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The paper focuses on specific case studies concerning the representation of the figure of the poor in bishop Gregory of Tours’ ‘Libri Historiarum’. The analysis of this source demonstrates how the needy, although on the edge of society, nevertheless constituted a significant spiritual resource for those who wanted to ensure the purification from their sins through alms, especially the richest. This constituted a dynamics of reciprocal remuneration through which, on the one hand, the suffering of the indigent was made less arduous by the charity of the divites ; on the other hand, the pauperes themselves were believed to act in favour of their earthly benefactors in the afterlife. Although certainly marginal figures, the poor were not, therefore, completely excluded from Merovingian society in the sixth century. Rather, in the Gaul of the ‘Libri Historiarum’, an attempt was made to offer them adequate assistance thanks to the concrete measures taken by those who, whether lay or ecclesiastical, recognised, as Peter Brown has pointed out, the figure of Christ in every needy. Such benefactors were able to offer help to those who extended their hands to receive alms. At the same time, they earned a credit for the salvation of their souls to enter the kingdom of heaven. The different social function of the poor, as illustrated by Gregory of Tours, finds a full correspondence in the theological and social vision of other illustrious Christian authors of the sixth century, such as bishop Caesarius of Arles and, above all, Pope Gregory the Great. These maintained that, according to divine providence, the inferior pay respect to the superior and the superior show benevolence towards the inferior, thus creating a single concordant harmony. The paper, therefore, highlights the different social functions of pauperes both by studying some specific figures of indigents and by examining the ecclesiastical mentality concerning the general question of poverty and its effects on marginalisation.

So far, the history of early Medieval glassmakers has mainly been derived from archaeological sources. Significant in this context was, more than half a century ago, the discovery of a new glass recipe, which began to spread in Europe from the ‘deepest’ early Middle Ages; the question of how this could develop is still subject of various discussions. A new contribution was published by Alexis Wilkin in 2019. According to this contribution, the early Medieval glass artisans owed the technological foundations of their new recipe to their collaboration with metal artisans. There is some clear evidence for this theory, but besides the technical innovation the social conditions of the artisans should not be forgotten. The glassmakers of the early Middle Ages were not free entrepreneurs, in the historical texts they are dependent on their landlords. This dependency, however, gives rise to a purely historical method of investigation: new finds of early Medieval glassworks manufactured according to the altered glass recipe can be assigned to the territories of specific landlords. This paper examines the extent to which family connections can be made visible in the passing on of glassmakers belonging to these families, perhaps also in the development of the new glass recipe.

Ancient statues continued to be visible in the cityscape of Constantinople after Late Antiquity. Myths and legends often arose around them, as their original meaning and designation had been forgotten. This article discusses examples from the early and middle Byzantine periods in order to show which functions statues assumed in the understanding of imperial power and which messages they could convey. It is not surprising that statues were able to influence the public discourse on the one hand, and that the emperor could exercise dominion and assert his sovereignty of opinion with these visible monuments on the other.

Christian theologians were involved in anti-Jewish arguments almost since the ‘parting of the ways’ of the two religions. In late antiquity and the early middle ages, anti-Jewish arguments were based almost exclusively on Biblical quotations, which were adduced as evidence meant to substantiate the Christian interpretation of scripture. It was only in the scholastic period that new forms of evidence were included in the traditional argument Adversus Iudaeos , which were derived from the recourse to reason. The Jewish figures presented by Christian authors within their writings are constructed entirely according to Christian assumptions and prejudices; only rarely do we get any real Jewish voices representing points of view close to any kind of Jewish reality. This only changed when growing numbers of Jews converted to Christianity in the high middle ages; Jewish converts drew the attention of Christian authorities to rabbinic literature. At first, the Talmud was targeted as a sinister text allegedly undermining theological truth, but later it was appropriated by Christian propagandists, who tried to base their anti-Jewish arguments on the post-biblical canon of Rabbinic Judaism. The article analyses the gradual expansion of anti-Jewish evidence; in particular, it highlights turning points when anti-Jewish strategies tried to include new methods and media to substantiate the credibility of Christian claims to monopolise religious truth. The Jewish side reacted against such attempts by reinterpreting and rewriting the history of anti-Christian Jewish arguments, notably on the occasion of the Paris Talmud trial. The redirection of Christian-Jewish arguments in the high middle ages provides ample evidence for the study of contesting truths, the substantiation and subversion of validity claims, as well as the rewriting of history in order to further political aims.

