnet, daß er sein Leben lang dessen Anregungen und Aufgaben folgt und die mitgetheilten Ideen mit einer Freiheit und Eigenthümlichkeit, mit einem Gedankenreichthum und einer durchgebildeten Organisation ausführt, wie es der Anregende nicht vermocht hätte. Das aber ist das Verhältnis zwischen Breitinger und Bodmer” (Johann Mörikoser: “Johann Jakob Bodmer,” ADB 2, 1876, 19–23; Johann C. Mörikoser: “Joh. Jakob Breitinger,” ADB 2, 1876, 295. Here, 1876, 295; Such an occurrence hardly appears in the realm of literature a second time, that such an astute and thorough companion subordinates himself to his colleague to such a high degree, and that throughout his life he followed his [B.’s] proposals and assignments, and completed these shared ideas with a freedom, individuality and richness of ideas that the motivator couldn’t have done himself. But that was the relationship between Breitinger and Bodmer). Together with B., Breitinger released the first theoretical treatment of the beautiful in art, Vom Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungskraft zur Ausbesserung des Geschmacks (Of the Influence and Use of the Imagination for the Improvement of Taste) (1727) that bases itself on spiritual considerations. In recent years, Breitinger’s greatest contribution has been considered his Kritische Dichtkunst (Critical Art of Poetry) (1740), which discusses the nature of aestheticism, based on philosophical considerations and a classical education and for which B. provided an introduction. The first section deals with depictions of nature in poetry and provides a comparative study between the artistic mediums of poetry and painting in order to legitimize the fantastic in poetry. Of lasting influence is his incorporated treatment of the epic and fable genres. In the second section, Breitinger deals with the language of poetics, and takes issue with Gottsched’s rigid and formalized system of poetics, reiterating many of B.’s criticisms and adding no few number of his own. Breitinger, convinced by B.’s fiery enthusiasm, worked closely with B. to promote the study of early German poetry. In this vein, he released an edition of Boner’s fables that still enjoys critical worth. Further, the two professors provided B.’s student Christoph Heinrich Myller with numerous handwritten transcriptions from medieval manuscripts for his three-volume Samlung deutscher Gedichte (Collection of German Poems) (1784–1785). Together, B. and Breitinger published the series “Discourse der Mahlern” (Discourse of Painters) (1721–1723), “Die Helvetische Bibliothek” (The Helvetic Library) (1735–41), “Sammlung critischer poetischer und an-

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derer geistvollen Schriften” (Collection of Critical Poetic and Other Inspired Writings) (1741–1744) and “Der Mahler der Sitten” (The Painter of Manners) (1746). Breitinger collaborated on numerous projects with B., including “Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche der Einbildungskraft” (Of the Influence and Use of the Imagination) (1727) and “Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie” (Critical Treatment of the Fantastic in Poetry) (1740), with which they engaged in a public debate – today known as the “Zürcher Literaturstreit” (Zurich Literary Feud) – with Johann Christoph Gottsched, arguing against his strict poetic regimen of rules and views on imagination and the depiction of das Wunderbare (the fantastic); in its essence, this conflict was the presaged clash between the rising Romantic movement and the Enlightenment in the 18th century. In the framework of this conflict, B. championed John Milton’s Paradise Lost as an unparalleled example for the importance and role of imagination in the realm of poetics, and accordingly provided the first German translation of this work (1732). He also produced translations of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1737) and of the works of Homer in two volumes (1778). The text editions of medieval German poetry that B. released provided the building blocks for the burgeoning field of German Philology; this discipline began with the study of the medieval German heritage as it had been preserved in written form, and only later developed into the study of contemporary literature. The works by B. in this realm exerted considerable influence on other German philologists who took up the cause, and included a standardization of orthography for edited Middle High German texts, which influenced generations of researchers to come. This influence is most remarkably demonstrated by the tribute Stiftung von Schnyder von Wartensee: Johann Jakob Bodmer Denkschrift zum CC. Geburtstag (19. Juli 1898) (1900; Tribute on his 200th Birthday, 19. July 1898) and the foundational role for the study of German literature attributed to B. in Max Wehrli’s J. J. Bodmer und die Geschichte der Literatur (1936). Due to his prodigal work and inexhaustible spirit, B. came into contact with and was greatly respected by many of the great contemporary literary personalities of his day. Among those influenced by B.’s scholarship were Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich von Hagedorn, among other notables. Johann Gottfried Herder and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing also recognized the important role he played in providing the burgeoning Romantic Movement, with its romantic reminiscences of the Middle Ages, with a stable literary foundation. Further, the public argument with Gottsched, which B. and Breitinger decided in their favor, gave a strong impulse and justification

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for the renewed interest in medieval literature. This service contributed significantly to the reception of the (romanticized) medieval aesthetic during the 18th century, and can thus be considered as the first reception of medieval material by a ‘modern’ audience. Select Bibliography Works: Von dem Einfluß und Gebrauche Der Einbildungskraft; Zur Ausbesserung des Geschmackes: Oder Genaue Untersuchung Aller Arten Beschreibungen, Worinne die ausserlesenste Stellen Der berühmstesten Poeten dieser Zeit mit gründtlicher Freyheit beurtheilt warden (1727; Of the Influence and Use of the Imagination for the Improvement of Taste: Or Precise Analysis of All Sorts of Descriptions Wherein the Most Exquisite Passages of the Most Famous Poets of this Era are Evaluated With Systematic License); Anklagung Des verderbten Geschmackes, Oder Critische Anmerkungen Über Den Hamburgischen Patrioten, Und die Hallischen Tadlerinnen (1728; Denouncement of the Deterioration of Taste, Or Critical Commentaries to the Patriots of Hamburg and the Critics of Halle); Johann Miltons Verlust des Paradieses. Ein Helden-Gedicht. In ungebundener Rede übersetzt (1732, 1742 and 1965; John Milton’s Paradise Lost. A Heroic Poem, Translated in Free Verse); Brief-Wechsel Von der Natur Des Poetischen Geschmackes. Dazu kömmt eine Untersuchung Wie ferne das Erhabene im Trauerspiele Statt und Platz haben könne – Wie auch von der Poetischen Gerechtigkeit (1736 and 1966; Letter Correspondence About the Nature of the Poetic Sensibility. Thereto an Examination of to What Extent the Sublime Can Assume and Have a Place in the Tragedies – And About Poetic Justice); Versuch einer Deutschen Übersetzung von Samuel Butlers Hudibras, Einem Satyrischen Gedichte wider die Schwermer und Independenten, zur Zeit Carls des Ersten (1737; Attempt at a German Translation of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, A Satirical Poem Against Visionaries and Independents in the Era of Charles I); Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie und dessen Verbindung mit dem Wahrscheinlichen. In einer Vertheidigung des Gedichtes John Miltons von dem verlohrenen Paradiese – Der beygefüget ist Joseph Addisons Abhandlung von den Schönheiten in demselben Gedichte (1740 and 1966; Critical Treatment of the Fantastic in Poetry and its Connection to the Possible. As a Defense of the Poem Paradise Lost by John Milton – Including Joseph Addison’s Treatment of the Beauties Found in the Same Poem); Critische Betrachtungen über die Poetischen Gemählde Der Dichter mit einer Vorrede von Johann Jacob Breitinger (1741 and 1971; Critical Commentaries to the Poetic Portraits of the Poets with a Preface by Johann Jacob Breitinger); Critische Briefe – Zusammen mit Johann Jacob Breitinger (1746 and 1969; Critical Letters – Together with Johann Jacob Breitinger); Neue Critische Briefe über gantz verschiedene Sachen, von verschiedenen Verfassern (1749; New Critical Letters About Very Diverse Things by Various Authors); Die Grundsätze der deutschen Sprache. Oder: Von den Bestandtheilen derselben und von dem Redesatze (1768; The Foundational Rules of the German Language. Or: Of the Elements of the Same and the Spoken Sentence); Homers Werke. Aus dem Griechischen übersetzt von dem Dichter der Noachide, 2 vols. (1778; The Works of Homer. Translated from the Greek by the Poet of the Noachide). Editions: Paragone della poesia tragica d’Italia con qvelle di Francia (1732; Paragons of Tragic Italian Poetry with Precursors from France); Des Freiherrn von Canitz satirische und sämmtliche übrige Gedichte (1737; The Baron of Canitz’s Satirical and All Other Poems); Ein halbes Hundert Neuer Fabeln (1744; Fifty New Falbes); Thirsis und Damons freundschaft-

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liche Lieder (1745; Thirsi and Damon’s Friendly Songs); Martin Opitzens Von Boberfeld Gedichte (1745; The Poems of Martin Opitz from Boberfeld); Proben der alten schwäbischen Poesie des Dreyzehnten Jahrhunderts. Aus der Manessischen Sammlung (1748 and 1973; Samples of Old Swabian Poetry of the Thirteenth Century. From the Manesse Collection); Chriemhilden Rache und die Klage, zwey Heldengedichte Aus dem schwaebischen Zeitpuncte. Samt Fragmenten aus dem Gedichte von den Nibelungen und aus dem Josaphat. Darzu kommt ein Glossarium (1757; Chriemhild’s Revenge, and the Lament; Two Heroic Poems from the Swabian Era. With Fragments from the Poems of the Nibelungen and from Josaphat. Thereto a Glossary); Sammlung von Minnesingern aus dem schwaebischen Zeitpuncte CXL Dichter enthaltend; durch Ruedger Manessen, weiland des Rathes der Uralten Zyrich. Aus der Handschrift der Koeniglich-Franzoesischen Bibliotheck, 2 vols. (1758–1759; Collection of Minnesinger from the Swabian Era, Containing 140 Poets; Preserved by Ruedger Manessen, Formerly Member of the Old Zurich Advisory Council); Altenglische Balladen. Fabel von Laudine. Siegeslied der Franken (1780; Old English Ballads. Fable of Laudine. Victory Song of the Franks). Literature: Eugen Wolff: “Briefwechsel Gottscheds mit Bodmer und Breitinger,” Zeitschrift für den deutschen Unterricht 11 (1897): 353–81; Wolfgang Bender: Johann Jakob Bodmer und Johann Jakob Breitinger, 1973; Christian Geltinger: “Johann Jakob Bodmer,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 17 (2000); Gesa von Essen: “Bodmer, Johann Jakob,” IGL, vol. 1, 2003, 215–17.

Maurice Sprague

Borst, Arno (May 8, 1925, Alzenau, Lower Franconia – April 24, 2007, Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg), German Historian. B. is considered one of the most versatile and productive medieval historians of 20th-century Germany. He performed pioneering work in areas as diverse as the study of medieval hereticism, history of linguistics, civilization studies, and history of science and ideas. B.’s dissertation research on Catharism resulted in the monograph Die Katharer (1953), which instantly established him among German historians. His reputation was affirmed with his monumental, multi-volume study on the history of multilingualism in late antiquity and the Middle Ages (Der Turmbau von Babel, 1957–63). Lebensformen im Mittelalter (1973) brought him international recognition with popular and scholarly audiences: Drawing on a multitude of source texts, B.’s insightful analysis and animated style seemingly bring to life a selection of medieval people from all social backgrounds. The prime of his career was dedicated,

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but not limited, to topics as diverse as the regional history of Southern Germany, monasticism, the medieval university, medieval historiography, chivalry, and death in the Middle Ages. The study of early medieval time measurement became B.’s main focus from the mid-1980s until his death, resulting in innovative works such as Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas (1990). His achievements were honored with numerous prestigious national and international awards. B. was born the son of a state superintendent in Alzenau, Lower Franconia, on May 8, 1925. He attended the Catholic high school at Münnerstadt (Lower Franconia), from which he graduated in 1943 before entering military service during the Second World War. From 1945 to 1951, B. studied history, German philology (Germanistik), and Latin at the universities of Göttingen and Munich under Hans Heinrich Schaeder and Percy Ernst Schramm; both also co-directed B.’s dissertation (1951) on the Cathar movement of Southern France. In 1951, he married Gudrun Witzig with whom he would have four children. After initially teaching at Münster where he also completed his habilitation under Herbert Grundmann’s direction, B. was appointed full professor at the University of Erlangen in 1962. He declined offers from various universities in favor of the newly founded University of Konstanz, which he joined as full professor of medieval history in 1968. During the 1969–1970 term, B. served as prorector of the university; from 1987 until his retirement in 1990, he held an endowed professorship from the German Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft. During his lifetime, B. was a member of several academic societies and foundations, among them the Stiftung Maximilianeum (from 1949), the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (full member from 1982), the Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (corresponding member from 1986), and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (corresponding member from 2003). His accomplishments were recognized with a number of awards and prizes: B. was awarded the Preis des Historischen Kollegs (1986), the Carl-Friedrich-Gauß-Medaille (1986), the Brüder-Grimm-Preis der Universität Marburg (1995), the Balzan Prize (1996), and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz) (1998). His writing skills were honored with the Bodensee Literaturpreis (1979) and the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa (1982). From 1983 to 1996, B. served as a full member of the board of directors (Zentraldirektion) of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) in Munich. From 1996 on, B. presided over the Arno-Borst-Stiftung, a foundation he had created to promote the study of medieval history. He died in Konstanz on April 24, 2007. With Die Katharer (1953; The Cathars), B. presented the first exhaustive examination and interpretative analysis of the Cathar movement of Southern

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France. Utilizing all sources published at the time, he was the first to study the Cathars within their own historical and sociological context. Divided into four sections, the study traces the history of the movement and its impact on medieval society, examines the doctrine of Catharism, and surveys the historiography from the 11th to the mid-20th century. Translations into French (1974) and Japanese (1975) followed. The groundbreaking Turmbau von Babel (1957–1963; Building the Tower of Babel), a six-volume study expanding on his habilitation, established B. as a vastly productive, highly imaginative scholar: Over the course of more than 2,300 pages, B. surveys theological, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnological and geographical sources from late antiquity and the Middle Ages, compiling them into a unique ethnological history in search of the origins of multilingualism. For Lebensformen im Mittelalter (1973; Medieval Ways of Life), B., who credited Friedrich Schiller, Jacob Burckhardt, and Johan Huizinga as his influences, compiled a collection of examples from historical sources, supplemented with an insightful, sensitive commentary. Incorporating medieval chronicles, biographies, diplomas, archival files, and letters as well as literary and scientific writing, B. brings to life the likes of Gregory of Tours, Ulrich von Hutten, and a sexagenarian husband who offers advice to his teenage wife. Divided into two sections, Condicio humana and Societas humana, this informative study showcases the versatility and changeability of the medieval people’s ‘historically acquired social behavior’ (so B.’s definition of Lebensformen). Still immensely popular today, Lebensformen was translated into Japanese (1986) and Italian (1988). B.’s range of interests is underscored by his contributions to the study of medieval civilization and society and his work on regional history: He published on the study and teaching of history at the medieval university (Geschichte an mittelalterlichen Universitäten, 1969), on the House of Hohenstaufen (Reden über die Staufer, 1978), and on the history of the Lake Constance region and its monasteries (Mönche am Bodensee: 610–1525, 1978; Ritte über den Bodensee: Rückblick auf mittelalterliche Bewegungen, 1992). B. also served as contributing editor for important essay collections investigating medieval knighthood (Rittertum im Mittelalter, 1976) and death in the Middle Ages (Tod im Mittelalter, 1993). His work on the reception history of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Das Buch der Naturgeschichte. Plinius und seine Leser im Zeitalter des Pergaments, 1994) and his research on the 11th-century German scholar, composer, and music theorist Hermann the Lame, also known as Hermannus Contractus or Hermann of Reichenau, introduced B. to the history of science. It led to intense research and editing work on gaming and number theory (Das mittelalterliche Zahlenkampfspiel, 1986), calendar

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calculation (Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas, 1988; English trans. 1993), and the Carolingian calendar reform (Karolingische Kalenderreform, 1998; Der Streit um den karolingischen Kalender, 2004), issues that continued to occupy B. until his death. Throughout his career, B. was lauded for his pioneering zeal and inquisitive spirit, leading him to explore thereto little investigated subjects with great care and insight (cf. Horst Fuhrmann, “Laudatio auf Arno Borst,” 1987, 532–35). B. is credited with a novel methodological approach to the study of Catharism (Emily McCaffrey, Memory and Collective Identity in Occitanie,” 2001, 133), and more than half a century after its original publication in 1953, Die Katharer is still regarded one of the standard texts on the subject. However, recent studies have claimed that B.’s interpretation of sources pertaining to the history, origin, doctrine, and rituals of the Cathars is (partly) inaccurate (Gerhard Rottenwöhrer, Die Katharer, 2007, 312–13). To this date, B. is considered the scholar who has studied the origins of medieval linguistics within a European context most comprehensively (Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Such Stuff as People Are Made On: Ethnogenesis and the Construction of Nationhood,” 2006, 199), and the “capital importance” (Bernhard Bischoff, “The Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages,” 1961, 209) of his contribution to this field was noted even before the completion of Der Turmbau von Babel in 1963. Otto Gerhard Oexle regards B.’s methodology in Lebensformen im Mittelalter as indicative of a paradigm shift in the approach to social history (Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Mittelalterforschung in der sich ständig wandelnden Moderne,” 2003, 238). He notes that even though B.’s model found no immediate adaptors, it marked a decisive break away from the established practices (ibid. 239). Select Bibliography Works: Die Katharer, 7th ed. (2000); Der Turmbau von Babel, 2nd ed. (1995); Lebensformen im Mittelalter, new ed. (2001); Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics, and Artists in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. trans. by Eric Hansen (1996). Originally published as Barbaren, Ketzer und Artisten (1990); The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, 2nd ed. trans. by Andrew Winnard (1994). Originally published as Computus: Zeit und Zahl in der Geschichte Europas, 3rd rev. and expanded ed. (2004). Literature: Bernhard Bischoff, “The Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 36.2 (1961): 209–24; Horst Fuhrmann, “Laudatio auf Arno Borst,” HZ 244 (1987): 529–35; Emily McCaffrey, “Memory and Collective Identity in Occitanie. The Cathars in History and Popular Culture,” History & Memory 13.1 (2001): 114–38; Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Mittelalterforschung in der sich ständig wandelnden Moderne,” Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Stand und Perspektiven der internationalen und interdisziplinären Mittelalterforschung, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz and Jörg Jarnut (Munich:

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Fink, 2003), 227–52; Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Such Stuff as People Are Made On: Ethnogenesis and the Construction of Nationhood,” MHJ 9, 2 (2006): 195–242; Gerhard Rottenwöhrer, Die Katharer: Was sie glaubten, wie sie lebten (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2007).

Judith Benz

Bosl, Karl (November 11, 1908 in Cham, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria – January 18, 1993 in Munich), leading 20th-Century German Medieval Historian. B. stands along with Otto Brunner as a principal agent in the shift of medieval historiography from an account of political and statist significance toward a social narrative. B.’s examination of medieval culture through the sociological lens pioneered the now well-established search for historical evidence in the local and personal histories of persons, locations, and events outside of or beyond those of traditionally transmitted political importance. B. made a distinction, however, between social history (Sozialgeschichte) and societal history (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) that he conducted in, for example, Die Grundlagen der modernen Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Eine deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters (1972), Gesellschaftsgeschichte Italiens im Mittelalter (1982), and Gesellschaft im Aufbruch: Die Welt des Mittelalters und ihre Menschen (1991). B. was born in the small northern Bavarian town of Cham. His father, Xaver Bosl, was a military musician and later worked as a facilities manager for the regional governmental office. His mother Maria (née Mühlbauer) worked as a seamstress and arranged for Karl and his brother Siegfried to attend the School of the Benedictine Abbey in Metten from 1918–1927. B. continued his studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, concentrating on history, German literature, and classical and medieval Latin philology, the latter with Paul Lehmann. He completed his exams in 1931 and began teaching at various schools in Bavaria. While teaching, B. continued his research and his doctoral work and earned his degree in 1938 with the work Das Nordgaukloster Kastl (1939). In 1944, while working at a school in Ansbach, B. earned the right to teach at institutions of higher learning in Germany from the University of Munich with his now classic work, Die Reichsministerialität der Salier und Staufer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des hochmittelalterlichen deutschen Volkes, Staates und Reiches, 2. vols. (1950–1951). B. began his professorship in Munich in 1947 and was also a Commissioner for the Cul-

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tural Ministry devoted to rebuilding the Bavarian high school system. In 1949, he co-founded the Bavarian Philological Society and served as president of the organization until 1954 and remained the honorary president thereafter. B. became a full professor in the department of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Würzburg in 1953, taking up the chair formerly held by Max Spindler. It was during this period that B. began to shape the future of medieval historiography. In a later essay, entitled “Structural Problems of Medieval Social History of Europe: Ideal Types and the Specific Meaning of the Words in Latin Sources,” Ethnicity, Identity, and History: Essays in Memory of Werner J. Cahnman, ed. Joseph B. Maier and Chiam I. Waxman (1983), 27–30, B. describes his role in shaping German historiography in the post-War period: “I therefore insisted after 1945 that German historiography’s greatest need was not a renaissance of Ranke, still the ideal of many contemporary historians, but the acceptance of Max Weber. The collapse of the Third Reich had inevitably brought to an end the analysis of history – especially German history – exclusively in terms of étatisme and national state; it was time to look for new factors such as society, communal history, cooperation, liberty or representative institutions” (27). During the 1960s, the history of Bavaria became a prevailing area of B.’s research and remained so, as evident in a collection of books and essays that dominate the field: Zur Geschichte der Bayern (1965); Die Sozialstruktur der mittelalterlichen Residenz- und Fernhandelsstadt Regensburg (1966); Das Grossmährische Reich in der politischen Welt des 9. Jahrhunderts (1966); Die wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung des Augsburger Bürgertums vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert (1969); Bayerische Geschichte (1971); München: Bürgerstadt, Residenz, heimliche Hauptstadt Deutschlands (1971); Dokumente zur Geschichte von Staat und Gesellschaft in Bayern (1974); Böhmen und seine Nachbarn: Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in Mitteleuropa (1976); Cham: Die Geschichte der Stadt und ihres Umlandes in 1200 Jahren (1989), and above all Bosls Bayerische Biographie: 8000 Personlichkeiten aus 15 Jahrhunderten (1983). From 1960–1977, he held the chair for Bavarian History and Comparative Regional History at the University of Munich. B. headed the Collegium Carolinum, a research institute for Bohemian History, from 1958 until 1980, producing several publications, including Das Handbuch der Geschichte der böhmischen Länder (Stuttgart A. Hiersemann 1967–1974). B. had over 80 doctoral students and enjoyed countless international relationships, receiving numerous awards (Distinguished Service Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bavarian Distinguished Service Medal, Bavarian Constitutional Medal in Gold, Bavarian Maximilian Medal for Arts and Sciences, AdalbertStifter-Medaille). B. was a member of most major international societies of medievalists and historians, including the Medieval Academy of America.

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He also held visiting lecturer positions worldwide, including at the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His own personal library is now housed at the Meiji University Library in Tokyo. B.’s work, which encompasses close to 600 books, articles, and reviews (including edited volumes) remains highly regarded. For the most extensive bibliography, see Karl Möckl, Biographisches Lexikon des Kartellverbandes katholischer deutscher Studentenvereine, vol. 6 (2000), 12–17. General criticism of B. remains largely ideological and concentrates on the attempt to find implicit fascist tendencies either in the content or subject (particularly medieval kingship) of his work. B.’s habilitation was supported by Theodor Mayer, party member and president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica from 1942–1945, when B.’s work was accepted for publication. Little information is available on the six years between his doctoral thesis and habilitation, except that upon his habilitation, B. was not granted a professorship due to unspecified political reasons, a claim which itself seems questionable as B. was under the tutelage of Mayer, as Michael Borgolte points out in his Sozialgeschichte des Mittelalters: eine Forschungsbilanz nach der deutschen Einheit (1996). Following the war, B. was named Professor of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Munich. To this day, research is lacking on exactly what B.’s position was during Third Reich. Some of the main research on historians of this period has been conducted by B.’s friend and associate, the Czech historian Frantisek ˇ Graus, himself an inmate at Theresienstadt, and one of the most outspoken critics of the Nazi ideology latent in the works of B.’s associates Otto Brunner and Walter Schlesinger, particularly in his article, “Verfassungsgeschichte des Mittelalters,” Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986): 529–90. The only questionable material surrounding B. and National Socialism that has surfaced to date stems from B.’s glowing and uncharacteristically incomplete portrait of the historian Karl Alexander von Müller, whose membership in the Reich’s Institute for the History of the New Germany and nominal leadership of the division for research on the “Jewish Question” go unmentioned. The essay appeared in the festschrift for Müller that B. edited with Friedrich Pankraz, Land und Volk Herrschaft und Staat in der Geschichte und Geschichtsforschung Bayerns: Karl Alexander von Mueller zum 80. Geburtstag (1964). Ultimately, however, there is simply no objective evidence establishing B. as having had any kind of elective participation in the Nazi regime. Moreover, B.’s work and life, marked by local and global achievement, partnership, and activism, soundly contradict notions of fascist sympathies. Four festschrifts celebrating B.’s 60th, 65th, 75th, and 80th birthdays evidence his enormous influence and the great respect he enjoyed among the post-War generations of medievalists (Richard van Dülmen, Gesellschaft und

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Herrschaft: Forschungen zu sozial-und landesgeschichtlichen Problemen vornehmlich in Bayern. Eine Festgabe fur Karl Bosl zum 60. Geburtstag, 1969; Friedrich Prinz, ed., Geschichte in der Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Karl Bosl zum 65. Geburtstag, 11. 11. 1973, 1974; Ferdinand Seibt, ed., Die böhmischen Lander zwischen Ost und West. Festschrift für Karl Bosl zum 75. Geburtstag, 1983; Ferdinand Siebt, ed., Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift für Karl Bosl zum 80. Geburtstag, 1988). B.’s focus areas included constitutional history (Verfassungsgeschichte) and economics in his book Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft im deutschen Mittelalter (1973) and social class in works like Das Problem der Armut in der hochmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft (1974). While B. made significant contributions in each of these categories and in many others, his work on the medieval ministeriales and power relations remains central to his reputation (Die Reichsministerialität der Salier und Staufer: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des hochmittelalterlichen deutschen Volkes, Staates und Reiches, 1950; Herrscher und Beherrschte im Deutschen Reich des 10.–12. Jahrhunderts, 1963, and Europa im Aufbruch: Herrschaft, Gesellschaft, Kultur vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert, 1980). Later work on the “pauper Christi” movement in Armut Christi: Ideal der Mönche und Ketzer: Ideologie der aufsteigenden Gesellschaftsschichten vom 11. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (1981), and Gesellschaft im Aufbruch: Die Welt des Mittelalters und ihre Menschen (1991), for example, confounds attempts to pigeon-hole B.’s research. Without exaggeration, many of the key principles informing 21st-century historiography can be traced back to B. and his closest colleagues. Select Bibliography Works: Frühformen der Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Europa: Ausgewahlte Beiträge zu einer Strukturanalyse der mittelalterlichen Welt (1964); Franken um 800: Strukturanalyse einer fränkischen Königsprovinz (1969); Europa im Mittelalter:Weltgeschichte eines Jahrtausends (1970); Die Unfreiheit im Übergang von der archäischen zur Aufbruchsepoche der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft (1973); Die Gesellschaft in der Geschichte des Mittelalters (1975); Gesellschaftswandel, Religion und Kunst im hohen Mittelalter (1976); Regularkanoniker (Augustinerchorherren) und Seelsorge in Kirche und Gesellschaft des europäischen 12. Jahrhunderts (1979); Kernstadt, Burgstadt, Neustadt, Vorstadt in der europäischen Stadtgeschichte (1983). Literature: Wilhelm Störmer, “Karl Bosl 75 Jahre,” Die Oberpfalz (1983): 352–54; Michael Zimmermann, “Laudatio für den Ehrenbürger Professor Dr. Karl Bosl,” Die Oberpfalz (1984): 60–68; Hubert Freilinger, “Praedicatio et Congratulatio,” Historia Magistra: Die geschichtliche Dimension der Bildung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988); Giles Constable, William J. Courtenay, and Astrik L. Gabriel, “Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America,” Speculum, 68, 3 (1993): 935–36; Manfred Treml, Karl Bosl: Eine Bibliographie: Materialien zur Bayerischen Geschichte und Kultur, 3 (Augsburg: Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, 1996).

Stephen Mark Carey

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Boyle, Leonard Eugene, O.P. (November 13, 1923, Ballybefey, Co. Donegal, Ireland – October 25, 1999, Rome), Latin Palaeographer, Historian, and Theologian. From his early days, B.’s articles, and particularly his theses, have been important contributions to Canon Law, and during his whole life he was interested in this subject. He launched the editing of English and Irish papal documents. In addition, he taught Latin Paleography and wrote a handbook which has been published in several editions. As prefect of the Vatican Library, B. tried to make the study of manuscripts easier, and during this time he devoted much effort to the foundation of the library and its history. He was involved in the training of medievalists, and as president of the F.I.D.E.M. (Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales), he started courses for young European scholars in Rome and in the Vatican Library. In the last years of his life, when he was president of the Leonine Commission, B. was responsible for the edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas. B. attended primary schools in Donegal, Westmeath, Cork, and secondary school at Mont Melleray Seminary, Cappoquin, Co. Waterford (1937–1943). After his entrance into the Dominican Order at Cork on September 4, 1943, he studied philosophy at Cork and Dublin (1944–1947) and theology at Studium generale of English Dominicans (Blackfairs, Oxford, 1947–1951). He was ordained priest in December 1949 and awarded the Dominican Order Degree of Lector of Theology in July 1951. For his essay “The Oculus sacerdotis and some other works of William of Pagula” (Transaction of the Royal Historical Society … London, 1955), B. was awarded the Alexander Prize of the Royal Historical Society in June 1954. From February 1955 to June 1957, B. was employed by the Public Record Office and the National Library of Ireland to do research work in the Vatican Archives aimed at a continuation of the Calendar of Papal Registers, and he resided at the Collegio San Clemente, Rome. He completed his studies by obtaining his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford in December 1956 for his thesis, A Study of the Works of William of Pagula, Vicar of Winkfield, ob. ca. 1332. He began teaching as professor of Latin Paleography and History of Medieval Theology at the Angelicum, the Dominican University in Rome (October 1956), and Church History at the “Jesus Magister” Institute for Christian Brothers at the Lateran University (October 1960). B. was nominated Visiting Professor of Latin Paleography at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto in October 1961, where he became Professor Ordinarius of Latin Paleography and Diplomatica in January 1966.

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B. was member of the Gratian Institute of Study and Research in Medieval Canon Law (1955), of the Medieval Academy of America (1955), of the Catholic Historical Association (1962), of the Midwest Medieval History Conference (1963); he was fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1963), councilor of the Medieval Academy of America (1971–1974), vice-president of American Catholic Historical Association (1976), member of the Comité international de Paléographie (1976), fellow of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Duke University (1976), of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Medieval Canon Law (1975), of the Consultative Group on Canadian Archives reporting to the Social Science and Humanities, the Research Council of Canada (1978–1979), Comnaught Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Toronto (1979–1980), fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1980), Master in Theology of the Dominican Order (February 1981), Prefect of the Vatican Library (May 1984-May 1997), president of the Comité international de Paléographie (1985–1995), president of F.I.D.E.M. (Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales, 1987–1999), and president of the Commissione Leonina (1997–1999). For his large experience, B. was nominated general editor of Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland (1970), chief consultant of Ambrosiana Microfilm Catalogue (University of Notre Dame 1979–1981), and editorial consultant to Viator (1980–1986). His main interests were Medieval Studies, but as he resided in San Clemente, B. was also engaged in Christian Archaeology and published A Short Guide to San Clemente, which was brought out in several new editions and translated into many languages. He also initiated a new series, San Clemente Miscellany, in which the results of the excavations are collected. As a result of his intensive studies in the Vatican Archives, he published A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of its Medieval Holdings (1972), a fundamental handbook for English-speaking scholars of Vatican sources. Soon interested in Latin paleography, he gained vast knowledge and experience in this field and presented it in an important manual, Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (1984), which was republished in 1999 in a separate volume as Vox pagine. An Oral Dimension of Texts. His research in Canon Law was also considerable as reflected by his “The Summa summarum and Some Other English Works in Canon Law” (Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Boston College 1963, 1965), “The Compilatio quinta and the Registers of Honorius III” (Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 6 [1978]), in his monograph Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400 (1981), and his article “Canon Law before 1380” (The History of the University of Oxford, 1984).

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B. also made a contribution to English History with “The Nowell Codex and the Poem of Beowulf” (The Dating of Beowulf, 1981). As a Dominican, he studied the life and works of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most important representatives of the Order: “The Quodlibet of St. Thomas and Pastoral Care” (The Tomist 38 [1974]), The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas (1982); and for the edition of the works of St. Thomas he published “A Remembrance of Pope Leo XIII: The Encyclica Aeterni Patris” (Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards, 1981). Being appointed Prefect of the Vatican Library, B. got involved in the history of the library and its collections; his favorite subject, to which he contributed new important discoveries, such as “Nicolas V and the Foundation of the Library: Sixtus IV and the Vatican Library” (Rome: Tradition, Innovation and Renewal. A Canadian International Art History Conference, 8–13 June 1987 …, 1991), and “Per la fondazione della Biblioteca Vaticana” (I codici latini di Nicolo V: Edizione degli inventari e identificazione dei manoscritti, ed. Antonio Manfredi, 1994). For special research of the collection he also established a new series, the Miscellanea Bibliothecae Vaticanae, and he served as editor of the microfiche catalogue, Biblioteca Palatina: Druckschriften/Stampati Palatini/Printed Books (1989). Select Bibliography Works: “The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 5 (1955): 81–110; “A Study of the Works of William of Pagula, Vicar of Winkfield, ob. ca. 1332,” D. Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford 1956; A Short Guide to San Clement’s (1960); A Survey of the Vatican Archives and of its Medieval Holdings (1972; rev. ed. 2001); Medieval Latin Paleography: A Bibliographical Introduction (1984; rpt. in 1999, as Paleografia latina medievale: introduzione bibliografica, versione italiana di Maria Elena Bertoldi (1999); Vox pagine. An Oral Dimension of Texts (1999); “The Summa summarum and Some Other English Works in Canon Law,” Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Boston College 1963 (1965, 415–56); “The Compilatio quinta and the Registers of Honorius III,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 6 (1978): 9–19; Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400 (1981); “Canon Law before 1380,” The History of the University of Oxford (1984), 531–64; “The Nowell Codex and the Poem of Beowulf,” The Dating of Beowulf (1981), 23–32; “The Quodlibet of St. Thomas and Pastoral Care,” The Tomist 38 (1974): 232–56, The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas (1982); “A Remembrance of Pope Leo XIII: The Encyclica Aeterni Patris,” Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards (1981), 7–22; “Nicolas V and the Foundation of the Library: Sixtus IV and the Vatican Library,” Rome: Tradition, Innovation and Renewal. A Canadian International Art History Conference, 8–13 June 1987 … (1991), 63–73; “Per la fondazione della Biblioteca Vaticana,” I codici latini di Nicolo V: Edizione degli inventari e identificazione dei manoscritti, ed. Antonio Manfredi (1994), XI–XXII.

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Literature: A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. J. Brown and W. P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

Christine Maria Grafinger

Branca, Vittore (July 9, 1913, Savona, Italy – May 28, 2004, Venice), Italian Philologist. B. is considered the greatest contemporary scholar of Boccaccio, having produced more critical and editorial work on Boccaccio than anyone else. B.’s major contributions to research are undoubtedly his critical edition (the first completed) of Boccaccio’s Italian and Latin writings, and his discovery of the Decameron autograph. He also published critical editions of Saint Francis, Morelli, Poliziano (autograph both recovered and edited by B. and considered the most recent discovery of Italian humanist philology), Alfieri, Manzoni, Conciliatore, Barbaro, and Nievo (for which he was awarded the Ministry’s prize in “Filologia e Linguistica” in 1976). B. directed the international team project in cataloguing nearly 8,000 images and creating Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, collaborated on the Enciclopedia Italiana, and founded the International Association for Studies on Italian Language and Literature (Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana). In 1963, he created Studi sul Boccaccio, a journal which would become a means of announcing current work and new discoveries. B.’s graduation with honors from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1935 was followed by the publication of his thesis. He completed his graduate studies in Medieval Culture and Literature at the University of Salzburg, and in 1937 joined the Accademia della Crusca, where he began his collaboration on the National Edition of Boccaccio’s works. B. taught as professor of Italian Literature at the Universities of Florence, Rome (Maria S.S. Assunta University), Catania (1944–1949), and Padua (upon his 1953 return from Paris), and was the Chancellor of the University of Bergamo (1962–1972). He was a visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris (1952–1953 and 1976–1977), at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, and at several institutions in the United States: Berkeley (1982), Harvard (1970), New York University (1988 and 1990), Columbia University (1991). He taught in England, Eastern Europe (Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade), South America (University of Montevideo

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and University of Buenos Aires), Turkey (University of Ankara and Istanbul), and Australia (Perth, Sydney, Melbourne). B. was long associated with Venice’s Foundation Giorgio Cini (1953– 1996), serving as General Secretary and Director of the Center for Culture and Civilization, and eventually becoming the foundation’s Vice-President (1972), and then President (1995). B. was a member of numerous cultural institutions and academies, including the National Accademia dei Lincei, the Accademia dell’Arcadia, the Istituto Accademico in Rome, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, the Académie du Monde Latine (Institut de France), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston), the Modern Language Association of America and the Medieval Academy of America; he was a fellow of the Royal British Academy and of the Real Academia de España, an officer of the Légion d’Honneur (France), Commander of the Order of Polonia Restituita (Poland) and of the Order of Malta, rector of the University of Bergamo (1968–1972), and director of the Division of Arts and Letters of UNESCO (1950–1953); he presided over the Commission for the Cultural Policy of RAI-TV (1966–1975) and directed the literary journals Studi sul Boccaccio with Giovanni Getto, and Lettere Italiane with Carlo Ossola. Finally, B. was directly involved in the Italian Resistenza during World War II, became a clandestine member of the CTLN (Tuscan Committee for National Liberation), eventually receiving its gold medal and co-directing the CTLN’s official newspaper, Nazione del Popolo. B. studied in Pisa with Attilio Momigliano and Mario Casella, and then in Florence with Michele Barbi and Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. He was among the first scholars who emphasized studying multiple authorial interventions in textual redactions as a crucial research tool. In the critical field, in addition to over four hundred articles primarily focused on the literature between the 13th and 15th and the 18th centuries, his most noteworthy volumes and studies are: Il cantare trecentesco (1936); Storia della critica al Decameron (1939); Note sulla letteratura religiosa del Trecento (1939); “Note per una storia dell’anima del Manzoni,” Convivium XIII (1941); Mistici del Duecento e del Trecento (1942); Emilio De Marchi e il realismo meditativo (Brescia 1946); Alfieri e la ricerca dello stile (1947); “Storia delle raccolte di rime e delle collezioni dei Classici,” Orientamenti e Problemi di Letteratura Italiana (1948); Il cantico di Frate Sole (1950); Boccaccio medievale (1956, 1997), trans. into French, English, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese; Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio (1958, 1990); Civiltà letteraria d’Italia (1962); Incompiuta Seconda Centuria di Angelo Poliziano (1962); Civiltà letteraria d’Italia (1962); Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, saggi propri e saggi altrui raccolti da Vittore Branca (1964); “Poetica del rinnovamento e tradizione agiografica nella Vita Nuova,” Miscel-

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lanea Italo Siciliano (1966); Rinascimento europeo e rinascimento veneziano (1967); “Fulvio Testi en la Corte de Urbano VIII y Felipe IV,” Revista de Occidente (1969); I nuovi metodi della critica (1970); Sebastiano Ciampi (1970); Occasioni manzoniane (1973); Concetto, storia, miti e immagini del Medioevo (1973); Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 3, ed. Vittore Branca (1974, 1988); Filologia, critica, storia in collaborazione con Jean Starobinski (1978); Alfieri e la ricerca dello stile con cinque nuovi saggi (1979); “Giovanni” and “L’Umanesimo veneziano,” Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3 (1980); Poliziano e l’Umanesimo della parola (1983); Boccaccio visualizzato (1985); Mercanti e scrittori (1986); Esopo toscano (1989); Esopo veneto (1992); Boccaccio. Profilo biografico (1997). His narrative prose works include: Un sogno (1983); Ponte Santa Trinita (1988); Con amore volere. Narrar mercantesco fra Boccaccio e Machiavelli (1995); La sapienza civile. Studi sull’Umanesimo veneziano (1997); Boccaccio visualizzato (1999); Il capolavoro del Boccaccio e due diverse redazioni. Variazioni stilistiche e narrative, vol. 2 (2002). B. received honorary degrees from the universities of Budapest (1967), New York and Bergamo (Italy, 1973), the Sorbonne (Paris, 1976), McGill (Montreal, 1985), and Cologne (1998); a gold medal from the Benemeriti della Cultura (Italy); the honor of “Cavaliere di Gran Croce” of the Italian Republic; Medaglia d’oro del CNL della Toscana; held the titles of Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, Commander to the Order of Poland Restored, Commander to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Honorary Citizen of Florence (2002). B. contributed to the broadening and enlivening of the literary and cultural conception of “tradition,” joining august medieval masterpieces with the poetics of the previous centuries. In reconstructing texts, B. demonstrated the importance of understanding how and why (both in philological and historical terms) such texts were diffused, and he produced what remains as one of the most impressive bodies of work by a single critic; in regard to B.’s Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 2: Un Secondo Elenco di Manoscritti e Studi sul Testo del ‘Decamerone’ con due Appendici, Marga Cottino-Jonesmaintains that “To produce such an impressive collection of documents and philological commentaries is an accomplishment that only a scholar with superb philological expertise and consummate literary talent could carry out” (see bibliography). B.’s criticism remains fundamental for contemporary scholars who use B.’s studies as a basis for understanding the tones, themes and functions of the Decameron, and who credit B. as having “struggled to reconcile the obvious variety of the book’s events with a uniform moral vision that would provide and objective meaning to the work” (see bibl.). B.’s studies were focused on bringing philology and criticism together, and he broadened the literary and sociological perspectives through his historiographic identifica-

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tion of and focus on the merchant writing of the Renaissance (“letteratura mercantesca”). B.’s work had a lasting influence on modern philological approaches, which adopted his definitions of ‘characterized’ versus ‘characterizing’ traditions (the former referring to a manuscript tradition in and of itself, and the later intending the means and motives for which such a tradition begins). B.’s continuing influence is demonstrated by the Bibliografia degli scritti authored by his students in Padua and by the volumes of Studi sul Boccaccio and Lettere Italiane dedicated to him. Biographies and biographical outlines of B. have been published by Giorgio Padoan (I critici, 1988), Andrè Chastel (“Le monde,” December 27, 1988), Felix Gilbert and Cecil Grayson (“T.L.S.,” Novembre 26, 1976; June 5, 1987) and F. Lanza (“L’Osservatore Romano,” March 24, 1997). Scholars such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Victoria Kirkham (see bibliography) maintain that B.’s work “struck an ideal balance between solitude in the studiolo and solicitude for ‘civil conversation.’” Likewise, Marvin B. Becker affirms that, “Vittore Branca’s Boccaccio Medievale (1956) stands as one of the most compelling and attractive works of scholarship to be published in post-war Italy. Ignoring Croce’s lofty counsel, he set Boccaccio’s prose and poetry within the frame furnished by that not unmatched pair – literary and social change – with startling consequences” (see bibliography). B. thus continues to be widely acknowledged for his dedication and contribution to both literary and social history. Select Bibliography Literature: Marvin B. Becker, “Review of Studi sul Boccaccio,” Renaissance News 18.1 (Spring 1965): 22–23; Marga Cottino Jone, “Review of Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 2: Un Secondo Elenco di Manoscritti e Studi sul Testo del ‘Decamerone’ con due Appendici,” Speculum 9.2 (April 1994): 429–30; Timothy Kircher, “The Modality of Moral Communication in the Decameron’s First Day: in Contrast to the Mirror of Exemplum,” Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (2001): 1035–73; Victoria Kirkham, Branca Memoriam, www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/heliotropia/aba/branca_memoriam. shtml (last accessed on September 4, 2009); Manlio Pastore Stocchi, “Ricordo di Vittore Branca” (Commemorative speech November 27, 2005), at: http://www. istitutoveneto.it/iv/unione/pdf/brancacommemorazione.pdf.

Federica Anichini

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Braune, Wilhelm Theodor

Braune, Wilhelm Theodor (February 20, 1850, Großthiemig an der Saale – November 10, 1926, Heidelberg), German Philologist and Medievalist. Along with seminal scholars such as Eduard Sievers and August Leskien, B. was a representative of the Junggrammatiker (Neogrammarians), a school of philology centered in Leipzig. In contrast to previous linguistic movements in the 19th century, the Leipzig School sought to subject the historical development of language to scientific research with their insistence that phonetic changes occurred without exception within a given context and operated independent of syntax or semantics (see Kurt R. Jankowsky, The Neogrammarians, 1972; for a brief overview of the ideas and practice of the Neogrammarians, see Rudolf Ru zi ˇ cka, ˇ Historie und Historizität der Junggrammatiker, 1977). B. made many contributions to the field of Older Germanics with significant grammatical texts on Gothic and Old High German, both of which became and remain the standard reference works in their respective areas (Althochdeutsche Grammatik, 1886, 14th ed. 1987; Gotische Grammatik, 1880, 18th ed. 1973). Having founded the scholarly journal Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur in 1874 with Hermann Paul, he twice served as its editor. In the field of Middle High German literature, B. advanced our understanding of the original language of Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneas and reinvigorated the discussion concerning the various manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied. The son of a Protestant minister in Brandenburg, B. was educated in Halle an der Saale at the Lateinschule der Franckeschen Stiftung, graduating in 1869. He began his studies the same year at the University of Leipzig working under Leskien, Friedrich Zarnke, Georg Curtius, Rudolf Hildebrand, Ernst Windisch, and Georg Voigt. He befriended Sievers and Paul, with whom he collaborated professionally; among other colleagues and fellow students were such influential scholars as Karl Brugmann, Hermann Osthoff, Berthold Delbrück, Karl Verner, and Otto Behagel. B. received his doctorate in Classical and German Philology under the direction of Zarnke. His dissertation, “Untersuchungen zu Heinrich von Veldeke,” was published in 1873 (ZfdPh 4 [1873]: 249–304). The following year proved to be a particularly active one for B.: he completed his Habilitationsschrift, “Über die Quantität der althochdeutschen Endsilben” (PBB 2 [1876]: 125–167), began his tenure at the University of Leipzig as Privatdozent, and along with Paul, established the Beiträge, which from its inception provided other Neogrammarians with a reputable forum in the nascent field of Historical Linguistics. Following Paul’s appointment in Freiburg, B. almost single-

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handedly edited the Beiträge until the 15th volume, after which Sievers took over; B. edited the journal once again for its 32nd through 48th volumes. He also edited the first volume of Max Niemeyer’s Neudrucke deutscher litteraturwerke des XVI. und XVII. jahrhunderts with an edition of Martin Opitz’s Buch von der deutschen Poeterey; B.’s editions would eventually constitute 15 of the first 17 volumes of the series, including works of Martin Luther, Andreas Gryphius and Christian Weise. His Althochdeutsches Lesebuch appeared in 1875. In 1877, B. became außerordentlicher Professor in Leipzig and served as the first assistant and curator in the university library. He married Sophie Lange, the daughter of the classical philologist Ludwig Lange in 1879, and moved to Gießen a year later where he became ordentlicher Professor. Though more a testament to his training in Leipzig, his Gotische Grammatik did not appear until this first year in Gießen. Other significant works followed before he left for Heidelberg in 1888, among them his Althochdeutsche Grammatik in 1886. This book, aside from the Abriß der althochdeutschen Sprache (1891; 15th ed. 1989), a smaller, redacted grammar of Old High German and Old Saxon morphology, was B.’s last, though his essays often proved to be profuse and ambitious in argumentation. In 1888, he began his tenure at the University of Heidelberg, taking over Karl Bartsch’s chair and becoming the first chair of the newly formed Germanisch-Romanisches Seminar. Though he continued to concentrate his research efforts on phonetics and morphology in Germanic languages, he taught courses on these as well as other subjects, such as Middle English, Middle High German literature, and Old Norse. Notable students include Karl Helm and Klara Hechtenberg Collitz. By the time of his retirement, B. had received several honors, including being named geheimer Hofrat II. Klasse of the German Empire in 1917. He retired as professor emeritus in 1919. His wife died in 1920, following the deaths of three of their five children. B. remained in Heidelberg until his death in 1926. Throughout his career, B. was primarily interested in scientific, systematic description of historical changes in Germanic languages and their morphology, an interest in common with other Neogrammarians. As some have pointed out, however, he seldom engaged in the theoretical debates the new movement fomented (see Hans Fromm, “Wilhelm Braune,” PBB 100 [1978]: 16). His dissertation, for instance, is not thought to be a Neogrammatical, or even philological work, as it sought to interpret Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneas in a literary-historical rather than linguistic-historical context insofar as he speculated on the Lower Rhenish origins of Heinrich’s native dialect and the transmission of the manuscripts as we have inherited them. He once again turned to Middle High German literary history when in 1900 he published “Die handschriftenverhältnisse des Nibelungenliedes”; there he

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argued for the preeminence of manuscript B as that which most closely approached the original and furthermore claimed that it, along with A, derived from the same original archetype, a move that put him at odds with the conclusion of Zarnke, who preferred C. B.’s most notable contributions to scholarship, however, were indeed philological and displayed an active curiosity in the geography of language change. B. himself penned the first essay of the Beiträge, “Zur Kenntnis des Fränkischen und zur hochdeutschen Lautverschiebung,” which discussed the isoglossical features of Rhenish Franconian (Rheinfränkisch) and their relation to the second Germanic sound shift. He addressed questions of Old High German orthography both in his Habilitationsschrift and in an essay, “Die altslovenischen Freisinger denkmäler in ihrem verhältnisse zur althochdeutschen orthographie” (PBB 1 [1874]: 527–34); the latter called upon his knowledge of Slavic languages gained from his studies with Leskien in Leipzig. Along with Karl Zangemeister, the librarian at Heidelberg, B. built upon discoveries Sievers made concerning the Old Saxon Genesis and Heliand in determining that the texts were written by two separate authors, a view still supported by most scholars. B. had completed and published his only books before leaving for Heidelberg in 1888, though he revised them into several editions. He was attuned to the practical needs of his colleagues and students in writing both his Gotische Grammatik (1880) and Althochdeutsche Grammatik (1886); as he wrote in the latter’s first edition, the purpose of the book was as a “grammatisches hülfsmittel für den lernenden” (“grammatical aid for the student”). While omitting syntactical analysis, these grammars comprehensively discuss the development of individual sounds (Lautlehre) and morphology (Flexionslehre) with respect to the differing dialects of Old High German. The Old High German grammar was intended as a companion to his Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (1875, 17th ed. 1994), which contains prose and verse texts from the different dialects and epochs of the language, as well as an expansive bibliography. B. is best remembered for his grammatical works, which teachers and students still employ today. They serve as the authoritative works for their respective languages not only in their conciseness, but also in their practical application for study: Gotische Grammatik entered an 18th edition in 1973, while the 14th edition of Althochdeutsche Grammatik was published in 1987. The Althochdeutsches Lesebuch has seen 17 editions, the most recent having been published in 1994. This popularity, however, has not insulated the grammars from some criticism: Fromm is not alone in deriding the many emendations that the various editions have seen since B.’s death as mere “Aufpfropfung” (“grafting”) that obscures the original aims of the author

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(“Wilhelm Braune,” PBB 100 [1978]: 17–18, note 19), while Jankowsky notes that the Neogrammarians are still criticized for their inattention to syntax in part because the grammars of B. and Paul neglected syntactic problems (The Neogrammarians, 1972: 166). In Sievers’s obituary on B., he lauded his friend for his objectivity (he was “unerschüttert in der sachlichkeit,” “unshaken in objectivity”). Indeed, B.’s essays have rightly been praised for their methodical precision and objectivity even if many of their conclusions later met with resistance or outright rejection. Theodor Frings would later concur with the conclusions B. reached in his dissertation, arguing against Carl von Kraus that the extant text of Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneas likely was a Thuringian redaction of a Lower Rhenish original (Theodor Frings, Drei Veldekestudien, 1949). For more than a half-century, B.’s conclusions on the manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied reigned – Sievers believed B. had solved most of the problems “definitiv” (“Wilhelm Braune,” PBB 51 (1927): III) and Panzer was convinced that B.’s organization of the manuscripts was “gesichert” (“assured”) (Friedrich Panzer, “Wilhelm Braune,” ZfdPh 52 [1927]: 162; see also the same author’s Das Nibelungenlied: Entstehung und Gestalt, 1955) – until Helmut Brackert subjected B.’s presuppositions to critical scrutiny; for one, he objected to the assumption that an original text could be recognized in the available manuscripts and fragments, although that particular text is no longer extant (Helmut Brackert, Beiträge zur Handschriftenkritik des Nibelungenlieds, 1963). As for the reception of his inaugural essay to the Beiträge, scholarship now views B.’s argument in favor of dialect boundaries as too strict, preferring to describe the differing Rhenish dialects in softer terms of zones. Yet Fromm, as do many who wrote about him, rightly commends B. for his methodology, new at the time, of drawing from non-literary Medieval records and employing them far more effectively than Karl Müllenhoff before him (for analysis of this debate, see Klaus Matzel, “Das Problem der ‘karlingischen Hofsprache’,” Mediaevalia litteraria, ed. Ursula Hennig and Herbert Kolb, 1971, 15–31). Select Bibliography Works: Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 17th ed. (1875; 1994); Gotische Grammatik. 18th ed. (1880; 1973); Althochdeutsche Grammatik. 14th ed. (1886; 1987); “Zur kenntnis des fränkischen und der hochdeutschen lautverschiebung,” PBB 1 (1874): 1–56; “Die handschriftenverhältnisse des Nibelungenliedes,” PBB 25 (1900): 1–222. Literature: Eduard Sievers, “Wilhelm Braune,” PBB 51 (1926): I–IV; Friedrich Panzer, “Wilhelm Braune,” ZfdPh 52 (1927): 158–164; Hans Fromm, “Wilhelm Braune,” PBB 100 (1978): 4–39.

Joshua M. H. Davis

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Brunner, Otto

Brunner, Otto (April 21, 1898, Mödling, greater Vienna – June 12, 1982, Hamburg), Austrian Historian. B. is considered one of the founders of a modern, methodologically reflected social and conceptual historiography as well as a chief practitioner of German regional history (Landesgeschichte). His successful study Land und Herrschaft (1939) examines territories in late-medieval Austria and discusses key concepts of medieval social and constitutional history, for example: peace and feud; state, law, and constitution; and house and household. Later publications, such as Adliges Landleben (1949), were informed by the early work, yet he now shifted the focus of his research to the early-modern era and placed it within a European context. His fervent rejection of the use of modern concepts for the study of pre-modern history prompted an interest in the study of the origin and semantic changes of historical terminology (Begriffsgeschichte). It culminated in the multi-volume lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, co-edited with Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, which is considered an important research tool for historians and jurists. B.’s legacy is overshadowed by his affiliation with the National Socialist regime and the overt Nazi agenda informing his early works. B. was born the son of a judge in Mödling, greater Vienna, on April 21, 1898. Raised Catholic, he later embraced anti-clericalism. After his father’s death in 1900, the family moved to Langenlois (Lower Austria). Following his mother’s remarriage in 1909, the family eventually relocated in Brünn (Moravia) where he attended the local German high school until 1916. In 1917, he was drafted into the military and participated in the First World War in Slovenia. From 1918 to 1922, B. studied history, geography, and economic and legal history at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung) in Vienna under Alfons Dopsch, Hans Hirsch, and Otto Redlich. Redlich also directed his dissertation on Austria and Walachia during the Turkish War, which was completed in 1922. In 1921, he married Stephanie Staudinger, a district attorney’s daughter. After receiving his Ph.D., B. began working as a cataloguer at the Family, Court and State Archive (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv) in Vienna (1923). During this time, he worked on his habilitation on medieval and early-modern Viennese financial history (“Finanzen der Stadt Wien von den Anfängen bis ins 16. Jahrhundert”), which he completed in 1929. B. was appointed untenured professor at the University of Vienna in 1931 and promoted to a tenured professorship in medieval and South-east German regional history in 1941. From 1940 to 1945, he served as the direc-

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tor of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research. At this time, B. co-directed the National Socialist Süddeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Vienna, a research group whose original mission was to prepare Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi-Germany ideologically. An ardent follower of the pan-German movement, B. was assigned the task of organizing the edition of an Austrian ethnic history (Volksgeschichte). Due to his involvement with the National Socialist government in Austria, he was demoted to the rank of associate professor in 1945 and forced into retirement in 1948. After spending considerable time working as an independent scholar, he held a visiting appointment at the University of Cologne in 1952 before succeeding Hermann Aubin as tenured Professor of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Hamburg in 1954. Here he crafted himself a remarkable institutional career and was named rector of the university for the 1959–60 term. He remained at Hamburg until his official retirement in 1966, but continued teaching until 1971. During his lifetime, B. was an acting member of numerous academic societies, for instance, the Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Hamburg, over which he presided from 1958 to 1960; the Akademie der Wissenschaften Mainz; and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Münster and Heidelberg. From 1968 to 1979, he was a co-editor of the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. He died in Hamburg on June 12, 1982. In Land und Herrschaft (1939), B. defines land as a community embracing the law, the ruler and the people, rather than a as a region or territory. He identifies the lord’s house (Haus) as the seat of his authority and the nucleus of seigneurialism and claims that the essence of lordship was derived from Germanic institutions. Famously reassessing the significance of the feud in late-medieval Austria, B. establishes violence as a legitimate means of conflict resolution and restoration of justice. The 4th edition (1959) was purged of the Nazi terminology and no longer aimed at writing a folk history (Volksgeschichte), but a structural history (Strukturgeschichte) instead. In the biographical study Adliges Landleben (1949), he employs in-depth archival research to examine the life and work of the Austrian aristocrat Helmhard von Hohberg (1612–1688) in the context of the intellectual, economic, and agrarian developments of the time and thus contributes to our understanding of provincial aristocratic culture in the 17th century. During his Hamburg years, B. published a number of influential essays dealing with general concepts of historiography. A selection appeared in the volume Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte (1956), later in an expanded edition as Neue Wege der Verfassungsund Sozialgeschichte (1980). Translations into Italian, Japanese, and Spanish followed soon thereafter. Here, B. revisited topics previously discussed in

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Land und Herrschaft, such as seigneurialism, sovereignty, and freedom, and placed them in a modern, European context. He also traced the evolution of the pre-modern European agrarian economy to the market economy of the industrialized age and examined the role of the autarkic household, thereby coining the expression of ‘the entire house’ (das ganze Haus). More specifically, he examined the influence of the familial, social, economic, and legal relationships within the household on the economy as perceived by earlymodern society up to the Enlightenment. Another area of interest during the 1950s and ’60s was that of sovereignty and its evolution in Europe, which he addressed in several essays. B. was also interested in the methodology and scope of the historical disciplines and auxiliary sciences, a topic he famously discussed in his inaugural address as rector of the University of Hamburg. The competent English translation of Land und Herrschaft (1992) stimulated renewed interest in the work and was followed by numerous reviews in journals of various disciplines. To this day, the work is hailed for identifying the application of the 19th-century model of the state to the Middle Ages as inadequate and instead resorting to concepts found in the sources (Arnold, EHR 110, No. 437 (1995): 708). While B.’s definition of lordship remains fruitful especially for early-modern historians (Kaminsky, Van Horn Melton, xxxviiif), critics of his constitutional model have pointed to the limited range of the territories studied and object to an application of B.’s findings beyond the Austrian context (ibid., xxvii). Equally disputed is the question whether the origin of his model and the concepts proposed can indeed be derived from the sources examined (ibid., xxviif.). A major area of controversy is B.’s affiliation with the National Socialist regime and his folkish (völkisch) approach to historiography, which is clearly present in the early editions of the work, but did not curb its impact on German and Austrian scholarship after 1945. In recent years, Gadi Algazi most prominently stressed the reactionary tendencies inherent in B.’s logic of argumentation and language, which in his view results in a form of totalitarian historiography (“Otto Brunner – ‘Konkrete Ordnung’ und Sprache der Zeit,” 181). Likewise, Adeliges Landleben (1949), B.’s second major study, was commended for its methodological originality. At the same time, it has been argued that the work is marked by B.’s – now less overt – Nazi agenda (Peter N. Miller, “Nazis and neo-stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich Before and After the Second World War,” Past & Present 176, 1 [2002]: 158). Select Bibliography Works: Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (1992). Originally published as: Land und

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Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, 4th rev. ed. (1959); Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist: Leben und Werk Wolf Helmharts von Hohberg, 1612–1688 (1949); Neue Wege der Verfassungs-und Sozialgeschichte. Vorträge und Aufsätze, 3rd exp. ed. (1980). Literature: Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Sozialgeschichte – Begriffsgeschichte – Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners,” VSWG 71 (1984): 305–04; Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch, Historische Studien 17 (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus Verlag, 1996); id., “Otto Brunner – ‘Konkrete Ordnung’ und Sprache der Zeit,” Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945, ed. Peter Schöttler, 2nd ed. (1997; Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), 166–203; Stefan Weiss, “Otto Brunner und das Ganze Haus: Die zwei Arten der Wirtschaftsgeschichte,” HZ 273.2 (2001): 335–69; Peter N. Miller, “Nazis and Neo-Stoics: Otto Brunner and Gerhard Oestreich Before and After the Second World War,” Past & Present 176.1 (2002): 144–86.

Judith Benz

Burdach, Konrad (May 29, 1959, Königsberg, Prussia – September 18, 1936, Berlin), German Literary Medievalist. B. surprised his contemporaries already as a 21-year-old with the 1880 publication, Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide. The work transformed minnesong research. The biographical-chronological approach, in which the lack of adequate documentary evidence always gave very hypothetical results, was complemented by interpretation based on stylistic and intellectual history. The book was a kind of vade mecum of Middle High German sung and spoken poetry and was re-printed essentially unchanged in 1928. In the last, incomplete, major work of his mature years B. left behind, which was also dedicated to Medieval literature and the origins of the “Grail”, he investigated the roots of European Medieval poetry. His second major research theme also enriched German philology at the end of the nineteenth century. This was the compilation of findings presented in his habilitation on the history of German as a written language. They formed the foundation of his third area of research, philological studies on Goethe. B. was able to dedicate himself fully to the continuation of his research in the field of the history of New High German as a written language from 1902, the year he was appointed to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The

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series of publications founded by him and financed by the Academy, “Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation” (From the Medieval Era to the Reformation) served as a medium for editions of previously unknown handwritten texts. The principal item was the publication of the prose dialogue discovered by B., “Der Ackerman aus Böhmen.” B.’s father was a district court judge. B. attended the Imperial grammar school in Königsberg from 1867 to 1876. After completion of his schooling, he was firmly convinced he wanted to study history and philology. In the summer of 1876, he began his studies in classical and German philology in Königsberg. From the winter of 1876–1877, he continued his studies in Leipzig, apart from a short interlude in Bonn in the summer of 1877, and graduated in Leipzig in 1880. He took up post-doctoral studies in Berlin to deepen his knowledge from 1880 to 1883. There he became a student of Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886), who treated his younger colleague with affection and esteem for his innovative writings on minnesong. In 1881, B. won a competition of the Grimm Foundation on a theme set by Wilhelm Scherer, “Die Sprache des jungen Goethe” (The Language of the young Goethe). During his period in Berlin, he began work on his habilitation text, “Die Einigung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache: Einleitung. Das 16. Jahrhundert” (The Unification of New High German as a Written Language: Introduction. The 16th century). His habilitation took place on 3. 5. 1884 in Halle. His inaugural lecture was dedicated to the “Entstehung des Goethischen Faust” (The Creation of Goethe’s Faust). B. pursued his academic career exclusively in Halle, where, apart from a two-year study tour from 1897 to 1899, he taught at the university for 18 years, from 1887 as extraordinary professor, and from 1892 as full professor and director of the German teaching college. Numerous attempts to get an appointment at another German university failed. In 1902 he was made a full member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The appointment to the Academy was made possible through the creation of three new posts by Emperor Wilhelm II on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the new positions granted by the emperor to be “preferably for German language research” (Imperial decree 14. 3. 1900). With his election to the Academy and his move to Berlin, B. was able to realize a long cherished wish to leave his teaching duties at the University of Halle. In a letter to Erich Schmidt (16. 10. 1902, Ziegengeist Brief 283) he wrote, “I never fitted in at Halle. Examinations university. Enormous support institution to the Prussian state, to cover its requirements in pastors and schoolmasters, oafish spirit of the students.” He worked at the Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1902 without a break until his death.

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During his period at the University of Halle, he continued his collaboration with Erich Schmidt on work begun by Wilhelm Scherer on the Weimar Goethe Edition. Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan was edited by him in 1887–1888 (I Section, vol. 6). Together with Erich Schmidt he also published the Kleinen Schriften (Minor Works) of their teacher Wilhelm Scherer, who had died in 1886. In the research position for German linguistics created especially for him at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he continued his investigation into the origins of written German and of German humanism, begun during the first half of his tenure in Halle. In his travels for research in the libraries and archives of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Austria and Italy, undertaken with the support of the Academy, he also endeavored, in close connection to the hand written tradition, to investigate the origin and beginnings of New High German in its written form: the state and development of which in the period from Luther to Goethe he had already repeatedly examined. The studies of handwritten texts led to the major compilation, which owed its existence to him, Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation (From the Middle Ages to the Reformation). At the end of his life the published work, undertaken with only a few collaborators, extended to 15 volumes. His dissertation, adapted for publication, Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide (1880), won high recognition from German literary scholars Wilhelm Scherer and Karl Müllenhoff in Berlin. His habilitation guaranteed his acceptance in learned society (Ziegengeist, “Briefwechsel,” 11). The Kleine Schriften von Wilhelm Scherer he published with Erich Schmidt in 1893 was mentioned in numerous reviews (incl. by Otto Behagel, Anton Bettelheim, Arthur Chuguet, Otto Harnack, Gustav Roethe), albeit with some critical comments, and the scholarly significance of the edition noted as well as respect paid to the achievements of the two editors (Ziegengeist, “Briefwechsel” 10). B.’s collected edition Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation was greatly admired. German literary scholar Günther Jungbluth judged it as follows “Burdach’s ambition to achieve universal relevance undoubtedly led him in interpretation of his sources to conclusions often well beyond the limited foundations of what was known, but his discoveries and ideas gave new and valuable impetus to research” (NDB 3, 41). Paul Piur sees B.’s work as an important survey of intellectual history, in which he was able to go beyond the narrow confines of specialist knowledge in German literary studies (Piur, 109).

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Select Bibliography Works: Reinmar der Alte und Walther von der Vogelweide, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Minnesangs, 2nd rev. ed. (1880; 1928); Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation (1893–1936), vol. 1–15; Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus (1918); Der Gral: Forschungen über seinen Ursprung und seinen Zusammenhang mit der Longinuslegende, ed. Hans Bork, 2nd rev. ed. Johannes Rathofer (1938, 1974); Kleine Schriften von Wilhelm Scherer, ed. Konrad Burdach und Erich Schmidt (1893), vol. 1 and 2. Editions: Goethes Werke, ed. by order of the Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen (Weimarer Ausgabe), 1. Abteilung. 1887–1919; (with Alois Bernt), Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, introduction, critical text, glossary (1917). Literature: Julius Petersen, “Konrad Burdach zum Gedächtnis,” Goethe Viermonatsschrift der Goethe-Gesellschaft 1 (1936): 306–309; Paul Piur, “Konrad Burdach zum Gedächtnis,” ZfdPh 62 (1937): 106–12; “Konrad Burdach – Erich Schmidt, Briefwechsel 1884–1912,” ed. Agnes Ziegengeist (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Hirzel 1998); Agnes Ziegengeist, “Der Konrad-Burdach-Nachlaß im Berliner Akademie-Archiv” [Mit ungedruckten Texten von Konrad Burdach, Rudolf Hildebrand, Erich Schmidt, Wolfgang Stammler], Zeitschrift für Germanistik N.F. 3 (1992): 670–83; Agnes Ziegengeist, “Konrad Burdach,” IGL, vol. 1 (2003), 297–300; Christoph König, “Der gespaltene Philologe: Konrad Burdach,” Hofmannsthal: Ein moderner Dichter unter den Philologen (Göttingen: Wallstein 2001), 198–213; Günther Jungbluth, “Burdach, Carl Ernst Konrad,” NDB 3, 41.

Gertrud Blaschitz

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C

Cappelli, Adriano (June 8, 1859, Modena – September 11, 1942, Vigotto, Parma), Italian Archivist and Paleographer. C.’s scholarly work exceeded local history and was not directly connected with his work as an archivist. The result of his personal research was published in two manuals: one on chronology and the other one on the most common Latin abbreviations in manuscripts and documents. In his handbook on chronology from the beginning of the Christian era until the present time, C. delivered, apart from notes of a general chronology, also chronological tables of the emperors, the popes, the rulers, and governments of all countries of Europe, as well as principal calendars, including feast-days. Even today this reference work is very valuable for its clarity of representation, even though the bibliography is no longer up-to-date. Beside this, he has published some articles on the reform of the calendar. C. became famous for his handbook on Latin abbreviations, which has been republished in different editions (1st ed. 1899). This repertorium preserves more than 15,000 alphabetically ordered terms from the Middle Ages until the 17th century. A large part of them were taken from earlier manuals, such as Johann Ludolph Walter, Lexicon diplomaticum … (1745–1747), while some others he collected from little-known documents, the provenance of which he unfortunately did not indicate. This handbook can be very easily used by professionals as well as by students today, and it can still be considered the best modern compilation of abbreviations. There are, however, some lacunae caused by the fact that C. did not include medical and astronomical manuscripts, and that he sometimes mixed real abbreviations with logograms and symbols. The signs of the High Middle Ages are from time to time confusingly repeated. C.’s work has also been translated into German. C.’s father, Antonio, was a librarian at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. C. studied in Florence and obtained his doctorate degree in philosophy at the Istituto di studi superiori. He was trained as an archivist and started his career in the public archives in Milan (1884). His supervisor was C. Cantù, with

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whom C. worked on the extensive archival materials of the famous ducal houses of Visconti and Sforza. During this collaboration he gained extraordinary experience in paleography and diplomatics, and acquired notable knowledge and erudition in historical sciences. In 1903, C. moved to Parma, where he was appointed director of the local public archives, and he kept this post until his retirement in December 1925. In recognition of his work in the archives, C. received the title of honorary director. He was also a mentor of studies of local history and therefore was nominated to be a member of the presidential council on the section of research on local history in Emilia and Romagna (Consiglio di presidenza della Deputazione di storia patria per l’Emilia e Romagna). Petrucci points out that C. did not become famous for his research in local history, but for his two manuals. Select Bibliography Works: Lexicon abbreviaturarum: dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, usate nelle carte e codici specialmente del Medio-evo, riprodotte con oltre 14000 segni incisi con l’aggiunta di uno studio sulla brachigrafia medioevale, un prontuario di sigle epigrafiche, l’antica numerazione romana ed arabica ed i segni indicanti monete, pesi, misure, etc. (1899; 6th re-ed. 1990); Cronologia, cronografia e calendario perpetuo dal principio dell’era cristiana ai nostri giorni (1906; 7th re-ed. 1998); “Una grida sulla riforma del calendario,” Archivio storico lombardo, 3rd series, 17 (1902): 471–73; “La riforma del calendario giuliano negli Stati di Parma e Piacenza,” Archivio storico per le provincie parmesi XXIIbis (1922): 91–98. Literature: Ludwig Traube, “Paleographische Anzeigen,” Neues Archiv 26 (1920): 229–40; Arnaldo Barilli, “Commemorazione del deputato emerito Comm. Dott. Prof. Adriano Cappelli,” Archivio storico per le provincie parmensi, 3rd series, 7/8 (1942/ 1943): XX; Armando Petrucci, “Cappelli, Adriano,” Dizionario Bibliografico Italiano 18 (1976): 720–21.

Christine Maria Grafinger

Cardini, Franco (August 5, 1940, Florence), Italian Historian/Medievalist. C. is the author of more than 120 monographs such as Il Barbarossa. Vita, trionfi e illusioni di Federico I imperatore (1985), Europa 1492 (1989), Il Medioevo in Europa (1999), Europa e Islam. Storia di un malinteso (1999), and Le crociate in Terrasanta nel Medioevo (2003). Along with other interests and fields of research, he is a

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specialist in topics that are strongly connected with Frederick I., Francesco of Assisi, medieval festivities, crusades, the political situation in the Holy Land and Europe in the Middle Ages such as the relation between Western society and Islam nowadays. In 1966, C. finished his studies at the University of Florence with a Ph.D. in Medieval History before doing his military service. In 1967, he was nominated assistant volunteer at the chair of Medieval History of the “Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia” (Faculty of Arts Subject) at the University of Florence. In 1968, he became a professor at the “Scuole Medie Superiori” (Junior High School). In the same year, C. obtained his diploma in paleography at the specialized school “Archivio di Stato di Firenze.” After several stays as a scholarship holder in Poitiers and Moscow, C. became a university assistant at the chair of “Storia Medievale e Moderna della Facoltà di Magistero dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze” (Medieval and Modern History in Florence) in 1971. In the same year, C. was nominated “Professore Incaricato di Storia medievale.” From 1971 to 1985, C. was teaching Medieval History not only in Florence, but also in Paris, Poitiers, Göttingen, Barcelona, Burlington, Turku, São Paulo, Amman and Jerusalem. In 1978, 1980, and 1984 he was a lecturer teaching “Italian History and Culture” at the Middlebury College Summer Sessions in Vermont (USA). From 1985 to 1989, C. was holding a professorship for Medieval History at the University of Bari (Puglia/ Italy). Since 1989, he has been a full professor of Medieval History at the University of Florence. Among other activities, C. was Directeur de Recherches at the “École des Hautes Études” in Paris (1991–92), member of the Administration Council of the Italian Television RAI (July 1994–July 1996) and visiting professor at the “Freie Universität Berlin” (1996). In 1996, C. was nominated member of the National Italian Commission of the UNESCO. Besides various memberships in scientific councils, including the Scientific Committee of the “Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo” (Institute of Italian History for the Middle Ages) in Rome (2003), C. was a lecturer at the University of San Marino. He also taught at the “Pontificia Università Lateranense” (Pontifical University of the Lateran) in Vatican City and at the “Istituto Universitario Suor Orsola Benincasa” in Naples. Among his extensive bibliography, one can find his first publication, Le crociate tra il mito e la storia (1971), in which C. deals with the crusades separating the myths from the historical facts. Having a view of C.’s critic literature, the crusades reappear continually in studies such as Studi sulla storia e sull’idea di crociata (1993), in I colori dell’avventura. Le crociate e il regno ‘franco’ di Gerusalemme (1994) about the Franconian state in Jerusalem, and in a contribution published in collaboration with Domenico Del Nero dealing with the

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Children’s Crusade, La crociata dei fanciulli (1999). The crusades are also the main topic in several books such as Le crociate. La storia oltre il mito (1999), Le crociate (1999), La croce, la spada, l’avventura. Introduzione alla crociata (2000) and in his report on crusades in the Holy Land, titled Le crociate in Terrasanta nel Medioevo (2003). In La strega nel Medioevo. Resistenza pagana al cristianesimo, condizione femminile, emarginazione sociale (1977) and in Magia, stregoneria, superstizioni nell’Occidente medievale (1979), C. illustrated the role of witches, superstition and magic in the Middle Ages. C.’s preoccupation with witches is also reflected in Radici della stregoneria. Dalla protostoria alla cristianizzazione dell’Europa (2000) wherein C. represents the beginning of witchcraft up to the Christianization of Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Numerous of C.’s books deal with medieval cavalry and war, e. g., Alle radici della cavalleria medievale (1981, new ed. 2004), Guerre di primavera. Studi sulla cavalleria e la tradizione cavalleresca (1992) and Quella antica festa crudele. Guerra e cultura della guerra dal Medioevo alla Rivoluzione francese (1995), giving an overview on the culture of war from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. C. published several volumes treating the topic of medieval sacral festivities, such as I giorni del sacro. Il libro delle feste (1983), La festa di san Giovanni e le acque in Italia (1990), which deals with the celebration of Saint John, and Il cerchio sacro dell’anno. Il libro delle Feste (1995). With his biography on Frederick I, Il Barbarossa. Vita, trionfi e illusioni di Federico I imperatore (1985), C. does not only reach medievalists, but also a wider audience interested in the Middle Ages and in the vita of the Emperor. In this book, C. does not only describe the adventurous life of the Emperor himself, but also gives an overview from the beginnings of the empire of Charlemagne up to the death of Frederick I. C. tries to present the real personality of the Roman Emperor, King of Germany, Italy and Bourgogne, a person whose name is associated with many legends. C., however, tries to separate legends from objective facts in order to make a contribution to historiography on the “real” Frederick I, a man considered “magnanimous” and “cruel” at the same time. The role of Frederick is also examined in a chapter of La vera storia della Lega Lombarda (1992), dealing with the resistance of the Lombardic League of Cities against Frederick I. Six years later, a remarkable book on Charlemagne, Carlomagno. Un padre della patria europea (1998) was published, wherein the importance of Charlemagne as a “European Father” and his function as a symbol of European identity are subject of discussion. In 1989, C. published another important biography, this time on Francesco d’Assisi, in which he narrates Francesco’s life creating the fascinating

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image of the person, yet without simplifying problematical aspects in the vita of the Holy Poor. C. aims at creating the portrait of a Saint whose texts were often read and interpreted in opposing ways because of the heterogeneity of the fonts and a reading that can be considered as naïve and compromising. Europe in the Middle Ages. Europa 1492 (1989) gives a portrait of the continent 500 years ago. C. treats history, life and culture of the second half of the 15th century. Numerous illustrations of medieval courtly and “normal” life support the understanding of what C. imparts to the reader in the various chapters on European politics, the Faith in God and the endeavor to explore new countries in the East such as the mythical realm of Priest John. C.’s preoccupation with themes treating Europe in the Middle Ages is also shown by Europa anno Mille. Le radici dell’Occidente (1995). C. describes the waiting for the Antichrist, the climate one thousand years ago, the influence of Byzantine architecture, sea voyages and techniques of war. Demonic figures and the belief in wonders are mentioned as well as the world of the book, the Institution of the Church, or the development of medieval cities. Medieval cities can be considered one of C.’s favorite topics since he composed several historic portrayals of his native town Florence such as Breve storia di Firenze (1990), Firenze. La città delle torri, dalle origini al 1333 (1995) and Storia illustrata di Firenze (2005). Beyond Florence, C. investigated in the history of Ferrara and Prato: Le occasioni e la storia. Studi per Ferrara (1994), Storia illustrata di Prato (2003), Breve storia di Prato (2004). In a volume with Maria Teresa Beonio Brocchieri Fumagalli on the oldest European universities, Antiche università d’Europa (1991), C. shows the development of the most prestigious universities that mainly emerged from cathedral schools, and became an advertising media for cities (e. g., Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Salamanca, Prague, Vienna) as lots of students and scholars moved to those cities in order to learn or teach there. The often conflict-ridden relations between Europe and Islam both in the Middle Ages and nowadays come to light in Europa e Islam. Storia di un malinteso (1999), prefaced by Jacques Le Goff, wherein C. describes misunderstandings, confrontations, and encounters between Christians and Moslems from the beginnings to the present. Beside his publications on the topics mentioned above, C. published numerous books on various themes. Volumes on the historical development from feudalism to bourgeoisie (with Giovanni Cherubini), Dal feudalismo al trionfo della borghesia (1983), on the public palaces of Tuscany, Palazzi pubblici di Toscana. I centri minori (1983), the Italian courts of the Renaissance (with Stefano Bertelli and Elvira Garbero Zorzi), Le corti italiane del Rinasci-

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mento (1985), and the relation between Jerusalem, the Holy Land and Europe, Gerusalemme, la Terrasanta e l’Europa (1987), are followed by Dal medioevo alla medievistica (1989), a book explaining how medievalism has become an important researching field in science. As far as travelling is concerned, one can find information on the medieval pilgrim not only in Gerusalemme d’oro, di rame, di luce. Pellegrini, crociati sognatori d’Oriente fra XI e XV secolo (1991) in the context of persons who wanted to explore the world towards East, but also in In Terrasanta. Pellegrini italiani tra Medioevo e prima età moderna (2002) where C. talks about the lives of pilgrims, their diaries and their deep faith. But C. is not only known as an author of critical literature, as his fantasy novel Il giardino d’inverno (1996) testifies. The story begins in Sicily at the court of Frederick II and leads the protagonist, Erec di Vannes, to Palestine and other countries of Minor Asia where he fights against wizards and ghosts, trying to arrive at the Garden of Life. The story, written in the tradition of fantastic literature, focuses on the clash of the Christian and the Islamic culture. To do justice to C.’s enormous oeuvre, the publications on topics such as the Three Wise Men, the Templars, Jews, popes, Joanne of Arc, inquisition and his book on the invention of the occident must be mentioned at this point. In his most recent publications, C. describes world conflicts since the reign of Charles V (Le radici perdute dell’Europa. Da Carlo V ai conflitti mondiali, with Sergio Valzania, 2006) and deals again with the conflict-ridden relations between Christianity and Islam (Io e Te. Il cristiano e il saraceno, 2006). Select Bibliography Works: Le crociate tra il mito e la storia (1971); Il movimento crociato (1972); La strega nel Medioevo. Resistenza pagana al cristianesimo, condizione femminile, emarginazione sociale. Le basi del problema (1977); Magia, stregoneria, superstizioni nell’Occidente medievale (1979); Alle radici della cavalleria medievale (1981; new ed. 2004); Quell’antica festa crudele. Guerra e cultura della guerra dall’età feudale alla grande rivoluzione (1982; new ed. 1987; 2nd ed. 1988 and 1995); Dal feudalismo al trionfo della borghesia (1983); I giorni del sacro. Il libro delle feste (1983); Palazzi pubblici di Toscana. I centri minori (with S. Raveggi, 1983); Il Barbarossa. Vita, trionfi e illusioni di Federico I imperatore (1985; new ed. 1990); Le corti italiane del Rinascimento (with S. Bertelli and E. Garbero Zorzi, 1985); Gerusalemme, la Terrasanta e l’Europa (1987); Dal medioevo alla medievistica (1989); Francesco d’Assisi (1989; new ed. 1991); Europa 1492 (1989; as Europe 1492. Portrait of a Continent Five Hundred Years Ago, 1989); Breve storia di Firenze (1990); La festa di san Giovanni e le acque in Italia (1990); La vera storia della Lega Lombarda (1991; new ed. 1992); Antiche università d’Europa (with M.T. Beonio Brocchieri Fumagalli, 1991); Gerusalemme d’oro, di rame, di luce. Pellegrini, crociati, sognatori d’Oriente fra XI e XV secolo (1991); I poveri cavalieri del Cristo. Bernardo di Clairvaux e la fondazione dell’Ordine templare (1992); Guerre di primavera. Studi sulla cavalleria e la tradizione cavalleresca (1992); Forces of Faith (1993); Studi sulla storia e sull’idea di crociata (1993); I colori dell’avventura. Le crociate e il regno ‘franco’ di Gerusalemme (1994); Le occasioni e la storia. Studi per Ferrara (1994); Noi e l’Islam (1994); L’invenzione dell’Occidente

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(1995; new ed. 2004); Firenze. La città delle torri, dalle origini al 1333 (2000, 1995); Demoni e meraviglie. Magia e stregoneria nella società medievale (1995); Il cerchio sacro dell’anno. Il libro delle Feste (1995); Gli ebrei. Popolo eletto e perseguitato (1995); Europa anno Mille. Le radici dell’Occidente (2000, 1995); Il pellegrinaggio. Una dimensione della vita medievale (1996); Il giardino d’inverno (1996); L’avventura dell’Islam (1996); Cultura e società nella Toscana medievale. Firenze e Prato (1996); Il Santo Graal (1997); Le radici cristiane dell’Europa. Mito, storia, prospettive (1997); Giovanna d’Arco (1998); Carlomagno. Un padre della patria europea (1998); La crociata dei fanciulli (with D. Del Nero, 1999); Il Medioevo in Europa (1999); Le crociate. La storia oltre il mito (1999); L’Inquisizione (1999); La nascita dei templari. San Bernardo di Chiaravalle e la cavalleria mistica (1999); Europa e Islam. Storia di un malinteso (1999); Il Saladino. Una storia di crociati e saraceni (1999); Federico Barbarossa. Il sogno dell’impero (2000); Radici della stregoneria. Dalla protostoria alla cristianizzazione dell’Europa (2000); La croce, la spada, l’avventura. Introduzione alla crociata (2000); I Re Magi. Storia e leggende (2000); Fratelli in Abramo. Breve storia parallela dell’ebraismo e dell’Islam (2000); L’apogeo del Medioevo. I secoli XII–XIII (2001); In Terrasanta. Pellegrini italiani tra Medioevo e prima età moderna (2002); Per essere Franco. Le rabbie di uno che non sta bene a nessuno (2003); Le crociate in Terrasanta nel Medioevo (2003); Storia illustrata di Prato (2003); Breve storia di Prato (2004); La lunga storia dell’Inquisizione. Luci e ombre della ‘leggenda nera’ (with M. Montesano, 2005); Storia illustrata di Firenze (2005); La globalizzazione. Tra nuovo ordine e caos (2005); Le radici perdute dell’Europa. Da Carlo V ai conflitti mondiali (with Sergio Valzania, 2006); L’invenzione del nemico (2006); Io e Te. Il cristiano e il saraceno (2006). Literature: http://www.francocardini.net (last accessed on September 7, 2009, only available in Italian); http://www.emsf.rai.it/biografie/anagrafico.asp?d=398 (last accessed on September 7, 2009, site of the Italian Television RAI, only available in Italian).

Daniel Rötzer

Castro (y Quesada), Américo (May 4, 1885, Cantagalo, Rio de Janeiro – July 25, 1972, Lloret de Mar, Gerona Province, Spain), Philologist, Literary Critic, Historian. C.’s major contribution – among many – to the study of Spanish literature, culture, and history is his “revolutionary,” revisionist demythification of the Spaniards’ – intellectuals, scholars, and laymen – perspectives on their national past, on the formation of their distinctive culture, and on how that culture distinguished Spain from the rest of Europe. C.’s reevaluation of the crucially important presence of Muslims and Jews (i. e., Muslim and Jewish Spaniards) throughout the Middle Ages and, as persecuted converts, also during the 1500s, 1600s, and even 1700s, is essential to any study of C.’s thought.

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The catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was a crucial, determining factor in radically transforming C.’s intellectual and scholarly perspectives and goals. How could his beloved country have possibly arrived at and perpetrated such a suicidal, fratricidal disaster? C.’s anagnorisis, his recognition of the earlier mythification of Spanish history, led him to propose a radically different view of how Spanish culture had been formed during the Middle Ages and how it had evolved – eminently European, but, at the same time, very different from that of its neighbors. In appraising C.’s intellectual life and his contributions to scholarship, we are, then, faced with two radically different stages: the pre- and the post-1937 C. The year of his exile and arrival in America marked a decisive, crucially important divide. In 1940, C. was called to Princeton University, where he was invited to occupy the Emory L. Ford Chair of Spanish. The radical change in his perspectives and purposes is eloquently documented in his acceptance lecture, Meaning of Spanish Civilization (Princeton 1940; rpt. in 1976 and 1977). C.’s parents, Antonio Castro and Carmen Quesada, were both Andalusians, from Granada in Southern Spain. His parents were in South America, where his father was conducting business in Argentina and Brazil, when Américo was born, in the little town of Cantagalo, some 130 kilometers northeast of Rio de Janeiro. Parents and child soon returned to Granada (1889), where Américo would study law and literature at the University of Granada. He earned his degree (licencia) in 1904 and the following year traveled to Paris to continue his studies at the Sorbonne. C. remained there until 1908 and then returned to Spain to study at the University of Madrid (Universidad Central), earning his doctorate in Filosofía y Letras in 1911. In Madrid, C. came into close contact with such distinguished intellectuals and scholars as Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the innovative Institución Libre de Enseñanza, and especially with Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the brilliant polymath and far-ranging scholar, who founded the Centro de Estudios Históricos and who brought to Spain modern philological and critical methods, based on rigorous Central-European norms developed in Germany in the 19th century. Menéndez Pidal’s influence, especially on the pre-1937 C., was incalculably important. Crucial, too, were C.’s ongoing contacts and friendship with the brilliant Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, whose important influence on C.’s thought and writings is clearly manifested during both stages, pre- and post-1937, in C.’s teaching and vast scholarly production. Early on, C. threw himself, with unbounded energy, enthusiasm, and passion, into Madrid’s intellectual life, not only in his vastly important contributions to specialized scholarship, but also in his intense interest in Spanish and Hispano-American society and their urgent need to

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catch up with ongoing developments in the rest of the modern world. Most particularly, C. was deeply concerned with the quality of Spanish education. From 1926 on, he regularly contributed short essays, on a vast number of topics, to the Madrid newspaper El Sol and to La Nación in Buenos Aires. Years later, C. was to bring many of these notes, essays, and editorials together in a fascinating three-volume work: De la España que aún no conocía (1972). These pre-Civil War writings often anticipate and portend C.’s deep concern with the destiny of Spain and its distinctive culture as well as with the mythification of its early history. As part of C.’s intellectual background, his extensive travels must be mentioned. Throughout his life, C. traveled all over Hispano-America, Europe, and the U.S., giving lectures and classes: Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, France, Italy, the U.S.; in 1930–31, he was a Gastprofessor at the University of Berlin, and in 1931 he was named ambassador to Germany by the Republican government. In 1935 and 1936, he was given doctorates honoris causa by the Universities of Poitiers and Paris (Sorbonne). Two of C.’s early trips seem to have been particularly important: his field work in Zamora Province (1912), which intensified his interest in Spanish dialectology and the pre-history of the Spanish language (El dialecto leonés, 1913) and, even more important, his stay in Morocco, aimed at studying the archaic dialects of Sephardic Jewish communities. In Morocco, C. experienced, at first hand, an archaic, tri-religious society – the symbiosis (convivencia) of Muslims, Jews and Christians – which must inevitably have reminded him of medieval Spain. C.’s pre-Civil War scholarly writings can be characterized as consistently brilliant achievements in literary criticism, philology, and linguistics. Some of the most important titles are: El dialecto leonés de Zamora (1913); Fueros leoneses (with Federico de Onís, 1916); Vida de Lope de Vega (with H. A. Rennert, 1919; 1968); Biblia medieval romanceada (collaborative, 1927); Santa Teresa y otros ensayos (1929; 1971); Glosarios latino-españoles (1936). Without doubt the crowning achievement of the pre-Civil War writings is El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925) – a vindication of Cervantes, as a brilliant, far-ranging Renaissance author – which merited over 40 reviews in Europe and the Americas (rev. ed.: Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, 1972). C.’s numerous, rigorously annotated editions of medieval and Golden Age literary works are also characteristic of the pre-Civil War period. C.’s departure from Spain in 1937 and his taking refuge in the U.S. were attended by what can only be characterized as an intellectual – almost a quasireligious – transfiguration. The first major work written during his American exile was España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948; 1983; 2004).

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Under a variety of different titles and in diverse, ongoing transformations, this book was to become C.’s crowning achievement: La realidad histórica de España (1954); The Structure of Spanish History (1954); La Spagna nella sua realità storica (1955); Spanien: Vision und Wirklichkeit (1956); Réalité de l’Espagne: Histoire et valeurs (1963); The Spaniards: An Introduction to their History (1971). As we have seen, C. corrected, revised, amplified and kvetched about each one of his work’s scholarly avatars. During the rest of his life, C. was also to write and publish a series of brilliant ancillary books, all of which can, in a sense, be viewed as massive footnotes to La realidad histórica and its various transformations. Among eleven other crucially important book-length publications, perhaps Hacia Cervantes (1960) and Cervantes y los casticismos (1966) are among the most significant. Inevitably, C.’s radical reevaluation of Spanish history and literature was to be strenuously opposed by various Spanish scholars, as well as by certain Hispanists from other countries. Principal among his various opponents was Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (España: Un enigma histórico, 1956–1971). Sánchez-Albornoz’s irreconcilable opposition to (or perhaps even hatred of) C.’s ideas sometimes obviously borders on the obsessive. But other colleagues agreed with and enthusiastically accepted what C. had achieved. Stephen Gilman’s brilliant reconstruction of The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (1972), to say nothing of various other pathfinding works, builds on C.’s discoveries, as does his Novel According to Cervantes (1989). Through numerous original discoveries, Francisco Márquez Villanueva continues, brilliantly and innovatively, to expand and elaborate on C.’s ideas. Albert Sicroff’s pathbreaking work on the Inquisition likewise brilliantly builds on C.’s findings (Les controverses des statuts de ‘pureté de sang’ en Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle, 1960). James T. Monroe’s pathfinding Hispano-Arabic studies were initially inspired by Don Américo. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, as editor of a new edition of El pensamiento de Cervantes (1972), has also made fundamental contributions to C.’s legacy. Beside that, we should take into account the crucially important series: Américo Castro, Obra reunida, ed. José Miranda, to be published in six volumes, of which three have already appeared (2002–2004). The volumes include extensive introductory studies by the various editors. Luce López-Baralt’s pathfinding Golden Age, HispanoArabic, and Morisco investigations are certainly also inspired, at least in part, by C.’s work. And now, new generations of American and Spanish Hispanists – too numerous to be specified here – have taken up and productively elaborated upon C.’s thought. After so many bitter polemics during his lifetime, C. would have been more than pleased by the ongoing triumph of his ideas.

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Select Bibliography Works: There are five extensive, mutually supplementary, bibliographies of C.’s works. The most complete, to which I remit here by date, is Homenaje a Américo Castro, ed. José Jesús Bustos Tovar and Joseph H. Silverman (1987), 15–33 (446 items). Literature: Guillermo Araya, El pensamiento de Américo Castro (Madrid: Alianza, 1983); José Luis Gómez-Martínez, Américo Castro y el origen de los españoles (Madrid: Gredos, 1975); Pedro Laín Entralgo, ed., Estudios sobre la obra de Américo Castro (Madrid: Taurus, 1971); Eduardo Subirats, ed., Américo Castro y la revisión de la memoria: El Islam en España (Madrid: Libertarias, 2003).

Samuel G. Armistead

Chenu, Marie-Dominique, O.P. (1895–1990), French Dominican Priest and Scholar of Medieval Theology. C. was born in the vicinity of Paris, entered the Dominican Order at the age of 18, and studied in Rome during World War I. He did his doctoral studies on contemplation in the theology of Thomas Aquinas at the Angelicum University in Rome and served as professor of the history of Christian doctrines at the Dominican theological school, Le Saulchoir, from 1920 to 1942. In 1930, together with Étienne Gilson, he founded the Institute of Medieval Studies in Canada and taught there for three months of the year. In 1937–1938, he called for Dominicans to study Islamic thought, contributing to the formation of a new school in Cairo. After being censured by Roman Catholic Church authorities, he left Le Saulchoir in 1942, teaching at the Sorbonne from 1944 to 1951 and joining the faculty of the Institut Catholique in Paris in 1953. He was an advisor to a bishop at Vatican II. When C. entered the field of medieval theology, most Catholic scholarship was dominated by an abstract, syllogistic, neo-scholastic approach that largely neglected the social dynamics of the medieval context, that downplayed the role of symbolism, that sharply separated theology from spirituality, and that distrusted appeals to religious experience as dangerously subjective. Influenced by the Annales school of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, C. studied the economic and social background of medieval theology, especially its connections to changes in society in the 12th and 13th centuries. In a talk given in 1936, published the following year, C. set forth a program to renew Catholic theology by introducing a historical methodology and

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calling attention to the role of the experience of faith in medieval theology (Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, 1937; rpt. with commentaries on the controversy that followed: G. Alberigo, M.-D. Chenu, E. Fouilloux, J.-P. Jossua, J. Ladriére, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, 1985). Some powerful ecclesiastical officials rejected this appeal as relativistic, and in 1942 Vatican authorities placed C.’s programmatic work on the Index of Forbidden Books. Nonetheless, C.’s work continued to be widely respected. His immensely influential article, “Le plan de la somme théologique de S. Thomas” (RTh 47 [1939]: 93–107) argued that the structure of Aquinas’s Summa Théologiae was Platonic, rooted in the exitus-reditus scheme, the emanation of creation from God and its return to God. C. transformed the way scholars understand the historical context, the literary forms, and the language and vocabulary of Aquinas, especially in his groundbreaking Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin (1950; 2nd ed. 1954; English trans. Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. of the original ed. with authorized corrections and bibliographical additions, A.-M. Landry, O.P. and D. Hughes, O.P., 1964). He wrote a more popular study of Aquinas (St. Thomas d’Aquin et la théologie, 1959; English trans. Aquinas and His Role in Theology, trans. Paul Philibert, O.P., 2002). C.’s historical approach to Aquinas’s theology was a major factor in the demise of the abstract neo-scholastic synthesis and its hegemony in Catholic thought. C. was deeply interested in relating the study of medieval theology to contemporary social and economic problems (Pour une théologie du travail, 1955; English trans. The Theology of Work: An Exploration, trans. Lilian Soiron, 1966; Théologie de la matière: Civilisation technique et spiritualité chrétienne, 1967). C. transformed the study of theology of the 12th century, stressing the new awareness of nature, history, and grammar, the vital importance of the symbolic mentality, the creativity of interpretation of the Old Testament, the dynamic sense of tradition and progress, the new conditions for teaching theology, and the birth of scholasticism (La théologie au douzième siècle, 1957; partial English trans. Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, 1968). C. argued that in the 12th century, new forms of moral conscience and of self-consciousness emerged together with new conceptions of sin and moral intention and new practices of confession and examination of conscience (L’éveil de la conscience dans la civilization médiévale, 1969). Jacques Le Goff acknowledged C. as a major influence on his thought (“Le père Chenu et la société médiévale,” RSPT 81 [1997]: 371–80). Jean Jolivet offered a helpful overview of C.’s contribution (“M.-D. Chenu, Médiéviste et théologien,” RSPT 81 [1997]: 381–94). Jean-Claude Schmitt stressed the relation of C. to the Annales School and to the historical method

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of Marie-Joseph Lagrange (“L’œuvre de médiéviste du père Chenu,” RSPT 81 [1997]: 395–406). Inos Biffi has studied the influence of C. in Italy, as the standard authority for 12th- and 13th-century Christian theology (“Presenza e influsso di M.D. Chenu in Italia,” RSPT 75 [1991]: 469–89), and A. Franco has studied his theory of knowledge (“L’epistemologia teologica di M.-D. Chenu,” Synaxis 5 [1987]: 7–71). The book-length studies of C.’s thought to date have focused more on his contribution to contemporary Catholic theology than on his influence in medieval studies. Christophe Potworowski argued that a contemplative approach to the incarnation is the structural center of C.’s theology and suggested there are limitations of C. in relation to contemporary hermeneutical and critical theory (Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu, 2001). Emilio del Rio, S.J., together with two of his colleagues, offered a summary and analysis of C., but refrained from any critical engagement (Fe, Inteligencia y Teología: La Teología: Congar, Chenu, Deman, 1963). Select Bibliography A full bibliography of works by C. may be found in Potworowski, 237–321; for a bibliography of works about C., see id., 322–28; for an earlier bibliography of C.’s works, see André Duval, O.P., “Bibliographie du P. Marie-Dominique Chenu (1921–1965),” Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu, maître en théologie, Bibliothèque thomiste 37 (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 9–29; Marie-Dominique Chenu, La parole de Dieu, vol. 1, La foi dans l’intelligence (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964), vol. 2, L’Évangile dans le temps (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1964); Josep-Ignasi Saranyana, “Marie-Dominque Chenu (1895–1990),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 183–93.

Leo D. Lefebure

Cleasby, Richard (November 30, 1797, Craig House, Westmorland – October 6, 1847, Copenhagen), English Philologist. C. was an English philologist with a special emphasis on Icelandic. He was one of the first English scholars of the modern language, had a special interest in Old Norse, and ultimately contributed significantly to the compilation of the first English dictionary of Old Norse/Icelandic. This dictionary remains a standard work of Scandinavian philology today.

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C.’s family was wealthy and prominent. His younger brother, Sir Anthony Cleasby, was a noted judge; his father, Stephen Cleasby, had a sizable brokerage business in London. C.’s personal situation allowed him to devote the bulk of his life to travel and study. After attending school in London, C. began to work in his father’s business at the age of fifteen, but left the business in 1824 and left England for Europe. The following four years, he was busy traveling throughout Europe, spending most of his time in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany. In 1828, he went to Edinburgh to study, but left the city in the spring of 1829. In 1830, C. began to study philosophy and Germanic philology in Munich. He soon became especially interested in German dialects (although he does not seem to have published anything on them). He traveled widely in Germany to investigate them, and was able to establish solid contacts with several important dialectologists and scholars of the time, including Jacob Grimm and Johann Andreas Schmeller. In 1833, C. met the well-known Swedish poet and churchman Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846), who encouraged him to visit Scandinavia. This meeting led C. to travel to Denmark and Sweden in 1834 and also piqued his interest in the Scandinavian languages, thus setting him on the path to his major intellectual achievement, namely his Icelandic dictionary. Before beginning work on his dictionary, though, C. collated the most famous manuscript of the Gothic Bible, the Codex Argenteus, located in Uppsala; his work on that manuscript was completed in 1839. By 1839, C. had begun to study Icelandic, with a native speaker of the language to help him, and in 1840, he left England once again and settled down in Copenhagen. Then, as today, Copenhagen was a major center for the study of Icelandic and the other Scandinavian languages where a number of Icelandic manuscripts were available for use, and moving there was therefore a good decision on C.’s part. Unfortunately, he had to face a number of problems when working on his Icelandic dictionary. The need for such a work was apparent – in a letter to a friend written in 1840, C. stated that he was preparing the dictionary “to get an unaccountable and most scandalous blank filled up” (quoted in Garnett/ Haigh, “Cleasby, Richard (1797–1847),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5583). Moreover, C. had the time, money, and understanding of the subject that were required to do the work. However, he had struggled with health problems for years (he had developed a liver problem while in Italy, which had forced him to frequently visit Carlsbad, and also suffered from rheumatism), and family issues, specifically the death of his mother in 1841 and that of his father in 1844, compelled him to occupy much of his time with financial matters. He did have other scholars collecting data for him, and by 1846, a dictionary of poetic

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vocabulary, prepared by a Dr. Egilsson under C.’s direction, was ready for print. In 1847, C. had completed a few entries in his planned prose dictionary. Several scholars, including Jacob Grimm, to whom C. had sent the specimens, commented favorably on them. Unfortunately, C.’s health continued to worsen, and that same year he died of typhoid fever in Copenhagen. The dictionary was far from complete at his death, but C.’s heirs decided to sponsor its completion financially. Konrad Gislason, who had helped C. study Icelandic a number of years earlier and had been working on the dictionary since 1840, took over the task of completing the project. By 1854, the material that had been collected was ready for publication, but C.’s heirs became concerned with the cost of the project and therefore had the material sent to England. The unpublished material was then passed to G. Webbe Dasent, a well-known scholar of Scandinavian linguistics and philology. Dasent attempted to convince the Clarendon Press to publish the dictionary, but nothing seems to have happened until 1864, at which point Dasent obtained a grant from the Press to finish preparing the work for publication. Due to various other commitments, Dasent was not in a position to do the work himself, and he therefore hired an Icelandic scholar named Gudbrand Vigfusson to do the work. Vigfusson both edited and refined the material that had been prepared by C. or under C.’s direction, and was able to make numerous additions and improvements to it, both because of his extensive training in the subject and because Old Icelandic texts that had been unavailable to C. had become accessible in the meantime. The first edition of C.’s An IcelandicEnglish Dictionary (1874) lists both C. and Vigfusson on the title page, with C.’s name coming first; it included an introduction and biography of C. written by Dasent. A second edition, containing a supplement by Sir William Craigie, appeared in 1957. Assessing C.’s contributions to medieval studies is difficult, since his only major contribution to the field was his dictionary, and it is clear that the published version of the dictionary contains far more of Vigfusson’s work than it does of C.’s. (G. Webbe Dasent admits as such in his preface to the first edition.) Leaving that aside, the dictionary did and does fill a very real need. It remains the standard dictionary of Old Norse/Icelandic, and has served as source material for various smaller dictionaries, including Geir T. Zoëga’s A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910). The dictionary would never have been completed without C.’s genuine enthusiasm for the project and his generous financial support of it before his death, nor without the continued support from his family for a number of years after C.’s death, and as such C. deserves praise for his contribution to medieval studies.

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Select Bibliography Literature: G. Webbe Dasent, “Introduction and Memoir,” Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic – English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), xlv–lix, lxi–civ; Richard Garnett, rev. by John D. Haigh, “Cleasby, Richard (1797–1847),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5583).

Marc Pierce

Cohen, Gustave (-David) (December 24, 1879, SaintJosse-ten-Noode-lez-Bruxelles, Belgium – June 9, 1958, Paris), Belgian-French Medievalist. A prolific literary scholar and dynamic teacher, C.’s lasting contribution consists in elevating the study and performance of medieval drama to unprecedented levels. His expertise extended to medieval art and ideas as well as philology and his diachronic command of French literature (from medieval through to the 20th century) and multi-national approach, particularly the exchange between France and the Low Countries. Moreover, the Dreyfus Affair, his World War I military service and activist exile during the Occupation shaped his emergence as a public intellectual. The son of a Jewish paper manufacturer from Marseilles and his Belgian wife, who had moved to Brussels after suffering ruin near Paris in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), C. was born and educated in the Brussels area through high school (Ixelles Atheneum). He traveled widely throughout Europe, even into Africa, earned his law doctorat at Brussels (1903), then studied at Liège with Maurice Wilmotte, took his licence in literature at Lyon (1909), then taught for 3 years at the Schweitzer institute, and studied at the nearby Sorbonne and École des Hautes Études, in Paris. His most eminent mentors included Joseph Bédier, Gustave Lanson, Gaston Paris, and Paul Meyer. C. was named to a lectureship in French at Leipzig, where he remained until 1909. Thereafter, the University of Amsterdam appointed him to its newlycreated chair of French language and literature (1912–1919). As that institution’s sole professor in French, C. taught all centuries of French literature and would later establish the Institut français des Pays-Bas, the Maison Descartes (1933), Amsterdam’s only foreign cultural center. During World War I, C. was mobilized in 1914 as an infantryman th (46 regiment). His valor earned him status as grand mutilé de guerre and life-

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long crippling grenade wounds, the Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre. He then resumed his post at Amsterdam. While also supervising primary education for French evacuee children, C. worked on his doctoral thesis. Also in the wake of the outcome of the “Great War,” Alsace was liberated from Germany and returned to France. Its capital, Strasbourg, was home to a major university whose postwar reorganization included appointing C. to teach the history of medieval French literature (1919). His most influential colleagues there were Lucien Febvre and Ferdinand Baldensperger. In 1922, after defending his doctoral thesis, receiving a mention très honorable (1920) and the Grand Prix Broquet-Gonin from the Académie Française (1921), C. was called to the Sorbonne to replace Henri Chamard, where he taught a course on Ronsard, then he replaced Fortunat Strowski in 1924, again teaching French Renaissance authors. The Sorbonne hired C. in his own right, first as maître de conférences in 1925, and afterward to the chair of the history of medieval French literature (1932–1940, 1944–1948). At some point, C. married; his wife died before World War II. During his electrifying tenure at the Sorbonne (as many as 300 students packed the amphitheatre for his courses), C. founded an amateur theater group dedicated to recreating authentic performances of medieval French plays, which he named “les Théophiliens” (French Review 12.6 [May 1939]: 453–48), after the main character in Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile (c. 1260), in May 1933, which continued into the mid-1950s. When World War II unleashed its devastation, C.’s war medals and grand mutilé status availed him tragically little: forced to flee Paris (1940), he first taught at the University of Aix-en-Provence, then at the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice. Despite his recent conversion to Catholicism, Vichy imposed the Statut des Juifs, which meant that he, like all other Jews, was expelled from his university post. Thanks to contacts in the USA (such as former student Jean Seznec), he found refuge: in September 1941, Yale University invited C. as visiting professor, thereby permitting him US residency, in New York. In February 1942, C. co-founded, with fellow exiles – prominent Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain and philosopher Jean Wahl – and financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York: a French-language university modeled on the Parisian École des Hautes Études (itself patterned on the flexible, German research-university model). Founded to combat totalitarianism and injustice and, as did the New School (see Aristide Zolberg, “The École Libre at the New School, 1941–46,” Social Research 65.4 [Winter 1998]: 921–51), the École Libre welcomed other refugee scholars, artists and literary authors, with summer sessions recreating the Pontigny colloquia, held at Mount

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Holyoke College in Massachusetts (1942–44). Late in 1943, as if sensing the certainty of Allied victory in Europe, C. left his deanship at the École, traveled to New Orleans and then directed an alternative version of the Théophiliens in Guadeloupe, before returning to France, via Algiers, to his Sorbonne professorship in November 1944. He remained there until retiring in 1948. Also during those years, he directed the ten-day seminar on the Middle Ages at the Colloques de Cerisy held at Royaumont (July 1–10, 1947–48). Despite increasing physical incapacity from his war wounds, C.’s prolific pen continued unabated until mere weeks before his death. C.’s total publications span almost all centuries of French literature and culture, but his three main foci include: fostering medieval theater studies (as of 1906), cultivating the continuity and significance of French medieval culture, and re-evaluating cultural exchange between France and the francophone Low Countries. Accordingly, his doctoral thesis treated a non-medieval subject, Les écrivains français en Hollande dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (1920). By contrast, his thèse complémentaire of 1920 more characteristically deals with medieval French drama: Mystères et moralités du manuscrit 617 de Chantilly, winning several awards and later revised as Nativités et moralités liégeoises du Moyen-âge (1953). These books contain not only critical editions of 5 dramatic texts, but also a study of the Walloon dialect and information on stagecraft, art, music, personages and place-names. At Liège, Wilmotte encouraged C. to undertake his Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français au Moyen âge (1906). But C.’s great breakthrough discovery was his Le livre de conduite du régisseur et le compte des dépenses pour le Mystère de la Passion: joué à Mons en 1501 (1925), along with the play’s text: actual documents recording how medieval theater was realized. Later, among other titles, came his two-volume Théâtre en France au Moyen-âge (1928–1931; rpt. as 1 vol., 1948), in which he promulgated his momentous “law,” developing Léon Gautier’s theory, that “all religions generate drama by themselves and all rituals willingly and spontaneously take dramatic and theatrical shape” (see Eli Rozik, “The Ritual Origin of Theatre: Scientific Theory or Theatrical Ideology?” Journal of Religion and Theatre 2.1 [2003]: 105–40). He edited medieval comedies in Recueil de farces françaises inédites du XVe siècle … (1949). Most of his journal articles on medieval theater were reprinted in Études d’histoire du théâtre en France (1956). C.’s replacement stint at the Sorbonne, requiring him to teach Ronsard, along with his work on Rabelais and other 16th-century authors, convinced him of the continuity between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, opposing the theory of rupture and reinvention of the Renaissance promulgated by Jacob Burckhardt. Upon joining the Sorbonne faculty as professor of medieval

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French literature, C. did his major research on medieval French theater and also on Chrétien de Troyes’s romances. Further ventures, into medieval history and art history, inspired C. to emend Johan Huizinga’s autumnal, decadent view of the later Middle Ages. C.’s conviction of medieval continuity extended trans-nationally and into current events, as epitomized in La Grande Clarté du Moyen Âge (1943), composed in exile, and urging the reader to take courage in the “luminous example” of the Middle Ages during France’s wartime subjugation. After his return to the Sorbonne and ensuing retirement, the fruits of his highly productive last 8 years – so numerous that even Cohen had difficulty foreseeing and then recalling them – as in the Vie littéraire en France au Moyen Âge (1953) represent a “synthesis and recapitulation” of previous work modified by maturity (review by Robert J. Clements, Speculum 29 [1954]: 794–95). C.’s literary-historical scholarship is characterized by its sweeping perspective, born of precisely-analyzed examples, transcending the very texts he edited so carefully. Even well-known materials elicited fresh conclusions. Although his theories on ritual now stand opposed by current anthropologists (see Rozik, supra), C. nonetheless resurrected medieval theater, particularly in founding the Théophiliens, and on a larger scale approached medieval studies as a modern-day civic humanist, striving to better his world via the lessons of the past. One of the lesser-known by-products of his École Libre in New York in 1941 was the reconciliation of French and Belgian political cultures. The Maison Descartes, founded by C. in 1933, now moved to downtown Amsterdam, an important Franco-Dutch cultural center, remains vital to this day. In all, C.’s principal talent lay in what Paul Zumthor, a former Théophilien, terms a “poetic intelligence”: animating the ideas of more rigorous scholars like Edmond Faral, et al. (Helen Solterer, “Performing Pasts: A Dialogue with Paul Zumthor,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 [1997]: 595–640). Select Bibliography Works [medieval studies books only, excluding those not given above; minus most reprints and trans. of his works, also omitting articles and typed fascicles containing course notes and texts for his Sorbonne courses. See C.’s complete bibliography in Mélanges d’histoire du théâtre et de la Renaissance offerts à Gustave Cohen (1950), 15–27, and “Bibliographie des œuvres de Gustave Cohen, nouvelle edition,” Mélanges d’histoire du théâtre du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance (1955), 1–24]: Adam le Bossu, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, Jeu du Pèlerin, ed. with Jacques Chailley (1935); Anthologie de la littérature française du Moyen-Âge (1946); Anthologie du drame liturgique en France au Moyen âge (1955); with Louis Réau, L’art du moyen âge: arts plastiques, art littéraire, et la civilisation française (1935); Aucassin et Nicolette, prose trans. (1954, 1986); Chrétien de Troyes. Œuvres choisies (1936); Chrétien de Troyes et son oeuvre: un grand romancier d’amour et d’aventure au XIIe siècle (1931,

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rev. ed. 1948); La comédie latine en France au XIIe siècle, ed., 2 vols. (1931–32); L’évolution de la mise en scène dans le théâtre français (1910); La Farce de Maître Pathelin, adapted for musical performance (1938); Une grande représentation théâtrale en juillet 1501 (1929); Histoire de la chevalerie en France au Moyen-Âge (1949); Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du Moyen-Âge (1906; rev. ed. 1927); La civilisation occidentale au Moyen Âge: du XIe au milieu du XVe siècle, with Henri Pirenne and Henri Focillon [vol. 8 of Histoire du Moyen Âge, ed. Gustave Glotz] (1933); Le jeu d’Adam et Ève, with Jacques Chailley (1936); Le ‘Jour du Jugement’ dans le théâtre du Moyen âge (1957); Lettres chrétiennes au Moyen âge (1957); Littérature française du moyen âge (1951); Mystère de la Passion des Théophiliens, … d’après Arnoul Greban et Jean Michel (1950); Le mystère de la Passion joué à Mons en juillet 1501: Livre des Prologues, Matinée IIIe (1957); La poésie en France au Moyen-âge (1952); La poésie lyrique française au moyen âge, XIIe–XIIIe siècles (1946); Rutebeuf: Le Miracle de Théophile (1934); Scènes de la vie en France au moyen âge (1950); Tableau de la littérature française médiévale: idées et sensibilités (1950); Le théâtre français en Belgique au Moyen Âge (1953); La vie littéraire en France au Moyen-âge (1949). Literature: Angus J. Kennedy, “Gustave Cohen and Christine de Pizan: A Re-Reading of the Ditié de Jeanne d’Arc for Occupied France,” Sur le chemin de longue étude … Actes du Colloque d’Orléans, juillet 1995, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Champion, 1998), 101-10; Roy Rosenstein, “A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 499–520; Roy Rosenstein, “Resistance Literature and the Exilic Imagination: Wartime Readings in Medieval Poetry for Occupied Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 521–57; Helen Solterer, “Gustave Cohen at Pont-Holyoke: The Drama of Belonging to France,” Artists and Intellectuals in World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, ed. Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 145–61; Helen Solterer, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theaters and the Battle for the French Republic (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010).

Nadia Margolis

Contini, Gianfranco (January 4, 1912, Domodossola – February 1, 1990, Domodossola), Italian Linguist and Literary Critic. C. was an Italian romance philologist and literary critic who did significant work in the field of stylistic criticism introducing the methods from linguistics and semiotics in Italian criticism. He gained worldwide recognition for his analysis of the literary techniques of Italian master authors, such as Dante and Petrarch, and for his critiques of contemporary authors, from Giovanni Pascoli to Carlo Emilio Gadda and Eugenio Montale.

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Born in Domodossola, son of Riccardo and Maria Cernuscoli, C. received his secondary education at the Collegio Mellerio Rosmini in Domodossola. He enrolled in the Facoltà di Lettere in Pavia where he was a student of the prestigious Collegio Ghislieri and where he graduated in 1933 with a thesis on Bonvesin de la Riva. The following year, C. attended advanced courses under the supervision of Santorre Debenedetti in Turin where he met some of the young intellectuals who worked for the publishing house Einaudi: the music critic Massimo Mila, the historian Leone Ginzburg, and Giulio Einaudi, who assigned him to the critical edition of Dante’s Rime, published in 1939. During this productive period of studies, C. also met some founders of the Tuscan poetic group “Solaria” and his friend Carlo Emilio Gadda whose work C. reveled to the critics and to the public with his review of Castello di Udine (published in Solaria in 1934). In Perugia C. met Aldo Capitini who would inspire his later politic position (“Azionismo”). From 1934 to 1936, C. lived in Paris, where he studied with Bédier and Millardet. He also presided as director of the Centro di filologia italiana at the Accademia della Crusca in Florence and taught French literature in Pisa. In this period began his friendship with Eugenio Montale and his collaboration with Letteratura. In 1938, he was appointed a post as professor of Romance Philology at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland), carrying on a tradition established by Joseph Bédier, the university founding philologist in 1889. There he alternated his militant criticism, and teaching and research. C. was always interested in Swiss culture, in particular in the cultural tradition of Ticino (“ticinese culture”), and had some Italian students who were also refugees in Switzerland during World War II, such as D’Arco Silvio Avalle and Dante Isella. In 1944, he returned to Italy to participate directly in the resistance in his home town. He was in Ossola when Domodossola expelled the Nazi militia, and was briefly a Republic (Repubblica dell’Ossola) from 10 September to 23 October 1944. C. was the Minister of Education in the transitional government, and together with Carlo Calcaterra developed a reform of the school programs which aimed at a renewal of Italian culture, from nationalistic to open-minded and pro-European, with the strong ethical inspiration of Mazzini. In those days, C. also wrote the program of the Partito d’Azione for Ossola. As a representative of the Partito d’Azione, he participated in the meetings of the CLN (Comitato di liberazione nazionale). He returned to Switzerland after the fall of the Republic, and resumed teaching in Freiburg after the war. C. held the chair of Romance Philology at the University of Freiburg until 1953 when he was appointed the chair of Romance Philology at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero (University of Florence), then of Spanish language and literature and Romance Philology at the School

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of Arts (University of Florence), a position he left upon receiving the appointment at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. From 1957 through to 1981, he was president of the Società Dantesca Italiana and, until 1968, director of Studi danteschi, its official publication. His scientific production, studies and publications continued unabated through the years, despite his health problems. In 1985, C., after a serious illness, returned permanently to Domodossola, to the villa of San Quirico, where he died five years later on the 1st of February, 1990. The method of criticism introduced by C. is called critica delle varianti (critic of the variants), since it analyzes the previous editions and manuscripts of a text, which Benedetto Croce called scartafacci. More generally, it is part of the stylistic criticism initiated by Karl Vossler and Leo Spitzer. For C., the analysis of the technical aspects of linguistic expression was the first stage of literary criticism, the foundation upon which all interpretation of the text rested. Although he believed in the absolute cohesiveness of form and content, he always insisted that the proper understanding of a text required it to be read and analyzed within its historical context. While sharing with the American New Critics a rejection of the relevancy of biographical, psychological, and ideological considerations, C. always insisted on the importance of the text’s historical dimension: its roots in the language of its affiliated and predecessor texts and its relation to prior linguistic expression. During the 1960s, C. revitalized interest in completing the Edizione Nazionale of Dante’s works – a project which had been initiated in the 1920s under the sponsorship of the Società Dantesca Italiana and which remains to be completed. C.’s central interest and contribution to Dante studies lay in his commitment to a systematic, scientific study of the formal properties of Dante’s literary process and, in particular, of the stylistic and linguistic properties of the text – a conviction informed by his adherence to Saussurean semiotic principles. C.’s method is best illustrated by his collection of essays Un’idea di Dante: Saggi danteschi (1976), which contains two fundamental studies: “Un’interpretazione di Dante” and “Dante come personaggio-poeta”. The former in particular demonstrates C.’s interest in intertextual analysis, in the detection of uses of the same word in different vernaculars, in the “plurilinguistic, composite character” (18) of the poet’s use of language, and in the suggestiveness of “semantic interplay” among texts (26). Since such interplay was a salient characteristic of Dante’s own works, C. insisted on the importance of explaining “Dante with Dante” and of analyzing internal verbal echoes (echi di Dante in Dante) within his texts and from one text to another for their power to create a context of meaning. C.’s dominance as Dante philologist was established with his edition of the poet’s Rime (1939, 2nd expanded

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ed. 1946, 3rd rev. ed. 1965), which became noted for the pithiness and the elegance of its commentary and for the systematic analysis of the stylistic, rhetorical, and intertextual features of the poems. In his studies on Italian literature C. identified two main trends from the linguistic and stylistic point of view, from its origins to the 20th century: a multilingual line and a monolinguistic one. The multilingualism, which the critic preferred, is characterized by the experimental use of language, and begins with Dante to develop up to Carlo Emilio Gadda and Pier Paolo Pasolini, while monolingualism, which is the exclusive use of an elitistic, “high”, literary language begins with Petrarch. Even though his analysis was based on a predetermined criterion, C. was convinced that a method is valid only if accompanied by a sensitive understanding of the critic. C.’s personality and thoughts may be seen in Diligenza e voluttà, an interview with Ludovica Ripa di Meana(1989); and in “I ferri vecchi e quelli nuovi. Ventuno domande di R. Federici a Gianfranco Contini (1968),” (La critica degli scartafacci e altre pagine sparse, 1992). Select Bibliography Editions: C.’s critical editions remained fundamental texts and models for philological and literary studies: Dante, Rime (1939, 2nd ed. 1946), Bonvesin della Riva, Opere volgari (1941), Eugenio Montale, Opera in versi (1980) with Rosanna Bettarini, Il Fiore e il Detto d’amore attribuibili a Dante Alighieri (1984); Petrarch, Canzoniere (1964) with Daniele Ponchiroli; Poeti del Duecento (1960). Works: Scritti critici di Francesco de Sanctis (1949); Teatro religioso del Medio Evo fuori d’Italia (1949); Racconti della Scapigliatura piemontese (1953, 2nd ed. 1992); La letteratura italiana. Otto-Novecento (1974); Letteratura dell’Italia unita 1861–1968, Letteratura italiana delle origini, Letteratura italiana del Quattrocento, Letteratura italiana del Risorgimento (1968–1986); Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei (1978, a section had been already published in Italie magique, 1946). Essays: Varianti e altra linguistica. Una raccolta di saggi (1938–1968) (1970); Esercizi di lettura (1982); Altri esercizi (1942–1971) (1972); Ultimi esercizi ed elzeviri (1965–1987) (1989); Postremi esercizi ed elzeviri (1998). A paramount contribution to understand his method is: Breviario di ecdotica (1990); also, Un’idea di Dante (1976); Una lunga fedeltà. Scritti su Eugenio Montale (1984); Quarant’anni di amicizia. Scritti su Carlo Emilio Gadda (1934–1988) (1989). Translations: Alcune poesie di Holderlin tradotte da Gianfranco Contini (1941, 2nd ed. 1982); Gil Vicente, “Trilogia delle barche” (Teatro religioso del Medioevo fuori d’Italia, 1992). Literature: Giorgio Petrocchi, I critici (Milan: Marzorati, 1969), 3801–17; D’Arco Silvio Avalle, “La critica delle strutture formali in Italia,” Strumenti critici 1 (1966–1967): 337–76; and Strumenti critici 2 (1968): 168–206, 304–342; A. R. Pupino, Il sistema dialettico di Gianfranco Contini (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi); “Atti delle gior-

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nate di studio dedicate a Contini,” Filologia e critica 15.2–3 (1991): 165–661 (in particular the contributions by Cesare Segre, Guglielmo Gorni, Marcello Perugi, and Dante Isella); P.V. Mengaldo, “Preliminari al dopo Contini,” Paragone / Letteratura 41 (1990): 3–16 (also in “La tradizione del Novecento. Terza serie,” Poesia 51 (1992), 159–73); Paolo Leoncini, “Contini ossolano e ticinese da Rosminia Capitini,” Microprovincia 35 (1997): 79–118; G. Breschi, Bibliografia degli scritti di Gianfranco Contini (until 1972) (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1973); F. Bonardelli, “Bibliografia delle opere (1973–1977),” Il sistema dialettico di Gianfranco Contini, ed. A. R. Pupino (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1977); G. Nascimbeni, “Incontro con Contini,” Nuova antologia 122 (1987): 230–35; M. Forti, “Contini: filologia e memoria,” Nuova antologia 128 (1993): 347–55; Amicizie, ed. Vanni Scheiwiller, prefaced by P. Gibellini(Milan: Scheiwiller, 1991); G. Pozzi, Alternatim (Milan: Adelphi, 1996), 526–74; G. Pozzi, “Gianfranco Contini italo-svizzero,” Microprovincia, 35 (1997): 19–27; D. Isella, “Friburgo ’44–’45,” Studi di filologia medievale offerti a d’Arco Silvio Avalle (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1996), 175–83; Pagine ticinesi di Gianfranco Contini, ed. R. Broggini(Lugano: Salvioni, 1986).

Beatrice Arduini

Curtius, Ernst Robert (April 14, 1886 in Thann, Alsace – April 19, 1956 in Rome), German Romanist, Philologist, and Literary Scholar. C. was one of the most brilliant, influential, and controversial European medievalists of the twentieth century. Although his medieval scholarship accounts for only a portion – by no means the largest – of his total output, its impact on the field was enormous. C. established the study of Medieval Latin as literature and was the first to trace its formative rhetorical influence on the European vernacular languages and literatures. His major work, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (hereafter ELLMA), has been continually in print and widely discussed and translated since its publication in 1948. In fact, so much has been written on ELLMA in particular and C. in general, that a “Curtius industry” is itself now an object of continuing academic inquiry. C. was the son of Friedrich Curtius, a Prussian civil servant, and Louise (neé Erlach-Hindelbank), daughter of a Swiss patrician family. His grandfather Ernst and his great-uncle Georg were noted classical scholars. C.’s upbringing in French-German Alsace (where his father was sent by the Reich government), the bilingualism of his well-educated household, and extensive travels beginning in his youth combined to give him the cosmopolitan

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and European outlook that was to characterize his life and work. After secondary school in Colmar and Strasbourg, he began to take courses in comparative and new philology in Strasbourg in 1903. After a period in Berlin studying Sanskrit (1905–06), he returned to Strasbourg to work with the Romance philologist Gustav Gröber (later a co-dedicatee of ELLMA). C. wrote his dissertation on an Old French paraphrase of the Book of Kings in 1910 (Li Quatre Livre des Reis, published in 1911) and his Habilitation on the French literary critic Ferdinand Brunetière in 1913. He was a lecturer (Privatdozent) in Romance languages in Bonn from 1913–1919 (with an interruption for war service in Poland in 1914–1915, where he was wounded in the neck) and associate professor (Extraordinarius) in Bonn in 1919–1920. He was appointed to a full professorship in Marburg in 1920, in 1924 in Heidelberg, and in 1927 in Frankfurt/Main. In 1929 C. returned to Bonn, where he remained until his retirement in 1951. He received the Lessing Award in Hamburg in 1950, and honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow (1951) and the Sorbonne in Paris (1954). He was a member of numerous societies and academies, including the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (1942), Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich (1944), the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste (1952), the British Academy in London (1955), and the Medieval Academy of America. C. died in Rome in 1956. The Middle Ages was always a significant part of C.’s teaching. In addition to all periods of French literature he gave courses in Romance philology, Old Provencal, Medieval and Renaissance Italian, Medieval and Golden Age Spanish, and Vulgar and Medieval Latin. However, for the first two decades of his career C. did not primarily publish as a medievalist, but rather as a critic of modern French and European literature and culture and as an intermediary between France and Germany (Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich, 1919; Balzac, 1923; Französischer Geist im neuen Europa, 1925; Die französische Kultur. Eine Einführung, 1930; Essays on European Literature, 1950). He was also an important public intellectual, increasingly engaged against the extreme right and what he saw as the barbarization of German culture. In 1932 he published Deutscher Geist in Gefahr, a polemic against the forces of völkisch nationalism that would lead to the Nazi regime in Germany after 1933. It was only in 1936–37 that he made the conscious decision to “return to older periods … in the first instance to the Romance Middle Ages” (Essays, 498). The studies that would eventually make up ELLMA began about this time, many of them first published as journal articles. The most influential part of C.’s medievalist scholarship has been his emphasis on the legacy and continuity of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradi-

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tion. C. pioneered the analysis of rhetorical formulae and literary commonplaces (preformulated or standardized expressions or phrases, stereotypical motifs, images, and representational schemata, quotes, etc.), which he called topoi (sing. topos, also “topic”). In ELLMA, he traces the origins of topoi in Antique rhetoric; their codification and systematization in the late Classical period; their revival and elaboration in Medieval Latin literature; their adoption by the vernacular literary traditions of Europe; and their survival into the Early Modern and Modern periods. The first part of ELLMA (1–78) explores the origins of topoi in antique rhetoric and their transformation into literary devices. Originally, topoi were nothing more than “helps toward composing orations” within the context of practical politics and forensics in the Antique city-state and the Roman republic. They were “schemata of thought and expression,” “storehouses of trains of thought” (C. quoting Quintilian), “intellectual themes, suitable for development and modification at the orator’s pleasure.” With the downfall of the Greek city-state and after the end of the Roman republic, rhetoric, losing its original meaning and purpose in practical oratory, underwent a fundamental recontextualization: “It penetrated into all literary genres. Its elaborately developed system became the common denominator of literature in general.” Topoi, too, were transformed: “They become clichés, which can be used in any form of literature, they spread to all spheres of life with which literature deals and to which it gives form” (ELLMA, 70). The central part of ELLMA (79–202) analyses the development and literary transmission of individual topoi: topics of the exordium and conclusion; inexpressibility; outdoing; invocation of nature; ideal landscapes (most famously the locus amoenus); the world upside down; boy and old man; old woman and girl; the Goddess Natura; the muses; metaphors and symbols of various kinds (e. g. nautical, alimentary, corporeal, the book). C. also examines (145–66, 203–301) the relationship between poetry and other major discursive traditions (rhetoric, philosophy, and theology) and traces the development of particular styles (most notably the opposition between classicism and mannerism). The last section of the text proper (348–79), though concerned mostly with Dante, pursues the legacy of the rhetorical tradition forward to Goethe. Thereafter follow nearly two hundred pages of “excursuses” of various kinds (405–598). Most of them add to and deepen the material and themes already covered (further topical analyses, discussions of individual authors), but some are connected only very loosely with the rest of the text. One of the most notable and controversial of these is C.’s polemic attack on Gustav Ehrismann’s “chivalric system of the virtues” (519–37).

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While C. did not single-handedly invent “topological scholarship” (Toposforschung), ELLMA was probably its most important foundational text and single biggest influence. In foregrounding the rhetorical tradition and rhetorical continuities within particular literary traditions over long periods of time, the topological focus helped correct the long-dominant Romantic view of early literature as the unmediated, original and genial expression of the author or of the Volk. It is obviously true that a single-minded focus on topoi can lead to a neglect of poetic individuality, and C. was indeed so accused (see Peter Godman’s epilogue to ELLMA, 600). Nonetheless, if Toposforschung is now somewhat outdated as a primary research agenda or interpretive methodology (its heyday was the 1960s–1980s), that is mainly because its basic insights have found wide acceptance and form part of the standard equipment of contemporary Medieval Studies. When Leo Spitzer called ELLMA a “vast grammar or dictionary of topoi” (American Journal of Philology 70 [1949]: 426), he meant it as a criticism. But although that is probably how the book is most often used by medievalists today, the fact that it is still useful in this way after more than half a century is a testimony to its solidity. In a wider sense, ELLMA and Toposforschung can be seen as forerunners of the new focus on rhetoric within many humanities disciplines today. But ELLMA was not just about topoi. As Godman points out, C.’s purpose was to “revitalize an entire system of thought and expression that he believed lay at the heart of European culture” (epilogue to ELLMA, 647). In focusing on Medieval Latin as the stylistic mother of all the major European vernaculars, he was taking what he called the “universal standpoint” (ELLMA, viii) and attacking the two central aspects of the then-dominant Geistesgeschichte school of literary interpretation: the idea of independent national literatures, another legacy of the Romantic tradition, and the systematic period distinctions within literary history. He was also against what he saw as academic overspecialization, and stated that he wrote ELLMA for a popular audience. However, although C.’s Medieval Latin universalism certainly contributed to a more historically accurate understanding of the Middle Ages as cosmopolitan and international, it was itself deeply ahistorical, that is, built on a view of literature as a self-contained system removed from history. This also lay ELLMA open to the charge of neglecting popular trends outside of the learned Latin tradition. Other critics have pointed to the limited scope of ELLMA’s alleged universalism (neglect of Jewish, Arabic, Slavic influences, comparative neglect of German literature). The fact that about half of the book consists of more-or-less integrated “excursus” has also come in for criticism, given that C. frequently stresses the inner coherence

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and organizational elegance of his study (for all these critiques see Godman’s epilogue, 649–50). The medieval work that C. published after or independently of ELLMA (most of it in his Gesammelte Aufsätze) continued in the same vein, emphasizing the priority of Latin and the learned tradition. This is also true of a series of articles on the Old French Epic, which together form a book-length study (Gesammelte Aufsätze, 98–304). C. is also an important figure in another, newer area of medievalist research, the investigation of the history of the discipline and its formative personalities. The cultural-political background of C.’s self-reinvention as a medievalist in the mid-1930s is especially interesting in this regard. In the foreword to the English translation of ELLMA, C. described the book as serving the cause of the international European “new Humanism” he had called for in Deutscher Geist in Gefahr as a means of counteracting nationalist barbarism. Recent scholarship on the history of ELLMA places the work in the context of other “European” visions of the wartime and postwar eras and emphasizes the specifically “German mandarin” anxieties and preoccupations behind C.’s medievalism (Carl Landauer, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Literary Critic,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 1996, 334–54). Select Bibliography Works: Li Quatre Livre des Reis (1911); Das Buch als Symbol in der Divina Commedia (1926); “Zur Interpretation des Alexiusliedes” (1936; in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 58–80); “Zur Literarästhetik des Mittelalters” (1938, 3 parts); “Dichtung und Rhetorik im Mittelalter” (1938); “Theologische Kunsttheorie im spanischen Barock” (1939); “Über die altfranzösische Epik”(1944); “Dante und das lateinische Mittelalter” (1943); Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), “Die Lehre von den drei Stilen in Altertum und Mittelalter: Zu Auerbachs Mimesis” (1952). – Further articles rpt. in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (1960); Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur (1950). Literature: ILG, vol. 1 (2003), 353–55; Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. Das 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 5 (1958), 423–29; Peter Godman, “The Ideas of Ernst Robert Curtius and the Genesis of ELLMA,” Epilogue to 1990 edition of ELLMA (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 599–653; Ernst Robert Curtius. Werk, Wirkung, Zukunftsperspektiven, ed. Walter Berschin and Arnold Rothe (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989); Heinrich Lausberg, Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993); Albrecht Classen, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Book: The Impact of an Idea on Modern Philological Research,” Leuvense Bijdragen 87.1–2 (1998): 59–78.

Alexander Sager

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D D’Ancona, Alessandro (February 20, 1835, Pisa – November 8, 1914, Florence), Italian Philologist. D. became vigorously involved with De Sanctis’s teaching of the Divine Comedy at the University of Turin around the 1910s. His role as a student was that of convincing De Sanctis to publish the results of his research, so as to disseminate them as widely as possible. This is testified by a letter exchanged between D. and the publisher Gasparo Barbèra (Gasparo Barbèra, Lettere, 1841–1879). This did not happen for different reasons, but it is important that enthusiasm was kept alive in an age when aversion to the historical school was a product of aesthetic philology, which played a major role in blocking the important philological work carried forward by Pio Rajna and the other historic philologists including D. D. was the only representative of the historical school who did not encounter harsh criticism by Benedetto Croce. D.’s work remained within the boundaries of investigation of the sources and did not invade the field of hermeneutics, to which Croce’s aesthetical school was devoted (Luigi Russo, La critica letteraria contemporanea, 1977, I, 35). D. became famous especially for his studies of popular poetry and of sacred representations. He produced original and outstanding research on Florentine and Sicilian 13th-century lyrical poetry. D. enrolled at the University of Turin in 1855 officially as a law student, when in fact, he moved to Turin to act as an intermediary between the Tuscan and Piedmontese liberals. In Turin he met Cavour, and took part in the Italian Risorgimento and in the process of unification of Italy. At an early age he became the director of the Florentine newspaper La Nazione. He later turned to literature studies after having attended the lectures of De Sanctis. D. was appointed Professor of Literature at the University of Pisa in 1861 where he remained until 1900, when he retired and kept only his Professorship in Dante Studies until 1909. His interest in the political questions of his age led him to write about Italian history and his personal political experiences (Ricordi storici del Risorgimento, 1913; Pagine sparse di letteratura e di storia, 1914). D. is one of the most important exponents of the Italian historical school, a group of philologists who systematically applied the theoretical model

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formulated by Lachmann and imported in Italy by De Sanctis. He was particularly interested in the origins of Italian poetry, and analyzed specifically the lyrical monostrophic song. His thesis was that vernacular Italian (Tuscan) lyric poetry was a germination of Sicilian lyrical poetry, which had been disseminated to other regions through the emigration of poets from Sicily to Tuscany due to the historical circumstances at that age. His studies on popular poetry include examinations of early 13th-century poetry, with particular reference to Jacopone da Todi, Cielo d’Alcamo and Convenevole da Prato (La poesia popolare italiana, 1906). D. also devoted great attention to Italian sacred representations (Sacre rappresentazioni nei secoli XIV, XV, e XVI, 1872), formulating a theory which is still valuable (Origini del teatro in Iitalia, 1st ed. 1872). The teaching of D. became in time an authentic forge from which emerged the future fathers of Italian philology, for example Francesco D’Ovidio and Pio Rajna. D. was responsible for providing new inspiration to the discipline of philology and for freeing Italian academia from the state of isolation and backwardness in which it had fallen, being tied to the routine of 18thcentury methodology. He reduced the distance from the revolutionary and original contribution of European scholars (Gaston Paris, Gustav Gröber, and Eric Köhler). He entertained a consistent correspondence with Adolfo Mussafia (Luca Curti, ed., Carteggio D’Ancona, VI: D’Ancona – Mussafia, 1978), which is useful to understand the difficulties that philologists of his age encountered in relation with critical editions and methodology. Although aspects of his approach have to be considered obsolete today, his ecdotics (from ékdotos, a term used for the first time by Henri Quentin to indicate the methodology of manuscript edition) founded modern and contemporary philology. His most dated theories, for example the monogenetic theory of Italian lyrics and that of the popular matrix in poetry (Studj sulla letteratura italiana de’ primi secoli, 1884), have been argued throughout the 20th century. However, his theories have the merit of having triggered discussions which in the final analysis made Italian philology progress. A number of his works remain milestones in the history of Italian philology, first and foremost Origini del teatro in Italia (1877), where he dealt with a field of study which had never been explored before, and Le sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV e XV (1872), where combining textual analysis with historical reconstruction he shed light on the liturgical origin of medieval theatre. His most valuable works also include Opere di Tommaso Campanella (1854), Memorie e documenti di storia italiana dei secoli XVIII e XIX (1913), Studj di critica e storia letteraria (1912), Viaggiatori e avventurieri (1912).

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Select Bibliography Literature: Gabriella Macciocca, “D’Ancona, Alessandro,” in Letteratura italiana. Gli autori (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), vol. I, 645–46; Umberto Renda and Piero Operti, Dizionario storico della letteratura italiana (Turin: Paravia, 1952), 338–39; Sara Poldrelli, http://www.bibliomanie.it/dancona_montaigne_poledrelli.htm; Carteggio D’Ancona, VI: D’Ancona – Mussafia, ed. Luca Curti (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1978); Luigi Russo, Ritratti e disegni storici (Bari: Laterza, 1937), 389–416; L. Ferrari, Bibliografia degli scritti di Alessandro D’Ancona (Florence: Tip. di G. Barbera, 1901).

Claudia Boscolo

Docen, Bernhard Joseph (October 1, 1782 – November 21, 1828), German Medievalist. D.’s most significant contribution to the field of Medieval German studies was his cataloguing and describing the numerous manuscripts that were added to the National Library in Munich, Germany, during the Bavarian secularization process. His chance at achieving a position of true prominence in the realm of German Philology was passed over when he discovered the fragment of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Titurel in the Munich Manuscript G in 1810 but, failing to recognize its importance, shared it with August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) in a letter now popularly known as the TiturelSendschreiben. This led Schlegel to the paradigm-shifting realization that, contrary to the state of knowledge at the time, not the Jüngere Titurel but rather the Ältere Titurel had been composed by the Middle High German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. D. was born to Anna Franziska and Philipp Werner Docen, a government employee of Osnabrück, who served as the secretary of the Department of Justice. He attended the Catholic Gymnasium of Osnabrück and received a private education in Greek until transferring to study medicine at the University of Göttingen in 1799. Once there, he discovered his fascination for literature and archaeology as a student of Christian Gottlieb Heyne (1729–1812), founder of the modern study of classical archaeology and mythology. In 1802, D. studied in Jena and Dresden before travelling to Nuremberg in 1803 to study early German literature, where he wrote his critically acclaimed Andenken an Hans Sachs [Tribute to Hans Sachs], for which he was awarded a Diploma by the Pegnesisch Blumenorden of Nürnberg. At the end of 1803, he resettled to Munich where he achieved the post of librarian at the Munich

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Library in 1804 under the direction of Johann Christoph Freiherr von Aretin (1773–1824). This was directly following the Bavarian secularization process of 1802–03, wherein, among other results of secularization, the monastic libraries were seized by the state, resulting in D. cataloguing and describing a wealth of old German and Latin manuscripts. Soon after he was promoted to Scriptor (1806), then Custos (1811). His numerous and scattered publications regarding medieval German literature were released in his Miscellaneen zur Geschichte der teutschen Litteratur (1807) [Miscellany to the History of German Literature], and he served as co-editor of the Museum für altdeutsche Litteratur (1809–11) [Museum for Old German Literature] together with Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1780–1856) and Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching (1783–1829). Following the period of industriousness that peaked around the years 1807–1811, D. turned more to his own composition of fiction and poetry, which was influenced by his studies of literature and serves as an early example of the reception and influence of medieval poetry in the modern era. D. never married and was described by Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886) as “unverheirathet, freundlos, eine einsame, wenn auch nicht ungesellige Natur” who nevertheless “ … besass eine umfassende Kenntniß unserer Litteratur und hat die Forschung durch Einzelmittheilungen und Uebersichtungen mannigfach gefördert” (ADB, vol. 5, 1877, 279–80) (unmarried, friendless, of lonely but not disagreeable nature … who nevertheless … possessed a holistic knowledge of our literature and had promoted research through individual studies and comprehensive treatments in many ways). Ultimately, D.’s contributions to the field of medieval German Philology, apart from his discovery of the Titurel fragment as mentioned above, are limited. He published primarily short publications treating isolated aspects of German and Latin literature, lexicology and etymology; he did however recognize the importance of the smaller prose pieces of the 8th–12th centuries that are considered “stylistically impoverished” for such works. Although D. left the spotlight for others, he provided no few tools for the investigation of poetry in the 12th–13th centuries, the mysticism of the 14th century, and the rise of the Volkslied. D. also partook in a public debate with Jacob Grimm wherein he defended a romanticized view of the Minnesinger and Meistersinger as poets who took little notice of formal considerations for composition and performance. D. also composed numerous pieces treating German orthography, wherein he proposed the elimination of capitalization for nouns and worked on bettering a systematic and regulated form of bibliographical citation and library cataloguing.

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Select Bibliography Works: Andenken an Hans Sachs’ berühmten Nürnbergischen Meistersänger, 1803 [Tribute to Hans Sachs’ Famed Nurnberg Meistersinger]; Über die Ursachen der Fortdauer der lateinischen Sprache seit dem Untergänge des abendländischen Römer-Reichs, 1815 [Concerning the Cause of Continuation of the Latin Language since the Fall of the Roman Empire]; Über Sprache, Schrift und Literatur der Deutschen, vol. 1: Gegen die großen Anfangsbuchstaben, 1824 [About the Language, Writing System and Literature of German, vol. 1: Against Capitalization]; Vereinfachung der deutschen rechtschreibung und erleichterung des deutschen schreibunterrichts durch entfernung der großen anfangsbuchstaben bei den gemeinsamen Hauptwörtern. Eine Einladung an das gesammte Publicum, 1826 [Simplification of the German Orthography and Written Instruction through the Removal of the Capitalization of Nouns. An Invitation to the Public]; Versuch eines allgemein anwendbaren bibliographischen Systems. Durch mehrfältige Zusätze erweitert und erneuert, 1827 [Attempt at a Universal Bibliographical System. Expanded and Renewed by Multiple Additions]; “Zur Geschichte der Minnegerichte im Mittelalter,” Aurora (27. 07. 1804): 357–60 [To the History of the Courts of Love in the Middle Ages]; ed., Miscellaneen zur Geschichte der teutschen Litteratur, neu aufgefundene Denkmäler der Sprache, Poesie und Philosophie unserer Vorfahren enthaltend, vol. 2, 1807, 1809 [Miscellaneous to the History of German Literature, Newly Discovered Monuments that Contain the Language, Poetry and Philosophy of Our Forefathers]; ed., Museum für altdeutsche Litteratur und Kunst, vol. 2, 1809–11, 1971 [Museum for Old German Literature and Art]. Editions: Erstes Sendeschreiben über den Titurel, enthaltend die Fragmente einer Vor-Eschenbachischen Bearbeitung des Titurel. Aus einer Hs. Der königlichen Bibliothek zu München, 1810 [First Missive About Titurel, Containing the Fragments of a pre-Eschenbach version of Titurel. From a Manuscript of the King’s Library in Munich]; Kaiser Karl der Große. Abschnitt einer altdeutschen poetischen Chronik (der Kaiserchronik), 1812 [Emperor Charlemagne, Excerpt from an Old German Poetic Chronicle]; Lied eines fränkischen Dichters auf König Ludwig III (Ludwigslied), 1813 [Song of a Frankish Poet to King Louis III]; Einige Denkmäler der althochdeutschen Litteratur in genauem Abdruck aus Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu München, 1825 [Select Monuments of Old German Literature in Exact Prints from Manuscripts of the King’s Library in Munich]. Literature: Philipp Strauch, ed., “Zur Geschichte der deutschen Philologie. Briefe an Bernhard Joseph Docen,” AfdA 28 (1902): 123–59; Eckhard Grunewald: Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1988), 79–81 & 327–49; Wilhelm Scherer: “Bernhard Joseph Docen,” ADB 5, (1877): 278–80; Iris Nölle-Hornkamp: “Bernhard Joseph Docen,” IGL, vol. 1 (2003), 395–96.

