What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in July, which tell us about topics including heretical purse-makers and drowned villages.
This series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 34 open-access articles we found.
The Medieval Public Sphere and the Response to a Condemnation for Heresy in Bologna, 1299
By Teresa Barucci
The English Historical Review
Bologna, 1299. The purse-makers Bompietro and Giuliano are burned at the stake as heretics by the Dominican Inquisition. A discussion about the lack of fairness of the condemnation ensues and spreads all over the city. The outrage of the Bolognese community is such that an investigation into the disorders and a mass excommunication follow.
This article uses the Bolognese episode, for which a rich documentation survives in the form of inquisitorial records, as a lens through which to observe and comment on the phenomenon of the ‘public sphere’ (a term coined in Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit) in medieval Europe. The first aim of the article is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct a ‘public sphere’ in the specific context of the public response to the condemnation for heresy of the two purse-makers. In so doing, the article looks at the social composition and at the communication mechanisms of, and at the discussion taking place within, the Bolognese public sphere. Importantly, it proposes the idea that the Inquisition too was a public authority around which a public sphere could develop, in contrast to the focus on secular political institutions of the previous historiography.
The second aim is to build on the evidence presented to demonstrate that the notion of the ‘public sphere’ can be an effective tool for the study of the interaction between the people and public authorities in the pre-modern world—if the critical functions rather than the structural characteristics of the phenomenon are emphasised.
Click here to read this article
The Warfare Ideology of Ordeal: Another Form of Just War Thinking? Theory and Practice from the Early Middle Ages
By Mihaly Boda
Journal of Military Ethics
Studying the military thinking and military history of the Middle Ages, one can observe several forms of warfare ideologies. Three of these ideologies are the holy war ideology, the ideology of ordeal (or iudicium Dei), and the traditional just war theory. Every such ideology has the common characteristic of a stronger or weaker link to concepts of a Christian God, religion, or church. Beyond this common characteristic, the ideologies differ from each other in some key respects. The holy war ideology applies first and foremost the concept of God, traditional just war theory applies the concept of justice, and the ideology of ordeal relies on both the concepts of God and justice. This article presents the ideology of ordeal as a form of just war thinking, and describes its features through historical examples, through its essence, and in contrast to other ideologies.
Click here to read this article
The Political Economy of Seigneurial Lordship in Flanders, c.1250–1570
By Frederik Buylaert, Thijs Lambrecht, Klaas Van Gelder and Kaat Cappelle
Past & Present
The recent debate between Chris Wickham and Shami Ghosh exposes different interpretations of the political economy of Europe, with Wickham arguing for the persistence of the feudal economy up to about 1700, and Ghosh imagining a distinct phase in which economic development was not yet capitalist but was no longer decisively shaped by the demands of lords. This article contributes to the discussion with the story of Flanders, where two contrasting trajectories interlocked.
On the one hand, coastal Flanders saw the rise of agrarian capitalism from the fourteenth century onwards, when small-scale farms were amalgamated into large agricultural enterprises that relied on the wage-labour of dispossessed peasants and their descendants as well as temporary labour migration from nearby regions. Inland Flanders, by contrast, saw the persistence of a peasant society dominated by small-scale landownership. ‘Middle-class lordship’ was critically important for this divergence. The peasants of inland Flanders acquired an unusual measure of control over seigneurial courts and their regulatory capacities, using them to stimulate the commercialization of society while thwarting experiments with agrarian capitalism. The Flemish evidence thus complicates narratives about feudalism in Europe, showing that the spectrum of possibilities in the political economy of lordship deserves closer scrutiny.
Click here to read this article
A Local Translation in a Global World: Odoric of Pordenone, William of Solagna, and a Giant Tortoise in Fourteenth-Century Padua
By Philippa Byrne
Journal of Medieval History
Abstract: This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenth-century spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331). Odoric’s text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia. This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to the process of composition and likely audience. Odoric worked with a co-author and addressed a specifically Franciscan audience in the early fourteenth-century Veneto. The central priority of the text was to convey the ‘reality’ of a distant martyrdom, in Tana, India, in the absence of tangible relics to demonstrate the truth of that martyrdom. The account highlights some of the intellectual tensions produced as a narrative of universal mission – and martyrdom – became increasingly central to Franciscan identity.