The history of medieval economic sanctions is currently both known and unknown. Many instances of their deployment have been acknowledged or analysed in the context of the conflicts they were part of, like the 1205/1206 blockade of the Rhine as an element in the struggle between Philipp of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick. On the other hand, research in Medieval Studies that puts economic sanctions centre stage is still an emerging field. This paper argues that a broader investigation of episodes of economic sanctioning in the narrative sources is a sensible next step to develop this field, since it would bring the triple advantages of expanding its current geographical and prosopographical scope beyond the ecclesiastic Mediterranean ( 1 ), of putting its currently prevailing focus on normative texts into context ( 2 ), and of obviating the more unnecessary pessimisms currently characterising evaluations of medieval economic sanctions ( 3 ). To show the potential of narrated medieval sanctions episodes to inform our understanding of economic thinking around medieval economic sanctions, three examples from 13 th -century historiography are analysed: the above-mentioned blockade of the Rhine, a smugglers’ tale in Matthew Paris’s ‘Cronica Majora’ against the backdrop of papal embargo legislation, and Salimbene of Parma’s report on third-party participation in a Venetian blockade of the river Po.

Lutwin’s late 13 th century account of the lives and deaths of the protoplasts and their first descendants, ‘Eva und Adam’, employs traits and literary techniques usually associated with vernacular courtly literature to convey its religious message to an audience of German speaking nobility. Such techniques include the amplification of the source material by adding newly invented sequences to the narrative’s plot as well as a highly self-conscious narrator, reflecting on his role as a mediator of divine revelations while, at the same time, openly exhibiting his ability to orchestrate the events and characters within his narrative. For decades, the scientific community has been split over the question whether these features may present evidence that contemporaries might have viewed the majority of courtly epics and romance as purely fictional. However, considering the religious nature of Lutwin’s themes and statements, it seems unlikely to assume that a medieval audience had to actively suspend their disbelief in order to accept courtly adaptations of biblical stories. Applying the modern dichotomy between factuality and fictionality therefore leads us to regard Lutwin’s ‘Eva und Adam’ as a paradoxical text riddled with inconsistencies. The concept of ‘fideales Erzählen’, recently introduced by Elke Koch, provides an alternative and potentially more adequate means of describing the historical modes of conceiving and perceiving premodern religious literature. Accordingly, instead of empirical verifiability being the main criteria in determining the status of factual or fictional texts respectively, faith, divine inspiration and adherence to common orthodoxy could, in the notion of a medieval audience, enable authors to present truthful insights into otherwise unattainable religious truths. Based on Koch’s deliberations, this paper re-evaluates several aspects of Lutwin’s ‘Eva und Adam’ – most notably the conception of its narrator – which in the past would have been considered as traits of fictional literature. It can be shown that, although Lutwin acts as a conscious arranger of his narration, his account’s proclaimed verisimilitude remains unchallenged.

With his ‘Ovidius moralizatus’ ( c. 1340 ), a Christian-allegorical interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petrus Berchorius ( Pierre Bersuire ) significantly contributed to the rehabilitation of Classic mythology across Christian Europe, and the treatise was widely distributed in various manuscripts for almost two centuries. When it first appeared in printing in 1509, however, the book encountered a significantly different intellectual environment, and it became involved in the dispute between traditionally minded Dominicans and a group of pre-reformation humanists which escalated in the ( in- )famous ‘Pfefferkorn controversy’ at Cologne university. Its humanist critics mocked the work of the alleged Dominican Berchorius ( in fact, he had been a Benedictine ) in their famous satire ‘Epistolae obscurorum virorum’, ridiculing Berchorius’ Christian interpretation of Classical mythology.

