What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in December, which range from the Norse in Greenland to the Wreck of the White Ship.
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 88 open-access articles we found.
The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West
By James Robert Burns
Journal of Late Antiquity
This paper examines the relationship of banditry with slavery and constructions of sanctity in the early medieval West. Eric Hobsbawm suggested that, across preindustrial societies, bandits were admired and supported as dispensers of justice. Yet this role seems more obviously fulfilled in Late Antiquity by saints. Where we do have bandits who appear to have been championed by the poor, they sometimes appear as failed holy men amid contests over religious authority. Indeed, the conceptual overlap between modern interpretations of the bandit and the holy man echoes their shared association with the wilderness in contemporary hagiography.
But this shared association leads to bandits usually appearing as the antithesis of saints rather than their allies in justice. In this light, the holy man emerges as the “anti-bandit”: a crucial aspect of the significance of saints at a time when brigandage threatened the activities of pilgrims and churchmen. Furthermore, that both slavers and fugitive slaves were characterized as brig-ands raises interesting questions about the supposed marginality of bandits. Overall, the early medieval evidence shows that banditry was a more heterogeneous phenomenon than Hobsbawm theorized.
Click here to read this article
The ends of history? Jerome, Geruchia, and the Rhine crossings
By Mateusz Fafinski
Early Medieval Europe
This article revisits Jerome’s treatment of the Rhine crossings of 406 in his letter to the widow Geruchia, and the broader issue of breaching the Roman limes. It argues that his description of the events in Gaul and on the border was framed to fit his notion of the history of salvation. Placing Jerome’s letter to Geruchia in its historical and theological setting, the paper questions the role of contemporary historical details in its composition. Jerome’s account was shaped by hearsay, memory, and tropes from other authors, including Ammianus Marcellinus, alongside the ways that Jerome thought about time, truth, and gender. In this way, the paper casts a new light on what we can say about the early fifth-century invasion of Gaul. The events of 406 are prone to misinterpretation without an analysis of Jerome’s philosophy of history.
Click here to read this article
Rethinking mothering and fathering in medieval and early modern europe
By Elizabeth Foyster
The History of the Family
This research note reviews the articles submitted as part of the Special Issue on Mothers and Fathers in Medieval and Europe. It notes common themes and also points to future directions for research in this expanding field.
Click here to read this article
Early Mamluk scholarship in the Islamic State’s magazine
By Tim Jacoby
Politics, Religion & Ideology
This paper traces out all the references to classical Islamic scholarship with the Islamic State’s flagship, English-language magazine. It finds that more than one-third of these relate to one man and two of his students, living in Damascus during the early part of the fourteenth century. This, it is argued, can be explained in four ways. Firstly, the Islamic State uses their work as a basis for its own governance agenda, especially its search for legitimacy and authority. Secondly, it points to their struggles against the authorities of the day as grounds for its more general call-to-arms, notably its focus on recruitment.
Thirdly, the Islamic State develops a wider narrative of diachronic comparison to ‘Mongolise’ its opponents and place itself at the vanguard of opposition to Western hegemony more broadly, and to its military policy in the Middle East in particular. Fourthly, it uses the internal divisions of the tumultuous early Mamluk period as a basis for the separatist claim that lies at the heart of the putative Caliphate’s strategy.
Click here to read this article
Earl Thorfinn of Orkney and the forgotten battle of 1058
By Tom Licence
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
Verses by Arnórr ‘jarls’-poet’, preserved in Orkneyinga saga, describe a battle in which Earl Thorfinn of Orkney fought the English south of the Isle of Man. The thirteenth-century saga-author associated these verses with a campaign supposedly fought in the 1030s or 1040s, but this account is doubtful. Turning to the Norwegian expedition of 1058, this article considers whether the verses might originally have referred to that campaign and later become linked with a different story. New readings of the key stanzas are proposed, and a new sequence, with consequences impacting on the chronology and circumstances of Thorfinn’s life and death. There are ramifications for discussions touching the saga tradition, Arnórr’s career, Malcolm (Máel Coluim) III Canmore’s career, and his marriage to Ingibjorg.