Click here to read this article
Medievalism: Some Historiographical Insights into the Mirror and Its Reflection
By Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas
Research into ideological applications of the medieval period is well served by the notion of ‘medievalism.’ This concept indicates both the set of post-medieval representations of the Middle Ages and the field of scholarship investigating such representations. This is a burgeoning field of research that stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and is the subject of extensive debate. The first part of the article discusses some of the interpretive hypotheses and proposes a set of six hermeneutic tools from a variety of fields of study, which are usefully applied to medievalism: palimpsest, invented traditions, alterity, entangled history, broadened historiography, regimes of historicity.
The second part of the article penetrates deeper into the last of these hermeneutic tools, namely the concept of ‘regime of historicity’ elaborated by François Hartog. Medievalism stands out as a distinct ‘regime of historicity’ which relates to a significant part of various -isms (including cultural, social and political movements) from the 19th century to the first decades of the 21st century, i.e., from romanticism onward. Three applied examples follow: the essay discusses the relationships between medievalism and three -isms of paramount importance for the history of the contemporary age, that are Catholic modernism, socialism, and fascism.
Click here to read this article
Beyond Hagiography: Gender and Violence in the Earliest Liturgy for Pelagius
By Kati Ihnat
Medieval Encounters
Pelagius is most famously known as the saint who was martyred by the tenth-century emir of Córdoba for not submitting to his advances. The story has fascinated historians of gender and sexuality for the ways in which it appears to challenge gendered standards of sanctity. But was this how Pelagius was remembered in the sources with which he was first venerated? This article looks beyond the hagiographical narrative that has mostly concerned historians to the existing liturgies for the saint as celebrated according to the Old Hispanic Rite, with a Mass and three distinct offices surviving in multiple manuscripts from early medieval Iberia. Close study of the liturgy reveals how liturgists consciously shaped the identity of Pelagius, borrowing materials and tropes from both male and female saints in order to anchor an unusual contemporary saint in old models.
Click here to read this article
Weaving in Late Fourteenth-Century Yorkshire: An Early Example of Proto-Industrialisation?
By John S. Lee
Yorkshire Archaeological Journal: A Review of History and Archaeology in the County
In 1399 an inquisition considered infringements of the York weavers’ guild monopoly over weaving coloured and striped woollen cloths within the county of Yorkshire. It detailed the nature and extent of rural cloth-making in Yorkshire at the close of the fourteenth century, a period recently identified as one of significant transition within the national economy. The inquisition provides an invaluable insight into the spatial distribution of the weavers, the volume of their production and its seasonal nature. The important roles played by women and immigrants within this industry are also illuminated through this document. Geographically, weaving was spread across much of the central part of the county. The inquisition reveals a pattern of production that was predominantly small-scale, of limited duration, and of limited output. The evidence provided by the inquisition offers a rare opportunity to examine proto-industrialisation within a late-medieval context.
Click here to read this article
“Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino”: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest
By Adam Mahler
Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” [Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine song” as an allusion to the Pinhal de Leiria, the pine forest that he planted—or so the story went. Though Portuguese historians and paleobotanists have debunked the Leiria forest’s origin story, a preponderance of documentary evidence from Denis’s reign suggests that the monarch recognized forests as poetically generative sites of political and social tension.
In this article, I chart ecocritical and new materialist paths through the “pine songs” of Denis and other Galician-Portuguese troubadours by examining the medieval forest in its cultural, commercial, and poetic dimensions. I contend that Denis’s pines and his poems are affectively and acoustically co-constituted, concluding that the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, particularly in its woman’s-voice compositions, encodes important ecological knowledge.