The complex manuscript tradition of Philostratus’ ‘Letters’ cause a row of problems and uncertainties: it is unclear, for example, which of the several surviving versions of the letter collection is the original one, which sequence of the letters is authorial, which version of some letters that have survived in different lengths is authentic, why some letters differ that much in form and content from others, and, last but not least, if the collection was written by Philostratus at all. These questions seem to pose insurmountable difficulties for the project of a new edition. Therefore, we still rely on editions from the nineteenth century for Philostratus’ ‘Letters’. The question is whether the problems of the formation of the epistolary corpus and the evaluation of its multiple versions can be explained by traditional textual criticism. I argue that a codicological, palaeographical, and historical examination of the individual textual witnesses could shed new light on the open research questions by focusing on the overall context, position, and function of Philostratus’ ‘Letters’ in each manuscript. At the same time, research on the still uncertain purpose and function of the ‘Letters’ could possibly contribute to understand the mechanisms of ( manuscript ) tradition of the corpus.

It is well known that Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscript letter collections had a didactic function serving as manuals on epistolary art. An important task is to examine how and to what extent this function influenced the structure of collections and the method of reworking epistolary material. The subject of the present paper is the letter collection surviving in cod. Heid. Pal. gr. 356 ( 13 th c. ). The collection contains Pseudo-Libanios’ ‘Epistolary Styles’, letters of Phalaris, Libanios, Gregory of Nazianzos, Symeon Logothetes, Michael Psellos and other authors. The collection is analyzed in terms of its content and structure. Its following features are revealed: Firstly, from letters of different authors, those are selected that correspond to common epistolary situations. Most of the letters presented in the collection are recommending, reproaching for silence, accompanying the gift, etc. Secondly, letters belonging to the same type or epistolary situation are often grouped together. Thirdly, letters are reworked so that it is more convenient to use them as models. Gregory of Nazianzos’ letters are presented in short excerpts, many of them being transformed so that they serve as models for certain letter types – friendly, commendatory, etc.

The letters of Phalaris are among the letter collections assembled by Rudolf Hercher in his, ‘Epistolographi graeci’, published in 1873. They differ from other collections in that volume in the size of the corpus ( 148 letters ) and the breadth of the manuscript tradition ( more than 132 manuscripts ). Moreover, the number and the order of the letters vary greatly from one manuscript to another. These characteristics explain why there is no modern critical edition of the letters of Phalaris. This paper addresses a methodological issue: how can we get a comprehensive view of the transmission of the letters of Phalaris? It examines these letters from the perspective of the collection, given that the letters of Phalaris are often transmitted within manuscripts that combine several corpora of letters, thus forming large epistolary collections. This paper shows to what extent the results obtained by the editors of other epistolary texts can be applied to the letters of Phalaris and what is gained, on a literary level, by replacing these letters in their context of transmission.

The emperor Julian’s career as a letter writer began long before his brief term as sole ruler of the united Roman empire from 361 to 363. In the surviving collection of 82 letters, only 73 were deemed authentic by their editor Emily Wilmer Cave Wright in the 1923 Loeb edition. The remaining nine she deemed apocryphal. This paper looks at two methodological issues associated with Julian’s letter collections. What grounds should the modern scholar use to discern authentic from forged letters; and were Julian’s letters of the same types as Christian letters of Late Antiquity or were they closer to Classical models? A third question arises from a survey of Julian’s epistolary addressees. These reveal a diverse network of people of various levels of status, including Basil, bishop of Caesarea, the Jews of Alexandria, and a priestess of Demeter and Cybele. How does this diversity compare with the correspondence of ( Christian ) emperors and bishops of the fourth century? I aim to answer these questions by considering those letter types in Julian’s letter corpus that were new in the fourth century, such as letters of recommendation for travellers and letters to religious groups, and others more familiar, that is, letters of friendship and letters of consolation. The overarching hypothesis is that Julian was inspired to write and have collected his public and personal letters in the same way as the Christian bishops whom he knew and with whom he corresponded, notably Bishop Basil of Caesarea.

Heuristic is the first step to provide a good critical text edition. It allows to collect all the manuscripts of a work, as well as to order them according to their content. This preliminary work phase is also important in order to obtain essential information about the genre and type of a work, thus providing useful new starting points for a comprehensive study. The paper provides the first results of this work phase within the project that involves editing, translating and providing a commentary on Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ ‘Epistula ad Ammaeum II’. All the manuscripts of the ‘Epistula’ can be divided into two groups, which are almost always characterised by two specific and different compositions: the first one allows us to consider the ‘Epistula’ as a rhetorical treatise providing rhetorical and grammatical remarks about the style of Thucydides; the second clarifies the importance of the ‘Epistula’ as necessary support to the comprehension of the ‘Historiae’ of Thucydides. Within these two groups of manuscripts there are some witnesses which present an unusual composition, such as the Parisinus gr. 2755. This case study sheds light on interesting and sometimes neglected aspects of the ‘Epistula’ and provides a complete analysis of its genre and use.