Click here to read this article
Marco Polo’s Baggage: Manuscripts, Doubts, and A Mongol Lady’s Headdress
By Christian de Pee
Journal of Song-Yuan Studies
For many years, I did not know what to do with Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324) or with his book. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, I read Ronald Latham’s translation of The Travels, published as a Penguin Classic, and found in it many details that seemed to prove the truthfulness of the account, such as the description of the Mongol penal regime of “seven strokes of the rod, or seventeen or twenty-seven or thirty-seven or forty-seven, ascending thus by tens to 107 in proportion to the magnitude of [the] crime.” But the footnotes to Latham’s translation made me apprehensive, as they referred to a variety of manuscripts, each of which appeared to contain unique details. What kind of text might Polo’s book be? Where did these unique details come from? Why didn’t all these details appear together in one manuscript? When Frances Wood published Did Marco Polo Go to China?
In 1995, the book did not convince me that Marco Polo had never traveled to the court of Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294), but it added to my apprehension about the transmission of his book. If the overlapping manuscripts left enough uncertainty to argue that Polo put his book together from “a Persian guidebook in the family’s possession, or Persian accounts of the Mongol conquests,” what could be known with certainty about Polo’s book? How might one use it in research, or even in teaching?
Click here to read this article
Ice and fire: Norse farming at the edge of the ice cap of the Western settlement in Greenland
By Elia Roulé, Natasha Roy, Ludovic Gesset, Camille Picard, Charly Massa, Emilie Gauthier
Quaternary Science Reviews
In the late 10th century, the Norse established settlements in Greenland that lasted until the mid-15th century, driven by more than just climatic factors. These settlers introduced agropastoral practices and engaged in long-distance trade, especially in the highly prized walrus ivory. The Eastern Settlement (Eystribyggd), at 60°N, proved to be the largest and best studied settlement, in contrast to the smaller Western Settlement (Vestribyggd) at 64°N, particularly in the Kapisillit area. The Western Settlement was likely abandoned earlier than the Eastern Settlement, although the exact timing remains debated.
The harsher climatic conditions may have pushed the western settlers towards a subsistence strategy focused, in addition to farming activities, on hunting and fishing. High-resolution multi-proxy analyses of lake sediments from Lake Itinera and Lake Pingu at Kapisillit, only 2 km away from the nearest Norse ruins, reveal subtle environmental changes and fire activity between 1000 and 1200 CE. These changes are characterised by a slight clearing of scrubland, including willows and alders, and an increased spread of herbaceous vegetation. Although the presence of coprophilous fungal spores suggests some herbivore activity, the data do not indicate significant grazing pressure. Instead, the declining values of these spores may reflect a decline in domesticated animals or increased hunting of wild herbivores, such as caribou, towards the end of the settlement period. After the mid-13th century, our results suggest a decrease in human influence, coinciding with the onset of the Little Ice Age. However, the reasons for the eventual abandonment of the Western Settlement remain unclear.
This study provides evidence from pollen data and records of fire activity and contributes to our understanding of the complex interactions between societies and the environment, highlighting grazing and hunting pressure as key factors in vegetation change at the Western Settlement. The results highlight the complexity of interpreting environmental data, particularly in distinguishing between anthropogenic impacts and natural variability during the Norse period.
Click here to read this article
‘Compassion Alone Moved Me to Tell This Story’: Orderic Vitalis on the Wreck of the White Ship
By Harriet Claire Strahl
Journal of Medieval History
The eight complete contemporary accounts of the 1120 wreck of the White Ship offer a unique opportunity to study emotions, remembrance and the writing of recent history in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman society. This essay analyses and compares Orderic Vitalis’ long, detailed and affective text with other accounts of the wreck and its aftermath at the royal court of Henry I to identify grief and commemoration for victims in a national and local context. It reveals Orderic’s unique, local viewpoint on this nationally significant disaster. All narrative elements in his account reflect upon the theme of duty, prompting readers to commemorate the local victims connected to Orderic’s monastic community. The account itself was an act of duty for Orderic, revealing how he conceived of his Historia Ecclesiastica as a commemorative communal history, and how he saw his role as a monk within both the monastic and wider community.
