What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in October, which tell us about topics including looking at manuscripts to the denizens of hell.
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 65 open-access articles we found.
(In-kind) Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: It’s not (all) about the money
By Jordan Claridge, Vincent Delabastita, Spike Gibbs
Explorations in Economic History
This paper explores the prevalence of in-kind wages in medieval labour markets and the underlying reasons for their use. Using a new dataset of agricultural labourers in medieval England, we demonstrate that, until the late fourteenth century, wages were recorded anonymously and most remuneration was done through in-kind payment. From the 1370s, however, labour remuneration shifted increasingly to cash and workers began to be named individually in the accounts which recorded their wages. We argue that these changes reveal a fundamental shift in labour relations in late medieval England, providing new empirical insights into the ‘golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death.
Click here to read this article
A Historian’s View of the Qurʾān
By Fred M. Donner
Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association
The Qurʾān, as a sacred text, poses distinctive challenges for the historian. The talk will begin by addressing briefly some of these challenges, in particular the limits of what the historian can say about sacred texts like the Qurʾān. The bulk of the talk will then discuss the challenges historians face in understanding the text’s transmission, as revealed both by Muslim tradition and from the evidence of the material record, and what implications the historian might draw from the Qurʾān’s content.
Click here to read this article
The English Lordship of Ireland and the Irish Sea World: Re-assessing the Origins of the Kildare Ascendancy, c.1390–c.1513
By Simon Egan
The English Historical Review
By 1500, the FitzGeralds of Kildare had established themselves as one of the most powerful entities in Ireland. A considerable body of work has been completed on the rise of this dynasty and their relations with the Tudor monarchy. Scholarship has focused primarily on the career of the eighth earl of Kildare, Gerald FitzGerald (d. 1513): his ability to forge alliances with both the colonial and native Irish nobility has been viewed as a core element in the establishment of his dynasty’s ascendancy. This article seeks to offer a new perspective on the establishment of Kildare power and locates the rise of the Kildare earls within a wider chronological and geographic framework of interpretation. In particular, it argues that the Kildares’ rise to prominence owed much to the earlier efforts of the Butler earls of Ormond. During the early 1400s, the Butlers forged a series of dynastic alliances with the nobility of Ireland’s western seaboard and helped to extend English influence into western Scotland. Following the Butlers’ ejection from Ireland in the 1460s, the FitzGeralds of Kildare appropriated many of these dynastic alliances. This article investigates the Butlers’ relations with the nobility of this ‘wider Irish Sea world’ and explores how events on Ireland’s western seaboard and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland shaped both the emergence and establishment of the Kildare ascendancy, as well as the development of England’s Irish colony during key phases of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.
Click here to read this article
Rayḥāna “The Mad”: Her Persona and Poetry
By Marlé Hammond and Geert Jan van Gelder
Der Islam
This article on the intriguing second-/eighth-century Iraqi Muslim ascetic poet Rayḥāna al-Majnūna, or Rayḥāna “The Mad,” consists of two parts: (1) a study contextualizing her persona and corpus and arguing that her historical and folk-loric identity as a black woman poet situates her at a creative nexus of wisdom, madness, and worship, and (2) appendices including translations of her poems and their anecdotal frameworks as they are preserved in three medieval sources: ʿUqalāʾ al-majānīn by Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Ḥabīb al-Nīsābūrī (d. 406 H/1015–16 CE), Ṣifat al-ṣafwa by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. circa 597 H/1201 CE), and Talkhīṣ al-mutashābihby al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463 H/1071 CE). It is hoped that the translations will give the reader direct knowledge of Rayḥāna’s distinctive poems and that the con-textual analysis will support informed interpretations of both the poems and the narratives in which they are embedded through its attention to various discursive prisms including textual traditions relating to mental health, religious devotion, and women’s writing.
