medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 13/2021
Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century, I. Guest Editors: Christopher Heath, Clemens Gantner and Edoardo Manarini. Ideologies of Translation, III. Guest Editor: Jan Odstrčilík
No.:
13
Year of the volume:
2021
“medieval worlds” provides a forum for comparative, interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Its aim is to overcome disciplinary boundaries, regional limits and national research traditions in Medieval Studies, to open up new spaces for discussion, and to help developing global perspectives. We focus on the period from c. 400 to 1500 CE but do not stick to rigid periodization. medieval worlds is open to submissions of broadly comparative studies and matters of global interest, whether in single articles, companion papers, smaller clusters, or special issues on a subject of global/comparative history. We particularly invite studies of wide-ranging connectivity or comparison between different world regions. Apart from research articles, medieval worlds publishes ongoing debates and project and conference reports on comparative medieval research.
The present volume contains three stand-alone articles, which provide interdisciplinary and comparative insights into topics ranging from a text edition of a 9th century Cambodian religious stela (D. Goodall and Ch. Hun); to Byzantine and Chinese gardens in comparison (C. Virag and F. Spingou); and to a world map of a Christian Iberian manuscript (P.S. Marschner). J. Tolan presents an interim report on the activities of the multi-institutional team in the ERC SyG project EuQu, exploring the various roles of the Qur’ān in European cultural history. All further articles are assembled in two thematic sections: Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century was organised by guest editors C. Heath, C. Gantner and E. Manarini and, with the further contribution by F. Veronese and G. Zornetta, explores how evidence of movement and mobility can be used to trace the exchange of cultures, of ideas and products. The section Ideologies of Translation, III – Multilingual Sermons under guest editor J. Odstrčilík was introduced in volume 12, 2020 and is now augmented by studies of N. Stam, G. Knight, J. Odstrčilík and H. Halmari employing philological, linguistic, palaeographic and historical methods on different types of evidence for multilingual preaching.
available as
Details
Editorial
Page 2 - 2 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s2
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Introduction: Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century
This article introduces the themed section »Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean: Changing Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Long-Twelfth Century«. This series of articles engages with the ongoing debates in historiography on the role of movement and mobility in the socio-political frameworks of medieval societies throughout the Mediterranean world from Iberia to the Near East. The papers introduced here consider a wide range of contacts and exchange from the diplomatic encounters of late antique Byzantium via the exchange of (religious) ideas and spiritual objects in Italy and the Near East to the fundamental mobility of capital, slaves and goods. Rather than reveal a static, ossified and self-contained range of landscapes, this article will argue that there were not only cross-cultural, religious and political contacts but also economic and social connections that fused the Medieval Mediterranean into a heterogenous contact zone of cultures, ideas and products. Using this broader framework of the Mediterranean as a contact zone and border region between and across the longue durée represented by the period from Late Antiquity until the end of the twelfth century allows the contributions to demonstrate movement, not stasis after Rome and the expansion of horizons rather than their restriction.
Keywords: movement, contact zone, Mediterranean economies, cultural production, pre-modern society, celestial mobilities, socio-cultural exchange
Page 3 - 11 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s3
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Aspects of Movement and Mobility in Lombard Law: Fugitives, Runaway Slaves and Strangers
Lombard laws were issued between 643 and 755. They comprise in toto an invaluable normative source for the Lombard kingdom and society in the seventh and eighth centuries. Commentators have concentrated upon the witness that the laws comprise for the ability of Lombard kings to rule, control and influence society. This paper, however, will consider aspects of both movement and mobility through and across the kingdom using the prism provided by the law with regard to fugitives, runaway slaves and strangers. What does the law tell us about the conceptual parameters associated with those who composed and compiled Lombard law? How did the Lombard kingdom respond to movement and mobility? What do prescriptions which relate to frontiers reveal about the broader interconnectivity of the Mediterranean world? In addressing these issues, and in considering the broader connotations revealed, this paper will argue for a deeper mobility in the early medieval West.
