Medieval History

Il contributo affronta, tramite l'utilizzo di fonti archivistiche, il ruolo svolto dagli ebrei di Messina nel commercio degli schiavi in Sicilia tra tardomedioevo e prima età moderna. L'obiettivo è una prima ricostruzione dell'inserimento di alcuni componenti della comunità giudaica peloritana nel lucroso traffico di questa preziosa "merce umana" e dell'atteggiamento dell'aljama nei confronti di importanti problematiche come la redenzione degli ebrei ridotti in schiavitù.

This book explores the notebooks of S. Belle, an astrologer who lived in late fifteenth-century France, as a case study of late medieval astrological practice. These notebooks combine astrological doctrine, a large collection of horoscopes, an almanac, and three complete judgements of nativities. By studying Belle’s methods, processes of learning, and practices, this book contributes to a better understanding of the internal architecture of astrology in the pre-modern world; this includes its techniques, methodologies, goals, transmission, and development throughout history. It offers an internalist view of the practice of astrology, as a counterpart to the existing research into astrology’s social and cultural impact.

Este trabajo pretende ser un breve análisis de la labor científica de la santa Hildegarda de Bingen a través de distintas fuentes y recursos centrados en este tema. El trabajo se dividirá en una breve biografía y una serie de datos sobre la vida de Hildegarda, para posteriormente analizar algunas de las obras de Hildegarda que no entran estrictamente en el campo de la ciencia, aunque como se verá, en este momento todo esto estaba relacionado. Por último es cuando ya se entrará a analizar toda una serie de elementos del mundo científico de la época de Hildegarda, así como de su propia vida en este campo, para después ya centrarnos concretamente en sus dos obras científicas, la Physica y el Causae et Curae. Por último, se presentarán una serie de conclusiones, o más bien, pensamientos personales sobre lo analizado y las consecuencias de ello.

This study investigates the place of San Salvatore in the holy topography of Venetian Candia. By focusing on the largest convent in the Augustinian Province of the Holy Land, it contributes to a better understanding of a neglected subject in mendicant scholarship, namely the Augustinian friars’ expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. This article offers a detailed reconstruction of the demolished building and its sacred space, and sheds new light on interaction among the mixed Latin-Greek population in Venetian Crete by examining icons, altars, liturgy and, in particular, the introduction of the cult of Nicholas of Tolentino.

The principal theme of this volume is the importance of the public use of human remains in a historical perspective. The book presents a series of case studies aimed at offering historiographical and methodological reflections and providing interpretative approaches highlighting how, through the ages and with a succession of complex practices and uses, human remains have been imbued with a plurality of meanings. Covering a period running from late antiquity to the present day, the contributions are the combined results of multidisciplinary research pertaining to the realities of the Italian peninsula, hitherto not investigated with a long-term and multidisciplinary historical perspective. From the relics of great men to the remains of patriots, and from anatomical specimens to the skeletons of the saints: through these case studies the scholars involved have investigated a wide range of human remains (real or reputed) and of meanings attributed to them, in order to decipher their function over the centuries. In doing so, they have traversed the interpretative boundaries of political history, religious history and the history of science, as required by questions aimed at integrating the anthropological, social and cultural aspects of a complex subject.

This article explores the emergence and significance of printed game boards in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century. These objects constitute an important and overlooked visual and material aspect of a pervasive culture of gaming that engrossed a huge range of the populace: both the rich and the poor, men and women, the educated and the illiterate. Printed game boards not only served to entertain, but also mirrored and reified deeper social and moral concerns about gambling and leisure, a tension between the prescribed morality of the legal sanctions, decrees, and censures associated with the Counter-Reformation, and the everyday games common both in courtly leisure and play on the street and in the tavern. Visually manifesting a dual understanding of games as both ludic and mimetic, printed game boards enacted the ontology of life’s journey for early modern players, from the courtly, to the religious, to the quotidian.

"By Fire and Sword:  Bellum Hostile and 'Civilians' in the Hundred Years War,” in Civilians in the Path of War, ed. Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002): 33-78.  Examines the nature of and reasons for the use of violence against civilians during the Hundred Years War.