Click here to read this article
Lustrous silk and dark wool: materiality, colour and the refashioning of St. Augustine in the medieval imagination
By Krisztina Ilko
Historical Research
Male bodies dressed in brilliant silk clothing conveyed messages of power in late medieval Italy. Previous scholars examined how these glamorous bodies reflected contemporary ideals of gentility and whiteness in a courtly context. This article shifts the attention from secular to religious contexts through examining the fictive materiality of the attire of St. Augustine. Silk and wool were two driving forces of the pre-industrial economy. Yet they are rarely considered together, and the discussion has focussed on production. Much less thought has been put into the social implications. By pulling together the threads of silk and wool, this article illuminates how St. Augustine’s dual silk-woollen attire transformed his body in the medieval imaginary and became a powerful visual tool to communicate messages of leadership, legitimacy and kinship.
Click here to read this article
Scabies: a historical perspective
By Joseph M. Lam and Wingfield Rehmus
International Journal of Dermatology
In their scoping review, the authors describe a health scourge that has plagued humans since antiquity. We can trace records of scabies infestation to biblical times, where the term zaraath (which initially referred to scaling skin but then became the origin of the word leprosy) likely referred to conditions including scabies infestation. This may explain how some were ‘cured’ of leprosy by bathing in the sulfur-rich Jordan River.
Click here to read this article
Were the tables of Ibn Isḥāq al-Tūnisī known in Paris c.1300?
By C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Journal for the History of Astronomy
Two Latin sources from the years around 1300 (John of Sicily’s commentary on the canons to the Toledan tables and a parchment slip documenting the astronomical activities and observations of Alard of Diest) contain brief references suggesting that Parisian scholars of this period had access to a set of astronomical tables for Tunis known as tabulae Benesac. According to the argument developed in this article, the tables in question probably corresponded to a Maghribī zīj originally created by Ibn Isḥāq al-Tūnisī in c.1222. The article goes on to discuss the possible channels of transmission that could have brought these tables to Paris as well as the potential implications of this finding for the history of Latin astronomy in the late 13th and early 14th century. Attention is also drawn to the presence of eclipse-related material from the Muqtabas zīj by Ibn al-Kammād in a Northern French manuscript of the second half of the 13th century, which was independently translated from the Arabic and accordingly does not derive from the well-known translation by John of Dumpno (Palermo, 1260).
Click here to read this article
Bishops, Canon Law and Governance in Tenth-Century England: the Constitutiones of Oda of Canterbury
By Edward Roberts
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury’s Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda’s sources, the text’s place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda’s statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.
Click here to read this article
Seen and named in narratives: denizens of hell in the early Middle Ages
By Danuta Shanzer
Early Medieval Europe
This article discusses a special type of narrative: encounters with named individuals in hell. The catchment is broad (Homer to Dante) but the focus is on the early Middle Ages. Philological and literary techniques elucidate and reinterpret a number of important visionary texts, Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, and Carolingian. Boniface, Ep. 115 re-emerges as a woman’s vision. Gregory of Tours, DLH 8.5 (Guntram’s banquet of 585), where Chilperic is sighted, finds a place within the Roman tradition of the dark or terrifying banquet and the dangerous telling of dreams. In the Visio Pauperculae (terminus post quem = 3 October 818), Queen Irmengard’s torture is reinterpreted by reference to the NT and to contemporary legal realia. An argument is made for an old emendation that required a romantic and courtly reading, including a fuzzy connection to Dante’s Inferno 5.
Click here to read this article
Medieval reading in the twenty-first century?
By Aengus Ward and Shiyu He
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Reading practices in medieval manuscripts have often been the subject of critical analysis in the past. Recent technological developments have extended the range of analytical possibilities; one such development is that of eye tracking. In the present article, we outline the results of an experiment using eye tracking technologies which were carried out recently in Spain. The analysis points to particular trends in the ways in which modern readers interact with medieval textual forms and we use this analysis to point to future possibilities in the use of eye tracking to broaden and deepen our understanding of the workings of the medieval page
Click here to read this article
We found 75 open-access articles from September – 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 September
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in October, which tell us about topics including looking at manuscripts to the denizens of hell.
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 65 open-access articles we found.