The letters of Dionysios of Antioch have been preserved in more than 30 manuscripts ( the oldest dating to the 10 th c. ). They are often transmitted in the context of eminent late antique epistolographers ( e. g. Libanios or Basil ). It seems that both the label ‘school of Antioch’ and the function as models favoured their transmission. In addition, Dionysios provided some theoretical reflections on epistolographic techniques that may have interested learned circles. Nevertheless, these 85 short texts rarely received scholarly attention ( due to the lack of facts ), but a new edition ( after more than 150 years ) will contribute to the understanding of middle Greek letter-writing.

Priests’ relationships with their brothers and sisters are richly evidenced in tenth- and eleventh-century documentary sources across the Latin West. But the looming shadow of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ has focused historians’ attentions on clerical marriage and vertical familial relationships ( fathers and sons, or uncles and nephews ). This article redresses the balance, arguing that sibling relationships have been underestimated in their importance to the lived experience of local priests, their families and communities in the tenth and eleventh centuries in post-Carolingian western Francia. It examines how priests and their brothers and sisters managed estates, co-operated to pool resources, and developed inheritance strategies with particular emphasis on how such records may reflect both practice on the ground and the concerns of the scribes, draftsmen and archivists who recorded, copied and edited them.

This article explores the question of how tithing rights in the dioceses of Freising and Mâcon developed between the ninth and eleventh centuries. I argue contrary to previous research that in these two dioceses, the tithes at local churches did not fall into the hands of the laity already in the Carolingian period, based on ideas of ‘Eigenkirchenrecht’. Instead, we can observe how, from the later ninth century onwards, bishops themselves detached tithing rights from baptismal churches and allocated them to other, minor churches, to foster them economically. In the course of the tenth century, bishops then also gave tithing rights – without any church – to laymen, in Freising at first usually in the context of exchanges. In the second half of the eleventh century, in documents from the diocese of Mâcon, tithes in lay hands were usually presented as a sinful result of alienation; they were ‘returned’ to the cathedral ( or bought back by the bishops ). In the course of this, however, tithing rights that actually had been allocated to baptismal churches in the ninth century, now passed into the hands of the cathedral chapter or the bishop.

This article examines how tenth and eleventh-century bishops imposed ecclesiastical discipline on their priests after the waves of Carolingian episcopal statutes had ceased. It uses the manuscript Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac, Ms 1979 as an example of an episcopal manual with which bishops could impose and maintain ecclesiastical discipline in their diocese via the organisation of local synods, holding a court and visitation. The manuscript in question contains material to support the bishops in these tasks and demonstrates how these institutions were shaped by the ideals of their Carolingian predecessors. The article starts with an analysis of the composition of the manuscript and then goes on to explore how it could have been used for the instruction and examination of priests during diocesan synods. Finally, it examines a collection of canones in the manuscript, also known as the ‘Collectio 234 capitulorum’, as a means to establish ecclesiastical discipline by monitoring behaviour and administering justice via visitation and holding a court. A description of Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac, Ms 1979’s content and codicological composition as well as the material comprising the ‘Collectio 234 capitulorum’ have been added as appendices.

This article examines a text known as the ‘Admonitio synodalis’ as evidence for episcopal expectations of local priests in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The ‘Admonitio’ is generally considered a stable text that represented and fostered continuity within the Church, but this article highlights instead its early development. It begins by identifying a previously unedited version of the text found in some tenth-century manuscripts, arguing that this long recension is the closest to the original form. It then turns to how the text was adapted in the tenth century, notably by Bishop Rather of Verona. It finally examines the changes made to the text when it was incorporated into the liturgy of synodal ordines in the early eleventh century. A transcription of the tenth-century recension, based on a Brussels manuscript, is provided as an appendix.