The letter written by Archbishop Manasses I of Reims (c. 1069-1080) to papal legate Hugh of Die in early 1080, first published by Jean Mabillon in 1687 and traditionally known as the Apologia, offers a vigorous defense of archiepiscopal prerogative against legatine authority during the pontificate of Gregory VII. Long thought to be the original letter sent to Hugh, the Mabillon text is, in fact, a later, expanded recension of the archbishop's letter created to support resistance to Gregory VII's reform agenda. The original, shorter version of Manasses's letter survives uniquely in a little-studied, sixteenth-century copy at Wolfenb & uuml;ttel. The expanded recension was likely compiled as part of a legal dossier assembled to defend ecclesiastical traditions and clerical privileges, including marriage, in the church province of Reims. Through a textual analysis and comparison of the versions of Manasses's letter, what once was seen as a singular protest emerges as a strategic text within a broader regional pushback against Rome and reveals how local clerical networks harnessed legal tools to challenge papal reform. The history of the letter's preservation and reproduction, from Mabillon to modern editors, in turn demonstrates the necessity of querying the manuscript and printed evidence of sources from the eleventh-century reform period to better understand how they were deployed and how modern editorial choices have shaped our reception, and hence our assumptions, about the texts.
This article explores medieval Jewish and Christian interpretations of an enigmatic biblical commandment-the mandate to incinerate a red heifer to produce waters of expiation (Num. 19)-as a case study to examine interreligious dialogue in medieval exegesis. It features a critical edition and translation of one such reading by the fourteenth-century Italian poet and intellectual, Immanuel of Rome. Immanuel's commentary is contextualized both in his own oeuvre as well as in the broader field of contemporary Jewish thought. The article also examines Immanuel's red heifer exegesis as a unique example of a biblical passage glossed differently in two of the author's commentaries, which sheds new light on his exegetical methodology. As a biblical precept no longer observed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the red heifer serves as a useful tool to demonstrate the approaches of Jewish scholars who insisted on the integrity of the biblical commandments but grappled to rationalize an especially cryptic ceremony. On the other hand, it also exhibits various exegetical modalities adopted by Christian glossators who struggled to discern the precept's literal meaning in light of a predominant tradition of allegorical interpretation. When contextualized within the environment of medieval Jews, Christian scholastics, and the mendicant orders, readings of the red heifer rite highlight the interchange of approaches that transcended religious and even temporal boundaries. The article concludes by demonstrating the impact of mendicant vernacular preaching on Jews of the Italian peninsula, focusing on the red heifer interpretation as an example of such dialogue.
The study of late antique and early medieval urban religion in the Iberian Peninsula suffers from a dearth of datable and localizable source material. Martyr passions abound, as do liturgical texts, but these almost always survive only in later manuscripts, filtered through monastic libraries and scriptoria. How far these copies preserve the genuine texts performed in earlier cult remains an open question. This article intervenes in this discussion by focusing on a somewhat unusual cult known as the 'Innumerable' or 'Eighteen' martyrs of Zaragoza. The cult's Passion text survives in two variant redactions. One originates from the sixth-century city of Zaragoza, the cult's center, while the other derives from the Carolingian monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Pr & eacute;s in ninth-century Paris. These divergent lines of transmission make possible a comparative study that both elucidates the process of 'monasticization' that the Passion underwent in Carolingian hands and vindicates the relative conservatism of the Iberian lines of transmission. Indeed, the Iberian manuscripts retain a remarkable amount of distinctly local material, thereby presenting a rich case study in the civic and oral sensibilities of martyr passions. This article places the Passion back in its civic context, amidst the complex and fractious religious life of Visigothic Zaragoza, complementing the burgeoning interest in communal liturgical and ceremonial life evident among historical liturgists and musicologists. More broadly, it shows that Iberian passions are indispensable texts for historians of urban religious expression and civic Christianity in the Visigothic period.
This paper seeks to examine various aspects of Templar general chapters and also to draw some comparisons with the general chapters of other orders. Origins, frequency, length, and location are discussed, together with the size and composition of the chapter. The functions of chapters, including legislation, appointments to leading offices, alienation of property, and justice, are considered. The question of capitular seals is also investigated. For many topics the surviving evidence is limited, but some claims that have been made about Templar general chapters are challenged. The evidence about alleged early chapters is not convincing. It seems that chapters were expected to be held annually and not at intervals of five years. There is evidence to show that chapters were occasionally held in western Europe as well as at the Order's headquarters and other places in the East. Lastly, the assertion that Hospitaller general chapters were more representative than those of the Temple is questioned.
