This article examines how a horoscope can serve as primary source evidence for understanding local calendar practice in late fifteenth-century England. It focuses on a horoscope elected by Richard Fitzjames (d. 1522), Warden of Merton College, Oxford (1483–1507), and chaplain to Henry VII, for the laying of the foundation stone of his building programme. The horoscope, originally part of a stained-glass programme in the Warden’s Lodgings, was destroyed in 1693 but copied down in 1601 by John Chamber. Some scholars have questioned the horoscope’s accuracy, claiming that this was the result of the incompetence of the astrologer. While a prima facie case exists for such a claim, a deeper examination of the horoscope provides evidence which contributes to an understanding of medieval dating methods in fifteenth-century England.
Beginning with the forced conversion of the Muslim populations of Spain (‘Moriscos’) in the early sixteenth century, a policy problem emerged around a sense that the beliefs and religious practices of these new converts were now illegible and possibly heritable across generations. For a state set on increasing ethnic and religious homogeneity, that flood of ‘new Christians’ troublingly muddied the waters, impeding distinctions of religious identities and requiring entirely new legal and bureaucratic frameworks to govern these new sectors of society. In 1566, Philip II (1556–1598) and his ministers sought to eliminate interior heterodox belief by prohibiting exterior manifestations of cultural and linguistic diversity through a pragmática that outlawed a broad range of Morisco cultural practices — including dress and female veiling, zambras, bathing, and the use of Arabic naming conventions, but, most of all, the prohibition of spoken or written Arabic in Granada. By prohibiting the use of spoken Arabic, the decree was designed to grapple with and eliminate language as a marker of heritable cultural difference in all its contexts. Núñez Muley, an elder Morisco leader, issued a rebuttal of these policies in a petition known as the ‘Memorial’. This essay shows how a major element of Núñez Muley’s language-focused argument decouples language from definitions of alterity and maps language onto a vector of naturalization, linguistic and embodied.
This essay examines the use of stories of sexual violence in two Cistercian works, Baldwin of Forde’s sermons, and a treatise on self-formation often attributed to Stephen of Sawley. The Cistercians had to form adult converts who came from a culture of elite masculinity, whether the aristocracy or schools. These works use imaginative engagement with biblical narratives to subvert these secular ideals, reinterpreting them as a state of weakness and violation, in contrast to the monastery’s secure and loving community. Their imaginative moralizing reinterpretations are distinct from not only allegorical readings but also from their literal warning to female religious.
In early medieval Northumbria, the monastery of Whitby emerged as an important centre of religious, cultural, and political influence under the leadership of its abbesses. Whitby was a double monastery governed by women of high status, notably Hild and her successor Ælfflæd, both of whom were closely connected to the secular aristocracy. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of Ælfflæd’s Latin letter to the continental abbess Adela, one of the few texts authored by a woman to come down to us from early medieval England. Focussing on the letter’s linguistic features, biblical and patristic references, and formulaic structure, the study offers a comprehensive analysis of Ælfflæd’s compositional technique. The article situates her letter within the broader context of Whitby’s intellectual legacy and demonstrates the significance of female monastic leadership in shaping early medieval Christian networks and literary culture.
A fifteenth-century medical-magical compendium replete with recipes for women’s beautification and gynecological concerns, the Sefer ‘ ahavat nashim ( Book of Women ’ s Love ) has most often been studied within the scholarship on medieval Hebrew medicine. Yet, it is a manuscript that evades easy categorization, especially given the frequent employment of Hebrew-Aljamiado — ‘Spanish’ Romance words written in Hebrew characters — throughout the text. In this chapter, I consider the Sefer ‘ ahavat nashim as a linguistic contact zone through an emphasis on and exploration of its aljamiado usage. A majority of the Spanish loanwords included in the compendium are food-related, appearing as ingredients and preparation techniques. The chapter thus gathers an annotated list of the Hebrew-Aljamiado words that appear in the manuscript and analyzes these food-related terms for what they indicate about the lived culinary practices of the text’s author and his communal context. By focusing on its linguistic and culinary aspects, I contend that the Sefer ‘ahavat nashim demonstrates the material embodiment of language and cultural contact that shaped the foodways, as much as the medicine and magic, of the premodern Iberian Jewish community.
In this chapter I analyse how the Hebrew phase from the Torah ‘ehyeh ašer ehyeh’ and its variations is used in a sixteenth-century Arabic-Aljamiado Morisco grimoire, the Dichos de libros maravillosos , which alternates between Ibero-Romance or Spanish and Arabic with no warning and often within the same sentence, all represented in Arabic script. This phrase or its variations are used as part of the instructions or the protective talismans themselves — many of which suggest a collegiality among the monotheistic believers and require the assistance of or protection from jinn. I argue that the repeated presence of this phrase in this manuscript exclusively for Moriscos, a group for the most part already fluid in their religious identity and practice, highlights further fluidity among the three major Abrahamic traditions for this type of culturally fluid Moriscos. While one religion was always prioritized — and indeed many Moriscos strived to remain faithful Muslims despite their outward conversion — they were still all ‘siblings’ with followers who can be considered the children of God. The presence of this Hebrew phrase helps erase divisions among believers through these shared God-sanctioned magical practices as this Morisco magic text draws indiscriminately from the three major Abrahamic religions for protection.
