This paper deals with the expression boni homines or boni viri in Burgundian sources from the ninth to the end of the thirteenth century. It focuses on the practical meaning of the expression. After discussing some general aspects of the sources, the paper analyzes the use of the expression in relation to the social roles performed by the individuals whom it described, and then examines the formulary use of said expression in the context of the transformation of legal and governmental practices in the duchy of Burgundy.
This article reconsiders the role of magnificence in late medieval political thinking, focusing on how the built environment was thought to evoke authority through its capacity to inspire admiration. The study traces the intellectual roots for these ideas back to scholastic commentaries of Aristotle’s Politics . Commentators such as Albert the Great and Giles of Rome expanded upon Aristotle’s insights, arguing that awe induced by magnificence could suspend the viewer in admiration, leading to reverence and support for political rule. In his De regimine principum , Giles applied these ideas on the protective role of magnificence specifically to princely residences. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mirrors for princes testify how widespread the notion became that a magnificent residence leads to authority. Through a close reading of Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis , and by examining manuscript circulation of Giles’s De regimine principum in Florence, this article further investigates how this discourse on magnificent architecture—initially formulated in and for courtly contexts—was absorbed into civic humanist settings such as fifteenth-century Florence, where magnificence was claimed to project collective power as the magnificence of the cityscape was thought to evoke admiration that sustains domination.
This article explores the intersection of Renaissance politics, rhetoric, and cartographic knowledge in the works of Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Niccolò Machiavelli. It first examines how Bruni and Poggio harness cartographic references in their panegyrics to reinforce a centralized, oligarchic vision of governance, and establish morally and politically justifiable hierarchies in society. The article then analyzes the various ways in which Machiavelli challenges the class-based ideologies upheld by earlier humanists. While scholars have traditionally examined these texts in isolation or have connected their spatial representations primarily to painting, this study approaches them through a shared interpretive framework, using the concept of “cartographic rhetoric,” a mode of discourse that draws on geography, cartographic thinking, and emerging visual strategies to either solidify a centralized ideology and the spatial vision it embodies, or to destabilize its legitimacy.
This paper examines the functions of the office of pristav in the medieval County of Zagreb, which was a part of the duchy of Slavonia and a wider Croatian historical area, in the transitional period of the thirteenth century. This was when literary culture started being introduced on a significant scale into a still largely oral society. The sources studied here indicate that pristav s were primarily employed as court officials in matters concerning landed property. These were very important matters, as property was in this period becoming a crucial social factor that determined one’s social standing. The pristav ’s task was to inspect boundaries, perform liveries of seisin, memorize court procedures, and guarantee the permanence of a party’s property rights. Parallels can be drawn between the situation in the County of Zagreb and the medieval Kingdom of Croatia farther to the south, and it is evident that in the latter the pristav s retained most of their early medieval capacities very late into the Middle Ages. In the area studied in this paper, their role was diminishing as legal matters were increasingly taken over by local assemblies of nobles, and as matters regarding landed estates became dependent on written records.
Andrea Mantegna’s depiction of the simian man has been perceived merely as one of the hybrid creatures that represent vices in his painting of the Roman goddess Minerva (Pallas Athena) expelling the vices from her garden. This hybrid image has no precedent in Romanesque sculpture, moralizing bestiaries, animal tales, or Gothic margins. The raised hand of the monkey with the palm exposed reveals what is known as a simian flexion crease or a single transverse palmar flexion crease characteristic of simians, but rarely found in humans. The depiction indicates that Mantegna painstakingly sketched the palm of an actual monkey in his effort to depict its authentic features, suggesting that his simian man was related to contemporary developments in the fields of physiognomy and comparative anatomy in Northern Italy and is a significant expression of “pre-Vesalian” empirical anatomy.
In 1084 at the Lotharingian abbey of Lobbes, the scribe Goderannus left a neatly composed and lengthy colophon in a large illuminated Bible. Scribal colophons have long been used to group and date manuscripts and are treasured for information they reveal about scribal practice. This article builds on the notion that colophons record what someone wished to be remembered and contends that colophons often serve a function. It thus examines the Lobbes Bible colophon as a record of a gift to a saint, and considers how it seeks to collapse past, present, and future, and bring closer the human and divine. Goderannus’s careful layout of the colophon and extensive citation of the date is unusual, as is his reference to the political strife of the day. These characteristics of the colophon draw on local interest in the measurement of time. At a moment of uncertainty at the abbey, the colophon looks to the future and invites contemplation of the echoes between past and present.
French libertine writer Charles Sorel was well versed in Italian scholarship and commented extensively on Italian writers in several treatises. But he is best known for his novel La Vraye Histoire comique de Francion , wherein he satirizes society, supports nonconformity, and challenges cultural conventions. Italy was a trove of inspiration, and Sorel was dissatisfied with certain literary trends. He exploits the popular works of Francesco Petrarch, Luigi Pulci, Ludovico Ariosto, and Giovanni Boccaccio to parody the courtly tradition, rebrand the epic, and expose human foibles. His novel is also set during the seventeenth century, when Italy was a focal point of upheavals, marked by the execution of Giordano Bruno and trials of Galileo Galilei. Sorel’s protagonist concludes his travels in Rome, the city of the Inquisition, where he is forced to reform his ways. This essay considers how Sorel’s appropriation of Italian literary sources, and the allure of Italy as a travel destination, helped craft his satiric portrayal of literature, relationships, and society.
The expression boni homines (good men) is frequently used in legal documents of the Middle Ages. In this paper, which focuses on Portugal between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I intend to explore some of the aspects pertaining to this classification. I will concentrate on the role this notion played in the interaction between monarchical and local powers, in the framework of legal exercise and symbology. From broad concepts that point to the “optima pars” of political society to very specific situations in which experts were appointed to assess situations and measure land, the study of the meaning of the expression boni homines in the Middle Ages offers us the possibility to better understand governance strategies that promoted certain social agents through public recognition of their expertise, which clearly depended on their good reputation and moral character.
The contributors to this cluster seek to decipher the meaning of the expressions that compose what we call the language of trust, by studying its origins and concrete uses across medieval Europe. As authors of the essays in this cluster, we aim to understand how the expressions such as boni homines or viri articulate the notions of fides (faith, trust, trustworthiness), fama (reputation, public opinion), and expertise.
A constitutive, defining part of disputing in medieval Europe is the role of third parties in prevention or settlement of dispute. Medieval Poland offers much evidence about those third parties: their identity, recruitment, specific roles, knowledge available to them, and their social standing. This article presents several instances of prevention and resolution of disputes, and of third-party individuals involved. While those people varied widely, common to them were three traits: knowledge (especially of law), trust (socially attributed to them), and their reputation. While in these instances such parties were not designated in the written record as “good,” with that word, in fact they clearly shared a common ascription of high personal quality—and expressed as well as enhanced that quality in a range of transactions that mattered, including, above all, in disputes.
This article offers a meticulous examination of an understudied passage in Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Treatise on Painting (1584), in which philosophers who deliberately blind themselves (Homer, Democritus, and Plato) become models for the painter constructing his interior design. The aim is to show that, through a subtle selection of sources and building on Marsilio Ficino’s portrayal of contemplative and creative philosophers in book 13 of his Platonic Theology , Lomazzo reverses the traditional disdain for blindness in Renaissance art theory, which is centered on the eye of the body. In doing so, Lomazzo takes up the distinction between the spiritual eye and the physical eye, and conveys a dynamic vision of the faculties of the mind, which forges its own concepts away from the distractions of visible objects and sounds. Two transfers of ideas are examined: from the ancient depictions of figures such as Homer, Democritus, and Plato to their reception in the Renaissance, and from the philosophy of the second half of the fifteenth century to the art theory of the late sixteenth century.
This paper analyzes the significance of the term vir bonus in several of Papinian’s fragments from the Digest , one of the three collections making up the ultimate compilation of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis . Although the expression is largely used in a technical sense in the Corpus Iuris Civilis —denoting either a third party appointed to complete a pending juridical act or, in an abstract sense, the ideal to which legal actors were expected to conform—Papinian also uses it in a different way. While some of his passages remain consistent with the standard classical usage, in others, his reasoning is heavily influenced by ethical and moral considerations, which overshadow the technical aspects of the notion of the “good man.”
Clerical tonsure may have emerged independently in different regions and its symbolism could vary, but wherever it appeared it was a clear and inextricable sign of the members of the clergy. It was a mark of privilege, but unlike dress it could not be easily concealed or quickly removed, and so it identified clerics whether they wanted it or not. This made the tonsure an instrument of control over clerical behavior. For bishops, such an instrument became particularly useful when local churches spread throughout the countryside. The clergy of these communities, sometimes distant from the city, remained subject to bishops who, however, had few other means of overseeing them. The sign that singled them out helped to secure their behavior and allegiance.
In the early Islamic period, a new requirement for converts to Judaism emerges in Jewish legal sources: shaving the head and paring the nails. In one of the versions, facial hair is also explicitly mentioned. In the present article this requirement is examined in the context of punitive shaving of head and facial hair, which also first appears in the same period. These Jewish sources are studied with the broader background of such requirements in Byzantine and Muslim law, and additional demands not to imitate hairstyles prevalent in other confessional communities.
Visual evidence is an important component of our historical sources. Attention to strict regulations about shaving needs to be complemented by nuanced reading of visual patterns that indicate what artists and audiences thought of as not only ideal and formal but also plausible and actual. Theoretical, largely moralizing support for clerical shaving characterized it as eradicating sin and worldliness. Face-shaving and tonsuring were regulated activities in the religious orders, marking, bonding, and disciplining all members in ways both personal and communal, and distinguishing them from lower status, bearded conversi. Freshly shaved men suited the theoretical precepts, though in actuality such factors as age, health, timing, and travel gave rise to a variety of practices and facial appearances. For the artist, beards were variable, affective devices that aided naturalistic effects, enabled differentiations, and increased their work's persuasive presence.