This study both reveals and resolves a basic problem elided by the historiography of early kabbalah. The problem is that scholarship has followed obsolete research from the 1940s by putting a single fragmentary text to a task that it is unfit to perform. More than eighty years ago, Gershom Scholem adduced a short fragment copied in sixteenth-century Italy to show that the kabbalists' signature doctrine of divine androgyny goes all the way back to the earliest medieval authority to whom kabbalistic knowledge is traditionally ascribed, namely, the Proven & ccedil;al sage Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posqui & egrave;res (the Rabad, per his acronym). After reviewing the contents of the fragment and exposing its paratextual relationship to the Rabad's Ba'ale ha-nefesh, this study provides ample grounds for dismissing the fragment's ascription to the Rabad, and, more generally, for rejecting the attribution of any kabbalistic writing to this foundational figure. The study then proceeds to collate the fragment with an early-fourteenth-century family of texts associated with Shem Tov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon-texts expounding the wisdom of Nahmanides-to establish the late provenance of a fragment, thought heretofore to date to twelfth-century France, espousing a doctrine that scholars believed had shaped the tradition from the beginning. The conclusion, which discusses the ramifications of removing the (Pseudo-)Rabad fragment from the archive of early kabbalah, is followed by an appendix containing a suite of paleographic evidence supporting the arguments advanced in the study.
Most scholars tend to focus on the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Anselm of Aosta's Proslogion and they often consider any meditative features to be of little importance. I will argue that reading the Proslogion as a meditative text can be justified based on the manuscript evidence and its textual history. A careful examination of the manuscript witnesses to this text reveals at least four versions, which enabled different readings of the text. I will argue that one version was a more meditative reading, namely, the first version of the Proslogion. That focus is also attested by the type of texts that travelled with this version from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Having established the validity of such a reading, I will bring to the surface the features of the Proslogion that make it a meditative text. Of the many possible outcomes focusing on the meditative features of the Proslogion, this essay will explore only one here: the fool of chapter two emerges not as some heretic, pagan, or proto-atheist, with whom Anselm has engaged in intellectual combat. Instead, in the mimetic tradition of meditative texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the fool is Anselm himself and, by extension, the reader.
This article presents three new discoveries of Carolingian epistolae formatae from Provence and Catalonia, which update recent editions of the texts in question and offer clues about their historical context and purpose.
In this paper, I examine the Oratio habita in enarratione Lucii Apuleii, the written version of a speech pronounced by the Bolognese master Filippo Beroaldo the Elder. An inaugural speech for his commentary on Apuleius's Golden Ass, this text was printed in November 1500 and has, until now, remained unedited and untranslated. In the introduction, I argue that Beroaldo, by imitating Aulus Gellius in his speech, reproduces a distinctive trait of Apuleius, the embodiment of one's model, thus reducing the distance that separates him from Apuleius. This technique, I contend, reflects a very close relationship with the text and its author (Apuleius), who is not only read and commented on but also 'lived' and embodied. In the commentary, I highlight the complex structure of Beroaldo's speech, analyzing the rich intertextual relationship that he entertains with the ancient authors.
Couched within a question about the culpability or innocence of a rape victim in a dramatic case in Gratian's Decretum lies a quotation attributed to Saint Lucy. This early Christian martyr from Syracuse enjoyed increasing popularity and devotion in northern Italy and beyond by the twelfth century. Gratian appeals to her story and to her own statement as his first authority within this section of his famous textbook, Decretum C.32 q.5, in order to argue that a woman's chastity or modesty (pudicitia) cannot be tarnished or taken away through physical force. If she does not consent to the act, she is not guilty and her purity remains. This note discusses the story about Lucy, explains the liturgical centrality of narratives like it, and, with an examination of several twelfth-century manuscripts, tracks down the source (or likely source type) for the dialogue Gratian quotes. In doing so, it highlights a hitherto underappreciated source for Gratian's Decretum, namely, hagiography.
In his Epitaphios for the emperor Julian, composed in Antioch at some point between 365 and 368, Libanius describes an embezzlement trial that was held most likely in 359, in which Julian ruled against the accused, defying the wishes of Constantius II's praetorian prefect, Florentius. Libanius puzzlingly suggests that the trial prompted Julian's campaign to rebuild fortresses in Batavia and to restore shipments of British grain blockaded by barbarian forces. Scholars have yet to explain the causal and chronological relationship between these events. This article suggests that Libanius's narrative is a propagandistic representation of several distinct stages of the taxation dispute Julian fought with Florentius. With the aid of recent advances in our archaeological understanding of agricultural practices in Britain and on the lower Rhine, the article argues that in response to this dispute, Julian's Batavian campaign was intended to disrupt longstanding access by barbarians on the lower Rhine to the later Empire's military supply mechanisms.
