Comitatus, the graduate journal sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, is now in its thirty-seventh year of publishing articles by new scholars working in any field of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. The annual journal is distributed internationally to libraries and individuals; volume 38 (2007) will be available September 2007.
A subscription to Comitatus is $30 annually, plus $3.00 domestic surface mail postage and $5.00 international.
Please direct questions about submissions or subscriptions to:
Blair Sullivan
310-825-1537
sullivan@humnet.ucla.edu
Volume 38 (2007)
Editor: David Bennett (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures)
Editorial Board : Lisa Boutin (Art History), Val Cullen (English), Aaron Moreno (History), Edward McCormick Schoolman (History), Charles Russell Stone (English), Christine Thuau (French and Francophone Studies), Erica L. Westhoff (Italian)
Managing Editor: Blair Sullivan (CMRS)
CONTENTS
Articles:
Patrimoniolum Ecclesiae Nostrae: The Papal Estates in Merovingian Provence / Gregory I. Halfond. The papacy was one of the Mediterranean world’s most powerful landowners in the early medieval West. Its property holdings (known collectively as the Patrimonium Sancti Petri) stretched from Dalmatia to Italy to North Africa. Among its holdings were patrimonial estates in southern Gaul. Although much about these estates remains mysterious, not least of all their shadowy origins and demise, the absence of evidence does not reflect a lack of historical importance. The existence of the Gallic patrimony helped to strengthen ties between the Merovingian kingdoms and Rome, and the property served as an important outpost of papal authority within Gaul. Moreover, the patrimony’s managers (or rectors) were deeply involved in the local politics of Provence. This article surveys the available evidence for the Gallic patrimony, and attempts to situate it within the complex ecclesiastical world of early medieval Francia.
Jewish-Christian Debate and the Didacticism of Drama in the Jeu D’Adam / Christopher Lee. This article takes a closer look at the un¬derstudied debate between Isaiah and Judeus in the Anglo-Norman Jeu d’Adam, situating their exchange within the larger context of twelfth-century Jewish-Christian polemical literature. Consistent with this tradition, Jewish doubt in the play prompts responses designed to provide instruction for a Christian audience. The play differs in that Judeus’s objections, informed by Augustinian semiotics, range beyond the proper interpretation of Old Testament signs to question the ability of the play itself and the dramatic medium in general to present sacred truth. Isaiah’s response likewise draws on Augustinian sign theory to defend the superiority of visual signs, or res significandi, over words in teaching Christian doctrine. This vindication of dramatic res is reflected in the extensive use of stage directions, props, costumes, gestures, and scenery as a means of communicating meaning in the play as a whole.
A Crusader in a “Communion of Saints”: Political Sanctity and Sanctified Politics in the Cult of St. Simon de Montfort / John St. Lawrence. Between the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and the defeat and death of Simon de Montfort in 1265, few saints appeared in England who had not been royal opponents. Moreover, many promi¬nent churchmen cooperated to oppose royal authority in life and to promote each other’s saint’s cults after death. Their communion of saints existed in tension with Rome. Reforms of the standards of sanctity and miracles progressively reserved the authority to recognize saints to king and pope. Despite the fact that de Montfort was a layman, his career as a crusader and his popular rebellion against perceived royal and papal abuses of power simultaneously established him as a saint in this English tradition and ensured that his sanctity would never receive official sanction. This article establishes the normalcy of the cult of St. Simon de Montfort within its period and place.
A Place among the Leaves: The Manuscript Contexts of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls / Todd Preston. A consideration of the manuscript contexts of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls provides a window onto the possible medieval reception of poem. Due to the content of the poem, many modern interpretations of the Parliament variously describe the poem as one devoted to courtly love, common profit, or some admixture thereof. However, a more contextual and contemporary vision of the poem emerges by analyzing the Parliament in terms of the texts with which it travels. An analysis of the fourteen manuscript contexts of this dream vision reveal that the poem more typically functions as either as part of a general miscellany or as part of an author-anthology devoted to Chaucerian works. Ultimately, rather than suggesting a single thematic approach to the Parliament, the investigation of its manuscript contexts suggests the need to approach each manuscript on its own, unique terms.