Keywords: Lombard laws, mobility, fugitives, slaves, spatial responses, Pirenne thesis, Rothari
Page 12 - 35 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s12
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Ad utriusque imperii unitatem? Anastasius Bibliothecarius as a Broker between Two Cultures and Three Courts in the Ninth Century
In 870, Anastasius, former (and later once again) librarian of the papal bibliotheca and chancellery, well-known erudite and former anti-pope, reached the pinnacle of his career as a diplomat. While exiled from Rome for a crime committed by his cousin, he was an important member of a mission sent to Constantinople by the Carolingian emperor and lord of Italy Louis II. He was sent there to negotiate a marriage alliance between Louis’s daughter and only surviving child Ermengard and a son of the upstart Byzantine emperor Basil I, which was ultimately to serve to bind the two empires together in the fight against the Saracens, southern Italy and Sicily. While there, Anastasius also joined the papal delegation at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, which was there in the pope’s stead to formally depose Patriarch Photius and negotiate the case of Bulgaria. We thus see Anastasius as a diplomat and cultural broker between Latin and Greek ecclesiastic and lay culture and between three courts. He composed a letter about his dealings in the East for Pope Hadrian II in 870, and thus we have an invaluable first-hand eyewitness account. While most negotiations started in 869 and 870 between the East and the West ultimately failed or were rendered pointless by political change, Anastasius shows us that 870 was a great chance for all sides. And while most parties involved lost something by the failure of the exchanges, Anastasius himself regained and kept a powerful position in the papal administration once again.
Keywords: Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Louis II, emperor, Hadrian II, pope, Rome, papacy, Carolingian empire, Byzantine Empire, diplomacy, cultural broker
Page 36 - 53 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s36
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Holiness on the Move: Relic Translations and the Affirmation of Authority on the Italian Edge of the Carolingian World
Between the eighth and ninth centuries many kings, dukes and counts in Carolingian Europe promoted the collection of relics in cathedrals and/or urban foundations both to centralize their power and to increase their prestige. Their ventures were part of a wider framework in which the mobility of the saints’ bodies, which was strictly defined by the Carolingian authorities, put various political and social agents in a relationship, often competitive, with each other. This paper considers two cases of the translation of saints’ bodies at the peripheries of the Carolingian Empire: the furta sacra of St Mark (from Alexandria, Egypt to Venice, 828) and St Bartholomew (from the island of Lipari to Benevento, 838-839). Both the hagiographical traditions narrate the theft and transport of the relics from the Islamic world to the Italian peninsula by boat. These two cases are also both related to a conscious and ambitious plan to strengthen local public authorities. The paper examines the underlying political strategies that led to the mobility of two of the most important relics in the Mediterranean context and the circulation of cultural models from the Carolingian worlds, which relocated the saints’ bodies in order to redefine the political balance.
Keywords: translations of relics, public authorities, peripheries of the Carolingian Empire, Benevento, Venice
Page 54 - 75 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s54
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
The Translation of St Sylvester’s Relics from Rome to Nonantola: Itineraries of corpora sacra at the Crossroads between Devotion and Identity in Eighth-Tenth-Century Italy
Pope Sylvester I (314-335) became an important figure in the political history of early medieval Italy. His legendary relationship with Constantine I (306-337), the first Christian emperor, played a significant role in establishing his ideological prominence. Declared a saint of the early Roman Church, Sylvester’s relics did not gain much attention until the middle of the eighth century, when they became a source of competition. On the one hand, Roman popes venerated his body in the monastery of St Stephen and St Sylvester, founded by Pope Paul I around 760 inside the Eternal City; on the other hand, the Lombard king Aistulf and his brother-in-law, Abbot Anselm, claimed to have brought Sylvester’s relics north, in order to have them buried in Anselm’s newly founded monastery of Nonantola in the Po Valley. Scholars would appear to have overlooked this major issue when investigating the relationship between Lombard elite society and Roman popes in the eighth century. This article will therefore consider the dates, forms, and narratives of the translatio of St Sylvester in order to evaluate Nonantola’s political and ideological involvement in this »holy« movement. The main argument is that through the »journey« of Sylvester’s relics within the Lombard kingdom, King Aistulf was able to increase his prestige and political influence. For its part, Nonantola rewrote the history of its origins by centring it on the relics of the Constantinian pontiff and those of Pope Hadrian I, in order to claim political and spiritual primacy throughout the medieval period.