The figure of Saint Gallus, ostensibly the eponymous founder of Saint-Gallen, was the subject of much hagiographical treatment in the late Merovingian and early Carolingian periods. No fewer than four hagiographical texts were produced by individuals ensconced in communities that commemorated him. This process, called recently reecriture, permitted authors in iteration to employ the same basic narrative to a variety of ends. The anonymous Vita vetustissima (before 771), Wetti's Vita Galli (before 824), Wahalfrid's Vita Galli (833/34), and the anonymous Vita metrica Galli (between 833/34 and 837) each preserved accounts of Gallus' career and posthumous events attributed to his intercession. Reading in parallel four episodes shared between these four texts allows us to see the various ways authors chose to frame their subject and allows us to imagine the authorial ambition of their composers. This chain of custody for the Gallus materials responded to concerns about institutional integrity, facilities, and ecclesiology by occasioning new compositions at key moments, such as moments of investment, license, and donation. It also reveals the generic conventions used by its authors to achieve their authorial ambition. The Vita vetustissima treats Gallus as a conventional late antique holy man; Wetti's text was intended for lectionary purposes; Walahfrid's text was encyclopedic in nature; and the Vita metrica, an 'institutional Aeneid,' advances Gallus as a holy hero suited to secular letters. Principally, Abbot Gozbert (r. 816-37) stewarded this process as an exercise in community-building.
This note presents a previously unedited ninth-century witness of a Carolingian rite of the cold-water ordeal from Septimania and provides an examination of its language and provenance.
In the late eleventh century, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1040-d. after 1099) composed the most extensive collection of hagiographical writings known to have been assembled for a community of religious women in medieval England. At the behest of Abbess AE lfgifu (ca. 1037-ca. 1114) of Barking Abbey, he definitely wrote the following texts to honor the community's three principal saints: a uita of its founder and first abbess, AE thelburh (d. after 686); Matins lessons for her immediate successor, Hildelith (d. after 716); a uita and an account of the first translation of their later tenth-century successor Wulfhild (d. after 996); Matins lessons and a longer account of the three abbess-saints' translation on Laetare Sunday, 7 March 1092; and a report of a vision AE lfgifu received seven years after the event. This article makes the case for Goscelin's authorship of the Matins lessons for Sts. AE thelburh and Wulfhild as well, and for their preservation in London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho A XII (Part 6). Paleographical analysis of these lessons further indicates that the scribe responsible for copying them also copied the lives of Sts. AE thelburh and Wulfhild in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 176 (E.5.28), a late eleventh-century book of Barking origin. This hand exhibits features peculiar to scribes trained in northeastern France or the Low Countries, raising the possibility that Goscelin made these copies himself. But even if he did not make them, the appearance of the same hand in texts related to Barking's abbess-saints suggests that this scribe's work in Otho A XII (Part 6) should be located at Barking, too, thus increasing the total number of books the community once owned to twenty-two and further proving one of the instrumental roles that religious women played during the Middle Ages to orchestrate their communities' liturgies: commissioning writers and scribes to compose saints' lives, Matins lessons, and other texts and music to celebrate their principal feast days with due solemnity and distinctiveness.
Using the poems of John Scottus Eriugena as a case study, the author aims to show that glossaries that preserve the lemmata and glosses of a text in the same order as that of a codex unicus of the work can be used to construct the common exemplar from which the entries of the glossary and the text of the codex unicus derive. Thus, at least for Medieval Latin texts, glosses can be an essential component of the recensio codicum. The author argues further that where a dating order of poems can be established (as in the case under consideration), such constitutes evidence of editorial management on the part of the author or an associate.
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) collected his library at different times and in different ways depending on his studies, purposes, and available sources. The two surviving inventories of his library, both compiled after his untimely death at the age of 31, reveal significant gaps in the Aristotelian corpus. Despite this, the volumes that still remain and how much we can hypothesize once belonged to him show that he managed in a short time to amass the largest collection of Aristotle's works of his time, with texts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and even Arabic. To the medieval versions, he also added the humanistic ones.
