medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 7/2018
Verging on the Polemical: Exploring the Boundaries of Medieval Religious Polemic across Genres and Research Cultures
No.:
7
Year of the volume:
2018
MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting.
MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues.
Table of Contents
- Sita Steckel: Verging on the polemical. Towards an interdisciplinary approach to medieval religious polemic
- Birgit Wiedl: Anti-Jewish Polemics in Business Documents from Late Medieval Austria
- Melanie Brunner: Good and bad friars: polemical patterns and strategies between Franciscans in the early fourteenth century
- Bénédicte Sère: Obediencia, reformatio and veritas: Ecclesiological Debates during the Western Great Schism (1378-1417)
- Claudia Daiber: Polemics investigated in a late fifteenth-century Fastnachtspiel (Shrovetide play)
- Justine L. Trombley: The Text as Heretic: Mixed Genres and Polemical Techniques in a Refutation of the Mirror of Simple Souls
- Reima Välimäki: Transfers of anti-Waldensian material from a polemical treatise to a didactic text
- Andra Alexiu: Magistra magistrorum: Hildegard of Bingen as a Polemicist against False Teaching
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Verging on the polemical. Towards an interdisciplinary approach to medieval religious polemic
The present article attempts to take stock of the different definitions and connotations of the concept of religious »polemic« in order to encourage a more interdisciplinary debate on this topic. It argues that the interdisciplinary research fields engaging with religious polemics could generate important historical perspectives on current conflict cultures, and appear to be on the verge of an expansion of the horizon towards the global, connecting an extant, highly active research field on religious encounter in the Euro-Mediterranean area to the study of Asia and Africa. To be able to realize an integrative perspective and to write a comparative and entangled history of religious polemics, it seems necessary to reflect on the differences and gaps marking the overlapping research fields. The article therefore offers a brief historiographical sketch concerning the concept of »polemics«, and then offers a preliminary list of constituents or dimensions of the polemical which have been highlighted in the different research fields. In a concluding section, case studies from the accompanying contributions in this volume furnish examples on possible further perspectives, with an emphasis on non-traditional approaches cutting across established research fields.
Keywords: Religious polemics, inter-religious contact, intra-religious conflicts, medieval Judaism, medieval Latin Christianity, medieval Islam, history of Medieval Studies
Page 2 - 60 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s2
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Anti-Jewish Polemics in Business Documents from Late Medieval Austria
Anti-Jewish polemics can be found in abundance in medieval theology, literature, and art; yet as for documents that stemmed from economic encounters, little research has been done so far. In late medieval Austrian economic source material, only a few hints at anti-Jewish stances can be found in business documents, most of which stem from either an ecclesiastical or a municipal environment. While these brief references to the Jews’ interest rates, to Jewish counterfeiting and Jewish duplicity might not be categorized as polemical per se, they introduce polemical stereotypes and arguments into scenarios of everyday Jewish-Christian interaction, and thus contribute to making anti-Jewish sentiment part of the Christian mind-set.
Keywords: business documents, economic history, Jewish-Christian interaction, anti-Jewish polemics, Jewish history
Page 61 - 79 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s61
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Good and bad friars: polemical patterns and strategies between Franciscans in the early fourteenth century
medieval worlds • No. 7 • 2018 • 80-97 This study examines the use of polemical strategies in the internal Franciscan debates during the first half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the exchanges between Ubertino of Casale and his opponents during the Spiritual crisis, and between Michael of Cesena and Gerald Odonis in the aftermath of the so-called theoretical poverty controversy. By comparing the use of polemical tropes and patterns across the two conflicts, it is possible to isolate some of the strategies used by the participants in the debates, as well as highlighting the shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the definition of what constituted a »true« Franciscan. While outsiders contributed to the debates, this article focuses particularly on the ways in which members of the Franciscan order responded to challenges posed to the authors’ understanding of the Franciscan vocation by other members of the order. All sides in these debates agreed on poverty and obedience as central values of the Franciscan life, but they did not accept that their opponents might share their regard for the order’s rule and vocation. The debates therefore produced overlapping and competing visions of the Franciscan life which personalised and polarised the underlying larger issues, as well as establishing and defending the boundaries between »true« and »false« Franciscans, and thereby creating and reinforcing a sense of identity against those members of the order which fell outside the vision.
Keywords: poverty controversy, papal authority, rhetoric, polemics, Franciscan poverty, Gerald Odonis, Michael of Cesena, Raymond de Fronsac, Ubertino of Casale
Page 80 - 97 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s80
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Obediencia, reformatio and veritas: Ecclesiological Debates during the Western Great Schism (1378-1417)
The following is a brief presentation of the polemical strategies of textual discourses during the Great Schism. Our aim is to think of the history of the Great Schism as the history of the symbolic violence shaping the debates. The paper suggests joining the recent movement of what Jean-Pascal Gay calls »a cultural history of the controversial fact« to better grasp the ecclesiological advances of this late medieval period.
