medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 12/2020

This paper explores the role of competition between masters and their communities in shaping the dynamism of theological debate in twelfth-century Europe. Whereas scholastic debate in the thirteenth century was heavily influenced by the structures and curriculum of the University of Paris, this was not the case in the twelfth century. While there were celebrated confrontations between individual monks and schoolmen (such as St Anselm against Roscelin of Compiègne, and Bernard of Clairvaux against Peter Abelard), it is inadequate to interpret these episodes in terms of simple opposition between monastic and scholastic theological traditions. Rather, we see the evolution of a range of educational communities, of monks, of regular canons, and of secular clergy, each with their own interpretation of Christian teaching, and with their own attitudes to the use of reason and the learning of classical antiquity. After 1150, there was an increasing tendency to professionalization in the teaching of theology, epitomized by the growing influence of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, but there was no consensus about the extent to which it should also engage in philosophical reflection. There was also competition between the cathedral school at Notre-Dame and the canons of Saint-Victor, who preferred to emphasize the role of experience in the spiritual life. The case of Richard of Saint-Victor’s writing on the Trinity shows how he sought to combine an experiential dimension to religious insight, with presentation of Christian teaching in terms of reason, rather like St Anselm, rather than through debating patristic authority, as followed by disciples of Peter Lombard. The label of scholasticism should not conceal the enduring diversity of approaches adopted by different communities.

Schlagworte: twelfth century, Parisian schools, monasticism, canons regular, theology, Exegesis, Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris

My early work on scholasticism initially focused on the Tibetan tradition, and later on scholasticism as a comparative category. This scholarship was based almost exclusively on the doctrinal writings of scholastics. While valuable in starting a conversation, in the intervening years I have realized that a more diachronic perspective that emphasizes the social and institutional aspects of scholastic communities is needed. This paper considers three moments in the history of Indian (and to a lesser extent Tibetan) monastic communities of learning: when they first came into being, when they were flourishing, and when they started to die out. Stability, writing, and a commitment to confronting rivals, I argue, are conditions without which Buddhist scholastic communities would not have emerged in India. Although much could be said about the character of these communities during their halcyon days, I focus on three practices that are important to scholastic identity in India and Tibet: debate, commentary, and prayer. Finally, I consider some of the internal challenges and external threats that these communities faced in their twilight.

Schlagworte: scholasticism, India, Tibet, stability, writing, literacy, orality, Argumentation, debate, commentary, prayer, Ritual, apophaticism, persecution, book burning

The eleventh to thirteenth centuries in Tibet witnessed the development of religious schools based on the »New Transmissions« (gsar ’gyur) of Buddhist Tantras or the »Later Spread« (phyi dar) of Buddhism, in contrast to the »Early Transmissions« (snga ’gyur) of Tibetan Imperial times (seventh to ninth centuries CE). This period saw the beginnings of the system in which Buddhist monasteries became seats of religious and politico-economic authority throughout communities in Tibet. At the same time, in this culturally creative environment, followers of the »Ancient Transmissions« began to codify their textual heritage, resulting in the subsequent development of a rNying ma school, based especially on: i. the practice of the Inner Tantras (mahāyoga, anuyoga, atiyoga) and the Eight Sacred Word (bka’ brgyad) tantric deity cycles; ii. the related textual corpus of scriptures known as the »Ancient Tantra Collection« (rnying ma rgyud ’bum); iii. popular accounts of and rituals connected with the early tantric masters and their spiritual and magical feats, and especially the cult of the tantric guru and »second Buddha«, Padmasambhava, together with his key disciples; iv. the traditions of revelation, in which revealers identified as rebirths of the tradition’s cultural heroes continue to augment the textual heritage in each generation. Myang ral Nyi ma ’od zer was seminal to this development: himself a tantric revealer recognised as a rebirth of the emperor Khri srong lde’u btsan, he was responsible for a multi-volume revealed collection on the Eight Sacred Word deities, the Eightfold Sacred Word, Embodying the Sugatas (bka’ brgyad bde gshegs ’dus pa); was central to the lineage of the transmitted texts (bka’ ma) on the same deities; and produced the first full hagiography of Padmasambhava, while his immediate successors began the work of collecting the scriptures for the »Ancient Tantra Collection«, based on organising principles established in his work. This article probes how we should approach authority and authorship in this case. How far and in what sense should we consider Myang ral an »author« of the texts he revealed and why were the new claims to authority so compelling in this case? While Myang ral’s involvement with vision and ritual rather than logical argument or debate clearly distinguish him from mediaeval Tibetan scholastics – even those within his own tradition of Early Transmissions – yet his impressive work in compiling and systematising the heritage from his mentors would suggest that the contrast may not be as extreme as it would first appear.