Click here to read this article
The role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
By Paul Schoon
Historical Research
This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, an aspect of the rising that has not been the subject of a detailed study. It considers the circulation of news in written and oral form and its importance in driving the rebellion. Sources suggest that the news of the revolt traversed the country quickly, moving at up to sixty-five miles a day, and its transmission is shown through an isopleth map to radiate outwards across the country from its point of origin in south-east England. Rumour is considered by means of a thought experiment using three examples drawn from rebel activities in London in June 1381. It thrived in the absence of news, particularly in a highly stressed environment. It is possible that rumour was used as a tactic by rebel commanders, who were able to generate and manipulate rumours to their own advantage.
Click here to read this article
The discovery of the church of Rungholt, a landmark for the drowned medieval landscapes of the Wadden Sea World Heritage
By Dennis Wilken, Hanna Hadler et al.
Scientific Reports
The UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea holds remains of a medieval cultural landscape shaped by interactions between man and natural forces. From the Netherlands to Denmark, human efforts of cultivating low-lying areas created a unique coastal landscape. Since the Middle Ages, storm floods widely drowned embanked cultural land and especially affected North Frisia (Germany), where once fertile marshland was permanently turned into tidal flats. One key region, the Edomsharde, was widely destroyed in 1362 AD. Medieval settlement remains still occur in the tidal flats around the island Hallig Südfall and are commonly associated with Edomsharde’s trading centre Rungholt—ever since a symbol for the region’s drowned landscapes and focus of this study.
We present a first-time comprehensive reconstruction of this medieval settlement by means of new geophysical, geoarchaeological and archaeological data. Our results reveal remains of up to 64 newly found and rectified dwelling mounds, abundant drainage ditches, a seadike, and especially the discovery of Edomshardes’s main church as important landmark in this former cultural landscape. These finds together with the documented imported goods confirm a thriving society, involved in transregional trade and thereby close a significant gap in medieval history not only for North Frisia, but the entire Wadden Sea region.
Click here to read this article
We found 34 open-access articles from June – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
See also our list of open-access articles from June
Top Image: This manuscript image depicts the end of the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt. British Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in July, which tell us about topics including heretical purse-makers and drowned villages.
This series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 34 open-access articles we found.
The Medieval Public Sphere and the Response to a Condemnation for Heresy in Bologna, 1299
By Teresa Barucci
The English Historical Review
Bologna, 1299. The purse-makers Bompietro and Giuliano are burned at the stake as heretics by the Dominican Inquisition. A discussion about the lack of fairness of the condemnation ensues and spreads all over the city. The outrage of the Bolognese community is such that an investigation into the disorders and a mass excommunication follow.
This article uses the Bolognese episode, for which a rich documentation survives in the form of inquisitorial records, as a lens through which to observe and comment on the phenomenon of the ‘public sphere’ (a term coined in Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit) in medieval Europe. The first aim of the article is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct a ‘public sphere’ in the specific context of the public response to the condemnation for heresy of the two purse-makers. In so doing, the article looks at the social composition and at the communication mechanisms of, and at the discussion taking place within, the Bolognese public sphere. Importantly, it proposes the idea that the Inquisition too was a public authority around which a public sphere could develop, in contrast to the focus on secular political institutions of the previous historiography.
The second aim is to build on the evidence presented to demonstrate that the notion of the ‘public sphere’ can be an effective tool for the study of the interaction between the people and public authorities in the pre-modern world—if the critical functions rather than the structural characteristics of the phenomenon are emphasised.
Click here to read this article
The Warfare Ideology of Ordeal: Another Form of Just War Thinking? Theory and Practice from the Early Middle Ages
By Mihaly Boda
Journal of Military Ethics
Studying the military thinking and military history of the Middle Ages, one can observe several forms of warfare ideologies. Three of these ideologies are the holy war ideology, the ideology of ordeal (or iudicium Dei), and the traditional just war theory. Every such ideology has the common characteristic of a stronger or weaker link to concepts of a Christian God, religion, or church. Beyond this common characteristic, the ideologies differ from each other in some key respects. The holy war ideology applies first and foremost the concept of God, traditional just war theory applies the concept of justice, and the ideology of ordeal relies on both the concepts of God and justice. This article presents the ideology of ordeal as a form of just war thinking, and describes its features through historical examples, through its essence, and in contrast to other ideologies.