Keywords: Carloman and St Sylvestre on Mount Soratte, translations of relics, St Sylvester of Nonantola, Hagiography, Pope Sylvester I, Lombard kingdom, St Sylvester in Capite, Pope Paul I
Page 76 - 103 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s76
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Bilingualism in the Cambrai Homily
The Cambrai Homily (Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 679 [s. viii2] ff. 37rb–38rb) is a short prose homily found between two chapters of the Collectio canonum Hibernensis; as the Homily is incomplete, it has been suggested that it was copied from a stray leaf inserted into the exemplar of the Collectio. The Homily itself is estimated to date to the seventh or first half of the eighth century. More salient for the purpose of this anthology, however, is the fact that the Homily code-switches between Latin and Old Irish. Some claim that this text provides us with the earliest record of continuous Irish prose; as such it has long been an important source for early Irish linguistics, as well as evidence for sermons in the seventh-century Irish Church. Nevertheless, the aspects of code-switching between Old Irish and Latin in the Cambrai Homily remain underexplored. This article provides an assessment of existing perspectives on the relationship between Latin and Old Irish in this homily, and offers a fresh interpretation of the code-switching that takes place.
Keywords: Medieval homily, code-switching, translation studies, Old Irish, Latin, Cambrai
Page 104 - 119 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s104
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Between Innovation and Tradition: Code-Switching in the Transmission of the Commentary to the Félire Óengusso
This article presents a case study that explores the issue of code-switching in medieval text transmission with initial data mined in a three-year project run at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The case study is based on a bilingual corpus of glosses and notes in Irish and Latin that accompanies the ninth-century Martyrology of Óengus. This collection of material is referred to as the Commentary to the Félire Óengusso and is found in ten manuscripts. This provides an excellent opportunity to compare different versions of a bilingual text in order to analyse the way in which different scribes dealt with the bilingual material that they copied. In my analysis, a twofold approach to the material will be adopted: first, from the perspective of linguistics, I examine whether the grammatical characteristics of a code-switch influence its transmission. For this, I use Pieter Muysken’s typology of code-mixing (2000) to distinguish between complex and simple code-switches. Secondly, from the perspective of palaeography, I examine whether highly abbreviated words that could be interpreted as either Latin or Irish (visual diamorphs) may cause so-called »triggered« code-switches in transmission. The aim of the comparison is to provide a window on scribal practice in bilingual texts.
Keywords: bilingualism, code-switching, Ireland, Old Irish, Latin, typology, Transmission, palaeography, visual diamorphs, Martyrology, Óengus Mac Óengobann, glosses, commentary
Page 120 - 146 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s120
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Jacobus de Saraponte’s Aurissa: Evidence for Multilingual Preaching
One of the key questions of sermon studies on medieval multilingual sermons is whether – and to what extent – multilingual preaching actually occurred. The unpublished and little-known medieval art of preaching Aurissa, composed by Jacobus de Saraponte in the 14th century, provides unique insights into this issue. This study reconstructs the original composition of the work that was unknown until now. The article argues that the treatise consisted of three parts: the main treatise Theologia est sciencia (the only part described as Aurissa in the past), an additional chapter on preaching in the chapter and a list of rhymed words grouped thematically called the Quadrangulum. The study then provides an overview of the main 33 chapters, focusing on the peculiar terminology of the treatise, especially so-called notabilitates and the ways in which they can be extracted from the thema of the sermon. This leads to the main part of the article, which discusses the advice on the use of various languages. Jacobus de Saraponte provides detailed instruction on which languages should be used in different parts of the sermon (thema, initial prayer, notabilitates, conclusion) with regard to different audiences. Most notably, he mentions the possibility of mixed sermons. This type is described especially in his detailed advice regarding preaching in the chapter. Finally, the study investigates traces in the manuscripts showing how they were used. The conclusion discusses the degree to which the advice by Jacobus de Saraponte can be taken as evidence for so-called macaronic preaching, i.e., the type of preaching where languages would be mixed seemingly randomly within sentences.