Schlagworte: Tantric revelation, early rNying ma, Myang ral

At the basis of the medieval production of knowledge, dialectics seems to be one of the primary keys of thought. Medieval thinkers were trained to express and to represent the world according to the disputatio, which is a question of research and a form of academic exercise. They were trained to discuss and to challenge. We can distinguish two kinds of dialectics: an irenic one, ritualized dialectics, as Habermas has shown on the one hand, and a more polemical dialectics, as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, on the other. Our main aim is to establish that those dialectical techniques of disputatio or polemical treatises are tools to produce doctrines and thought. On the one hand, we analyze the typical scholarly disputationes produced in commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, within the Western university sphere. On the other, we focus on political and ecclesiological treatises in the time of the Great Schism, as a case study to understand the difference between irenic disputatio and polemical exchanges. The final thoughts in this article aim at contextualizing the self-awareness of the specialists of scholasticism within the saturation of polemics and the broadening of their audience through reaching a non-academic audience. The example of the well-known university theologian Jean Gerson is particularly relevant in the attempt to move beyond the world of the university.

Schlagworte: scholasticism, commentaries, Aristotle, debates, dialectics, disputatio, polemics, production of knowledge, Great Schism, Jean Gerson

Within Europe, there developed what has been described as a »medieval culture of disputation«.1 This description seems equally apt with regard to certain societies in Asia that had strong Buddhist scholarly traditions. A formalised practice of disputation is one of the many correspondences that exists, for instance, between the scholarly cultures of medieval Europe and Tibet. In Europe, various intellectual and social movements contributed to the eventual decline of scholasticism, the system to which disputation was central. But in Tibet, disputation still holds pride of place in a style of learning that is essentially medieval in origin. The existence of this »living tradition« and the availability of plentiful sources hailing from the medieval scholastic tradition may well be seen as major assets when it comes to understanding the earlier Tibetan practice. But confusion about sources, domains, and claims of continuity appear to have discouraged efforts in this direction. The current article is the first to consider Tibetan monastic disputation in historical terms. Through the clarification of boundaries, the identification of relevant historical sources, and by means of comparison with contemporary practice, it takes the first steps to understanding the evolution of disputation, specifically within institutional contexts.

Schlagworte: scholasticism, disputation, Tibet, Buddhism, monasteries, institutionalisation

This article is an experiment: it attempts to look at medieval Latin translation practices through the lenses of a modern sociological theory of narrative. It argues that topoi found in translation prefaces are key elements of narratives that explain why the act of translation is necessary at all. The article identifies three such narratives, and elaborates in particular on one of them, which describes translation with the help of bellic metaphors.

Schlagworte: Narrative , translation, topos, Latin, Conflict

The multilingualism of medieval England especially in the Middle English period, has for long been the subject of research in historical linguistics, literature, and medieval studies, to name but a few. It is particularly visible in the monolingual texts in the different medieval languages of literacy (Latin and Old English in the Old English period, and French, Latin and English in the Middle English period), where it has left traces in the lexicon and grammar of English. More recently, the numerous multilingual texts from medieval England have attracted increased attention, not least because they can be seen as written evidence for code-switching, a well-known discourse strategy in multilingual societies. Multilingual sermons are among the best-known text types showing this mixing of languages, and they are found from the Old English period onwards, though they are particularly well attested from the later Middle English period. The present paper will look at the main types of multilingual sermons from medieval England, both from the Old English and the Middle English periods. It will, however, go beyond this and place such sermons in the context of other medieval multilingual text types. Based on the analysis of a range of medieval multilingual texts, we will show that multilingual sermons, especially the so-called »macaronic sermons«, are not as unique as sometimes claimed in sermon studies. After a critical discussion of the traditional criteria for defining »macaronic« texts, we will argue that such texts can be better accounted for on the basis of functional classifications as provided by modern code-switching theories. Such an approach in no way reduces the special nature of »macaronic sermons«, but it firmly places them in the wider bilingual context of medieval England and the multilingual strategies regularly used by its speakers and writers in a variety of text types. The contextualisation of multilingual sermons in this wider context of written multilingual texts will hopefully lead to a better understanding of multilingual sermons from medieval England and possibly also those from other European countries.