Click here to read this article
The Political Economy of Seigneurial Lordship in Flanders, c.1250–1570
By Frederik Buylaert, Thijs Lambrecht, Klaas Van Gelder and Kaat Cappelle
Past & Present
The recent debate between Chris Wickham and Shami Ghosh exposes different interpretations of the political economy of Europe, with Wickham arguing for the persistence of the feudal economy up to about 1700, and Ghosh imagining a distinct phase in which economic development was not yet capitalist but was no longer decisively shaped by the demands of lords. This article contributes to the discussion with the story of Flanders, where two contrasting trajectories interlocked.
On the one hand, coastal Flanders saw the rise of agrarian capitalism from the fourteenth century onwards, when small-scale farms were amalgamated into large agricultural enterprises that relied on the wage-labour of dispossessed peasants and their descendants as well as temporary labour migration from nearby regions. Inland Flanders, by contrast, saw the persistence of a peasant society dominated by small-scale landownership. ‘Middle-class lordship’ was critically important for this divergence. The peasants of inland Flanders acquired an unusual measure of control over seigneurial courts and their regulatory capacities, using them to stimulate the commercialization of society while thwarting experiments with agrarian capitalism. The Flemish evidence thus complicates narratives about feudalism in Europe, showing that the spectrum of possibilities in the political economy of lordship deserves closer scrutiny.
Click here to read this article
A Local Translation in a Global World: Odoric of Pordenone, William of Solagna, and a Giant Tortoise in Fourteenth-Century Padua
By Philippa Byrne
Journal of Medieval History
Abstract: This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenth-century spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331). Odoric’s text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia. This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to the process of composition and likely audience. Odoric worked with a co-author and addressed a specifically Franciscan audience in the early fourteenth-century Veneto. The central priority of the text was to convey the ‘reality’ of a distant martyrdom, in Tana, India, in the absence of tangible relics to demonstrate the truth of that martyrdom. The account highlights some of the intellectual tensions produced as a narrative of universal mission – and martyrdom – became increasingly central to Franciscan identity.
Click here to read this article
Medievalism: Some Historiographical Insights into the Mirror and Its Reflection
By Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri
Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas
Research into ideological applications of the medieval period is well served by the notion of ‘medievalism.’ This concept indicates both the set of post-medieval representations of the Middle Ages and the field of scholarship investigating such representations. This is a burgeoning field of research that stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and is the subject of extensive debate. The first part of the article discusses some of the interpretive hypotheses and proposes a set of six hermeneutic tools from a variety of fields of study, which are usefully applied to medievalism: palimpsest, invented traditions, alterity, entangled history, broadened historiography, regimes of historicity.
The second part of the article penetrates deeper into the last of these hermeneutic tools, namely the concept of ‘regime of historicity’ elaborated by François Hartog. Medievalism stands out as a distinct ‘regime of historicity’ which relates to a significant part of various -isms (including cultural, social and political movements) from the 19th century to the first decades of the 21st century, i.e., from romanticism onward. Three applied examples follow: the essay discusses the relationships between medievalism and three -isms of paramount importance for the history of the contemporary age, that are Catholic modernism, socialism, and fascism.
Click here to read this article
Beyond Hagiography: Gender and Violence in the Earliest Liturgy for Pelagius
By Kati Ihnat
Medieval Encounters
Pelagius is most famously known as the saint who was martyred by the tenth-century emir of Córdoba for not submitting to his advances. The story has fascinated historians of gender and sexuality for the ways in which it appears to challenge gendered standards of sanctity. But was this how Pelagius was remembered in the sources with which he was first venerated? This article looks beyond the hagiographical narrative that has mostly concerned historians to the existing liturgies for the saint as celebrated according to the Old Hispanic Rite, with a Mass and three distinct offices surviving in multiple manuscripts from early medieval Iberia. Close study of the liturgy reveals how liturgists consciously shaped the identity of Pelagius, borrowing materials and tropes from both male and female saints in order to anchor an unusual contemporary saint in old models.
Click here to read this article
Weaving in Late Fourteenth-Century Yorkshire: An Early Example of Proto-Industrialisation?