Earlier studies carried out on Sungbo’s Eredo (embankment) showed that it is about 165 km in circumference and surrounds the whole of Ijebu Kingdom. From the date obtained by Aremu et al. (2013: 17), the structure is thought to have been built around 5000 years ago. However, it is possible that the site was also occupied during the medieval period, as evidenced in the remains around the sacred grove. This paper reports on a GPS survey of the site and excavations carried out during 2014 fieldwork archaeology intended to confirm or refute the dates previously obtained from the embankment. It examines the cultural materials recovered from the excavation, including Late Stone Age materials and those of the Neolithic period. Analysis of the Neolithic and Late Stone Age materials suggests that the site may be of greater antiquity than earlier reported and that this forest zone of West Africa was occupied at different time periods.

Audiences are among the dominant elements of courtly life and may be referred to as a central aspect of representation of power in many societies. Audiences also served as a stage for negotiation and political decision-making. Beyond that, the ceremonial of audience acted as an integrative factor, strengthening the connections between the ruler and his subjects, the élite and his dynastic background. It thus reflects the structure, or at least the intended structure of rule, and allows us to get insight into the perception of the ruler in the respective society. This volume offers an approach to forms and structures of audiences in different epochs and regions. Choosing a transcultural and diachronic perspective, it aims at delineating similarities and differences as well as possible lines of development of the ceremonial on a broad basis of case studies.

The illustrations of the Benedictine monk, artist, and chronicler Matthew Paris offer a gateway into the thirteenth-century world. This new study of his cartography emphasizes the striking innovations he brought to it, and shows how the maps became an investment and repository of certain medieval spatial practices: travel through the world, the occurrence of history in that world, and the religious practices and devotional attitudes that were assiduously cultivated within the larger visual culture of St. Albans abbey [in great measure produced by Matthew's own images]. Travel [i.e. space], history [time], and devotion [liturgy], then, are the primary issues and meanings deposited in and registered by Matthew Paris's cartographic landscape. In searching out these contexts, the book explores the paradigm of imagined pilgrimage as an organizing principle that pushes into greater relief medieval understandings of their arrangements of places and of histories. Thus traveling through geography could enact its meanings in a dynamic, religious, even devotional performance of the maps' materials. Richly illustrated with black and white and colour plates.

This paper tries to answer why the perception of the Devil changed a tempter doing God's will in the early medieval period, into an autonomous evil power waging war against God and Christendom by the early modern period.  To answer this, the paper looks at changes in theological understandings, major historic events, and artistic interpretations of the Devil.

La presente versione on line differisce dal testo edito nel 1976: non sono qui inserite le cartine dell’appendice, le due tabelle sinottiche dei beni e redditi della chiesa vescovile e della pieve di Tillida e l’indice dei nomi di persona e di luogo. Il testo è stato rivisto, introducendo integrazioni e modifiche; non è stata aggiornata la bibliografia, se non per gli apporti di studi successivi che hanno dimostrato la falsificazione di alcuni documenti. Della rimanente documentazione non sono state indicate le nuove edizioni, ad eccezione dei diplomi di Federico I e degli atti del processo di Ostiglia del 1151.

Monday 11 January 2021, 19:00 Israel Time

Sword and Buckler in Hebrew Letters: Traces of Early Illuminated German Fight Books in Jewish Manuscripts
Prof. Sara Offenberg
Department of the Arts, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Two manuscripts produced in early fourteenth-century German lands reflect similar iconography of fighting with Sword and Buckler (small round shield); one is the well-known fencing manual, Leeds, Royal Armouries, MS I. 33, produced ca. 1320, and the other is a Hebrew manuscript of the Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France héb. 9, made in 1304, that will be the focus of this paper. I wish to demonstrate that the iconography of the masorah figurata was adapted from German Fechtbücher (fencing manuals), which are books of instructions, usually with illustrations, detailing the fencing arts. First, I relate to the realia of Jews bearing arms and Jewish fencing masters. Afterward I discuss the iconography of the fighting figures; subsequently, after examining the texts that make up the micrography, I reach a broader conclusion regarding the reason the patron commissioned this work and the meaning of the scene. This lecture intends to demonstrate how Hebrew illuminated manuscripts can shed more light on the study of fight books iconography.