Maurice Sprague

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Donaldson, E. Talbot (March 18, 1910, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – 1987, Bloomington, Indiana), American Medievalist. D. was one of the great literary critics and scholars of the mid-20th century. He produced editions and translations of what could be termed the three most important works of medieval English literature: Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, and Piers Plowman. A New Critic and philologist, he also provided many influential close readings of Old and Middle English texts: for example, his insistence that Chaucer the Pilgrim be treated as a distinct persona from Chaucer the Narrator and Chaucer the Poet opened a new way of reading the Canterbury Tales that is widespread today. D. is perhaps best known for being the leading opponent of D. W. Robertson’s form of Augustinian literary criticism during the exegetical debates of the 1950s and 1960s. D.’s collection of essays, Speaking of Chaucer, and his edition (with George Kane) of the B-Text of Piers Plowman are landmarks of 20th-century English literary and textual criticism. D. was born in 1910 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and was educated at Kent School in Connecticut. He graduated from Harvard University in 1932 with a degree in Greek and English, then returned to teach English, French, Latin and Greek at Kent school for the next eight years, taking a year out as a Fellow in General Studies at Yale University in 1938–1939. Yale accepted him as a graduate student in 1940, and in 1943, he produced a Ph.D. on the C-Text of Piers Plowman (published in 1949). The war intervened, and he joined the U.S. Army Air Force, rising from the rank of private to captain by 1946. He returned to Yale to be a research professor, then assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor in 1956. In 1966, he was named George E. Bodman Professor of English, and during his time at Yale he regularly held the positions of director of graduate studies in English and associate chair of the Department of English. In 1967, D. moved to Columbia University, where he had already been an adjunct professor in 1964; however, during that time he was also a visiting professor back at Yale, and he returned to Yale in 1970. D. married Judith Anderson, also an English scholar, in 1971; in 1973, D. was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, and in 1974, D. and Anderson moved to Indiana University. D. was named distinguished professor of English at Indiana; he retired in 1980. D.’s contribution to literary and medieval studies in North America was significant: he was a fellow, vice president and president of the Medieval Academy of America, president of the New Chaucer Society, president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, corresponding fellow of the Brit-

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ish Academy, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and twice a Guggenheim Fellow. With George Kane, he won the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy for their edition of the B-Text of Piers Plowman. D. was also a founding editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. More impressive, though less tangible, perhaps, is the influence D. had upon a generation of medievalists who were his students (their reminiscences are collected in Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, ed., Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700–1600, 1982; see also Elizabeth D. Kirk, “Donaldson Teaching and Learning,” The Chaucer Review 41.3 [2007]: 279–88). The impact D. must have had can perhaps be judged by the statistic that during his time as director of graduate studies in English at Yale, the percentage of women graduate students rose from 10 % to 50 %. D.’s early work, growing out of his thesis, was primarily philological and textual, whether of the specific scribes and manuscripts of Piers Plowman, or the study of specific lines, scansion or phrasing in Chaucer. In 1949, D. published his thesis on the C-Text of Piers Plowman, and much of the next decade was spent in editorial work with George Kane on the B-Text. Their editorial approach was pioneering in many respects, as Lee Patterson argues (“The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome McGann, 1985, 55–91): eschewing the traditional method of textual criticism of grouping manuscript stemmata based on common scribal errors, instead Kane and D. argued that there were certain classes of mistakes that scribes were likely to make, and thus might have made them independently. Therefore, the existence of an error of this kind was not an indication that the manuscripts were related stemmatically. Although this approach, disappointingly, did not produce conclusions about the relationship of the manuscripts of Piers Plowman which were any more irrefutable than previous arguments, nonetheless the Kane-D. edition was the ground of much Piers Plowman scholarship for the next several decades, and won for them the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy in 1978. D. produced an alliterative verse translation of Piers Plowman (published posthumously), and edited what is essentially a student’s edition of Chaucer’s works, a quintessentially New Critical edition which keeps critical and scholarly apparatus to a minimum, and aims above all to make the text of Chaucer’s works easily accessible to students of Chaucer. As perhaps befits a scholar devoted to both philology and New Criticism, over the course of his career D. produced primarily editions but only one monograph, a study of Chaucer’s impact on Shakespeare. However, his work Speaking of Chaucer, a collection of his most important articles, was to have an

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impact on Chaucer studies comparable to D. W. Robertson’s A Preface to Chaucer or C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love. D.’s most important contribution to Chaucer studies was, perhaps, his article, “Chaucer the Pilgrim” (PMLA 69 [1954]: 928–36) (Geoffrey Gust, “Revaluating ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’ and Donaldson’s Enduring Persona,” The Chaucer Review 41.3 [2007]: 311–23). D. argued that there was a crucial distinction in the Canterbury Tales between the author Chaucer and the narrator of the tales, the pilgrim ‘Chaucer’. The narrator was a persona Chaucer created, and the gap between the naive perceptions of that persona and Chaucer’s real understanding creates the thorough-going irony of the Tales. D.’s work in various articles on Criseyde was also highly influential: like D.’s student, Stanley Fish, was to do to great effect in readings of Milton, D. insisted that interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde must take into account the fact that reading is a process which takes place in time, and thus the reader’s changing response to Criseyde as the poem progresses is an essential part of the effect of the work. The main controversy of D.’s career came about through his opposition to the historicist stances taken by several contemporary scholars. He was determined to oppose the inroads exegetical criticism, as practised by D. W. Robertson and his followers, was making into Chaucerian and medieval studies. D. objected, in part, to the elitism patristic exegesis represented – the claim that special knowledge and learning (in scriptural allegory, for example) was required before a reader could read or enjoy medieval poetry. He also objected to the reductionism of the Robertsonian approach, which he believed insisted that all medieval poetry meant the same thing, and protested that their approach left no room for common sense supported by “careful reading,” or for mere enjoyment. D.’s conflict with Robertson was, in many ways, to set the tone in medieval studies for the next twenty years. Between them, D. and Robertson established the issues and points of debate that dominated medieval literary studies for the middle decades of the 20th century as discussed by Lee Patterson (Negotiating the Past, 1987), Derek Pearsall (“Chaucer’s Poetry and Its Modern Commentators: The Necessity of History,” Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers, 1986, 123–47; “The Criticism of Chaucer in the Twentieth Century,” Chaucer’s Mind and Art, ed. A. C. Cawley, 1969, 1–25), Ralph Hanna (“Donaldson and Robertson: An Obligatory Conjunction” The Chaucer Review 41.3 [2007]: 240–49) and Anne Middleton (“Medieval Studies,” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 1992, 12–40). For many years, until scholars moved on to other interests such as gender studies, Marxism, and post-colonial studies, and until a new kind of non-exegetical historicism de-

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veloped with the New Historicists of the 1980s, D.’s kind of scholarship was the only option for those who resisted the Robertsonian approach. Ironically, several scholars today see similarities in D.’s and Robertson’s approaches that were not apparent fifty years ago: Carolyn Dinshaw (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 1989) argues that the two scholars are alike in their “masculine” readings of Criseyde, while Kathy Cawsey points out that both depend for their interpretations on an ironic distance between text and reader. Nonetheless, D.’s “careful reading,” the close reading technique of New Criticism, has become standard for literary critics of all stripes, and his emphasis on irony in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and on the narrator’s and reader’s relationship with Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde still form the basis for much undergraduate teaching of Chaucer. His seminal articles have been extensively anthologized and form the fundamental reading of any Chaucer scholar. Kane and D.’s approach to the editing of Piers Plowman continues to incite debate (see Robert Adams, “Editing Piers Plowman B: The Imperative of an Intermittently Critical Edition,” Studies in Bibliography 45 [1992]: 31–68; Charlotte Brewer, “Authorial vs. Scribal Writing in Piers Plowman,” Medieval Literature: Texts and Interpretation, ed. Tim William Machan, 1991, 59–89), and Donaldson’s translation of Beowulf has been surpassed only very recently by Seamus Heaney’s translation as the version of choice for the undergraduate classroom. Select Bibliography Works: Speaking of Chaucer (1970); with George Kane, ed., Piers Plowman: The B Version (1975); “Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition,” Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (1960): 1–26; “Designing a Camel; or, Generalizing the Middle Ages,” Texas Studies in Literature 22 (1977): 1–16; Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (1958); trans. Piers Plowman: An Alliterative Verse Translation, ed. Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson (1990). Literature: Bonnie Wheeler and Carolynn Van Dyke, ed., “Special Issue: The Legacy of New Criticism: Revisiting the Work of E. Talbot Donaldson,” Chaucer Review 41.3 (2007): 213–323; Mary J. Carruthers, “Speaking of Donaldson,” Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Is Contexts 700–1600, ed. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1982), 365–80; Lee Patterson “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 55–91; Kathleen Cawsey, “E. Talbot Donaldson: The Careful Reader,” Twentieth-Century Chaucer Studies and Theories of Audience, Ph. D. diss., University of Toronto 2006, 100–42. *With thanks to Judith Anderson

Kathy Cawsey

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Dopsch, Alfons (June 14, 1868, Lobositz, Bohemia – September 1, 1953, Vienna), Medieval Historian. The social and economic historian D. focused much of his work on his native Austria. On the basis of his expertise in medieval documents and his earlier study of the economy and society of the Carolingian Empire (Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit vornehmlich in Deutschland, 1912/13, 2nd ed., 1921), he wrote the highly influential Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung (1923; The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, 1937). In this book, he argued for economic and cultural continuity from the Roman era into the Early Middle Ages, a thesis that continues to inform historical study of late antique and early medieval society. D. was born in Lobositz in Bohemia along the border between those speaking Czech and German in the Austrian Empire. After attending gymnasium in Leitmeritz, he began to study history at the University of Vienna in 1886. After also commencing studies at the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung in 1889, he attained his doctorate in 1890 and became Privatdozent in 1893 and professor in 1898 at the University of Vienna, where he taught until 1937. After completing his dissertation on the Battle of Lobositz (1756) in 1892, he became interested in medieval documents and focused his research upon the Early Middle Ages while studying under Theodor Sickel. That same year he began to work with Engelbert Mühlbacher on producing the MGH edition of Carolingian charters, Die Urkunden Pippins, Karlmanns und Karls des Großen (1906). This intimate acquaintance with Frankish sources led to his close analysis of medieval documents in contrast to a purely theoretical approach to history. In the first decades of the 20th century, D. wrote about Austrian constitutional and administrative history while in the 1920s and 1930s, he became one of the foremost authorities on the early medieval economy. Aside from producing a rich body of scholarship, he was an eminent teacher who trained many archivists. Though most famous as a Carolingianist, D. pursued medieval German history rather broadly: his early career focused upon Austrian territorial history. With Alfons Huber, he wrote a constitutional history of Austria, Österreichische Reichsgeschichte, 1901. Throughout his career, he produced related legal and political studies including, for example, Die Bedeutung Herzog Albrechts I. von Habsburg für die Ausbildung der Landeshoheit in Österreich (1282–98), 1893; Die Kärnten-Krainer Frage und die Territorialpolitik der ersten Habsburger in Österreich, 1899; Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters, 1915; Neue Forschungen

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über das österreichische Landesrecht, 1918; and Beneficialwesen und Feudalität, 1932. He also undertook narrower, related research upon Austrian economic history, such as in his study of Austrian financial administration, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Finanzverwaltung Österreichs im 13. Jahrhundert,” MIÖG 14 (1895): 449–69 and 18 (1897): 233–340. D.’s work on Austrian constitutional history led him to seek the roots of the Middle Ages in the Carolingian period. In Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit, he analyzed documents relevant to the Carolingian Empire’s economic structures and development. He addressed the centuries old questions of how and why the Roman world became unglued and how medieval kingdoms then developed. Contrary to the argument, first forwarded by historians during the Renaissance, that catastrophe brought an end to the Roman Empire, D. believed that gradual changes in politics, society, and economy had marked the transition from the ancient to the medieval era. International recognition for this thesis came with The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization. D. offered evidence that the early medieval West had carried on Roman fiscal and trade practices, thereby making a compelling argument for continuity. D. published many other articles and short books on medieval economic and social history. In Naturalwirtschaft und Geldwirtschaft in der Weltgeschichte, 1930, he argued that monetary and natural economies had co-existed throughout world history; one did not preclude the existence of the other. Herrschaft und Bauer in der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 1939, posed important questions concerning German agrarian history while synthesizing much earlier work in the field. Many of his articles appeared in two collections: Verfassungs- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters, 1928, and Beiträge zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 1938. Among his other works are Die ältere Sozial- und Wirtschaftsverfassung der Alpenslaven, 1909, portions of which appeared in The Early Social and Economic History of Peasants in the Alpine Districts of Austria, 1930–1939; Österreichs geschichtliche Sendung, 1917; Der deutsche Böhmerwaldgau, 1919; Der Wiederaufbau Europas nach dem Untergange der alten Welt, 1920; The Historical Position of the Germans in Bohemia, 1919; Die deutsche Kulturwelt des Mittelalters, 1924; Die ältere Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Bauern in den Alpenländern Österreichs, 1930; Die freien Marken in Deutschland, 1933; and “Agrarian Institutions of the Germanic Kingdoms from the Fifth to the Ninth Century,” CEHE 1 (1941): 180–204. D. helped to make medieval documents, especially from Austria, more accessible through editions. In addition to Die landesfürstlichen Gesamturbare der Steiermark, 1910, he edited with Wladimir Levec Die landesfürstlichen Urbare Nieder- und Oberösterreichs aus dem 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, 1904. He also

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headed the series Österreichische Urbare: Herausgegeben von der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1904–1956. D. sparked new scholarly debate with which historians and archeologists continue to grapple today. Scholarly admiration for D. rests upon his critical use of sources: he argued successfully for renewed study of medieval documents. In contrast to his contemporaries who associated certain texts with certain historical questions, he believed in using medieval sources broadly to address a variety of topics. Economic and legal documents, for example, could illuminate social history. He argued against theses developed from silences in the sources as much as against using late medieval documents as evidence for the early Middle Ages. Though he often took a positivist view, he did not address individuals or individual developments as much as general trends: he presented his research in broad strokes. Sometimes, this style makes his scholarship seem a bit vague, but it left room for other scholars to address the gaps he left. His argument against a sharp divide between the ancient and medieval eras remains his greatest achievement. When he wrote The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, most scholars believed that the end of the Roman Empire marked a rupture in European history. In his two major early medieval economic studies D. examined a relatively wide range of texts in a detailed manner, questioning the documentary evidence directly rather than relying upon earlier historical interpretations to guide his research. D. caused scholars to re-examine a period for which many thought the economy had fallen apart. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne almost immediately challenged D.’s trajectory for this economic transformation; he argued in his Muhammad and Charlemagne (1939) that the early medieval economy fundamentally changed in the 7th century with the development and spread of Islam, which fundamentally split the Mediterranean world. D. on the other hand believed the 9th-century Carolingian economy showed continuity with the Roman world. Pirenne and D., however, agreed that the end of the Roman Empire was not cataclysmic. Understanding the economy remains key to determining the degree to which transformations in Roman culture and life shaped early medieval Europe. Scholars now generally agree that the medieval world was not a sharp break from the Roman past, though they argue about the degree, type, and mechanisms of that continuity. (See the various essays in Thomas F. X. Noble, ed., From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms, 2006). The Carolingian economy has remained a topic of controversy with some historians aligning more with D.’s thesis (Sture Bolin, “Mohammed, Charlemagne and Ruric,” Scand. Econ. Hist. Rev. 1 [1953]: 5–39; Maurice Lombard, Espaces et

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réseaux du haut moyen âge, 1972) and others more with Pirenne (Richard Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, 1983, 75; Claude Cahen, “Commercial Relations Between the Near East and Western Europe from the VIIth to the XIth Century,” Islam and the Medieval West, ed. Khalil I. Semaan, 1980, 1–25). Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, however, have urged scholars to recognize change within the context of continuity and argued for connections across the early medieval Mediterranean world (The Corrupting Sea, 2000, 153–72). Michael McCormick has argued that historians need not accept every argument of either D. or Pirenne but rather they should exploit new evidence available through digital analysis and archeology (The Origins of the European Economy, 2001, 5). Like McCormick, most Carolingianists now believe that the economy was far more complex than the closed Hauswirtschaft that scholars prior to D. believed had predominated in the Carolingian world (Adriaan Verhulst, “Economic Organisation,” NCMH 2 [1995]: 481–509; Richard Hodges, Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne, 2000, 59–118). In at least the last 40 years, many scholars, including those already cited, have adopted D.’s methodology of employing material culture when examining the economy. Freed from the constraint of early modern assumptions about the era, early medievalists continue to re-evaluate the documentary evidence. As debate over the relative (dis)continuity in late antiquity persists, D. still shapes current historical discourse concerning the “transformation of the Roman world,” as exemplified by a recent historical initiative of the European Union and its resulting series of collaborative essay collections (1997–2004). Even if some of D.’s works have not aged well, most historians recognize the important questions they posed. D., for example, saw continuity from the Carolingian era into the High Middle Ages in his Herrschaft und Bauer. Though criticized for being out-of-date almost from its publication (Philippe Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales en Bavière, 1949), the study made the provocative argument that gradual evolution, not major changes, marked agriculture. Subsequent work on Medieval agricultural history has emphasized variety over time and space. (Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe, orig. in German, 1935, 3rd ed., 1978, in English 1980, 1–95; Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, 3–357; Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements, 2002, 125–55; Christine Grainge, “Assarting and the Dynamics of Rhineland Economies in the Ninth Century,” AgHR 54.1 [2006]: 1–23) Although his Naturalwirtschaft und Geldwirtschaft now seems dated by its assumptions about the non-western world, and though scholars, such as Bernard H. Slicher van Bath (1st Dutch ed. 1960,

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The Agrarian History of Western Europe, English ed. 1963, 29, 38), soon criticized its use of evidence and commonplace thesis, D.’s arguments for a “multifaceted” medieval economy prefigure subsequent work. (David Nicholas, “Economy,” The Central Middle Ages, 2006, 57–90) Many of his contemporaries in the international scholarly community recognized D.’s contributions to early Medieval historiography during his own lifetime, as evidenced by his Festschrift, Wirtschaft und Kultur: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Alfons Dopsh (1938), which immediately received high praise and was reprinted in 1966. He was also a member of countless societies and academies and taught in prestigious visiting positions at the Universities of Berlin and Munich. Select Bibliography Works: Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit vornehmlich in Deutschland (1912/ 1913, 2nd ed. 1921); Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung, aus der Zeit von Caesar bis auf Karl den Grossen (1923); Naturalwirtschaft und Geldwirtschaft in der Weltgeschichte (1930); Herrschaft und Bauer in der deutschen Kaiserzeit (1939). Literature: Alfons Dopsch, “Selbstdarstellung” and “Ergänzung zur Selbstdarstellung,” Beiträge zur Sozial- und Wirschaftsgeschichte (1938): 277–328, and Selbstbiographie (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924); F. Vercauteren, “Alfons Dopsch,” MA 59 (1953): 467–73; Otto Brunner, “Alfons Dopsch,” ZRG, Germ. Abt. 72 (1955): 455–58; Theodor Mayer, “Alfons Dopsch,” HZ 179 (1955): 213–16; Otto Brunner, “Alfons Dopsch,” NDB, vol. 4 (1959), 77; Hanna Vollrath, “Alfons Dopsch,” D Hist. 7 (1980): 39–54.

Valerie L. Garver

Duby, Georges Michel Claude (October 7, 1919, Paris – December 3, 1996, Le Tholonet, near Aix-en-Provence), major French Economic and Social Historian. D. is generally regarded as the outstanding historian of medieval France in the second half of the twentieth century and the most brilliant disciple of the third generation of the Annales School. His early research, inspired by the work of Marc Bloch, advanced the annaliste goal of making the study of history interdisciplinary by incorporating the social sciences. His dissertation, La société des XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1953), was a groundbreaking work that presented new theories of the genesis and development

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of feudal (D. preferred the term “seigneurial”) society: the feudal revolution with its clear-cut chronological stages, the development of the knightly class, the organization of the aristocratic family. It was instantly recognized as a masterpiece for its methodology as well as its substance, and became the model for future regional studies. It formed the backbone of everything else D. wrote. Although he considered himself an authority on the French eleventh and twelfth centuries only, in practice he wrote extensively on earlier and later periods and on a wide range of subjects: the fine arts (medieval and modern) and culture, medieval kinship relations, medieval warfare, courtly love, medieval marriage and women. In the 1970s-1990s, his research focus shifted away from material structures to mentalités, the ideologically-constituted value systems that guide human attitudes and actions. He used anthropological material and concepts (images and the imaginary, memory, and myth) to explore how medieval people experienced their social context. Born in Paris into a family of artisans from the Alsace region, D. grew up in Mâcon, Burgundy. He attended the Mâcon lycée, where he won the annual National Art Competition for high school students. In 1939 he received his undergraduate degree (licence) from the University of Lyon with a specialization in geography, which was then a new, prestigious field of study. His passion for history came soon afterwards, from contact with André Allix and Jean Déniau, teachers whom he admired because they inspired their students. In 1942 he passed the agrégation examination that qualified him to teach history, geography, and literature, and he married a historian, Andrée Combier (their life-long partnership produced a son and two daughters). Living in the Vichy “free zone” during World War II, D. skillfully avoided the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) which forced hundreds of thousands of French citizens to work in labor camps in Germany for the war effort. In 1944 D. was promptly recruited by Jean Déniau as assistant in the History of the Middle Ages at the University of Lyon, where he prepared his doctoral thesis under the Sorbonne’s renowned economic historian Charles-Edmond Perrin and defended it at the Sorbonne in 1952. After junior appointments at the Universities of Besançon (1950–1951) and Marseille-Aix-en-Provence (1951–1953), and the publication of his thesis (1953), the position of professor of Medieval History was created for him at Marseille-Aix. His years at Aix were satisfying and productive: as the author of commissioned works, the founding co-editor of the journal Études rurales, and as founder and director of the innovative Center for the Study of Mediterranean Societies (Centre d’études des sociétés méditerranéennes) at Aix which he developed into an international forum for medieval study. D. had rejected earlier attempts to lure him to Paris but the move came in 1970 with his election to the Chair in

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the History of Medieval Societies at the prestigious Collège de France, which he retained until 1992. He promptly made his mark at the Collège de France by transforming his public seminars into lively interdisciplinary discussion forums where colleagues and guests from the whole range of the medieval disciplines debated new topics of research on the Middle Ages. The sessions provided an idea-bank and research instruments for many of the twelve books he wrote during the 1970s and 1980s. His reputation brought invitations to give public lectures at foreign universities on both sides of the Atlantic and he became the primary representative of France’s medieval historiography in prominent academic societies at home and abroad. It was mainly during the Paris years that D. became an invaluable interpreter of the Middle Ages for non-academic audiences. In addition to the many books he wrote, his radio lectures on medieval history reached millions of French homes. In 1986–1991 he was a familiar figure on television as director of “SEPT” (Société d’Édition des Programmes de Télévision), the Franco-German television channel that promoted quality cultural programming. In 1987 he became one of the very rare French medieval historians to be elected to the Académie Française. He also received honorary degrees from a number of foreign universities that included Harvard University and the University of Montreal, and his list of national honors included Commander of the Légion d’Honneur. In retirement, at his home in Le Tholonet (near Aix), the subject of women in the Middle Ages was the main academic focus of his last ten years. D.’s La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1953) is a detailed economic analysis of institutions and ideology in the small, rural Mâcon region of southern France, but its problem-based approach tackles much larger issues. By making chronology the backbone of his study, D. refines and corrects Marc Bloch’s work on feudal society. He uses linguistic changes in monastic court records between 980 and 1030 as the starting point for a theory of how seigniorial society took shape. It shows that powerful aristocratic families, descended from the old Carolingian aristocracy, filled the power gap left by a declining monarchy and consolidated their socio-economic power by controlling marriage and inheritance practices within the family to keep the patrimony intact. D. shows that the knightly class already belonged to the nobility in the mid-11th century. Hailed instantly as a masterpiece of analysis and clarity, this work provided a generation of historians with a fresh understanding of the Middle Ages. It forms the methodological and thematic basis of D.’s subsequent work, and secured his appointment at Aix. D.’s L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval: France, Angleterre, Empire, IXe-XVe siècles. Essai de synthèse et de perspectives de recherches (2 vols, 1962; rpt. 1975) pioneered research on the growth of medieval commerce and

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the economy. Its survey of the agrarian economy of England, France, and Germany, traces the interaction of economic, social, legal, and political changes in the countryside from the 9th–10th centuries, the 11th–13th centuries, and the 14th–15th centuries. It finds that the primary stimulus to economic growth was not trade, but feudal exploitation of peasant labor by the powerful elites who were faced with a decline in income caused by a decrease in private wars. Commissioned for a non-academic audience, its engaging style, large bibliography, numerous maps and charts, and its translated Latin charters, could not fail to impress, and its English translation (1968) brought D. renown in the USA and England. Hailed as a masterpiece of synthesis and analysis, it won the prestigious Premier Prix Gobert of the Académie Française and aided D.’s election to the Collège de France. His major venture into the history of mentalités, Les trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (1978) was hailed as a classic of national importance and aided his election to the Académie Française. It explores a medieval idea that Jacques Le Goff and others had linked to monarchic ideologies, namely the organization of society into three “orders” arranged hierarchically according to function: those who pray (monks), those who fight (knights), and those who work the land (peasants). D. asks how and why this trifunctional image was expressed, implemented, and adjusted over time in the north of France, then revived as the three estates of the ancien regime. Influenced by French structural anthropology, he treats the concept as an ideological construct expressed as an image in order to mask the true nature of its function: justification for the feudal exploitation of the poor by the powerful. It first appears in early 11th--century documents as a reaction to disruptive social movements in northern France, then disappears for 150 years, to reappear in the 13th century with the return of monarchic power. It would represent the social organization of the nation under the ancien regime and survive the French revolution. D. also wrote prolifically for an educated, non-academic audience. Le temps des cathédrales. L’art et la société, 980–1420, 3 vols. (1976) offers a sociology of medieval art divided into the three chronological periods familiar from his earlier works. Heavily criticized by art critics, it nevertheless won the prestigious Grand Prix Robert for the most eloquent work of history in 1976, and remains a cult work with readers. Le Dimanche de Bouvines: 27 juillet 1214 (1973) shows how memory was used over time to distort perception of the battle of Bouvines for political ends. It established D. as a national historian of France. His Le Chevalier, la Femme et le Prêtre (1981) concerns the aristocratic family, women, and the sacralization of marriage by the church. D.’s prolific œuvre of over 400 hundred titles made him a near icon in France during his lifetime. His non-dogmatic presentation of ideas and his

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clear, elegant style that established an empathetic rapport with its audience effectively brought his subject matter to life. He prized his role as a teacher, indeed the number of festschrifts and anniversary volumes that pay homage to him (from Aix to the Netherlands to Chile) attest to a generation of successful doctoral students and disciples whom he inspired. His reputation still commands a devoted following in some parts of the world. However, a growing body of research undermines D.’s central argument for the emergence of a feudal society. Its chronology remains valid for the Mâcon region and some parts of southern France, but not for the rest of the country, where developments came much later because of regional differences. One of D.’s most prominent disciples, Jean Flori, showed that knightly access to nobility came much later in northern France than D. had claimed (L’essor de la chevalerie (1986). The reliability of the monastic charters’ evidence has been called into question (Dominique Barthélemy, “La mutation féodale, a-t-elle eu lieu?,” Annales: E.S.C. [1992]: 767–77; “The Feudal Revolution,” Past and Present 152 [1996]: 196–205), and comparative studies of other regions show no evidence of a “crisis” around the year 1000 (see Patrick J. Geary, “Moral Obligation and Peer Pressure: Conflict Resolution in the Medieval Aristocracy,” Georges Duby: L’écriture de l’histoire, 1996, 217–22). The evidence for changes in the organization of the aristocratic family has also been disputed (Theodore Evergates, “The Feudal Imaginary of Georges Duby,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 [1997]: 641–60). In 1986 Elizabeth A. R. Brown pointed to serious deficiencies in The Three Orders, notably the conceptual inconsistency in its examples of the trifunctional model in 11th-century northern France, a failure to link the intellectual expressions of trifunctionality with its political enforcement, and insufficient attention to the insular expressions of trifunctionality (“Georges Duby and the Three Orders,” Viator 17 [1986]: 51–64). Although D. taught and wrote on the family, sexuality, and marriage in the French Middle Ages, he has been severely criticized by feminist historians for the absence of medieval women in his work (Kimberley A. Loprete, review of Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, in Speculum 70 [1995]: 607–09). In the last decade of his life D. worked hard to fill this significant gap with Dames du XIIe siècle. Héloïse, Aliénor, Iseut, et quelques autres, 3 vols., 1995–1997 (Women of the Twelfth Century, 1997–1998) and, with Michelle Perrot, the second volume of the vast collaborative work, L’Histoire des femmes en Occident (1990). Christiane Klapisch-Zuberattributes D.’s limited success in this area to his “not knowing how to read his sources” (“Le Médiéviste face au silence des femmes,” Sciences Humaines 175 [2006]: 61), while Virginie Greene shows him acknowledging the agency and power of medieval women in some of his medieval sources but not in others (“The

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Knight, the Woman, and the Historian,” Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2003, 43–63). Select Bibliography Works: Histoire de la civilisation française, with André Mandrou (1958); L’an mil (1967; rpt. 1980, 1985). Hommes et Structures du Moyen Age, 2 vols (1973); Histoire de la France rurale (1975); Saint Bernard. L’Art Cistercien (1976); L’Europe au Moyen Age, Art roman, Art gothique (1979); Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (1984); William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry (1985); “Ideologies in Social History,” Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, ed. Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 151–65; Le Moyen Age: De Hugues Capet à Jeanne d’Arc, 987–1460 (1987); France in the Middle Ages, 987–1420: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc (1991); Mâle Moyen Age. De l’amour et autres essais (1988); Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (1990; rpt. 1994); Images de femmes, with Michelle Perrot (1992). Literature: Georges Duby: L’Histoire continue (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Georges Duby et l’histoire des femmes, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Clio 8 (1998; journal issue devoted to D.); R. I. Moore, “Duby’s Eleventh Century,” History 69 (1984): 36–49; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); José Enrique Ruiz-Doménec, “Georges Duby (1919–1996),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 295–303.

Carol R. Dover

Duhem, Pierre (June 10, 1861, Paris, France – September 14, 1916, Cabrespine, France), French Historian. Edward Grant begins his book Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos: 1200–1687 by acknowledging D.: “No study of medieval cosmology could proceed without taking cognizance of Pierre Duhem’s monumental ten-volume study on that subject.” D. was perhaps the first person to recognize the intellectual achievements of medieval science and to challenge the Burkhartian construction of the Renaissance as a radical era which ended the “intellectual stagnation” of the Middle Ages. D. brought to light a series of forgotten philosophers of the 14th and 15th centuries and demonstrated how their physical

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theories suggestively prefigured those of Galileo, Leonardo de Vinci and Descartes. In doing so, D. introduced not only the topic of medieval science but also a new thesis of scientific change, claiming that scientific advancement was marked by continuity, not by reaction and revolution. D. came to the study of history unexpectedly. He began his professional life as a scientist and academic. In 1884 he presented a doctoral thesis in physics on the subject of thermodynamic potential. The thesis challenged Berthelot’s principle of maximum work, which had been formulated by Berthelot and was widely accepted at the time. D.’s criticism of the principle was correct, but Berthelot was an influential member of the French scientific community. Because of Berthelot’s interference, the thesis was refused and D. was ever excluded from an academic posting in Paris. D. received his doctorate in 1887 after completing a second thesis on electromagnetic theory. He began teaching at Lille (1887–1893), moved to a position at Rennes (1903–1904), and then finally became professor of physics at Bordeaux (1894–1916) where he would remain for the rest of his career. D.’s earlier publications examining 16th- and 17th-century mechanics reveal his budding interest in the historical evolution of scientific thought. The preface to Les origines de la statique (1904) contains the first articulation of his continuity thesis, where he characterizes “pretended intellectual revolutions” as “unjust and sterile reactions”; and claims that “[r]espect for tradition is an essential condition of scientific progress” (Les origines, I:2). Initially, D. believed that this trajectory of scientific thought was initiated by the Greeks, arrested by medieval scholasticism, and rekindled by Leonardo de Vinci. However, he was forced to reconsider this account of events when he encountered the work of Jordanus de Nemore and his science of weights. Ordering manuscripts from the archives in Paris, D. discovered many more thinkers like Jordanus, who had offered innovative physical theories that suggestively prefigured 17th-century science. D. published his discoveries in a three-volume study, Études sur Léonard de Vinci, which appeared successively in 1906, 1909 and 1913. For the first time, the works of the 14th-century philosophers Nicole Oresme and Jean Buridan appeared in print and were disseminated to a wider readership. At the completion of these three volumes, D. was able to define his continuity thesis in more specific terms: he was able to state the precise contributions of medieval science and account for the historical events which led to these conjectures. D. identified the principle achievements of the 14th century to be its theories of projectile motion and acceleration, as well as its system of latitude measurement for recording physical changes. In Le système du monde, D. investigated further innovations, such as 14th-century speculations on the possibility of other worlds, of infi-

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nite space, and infinitesimal magnitudes. Secondly, D. was able to identify historical circumstances that precipitated these innovations. He claimed that the Condemnations of 1277 had challenged the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy and so allowed philosophers to invent new conceptions of space and time. Thus, he argued that 1277 marked the birth-date of modern science. By the time of his death, only four volumes of Le système were in print, even though he had drafted ten volumes. His daughter, Hélène, saw to the posthumous publication of the complete series. While D. is considered as a founding figure of medieval science, during the initial decades of the discipline, he was also considered its foil. In 1959 Marshall Clagett commented that “the succeeding study of medieval mechanics has been largely devoted to an extension or refutation of Duhem’s work” (Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, xxi). The most criticized facet of D.’s thesis was the importance he had ascribed to the Condemnations of 1277. This was the least securely defended aspect of D.’s thesis because he had allowed his personal beliefs to frame his account of the event. He described the Condemnations as a triumph of Church over the determinism of Greek philosophy, and a source of pride for any French nationalist or Christian (Études 3: xiii–xiv). Alexandre Koyré challenged that the Condemnations of 1277 could mark the birth-date of modern science, given that the document was riddled with errors and misconceptions. However, Edward Grant has demonstrated that the date is important for medieval theories of cosmology, since the controversy generated new hypotheses of space. The recent Encyclopedia of Medieval Science (2005) lists “1277” as its own entry, indicating that the date is considered a significant one; however the precise nature of its significance has been adjusted and revised. The roster of medieval achievements which D. identified have received continued attention by later generations of scholars such as Anneleise Maier, Marshall Clagett, and John Murdoch. Even though most contemporary scholars feel that D. overstated the achievements of medieval science, they would nonetheless agree that D.’s work was important for signaling the achievements of medieval science and thus established its basis as a legitimate field of study. Select Bibliography Works: Les origines de la statique, 2 vols. (1905–1906); Études sur Léonard de Vinci, 3 vols. (1906–1913); ZEIN TA AINOMENA, Essai sur la notion de théorie physicque de Platon à Galilée (1908); Le système du monde, 10 vols. (1913–1959); for a comprehensive bibliography of D.s publications, see Jaki, 1984, 437–56. Literature: Hélène Duhem, Un savant français: Pierre Duhem (Paris: Plon, 1936); Stephen Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (The Hague: Nijhoff,

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1984); R. R. Russell Niall Dickson Martin, “The Genesis of a Mediaeval Historian: Pierre Duhem and the Origins of Statics,” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 119–29; Russell Niall Dickson Martin, Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991); Michael McVaugh, “Pierre Duhem,” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 57–67; Donald G. Miller, “Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1970–80), VI: 225–32; John Murdoch, “Pierre Duhem,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, Vol. III: Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 2000), 23–42; Michael McVaugh, “Pierre Duhem (1861–1916),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 57–67.

Sarah Powrie

Adler, Guido

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Ehrismann, Gustav Adolph (October 8, 1855, Pforzheim, Germany – September 9, 1941, Hamburg), German Medievalist. E. was one of the most active and influential early 20th-century Germanists, a key figure in the transition from text-critical philology to more wide-ranging schools of literary and cultural interpretation. His edition of Hugo von Trimberg’s Renner (1908–1911) and his edition (1915) and studies (1919) of Rudolf von Ems’s Weltchronik laid the basis for modern research on these texts and are still used today. His 1912 updating of Karl Weinhold’s Middle High German grammar was standard for decades (updated again in 1968). His work on the “chivalric system of the virtues,” though controversial, was canonical for several generations of medieval Germanists and continues to inspire new research. His large-scale Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, though also influential in its day, fell in the post-WWII period into general disuse outside specialist circles. E. was the son of Friedrich Ehrismann, a jeweler and manufacturer of goldware, and his wife Emma (neé Pregitzer). After secondary school he studied Classical, German, and Romance philology in Heidelberg and Leipzig between 1875 and 1881, earning his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1880 under Karl Bartsch with a thesis entitled “Über das Verhältnis der Handschriften des Renner von Hugo von Trimberg” (Germania 30 [1885]: 129–59). E. returned to Pforzheim in 1881, where he devoted himself to private study and publication for the next thirteen years. During this period, in addition to comprehensive text-critical, etymological, and bibliographical work, he studied medieval philosophy and ecclesiastical literature, laying the foundations for his later focus on Geistesgeschichte. In 1894 he returned to Heidelberg and completed his Habilitation with “Untersuchungen über das mittelhochdeutsche Gedicht von der Minneburg” (PBB 22 [1897]: 257–341). He became a professor in Heidelberg in 1901, and in 1909 was called to the University of Greifswald to head the Germanistisches Seminar, where for the next fifteen years he lectured and held seminars in all periods of German literature. During this time he advised over two hundred doctoral theses

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(an average of fifteen per year). In 1923–1924, he was appointed member of the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Göttinger Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften; the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften followed suit in 1932. E. retired in 1924, returning to Heidelberg that same year. In 1933, he went to Berlin, in 1938 to Hamburg-Othmarschen, where he died in 1941. E.’s geistesgeschichtlich approach to literary history, with its focus on the development of spiritual traditions, philosophical systems, eternal verities and “central ideas,” was at the methodological forefront of its day and represented an important advance, especially in its inclusion of cultural history in the study of literature. Many of E.’s interpretations still define basic (though not uncontested) positions in the field, for example the view that Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg are to be interpreted as opposites in every way (Damaris Schneider, “Die Darstellung des ‘Tristan’ von Gottfried von Straßburg in der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung nach Gustav Ehrismann,” Mediävistische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Rolf Bräuer and Otfrid Ehrismann, 1992, 195–213, here 197). Most notably, E.’s work on the “ritterliches Tugendsystem” (“chivalric system of the virtues”, 1919; also in vol. 2/2/1 of the Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 1927) sought to anchor the knightly code in an Aristotelian system of ethics mediated to the Middle Ages through Cicero. This was a highly innovative and groundbreaking study. It linked for the first time the ethical content of Middle High German courtly literature with the traditions of antiquity, such as they had survived into the Middle Ages and been reinterpreted by the Church and the German nobility. E.’s pioneering work influenced a whole generation of medieval Germanists and led to the first large-scale studies of courtly culture within medieval German literature (Eduard Neumann, “Der Streit um ‘Das ritterliche Tugendsystem,’” Ritterliches Tugendsystem, ed. Günter Eifler, 1970, 199). In 1943, the Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius subjected this “system of chivalric virtues” to a very negative review, accusing E. and his followers of two main errors: oversimplifying the routes of mediation between antiquity and the medieval German poets, and interpreting the ethical precepts found in the literature in terms of a single normative system (“Das ‘Ritterliche Tugendsystem,’” DVjs 21 [1943]: 343–68; also in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1948, 1953 sqq.). The justification for this attack, which Curtius couched in harsh and mocking rhetoric, long continued to be debated in Germanist circles (see articles in Günter Eifler, ed., Ritterliches Tugendsystem, 1970). Looking back, it seems to have clarified very little of substance to the field (Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture [1991], 301–2). In any case, E.’s basic insight that the medieval chivalric code was connected to

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Greco-Roman models was certainly accurate and, corrected in detail and updated, continues to provide a basis for new work (q.v. Stephen Jaeger’s Origins of Courtliness, 1985). E.’s multi-volume history of German literature (nearly 2,000 pages) was greeted in its day (published between 1918–1935) as a perfect synthesis between the text-critical analysis characteristic of traditional medieval German philology and idea-oriented interpretive impulses derived from the study of more recent literature (E. taught in all periods) (Otfrid Ehrismann, “Die Stille der Provinz: Gustav Ehrismann, Germanist in Greifswald,” Mediävistische Literaturgeschichtsschreibung, 1992, 17–50, here 38). The foreword to the second volume (1922, v-vii) sets out E.’s complex approach most clearly. Literary texts and materials were to be examined in five distinct ways: philologically, establishing the basic facts of the text and its authorship; historically, relating the text to its historical epoch and understanding its author as a “child of his age”; psychologically, exploring the author’s “basic spiritual conditions” and seeing the work as a function of “experience”; aesthetically, with a view to external artistic forms, their laws and principles; and ethically/metaphysically, setting out the moral and ideational content of the work, grasped both as a natural expression of the Volksbewusstsein and as an attempt to come to terms with the “meaning of life” under the aegis of eternal moral ideals and norms of religion. The ethical/metaphysical aspect linked medieval German literature with the ethical idealism of modern German literature and philosophy. The status of E.’s history did not long outlast the end of the Second World War, for numerous reasons. Firstly, its nationalist orientation and terminology (like Volksbewusstsein) fell out of fashion throughout the 1950s. Secondly, new fields of literary study such as the sociological and receptionbased approaches, and new philosophical orientations like existentialism, moved increasingly away from the kind of idealist focus found in E., and were better accommodated by the new general histories that began to appear after the late 1950s. It is possible that, given the right editorial will and publisher’s interest, E.’s multi-pronged approach to literary study would have allowed the work to transcend both deficits and be brought up to date. But that never happened. Only the first volume (1918) was ever reedited (1932), and the series as a whole experienced only one reprinting, in the mid-1950s. But the age of single-author literary histories on the scale of E.’s work (shorter ones continue to be written) was also nearing its close at this time, and E.’s immediate successors in this area are themselves now long out of date. Despite the obsoleteness of the work as a whole, however, the sophistication and clarity of E.’s conceptual system keep his history alive within

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specialist circles, where it is still considered a “treasure trove” of information (Rolf Bräuer, “Kriterien der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung,” Mediävistische Literaturgeschichtsschreibung, 1992, 63–80, here 74–75). Select Bibliography Works: “Duzen und Ihrzen im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung 1 (1900): 117–49; 2 (1902) 118–59; 4 (1903), S. 210–48; 5 (1904), 127–220; “Die Wörter für Herr im Althochdeutschen,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung 7 (1905): 173–202; “Märchen im höfischen Epos,” PBB (1905): 14–54; Studien über Rudolf von Ems. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Rhetorik und Ethik im Mittelalter, 1919; “Die Grundlagen des ritterlichen Tugendsystems,” ZfdA 56 (1919): 137–216; Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (4 vols.), 1918–1935; Der Geist der deutschen Dichtung im Mittelalter (1925/1931); Karl Weinhold, Kleine mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik (ed. G. Ehrismann, 1912; 14th edition ed. Hugo Moser, 1968). Editions: Der Renner von Hugo von Trimberg (4 vols.), 1909–1911; Rudolfs von Ems Weltchronik, aus der Wernigeroder Handschrift, 1915. Literature: IGL, vol. 1, 2003, 418–20; Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, vol. 7, 237; Otfrid Ehrismann, “Die Stille der Provinz. Gustav Ehrismann, Germanist in Greifswald,” Mediävistische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Rolf Bräuer und Otfrid Ehrismann (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1992), 17–50.

Alexander Sager

Ewert, Alfred (July 14, 1891, Halstead, Kansas – October 22, 1969, Oxford), French Philologist. Both through his publications and his unrelenting work as editor and reviewer, E. made a noteworthy contribution to Medieval French literary scholarship, namely in the areas of textual criticism and Anglo-Norman studies. The merit and importance of his editions of Old French texts (Gui de Warewic; the Fables and Lais of Marie de France; Béroul) were immediately recognized by scholars in the field and his work on Béroul’s Roman de Tristran in particular has had a profound and lasting impact on textual criticism and editing of this late 12th-century romance. Raised in Gretna (Manitoba), E. graduated from the University of Manitoba with First Class Honors in 1912, then entered Saint John’s College, in Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a First Class degree in German

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(1914). After serving in France in the First War (1915–1919), he returned to Oxford and obtained another First Class degree in French, with Spanish as a special subject. E. began his academic career the following year with an associate professorship in Dallas, Texas (1920–1921), before returning definitively to Oxford 1921, when he took up an appointment as Taylorian (and later University) Lecturer in French, that he combined with Lectureships in French at University and Jesus Colleges. Nine years later – and although he had published only one short article – E. was elected to the Chair of Romance Languages (thus succeeding E. G. R. Waters) and admitted to a Professorial Fellowship at Trinity College (1930). Extremely active in university affairs, he served not only as Senior Proctor at Oxford (1943–1944) and Dean in his college (1940–1944), but also as member of the Council of St. Hugh’s College (1932–1951) and Curator of the Bodleian Library (1943–1961). At retirement, in 1958, he was named Professor Emeritus and elected Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College. Over the course of his career, E.’s contribution to scholarship was recognized by several honors: he was officer of the French Légion d’honneur, corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (since 1944), fellow of the British Academy (elected in 1957), honorary doctor of letters of the University of Leeds (1959; following Walther von Wartburg, in 1958), and president of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures (1957) and of the Modern Humanities Research Association (1959). At age 70, he was honored with a Festschrift by his colleagues at Oxford. Throughout his career, E. devoted much of his efforts to the promotion of French studies in general, and to medieval studies in particular. He served as delegate of the Oxford University Press for nearly 20 years and member of the editorial board of Medium Aevum from 1932 to 1957, and played a major role in the development of French Studies in Britain through his collaboration with Basil Blackwell: E. was General Editor of the French Texts series published by Blackwell, and founded the prestigious review French Studies, for which he served as editor, then general editor, for many years (1947–65). In addition to these responsibilities, E. was also a founding member of the Anglo-Norman Text Society, of which he became president and on whose editorial board he served until his death, exercising “an immense and much appreciated influence over all of its publications” (Shackleton 2). In this same spirit of service to the discipline, E. wrote a large number of critical reviews. E.’s major publications fall principally into two fields: textual criticism and language studies. Of particular importance is E.’s work as an editor of Old French texts. As early as 1933, he established his reputation as an Anglo-Nor-

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man scholar with the first complete modern edition of the romance Gui de Warewic. His subsequent editions also centered on early Medieval authors whose works were either written in Norman – Béroul’s Roman de Tristran (1939) – or conserved in Anglo-Norman manuscripts – Marie de France’s Fables (partial edition, with R. C. Johnston, 1942) and Lais (1944), both edited after Brit. Lib., Harley 978. The last three editions, published by Blackwell, were first intended to remedy the dearth of Old French texts available for teaching in British universities during the war; they went far beyond this modest goal, however, by supplying scholars with original critical editions that were established with high scientific standards and followed recent evolutions in editorial practices. E. devoted articles to various manuscripts and to textual problems of other works – from the Strasburg Oaths (1935) to a 14th-century Latin-French nominale (1934) –, but it was clearly the Tristan romance that most retained his attention: after decades of study of Béroul’s poem, E. complemented his 1939 edition with an important and long-awaited commentary volume, that would only be published posthumously (1970). In the same year that his first critical edition appeared, E. also published The French Language (1933), a work combining a history of the language with a historical grammar. Modestly addressed to students and general readers at a time when nothing comparable existed in English, it met with immediate success and established E.’s reputation as a romance linguist. At retirement, he returned to a broad historical perspective in his Of the Precellence of the French Tongue (1958), which attempted to identify internal linguistic factors that favoured and maintained the prestige of the French language. It was also only in his later years that he would devote research to a nonFrench author: between 1940 and 1965 he published a series of three articles on Dante. Although his French Language has often been reprinted and still figures in M.A. and Ph.D. reading lists in a number of American universities, E. is primarily remembered for his critical editions of Old French texts. At the time of publication, reviewers consistently praised the editor’s careful erudition and shrewd judgment. E.’s approach to editing was invariably conservative. In each instance, however, he explicitly justified his attitude on textual or stylistic grounds: the contaminated manuscript tradition of Gui de Warewic made the stemma difficult to establish and pleaded in favor of printing the text of the “best manuscript,” Brit. Lib., Add. 38662, and restoring omitted passages by recourse to Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., 50, art. 7 (ed., xv–xix, xxvi–xxvii);

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his circumspection in the case of Marie de France’s works was prompted by ignorance of the degree to which Anglo-Norman may have influenced Marie’s linguistic usage and versification (e. g., Lais, ed., xx–xxii); Béroul’s romance was edited with as few corrections as possible not only because it is conserved by a single fragmentary manuscript, but also because careful study of the poem led E. to the conviction that the author was “a well-informed but non-conforming deviationist in grammar and style no less than in his treatment of received narratives” (ed., II: 44). Thus justified in each individual case, E.’s editorial philosophy also clearly adhered to the new editorial principles that came into vogue in the wake of Bédier’s work on the Lai de l’ombre and the Chanson de Roland (1913, 1927, 1928). Coupled with the rigor and critical acumen that characterize E.’s scholarship, his conservatism would assure his editions a generally enthusiastic reception and a remarkable longevity (the best-manuscript approach, which largely dominated the Old French field from the 1930s to the 1970s, is still widely practiced). His 1933 Gui de Warewic remains the only complete critical edition of this Old French romance and forms the basis for all scholarly investigation. Since publication, another complete MS and three additional fragments have been discovered (Ruth Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature, 1999, 90–91). Replacing Karl Warnke’s composite text (1885) and Ernest Hoepffner’s linguistic reconstruction (1921), E.’s conservative text of Marie de France’s Lais quickly imposed itself as the authoritative edition of the work; often reprinted, it remained unrivaled until the publication of Jean Rychner’s 1966 edition (rev. by E.: FSt 22 [1968]: 52–54). The latter, which is less conservative than E.’s and offers a full critical apparatus, has won general favor and become the most often cited edition in scholarly publications. Some critics, however, still prefer E.’s text, which has continued to be reprinted (most recently in 1995). E.’s most important contribution to Old French textual criticism, however, was undoubtedly his edition and commentary of Béroul’s Tristran. The 1939 edition was favorably received: reviewers underscored the originality of E.’s contribution, and the Anglo-Norman scholar F. J. Tanquerey considered it to be the “édition définitive” (MAevum 10 [1941]: 116). The extensive commentary volume he later published was the first work of such length to be devoted to resolving the manifold textual problems posed by this difficult, fragmentary text. It contains a wealth of information on the various versions of the Tristan legend, reviews the exegetical criticism of the preceding 70 years, and offers important and original discussions of, and solutions to problematic passages. The work has been unanimously acknowledged as a major contribution to our understanding of the text.

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E.’s conservative editorial approach and the solutions he adopted had a profound effect on subsequent editions of the work, beginning with that of his predecessor, Ernest Muret: in 1947, Lucien Foulet, and Mario Roques issued a revised version of Muret’s edition which restored over 100 previously rejected MS readings. Other recent modern editions of the work, though fairly numerous, have not fundamentally differed from E.’s. His conservatism, however, has not been endorsed by all scholars. The year following the appearance of E.’s commentary, T. B. W. Reid, who had already proposed a number of corrections (“On the Text of the Tristran of Béroul,” Medieval Miscellany Presented to Eugène Vinaver … [1965], 263–88) that were either rejected or ignored by E., published his Tristran of Beroul: A Textual Commentary (1972). Affirming the ‘right to emend,’ Reid offered analyses of some 450 difficult loci and proposed numerous emendations. His arguments would later be refuted by Sven Sandqvist who, in his Notes textuelles sur le ‘Roman de Tristan’ de Béroul (1984), reaffirmed the necessity of maintaining a conservative editorial stance. While the most important recent edition of the romance adopts a clearly interventionist attitude and renews the debate with a fresh consideration of the evidence (Steward Gregory, ed., 1992), E.’s influence on this edition and on all discussions of the textual problems raised by Béroul’s romance remains tangible. Select Bibliography Works: “An Early MS. of the Roman des romans,” MLR 23 (1928): 299–306; “On Textual Criticism, with Special Reference to Anglo-Norman,” Arthuriana 2 (1929–1930): 56–69; “Deux fragments du Roman de la rose,” R 57 (1931): 233–34; “Two Fragments of the Roman de la rose,” MLR 26 (1931): 182–87; The French Language (1933; 2nd ed., 1943); “A 14th-Century Latin-French Nominale (St. John’s College, Oxford, Ms No. 178),” MAevum 3 (1934): 13–18; “L’accident du vers 2242 de la Chanson de Roland,” R 59 (1933): 81–82; “Gui de Warewic: Some Observations,” MAevum 4 (1935): 67–68; “The Strasburg Oaths,” Transactions of the Philological Society 1935, 16–35; “Anglo-Norman Studies,” MAevum 7 (1938): 164–66; “On the text of Béroul’s Tristran,” Studies in French Language and Mediaeval Literature presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope (1939), 89–98; “Dante’s Theory of Language,” MLR 35 (1940): 355–66; “Doctrine and Linguistics in the Natural Sciences,” Literature and Science (1955), 36–44; “The Glasgow Latin-French Glossary,” MAevum 25 (1956): 154–63; Of the Precellence of the French Tongue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958); “Dante’s Theory of Diction,” ABMHRA 31 (1959): 15–30; “Art and Artifice in the Divina Commedia,” Centenary Essays on Dante by Members of the Oxford Dante Society (1965), 77–90; “An Instance of Cyclical Recurrence in French Literary History,” Medieval Miscellany Presented to Eugène Vinaver, ed. F. Whitehead et al. (1965), 113–23. Editions: Gui de Warewic, roman du XIIIe siècle, 2 vol. (1933); The Romance of Tristran by Beroul. A Poem of the Twelfth Century (vol. I, 1939; vol. II, 1970); Marie de France, Fables, selected and edited by A.E. and R. C. Johnston (1942); Marie de France, Lais (1944).

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Literature: Ruth Dean, Urban T. Holmes, and William J. Roach, “Alfred Ewert,” Speculum 45 (1970): 519–20; R. S[hackleton], “In memoriam Alfred Ewert (1891–1969),” FSt 24 (1970): 1–3; S. Ullmann, “Alfred Ewert, 1891–1969,” Proceedings of the British Academy 55 (1969): 377–89; Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961); Glyn S. Burgess, “Alfred Ewert (1891–1969): The First English Edition of the Lais,” The Reception and Transmission of the Works of Marie de France, 1774–1974, ed. Chantal Maréchal (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2003), 251–59.

Craig Baker

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F Faral, Edmond (March 18, 1882, Médéa, Algeria – February 8, 1958, Paris), French Medievalist. F. had a long and successful career in French and Latin medieval literature, having held a Chair in medieval Latin literature at the Collège de France from 1925–1955. He was a scholar of broad interests who, in addition to writing numerous books, produced editions of French and Latin texts, as well as a long list of significant articles. F.’s most noteworthy theory was laid out in his three-volume La légende arthurienne. Études et documents (1929), in which he argued that Geoffrey of Monmouth had not drawn from Celtic sources for his Historia Regum Britanniae. F. argued, polemically, that it was Geoffrey himself, in spite of his protestations, who had created the Arthurian material, the matière de Bretagne, based on Greco-roman influences (Ursula Bähler, Gaston Paris et la philologie romane, 2004, 568–69). F.’s rejection of the Celtic folkloric roots of medieval French literature was an extension of his mentor Joseph Bédier’s influential assertions of the clerical and essentially Latin roots of French medieval literature (Alain Corbellari, Joseph Bédier: Ecrivain et philologue, 1997, 315). F. was born in Algeria to a Protestant family originally from the Languedoc region of France. He attended the Lycée d’Alger and the Lycée Henri IV, and in 1903 gained entry to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. In 1906, he passed with high marks the national exam known as the agrégation in grammar. In 1907, he began a period of high school teaching, first in Nantes and then, in Paris in 1909, at the Lycée Voltaire and the École Alsacienne. In spite of significant time devoted to his teaching and military service, F. completed his doctorate in 1910 with a thesis titled Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge. F. was one of the principal disciples of Joseph Bédier, although as a member of the Collège de France, Bédier did not direct theses. In 1920 F. became director of Medieval Latin literature at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and in 1924 he became professor at the Collège de France. In his inaugural lesson, he paid homage to Bédier, to whom he would remain loyal throughout his career. In 1925, a chair was created for F. in Latin literature, a move which represented a decisive victory over Bédier detractors

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such as Paul Meyer, and signaled the beginning of a “Bédieriste” era at the Collège that would last into the 1950s (Corbellari, 491). Between 1935 and 1936, F., then director of La revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, was elected membre ordinaire of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He was also elected president of the Fondation Singer-Polignac, as well as to the Conseil Supérieur de l’Education nationale. When Bédier retired from the Collège de France in 1937, F. asked to take his place, an honor which they refused him. As compensation, he was invited to take over the role of administrator of the school from Bédier, which he accepted (Corbellari, 314). F. would remain at the Collège until 1955, when he began his retirement and assumed the title of administrateur honoraire. F. also held the honorable distinction of the Grand-croix de la Légion d’honneur. He died in 1958 after complications from surgery. F.’s 1910 Les jongleurs en France au Moyen Âge is still regularly cited, although it remains controversial for its assertions of the Latin antecedents of the French jongleurs. In 1913, he published Recherches sur les sources latines, his first collection of studies of Latin literature of the Middle Ages, in which he both echoed and supplemented Bédier’s clerical vision of the literary arts (Corbellari, 315). F. would spend his career studying the confrontation between popular and learned culture, dual pathways which he believed to be more independent than had previously been thought. He sought to demonstrate that literary creations in the “langue vulgaire,” such as the romances and the fabliaux, derived not from a font of folkloric sources borne along by cultural memory, but from the classical tradition learned in the ecclesiastical schools where their authors had been trained. He notably claimed that scholars had searched in vain for the so-called “lost” Welsh and Irish poems, the putative sources for the French material (“Faral, Edmond,” Dictionnaire de biographie française, ed. Roman d’Amat, vol. 13, 1975, 575–76). In his La Chanson de Roland. Étude et analyse, 1934, F. continued to support the legacy of his mentor, asserting that no one had managed to successfully refute Bédier’s theories concerning the clerical origins of vernacular literature in Medieval France (Corbellari, 315). F. also produced a series of valuable editions, including Courtois d’Arras Jeu du XIIIe siècle, 1911; Gautier d’Aupais, 1919; Villehardouin. La conquête de Constantinople, 1938, and Ermold le Noir. Poème [Latin] sur Louis le Pieux, 1932. His Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf appeared posthumously in 1959–60 with coeditor Julia Bastin. He was also a major collaborator in the multi-volume Histoire littéraire de la France, undertaken in 1924 by Bédier and Paul Hazard. F. finds a place amongst the masters of medieval literary history, but the early years of his career were marked by difficulty. It was rumored that

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Bédier had taken F.’s side in 1910 when F. came close to having his thesis refused. Bédier publically stated that F.’s first effort, Les Jongleurs au Moyen Age, had not been well received, and with good reason, for it bore the marks of a beginner who had taken on an over-studied subject and tried to revive it. A 1910 review of Les Jongleurs by Jean Acher acerbically stated that F.’s work added little to the research of his predecessor (Corbellari, 96–99). Years later, Bédier would minimize F.’s shaky debut and emphasize the value of his later works and the distinguished career that all had come to recognize. Indeed by 1924, F. had become a highly respected scholar. In his 1997 biography of Bédier, Alain Corbellari suggests that F. had been able to have the career that he did because he had found a niche for himself in the neglected field of Latin literature of the Middle Ages. He also notes that F. was one of the medievalists who perhaps suffered the most from having to work in the shadow of Bédier (314). F.’s La Légende arthurienne (1929) was followed in 1932 by Charles Bertram Lewis’s Classical Mythology and Arthurian Romance. Both of these works sought to drastically minimize the authentic Celtic contribution to the Arthurian tradition in France, positing instead the influence of the post-classical tradition. Roger Loomis with his Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (1927), refuted them both by seeking to reestablish the theory of Celtic origins (Ursula Bähler, Gaston Paris et la philologie romane [2004], 543). Paris biographer Ursula Bähler cites Michel Zink’s summary of the debate, in which he emphasizes the established originality and antiquity of Celtic literatures and insists that the similarities to the Old French romances were too striking for anyone to deny a relationship. Geoffrey of Monmouth had surely drawn from Celtic sources as had the French poets, and both F. and Loomis had been too extreme in their assessments (Bähler, 569). Modern critics recognize that F., in taking Bédier’s theories even further, had gone too far in his assessments of the origins of the matière de Bretagne. With his refusal of the folkloric origins of the fabliaux, he shared with Bédier, according to Corbellari, an unfortunate tendency toward giving such texts the status of documents. Bédier’s biographer also criticizes him for mistakenly seeing the fabliaux as portraits of daily life in the 13th century and for failing, as did Bédier, to recognize literary artifice, which led them to confuse authorial and narrative voice (Corbellari, 96–99). Critics have offered mixed reviews of F.’s scholarly editions. A 1933 review of his edition of Ermold le Noir contained harsh criticism from Léon Levaillain, who ended his compte rendu in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes with the lament that the definitive edition of the poem had yet to be produced (94 [1933]: 163). By contrast, Edgar H. McNeal, in a 1940 review,

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praised F.’s edition of Villeharduoin’s La Conquête de Constantinople as a welcome and definitive new edition of the work (American Historical Review 45 [1940]: 620). In his Charlemagne et Arthur, ou le roi imaginaire (1992), Dominique Boutet sets out to reframe long-standing debates in French medieval literary studies. He cites in his introduction F.’s La Légende arthurienne and Gaston Paris’s Histoire poétique de Charlemagne (1865) as the foundational works on Arthur and Charlemagne, seminal studies which had nonetheless failed to come to terms with the nature of the two most famous kings of French medieval literature (7–8). Select Bibliography Works: Mimes français du XIIIe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire du théâtre comique au Moyen Âge (1910); Le Roman de Troie en prose (1922); Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle: Recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du Moyen Âge (1924); Petite grammaire de l’ancien français (1941); La vie quotidienne au temps de St. Louis (1942); De Babione (1948); Jean Buridan, maître ès arts de l’Université de Paris (1950); Guillaume de Digulleville, moine de Châlis (1962). Literature: “Notice sur Edmond Faral,” Histoire littéraire de la France 40 (1974); Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1999).

Anne Latowsky

Frappier, Jean (April 22, 1900, Bordeaux – August 24, 1974, Paris), French Medievalist. Christened the dean of French Arthurian scholars, F. was linked to scholarship on Chrétien de Troyes as well as to that of medieval and Renaissance prose and poetry generally. At once erudite and subtle, F.’s interpretations of Medieval literature have remained as valid sources of inspiration for generations. F.’s career was propelled with great energy and organizational skills, and sparked by two early theses (1936). Upon their publication, the young scholar was named to a professorship at the University of Strasbourg (1937), until called to Gustave Cohen’s chair of medieval French literature at the Sorbonne (1948), a position he held until retirement in 1969. F. chose his text well: La mort le roi Artu, a sympathetic prose romance, was composed with a modernistic simplicity that eschewed the fantastic. Pas-

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sionate intensity is economically understated in the text. Lancelot and Guenevere’s adultery continues unchecked, the Round Table is decaying, and Arthur’s fall at the moment of his triumph, does not yet keep the king from accepting his destiny. For these scenes, F. evokes the powerful figure of Fortuna – summoned with the vibrancy of a philological pioneer. In addition, his role in the expansion of Arthurian studies is immeasurable. He was the most important European arthurisant of his time. While marking time in Strasbourg, F. published numerous studies on the French Renaissance, a secondary focus that never exhausted his active curiosity. But his central interest remained the Middle Ages. Arthurian romance and lyric and epic poetry bordered his scholarly domain. The bibliography included in the homage volume, Mélanges Frappier (filled as well with about 100 studies in his honor), retraces his publications from the late 1950s and early 1960s. It would be no exaggeration to assert that they alone changed the course of medieval French studies, establishing a kind of “Frappier school” for each topic in question. F. brought out revisions of his earlier Sorbonne lectures on Yvain (1969) and Perceval (1972), which synthesized antecedent research. He also completed several collections of previously published work. In the early 1970s, he contributed to the Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, a pan-European project, initiated by German Arthurians, tracing the development of all genres of medieval Romance literature from the beginnings down to 1500. F.’s engagement and positivism informed his insights into Medieval texts. Just as his critical study and his edition of the last part of the prose Lancelot (i. e., La mort le roi Artu) were hailed at the time as vital to the pioneering research on the Vulgate Cycle and its related subjects, he began and continued to turn out “hautes vulgarisations” – for example, his influential modern French rendition of Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette. His commitment to a wider audience is also apparent in his monograph on Chrétien which presents the results of myriad studies on the greatest of the medieval French romancers. For any reader wishing to learn more about Chrétien de Troyes and the genesis of Arthurian romance, F.’s little “vulgarization” is the answer. Artless – yet it does not skirt controversy – the work grapples with the issues unpedantically. Without being a testy zealot of a single theory, a gentle F. contributed to Arthurian studies in this modest study a compilation of impressive arguments on behalf of the celtisants and for Chrétien’s stunning originality – a nuanced compromise that resulted in a conciliation of the baffled spheres of influence, the heretics, iconoclasts, and reactionaries. Vraisemblable, “believable, with verisimilitude,” is a kind of leitmotif in his Chré-

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tien de Troyes. He searched for an understanding of man and the meaning of life and always to uncover the aesthetic values of the literary text. F. wrote a delicate French; his tone was balanced – never crude; and he maintained a sense of symmetry – all of which he subordinated to intellectual and humanistic acumen. As J.-Ch. Payen intimates, F. saved his soul by cultivating the past through a highly literate discipline. Select Bibliography Works: Etude sur La mort le roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (1961); edition: La mort le roi Artu, 2nd ed. (1996); for greater detail, i. e. (besides a more comprehensive biography), an expanded list of F.’s publications may be consulted in both his Festschrift, Mélanges de langue et de littérature du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance offerts à Jean Frappier, 2 vols. (1970), and in two detailed bio-bibliographical encyclopedia articles by Raymond J. Cormier: “Jean Frappier (1900–74),” Dictionary of Medieval Scholarship, ed. Helen Damico, 3 vols. (1995–1998), II: 415–23; and “Chrétien de Troyes,” Great Lives from History: Ancient and Medieval, ed. Frank N. Magill, 5 vols. (1988), vol. I, 485–89. Literature: B. J. Wittig, “The Aeneas-Dido Allusion in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide,” CL 22 (1970): 237–53; Raymond J. Cormier, One Heart One Mind: The Rebirth of Virgil’s Hero in Medieval French Romance (University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1973 [see introductory chapter for an attempted imitation F.’s first chapter of his Chrétien de Troyes]; Douglas Kelly, ed., The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, A Symposium (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985); Norris Lacy, ed., The Arthurian Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1985); Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and Keith Busby, ed., The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987–1988); Jean-Charles Payen, “Une Approche classiciste du roman médiéval: Jean Frappier, lecteur de Chrétien de Troyes,” Oeuvres et Critiques 5,2 (1980–81), 45–52 (volume coordinated by R. J. Cormier); for a new approach that questions F.’s conclusions, see Joan Tasker Grimbert, “Chrétien, the Troubadours, and the Tristan Legend: The Rhetoric of Passionate Love in D’Amors qui m’a tolu a moi,” Philologies Old and New: Essays in Honor of Peter Florian Dembowski (Princeton, NJ: Edw. C. Armstrong Monographs, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, 2001), 237–50.

Raymond J. Cormier

Fuhrmann, Horst (June 22, 1926, Kreuzburg, in Upper Silesia), German Historian. The influence of forged Pseudo-Isidorian decretals on canon law has been greatly illuminated by the work of F. F.’s three-volume work Einfluss und Verbreitung der Pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen which is the standard source re-

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garding the forgeries and their support of the unmitigated power of the papacy over secular authority. The wide ranging consequences of F.’s research on the papacy, the church and canon law in the Middles Ages continues to inspire a wide range of historians. F.’s influencial work on the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals has broken the ground for recent work by Klaus ZechielEckes’s on the creators of the forgeries, Rudolf Schieffer’s on their structural composition, and Gerhard Schmitz’s on their thematic content. Notable contributors to critical editions of the forgeries include Wilfried Hartmann, Paul Hinschius and Etienne Baluze. F. was born the son of a train conductor and raised in Kreuzberg (now Kluczbork in south-western Poland) where he attended the local Volksschule and Gymnasium. At seventeen, F. was called to emergency service for the German air force in Gleiwitz. Shortly thereafter he served in an American prisoner of war camp until 1945. Originally, F. planned to study aircraft engineering, but, due to the political climate of the time, he astutely chose to study law, history, and classical philology at the University in Kiel instead. F. received his Ph.D. in 1952 under the direction of Karl Jorden and wrote his thesis on medieval patriarchy. Two years later he took his teaching exams in history and Latin in 1954. That year proved to be fortuitous for F. as he not only passed his exams, but also married Dr. jur. Ingrid Winkler-Lipolt and began what would later become a legendary career at the Institute for Monumente Germaniae Historica. He worked as an assistant for the MGH in Munich and at the German Historical Institute in Rome until 1957, when he took a position as an assistant in the history department at the University in Kiel. A few years later he finished his habilitation on the meaning and effectiveness of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals in the Middle Ages. In 1962, he became a professor of history at the University in Tübingen and won the “Premio Spoleto” for his research from the Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. While in Tübingen, F. continued to publish articles on the PseudoIsidorian decretals, the Donation of Constantine and the emergence of the papal state. In 1971, F. was chosen to serve as the president of the MGH with its subsequent position as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Regensburg. While being an active director of the MGH and an engaging professor at Regensburg, F. continued not only to share his formidable research with his peers in academia, but also wrote texts on medieval history for the general public. His facility for sharing medieval history with a variety of audiences has led to numerous awards including honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Tübingen in 1981, the University of Bologna in 1982, and Columbia University in New York in 1992. He was also awarded the “Cultore di

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Roma” in 1981, the “Ordre Pour le Mérite” in 1986, and the “Bundesverdienstkreuz” in 1987 (from the German government). In 1992, F. was chosen to serve a five-year term as the president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The following year, F. retired from the University of Regensburg. In 1994, F. retired from his twenty-three year career at the helm of the MGH. He continues to stay active as a scholar and was awarded the Silesian Culture Award in 2003 for his contributions to the history of Silesia. F.’s research on the Pseudo-Isidorian forgeries built upon the seminal work of the late Johannes Haller, Friedrich Maassen, and Emil Seckel. Like his predecessors F. focuses on the cultural and historical impact of these 9th-century documents as evinced by not only his extensive work Einfluss und Verbreitung der Pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen but also by his notable publications on the papacy such as Von Petrus zu Johannes Paul II.: das Papsttum: Gestalt und Gestalten and Papst Urban II. und der Stand der Regularkanoniker. The life of Pope Gregory VII and his role in establishing papal authority over secular monarchs has been a particular focal point of F.’s research. F. has also written standard texts for medieval history such as the second volume of Deutsche Geschichte im Hohen Mittelalter von der Mitte des 11. bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts and Einladung ins Mittelalter which have also been translated for the international community and reprinted a number of times. ‘Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen’: Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica and Menschen und Meriten: eine persönliche Portraitgalerie shows F.’s skill as a biographer. The biographies as well as his work Überall ist Mittelalter attest to F.’s interest in establishing the relevance of history to contemporary life for both scholars and laymen alike. Hubertus Seibert has observed that no other German historian enchants audiences through his narrative skill and striking examples as well as excites them about his interpretation of the Middles Ages like F. (Ostdeutsche Gedenktage, 107). Indeed the reviews of his works often note F.’s talent as an engaging writer like the review of Überall ist Mittelalter in Speculum which described the work as a “good read, instructive and entertaining, sophisticated and erudite” (74 [1999]: 418). The erudite nature of F.’s scholarship has been noted by scholars for nearly three decades. Joseph Semmler praised his book Einfluss und Verbreitung der Pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen as not only a fundamental contribution to the history of canon law and intellectual history of the 9th through to the 12th century, but also noted that the work eradicates a void that had been left by a blatant misinterpretation of decretals (Historische Zeitschrift 222 [1976]: 663). More recently Tom F. X. Noble wrote that F.’s Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages “provides a comprehensive resume of his

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unrivaled knowledge of the ‘Pseudo-Isidorian Forgeries’” (Theological Studies 63 [2002]: 844). Select Bibliography Works: “Studien zur Geschichte mittelalterlicher Patriarchate,” Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 39 (1953): 112–76; 40 (1954): 1–84; 41 (1955): 95–183; Das Constitutum Constantini (1968); Einfluss und Verbreitung der Pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen: Von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit, MGH SS 24 v.1–3 (1972–1974); Deutsche Geschichte im Hohen Mittelalter von der Mitte des 11. bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts (1978; trans. as Germany in the High Middle Ages, 1986); Von Petrus zu Johannes Paul II.: das Papsttum: Gestalt und Gestalten (1980); Papst Urban II. und der Stand der Regularkanoniker (1984); Einladung ins Mittelalter (1987); Die Päpste: von Petrus zu Johannes Paul II (1998); Fern von gebildeten Menschen: eine oberschlesische Kleinstadt um 1870 (1989); Überall ist Mittelalter: von der Gegenwart einer vergangenen Zeit (1996); ‘Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen’: Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (1996); Menschen und Meriten: eine persönliche Portraitgalerie (2001); Papal Letters in the Early Middle Ages (with Detlev Jasper, 2001); Cicero und das Seelenheil, oder, Wie kam die heidnische Antike durch das christliche Mittelalter? (2003). Literature: Hubert Mordek, ed., Papsttum, Kirche und Recht im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Horst Fuhrmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991); Hubertus Seibert, “Horst Fuhrmann,” Ostdeutsche Gedenktage (1996): 103–08; Wolfgang Weber, ed., “Fuhrmann, Horst,” Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1984), 162; “Horst Fuhrmann,” Internationales Biographisches Archiv 14 (Munziger Archiv 2001).

Karina Marie Ash

Funkenstein, Amos (March 9, 1937, Tel Aviv – November 11 1995, Berkeley, CA), Israeli-GermanAmerican Medievalist. F. was an exceptionally original and diversified scholar with an extraordinary scope of knowledge and interests, who influenced the intellectual discourse within Israeli, German and American scholarly research in a large range of fields. In all his diverse research F. worked as an historian, equipped with a sensitive attention to problems of historic consciousness, historiography, and history of science, providing a critical examination of modern historiosophic paradigms. His research of European history had its core in an interdependent discussion of Jewish and Christian sources from the viewpoint of

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secularization as its constitutional point of departure, a viewpoint that was rooted in modern German historiographic paradigms. F. was raised in an Israeli national-orthodox family. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Free University (Freie Universität) of Berlin, where in 1964 he submitted his doctoral thesis entitled Gegenwartsbestimmung, Heilsplanbegriff und Entwicklungsgedanke im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters (Identification of the Present, the Concept of Redemption and Notion of Development in Medieval Historical Thought). In 1967, he was appointed lecturer at UCLA and in 1983, while still at UCLA, joined the newly founded Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Until his early sudden death at the age of sixty, Funkenstein shared his time between universities in California (Southern California, Stanford, UCLA and from 1991 in U.C. Berkeley) and Tel Aviv University. F.’s inclination toward problems of historiography led him to the study of the development of historic consciousness from its roots in late antiquity in Jewish apocalyptic writings and of the Church Fathers throughout the early Middle Ages to late medieval and early modern secular culture. F. was occupied mostly with the moment in which history transforms from serving an objective tool to describe natural development into a constitutive theological/teleological framework of divine providence. It is precisely because of their enrichment with a completely new ideological and terminological arsenal such as providence, progress, teleology, and linear development, that F. treats history and counter history as main tools of cultural identity. All this is clearly presented already in his doctoral thesis published in 1965 under the title Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters now available in electronic form on the website of Tel Aviv University. In this early research Funkenstein deals mostly with the development of historic consciousness in late antiquity until the 12th century. His later research followed this notion until the 17th century. In his mature writings and especially in his key study, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (1986), F. developed his research program striving to provide a full description of medieval and early modern culture, one that captures the cultural phenomenon in its full expression through all its intellectual manifestations: historic narrative, scientific world view, theological speculations, polemical and apologetical thought. By doing so, he led his work beyond disciplinary limits and beyond linguistic and religious differences. The emphasis on the theological context of medieval philosophy and science led F. to turn to Bible hermeneutics as an integral part of his research.

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This was probably influenced by his occupation with Jewish medieval sources in which the literary boundaries between exegetical literature and academic treatises are not very severe. Similar mechanisms of turning to other fields were developed by F. in his historic description of medieval and early modern science. In this he acknowledges his debt to the work of Anneliese Maier. The notion of “secular theology” was a central and highly influential one, and was mostly developed in his already mentioned systematic study Theology and the Scientific Imagination. Here he combines his deep interest in science, with a vast knowledge of theology that enabled him to examine carefully the changing place of science within the European mind, focusing on the mechanisms of continuity rather than on the concept of the new age as a new beginning. F. argued against the dominant narrative of conflict between science and religion and against the paradigm of modernity as a completely new beginning marked by labels such as the Renaissance, Humanism and Reformation. F. holds fast to the conviction that, especially during the 14th to 17th centuries, science and theology were sharing one and the same discourse and that the most “revolutionary” ideas of the new science in the 17th century emerged out of a long process of transformation. This idea is clearly seen in the very structure of the book, divided into four major parts according to the four major divine attributes: omnipresence, omnipotence, providence, divine knowledge. The most quoted thesis of F. in contemporary scholarship regards the mental transformation that took place within European Christianity concerning the image of Judaism (“Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages,” Viator 2 [1971]: 373–82). The topic has become central since this article was published and thus has been vastly researched. Yet the basic intuition of F. continues to provide a constant point of departure for new studies of the field. Since 1996, three volumes of contributions have been dedicated to the various fields of F.’s research; a major part of the discussions concentrates on his concept of historic consciousness, and on his concept of secular theology, and the process of secularization in science, art, politics, and other fields of European culture. Select Bibliography Works: Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986) was translated also into French and Italian; Maimonides: Nature, History, and Messianic Beliefs, translation by S. Himelstein, originally published in Hebrew (1983; 1986, 1988 also in French); Perceptions of Jewish History (1993; a collection of earlier studies published originally in Hebrew. trans. also into German, 1995); together with Rabbi Adin Steinsalz, The Sociology of Ignorance (1987 [in Hebrew]); Styles in Medieval Biblical Exegesis – An Introduction (1990 [in Hebrew]).

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Literature: Townsend Center Occasional Paper 6 (1996) [with contributions on F. by Robert Alter, David Biale, Anthony Long, Isaac Miller, and Steven J. Zipperstein]; Jewish Social Studies 6.1 (1999) is devoted to Amos Funkenstein’s ‘Perceptions of Jewish History’: An Evaluation of His Works by His Students, ed. Robert S. Westman and David Biale; Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 2008).

Yossef Schwartz

Furnivall, Frederick James (February 4, 1825, Egham, Surrey – July 2, 1910, St. George’s Square, Primrose Hill, London), English Editor and Medievalist. F. was one of the figures who, along with Walter W. Skeat, Henry Bradshaw, James Murray, and others, was pivotal in turning Victorian medievalism and enthusiasm for all things medieval into a field of solid scholarship and textual criticism. Although not himself an academic, F.’s work in many ways laid the foundation for modern academic medieval and literary studies. F. founded the Early English Text Society, which was responsible for printing readily-accessible scholarly editions of hitherto primarily unavailable English texts; he also founded the Chaucer Society, the Wyclif Society, and the New Shakespeare Society. He was secretary of the London Philological Society and a key initiator of the Society’s New English Dictionary project (now the Oxford English Dictionary), and served as editor of the New English Dictionary for many years. F. was born the son of an evangelical physician in Surry, England. His early schooling took place in Englefield Green, Turnham Green, and Hanwell; in 1841 he entered University College, London, where he studied German, mathematics, science, and history. In October 1842, he matriculated at Trinity College Cambridge, and graduated in mathematics and science with a B.A. in 1846 and an M.A. in 1849. He then studied law at Lincoln’s Inn in 1846, and in 1849, he was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn. There he met Socialist John Malcolm Ludlow, and in 1848, the two joined the Christian Socialists movement, although later in his life F. became agnostic. Following his socialist ideals, in 1854, F. began teaching grammar and English literature at the London Working’s Men College, where he was to teach for much of his life.

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In 1847, F. became a member of the London Philological Society, and although he had been privately pursuing literary studies for years, this in many ways marks the beginning of his public career of making English literature, language and history available to people of all classes and backgrounds. F. regularly presented philological papers at the society, and also published some early English poems in the Transactions of the Society. He became joint secretary of the Society, with T. H. Key, in 1853, and sole secretary from 1862 until a few weeks before his death in 1910. In 1864, F. founded the Early English Text Society, and edited an astonishing 39 volumes himself. Although F. founded several more literary societies, such as the Ballad Society, the New Shakespeare Society, the Browning Society and the Shelley Society, his societies of most interest to medievalists are the Chaucer Society, founded in 1868, and the Wyclif Society, founded in 1882. In 1884, F. was awarded a Civil List Pension for his literary efforts. He was also recognized with an honorary doctorate from the University of Berlin, a D.Litt. from Oxford University, and an honorary fellowship from Trinity Hall, Cambridge. F. was known throughout his life for his involvement in athletics, especially sculling, walking, and cycling. He died of cancer in Primrose Hill on July 2, 1910. In 1858, the Philological Society initiated a project to revise the English dictionaries available at the time, and F. was one of the members who suggested the creation of an entirely new dictionary which would not only give current definitions for words in use but which would trace the definitions of words back to their first appearance, providing quotations and examples of usage for each period of history. This project soon ballooned into a huge endeavor, as readers and sub-editors across the country compiled quotations from all eras on individual slips of paper. F. was chief editor of the project for nearly twenty years, and kept it going as interest intermittently waned and as various publishers accepted and then declined to produce the gargantuan publication. F. developed the concept of a Concise dictionary, to be published in the interim; and when Oxford University Press finally signed on to publish the dictionary and James Murray took over as editor (partly because F. had alienated half of the sub-editors), F. continued as a reader and contributor. In part to provide historical texts upon which the dictionary’s readers could draw, in 1864 F. founded the Early English Text Society. The Society began with the monumental goal of printing the entire corpus of pre-1550 English literature. It was subscription-based, and F. promised to provide his subscribers with regular editions of a wide range of Early and Middle English Texts. Because F.’s ability to access manuscripts was dependent largely on

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chance, and because he depended on editors with uneven levels of training, the texts printed seem rather ad hoc today (ranging from romances to cookbooks to religious treatises to legal documents to grammars), and sometimes contain careless mistakes. Nonetheless, by F.’s death the society had published over 250 volumes, and these continue to be of immense scholarly value for students of English literature and history. To this day the Society continues to produce yearly scholarly editions of medieval texts. Unable to do justice to the literary greats of the Middle Ages within the mandate of the Early English Text Society, in 1868 the Chaucer Society was created with the goal of printing all the best manuscripts of Chaucer’s works. For the Chaucer Society F. edited a six-text edition of the Canterbury Tales, which printed parallel texts of the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge University Library, C.C.C. Oxford, Petworth and Lansdowne manuscripts. This was followed by editions of other Canterbury Tales manuscripts, including Harley 7334 and Cambridge Dd. 4.24, the manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde, and parallel text editions of the minor poems. Although these should be more properly called transcriptions than editions, they laid the foundation for the later editions of Skeat and of Manly and Rickert (Baker, 159). The Chaucer Society was also instrumental in determining the chronology of Chaucer’s works and the order of the Canterbury Tales, in establishing the definitive Chaucer canon, and in publishing the Life Records of Chaucer. F. also founded the Wyclif Society, which published more than fifteen of Wyclif’s Latin works. F.’s impact on modern medieval scholarship is hard to underestimate. Despite F.’s lack of formal training in textual scholarship or philology, and despite the fact that modern scholars are lukewarm about F.’s editorial capabilities – and despite the fact that his abrasive nature alienated half of the people caught in what Jo McMurty calls his “editorial dragnet” (English Language English Literature 1985) – he is in many ways the proverbial giant upon whom other scholars stand. F.’s inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm lay behind the immense amount of textual, editorial, and publishing work done on medieval English texts in the second half of the 19th century, and anyone who uses the Oxford English Dictionary, the remarkable EETS series of medieval texts, or any modern edition of Chaucer is reaping the benefits of F.’s work. F. made early English texts of all forms and genres readily available in scholarly editions, and set the standard for publishing medieval texts that persists to this day. Whereas in early Victorian times English scholars had to look to the continent, and especially Germany, for editions and scholarship on early English writing, by the 1880s the proliferation of EETS texts had revitalized English scholarship not just in England but in Germany as

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well, attested by the fact that Bernhard ten Brink dedicated his History of English Literature to F. F. also supported the careers of women scholars such as Caroline Spurgeon and Edith Rickert, both of whom became groundbreaking medievalists, at a time when women were not welcomed into the male-dominated field. F.’s transcriptions of the Chaucer manuscripts were heavily used by later editors of Chaucer’s works, not least among them Walter W. Skeat, and Donald Baker writes that history may well call F. “the most important of all Chaucerians – not the best scholar, etc., but the most important” (Baker, 169). Derek Brewer honored F. in the inaugural lecture at the first meeting of the New Chaucer Society in 1979, acknowledging that without the efforts of F.’s ‘old’ Chaucer Society, the New Chaucer Society would be unable to exist (“Furnivall and the Old Chaucer Society,” Chaucer Newsletter 1 [Summer 1979]: 2–3). Select Bibliography Works: ed., A Six-Text Print of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Parallel Columns, 7 vols. (1869–1877); ed. A Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, 3 vols. (1871–1879); ed. Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. Translated by John Lydgate, 3 vols. (1899–1904); ed., Regement of Princes and Fourteen Minor Poems (1897). Literature: William Benzie, Dr. F. J. Furnivall: Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1983); Donald C. Baker, “Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910),” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1984): 157–69; Derek Pearsall, “Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998): 125–38; Richard Utz, “Enthusiast or Philologist? Professional Discourse and the Medievalism of Frederick James Furnivall,” Studies in Medievalism 11 (2001): 189–212; Antonia Ward, “‘My Love for Chaucer’: F. J. Furnivall and Homosociality in the Chaucer Society,” Studies in Medievalism 9 (1997): 44–57; Peter Faulkner, “‘The Paths of Virtue and Early English’: F. J. Furnivall and Victorian Medievalism,” From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simons (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 144–58; William S. Peterson “Furnivall, Frederick James (1825–1910),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ortwin Kuhn, “F. J. Furnivall als Repräsentant englischer Philologie,” Weltsprache Englisch in Forschung und Lehre: Festschrift für Kurt Wächtler, ed. Peter Kunsmann and Ortwin Kuhn (Berlin: Schmidt, 1981), 53–80.

Kathy Cawsey

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G Ganshof, François-Louis (March 14, 1895, Brughes – July 26, 1980, Brussels), Medieval Historian. An influential legal and institutional historian, G. contributed to the vibrant medieval scholarship produced at the University of Ghent in the 20th century. The most renowned student of the great historian Henri Pirenne, G. succeeded him in 1930 as professor of medieval history at Ghent where he taught from 1923 to 1961 and became known not only as one of the great historical minds of the 20th century, but also as a generous teacher and mentor. His studies examined feudalism, political relations, the Carolingian Empire, Flanders, as well as rural and urban expansion. G. was born in Brughes on 14 March 1895. After finishing his secondary education at the Athénée Royal, G. matriculated at the University of Ghent in 1913. The First World War interrupted his studies, and he served as a sous-lieutenant. After the war, he continued his education and graduated with doctorates in history (1921) and law (1922). His legal expertise helped him to become one of the most important legal historians of the Middle Ages. Influential upon his later work was the year he spent in Paris at the École des Chartes where he encountered the work of Ferdinand Lot. After working briefly as a lawyer, he returned to Ghent where he taught in both Flemish and French until the university became fully Flemish-speaking in 1930. Strongly supporting this move, he helped the university retain its international prestige through this transition. His student and eventual successor R. C. van Caenegem credited him with establishing the juridical and institutional emphasis of the Ghent School (1980, 236). Though G. retired in 1961, he remained an active scholar until his death in 1980; his essay “Die Entwicklung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in den europäischen Regionen. 8. Das Fränkische Reich” (Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, vol. 2, 1980, 151–205) appeared only weeks before his death. Author of 10 books and 197 articles, G. was a prolific scholar who made major contributions to many areas of medieval history but particularly to Carolingian legal, institutional, rural, and economic history. From the start his work reflected his legal training and interest in institutions (Étude sur les ministeriales en Flandre et en Lotharingie, 1926). In his examinations of law and

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justice, he concentrated on understanding the nature of legal documents in addition to the information they could provide. (“La ‘tractoria’. Contribution à l’étude des origines du droit de gîte,” RHD 8 [1927]: 69–91; Contribution à l’étude des origines des cours féodales en France, 1928; “Le droit urbain en Flandre au début de la première phase de son histoire,” RHD 19 [1951]: 387–416). After publishing related articles, he offered a lucid account of the institutions of the county of Flanders: Recherches sur les tribunaux de châtellenie en Flandre avant le milieu du XIIIe siècle, 1932. He built on that work in subsequent articles (“Die Rechtsprechung des gräflichen Hofgerichts in Flandern von der Mitte der 13 Jhs.,” ZRG 58 [1938]: 163–77; “Les transformations de l’organisation judicaire dans le comté de Flandre jusqu’à l’avènement de la maison de Bourgogne,” RBPh 18 [1939]: 43–61; Le roi de France en Flandre en 1127 et 1128, 1949). In “La Flandre” (Histoire des institutions françaises au moyen âge, vol. 1, 1957, 343–426), he offered a comprehensive overview of his research on medieval Flemish institutions. His legal interests led G. to tackle the thorny issues of vassalage and feudalism. (“La juridiction du seigneur sur son vassal à l’époque carolingienne,” RUB [1921–1922]: 1–21; “Benefice and Vassalage in the Age of Charlemagne,” CHJ 6 [1939]: 147–75; “L’origine des rapports féodo-vassaliques,” I problemi della civilità carolingia, 1954, 3–45; “Les relations féodo-vassaliques aux temps post-carolingiens,” I problemi comuni dell’Europa post-Carolingia, 1955, 67–114). G. often focused on the internal relations of the Carolingian Empire. This research interest may trace to his work in collaboration with Ferdinand Lot and Christian Pfister on Les destinées de l’Empire en Occident de 395 à 888 (1934, 2nd ed. 1940–1941). Among the most influential of his numerous articles concerning the Carolingians were “Charlemagne” (Speculum 24 [1949]: 520–28); “The Impact of Charlemagne on the Institutions of the Frankish Realm” (Speculum 40 [1965]: 47–62); “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte und Bedeutung des Vertrages von Verdun (843)” (DA 12 [1956]: 313–30); “Louis the Pious Reconsidered” (History 42 [1957]: 171–80); “L’église et le pouvoir royal dans la monarchie franque sous Pépin III et Charlemagne” (Le chiese nei regni dell’Europa Occidentale e i loro rapporti con Roma fino all’800, 1960, 95–141); “The Treaties of the Carolingians” (MRS 3 [1968]: 23–52); “Op de vooravond van de eerste crisis in het regeringsbeleid van het Frankisch Rijk onder Lodewijk de Vrome, de jaren 828 en 829” (BMHG 82 [1968]: 11–34; German translation in FMS 6, 1968). G. extended his work on the Franks back to the Merovingian era (“Quelques aspects principaux de la vie économique dans la monarchie franque au VIIe siècle,” Caratteri del secolo VII in Occidente, 1958, 73–101; “Les traités des rois mérovingiens,” RHD 32 [1964]: 163–92). G. approached urban and rural history within the context of institutions which he believed reflected wider social trends and events. In his influential

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Over stadsontwikkeling tussen Loire en Rijn gedurende de Middeleeuwen (1941, 2nd ed. 1944; also issued in French), he built on his earlier studies of individual cities such as his native Brughes (“Iets over Brugge gedurende de preconstitutionele periode van haar geschiedenis,” NH 1 [1938]: 281–303). His later studies of Flemish cities included “Einwohnergenossenschaft und Graf in den flandrischen Städten während des 12 Jhs.” (ZRG 74 [1957]: 98–118); “Bruges au moyen âge – Les halles et le beffroi de Bruges” (Congrès archéologique de France, 1962, 16–28). As for rural history, G.’s “Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime. France, the Low Countries, and Western Germany” (CEHE 1 [1941]: 291–339) had a major impact on the field as demonstrated by its reprinting in 1942 and second edition with Adriaan Verhulst. The history of manorialism especially in the Lowlands also received his attention (“Manorial Organization in the Low Countries in the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 31 [1949]: 29–59). G.’s intimacy with medieval sources allowed him to produce valuable synthetic works such as The Middle Ages: a History of International Relations, which originally appeared in French in 1953 and later in Spanish and Italian. La Flandre sous les premiers comtes (1943, 3rd ed. 1949, in Flemish 1944 with subsequent editions and translations) offered a history of Flanders up to the 12th century that rested upon almost a decade of published articles. Among his many studies of medieval sources and their authors are: Eginhard, biographe de Charlemagne (1951); Een historicus uit de VIe eeuw, Gregorius van Tours (1966); Een historicus uit de VIIe eeuw, Fredegarius (1970); Een historicus uit de IXe eeuw, Nithard (1971); “L’historiographie dans la monarchie franque sous les Mérovingiens et le Carolingiens” (La storiografia altomedievale, 1970, 631–85). He also published numerous critical notes on individual documents including “Observations sur la localisation du ‘Capitulare de villis’” (MA 55 [1949]: 201–23) and “Observations sur la date de deux documents administratifs émanant de Charlemange” (MIÖG 62 [1954]: 83–91). Some of G.’s works addressed source typology and production. In Wat waren de Capitularia? (revised in French as Recherches sur les Capitulaires, 1958; in German 1961), he argued for the original oral nature of these lists of laws issued by Carolingian rulers. He himself gleaned a great deal from these sources for his Carolingian studies. G. also edited medieval texts, often in collaboration with others such as Françoise Godding-Ganshof and Antoine de Smet, Le polyptyque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Bertin (844–859), 1975. G. helped to make historiography and methodology more comprehensible to students through his valuable contribution to the Encyclopedie van der Geschiedenis der Middeleeuwen (1962, by R. C. van Caenegem, issued in

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updated German, 1964, and English, Guide to the Sources of Medieval History, 1978). This work rested upon the collective knowledge of the series of medieval history professors at Ghent, and in his introduction van Caenegem thanked G. for making his notes on medieval sources available to him for uses of teaching, research, and publication. The sheer range of sources included in the volume demonstrate G.’s breadth of knowledge and interest. He also contributed to the post-war Algemeen Geschiedenis der Nederlanden among other historical surveys. G. profoundly influenced early medieval history. His refusal to engage with theory or to speculate more widely based upon analysis of the evidence can now make his works seem old fashioned. Although he was a positivist, believing that one could reconstruct what happened in the past from historical sources, his works nevertheless remain important to modern scholars who are far more skeptical that historical “reality” is knowable. Apart from his rich knowledge and careful analysis of the sources as well as his ability to synthesize complex data, historians also recognize him for his comprehensive approaches to the subjects with which he engaged. Though he did not forward a major original thesis, past and present scholars have valued his erudition and detailed knowledge of Carolingian sources. Among his most well-known studies today are Feudalism (3rd English ed., 1964) and Wat waren de capitularia? Perhaps G.’s most famous work among Anglophones is The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (1971), in which 16 of his most important essays were compiled and translated; earlier the short paperback Frankish Institutions Under Charlemagne (1968/70) had appeared, which contained an essay on Charlemagne originally published in German and one new chapter on Charlemagne’s army. The former book’s essays remain a nearly unparalleled examination of political, cultural, economic, and social aspects of the Carolingian world; the latter book introduced a relatively wide readership to G.’s scholarship and indeed to Carolingian history. Whereas G. often gave the impression that Carolingian kings were relatively ineffective in achieving their goals and that significant decline marked the 9th century, more recent Carolingianists have emphasized the great achievement of these Frankish rulers in the face of substantial difficulties (Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians, 1983; Pierre Riché, The Carolingians, 1983; English trans. 1993; Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald, 1992; Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, 2000; English trans. 2004; Simon MacLean, Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century, 2003; Eric J. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire, 2006). G.’s work on Carolingian documents, especially in his “Charlemagne et l’usage de l’écrit en matière administrative” (MA 57 [1951]: 1–25),

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remains a basis for work on the written word and literacy in the Carolingian world. Scholars have since reinforced and expanded G.’s original argument for the importance of Carolingian innovations in employing writing in government (Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word, 1989; Janet L. Nelson, “Literacy in Carolingian Government,” The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, 1990, 258–96). His lifetime’s work on feudalism is perhaps best summarized by his short juridical work What is Feudalism? which originally appeared in French in 1944, but came out in four editions and in five translations. G. suggested the question could provoke two approaches: a legal, juridical one or one that assumed feudalism comprised a component of society as a whole. Hotly debated since the time of their publication, G.’s ideas on vassalage still affect scholarly arguments concerning lordship, power, and feudalism. From the legal perspective he argued for a “union of vassalage and benefice” during the Carolingian period. Though subsequent scholars may have disagreed with G. on particulars, especially his dating of this phenomenon, Susan Reynolds was among the most important historians to question this thesis as a whole. She argued that G. took the evidence of capitularies too literally, believing that they indicated that holding land as a benefice had become an accepted if not common practice. Instead, she notes that these texts often responded to specific circumstances and that charter evidence does not support G.’s argument (Fiefs and Vassals, 1994, 32, 92, 107). Her stress on examining the evidence without preconceptions of progress and the use of modern interpretations of legal terms concerning vassalage has proven influential. (111) Other scholars have approached feudalism according to its interconnections with the rest of medieval life (Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation, 900–1200, 1980, English ed. 1991) or have suggested new approaches, such as examining ideas of lordship and power (Cultures of Power, ed. Thomas N. Bisson, 1995). Select Bibliography Works: Le Moyen Âge (1953 with subsequent editions and Spanish [1960], Italian [1961] and English [1971] translations); Flandre sous les premiers comtes (1943, 3rd ed. 1949, in Flemish 1944 with subsequent editions and translations); Wat waren de capitularia? (1955); Feudalism, 3rd English ed. (1964); The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy (1971); Frankish Institutions Under Charlemagne (1968). Literature: Bibliographie des travaux historiques de François-Louis Ganshof, (Brussels: De Meester de Wetteren, 1946); R. C. van Caenegem, “In memoriam François-Louis Ganshof,” JKAWLSK (1980): 231–51; Adriaan Verhulst, “François-Louis Ganshof,” MA 86 (1980): 523–38; Dirk Heirbaut, “François-Louis Ganshof (1895–1980),” Re-

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writing the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 223–41.

Valerie L. Garver

Gerbert, Martin O.S.B. (Christian name: Franciscus Dominicus Bernardus) (August 12, or 11 or 13, 1720, Horb, Germany – May 13, 1793, St. Blasien, Germany), Historian and Theologian. After his education at the Jesuit school in Freiburg and at Klingenau (canton Aargau, Switzerland), G. entered the Benedictine abbey of St. Blasius (Black Forest) in 1736, where he gave his vow a year later. At the end of his theological-philosophical studies he was ordained as priest in 1744. At first he taught philosophy and theology and was at the same time librarian of the monastery. Apart from a series of theological publications, G. modified the teaching method of theology, particularly the scholastic system, demanding a connection between systematic theology and historical ancillary sciences. He expressed his opinion in the Principia theologiae (8 vols.). From 1759 to 1762, he travelled in Germany, Italy and France to study the archival collections of different monastic libraries. During his first journey to France he visited the most famous libraries of Paris and came also in contact with the Maurins. He then made an extended visit to German monasteries where he collected material for his project on old liturgy. His last trip took him to Italy, where he spent several months in Rome and established a contact with Garampi, the prefect of the Vatican Archives. The results of his collecting material he edited in relevant publications. The work in different archives had awakened in him the interest in historical research. After his election as abbot of the monastery, G. initiated his historical studies, and he established a notable centre of methodical study of history at St. Blasien which he directed himself. The first two volumes of Hergott’s Monumenta domus Austriacae were compiled there, and G. undertook the adaptation of the two volumes Typographia principum Austriae post mortem Marquardi Hergott, a description of the tomb of the princes of the royal houses of Habsburg and Babenberg (1772). At the same time, he also published a Codex epistolaris Rudolphi I Romani regis (1772), followed by De Rudolpho Suevico comite de Rhinfelden, duce et rege, deque eius familia (1785).

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Nevertheless, G.’s main interests were sacramental theology, liturgy, and notably ecclesiastical music. As for the history of the theory of music in the Middle Ages, he presented the first substantial collection of source material. The two most important works in this field are De cantu de musica sacra (1774) and Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra (3 vols., 1784), a collection of principal writers of Church music from the 3rd century until the invention of printing. Although containing many textual errors (because he carelessly printed the wrong versions of the texts), G.’s work has been of great importance for the history of music, because it preserves many unknown texts or texts which have perished in the meantime. Even today, a lot of them can still only be found in G.’s edition. After his election as abbot G. had to spend much time carrying out his administrative and spiritual duties, and after 1768, when the abbey including the church and the library had burnt to the ground, he was occupied with its reconstruction. Fortunately the papers and documents from the archives and a large part of the book collection could be saved because they had been packed into boxes some weeks before. But despite the many difficulties, G. did not give up his own scientific enterprise. Territorial history became another subject of his studies and he published the Historia Nigrae Silvae (3 vols., 1783–1784), a book rich in primary sources which until today represents the only history of the Black Forest. G. tried to show the history of the Benedictine order in the mountains of his homeland and the usefulness of monasticism which had come under attack during his time (Ordinis S. Benedicti coloniae, 1783–1788). In his large project of the Germania sacra, G. wanted to publish a description as well as the main sources of each German diocese. The editorial work went on after his death until the secularization, and nine volumes in total were brought out. He was raised to the level of Prince Elector (Prince Abbot) of the Empire. G. was very much devoted to the House of Austria, but as a Benedictine he was opposed to Joseph II’s church policy. In the Febronian controversy he showed a mediating attitude. He died on 13 May 1793 in St. Blasien. Select Bibliography Works: Principia theologiae exegeticae. Praemittuntur Prolegomena Principia theologiae exegeticae. Praemittuntur Prolegomena theologiae christianae universae. Accedit mantissa de traditionibus Ecclesiae arcanis, auctore P. Martino Gerbert … (1757); De cantv et mvsica sacra a prima ecclesiae aetate vsqve ad praesens tempus. Auctore P. Martino Gerberto … (1774); Monvmenta veteris litvrgiae alemannicae … Ex antiqvis manuscriptis codicibvs collegit et digessit Martinvs Gerbertvs … (1777–1779); Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum. Ex variis Italiae, Galliae & Germaniae codicibus manuscriptis collecti et nunc primum publica luce donati a Martino Gerberto abbate, (1784); Historia Nigrae Silvae ordinis Sancti Benedicti coloniae, opera et studio Martini Gerberti, monasterii et congreg. S. Blasii in eadem Silva abbatis S.G.R.I.P. collecta et illustrata … (1783–1788).

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Literature: A. Brinzinger, Fürstabt Martin Gerbert von St. Blasien: Ein Lebensbild aus dem 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Decker & Hardt, 1916); Korrespondenz des Fürstabtes Martin II. Gerbert von St. Blasien, ed. Georg Pfeilschifter (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller, 1931–1934); W. Müller, “Gerbert, Martin,” NDB 6 (1964), 257–58; “Gerbert, Martin,” BiographischBibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 2 (1990), 213.

Christine Maria Grafinger

Gilson, Étienne (June 13, 1884, Paris – September 19, 1978, Cravant), French Philosopher/Medievalist. Exegete of the Middle Ages and representative of New-Thomism, G. is the author of more than 600 monographs and articles dealing mainly with topics such as religious philosophy, mystical theology and Thomism. Among his enormous publications one can find Études de philosophie médiévale (1921), La philosophie au Moyen-Âge (1923), La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (1924), Saint Thomas d’Aquin (1925), Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin (1929), La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (1934), Dante et la philosophie (1939), Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (1939), La philosophie et la théologie (1960), Hommage à Bergson (1967) and Dante et Béatrice, études dantesques (1974). With his numerous publications, G. had a great impact on the understanding and development of Christian philosophy both in European and American research and became an appreciate representative of Medievalism as his election in the Académie Française in 1946 bears witness. After leaving the elementary school “Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes de la paroisse Sainte Clotilde” at Paris in 1895, G. attended the “Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs,” later he went to the “Lycée Henri IV.” In 1903, he graduated at the Sorbonne (baccalauréat ès lettres). From 1903 to 1904, G. did his military service at the Infantry. In 1905, he started his studies at the “Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Paris”; at the “Collège de France” he attended a lecture of Bergson, titled L’effort intellectuel. In 1907, G. obtained the admission to teach philosophy in high schools (agrégation de philosophie), until 1913 he taught in Bourg-en-Bresse, Rochefort sur Mer, Tours, Saint-Quentin and Angers. In 1913, G. submitted his PhD thesis on La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie at the University of Paris. At the beginning of World War I, G., drafted as a Sergeant, later served as a Lieutenant (sous-lieutenant) in Verdun until he was put into a prisoner-of-war camp in February

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1916. After his captivity, the medal for bravery “Croix de guerre” was conferred on G. for having “parcouru constamment un terrain découvert, sous le bombardement le plus intense, pour assurer le commandement de ses sections de mitrailleuses réparties sur un large front.” (Mélanges offerts à Étienne Gilson de l’Académie Française, 10). After the war, G. taught history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, from 1921 he held the position as a professor of history of medieval philosophers at the University of Paris. In 1922, G. traveled to Russia to organize French canteens for hungry children. In 1926, he went the first time to North America in order to participate at the “Congrès d’Éducation morale de Montréal” in Canada. In the same year, he was a summer-lecturer at the University of Virginia. In September 1926 he became a changing professor at the University of Harvard. In 1928, G. abandoned his chair in Harvard to dedicate more time to his project in Toronto where in 1929 he was the co-founder of the “Institute of Mediaeval Studies.” In the same year G. became a member of the “American Academy of Arts and Sciences.” From 1932 to his retirement in 1951, he held the position of a full professor of history of medieval philosophy (Professeur d’Histoire de la Philosophie du Moyen Age) at the “Collège de France.” In 1937, he became president of the “Institut scientifique franco-canadien”, a position which G. held to his retirement as well. From 1951 on, G. was a full professor at the “Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies” in Toronto. During his exciting life several doctores honoris causa were conferred on G., but his entry into the Académie Française can be considered G.’s greatest success. On October 24, 1946, after a disputed election with three ballots, G. obtained the necessary 18 votes which allowed him to triumph over his three adversaries Marius Ary-Leblond, Albert Dauzat, and René Peter. On May 29, 1947, G. entered the Académie Française and was received by Pasteur Vallery-Radot. Later G. became chairman by seniority, a position that the immortal held to his death in 1978. G.’s work is of special interest to French and Canadian philosophers, to medievalists and especially to intellectual historians. G.’s first monograph, La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (1913) discussed the thought of Descartes. With his study of scholastic thought and cartesianism, “G. was able to detect important influences upon Descartes of scholasticism, in particular the influence exerted by the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas” (O’Connor, 291). G., a philosopher “in his own right,” has to be considered a Thomist: “His work is marked by its fidelity to what he takes to be the actual ideas of the historical Thomas Aquinas” (O’Connor, 292). All his books, Le thomisme, introduction au système de saint Thomas d’Aquin (1919), Saint Thomas d’Aquin (1925), Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (1939), and Saint Thomas moraliste

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(1974), deal with the representation of the Thomism system, characterized by the difference of reason and faith. It is not by chance that G.’s second and last publication both focus on Thomas Aquinas with whose philosophy G. was busy for his whole life. In La philosophie au Moyen-Âge (1923), representing an overview on the history of philosophy from the Greek “Pères Apostologistes” to the oriental philosophers and finally to the philosophy of the 14th century, G. devotes a great part on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas noticing that “Une double condition domine le développement de la philosophie thomiste: la distinction entre la raison et la foi, et la nécessité de leur accord” (528). As far as Christian philosophy is concerned, for G. Christianity is not only an important force in the history of medieval thinking, but it represents at the same time the hermeneutic horizon for the understanding of thinkers of early modern times (cf. Schönberger, 184). Beside Christian philosophy and other topics related to medieval philosophy, G. deals with the “ExodusMetaphysics” and the opposition of existentialism and essentialism. “ExodusMetaphysics” denotes the inspiration in which God is thought as “reine Wirklichkeit” – pure reality (Schönberger, 185). This line of thought was, for the first time, approached by the church fathers. G. argues that especially in Thomas Aquinas appears a new “dissociation” of form and reality that differs from Platonism and Aristotelism (cf. Schönberger, 185). As far as existentialism is concerned, in L’être et l’essence (1948), G. tries to point out the understanding of being (“Seinsverständnis”) of occidental thinking throughout the centuries. G. argues that Thomas Aquinas can be considered the only exception, because for Thomas “being” comes first while in the thinking of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and in modern rationalism and idealism “being” is considered as something that is added to the essential determinations (cf. Schönberger, 185–86). In several of his books and articles, G. pointed out that the leading intellectual figures of the Middle Ages – such as Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Bonaventure, Albert and Scotus – did not share the same views in their thinking as theologians have always argued: “By arguing for important differences between the philosophical positions of those men, Gilson went a long way toward establishing, for a contemporary audience, first of all the scholastics’ reputations as philosophers and secondly their identities as individual philosophers” (O’Connor, 291–92). Rolf Schönberger praised G. for having pointed out the various ways of thinking in the Middle Ages (186). For this reason scholars in the field of medieval philosophy have credited him for his historical erudition which he combined with systematic and inspiring ideas. Margret McGrath, who compiled a complete bibliography

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of G.’s books and articles, emphasized that G. is recognized as an important figure in the intellectual and cultural life of France, including philosophy, politics, journalism, theology, literature and music. Thanks to G.’s studies, medieval philosophy was re-discussed in different fields of research in the 20th century. G. was able to show the importance of medieval philosophy for a continuous understanding of the occidental intellectual history. He composed monographs about all important figures of the Middle Ages. Select Bibliography: Works: Selected Volumes: La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie, 1913; Le thomisme: Introduction au système de saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1919; as The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1924; as The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1956; Études de philosophie médiévale, 1921; La philosophie au Moyen-Âge, 1923 (2 vols.); La philosophie de saint Bonaventure, 1924; as The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure, 1938; René Descartes: Discours de la méthode: Texte et commentaire, 1925; Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1925; as Moral Values and the Moral Life: The Ethical Theory of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1931; Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin, 1929; as The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, 1960; Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien, 1930; L’ésprit de la philosophie médiévale, 1932 (2 vols.); as The Spirit of Mediaevel Philosophy, 1934; Les idées et les lettres, 1932; Pour un ordre catholique, 1934; La théologie mystique de saint Bernard, 1934; as The Mystic Theology of Saint Bernard, 1940; Le réalisme méthodique, 1935; Christianisme et philosophie, 1936; as Christianity and Philosophy, 1939; The Unity of Philosophical Experience, 1937; Héloïse et Abélard, 1938; as Heloise and Abelard, 1951; Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, 1938; Dante et la philosophie, 1939; as Dante the Philosopher, 1948; Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, 1939; God and Philosophy, 1941; Philosophie et incarnation selon saint Augustin, 1947; L’être et l’essence, 1948; History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education, 1948; Being and Some Philosophers, 1949; L’école des muses, 1951; as The Choir of Muses, 1953; Wisdom and Love in Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1951; Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales, 1952; Les métamorphoses de la cité de dieu, 1952; The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Pope Leo XIII, 1954; History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 1955; Painting and Reality, 1957; A Gilson Reader: Selected Writings of Étienne Gilson, edited by Anton C. Pegis, 1957; Peinture et réalité: Problèmes et controverses, 1958; Elements of Christian Philosophy, 1960; La philosophie et la théologie, 1960; as The Philosopher and Theology, 1962; Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne, 1960; St. Thomas Aquinas and Philosophy, 1961; Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant (with Thomas Langan), 1963; Introduction aux arts du beau, 1963; as The Arts of the Beautiful, 1965; Matières et formes: Poétiques particulières des arts majeurs, 1964; as Forms and Substances in the Arts, 1966; The Spirit of Thomism, 1964; Recent Philosophy: Hegel to the Present (with Thomas Langan and Armand A. Maurer), 1966; In Search of Saint Thomas Aquinas,. 1966; Les tribulations de Sophie, 1967; La société de masse et sa culture, 1967; Linguistique et philosophie: Essai sur les constantes philosophiques de langage, 1969; D’Aristote à Darwin et retour: Essai sur quelques constantes de la biophilosophie, 1971; as From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution, 1984; Dante et Béatrice: Études dantesques, 1974. Literature: Étienne Gilson et nous: la philosophie et son histoire, ed. Monique Couratier (Paris: Vrin, 1980); Lawrence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute

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of Mediaeval Studies, 1984); Francesca Aran Murphy, Art and intellect in the philosophy of Etienne Gilson (Columbia, MO, et al.: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Mélanges offerts à Étienne Gilson de l’Académie Française (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and Paris: Vrin, 1959); Margaret McGrath, Étienne Gilson, A Bibliography-Étienne Gilson, une Bibliographie (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984); David O’Connor, Gilson, Étienne (Henri), Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed., ed. Roland Turner (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1987), 290–92; Rolf Schönberger, Étienne Gilson, ed. Julian Nida-Rümelin (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1991), 183–86; http:// www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=596 (last accessed on Jan. 24, 2009); Alessandro Ghisalberti, “Etienne Gilson (1884–1978),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 107–16.

Daniel Rötzer

Gollancz, Sir Israel (July 13, 1863, London – June 23, 1930, London), English Medievalist and Shakespeare Scholar. Sir Israel Gollancz was among the foremost British medievalists of the early 20th century, a prolific editor and scholar, and a gifted teacher. He was responsible for some of the earliest products of the Early English Text Society, founded a year after his birth by Frederick Furnivalland Richard Morris, and became the first University Lecturer in English at Cambridge in 1896. He produced editions of important Old and Middle English texts under the auspices of the society. He is remembered, in particular, for his critical edition of Pearl (1891; 2nd ed. 1921), which followed Morris’s own edition of two years earlier, and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1940), which was completed after his death by his friend, colleague and former student Mabel Day. He married Alide Goldschmidt in 1910, with whom he had a son and a daughter. G. was among the founding members of the British Academy and served until his death as its first secretary. A biennial series of lectures and academic prizes, established at the British Academy in 1924 by his friend Frida Mond, was dedicated to his memory after his death. G. was the youngest of the four sons of Samuel Marcus Gollancz, rabbi of London’s Hambro synagogue, and Johanna Koppel. His family occupied a distinguished position within the Orthodox Jewish community; G’s elder brother, Hermann, became Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew at University Col-

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lege, London, and G. himself participated actively in the training of rabbis. He was educated at the City of London School and took his first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge, graduating in 1887. At Christ’s he enjoyed the patronage of the philologist W.W. Skeat, the first Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the university. Skeat is warmly remembered in the preface to G.’s 1921 edition of Pearl as his ‘beloved master’ (x). From 1892 G. was Quain English Student and Lecturer at University College London for three years. He took up his permanent position as University Lecturer in English at Cambridge in 1896, but had been connected with the nascent department and its founding campaigners for some years. He moved to London in 1903, where he became Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College, resigning from his position at Cambridge shortly afterwards. He was awarded a DLitt from Cambridge on his departure, and was knighted in 1919. G. was prolific in the field of medieval literary studies, but he also produced influential material on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and acted as general editor of the forty-volume Temple Shakespeare (1894–1996). His earliest piece of textual scholarship was an edition of the Middle English Pearl, which incorporated a facing-page translation. G.’s decision to translate Pearl represented an effort, he suggested, to make the text accessible “beyond the limited circle of students of Middle English” (ix), and his extensive emendations of the Middle English text were conceivably motivated by a similar concern. A year after this text appeared he published an edition of Cynewulf’s Christ, and then a two-volume edition of the poems contained in The Exeter Book in 1895. Like his edition of Pearl, these two works contained modern English translations of their medieval texts. G. began his editorial work on the second major text of the Cottonian manuscript, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the publication in 1867 of a revision of Morris’s 1864 edition for the Early English Text Society. A second revision was published in 1912. In the last years of his life, G. had been working on his own edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the text, notes and glossary of which were largely in place at the time of his death. The edition was completed by Mabel Day, who also contributed a substantial scholarly introduction to the volume. This was accompanied by an essay on the dialect of the manuscript by Mary Serjeantson. Among G.’s later editions are The Quatrefoil of Love (1901), published as part of a miscellany commemorating Furnivall’s seventy-fifth birthday, and Boccaccio’s eclogue Olympia (1913), the Latin text of which was incorporated as an appendix to his second edition of Pearl. The Pearl-poet was not demonstrably influenced by Boccaccio’s text, but the similarity between the

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two had been noticed by earlier scholars, and continued to intrigue later ones long after G.’s death. His editions of a number of short Middle English texts appeared in the Select Early English Poems series, to which he contributed the constituent volumes between 1913 and 1930. Among these, many became standard scholarly editions, including Patience (1913) and Cleanness (the first volume of which was published by G. in 1921), The Parliament of the Thre Ages (1915), St Erkenwald (1922), Wynnere and Wastour (1930), and Death and Liffe (1930). In 1923, after considerable labor, G. produced the first photographic facsimile edition of the poems of Cotton Nero A.x. He was justly credited for having brought the manuscript and its illustrations to the attention of a new and much wider company of scrutineers, and the facsimile is still widely used. The second volume of Cleanness, which consisted in G’s glossary and notes to the text of the first volume, was published after his death by Mabel Day (1933), as was his edition of Death and Liffe (1930). Some of his writing on early-modern drama was heavily reliant on his knowledge of medieval languages and literatures, most notably Hamlet in Iceland (1898), which was later revised and republished as The Sources of Hamlet (1926). In the introductions to the two volumes, the name Hamlet is traced to Snorri Sturlason’s Skaldskaparmál (the second part of his celebrated Prose Edda), in which it appears as the Norse cognate Amlo£o. The second book substitutes later sources, beginning with the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, for the Icelandic texts of the first. Like his other editions of poetry from MS Cotton Nero A.x, G.’s text of Pearl was heavily emended. Though he was frequently criticized for making apparently arbitrary emendations to the texts he edited, and for failing to account explicitly for the editorial choices he made, some of the emendations in Pearl were less arbitrary than they may first have appeared. Indeed, in a footnote to the introduction of his second edition of the text, he robustly defends his decision to insert twenty-one syllabic e’s into his text in order to preserve metrical regularity, a decision that is presented as an explicit challenge to the conservative editorial policy of Charles Osgood. What Osgood had perceived in the manuscript text as syllabic patterns that could easily be accommodated by Germanic alliterative convention, G. regarded as unwitting scribal departures from what must originally have been a regular alliterating iambic tetrameter line. G.’s two revised editions of Morris’s text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were reviewed in Modern Language Notes in 1915 by Tomas Knott, alongside Morris’s original edition and Frederic Madden’s earlier edition of the poem (30 [1915]: 102–08). Knott had been able to restore some of the missing fragments of the text, emended conjecturally by

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G., as by Morris and Madden before him, by interpreting impressions of these fragments preserved as inverted images on the facing folio (the ‘offset’). Though all editors are found to be guilty of making arbitrary (and, on occasion, quite erroneous) emendations, G. is also congratulated for restoring original manuscript readings that Morris and Madden had presumed to be erroneous, as well as for weeding out ‘unnecessary’ textual changes. But perhaps the most important compliment that Knott was able to pay to G. was that this was a scholar who was never reluctant, after careful reflection, to revise or even reject his own academic judgments. Paul Reichart made a similar observation many years later in an article on the editorial history of the Pearl manuscript, in which he praised G. for scrutinizing his own work with the same objectivity he would employ in the appraisal of others’ (“Sir Israel Gollancz and the Editorial History of the Pearl Manuscript,” Papers on Language and Literature 31 [1995]: 145–63). Henry Savage’s lengthy review of G.’s own edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight praises the editor for much of his work on the text, and especially for the quality of his notes, but predictably decries his propensity so readily to emend a text that previous editors had seemed happier to preserve (Modern Language Notes 59.5 [1944]: 342–50). Nevertheless, he characterizes a small number of G.’s emendations as ‘ingenious’ (346). G.’s edition of Death and Liffe, published in the year of his death, was necessarily more conjectural in its editorial method than his other editions, because it survives uniquely in a 17th-century manuscript, one whose text he had no hesitation in describing as ‘a highly corrupt version of the original Middle English poem.’ A later editor of the poem, Joseph M.P. Donatelli, complained about the conjectural nature of many of G.’s emendations in this text. In his Speculum review of Donatelli’s edition (April, 1991), however, Thorlac Turville-Petre defends G. on the grounds that a text conjecturally reconstructed must necessarily be preferable to one that incorporates corrupt readings. G.’s abiding objective, after all, had been to render accessible texts that might have appeared obscure in earlier editions. G. died in London in 1930, but his contribution to the developing field of medieval English studies and to Shakespearean scholarship will ensure that his reputation endures. Select Bibliography Editions and translations: Pearl: An English Poem of the Fourteenth Century (1891); ed. and trans., Cynewulf’s Christ: An Eighth Century English Epic (1892); The Exeter Book: An Anthology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry Presented to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, First Bishop of Exeter (1050–1071) and Still in the Possession of the Dean and Chapter, edited from the Manuscript with Translation, Notes, Introduction, etc., 2 vols. (1895); ed., The Parlement of the Thre Ages:

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An Alliterative Poem of the Fourteenth Century, Now first edited, from Manuscripts in the British Museum, with Introduction, Notes, and Appendices containing the Poem of ‘Winnere and Wastoure,’ and illustrative Texts (1897); ed. and trans., Hamlet in Iceland: being the Icelandic romantic Ambales Saga, edited and translated, with extracts from five Ambales Rímur and other illustrative texts, for the most part now first printed, and an introductory essay (1898); ed., “The Quatrefoil of Love,” An English Miscellany Presented to Dr Furnivall in Honour of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. W. P. Ker, A. S. Napier, and W. W. Skeat (1901): 112–32; ed. with Richard Morris, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight (1912); ed. and trans., Boccaccio’s Olympia, edited with an English Rendering (1913); ed., Patience: An Alliterative Version of Jonah by the Poet of Pearl, Select Early English Poems, 1 (1913; rev. 1924); A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster: An Alliterative Poem on Social and Economic Problems in England in the Year 1352 with Modern English Rendering (1920); Pearl: An English Poem of the XIVth Century: Edited with Modern Rendering together with Boccaccio’s Olympia (1921); ed. St Erkenwald (Bishop of London 675–693): An Alliterative Poem, written about 1386, Narrating a Miracle Wrought by the Bishop of St Paul’s Cathedral (1922); ed., Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Unique MS. Cotton Nero A.x in the British Museum (1923); ed., Hoccleve’s Works, volume 2: The Minor Poems in the Ashburnham MS Addit. 133. Literature: Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Gollancz, 1987); A. M. Hyamson, rev. William Baker “Gollancz, Sir Israel (1863–1930),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; online ed., May 2006) [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/33445]; Nicole Clifton, “Sir Israel Gollancz (13 July 1864–23 June 1930),” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 102, 96–103; Obituary: Sir Israel Gollancz, The Times, 24 June, 1930; Thomas Knott, “The Text of Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight,” Modern Language Notes 30 (1915): 102–08; J. R. Hulbert, review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Modern Philology 23.2 (November 1925): 246–49; Henry Savage, review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz, Modern Language Notes 59.5 (1944): 342–50; Thorlac Turville-Petre, review of Death and Liffe, ed. Joseph M.P. Donatelli, Speculum 66.2 (April, 1991): 392–94; P. F. Reichardt, “Sir Israel Gollancz and the Editorial History of the Pearl Manuscript,” Papers on Language and Literature 31 (1995): 145–63; A. Lindley, “Pinning Gawain down: the Misediting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” JEGP 96 (1997): 26–42.

Stephen Penn

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Grabar, André (July 26, 1896, Kiev – October 5, 1990, Paris), Archaeologist and Art Historian of Classical Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages. G.’s prolific and multi-disciplinary research includes more than thirty book titles, plus numerous book chapters and approximately three hundred articles, all widely translated and reprinted. The largest part of his oeuvre is devoted to Byzantine art of antiquity and the Middles Ages, but he also did much research on the art of the western Middle Ages. The main thesis of much of his work on Christian iconography stated that the early Christians appropriated motifs, symbols and images from contemporaneous Roman art, but imbued these forms with religious signification. During his adolescence in Kiev, G. hoped to become an artist; though his training and career eventually addressed art history exclusively, he did continue to paint throughout his lifetime. G. began his higher education at the University of St. Vladimir in Kiev, studying there for one year, then continuing for two years in Petrograd, receiving his diploma in 1919 in Odessa. His professors included N. Kondakov, D. Analov and J. Smirnov. Eventually after the Bolshevik Revolution, G. left the tumult of Russia for Bulgaria where he worked from 1920–1922 as an adjunct curator at a museum in Sophia, cataloguing the region’s medieval art. G. emigrated to France in 1922 and within a year married Julie Ivanova. (Their son Oleg Grabar studied Islamic art.) His first teaching position was as a Russian instructor in Strasbourg, a job he held for six years. His earlier work in Bulgaria contributed to his doctoral thesis, completed in 1928 and entitled La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie au moyen âge. For the next nine years, still in Strasbourg, he taught art history, and more specifically, Byzantine civilization and art history. Also during this period, he was mentored by Paul Perdrizet and Gabriel Millet. G. began teaching archeology and Byzantine studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1937, replacing Millet; he was a member of the Collège de France from 1946–1966 and was initiated into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1955. In 1945, G. and Jean Hubert began the important Medieval and Byzantine serial, Cahiers Archéologiques; he also founded the Bibliothèque des Cahiers Archéologiques, which published monographs. G. was associated with the Centre des Etudes Médiévales in Poitiers along with Gilson and Ganshof. In his 1946 work, Martyrium, G. noted the parallels between the customs of Roman veneration of deceased heroes and the practices of Christian veneration of heroic saints, or more specifically, martyrs. He also studied the dif-

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ference in veneration of relics between the eastern and western regions of the Roman world and the ensuing architectural differences. He first disseminated this research in the form of lectures offered at the Collège de France in 1942. In 1947, G. began his long association with Dumbarton Oaks, writing frequently for its publications. His 1961 lecture series, part of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts and presented in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., was published in 1968 as Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins in the Bollingen Series. This research on Christian art from the period of late antiquity was incorporated in his 1978 work, Les voies de la création en iconographie chrétienne, which included an extensive study of medieval Christian iconography, both western and Byzantine. In both works, G. was concerned with the origin and functions of visual motifs. More specifically, a number of G.’s publications focused on the sources and evolution of motifs in Christian iconography as inspired by its contemporaneous context, the religious and profane art of the Roman Empire, itself heir to a Greek iconic lexicon. This iconic inheritance was then gently appropriated and translated to a new context. For instance, G. traces Resurrection motifs to Roman depictions of Triumph. Christ the Savior is analogous to Hercules, both figures typically used in funerary art. The Shepherd, a common figure in Roman art, conveyed the concept of the virtue humanitas, according to G., which explains its appropriation and use by Christians to symbolize Christ. This thesis was not accepted by all scholars. In her review of Christian Iconography: a Study of its Origins (1968), Jocelyn M.C. Toynbee disputed G.’s acceptance of Klauser’s hypothesis that the pagan art which influenced Christian art used symbols to represent virtues. Toynbee believed instead that this was an innovation of Christian art itself. On the other hand, Toynbee found plausible G.’s explanation for the late appearance of Crucifixion images: there were simply no corresponding depictions in the art of Rome itself (Classical Review 20 [December 1970]: 380–83). One important source of motifs for depictions of Christians was, according to G., the Roman depictions of circus scenes which allowed for the comparison of the martyr and the athlete, an innovative idea in the estimation of Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse in his review of Christian Iconography (The English Historical Review 86 [July 1971]: 598–99). G.’s corpus of research, from his early work to his later writing, continues to be cited in general studies on Byzantine art. His work on martyrs and relics was greatly admired by Richard Krautheimer in his 1953 review of G.’s book (Art Bulletin XXXV [1953]: 57–61). While Krautheimer did

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take issue with some of G.’s procedural steps, he expressed much admiration for his colleague’s innovative research: “The application of [his] thesis to Early Christian and Byzantine church architecture has led G. to what may well be the first consistent interpretation of the origin of these forms and of the basic differences that separate Eastern and Western medieval architecture.” This same work on martyrs remains pertinent to Robin Cormack’s Byzantine Art (2000) as does G.’s 1963 study of Byzantine sculpture. David Talbot Rice’s bibliography of core texts in his Art of the Byzantine Era (1963) lists G.’s earliest publication, the book on Bulgarian religious painting, a work also cited by Christa Schug-Willein her Art of the Byzantine World (New York 1969). G.’s work on Christian iconography is considered fundamental to introductory studies on Byzantine art and informs Thomas F. Mathews’s Byzantium: From Antiquity to the Renaissance (1998). His work remains a pertinent resource for art history studies and even for postmodern theorists. Annabel Jane Wharton, (“Rereading Martyrium: The Modernist and Postmodernist Texts,” Gesta 29 [1990]: 3–7) finds that this work is, “a text that points to the signifying potential of convention.” Wharton credits G. with the understanding that, “distinct architectural forms hold meaning depending on their syntactical setting” Select Bibliography Works: La peinture religieuse en Bulgarie (1928); Recherches sur les influences orientales dans l’art balkanique (1928); La décoration byzantine (1928); Deux images de la vierge dans un manuscrit serbe (1930); L’empereur dans l’art byzantin (1936, rpt. 1971); L’art byzantin: 86 héliotypies précédées d’une introduction (1938); Miniatures byzantines de la Bibliothèque Nationale: 66 photographies inédites (1939); Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique (1943–1946); La peinture byzantine: Etude historique et critique (1953); L’iconoclasme byzantin: dossier archéologique (1957); La peinture romane du onzième au treizième siècle: Peintures murales par André Grabar, L’enluminure par Carl Nordenfalk (1958); Sculptures byzantines de Constantinople, IVe–Xe siècle (1963; L’âge d’or de Justinien, de la mort de Théodose à l’Islam (1966); Le premier art chrétien (1966); L’art de la fin de l’antiquité et du moyen âge (1968); L’art du moyen âge en Europe orientale (1968); Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (1968); Les manuscrits grecs enluminés de provenance italienne, IXe–XIVe siècles (1972); Sculptures byzantines du moyen âge: XIe–XIVe siècle (1976); Les voies de la création en iconographie chrétienne (1979). Literature: Richard Krautheimer, “Review of Andre Grabar, Martyrium. Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chretien antique, 2 vols. (Paris: Collège de France: 1943–1946),” originally Art Bulletin, XXXV (1953): 57–61; rpt. in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1969): 151–60; Annabel Jane Wharton, “Rereading Martyrium: The Modernist and Postmodernist Texts,” Gesta 29 (1990): 3–7; Henry Maguire, “André Grabar 1896–1990,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): xiii–xv; Suzy Dufrenne, “Andre Grabar,” Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale

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35 (1992): 101–07; Helene Toubert, “Andre Grabar,” Revue de l’art 97 (1992): 96–97; Gilbert Dagron, “André Grabar 26 juillet 1896–3 octobre 1990,” Nécrologie, Annuaire du Collège de France (Paris 1990–1991): 91–94; Maria Giovanna Muzj, Un maître pour l’art chrétien-André Grabar: Iconographie de la théophanie (Paris: Editions du Cerf Histoire, 2005).

Linda Marie Rouillard

Grabmann, Martin (January 5, 1875, Winterzhofen – January 9, 1949, Munich), German Medievalist. G., scholar of medieval theology, philosophy, science, and spirituality, belongs to the generation that departed from (neo)thomistic Catholic scholarship with its rather narrow outlook and opened his view to medieval intellectual history in its widest spectrum: philosophy and mysticism, local schools of thought not only in the Parisian center but also in Italy, England, Germany, and the Low Countries, women’s religious literature, the manifold teachings and reasoning of late scholastics, and the diversity of methods and opinions within the different faculties of medieval university. Such a variety of fields could be fully exposed and discussed only by drawing on the rich collections of medieval manuscripts located in universities, libraries, and monasteries throughout Europe. Moreover such research required an innovative set of methodological considerations concerning the evaluation and classification of newly discovered materials. G. was aware of these important methodological aspects and has provided us with a most impressive effort to cope with this philological challenge. Although G. himself did not prepare any significant critical edition of medieval works, he was probably the most diligent of all modern scholars in his efforts to discover and chart the map of medieval philosophical and theological writings. G.’s unique achievement in his own time, and the main reason why he has remained an essential source of information until the present day, lies in the rich database he created, based on materials taken from almost all the significant libraries in Europe. G. was born to a rural Catholic south German family in Winterzhofen (Bavaria). He received his early education in Eichstätt, first in a humanistic high school (Gymnasium), where he acquired a solid knowledge of classic languages, and later (1893–1898) in a theological seminar (PhilosophischTheologische Hochschule), where he was first introduced to the teaching of

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Thomas Aquinas by representatives of the neo-scholastic tradition of Eichstätt, and where he was ordained priest on March 20, 1898. His first study, published shortly later, was dedicated to Thomas Aquinas’s ecclesiastical teaching (Die Lehre des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin von der Kirche als Gotteswerk: Ihre Stellung im thomistischen System und in der Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Theologie, 1903). It fully represents this background and its rather limited perspective changed dramatically after G. was sent to Rome to develop his studies in philosophy, theology and paleography, where he came under the influence of Franz Ehrle S.J and Heinrich Denifle. G. met the two in Rome in 1900, where he finished his formal studies, writing his doctoral thesis both in philosophy and theology in 1902. Denifle died in 1905, but Ehrle remained an important dialogue partner until his death in 1934. G. returned to Eichstätt, and during the following decade of his life he divided his energies between church duties and his own research. In 1906, he was appointed professor for Dogmatics in Eichstätt, a position that enabled him to concentrate on his first extensive research. The most important publication that emerged from this period were the two volumes of the History of Scholastic Method (Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, vol. 1: Die scholastische Methode von ihren ersten Anfängen in der Väterliteratur bis zum Beginn des 12. Jahrhunderts, 1909; vol. 2: Die scholastische Methode im 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhundert, 1911). In 1913, G. moved to Vienna, where he stayed until 1918, teaching Christian philosophy at the Faculty of Theology. Then he was invited to take the position of Professor for Dogmatics in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Munich, an appointment that resulted among other things in intensifying his working relationship with another highly significant source of inspiration – Clemens Baeumker. The two main centers of G.’s scholarship remained Munich and Rome, but he spent much time each year traveling between the principal source centers throughout Europe. This international European effort was seriously interrupted by WW I that caught G. in the midst of his most energetic scholarly period and forced him to limit himself to German and Central European libraries. He describes that experience in the preface to his study on the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle that appeared 1916 in the midst of the war (Forschungen über die lateinische Aristoteles-Übersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, 1916, IX). In the last decades of his life G. became one of the most authoritative scholars of medieval intellectual history, honored with a myriad of titles from universities in Europe and on the other side of the ocean. In 1954, five years after his death, the Grabmann-Institut was established in Munich, were it is located today. The character of G.’s point of departure was theological, or more precisely, Thomistic, yet his approach to Thomas was from the very beginning

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and until his latest research less analytic and more historical in nature and scope. That is to say, his purpose was to present the wealth and relevance of Catholic philosophy in its medieval grandeur phase, which, in his view, undoubtedly culminated in the works of Thomas Aquinas but could be understood only in its full historical setting. To understand Thomas meant for G. to locate the manifold sources of his arguments and ideas, from the Church Fathers until the scholastic institutions in which Thomas received his primary education; to analyze the parallel and often competing rival teachings of his contemporaries, and then carefully study the variety of Thomistic schools in the late-medieval and early-modern eras. This broad perspective is mostly apparent in his extensive description of scholastic methods. Two volumes published in 1909–1911 describe the development of the Christian Latin intellectual tradition from the Church Fathers to the early decades of the 13th century. A third volume, dedicated to late scholastic thought, was not published. However, and as G. himself declares in his autobiographic notes (“Autobiographische Notizen,” Mittelalterliches Geistesleben, III, 1956, 2–3), it was published many years later, based on his detailed study of materials, especially those that became available for him in Munich, and dedicated in its title solely to the teaching of Aquinas (Die theologische Erkenntnis- und Einleitungslehre des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin auf Grund seiner Schrift in Boethium De trinitate, 1948). Together with his research of the Latin translation and reception of Aristotle that was published in 1916, it provides the reader with a full account of late scholastic methods of thought. Indeed, on the path toward a full understanding of Aquinas’s significance, G. provides us with an impressive comprehensive study of 13th century scholastic methods that certainly completes the picture of the two first volumes. However, in addition to recognizing the fact that this book actually constitutes the missing third volume of G.’s greatest systematic research, i. e., a comprehensive history of scholastic methods, it is most important to note the original and unique way in which this goal is achieved. Thus, in his observations on Thomas’s commentary on Boethius, G. does not behave as a typical neo-scholastic researcher but incorporates in his work the scholastic method itself. Just as Thomas used Boethius’s short theological treatise in order to develop a full description of his own contemporary theology, G. used his super-commentary to Thomas’s commentary in order to sketch a full and comprehensive picture of 13th century scholastic discussion, before and after Thomas. In the first two volumes, written at the very beginning of his long scholarly career, G. wrote about the scholastic method, while in the later volume, he implemented that very methodology in the most sovereign manner. This work, still awaiting an English trans-

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lation, may be regarded as one of the most impressive testimonies of 20thcentury medieval scholarship. In 1925 G. was appointed as the main editor of the monumental German project of medieval thought: the “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie im Mittelalter,” established by Clemens Baeumker in 1891, in which G. was co-editor since 1916 (vol. 13). One of his early contributions was the modification (in 1928, vol. 27) of the title of the series, i. e., the addition of the term “theology.” In a way, this alteration suggests the significant character of G.’s unique position as scholar of medieval intellectual history. Coming from the field of theology, G., at the outset of his research, adopted a Catholic perspective in reading medieval intellectual history, one that had always been regarded as a paradigmatic intellectual achievement in 13th-century scholasticism and a source of inspiration also for the modern mind. However, his historical-philological methodology forced him to analyze and to reveal these intellectual phenomena in their full diversity and richness. Therefore, throughout his entire life he remained on the one hand a religious historian of philosophy, who definitely emphasized the priority of Theology within medieval thought, while on the other hand his in-depth acquaintance with the vast literature written in the Middle Ages did not allow him to take one of the two most popular and dangerous paths taken by so many other Catholic scholars: He could not force on the medieval mind a narrow definition of “Christian philosophy,” rooted in his own religious sentiment while ignoring the richness of actual medieval intellectual activity; nor could he ignore the basic linkage between philosophic language and methodology and the variety of the theological discourse that ranged from the scholastic theology in the schools to ecstatic and mystic religious devotion. Here he differs clearly from scholars who carry out systematic study of medieval philosophic texts in their broader philosophic context, often ignoring their immediate cultural context, yet at the same time succeed in reintegrating them into general philosophic discourse. This translation into universal philosophic language is probably the less developed aspect of G.’s argumentation, for which he was often criticized. But one must not ignore the great achievement gained through this methodological condensation. It is hard to think of any other historian who succeeded so impressively in portraying the wealth and dynamic character of medieval Latin thought in all its manifestations. By integrating medieval philosophy and theology into its social and cultural context, G. was also an important figure of medieval German studies, especially due to his studies of the German intellectual tradition and of German women’s spirituality. To describe his extensive fields of interest G. often

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used the notion of “Culture” in a mode different from the way it is later used, defining it as “a moral energy of religious thought, emotion and life, that brings forth powers and values that are effective beyond the borders of the Middle Ages” [“eine sittliche Energie des religiösen Denkens, Fühlens und Lebens, die über die Grenzen des Mittelalters hinauswirkende Kräfte und Werte in sich schliet,” Die Kulturwerte der deutschen Mystik des Mittelalters, 1923, 20]. It is the religious aspect of life that provides us with the general, “cultural” key to the variety of medieval phenomena and it is this religious element, not the pure philosophic-scientific one that makes it relevant for the modern mind. The same assertion is expressed by the notion of “medieval spiritual life” (“mittelalterlichen Geistesleben”) that became the famous title of G.’s last great collection of research [Mittelalterliches Geistesleben: Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystik, I, 1926; II, 1936; III, 1956], but was in use much earlier [for example, already in 1916: Aristoteles-Übersetzungen, 3]. Both terms have little to do with the present methods of culture studies. Instead, they express the need to find a terminology that would be able to encompass very different realms of intellectual activity and that would suggest the relevance of all these subject matters for the devout catholic scholar and his reader. G. himself has left several written methodological instructions, in which he tries to systematize his research methods, e. g., in the opening of the first volume of his research on the scholastic method (Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, I, 1–54) and in the opening article of the first volume of his collected essays. Especially this article, written in 1926 (“Forschungsziele und Forschungswege auf dem Gebiete der mittelaterlichen Scholastik und Mystik,” Mittelalterliches Geistesleben, I, 1–49), presents a unique and original description of the most important methods of research, a comprehensive survey of the achievements of the vast research done by European scholars since the mid-19th century, and the main challenges that research still faces. G.’s unique acquaintance with so many local centers of research enabled him to sketch a research program that he himself pursued during the following twenty years, and generations of other scholars ever since have strived to achieve. For this reason in particular some lacunae in his program must be noted. First and foremost, as Kurt Flasch rightly emphasized (“Die Konzeption der Philosophiehistorie bei Clemens Baeumker und Martin Grabmann,” Theorie der Philosophiehistorie, 2005, 339–77), the lack of interest and orientation towards classical Latin and especially Greek sources. It is certainly true that G.’s references to Pagan, Arabic, or Jewish sources were formulated only from an inner Christian perspective. Aristotle is of course a most important

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figure and G. dedicated huge efforts to the exact outline of all traces of his reception in the West, but even here he did not feel obligated to a careful study of the ancient Aristotelian traditions which he relegated to scholars of antiquity. Yet G. himself would not tolerate such separation with regard to the Patristic literature of late antiquity. Here the continuity was too important. But even more extreme is the negligence of Jewish and especially of Moslem Arabic literature, which he himself declared to stand beyond his spectrum of knowledge and interest [Mittelalterliches Geistesleben I, 17]. Flasch’s critical tone seems to derive from his general rejection of G.’s theological orientation, which is strongly rooted in the scholastic method itself and provides a highly reliable picture of its details. As John Inglis wrote (Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of medieval Philosophy, 1998, 232–33): “… Martin Grabmann’s Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode … remains the most detailed history of medieval methodology extant. Even when we disagree with G., we often rely on his research.” G. is still present at any serious study of German medieval tradition. In the last generation, the project of editing medieval German philosophers (Corpus Philosophorum Teutonicorum Medii Aevi), whose major editor is Kurt Flasch himself, is heavily indebted to G.’s early achievements, especially in the edition of Ulrich of Strasburg, to which G. dedicated the most significant early bio-bibliographical study (Mittelalterliches Geistesleben I, 147–221). It is difficult to think of another scholar of medieval thoughts whose studies are still relevant in so many fields of medieval studies. Select Bibliography Works: Die Geschichte der katholischen Theologie seit dem Ausgang der Väterzeit, 1933; Gesammelte Akademieabhandlungen, 2 vols., 1979; apart from a few English articles published by G. himself, there are some English translations of his Aquinas studies, which were carried out in G.’s lifetime: Thomas Aquinas. His Personality and Thought, trans. Virgil Michel (1928); Introduction to the Theological Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. John S. Zybura (1930); Interior Life of St. Thomas Aquinas, Presented from his Works and the Acts of his Canonization Process, trans. Nicholas Ashanbrener (1951). Literature: Bernhard Bischoff, “Nachruf Martin Grabmann,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 8 (1951): 254; Martin Grabmann: Nachlass und Schrifttum, ed. Hermann Köstler and Ludwig Ott (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980); Credo ut intelligam: Martin Grabmann zum 50. Todestag, ed. Thomas Prügl (St. Ottilien: EOS, 1999); Philipp W. Rosemann, “Martin Grabmann (1875–1949),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico, vol. 3 (New York and London: Garland, 2000), 55–74.

Yossef Schwartz

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Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl and Grimm, Wilhelm Karl

Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl (January 4, 1785, Hanau – September 20, 1863, Berlin), and Grimm, Wilhelm Karl (February 24, 1786, Hanau – December 16, 1859, Berlin), German Philologists.

Known to most laypeople for their collection of fairytales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s impact on medieval studies is as diverse as it is great. Along with Georg Friedrich Benecke and Karl Lachmann, they are considered to be the founders of German philology. The Grimms were pioneers in many fields, helping to lay the foundation for the future study of folklore, history of law, lexicography, linguistics, literature, mythology, and runes. While J.’s most influential work, the four-volume Deutsche Grammatik (1819–1837), offered a comparative and historical approach to linguistics, W.’s landmark study was on the heroic epic tradition, the Deutsche Heldensage (1829). The Grimm name is also closely connected to the development of critical editions and the etymological project of the Deutsche Wörterbuch (1854–1961), which is still the standard work on the historical use of the German language. J. and W., whose lives and careers are closely intertwined, were born in Hanau, Hesse. Two years after their father’s death in 1796, the brothers attended the Lyceum in Kassel. J. departed in 1802 and W. in 1803 to Marburg to study law under Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who exposed J. to the study of medieval manuscripts during a research trip to Paris in 1805, causing him to discontinue his studies of law, unlike W., who finished in 1806. Savigny introduced the brothers to the Heidelberg Romantics Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who influenced the Grimms’s early work, enlisting them to assist in their collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–1808). In 1808 J. became the librarian to King Jérôme in Wilhelmshöhe and in 1816 in Kassel together with W., who had been a librarian there since 1814. After fifteen years in Kassel, the brothers were appointed to the University of Göttingen in 1829, with J. beginning in 1830 as a librarian and untenured professor and habilitating the same year, and W. as an assistant librarian, receiving an untenured professorship in 1831 and becoming tenured in 1835. When the brothers took part in the protest of the “Göttingen Seven” against King Ernst August’s abolishment of the state constitution of Hanover in 1837, they were dismissed from their posts and exiled, forcing them to move back to Kassel. With the help of Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Eichhorn, Lachmann, and Savigny, the Grimms were invited to Berlin in 1840 by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, becoming full members of the

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Akademie der Wissenschaften and professors at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1841. W. died on December 16, 1859, in Berlin, and J. on September 20, 1863. Like many scholars of their time, the Grimms were influenced by Johann G. Herder, who emphasized comparative study and historical development as methodological approaches. J.’s first independent publication, Über den altdeutschen Meistersang (1811), represents the highpoint of early Meistersang scholarship, even though he erroneously equated Meistersang with courtly love lyric. J.’s Deutsche Grammatik earned him wide acclaim, his philology helping to found linguistics as a field of study and making the study of manuscript transmission possible. Less influential was his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848), which is more an ethnology of the Germanic tribes than a study of historical linguistics. W. in particular was a pioneer in manuscript studies. In contrast to Lachmann, who attempted to recreate a textual archetype and who did not include interpretative commentary in his editions, W. anticipated modern literary and reception studies, including in his editions transcribed texts with translations, footnotes, and materials explaining the socio-historical background of the text and author. W. made available a number of significant medieval texts, such as the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunner Gebet (1812), the Arme Heinrich (1815) and the Edda (1815), all co-published with J., and his editions of Graf Rudolf (1828), Vridankes Bescheidenheit (1834), Der Rosengarten (1836), and Konrad von Würzburg’s Goldene Schmiede (1840) and Silvester (1841). In the positivistic spirit of the Romantics, the Grimms published groundbreaking collections of source materials. Seminal was their collection of sagas, the Deutschen Sagen (1816–1818), which helped to define the saga genre by differentiating between historical-based and more fairy-tale-like sagas. J.’s collection of Germanic myths, Deutsche Mythologie (1835), was just as influential, deemphasizing Nordic mythology and emphasizing the comparison of the larger Indo-Germanic context. J.’s works on Germanic law, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828) and Weistümer (1840–1842), established a firm foundation for the future of the field, representing the first large collections of sources that chronicled laws relating to social class, property, crime, and the court. For his part, W. offered a translation of Danish heroic songs, ballads and fairy tales (1811), and seminal studies on runes, Über deutsche Runen (1821), the Germanic saga tradition, Die deutsche Heldensage (1829), and rhymes, Zur Geschichte des Reims (1851). In lexicography, the Grimms were the first to create a German etymological dictionary. The first three volumes of the Deutsche Wörterbuch appeared between 1854–1862, with Jacob compiling letters A-C and F, and W. compiling D. Unlike Johann Christoph Adelung’s dictionary

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(1774–1781), which emphasized the contemporary usage of German in the 18th century, the Grimms’ project traced the historical usage of the language. J. and W. were recognized for their scholarship with honorary doctorates from the University of Marburg in 1819. In 1828 J. received an honorary doctorate from the University of Berlin and in 1829 from the University of Breslau for his work on law, and such awards as the Cross of the Honor Legion from France in 1841 and knighthood from Prussia in 1842. J. participated as chairman of the first two national conferences of German studies in 1846 and 1847, and as a voting member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt in 1848. Although the Grimms’ scholarship was informed by the Romantic idea of Naturpoesie, the scholarly rigor of their work differentiates it from the idealistic literary project of Romanticism. As Lothar Bluhm has shown (Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie, 1997), the Grimms helped to establish philology as a serious field of study, and their work was groundbreaking in many ways, often becoming the standard for similar projects in Germany and abroad. The Grimms were given positive reviews in many journals, including in the Göttingischen Gelehrte Anzeigen (1811–1829) by Benecke and in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum (1841) by Moriz Haupt, who foresaw the lasting importance of J.’s work in linguistics. While research has moved forward, sometimes making J.’s observations obsolete, the Deutsche Grammatik continues to be recognized as fundamental to historical linguistics. As Konrad Koerner has confirmed, (“Jacob Grimm’s Place in the Foundation of Linguistics as a Science,” Word 39 [1988]: 1–20), J. introduced many new concepts to the field, while also establishing the importance of phonology to linguistics. Frans van Coetsem concurs with this assessment, highlighting how J.’s refinement of Rasmus Rask’s work on the Germanic sound shift, what is now known as “Grimm’s law,” continues to influence linguists who analyze chain shifting of consonants (“Grimm’s Law: A Reappraisal of Grimm’s Formulation from a Present-Day Perspective,” The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, 1990, 43–59). Ulrich Hunger (“Die altdeutsche Literatur und das Verlangen nach Wissenschaft,” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 259) credits J.’s philology with contributing to the development of reliable critical editions, providing the necessary philological tools to determine meter and create a normalized Middle High German (see also Lothar Bluhm Die Brüder Grimm, 1997, 115, 234–35). His philology, for instance, enabled J. and W. to identify alliteration in the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunner Gebet, thereby placing the former text within the epic and saga traditions (Ernst Dick, “The Grimms’ Hildebrandslied,” The Grimm Brothers, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen,

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1990, 77). The philology and apparatus of W.’s critical editions have since become outdated, but still possess historical and reference value for manuscript studies. J.’s and W.’s edition of Hartmann von Aue’s Arme Heinrich remains influential, forming the basis for the later scholarly and popular reception of the tale, as Rüdiger Krohn (“A Tale of Sacrifice and Love: Literary Way Stations of the Arme Heinrich from the Brothers Grimm to Tankred Dorst,” A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue, ed. Francis G. Gentry, 2005, 223–28) has emphasized. Otfrid Ehrismann praised W.’s Deutsche Heldensage, finding that it still represents one of the best collection of sources for the Nibelungenlied (Nibelungenlied, 1987, 244). This evaluation is reaffirmed by noted scholars such as Edward R. Haymes (Das Nibelungenlied, 1999, 42) and J.-D. Müller (Das Nibelungenlied, 2002, 28–29), who turn to W.’s work when discussing the genesis and transmission of the epic in the saga tradition. And as Monika Köstlin emphasizes, W.’s study explores many of the questions still occupying the field today, anticipating the theory of oral-formulaic composition (Im Frieden der Wissenschaft, 1993, 113–14). Michael Jacoby has criticized J.’s Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer for its Romantic nationalism, showing that J.’s emphasis upon the autochthonous development of Germanic law was short-sighted, excluding many biblical and non-European influences (Germanisches Recht, 1986). Even so, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, like his Weistümer (Gerhard Heitz, “Jacob Grimm und die Edition der Weistümer,” Die Brüder Grimm, ed. Astrid Stedje, 1985, 79), is still recognized as a useful source on historical jurisprudence (Recht und Verfassung, ed. Hartmut Boockmann et al.,1998, 77; Karl Kroeschell, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, 2005, 58) and continues to form the basis of research on new source materials, such as Stephen P. Schwartz’s dissertation on Old Norse and Frisian texts (Poetry and Law in Germanic Myth, 1973). Beate Kellner has levied a similar criticism against J.’s Deutsche Mythologie (Grimms Mythen, 1994), calling for a reevaluation of J.’s sources in light of its patriotic positivism. Despite the errors or omissions resulting from J.’s approach, he has been credited with laying a firm foundation for the study of mythology, as Jan De Vries, amongst others, has emphasized (Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 1970 [1935], 53). J.’s mythology enjoys popular reception today and informs many handbooks and lexica on mythology such as the Handbuchwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (1927–42) and the Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde (1974 [1936]). The lasting importance of Grimms’s etymological project, the Deutsche Wörterbuch, is best evinced through its completion in 1961, over a hundred years after its inception, the publication of an electronic edition in 2004

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(http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/DWB [last accessed on Nov. 26, 2006]), and the new print edition currently in progress. Select Bibliography: Jacob Grimm’s Works: Deutsche Grammatik, 4 vols. (1819–37); Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828); Deutsche Mythologie, 2 vols. (1835); Weistümer, 3 vols. (1840–42); Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 2 vols. (1848); Wilhelm Grimm’s Works: Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (1811); Über deutsche Runen (1821); Die deutsche Heldensage (1829); Co-Publictions: Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von Aue (1815); Lieder der alten Edda (1815); Deutsche Sagen, 2 vols. (1816–1818); Deutsches Wörterbuch, 32 vols. (1854–1961). Literature: Ludwig Denecke, Jacob und sein Bruder Wilhelm (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1971); Friedrich Neumann, “Grimm, Brüder,” NDB, vol. 7, 76–79; IGL, vol. 1, 611–18.

