UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies | Viator Abstracts, Vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 2007)

The Search for Orthodoxy A.D. 325–553. RAMSEY MACMULLEN. How could Christendom be split into six churches by the mid-sixth century, despite repeated, strenuous efforts to bring about a unity of doctrine? The six were, at the end (and five remain to this day), Arian, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, and East Syrian. The focus of discussion is on the eastern half of the Roman world and on the play of forces beyond the strictly theological at the decisive councils: namely, control of procedures, documents, and witnesses, so as to insure a majority vote at the end, and, in the run-up, control of the emperor who summoned the council and determined the list of invited bishops. The forming of voting blocs encouraged the forming of fixed traditions, influenced by regional loyalties of all sorts and stubbornly maintained in the face even of imperial force. Hence, from the mid-fifth century, independent churches.

Augustine’s Heartbeat: From Time to Eternity. MARJORIE O’ROURKE BOYLE. The personal climax of Augustine’s Confessions is believed to be a mystical ecstasy inspired by Platonist philosophy. “Augustine’s Heartbeat” takes his historical pulse to read his famous experience at Ostia as a rational meditation. It argues that Augustine invented this method of reasoning from time to eternity from his knowledge of three common subjects: meter, music, and medicine. His professional experience as a rhetor, who marked the metrical beats of words, coincided with the convictions of the power of musical rhythms to attain infinity. Decisive was pulse lore, the popular idea of the physician Herophilus, who applied meter and music to explain how the beating heart made music. Augustine at Ostia conversed through creatures who transcended their temporality by tapping “with a whole heartbeat” the absolute trochee, the eternal Word (verbum).

Oblivion, Memory, and Irony in Medieval Montecassino: Narrative Strategies of the “Chronicles of St. Benedict of Cassino.” LUIGI ANDREA BERTO. The dissolution of the Lombard political unity in southern Italy and the Muslim military activities in that area rendered the ninth century a crucial yet troubled period for the history of this part of the Italian peninsula. The abbey of Montecassino was deeply affected by those events as well. Its riches, in fact, made it an easy target for the Muslims, who, after imposing heavy tributes on the monastery, sacked and destroyed it in 883. Several years had to pass before Saint Benedict’s monks could return to Montecassino. In the difficult period of exile they put a lot of effort in the reconstruction of their community’s identity as well as in reaffirming its role as repository of southern Italy’s memory. In this process of reconstruction the texts known as the “Chronicles of Saint Benedict of Cassino” had the fundamental task of describing as well as explaining the events that had provoked the crisis of southern Lombard Italy.

Memory, Epistemology, and the Writing of Early Medieval Military History: The Example of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (1009–1018). DAVID S. BACHRACH. In the current debates concerning the value of information that can be obtained from early medieval narrative texts insufficient attention has been paid to the wide range of tools available to scholars to test the reliability of these sources, particularly with regard to military matters. This study has a two-fold purpose. First, an effort is made to bring some clarity to the wide-ranging debate about the place of memory and epistemology in evaluating the narrative texts that survive from the early Middle Ages. The second task undertaken here is to begin the evaluation of the information provided by Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg in his Chronicon regarding the military organization of Ottonian Germany. In regard to this latter objective, a thorough analysis of Thietmar’s use of the term miles makes clear that the bishop of Merseburg reserved this word to refer to professional soldiers, and that he did not use the term in a “feudal” sense. In addition, a careful examination of the contexts in which Thiemtar depicts milites being deployed suggests that they served primarily to serve the needs of siege warfare, either defending or assaulting fortified cities, fortresses, and lesser strongholds.

Fulcard’s Pigsty: Cluniac Reformers, Dispute Settlement, and the Lower Aristocracy in Early Twelfth-Century Flanders. STEVEN VANDERPUTTEN.This article argues that the chronology and geography of the Cluniac reform movement in the county of Flanders in the early twelfth century were to a large extent determined by the attempts of the counts to regain control over the feudal network and by the reformers’ specific strategies to reassess relations between monastic communities and their lay officers. Through the example of the turbulent abbacy and eventual deposition of Fulcard, abbot of Marchiennes and member of one of the most powerful local clans in the southeastern parts of Flanders, it is shown how the dividing line between supporters and adversaries of the reform movement ran across the division between the higher levels of the Flemish aristocracy and families who had recently introduced themselves into the aristocratic network. If one accepts the existence of opportunities for consensus based on what Patrick Geary has described as “structural conflicts,” it can be understood how Cluniac reforms at the same time constituted a point of dissent and an opportunity for all parties involved to reassess their relations in a satisfying and largely peaceful manner.