The Breathing Instrument: An Iconographic Study of the Concert of Angels in Master Matthias’s Isenheim Altarpiece / Katherine Anderson-Tuft. The Concert of Angels panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece is prominently portrayed in a central position of the retable painted by the German master known as Matthias Grünewald. Yet, both the elusive iconography of the Concert and its prominent placement within an altarpiece portraying the history of Christian salvation have continually puzzled critics and art historians. The Concert of Angels panel draws upon Christian metaphors for music which have been largely forgotten, resulting in an obscured iconographic message. This study explains the iconography of music in the Concert panel to reveal a visual discourse on Christian redemption between the panels of the altarpiece, particularly between the Concert of Angels panel and the celebrated Crucifixion scene in the final presentation of panels. By examining the musical iconography presented in the Concert of Angels panel and placing the piece within its socio-historic-religious context, the seemingly obscure iconographic references become an ingenious visual language for the Christian celebration of salvation within the context of the entire Altarpiece program.
The Myth of the Androgyne in Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love / Rossella Pescatori. In Leone Ebreo's Dialogues of Love (1535) a particular space is dedicated to the Androgyne’s Myth. This article elucidates how this Myth condenses in itself the Dialogues’ philosophical system. Having in mind Plato, Ficino, Pico, and the Spanish Kabbalah, with obvious references to the book of Zohar, Leone puts Love as the principle which governs the whole universe, and emphasizes that in the entire universe there is a radical polarity in terms of male and female symbols. This cosmological issue is connected to the creative force of language, which analogically reproduces reality. In fact, there must be a division between signifier and signified, between form and content, between fabula and historia, in order to have a world or a reality. The Dialogues’ two interlocutors, Sofia and Filone, represent, in fact, two halves of the androgyne whose names, when united, form the composite body that we call “philo-sophy.”
Intimate Enclosures: Framing the English Portrait Limning, 1585–1615 / Tai van Toorn. The works of the early modern English painters Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver disclose a tension between the miniature portrait, or “limning,” and its frame. While the frame of the typical Elizabethan and early Jacobean miniature tightly circumscribes an oval space of merely a few square inches, an abundance of visual details, symbols, and inscriptions threatens to burst beyond the border and upstage the face at the center of the portrait. Drawing from the concept of the “parergon,” this article analyzes the miniature portrait’s connections with external physical borders and internal marginal spaces, as well as parergetic devices which enclose, ornament, and supplement the image. Within the historical context of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, frames and framing strategies play an important role in artistic theories and practices, aristocratic culture, the creation of meaning, and conventions for displaying art. The author argues that the relations between strategies of framing and the communicative powers of the face are central to the limning’s mode of representation within elite culture.
Panting Sentinels: Erotics, Politics, and Redemption in the Friendship Poetry of Katherine Philips (1631–1664) / Kamille Stone Stanton. After reviewing recent literary criticism regarding the erotic potential and political implications of Katherine Philips’s friendship verses, this essay works directly from Poems (1667) to argue that the poet’s conceptualization of friendship was as a vehicle for religious redemption inspired by Queen Henrietta Maria’s devout humanism and the Caroline court’s Religion of Love. Although current Philips criticism discusses the stated devotional aims of same-sex friendship as the poet’s efforts to deflect potential sexualized readings, this essay finds that in the only edition of Philips’s poetry that was authorized by the poet, friendship and religious redemption are thoroughly intertwined.
Reviews
Thomas O'Donnell, editor Volume 37.
David Bennett, editor Volume 38.
Editorial board members at the April 13th, 2006 meeting.
Editorial board members at the April 13th, 2006 meeting.