Scott E. Pincikowski

Gurevich, Aron Iakovlevich (May 12, 1924, Moscow – August 5, 2006, Moscow), Russian Medievalist. Despite isolation and censure by the Soviet regime, G. made a formative contribution to that historical-anthropological study of social and cultural aspects of medieval European civilization known as the history of mentalités. Parallel to the French Annales school, G. pursued his distinct line of research focusing on northwestern Europe and on the mindset and the patterns of thought of the “mute majority” of the Medieval population: the illiterate. In the West, G. has often been seen as a proponent of a tempered, Gramscian version of Marxism. In fact, his entire life’s work was an attempt to break free from economic determinism as the prevailing 20th-century approach to history. His studies on the archaic society of medieval Scandinavia (Svobodnoe krestianstvo feodal’noi Norvegii [Free Peasantry of Feudal Norway], 1967; and Norvezhskoe obshchestvo i rannee srednevekov’e: Problemy sotsial’nogo stroiia i kul’tury [Norwegian Society in the Early Middle Ages: Problems of Social Organization and Culture], 1977) convinced him that the Marxist dogma that ‘matter’ determined ‘consciousness’ did not hold up. Rather, the inverse was true: personal relations and notions found reflection and representation in material and social cultures (Problemy genezisa feodalizma v Zapadnoi Evrope [The Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism], 1970; cf. George DUBY’s later definition of feudalism as a particular mentality, a state of mind). Concurrently with Evans-Pritchard and Keith Thomas, in the mid-1960s G. advocated

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anthropology as an alternative to Marxism. In his holistic concept of “sociocultural history,” economy was just one of the many factors affecting and affected by the human mind. Accordingly, the purpose of historical research was to reconstruct the subjective realities of peoples of the past who had collectively created economic and social change. Interdisciplinary approach was essential to this endeavor; G. readily absorbed and synthesized the methods of Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as the methods of the Russian school of structuralist semiotics (Yurij Lotman, Boris Uspenskij) that emerged in the early sixties, and of the French Annales school. Like Lucien Febvre, G. understood mentalité as the collective unconscious, a pre-reflective set of notions and attitudes, a way of thinking typical of the age rather than of an individual. However, the influence of Marc Bloch (and his Marxist upbringing?) also made him sensitive to differences between the worldviews of diverse social groups. Like Jacques Le Goff, G. also emphasized the gap between the concepts inherent in the historian’s mind and those of the people of the epoch he studied, and warned against projecting modern standards and values onto the past. The past, which to a historical anthropologist is what a “foreign country” is to a social anthropologist, ought to be studied on its own terms, so as not to forfeit its ‘otherness’ and uniqueness. In his Kategorii srednevekovoi kul’tury [Categories of Medieval Culture] (1972), G. explored some of the “native” medieval constructs – of time, space, wealth, poverty, property, labour, law, and individuality – by using an unprecedented range of sources (legal and ecclesiastical, literary, oral and visual, popular and learned). His subsequent books – Problemy srednevekovoi narodnoi kul’tury [Problems in Medieval Popular Culture] (1981), Kul’tura i obshchestvo srednevekovoi Evropy glazami sovremennikov: exempla XIII veka [Culture and Society of Medieval Europe in the Eyes of the Contemporaries: Exempla of the Thirteenth Century] (1989), and Srednevekovyi mir: kul’tura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: The Culture of the Mute Majority] (1990) – dealt with the concepts of death, Last Judgment and the afterlife, magic, miracle, sanctity, the comic, the grotesque, laughter, family, childhood, and womanhood. He was particularly attentive to the correlation and mutual influences of popular and learned medieval cultures. In his Das Individuum im europäischen Mittelalter (1994, trans. into Russian only in 2005), published in the prestigious pan-European series The Making of Europe (1993–2006), G. revisited the commonly accepted opinion that individual consciousness and self-awareness stemmed only from the Renaissance, tracing the origins of individuality back to the early Middle Ages. G. was born in Moscow into a secularized Jewish family. Poor health saved him from mobilization during WWII, but for two years he had to com-

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bine university studies with full-time work at a tank-production plant. In 1944–1946 he studied at Moscow State University under the eminent medieval historians Neusykhin and Kosminski, and in 1950 earned the degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences with a thesis on the peasantry of south-west England in the pre-Norman period. As a Jew and non-Party member, he could not find employment in the capital, and between 1950 and 1966 taught at a provincial pedagogical institute in Kalinin (Tver’), visiting his family and friends, as well as libraries in Moscow, only on weekends. His thesis on the social history of Norwegian peasantry in the High Middle Ages brought him the degree of Doctor in Historical Sciences in 1962. A year later he became a full professor at the Kalinin pedagogical institute. In 1966, at last he received a research position in Moscow, at the Department of History of Culture in the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Between 1969 and 1992, he was a senior research fellow in the Scandinavian section of the Institute for General History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He taught at Moscow State University in 1975–1977, and returned in 1989 to take up a position as professor to the Department of Social Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy. Between 1992 and 2006, he held the position of the leading research fellow in the Institute for Higher Research in the Humanities, the Russian State University for Humanities, and in 1993 he became chair of the Department of European Cultures in the Institute for the History and Theory of World Culture, Moscow State University. In addition, between 1995 and 2006, G. chaired the Department of History and Theory of World Culture in the Institute for General History of the Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences. In his homeland, G.’s influence was severely limited by the country’s political predicament. As the author of hugely popular books and a gifted speaker, he was frequently invited throughout the 1970s and 1980s to speak on educational television programs and to lecture to non-academic audiences. So many people attended that mounted police were occasionally dispatched to ensure order. However, the official academe did not accept his ideas, which were not standard Marxist fare, and stifled his career. For most of his life, this generous and helpful teacher, a scholar with encyclopedic knowledge, and a warm, caring and witty person, was banned from teaching at academic institutions in Moscow and from supervising graduate students: a tragedy for him and a great loss for the many who might have benefited from becoming his students. He was also forbidden to travel abroad, to hold prestigious academic posts, and to publish a journal or in any other way institutionalize his school of thought. Only with the demise of communism in the late eighties did these restraints lift. In spite of his age, G. sprang into action. He lectured to crowded auditoriums in Russia and abroad, promoted

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the translation into Russian of the seminal works of contemporary Western historians, introduced the Russian reader to the nouvelle histoire (see Istoricheskii Sintez i Shkola Annalov [Historical Synthesis and the Annales School], 1993), brought international scholars to Moscow for a 1989 symposium dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Annales, and in the same year co-founded the periodical Odissei: Chelovek v istorii [Odysseus: Man in History] which he hoped would give voice to the specifically Russian tradition of historical anthropology. In this period he also served as a member of the Academic Council on the History of World Culture in the Russian Academy of Sciences, associate editor of the Russian journal on social sciences Arbor Mundi, editor-in chief of Odyssei, board member of the book series Monuments of Historical Thought. Unfortunately, a complete loss of sight in the last thirteen years of his life stopped G. short of establishing his own school, however, he persisted in other scholarly activities and research. International acclaim first came to G. after his articles on wealth and giftbestowal among the ancient Scandinavians (Scandinavica 7/2 [1968]: 126–38) and on medieval attitudes to property (Annales ESC 27 [1972]: 523–48). All but one of his books have been made available in at least one major European language; The Categories of Medieval Culture (1972) was translated into fifteen foreign languages, and Medieval Popular Culture (1981) into eight. Throughout the world, these two monographs have become mandatory reading for students in the humanities in particular. Judging by the number of translations and their subsequent reprints, G. enjoyed particular success in the German-speaking lands. Leading Western historians have been inspired by G.’s work and accepted him as a peer worth arguing with (e. g., Léopold Genicot, Jacques Le Goff, George Duby, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Burke, Isaiah Berlin, and others). Prestigious academic bodies have bestowed honors on him: he was made a corresponding fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, foreign member of the Renaissance Academy of America, Belgian Société Jean Bodin, the Royal Norwegian Society of Scholars, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Royal Historical Society, an associate editor of The Journal of the Historical Society and of the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, a PhD honoris causa of the Swedish University of Lund and of the Polish University of Poznan. Western reviewers generally agree that as a theoretician G. was less original and compelling than he was as a practicing historian. To an extent, this opinion is due to the belated appearance of the English anthology of his methodological essays (Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, 1992), which had certainly been innovative at the time of their initial publication during the 1970s and 1980s. It is nevertheless true that the limitations of G.’s method

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have become clearer since his works were first published. Having discarded purely economic causation, G. did not manage to rid history of determinism, at the socio-psychological level. Moreover, in his reconstruction of medieval mentalités, G. heavily relied on serial sources as a means to discover repetitive motifs, collective notions, pre-reflective long-term matrices of thinking and social behavior. While perfectly suited for the study of the static and universal features of human conscience, this approach failed to account for the dynamic, the salient and the untypical. Nonetheless, the fact remains that for over thirty years, G. was Russia’s one and only historical anthropologist. In the Russian context, perhaps, only Bakhtin contributed as much to de-ideologize the historical thought and expand the historian’s terrain. Outside of Russia, his was a compelling voice added to an already powerful choir. His books continue to be read and debated, by laymen and scholars alike. This, to G., was the scholar’s major goal and achievement: to pose a question, to provoke thought, and to restore the writing of history to what it should be – an open-ended debate. G. published about 500 scholarly works. Select Bibliography Works: Problemy genezisa feodalizma v Zapadnoi Evrope [Problems in the Genesis of Feudalism in Western Europe] (1970); Kategorii srednevekovoi kul’tury [Categories of Medieval Culture] (1972); Problemy srednevekovoi narodnoi kul’tury [Problems in Medieval Popular Culture] (1981); Kul’tura i obshchestvo srednevekovoi Evropy glazami sovremennikov: exempla XIII veka [Culture and Society of Medieval Europe in the Eyes of the Contemporaries: Exempla of the Thirteenth Century] (1989); Srednevekovyi mir: kul’tura bezmolvstvuiushchego bol’shinstva [The Medieval World: The Culture of the Mute Majority] (1990); Das Individuum im europäischen Mittelalter (1994); with A. Giardino, Il mercante dall’antichità al medioevo (1994). Collected articles: Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages: Essays (1992); Lezioni romane: Antropologia e cultura medievale (1991); Istoria – neskonchaemyi spor. Medievistika i skandinavistika: statii raznykh let [History: An Open-Ended Debate: Essays in Medieval and Scandinavian Studies] (2005). Literature: Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz, Moderne Konturen historischer Anthropologie: eine vergleichende Studie zu den Arbeiten von Jacques Le Goff und Aaron J. Gurjewitsch (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1994); Jan Pomorski, W poszukiwaniu antropologicznego wymiaru historii, Aron Guriewicz i Carlo Ginzburg: interpretacje [In Search of the Anthropological Assessment of History: Aron Gurevich and Carlo Ginzburg: Interpretations] (Lublin: University of Marie Curie-Skłodowska, 1998). Scholarly autobiographies: “Why am I not a Byzantinist?,” Homo Byzantinus: Papers in Honor of Alexander Kazhdan, ed. A. Cutler and S. Franklin, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 [1992]: 89–96; Istoriia istorika [History of an Historian] (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004).

Elena Lemeneva

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von der Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich August Wilhelm (February 19, 1780, Schmiedeberg/ Uckermark – June 6, 1856, Berlin), German Philologist. When H. began his career as philologist and literary critic, most great medieval German literary works lay in university libraries and archives in manuscript form, relatively unknown except to a scant few philologists and to those entrusted with manuscript preservation. Through H.’s efforts, a number of key texts became available to the general reading public for the first time. Indeed, his most important contribution to the Romantic reception of medieval literature can be located in the popularization of various medieval texts. He considered such works to be essentially “literary” (rather than linguistic or historical), and he emphasized the value of the story over the mere form: in contrast to Jacob Grimm, Karl Lachmann and Georg Friedrich Benecke, H.’s chief opponents in the early years of German literary studies (Germanistik), he focused attention away from the text’s strictly philological features and onto the work’s mythical, cultural and “Germanic” characteristics. While H.’s prominent literary contemporaries aimed their criticisms at his seemingly arbitrary and shallow renderings of medieval texts into modern idiom, his endeavors contributed substantially to the popularization of a medieval literary heritage with those Germans who longed for such a cultural foundation upon which to base their growing feelings of nationalism. Like August Wilhelm Schlegel, H. “envisioned a return to the values of medieval (Catholic) Christianity as part of a restoration of political and religious life throughout Europe” (George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, 2004, 101). Goethe was familiar with H.’s method of “actualizing” medieval literature, and the German bard certainly incorporated similar principles in his own efforts to revitalize works from earlier times. One of the earliest practitioners of what was to become Germanistik, H. was endowed with the first officially recognized professorship in this discipline. H. studied law in Halle from 1797–1800 and began a career in 1801 with the city and state courts of Berlin. The budding jurist had the opportunity

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to hear lectures by August Wilhelm Schlegel on German literature that aroused in him a passion for the epic and lyric of the medieval period, especially for the Nibelungenlied. By 1807 the French domination of Europe drove H. out of his legal profession, and he turned his interest to more aesthetic matters; he began to study intensely old German texts, editing German Volkslieder, several epics and chapbooks (Volksbücher) and the Nibelungenlied, while he was earning the doctor of philosophy degree (1808). Two years later, H. became a professor extraordinarius (essentially an unpaid position) for German Language and Literature at the University of Berlin – this (together with the Göttingen professorship of Georg Friedrich Benecke) marks the first time German Studies achieved such status as an officially recognized, scientific discipline (Jeffrey Peck, “‘In the Beginning Was the Word’: Germany and the Origins of German Studies,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 1995, 134–36). The next year H. took a similar position at the University of Breslau. On travels in the south to Switzerland, Italy and southern Germany during 1817 and 1818, he became familiar with numerous medieval manuscripts, and it became his greatest desire to make them available to the reading public for their artistic value rather than as objects of philological scrutiny. By 1818 H. was finally made ordinarius in Breslau, where he continued his editorial efforts. In January, 1824, when he joined the regular faculty in Berlin at the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität, his production in this area increased dramatically. He served four times as dean of the faculty, and by 1841 he was invited to join the prestigious Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He died in June of 1856 after a long and most distinguished academic career. H.’s scholarly activity lay primarily in editing and translating medieval texts from Middle High German into modern German, and popularizing them. The copious number of such translations and editions includes Das Nibelungenlied, various works of the courtly troubadours, the Edda, older German heroic poetry, portions of Gottfried’s Tristan, and a very large body of other medieval and early modern literary pieces. Besides these, his most significant scholarly endeavor was the Literarischer Grundriss zur Geschichte der Deutschen Poesie, which he and his colleague Johann Büsching published in 1812. In the early days of the German Romantic movement the Grimms, Lachmann, and others championed a rigorous philological approach as the only acceptable path to understanding medieval literature. Their success in dominating academia during this period ensured that, throughout his career H. could not escape the charge that his translations and editions were dilettante. Nevertheless, Buch der Liebe earned the praise of Schlegel, who

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proclaimed that H.’s translations reveal “much learnedness, good sense, diligence and love of the topic” (quoted in Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalter-Rezeption der Brüder Schlegel, 2000, 95). His revising and editing toil on the Nibelungenlied became a lifelong work-in-progress, and earned him great praise as well as strong criticism (Otfried Ehrismann, Nibelungenlied: Epoche – Werk – Wirkung, 2nd ed., 2002, 176–79). While the more benevolent among his reading public praised his efforts as an “important turning point in literature,” Jakob Grimm condemned it as a “complete failure” (Reifferscheid, 333; Lothar Bluhm, Die Brüder Grimm und der Beginn der Deutschen Philologie, 1997, 182–214). For the scientifically-oriented philologist Grimm, the liberties H. took while renovating the medieval German text yielded an arbitrary and confusing mixture of old and new forms that no one had ever actually used, and he considered the result to be an unfortunate hybrid that was intended to please everyone and, therefore, pleased no one. H.’s 1810 edition of this same work encountered similar obstacles, since, according to his detractors, he had employed two different manuscripts unscientifically and capriciously as overlay to an already flawed original. Of course, these efforts were not capricious, since his aim was not philological but rather social and political: H. was gaining a popular reputation as one of the great German patriots of the time, and his efforts here were clearly aimed at providing the German reading public with a literary-historical foundation for nationalcultural pride (Ehrismann, 176–77). Nevertheless, not a single edition of his many popularizations survived the 19th century, and most lapsed into obscurity even during H.’s lifetime (Grunewald, 337–38). With a very few exceptions (including a dissertation by Helmut Assmann in 1922), it was not until the 1960s that H.’s work became a focus of interest by historians of Germanistik. Grunewald’s thorough study (q.v., esp. 1–9) presents a welcome corrective to some one-sided tendencies to apostrophize or condemn Hagen. Select Bibliography Works: F. v. d. Hagen and Johann Gustav Büsching, Literarischer Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Poesie von der altesten Zeit bis in das sechzehnte Jahrhundert (1812). Editons: Many editions of the Nibelungenlied, among the most important of which are: Der Nibelungen Lied, ed. F. v. d. Hagen(1807), Der Nibelungen Lied: in der Ursprache mit den Lesarten der verschiedenen Handschriften, ed. F. v. d. Hagen(1810); Der Nibelungen Lied: zum erstenmal in der ältesten Gestalt aus der St. Galler Handschrift mit Vergleichung der übrigen Handschriften …, 2nd ed., ed. F. v. d. Hagen(1816); Der Nibelungen Noth zum erstenmal in der ältesten Gestalt aus der St. Galler Urschrift mit den Lesarten aller übrigen Handschriften, 3rd ed., ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1820); Der Nibelungen lied, ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1824); and

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Der Nibelungen Lied in der alten vollendeten Gestalt, ed. F. v. d. Hagen with F. W. Gubitz (1842); Deutsche Gedichte des Mittelalters, 2 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagenwith Johann Gustav Büsching (1808–1825); Buch der Liebe, ed. F. v. d. Hagenwith Johann Gustav Büsching (1809); Lieder der älteren oder Sämundischen Edda, ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1812); Gottfried von Strassburg Werke, 2 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagen(1823); Minnesinger: Deutsche Liederdichter des zwölften, dreizehnten und vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, 4 vols. in 5 parts, ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1838–1856); Gesammtabenteuer: hundert altdeutsche Erzählungen, 3 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1850); Das Heldenbuch: altdeutsche Heldenlieder aus dem Sagenkreis Dietrichs von Bern und der Nibelungen, 2 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1855); F. v. d. Hagen, Über die ältesten Darstellungen der Faustsage (1844); Museum für altdeutsche Literatur, 2 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1809–1811); Germania: neues Jahrbuch der Berlinischen Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache und Alterthumskunde 10 vols., ed. F. v. d. Hagen (1836–1853). Literature: Alexander Reifferscheid, “Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich v. d.,” ADB, vol. 10, 332–37; Eckhard Grunewald, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen 1780–1856: ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte der Germanistik (Berlin & New York: W. de Gruyter, 1988); Klaus Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1989).

Christopher R. Clason

Haupt, Moriz (July 27, 1808, Zittau, Saxony – February 7, 1874, Berlin), German Medievalist. Like Georg Friedrich Benecke, Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, and Karl Lachmann, H. was a pioneer in German philology. As with most of the early specialists in German studies, classical philology was the basis of his education. It is the critical method on which his fame is founded. His predecessor and great role model was Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). Like Lachmann, H. was trained as a classical philologist, and he sought to apply the methods of textual criticism to Middle High German Texts. His methodical achievement as an editor of Middle High German texts lies in the way in which he evaluated the written tradition of these texts. In his opinion this was the only way to recover the poet’s words as exactly as possible so that the reader would get an impression of the “true” original. With each edition, he sought to establish a critically validated text and to recover the “correct” version from the manuscript material he had before him. His intention was to provide editions for educated readers and specialists, and he believed that his ideal “attentive reader” would want to study variant readings.

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Most of his own editions and most of the works of Lachmann, which he edited and published after Lachmann’s death, are still in constant use. His purist, strictly philological stance, which could be described as fundamentalist, split the field of philology into the Berlin and Viennese school. The most important members of the Berlin group around H. were Lachmann (1793–1851), Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), Karl Müllenhoff (1818–1884) and later Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886); those in the Vienna group around Franz Pfeiffer (1815–1868) were Ludwig Uhland (1782–1862), Adolf Holtzmann (1810–1870), Karl Bartsch (1832–1888), and Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle (1825–1892). H.’s early education was mainly conducted by his father, Ernst Friedrich (1774–1843), a lawyer, syndic and mayor. After spending five years at Zittau Gymnasium (1821–1826), H. attended the University of Leipzig, where he studied classical philology (1826–1830). At the end of his university studies in 1830, he returned to his father’s house and devoted the next seven years to studies in Greek, Latin, German, Provencal, and Bohemian, while also taking care of his melancholic father. His friendship with Lachmann, whom he visited in 1831 in Berlin, greatly affected his intellectual development. In September 1837, with Quaestiones Catullianae, he completed his post doctoral qualification (“Habilitation”) at the University of Leipzig. His first lectures as assistant professor (Privatdozent), dealing with such diverse subjects as Catullus and the Nibelungenlied, indicated the two main strands of his interests. A new chair of German language and literature was founded for his benefit, in 1841 he became professor extraordinarius, and in 1843 professor ordinarius. In 1842, he married Louise Hermann, the daughter of his former professor at the University of Leipzig. Convicted of high treason after the “revolution of 1848,” H. was deprived of his professorship in 1851. Two years later, however, he was called to succeed Lachmann at the University of Berlin as professor ordinarius for Roman Literature (1853–1874). From the 1859/60 winter semester on, he no longer lectured in German philology. His most important students were Christian Belger, his later biographer, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the editor of his Opuscula, and Friedrich Zarncke, one of the editors of the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (1854–1866; rpt. 1990). The most important aspects of his teaching were the history of old German poetry; Horace, Catullus, Propertius, Aristophanes, Homer, Aeschylus, and Tacitus. H.’s greatest scientific achievements lie, without a doubt, in the field of textual criticism and editorial practice, following the principles of his role

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model Karl Lachmann. Lachmann’s editorial principles, based on classical philology, were to be applied to medieval German texts in order to reconstruct and scientifically verify, through careful examination of the handwriting, the original author’s words. Explicating his methods, H. typically preferred to stay taciturn and contented himself with laconic statements for those who understood, who were expected to agree with his decisions without him providing justification. In the preamble to his Neidhart-edition, he virtually demanded blind trust in his decisions noting apodictically, “wherever either my remarks or my silence dissent from Benecke’s edition, I demand to be believed” (preface vii). He kept to himself the lengthy and laborious methods behind his scholarly decisions, and rather than offering a verifiable basis for his scientific judgments, H. insisted on the authority of the scholar, as had Lachmann. This authority was based not only on scholarly accomplishments but also, and primarily, on the moral integrity and ethos of the scientific method. H.’s primary fields of research were textual criticism, exegesis, editions of Roman und Middle High German texts. He was always concerned with the historical truth and wanted to establish the authenticity of his authors’ works, so that his readers could understand and appreciate them in the context of their time. The poetic text remained his main concern, and to him, textual criticism took on the status others might ascribe to original composition. H. sought to address specialists in his field and had little interest in recognition from the general public. This was especially true of the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum (ZfdA), which he founded in 1841. The arrogance of his attitude was a direct challenge to his opponents and led to intense and defamatory counterattacks. Franz Pfeiffer, one of his strongest opponents, was editor of Germania, a journal which took an approach in sharp contradiction to the philologically-based textual criticism typical of the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum. In interpreting medieval texts, Pfeiffer was eager to communicate his findings to a well-educated public and to create close links with other German literary scholars at universities and schools. Pfeiffer and H. represented two opposite poles, which may be characterized as “esoteric versus value for the public.” One emphasized pure philological science and the other cultural and educational aspects. This polarization has lain at the centre of numerous debates ever since. H. was clearly an outstanding figure among his contemporaries, especially after Lachmann’s death. The importance of his research in the fields of German and Classical philology was honored by the scientific community. By 1836, he was already a corresponding member and by 1853 a full

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member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. This was followed by a number of honorable posts in subsequent years: 1846 full member of the Royal Saxon Academy of Sciences; 1846–1848 deputy secretary; 1849–1853 secretary of the Humanities and Social Sciences department; 1853 foreign full member; 1848 corresponding member of the “Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna;” 1854 foreign member of the “Imperial Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich;” 1857 corresponding member; 1861–1874 secretary of the Humanities and Social Sciences department; 1871 foreign member of the “Imperial Society of Sciences,” later “Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. In 1871, he was decorated with the “Pour le Mérite” Medal for Science and Arts. H.’s 1858 edition of Neidhard’s (von Reuenthal) lyrics is still in constant use and the terseness of his introductions and notes helps to confirm our picture of a severe, self-confident and always judicious editor employing what he considers his unfailing method (Wenzel, “Moriz Haupt (1808–1874),” 43). The Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum which H. edited from 1841–1873 (vol. 1–16) by himself is still an exceptionally important publication for modern German literary studies. Select Bibliography Works: Opuscula, ed. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, vol. 1–3 (1875/76, rpt. 1967); Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, vol. 1–16 (1841–1873). Editions: H. edited “Hartmann von Aue’s Erec” (1840); “Rudolf von Ems’s Der guote Gerhard” (1842); “Hartmann von Aue’s Lieder und Büchlein und Der arme Heinrich” (1844); “Konrads von Würzburg’s Engelhard” (1845); “Winsbecke und Winsbeckin” (1851); “Gottfried von Neifen’s Lieder” (1851) and “Neidhard von Reuental” (1858, 2nd rev. ed. 1954, rpt. 1989). – After Lachmann’s death H. edited Lachmann’s major works on “Des Minnesangs Frühling” (1857); “Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide” (3rd ed. 1853, 4th ed. 1864), “Wolfram von Eschenbach, Werke” (1854, 3rd ed. 1872); “Hartmann von Aue, Iwein” (mit Anmerkungen von Georg Friedrich Benecke, 3rd ed. 1868). Literature: Eine Wissenschaft etabliert sich (1810–1870), ed. Johannes Janota (Tübingen: Max Niemayer); Karl Bartsch, “Moriz Haupt,” Germania 19 (1874): 238–42; Uwe Meves, “Moriz Haupt,” IGL 1800–1950, vol. 1 (2003), 682–84; Jan-Dirk Müller, “Moriz Haupt und die Anfänge der Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum,” Wissenschaft und Nation: Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann und Wilhelm Vosskamp (Munich: Fink 1991), 141–64; Wilhelm Scherer, “Haupt,” ADB, vol. 11 (1880), 72–80; Edith Wenzel, “Moriz Haupt (1808–1874),” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Portraits, ed. Christoph König, Hans-Harald Müller, and Werner Röcke (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 2000), 41–46.

Gertrud Blaschitz

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Heer, Friedrich (April 10, 1916, Vienna – September 18, 1983, Vienna), Austrian Medievalist. Methodically, H. already transcended every monodisciplinarian approach to history, not limiting himself to typical historical sources (e. g., chronicles, diplomata, letters, etc.), but using the whole of the available material, including works of art, theological and philosophical treatises, vernacular literature, etc., in order to reconstruct the mentality of a certain epoch. While in the universities of his days, theological writings were usually explored by theologians only, he convincingly analyzed them as manifestations of political and social concepts (most successfully in his earliest works on the 11th and 12th century). He also dealt (as did, much later, Jacques Le Goff) with other subjects which then were the exclusive domain of theologians, as the changing imaginaries of heaven and hell, showing the importance of religious items for the general history of the Middle Ages and their importance for building up structures of socio-political power by members of the church. A specific characteristic, particularly of H.’s later books (e.g. Kreuzzüge – gestern, heute, morgen?), was his tendency to link medieval phenomena to their traditions or analogues in modern times. In most of his publications, there is an outspoken interest in the consequences of even remote historical evolutions for the socio-political situation of his own age. Therefore, the type of historical book he preferred was not the concentrated monograph on a certain problem, but the large overview through the ages (as represented, by his masterful Europäische Geistesgeschichte [Intellectual History of Europe]). H.’s works are exemplary antidotes against every kind of narrow, one-sided views on history, and against a purely antiquarian approach to the past. H. was born into a small-bourgeois Viennese family. Very early on, he became interested and immersed himself in the political conflicts of the Austrian Ständestaat (Nation of Estates). From 1934 onwards, he studied history, German literature, and art history in Vienna (and, for a short time, in Riga, Königsberg, and Berlin) where he received his academic degree in 1938 under the medievalists Hans Hirsch and Otto Brunner. Another academic teacher important for H. was the famous art historian Hans Sedlmayr. Manifesting himself as an outspoken opponent of National Socialism, H. was immediately imprisoned after Austria’s Anschluss (Annexation) to the German Reich, but set free in 1940 and called up to the Wehrmacht, which, he used to say, saved his life, as otherwise he would have ended up in a concentration camp. Though habilitated for Medieval History in 1950, he earned

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his life not as a university professor, but as a free-lance journalist and redactor, and in 1961 he was elected editor-in-chief of the Burgtheater’s dramaturgy (until 1972), nonetheless continuing to publish and to teach. He also wrote several (partly autobiographical) novels with a strong touch on cultural-political themes, published under the pseudonym Hermann Gohde. At the University of Vienna, H. gave lectures on “Intellectual History of the Occident,” but attracted astonishingly few students, probably because he presumed a range of historical, literary, and philosophical knowledge from antiquity to the present time that made it difficult to follow his lectures and to understand his poignant allusions. This may be a reason, too, why he never founded a school. But there were institutional hindrances as well, as he never became an ordinary professor and, though member of the influential Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, was regarded with distance even by his former fellow-students at the university, now holding the chairs, who advocated a much more traditional approach to history. It was more through his public lectures and non-academic essays and as a political writer of very intensive (originally Catholic) humanistic engagement that H. became a prominent figure of post-war Austrian intellectual culture. He counted many contemporary intellectuals among his friends. As the editor (1949–1961) of the prestigious journal of the catholic left, Die Furche, he pleaded for a more open and communicative church, underscoring that, even between ideological opponents, discussions should never cease. H.’s book Mittelalter 1000–1350 (1961) was most read by medievalists and continues to be his most-nuanced general overview over the high Middle Ages, especially given the immediate translation into English and Italian, and the many American editions which made it a best-seller. But also a number of his other books were rendered into diverse major languages. It is a pity that his important works of 1949/52 on the Investiture controversy and the period of the Hohenstaufen have not been translated and are neglected even by most German-speaking medievalists of today. It is true, however, that sometimes H.’s genius made him see connections or quote details which do not stand up to critical inquiry. But compared to the wealth of intellectual impulses his thoughts provide, these errors are merely trifles. The formidable range of his knowledge was expressed adequately by one of his examiners at his habilitation: “You simply know too much.” Studying his works always means to receive new inspirations and to be invited to consider historical relations the reader himself would probably never have thought of. Given that H.’s publications sum up to about 3,500 titles with ca. 50,000 pages, only those can be mentioned which are most important for Medieval

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Studies: “Reich und Gottesreich. Eine Studie zur politischen Religiosität des 12. Jahrhunderts” [Empire and The City of God: A Study of Twelfth-Century Political Religiosity], Ph.D. diss. Vienna 1938; Aufgang Europas. Eine Studie zu den Zusammenhängen zwischen politischer Religiosität, Frömmigkeitsstil und dem Werden Europas im 12. Jahrhundert [The Rise of Europe: A Study on the Connections Between Religiosity, the Type of Piety, and the Development of Europe in the 12th Century], 1949; Die Tragödie des Heiligen Reichs [continuation of no. 2; Tragedy of the Holy Roman Empire], 1952; Europäische Geistesgeschichte [European Intellectual History], 1953; Die dritte Kraft. Der europäische Humanismus zwischen den Fronten des konfessionellen Zeitalters [The Third Force: European Humanism Between the Fronts of a Confessional Age], 1959; Mittelalter 1000–1350 [The Medieval World: Europe 1000–1350], 1961; Das Heilige Römische Reich [The Holy Roman Empire], 1967; Gottes erste Liebe – 2000 Jahre Judentum und Christentum [God’s First Love – 2000 Years of Jewry and Christianity], 1967; Kreuzzüge – gestern, heute, morgen? [Crusades – Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow?], 1969; Abschied von Höllen und Himmeln [Good-Bye to the Many Hells and Heavens], 1970; Karl der Große und seine Welt [Charlemagne and his World], 1977. H. also edited and prefaced several paperback-florilegia of important philosophers, such as Meister Eckhart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hegel, and Leibnitz. A few volumes of his works have been reprinted in a complete edition (2003ff.), which, however, seems to be at a standstill. Select Bibliography Literature: Evelyn Adunka, Friedrich Heer (1916–1983): eine intellektuelle Biographie (Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, 1995); Adolf Gaisbauer, Friedrich Heer: Eine Bibliographie (Vienna: Böhlau, 1990); Wolfgang Ferdinand Müller, Die Vision des Christlichen bei Friedrich Heer (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2002); Offener Humanismus zwischen den Fronten des Kalten Krieges: Über den Universalhistoriker, politischen Publizisten und religiösen Essayisten Friedrich Heer, ed. Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005); Fritz Fellner and Doris Corradini, Österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006), 173–74; Die geistige Welt des Friedrich Heer, ed. Richard Faber and Sigurd Scheich (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008).

Peter Dinzelbacher

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Hibbard, Laura Alandis (June 18, 1883, Chicago – August 25, 1960, New York City), Medievalist in English Literature. H. is noted for her work on English medieval romance, particularly the noncyclic legends. Just prior to Joseph Bédier’s 1912 “renouvellement” of the Tristan legend into a modern narrative, H. published her own modern narration of three romances (Three Middle English Romances: King Horn, Haelok, Beves of Hampton, 1911). A graduate of Chicago’s Hyde Park High School, H. finished her undergraduate work at Wellesley College in 1905 and completed her Masters degree there in 1908. She studied with such teachers as Martha Hale Shackford, Katharine Lee Bates, Sophie Chantal Hart, Mary Whiton Calkins, Vida Dutton Scudder and Sophie Jewett, her first teacher of medieval English literature during her undergraduate studies. H. taught briefly at Kemper Hall in the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then at Mount Holyoke College from 1908–1916. Holyoke accorded her a year’s leave to study at Oxford and then the University of Chicago in 1910. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1916 with a thesis on sources for medieval English romances. H. then taught at Wellesley College until 1943, advancing to full professor in 1929. She was also awarded the Katharine Lee Bates Endowed Chair in English Literature. After her marriage in 1925 to Roger Sherman Loomis (widower of her friend and classmate Gertrude Schoepperle), she often taught for one semester at Wellesley during the academic year, returning to New York for the other half of the year where her husband taught at Columbia University. While a faculty member at Wellesley, H.’s course offerings ranged from survey courses of English literature to specialized courses on Arthurian literature, as well as on Chaucer. Upon her retirement in 1943 and permanent move to New York City, H. continued to teach, offering evening courses on Chaucer for Hunter College and sometimes teaching summer courses for Columbia. After H.’s death, Roger remarried with another medievalist, Dorothy Bethurum, with whom he lived for three years until his death. H.’s scholarship focused mainly on English romance, Arthurian romance and Chaucer, and also included some work on art. Her publications include more than thirty articles, four books, and two books co-authored with her husband. Her knowledge of medieval literature in general was encyclopedic, showing a broad understanding of the circulation and evolution of themes and motifs throughout medieval Europe, as is evidenced in her second book,

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Medieval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (1924), based on her dissertation, written under the direction of John Manly. H.’s third book (Medieval Vista, 1953) was devoted to manuscript illuminations from New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library. Adventures in the Middle Ages (1962) was a posthumous publication of a collection of H.’s essays. The collaborations with Roger Sherman Loomis include the ever-classic Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (1938) and Medieval Romances (1957), eight romances rendered into modern English. She also wrote about medieval motifs in art (“The Table of the Last Supper in Religious and Secular Iconography,” Art Studies 5 [1927]: 71–88) and on manuscript depictions of theatrical presentations at the French court as illustrated in B.N. Fr. 2813 Chronique de Charles V (“Secular Dramatics in the Royal Palace, Paris, 1378, 1389, and Chaucher’s Tregetoures,” Speculum 33 [1958]: 242–55) using such depictions to explicate Chaucer’s references to magnificent dramatic productions and performances. Her husband, Roger Sherman Loomis, demonstrated his admiration and respect for her scholarship, citing her work on more than one occasion in his The Development of Arthurian Romance (1963), specifically with regards to her research on the Auchinleck manuscript, and her analysis of Gawain and the Green Knight. Her graduate advisor, John Manly, proclaimed the value of her work in the published version of her dissertation, noting in particular “the accuracy and fulness of the discussions,” as well as “the clearness with which the present state of knowledge and opinion on each romance is set forth” (review in Modern Philology 24 [1926–1927]: 122–24). In his review of H.’s second book, Howard Patch (JEGP 25 [1926]: 108–14) remarked especially on the author’s notes about the influence of romance narratives on art. Medieval Romance in England (1924) became a classic work, as evidenced by a second edition more than thirty years later, proof of its continuing merit and pertinence to the field. Likewise, the co-authored Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art was also reprinted nearly three decades later (1966), testimony to its importance to Medieval Studies. Scholars such as Henry Hall Peyton III, in discussing H.’s place in the Medieval academy have often had more to say about her place as the second of three medievalist wives to Roger Sherman Loomis than about her scholarship (“The Loomis Ladies,” On Arthurian Women, ed. B. Wheeler and F. Tholhurst, 2001, 343–47). More recently Katherine Lynch’s work on H., however, has highlighted the innovation of H.’s thesis regarding the role of the Auchinleck manuscript as a source for Chaucer: in contrast to Eugen Köbling who had dismissed the possibility, H. methodically and effectively demonstrated the connections (“Laura Hibbard Loomis: Mrs. Arthur,”

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Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance, 2005, 239–54). Lynch also credits H. more generally for her understanding of the literary exchange between cultures which appropriated and reworked motifs and themes, in particular the translations between the French and English traditions (“The Holy Relics of Charlemagne and King Athelstan: The Lances of Longinus and Saint Mauricius,” Speculum 25 [1950]: 437–56). Select Bibliography Works: Three Middle English Romances: King Horn, Havelok, Beves of Hampton (1911); “Jacques de Vitry and Boeve de Haumtone,” Modern Language Notes 34 (November 1919): 408–11; Medieval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Noncyclic Metrical Romances (1924; 2nd ed. 1960); “The Table of the Last Supper in Religious and Secular Iconography,” Art Studies 5 (1927): 71–88; Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art, with Roger Sherman Loomis (1938; 1966 and 1975); “Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript: Thopas and Guy of Warwick,” Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (1940); “The Holy Relics of Charlemagne and King Athelstan: The Lances of Longinus and Saint Mauricius,” Speculum 25 (1950): 437–56; “The Passion Lance Relic and the War Cry ‘Monjoie’ in the Chanson de Roland and Related Texts,” Romanic Review 41 (1950): 241–60. Medieval Vista (1953); Medieval Romances, with Roger Sherman Loomis (1957); “Secular Dramatics in the Royal Palace, Paris, 1378, 1389, and Chaucer’s ‘Tregetoures,’” Speculum 33 (April 1958): 242–55; Adventures in the Middle Ages: A Memorial Collection of Essays and Studies (1962). Literature: Henry Hall Peyton III, “The Loomis Ladies: Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis (1882–1921), Laura Hibbard Loomis (1883–1960), Dorothy Bethurum Loomis (1897–1987),” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 343–47; Kathryn Lynch, “Laura Hibbard Loomis: ‘Mrs Arthur,’” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 239–54.

Linda M. Rouillard

Hilka, Alfons (July 30, 1877 – June 21, 1939), German Romance Medievalist. H. published editions of Old French texts, particularly those of Chrétien de Troyes; he is also well known for his editions of medieval Latin works, most importantly his edition of the Carmina Burana from ca. 1220. He was an extraordinary expert of Old French and medieval Latin literature. H.’s greatest contributions were in the area of editing medieval texts, and also in the area

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of narrative research, particularly global comparative investigations of narrative themes and motifs. H. was the son of tailor Johannes Hilka (1844–1901) and his wife Franziska (1856–1894). He studied Romance languages, English philology, and classical philology, along with comparative linguistics and Sanskrit in Breslau, Berlin, and Poitiers, and was a student of A. Tobler and Carl Appel. In 1903 he earned his “Staatsexamen” (roughly comparable to the M.A.), which allowed him to teach in high schools (Gymnasium) in Oppeln, Gleiwitz, and Breslau. Under the guidance of Appel, H. wrote his doctoral dissertation on Chrétien de Troyes (Die direkte Rede als stilistisches Kunstmittel in den Romanen des Kristian von Troyes [1902; Genève: Slatkine, 1979]). In 1912 he earned his Habilitation (2nd qualifying dissertation) with an edition of the Old French romance Athis et Prophilias. He held a temporary position at the University of Bonn from 1914 to 1915. Later he would dedicate his edition of the ProsaAlexanderroman (1920) to Appel on the occasion of the latter’s retirement on May 17, 1917. H. received his first full professor position at the Romanisches Seminar at the University of Greifswald (1918–1921), and then he was appointed Ordinarius (head) in the Department of Romanische Philologie at the University of Göttingen (1922–1938), succeeding Stimmings there. He ended his career in Göttingen. 1929–1930 he was visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, during which year he traveled widely; in 1934 he gave guest lectures at the International University of Santander, Spain. H. founded the Sammlung mittellateinischer Texte (vols. I–IX, 1911–1926) that served to help university professors prepare their classes and made medieval Latin texts available for them and their students. Beginning in 1925, H. edited, together with Gerhard Rohlfs, the Sammlung Romanischer Übungshefte (continued until 1974, with the last vol. no. 77). Between 1920 and 1934, H. served as editor of a then and today leading Romance journal, the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. He was member of the Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, of the Medieval Academy of America, and a Korrespondierendes Mitglied of the Schlesische Gesellschaft für vaterländische Kultur. H. is responsible for a good number of scholarly works, including a catalog of the Latin manuscripts in the Breslau municipal library (1915), an edition of the Sendabar and Dolopathos stories of the Seven Sages Cycle (Das Leben und die Sentenzen des Philosophus Secundus des Schweigsamen in der französischen Literatur, 1910), and an edition of the Disciplina clericalis of Peter Alfonsi (1911). He is perhaps best known, however, for his edition of the Latin lyrics familiar to us as the Carmina Burana (1930, ed. together with Oskar Schumann; rpt. numerous times, last 1991), still considered an important stage in the editorial history of this lyric corpus, though superseded today by more recent

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editions (e. g., Carmina Burana, ed. Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, 1987). His editions of Old French texts include Florimont (1933), an adventure romance by Aimon de Varennes, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, notably Perceval (1935; rev. ed. 1966), and an edition of the Oxford Roland (1926; rpt. 1997). He also wrote about a Spanish folk romance. Among his other publications are a beginning French reader (Comme on fait son lit on se couche, 1925) and an edition of plays for students of French (Théâtre de la jeunesse, 1921). H.’s work was known to English-speaking scholars in part because he published in Speculum (1934) and in Modern Philology (1930). He served as editor of the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie from 1920–1934. James Douglas Bruce’s study The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300 (1928; rpt. 1974), was also based on H.’s considerable contributions and assistance. H. had been trained in the Lachmann method of editing medieval texts, but he soon diverted from it and, starting with his edition of Athis et Prophilias, relied on a base manuscript, leaning more toward Bédier’s approach, while trying to avoid the problem with Mischtexten (conflated texts). In the global debate about the so-called Indian theory, which claimed an East Indian origin for medieval narratives, H. preferred Bédier’s agnostic theory, assuming that many narrative motifs had migrated over space and time from east to west. In the 1930s, circumstances changed for H. His failure to maintain the editorial principles that he had developed, a combination of the Bédier and Lachmann methods, was criticized. That H. was replaced as editor of Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie in 1934 marked the end of his reign in the field of Romance and medieval Latin philology and editing. Finally, his emphasis on medieval Latin literature met with little response from his colleagues, and he died early, at the age of 62, before completing his many editorial projects. Since he wrote only in German, his research has become increasingly less accessible to international scholarship.

Select Bibliography Works: Li Romanz d’Athis et Prophilias, ed. H., 2 vols. (Dresden: Gedruckt für die Gesellschaft für romanische Literatur, 1912 and 1916); “Die Wanderung der Erzählung von der Inclusa aus dem Volksbuch der Sieben weisen Meister,” Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 1 (1917): 29–72 (among many other articles); Der altfranzösische Prosa-Alexander-Roman nach der Berliner Bilderhandschrift, nebst dem lateinischen Original der Historia de Preliis (Rezension J2), ed. H. (1920; 1976); Ein bisher unbekanntes Narcissusspiel: l’histoire de Narcisus et de Echo (1914); Historia Septem sapientum, vol. I: Eine bisher unbekannte lateinische Übersetzung einer orientalischen Fassung der Sieben weisen Meister (Mischle Sendabar) (1912); Historia septem sapientum, vol. II: Johannis de Alta Silva Dolopathos, sive, De rege et septem sapientibus (1913); Hilka and W. Söderhjelm, ed., Disciplina clericalis

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des Petrus Alfonsi (1911; rpt. in Materials for Crusade and Mission, ed. Benjamin Zeev Kedar. 1968; H. had discovered a Latin translation of the Hebrew version); with Franz Skutsch, Gustav Türk, Richard Wünsch and Konrad Ziegler, ed., Catalogus codicum latinorum classicorum qui in Bibliotheca urbi [i. e. urbica] Wratislaviensi adservantur (1915; 1975); Souvestre, Théatre de la jeunesse, ed. H. (1921); Emile Souvestre and H., Comme on fait son lit on se couche (1925); Beiträge zur lateinischen Erzählungsliteratur des Mittelalters: I. Der Novus Aesopus des Baldo. II. Eine lateinische Übersetzung der griechischen Version des Kalila-Buchs (1928); “Eine spanische Volksromance,” Modern Philology 27.4 (1930): 19–26; H. and F. P. Magoun, “A List of Manuscripts Containing Texts of the Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni, Recensions I1, I2, I3,” Speculum 9.1 (Jan 1934): 84–86; Das altfranzösische Rolandslied nach der Oxforder Handschrift (1926; rev. Rohlfs, 1948; 1997); H. with Otto Schumannand Wilhelm Meyer, ed., Carmina Burana, mit Benutzung der Vorarbeiten Wilhelm Meyers (1930; critical commentary 1941; 1983); Alfred Risopand H., ed., Aimon von Varennes: Florimont (1933); Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, ed. H., 2 vols. (1933–1937); Das Viaticum narrationum des Henmannus Bononiensis, ed. H. (1935–1936; rpt. 1972). – See also Initia carminum ac versuum Medii Aevi posterioris Latinorum. Alphabetisches Verzeichnis der Versanfänge mittellateinischer Dichtungen, ed. by Hans Walther on the basis of H.’s preparatory work (1959). H. left behind a large number of almost completed critical editions and studies, many of which were published posthumously. Literature: E. S(chröder), “Nachruf auf Alfons Hilka,” Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (1939/40): 37–39. A. Långfors, “Chronique: Alfons Hilka,” Romania 65 (1939): 558; W. Theodor Elwert, “Hilka, Alfons,” NDB vol. 9, 146; Hans Helmut Christmann, “Hilka, Alfons,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, vol. 6 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1990), 1032–36; id., “Leistung und Schicksal eines Philologen: Der Romanist Alfons Hilka als Erzählforscher, Mittellateiner und Textherausgeber,” Festschrift Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger, ed. Johannes Janota et al., vol. 1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 255–65.

Wendy Pfeffer and Albrecht Classen

Hilton, Rodney Howard (November 17, 1916, Middleton, Lancashire, England – June 7, 2002, Birmingham, England), British Historian. H. transformed the study of medieval England’s economic and social history with a brand of scholarship informed by the British Marxist tradition and by his commitment to careful and extensive archival research combined with the new techniques of historical archaeology. Unlike his predecessors, who viewed feudalism from the perspective of landowners, H. examined it from

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the bottom up. Looking at feudalism as a mode of production rather than a series of aristocratic obligations, he focused primarily on the relationships among the peasantry and townspeople; he included the upper classes only in regard to their ties to the working classes. His analyses gave the previously invisible members of the underclasses a voice and showed them worthy of our attention. His work emphasized the ways medieval England’s exploited classes actively and creatively manipulated feudal constraints; it also uncovered their dynamic contributions to the forces of economic and social change. As a result, he repeatedly reminded the 20th century that the Middle Ages were not a static period waiting to be transformed into modern capitalism. The story of H.’s political and intellectual leanings begins with his family’s Unitarian and Independent Labour Party affiliations. After attending Manchester Grammar School, he studied at Balliol College and later Merton College, Oxford University. There, under the guidance of R. V. Lennard, he began his lifelong study of rural medieval England’s social and economic history. During his time at Oxford, he joined the Communist Party. Though he eventually quit the party in 1956 and supported the New Left, his personal and academic convictions always allied with the British Marxist tradition. With his doctoral thesis all but complete in 1940, he served in the British Army in North Africa, Syria, Palestine, and Italy during World War II. Among the local folk in these outposts, he observed for himself the peasants’ creative dignity. He saw firsthand that the exploitation of servile peasantry was a widespread phenomenon, both geographically and historically. In addition, this experience laid the foundation for his later protests against the Eurocentric biases in understanding 20th-century societies around the world. In 1946, he was appointed Lecturer and Reader in Medieval History at University of Birmingham; there he received a personal chair in Medieval Social History in 1963 and retired in 1982. Early in his career, he helped form the Communist Party Historians Group. The group’s most enduring legacy is the influential journal, Past and Present, founded in 1952 in order to bridge the gap between Marxist historians and receptive non-Marxists. His honors included being named the Ford lecturer at Oxford in 1973 and being elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1977. Today, his papers are held in the University of Birmingham Special Collections. Immediately after World War II, H. published his Oxford doctoral thesis, The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1947), which demonstrates the modes of thought and research that would become his trademarks: diligent archival work and the understanding that peasants were a class central to the medieval economy.

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Through careful readings of the records, he demonstrated that the peasants’ excess production supported the nobility, church, state, and towns. By documenting what he saw as the emergence of agrarian capitalism in the previously obscured lives of townspeople and peasants, H. captured a fresh medieval social history. Although his assumptions emerged from the British Marxist tradition, he claimed he was more concerned with providing an explanation of the actual historical process than with debating theoretical constructs. He turned more explicitly to the theme of peasants able to organize themselves around strong ideas and into purposeful action in The Revolt of 1381 (with Hyman Fagan, 1950) and Bondmen Made Free (1973). In both studies, he saw the 1381 Uprising as coherent and having lasting effects, a hitherto unpopular position and perspective on the peasants. His later studies comprised such book-length studies as A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (1966), The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (1969), and The English Peasantry in The Later Middle Ages (1975), based on his 1973 Ford lectures. In these, he continued to develop his concern with the English feudal peasantry’s differentiation into low, middle, and high subclasses, addressing directly the question of whether this differentiation of the peasantry provided capitalism’s embryonic beginnings or if 16th-century capitalism stimulated the differentiation of the peasantry into smaller groups. In his final years, H. helped develop the history of towns and placed them resolutely within the framework of feudal society, not at the beginnings of modernity, in his English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (1992). Throughout, H.’s scholarship emphasized that the forces of both production and class conflict together fueled changes within the feudal economy and, eventually, the emerging capitalist mode. A medievalist working in the Marxist tradition, H. was one of the major post-war British historians. Highly influential, he helped change the way historians thought about the Middle Ages. As a result, the quality of his scholarship helped bring the British Marxist perspective into the mainstream. His extensive array of publications was (and continues to be) used and respected by scholars from many fields and of many theoretical persuasions. They found his work particularly readable because he enlivened the enormous quantities of archival data with colorful retellings of episodes culled from the archives, a technique similar to that of the French Annales tradition. He trained many historians, sometimes known collectively as the Birmingham School. Because he focused on looking at history from below, he did not ignore women or cultures beyond England’s shores. Beyond the domain of history, he repeatedly invigorated his scholarship by looking at the Middle Ages from other critical and scholarly perspectives.

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For example, he saw archeology as an important source of historical information and organized the excavation of an abandoned medieval village. And he was consistently interested in the ways literature helped provide insight into popular mentalities, publishing first a 1941 article in English Historical Review, “A Thirteenth-Century Poem on Disputed Villein Services,” and continuing with studies of the Robin Hood ballads. His ability to see how different fields of study could inform historical study helped lay the groundwork for two dominant modes of medieval literary study since 1980: cultural studies and New Historicism. When he retired in 1982, colleagues honored him with a volume, Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R. Cross, Christopher Dyer, and John Thirsk, 1983. Though Edward Miller’s “Introduction” credits H. for the flowering of English medieval rural history (xii), a perusal of the Festschrift’s table of contents disproves any notion that H.’s influence was limited to England or the Middle Ages or even historical studies. Scholars of German, Russian and French medieval and early modern social history – as well as literary history – expressed their intellectual debts to H. Moreover, Jean Birrell’s “Bibliography of R. H. Hilton’s works to January 1982” (319–22) in the same volume lists translations of his work into Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Polish. Earlier, Simon Clarke’s defense of the British Marxists – “Socialist Humanism and the Critique of Economism,” History Workshop 8 (Autumn 1979): 137–56 – found H.’s body of work to be an example of Marxist historiography that avoids the pitfalls of overly reductive economism. In a later study, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), Harvey Kayeargues that H. reconceived feudal England as a “class-struggle society” (76). In this way, H.’s work was important for developing a theory of class determinism and for providing a dynamic analysis of feudalism from the bottom. Kaye reiterates this position in “Fanning the Spark of Hope in the Past: The British Marxist Historians,” Rethinking History (2000): 281–94. In two extensive essays (“Rodney Hilton (1916–2002): In Memoriam,” Journal of Agarian Change 6.1 [January 2006]: 1–16, and “Differentiation of the Peasantry under Feudalism and the Transition to Capitalism: In Defense of Rodney Hilton,” JAC 6.1 [January 2002]: 17–68), Terence J. Byres vigorously defends H.’s argument that the differentiation of the English feudal peasantry became the foundation for capitalism, not that merchant capital became the “solvent of feudal relations.”

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Select Bibliography Works: The Economic Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1947); with Hyman Fagan, The English Rising of 1381 (1950); Rodney Hilton, ed., Ministers’ Accounts of the Warwickshire Estates of the Duke of Clarence, 1479–1480 (1952); Rodney Hilton, ed., The Stoneleigh Leger Book (1962); A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (1966; rpt. 1983); The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (1969); Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973); English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (1992). – The overwhelming majority of his journal articles and lecture series are reprinted in the following essay collections: Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975); Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976); Rodney Hilton, ed., Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History (1976); Rodney Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (1990). Literature: Virginia R. Bainbridge, “Rodney Hilton,” Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing vol. 1, ed. Kelly Boyd (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 534–35; Rosamond Faith, “Rodney Hilton,” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 278–82; “Rodney Hilton,” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004; “Rodney Hilton,” Biographical Dictionary of British Economists, ed. Donald Rutherford (Bristol: Thoemmues Continuum, 2004).

Candace Barrington

Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr. (July 13, 1900, Washington, D. C. – May 13, 1972, Memphis, TN), influential Romance Philologist and Historian of Medieval French Literature and Culture. H. composed manuals of Old French language and literature, Medieval French culture, provocative analyses of French Arthurian literature (especially Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes), and edited primary texts, critical volumes and sourcebooks. An admired teacher and resourceful editor of a journal and monograph series, he championed Medieval studies and the humanities on all levels. The son of a naval engineer, H. began his education as a naval officer until an ear ailment forced him to resign from Annapolis in 1917. He then entered the University of Pennsylvania to become an Anglican minister, until lured away by language study, particularly in courses with Walter Woodburn Hyde, in Greek, and James Pyle Wickersham Crawford in Ro-

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mance languages. By the time H. received his B. A. (cum laude) in 1920, he had already studied and decided to specialize in Old French, thanks to Crawford and a fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry (Mahoney and Keller, 12). He also excelled as an actor and operatic singer; his resonant bass voice becoming one of his lifelong trademarks. His first teaching post, at the University of Western Ontario summer school in 1920 (also in 1923), preceded his entering Harvard University on a fellowship for his M. A. (1921). He completed his Ph.D. requirements by the following year, despite heavy teaching responsibilities and marriage to Margaret Gemmell (1900–1973), with whom he would have three children. At Harvard his mentors included Jeremiah Denis Matthias Ford, and Charles H. Grandgent. A Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to Paris (1922–1923) permitted H. to study with the most eminent French medievalists: Mario Roques, Joseph Bédier, Antoine Meillet, and briefly, Edmond Faral and Joseph Vendryes – who were somewhat taken aback by the cocky, though capable, young American (Mahoney and Keller, 12–13). After returning to the U.S. to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard (1923), H., as assistant professor of French at the University of Missouri at Columbia, became known as a galvanizing teacher of Old French, and commenced work on his History of Old French Literature. At Missouri he met and befriended Alexander Herman Schutz, the one other dynamic member in an otherwise staid department. H. soon left Missouri for an associate professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1925), where he would soon become full professor at 27. He published his first book, A History of Old French Literature from the Origins to 1300, in 1930 via mimeograph, then locally by subscription, for lack of a publisher, until 1937, when the work’s acclaim attracted two major firms for two editions and several printings. H.’s next important work, suggested by Milton scholar George C. Taylor, dealt not with a Medieval French author but with the 16th-century Huguenot poet Guillaume du Bartas, for whose works H. headed a team of scholars in publishing the first critical edition (3 vols., 1935–1940). Also in 1935, H. traveled through Europe researching medieval daily life and forged a friendship with Helmut Hatzfeld at Heidelberg. H. collaborated with Schutz for his next project, A History of the French Language (1938). He then conceived and cofounded the University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures Series 1940. During World War II, H., eager to serve however he could, was appointed liaison officer between the Office of Strategic Services and Department of State (1942–1944) in Washington, D.C. Amidst various personal troubles after returning to Chapel Hill, H. was named Kenan Professor in 1945 and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (1950) among other honors. Along with Old French, he taught Old Irish and Old Welsh, in addition to

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Medieval Latin and other Medieval Romance languages, philology and paleography. In 1952 appeared the first of several printings of Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, then in 1959 his controversial Chrétien, Troyes and the Grail, co-authored with Sr. M. Amelia Klenke. H.’s increasing interest in Medieval fields beyond philology, such as numismatics and domestic architecture, led him to frequent travels in Britain and France. In 1959, he and Alfred Engstrom realized his dream of a Romance-languages short-article journal, first conceived with Schutz in 1923: Romance Notes. Though permanently at UNC-Chapel Hill, he was visiting professor at the universities of Chicago (1929), Notre Dame (1948, 1956), Louisiana State (1950), Michigan State (1959) and, as a Fulbright Lecturer, Melbourne, Australia (1960). Remaining highly active after retiring from UNC-Chapel Hill (1965), he lectured at Memphis State, where he died of a heart attack in 1972, mere days after mailing the typescript of his Medieval Man to the publisher. H. and his wife are buried at Chapel Hill cemetery. As a Medievalist – for he also wrote on other subjects – H. produced some 73 articles, and many more for encyclopedias, dictionaries and popular magazines, innumerable reviews for journals in the US and England, and 10 books, several of which became standard sources. Even his first, A History of Old French Literature from the Origins to 1300, became a classic, yet first appeared in 1930 via mimeograph, then locally by subscription, for lack of a publisher, until 1937, when the work’s acclaim attracted two major firms successively for two editions and several printings. This survey’s virtues lay in its avowedly descriptive and factual – rather than critical – approach, since H. felt that American students, unlike their European contemporaries, needed a foundation of information on Medieval literature before they could judge critically for themselves. Whenever he did discuss theories of interpretation, H. typically took pains to state “all the varying critical hypotheses” (viii) whether he agreed with them or not. Despite this book’s success, H.’s hopes to produce a companion volume for the later French Middle Ages (History, viii) never materialized. After collaborating with Schutz for his next project, A History of the French Language, covering French linguistic evolution from Latin through modern French in way expressly designed for American students, H. again had to settle for small-time publishers until 1938. Doubtless recalling his own struggles and those of other rising U.S. philologists whose works were deemed unmarketable by trade publishers, in 1940 H. assumed his additional role as erudite impresario by co-founding (with Sturgis Leavitt) his department’s Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures Series, which he built up from a modest home-grown enterprise into a respected outlet for

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worthy dissertations and other specialized research, such as already existed for scholars in Europe. His later establishment of Romance Notes fulfilled a similar purpose. Yet somewhat ironically, when H. completed his critical edition of Adenet le Roi’s epic Berte aus grans piés for Mario Roques’s prestigious Paris-based Classiques français du Moyen âge series in 1938, only to find its publication halted by World War II, H. published it with his own series at UNC Chapel Hill. In his textual-editing philosophy, he favored minimal intervention, following Bédier’s precepts: look for the best manuscript (closest to author’s dialect and time period; quality of execution and completeness) as the base for the edition. H. also incorporated some modified Lachmann-ian touches: derive the stemma based on common lessons rather than common error (see his review of E. B. Ham’s Textual Criticism and Jehan le Venelais; also Pickens’s analysis, 80). His favorite, and most favored, book, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century: Based on the Observations of Alexander Neckham in London and Paris (1952, 1962, 1970), reflects an interdisciplinary, cross-sectional approach to history similar to that of the new Annales School in France, but in more accessible style for students and general readers. But not all of his findings met with such universal accolades, especially his work on Chrétien’s Perceval (Conte del Graal) and the Holy Grail’s origins and symbolism, beginning in 1948 and most fully elaborated in Chrétien, Troyes, and the Grail (1959). In attempting to counterbalance what he considered an overly Celtic-centered view of the romancer’s sources, H. theorized that Chrétien may have been a converted Jew who intended his Conte del Graal to be a Judaeo-Christian allegory of the Christian quest to convert the Jews by theological teaching. Thus the romance’s Grail procession represents the Old Law (Synagoga) transformed into the New Law (Ecclesia), with all the romance’s key objects (grail, paten, bleeding lance) finding symbolic counterparts – once the Grail question is asked – in the Last Supper and Passion. Despite the consensus against his interpretation, H. includes it, along with works by dissenting scholars, in his introductory overview, Chrétien de Troyes (1970). His final work, Medieval Man: His Understanding of Himself, His Society, and the World, Illustrated from His Own Literature, appeared posthumously, as edited by his son, in 1980. H.’s publications, pedagogical dedication and charisma, and editorialadministrative energy helped to elevate UNC-Chapel Hill’s Romance Languages Department and library to national and international prominence. In his day, he was perhaps the most widely recognized philological voice in the country, from academic circles to Time magazine (see, e. g., “Letters”, June 7, 1968). His linguistic and literary histories receive scant mention in Europe because he aimed them specifically at bringing American students up to par

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with their European colleagues for advanced study. His students continue his legacy while adding their individual imprint. Various sourcebooks, five important festschriften honoring mentors and colleagues, and completed projects left unfinished by others, round out his productivity – all requiring much editorial labor and yielding minimal glory while rendering inestimable service. Although his Grail theory was largely discredited – his more measured exegesis in pt. 1 of Chrétien, Troyes, and the Grail somewhat undermined by the extremism of his co-author, Sr. M. Amelia Klenke in pt. 2 – his positive contribution lay in provoking fine analyses from colleagues like Roger Sherman Loomis (1956), Jean Marx (1957) and, most fiercely eloquent, Jean Frappier, who labeled it “l’immense et chimérique extrapolation” (267) in Romance Philology (1962, 1966), to be answered by Edward Billings Ham (Perceval Marginalia), in 1962. H. is now rarely cited by the “New Philologists” (save for H.’s former student Rupert Pickens, in disputing them and also Bernard Cerquiglini’s 1989 polemic, Éloge de la variante), and in 12th-century studies (e. g., absent from Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson and Giles Constable [1981]; and Karl Uitti’s update to H.’s 1970 volume, Chrétien de Troyes Revisited [1995]). But for the non-scholarly world, by contrast, H.’s balanced, highly informative, yet reader-friendly writings still hold sway, as evidenced by plentiful recent citations of his Daily Living, his History of Old French Literature and Chrétien de Troyes (see amazon.com). Select Bibliography Works: [Publications specifically cited in the above discussion only. A complete bibliography of H.’s works to 1965 is found in the preface to Mahoney and Keller, infra, 17–22]. Adenet Le Roi’s Berthe aus grans piés (1946); Chrétien de Troyes (1970); Chrétien, Troyes, and the Grail, pt. 1 (1959); Daily Living in the Twelfth Century (1952, 1953, 1962, 1964, 1970); A History of Old French Literature from the Origins to 1300 (1930, 1937–1948, rev. ed. 1962); A History of the French Language (1933; 1935, 1938; 1967); Medieval Man, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes III (1980); Review of E. B. Ham, Textual Criticism and Jehan le Venelais, Speculum 22 (1947): 468–70. Literature: Raymond J. Cormier, “Jean Frappier (1900–1974),” Dictionary of Medieval Scholarship, ed. Helen Damico, Dictionary of Medieval Scholarship, 3 vols. (New York & London: Garland, 1995–1998), 2: 415–23; Jean Frappier, “Le Conte du Graal est-il une allégorie judéo-chrétienne?” pt. 1: Romance Philology 16.2 (1962): 179–213, pt. 2: 20.1 (1966): 1–31, both rpt. Autour du Graal (Geneva: Droz, 1977), 225–305; Edward Billings Ham, Perceval Marginalia (Hayward, CA: California State Press, 1962); Urban Tigner Holmes III, “A Son’s Recollection,” introduction to Medieval Man, supra, 13–17; William W. Kibler, “Holmes, Urban Tigner, Jr.,” The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed., Norris J. Lacy (New York & London: Garland, 1996), 238–39; Roger Sherman Loomis, “The Grail Story of Chrétien de Troyes as Ritual and Symbolism,” PMLA 71 (1956):

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840–52; Anon. “Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr.” Medieval Studies in Honor of Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., ed. John Mahoney and John Esten Keller (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1965), 11–22; Jean Marx, “Quelques remarques au sujet de récents travaux sur l’origine du Graal,” Le Moyen Âge 63 (1957): 469–80; Rupert T. Pickens, “The Future of Old French Studies in America: “The ‘Old’ Philology and the Crisis of the ‘New’,” The Future of the Middle Ages, ed. William D. Paden (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 53–86, esp. 80.

Nadia Margolis

Holthausen, Ferdinand (September 9, 1860, Soest, Germany – September 19, 1956, Wiesbaden, Germany), German Linguist and Philologist. Like many scholars of his time, H. made significant contributions to more than one field of linguistics; in his case, it was dialectology and historical linguistics. His contributions to medieval studies were relatively few, especially in comparison with his work in historical linguistics, but significant (his edition of Beowulf was very influential in its time, for instance), thus meriting his inclusion in this handbook. In all of his work, both linguistic and literary, H. strove to synthesize the Neogrammarian approaches to historical linguistics that he had learned during his time as a student with a careful philological approach. H. was born on September 9, 1860, in Soest, Germany, son of August Holthausen, a merchant, and Bernhardine Freytag. From 1880–1885 H. studied comparative linguistics and Germanic philology in Leipzig, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Jena, under prominent scholars like Karl Brugmann and Eduard Sievers. He was awarded a doctorate at Leipzig in 1884 and a Habilition in Heidelberg in 1885. H.’s dissertation, Studien zur Thidrekssaga, focused on Old Norse; this work was later published (first in article form, PBB 9 [1884]: 451–503, and also in book form the same year). His Habilitionsschrift, Der Vocalismus der Soester Mundart (published in 1886), was a study of his native dialect. H. taught in Heidelberg from 1885–1888, in Göttingen from 1888–1891, and in Giessen from 1891–1893. In 1893 he left Germany for Sweden, where he was professor ordinarius (roughly equivalent to a full professor) of Germanic Languages in Gothenburg until 1900. That same year he returned to Germany, first as professor extraordinarius (roughly equivalent

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to an untenured associate professor) and then as professor ordinarius of English Philology in Kiel. He retired from Kiel in 1925 and moved to Wiesbaden, but from 1928–1935 he held a visiting appointment in Frankfurt. He died in Wiesbaden, Germany, on September 19, 1956. H.’s main area of study was historical linguistics, and his reputation in this area rests largely on the series of handbooks he prepared. He wrote, for example, etymological dictionaries for Old English and Modern English, among other Germanic languages (Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1934); a grammar and reader of Old Icelandic (Altisländisches Elementarbuch, 1895–1896, and Altisländisches Lesebuch, 1895–1896); and a grammar of Old Saxon (Altsächsisches Elementarbuch, 1899, 2nd edition 1921). Some of these handbooks have been superseded by more modern works, but others have retained their value with the years. His Gothic etymological dictionary was reprinted as recently as 2002, for instance; his Old English etymological dictionary remains handy; and his handbook of Old Saxon is still one of the two standard grammars of the language (the 1973 revision of his handbook, Altniederdeutsches Elementarbuch, prepared by Gerhard Cordes, but retaining the chapter on Old Saxon syntax by H., has not fared as well). As for medieval studies, H.’s reputation in this area stems mainly from his editorial work. He edited a number of Old and Middle English texts, including Beowulf (Beowulf nebst dem Finnsburg-Bruchstück, 1906) and An Enterlude of Wealth and Health (An Enterlude of Wealth and Health: Eine englische Moralität des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 1908). In all of his editing, H. strove to adhere as closely to the text as possible, but also to correct what he saw as metrical or scribal errors and infelicities. Whether he succeeded in limiting his editorial changes remains a matter of some debate, although H. did always strive to justify his decisions in this area. In his edition of Beowulf, for instance, H. proposed numerous emendations. To take one example, H. emended the manuscript reading brim leade ‘sea lead’ to brimlade ‘sea path’ in Beowulf line 1051a on the grounds that this compound appears in the OE poem The Seafarer, the element -lad is used in other compounds, and the narrative situation seems to require its use. This emendation is currently widely, although not universally, accepted. Some scholars also accused H. of being less careful than he should have been in his changes, but others rejected this view, arguing that although current thinking held that editors should alter manuscript readings as little as possible, H.’s work was representative of a different, but equally valid, approach to philology which drew on more extensive emendation of the original manuscripts. Some of H.’s editions proved to be quite popular, especially his Beowulf (the 8th edition of this text was published in 1948). H. was also general editor of the “Kieler Studien zur englischen Philo-

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logie” (“Kiel Studies in English Philology”) series from 1901 to 1915, and together with Lorenz morsbach edited the series “Alt-und mittelenglische Texte” (also “Old and Middle English Texts”); H.’s editorship of the latter series lasted from 1901 to 1926. Finally, it should be noted that the German author Wilhelm Lehmann was H.’s student in Kiel; under H.’s influence, Lehmann wrote several articles on linguistic topics (especially etymology). Select Bibliography Works: Additional works: Cynewulfs Elene mit Einleitung, Glossar, Anmerkungen und der lateinischen Quelle (1905), Altfriesisches Wörterbuch (1925), Gotisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (1934), Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altwestnordischen (1948). Literature: Kemp Malone, “Review of the sixth edition of Holthausen’s Beowulf,” Speculum 5 (1930): 327–28; Walther Fischer, “Ferdinand Holthausen (1860–1956),” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 194 (1957): 36–38; Raymond P. Tripp, Jr., “The Restoration of Beowulf 1051b: brimleade, ‘sea-lead’,” MP 86 (1988): 191–95; Hartwig Molzow, “Holthausen, Ferdinand,” IGL, vol. 2, 796–98 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003).

Marc Pierce

Huizinga, Johan (December 7, 1872, Groningen, The Netherlands – February 1, 1945, De Steeg, The Netherlands), Dutch Cultural Historian. H.’s international reputation is based primarily upon his Herfsttij der Middeleeuwe: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden of 1919. This interdisciplinary study of late-medieval Burgundy and the Low Countries depicts a pessimistic and decadent culture nostalgic for its glorious past, clinging to a set of elaborate but no-longer meaningful rituals. The study has been praised for its finely-tuned aesthetic appreciation of the cultural forms – religious, literary, social – through which late medieval culture expressed itself. Initial reception of H.’s study by Dutch historians, many of whom viewed it as too impressionistic, was not unanimously enthusiastic. Its interest in the ways in which Burgundian culture represented itself contrasted with the interests of traditional histories, which tended to detail the develop-

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ment of legal, financial, and administrative institutions. But once translated, the work quickly gained international renown. F. W. N. Hugenholtz demonstrates that the first German reviews were highly positive (“The Fame of a Masterwork,” Johan Huizinga 1872–1972, ed. W. R. H. Koops, published in 1973). Fritz Hopman’s English translation, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, appeared in 1924; already in 1925, C. L. Kingsford praised H.’s methodology in a review in the English Historical Review 40: 273–75, reading his work as a protest against the predominance of scientific historians, who, in concentrating upon economic development, had missed the uniqueness of the period and relegated art, literature and intellectual life to the appendix of “real” history. The work was re-translated in 1996 as The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. The first English title of the work, The Waning of the Middle Ages, had been said to stress too emphatically the negative aspect of H.’s own title (although H. himself collaborated with Hopman, which indicates that he endorsed the sense of the title), which takes “autumn” (herfsttij) as its metaphor. This emphasis was felt by many to miss the ambivalence at the heart of H.’s notion of “decline”; for him, “autumn” is not completely negative, but gathers the positive concept of impending rebirth as well as the attractive aspects of maturity and fullness. Moreover, Hopman’s translation was an abridgement. Still, the new translation has not received unanimous approval, as Edward Peters and Walter P. Simons attest in their article “The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages” in Speculum 74 (1999): 587–62. Although approving the decision to translate the full work, they observe that while the new translators decry the Hopman’s translation’s failure to capture the glorious quality of H.’s Dutch prose, they fail themselves to reproduce his style. H.’s academic formation began in 1891 at the University of Groningen, where he studied Dutch language and literature as well as Sanskrit, earning a degree in Indo-Germanic languages in 1895. He then studied comparative literature at the University of Leipzig, returning to Groningen in 1897 to complete a doctoral thesis on the jester figure in Indian drama, Vidûsaka in Indian theatre, under classical scholar J.S. Speyer. As of 1902 his research interests shifted toward medieval and early modern cultural history. After teaching at the secondary school level in Haarlem and lecturing from 1903–1905 on ancient history at the University of Amsterdam, where he published some articles on the history of that city, in 1905 he was appointed professor of General and Dutch History at the University of Groningen. It was in his inaugural lecture at Groningen that H. first publicly proposed the view that history should study the various forms of daily thought and life, that is, the images a culture possessed of itself, which he would develop in The Autumn

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of the Middle Ages. In 1915 H. was named professor of general history at the University of Leiden, where he taught until the end of his career. In 1938 he became vice-president of the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation with the League of Nations. Because of a speech of 1941 in which he criticized German influence on Dutch learning, the Nazis arrested him. Released in 1942, H. was nonetheless not permitted to return to Leiden. He died in custody at De Steeg just months before the end of the war. Although famous as a medieval historian, H. is also known for his studies of modern culture. His 1918 study on the American character called Mensch en menigte in America (Man and the Crowd in America) with its examination of the mechanization of culture, which he deemed to be especially prevalent in the United States and which he believed would arrive in Europe in the near future, developed his idea of cultural decline, stressing the civilizing potential of the process even as it deplored some of its effects upon the individual. H. traveled throughout the United States in 1926 and subsequently composed Amerika Levend en Denkend (America Living and Thinking), which was, once again, both critical and admiring. In 1933 during his inaugural speech for the one-year position of Rector Magnificus of the University of Leiden, H. outlined the main ideas that he would develop in Homo ludens: Proeve eener bepaling van het spelelement der cultuur, 1938 (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture), in which he theorizes upon the centrality of the impulse to play in major institutions like the law, military and scientific associations, and in the arts. 1935 saw the publication of the widely-read In de Schaduwen van morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow), in which he analyzed a world torn by communism and fascism, asserting that the salvation of Western civilization lay in cultural and spiritual renewal. Living through the two world wars, he applied his understandings of history to the world he saw around him. From a philosophical perspective, his understanding of the decline of civilizations differed from that of Oswald Spengler as outlined in The Decline of the West (1918) in that he did not view the rise and fall of civilizations as cyclical. His idea of decline was less deterministic, for, although he is frequently viewed as pessimistic, he believed that human beings could be saved through the correct education. While his work often seems to manifest a mistrust of technology, he clearly indicated his belief that with proper guidance, it could contribute to the civilization of humankind. H.’s influence has been profound and lasting; his Herfsttij der Middeleeuwe has been in print continuously in many languages since its publication. Because of the study’s strong interdisciplinary emphasis, today H. is considered to be one of the fathers of cultural history. His conviction that the 15th century as depicted in contemporary chronicles, literary, and visual arts was a

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period of extremes, of both elevated and brutish sentiment, of great charity and cruelty, of love and violence, has emerged as a highly popular way of conceiving of the late Middle Ages. Moreover, H.’s approach has proved compatible with such major trends in historiography as Kulturgeschichte and l’histoire des mentalités, assuring continued interest in his works. In the 1920s, H. was championed by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founders of the Annales school of history. His reputation suffered somewhat after his death when scholars like Rosalie Colie in “Johan Huizinga and the Task of Cultural History,” American Historical Review 69 (1964): 607–30, questioned his lack of attention to the political implications of his theories. Also, his notion of “decline” has become controversial since World War II crushed the long-held belief of la grande culture as a safeguard against barbarism. But more recently H. has enjoyed a revival, fostered partly by Jacques Le Goff, an interview with whom appears in the introduction to French translations of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwe, which as of 1975 has been translated as L’Automne du Moyen-Age rather than Le Déclin du Moyen-Age. H.’s attention to ritual has made his work a point of departure for such recent studies as Peter Arnade’s Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civil Life in Late Medieval Ghent. Arnade observes that H.’s attention to symbolic action is an achievement, although modern historians cannot accept his notion of these symbols as “empty ciphers.” Select Bibliography Works: Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (1919; multiple trans.); Erasmus (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1924); Leven en werk van Jan Veth (1927); De figuur van den dood bij Dante (1927); Cultuur-historische verkenningen (1929); De wetenschap der geschiedenis (1937); Homo Ludens: proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur (1938); Mijn weg tot de historie (1947); Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (essays collected from H.’s Verzamelde werken) (1948–1953; Engl. trans. 1959). Literature: F. Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega y Gasset (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Wessel Krul, Historicus tegen de tijd: Opstellen over Leven en Werk van J. Huizinga (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1990); Anton van der Lem, Johan Huizinga: Leven en werk in beelden en documenten (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1993); Anton van der Lem, De Eeuwigheid in een afgehaald bed: Huizinga en de Nederlandse beschaving (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1997).

Tracy Adams

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J

James, Montague Rhodes (August 1, 1862, Goodnestone, Kent, England – June 12, 1936, Eton, Buckinghamshire [today Berkshire], England), British Biblical Scholar, Manuscript Historian, and Philologist. A monumental figure in the history of medieval scholarship, J. brought an extraordinary range of talents – in philology, codicology, and iconography – to bear on a wide range of issues. His career encompassed three distinct yet overlapping areas of activity: Biblical (and to a lesser extent classical) studies, to which he contributed numerous articles, editions, and translations, the most famous of which is The Apocryphal New Testament (1924); art history (what he termed “Christian archaeology”), where he applied his extensive knowledge of the Bible and hagiography to the interpretation of iconography, published widely, and served as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University; and manuscript history, the field in which J.’s work is most relevant to this day both because it is a principal foundation for modern codicology, and because J.’s catalogues of manuscript collections and facsimiles of major manuscripts remain of significant scholarly value. J. was born to Herbert James, a country parson whose family had been large landholders in Jamaica until the abolition of slavery in 1807, and Mary Emily Horton, whose father served with distinction as an admiral in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars. At Eton, which he attended as a King’s Scholar from 1876 to 1882, J. excelled in the study of classics and foreign languages, and because of his precocity was given the rare opportunity to delve into the college library’s medieval manuscripts and early printed books. His preparation at Eton gave J. a profound familiarity and comfort with manuscripts at a young age which, combined with his intellectual discipline, philological training, and formidable memory, enabled him in later years to produce manuscript catalogues and studies on a prodigious scale. From Eton, J. went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he earned his B.A. in 1886. That same year, as another mark of his early mastery of “antiquities,” he was named assistant director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and director in 1889. In 1887 he was given a fellowship at King’s for his dis-

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sertation project on the Apocalypse of Peter, and in 1892 he published his research with J. A. Robinson as The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter: Two Lectures on the Newly Recovered Fragments Together with the Greek Texts. Simultaneously, he had embarked on the task of cataloguing the medieval manuscripts in Cambridge college collections. The first three of these “descriptive catalogues” (plus two others devoted to the manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum and library of Eton College) appeared in 1895 and announced J. as a cataloguer of exceptional, and indeed unprecedented, acuity and thoroughness. Until he died in 1936, J. continued to devote himself to both administration and scholarship. He was elected Provost of King’s College in 1905, and remained director of the Fitzwilliam Museum until 1908. More catalogues of manuscripts in Cambridge college libraries were published, as were those of other collections both private (Henry Yates Thompson [1898, 1902], J. P. Morgan [1907]) and public (the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester [1921]). J. also remained an active translator, reviewer, and, in the facsimiles of sumptuous manuscripts made for the Roxburghe Club for which he wrote introductions and notes, presenter of some of Britain’s finest medieval patrimony. As serious as his scholarship was, J. was also a public intellectual who often wrote letters and articles for the press, as well as the guidebooks Abbeys (1925), produced for the Great Western Railway, and Suffolk and Norfolk (1930). In 1918 he was named Provost of Eton, a position he held until his death, and in 1930 he was awarded the Order of Merit. Another aspect of J.’s legacy merits brief mention, though it is not directly related to his medieval scholarship. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until his death, J. published ghost stories that earned him fame with the general public. These stories are still in print, continue to be adapted for radio and television, and have an enthusiastic following on the Internet. It seems fitting that a man for whom the past was so tangible would be adept at creating tales in which the dead remain present. It is a testament to the breadth of J.’s scholarly oeuvre that there could just as easily be an entry on him in a sourcebook on Biblical or classical studies as in the present volume. Though we must limit ourselves to his most pertinent medieval scholarship, it is important to note that such categorization would probably have struck J. as profoundly untrue to his own thinking and to history. Underpinning all of his scholarship was, ultimately, his extensive training in classical and foreign languages, from which sprang his interests in paleography, in manuscript structures more generally, and in the kinds of stories told in these languages, their history, and their visual representation. J. did not evolve from one interest to another; rather, he remained com-

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mitted to Biblical, classical, and medieval subjects all of his adult life, for as a text, manuscript, and art expert he saw the profound continuities between these periods. Given the institutional strictures that have developed between humanistic disciplines, J.’s career is a useful reminder of the kind of dialogue between fields that has always sustained the best medievalism. One of J.’s most important legacies is his foundational role in establishing both modern manuscript-cataloguing principles and the science of codicology. By 1932, J. had produced catalogues for twenty-six collections encompassing some 6,000 manuscripts. Like his contemporaries, he neither had a term for his approach to describing and studying manuscripts, nor did he explicitly articulate the principles of this approach. Nonetheless, it is clear that from an early date J. appreciated the information that manuscripts’ physical structures could provide about date, site of production, patronage, ownership, and a myriad of other questions. As a cataloguer, he was the first to regularize inclusion of incipits and explicits; he used an innovative system that assigned Arabic numerals to each text in a manuscript, and Roman numerals to subsections or “chapters,” providing folio numbers for both; he commented on script more frequently than his contemporaries, and usually provided the number of written lines; he made observations about early or important bindings; and he employed separate indexes for medieval provenances, remarkable decoration, and the dates of other manuscripts mentioned. Most of these practices have become the norm, which shows the profound influence he had on the archaeological understanding of manuscripts. The facsimiles for which J. wrote introductions and notes are another indication of his pathbreaking approach to manuscripts. In these luxury publications, he had the space to pursue questions of provenance, ownership, and visual content that he could address only sparsely in the catalogues. The research is exhaustive, and full of comparative commentary that could only result from years of traveling around the United Kingdom and Europe looking at manuscripts and noting their features. In this way, J. sensitized generations of scholars to the importance of looking for not only textual but material affinities between manuscripts, a crucial step in the evolution of codicology as a methodology distinct from philology and paleography. Moreover, the descriptions of textual and especially visual content in these facsimiles are incredibly exact, underscoring the significance of easily overlooked details. It could be argued that J.’s “panoptic” approach to describing the manuscript page’s content was foundational to manuscript studies, anticipating as it did the explosion of interest in image-text relationships, the semiotics of layout, marginal imagery and commentary, devotional interaction with the page, and a host of other issues.

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It should also be noted that J.’s editions and translations of Walter Map’s De nugis curialium (edition 1914, translation 1923) and of The Apocryphal New Testament were only superseded in 1983 and 1993, respectively. His treatment of texts, like that of manuscripts, manifested his scrupulous attention to detail and, in the case of his translations, an ear for the mot juste that benefited his fiction as well. J. was considered something of a national treasure during his lifetime – for his scholarship, his high administrative positions at storied centers of learning, and his ghost stories – and surveyed the burgeoning field of medieval studies with a stature that was fairly Olympian. To give but one example of the esteem in which he was held, from a review of A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin MSS. in the John Rylands Library at Manchester: “Dr. M. R. James [has,] by publishing these two fine volumes, deserved well of all lovers of illuminated MSS. [It] is but one of many such debts we owe him. The Library Authorities were indeed fortunate to secure his aid. As usual, his learning is only equalled by his modesty” (The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 42/243, June 1923, 307). Modern biographers and students of his work, while overwhelmingly laudatory, have nonetheless deflated some of his mythic persona. It has been observed that, even with his considerable intellectual gifts, J. had to work very quickly to produce the amount of scholarship that he did. As a result, he was sometimes overconfident or hasty in his datings and attributions; he would misidentify illustrations, especially when dealing with a text with which he was not familiar; and his presentation of information in his catalogues was at times confusing. It has also been observed that while J. is certainly one of the fathers of modern manuscript cataloguing and codicology, other factors – particularly photography, safer and easier travel, rising literacy rates, graphic reproduction technologies, and the institutionalization of Medieval Studies at the university level – made possible the career that he had. But clearly the most important factors were his exceptional mind and mental tenacity.

Select Bibliography Works: [What follows is only a partial list intended to give a sense of the breadth of J.’ scholarship; more complete bibliographies can be found in the bibliographical appendix by A. F. Scholfield in S. G. Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James 1939] Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (1980); and The Legacy of M. R. James: Papers from the 1995 Cambridge Symposium, ed. Lynda Dennison (2001); with J. Armitage Robinson, The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter: Two Lectures on the Newly Recovered Fragments Together with the Greek Texts (1892); A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Jesus College, Cambridge (1895); edition of Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (1914); The Apocryphal New Testament (1924); Abbeys (1925); The Romance of Alexander: A Collotype Facsimile of MS. Bodley 264 (1933).

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Literature: S. G. Lubbock, A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939); Richard William Pfaff, Montague Rhodes James (London: Scolar Press, 1980); Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); The Legacy of M. R. James: Papers from the 1995 Cambridge Symposium, ed. Lynda Dennison (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2001).

Mark Cruse

Jeanroy, Alfred-Marie-Henri-Gustave (July 5, 1859, Mangiennes, Meuse – March 13, 1953, Castelmaurou, Haute-Garonne), French medievalist, philologist, literary historian. J.’s contributions to French medieval scholarship are both wide-ranging and numerous, as he produced more than 600 books, critical editions, articles, reviews, and other writings over the course of his lengthy career. First and foremost, he remains known for his pioneering work in troubadour (Occitan) studies, but he is likewise regarded as an authoritative voice on the northern French lyric tradition. His thesis, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au Moyen Age (1889), compares medieval French, Occitan, Italian, German, and Galician lyric from an historical perspective. The importance of his later, equally monumental La poésie lyrique des troubadours (1934) is reflected by the fact that it was reviewed in no fewer than 17 journals upon its appearance and serves as an indispensable tool up to the present day. J. was born the son of a medical doctor and began his schooling in his home province, at the Collège de Verdun. He later enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and then entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1878, the same year as philosopher Henri Bergson and Socialist leader Jean Jaurès. In 1881, he earned the agrégation des lettres and then continued his studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, under the tutelage of Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer. Over the next several years, he held a number of different posts: rhetoric teacher at lycées in Troyes and Besançon (1881, 1883), lecturer in French literature at the University of Besançon (1884–1885), teacher at the Collège Stanislas in Paris (1885), lecturer in Greek literature at the University of Poitiers (1888). After successfully defending the two theses required for the doctorate, one of which he wrote in Latin, as customary, J. assumed a position teaching language and literature of the south of France

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at the University of Toulouse (1889). In 1909 he was named to the chair of Langues et Littératures de l’Europe Méridionale (Languages and Literatures of Southern Europe) at the Sorbonne, where he stayed until his retirement in 1934. He also served as associate director of Romance philology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, beginning in 1911 (see Christophe Charle, Les Professeurs de la faculté des lettres de Paris, Dictionnaire biographique 1909–1939, vol. 2, 1986, 113–14.) Over the course of his long career, J. collaborated significantly on many journals and reviews, e. g., Romania, Annales du Midi, Revue critique, Revue des langues romanes, Revue des Pyrénées, Revue de la philologie française et provençale. The opening sentence of Mario Roque’s moving tribute in Romania, following the death of his “colleague and friend,” describes him as “un des plus anciens et plus fidèles collaborateurs de la Romania” (“one of the oldest and most faithful contributors to Romania”) and cites his help in ensuring that the journal be published during the difficult years of World War I (74 [1953]: 539). J.’s efforts and accomplishments also earned him honors and recognition throughout Europe and in the United States, where he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1927 (see “Memoirs” in Speculum 31.3 [1953]: 569–70). Perhaps most notably in his homeland, he was named a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1922 and an officer of the Légion d’Honneur ten years later. The eldest of his three daughters, Thérèse Labande-Jeanroy (who earned a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg with her thesis on 18th- and 19thcentury Italian language), her stepson, Edmond-René Labande (who was then studying at the Ecole des Chartes in Paris), J.’s colleagues, and his students offered him a volume of Mélanges in 1928, while the Annales du Midi devoted an issue to his memory in 1953. Although a sharp critic who could be relied upon to identify the smallest oversight or issue stinging judgment for slipshod work, J. nevertheless impressed many people as being gentle and modest. He also faced adversity courageously: the death of his daughter Thérèse in 1933; the declining mental health and death of Marie-CarolineBerthe (née Schmidt), the first of his two wives, in 1939; his own failing eyesight later in life. The scope and rigor of J.’s writing and teaching, as well as the large number of works he published and students he trained over his extremely lengthy career, make the task of summarizing his scholarship a daunting proposition. It is useful to begin by recognizing that J. downplayed, indeed outright rejected, notions about lyric poetry that had gained acceptance during the early decades of the 19th century. J.’s discarding of Romantic idées reçues can be attributed to two main causes. First, his own scholarly training

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dated from a period when scientifically-oriented historical analysis was being applied, with greater or lesser appropriateness and success, to aesthetics. His mentors were, after all, Paris and Meyer, the founders and major proponents of the new philology (see William Paden, “Alfred Jeanroy,” Medieval Scholarship, Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico, 1998, 227–39; David F. Hult, “Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Block and Stephen G. Nichols, 1996, 192–224). Second, J., who some claim undervalued the imagination of medieval writers and, ironically enough for a specialist in lyric poetry, appeared to have little use for music, doubtless found that scientific and historical approaches suited well his natural inclination toward how the troubadour corpus should be examined. La poésie lyrique, for example, strongly reflects the Cartesian impulse, still evident in current French scholarship, to divide a broad field of study into its smallest possible discreet elements. Therefore, this magnum opus is divided into two volumes: Tome I presents the “external” history of the repertory and its diffusion outside France, a listing of troubadours classified by region, and bio-bibliographical notices; Tome II covers the “internal” history of the repertory and the evolution and of its principle genres. Each volume is divided into several chapters that are themselves divided into multiple sections. The other significant influence upon J.’s critical analysis of Occitan and northern French texts went hand in hand with the historical approach: the nationalistic tendencies that permeated scholarship during the latter part of the 19th century. Political tension between France and the Germanic states, in particular, only heightened the resolve of French philologists, such as Paris, to demonstrate the primacy of French lyric genres and even to prove that they had spawned the lyric poetry of neighboring lands. These nationalistic theories of the evolution of poetic types were weak at best and, needless to say, hardly garnered support from German colleagues. Thus, they rapidly gave way to better substantiated explanations that accounted more satisfactorily for principles of rhetoric and versification. J.’s painstakingly detailed studies of texts and their authors constitute an invaluable legacy to scholarship in medieval French. Many of his critical editions that were published by Honoré Champion, as part of the celebrated Classiques Français du Moyen Age collection, remain in circulation and are still considered standard. As mentioned above, La poésie lyrique continues to be recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative study of the troubadours. J.’s research on the evolution of lyric genres inspired his successors to add even more detail about rhetorical conventions and linguistic

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phenomena to the classification of texts by type. Roger Dragonetti’s La technique poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: contribution à l’étude de la rhétorique médiévale (1960; rpt. 1979) and Paul Zumthor’s Essai de poétique médiévale (1972), as well as other critical studies that proliferated during the two decades following J.’s death, show marked indebtedness to his pioneering analysis. J.’s earliest work on the origins of French lyric sought to prove, among other things, that the so-called “popular” forms (often, both “populaires” and “popularisants”) had been strongly influenced, right from the start, by the aristocratic poetry of the Occitan troubadours. Part of this research bore upon the connection, which Paris had also explored, between forme fixe poetry and dance forms associated with the arrival of spring, particularly the ballette and the rondet. The evocation of a springtime setting in reverdie texts, along with the use of certain related refrains and lexical items, remained the focus of debate about categorizing lyric compositions for quite some time. Pierre Bec’s two-volume La lyrique française au moyen-âge: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux (1977, 1978) and other studies devoted to specific genres, such as the pastourelle, stemmed from this deliberation. Nico H. J. van de Boogaard’s Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (1969), which inventoried widespread medieval French refrains, likewise contributed to the search for elements that somehow marked a given composition as being either “popular” or “courtly.” It is clear that no sharp line can be drawn between these two registers, as any influence obviously would have flowed in both directions. Nevertheless, the desire to classify lyric genres has not disappeared completely from contemporary scholarship. During the 1980s and 1990s, as feminist studies grappled seriously with discerning and inventorying the characteristics of “écriture féminine” (“feminine writing”) in order to establish the female authorship of many anonymous compositions, J.’s unfortunate beliefs about the women troubadours, the trobairitz, met with harsh criticism. In Tome I, 316–17, of La poésie lyrique, he opines, “Je me figure que nos ‘trobairitz’, esclaves de la tradition, incapables d’un effort d’analyse, se sont bornées à exploiter des thèmes connus, à user d’un formulaire courant … Il n’y aurait là que des exercices littéraires, au reste non dénués de mérite. […] il me paraît plus naturel de prêter à ces femmes ‘nobles et bien enseignées’ une certaine paresse d’esprit, une évidente faute de goût, que ce choquant oubli de toute pudeur et de toute convenance.” (“I imagine that our ‘trobairitz,’ slaves to tradition, incapable of analytical effort, limited themselves to exploiting known themes, to using everyday formulations … These were only literary exercises, moreover not without merit. […] it appears more natural to me to attribute to these ‘noble

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and well-educated’ women a certain mental laziness, an obvious lack of taste, than this shocking disregard of all decency and appropriateness.”) Tempting as it might be to scoff at the viewpoint these comments seem to reflect, it is perhaps only fair that they be interpreted somewhat within the context of J.’s own time, when few women had access to the academy and few women were recognized for their capabilities as authors. Furthermore, it is hardly as if J. credited the male troubadours with exercising much creativity or originality (see Paden, 235). One would like to think that he recognized, supported, and was proud of his daughter Thérèse’s achievements referred to above. Select Bibliography Works: J.’s publications and critical editions number more than 600. See the Selected Bibliography of Paden’s article, cited below, for a useful representative list of his most significant works. Anthologie des troubadours: XIIe–XIIIe siècles, ed. refondue, textes, notes, traductions by J. Boelke (1974); La poésie lyrique des troubadours, 2 vols. (1934); Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen-âge: études de littérature française et comparée, suivies de textes inédits (1889. 2nd rev. ed. 1904; 3rd ed. 1925; 4th enlarged ed. 1965). Translated as La lirica francese in Italia nel periodo delle origini, traduzione italiana riveduta dall’autore, con note e introduzione by Giorgio Rossi, 1897. Literature: Christophe Charle, Les professeurs de la faculté des lettres de Paris: Dictionnaire biographique 1909–1939, vol.2 (Paris: CNRS, 1986), 113–14; William Paden, “Alfred Jeanroy,” Medieval Scholarship, Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998), 227–39.

Beverly J. Evans

Jónsson, Finnur (May 29, 1858, Akureyri, Iceland – March 30, 1934, Copenhagen), Icelandic Medievalist. Among J.’s most significant contributions in Norwegian and Icelandic studies are his literary history, his edition of skaldic poetry, his studies of poetic language and of the work of Snorri Sturluson, his editions of the sagas, and his transcriptions of manuscripts. Particularly by the standards of an era when academics were not required to disseminate their research so assiduously as now, his upwards of 250 publications are astoundingly diverse and in some cases remain of value to the field. J.’s parents were Jón Borgfir6ingur Jónsson and Anna Gu6rún Eiríksdóttir. Having studied at the Latin school in Reykjavík from 1872 till 1878, he

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matriculated at the University of Copenhagen in 1878 and there he spent his entire career. From the first he was described as “flittig” (“industrious”) by all who knew him. A formative influence was Johan Nicolai Madvig, Professor of Latin and noted textual scholar. J. graduated as candidatus philologiae in 1883 and defended his doctoral thesis on 6 November 1884, its publication occurring in the same year. In 1885, he was appointed as “privatdocent” and married Emma Heraczek; there was one son of the marriage. He gained a salaried docentship in 1887. In 1891, he joined the board of Det kongelige nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, which had charge of a long-running series of editions and textbooks, along with the leading journal Aarbøger for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie. This was complemented from 1895 by a position on the editorial board of the Samfund til Udgivelse af gammel nordisk Litteratur. J. was to avail himself to the full of the publication opportunities that these positions afforded. He also produced teaching textbooks and anthologies and, as a proponent of Icelandic culture and Home Rule, addressed some of his writings to tourists and the general public. After his move to Copenhagen, he seldom visited Iceland but he contributed to efforts to maintain amity between that country and Denmark and published sporadically on post-medieval Icelandic literature. In 1898, J. was promoted to the rank of Extraordinary Professor in Nordic Philology. He took up a seat on the board of the Arnamagnaean Institute in 1905 and served as the Institute’s director from 1920. J. attained the rank of Ordinary Professor in 1911, remaining in the post until mandatory retirement in 1928. Among numerous awards were an honorary doctorate from the University of Iceland and a fellowship of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. After retirement J. continued his scholarly activities with undiminished energy and productivity until the very end. There is hardly a topic within Old Norse-Icelandic studies that J. left untouched. His interests, which remained consistent throughout his career, can be summarized as follows. While still a student J. issued two volumes of Sagas of Icelanders with Hi6 íslenzka bókmenntafélag (1881–1883) and they were followed by publications on Egils saga (1886–88), Gísla saga Súrssonar (1903), Njáls saga (1908), Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (1916), Bandamanna saga (1933), and Vatnsdœla saga (1934). His interests in the kings’ sagas are represented by work on Heimskringla (1893–1901), Knytlinga saga (1900), Fagrskinna (1902–1903), Sverris saga (1920), Ágrip (1929), and various redactions of the Saga Óláfs Tryggvasonar (1932). Where regional sagas and other sources are concerned, he had enduring interests in the Greenland settlements (1893, 1899, 1914, 1917, 1924, and 1930), Íslendingabók (1886 and 1930), Landnámabók (1900, 1921, and 1925), Færeyingasaga (1927), and Flóamanna saga (1932).

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Much of the above work was editorial and F. also undertook substantive editions of manuscripts, including Hauksbók (1892–1896), Eirspennill (1916), and Morkinskinna (1932). In 1887, he completed the mammoth edition of Snorra Edda begun by the Arnamagnaean Commission and subsequently produced several other editions and studies of this text (1900, 1904, 1924, 1929, 1932, and 1934). His editions and other studies on the Poetic Edda were quite as copious (1891, 1905, 1927, and 1932). With his doctoral thesis (1884) he laid the foundation for sustained research upon skaldic poetry. Later studies in the 1890s and 1900s addressed topics in skaldic poetics and supplied trial editions of specific poems, culminating in his edition of the entire corpus (1912–1915) and revised edition of Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s Lexicon Poeticum (1913–1916). He continued to write prolifically on skaldic poetry (1924, 1927, and right through the period of his retirement). Another persisting interest was the rímur, starting with Skí6arima (1883) and continuing with Fernir forníslenskir rímnaflokkar (1896), Hrólfs saga kraka og Bjarkarímur (1904), a large collective edition of rímur (1905–1922), and, at the end of his career, a glossary to some of the principal rímur (1926–1928). He was also active in the study of proverbs and folklore (1913–1914 and 1920), mostly drawing upon compilations by previous collectors. His most comprehensively synthesizing work took the form of a history of Icelandic literature, which began its development in 1891–1892 and through successive versions for various audiences culminated in the full-scale revised edition published between 1920 and 1924. J.’s contributions are erratic in quality but many continue to have some qualified influence and a few still play a decisive role in current scholarship. Central to his work were positivist convictions, simplicity and economy of hypothesis, and a comprehensive grasp on the documentary material. On the literary-historical side, his advocacy of the historicity of the sagas of Icelanders was sharply contested by Walter Baetke (Über die Entstehung der Isländersagas, 1956) but a more widely accepted compromise position has an early representative in Knut Liestøl (Upphavet til den islandske ættesaga, 1929). His defense of the historicity of the kings’ sagas depended upon branding the evidently fictive elements in extant redactions as interpolations and has yielded to a more nuanced assessment on the part of subsequent scholars, according to which at least some of these supposed excrescences are integral to the original narrative (Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade, Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings [1030–1157], 2000). J.’s definitions and conceptualizations of literary genres, as in the case of the “fornaldarsaga,” have been criticized as simplistic (Stephen A. Mitchell, Heroic Sagas and Ballads [1991], 23), though in practice subsequent

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attempts at genre demarcations have scarcely proved more satisfactory. J.’s staunch opposition to Sophus Bugge’s hypotheses on possible Anglo-Saxon and Irish influences upon Eddaic poetry and other genres has seemed to defy the intrinsic probabilities (Dietrich Hofmann, Nordisch-englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit, 1955; Bo Almqvist, “Scandinavian and Celtic Folklore Contacts in the Earldom of Orkney,” Saga-Book 20 [1978–79]: 80–105) and his opinion that the poems of the so-called Poetic Edda preserved in the Codex Regius stem from a single redactor has been judged equally simplistic (Gustav Lindblad, Studier i Codex Regius av äldre Eddan, 1954). By contrast, his conclusions concerning the authenticity of most saga lausavísur, though contested by Peter Foote (“An Essay on the Saga of Gísli and its Icelandic Background,” The Saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston, 1973, 93–134) and many other scholars, underlie the chronology of the corpus still standardly used (Hans Kuhn, Das Drottkvætt, 1983, and Kari Ellen Gade, The Structure of Old Norse Dróttkvætt Poetry, 1995). J.’s final version of his literary history (1920–1924) continues to be widely consulted and is not entirely superseded by Jan de Vries (Altnordische Literaturgeschichte, 1964–1967), who too readily accepts some speculations on literary influences. Certain of J.’s editions, including Hauksbók (1905), Snorra Edda (1931), Morkinskinna (1932), and the diplomatic texts incorporated in the A volumes of his skaldic edition (1912–1915), also remain in currency, thanks to his accuracy in manuscript reading and transcription. Unhappily, the edited texts in the B volumes of the skaldic edition adhere closely and often uncritically to particular favored manuscripts. Numerous emendations are adopted, some scribal and some due to J. himself or previous editors. Sustained polemical attack came from Ernst A. Kock (Notationes Norrœnae, 1923–1944), side by side with more reasonable, nuanced critique from Konstantin Reichardt (Studien zu den Skalden des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts, 1928) and other scholars. J.’s edition has nevertheless not yet been superseded and is still standardly cited; promised for the near future, however, is the entirely re-worked Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages: a New Edition (ed. Margaret Clunies Ross et al.). Regrettably, J.’s emendations found their way wholesale into his revision of Lexicon Poeticum. In a piece of misguided esteem for this supposedly comprehensive and reliable compilation, the Arnamagnæan Commission decided to include only a minimal treatment of the poetic vocabulary in its Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. By contrast, J.’s more conservative glossary to selected rímur retains its usefulness, especially in the absence of full documentation of rímur vocabulary elsewhere.

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Select Bibliography Works: Kritiske studier over en del af de ældste norske og islandske skjaldekad (1884); Egils saga Skallagrímssonar tilligemed Egils større kvad (1886–1988); Eddalieder: altnordische Gedichte mythologischen und heroischen Inhalts (1888–1890); (with Eiríkur Jónsson) Hauksbók …, 3 vols. (1892–1896); Heimskringla: Nóregs konunga sögur af Snorri Sturluson (1893–1901); (with Helgi Pétursson) Um Grænland a6 fornu og nyju ´ (1899); Landnámabók I–III: Hauksbók. Sturlubók. Melabók m.m. (1900); Den oldnorske og oldislandske litteraturs historie (1893–1902); Rímnasafn. Samling af de ældste islandske rimer (1905–1922); Brennu-Njálssaga (1908); “Sagaernes lausavísur,” Årbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie (1912): 1–57; Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning, vols. A. 1–2, Tekst efter håndskrifterne, vols. B. 1–2, Rettet tekst (1912–1915); Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ Septentrionalis … (1913–1916); “Um Hallgrím Pjetursson 1614 – 27. október 1674,” Skírnir 89 (1915): 337–57; Konungs skuggsjá = Speculum regale (1920); Norsk-islandske kultur- og sprogforhold i 9. og 10. årh. (1921); Ordbog til de af Samfund til udg. af gml. nord. litteratur udgivne rímur samt til de af dr. O. Jiriczek udgivne Bósarimur (1926–1928); Edda Snorra Sturlusonar (1931); Morkinskinna (1932). Literature: Finnur Sigmundsson, “Finnur Jónsson. Ritaskrá,” Skírnir 108 (1934): 199–208; Finnur Jónsson, Ævisaga eftir sjalfan hann (Copenhagen: Møller, 1936); Halldór Hermannsson, “Finnur Jónsson. May 28, 1858 – March 30, 1934,” JEGP 34 (1935): 472–79; Páll Eggert Ólason, Íslenzkar Æviskrár (Reykjavík: Hi6 íslenzka Bókmenntafélag, 1949), vol. 2, 12–13; Ármann Jakobsson, “Den kluntede afskriver. Finnur Jónsson og Morkinskinna,” Opuscula 11 (2003): 289–306.

Russell Poole

Junius F. F., Franciscus (= F. F.) (François du Jon, also: Franciscus Junius the Younger) (Jan. 29, 1591, Heidelberg, Germany – Nov. 19, 1677, Windsor, England), important Dutch Philologist and Art Historian. He is best known for his editio princeps of the Gothic Bible (or Wulfila Bible), his thorough studies of Old Germanic Languages, and his landmark work on the art of classical antiquity. J. was born in Heidelberg, Germany (at J.’s time: Electoral Palatinate) on Jan. 29, 1591; the true date of birth was first established by Johan Kerling (“Scholar, Antiquary, Factotum: Franciscus Junius Revisited,” Current Research in Dutch and Belgian Universities on Old English, Middle English and Historical

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Linguistics […], ed. F. Diekstra, 1984). His father, Franciscus Junius the Elder (1545–1602), born in Bourges, France, was a famous Calvinist theologian, who had studied under Calvin himself in Geneva. He translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin, was appointed professor of theology in Neustadt and Heidelberg and followed a calling to Leiden in 1592. J. therefore grew up in the Netherlands and regarded himself a Dutchman throughout his life. His mother, Joanna l’Hermite, the daughter of Simon l’Hermite, lay judge in Antwerp, died a few months after J.’s birth in 1591. J. and his siblings were brought up by their father and his fourth wife, Maria Glaser. J. grew up in a learned, peaceful and tolerant environment. He spent his early school years at the Latin Schools in Leiden and, from September 1601 onwards, at Dordrecht. When J.’s father and stepmother died from a plague in Leiden in 1602, Gerardus Joannes Vossius, the rector of the Dordrecht Latin School, took the orphans into his house. On April 23, 1608, J. matriculated as a student of Leiden; letters tell of his studies in Greek, philosophy, logic, and physics. For a short while he considered a military career, but followed his academic ambitions instead. He moved to Middelburg in 1614, where his maternal uncle had taken a minister’s place, and began studying theology, staying in the house of Rev. Willem Teellinck. In the following year, he spent three months in England in order to improve his English and to learn about the country and the Church of England. The ensuing years saw growing tensions and quarrels between several ecclesiastical and political factions, the Gomarists and Remonstrants, and J., pleading for peace and unity, decided to move to Delft in 1616 and live with his sister Johanna and her husband. In 1617, J. took up a position as a minister in the small protestant community of Hillegersberg, but religious quarrels between two hostile groups ended with the suspension of J. in 1619, as he refused to take sides. His situation deteriorated in the aftermath, his career in the church came to an end, and in 1620, J. travelled to Paris, where he studied Italian, among other subjects, and moved to England the following year. For the next 30 years, from 1621–1651, he stayed in the service of the patron and famous collector of classical and contemporary art, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. In the early years of his most fruitful stay, J. worked on a Catalogus […] artificum et operum, leading to his fundamental work De pictura veterum (publ. 1937). He later worked as a librarian. From 1641–1646, possibly longer, he was the personal tutor of Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a member of the Howard family (cf. Chris Heesakker, “Franciscus Junius as a Tutor: His Paraenesis Missa Alberico de Vere,” Franciscus Junius F.F. and His Circle, ed. Bremmer, 1998, 93–115). This period marks the beginning of his increased preoccupation with the Germanic languages,

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among them Frisian and Old English, and from 1646–1648, J. lived in Frisia – according to his biographer Graevius – in order to learn Frisian. In 1651 he moved back to the Low Countries and lived with his sister Elizabeth in Amsterdam. In 1654, J. received the Codex Argenteus from Sweden, containing the Gothic bible translation (Wulfilas Bible), and decided to edit it. In 1662, J. moved to Dordrecht and worked with Thomas Marshall on the Codex Argenteus and a Gothic glossary. After studies in Frisian, he returned to England in 1670, where he worked in Oxford and was buried in Windsor after his death on Nov. 19, 1677 (cf. Breuker, “On the Course of Franciscus Junius’s Germanic Studies,” Franciscus Junius F.F. and His Circle, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., 1998, 129–57; Kees Dekker: The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries 1999, 92–104; Nativel “A Plea for Franciscus Junius as an Art Theorician,” Franciscus Junius F.F. and His Circle, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr., 1998, 20–28, B. J. Timmer, “Junius’ Stay in Friesland,” Neophilologus 41 [1957]: 141–44). J.’s works fall into one of two categories, either ancient art or Germanic philology. While in service of the Howard family, J. was asked by Thomas Howard to compile a catalogue of ancient artworks, using classical literature as a source. Profiting from his enormous knowledge of ancient authors, J. soon compiled a great collection of quotes. However, he never thought it to be complete and this Catalogus Architectorum, Mechanicorum, sed praecipue Pictorum, Statuariorum, Caelatorum, Tornatorum, aliorumque Artificum, et Operum quae fecerunt, secundum seriem litterarum digestus was first published by Johannes Georgius Graevius together with his second edition of De Pictura Veterum (see below) in 1694. Although the Catalogus was not published during his lifetime, even the manuscript proved to be a treasured work of reference. In his research for the Catalogus, J. also came across many references to art and its history in general. In 1637, the structured and commented compilation of these quotes became his first major publication: De Pictura Veterum, which turned out to be a great success and was read by nobles, clergymen, and artists in England and the Netherlands. Revised English and Dutch versions (The Painting of the Ancients, 1638; De Schilder-konst der Oude, 1641), translated by J. himself, were published only a few years later. After his return to the Netherlands in 1642, possibly earlier, J. started to turn his interest towards old Germanic dialects, mainly Old and Middle English, Old High German, Old Frisian, Gothic and Old Norse. Apparently his initial aim was to compile a Dutch etymological dictionary. This Etymologicum Teutonicum, now lost, which his studies of the other Germanic languages were supposed to help him with, never reached a publishable stage but is repeatedly referred to in J.’s other works. However, J.’s studies of those

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other languages proved to be very productive: In 1655, he published his Observationes in Willerami Abbatis Francicam Paraphrasis Cantici Canticorum (an etymological commentary on an Old High German paraphrase of the Song of Songs), and – in the same year – the first edition of the Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios (an Old English poetic paraphrase of the Genesis). Until 1660 J. had also compiled much of what in 1743 would finally be published by Edward Lye as an English etymological dictionary called Etymologicum Anglicanum. In 1654 J. came into possession of the so-called Codex Argenteus, a representative volume containing a Gothic translation of the Gospels by 4th-century bishop Wulfila, which to this day is the main source of the Gothic language. In collaboration with Thomas Marshall, he was the first to edit the complete text and in 1665 they published it together with a new edition of the West Saxon Gospels in a volume called Quatuor D.N. Jesu Christi Evangeliorum Versiones Perantiquae, Gothica scilicet et Anglosaxonica. Later that same year, J. and Marshall published the first Gothic dictionary, the Gothicum Glossarium, to accompany their earlier work. J. cared very much about the way his works left the press. Even in the preparation of his earliest publications, he had shown great interest in the art of typesetting. While he was preparing the publication of his Germanic studies in 1654, he started having letters cast for each language at his own expense and according to his own specifications. These ‘Junius-Types’ stayed in his possession, even when he changed printing house (which he often did). (cf. Peter J. Lucas, Junius, His Printers and His Types: An Interim Report,” Franciscus Junius F.F. and His Circle, 1998: 177–97; Kevin S. Kiernan: “Alfred the Great’s Burnt Boethius,” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle, 1998, 7–32). All throughout his life J. studied ancient and medieval authors, but many of his notes and thoughts never saw the light of publication. Still, even his unpublished manuscripts and annotated books form a great treasure of scholarship now to be found in the Leiden and Oxford university libraries. Along with his punches and matrices these documents continued to serve generations of scholars as inspiration and basis for their studies. Scientists such as George Hickes or Christopher Rawlinson worked with his manuscripts, Johann Philipp Palthen used J.’s transcripts for his 1706 edition of Tatian’s Harmonia Evangelica (cf. William Lawrence Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its creation, dissemination, significance, and history in scholarship, 1994: 95–97) and even the famous Jacob Grimm based his habilitation treatise – an edition of the OHG Murbach Hymns – on J.’s transcripts. His art historical works on the other hand, De Pictura Veterum and the Catalogus “remain to this day the most liberal, the most committedly loving, and by far the most

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exhaustive presentation of the literary sources of classical art” (Aldrich, Fehl, and Fehl, in their ed. Franciscus Junius, The Literature of Classical Art, 1991, xiii–xiv). These were quite recently reedited to be accessible for modern scholars. Many contemporaries praised J., both for his superior scholarship and his noble character. Dutch poets such as Joost van den Vondel composed hymns in his honor; in a poem, the scholar Jan van Vliet praised J. as the one “who restored the old languages to the fatherland and splendour to the languages,” and Peter Paul Rubens wrote a laudatory letter for his advance copy of De Pictura Veterum in Latin – a great honor considering that this language was unfamiliar to Rubens but almost native to J. In a biography attached to his edition of De Pictura Veterum, J.’s posthumous editor Johannes G. Graevius states that “Those who knew him loved him and deemed him a relic of the golden age, a man who worked the field of letters, not in hope of a reward, nor for the lust of fame or the idle temptation of vanity, but to serve his country and the world of learning.” Select Bibliography Works: Catalogus Architectorum, Mechanicorum, sed praecipue Pictorum, Statuariorum, Caelatorum, Tornatorum, aliorumque Artificum, et Operum quae fecerunt, secundum seriem litterarum digestus (posthumous; part of 2nd ed. of De Pictura Veterum, ed. Johannes Georgius Graevius, also part of the 1991 ed., see below); De Pictura Veterum Libri Tres (Amsterdam: Johannes Blaev, 1637); 2nd rev. ed. Johannes Georgius Graevius (1694); The Painting of the Ancients, in three Bookes (1638); new ed.: The Literature of Classical Art. vol. 1: The Painting of the Ancients: De Pictura Veterum. vol. 2: A Lexicon of Artists and Their Works: Catalogus Architectorum, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl (1991); De Schilder-Konst der Oude begrepen in drie boecken (1641); Observationes in Willerami Abbatis Francicam paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum (1655) (rpt. 1992, ed. Norbert Voorwinden); Etymologicum Anglicanum, ed. Edward Lye (1743); Tatiani Alexandrini Harmoniae Evangelicae antiquissima Versio Theotisca, ed. Johann Philipp Palthen (1706); Quatuor D. N. Jesu Christi Evangeliorum Versiones perantiquae duae, Gothica scil. et Anglo-Saxonica […] (1665); Gothicum Glossarium quo pleraque Argentei Codicis Vocabula explicantur atque ex linguis cognatis illustrantur (with Thomas Marshall) (1665); Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum Sacrae paginae Historiarum / abhinc annos MLXX. Anglosaxonice conscripta (1655; rpt. 2000, ed. Peter J. Lucas); several glossaries (mss., cf. John P. Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage, 2008, 218–35). Literature: Ph. H. Breuker, “Junius, Franciscus,” RGA, vol. 16 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 129–32; id., “On the Course of Franciscus Junius’s Germanic Studies, with Special Reference to Frisian,” Franciscus Junius F. F. and His Circle, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 129–57; Kees Dekker: The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries: Motivation and Methods of Jan Van Vliet (1622–1666) (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Philipp Fehl, “Access to the Ancients:

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Junius, Rubens and Van Dyck,” Franciscus Junius F. F. and His Circle, see above: 35–70; Norbert Voorwinden, “Zu Junius’ Observationes in Willerami Paraphrasin,” Franciscus Junius, Observationes in Willerami Abbatis Francicam Paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum, ed. Norbert Voorwinden (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), v–xxxiii; Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl, “Preface” and “Introduction: Franciscus Junius and the Defence of Art,” Franciscus Junius, The Literature of Classical Art I: The Painting of the Ancients, De Pictura Veterum, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), xiii– lxxxiii; Colette Nativel, “A Plea for Franciscus Junius as an Art Theorician,” Franciscus Junius F. F. and His Circle, see above, 19–33; Cornelis S. M. Rademaker, “Young Franciscus Junius: 1591–1621,” Franciscus Junius F. F. and His Circle, see above:,1–17; E. G. Stanley, “The Sources of Junius’s Learning as Revealed in the Junius Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library,” Franciscus Junius F. F. and His Circle, see above: 159–76; Jacob Cornelis van Slee, Rochus von Liliencron, “Junius: Franciscus J. (du Jon) der Jüngere,” ADB, vol. 14 (Leipzig and Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1881), 734–35.

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K Kane, George J. (July 4, 1916, Humbolt, Saskatchewan – December 27, 2008), English Medievalist. K. is an English medievalist best known for his editions of the A, B, and C versions of Piers Plowman for Athlone Press and for literary scholarship on Middle English literature, particularly the works of Chaucer and Langland. The eclecticism approach known as the Kane-Donaldson methodology that he adopted for editing the Piers Plowman texts and the Legend of Good Women has generated much debate among textual critics. K. was born on July 4, 1916, in Humbolt, Saskatchewan, the son of George Michael and Clara Kane. He married Katherine Bridget Montgomery and had one son and one daughter. He received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1936 and his M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1937. During WWII, he served in the Artist’s Rifles and Rifle Brigade for the British Army from 1939–1946. Afterward, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of London in 1946. K. began his career as an assistant lecturer (1946–1948), lecturer (1948–1953), and reader (1953–1955) at the University College London. In 1955, he became professor of English language and literature at Royal Holloway College, where he was also department head. From 1965 to 1976, he was professor of English language and Medieval literature at King’s College, department head 1968–1976, and Professor Emeritus beginning in 1976. From 1962 to 1966, he served as public orator, and from 1970 through 1976 he served as a member of the governing body of London School of Oriental and African Studies. In addition, he has been a fellow of a number of institutions: fellow of University College in 1971, fellow of King’s College in 1976, fellow of Medieval Academy 1978, and fellow of the National Humanities Center, 1987–1988. In 1976, he became the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1980, he gave the Biennial Lecture for the New Chaucer Society. K. received the British Academy’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize in 1963 and again in 1999 in recognition of his exceptional work on the complex textual problems presented by Piers Plowman, and in 1988 a collection of essays by his fellow scholars was published in his honor: Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane (1988).

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K., along with E. Talbot Donaldson and George Russell, edited the A, B, and C versions of William Langland’s poem, Piers Plowman, in an attempt to reproduce an authorial text. Since Langland may have composed three versions of his poem during his lifetime and many later copyists introduced incalculable numbers of errors, conjectures, omissions, and conflations into the 54 extant manuscripts of the popular work, recovering authentic authorial texts is probably impossible. K. has made the controversial assertion that editorial judgment should take precedence over evidence of medieval scribal copy or stemmatic lines when editing medieval texts. In the Athlone Press editions of Piers Plowman, therefore, the editors have chosen to dismiss the hyparchetypes as scribally corrupt and, thus, lacking authority. This approach has been challenged by other textual editors, leading to much discussion about modern editorial work and theory. Some scholars, such as C. David Benson, question K.’s ability to distinguish between scribal and authorial writing. In addition, some Langland scholars have debated the chronology of the A, B, and C versions as described in the editions and the status of the “Z Version,” a text which a minority of scholars have called an early authorial text but which K. says is a corrupt scribal copy. Despite the debate over K.’s editorial theories, however, his Athlone editions of Piers Plowman and the Glossary (2005) based on them are monumental accomplishments and most helpful for academic scholars of the works. In his critical book titled Chaucer (1984), K. traces Chaucer’s growth as a writer against the backdrop of Classical and contemporary Italian and French authors who influenced him. As he argues in his early book The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies (1965), K. believes the artistic value of medieval works should take precedence over biographical, historical, social, or religious considerations. In 1994 he co-edited Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women with Janet Cowen. Select Bibliography Works: Middle English Literature: A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman, 1951; ed., Piers Plowman: The A Version. Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman and Do-Well. An Edition in the Form of Trinity College, Cambridge, Manuscript R. 3.14, Corrected from Other Manuscripts, with Variant Readings, 1960; The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies, published for the College by H. K. Lewis, 1965; K. and E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Piers Plowman: The B Version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best, 1988; rev. 1997; Chaucer and Langland: Historical and Textual Approaches (1989,); George Russell and K., ed., Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best, An Edition of Huntington Library MS HM 143, 1997; Janet Cowen and K., ed., Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, 1994; Piers Plowman, Glossary: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best: A Glossary of the English Vocabulary of the A, B, and C Versions as Presented in the Athlone Editions, 2005.

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Literature: Contemporary Authors Online, “George Kane,” http://scroll.lib.wsc.ma. edu:2067/servlet/BioRC (last accessed on November 22, 2008); Robert Adams, “Editing Piers Plowman B: The Imperative of an Intermittently Critical Edition,” Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 32–68.

Marilyn Sandidge

Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig (May 05, 1895, Posen – September 09, 1963, Princeton, NJ). K. was born in Posen (now Poznan, ´ Poland), capital of the homonymous Prussian province, from a rich family of assimilated Jewish industrialists. His parents, Joseph and Clara Hepner, brought him up in the culture and values of the German nation, which he felt to be part of until the coming of Nazism. Destined to work in the paternal firm, he undertook commercial studies in Hamburg, up to the outbreak of the First World War, which he took part in as a volunteer. He fought on the French front, where he was wounded in Verdun; he was then sent to Russia and Turkey, where he came into contact with the Mediterranean and Oriental culture, which would be very important for his subsequent research. In 1918, he matriculated at the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the Islamist Carl Heinrich Becker. In a short time, he left his studies again, to fight against the rebel Polish in Posen and the spartakist in Berlin. In 1919 he went to Munich to enroll in the Faculty of Economics. Here he attended Max Weber’s courses and took part in the repression of the second Bavarian People’s Councils’ Republic (Räterepublik), with the Freikorps. In fall 1919 he was in Heidelberg to continue his university training. Here he attended lectures given by the historian of culture Eberhard Gothein, by the national economist Edgar Salin and by the historian of antiquity Alfred von Domaszewski. However astonishing it may seem, he did not attend courses on medieval history, though he came soon into contact, even of friendship, with the medievalists Karl Hampe, Percy E. Schramm and Friedrich Baethgen. K. graduated under the direction of Gothein in 1921, offering a dissertation on the nature of Muslim craftsmen guilds. In Heidelberg, K. was introduced to the circle of the poet Stefan George whose verses taught German youth to reconcile with its history, after the deep wound to the national

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pride, caused by the catastrophic outcomes of the Great War and the severe sanctions imposed on Germany by the treaty of Versailles. In the circle of George, K. learned to temper his original nationalist ardor with cultural universalism, and became convinced that “science” and “life” do not have to be considered two different aspects in the living unity of the individual. In this cultural milieu, he composed his first work: Kaiser Friedrich II (Emperor Frederick II, 1927–1931). Even if the appreciation of his work among German medievalists was not unanimous at all, in 1930 K. was invited to teach Medieval History at the University of Frankfurt, at first as honorary professor, and then as an ordinary professor. Nevertheless, he could teach for only a little time, because in April 1933, a Nazi law compelled all Jewish professors to retire from teaching unless they had fought in the First World War or against the communist Spartakists in the immediate period after the war. For K., that was the case, but he stopped his teaching all the same, in polemic against an obtuse anti-Semitic rule that hurt his person and values. In August 1934, he was asked to swear faithfulness to Hitler, but he refused to do it and chose to retire, when he was only thirty-nine years old. Nevertheless, he did not leave Germany, though permanence in his country became extremely uneasy for him. Up to 1938, he lived mostly in Berlin, with some stays in Italy and in England, in Brussels and Paris, for research needs, for conferences and short teaching contracts. In 1938, when his survival in Germany had become impossible, K. left his country, went to England first, and then to the United States, where he got a teaching contract at the University of California, Berkeley. Here he published Laudes regiae. A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler Worship in 1946. The quiet climate of these years suddenly broke off in 1949, when, in full McCarthyist hysteria, university professors were asked to subscribe to the oath of anticommunist faithfulness. In a pamphlet titled The fundamental Issue, K. sharply criticized a provision that undermined freedom of teaching, using the same arguments as fifteen years earlier, when he had protested against the proscription of Jewish teachers in Germany. In this way, he began a legal dispute with the University of California, which was to conclude successfully for him and his colleagues some years later when he had already left Berkeley, moving to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Here he stayed from 1951 until his death and composed his last published work: The King’s Two Bodies. In the circle of George, K. conceived the idea to write his first book on the figure of Friederich II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman emperor and King of Sicily. On the other hand, George had himself evoked the image of the Emperor in some poems, and Wolfram von den Steinen, a historian close to the circle, at the beginning of the Twenties had published works on

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the Swabian sovereign. Generally speaking, the figure of Friederich II was widely present in German culture in the first decades of the 20th century, mostly because of Nietzsche’s influence, which was pervasive even among historians. K. wrote his ponderous biography – more than six hundred pages – on Kaiser Friedrich II in less than five years, starting from 1922. The first volume (Textband) was published in 1927; in 1931 the second volume (Ergänzungsband), containing notes and historiographical excursus, came out. These were years of deep and concentrated work in various European archives and libraries like the Roman Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the Berlin Monumenta Germaniae Historica – a privileged place for German historical erudition. Nevertheless, these were also years of discussion with the historians of whom he was disciple and friend, and of constant attention to the contemporary cultural debates. Surprisingly, the first readers caught only the literary aspect of that work, misunderstanding its complex structure and inspiring principles: this misunderstanding was to go on up to the Nineties. Today K.’s Kaiser Friedrich II is still able to astonish readers because of its singular mixture of erudition and vocation for the historiographical synthesis, vivid descriptions of milieus and characters, and the richness of images endowed with political meanings. But K. does not consider history a rhetoric exercise, aimed at edifying the readers’ souls, pushing them to political action; he does not even consider history a fiction, opposed to the practices of scientific historiography, as they had been consolidated in the second half of the 19th century, with the progressive professionalization of that discipline. K. does not doubt the value of historical research; on the contrary, he thinks it is a fixed passage for whoever wants to accomplish a historiographical work that should not be charged with dilettantism. In 1938, when he left Germany for good, K. brought with him the manuscript of his second work, mostly completed, that was to appear only in 1946: Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Medieval Ruler Worship. In this book, the fundamental importance of liturgy for the understanding of medieval reign and of the Middle Ages tout court, was acknowledged for the first time in a wide historical perspective. This work may be considered a refined pendant of the research about Ordines that Percy E. Schramm was carrying out in the same years. Besides, K. was able to enrich his volume with the contribution of the musicologist Manfed F. Bukofzer, which showed that musical evidence could represent a precious source for historians. The existence of liturgical songs in honor of the sovereigns was already known, for example on the occasion of Charles the Great’s coronation: K. reconstructed the complete history of Laudes regiae; he followed their tracks back to antiquity, and tied their origins to the fusion of

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late-Roman formulas with Anglo-Irish elements; he showed that, during Pipin’s reign or, at most, at the beginning of Charlemagne’s, those formulas and elements had ripened in the expression of the Frankish idea of regal priesthood, according to which the king stood for the terrestrial image of Christ, lord of the universe. Then, K. followed the developments of that idea in the Roman Curia, in the Norman Kingdoms of Sicily, Normandy and England, in Dalmatia and in the Venetian colonies, up to their late, disquieting resonance in an hymn of Fascist Italy, “in a so exhaustive way that on this topic little remains to add” (P. E. Schramm, “Review to Selected Studies,” Erasmus. Speculum Scientiarum 18 [25-VIII-1966], 451). While Laudes deals prevailingly with high Middle Ages, when the worship of rex-sacerdos was strong, The King’s Two Bodies goes through high and low Middle Ages. This work was begun in the late Forties at the University of California, Berkeley and was finished at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where the atmosphere was free of material worries; it had been solicited from the conversation of famous scholars, such as Max Radin, Erwin Panofsky, Andreas Alföldi, Kurt Weitzmann, Theodor E. Mommsen, Harold Cherniss, and Leonardo Olschki. This work moves from the theory of the 16th-century English jurist Edmund Plowden, according to which the king’s person has a double body: the natural, mortal body and the political, invisible, incorruptible one. While in The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (Les Rois thaumaturges), Marc Bloch reconstructed the sacral aspect of the ancient European monarchies, showing anthropological sensitiveness for the “collective representations,” K. chronologically inventories those materials of the learned culture that constitute its symbolic foundations. In so doing, he makes use of scattered and various documents: theological and ecclesiological treatises, juridical and political essays, administrative acts and numismatics, literary and narrative sources, iconographic representations. K. describes the way in which the late-medieval juridical and political thought conceived the immortality of the monarchy beyond the mortal person in which it is embodied. He offers, then, the genealogy of the distinction between the public function and people who practice it. In the U.S. scientific world, K.’s prestige has grown for many years, also in virtue of the scholars who have continued and still proceed in cultivating the research areas K. introduced, such as Michael Cherniavsky, Ralph E. Giesey, Robert L. Benson, Sarah Hanley, Richard A. Jackson, and Lawrence M. Bryant. On the other hand, in Europe K.’s name was still largely unknown in the Eighties, because the wide reputation of his juvenile work on the Emperor Frederick II (soon translated into English, 1931, and Italian,

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1939) had gradually diminished. K.’s name was remembered only in the works of a few erudite researchers who generally just utilized the wide range of materials K. collected without any reflection on the structure of the volume and on the conception of history it contained. These interpreters, in a positivistic mood, often reproved him for having included legendary elements in the historical treatment, for not having made a distinction between myth and factual reality, in order to renew the imperial apotheosis in the reader. This was also the judgment expressed by the first critics of K.’s work, e. g., Albert Brackmann. A similar prejudice characterized also the European reception of The King’s Two Bodies up to the eighties. This work has usually been considered a mine of references to little known sources, “fascinating in style and sagacity,” but “oblique, artificial, far-fetched,” “eclectic in topics and eccentric in synopsis,” as Theodor Schieffer and Ernst Riebstein maintained. In Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975, 33f.), Michel Foucault paid homage to K.’s genius: this was a turning point in K.’s critical reception that would be evident in France – with Marcel Gauchet’s, Louis Marin’s, JeanMarie Apostolidès’ and Alain Boureau’s works, but also with the translations of The King’s Two Bodies into Spanish (1985), French (1988), Italian (1989) and German (1990). In 1982, Eckhart Grünewald (Ernst Kantorowicz und Stefan George. Beiträge zur Biographie des Historikers bis zum Jahre 1938 und zu seinem Jugendwerk ‘Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite,’ 1982) published a scrupulous biography that focused on K.’s German period. In 1993, Johannes Fried and Robert L. Benson (Ernst Kantorowicz. Erträge der Doppeltagung, 1997) organized an important international conference, concentrating on some neglected aspects of K.’s life and works. From that day on, in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and England has begun a veritable K. Renaissance, that has yet to end (Geschichtskörper. Zur Aktualität von Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ed. by Wolfgang Ernst, Cornelia Vismann, 1998; Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963). Soziales Milieu und wissenschaftliche Relevanz, ed. Jerzy Strzelczyk, 2nd ed., 1996; 2000; Kay Schiller, Gelehrte Gegenwelten. Über humanistische Leitbilder im 20. Jahrhundert, 2000; Roberto Delle Donne, “‘Historisches Bild’ e signoria del presente. Il ‘Federico II imperatore’ di Ernst Kantorowicz,” Le storie e la memoria. In onore di Arnold Esch, ed. Roberto Delle Donne, Andrea Zorzi, 2002, 295–352). The influence of his work in medieval and modern studies is particularly, but not exclusively, evident among the historians of kingship, ritual, and ceremony; just to mention few names: Alain Boureau (Le simple corps du roi. L’impossible sacralité des souverains français, XVe-XVIIIe siècles, 2nd ed. 2000), Natalie Zemon Davis (“History’s Two Bodies,” American Historical Review 94 [1989]: 1–10), Sergio Bertelli (The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of

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Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 2001), Johannes Fried and Patrick Geary (Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Patrick J. Geary, and Johannes Fried, 2002). Unlike the majority of medievalists, who are not well known outside the specialists’ circles, K. has become a benchmark also for literary critics (David Norbrook, “The Emperor’s New Body: Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism,” Textual Practice 10 [1996]: 329–57), social and political scientists (Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2004; Mauro Calise, “Corporate Authority in a long-term Comparative Perspective-Differences in Institutional Change between Europe and the United States,” Subsidiarität als rechtliches und politisches Ordnungsprinzip in Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft, 2002), philosophers (Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 2005; Il regno e la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, 2007) and gender researchers (Cynthia Herrup, “The King’s Two Genders,” Journal of British Studies 45 [July 2006]: 493–510). Select Bibliography Works: Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, I–II (1927–1931; transl. Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, 1931, with omission of the Ergänzungsband of 307 pages); Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship (1946; The Fundamental Issue. Documents and Marginal Notes on the University of California Loyalty Oath (1950); The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957); Selected Studies (1965; with K.’s bibliography). Literature: Ralph E. Giesey, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz. Scholarly Triumphs and Academic Travails in Weimar Germany and the United States,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 30 (1985): 191–202; Alain Boureau, Histoires d’un historien. Kantorowicz (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Robert E. Lerner, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963),” Medieval Scholarship. Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, I, History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 263–76; Roberto Delle Donne, “Kantorówicz, Ernst Hartwig,” Federico II: Enciclopedia fridericiana (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2005), vol. II: 121–19; Francisco Javier Caspistegui, “Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895–1963),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 195–221; Olaf B. Rader, Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Lutz Raphael (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2006), vol. 2: 7–26.

Roberto Delle Donne

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Katz, Jacob (Hebrew: Ya’akov Katz; November 15, 1904, Magyargencs – May 20, 1998, Jerusalem), Israeli Historian of Early Modern and Modern Jewry. K. was not a medievalist. Most of his academic inquiries focus modern Jewish history. Nonetheless, he made a few path-clearing contributions to the study of Medieval and early modern Ashkenazic Jews. His most influential work on the subject is Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (1958; partial English ed., 1961; full English ed., 1993), which introduced a sociological approach to the study Jewish history. Also significant is his Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (1960; first English edition, 1961. K. cautioned that the Hebrew edition should take precedence because it was actually written after the English edition). Chapters 1–6 of the monograph, The ‘Shabbes Goy’: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility (1983; first English Edition 1989), constitute K.’s most extensive, single contribution to the study of the pre-modern centuries published after 1961. Like much of his work, they emphasize the practical flexibility of rabbinic jurisprudence in the face of historical reality. His article, “The Concept of Social History and Its Possible Use in Jewish Historical Research” (Scripta Hierosolymitana 3 [1956]: 173–94) is a critique of earlier Jewish historiography and serves as an introduction to the theoretical and methodological approach that he applied throughout his scholarship. Less well known among K.’s works on Medieval and early modern topics are an early article on patterns of familial organization and behavior among pre-modern Ashkenazic Jews (“Marriage and Family Life at the End of the Middle Ages,” Zion 10 [1945]: 22–54 [in Hebrew]; this largely foreshadows sections of Tradition and Crisis); an article on a rabbinic controversy involving institutional authority and messianic expectations in 16th-century Safed (“The Dispute between Jacob Berab and Levi ben Habib over Renewing Ordination,” Zion 17 [1949]: 28–45; an English translation appeared in Binah 1 [1989]: 119–41, as well as in Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility [1988]); an article on a rabbinic principle for the definition of Jewishness that Rashi, among other authorities, employed creatively in the Middle Ages (“‘Although He Sins, He is a Jew,’” Tarbiz 27 [1958]: 203–17 [in Hebrew]); an article on premodern polemics (“Three Apologetic Statements and their Fate,” Zion 11–12 [1958]: 174–93 [in Hebrew]); a handful of articles on rabbinic law and Jewish mysticism that emphasize, against a powerful historiographical current, the latter’s integration of the former (for instance, “Post-Zoharic Relations between Halakhah and Kabbalah,” Da’at 4 (1980): 57–74; published in Eng-

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lish in Bernard D. Cooperman, ed., Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century [1983]; see also the Hebrew collection Halakhah and Kabbalah [1984]); and an article on the use of rabbinic works as historical sources (“On Halakhah and Derush as a Historical Source,” Tarbiz 30 [1961]: 62–68 [in Hebrew]). K.’s historical survey for children, Israel among the Nations (1945–1950), was the standard textbook in Israeli religious schools for decades. K. was born to one of a few Orthodox Jewish families in a small village in Western Hungary. From the age of sixteen he was a student at the provincial Yeshivot (Talmudic academies) of Györ and Sàtoralja-Ujhely, then at the staunchly anti-modernist and anti-Hasidic Pressburg Yeshiva (in present-day Bratislava). By 1927, however, K. had read extensively and independently in secular literature and politics, and had developed Zionist convictions. In 1928 he moved to Frankfurt, where he became a student of Sociology the University of Frankfurt under Karl Mannheim. At the same time, he studied at the modernist (Orthodox) Adat Yeshurun Yeshiva. K. received his doctorate in 1934 after defending a dissertation on German-Jewish assimilation. After a year studying English at Jews’ College in London amid fellow Jewish-German expatriates, K. immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1936. He worked as a schoolteacher, instructor of schoolteachers, academic administrator, and published various articles in the field of education in Tel Aviv. In 1949 he joined the faculty of the Department of Education of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He subsequently taught at the Departments of Sociology and Jewish History. K. served as dean of the School of Social Science from 1959–1963 and rector of the University from 1961–1971. He spent his 1956–1957 sabbatical at the universities of London and Manchester. After his retirement in 1973 he was visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Lucerne, the University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University, and Yeshiva University. In addition to various honorary doctorates, he was awarded an honorary foreign membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, and the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies in 1980. About two-thirds, comprising parts I and II, of K.’s four-part monograph Tradition and Crisis, present a sociological portrait of what K. conceives as a unitary, Medieval Ashkenazic society extending over Germany, northern France, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Western Hungary. He is particularly attentive to that society’s legal and religious framework, institutions, guiding conceptions, and political and economic constraints and capacities. Collectivities such as the kehillah ([normative Jewish] community) and the Jewish family serve as K.’s primary units of analysis. The work is a milestone in the academic study of Jews in that it introduced sociological concerns and

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methods to the study of Jewish history, and hence opened the way for social history within the broader field(s) of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish studies. Intensely criticized in the 1950s by some of K.’s fellow Zionist historians, notably Ben-Zion Dinur and Shmu’el Ettinger, K.’s socialhistorical approach – which bears the marks of Mannheim’s Weberian approach, and to a lesser extent those of Hans Weil and Mannheim’s critic, Max Horkheimer – has been dominant in historiography on Medieval and early modern Jews since the 1970s, albeit in ways that depart significantly from K.’s contribution precisely because they constitute important reactions to it. The method that under girds Tradition and Crisis and constitutes K.’s legacy to medievalist scholarship in Judaica consists essentially of gleaning sociological information from communal registers (called pinkasim) and rabbinic sources (responsa, ethical and polemical works, commentaries and codes). Scholars had ordinarily examined, and in many cases still examine, the latter sources chiefly for their value to the historical reconstruction of Jewish thought. By contrast, K. mined these sources to locate processes and patterns of Jewish (inter)action within a sociocultural context in order to identify “typical” structures and “norms” of Jewish “tradition.” While anthropological categories have taken the place of K.’s sociological ones in recent literature, his basic method remains unchallenged. As in other of his works, for example Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (1973), K.’s treatment of the socio-historical construct of “tradition” provides a background and reference point for his explication of the cultural shifts that shaped Ashkenazic “society” from the 16th to the 18th centuries, changes which culminated in the watershed of modernity throughout the 19th. K.’s delineation of a pivotal “end of the Middle Ages” as a transitional period in European Jewish history is at least one major cause for the development of an Early Modern field in Jewish historiography. That delineation also set the stage for numerous studies of European Jewish modernization. K.’s emphasis on the internal dynamics of the Jewish community – his “immanentist” approach to Jews and Judaism – is a hallmark of the nationalist historiography associated with the “Jerusalem School” of Dinur, Ettinger, Gershom Scholem, Yitzchak (Fritz) Baer, and others. K.’s ruthlessly economical and transparent style is, however, a departure from that which prevailed among some exponents of that school. Like Tradition and Crisis, Exclusiveness and Tolerance focuses chiefly on the experience of central European Jews, is founded largely on the study of rabbinic sources (here mostly excluding polemical literature), and devotes its first two parts – ten of fifteen chapters, to be exact – to the Jewish “Middle Ages” (here including the transitional early modern centuries). The work ex-

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plicates ways in which Ashkenazic elites developed highly pragmatic, flexible approaches to Halakhah (Jewish law) and Minhag (communal custom) in order to permit Jews’ extensive and multi-faceted interaction with the “idolaters” – Christians – on whom the physical and political viability of Jewish communities depended, while cultivating within Jewish society a strong, compensatory sense of separateness from, even revulsion toward, Christianity. That sense, K. argued, hardened into “estrangement” with the late Medieval phenomenon of ghettoization in Central Europe to such an extent that, with few exceptions, Judaism became “a closed system of thought” until the dawn of modernity. K.’s students and other scholars have questioned several of his conclusions, assumptions and analytical parameters, all while participating in the project of writing a social history of the Jews that he inaugurated. For instance, in his own studies of Jewish-Christian confrontation in the Middle Ages, David Berger has stressed the accuracy of K.’s sensitivity for the emotional attitudes and motivations that Medieval Jews developed toward Christianity, while pointing out that K.’s mastery of polemical Jewish sources was incomplete, and his knowledge of Latin sources negligible. Studies of Ashkenazic jurisprudence and lore in the wake of the First Crusade by such scholars as Israel Yuval, Hayim Soloveitchik, Avraham Grossman, Robert Chazan, and Jeremy Cohen, have contended with the question that K. first approached sociologically, of the roles that normative conceptions and visceral perceptions of the “other” may have played in Jews’ acts of martyrdom and their normative interpretation. In particular, the Germanocentricity of K.’s scholarship has been implicitly and explicitly questioned by social historians of Jewish modernization whose research focuses on places other than Central Europe (see for instance Todd M. Endelman’s The Jews of Georgian England [1979]). Even those studies of Medieval Jews that generally retain K.’s focus on Ashkenaz, as well as his emphasis on such themes as familial and economic behavior, largely eschew K.’s totalizing sociological categories – “structures,” “society,” “tradition,” a broadly-conceived “Ashkenaz,” etc. – in favor of narrower, anthropologically-informed readings of given rabbinic rituals and texts alone. Examples of these approaches include the works of K.’s student, Hayim Soloveitchik (see for example Principles and Pressure: Jewish trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages [in Hebrew, 2003]), and Ivan Marcus (see for instance, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe [1996]). K.’s capacious interpretation of the term “Ashkenaz” has subsided, similarly, in scholarship that displays a greater sensitivity to local variety and historical specificity than K. did. Elisheva Carlebach notes, for example, not only that K.’s evidence of a “closed” Ashkenazic Ju-

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daism is faulty for Central Europe, but that his insights concerning the Jews of that region apply more readily to early modern, Polish Jewry, which was not ghettoized. K.’s agenda in Exclusiveness and Tolerance and in The ‘Shabbes Goy’ to explain how Jewish authorities legitimized historical change through normative jurisprudence continues to echo in the work of historians of rabbinic law who have followed his pioneering work (see for instance, Edward Fram’s Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550–1655, 2000; see also Soloveitchik’s article, “Can Halakhic Texts Talk History,” AJS Review 3 [1978]: 52–196, which elaborates upon the possibilities of K.’s method). K.’s chief legacy in medievalist studies, then, lies less in his specific arguments than in the conceptual and methodological shift, especially momentous for modern scholarship in Judaica, that his research accomplished in moving away from the (pure) intellectual history of Judaism, and onto the social history of Jews. Select Bibliography Works: Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. and with an afterword by Bernard Dov Cooperman (1958; 1993); “‘Although He Sins, He is a Jew’,” Tarbiz 27 (1958): 203–17 (in Hebrew); Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (1961); Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (1978); The ‘Shabbes Goy’: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility (1989); Divine Law in Human Hands: Case Studies in Halakhic Flexibility (1989). Literature: Jay M. Harris, The Pride of Jacob: Essays on Jacob Katz and his Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

David Graizbord

Ker, Neil Ripley (May 28, 1908, London, England – August 23, 1982, Foss, Scotland), Paleographer. K. is remembered as one of the greatest scholars of Anglo-Saxon paleography. He is perhaps best known for his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing AngloSaxon (1957; revised imprint with supplement, 1990), the first and only work to replace Humphrey Wanley’s monumental catalogue of 1705. K.’s output is much broader than this, however, and includes very many studies of paleography, codicology, library-history, and indeed almost every aspect of the production and survival of manuscripts in England.

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K. was the only child of Robert Macneil Ker and Lucy Winifred. He attended a preparatory school in Reigate and then Eton College, and came up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1927. On the advice of C.S. Lewis he read English language and literature, obtaining the degree in 1931. He wrote a dissertation for the B.Litt. on manuscripts containing homilies by the AngloSaxon Ælfric of Eynsham which he completed in 1933; this interest in manuscripts was actively encouraged by Kenneth Sisam. K. began teaching paleography in 1936 and was formally appointed lecturer in 1941. He married Jean Francis in 1938 and they had four children. He was a conscientious objector and so worked in the Radcliffe Infirmary during the Second World War. He was elected fellow of Merton College Oxford in 1945, and appointed reader in paleography in 1946. He was the first Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford 1952–1953, and he delivered the Sandars lectures in bibliography at Cambridge in 1955. He was appointed librarian of Merton College 1955–1968, vice-president there 1962–1963, and honorary fellow from 1975; he retired from lecturing in 1968. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Reading in 1964, Leiden in 1972, and Cambridge in 1975. He was appointed to fellowships in the British Academy in 1958, the Medieval Academy of America in 1971, and the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1977. He also received a gold medal from the Bibliographical Society in 1975 and was appointed CBE in 1979. He remained an active walker throughout his life: he was president of the Oxford mountaineering society as an undergraduate in 1929, and he died after falling during a walk in 1982. K. is usually thought of first as a paleographer, and indeed his contributions to the study of script remain important to this day. He identified several important scribal hands, including that of the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop Wulfstan of York (“The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan,” Books, Collectors and Libraries [1985], 9–26) and two monks of Worcester, Hemming and Coleman (“Hemming’s Cartulary,” ibid., 31–60; “Old English Notes Signed ‘Coleman’,” ibid., 27–30). Similarly, his English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (1960), the published version of his Lyell Lectures delivered at Oxford, is a ground-breaking study in paleography and has been described some forty years after its appearance as perhaps his finest achievement (Teresa Webber, rev., “Ker, Neil Ripley (1908–1982),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 31, 2004, 388–89). However, K.’s work encompassed paleography in the broad sense, considering not only script but all aspects of book-production in medieval England. He is perhaps best remembered for his catalogues, particularly Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (1941; 2nd ed. 1964; supplement by Andrew G. Watson, 1987), the Catalogue of Manuscripts

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Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957; rev. imp. with supplement 1990), and the Medieval Manuscripts of Great Britain (5 vols., 1969–2002; vol. 4 with Alan J. Piper; indexes and addenda ed. Ian C. Cunningham and Andrew G. Watson). In all three works, but particularly the second and third, he established new standards of detail and precision in describing manuscripts. As well as providing the date and contents of each manuscript, he also gave extensive information on binding-structures, page-layout, script, and provenance. This emphasis on the book as a whole, not just the script, as providing evidence for origin and provenance was unusual for his time, and the methodology outlined in his introduction to the Medieval Libraries of Great Britain remains important and useful. Furthermore, this emphasis allowed him to identify disparate leaves and fragments of manuscripts, most famously recognizing the parent manuscript of one leaf from the matching wormholes (“Membra Disjecta,” British Museum Quarterly 12 [1937–1938]: 130). These interests are manifest in his other writings which include studies of manuscripts, libraryholdings (including especially the history of Oxford college libraries), bookcollectors, and the products of particular scriptoria. K.’s Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (1957) is still the single authoritative source on the subject, and few of his dates or attributions have been overturned in the half-century since their publication. Its lasting importance is demonstrated by the number of updates which it has received. Not only did K. himself issue a supplement (“A Supplement to Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon,” Anglo-Saxon England 5 [1976]: 121–31), but Mary Blockley published another update (“Further Addenda and Corrigenda to N.R. Ker’s Catalogue,” Notes and Queries new series 29 [1982]: 1–3), and this second update was itself considered important enough to reprint twelve years later as a “Basic Reading” (Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings, ed. Mary Richards, 1994, 79–85). No scholar can write on English vernacular script before A.D. 1200 without considering K.’s opinion on the subject, and it is testimony to his authority that much of the debate over the Beowulf manuscript was focused on what K. meant (David N. Dumville, “Beowulf Come Lately: Some Notes on the Palaeography of the Nowell Codex,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 225 [1988]: 49–63; Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, 2nd ed. 1996, xv–xxi; David N. Dumville, “The Beowulf Manuscript and how not to Date it,” Medieval Studies English Newsletter [Tokyo] 39 [1998]: 21–27). Similarly, the lasting impact of his Medieval Libraries of Great Britain is demonstrated by its two editions (1941 and 1964) and supplement (1987, with Andrew G. Watson). Furthermore, K.’s process of cataloguing has been recognized as exemplary, and Felicity Strong has noted that “the method he evolved for the description

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of manuscripts, as set out in MMBL 1, is the nearest approach to a systematic standard in this country” (“Neil Ripley Ker,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 7 [1983]: 209). As well as his own publications, K.’s legacy remains in the many datings and attributions which appear in other scholars’ work. He contributed to The Will of Ælfgifu, edited by Dorothy Whitelock in 1968, two volumes of Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile (The Pastoral Care, ed. Neil R. Ker, 1956; The Paris Psalter, ed. Bertram Colgrave, 1958), and six volumes published by the Early English Text Society (The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, ed. Richard M. Wilson, 1954; Facsimile of MS Bodley 34, ed. Neil R. Ker, 1960; The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, 1962; The Owl and the Nightingale, ed. Neil R. Ker, 1963; Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253, ed. Neil R. Ker, 1965; The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile, ed. Neil R. Ker, 1976). Furthermore, his unpublished notes and card-indexes, most of which are preserved in the Bodleian library, remain a valuable resource to this day. Select Bibliography Works: For a full bibliography of K.’s publications see Joan Gibbs, “A Bibliography of the Published Writings of N.R. Ker,” Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, ed. Malcolm B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson, 1978, 371–79; and “A Supplementary Bibliography of the Published Writings of N.R. Ker,” Books, Collectors, and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. Andrew G. Watson, 1985, xiii–xiv. Literature: Christopher R. Cheney, “Introduction: Neil Ripley Ker’s Contribution to the Study of Manuscripts,” Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker, ed. Malcolm B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scholar Press, 1978), xi–xv; Anon. [G. R. Davies], “Dr N. R. Ker”, The Times (25 Aug 1982), 10; Anon., “Dr. N.R. Ker,” Bodleian Library Record 11 (1983): 64–65; Christopher R. Cheney, “Obituary: Neil Ripley Ker, 1908–1982,” Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association 16 (1983): 86–87; Helmut Gneuss, “Neil Ker,” Jahrbuch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, (1983): 189–91; Felicity Strong, “Neil Ripley Ker,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 7 (1983): 209–10; Anthony I. Doyle, “Neil Ripley Ker, 1908–1982,” Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1993): 349–59; Kevin S. Kiernan, “N. R. Ker (1908–1982),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline 2, Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998), 425–37; Teresa Webber, rev., “Ker, Neil Ripley (1908–1982),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31, 388–89.

