Medium Aevum articles from September 1995

Medium Aevum archives from September 1995

The presentation of clerical characters in Hartmann's 'Gregorius' and in 'Vie du pape Saint Gregorie.'
September 22, 1995... I As with so much medieval literature, nothing can be known for certain about the historical situation in which the narrative works of Hartmann von Aue were composed. There is no reliable evidence to indicate where they were written, for whom,...

An Anglo-Norman treatise on female religious.
September 22, 1995... London, British Library, MS Egerton 613 is a make-up volume containing seventy folios of the thirteenth century and has been meticulously described by Betty Hill.(1) It was acquired by the British Library from Sotheby's in May 1836, having...

'Leizla Rannveigar': gender and politics in the Otherworld vision.
September 22, 1995... I The medieval Otherworld vision, though highly conventional in form, is nevertheless capable of multiple signification, participating in and overlapping with other genres: confession, autobiography, satire, chronicle and sermon. The vision...

The literary use of religious formulae in certain Middle English romances.
September 22, 1995... lett vs thynk on hym that vs hathe bought And we shall please god ther-fore. (Stanzaic Morte Arthur, 3718-19) Formulae invoking the saving power of Christ's Passion and the creating vigour of God the Father are numerous in the Middle English...

'Pamphilus de amore' 'in Inglish Toung.'
September 22, 1995... It is a truism, yet often ignored, that the Middle Ages did not end abruptly in 1500. E. Ph. Goldschmidt, for instance, has analysed the publications of early printers and demonstrated 'that a great proportion of the surviving writings of the...

The pagan gods in Joseph of Exeter's 'De bello Troiano.'(Notes)
September 22, 1995... Discussions of Joseph of Exeter's epic poem on the Trojan War, De bello Troiano,(1) often refer to the poet's inclusion of pagan gods in his account of Troy's fall. The presence of these deities is in sharp contrast to Joseph's main source of...

Unrecorded Middle English verse in the library at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. (England)(Notes)
September 22, 1995... 1 'Spes mea in deo est' A box on the shelves of the manuscript library at Holkham Hall, labelled 'Covers of Old Law MSS.', contains five vellum wrappers removed from manuscripts. A group of law manuscripts on an adjacent shelf were all rebound...

La Estoria de Espana de Alfonso X: Creacion y evolucion.
September 22, 1995... In recent years it has become a commonplace in Spanish medieval studies to recall how much we owe to Ramon Menendez Pidal.(1) Nowhere is this more true than in the area of historiography known under the generic label 'Alphonsine' in reference to...

Version critica de la Estoria de Espana: Estudio y edicion desde Pelayo basta Ordono II.
September 22, 1995... In recent years it has become a commonplace in Spanish medieval studies to recall how much we owe to Ramon Menendez Pidal.(1) Nowhere is this more true than in the area of historiography known under the generic label 'Alphonsine' in reference to...

The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration and Use.
September 22, 1995... This distinguished collection of eleven essays originated in a conference held in 1990 by the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500. Its stated purpose is to elucidate various aspects of Latin biblical manuscripts up to the thirteenth...

A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to About AD 1000.
September 22, 1995... Welsh antiquity appears at first sight a chaotic tangle of history, pseudo-history, legend and pure invention. The process of disentangling it began earlier this century with G. J. Williams's exposure of the forgeries of Iolo Morganwg and with...

Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral Library.
September 22, 1995... The manuscripts in Hereford Cathedral's celebrated 'chained library' have since 1991 been in the custodianship of the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust, set up following a well-publicized agreement between the Dean and Chapter and the National Heritage...

The Making of Textual Culture: 'Grammatica' and Literary Theory, 350-1100.
September 22, 1995... Linguistic trends such as structuralism and semiotics have led to a new appreciation of grammar as a basic constituent of textual culture and literary theory. In view of this development it is not surprising that historians and philologists are...

Job, Boethius and Epic Truth.
September 22, 1995... Asserting the existence of a continuous tradition of heroic poetry from antiquity to the Renaissance, Ann W. Astell takes her definition of 'epic truth' from Stoic, Neoplatonic and early medieval Christian exegetes, who interpreted the Iliad, the...