Keywords: Multilingualism, Middle Ages, preaching, ars praedicandi, sermons
Page 147 - 176 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s147
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Language Mixing as a Persuasive Strategy in Oxford, MS Bodley 649
One of the salient features of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, a fifteenth-century sermon collection, is its frequent switching from Latin to English – and back to Latin again. Building on Wenzel’s (1994) groundbreaking work on macaronic sermons, I discuss the rhetorical characteristics of English elements in MS Bodley 649, with the purpose of showing that language mixing in this collection is not random but rather one of the rhetorical devices that the author uses for persuasion. The English elements are frequently used to build grammatical cohesion through structural parallelism. Also, lexical and semantic cohesion are achieved via repetition of the same words in both languages or through English paraphrases of Latin scriptural content. Alliteration, another rhetorical device, often coincides with language switches within the sermons. I hope to show that, together with other rhetorical strategies, mixing English into Latin constitutes one means within an entire bundle of linguistic devices that all contribute to the persuasive purpose of the genre. As a preliminary finding of some work in progress, I report on the nature of the English words mixed into these highly scholastic and often allegorical sermons. The English elements within the sermons tend to provide content that is mundane, or objectionable (from the point of view of Christian conduct and goals), or even merely negative (if not repulsive). An important conclusion is that none of the rhetorical strategies that overlap with code-switching into English are used mechanically and systematically by the sermonist; the coincidence of the bundled persuasive features is never predictable. However, this does not mean that mixing English elements into Latin in MS Bodley 649 should be characterized as random. A persuasive sermon is not tamely predictable in its delivery; it must offer surprises as audience-engagement strategies. The most salient surprises in MS Bodley 649 are provided by the English elements.
Keywords: macaronic sermons, Oxford MS Bodley 649, code-switching, persuasion, cohesive devices, alliteration, repetition, structural parallelism
Page 177 - 194 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s177
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
The World Map of the Corpus Pelagianum (BNE, 1513, fol. 1v) and its Strategies of Identification
One of the manuscripts of the famous Corpus Pelagianum contains a square world map that is simultaneously a genealogical chart of peoples that are descended from the sons of Noah. In combining a geographical imagination of the world with genealogies, this illustration becomes an impressive intellectual achievement of the high medieval Iberian Peninsula and differs considerably from other forms of medieval world maps. In this article the characteristics of this cartographical and genealogical figure will be investigated in general, but also with regard to the map’s context in the manuscript Madrid, BNE, 1513. Hence, the map will be contextualised in relation to the text corpus that follows it and, therefore, its interaction with the textual heritage of Christian-Iberian historical writing, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, will be illuminated. In particular, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville were an important source, both for the textual content of this codex and for the information displayed on the map. Accordingly, this article is, after some introductory passages on the composition of the codex BNE 1513, divided into two parts. The first describes the characteristics of the geographical chart and compares them with other contemporary world maps. The second part addresses peoples of the world that appear in this illustration and discusses how their identification correlates with the historiographical texts in BNE 1513. So far, these parallels have not been taken into account in research on this codex.