“Nec signis nec testibus creditur …”: The Problem of Eyewitnesses in the Chronicles of the First Crusade. ELIZABETH LAPINA. This article challenges the widely accepted convention that medieval authors hardly ever dared to question the veracity of first-hand accounts. It demonstrates that the concept of “witness” as defined in Christian theology had a significant impact on the writing of history in the Middle Ages. This concept discounts the importance of observation and emphasizes divine inspiration as the source of superior knowledge. The goal of this article is to trace its influence on the chronicles of the First Crusade. The article begins by examining the instances when second-hand chroniclers chose to disagree with an interpretation of events offered by first-hand observers. It then analyses the attempts by the former to justify their decision to correct the accounts of the enterprise written by its participants. Some of these chroniclers, especially Guibert of Nogent, worked to undermine the prestige of eyewitnesses by arguing that senses could mislead and, more important, that observation did not necessarily entail understanding.

Leprosy and Law in Béroul’s Roman de Tristran. SALLY L. BURCH. The author notes that, in the episode of Yseut’s trial, Tristran’s disguise as a leper differs from the lover’s disguise in other versions of the “ambiguous oath” folktale. The article argues that this is significant, because the queen’s contact with the “leper” provides for the spectators at the Mal Pas an apparent physical test of her virtue: an adulteress would fear leprosy as a punishment for her sin. Hence, this incident can be read as a form of trial by ordeal. Béroul’s sophisticated handling of the unilateral ordeal process reflects contemporary debates about ordeals, and suggests that he had a clerkly background.

The Jews between Church and State in Reconquest Iberia: The Evidence of the Ecclesiastical Tithe. JONATHAN RAY. The focus of this article is the struggle over Jewish tithes in medieval Iberia. In the analysis of this subject the author seeks to situate the apparent decline in Jewish status within the context of the struggle over power and resources that took place between the church and the various peninsular monarchies. He argues that the relationship between the Jews, the crown, and the church owes far more to the developments in Iberian political and economic life due to the success of the reconquest than it does to any broader European movement toward persecution and exclusion. The article also suggests that the subject of Jewish tithing offers a new vantage point for studying the development and relationship of royal and ecclesiastical institutions.

The Labor of Aedificatio and the Business of Preaching in the Thirteenth Century. CLAIRE M. WATERS. The image of aedificatio in its literal and metaphorical senses, as building and teaching, contributes to both the theory and the practice of Christian preaching almost from its inception. As ideas about labor and profession develop in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, increasing emphasis falls on preaching’s simultaneous dependence on the concrete and the metaphorical, on abstract learning and the duty to an audience. Aedificatio becomes, ultimately, both what sets preaching apart from other kinds of work and what links preachers to their social context. Its implications are explored by theorists from Augustine onwards, but receive particular attention from the mendicants and their critics as they try to work out the preacher’s appropriate attitude toward his profession. The importance of both the preacher’s and God’s contribution to the work of preaching leads to difficult questions about ownership, pride, and professional self-consciousness that tend to blur the distinction between preaching and other kinds of labor.

Masculinity and Politics in Njáls Saga. ÁRMANN JAKOBSSON. The subject of this study is how masculinity is problematized in Njáls Saga (ca. 1280), with the charac;ters constantly accusing each other of not being manly. The author argues that the ob;session of the saga characters with masculinity actually undermines the manly/unmanly-binary, since almost every character in the saga is subjected to ridi;cule about lack of manliness. While these allegations are often unfounded, sometimes they do have some foundation in reality; but even when the protagonists are indeed unmanly, they remain the most impressive characters in the saga. Thus it is possible to read the saga’s treatment of gender as critical of the norms of a misogynist society, showing how the ideal of masculinity may become so exaggerated that it becomes uncompromising and oppressive and leads to failed marriages and to outpourings of an aggressive heroism that thrives on the uneasiness of males, who know that everything may be used against them.

Re-reading the Relationship between Devotional Images, Visions, and the Body: Clare of Montefalco and Margaret of Città di Castello. CORDELIA WARR. The visualization and imitation of Christ were central to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century spirituality. Saints and holy people increasingly focused their spirituality through the bodily reenactment or representation of Christ’s Passion. Images, and thus the sense of sight, were central in religious practice. Visual stimuli, real or imagined, provoked physical reactions. This article explores the tensions inherent in the use, and perceived use, of images by two Italian thirteenth-century holy women—Clare of Montefalco (d. 1308) and Margaret of Città di Castello (d. 1320). A careful reading of surviving documentation for the canonization process (1318–1319) of Clare of Montefalco, and of the fourteenth-century vitae of Clare and Margaret, allows a problematization of the ways in which images were understood to have been used by women and to have affected women.

The First Political Pamphlet? The Unsolved Case of the Anonymous Account of the Good Parliament of 1376. CLEMENTINE OLIVER. Ever since V. H. Galbraith’s edition of the Anonimalle Chronicle was published in 1927, we have been fortunate to know more about what happened in the so-called Good Parliament of 1376 than about the proceedings of any other medieval parliament that came before it. The Anonimalle account provides a glimpse into the secret world of the commons’ debate that took place behind closed doors, and so it reads very much like an eyewitness account. Nevertheless after all these years, the origins of this account remain a mystery, for we still do not know who wrote it. This essay reexamines the question of the author’s identity, and suggests that this account of the Good Parliament was written by a chancery clerk as an independent text, a piece of parliamentary reportage intended for circulation as it was. In particular, the essay argues that it was written and circulated as a part of a broader campaign for public opinion on parliament’s behalf.