Click here to read this article
‘The Way We Were’: a journey in the last fifty years of Byzantine archaeology (1975-2024)
By Luca Zavagno
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
Just a few months after Barbra Streisand (as Katie) and Robert Redford (as Hubbell) featured in The Way We Were, Clive Foss published the first of his many seminal works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on the transformation experienced by twenty Anatolian cities cited by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Thematibus; the main idea was to prove that urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, came virtually to an end following the Persian invasion and retrenched to villages and fortresses until the tenth century. ‘These conclusions, of course, apply only to [Anatolia], but … they would prove valid for the whole Byzantine empire [and] they are based almost entirely on the results of archaeology.’
Click here to read this article
Masters of Mechanics: Exploring the Science of Ingenious Devices in the Abbasid Empire
By Alessia Zubani
Journal of Abbasid Studies
This article explores the historical development of mechanical inventions during the Abbasid period, a time of significant scientific and technological advancements in the medieval Islamicate world. It focuses on works addressing mechanical devices prevalent in the Abbasid context, such as water clocks, drinking vessels, and musical automata. The study has three main objectives: first, to provide an analysis of the intellectual and scientific environment of the time, discussing both renowned and lesser-known scholars; second, to investigate the connections between scholars and translators, as well as the interrelations among texts, highlighting the importance of teaching activities, patronage, and scientific collaborations; and third, to examine the relationship between translators, scientists, and mechanicians with the Abbasid court, showcasing the interest of princes and caliphs in mechanics and mechanical devices.
Click here to read this article
We found 88 open-access articles from November – 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 November
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in December, which range from the Norse in Greenland to the Wreck of the White Ship.
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 88 open-access articles we found.
The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West
By James Robert Burns
Journal of Late Antiquity
This paper examines the relationship of banditry with slavery and constructions of sanctity in the early medieval West. Eric Hobsbawm suggested that, across preindustrial societies, bandits were admired and supported as dispensers of justice. Yet this role seems more obviously fulfilled in Late Antiquity by saints. Where we do have bandits who appear to have been championed by the poor, they sometimes appear as failed holy men amid contests over religious authority. Indeed, the conceptual overlap between modern interpretations of the bandit and the holy man echoes their shared association with the wilderness in contemporary hagiography.
But this shared association leads to bandits usually appearing as the antithesis of saints rather than their allies in justice. In this light, the holy man emerges as the “anti-bandit”: a crucial aspect of the significance of saints at a time when brigandage threatened the activities of pilgrims and churchmen. Furthermore, that both slavers and fugitive slaves were characterized as brig-ands raises interesting questions about the supposed marginality of bandits. Overall, the early medieval evidence shows that banditry was a more heterogeneous phenomenon than Hobsbawm theorized.
Click here to read this article
The ends of history? Jerome, Geruchia, and the Rhine crossings
By Mateusz Fafinski
Early Medieval Europe
This article revisits Jerome’s treatment of the Rhine crossings of 406 in his letter to the widow Geruchia, and the broader issue of breaching the Roman limes. It argues that his description of the events in Gaul and on the border was framed to fit his notion of the history of salvation. Placing Jerome’s letter to Geruchia in its historical and theological setting, the paper questions the role of contemporary historical details in its composition. Jerome’s account was shaped by hearsay, memory, and tropes from other authors, including Ammianus Marcellinus, alongside the ways that Jerome thought about time, truth, and gender. In this way, the paper casts a new light on what we can say about the early fifth-century invasion of Gaul. The events of 406 are prone to misinterpretation without an analysis of Jerome’s philosophy of history.
Click here to read this article
Rethinking mothering and fathering in medieval and early modern europe
By Elizabeth Foyster
The History of the Family
This research note reviews the articles submitted as part of the Special Issue on Mothers and Fathers in Medieval and Europe. It notes common themes and also points to future directions for research in this expanding field.
Click here to read this article
Early Mamluk scholarship in the Islamic State’s magazine
By Tim Jacoby
Politics, Religion & Ideology
This paper traces out all the references to classical Islamic scholarship with the Islamic State’s flagship, English-language magazine. It finds that more than one-third of these relate to one man and two of his students, living in Damascus during the early part of the fourteenth century. This, it is argued, can be explained in four ways. Firstly, the Islamic State uses their work as a basis for its own governance agenda, especially its search for legitimacy and authority. Secondly, it points to their struggles against the authorities of the day as grounds for its more general call-to-arms, notably its focus on recruitment.
Thirdly, the Islamic State develops a wider narrative of diachronic comparison to ‘Mongolise’ its opponents and place itself at the vanguard of opposition to Western hegemony more broadly, and to its military policy in the Middle East in particular. Fourthly, it uses the internal divisions of the tumultuous early Mamluk period as a basis for the separatist claim that lies at the heart of the putative Caliphate’s strategy.
Click here to read this article
Earl Thorfinn of Orkney and the forgotten battle of 1058
By Tom Licence
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
Verses by Arnórr ‘jarls’-poet’, preserved in Orkneyinga saga, describe a battle in which Earl Thorfinn of Orkney fought the English south of the Isle of Man. The thirteenth-century saga-author associated these verses with a campaign supposedly fought in the 1030s or 1040s, but this account is doubtful. Turning to the Norwegian expedition of 1058, this article considers whether the verses might originally have referred to that campaign and later become linked with a different story. New readings of the key stanzas are proposed, and a new sequence, with consequences impacting on the chronology and circumstances of Thorfinn’s life and death. There are ramifications for discussions touching the saga tradition, Arnórr’s career, Malcolm (Máel Coluim) III Canmore’s career, and his marriage to Ingibjorg.
Click here to read this article
Marco Polo’s Baggage: Manuscripts, Doubts, and A Mongol Lady’s Headdress
By Christian de Pee
Journal of Song-Yuan Studies
For many years, I did not know what to do with Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324) or with his book. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, I read Ronald Latham’s translation of The Travels, published as a Penguin Classic, and found in it many details that seemed to prove the truthfulness of the account, such as the description of the Mongol penal regime of “seven strokes of the rod, or seventeen or twenty-seven or thirty-seven or forty-seven, ascending thus by tens to 107 in proportion to the magnitude of [the] crime.” But the footnotes to Latham’s translation made me apprehensive, as they referred to a variety of manuscripts, each of which appeared to contain unique details. What kind of text might Polo’s book be? Where did these unique details come from? Why didn’t all these details appear together in one manuscript? When Frances Wood published Did Marco Polo Go to China?
In 1995, the book did not convince me that Marco Polo had never traveled to the court of Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294), but it added to my apprehension about the transmission of his book. If the overlapping manuscripts left enough uncertainty to argue that Polo put his book together from “a Persian guidebook in the family’s possession, or Persian accounts of the Mongol conquests,” what could be known with certainty about Polo’s book? How might one use it in research, or even in teaching?
Click here to read this article
Ice and fire: Norse farming at the edge of the ice cap of the Western settlement in Greenland
By Elia Roulé, Natasha Roy, Ludovic Gesset, Camille Picard, Charly Massa, Emilie Gauthier
Quaternary Science Reviews
In the late 10th century, the Norse established settlements in Greenland that lasted until the mid-15th century, driven by more than just climatic factors. These settlers introduced agropastoral practices and engaged in long-distance trade, especially in the highly prized walrus ivory. The Eastern Settlement (Eystribyggd), at 60°N, proved to be the largest and best studied settlement, in contrast to the smaller Western Settlement (Vestribyggd) at 64°N, particularly in the Kapisillit area. The Western Settlement was likely abandoned earlier than the Eastern Settlement, although the exact timing remains debated.
The harsher climatic conditions may have pushed the western settlers towards a subsistence strategy focused, in addition to farming activities, on hunting and fishing. High-resolution multi-proxy analyses of lake sediments from Lake Itinera and Lake Pingu at Kapisillit, only 2 km away from the nearest Norse ruins, reveal subtle environmental changes and fire activity between 1000 and 1200 CE. These changes are characterised by a slight clearing of scrubland, including willows and alders, and an increased spread of herbaceous vegetation. Although the presence of coprophilous fungal spores suggests some herbivore activity, the data do not indicate significant grazing pressure. Instead, the declining values of these spores may reflect a decline in domesticated animals or increased hunting of wild herbivores, such as caribou, towards the end of the settlement period. After the mid-13th century, our results suggest a decrease in human influence, coinciding with the onset of the Little Ice Age. However, the reasons for the eventual abandonment of the Western Settlement remain unclear.
This study provides evidence from pollen data and records of fire activity and contributes to our understanding of the complex interactions between societies and the environment, highlighting grazing and hunting pressure as key factors in vegetation change at the Western Settlement. The results highlight the complexity of interpreting environmental data, particularly in distinguishing between anthropogenic impacts and natural variability during the Norse period.
Click here to read this article
‘Compassion Alone Moved Me to Tell This Story’: Orderic Vitalis on the Wreck of the White Ship
By Harriet Claire Strahl
Journal of Medieval History
The eight complete contemporary accounts of the 1120 wreck of the White Ship offer a unique opportunity to study emotions, remembrance and the writing of recent history in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman society. This essay analyses and compares Orderic Vitalis’ long, detailed and affective text with other accounts of the wreck and its aftermath at the royal court of Henry I to identify grief and commemoration for victims in a national and local context. It reveals Orderic’s unique, local viewpoint on this nationally significant disaster. All narrative elements in his account reflect upon the theme of duty, prompting readers to commemorate the local victims connected to Orderic’s monastic community. The account itself was an act of duty for Orderic, revealing how he conceived of his Historia Ecclesiastica as a commemorative communal history, and how he saw his role as a monk within both the monastic and wider community.
Click here to read this article
‘The Way We Were’: a journey in the last fifty years of Byzantine archaeology (1975-2024)
By Luca Zavagno
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
Just a few months after Barbra Streisand (as Katie) and Robert Redford (as Hubbell) featured in The Way We Were, Clive Foss published the first of his many seminal works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It focused on the transformation experienced by twenty Anatolian cities cited by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Thematibus; the main idea was to prove that urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, came virtually to an end following the Persian invasion and retrenched to villages and fortresses until the tenth century. ‘These conclusions, of course, apply only to [Anatolia], but … they would prove valid for the whole Byzantine empire [and] they are based almost entirely on the results of archaeology.’
Click here to read this article
Masters of Mechanics: Exploring the Science of Ingenious Devices in the Abbasid Empire
By Alessia Zubani
Journal of Abbasid Studies
This article explores the historical development of mechanical inventions during the Abbasid period, a time of significant scientific and technological advancements in the medieval Islamicate world. It focuses on works addressing mechanical devices prevalent in the Abbasid context, such as water clocks, drinking vessels, and musical automata. The study has three main objectives: first, to provide an analysis of the intellectual and scientific environment of the time, discussing both renowned and lesser-known scholars; second, to investigate the connections between scholars and translators, as well as the interrelations among texts, highlighting the importance of teaching activities, patronage, and scientific collaborations; and third, to examine the relationship between translators, scientists, and mechanicians with the Abbasid court, showcasing the interest of princes and caliphs in mechanics and mechanical devices.
Click here to read this article
We found 88 open-access articles from November – 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 November
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