Keywords: mappae mundi, genealogy, Christian-Muslim relations, Isidore of Seville, Pelayo of Oviedo, Corpus Pelagianum, BNE 1513, Chronicle of Alfonso III, Chronicle of Sampiro, Chronicon regum Legionensium, ethnonyms
Page 195 - 228 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s195
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
The Pleasures of Virtue and the Virtues of Pleasure: The Classicizing Garden in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China and Byzantium
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Byzantium and China, the garden as a site of pleasure was an important literary theme among literati. Although pleasure had long been associated with gardens prior to this period, its simultaneous resurgence in both cultures was specifically linked to new ways of engaging with the classical tradition. This paper explores the nature and significance of the discourse of pleasure in the imagination of gardens in these two culturally distinct, but historically resonant, imperial societies. Noting important parallels and divergences in the literature surrounding pleasurable gardens in the two traditions, it argues that the garden as a site of pleasure was more than a document of the carefree pleasures of communing with nature. Instead, it was a declaration among literati – constrained by their place in a vast imperial bureaucratic system – of their agency, their integrity and, above all, their virtue. Far from being just a psychological or affective state, the pleasures they documented were a testimony of their freedom and moral authority in the face of a vast political order upon which they depended, but that also required their participation and validation as the bearers of the authoritative classical tradition that sustained the very imperial project. As a site charged with references and allusions to the ancient past and its authoritative voices, the garden provided an optimal arena in which those literati retreating from the front lines of official duty could fashion the conditions of their own pleasure, and thereby display their virtue, assert their autonomy and bring to fulfillment their human potentiality.
Keywords: gardens, pleasure, antiquity, classicizing learning, literati, Song Dynasty, Byzantium, virtue, self-cultivation
Page 229 - 265 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s229
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Sectarian Rivalry in Ninth-Century Cambodia: A Posthumous Inscription Narrating the Religious Tergiversations of Jayavarman III (K. 1457)
This article provides an edition and translation of an inscribed two-sided stela (K. 1457), discovered during the construction of a road in the northwest of Cambodia in 2019, that commemorates the endowment of a Viṣṇu temple during the reign of the ninth-century king Jayavarman III. The inscription, in Sanskrit verse except for a few lines in Khmer prose that give details of the grants made, is undated, but uses the posthumous name of Jayavarman III, namely Viṣṇuloka, whose death cannot have occurred later than 877 CE. »Syncretism« is a label often bandied about in connection with ancient Khmer religious life. In counterpoise, this epigraph alludes to Jayavarman III having attempted to drive out Buddhists and to convert his subjects into Śaivas, before being himself won over to Vaiṣṇava devotion, after his Śaiva chaplain was struck dumb and died during a debate with a priest of the temple of Cāmpeśvara, once the most famous Viṣṇu temple in the Khmer religious landscape, whose location can no longer be determined with certainty. A second faith-inspiring drama is also sketched after the first endowment: a wife of the king entered Viṣṇu’s temple while menstruating and began to bleed from her breasts. K. 1457 adds nuance to our picture of the interrelations between the classical Indian religions among the Khmers, and confirms the recognition at that time of three principal religionists: Buddhists, Vaiṣṇavas, and Śaivas. Comparison with evidence for religious rivalry specifically between Śaivas and Vaiṣṇavas in different parts of the Indian sub-continent (particularly Nepal and the Tamil-speaking South) enables us to
Keywords: »Hinduism«, religious history, religious nomenclature, Khmer history, religious persecution, religious conversion, Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism
Page 266 - 295 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s266
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
The European Qur’ān: The Place of the Muslim Holy Book in European Cultural History
Page 296 - 307 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no13_2021s296
PDF
0,00 €
Open Access
Edition:
978-3-7001-8982-4, eJournal, PDF, limited accessibility , 01.07.2021
Pages:
307 Pages
Images:
numerous colour and b/w images
Language:
English
DOI (Link to Online Edition):