Framing Medieval Bodies.
September 22, 1995... Perhaps the best single word to describe this collection of twelve essays is 'suggestive', though different essays accomplish this in different ways. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin say in their Introduction that 'bodies are as much the product, as the...

The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200.
September 22, 1995... The five voices are those of theologian Peter the Chanter, the compiler of the medical treatise Prose Salernitan Questions, Andreas Capellanus in the De amore, romancer Jean Renart, and Jean Bodel as an author of fabliaux. All pronounce...

Cultural Interplay in the Eighth Century: The 'Trier Gospels' and the Making of a Scriptorium at Echternach.
September 22, 1995... This monographic study examines in detail the codex of the Trier Gospels with a view to clarifying the many uncertainties which surround this eighth-century work. The author addresses such questions as the date and authorship of the work, its...

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend.
September 22, 1995... D. D. R. Owen, well-known for his translations from Chretien de Troyes, has written a fine addition to the already substantial shelf of Eleanor of Aquitaine biography. He has something brand new and convincing to argue: that Eleanor's personality...

Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian.
September 22, 1995... In 1936, Bernhard Bischoff noticed in a late eleventh-century composite manuscript of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (MS M. 79 sup.) several series of unprinted biblical commentaries. They embodied references to Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop...

Nine Medieval Latin Plays.
September 22, 1995... Peter Dronke's anthology of plays, which all will welcome with considerable enthusiasm, augurs most favourably for this new series, Cambridge Medieval Classics, of which this is the first volume and Dronke, fittingly, the general editor. Future...

Der Landgrafenpsalter: Vollstandige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat der Handschrift HB II 24 der Wurtttembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. Kommentarband.
September 22, 1995... Psalters are of particular importance among the books of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries because of the role they play in mediating between clerical and monastic practices and the religious life of the lay nobility. The five studies united...

Thomas de Chobham: Sermones.
September 22, 1995... This is a companion volume to Chobham's Summa de arte praedicandi, earlier produced by the Corpus Christianorum series by the same editor. Thomas of Chobham, sub-dean of Salisbury Cathedral, died between 1233 and 1236. He studied in Paris,...

Albertanus of Brescia: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Early Thirteenth Century.
September 22, 1995... Albertanus of Brescia (c. 1200 - after 1251) has hitherto been undervalued as a figure of the urban culture of northern Italy, evoking primarily the interest of local historians. James M. Powell's study presents a new image of the judge, legal...

The Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela.
September 22, 1995... William Melczer's book offers the first complete English translation of book v of the famous Liber Sancti Jacobi, a mid-twelfth-century 'collection of five compilations, actually books, on various subjects connected... by a double unifying...

In the Foreground: 'Beowulf.'
September 22, 1995... Eric Stanley has written well and often on Beowulf and this book represents a magisterial return to a text whose poetic merits the author justly celebrates. The book is divided into two main sections, carefully distinguishing 'what is said of...

Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History.
September 22, 1995... The familiar image of the religious foundation in Exeter before 1050 is that painted by the Leofric inventory of 1069 x 1072: a miserable institution, with few possessions of any kind, and only five old liturgical books. This image may in part be...

The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature.
September 22, 1995... The focus of this book is neither 'romance' nor 'language' but psychoanalysis. Gayle Margherita means to provide a forum 'wherein feminism, psychoanalysis, and historicism might productively intersect' (p. 161), but the most accurate of the...

'Piers Plowman': A Facsimile of the Z-Text in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 851.
September 22, 1995... MS Bodley 851 contains medieval Latin poems and a composite text of Piers Plowman, the first part of which is the unique text of what A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer regard as a version of the poem anterior to the A text. Their claim is accepted...

The Manor, the Plowman and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance English Literature.
September 22, 1995... The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd is an able and interesting production, directed primarily at the student of late medieval English literature, but one which will sometimes engage the historian as well. At its best it offers readings of...

Gender and Romance in Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales.'
September 22, 1995... This book explores the way medieval romances 'performed' gender, how they contributed to the complex processes in which masculinity and femininity were constituted, and how they related gender to other dimensions of social relations. For Susan...

Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition.
September 22, 1995... Narrative, Authority and Power follows close on the heels of Seth Lerer's Chaucer and his Readers and recent articles by Paul Strohm in offering new and fruitful ways of approaching the work of English writers of the last years of the fourteenth...

Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381.
September 22, 1995... The central focus of Steven Justice's attention, in this impressive study, is the group of short texts known as the 'Letters of John Ball'. He examines them from many points of view, and using a wide range of interpretative strategies, in...

Das Buch im Roman: Studien ze Buchverweis und Autoritatszitat in altfranzosischen Texten.
September 22, 1995... Max Grosse treats the notion of the livre 'book' and its synonyms and related terms in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, that is, at the time the French language was establishing itself in relation to the learned Latin tradition and the...

La 'Navigatio Sancti Brendani' e la sua fortuna nella cultura romanza dell'eta di mezzo.
September 22, 1995... Renata Anna Bartoli opens this study with an 88-page account of the Celtic background from which the Navigatio grew. First she deals at length with the idiosyncrasies of the relatively independent early Hibernian Church. Then she considers those...

De quatuordecim partibus beatitudinis (The Fourteen Parts of Blessedness).
September 22, 1995... This book offers a careful edition of three texts in three different languages that are nevertheless part of a common design: De quatuordecim partibus beatitudinis is chapter 5 of the early twelfth-century Dicta Anselmi, containing also some...

L'Art metrique de la chanson de geste: Essai sur la musicalite de recit.
September 22, 1995... Edward A. Heinemann aims to study epic formulaic variation in Old French from the standpoint of the relation between the 'grammatical unit' and the 'metrical unit', and the stylistic significance of this. By 'metrical', as applied to the line,...

The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c. 1300.
September 22, 1995... Whilst this book succeeds admirably in maintaining a coherent structure and provides a much-needed synthesis, it is in one sense a series of essays on Occitan society, rather than politics, studied mainly, but by no means exclusively, through the...

'Orgolh' -'umil': Untersuchungen zur lexicalischen Auspragung des Altokzitanischen im Sinnbereich des Selbstgefuhls.
September 22, 1995... This work derives from a thesis and centres on a study, based on onomasiological principles, of the terms orgolh and umil, although I do not see why it was not possible to achieve parity of grammatical level by opting for orgolhos or possibly...

Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: a Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy.
September 22, 1995... This collection of essays, published to mark Elspeth Kennedy's retirement, covers a wide variety of texts, genres and approaches, focusing on shifting emphases of translation, the interweaving of genres, and the reconfiguration of motifs....

'Protheselaus,' by Hue de Rotelande.
September 22, 1995... Protheselaus is a sequel to the much better-known Ipomedon (also edited by A. J. Holden, in 1979). Protheselaus is in fact one of Ipomedon's sons, and the story deals with his quest to win back his inheritance from his brother and be reconciled...

Girart d'Amiens: 'Escanor.' Roman arthurien en vers de la fin de XIIIe siecle.
September 22, 1995... This edition is the first to be published since that of H. Michelant (Tubingen, 1886). In its present state the poem runs to some 26,000 octosyllabics, to which two sizeable lacunae in the middle of the story would have added a further 1200...

The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission.
September 22, 1995... This book elicits a variety of medieval interpretations of the Roman de la Rose from a study of aspects of its manuscript versions. These include rubrication, readers' annotations, marginal glosses, interpolations, remaniements, illustrations and...

Le Lexique de Charles d'Orleans dans les 'Rondeaux.'
September 22, 1995... Like its predecessor, Daniel Poirion's Le Lexique de Charles d'Orleans dans les Ballades (Geneva: Droz, 1967), this lexicon is the fruit of much painstaking labour. The exhaustive glossary is preceded by a wide-ranging introduction, taking up...

Villon hier et aujourd'hui: Actes du colloque pour le cinq-centieme anniversaire de l'impression du 'Testament' de Villon.
September 22, 1995... Space not allowing consideration of all 23 articles, a selection must perforce be made. Longest is Paul Martin's excellent explication de texte of the Debat du cuer et du corps, whose several new interpretations must be incorporated into any...

Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric.
September 22, 1995... The substance of this volume will be of interest to anyone whose knowledge of medieval poetry is, like mine, based on critical editions rather than on acquaintance with the manuscripts from which they are derived. Getting to the substance of the...

Word and Drama in Dante: Essays on the Divina Commedia.
September 22, 1995... The eight essays collected here are based on lectures held in University College, Dublin from 1987 to 1990. With the exception of Antonio Corsaro (Universita Degli Studi, Urbino) and Dante Della Terza (formerly Irving Babbitt Professor of...

Perception and Passion in Dante's 'Comedy.'
September 22, 1995... It is a great challenge, when trying to bring philosophy to bear upon the reading of medieval literature, to introduce arcane or difficult concepts and yet avoid a presentation that is bifurcated and accentuates the gap between the informing...

Crestomatia iberorromanica: Textos paralelos de los siglos XIII-XVI.
September 22, 1995... Timo Riiho is professor of Iberoromance languages at the University of Helsinki; fluent in Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, English (and competent in Basque), author of two superb books on these languages' early history, he and his colleague Lauri...

The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the 'Libro de buen amor.'
September 22, 1995... The Libro de buen amor combines three alluring features: an obscure manuscript tradition, the author's call to the reader to understand rightly a meaning which appears protean, and constant allusions to the mechanics of reading and writing. John...

Die lateinisch-althochdeutsche Tatianbilingue Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen Cod. 56.
September 22, 1995... The Old High German translation of Tatian's Gospel Harmony has played an important part in the history of German scholarship because, for a number of reasons, its language, as represented by the bi-lingual Latin-German manuscript in St. Gall, was...

Festschrift Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger.
September 22, 1995... Die Festschrift, die ich hier anzuzeigen habe, ist in fast jeder Hinsicht aussergewohnlich: Sie gilt zwei Mediavisten gleichzeitig; deren Namen, Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger, ersetzen den Titel und stehen damit fur ein Programm; kein...

Die Literatur des Fruh- und Hochmittelalters in den Bistumern Passau, Salzburg, Brixen und Trient von den Anfangen bis zum Jahre 1273.
September 22, 1995... Fritz Peter Knapp's extensive, well-produced, readable and (since it may also be seen as a reference work) usable book is unusual as a literary history primarily because of its regionalist approach, as part of a projected seven-volume history of...

Enklaven-Exklaven: Zur literaischen Darstellung von Offentlichkeit und Nichtoffenlichkeit im Mittelalter: Interpretationen, Motiv- und Terminologiestudien.
September 22, 1995... This book is a contribution to the recent discussion on the public and nonpublic realms in the Middle Ages, based mainly on literary evidence and ranging from early Middle High German to the sixteenth century. Rudiger Brandt concedes that the...

Heinrich von Veldeke und Ovid.
September 22, 1995... In matters of literary taste the twelfth century was an aetas Ovidiana, and Heinrich von Veldeke is often adduced as one of the age's German exponents. Yet, remarks Renate Kistler at the beginning of her book, Veldeke's real relationship to Ovid...

'Wort unde werc': Studien zum narrativen Diskurs im 'Parzival' Wolframs von Eschenbach.
September 22, 1995... Alexandra Stein's study provides yet more evidence of the continuing fascination of the 'vielgeruhmte und -gerugte "Dunkelheit", die Wolframs Dichtung [Parzival] auszeichnet' (p. 15). This attempt at projecting light into the darkness focuses...

Heinrich Steinhowels 'Esopus' und seine Fortsetzer: Unterschungen zu einem Bucherfolg der Fruhdruckzeit.
September 22, 1995... This book, a slightly revised and expanded version of a thesis written at Munster under Klaus Grubmuller, deals primarily with the Esopus of Heinrich Steinhowel, a substantial collection of Aesopic fables and other comparable texts which was...

Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, c. 970-c. 1130.
September 22, 1995... This book is a notable contribution both to the literature of the crusades and to French regional studies. While, moreover, the author uses a wide range of sources, including chronicles, hagiography and conciliar decrees, the main weight of this...