This study focuses on the discussion that took place in 1636 between Alexandre Ros, under the pseudonym of Juan Gómez Adrín, and Diego Cisteller regarding which language should be used in liturgical preaching in the Archdiocese of Tarragona (Catalonia). Adrín supported preaching in Spanish whereas Cisteller defended the use of Catalan. I place this discussion in the context of the ‘Theory of the Primitive Castilian’, which argued that Spanish was one of the seventy-two Babelian languages and that Catalan was simply a deformation of Spanish. I argue that the best opposition to this linguistic fusion of Spanish and Catalan appears in the interpretation of the preaching of Saint Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), since he was supposed to have preached exclusively in Catalan everywhere he visited. Yet in Saint Vincent Ferrer’s festivities we find at least one example of ‘bivalency’ by which Catalan and Spanish are considered to be the same language. While this bivalency could have supported the fusion of the two languages and the ‘Theory of the Primitive Castilian’, it could have also questioned the superiority and even the objective existence of Spanish.
Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St Albans, drew the elephant which was presented to King Henry III, and kept at the Tower of London from 1255 to 1257. Matthew also wrote short passages of text, to accompany these drawings. One of these texts is printed here for the first time, showing how Matthew continued to repeat the myths about elephants copied from bestiaries, while stressing that he had drawn one from life. There are several references to the elephant in contemporary chronicles and government records. These references provide the few definite facts about the elephant’s arrival in England and brief life at the Tower, as distinct from the speculation found in popular works and online.
Customarily, Middle English scholars search for texts to discuss through either manuscript catalogues or their derivatives, bibliographical indexes. However, both procedures are only approximative; as M. R. James pointed out a century ago, one should never trust that a cataloguer has told you everything. Moreover, unique Middle English texts routinely occur in MSS many scholars think do not require examination, e.g. those written in Latin or copied in the early modern period. This essay collects a number of examples from Oxford libraries, at least one of which challenges conventional literary history accounts of Middle English literature.
Around the turn of the seventeenth century, Aragonese Moriscos (Muslims who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century) versified several foundational Aljamiado texts ( romance -language texts written with the Arabic script). Many of these poetic adaptations were copied in Latin-script manuscripts, as exemplified by Muhammad Rabadán’s Libro de las luces (1603). This chapter brings critical attention to another Latin-script poem copied around 1603, La degüella de Ibrahim (Barcelona, BC, MS 1574, fols 1 r –11 v ). I argue that the poem’s emphasis on aurality enhances listeners’ embodied connection to revered prophetic figures, rendering Abraham and Ishmael spiritual paradigms at a time when controversies surrounding the evangelization of Morisco children and Abrahamic lineages had come to a fore. Multilingual sounds in La degüella de Ibrahim reveal the overlooked possibilities of Moriscos’ poetic practices, ones that directly contested authorities’ attempts to eradicate religious and cultural identities on the eve of the expulsion.
The Conflict of Wit and Will is an alliterative psychomachia transmitted in fragments. A violent and moralizing allegorical narrative recorded on six strips of parchment used to repair a sixteenth-century printed book, the poem is a disturbing and delightful revenant. A unique blend of romance and social satire, Wit and Will attests to a literary groove or poetic microclimate from which nothing else has survived. This essay supplements the first and only edition, by Bruce Dickins (1937), with comments on the poem’s text, metre, date, style, and place in English literary history. The whole alliterative tradition looks different if one emphasizes the middle of the fourteenth century rather than, as is conventional, the end of the century, and this is one good reason to care about Wit and Will . Another is that it has considerable interest as a poem.
This chapter examines two sixteenth-century Aljamiado documents that re-tell the story of the conversion to Islam of Kaʿab al-Aḥbar, a spiritual advisor to Muhammad and an influential member of the early Islamic community. The two accounts preserved in RAH 11/9393 and BNE 5390 seemingly reveal a Morisco literary strategy which attempted to highlight the similarities between Islam and the Christianity of the Iberian authorities while casting Judaism in a negative light. These works could be read as attempts to modify ancient stories in order to help create a theological argument for the coexistence of Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula.
In 1584, a boy faced heresy charges for teaching a sexualised version of a Catholic prayer in Tagalog to his stepmother’s Bisaya-speaking slaves. His trial, among the first cases from the Philippines to be reported to the Inquisition in Mexico, reveals the anxieties of the residents of Spanish Manila over the multilingual spaces they inhabited. Interweaving this story in a history of language contact between Spanish and various Philippine languages, I examine translation in this essay as a tool for policing linguistic diversity. I first describe how precolonial and pericolonial multilingualisms interacted with Spanish as a politically hegemonic yet demographically restricted language. I then analyse translation norms from the period, relating them to a productive hysteria over heterodoxy that shaped language usage in an emerging Hispano-Asian world around the Pacific.
This article investigates how Julian of Norwich deployed not only the discourses but also possibly direct or indirect experience of pregnancy and childbirth in order to understand and represent the kenotic self-sacrifice of Christ’s incarnation, passion, and death. Julian’s processing of her revelations and her text is also seen as akin to a birthing process. This essay additionally sheds new light not only on the role of Mary as mother of Christ and spiritual mother of humanity, but also on Christ Himself as mother.