Keywords: Jean Gerson, Paris, universities, violence, theology, polemics, ecclesiology, Great Schism
Page 98 - 113 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s98
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Polemics investigated in a late fifteenth-century Fastnachtspiel (Shrovetide play)
The article analyses the polemics used in the Fastnachtspiel (Shrovetide Play) Der Juden Messias – in scholarship also known as Spil vom Herzog von Burgund − by the meistersinger Hans Folz (1435/40-1513), a barber-surgeon from Nuremberg. The play belongs to a group of Shrovetide plays within Folz’s oeuvre which, under a religious cover, negotiates the given sociological divide in the city of Nuremberg between the Christian and the Jewish communities at the end of the fifteenth century. In its first part, the play systematically stabilizes the Christian side and destabilizes the other, i.e. the Jewish side by directing polemical attacks through the devices of self-accusation and self-flagellation by the Jewish characters. The effect is that the actions of the Christian side are legitimized and any moral hurdles towards condemning the Jewish characters are removed by ultimately equating them with feces and swine. The second part contains a rather ambiguous message since on the one hand the ruler expressis verbis gives his permission to the mob, represented by the jester characters, to rob, rape and oust the Jewish characters. This consenting, on the other hand, prompts a uniting of the mob characters with the ruler. In other words, any moral authority of the ruler – who clearly is a metaphor for the later emperor Maximilian I – is put on a par with the mob and is therefore denied. Whether or not this latter message was appreciated by the city council of Nuremberg at the time remains an open question since there is, to date, no archival proof of the play’s staging nor of its rejection.
Keywords: staging the Judensau, criticizing the ruler, Anti-Judaistic polemics and agitation, Fastnachtspiel/Shrovetide Play, sixteenth century city culture, City of Nuremberg
Page 114 - 136 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s114
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The Text as Heretic: Mixed Genres and Polemical Techniques in a Refutation of the Mirror of Simple Souls
This article examines the style and rhetoric of a fourteenth-century treatise written against the condemned mystical work The Mirror of Simple Souls. The treatise addresses thirty-five extracts from the Mirror which are refuted as errors. Rather than merely a list of erroneous propositions, the text is a polemical narrative which employs various genres and literary styles from the canon of anti-heretical writings. The article notes how these various genres are combined to produce a comprehensive condemnation of the Mirror, and examines the rhetoric used to address it. The text is shown to go beyond merely refuting the Mirror’s doctrine. It also personifies the text by connecting it to the broader concept of heresy through the use of standard tropes that are usually used to describe the person of the generalised »heretic«. This makes it unique in the history of the Mirror’s reception, and shows how an anonymous text was assessed and characterised with tactics more often applied to human agents, rather than texts.
Keywords: textual refutation, condemned texts, heresy, The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete, anti-heretical texts, polemic
Page 137 - 152 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s137
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Transfers of anti-Waldensian material from a polemical treatise to a didactic text
Ulrich von Pottenstein translated Petrus Zwicker’s anti-Waldensian treatise Cum dormirent homines (1395) in his large catechetical encyclopaedia (ca. 1410), written in Early New High German. The translation was dispersed in different chapters, transforming the reading experience of the anti-heretical work but at the same time adding a polemical element to a pastoral text. The article discusses the historical context of Zwicker’s original Latin treatise and Ulrich’s translation, in particular the inquisitions against Waldensians that Zwicker led in Austria in the 1390s, as well as Ulrich’s ecclesiastical career. The second part of the article explores solutions Ulrich had to employ when he translated a text for a lay audience that was not only polemical but also required from its readers a basic understanding of exegesis. Finally, the reasons for Ulrich’s decision to translate Zwicker and the composite nature of the pastoral-didactic text with polemical passages is discussed. As for polemical treatises in general, the motivation behind Ulrich’s translation was to defend the Church against its enemies. Ulrich’s vernacular text had potential to extend the audience of a Latin anti-heretical treatise, but his catechetical encyclopaedia was too large and tedious to read to ever become a popular work. The article proposes that the polemical nature of the original was not mitigated in the process. On the contrary, Ulrich does not shy away from using denigrating or violent language, and polemical style is an essential part of his catechesis. A further study of polemical style in late-medieval pastoral and didactic works, especially vernacular texts, is proposed as a promising area of future research.
Keywords: Wiener Schule, Early New High German, translation, Ulrich von Pottenstein, Petrus, Zwicker, inquisition, pastoral care, anti-heretical polemics, Waldensians, heresy
Page 153 - 169 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s153
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Magistra magistrorum: Hildegard of Bingen as a Polemicist against False Teaching
The present paper explores the role that gendered concepts of teaching, preaching, and prophecy played in the polemical writings of Hildegard of Bingen. As this type of discourse was an integral part of the prophetic persona, the analysis focuses on how it shaped itself in order to remain within the boundaries of orthodoxy, which forbade women to preach. Employing a prophetic persona was one of the few means through which women were able to produce texts that could tackle problems which affected the Church in its entirety, such as heresy. The concept of teaching, more precisely the sharp distinction between good and false teaching are essential for understanding not only how Hildegard viewed her mission, but also how this mission was supposed to be carried out within the limits accepted by the Latin Church. By inspecting the manner in which bad and false teaching were thematised in order to serve as a polemical instrument, one can glean how polemics were embedded in texts. A careful analysis of the source material thus needs to start from a theoretical discussion of sermon and preaching – as the texts analyzed here have traditionally been linked with both of these concepts. Scholars usually tend to overlook the ultimately performative function of preaching, yet this is what made the concept relevant in a social context.
Keywords: Gender, heresy, public communication, audiences, preaching, teaching, prophecy
Page 170 - 189 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no7_2018s170
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Edition:
978-3-7001-8360-0, eJournal, PDF, limited accessibility , 01.07.2018
Pages:
189 Pages
Language:
English
DOI (Link to Online Edition):