This article analyses the correspondence of Boniface and his associates, arguing that Boniface deliberately but subtly communicates a Pauline apostolic identity in his letters by expressing his personal and professional successes, struggles, and feelings through a pervasive language of biblical allusions drawn primarily from the Pauline Epistles. The effectiveness of this hermeneutic becomes apparent when we see the complicity of Boniface’s fellow-correspondents and their ability and willingness to respond to his Pauline allusions in kind. They express their support of Boniface’s missionary and reform projects through their participation in these discursive practices; their ability to recognize, interpret and engage with this biblical language supplies the meaning to his words and, in doing so, systematically constitutes Boniface as an apostolic figure.

Chapter 3 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship
by Dr Peter Critchley

The purpose of this study is to recover politics as a creative and rational arena of discourse capable of uniting disparate individuals within a reasonable commonality.

The citizen ideal as it was originally conceived and practised in classical Greece formed a complete contrast with modern notions of citizenship. The overarching ethic uniting citizens with each other within the polis was the organic and ecological conception of politics as integral to personal development. This is what the Greeks defined as paideia. As with so many of the classical terms defining politics, there is no adequate English translation with which to translate the meaning of this term in all of its richness. Paideia is normally translated as education, but the term connotes much more than this. By paideia the Greeks understood a formative and life-long process through which the individual became an asset to the polis, to his friends and family, capable of and willing to live up to the highest ideals of the community. The term is expansive and adumbrates a range of potentialities from the personal to the public. There is no English equivalent. The closest is the German concept of Bildung, which played a crucial role in Hegel’s political philosophy. This concept encompasses character development, growth, and a well-rounded enculturation so that the body politic is equipped with the knowledge and skills it needs to flourish. Bildung affirms the creative integration of the individual into the environment through the ability to shape, appreciate and transform that environment as his or her own world, an extension of one’s flourishing humanity. Educated thus, the individual acquires a comprehensive sense of duty as well as becoming capable of assuming ethical and political responsibility for the world around. The modern instrumental notion of means and ends is totally inappropriate in this context. The individual and the polis are simultaneously means and ends – the end of the polis is human self-realisation, the self-realisation of the citizen is the means by which the polis flourishes. Excellence in personal and public life are mutually conditional. The polis is the realised community of realised individuals. Education is therefore a unified process of self- and civic-development. Here is the answer to Marx’s question as to who shall educate the educator. If the polis is the ‘school’ in which the highest virtues of the individual as citizen were formed and given expression, it is also informed by the public commitment of the citizens. Politics was concerned not simply with administering the collective affairs of the polis but also with nurturing its members as public beings who were capable of assuming a citizen identity through developing the competence to appreciate and to act in the public interest. Paideia was both a civic schooling and personal training which cultivated both independence of mind and individual responsibility within an overarching civic culture and commitment. In comparison, modern notions of politics as the effective administration of public order and of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills are remarkably thin. To the Athenians, politics and education go together as social practices. The conception is inherently organic and holistic, ruling out any instrumental means-ends rationality and the strict demarcation of distinctive spheres which pervades the modern world. Hellenic politics is concerned not merely with the efficient transaction of public business and the making of laws but with the human growth of its participants. The process by which the Athenians gathered as an ekklesia to decide upon policies was simultaneously a mutual education in which each learned the judgement to act justly according to an appreciation of civic ideals of right and wrong. The political realm was not strictly institutional and administrative but was indeed a process in being a continuous, everyday framework for intellectual, ethical, and personal growth. Paideia nurtured the capacity of individuals to participate in public affairs in a creatively meaningful sense, engaging their best abilities to promote the development of the polis and ensuring their own self-development, succeeding in determining their private affairs in accordance with the collective affairs of the public community.