Peter A. Stokes

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Ker, W. P. (William Paton) (August 30, 1855, Glasgow, Scotland – July 17, 1923, Macugnaga, Italy), British Medievalist. Although K. wrote essays (often first presented as lectures) on literature from epochs ranging from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, K. is best known for his surveys of medieval literature. His influential surveys, including The Dark Ages and Epic and Romance, were among the first to offer comprehensive views of all the literatures of the Middle Ages, not just of a particular language or culture. Although K. examined texts individually, his major contribution lies not in the critique of specific works, but in the connections he established. For medievalists of the early 20th century, K.’s observations formed the basis for standard literary interpretations, although later some assumptions were challenged and more detailed analyses superseded his general surveys. K., the son of a Glasgow merchant, graduated from Glasgow Academy. He studied classics and humanities first at Glasgow University and then at Balliol in Oxford. After beginning his academic career as an assistant to William Young Sellar at Edinburgh University in 1878, he was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls in Oxford beginning in 1879 (election is for life, and fellows are free to pursue research during a portion of each year). In 1883, K. became professor of English literature and history at the University College of South Wales in Cardiff. He left in 1889 when appointed Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London. During his long tenure (he retired in 1922), he served as director of Scandinavian studies in London, chair of the Modern Languages Board, and chair of the English Board, the committee responsible for setting up the English School. From 1920–1923, he was named professor of poetry at Oxford, an illustrious position occupied by the likes of W. H. Auden and Matthew Arnold. Never marrying, K. was devoted to the study of literature and to the education of his students, which included G. K. Chesteron and R. W. Chambers, who succeeded him as Quain Professor at University College. During World War I, he served the Admiralty in England. Intensely interested in politics, K. supported the Tory party and Unionism. He deplored the divisions among nations that led to World War I and the subsequent dissolution of the British Empire. His holistic view of European and British politics informed his scholarship, which emphasized the relationships among various medieval literatures. A year after retiring, he had a heart attack and died while walking through Italy. Devoted students and colleagues, including R. W. Chambers and B. Ifor Evans, wrote biographies about him. Glasgow University estab-

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lished the annual W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, one of which was delivered by J. R. R. Tolkien (Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics [1936; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1969]). K.’s first published work was Epic and Romance by Macmillan in 1897, which established his reputation and which proved so successful that it was republished in 1908; Dover printed an edition in America in 1957. K. described epic and romance as the “two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages” (5). He defined the genres, summarized examples of each followed by a commentary, and discussed the relationship between the two. He traced the evolution of the Teutonic epic from its origins in the oral traditions of the Germanic peoples who settled in the lands of the Roman Empire. The epic, he claimed, proceeded from a heroic age – an age of chaos and war (the Dark Ages), while the romance was a product of the chivalric age that emerged with the beginning of the Crusades about 1100 after the Germanic migrations ended. It becomes clear that K. saw romance as a degeneration of the epic, although there were romances he admired – particularly Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. The Dark Ages, K.’s next volume published in 1904 and the first in a series edited by George Saintsbury called “Periods of European Literature,” focused upon the Latin and vernacular literatures produced in Europe from the fall of Rome in the 400s until about 1100. The Dark Ages was the first period of the Middle Ages, followed by the medieval period, which began about 1100. The literary strands of the Dark Ages were three-fold: Latin, Teutonic, and Celtic. K. admired the Latin because it was the medium through which all other literatures were transmitted, including Greek and Arabic. The weakness, he thought, was in Latin writers’ propensity toward the dogmatic and pedantic since authors tended to be proselytizing Christian teachers. The Latin period began with the writings of the philosopher Boethius, who wielded tremendous influence from his time up to the time of Queen Elizabeth I, one of Boethius’s translators. As for the Celtic, K. particularly admired the writing from Ireland where there were Latin masters who also recorded the native Gaelic heroic masterpieces of the Ulster cycle. K.’s favorite literature was the heroic poetry of the various Teutonic groups, particularly from Scandinavia and Iceland. He surveyed sagas and Eddic literature. The literature of the Dark Ages ended about 1100 when “modern poetry” was invented in Provence. K. hoped his book would demonstrate that the so-called Dark Ages contained much more light than many presumed. This popular book was reprinted many times, including an American edition in 1960. In 1905, a number of K.’s essays were collected together and published in Essays on Medieval Literature. For K., Dante was the greatest writer of all the Middle Ages and the “first modern” to master the Homeric simile. Boccaccio

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was a genius occupying the border between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who employed a medieval allegorical writing style along with a modern realist style. K. asserted his belief that Chaucer was the master medieval writer in English with Gower a worthy companion. In English Medieval Literature of 1912 K. surveyed poetic and prose developments in England from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons through Chaucer. He traced prose’s continuous development from the Old English period through the Middle English period. He saw poetry as discontinuous because of the Norman Conquest, which ended Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry and replaced it with French romances. After the Norman Conquest, English poets struggled with a foreign language and genre, but eventually naturalized the poetry, culminating with the masterpieces of Chaucer. Art of Poetry, published in 1923, anthologized lectures on modern poets that K. delivered while serving as professor of poetry at Oxford. After his death, various other lectures were gathered and published, most notably the two-volume series by Charles Whibley in 1925. The single subject that received the most weight was the heroic literature of Scandinavia/Iceland, a favorite literary corpus that K. sought to promote. K. was revered for his erudition by his contemporaries and by the next generation of scholars. K. was the only scholar capable of producing comprehensive surveys of the Middle Ages, for he alone had the capacious reading and memory for the task, claimed B. Ifor Evans, and the linguistic fluency in “the tongues and the literatures of all lands in Europe to the borders of the Slavs,” said Chambers (398). As Chambers observed in 1942, few contested the generalizations drawn by K.; for example, Medieval English Literature “is a classic of English criticism …” (Chambers, Medieval English Literature, 188). K.’s strength lay in his ability to succinctly synthesize the literatures of medieval Europe. Theodore Andersson pointed out that before K. there were virtually no books on sagas and that the sagas were studied only in Scandinavia and in some German universities. K. wielded tremendous influence upon the work of Andreas Heusler and consequently upon the discipline of Scandinavian/Icelandic studies (Andersson, “A Glance Back at W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance,” Envoi 3.2 [Autumn 1992]: 283). However, K.’s interpretations of individual works seem dated. His critical approach was impressionistic – the impact a work had upon him (T. M. Gang, “Approaches to Beowulf,” Review of English Studies 3.9 [January 1952]: 1–12). Like many of his time, K. took an evolutionary approach to his subject, so he saw Latin literature decaying and disappearing during the Dark Ages, to be replaced by the new, vigorous species of Teutonic heroic poetry that would itself one day degenerate into the chivalric romance. Thus, critics of medieval ro-

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mance largely ignore K.’s observations. Also, K. was trained in the classics, and his preference for Homer’s Iliad was strong, another reason why he favored epic over romance. As D. M. Hill noted (“Romance as Epic,” English Studies 44 [1963]: 95–107), since K. predetermined that romance was debased epic, he misappropriated sections of epics and romances to “prove” romance’s inferiority. Along with Homer, the other arbitrary standard K. used to measure literature was its degree of realism; in this way, K. could connect medieval literature to the Naturalist/Realist novels of his own time (Andersson, 280–81). The first significant dissension from K.’s critical stances came in 1936 when J. R. R. Tolkien took issue with K.’s reading of Beowulf (Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics). K. had maintained that Beowulf was among the weakest of epics because it centered upon Beowulf’s fight with monsters exclusively and only by way of allusion brought in history, personal conflict, and tragedy, which to K. was what made the epic a great genre. K.’s interpretation had become the standard one until Tolkien disagreed in his famous Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics essay, which would reverse critical opinion about the poem. Even still, Tolkien structured his essay by saying, “The chief points with which I feel dissatisfied I will now approach by way of W. P. Ker, whose name and memory I honour” (1936; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 6). Many of K.’s observations still stand and his books are succinct and comprehensive surveys of medieval literature; however, the books seem dated to many readers because of the brevity of his treatments (we now usually expect detailed, complete analyses), the minimal bibliographic references (again, exhaustive bibliographies are the norm), and his impressionistic approach when producing critical evaluations of literature. Select Bibliography Works: The Art of Poetry: Seven Lectures, 1920–1922 (1923; 1967); Collected Essays, 2 vols., ed. Charles Whibley (1925; 1967); The Dark Ages (1904; 1958); Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature, 1897; 1957; Essays on Medieval Literature (1905; 1978); Form and Style in Poetry: Lectures and Notes, ed. R. W. Chambers (1928); Medieval English Literature (1912; 1955); On Modern Literature: Lectures and Addresses, ed. Terence Spencer and James Sutherland (1955). Literature: Theodore M. Andersson, “A Glance back at W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance,” Envoi 3,2 (Autumn 1992): 277–91; R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind: Studies of English Writers, from Bede to A. W. Housman and W. P. Ker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939); B. Ifor Evans, W. P. Ker as a Critic of Literature (Glasgow: Jackson, 1955); J. H. P. Pafford, W. P. Ker, 1855–192: A Bibliography (London: 1950); J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft, 1969).

Barbara Stevenson

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Kibre, Pearl (September 2, 1900(?), Philadelphia – July 15, 1985, New York), American Medievalist. K.’s contribution to research can be recognized in three main areas: the organization of medieval universities, codicology and early printed books, and the study of medieval science and medicine (Edward F. Crantz et al., “Memoires of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America,” Speculum 61 [1986]: 759–69). Most notably, her collaboration with her colleague and mentor, Lynn Thorndike, and their meticulous, empirical assessment of manuscript and print sources, resulted in their important joint publication, Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (1937; rpt. 1963). The impact of the publication, now affectionately referred to as the ‘TK Index,’ was such that it was at once welcomed by the scholarly community, described by one reviewer as “a very precious contribution to the study of the history of science in the middle ages” (Mary Catherine Welborn, “Review of A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin,” Isis 29 [1938]: 140–41); indeed, the Catalogue still is an indispensable reference work for modern students of scientific and medical manuscript culture. Moreover, K.’s individual scholarly publications reflect her lifelong interest in the university, 1200–1500, her contribution to archival and library studies, and her concern with the study of classical and medieval medical practices. K. was the daughter of optometrist Kenneth Kibre and his wife Jane du Pione. The family lived in southern California, where K. attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and matriculated at the southern branch of the University of California, where she was “among a small group of students in the Department of History, founded in 1919” (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900–1985),” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance, 2005, 541–51). K. moved to Berkeley in 1921, receiving a B.A. in History in 1924, and an M.A. in 1925 under the direction of Louis John Paetow (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900–1985),” 543). K. was awarded her doctorate in 1937 from Columbia University, where she was mentored by Lynn Thorndike. She taught thereafter at Hunter College until her retirement in 1971, and she was an active member of the Graduate School at the City University, New York (CUNY) after 1965, also until her retirement. At CUNY, K. helped to foster graduate, particularly doctoral, research in history. She was mentor to some of the most well-known American Medieval and Renaissance scholars, including Nancy Siraisi and Luke Demaitre. In 1972, the Graduate School at CUNY dedicated the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study in recognition of her contribution to

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graduate scholarship (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900–1985),” 542). K. was elected a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, sponsored by Thorndike among others, in 1964; she served as third vice-president (1964–1967) and as President of the Fellows (1975–1976). She was also a member of the U.S. Subcommission for the History of Universities within the International Committee of Historical Sciences, and served on the editorial board of Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. K. was a regular visitor to European research libraries and archives, including the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Vatican Library. In 1976, K. was honored by her colleagues in a commemorative volume of Manuscripta, Science, Medicine and the University, 1200–1500, which was initiated by her former student Nancy G. Siraisi (Edward F. Crantz et al., 761). The volume’s essays, “tied together by their emphasis on manuscript studies” (Vern L. Bullough, “Review of Science, Medicine and the University, 1200–1500: Essays in Honour of Pearl Kibre, by Nancy G. Siraisi,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 [1978]: 203–05) reflect K.’s interest in codicology and book production in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, and is “a fitting tribute to [K.] who retired … in 1971 after thirty-four years service” (Bullough, 204–05). Bullough notes that K.’s first monograph, The Library of Pico della Mirandola (1936) established her reputation as a student of Early Modern books, libraries and collectors. It is for, however, her fruitful collaboration with Thorndike that she will be best remembered amongst medievalists. Revealingly, the authors of the recent Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference (2000) acknowledge their indebtedness to this massive scholarly contribution, stating that their frustration at being unable to easily access catalogued information on scientific and medical writing in Middle English was “compounded by [their] envy of the Thorndike and Kibre Catalogue” (Linda Ersham Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, 2000). Not only did Voigts and Kurtz use TK as their template, endeavouring to produce an electronic reference “providing for the medieval English vernacular the kind of information found in Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre’s A Catalogue,” but they incorporate the work of Thorndike and K. into their electronic database: an appropriate tribute to the close, painstaking and detailed work carried out by K. and her collaborator and published almost sixty years earlier. K.’s exposure to academic texts of medicine and science in Latin undoubtedly prompted her identification of an underdeveloped area of investi-

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gation and, funded by the Medieval Academy of America, she published The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities (1948; rpt. 1962), followed in 1961 by Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages (rpt. 1962), the latter leading to the award of the Haskins Medal, also from the Mediaeval Academy, in 1964 (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900–1985),” 545). A collection of her shorter articles, along with an updated bibliography (xi–xviii), appeared in 1984: Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine. K.’s research into Hippocrates resulted in the appearance of a series of eight scholarly papers – Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages – in the journal Traditio between 1975 and 1982; the series was published in book form just before her death (1985) (Edward F. Crantzet al., “Memoires of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America,” Speculum 61 [1986]: 762). The impact of K.’s collaboration with Thorndike, and the outcome of that partnership, cannot be underestimated; the Catalogue lists more than ten thousand items, many of which had previously been identified. Simply put, it remains one of the most important and reliable resources for students of Medieval science and medicine and, in a fitting acknowledgement of this influential scholarly contribution, work is underway on a digital version of the Catalogue (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre [1900–1985],” 544). K.’s collaborative work, however, did not in any way detract from her individual scholarship, though it is perhaps a result of her close work with Medieval scientific manuscripts, and her frequent trips to European libraries throughout the 1930s, that K. developed her academic interest in classical and Medieval medicine and in library and archival repositories respectively. Her association with Thorndike and Paetow had undoubtedly influenced her intellectually but, interestingly, “[N]either … had done any significant work in the history of medicine, which became one of Kibre’s primary fields of research” (Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900– 1985),” 545). K.’s name has become synonymous with scholarship on the Greek physician Hippocrates, largely due to her impressive series of articles covering the translation and reception of his work in the Latin Middle Ages. K. also combined, as Crantz et al. note, her interest in medicine with her research into the Medieval universities extremely effectively and with some important results (“Memoires of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America,” 762). She produced scholarship on Albertus Magnus, Giovanni Garzoni and Dominicus de Ragus; on women medical practitioners in university circles; and on scholarly privileges at European universities, and in recognition of her work on both medicine and

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the university, K. was invited to address the University of Louvain at its 450th anniversary in 1975, where she gave a lecture titled: “Arts and Medicine in the Universities of the Later Middle Ages,” published in Les universités à la fin du Moyen-Âge, ed. J. Pacquet and J. Ijsewijn, 1978, 213–27). Select Bibliography Works: The Library of Pico della Mirandola (1936; rpt. 1966); with Lynn Thorndike, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (1937; rev. 1963); “The Intellectual Interests Reflected in Libraries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 7 (1946): 257–97; The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities (1948; 1962); “Scholarly Privileges: Their Roman Origins and Medieval Expression,” American Historical Review 59 (1954): 543–67; “Two Alchemical Miscellanies: Vatican Latin MSS 4091, 4092,” Ambix 8 (1960): 167–76; “Giovanni Garzoni of Bologna (1419–1505), Professor of Medicine and Defender of Astrology,” Isis 58 (1967): 504–14; Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris and Oxford (1961–1962); with Lynn Thorndike, “Further Addenda and Corrigenda to the Revised Edition of Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre: A Catalogue of Incipits in Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 1963,” Speculum 43 (1968): 78–114; “Arts and Medicine in the Universities of the Later Middle Ages,” Les universités à la fin du Moyen-Âge, ed. J. Pacquet and J. Ijsewijn, (1978), 213–27; Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine (1984); Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages (1985). Literature: Vern L. Bullough, “Review of Science, Medicine and the University, 1200–1500: Essays in Honour of Pearl Kibre, by Nancy G. Siraisi,” Renaissance Quarterly 31 (1978): 203–05; Edward F. Crantz et al., “Memoires of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America,” Speculum 61 (1986): 759–69; Ronald Doviak, “Pearl Kibre: Bio-Bibliography,” Manuscripta 20 (1976): 244–50; Nancy G. Siraisi, “Pearl Kibre (1902–1985),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 521; Nancy G. Siraisi, Science, Medicine and the University, 1200–1500: Essays on Honour of Pearl Kibre (St Louis: St Louis University Library, 1976); Elspeth Whitney and Irving A. Kelter, “Pearl Kibre (1900–1985),” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 541–51.

Carrie Griffin

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Kittredge, George Lyman (February 28, 1860, Boston, Massachusetts – July 23, 1941, Barnstable, Cape Cod), American Medievalist and Teacher. K. was in many ways one of the first great critics of English literature. Although Victorian scholars and enthusiasts such as F. J. Furnivall, Walter W. Skeat, Henry Bradshaw, Bernhard ten Brink, and others were great scholars, editors, publishers, and popularizers of Medieval English literature, they rarely provided overarching interpretations of the literature in the way that we expect literary scholars to do today. The scholars of K.’s generation were the first to interpret literature rather than simply trace sources, define obscure words, parse confusing lines, or solve manuscript cruxes. K. in many ways bridged the transition: most of his first articles published in Modern Philology, Modern Language Notes or the PMLA were of the older kind of scholarship, but two seminal articles, “Chaucer’s Pardoner” (Atlantic Monthly LXXII, December 1893: 829–33) and “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage” (Modern Philology 9.4 [Spring 1912]: 435–67) put forward arguments that could properly be called interpretations. In these articles, K. first developed the theories of the ‘roadside drama’ and the ‘marriage group,’ which were to dominate Chaucer studies for the first decades of the 20th century, and which had to be ‘answered’ before other interpretations could be proposed. Both are still often incorporated into undergraduate teaching (Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 1999). K. was a scholar at what was, in many ways, a crucial time in the history of English studies. English literary studies were moving from the realm of the gentleman scholar into the universities, and K. himself, being the son of a merchant, exemplified this movement. Having grown up in Barnstable on Cape Cod, at the age of fifteen K. attended Roxbury Latin School. Three years later, he entered Harvard to study classics, graduating in 1883. At Harvard he met Francis James Child, who was to be a formative influence on his life and scholarship. K. then taught Latin for several years at Phillips Exeter School in Exeter, New Hampshire, and on Child’s advice studied in Germany for a year, from 1886–1887. In 1888, K. returned to Harvard to teach English, and became a full professor there in 1895. Over the course of his long career at Harvard, K. taught Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, romances, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and the Bible; he also worked alongside the man who was to produce a lasting edition of Chaucer’s works, Fred N. Robinson. K. was chair of the Division of Modern Languages from 1894–1924 and of Comparative Literature from 1917–1936; in 1917 Harvard

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named K. the first Gurney Professor of English literature. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president in 1904 of the Modern Language Association, honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Although he never wrote a Ph.D., K. was granted honorary doctorates from Harvard (1907), Johns Hopkins (1915), McGill (1921), and Oxford (1932), among others. He retired in 1936. K.’s first scholarship originated in his background in languages. With J. B. Greenough he worked on Latin and English grammars, and published in Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901) a study of English grammar, word formation, and etymology. He also produced school textbooks such as The Mother Tongue (1900). K. also did extensive work with Francis Child on English and American ballads. In 1929, K. published a study on witchcraft in Old and New England, but he is best known for his editions of Shakespeare. In Medieval studies, K. published a wealth of articles on source study and textual details in Chaucer, the Gawain Poet, Malory, Machaut, and others, as well as editing the Latin romance Arthur and Gorgalon (1903) and producing a phonological and folktale-motif study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1916). K. is perhaps best remembered as a great teacher, as argued by Clyde Kenneth Hyder (George Lyman Kittredge: Teacher and Scholar, 1962) and Stuart Sherman (“Kitty” ed. Houston Peterson, Great Teachers 1946). He taught a generation of American Medieval scholars, including F. N. Robinson, J. M. Manly, Carleton Brown, J. S. P. Tatlock, and John Livingston Lowes. It was in attempting to make Medieval poetry accessible to undergraduates that K. developed his approach to literature: close study of the text, demonstration of the importance of individual words and philology, and an emphasis on the dramatic aspects of literature. K. was well known as a Shakespeare scholar, and it may have been this dramatic background that led to his reading of the Canterbury Tales and other Medieval works as essentially psychological and dramatic. In 1914, K. was invited to give a series of lectures on Chaucer at Johns Hopkins University. These lectures were published as Chaucer and his Poetry (1915), a book which became enormously influential in Chaucerian studies. Chaucer and his Poetry outlined K.’s two most important theories: the concept of the ‘roadside drama,’ which considers the stories within the Canterbury Tales as secondary to the dramatic interactions between the pilgrims; and the ‘marriage group’ theory, which maintains that the Wife of Bath initiates a discussion on marriage to which the Clerk, Merchant, and Franklin respond. The concept of the marriage group, especially, spawned a debate that lasted well into the middle of the century (see, among others, John Kenyon,

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“Further Notes on the Marriage Group in the Canterbury Tales,” JEGP 15 [1916]: 282–88; Henry Barrett Hinckley, “The Debate on Marriage in the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 32.2 [1917]: 292–305; Carleton Brown, “The Evolution of the Canterbury ‘Marriage Group’,” PMLA 48 [1933]: 1041–59; C. P. Lyons, “The Marriage Debate in the Canterbury Tales,” English Literary History 2, 1935, 252–62; Germaine Dempster, “A Period in the Development of the Canterbury Tales Marriage Group and of Blocks B2 and C,” PMLA 68 [1953]: 1142–59). Unlike previous scholars of the Canterbury Tales, who tended to focus on the individual tales rather than the links between them, K. insisted that the study of the pilgrims and their interactions was more important than the study of the individual tales, and that the tales existed primarily as expressions of the psychology of their tellers. Chaucer and his Poetry made claims about Chaucer’s writing which were to influence Chaucer studies, in various ways, for most of the 20th century. While few scholars today would advocate a wholehearted adoption of K.’s dramatic principle, such as that used by R. M. Lumiansky in his work Of Sondry Folk (1955), some are still providing attempts to rework the dramatic theory in ways which complement more recent theoretical developments (H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self, 1990; Jeff Henderson, “Chaucer’s Experiment in Narrative Metadrama: The General Prologue as Dramatis Personae,” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 14.1, Spring 1988; John M. Ganim, “Drama, Theatricality and Performance: Radicals of Presentation in the Canterbury Tales,” Drama, Narrative and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding, 2003). Likewise, although the heyday of the ‘Marriage Group’ controversy has passed, people returned to the concept throughout the 20th and into the beginning of the 21st centuries (see, among others, R. E. Kaske, “Chaucer’s Marriage Group,” Chaucer the Love Poet, ed. Jerome Provost et al., 1973; Clair C. Olson, “The Interludes of the Marriage Group in the Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowlandand Lloyd A. Duchemin, 1974; Warren Ginsberg, “The Lineaments of Desire: Wish-Fulfillment in Chaucer’s Marriage Group,” Criticism 25.3 [Summer 1983]: 197–210; Joan G. Haahr, “Chaucer’s ‘Marriage Group’ Revisited: The Wife of Bath and Merchant in Debate,” Acta 14 [1990]: 105–20; Zong-Qi Cai, “Fragments I–II and III–IV in The Canterbury Tales: A Re-Examination of the Idea of the ‘Marriage Group,’” Comitatus 19 [1988]: 80–98; Mari Pakkala-Weckström, “Discourse Strategies in the Marriage Dialogue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105.2 [2004], 153–75); other scholars reject the depiction of the ‘Marriage Group’ in its limited sense as a ‘discussion’ between the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin, but

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nonetheless acknowledge that themes raised by these tales, such as marriage, women’s sovereignty, and gentillesse run throughout the Canterbury Tales (Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 1983). K.’s concept of Chaucer’s audience has been challenged many times, most notably by critics such as C. S. Lewis and D. W. Robertson, who objected to K.’s ahistoricity; nonetheless, K.’s main assumption, that Chaucer’s audience was much like a theatrical audience, watching characters in a play, still has some appeal today, if only because of the vividness of the characters and the drama between them. In his theories about Chaucer as a supreme realist and the Canterbury Tales as a psychological drama, K. would set the stage for the next decades – indeed, in some ways the next century – of Chaucerian criticism. Select Bibliography Works: Chaucer and his Poetry (1915); “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Atlantic Monthly 72 (December 1893): 829–33; “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology 9.4 (Spring 1912): 435–67. Literature: James Thorpe, A Bibliography of the Writings of George Lyman Kittredge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948); Clyde Kenneth Hyder, George Lyman Kittredge: Teacher and Scholar (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1962); B. J. Whiting, “Introduction,” Chaucer and His Poetry: Fifty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970): vii–xxxvi; Elizabeth Jackson, “The Kittredge Way,” College English 4.8 (May 1943): 483–87; Derek Pearsall “Kittredge, George Lyman” Dictionary of American National Biography (New York: OUP 1999), 781–82; Kathleen Cawsey, “George Lyman Kittredge: The Dramatic Reader,” Twentieth-Century Chaucer Studies and Theories of Audience, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto 2006, 32–64.

Kathy Cawsey

Klaeber, Friedrich (Frederick) (October 1, 1863, Beetzendorf, Prussia – October 4, 1954, Naumburg), German-American Medievalist. At the forefront of Beowulfian scholarship in the 20th century and continuing into the 21st has been K. He is most noted for his edition of Beowulf, first published in 1922 by D.C. Heath (with subsequent editions in 1936, 1941, 1950). Yet K.’s scholarly activity extended beyond Beowulf. He authored over three dozen articles in German and English on topics touching on language

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(etymology, dialectal variants, and, as reflected in the preface to his Old English Historical Prose Texts, 1896, spelling reform); on Old English poetry, exclusive of Beowulf (“Emendations in Old English Poems,” 1904, “Die Ältere Genesis und der Beowulf,” 1910, “Zur jüngeren Genesis,” 1926); on comparative studies of Beowulf and other works (“Aeneis und Beowulf,” 1911, “Concerning the Relation Between Exodus and Beowulf,” 1918, “Attila’s and Beowulf’s Funeral,” 1927); and major studies like The Later Genesis, and Other Old English and Old Saxon Texts, Relating to the Fall of Man (1931) and “Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf” (1911/1912), recently translated as The Christian Elements in Beowulf (1996). These and his two-part article “Studies in the Textual Interpretation of Beowulf” (1905/1906) represented material he incorporated, in part or in full, in his editions of Beowulf. A festschrift in his honor corroborates K.’s far-ranging interests in linguistics, metrical and syntactical problems, paleography, and literature from Old English through Shakespeare (Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud, 1929) and contains a bibliography of his works from 1892 to 1929; Martin Lehnert’s tribute to K. on his ninetieth birthday completes K.’s bibliography from 1929 to 1953 (“Friedrich Klaeber zum 90. Geburtstag am 1. Oktober 1953,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2 [1953]). Nurtured in a middle-class cultured Lutheran home in Beetzendorf, Prussia (in the Altmark), K. later attended Schulpforta, the Gymnasium of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Leopold von Ranke, and Friedrich Nietzsche, from 1876 to 1881. He considered his years at Pforta as having been instrumental in shaping his intellectual and ethical discipline. K.’s advanced studies were spent at the universities of Halle, Leipzig, and Kiel, and finally at the University of Berlin, where he worked under the tutelage of Julius Zupitza and Adolf Tobler. Other major figures that influenced his thought were Wilhelm Dilthey and Johann Gustave Droysen. In 1893, after having completed his dissertation, Das Bild bei Chaucer, directed by Zupitza, K. was invited to join the University of Minnesota, swiftly rising from the rank of instructor of Old and Middle English and Gothic to that of professor and head of the Department of English and Comparative Philology, which he founded; he held this post from 1898 until his retirement in February 1931. In 1902, K. traveled to Germany to marry Emma Agnes Charlotte Wahn, who remained his “comrade” (his word) until her death under straitened circumstances during the winter of 1946–1947 at Bad Kösen, a small town in eastern Germany near Naumburg. K. exemplified the expatriate intellectual, speaking in a heavy German accent (though he pronounced English sounds flawlessly) and dressing and

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teaching in a style more consonant with professors at German universities than with that of his American colleagues. Students’ class notes and reminiscences portray a demanding but witty and engaged teacher, with a dedication to promoting the orderliness and scholarly traditions of Germanic philology as practiced in his native Germany. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin for having done so. During his thirty-eight years at Minnesota, K. participated in the activities of the German-American wider intellectual community in the Twin Cities; he was one of the directors of the Germanistische Gesellschaft of St. Paul-Minneapolis and published anthologies of German prose (Deutsche Worte, 1917) and of war poems by German poets (Deutsche Kriegsgedichte, 1915). In the heat of World War I, he published a review article on German war poetry (“Ein neues Blatt deutscher Dichtung,” 1916) in which he claimed that World War I had sparked a literary renaissance among the German people. These activities and his genuine open affection for his native land perhaps caused the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety to bring disloyalty charges against him in 1917, charges which were refuted by Marion L. Burton, president of the university at the time, and from which he was exonerated. K. published extensively; the light of 216 Folwell Hall shone continuously into the early hours; but it was the publication of the first edition of Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg (1922) that brought international recognition to him and to the University of Minnesota. Upon his retirement, K. returned to Germany where (invited by Wilhelm Horn) he joined the University of Berlin as adjunct professor of Anglo-Saxon; ran an advanced seminar on Beowulf; lectured widely at conferences and symposia; published with regularity; and served as the unofficial faculty in residence for the University of Minnesota in Berlin. In Germany, K. identified himself with those German-American intellectuals who had offered much to American culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a number of lectures, he spoke with sensitivity on the dilemma which informs the experience of the immigrant intellectual, pulled by loyalties to two cultures, a psychic condition K. experienced throughout his life. In his native land, he was thought of as a marginal figure, not fully German, not fully American, which affected his standing with the students at Berlin, and in 1941 he found himself in danger of being sent to a concentration camp. He was profoundly affected by the events of World War II. After his home was destroyed during an American bombing raid in 1944, he and his wife fled to her house in Bad Kösen (southwest of Magdeburg), in what was to become the Russian zone. Years of extreme privation and physical pain followed, alleviated from 1945 to his death by the extraordinary generosity of his colleagues and friends

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at the University of Minnesota and in the civic Minneapolis community (Damico, “‘My Teacher of Anglo-Saxon was Frederick Klaeber’: Minnesota and Beyond,” The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal, 1997). A selection from his letters to his American colleagues was published in 1989 (Damico, “Klaeber’s Last Years: Letters from Bad Koesen,” Old English Newsletter 22.2 [1989]). Partially paralyzed, bedridden, and in poverty, K. continued his scholarly activity on the second floor of Berbigstrasse 3, completing his final edition of Beowulf at eighty-seven. K. died on 4 October 1954 in a private clinic in Naumburg and was buried on 8 October 1954 next to Charlotte Klaeber in a cemetery near their home in Bad Kösen. K.’s study on the correspondences between the Aeneid and Beowulf (“Aeneis und Beowulf,” 1911), in part adapted in Tom Burns Haber’s A Comparative Study of the Beowulf and the Aeneid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), offered arguments for classical influences on Beowulf and remains the best work on the subject to date (Theodore M. Andersson, “Sources and Analogues,” The Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997]); his “Attila’s and Beowulf’s Funeral” (1927) reiterates classical influence on the poem; and his “Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf” exemplifies an impeccable and thorough argument for proving his thesis for Christian authorship of Beowulf. But K.’s main contribution rests on his editions of Beowulf, and especially the 1922 edition, wherein he “settled” (his word) the issues of single over multiple authorship, Christian over pagan authorship, and the author’s familiarity with the Aeneid. An example of mature and superior scholarly knowledge and editorial judgment, the 1922 edition marked the beginning of a new type of editing in American scholarship with its breadth of coverage and its insightful interpretations. Its extensive and “complexly constructed glossary,” systematic bibliography, tour-de-force introduction, notes, and contextualization of vocabulary present the poem in the context of Anglo-Saxon culture within a broader Germanic world view. It exemplified high scholarship in the Germanic philological tradition. At its release, scholars from Europe (Ferdinand Holthausen, R.W. Chambers) and America (Albert S. Cook) remarked that it superseded all earlier editions. K.’s industry and scholarly precision continued to be evident in the subsequent 1936, 1941, and 1950 editions, even though these were undertaken in the midst of difficult working conditions brought about by the hostilities of the war years. The first and second supplements (incorporated in the 1950 edition) were first published as articles during the war years and difficult to obtain (Anglia Beiblatt 52 [1941]: 135–37; Beiblatt zur Anglia 54/55 [1944]: 274–80). The 1950 edition reflected

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painstaking scholarly attention in its revised bibliographies, notes, and glossary, and, although K. claimed the introduction was substantially that of the 1936 edition, it remained a “masterpiece” (Wilhelm Horn, “Friedrich K., zum achtzigsten Geburtstag am 1. Oktober 1943,” Archiv 184 [1944]: 1). Later in his ninetieth-birthday tribute to K., Lehnert justly called it the “BeowulfBible of international studies” because for over eighty years, from the first to the 1950 third edition, it had earned the respect and recognition even of scholars from unrelated fields (“Friedrich Klaeber zum 90. Geburtstag am 1. Oktober 1953,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik [1953]: 124). For more than eighty years, K.’s Beowulf has been the touchstone for much Beowulfian scholarship, despite subsequent scholarly German and American editions (Heinrich Ch. Matthes [Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 189/1 (1952): 56–57], one of the many reviews of the 1950 edition). The edition has formed the point of departure for studies contesting or extending K.’s views on single authorship and Christian and classical influences on the poem, too numerous to be listed here, to say nothing of the more recent studies on linguistic and metrical problems (e. g., two of many, Fulk, “Some Contested Readings in the Beowulf Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 56 [2005]; Blockley, “Klaeber’s Relineations of Beowulf and Verses Ending in Words Without Categorical Stress,” Review of English Studies 46 [1995]); his views on kinship (Bloomfield, “The Bourgeois Family in Beowulf: Frederick Klaeber and Sentimental Kinship,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 17.1 [1993]); male sovereignty (Bloomfield, “Benevolent Authoritarianism in Klaeber’s Beowulf: An Editorial Translation of Kingship,” Modern Language Quarterly 60.2 [1999]); and the nature of female sovereignty (Helen Damico, Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, 1984); Bloomfield, “Diminished by Kindness: Frederick Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 [1994]). The 1950 third edition itself is the basis for a revised fourth edition of K.’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Select Bibliography Works: K.’s letters and papers at Minneapolis, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Archives; Atlanta, Georgia, Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff Library. – Das Bild Bei Chaucer. Teil 1. Abschnitt 1: Sammlung der Bilder aus der Tierwelt (1892); Old English Historical Prose Texts (1896); “Emendations in Old English Poems,” Modern Philology 2 (1904): 141–46; “Studies in the Textual Interpretation of Beowulf,” Modern Philology 3.2 (1905): 235–65; and 3.4 (1906): 445–65; “Die Ältere Genesis und der Beowulf,” Englische Studien 42 (1910): 321–38; “Aeneis und Beowulf,” Archiv 126 (1911): 40–48, 339–59; “Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf,” Anglia 35 (1911): 111–36, 249–70, 453–82; 36 (1912):169–99 [trans. as The Christian Elements in Beowulf, trans. Paul Battles. Subsidia 24

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1996]; “Concerning the Relation Between Exodus and Beowulf,” Modern Language Notes 33 (1918): 218–24; Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg (1922; subsequent editions: 1936, 1941, 1950); “Zur jüngeren Genesis,” Beiblatt zur Anglia 49 (1926): 361–75; “Attila’s and Beowulf’s Funeral,” PMLA 42 (1927): 255–67; The Later Genesis, and Other Old English and Old Saxon Texts, Relating to the Fall of Man (1931); “Beowulfian Minora,” Anglia 63 (1939): 400–25. Literature: Mary Blockley, “Klaeber’s Relineations of Beowulf and Verses Ending in Words Without Categorical Stress,” Review of English Studies 46 (1995): 321–32; Josephine Bloomfield, “Benevolent Authoritarianism in Klaeber’s Beowulf: An Editorial Translation of Kingship,” Modern Language Quarterly 60.2 (1999): 129–59; also, “The Bourgeois Family in Beowulf: Frederick Klaeber and Sentimental Kinship,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 17.1 (1993): 34–52, “Diminished by Kindness: Frederick Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 183–203, and “The Canonization of Editorial Sensibility in Beowulf: A Philological and Historical Reassessment of the Klaeber Edition” (Diss. Univ. of California, Davis, 1991, which places the Klaeber edition in the context of 19th-century German tradition of education and scholarship); Helen Damico, “Klaeber’s Last Years: Letters from Bad Koesen,” Old English Newsletter 22:2 (1989): 41–54, and “‘My Teacher of Anglo-Saxon was Frederick Klaeber’: Minnesota and Beyond” [Title partially adapted from a reminiscence of one of Klaeber’s students, Mary Ellen Chase, A Goodly Fellowship (New York, 1939)], The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 73–98; with photographs and figures); R.D. Fulk, “Some Contested Readings in the Beowulf Manuscript,” Review of English Studies 56 (April 2005): 193–223; Martin Lehnert, “Friedrich Klaeber zum 90. Geburtstag am 1. Oktober 1953,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2 (1953): 122–28, which contains a bibliography of K.’s works from 1929 to 1953; Kemp Malone and Martin B. Rudd, Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), which contains a bibliography of K.’s works from 1892 to 1929.

Helen Damico

Klibansky, Raymond (October 15, 1905, Paris, France – August 5, 2005, Montreal, Canada). For the medievalist, K. is best known for his studies examining the continuity of the Platonic tradition in that period: K. helped to create the first published edition of Nicholas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia; he published Meister Eckhart’s Latin works, and he also initiated the Corpus Platonicum medii aevi series. For the political philosopher, K. is better known for his work on John

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Locke, for his work as an advocate of civic freedom, and for his support of the Czech dissident Jan Patocka. K.’s father, Hermann Klibansky, was of Jewish-Lithuanian extraction and worked as a wine exporter. Both parents practiced their Jewish faith and K. described his upbringing as traditional. The family lived in Paris until the outbreak of the First World War, when they were compelled to return to his father’s home in Frankfurt. There, K. attended the prestigious Odenwald school, a progressive school where German intellectuals and writers, such as Thomas Mann, educated their children. In 1923 K. began studying philosophy and classical languages at the University of Heidelberg, where he was instructed by Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, Max Weber’s brother. He eventually became friends with the Weber family. However, his friendship with Ernst Cassirer would prove to be the more formative and enduring influence. Cassirer became K.’s mentor and introduced him to the key personages which would shape his professional life. While staying with the Cassirer family in Hamburg in 1926, K. was introduced to Aby Warburg, who had recently established his library in that city. In 1933 Warburg would move the library to London, at K.’s suggestion, and K. would find refuge and employment there while exiled from Germany during the war. Cassirer also introduced K to the art historian Erwin Panofsky. At the time of their meeting, Panofsky was already engaged in a study of melancholy in the art of Albrecht Dürer. K. expressed interest in the project and offered to research the history of melancholy in ancient and medieval philosophy. Together with Fritz Saxl, who was acting director of the Warburg Institute from 1929–48, Panofsky and K. collaborated on a history of melancholia, which would become one of K.’s most famous publications: Saturn and Melancholy. Although a German edition of the book was completed in 1939, its publication was arrested by the war. After the war, it became clear that an English edition of the book was required, and so the publication was delayed again, until K. could complete a translation in 1964. The last introduction, so to speak, which K. owed to Cassirer was that of Nicholas of Cusa. Cassirer did not introduce Cusa to K. so much as he introduced the conditions which allowed for K.’s research to take shape and receive notice. In 1927, Cassirer published Individuum und Kosmos (in English translation: The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 1964) which devoted two chapters to Cusa’s philosophy and drew attention to Cusa’s overlooked role as a pivotal figure. Shortly after the book was issued, the publisher Felix Meiner agreed to support a critical edition of Cusa’s complete works. Ernst Hoffmann, professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, was enlisted in the project. Hoffmann was K.’s thesis director,

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supervising the latter’s thesis on 12th-century Platonism. Interestingly, Hoffmann was acting supervisor to Paul Oskar Kristellar at the same time. K.’s role in the critical edition of Cusa’s works was likely suggested by Cassirer, rather than by Hoffmann. After the publication of Individuum und Kosmos, K. had insisted to Cassirer that a textual edition of Cusa’s works was needed and that such an edition would only be useful to scholars if it contained an apparatus addressing both sources and manuscript variations. In the Cusa project, K. was assigned to these two tasks: he was asked to create the textual fontus and to draft the stemma of extant manuscripts. The textual fontus which K. created for Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia drew largely from his doctoral research on 12th-century Platonism. The manuscript research for the project required him to visit archives across Europe, and in the course of these visits, he made additional discoveries concerning Meister Eckhart’s Latin works. K. and Hoffmann set to work formatting the first two volumes of the Opera Omnia. In 1932, the text editions of the first two volumes, Apologie Doctae Ignorantiae and De Docta Ignorantia, were both published. In that same year, 1932, K. devised an outline for a critical edition of Meister Eckhart’s writings drawing upon the discoveries of his archival expeditions. Between 1934 and 1936, he published two articles on Eckhart’s Latin works, which highlighted Eckhart’s use of Jewish and Arabic sources. This was a daring political statement. At the time, Eckhart was used as a propaganda piece for German nationalism. The article presented K.’s own defiant response to this ultra-nationalist ideology, by demonstrating that there was nothing “purely Aryan” about Eckhart’s thought. Shortly after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, K. left Germany and arrived in London penniless. He was supported by the Academic Assistance Council, thanks in part to Etienne Gilson, who had recommended K. Gilson described him as “one of the four or five greatest academics in the world of medieval philosophy.” In 1934, K. became an honorary lecturer at King’s College London. In 1939 he published The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages, which outlined his plans for the Corpus Platonicum medii aevi series. However, the editions of the series were delayed as K. worked as a British intelligence officer during the war. In 1946, K. was invited to become an honorary member of the department of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He became increasingly interested in philosophy as an instrument of tolerance and peace, believing that it might become an international language for uniting the world community. He established a series entitled “Philosophy and the World Community” which featured texts advocating a philosophy of justice and peace. Later in life, he became interested in John Locke and David

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Hume, publishing a critical edition of John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1962). K.’s editions of Cusa’s and Eckhart’s works were pioneering, not only because they made these works widely available, but also because they were extraordinarily thorough, being based upon all extant manuscripts and including a detailed apparatus documenting possible sources. The American Cusanus Society celebrated K.’s foundational role in Cusanus research, dedicating its 2004 newsletter to his life’s achievements. While K.’s influence is most palpable in Cusanus studies, his contribution to the broader study of medieval Platonism cannot be overlooked. K.’s The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages, 1939, outlined a history of Platonic thought in the medieval period and identified two currents in this history: an indirect tradition, extending from commentaries on late ancient authors, such as Boethius and Macrobius, who had assimilated Platonic notions; and a direct tradition extending from Latin translations of Plato’s works, such as the Timaeus, the Meno and the Phaedo. Stephen Gersh’s Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition, 2 vols., 1986, outlined in greater detail the Platonic doctrine of this “indirect” tradition of late ancient authors. He also questioned K.’s claims for a “direct” Platonic tradition, noting that the translation and accompanying commentary significantly alter the original. Peter Dronke’s work on 12th-century intellectual culture extended K.’s initial investigations of Chartrian authors. Dronke has illustrated the pervasive influence of Platonic thought in the literature and philosophy of this period (Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, 1974; A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, 1988) and suggested its influence for later writers (Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions, 1986). Werner Beierwaltes’s study of Neoplatonic metaphysics in early Christian authors, medieval German philosophy, and German Idealism has investigated in detail K.’s intuition that the tension between rationalism and mysticism found in Shelling and Hegel could be traced to an earlier tradition in Eckhardt and Cusa. Though K.’s research engaged the philosophy of a distant period, the questions he pursued remained deeply engaged with the problems of his own times. An obituary in the Montreal paper, Le Devoir, aptly described him as “Le savant, le juste, le témoin” – a learned man, a just man, and a witness of history. Select Bibliography Works: Nicolai de Cusa. Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, ed. R. K. (1932), vol. 2 of Opera Omnia; Nicolai de Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, ed. R. K. and Ernst Hoffmann (1932), vol. 1 of Opera Omnia; Magister Eckhard. fasc. I: Super oratione dominica, ed. R. K. (1934);

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Opera Latina Magistri Eckardi; Magister Eckhard, fasc. XIII: Quaestiones Parisienses, ed. Antonius Dondaine O.P. and Raymond K. (1936); Opera Latina Magistri Eckardi; The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939); Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Religion, Art and Natural Philosophy, ed. Erwin Panofsky, R. K., and Fritz Saxl (1964). Literature: Morimichi Watanabe, “The Origins of Modern Cusanus Research in Germany and the Foundation of the Heidelberg Opera Omnia,” Nicholas of Cusa: In Search of God and Wisdom, ed. Gerard Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 17–42; Le philosophe et la mémoire du siècle. Tolerance, liberté et philosophie. Entretiens avec Georges Leroux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998); Martin Thurner, “Raymond Klibansky,” American Cusanus Society Newsletter 21 (2004): 17–32; Martin Thurner, “Raymond Klibansky (1905),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 255–70; Jill Kraye, “Obituary: Professor Raymond Klibansky,” The Independent, November 3, 2005; Georges Leroux, “Raymond Klibanksy (1905–2005) – Le Savant, le juste, le témoin,” Le Devoir August 13–14, 2005, http://www.ledevoir.com/2005/08/13/88152.htmlhaut_ de_page.

Sarah Powrie

Kuhn, Hugo Bernhard (July 20, 1909, Thaleischweiler, Palatinate – October 5, 1978, Prien am Chiemsee, Bavaria), German Literary Medievalist. K. conducted research on narrative structures, the historical uses and functions of medieval texts, especially of German Minnesang, as well as on genre theory and genres of the High and Late Middle Ages. His research inspired numerous works on narrative structure and fictionality in courtly romance and epic. K.’s monograph and essays on Minnesang continue to be regarded as fundamental. Furthermore, his theory on the performative dimension of medieval literature has been very influential in German medieval studies. K. was born in the Palatinate, Germany, as the son of a Pietist preacher. After the family had moved via Landau to Breslau, he attended Breslau’s St. Maria Magdalena Gymnasium. K. studied protestant theology, philosophy, mathematics, and art history at the University of Breslau from 1929–1932, and philosophy and German philology with Paul Kluckhohn and Hermann Schneider at the University of Tübingen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1935 with a thesis on Walther von der Vogelweide’s Kreuzzugslied and Preislied, and

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his Habilitation in 1939 with a thesis on 13th-century German Minnesang, which resulted in his book Minnesangs Wende (The Turn of Minnesang), 1952, 2nd ed. 1967. After serving in the Second World War, during which he was wounded, K. first became Privatdozent (1944), then professor (1947) at the University of Tübingen. In 1954, he was appointed professor at the University of Munich where he taught medieval German language and literature until shortly before his death in 1978. He held visiting professorships at the universities of Sidney and Melbourne (1959/60) and at the University of Texas at Austin (1970). As the founder and chair of the Kommission für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters (Commission for German Literature of the Middle Ages) at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities), as co-editor of its prestigious series Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Munich Texts and Studies on Medieval German Literature), as general editor of the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek (Library of Old German Texts), and as co-editor of one of the most important German humanities periodicals, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, K. was among the figures shaping post-war German Medieval Studies. His students went on to become professors at the universities of Bonn, Bremen, Erlangen, Munich, Regensburg, Siegen, Tübingen, the University of California at San Diego, and at Princeton and Yale. K.’s life and achievements have found renewed critical attention in the wake of the heightened interest in the history of the discipline, especially in a book chapter by Wachinger (“Hugo Kuhn und die Münchener Akademiekommission für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters,” Das Mittelalter und die Germanisten: Zur neueren Methodengeschichte der Germanischen Philologie, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz, 1998, 33–48), who emphasizes the role K. played in establishing the influential Kommission für deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters, and in Haug’s short intellectual biography (“Hugo Kuhn (1909–1978),” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Porträts, ed. Christoph König, HansHarald Müller, and Werner Röcke, 2000, 257–72), in which he stresses K.’s “extraordinary charisma” (260) and characterizes his thinking as both concrete and demandingly abstract at the same time (261 and passim). K.’s oeuvre is dominated by his shorter pieces, written in a dense and allusive, sometimes hermetic style. Most of his shorter contributions are collected in the three volumes Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter (Literature and the World in the Middle Ages), 1959; Text und Theorie (Text and Theory), 1969; Liebe und Gesellschaft (Love and Society), 1980. They do not form a systematic theory of medieval literature but identify and describe various determining factors of medieval culture, such as the narrative structure as a device to generate meaning; the functionality (Gebrauchsfunktion) of medieval art; medieval lit-

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erature as a performative form (Vollzugsform, Aufführungsform); and the significance of the performance context (Aufführungssituation) for an understanding of medieval literature. In his 1948 article “Erec” (rpt. in Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter, 133–50), K. elucidated a basic structural pattern of Arthurian romance, the double cycle (doppelter Kursus), an intricate bipartite structure of parallels and contrasts that conveys an inherent meaning of the work: in this perspective, the quest of the Arthurian knight becomes one for the right balance between love and desire on the one hand and chivalric action as well as duty toward society on the other. In his 1973 paper “Tristan – Nibelungenlied – Artusstruktur” (“Tristan – Nibelungenlied – Arthurian Structure”; rpt. in Liebe und Gesellschaft, 12–35), K. sketched out a genre-surpassing theory of medieval narrative schematism and the various complex reactions to it in medieval vernacular epic. Both the significance of the double cycle and the more general idea that courtly romances discuss matters of aristocratic selfdefinition by way of narrative structure became generally accepted theorems in German medieval studies. Equally influential were K.’s works on medieval literature as performative form, exemplified by vernacular love poetry, Minnesang. K. was one of the first scholars in Germany who not only pleaded for an integration of the performance context (Aufführungssituation) into any attempt at interpreting Minnesang (“Minnesang als Aufführungsform” [“Minnesang as Performative Form”], 1968, rpt. in Text und Theorie, 182–90), but also, from his early writings on, defined medieval art as a performative or ‘consummative’ form (Vollzugsform) in a broader sense. Requiring active ‘consummation’ by its recipients, this art form is realized in a cult-like, performative mode that, according to K., can be traced in medieval architecture as well as in medieval love song and other genres of literature and music (first fully developed in “Zur Deutung der künstlerischen Form des Mittelalters” [“On the Interpretation of the Medieval Art Form”], 1949, rpt. in Dichtung und Welt, 1–14). The significance of K.’s work lies not only in these theoretical and at times speculative pieces on medieval epic, love poetry, and other art, but also in his ground-breaking reassessment of established notions of epigonality in his monograph study on late German Minnesang, Minnesangs Wende, which paved the way for a re-evaluation of the formalist later Minnesang and for overcoming old value judgments on 13th-century poetry and epic. K.’s structural model of Arthurian romance was canonized and further developed by Kurt Ruh (Höfische Epik I: Von den Anfängen bis Hartmann von Aue, 1967, 2nd ed. 1977, 115–41), Hans Fromm (“Doppelweg,”Werk – Typ – Situation: Festschrift Hugo Kuhn, ed. Ingeborg Glier, 1969, 64–79), Christoph Cormeau (Hartmann von Aue. Epoche – Werk – Wirkung, 1985, 2nd ed. 1993, 174–93), Walter Haug (articles on Hartmann and Wolfram rpt. in Strukturen als Schlüs-

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sel zur Welt, 1989, and Brechungen auf dem Weg zur Individualität, 1995, as well as Vernacular Theory in the Middle Ages, 1997, 91–106), and many others. As late as in 1999, the volume Erzählstrukturen in der Artusliteratur, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel, attests the impact and value of this model. At the same time, scholars have criticized the notion of the Arthurian double cycle for its reductive tendency and its suppression of textual detail (esp. Elisabeth Schmid, “Weg mit dem Doppelweg,” Erzählstrukturen in der Artusliteratur, ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel, 1999, 69–85). The concept of Minnesang as a performative form (Aufführungsform) proved to be equally inspiring and was taken up with necessary corrections and reformulations by Peter Strohschneider (esp. “Aufführungssituation,” Kultureller Wandel und die Germanistik in der Bundesrepublik, vol. 3, ed. Johannes Janota, 1993, 56–71), who added a procedural and communicative aspect to K.’s static notion of the performance context. Its prevalence is also attested in various contributions in the volumes ‘Aufführung’ und ‘Schrift’ in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jan-Dirk Müller, 1994, and Text und Handeln: Zum kommunikativen Ort von Minnesang und antiker Lyrik, ed. Albrecht Hausmann, 2004. Select Bibliography Works: For a full list of K.’s publications, see: Hugo Kuhn, Liebe und Gesellschaft, ed. Wolfgang Walliczek (1980), 199–216. – Minnesangs Wende (1952, 2nd ed. 1967). – K.’s shorter essays are collected in three volumes of Kleine Schriften: Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter (1959, 2nd ed. 1969); Text und Theorie (1969); Liebe und Gesellschaft, ed. Wolfgang Walliczek (1980); and in Entwürfe zu einer Literatursystematik des Spätmittelalters, ed. Burghart Wachinger (1980). Literature: Walter Haug, “Hugo Kuhn, 1909–1978”, DVjS 52 (1978), [no pag.; 7pp. after 526]; Hans Fromm, “Hugo Kuhn, 20. 7. 1909–5. 10. 1978,” Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1979, 240–47; Norbert H. Ott, “Kuhn, Hugo,” NDB, vol. 13 (1982), 261–63; Burghart Wachinger, “Hugo Kuhn und die Münchener Akademiekommission für Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters,” Das Mittelalter und die Germanisten: Zur neueren Methodengeschichte der Germanischen Philologie, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz (Freiburg/Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1998), 33–48; Walter Haug, “Hugo Kuhn (1909–1978),” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik in Porträts, ed. Christoph König, Hans-Harald Müller, and Werner Röcke (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2000), 257–72; “Kuhn, Hugo Bernhard,” IGL, vol. 2 (2003), 1033–35.

Markus Stock

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Kuhn, Sherman M. (September 15, 1907, Alexandria, South Dakota – January 7, 1991, Ann Arbor, Michigan), American English Philologist. K. was one of the foremost American scholars of Old and Middle English of his time. His incisive articles, careful editorial work, and contributions to the Middle English Dictionary (MED) ensure his reputation. K. also had a reputation as a meticulous and demanding teacher. But his contributions to the MED are his most important contributions to medieval studies; it is safe to say that the MED would never have been completed if not for K.’s work. K. was born on September 15, 1907 in South Dakota, and was the son of a Presbyterian minister. His father seems to have switched parishes frequently, and K. therefore moved fairly often growing up, spending time in several states and also in Canada (where his father was homesteading at the time). K. attended Dubuque University in Iowa and then in 1929 received a B.A. from Park College in Missouri. After completing his undergraduate degree, K. taught high school English in Illinois, while attending the University of Chicago in the summers. He received an M.A. in American literature from Chicago in 1933 and a Ph.D. in English linguistics from the same institution, for a dissertation on the Mercian dialect of Old English, A Grammar of the Mercian Dialect (1935, published in 1938). K.’s first university teaching appointment was at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University); K. taught there from 1935 until 1948, with the exception of an eighteen month stint as a cryptographer in the United States Army during the latter stages of World War II. In 1948, at the instigation of Hans Kurath, he left Oklahoma for the University of Michigan, where he was associate professor of English and associate editor of the MED. At Michigan, Kuhn taught courses in Old and Middle English language and literature, Old Irish, Old Norse, lexicography, and paleography. He became full professor of English in 1955 and editor of the MED in 1961, after Kurath retired. K. retired from Michigan in 1983, but remained professionally active for a number of years thereafter. He received a number of honors during his career, including a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award (one of five awarded per year) from Michigan in 1983. He was a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Dictionary Society of North America. A volume of his selected writings appeared in 1984. Kuhn died on January 7, 1991. K.’s contributions to Medieval Studies fall into three main categories. The first of these is of course his scholarship. Much of K.’s research, from his doctoral dissertation onward, focused on Old English. Important publi-

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cations in this area include works on the Old English Corpus Glossary (“The Dialect of the Corpus Glossary,” PMLA 54 [1939]: 1–19); the phonemic system of Old English (“On the Syllabic Phonemes of Old English,” Language 37 [1961]: 522–38); semantic patterns in Middle English (“Middle English don and maken: Some Observations on Semantic Patterns,” American Speech 52 [1977]: 5–18), and two articles on Old English digraphs, co-authored with Randolph Quirk(“Some Recent Interpretations of Old English Digraph Spellings,” Language 29 [1953]: 143–56; and “The Old English Digraphs: A Reply,” Language 31 [1955]: 390–401). K. also worked extensively on the Vespasian Psalter; he wrote several articles on the text (e. g., “The Vespasian Psalter and the Old English Charter Hands,” Speculum 18 [1943]: 458–83), and prepared an edition of the work, The Vespasian Psalter (1965). A follow-up volume to this work, containing an introduction, notes, and so on, remained incomplete at his death. K.’s edition was praised for the care and accuracy used in its compilation, although some reviews criticized Kuhn for some of his editorial decisions (e. g. K. came under fire for his decision to number the verses of the text according to their divisions in the manuscripts, and not according to their divisions in the Vulgate, as previous editions had). Beyond his scholarship, K. also contributed extensively to the field as an editor. While serving as associate editor of the MED, K. worked closely with Hans Kurathto develop the editorial plan for the MED, which had languished for a number of years before his arrival; the first volume, with Kurath as editor and K. as associate editor, Middle English Dictionary. Part 1, e to endelonges, appeared in1952. After taking over as editor in 1961, K. revised the editing plan extensively, leading to a greater systemization and regularization, and, in the minds of some, a higher level of quality than can be found in some of the earlier fascicles. K. was involved with the preparation of sixtyseven of the fascicles, both as associate editor and as editor; during his editorship, the letters G through P were completed. (K. described the process at length in his article “On the Making of the Middle English Dictionary,” Dictionaries 4 [1982]: 14–41. Even in his last year as editor, when sickness forced him to remain at home for over four months, K. was actively involved in the editorial process. The results have been praised by numerous scholars of medieval English. Finally, K.’s service to the profession must not be forgotten. In addition to his time as editor of the MED and his teaching and training of students, K. was closely connected with the Medieval Academy of America, serving on the Academy’s Nominating Committee in 1973–1974 and on the editorial board of Speculum, the Society’s journal, from 1967 to 1970. His achievements speak for themselves.

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Select Bibliography Literature: Celia Sisam, “Review of The Vespasian Psalter, edited by Sherman M. Kuhn,” The Review of English Studies [N.S.] 18 (1967): 179–180; John H. Fisher et al., “Sherman M. Kuhn,” Speculum 66 (1991): 721–22; Robert E. Lewis, “In Memoriam: Sherman McAllister Kuhn (1907–91),” OEN 24 (1991): 10.

Marc Pierce

Kurath, Hans (December 13, 1891, Villach, Austria – January 2, 1992, Ann Arbor, Michigan), American Dialectologist and Lexicographer. K. remains one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. He is best known for his work on dialectology; he profoundly influenced the practice of dialectology in North America, through the application of Neogrammarian ideas about sound change to questions of dialect geography. However, he also contributed heavily to medieval studies through his work on the Middle English Dictionary (MED), serving as its editor from 1946 to 1962. K. was born in Villach, Austria on December 13, 1891, and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on January 2, 1992. He left Austria for the United States in 1907, and became an American citizen in 1912. K. attended the GermanAmerican Teachers Seminar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as well as the University of Wisconsin, before receiving an A.B. degree from the University of Texas in 1914. During his time in Wisconsin, K. came under the influence of Eduard prokosch, the well-known Germanic linguist. prokosch proved to be tremendously influential in K’s life; K. followed prokosch to Texas, and they remained close until Prokosch’s death in 1938. (K. eventually married Prokosch’s daughter Gertrude, in fact.) In 1920, K. was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1920, for a dissertation entitled The Semantic Sources of the Words for the Emotions in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic Languages, supervised by Carl Darling buck. K.’s dissertation does not fit very well with the rest of his published work; its topic was apparently selected by buck, who at the time was preparing his monumental work on Indo-European synonyms. While at Chicago, K. also studied with Francis A. wood, a prominent Germanic linguist of the time. From 1914–1916, and then again from 1917–1919, K. taught German at the University of Texas. In 1920, he accepted a similar position at Northwestern University, and

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remained there until 1927, when he left for Ohio State University. At Ohio State he was Professor of German and Linguistics; during his time there, he was also appointed Director of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States (in 1930). Shortly thereafter, in 1931, K. accepted a position at Brown University. He taught at Brown until 1946; he served as Professor of Germanics and Linguistics and as chair of the Department of German and the Division of Modern Languages there. In 1946 he left Brown for the University of Michigan, where he was Professor of English and Editor of the MED (replacing Thomas A. Knott, who had died in 1945, in the latter position). Officially he retired from Michigan in 1962, but he remained active in the profession long thereafter. K. received a number of scholarly honors. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, as well as the University of Michigan Press Book Award in 1972 for the MED (he shared this honor with his successors as editor of the MED) and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement award from the University of Michigan in 1961. He was the recipient of a Festschrift edited by Harald Scholler and John Reidy, Lexicography and Dialect Geography. Festgabe für Hans Kurath (1973). K. was also deeply involved with the Linguistic Society of America. He served as president of the Society in 1942 and directed its summer Linguistic Institutes from 1947 to 1950. Moreover, the December 1961 issue of Language, the society’s flagship journal, was dedicated to him on the occasion of his retirement. K.’s scholarly reputation rests on his achievements in two fields: dialectology and lexicography. As noted above, K. directed the Linguistic Atlas of the United States, which resulted in publications like K.’s Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England (1939) and the Linguistic Atlas of New England (1939–1943), which was prepared by K. and a team of experts. K. also published a number of other significant works in this area, including “American Pronunciation” (Society for Pure English Tract XXX [1928]: 279–297), Studies in Area Linguistics (1972), and, together with Raven I. McDavid, Jr., The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961). The first of these publications is notable for being one of the first scholarly projects to defend the idea of “American English”; it also brought K. to the attention of other American scholars interested in dialectology, and eventually led to his selection as director of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States. A number of fieldworkers who were trained or supervised by K. later made their own significant contributions to the field, and the data collected under his direction remains useful today. As for his lexicographical work, the MED is a major work of medieval studies. The first fascicles (Middle English Dictionary. Part 1, e to endelonges)

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appeared in 1952, edited by K. The work was completed in 2001, and can be accessed electronically, along with various other Middle English resources, at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Beyond the MED and related publications like Middle English Dictionary: Plan and Bibliography (1954), K. published relatively little on medieval topics, although his paper on consonantal developments in Middle English (“The Loss of Long Consonants and the Rise of Voiced Fricatives in Middle English,” Language 32 [1956]: 435–45) remains a classic in the field. Ironically, in light of its overwhelmingly positive reception, K.’s appointment as director of the MED project was not universally welcomed, due to his lack of training in both medieval studies and lexicography. It has been suggested recently that K. was in fact not chosen for his scholarly achievements in medieval studies, but instead because his work on the Linguistic Atlas of the United States had showcased his administrative abilities, and the University of Michigan, who was financially sponsoring the MED, wanted someone who would push the project along towards completion. (At the time K. was hired at Michigan, the university had sponsored the MED for fifteen years, but none of it had been published in that time.) K. was indeed able to do so, and to overcome his lack of training in medieval studies through hard work. His contributions to the Middle English Dictionary (hereafter MED) speak for themselves and merit his inclusion in this handbook. Select Bibliography Works: Additional works: “The Origin of the Dialectal Differences in Spoken American English,” MP 25 (1928): 385–95; “A Specimen of Ohio Speech,” Language 6 (1930): 92–101; “New England Words for the Seesaw,” AS 8 (1933): 14–18; “Folk Song and Folk Speech,” AS 20 (1945): 122–125; “The Binary Interpretation of English Vowels: A Critique,” Language 33 (1957): 111–22; “Some Questions of English Phonology: A Reply,” Language 34 (1958): 259–60; “Phonemics and Phonics in Historical Phonology,” AS 36 (1961): 93–100; “English Sources of Some American Regional Words and Verb Forms,” AS 45 (1970): 60–68; The Dialectical Structure of Southern England: Phonological Evidence (1970; co-authored with Guy S. lowman, Jr.). Literature: Raven I. McDavid, Jr., “Hans Kurath,” Orbis 9 (1960): 597–610; Sherman Kuhn, “On the Making of the Middle English Dictionary,” Dictionaries 4 (1982): 14–41; Richard W. Bailey, “Hans Kurath,” Language 68 (1992): 797–808; Michael Adams, “Phantom Dictionaries: The Middle English Dictionary Before Kurath,” Dictionaries 23 (2002): 95–114.

Marc Pierce

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Kuttner, Stephan (March 24, 1907, Bonn – August 12, 1996, Berkeley), Canon Lawyer. Although K. published two books in addition to his dissertation and seven substantial articles before he reached the age of thirty, and continued to publish until his death, K.’s major contribution to his subject was to engender and direct a virtually new subfield of textual scholarship that transformed the modern study of medieval canon law. Beginning with the Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140–1234), Studi e testi, vol. 71 (1937), which demonstrated the extent of surviving but unpublished and inaccessible canonistic material from the period between Gratian and Gregory IX’s decretals, he began a program of research and scholarship which resulted in the creation of the Institute of Research and Study in Medieval Canon Law. This organization was to serve as the coordinating vehicle for the Monumenta iuris canonici (MIG), designed to publish critical editions of medieval canonistic texts, both collections (Corpus collectionum) and glosses (Corpus glossatorum), as well as modern studies of those texts (Subsidia). This continuing work began in 1965 with the appearance of the first volume of the Subsidia. The Institute’s work is chronicled in the Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law (BMCL), of which the first ten issues appeared in Traditio, cofounded by K., and which since 1970 has continued as an independent annual. K. was born of a family of Jewish ancestry, but brought up in the Lutheran observance. He studied in Frankfurt, Freiburg and Berlin, receiving from the latter the J.U.D. in 1930 with his thesis, “Die juristische Natur der falschen Beweisaussage.” That same year he began manuscript study in Rome. In 1932 he converted to Roman Catholicism, and the next year, having married Eva Illch, K. emigrated to Italy. In 1934 he was appointed by Pius XI research associate of the Vatican Library in charge of preparing a comprehensive corpus glossarum of medieval canon law. From 1937 to 1940 he served as Associate Professor of the history of sources at the Pontifical Institute of the Two Laws at the Lateran. With the aid of the church, in 1940 the Kuttners fled Europe for the U.S.A., where K. served first as visiting professor (1940–1942), then as professor of the history of canon law (1942–1964) at Catholic University of America. Subsequently he served as the first T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Yale University (1964–1970), and as director of the Robbins Collection in Roman and Canon Law in the Law School, University of California, Berkeley (1970–1988), where he continued to live as professor emeritus of law until his death. In 1967, he was appointed by Pope Paul VI to the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law.

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It has been widely suggested that the breadth and depth of K.’s knowledge and scholarship in his field was unrivalled by any lay canonist since the 14th century. His doctoral thesis concentrated on oaths and perjury and suggested the importance of medieval foundations to modern jurisprudence. His 1935 Kanonistische Schuldlehre, von Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX established a trend in his work not only to illuminate concepts through careful textual analysis, but to do so with a new body of sources, often unprinted. In major articles published in Traditio, he used the same technique for the early glossators (1943), the concept “cardinalis” (1945), and [with Eleanor Rathbone] for 12th-century Anglo-Norman canonists (1949). From 1950 on, a multitude of shorter essays, notes, articles, papers and reviews comprised the bulk of K.’s publications, along with several collaborative editions and a final book with Robert Sommerville, Pope Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi (1089) (1996). The breadth and depth of his vision of canon law and its relevance to a modern world was eloquently expressed in Harmony from Dissonance: An Interpretation of Medieval Canon Law, Wimmer Lecture X, 1956 (1960). James A. Brundage, in Medieval Canon Law (1955), in the introduction to his select bibliography, states quite simply: “A single individual, Stephan Kuttner, has towered over the study of Medieval canon law in the twentieth century.” The reason is not difficult to fathom. The Repertorium, together with the MIC and the BMCL, represent the foundations of current scholarship in the field, while the Institute, renamed the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law in 1996, and relocated to Munich when K. stepped down as president in 1991, remains the preeminent institution in its field. Given the extent of his writings, his many articles, papers, etc., are frequently cited on issues as diverse as terminology, etymology, manuscript dating, as well as more general issues of legal history. The major weakness in K.’s grand schema was his omission in the Repertorium of record material from medieval ecclesiastic courts, publication of which has accordingly lagged behind canonical collections and commentary. The length of his career and the scope of his influence are evidenced by the four Festschriften for K.: 1. Collectanea Stephan Kuttner, ed. Giuseppe Forchielli and Alphons M. Stickler, Studia Gratiana 11–14 (1967); 2. Church, Law and Society. Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Robert Somerville (1977); 3. Festgabe zum 75. Geburtstag von Stephan Kuttner (1982); 4. The Two Laws. Studies in Medieval Legal History Dedicated to Stephan Kuttner, ed. Laurent Mayali and Stephanie A.J. Tibbets (1990). The Kuttner Institute maintains a complete Bibliography of K. on-line at: http://www.kuttner-institute.jura.unimuenchen.,de/bibliography_ kuttner.htm.

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Select Bibliography Books: Kanonistische Schuldlehre von Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX. Systematisch auf Grund der handschriftlichen Quellen dargestellt (1935); Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140–1234); Prodromus Corporis Glossarum 1 (1937; rpt. 1973, 1981); [with Robert Somerville] Pope Urban II, the Collectio Britannica, and the Council of Melfi 1089 (1996). Collected Essays: History of Ideas and Doctrines of Canon Law in the Middle Ages (1980; 2nd ed. 1993), 11 papers from 1936–1976, with Retractationes; Medieval Councils, Decretals, and Collections of Canon Law (1980), 13 papers, 1933–1976, with Retractationes; Gratian and the Schools of Law, 1140–1234 (1983; 2nd ed. 1994), 10 papers, 1934–1952, with Retractationes; Studies in the History of Medieval Canon Law (1990), 18 articles, 1937–1988, with Retractationes. Editions: [with J.D. Hannan] Decreta septem priorum sessionum Concilii Tridentini sub Paulo9 III Pont. Max. Ex autographo Angeli Massarelli (codice Morganiano ms. A.225A NeoEboracensi) hic phototypice recuso (1945); “Addenda,” Seminar 6 (1948): 72–76; [with G. Fransen]; Summa ‘Elegantius iniure divino’ seu Coloniensis (I: 1976, II: 1978, III: 1986, IV: 1990). MIC, Series A, I, 1. Literature: Manlio Bellomo, “Stephan Kuttner: l’uomo, lo studioso,” RIDC 7 (1996): 9–12; Peter Landau, “Stephan Kuttner’s wissenschaftliches Werk,” RIDC 7 (1996): 13–20; Robert Brentano, Robert Somerville, Brian Tierney, and Thomas N. Bisson, “Stephan Kuttner,” Speculum 72 (1997): 929–31; Marquis Who’s Who (2006).

Scott L. Taylor

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L

Lachmann, Karl (Carl) Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm (April 3, 1793, Braunschweig – March 13, 1851, Berlin), leading 19th-century German Philologist and Linguist. L. remains both a point of departure and contention in the area of textual criticism, particularly the production of modern editions of ancient and Medieval works through the analysis and incorporation of the available corpus of manuscripts of a given text. The Lachmann Method, as commonly referred to today, does not appear as a single cohesive proposition but rather unfolds in the prefaces to critical editions, letters, and essays, as in “Ausgaben classischer Werke darf jeder nachdrucken: Eine Warnung für Herausgeber” (1841). The method developed over time as L. defined and refined it with each new edition. The method is also identified as stemmatics or stemmology and involves tracing a manuscript tradition back to an existing or supposed original, a hyperarchetype. This process of identifying the archetype is called the recension (recensio) and the next step is the selection (selectio), in which the dominant variant within a manuscript stemma or family tree, is established. The examination (examinatio) follows and corruptions are identified. The correcting of errors, the emendation (emendatio/divinatio) comprises the final and most controversial stage in the Lachmann Method. L. himself developed his method in response to emendatio or conjectural criticism but still accepted it as a necessary part of the process after the scientific steps had been taken. His goal was to remove as much as possible the interpretation of the editor from the reproduction of ancient texts, as expressed in his famous and oft quoted dictum “Recensere sine interpretation possumus et debemus” (We should and must evaluate the manuscripts without interpretation). With his classical editions, particularly the Novum testamentum Graece, L. establishes a minimalist approach to manuscript editions, relying on very few manuscripts, seeking out the oldest of these and insisting on absolute adherence to the manuscript text with little or no changes. For texts in the medieval German vernacular, L. pioneered and established the critical tradition and relied, to a certain extent, on conjectural practices to a greater degree than for classical philology. Aside from being considered one of the

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founders of modern Textual Criticism, L. also formulated a linguistic rule. In his most acclaimed work, In T. Lucretii Cari de Rerum Natura Libros Commentarius (1850), L. formulated a phonological law regarding the lengthening of vowels preceding voiced stops in Latin, which is still being refined and debated among linguists, such as Klaus Strunk, in his Lachmanns Regel für das Lateinische – Eine Revision (1976). The only child of Karl Ludolf Friedrich Lachmann (1756–1823) and Julie von Löben, who died in 1795 when L. was only two years old, L. was educated by his father until he entered the Katharineum, a prominent Gymnasium in Braunschweig, in 1800. L.’s father, a theologian and minister at St. Andreas in Braunschwieg, was also extremely active in shaping education policy in Braunschweig. He promoted the establishment of technical schools and also campaigned for the integration of the two Gymnasia in Braunschweig, the Martineum and the Katharineum, which eventually took place after his death with the establishment of the Martino-Katharineum in 1828. L. completed studies at the Katharineum at an accelerated pace, finishing at age 16 in 1809. While at the Katharineum, L. began his life-long friendship with jurist and philologist, Carl August Clemens Klenze (1793–1838), president of the Berlin University (Humboldt) 1828–1829. L. entered the University of Leipzig to study theology in 1809 but after only a semester, his interest in New Testament textual criticism motivated a move to the University of Göttingen, where he studied with Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) and became immersed in philology. In October 1814, L. earned his doctorate with the now lost work, De critica Tibulli carminibus recte instituenda (On the Proper Critical Reception of the Songs of Tibullus) in Halle, and in April of 1815 he earned the habilitation with a lecture in Göttingen. L. also finished an edition of the works of Propertius at this time, but it would not be published until 1816 because in the weeks following his habilitation, he broke off philological pursuits to volunteer, against his father’s wishes, for the Eichsfeld Infantry Regiment. However, L. did not take part in the battle against because Napoléon, who had returned from exile on Elba to reclaim France but was quickly defeated in June of same year at Waterloo. Although L.’s regiment saw no action, the experience did provide inspiration for a number of poems, one on the death of Friedrich Wilhelm von Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Oels at the Battle of “Quatre-Bras” in Belgium on June 16, 1815. L. would continue to compose poetry in German, Latin, Greek, and Middle High German throughout his life. L.’s military service established connections that enabled him to quickly acquire the venia legendi, the right to hold lectures at the university for Greek, Roman, and Germanic antiquity in Berlin in 1816. After passing further

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exams to teach at institutions of higher learning, L. began teaching at the Friedrich-Werderschen Gymnasium in Berlin. In the summer of that same year, L. took up a position at the Collegium Fridericianum in Königsberg and was elevated to professor (extraordinarius) in 1818 where he remained until 1827. After a sabbatical, L. taught in Berlin during the Winter Semester in 1824–1825, at which time he stayed with Klenze. L. returned to Berlin in the summer of 1827 and remained there for rest of his career as a full professor (ordinarius) in the department for Classical and Germanic Philology at the Berlin University (later Humboldt). L. lived with Klenze, who was married with children, and the two shared an office on the ground floor of the house in the Louisenstrasse. Following Klenze’s death in 1838, the family moved to Potsdam. L. remained in Berlin but changed addresses frequently and was often a guest at other universities. L.’s relationship with Klenze deserves far more scholarly attention than it has received. In the academic years 1836–1837 and 1846–1847, L. served as head of the department and in 1843–1844 held the position of university president. L. was a member of the Berlin Academy of the Sciences from 1830 until his death and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1837. L. took active part in the Prussian University Reform of 1849. At the end of January 1851, L. suffered from an intense inflammation of chronic gout in his left foot and ankle, which became infected and led to an amputation of the foot, which in turn also became infected and he died from the resulting complications on March 13, 1851. L. never married and was buried next to his longtime friend and renowned theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) at the Trinity Church Cemetery in Berlin on March 17, 1851. L. produced numerous editions, commentaries and essay in the areas of both classical and Germanic philology as well as literary translations and personal poetry and letters. L.’s circle of collaborators, friends, and students includes a wide range of the most important figures in 19th-century classical and Germanic philology. The brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), particularly Jacob, collaborated with L. on several projects, including the Deutsche Grammatik and the edition of Reinhart Fuchs, which is dedicated to L. and Georg Friedrich Benecke (1762–1844), also in Göttingen. The Brothers also worked with L. on the edition of Hartmann von Aue. L. established several friendships and working relationships in Göttingen, including classical philologist Georg Ludolf Dissen (1784–1837), jurist Johann Friedrich Ludwig Göschen (1778–1837), theologian Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855). Longtime friends and collaborators also include theologian Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen (1791–1860), clas-

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sical philologists Christian August Brandis (1790–1867), August Boeckh (1785–1867), Karl Ludwig Lehrs (1802–1878). L. produced his edition of Ulrich von Liechtenstein (1841) together with Austrian Germanist Theodor Georg von Karajan (1810–1873). L.’s work on the New Testament was particularly influenced by the work and comments of his friend, the classical philologist and grammarian, Philipp Karl Buttmann (1764–1829). The eminent theologian, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and classical philologist, August Immanuel Bekker (1785–1871) collaborated with L. on his New Testament edition. L. produced editions of Latin texts on surveying with legal historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), and Friedrich Bluhme (1797–1874). L.’s students include some of the most important names in Germanic Philology, especially Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806–1868), Karl Joseph Simrock (1802–1876) and Moritz Haupt (1808–1874). In practice, many of L.’s editions, albeit with scholarly revisions, remain the standard critical editions; foremost among them stands L.’s edition of Parzival, which was the centerpiece of his edition of the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach (1833), the poems by Walther von der Vogelweide (1827), and the works of Hartmann von Aue (1843). L.’s Der Nibelungen Noth und die Klage (1841) was superseded by Karl Bartsch’s edition (1870), and Werner Schröder’s edition of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm (1978) has become the standard edition of that work. Henrik Sparnaay’s Karl Lachmann als Germanist (1948) represents an early attempt at analyzing L.’s approach to vernacular German texts. Magdalene Lutz-Hensel continues this engagement on a broader scale with her Prinzipien der ersten textkritischen Editionen mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung (1975), and more recently P. F Ganz provides a overview of L.’s legacy in his essay, “Lachmann as an Editor of Middle High German Texts,” Altgermanistische Editionswissenschaft, ed. Thomas Bein (1995), 106–25. More generally, Harald Weigel examines L.’s impact on the creation of critical editions in his more recent Nur was du nie gesehn wird ewig dauern: Carl Lachmann und die Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Edition (1989). Engagement with L.’s impact on medieval editions is not limited to the German vernacular, as evidenced by the volume edited by Christopher Kleinhenz, Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism (1976) and Peter F. Dembowski’s essay, “The ‘French’ Tradition of Textual Philology and Its Relevance to the Editing of Medieval Texts,” Modern Philology 90.4 (1993): 512–32. L.’s legacy remains a mainstay in literary research as Helmut Müller-Sievers’s recent essay, “Reading Evidence: Textual Criticism as Science in the Nineteenth Century Source,” GR 76.2 (2001): 162–71, demonstrates. Attempts to use the Lachmannian approach to establish a standard of

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textual critique began early and works like Paul Maas’s Textkritik (1957) and Eugene Vinaver’s essay “Principles of Textual Emendation,”Studies in French Language and Medieval Literature Presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope (1939) evidence this early trend which continues, albeit with reservations and modifications as seen in Jürgen Dummer’s edited volume, Texte und Textkritik: eine Aufsatzsammlung (1987). L.’s editions of classical languages have attracted far more attention than his vernacular editions and none are more contended than the biblical texts and none is more celebrated than his edition of Lucretius. L.’s method set the tone for philological rigor in the creation of critical editions. The body of literature surrounding L.’s classical editions, particularly the editions of sacred texts, is both a Leviathan and Chimera. Martin L. West’s Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique Applicable to Greek and Latin Texts (1973) and Winfried Ziegler’s Die ‘wahre strenghistorische Kritik’: Leben und Werk Carl Lachmanns und sein Beitrag zur neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft (2000) provide foundational information in this very broad area. In the face of all this criticism, it would be unfair to underestimate the importance of L.’s contributions and to fail to evaluate them in their own historical context. Regardless of the problems inherent in L.’s method, his work represents a paradigm shift and the beginning of textual criticism as we know it. L called for a move away from what he referred to as “fan” (Liebhaber) editions toward critical scholarly editions. L. is credited with transforming textual criticism into a science in which the text is viewed as material artifact. The critic was obliged to trace back through deduction to the source without interpreting at all. His methods have been criticized for relying on genealogies that are too simplistic, for excluding recent manuscripts or those that are inconvenient to the hypothesized genealogy and for constructing the texts to adhere to his own critical standpoint. In his now famous essay, “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de L’Ombre: Réflexions sur l’art d’éditer les anciens textes,” Romania 54 (1928): 161–96, 321–56, Joseph Bédier assailed the method noting a reductionist tendency in practice of the method and observing that more than one “archetype” might exist for a text. In his essay, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–1951): 19–37, W. W. Greg pointed out that socalled mistakes may be a result of scribal intention, and Paul Zumthor completely abandons the grounding principles of the Lachmann Method, when he argues with his concept of mouvance that the search for an authentic original is anachronistic to the production and reception of medieval texts in which variation was intentional in his Essai de poétique médiévale (1972) and Langue, texte, énigme (1975). Thomas Cramer’s work Waz hilfet ane sinne kunst? (1998) and Thomas Bein’s Autor – Autorisation – Authentizität (2004, with Rü-

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diger Nutt-Kofoth and Bodo Plachta), have provided substantial support to the notion that variation may be attributed to scribal and authorial intention. Nonetheless, modified versions of the Lachmann Method, such as the Neolachmannian Method or New Stammatics, are still standard today. Sebastiano Timpanaro has done the most detailed and nuanced study of the development of L.’s method, with his classic, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (2005). Select Bibliography Essays: “Über die ursprüngliche Gestalt des Gedichts der Nibelunge Noth,” (1816); “Über die Leiche der deutschen Dichter des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts” (1829), “Über althochdeutsche Betonung und Verskunst” (1831), “Über das Hildebrandslied” (1833), “Über Singen und Sagen” (1833), all in Kleinere Schriften zur Deutschen Philologie, ed. Karl Müllenhoff (1876); “Otfrid” (1833), “Über den Eingang des Parzival” (1835), “Über drei Bruchstücke niederrheinischer Gedichte aus dem zwölften und aus dem Anfange des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts” (1836); “Ausgaben classischer Werke darf jeder nachdrucken: Eine Warnung für Herausgeber” (1841), all in Schriften zur Deutschen Philologie, ed. Karl MÜLLENHOFF (1876); De choricis systematis tragicorum graecorum libri quattuor (1819); “De mensura tragoediarum liber singularis” (1822); “Kritik der Sage von den Nibelungen,” Zu den Nibelungen und zur Klage: Anmerkungen (1836), 333–49; “Bruchstücke aus den Nibelungen,” Zeitschrift für Deutsches Althertum 1 (1842): 111–16; “Lesarten zu Hartmanns Gregorius,” Zeitschrift für Deutsches Althertum 5 (1845): 32–69; Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias (1847); Kleinere Schriften zur Classischen Philologie, ed. J. Vahlen (1876). Editions: Sex. Aurelii Propertii carmina (1816); Auswahl aus den Hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (1820); Specimina linguae francicae (1825); Der Nibelunge Noth mit der Klage (1826); Iwein eine Erzählung von Hartmann von Aue (with commentary by G. F. Benecke) (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1827); Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide (1827); Q. Valerii Catulli Veronensis liber (1829); Albii Tibulli libri quattuor (1829); Sex. Aurelii Propertii elegiae (1829); Novum testamentum Graece (1831); Wolfram von Eschenbach (1833); Terentiani Mauri De litteris syllabis et metris (1836); Gotthold Ephraim Lessings sämmtliche Schriften (1838); Gregorius eine Erzählung von Hartmann von Aue (1838); Philologische Abhandlungen von Clemens August Carl Klenze (1839); Zwanzig alte Lieder von den Nibelungen (1840); Der Nibelungen Not und die Klage. Nach der ältesten Überlieferung mit Bezeichnung des Unechten und Abweichungen der gemeinen Lesart (1841); Ulrich von Liechtenstein (with commentary by Theordor von Karajan) (1841); Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine (with Phillip Buttmann) (1842); Babrii fabulae Aesopeae (1845); Aviani fabulae (1845); Die Schriften der römischen Feldmesser (with Friedrich Bluhme, Theodor Mommsen, and Adolf August Friedrich Rudorff) (1848); T. Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex (1850). Translations: Shakespeares Sonnette (1820); Shakespeares Macbeth (1829). Literature: Thomas Bein, Textkritik: Eine Einführung in Grundlagen germanistischmediävistischer Editionswissenschaft – Lehrbuch mit Übungsteil (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007); Peter F. Ganz, “Lachmann as an Editor of Middle High German Texts,” Probleme mittelalterlicher Überlieferung und Textkritik, ed. id. and Werner Schröder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 12–30; Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Criticism, ed. Chris-

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topher Kleinhenz(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976); Magdalene Lutz-Hensel, Prinzipien der ersten textkritischen Editionen mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1975); Martin Hertz, Karl Lachmann, eine Biographie (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1851); Uwe Meves, “Lachmann, Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm,” IGL, 2 (2003), 1046–49; Winfried Ziegler, Die ‘wahre strenghistorische Kritik’: Leben und Werk Carl Lachmanns und sein Beitrag zur neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac,ˇ 2000).

Stephen Mark Carey

Ladner, Gerhard B. (December 3, 1905, Vienna – September 21, 1993, Los Angeles), Austrian Medievalist and Art Historian. After having completed his doctoral thesis on 11th-century Italian paintings, L. worked on iconography, which he also taught, together with Christian archaeology, at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies after his escape from the Nazi-regime. But from early on, he also occupied himself with diplomatics by editing papal documents and the collection of letters of Petrus de Vinea. For more than 50 years, he worked on the enormous publication in five volumes of the images of popes painted and sculpted in their own times. During his lifetime, L. continued to study images of important persons in their cultural context, such as the oldest one of St. Francis of Assisi. In the United States, he taught medieval history, always taking into account the cultural aspects, civilization, and art history, especially at the University of California where he organized Medieval Studies. In his research project of the 11th-century Investiture Controversy (The Idea of Reform), he drew together diverse theological and political movements of the mid-11th century. One of L.’s key themes is the image of man in medieval art; he showed that the tenet of Christian theology was also a great justification of Christian art. His professor, Schlosser, had already pointed him in the direction of the study of symbolism, so in his last year, L. began to work on this monumental project of a manual of symbols from late antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, he only published the first volume of the Early Christian symbols, while the second volume covering the Celtic-Germanic period was edited after his death. L. was born into a bourgeois family of Bohemian Jewish background. His highly respected family, where Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and

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other scholars and artists were guests, made a considerable contribution to Viennese cultural life. Three personal experiences in his youth had a significant impact on his later life: the youth movement (1920–1925); the meeting with the poet Stefan George (1930), whose poems he later translated – when L. was eighteen, he began writing poems in George’s style – and a conversion from Judaism to Catholicism (1933). The young L. was enthusiastic about Italy and art, and he studied history as well as art history and diplomatics with Hans Hirsch at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Austrian Institute for Historical Studies). At the behest of the Österreichische Kommission für historische Ikonographie (Austrian Commission of Historical Iconography), L. catalogued in two years (1931–1933) 1,077 portraits of the Archduke Ferdinand of Tirol, and in an interpretative essay he placed the collection in its original historical context. After his doctorate, he was Paul F. Kehr’s assistant at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Berlin for two years, collaborating with him on the edition of Henry IV’s diplomata, but he cut short the project for health reasons. L. was secretary of the Austrian commission for historical iconography of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques for two years (1931–1933). After having completed his habilitation, he accepted the invitation to emigrate to Canada, where he was appointed assistant professor at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto in 1938. L. taught medieval history and archaeology at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto until 1946, when he moved to Notre Dame (Indiana) and was promoted to associate professor. Between 1949 and 1951 he had a sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he returned again in 1960/1961 and 1974. L. thought that “Princeton had been his rescue as a scholar.” From Notre Dame he moved to Howard University in Washington in 1951, again as an assistant professor, though he was soon promoted to the rank of associate professor a year later. In 1952 he transferred to Fordham University in New York as a full professor. The success of his The Idea of Reform (1959) had made him famous everywhere, and many honors were bestowed upon him, such as the Haskin Medal of the Medieval Academy of America (1961). He was professor at the University of California in Los Angeles from 1963 until his retirement in 1973. In the following year he taught as distinguished visiting professor in Berkeley, and from 1977–1978 he was president of the Medieval Academy of America. At the end of his career at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, L. presented a work on Die Bildnisse der Kaiser und österreichischen Herzöge aus dem Geschlechte Habsburg von Rudolf I. bis Friedrich III. (1929; Images of the Emperors and the Austrian Dukes of the House of Habsburg from Rudolf

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I to Frederick III). He obtained his doctorate with the thesis, “Die italienische Malerei im 11. Jahrhundert” (1930; The Italian Painting in the 11th Century), and he wrote his habilitation under the supervision of Hans Hirsch on the topic Theologie und Politik vor dem Investiturstreit. Abendmahlstreit, Kirchenreform, Cluny und Heinrich III (1938; Theology and Politics before the Investiture Controversy: Communion Contest, Reform of the Church, Cluny and Henry III). Alongside the work with Kehr at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, L. wrote a second thesis on the chancery of Frederick II and the letters of Petrus de Vinea (1933). With a grant from the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, he started his opus maximum in three volumes, Die Papstbildnisse des Altertums und des Mittelalters (vol. 1: 1941; vol. 2: 1970 vol. 3: 1984; Images of Popes in Antiquity and the Middle Ages) in 1933 (in 1941 an Italian translation of the first volume appeared in print, I ritratti dei Papi nell’Antichità e nel Medio Evo). He worked for nearly 50 years to compile a history of all those images of popes painted or sculpted in their own time or in their posterity. Van Engen characterizes this impressive publication as, “The model for this project was that of a catalogue raisonné, with a full description of each monument, all texts printed to it and an extensive bibliography.” The last volume contains corrections and important essays. He had also collected materials for the history of popes of the 14th and 15th centuries, which he never published. Benson, Constable, and Van Engen compare L.’s research with Percy Ernst Schramm’s studies of the images and insignia of kings and emperors, though L. focused on popes, whose images and insignia represented notions of the church rather than the “state.” He also tried to find in the images of popes medieval forms of “portraiture”; later, in his study of the image of St. Francis in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, he suggested that it represented a combination of a portrait and a symbol (“Das älteste Bild des hl. Franziskus von Assisi: Ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Porträtikonographie” [1964; The Oldest Images of St. Francis of Assis: A Contribution to the Medieval Iconography of Portraits]). As a result of his sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in 1949/1951, he published The Idea of Reform (1959). The promised second and third volume never appeared in print. In his review, Löwe (Deutsches Archiv für die Erforschung des Mittelalters 18 [1962]: 588–89) praised L.’s valuable comparison of Latin and Greek theology regarding the idea of reforming the Church. The chapter on St. Augustine has a central position in L’.s book, in which he presented – always referring to the reform of ideas – his concept of history and society. In the 2nd part, in which L. repeatedly dealt with baptism and men’s ordination into priesthood, he also pursued the connection with the reform movement of the

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11th century. L. continued to pursue this theme in the 3rd part, which deals with the ideals of monasticism as the motivating factor underlying the drive toward reform. The 39 published articles in Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in History and Art (1983) offer – as Van Egen indicates – medievalists an occasion to study L.’s contribution to our understanding of medieval civilization published over the past sixty years. Stimulated by the interpretation of papal iconography, L. wrote various contributions on iconography and symbolism in general. He did not only concentrate his research on literary and artistic evidence regarding the meaning of certain symbols, but he always asked larger questions concerning the meaning of symbols. During the last years of his life, he devoted a great deal of time to the study of symbols. The first volume, Handbuch der frühchristlichen Symbolik: Gott, Kosmos, Mensch, was published in 1992, and a few years later translated into English (God, Cosmos and Humankind: The World of Early Christian Symbolism, 1995). In Heinrich Fichtenau’s view (MIÖG 101 [1993]: 169), this subject reveals a deep understanding of the mental phenomena of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It is more than simply a handbook; it is an attractive description with rich illustrations. In her review of the English translation, Margret R. Miles (Speculum 73 [1998]: 866–68) came to a similar conclusion: “it is a rich and densely packed book and a remarkable compendium of early Christianity; it will edify, educate and inspire its reader.” L. did not really appreciate this characterization because it was nothing like a compendium. The second volume should have been concerned with the symbols of the Celtic-Germanic antiquity, but L. was only able to publish one article in the 31st volume of the Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschungen. Herwig Wolfram (MIÖG 102 [1994]: 512) indicates his importance as an organizer of Medieval Studies in America and portrayed him as a scholar full of human qualities and erudition, who tried to transfer the beauty of the world and humanity to his students. L. received much public recognition: from May 1967, he was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Science; he received an honorary doctorate from the Loyola University and from the University of Los Angeles and the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto; he was member of the American Philosophical Society; of American Historians’ Association; American Catholic Historians’ Association; of Collection of Art Association; of the Renaissance Society of America; of the American Society for the Study of Religion; of the Patristic Academy of America; of the Club ‘Medieval’ in New York; of the American Academy of Arts and Science; and of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia.

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L. was a historian who worked without ever taking a rest and with enormous self-discipline until the end of his life. Select Bibliography Works: “Die italienische Malerei im 11. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, N. F. 5 (1931): 33–160; “Zur Porträtsammlung des Erzherzogs Ferdinand von Tirol,” MIÖG 47 (1933): 470–82; 49 (1936): 367–91; “Fomularbriefe in der Kanzlei Kaiser Friedrichs II. und die Briefe Petrus de Vinea,” MIÖG Erg.-Bd. 12 (1933): 92–198; Theologie und Politik vor dem Investiturstreit. Abendmahlstreit, Kirchenreform, Cluny und Heinrich III. (1936); The Idea of Reform, its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (1959); Die Papstbildnisse des Altertums und des Mittelalters (1941–1984); “Das älteste Bild des hl. Franziksus von Assisi: Ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Portraitikonography,” Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Professor Percy Ernst Schramm (1964), 449–60; Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies in History and Art (1983), 2 vols.; Handbuch der frühchristlichen Symbolik: Gott, Kosmos, Mensch (1992), English trans.: God, Cosmos and Humankind: The World of Early Christian Symbolism (1995). Literature: John Van Engen, “Images and Ideas: The Achievements of Gerhart Burian Ladner, with a Bibliography of his published works,” Viator 20 (1989): 85–115; “G. Ladner, ‘Erinnerungen,’” ed. Herwig Wolfram-Walter Pohl, Sitzungsberichte Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 617 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1994); Herwig Wolfram, “Nachruf Gerhard B. Ladner,” MIÖG 102 (1994): 510–13; Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable, John Van Engen, “Gerhard Burian Ladner,” Speculum 71 (1996): 802–04.

Christine Maria Grafinger

Lagarde, Georges de (October 27, 1898, Chambéry – June 26, 1967, Paris), French Legal Historian, Docteur en droit, Professeur de droit social. L.’s scholarly reputation rests largely, if not exclusively, on his six-volume La Naissance de l’Esprit laïque au déclin du Moyen Âge, which he himself revised almost entirely before his death in 1967, into the five-volume version published between 1956 and 1970. This work, identifying in essence the lay spirit with efforts to reclaim from the clericate prerogatives of the sacerdotium, and advancing the significance of Ockham’s Opus Nonaginta dierum in the formation of the concept of “rights” (droits subjectifs), would influence a generation of both scholars and jurists, such as Michel Villey, and engender a late 20th- and early 21st-century debate on the canon law origins

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of individual rights as opposed to genesis in the voluntarism of the nominalists. Born in 1898 in Chambery, Savoy, L. was a Languedocien of Ardeche. Orphaned at eleven, he subsequently was raised in Paris, where he pursued doctoral studies in law under the guidance of the noted authority in medieval canon law, Paul Fournier, until his academic endeavors were interrupted by WW I. He was able to resume his studies following several years employment as head of legal affairs for a mining company in Aniche, and completed his thesis, Recherches sur l’esprit politique de la Réforme, in 1926. For the rest of his life, L. balanced the practice of law with his scholarly endeavors. Between 1932 and 1946, during vacations, particularly at his house in his beloved Ardeche, he completed his multivolume magnum opus, Naissance de l’Esprit laïque au déclin du Moyen Âge. Beginning in 1950, he undertook a complete revision of this work, still in progress at the time of his death. In 1953, he was awarded the Legion of Honor on the nomination of the Minister of Commerce; and in 1964, he was appointed an officer of the same Order at the designation of the Minister of Transportation. L.’s major contribution to Medieval Studies was in identifying and being first to study in detail a late-medieval attitude founded on values outside the Church and frequently consciously in opposition to the claims of ecclesiastics. That attitude is identified as the “lay spirit,” and is the motivating force behind efforts to reclaim certain domains of action from Church control. Indeed, interested mostly in the theoretical aspects of this notional opposition, while tracing the emerging “lay spirit” from the dawn of the 13th century, he finds Ockham’s discussion of the evolution of private property, and hence political dominion, as laid out in his defense of Michael de Cesena and the Franciscan doctrine of Poverty, Opus Nonaginta dierum, to represent a significant departure in medieval political thought, foundational to the subsequent Ockhamist output in political theory. The French jurist, Michel Villey, relying heavily on Lagarde, would subsequently argue that here is to be found the genesis of “droits subjectif,” ius as potestas or facultas, i. e., “rights.” Critics have noted a number of problems in L.’s work. Foremost among these was the imprecision of L.’s thorough definition of lay spirit. As pointed out by G. I. Langmuir in his review of the third edition of Bilan du XIIIe siècle (Speculum 34 [1959]: 297–99), L. was “content to use an abstract definition of the proper relations of the spiritual and temporal authorities as an index for the development of the lay spirit, and has tended to consider all lay opposition as if it were basically the same kind as that of Marsiglio or of heretics such as the Albigensians.” Obviously, when figures such as John of Salisbury

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condemned tyranny in sacerdotio, they were not exhibiting the lay spirit, though L.’s construct does not allow for facile differentiation of these types of opposition to ecclesiastic conduct. Furthermore, by defining his lay spirit in negative terms, he failed to account for the varying purposes of lay conduct, and hence did not distinguish between opposition to the hierocratic Church and temporal concerns. Indeed, entire areas of development described by L. in the economic, juridical, and bureaucratic areas were, as Langmuir emphasizes, creations not of Church or lay authority separately, but characteristic of the saeculum. On the question of Ockham’s role in the development of subjective legal rights, L. saw in William’s philosophical nominalism and voluntarism an emphasis on will at the expense of reason that departed from the jurists and theologians who preceded him. This interpretation has been challenged by scholars such as Brian Tierney, who in The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (1997), persuasively argued that there is no necessary connection between these elements of Ockham’s early moral theory and his later political works which were founded upon a much older, clearly medieval emphasis upon ratio as the basis for rights. Nonetheless, given the complexity of Ockham’s opera politica, which will necessarily invite debate for years to come, and L.’s undeniable breadth of erudition in political theory if not praxis, his work will continue to represent an invaluable reference for those studying the development of intellectual opposition to the institutional Church through the 14th century. In light of his long involvement and contributions to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, Études présentées à la Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Assemblées d’États XXXVIII, was dedicated to L. as a Liber Memorialis, and contains a select bibliography along with a eulogistic biographical sketch by Antonio Marongiu, Professor at Università degli Studi di Roma, and vice-president of the commission. Select Bibliography Books: Recherches sur l’esprit politique de la Réforme (1926); La Charte du Travail. Sa Place dans l’Evolution du Corporatisme moderne (1942); La Naissance de l’esprit laïque au déclin du moyen age, vol. I: Bilan du XIIIe siècle, 3rd ed. (1956 [1934]); II. Secteur social de la Scolastique, 2nd ed. (1958 [1942]); III. Le Defensor pacis (1970); IV. Guillaume d’Ockham, Défense de l’Empire (1962); V. Guillaume d’Ockham, Critique des structures ecclésiales (1963). The preceding 5-volume edition includes the following works: II. Marsile de Padoue ou le premier théoricien de l’Etat laïque, 2nd ed. (1948 [1934]); IV. Ockham et son temps (1942); V. Ockham, Bases de départ (1946); VI. Ockham, La Morale et le Droit (1946).

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Articles: In his career, L. published a number of articles, the most significant of these appearing in Études présentées à la Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des Assemblées d’États as follows: “L’idée de représentation dans les œuvres de Guillaume d’Ockham,” vol. I (1937; 1967), 19–45; “Individualisme et corporatisme au Moyen Age,” vol. II (1937), 1–60; “La structure politique et social de l’Europe au XIVe siècle,” vol. III (1939), 91–118; “La philosophie sociale d’Henri de Gand et de Godfroid de Fontaines,” vol. VII (1943), 55–134; “Les théories représentatives du XIVe–XVe siècle et l’Eglise,” vol. XVIII (1958), 63–76; “Ockham et le Concile général,” vol. XXIII (1960), 83–94. Literature: Jean Bennet, Biographies de personnalités mutualistes, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Mutualité Française, 1987), 255–62; Liber Memorialis Georges de Lagarde, London, 1968, with a preface by A. Marongiu and a select bibliography (Paris and Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts-Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970).

Scott L. Taylor

Lamprecht, Karl Gotthard (February 25, 1856, Jessen an der Elster – May 10, 1915, Leipzig), German Cultural Historian. As an historian, L. became well-known in Wilhelmine Germany as the proponent of “Universalgeschichte” (“universal-history,” which attempted to synthesize political, social, economic and cultural aspects of a specific German region during various historical periods) and as the main opponent to the conventional school of German cultural-historical methodology, which had been based on “traditional event-and-character” historical focuses (Gerald Diesener, “Karl Lamprecht: 1856–1915: German Cultural and Social Historian,” Great Historians of the Modern Age: An International Dictionary, ed. Lucian Boia et al., 1991, 680–81). L.’s “notoriety” results from his unconventional methodology and his unsuccessful battle to supplant the ancien régime of German historiography, and his contributions to medieval studies mark the beginning of the dispute. As a result, the significance of L.’s scholarship for medieval studies becomes lost in the sensation his work provokes. Nevertheless, one must credit him with some of the most comprehensive examples of German historiography of the medieval period, and his writing on the medieval history of the Rhineland earns him the “reputation as possibly the most promising face in the profession” (Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915), 1993, 83).

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L. was born the son of a pastor in Jessen on the Elster. He was educated at the public school, but also was given private lessons by his father. Later he attended Gymnasium at Wittenberg and the country school at Pforta, just before enlisting in the military (1874–1875). In Göttingen L. studied history, philosophy, psychology, German literature, and geography, after which he traveled to Leipzig to complete his doctorate in 1877 in history, writing a dissertation on the French economy in the 11th century. Through the support of a Rhineland patron, L. pursued studies on the region from 1880 through 1886, culminating in the publication of the three-volume Economic Life of Germany in the Middle Ages (Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 1885–1886). He received a professorship at Bonn in 1885, then at Marburg in 1890 and finally at Leipzig in 1891. During this period, L. became involved with the “Positivist Circle,” especially Wilhelm Oswald, Wilhelm Wundt, Karl Bücher, Friedrich Ratzel, and others. Also at this time, L. planned his history of Germany, a monumental effort that intended to trace the development of the German people as a political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural totality (Diesener, 1991, 680), rather than as an exercise of connecting great historical characters and events, which had formed the wellentrenched status quo of 19th-century historical discourse. From 1891 until 1909, he labored on this massive undertaking, and the result, the twelve-volume German History (Deutsche Geschichte, 1895–1909) remained incomplete, but provided a theoretical nucleus around which Lamprecht could build his “Institute for Culture and Universal History” (Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschichte) in 1909. After years of professional strife, which has become known in the field of German historiography as the Methodenstreit (“battle of methodologies”), L. died in 1915, probably the victim of a perforated ulcer and anemia (Chickering, 1993, 641); his decline in health was doubtlessly exacerbated by years of some of the most bitter feuding the already contentious academic profession had ever witnessed. Very early in his career, L. published a number of essays on a broad range of medieval topics, including “letters of consent” from the 12th century and the illumination of medieval manuscripts. However, L.’s major contribution to medieval studies, as well as one of his lengthiest and best written works, is the massive Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter. When the three volumes appeared in 1885–1886, they stood out as one of the most comprehensive historical examinations of a relatively small region (some three hundred square miles in the Rhineland) from many perspectives (law, economy, geography, etc.) ever written. Concentrating on the Hunsrück and Eifel regions, L. provides the reader with narrative descriptions, statistical analyses and a plethora of documents relating to aspects of land ownership, use, social institutions,

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law and other matters that provide a multifaceted, detailed and dynamic view of German life in the western river valleys before the Reformation. The documentation in these volumes is enormous, covering some 1600 pages of material. While L.’s argumentation suffers some from his eclectic methodology, the work overall evinces the brilliance of a productive and creative mind, and its “grand scope, provocative conclusions and innovative exploitation of statistics and tools from other disciplines have ensured its place as a monument of German historiography” (Chickering 1993, 80–83). Yet more comprehensive is L.’s Deutsche Geschichte, one of the major works of its kind and the most significant contribution to L.’s theoretical position, that of Universalgeschichte. While the earlier volumes of this massive endeavor, and those containing the material most relevant to the Middle Ages, remain close to L.’s original methodologies, the later volumes betray some unfortunate factual errors and a growing inclination to view the progress of history exceedingly as a psychological process (Diesener 1991, 681), tendencies that marred much of his later work and speeded his decline in reputation during his later years. Chickering (1993) reports that, at first, German historians expressed amazement at the accomplishment of Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, and that its young author evinced academic precociousness and advanced talents for historical synthesis. Later, its reception suffered greatly because of the methodological strife surrounding L., and some used this work to cast ad hominem insults at his unorthodox techniques. However, it was the first volumes of the Deutsche Geschichte that became the special target of brutal attacks from Georg von Below (in 1893 and 1895), and L.’s responses to the criticism were couched in no less extreme terms, even bordering on libel. The effects were disastrous for his professional status, and soon the major historians of the age began to line up against his rejection of the common contemporary methodologies. This set the tone of his reception until recent years, when interest in the Positivismusstreit resurfaced and a more balanced and sober view became possible. In the German Democratic Republic, L. could serve as an alternative to Ranke, and his medieval writings provided sources for an examination of historical materialism (Hans Schleier, ed., Karl Lamprecht: Alternative zu Ranke: Schriften zur Geschichtstheorie, 1988). Major studies of L. (e. g., by Chickering and Luise Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, 1984) have created an increasingly more objective framework for examining him, and have considered, for example, his important influences on New Historians in other lands (e. g., England, Belgium, France, Poland and the USA: see SchornSchütte, 1984, 287–336) asserting that, despite his faults and shortcomings, L. “was the most famous and interesting historian in Wilhelmine

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Germany” (Chickering 1993, xii). His Institut, recently revitalized by new historians of Universalgeschichte, remains a significant representative of L.’s theories, having recently published a comprehensive collection of essays on L’s importance to the field and the Institute’s own history through the 20th century (Gerald Diesener, Editha Kro , Manfred Kossok et al., ed., Karl Lamprecht weiterdenken: Universal- und Kulturgeschichte heute, 1993). Select Bibliography Works: Beiträge zur Geschichte des französischen Wirtschaftslebens im elften Jahrhundert (1878); “Die Entstehung der Willebriefe und die Revindication des Reichsgutes unter Rudolf von Habsburg,” Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte 21 (1881): 1–19; “Recht und Wirtschaft zur Frankenzeit,” Historisches Taschenbuch 2 (1882): 43–67; Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die Entwicklung der materiellen Kultur des Plattenlandes auf Grund der Quellen zunächst des Mosellandes, 3 vols. (1885–86); “Der Ursprung des Bürgertums und des städtischen Lebens in Deutschland,” Historische Zeitschrift 61 (1891): 385–424; Deutsche Geschichte, 12 vols. (1895–1909). Literature: Matti Viikari, Die Krise der ‘historistischen’ Geschichtsschreibung und die Geschichtsmethodologie Karl Lamprechts (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1977); Bernhard vom Brocke, “Karl Lamprecht,” NDB 13 (1982), 467–72; Luise SchornSchütte, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1984), 373; Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993); Gerald Diesener, Editha Kro, Manfred Kossok, et al., ed., Karl Lamprecht weiterdenken: Universal- und Kulturgeschichte heute (Leipzig: Leipziger Universität-Verlag, 1993).

Christopher R. Clason

Lassberg, Joseph Maria Christoph, Freiherr von (October 4, 1770 – March 15, 1855), German Medievalist. L.’s contribution to the field of medieval studies is two-fold. Firstly, he transcribed and published numerous texts and manuscripts, providing the burgeoning field of German philology with material for study. This included transcribing works for noted German philologists who then published these transcriptions under their names. The most significant transcriptions that L. published under his own name are those found in his Liedersaal [Chamber of Songs] (1820–1825); though not in keeping with philological standards

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of our time, these transcriptions are still referenced. Secondly, L. was an enthusiastic collector of old prints and hand-written manuscripts who amassed an amazing library that contained some 173 handwritten manuscripts and 12,000 printed volumes, among which was to be found the famed Nibelungenlied Manuscript C, which was transcribed in vol. IV of his Liedersaal and supplemented by Manuscript B following his acquisition of the manuscript at the Vienna Congress in 1813 (Hans Bloesch: “Aus der Frühzeit der Germanistik. F. v L. und Joh. Rud. Wyß d.J.” Festgabe Samuel Singer, ed. Harrz Maync, 1930, 56–66). Born into the distinguished line of the Freiherren von Lassberg (Barons of Lassberg, Upper Austria), L. was the son of the strict Catholic family of Joseph Maria and Anna Henriette Ludovica; he had two brothers and two sisters. He was educated first at Cistercian Salem Abbey (Reichskloster Salem) before he attended the Gymnasium in Donauschingen, where he had a penchant for old languages and started collecting books. At the age of 15, he was sent to France to learn the language and customs of the land and served as a cadet in the 4th Strasbourg Hussar Regiment under the command of the Duke Louis Philippe II of Orléans (1747–1793). Thereafter, in 1786, he received an education in law, accounting and forest management in Strasbourg and Freiburg. Thereto, a pivotal event in his life took place in 1786, when he was ceremonially inducted into and knighted by the Order of St. John in the ruins of Castle Trifels (where Richard the Lionhearted [1157–1199] was held during his return from the Third Crusade in 1193). L. considered himself the last knight of the old empire and a somewhat romanticized notion of nobility would motivate him throughout his life (see his letter to Jacob Grimm on June 26, 1829). Following an extended visit to the court of Karl Eduard von Stuart in Colman, Alsace, he continued his education of the court of the Prince Josef Friedrich Wilhelm of Hohenzollern-Hechingen (1717–1798) in 1788 before returning home to assume a post as a forest ranger. In 1792 he assumed the role of head forester of Castle Heiligenberg before marrying his first wife Maria Anna Ebinger von der Burg (–1814) in 1795, with whom he had four children. In 1798, L. purchased the Castle of Helmsdorf near Immenstaad am Bodensee, entitling him to membership in the Hegau branch of the Swabian Knights of the Empire (schwäbische Reichsritterschaft). In 1804 he was made the head forester of the Princedom of Donauschingen. In 1805, he met Elisabeth von Fürstenberg (born Princess of Thurn und Taxis), establishing a life-long friendship. Together with Elisabeth, he travelled extensively and attended the Vienna Congress (1814–1815) where he got to know Jakob Grimm and joined the Wollzeilergesellschaft, a society whose objective was to gather vernacular poetry and that facilitated his association

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with other German philologists. In 1813, he purchased an estate in Eppishausen in Canton Thurgau where he began to devote more time to the study of medieval German literature, an endeavor in which he was supported considerably by Elisabeth, both personally and financially, enabling his publication of the Liedersaal and the acquisition of the Nibelungenlied Handschrift C. Following the death of Elisabeth in 1822, L.’s motivation to work was impaired and he withdrew to his estate, during which time he reported himself only able to prepare transcriptions from the manuscripts in his possession like a pious monk (“wie ein frommer Mönch”). He slowly re-emerged to continue his work, and came into increasing contact with other German philologists by sharing transcriptions from his library which they then published, among whom were to be found Ludwig Uhland, Karl Lachmann, Gustav Schwab, George Benecke and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. The works L. produced during this phase in his life were primarily intended only for a small circle of friends and philologists with similar interests (Hildegund Beckmann-Ritzel: “Schrifttum von und über Joseph von Lassberg,” Joseph von Lassberg. Mittler und Sammler. Aufsätze zu seinem 100. Todestag, 1955, 395–413). In 1826 he released the Littower under the pseudonym of Meister Sepp von Eppishusen, followed by Sigenot (1830), Eggenlied (1832) and Ein schön alt Lied von Grave Friz von Zolre, dem Oettinger und der Belagerung von Hohenzolren nebst etlichen andern Liedern [A Beautiful Old Song by Count Friz von Zolre the Oettinger and about the Siege of Hohenzolern along with Other Songs] (1842). He transcribed thousands of verses from his manuscripts for his contemporaries, which they then published. He married the Canoness Maria Anna (Jenny) Freiin von Droste Hülshoff in 1834 (the sister of the famed poetess Annette von Droste-Hülshoff), who bore him twin daughters in 1836. Shortly thereafter he fell off a wagon and broke his leg, and though he healed, never fully recovered. L. sold his estate in Eppishausen and relocated to the Old Meersburg Castle in 1838, where his famed library was housed. In 1845, L. was honored with the title Dr.Phil. h.c. by the University of Tübingen for his contributions to the field of German philology. He died in Meersburg at the age of 85 on March 15, 1855. L.’s most enduring contribution to the modern field of medieval studies is his edition of the Nibelungenlied (1825), which is still in use today. This edition of the text was the worthy successor of the Nibelungenlied und Klage (1784) that had been released by Christoph Heinrich Myller which had inspired a critical engagement with the text by such notable personalities as Friedrich von der Hagen, Georg Friedrich Benecke, Karl Lachmann and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm et. al. His romanticized view of knighthood and the Middle Ages, as well as his tendency to attribute the provenience of numer-

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ous texts to the realm of the Rhine and Alsace in keeping with his patriotic views necessitated revision by later scholarship (Ulrich Gaier u. Helmut Weidhase: “Joseph Freiherr von Lassberg. Imaginierte Lebensformen des Mittelalters,” Marbacher Magazin Sonderheft 82, 1998). L.’s most significant contribution to the field of medieval studies was undoubtedly the extensive library of manuscripts and early prints that he collected during his lifetime (Volker Schupp: “Joseph von Lassberg als Handschriftensammler,” Unberechenbare Zinsen. Bewahrtes Kulturerbe. Katalog zur Ausstellung der vom Land Baden-Wurttemberg erworbenen Handschriften der Fürstlich Fürstenbergerischen Hofbibliothek, ed. Felix Heinzer, 1993, 14–33; Volker Schupp: “J. v. L., die Fürstlich-Fürstenbergische Handschriftensammlung und Johann Leonard Hug, Professor an der Universität Freiburg,” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 131, 1996, 93–106; Klaus Gantert: Die Bibliothek des Freiherren Joseph von Lassberg. Ein gescheiterter Erwerbungsversuch der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1999). Following his death in 1855, his library was acquired by the Fürstlich-Fürstenbergischen Hofbibliothek zu Donaueschingen where it remained until it was acquired by the Land Baden-Württemberg in 1993. This was followed by a “politisch motivierte … in sachlicher Hinsicht durchaus problematische” [politically motivated … and objectively very problematic] (Felix Heinzer: “Ehemals Donaueschinger Handschriften,” Scriptorium 49 [1995]: 312–19) division of the priceless collection among the libraries of Karlsruhe (manuscripts dated to 1500 or earlier and transcriptions thereof) and Stuttgart, which was greatly criticized. Select Bibliography Letters: Franz Pfeiffer: “Zur Geschichte der deutschen Philologie. Briefe an Josef Freiherr von Lassberg,” Germania 13 (1868): 118–27, 244–49, 365–84, 487–508 [To the History of German Philology. Letters to Josef Baron of Lassber]; Franz Pfeiffer: Briefwechsel zwischen Josef Freiherr von Lassberg und Ludwig Uhland, 1870 [Letter Exchange Between Josef Baron of Lassberg and Ludwig Uhland]; Albert Leitzmann: “Briefe des Freiherr von Lassberg an Jacob Grimm,” Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, philos./hist. Kl., 1931, 1026–112 [Letters of the Baron of Lassberg to Jacob Grimm]; Karl Schulte-Kemminghausen: “Nachtrag zum Briefwechsel zwischen Jakob Grimm und J. v. L.,” Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, philos./hist. Kl., 1933, 754–87 [Addendum to the Letter Exchange Between Jacob Grimm and J.v.L.]; Eckehard Grunewald: “Vom Liedersaal zu den Minnesingern. J.v.L.s Briefe an Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen,” Euphorion 75.3 (1981): 342–59 [From the Chamber of Songs to the Minnesinger. J.v.L’s Letters too Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen]; Martin Harris: “J. v. L. im Briefwechsel mit norddeutschen Germanisten. Neu aufgefundene Briefe zur Geschichte der germanischen Philologie,” Euphorion 80 (1986): 46–82 [J.v.L. in the Letter Exchange with German Philologist from Northern Germany. Newly Discovered Letters to the History of German Philology].

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Editions: Liedersaal, das ist: Sammlung altteutscher Gedichte aus ungedrukten Quellen, 4 vols. (1820–1825, rpt. 1968)[Chamber of Songs. That is: A Collection of Old German Poems from Unpublished Sources]; [under the pseudonym of Maister Seppen von Eppishusen]: Ein schoen und anmuetig Gedicht, wie eine heidescher Küng, genannt der Littower wunderbarlich bekert und in Prüssenland getoufft ward, 1826 [A Beautiful and Charming Poem about How a Pagan King named Littower was Miraculously Converted and Baptized in Prussia]; Ein schoen und kurzweilig Gedicht von einem Riesen genannt Sigenot, 1830 [A Beautiful and Entertaining Poem about a Giant named Sigenot]; Eggen-Liet, das ist: Der Wallere, von Heinrich von Linowe, 1832; Ein schön alt Lied von Grave Friz von Zolre, dem Oettinger und der Belagerung von Hohenzolren nebst etlichen andern Liedern (1842) [A Beautiful Old Song by Count Friz von Zolre, the Oettinger, and About the Siege of Hohenzollern along with Other Songs]. Literature: Otto Rombach, “Der letzte Ritter auf der Meersburg: Über den Handschriftensammler J. v. L.,” Beiträge zur Landeskunde. Regelmäßige Beilage zum Staatsanzeiger für Baden-Württemberg 1 (1975): 1–7; Volker Schupp, “Die adlige Wissenschaft des Reichsfreiherrn J. v. L.,” Beiträge zur Droste-Forschung 5 (1978–1982): 144–65; Volker Schupp, “Laßberg, Freiherren von,” NDB, vol. 13, 1982, 670–72; “Laßberg, Joseph Maria Christoph Freiherr von,” IGL, vol. 2, 2003, 1063–65.

Maurice Sprague

Leclercq, Jean, O.S.B. (January 31, 1911, Avesnes – October 27, 1993, Clervaux), French Monastic Scholar (Religious History). L. was admitted to the Benedictine Abbaye Saint-Maurice in Clervaux in 1928. He then studied theology at Collegio Saint Anselmo in Rome from 1933–1937 and came under the influence of Anselm Stolz’s theories on mystic theology. Publishing his dissertation on John of Paris in 1944, L. then shifted his focus to medieval monastic authors. He taught at both Saint Anselmo and the Gregorian University in Rome. Following the Second Vatican Council, L. turned his attention mostly to monastic renewal. He also entered into inter-monastic dialogue with Buddhism and attended inter-faith meetings in Bangalore (1973), Kandy (1980), and elsewhere. L. continued to write on medieval monasticism and monastic literature until his death in 1993. Following his work on John of Paris, L. was convinced by Étienne Gilson to focus on monastic spirituality. It is this work that serves as his greatest contribution to the field of medieval studies. Though his first study was

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on Pierre de Celle, his most influential scholarship focused on the figure of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. At the behest of the procurator general of the Cistercian order, L. produced a fine chronicle of Bernard’s life and mind in Saint Bernard mystique (Bruges et Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1948). Other articles following this work include “Saint Bernard et Origène d’apres un centon monastique,” Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, Mélanges Marcel Viller 25 (1949): 140–45; “Saint Bernard et ses secretaries,” Revue Bénédictine 61 (1951): 208–29; and “Le mystère de l’Ascension dans les sermons de Saint Bernard,” Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum 15 (1953): 81–88. L. would continue throughout his life to work on Bernard and use him in arguments in his studies of 12th-century monastic life as a whole. L. sought to understand the religious lives of medieval monks through their own eyes. He brought to monastic studies an insider’s approach and hoped that his work would not only inform but also inspire. Evidence of this lies in his most popular work, L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du moyen-âge (1957). This general study of monastic spirituality sought to understand the tension within monastic life between the study of letters and the “exclusive search for God.” L.’s approach focuses on the writings of medieval monks arguing that literature is the method by which monks most clearly revealed themselves. His survey follows the lives and writings of numerous medieval monks and provides a useful assessment of the mentality of those in the monastic world. In later decades, L. began to consider later developments in the interaction between 12th-century monasticism and European culture. In Le mariage vu par les moines au XIIe siècle (1983), he argues for the greater relevance of monks in 12th-century conceptions of marriage. La femme et les femmes dans l’œuvre de saint Bernard (1983), is another examination of the influence of monks on the culture at large. Once again L.’s profound knowledge of Bernard serves as the starting point for his discussion of how monks perceived women. L. also looked at general issues of spirituality and religious life in works such as Vie religieuse et vie contemplative (1969); Le défi de la vie contemplative (1970); and numerous articles in La Vie Spirituelle. Through these works and others, he described monastic spirituality and theology as a cohesive worldview that is critical for a full understanding of the medieval period. Consequently, L. managed to bring further historical consideration to the once insular world of 12th-century monasticism. L.’s greatest triumph was his ability to make the study of monastic spirituality relevant to the medieval world. His promotion of the importance of monasticism to narratives of the 12th century allows scholars of medieval

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religion an avenue with which to engage dialogues on medieval culture, society, and politics. Moreover, L.’s unique depiction of monastic thought breaks with traditional narratives of medieval monasticism as insular and estranged from medieval culture. L.’s attention to monastic literary sources allows for significant psychological analysis of monks and the monastic milieu. While diverse approaches to these and other sources outside the monastic community provide a helpful complement to his internal view, L.’s contribution remains important to the study of the greater medieval world. Select Bibliography Works: Jean de Paris et l’Ecclésiologie du XIIIe siècle (1942); La spiritualité de Pierre de Celle (1115–1183) (1946); Pierre le Vénérable (1946); in collaboration with J.P. Bonnes, Un Maître de la vie spirituelle au XIe siècle: Jean de Fécamp (1946); Saint Bernard mystique (1948); La vie parfaite. Points de vue sur l’essence de l’état religieux (1948); Lettres d’Yves de Chartes. Édition critique et traduction precedes d’une introduction (1949); “Une nouvelle édition des oeuvres de S. Bernard,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 44 (1949): 194–97; “L’Édition de Saint-Bernard,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 45 (1950): 715–27; “Saint Bernard et ses secrétaries,” Revue Bénédictine 61 (1951): 208–229; Études sur S. Bernard et le texte de ses écrits (1953); “Saint Bernard et la théologie monastique du XIIe siècle,” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cistenciensis 9, III–IV (1953), 7–23; L’amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du moyen-âge (1957); “Nouvelle réponse de l’ancien monachisme aux critiques des cisterciens,” Revue Bénédictine 67 (1957): 77–94; “Les sources chrétiennes,” La vie spirituelle 98 (1958): 654–61; L’idée de la royauté du Christ au moyen âge (Coll. Unam Sanctam) (1959); in collaboration with F. Vandenbroucke and L. Bouyer, La Spiritualité du moyen âge (1960); “De l’humour à l’amour, à l’école de saint Bernard,” La Vie Spirituelle 101 (1959): 182–203; S. Pierre Damien ermite et homme d’Église (1960); Études sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen âge (1961); La liturgie et les paradoxes chrétiens (1963); Témoins de la spiritualité occidentale (1965); Vie religieuse et vie contemplative (1969); Le défi de la vie contemplative (1970); Nouveau visage de Bernard de Clairvaux: Approches psycho-historiques (1976); “The Renewal of Theology,” Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson et al. (1982); Le mariage vu par les moines au XIIe siècle (1983); La femme et les femmes dans l’oeuvre de saint Bernard (1983); Nouvelle page d’histoire monastique (1986). Literature: G.G. Meerseman, “Teologia monastica e riforma ecclesiastica da Leone IX a Callisto II,” Il monachesimo e la riforma ecclesiastica, 1049–1123 (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 1971); Gregorio Penco, “Le teologia monastica: Bilancio di un dibattitio,” Benedictina 26 (1979): 189–98; In Honour of Dom. Jean Leclercq (Montreal: Mount Saviour Monastery, 1986); John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” The American Historical Review 91.3 (June 1986): 519–52; The Joy of Learning and the Love of God, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995); Survival or Prophecy? The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: Straus and Grioux, 2002); Gregorio Penco et. al., Dom Jean Leclercq tra storia e profezia del monachesimo (Cesena: Badia di Santa Maria del Monte, 2003).

Daniel J. Watkins

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Le Goff, Jacques Louis (January 1, 1924, Toulon, France – Present), French Historian of the Middle Ages. L. is considered an influential social and cultural historian of the Middle Ages and a pioneer of the New History that developed in France in the 1970s and 1980s. In line with the third generation of Annales historians, his work focuses primarily on the history of mentalities in the Middle Ages, though it ranges from antiquity to the present. Influenced by French structuralism in the 1960s-1970s, L. developed a wide-ranging model of historical inquiry in which “the approach is more important than the material, and any source can be useful.” It expanded the historian’s field with new topics and questions that explored hitherto unexploited areas of human behavior and social groups such as banking, merchants, teachers, academic expenses, and dreams. Combining Marc Bloch’s idea that technological change was related to collective psychology, and Fernand Braudel’s notion that mental structures changed at a slower pace than material structures over the long haul, L. reclassified the Middle Ages as a long “pre-industrial” period (2nd century to the mid-19th century), whose cultural and mental structures have not yet vanished entirely. In the 1970s-80s, using the anthropological notion that perception, values, and experience are culturally constructed, he explored the collective psychology of medieval social groups with concepts such as gestures, images, myth, representation, imagination, sensibility, which aimed to reconstruct the ways of thinking and feeling of medieval people. L. was born in Toulon on January 1, 1924, the only child of a devoutly Catholic mother from Provence and an anticlerical teacher of English from Brittany. He was raised Catholic but received secular schooling at the Toulon lycée. In the naval port of Toulon, home to a heavily mixed ethnic immigrant population, he developed an early awareness of political, social, and racial issues, and a love of cities. His preparation for entry to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris was interrupted by World War II and he spent part of 1943–1944 in the Alps to avoid the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire, a system of forced labor for the German war effort). Having entered the ENS in October 1945, he spent 1947–1948 doing research at the Charles University in Prague. After passing the agrégation (teaching certification) examination in history in 1950 and teaching at the Amiens lycée in 1950–1951, he began a protracted quest for his ideal combination of teaching and research. It took him to advanced study at Oxford University’s Lincoln College (1951–1952), research as a Member of the prestigious École française de Rome (1952–1953), research as an associate at the Centre National de la

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Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris (1953–1954), teaching as assistant to historian Michel Mollat du Jourdain at the University of Lille (1954–1959), followed by research at the CNRS (1959–1960). Intent on becoming a professional historian, he found the conventional academic path blocked by his lack of a doctorat d’état. However, his quest ended in 1960 when Fernand Braudel, on the strength of two small research books that L. had published in 1956 (Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Âge, 8th ed. 1993. Merchants and Bankers in the Middle Ages) and 1957 (Les intellectuels au Moyen Âge. Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, 1993), offered him a junior position at the renowned Sixth Section (research division) of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris, teaching historical research methodology at the university level. Two years later, promotion to the rank of Full Professor made his career path secure, and he married a Polish doctor, Hanka Dunin-Wasowicz, a union that would produce a daughter, Barbara, and a son, Thomas. He became co-director of the journal Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations in 1969. In 1972, he succeeded Fernand Braudel as president of the Sixth Section. He oversaw its complex reorganization into an autonomous institution as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) three years later, and served as its President until he retired in 1977. Always fascinated by the media, from 1968 he became a familiar voice to radio listeners as the moderator of a weekly program, “Les lundis de l’histoire” (History on Mondays) on “France Culture,” the French public radio station devoted to cultural programming. His many awards include the Fondation de France prize (1982), Diderot-Universalis prize (1986), French Ministry of Culture’s National Prize in History (1987), City of Münster Prize (1993), Hegel Prize (1994), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Heineken prize for History (2004), and Dan David Laureate (2006). Ever an intellectual engaged in his times, L. has presided over educational and cultural commissions, and is a vocal supporter of human rights and the unification of Europe. Pour un autre Moyen Âge. Temps, travail et culture en Occident (1977, rpt. 1991. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 1980) is a collection of 18 essays that were published separately as articles between 1956 and 1976. Like L.’s preface, the essays are a manifesto for a “different” Middle Ages brought to life by “documents and ideas, sources and imagination,” and contact with the social sciences. It would help readers understand their collective identity in relation to past, present, and future, from critical reflection as well as experience. The essays are grouped under four thematic headings: Time and Labor, Labor and Value Systems, High Culture and Popular Culture, and Towards a Historical Anthropology. They show the interaction of material, religious, economic, intellectual, and social factors, even the first essay which explains

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why Jules Michelet is L.’s model historian. “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages” (1960) contrasts two concepts of time and labor. The municipal mechanical clock, invented in 1345, made it possible for merchants (the future middle class) to measure their work time (“time is money”). It competed with the system of ringing bells to mark the natural divisions of the day in monasteries (where labor was dedicated to God). “History and the Ordinary Man” spells out the potential of a history-anthropology alliance: a material, social, biological, and psychological history of the common man. La naissance du purgatoire (1981; rpt. 1991. The Birth of Purgatory, 1984) invokes relations between religion and society, mentalities and l’imaginaire (“the imagination”), to establish a history and a rationale for the emergence of the Christian doctrine of purgatory over the long term in the medieval West. Part I is a theological “pre-history” of the idea regarding the end of the 11th century, during which time purgatory did not exist. Part II insists that the concept of purgatory as a place was actually born 1170–1200, when the word itself appeared. Part III contends that purgatory did not become a physical reality until 1300, when it was described in Dante’s Purgatorio. The theological (intellectual) changes reflect social changes. L’imaginaire médiéval: Essais (1985; rpt. 1991. Medieval Imagination, 1988, 1992) was released as a sequel to Time, Work, and Culture, with which it shares themes and tools. The translation comprises 16 of the French edition’s 18 essays, all of which were published as articles between 1976 and 1984. Medieval “imagination” interests L. for its potential to shape material and mental realities. Grouped under five headings, The Marvelous, Space and Time, The Body, Literature and the Imagination, and Dreams, the essays illustrate the slowmoving mentalities of long-term history seen mainly through the lens of historical anthropology. The essay “The Marvelous in the Medieval West” (1978) seeks to reveal medieval men’s attitudes toward accounts of marvelous (wondrous, incredible) events, objects, and powers, which the Church equated with a rival belief system that was “low” (not clerical) in origin. Changes in the Church’s attitude from the 5th–14th centuries are attributed to social pressures and conditions. The larger, second part of the essay, in schematic note form, is a “preliminary catalogue of the marvelous” intended as a guide to developing the topic. The book’s most recent essays contrast high culture with popular culture. Histoire et mémoire (1986; History and Memory, 1992) is based on four of ten articles L. published in an Italian historical encyclopedia between 1977 and 1982. Originally published in Italian as Storia e memoria (1977), the English translation is abbreviated from the French. It is largely a philosophical reflection on writing history. The common thread linking the four essays, Past /

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Present, Antique (Ancient) / Modern, Memory, and History, is history and time. The first essay uses sources from antiquity to the 20th century to establish that historical thinking requires a critical awareness of differences between past and present time. The second essay examines changing concepts such as “antique (ancient) / modern” from the 16th–20th centuries in the West. Antiquity had perceived past and present as a continuum (present values were related to past values). This continuum was split apart in the 16th century by a model of “progress” based on newness, as a result of which the past ceased to be seen as a repository of values for the present. This fracture underlies today’s emphasis on change for its own sake, and its sense that the future has no use for the past. The third essay concerns the study and uses of memory in the 20th century and, more briefly, in medieval times. Memory, once a testimonial to authenticity, is no longer reliable because we know that it tends to distort and revise over time. Moreover, the increasing availability of written forms (manuscripts, books, computers) has deprived memory of its authority. Documents therefore have to be deconstructed to be useful as evidence of past mentalities. The final essay, longer than the other three combined, reflects on the challenge historians now face in retrieving the past and defining history’s future, in which the history-memory relationship poses new problems. Saint Louis, 1996, is a very long biography (947 pages) of a 13thcentury monarch, Louis IX of France, who occupied a secular position but was also a saint. L. uses the discredited “biography of great men” genre to examine the changing “representation” of the king-saint over time in three chronological slices: during Louis’s life, between his death and his canonization (1270–1297), and afterwards. L. deconstructs his medieval sources to show how a mythical iconic image was constructed and evolved over time. The book won the French Academy’s prestigious Grand Gobert prize in 1996. For non-specialized readers, L.’s La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (1964; rpt. 1965, 1967, 1972; 2nd ed. 1984) remains a classic: the first French student textbook of medieval history to reflect the new Annales influence, with photographs, maps, charts, and diagrams, it has been translated into over twenty languages. L. has always been a provocative, controversial figure. As director of EHESS, his professorial brilliance was on display in his dynamic weekly seminar, where he initiated students and visitors into historical anthropology. Lester K. Little describes L.’s generous critique of their research ideas and presentations, his questions and suggestions for new approaches, comparisons, and sources, and he justifies the provocative, dogmatic tone of L.’s writing in light of the classroom context (review of Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, in Journal of Social History 16.1 [1982]: 153–55). One measure of

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L.’s success is the number of former students and disciples who have developed his ideas further: Alain Boureau, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Jérome Baschet, Jacques Ciffoleau, Jean-Claude Bonne. L.’s writing was intimately tied to his teaching. Professional historians have found his work stimulating, provocative, delightful reading that resonates with 20th-century readers, and have praised his sensitivity, imagination, and erudition. L. has professed to avoid “theory” because he has no gift for it, yet his approach has been called into question for relying on theoretical structures (from anthropology and sociology) at the expense of historical evidence. Both R. W. Southern (“Between Heaven and Hell,” review of The Birth of Purgatory, in Times Literary Supplement, June 15, 1982, 651–52) and Robert E. Lerner (review of The Birth of Purgatory, in The American Historical Review 87 [1982]: 1374–75) offer functional evidence that L.’s chronology for the birth of purgatory is flawed, key precedents are ignored, and the philological evidence is inadequate. John Van Engen finds L.’s use of structuralist social contexts self-serving because they provide a convenient, ready-made causality in the place of historical evidence (review of The Medieval Imagination, in Church History 59 [1990]: 401–03). In a similar vein, Malcolm Vale (“The Return of the Event,” Times Literary Supplement, August 16 [1996]: 3–4) and Alain Saint-Denis (Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 75 [1997]: 1179–83) find an overemphasis on Saint Louis’s religious faith and inadequate attention to significant political events in the king’s reign. Others have pointed to L.’s lack of conceptual rigor, notably a failure to define key terms and to “back up his assertions with sufficient evidence for the reader to judge whether they hold” (Sharon Farmer, review of The Medieval Imagination, in The American Historical Review 95 [1990]: 473–75). Faith Wallis likewise finds L.’s use of the medieval concept of memoria (memory) uninformed and misleading because he ignores its complex medieval connotations (“The Ambiguities of Medieval ‘Memoria,’” review of History and Memory, in Canadian Journal of History 30.1 [Apr. 1995]: 77). L.’s legacy may well be that he served, in Lester K. Little’s words, to “refresh history and keep it alive.” Select Bibliography Works: La bourse et la vie. Économie et religion au Moyen Âge (1986; 2nd ed., 1996); Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (1988, rpt. 1998); Saint François (1999; Saint Francis of Assisi, 2004); with Pierre Nora, Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols. (1974, rpt. 1986); Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical Methodology, 1985 (abridged). Literature: Jacques Le Goff, “L’appétit de l’histoire,” Essais d’ego-histoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 173–239; La nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Legoff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978; Brussels: Complexe, 1988

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[abridged]); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); François Dosse, L’histoire en miettes, des Annales à la ‘Nouvelle Histoire’ (Paris: La Découverte, 1987; Paris: Pocket, 1997); The New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Jacques Le Goff (1924),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 305–15.

Carol R. Dover

Lehmann, Paul (July 13, 1884, Braunschweig – January 4, 1964, Munich), Medieval Philologist, Medieval Latinist, Library Historian, Medievalist. L.’s seminal work on the Latin literature of the Middle Ages was informed by his painstaking and thorough research of textual transmission. His extensive research into library holdings and library catalogues of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period is displayed in his life-long commitment to the series inspired by his teacher and mentor, Ludwig traube, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands und der Schweiz. L. is editor of the first two volumes (1918; 1928). As L. himself observes, however, the material artifacts of the Middle Ages are not in themselves the primary focus of his work, but rather they are valuable as “expressions, bearers, and mediators of the intellectual life of the past” (EdM I). L. was born in Braunschweig, where his father was a merchant. L. first attended university in Göttingen, where he studied history with Karl Brandi. After just one semester, he moved to Munich, where he changed his field to Latin philology and became a devoted and prominent follower of Ludwig traube. L.’s subsequent work in library history combines both his early interests in history and philology, and all three fields are fundamental to his approach to Latin literary medieval and humanistic history. In 1907 he received his Munich doctorate with a dissertation entitled Franciscus Modius als Handschriftenforscher. His habilitation (also in Munich), Johannes Sichardus und die von ihm benützten Bibliotheken und Handschriften, was completed in 1911. Both investigated “bio-historiography” (“Gelehrtengeschichte”) of the 16th and 17th centuries. L. joined the faculty of the University of Munich in 1917 and was professor of medieval philology from 1921–1953. In 1917 he also became a member

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of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, serving as secretary for the Philosophical-Historical Class from 1941–1942. From 1949–1964, L. was the delegate of the Bavarian Academy to the Commission of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae; he was also a member of the International Thesaurus Commission. He was a founder and for several years the chairperson of the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, which began publication in 1959; he represented the West German scholarly academies at the Union Académique Internationale for numerous years. A bomb attack on July 12, 1944, destroyed almost all of L.’s research work, so that he was able to complete only a few of his pre-war projects. Moreover, a traffic accident in 1951 left L. severely handicapped. Among L.’s students, Bernhard bischoff and Franz brunhölzl both held the chair of the Institute of Medieval Latin Philology in Munich. They co-edited the Festschrift for L., Liber Floridus (1950). L.’s publications span six decades and range from studies of individual manuscript fragments (for example, in “Fragmente,” an essay published in 1944 which provides an overview of previous work, L. summarizes his 1908 discovery and publication of fragments from a 5th-century codex, 4) to extensive studies of medieval library holdings (his first publication, in 1905, was on the Riddagshausen Library) to discussions of literary authors and themes (for example, his work on Johannes de Wetslaria, 1936; EdM V) as well as to broader overviews represented in his significant contribution to Volume II (1923) and even more so to Volume III (1931) of Max Manitius’s Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters. L.’s interest in the literary tradition from antiquity to the early modern via study of fragments was not limited to a specific period, genre or geographic location. He was by training a philologist, but he defined his field as a combination of linguistic expertise, literary history (transmission of literature), history, and the more practical fields required for close study of the material artifacts of the Middle Ages: paleography and codicology. In the true sense of the word, L. was a medievalist: an interdisciplinary scholar who employed approaches and methodologies that have recently gained renewed attention. L. published more than 300 works: these include an early essay, “Vom Mittelalter und von der lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters” (1914), which appeared in volume 5 of the series Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters and marks L.’s start as editor of the series. Combining his interests in philology and history, L. provides a succinct overview of the history and usage of the term “Middle Ages” as well as the gradual formation of a discipline of medieval literature. L.’s Die Parodie im Mittelalter (1923; 21962) provided the first broad overview of medieval Latin parody, and his book includes a selection of previously published as well as unpub-

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lished primary texts with transmission and editorial information for each. His Pseudo-antike Literatur des Mittelalters (1927) is an investigation of select works ascribed to classical Latin authors. Near the end of his life, L. published a five-volume selection of his essays, Erforschung des Mittelalters (1959–1962), which he had begun in 1941. Volume I contains a bibliography of his publications up to 1941 (381–90); volume V contains a subject index to the entire collection. It is here that one finds his most well-known essays: some on specific themes or stories such as “Judas Ischarioth in der lateinischen Legendenüberlieferung des Mittelalters” (1930; vol. II), and others representing his interest in medieval libraries and their catalogues, for example, “Die mittelalterliche Dombibliothek zu Speyer” (1934; vol. II). L.’s learned two-volume Geschichte der alten Fuggerbibliothek (I.1956; II.1960), which traces the Fugger family book collection, bears witness to his life-long interest in library history. The breadth of L.’s scholarship is perhaps most explicitly portrayed in the essays of Erforschung des Mittelalters. To a great extent, the tasks and goals he sets forth for the relatively young discipline of Medieval Latin Philology in his “Aufgaben und Anregungen der lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters” (1918; vol. I) inform his subsequent scholarship. That scholarship greatly helped to establish and broaden his chosen discipline. Though Bayless in her 1996 book, Parody in the Middle Ages, criticizes L.’s work – for example, the inadequacy and unreliability of his references – nonetheless she refers to it as “the classic work in medieval Latin parody” (15); Rigg, too, in his entry on “Satire” in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (1996, 567) calls it still the most thorough study of medieval satire. L.’s 1940 publication (with Otto glauning) on Medieval manuscript fragments (“Handschriftenbruchstücke”) of the University library and the Georgianum in Munich has gained particular value in light of the destruction of that collection during the Second World War. Select Bibliography Works: In addition to the works mentioned above, L.’s more than three hundred publications include: “Literaturgeschichte im Mittelalter” (EdM 1 [1912], 82–113); “Cassiodorstudien” (EdM 2 [1912–1918]: 38–108); Mitteilungen aus Handschriften (a series of essays published by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 1929–1951); “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der antiken römischen Literatur bis zur Renaissance” (Philobiblon 7 [1934]: 209–28); “Das literarische Bild Karls des Großen vornehmlich im lateinischen Schrifttum des MAs” (EdM 1 [1934], 154–207); “Auf der Suche nach alten Texten in Nordischen Bibliotheken,” EdM I (1937): 280–306 which treats L.’s research on Medieval Latin holdings of Scandinavian libraries, with bibliography.

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Literature: Bernhard bischoff, “Paul Lehmann 13. 7. 1884–4. 1. 1964,” Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1964), 179–83; Franz brunhölzl, “Paul Lehmann †,” Historische Zeitschrift 199.3 (1964): 788–91; Heinz haffter, “Paul Lehmann, “Et in Arcadia Ego (Baden: Hans Jörg Schweizer, 1981), 141–42; J. Hönscheid, “Lehmann, Paul,” LGB2, vol. 4 (1995), 435; Hans lülfing, “Textüberlieferung – Marginalienforschung – Literärgeschichte,” Milde and Schuder (1988), 191–93; Peter wirth, “Lehmann, Paul,” NDB, vol. 14 (1985), 92; “Lehmann, Paul,” DBE, vol. 6 (1997), 296.

Alison Beringer

Lejeune, Rita (November 22, 1906, Herstal, Belgium – March 18, 2009, Liège, Belgium), French and Belgian Literary Scholar. L. was best known for her varied academic production in the fields of literary criticism, Romance philology, and art history, as well as for her contribution to the study of the literature, art, history, and culture of her native Wallonia. She was also renowned for her teaching of medieval literature in the languages of oïl and of oc and of Walloon studies, and in particular for pioneering new courses in the latter and for bringing the study of Provençal literature into the mainstream of the curriculum of the Faculty of Philosophy and letters at the University of Liège. Born in Herstal, province of Liège, Belgium, on 22 November 1906, L. spent her early childhood at the center of the Walloon cultural milieu and gained an appreciation for her region’s cultural heritage from her father Jean Lejeune (Jean Lamoureux, pseud.), a poet who composed his works in Walloon. L. would complete her first degree at the University of Liège at the age of 22 under the direction of Maurice Wilmotte. She continued her studies in Paris with Alfred Jeanroy, Abel Lefranc, and Mario Roques and, in 1935, received a degree from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Romance Philology. In Liège that same year, she defended her thèse d’agrégation on the medieval French author Jean Renart. Four years later, she would be engaged at Liège as a chargée de cours in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Married to the Walloon politician and academic Fernand Dehousse (for which reason L.’s earliest publications are sometimes attributed to “Rita Lejeune-Dehousse”), L. had two children, Françoise Dehousse and JeanMaurice Dehousse (the latter, like his father, would become a prominent

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politician in Wallonia). During the World War II years, L. dedicated herself to helping victims of the war and in particular of the bombings of Liège and contributed to the resistance movement and the underground press in Belgium. In the capacity of chargée de cours at Liège, L. introduced a course on the history of Walloon literature, the success of which would lead to her promotion to chargée de cours de première catégorie in 1947; however, it was only in 1954 that she would finally gain the title of Professor, despite her manifestly superior qualifications as a teacher and scholar. In 1977, L. became Professor Emerita. Beyond the walls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Liège, L. served in many functions in a variety of academic societies. Among her most significant: editorial secretary and co-director of the journal Moyen âge; president of the Belgian section of the Société internationale arthurienne; founding vice president of the Société Rencesvals; and co-director of Épopées romanes (volume 3 of the Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters series issued in 10 fascicles between 1981 and 2005). She was a foreign correspondent member of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona (1952), Maîtresse ès Jeux of the Académie des Jeux Floraux de Toulouse (1961), and member of the Académie royale de Belgique (associate member 1977; full member 1988; emerita 2006). L.’s thèse d’agrégation on Renart, L’œuvre de Jean Renart. Contribution à l’étude du genre romanesque au moyen âge (1935), won immediate praise from her peers and is still cited among the fundamental works on this medieval romancier. She would produce editions of important medieval works before the close of the decade, among them Renart’s Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (1936) and Renaut’s Le Lai d’Ignaure; ou, Lai du prisonnier (1938). Through the 1940s, L. turned out several articles relating to early Gallo-Romance literature as well as to the region of Wallonia; in 1952 she prepared the text for the important volume on the “Motets wallons” of the Turin ms. 42, edited by Antoine Auda. In 1955 L. organized, together with art historian Jacques Stiennon, an exposition on Le romantisme au Pays de Liège, whose catalogue – edited by the aforementioned two – marks one of the most successful and significant events ever dedicated to Walloon culture. The pair would make a considerable impact with the publication of La légende de Roland dans l’art du moyen âge in 1966 (with an identical 2nd edition in 1967 and translations in Dutch and German and later in English). A survey of the iconography of Roland in medieval and early modern Europe, La légende de Roland dans l’art du moyen âge numbers among L. and Stiennon’s most remarkable achievements in its detailed treatment of a variety of artistic media.

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Published in two volumes rich in iconic imagery (vol. 1 contains 63 color plates of illuminated mss. and stained glass, while vol. 2 is wholly dedicated to 509 black-and-white photographs of frescos, mosaics, sculptures, etc.), the work serves as a resource for scholars in fields ranging from history to art history to textual criticism. L. and Stiennon would continue their collaboration for years. Shortly after La légende de Roland, they would produce, together with Paul Harsin and Fernand Vercauteren, a volume dedicated to the Abbey of SaintLaurent de Liège on the occasion of its millennial. From 1977 to 1981 L. and Stiennon would direct the publication of four beautiful tomes on the literature, art, and culture of Wallonia in the series La Wallonie: le pays et les hommes. In 1982, L., together with Joseph Deckers, would edit a collection of studies titled Clio et son regard in honor of Stiennon in celebration of his twenty-fifth year of teaching at Liège. L. continued to contribute to the world of scholarship after her retirement from teaching with remarkable critical acumen in articles and books on medieval French literature and Walloon culture. Among the titles she published in her post-retirement years: Littérature et société occitane au Moyen Age (1979), Du nouveau sur Jean Renart (1997), and Anthologie de la poésie lyrique en wallon (2004), a collection of Walloon dialect poetry in French translation. L. gained immediate notoriety with her breakthrough 1935 thesis on Jean Renart and her subsequent edition of Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole. These contributions have received almost unanimous praise and are still cited as obligatory starting points for any investigation into Renart. A common criticism, especially in the second half of the 20th century, has been that of L.’s historicizing, positivist approach: particularly after Michel Zink’s Roman rose et rose rouge (1979), scholars began to favor the notion of Renart’s literature as self-referential and explicitly fictitious. Additionally, L.’s attribution of the Plait Renart de Nammartin contre Vairon son roncin and De Renart et de Piaudoue to Jean Renart is not generally accepted today, largely as a result of the findings of Charles Müller’s systematic linguistic analysis of the texts in “Moyens statistiques et problèmes d’attribution de textes anonymes,” Études de linguistique appliquée 6 (1972): 107–15. L. may be best known to scholars, particularly outside the field of literary criticism, for her collaborative effort with Stiennon on the ample La légende de Roland. The two-volume opus, however, is not without its critics: many, such as Jaroslav Folda, Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 621–23; P. Le Gentil, Le Moyen Age 74 (1968): 87–99; Yvonne Labande-Mailfert, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 9 (1966): 417–21; Clarke Maines, Speculum 52.4 (1977): 801–23; D. J. A. Ross, Medium Aevum 37 (1968): 46–65; and Marc Thibout,

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Bulletin monumental 124 (1966): 334–38, question some of the Belgian scholars’ many interpretations. Maines, for example, comments, “Lejeune and Stiennon’s monumental study suffers more than occasionally from over-interpretation” (809), while Ross remains skeptical of “several of the identifications proposed” and unconvinced that “in all cases a sufficiently rigorous method of study has been employed” (46). Nevertheless, few deny the unique and innovative perspective that the work brings to the study of Rolandian iconography. Select Bibliography Works: Anthologie de la poésie lyrique en wallon: textes dialectaux traduits en français, ed. L. (2004); Littérature et société occitane au moyen âge (1979); L’œuvre de Jean Renart. Contribution à l’étude du genre romanesque au moyen âge (1935; rpt., 1968); Recherches sur le thème: les chansons de geste et l’histoire (1948); “Le Roman e Guillaume de Dole et la Principauté de Liège,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 17 (1974): 1–24; L. and Jacques Stiennon, La légende de Roland dans l’art du moyen âge, 2 vols. (1966); Le romantisme au Pays de Liège: exposition Musée des Beaux-Arts, 10 septembre-31 octobre 1955, ed. L. and Stiennon (1955); La Wallonie: le pays et les hommes: lettres, arts, culture, ed. L. and S., 4 vols. (1977–1981); Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. L. (1936); Renaut [de Beaujeu], Le Lai d’Ignaure; ou, Lai du Prisonnier, ed. L. (1938). Literature: Fred Dethier, “Rita Lejeune,” Mélanges offerts à Rita Lejeune. Professeur à l’Université de Liège. Vol. 1 (Gembloux: Duculot, 1969), ix–xiv; Nadine Henrard, “Bon anniversaire, Madame. Rita Lejeune vient de fêter ses 100 ans,” Le 15e jour du mois: mensuel de l’Université de Liège 159 (December 2006); Lily Portugaels, “Une grande Liégeoise s’en est allée,” La Libre Belgique (March 19, 2009); “Rita Lejeune, une grande dame de 99 ans,” La Libre Belgique (November 22, 2005).