Medieval revolts were noisy, disruptive events. Rebels' noisiness, and the rhetorical usefulness to medieval chroniclers of describing them as such, has been extensively commented upon by scholars. This article suggests new ways of approaching the role of sound in premodern revolts through a careful consideration of one town, St. Albans, the site of several popular uprisings in the fourteenth century. Crucially, St. Albans was a monastic town with a system of lordship that relied heavily upon performative rather than physical displays of might. The abbots and community of St. Albans utilized processions and a network of increasingly intrusive bells to impose their acoustic regime over the town. Sound was a fundamental part of monastic lordship and therefore also a means of rebellion against it. A comparison of revolts in 1327 and 1381 shows how the St. Albans townspeople weaponized their intimate knowledge of their town's geography and auditory landscape to attack the abbey with carefully placed noisiness, mock rogation ceremonies, and the eventual erection of their own bell tower. Ultimately, the case study of St. Albans reveals the utility of local contextualization not just for accessing the sounds of revolt, but for understanding how and why medieval towns rose against their monastic lords.
This article examines the curious phenomenon of papal beards between 1510 and 1700, analyzing how facial hair became a significant element in papal self-fashioning and religious symbolism. Beginning with Julius II's beard, reportedly grown in protest after losing Bologna during the Italian Wars, the tradition of papal beards continued with Clement VII's, cultivated after the 1527 Sack of Rome. It solidified during Paul III's long pontificate. Beards were transformed from situational aberrations to a normalized feature of papal presentation despite canonical prohibitions. This revolution in papal facial hair paralleled a broader Renaissance reevaluation of beards as symbols of classical virtue and masculine authority. Humanist defenses of clerical beards, particularly Piero Valeriano's 1531 Pro sacerdotum barbis, provided theological justification by selectively citing biblical precedents. The papal beard disappeared again under Clement XI in 1700, a shift that reflected further changes in the complex interplay between religious tradition, gender performance, and cultural context in early modern Europe.
This article studies the political incentives of having the first edition of the memoir of King James I of Aragon (1208-76) published in 1557 Valencia. Printed by Jer & ograve;nima Gal & eacute;s and dedicated to Prince Don Carlos (1545-68), heir of the Spanish throne, the editio princeps of this medieval historiographical work was part of a larger maneuver of an opportunistic Valencia city council aiming to promote an image of the kings ofAragon as military leaders of classical Roman splendor and influence the prince in his consideration of the Aragonese crown. The choice of the work was the responsibility of Honorat Joan (1507-66), the humanist preceptor of the young prince. The work's inclusion in the prince's library sheds light on the young heir's education as well as on the role that printing medieval Catalan historiography played in the scholarly battle for writing the history of Spain under the Habsburgs.
According to Clement of Alexandria, the ideal Christian man kept the hair of his head cut short while cultivating a beard and a hirsute body. This article argues that Clement conceived of maleness as a discrete "nature" that God created with accompanying physiological distinctives-among them patterns of hair growth. Consequently, ethical grooming entailed embracing and maximizing the ways that hair already tended to grow on the male body; actions that seemed to go against "natural" male patterns of hair growth (e.g., shaving, depilation, growing long locks) were seen as a problematic resistance to the design of God as Creator. The force of Clement's grooming recommendations rests on certain hair states being "natural" or "according to nature." This essay suggests that Clement drew on Galen's theory of hair growth in order to justify the "naturalness" of certain behaviors.
Although the authoritative collections of hadiths, fragmentary texts that enshrine the Prophet Muhammad's sunna, or way, provide detailed guidance on how Muslim men should style their beards, it was not always clear how to interpret them. Later generations of Muslim scholars fashioned a discursive tradition around styling the beard that clarified the meanings entangled within these holy but cryptic texts to define the elements of Muslim style. This article examines Islamic etiquette on grooming the beard through the eyes of three brilliant but overlooked early modern Muslim thinkers living in Ottoman Arabic-speaking lands: Najm al-D & imacr;n al-Ghazz & imacr; (d. 1651) and his student 'Abd al-Ghan & imacr; al-N & amacr;bulus & imacr; (d. 1731), both of Damascus, and Mull & amacr; 'Al & imacr; al-Q & amacr;r & imacr; (d. 1605), an & eacute;migr & eacute; from Herat who settled Mecca. All were religious polymaths, scholars of both the exoteric discipline of jurisprudence (fiqh) and the esoteric discipline of Sufism (tasaw-wuf), which figure into their imaginative treatment of beard grooming as a form of Muslim ethical self-fashioning. N & amacr;bulus & imacr; and Q & amacr;r & imacr; composed independent treatises on grooming the beard that are examined here for the first time in the Euro-American academy. Their scholarly discourses reveal spirited inter-Muslim debates on growing, trimming, and combing the beard that elicit how Islam defined the well-groomed man.