(In-kind) Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: It’s not (all) about the money
By Jordan Claridge, Vincent Delabastita, Spike Gibbs
Explorations in Economic History
This paper explores the prevalence of in-kind wages in medieval labour markets and the underlying reasons for their use. Using a new dataset of agricultural labourers in medieval England, we demonstrate that, until the late fourteenth century, wages were recorded anonymously and most remuneration was done through in-kind payment. From the 1370s, however, labour remuneration shifted increasingly to cash and workers began to be named individually in the accounts which recorded their wages. We argue that these changes reveal a fundamental shift in labour relations in late medieval England, providing new empirical insights into the ‘golden age of labour’ that followed the Black Death.
Click here to read this article
A Historian’s View of the Qurʾān
By Fred M. Donner
Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association
The Qurʾān, as a sacred text, poses distinctive challenges for the historian. The talk will begin by addressing briefly some of these challenges, in particular the limits of what the historian can say about sacred texts like the Qurʾān. The bulk of the talk will then discuss the challenges historians face in understanding the text’s transmission, as revealed both by Muslim tradition and from the evidence of the material record, and what implications the historian might draw from the Qurʾān’s content.
Click here to read this article
The English Lordship of Ireland and the Irish Sea World: Re-assessing the Origins of the Kildare Ascendancy, c.1390–c.1513
By Simon Egan
The English Historical Review
By 1500, the FitzGeralds of Kildare had established themselves as one of the most powerful entities in Ireland. A considerable body of work has been completed on the rise of this dynasty and their relations with the Tudor monarchy. Scholarship has focused primarily on the career of the eighth earl of Kildare, Gerald FitzGerald (d. 1513): his ability to forge alliances with both the colonial and native Irish nobility has been viewed as a core element in the establishment of his dynasty’s ascendancy. This article seeks to offer a new perspective on the establishment of Kildare power and locates the rise of the Kildare earls within a wider chronological and geographic framework of interpretation. In particular, it argues that the Kildares’ rise to prominence owed much to the earlier efforts of the Butler earls of Ormond. During the early 1400s, the Butlers forged a series of dynastic alliances with the nobility of Ireland’s western seaboard and helped to extend English influence into western Scotland. Following the Butlers’ ejection from Ireland in the 1460s, the FitzGeralds of Kildare appropriated many of these dynastic alliances. This article investigates the Butlers’ relations with the nobility of this ‘wider Irish Sea world’ and explores how events on Ireland’s western seaboard and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland shaped both the emergence and establishment of the Kildare ascendancy, as well as the development of England’s Irish colony during key phases of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.
Click here to read this article
Rayḥāna “The Mad”: Her Persona and Poetry
By Marlé Hammond and Geert Jan van Gelder
Der Islam
This article on the intriguing second-/eighth-century Iraqi Muslim ascetic poet Rayḥāna al-Majnūna, or Rayḥāna “The Mad,” consists of two parts: (1) a study contextualizing her persona and corpus and arguing that her historical and folk-loric identity as a black woman poet situates her at a creative nexus of wisdom, madness, and worship, and (2) appendices including translations of her poems and their anecdotal frameworks as they are preserved in three medieval sources: ʿUqalāʾ al-majānīn by Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Ḥabīb al-Nīsābūrī (d. 406 H/1015–16 CE), Ṣifat al-ṣafwa by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. circa 597 H/1201 CE), and Talkhīṣ al-mutashābihby al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d. 463 H/1071 CE). It is hoped that the translations will give the reader direct knowledge of Rayḥāna’s distinctive poems and that the con-textual analysis will support informed interpretations of both the poems and the narratives in which they are embedded through its attention to various discursive prisms including textual traditions relating to mental health, religious devotion, and women’s writing.
Click here to read this article
Lustrous silk and dark wool: materiality, colour and the refashioning of St. Augustine in the medieval imagination
By Krisztina Ilko
Historical Research
Male bodies dressed in brilliant silk clothing conveyed messages of power in late medieval Italy. Previous scholars examined how these glamorous bodies reflected contemporary ideals of gentility and whiteness in a courtly context. This article shifts the attention from secular to religious contexts through examining the fictive materiality of the attire of St. Augustine. Silk and wool were two driving forces of the pre-industrial economy. Yet they are rarely considered together, and the discussion has focussed on production. Much less thought has been put into the social implications. By pulling together the threads of silk and wool, this article illuminates how St. Augustine’s dual silk-woollen attire transformed his body in the medieval imaginary and became a powerful visual tool to communicate messages of leadership, legitimacy and kinship.