Lawrence Minot, Edward III, and Nationalism. DAVID MATTHEWS. The fourteenth-century poems of Laurence Minot were discovered in the eighteenth century and enjoyed some vogue in the late nineteenth before largely falling from view in twentieth-century medieval studies because of their violently expressed nationalism. This essay revisits them, treating them as examples of what Catherine Belsey has called “imperative texts” and arguing that they do the nationalist work of “imagining a community,” in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase. The essay takes issue with Anderson’s idea that nationalism is incompatible with the Middle Ages, noting that the strength of his analysis, the emphasis on imagined communities, is also its weakness when it comes to restricting the analysis to recent modernity. In Minot’s fourteenth-century imagining of England, nevertheless, what we see is not the stridently self-confident Englishness that some recent historians perceive so much as the attempt to perform an Englishness as yet uncertain and fragile and in need of precisely the kind of cultural bolstering that Minot gives it.

Chaucer’s Pardoner, Rutebeuf’s “Dit de l’Herberie,” the “Dit du Mercier,” and Cultural History. JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN. Criticism of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale has long held that Roman de la Rose’s Faux Semblant lay behind Chaucer’s portrait of a hypocritical churchman. Yet however much Faux Semblant’s speech may explain the Pardoner’s blatant hypocrisy, the rhetoric and content of his confession and his later intemperate “salesmanship” to the other pilgrims and to Harry Bailly in particular can be derived largely from the commercial discourse of medieval France, specifically the practices of provincial itinerant salesmen revealed in the comic and satiric Old French “trade” poems: Rutebeuf’s “Dit de l’ Herberie” and the anonymous “Dit du Mercier,” which share a surprising number of details with Chaucer’s poem and probably served as models for his tavern realism, his faux relics made with “latoun,” and his treatment of the Pardoner as emasculated. Moreover, like Chaucer’s poem, the two “Dits” are heavily ironic in revealing their narrators’ deceptive and un;savory natures, either through direct confession or through audience inference.

“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visions. MARY C. ERLER. The anonymous author of this dictated letter, probably a Nunnaminster anchoress, bears comparison with her contemporary Margery Kempe, and thus enlarges our knowledge of the English female visionary tradition. Yet the anchoress reveals a different kind of spiritual reading and provides a more unmediated voice than Kempe’s, while her vision’s condemnation of the state of religious life seems to have encountered less opposition than Margery’s message. Investigation of the six clerics who were the first recipients of the 1422 “Revelation of Purgatory” shows a conservative, orthodox group, two of them highly placed members of Lancastrian ducal familia. Part of a conversation about reform in the last years of Henry IV’s reign, the vision’s positioning in historic Winchester with its traditional interlocking of secular and spiritual power, and its indebtedness to St. Birgitta’s Revelations, recently introduced to England, may have validated its violent rhetoric of purgatorial punishment.

The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Classical Comparisons and the Circle of Cardinal Isidore. MARIOS PHILIPPIDES. This article focuses on comparisons produced soon after the fall of 1453: Mehmed II Fatih, the sultan of the Ottomans, is contrasted with numerous ancient personalities and especially with Alexander Xerxes; both historical figures were familiar to contemporary humanists. Such comparisons and other allusions originate with two eyewitnesses, Archbishop Leonardo Giustiniani from Chios and Cardinal Isidore. Their allusions and comparisons to antiquity derive from their conversations during the siege. After the fall Isidore escaped to Venetian Crete; he and his circle, which included notable humanists such as Lauro Quirini, initiated a bombardment of letters to the West, by means of which Isidore’s allusions comparisons went on to form a nucleus, making Isidore the inventor of an important literary comparison. Isidore’s commanding personality bridged both worlds: a Greek prelate and papal nunzio in Constantinople. His commanding personality provided the impetus for the literary coloring of the siege to the West.

Bruegel’s Falling Figures. ROSS HAMILTON. Reformation iconoclasm imposed intense pressure on the relation between pictorial images and their viewers. Medieval techniques used in the interpretation of biblical texts as well as processes of association involved in systems of mnemotechnics contributed to the process of redefining their function as images intended for spiritual meditation. This essay examines five paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (“Fall of the Rebel Angels,” “Conversion of Saul,” “Fall of Icarus,” “Parable of the Blind,” and “The Peasant and the Birdnester”). Each presents a moment of transformation associated with the biblical narrative of the Fall of Man. In this context, incomplete actions are held within a larger pattern of divine justice and promised redemption. During the turbulent 1560s, for a contemplative viewer, such representations of change as a phase in the cycle of becoming rather than an irredeemable rupture served to reaffirm the possibility of controlling spiritual and political chaos.