Kevin B. Reynolds

Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples) (November 29, 1898, Belfast, Northern Ireland – November 22, 1963, Cambridge, England), British Medievalist. L. was a scholar with wide-ranging interests and a gift for writing memorable and accessible prose, as the breadth and influence of his writings attest. He is widely credited with popularizing and clarifying the concept of “courtly love” through his influential The Allegory of Love (1936), which traced the development of courtly love from antiquity to the Renaissance. While L.’s

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definition of courtly love has been challenged (even perhaps discredited), the book continues to be a standard introduction to the concept for students and to frame scholarly discussions of courtly love. It has been called “the most influential book on medieval literature by a British scholar in the twentieth century” (Derek Brewer, “C. S. Lewis,” 412). L. also wrote a still widely admired introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature, The Discarded Image (1964), based on a series of lectures given at Oxford. L.’s popular writings – science fiction, novels, children’s literature, and Christian apologetics – aside from their own merits, can be credited with popularizing medieval ideas, especially his series of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), and his science-fiction trilogy, both of which draw heavily on ideas from medieval romance. L. was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to a father who was a solicitor and a mother who was the daughter of a clergyman. His mother passed away when L. was nine years old, leaving his father to care for him and his older brother, Warren. He attended boarding school and then a public school until he was fourteen, when he was sent to a private tutor in Surrey, the eccentric William T. Kirkpatrick (the “Great Knock” as L. called him), who exercised an enormous influence on the young L., as described in L.’s 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He entered Oxford in 1917, but in the fall of that year was commissioned as an officer in the British army, and was sent to the trenches in France before the close of the year. He served there until April of 1918, when he was wounded and returned to England. In the spring of 1919, he re-entered Oxford, where he studied Greek and Latin, completing the course in 1922. He then turned to English literature, completing the threeyear English course after only one year in 1923. In 1925, he became a fellow at Oxford where he remained for the next thirty years. While at Oxford, L. established himself as a stimulating lecturer and a brilliant literary critic, initially on the merits of the Allegory of Love. Early in his career at Oxford, L. converted from atheism to Christianity, an event which powerfully influenced the course of his life. L.’s Christian faith provided a foundation for all of his future thinking and writing on almost any subject, scholarly or popular, religious or secular. While at Oxford, L. became a part of a small circle of friends, drawn together by common interests in medieval literature and Christianity, who met regularly and informally to discuss, among other things, each other’s writing. The group, known affectionately by its members as “the Inklings,” included other notable medieval scholars such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Nevill Coghill and writers such as Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Hugo Dyson. In addition to L.’s reputation as a literary critic, he gained international fame as a writer of popular

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Christian apologetics and then as the author the Chronicles of Narnia, becoming perhaps the most visible and influential spokesperson for Christianity in the 20th century. Despite his scholarly achievements – though perhaps due in part to his popular success – L. was never awarded a full professorship at Oxford. In 1954 he accepted a full professorship in English and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, where he remained until his death in 1963. In 1957 he married Joy Davidman, who died of cancer only three years later in 1960. L. himself passed away after his own struggle with cancer in 1963. In The Allegory of Love, L. set out to discuss medieval allegorical love poetry by tracing the historical development of both “courtly love” and the allegorical method. L. regarded the rise of courtly love – whose qualities he enumerated as “Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love” (2) – as a real change in human sentiment that began to take place in the 11th century. He argued that the sentiment we call romantic love was absent in classical and early medieval literature. When it did arise and become the substance of serious imaginative literature, it acquired the characteristics listed above due to at least in part to the conditions of feudal society. Humility and courtesy could be explained, L. argued, by reference to the feudal relationship between vassal and lord, which L. compared to a mold into which the new sentiment was poured. The element of adultery could be explained by the actual practice of feudal society, in which romantic love had little to do with marriage. The new sentiment found expression in allegory, L. argued, because allegory and personification were the tools available to medieval poets for the expression of the inner world and the contending forces of human emotion. Allegory, according to L., was “the subjectivism of an objective age” (30). Having traced these two strands of literary history, L. devoted the rest of the book to expositions of the high points of the allegorical love poem, including the Romance of the Rose and Chaucer’s love poetry and dream visions. L. regarded himself as both a critic and a literary historian, and the ability to describe major historical developments through brilliant exposition of individual literary works is characteristic of his scholarship. His English Literature in the Sixteenth Century described the change from the medieval to the modern world. L. saw taking place in the literature of that century, while The Discarded Image introduced the modern reader to medieval and Renaissance literature by way of recreating the medieval imagination of the cosmos. The Allegory of Love received favorable reviews in numerous journals and papers, including the London Observer and London Sunday Times (1936) and established L.’s reputation as a literary critic. L. was soon criticized, however, for his alleged oversimplification of courtly love and for his ready acceptance of the rise of courtly love as a real historical change. E. T. Donaldson has

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pointed out, for example, that adultery, one of L.’s four characteristics of courtly love, is absent from most of the poetry L. discusses in the book and indeed from most English literature up to Malory (“The Myth of Courtly Love,” Ventures: Magazine of the Yale Graduate School, 1965). Despite the fault that Donaldson and others have found in L.’s treatment of courtly love, The Allegory of Love remains a landmark study and the starting place for many discussions of courtly love and allegory. Furthermore, little fault has been found with the majority of the book, including L.’s discussion of the rise of allegory and his expositions of individual poems. As a literary critic, L.’s perception, generosity, and powers of exposition were extraordinary, resulting in numerous illuminating readings of many difficult and some previously inaccessible literary works. Select Bibliography Works: The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1939); English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of English Literature (1954); Studies in Words (1960); The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964); Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (1966). Literature: Derek Brewer, “C. S. Lewis (1898–1963),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2: Literature and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998); Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide (London: Harper Collins, 1996); George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (London: Macmillan, 1988); George Watson, ed., Critical Essays on C. S. Lewis (London: Scolar, 1992).

Jason Herman

Lexer, Matthias von (October 18, 1830, Liesing, Lesachtal, Carinthia – April 16, 1892, Nuremberg), German Linguist and Lexicographer. Still today, the Middle High German dictionary which scholars are most likely to reach for is that of L. Though it was conceived as a supplement and alphabetical index to the Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch of Benecke-MüllerZarncke (1854–1866), and should really be used in conjunction with this earlier work, L.’s three-volume Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch (1872–1878) can for many purposes also operate alone, and the affordable short version,

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Mittelhochdeutsches Taschenwörterbuch (1878, last revision by L. 1885), will be found on the shelves of most serious students of the subject. It would be fair to say that almost all 20th-century work in Medieval German language and literature has been dependent on this tool, and this will remain the case until the new dictionary currently being prepared in Trier finally appears. L. was born the son of a Carinthian (southern Austrian) farmer and miller, received his primary education in the local school in Liesing, and then attended high school (Gymnasium) at Klagenfurt (1844–1851). At the University of Graz, he first studied law, but changed after a semester to German linguistics and history. In 1852 he transferred to the University of Vienna, qualifying as a high school teacher in 1857. A grant from the Austrian education ministry allowed him to continue his studies in Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of the linguist and lexicographer par excellence, Jacob Grimm. In spring 1859 he traveled through his native Carinthia gathering material for his doctorate on dialectology, which he presented to the University of Erlangen in 1860 under the title Kärntisches Wörterbuch. Mit einem Anhange: Weihnacht-Spiele und Lieder aus Kärnten. While still a student, L. had gained significant teaching experience, with spells as assistant at the German high school in Krakow, Poland, and as private tutor for the Austrian Count Lamberg and the Hungarian Count Hunyadi. From 1860 until 1863, he was employed in Nuremberg on the Royal Bavarian Academy’s project to publish a complete edition of German town chronicles, Chroniken deutscher Städte vom 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert. In 1863, he was given a chair of German at the University of Freiburg, and was made ordinarius in 1866; he moved to Würzburg in 1868, where he held the chair until 1891. During these years, he served as dean of the philosophical faculty and rector of the university, and founded the Seminar für deutsche Philologie. In 1885, he received a knighthood, the Ritterkreuz des Verdienstordens der bayerischen Krone, and from 1887, he was a corresponding member (from 1891 a full member) of the Royal Munich Academy. In 1891, he accepted the chair of German philology at the University of Munich, where in the last months of his life he again founded a seminar of German philology. He died of a lung illness and was buried in the Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg. L. had a wide range of interests in Medieval and modern German language, literature, history, and mythology. In his years with the town chronicles project he edited five volumes of the series on historical texts from Nuremberg and Augsburg, and separately, he also edited the chronicles of Endres Tucher and Johannes Aventinus (Endres Tuchers Baumeisterbuch der Stadt Nürnberg (1464–1475) (1862); Johannes Turmair’s genannt Aventinus bayerische Chronik (1882–1886). A celebrated essay on Walther von der Vogelweide

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may be seen as his major contribution to literary studies (Über Walter von der Vogelweide. Ein Vortrag, 1873). However it was in linguistics, in particular in dialectology and lexicography, that L. made his name. While still a student, he published his first academic work, a study of the effects of Indo-European ablaut in the paradigms of German grammar (Der Ablaut in der deutschen Sprache, 1856). His doctorate, the Carinthian dictionary which was intended as a supplement to Johann Schmeller’s Bayerisches Wörterbuch, was his first excursion into the realms of lexicography, and earned him the accolade, “Vater der Dialektgeographie Kärntens” (Matzel, 135). Further work on lexicography followed in the form of glossaries to the chronicle editions and contributions to Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, especially the letters N-Q in volume 7. Thus, he was already widely experienced when he began his magnum opus, the three-volume Middle High German dictionary, and its accompanying single-volume “pocket dictionary” aimed at those who “merely wish to know the meaning of the old German phrase.” His published lecture on the history of German-language lexicography (Zur Geschichte der neuhochdeutschen Lexikographie, 1890) was a fitting culmination to this career. The first informed retrospective on L.’s work was that by Karl Weinhold in 1893, which has something of the tone of an obituary. Weinhold was seven years his senior, and had observed his work from the beginning: as one of Weinhold’s first students, L. had helped him gather material on south German Christmas plays and songs. A fuller and more distanced evaluation can be found in the essays by various scholars edited by Horst Brunner in 1993 as a centenary celebration. The Carinthian dictionary which was praised so highly by Weinhold has most recently been discussed by Ingo Raffenstein (in Brunner, 1993). Raffenstein demonstrates this work to be remarkably comprehensive in its coverage of the dialect of L.’s home village of Liesing in the Lesachtal, and despite larger gaps in its coverage of other districts, it remains “eine heute noch wertvolle und zum größten Teil noch nicht ersetzte Wortsammlung.” Its weakest point would seem to be the etymologies, where subsequent work on Austrian phonology has rendered many assumptions obsolete. The Middle High German dictionary has become the yardstick by which all subsequent lexicography in the language has been measured. Beate Henning, for example, wrote in the introduction to her Kleines Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (1993) of her debt to L.’s Taschenwörterbuch. Norbert Wolf (in Brunner, 1993) speaks of L.’s special gift for succinct precision which has been a model for later dictionary makers in other philologies, too, a characteristic which was already noted by contemporaries in relation to L.’s work on

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the Grimm dictionary. The Middle High German dictionary is noted for its admirably comprehensive coverage of the language of courtly literature. In its coverage of Medieval technical prose, it is less impressive: Gundolf Keil (Brunner, 1993) has pointed to significant gaps in its medical and scientific vocabulary, and the coverage of legal terminology has been entirely overtaken by the Wörterbuch der mittelhochdeutschen Urkundensprache (appearing since 1994). However, this must be seen in the light of the fact that such texts have only in the 20th century come to be taken seriously as subjects of literary and cultural interest. Wolf concludes that the fact that a modern MHG dictionary has been so long awaited is attributable to the outstandingly high quality of L.’s work which in many cases must have seemed intimidating. Horst Brunner has argued that L.’s role in establishing German studies as a serious discipline in Würzburg is equally important. Prior to 1868, the young subject of Germanistik had been badly served by its Würzburg representatives. L. sought to put the profession of school German teacher on the same level of academic respectability as other school subjects by developing the university training of teachers. His advocacy of such ideas was eloquently voiced for example in his public lectures as university rector. Select Bibliography Works: Kärntisches Wörterbuch (1862); Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch (1872–1878); Mittelhochdeutsches Taschenwörterbuch (1878); Karl Weinhold, “Matthias von Lexer,” ZfdPh 25 (1893): 253–55; includes a complete publication list; Klaus Matzel, “Matthias Lexer – Leben, Werk, Bedeutung,” Carinthia I 181 (1991): 127–46. Literature: Horst Brunner, “Walther von der Vogelweide und die Würzburger Professoren,” Blütezeit: Festschrift L. P. Johnson, ed. Mark Chinca (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 123–39; Matthias von Lexer: Beiträge zu seinem Leben und Schaffen, ed. Horst Brunner (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1993).

Graeme Dunphy

Liepe, Wolfgang (August 27, 1888, Schulzendorf, Kreis Ruppin, Mark Brandenburg – July 10, 1962, Kiel), German Medievalist. The fundamental research of the late-medieval/early-modern prose novel (previously identified as Volksbuch, see Albrecht Classen, The German Volks-

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buch, 1995) is intimately connected with the name of L. as Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Der Mythos vom Volksbuch, 1977) and Xenja von Ertzdorff (Romane und Novellen, 1989), among others, have confirmed. L. offered the fundamental contribution to the investigation of the subgenre of German translations from the French by the Countess Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken with his seminal study on Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken: Entstehung und Anfänge des Prosaromans in Deutschland, 1920). Unfortunately, but not uncommon for the history of German academic research in the 1920s and 1930s, especially under the Nazi regime, L. was soon forgotten after his expulsion from Germany, and he could not regain his previous reputation after his return in 1952 (permanently in 1953). L. was born as the son of a Protestant minister in Brandenburg. After his father’s death in 1895, the family moved to Potsdam outside of Berlin. L. attended high school (Gymnasium) there since 1897, and he graduated in 1906. From 1906 to 1909 he studied German, French, philosophy, and art history at the University of Berlin with Erich Schmidt, Gustav Roethe, Max Herrmann, Heinrich Morf, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Max Dessoir, and Heinrich Wölfflin. In the fall of 1909, he moved to Paris where he studied for one year with Charles Andler, Henri Lichtenberger, Joseph Bédier, Emile Mâle, and others. After a short move back to Berlin, he continued with his studies in Halle since the spring semester 1911, and graduated with his Ph.D. in 1913, having submitted his dissertation on the religious problem in modern German drama from Lessing to the Romantics, which earned him highest accolades. The book was printed in 1914. He married Gertrud Neustadt in 1915, and during the First World War he served as a school teacher instead of being drafted into the army for medical reasons. In 1919 he completed his habilitation which was dedicated to the Countess Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken (ca. 1393–1456). L. began with his teaching career in 1919 in Halle, offering courses on modern German literature, followed by a lectureship in Theater Arts in 1922, also in Halle. L. was particularly successful in founding a folk theater which quickly counted 20,000 subscribers. In 1925 L. was finally appointed untenured professor in Halle, followed by an appointment as professor for modern German literature at the University of Kiel in 1928. This position transformed into a tenured professorship on April 1, 1928. Already in 1929 he went on a lecture tour through the United States, based on an invitation as a visiting guest professor at Harvard University for one year. This was the first guest professorship for a German scholar at Harvard following the First World War. Although Harvard offered L. to stay after the one year, he rejected, preferring to return to Germany. But in 1933 L. was relegated from

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his position in Kiel because his wife was of Jewish descent, and his own mother was the daughter of a Protestant minister and lecturer who, having been born a Jew, had converted to Christianity. Curiously, L. was ordered to assume a post at the University of Frankfurt on November 1933, and in 1936 he was allowed to return to Kiel. At that point the Nuremberg Laws, aimed against Jews in Germany, had been enacted, and L. was strongly recommended to retire, which he did on April 1, 1936. Shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, he received the invitation for a guest professorship at the Yankton College in South Dakota, where he stayed until 1947, when he was appointed professor of German at the University of Chicago. In 1952, the American Philosophical Society sent him to Germany to go on a lecture tour. In 1953, L. received his original position at the University of Kiel again, and in 1960, he received the Kulturpreis (Culture Award) of the city of Kiel in 1960. He died in Kiel on July 10, 1962. Eberhard Schulz published a collection of L.’s scholarly articles under the title Beiträge zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte (Neumünster 1963). Famous scholar Benno von Wiese contributed a dedication in which, however, he focused exclusively on L.’s research on the 19th-century dramatist Friedrich Hebbel. But the first article included in this volume is L.’s investigation of the origin of the prose novel in Germany, first published in Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 36 (1922), which he had obviously developed on the basis of his habilitation. Although L. dedicated most of his career as a professor of German literature to the 19th century and drama, his monograph on Elisabeth von NassauSaarbrücken and the 15th-century prose novel (1920) continues to be one of his most important critical studies, underscoring his profound understanding of the late Middle Ages, offering significant insight into the cultural transfer between France and Germany in the 15th century, which already involved Elisabeth’s mother, Margarethe. In this monograph, L. vehemently argued against aesthetic and political criteria that had been used by contemporary literary critics dealing with medieval and early-modern documents. By contrast, he offered insights into the historical-political context and into the literary-historical conditions prevalent at Elisabeth’s time, thereby establishing a solid base for future research which could closely follow L.’s scholarly model, moving away from traditional, but rather untrustworthy, theoretical approaches. L. was one of the first to suggest a reading of Elisabeth’s prose novels (and of other contemporary works) as reflections of the actual political and cultural situation in France and Germany. In this process, L. was one of the first to highlight the intellectual and religious sources of influence relevant for the creation of Elisabeth’s novels. Whereas older scholarship had tended to identify these popular texts, which were soon

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adapted by the book printers and then were sold on the book markets all over Germany, as reading material for the urban class, L. demonstrated the exclusively aristocratic readership during the first decades after Elisabeth had completed her compositions. Moreover, he extrapolated from his analysis far-reaching observations about late-medieval German literature that still hold true today. L.’s book was reviewed in numerous Germanist journals, but also in The Times Literary Supplement (1923), and it has remained one of the seminal studies in the field of late-medieval German prose novels. Ute von Bloh has rightly emphasized that L.’s investigation of the manuscript and print edition was the first one to lay a solid basis for further research, whereas all previous publications had relied on erroneous assumption regarding Elisabeth’s writing because of untrustworthy text editions (Ausgerenkte Ordnung [2002], 4–5; eadem, Historie von Herzog Herpin [1990], 9). L. was also the first to identify Königin Sibille as authored by Elisabeth, which led him to the conclusion that the poet had created a whole cycle of prose novels in the sequence Herpin, Sibille, Loher, and Huge, whether the French sources had made up components of such a cycle or not. Moreover, L. also realized that these handwritten novels circulated among the high-ranking nobility connected with the family of Nassau-Saarbrücken, whereas they became more popular reading material only once they were accepted by the book-printers and so entered the early-modern book markets (Bodo Gotzkowsky, Volksbücher [1991], 79–92). Select Bibliography Works: Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken: Entstehung und Anfänge des Prosaromans in Deutschland (1920); “Die Entstehung des Prosaromans in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 36 (1922): 145–61; also in: Wolfgang Liepe, Beiträge zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte, ed. Eberhard Wilhelm Schulz (1963), 9–28. Literature: Eberhard Schulz, “Wolfgang Liepe zum Gedenken,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes 10, 4 (1963): 3–5; Ingrid Bigler, “Wolfgang Liepe,” Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, 3rd rev. ed. (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1984), 1416; Eberhard Wilhelm Schulz, “Liepe, Wolfgang,” NDB, vol. 14 (1985), 532–33; Gerhard Sauder, “Wolfgang Liepe – Erinnerung,” Zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich: Elisabeth von Lothringen, Gräfin von Nassau-Saarbrücken, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs and Hans-Walter Herrmann (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2002), 41–47.

Albrecht Classen

Loomis, R. S.

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Loomis, R. S. (October 31, 1887, Yokohama, Japan – October 11, 1966, Waterford, Connecticut), American Medievalist and Arthurian Scholar. Although L. made numerous contributions to Arthurian research, he is known first and foremost for his theory concerning the Celtic origins of Arthurian literature. His Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, published in 1927, provoked much controversy among scholars and presented ideas that even L. himself began to question, soon after the book’s publication. Over the course of his career and until his death, he continued to challenge and refine the notions set forth in this initial critical study, producing later works that reflected his evolving ideas regarding Celtic influence on the Arthurian legend: Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (1949), for which he was awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America, and The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963). Despite the controversy provoked by his early work, L. quickly emerged as one of the most prolific Arthurian scholars to date. In 1959, his edited volume titled Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History emerged and, with its 41 essays by 30 scholars (including six essays by L.), remains a monumental work for Arthurian scholars. Born in Yokohama, Japan, to missionary parents, L. attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. In 1909, he received his B.A. from Williams College and his M.A. from Harvard the following year. A Rhodes Scholar at New College in Oxford, he earned his B.Litt. in 1913. He also received several honorary degrees, including doctorates from the University of Rennes in France and the University of Wales in 1952, and in 1957, honorary degrees from Williams College and Columbia University. L. was married three times. In 1919, he married Gertrude Schoepperle, his first wife, who died two years later. From 1925 until her death in 1960, he was married to his second wife, Laura Hibbard. He wed Dorothy Bethurum in 1963; she survived him, dying in 1989. All of these women were themselves distinguished medievalists. L.’s first teaching position was at the University of Illinois, where he became an English instructor in 1913 and where he taught until volunteering for the United States Army in 1918. During World War I, he was editor of an army publication titled Attenshun 21. His academic career at Columbia University began in 1920, as an instructor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He became an assistant professor in 1926, was promoted to associate in 1939, and then to full professor in 1947. During the 1955–1956 academic year, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford, a professor-

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ship founded by George Eastman in 1929 that offered distinguished, senior American scholars an opportunity to lecture there. After returning to Columbia in 1956, he became Emeritus, though he continued teaching as a special lecturer until 1957. He remained an active and productive scholar, up until his death in Waterford Connecticut on October 11, 1966. In addition to being one of the founders of the Mediaeval Club of New York and serving twice as its president, L., along with Jean Frappier and Eugène Vinaver, founded the International Arthurian Society, attending its first congress in 1930. He was president of the society’s American branch until 1964 and was named honorary president in 1966. L.’s contribution to Medieval Arthurian studies is immeasurable. The corpus of his research consists of twenty books that he authored, edited, translated, or collaborated on, 119 articles, and 37 book reviews. His theory of Celtic origins first made him a significant Arthurian scholar. Based on the idea that Irish myths became Welsh legends and were then disseminated by Breton storytellers to the French, who in turn passed them on to the English, this theory continued to be a central part of his research throughout his career and figured prominently in many of his later publications. He consistently maintained that Celtic traditions played a major role in the development and growth of the Arthurian legend. Much of his work focused on Arthurian romance, including (in addition to titles mentioned above) Wales and the Arthurian Legend (1956), a collection of essays, and The Development of Arthurian Romance (1963), a slim but useful volume that serves as an introduction to many important Arthurian themes and their sources. L. also ventured into Chaucerian studies with two articles and his final book, A Mirror of Chaucer’s World, appearing in 1965 full of illuminations and other works of art illustrating Chaucer’s poems, as well as the time period during which he wrote them. Moreover, L.’s early scholarship includes several pedagogical publications. The first, an essay titled “Defense of Naturalism” and published in 1919 is still used in American literature courses. He also published two college textbooks that are still in circulation: Modern English Readings (1934), a collaborative effort with Donald L. Clark and then with John H. Middendorf, and Medieval English Verse and Prose in Modernized Versions (1948), in collaboration with Rudolph Willard. Throughout his career, L.’s ideas consistently sparked controversy. Most notably, views expressed in his Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance were at the center of heated debates, despite his later efforts to refine and withdraw certain notions therein. Reviews of the book were largely critical and skeptical about L.’s bold and extreme claims. In his review, William A. Nitze criticized L. for not applying a rigid scholarly method to his study (Modern Lan-

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guage Notes 42.8 (1927): 563), whereas Eleanor Hull argued that it would be difficult to persuade those interested in Celtic studies to accept his main conclusions on the grounds on which they were presented in the book (Folklore 38.2 [1927]: 212), and indeed it was. Kenneth Jackson, a Celtic scholar, disagreed with L. on at least five major points: methodology, qualifications, transmission, parallels, and the “folkness” of the folk tradition (“The Jackson-Loomis Controversy Re-Examined,” Folklore 83.2 [1972]: 109). Some scholars, however, reviewed L.’s study more positively; for example, Howard R. Patch cites the author’s treatment of names and his evidence for transmission and relationship as valuable, acknowledging his success in clarifying difficulties presented in previous studies of Gareth, Mordred, and Merlin and noting too that the volume offers a collection of material of great value in itself, even apart from the theories proposed in the book (Speculum 4.1 [1929]: 120). L.’s later works elaborating on claims initially made in Celtic Myth also proved controversial for some scholars, despite the withdrawal of his thesis that the Grail was originally a Celtic cauldron or fertility symbol. His Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes provoked a disagreement with Jean Marx, who dismissed L.’s claim concerning Breton intermediaries between the insular Celtic areas and the Continent, on the grounds that there was no surviving Breton Arthurian tradition to speak of in the Middle Ages (A History of Arthurian Scholarship, [2006]: 102–03). Other publications, such as The Development of Arthurian Romance, which considers the Celtic origins of Arthurian motifs and characters, their transmission and use in verse romances, as well as the development of prose romance cycles and the adaptation of Arthurian themes to English romances and which has been praised as the best introduction to medieval texts and modern scholarship published on the subject, were better received by scholars. Considered to be the culmination of L.’s career, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (viewed as a much needed replacement for James D. Bruce’s important work from 1923, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300) was met with approbation from most reviewers, who seemed awed by the immensity of his editorial task (Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, v. 2, 388). Others, including Urban T. Holmes, argued that the volume ignored those scholars whose beliefs about the origins of the Arthurian legend did not coincide with L.’s. Nonetheless, this monumental work is probably the most widely used of his works, even today.

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Select Bibliography Works: “Defense of Naturalism,” International Journal of Ethics 29 (1919): 188–201; The Romance of Tristram and Ysolt by Thomas of Britain (1923); Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (1927); Modern English Readings (1934); Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (1938); Medieval English Verse and Prose in Modernized Versions (1948); Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (1949); “Grail Problems,” Romanic Review 45 (1954): 12–17; Wales and the Arthurian Legend (1956); “The Grail Story of Chrétien de Troyes as Ritual and Symbolism,” PMLA 71 (1956): 840–52; “Arthurian Tradition and Folklore,” Folklore 69 (1958): 1–25; Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative Effort (1959); The Development of Arthurian Romance (1963); The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963); A Mirror of Chaucer’s World (1965); “Fundamental Facts About Arthurian Origins,” Studi in Onore di Italo Siciliano (1966), 677–83. Literature: Ruth Roberts, Studies in Medieval Literature: A Memorial Collection of Essays (New York: B. Franklin, 1970); Raymond J. Cormier, “The Jackson-Loomis Controversy Re-Examined,” Folklore (1972): 101–21; Claude Luttrell, “The Arthurian Traditionalist’s Approach to the Composer of Romance: R. S. Loomis on Chrétien de Troyes,” Oeuvres & Critiques: Revue Internationale d’Etude de la Reception Critique d’Etude des Oeuvres Litteraires de Langue 5.2 (1980–1981): 23–30.

Amy L. Ingram

Lot, Ferdinand (September 20, 1866, Le Plessis-Piquet, France – July 19, 1952, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France), French Medieval Historian. L.’s enormous body of scholarship, which includes his Etudes sur le règne de Hugues Capet et la fin du Xe siècle (1904) and Les Invasions barbares et le peuplement de l’Europe (1937), made him an authority on the later Roman Empire and Medieval Europe. However, his research interests also produced important works in other domains, including Breton history, Latin and Celtic philology, and medieval literature. He published the first great study on the 13thcentury Prose Lancelot, focusing on the notion of interlace (entrelacement) that he himself first identified within the romance. This monumental study paved the way for further research on the romance, as well as on the cycle to which it belongs, and remains the most comprehensive study on the topic of interlace within the Vulgate Cycle. Moreover, his basic work on the chanson de geste puts forth his views concerning the origin of the genre, calling into question those established by Joseph Bédier, and his articles on the subject,

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published between 1926 and 1940, were key in establishing what became (for a while) current theories on the medieval French epic. The son of a lawyer, L. was born in a Paris suburb, where he later returned and spent much of his life. His medieval studies began in 1886 at the Ecole des Chartres, where he attended lectures by Fustel de Coulanges and wrote his thesis on the last Carolingian kings, completed in 1890, under the direction of A. Giry. He left the Ecole des Chartres upon the completion of his degree and spent ten years at the Sorbonne as a librarian. Following the death of A. Giry in 1900, he returned to the Ecole des Chartres to teach. His doctoral thesis, which he completed in 1904 for the University of Nancy, also focused on Medieval French history, expanding his earlier research to cover the reign of the first Capetians. He began his teaching career as a lecturer at the Faculté des Lettres de Paris (the Sorbonne) in 1909 and was appointed tenured professor and named Chair of Medieval history in 1920, despite his public attack on the institution in 1912. In 1924, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, retiring from the Sorbonne in 1937. Nonetheless, after his retirement, he continued to teach at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for three more years. From the beginning of his career to the end, L. made substantial contributions to the fields of medieval history and medieval literature. His theories on the origins of the chanson de geste, which proposed a link between the earliest epic themes and historical events taking place during the Carolingian and Merovingian eras, connected his two primary scholarly interests: history and literature. L.’s study of the Prose Lancelot, which, in its own way, also fused the two, treated the Lancelot-Graal cycle differently than those who came before him, since he was the first to consider the work as a reflection of a 13th-century shift in thought, which brought with it a new form of romance, rather than as an unsystematic conglomeration of disconnected parts. In addition to his identification of entrelacement within the Prose Lancelot, L. also proposed that four of the five romances belonging to the cycle were composed by a single author, supporting his contention through an argument that the concise chronological thread running throughout the texts, lending it a historical feel, could only result from the conscious efforts of a sole artist. As far as scholarship devoted to history is concerned, his L’art militaire et les armées au Moyen Age en Europe en dans le Proche Orient was the first book in French focused exclusively on French military history and institutions that went beyond the Middle Ages. With few exceptions, L.’s work on medieval history was enthusiastically received and lauded by the masses. Regarding his Etudes sur le règne de Hugues Capet et la fin du Xe siècle, H. W. C. Davis notes in his review that “his knowl-

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edge of the sources is exhaustive and he discusses the vexed questions of his period with admirable acumen” (English Historical Review 20.78 [1905]: 352). His comprehensive study of the continuity between Rome and the Middle Ages, titled La fin du Monde antique et le début du Moyen Age (1927), was recognized as bridging the gap left by similar scholarship. C. H. Taylor described the book as emphasizing the continuity of development between the 3rd and 8th centuries and as giving to that period a unity of its own as an age of transition (Speculum 4.2 [1929]: 236). As for literature, L.’s views on the Old French epic were significant in their time, in that they offered an alternative to those provided by Joseph Bédier, who had been, until L. put forth his theories, the leading authority on the origins of the chanson de geste. Essentially, L. was in disagreement with Bédier’s propositions, and following L.’s publications on the subject, scholars tended to fall into one camp or the other. Among L.’s followers were Grace Frank, Dimitri Scheludko, René Louis, and G. Gabotto. Many, however, remained unconvinced by his theory concerning the author of the Prose Lancelot, and some, including J. D. Bruce, disagreed with and challenged it. Later, Jean Frappier proposed a theory concerning the author of the cycle that both supported and refuted L.’s notion, when he claimed that, although different authors wrote the various parts of the work, they were merely carrying out the structured plan created by a single “architect.” L.’s disputed theory aside, his work on interlace presented within this study was monumental. Select Bibliography Works: Les derniers Carolingiens (1891); Etudes sur le règne de Hugues Capet et la fin du Xe siècle (1903); Fidèles ou Vassaux (1904); Etude sur le Lancelot en prose (1918); La fin du monde antique et le début du Moyen Age (1927); Les invasions germaniques: La pénétration mutuelle du monde barbare et du monde romain (1935); Les invasions barbares et le peuplement de l’Europe (1937); L’art militaire et les armées au Moyen Age en Europe en dans le Proche Orient, 2 vols. (1946); Etudes sur les légendes épiques françaises (1958); Recherches sur les effectifs des armées françaises des guerres d’Italie aux guerres de religion, 1494–1562 (1962). Literature: Alfred Richard, M. Lot et l’histoire du Poitu (Poitiers: Imprimerie Blais et Roy 1904); Elliott Healy, “The Views of Ferdinand Lot on the Origins of the Old French Epic,” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 433–65; J. Hovrent, “Ferdinand Lot et les origines des légendes épiques françaises,” Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie 65 (1959): 321–48; M. Alfred Merlin, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Ferdinand Lot (Paris: Académie des inscriptions & belles-lettres, France, 1956); Charles-Edmond Perrin, Recueil des travaux historiques de Ferdinand Lot, 3 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1968–1973); CharlesEdmond Perrin, Un Historien français: Ferdinand Lot, 1866–1952 (Geneva: Droz, 1968).

Amy L. Ingram

Lowe, Elias Avery

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Lowe, Elias Avery (October 15, 1879, Moscow – August 8, 1969, Bad Nauheim, Germany), Paleographer. L. is recognized today as one of the great contributors to paleography, particularly in the study of scripts before A.D. 800. Credited early in his career with producing “one of the first fruits” of Traube’s “New Palaeography” (William M. Lindsay, “The New Palaeography,” The Classical Review 28 [1914]: 209–10), he went on to produce a series of seminal works on early script, culminating in the monumental twelve-volume Codices Latini Antiquiores (1934–1971). This work remains the standard reference for Latin manuscripts before 800 A.D., containing photographs and descriptions of some 1811 manuscripts, and the introductions to the volumes are still recognized as fundamental contributions to the field. L. was born to Charles Loew and Sarah Ragoler in 1879. His place of birth was most recently reported as Moscow (James J. John, “Lowe, Elias Avery (1879–1969),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 34, 2004, 563), but other sources give Lithuania (T. Julian Brown, “E. A. Lowe and Codices Latini Antiquiores,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 [1977]: 178; Hope Mayo and Sunil Sharma, “The E. A. Lowe papers at the Pierpont Morgan Library,” Scriptorium 46 [1992]: 91). The family migrated to New York City in 1892, and L. became a citizen of the United States in 1900. He studied at the University College of New York from 1894 to 1897, and he studied for the B. A. at Cornell University from 1899, completing the degree in 1902. He then began graduate studies at the University of Halle in 1902. Soon after he arrived at Halle, he was sent by his professor in Classical Philology, George Wissowa, to Munich where Ludwig Traube was then professor of Latin philology; L. decided to remain at Munich and complete his degree under Traube. L.’s initial topic for the dissertation was the transmission of texts, but he soon recognized that such work required better understanding of the surviving manuscripts. He therefore turned to “pure paleography” as espoused by Traube and proceeded to analyze the extant books from Monte Cassino. While doing so, he discovered three previously unknown calendars written in the late 8th century, and so he edited these for the dissertation, completing the degree in 1907. L. had been a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome from 1907 to 1908 and was again from 1909 to 1911. He became research associate in paleography at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1911, a post which he retained until 1953. He also married in 1911: his wife was Helen Tracy Porter who had a significant career herself as a translator of Thomas Mann, and they had three daughters together.

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L.’s teaching career began with lectures at Oxford in 1913, and he was appointed lecturer there the following year, and then reader in 1927. He was then appointed professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in 1936, a post which required no teaching, but he continued to lecture at Oxford until 1948, though with a break during the war. He was appointed honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1954, and received the Haskins medal from the Medieval Academy of America in 1957, and the Bibliographical Society’s gold medal in 1959. He was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and he received honorary doctorates from Oxford in 1936, the University of North Carolina in 1946, and the National University of Ireland in 1964. L. suffered from poor health and poor eyesight in his later life. The former consisted primarily in angina pectoris which commenced in his mid sixties and which required nitroglycerin; the latter involved cataracts which left him nearly blind when in his late sixties until surgery restored his sight, though still with the need for thick glasses. Nevertheless, he survived through these years, and indeed through his seventies and eighties, dying shortly before his ninetieth birthday but living just long enough to complete his monumental Codices Latini Antiquiores (1934–1971). L.’s first monograph publication was Die ältesten Kalendarien aus Monte Cassino (1908), followed by an examination of early Latin and particularly Visigothic minuscule, Studia palaeographica (1910). Neither of these works made direct use of the systematic survey of scripts from Monte Cassino which L. had completed under Traube, but this material bore fruit in 1914 with his landmark study The Beneventan Script, and the accompanying Scriptura Beneventana which was delayed by war and so not published until 1929. L.’s work on minuscule scripts was then followed by a series of important studies on Uncial, a script which had received little previous objective analysis. These studies include A Sixth-Century Fragment of the ‘Letters’ of Pliny the Younger (1922), Codices Lugdunenses antiquissimi (1924), and the later English Uncial (1960). Then, in the 1930s, he began the project that would occupy the remainder of his life: Codices Latini Antiquiores. This was published in eleven volumes and a supplement between 1934 and 1971, and with a 2nd edition of volume two published in 1972. The volumes contain photographs and descriptions of some 1811 items, the objective being to include all surviving Latin literary manuscripts produced before A.D. 800. Editorial assistants included Bernhard Bischoff, who later held Traube’s seat at Munich, and Virginia Brown who became Professor of Paleography at the University of Toronto; as T. Julian Brown noted (op. cit., 187), these assistants all benefited greatly from the training they received, and it is no

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coincidence that they went on to become important paleographers themselves. Among reviews of The Beneventan Script is one by William J. Lindsay, another student of Traube’s, and it is perhaps no surprise that Lindsay celebrated this work in his review (“The New Palaeography,” The Classical Review 28 [1914]: 209–10). Nevertheless, Lindsay’s praise was not overstated, and the book proved to be an extremely influential example of Traube’s methods, such that James J. John described it in 2004 as “a landmark in Latin palaeography” which “set new standards for treating the history of a script and … overwhelmed the palaeographical world” (“Lowe, Elias Avery (1879–1969),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 34, 2004, 563–65). Its importance is further reflected by its reissue in 1980 with a volume of updates by Virginia Brown, and further updates were published separately (Virginia Brown, “A Second New List of Beneventan Manuscripts,” Medieval Studies 40 [1978]: 239–89 and 50 [1988]: 584–625). L.’s work on Uncial script also remains valuable, not only for its conclusions but even more for its elucidation of method, and most of these studies were reprinted in a posthumous collection (Palaeographical Papers, ed. Ludwig Bieler, 1972). L.’s approach was based on Traube’s and included compiling lists of manuscripts of similar dates, in similar hands, or from similar places; the recognition that scripts must be analyzed according to clear and distinct criteria; and that “only by amassing all available data could sound results be obtained” (T. Julian Brown, op. cit., 181, citing an unpublished speech made by L. in 1960). Indeed, as T. Julian Brown noted, L. “published his methods as openly as his results; and that, after all, is the most generous and durable form of teaching” (ibid., 183). These works alone would have established L. as one of the most important paleographers of his time, but even they have been somewhat eclipsed by his Codices Latini Antiquiores (1934–1971). Described by L. himself as 1500 articles with accompanying facsimiles (ibid., 182, citing L.’s speech of 1960), these remain valuable for their reproductions, their discussions of specific scribal hands, and for the broader syntheses in the introductions to each volume. Thus, as three examples among many, L.’s discussion of Insular script in the second volume of Codices Latini Antiquiores has been cited extensively by David N. Dumville in the latter’s A Palaeographer’s Review (1999), the footnotes of Bernhard Bischoff’s Latin Palaeography (1990) are filled with references to “CLA”, and the editors of T. Julian Brown’s Palaeographer’s View (1993) saw fit to add a full concordance of the so-called “CLA numbers” of all manuscripts cited in the volume.

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Select Bibliography Works: For a full bibliography of L.’s publications, see the “Bibliography of Publications 1907–1969,” in his Palaeographical Papers 1907–1965, II, ed. L. Bieler (1972), 594–611. Autobiographical comments are not infrequent in L.’s writing; for the clearest examples see “The Ambrosiana of Milan and the Experiences of a Palaeographer,” and “Autobiographical Note,” Palaeographical Papers 1907–1965, II, ed. L. Bieler (1972), 575–90, and 591–93. Literature: William M. Lindsay, “The New Palaeography,” The Classical Review 28 (1914), 209–10; T. Julian Brown, “Latin Palaeography since Traube,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1959–1963): 361–81; Bernhard Bischoff, “Elias Avery Lowe,” Jahrbuch, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1970): 199–203; T. Julian Brown, “E. A. Lowe and Codices Latini Antiquiores,” Scrittura e Civiltà 1 (1977): 177–97; James J. John, “E. A. Lowe and Codices Latini Antiquiores,” American Council of Learned Societies Newsletter 20/5 (Oct 1969): 1–5; James J. John, “A Palaeographer Among Benedictines: A Tribute to E. A. Lowe,” American Benedictine Review 21 (1970): 139–47; Hope Mayo and Sunil Sharma, “The E. A. Lowe Papers at the Pierpont Morgan Library,” Scriptorium 46 (1992): 90–107; James J. John, “Lowe, Elias Avery (1879–1969),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. G. C. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 34 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 563–65.

Peter A. Stokes

Lubac, Henri de (February 20, 1896, Cambrai – September 4, 1991, Paris), French Theologian. L. was a French Jesuit priest of the Roman Catholic Church and a leader in the mid-century theological movement known as ressourcement theology (also, la nouvelle théologie), characterized by a return to patristic and Medieval sources. L. played a key role in the shaping of the Second Vatican Council wherein ressourcement was viewed as a first step in the process of renewal, or aggiornamento, for the Church. L.’s major contribution to Medieval Studies is his four-volume magnum opus, Exégèse médiévale (vol. 1, 1959, vol. 2, 1959, vol. 3, 1961, vol. 4, 1965). Born into an aristocratic family in Cambrai, northern France, on February 20, 1896, L. entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1913. After serving in the First World War, L. pursued theological training in England and France and was ordained in August of 1927. During WWII, L. was a leading voice in the Catholic resistance movement, contributing often to the clandestine journal of the Resistance, Cahiers du témoignage chrétien. In 1950 with the publication of

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the encyclical Humani Generis, L.’s work fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy. After nearly a decade of ostracism, however, L. was invited by Pope John XXIII to serve as consultant for the preparatory Theological Commission of the Second Vatican Council. In 1983, Pope John Paul II elevated him to Cardinal. L. died on September 4, 1991. By the end of his life, he had published more than forty volumes and numerous articles on a range of subjects. In 1929, L. joined the faculty of the School of Catholic Theology in Lyons as Professor of Fundamental Theology. He soon also received an appointment at Fourvière, where he taught occasionally. In 1940, L. founded with Jean Daniélou the series Sources Chrétiennes, which set out to make patristic and Medieval sources available to a larger public. On the founding and history of the series, see Étienne Fouilloux (La Collection ‘Sources chrétiennes,’ 1995). He published a number of significant volumes between 1938 and 1946, however his work quickly came to be suspected of historical relativism for his use of less canonical medieval sources (Corpus mysticum, 1944) and under suspicion of unorthodoxy for his interpretations of Thomas Aquinas (Surnaturel, 1946). By 1950, L. was compelled by Jesuit authorities to leave his teaching position in Lyons; his books were banned, removed from the libraries of the Society of Jesus, and removed from the market. He began work on Exégèse médiévale and published a number of important books during this period, including a study of Origen, three books on Buddhism, and a book of meditations on the Church. The ostracism seems to have resolved itself by 1960 when L. was invited to contribute to the Second Vatican Council. For further biographical information on L., a number of sources are available. Both Antonio Russo’s and Jean-Pierre Wagner’s studies contain comprehensive intellectual biographies (Wagner, Henri de Lubac, 1991; Russo, Henri de Lubac, 1994). L.’s own memoir takes a retrospective look at his writing career and endeavors to locate unities in what at first appears to be a “scattered” oeuvre (Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits, 1989). Because L. published on an array of subjects ranging from Buddhism to Marxism, from Origen to Teihard de Chardin, and from sacramental theology to ecclesiology, this article lists only those works that pertain directly to Medieval Studies and that are likely to be of interest to scholars in fields other than theology. It is difficult, however, to separate L.’s contributions to Catholic theology from his contributions to Medieval Studies since, as Fergus Kerr notes, L.’s entire career was devoted to recreating a pre-modern Catholic sensibility (Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 2007). It was the conviction of the ressourcement theologians that in order for theology to speak faithfully to the present situation of the Church, it must engage in studied recovery of the Church’s past. Nearly all of L.’s major interventions in the

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field of Catholic theology are thus built on careful readings of patristic and medieval sources. L.’s first major work, Catholicisme: Les Aspects sociaux du dogme (1938), works from patristic and Medieval sources to underline the importance of the social and communal dimensions of Catholicism, against what he saw as the overly individualistic spirituality of the time. In 1944, Corpus Mysticum: Essai sur l’Eucharistie et l’Eglise au Moyen Age appeared. Beginning with the observation that the phrase corpus mysticum referred initially to Christ’s Eucharistic body, and not to the visible Church as an institution, L. argues for a return to the medieval understanding of the Eucharist according to which Christ is mystically at work during any celebration of the Eucharist. Surnaturel: Etudes historiques (1946) was the most controversial of L.’s publications. His argument places into question the accepted neo-Thomist conception of a “pure nature” that exists prior to, and separate from, divine grace. For L., nature is always already “surnaturel.” There is no separation of purely natural destiny and supernatural destiny (Raul Berzosa Martinez, La Teologia del Sobrenatural en los escritos de Henri de Lubac, 1991). Moreover, L. argues, this neo-Thomist conception of a purely natural destiny actually paved the way for secular humanism. L.’s most significant contribution to medieval studies is his monumental four-volume study, Exégèse médiévale. A vast encyclopedic study of medieval writings on Biblical interpretation, read too often as merely a compendium, Exégèse médiévale does in fact contain a theological argument within its labyrinth of citations. The argument is essentially that Christian allegory, or “spiritual exegesis,” is distinct from the Greek allegory in its emphasis on the unity of meaning, mediated through the Christic body (Donath Hercsik, Jesus Christus als Mitte der Theologie von Henri de Lubac, 2002). Furthermore, as Susan Wood explains, (Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac, 1998), L. levels a serious critique against the historicist approach to Biblical exegesis prevalent at the time. Two other titles should be mentioned: Augustinisme et théologie moderne (1965) examines the genesis of the concept of “pure nature” and contends that this concept arose out of the “distorted” Augustinianism of nominalist theologians from the later medieval period; and La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore (vol. 1, 1979; vol. 2, 1983), a study of Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135–1202), whose Trinitarian theology of history, divided into three ages, drew upon the language of Scriptural exegesis. Publication of L.’s Oeuvres complètes (50 vols. [15 completed]; 1998–), which will include a comprehensive bibliography, is currently in progress. The impact of L.’s work on contemporary Catholic theology is impossible to measure, as his thought is so central to a number of fields within

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theology, from Biblical exegesis to Eucharistic theology. He is cited as a major influence on the school of theology known as Radical Orthodoxy, which, somewhat like ressourcement theology, revives many key aspects of patristic and medieval doctrinal thought (Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, 1999). David Grumett’s synthesis of L.’s theology (De Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed, 2007) includes the most up-to-date bibliography of works on L. to be found. As he notes, not much expository work on L. has been published with the notable exception of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s study (Henri de Lubac: Sein organisches Lebenswerk, 1976). L.’s work has also been influential in literary studies, particularly in Chaucer studies. Exégèse médiévale is cited extensively in D.W. Robertson’s A Preface to Chaucer (1962) and is often associated with the school of literary criticism named for the latter [see D. W. Robertson]. As Robertsonianism fell out of critical vogue, accused by Lee Patterson, among others, of promoting a “conservative, universalist, and institutional view of the Middle Ages” (Negotiating the Past, 1987), L., by association, seemed to lose currency in literary studies. Recently, however, scholars in literary studies have been recuperating L.’s work. Carolyn Dinshaw’s influential queer study, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (1998), draws heavily on L.’s discussion of the figure of the Beautiful Captive. Bruce Holsinger demonstrates the influence Exégèse médiévale had on French post-structuralist critic Roland Barthes (The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, 2005). Holsinger argues that the postmodern questioning of modernist narratives was at least in part inspired by a long retrospective glance at the Middle Ages. Barthes’s imagining of an ideal writing activity as one of “proliferating commentary, branching out, recurrent,” does indeed resemble the Medieval exegetical culture L. unearthed in his magnum opus (Le Grain de la voix, 1981). Select Bibliography Literature: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac: Sein organisches Lebenswerk (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976); Henri de Lubac, Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits (Namur: Culture et vérité, 1989); John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2005).

Michael Johnson

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Luick, Karl

Luick, Karl (January 27, 1865, Floridsdorf (now part of Vienna) – September 20, 1935, Wien), Austrian Linguist. L.’s detailed research in the area of English historical phonology figures among the most significant contributions to pre-structural and, indirectly, structural linguistics, and even generative grammar (the idea of rule ordering). His deep knowledge of the discipline found confirmation in two hundred contributions (books, articles and reviews), chiefly on the history of English pronunciation. Of special importance is his monumental Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, an unfinished work confined to chapters on historical English phonology. The grammar remains an invaluable source of information on how English pronunciation evolved through centuries both in the standard speech and in dialects. L.’s classic contributions to English versification (see below) are considered, together with those by Eduard SIEVERS, pioneering studies of Middle English prosody. L. was born in 1865 in a working class family. In 1884, he enrolled at Vienna University where he listened to the lectures of Brandl, Mehringer, Schipper, Schröer, among others, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1888. As a student he published several articles on the German language, but soon his interests shifted towards English philology. A pupil of Schipper, L. originally followed his professor’s interests in the study of metrics, which was the subject of his post-doctoral dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) on the Late Middle English alliterative verse (Der mittelenglische Stabreimvers des XIV. Jahrhunderts in seinem Verhältnis zum Altenglischen). His early fascination with metrical problems was strengthened in the 1880s through his personal acquaintance with Eduard Sievers. In 1893, L. was offered a position of Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Graz. At that time he became deeply involved in the study of works of two eminent English linguists, Alexander J. Ellis and Henry Sweet. The year 1896 saw the publication of his first major monograph Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte. Two years later, he was promoted to Professor Ordinarius in Graz, where he continued to work for ten years. In 1908 L. returned to Vienna University where he obtained a chair as Professor of English. From that time onwards his work concentrated on the writing of Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, his opus magnum, whose first installment (Lieferung) was published in 1914 (the last, ninth installment of the Grammatik dealing with English vowels came out in Strasbourg in 1929). In 1925 L. assumed the office of Rector of Vienna University. Ten years later, at the age of seventy, he died on 20th September 1935, leaving his greatest work incomplete. Five years after his death,

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his pupils Friedrich Wild and Herbert Kozioll edited and published chapters on consonants (1940). L.’s findings in the area of historical phonology opened new perspectives for the subsequent research. The first of his two early studies of English historical phonology, Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte (1896), based on the data from Alexander J. Ellis’s monumental Early New English Pronunciation (1869–1889), contains one of his most important hypotheses, a theory concerning the specific Northern and Scottish open syllable lengthening and lowering of Middle English [i, u] to [e:, o:]. In his other early study, Studien zur englischen Lautgeschichte (1903), L. launches a theory connecting the loss of a word-final schwa and open syllable lengthening in Middle English. The most important tenets of L.’s linguistic theory as expounded in Untersuchungen and Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache could be formulated as follows: (1) changes in language are not blind, (2) language development takes place on teleological lines, (3) language change is symmetric (hence L. comes close to André Martinet’s idea of the functional load) and (4) sound changes are interrelated. L.’s emphasis on the significance of the living dialects for reconstructing the past stages of English pronunciation, was duly noted in Lorenz Morsbach’s extensive 44-page long review of Untersuchungen (“Über einige Probleme der englischen Sprachgeschichte,” Archiv 100 (1898): 53–76, 267–76). Referring to the same work, Eilert Ekwall (“Karl Luick. In memoriam,” ES 18: 24–26, 1936) stated that L. “wrote nothing less than a history of the vowels in the English dialects.” According to Josef Vachek, a prominent member of the Prague School (“Prof. Karl Luick and problems of historical phonology,” Casopis pro moderní filologí 19 (1933): 273–91), both Untersuchungen and L.’s opus magnum, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (1914–1940), contained assumptions bringing both studies into the area of the then developing structural phonology. Gero Bauer (“Zu einer frühen Anwendung historisch-phonologischer Prinzipien. K. Luick’s Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte von 1896,” Die Sprache 18 [1972]: 1–8), finds a striking resemblance between Andre Martinet’s theory of sound change and ideas originally expressed in Untersuchungen (‘push chain’ and the concept of ‘empty slots’). William G. Moulton (“Dialect Geography and the Concept of ‘Phonological Space,’” Word 18 [1962]: 23–33) draws a parallel between the current theories of phonological space and L.’s concept of “Verbreitungsgebiet.” These and many other evaluations allow one to rank his studies among the greatest achievements of English historical phonology at the turn of the 20th century (cf. Jerzy Wełna, A Critical Survey of a Historical Phonology of English Vowels with special reference to Karl Luick’s ‘Historische Gram-

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matik der englischen Sprache’, 1987). Practically all contributions to historical phonology of English contain references to L.’s grammar. Select Bibliography Works: Untersuchungen zur englischen Lautgeschichte (1896); Studien zur englischen Lautgeschichte (1903); Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (1914–1940). Literature: Josef Vachek, “Prof. Karl Luick and problems of historical phonology,” Casopis pro moderní filologí 19 (1933): 273–91; Gero Bauer “Zu einer frühen Anwendung historisch-phonologischer Prinzipien,” Die Sprache 18 (1972): 1–8; Jerzy Wełna, A Critical Survey of a Historical Phonology of English Vowels with Special reference to Karl Luick’s Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1987); Luick Revisited. Papers Read at the Luick-Symposium at Schloss Liechtenstein, 15.–18. 9. 1985, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Gero Bauer (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988) [contains 25 papers related to various aspects of L.’s works, including the following general evaluations of his studies: Gero BAUER, “Who was Karl Luick?,” 3–13; Jacek Fisiak, “Karl Luick and Historical English Phonology,” 15–30; Klaus Dietz, “Karl Luick and Historical English Dialectology,” 31–78, Udo Fries, “Karl Luick on Syntax,” 79–94]; Nikolaus Ritt, “Luick, the Theoretician,” VIEWS 2 (1992): 93–105. H. G. Widdowson, “Comments on: Luick, the Theoretician. Nikolaus Ritt and Cohesion in OE prose. Hans Peter Platzer,” VIEWS 2 (1992): 106–11; Jerzy Wełna, “Karl Luick’s Historische Grammatik and Medieval English Consonant Changes,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 44 (2008): 83–100.

Jerzy Wełna

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M Maier, Anneliese (November 17, 1905, Tübingen, Germany – December 2, 1971, Rome, Italy). M. is best known for her various articles on 14th-century natural philosophy. These were collected and reissued in two series: in the five-volume Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik and in the three-volume Ausgehendes Mittelalter. In addition to her articles on late scholasticism, she catalogued manuscript collections at the Vatican library and was the first woman to be employed in this task. Towards the end of her life, she began to examine the Avignon debates concerning the beatific vision; however, she died before her plans for the project were completely realized. M.’s intellectual interests in history and philosophy, as well as her remarkable dedication to scholarly research, might be understood as the legacy of her father, Heinrich Maier, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. After she completed high school (Lyceum), M. studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the University of Berlin, working for a time under the guidance of Max Planck. In 1930, she completed her doctoral dissertation on Kant’s categories of quality, a topic which extended her father’s research. M.’s father died in 1933, after completing the first volume of a three-volume study, Philosophie der Wirklichkeit. During the years following his death, M. undertook the task of completing her father’s work, editing the two remaining volumes of the series. In 1936, the Prussian Academy of Sciences asked M. to edit Leibniz’s letters for the publication of the philosopher’s complete works. The assignment brought her to Italy and, most significantly, to the Vatican library, which would become her workplace and her home for the rest of her life. She became friends with the archivists of the library, Monsignor Mercati, the prefect of the archives, as well as the prelate and scholar, August Pelzer. It is likely Pelzer who suggested to M. that she pursue scholastic topics and examine the much-debated claims of Pierre Duhem, who had argued for the achievements of 14th-century science. During her initial years in Rome, M. worked under the auspices of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaft. When her funding from Germany stopped during the war, Cardinal Mercati provided her with financial support, using the operating funds at his disposal.

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Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she published several articles on scholastic topics; however, the publications were overshadowed by the war. She had the opportunity to revise and republish these articles, thanks to her friendship with Don Giuseppe De Luca who offered to reissue her work in the series Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik. The first volume of the series, entitled Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrundert (1949), outlines her response to Duhem’s scholarship, and in particular his Études sur Léonard de Vinci. Duhem claimed that 14th-century natural philosophy had paved the way for the development of classical physics in the 16th and 17th centuries. M. agreed with Duhem that the achievements of late scholasticism were significant, but she criticized him for being anachronistic and for distorting the scholastic authors by explaining their theories with reference to modern science. She maintained that the natural philosophy of the period must be understood as significant in its own right and examined according its own terms. She argued that the “continuity” between the 14th and 17th centuries does not represent an evolution toward modern physics, but rather a gradual abandonment of Aristotelian principles. Zwei Gundprobleme der scholastischen Naturphilosophie (1951) contains her examination of the theory of impetus. Duhem had claimed that Buridan’s theory of impetus contained the essential elements of Galileo’s inertia; however, M.’s careful examination of Buridan’s writing showed that the 14th-century theory was fundamentally different from inertia. Other titles in the series included, An der Grenze von Scholastik und Naturwissenschaft (1952), Metaphysische Hintergründe der spätscholastischen Naturphilosophie (1955), and Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik (1958). M. also completed two major projects cataloguing the manuscripts at the Vatican archives. Her catalogue of the Borghese collection was published in 1952. The catalogue of codices 2118–2198 was published in 1961. After 1967, she began the final phase of her scholarly career, editing texts of scholastic disputes concerning the beatific vision – a debate which had emerged with John XXII’s papacy and was resolved under Benedict XII. Several articles describing the debate were reissued in the third volume of Ausgehendes Mittelalter. She died in November 1971, in the midst of working on one such text in this series, and so, like her father, she died in the midst of an ambitious project. While she received numerous distinctions and was recognized as an authority in many countries, M. traveled very little and remained attached to the Vatican library. In 1950, Josef Koch, at the University of Cologne, invited her to teach at the institution. After a summer of teaching, she was appointed to a professorship. However, she left Cologne within the year, anxious to return to Rome for more archival research. In 1954 she became a fellow of the

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Max-Planck-Institute, which guaranteed her a permanent income and freed her from continuing financial worries. She was made a fellow of numerous societies and regularly reviewed books for Isis. In 1966 she received the Sarton Medal of the American History of Science Society. Eduard J. Dijksterhuis praised M. in his De Mechanisering van het Wereldbeeld (1950) for her careful archival research, which brought to light works of late-scholastic natural philosophy. Marshall Clagett acknowledged his own indebtedness to her in The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1959) in which he explains that her work provided a necessary reevaluation of Duhem’s research, since her investigations framed medieval science in its own terms. She is often listed with Clagett, Duhem, and Thorndike as one of the pioneering figures in the study of medieval science (Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg, 1978). Select Bibliography Works: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, 5 vols. (1949–1958); Codices Burghesiani Bibliothecae Vaticanae (1952); Codices Vaticani latini. Codices, 2118–2192 (1961); Ausgehendes Mittelalter: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts, ed. A. Paravicini Bagliani, 3 vols. (1964–1977). Literature: Alfonso Maierù and Edith Sylla, “Daughter of Her Time: Anneliese Maier (1905–1971) and the Study of Fourteenth-Century Philosophy,” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2005), 625–45; Alfonso Maierù, “Anneliese Maier e la filosofia della natura tardo scolastica,” Gli studi di filosofia medievale tra Otto e Novecento: Contributo a un bilancio storiografico, ed. Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Maierù (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991); John Murdoch and Edith Sylla,“Anneliese Maier and the History of Medieval Science,” Studi sul XIV secolo in Memoria di Anneliese Maier, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Alfonso Maierù (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981), 7–13; a complete bibliography can be found on pp. 15–23; Steven Sargent, “Introduction,” On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writing of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy, ed. and trans. Steven Sargent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

Sarah Powrie

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Maitland, Frederic William

Maitland, Frederic William (May 28, 1850, London – December 19, 1906, Canary Islands), English Medieval Legal Historian. M. published numerous monographic and article-length studies of English Legal History, usually predicated on careful study of public court records. He revolutionized the study of history itself through his use of primary source materials and meticulous substantiation of his analysis. His major publications included History of English Law (1895), for which he wrote all but the first chapter, English Constitutional Law (1908) and Domesday Book and Beyond (1897). He was considered an expert on 12th and 13th century law, especially English Parliamentary and Common Law, but his methodology has been extended to other topics in historical research. While some of his conclusions have been called into question, he is still held in very high regard. He specifically remembered for establishing that the parliaments in the 12th to early 14th century were more judiciary than political, in direct contradiction to the work of his older colleague, the historian William Stubbs (3 vols., Constitutional History of England, 1891–1896). He is also remembered for his edited volumes of English parliamentary court rolls, especially of 1305, and for his correspondence with scholars in America and Europe. The Selden Society, which he founded in 1887 to edit and publish English court and legal records, is still in existence as a subscription organization and has published, to date, over 130 volumes. M. himself edited the first three volumes and worked on five more. M. was born in London, the son of John Gorham and Emma (Daniell) Maitland. He was orphaned early and by some reports, M. and his two sisters were raised by his aunt. He attended university to study Mathematics, but was not successful. He then studied philosophy or moral studies at Eton (B.A. 1872) but did not get an expected fellowship in history. He studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, London (1872). He also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (M.A. 1976). In 1876 he was called to the bar in London and worked on conveyances and real estate law. It was during this period of time when he amused himself by reading court rolls from the time of Edward I, and II parliament, that he began the research which secured him a readership in history at Cambridge (1884–1888), and later an appointment as the Downing Professor of the Laws of England (1888–1906) at Cambridge, in which post he spent the rest of his brief life. This chair was endowed by his friend, Henry Sidgwick, who had great admiration for his work. He was a tireless, careful and modest scholar, with many friends throughout Europe and

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America with whom he corresponded. Among close friends were the British historians J. Leslie Stephens (about whom he published a book), Paul Vinogradoff, Reginald Lane Poole, and John Horace Round (until they fell out over Round’s treatment of the historian Hall), and the American historians Martha Mitchell Bigelow, James Barr Ames, and James Bradley Thayer, among others. He was fortunate in these relationships, most of which were very cordial, possibly due to his modesty in critiquing them and his personal charm. He married Florence Fisher in 1886 and they had two daughters, Fredgond and Ermengard. However, he also suffered from ill health, in respect of which he declined the Regus Chair of History in 1902. He traveled to the South Atlantic each winter in later life, as a result. He died at the age of 56, on his last visit, having reached Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands suffering from respiratory difficulties. These problems are variously ascribed to diabetes or tuberculosis. The volume of M.’s edited and authored works, as well as his correspondence with colleagues and friends is all the more remarkable considering that his scholarly career lasted little more than 20 years and during much of that his health was very unreliable. His interest in the medieval history of English law somewhat predates his academic appointments and may have lead to them. Some of his most lasting contributions began when in 1886 he was asked by Henry Maxell Lyte, Deputy Keeper of the Public Records Office in London, to consider editing the bundles of petitions presented to Edward I’s Parliament. Thus began publication of the Year Books of the English Parliament, which before that existed only in their original hand-written form. He was soon convinced that the project was too much for one man and agreed to edit the first year and set up a program with other scholars to edit the rest. This has become the major project of the Selden Society and has made invaluable historical material available to scholars all over the world. In fact, the use of court records, often the only written documents during long periods of English history, for a range of studies on the social life and culture of an historical period is perhaps his most significant contribution to the methodology of historical as well as legal studies. His writing style is also very distinctive. It is interpreted as an indication of his subtlety, that M. suggests and speculates but does not claim final and ultimate authority. He was often praised by colleagues for his literary exactitude in an age when sweeping historical statements, predicated on secondary sources, were common. For example, when he notes that the Parliamentary Year Books demonstrate a strong judicial use of 12th through early 14th century-parliaments, he does not say that is their only business. In fact, his somewhat revolutionary thesis is that individuals brought their petitions to the parliament by choice in

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order to either avoid judgments of local courts who they considered to be biased or to have the finality of their cases assured by having them heard in the highest court. He made this determination by examining the actually petitions, mining them for a more accurate picture of both noble and common man in those periods. And since the Parliament was concerned with all the business that might involve the king and his people, this judicial function was open to both noble and commoner. M.’s authored works, as noted by Elton, were usually based on a single edited work such as Bracton’s Note Book (1887), which he somewhat misinterpreted both as a source and as to their meaning, and the Parliamentary Year Books. Elton notes for example (30) that Domesday Book and Beyond (1897) was based on William Lyndwood’s 15th century-Provinciale, a treatise on Canon Law and that his lectures for Township and Borough (1898) while not based on a single book, were based on a single town. Elton argues that this method kept his work close to the printed sources but also may have clouded his conclusions. If one grounds a study in a single source, it is likely that the contents of that source will contour one’s examination of related materials. This methodology does not seem to have affected others’ evaluation of his work, however. In fact, Eltonnotes later that “Maitland is often treated by contemporary historians as if still a living colleague.” (33). Nevertheless, some of his assumptions about printed sources caused serious interpretive errors. Bracton’s Note Book, over which he labored for several years, was shown not to be the work of a single person as he had supposed, by Samuel E. Thorne of Harvard University. Thorne also disputed M.’s assumption that English Common Law judges operated in ignorance of the Roman Code (43). M. seems to have been much more interested in producing edited work and original writing than in either criticizing his colleagues or making a reputation for himself at their expense. There are numerous stories of his care in giving his colleagues their due, even when he disagreed with their theories. For example, Stubbs, a respected historian of his time, received encomiums as well as critical appraisal of his classical-style, sweeping histories of England. M. attempts to tone down the criticism of one colleague for another, Hall, whose work was less than stellar, were taken so far that he made an unintended enemy of the more contentious colleague, Round. He appears to have been very kind to his students and younger colleagues. Mary Bateson, a younger scholar who edited the Charters of the Borough of Cambridge (1901) with him, preceded him in death by three weeks and received an adulatory memorial at his hand. Yet his own work was tireless and executed to exacting standards. It should also be noted that he had many responsibil-

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ities, was devoted to his family, lectured on both history and the law, worked with colleagues and as the first president of the Selden Society with attendant administrative duties, and generally maintained the public life of a scholar. Many scholars of medieval and legal history, as well as of the law, claim to have been influenced by M.’s work. Even those who have had reason to question his conclusions about the relationship between common law and canon law in the 16th century still respect the meticulous approach he took to original sources. Helen Cam, in her introduction to collected essays, calls him ‘an historian’s historian,’ despite the fact that much of his work lies between history and the law. One can look to Bell’s work on M. to see an examination of each of M. major studies, and how their conclusions have been researched, contradicted or modified. J. P. Reid evaluates H. E. Bell’s critical biography by noting that it serves as a guide for current students who might otherwise have to pick their way through a mass of secondary works. Reid further notes that M. pointed the way for his revisers that no matter how many of his theories were later called into question, he was still the authority upon which subsequent work was based and his critics respected him for this reason. M. was their starting point. He also reminds us that M. work was usually original and showed evidence of exceedingly careful work. For example, he taught himself medieval philology and his grammar of the Anglo-French language was so valued that it was reprinted in the Cambridge History of English Literature (2002). He goes on to list selected brilliant sentences from M.’s work. Helen Camdealt with M. as both an historian and a lawyer, emphasizing, as had others, the value of his legal training in interpreting the various cases, petitions and judgments of the many texts he edited and the value to subsequent historians of English Legal History, but also of English history itself. Sir William Holdsworth, who wrote two extensive studies on M. and gave much credit to his work, also disproved his argument “that during Henry VIII’s reign, the common law was seriously endangered by a threatened reception of Roman law (J. P. Reid, Columbia Law Review, 1967 V. 67. No. 2, 396). In fact, he was somewhat out of his depth in the 16th century and Holdsworth documented the coexistence of both forms of law during that period. William Kapelle provides an excellent model for the value and nature of M.’s contributions of Domesday Book and Beyond (1897) in his article: “Domesday Book: F.W. Maitland and His Successors.” He charts the revisions of M. theories that the Domesday Book of 1086 was a ‘geld book’ used to establish the value of payments owned the king by the manor holder and his dependents. This work was M’s attempt to explain the many types of information found in that text and revise the work of his colleague, Round.

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His theory depended on the concept that geld was assessed by manor, and was really an exploration of what Round’s work might imply when applied to individual cases. James Tait later undermined the theory that boroughs were fortresses and that M.’s concept of a manor needed to be revised. It was not until 1940 that the ‘geld hypothesis’ itself was proven inaccurate when V. H. Galbraith noted that ‘Domesday’ could not be a geld book because geld was too unimportant a source of revenue to have justified such an elaborate survey. Rather, it was to assist William in his function as a feudal overlord. But Kapelle also notes the general respect for the quality of M’s thought and ends with “Nor is it clear that M.’s way of looking at Domesday will turn out in the end to be less correct than Galbraith’s.” M.’s original work on English legal history is seen by many general and legal historians to be either the standard against which others’ work is measured or the starting point for their work. The publication of yet another monograph honoring him in 2002 is a testament to the lasting influence of a scholar who redefined the practice of history by insisting on carefully examination of the influence that the institutions of the law had upon the lives of individuals. His methodology is still emulated for this reason: that it emphasizes the real lives of real people, Kings, nobles and commons, as the original stuff of history. It has been said of him that he taught historians where to look, but not what to find, or that preconceptions, especially those created by our knowledge of the present or of periods later than our object of study, should not be allowed to deform our examinations of the documents of the past. He may have concentrated on legal documents, but his insights on particularity are still being used by medieval historians from those working on the more orthodox to the more revisionary areas of scholarship. Whether they study the law to understand king and nobility, commoner or even women, many acknowledge their debt to this modest man whose few years of work were the respected object of others’ study more after his death than during his life. Select Bibliography Works: Justice and Police (1885); Why the History of English Law is Not Written (1888); Doomsday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (1897); Roman Cannon Law in the Church of England (essays) (1898); Township and Borough (1898); English Law and the Renaissance (1901); Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906); The Constitutional History of England (1908); Equity; also the Forms of Action at Common Law (1909); The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland (1911); Selected Essays, ed. H.D. Hazeltine et. al. (1936); Selected Historical Essays, chosen and introduced by Helen Cam (1957); Frederic William Maitland, Historian: Selections from His Writing, edited, with introduction, by Robert Livingston Schuyler (1960); The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. C. H. S. Fifoot (1965); Letters to George Neilson (1976); Edited Works: Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester in 1221 (1884); Bracton’s Note Book (1887); Select Pleas of the Crown, vol. 1: 1220–1225 (1888);

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Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts, vol. II: Reigns of Henry III and Edward I (1898); Select Passages from the Works of Bracton and Azo (1895); Magistri Vacarii Summa de Matrimonio (1898); Memoranda de Parliamento (1893); with Sir Frederick Pollock, The History of English Law, 2 vols. (1895); with W. P. Baildon, The Court Baron (1891); with Mary Bateson, The Charters of the Borough of Cambridge (1901); with G.J. Turner, Year Books of Edward II, 4 vols. (1903–1907); with F. C. Montague, A Sketch of English Legal History (1915); translation of: Otto Frederich von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, translated with an introduction by Frederic William Maitland (trans. of Die Publicistischen Lehren des Mittelalters) (1900). M. also contributed to such publications as Harvard Law Review and Westminster Review. Literature: H. E. Bell, Maitland: A Critical Examination and Assessment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); James Cameron, Frederick William Maitland and the History of English Law (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965); G. R. Elton. F. W. Maitland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985); C. H. S. Fifoot, Frederick William Maitland: A Life. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); W. S. Holdsworth, The Histories of Anglo-American Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928); W. S. Holdsworth, Some Makers of English Law: The Tagoer Lectures, 1937–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Alan Macfarlane, F. W. Maitland and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Contemporary Authors Online, Gale 2002; Natalie Fryde, “Frederic William Maitland (1850–1906),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 25–33.

Janice M. Bogstad

Malkiel, Yakov (Kiev, Russia [now the Ukraine], July 22, 1914 – April 24, 1998, Berkeley, California), Philologist, Linguist, Medievalist, Literary Critic. M.’s major contribution – among many – as an enormously productive and highly original scholar and also a superb teacher – was his great personal achievement in successfully transplanting Central European philology to the United States, in founding a highly successful and greatly respected international and multilingual learned journal, and in inspiring a great number of enthusiastic and totally committed disciples, many of whom were to become esteemed and productive scholar-teachers, in their own right. M. was born into a well-to-do Russian-Jewish merchant family that maintained a keen interest in intellectual and cultural activities. His parents were Leon and Claire Malkiel. After the Russian Revolution (1917) and the chaotic events involved in the Russian Civil War – Reds against Whites

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(1918–1920) – M.’s family was financially ruined and, in August 1921, they emigrated to Germany and settled in Berlin. M. completed a nine-year course of Gymnasium studies (Realgymnasium Berlin-Schöneberg), where he majored in Latin and French, and wrote a thesis on Paul Valéry. M. entered the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin (later Humboldt University), to specialize in Romance Linguistics. The date was March 3, 1933: “That is to say, two days before the National Socialist Revolution” (Malkiel apud Rico, p. 610). By that time, M. had already acquired an excellent knowledge of Latin, French, English, and Italian, in addition to German and his native Russian. (I once made bold to ask him if, having lived in Kiev, he also may have known Ukrainian. He looked shocked and not a little angry: “It would have been impossible for us to know that language! That was what the servants spoke.”) During his university years, M. added Old French, Old Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Old (Church) Slavic, Hebrew, and Arabic to his formidable linguistic repertoire. In 1938, he completed his university studies with a magnum cum laude. His thesis was on Das substantivierte Adjectiv im Französischen (“The Nominalized Adjective in French”), published in Berlin, 1938, of which I have a copy in my personal library. Significantly, the thesis was published by the “Jüdischer Buchverlag Joseph Jastrow.” I believe this was the very last “Jewish” doctoral dissertation to come out of the Berlin University until after World War II. Years ago, M. told me that, as he and other new students were being enrolled at the university, the scrivener, who was taking down each enrollee’s name and other pertinent data, stopped when it was M.’s turn, lifted his hand, and announced in a loud voice to the assembled students: “Mit dieser Hand hab’ ich selbst Herrn Horst Wessel eingeschrieben” (“With this very hand, I myself enrolled Mr. Horst Wessel”). (H. Wessel was a Nazi thug, author of the virulently anti-Semitic Horst Wessel Lied; he was killed in a brawl in Berlin in 1930, but later was celebrated as a Nazi martyr.) M. then asked me: “Why did the scrivener wait precisely until it was my turn to say such a thing?” In theory, the great Ernst Gamillscheg (author of the monumental Romania Germanica, 1934–1936) was to direct M.’s university work, but, in practice, Gamillscheg systematically ignored M., probably for fear of having any significant contact with a Jewish student. Years later, M. never participated in the various publications honoring Gamillscheg. Among his teachers at Berlin, M. looked back upon Eugen Mittwock with particular affection (Malkiel apud Rico, p. 610). These university years at Berlin must have been a very hard and bitter time for the young M. Even so, he cherished at least one episode which was a source of particular delight: M. took a course in Aramaic, with an old-style Jewish scholar (of the type who can instantly recite any passage of the Pentateuch by

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heart and flawlessly at any moment). When it was M.’s turn to recite he made a mistake in his Aramaic. His teacher then observed, in a characteristic mixture of Aramaic, German, and Yiddish: “Mar Malkiel, Sie sint a schlechte Philolog!” (‘Mr. Malkiel, you are a bad Philologist’; the name Malkiel here being pronounced with ie as a single syllable, as in German). “That,” M. liked to say, with a twinkle in his eye, “was the most failed prophesy ever spoken.” In regard to the mostly bitter experiences during the Berlin years, let it be said that a later generation of distinguished German scholars attempted, with the deepest and sincerest appreciation, very successfully, to make up for injustices of the past: On October 6, 1983, M. was awarded a Ph.D. Honoris Causa and invited to lecture at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he spoke on “Tobler, Gröber und der junge Meyer-Lübke” (‘T., G., and the young M.-L.’; see Steven N. Dworkin, “Yakov Malkiel,” Language 8 [2004]: 153–62; here 154). The lecture was published together with lengthy studies by Jürgen Trabant and Kurt Baldinger, honoring M. and his work (Ehrenpromotion Yakov Malkiel, 1984). As the situation in Germany became ever more difficult and ever more dangerous, emigration became, in practical terms, the only possible option for M. and his parents. Even after war had been declared, they were still able to leave Germany – one might say, at the very last moment – and, crossing into Holland, they embarked for New York at Rotterdam, in February 1940. The ship was the Volendam and the passenger list consisted almost exclusively of Jewish names (private information: Michael Hackenberg). The subsequent two years that M. spent in New York were “grim” and, as M. himself avowed, “the saddest years of my life” (Malkiel apud Rico, 610). Only the great Spanish critic and linguist, Tomás Navarro, at Columbia, encouraged M. to continue his investigations, in an America still deeply affected by the economic catastrophe of 1929–1930. Though all doors seemed closed to him, M. finally received an invitation to teach languages, on a temporary basis, at the University of Wyoming (Laramie). While there – only for six months – M., astoundingly, taught Latin, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. In June 1942, M. was invited to the University of California, Berkeley, as a one-year lecturer, by the eminent Hispanist, S. Griswold Morley, and this preliminary invitation quickly turned into a regular appointment. M. never forgot Morley’s kindness and it is no coincidence that the lead contribution to the first volume of M.’s splendid new journal, Romance Philology, is a review-article by Morley, on Paul Bénichou’s pathfinding ballad work: “A New Jewish-Spanish Romancero,” 1,1 (1947): 1–9. From 1942 until his retirement in 1983, M. continued to teach and do his research at Berkeley, with only brief absences to serve as Visiting Professor

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at various other American universities. In 1948, M. married María Rosa Lida, a brilliant Argentinean scholar, who combined a superb knowledge of Greco-Roman classical literature with equally far-ranging mastery of Medieval and Golden Age Spanish writings. M. attained full professor rank in 1952. To enumerate the many honors bestowed on him would take us far beyond the limits of this entry. Besides from Berlin, M. was given honorary doctorates from Chicago, Georgetown, Illinois, Oxford, Paris-Sorbonne, and Salamanca (Dworkin, 154). M.’s was a life fully committed and totally given over to scholarship. As Dworkin has rightly observed, “Scholarship was Malkiel’s entire life. When in Berkeley he was on campus from early morning until late at night seven days a week, taking all his meals at campus or nearby restaurants and returning around midnight on the last bus to … [his] home … He had no hobbies, outside interests, or close friends. His travel and extended stays abroad were based around research trips, participation in scholarly meetings, visiting appointments, and lecture invitations” (160). There can be no doubt that M. was not an easy person to get along with. Time and again, he created quite unnecessary and easily avoidable problems with colleagues, some of whom were working in fields very closely related to his own. Such problems could, and indeed did, sometimes lead to definitive personal disruptions. Yet for me, at least – and for many other colleagues as well – these negative, problematic aspects are far outweighed by M.’s many very positive characteristics: He was invariably kind, patient, and generous to younger scholars and he was a superb, spell-binding teacher. To these merits we must also add his unflagging devotion to knowledge, his tireless editing of the extensive Nachlass of María Rosa Lida, his beloved wife (m. 1962), and his heroic dedication to Romance Philology, as a gigantic ongoing creative project. “For these and uncountable other contributions, M. should and will be remembered. For me, his example will always be an inspiration” (Armistead, “Remembering Yakov Malkiel,” Romance Philology 52 [1998]: 6–8: here 8; published together with crucial observations by Jerry Craddock, Peter Dembowski, Edward Tuttle, and Barbara De Marco). 3. M.’s Autobibliography runs to an astounding 822 items. Until relatively late in his career, he did not particularly favor books as a preferred vehicle. Sections of books, lengthy monographic articles, and book-length monographs, all massively and meticulously annotated, were his favorites. A majority of his studies pertain to Hispano-Romance problems, but his writings obviously attest to a total and authoritative control of all other geographic modalities: Gallo-, Italo-, Daco-, and Rheto-Romance, as well as Sardinian. A conversation with M. could easily and fascinatingly involve the seemingly most

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obscure and recondite sidelines: the “Lost Romania” (e. g., Dalmatian, last speaker: Antonio Udina, d. 1898); North African Latin; the abundant Latinisms in Albanian; lexical parallels between Rumanian and Hispano-Romance. Everything was at his fingertips! M.’s edited and unedited papers (mostly 1942–1992) – his Nachlass – have been brought together and are available for consultation at the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley). The online “Guide to the Yakov Malkiel Papers” includes a useful summary of his life and scholarship. Select Bibliography Works: As we have seen, M.’s list of publications is gigantic: A Tentative Autobibliography: Yakov Malkiel, with an introduction by Henry Kahane, Romance Philology (Special Issue, 1988–1989), ed. Joseph J. Duggan and Charles B. Faulhaber, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 (a total of xxxi + 186 pp.). Literature: Francisco Rico, “Semblanzas: Yakov Malkiel,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 6 (1969): 609–13 (which includes a brief autobiographical letter written by M.: 609–11); Otto Gsell, “Das sprachwissenschaftliche Œuvre Yakov Malkiels: Ein Forschungsbericht (1958–1978),” Iberoromania 13 (1981): 1–29; Paul Lloyd, “Necrology: Yakov Malkiel (1914–1998),” Hispanic Review 67 (1999): 111–13; Steven N. Dworkin, “Yakov Malkiel,” Language 8 (2004): 153–62 (extensive bibliography). In the abovecited Ehrenpromotion, Jürgen Trabant includes (6) the brief Lebenslauf (“Biographical Note”), originally appended to M.’s Ph.D. thesis. In my own brief article, I tap into the as yet unedited oral corpus of “Malkiel Stories” still known to certain individuals around University of California, Berkeley (“Remembering”).

Samuel G. Armistead

Mallet, Paul-Henri (August 20, 1730, Geneva – February 8, 1807, Geneva), major Swiss Historian. M. was a productive historian who played a major role in the reception of Old Norse poetry, mythology and culture. His works on the history of Denmark and translations of Old Norse poetry and literature into French provided thoroughly compiled material about the Scandinavian antiquity and Middle Ages. These seminal studies were widely read in Western Europe. Their translation into English and German proved to be the catalyst for the Nordic renaissance. The poetry M. had made accessible in French met the enthusiasm Rousseau’s works and the pre-Romantic concept of the sublime had created

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throughout Europe. Nordic poetry and myth served as an alternative to classical beauty: perceived as wild, uncorrupted, strong and violent, they fit well into the concept of the “noble savage.” M.’s studies and translations had a significant impact on European thought and culture. M.’s family was among the Huguenots who had left France during the religious wars. His parents were Jean-Gabriel Mallet (1678–1752), a merchant, and later an official in Geneva, and Jeanne-Marguerite, née Masson. M. grew up and lived in Geneva most of his life, apart from eight years in Copenhagen and his years in exile after the French Revolution (1792–1801). He became friends with the economist Jacques Necker (1732–1804) and the humanist Jacob Vernet (1698–1789). In 1784, he married Marguerite Du Pan. Two years later, the marriage was dissolved. At the age of seven, M. was enrolled in Geneva’s learned school. In 1746, he took up his studies at university, working as a private tutor to assure himself a livelihood. Jacob Vernet recommended him to Andreas Peter von Bernstorff (1735–1797), later the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Shortly afterwards, in 1752, M. was appointed Professeur Royal de Belles-Lettres Françoises at the University of Copenhagen. There, M. studied Nordic languages and literature, and he taught French to the crown prince (Christian VII) from 1755 onwards. In 1760, M. returned to Geneva, where he was appointed professor of history at the university. M. wrote several historical works. The most important and influential were the two volumes Introduction a l’Histoire de Dannemarc, ou l’on traite de la Religion, des Loix, des Mœurs & des Usages des Anciens Danois (1755; Danish translation Indledning udi Danmarks Riges Historie, hvorudi handles om de gamle Danskes Guds-Dyrkelse, Love, Sæder og Skikke, 1756), and Monumens de la Mythologie et de la Poesie des Celtes, Et particulierement des Anciens Scandinaves: Pour servir de supplement et de preuves a L’Introduction a l’Histoire de Dannemarc (1756). In these works, which established M.’s reputation in Western Europe, he gives detailed geographic information, vivid accounts of pagan mythology, a sketch of Viking society, translations of Old Norse poetry and mythological writings into French including copperplate prints, thus providing a well-readable combination of sourcebook, learned study and popular presentation which secured the immense success of these works. He reprinted the Introduction and Monumens as the first vol. of his Histoire du Dannemarc (4 vols., 1758–1777), relating the history of Denmark from the oldest times up to 1661. Before the completion of the 1st edition, a 2nd enlarged edition was produced (6 vols., 1763), covering the years up to 1559. By this time, M. had changed his view on Old Norse literature and myth from a rather classicist one toward a perception that was highly influenced

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by pre-Romantic aesthetics, admiring the dark and passionate images of the mythological eddic poetry (M.: “sublime et d’obscurité”) rather than the intricate language and metres of the intellectual – manieristic, so to speak – skaldic art. M.’s work was anonymously translated into German (Herrn Professor Mallets Geschichte von Dänemark, 3 vols., 1765–1769, foreword by Gottfried Schütze) and into English by Thomas Percy (Northern Antiquities: Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, And other Northern Nations; Including those of Our own Saxon Ancestors, 2 vols., 1770). Writers such as Thomas Gray, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Johann Gottfried Herder were inspired by M.’s work, which, together with Peder Hansen Resen’s Edda Islandorum (1665), was the main source for knowledge about Medieval Scandinavia and Old Norse poetry and myths. In his Copenhagen years, M. edited the Mercure danois (1753–1758). In 1755, he undertook a journey to Norway and Sweden. He later incorporated his collected material and observations from this journey into his translation of a travel account by William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (2 vols., 1784). The translation appeared under the title Voyage en Pologne, Russie, Suède, Dannemarc, &c. […]. Traduit de l’anglais, enrichi de notes & des éclaircissemens nécessaries, & augmenté d’un Voyage en Norvège (1786). Other works of M. were the Histoire de Hesse (4 vols., Geneva 1767–1784), the Histoire de la maison de Brunswick (3 vols., Geneva 1767–1779), and the Histoire de la maison et des états du Mecklenbourg (4 vols., Geneva 1796–1805). Through his later years, M. remained productive and saw the publication of the Histoire des Suisses ou Helvétiens (4 vols., Geneva 1803) and De la ligue hanséatique (Geneva 1805). Select Bibliography Literature: Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi: De la vie et des écrits de PaulHenri Mallet (1807); Hélène Stadler, Paul-Henri Mallet 1730–1807 (1924); Thor J. Beck, Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature (1755–1855): A Study in Preromantic Ideas, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University 1934–1935); Margaret Clunies Ross and Lars Lönnroth, “The Norse Muse: Report from an International Research Project,” alvíssmál 9 (1999): 3–28; Margaret Clunies Ross, The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820 […] (Trieste: Edizioni Parnasso, 1998); Margaret Clunies Ross, “Percy and Mallet. The Genesis of Northern Antiquities,” Sagnaqing helga6 Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum 10. apríl 1994, ed. Gísli Sigur 5 sson, Gu 5 rún Kvaran, and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, 2 vols. (Reykjavík: Hi6 íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1994), vol. 1, 107–17; François-Xavier Dillmann, “Frankrig og den nordiske fortid – de første etaper af genopdagelsen,” The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture, ed. Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (Århus: Aarhus University Press, 1995), 13–26; Franz v. Jessen, “Mallet, P.H.,” Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, Bd. 9, ed. S. Cedergreen Bech (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944): 374–76; Thomas Krömmelbein, “Mallet in Deutschland: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte der nordischen Poesie und Mythologie,” Aus dem Antiquariat, December 1995 (Beilage zum Börsen-

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blatt für den deutschen Buchhandel Nr. 103/104, 28. Dezember 1995): A449–56; Lars Lönnroth, “Mallet och det nordiska sublima,” Sagnaqing helga6 Jónasi Kristjánssyni sjötugum, ed. Gísli Sigur 5 sson, Gu 5 rún Kvaran, and Sigurgeir Steingrímsson, 2 vols. (Reykjavík: Hi6 íslenska bókmenntafélag, 1994), 527–37.

Jens Eike Schnall

Manitius, Max (March 23, 1858, Dresden – September 21, 1933, Kötzschenbroda), Medievalist, Philologist, Literary Historian, Historian. M.’s greatest contribution to medieval studies is his three-volume reference work, Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (I: Von Justinian bis zur Mitte des zehnten Jahrhunderts, 1911; II: Von der Mitte des zehnten Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch des Kampfes zwischen Kirche und Staat, 1923; and III: Vom Ausbruch des Kirchenstreites bis zum Ende des zwölften Jahrhunderts, 1931. Paul Lehmann [see the entry here] contributed significantly to the 3rd volume). This extensive and detailed history of Latin literature spans the period from the early 6th century to the end of the 12th, and remains indispensable to the scholar of Medieval Latin literature. M. was born in Dresden, Germany, where his father was Privy Counselor in Saxony’s Ministry of Justice. After attending high school in Dresden, M. attended university in Leipzig, where he studied History and Classics. M. received the doctoral degree in 1881 for his dissertation, “Die Annales Sithienses, Laurissenses minores und Enharti Fuldenses,” written under the direction of Wilhelm Arndt. After a brief stint (1883/1884) working with Ernst Dümmler on the 2nd volume of Dümmler’s Poetae Latini aevi Carolini at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Halle, M. earned his living from 1884 on as a teacher at a Dresden girl’s school, the “Noldensche höhere Mädchenschule.” There he pursued research alongside his duties as teacher, publishing throughout his life both scholarly and popular articles with a particular focus on the transmission of classical authors. Though best-known for his GLLM, M. also published shorter works. His broad interest in literary history is evident already in his 1891 monograph on Christian literature, Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Poesie bis zur Mitte des 8. Jahrhunderts, which explores Christian literature in numerous regions, including Italy, Spain, and Africa. Among M.’s other publications

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are an edition of the 11th-century satirist Amarcius (Pseudonym) (1888) and the Handschriften Antiker Autoren in Mittelalterlichen Bibliothekskatalogen (1935); the latter, on Medieval library manuscript catalogues was edited and published posthumously by his son, Karl Manitius. Without a doubt, M.’s most lasting contribution to scholarship is his extensive and detailed GLLM. Despite flaws – in 1963, Karl Langosch criticized M.’s approach, claiming that it suffered from “a subjective preference for the Classical Roman and from prejudices against such medieval elements as rhyme, rhythmic composition, and hagiography,” and considered the result less a literary history than “a peculiarly organized collection of monographs frequently infelicitous in both their broad outlines and their details, providing above all else biographical information and plot summaries …” (LM, p. 79) – the GLLM remains fundamental to the study of Medieval Latin literature. In particular the painstakingly detailed bibliographical information on Medieval manuscripts proves very useful. In his article, “Prose Styles and Cursus” (Medieval Latin, 111–21; here 120), Tunberg touts the GLLM as “an excellent starting point for understanding any period of medieval Latinity to the end of the twelfth century” (120), and Jan Ziolkowski asserts its indispensability, with the caveat that if Brunhölzl’s project is completed, the value of the GLLM will decrease (“Die Mittellateinische Literatur,” ELP, 321). This more recent and similarly titled project of Franz Brunhölzl (I: 1975; II: 1992) was intended to cover the period from the 6th to the 15th century, but the last volume published ends with the mid-11th century. Select Bibliography Works: M.’s publications are extensive and wide-ranging; in addition to the works already mentioned, they include an edition of anonymous 9th-century geographical writings, De situ orbis (1884); “Zu spätlateinischen Dichtern,” Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien 37 (1886): 81–101, 241–54 and 401–11; “Die Messias des sogenannten Eupolemius,” Romanische Forschungen 6 (1891): 509–56, the first publication of a manuscript of this text; Deutsche Geschichte unter den sächsischen und salischen Kaisern (911–1125) (1889); Beiträge zur Geschichte des Ovidius und anderer römischer Schrifsteller im Mittelalter (1900); in collaboration with other scholars: Illustrierte Weltgeschichte (1914); with Robert Ulrich, Vagantenlieder aus der lateinischen Dichtung des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (1927); “Zu Petrus’ von Cluni Patristischen Kenntnissen,” Speculum 3 (1928): 582–87. Literature: M.L.W.L. “Historical News,” The American Historical Review, 39, No. 2 (1934), 389. Gabriel silagi, “M., Max,” NDB, Vol. 16 (1990), 36–37; “M., Max,” DBE, Vol. 6 (1997), 589.

Alison Beringer

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Manly, John Matthews (September 2, 1865, Sumter County, Alabama – April 2, 1940, Tucson, Arizona), American Medievalist and Chaucerian. M. belongs to the second generation of Chaucer scholars active between 1910 and 1950 and put the University of Chicago on the map of Chaucer studies. He published numerous scholarly articles on medieval topics as well as his much-hailed monograph Some New Light on Chaucer, 1926. Described as one of the “last of the great nineteenth-century philological endeavors” (Gilles and Tomasch, 364), his largest contribution comes in conjunction with his colleague, Edith Rickert, in providing the massive eight-volume critical edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 1940, for which in 1942 they posthumously received the Haskins Medal awarded by the Medieval Academy of America for a distinguished book in the field of medieval studies. He was also the cofounder, managing, and later general editor of Modern Philology. M. was born the oldest of nine children of Baptist clergyman Charles Manly (also president of Furman University 1881–1897) and Mary Esther Hellen Matthews. He received an A.M. degree from Furman in 1883, after which M. served as acting principal of Greer High School in South Carolina (1884), as well as a tutor in Palmyra, Virginia (1884–1885). While studying for another A.M. degree – awarded by Harvard in 1889 – M. worked as an assistant in the preparatory department at William Jewell College. After his subsequent Harvard Ph.D. in 1890, he was briefly an instructor of AngloSaxon at Radcliffe College (1890–1891). Brown hired M. as an acting assistant professor of English language and literature (1891), promoted him to associate professor of English in 1892, and to full professor in 1898. In the same year, M. was wooed away by the newly founded University of Chicago as professor and chair of the department of English, a post he held for 31 years. M. spent 1909 in Göttingen, Germany, as an exchange professor. In 1912, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Furman, followed by honorary degrees from Brown (1914), Wisconsin (1923), North Carolina (1924), and Yale (1925). During WWI, M. enlisted in the US Army, was commissioned captain in 1917, assigned to Military Intelligence – especially the cryptography unit American Black Chamber (MI-8) – and discharged in 1919 as major. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Medieval Academy of America, he served as president of the Modern Language Association in 1920–1921 (where he strove to promote research), as president of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1922–1923, and the Medieval

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Academy in 1929–1930. In 1929, M. was named Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor, and retired from teaching in 1933. The University of Chicago now awards a John M. Manly Distinguished Service Professorship. M. has over fifty publications to his credit on subjects as diverse as Shakespeare, contemporary British and American literature, pedagogy, medieval drama, the Goliards, Bacon, and Langland. Two major articles discuss the authorship of Piers Plowman, in which M. argues for a lost leaf to explain gaps between the A and the B text as well as for multiple authorship for the three versions of Piers Plowman (“The Authorship of Piers Plowman,” MP 7 [1909]: 83–144 and “The Lost Leaf of Piers the Plowman,” MP 3 [1906]: 359–66). Because M.’s views were quickly enshrined in the Cambridge History of English Literature, 1908, they held sway for a quarter century and, though refuted by George Kane (Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship, 1965), engendered a new direction in Langland scholarship. Starting with his published Harvard dissertation, Observations on the Language of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, 1893, the bulk of M.’s work concentrates on Chaucer. In 1926, he published two celebrated works, although Chauncey Wood denies M.’s critical work any lasting effect (“John Matthews Manly: Some Old Light on Chaucer,” MedPers 15 [2000]: 1–10). His monograph, Some New Light on Chaucer, posits historical “prototypes” for the CT pilgrims. In his commitment to “accurate historical contextualization” (Gilles and Tomasch, 371), M. finds records for a Southwark Tavern owner named Henry Bailly and possibly the Reeve, but offers more tenuous real life models for the other Canterbury pilgrims. Additionally, M. refutes the patronage motif for Chaucer’s professional advancement. Essentially Romantic in its critical outlook, M.’s famous British Academy lecture “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians” illustrates 19th-century “anti-art concepts” by demonstrating how Chaucer turned from rhetorical art to nature in his writing; Derek Brewer grants that M.’s lecture “was one of his most influential writings, and opened up an important new vein in Chaucer scholarship and criticism” (Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2, 1978, 14, 385). M.’s 1928 student edition of the CT has been credited with an original body of notes largely gone unnoticed by scholars (J. R. Hulbert, “John Matthews Manly,” MP 38 [1940]: 1–8), a “long and valuable introduction” (Albert C. Baugh, “Fifty Years of Chaucer Scholarship,” Speculum 26 [1951]: 659–72), and “an excellent glossary” (Martin B. Ruud, MLN 44 [1929]: 541–43). In 1924, M., with Rickert, embarked on the largest endeavor of his professional life, in an effort to assemble all extant manuscripts of the CT and to find their common ancestor. Their fifteen-year-long unprecedented undertaking of archival research, manuscript hunting, photostatic reproduction,

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and tremendous editorial work was imbued with the energy of scientism and the tenets of 19th-century rationalism that the original text could be recovered and that the editorial process could be freed from subjectivity. Their method in The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 1940, is based on Lachmannian stemmatics, which, through recension, produce a manuscript genealogy. The first two volumes describe the editorial process, condition, dates, and classification of the manuscripts (the eighty-four earliest texts and Caxton’s two printed editions), along with dialect, spelling, and illumination. Volumes 3 and 4 contain the edited text and a valuable discussion of the glosses, and volumes 5 through 8 the variants. Recension, however, failed to identify the single archetype. Curiously, though, they proceed as if a single manuscript ancestor existed. Two other important studies emanated from M.’s and Rickert’s research tour de force, edited by their students Clair C. Olsen and Michael M. Crow: Chaucer’s World (1948) and Chaucer Life-Records (1966). In 1923, on the occasion of his 25th anniversary as chair of the English Department at Chicago, his students and colleagues – a veritable Who’s Who of the English academic scene – presented him with a festschrift (The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature). Nevertheless, the 4, 750 pages of the The Text of the Canterbury Tales still loom largest both in M.’s career and in Chaucer scholarship, and are the most commented on. Donald Baker calls M. “the greatest of the textual scholars” of the CT (“Introduction,” The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscripts, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, vol. 1: A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1979, xvii). Not all assessments have been this enthusiastic. Initial reviews of the work were favorable but muted by the recent death of M. (Rickert had died in 1938 already) as well as WWII. Margaret Galway called the work “monumental” and the “definitive edition of the text” of the CT (MLR 35 [1940]: 534–37). Carleton Brown considers their edition a worthwhile reference work but suspects that the “casual reader” would “pass these four volumes [of variants] by with a shudder” (MLN 55 [1940]: 606–21). While Robert K. Root characterizes their study as “exhaustive” and meticulously complete, he finds it difficult reading, questions the validity of the genetic manuscript relationships, and therefore doubts their conclusions (SP 38 [1941]: 7–17). Dorothy Everett lauds M. and Rickert for accuracy and the “revolutionary” discovery of the relationship between the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts, but denies that there is much linguistic merit (RES 18 [1942]: 93–109). That this long term project had been marred in presentation and coherence because of financial and publication pressures, the death of Rickert, and the deteriorating health of M. is even expressed in the

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Haskins medal award announcement: “Had Manly [only] lived longer” maybe he “would have felt able to integrate his conclusions” (PMLA 17 [1942]: 453–54). In 1946, Germaine Dempster acted as an apologist for M., arguing that his continuous editorial shifts are “inherent in the material” and that his procedure was indeed consistent (“Manly’s Conception of the Early History of the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 61 [1946]: 379–415). Later assessments remain mixed as well. Baugh postulates that ManlyRickert “has not revolutionized the text” of the CT, but that it will always be a reference work on manuscript details and variants (661). Kurt Rydland argues that the variant record is incomplete and that regional dialect forms had been neglected (“The Meaning of ‘Variant Reading’ in the Manly-Rickert Canterbury Tales,” NM 73 [1972]: 805–14). George Kane is M. and Rickert’s harshest critic, positing that the point of their edition was to discredit other editions and to “devalue the previously esteemed Ellesmere manuscript” (207). He further rejects their manuscript classification system and faults them for unclear editorial procedures, not being cognizant of editorial problems, applying the same subjective judgment in editing the tales as they supposedly aim to exclude, misreading evidence, being mistaken about “authorial revision” (225), not taking into account enough scribal variation, being superficial readers, lack of knowledge of Middle English, not using a dictionary, and generally being amateur linguists. His final recommendation is to rely on Manly-Rickert neither for manuscript prehistory nor preeminence. N. F. Blake echoes Kane’s concerns (The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales, 1985), some of which have been refuted or mitigated by Virginia E. Leland (“Professors Manly and Rickert and Medieval English Studies in Chicago,” Medieval English Studies: Past and Present, 1990, 56–60) and Elizabeth Scala (303, 306–07). Manly-Rickert’s most ardent champion is Roy Vance Ramsey, whose almost seven hundred-page monograph attempts to elucidate the intentions, procedures, and achievements of their work. Although a number of critics claim that the Manly-Rickert edition has been little used, some of its findings still stand. Since their indefatigable search of European libraries and manor houses, no further manuscripts of the CT have been discovered; the manuscript groupings, especially the constant groups a, b, c, d, have been accepted; and the text of the Hengwrt has been privileged over the Ellesmere. Furthermore, the vast amount of data collected in the project and stored on over 60,000 collation cards is being used by the Variorum Chaucer project at the University of Oklahoma. The online CT Project, http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/index.html is trying to redo M. and Rickert’s work with more advanced technology. Lastly, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s World, and Chaucer Life-Records still

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“continue to form the base of Chaucer research” (Scala, 297); and the “scientific humanism” of M. and Rickert continues to inform and influence our scholarly modus operandi even today (Gilles and Tomasch, 378). Select Bibliography Works: “Marco Polo and the Squire’s Tale,” PMLA 11 (1896): 349–62; “On the Date and Interpretation of Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,” SNPL 5 (1896): 107–26; “Literary Forms and the New Theory of the Origin of Species,” MP 4 (1907): 577–95; “Familia Goliae,” MP 5 (1907): 201–09; “A Knight Ther Was,” TAPA 38 (1908): 89–107; “Elkerlijc-Everyman: The Question of Priority,” MP 8 (1910): 269–77; “The Miracle Play in Mediaeval England,” Essays by Divers Hands 7 (1927): 133–53; “Sir Thopas, A Satire,” E&S 13 (1928): 52–73; “On the Question of the Portuguese Translation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” MP 27 (1930): 467–72; “Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS,” Speculum 6 (1931): 345–91; “Three Recent Chaucer Studies,” RES 10 (1934): 257–73. Literature: Sealy Gilles and Sylvia Tomasch, “Professionalizing Chaucer: John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert, and the Canterbury Tales as Cultural Capital,” Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 364–83; George Kane, “John M. Manly (1865–1940) and Edith Rickert (1871–1938),” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul. G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), 207–29; Charlotte C. Morse, “What the Clerk’s Tale suggests about Manly and Rickert’s Edition – and the Canterbury Tales Project,” Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2001), 41–56; Roy Vance Ramsey, The Manly-Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 1994); Elizabeth Scala, “John Matthews Manly (1865–1940); Edith Rickert (1871–1938),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998), 297–311; “Vita,” The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923; rpt. 1968), 425.

Anita Obermeier

Massmann, Hans Ferdinand (August 15, 1797 – March 3, 1874), German Medievalist. M. made a name for himself as an Old German Philologist primarily as an editor and transcriber of texts from Medieval manuscripts. His editions of Medieval German texts, most notably his Deutschen Abschwörungs-, Beicht-, Buß- und Betformeln des 8.–13. Jh. [German Purification-, Confession-, Penance-, and Prayer Phrases of the 8th–13th Century] (1839), Gottfried von

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Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolt with its continuation by Ulrich von Türheim (1843), Otte’s Eraclius (1843), St. Alexius (1843) and the Kaiserchronik (1849–1853) were not all highly praised during his lifetime, but considered invaluable for the burgeoning field of German philology. M. broke new ground with his treatment of the Dance of Death with his publications Die Litteratur der Todtentänze [The Literature of the Dance of Death] (1841) and Die Baseler Todtentänze [The Basel Dance of Death] (1847). Further, he was one of the first to subject the game of chess to closer study with his Geschichte des mittelalterlichen, vorzugsweise des deutschen Schachspieles [History of the Medieval, Primarily German, Game of Chess] (1839). M. is also to be thanked for releasing volume 6 of Eberhard Gottlieb Graff’s Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz [Treasury of the Old High German Language] (1842, 1963) as well as a complete index thereto (1846). M. can also be considered a pioneer in the field of Gothic studies, for which he released the first edition of Skeireins with an accompanying dictionary (1834), the Urkunden von Neapel und Arezzo [Documents from Naples and Arezzo] (1838), the contributions known as Gothica minora (1841–1842), and the Ulfilas, an early Gothic translation of the bible (1857) as well as fragments thereof known as the Turiner Fragmente [Fragments of Turin] (1857 and 1868). Born to the clockmaker Johannes Christoph and his wife Marie Elise, M.’s father took great care to instil the joy of learning in his son and to ensure that he received a quality education. M. attended the Friedrich-Werder Gymnasium in Berlin and then went to the University of Berlin to study Theology in 1814. From 1815–1816 he served as a volunteer in 2nd East Prussian Regiment during the Napoleonic War. Thereafter he continued his studies in Berlin and Jena until he completed his studies in 1818. M. was the oldest and best student of the Father of Gymnastics Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) and sought to propagate his ideas. M. took part in the Wartburgfest of 1817, and lead the now infamous book burning on the 18th of October; most of the books burned (actually just bound maculature) had not been read by those who partook in the event. Afterwards, M. spent the winter of 1817–1818 reading the books that he had condemned to the fire, “… da ihm doch einfiel, wie lächerlich es sich ausnehmen müsse, wenn er, zur Rede gestellt, eingestehen müsse, den größten Theil derselben noch nicht von weitem erblickt zu haben” (Wilhelm Scherer: “Hans Ferdinand Massmann”, ADB 20, 1884, 569–71) [for he realized how ridiculous it would appear if, during discussion, he had to admit to not having had read them, much less even seen them from a distance]. In 1818, he went to Breslau and became an assistant teacher at the Evangelical Gymnasium and director of the local public gymnastic institute; he also attended lectures and developed an interest in min-

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eralogy. In 1819, he was incarcerated for 8 days and subsequently transferred as punishment to the Gymnasium in Magdeburg as a result of the Demagogenverfolgung (persecution of the demagogues) which had been instituted as a means by which to enforce the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. M. returned to Berlin in 1820 to study turnery and natural sciences. In 1821 he joined the Institute of Education for Young Men, but soon departed for Switzerland, where he met the educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) before beginning his study of German language and literature, once again in Berlin. In August of 1824, he began a research expedition to visit the most important German libraries and began his career as an Old German Philologist with the Erläuterungen zum Wessobrunner Gebet [Explanatory Notes to the Prayer of Wessobrunn]. In 1828 he settled in Munich, where he served as the gymnastics instructor for the Cadet Corps. In 1827 he completed his Habilitation and assumed the leadership of a well-respected public gymnastics institute in 1828. In 1829 M. was appointed assistant professor and in 1835 promoted to full professor of German Language and Literature in Munich. In 1842 he was called to Berlin and entrusted with the regional organization of gymnastic instruction. In 1846 he assumed an assistant professorship which was greeted with dismay by Karl Lachmann and joy by Alexander von Humboldt. Following a restructuring in the regional instruction of gymnastics in the 1850s, M. turned his attention solely to his university career. Following a stroke in 1860, his strength gradually faded until he died on August 3, 1874 in Muskau. Despite the fact that his contemporary critics noted that his released editions of Medieval texts lacked the polished elegance of Karl Lachmann’s, during this early phase of the study of German language and literature, M.’s editions were highly appreciated and useful, and quickly came to be considered indispensable to the burgeoning field of medieval German studies. The numerous reprints of his works, and the enduring usefulness of his insightful studies has lead M. to be considered one of the most important early German philologists. This impact can also be appreciated by recognizing that Karl Bartsch, Franz Pfeiffer and Friedrich Zarncke were among his students. Further, M. had extensive contact with German philologists throughout Europe. His extensive network of correspondences (with such notable personalities as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, A. H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Alexander von Humboldt, Karl Bartsch, Joseph Maria Christoph Freiherr von Lassberg, Ludwig Uhland, and Friedrich Zarncke among others), can be seen in his letters which are scattered throughout the libraries of Germany and which have yet to be systematically treated.

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Select Bibliography Works: Kurze und wahrhaftige Beschreibung des großen Burschenfestes auf der Wartburg bei Eisenach am 18ten und 19ten des Siegesmonds 1817 (1817, rpt. 1917) [Short and Truthful Description of the Grand Festival of the Student League at the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach on the 18th and 19th of October 1817]; Erläuterungen zum Wessobrunner Gebet des achten Jahrhunderts. Nebst zweien noch ungedruckten Gedichten des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (1824, 1971) [Explanatory Notes to the Prayer of Wessobrunn from the 8th Century. Thereto Two Unpublished Poems from the 14th Century]; ed.: Denkmäler deutscher Sprache und Literatur aus Handschriften des 8ten bis 16ten Jahrhunderts zum ersten Male herausgegeben (1, 1828) [Monuments of German Language and Literature from Manuscripts of the 8th–16th Centuries]; Armin, Fürst der Cherusker und Befreier Deutschlands vom römischen Joche im neunten Jahre nach Christi Geburt (1839) [Armin, Prince of the Cherusci and Liberator of Germany from the Roman Yoke in the 9th Year After the Birth of Christ]; “Gothica minora” Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum l (1841): 294–393, and 2 (1842): 199–204; ed.: Eberhard G. Graff, Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz oder Wörterbuch der althochdeutschen Sprache, vol. 6 (1842, 1963) [Eberhard G. Graff, Treasury of the Old High German Language or Dictionary of Old High German]; Vollständiger alphabetischer Index zu dem althochdeutschen Sprachschatze von E. G. Graff: Gedrängtes althochdeutsches Wörterbuch oder vollständiger Index zu Graffs althochdeutschem Sprachschatze (1846, 1963) [Complete Alphabetical Index to the Treasury of the Old High German Language by E. G. Graff: Compact Old High German Dictionary or Complete Index to Graff’s Treasury of the Old High German Language]; Die Baseler Todtentänze in getreuen Abbildungen. Nebst geschichtlicher Untersuchung, so wie Vergleichung mit den übrigen deutschen Todtentänzen, ihrer Bilderfolge und ihren gemeinsamen Reimtexten. Samt einige Anhange: Todtentanz in den Holzschnitten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (1847) [The Dances of Death in Basel in Faithfully Reproduced Images. Thereto Historical Examination, as well as Comparison with the Other German Dances of Death, Their Sequence of Images and Their Mutual Rhyming Texts. Replete with Appendix: The Dance of Death in the Woodcuts of the 15th Century]; “Die verlorenen Blätter des Ulfilas sind wiedergefunden,” Germanistik 2 (1857): 342–43 [The Lost Pages of the Ulfilas Have been Recovered]; “Die Turiner Blätter des Ulfilas mit einer Schrifttafel” Germanistik 13 (1868): 271–84 [The Turin Pages of Ulfilas with a Script-Table]. Editions: Bayerische Sagen, vol. 1: Der Untersberg bey Salzburg (1831) [Bavarian Sagas, vol. 1: The Untersberg near Salzburg]; Skeireins Aivaggieljons thairh Iohannen. Auslegung des Evangelii Johannis in gothischer Sprache. Aus römischen und mayländischen Handschriften nebst lateinischer Üebersetzung, belegenden Anmerkungen, geschichtliche Untersuchung, gothischlateinischem Wörterbuche und Schriftproben (1834) [Skeirein’s Aivaggieljons thairh Iohannen. Exegesis of the Evangelium of John in the Gothic Language. From the Roman and Milanese Manuscripts with Latin Translation, Reference Notes, Historical Discussion, Gothic-Latin Dictionary and Script Examples]; Deutsche Gedichte des zwölften Jahrhunderts und der nächstverwandten Zeit (1837, 1969) [German Poems of the 12th Century and the Most Closely Related Time]; Gotische Urkunden von Neapel und Arezzo (1838) [Gothic Documents from Naples and Arezzo]; Die kleinen Sprach-Denkmahle des VIII–XII Jahrhunderts: Die deutschen Abschwörungs-, Glaubens-, Beicht- und Betformeln vom achten bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert (1839) [The Small Language Monuments of the 8th/13th Century: The German Purification-, Confession-, Penance-, and Prayer Phrases of the 8th–12th Century]; Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan und Isolt. Fortsetzung und Schluß durch Ulrich von

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Türheim (1843) [Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan and Isolt. Continuation and Conclusion by Ulrich von Türheim]; Cornelius Tacitus: De origine moribus de situ ermanorum libellus: Germania des C. Cornelius Tacitus. Mit den Lesarten sämmtlicher Handschriften und geschichtlicher Untersuchungen über diese und das Buch selbst (1847) [Cornelius Tacitus: De origine moribus de situ ermanorum libellus: The Germania of C. Cornelius Tacitus. With the Versions of All Manuscripts and Historical Investigation of These and the Book Itself]; Der Keiser und der Kunige Buoch oder Die sogenannte Kaiserchronik. Gedicht des zwölften Jahrhunderts von 18578 Reimzeilen. Nach 12 vollständigen und 17 unvollständigen Handschriften sowie anderen Hülfsmitteln, mit genauen Nachweisungen über diese und Untersuchungen über Verfasser und Alter, nicht minder über die einzelnen Bestandtheile und Sagen, nebst ausführlichem Wörterbuche und Anhängen zum ersten Male herausgegeben, 3 vols. (1849–54) [The Emperor and the Book of Kings or the so-called Emperor’s Chronicle. Poem of the 12th Century Comprising 18578 Rhyming Verses. Based on 12 Complete and 17 Fragmentary Manuscripts as well as Other Resources, with Exact Appendix of These and Examinations of the Author and Age, Including a Treatment of the Individual Elements and Sages with Extensive Dictionary and Appendix, Released for the First Time]; Ulfilas. Die Heiligen Schriften Alten und Neuen Bundes in Gothischer Sprache. Mit gegenüberstehendem griechischem und lateinischem Texte, Anmerkungen, Wörterbuch, Sprachlehre und geschichtlicher Einleitung (1857) [Ulfilas. The Holy Texts of the Old and New Testament in the Gothic Language. With Parallel Greek and Latin Texts, Commentary, Dictionary, Linguistic Instruction and Historical Introduction]; Das Zeitbuch des Eike von Repgow in ursprünglich niederdeutscher Sprache und in früher lateinischer Übersetzung (1857, 1969) [The Chronicle of Eike von Repgow in the Original Lower German Language and in Early Latin Translation]. Literature: Karl Bartsch, “Hans Ferdinand Massmann,” Germania 19 (1874): 377–80; Ludwig Denecke, “Hans Ferdinand Massmann in der frühen Germanistik: Anmerkungen und Ergänzungen zu einer Wissenschaftlerbiographie,” WW 46.1 (1996): 144–50; Hans Ferdinand Massmann – Sein Leben, seine Turn- und Vaterlandslieder: Zur Erinnerung an seinen hundersten Geburtstag, ed. Carl Euler und Rudolf Hartstein (Berlin-Charlottenburg: R. Heinrich, 1897); Joachim Burkhard Richter, Hans Ferdinand Massmann Altdeutscher Patriotismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1992); Heidrun Markert, “Hans Ferdinand Massmann,” IGL, vol. 2 (2003), 1167–70.

Maurice Sprague

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Maurer, (Johann) Friedrich (Wilhelm) (January 5, 1898, Lindenfels/Odenwald – November 7, 1984, Freiburg im Breisgau), German Linguist and Literary Scholar.

M. combined language study, which he saw as linked with history, sociology and folklore, with the study of Medieval German literature. At Freiburg, he set up the study of Scandinavian languages and Dutch, and helped establish the institute for historical Landeskunde, from which emerged the Historischer südwestdeutscher Sprachatlas (ed. Wolfgang Kleiber, Konrad Kunze, Heinrich Löffler, 1979). He also set up the Südhessisches Wörterbuch (ed. Rudolf and Roland Mulch, 1965–), and was one of the co-founders of the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim in 1964. His specific scholarly legacy is threefold: in the language area we have the three volumes of the Deutsche Wortgeschichte, which he edited first with Friedrich Stroh and then with Heinz Rupp, and his study of the relationship between the North Germanic languages and Alemannic, as well as other work on the varieties of German; in the literary area he combined philological and literary investigation in a much-read interpretation of the main writers of the Middle High German period, Leid (1951); as an editor of Medieval texts, his edition of the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide for the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek (ATB) is important, but his most enduring legacy is his edition of clerical poetry in early Middle High German, the seminal period between about 1050 and 1200. The three volumes of Die religiösen Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts (1964–1967, some texts of which also appeared separately in the ATB series) made available a major corpus. His insistence for many of the works that they were composed in the Old High German long-line with internal rhyme, arranged into strophes, is more controversial, but the carefully produced collection, with diplomatic transcriptions, notes and bibliographies, is a resource which will not lose its value. He was active as editor of journals and of major series. The son of a Kreisschulrat, M. attended high school (Gymnasium) in Darmstadt. He served in the First World War and was wounded on the Western front in 1917. After 1933, he was involved with several Nazi organizations and was suspended from teaching for a short period after the Second World War. He studied classics and comparative philology in Frankfurt a. M., Heidelberg and Giessen, where he gained his doctorate under the supervision of Otto Behaghel in 1921/1922 with a study of Oswald von Wolkenstein.

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Behaghel was a major influence, the 1934 Festschrift for whom M. co-edited and whose Die deutsche Sprache (1888) he annotated as the 9th ed. in 1953 (14th ed., 1968); he would insist wryly and philologically in lectures on the correct spelling (with an internal -gh-) of his mentor’s name. His 1924 Giessen Habilitationsschift gave rise in 1926 to his Untersuchungen über die deutsche Verbstellung in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. After several teaching positions, M. became ausserordentlicher (associate) professor at Giessen in 1929, and from 1931–1937 he was professor of German at Erlangen (where he gave an address on Goethe’s language at the centenary celebrations in 1932), when he succeeded Friedrich Wilhelm, another specialist in the writings of the 11th and 12th centuries, in the chair of German Philology at Freiburg in Breisgau, remaining in that post until his retirement in 1966. During the Second World War he was Prorektor. M. was awarded the Brüder-Grimm-Preis in Marburg in 1963 and the Jakob-Burckhardt-Preis of the Goethe-Stiftung in Basel in 1976. He held an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University (1966) and was the recipient of three Festschriften. He died in 1984. M.’s work is typified by his constant awareness of the inter-connected nature of different scholarly disciplines, philology in the German rather than the English sense, which combines detailed study of the language in all its aspects with literary interpretation, and which also pays close and detailed attention to the nature of text and form. He published a number of papers on regional language and folk-life studies, and a study of Bible translations, Studien zur mitteldeutschen Bibelübersetzung vor Luther (1929); his first major editions of medieval texts were for the Leipzig Deutsche Literatur … in Entwicklungsreihen series, for which he edited the important but relatively little-known religious work Die Erlösung in 1934, and then in 1940 the Rolandslied and the Alexanderlied. In 1942, M. published the first edition of a book which attempted to clarify the relationship between North Germanic and the Elbe-German branch (especially Alemannic) of West Germanic; Nordgermanen und Alemannen; it was controversial, and required some revision, but a third edition appeared in 1952. 1943 saw the first appearance of the Deutsche Wortgeschichte, originally co-edited with Friedrich Stroh, which eventually grew to three volumes, with an index volume by Heinz Rupp. A third edition by M. and Rupp was published in 1974–1978. Other studies on language and dialect were published as collections. Further language studies included Mundart und Schriftsprache in 1956, and a series of articles on language and literature was collected as Dichtung und Sprache des Mittelalters in 1963, and much augmented in 1971. Some of the articles included had appeared in the journal Der Deutschunterricht, of which M. was an editor. Several were concerned, too, with the formal matter of the internally-rhymed long-line strophe in

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early Middle High German. M.’s editions of Walther von der Vogelweide’s poems for the ATB had first appeared in two vols. in 1955 and 1956, with the addition of the known melodies, and went into several editions, although some of his views on the relationship between Ton and Lied were not always accepted. M. produced editions of the poetry of Frau Ava (1966) and of the Physiologus in 1967 for the same series, but of greater importance were his three volumes of 11th- and 12th-century German religious poetry, the first two of which gave the edited versions in long-line strophes, the third containing texts in rhymed couplets, covering 64 works in all, ranging from the substantial (such as the Alexanderlied) to the very fragmentary (such as Esau und Jakob, which survives in ten small fragments). Diplomatic texts were provided so that access was possible to the manuscript form or, in cases where the manuscript had been lost, to the earliest edition (the Annolied is a case in point here). Maurer determined the formal structures by reference to capitals in manuscripts, narrative flow, and the extent of Reimbrechung, with Heinrich von Veldeke as the chronological divide between long-line and couplet forms. M.’s collection contains virtually all the smaller surviving early Middle High German religious texts and some larger ones, though not, of course, massive works like the Kaiserchronik (which M. wanted in long-lines), nor the more extensive biblical epics, though one, the Altdeutsche (Wiener) Genesis was edited in 1972 by Kathryn Smits, M.’s student, in long-line form. The Deutsche Wortgeschichte and the contributions to the varieties of German, especially in the work which provided the foundations of the Sprachatlas are of enduring importance, as are amongst M.’s literary studies not only Leid, but many of the smaller pieces later collected, such as that on “Der Topos der Minnesklaven” or the short piece on “Salische Geistlichendichtung,” both in 1953. It has been rightly noted as a positive feature of M.’s work that he raised both in language and literature controversial questions which properly stimulated discussion, even if definitive answers are still now not clear. Thus Nordgermanen und Alemannen used material in the first edition that was countered by other scholars (notably by Hans Friedrich Rosenfeld) and was indeed adapted. Also controversial were M.’s views on the form of early MHG poetry as manifested principally in the three-volume corpus. Although he had supporters, there was strong opposition, notably from Werner Schröder, in articles and in the introduction to his own ATB edition of a smaller collection of the same texts (Kleinere deutsche Gedichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, 1972). Certainly there has never been anything approaching consensus on the long-line strophes for every work included in this category by M. (again such as the Annolied), and each individual text needs to be considered in this respect. But the value of M.’s corpus lies still in

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the scholarly presentation of a large range of texts on which so much more needs to be done; M. regretted in the introduction to the final volume that he would not be able to offer a commentary on the various individual works, but he provided nevertheless a sound basis for this work to be done. Select Bibliography Works: Nordgermanen und Alemannen: Studien zur germanischen und frühdeutschen Sprachgeschichte, Stammes- und Volkskunde (Bern and Munich: Francke/Lehnen (1942; 3rd ed. 1952); Deutsche Wortgeschichte, ed. M. and Friedrich Stroh (M. and Heinz Rupp 1943; 3rd ed. 1974–1978); Leid: Studien zur Bedeutungs- und Problemgeschichte, besonders in den großen Epen der staufischen Zeit (1951, 4th ed. 1969); Die Lieder Walthers von der Vogelweide. I. Die religiösen und politischen Lieder, ed. M. (1955, 3rd ed. 1967); II. Die Liebeslieder (1956, 3rd ed. 1969); Mundarten und Schriftsprache (1956); Dichtung und Sprache des Mittelalters. Gesammelte Aufsätze (1963, 2nd augmented ed. 1971); Volkssprache. Gesammelte Abhandlungen ([1933] 1964 = Beiheft 9 to Wirkendes Wort); (ed.) Die religiösen Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts (1964–1970); Die ‘Pseudoreimare’: Fragen der Echtheit, der Chronologie und des ‘Zyklus’ im Liedercorpus Reinmars des Alten (1966); Sprachgeographie: Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1972 = Beiheft 21 to Wirkendes Wort). Literature: Die Wissenschaft von deutscher Sprache und Dichtung: Methoden, Probleme, Aufgaben, ed. Siegfried Gutenbrunner, Hugo Moser, Walther Rehm, and Heinz Rupp (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963) [= Festschrift Maurer zum 65. Geburtstag]; Festgabe für Friedrich Maurer zum 70 Geburtstag, ed. Werner Besch, Siegfried Grosse, and Heinz Rupp (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1968); Deutsche Sprache. Geschichte und Gegenwart. Festschrift Maurer zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Hugo Moser, Heinz Rupp, and Hugo Steger (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1978); Die Freiburger Universität in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Eckhard John et al. (Freiburg i. Br.: Ploetz, 1991), esp. 115–49; Christof Hamann, “M.,” IGL, II, 1173–175 (with list of obituaries).

Brian Murdoch

Menéndez-Pidal, Ramón (March 13, 1869, La Coruña, Spain – November 14, 1968, Madrid), Spanish Philologist. M. was one of the foremost philologists and cultural historians of 20th-century Spain. In a career spanning nearly three quarters of a century, and disciplines as varied as philology, political history, folklore and literary criticism, M. emphatically refuted 19th-century assertions regarding the supposed paucity of an early literary and intellectual tradition on Spanish soil, while establishing the importance of the rigorous study of history and historical

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linguistics to his own time. Although his interpretations have been contested in recent decades, he was largely responsible for the formulation of the enduring vision of Spain in the Middle Ages. A prodigious author, he is best remembered for his research on early Spanish historiography, for his contributions to the study of Romance epic, and for his seminal work on the origins and development of the Spanish language. His critical editions of medieval Spanish texts served to encourage serious research on the literature of the Spanish Middle Ages while his philological treatises served as a point of reference for much of the subsequent work done in Spanish historical linguistics. He is also known for his work on dialectology, etymology, and the Romancero, as well as a polemical study on Bartolomé de Las Casas. M. studied at the University of Madrid, where he was a student of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Earning his doctorate in 1893, he first taught at the Escuela de Estudios Superiores of the Ateneo de Madrid. In 1899, he assumed a chair in Romance Philology at the University of Madrid, where he remained until his retirement in 1939. His affiliation with the precursor of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (1907), led him to the directorship of its Centro de Estudios Históricos, founded in 1910. Through the auspices of the research-oriented Centro, M. was able to consolidate and extend the study of philology, founding the prestigious Revista de filología española in 1914. M. was named a member of the Real Academia Española in 1902, and was elected its director in 1925, a position he held until 1939; he was reelected in 1947, and continued as director until his death in 1968. He was also a member of the Real Academia de la Historia, named in 1912. During the years of the Spanish civil war, M. lived in exile in Cuba, the United States, and Paris, lecturing, among other venues, at Columbia University. After the war, M. returned to Spain, and, although formally retired from his university position, he continued to write even into his nineties. During his lifetime, he was awarded honorary doctorates from a number of foreign universities, among them Toulouse, Hamburg, Oxford, Paris, and Brussels. M. was one of the preeminent scholars of the Romance epic. The importance of his contributions to this field was recognized early on: His doctoral work, a multi-volume study and critical edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid, was awarded a prize by the Real Academia Española in 1893. Though not published until 1908–1911, this work set a new standard for such editions, and was not superseded until the final decades of the 20th century. His La leyenda de los Infantes de Lara (1896) was an exhaustive study of the legend and its transmission up through the 20th century; this monograph received a prize from the Real Academia de la Historia in 1897.

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M. was a proponent of neotradicionalismo, or the popular, oral, and fragmentary character of the Romance epic, applying this theory not only to the Spanish epic, but also to the French Chanson de Roland, in La Chanson de Roland y el neotradicionalismo (1957). The person of the juglar, or minstrel, is central to his hypothesis of a collective, popular epic tradition, as he demonstrates in Poesía juglaresca y juglares (1924). He continued to work on the filiation and diffusion of the epic through time in L’Epopee castillane à travers la littérature espagnole (1910) as well as on the historical context of the Cid, publishing one of his most well-known books, La España del Cid (1929) on the subject. Perhaps M.’s most enduring legacy is his work on the origins and development of the Spanish language. In addition to the significant grammatical study appearing as part of his critical edition of the Cantar de Mio Cid, M. published a Manual de gramática histórica española elemental (1904), as well as studies on leonés, basque, and mozarabic. His masterwork in this regard is the monumental Orígenes del Español, first published in 1926, but subsequently revised and reprinted many times, in which M. reconstructs the development of Spanish in the two centuries preceding the appearance of the first sustained literary texts. This work, after many years, is still one of the most important volumes about the history of the Spanish language. M. has long been recognized for the success of his efforts to reinvigorate the study of medieval literature and language in Spain at the turn of the 20th century, for his precious reconstruction of proto-Spanish, and for making available, through critical editions, some of the great classics of the Middle Ages. That said, his legacy has not been entirely free of controversy, doubtless because much of his work, while meticulously documented from a philological point of view, nevertheless reveals his constant preoccupation with what he saw as the relevance of the medieval archive to the soul and purpose of modern Spain. Devolving from his neotraditional stance vis-à-vis the epic tradition in general and the Cid in particular, M.’s work has therefore been criticized for what is seen by some as a counterfactual reading of Castile and Castilian as the inspiration and source of a more generalized national ethos. Yakov Malkiel (“A Tentative Typology of Romance Historical Grammars,” Essays on Linguistic Themes, 1968, 199–228), in discussing Orígenes, points out what he sees as the bias of M.’s choices to focus on those features of Castilian that are most distinct from other dialects on the peninsula and to remain silent about Galician Portuguese and Catalán, in the interest of promulgating the primacy of Castilian. María Eugenia Lacarra (“La utilización del Cid de Menéndez Pidal en la ideología militar franquista,” Ideologies and Literatures 3 [1980]: 95–127; “Consecuencias ideológicas de algunas de la teorías en torno a la épica peninsular,” Actas del Séptimo Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de

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Hispanistas, ed. Guiseppe Bellini, 1982, vol. 2, 657–66) has taken issue with M. on the grounds of socio-political anachronism: The Cid cannot be read as an emblematic hero vindicating a transcendent – and Castilian – Spanish identity, since in his time, the Cid could have conceptualized neither the idea of a modern nation-state nor that of a Reconquista, the presence of Islam on the peninsula being, quite simply, a part of the contemporaneous political landscape. M.’s commitment to an heroic ideal of Spanishness is also a factor in his assessment of what he saw as Bartolomé de las Casas’s paranoia, a reading that occasioned a fair number of negative reactions to the publication of El Padre Las Casas: Su doble personalidad in 1963. M.’s views have been challenged on scholarly grounds as well in recent decades, although somewhat less vociferously. Particularly at issue in this respect have been his reconstructions of epic verses from historiographic sources and his conceptualization of the traditional oral poetic life of the Romancero. The first practice has been considered by some as excessively hypothetical; the second as a refusal to take into account what some see as patent evidence of learned and individual composition. There is however by no means a sense of unanimity about these evaluations of M.’s work. Some critics defend his conclusions, as does Samuel G. Armistead, arguing vigorously in favor of the validity of both the verse reconstructions and the Pidalian stance on the Romancero (“Menéndez Pidal, The Epic and the Generation of ‘98’,” La Corónica 29.2 [2001]: 33–57). E. Michael Gerli gives M.’s idealization of Spanish and Castilian history a more sympathetic reading as a product of its time and place (“Inventing the Spanish Middle Ages: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spanish cultural history, and ideology in philology,” La Corónica 30:1 [2001]: 111–26). Most recent commentary about M., whether or not taking issue with some of his conclusions, acknowledges him as one of the preeminent Spanish medievalists of the 20th century; as Colin Smith comments, “We do well to remember that much of Menéndez Pidal’s work in all fields was truly original research, since his few predecessors had provided little on which to build …” (“Ramón Menéndez Pidal,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico, Donald Fennema, and Karmen Lenz, 1998, vol. 2, 360). In the end, perhaps the most important contribution of an extraordinarily prolific and gifted scholar like M. is that even decades after his death, his writing continues to incite further research and passionate discussion.

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Select Bibliography Works: La leyenda de los siete infanates de Lara (1896); Crónicas generales de España (1898); Manual elemental de gramática histórica española (1904); Primera crónica general de España que mando componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289 (1906); Cantar de Mio Cid: texto, gramática y vocabulario (1908–1911); L’Epopee castillane à travers la littérature espagnole (1910), with a preface by Ernest Mérimée; Poesía juglaresca y juglares: aspectos de la historia literaria cultural de España (1924); Orígenes del español: estado lingüístico de la Península ibérica hasta el siglo xi (1926); Flor nueva de romances viejos (1928); La España del Cid (1929); Poesía árabe y poesía europea (1937); De Cervantes y Lope de Vega (1940); La lengua de Cristóbal Colón, el estilo de Santa Teresa, y otros estudios sobre el siglo XVI (1944); La epopeya castellana a través de la literatura española (1945); Reliquias de la poesía épica española (1951); Toponimia prerrománica hispana (1952); Romancero hispánico: (hispano-portugués, americano y sefardí) Teoría e historia (1953); España, eslabón entre la Cristiandad y el Islam (1956); La Chanson de Roland y el neotradicionalismo (1959); El padre Las Casas. Su doble personalidad (1963). Literature: Samuel G. Armistead, “The Mocedades de Rodrigo and Neo-Individualist Theory,” Hispanic Review 46.3 (1978): 313–27; Samuel G. Armistead, “Menéndez Pidal, The Epic and the Generation of ‘98’,” La Corónica 29.2 (2001): 33–57; Lino G. Canedo, review of El Padre Las Casas. Su doble personalidad by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, The Americas 21.2 (1964): 209–11; Fernando Diez de Medina, “Una Polemica Que Dura Cuatro Siglos: El Padre las Casas y el Ultimo Libro de Don Ramon Menendez Pidal,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 6.3 (1964): 425–31; E. Michael Gerli, “Inventing the Spanish Middle Ages: Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spanish Cultural History, and Ideology in Philology,” La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature 30:1 (2001): 111–26; Lewis Hanke, “More Heat and Some Light on the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 44.3 (1964): 293–340; Steven Hess, Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Boston: Twayne, 1982); María Eugenia Lacarra, “La utilización del Cid de Menéndez Pidal en la ideología militar franquista,” Ideologies and Literatures 3 (1980): 95–127; Colin Smith, “Ramón Menéndez Pidal,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico, Donald Fennema, and Karmen Lenz (New York: Garland, 1998), II, 351–64; Angel Gómez Moreno, “Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968),” Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jaume Aurell and Francisco Crosas (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 69–85.

Kimberlee Campbell

Meyer, Marie-Paul-Hyacinthe (Paul) (January 17, 1840, Paris – September 8, 1917), French Medievalist. Along with Gaston Paris, M. was one of the major pioneers of the field of Romance Philology in France. Motivated by a passionate desire to create for France what German philologists had accomplished in Germany, M. and

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Paris adopted scientific methods as their guiding principles. Their collaboration would determine the development of Romance studies in France from the 1860s on. During a time of great scientific progress, they saw their discipline as a science, not unlike the natural sciences, one which would grow and meld with other disciplines (Richard Traschler, “Un siècle de lettreüre: Observations sur les études de littérature française du Moyen Âge entre 1900 et 2000,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 48 [2005]: 359–60). Together they founded La Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature in 1866, the journal Romania in 1872, and the Société des anciens textes français in 1875. M. is known for his many editions of manuscripts, but is perhaps best known as co-founder of Romania, which he edited for thirty-nine years, with Paris until 1903, with Antoine Thomas until 1906, and alone from 1907–1911. When Paris died in 1904, M. boasted that all 100 volumes published by the Société were of unquestionable value (Charles Ridoux, Évolution des études médiévales en France de 1860 a 1914, 2001, 420). Throughout his career, M. maintained his belief in the promotion of the scientific study of medieval languages. In an article entitled “Ouvrages sur les patois,” (Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature 1,1 [1866]: 400–06), he decried the lack of methodology amongst current philologists and called for a “grammaire scientifique” (Ridoux, 484). A devoted teacher for his entire career, M. sought, especially with the Société, to create the conditions under which students would produce editions of Old French and Provencal texts (Jacques Monfrin, Études de Philologie Romane, 2001, 15). M. was born in Paris. His father was a legal translator of Alsatian origin. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then entered the École des Chartes in 1857, where he studied under François Guessard in Romance Languages and Friedrich Diez in Romance Linguistics. There he formed what would be his lifelong friendship with Paris, who was in the class behind him. In 1861, M. obtained the diploma of archiviste-paléographe with a thesis entitled “Recherches sur la langue parlée en Gaule aux temps barbares Ve–IXe siècle.” Upon completing his studies, he lacked the sorts of connections that Paris enjoyed, and was forced to take odd jobs for little money doing tasks such as collation and copying. At one point he worked in this capacity for Theodor Mommsen (Monfrin, 11). In 1861, while working for the imperial archives, M. was sent on a mission to England by the Bibliothèque impériale to buy manuscripts at an auction. During his stay, he made his great discovery of the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, régent d’Angleterre de 1216 à 1219, his edition of which appeared between 1891 and 1901. Throughout his career, he visited England frequently and published over one hundred manuscripts that he found there, editions

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which form the basis of modern knowledge of Anglo-Norman literature. M. also provided a constant stream of notes on his work, which he considered an essential service to his profession. M.’s journey to Provence in 1862 was also highly significant for his career. He was sent by the Minister of the Interior to inventory the archives of the town of Tarascon, and during his stay he became a Provençaliste, learning the language and the way of the life. He befriended some of the prominent promoters of Provençal language and literature, known as the Félibriges, including Frédéric Mistral. Their correspondence is preserved in Correspondance de Fréderic Mistral avec Paul Meyer et Gaston Paris, 1978. M. would go on to promote the cause of Provençal throughout his career and publish numerous editions of Provençal texts (Monfrin, 13–14). In 1863, M. began work in the Catalogue des manuscripts français du Département des manuscripts de la Bibliothèque impériale where he remained until 1865. From 1866 to 1872, he worked as an archivist in the national archives. In 1871, M. was moved to take up arms against the invading Prussians. In 1872, he began work at the École des Chartes, where he worked as secretary of the school until 1876, at which point he joined the Collège de France, having been granted a Chair in languages and literatures of Southern Europe. He would also teach for many years at the École des Chartes, beginning with a single course in 1865. In 1869, Guessard expressed his profound desire to have his former student replace him, and M. took over the position in Romance Philology until 1878 (Monfrin, 72). He stayed on as a lecturer until 1882, at which point he left his Chair at the Collège de France and assumed a tenured position in Romance Philology and the directorship of the École, where he would remain until his retirement. In 1880, M. suffered enormous grief over the loss of his first wife, Lilian Gwendoline Blackburne, an Englishwoman with whom he had fallen deeply in love. She died not long into their marriage at twenty-four after a horrific bout with the neurological disease Chorea. M. detailed her suffering and his heartbreak in a letter to Mistral (Monfrin, 11). In 1883, M. was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, and in 1904 to the Conseil supérieur de l’Instruction publique. By 1910, M. was plagued by unrelenting fatigue and admitted publicly that he was ailing. In 1911, he handed over the reins of Romania to Mario Roques. By 1914, he was still teaching, but was ill and weak. In January of 1917, M. gave up his chair at the École des Chartes, and when he died on September 8, 1917, France was once again under siege by the Germans. In 1898, M. sided openly with Alfred Dreyfus, attracting the attention of anti-Semite journalist Edouard Drumont, who attacked him in La France

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Juive in 1886, accusing him of being a German Jew trying to pass as an Alsatian Catholic. At the height of the Dreyfus Affair, M. and others at the École were sought out by Emile Zola to verify the authenticity of the infamous document with which Dreyfus had been accused. On February 2, 1899, M. went before the Cour de cassation with his colleagues to affirm that the document was not in the hand of Dreyfus (Ridoux, 969–70). M. was an integral part of five decades of Romance studies in France, at the helm of Romania and as editor of numerous editions. A large part of his work consists of his countless notes and commentaries, and therefore an inventory of his work would be nearly impossible to produce. He published his Études sur la chanson de Girart de Roussillon in 1858–1859 while still a student at the École. His Études sur l’histoire de la langue française, appeared in 1862, and in 1865, he produced his edition of Flamenca. In 1876, M. published in Romania a 19,000 verse poem in French verse of the First Crusade, the Chanson de Jerusalem de Graindor de Douai. Lengthy biographies of Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier have appeared in the last ten years, whereas M. still awaits this honor. His legacy has likely suffered, to a certain degree, from the tendency in modern scholarship to dismiss his generation of Romance philologists as nationalist and positivist. Ursula Bähler, in her 2004 biography of Paris, laments such belittling characterizations, and suggests that their generation be viewed instead as the real “new philologists” for their establishment of Romance Philology and the founding of Romania (Gaston Paris et la philologie romane, 2004, 14–15). Keith Busby describes M.’s engagement with Anglo-Norman literature as tireless, but layered with an unmistakable contempt. This attitude, he suggests, was born of a typical late 19th-century colonial view of the French of England as a corrupt form of the continental standard, one that in reality never existed. For Busby, M. was caught between his fierce French nationalism and his desire for scientific accuracy (“Three Frenchmen Abroad: De la Rue, Michel, and Meyer in England, Nineteenth-century French studies 22 [1994]: 359–60). In Monfrin’s estimation, M. was a great producer of editions who worked quickly, but accurately. He eschewed broad theories and overarching views of issues, which might explain why he only produced one monograph although he would have been capable of many more (28–29). Select Bibliography Editions: Anciennes poésies religieuses en langue d’oc (1860); Bestiaire de Gervaise (1872); Blandin de Cornouailles (1873); Brun de la Montagne, roman d’aventures (1875); Chanson de la croisade albigeoise (1875–1879); Un récit de la première croisade fondé sur Baudry de Bourgueil

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(1876); Le Débat des hérauts de France et d’Angleterre (1877); Daurel et Beton, chanson de geste provençale (1880); Raoul de Cambrai with Auguste Lognon (1882); La Vie de Saint Grégoire par frère Angier (1883); Fragments d’une vie de saint Thomas de Cantorbéry (1885); Les Contes moralisés de Nicole Bozon, frère mineur, with Lucy Toulmin Smith (1889); L’escoufle; roman d’aventure, with Henri Victor Michelant (1894); Documents linguistiques du midi de la France (1909); Doon de la Roche, chanson de geste, with Gédéon Busken Huet (1921). Literature: “Nécrologie, Paul Meyer”, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 78 (1917): 429–46; “Notices sur Paul Meyer”, Histoire Littéraire de la France 35 (1921): xxi–xxxv; Charles Bémont, “Paul Meyer,” Revue Historique 126 (1917): cxxvi; Jacques Monfrin, Études de Philologie Romane (2001): 21–33, 71–89.

Anne Latowsky

Mitteis, Heinrich (November 26, 1889, Prague – July 23, 1952, Munich), major German Legal and Constitutional Historian. M. was a medieval historian who did significant work in the field of constitutional law of the German Empire and its neighboring countries in the Middle Ages. Decisively moving away from traditional positivism and the concept of history as a static phenomenon, M. established a new school of thought determined by its dynamic-functional approaches to historical aspects and structures. His research concentrated on medieval constitutional law in light of political developments, studying, above all, the basic features of feudalism in its political context. M.’s observations became the classical standard in German legal history because he succeeded in correlating legal history with political history (“Rechtsgeschichte und Machtgeschichte”). He was sometimes criticized, though unjustly, for his thematic limitation to the high Middle Ages, for neglecting neighboring disciplines, especially canon law (but see M.’s article “Beaumanoir und die geistliche Gerichtsbarkeit”), and for his repeated efforts to understand history from an intellectual point of view (“Geistesgeschichte”). Particularly the latter approach, however, can now be regarded as one of the most fruitful strategies in modern historical research, so we might say that M. was ahead of his time, at least with regard to this interdisciplinary approach. He made great efforts just shortly before his death to incorporate, for instance, Dante’s various poems into his historical research, and he emphasized repeatedly the importance and necessity

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for legal history to integrate the insights of neighboring disciplines, such as literary history and church history, but he did not achieve the real breakthrough in this area. M. was not only a legal historian, he also lived and breathed the world of laws as the basis of justice and peace, both in the past and the present, particularly because for him factual history and legal history were simply two sides of the same coin. He identified the Middle Ages as a unified world where the political and cultural differentiation and discrimination among peoples and nation states had not yet occurred. M.’s father Ludwig Mitteis, also a well-known legal historian (1859– 1921), was professor at the universities of Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna. His mother was Hermine, neé Luber (1858–1912). M. grew up in Leipzig, deeply inspired by and involved with music; in fact he would have almost decided to study music and to become a symphony conductor. Nevertheless, when he began his university studies in Leipzig, he opted for law. He continued his studies in Berlin in the winter semester of 1909/1910, taking classes with Heinrich Brunner, Otto Gierke, and Karl Hellwig, after which he returned to Leipzig again, taking classes there with Karl Binding, Otto Mayer, Rudolf Sohm, Adolph Wach, and also his father, until he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1913 (summa cum laude). He interrupted his legal internship in 1913/1914 embarking on further studies in Bonn with Ulrich Stutz and Hans Schreuer. Between 1915 and 1918, M. served in the military, fighting on the front during the First World War. In 1919 he married Mathilde (Liddy) (1888–1971), daughter of the General Lieutenant Hans Abt; they never had children. In the same year, 1919, he earned his habilitation (advanced doctoral degree granting the privilege to teach at the university) in the areas of German Legal History and Civil Law. In 1920 he gained a teaching position at the newly-founded university of Cologne, where he was appointed regular Professor in 1921, followed by a position at the university of Heidelberg in 1924 (as successor to Hans Fehr). In 1927 M. established, together with Leopold Wenger, the “Deutschen Rechtshistorikertag” (Conference of the German Legal Historians). Although M. did not fully identify with the Weimar Republic, he was carefully suspicious of the Hitler regime. Early on he publicly voiced his opposition against the defamation of his Jewish colleagues in 1933 and was subsequently removed as dean. In 1934 he taught at the university of Munich as the successor of Karl August Eckhardt upon the express wish of the faculty there. But he experienced political conflicts with the Nazis once again because he had protested against the radical change of the university constitution. In 1936 he transferred to the University of Vienna, but after the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938 M. was immediately relegated from

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his position there and ordered to teach at the insignificant university of Rostock on the Baltic Sea. In 1947 M. became the editor of the highly regarded journal Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (ZSRG). Following the war, in 1946 he received a position at the University of Berlin, in 1948 he accepted a call to Munich, and in Spring of 1952 a call to Zurich, though he returned to Munich occasionally to complete some teaching assignments. He died there on July 23, 1952. M. had been member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg from 1925, of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna from 1945, of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin from 1946, and of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich from 1949 (he served as its president from 1950–1952). M. enjoyed extensive reputation for his work in legal history and for his extraordinary teaching abilities, inspiring whole generations of students. He was regarded as one of the major figures in the tradition of German legal history and reputed as a worthy successor of such giants as Jakob Grimm and Karl Friedrich Eichhorn. Throughout his academic career he made serious attempts to stay abreast of current research and untiringly published book reviews in the ZSRG, the HZ, and elsewhere (a total of 190). In his doctoral dissertation, “Rechtsfolgen des Leistungsverzuges beim Kaufvertrag nach niederländischen Quellen des Mittelalters” (“Legal Implications in Case of a Default in the Payment Following a Merchandise Contract According to Dutch Sources from the Middle Ages,” 1913), M. focused on private law in the Middle Ages. In the following year he published an article on “Beaumanoir und die geistliche Gerichtsbarkeit” (“Beaumanoir and the Ecclesiastic Courts,” ZSRG [Kanonistische Abteilung] 4 [1914]: 263–357), comparing the legal procedures in ecclesiastical courts with those in secular courts in 13thcentury France. Subsequent articles published in the following years pursued similar themes based on different sources and employing varying perspectives, including family law (1924) and the medieval Peace and Truth of God Movement (treuga Dei) (“Zum Mainzer Reichslandfrieden 1235,” ZSRG [Germ. Abt.] 62 [1942]: 13–56). After 1925, M. dedicated most of his research to medieval constitutional law in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe, such as in his monograph Politische Prozesse des frühen Mittelalters in Deutschland und Frankreich (“Political Processes of the Early Middle Ages in Germany and France,” 1927). In 1933, M. published his seminal study on Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt: Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Verfassungsgeschichte (rpt. repeatedly until 1974), analyzing the basic structures of feudalism and of dynastic laws within the European context. This comparative perspective was to be M.’s lasting legacy because he treated medieval laws on a broad

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basis. He subsequently continued with this research agenda addressing the fundamental structures of Medieval society, poignantly expressed in his second major monograph, Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters: Grundlinien einer vergleichenden Verfassungsgeschichte des Lehnszeitalters (1940, 11th ed. 1986; The Nation in the High Middle Ages: Structural Outlines of a Comparative Constitutional History of the Time of Feudalism), where he takes into view many different European countries during the Middle Ages, including the crusader kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean. He argued that the classical concept of the state was not lost in the Middle Ages, but transferred to the figure of the king. Another seminal study proved to be Die deutsche Königswahl: Ihre Rechtsgrundlagen bis zur Goldenen Bulle (1938; 2nd ed., exp. ed. 1944; rpt. 1965 and 1987; The German Election of Kings: Its Legal Foundation until the Golden Bull [1356]). In an article, “Die germanischen Grundlagen des französischen Rechts,” “The Germanic Basis of French Law”), also published in ZSRG [Germ. Abt.] 63 [1943]: 136–213, M. claimed that medieval French law was founded more upon Germanic law than on Roman law. In 1947, defending the relevance of legal history at large, M. published his book: Vom Lebenswert der Rechtsgeschichte (Critical Justification of Legal History). For students and nonacademic readers he published the summary of his research field, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (1949; History of German Law; reprinted and expanded many times, latest in the 19th expanded ed. by Heinz Lieberich in 1992), and Deutsches Privatrecht (1950; German Civil Law). Posthumously appeared a collection of M.’s articles in the volume Die Rechtsidee in der Geschichte, ed. Leiva Petersen (1957; The Concept of Law in History). Apart from his impressive research and publication record, M.’s strong stance against the terror regime of the National Socialists, only thinly veiled through his academic topics, deserves to be mentioned. However we might evaluate his concept of the feudal structures and legal conditions determining medieval states, in all his books and articles, especially those published during the Nazi regime, M. expressed an unshakable belief in the absolute significance of the law and of the legal structures determining a country and a people (Karl S. Bader, “Heinrich Mitteis,” 1957, XXIV–XXV). Unfortunately, M.’s profound learning had fairly little impact on Medieval Studies outside of German-speaking countries, both because of the language barrier (only Geoffrey Barraclough included a chapter from Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt [1933] in his Medieval Germany [1938]) and because of political reasons insofar as German scholars suffered from the same fate as many of their countrymen, being subjected to the “collective guilt” implicitly imposed on Germany after the Second World War (Paul R. Hyams, “Heinrich Mitteis and the Constitutional History of

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Medieval England,” Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren, 1991, 61–70). However, Joseph R. Strayer wrote an excellent review of M.’s Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters in the American Historical Review 59, 4 (1954): 910–11, identifying him as an eminent medievalist. Hanna Vollrath, in her “Introduction” to England and Germany in the High Middle Ages (1996), praises M. for having been one of the very few medievalists to endeavor a comparative approach in European legal history (1–2), but also criticized him for absolutizing the significance of the feudal state as a centripetal entity, disregarding a host of many other factors. Liliana Mencarelli Fichte published an Italian translation of M.’s Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters in 1962 (Le strutture giuridiche e politiche dell’età feudale), followed by H. F. Orton who produced an English translation (The State in the Middle Ages) in 1975. Apparently, however, M. enjoyed considerable respect in Japan, insofar as Terushiro Sera produced a translation of his Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (on the basis of the 2nd ed. from 1952) in 1954 as Doitsu hoseishi gaisetsu, and once again in 1971 on the basis of the 11th edition (1969). Terushiro Sera and Toshio Hironaka published a Japanese translation of M.’s Deutsches Privatrecht in 1961, followed in 1980 by a Japanese translation of M.’s Vom Lebenswert der Rechtsgeschichte, by Takeshi Hayashi, as Ho shigaku no sonzai kachi. Although M. did not establish a circle of disciples, here disregarding the large number of doctoral students who completed their work under his guidance, and although he never received a Festschrift, his monographs and articles established a solid research agenda for which he has remained famous in German historiography. Karl Kroeschell(Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 1, 8th ed., 1987, 20) emphasized that M.’s book on Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt has to be regarded as one of the most important studies on medieval feudal law. Countless reviewers agreed with M.’s thesis that in the Middle Ages civic law and public law, as expressed in feudal relationships, could not be separated (Bernhard Diestelkamp, “Heinrich Mitteis’ ‘Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt’ im Lichte moderner Forschung,” Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren, 1991, 11–21). Peter Landau emphasized that M.’s idea that in the time of medieval feudalism the foundation for modern constitutionalism were established (“Heinrich Mitteis als deutscher Rechtshistoriker,” Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren, 1991, 8), met with general approval at his time. His argument, formulated in his Deutsches Privatrecht, that Germanic law was the root of medieval civil law, quite independent of Roman law, seems to have withstood the test of time, as reflected by the 11th ed. of this textbook, published by Heinz Lieberich in 1981, despite a more critical stance toward these positions in modern scholarship.

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Select Bibliography Works: Politische Prozesse des früheren Mittelalters in Deutschland und Frankreich (1927; rpt. 1974); Zum Schuld- und Handelsrecht der Kreuzfahrerstaaten,” Beiträge zum Wirtschaftsrecht: Festgabe für E. Heymann, ed. F. Klausing et al. (1931), 229–88; “Zur Geschichte der Lehnsvormundschaft,” Festschrift Alfred Schultze, ed. Walther Merk (1934), 129–74; “Rechtsgeschichte und Machtgeschichte,” Wirtschaft und Kultur: Festschrift Alfons Dopsch, ed. Gian Piero Bognetti (1938), 557–80; “Über den liber consuetudinum imperii Romanae,” Studi di storia e diritto in onoranza di Enrico Besta (1938), 1–33; “Land und Herrschaft, Bemerkungen zum gleichnamigen Buch Otto Brunners,” HZ 163 (1941): 255–81 and 471–89; “Zum Mainzer Reichslandfrieden 1235,” ZSRG [G] 62 (1942): 13–56; Die Rechtsgeschichte und das Problem der historischen Kontinuität (1947); “Zur staufischen Verfassungsgeschichte,” ZRG [G] 65 (1947): 316–37; Über das Naturrecht (1948); “Politische Verträge im Mittelalter,” ZSRG [G] 67 (1950): 64–128; “Zur Lage der rechtsgeschichtlichen Forschung in Italien,” ibid. 69 (1952): 203–38; Die Krise des deutschen Königswahlrechts (1951); “Formen der Adelsherrschaft im Mittelalter,” Festschrift Fritz Schulz (1951), 226–58; “Über den Rechtsgrund des Satzes ‘Stadtluft macht frei’,” Stengel-Festschrift, ed. Hans Niedermeyer and Werner Flume (1952), 342–58. Literature: Karl S. Bader, “Heinrich Mitteis,” Heinrich Mitteis, Die Rechtsidee in der Geschichte (Weimar: Böhlau 1957), XIII–XXIX; G. Köbler, “Wege deutscher Rechtsgeschichte,” Festschrift K. Kroeschell (Frankfurt: Lang 1988), 205–06; G. Landwehr, in: Juristen im Porträt: Festschrift des Verlages C. H. Beck (Munich: Beck 1988), 572–83; G. Brun, Leben und Werk des Rechtshistorikers Heinrich Mitteis unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seines Verhältnisses zum Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Lang 1991); P. Landau et al., Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren (1889–1989) (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1991); Adalbert Erler, “Mitteis, Heinrich,” Handbuch der Rechtswissenschaften, ed. id. and Ekkehard Kaufmann. Vol. III (Berlin: Schmidt, 1984), 614–17; Nikolaus Grass, NDB 17 (1994): 577–79; Bernhard Diestelkamp, Drei Professoren der Rechtswissenschaft in bewegter Zeit (Stuttgart: Steiner 2000).

Albrecht Classen

Mohr, Hans Wolfgang Julius (June 19, 1907, Cologne – November 8, 1991, Schwäbisch Hall), German Medievalist. In the beginning of his academic career, M. concentrated his research on Old Germanic and Nordic literature. Although he was responsible for three volumes of the 2nd edition of the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (1953–1972), together with his friend and colleague Wolfgang Kohlschmidt and with Klaus Kanzog, he became, above all, one of the acclaimed masters

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of academic essays and articles about MHG German literature between the late 1940s and the 1970s: All of them present empathetic and intuitive interpretations of MHG poetic works, especially, but not only, of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s courtly romance Parzival (ca. 1205). They were mostly published in academic journals and in festschriften. Later he also published a series of translations of courtly romances into modern German. Furthermore, M. was not only a medievalist of high reputation, but also a fascinating academic teacher. M. was the son of the merchant Gottlob Mohr and his wife Elisabeth (1880–1979). In 1925 he graduated (Abitur) from the Oberrealschule in Bielefeld. From 1925 until 1932, M. studied musicology, philosophy, and above all philology (German, Nordic, and Classical philology, but also English) at the universities of Jena (1925), Heidelberg (1925/1926), Kiel (1926–1928), Berlin (winter term 1927/1928), and Tübingen (1931/1932). His doctoral thesis (Kenningstudien: Beiträge zur Stilgeschichte der altgermanischen Dichtung; published 1933) was supervised by Hermann Schneider (Tübingen). M. received his doctorate in 1932 at the University of Tübingen, then became collaborator at the Sprachatlas (University of Marburg, 1933), lecturer at the University of Durham, UK (1933/1935), and afterwards, in 1937, “Vertreter eines Dozenten” (substitute for an Assistant Professor) of Scandinavian literature at the University of Cologne. There, he earned his habilitation in 1938 (Wortschatz und Motive der jüngeren Eddalieder mit südgermanischem Stoff, published in 1938/1939: Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 75/76: 217–280, 149–217). In 1940 and 1941, M. was “Privatdozent” at the University of Münster, got a call to Kiel in 1941, where in 1942 he became a Full Professor (Ordinarius) of German Studies. In 1957 he was appointed to the highly reputable chair of his academic teacher, Hermann Schneider, at the University of Tübingen where he taught until his academic retirement in 1972. He received several calls for a professorship in Münster and as a visiting professor in the US, but declined all of them. One must remember that guest lectures of a visiting colleague were a rarity at that time, and that the so-called ‘academic tourism’ of our times had not yet been invented. After his retirement, mostly living near Tübingen, M. died in Schwäbisch Hall on November 8, 1991. Whereas only in the first decade of his academic career M. published two monographs and several articles about Old Scandinavian literature and heroic epics (these publications are listed in Dietmar Wenzelburger’s “Bibliographie Wolfgang Mohr” in the first festschrift for Mohr (1972 [see below], 445–46), he often, but not regularly, offered classes on Norwegian and Icelandic literature of the Middle Ages. As a professor in Kiel and especially later

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in Tübingen, M. concentrated his lectures and seminars more and more on MHG poetic works, and the same can be said about his publications. But as his position as chair in Kiel and Tübingen included the history of German language, he quite regularly also taught German “Sprachgeschichte” from the Germanic times until today. But he published only a few articles dealing with language (not yet linguistics): about the language of children (“Beobachtungen zur Kindersprache,” Schule und Psychologie 1 [1954]: 207–20), and about the well-known children’s play with marbles (“Murmelspiel: Ein Experiment,” Festschrift für Jost Trier, ed. William Foerste and Karl Heinz Borck, 1964, 47–68). He also published some articles about modern German literature: Goethe’s metrics and one of his poems (“Goethes Verskunst,” Wirkendes Wort 4 [1953/1954], rpt. Wirkendes Wort, Sammelband 3: Neue Deutsche Literatur 1963, 288–300; “Goethes Gedicht Wiederfinden und der Frühlingsreihen Burkarts von Hohenvels,” Festschrift Friedrich Beißner, ed. Ulrich Gaier and Werner Volke, 1974, 256–73; rpt. in Gesammelte Werke II, 1983, 91–111), and many entries for the Reallexikon. M.’s numerous essays and articles, published until 1972 on MHG texts, mostly lyrics and epics, and above all on Wolfram von Eschenbach, are listed in the “Bibliographie Wolfgang Mohr” by Dietmar Wenzelburger (‘Getempert und gemischet’ für Wolfgang Mohr zum 65. Geburtstag von seinen Tübinger Schülern, 1972, 445–51). Later, M. only wrote few more articles (see IGL, vol. 2, 1249–51, here 1250; and Wolfgang Mohr, Gesammelte Aufsätze I/II, 1979 and 1983), but he published modern German translations of five courtly romances: Wolfram von Eschenbach (Parzival, 1977, 2nd ed. 1979; Titurel, 1979, bilingual), Gottfried von Straßburg (Tristan und Isold, 1979), Hartmann von Aue (Erec, Iwein, 1980, 1985). Encouraged by his students and future colleagues, Ulrich Müller and Franz Hundsnurscher, M. edited two volumes with a selection of his essays (1979, 1983). He chose to reprint his articles on Wolfram von Eschenbach and on MHG lyrics of the late 12th and 13th century, i. e., the ‘classical period’ of MHG poetry, and he added also some unpublished papers (“Zu den Atze-Sprüchen Walthers von der Vogelweide,” 1980, “Beiläufiges zu den Liedern Hartmanns von Aue,” 1980, “Nachwort zu ‘Wolframs Tagelieder,’” 1977). All of these essays and articles are characterized by an elegant and refined style of writing, without an excessive use of academic terminology, and they are a pleasure to read even today. Volume II (Lyrik) contains several essays which have been of high importance for the history of German philology, for example: “Wolframs Tagelieder” (1948); “Spiegelungen des Tagelieds” (1971); “Zur Form des mittelalterlichen deutschen Strophenliedes” (1953); “Vortragsform und Form als Symbol im mittelalterlichen

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Liede” (1963); “Tanhusers Kreuzlied” (1960); and on Walther von der Vogelweide (“Der Reichston Walthers von der Vogelweide,” 1953; “Altersdichtung Walthers von der Vogelweide,” 1971). M. was one of the first medievalists who stressed the importance of the social context (“Minnesang als Gesellschaftskunst,” 1954), and he was also the first who cautiously presented the theory that the “domina” (“vrouwe”) of a minnesinger might (perhaps also) mean the court of a noble prince (“Die ‘vrouwe’ Walthers von der Vogelweide,” 1967). M.’s essays on Wolfram von Eschenbach, collected in vol. I of his Gesammelte Schriften (1979), have been, above all, widely read at his time and they are important until today: “Parzival und die Ritter” (1958); “Parzivals ritterliche Schuld” (1952); “Hilfe und Rat in Wolframs Parzival” (1954); “Zu den epischen Hintergründen in Wolframs Parzival” (1965); “Wolframs Kyot und Guiot de Provins” (1966); “König Artus und die Tafelrunde: Politische Hintergründe in Chretiens Perceval and Wolframs Parzival” (paper presented in 1969 and 1970, previously unpublished); and “Willehalm” (lecture at Tübingen 1971, previously unpublished). He was, again, the first who underlined the role of Gauvain/Gawan, the other hero besides Perceval/Parzival: “Parzival und Gawan” (1958); “Obie und Meljanz: Zum 7. Buch von Wolframs Parzival” (1957); “Landgraf Kingrimursel: Zum 8. Buch von Wolframs Parzival” (1965). Joachim Bumke characterized the quality of these papers as most convincing. M. also published articles on Gottfried’s Tristan (“Tristan und Isold als Künstlerroman,” 1959); Mechthild von Magdeburg (1963); Priest Arnold (1963); Graf Rudolf (1967); Hartmann’s Iwein (“Iweins Wahnsinn 1971); and Chrétien’s Cligès (1972). Special features of M.’s works, both of his articles and his translations, have been his profound knowledge of Old French literature and of musicology. It is relatively easy to describe the quality of M.’s writing and the fascination of his academic teaching. One just has to turn to quotes made by colleages of his. Joachim Bumke, in his masterful and exhaustive “Forschungsbericht” about Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote (Die Wolfram von EschenbachForschung seit 1945: Bericht und Bibliographie, 1970): “The special value of M.’s interpretations for me is, that they do not apply any forceful understanding or any narrow-minded methodology, but explore with love, compassion, and knowledge the human problems and solutions in Wolfram’s poetry, and present us the Parzival as a comoedia humana […] His compassionate and understanding humanity takes off constraint and numbness. The poetic persons become by his interpretations living individuals, who show the quality of their personality by their thinking and doing, leaving the question for a complete meaning and shape in the background […] It is somewhat like a

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private handling of poetry which leave decidedly ordinary concepts of academic scholarship behind: M. has always been stressing the subjective and experimental character of his interpretations, which nevertheless is deeply directing into the poetry without any force.” (194) The first festschrift for Wolfgang M. (‘Getempert und gemischet’ für Wolfgang Mohr zum 65. Geburtstag von seinen Tübinger Schülern 1972) was called “a somewhat rare example” of this genre by the British medievalist Peter Ganz: Not colleagues and friends, established and of the same age, but “students of a younger generation have met to thank their mentor […] Even readers who don’t know Wolfgang Mohr personally realize at once the significance which he must have had for his pupils: He has not founded a ‘school,’ he did not teach orthodox methods which were meant to be the only right ones. Instead philological enthusiasm, delight with literature, and also ‘common sense’ are presented in this uncustomary gift (Peter Ganz, in PBB 96 [1974]: 198–202, here 198). M.’s approach to medieval literature was a very personal one. He did not belong to any academic ‘school,’ he never thought of having founded the one and only method of interpretation; instead he combined ‘close reading’ with comparative, musicological, and early sociological interpretation, and there can also be found profound observations of emotions (a research focus that was to gain common recognition only much later). As mentioned above, M. was a fascinating academic teacher. In addition to his lectures, he was able to impressively recite MHG poetry, above all epics of considerable length. His translations, for all of which he used rhyming verses, were not only meant to be quietly read, but also to be presented by reciting. There have been controversial discussions about such translations in verses, and not – as usual today – in modern prose. Twelve years after M.’s death, and more than twenty-five years after the first edition of his translation of Wolfram’s Parzival, parts of it were edited by Walter Schafarschik, one of M.’s last students, in the widely read series of Reclams Universalbibliothek (Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Auswahl, ed. Walter Schafarschik, 2003), and the same translation was also used for a tv movie (Richard Blank: Parzival, Westdeutscher Rundfunk/West Germany, 1980), and for two audio books (8 CDs: Peter Wapnewski 1997; 18 CDs: Twitchet Cicely McArcher 2007). Peter Wapnewski, also well-known by his books and articles about Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrote in 1980: “[Mohr] has succeeded – and perhaps he himself was astonished about his success, but certainly all specialists were astonished – to speak Modern German with Middle High German verses (or vice versa), and to transport the special quality of the ancient poetry into our times” (Peter Wapnewski: “Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival,” ZEIT-

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Bibliothek, ed. Fritz Raddatz, 1980, 48–50, here 50; also quoted by Schafarschik 2003, 166). Select Bibliography Works: Schicksalsglauben und Heldentum (1935); Die Welt der Germanen (1977); Wolfram von Eschenbach: Aufsätze (1979); Gesammelte Aufsätze (1983); translations: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival (1977, 2nd ed. 1979); Hartmann von Aue, Erec (1980); Hartmann von Aue, Iwein (1985). Literature: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 2nd ed. by Wolfgang Mohr, Werner Kohlschmidt, in cooperation with Klaus Kanzog, [only] vol. I–III (1958–1977); For a complete bibliography of the articles, essays, and reviews, see: ‘Getempert und gemischet’ für Wolfgang Mohr zum 65. Geburtstag von seinen Tübinger Schülern, ed. Franz Hundsnurscher and Ulrich Müller (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1972), 445–451 (by Dietmar Wenzelburger), and: “Mohr, Wolfgang,” IGL, vol. 2, 2003, 1249–51 (also CD-ROM). Another festschrift for Wolfgang Mohr was published five years later by Herbert Kolb, and Kurt Ruh, Festgabe zum 70. Geburtstag von Wolfgang Mohr, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 106. III (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977).

Ulrich Müller

Müllenhoff, Karl Victor (August 8, 1818 – February 19, 1884), German Medievalist. M.’s most significant contributions to the field of research focused on the Nibelungenlied, Germanic antiquity and mythology, Greek and German Heroic Saga and Indogermanic historical linguistics, being described as a skilled editor of Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Old High German, Middle High German, Greek, and Latin texts. During his career, M. conceived the plan for the monumental Deutsche Alterthumskunde [German Lore of Antiquity] (1870–1891) and provided significant research for the project, which was completed only after his death. His interest in the history of the German language lead M. to develop what is known as the Continuity Theory for the development of the written German language in the prologue to his Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII–XII. Jahrhundert [Monuments of German Poetry and Prose from the 8th–12th Century] (1864). M. also released several editions of Medieval literature based on the philological method as adapted to the field of Old German Philology by Karl Lachmann, including Kudrun (1845), Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogthümer Schleswig-Holstein und Lauenburg [Sagas, Fairy Tales

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and Songs of the Dukedom of Schleswig-Hostein and Lauenburg] (1845), Das Wessobrunner Gebet [The Prayer of Wessobrunn] (1861), the critically acclaimed Denkmäler (together with Wilhelm Scherer), Altdeutsche Sprachproben [Samples of the Old German Language] (1864), Ornit und die Wolfdietriche (1871–1873, in Deutsches Heldenbuch 3 & 4) and Laurin (1874, rev.). He also released an edition of Tacitus (1873) and a treatment of Beowulf (1889). His glossary of Klaus Groth’s Quickborn (1853) broke new ground by drawing Low German into the realm of academic research. Further, his treatment of runes in Zur Runenlehre [Lessons in Runology] (1852) can also be considered as foundational. M. is also important for his editions of letters and works by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm and Karl Lachmann (see publications below), the last of which he supported in the Nibelungenstreit of the 19th century. He is considered extremely influential for the establishment of the discipline and the continuation of the works of Jacob Grimm and Karl Lachmann, and among his students can be found the influential German philologists Wilhelm Scherer, Elias von Steinmeyer, Arthur Amelung, Oskar Paul Jänicke, Julius Zupitza, and Ernst Martin. M. was born the son of Johann Anton and Anna Müllenhoff in Marne (Süderditmarschen). His father encouraged him to achieve a higher education and to be consequential in all of his undertakings. His education began at the Volksschule in Marne, where he began studying Latin and Greek under the future Pastor Nehlsen in Wesselburen. From 1830, he attended the Gelehrte Schule in Meldorf, where the Director Wilhelm Heinrich Kolster substantially influenced the young man’s development and provided the first impetus to the study of German language and literature. In 1837, M. went to Kiel to study German Philology, History, Art History and Mathematics; he spent the summer of 1839 studying in Leipzig where he met the German Medievalist Moritz Haupt. Haupt encouraged M. to study in Berlin, which he did under the influential guidance of Karl Lachmann, Friedrich Ranke and Wilhelm Grimm among others. In 1841, he visited home, became engaged to his childhood sweetheart Henriette Thaden and returned to Kiel to complete his studies; he completed his doctorate on April 7, 1842 with the dissertation Theologumena Sophoclis, which has remained unpublished, under the supervision of Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch. After completing his education, he taught in Marne from 1842–1843, during which time he intensified his study of German Philology. In 1843, he accepted a humble post at the University of Kiel Library, and began to instruct at the university (Walther Heinrich Vogt: “Die Gründung der Germanistik, der Deutschen und Nordischen Philologie an der Universität Kiel,” Festschift zum 275jährigen Bestehen der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, 1940, 295–308;

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Rudolf Bülck: “Karl Müllenhoff und die Anfänge des germanistischen Studiums an der Kieler Universität,” Zeitschrift der Geschichte für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 74/75 [1951]: 363–407). He was appointed to the position of assistant professor for German language, literature and antiquity on March 2, 1846, and married shortly thereafter on May 5, 1846. Finally, on December 30, 1854, M. was promoted to full professor. On September 25, 1858, he was called to fulfil the vacant professor position of Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in Berlin. He completed his Habilitation in 1861 under the title De carmine Wessofontano et de versu ac stropharum usu apud Germanos antiquissimo, which was published under the title Das Wessobrunner Gebet that same year, and again in his Denkmäler (1864). He served as dean for the Institute of Philosophy from 1862–1863. On February 2, 1864, he was named the successor of Jacob Grimm in the Prussian Academy. On January 31, 1873, his wife passed away and he remarried to Ferdinande Helmsdörfer on the 15th of May 1875. In the same year, he was honored with an induction into the Roten Adler Orden. He also served as an editor of the Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum [Magazine for German Antiquity], which was renamed Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur [Magazine for German Antiquity and Literature] together with Elias Steinmeyer and Wilhelm Scherer. M.’s activities as an instructor concentrated on a two year cycle treating various aspects and problems in the field of Old German Philology. A slow loss of vision necessitated that he restrict his teaching activities starting in 1880, and in 1883 he began to demonstrate symptoms of aphasia bringing his research to an end. He died on February 19, 1884. M.’s Continuity Theory postulates a continuous development of the written German language. This theory assumes a continuous and related tradition of written discourse on the part of successive centers of political power (represented primarily by emperors’ courts) that encompasses virtually all social and cultural achievements of significant note during the Middle Ages. This can be divided into roughly five periods: 1. the beginning of a standardized written script in the era of Charlemagne and his court, 2. the poetic language of the Middle High German poets, 3. the German of Prague (Prager Deutsch) in the 14th century, 4. the German of the Court of the Emperor in Vienna of the 15th century and 5. the codification and standardization affected by Martin Luther. Later research has criticized M.’s theory as untenable in several points, including the lack of written transcriptions from the 10th century necessary to evaluate the theory, the postulation of the MHG poetic language being the norm despite significant indicators that its use was restricted to a relatively small social and political segment of certain regions, and the homogenous conditions necessary for such a continuous de-

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velopment were exceedingly unstable throughout the Middle Ages (Werner Besch: “Die Entstehung und Ausformung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache / Standardsprache,” Sprachgeschichte. Ein Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und ihrer Erforschung. vol. 2, ed. Werner Besch et al., 1985, 1781–1810). M.’s Continuity Theory must be viewed in the context of the nation-building patriotism that was thriving during his era. M.’s participation in the so-called Nibelungenstreit [Dispute concerning the Nibelungen] confined itself to defending Karl Lachmann’s theory of a lost precursor to the Nibelungenlied, his reconstruction of the lost text (which bore little resemblance to the transmission as it has been preserved) and the proximity of manuscripts A, B and C to the lost original (Rainer Kolk: Berlin oder Leipzig? Eine Studie zur sozialen Organisation der Germanistik im ‘Nibelungenstreit,’ 1990). M.’s efforts to defend this theory have been described as “einen aussichtslosen Versuch, Lachmanns weitgehend esoterisch gehandhabte Methode zu explizieren” (Ulrich Wyss: “Nibelungische Irritationen. Das Heldenepos in der Literaturgeschichte,” Das Nibelungenlied, ed. John Greenfield, 2001; 169–83; here 177) [A hopeless attempt to explain the mostly esoteric methodology of Lachmann]. M.’s most enduring contributions continue to be the editions of medieval poetry that he released. Select Bibliography Zur Runenlehre. Zwei Abhandlungen zusammen mit Rochus von Liliencron (1852) [Lessons in Runology. Two Studies Together with Rochus von Liliencron]; Über die Weltkarte und Chorographie des Kaisers Augustus (1856) [Concerning the World Map and Geography of Emperor Augustus]; Paradigmata zur deutschen Grammatik. Zum Gebrauch für Vorlesungen (1859) [Examples for German Grammar. For Use in Lectures]; Zeugnisse und Excurse zur deutschen Heldensage (1860) (also ZfdA 12 [1865]: 253–86, 413–36) [Witnesses and Excursus to the German Heroic Saga]; Deutsche Alterthumskunde, 5 vols., vol. 1, 1870, vol. 2, 1887, vol. 3, 1892, vol. 4, 1900, vol. 5–1, 1883, vol. 5–2, 1891 [German Lore of Antiquity]; Beovulf. Untersuchungen über das angelsächsische Epos und die älteste Geschichte der germanischen Seevölker (1889) [Beowulf. Investigation of the Anglo-Saxon Epos and the Oldest Story of the Germanic Sea-faring People]; “Die deutsche Philologie und die höhere Schulbildung,” DVjs 14/3 (1851): 239–66 [German Philology and Higher Education]; “Zur Geschichte der Nibelunge Not” Allgemeine Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Literatur 4 (1854): 877–979 [To the History of the Nibelunge Not]; “Über die ursprünglichen Liederbücher des 2. Teiles von der Nibelunge not” Nibelungenstudien, ed. Rudolf Henning (1883), 95–96 [About the Original Songbooks of the Second Part of the Nibelunge Not]. Editions: Kudrun: Die echten Theile des Gedichtes mit einer kritischen Einleitung (1845) [Kudrun. The Authentic Parts of the Poem with a Critical Introduction]; Sagen, Märchen und Lieder der Herzogthümer Schleswig-Holstein und Lauenburg (1845) [Sagas, Fairy Tales and Songs of the Dukedom of Schleswig-Hostein and Lauenburg]; Quickborn [glossary and introd.], 1854; Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII–XII. Jahrhundert.

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Zusammen mit Wilhelm Scherer (1864, 1892, 1964) [Monuments of German Poetry and Prose from the 8th–12th Century. Together with Wilhelm Scherer]; Altdeutsche Sprachproben (1864, 1963) [Samples of the Old German Language]; Germania Antiqua. Cornelii Taciti Libellum (1873); Laurin. Ein tirolisches Heldenmärchen aus dem Anfange des XII. Jahrhunderts (1874, 1926, 1948) [Laurin. A Tyrolean Heroic Fairy Tale from the Beginning of the 12th Century]; Jacob Grimm: Kleinere Schriften, 5 vols. (1864–1871) [Smaller Writings of Jacob Grimm]; Wilhelm Grimm: Die deutsche Heldensage, 2nd ed. (1867) [The German Heroic Saga]; Karl Lachmann: Der Nibelunge Noth und die Klage, 4th and 5th ed. (1867, 1878); Jacob Grimm: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 3rd ed. (1868) [History of the German Language]; Karl Lachmann: Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide, 5th ed. (1875, 1891) [The Poems of Walther von der Vogelweide]; Karl Lachmann: Kleinere Schriften, vol. 1: Kleinere Schriften zur deutschen Philologie (1876, 1969) [Shorter Writings, vol. 1: Short Texts on German Philology]; Iwein, Eine Erzählung von Hartmann von Aue. Mit Anmerkungen von Georg Friedrich Benecke und Karl Lachmann, 4th ed. (1877) [Yvain. A Story by Hartmann von Aue]; Karl Lachmann: Wolfram von Eschenbach, 4th ed. (1879). Literature: Ernst Martin: “Karl Müllenhoff” ZfdP 16 (1884): 366–69; Wilhelm Scherer: “Karl Victor Müllenhoff,” ADB 22 (1885), 494–99; Wilhelm Scherer: Karl Müllenhoff – Ein Lebensbild (1896; rpt. 1991); Wolfgang Höppner, “Müllenhoff, Karl Victor,” IGL, vol. 2 (2003), 1276–278.

Maurice Sprague

Murray, James Augustus Henry (February 7, 1837, Denholm, Scotland – July 26, 1915, Oxford, England), British Lexicographer and Dialectologist. At first glance, M. may appear to be an odd choice for inclusion in a handbook of medieval studies, as he is best known for his contributions to lexicography, especially for his service as editor of what was originally called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, but later was renamed the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). However, it cannot be denied that the OED has significantly affected Medieval studies (it is often a handy first source to check English etymologies, for instance); moreover, M. edited several texts for the Early English Text Society (EETS). These contributions warrant M.’s inclusion in this work. M. was born in Denholm, Scotland, on February 7, 1837, son of Thomas Murray, a tailor, and Mary Scott. He was christened James Murray, and only began to use the middle names Augustus and Henry when he was eighteen; he apparently never justified this decision. He grew up in what one might

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call “genteel poverty,” as there was never much money available, but his family enjoyed a certain amount of respect in the community. As one might expect, M. was a precocious child; family legend holds that he learned to read at the age of eighteen months and, at about the same age, attempted to show his infant brother some of the letters in his primer, apparently believing that this was the greatest gift he could give the baby. In addition, M. is said to have given the family cows Latin names and to have taught them to respond to these names when called. He was very interested in a wide range of fields as a child and adolescent, from botany and astronomy to bookbinding. As a schoolboy, M. became very interested in the life and career of John Leyden, also born in Denholm, who was famous locally for his learning and ability in the sciences and in languages, and it is possible that M’s interest in language was intensified by his admiration for Leyden. At school M. acquired at least some knowledge of French, Italian, German, and Greek (he would eventually acquire some knowledge of approximately 25 languages). He left school at the age of fourteen, because his family could no longer afford to keep him there, especially because he had three surviving younger siblings at the time. M. wanted to go on to a university, but was too young to do so, and he therefore worked at various odd jobs until he began to teach school at the age of seventeen. During this time, M. also began an intense program of self-education, reading extensively in various fields of study, especially archaeology and philology; became involved in politics and various local learned societies; and sketched plans to write several books on various topics, which remained unpublished. M. also discovered Old English during this period, and became an enthusiastic student of the language and its literature. His first book, a travel narrative titled A Week Among the Antiquities of Orkney (1861), was written during this period. In 1862, M. married for the first time, and in 1864 he moved to London where he worked as a bank clerk and began an intensive study of dialectology and linguistics. His first wife died in 1865, and he remarried in 1867. In 1868, M. joined the Philological Society and quickly became one of the important members of the group. Several years later, M. was asked by the well-known philologist Walter Skeat to join the English Dialect Society and assist him in some of the Society’s publications. At about the same time, M. received a B.A. degree from London University (1873), and in 1874 an honorary degree from Edinburgh University (he was later to receive honorary degrees from several other institutions). In 1870, M. and his second wife moved to Mill Hill, near London (and now a suburb of the city), where he had accepted a position as a schoolteacher. Plans for an unabridged English dictionary, to be prepared by the members of the Philological Society, had gotten underway in 1857, but the

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project had remained bogged down for years. In 1879, M. formally agreed to take over the editorship of the project, which was to be published by Clarendon Press. Ironically, three years earlier M. had been asked to edit a new English dictionary for another publishing company, although the negotiations had collapsed, due to issues involving the scope of the project and various financial considerations. For several years, M. continued to teach in Mill Hill while simultaneously directing the work of the OED, but this eventually proved to be too difficult, and in 1885 he left Mill Hill and moved to Oxford. For a number of years, M. also worked as an examiner for Oxford to supplement his income. He did not teach at Oxford, but did give occasional lectures. The first part of the dictionary was published in 1884. M. was knighted in 1908 for his work on the OED, but unfortunately did not live to see its completion, as he died in Oxford in the summer of 1915 and the OED was not completed until 1928. M.’s greatest contribution to medieval studies is his editorship of the OED. Whatever its faults, the OED remains a handy first source of information on English etymology. It should also be remembered that other important scholars of Medieval studies honed their academic skills by working on the OED, including W.T. Craigie, C.T. Onions, and J.R.R. Tolkien. M. was able to revitalize the project, by systematizing the methods of data collection (data had been collected by volunteers who had then submitted it on slips of paper to the previous editor, who had let it sit in storage for years); by establishing more careful methods of analysis, to be done by teams of scholars, than those used by earlier English lexicographers like Samuel Johnson; by increased attention to then-current approaches to linguistics; and by investing a great deal of time, effort, and energy. One can justifiably speculate that the OED would never have been finished, if not for M. and his contributions to the project. (And in fact the project was almost abandoned at least twice during M.’s editorship, once by him for personal reasons and once by the publisher for financial reasons.) M.’s other contributions to Medieval studies are relatively minor. He edited several Medieval texts for the Early English Text Society, e. g., Sir David Lyndesay’s Minor Poems (1871), The Complaynt of Scotlande (2 vols., 1872–1873), and Thomas of Erceldoune’s Romance and Prophecies (1875), but such studies, as well as his other work on Scots, ended when he took over the editorship of the OED, as he simply did not have the time or energy for outside projects.

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Select Bibliography Works: Synopsis of Paley’s Horae Paulinae (1872), The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland. Its Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations (1873); The Evolution of English Lexicography (1900). Literature: K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); R. W. Burchfield, “Murray, Sir James Augustus Henry (1837–1915),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35163).

Marc Pierce

Mustanoja, Tauno F. (1912–1996), Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. M. was a specialist of Middle English syntax, whose major work, A Middle English Syntax (1960), is a basic reference book for scholars of the history of English still today. M. (till 1945 Salminen) was born in the town of Tampere in southwestern Finland. Neither of his parents, father Frans Viktor Salminen and mother Johanna Aalto, had academic education. He went to school in Tampere and studied at the University of Helsinki. He married Sirkka Sofia Nurmisalo in 1938. Their four children were born between 1941 and 1947. Studying English was neither usual nor easy in Finland in the first half of the 20th century, and M. had to learn the pronunciation by listening to BBC programs on an old-fashioned crystal radio set. He graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1938, having studied modern and classical languages and literature. After graduating, he spent the academic year 1938–1939 at Cambridge, taking post-graduate courses in medieval literature and textual criticism. He started teaching English at the University of Helsinki in 1939 and continued doing this after serving in the wars of 1939–1945. He received his doctorate degree at this university in 1948. M. was appointed a docent of the University of Helsinki in the same year, an associate professor in 1957, and a professor in 1961. He spent the academic year 1965–1966 as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and frequently visited Great Britain,

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France, and the U.S. on research and lecturing trips. M. retired from his chair at Helsinki in 1975. Besides his university career, M. held several important positions. During a three-decade membership and chairmanship of the Board of the United States Educational Foundation in Finland (USEF) after the 1950s, he worked in many ways to strengthen the cultural and scholarly relations between post-war Finland and the English-speaking world. He was chairman of the British Council Scholars’ Association in Finland, of the Finnish-American Association, and of Lingva, the language students’ association at the University of Helsinki. He was also a Vice-President and President of the Modern Language Society of Helsinki and a long-time editor of the Society’s bulletin Neuphilologische Mitteilungen and its monograph series Mémoires de la Société de Néophilologique de Helsinki. During his time, from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Society’s bulletin became an internationally esteemed journal, which included articles by the leading authorities in the field of French, German and English philologies. M.’s scholarship won recognition both internationally and in Finland. He was a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America and the Modern Language Society of Helsinki, a fellow of both the British Academy and the Medieval Academy of America, and a member of the Royal Society of Letters in und, Sweden. He was awarded the Honorary Award of the Emil Aaltonen Foundation in 1962. M. wrote several monographs and some 70 articles and reviews dealing with early English syntax, Anglo-Saxon literature and culture, Medieval art, Chaucer, Shakespeare, modern English and American literature and folklore, but also course books for Finns studying English. The following list is mainly limited to the works most relevant to historical research. A complete list of M.’s publications is given in Studies Presented to Tauno F. Mustanoja on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Emil Öhmann, Veikko Väänänen, Auvo Kurvinen, Kari Sajavaara, and Matti Rissanen (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXXIII, 1–2 [1972]). M.’s dissertation, entitled The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter – The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage – The Thewis of Gud Women (1948) consisted of the editions of three 13th-century poems, two Middle English and one Middle Scot. This work gained him both a doctor’s degree with the highest honors and a docentship at the University of Helsinki. Les Neuf Joies Nostre Dame: a Poem Attributed to Rutebeuf (1952) is an edition of an Old French poem, with a discussion on the authorship of the poem. The English Syntactical Type ‘One the Best Man’ and Its Occurrence in Other Germanic Languages (1958) and “The Middle

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English Syntactical Type His Own Hands ‘with His Own Hands, Himself’ with Reference to Other Similar Expressions” (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LX [1959]: 267–86), dealing with two syntactic structures, are preludes to his major work. A Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, XXIII [1960]), consisting of more than 700 pages, discusses the development of English clause syntax from the 11th to the 16th century. Up to that point, the study of historical English had mainly concentrated on phonology and morphology, and there was no model for a general presentation of historical syntax. Having been inspired with the idea since the 1930s, M. completed this comprehensive work after the war, working day and night, while having to support a family with four children at a time when there was no regular system of scholarly grants in Finland. The Syntax includes extensive bibliographies of earlier studies on the aspects discussed. M. also compares the development to earlier periods of English and Germanic languages, discusses dialectal variation where possible, and considers the influence of foreign languages, particularly of Latin and French, on Middle English syntax. He also acknowledges the connection between syntax and style and examines the influence of speech rhythm on the choice of syntactic types. The Middle English Syntax immediately brought him international fame and is still exemplary in its profound analysis of linguistic structures combined with comprehensive reading and understanding of the finest features of textual expression. According to Janet Bately, it’s “a wonderful reference book, and not just for students of Middle English, thanks to the way it looked both back and forwards” (Matti Kilpiö in “In Memoriam: Tauno F. Mustanoja,” Old English Newsletter 30.1 [1966]: 12). And Francis Lee Utley concludes his article “Syntactical Problems in Middle English” (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXXIII, 1–2 [1972]: 456–71), in which he illustrates “the application of Mustanoja’s excellent reference grammar” by saying: “Close work with texts, systematically approached but without doctrinal or theoretical chains or over-elaboration, is of the highest value for stylistics and criticism, and for the humane understanding of what human beings thought and said in language close to our own, but just different enough to tantalize us. And for such a task we must be intensely grateful for the aid of Mustanoja’s A Middle English Grammar.” Today, nearly half a century after its publication, M.’s syntax is still used as a reference work and course book by scholars and students of Middle English all over the world. No important work on English historical syntax

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can avoid quoting his work, as documented by Frans Theodor Visser’s An Historical Syntax of the English Language (vol. I, 1963) to The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. II: 1066–1476 (ed. Norman Blake, 1992). The latter contains some 40 references to M., and Olga Fischer, the author of the chapter on syntax in this volume, writes (391): “This chapter leans heavily, as the many references show, on Mustanoja’s (1960) detailed work on Middle English Syntax and on Visser’s (1963–1975) historical grammar. Their contribution frequently provides the basis or the starting-point for the discussion … and any interested student would do well to get acquainted with these works.” Unfortunately, his enormous professorial workload and a slowly developing serious illness prevented M. from ever completing the second volume. Though primarily a language historian, M. was also interested in literature. American Fiction in Finland: an Essay and Bibliography (Mémoires de la Société de Néophilologique de Helsinki XXIV, 1960), written in collaboration with Philip Durham, is an extensive monograph on the reception of American Literature in Finland. M.’s friendship with Francis P. Magoun, whom he called his “mentor,” was fostered by their mutual interest in Beowulf, Longfellow’s Hiawatha and the Finnish national epic Kalevala. In collaboration with Ernest J. Moyne, M. discussed “Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Kalevala” (American Literature XXV [1953]: 87–89). M.’s essay “The Unnamed Woman’s Song of Mourning over Beowulf and the Tradition of Ritual Lamentation” (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXVIII [1967]: 1–27) is quoted by Stanley B. Greenfield in his review of a volume on Beowulf (Comparative Literature 38 [1986]: 100) as solving a crucial question of dispute as to the personality of a woman lamenting at the hero’s funeral pyre. M.’s analysis on Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (“Two Painters: Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson” (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXI [1960]: 221–44), again, shows his interest in literary research and visual arts. M.’s last work, a collection of essays called Runo ja kulkuri (“The Poem and the Vagabond” 1981), is a fine analysis of Western literature and civilization ranging from classical antiquity through Medieval Europe to Renaissance England. M. was one of the best-known researchers of medieval English, whose A Middle English Syntax is still a basic reference work for scholars of the history of English. M.’s particular strengths were Greek, classical and medieval Latin, and medieval French. He was also an expert in Old and Middle English literature, particularly of poetical texts. He was a keen amateur painter and a connoisseur of visual arts, gardens, and wines. As a scholar and teacher, M. always emphasized the importance of the connection between language and its users, and the interrelation between

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language and culture. His lectures and writings combined the analysis of language with pertinent observations about medieval and, more broadly, European literature, society, and culture. As an academic teacher and supervisor, he emphasized the high standard and honesty of research. M. trained a whole generation of English medievalists in Finland. He established the reputation the English Department at the University of Helsinki has in the field of historical English, still following his humane idea of language, with variation both as an inherent characteristic and as a result of historical, cultural and social influences. Select Bibliography Literature: Matti Kilpiö, “In Memoriam: Tauno F. Mustanoja,” Old English Newsletter 30.1 (1996): 12; Matti Rissanen, “Tauno F. Mustanoja – In Memoriam,” Academia Scientiarum Fennica Yearbook (1996): 67–69; Studies Presented to Tauno F. Mustanoja on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Emil Öhmann, Veikko Väänänen, Auvo Kurvinen, Kari Sajavaara, and Matti Rissanen (Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXXIII, 1–2 [1972]); Matti Rissanen, “Introduction to Tauno F. Mustanoja (1967) ‘The Unnamed Woman’s Song of Mourning over Beowulf and the Tradition of Ritual Lamentation’,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CVIII (2007): 151–52.

Kirsti Peitsara

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Adler, Guido

N Nardi, Bruno (June 24, 1884, Spianate, Lucca – July 9, 1968, Rome), Italian Medievalist. N.’s entire career was dedicated to research on the philosophical underpinnings of Dante’s Divine Comedy. As Tullio GREGORY has said, N.’s life’s work was present in embryonic form in his doctoral dissertation, Siger de Brabant dans la Divine Comédie et les sources de la philosophie de Dante (LA 2 [1961], 31). By questioning Dante’s conformity to the philosophical thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas and arguing for a stronger influence of Avveroist philosophy in the 13th and 14th century, N. addressed the complexity of Medieval culture and thought in general and put himself in opposition to mainstream Thomistic Catholicism. As with many Italian scholars of his era, N.’s most significant contributions to research are not found in one volume, but are dispersed in essays in various journals and anthologies. Some of his most fundamental essays, such as those on the Empyrion, on Empire, and on Dante’s politics can be found in the volume Saggi di filosofia dantesca (1930). Another fundamental volume is his Dante e la cultura medievale (1942), where one can find his seminal “Dante profeta” and important essays on the philosophy of love in the Italian 13th century or on the origin of the human soul in Dante’s thought. In all of his work, Dante is read within the larger philosophical and historical context of the European 13th century. N. was the first of nine children of a family of well-to-do farmers in Spianate in the Italian province of Lucca, where he was raised in a tradition of Tuscan, post-Risorgimento liberalism. He studied at the local Francescan seminary and then later in the Facoltà teologica fiorentina, where he was consecrated as a priest in 1907. At the age of 24 (1908) he enrolled at the Catholic University of Leuven where he worked with Maurice De Wulf and others. He completed his dissertation on Siger of Brabant and Dante Alighieri in 1912 and published it in Italian in the “Rivista di Filosofia Neo-scholastica.” After his doctorate N. returned to Florence where he enrolled in the Istituto di studi superiori e pratici e di perfezionamento, where he was required to complete only the tesi di laurea. In 1914 he abandoned the priesthood and spent the period between 1912 and 1916 between Florence, Vienna, and Berlin, until he moved to Mantova where he taught as a substitute teacher at the liceo Vir-

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gilio where he remained until 1934. In the meantime he finished his Italian thesis, Intorno alle dottrine filosofiche di Pietro d’Abano (under Giuseppe Melli) only in 1919. He married Giulietta Bertoldi in 1921 with whom he had two children, Tilde and Franco, and in 1934, he was transferred to Milan. In 1938, he was called to Rome for his first university teaching position in the Facoltà di Lettere at the University of Rome, where he taught the history of medieval philosophy. Since he had abandoned his priesthood and given the anti-Thomistic nature of his scholarship, the Vatican made it impossible for him to obtain a chair at an Italian university. His importance as a scholar of the Middle Ages was not officially recognized until late in his life. In 1955 the two volume anthology Medioevo e Rinascimento was published in his honor by the University of Rome. He was given the “Penna d’oro” in 1960 by the Italian Prime Minister, for which occasion the Dante review L’Alighieri published his complete bibliography. In 1962 he was given a laurea “honoris causa” from the University of Padova and in 1964 he was invited by Oxford University for the Encomi clarendoniani in order to receive a doctorate “honoris causa.” Through his numerous essays on Dante and on the “minor” medieval philosophical tradition and its influence on medieval Italian writers, N. opened new horizons on the Divine Comedy for future scholars, such as Gregory and others. He always insisted that Dante’s intellectual background could not be homogenized solely with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but that the philosophical and theological debates and controversies of Dante’s time had to be reconstructed. In this manner the Dante’s thought would not be merely subjugated to Thomistic philosophy. N.’s career was extraordinarily prolific and he addressed every facet of Dante’s thought and writing in essay form. Among the most salient of these essays is “Dante profeta” (Dante e la cultura medievale, 1942) in which he avoids the rigidity of systemizing Dante’s thought and presented the idea that Dante “went deeper than his contemporaries, and his solutions were often bolder and more complex than theirs” (GARIN, SD 45 [1968]: 18). Throughout his career N. participated in public debates on religion and politics. He threw himself into the debate between De Wulf and Giovanni Gentile on Neo-Scholasticism, in which he distanced himself from the stances of his compatriots Gentile and Benedetto Croce. He collaborated with the Tuscan modernist review La Voce in the 1930s at the same time as he was writing essays on Averroism and Dante, in reviews such as Studi Danteschi, Giornale Dantesco, and Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana. As Eugenio Garin said, N. was “guided by his Dante” to explore some of the most important issues of Medieval thought (SD 45 [1968]: 18). So N. was not just a Dante scholar, but a scholar of Medieval thought who

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wrote on and around Dante and the Italian 13th century in order to address issues of importance for any medievalist – cosmology, politics, religion, philosophy, etc. Of course he is most well-known among scholars of Medieval Italian and he is ubiquitously acknowledged in Dante Studies for his contribution to the interpretative analysis of Dante and of Medieval philosophy. In late 20th-century debates on the significance of Islamic influences on Medieval Italy, N.’s research is proving fundamental. More than twenty years after his death, Francesco Mazzoni calls him “one of the most important Dantists of our century” (‘Lecturae’ e altri studi danteschi, 3). He is also known for his controversial chronology of Dante’s career which put the De Monarchia before the Paradiso. Despite the fact that much of his dating is not generally accepted today, his general vision of Dante’s career and works has been extremely influential. He pushed to accept the literal truth of the Comedy as Dante presented it. Immediately after his death the Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana dedicated an issue to N., who had regularly contributed to the journal during his life. Here Garin’s essay has the tone of a personal memory of the great scholar, yet is the beginning of a critical analysis of his research. Tullio Gregory, one of N.’s students in Rome, has led the research into N.’s importance in Dante studies and in the religious and political debates of 20th-century Italy. N.’s most important anthologies of essays, Lecturae e altri saggi danteschi (1990), which includes the essays of Saggi di filosofia dantesca of 1930, and Dante e la cultura medievale (1983), have gone through multiple reprints and new editions. The most recent editions, edited by Rudy Abardo, Paolo Mazzantini, and Gregory, feature critical biographies and evaluations of his importance as a scholar both of Dante and of medieval philosophy. With each new edition N.’s work at reconstructing the philosophical underpinnings of Dante’s poetry is seen as fundamental for contemporary work on the poet. In addition, they praise his manner of using Dante as a guide in addressing issues of larger cultural importance for the European Middle Ages. Most recently, his role in intellectual debates of the 20th century have led scholars to publish editions of his letters (Pietroforte, Storia di un amicizia: Il carteggio Nardi-Chiocchetti, 2004, and Varianini, Bruno Nardi a Pescia: Il carteggio con Giuseppe Prezzolini, 2005). Both volumes present the medievalist as an important figure in the political and religious debates of pre- and postWWII Italy and draw important connections between N.’s anti-Thomistic research interests and his fruitful dialogue with important modernists such as Prezzolini.

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Select Bibliography Works: Sigieri di Brabante e le fonti della filosofia di Dante (1912); Saggi di filosofia dantesca (1930); Dante e la cultura medievale: Nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca (1942); Nel mondo di Dante (1944); Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento italiano (1945); Dante e la cultura medievale. Nuovi saggi di filosofia dantesca, 2nd ed. (1942; 1949); Il problema della verità: Soggetto e oggetto del conoscere nella filosofia antica e medievale (1951);La filosofia di Dante (1952); Il problema dell verità: Soggetto e oggetto del consoscere nella filosofia antica e medievale, 2nd ed. (1951; 1952); Saggi sull’aristoelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (1958); Studi di filosofia medievale (1960); Dal Convivio alla Commedia: Sei saggi danteschi (1960); Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (1965); Saggi e note di critica dantesca (1966); Dante e la cultura medievale, nuova edizione, ed. Paolo Mazzantini (1983); ‘Lecturae’ e Altri Studi Danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo (1990). Editions and Translations: Saint Thomas D’Aquinas, Opuscoli e testi filosofici, 2 vols. (1915); Saint Thomas D’Aquinas, Trattato sull’unità dell’intelletto contro gli averroisti, Translation and commentary (1938); San Pier Damiani, De divina omnipotentia e altri opuscoli. Translation (1943). Literature: Eugenio Garin, “Ricordo di Bruno Nardi,” SD 45 (1968): 5–28; Tullio Gregory, “Introduzione,” Dante e la cultura medievale, nuova edizione, ed. Paolo Mazzantini. (Bari-Rome: Editori Laterza, 1983), vii–xliv; Tullio Gregory, “Bruno Nardi,” GCFI 22 (1969): 469–501; Tullio Gregory, “L’opera di Bruno Nardi,” LA 2 (1961): 31–52; Francesco Mazzoni, “Bruno Nardi Dantista,” ‘Lecturae’ e Altri Studi Danteschi. (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1990), 4–21; Stefania Pietroforte, Storia di un’amicizia filosofica tra neoscolastica, idealismo e modernismo: Il carteggio Nardi-Chiocchetti (1911–1949). (Florence: Edizioni del Gallo, 2004); Aldo Vallone, “Bruno Nardi Lettore di Dante,” ‘Lecturae’ e Altri Studi Danteschi, ed. Rudy Abardo (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1990), 23–37; Laura Simoni Varanini, Bruno Nardi a Pescia: Il Carteggio con Giuseppe Prezzolini, (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2005); Medioevo e Rinascimento: Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1955).

David Lummus

Noreen, Adolf Gotthard (March 13, 1854, Östra Emtervik, Värmland, Sweden – June 13, 1925, Ärtemark, Dalsland, Sweden), Swedish Philologist. N. was one of the foremost scholars of linguistics and Medieval studies of his time, and some of his works on these subjects remain relevant today. His two-volume handbook of Old Norse is the standard grammar of the language and his multi-volume study of Modern Swedish is still rewarding reading. He also contributed to fields like onomastics.

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N. was born on March 13, 1854, in Östra Emtervik, Värmland, Sweden, and died on June 13, 1925, in Ärtemark, Dalsland, Sweden. He was educated in Uppsala, receiving a doctorate there in 1877; his dissertation, Fryksdalsmålets ljudlära (Phonology of the Fryksdal Dialect), was groundbreaking in its application of new developments in phonetics to the analysis of a Swedish dialect, drawing on recent work by scholars like Eduard Sievers. That same year N. was appointed to a position as docent in Uppsala, which he held for ten years. In 1887, he became professor of Nordic languages in Uppsala, and would teach there for the rest of his career. N. retired in 1919; the same year he was elected to the Swedish Academy. In addition to his election to the Swedish Academy, he was recognized for his outstanding work with two honorary degrees, one from Oslo (1911) and one from Groningen (1914). N. spent 1879 studying in Germany and Switzerland; he spent most of that year studying in Leipzig with August Leskien, one of the founders and most important representatives of the Neogrammarian school of linguistics. N. was later to apply Neogrammarian ideas in much of his own research, although he remained committed to the study of dialects, of onomastics, and of Modern Swedish for the rest of his life. In terms of historical linguistics and Medieval studies, Noreen’s reputation in these areas rests largely on his justifiably well-known handbooks. He published a two volume grammar of Old Norse, Altnordische Grammatik I: Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (1884; 5th ed. 1970) and Altnordische Grammatik II: Altschwedische Grammatik mit Einschluss des Altgutnischen (1891; rpt. 1978). The second volume is particularly noteworthy, as it is the first significant handbook of Old Swedish. This work remains one of the standard handbooks of Old Norse today. N. also wrote a more general historical survey of the Nordic languages (Geschichte der nordischen Sprachen, besonders in altnordischer Zeit, 1891), a study of Swedish etymology (Svenska etymologier [Swedish Etymologies], 1897), a study of the development of nasal vowels in Scandinavian (“De nordiska språkens nasalerade vokaler” [“Nasalized Vowels in the Nordic Languages”], Arkiv för nordiska filologi 3 [1886]: 1–41), and a text on Proto-Germanic phonology (Utkast till Föreläsningar i urgermansk Ljudlära med Huvudsakligt avseende på de Nordiska Språken [A Sketch of Lectures on Proto-Germanic Phonology, with Special Emphasis on the Nordic Languages], 1890; German translation published 1894). All of these works are characterized by a careful attention to detail, the judicious application of Neogrammarian ideas about diachronic linguistics to Scandinavian (or Proto-Germanic) data, and a deep and abiding interest in descriptive linguistics. N’s main other contributions to Medieval Studies is probably the normalized edition of an early Swedish legal text, the Västgötalagen, in fact the oldest of the Swedish provincial

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laws, probably written around 1220 (although the earliest preserved manuscript is dated to about 1280), which he prepared with Eugéne Schwartz (Äldre Västgötalagan. Normaliserad Text [West Gotland Law. Normalized Text], 1876). N.’s contributions to dialectology, onomastics, and the analysis of Modern Swedish are also important. His dissertation, as mentioned above, was groundbreaking in its synthesis of traditional ideas about dialectology with more modern developments in the study of phonetics, and Noreen followed it up with a corresponding dictionary (Ordbok öfver fryksdalsmålet, Dictionary of the Fryksdal Dialect, 1878). As for onomastics, his contributions in this area were more administrative than scholarly; N. served as president of the Ortnamskommittén (‘Committee on Place Names’) in 1902, but does not seem to have published any significant studies of place names. His work on the analysis of Modern Swedish consists largely of his monumental Vårt språk (“Our Language”), published between 1903 and 1923. Nine volumes were planned, but volumes six and eight, as well as portions of volumes four and nine, never appeared. This massive handbook proved to be crucial for the study of Modern Swedish, as it jettisoned the time-honored tradition of analyzing Swedish as if it were Latin and introduced the distinction between diachrony and synchrony introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure. The work influenced a number of scholars, both at home and abroad (Leonard Bloomfield, the dean of American linguistics in the 1930s and 1940s, drew on some of Noreen’s ideas for portions of his masterwork, Language [1933]). Some recent work on the history of linguistics in Scandinavia argues that one should speak of an “Anglo-Scandinavian School” of linguistics, consisting of scholars like N., Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen, Johan August Lundell, and Johan Storm. According to this view of the history of linguistics, this group of scholars helped bridge the gap between Neogrammarian historical linguistics and later more descriptive approaches. N. was one of the most prominent members of this group, and this, along with his other achievements, secure him a place in the history of linguistics. Select Bibliography Works: Ordbok öfver fryksdalsmålet [Dictionary of the Fryksdal Dialect] (1878); Altnordische Grammatik I: Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (1884; 5th ed. 1970); Utkast till Föreläsningar i urgermansk Ljudlära med Huvudsakligt avseende på de Nordiska Språken [A Sketch of Lectures on Proto-Germanic Phonology, with Special Emphasis on the Nordic Languages] (1890; German translation published 1894); Altnordische Grammatik II: Altschwedische Grammatik mit Einschluss des Altgutnischen (1891; rpt. 1978); Geschichte der nordischen Sprachen, besonders in altnordischer Zeit (1891); Svenska etymologier [Swedish Etymologies] (1897).

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Literature: John Lotz, “Plan and Publication of Noreen’s Vårt Språk,” Studia Linguistica 8 [1954]: 82–91; Lennart Elmevik, “Noreen, Adolf,” Svenskt Biografiskt Lexicon, vol. 27: Nilsson-Nässtrom (Stockholm: Norstedts Tryckeri AB, 1990), 494–503; Even Hovdhaugen, Fred Karlsson, Carol Henriksen, and Bengt Sigurd, The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2000); Andrew Linn, “Noreen, Adolf Gotthard (1854–1925),” Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 8 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), 696–97.

Marc Pierce

Adler, Guido

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O

Ohly, Ernst Friedrich (January 10, 1914, Breidenbach, Hessen – April 5, 1996, Münster, Westphalia), German Literary Medievalist. O. was a renowned scholar of medieval German and Latin poetry, and of medieval theological and scientific literature. His principal contributions to the study of his own discipline, Middle High German literature, were monographs on the Kaiserchronik and the medieval versions of the Song of Solomon, both of which had a lasting impact on the interpretation of these particular texts. (He later edited the St. Trudpeter Hohelied, 1998.) Far more important, however, was his later work on medieval symbolism and spiritual hermeneutics, which had wide-reaching implications for all the medieval disciplines. O. attended school in Giessen and Wiesbaden (Abitur 1932), then studied German, Greek, and History at Frankfurt, Vienna, and Königsberg. Like many of his generation, he came into conflict with National Socialism. He completed a year’s military service in 1934–1935, and joined the SA in order to be eligible for study grants. However, when in 1935/36 the Nazi student organisation NSDStB harassed Paul Hankamer, professor of modern German literature at Königsberg, for alleged “un-German attitudes,” he organized a petition which resulted in his expulsion from both the SA and the university. Nevertheless, he was able to resume his studies in Frankfurt, graduating with state exams in 1939. In the meantime, his doctoral dissertation on the Kaiserchronik had already been submitted in 1938. (Published as Sage und Legende in der Kaiserchronik: Untersuchungen über Quellen und Aufbau der Dichtung, 1940, rpt. 1968.) O. was called up when war broke out, but released from the army after sustaining an eye wound in France in 1940. This allowed him to spend some of the war years in junior teaching posts and researching his habilitation on medieval interpretations of the Song of Solomon (submitted 1944, published as Hohelied-Studien: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200, 1958). Redrafted in 1944, he was captured in Hungary and spent the next nine years as a POW in Hungarian, then Soviet camps. He later

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wrote of his encounters with Russian literature at this time in the essay “Glück eines Gefangenen mit Puschkin und mit Steinen,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 37 (1987): 87–92. Returning to Germany in 1953, he was given a lectureship in Frankfurt. He held untenured professorships in Frankfurt (1954–1956), Chicago (1956–1957) and Mainz (1957–1958), then full chairs in Kiel (1958–1964) and Münster (1964–1982). He was granted an honorary membership of the MLA in 1973, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1985. O. is known as the founder of the systematic study of medieval hermeneutics (mittelalterliche Bedeutungsforschung). A seminal document of this field of research is his Antrittsvorlesung in Kiel, “Vom Geistigen Sinn des Wortes im Mittelalter” (published ZfdA 89 [1958/9]: 1–22; transl. Northcott), which for the first time attempted to understand medieval etymologies favourably as being logical within their own terms. If Hugh of St Victor derived Latin mors from morsus because death was first incurred through Adam’s biting of the apple, this was a kerygmatic statement. O. writes: “It would be foolish to deride such an etymology as unscientific if it helped the people of its time to arrive at a deeper signification of the meaning of the word, since it was precisely the task of etymology at that time to illuminate the spiritual meaning of the word. Our modern etymology would have appeared questionable to the Middle Ages, because it is bogged down in the literal meaning of the word and does not give any explanation of the meaning of the world or of life. The spiritual meaning of the word with its universe of signification, and its scope of signification, contains an interpretation of meaning that derives from the Christian spirit and is thus a guide to life.” This method of thinking our way into the symbolic subtext of medieval ideas was subsequently applied by O. to many other aspects of intellectual life. For example, a posthumously published collection of essays, some of which had previously appeared separately, on the motif of the pearl (Die Perle des Wortes: Zur Geschichte eines Bildes für Dichtung, 2002) looks at such motifs as the tears of the aurora or as the birth of Venus, investigating changing interpretations especially in the late medieval and early modern period. Motifs include the pearl which has been bored through, which he traces from ancient Indian poetry to Goethe, via Wycliffe’s interpretations of the pure pearl representing Christ as God, the bored pearl the wounded Christ as man. O. broadened the concept of typology, which usually is a component of medieval Biblical interpretation, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac being for example a “type” of the sacrifice of Jesus by God. For O., many kinds of medieval symbolic signification can be thought of as typology, and he applied the concept to his exposition of the Kaiserchronik. This interest later resulted also

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in an important contribution to the study of the theology of the Reformation: Gesetz und Evangelium: Zur Typologie bei Luther und Lucas Cranach: Zum Blutstrahl der Gnade in der Kunst, 1985. The key concept in all of this is the relationship between the signifier and the signified. A good expression of this will be found in a volume of posthumous papers entitled Zur Signaturenlehre der frühen Neuzeit: Bemerkungen zur mittelalterlichen Vorgeschichte und zur Eigenart einer epochalen Denkform in Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kunst. ed. Uwe Ruberg and Dietmar Peil, 1999. The importance of O.’s work lies in its universal applicability. With reference to the essay “Vom geistigen Sinn …,” Worstbock writes, “Nie hat in der Mediävistik ein einzelner Aufsatz eine vergleichbare nachhaltige Wirkung ausgeübt” (obituary in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum: Never has one single article exerted a comparable long-term impact in Medieval Studies). O.’s analysis of the mechanisms of medieval significs – the way in which symbols operate as signposts pointing to deeper truths – has marked a turning point in the discourse not only of his own field, medieval literature, but also of art history, theology, and the history of mentality, with a lasting effect on the way we read our medieval sources. Select Bibliography Works: Der Verfluchte und der Erwählte: Vom Leben mit der Schuld (1976; English: The Damned and the Elect: Guilt in Western Culture, 1992, trans. Linda Archibald); Schriften zur mittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (1977, rpt. 1983); Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs and the Philology of Culture (2005) [a posthumous collection of his essays trans. Kenneth Northcott]; Süße Nägel der Passion: Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Semantik (1989); Metaphern für die Sündenstufen und die Gegenwirkungen der Gnade (1990); “Diamant und Bocksblut: Zur Traditions- und Auslegungsgeschichte eines Naturvorgangs von der Antike bis in die Moderne,” Wolfram-Studien 3 (1972): 72–188; Ausgewählte und neue Schriften zur Literaturgeschichte und Bedeutungsforschung, ed. Uwe Ruberg and Dietmar Peil (1995) [contains a full bibliography of his work]. Literature: Franz Josef Worstbrock, “Friedrich Ohly (1914–1996),” ZfdA 124 (1995): 373–74; C. Stephen Jaeger, “Friedrich Ohly (1914–1996),” Speculum 72 (1997): 941–43; Verbum et signum, ed. Hans Fromm, Wolfgang Harms, and Uwe Ruberg (Munich: W. Fink, 1975) [Festschrift on his 60th birthday].

Graeme Dunphy

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P Paris, Gaston Bruno Paulin (August 9, 1839, Avenay, Marne – March 5, 1903, Cannes), French Medievalist. P. earned an international scholarly reputation as he dominated French Medieval studies and Romance philology in France for the last thirty years of the 19th century. He published a thesis, Etude sur le rôle de l’accent latin dans la langue française (1862), which he defended at the Ecole de Chartes and dedicated to German professor-mentor, Friedrich Diez of the University of Bonn. His Ph.D. thesis, De Pseudo-Turpino, was published in Paris just three years later, and from there, he went on to publish an abundance of monographs and editions and made numerous contributions to Romania, the scholarly journal he founded with Paul Meyer in 1872, and the Histoire littéraire de la France. He championed the Lachmannian method of editing medieval texts in France, and the prologue to his Vie de Saint Alexis is something of a manifesto on the method that swept Europe, in no small part due to P., until the onset in the early 20th century of Bédierisme, the method so named for Joseph Bédier who advocated the use of a single, best manuscript as the basis for an edition. P. was born to Paulin Paris, a philologist and teacher at the famous Collège de France. P. graduated from the Collège Rollin in Paris, but then pursued his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn, where he became the student of the famous philologist, Friedrich Diez. Upon returning to Paris and while taking courses at the Ecole des Chartes, he studied law and literature at the University of Paris and earned the degree of doctor in literature in 1865. In 1872, he succeeded his father as professor of medieval literature at the Collège de France. In 1876, he was admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions, and he won the Academy’s Gobert prize twice: in 1866 with the Histoire poétique de Charlemagne and in 1872 with the Vie de saint Alexis. In 1895, he was appointed director of the Collège de France in 1895 and a year later, he became an immortel, a member of the Académie Française. Although he died in 1903, many of his works, notably his Vie de Saint Alexis, knew successive editions and reprints. As a devotee to the Lachmannian method of textual editing, the scientific approach named for the noted Classical and Germanic philologist, Karl

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Lachmann, P. broke sharply with the more romantic method of previous French philologists, notably his father. Instead of deriving some kind of subjective pleasure from medieval texts, P. sought the authorial archetype of a given work and render the work in the language of the author. In his prologue to his Vie de Saint Alexis (1872), he explains step by step his method of editing, all while exhorting his colleagues to employ the same methods. From the four copies of the Alexis that date from the 12th and 13th centuries, he derived a text that he believed dated from 1040 and that he rewrote in “la bonne langue française telle qu’elle devait se parler et s’écrire au milieu du XIe siècle” (“correct French as it would have been spoken and written in the middle of the 11th century”) (135). By classifying all extant manuscripts of a work by comparing common errors among them, P. and his disciples would establish stemmae manuscriptae – textual geneologies that enabled them to posit which text came closest to a lost, Urtext. In addition to his edition of the Alexis, he edited or co-edited several other magisterial editions: an eight-volume Miracles de Nostre Dame par personages co-edited with Ulysse Robert and François Bonnardot (1876); Deux Rédactions du ‘Roman des sept sages de Rome’ (1879); Aucassin et Nicolette (1878); La vie de saint Gilles, co-edited with Alphonse Bos (1881); a two-volume Merlin, roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, co-edited with Jacob Ulrich (1886); Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, co-edited with Gustave Marie Joseph Servois (1893); Orson de Beauvais, chanson de geste du XIIe siècle (1896); and François Villon (1901). As a literary critic, P. was equally influential. In 1881 and 1883, he published a two-part article in Romania, blandly titled “Etudes sur les romans de la table ronde,” that would reshape the way critics looked at courtly literature. In the first article, he coined a term, but it was only with the second part, in a discussion of Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier de la Charrette ou Lancelot, that P. explored more fully the notion of amour courtois, or courtly love. According to P., courtly love represented the love ideal for the refined people of Medieval courts. It involves four criteria: the love affair is illicit and thus secret; the lover holds a rank inferior to his would-be beloved, who treats him haughtily; in the hope to be deemed worthy of her affection, he performs great feats of chivalric prowess in her honor; and, as a way of summarizing the first three criteria, love is an art form with its own rules to be followed. This idea would be picked up and elaborated on for decades to come by famous philologists like C.S. Lewis and Moshé Lazar. In the last two decades, the term has come under intense scrutiny, especially from feminist scholars who see the notion as one that establishes unrealistic norms for real women, but also from philologists who have found evidence contrary to P.’s rigid system.

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In addition to this and other influential articles, he published several literary anthologies in an effort to make Medieval French literature more widely known and read. La Littérature française du Moyen Age (XIe–XIVe siècle) first appeared in Paris in 1888, but four additional editions would soon follow. His Extraits de la ‘Chanson de Roland’ et de la ‘Vie de Saint Louis’ par Jean de Joinville would soon follow in 1889. Then he published his Chrestomathie du Moyen Age (1897) and a volume titled Poèmes et legends du Moyen Age (1900). P. will long be remembered as a significant figure, almost a scholarly father, to students of Old French literature. His editions may no longer be considered the standard of a given work today, yet set the scholarly standard for his and the following generation. His contributions have most recently been the subject of several articles in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (eds. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 1996): for example, David F. Hult links the coinage of the idea of courtly love as a kind of scientific reaction to his father’s more romantic appreciation of Medieval literature, while E. Jane Burns, Sarah Kay, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer bring us back to that same literary event as one that marks the beginning of the “woman question” in the field. Yvan Lepage details P.’s contributions and controversies in chapter two of his Guide de l’édition de textes en ancien français (2001), “La Période scientifique (1866–1912),” following P.’s influence over Old French philology from the foundation with Paul Meyer of the Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature in 1866 to the 1913 “rebellion” of Joseph Bédier against P.’s “quête obsessionelle de l’archétype et les ‘monstres’ qu’elle engendre” (37). Select Bibliography Works: ed., Les plus anciens monuments de la langue française (IXe, Xe siècle) (1875); La vie de saint Alexis (7th, rev. ed., 1967); La Littérature française du Moyen Age (XIe–XIVe siècle), ed. revue par Mario Roques (1966); Ulysse Robert and François Bonnardot, ed., Les miracles de Notre-Dame par Personnages, 8 vols. (1877). Literature: E. Jane Burns, Sarah Kay, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer, “Feminism and the Discipline of Old French studies: Une Bele Disjointure,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 225–66; David F. Hult, “Gaston Paris and the Invention of Courtly Love,” Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 192–224; Yvan G. Lepage, Guide de l’édition de textes en ancien français (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001).

Daniel E. O’Sullivan

Paul, Hermann

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Paul, Hermann (August 7, 1846, Salbke bei Magdeburg, Germany – December 29, 1921, Munich), German Linguist and Philologist. P. was one of the most influential linguists and scholars of medieval studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was one of the leading Neogrammarians (German Junggrammatiker), whose ideas dominated linguistic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, it is not a stretch to call P.’s most important work, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880), the Neogrammarian Bible. This work remains rewarding reading today. P’s other contributions to linguistics and Medieval studies include studies of Middle High German language and literature, lexicography, metrics, and language pedagogy. P. was born on Aug. 7, 1846, in Salbke bei Magdeburg, Germany. He developed his interest in Medieval Germanic studies early, becoming interested in Medieval German literature and in Middle High German during his schooldays. In 1866, P. completed his Abitur (secondary school exams) in Magdeburg and began his university studies in Berlin (where he studied with the well-known linguist and philosopher Heymann Steinthal). However, he did not stay in Berlin for long, leaving for Leipzig after only one year; in Leipzig he was able to study with a number of important figures in 19thcentury linguistics and philology, including Georg Curtius, Adolf Ebert, and Friedrich Zarncke. In 1870, P. received a doctorate from Leipzig for a dissertation on Freidank; in 1872, he completed his Habilition in Leipzig with work on Gottfried’s Tristan. This enabled him to teach as a Privatdozent (roughly equivalent to assistant/associate professor), which he did in Leipzig from 1872–1874. In 1874, he left Leipzig for Freiburg im Breisgau, and served as professor extraordinarius (roughly equivalent to an untenured associate professor) there until 1877. In 1877, he was promoted to professor ordinarius (roughly equivalent to a full professor) in Freiburg. P. left Freiburg in 1893, to accept a professorship in Munich, where he succeeded Matthias Lexer, best known for his Middle High German dictionary. (P. had previously unsuccessfully applied for professorships in Kiel, Jena, Tübingen, Halle, Leipzig, and Berlin). He served as Rektor of the University of Munich in 1909–1910, and was named a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna in 1919. Perhaps his most outstanding characteristic was his ability to be a productive scholar despite severe problems with his vision. He had suffered from a serious eye infection during his schooldays, which left him with impaired vision for much of his life. P. in fact went blind in 1914, but remained a productive scholar until his death.

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In an autobiographical article (“Mein Leben,” PBB 46 [1922]: 495–98), P. suggested that his work fell into three main categories: Germanic phonology and morphology, Medieval German literary studies (with a focus on textual criticism and Middle High German), and the linguistic analysis of Modern German. This assessment is something of an oversimplification, as he also contributed significantly to fields like historical linguistics, language pedagogy, syntax, and lexicography, and was a prominent editorial figure. P.’s contributions to the study of Medieval German literature are indeed immense. His dissertation and Habilitionsschrift both focused on questions of Middle High German literature; his dissertation, Über die ursprüngliche anordnung von Freidanks ‘Bescheidenheit’ (1870) dealt with the composition of Freidank’s Bescheidenheit, a verse collection of aphorisms thought to have been written between 1215 and 1230. P. in fact planned to prepare a critical edition of the text, but was never able to accomplish this task. His Habilitionsschrift, Zur kritik und erklärung von Gottfrieds von Strassburg Tristan (1872) turned to Gottfried’s Tristan; a planned critical edition of this text was also never completed. Beyond these two works, P. published a number of works on literary topics ranging from the life of the Middle High German poet Hartman von Aue (“Zum leben Hartmanns von Aue,” PBB 1 [1874]: 535–39), to the question of whether a unified Middle High German literary language ever really existed (Gab es eine mittelhochdeutsche Schriftsprache?, 1872). His most significant contribution to the study of Middle High German, however, is certainly his Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik (1881, 25th ed. 2007). This handbook remains the standard grammar of Middle High German. In terms of Germanic phonology and morphology and the linguistic analysis of Modern German, P. published an enormously influential article on the development of the Germanic vocalic system (“Zur geschichte des germanischen vocalismus,” PBB 6 [1879]: 1–256) that has become a true classic in the field; as well as numerous shorter papers. P.’s major contribution to the study of Modern German is certainly his five-volume Deutsche Grammatik (1916–1920), described by Friedrich Wilhelm in his obituary of P. (Münchener Museum für Philologie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 4 [1924]: 222–26) as “die einzige vollendete wissenschaftliche Grammatik der deutschen Sprache.” Another important publication in this area is P’s book on German meter, Deutsche Metrik (1905). His contributions to historical linguistics are also immense. His most important single contribution to this area, and to linguistics in general, was his monumental Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). This volume rapidly became a standard handbook (five editions of the text were published during P.’s lifetime, the book was reprinted as recently as 1995, and there are Eng-

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lish and Japanese translations), and has had a lasting and wide-ranging influence on the field (it is still cited in scholarly articles today, for instance). The book is notable both for its expression of Neogrammarian ideas about language and language change, and for its expression of ideas that remain current today, including what P. himself described as the question of “welche bedeutung die wechselwirkung der individuen aufeinander für die entwicklung die sprache hat” (497). P. also worked on questions of lexicography, syntax, word formation, and language pedagogy. He compiled a German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch (1897, 10th ed. 2002). P. was also interested in the theoretical aspects of lexicography, publishing various essays on lexicographic topics, e. g., “Beiträge zum deutschen Wörterbuch” (Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung 10 [1908–1909]: 66–96); the titles of most of these articles suggest that he was mainly concerned with his dictionary. As to syntax, P. recognized the importance of syntax early on; his Middle High German grammar was one of the first such handbooks to include a section on syntax (this section was not included in the first edition of the book; it was added to the 2nd edition of 1884). His papers on word formation also generally developed out of his lexicographical work; his most important publication in this area is probably “Über die Aufgaben der Wortbildungslehre,” Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und der historischen Classe der k.b. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München, Jahrgang 1896: 692–713). Finally, P. also published a book on language pedagogy, Über Sprachunterricht (1921). P.’s activities as an editor must also be taken into consideration. Paul was a cofounder (with Wilhelm Braune, another Neogrammarian and a former student of P.’s) of one of the most important journals of German(ic) linguistics and literature, the Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. This journal has been published since 1874, and is still generally referred to as the “PBB” (for Paul-Braune Beiträge). P. co-edited the journal from 1874 to 1891 and was a consulting editor from 1891 until his death. P. was also the founding editor of the Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, and edited three of the volumes in the series (a volume of poems by Walther von der Vogelweide and two texts by Hartman von Aue, Gregorius and Der arme Heinrich). P. also served the general editor of the Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, an important multivolume reference work (1891–1893). P. remains an important figure in the history of linguistics and Medieval studies. His Prinzipien is one of the central Neogrammarian texts, and many of his other works, especially his dictionary, his Middle High German grammar, and his monograph-length 1879 article on the development of the German vowel system, are still worthwhile reading. Moreover, it should not be

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forgotten that the Neogrammarian school of linguistics was enormously influential in the development of linguistics today. American Structuralism, although influenced heavily by the Prague School and the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, remained rooted in Neogrammarian ideas. Neogrammarian ideas and references to P. abound in the work of the dean of American linguistics in the 1930s and 1940s, namely Leonard Bloomfield, e. g., his masterpiece Language (1933). P’s ideas have also had an impact on more recent approaches to linguistics; William Labov, the central figure in the origins and development of sociolinguistics has been substantially influenced by Neogrammarian thought (see Labov’s Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors [1994] for some discussion). These factors assure P.’s place in the history of linguistics and Medieval studies. Select Bibliography Literature: Kurt R. Jankowsky, The Neogrammarians. A Re-evaluation of Their Place in the Development of Linguistic Science (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); Marga Reis, “Hermann Paul,” PBB 100 [1978]: 159–204; Helmut Henneand Jörg Kilian, ed., Hermann Paul: Sprachtheorie, Sprachgeschichte, Philologie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998); Mark Hale, “Neogrammarian Sound Change,” Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. Brian Joseph and Richard Janda (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 343–68.

Marc Pierce

Pfeiffer, Franz (February 27, 1815 Bettlach near Solothurn, Switzerland – May 29, 1868 Vienna, Austria), German Medievalist. P. published not only the most important minnesong manuscripts (manuscript B Weingartner Liederhandschrift and C Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift), he was also one of the first German literary scholars to undertake historicalcritical editions of Middle High German prose literature, including mystical writings, chronicles, and urbar texts. Through his work, he realised that Middle High German was not a uniform language but exhibited geographical differences reflecting variant developments from Old High German rudiments. As P.’s confidence in the written tradition of the original grew, so did his reservations about the editorial practices of some of his colleagues. He interest in grammatical forms such as inflection and word order, but

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also in metrics of verse texts, meant that he was no longer inclined to follow the strict methods of the Lachmann school. This new approach, however, increased his antipathy to the highly regarded Berlin school and its supporters, especially Moriz Haupt (1808–1874), who was Lachmann’s successor in Berlin. The so-called “Nibelungenstreit” or Nibelungen dispute, further sharpened the conflict. For Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) the written Nibelungenlied (1180–1210) was not the work of one anonymous author, but the result of a gradual synthesis of individual songs. P., on the other hand, held the theory that the minnesinger Der von Kürenberg should be viewed as the author. In 1856, P. founded the Germanic (“Germania”), a quarterly periodical devoted to German antiquarian research, which continued to be published until 1892. In 1864 he began to publish the Deutsche Klassiker des Mittelalters with the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide, but in contrast to Haupt (ZfdA) he did so without offering textual variants, adding instead explanations of vocabulary and factual aspects. P. was born in modest circumstances. He attended grammar school at Solothurn. After medical studies at the University of Munich he took up German philology. He received his training in textual criticism from Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797–1874). During extensive study tours to major libraries between 1840 and 1841, he became familiar with the most important collections of hand-written manuscripts in Middle High German literature. From 1843, he served as secretary, and from 1846 librarian, at the Stuttgarter Literarischer Verein, the Stuttgart Literary Association. It was in that position that he published the most important minnesong manuscripts; manuscript B Weingartner Liederhandschrift and C Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift. As of 1857, he was engaged as librarian at the Royal Library of Stuttgart. While there he received a call to the University of Vienna, where the chair of German language and literature had been founded in 1850. He was the third full professor for German philology in Vienna. P. died very suddenly, of heart disease. During P.’s term as professor, mutual opposition between Vienna and Berlin began to grow, beginning as differences over methodologies and ending in open and serious antagonism. Editions were published and textual criticism undertaken in both places, in Vienna employing a more pragmatic approach with greater respect for handwritten transmission of manuscripts, while in Berlin accuracy and consistency in editorial practise were emphasised in the belief that “higher standards” of textual criticism were thus achieved, (though in fact much intuition was involved). The Berlin group was not satisfied merely with publishing editions of reconstructed (or con-

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structed) texts in a standardised Middle High German, but proceeded to judge the authenticity, or lack of it, of a text on the basis of “archetypes.” While P.’s studies led to editions and commentaries, familiar to us from the Deutsche Classiker des Mittelalters which he started, the editions of the School of Berlin offered complex textual variants, but little help in understanding. P.’s prose editions continued with Konrad von Megenbergs Buch der Natur in 1861 and Berthold von Regensburg’s Predigten in 1862. His most important student was Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886). Scherer felt the lack of a critical methodological approach assigning equal weight to text, content, and meaning, and found these in the works of the Berlin School rejected by P. Thus, Scherer joined the opposing camp in Berlin in 1860, where he came in contact with Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), Moriz Haupt (1808–1874) and especially Karl Müllenhoff (1818–1884) who became his mentor. After his graduation in 1862, Scherer presented the results of his collaboration on Middle High German with Müllenhoff, whose work on the origin of texts as well as explication of their contents from a combined historical, theological and legal point of view had long been regarded as exemplary, as his doctoral thesis at the Vienna faculty, and the conflict with P. broke into the open. After initially rejecting the defector, P. was obliged to accept Scherer’s admission to doctoral degree status but managed to impose an unusual restriction on the degree title, the Venia legendi, to “Ältere deutsche Literatur des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts” (Old German Literature of the 12th and 13th centuries). In 1870, P. was made a full member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. His contemporaries, among them Reinhold Bechstein, regarded P. as central to a non-dogmatic, up-to-date and innovative approach to German literary studies. Rainer Kolk (“Liebhaber, Gelehrte, Experten. Das Sozialsystem der Germanistik bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wissenschaftgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 48–114) saw him as an important figure in popularising scientific knowledge, while still maintaining a high level of textual accuracy. The Germania publications in particular were proof of the appeal of German philology. His rejection of the “esoteric philology of Moriz Haupt” was fundamental in his turning towards specialist colleagues and educated readers as audience (“Liebhaber, Gelehrte, Experten. Das Sozialsystem der Germanistik bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wissenschaftgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 48–114). His strategy, to win a broad circle of readers attracted

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by the beauty of Middle High German poetry, by abandoning the extensive critical apparatus of interpretation, was very successful. (Walther von der Vogelweide, ed. Franz Pfeiffer, introduction). P. was also involved in training of teaching staff at the university and developed a new course structure. (Uwe Mewes, “Zum Institutionalisierungsprozeß der Deutschen Philologie. Die Periode der Lehrstuhlerrichtung”, Wissenschaftgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994, 115–203). Through his publications, P. drew attention to Medieval poetry of great cultural and historical importance. It was clearly important to the Vienna School that the reader could form for himself a lively image from the text through his own reading. (Helmut Birkhan, “Altgermanistik und germanistische Sprachwissenschaft,” Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, vol. 5, ed. Karl Acham, 2003, 115–92). Select Bibliography Works: Most of the many writings P. edited are still in use today: Die Weingartner Liederhandschrift (1843); Rudolf von Ems, Barlaam und Josaphat (1843, rpt. 1965); Der Edelstein von Ulrich Boner (1844); Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (1844); Deutsche Mystiker des 14. Jahrhunderts, vol 1, 2 (1845, 1857, rpt. 1962); Österreichische Urbarbuch (1850); Konrad von Megenberg, Das Buch der Natur: Die erste Naturgeschichte in deutscher Sprache (1861; rpt. 1962); Berthold von Regensburg, Vollständige Ausgabe seiner Predigten mit Anmerkungen und Wörterbuch (1862, rpt. 1965); Walther von der Vogelweide, Lieder (1864). Literature: Helmut Birkhan, “Altgermanistik und germanistische Sprachwissenschaft,” Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, vol. 5, ed. Karl Acham (Vienna: Passagen, 2003), 115–92; Heide Fuchs, “Die Geschichte der germanistischen Lehrkanzlei von ihrer Gründung im Jahre 1850 bis zum Jahre 1912,” Ph.D. diss. Vienna 1967, 27–37; Eine Wissenschaft etabliert sich (1810–1870), ed. Johannes Jonata (Tübingen: Max Niemayer, 1980); Walter Kofler, “Das Ende einer wunderbaren Freundschaft: Der Briefwechsel Holtzmann – Pfeiffer – Zarncke – Bartsch,” ZfdA 127 (1998): 247–70; Joseph Strobl, “Franz Pfeiffer,” ADB, vol. 25 (1887), 635–39; Peter Wiesinger and Daniel Steinbach, 150 Jahre Germanistik in Wien. Ausseruniversitäre Frühgermanistik und Universitätsgermanistik (Vienna: Praesens, 2001), 36–41.

Gertrud Blaschitz

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Prawer, Joshua (November 10, 1917, Bêdzin, Upper Silesia, Poland – April 30, 1990, Jerusalem, Israel), Israeli Medievalist. P. was one of the most important and influential scholars of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem. The gamut of his studies varied from agrarian settlements to cultural history of Outremer. His two magna opera, however, were Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem (1969; French translation of Hebrew original Toledot mamelekhet ha-tsalebanim [1963]) and The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (1972, translated into Hebrew as Hatsalebanim: diyokanah shel ha-heverah qolonialit [1975]). Largely until today, these introductory works are regarded as first-rate contributions and authorities in the field. P. was not the first scholar to write the history of the Crusading Kingdom: he was, in fact, preceded by some important scholars, such as Reinhardt Röhricht (Geschichte des Königreiches Jerusalem, 1898), John L. La Monte (Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100 to 1291, 1932), René Grousset (Le royaume latin de Jérusalem, 1934–1936), Steven Runciman (A History of the Crusades, 1951) and Jean Richard (Le royaume latin de Jérusalem, 1953). Unlike his predecessors, however, who dealt with either political and military events or the royal government and aristocracy, P.’s pioneering works offered a more penetrating insight into the history of the Latin kingdom. They attempted to cover as many aspects as possible, with the highest degree of academic accuracy and with vivid exposition. P. was born into the family of a Jewish cloth merchant and a mill owner. As a child, he went to a local Jewish elementary school, modeled after a heder, where he acquired the basics of the Jewish tradition, Bible and Ancient Hebrew. Later on, he pursued his studies in the Jewish Gymnasium of Bêdzin, where the classes were taught mostly in Polish, which became his first language. At the same time he also acquired a good command of spoken German. P. rose in a strong atmosphere of Zionism and was a member in two youth Zionist organizations: Ha-shomer ha-tahor and Ha-tsofim. Having graduated from the gymnasium, in 1933, P. successfully passed the entrance exams into university, but eventually decided to make aliyah to Palestine, in 1936. There P. commenced his studies in the then-nascent Hebrew University of Jerusalem, first in the faculty of Mathematics, later in the History department, where he received his MA degree in 1941 (his M.A. thesis was on the Crusading town of Tyre) and Ph.D. degree in 1945. P. studied with some influential medievalists, such as Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer and Richard Koebner, his Ph.D. supervisor. One of his undergraduate papers (“The

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Position of the Geonim and Nesiim in Eretz Israel between the Ninth and Twelfth Centuries”), written either in the late 1930s or early 1940s, was published posthumously (Hayo-Haya, 2001, 100–21). At the same time, P. was an active member of the Haganah, the Jewish defense force and was wounded in the War of Independence (1948–1949), serving as liaison officer between the Jewish army and the Christian institutions of Jerusalem. In 1948, P. got married and in the following year received a post-doctoral research grant, which enabled him to spend a year in Paris and London, studying various manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale, Ecole de Chartre and British Museum. Upon his return, P. officially joined the History department staff. At this point, he already published a book and six articles. Between 1953 and 1955, he served as a deputy dean of the Humanities. While acting as a dean (1961–1965), P. initiated a series of reforms in the liberal arts curricula and was also instrumental in establishing the Hebrew University pre-academic unit, suiting needs of students from underprivileged families of oriental origin and new immigrants. His wish to assist needy students was expressed also in his service to the pedagogic secretariat of the Ministry of Education, which he chaired between 1956 and 1958, proposing a system of graded tuition fees. Between 1975 and 1978, he served as a pro-rector of the Hebrew University. P.’s classes are remembered to have been taught in a vivid, enthusiastic, jocular, anecdotal and sometimes stinging atmosphere. Despite his almost exclusive commitment to the Crusading studies, P. taught a large variety of classes, including Medieval Christian Theology (1968–9), Law and Parliament in Medieval England (1958–1959 and 1964–1965), Medieval Town (1957–1958 and 1959–1960), Late Medieval England (1972–1973), Early Middle Ages (1971–1972), Representative Institutions in Medieval Europe (1966–1967), Feudal Government (1959–1960) and Medieval Monasticism (1967–1968). P.’s intellectual activities were not confined only to research and teaching at his alma mater. From the 1950s onwards, he conducted a series of archaeological excavations of some crusading sites, including St. Louis’s wall and mural towers of Caesaria and the Hospitaller castle of Belvoir (south of Sea of Galilee). In addition, he was editor-in-chief of the 32 volume Encyclopaedia Hebraica, published between 1949 and 1984. P. was also involved in pre-academic education system, directing the P. Committee, which proposed and later carried out the establishment of a mid-stage between primary and secondary education in Israel. He was also instrumental in the establishment of Haifa and Beersheba universities (1966 and 1975, respectively). Throughout his career, he was a chairman and member of various academies and societies, both in Israel and abroad. For instance, he chaired the Humanities

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Section of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies and was member of the boards of the Israel Archaeological Society, the Yad Ben Zvi Institute (Jerusalem) and the Open University (Tel Aviv). He also maintained strong ties with the fellow-medievalists from abroad. He was member of the Medieval Academy of America and was honored to be one of the two plenary speakers at the 16th International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo (May 9, 1981). In addition, he was elected correspondent member of Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de France (1967) and Royal Historical Society (1984). For his academic achievements, P. was awarded several prizes, including Prix Gustave Schlumberger (1967), Israel Prize for Humanities (1969), Rothschild Prize for Humanities (1972) and made chevalier of Ordre National du Merite, France (1973). In 1966, he received a Ph.D. honoris causa from University of Montpellier. Even as an emeritus, P. continued being involved in the affairs of the Hebrew University, until his death. He died on April 30, 1990 in Jerusalem. Apart from his two magna opera, discussed above, P. published a large number of studies, books, and articles alike, on various matters relating to Crusading. One particular topic that P. was preoccupied with was the history of the Jews of Outremer under the Crusaders. The first study on that subject, appeared in 1946 in Hebrew periodical Zion, was closely modeled after Simha’s Asaf and L. A. Mayer’s Sefer ha-Yishuv, a catalogue of sources on the Jews of Palestine. In 1965, he published a short article on Jewish immigration to Crusading Palestine (in Western Galilee and the Coast of Galilee [1965], 129–36), while two years later another article, on the Jewish settlement in Crusading Jerusalem, appeared (Ariel [1967], 60–66). His interest in the fate of the Jews under the Crusaders developed into a book, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1988). P. was equally interested in topography and everyday life in Crusading towns. Apart from several studies on the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem (Zion [1947]: 136–48; Ariel [1967]: 60–66; The Israel Museum News [1977]: 80–91), P. published a number of articles on the Latin settlement in Jerusalem (Speculum [1952]: 490–503; in Judah and Jerusalem (1957): 90–104 and Qadmoniot (1967): 47–51; in Crusade and Settlement, ed. P. W. Edbury [1985], 2–16) and other Outremer towns (on Ascalon: Eretz-Israel [1956]: 231–51 and [1957]: 224–37; on Acre: Byzantion [1952]: 58–61; Eretz-Israel [1953]: 175–84; on other towns, in The Medieval City, ed. H. A. Miskimin et al. [1977], 179–99). His particular interest in the history of Jerusalem led him to initiate and supervise a multivolume project Yerushalayim le-doroteah (Jerusalem in Different Periods), a general introduction to the history of the city, published for the Open University (1984). In addition, he was the editor-in-chief of two volumes of Sefer Yerusha-

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layim (The Book of Jerusalem, 1987), an ongoing project covering various aspects of the city’s history from the Biblical times). P. published a number of studies on rural settlements in the Crusading Kingdom. Based on his intimate acquaintance with Arabic agricultural system of fellahin and on written sources, Latin and later Turkish alike, P. came to the conclusion that the Frankish settlement was predominantly urban, while seigniorial lands were tilled by Muslim or Oriental Christian farmers (Eretz-Israel [1951], 145–52; Byzantion [1952], 1–61 and [1953], 143–70; and in his Crusading Institutions [1980], 143–200). Another sphere of P.’s interest was legal history of the Crusading Kingdom, in particular a 13th-century collection Livre des Assisses des Bourgeois, which, as he has shown, was largely based on the Provençal Lo Codi (Revue historique de droit français et étranger [1954]: 198–227 and 358–82 and in Crusading Institutions [1980]: 358–411). Military history of Outremer was yet another subject of P.’s work. Two particular issues attracted his attention: Palestinian-Egyptian frontier and the Battle of Hattin (1187). In a 1963 study, revised in 1980, P. spoke about military campaigns into Sinai and penetration into Egypt (in Elath. The Eighteenth Archaeological Convention [1963], 168–81 and in Crusading Institutions [1980], 471–83. He was the first crusading historian to publish a detailed study on the Battle of Hattin, where he described the size of the forces, military logistics, environmental conditions of the area of the battle and the battle itself. A wide gamut of topics studied by P. is well reflected in his 1980 book Crusader Institutions. A collection of articles, this book is divided into five sections: feudal system, colonization and economy, social history, legal history, and military history. The book consists of nineteen studies, some of which had previously been published, in different versions and forms. The preface to P.’s festschrift begins with the remark, “The work and personality of Joshua P. have earned him the admiration not only of crusading historians, but of a still wide circle of scholars throughout the world” (Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem, ed. Benjamin Zeev Kedar et al.). In his biographical obituary, Benjamin Zeev Kedar also noted that there was a visible difference between his acting and writing personae (Mediterranean Historical Review [1990]: 107–16). In addition to a large number of first-rate contributions to the field, P. brought up a generation of Israeli historians with international reputation, such as Benjamin Zeev Kedar, Amnon Linder and Emmanuel Sivan. Despite P.’s solid and long-living authority, some of his concepts and ideas have not remained unchallenged over the years. For example, his vision

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of the Frankish society as predominantly urban and isolated from the subjugated Muslims and Oriental Christians, proved to be erroneous, as Ronnie Ellenblum’s work has shown (Frankish Rural Settlement in Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1998). Similarly, his notion of the Crusading Kingdom as the first European colonialism across the water, was challenged by several authorities at the Second Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (2–6 July 1987) (The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar [1992], 341–66). Furthermore, the idea that the Crusade, itself a variety of peregrinatio, unlike the Jewish aliyah, did not carry any sense of ‘returning home’ remains to be challenged and perhaps proven otherwise. Select Bibliography Works: The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291) (1947; in Hebrew); Jerusalem: Living City (1968; trans. into English, German, French, and Spanish); Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem (1969–1971; French version of the Hebrew original from 1963); The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (1972); Crusader Institutions (1980); The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1988). Literature: B. Z. Kedar et al., “Joshua Prawer – an Appreciation,” Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem, ed. Benjamin Zeev Kedar et al (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982), 1–4; “Professor Yehoshua Prawer ’al yalduto ve-’al reshith darko ba-universitah” (Professor Joshua Prawer on his Childhood and Beginnings at the University), Iggereth of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 7 (May 1990), sine paginis; B.Z. Kedar, “Joshua Prawer (1917–1990), Historian of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem,” Mediterranean Historical Review 5.2 (1990): 107–16; “Yehoshua Prawer,” Hayo Haya 1 (2001): 100–01; B. Z. Kedar, “Ha-motiv ha-tsalebani ba-siah ha-politi ha-israeli” (The Crusading Motif in Israeli Political Discourse), Alpayyim 26 (2004): 20–23.

Philip Slavin

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R Rajna, Pio (July 8, 1847, Sondrio – November 25, 1930, Florence), Italian Philologist. R. is the most important representative of the so called historical school, a stream of critical methodology based on the systematic application of Lachmann’s theoretical model to medieval texts. He is one of the most influential Italian romance philologists of all times, having introduced the comparative method in Italy. His work on the origins of the Italian chivalric epic has provoked much debate among philologists, being focused on the connection between French epic and Tuscan chivalric narratives. He studied the Italian romance epic, with particular focus on the Franco-Venetian tradition, from the cantari to the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. In 1869 he published the source of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance literature, which he identified in a poem on Roland contained in a Florentine manuscript (Mediceo Palatino 78 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana). The depth of his analysis and the strength of his research gained him harsh criticism from Italianists of his time, who viewed his philological work as a threat to the acknowledgment of the genius of Italian poets such as Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto. However, today his figure is greatly appreciated for the enormous contribution he offered to a thorough understanding of the process that led to the composition of the major Italian Renaissance poems. Although his most significant involvement in Italian philology revolves around the analysis and the identification of the sources of the great Italian Renaissance epic, he also undertook an examination of the genesis of the Divine Comedy, offering important editions of the Vita Nuova and the De Vulgari Eloquentia. He is also appreciated for his research on the origins of the Italian language. R. studied at the University of Pisa, where he attended the courses of Alessandro D’Ancona, ad was encouraged to pursue research on the Italian chivalric poem. There he also took courses in classics with Dino Comparetti. He graduated with a dissertation entitled La Medea di Seneca raffrontata con quella di Euripide, demonstrating a high degree of excellence in comparative studies applied to classical literature. Consequently, he accessed the Scuola Normale di Pisa, where he undertook postgraduate studies (Diploma di Perfe-

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zionamento). His doctoral thesis focused on Italian poems and romances from the origins to the age of Pulci and Boiardo, and made it clear that R.’s orientation was towards a historical-comparative approach, which remained unvaried throughout his career. While in Florence, he discovered an Italian cantare, which he entitled Orlando, where he envisaged the main source of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante. At that time he was employed as a high school teacher in Florence, where he continued to study the tradition of cantari and contributed to D’Ancona’s commentary of the Vita Nuova (1872), volunteering to edit the text with variants of manuscripts and early prints published in notes. This gave him the opportunity to start his life-long activity as an editor and commentator of the works of Dante Alighieri. By the time he transferred to the Liceo Classico “G. Parini” in Milan, he had offered enough evidence of his ability to contribute decisively to the investigation the sources of Italian chivalric literature. D’Ancona encouraged him to develop his argument that the Orlando Furioso had clear connections with the previous literary production, being an elaboration of themes, motifs and characters that could be found in a great number of cantari, interwoven, updated and adapted by Ariosto for the court of the Estensi. In 1872 he was appointed Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Milan. This was the first lectureship on romance philology ever established in an Italian University. During his academic career he also travelled to various locations where the chivalric epic was set, for example Rencesvals in 1880. This demonstrated his attachment to topography in literature, a way to connect the fictitious events recounted in the poems with historical reality. His approach to literature was always historical-philological, and one of the great merits of his investigation is to have provided the public with precise historical contexts where to place their readings. Le origini dell’epopea francese (1884) follows the idea of contextualizing literature within a historical framework. He consequently moved to the University of Florence where he kept his appointment for nearly thirty years (1884–1922). At this point, however, he had already written his major works, and his academic and teaching activity took most of his time. Throughout these years he acquired notoriety as one of the most important romance philologists in Europe and as a figure of reference as far as Italian medieval philology was concerned. While he was devoting himself to new fields of interest, he never found the time to publish his history of Provençal literature and of the Italian chivalric romance, which he had announced. When he died in 1930 he left an enormous amount of unpublished papers which still offer material for discussion.

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R.’s contribution to Italian medieval studies follows mainly two streams: on the one hand his work on the origins of French epic and of Italian chivalric literature places him among the greatest names of European romance philology, alike Joseph Bédier and Gaston Paris. On the other hand, his involvement with the edition and analysis of Dante Alighieri’s works links his name to the field of Italian studies. His approach to the history of French and Renaissance epics caused him to be harshly criticized by both French philologists and Italian literature historians. R. viewed the creation of the Italian chivalric poem as a development of earlier poems that were circulating in the form of compositions sung by popular story tellers in market squares, the cantari, short poems in ottava rima, a meter typically Italian. Thus, he contributed to creating a connection between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Benedetto Croce and his followers viewed his results as a way to create good critical editions and maintained that his theoretical model served no purpose in literary criticism. While Barbi defended the need for good critical editions for the literary critic to access texts the closest possible to the original, Croce maintained that philology is an auxiliary technique, which must not interfere with an esthetical evaluation of the literary text, and considered R.’s subtle work of reconstruction on the sources of the Orlando Furioso a as a mere exercise with no relevance to the appreciation of the poetic value of Ariosto’s original invention. The acceptance of the artist’s genius excludes, according to Croce, the consideration that the external import of sources such as documents, legends, and classical culture may cast doubt on the originality of his creative impulse. However it is doubtless that the work of identification of the sources helped scholars to contextualize Dante’s text. R.’s debut as a philologist (the identification of the source of Pulci’s Morgante) remains one of the greatest achievements of both the historical school and Italian philology overall (La materia del Morgante in un ignoto poema cavalleresco del secolo XV, 1869). His studies on the tradition of the Italian cantari is still today to be considered as the starting point for philologists who wish to undertake the study of this late medieval vernacular stream of poetry (Le Fonti dell’Orlando Furioso, 1876). Subsequently, he undertook the analysis of the origins of French epic, which gained him a certain amount of criticism from French philologists specially Bédier, in that R.’s analysis focused especially on the essentially historical nature of medieval epic (Le origini dell’epopea francese, 1884). He devoted attention to the exploration of the Italian contribution to the development of French epic, investigating Franco-Italian literature (Ricerche intorno ai ‘Reali di Francia’, seguite dal ‘Libro di Fioravante’ e dal ‘Cantare del Bovo

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d’Antona,’ 1872). His critical edition of Dante’s Vita Nuova (1872), with a commentary by Alessando D’Ancona is still very valuable, and was followed by a critical edition of the De vulgari eloquentia (1897). R. is also important for having produced interesting surveys on the origins of the Italian language (Le origini della lingua italiana, 1891). Select Bibliography Literature: Carteggio Pio Rajna – Francesco Novati (1878–1915), ed. Guido Lucchini (Milan: LED, 1995); Gabriella Macciocca, “Raijna, Pio,” Letteratura italiana. Gli autori (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), vol. II, 1475–76; Francesco Mazzoni, “Pio Rajna dantista”, in Pio Rajna e le letterature neolatine. Atti del Convegno internazionale (Sondrio 24–25 settembre 1983), ed. R. Abardo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993), 5–25; Umberto Renda – Piero Operti, Dizionario storico della letteratura italiana (Turin: Paravia, 1952), 923–24; Carla Maria Sanfilippo, ed., Carteggio Rajna – Salvioni, (Pisa: Pacini, 1979).

Claudia Boscolo

Reese, Gustave (November 29, 1899, New York – September 7, 1977, Berkeley, California), American Musicologist, Teacher, and Administrator. R.’s Music in the Middle Ages (1940), which established him as an authority on the subject, had no true precedent, for it far surpassed in detail and length earlier historiographic treatments of medieval music. He had originally planned to cover both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in a single volume; however, he ultimately produced a separate volume, Music in the Renaissance (1954), on the latter period. Other important contributions include his being a founder-member, and eventually, President, of the American Musicological Society (AMS, formerly the American Musicological Association), his serving as editor of The Musical Quarterly, and his teaching and mentoring future scholars for five decades. Despite his interest in music, R.’s family insisted that he study law. Therefore, he earned the LLB degree in 1921 from New York University and was admitted to the New York State bar. As he continued to love music first and foremost, R. apprenticed himself to Oscar Sonneck, Director of Publication at the music press G. Schirmer, Inc., and eventually headed the company’s publication department (1940–1945). While working for Schirmer,

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he returned to New York University, this time to study for the Mus.B. degree, which he earned in 1930. He taught music there, almost continuously, from 1927 until his retirement in 1974 and also held visiting professorships at several universities – City University of New York, Duke, Michigan, Oxford, Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles – in addition to offering musicology courses at the Juilliard School. Throughout his academic career, R. remained extremely active in music publication and musicological administration. As mentioned above, he was a founding member of the AMS, of which he became secretary (1934–1946), vice-president (1946–1950), and president (1950–1952). As James Haar documents, he served as vice-president of the Plain-Song and Medieval Music Society (1958), member of the council of the International Musicological Society (1967–1972), and president of the Renaissance Society of America (1971–1973) (“Reese, Gustave,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 21, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2001, 73). Furthermore, he was associated with the American Council of Learned Societies and the Music Library Association. One of the most remarkable things about R., especially given the scope and quality of his research and his legendary contributions as an educator, is that he was largely self-taught in musicology. Arthur Mendel, in particular, refers to his rich background in listening and to his knowledge of the Anthologie sonore (“Gustave Reese (1899–1977): A Personal Memoir,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 30.3 [1977]: 360]. Produced in France from the mid-1930s until the mid-1950s, this ambitious series of recordings represented an important source of exposure to musical performance. R.’s diverse interests, which included significant expertise in the operatic repertory, coalesced when a copy of the Harmonice musices odhecaton, a collection of popular Franco-Flemish music that had been published in Venice by Petrucci in 1501, was brought to Schirmer by an antiquarian book dealer around 1932. His first scholarly article, “The First Printed Collection of Part-Music: the Odhecaton” (The Musical Quarterly 20.1 [1934]: 39–76), resulted from his examination of this artifact in his place of employment. R. subsequently published many articles on late-Medieval and Renaissance topics and served as editor or co-editor of several Festschriften. Music in the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance form his magnum opus. The shorter Fourscore Classics of Music Literature (1957), which was designed for primarily instructional purposes, surveys some of the most significant compositions of all times. Music in the Middle Ages and Music in the Renaissance remain unsurpassed in length and detail among music history volumes by a single author concerning these periods. Adding a personal, anecdotal touch to what is known of

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“Gus,” Mendel mentions that he wrote both of these massive works on his lap, seated in his home office (363). This was obviously well before the advent of word processing and laptop technology. At the time of his death, R. was even engaged in revision of Music in the Middle Ages, in order to reflect the increased knowledge that had resulted, to a large extent, from its appearance in 1940. Haar summarizes well the value of these two monumental studies, which are still on the market: “In many respects R.’s work set new standards; the completeness and precision of bibliographic documentation, together with the orderly marshalling and clear exposition of fact in his books, have made them model textbooks. His fairness in representing the work of other scholars and his ability to select the best from among conflicting theories are exemplary. Another feature of these books is R.’s apt mixture of bibliographic fact with aesthetic judgment based on genuine acquaintance with an enormous body of music …” (73). The Festschrift dedicated to R. upon his 65th birthday and the memoirs devoted to him upon his death testify eloquently to the fact that fellow musicologists, other colleagues, and students alike felt extremely indebted to him for his invaluable contributions to a wide array of related enterprises: research, publication of music, education, administration of learned societies, performing arts. R.’s far-reaching, consistently excellent work resulted in his receiving three honorary doctorates, as well as New York University’s Great Teacher Award and its Presidential Citation. It is especially important to note that this master teacher’s concern for his students extended far beyond academics. Edward H. Roesner observes, “He spent long hours with his students at his apartment, which they often came to regard as a second home” (“Gustave Reese, 1899–1977,” The Musical Quarterly 63.4 [1977]: 581). It is no wonder that so many of them soon became successful teachers themselves. Similarly inspired and encouraged were the many young composers in whose career R. took a genuine interest. In tribute to his memory, the Gustave Reese Prize continues to be awarded annually to a deserving student by the New York University Department of Music. With respect to performance practice, R.’s contributions were evident though his connection with the New York Pro Musica Antiqua and the Waverly Consort, early music ensembles that came into being in the early 1950s and the mid-1960s, respectively. (See also “Tributes to Gustave Reese, 1899–1977,” Early Music 6 [1978]: 99–101.) It is undeniable that R.’s comprehensive books on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in conjunction with his myriad contributions to musicology in general, imparted tremendous impetus to the study and performance of early music. During the latter part of the 20th century, numerous professional ensembles dedicated to the interpretation of the Medieval repertory

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joined the ranks of those already mentioned, as did many college and amateur groups. Thanks to the influence of R.’s and others’ work, freshly edited scores appeared on the market for use by these enthusiasts. Music history programs that had theretofore construed “early” as a reference to the 17th century began to pay serious attention to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Roesner summarizes, “… it is fair to say that no one man was more instrumental in bringing about the revival of early music in this country (the United States)” (580). In “The Greater World of Gustave Reese,” which serves as introduction to Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music, Friedrich Blume (translated by LaRue) affirms, “It would be difficult to overestimate the intrinsic and historical importance of much of the knowledge discussed in his books. The learned impulses of American and European musicology that had interpenetrated one another throughout the 20th century now did so to a greater extent. […] Whatever will come afterward – let us hope there will be giants – can only be a continued treatment of what in his writings is already present in every essential feature” (Jan LaRue, ed., et al. Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, 1966, xvii). Although some arguably “giant” scholars may have left their imprint on the field of Medieval music in the most recent decades, it would be difficult to maintain credibly that their contributions exceeded in scope or surpassed in quality those of R. Select Bibliography Works: (selected publications, see Steinzor for complete list) Music in the Middle Ages, with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient Times (1940); Music in the Renaissance (1954; rev. 1959); Fourscore Classics of Music Literature (1957; rpt. 1970); “The First Printed Collection of Part-Music: The Odhecaton,” The Musical Quarterly 20 (1934): 39–76. Literature: Curt Efram Steinzor, “Gustave Reese,” American Musicologists, c. 1890–1945: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook to the Formative Period (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 205–09; James Haar, “Reese, Gustave,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 21, ed. Sadie Stanley (New York: Grove, 2001), 73–74; Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. Jan LaRue et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966); Arthur Mendel, “Gustave Reese (1899–1977),” The Musical Quarterly 63.4 (October 1977): 597–581; “Tributes to Gustave Reese: 1899–1977,” Early Music 6 (1978): 99–101.

Beverly J. Evans

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Rico Manrique, Francisco (April 28, 1942, Barcelona, Spain – Present), Spanish Romance Philologist, Literary Historian, Poet and Prose Writer. Versatile critic, literary historian, and polygraphic author (his works encompass textual criticism, literary and art history and criticism, poetry and prose writing), he stands out as one of the major scholarly figures in the European academia. He devoted most of his scholarly writings to Latin and vernacular Romance literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Castilian, Catalan, Italian, French), wrote several poems and prose works and collaborated to the creation of the screenplay for the film La Celestina (1996). R. attended the University of Barcelona and was a student of José Manuel Blecua and Martín De Riquer. He frequented as assiduously the literary circles as the academic institution. After graduating in 1966, he accepted a research assistantship and an associate lectureship in Romance Philology. At the foundation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1968), R. obtained an established university post in the Department of Spanish Philology, where he is now a catedrático (full professor) of Medieval Hispanic Literatures. R. is a member of the Real Academia Española, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei, and corresponding member of the Académia das Ciéncias of Lisbon, The British Academy and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. R. sits on the editorial board of several journals (Hispanic Review, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica, Studi Petrarcheschi) and directs the academic series Biblioteca Clásica, Filología, Clásicos y Modernos, Letras Hispánicas. In 2004 he founded, together with Gian Mario Anselmi and Emilio Pasquini, the Italian philological journal Ecdotica (Bologna). In keeping with his specialization in Romance Philology, R.’s main interests have encompassed sundry genres and broader periods of Spanish and non-Spanish literatures, such as the picaresque romance, the Italian Trecento and the siglo de oro. A historical and philological investigation of the Spanish and Italian Middle Ages and of Humanism can be found in the critical works that he composed throughout the Sixties and the Seventies: La novela picaresca española, 1966; El pequeño mundo del hombre. Varia fortuna de una idea en las letras españolas, 1970; La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, 1970; Alfonso el Sabio y la ‘General Estoria,’ 1972. In 1974 appeared the work which would gain R. critical acclaim and international recognition: Vida u Obra de Petrarca, I: Lectura del Secretum. For the first time since Billanovich’s Petrarca letterato: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (1947), a sedulous philological and chronological reconstruction of Petrarch’s Secretum (De secretu conflictu curarum mearum)

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with a thorough bibliography was published, preceded and followed by several journal articles on Petrarchan topics, among which has to be mentioned “Rime sparse, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, para el título y el primer soneto del Canzoniere,” MR 3.1 (1976): 101–38. In R.’s expectations, the Lectura del Secretum should have been the first of a three-volume work, including two other books, respectively on the Familiares and the Canzoniere, which were never published, albeit R.’s scholarly interest in Petrarch has continued over the recent years, as expressed in a series of critical and philological studies that appeared in academic journals, conference proceedings, handbooks, and miscellaneous collections, and in the anthology of Latin epigrams Gabbiani (2008). Several articles on Petrarch’s Latin works are currently in press, and the twovolume La scrittura del ‘Secretum’ e l’umanesimo petrarchesco is forthcoming. On the Spanish side of his scholarship, R. has worked on medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature and picaresque romance (Signos e indicios en la portada de Ripoll, 1976, on medieval Latin poetry and Romanesque symbolism in Cataluña; Nebrija frente a los barbaros, 1978, on the humanist grammarian Antonio de Nebrija; a critical edition of the Lazarillo de Tormes, 1987, followed by Problemas del Lazarillo, 1988). In the meantime he had started – with the co-operation of other Spanish and international scholars – his project Historia y critica de la literatura española (1979–), a whole collection of scholarly essays, first of this kind in Spanish literary history. A collection of critical and philological notes was published in the 1982 anthology Primera Cuarentena y Tratado general de literatura. As a digest of R.’s historical and critical work, in 1990 appeared a handbook of medieval and Renaissance literature, the Breve biblioteca de autores españoles (from the Cantar de mio Cid to El burlador de Sevilla), with a summary of each work by contemporary Spanish scholars. In the early 1990s were published Texto y contextos. Estudios sobre la poesía española del siglo XV (1990); an introduction to the critical edition of the Cantar de mio Cid (1993); El sueño del humanismo: De Petrarca a Erasmo (1993), an accomplished cultural history of Humanism and some of its eminent intellectuals; Figuras con paisaje (1994), resuming the interdisciplinary work begun with the 1976 monograph Signos e indicios en la portada de Ripoll. As a further confirmation of R.’s interdisciplinary approach to late-medieval literature, mention has to be made of the screenplay written for Gerardo Vera’s film La Celestina (1996), drawn from the homonymous 15th-century poem. In 2003, R. collected some of his critical and philological essays – together with a series of poems and prose works written by himself – in the volume Los discursos del gusto: Notas sobre clásicos y contemporáneos. In 1998 appeared a critical edition of the Don Quijote (rpt. 2004) and the study of textual criticism, En torno al error. Copistas, tipógrafos,

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filologías, followed by the fundamental philological essay El texto del Quijote, for the Biblioteca F.R. of the publisher Destino (2005). His latest essay of literary history, “Esbozo del Humanismo español”, SF 51.153 (2007): 526–31, dates from 2007. R’s works on the picaresque romance and on the cultural history of Humanism, Renaissance, and the Spanish siglo de oro may be considered cuttingedge critical contributions which gained international recognition and success, and were translated into other languages, such as English, Italian, and Japanese (e. g., La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, 1970; El pequeño mundo del hombre, 1970; Breve biblioteca de autores españoles, 1990; El sueño del humanismo: De Petrarca a Erasmo, 1993). His two critical editions, of the Lazarillo de Tormes (1987) and the Don Quijote (1998), published respectively by the academic publisher Cátedra and the Instituto Cervantes, are to be cited as crucial points throughout R.’s philological studies in Spanish Renaissance literature. Indeed a pivotal work for a better understanding of Petrarch as an intellectual and a man of letters of his time is the monograph Vida u Obra de Petrarca, I: Lectura del Secretum (1974). This critical and historical work broke fresh grounds in Petrarch’s literary criticism, at least as far as Petrarch’s biography, chronology, and the philological study of his work are concerned. R.’s study challenged an exclusively biographical reading of the Secretum that tended to overlook Petrarch’s fictional celebration of the self (which began with the 1345 discovery of Cicero’s letters), and the process of appropriation/ individuation of archetypes achieved through literary writing. In other words, R. denies that the few uncanny biographical details scattered along the three dialogues may themselves suffice to reconstruct Petrarch’s life, unless they are considered in the light of literary making. On the chronological side, the reconstruction of Petrarch’s literary biography as centered around the year 1353 (when, according to the critic, the third and final version of the Secretum was written), comes across as a little artificial and unbalanced. R.’s views, in contrast with a long-standing critical tradition somehow represented by Wilkinsand Baron, were accepted in Italy by Billanovich and in the U.S. by Bernardo and their followers, i. e., those scholars concerned to demonstrate Petrarch’s fictitious transposition of his own biographical details. Finally, we must mention R.’s philological and interdisciplinary efforts to consider medieval Latin and Romance literatures as a whole, i. e. originating from a shared cultural and historical background, but leading to different outcomes in terms of contents, language, and style (e. g. Los discursos del gusto: Notas sobre clásicos y contemporaneous, 2003); El sueño del humanismo. De Petrarca a Erasmo, 1993; Figuras con paisaje, 1994; Signos e indicios en la portada de

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Ripoll, 1976, and the screenplay for La Celestina, 1996). Several significant reviews of Vida u obra de Petrarca. I: Lectura del ‘Secretum’ were published by K. Foster, in MLR 73 (1978): 442–44; A. D. Scaglione, in RPh 30 (1977–78): 116–18; D. Phillips in Italica 54.2 (1977): 300–06; V. Branca, in Corriere della Sera, supplement, 11/04/1976, 16; G. Martellotti, in ASNSP (CLF), s. III, vol. 6, 4 (1976): 1394–1401; F. Bruni, in MR 3, 1 (1976): 144–52; A. Dolfi, in L’Albero 54 (1975): 196–99. A bio-bibliography and a selection of philological and critical works of the author are now digitally available respectively at http://www.cervantes virtual.com/bib_autor/franciscorico/pcuartonivel.jsp?conten=presentacion and http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/FichaAutor.html?Ref=2806. A collection of recent critical essays on R. (1998) has been digitalized on the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (2008) website at http://descargas.cervantesvirtual. com/servlet/SirveObras/09258374368781873085635/028894.pdf?incr=1. A printed complete bibliography of R. is not yet available at the moment. Again, one may find useful web resources at http://www.cervantesvirtual. com/FichaObra.html?Ref=30751, and in the introductions to the editions of the Biblioteca F.R. of the publisher Destino (http://www.edestino.es/Ficha Autor.aspx?IdPack=3&IdPildora=EXT71). Of some interest is the DizionarioCronologia in the Storia della Civiltà Letteraria Spagnola (by M. Aldomà Garcia, 1991). Enrico Santangelo

Riquer Morera, Martín de, conde de Casa Dávalos (May 3, 1914, Barcelona, Spain – Present), Catalán Philologist Working across both languages and centuries, R. is one of the best-known authorities on Catalán, Castilian and Provençal language and literature of the Medieval and Early Modern periods. He is well-known for his work on the Quijote as well as important studies on the troubadours, Arthurian literature and the Old French chanson de geste. In addition, he has been a major force behind the rediscovery of Medieval Catalán literature, publishing critical editions of essential literary monuments and important anthologies of works belonging either geographically or linguistically to that region.

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R. began his teaching career in 1942, as an adjunct in modern philology at the University of Barcelona. He received his doctorate in Romance Philology from the University of Madrid in 1946. In 1950, he became professor of the history of Romance literatures at the University of Barcelona. He taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona from 1970 to 1976, when he returned to the University of Barcelona, where he taught until his retirement in 1982. R. was deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Barcelona from 1965 to 1966, president of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona from 1963 to 1996, and a member of the Real Academia Española from 1965 on. He has received many prestigious awards for his work, among them the 1970 Ramon Llull Prize, the 1983 Gold Medal of the City Council of Barcelona, the 1988 Montaigne prize, the 1990 Menéndez y Pelayo Prize, the 1992 Catalán Creu de Sant Jordi, the 1997 Prince of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences, the 1999 Lletra d’Or Prize, and the 2000 Spanish National Prize for Letters. R. has also received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Rome and Liège, among others. A scholar with early ambitions as a classicist, R., not surprisingly, began his career with a first book on humanism in Catalonia (L’humanisme català, 1934). This volume was indicative of the major themes of R.’s vast production of more than 300 books and articles: first, his interest in the intersections and influences between ethnicities, languages, epochs and genres; and second, his lifelong love for and commitment to the literature of his patria chica, Catalonia. Much of his work reflects one or the other of these two themes. R. is particularly well-known for his work on Medieval lyric poetry, and more specifically, the Catalán troubadours writing in Provençal. Among his many articles and editions in this vein are a critical edition of the works of Jordi de Sant Jordi in 1935, and edition of selected poems of Pere Torroella in the same year. A translation of Bernard de Ventadorn appeared in 1940; a translation and commentary of selected poems of Ausias March followed in 1941. His interest in the troubadours continued, with translations and commentary of Cerverí de Girona in 1947, and an edition of the works of Guillem de Berguedà in 1971, among others. He also published an important anthology of troubadour poetry in 1975 (Los trovadores, in three volumes). His interest in Catalán literature is not limited to the domain of lyric poetry; in fact, his research on the literature and history of his native region spans both subjects and time periods, as reflected in studies of everything from major figures Bernard Metge and Raymon Llull (edition, translation, and commentary of Libro de Amigo y Amado. El Desconsuelo, 1950) to a later book on the fifteen generations of his own family in Catalán history (Quinze generacions d’una família catalana, 1979). He will perhaps be best remembered for

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his editions and translations of the Catalán chivalric novel, Tirant lo Blanc, his work on that literary monument spanning more than forty years, from a first edition appearing in 1947 to another in 1990, as well as a number of studies, among them his Aproximació al Tirant lo Blanc, also appearing in 1990. R.’s interest in chivalry, and in the interplay between life and literature in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern periods led to research in several directions, among them, his work on nobles of the 15th century who attempted to live out the chivalric dream, including the specifics of their arms, and of contemporaneous heraldry. Book-length studies include Manual de heráldica española (1942), Caballeros andantes españoles (1967), L’arnès del cavaller: armes i armadures catalanes medievals (1968), and Heràldica catalana des de l’any 1150 al 1550 (1983). R.’s work on the Quijote represents a logical extension of his interest in chivalric literature and life. His often reprinted Aproximación al Quijote tackles, among other issues, the question of the Medieval chivalric sources of Cervantes’s text. R. is well-known for his work on Avellaneda, having contributed both an edition of the Avellaneda Quijote (1972) and a historical study (Cervantes, Pasamonte y Avellaneda, 1988). He has also done extensive research on Cervantes and the city of Barcelona (Cervantes en Barcelona, 1989). Finally, his numerous editions of the Quijote, beginning with the Juventud edition in 1944, have long been a standard choice for bringing Cervantes’s writing to the classroom. Last but certainly not least, R.’s work crosses another border with his interest in the Old French chanson de geste and in the Arthurian material, particularly in the writing of Chrétien de Troyes. His well-known volume published first in Spanish (1952) and later (1957) in French as Les chansons de geste françaises, has long served as an excellent introduction to theories about the origins and development of the Old French epic. In addition, R. has published studies on the works of Chrétien de Troyes and on the Chanson de Roland, among other subjects from French medieval literary history. R.’s importance to our knowledge of the Middle Ages cannot be overstated. First, and perhaps most importantly, he is almost single-handedly responsible for the rediscovery of the Catalán troubadours as well as for the editions of Tirant lo Blanc that brought this important 15th-century novel to the attention of a wider scholarly audience (comment by César Antonio Molina quoted in “Los cervantistas reconocen en Martín de Riquer al gran maestro,” El País [April 10, 2005]: 49). In fact, as noted medievalist Carlos Alvar has noted, Medieval Catalán literature cannot be studied without reference to R. (“Martín de Riquer,” Anthropos 92 [1989]: 21). R.’s contributions to the study of the Quijote are also significant, particularly in terms of his care-

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ful theories about the identity of Avellaneda. Also most interesting, in terms of understanding the context of Cervantes’s writing, are R.’s studies about the intersection of life and literature, in the form of attempts to live out chivalric vows and deeds, in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Finally, his work on the history of heraldry and arms represents an important contribution to our knowledge of Medieval military and nobiliary practice (Francisco Rico, “La literatura española de Riquer,” Anthropos 92 [1989]: 26). Beyond his research, R. has made significant contributions to the work of students and colleagues alike. A beloved classroom teacher, forming several generations of medievalists, he is also the indefatigable editor of individual texts, collections, and literary histories that serve as reference works and cogent introductions to Provençal, Catalán, Portuguese and Spanish literature, as well as the author of several well-reasoned guides for reading major literary works, most notably that of Cervantes and Tirant lo Blanc. Select Bibliography Works: L’Humanisme català (1388–1494) (1934); Humanisme i decadència en les lletres catalanes (1934); 3. Jordi de Sant Jordi, Poesies (1935; ed.); Pere Torroella, Poesies (1935; edition); Bernatz de Ventadorn, Poesías (1940; trans.); Ausias March, Obras (1941; translation); Manual de heráldica española (1942); Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (1944; ed.); Juan Boscán y su cancionero barcelonés (1946; ed. and trans.); Joanot Martorell, Martí Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc (1947; ed.); Obras completas del trovador Cerverí de Girona (1947; ed. and trans.); Resumen de literatura catalana (1947); La lírica de los trovadores: antología comentada (1948); Resumen de literatura provenzal trovadoresca (1948); Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera, Corvacho, o reprobación del amor mundano (1949; ed.); Ramon Llull, Libro de Amigo y Amado. El Desconsuelo (1950; ed. and trans.); Bernat Metge, Obres completes i selecció de lletres reials per ell redactades (1950; ed.); Los cantares de gesta franceses: sus problemas, su relación con España (1952); Obras de Don Juan Manuel (1955; critical ed. in collaboration with J. M. Castro y Calvo); Historia de la literatura universal (1957–1959; in collaboration with José María Valverde); Història de la literatura catalana (1964–1966; directed by); Aproximación al Quijote (1967); Caballeros andantes españoles (1967); L’arnès del cavaller: armes i armadures catalanes medievals (1968); Cavalleria: fra realtà e letteratura nel Quattrocento (1968); Guillem de Berguedà. Edición crítica, traducción y glosario (1971; ed.); El combate imaginario: Las cartas de batalla de Joanot Martorell (1972; in collaboration with M. Vargas Llosa); Los trovadores, historia literaria y textos (1975); Quinze generacions d’una família catalana (1979); Heràldica catalana des de l’any 1150 al 1550 (1983); Vida i aventures de don Pero Maça (1984); Estudios sobre el Amadís de Gaula (1987); Cervantes, Pasamonte y Avellaneda (1988); Cervantes en Barcelona (1989); Aproximació al Tirant lo Blanc (1990); Tirant lo Blanch, novela de historia y de ficción (1992); Les Poesies del trobador Guillem de Berguedà (1996; ed. and trans.); Llegendes històriques catalanes (2000); Para leer a Cervantes (2003); Vida y amores de los trovadores y sus damas (2004). Literature: José Alsina, “Martín de Riquer y la Real Academia de Buenas Letras,” Anthropos 92 (1989): 31; Carlos Alvar, “Martín de Riquer,” Anthropos 92 (1989): 20–22; Lola Badia, “Martí de Riquer i la literatura catalana medieval,” Anthropos 92 (1989):

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28–30; Antoni M. Badia i Margarit, “Acte d’Obertura,” Symposium in honorem Prof. M. de Riquer (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1984), 11–18; Joan Francesc Fondevila, Martí de Riquer: La gran obra d’un humanista expert en literatura provençal, catalana medieval i cervantina (Barcelona: Fundació Catalan per a la Recerca, 2003); César Antonio Molina, as quoted in: “Los cervantistas reconocen en Martín de Riquer al gran maestro,” El País, [April 10, 2005]: 49 (newspaper article, no byline); Gabriel Oliver, “Martín de Riquer, romanista: una aventura literaria rigurosa y atrevida,” Anthropos 92 (1989): 22–24; Joaquim Parellada Casas, “Martín de Riquer: ‘La agudeza y arte de ingenio,’” Anthropos 92 (1989): 43–44; Francisco Rico, “La literatura española de Riquer,” Anthropos 92 (1989): 25–28; Martín de Riquer, “Autopercepción intelectual de un proceso histórico,” Anthropos 92 (1989): 8–17.

Kimberlee Campbell

Robertson, D. W. (Durant Waite), Jr. (October 11, 1914, Washington D. C. – July 26, 1992, Chapel Hill, North Carolina), American Medievalist. R.’s chief contribution to the study of Medieval literature is a method of interpretation that R. called “historical criticism” but is also known as “doctrinal criticism,” “exegetical criticism,” or “Robertsonian criticism.” The fundamental assumption of historical criticism is that Medieval works of literature, secular and imaginary as well as sacred, were intended to convey doctrinal truths, using allegorical technique and a rich system of iconography developed by the apostles and church fathers. R. and his followers extended their allegorical and iconographical readings of Medieval vernacular poetry even to poems that were not overtly allegorical or iconographic in form. R.’s claims generated much discussion and challenged many of the predominant readings of late Medieval poetry in the 1950s and 60s. His ideas were not wholeheartedly adopted outside of a few devoted friends and followers (including Bernard F. Huppé and R. E. Kaske), but his work changed the direction of Chaucer scholarship by drawing attention to patristic, and especially Augustinian, influences on Chaucer’s work. R. was born in Washington D.C. but spent most of his early life in North Carolina. He received both his undergraduate degree (A.B., 1935) and his graduate degrees (M.A., 1937 and Ph.D., 1945) from the University of North Carolina. After brief teaching assignments at the University of Maryland, University of North Carolina, and Yale University, he joined in 1946

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the faculty of Princeton University, where remained until his retirement in 1980. While R. spent most of his career developing and refining his theory of Medieval literature, his most important critical study remains his Preface to Chaucer (1962), in which he laid out in detail what he took to be the aesthetic presuppositions and interpretive techniques of the Middle Ages. Chief among these presuppositions was that figurative language and poetic fictions had no value in themselves but possessed value only insofar as they led the mind toward the understanding of a spiritual truth. Modern aesthetic approaches to Medieval literature, R. argued, fell short because they stopped at the level of aesthetic appreciation and literal understanding, without taking the next step toward consideration of the spiritual meaning to which the literal sense points. As this critique of modern aestheticism suggests, R.’s work was in large part an attempt to dismantle post-romantic and modernist assumptions about reading, including the idea that a reader must enter into the emotional experience of a work of literature and identify with its characters. Such emotional identification, R. argued, was guarded against by Medieval readers and led modern readers to misinterpret much Medieval poetry. R. argued, for example, that the tradition of “courtly love” was a modern misinterpretation brought about by a failure to observe poetic fictions objectively, with proper attention toward allegorical meaning. Rather than identifying with Lancelot in the Arthurian legend, R. maintained, the Medieval reader would have (and the modern reader ought to) regard him as an exemplum of purely carnal, misdirected love. R. laid out his theory at a time when dramatic and psychological readings of many Medieval works predominated. In Chaucer scholarship, the “roadside drama” approach to the Canterbury Tales, which highlighted supposed dramatic interplay between the pilgrim characters, was the source of much scholarship. R. directly challenged these dramatic and psychological readings, arguing that Medieval literature did not have “characters” in the modern sense and that Medieval authors were not interested in self-expression or psychological exploration, but rather in the apprehension of abstract truth. The force of R.’s challenges, however, was drained by criticism of his methodology. A number of responses to his work criticized it as reductionist and lacking in evidence (see, for example, E. T. Donaldson, “Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition,” Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1958–59, ed. Dorothy Bethurum, 1960, 1–26). Common objections were that his readings assumed an audience with a knowledge of patristic scholarship and interpretation beyond the reach of the majority of even courtly readers, and

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that there was no evidence for scriptural exegesis of secular poems in the Middle Ages. Despite these and other objections, however, R.’s claims have continued to merit discussion in Chaucer scholarship. Many scholars today are willing to admit patristic influences on Chaucer’s work and object only to R.’s insistence that patristic or doctrinal readings are the only valid readings of Medieval literature. Select Bibliography Works: “Historical Criticism,” English Institute Essays 1950, ed. A. S. Downer (1951), 3–31; with Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (1951); A Preface to Chaucer (1962); “Chaucer and Christian Tradition,” Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (1984), 3–32; Essays in Medieval Culture (1980). Literature: Alan T. Gaylord, “Reflections on D. W. Robertson, Jr. and ‘Exegetical Criticism,’” The Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 311–33.

Jason Herman

Robinson, Fred Norris (April 4, 1871 – July 21, 1966), American Chaucerian and Celticist. R.’s career unfolded entirely at Harvard, and his fame rests on two rather divergent fields: R. is best known for his two editions of Chaucer’s complete works, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1933, 1957 – slightly different titles exist depending on the press and reprints), the editions that facilitated generations of students’ first contact with Chaucer and in their third incarnation live on in the Riverside Chaucer (1987). R. is also granted the honor of singlehandedly having introduced the formal study of Celtic languages and literatures into the United States. Most of his critical publications come in this area. He taught the first course in Gaelic in the US, and because of his collection building with Irish language and literature, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton, and Manx books, Harvard’s Widener Library has the finest collection of works in the field of Celtic Studies in the world. The first issue of The Chaucer Review (1966) is dedicated to his memory. A native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, R. received his B.A. in Modern Literature from Harvard under the tutelage of Francis James Child and George Lyman Kittredge in 1891. R. advanced quickly through Master’s (1892) and doctoral degrees (1894), also at Harvard. His dissertation was On the

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Modal Syntax of Finite Verbs in the Canterbury Tales. After a short instructorship in English at Harvard in 1894, he studied Celtic Philology under Swiss scholar, Rudolph Thurneysen, at Freiburg in Germany in 1895, then the world’s foremost school of Celtic languages. In 1896, R. returned to Harvard as an instructor [teaching also courses in Irish], was promoted to assistant professor in 1902, to full professor in 1906, in 1936 was named Gurney Professor of English Philology, thus following in Kittredge’s footsteps, and became professor emeritus in 1939. He served as acting president of Radcliffe College, was chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Dante Society, the Mediaeval Academy (1948–51) and one of its 20 founding fellows, the Linguistic Society of America (1943), and the Modern Language Association (1945). He was vice-president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. R. held honorary degrees from Bowdoin College (1936), the National University of Ireland, the University of Edinburgh (1959), the University of Dublin, the National University of Wales, and Ohio State University. In the inaugural volume of the Journal for Celtic Studies, a collection of Papers in Honor of Fred Norris Robinson, R. was called the “Dean of American Celticists,” a “master of scholars,” who “enriched knowledge, gathered libraries, and directed learned societies” (ed. Howard Meroney, 1950, dedication page). R. was also an avid book reviewer with about twenty published reviews, but he has written surprisingly little analytical scholarship, especially in the field of medieval studies and Chaucer, a fact that prompted A. Brandl to question the stature and suitability of R.s editorship: “Who is this F. N. Robinson? One looks in vain for him in the English bibliograpies,” ASNSL 146 [1933]: 266–68). His most important contribution is his complete edition of Chaucer’s oeuvre, a work that at its 1933 publication date had been more than 30 years in coming, weighed in at over a thousand pages, and became the standard edition of Chaucer within a few years. R. explains his editorial methods and constrictions in the 1933 edition. The edition was supposed to be based only on manuscripts available in print; therefore, he made “the text afresh from the Chaucer Society’s reprints” but also had to resort to “photographs or copies of unpublished manuscripts,” aiming for “grammatical purification of the text” (xi). For the CT, R. relied on the “eight printed manuscripts and Thynne’s edition,” collated the Cardigan and Morgan copies, and consulted the textual studies of Brusendorff, McCormick, Tatlock, Zupitza, and Koch. Publishing his edition while Manly and Rickert’s Chicago Chaucer project was in full swing, R. decided not to mine their findings pre-

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maturely. He also had intended a much more extensive critical apparatus from which both space and the publication of Root’s Troilus and Manly’s and Rickert’s forthcoming edition of the CT dissuaded him. The explanatory notes and the glossary were curtailed as well, but R. hoped to have provided the reader “with all necessary help for the understanding of the text” (xii). Ultimately, he defines his edition thus: it is a critical edition, except for the fact that it does not use all manuscripts, and the “editor does not belong to the severest critical school,” making eclectic judgments (xxxii, xxxiii), in fact echoing the critique of Joseph Bedier of strict Lachmannian stemmatics (Reinecke 239) and practicing a “best manuscript” approach. Almost 25 years later, in 1957, and long after he had retired from Harvard, R. published a second edition, in which he credits two publications for the bulk of his revisions: Sources and Analogues to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1941) and Manly’s and Rickert’s eight-volume edition of the CT (1940). R. did, however, not deviate from his method of “dealing with orthography, grammatical correctness, and such matters” because as he put it, “an editor cannot evade the responsibility of exercising his own judgment” (vii). Because of Manly and Rickert, R. reports to have changed two hundred readings “significant for sense, style, or metre” and listed them in the beginning of the textual notes (vii). R. rebuffs the Bradshaw shift and maintains the Ellesmere order of the CT as in the first edition. He made few changes to the text of Chaucer’s other works as well as their textual notes, but boasts of greatly expanded explanatory notes throughout, selectively incorporating new scholarship. The general introduction and the headnotes to the various works are reprinted with only minor factual revisions. Almost all assessment of R.’s scholarly significance and impact is focused on his “magisterial,” “monumental,” and definitive Chaucer edition (Bate, Shinagel, Engell 39; Baugh 661). Nevertheless, his essay, “Satirists and Enchanters in Early Irish Literature,” (Studies in the History of Religion, ed. D. G. Lyon and G. F. Moore [1912], 95–130) is still required reading in many courses on the Celtic Literary Tradition and was also reprinted by Chicago University Press (1960) and in The Bardic Source Book: Inspirational Legacy and Teachings of the Ancient Celts, ed. J. Matthews (1998; 134–58), and translated into Italian (La Satira, Storia, Techniche, e Ideologie [1979], 105–26). Despite the mixed reactions to R.’s edition of Chaucer’s works, it quickly established itself as the primary edition. German scholar A. Brandl fires the first salvo, lauding the introduction and notes, but criticizing the textual and linguistic aspects, especially that R. does not follow Lachmannian stemmatics in manuscript relationships (ASNSL 146 [1933]: 266–68), as does Hermann Heuer in Anglia Beiblatt (45 [1934]: 201–04). In his review of the 1933

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edition, J. S. P. Tatlock praises it as “the soundest, most stimulating, and most agreeable edition in existence, for both the general reader, the serious students, and proficient scholar. Few or none of us will live to see a better,” especially singling out the excellent text, commentary, and glossary, but faulting R. for not recognizing inaccuracies in the Chaucer Society’s printed editions of the manuscripts” (Speculum 9.4 [1934]: 459–64). Albert H. Marckwardt questions the order of the text in R., with the CT coming first (EJ 23 [1934]: 433–34). Mabel Day lauds R. as “most excellent” with extensive apparatus, and a concise introduction, but she finds the glossary lacking, inconsistent, and not totally up to date as (RES 11 [1935]: 346–47). Dorothy Everett predicts that R’s edition “will probably make the widest appeal” but cautions about R.’s method to adopt readings based on their metrical regularity (“Middle English,” YWES 14 [1933]: 103, 104). M. B. Ruud gives accolades to R. for preparing an edition for multiple audiences from the beginning student to the Chaucer scholar with model introductions, explanatory notes, and glossary, but less satisfactory textual notes and scribal variants from the Ellesmere (MLN 50 [1935]: 329–32). In 1938, Everett also did a lengthy review that accorded R.’s 1933 edition indispensable status for its reflection of modern-day scholarship, detailed commentary, and competent literary historicity. She was, however, highly critical of linguistic aspects, such as unexplained idiomatic expressions, false cognates, and crux passages, as well as glossary gaps and inconsistencies, and careless notes (MAE 7 [1938]: 204–13). The 1957 edition was greeted by Arthur Sale in the Cambridge Review with the reminder that the Cambridge Review had predicted that the 1933 edition would become the standard “for all serious students of Chaucer” (79.1921 [1958]: 233–35). Vernon P. Helming’s review in Speculum pointed out that R. had supplanted Skeat in scholarly papers citations and that the second edition was published from a “desire to make a good book better”; he does, however, not think that all of R.’s inclusions of Manly and Rickert variants improve the text (33.1 [1958]: 123–25). In 1985, N. F. Blake counted R.’s 1957 edition as one of the two most widely used editions of Chaucer’s CT in Britain (ix). Charles Moorman attributes this enormous success mainly to extra-textual aspects, such “a generally agreed-upon canon,” the helpfulness of the apparatus, and the textbook format (109). George Reinecke, R.’s former editorial assistant on the 1957 edition, postulates that the early resistance to R.’s becoming the standard came from four camps: R. contemporaries, who had not yet accepted his edition as standard; English scholars loyal to Skeat; scholars loyal to Manly and Rickert; and followers of Root’s edition of Troilus (237). The

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scholar most critical of R., and inherently of the 3rd edition – Larry D. Benson’s Riverside Chaucer (1987) – is Roy Vance Ramsey (1989, 1994). He considers R.’s edition to be flawed, arguing that R. did not emend from manuscript evidence but edited from Skeat’s 1894 edition of the CT and also based himself on Skeat’s glossary, merely respelling entries to reflect the spellings in the Ellesmere manuscript (“Editing” 140, 145, 146, 150). According to Ramsey, R. had access to manuscript photostats in the Harvard library but did not use them (Manly-Rickert 23). For better or worse, the R. editions live on in a number of other editions, of which the Riverside is one: others are the 1965 Cambridge editions of Maurice Hussey’s The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale and The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, A. C. Spearing’s The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, and James Winny’s The General Prologue; the Japanese translations of various CT by Michio Masui (1995); a slew of audio editions of various Chaucer works by Paul Piehler and Jess B. Bessinger (1962–1986) as well as a braille edition of Troilus and Criseyde (1971). Joseph A. Dane sums it up best: “The Riverside editors have not decided whether to depart absolutely from Robinson … the edition that by its very existence should supersede the authority of Robinson’s earlier editions has paradoxically transformed Robinson’s earlier text into a textual authority” (177). Select Bibliography Works: “Celtic Versions of Sir Beues of Hamtoun,” ESt 24 (1898): 463–64; “Two Fragments of an Irish Romance of the Holy Grail,” ZCPh 4 (1903): 381–93; “A Variant of the Gaelic ‘Battle of the Mantle,’” MP 1.1 (1903): 145–57; “A Note on the Sources of the Old Saxon Genesis,” MP 4.2 (1906): 389–96; “The Irish Lives of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton,” ZCPh 7 (1907–8): 25; ed. with E. S. Sheldon and W. A. Neilson, Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (1913); Human Sacrifice among the Irish Celts (1913); ed. with Max J. Herzberg, The Prologue, the Knight’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (1936); “Irish Proverbs and Irish National Character,” MP 43.1 (1945): 1–10; “The Irish Marginalia in the Drummond Missal,” Mediaeval Studies in Honor of J. D. M. Ford, ed. U. T. Holmes, Jr. and A. J. Denomy (1948), 193–208; The Wyf of Bath (1973). Literature: W. Jackson Bate, Michael Shinagel, and James Engell, “Fred N. Robinson 1871–1966,” Harvard Scholars in English, 1890–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 38–41; Albert C. Baugh, “Fifty Years of Chaucer Scholarship,” Speculum 26 (1951): 659–72; N. F. Blake, The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (London: Edward Arnold, 1985); Joseph A. Dane, “Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions,” Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991): 164–83; F. P. Magoun, Jr., B. J. Whiting, and H. M. Smyser, “Fred Norris Robinson,” Speculum 42.3 (1967): 591–92; Charles Moorman, “One Hundred Years of Editing the Canterbury Tales,” ChR 24.2 (1989): 100–14; George F. Reinecke, “F. N. Robinson,” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul. G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books,

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1984), 231–51; Roy Vance Ramsey, “F. N. Robinson’s Editing of the Canterbury Tales,” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 134–52; The Manly-Rickert Text of the Canterbury Tales (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 1994), 22–56, 589–601.

Anita Obermeier

Rougemont, Denis de (September 8, 1906, Couvet, Switzerland – December 6, 1985, Geneva), Swiss Writer. R.’s contribution to medieval studies consists primarily in his discussion of fin’amors and its relationship to the Cathar movement of the 12th and 13th centuries, the thesis of his work L’Amour et l’Occident, published in 1939. The history of the discussion of fin’amors or courtly love is a long one, beginning with Gaston Paris’s initiation of the latter term in his 1883 study of Lancelot ou le chevalier de la charrette. In Paris’s schema, courtly love positioned the Lady as the Knight’s moral superior, a woman to be adored as much as loved. A knight who truly submitted himself to his lady and to love would be ennobled and would become virtuous, even if the love in question was adulterous. Later scholars dismissed the concept of courtly love as anachronistic; others interpreted the poetry of unrequited love or adulterous love as mere poetic pretext or even as sublimated spiritual love. R.’s life embraced numerous careers and interests: teaching, lecturing, political activism and engagement, travel, writing (fiction, literary criticism, cultural studies, political analysis, translation), statesman. He studied at the University of de Neuchâtel from 1925–1927, where his professors included Max Niedermann and Piaget; then he enrolled for a year at the University of Vienna, followed by a year at the University of Geneva. He returned to the University of Neuchâtel to complete his licence in 1930 and a thesis on Bergson. His early career involved positions in publishing (Je Sers, Plans, Nouvelle Revue française) and political activism. He was affiliated with groups calling themselves “personnalistes,” known as Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, the same names being given to their journals. The “personnaliste” movement focused on the intersection between the individual and his/her community, producing a philosophy of political engagement well before Sartre’s use of the word in existentialist philosophy. R. took his first teaching position at the University of Frankfurt as an instructor of French for a year in 1935, and a few years later published his jour-

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nal describing the Nazi party during this period under the title of Journal d’Allemagne (Paris, 1938). Nicolas de Flue, R.’s dramatic text about a 15th-century Swiss hermit, set to music by Arthur Honegger, dates from 1938, the same year in which he wrote L’Amour et l’Occident. R. spent a year in the military (1939–1940), during which time he published articles as part of the resistance movement against Hitler. Discharged in August 1940, he left Switzerland to lecture in the US, residing alternately in New York and Princeton until 1947 when he returned to his homeland. In 1942–1943, R. worked for the Office of War Information as a director for the program La Voix de l’Amérique parle aux Français. This seven-year period in the U.S. saw the production of numerous political writings and his reception of the first award of the Bollingen-Foundation Fellowship (1944). In 1950, he became director of the newly formed Centre européen de la culture, and then, in 1954 director of the Foundation européenne de la culture, organizations which promote European unity on the basis of shared culture, rather than simply on economic exchange. In this capacity, R. organized and participated in numerous intellectual forums, councils, institutes and colloquia related to the arts in Europe. R. also promoted the idea of a Europe organized around regional identity rather than political or national affiliations, as he described in L’Un et le divers (Neuchâtel, 1970) and in Lettre ouverte aux Européens (Paris, 1970). He directed and taught the history of ideas at the Institut universitaire d’études européennes. While not specifically trained as a medievalist, R. saw Medieval romances and myths as pertinent to 20th-century attitudes and cultural identity, particularly with regards to the “crise moderne du mariage.” L’Amour et l’occident begins with an analysis of the all-consuming passion of the Tristan-and-Iseult myth which alternates between the consummation of an uncontrollable passion and then unwavering chaste love. R. then examines similar themes in troubadour poetry for which he specifically posits an eastern source: the Cathar sect, with its dogma based on Manichean principles. R. attenuates Otto Rahn’s 1934 suggestion that the troubadours were in fact themselves Cathars by proposing that the troubadour poetry was “au moins inspiré par l’atmosphère religieuse du catharisme.” Comme toi-même (1961; re-edited as Les Mythes de l’Amour in 1972) returns to the Tristan legend, applying it to 20th-century literature. Reaction to R.’s work on literature ranges from admiration to dismissal. François Saint-Ouenconsiders L’Amour et l’Occident to be a “monument d’érudition” (Denis de Rougemont, 1995). While the majority of R.’s oeuvre encompasses political and cultural studies, Dethurens sees L’Amour et l’Occident as an innovative study of Europe and its culture engendered by forbid-

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den, fatal love as described in the Tristan-Iseult legend, even as Huizinga studied late Medieval culture through the ludic, or Girard studied culture through the sacred and the profane (“Denis de Rougemont et l’amour de l’Occident,” Oeuvres et critiques [2002]: 249–57). In Dethurens’s analysis of L’Amour et l’Occident, this fascination with the Tristan story allows R. to address that concept which will become a major theme in his larger corpus: the evolution of personal and cultural identity as a consequence of the definition of love and marriage. That is, Europe identifies itself as a culture in large part because of a shared definition of a basic human relationship. In contrast to this enthusiastic reception, Roger Boase dismisses catharism as a direct cause of courtly love (The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship, 1977) in his overview of the evolution of the concept, placing R.’s thesis alongside that of Otto Rahn, whose work was also disputed. Literary critics such as D.W. Robertson, Jr. (“The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts,” The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F.X. Newman, 1968, 1–18), also dismissed the Manichean influence on the development of courtly love, a term he finds useless and anachronistic. Likewise, John F. Benton disputes connections between troubadours and Cathar ideologies (“Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love,” The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F.X. Newman, 1968, 19–42). Select Bibliography Works: L’Amour et l’Occident (1939, 1972); Nicolas de Flue, légende dramatique (1939); La Part du Diable (1942); Les Personnes du Drame (1944); L’Aventure occidentale de l’Homme (1957); Vingt-huit Siècles d’Europe: la conscience européenne à travers les textes d’Hésiode à nos jours (1961); Les Mythes de l’amour (1961). Literature: André Reszler and Henri Schwamm, Denis de Rougemont, l’écrivain, l’Européen: études et témoignages publiés pour le soixante-dixième anniversaire de Denis de Rougemont (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1976); François Saint-Ouen, Denis de Rougemont: Introduction à sa vie et son oeuvre (Geneva: Georg, 1995); Bruno Ackermann, Denis de Rougemont: une biographie intellectuelle (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1996); Pascal Dethurens, “Denis de Rougemont et l’amour de l’Occident,” Oeuvres et critiques 27 (2002): 249–57.

Linda Marie Rouillard

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Ruh, Kurt (May 5, 1914, Neuhausen, Switzerland – December 8, 2002, Veitshöchheim, Germany), Swiss Medievalist. 1. Following in the footprints of a few predecessors like Wolfgang Stammler, the Swiss medievalist R. opened up whole new fields for Medieval Studies. In his 1940 doctoral dissertation (“Der Passionstrakt des Heinrich von St. Gallen”), he took the first steps in the direction of “Überlieferungsgeschichte” and future studies of religious writings in prose – steps he widened with his much acclaimed “Habilitationsschrift” (“Bonaventura deutsch …”) in 1956. R.’s studies of religious and spiritual writings (both in Latin and in various European vernacular languages) culminated in his later years in his four-volume Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik (1990–1999). Especially his new interpretation of Meister Eckhart, concentrating both on his biography and his oeuvre (Meister Eckhart, 1985, 2nd ed. 1989) as well as on manuscript tradition (see his collection of the so-called Paradisus anime intelligentis), became enormously influential. R.’s editions, especially of Franciscan writings, brought forward new models of editing as well as new concepts of understanding vernacular sermons and prose-writings. The importance R. saw in medieval manuscript culture made him organize a new section of “newly discovered medieval manuscripts” in the ZfdA, which R. edited (as successor of Friedrich Ohly) from 1969 to 1985. From the start of his tenure as Chair of Medieval German Literature, department of German Philology at the University of Würzburg, R. launched (upon the initiation of the publishing house Walter de Gruyter) the 2nd edition of the Verfasserlexikon and acted as its main editor until 1985 (from the beginning being accompanied, and followed in this position, by Burghart Wachinger). The Verfasserlexikon – complete in 14 volumes by now – must rightfully be called the “Standardwerk” for every scholar who studies medieval German literature. When R. undertook the enormous task, it was he who laid the foundation for the then-new “erweiterter Literaturbegriff” (expanded concept of literature). Shortly after he had been called to serve as department head at the University of Würzburg, R. developed the new critical approach of “Überlieferungsgeschichte” (history of manuscript dissemination), which was pursued by the so-called “Würzburger Forschergruppe;” this group of scholars, led by R., developed methods of editing and studying literature similar to, and way ahead of, the so-called “New Philology” of later decades. Numerous

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studies devoted to these methods would be published in the series “Texte und Textgeschichte” and the “Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” where R. cooperated with and joined the theoretical implications of his friend and colleague Hugo Kuhn, whose chair at the University of Munich R. held by proxy in 1958/1959. While striving for a new and a much wider understanding of literature and manuscript culture, R. did by no means want to replace (or even underestimate) the “literary canon.” He initiated the Wolfram von Eschenbach Gesellschaft and acted as its first president from 1968 to 1974. His two-volume study, Höfische Epik des deutschen Mittelalters, written for students, sharpened the understanding of the structures of the courtly romances, as did his essays on Morungen’s “Tageliedwechsel,” Walther von der Vogelweide’s “Minnesang” and “Sangspruch” (see: Kleine Schriften, 1984). R. was the son of a Swiss teacher and musician, and was a member of the Protestant Church. He studied German and Romanic philology from 1933 until 1939, mostly at the University of Zürich, but also in Berlin and Rome. His doctoral thesis (Der Passionstraktat des Heinrich von St. Gallen, published in 1940) was supervised by Rudolf Hotzenköcherle. In the beginning of 1939, he graduated from the University of Zürich, and some months later passed the exam to teach at a high school (“Gymnasium”). From 1942 until 1958, he was a high school German teacher at Schiers/Graubünden. According to academic tradition in Switzerland, he wrote a “Habilitationsschrift” during these years, and in 1954 earned his habilitation at the University of Basel (Bonaventura deutsch: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Franziskaner-Mystik und -scholastik, published in 1956). From 1954 until 1958 he was “Privatdozent” at the University of Basel, but also continued to teach at his local school. After working for two years at the University of Munich, in 1960 he became a Full Professor (Ordinarius) of medieval German literature at the University of Würzburg, where he remained until his retirement (“Emeritierung”) in 1980. He received requests to teach at the universities of Bern (Switzerland) and Kiel (Germany), but declined both of them. For the next two decades after his retirement, R. continued his academic research, living near Würzburg. He died there on December 8, 2002. Some of R.’s best-known students and later colleagues deserve to be mentioned here: Volker Honemann, Dorothea Klein, Konrad Kunze, Freimut Löser, Volker Mertens, Karin Morvay, Georg Steer, and Werner Williams. During roughly 60 years, R. wrote and published an impressive number of monographs, editions, and articles. From the beginning of his academic career, medieval European mystics were the main topic of his research, but

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he also published important works about MHG lyrics and epics. A complete listing of his publications can be found in the brochure Zum Gedenken an Kurt Ruh (1914–2002), which was issued in 2002 by his most important publishing house, Walter de Gruyter (Berlin). Three ‘festschriften’ were dedicated to him: Medium aevum deutsch: Beiträge zur deutschen Literatur des hohen und späten Mittelalters. Festschrift für Kurt Ruh zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Dietrich Huschenbett, 1979; Überlieferungsgeschichtli-che Editionen und Studien zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Kurt Ruh zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Konrad Kunze, 1989; and Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Editionen und Studien zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Kurt Ruh zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Konrad Kunze, Johannes G. Mayer, and Bernhard Schnell, 1989. In 1967 and 1980, R. published two volumes, Höfische Epik des deutschen Mittelalters, which have been regarded as an outstanding survey of MHG courtly romances from the beginning through the early 13th century. His numerous articles were collected in two volumes: Kleine Schriften, ed. Volker Mertens (1984); volume I presents papers about lyrics and epics written between the 12th and 15th centuries, volume II contains articles about scholastic and mystical writings of the late Middle Ages. Volume II consists of 17 articles, selected from a total of 71, among them papers about Thomas Aquinas, Heinrich von St. Gallen, Nikolaus von Flüe, Berthold von Regensburg, Heinrich Seuse, female mystic authors (Mechthild von Magdeburg and others), and Meister Eckart. Beginning in 1985, R. wrote and published a significant series of five books about medieval European mystics: Meister Eckhart: Theologe. Prediger. Mystiker (1985); and Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, vols. I–IV (I: Die Grundlegung durch die Kirchenväter und die Mönchstheologie des 12. Jahrhunderts, 1990; II: Frauenmystik und Franziskanische Mystik der Frühzeit, 1993; III: Die Mystik des deutschen Predigerordens und ihre Grundlegung durch die Hochscholastik, 1996; IV: Die niederländische Mystik des 14. – 16. Jahrhunderts, 1999); most of them were translated into Italian (1989, 1995, 2002), the monograph about Meister Eckhart also into French (1997). R. further edited several editions of mystical writings, and he revised an older edition of the courtly novella, Die Märe vom Helmbrecht von Wernher dem Gartenaere (1960–1968). His papers about courtly literature deal with Heinrich von Morungen (1944), Lancelot (1959, 1975, 1982), Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Armer Heinrich (1965, 1971), ‘Spruchdichtung’ (1968), Moriz von Craun (1970), the Neidhart-songs of ms. R (1974), Wolfram von Eschenbach (1974, 1975, 1989), Heinrich Wittenwiler (1978, 1984), heroic poetry (1977), and Walther von der Vogelweide (1980/1981, 1985, 1989). Of utmost importance is R.’s academic work as an organizer: the “Würz-

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burger Forschergruppe,” the journal Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur (1969–1985), and, above all, the 2nd edition of the Verfasserlexikon (Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 14 vols., 1978–2008; since 1995 together with Burghart Wachinger), the superior encyclopedia of medieval German (and partly also medieval Latin) authors and works. 2. Although R.’s “dissertation” consisted – which is not always recognized – in large parts of studies on medieval German language and dialects of writing, and his first series of academic lectures were given in Munich in 1958/1959 on the “Grammar of Middle High German Language and Syntax”; a knowledge and understanding of Middle High German (and its regional variations) and Old High German, or “Frühneuhochdeutsch,” was something R. expected of all of his students. Although he did not go into linguistic studies. He also did not enjoy theories. Being a contemporary (and colleague) of Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, and others, R. did not write about “Rezeptionsästhetik,” the role of the reader, or structuralism, at the same time knowing perfectly well that his view of “Überlieferungsgeschichte,” the Arthurian novel and even mysticism had much in common with these then-leading theories. For R., making use of the methods of Lachmann was legitimate as long as the manuscripts were not just used to reconstruct originals, but were studied as literary testimonies in their own right and history. His philological premise was not a starting point for elaborate theories, but for short statements formulated in the founding manisfesto of the Würzburger Forschergruppe (1973), and also in an essay on “Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Prosaforschung” (Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Prosaforschung: Beiträge der Würzburger Forschergruppe zur Methode und Auswertung, ed. R., 1985). Some members of the Forschergruppe (such as his former assistant Georg Steer) have developed these theories in more detail. Brevity and clarity of expression (some of his students mistook these ideals as stern) were always characteristic of R. as a teacher. He was fascinated by his fields of study and was able to fascinate others. Nobody who heard him talk about Meister Eckhart or Gottfried’s Tristan, or who followed him into Dante’s Inferno during the lectures he gave three times a week at 8 a.m., will ever forget. A Swiss living in Franconia, having studied French and Italian literature as well, R. always considered his field of studies as European based on Latinity (English always remained somewhat alien to him). The academic honors awarded him are reflections of this European and more-than “germanistisch” leaning: Dr. theol. honoris causa at Uppsala 1986 and at Tübingen (Catholic Theology) 1964. Given his interest in Hadewijch and Ruusbroec, becoming a member of the Koninklijke Academie voor Neder-

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landse Taal- en Letterkunde at Gent in 1984 was a special honor to R., as well as his membership of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (from 1979) or the “Brüder-Grimm-Preis” in 1981. Of the Festschriften presented to him, the last one in 1989, presented on the occasion of his 75th birthday, contains studies on text transmissions and interpretations by R.’s friends, colleagues and students. All these academic honors are but reflections of his influence in academia. Never acting alone, but often enough being the main advocate for his and his colleagues’ new ideas, R. established a widened understanding of literature (“erweiterter Literaturbegriff”) and made sure to settle the ground for future investigations into hitherto neglected (or even unknown) texts (Verfasserlexikon). In this process he developed the method of “Überlieferungsgeschichte,” thus being able to close the gap between “Lachmannians” and “New Philologists,” even long before the latter emerged in the late 1980s. R. laid the ground for studies of religious vernacular prose writings not only in German, but also in Dutch and Italian, demonstrating at the same time the connections between Latin authors and vernacular writings (Abendländische Mystik). By acknowledging the “Mehrwert der Volkssprache” (‘surplus’ of the vernacular) as used by the German mystics, R. laid claim to a new hierarchy of religious-literary texts. By transposing the phrase of “Sitz im Leben” (location in real life) to medieval German literature he showed ways of connecting the history/histories of literature with religion, philosophy, and society. Ironically, he was an academic revolutionary who loved the tradition. Select Bibliography Works: Franziskanisches Schrifttum im deutschen Mittelalter, 2 vols. (1965, 1985); Höfische Epik des deutschen Mittelalters, 2 vols. (1967–1980); Kleine Schriften, ed. Volker Mertens, 2 vols. (1984); Meister Eckart (1988, 2nd ed. 1989); Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, 4 vols. (1990–1999). Literature: Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd rev. ed., 14 vols., ed. Kurt R. et al. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1978–2008); Kleine Schriften, vol. I: Dichtung des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters; vol. II: Scholastik und Mystik im Spätmittelalter, ed. Volker Mertens (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984). For a complete bibliography, including articles about R. as scholar, academic teacher, and organizer, see: Zum Gedenken an Kurt Ruh (1914–2002), ed. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002); and Kurt Ruh, “Ruh, Kurt,” IGL, vol. 3, 1540–42 (also available as a CD-ROM).

Freimut Löser (2.) and Ulrich Müller (1.)

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Runciman, Sir Steven (July 7, 1903, Northumberland – November 1, 2000), Crusade Historian. R. is one of the best-known British historians of the 20th century. This is especially the case among laymen who were first introduced to the history of the crusades through R.’s three-volume work published in the 1950s. R. himself claimed that he earned even more for Cambridge University Press, “than any author except God” (Anthony Bryer, “James Cochrane Stevenson Runciman (1903–2000),” Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honor of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, 2006, xli). At his death in 2000, twenty of his twenty-seven books were still in print in English. Along with his tremendous popularity, R. is important for his effort to provide the student of the crusades with a Byzantine perspective. Besides his Crusade studies he published respected works in Byzantine history. He was considered to be the British doyen of Byzantine studies. He focused scholarly attention on the importance of Byzantium for the development of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Fundamentally dissatisfied with what he considered overspecialization and concentration on historical minutia, R. believed, “that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man” (A History of the Crusades, vol. 1, 1951). This in fact meant a commitment to narrative history. R. was also committed to making available history previously inaccessible to an English-speaking audience. R. was born James Cochran Stevenson R. in 1903 into a parliamentary family. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1921, with a double first in history. The first and only postgraduate student of J.B. Bury, he was a fellow at Trinity from 1927 to 1938, and university lecturer from 1932 to 1938. In 1938 the inheritance from his grandfather enabled him to choose to become an independent scholar. From 1940 to 1947, he was in government service in Sofia, Cairo, and Jerusalem. From 1942 to 1945, he held the first chair of Byzantine art and history at of the University at Istanbul. This would be his last academic post except for an honorary fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1965. He was elected fellow of the British Academy in 1957. R. was a member of Greek Order of the Phoenix in 1961, and of the Bulgarian Madara Horsemen; in 1969 he was named the Grand Orator of the Great Church of Constantinople, the senior lay position in the patriarch’s synod. He won the Wolfson Literary Award in 1982, the David Livingstone medal in 1992, the Onassis Prize for Culture in 1997, and was the holder of a number of honorary doctorates. Steven R. was knighted in

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1958. After publishing the History of the Crusades, R. spent much of time engaged in a series of distinguished lectures: the Wayneflete lectures at Oxford in 1953–1954, the Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews between 1960–1962, and the Birbeck lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1966. Some of these lectures were turned into books. He also became the patron, president, trustee or advisor to numerous organizations and institutions such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was at various times president of the Society for the promotion of Byzantine Studies, and vice president of the London Library and the Royal Historical Society among other organizations. As a historian R. generally avoided monographs, opting instead for narrative history with wider appeal than works geared toward specialists. R.’s first work, The Emperor Romanus Lacapenus and His Reign (1929), was based on his fellowship thesis at Cambridge. It was a comprehensive political study of a little known period and served to revive interest in Byzantine studies at this time. Significantly, the sources used were mainly from Greek chronicles nearly all published in the Corpus Scriptum Historiae Byzantinae or in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. This reliance on published sources would prove to be a characteristic feature of R.’s work. The Emperor Romanus was soon followed by The First Bulgarian Empire (1930), which provided the reader of English with material previously available only to those familiar with one or more Slavic languages. Byzantine Civilization (1933) was the first short book in English to cover the main features of this civilization. R. relied on modern authorities. This work has been widely read and often reprinted. In 1947 he published The Medieval Manichee, a broad work tracing the movement of dualist religious thought through Byzantium, the Balkans, and northern Italy into France where it became the basis of Catharism. The work stimulated interest in the origins of this heresy. R. is best known for his A History of the Crusades, which was published in three Volumes: Volume I, The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951); Volume II, The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187 (1952); and Volume III, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954). It was the first large-scale scholarly work on the subject in English, and it exerts perhaps a greater influence on general knowledge of the Crusades than any other. This substantial narrative history, written from a Byzantine perspective, is told mainly from a political point of view. R. contends that the Crusades were a complete failure. His conclusion was that the Crusades, “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.” A similar doleful opinion is asserted in the preface to The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (1965), “In this story the Greek people is the tragic hero.” The Eastern Schism (1955) also demonstrates R.’s

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penchant for political history, this time in lieu of law and theology. The Sicilian Vespers (1958) sheds light on politics and diplomacy in the 13th-century Mediterranean world. In 2001 at a Crusader Congress at Zaragoza honoring his continuing value as a narrative historian of the Crusades, Bernard Hamilton maintained that the efforts of R. ensured that, “we cannot now ignore the Byzantine dimension,” of the Crusading movement, as well as reminding us to “think of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as closely linked to the Latin Empire of Constantinople and to the other states of Frankish Greece” (Anthony Bryer, “James Cochran Stevenson Runciman (1903–2000),” Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honor of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, 2006, xxxix-lv, xliv). R. was a Byzantinist. He maintained an admiration for the East, from which, “all the fundamental elements of our civilization came” (Constable, 2003). He is widely admired for his narrative skill. However, his rather narrow range of sources has been commented on. R. was always content to utilize printed sources, specifically from chronicles. He was neither an archivist nor an archaeologist. Thus one finds topics such the art and architecture of outremer examined in nineteen pages in volume three of A History of the Crusades. The same volume contains a discussion of commerce in sixteen pages. Intellectual life is confined to four pages in Appendix II. In contrast, volume 4 of A History of the Crusades (1977) is devoted to art and architecture. Part of this, shift is due to the Setton projects’ use of specialists in its presentation as well as the general advancement of knowledge concerning the period. Nevertheless, in his study of the crusades R. is committed to politics and war. Thus more recent contributions to the study of Crusade history have expanded the parameters established by R. There has also been a refocus of attention away from Byzantium as indicated by Paul Magadalino (The Byzantine Background to the First Crusade, 1996, 1). While R. made Byzantium an integral part of the crusading movement, arguing for an important role played by Emperor Alexios I in initiating the Crusades, as well as acting as advisor and aid to the crusaders themselves, some recent historians have taken a different path. In Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, 1986, Alexios played a less crucial role. Riley-Smith also questions how much Urban II was concerned with Byzantine relations. John France, in Victory in the East: a Military History of the First Crusade (1994), argues that Alexios did little to assist the Crusade. In works by historians such as these the role of Byzantium itself in the Crusading movement is considerably reduced. There is little Byzantine content in (The Oxford History of the Crusades, 1995) which was edited by Riley-Smith. A second way in which historians of the Crusades have moved away from the R. position is with regard to their

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general opinion of the Crusades themselves. Historians of the Crusades are now often far less negative of the movement’s effects than R. Thus Peter Locke (The Routledge Companion to the Crusades, 2006, 442), maintains that the Crusades, “were a very positive series of events involving adaptation, invention and innovation on the part of a significant group in western society.” They also served to restrain the advance of Islam into southeast Europe. In the final analysis, these are representative of views held by historians studying the Crusades from a western perspective. Byzantinists, though perhaps less negative than R., still maintain a far less sanguine attitude to the enterprise. The Medieval Manichee is a typical R. work of great range. Although it is accepted that there are Eastern filiations for dualism in the West, these are difficult to prove. Much recent research has been directed toward an internal development of heresy. It is possible to associate the origins of Catharism in puritanical reform movements within the Latin church (George H. Shriver, “A Summary of Images of the Cathars and the Historian’s Task,” Church History 40.1 [1971]: 48–54, here 49).While R.’s Eastern Schism characteristically concentrates on politics behind the breach, Francis Dvornik’s (Byzantium and the Roman Primacy, 1966) is a more in-depth study of ideas and attitudes which provides a fuller background to the controversy. Select Bibliography Works: The Emperor Lecapenus and his Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium (1929); A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (1930); Byzantine Civilization (1933); The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (1947); A History of the Crusades, vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951); A History of the Crusades, vol. 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187 (1952); A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954); The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Church during the Xiith and Xiiith Centuries (1955); The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958); The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (1965). Literature: Anthony Bryer, “James Cochran Stevenson Runciman (1903–2000),” Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honor of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xxxix–lv; Giles Constable, “Sir Steven Runciman,” PAPS Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 147.1 (March, 2003): 96–101.

Robert W. Zajkowski

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S

Sapegno, Natalino (November 10, 1901, Aosta, Italy – April 11, 1990, Rome), Italian Literary Historian and Critic. Born in Aosta (northwest of Turin) in 1901 of a Piedmontese father, Giuseppe Sapegno, and Aostan mother, Maria Luisa Viora, S. spent his earlier years between Aosta and Turin, finally settling down in Aosta before the start of the First World War to attend the local “Liceo Classico.” In 1918, S. moved back to Turin to attend university courses. During his college years, he became close friends with his contemporary, journalist and publisher Piero Gobetti and with Gobetti’s circle of intellectuals (especially Fubini, Antonicelli, De Benedetti, Carlo Levi), and he actively contributed to Gobetti’s journals. This intellectual environment marked the first significant stage of S.’s critical and philosophical training, and would leave a longlasting imprint on his literary and cultural education. After graduating in 1922, he maintained his assiduous frequentation of the intellectuals of the Gobetti circle, collaborated with La Rivoluzione liberale and Il Baretti, and (until 1931) with the Florentine La Nuova Italia and Leonardo (in which he published, among others, his reviews of the poems of Sbarbaro, Saba, Montale). The death of Gobetti in Paris (1926) and the publication by the Edizioni del Baretti (Torino) of S.’s degree dissertation the same year (Frate Jacopone, 1926) marked the conclusion of S.’s personal frequentation of the Gobetti circle. Meanwhile, in 1924, he had published with the Turinese publisher G. B. Paravia an edition and translation of Molière’s L’avare, which witnessed S.’s interest for European literature, further shown by the articles which later appeared in several literary journals. In the same year, he was appointed to the post of teacher of Italian in the “Istituto Tecnico” (upper secondary technical school) of Ferrara, where he would remain until 1936. After getting the “libera docenza” (Italian university teaching qualification, no more in use since 1970) in the Università di Padova (1930), and being forced by the events to swear loyalty to the Fascist regime, he was first employed by the Università di Palermo (1936) and then by the Università di Roma (“La Sapienza”) in 1937, where he would remain until 1976, the year of his retirement. He spent

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the last fourteen years of his life writing critical essays for specialist and nonspecialist journals, and revising his larger works. The Turinese period and S.’s first teaching appointments and critical works belong to the Crocean phase of his education and scholarship, witnessed by the monograph on Jacopone, the volume Il Trecento for the Storia letteraria d’Italia (1933), and the Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana (3 vols., 1936, 1941, 1947), a model for Italian literary history ever since. Through Croce’s scholarship, S. and the intellectuals brought up between the university and the Gobetti circle could gradually overcome the positivistic – and purportedly scientific – approach to literary analysis introduced by the founder of the “historical method,” Arturo Graf, and developed by his followers, university professors and co-founders of the academic journal Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, Rodolfo Renier and Vittorio Cian. But Croce would not represent a point of arrival, neither for S., nor for his fellow scholars. S., imbued with the anti-dogmatic approach to Croce taken by the members of the Gobetti circle, aimed at the renewal of Croce’s aesthetics in a direction anticipated by De Sanctis, and later developed by Gramsci from a Marxist standpoint. Croce’s essays on aesthetics, poetry and literature widely influenced S.’s critical views before and after his work on Jacopone; however S. himself was well aware that the Crocean method, flexible by its very nature (see Croce’s Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, 1929–1932), would allow further historicistic developments. This is expressed, for example, in this statement of 1977: “Io non rinnegavo affatto, neppure allora la sostanza dell’insegnamento crociano; e il marxismo era per me una convinzione maturata su tutt’altro terreno, e non certo un metodo nuovo di critica letteraria, tutt’al più un ulteriore conforto all’esigenza storicistica, nel senso desanctisiano, che mi era stata presente in ogni tempo” (“Croce e la mia generazione,” Pagine di storia letteraria [1986]: 205–07; “Not even in that moment [1952, with the publishing of an anthology of 14th-century poets criticized by Croce] did I repudiate the essence of Crocean teaching. Rather than seeking a new method of literary criticism, my Marxism was based on an utterly different ground, further corroborating – in De Sanctis’s sense – my ever-present historicistic need,” my own trans.). Such a statement reveals that Croce’s idealistic view of literature had not been rejected in S.’s work, but it needed nonetheless to be revisited, not only in the light of Gobetti’s antidogmatism, but also through a careful rereading of De Sanctis’s Saggio sul Petrarca and Storia della Letteratura Italiana, to which S. provided new critical introductions respectively in 1952 and 1958. From the volume on the Italian Trecento up to the mid-50s, S. had applied his critical method to the analysis of the ‘minor’ works of the Italian “three crowns,” Dante, Petrarch,

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and Boccaccio. The first editions of a selection from Petrarch’s Latin and vernacular works (then included in the enlarged edition of Petrarch’s Rime, Trionfi e Poesie Latine, ed. by Neri-Martellotti-Bianchi-Sapegno, 1951), Boccaccio’s Decameron and minor works (complete editions would appear in 1952 and 1956), and some novellieri of the Trecento (Sacchetti, Sercambi) all date from 1936–1939. Along the same aesthetic lines, in 1949 appeared another work of literary history, the Disegno storico della letteratura italiana. The critical essays appeared between 1945–1949 and the early 1950s are marked by an increased attention to authors from the second half of the 18th to the 20th century (Alfieri, Leopardi, Manzoni, Carducci), but in this decade certainly stands out the commentary to the Commedia (1955–1957), in which the scholarship of De Sanctis allowed in S.’s criticism “ulteriore conforto all’esigenza storicistica.” The new commentary, unlike contemporary Dantean criticism still prone to Crocean aesthetics (e. g., Momigliano’s commentary to the Commedia), was intended to set the geographical, historical and social contexts of Dante’s work, while offering a solid philological presentation and interpretation of the text. S.’s commentary was inspired by “il fermo proposito di rinunciare del tutto a quel modo di illustrazione cosiddetta estetica che oggi è d’uso, tutto inteso a […] distinguere, come si dice, la poesia dalla non-poesia” (“the firm purpose to reject utterly the contemporary so-called aesthetic criticism, single-mindedly aimed to distinguish between poetry and non-poetry”; my own trans.) In other words, S.’s analysis was conducted both inside (philology, aesthetics) and outside the text (geography, history, society), in order to avoid “un modo di lettura frammentaria ed estetizzante, tutta affidata al gusto e povera di senso storico e filologico, e cioè intimamente falsa e diseducativa” (a critical reading which is fragmentary, aestheticizing and solely inspired by personal taste; historically and philologically poor, i. e., intrinsically fake and misleading,” my own trans.) (La Divina Commedia, ed. by N.S., vol. 1, Inferno [1955], VIII–IX). Such a historicistic position, further developed in its social and political implications, would then lead S. to accept the Marxist theories on politics and society presented in Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (first edition 1947–1951, then 1949–1953). S.’s essays of the early sixties may well illustrate “una convinzione maturata su tutt’altro terreno”, the new Marxist position taken by the scholar (e. g., the introduction to I promessi sposi, 1960; Ritratto di Manzoni e altri saggi, 1961; several articles then collected in the 1986 edition of the Pagine di storia letteraria). S.’s Marxism was in fact founded on an utterly different ground from literary analysis. Strictly speaking, it never aimed to represent “un metodo nuovo di critica letteraria.” This, in the short term, would lead to S.’s undermining of his own Marxist standpoint, witnessed by the lec-

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ture delivered at the conference Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea (1967; published in the conference proceedings as Gramsci e i problemi della letteratura, 1969), which marked a rediscovery of Croce and De Sanctis. According to S., they were genuinely concerned, unlike Gramsci, with the literary phenomenon itself. Meanwhile, a Storia letteraria del Trecento had been published in 1963. This new book, partly coming from the histories published in 1933 and 1936, eventually resulted in a critically and historically more accomplished work, obtained through a new reading of 14th-century literature in the light of De Sanctis’s, Croce’s, and Gramsci’s analyses. On the side of literary criticism, the years 1960–1965 witnessed a recurring interest in the life and works of Petrarch. The offprint Francesco Petrarca (from Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. 2) dates 1965, as do the volumes La poesia del Petrarca and Commento alle Rime. In 1965 the publisher Garzanti appointed S. and Emilio Cecchi as editors of the comprehensive work Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1965–1969, 9 vols.). S.’s last literary history is the 1968 Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, written together with Walter Binni. After his retirement from academic teaching (1976), throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, he contributed to literary history and criticism with several articles and essays for newspapers and literary journals, and with the revision and new editions of his major works. In 1978, he edited with Gorizio Viti I promessi sposi. S.’s scholarship has influenced Italian literary criticism before and after the Second World War. His original re-reading of Crocean aesthetics through De Sanctis’s historicism and Gramsci’s social views has undoubtedly represented a fundamental turning point for Italian literary critics and historians, as witnessed by the twelve updated reprints of the monograph Il Trecento, and the three editions of the volumes of his Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana. On the side of literary history, in particular, S.’s work still represents a point of arrival and unquestionable milestone for contemporary historians. His literary criticism, on the contrary, raises a few issues about the social and political views influencing and often biasing the critic’s judgment at the stage of his 19th- and 20th-century studies. Even his renowned commentary to the Commedia, still a part of several school programs, is not entirely exempt from some outdated critical results and perspectives (Florence as the writing location of the first seven cantos; an underevaluation of Dante’s mystical perspectives). Finally, as far as his assessment of the Otto-Novecento is concerned, the Croce-Gobetti-De Sanctis-Gramsciline seems not to have led S. to an impartial and exhaustive standpoint upon several poets and prose writers such as (in order of record) Belli, Saba, Porta (1946), Pascoli (1955), Manzoni, Carducci, Alfieri, Leopardi, (essays appeared between 1947 and 1954, then collected, with some changes, in Ritratto di Manzoni e altri saggi, 1961), and

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D’Annunzio (1963). In other words, the most conspicuous and significant literature of the Otto-Novecento (with no exception for Ungaretti and Montale’s poetry or Svevo and Pirandello’s prose) was – narrowly – judged either solely for its social-historical implications (Manzoni, Carducci, Alfieri, Leopardi) or from an exclusively organic and historicist perspective, rather than for its own intrinsic value of witness to a psychological change of a generation at the turn of the 20th century. This flaw had been indirectly admitted by S. himself during the conference Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea (1967), and the issue was then explained and developed in the 1970/80s by a group of younger critics (Renato Barilli, Giorgio BarberiSquarotti, Nino Borsellino), suggesting that a viable approach to 19th- and 20th-century literature consisted in fact in the interpreting of the failure of any organic and totalizing view of reality. On the medieval side of S.’s literary historiography and criticism, especially as far as the Trecento is concerned, numerous are the scholars who pointed out and outlined S.’s groundbreaking post-Crocean results. Among them we ought to mention Bonora and Pozzi in S.’s obituary (Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 168.541 [1991]: 625), together with the chapters by Bonora, Tartaro and Ricciardi in the three-part conference proceedings volume Letteratura e critica. Esperienze e forme del ’900, Atti del Convegno in onore di N.S., Saint Vincent-Aosta, 30/09–03/10/1991 (1993). A specific up-to-date collection of studies on S.’s edition of the Commedia is available in Il Dante di Sapegno nella critica del Novecento: lezioni Sapegno 2001, ed. by Maria Corti, Dante Della Terza, and Guglielmo Gorni (2002). S.’s position within contemporary Italian literary criticism is outlined by Mario Barenghi in Carlo Muscetta, La critica italiana moderna e contemporanea (1994), 4 vols.; vol. IV, 47–54. For a sound and revealing analysis of S.’s Turinese years, with an interesting outlook on S.’s relation with the Florentine avant-garde (Papini, Prezzolini) and his standpoint in the Croce-Gentile debate, see Carlo Dionisotti, Natalino Sapegno dalla Torino di Gobetti alla cattedra romana (1994). Select Bibliography A useful general guide to S.’s life and works, in which may be found a variety of differently oriented critical views is Letteratura e critica: Esperienze e forme del ’900, Atti del Convegno in onore di N.S. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993). See in particular 3–13, 43–61, 63–81, 119–31, 133–40, 149–62, 231–52, and 267–75; for an updated reference survey of S.’s life and works, see http://www.sapegno.it/biografia.html (last accessed on Nov. 16, 2008), edited by the Centro Studi Storico-letterari “Natalino Sapegno,” Aosta. A bibliography of S.’s studies up to 1978 may be found in the vol. 5 of Letteratura e critica: Studi in onore di N.S. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974–1979), 5 vols., 1–25. Outside Italy, scholars evaluated S.’s major works in two book reviews (respectively on the edition of the Com-

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media and on the Compendio and Disegno storico) and one essay on his overall critical work: Lienhard Bergel in Italica 34, 2 (1957): 116–18; Umberto Mariani in The Modern Language Journal 51. 5 (1967): 310–12; Olga Ragusa, “Italian Criticism since Croce,” Contemporary Literature 9. 4 (1968): 473–91. S.’s lectures on Dante delivered abroad, witnessing his views on contemporary Dantean criticism are collected in Introduzione alla Divina Commedia: le lezioni di Cambridge e di Yale, ed. by Bruno Germano; pref. by Giuseppe Mazzotta (Turin: N. Aragno, 2002).

Enrico Santangelo

Sapori, Armando (July 11, 1892, Siena – March 6, 1976, Milan), Italian Medievalist and Historian (Economic History). S. studied at the University of Florence, and early on he worked as a journalist in his hometown, Siena. After S. had obtained his doctorate in law, he started a career as an archivist-paleographer in the Archivio di Stato of Florence, an ideal opportunity for a young researcher. During his time as an archivist (1921–1932), he published many articles on political and literary history and developed an interest in economic history. His first university chair he held in Ferrara (1932–1935), then he moved to Florence, where he stayed for 27 years until his retirement. He also held a lectureship at the Bocconi Commercial University of Milan and was elected president of that institution from 1952 to 1967; in 1956 he became member of the Accademia dei Lincei. S., who already during the war had come in contact with groups of resistance, was also influential in Italy’s political life with his antifascist position for a long time and as an independent member of the Left; he was a senator from 1948 to 1953. Writing until the end of his life, he died in Milan on March 6, 1975. S.’s first articles focused on political and literary history, such as “Gli italiani in Polonia nel Medioveo,” Archivio storico italiano serie VII, 83 (1925): 125–55; “or “Rassegna delle pubblicazioni danteschi italiane del secentenario,” Studi su Dante e rassegna bibliografica del secentenario (1921), 177–282. In these years, he already specialized in economic history. His preparatory article on late-medieval companies, such as the Bardi and Peruzzi in England, constituted the basic research for his volume La crisi delle compagnie mercantili dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi (1926), which paved the way to his university career. The

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bibliography of his publications, compiled by his daughter in 1963, listed 146 items, including reviews and speeches, and reflects his extraordinary range of activities. One of the main sources of his studies were the books of accounts and manuscripts with commercial references kept in different archives and libraries. Many of his articles and books deal with Tuscan merchants, bankers, craftsmen, and their business companies, such as the Bonsignori, Bardi, Peruzzi, del Bene, Frescobaldi, Medici, etc. Already in his first study he was able to show how these companies and bankers were forced to safeguard directly or indirectly the political control for the maintenance and extension of their commercial power. He analyzed the function of payment, established a list of relevant economic factors and dependants of the companies, because each statistical aspect indicated the evidence of the degree of the organization or the modernity of each singular commercial enterprise of the Italian municipality in the 13th century. He published his research on municipal merchants and their properties in the area surrounding Florence in Mutui dei mercanti fiorentini (1928). In his study Una Compagnia di Calimala ai primi del Trecento (1932), S. perfectly documented the activity of a Florentine merchant – particularly the merchant’s relations with the markets of the Ponente. Besides the trade with French cloth, the company of Calimala also did dye-works as a sort of secondary activity. Continuing his research in economic history, S. showed that the trading organization of the Gianfiliazzi and the Alberti del Giudice mainly concentrated their business and administration in the area of the Arno and the Apennines. All these studies have been fundamental for his publication Studi di storia economica medievale (1940), reprinted a number of times. After the war, S. turned toward the period before and after Lorenzo il Magnifico, and in 1949, he unearthed the extensive economic network of this family in La Banca Medici. His richly illustrated volume on Mercatores (1952) was translated into German and French. This volume showed, on the basis of extensive documentation, several aspects of merchant culture, like commercial relationships, social and cultural life as well as religious and political sentiments. In his articles “Un bilancio domestico a Firenze alla fine del Dugento,” La Bibliografia 30 [1928]: 210–33); and “Case e botteghe a Firenze nel Trecento: La rendita della proprietà fondiaria,” Rivista di storia economica IV.2 [1939]: 97–132), S. illustrated the costs of living and the purchasing power of money; and in his study “La fiera di Salerno del 1478”, he illustrated the difference between a market and a fair from a legal and economic point of view. Many of his studies, presenting his understanding of personalities, organizations, the geographic and economic development and culture of the medieval Italian business world, were collected in three large

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volumes, Studi di storia economica (1956–1965). Some of the best essays tackle controversial problems, such as religion and morality of merchants, or the medieval origin of the Renaissance and the Renaissance crises. From quite early on, S. was respected and admired by international scholars. In 1957 the Mélanges were published in his honor, in which he was presented as an authentic heir of Henri Pirenne and Marc Bloch. A remarkable portrait of S. was drawn up by Lucien Febvre, who wrote this as one of his last papers. The high regard toward him was expressed during the public presentation of this volume, in which the most famous colleagues who had contributed claimed that S. was a humanist in the total sense of the term. French universities expressed their esteem for S. in Poitiers in 1950 and at the Sorbonne in 1960, and during those occasions these honors were bestowed upon him as a result of the nomination by his friend Renouard. Moreover, S. received several doctorates honoris causa. As a scholar as well as a person, he had a high sense of duty, not only on the intellectual side of his research, but also with respect to his identification with his own country. In some ways he showed his vision in his books Mondo finito (1946) and Cose che capitano (1971). In his accounts, which were sometimes witty but always very expressive, he presented the historical facts in their simplicity, but without missing their context. With his ability to connect teaching and research he created a sort of ethics of professorship and was well received by the students. He presented his world-view in his only study of a general theme in Esame di coscienza di uno storico (1965), in which he described the work of an historian as the work of intelligence, and that the intelligence of one person could never be identical with that of another. Further, he explained that there never must be asked more from a document than it contains. In his opinion, historical research depends always on the historian and above all on his sensibility. Select Bibliography Works: Studi su Dante e rassegna bibliografica del secentenario,” Studi su Dante e rassegna bibliografica del secentenario (1921), 177–282; “Gli italiani in Polonia nel Medioveo,” Archivio storico italiano 83 (1925): 125–55; “La beneficienza delle compagnie mercantili del Trecento,” Archivio storico italiano 83 (1925): 251–72; “Un bilancio domestico a Firenze alla fine del Dugento,” Bibliofilia 30 (1928): 210–33; “L’interesse del denaro a Firence nel Trecento, dal testamento di un usuraio,” Archivio storico italiano 86 (1928): 161–86; “Un fiorentino bizzarro alla corte di Borgogna: Scaglia Tifi,” Archivio storico italiano 89 (1931): 49–84; La crisi delle compagnie mercantili dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi, 1926; Una Compagnia di Calimala ai primi del Trecento, 1932; “La cultura del mercante medievale italiano,” Rivista di storia economica 2 (1937): 89–125; “Case e botteghe a Firenze nel Trecento: La rendità della proprietà fondiaria,” Rivista di storia economica 4 (1939): 97–132; Studi di storia economia medievale, 1940; “La Banca Medici,” Moneta e credito, rivista trimestrale della Banca nazionale del lavoro 8 (1949): 420–31; Mercatores, 1942; “L’evol-

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uzione mercantile della nobiltà italiana nel Medioevo,” Rivista del diritto commerciale e del diritto generale delle obbligazioni 42 (1944): 3–18; “Le compagnie italiane in Inghilterra, secoli XIII–XV,” Moneta e credito, rivista trimestrale della Banca nazionale del lavoro 12 (1950): 389–408; “La fiera di Salerno del 1478,” Bolletino dell’Archivio storico del Banca di Napoli 2 (1954): 51–84; Studi di storia economia, 1940; 3rd ed. 1955–1967); “Il ‘bilancio’ della filiale di Roma del banco Medici del 1495,” Archivio storico italiano 131 (1973): 163–224. Literature: Lucien Febvre, “Introduction Armando Sapori,” Le marchand italien au Moyen âge [Texte imprimé], conférences et bibliographie (Paris: Colin, 1952), LXX-126; Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, 2 vols. (Milano, Istituto editoriale cisalpino, 1957); David Herlihy, Frederic Lane, and Robert S. Lopez, “Armando Sapori,” Speculum 53 (1978): 657–58; Stephan Epstein, “Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati Siena,” Catalogo della biblioteca di Armando Sapori, ed. Anna Maria Bertolla, Luciano Borghi, and Mario De Gregorio, 2 vols. (Montepulciano: Edizioni del Grifo, 1982); see also the review by Stephan Epstein, Biblioteca Archivio storico Italiano 142 (1984): 175–76; Giovanni Cherubini, “Armando Sapori storico del Medioevo,” Bullettino Senese di storia patria 90 (1983): 249–62; Edmond-René Labande, “Un historien qu’on ne saurait oublier: Armando Sapori (1892–1976),” Le Moyen Age 33 (1978): 557–68.

Christine Maria Grafinger

Scherer, Wilhelm (April 26, 1841 – August 6, 1886), German Medievalist. S. was a German philologist of exceptional scope. In his lectures he covered all fields of German philology except for Nordic. The treatment of his material was characterized by an interdisciplinary approach including knowledge drawn from music, visual arts, theology, philosophy, and social and political history (Schröder, 1890, 111). His most significant contributions for the field of Medieval Studies can be found in his Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII–XII Jahrhundert [Monuments of German Poetry and Prose from the 8th–12th Century] (1864), Notker (1876), his portrait of Jacob Grimm (1865), Deutsche Studien [German Studies] (1870–1878) and his Geistliche Poeten der Deutschen Kaiserzeit [Ecclesiastical Poets of the German Empire] (1874–1875), all of which still serve as reference books today. Particularly important for his time was that he embraced the rise of empiricism in science and firmly believed it could be used to promote and profit the field of German philology. S. was instrumental in establishing the study of Goethe in the young field of new German philology in the second half of the 19th cen-

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tury, and one of the first to produce reproductions of early German prints in an academic context. S. was also one of the first to view the history of the field of German Philology as a field of study. A number of his students went on to become notable figures, including Konrad Burdach, Rudolf Henning, Gustav Roethe, Anton Schönbach, Erich Schmidt and Edward Schröder among others. S. was born in Schönborn, Austria, to Wilhelm Scherer, Sr., and his wife Anna on April 26th, 1841. After completing his studies at the Akademische Gymnasium in Vienna, S. began studying at the University of Vienna at barely 17 years of age. His interest in German Philology brought him into contact with Franz Pfeiffer, but a conflict of personalities lead S. to transfer his studies to Berlin in 1860, where he studied under Jacob Grimm, Moriz Haupt and Karl Victor Müllenhoff among others, with the last of which he established a long and academically productive relationship. S. then returned to Vienna in 1862 and received his doctorate in May of the same year (without presenting a dissertation); in 1864 he completed his habilitation with the lecture, “Über den Ursprung der deutschen Litteratur” and in the same year released the acclaimed Denkmäler (1864) together with Müllenhoff. He instructed as a ‘Privatdozent’ at the University of Vienna for four years before publishing his influential Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache [To the History of the German Language] (1868). Seen as a “renegade and enemy” by Pfeiffer (Schröder, 1890, 106) who stood in conflict with the German philologists in Berlin, S.’s attempts to become a professor were thwarted by Pfeiffer until the Ministry of Education intervened. Following Pfeiffer’s death, S. assumed the vacated position at the University of Vienna at the age of 27. In 1871, S. published Geschichte des Elsasses von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart [History of Alsace from the Oldest Times until the Present Day], which coincided with the new political environment following the end of the Franco-Prussian War. S. then left Vienna in 1872 to become the first professor and director of German Studies of the newly established Reichsuniversität in Strasbourg. The period in Strasbourg (1874–1877) was extraordinarily fruitful for S. both personally and professionally. He published a series of influential works, including Deutsche Studien [German Studies] (1874), Vorträge und Aufätze zur Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Oesterreich [Lectures and Articles to the History of Intellectual Life in Germany and Austria] (1874), Geistliche Poeten der deutschen Kaiserzeit [Ecclesiastical Poets of the German Empire] (1874–1875), Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung im 11. u. 12. Jahrhundert [History of German Poetry in the 11th and 12th Centuries] (1875), the Wiener Notker together with Heinzel (1876) and Die Anfänge des deutschen Prosaromans und Jörg Wickram von Colmar [The Advent

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of the German Prose Novel and Jörg Wickram von Colmar] (1877), which established S. as one of the first German Philologists to engage seriously with contemporary German literature as a field of study. He was honored by induction to the Roten Adler Ordens in 1876. From 1876 to 1886, he served as editor of the Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur [Magazine for German Antiquity and German Literature] together with Karl Müllenhoff und Elias von Steinmeyer. In 1877, he accepted the invitation to relocate to Berlin and assume the task of teaching in the young field of new German literature. His emphasis grew to become the study of Goethe, making him one of the first scholars in that field; thereto he published numerous articles which have since been collected in his Aufsätze über Goethe [Articles About Goethe] (1886). He married a concert singer name Marie in 1879, and his Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur [History of German Literature] (1879–1883), which began in that same year, was well-received. Following the death of Müllenhoff in 1884, S. initially took up the completion of his Deutsche Alterthumskunde [German Lore of Antiquity] (1870–1891), but soon returned to his study of Goethe. In 1885, he was awarded a place in the Geheimer Regierungsrat [Governing Privy Council] and made the Vice President of the Goethe Society. Many of his envisioned projects still waiting to be completed, S. suffered a stroke at the age of 45 and died on August 6th, 1886. S. and his role in the field of German Philology during the 19th century has provided following generations with considerable material for further study. A certain fascination with his person, a prodigy of 27 years of age when assuming the mantle of professor and his tragic death at the young age of 45, has continued to exert its influence, in conjunction with his profound and insightful contributions into the history of German literature, for more than 130 years. His histories of German literature, both old and new, provided Dobrinkat with material for a dissertation in 1965 (Uta Dobrinkat: “Vergegenwärtigte Literaturgeschichte. Zum Verhältnis von Gegenwart und Vergangenheit in der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung Wilhelm Scherers am Beispiel der Skizzen aus der älteren deutschen Literaturgeschichte und der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur,” Ph. D. diss. Berlin 1965), and his treatment of Goethe materials for Lee’s dissertation of 1971 (Katherine Inez Lee: “Wilhelm Scherer’s Goethe Criticism. An investigation and examination of Scherer’s critical method”, Ph. D. diss., Stanford University 1971). Numerous monographs have been released devoted to his person and his work, particularly his role in the history of the field of German Studies (Wolfgang Höppner: Das ‘Ererbte, Erlebte und Erlernte’ im Werk Wilhelm Scherers. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Germanistik, 1993; Peter Salm, Drei Richtungen der Literaturwissenschaft. Scherer, Walzel, Staiger, 1970; Jürgen Sternsdorff, Wissenschafts-

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konstitution und Reichsgruendung. Die Entwicklung der Germanistik bei Wilhelm Scherer; eine Biographie nach unveröffentlichen Quellen, 1979; Ulrich Wyss, “Abgrenzungen. Die Germanistik um 1900 und die Tradition des Faches,” Konkurrenten in der Fakultät. Kultur, Wissen und Universität um 1900, ed. Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert, 1999, 61–77). Wolfgang Höppner has published extensively on S., the man and his studies. His most influential and referenced work today, for the field of Medieval Studies, remains his Denkmäler (1864, last reprint 1964) which collects numerous texts not available elsewhere and provides them with critical commentary. His Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur (1883) was a critical success and constantly expanded upon and reprinted until 1949. His estate has been used to publish numerous scripts, including his last substantial work Poetik (1977). S.’s Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache was re-released by Kurt Jankowsky in 1995 due to its enduring relevance.

Select Bibliography Works: Jacob Grimm (1865, 1885, 1985); Leben Willirams Abtes von Ebersberg in Baiern (1866) [The Life of Williram, Abbot of Ebersberg in Bavaria]; Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1868, 1878, 1890, 1995) [About the History of the German Language]; Geschichte des Elsasses von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1871, 1885) [History of Alsace from the Oldest Times until Present Day]; Deutsche Studien. I: Spervogel (1870), II: Die Anfänge des Minnesangs (1874), III: Drama und Dramatik (1878) [German Studies. I: Spervogel, II: The Beginnings of Minnesang, III: Drama and Dramaticism]; Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Oesterreich (1874) [Lectures and Articles on the History of Intellectual Life in Germany and Austria]; Geistliche Poeten der deutschen Kaiserzeit. I: Zur Genesis und Exodus (1874), II: Drei Sammlungen geistlicher Gedichte (1875) [Ecclesiastical Poets of the German Empire. I: Genesis and Exodus, II: Three Collections of Ecclesiastical Poetry]; Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert (1875) [History of German Poetry in the 11th and 12th Centuries]; Die Anfänge des deutschen Prosaromans und Jörg Wickram von Colmar (1877) [The Advent of the German Prose Novel and Jörg Wickram von Colmar]; Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur (1883, numerous reprints until 1949) [History of German Literature]; Aufsätzen über Goethe, ed. Erich Schmidt (1886, 1900) [Articles About Goethe]; Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1886, 1995) [History of the German Language]; Kleine Schriften, ed. Richard Meyer (1893) [Short Texts]; Deutsche Bildnisse. Dichter- und Gelehrtenportäts, ed. Alexander Eggers (1919) [German Effigies. Portraits of Poets and Scholars]; Von Wolfram bis Goethe (1924) [From Wolfram to Goethe]; Poetik, ed. Gunter Reiss (1977) [Poetics]. Editions: Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII–XII Jahrhundert, with Karl Müllenhoff (1864, 1892, 1964) [Monuments of German Poetry and Prose from the 8th–12th Centuries]; Notkers Psalmen nach der Wiener Handschrift, with Richard Heinzel (1876) [Notker’s Psalms from the Vienna Manuscript]; Deutsche Drucke älterer Zeit in photolithographischer Nachbildung. Thomas Murner, Der Schelmen Zunft (1512) (1881) [German Prints of an Old Era in Photolithographic Reproduction. Thomas Murner’s Schel-

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menzunft]; Deutsche Drucke älterer Zeit in Nachbildungen 1–3, 1883, 1884, 1885 [Graphic Reproductions of Older German Prints]; Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (1870, 1878, 1991) [German Grammar]; Karl Müllenhoff, Deutsche Alterthumskunde, vol. 1 (1870) [German Lore of Antiquity]. Literature: Edward Schröder: “Wilhelm Scherer,” ADB, vol. 31 (1890), 104–14; Briefwechsel: Wilhelm Scherer – Erich Schmidt, ed. Werner Richter, Eberhard Lämmert et al. (Berlin: Schmidt, 1963); Briefwechsel 1872–1886. Wilhelm Scherer – Elias von Steinmeyer, ed. Horst Brunner and Joachim Helbig (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1982); Wolfgang Höppner: “Scherer, Wilhelm,” IGL, 2 (2003): 1582–585; Wilhelm Scherer. Briefe und Dokumente aus den Jahren 1853 bis 1886, ed. Mirko Nottscheid and Hans-Harald Müller (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2005).

Maurice Sprague

Schlegel, August Wilhelm (von) (September 8, 1767, Hannover – June 12, 1845, Bonn), German Philologist, Literary Critic, Cultural Historian, and Poet. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance S. bears for German Romanticism, especially in the areas of aesthetics and literary reception. His aesthetic theories are organized into lectures he delivered in Berlin during the first decade of the 19th century. Here one finds the first important programmatic formulations of the Romantic view on medieval literature. S. ties the Nibelungenlied, which he sees as a German Iliad, to Calderón, establishes an essential Romantic mythology based largely upon medieval literary texts, and shows how Christianity and chivalry emanate from the epic literature of the Middle Ages (Glyn Tegai Hughes, Romantic German Literature, 1979, 43–44). These pronouncements inspire the German Romantics to explore their understanding of the medieval period through literary works, as well as an entire generation of academicians to rediscover and to examine systematically the heroic and courtly German epics as well as the songs of the troubadours (see, for example, George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, 2004, 72–120). S. may stake a legitimate claim as one of the primary initiators of Germanistik, the study of German literature, which grew out of these activities. S. was the son of a Lutheran pastor, Johan Adolf Schlegel, and the elder brother of Friedrich Schlegel, with whom he formed part of the core group

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that began the Romantic literary movement in Germany around the turn of the 19th century. After studying theology and philosophy at Göttingen, he found a position as tutor in Amsterdam, then returned to Jena, where he married Karoline (Michaelis) Böhmer (1796) and became a university professor (1798). Together with his brother he edited the Romantic literary journal Athenäum from 1798 until 1800, and began to translate Shakespeare’s plays into German, sixteen of which he published before 1801 – these translations, together with thirteen published by Dorothea Tieck, became the standard edition of the English’s bard’s works in German until the modern era. Thereafter, the older Schlegel sibling traveled to Berlin (1801–1804), where he delivered his Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst (Lectures on Literature and Art) that became the definitive expression for many Romantic aesthetic principles, inspired a group of early medievalists, and provided the initial impetus for German studies (“Germanistik”) as well as the enduring German fascination with the philology of the Indian subcontinent. After Karoline divorced him and became involved with the German Romantic philosopher Schelling, S. began a relationship with the French intellectual and author Germaine de Staël, serving as her son’s tutor and accompanying her on extensive travels (e. g., to Vienna, Switzerland, and Italy) until her death in 1817. Having been awarded a patent of nobility in 1815, S. returned as professor to Bonn in 1818, where he founded the formal German academic study of Sanskrit and Indian philology, his chief pursuit over the next decades. He began the journal Indische Bibliothek and translated a number of works from Sanskrit, such as the Bhagavad-Gita and Ramayana. Indeed, he became one of the most famous and prolific German translators during this period, and his activities spanned a remarkable number of languages and works. S. remained in Bonn until his death in 1845. While S.’s reputation is largely based upon his key role in founding and furthering the early German Romantic movement, his most significant contributions to medieval studies consist of his aesthetic writings, especially his Berlin and Vienna lectures, his research into the Nibelungenlied and his pioneering efforts to focus the attention of his fellow Romantics, as well as that of his reading public, on the literature of medieval Europe. Thomas G. Sauer (“August Wilhelm Schlegel,” German Writers in the Age of Goethe: Sturm und Drang to Classicism, ed. James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweizer. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 94 [1990], 257–66) illustrates S.’s promotion of the Nibelungenlied as a unified, aesthetically legitimate object of study, and his determination of the formal aesthetic qualities reflected in medieval works. Edith Höltenschmidt (Die Mittelalter-Rezeption der Brüder Schlegel, 2004) presents his concept of medieval philology in relation to his formu-

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lations of classical and modern literature, traces in painstaking detail the development of S.’s Nibelungenlied project and the small controversy his findings sparked with Karl Lachmann, Georg Friedrich Benecke and Jacob Grimm, and documents his other medieval linguistic and literary contributions, including the identity of Wolfram von Eschenbach as the author of the Older Titurel. Yet, as René Welleck (A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, 1955, 39) points out, S.’s actual scholarly contributions in this area pale in the shadow of others among his contemporaries, whose projects on the French troubadours and on the German epic far outstrip S.’s own medieval scholarship. Volume 15 of Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (ed. Cherie D. Abbey and Janet Mullane, 1987, 202–46) devotes an entire section to the critical reception of S.’s general work. Specifically in regard to his medieval scholarship, some of the earliest appreciation for S.’s important contributions comes from Germaine de Staël (see Abbey and Mullane, 203–05), who in her De l’Allemagne (1810) praises S.’s perceptive insights on the French literature of chivalry and the songs of the troubadours. Heinrich Heine pens perhaps the most significant, but also the most scathing, 19th-century commentary on Schlegel’s work. Heine’s Die Romantische Schule (1836, 123–27) caricatures S. mercilessly, and rails particularly strongly against his medievalizing, which Heine considers the main error of German Romanticism. By the mid-20th century, the negative image of S. loses some of its predominance and a more balanced view gains expression. René Wellek asserts that one must give him his due for his role in fostering the German enthrallment with the world of Arthurian romance, particularly with Tristan and Parzival, and in providing a critical lens through which even modern readers could appreciate the heroes of the remote, medieval past. At the same time, it is important to note A. W. S.’s errors stemming from his fanciful suggestions regarding the composition of the Nibelungenlied (e. g., that a later balladeer wove adventures together) and his insistence that Provençal lyric and the legends around Charlemagne both sprang from Germanic traditions (René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 [1955], 39–40). More recent criticism has granted S. an ever more central and energetic role as catalyst and impetus for Romantic medievalism (see especially the excellent study by Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalter-Rezeption der Brüder Schlegel, 2000). But his importance in the overall scheme of things medieval remains a clouded issue: Gerard Kozielek (Mittelalterrezeption: Texte zur Aufnahme altdeutscher Literatur in der Romantik, 1977, 22) maintains that, while S.’s critical lectures and studies, especially in conjunction with those of his brother, held a crucial, general importance, his contribution to the specific reception of medieval literature was only indirect, and his activities in this field, compared to those of

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many contemporary Romantic colleagues, were of minor significance. See also the contribution to this Handbook by Berta Raposo (in Topics). Select Bibliography Works: Sämmtliche Werke, 12 vols., ed. Eduard Böcking (1846–47; rpt. 1971); Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, 6 vols., ed. Ernst Behler and Frank Jolles (1989–); Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner (1962); Kritische Schriften, ed. Emil Staiger (1962). – S.’s works that bear relevance to medieval topics include the following: Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Vorlesungen, 2 vols. (1809–1811); Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales (1818; rpt. 1971); Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst, 3 vols., ed. Jakob Minor (1884; rpt. 1968); Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Poesie: Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Universität Bonn seit dem Wintersemester 1818/19, ed. Josef Körner (1913; rpt. 1968). Literature: Franz Muncker, “Schlegel, August Wilhelm,” ADB, vol. 31 (1890), 354–68; Ralph Ewton, The Literary Theories of August Wilhelm Schlegel (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); NDB, vol. 23 (2007), 38–40; Gwyn Seward McCary, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Reading of Medieval Literature at the Time of the Berlin lectures, Ph. D. diss. Cornell University, Ithaca, 1978; Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalter-Rezeption der Brüder Schlegel (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2000); Harald Schmidt, “Schlegel, August Wilhelm von,” IGL 3 (2003), 1596–99; Berta Raposo, “Rediscovery of the Middle Ages” (in this Handbook).

Christopher R. Clason

Schlegel, Friedrich (March 10, 1772, Hanover – January 12, 1829, Dresden), German Literary Critic, Philosopher, Philologist. Friedrich Schlegel’s interest in medieval literature has long been overshadowed by his brother August Wilhelm’s reception of the Middle Ages (see Clason above). It is true that his concrete knowledge of literature and matter cannot be compared by those of the older Schlegel, but his contributions to the area of the philosophy of history and to the theory of art history were fundamental to the Romantic appropriation of the Middle Ages and for the 19th-century understanding of the period. Friedrich Schlegel, younger brother of August Wilhelm Schlegel and the son of a Lutheran general superintendent (roughly equivalent to Dean or Archdeacon) in Hanover, was originally supposed to become a merchant. However, he quickly discovered an inclination towards the humanities, and

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in 1790 he matriculated at the University of Göttingen, to study law. In 1791, he switched to Leipzig, where he began a broad program of study (law, history, philosophy, literature) and decided to become a literary critic. There he made friends with Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), who was later also significant in the formation of the romantic conception of the Middle Ages. In 1794 he moved to Dresden and, through protracted private reading carried out in the margins of his academic studies, acquired the elements of classical philology. In 1795 he produced the comprehensive essay Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (“On the Study of Greek Poetry,” pub. 1797). In 1796 he was in Jena, working for J. F. Reichard’s newspaper, Deutschland, acquaintance with Schiller and Goethe. In 1797–1799 he was in Berlin, making significant friendships with Friedrich Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit (née Mendelssohn), and Ludwig Tieck, and visiting the salons of Berlin Jewish ladies. In 1799 he returned to Jena, where the circle of early Romantics was gathering and finding a voice in the journal Athenäum, which published many of F. Schlegel’s fragments, and, in 1800, his Gespräch über die Poesie (“Conversation about Poetry”). In 1800, he published his habilitation at the University of Jena and lectured on transcendental philosophy. In 1802 he and Dorothea Veit (they married in 1804) moved to Paris, where he occupied himself with Orientalist and medieval studies, and gave the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée private lectures on the history of European literature (the manuscript is lost, but S. Boisserée’s notes survive). He edited the journal Europa from 1803 to 1805 and was in Cologne from 1805 to 1808, where he lectured On German Language and Literature (1807). In 1808, he converted to Catholicism and moved to Vienna. In 1809, he became Secretary of the Viennese Court and State Chancery. In 1810, he founded the journal Österreichischer Beobachter and lectured on Modern History (Über die neuere Geschichte). He founded the journal Deutsches Museum in 1812 and lectured on medieval and modern literature (pub. 1814). From 1815 to 1817, he was Imperial and Royal Counselor to the Legation to the Bundestag in Frankfurt. In 1819, he traveled to Italy with Emperor Franz and Metternich. He edited the journal Concordia 1820–1823. In 1820–1825, the first ten volumes of his collected works appeared, in 1827 followed lectures on the philosophy of life (pub. 1827), and lectures on the philosophy of history (Vorlesungen über Philosophie der Geschichte) in 1828. S. died unexpectedly during a stay in Dresden on January 12th, 1829. Because of the dates of his life, S. was active in all phases of the Romantic period, from Jena Romanticism via his turn to nationalism in his time in Paris and Cologne to the Viennese period, where he argued for the dominance of Austria in Europe as the successor of the old German Empire, dominated by Catholic Christianity. The first phase began with the German re-

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vival of the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” with its consciousness of modernity, which Schlegel understood as an epoch separate from antiquity. This already offered hints as to the centrality which the Middle Ages would assume in S.’s view of the world. His Gespräch über die Poesie invoked the entanglement of the Romantic in the medieval, and his plea for a new mythology gave a decisive impulse to a concern with non-classical subject matter – that is, to the poetic reception of the Middle Ages. While he portrayed Greek antiquity as a perfect platonic image of all poetry, it was the ‘older moderns’, chiefly Dante, followed by Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Shakespeare who were the founding fathers of the new romantic poetry, which was prefigured by the medieval period. In the second phase, which was dominated by his lectures on the history of European Literature in Paris and Cologne, his concept of Europe (in the sense of the Occident), which gave its name to the journal he edited between 1803 and 1805, became increasingly developed. This is the period where he wrote most of his medievalist works, which were conceived as comprehensive-universalistic, not confined to literature, but dealing with artistic and cultural phenomena in general. This is particularly apparent in his treatment of the Gothic, which gave him the reputation of a “Winckelmann of the Gothic” (according to J. Görres): in his Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz und einen Teil von Frankreich (Letters from a Journey Through the Netherlands, the Rhine, Switzerland and Parts of France) (1805) he described Gothic as the epitome of German Christian art, whose strivings for the infinite were the best reflection of medieval culture. His Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Poesie und Nachricht von provenzalischen Manuskripten (Contributions to the History of Modern Poetry and Report on Provencal Manuscripts), published in Europa in 1803 were chiefly concerned with Old French and medieval German manuscripts from the Paris National Library and the papers left by La Curne de St. Palaye. His medieval work proper consisted in the translation and editions of fictional and autobiographical Old French, medieval German and Middle Latin literature, together with his wife Dorothea (and sometimes the friend of the Parisian household, Helmina von Chézy): she made the translations, while he was responsible for fixing the text (little attention was paid to philological exactness). In the third phase of his creativity his editorial activity was overtaken by journalism. He concerned himself with a backwardlooking utopia, in which the medieval empire and papacy – in their basic principles, not their real expression – was used as a model for the restructuring of the future of Europe following the confusion of the Napoleonic Wars. F. S.’s image was influenced by his development from an Early to a conservative, not to say reactionary, Late Romantic. Even his contemporaries made use of the contrast between the early and late Schlegel. However, re-

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search into Schlegel proper began in the 1870s, when his Early Romantic side was rediscovered by Wilhelm Dilthey and Rudolf Haym. Josef Minor was responsible for an edition of the early work in two volumes (1882) which set a first academic standard. Around the turn of the century, Josef Körner was decisive in the development of a whole picture of Schlegel which went beyond one-sided appropriation; later E. R. Curtius, R. Wellek, and G. Lukács appraised his work as a literary critic. In the last decades of the 20th century, the image of Schlegel as an early romantic precursor of the postmodern in his fragmentary theory of literary production was predominant. In this regard, Friedrich Strack (“Zukunft in der Vergangenheit? Zur Wiederbelebung des Mittelalters in der Romantik,” Heidelberg im säkularen Umbruch. Traditionsbewußtsein und Kulturpolitik um 1800, ed. id., 1987, 252–81) stresses the revolutionary-utopian component of S.’s picture of the Middle Ages, which was more concerned with the future than the past, while Gerard Kozielek (“Ideologische Aspekte der Mittelalterrezeption zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Mittelalter-Rezeption. Ein Symposion, ed. Peter Wapnewski, 1986, 119–32) sees his attempted revival of the Middle Ages as connected to a whole program for the renewal of the nation. In general, however, F. Schlegel’s preoccupation with the Middle Ages was rarely the object of individual research projects until the appearance, in 2000 of Edith Höltenschmidt’s richly detailed and ground-breaking monograph. In it, S.’s contribution is assessed as having recognized the necessity of a cross-fertilization of literature and philology. Select Bibliography Works: Kritische Ausgabe (KA). 35 volumes with introduction, commentary and index, ed. Ernst Behler with Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (1958ff., 1–14, 15/1–24, 29–30, 35 have appeared to date). Periodicals: Athenäum: Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel (1798–1800); Europa: Eine Zeitschrift, ed. F. S. (1803–1805); Deutsches Museum, ed. F. S. (1812–1813); Concordia: Eine Zeitschrift, ed. F. S. (1820–1823). Adaptations and translations: Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orléans: Aus altfranzösischen Quellen [with Dorothea Schlegel], ed. F. S.(1802) (KA 33: 33–57); Geschichte der Margaretha von Valois, Gemahlin Heinrichs IV., von ihr selbst beschrieben. Nebst Zusätzen und Ergänzungen aus französischen Quellen, 2 vols. [with Dorothea Schlegel], ed. F. S. (1803) (KA 33: 59–209); Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters. Aus gedruckten und handschriftlichen Quellen, 2 vols., ed. F. S. (1804) (KA 33: 211–376); vol. 1: Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin [trans. D. Schlegel], vol. 2: Geschichte der schönen und tugendsamen Euryanthe [trans Helmina von Chézy]; Lother und Malle: Eine Rittergeschichte aus einer ungedruckten Handschrift [trans D. Schlegel (1805) (KA 33: 377–354); “Roland: Ein Heldengedicht in Romanzen nach Turpins Chronik” [trans. F. S. aus der Historia Vitae Karoli Magni et Rotho-

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landi], Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806: 127–256; “Trutznachtigall: Eine Auswahl geistlicher Volkslieder nach Friedrich Spee und einigen anderen,” Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806: 127–56. Unpublished writings: Über deutsche Sprache und Literatur. 21 Vorlesungen von F. Schlegel vom 12. Juny-21. August 1807 in Kölln uns privatissime gehalten. Lecture notes made by Sulpiz Boisserée in the Cologne City Archives. Literature: Ernst Behler, “Der Stand der Schlegel-Forschung,” JbdSG 1 (1957): 253–289; id., “Neue Ergebnisse der Friedrich Schlegel Forschung,” GRM 39 NF 8 (1958): 350–365; Volker Deubel, “Die Friedrich-Schlegel-Forschung 1945–1972,” DVG 47 Sonderheft (1973): 48*-181*; Friedrich Schlegel in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966; newly expanded ed. 1988); Klaus Peter, Friedrich Schlegel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978); Edith Höltenschmidt, Die Mittelalterrezeption der Brüder Schlegel (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000).

Berta Raposo

Schoepperle Loomis, Gertrude (July 15, 1882, Oil City, Pennsylvania – December 11, 1921, Poughkeepsie, New York), American Medievalist. S., Jakob Kelemina, and Ferdinand Lot played a prominent role in establishing Celtic folklore as a source for the Tristan romances. S.’s seminal work, Tristan and Isolt, A Study of the Sources of the Romance, has been instrumental for the research of at least two notable scholars of Arthurian romance, Friedrich Ranke and Roger Sherman Loomis. S. grew up during the oil boom in late 19th-century Pennsylvania. Her father had immigrated to Pennsylvania from Roetenbach, Germany, and married a local Pennsylvanian, Elizabeth Klein. After graduating from Oil City High School at seventeen, she began her studies at Wellesley College. At Wellesley she was distinguished as a Durant scholar and actively involved in the Scribblers’ Club and Tau Zeta Epsilon (TZE), Wellesley College’s Art and Music Society. She also cultivated a close friendship with Laura Hibbard, the Arthurian scholar who would become her husband’s second wife. S. received her M.A. from Wellesley in 1905 after writing her thesis on Friedrich Nietzsche. She continued her studies at Radcliffe College, where she studied with William Henry Schofeld. At Radcliffe she won an Edwin Austin Scholarship, the Harvard Annex scholarship, and Paton Prize while

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working on her Ph.D. thesis, “Studies on the Origin of the Tristan Romance”. Fellowships from the Ottendorfer Memorial fund and the Women’s Educational Association supported her dissertation research at the University of Munich during the winter semester of 1907–1908. The following year she studied at the University in Paris with Joseph Bedier. She was granted her Ph.D. from Radcliffe in 1909, but she stayed at the University of Paris for another two years as a Alice Freeman Palmer Fellow and received the diplôme d’élève titulaire de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes. During the summer of 1909, S. studied Irish at the Dublin School of Irish Learning as well as Munster Training College. S. began teaching as an Instructor in English at the University of Illinois in 1911. The following academic year she taught as an instructor of German at New York University. In 1913, she returned to the University of Illinois as an instructor and was promoted to associate professor in English in 1914. Five years later, she accepted a position as an assistant professor of French at Vassar College. The move to New York appears to have been inspired by more than career advancement since S. married a professor at Columbia University, Roger Sherman Loomis, after relocating to Vassar in 1919. They settled in Poughkeepsie where S. continued to teach and write until she was stricken by peritonitis in 1921. A few months after the diagnosis, S. passed away. The memorial volume of essays gathered in her honor and edited by her husband, Medieval Studies in Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis, is one of the first memorial volumes for a woman scholar in the U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, Tristan scholarship was dominated by two theories seeking to uncover a source text for the romance; the continental theorists claimed the Tristan legend was a literary creation from France and the insular theorists asserted that the legend derived from a Celtic oral tradition. By 1900, Ferdinand Lot provided a way to combine both of these theories in his double analysis, which allowed for the influence of historical Celtic sources as well as chivalric French literary tropes. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Bedier and Wolfgang Golther attempted to reconstruct an “Urtext” of the romance. This shift away from historical and folkloric sources of the romance and toward the reconstruction of the first written source for the romance was harshly criticized by Joseph Loth and S. She provided ample evidence of Irish motifs in different versions of the Tristan romance and concluded that a continental “Urtext” may have been a source text for some of the Tristan romances but not all of them. Four years after her death, Friedrich Ranke devoted a third of his book Tristan and Isold to the discussion of S.’s Celtic motifs. Ranke reconstructed a coherent oral legend based on the Celtic tradition illuminated by S.’s research and thereby provided a

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counter model to Bedier’s “Urtext” which still inspires scholars of Celtic Studies and Arthurian romance today. S.’s work garnered mixed reviews at first. Robert Priebsch notes that her book Tristan and Isolt: A Study of the Sources of the Romance doesn’t offer anything really new to Tristan scholarship (Modern Language Review [1917]: 510). Yet Joseph Lothasserts that the same book is indispensable to everyone who is interested in Arthurian romance and folklore in the Middles Ages (Revue celtique [1914]: 383). Her book on the Irish saint Columba, Betha Colaim chille. Life of Columcille, which she edited with Andrew O’Kelleher, was deemed to be useful and notable for students of folklore, hagiography, and grammar (Modern Language Review [1919]: 347). After the memorial volume Medieval Studies in Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis was published, scholars continued to praise her scholarship. In one review, A. G. von Hamel states that S.’s work on the Tristan romance marks a new era in medieval research (English Studies [1928]: 76). In another review of the same memorial publication, S.’s book Tristan and Isolt is regarded as nothing less than brilliant (Review of English Studies [1929]: 103). Her seminal monograph on Tristan was edited by Roger Sherman Loomis in 1960 and has been reprinted a number of times. Select Bibliography Works: The Island Combat in Tristan (1910); “Chievrefoil,” Romania 38 (1909): 196–18; “The Love Potion Tristan and Isolt,” Romania 39 (1910): 277–96; “Sur un vers de la Folie Tristan de Berne,” Romania 40 (1911): 86–88; “Le Buguel-noz en Irlande” (with A. O’Kelleher), Revue Celtique 32 (1911): 53–58; “Finn dans le pays des geants” (with A. O’Kelleher), Revue Celtique 32 (1911): 184–93; “The Reproach of Diarmaid” (with J.H. Lloyd and O.J. Bergin), Revue Celtique 33 (1912): 41–57; “The Death of Diarmaid” (with J.H. Lloyd and O.J. Bergin), Revue Celtique 33 (1912): 157–79; Tristan and Isolt: a Study of the Sources of the Romance (1913; rev. ed. by R.S. Loomis, 1960); “Isolde Weisshand am Sterbebette Tristans,” ZfdPh 43 (1914): 453–55; Betha Colaim chille. Life of Columcille, ed. Andrew O’Kelleherand G. S. (1918); “John Synge and his Old French Farce,” North American Review 214 (1921): 503–13; “The Old French Lai de Nabaret,” Romanic Review 13 (1922): 285–91; “Arthur in Avalon and the Banshee,” Vassar Mediæval Studies (1923): 1–25. Literature: Roger Sherman Loomis, Tristan and Isolt: a Study of the Sources of the Romance, 2nd ed. (New York: Franklin, 1960), 565–67; Medieval Studies in Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis (New York: Columbia Press, 1927), 9–11; Kathryn Lynch, “Laura Hibbard Loomis,” Women Medievalist and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 242; Henry Hall Peyton, “The Loomis Ladies,” On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of Maureen Fries (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 343–44; Rosemary Picozzi, History of Tristan Scholarship (Bern: P. Lang, 1971), 46–50.

Karina Marie Ash

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Schramm, Percy Ernst

Schramm, Percy Ernst (October 14, 1894, Hamburg – November 12, 1970, Göttingen), German Historian. Besides studies on his hometown and the history of the Second World War, S. is best known as the medievalist who has brought the study of signs and symbols of rulership (Herrschaftszeichen) into the focus of the inquiry about the character of the medieval state. His great analytical collection of these insignia, of the liturgy accompanying their presentation (ordines), and the critical evaluation of pictorial evidence for the understanding of the ideas governing medieval states and empires make him one of the founders of a subdiscipline of medieval Symbolforschung. Having started out with a monograph on the renovatio of Otto III, he published volumes on the images of kings and emperors, on the monuments (in the widest sense, which he called Denkmale) of German emperors and a great collection on studies of Herrschaftszeichen. Besides the presentation of evidence not fully appreciated by historians before him (for example, using images merely as illustrations) S. elaborated in several studies a rigorous methodology to be applied to these kind of primary sources, not less valuable for the subject than written evidence. Together with Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Walter Ullmann, and Marc Bloch, he gave political history an entirely new dimension through the analysis of rites and symbolic actions as an innovative approach to medieval political thought and interaction. S. was born into a leading Hamburg burgher family which could look back to at least nine generations of prominent citizens. His early interest in history was supported by his friendship with the famous art historian, Aby Warburg. Having served as cavalry captain in the First World War, he had to witness the end of the peaceful prosperity of the Hanseatic town and of Germany in general. He completed his studies in Heidelberg, where he received the doctorate in 1922 and became Dr. habil. (Privatdozent) two years later with the study on Otto III. For three years, he worked with Harry Breslau in the workshop of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica on the edition of the charters of Emperor Henry III. In 1929, he received an offer from the University of Göttingen, where he served for four decades as professor of medieval history. S. married a fellow historian, Ehrengard (Eta) von Thadden (1900–1985), and they had three sons, one of them (Gottfried, b. 1929) followed his father’s footsteps and was professor of history at the University of Freiburg until his retirement. S. was Shreve Fellow at Princeton, when Hitler took power in 1933, and he tried to justify the Nazis take-over. Typical of his class of people, he was more frightened by the Bolshevik danger than by

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right-wing politics; he had supported Field Marshal Hindenburg and for a short while even the National Socialists (which, however, does not warrant him being called one of “the Nazi twins” by the poorly informed and vindictive Norman Cantor).True, however, that he sacrificed old friendships with émigré colleagues, perhaps out of fear or political adaptation. During the Second World War, S. was for years the diarist of the German Army’s High Command, the documents of which he rescued (against orders of destruction) and later in life critically edited and published. After the war, his interest was, therefore, split between medieval and contemporary studies, the latter of which brought him into many controversies. In 1958, S. was elected member of the order “Pour le Mérite” and in 1963 its chancellor. He remained active to the last days of his life and managed to publish five volumes of his collected articles, augmented and up-dated with the latest literature. His scholarly output is immense and so is the list of his pupils: over 50 doctors of whom more than half were medievalists and many became professors. S. may be regarded as a pioneer in fields that later came into their own and were to be called historical anthropology, interdisciplinary study, and comparative history. He also laid the foundation for such approaches by a huge collection of relevant objects and connected texts. Some of that may appear rather as an “imaginary museum,” but they are goldmines for further study. The great project of an all-European critical history of kingship remained though a torso, the exemplary studies (above all of France and the Empire, less well researched for England and fragmentary for Spain) demonstrate the possibilities inherent in his methodology. S. emphasized the simultaneous presence of change and continuity (polemicizing with the so-called Warburg-school’s notion of “survival of antiquity” which he saw as neglecting the originality of the medieval centuries) and of the medieval amalgam of classical, Christian, and gentile traditions – without excluding or overemphasizing any one of these. He was also among the few western medievalists who were aware of the significance of Byzantium for the rest of Europe, even if Byzantinists may have found his knowledge in that field incomplete. S.’s rigorous definitions, which he called “grabbing tools” (Greifwerkzeuge), distinguishing between symbols, signs, attributes, etc. remained helpful for all who handle this kind of evidence. And finally, he pointed out the importance of continuous exchange between centers of power – papacy and empire, one kingdom and the other – in the form of imitation and borrowing. Most of S.’s innovative ideas were received by many historians and not only his pupils. Alas, little of his work became known to a wider readership outside of Germany, as only his (not best) book on English coronations was translated (besides a few studies into Spanish and Catalan). The repeated re-

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prints of his major monographs suggest that his work has not become obsolete after many a decade. Of course, some details, such as the dating and filiation of coronation ordines, have been revised and corrected by subsequent research. His assessment of the Ottonian renovation was rightly challenged half a century later as one-sided (Knut Görich, Otto III., Romanus, Saxonicus et Italicus: kaiserliche Rompolitik und sächsische Historiographie, 1993). In the late 20th century, the study of symbolic acts and gestures came to be studied (above all by Gert Althoff and his “school”) in a wider context than S.’s, profiting from insights into anthropology. Most recently, the entire approach, not only of S.’s, to ritual as a valid expression of politics come under fire, not always convincingly (see e. g., Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory, 2001). And he was not alone among his like-minded colleagues who neglected the aspect of the “reception” of all these political shows and rituals by the governed (see Janos M. Bak, “Coronation Studies – Past, Present and Future,” Id. ed. Coronations [1989], 1–15), but he was convinced that in pre-modern times – in contrast to the later centuries – history “was made” by the elites. None of these critical points deduct from the pioneering merits of “PES,” as he liked to sign himself on postcards sent to his pupils on some new discovery or bibliographical suggestion. Select Bibliography A complete bibliography (to 1963) was compiled by A. Ritter, “Veröffentlichungen von Professor Dr. Percy Ernst Schramm,” Festschrift Percy Ernst Schramm zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstag von Freunden und Schüern zugeeignet, ed. Claus-Peter Classen and Peter Scheibert (1964) vol. 2, 291–321. Major (medievalist) works: Die deutschen Kaiser und Könige in Bildern ihrer Zeit: 751–1190 (1928; 2nd ed. [with Florentine Müterich et al.], 1983); Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Erneurungsgedankens vom Ende des karolingischen Reichs bis zum Investiturstreit, 2 vols. (1929; rpt. 1967, 1984, 1992); A History of the English Coronation, transl. by L. G. Wickham Legg (1937); Der König von Frankreich: Das Wesen der Monarchie vom 9. zum 16. Jahrhundert. Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte des abendländischen Staates, 2 vols. (1939, rpt. rev. ed. Darmstadt: WBG, 1960); Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum siebzehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (1954–1956); Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser [with Florentine Müterich] 2nd ed. (1978); Sphaira – Globus – Reichsapfel: Wanderungen und Wandlungen eines Herrschaftszeichens von Caesar bis Elisabeth II.: Ein Beitrag zum ‘Nachleben’ der Antike (1958); Kaiser, Könige und Päpste. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 4 vols. in 5 (1968–1971). Literature: Janos M. Bak, “Medieval Symbology of the State: Percy E. Schramm’s Contribution,” Viator 4 (1973): 33–63; “Percy Ernst Schramm,” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and † Joseph B. Zavadil, vol. 1: History (New York: Garland, 1995), 247–62; Gray C. Boyce, “Percy Ernst

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Schramm,” AHR 76 (1971): 961–62; Norman Cantor, “The Nazi Twins: Ernst H. Kantorowicz and Percy E. Schramm,” Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives and Works of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Morrow, 1991), 79–117; Joseph Deér, “Byzanz und die Herrschaftszeichen des Abendlandes,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 50 (1957): 405–36; André Grabar, “L’Archéologie des insignes médiévaux du pouvoir,” Journal des savants (1956): 5–19, 77–92; Joist Grolle, Der Hamburger Percy Ernst Schramm – ein Historiker auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit (Hamburg: Verein für hamburgische Geschichte, 1989).

János M. Bak

Schultz, Alwin (June 8, 1838, Muskau, Silesia – October 3, 1909, Munich, Germany), Art and Culture Historian. S. can be counted among the pioneers of the cultural sciences. He himself embodied the union of art history and literary history. The secular history of the 12th and 13th centuries he published in 1879, drawing on a wide range of very varied sources, was revolutionary. In writing Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger (Court life in the period of the Minnesinger), as he explained in the preface to the first printing, he used “all contemporary texts, to the extent they were accessible to me,” and “read and used extracts from more than two million lines of verse.” Introducing the research report on his work, with its rich source material, he mentioned just a few publications which had been of some use to him, but emphasized that he had in fact entered uncharted waters. His highly acclaimed collection of sources, an interesting outcome of logical positivism, was re-printed in an extended and improved version already in 1889, re-printed in 1965 and again in 1991. S.’s very detailed and learned cultural history is still a hand tool of many university teachers. It remains a source of inspiration not to be undervalued in many scientific works and continues to be, in the volume of source material it offers, a welcome reference book for many authors, particularly those first approaching the field. S. was born the son of a Protestant architect. After completing grammar school in Breslau, from 1858–1859 he studied Christian archaeology and German philology there. In 1859, he took up studies at the Imperial School of Architecture in Berlin, where he was trained in drawing. On his return to Breslau, he wrote a dissertation on the Silesian architect, sculptor, and founder Jodok Tauchen, and in 1864 was awarded his doctorate in philos-

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ophy. In 1861, he began private studies in art history, since the University of Breslau offered no courses in the subject at the time. His first publication appeared already in 1862, Über Bau und Einrichtungen der Hofburgen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (On the Construction and Design of 12th- and 13th-Century Imperial Palaces), which came out in a second edition in 1873. In 1866, he presented his habilitation as private university lecturer for Christian archaeology and art history at Breslau University. From 1870 to 1873 he was temporary head of the university library, and in 1872 he was appointed professor. S., who up to this point had worked primarily in the field of Silesian art, in 1879 published his most valuable work of cultural history in two volumes, Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger. The wealth of material in the work brought him wide recognition from his contemporaries and he was regarded as one of the most important cultural historians of the German speaking area. In 1882, he was appointed a full professor of art history at the German university in Prague, a post he kept until 1903, becoming dean in 1885–1886. During his time at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague, he continued his research in art history, the cultural science aspects becoming dominant. S. remained at the university until entering retirement. A speech defect appears to have played a role in numerous discussions of further appointments, in spite of broad recognition of his achievements. Already during S.’s time in Breslau, the Allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste (General History of the Fine Arts) appeared (1895–1900ca.), a wideranging art history which appeared in instalments, and for which, together with the general editors Carl Schnaase and Wilhelm Lübke, S. worked on the 2nd volume, Die romanische Kunst (Romanesque Art). Numerous scientific publications on Silesian art history also appeared in periodicals. Moreover, he was engaged in the museum sector, for instance in inventorying and setting up new installations. After his arrival at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague in 1882, he published many art historical works which made him a name known in the broadest possible circles. In 1884, Kunst und Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung in das Studium der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Art and Art History. An introduction to studies in recent Art History) appeared, which was widely referred to as the “Mini Alwin Schultz” and was very popular for many years as a handbook for students. The work was published in an expanded 2nd edition in the same year, under the title Einführung in das Studium der neueren Kunstgeschichte, which was referred to as the “Big Alwin Schultz.” During his years in Prague, he dedicated himself increasingly to cultural history. Based on his extensive knowledge of art and major literary works, he produced further foundational cultural histories. In 1890, his book Alltagsleben einer deutschen Frau (Daily Life

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of German Women) appeared, in 1892 his Deutsches Leben im 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (German Life in the 14th and 15th Centuries), and in 1900 his Allgemeine Kunstgeschichte der Renaissance (General History of Renaissance Art). His work received sharply diverging assessments from members of different academic disciplines. The art historian Hugo Schmerber at the beginning of the 20th century (“Nekrolog,” Jahrbuch der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für vaterländische Cultur [1909]: 44–46) offered the following assessment of S.’s life work: “What was characteristic of his working methods was the collection of factual material; elements of today’s art topographies can be detected in his first art history publications. He gives mainly exact descriptions, seldom aesthetic observations, which he also doesn’t value highly in the work of others; where he does pass judgement on purely artistic grounds, it sometimes fails. As a result of this style of writing, his works often make dry reading. He belongs among those who are often quoted but seldom read.” The volume of material in S.’s collected works impressed Harry Kühnel as well, but Kühnel shares the opinion that S. did not employ adequate critical methods in evaluating literary sources. Walter Höflechner on the other hand reviewed Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger and Alltagsleben einer deutschen Frau with unconfined approval (100 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Graz, ed. Walter Höflechner and Götz Pochat, 1992, 6–60). The richness of the material in S.’s work was also viewed extremely positively by Elke Brüggen, although she identified methodological weaknesses, too. She stressed his deficient critique of sources, and the tendency to generalize from single literary examples, “documenting” his conclusions as facts (Elke Brüggen, Kleidung und Mode in der höfischen Epik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts, 1989, 13–15). Similarly, Helga Schüppert had already demonstrated in 1982 with the example of clothing to what degree inadequate critical assessment of sources could influence assertions about Medieval “realities” (Helga Schüppert, “Didaktik als Quelle für adeliges Alltagsleben?” Adelige Sachkultur des Spätmittelalters, ed. Heinrich Appelt, 1982, 215–57). Helmut Birkhan recommended students of German literature read S.’s work to acquire an understanding of Cultural Studies. However, he warned against following the naiveté of the author, who cited numerous literary passages as proof of medieval “realities,” which a literary historian would recognize as “topos, theme, or hyperbole” (Helmut Birkhan, Ältere deutsche Literatur, eine Einführung, 1985, 20). Otto Lauffer reviewed Das häusliche Leben der europäischen Kulturvölker vom Mittelalter bis zur zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts and essentially criticized four aspects. He found the term “häusliches Leben” in the title unsuit-

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able and faulted the temporal restrictions, as well as the complete lack of archaeological sources and a clear and systematic presentation (Otto Lauffer, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 2 [1904]: 237–44). Select Bibliography Works: Die Legende vom Leben der Jungfrau Maria und ihre Darstellung in der bildenden Kunst des Mittelalters (1878); Das höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger (1879, 2nd exp. and rev. ed. 1889, 2nd, exp. and improved ed. 1965, rpt. 1991); Allgemeine Geschichte der bildenden Künste im Mittelalter, vol. 2: Die romanische Kunst, a broad-ranging art history in installments, to which S., together with Carl Schnaase and Wilhelm Lübke, wrote vol. 2, Die romanische Kunst (1871); Allgemeine Kunstgeschichte der Renaissance, Architektur, Plastik, Malerei (1898); Deutsches Leben im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (1892); Das häusliche Leben der europäischen Kulturvölker vom Mittelalter bis zur zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (1903, rpt. 1968). Literature: Peter Csendes, “Alwin Schultz,” Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon, vol. 11 (1999), 341; Hugo Schmerber, “Alwin Schultz,” Biographisches Jahrbuch 14 (1912): 91; “Alwin Schultz,” Deutsches biographisches Archiv, ed. Bernhard Fabian, Microfiche Edition (Munich: Saur, 1960–1999).

Gertrud Blaschitz

Schwietering, Julius (May 25, 1884, Engter/Osnabrück – July 21, 1962, Frankfurt/Main), Professor of medieval German language and literature. In the first half of the 20th century, S. was one of the most important and influential medievalists in Germany. With his textual interpretations, he significantly furthered the understanding of German medieval poetry. His research on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s works, Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, the minnesong, and medieval mysticism are still critical today. In contrast to the more positivistic approach in philology of his time, it was important to S. to combine problems addressed in literary studies with findings in archaeology, theology, art history, and cultural studies in order to achieve historically appropriate interpretations of the text. S. was a representative of the method using intellectual history. His intentions were to reconstruct processes and epochs in intellectual history by interpreting the form and content of literary works of art. He tried to understand medieval literature as one of the first by referring to categories from the contemporaneous world view which contained the approximate concept of typology in theology and exegesis with-

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out neglecting the traditional connections in cultural history unique to each individual work. As a pioneer, S. had realized an interdisciplinary perspective in literary studies early on. He recognized critical rudiments of medieval literature and subtly explored them. By means of this type of study, he saw a key to contemporaneous secular poetry in medieval piety. As editor for the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur (1939–1962), one of the most significant German-language journals in medieval philology, he critically influenced the program of Germanic medieval studies for decades. S. was the son of a Lutheran pastor. After a high school (Gymnasium) education in Clausthal and Göttingen, he studied German literature, English literature, theology, art history, cultural studies, and classical studies in Göttingen from 1903–1908. With the thesis Singen und Sagen he completed his doctoral studies in Göttingen in 1908, and he completed the requirements for a university lecturer in 1921 in Hamburg with the study Die Demutsformel mittelhochdeutscher Dichter. After working as an assistant at the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (1909–1923), he became the director of the Kunstgewerbeund Historisches Museum in Bremen in 1923. From 1924 to 1928, he taught as a professor for German language and literature at the University of Leipzig, from 1928 to 1932 at the University of Münster, from 1932 to 1938 at the University of Frankfurt a. M., and from 1938 to 1945 at the University of Berlin. From 1939 to the end of the war in 1945, he led the research projects of the German Commission of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He taught as a professor at the University of Frankfurt a. M. from 1946 until he retired with emeritus status in 1952. S. received countless guest professorships in the U.S., among them in Chicago and Princeton. He was an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1958. S. was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. The most important publications by S. were included in the comprehensive volume Philologische Schriften (1969) edited by Friedrich Ohly and Max Wehrli. In addition to his dissertation Singen und Sagen (1908), which deals with the tradition and function of this commonly paired formula, the volume also contains his publication for the certification for a university lecturer (Habilitationsschrift), Die Demutsformel mittelhochdeutscher Dichter (1921), which investigates the topoi of humility and inability in the prologues and epilogues of 12th- and 13th-century secular and religious literature. Along with essays on individual medieval texts, especially on Parzival, Minnesang, and Tristan, S. presented significant word-historical and motif-historical studies which reconstruct important traditional connections in the overall

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work. Among these publications, the essay “Mittelalterliche Dichtung und bildende Kunst” (1923) analyzes the reception of the pietà motif and Gothic architecture in medieval narrative literature, showing an interdisciplinary path in cultural history. Also of note is his study “Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung” (1925), in which the well-known interpretive model from the Biblical exegesis of the typological opposition between a deficient earlier and a fulfilled later world epoch is applied fruitfully to the interpretation of secular medieval poetry. In studies which are still relevant today, Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg und die Bernhardische Mystik (1943), and Parzivals Schuld. Zur Religiosität Wolframs in ihrer Beziehung zur Mystik (1944), S. investigates the influence of medieval religiosity on courtly literature. In all of his publications, he strives to interpret literary works in connection to the cultural and intellectual contexts of their time. This is especially true for his large work on literary history Die deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters. In this volume, part of the Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft (1932–1941), S. offers an overview on German medieval literature from the Carolingian poetry of the 9th century to the novelistic and “morality literature” (“Erbauungsliteratur”) of the late Middle Ages. In this literary history, all of his research specializations are connected. It expresses his interpretive method of a literary work of art as a necessary expression of an intellectual historical moment. S. critically promoted the understanding of medieval literature. In his literary history Die deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters, he presents an impressive overview of the religious and secular poetry from the 9th through the 13th centuries. In his individual investigations, he interpreted the texts in their historical connection by calling on archaeological, cultural-historical and theological findings, a method which paved the way for interdisciplinary medieval studies. His studies on Parzival and Tristan are still discussed today. S.’s work is recognized by a high philological ethos and a linguistic elegance. Select Bibliography Works: Singen und Sagen (1908); Die Demutsformel mittelhochdeutscher Dichter (1921); “Mittelalterliche Dichtung und bildende Kunst,” ZfdA 60 (1923): 113–27; “Typologisches in mittelalterlicher Dichtung,” Vom Werden des deutschen Geistes: Festgabe für Gustav Ehrismann, ed. Paul Merker and Wolfgang Stammler (1925), 40–55; Der Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg und die Bernhardische Mystik (1943); Parzivals Schuld: Zur Religiosität Wolframs in ihrer Beziehung zur Mystik (1946); Die deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters (1932); Philologische Studien, ed. Friedrich Ohly and Max Wehrli (1969). Literature: Friedrich Ohly, “Julius Schwietering †,” ZfdA 92 (1963): 1–7; Wolfgang Harms, “Julius Schwietering,” IGL, vol. 3 (2003), 1694–96.

Heiko Hartmann

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Sievers, Georg Eduard (November 25, 1850, Lippoldsberg on the Weser – March 30, 1932, Leipzig), German Medievalist. For modern scholars and students, S.’s fame rests in particular on his classic theory of the “Five Types” of Germanic alliterative metrics; on his path-breaking contributions to the science of phonology; on his Old English grammar; on his studies in attributions and sources of Germanic and other texts; and on a series of definitive editions of early Germanic texts. The son of a mines inspector, S. married Alice Towell, of Dublin, in 1881; they had a daughter and two sons; she pre-deceased him in 1918. Little is known of his personal life, thanks to the destruction of his correspondence shortly before his death. In a brilliant early career, S. studied classical and Germanic philology at Leipzig from 1867 to 1870, under Georg Curtius, Adolf Ebert, August Leskien, and Friedrich Zarncke. Curtius memorably dubbed S. and his fellow-students Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Braune the “Junggrammatiker,” i. e., “neogrammarians” (Kurt R. Jankowsky, The Neogrammarians: A Re-Evaluation of their Place in the Development of Linguistic Science, 1972; Henry M. Hoenigswald, “The Annus Mirabilis 1876 and Posterity,” Transactions of the Philological Society [1978]: 17–35). S. gained his doctorate in 1870 with the dissertation Untersuchungen über Tatian, directed by Zarncke. In 1870–1871, he studied Old English at Berlin, under Karl Müllenhoff, and translated two monographs on Nordic philology from the Danish. In 1871, he visited the Bodleian Library and British Museum, where his work in transcribing and collating manuscripts containing OHG, OS, and OE texts was to provide material for many of his subsequent publications. His meeting at this time with Henry Sweet influenced his studies of phonetics and OE grammar. In 1871, S. was appointed the first “ausserordentliche” Professor of Germanic and Romance Philology at the University of Jena. To facilitate his teaching, which included the Nibelungenlied, the Heliand, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach, he produced editions of Tatian, Hildebrandslied and other OHG fragments, and the Murbach Hymns. With Paul and Braune, he founded the periodical Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur in 1873 and made numerous contributions to it, as also to Anglia, Indogermanische Forschungen, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, and Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur. In 1876, he became the first “ordentliche” Professor of Germanic and Romance Philology at Jena. Work from this period included his monograph on the physiology of phonetics and his edi-

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tion of the Heliand. He began a program of publications on skaldic metrics and a collaborative edition of OHG glosses. In 1880, at a time of ill-health and nervous exhaustion, he received a call to Harvard University, but declined when Jena appointed him the first “ordentliche” Professor of German Philology in 1881. He published his Old English grammar and oversaw its translation into English by his American doctoral student Albert S. Cook. In 1883, he accepted a call to the University of Tübingen, where he served as Professor of Germanic Philology. Here he extended his metrical studies from skaldic poetry into the Poetic Edda and OE verse, expounding his theory of the “Five Types.” 1887 saw a move to the University of Halle/Saale, where he served as Professor of German Language and Literature until 1892. S.’s final post was at the University of Leipzig, from 1892 until 1922, as Professor of Germanic Philology. He received numerous honors, among them fellowships of the Modern Languages Association of America, the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, and the British Academy. In 1903 he visited the USA at the invitation of George Lyman Kittredge, of Harvard University, and lectured at the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. He consolidated previous articles into his book-length study of early Germanic metrics (1893). In addition to serving as editor-in-chief of Beiträge from 1892 to 1906, he helped Paul in the initiation of the Grundriss der germanischen Philologie. During this time his scholarship became increasingly focused upon new approaches to the study of rhythm, accentuation, and intonation, which he demonstrated through public recitations that became celebrity events. He retired in 1922 but maintained his scholarly pursuits and served as sole editor of Beiträge from 1925 up until his death in 1932. As noted, a good proportion of S.’s publications in the first thirty years of his career were founded upon his thorough-going critical compilation of forms from manuscripts of early Germanic-language texts. This work paved the way toward, inter alia, a definitive documentation of early Germanic paradigms and the hypothesis that lines 235–851 of the OE Genesis were freely translated from OS. On the metrical front, S. worked from statistical observations concerning different sequences of strong, medium, and weakly stressed syllables in the lines of early Germanic alliterative poetry, combined with the application of the concepts of anacrusis and resolution, so as to accommodate the attested lines to a basic metrical system of Five Types. At the same time, he acknowledged residual problems with the hypermetric verses in OE and OS. On a broader linguistic front, his enunciation of “Sievers’s Law” accounted for a series of alternations between vowels and semivowels in Germanic and various other Indo-European dialects, as also some nonIndo-European languages. From 1908 onwards he extrapolated from con-

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temporary trends in musicological research so as to create a methodology termed Schallanalyse (or Stimmanalyse). To this end, he built a corpus of Sagverse (“spoken verse”), consisting of informal verse and rhythmic prose from a wide range of European and Near Eastern sources, and sought to identify “personal curves” of utterance, unique to individual writers. Through analysis of such diverse texts and corpora as the Poetic Edda, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Praefatio to the Heliand, and the verses in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, S. sought to show that any alteration of the “personal contour” within a specific text presupposed a change of writer. S. is universally regarded as among the very greatest Germanic philologists of the late 19th and early 20thcenturies. His publications embody an almost unparalleled series of successes and triumphs. What Jakob Grimm is to the inception of modern Germanic scholarship, S. is to its second, neogrammarian phase. His theory as to the OS origins of the OE Genesis B was resoundingly vindicated in 1894, with the discovery of a manuscript fragment of the OS Genesis. He anticipated 20th-century linguistic fieldwork by insisting that phonological science had as its goal accurate observation and transcription and shows something akin to prescience in emphasizing the role of system in language, in viewing so-called “individual sounds” as abstractions, and in positing the sentence as the minimum linguistic unit. His editions of Tatian and of the Heliand, his monograph on early Germanic metrics, and his Old English grammar, in their various revised forms, have attained classic status. Of unrivalled documentary significance are his descriptions of pronunciation and intonation in contemporary German dialects. Sievers’s Law has remained controversial, though, with continuing discussion as to whether it is Indo-European in origin, how it relates to alliterative verse in Germanic, and other questions (Charles M. Barrack, Sievers’ Law in Germanic, 1998). S.’s Five Types metrical system has been widely criticized, for instance by Andreas Heusler (Deutsche Versgeschichte, 1925). Nevertheless, it is still regarded as a starting-point for all metrical discussions and as an essential tool in the editing of texts. Discussions of the metrics of dróttkvætt (Hans Kuhn, Das Dróttkvætt, 1983; Kari Ellen Gade, “Hans Kuhn’s Das Dróttkvætt: Some Critical Considerations,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 88 [1989]: 34–53; Kristján Árnason, The Rhythms of Dróttkvætt and other Old Icelandic Metres, 1991; Anthony Faulkes, ed., Snorri Sturluson. Edda: Háttatal, 1998) use it constantly as a point of reference even though dissenting from it to differing degrees on key features such as internal rhyme and prosodic length. S.’s rejection of the very persistent and prevalent Cynewulfian hypothesis, which proposed Cynewulf for authorship of virtually every poem in the OE corpus, based itself upon minute textual and linguistic analysis

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and has withstood the scrutiny of subsequent scholarship. By contrast, his investigation of Sagverse through Schallanalyse was from the outset largely dismissed as subjective (Andreas Heusler, “Eduard Sievers und die Sprachmelodie,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung 33 [1912]: 1477–86; Hans Lietzmann, Schallanalyse und Textkritik, 1922; Sigur6ur Nordal, ed., Egils saga SkallaGrímssonar, 1933; Gerold Ungeheuer, “Die Schallanalyse von Sievers,” Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 31.2/3 [1964]: 97–124). Even so, S.’s application of this theory to the restoration of archaic verb-forms in Hebrew texts was partially vindicated in 1921 by attestations in newly discovered manuscripts. Select Bibliography Works: Das Hildebrandslied, die Merseburger Zaubersprüche und das Fränkische Taufgelöbniss (1872); Tatian. Lateinisch und altdeutsch (1872); Die Murbacher Hymnen (1874); Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis (1875); Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie zur Einführung in das Studium der Lautlehre der indogermanischen Sprachen (1876; rev. ed. 1881); Die althochdeutschen Glossen (with Elias Steinmeyer), 5 vols. (1879–1922); Angelsächsische Grammatik (1882); “Zu Cynewulf,” Anglia 13 (1891): 1–25; Altgermanische Metrik (1893); “Beowulf und Saxo,” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der kgl. Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Kl., 47 (1895), 175–92; Metrische Studien, 4 vols. (1901–1919); “The Relation of German Linguistics to Indo-European Linguistics and to German Philology,” Congress of Arts and Sciences: Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. H. Rogers, vol. 3 (1904), 237–85; Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse (1924); “Shakespeares Anteil am King Lear,” Anglica: Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie: Alois Brandl zum 70. Geburtstage überreicht, vol. 2 (1925), 173–210. Literature: Theodor Frings, “Eduard Sievers,” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der kgl. Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Kl. 85, 1 (1934), 1–56; Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt, “Schriften,” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der kgl. Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Kl., 85, 1 (1934), 57–92; Peter Ganz, “Eduard Sievers,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 100 (1978): 40–85; John C. Pope, “Eduard Sievers (1850–1932),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil, vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1998).

Russell Poole

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Simrock, Karl Joseph (August 28, 1802, Bonn – July 18, 1876, Bonn), German Medievalist and University Professor. By the middle of the 19th century, S. had already earned a reputation as the “Erneuerer der deutschen Volkspoesie” (“Renovator of German Folk Literature”), as Hugo Moser (“Karl Simrock als Erneuerer mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung: Bemerkungen zu seinem Verfahren,” Festschrift für Hans Eggers zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Herbert Backes and Patricia Mogger, 1972, 458–83) has pointed out, largely on the basis of his 1827 translation of the Nibelungenlied into New High German. According to Joachim Heinzle (“‘… diese reinen kräftigen Töne’: Zu Karl Simrocks Übersetzung des Nibelungenliedes,” Die Nibelungen: ein deutscher Wahn, ein deutscher Alptraum: Studien und Dokumente zur Rezeption des Nibelungenstoffs im 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Joachim Heinzle and Anneliese Waldschmidt, 1991, 111), while reviewing this work, Goethe asserted that a knowledge of it “was an essential step in one’s education for nationhood.” The Biedermeier dramatist Friedrich Hebbel and the great Romantic composer Richard Wagner both doubtlessly knew the Nibelungenlied via S., as Doris Pinkwart (Karl Simrock [1802–1876]: Bonner Bürger, Dichter und Professor: Dokumentation einer Ausstellung, 1979) has claimed. As the holder of the first university chair of Germanistik at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, S. remains one of the most famous intellectual figures in the history of that city. Although S. is not known primarily as a scholar in the strictest sense, his translations as well as his efforts to popularize Germanic and Medieval German literature in a number of collections did much to foster a sense of cultural cohesion among the Germanspeaking reading public of the mid-19th century. S., son of a music publisher from an old and well-established Bonn family, was the youngest of thirteen siblings. His father, Nikolaus, who counted Ludwig van Beethoven among his friends, became a member of the Order of Illuminati and helped to found a reading circle of like-minded intellectuals. The children were raised in a home where enlightened tolerance and liberalism flourished, French was spoken at mealtimes and the ideals both of the French Revolution and burgeoning German nationalism often found expression. At the newly established Preußisch-Rheinischen Universität in Bonn Karl S. matriculated as a student of law in 1818, and continued legal studies in 1822 in Berlin. Enjoying the thriving Romantic cultural environment that Berlin offered, he was able to hear lectures by Carl Lachmann, the

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great editor of medieval texts, as well as by Friedrich von der Hagen, the first Professor of Germanistik. S. began a career in the Prussian civil service in 1823, but as the result of a poem he composed in 1830 praising the French July Revolution, he was dismissed from his position. Thereafter he retired in Bonn to the life of a landed gentleman and intellectual. In 1834 he earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Over the rest of his years S. spent a great deal of time at his estate, conferring upon his family manor the epithet “The Parzival House.” There he developed his talents as a vintner, producing a well-known wine from grapes grown on his ancestral lands. During this period he also invited some of the leading German intellectuals to his estate for cheerful company and the stimulating exchange of ideas. Among his acquaintances S. could count Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Ludwig Uhland, Wolfgang Müller, and Ferdinand Freigrath. From 1844 through 1847, he became an important figure in the most significant literary circle in the Rheinland, the so-called “Maikäferbund.” Finally, in 1850 he acquired a professorship at the university in Bonn, and two years later became the first regular faculty member of that university to hold a chair in German philology. S. became dean of the faculty of philology from 1856 through 1857. Although the university at Munich offered him two similar posts, nothing could lure him away from his beloved Rhineland, and he turned down both offers. S. served as city councilor in Bonn over a brief period, from 1860–1861. Shortly after he turned seventy years of age, his wife died, and he deeply grieved the loss of his closest friend and companion for the remainder of his life. He met his own death in 1876, approximately a month before his seventy-fourth birthday, in Bonn, the city of his birth. While S.’s place in history as the first professor of German philology at Bonn is well-established, his greatest significance by far as a medievalist proved to be in his role as translator and “popularizer” of German medieval epics, poetry, and Volksbücher. Until S.’s translations became available, the reading public’s knowledge of medieval and early modern German literature was drawn to a large extent from the few, somewhat dry, scholarly renderings of the original texts into modern language when they were available. When they did not yet exist the reader was left on her or his own to decipher the ancient idioms. S.’s translations include an incredible number of works that span the Old-, Middle- and Early New High German periods. Among the most significant of his publications were his verse translations of the Nibelungenlied (1827), Hartmann’s Der arme Heinrich (1830) and Wolfram’s Parzival and Titurel (1840). His literary-critical works, such as his Althochdeutsches Lesebuch (1851), his Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie (1853–1855), or his investigations and elucidations of medieval metrics pale in comparison.

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Additionally, S. collected an impressive number of folk materials, such as chapbooks (Volksbücher), sayings, sagas, folk songs, fairy tales, hymns, etc. Many of these works had their roots in the medieval period, or were carried forth from earlier times in the traditions of the German Middle Ages. Again, although S.’s contributions were far from ground-breaking, his essential contribution to medieval studies lies in his efforts to translate and disseminate these materials among the German cultural Volk, which longed for such connections as legitimization of growing feelings of nationalism. As positively as the German public received S.’s translations and adaptations, serious critical reception of his efforts in Germanistik were often harsh and rejective. For example, S.’s Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie drew strong criticism from virtually all commentators who mention it, and there were not many who bothered to do so (see Rudolf Simek, “Karl Simrock und die germanische Mythologie,” Karl Simrock 1802–1876: Einblicke in Leben und Werk: wissenschaftliche Beiträge und Dokumentarisches anläßlich Simrocks 200. Geburtstag am 28. August 2002, ed. Karl-Simrock-Forschung, 2002, 53–60). Subsequent critics (especially Wolfgang Golther) condemn S. as too facile with his popularizations and too old-fashioned in his language and style, according to Simek (“Karl Simrock und die germanische Mythologie,” q.v., 58). In evaluating the S. rendering of the Nibelungenlied, Andreas Heusler calls him “the most terrible of translators” in 1910, although in the next year he strongly praises S.’s Edda (Simek, “Karl Simrock und die germanische Mythologie,” q.v., 58). More recent critics discuss S.’s promotion of medieval literature in a more balanced manner, and welcome especially his role in renewing and preserving many older works. Especially valuable in this regard are the essays by Moser (“Karl Simrock als Erneuerer mittelhochdeutscher Dichtung: Bemerkungen zu seinem Verfahren,” q.v.) and Hoecker’s biography (Nicolaus Hocker, Carl Simrock. Sein Leben und seine Werke, 1971). Perhaps the most comprehensive picture of the remarkable career of this prolific scholar is offered by Moser, in his biography of S. (Karl Simrock: Universitatslehrer und Poet, Germanist und Erneuerer von ‘Volkspoesie’ und älterer ‘Nationalliteratur’: Ein Stück Literatur-, Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1976), which situates him squarely in the middle of the Biedermeier aesthetic, praising his positive accomplishments but also offering a balanced criticism appropriately. The city of S.’s birth and death, Bonn, has long cherished the legacy of their university’s first German philologist: in 1979 Doris Pinkwart published a collection of essays, photos and reports documenting an exhibit that had taken place in Bonn, commemorating S.’s life and work (Karl Simrock [1802–1876]: Bonner Bürger, Dichter und Professor: Dokumentation einer Ausstellung, 1979). The great number of editions and other

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works represented at this event bears witness to the vast scope of S.’s contributions to the public’s knowledge of medieval literature and culture. Clearly, his reputation has recovered substantially since the rejections of his scholarly contemporaries. Select Bibliography Works: Karl Simrocks ausgewählte Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Gotthold Klee (1907); Karl Simrocks Werke: kleine Auswahl in sieben Bänden, ed. Gotthold Klee (1909); Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Karl Simrock (1827); Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide, trans. Karl Simrock with Wilhelm Wackernagel (1833); Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival und Titurel: Rittergedichte, trans. Karl Simrock, 2 vols. (1842); Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan und Isolde, 2 vols., trans. Karl Simrock (1855); Die deutschen Volksbücher gesammelt und in ihrer ursprünglichen Echtheit wiederhergestellt, 58 vols. (1839–1867). Literature: S. Nicolaus Hocker, Carl Simrock. Sein Leben und seine Werke (Walluf bei Wiesbaden: Sändig, 1971), 159; Hugo Moser, Karl Simrock: Universitätslehrer und Poet, Germanist und Erneuerer von ‘Volkspoesie’ und älterer ‘Nationalliteratur’: Ein Stück Literatur-, Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Schmidt, 1976); Edward Schröder “Simrock, Karl Josef,” ADB 34 (1892), 382–85; IGL, vol. 3, 1740–43.

Christopher R. Clason

Skeat, Walter William (November 21, 1835, London – October 6, 1912, Salisbury Villas, Cambridge), English Editor, Philologist, and Medievalist. S., along with colleagues such as F. J. Furnivall, Henry Bradshaw, Richard Morris, and others, was a pivotal figure in bringing literary and philological scholarship into the universities and in transforming Victorian medievalism into a solid scholarly discipline. A philologist at heart, S. maintained that philology and etymology did not interfere with but in fact increased a literary and aesthetic appreciation of medieval English texts. S. is best known for his critical editions of Piers Plowman and the seven-volume Clarendon Chaucer; he also edited numerous Old and Middle English texts for the Early English Text Society, the Scottish Text Society, the Clarendon Press, and the Philological Society. He was among the first to insist on scientific methods for etymological and philological work, and following Furnivall’s establishment of such societies as the Early English Text Society

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and the Chaucer Society, founded the English Dialect Society to study and publish on issues of dialect and etymology. According to scholars such as Jo McMurty (English Language, English Literature: The Creation of an Academic Discipline, 1985), S. was also instrumental in making English an accepted field of study at the University of Cambridge. The son of an architect, S. was born into a comfortably middle class, Church of England family in London near Hyde Park. He attended several schools as a child, among them King’s College School in the Strand, where he studied Latin and Greek under Reverend Oswald Cockayne, a leading Anglo-Saxon scholar. In 1854 S. matriculated at Christ’s College in Cambridge. He graduated with a first-class degree in mathematics and theology in 1858, and took holy orders in 1860. Expecting to remain within the church for the rest of his life, he became a curate of East Derehem in Norfolk and two years later moved to a curacy in Godalming, Surrey. There, however, he became ill enough to be unable to continue his work as a cleric, and returned in 1864 to Christ’s College in Cambridge with a lectureship in mathematics. Over the next half-century, S. continued to teach and lecture at Cambridge, developing lecture series on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature and philology as well as mathematics. He became one of England’s leading philologists, editors and scholars. S. was an active member of the Philological Society, the Early English Text Society, and in 1973 he was instrumental in founding the English Dialect Society, of which he was director until it was disbanded in 1896. S. was also a founding fellow of the British Academy. One of S.’s more understated contributions to the establishment of English literature and philology as legitimate university disciplines was his donation in 1866 of £100 for a prize for the best student examination in English language and literature at Christ’s College, which encouraged students to consider English as an option for study. In 1878, S. was elected to the Elrington and Bosworth professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, and in that same year he established for the first time an honors examination in English language and literature. By the time he died in 1912, English was firmly established as a respectable discipline of study at Cambridge. In his early years at Cambridge, two things happened which set S. on the course to becoming one of the greatest 19th-century editors and scholars of Old and Middle English. In 1864, F. J. Furnivall established the Early English Text Society, and, brushing aside S.’s protests that he had no skill or experience in manuscript editing, persuaded him to produce an edition of the 15th-century Scottish text of Lancelot of the Laik. S. went on to publish over a dozen editions of early and Middle English texts for the EETS. In working

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on the Lancelot manuscript, S. also became acquainted with the librarian of King’s College, Henry Bradshaw, who was to become a major influence on S.’s later scholarship. The second encounter of importance was with Richard Morris, another editor for EETS and the Clarendon Press. In 1867 Morris published Specimens of Early English, which so intrigued S. that he created a glossarial index for the work. Morris incorporated S.’s glossary into the 1871 edition of the work, and included S. as co-editor. S.’s most significant work for the EETS was an edition of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Unlike earlier editors, who believed there were only two separate versions of the poem, S. positively identified three distinct versions. He published an edition of the A-Text in 1867, the B-Text in 1869 and the C-Text in 1873; these were followed in 1877 and 1885 with notes and glossary. The Clarendon Press published a two-volume parallel-text edition of the poem in 1886, a work still used by modern scholars. Although later critics disputed S.’s editorial methods, and S. himself came to the conclusion that he had not chosen the best base text for his edition, nonetheless S.’s work was unprecedented in the quality of its scholarship and critical apparatus, and many of its extensive notes and glosses remain unchallenged. The other major addition S. made to the study of English literature was the seven-volume edition of Chaucer’s works, published between 1894 and 1897 for the Clarendon Press. Drawing heavily on Henry Bradshaw’s expertise in Chaucer, S. produced The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in six volumes, with a seventh volume devoted to Chaucerian and Other Pieces. Although it has been criticized for depending too heavily on the Chaucer Society’s transcripts of the Canterbury Tales and other works, S.’s edition was nonetheless extremely important because of its extensive notes and thorough glossary. S.’s editorial methodology was not always explicit, and as A. S. G. Edwards notes (“Walter W. Skeat [1835–1912],” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul Ruggiers, 1984, 171–89), S.’s desire to make Chaucer accessible and his rhythm and spelling more regular led to some emendations that editors today would dispute. As well, S.’s adoption of the Bradshaw shift in the order of the Canterbury Tales, against his own better judgment, is no longer considered valid. However, the Clarendon Chaucer remains in print to this day, and was the standard reference work for Chaucerian scholarship until it was superseded by F. N. Robinson’s edition. S. also produced a onevolume Student’s Chaucer, which was widely used in undergraduate classrooms. S. also wrote extensive etymological and philological works, including his Etymological Dictionary (1897–1882), Principles of English Etymology (1887–1891), English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day (1911), On the Survival

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of Anglo-Saxon Names as Modern Surnames (1907), and The Science of Etymology (1912). His work, along with that of other Anglo-Saxonists, disproved much of the fanciful etymology that had been common before that time; he also helped establish not only Old and Middle English historical pronunciation but, on the basis of the Anglo-Saxon use of the Latin alphabet, helped challenge received notions about Latin pronunciation as well. S.’s work on Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and English etymology laid strong scholarly foundations upon which much later work would be based. Although S.’s editorial choices have often come under fire, nonetheless his provision of authoritative, critical texts and the extensive scholarly apparatus remains invaluable. S.’s manuscript work cemented the canons for some of the literary greats of English literature, and few scholars today would disagree with his conclusions: his establishment of the A, B, and C traditions of Piers Plowman manuscripts was vital to all subsequent Langland scholarship, and he definitively established the canon of Chaucer’s works, eliminating many apocryphal texts and sorting out the authorial fragments of the Romaunt de la Rose. Reviews of S.’s Chaucer called it a “monument of learning and sagacity”; “the best edition ever published” (G. L. Kittredge, The Nation LIX [1894]: 309–10, 329–30; E. Flügel, Dial February 1895, 116). All of the major editors of Piers Plowman, including A. V. C. Schmidt, George Kane, and E. Talbot Donaldson, acknowledge their debt to S. in their introductions. It has remained the standard edition for over a hundred years, and crucially influenced 20th-century textual scholarship on the poem; his interpretative and historical notes are still referred to by modern critics and editors. Of S.’s other extensive work for the EETS, most of his editions of Old and Middle English texts are still in use today. Select Bibliography Works: ed., The Vision of William Concerning Piers Plowman (1867–1885); ed., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols. (1894–1900); ed., Parallel Extracts from 29 MSS of Piers Plowman (1865); A Student’s Pastime (1896); Principles of English Etymology (1888). Literature: Charlotte Brewer, “Walter William Skeat (1835–1912),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico (New York: Garland, 1998): 139–49; Kenneth Sisam, “Skeat, Walter William (1835–1912),” rev. Charlotte Brewer, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004; online ed., May 2006); James D. Johnson, “Walter W. Skeat’s Canterbury Tale,” Chaucer Review 36.1 (2001): 16–27; Arthur Sherbo, “More on Walter William Skeat,” Poetica 36 (1992): 69–89.

Kathy Cawsey

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Southern, R. W. (Richard William)

Southern, R. W. (Richard William), (February 8, 1912, Newcastle upon Tyne, England – February 6, 2001, Oxford, England), British Medieval Historian. One of the greatest medieval historians to date, S. made significant contributions to his field. His first book, titled The Making of the Middle Ages and published in 1953, traces the development of western Europe from the late 10th to the early 13th century through the analysis of medieval social, political, and religious organization, while also capturing the inner workings of human thought and emotion, as Robert Bartlett has noted. With his studies on St. Anselm, S. produced standard works on this important monastic thinker, and his Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, published in 1963 and revised in 1990 as Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, is a major book on the subject. S. also aimed to define Medieval humanism in terms of scholasticism S. was born in Newcastle upon Tyne to a merchant father. After completing the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied under V. H. Galbraith and graduated in 1932. Following graduation, he studied in Paris with both F. M. Powicke and Ferdinand Lot, as well as in Oxford, where he received his M.A. in 1936. S. was a research Fellow at Exeter College from 1933–1937. His fellowship at Balliol (1937–1961) was interrupted between 1940 and 1945 by his military service with the Durham Light Infantry and with the RAC. Retiring as major from the army, he returned to Balliol and completed his fellowship, before being named Chichele Professor of modern history at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College in 1961. From 1969–1981, he was president of St. John’s College in Oxford. In 1960, he was elected a fellow of the British Academy and was knighted in 1974. S. married Sheila Cobley in 1944, and they had two sons. Early on, S.’s The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), which has been translated into twenty-seven languages and is still in print today, established him as a prominent historian. In addition to discussing medieval society, religion, and traditions of thought, this important work also explores the evolving literature of the Middle Ages and its relation to medieval society, in a chapter devoted to the two most prevalent literary genres of the period, epic and romance. Many of his publications, however, focus on the cultural history of the 12th and 13th centuries and its relation to religious doctrines and institutions (Boureau, 219). His groundbreaking work on St. Anselm began in the 1930s, with philological studies of his correspondence, fol-

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lowed in 1963 by the first biography written about him and subsequent editions of his texts in later years. In his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962), S. illustrates the significant role of English mediation in Arab learning in the early 12th century, demonstrating continuity and thus changing the way the century following the Conquest is viewed and treated (i. e., as a simple transitional period in history) (Boureau, 225). He also demonstrated his understanding of the radical societal differences between Christendom and Islam, addressing them in detail for the first time. Considered a definitive source on the Middle Ages, S.’s scholarship has been central to the work of other Medieval historians. Although published in 1953, his Making of the Middle Ages continues to inspire dialogue among scholars, as Rachel Fulton’s 2004 book From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Middle Ages, 800–1200 attests. According to the book’s reviewer, Kevin Madigan, Fulton goes beyond S.’s ideas on devotion to the suffering, human Christ and to his mourning mother, Mary, to further explore and account for how, when, and why this form of devotion came to the fore (History of Religion 45.3 [2006]: 270). R. Moore, who refers to The Making of the Middle Ages as one of the most influential books ever written on the European Middle Ages, was himself indebted to S.’s work therein, since his book titled The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (2000) follows the same chronological parameters as S.’s, sharing the view that the period from the late 10th to the late 12th century witnessed, in western Europe, a transformation so complete and so momentous that it can be seen as a turning point in world history and arguing the point even more strongly than S. did (Journal of World History 13.2 [2002]: 495–97). Moreover, S.’s Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962) has served as a stepping-stone for the ever-increasing number of scholars in recent years who are researching and writing about Islam, both in relation to Christianity and otherwise, including John L. Esposito, Dorothee Metlitzki, Lisa Lampert, and Zachary Lockman, all of whom have built upon, in various ways, his views on the subject. Though highly admired and respected, S.’s scholarship did not escape criticism. R.M. Thomson, for example, rejects his interpretation of England’s place in the 12th-century renaissance, offering instead a more positive one, by broadening the scope of England’s contributions during this era beyond S.’s (Past and Present 101 [1983]: 4). More recently, Thomson has questioned aspects of S.’s last publications, such as his definition of humanism and his prolongation of the 12th-century Renaissance into much of the 13th century (Journal of Religious History 26.3 [2002]: 264). In this same review of the two-volume Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Thomson further contends that S.’s interpretations put forth in the texts (many of

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which are, he claims, repetitions of his earlier work) have led to the undervaluation of regions of western Europe and of some non-scholastic communities, including Benedictine monasticism. Select Bibliography Works: The Making of the Middle Ages (1953); Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962); The Life of St. Anselm by Eadmer (1962); St. Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought (1963); Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970); Medieval Humanism and the Other Studies (1970); Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (1986); “Anselm: An Examination of the Foundations,” Albion 20 (1988): 181–204; Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1: The Foundations (1995); Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 2: The Heroic Age (2001). Literature: D. J. A. Matthew, “Professor R.W. Southern and the Study of Medieval History,” Durham University Journal 31.3 [1970]: 160–71; William Palmer, “Sir Richard Southern Looks Back: A Portrait of the Medievalist as a Young Man,” Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion 74.1 (1998): 18–31; Alain Boureau, “Richard Southern: A Landscape for a Portrait,” Past and Present 165 (1999): 218–29; R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); R. M. Thomson, “Richard Southern and the Twelfth-Century Intellectual World: Essay Review of R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. I: Foundations, vol. II: The Heroic Age,” Journal of Religious History 26.3 (2002): 264–73; Rachel Fulton, Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Middle Ages, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Robert Bartlett, History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004); John Jeffries Martin, “Obscure, Significant Events: R. W. Southern and the Meaning of Scholarship,” Rethinking History 10.2 [2006]: 297–305.

Amy Ingram

Spitzer, Leo (February 7, 1887, Vienna – September 16, 1960, Forte dei Marmi), Linguist and Literary Critic. S. is considered one of his century’s main scholars in Romance philology; he founded modern stylistics as an important field of research. His particular strength was the diversity and breadth of his studies dealing with various domains of linguistics and text analysis, his knowledge in different Romance literatures and languages, and, more generally, in European cultural history. The attempt to transcend the boundaries between linguistics and literary criticism, pivotal to S.’s thinking, shaped also his conception of style re-

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search. Therefore, his stylistic endeavors intended to capture the collective languages of speech communities as well as the speech-traits of individuals, mirrored particularly in the distinctive linguistic characteristics of literary texts. While initially S. focused on the stylistic idiomatology of vernacular varieties of language, this scope was soon supplemented by the study of individual factors in linguistic innovations. S. pointed towards irregular and unstable elements in language, i. e., creative deviance from normal linguistic usage. Starting with micrological treatment of grammar, semantics, syntax, and style, he discussed how linguistic phenomena, historical, cultural and philosophical contexts are intertwined; by analyzing style device, S. tried to elucidate the mind or “inner self” of an author as well as concepts of artistic subjectivity or the internal coherence and the specific aesthetic value of a single text. In doing so, however, S. never developed a coherent theory or an objective methodology. Instead, he was interested in empirical analysis of linguistic material and in the identification of specific traits. S. often related to the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey and favors a “philological circle” to recognize the “spiritual essence” of an author, the aesthetical substrate of a text as well as its nexus with literary history. S. was born in the fin-de-siècle Vienna on February 7, 1887, as the eldest son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family. In 1906, he graduated there from the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium and he began to study Romance philology at the university of his native city, mainly Comparative Historical Linguistics with Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke. In 1910, he completed his Ph.D. thesis dealing with Rabelais’s grotesque word formations. After longer periods of study in Paris, Leipzig, and Rome, he achieved the qualification of “Habilitation” at Vienna, where he became “Privatdozent” in 1913. In 1914, S. was drafted into the Austrian army and assigned to the bureau of censorship. On the basis of this experience, he worked later on a study analyzing the various circumlocutions for the forbidden mentioning of hunger and the writers’ inventiveness in the letters of Italian prisoners of war. In 1918, he accepted an appointment at the University of Bonn, following his mentor Meyer-Lübke. Called to the Chair of the Department of Romance philology at Marburg in 1925, S. established networks with authors and literary scholars from many European countries. Soon, S. was famous for charismatic academic teaching as well as distinguished scholarship. When receiving a call to Cologne in 1930, S. developed his new institution into a modern and cosmopolitan place. Only few months after the Nazi-regime had seized power, however, S. was dismissed. He declined offers from the University of Manchester, but accepted the Chair of Western European Literature at Istanbul/Turkey. There, he was also charged with the organization of a large program of modern European

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languages, a task fulfilled by S. with an inclination to comparative research with a focus on literary studies rather than the linguistic discipline in a stricter sense. In 1936, S. emigrated to the United States after having received an invitation by the Johns Hopkins University, where he spent the rest of his academic career. Quickly acclimatized to the new academic atmosphere, S. contributed to reforming the university system and analyzed the American society more generally, including the tradition of his new country with its peculiarities in civilization, literature, and popular culture. During the 1950s, S. gained growing recognition in Europe, mostly in Italy, where he received the Premio Internazionale Feltrinelli from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. Two collections of his studies were printed in Italy, but he was an invited professor throughout Europe, including Heidelberg/Germany. S. died unexpectedly when in Italy in 1960, only shortly after he had received standing ovations for his paper on the history of style investigation – “Les Études de style et les différents pays” – at the Congress of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures at Liège/Belgium. The origins of S.’s research lay first in historical comparative linguistics. His early studies of etymology, morphology, lexicology, grammar, and syntax of Romance languages (see Aufsätze zur romanischen Syntax und Stilistik, 1918) were still partly influenced by the positivist neogrammarian approach [Junggrammatiker] of his mentor Meyer-Lübke; according to this paradigm, historical linguistic changes are grounded in a system of phonetic laws. But already in his Ph.D. thesis (Die Wortbildung als stilistisches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais, 1910), S. had modified these assumptions. Dealing with Rabelais’s grotesque word formations, S. attributed to these the character of expressions of a creative personality and integrated stylistic poetic practices into the realm of linguistic analysis. During the 1920s, S. became increasingly critical against hypotheses regarding mechanical linguistic laws; he stressed the relevance of the individual usage of language that is deviant to standard use, without which linguistic innovation would not be possible. In several studies, S. followed a descriptive-psychological method and included historical and cultural contexts into linguistic research (exemplary in this context: Italienische Kriegsgefangenenbriefe, 1921; Italienische Umgangssprache, 1922). At the same time, S. sympathized with scholars and concepts opposing the main assumptions of the neogrammarians, so in his reverence to Hugo Schuchardt (Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier: Ein Vademecum der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, 1922), as well as in his affinity for idealistic language theory in broader terms, as developed in the aesthetical theory of Benedetto Croce’s “filosofia del parlare,” or by Karl Vossler as a basis for “idealistic” linguistics. S. was inspired by Vossler’s reflexion of language that established

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a causal nexus between linguistic phenomena and the human intellect, and emphasized the innovative aspects of the ingenious individual, but declined the aestheticist narrowing of the linguistic field. The analysis of the intellectual, as S. claimed, must not ignore the technical aspect of the interpretation of language. What is necessary is the detailed philological description of the concrete linguistic material, knowledge of linguistic categories and a specification by relevant empirical evidence. S. himself claimed an in-between position, as his self-characterization as “idealistic positivist,” or “positivistic idealist” indicates. Main publications of that time reflect S.’s engagement with applied style research since 1918; they collect and blend linguistic and aesthetic approaches: Stilstudien (1928), two volumes dealing with collective style (vol. 1: Sprachstile, focused on stylistic effects of the mentality, or “Geisteshaltung,” of a language speech community, group or nation) and individual style (vol. 2: Stilsprachen, focused on style as artistic usage of language and as a creative trait of the individual, especially in poetry), as well as Romanische Stil- und Literaturstudien (2 vols., 1931). During the 1920s, S. implemented Freud’s theory of psychiatric deviance in his psychologically oriented stylistics; the aim was to sketch the web of interrelations between the peculiar linguistic expression and the mind of an author, thereby to conclude from traits of individual style to the “common spiritual etymon,” or “the psychological root.” In studies published in the 1930s and 1940s, however, S. tended to reject these psychological interpretations by negating their validity especially for earlier literary epochs and introduced the aesthetic appreciation of poetical language: by drawing on concepts of contemporary phenomenology, the aesthetic unit of the artwork was highlighted as well as its character as a specific form of imagination and cognition. Two volumes of collected essays, published by S. on the occasion of his 60th birthday, address once more the nexus between individual and collective style: Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (1948), and, conceived as a counterpart, Essays in Historical Semantics (1948). In Linguistics and Literary History, S. focused on historical rather than contemporary writers and their styles, placing them into their specific cultural contexts and into the tradition of intellectual history. Here again, S. reverted to the “philological circle,” the hermeneutical dynamic of which involves the subjectivity of the critic. At the same time he opposed a universally valid method. Instead, the critic has to dispose of “a Protean mutability […], for the device which has proved successful for one work of art cannot be applied mechanically to another.” In Historical Semantics, by contrast, S. combined lexicography and history of thought by analyzing words, phrases or concepts used by writers in

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various periods; in this context, S. singled out items such as “Race,” “Gentiles,” “‘Milieu’ and ‘Ambiance.’” He took into account the whole conceptual field, the various semantic expansions and attractions that animate language, to trace the development of meaning in different cultural settings. His essays on word-histories and semantic changes are based on literary material from different contexts, where certain civilizations – in S.’s case the Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and Christian Occident – have left their imprint, their “style.” Formations, tendencies and changes of meaning are understood as “the most sensitive barometer of the cultural climate.” S. emphasized learned key-words, i. e., the “cultured vocabulary” that provides an “explanation of most of our current European intellectual nomenclature.” The related articles on Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung,’ originally published in two installments in the journal Traditio (vol. II [1944]: 409–64; vol. III [1945]: 307–64), in 1963 in a revised and expanded edition, study the pagan and Christian belief in an ordered universe and an innate harmony, a concept which underlies the “untranslatable” German word “Stimmung” as a term expressing the “unity of feelings experienced by a man face to face with his environment (a landscape, nature, one’s fellow man).” S. pointed out a movement from Pythagorean cosmology and Platonic theory of the musical and mathematical correspondences linked to the “World Soul” to the difficult relation of the visible nature to the invisible will of the Creator and the connection between divine grace and music in Christian thought. S. went on to scrutinize the related speculations of spiritual unification in medieval and early Renaissance theology, musicology, or poetics to state the final disenchantment of the world caused by the rationalistic attitude of Enlightenment. In the course of the 1940s and 1950s, S. published instructive stylistic “explications de texte” applied to various writers of Romance languages; he accentuated the “So-Sein,” the “being so and not otherwise” of exemplary literary texts. Therefore, the philologist has to recognize the inward form of art, “the sense-beyond-sense” that poetical language creates (see A Method of Interpreting Literature, 1949). Besides, his interest in English and American literature, culture, and everyday-life increased considerably; his subtle analysis of a “Sunkist” advertisement became particularly famous (“American Advertising Explained as Popular Art,” ibid.; see also Essays on English and American Literature, 1962). During the last years of his life, S. reiterated – often in an autobiographical frame – his theory and method. He stressed once again the necessary conjunction between linguistics and literary criticism as well as the subjective impact implied in the initial intuitive assumption when reading a literary text, e. g., in the title essay of Linguistics and Literary History, or in his

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lecture “Sviluppo di un metodo” (CN 20 [1960]: 109–28), given at the University of Rome. S.’s contribution to the field of Medieval Studies is complex and versatile, both in topics and methodology. To appreciate his numerous articles, comments, and notes in all their variety even approximately (see Baer’s and Shenholm’s Descriptive Bibliography, 1991) – embracing single problems of textual criticism, medieval etymologies or historical semantics, of medieval poetics and stylistics as well as contemporary premises of literary criticism, often controversially discussed – is hardly possible. One main feature, however, is S.’s special concern with the aesthetic quality of medieval texts. This applies, for instance, to his essays on the Spanish romances, the Cantar de Mio Cid (see, e. g., the collection Sobre antigua poesía española, 1962), the Libro de buen amor (“Zur Literaturgeschichte: Zur Auffassung der Kunst des Arcipreste de Hita,” ZRP 54 [1934]: 237–70), or to Marie’s de France Lais (“Marie de France: Dichterin von Problem-Märchen,” ZRP 50 [1930]: 29–67). In her tales, the poet Marie de France intertwines in a highly artistic way rational and fabulous-mysterious elements and creates symbols for tensions and ambiguities representing – in accordance with Christian spirituality – the invisible realities of the soul. In a similar manner, S. emphasized the aesthetic value of the earliest texts written in Italian vernacular language, such as Francis’ of Assisi Cantico di Frate Sole, or the Ritmo Cassinese which is, according to S., “the first perfect (and complete) poem of Italian literature” (see the essays reprinted in Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–1956, 1959). Several articles deal with Dante’s refined style and his elaborate mode of composition (collected in Studi italiani, 1976). By analyzing the “linguistic portrait” of Piero della Vigna in the Commedia, S. exemplified, how Dante’s stylistic skills adapt to the various situations or characters evoked; in reference to De vulgari eloquentia, S. underlines the artistic and humorous quality of Dante’s ‘essaystyle’ as a kind of self-fashioning, by which Dante communicates his “own mental disposition” to the reader. S.’s studies also focused on Provençal literature: opposing the paradigms of social historical and biographical tendencies of research, he examines lexical, semantic, metrical, and stylistic material in Jaufré Rudel’s “amour lointain” cycle to ascertain “the paradox character of love,” related to concepts of Christian mystics, as main theme of troubadour love lyric (L’amour lointain de Jaufré Rudel et le sens de la poésie des troubadours, 1944; reprinted, e. g., in Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–1956, 1959). Already in his own time, S. had an excellent academic reputation. Posthumous critics drew upon the ingenious readings in his studies on style, thereby highlighting the finesse with which he discussed, in concrete detail, a multitude of texts from the early Middle Ages up to the 20th century, often

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rendering impressive models of “close reading.” His works mirror his manyfold interests, his critical wit, and his creativity. Both breadth and depth of his voluminous œuvre are outstanding features, and so the vast range of topics spanning several disciplines, languages, literary genres, and periods. Single critical opinions have seen eclecticist and volatile tendencies in S.’s scholarship. Nevertheless, there is consensus regarding his fascinating intellectuality, intuitive geniality and flexibility of methods that allow both differentiated insights and new perspectives. Collections of his essays appeared in several European countries, e. g., Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–1956 (1959); Études de style, ed. Jean Starobinski (1970); Studi italiani, ed. Claudio Scarpati (1976); Representative Essays, ed. Alban Forcione et al. (1988), supplemented, recently, by an edition of S.’s correspondence with Schuchardt: Briefe an Hugo Schuchardt, ed. Bernhard Hurch (2006). Select Bibliography Works: Aufsätze zur romanischen Syntax und Stilistik, 1918, rpt. 1967; Stilstudien, 2 vols., 1928, rpt. 1961; Romanische Stil- und Literaturstudien, 2 vols., 1931; Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, 1948, rpt. 1970; Essays in Historical Semantics, 1948; A Method of Interpreting Literature, 1949, rpt. 1977; Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’, ed. Anna Granville-Hatcher, pref. René Wellek, 1963; Romanische Literaturstudien, 1936–1956, 1959; “Sviluppo di un metodo” (CN 20 [1960]: 109–28); Sobre antigua poesía española, 1962; Études de style, introd. Jean Starobinski, 1970, rpt. 1988; Studi italiani, ed. Claudio Scarpati, 1976; Representative Essays, ed. Alban Forcione et al., foreword John Freccero, 1988. Literature: René Wellek, “Leo Spitzer (1887–1960),” CL 12 (1960): 310–34; Fritz Schalk, “Leo Spitzer (1887–1960) / Romanist,” Marburger Gelehrte in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ingeborg Schnack (Marburg: Elwert, 1977), 523–35; Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Heidi Aschenberg, Idealistische Philologie und Textanalyse: Zur Stilistik Leo Spitzers (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1984); James V. Catano, Language, History, Style: Leo Spitzer and the Critical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1988); E. Kristina Baer and Daisy E. Shenholm, Leo Spitzer on Language and Literature: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York: MLA, 1991); Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ‘Vom Strudel der Ereignisse verschlungen’: Deutsche Romanistik im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2000); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten: Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2002).

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Stengel, Edmund Ernst (December 24, 1879, Marburg – October 4, 1968, Marburg), German Medievalist Historian. S., whose understanding of scholarship was based on the unbroken tradition of German medievalism as it came to fruition in the late 19th century, had a lifelong fascination with medieval charters. He investigated the production, authenticity, and political content of important charters and groups of charters with a sharp intelligence in a myriad of essays and books. Diplomatics could not, for him, be separated from legal history. He gave political history a central place in the historical discipline, without losing sight of other important phenomena. Trained in the school of the “Monumenta Germaniae Historica” (MGH), he continuously broke new ground in his research. He was one of the instigators of modern research trends in the fields he worked in, not least in his capacity as organizer and founder or leader of academic institutions, which, like the Hessian State Office for Regional History (Hessisches Landesamt für geschichtliche Landeskunde) and the Photographic Archive of Older Original Charters (Marburger Lichtbildarchiv älterer Originalurkunden), still exist today. “Admittedly, new tasks often distracted him, so that older, ambitious plans were left lying fallow for long periods, or even permanently” (Walter Heinemeyer, “Stengel, Edmund E., Professor der mittleren und neueren Geschichte,” Marburger Gelehrte in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Ingeborg Schnack, 1977, 536–43, here 537). He himself was conscious that he tended to bite off more than he could chew: “I can and must, from personal considerations alone, reply to those who keep trying to warn me that I unfortunately don’t have the (somewhat dubious) luck to be one of those who are happy to spend their whole lives plowing with the same old nag. Fate has given me, over time, a whole park full of horses, which, now that they’re there, all need to be kept moving, and who get in each other’s way in the process” (quoted in Klaus Schäfer, “Aus den Papieren eines sparsamen Professors: Edmund Ernst Stengel (1879–1968) zum 125. Geburtstag,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte 109 (2004): 323–44, here 343). On occasion his almost limitless capacity for enthusiasm caused him to make astonishing mistakes, and the conclusion of his projects was delayed or even never achieved. Yet the interdisciplinary approach to regional history, and the integration of the historical auxiliary sciences in the main stream of the discipline are once again proving of seminal importance. His father was the Marburg scholar of romance studies, Edmund Max Stengel, his mother Ida (neé Herrmann). S. grew up in Marburg, where he

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went to school; he sat his Abitur (leaving Certificate) in 1898 in Greifswald, where his father had been “more or less exiled after a politically-motivated disciplinary proceeding” in 1896 (Ulrich Reuling, “Mittelalterforschung und Landesgeschichte auf neuen Wegen: Der Historiker Edmund E. Stengel als Wissenschaftler und Wissenschaftsorganisator in den zwanziger Jahren,” Die Philipps-Universität Marburg zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus, 2006, 143–64, here 145). Beginning in the summer of 1898, S. studied in Lausanne, Greifswald and Berlin, where he completed his doctorate (“Die Immunitäts-Urkunden der deutschen Könige vom 10. bis 12. Jahrhundert”, 1902) on 18th October 1902 under the supervision of Michael Tangl, a pupil of Theodor von Sickel. In the autumn of 1903, S. joined the staff of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), where he prepared the constitutions of Emperor Charles IV. In 1905, he returned to Marburg, where his grandfather Ernst Herrmann, a pupil of Ranke’s, had held the chair in history 1857–1884, and his father had founded the Seminar of Anglo-Romance Philology in 1875. S. earned his “habilitation,” enabling him to supervise doctoral students and apply for professorships, in 1907 with a study drawn from the same thematic area as his doctoral thesis (Die Verfasser der deutschen Immunitätsprivilegien des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts, 1907). Like his father, who was a member of the Reichstag 1907–1911, S. was interested in politics, though he did not share his father’s left-liberal views. In 1908 he joined the National Liberal Party. In the same year he married Frida Barth, the daughter of the Marburg University Director of Music. From July 1915, he saw active service as a junior officer in WWI. His marriage to Frida was childless, and the couple adopted a war orphan, a boy from Riga. In 1914, S. was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Medieval and Modern History and made director of the Seminar for Historical Auxiliary Sciences, and in 1919 was given a personal Chair. The Marburg Seminar for Historical Auxiliary Sciences had been founded in 1894 by Paul Fridolin Kehr on the model of the Austrian Institute of History, and was housed in the “Kugelhaus.” In 1922, S. was given the Chair of Medieval and Modern History and director of the Institute of Medieval History, Historical Auxiliary Studies, and Historical Ethnology, and promptly, and against the violent resistance of his colleagues, moved the Medieval department into the Kugelhaus, so that “this triple harmony of object of study and methodology became a veritable projection of Stengel’s research onto institutional organization and academic teaching” (Helmut Beumann, “Edmund E. Stengel †,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 18 (1968): XI–XV, here XIII). In 1923, S. turned down the offer of a chair in Berlin.

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In the 1920s, S., now a member of the German People’s Party (DVP), became involved in the discussions on the administrative reform of the republic, and advocated the idea of a Hessian state independent of Prussia and minus the Rhine-Main area (Das geschichtliche Recht der hessischen Landschaft, 1929). He thereby distanced himself from his colleague Hermann Aubin in Gießen, who was in favor of a Greater Hesse. S.’s methodological approach was characterized by “the connection of observations on geography and the history and archaeology of settlement patterns, dialect boundaries and – in the narrow sense – territorial history” (Ulrich Reuling, “Reichsreform und Landesgeschichte: Thüringen und Hessen in der Länderneugliederungsdiskussion der Weimarer Republik,” Aspekte thüringisch-hessischer Geschichte, ed. Michael Gockel, 1992, 257–308, here 289). S. initially kept a certain distance to National Socialism, but, under the influence of his wife (district leader of the NS-Frauenschaft [Women’s League] in Marburg, 1934–1935) and his adopted son, Lothar Stengel-von Rutkowski (a member of the SS from 1933 on, who taught “Racial Hygiene” at the University of Jena), he joined the party in April 1942, “of my free will – since, as a result of the threat to our national borders in the Russian winter of 1941–1942, all reservations had to give way to the necessity of strengthening the home front” (quoted in Anne Christine Nagel, Im Schatten des Dritten Reichs: Mittelalterforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1970, 2005, 37, n. 46). In 1935, the MGH was plunged into a deep crisis following the retirement of Paul Fridolin Kehr, and S. left Marburg in order to take over the leadership of the Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (Reich Institute for Older History), i. e., the former MGH, and the Preußisches Historisches Institut in Rom (Prussian Historical Institute in Rome), which had been linked to it since 1935, on 1st November 1937. The Austrian Institute in Rome was integrated in 1938, following the Anschluss. Although S. described the Repertorium Germanicum as the “chief task of the Institute in Rome” and stressed “its importance for German regional history, and for research into individuals and tribes,” the period up to the closure of the Rome Institute in 1943 was marked by “violent differences of opinion and arguments with his deputy in Rome” (Reinhard Elze, “Das Deutsche Historische Institut in Rom 1888–1988,” Das Deutsche Historische Institut in Rom 1888–1988, ed. Reinhard Elze and Arnold Esch, 1990, 1–31, here 21). In the same period, S. had also transferred the Photographic Archive from Marburg to Berlin, but thereafter was chiefly engaged in fighting off his rival Walter Frank, who was head of the Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany), and safe-

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guarding the independence of the MGH. In a bid to avoid the constant pressure of his rivals and the fusion of the two Reich Institutes under Frank’s leadership, S. even raised the possibility of moving the MGH to Munich. He proved to be a hard and ingenious negotiator, ruthless in the interests of his organization. In July 1938, he informed Himmler about the plan for an edition of all the charters of Heinrich the Lion. The SS Reichsführer proved to be in generous mood and authorized funding support of 7500 Reichsmarks; the first fascicle was already printed in 1941. S. also ensured that the “Brünner Schöffenbuch” was edited by the MGH, with financial support from the Reich Chancellery, rather than by the SS Research Institute for Ancestral Inheritance. In May 1939, to relieve the shortage of space in the institute, he coolly suggested that Reich Minister of Science and Research should acquire a “non-Aryan object,” a villa in Zehlendorf which had cost more than 350,000 Reichsmark to build, but was now available for “less than 10,000 marks.” But in the end, exhausted by National Socialist bureaucracy, S. and his successor in Marburg, Theodor Mayer swapped positions, and S. returned to Marburg with the Photographic Archive. He retired with emeritus status on 15th October 1946. He continued to lead the Hesse State Office for Regional History until 1953, and even continued to run the Photographic Archive until the summer of 1963. Shortly before his death in the summer of 1968 S. signed the Marburg Manifesto of the “Working group for the protection of the freedom of research and teaching,” which – unfortunately without any success – opposed the German university reform program. S. was a member of the Historical Commission of Hesse from 1908 on, and acted as treasurer in 1919–1929 and as chairman in 1929–1939 and 1942–1954. He was a corresponding member of the Berlin Academy of Science from 1936 and of the Viennese Academy from 1941. He succeeded Rudolf Kötzschke as the director of the Working Group of the Historical Commissions and Institutes of Regional History between 1947 and 1951. In 1955 he founded the Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde, editing 10 volumes by 1964. S. was an honorary doctor of the law and constitutional faculty of the University of Marburg, and received the Brothers Grimm prize in 1965. Two volumes of collected essays which he had reviewed and expanded were published in honor of his 80th birthday (Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte, 1960; Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Hessischen Geschichte, 1960). Following Theodor von Sickel, S. used the identification of the dictamen to explore the legal content of the concept of immunity. He was always conscious of the problems inherent in dictamen identification, which he once called “one of the best weapons of diplomatic research” (quoted in

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Heinemeyer, Stengel, Edmund E. as above, 537), but which could not be applied in the same way to charters of every medieval period. Unfortunately, only the first volume of the work which he planned to publish, based on his doctoral and habilitation theses, in two volumes, which would bring together “to perfection” approaches to diplomatics and to legal history appeared (Heinemeyer, as above, 537; Diplomatik der deutschen Immunitäts-Privilegien vom neunten bis zum Ende des elften Jahrhunderts, 1910, reprint 1964). In 1908, S., commissioned by the Historical Commission of Hesse and Waldeck, took over work on the Charter book of the Imperial Abbey Fulda. The task had been begun by Michael Tangl in 1897, but he gave it up in 1906. Although S. published a first fascicle in 1913, and both many of his own diplomatic researches and the dissertations of his pupils kept the work progressing, it took most of his life for the first volume to be published in its entirety (Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda, Bd. 1: Die Zeit der Äbte Sturmi und Baugulf, 1958). The problem of forgeries and the difficulty of dating the many charters which survived only as undated copies formed the principle difficulties of the project. For many years, its editorial principles were viewed as exemplary, a pattern for future projects. Today, however, more critical tones dominate; “Insufficient planning of the work” (Heinemeyer, “Nachruf auf Edmund E. Stengel,” Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 16 [1970]: 506–13, here 508) as well as the mistake of not surrendering the work to younger hands sooner, meant that S.’s “editorial masterpiece” (Friedrich Uhlhorn, “In memoriam Edmund E. Stengel,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde 80 [1969]: 10–12, here 11) remains a torso, whose value is further limited by “Stengel’s often unverifiable dating of many traditions and summaries” (Heinemeyer, “Nachruf,” as above, 508). During the preparatory work on the Fulda Charter Book in 1910, S. discovered in Kassel a codex of Rudolf Losse, Vicar-General of Trier and Dean of Mainz Cathedral. This important new source on the imperial history of the 14th century gave a new direction to S.’s research in years to come. In the following decades he edited his discovery (Nova Alamanniae: Urkunden, Briefe und andere Quellen besonders zur deutschen Geschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. in 3 parts, 1921–1930 [vol. 2/2 published posthumously by Klaus Schäfer in 1976]) and evaluated its contents. (Avignon und Rhens: Forschungen zur Geschichte des Kampfes um das Recht am Reich in der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 1930; Baldewin von Luxemburg: Ein grenzdeutscher Staatsmann des 14. Jahrhunderts, 1937). The completion of the edition, which met with the unanimous approval of his colleagues was delayed because he discovered, shortly before the projected end of the project, two further Losse manuscripts in Kassel.

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The intensive work on the difficult older Fulda tradition opened the way for S.’s interest in regional history. With the plan for a historical atlas of Hesse and Nassau, which he presented to the Historical Commision of Hesse and Waldeck in 1920, S. took a decisive part in the rise of research into regional history which, with its novel approach based on the history of cultural areas, was also a reaction to the defeat of 1918 and the consequent loss of German territory (Deutschland, Frankreich und der Rhein: Eine geschichtliche Parallele, 1926). In order to prepare the planned cartographic work, S. gathered a circle of interested pupils around him in the Marburg “Kugelhaus.” By uniting the interpretation of written sources with the findings of archaeology, geography, linguistics and ethnology, S. not only achieved new results in the field of settlement history, but also achieved a deeper understanding of political developments. His new approach was a success: 35 monographs on individual districts or historical landscapes within Hesse are evidence of this. True, critics occasionally deprecated the regional emphasis of the studies, and the resulting “vertical slices” (Heinemeyer, “Nachruf,” as above, 510), but S. had chosen this method in order to ease the financing of the publication of the books, which were lavishly illustrated with maps and consequently expensive. As the atlas project soon exceeded the financial powers of the Historical Commission, S. began single-mindedly to build up his own research institution, based on the example of the Leipzig Seminar of Regional History and Settlement Studies, founded by Rudolf Kötzschke in 1906, and the Rhineland Institute of Historical Regional Studies, set up by Hermann Aubin in Bonn in 1920. From then on, S. was to prove an influential academic manager of the modern type. From 1928 on, S. and his staff were involved in teacher training and development in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau as the school authorities, influenced by the discussions about education reform then taking place, decided that the so-called local heritage method (heimatkundliches Verfahren) was a useful medium by which to overcome the problem of “teaching methods which still mostly take an abstract-systematic stance and thus are removed from real life” (Ulrich Reuling, “Von der ‘Atlaswerkstatt’ zur Landesbehörde: Das Hessische Landesamt für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Marburg in seiner institutionellen und forschungsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung unter Edmund E. Stengel und Theodor Mayer,” Hundert Jahre Historische Kommission für Hessen 1897–1997, ed. Walter Heinemeyer, vol. 2, 1997, 1169–203, here 1189). In 1929, the collection of field names became the second official task alongside the atlas. The State Office’s collection of field names, compiled in the 30s, lists around 50,000 field names from the twelve districts of the Prussian administrative division of Kassel, and is an indispensable research tool for linguists, histori-

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ans of settlement and researchers in local studies to the present day. Theodor Mayer, briefly S.’s successor in Marburg and in those days the University Rector, was responsible for the transition in 1941 from a half-official research institute into a regional government office. This secured it financially, but exposed it to the baleful influence of the Party and the state. After the war, the new federal state of Hesse took the institute over as the Hessisches Landesamt für geschichtliche Landeskunde (Hessian State Office for Regional History). The Geschichtlicher Atlas von Hessen appeared 1960–1984 under S.’s pupil Friedrich Uhlhorn, the underlying conception of the work having undergone significant changes. S.’s intensive work with the early Hessian documents, and his experiences with the Fulda forgeries and the Imperial charters inspired him in the twenties to develop the plan of a photographic collection of the all the original charters up to the year 1275 extant on German soil, so that the material characteristics of the charters which were not visible in the editions (script, graphical form, seals) could be used as a comparative historical source. In this he revived an idea which had already been suggested by Karl Lamprecht in 1907, and made it reality in 1929 with the Marburger Lichtbildarchiv älterer Originalurkunden (Marburg Photographic Archive of Older Original Charters). S. profited from contemporary developments in photography. Rather than plates or films, he used 50x50 cm paper negatives, as this was the only way in which the various exposures – charter, seal, endorsement – could be combined on a single page. With the large scale reproductions, which aimed to reproduce the originals as exactly as possible, indeed, even to replace them to an extent, as a protection against catastrophes, S. created a unique resource (“Zentralstelle für die Lichtbildaufnahmen der älteren Urkunden auf deutschem Boden: Vortrag auf dem 21. Deutschen Archivtag in Marburg,” Korrespondenzblatt des Gesamtvereins der deutschen Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine 77 [1929]: 206–11; “Über den Plan einer Zentralstelle für die Lichtbildaufnahmen der älteren Urkunden auf deutschem Boden,” MinervaZeitschrift: Zentralblatt für die gelehrte Welt 6 [1930]: 33–36). S. later showed on several occasions how connections in cultural history and geography can be made on the basis of charters. He never realized his intention, formed in Berlin, of publishing a volume of plates of forged charters, in order to “illustrate in good photographs these remarkable records of struggles for material and political interests, sometimes characterized by the highest craftsmanship, sometimes by the gaucherie of their creator.” The unique Marburg photo collection, which comprises over 43,000 negatives of almost 14,000 pre-1250 charters in complete reproduction and as details, has been in the process of digitalization since July 2006 and is available on-line.