Click here to read this article
Scabies: a historical perspective
By Joseph M. Lam and Wingfield Rehmus
International Journal of Dermatology
In their scoping review, the authors describe a health scourge that has plagued humans since antiquity. We can trace records of scabies infestation to biblical times, where the term zaraath (which initially referred to scaling skin but then became the origin of the word leprosy) likely referred to conditions including scabies infestation. This may explain how some were ‘cured’ of leprosy by bathing in the sulfur-rich Jordan River.
Click here to read this article
Were the tables of Ibn Isḥāq al-Tūnisī known in Paris c.1300?
By C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Journal for the History of Astronomy
Two Latin sources from the years around 1300 (John of Sicily’s commentary on the canons to the Toledan tables and a parchment slip documenting the astronomical activities and observations of Alard of Diest) contain brief references suggesting that Parisian scholars of this period had access to a set of astronomical tables for Tunis known as tabulae Benesac. According to the argument developed in this article, the tables in question probably corresponded to a Maghribī zīj originally created by Ibn Isḥāq al-Tūnisī in c.1222. The article goes on to discuss the possible channels of transmission that could have brought these tables to Paris as well as the potential implications of this finding for the history of Latin astronomy in the late 13th and early 14th century. Attention is also drawn to the presence of eclipse-related material from the Muqtabas zīj by Ibn al-Kammād in a Northern French manuscript of the second half of the 13th century, which was independently translated from the Arabic and accordingly does not derive from the well-known translation by John of Dumpno (Palermo, 1260).
Click here to read this article
Bishops, Canon Law and Governance in Tenth-Century England: the Constitutiones of Oda of Canterbury
By Edward Roberts
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
This article challenges the view that canon law was insignificant in the development of tenth-century English administrative and judicial institutions through a new study of Oda of Canterbury’s Constitutiones, an important but neglected episcopal capitulary. Particular attention is paid to Oda’s sources, the text’s place in the legislative programme of King Edmund and the influence of wider European approaches to episcopal justice. The article shows that Oda’s statutes endorsed an emerging system of collaborative justice between secular and ecclesiastical elites, thus demonstrating that tenth-century English governance was informed by a wider range of normative legal traditions than usually thought.
Click here to read this article
Seen and named in narratives: denizens of hell in the early Middle Ages
By Danuta Shanzer
Early Medieval Europe
This article discusses a special type of narrative: encounters with named individuals in hell. The catchment is broad (Homer to Dante) but the focus is on the early Middle Ages. Philological and literary techniques elucidate and reinterpret a number of important visionary texts, Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, and Carolingian. Boniface, Ep. 115 re-emerges as a woman’s vision. Gregory of Tours, DLH 8.5 (Guntram’s banquet of 585), where Chilperic is sighted, finds a place within the Roman tradition of the dark or terrifying banquet and the dangerous telling of dreams. In the Visio Pauperculae (terminus post quem = 3 October 818), Queen Irmengard’s torture is reinterpreted by reference to the NT and to contemporary legal realia. An argument is made for an old emendation that required a romantic and courtly reading, including a fuzzy connection to Dante’s Inferno 5.
Click here to read this article
Medieval reading in the twenty-first century?
By Aengus Ward and Shiyu He
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Reading practices in medieval manuscripts have often been the subject of critical analysis in the past. Recent technological developments have extended the range of analytical possibilities; one such development is that of eye tracking. In the present article, we outline the results of an experiment using eye tracking technologies which were carried out recently in Spain. The analysis points to particular trends in the ways in which modern readers interact with medieval textual forms and we use this analysis to point to future possibilities in the use of eye tracking to broaden and deepen our understanding of the workings of the medieval page
Click here to read this article
We found 75 open-access articles from September – 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 September
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse