What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in January, which range from the population of Iceland to dual use furniture in a Czech church.
This ongoing 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 58 open-access articles we found.
The position of Gothic organs in Notre-Dame de Paris: An archeoacoustic simulation study
By C. d’Alessandro, E.K. Canfield-Dafilou, S.S. Mullins and B.F.G. Katz
Applied Acoustics
This study examines the acoustic effects of Gothic pipe organ placement within the late medieval architecture of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. A historically informed geometric acoustic model of the cathedral is used for numerical simulations. The liturgical choir and nave are furnished in a medieval style consistent with the period, including wooden stalls, tapestries, a rood screen, and walls enclosing the chancel. Historical evidence for the positions and dimensions of 14th- and 15th-century organs informs the modelled organ sound source used in the simulations.
The acoustic effects of six organ positions (on the western tribune, as a swallow’s nest on the south wall, on the rood screen, in the southern transept, and above the northern stalls in the choir), three elevation levels (ground level, triforium, and clerestory), and two occupancy conditions (occupied and unoccupied) are evaluated. Variations in sound pressure level (SPL) and centre time are analysed across the ground level. The results reveal significant effects of organ position on audibility, elevation on clarity, and occupancy on sound intensity and clarity. These findings inform discussions on the musical and political motivations behind organ placement in Gothic cathedrals and their acoustic implications.
Marrying heiresses in the reign of Philippe Auguste: aristocratic marital strategy in the counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre
By Charlotte H Crouch
French History
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a number of aristocratic women inheriting important lands in France. Their marriages carried the highest political importance. King Philippe Auguste (1180–1223) is often credited as the first king to use these heiresses and their marriages to control the aristocracy and extend the Capetian realm, with the families exercising no agency.
This article questions the extent of this control by focusing on one family, the comital family of Nevers, who experienced almost a century of female inheritance. Charters and letters show each member of the comital family reacting to local circumstances through its marital strategies. At a tumultuous time in the family’s history, it was able to manipulate the secular and ecclesiastical rules concerning marriage to navigate an intra-familial inheritance dispute. The family’s marital strategy reveals multiple layers of control: marriage played an essential role in the comital family’s strategies, with important roles for all members.
The subject of the article is two systems of acoustic vessels from the Church of St. Gall in Myšenec, which is associated with the production of the so-called Zvíkov and Písek architectural workshop, and All Saints Church in Kovářov in South Bohemia. These vessels, built into the vault, were placed with their rim facing the interior of the presbytery and their bottom in the space of the attic at the same time as the construction of the vault and were probably intended to improve the acoustics of the interior of the presbytery. In the foreign synthesising literature, examples are described of custom-made vessels as well as secondarily used household vessels, i.e. those primarily intended for food storage.
The paper aims to precisely determine the primary role of the vessels found in the two studied churches by detecting the hypothetical presence of food residues in them. Samples were taken from the inner surfaces of the vessels and their analysis showed a weak signal of casein (milk) in one case and a strong signal of gliadin (grain) in the other. The multiple potential functions of the vessels embedded in the vaults are discussed in the context of Czech examples and foreign research on acoustic vessels.
Sutton Hoo and Syria: The Anglo-Saxons Who Served in the Byzantine Army?
By Helen Gittos
The English Historical Review
The Sutton Hoo ship burial is one of the most famous examples of a group of lavishly furnished graves of the late sixth and early seventh centuries in south-east England. The discovery in 2003 of another, at Prittlewell (in Southend, Essex), and its publication in 2019, has brought our knowledge of them into sharper focus. One of the characteristics of these burials is that they tend to contain objects that were made in the eastern Mediterranean which were current, rather than old, when buried, and were of very unusual types.
This article argues that they were acquired by men who were recruited into the Byzantine army in 575 to serve on the eastern front against the Sasanians. Those who returned brought back with them metalwork and other items which were current, and distinctive, and not the kinds of things that were part of normal trading networks. This opens up a startlingly new view onto early medieval British history.
The Role of the Beguine Movement in the Commemoration of the Dead in Douai, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
By Mary Anne Gonzales
Medievalista
Commemoration and caritas were deeply intertwined and in Douai, this relationship was evident in the strategies that testators employed between 1228 and 1362. During this period, Douaisiens’ commemorative strategies brought together existing and new religious institutions and intercessors responsible for the salvation of the parish community. At a time when the penitential movement in the town was flourishing, testators considered beguines as among those efficacious in interceding for their souls. Testators requested pittances, simple prayers, and funerary services. The women performed these services alongside many other intercessors, including the parish church and its personnel, the mendicant orders, and the common poor. Thus, this period in Douai involved the formation of a network of commemoration in which intercessors, including beguines, contributed to the salvation of parishioners.
Iceland’s demographic transition: from turf houses to too many tourists
By Timothy Heleniak
Polar Record
Iceland was one of the last places in Europe to be settled. It thus has a relatively short population history as it was completely depopulated until about 871. Harsh climatic conditions, periodic epidemics, and numerous natural disasters were not conducive to robust population growth on the island. This article traces the demographic transition of Iceland’s population from the initial settlement to the present. This is the transition from high to low birth and death rates as a population modernises. Iceland has an impressive literary and historical record-keeping tradition beginning with the Saga Age in the 900s. It also has long had a well-developed statistical system which allows the study of population trends much further back in time than many countries.
The results show slow population growth for much of Iceland’s history with many episodes of steep population decline. A series of technological innovations in the 19th century allowed the country to modernise, the population to grow, and its demographic situation to improve. Iceland has completed the demographic transition, the population is growing, in part due to high immigration, and it has some of the best demographic indicators in the world. Despite these favourable trends, the country faces some demographic challenges.
An ulus within an ulus: the afterlife of Ariq Böke’s appanage in the Mongol Empire (1252–1336)
By Michael Hope
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan’s dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan’s grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.
Earliest evidence for heavy metal pollution on wildlife in Middle Age Europe
By M. Robu, C. Mirea, D. Veres, S. Olive, M. Vlaicu, P. Telouk and J.E. Martin
Environmental Pollution
Effects of past anthropogenic metal pollution on the wildlife are understudied. We investigate trace element incorporation in the dentition of a 1000 BP-year-old brown bear from the Romanian Carpathians, an area known historically for strong metallurgical activities. Background values as well as unnatural high lead (Pb), lithium (Li) and zinc (Zn) levels in a circa 5‒6-year-old brown bear male were detected using trace element maps across its functional dentition. High-resolution elemental transects and histological sections reveal the seasonal extent of lead intake, which occurred during five recorded summers, i.e. when the animal was actively foraging. We interpret the elevated Pb, Li and Zn concentrations in the terminal growth lines as evidence for the earliest-known anthropogenic heavy metal pollution in a wild animal. Our study underlines the impact of early industrial activities in a large terrestrial omnivore, demonstrating that anthropogenic threats on wildlife were not solely driven by hunting or landscape modification during the most recent decades.
Curating the enemy? Re-reading the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens orientaux
By James Wilson
Crusades
Published under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres between 1872 and 1906, the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens orientaux contains partial editions and French translations of medieval Arabic sources relating to the crusading period. Today, the five volumes of the Recueil remain the only access point to several important texts for non-Arabists when writing the history of the crusades. This article examines a series of curatorial and linguistic choices made by the Recueil’s editors, and traces the impact of these decisions upon the field of crusade studies. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the nineteenth-century translations of Ibn al-ʿAdīm’s (d. 1262) Zubdat al-ḥalab min taʾrīkh Ḥalab (‘The Cream of the Milk of the History of Aleppo’).
The first part of the article provides an overview of the modern historiographical debates on the counter-crusade paradigm, the main analytical model used to interpret Islamic experiences of the Levantine crusading movement. The second part reviews the Recueil’s paratexts, related academic reports and editorial correspondence to reconstruct the chronology underpinning this influential translation project. The third part compares the translations themselves with the underlying Arabic manuscripts and editions, in order to evaluate the impact of specific linguistic choices and textual omissions. The conclusion then reflects upon how the nineteenth-century curation of medieval Arabic texts in the Recueil has shaped, and continues to shape, how modern crusade historians conceptualise and interact with this key source base.
Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’: Towards a critical and holistic approach
By Shao-yun Yang
Modern Asian Studies
The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.
We found 58 open-access articles from January – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in January, which range from the population of Iceland to dual use furniture in a Czech church.
This ongoing 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 58 open-access articles we found.
The position of Gothic organs in Notre-Dame de Paris: An archeoacoustic simulation study
By C. d’Alessandro, E.K. Canfield-Dafilou, S.S. Mullins and B.F.G. Katz
Applied Acoustics
This study examines the acoustic effects of Gothic pipe organ placement within the late medieval architecture of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. A historically informed geometric acoustic model of the cathedral is used for numerical simulations. The liturgical choir and nave are furnished in a medieval style consistent with the period, including wooden stalls, tapestries, a rood screen, and walls enclosing the chancel. Historical evidence for the positions and dimensions of 14th- and 15th-century organs informs the modelled organ sound source used in the simulations.
The acoustic effects of six organ positions (on the western tribune, as a swallow’s nest on the south wall, on the rood screen, in the southern transept, and above the northern stalls in the choir), three elevation levels (ground level, triforium, and clerestory), and two occupancy conditions (occupied and unoccupied) are evaluated. Variations in sound pressure level (SPL) and centre time are analysed across the ground level. The results reveal significant effects of organ position on audibility, elevation on clarity, and occupancy on sound intensity and clarity. These findings inform discussions on the musical and political motivations behind organ placement in Gothic cathedrals and their acoustic implications.
Click here to read this article
Marrying heiresses in the reign of Philippe Auguste: aristocratic marital strategy in the counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre
By Charlotte H Crouch
French History
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a number of aristocratic women inheriting important lands in France. Their marriages carried the highest political importance. King Philippe Auguste (1180–1223) is often credited as the first king to use these heiresses and their marriages to control the aristocracy and extend the Capetian realm, with the families exercising no agency.
This article questions the extent of this control by focusing on one family, the comital family of Nevers, who experienced almost a century of female inheritance. Charters and letters show each member of the comital family reacting to local circumstances through its marital strategies. At a tumultuous time in the family’s history, it was able to manipulate the secular and ecclesiastical rules concerning marriage to navigate an intra-familial inheritance dispute. The family’s marital strategy reveals multiple layers of control: marriage played an essential role in the comital family’s strategies, with important roles for all members.
Click here to read this article
Food detection in medieval acoustic vessels
By Filip Facincani and Jaroslav Pavelka
Archeologické Rozhledy
The subject of the article is two systems of acoustic vessels from the Church of St. Gall in Myšenec, which is associated with the production of the so-called Zvíkov and Písek architectural workshop, and All Saints Church in Kovářov in South Bohemia. These vessels, built into the vault, were placed with their rim facing the interior of the presbytery and their bottom in the space of the attic at the same time as the construction of the vault and were probably intended to improve the acoustics of the interior of the presbytery. In the foreign synthesising literature, examples are described of custom-made vessels as well as secondarily used household vessels, i.e. those primarily intended for food storage.
The paper aims to precisely determine the primary role of the vessels found in the two studied churches by detecting the hypothetical presence of food residues in them. Samples were taken from the inner surfaces of the vessels and their analysis showed a weak signal of casein (milk) in one case and a strong signal of gliadin (grain) in the other. The multiple potential functions of the vessels embedded in the vaults are discussed in the context of Czech examples and foreign research on acoustic vessels.
Click here to read this article
Sutton Hoo and Syria: The Anglo-Saxons Who Served in the Byzantine Army?
By Helen Gittos
The English Historical Review
The Sutton Hoo ship burial is one of the most famous examples of a group of lavishly furnished graves of the late sixth and early seventh centuries in south-east England. The discovery in 2003 of another, at Prittlewell (in Southend, Essex), and its publication in 2019, has brought our knowledge of them into sharper focus. One of the characteristics of these burials is that they tend to contain objects that were made in the eastern Mediterranean which were current, rather than old, when buried, and were of very unusual types.
This article argues that they were acquired by men who were recruited into the Byzantine army in 575 to serve on the eastern front against the Sasanians. Those who returned brought back with them metalwork and other items which were current, and distinctive, and not the kinds of things that were part of normal trading networks. This opens up a startlingly new view onto early medieval British history.
Click here to read this article
The Role of the Beguine Movement in the Commemoration of the Dead in Douai, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
By Mary Anne Gonzales
Medievalista
Commemoration and caritas were deeply intertwined and in Douai, this relationship was evident in the strategies that testators employed between 1228 and 1362. During this period, Douaisiens’ commemorative strategies brought together existing and new religious institutions and intercessors responsible for the salvation of the parish community. At a time when the penitential movement in the town was flourishing, testators considered beguines as among those efficacious in interceding for their souls. Testators requested pittances, simple prayers, and funerary services. The women performed these services alongside many other intercessors, including the parish church and its personnel, the mendicant orders, and the common poor. Thus, this period in Douai involved the formation of a network of commemoration in which intercessors, including beguines, contributed to the salvation of parishioners.
Click here to read this article
Iceland’s demographic transition: from turf houses to too many tourists
By Timothy Heleniak
Polar Record
Iceland was one of the last places in Europe to be settled. It thus has a relatively short population history as it was completely depopulated until about 871. Harsh climatic conditions, periodic epidemics, and numerous natural disasters were not conducive to robust population growth on the island. This article traces the demographic transition of Iceland’s population from the initial settlement to the present. This is the transition from high to low birth and death rates as a population modernises. Iceland has an impressive literary and historical record-keeping tradition beginning with the Saga Age in the 900s. It also has long had a well-developed statistical system which allows the study of population trends much further back in time than many countries.
The results show slow population growth for much of Iceland’s history with many episodes of steep population decline. A series of technological innovations in the 19th century allowed the country to modernise, the population to grow, and its demographic situation to improve. Iceland has completed the demographic transition, the population is growing, in part due to high immigration, and it has some of the best demographic indicators in the world. Despite these favourable trends, the country faces some demographic challenges.
Click here to read this article
An ulus within an ulus: the afterlife of Ariq Böke’s appanage in the Mongol Empire (1252–1336)
By Michael Hope
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
In 1206 Chinggis Khan replaced the warring factions of Mongolia with a single polity, the Great Mongol Realm (Yeke Mongqol Ulus). The ulus was ruled by a khan, who allocated pastures, households and revenues to his relatives as shares (qubi). Chinggis granted the first allocation to his brothers and senior sons in 1207 but many more redistributions took place in the coming decades. Many of these appanages grew so large that their holders challenged the khan’s dominance and even broke free of his control to form their own polities (uluses). This article will explore the fluidity of the Mongol appanage system by taking the qubi of Chinggis Khan’s grandson Ariq Böke (d. 1266) as a case study. The Ariq Bökids established their own secondary ulus in Inner Asia, before fragmenting and lending their support to neighbouring khans in the fourteenth century.
Click here to read this article
Earliest evidence for heavy metal pollution on wildlife in Middle Age Europe
By M. Robu, C. Mirea, D. Veres, S. Olive, M. Vlaicu, P. Telouk and J.E. Martin
Environmental Pollution
Effects of past anthropogenic metal pollution on the wildlife are understudied. We investigate trace element incorporation in the dentition of a 1000 BP-year-old brown bear from the Romanian Carpathians, an area known historically for strong metallurgical activities. Background values as well as unnatural high lead (Pb), lithium (Li) and zinc (Zn) levels in a circa 5‒6-year-old brown bear male were detected using trace element maps across its functional dentition. High-resolution elemental transects and histological sections reveal the seasonal extent of lead intake, which occurred during five recorded summers, i.e. when the animal was actively foraging. We interpret the elevated Pb, Li and Zn concentrations in the terminal growth lines as evidence for the earliest-known anthropogenic heavy metal pollution in a wild animal. Our study underlines the impact of early industrial activities in a large terrestrial omnivore, demonstrating that anthropogenic threats on wildlife were not solely driven by hunting or landscape modification during the most recent decades.
Click here to read this article
Curating the enemy? Re-reading the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens orientaux
By James Wilson
Crusades
Published under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres between 1872 and 1906, the Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens orientaux contains partial editions and French translations of medieval Arabic sources relating to the crusading period. Today, the five volumes of the Recueil remain the only access point to several important texts for non-Arabists when writing the history of the crusades. This article examines a series of curatorial and linguistic choices made by the Recueil’s editors, and traces the impact of these decisions upon the field of crusade studies. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the nineteenth-century translations of Ibn al-ʿAdīm’s (d. 1262) Zubdat al-ḥalab min taʾrīkh Ḥalab (‘The Cream of the Milk of the History of Aleppo’).
The first part of the article provides an overview of the modern historiographical debates on the counter-crusade paradigm, the main analytical model used to interpret Islamic experiences of the Levantine crusading movement. The second part reviews the Recueil’s paratexts, related academic reports and editorial correspondence to reconstruct the chronology underpinning this influential translation project. The third part compares the translations themselves with the underlying Arabic manuscripts and editions, in order to evaluate the impact of specific linguistic choices and textual omissions. The conclusion then reflects upon how the nineteenth-century curation of medieval Arabic texts in the Recueil has shaped, and continues to shape, how modern crusade historians conceptualise and interact with this key source base.
Click here to read this article
Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’: Towards a critical and holistic approach
By Shao-yun Yang
Modern Asian Studies
The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.
Click here to read this article
We found 58 open-access articles from January – 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 December
Top Image: Organs at Notre Dame de Paris. Photo by Eric Chan / Wikimedia Commons
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