Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII contains more references to musical instrumentation than any other text in the Shakespearean corpus. Singers and musicians played a prominent though unnoticed role in the play's exploration of England's religious past and present. This essay argues that Henry VIII uses musical juxtaposition to compare the ecumenical potential in domestic and public forms of devotion. Music flourishes around the play's two queens: Anne Bullen's coronation with choirs singing Te Deum Laudamus immediately precedes Katherine of Aragon's tuneful, masque-like vision of her own coronation in heaven. As Katherine's private musicians play her a solemn deathbed “knell” blending Catholic and Protestant characteristics, they undercut the hegemonic nationalism of Anne's liturgical hymn. The play's meditation on devotion deepens with new evidence, first presented in this essay, that the composer Robert Johnson contributed to its music, including a devotional consort song that served as Katherine's “knell.”
Circulating in Castile during the fifteenth century, the poem Coplas del perro de Alva describes its protagonist, a dog, as a faithful Christian and guardian of the town of Alba de Tormes. According to the poem, the dog vigilantly safeguards the town so that neither Jew nor converso (Jewish convert) can enter. This article examines how the poem contributes to a larger debate taking place in the Iberian Peninsula on how to identify, classify, and locate the different groups — Christians, Jews, and conversos — inhabiting the Kingdom of Castile, while exemplifying the anxiety that accompanied the promulgation of the Statutes of Purity of Blood (1449). Furthermore, in line with recent scholarship in animal studies, the article analyzes how the dog, as a nonhuman protagonist, can illuminate the story's historical context by exposing the racial and political tensions and violent intolerance against Jews and conversos in Castile during this period.
This article examines the forms and practices of mediation employed by Hartmann von Aue in his version of the Arthurian romance Iwein. By depicting and enacting both contemporary media forms and processes of mediation, this article argues, Hartmann's text constantly foregrounds the technologies and processes of mediation through which its story reaches its public. Drawing on theories of medieval mediation put forward by Christian Kiening, this article analyzes Iwein as an example of engagement with concerns of mediation centuries before the establishment of explicit media discourses. The analysis targets depicted scenes of literary activity — reading, composing, and storytelling — that are laden with inherent cultural and religious iconography and are manipulated to produce moments that both reflect on and encourage processes of mediation in the discursive and narrative levels of the romance. This focus reveals how medieval textuality relied on and exploited a diverse landscape of existing medial forms and practices.
This article takes a new approach to the Pèlerinage allegories and later Latin poetry of the fourteenth-century Cistercian monk Guillaume de Deguileville. It argues that diagrams and “diagrammatic thinking” undergird his entire poetic oeuvre. The article situates Deguileville in a long medieval tradition of using diagrams as instruments for scientific and theological education. Deguileville understands diagrams not only as pedagogical tools, but as a way of structuring cognition and spiritual thought. Relying on ideas of similitude and analogy, these visual signs help his audience to process complex doctrines such as the Trinity. Deguileville's diagrams operate as aids to spiritual contemplation, in some cases bypassing ordinary modes of perception to offer insight into the divine. Ultimately, Deguileville's writings provide evidence of the rich complexity of medieval diagrams, which could function as cognitive prompts as well as deeply meditative and even sacramental images.
This article addresses a curious phenomenon: the refraction, or back-translation, of Latin texts through the vernacular back into Latin. It focuses on three distinct refractions of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (ca. 800) via Benedeit's Old French Voyage de Saint Brendan (ca. 1118). Historically dismissed as devoid of interest and derivative, the Latin translations of Benedeit's poem, copied in France, Wales, and Portugal, offer a particularly rich record of the changing perceptions, positions, and abilities of Latin with regard to French from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. In Goliardic verse, Latin breaks with classical tradition and renovates its daring poetic abilities. In Cistercian houses, domestic Latin offers an open door to monastic readers and listeners. Prismatic translations in the Brendan tradition complicate the easy story of an inert and prestigious Latin, instead emphasizing its nimble response to the desires of its users.