The Visio Taionis narrates the miraculous discovery in Rome made by the seventh-century Bishop Taius of Zaragoza of Gregory the Great's Moralia in Iob, which according to the story, could not be found in the Visigothic kingdom. This story originated as a chapter of the eighth-century Chronicle of 754 and circulated as the preface of several manuscripts of Gregory's Moralia. The legend underwent a rewriting in the twelfth century, which was published in 1705 with the title De inuentione librorum Moralium and reprinted in PL 75, cols. 507-10. An examination of the manuscript tradition reveals, however, that at least six different redactions of this story were made in the twelfth century and that the text reproduced in the PL is, in fact, a conflation of two of them made at the end of the fifteenth century. This article presents a catalogue of the more than fifty surviving witnesses to this story, a critical edition of the six redactions, and a study which locates their place of origin at Clairvaux or some other Cistercian abbey in northern France.
From its beginnings in the eleventh century through its decline in the early modern period, the movement of Christian holy war known as the crusades was sustained by the enthusiasm and willing participation of the European military aristocracy. Despite this, historians have yet to explain the continuing value of crusading and the maintenance of the crusading frontier for the aristocracy. This article argues for a fundamental re-evaluation of the nature of crusading, as it was perceived and experienced by European elites. Rather than large-scale military expeditions with global geo-political objectives, smaller more frequent tours of the frontier world constituted the normative crusading experience for aristocrats. These noble sojourns allowed for the acquisition of cultural capital through controlled and staged performances and interaction with the elites, landscape, and fauna of the crusading East. The study of these independent crusading expeditions requires engagement with an altogether different body of source material than usually is consulted in crusade historiography and a different set of questions to be asked of these sources, which in turn leads us to consider a different range of behavior, including tournament-going, hunting, and courtly life, as constituting the typical aristocratic crusading experience. It was through these activities that visiting aristocrats acquired the precious cultural capital that defined their social status in a period of hardening class distinctions. While aristocracy maintained crusading, crusading maintained distinction, and hence the entire European regime of lordship itself.
As self-appointed guardians of light who performed many of their activities between sunset and sunrise, medieval monks and nuns had a special relationship with fire, light, and darkness. While medieval monastic authors wrote copiously about light, however, modern scholars have shown comparatively little interest in this topic. Using the concept of lightscape, this essay recreates the unique Latin monastic culture of light of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, considering how religious communities used natural and artificial light as well as darkness to reinforce spiritual lessons, heighten the sensory experience of liturgical life, and signal distinctions between orders in a reform-minded age. Evidence from material culture as well as several textual genres demonstrates that monastic uses of candles, oil lamps, and lanterns reflected the commitment to a strictly regulated life which foregrounded bonds of community and encouraged constant spiritual and physical vigilance. Contemporary understandings of fire and light as heavenly matter also conditioned religious to see everyday light-sources as ready conduits for the miraculous, as well as technologies by which earthly spaces could be made to approximate heavenly ones.
Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon was the most widely read Latin chronicle of late medieval England. It (and its later continuations) influenced the production of several major chronicles that are frequently employed by scholars of the period, such as the Eulogium historiarum, Henry Knighton's Chronicle, John of Reading's Chronicle, John of Tynemouth's Historia aurea, and Thomas Walsingham's Chronica maiora. The continuations to 1377 are particularly valuable for providing contemporary narratives on the latter years of Edward III's reign, a period which saw hardly any independent historical narrative. Despite this, knowledge of the Polychronicon and its continuations has remained rather opaque and spotty. This article provides an assessment of the texts and manuscripts of the Polychronicon and its continuations to 1377 and beyond and serves as a starting point for further study and the production of much-needed critical editions. It lays out clear details on the development of these texts, including dates of composition and textual relationships. It newly identifies three previously unknown continuations, Crowland (for 1339), Suffolk (1340-73), and Abingdon (1380-1400), and offers information on several little-known continuations past 1377. This article also corrects many errors in previously available knowledge on these texts. It concludes with a detailed list of 188 manuscripts, adding to and correcting the 162 manuscripts scattered across previous works in varying degrees of detail.
The age of Humanism is characterized not only by a new, philological approach to the Latin and Greek classics, but also by the renewed attention paid to the Bible. Among the many intellectuals who meditated upon biblical texts and used them as a foundation for their actions was Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), a Camaldulensian monk and humanist. Analysis of the sources quoted in one of his letters, which he addressed to his Order in the name of Pope Eugenius IV shortly after being promoted to the office of Abbot General, will show how Traversari, in exhorting the monks to lead an authentic monastic life, founded his work not only on patristic literature, but also on the use of the scriptures. He left medieval allegory aside, instead being careful to draw a moral example for his religious order from the words of the Bible.