Schlagworte: Multilingualism, language mixing, code-switching, medieval period, England, Latin, English, text-types, sermons, administrative texts, literature

The intense practice of preaching became a prominent feature of religious life in the Western Church during the thirteenth century and afterwards. The new orders of mendicant friars considered preaching as their main duty, and equipped the libraries of their convents with many tools for putting together sermons. At the same time, attending sermons and taking down notes which could be reused for delivering new sermons became a habit with theology students in Paris. Manuscripts written by these students for private use document this process in various states of composition. Bilingualism, either with the juxtaposition of French and Latin words or in the use of a Latinised French which could be easily transposed into the vernacular, does not reflect the oral performance. But these reportationes, which are a selection of what the preacher said, suggest that their authors paid particular attention to the challenge of integrating elements of biblical commentary into the culture of the laity: interpretations of biblical narratives, verses and proper nouns are prevalent and, reversing the process, we find an exploration of the rich resources of words which belong to common culture but also have a resonance in the field of religious experience.

Schlagworte: preaching, oral communication, reportationes, bilingualism, French, Bible, metaphors

This article examines the language of an important collection of sermons by Angelo da Porta Sole, predicator generalis of the Dominican Order and Bishop of Grosseto, who preached in Tuscany in the early fourteenth century. It is a very early case of the macaronic sermon, in the wider sense of the term (not to be confused with a very particular kind of late fifteenth-century Italian preaching). Adopting the scheme proposed by Siegfried Wenzel for English macaronic sermons, this article examines three ways in which Latin and the Umbrian vernacular are combined in Angelo da Porta Sole’s sermons, namely: the insertion of a vernacular word in a Latin sentence; the presence of vernacular glosses of Latin words and etymological doublets; extended and frequent switching from Latin to the vernacular and vice versa. The last typology, which constitutes the fully macaronic mode, is frequently employed in dramatic or narrative contexts, particularly in sermons on Good Friday and at Easter.

Schlagworte: medieval preaching, Dominicans, bilingual sermons, Latin sermons, Umbrian vernacular

This article discusses the phenomenon of bilingualism in medieval sermons by focusing on one of the most understudied areas of sermon studies – fourteenth-century Catalonia and Aragon. Specifically, I concentrate on Latin sermons, which remain largely underexplored, partly due to a certain historiographical bias that favours »national« languages over Latin. The main focus is on Dominican sermons from the Aragonia Province (which included Catalonia and Aragon). The main argument is that bilingualism in sermons was an editorial communicative strategy acquired and developed in an educational context, i.e. in how language was approached and learnt by bilingual users. To make my case, I first discuss the language training of the Dominicans from Aragon and briefly review some bilingual grammatical works in order to place the bilingualism of the sermons within a wider context of written (and spoken) multilingualism. Second, I address bilingualism and code-switching in sermons by analysing texts in which Latin is the matrix language, the most common type of sermon evidence preserved from this area. As in better studied areas, such as France, England, or Italy, the linguistic intermingling in fourteenth-century sermons from Catalonia covers all types of »macaronicity«, as categorised by Siegfried Wenzel. Thus, the paper will add to current debates that seek to understand medieval bilingualism (written and spoken) as a late medieval Europe-wide phenomenon by discussing hitherto unstudied and underexplored evidence in manuscripts that remains largely unknown to scholarship.

Schlagworte: bilingualism, code-switching, macaronic sermons, Catalonia, Dominican Order, Nicholas Eymerich, Guillelmus Simonis

Over the twenty-five years since the seminal publication of Siegfried Wenzel’s Macaronic Sermons in 1994, the application of modern code-switching theory to historical homilies has become habitual. Although many authors now make use of Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame concepts, the present study presents the advantages of Muysken’s approach, which is instead based on notions of grammatical government. The threefold typological model developed by Muysken turns out to be beneficial for the determination of difficult syntactic structures. Such difficulties include diamorphs, words which may belong to more than one language, and directionality, which denotes the language underlying the code-switching components. Computerised analysis is shown to be aided by adopting this theoretical typology model by Muysken. A sample syntactic analysis is tailored to constructions concerning subjects and objects. Using the threefold categorisation contributes to the understanding of the differences in dependency and linearity between Latin-Irish and Latin-English code-switching. Additional elements of late-medieval multilingual sermons in these two areas are indicative of other linguistic strategies within the spectrum of bilingualism which can complement or compete with code-switching. Convergence and variance are consequently characterised in several collections of insular sermons to achieve an innovative insight into the alternatives available to deal with ambiguity.

Schlagworte: code-switching, English, Irish, sermons, typology