By John S. Lee
Yorkshire Archaeological Journal: A Review of History and Archaeology in the County
In 1399 an inquisition considered infringements of the York weavers’ guild monopoly over weaving coloured and striped woollen cloths within the county of Yorkshire. It detailed the nature and extent of rural cloth-making in Yorkshire at the close of the fourteenth century, a period recently identified as one of significant transition within the national economy. The inquisition provides an invaluable insight into the spatial distribution of the weavers, the volume of their production and its seasonal nature. The important roles played by women and immigrants within this industry are also illuminated through this document. Geographically, weaving was spread across much of the central part of the county. The inquisition reveals a pattern of production that was predominantly small-scale, of limited duration, and of limited output. The evidence provided by the inquisition offers a rare opportunity to examine proto-industrialisation within a late-medieval context.
Click here to read this article
“Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino”: The Ecopoetics of the Galician-Portuguese Pine Forest
By Adam Mahler
Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies
Denis of Portugal’s “Ai flores, ai flores do verde pino” [Oh flowers, oh flowers of the green pine] is the medieval monarch’s most famous cantiga de amigo and one of the best-known songs of the Galician-Portuguese tradition. Many have read Denis’s “pine song” as an allusion to the Pinhal de Leiria, the pine forest that he planted—or so the story went. Though Portuguese historians and paleobotanists have debunked the Leiria forest’s origin story, a preponderance of documentary evidence from Denis’s reign suggests that the monarch recognized forests as poetically generative sites of political and social tension.
In this article, I chart ecocritical and new materialist paths through the “pine songs” of Denis and other Galician-Portuguese troubadours by examining the medieval forest in its cultural, commercial, and poetic dimensions. I contend that Denis’s pines and his poems are affectively and acoustically co-constituted, concluding that the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition, particularly in its woman’s-voice compositions, encodes important ecological knowledge.
Click here to read this article
The role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381
By Paul Schoon
Historical Research
This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the role of news and rumour during the Peasants’ Revolt, an aspect of the rising that has not been the subject of a detailed study. It considers the circulation of news in written and oral form and its importance in driving the rebellion. Sources suggest that the news of the revolt traversed the country quickly, moving at up to sixty-five miles a day, and its transmission is shown through an isopleth map to radiate outwards across the country from its point of origin in south-east England. Rumour is considered by means of a thought experiment using three examples drawn from rebel activities in London in June 1381. It thrived in the absence of news, particularly in a highly stressed environment. It is possible that rumour was used as a tactic by rebel commanders, who were able to generate and manipulate rumours to their own advantage.
Click here to read this article
The discovery of the church of Rungholt, a landmark for the drowned medieval landscapes of the Wadden Sea World Heritage
By Dennis Wilken, Hanna Hadler et al.
Scientific Reports
The UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea holds remains of a medieval cultural landscape shaped by interactions between man and natural forces. From the Netherlands to Denmark, human efforts of cultivating low-lying areas created a unique coastal landscape. Since the Middle Ages, storm floods widely drowned embanked cultural land and especially affected North Frisia (Germany), where once fertile marshland was permanently turned into tidal flats. One key region, the Edomsharde, was widely destroyed in 1362 AD. Medieval settlement remains still occur in the tidal flats around the island Hallig Südfall and are commonly associated with Edomsharde’s trading centre Rungholt—ever since a symbol for the region’s drowned landscapes and focus of this study.
We present a first-time comprehensive reconstruction of this medieval settlement by means of new geophysical, geoarchaeological and archaeological data. Our results reveal remains of up to 64 newly found and rectified dwelling mounds, abundant drainage ditches, a seadike, and especially the discovery of Edomshardes’s main church as important landmark in this former cultural landscape. These finds together with the documented imported goods confirm a thriving society, involved in transregional trade and thereby close a significant gap in medieval history not only for North Frisia, but the entire Wadden Sea region.
Click here to read this article
We found 34 open-access articles from June – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
See also our list of open-access articles from June
Top Image: This manuscript image depicts the end of the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt. British Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175
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