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S. had the reputation of a strict teacher “who made the highest demands on his students, but at the same time stood by them as a friend and helper” (Uhlhorn, as above, 11). “Reserved in personal contacts” but “friendly by temperament,” S. was reputedly not a gifted speaker (Heinemeyer, “Stengel, Edmund E.,” as above, 540). Famous were the three-day historical expeditions which he led annually from 1923, where he introduced a historical landscape from prehistory to the problems of the present. On these excursions his “natural warmth and friendly temperament were apparent” (Heinemeyer, as above, 541). During the violent argument which broke out over the demerger of the Medieval department from the Historical Seminar, his dark side came to the surface. The row left those concerned with wounds that continued to hurt long afterwards, and led to an unfortunate breach between the previously united sub-divisions of history at Marburg which can still be felt today. That was the first time that his “dogged, unbending, sometimes hurtful way of defending his interests” became noticeable; S.’s “dry, somewhat clumsy, and imperious character” (Reuling, “Mittelalterforschung,” as above, 152) meant that he was not always easy to get on with. The circumstances of the times did not exactly help (Friedrich E. Paff, “Die Akte Klibansky: Aus der Arbeit der Historischen Kommission für Kurhessen und Waldeck, Marburg: Ein beinahe verloren gegangener Briefwechsel,” Zwischen Unruhe und Ordnung: Ein deutsches Lesebuch für die Zeit von 1925–1960 am Beispiel einer Region: Mittelhessen, ed. Gideon Schüler, 1989, 90–106). In addition, S. inclined to extreme economies, about which his pupils told countless, sometimes pointed anecdotes. Nonetheless, his colleagues, friends and pupils presented “the old boss,” as the younger ones respectfully called him, with a festschrift for his seventieth birthday (Schäfer, as above, 343; Festschrift Edmund E. Stengel, 1952). His academic authority was beyond question; his appetite for research and his iron discipline when it came to work made him an example to many and his seminars attractive to students of other fields too. S. also excelled in the political history of ideas. St Jerome’s dictum that the army made the emperor, inspired him to a study of the army and imperialism. He gained new insights into the nature of the imperial concept of power, not merely within the borders of the medieval empire, but for instance in Anglo-Saxon England, in northern Spain, down to the modern echoes in the foundation of the German empire in 1871 (Den Kaiser macht das Heer: Studien zur Geschichte des politischen Gedankens, 1910; greatly expanded in Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisergedankens im Mittelalter, 1965). S. successfully took up further problems of medieval imperial constitution, for instance in his essay on the position of the High Master of

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the Teutonic Order (“Hochmeister und Reich: Die Grundlagen der staatsrechtlichen Stellung des Deutschordenslandes,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 58 [1938]: 178–213; revised 1965), or on the origins of the imperial princes in land and feudal law (“Land- und lehnrechtliche Grundlagen des Reichsfürstenstandes,” Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 66 [1948]: 294–342; “Die Quaternionen der deutschen Reichsverfassung. Ihr Ursprung und ihre ursprüngliche Bedeutung,” ibid 74 [1957]: 256–61; both reprinted 1960). Select Bibliography Works: Die Immunitäts-Urkunden der deutschen Könige vom 10. bis 12. Jahrhundert (1902); Die Verfasser der deutschen Immunitätsprivilegien des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts (1907); Den Kaiser macht das Heer: Studien zur Geschichte des politischen Gedankens (1910; greatly expanded in Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisergedankens im Mittelalter, 1965); Diplomatik der deutschen Immunitäts-Privilegien vom neunten bis zum Ende des elften Jahrhunderts (1910, rpt. 1964); Nova Alamanniae: Urkunden, Briefe und andere Quellen besonders zur deutschen Geschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. in 3 parts (1921–1930 [vol. 2/2 published posthumously by Klaus Schäfer in 1976]); Deutschland, Frankreich und der Rhein: eine geschichtliche Parallele (1926); Das geschichtliche Recht der hessischen Landschaft (1929); Avignon und Rhens: Forschungen zur Geschichte des Kampfes um das Recht am Reich in der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (1930); Baldewin von Luxemburg: Ein grenzdeutscher Staatsmann des 14. Jahrhunderts (1937); “Hochmeister und Reich: Die Grundlagen der staatsrechtlichen Stellung des Deutschordenslandes,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 58 [1938]: 178–213; (rev. 1965); Urkundenbuch des Klosters Fulda, Bd. 1: Die Zeit der Äbte Sturmi und Baugulf (1958); Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte (1960); Abhandlungen und Untersuchungen zur Hessischen Geschichte (1960). Literature: Catalogus professorum academiae Marburgensis: Die akademischen Lehrer der Philipps-Universität Marburg, vol. 2: Von 1911 bis 1971, ed. Inge Auerbach (Marburg: Elwert 1979), 615–16; Claus Cramer, “Aufgaben und Probleme landesgeschichtlicher Atlanten, dargestellt am hessischen Atlaswerk,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 23 (1973): 81–140; Walter Heinemeyer, “50 Jahre Forschungsinstitut Lichtbildarchiv älterer Originalurkunden Marburg,” Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 25 (1979): 328–44; Friedrich Uhlhorn, “Der geschichtliche Atlas von Hessen: Planung und Gestaltung,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 23 (1973): 62–80; Annekratrin Schaller, Michael Tangl (1861–1921) und seine Schule: Forschung und Lehre in den Historischen Hilfswissenschaften (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002), 345–47.

Andreas Meyer

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Strauch, Philipp (September 23, 1852, Hamburg – September 20, 1934, Halle/Sale), German Medievalist. Whereas S. published only one major monograph, Pfalzgräfin Mechthild in ihren litterarischen Beziehungen, 1883, well into his academic career, and whereas he published not more than a handful of scholarly articles, he had a great impact on the development of Medieval German literary scholarship through his editions of mystical literature by (women) writers, such as Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, 1878; the correspondence between Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen, 1882 (rpt. 1966), Meister Eckharts Buch der göttlichen Tröstung und Von dem edlen Menschen, 1910 (3rd ed. 1933), Paradisus anime intelligentis, 1919 (rpt. 1998), and Schriften aus der GottesfreundLiteratur, 3 vols., 1927–1929. S. also made available again an important latemedieval chronicle, Jansen Enikels Werke, 2 vols., 1891–1900 (rpt. 1980), and he served in the highly influential role as editor of Germanic literature series, such as Hermaea and Germanische Studien. S. was the son of the merchant Friedrich Wilhelm Strauch and his wife Sophie Auguste in Hamburg where he went to school at the private school run by Dr. Heinrich Schleiden, and then the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneum, where he graduated in 1870 (Abitur). He studied law in Heidelberg (1871–1872), then Germanistics (Heidelberg 1872; Berlin 1872–1874 [studied also under Karl Victor Müllenhoff]; Strasbourg 1874–1876 [studied also under Wilhelm Scherer]). He earned his Ph.D. degree in Strasbourg in 1876 with a study on the gnomic poet Marner (printed in 1876; rpt. 1965). In 1878, he earned his Habilitation, without having written the usually required thesis. From October 1878 until 1900, he worked in Berlin at the Institute of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Between 1878 and 1883, he was Privatdozent (honorary Assistant Professor) of German Philology at the University of Tübingen, and from 1883 to 1893, he gained the rank of extraordinary professor for German Philology; between 1893 and 1895, he taught at the University of Halle/Saale, and between 1893 and 1902 he was Co-Director of the Institute of German Philology there. Between 1895 and 1921, he held the position of full professor in Halle, and from 1902, he was the sole director of the Institute of German Philology. From 1912 to 1913, he served as president of the University of Halle. In 1921 he retired, but he continued to offer lectures until 1923. Shortly after his death in 1934, the Harrassowitz publishing house produced a book containing lists of the books in the private libraries of Edward Sievers and S. (1935).

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Through his monograph on the Countess of the Palatinate, Mechthild (1419–1482), and her patronage of 15th-century writers and artists, S. laid the foundation of a new research project outside of the narrow confines of German philology, identifying the social-economic conditions that made possible the fostering of contemporary literature and the arts. He was followed in this enterprise only many decades later by William C. McDonald (German Medieval Literary Patronage, 1973, 182) and Joachim Bumke (Mäzene im Mittelalter, 1979, 304). Others, however, who recently studied the family context, tended to mention S.’s important contribution only in passing, perhaps unjustifiably disregarding it because of its early date (Dieter Mertens, “Eberhard im Bart und der Humanismus,” Eberhard und Mechthild, ed. HansMartin Maurer, 1994, 46). In many regards S. enjoyed highest respect for his editorial work, making available a number of significant texts from the German late Middle Ages, such as the mystical visions of the nun Adelheid Langmann in the convent of Engelthal (ca. 1312–1375); then the correspondence between the mystic Margaretha Ebner (ca. 1291–1351) and the priest Heinrich von Nördlingen; subsequently the famous world chronicle by Jans der Enikel (fl. middle of the 13th century); moreover S. also published Meister Eckhart’s Buch der göttlichen Tröstung (ca. 1314–1318), one of the author’s three major treatises in Middle High German; not to forget his edition of the Paradisus anime intelligentis, based on an Oxford manuscript (1919; rpt. 1998). Especially the editions of the mystical texts and of Enikel’s chronicle have not been superseded until today. Further, S. also made available again the Grisardis by the Nuremberg Carthusian Erhart Gross (1931), a major late-medieval German narrative based on Boccaccio’s Decameron. S. also contributed numerous entries on late-medieval German mystical writers, members of the Devotio moderna, various chroniclers, and poets to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie and the Realenzyclopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (3rd expanded and rev. ed., 1898 and 1899). S. was recognized for his work through several medals, such as the Roter Adlerorden 4th class, 1909 and the Königliche Kronenorden 3rd class, 1912, and through the honorable rank of Geheimer Regierungsrat, 1910, and the Honorable Doctorate of Theology from the University of Halle a. d. S., 1926. He was member of the Swabian Schiller Association since 1898, and member of the Federation of German Scholars and Artists in Berlin. Scholars in the fields of both medieval mysticism and late-medieval German literature have consistently and uniformly credited him for his outstanding editorial contributions and his interpretive analysis, as reflected most recently by Nikolaus Largier and Gilbert Fournier in their 2nd edition of the Paradisus anime intelligentis, 1998, and so also by Ursula Kocher in

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her study on Boccaccio und die deutsche Novellistik, 2005 (161). We know since S. that Jans der Enikel drew from a wide range of narrative sources for his world chronicle, but many details continue to be elusive. Fritz Peter Knapp confirms in his literary history (Die Literatur des Spätmittelalters. I. Halbband, 1999, 239), that S.’s assessment regarding Enikel’s use of oral sources was mostly correct, but he also reemphasizes that much research remains to be done to reach more solid conclusions. However, according to Knapp, S.’s edition still represents the fundamental basis for all investigations of Enikel, despite the vast gaps of knowledge about this poet (though Knapp ignored the fundamental research by Richard Perger, “Die Grundherren im mittelalterlichen Wien. III. Teil. Bürgerliche und adelige Grundherrschaften,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien 23/25 [1967/69]: 7–102). R. Graeme Dunphyfully concurs in this assessment, using S.’s edition for his English translation of excerpts in his anthology of Middle High German chronicle texts (History as Literature, 2003). In fact, already in his doctoral dissertation (Daz was ein michel wunder: The Presentation of Old Testament Material in Jans Enikel’s Weltchronik, 1997, published in 1998), Dunphy had demonstrated how much all modern research on Enikel’s Weltchronik has to begin with the observations developed by S. (ibid., 19, 22, 25–26). Obviously, future research will have to fall back on S.’s trustworthy work since he had truly laid the foundation for all investigations of Enikel’s Weltchronik. Helmut Brackert, who wrote an epilogue to S.’s edition of Marner’s works in the 1965 reprint, emphasizes that we can trust most of S.’s biographical conclusions about the poet (187–88), whereas some of his efforts to date the Marner’s poems would have to be revised today (188–89). Anton Schönbach, in his review of S.’s edition (Archiv für deutsches Altertum 3 [1877]: 118–29) had criticized the author for an overly enthusiastic assessment of Marner’s stanzas. But Jens Haustein (Marner-Studien, 1995) could demonstrate that the opposite was actually the case, though both Schönbach’s and S.’s aesthetic criteria were still deeply indebted to 18th- and 19thcentury literary concepts of emotional poetry. Nevertheless, Haustein mostly relied on S.’s editorial work which he generally praised for its pragmatic and yet philologically correct approach to the manuscript situation (12–13). Joachim Bumke also cited one of S.’s articles in which he had examined the origin and meaning of Marner’s name (“Egregius dictator Marnarius dictus,” ZfdA 23 [1879]: 90–94; Bumke, Mäzene, 434, n. 114). S.’s edition of the letters exchanged between Margaretha Ebner and Heinrich von Nördlingen was reprinted 1966, but without any modern comment or any critical update. Until today, this edition has not been replaced by any modern effort and continues to be cited by scholars interested in these

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two writers (Ursula Peters, “Vita religiosa und spirituelles Erleben,” Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, 1988, 105; Studien und Texte zur literarischen und materiellen Kultur der Frauenklöster im späten Mittelalter, ed. Falk Eisermann et al., 2004, 6). Joachim Bumke praised S. for having initiated the field of patronage research, but lamented also that hardly anyone had followed his footsteps until the 1970s (Bumke, Mäzene, 304). Fortunately, S.’s monograph Pfalzgräfin Mechthild in ihren litterarischen Beziehungen has been made available again online, which clearly signals the importance of this book for the history of 15th-century German literature (http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ Strauch1883 [last accessed on July 16, 2010]). On the occasion of S.’s 80th birthday, Georg Baesecke and Ferdinand Joseph Schneider published a festschrift for the honoree (Festgabe Philipp Strauch zum 80. Geburtstage am 23. September 1932 dargebracht von Fachkollegen und Schülern, Halle 1932). They emphasized how much this thin volume reflected the wide span of research interests represented by S., from the late Middle Ages to the 18th and 19th centuries. Modern scholarship has mostly accepted S.’s editorial and interpretive work, but has not reviewed it through a critical engagement. We can also accredit S. for laying the foundation for modern scholarship on Meister Eckhart with his work published since 1903, as Ingeborg Degenhardt (Studien zum Wandel des Eckharbildes, 1967, 222–25) and T. Schaller, “Die Meister-Eckhart-Forschung von der Jahrundertwende bis zur Gegenwart,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 15 [1968]: 215–316, 403–26) have amply confirmed (see the 2nd ed. of Paradisus anime intelligentis by Niklaus Largier and Gilbert Fournier, 1998, 194–95). Select Bibliography Works: Pfalzgräfin Mechthild in ihren litterarischen Beziehungen: Ein Bild aus der schwäbischen Litteraturgeschichte des 15. Jahrhunderts (1883); Schiller: Rede zur Feier des hundertjährigen Todestages Schillers gehalten in der Aula der Universität Halle-Wittenberg (1905); Die Deutschordensliteratur des Mittelalters: Rede zur Feier des Geburtstages S. Majestät des Kaisers am 27. Januar 1910 (1910); Meister Eckhart-Probleme: Rede gehalten bei Antritt des Rektorats der Vereinigten Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg am 12. Juli 1912 (1912). Editions: Die Offenbarungen der Adelheid Langmann, Klosterfrau zu Engelthal (1878); Margaretha Ebner und Heinrich von Nördlingen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Mystik (1882); Jansen Enikels Werke (1891–1900); Reigen für das Knaben- und Mädchenturnen (1898); Meister Eckharts Buch der göttlichen Tröstung und Von dem edlen Menschen (liber benedictus) (1910; 3rd ed. 1933); Sechs Briefe von Johann Christian Edelmann an Georg Christoph Kreyssig (1918); Paradisus anime intelligentis (Paradis der fornunftigen sele (1919); Kaspar Scheit, Die fröhliche Heimfahrt (1926); Sieben bisher unveröffentlichte Traktate und Lektionen

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(1927); Schriften aus der Gottesfreund-Literatur, 3 vols. (1927–1929); Kaspar Scheit, Lobrede von wegen des Meyen (1929); Rulman Merswin’s Neun-felsen-buch (1929); Die Grisardis des Erhart Grosz. Nach der Breslauer Liederhandschrif, (1931). Anthology: S. also published, together with Arnold E. Berger and Franz Saran, Studien zur deutschen Philologie: Festgabe der Germanistischen Abtheilung der 47. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Halle zur Begrüßung dargebracht (1903). Literature: Friedrich Wilhelm Wodke, “Wolfgang Liepe (1888–1962): Zum 75. Geburtstag am 27. August 1963,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Neue Folge, 4 (1963): 233–42; Ingrid Bigler, “Liepe, Wolfgang,” Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, 3rd, compl. rev. ed. by Heinz Rupp and Carl Ludwig Lang, vol. 9 (1984), 1416; Eberhard Wilhelm Schulz, “Liepe, Wolfgang,” NDB, vol.14 (1984), 532–33; Mechthild Kirsch, “Strauch, Philipp,” IGL, vol. 3 (2003), 1092–94.

Albrecht Classen

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T Tellenbach, Gerd (September 17, 1903 Berlin – June 12, 1999, Freiburg), German Historian. T.’s wide field of research, which began with his dissertation “Die bischöflichen passauischen Eigenklöster und Vogteien” (1926, printed in 1928; The Episcopalian Convents in Passau and their Estates), was anchored in his own interest in the relationship between the Church and secular society. This topic he pursued throughout his life, as reflected, for instance, in his posthumously published article, “Gedanken zur Roma aeterna” (“Ideas on Roma aeterna,” Menschen, Ideen, Ereignisse in der Mitte Europas: Festschrift für Rudolf Lill zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Wolfgang Altgeld, 1999, 9–24). The main thesis of his habilitation, completed in 1932, Libertas, Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreits (published in 1940 and again in 1948 as Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Controversy), focused on issues of general significance for the understanding of the entire Middle Ages. T. picked up this topic once again at the end of his life in his book Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert (1988, translated also into English as The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, 1993), but with a completely new perspective. For John Van Engen(review in Speculum 71 [1996]: 496–99), this book would require all students of that important epoch to rethink their presumptions: “on some points Tellenbach seems strikingly up-to-date, including an original reflection on the tripartite, or functional division of society” (497). Before the war, T. was engaged in a study of the transition from the early-medieval Franconian to medieval German history, as reflected in his book, Königtum und Stämme in der Wendezeit des Deutschen Reiches, published in 1939. Here T. called into question the much discussed assumption of the dissolution of the German Empire and its conditions, which is considered a historical-structural problem still today. This in fact prepared the development of the later “Freiburger Arbeitskreis” that globally conceived medieval history in structural terms. T.’s later research turned to prosopographical studies because his intention was to understand people and social groups in the Middle Ages in most specific terms, as he explained in his lecture upon his appointment as university rector at the University of Freiburg in the fall semester of 1949/1950.

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This was published as Zur Bedeutung der Personenforschung des frühen Mittelalters (1957). T. illustrated what new perspectives prosopography can open for regional history of the early and high Middle Ages. With these studies he was the first who moved from the question of who, or what, the “nobility” was, to the question of who the “nobles” were as people. His article, “Die geistigen und politischen Grundlagen der karolingischen Thronfolge” (Frühmittelalterliche Studien 13 [1970]: 184–302) is based on concepts and notes that T. had collected as far back as 1944/1945. Specifically, the question of the specific forms of early and high medieval sovereignty occupied T. during his whole life. His demands on how to pursue historiography were extremely high; the “scientific ethics of history” determined his approach, since for him research and writing, analysis and synthesis, belonged intimately together. T. went to school at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Baden-Baden, studied in Munich and Freiburg, and did his doctorate (1926) with Georg von Below. He began his university career as a professor in Gießen in 1938 and moved to Münster in 1942, and to Freiburg in 1944. Decisive for T.’s career was his admission into the Department of history headed by Georg von Below in Freiburg, whom he had chosen as supervisor for his doctoral thesis and also his habilitation. Very early on, while he was still living in Berlin, T. also came in contact with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but he entered into formal relations only subsequent to its re-establishment in Munich after the war. T. was elected as correspondent (1948) and as a full member of the Monumenta in 1956. On the other hand, he was also associated with the Prussian Historical Institute, later the German Historical Institute in Rome, where he began his first research in Italy as a member between 1928 and 1933 as collaborator of Paul Fridolin Kehr. During this stay in Rome, he contributed to the new project of the Repertorium Germanicum; its second volume, which T. had revised, became exemplary for the later volumes. Later on as professor of Medieval History at the University of Freiburg and as a well-established scholar he was appointed director of the Institute in 1962, which he directed for 10 years. Two times he was elected rector of the university of Freiburg; he was both President of the Westdeutsche Rektorenkonferenz (West German Conference of University Presidents) and Member of the Wissenschaftsrat (Council of Sciences). When T. was appointed director of the German Historical Institute in Rome, he was already familiar with the traditional research program there; nevertheless he had new ideas about how it should be carried out. For instance, he got financial resources and positions for a strictly defined project to expand the edition of the documents of the monastery of S. Salvatore on

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the Monte Amiata and the research in archives in Lucca, specifically offered to young historians. T. took great pains to continue the Repertorium Germanicum. For T. the Institute in Rome was not only to be a center of research, but it was also to offer an opportunity to further the education of young scholars from Germany and Italy. After his retirement and his return to Freiburg in 1972, T. followed with attention and good-will the new research directions of Medieval Studies. He died on June 12, 1999, in Freiburg at the age of 95. His habilitation thesis, “Libertas. Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreits,” was presented in 1932, printed in 1936, and four years later translated into English as Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investure Contest (1940, rpt. 1948). Without any doubt it is a seminal work of general significance for the understanding of the fundamental aspects of medieval society. The period of National Socialism in Germany when this study was written was very difficult for an historian, but the often-discussed questions of national history appeared in a new light by T.’s observation of the larger historical context. Prior to T., theological and ecclesiastical history, and also law had never been included into historical research on this decisive epoch in the development of the Western Church. By contrast, T. had always been interested in the problem of the Church and secular society, but, as K. Bihlmeyer mentioned in his review (Theologische Quartalschrift 118 [1937]: 505–07), it has also had considerable impact on modern historical research. In his article, Josef Fleckenstein (“Gerd Tellenbach als Nationalund Universalhistoriker,” QFIAB 53 [1973]: 1–15) points out that T. was both a researcher and an excellent writer. With his two studies, “Die Germanen und das Abendland bis zum Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Seculum Weltgeschichte 4 (1967): 201–401, 656–68, and “Die Grundlegung der späteren Weltstellung des Abendlandes” (Saeculum Weltgeschichte, vol. V: Die Epoche des Mongolensturms: Die Formation Europas. Die neuen islamischen Reiche, 1970, 69–239), which covers the whole Middle Ages until the middle of the 16th century, T. took a decisive step toward universal history. The two subjects, national and universal history, have been basic issues of his research. In his famous study on Libertas he had already taken into consideration the universal tendency of the medieval church. Select Bibliography Works: Die bischöflichen passauischen Eigenklöster und Vogteien (1928; re-ed. 1965); Repertorium Germanicum II. Verzeichnis der in den Registern und Kameralakten Urbans VI., Bonifaz’ IX., Innocenz’ VII. und Gregors XII. vorkommenden Personen, Kirchen und Orte des Deutschen Reiches, seiner Diözesen und Territorien (1933, re-ed. 1961); Römischer und christlicher Reichsgedanke in der Liturgie des frühen Mittelalters (1934); Libertas, Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreits (1936; 1996; trans. as Libertas, Church, State and Christian Society at

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the Time of the Investure Contest (1940]); Königtum und Stämme in der Wendezeit des Deutschen Reiches (1939); Die Entstehung des Deutschen Reiches: Von der Entwicklung des fränkischen und deutschen Staates im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert (1940, 3rd re-ed. 1947); Zur Bedeutung der Personenforschung des frühen Mittelalters (1957); Studien und Vorarbeiten zur Geschichte des großfränkischen und frühdeutschen Adels (1957); “Kaisertum, Papsttum und Europa im Hohen Mittelalter,” Historia Mundi 4 (1958): 9–103, 597–603; “Die Germanen und das Abendland bis zum Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Seculum Weltgeschichte 4 (1967): 201–401, 656–68; “Die Grundlegung der späteren Weltstellung,” Seculum Weltgeschichte 5 (1969): 69–239; “Die geistigen und politischen Grundlagen der karolingischen Thronfolge: Zugleich eine Studie über kollektive Willensbildung und kollektives Handeln im 9. Jahrhundert,” FMSt 13 (1979): 184–302; Aus erinnerter Zeitgeschichte (1981); Die westliche Kirche vom 10. bis zum frühen 12. Jahrhundert (1988, trans. into English as: The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century [1993]); Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, 5 vols. (1988–1996). Literature: Adel und Kirche: Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag, von Feunden und Schülern, ed. Josef Fleckenstein (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder 1968), Bibliography 581–87; Josef Fleckenstein, “Gerd Tellenbach als National- und Universalhistoriker,” QFIAB 53 (1973): 1–15; Festgabe Gerd Tellenbach zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Hagen Keller and Karl Schmid (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1983); Hagen Keller, “Das Werk Gerd Tellenbachs in der Geschichtswissenschaft unseres Jahrhunderts,” FMSt 28 (1994): 374–97; Arnold Esch, “Gerd Tellenbach 1903–1999,” QFIAB 79 (1999): XXXV–XXXVIII; Rudolf Schieffer, “Nachruf Gerd Tellenbach,” DA 56 (2000): 409–11.

Christine Maria Grafinger

Tolkien, John Ronald Ruel (January 3, 1892 Bloemfontein, South Africa – September, 2 1973 Bournemouth, Dorset). T. was an English university professor of Anglo-Saxon philology, a writer and a poet. Today he is best known for his great fantasy tales The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. In 1900, T. entered the humanistic grammar school King Edward’s, Birmingham. “He received a strong classical education with heavy emphasis on linguistic training […].” (Amelia Harper, “Education,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 141). In 1911, T. started with reading the classical subjects, Greek and Latin literature, at the Exeter College of the Oxford University. He chose Comparative Philology as special subject, where he attended lectures by Joseph Wright on Gothic Grammar. The later Sir William Alexander Craigie, a tutor of T., familiarized him with the Finnish language, which

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later had a main influence on his invented languages ‘Quenya’ and ‘Sindarin’. At the end of his three-year education he decided to stay at Oxford for reading English literature of the Middle Ages and Scandinavian Philology as special subject. After fighting in France during the First World War, he went back to Oxford, where Craigie offered him a position as a co-editor of the (New) Oxford English Dictionary (1918–1920). Beginning in 1920, he taught at the University of Leeds, from 1924 as Professor for English Philology. There T. taught courses in Old and Middle English, Medieval Welsh, Germanic Philology and Old Norse. During this time, he published A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), which was welcomed among scholars, and together with Eric V. Gordon an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925). In 1925, T. was accepted to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship for Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College in Oxford. During this time he received special notoriety for his lecture series on Beowulf and His Critical Reception. In 1936, he delivered the Sir Isaac Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy with the title Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, which is thought to be a landmark of modern scholarship on Beowulf. In the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews, T. presented another famous lecture On Fairy-Stories in 1939, in which he developed further his ideas mentioned in the Beowulf lecture. In 1945 T. accepted the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature, which gave him responsibility for Middle English up to AD 1500 (Michele Fry, “Oxford,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 494). From the very beginning of his career, the Celtic language Welsh was of special interest to him. In 1955, T. inaugurated thus the O’Donnell Lectures in Celtic Studies, with a lecture on English and Welsh. In 1959, T. retired from University. For T. philology never was something that ended in itself, therefore he always emphasized that the understanding of words, the knowledge of their origin can be always just a starting point for understanding the literature or stories that they tell. Consequently T. published several essays concerning extraordinary or interesting philological phenomena. In the essay “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography” (1925), which is particularly “valuable for its philological, etymological, and lexicographical acuity” (Jane Beal: “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 621) T. discusses twelve early Middle English words, giving each its proper etymology, a definition, and a modern English equivalent. Furthermore it “gives insight in Tolkien’s fascination with words generally, [and] his intimate knowledge of the use of words in a wide range of Old English and Middle English texts” (ibid.). In a lecture held at a conference at the Université de Liège in 1951, “Middle English ‘losenger’: A Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Inquiry” (1953), T.

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discusses the origin of the word ‘losenger’ that appears not only in Chaucer’s, but also in other authors’ texts. Based on the text The Reeve’s Tale by Chaucer, T. analyzed the linguistic features that characterize the Northern Dialect, spoken by two students in the tale to point out their regional provenance. In this essay entitled “Chaucer as Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” (1934) T. wanted to demonstrate that Chaucer was a philologist, but that the scribes of the surviving manuscripts “did not recognize his attempt to present northern speech” (Simon Horobin, “Chaucer as Philologist: A Reeve’s Tale,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 93). He rectified them by replacing some forms, so that T. thus reconstructed a passage, which he thought was closer to Chaucer’s original. (ibid.). Today scholars generally agree that the earliest surviving manuscript Hengwrt is a fair reflection of Chaucer’s original and that it contains lesser northern terms than T.’s reconstructed version. Nonetheless T.’s article on Chaucer’s dialect “continues to provide the foundation for every modern discussion of this feature of Chaucer’s language” (ibid.). In 1962, his special interest in Welsh enabled T. to hold a lecture on “English and Welsh,” (1963) to inaugurate the O’Donnell Lectures. T.’s observations “on the Old English noun we(e)alh “foreigner, slave, or Celt” […] have led to the clarification of a major historical enigma: what happened to the Britons and their Celtic language when the Anglo-Saxons invaded.” (John Garth, “English and Welsh,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 162). T.’s conclusion was that “the Britons continued to form a distinctive element in England after the invasion, only adopting English gradually” (ibid.). His first published book, however, was a larger work on words. A Middle English Vocabulary, intended to be a glossary to the reader of Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921), but was not published until 1922. It contains mainly a vocabulary that would be helpful for students while reading Middle English of the 14th century (Carl F. Hostetter, “A Middle English Vocabulary (1922),” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 421). T. achieved international scholarly appreciation with the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) (Daniel Grotta, Eine Biographie von J. R. R. Tolkien, 1979, 78), which he prepared in cooperation with Eric V. Gordon, who later became his successor in Leeds. T. also had a special interest in the Middle English West Midland dialect, which he examines in several research papers. In his essay “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Mei6had’,” (1929) he showed what some scholars before only touched slightly: that the manuscript corpus of the Ancrene Wisse (A) and the MS Bodley 34 of the Katherine Group (B) were both written in the same standard literary language from the West Midland. He called that system of spelling habits ‘AB Language’. In 1962, T. published an edition of the manu-

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scripts of the Ancrene Wisse group, Ancrene Wisse: the English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. For these two publications “T. became particularly renowned” (Arne Zetterstein, “Katherine Group,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 319–20). Together with Simone R. T. O. d’Ardenne, T. wrote the article “‘Iqqlen’ in Sawles Warde” (1947), where they analyze a sentence in one of the texts of the Katherine Group, that contains the unexplained word ‘iqqlen.’ In the 1930s, T. began a series of lectures on Beowulf and its critical reception, titled Beowulf and the critics, where he criticizes the way former researchers treated the poem. He addresses in particular William Paton Ker and his view in his book The Dark Ages (1904) (Michael D. C. Drout, “Beowulf and the Critics,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 56). In 1936 his explanations and researches culminated in the famous Sir Isaac Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy: “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” (1937) in which he emphasized again that the poem should not be read primarily as a historical document. To demonstrate this he developed the ‘allegory of the tower’. With it he shows that the monsters are not a childish flaw, like Ker argued, but that they are essential to the design of Beowulf. This article “is the most important essay ever written about Beowulf. Even if Tolkien had never published The Lord of the Rings, his academic reputation would have been made with this one essay. [… It] marks the beginning of modern scholarship on Beowulf. After “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, scholars refocused their attention on Beowulf itself rather than examining what was missing from the poem or was only tangentially discussed” (idem, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 57). Furthermore T. demonstrated that the author of the poem was a Christian poet writing down a historical fiction of the pagan past. The assumption “of a deliberately archaizing poet has had enormous influence on the subsequent criticism of the poem” (idem, “Beowulf: Tolkien’s Scholarship,” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, 2007, 60). T. also started to write a translation of the poem, but never finished it. Parts of it can be found in his “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf,” a foreword to the translation by John R. C. Hall (1940), where he examines the difficulties of translating Old English texts. He states that many times it is not possible to translate every Old English word into a modern equivalent, and therefore asserts that the use of archaisms and a slightly overblown style is often more appropriate than using colloquialisms frequently. In 1939, T. held the annual Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. There he presented “On Fairy-Stories,” (1947), a lecture about the value and shaping of fairy tales. T. at first corrects the Definition of fairy-story given in the OED, asserting that fairy refers to a place and

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that fairy-stories are stories about this place. Furthermore he challenges the opinion that these tales are only for children. T. asserted that fairy-stories are of great value because they offer what is today especially needed: fantasy, recovery, escape and consolation. Fantasy is created by the so called ‘sub-creator’, who creates a secondary world, which the reader believes to be true and in this way satisfies the deepest desire, the desire for the great escape, the escape from death, which leads into consolation of the Happy Ending, for which he coins the term ‘eucatastrophe’ (Tolkien 1988). This essay shed much light on T.’s view about writing fairy-stories, but critics had different opinions about this essay. Tom Shippey supposes that the essay is “Tolkien’s least successful if most discussed piece of argumentative prose, because it lacks a philological core” (The Road to Middle-Earth, 1982, 38) Whereas Verlyn Flieger notes, that although the essay “is broad and less focused. It is an extraordinary amalgam of genre-history, critical analysis, theory of fiction, and critical philosophy. A kind of letter-day defense of poesy,” (Splintered Light, 1983, 22). Although T. enjoyed a good reputation among scholars, his scholarly output was comparatively small. Many of his works were published posthumously. Beyond the academic world T. is mainly known for his invention of languages and the shaping of Middle-Earth, the fictional world of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit novels. T.’s passion for languages led him to a scholarly career in philology, but furthermore he took advantage of his knowledge of history and the languages of the Middle Ages in creating a fairy-story. While working on his tales he often read pieces of it during meetings of the Inklings, a club of which C. S. Lewis was also a member. He was often encouraged by the club’s members and in 1937 The Hobbit was published. The novel evoked an unexpected good response. In 1954 and 1955 the three parts of The Lord of the Rings were published. Because of these masterpieces and because Middle-Earth and its history had opened a whole new field for scholarly and layman research T. is called “Author of the Century” (Shippey 2000). Select Bibliography Works: A Middle English Vocabulary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922) [was intended to be included in: Kenneth Sisam, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921)]; “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography,” RES, vol. I, no. 2, 1925, 210–15; “The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” RES, vol. I, no. 3, 1925, 331–36; ed. with Eric V. Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925); “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Mei6had’,” Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, vol. XIV, 1929, 104–26; “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale,” Translations of the Philological Society, 1–70; “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95; The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (London: George Allen & Unwin,

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1937); “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf,” Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment: A Translation into Modern English Prose, ed. John R. Clark Hall (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940); with Simonne S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne, “‘Iqqlen’ in Sawles Warde,” English Studies, vol. XXVIII, no. 6, 1947, 168–79; “On Fairy-Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. Clive S. Lewis, 38–89 (London: Oxford University Press, 1947); with Simonne S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne, “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation,” Studia Neophilologica, vol. XX, 1947, 65–72; “The Homecoming of Beorthnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, New Series, vol. VI, 1953, 1–18; “Middle English ‘Losenger’,” Essais de Philologie Moderne, 1951, 63–76; The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of the Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954); The Two Towers: being the second part of the Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954); The Return of the King: being the third part of the Lord of the Rings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955); Ancrene Wisse: the English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 402. Early English Text Society, no. 249 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); “English and Welsh,” Angles and Britons: O’Donnel Lectures, 1963, 1–41. Literature: Scholarship and Fantasy, Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland, ed. Keith J. Battarbee (Turku: Turku University Press, 1993); Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979); J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (Michigan: Grand Rapids, 1983); Daniel Grotta, Eine Biographie von J. R. R. Tolkien, Architekt von Mittelerde (Aalen: Qualander Verlag, 1979); Christina Sculland and Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, vol. I: Chronology, vol. II: Reader’s Guide (London: HarperCollins, 2006); Tom A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982); id., J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the century (London: HarperCollins Publ., 2000); J.R.R. Tolkien: Tree and Leaf, 2nd ed. (1964; London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).

Katharina Baier

Traube, Ludwig (June 19, 1861, Berlin – May 19, 1907, Munich), German philologist, paleographer and manuscript scholar; one of the founders of Middle Latin philology as an independent discipline. T.’s work combined the exact, historically orientated, study of individual phenomena, with a concern to place them in context, and to link them to other subjects of interest, which he then attempted to synthesize into a whole. His aim – and his lasting legacy – was a philology based on the exact and com-

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prehensive study of manuscripts, which aimed for the examination of the history of the script and the scribe, of the surface which texts had been written on, the physical characteristics of the manuscript, but also of libraries, and last but not least the history of philology itself, making its insights available as part of the general discipline of history. T.’s academic program, which he formulated in his habilitation, connected philological strictness with research which would use all available disciplines, and display their insights. That he turned these ambitions into a method and stuck to it is, from the point of view of the history of scholarship, T.’s greatest achievement. Various large scale academic projects being realized today are based on T.’s preparatory work, or at least on his ideas. T. broadened our knowledge of Latin literature through his editions, as well as textual criticism and philological studies in the broader sense, and his paleographic writings, particularly those on the history of scripts and the systematization of types of writing, were an important contribution to the development of a paleographic discipline which was not confined to diplomatics, but had its own research interests. T. was born on the 19th of June 1861 in Berlin, the offspring of a Jewish family. His father, Ludwig Traube had a chair as professor of internal medicine in Berlin and is regarded as one of the founders of experimental pathology in Germany. His marriage, to Cora Marckwald, produced five children, of whom T. was the second. The eldest son died, despite his father’s best efforts, of diphtheria at an early age; his father never really overcame the loss. Following his primary education, which T., who struggled academically at the age of about ten, only got through with effort and constant help from his youngest sister, he attended the Wilhelm, and later the Askanisches Gymnasium in Berlin. He was taught, among others, by Georg Kaibel, with whom he remained connected all his life. During this period the young T. discovered his interest in classical literature, which may be connected to the fact that his father studied the authors of Greek and Roman antiquity in his spare time, and, after he fell ill, got his son, who he hoped would become a scientist, to read them aloud to him. As well as T.’s extraordinary talent, a certain unwillingness to be bound by the strict school rules quickly became apparent. Evidence of this is an episode recorded by his sister Margherita, who records that her fifteen-year-old brother, orphaned by the premature death of his parents, abruptly declared that he intended to leave school, as the work interfered with his studies. Furthermore, his marks in mathematics were so bad that T. had to repeat the lower sixth. At the tender age of seventeen he published his first academic work, a thorough review of Ernst Dümmler’s edition of the Gesta Apollonii. After his Abitur (school leaving

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certificate) in February 1880, where the examiners noted his extraordinary knowledge of ancient languages, he matriculated as a student at the University of Munich, where he attended lectures on History and Classical Philology, and came under the influence of Rudolf Schöll. In the summer of 1881 he spent a semester in Greifswald, in order to hear the then leaders in their field, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Adolf Kiessling, returning to Munich thereafter. There, in addition to his studies proper, he spent his spare time in an intensive examination of the rich manuscript collections of the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), playing a significant role in its cataloguing, and developed a strong interest in the history of libraries and manuscript studies, which was later to be in evidence in his publications. After six semesters, in 1883, T. received his doctorate. Following his – very belated – year of military service, which he served in 1886–1887, T. achieved habilitation status on November 28th, 1888, and was appointed as ‘Privatdozent’ (non-stipendiary lecturer) on December 31st, 1888. In his first official application to the faculty of September 22nd, 1888, T. had stated that he wished to continue combining the study of classical and medieval philology in the future, which has been called the “alleged birth of the subject” (Ludwig Traube, Rückblick auf meine Lehrthätigkeit, ed. Gabriel Silagi, 1988, 4). The same intention is apparent in a letter of October 12th of that year, in which T. applied to the Dean of the faculty for his permission to apply for habilitation in Classical and Medieval Philology at the University of Munich. T. began to teach in the summer of 1889. He achieved rapid academic success outside the university; 27 at habilitation, T. became a member of the Göttingen Learned Society (Göttinger Gelehrte Gesellschaft) in 1894, an extraordinary member of the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities in 1896 and a regular member three years later, and was a member of the central committee of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, where he was given responsibility for the running of the Antiquitates and the Auctores Antiquissimi. In 1902 he became a member of the Roman Accademia dei Lincei. At the university, he remained a non-stipendiary lecturer for over ten years after his habilitation, and lived off his father’s legacy. The university’s first attempt at creating an extraordinary, paid professorship for T., who had married a daughter of the Sinologist Friedrich Hirth in October 1900, only achieved the royal decree of October 1900, which gave T. the title and rank of an extraordinary professor, but no money, although the same decree created a paid extraordinary professorship for Carl Weymann – who was less experienced than T., and owed much to him academically. This first failure, which must have hurt T., was followed – after a period of negotiations for an appointment in Berlin, which T. quickly broke off – by a further application by the

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faculty in May 1901, which barely achieved a majority at the second vote in the senate, and the Ministry responsible decided to use the funds for an extraordinary professorship in Slavonic instead. On October 17th, 1901, T. wrote to the ministry, asking to be relieved of his non-stipendiary lectureship, which inspired his students to deliver an address to him in which they expressed their hopes that it would be possible to keep him at Munich University. On the 16th of November of that year a – markedly tendentious and de facto baseless – article appeared in the Munich daily press, stating that it was “noticeable” that T.’s lectures had been attended by only three or four students, but that the petition had had “nearly fifty” signatures (Traube, Rückblick, 3–4) T., who could not number tactically clever interaction with authority among his strengths, felt that this invective obliged him to justify himself to the university. His Rückblick auf meine Lehrthätigkeit an der Münchener Universität von 1889 bis 1901 is composed in a disciplined tone, but understandably could not always conceal the oppressive circumstances to which it owed its existence. After his application for permission to resign had been returned to the university, T. was persuaded to retract it, but this did not improve his difficult situation or another failed attempt to find a secure income. The situation only altered when T. received a job offer from the University of Gießen, which inspired the Ministry to announce that, if T. remained in Munich, they would agree to his being given a chair – once again without pay, but at least an application was made for permission to earmark the necessary funds in the budget for the following year. When T. agreed to remain in Munich, the Ministry told him on 17th of August 1904 that from September, he would receive the salary of a professor with chair, to the sum of 4560 Marks per annum. T. broke his connection with the Monumenta in the spring of 1904; according to his pupil and biographer Franz Boll, whose biographical introduction to the posthumous collection of T.’s lectures and essays edited by Paul Lehmann is one of the liveliest witnesses of the history of scholarship because of T.’s relationship with Paul von Winterfeld, who had a very difficult personality. The University of Munich had agreed to the creation of a seminar for the Latin Philology of the Middle Ages in 1906. For this reason T., who had gained his habilitation in 1888 on classical and middle Latin philology, and began to teach on medieval themes a year later, can be regarded, along with Wilhelm Meyer, Paul von Winterfeld and others, as one of the founders of Middle Latin Philology as an independent university discipline. In 1905 T. contracted leukemia. He died in Munich on May 19th, 1907, a few weeks before his 46th birthday. T., whom Boll described as a ‘master of

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his discipline’ (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 1, XLVI) and as equally characterized by a cheerful, friendly nature and great kindness to others, was buried beside his parents in the Jewish cemetery, Schönhauser Allee, in his birthplace, Berlin. T.’s extraordinary gifts were apparent from his first publication (Anzeige der ‘Gesta Apollonii’, ed. Ernst Dümmler, 1877, Literarisches Zentralblatt [1878]: col. 883). In a short, but thorough review, the schoolboy progressed beyond Dümmler and demonstrated “to which group of manuscripts the exemplar of the Apollonius-novel that the poet used, had belonged to” (Harry Bresslau, “Ludwig Traube. Ein Nachruf,” Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 33 [1908]: 539–47, here 540), made a plausible conjecture regarding the missing end of the text, and more than ten emendations to Dümmler’s text. It is a tribute to the quality of T.’s criticism that most of his suggestions were adopted by Dümmler for the second edition of the Gesta for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. His doctoral thesis on Macrobius’ neo-platonic sources, which appeared in 1883 under the title Varia libamenta critica, was a slim volume, which despite its modest volume once again offered various examples of T.’s striking astuteness in restoring corrupted texts. T. demonstrated this astuteness once again when, only three years later, he published the first fascicle of the Poetae Latini (MGH Poetae Latini, vol. 3, 1–264), which, when completed in 1896, comprised more than 800 pages and contained such important writers as Audradus Modicus, Hincmar of Reims, Paschasius Radbertus and Sedulius Scottus. T.’s work on the Poetae and the ensuing exchange of letters with Dümmler is closely connected to his volume on Karolingische Dichtungen (1888), the first chapter of which T. used as his application for habilitation status. The book combines a myriad of learned corrections, expansions and explanations on linguistic, metrical and rhythmic details of the first Poetae volume, which Dümmler had published. His introduction, in which he engages in uncharacteristically sharp apodictic criticism of the older Monumenta editions, is of significance for the history of the field. (ibid., 3–4). His work “O Roma nobilis,” published in 1891, is also dedicated to the poetry of the Middle Ages (Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1. Kl., 19/2 [1891]: 299–395), and contains various investigations of individual poems, all of which are excellent. The title comes from the first section, in which T. correctly dated two poems, which had been ascribed to late antiquity since their discovery, to the 10th century and localized them in Verona. In 1892 and 1896, fascicle two and three of volume three of the Poetae appeared in quick succession (MGH Poetae Latini, vol. 3, 265–517 and 517–745, addenda and indices); in 1896 T. contributed to Theodor Mommsen’s edition of Cassiodo-

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rus in vol. 12 of the Auctores Antiquissimi (MGH Auctores Antiquissimi, vol. 12, 459–84, Index rerum et verborum, 510–97). His Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti, published in 1898, was both a novelty and an example of T.’s scholarly approach; Bresslau called it a “highly praiseworthy, exemplary piece of philological and historical criticism” (Bresslau, “Ludwig Traube,” 545). T. describes the text’s history from a wide perspective, bringing together “internal and external witnesses and manuscripts on one page, and evidence of the copying process, the use, extent to which they were valued, and the diffusion of manuscripts on the other, with quotations and commentary,” that is the “whole apparatus, which usually is merely assumed for our text’s transmission, and which probably often only exists as a supposition” (“Textgeschichte der Regula S. Benedicti,” Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3. Kl., 21/3 [1898]: 599–731, here 604) and so came to the conclusion – not sustainable in that form in the light of present day knowledge – that there were already three diverging manuscript classes by the time of Benedict’s second successor Simplicius (pure, interpolated, and contaminated versions). Building on this, T. postulated the division of the three classes he had determined, which he believed ought to be considered with regard to the production of various versions. In the last decade of his life, T. turned his attention especially towards transmission- and library history, as well as to paleography. Many reviews and discussions of relevant works appeared in the period (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 1, LIV-LVII), which frequently exceed the usual scale of a review inasmuch as their author added various original observations of his own. The first fruit of the new – but already familiar to T. – research field was an essay on transmission history and paleography, which appeared in 1900 under the title “Perrona Scottorum, ein Beitrag zur Ueberlieferungsgeschichte und zur Palaeographie des Mittelalters” (Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philos.-philolog. u. hist. Kl., Jg. 1900, München 1901, 469–538). In it, the author undertook detailed explorations of the insular and continental hands, the relationship between paleography and transmission history, as well as the history of the abbreviation of the word noster. The investigation of this abbreviation, at least, was an approach which T. developed further, and with its aid he achieved important results. In the same year an essay appeared in which T., using abbreviations, found a criterion for the secure dating of the famous Roman Vergil-Codex (“Das Alter des Codex Romanus des Virgil,” Strena Helbigiana, 1900, 307–14). In 1903, he published a study of the textually badly corrupted writer Ammianus Marcellinus (“Die Ueberlieferung des Ammianus Marcellinus,” Mélanges Boissier: Recueil de mémoires concernant la littérature et les antiquités romaines dédié à Gaston

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Boissier … à l’occasion de son 80e anniversaire, 1903, 443–48), the edition of whose works he entrusted to a pupil. When some uncial fragments came to light as binding fragments in Bamberg in 1904, T. identified them as parts of the fourth decade of Livius (“Bamberger Fragmente der vierten Dekade des Livius. Anonymus Cortesianus,” Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3. Kl., 24/1 [1904]: 1–56); parallel to this, several notes and essays on further discoveries of manuscripts and the history of Tironian notes appeared (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 1, LVI-LVIII). Together with Rudolf Ehwald, T. wrote an essay concerned with library history on the notorious Benedictine “Jean Baptiste Maugérard. Ein Beitrag zur Bibliotheksgeschichte” (Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 3. Kl., 23/2 [1904]: 303–87), before the 7th edition of volume one of Wilhelm Wattenbachs Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, completed by T., appeared later that year. In 1906, the first issue of Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters was published, in which T. preceded an article of his pupil Siegmund Hellmann on Sedulius Scottus with a foreword containing his proposals on the objectives of medieval Latin philology (Siegmund Hellmann, Sedulius Scottus, 1906, IV–V). T. was able to prepare parts of his last book, Nomina Sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kürzungen, published in 1907, for the press. The book was without doubt a magnum opus, treating complex material with scholarly thoroughness. In it, T. systematically developed the methodical approach he had used from his earliest works, in order to make abbreviations fruitful in the assessment, dating and localization of manuscripts, by investigating the appearance, distribution and meaning of nomina sacra in various languages and language levels. Thus, T. achieved an insight into the different roots of Christian contraction abbreviations and the non-Christian suspension abbreviations. The volume not only contained many insights into religious history, but also new knowledge about Latin and Greek scripts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Many important works which T. himself did not publish anymore, such as an “Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters” (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 2, 1–176) or reflections on the “Geschichte und Grundlagen der Paläographie und Handschriftenkunde” (ibid., vol. 1, 1–127) were edited with a number of T.’s essays (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 3) by Franz Boll, Paul Lehmann, and Samuel Brandt. T.’s private library, comprising around 7500 volumes, was presented to the German state by his executor, on condition that it would be placed at the disposal of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica for use in the preparation of scholarly editions. T. had a number of pupils who, following their teacher, further developed his ideas and plans, put them into practice, and thus helped the Munich

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School to an international reputation; he himself wrote of Franz Boll, Charles Upson Clark, Ludwig Deubner, Max Goldstaub, Georg Karo, Heribert Plenkers, Edward Kennard Rand, Carl Weymann as well as Paul von Winterfeld (Traube, Rückblick, 28); Siegmund Hellmann, Paul Lehmann, Elias Avery Loew and Paul Maas should also be mentioned. Lehmann, who later became one of the most influential figures of the Munich paleographic school, was the most important member of the staff responsible for the edition of the Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge (1 sqq., 1918 sqq.) and took over T.’s chair, albeit fourteen years after his death. After his retirement in 1953, Lehmann and a colleague began the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch (1 sqq., 1967 sqq.). Rand, who later taught in Harvard, was responsible for many significant works on early medieval paleography, in particular on the school of Tours. Rand also founded the Medieval Academy of America and the periodical Speculum. With the creation of the Codices latini antiquiores (1 sqq., 1934 sqq.), which he ran for many years, Loew, who dedicated his thesis to the memory of his ‘unforgettable teacher’ (Die ältesten Kalendarien aus Monte Cassino, ed. and studied by Elias Avery Loew, 1908, preface), began the most important illustrative work for medieval paleography. But T. enjoyed a high reputation outside the circle of his pupils too, as the many scholarly obituaries testify (listed in Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 1, XII–XIV). A collection of essays in his memory was published in 1989, commemorating the 100th anniversary of his first lecture (Lateinische Kultur im VIII. Jahrhundert: Traube-Gedenkschrift, ed. Albert Lehner und Walter Berschin, 1989). Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, ed. Franz Boll, vol. 1: Zur Paläographie und Handschriftenkunde, ed. Paul Lehmann, 1909; vol. 2: Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie des Mittelalters, ed. Paul Lehmann, 1911; vol. 3: Kleine Schriften, ed. Samuel Brandt, 1920. Vol. 1, XLIX-LX contains a full list of T.’s works, LXII–LXXIII an overview of his literary remains; a photo of Ludwig Traube: Nomina Sacra, 2. flyleaf; Traube, “Rückblick,” in an appendix, with a photo of his grave. Select Bibliography Franz Boll, “Ludwig Traube, Vorbemerkung,” Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, vol. 1, XII–XLVII; collection of obituaries ibid., XII–XIV; Christel Meier, “Königin der Hilfswissenschaften? Reflexionen zu Geschichte, Selbstverständnis und Zukunft der Mittellateinischen Philologie,” FMSt 35 (2001), 1–21; here 5–8; Rosamond McKitterick, “Palaeography, Diplomatic and Codicology: The Last Fifty Years,” Omaggio al medioevo: I primi cinquanta anni del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo di Spoleto, ed. Enrico Menestò (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2004), 179–210, here 180–91.

Francesco Roberg

Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian

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Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian (November 21, 1800 Solz near Bebra, Germany – July 30, 1868 Marburg, Germany), German Theologian, Historian, and Philologist. V. was an influential theologian, politician, teacher, and scholar, who contributed significantly to several fields of study. The bulk of his published output was on topics that fall outside the scope of this handbook; for instance, as one would expect in light of his profession, V. published extensively on theological and religious topics, especially on the teaching of religion in the schools and on the history of the Lutheran church, as well as on Hessian history, modern German literature, and German folk songs. However, at least one of his ideas about medieval German(ic) literature remains influential, as is discussed below. V. was born in Solz near Bebra, Germany, on November 21, 1800. His father, Johann Georg Vilmar, was a minister, and his mother, Susanne Elisabeth Giesler, was the daughter of a minister. V. studied theology, classics, and Germanic philology in Marburg from 1818 to 1820, but then abandoned his personal religious beliefs. He would later regain them, in about 1840, and he remained extremely active in the Lutheran church from that point on. V. taught school in various locations in Germany, including Rotenburg and Hersfeld, before being elected to the diet of the electorate of Hessen in 1831, thus beginning his political career. In December 1831, V. was appointed to the ministerial committees for religion and instruction; he also served briefly as assistant reporter in the ministry of the interior and as a teacher in Hanau. From 1833 to 1850 V. directed the gymnasium in Marburg (and from 1836 to 1850 was on the committee on gymnasial affairs). During this period he also founded and edited the Hessischer Volksfreund; the periodical was founded in 1848 and V. was its sole editor until 1851. In 1850, he was named a consistorial counselor in the ministry of the interior; he was also acting superintendent of his church from 1851 to 1855. In 1855, he was elected superintendent of his church, but the Elector of Hesse, who had to approve the position, vetoed it instead. V. then became professor of theology in Marburg

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in October 1855, where he supervised students and taught courses on various Biblical and theological topics. V. was also active in the conferences of the Lutheran pastors, and edited twelve volumes of the Pastoral-theologische Blätter between 1861 and 1866. (Many of his own contributions to this periodical were published in a collected edition after his death.) He was honored for his work with an honorary degree from Marburg in 1833 and in 1851 was decorated by the state. V. does not seem to have been very happy in Marburg; he was also troubled by the events leading up to German unification and by the death of his second wife in 1868. He died in Marburg on July 30, 1868. In terms of medieval topics, V. is best remembered today for his ideas about the Old Saxon Hêliand, a 9th-century gospel harmony. This text exhibits some clearly pre-Christian, Germanic ideas and elements, and these ideas and elements led V. to refer to the type of Christianity presented on the Hêliand as “das Christentum im deutschen gewände” (“Christianity in a German garment”) and the depiction of Jesus as “ein deutscher Christus” (“a German Christ”) in his book on the subject, Deutsche Altertümer im Hêliand als Einkleidung der evangelischen Geschichte (1845). This thesis of the “Germanization of Christianity” has triggered an enormous amount of controversy in the scholarly literature; while most scholars of Old Saxon today accept the idea that the Hêliand retains some pre-Christian ideas and elements, they are not willing to accept V.’s thesis in its strongest form. Beyond his work on the Hêliand, V.’s contributions to the study of medieval German literature lie mainly in his book on the subject, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der deutschen National-Litteratur (1845), several later editions of which also appeared; and his work on Rudolf von Ems’ Weltchronik (Die zwei Recensionen und die Handschriftenfamilie der Weltchronik Rudolfs von Ems: Mit Auszügen aus den noch ungedruckten Theilen beider Bearbeitungen, 1839). V. also included samples of Gothic and Old High German texts in his Deutsche Schulgrammatik. Lautlehre und Flexionslehre nebst gothischen und althochdeutschen Sprachproben (1840), although one must wonder how much these samples helped his pupils with their study of German grammar. Finally, a book on German poetics, prepared on the basis of papers V. left at his death, appeared in 1870 (Die deutsche Verskunst nach ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Unter Benützung des Nachlasses von A. F. C. Vilmar, bearbeitet von C. M. W. Grein). Select Bibliography Works: Die zwei Recensionen und die Handschriftenfamilie der Weltchronik Rudolfs von Ems: Mit Auszügen aus den noch ungedruckten Theilen beider Bearbeitungen (1839); Verhältnis der evangelischen Kirche in Kurhessen zu ihren neusten Gegnern (1839); Deutsche Schulgrammatik. Lautlehre und Flexionslehre nebst gothischen und althochdeutschen Sprachproben (1840); Hessisches Historienbüchlein (1842); Deutsche Altertümer im Hêliand als Einkleidung der evange-

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lischen Geschichte (1845); Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der deutschen National-Litteratur (1845); Schulreden über Fragen der Zeit (1846); Hessische Chronik (1855); Die Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetorik (1856); Zur neuesten Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands (3 parts, 1858–1867); Geschichte des Konfessionstandes der evangelischen Kirche in Hessen (1860); Die Gegenwart und Zukunft der niederhessischen Kirche (1867); Idiotikon von Kurhessen (1868); Ueber Goethes Tasso (1869); Die deutsche Verskunst nach ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung. Unter Benützung des Nachlasses von A. F. C. Vilmar (1870); Kirche und Welt (1872; 2 vols., ed. C. Müller); Predigten und geistliche Reden (1876). Literature: Wilhelm Hopf, August Vilmar: Ein Lebens- und Zeitbild (2 vols., Erlangen: Martin Luther Verlag, 1912); Gerhard Müller, Die Bedeutung August Vilmars für Theologie und Kirche (Munich: Kaiser, 1969); G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., The Saxon Savior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Heinz-Günter schmitz and Eckart Steinhoff, “Vilmar, August Friedrich Christian,” IGL, vol. 3 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2003), 1950–52.

Marc Pierce

Vinaver, Eugène (June 18, 1889, St. Petersburg, Russia – July 21, 1979, Canterbury, Kent), Arthurian and Literary Scholar. V.’s invaluable contributions to Arthurian scholarship focus primarily on Medieval prose romance. They include his important work on the Prose Tristan and its relation to Malory, which constituted the main thesis of his Docteur-ès-Lettres, as well as his study of the sources of the Prose Tristan. His argument proposed that there was but one common source for the various Tristan poems and the prose romance: a single, lost French poem composed in the 12th century by a single author. Other studies identify and examine the aesthetics of Medieval literature, enhancing our understanding of the aesthetic principles found in romance. He also left his mark on textual editing, rejecting the “obsolete” methods of the 19th century and proposing what he referred to as the “best text” method. V. produced the definitive edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur, titled The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) and based on the Winchester manuscript of Malory discovered in 1934. His edition has been the basis for a large number of translations into foreign languages, prompting some to credit V. with presenting Malory to the entire world. The son of a lawyer and politician, V. immigrated to Paris with his family in 1919 and became a French citizen. He attended the University of Paris,

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where he earned his doctorate under the direction of Joseph Bédier and Alfred Jeanroy. The subject of his doctoral thesis, titled Le roman de Tristan et Iseut dans l’œuvre de Thomas Malory (1925), reflected his interest in both Medieval English and French literature (and accounts for his comparatist approach to literary studies) and led him to Lincoln College in Oxford, where he studied from 1921 to 1922. It was at Oxford that he earned his B.Litt., his M.A., and his D.Litt. Moreover, he was a lecturer and fellow of Lincoln College from 1924 to 1928 and a reader in French at Oxford from 1928 to 1933. His long career at the University of Manchester began in 1933, when he was appointed Professor of French Language and Literature. It was there that he met his wife, Elizabeth Malet Vaudrey, whom he married on September 23, 1939 and with whom he had a son. V.’s career at Manchester spanned 33 years, until he retired and became Emeritus in 1966. However, following his retirement, he embarked on a new phase of his career and began lecturing as a Visiting Professor at various universities, including five transatlantic ones and receiving honorary degrees from five others. Along with being named an honorary fellow of Lincoln College in 1959, he also held, beginning in 1977, honorary professorships at the Universities of Hull and Kent, where he continued to hold seminars up until a short time before his death. Additionally, he was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy from 1972 onward and of the Medieval Academy beginning the following year. Other honors include his decoration as Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur (1959), his election as a Foreign Member of the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (1961), and his being a laureate of the French Academy (1971). Over the course of his career, V. served as president of numerous societies, including the Society for the Study of Mediaeval Language and Literature (1939–1948), the Modern Language Association (1961), the Modern Humanities Research Association (1966), and the International Arthurian Society (1966–1969), which, along with Jean Frappier and R.S. Loomis, he was instrumental in founding. He also founded two scholarly journals, Arthuriana (1928), which became Medium Ævum in 1930 (but has since returned to its original title), and with others, French Studies (1947), along with two series for Manchester University Press, French Classics and Les Ouvrages de L’Esprit. V.’s scholarship is vast and numbers nearly 100 publications, including many major monographs. His publication of The Works of Sir Thomas Malory in 1947 was accompanied by his theory (based on textual evidence) that it was not Malory’s intention to create a single vast work, but rather a sequence of translations adapted from various French texts. During the latter part of his

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career, much of his research focused on the aesthetic principles of Arthurian romance, such as analogy, repetition, and interlace, along with the evolution of the genre of romance. Several books reflect his insight into the aesthetic value behind Medieval works, including Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance (1966), A la recherche d’une poétique médiévale (1970), and The Rise of Romance (1971). In addition to his work on medieval literature, he also published studies on 19th-century French literature and on the French classics, particularly Racine, after he found and published in 1944 the author’s personal notes on Aristotle’s Poetics. All of V.’s contributions to scholarship, regardless of their focus, have impacted literary studies. His pioneering work on Malory’s French sources remains the most thorough of its kind, and his extensive notes on the prose Tristan provide, in the absence of a complete critical edition, invaluable information for scholars seeking to sort through the various manuscripts of the enormous romance. With his Malory, he provided a survey of the historical and literary influence surrounding Malory during the time that he wrote, along with a useful study of the author’s narrative technique. Although his later contention regarding the nature of Malory’s text (i. e., that it was never intended as a unified work but rather as eight separate tales) was immediately met with objections by some and continues to provoke controversy, V. never amended his point of view. Among those not persuaded was R. M. Lumiansky, who called V.’s identification of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel as author unfounded and his criticism of William Caxton’s editing unconvincing. Lumiansky went on to criticize V.’s editions of Malory, which were based on the Winchester Manuscript, as an inadequate presentation of Malory’s book (Speculum 62.4 [1987]: 879). Regardless of the debate, however, his bold theory on Malory served to revive interest in Malorian scholarship, especially in the U.S. Unlike his often challenged views on Malory, his important publications on the aesthetics of Medieval prose romances were well-received by most scholars. For example, his A la Recherche d’une poétique médiévale was deemed remarkable and impressive, in a review by Norman B. Spector (Modern Philology 70.3 [1973]: 258–60). Likewise, R. T. Davies praised The Rise of Romance as being a masterpiece of scholarship and critical sensibility (The Review of English Studies 23.92 [1972]: 463–466), whereas Barbara Nelson Sargent noted that V.’s observations therein are presented with elegance and erudition (Modern Philology 71.4 [1974]: 405–07). The book retains, even today, a place on many graduate programs’ reading lists. Moreover, V.’s work on medieval aesthetics inspired further studies on the subject, carried out by other prominent medievalists, including Elspeth Kennedy and Norris J.

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Lacy, and remains a significant point of departure for the analysis of aesthetics in Medieval romance. Select Bibliography Works: Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut dans l’oeuvre de Malory (1925); Etudes sur le Tristan en prose (1925); Malory (1929); The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947); Racine et la poésie tragique (1951); L’Action poétique dans le théâtre de Racine (1960); A la Recherche d’une poétique médiévale (1970); The Rise of Romance (1971); King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales (1975); Entretiens sur Racine (1984). Literature: D. C. Muecke, “Some Notes on Vinaver’s Malory,” Modern Language Notes 70.5 (1955): 325–28; David F. Hult, “Lancelot’s Two Steps: A Problem in Textual Criticism,” Speculum 61.4 (1986): 836–58; R. M. Lumiansky, “Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, 1947–1987: Author, Title, Text,” Speculum 62.4 (1987): 878–97; Michael N. Salda, “Reconsidering Vinaver’s Sources for Malory’s ‘Tristran’,” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 88.4 (1991): 373–81; Laura Hodges and Sigmund Eisner, “Eugène Vinaver Teaching,” Arthuriana 8.3 (1988): 77–78; Elizabeth S. Sklar, “Rewriting Malory: Vinaver’s Selected Tales,” Arthuriana 11.4 (2001): 53–63.

Amy L. Ingram

Adler, Guido

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W Wackernagel, Karl Heinrich Wilhelm (April 23, 1806 – December 21, 1869), German Medievalist. W.’s lectures and research treated the entire field of German Philology and the young field of comparative linguistics, with an emphasis on German, Latin, Greek and the Romance languages. His article “Ueber Conjugation und Wortbildung durch Ablaut im Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen” [About Conjugation and Word Formation through Vowel Gradation in German, Greek and Latin] (1831), although flawed in certain aspects, was a considerable contribution to the fledgling field of comparative linguistics as represented by Jacob Grimm and Franz Bopp. W.’s interdisciplinary approach, philological skill, industriousness, and broad network of friends and colleagues lead him to become the most imminent German Philologist in the generation directly following that of Jacob Grimm and Karl Lachmann (Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Vosskamp, 1994). W. was born to Johann Wilhelm and Agnes Sophie in 1806, and his father switched professions from book printer to police detective the year he was born. His father died in 1815 and his mothered followed in 1818. W. began his education at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster in Berlin, from which he was expelled for his political views in 1820, afterwards he attended the Friedrich Werder Gymnasium in Berlin. W. was very close to his brother Philipp, who himself rose to become Professor, and introduced him to Hans Ferdinand Massmann, who for his part introduced the young W. to the “Father of Gymnastics” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) and to old German literature. He was incarcerated for three days in 1821 as a result of the Demagogenverfolgung (persecution of the demagogues) which had been instituted to enforce the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. W. began attending Berlin University in 1824, placing his emphasis on old German language and literature, and studied under Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, the Grimm brothers and Karl Lachmann, the latter of which with whom he formed a long lasting personal and professional relationship. W.’s years of study were marked by difficult financial conditions, but his spirit and talent ensured his perseverance, during this time he also gathered invaluable experience as a copyist

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of medieval manuscripts for Lachmann, Grimm, and von der Hagen. His first substantial work was Das Wessobrunner Gebet und die Wessobrunner Glossen [The Prayer of Wessobrunn and the Wessobrunn Glosses] (1827), with which he engaged in a debate with the Grimm brothers. W. also released creative writing of his own (Kurt Jankowsky: “Wilhelm Wackernagel [1806–1869],” Nineteenth-Century German Writers to 1840, ed. James Hardin and Siegfried Mews. Dictionary of Literary Biography, 133, 1993, 297–302), such as his Gedichte eines fahrenden Schülers [Poems of a Travelling Student] (1828), Neuere Gedichte [Newer Poems] (1842), Zeitgedichten [Contemporary Poems] (1843), Weinbüchlein [The Little Book of Wine] (1845), and posthumously, Gedichte [Poems] (1873). Hoffmann von Fallersleben encouraged him to spend 18 months in Breslau, during which time W. published little in the field of German Philology, but expanded his considerable repertoire of languages and knowledge. The most significant publication of this period was his Die mittelhochdeutsche Negations-Partikel ‘ne’ [The Middle High German Negation Particle ‘ne’] (1829). W. received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Göttingen in 1833. Toward the end of his time in Berlin, W. became friends with Karl Simrock, and their friendship proved to be poetically fruitful as together they released a translation of Walther von der Vogelweide’s poetry (1833). In the spring of 1833, W. accepted a teaching position for German Language and Literature at the University of Basel and was promoted to professor in 1835 (Jakob Wackernagel: “Zur Erinnerung an die Basler Zeit von Wilhelm Wackernagel, 19. April 1833 bis 21. Dez. 1869 (1933),” Professoren der Universität Basel aus fünf Jahrhunderten: Bildnisse und Würdigungen, 1960). In 1837, he became an honorary citizen of Basel and married Karoline Louise, with whom he had two sons. Following her death in 1848, he remarried to Maria Salomea in 1850. W. expanded his studies to include Art History, an interest which had arisen during his time in Breslau, and released thereto his Die Deutsche Glasmalerei [German Glass Painting] (1855) and Die goldene Altartafel von Basel [The Golden Altar Tablet of Basel] (1857) among others. In the same year he edited Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich [Poor Henry] (1855) with commentary that still enjoys critical worth. W. remained in Basel despite numerous invitations by other respected universities, including Tübingen (1833 as successor to Ludwig Uhland), Vienna (1849), Berlin (1856, successor of Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen), and Munich (1856). His later years were dedicated to the city and community of Basel, and he held numerous posts dedicated to improving the quality of life of its citizens (see Rollberg, 2003, 1967). Complementary to this dedication to Basel, he expanded his research to include Basel and the region, publishing among others his studies Ueber die mittelalterliche Sammlung zu

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Basel [About the Medieval Collection of Basel] (1857), Ritter- und Dichterleben Basels im Mittelalter [The Life of Knights and Poets in Basel in the Middle Ages] (1858) und Sechs Bruchstücke einer Nibelungenhandschrift aus der mittelalterlichen Sammlung zu Basel [Six Fragments of a Nibelungenlied Manuscript from the Medieval Collection of Basel] (1866). Following a protracted illness, W.’s death on December 21, 1868 ended the career of one of the most multifaceted and talented German Philologists that the discipline has ever seen (Kurt R. Janowsky: “Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806–69): A Philologist in Need of Being Rediscovered,” Multiple Perspectives on the Historical Dimensions of Language, ed. K. R. Janowsky, 1996, 115–28). The most significant work for modern study that W. released is now, as then, his Lesebuch (1835–1843), which is still extremely useful today. His Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur (1848–1894), which covered German literature from its beginnings until the 17th century, was hailed as the first philological and historical treatment of old German literature next to August Koberstein’s Grundriss der Geschichte der deutschen National-Litteratur (1847–1866). This work was overshadowed by the Nibelungenstreit of the 19th century, but following its “resolution,” W.’s theory that medieval German rhymed pair verse contained two beats (zweihebig) and not four (vierhebig) – promoted by Ferdinand Vetter and Max Rieger – which in turn also resulted in a controversy within the ranks of German philology before four beats carried the day. Further, W. was one of the first to propose a late and foreign origin for the German love lyric of the Middle Ages in his work Altfranzösische Lieder und Leiche [Old French Songs and Leichs] (1846), which is still a topic of discussion. Select Bibliography Works: Zwey Bruchstücke eines unbekannten mittelhochdeutschen Gedichtes (1827; Two Fragments of an Unknown Middle High German Poem); Die mittelhochdeutsche Negations-Partikel ‘ne’. Eine lexicographisch-syntactische Abhandlung (1829; The Middle High German Negation Particle ‘ne.’ A Lexicographic-Syntactic Study); Die Geschichte des deutschen Hexameters und Pentameters bis auf Klopstock (1831; The History of the German Hexameter and Pentameter until Klopstock); Ueber Conjugation und Wortbildung durch Ablaut im Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen (1831; About Conjugation and Word Formation through Vowel Gradation in German, Greek and Latin); Die Verdienste der Schweizer um die deutsche Litteratur (1833; The Merits of the Swiss in German Literature); Die altdeutschen Handschriften der Basler Universitätsbibliothek: Verzeichniss, Beschreibung, Auszüge (1836; The Old German Manuscripts of the University Library of Basel); Über die dramatische Poesie (1838; About Dramatic Poetry); Walther von Klingen: Stifter des Klingenthals und Minnesänger (1845; Walther von Klingen. Benefactor of Klingenthal and Minnesinger); Altfranzösische Lieder und Leiche aus Handschriften zu Bern und Neuenburg: Mit grammatischen und litterarhistorischen Abhandlung (1846; Old French Songs and Leichs from Manuscripts in Bern and Neuenburg. With Grammatical and Historical Literary Study); Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur. Ein Handbuch (1848–1855; History of German

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Literature); Die Deutsche Glasmalerei: Geschichtlicher Entwurf mit Belegen (1855, 1985; German Glass Painting. Historical Sketch with References); Ritter- und Dichterleben Basels im Mittelalter (1858; The Life of Knights and Poets in Basel in the Middle Ages); Die Hündchen von Bretzwil und von Bretten: Ein Versuch in der Mythenforschung (1865; The Puppies of Bretzwil and of Bretten. An Attempt at Mythological Research); Kleinere Schriften, 3 vols., ed. Moritz Heyne (1872–1874, 1966; Smaller Writings [includes chronological list of publications]). Editions: Das Wessobrunner Gebet und die Wessobrunner Glossen (1827; The Prayer of Wessobrunn and the Wessobrunn Glosses); Walther von der Vogelweide: Gedichte (1833; Walther von der Vogelweide. Poems); Deutsches Lesebuch, vol. I: Poesie und Prosa vom IV. bis zum XV. Jh. (1835, vol. II–IV: Proben der deutschen Poesie seit dem Jahre 1500, 1836; vol. V: Wörterbuch zum altdeutschen Lesebuch, 1839, 1971; German Reader. I: Poetry and Prose from the 4th–15th century, I–IV: Samples of German Poetry since 1500, V: Dictionary to the Old German Reader); Das Landrecht des Schwabenspiegels (1840; The Law of the Land in the Swabian Mirror); Die altdeutschen Dichter des Elsasses. I: Otfried von Weissenburg, II: Heinrich der Gleissner (1847–1848; The Old German Poets of Alsace. I: Otfried von Weissenburg II: Heinrich der Gleissner); Der arme Heinrich Herrn Hartmanns von Aue und zwei jüngere Prosalegenden verwandten Inhaltes (1855, 1911; Poet Henry by Hartmann von Aue and Two Younger Prose Legends of Related Content); Die goldene Altartafel von Basel. Erklaerung und Zeitbestimmung (1857; The Golden Altar Tablet of Basel. Explanation and Chronological Determination); Walther von der Vogelweide nebst Ulrich von Singenberg und Leutold von Seven (1862; Walther von der Vogelweide, Ulrich von Singenberg and Leutold von Seven); Kunstschätze der mittelalterlichen Sammlung zu Basel (1864; Art Treasures of the Medieval Collection in Basel); Sechs Bruchstücke einer Nibelungenhandschrift aus der mittelalterlichen Sammlung zu Basel (1866; Six Fragments of a Nibelungenlied Manuscript from the Medieval Collection of Basel); Gothische und altsächsische Lesestücke nebst Wörterbuch (1871; Gothic and Old Saxon Selections with Dictionary); Altdeutsche Predigten und Gebete aus Handschriften, ed. Max Rieger (1876, 1964; Old German Sermons and Prayers from Manuscripts); Proben der deutschen Prosa seit dem Jahre MD (1876; Samples of German Prose since 1500). Literature: Karl Bartsch, “Drei deutsche Litterarhistoriker,” Germania 16 (1871): 109–20; Edward Schröder, “Wilhelm W. Wackernagel,” ADB, vol. 54 (1908): 460–65; Thomas Konrad Kuhn, “Karl Heinrich Wackernagel,” Biographisch und Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, vol. 13 (1998), 134–36; Cathrin Rollberg: “Karl Heinrich Wilhelm Wackernagel,” IGL, vol. 2 (2003), 1965–67.

Maurice Sprague

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Waddell, Helen (May 31 1889, Azabu, Japan – March 5 1965, Highgate, London), Anglo-Irish Translator and Historical Novelist. W.’s work helped to dispel long-held notions about the sterility of learning during the so-called Dark Ages (ca. 476–1000 C.E.). The Wandering Scholars (1927) sits alongside the work of Charles Haskins (The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927) and Edward Kennard Rand (The Founders of the Middle Ages, 1928) as an account of a spirit of creative individualism which predated Renaissance humanism by several centuries. Together with her volumes of translations, this stimulated renewed interest in the ongoing tradition of the goliards and vagantes. She exerted considerable influence over the perception of Peter Abelard and his character in the mid-20th century and her work on The Desert Fathers reclaimed a place for the Vitae Patrum in modern scholarly research. W. was born in Azabu, Tokyo, on May 31, 1889, the eighth and youngest child of missionary parents. Her father’s roots lay in County Down, Northern Ireland, and her family life was steeped in the dogmatism of the Presbyterian Church. Following studies at Victoria College, Belfast, (1900–1907) and the award of a scholarship summa cum laude, she studied for a Bachelor’s degree and then a Master’s degree in English at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her M.A. dissertation, titled “John Milton the Epicurist,” won the commendation of its examiner George Saintsbury, who became a friend and would provide the introduction to her translations from the French (The History of the Chevalier des Grieux and of Manon Lescaut, by the Abbé Prévost, 1931). Other early supporters included George Gregory Smith, head of the English school at Queen’s from 1909 and the brilliant, but short-lived historian Maude Clarke with whom W. collaborated on an unpublished novel. W.’s studies were interrupted by the First World War and by the infirmity of her aged stepmother. She had been awarded the “Isabella Tod Memorial Scholarship for three years” at Queen’s, but went up to Oxford to study the secular origins of drama, being admitted to Somerville College in January 1921. Unusually, she elected to transfer from studying for the standard B.Litt. degree to the less established doctoral scheme. She taught for a year at Bedford College, London, before a sojourn in Paris, where she studied documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. W.’s doctoral research was, however, shelved upon her securing a publisher’s contract for what was to become The Wandering Scholars (1927). Although she applied for several academic posts in Oxford and London thereafter, she was never to hold a tenured lec-

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tureship and instead devoted her time to writing. Anti-feminist attitudes no doubt played a part in hampering her career prospects as she was adamant that she would never become the warden of a female hall of residence – a responsibility sometimes attendant upon confirmed spinsters in academia at this time. Over the subsequent nine years she produced the bulk of her written work, including books on the Abbé Prévost (1931), a widely read novelization of Peter Abelard’s life and numerous volumes of translations. The last two decades of W.’s life saw the attenuation of her intellectual output. She was badly shaken by “doodle-bug” attacks upon her London home in 1944 and 1945 and experienced amnesia. The W.P. Ker lecture she gave at the University of Glasgow on October 28 1947 was to be her last public address and revisits writers discussed in The Wandering Scholars (Poetry in the Dark Ages, 1948). The rest of her life was dominated by increasing mental incapacity. She is buried at Margherally, County Down, Northern Ireland. Her literary executor, Felicitas Corrigan, posthumously assembled a miscellany of previously uncollected Helen W. translations (More Latin Lyrics from Virgil to Milton, 1976) including pieces by Fulbert of Chartres and Peter Damian. With the exception of an essay on Abelard’s disciple John of Salisbury (“John of Salisbury,” Essays and Studies of the English Association 13 [1928]: 28–51) and The Wandering Scholars, W. wrote little direct literary criticism about the Middle Ages. Nonetheless her editorial work projects a view of the medieval world, the dominant themes of which are the eremitic life, satire, romance and courtship. The Wandering Scholars exemplifies this image. Through documentary evidence she contends that the spirit of poetic individualism associated with ancient Greece and Rome did not die, but rather remained as a spectral presence in a group of writers, centered on the vagantes or “wandering scholars.” The Early Middle Ages emerges from the volume not so much as a period notable for its paucity of learning, but as a time of ferment when the Neoplatonism of the Central Middle Ages had not yet come to fruition. W.’s Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929), a compendium of poetry presented with facing page translations in English, serves as an adjunct to the broad chronological study traced in The Wandering Scholars. The contents range from “Vergiliana” of late antiquity to Boethius’s 6th-century Quaenam discors foedera rerum (“This discord in the pact of things”), and later extracts from Peter Abelard and the Carmina Burana. The inclusion of St. Columba and Colman the Irishman extends her readiness to include the Celtic world. W.’s novel Peter Abelard builds upon an interest in the schoolman and his lover that burgeoned in the wake of the Great War. George Moore published his retelling of the romance in 1921 (George Moore, Héloïse and Abélard,

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1921), while Scott Moncrieff, famed as the first English translator of Proust, released his own rendering of selected letters four years later (The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, transl. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1925). W. focuses squarely upon the romance between the two lovers and draws her own versions of contemporary lyrics, prayers and hymns into the substance of the prose. The book ran to three editions in the first six months, with translations appearing in all major European languages. It re-established the popular vision of Abelard as a scholar-poet. Although Étienne Gilson released his Héloise et Abélard in 1938 and Enid McLeod her Héloise in the same year, neither surpassed Peter Abelard in popularity. W.’s major volume of prose translation (The Desert Fathers, 1936) was excerpted from Rosweyde’s revised second edition of the Vitae Patrum, published in Antwerp in 1628. This provides a contextualized study of early Christian asceticism demonstrating the significance of the desert wilderness as a site of potential inspiration and desolation. W.’s lasting legacy is chiefly as a translator and popularizer rather than as a pedagogue. Contemporaries like G. G. Coulton criticized the freedom she often exerted when translating poetry (Monica Blackett, The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell, 1973, 80–82). Her renderings of Latin now seldom surface in academic research, though The Desert Fathers and The Wandering Scholars have each been recently reprinted. She was an independent scholar par excellence who undoubtedly helped to nourish a wide audience for medieval literature in the inter-war years. Indeed, when writing of this period, Michael Clanchy has claimed for her the mantle of “the best-known medieval scholar in the English-speaking world” (Michael T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life, 1997, 328). The title “medievalist” was not an epithet courted by W. Her scholarly activities were not inhibited by any rigidly fixed notions of geography and periodization. Her first published book was a volume of Chinese poetry in translation (Lyrics from the Chinese, 1913). She also achieved name recognition across disciplinary boundaries, her lyrics becoming a source of inspiration to modern composers including Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Months before W.’s death, her decades-old translation of Prudentius’s Take him, earth, for cherishing, arranged as a motet by Herbert Howells, formed a centerpiece to the joint Canadian-American memorial service for John F. Kennedy.

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Select Bibliography Works: The Wandering Scholars (1927); “John of Salisbury,” Essays and Studies of the English Association 13 (1928): 28–51; Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929); The Abbé Prévost (1931); The History of the Chevalier des Grieux and of Manon Lescaut, by the Abbé Prévost, transl. from the original text of 1731 by W. with and introduction by George Saintsbury (1931); Peter Abelard: A Novel (1933); The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin by Helen Waddell (1936); Poetry in the Dark Ages: The Eighth W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture. Delivered in the University of Glasgow, 28 October 1947 (1948); More Latin Lyrics from Virgil to Milton, ed. D. Felicitas Corrigan (1976). Literature: Monica Blackman, The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell (London: Constable, 1973); D. Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986); Jennifer Fitzgerald, “Helen Waddell (1889–1965): The Scholar Poet,” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 322–38; P. G. Walsh, “Waddell, Helen Jane (1889–1965),” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 56 (2004), 637–39.

Robin Gilbank

Weber, Gottfried (January 17, 1897, Hütten near Königstein/Elbe – November 4, 1981, Hofheim/Taunus), German Medievalist. Despite a relatively small body of work, almost entirely concerned with Gottfried’s Tristan, the Nibelungenlied, and, above all, with Wolfram von Eschenbach, W. had a decisive influence on the Medieval German Studies of his day. W. represented, emphatically and almost without alternative, the methodological school of Geistesgeschichte, intellectual history, which embedded poetry and literature in its contemporary cultural context, a complex conglomeration of art, science, politics, and society. W. gave primacy, in considering medieval literature, to philosophy and religion/ theology, maintaining that only with knowledge of that could the nature of poetry be adequately understood. However, W.’s energetic advocacy of intellectual history as a critical method – perhaps the last attempt at a synthesis and general view of literature before the splintering of scholarship and research – could not prevent that the intellectual history, particularly as it had proven prone to ideology, was superseded by other methods and approaches following the end of the Second World War in 1945, or in the 1960s at the latest.

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Born in 1897 in a small village near Königstein/Elbe to Arnold Weber, a merchant, and his wife Katharina, W. took his high-school diploma (Abitur) at the Königlich-Preußisches Luisengymnasium in Berlin in 1914. He studied German Philology, History and Philosophy in Berlin (1914–1915, taught by Julius Petersen and Gustav Roethe) and Munich (1915–1920, taught by Carl von Kraus, Franz Muncker, and Hermann Paul), where he earned his Ph.D. (supervised by Muncker) with a study on Herder und das Drama in 1920 (printed in 1922 with the subtitle: Eine literarhistorische Untersuchung, rpt. 1978). W. returned to Berlin, working as J. Petersen’s assistant from 1922 to 1926, and earned his habilitation in 1926 with a thesis on Wolfram von Eschenbach. Seine dichterische und geistesgeschichtliche Bedeutung (printed in 1928), beginning a long association with Wolfram’s works. W. was associateprofessor for German Philology in Berlin until 1930, apart from a short interruption when he acted as a temporary substitute for Hans Naumann, who held the chair for medieval German philology at the University of Frankfurt a. M. In 1930, W. became full professor for medieval German philology at the University of Königsberg, thus succeeding Friedrich Ranke in his chair. In the years from 1937 to 1939, W. held the chair for medieval German philology at the University of Cologne as temporary substitute (Friedrich von der Leyenwas forced to retire for political reasons), where a second professorship was installed in 1939, which W. held until 1945. The position was eliminated after the end of the Nazi period. W. had never joined a political party, but for nine years he was only given the title of “stand-by” professor (“Professor im Wartestand”). From 1954 (until his retirement in 1965), he held the chair of medieval German philology in Frankfurt a. M., succeeding Julius Schwietering, to whom he was deeply indebted for essential elements of his intellectual history-based approach. Colleagues and scholars of the University of Frankfurt dedicated a festschrift to W. on the occasion of his 70th birthday. His last work, the only one between his retirement and his death in 1981, was published in 1975, once again concerned with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm (Wolframs von Eschenbach Antwort auf Gotfrids von Strassburg ‘Tristan’: Zur Grundstruktur des ‘Willehalm’). In 1948, W., at roughly the same time as Julius Schwietering, Bodo Mergell, and Walter Johannes Schröder, but independently of them, interpreted Parzival as a strongly religious work, and thus established for the decades to come a view that the religious theme was the key to Wolfram’s writing. W. assumed a fundamental dualism between God and the world, the religious and the chivalric sphere. He argued that the hero’s task was to create a synthesis of both, but that first each area had to be destroyed (one of W.’s key terms is ‘crisis’). In terms of the intellectual history and history of

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mentality, he attempted to place Wolfram between Augustinism (predestination), which was still dominant around 1200, and Thomism (emphasis on human free will), which is anticipated by Wolfram in the figure of Parzival, who eventually finds a balance between grace and his own efforts. In addition, W. posited a correlation with the ‘crisis’ in the worldview around 1200 associated with the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic, but explicitly did not understand this as indebted to art history (cf. Der Gottesbegriff des Parzival, 1935, 5). W. also posited a pattern of grace and redemption after crisis and decay in his 1965 account of Wolfram’s Willehalm, which he, however, reads as being written in a completely different, tragic tone (cf. “Die Grundidee in Wolframs Willehalm,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, Neue Folge, 6 [1965]: 1–21). His argument relied heavily on the text’s conclusion – which does not survive – in which he thought that the protagonists would renounce the world and live in the spirit of the Franciscan order. The monograph on Willehalm, which had been announced for 1967, never appeared, and only a smaller scale study was published ten years later. In the latter, W. interpreted Willehalm as Wolfram’s answer to Gottfried’s Tristan (with both poets relating to each other on a dialogic principle) (cf. Wolframs von Eschenbach Antwort auf Gotfrids von Strassburg ‘Tristan’, 1975, 7), but also to the Nibelungenlied, whose ‘problem and idea’ W. interpreted in Problem und Idee (1963), the first full interpretation of the work as situated in the dualistic conflict between chivalry and Christianity. According to W., the synthesis fails, defeat is inevitable, and the poet retires, in contrast to the chivalric romances, into pessimistic disbelief. W.’s academic work was not without its critics. Bumke criticized the parallels he drew to Aquinas as lacking a certain convincingness (cf. Joachim Bumke, Die Wolfram von Eschenbach-Forschung seit 1945, 1970, 155), the “einseitige[n] Verknüpfung des Parzival mit der scholastischen Theologie” (“one-sided connection of Parzival to scholastic theology,” Bumke 1970, 14) as well as the overly homogenous interpretation of the Nibelungenlied, which reduced everything to decay and failure, and over-interpreted the poet’s intention (cf. Werner Hoffmann, Das Nibelungenlied, 6th ed., 1992, 25–28). The broader acceptance of his theses was made still more difficult by W.’s style, which was sometimes apodictic, and sometimes vitriolic polemic (cf. his review of Walter Johannes Schröder’s Der Ritter zwischen Gott und Welt, 1952–1953). Bumke speaks of an “ungewöhnlicher Mangel an Toleranz gegenüber Andersdenkenden” (“unusual deficiency of tolerance for people who disagreed,” 1970, 155). However, his pupils above all stress his positive pedagogical contribution. His lectures, which were well attended and lively, must have been inspiring and motivating for his listeners. W.’s

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didactic passion (as well as his ability to hold back his criticism of other scholarly positions when necessary) is also evidenced by the two introductory volumes, intended primarily for students on Gottfried’s Tristan and the Nibelungenlied in the Sammlung Metzler series, which were well received both by reviewers and readers and have gone through many editions. He attempted to reach “a wider readership” with his editions of Parzival (1963) and Tristan (1967) for the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, inasmuch as he offered a detailed retelling of the story, rather than a translation. Select Bibliography Works: Der Gottesbegriff des Parzival: Studie zum zweiten Band des ‘Wolfram von Eschenbach’ (1935); Parzival: Ringen und Vollendung. Eine dichtungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (1948) [his habilitation formed vol. 1 of his study on Wolfram; this functions as vol. 2]; review of Walter Johannes Schröder: Der Ritter zwischen Gott und Welt (1952), AfdA 66 (1952/53), 80–89; Gottfrieds von Strassburg ‘Tristan’ und die Krise des hochmittelalterlichen Weltbildes um 1200, 2 vols. (1953); Nibelungenlied, with Werner Hoffmann (1961), 2nd, rev. and expanded, ed. 1964, 3rd, rev. and expanded, ed. 1968, 4th, rev. and expanded, ed. 1974; the 5th, more heavily rev. and expanded ed. 1982 continued by Werner Hoffmann alone; 6th rev. and expanded ed. 1992; Gottfried von Straßburg, with Werner Hoffmann (1962), 2nd rev. and expanded, ed. 1965, 3rd, rev. and expanded, ed. 1968, 4th, rev. and expanded, ed. 1973; from the 5th ed. 1981 continued by Werner Hoffmann alone; Das Nibelungenlied. Problem und Idee (1963); “Die Grundidee in Wolframs ‘Willehalm,’” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, Neue Folge, 6 (1965): 1–21; Wolframs von Eschenbach Antwort auf Gotfrids von Strassburg ‘Tristan’: Zur Grundstruktur des ‘Willehalm’ (1975). Editions: Jahresbericht über die wissenschaftlichen Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiete der neueren deutschen Literatur, N. F. 1 (1924)-5 (1928) (collaboration); Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival. Text, Nacherzählung, Worterklärungen (1963), 2nd rev. and expanded ed. 1967, 3rd unchanged ed. 1977, 4th ed. 1981; Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan. Text, Nacherzählung, Worterklärungen, with Gertrud Utzmann and Werner Hoffmann (1967), 2nd, unchanged, ed. 1983. Literature: Wilhelm Kosch, Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (Stadt: Verlag, 1958), 32–35; Festschrift Gottfried Weber zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. Heinz Otto Burger and Klaus von See (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1967); Ulrich Pretzel, “Epoche der Krise: Zum 70. Geburtstag Gottfried Webers,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 18, 1967; Werner Hoffmann, “Gottfried Weber zum 70. Geburtstag,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanisten-Verbandes 14 (1967): 2–3; Barbara Könneker, “Professor Gottfried Weber 80,” Uni-Report der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main vom 12.01.1977, 8; Siegfried Sudhof, “Gottfried Weber zum 80. Geburtstag,” Wirkendes Wort 27 (1977): 226; Gerhard R. Koch, “Nibelungenforscher: Zum Tode von Gottfried Weber,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nov. 14, 1981: 8; Werner Hoffmann, “Weber, Gottfried,” IGL, vol. 3, 2003, 1988–89.

Waltraud Fritsch-Rößler

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Wehrli, Max

Wehrli, Max (September 17, 1909, Zurich – December 18, 1998, Zurich), Professor of Medieval German Literature. W. accomplished significant publications on research in medieval and Baroque German literature. He also supported the arrangement and consolidation of research in Medieval Studies by means of a large overarching portrayal, in particular a history of medieval literature from its beginnings through the end of the 16th century. He enriched literary studies with important editions and translations, which included Grimmelshausen, Eichendorff, Spitteler, Hartmann von Aue, Walther von der Vogelweide, minnesong, and Baroque lyric poetry as well as the history of the Swiss Confederation. He was furthermore a co-editor for Bibliotheca Germanica from 1951 to 1967, which is a series important to studies in German medieval literature. Like Julius Schwietering and Friedrich Ohly, W. advocated philology based on intellectual history which, in addition to the aesthetic characteristics of the individual literary artwork, considered the relationship to tradition and the general history of ideas. His introductions to the literary history of the Middle Ages remain standard works today and are an undeniable basis for every major in German literature. W. studied German literature, ancient Greek, and Icelandic at the Universities of Zurich (1928–1935) and Berlin (1931). He finished his doctoral studies in 1935 in Zurich with a dissertation titled “Johann Jakob Bodmer und die Geschichte der Literatur”. After he had become certified as a university lecturer in 1937 (with an essay on Lohenstein’s Arminius), he taught German literature at the University of Zurich and became a professor of older German literature in 1947. In 1955, he was a guest professor at Columbia University in New York. W. received countless awards for his scholarly work in Germany and Switzerland. He was an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and a member of the Academies of Sciences in Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Munich. His research and teaching specializations included the German literature of the high Middle Ages and Baroque as well as historical studies in poetry. Among W.’s countless essays, editions, and monographs, two fundamental overall portrayals stand out: his 1980 Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts and his 1984 book Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter: Eine poetologische Einführung. In the first, a monumental literary history, W. offers a general overview of medieval literature, from its earliest beginnings in the 9th century to Martin Luther and Hans

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Sachs in the 16th century. W.’s description is valid still today and it offers students and scholars of German studies a standard work which spans over 800 years of literary history. In this literary history, W. strives to “see the past, especially medieval literature, as quite alien and different, following its laws of time, and at the same time to experience the literature, while readily paying attention to, as something personal and captive, perhaps even current” (Foreword, 2nd ed., 1984, 7). His literary history is a large sum of the research. His Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter. Eine poetologische Einführung is influenced by similar scholarly and didactic goals and shows medieval literary history systematically, in reference to its important poetological background, rather than chronologically according to the individual literary works. In this book, W. explains the (pre)condition of medieval vernacular poetry, for example the Latin-influenced educational context, the complex connection of orality and written work, the poets’ situation and their consciousness as authors, the connection to tradition in medieval text production, the meaning of the theories of rhetoric, the concept of beauty in the Middle Ages, allegory and typology, as well as the theory of “mehrfacher Schriftsinn” (“multiple meanings of the Bible”). W. elucidates the central conditions and characteristics of medieval literature, which must be recognized for a historically apt understanding of the text to be possible. It is a standard work that summarizes the discoveries of the individual disciplines, for example theology and art history, and makes literary studies fruitful. For the analysis of medieval German literature, it delivers essential requirements of knowledge. Along with both of these large studies, W. also published countless articles on individual medieval texts and special problems in philology. They are collected in the anthologies Formen mittelalterlicher Erzählung (1969), Humanismus und Barock (1993), and Gegenwart und Erinnerung (1998). W. gave medieval German research a significant impulse to focus on individual works, most specifically on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan. He also presented important and still valid interpretations, and in particular created important reference works for scholars and students with his two overviews, the large literary history and the poetological introduction, which document the state of research in literary history and convey his didactic ability. W. was one of the most important and prestigious representatives of German Medieval Studies in the 20th century.

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Select Bibliography Works: Deutsche Lyrik des Mittelalters: Auswahl und Übersetzung (1955); Formen mittelalterlicher Erzählung: Aufsätze (1969); Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter: Eine poetologische Einführung (1984); Hartmann von Aue, Iwein: Aus dem Mittelhochdeutschen übertragen (1988); Humanismus und Barock, ed. Fritz Wagner and Wolfgang Maaz (1993); Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (1980; 3rd ed. 1997); Gegenwart und Erinnerung: Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Fritz Wagner and Wolfgang Maaz (1998). Literature: Typologia Litterarum: Festschrift für Max Wehrli, ed. Stefan Sonderegger, Alois M. Haas and Harald Burger (Zurich and Freiburg i. Br.: Atlantis, 1969); Wolfgang Harms and Max Wehrli, “Max Wehrli,” IGL, vol. 3 (2003), 1989–90.

Heiko Hartmann

White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. (April 29, 1907, San Francisco, California – March 30, 1987, Brentwood, California), American Historian. W., historian of technology and cultural change, sparked the historical study of medieval technology with a preliminary survey, one small book, and a series of articles (eventually collected into books). By building on the theoretical work of such historians and anthropologists as Marc Bloch and Alfred Kroeber, reconsidering the European and Asian field work of archeologists, and gleaning further evidence from iconographic, literary, and linguistic sources, W. sought to reveal both the technological basis of medieval Europe’s important social transformations and the cultural predispositions fostering acceptance of these new technologies. To do both, W. examined little things – like stirrups and hand mills – and traced grand patterns that illustrated the ways culture and technology worked together to shape the western Middle Ages. Though many details of his various theses have been either modified or reversed, his early work encouraged the study of medieval technology. His later work extended his interest in the inter-relationship between technology and culture when, writing for a popular audience, he suggested that the source of the 20th-century ecological crisis could be traced to a medieval Christian ethos that viewed nature as a force for humans to dominate. W.’s interest in the Middle Ages began while an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in 1928. The son of a Presbyterian

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minister, W. next studied at New York’s Union Theological Seminary and received his M.A. in 1929. From there, he became a Ph.D. student of Charles Homer Haskins at Harvard and completed his degree in 1934 with a dissertation on Sicilian monasticism (completed under George LaPiana’s supervision after Haskin’s stroke). W. taught at Princeton from 1933 to 1937, then at Stanford until 1943. Early in his academic career, with the war in Europe looming, he realized that many resources a medieval historian would expect to use might be unavailable for years to come. He switched his focus to technology, knowing that his task would be synthesizing the primary research of others. After publishing in 1940 a Speculum article that would eventually be the blueprint for his later, groundbreaking work (“Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” vol. 15, [1940]: 141–59), he became president of Mills College, a women’s college in Oakland, from 1943 to 1958. There, he used his position to advocate for women’s education and feminist issues, publishing many magazine articles and a book, Educating Our Daughters: a Challenge to the Colleges (1950). W. left Mills in 1958 to join the University of California, Los Angeles faculty as a professor in the history department. There, he founded the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 1964; he was its director (1964–1970) and the co-editor of its journal, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies (1970–1981). At his retirement, the university faculty gave him its highest honor by making him university professor (1972–1974). He helped found the Society for the History of Technology and served as its president from 1960 to 1962; he was also president of the History of Science Society (1971–1972), the Medieval Academy of America (1972–1973), and the American Historical Association (1973). He was the recipient of the Pfizer Award (1962, for Medieval Technology and Social Change) from the History of Science Society, and of both the Leonardo da Vinci Medal (1964) and the Dexter Prize (1970, for Machina ex deo) from the Society for the History of Technology. Other awards include the Commonwealth Club Literature Award (1950) and Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America (1970). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958–1959) and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Medieval Academy, and the Royal Society of Arts. In 1970, he was made a Commendatore nell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. Additionally, he was a member of both L’Academie Internationale d’Historie des Sciences and Phi Beta Kappa. He received honorary degrees from MacMurray College, Lake Erie College, Mills College, and Rutgers University. His papers are held in the University of California, Los Angeles University Archives.

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W.’s first book, Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily, revised his dissertation describing the political and cultural status of fifty-one religious houses in Norman Sicily. It remained in print for several decades. W. published his initial survey of medieval technology in a 1940 Speculum article, “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages.” Aware of the obvious obstacles – insufficient archeological evidence and meager records – W. toppled geographical and subject barriers that might have restricted a less adventuresome scholar. By incorporating anthropological perspectives into his historical one, he saw how tracing technological developments could reveal the underlying rationality of medieval men and women whose ingenuity left no written record. Not limited to a parochial history of a small locale or short time frame, W.’s initial study encompassed Eurasia, from China to Northern Europe, across a sweep of several centuries. His seminal project, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962; MTSC), was not a monograph. Instead it gathered lectures he gave in 1957 at the University of Virginia: one on military technology and the origins of feudalism, a second on agricultural technology and Europe’s cultural shift north and west, and a third on mechanical technologies and medieval industrial power sources. The essays add technology to the work of social and political historians to explain how apparently small innovations adopted by the Franks and Carolingians led to larger cultural changes. Thus, he asserted that after Charles Martel recognized the usefulness of the stirrup for mounted shock combat, he reorganized his military into a cavalry and provided his warriors the extra income needed to maintain horses by providing them with larger landholdings, thereby germinating feudal economic and social order. W. also argued for the interrelated importance of three rather humble agrarian innovations: the heavy, wheeled plough; a three-fold crop rotation system; and open-field agriculture practiced in common. Together, these developments increased the region’s food production and triggered a shift in cultural momentum from the Mediterranean basin northward. W.’s third argument focused on the exploitation of wind and water to replace human and animal power, thereby providing the technical and intellectual foundations for the rapid developments in the succeeding centuries. W. also wrote over thirty articles, many collected into two volumes: Machina ex deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (1968) and Medieval Religion and Technology (1978). In these, W. argued that Europe’s practical transformation of East Asian innovations was rooted in Western Christianity’s assumption that labor-saving machines preserved human dignity. Initial reviews of MTSC praised it as an important book for its fresh perspective and daring conclusions on medieval technology. Very quickly, how-

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ever, critics claimed he misread the evidence and overestimated technology’s immediate effects, often charging him with technological determinism. The first assaults on the book targeted W.’s thesis regarding the stirrup’s role in the development of feudalism. Peter Sawyer vehemently attacked this thesis in a review article jointly written with Rodney Hilton (who attacked the agriculture thesis; see “Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough,” Past and Present 24 [1963]: 90–100). Sawyer primarily argued against W.’s methodology and his conclusions, asserting that W. claimed too much from significant but insufficient evidence, consequently oversimplifying the societies he sought to explain. Seven years later, with less passion but more precision, Bernard S. Bachrach unraveled W.’s argument by undermining the basis of W.’s thesis, Brunner’s 1887 theory of feudal beginnings, and by questioning whether armed horsemen engaging in mounted shock combat played any significant role in military tactics (“Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and Feudalism,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 [1970]: 49–75). W.’s examination of agricultural innovations did not escape criticism either. In the second half of the 1963 Past and Present review, Hilton contended that the available evidence does not allow historians to date the innovations as precisely as W. suggests; he also questioned whether agricultural production caused (rather than resulted from) population change. The book’s section on the development of power machinery was the last to buckle under attack. In his article, Richard Holt (“Medieval Technology and the Historians: the Evidence for the Mill,” Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, edited by Robert Fox, 1996, 103–21) demonstrated that W. attributed too many developments to the later Middle Ages (rather than earlier periods) and overlooked practical reasons why medieval people adopted mechanical innovations. Despite this stormy reception (and the sometimes grudging acceptance of his basic premises), re-evaluations of his work show that W. indeed recognized the multiple causes – some social, some technological – propelling change in medieval Europe. Bert Hall’s 1996 reassessment of MTSC (“Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change after Thirty Years,” Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology, ed. Robert Fox, 85–101) acknowledged that subsequent scholarship has dismantled much of W.’s arguments. However, Hall answered the charge that W. committed “technological determinism” by recasting his transgression as a “soft determinism,” wherein cultures choose which technologies to adopt, then were shaken by the new technologies. Hall identified this ambivalence, “where technology is neither fully socio-cultural nor entirely autonomous,” as representing “an

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awkward and unresolved tension in much of White’s work” (96). More recently, Alex Roland reconsidered MTSC in “Once More into the Stirrups,” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 274–585. After summarizing the criticism of W.’s arguments, Roland concluded not only that the critics sometimes misread W. but also that the broad outline of his thesis remains in place (if not the tighter chronology and specific players), from which it ignited useful research. MTSC was translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish, and the international response included reviews by Gero Kirchner (Historische Zeitschrift 210 [1970]: 105) and Sten Lindroth (Lychnos [1962]: 527–29). MTSC even reached the status of pop culture icon when it was satirized by John Updike in the short story “The Invention of the Horse Collar.” Despite this widespread readership and the concurrent attacks, W. never issued a second edition. Instead, he let his Dictionary of the Middle Ages entries on “Agriculture and Nutrition: Northern Europe” (1982), 1: 89–96, and “Technology, Western” (1988), 11: 650–64, reflect his final understanding on the subjects. Select Bibliography Works: Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily (1938); Educating Our Daughters: a Challenge to the Colleges (1950); Frontiers of Knowledge in the Study of Man (1956; reissued 1969); Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962); The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon’s Problem after Two Centuries, ed. W. (1966); Machina ex deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (1969; later published as Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture, 1971); Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (1978). Literature: Bert Hall, “Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (1907–1987),” Technology and Culture 30 (1989): 194–214; Bert Hall, “Lynn White, Jr., 29 April 1907–30 March 1987,” Isis 79.3 (1988): 478–81; Marshall Clagett, Richard H. Rouse, and Edward Grant, “Lynn Townsend White, Jr.,” Speculum 63 (1988): 769–71; Thomas F. Glick, “Lynn White, Jr. 1907–1987,” Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol. 2, ed. Kelly Boyd (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999), 1295–96.

Candace Barrington

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Whitelock, Dorothy (November 11, 1901, Leeds – August 14, 1982, Cambridge), major English Medieval Historian, Editor, and Literature Scholar. W. was a medievalist whose simultaneous approach to the literature, history, and culture of Anglo-Saxon England was, in its time, quite revolutionary. Building upon the interdisciplinary work pioneered by H. M. Chadwick and Bruce Dickens, she was partly responsible for moving the field of Anglo-Saxon studies in a new direction whereby the disciplines of history and literature were reconciled to construct new, full and rich historical perspectives. Working in a conservative, male-dominated environment in which the academic establishment considered gender equality a distant and alarming concept, W.’s career was dogged by prejudice and chauvinism. Nevertheless, she produced a series of works (most notably the first volume of the series, English Historical Documents) which effected a major key change in academic approaches to and concepts of the Anglo-Saxon age. W. was born on November 11, 1901 at 4 Cliff Mount, Leeds, the youngest of six children of Edward Whitelock (d. 1903), an accountant, and his second wife, Emmeline, née Dawson (d. 1950). At the age of 20, W. went to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English. During her time as an undergraduate, she had the opportunity to study under Hector Munro Chadwick (d. 1947), Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1912 to 1941. At Newnham, W. was also a junior colleague of the Celticist, Nora Chadwick (née Kershaw), who had married H. M. Chadwick in 1922, becoming a fellow of Newnham in 1923. Having graduated with first-class honors, W. spent the next seven years pursuing research at Cambridge (1924–1926) and Uppsala (1927–1929) before returning to Cambridge in 1929. During this time she was much encouraged in her work by H. M. Chadwick (to say she was supervised by him might suggest that the arrangement was more formal than it was) and it was at his suggestion that she turned her attention to the extant corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills, producing an edition complete with text, translation and commentary in 1930 (AngloSaxon Wills). This work, W.’s first edition of Anglo-Saxon primary sources, ‘followed the Chadwickian tradition of setting linguistic skills to serve cultural ends’ (Cecily Clark, “Dorothy Whitelock,”, Nomina 6 [1982]: 2). Moreover, having been well received at the time, even now this work is still in regular use by students and scholars alike. Simon Keynes, the current holder of the Elrington and Bosworth professorship at Cambridge, in his own biography of W., described the The Anglo-Saxon Wills as “a work of

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exemplary scholarship” which “made readily available a set of texts which are central to any perception of Anglo-Saxon society in the tenth and eleventh centuries” (Simon Keynes, “Dorothy Whitelock,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online). In 1930, W. moved to Oxford, where she was appointed a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s, an all-female college which, although it had been granted full status within the University of Oxford four years earlier in 1926, still did not have the same autonomy and privileges as the all-male colleges in the University. She became a tutor at St Hilda’s in 1936, a fellow in 1937 and served as vice-principal from 1950 to 1957. Although she published relatively little during her first decade at Oxford, W. cultivated an interest in the work of Wulfstan, bishop of London (996–1002), during this time. In 1939, she produced an edition of Wulfstan’s homily, “The Sermon of the Wolf to the English” (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos) to critical acclaim, which she followed with a series of significant papers on Wulfstan’s legislative productions. Her considerable contribution to an often-overlooked field was recognized by many, not least John Pope, who wrote that W. had “greatly extended our knowledge of Wulfstan’s legislative work and of his career under two kings” (John Pope, Review of Bethurum, Homilies, Modern Language Notes 74 [1959]: 334). Indeed, when Dorothy Bethurum came to produce a full critical edition of all Wulfstan’s extant homilies in the 1950s (Homilies of Wulfstan), she at once acknowledged W.’s precedence in the field: “my principal debt,”, wrote Bethurum, “is to Miss Dorothy Whitelock, whose careful reading of the text saved me from many errors and whose wide knowledge of Anglo-Saxon matters she has made available to me in discussion over many years. To her encouragement also I owe much” (Dorothy Bethurum, Homilies of Wulfstan [1957], vii). Whereas Bethurum’s edition of the homilies was produced very much with the needs of the professional scholar in mind (it contains a complex consideration of the manuscript contexts of the homilies and has no glossary or translation), W. had remembered the needs of the student as well: her edition of the Sermo contained a carefully constructed glossary, which has been a considerable boon to several generations of students of Old English. Perhaps influenced by the interdisciplinary training she had received under Chadwick, W. did not just discuss the text’s paleographical, codicological, literary and linguistic circumstances in her introduction: she also considered the life and times of Wulfstan himself and provided a lucid historical essay to accompany the text. Her introduction as a whole stands not only as a useful companion to the Sermo, but also as a fine exposition of the political and cultural conditions of early 11th-century England. The huge

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popularity of W.’s edition is evidenced by the fact that it appeared in three editions over 14 years, the last of which, in 1963, post-dated the publication of Bethurum’s work on the homilies and incorporated her research accordingly. In 1943, Sir Frank Stenton first published his seminal work, Anglo-Saxon England. Stenton and W. were regular correspondents who thought highly of each other. Inspired by Anglo-Saxon England, in 1945 W. set about collecting and translating a wide range of sources relating to Anglo-Saxon history. This was a project which would eventually culminate in her magnum opus, the first volume in the series, English Historical Documents. Although W.’s was actually the second volume in the series to be published, chronologically it constituted the first of an immense sequence of texts described by Schuyler as “a colossal enterprise … of unprecedented scope” (Robert Livingston Schuyler, “English Historical Documents,” vol. II, Political Science Quarterly 68 [1953]: 591), in which the primary sources for successive periods of English history were to be published in modern English. W.’s volume, published in 1955, constituted a fitting opening for such a huge project and it was extremely well received; “were this volume alone to survive an atomic war, posterity could rewrite the history of England in this period with very fair success” wrote a young Lawrence Stone in the Spectator. In 1979, W. oversaw a second edition of the first volume of English Historical Documents (which had already been twice reprinted). Peter Hunter Blair, writing in the Times Literary Supplement summed up that work’s reception when he wrote that EHD (as it had become known) was “never a book to stand unopened on its shelf, it was rather one which fell apart from constant use … as in the past, this book will continue to make an important contribution to the end for which the series was devised – the healthy development of English historical studies.” As ever, W.’s EHD stands as a testament to her dedication to her students, effectively straddling the boundary between the professional academic text and student textbook. The translations are clearly and uncomplicatedly rendered into lucid modern English prose; W.’s introductions, which do not stray into the realms of esoteric historiography and over-complex analysis, present clear and precise historical background and are models of sourcecriticism. The work is every bit a masterpiece. However, the success of EHD in the mid 1950s came at the end of a particularly depressing phase of W.’s career. At this time, St Hilda’s did not have the same privileges within the University of Oxford as the men’s colleges (and wouldn’t have until it was granted autonomy in 1955). During the 1940s, the fellows of St Hilda’s, led by W. and Helen Gardner (W.’s colleague in the English School who, in 1966, would become professor of Eng-

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lish literature at Oxford), challenged the principal of the college, Miss Mann, over the situation but were repeatedly frustrated. Partly because of her unhappiness at this inequality, in 1944, W. applied unsuccessfully for a chair at Liverpool. A year later, following J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation from the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship of Anglo-Saxon to the Merton chair of English literature, W. (encouraged by Stenton and by Kenneth Sisam) applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair at Oxford, but was again frustrated (partly due to Tolkien himself, who voted against her appointment). The professorship eventually went to C. L. Wrenn from the University of London. Having taken a leave of absence from Oxford to nurse her ailing mother between 1944 and 1945 and feeling the pressure of being a woman in a predominantly male profession, she even considered abandoning academia (at which time she received a series of touching letters of encouragement from Sir Frank and Lady Stenton). Nevertheless, in 1955, following the publication of a series of works – The Audience of Beowulf in 1951, The Beginnings of English Society in 1952, a facsimile of the Peterborough manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1954 and EHD in 1955 – W.’s standing as a scholar was finally recognized as she was appointed lecturer in Old English by the University of Oxford. In 1956, she was elected a fellow of the British Academy. Of all the work that W. produced in the 1950s, perhaps The Audience of Beowulf remains her most controversial. In his review, Norman Davis was generally admiring but, nonetheless, highlighted a number of flaws in W.’s argument, not least the “regrettable brevity” with which W. treated the linguistic evidence in the poem (Norman Davis, Review of The Audience of Beowulf, The Review of English Studies NS 3 [1952]: 377). Indeed, W.’s (albeit tentative) conclusion, which she based more on historical than textual analysis, that the poem should be placed at the court of Offa in the second half of the 8th century has received much criticism during the 50 years since the work went to press. Nevertheless, W. deserves considerable credit for the fact that the Audience of Beowulf was the first critical work to approach the poem simultaneously from literary, historical and philological perspectives which can truly be called modern. If nothing else, the Audience of Beowulf set an important methodological precedent for future work on the poem. Despite its shortcomings, as Davis predicted in 1952, the Audience of Beowulf remains a work which ‘no one interested in Beowulf can afford to neglect’ (Norman Davis, Review of The Audience of Beowulf, The Review of English Studies NS 3 [1952]: 377). In 1957, W. returned to Cambridge, succeeding Bruce Dickens as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. At the same time, W. inherited the leadership of a new institution known as the Department of Anglo-Saxon

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and Kindred Studies which, for the sake of administrative convenience, was located in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 1967, she oversaw the relocation of the department to the Faculty of English where, two years later in 1969, it assumed its present name, the Department of AngloSaxon, Norse and Celtic. In the same year, W. retired. However, retirement did nothing to slow a steady stream of publications. As well as working on a second edition of EHD, W. also produced another collection of important primary sources, Councils and Synods with other Documents Relating to the English Church: A.D. 871–1066 which was published in 1981. At the time of her death, she was engaged in working on a biography of King Alfred the Great which, sadly, remains unfinished. W. died on August 14, 1982. Select Bibliography Works: Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930); Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1939); The Audience of Beowulf (1951); The Beginnings of English Society (1952); English Historical Documents c.500–1042, 2nd ed. (1955; 1979); Councils and Synods with other Documents Relating to the English Church: A.D. 871–1066 (1981). Literature: England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1971) [with list of W.’s publications, 1930–1970, 1–4]; Helen Gardner, “Dorothy Whitelock,” St Hilda’s College Report and Chronicle (Oxford: St Hilda’s College, 1981–1982), 12–16; Henry Loyn, “Dorothy Whitelock (1901–1982),” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New York and London: Garland,1995), vol. 1, 289–300; Jana K. Schulman, “An Anglo-Saxonist at Oxford and Cambridge: Dorothy Whitelock (1901–82),” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 552–63.

Ben Snook

Wright, Joseph (October 21, 1855, Thackley, Yorkshire, England – February 27, 1930, Oxford, England), English Philologist. W. remains an almost legendary figure in medieval studies, both for his accomplishments in the field and for his unusual background. He was one of the first scholars to bring the then-new ideas of the Neogrammarians to England, and as such, had a major impact on historical linguistics. His repu-

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tation in medieval studies rests largely on the series of handbooks that he wrote and on his impact on generations of students as a teacher. W. was born on October 21, 1855, in Thackley, Yorkshire, England, and grew up in poverty. Hi father, Dufton Wright, worked as a weaver and quarryman, but earned little money (in fact, for a brief period the family had to live in a workhouse). W. began working in a mill at the age of six, and was illiterate until he was fifteen. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, W. was upset because some of his friends and colleagues could read about the war, but he could not. W. therefore taught himself to read and write, and later attended a night school for mill workers. After three years of study, he started his own night school, while still working at the mill. In 1876, the mill closed temporarily, and W. took the unexpected opportunity to study in Germany. He first went to Cologne, where he spent several weeks honing his German, and to Heidelberg, where he studied mathematics there for eleven weeks. At that point, he was out of money, and therefore returned to England, where he earned his living for the next several years teaching mathematics in various surroundings. W. returned to Germany in 1882 to further his study of mathematics, but soon changed fields of study from mathematics to philology. This time W. remained in Germany for several years, studying in Heidelberg, Freiburg i. Br., and Leipzig (where he studied with the well-known linguist Hermann Osthoff), eventually completing a doctorate in Heidelberg, with a dissertation on The Qualitative and Quantitative Changes in the Indo-Germanic Vowel System in Greek (1885). W.’s training in Germany left him well-acquainted with a number of scholarly fields, including the early Indo-European (especially Germanic) languages, historical linguistics (including the then new ideas of the Neogrammarians [German Junggrammatiker]), phonetics (which was then emerging as a scholarly field thanks to the efforts of scholars like Alexander Melville Bell, Paul Passy, and Henry Sweet), and dialectology. He would later use this training to good effect in his teaching and research. W. supported himself during his time in Germany with various professional activities: he taught school, did editorial work for several publishing companies and translated Karl Brugmann’s authoritative work on Indo-European linguistics, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1886), into English, among other things. W. returned to England in 1888 and began teaching at Oxford, first as a member of the staff of the Association for the Higher Education of Women, and then also for the Taylorian Institution. During this time, he supplemented his income by teaching German at a girls’ high school, correcting examination papers, and tutoring (he mainly coached students for the army or civil service). In 1891, he was appointed Deputy Professor of Com-

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parative Philology at Oxford; in 1901, W. became professor of Comparative Philology. He retired from Oxford in 1924 and died there on Feb. 27, 1930. W.’s scholarly contributions fall into three main areas: historical linguistics, dialectology, and teaching. His work on historical linguistics was crucial to the development of the field in England. He was, for instance, one of the first scholars in England to adopt Neogrammarian ideas (about the regularity of sound change, for instance); his translation of Brugmann’s work (1886) enabled those interested in historical linguistics but lacking the ability to read academic German to acquaint themselves with the new school of historical linguistics. W. also wrote handbooks for a variety of different languages, including Old and Middle English (Old English Grammar, 1908; An Elementary Middle English Grammar, 1923, coauthored with Elizabeth M. Wright), Old and Middle High German (An Old High German Primer, 1888; A Middle High German Primer, with Grammar, Notes and Glossary, 1888), and Gothic (Grammar of the Gothic Language, 1910). These handbooks are generally viewed as classics in the field. For instance, his Middle High German primer, revised by M.O’C. Walshe, was still in print as of the mid-1990s. His Gothic grammar has also been reprinted numerous times, most recently 2005, and remains the standard handbook of Gothic written in English. W. also wrote historical grammars of English and German (An Elementary New English Historical Grammar, 1924, co-authored with Elizabeth M. Wright; Historical German Grammar, 1907). As for dialectology, in 1873 the English Dialect Society was formed in Cambridge, and by 1889, W. had been selected to edit a proposed dictionary of English dialects. W. became editor-in-chief of the project by 1894, and directed the work with his customary energy and diligence. Such projects obviously face monumental logistical problems, especially financial, but Wright was able to surmount these problems and finish the work comparatively rapidly (especially when compared to admittedly larger projects like the Oxford English Dictionary itself or the Deutsches Wörterbuch begun by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, both of which took much longer to complete, even when their greater size is taken into consideration); the first part of the English Dialect Dictionary was published in 1898, and the final part of the six-volume work appeared in 1905. The work was praised for its high quality (and also for the speed with which it had been prepared), and W. was rewarded for his editorial duties with a yearly government pension. Beyond the English Dialect Dictionary, W. published an accompanying English Dialect Grammar (1905), and in a real labor of love, a grammar of the dialect of his home town, Windhill in Yorkshire (A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1893).

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Finally, W.’s skills and impact as a teacher must also be considered. A number of his pupils became prominent medievalists or historical linguists in their own right. His most prominent pupil was perhaps his wife Elizabeth Mary Wright, who eventually collaborated with him on a number of important works (including the English historical grammar and grammar of Old English mentioned above). His most famous pupil, however, was J.R.R. Tolkien, who went from being an Oxford professor (and specialist in Germanic philology, especially Old English) to being one of the most famous writers of fiction in history, thanks especially to his three-volume fantasy work The Lord of the Rings, among other novels. In fact, W. is usually credited with having convinced Tolkien to become a linguist, thanks to his outstanding teaching and winning manner. Elizabeth Wright eventually wrote a two-volume biography of W. (The Life of Joseph Wright, 1932), which contains numerous letters written to W. by his students, which uniformly praise his teaching. W.’s teaching, his research, and his publications were all instrumental in establishing linguistics and Germanic philology as objects of study at Oxford, and in England more generally. W.’s scholarship led to a number of accolades. He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1904; held honorary memberships in the Modern Language Association, the Utrecht Society, the Royal Society of Letters of Lund, and the Royal Flemish Academy; and received honorary degrees from Aberdeen, Dublin, Durham, Leeds, and Oxford. However, his forthright nature occasionally caused problems for him at Oxford (he sharply criticized the university administration on various grounds), and the university eventually declined a substantial donation that he had offered to support the Taylor Institute (Oxford’s institute for modern languages). In some ways, it is difficult to assess W.’s impact accurately, as some of the relevant sources are almost hagiographic, especially when discussing W.’s influence on Tolkien. Be that as it may, it is clear that W. had a significant impact on linguistics and medieval studies in England, as well as on Tolkien, and that his influence is still felt today. Select Bibliography Literature: Elizabeth Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (1932); Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977); Arnold Kellett, “Wright, Joseph (1855–1930),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/37036).

Marc Pierce

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Y Young, Karl (November 2, 1879, Clinton, Iowa – November17, 1943, New Haven, Connecticut), American Medievalist. Y.’s best-known scholarly contribution to Medieval Studies is his monumental two-volume collection of and commentary on early liturgical drama, The Drama of the Medieval Church. C. Clifford Flanigan describes Y.’s The Drama of the Medieval Church as the most influential, most significant book in the field of medieval Latin drama studies (“Medieval Latin Music-Drama,” The Theatre of Medieval Europe, 1991, 24). In a testimony to the continued longevity and interdisciplinary influence of Y.’s work on the drama, both Michal Kobialka (This is my Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages, 1999) and Leonard Goldstein (The Origin of Medieval Drama, 2004) have recently underscored the imprint of The Drama of the Medieval Church on medieval scholarship in general. Y. has had a lasting impact on Chaucer Studies as well. He was an avid Chaucer scholar throughout his career with important work on Chaucer’s reading and learning interrupted by his untimely death in 1943 (Robert A. Pratt, “Karl Young’s Work on the Learning of Chaucer,” A Memoir of Karl Young, 1946, 45–55; Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves, 1997). Materials which Y. collected and passed on to Robert A. Pratt, edited half a century later by Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, form the core of Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves, the cornerstone volume for The Chaucer Library. Y. was born in Clinton, Iowa, in 1879 to George Billings Young and Frances Eliza Hinman Young. With family roots on the east coast, Y. described himself as a “western Puritan.” His grandfather, the Reverend George Drummond Young (a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and missionary for the Presbyterian Church) had moved with his new wife, Abigail Billings, from Maryland through Ohio (where Y.’s father was born) to Iowa in their later years. Y.’s father, after graduating from Oberlin College, followed his parents to Iowa where he read law in a local law office and then began practicing law. In later years he became a judge. Given the strong academic influence in his family, Y. was encouraged to pursue the classical course at the high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan which

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was modeled after traditional New England Latin schools. Y. then attended the University of Michigan for his undergraduate work, receiving his B.A. in 1901. He pursued graduate study at Harvard University and completed his M. A. in 1903. The first two years spent studying in Cambridge proved the developing ground for his interest in the history of the medieval church and its connections with modern drama. Y. spent the next two years as a civilian instructor in English at the U. S. Naval Academy, where his interest in the liturgy developed through his connections with Father James Barron, Redemptorist Order, Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer in Annapolis. In the fall of 1905, he returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. Y. continued his study of church history, liturgy, and drama in more depth while centering his course of study for the Ph.D. on Chaucer. Both focuses proved lifelong scholarly interests for Y. Throughout his graduate student years, Y. spent summers in Europe, primarily England and France, where he became acquainted with the manuscript resources of the British Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale as well as those of provincial and monastic libraries. This early archival work set the stage for his extensive manuscript work for both the medieval drama and for Chaucer’s reading and learning. After granting his Ph.D. in 1907, Harvard offered Y. a travel grant for the 1907–1908 academic year which allowed him to expand his manuscript explorations to the libraries of the Vatican and Montecassino. In September 1908, Y. arrived in Madison, to begin his new position as an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. In his teaching, as in his research, Y. was a philologist; he was prepared to teach a graduate seminar in liturgical drama largely from the texts he had gathered himself during his research in Europe. (For Y.’s collected papers, with notes and photocopies of sources he used for his lifelong study of medieval drama, see MSS 43 – The Karl Young Papers; 7.5’, Yale University Music Library.) He taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1908 to 1923 where he rose from assistant professor to tenured associate professor, then full professor in the course of fifteen years. He married Frances Berkeley in 1911; they had two sons, George B. Young and Karl Young, Jr. In 1923, Y. was asked to join the faculty at Yale University where he taught until the end of his career (1943). Y. was involved in a spectrum of professional service and received numerous awards during his career. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society. At Yale University, Y. was Associate Fellow of Jonathan Edwards College from1933–1943 and Sterling Professor from 1938–1943. In 1926 Y. was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. He served on the Council of the Medieval Academy for two terms (1925–1928; 1928–1931) and was

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a member of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a fellow, as well, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Society of Literature. Y. served both as president of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy from 1936–39 and as president of the Modern Language Association in 1940. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of Wisconsin in 1934 and received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Michigan in 1937. In 1941, Y. received the Gollancz Memorial Prize from the British Academy for his distinguished work on medieval religious drama. Y.’s The Drama of the Medieval Church has been described as the definitive source for the medieval Latin drama in virtually every major publication on medieval drama since its publication in 1933 (C. Clifford Flanigan, “Karl Young and the Drama of the Medieval Church: An Anniversary Appraisal,” RORD 27 [1984]: 157–66). In his preface to The Drama of the Medieval Church, Y. explains the “essential purpose” of the work: “to assemble, in their authentic forms, the dramatic compositions which were employed by the Medieval Church in Western Europe as a part of public worship, and which are commonly regarded as the origins of modern drama” (“Preface,” The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1933, vol. I: vii). Y.’s predecessor, E. K. Chambers, sought to understand the conditions that made possible “the great Shakespearean stage” (E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 1903, vol. I: vi). Y., in contrast, focused the critical conversation about origins of the medieval drama considerably by arguing for the drama’s origins in the liturgy of the Roman Mass, the Canonical Offices, and the ceremonies of the liturgical year. Y. argued that the drama began with the Quem queritis trope, antiphonally chanted (and therefore dialogue in its simplest form), to celebrate Christ’s resurrection at the Easter Mass. Although early versions of this trope, associated with the Mass, offered the essential dramatic element of impersonation, Y. argued that the full dramatic potential of the Quem queritis trope could only be realized when it was “withdrawn from the Mass altogether, and was given a lodging-place in the Canonical Office” where the second element essential to drama could be realized in full: setting (The Drama of the Medieval Church [1933], I: 231–32). Y. structured his corpus of texts not chronologically, but thematically – with sub-headings in his two-volume collection including, “Plays Associated with the Resurrection and Passion,” “Plays Associated with the Nativity,” “Plays upon Other Subjects” – and from simplest forms to most complex within each sub-heading. Michal Kobialka describes the three axioms that delimit what critics have called Y.’s “cultural Darwinism”: that medieval drama originates in the church; that it develops from simple to complex forms; that Latin liturgical drama develops independently from

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secular vernacular drama (This is my Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages, 1999, 11–12). Toward the end of his career, Y. was embarking on a similarly monumental Chaucer project. Hanna and Lawler describe the extensive studies of Chaucer’s reading and learning that Y. was engaged in at the time of his death as the cornerstone project for The Chaucer Library series. Y. had “assembled the first list of relevant manuscripts, twenty-odd copies (all of them English), and acquired a few films” for the work that was to become Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves sixty-five years later (Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves, 1997, ix). Y.’s study of Chaucer’s literary sources and use of medieval glossators was prescient. The formative questions Y. recorded for his study of Chaucer’s learning anticipate critical interests among Chaucerians during the last two decades with uncanny specificity: “Not only must one ask, How did Chaucer use his books, and What did he think of them, but one must inquire also, How did he get them, How did they differ from the printed forms that we use, and What books, familiar to him, still lurk in original manuscripts, generally unknown to us?” (quoted by Robert A. Pratt, “Karl Young’s Work on the Learning of Chaucer,” A Memoir of Karl Young, [1946], 47). Y.’s The Drama of the Medieval Church initiated a series of key debates in medieval drama scholarship. His evolutionary model for the development of medieval drama was challenged three decades later by O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages, 1965, 1–34), who proposed examining the drama and its origins through anthropological, ritual, and literary theories. In direct counterpoint to Y., Hardison argued for the Mass as sacred drama (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages [1965], 35–79) and discussed at length the correlations between Christian rite and Christian drama. Y.’s and Hardison’s critical conversation is at the heart of most recent debates about what structural and elemental principals constitute medieval drama. Even more intriguing is the conversation their debate has most recently introduced into medieval scholarship about how drama and dramatic texts should be historicized, with an important shift from focusing on the “origins” and “history” of medieval drama to the “practice of representation” – what Kobialka calls a renewed interest not in dialogue, setting, impersonation, and the external performative elements of medieval drama, but rather a focus on the culturally and ideologically heterogeneous environments through which representation might configure and reconfigure itself (This is my Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages, 1999, 18–33). The impact of Y.’s research on texts that informed Chaucer’s learning has yet to be fully assessed. However, Y.’s focus, at a gathering of Columbia

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University’s English Graduate Union before his death, on the anti-feminist materials Chaucer had at his disposal when writing The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (Robert A. Pratt, “Karl Young’s Work on the Learning of Chaucer,” A Memoir of Karl Young, 1946, 52–54) set the stage for decades of critical inquiry into the tale. Recent discussions of the Wife of Bath draw specifically on the materials that form the core of Hanna’s and Lawler’s Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves. Select Bibliography Works: Major Books: The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus (1908); Ordo Rachelis (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1919); The Dramatic Associations of the Easter Sepulchre. (1920); Ordo Prophetarum (1921); The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933); Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, using materials collected by Karl Young and Robert A Pratt, vol. I: The Primary Texts (1997). Major Articles: “Chaucer’s Use of Boccaccio’s Filocolo,” MP 4 (1906): 169–77; “A Contribution to the History of the Liturgical Drama at Rouen,” MP 6 (1908): 201–27; “The Harrowing of Hell in Liturgical Drama,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 16:2 (1909): 889–947; “Observations on the Origin of the Medieval Passion Play,” PMLA 25 (1910): 309–54; “Philippe de Mézières’ Dramatic Office for the Presentation of the Virgin,” PMLA 26 (1911): 181–234; “Officium Pastorum: A Study of the Dramatic Developments within the Christmas Liturgy,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 17:1 (1912): 299–395; “The Origin of the Easter Play,” PMLA: 29 (1914): 1–58; “The Poema Biblicum of Onulphus,” PMLA 30 (1915): 25–41; “A New Version of the Peregrinus,” PMLA 34 (1919): 114–29; “The Home of the Easter Play,” Speculum 1 (1926): 71–86; “Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as Romance,” PMLA 53 (1938): 38–63; “The Maidenly Virtues of Chaucer’s Virginia,” Speculum 16 (1941): 340–49; “Chaucer’s ‘Vitremyte,’” Studies in Philology 40 (1943): 494–501; “Chaucer’s Appeal to the Platonic Deity,” Speculum 19 (1944): 1–13; “Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf,” MP 41 (1944): 172–82. 3. Unpublished work: MSS 43 – The Karl Young Papers; 7.5’, Yale University Music Library. [The Collection consists chiefly of notes and photocopies of sources collected for Young’s lifelong study of medieval drama.] Literature: C. Clifford Flanigan, “Karl Young and the Drama of the Medieval Church: An Anniversary Appraisal,” RORD 27 (1984): 157–66; “Karl Young,” Historical Register of Yale University, 1937–1951 (New Haven: Yale University, 1952), 325; A Memoir of Karl Young, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis (New Haven: private printing [Yale University Press], 1946); J. S. P. Tatlock, “Karl Young,” Speculum 20 (1945): 382–83; John Wasson, “Karl Young and the Vernacular Drama,” RORD 27: 151–55; E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903); Leonard Goldstein, The Origin of Medieval Drama (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); O. B. Hardison, Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965); Jankyn’s Book of Wikkid Wyves, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, using materials collected by Karl Young and Robert A. Pratt, vol. I: The Primary Texts (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1997); Michal Kobialka, This is my Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999); William L. Smoldon, The Music of the

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Medieval Church Dramas, ed. Cynthia Bourgeault (London: Oxford University Press, 1980); The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Regula Meyer Evitt

Adler, Guido

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Z

Zingerle, Ignaz Vinzenz (June 6, 1825, Meran, South Tyrol, which passed to Italy in 1919 – September 17, 1892, Innsbruck, Northern Tyrol, Austria), German Medievalist. Even more than the work of Karl Pfeiffer (1815–1868), who had been appointed a full professor in Vienna in 1857, Z.’s research placed great emphasis on the cultural-historical aspects of German literature. His extensive œuvre included fairy tales, sagas, legends, myths, folk customs, folk songs, and proverbs and these were then taken up as themes in German literary research. Beyond those sources he also examined material from games and theatricals from the medieval era, legal sources, urbarial texts, knightly codes, and witch trials. His research on Walther von der Vogelweide gave German philology renewed impetus. It was Z.’s article, “Zu Walther von der Vogelweide,” published in Pfeiffer’s “Germania” 21 (1876): 193–96, which drew the attention of scholars to the unique extant documented reference to a medieval poet. Z. concerned himself especially with the debate over Walther’s origins, a discussion which was of great pertinence in the intellectual world of the mid-19th century. As a result of his efforts, a monument to Walther was erected in Bozen (Bolsano) in 1847. The “Walther craze” which broke out in South Tyrol as a result contributed to German nationalist sentiments in the region, and Walther’s name became a nationalist political signal. Z. delivered an early and very impressive contribution to research concerning the relationship of text and image, with his identification of the fresco cycle at Runkelstein castle in the 1850s based on literary models. Z., one of seven children, was born the son of an educated mercantile family in Meran. The stories told him by his childhood nurse awoke his interest very early in the world of fairytales and sagas of South Tyrol. Z. attended high school at the Benedictine grammar school in Meran from 1835 to1842, and went on to study theology at Brixen. He entered the Marienberg seminary in 1845, but by 1846 had turned his back on monastery life. However he continued his theological studies, entering lower orders in 1847. From 1850 he taught at the Innsbruck grammar school, and in 1856, graduated

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under Karl Simrock in Tübingen, Germany, with a dissertation on “Die Oswaldlegende und ihre Beziehung zur deutschen Mythologie” (The Oswald Legend and its Relation to German Mythology). From 1858 he held the post of director of the university library in Innsbruck. In 1859, by imperial decree, he was appointed the first full professor in German philology at Innsbruck University. In 1862, Z. became dean of the university’s faculty of philosophy. Between 1876 and 1890 he served as the first director of the newly founded training college for German literature at Innsbruck University. He went into retirement in 1890. The main emphasis of his teaching was on medieval literature and cultural history, German linguistics, Gothic phonetics, the interpretation of Old High German linguistic documents, German mythology Kudrun and the history of contemporary literature by figures such as Goethe and Schiller. His research concentrated on the literature and cultural history of the medieval period, Walther von der Vogelweide, Oswald von Wolkenstein, Hans Vintler, the language and literature of Tyrol, and German mythology, fairytales, and sagas. Z.’s best known student was Josef Eduard Wackernell (1850–1929). Wackernell was appointed extraordinary professor in Innsbruck in 1887, but this against the wishes of his teacher, as Ignaz Franz Z. had envisaged his own son Oswald von Zingerle taking the position. Z. was a “poet-teacher” in the style of Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862). He founded the literary association “Aurora” in Innsbruck in 1843. Its members named themselves after knights, recited from their own works and from the works of classic and Romantic writers whom they admired, and published under pseudonyms. At Gufidaun castle (Summersberg) near Klausen in South Tyrol, which he acquired in 1880, he founded the “Walther Roundtable,” which issued diplomas printed in Old German Gothic type for the twelve members of the knightly circle. This was a strictly male circle which paid homage to a mentality of “laudatio temporis acti,” and whose thinking was strongly marked by cultural pessimism. Z.’s most admired models were the Grimm brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), especially their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Domestic Fairy Tales) brought out in 1812–1814, and the Deutsche Sagen (German Sagas) of 1816–1818. Z. had begun his own collections already in 1843 (with the help of his brother.) Thus, within a decade, five different publications followed closely one after another; dealing with sagas and fairy tales from Tyrol. In contrast to the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Z. didn’t poeticize the fairy tales and sagas he dealt with, but regarded them as “folk poetry” per se (Introduction, III).

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At the suggestion of Jacob Grimm, in 1862, three years after his appointment as full professor, Z. wrote the linguistic-historical study titled, Über die bildliche Verstärkung der Negation bei mittelhochdeutschen Dichtern (On the Pictorial Reinforcement of Negation in the work of Middle High German Poets). As the origins of Walther von der Vogelweide became a hotly discussed theme around the mid-19th century, Z. sought through literary analysis using historical sources and oral traditions to prove that Walther originated from South Tyrol. Z.’s theories, however, met with fierce opposition in the scholarly world. The Walther cult took root in Bozen not only because of Z.’s veneration of the great medieval poet, but a cultural political agenda lay behind the development as well. The figure of one of Germany’s greatest poets symbolized the German language, the German spirit, which must keep guard and prevent the advance of the Italian language. Z. received many honors in the course of his life; in 1858, he was awarded the Medal for Sciences from the Prussian king, from 1867 onwards he was corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and in 1873, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Royal Order of St Michael. In 1887, he became a government councilor, and in 1890 he was elevated to the aristocracy and granted the title “Edler von Summersberg.” Albert Leitzmann considered Z.’s collection of proverbs, Studien zu Freidanks Bescheidenheit (1950; Studies on Freidanks Bescheidenheit, to be outstanding for his time; Helmut Birkhan adjudged his scholarly work as “lacking a strong inclination toward linguistic research,” but acknowledged his activities in the fields of cultural history and European ethnology, and especially his edition of Hans Vintler’s “Pluomen der Tugent” (Helmut Birkhan, “Altgermanistik und germanistische Sprachwissenschaft,” Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, vol. 5, ed. Karl Acham, 2003, 125). The edition of HansVintler’s Pluemen der Tugent (1874, Flowers of Virtue), his fairy tale and saga collections, his research efforts in Tyrol as a linguistic enclave (Lusernisches Wörterbuch, 1869), and his works on the history of literature represent Z.’s most outstanding scholarly achievements for Max Siller(Max Siller, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle und die tirolische Literaturgeschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 11 [1992]: 39–50). Select Bibliography Works: Sagen aus Tirol (1850; Tyrolian Sagas); Kinder- und Hausmärchen aus Tirol (1852; Tyrolian Children’s and Domestic Fairy Tales); Kinder- und Hausmärchen aus Süddeutschland (together with Josef Zingerle) (1854; South German Children’s and Domestic

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Fairy Tales); Sitten, Bräuche und Meinungen des Tiroler Volkes (1857, rpt. 1971; Customs, Rituals, and Opinions of the Tyrolean People); Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Tirol (1859; Tyrolian Sagas, Fairy Tales, and Rituals and); Lusernisches Wörterbuch (1869; Lusernian Dictionary); König Laurin (1850; King Laurin); Das deutsche Kinderspiel im Mittelalter (1868; rpt. 1873; Children’s Game in Medieval times); Die deutschen Sprichwörter des Mittelalters (1864, rpt. 1972; Middle High German Proverbs), Tirolische Weistümer, vol. 1–4, (1875–1888; Tyrolian Sources of Law in the Middle Ages). Literature: Oswald von Zingerle, “Zingerle, Ignaz Vinzenz,” ADB, vol. 45 (1900), 316–20; Leopold Wagner, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle,” Ph.D. diss. Innsbruck 1962; Leander Petzold, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 11 (1992): 11–17; Helga Rogenhofer-Suitner, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle – Leben,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 11 (1992): 8–10; Max Siller, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle und die tirolische Literaturgeschichtsschreibung des Mittelalters,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 11 (1992): 39–50; Michael Gebhardt, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle, Adolf Pichler und der Germanistische Lehrstuhl an der Universität Innsbruck,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner-Archiv 11 (1992): 28–38; Alfred Ebenbauer, “Dichtung und Raum: Kritische Gedanken zu einer mittelalterlichen Literaturgeographie,” Interregionalität der deutschen Literatur im europäischen Mittelalter, ed. Hartmut Kugler (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1995), Helmut Birkhan, “Altgermanistik und germanistische Sprachwissenschaft,” Geschichte der österreichischen Humanwissenschaften, vol. 5, ed. Karl Acham (Vienna: Passagen 2003), 23–43, 125; Johannes Holzner, “Ignaz Vinzenz Zingerle,” IGL, vol. 3 (2003), 2103–04.

Gertrud Blaschitz

Zumthor, Paul (August 5, 1915, Geneva, Switzerland – November 1, 1995, Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Swiss-Roman Medievalist and Literary Historian. Z.’s contribution to the study of medieval literature includes 24 scholarly works, many of which have become classics, composed over a period of more than fifty years. Besides his erudition, already evident in his first work, Merlin le prophète: un thème de la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans of 1943, today still considered the standard work on the medieval magician, Z. is known for coining a number of different critical concepts that have become fundamental in Medieval Studies. Z.’s Essai de poétique médiévale (1972; Toward a Medieval Poetics), the first structuralist analysis of Old and Medieval French poetry, has been considered to represent a turning point, for medieval literary criticism until then had

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been historically oriented. But while Z. analyzed medieval literature as a system in this study, he also addressed the potential disconnect between the structuralist conception of literature and the emotional experience of poetry, awarding a central place to what he called théatralité (theatricality), the performative aspect of poetry. Medieval poetry, like its modern counterpart, must be assimilated to the reader’s own experience, “performed” by the reader, and thus made personally relevant. The notion of théatralité (which he claims in Essai to have coined) has been profoundly influential in medieval and early modern studies, which now see many elements of early European life as essentially theatrical. In Langue, texte, énigme (1975) Z. reiterates the primacy of form and the impersonality of medieval lyric poetry, but again, he maintains that the beauty of the poems lies in the performance that brings them to life. He did not regard the repetitiveness of Medieval poetry – the heavy use of convention – as the result of a lack of sophistication. Rather, he viewed conventions as fragments animated through performance. Z.’s studies on the troubadours laid the groundwork for a series of important studies written in he 1980s and 1990s on this subject, including Sarah Kay’s Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (1990), Simon Gaunt’s Troubadours and Irony (1989), and Laura Kendrick’s The Game of Love: Troubadour Word Play (1988). Other key concepts introduced into the Medieval literary critical repertory by Z. include orality, the importance of which he defines in his Introduction à la poésie orale (1983), and vocality, or the traces of oral culture in poetic texts, upon which he expounds in La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (1984) and La lettre et la voix ou De la ‘littérature’ médiévale (1987). But his name is linked in particular with the principle of mouvance, which holds that medieval texts, transmitted in manuscript, are inherently unstable. Thus any medieval text may have a variety of material realizations. Whereas editors of medieval works traditionally had compared surviving manuscripts to create an edition as close as possible to the “original” form of the text, Z., claiming that the boundary between author and scribe was much less distinct during the Middle Ages than it is today, believed that it made little sense to consider the author a supreme authority for a given text. Theorists today commonly consider medieval works as collaborative productions created over a long span of time and marked by variants. Bernard Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante (In Praise of Variant) (1989) can be seen as a follow-up to Z.’s exposition of mouvance. Moreover, the concept of mouvance helped give rise to the interdisciplinary movement known as the “New Medievalism” or the “New Philology” introduced in a special volume of Speculum in 1990. While Z. claimed that he was not personally interested in the edition of manuscripts, he was interested in making medieval literature available to modern readers. There-

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fore, he worked actively to make editions possible, and, as director of the series Bibliothèque médiévale, he helped bring obscure medieval writers to modern attention through anthologies. The Swiss Z. entered the Sorbonne in 1933, studying literature under Gustave Cohen, specialist of medieval theatre. During this period he joined a travelling theatre group directed by Cohen. Known as the Théophiliens, the group performed Medieval plays. Z.’s studies were disrupted by family financial difficulties caused by the death of his father, and he spent part of 1935 and 1936 in Italy caring for the children of an Italian nobleman. Nonetheless, he completed his Diploma of Advanced Studies (equivalent of the Masters Degree) in 1936 with a thesis on the Lancelot-Grail cycle, under Cohen. Because he was Swiss, he was not allowed to pass the agrégation in France. He thus returned to Switzerland to undertake a Ph.D. thesis on Merlin, once again under Cohen’s supervision. While completing his doctoral studies he taught at a school in Geneva. He accepted a lectureship at the University of Halle in Germany for the 1941–1942 academic year. But his doctoral studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the Swiss militia where he served as a soldier for two years. In 1943, he defended his thesis on Merlin. During his career, Z. taught at fifty different universities, although his principal appointments were at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Montreal. He was appointed professor at the University of Amsterdam in 1952, where he also served as the director of the Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures. In 1968 he accepted a professorship at the newly-established University of Vincennes, outside of Paris. He was appointed professor at the University of Montreal in 1972, where he taught until retiring to emeritus in 1980. Besides his literary scholarship, Z. also published novels, short stories and poetry. He died in Montreal on November 1, 1995. For Z., the Middle Ages represented the heritage of the modern world, even though an unbridgeable chasm divided that past from the present. He advised that the modern reader approach the Middle Ages through dialogue, as one approaches an alien culture: as an entity that can be intuited through flashes of insight, although never fully grasped. Thus the modern relationship with the Middle Ages is continually being renewed. This approach helped render the Middle Ages more accessible to readers, encouraging them to forge links with the past by enacting its literature. But Z.’s work has been important for fields beyond medieval literary scholarship. Even theorists of modern literature have adopted the notion of the text as “social,” as the production of numerous actors, rather than an individual work of genius. His

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interest in orality in medieval poetry led him to consider oral poetry of different countries and times, highlighting the universal aspects. He has become known as an authority on Western orality from the oral poetry of Antiquity to that of present-day Africa. While the importance of Z.’s corpus is recognized, scholars have pointed out some of the paradoxes that appear in his works. For example, many have perceived a tension between the structuralist project of locating meaning in the totality of a genre and Z.’s attempt to derive the meaning of an individual work from the experience of its performance. On the one hand, he sees texts in terms of typology and claims that they refer not to outside events but to other texts, and, on the other, he insists that a text becomes meaningful as a particular constellation of the elements highlighted in a particular manuscript manifestation or in a literal performance before an audience. These terms correspond to the perpetual debate between formalist and historical approaches to medieval literature. Select Bibliography Works: Merlin le prophète: un thème de la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans (1943); Antigone ou l’espérance (1945); Victor Hugo, poète de Satan (1946); Précis de syntaxe du français contemporain (1947); Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale (VIe–XIVe S.) (1946); Charles le Chauve (1957); La vie quotidienne en Hollande au temps de Rembrandt (1959–1960); La griffe (1957); Les contrebandiers (1962); Langue et techniques poétiques à l’époque romane (1963); Guillaume le Conquérant et la civilisation de son temps (1964); Essai de poétique médiévale (1972); Langue, texte, énigme (1975); Anthologie des grands rhétoriqueurs (1978); Le masque et la lumière (1978); Introduction à la poésie orale (1983); La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale (1984); Jeux de mémoire (1985); Stèle; suivi de Avants, poésie (1986); La fête des fous: roman (1987); Point de fuite: poésie (1989); Performance, réception, lecture (1990); Écriture et nomadisme (1990); La traversée (qui retrace le voyage de Christophe Colomb) (1991); La mesure du monde: représentation de l’espace au Moyen Âge (1993); La porte à côté: nouvelles (1994); Babel, ou l’inachèvement (1997); Fin en soi: poésie (Montreal: Hexagone, 1996); Literature: Helen Solterer, “Performing Pasts: A Dialogue with Paul Zumthor,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 641–60; Le nombre du temps: Une Hommage à Paul Zumthor, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner (Paris: Champion, 1988); Paul Zumthor, ou, L’invention permanente: critique, histoire, poésie, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Touletand Christopher Lucken (Genève: Droz, 1998); Evelyn Birge Vitz, “Paul Zumthor and Medieval Romance,” Dalhousie French Studies 44 (1998): 1–11.

Tracy Adams