Fordham Series in Medieval Studies

Offers new perspectives on freedom of conscience and religious liberty by tracing their origins to the Middle Ages, thereby challenging the common assumption that these core tenets of modernity were products of the Enlightenment

Deeply committed to the formation of a just and sacred society, medieval theologians and canon­ists developed sophisticated arguments in defense of religious liberty and freedom of conscience. They did so based upon the conviction that each human person possesses an inalienable right to pursue his or her spiritual vocation and to inquire into the truth, provided that such pursuits were not deemed injurious to the commonweal. For this was an age in which all power, whether secular or sacred, was held to be exercised legitimately only insofar as it served the common good. Within these basic parameters there existed a domain of personal freedom guaranteed by natural and divine law that could not be infringed by either secular or ecclesiastical authority. Theologians and canonists did not countenance blind obedience to reigning powers nor did they permit Christians to stand idle in the face of manifest transgressions of sacred tradition, constitutional order, and fundamental human rights.

Such foundational principles as the sacred domain of conscience, freedom of intellectual inquiry, dissent from unjust authority, and inalienable personal rights had been carefully developed throughout the later Middle Ages, hence from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Contrary to the popular conception, therefore, the West did not need to wait for the Protestant Reforma­tion, or the Enlightenment, for these values to take hold. In fact, the modern West may owe its greatest debt to the Middle Ages. With a Pure Conscience sheds further light on these matters in a variety of contexts, within and without the medieval university walls, and often amid momentous controversies. This was a robust intellectual culture that revered careful analysis and vigorous disputation in its relentless quest to understand and defend the truth as it could be ascertained through both reason and revelation.

With a Pure Conscience: Christian Liberty before the Reformation is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

WINNER, ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR STUDIES IN GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound.

Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle.

As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine.

Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.

Remember the Hand studies a body of articulate manuscript books from the Christian monasteries of northern Iberia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These exceptional, richly illuminated codices have in common an urgent sense of scribal presence—scribes name themselves, describe themselves, even paint their own portraits. While marginal notes, even biographical ones, are a common feature of medieval manuscripts, rarely do scribes make themselves so fully known. These writers address the reader directly, asking for prayers of intercession and sharing of themselves. They ask the reader to join them in not only acknowledging the labor of writing but also in theorizing it through analogy to agricultural work or textile production, tending a garden of knowledge, weaving a text out of words.

By mining this corpus of articulate codices (known to a school of Iberian codicologists, but virtually unstudied outside that community), Catherine Brown recovers these scribes’ understanding of reading as a powerful, intimate encounter between many parties—authors and their text, scribes and their pen, patrons and their art-object, readers and the words and images before their eyes—all mediated by the material object known as the book. By rendering that mediation conspicuous and reminding us of the labor that necessarily precedes that mediation, the scribes reach out to us across time with a simple but profound directive: Remember the hand.

Remember the Hand is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

In a series of close and unorthodox readings of works by Priscian, Boethius, Augustine, Walter Burley, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and St. Erkenwald, Jordan Kirk reveals the way that writers across the fourteenth century reckoned with the word as mere sound. Medieval Nonsense rebuts the idea that single-minded devotion to the kernel of meaning within the word motivated these authors in their engagement with vox sola, the mere utterance. Rather, they recognized the possibilities inherent in the accounts of language transmitted to them from antiquity, and they transformed those accounts into new ideas, forms, and practices of nonsignification.

Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar stories, objects, symbols, and myths.

Whose Middle Ages? gives nonspecialists access to the richness of our historical knowledge while debunking damaging misconceptions about the medieval past. Myths about the medieval period are especially beloved among the globally resurgent far right, from crusading emblems on the shields borne by alt-right demonstrators to the on-screen image of a purely white European populace defended from actors of color by Internet trolls. This collection attacks these myths directly by insisting that readers encounter the relics of the Middle Ages on their own terms.

Each essay uses its author’s academic research as a point of entry and takes care to explain how the author knows what she or he knows and what kinds of tools, bodies of evidence, and theoretical lenses allow scholars to write with certainty about elements of the past to a level of detail that might seem unattainable. By demystifying the methods of scholarly inquiry, Whose Middle Ages? serves as an antidote not only to the far right’s errors of fact and interpretation but also to its assault on scholarship and expertise as valid means for the acquisition of knowledge.

King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era.

Contributors: Martin Alvira Cabrer, Janna Bianchini, Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., Miguel Dolan Gómez, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Kyle C. Lincoln, Joseph O’Callaghan, Teofi lo F. Ruiz, Miriam Shadis, Damian J. Smith, James J. Todesca

Ecstasy in the Classroom analyzes the early thirteenth century theological discourse about Paul’s rapture and other modes of cognizing God. It reconstructs the perceptions of transformation and self they imply, and demonstrate their role in establishing the peculiar professional identity of scholastic theologians compared with other seers of God.

A collection of essays devoted to the culture of the Francophone European crusading states of the eastern Mediterranean. Contributors, including historians of the crusades, Old French literature, and medieval art, each address different themes and questions related to life, literature, and language in the Frankish Levant.

This volume brings together scholarship on pan-European late-medieval religious controversy, with particular attention to developments in England, Bohemia, and at general church councils. It builds on recent work by approaching late-medieval cultural transaction and controversy internationally. Contributors examine textual transmission and compilation, polemical rhetoric, and philosophical and theological interchange, among other subjects.

Ecclesiastical Knights is a spirituality study of the three military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara in Leon-Castile from the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. It explores the fundamental problem of the military orders: how the traditions of knighthood and monasticism were combined into a single way of life.

Explores the blurring of boundaries between genres (skaldic and eddic), periods (Viking Age, medieval, early modern) and cultures (Icelandic, Scandinavian, English, continental) in Old Norse-Icelandic poetry.

This study of the intellectual culture of the women’s monasteries of the Main Valley during the eighth century, based on analysis of the manuscripts produced and used by women religious, argues that the content of the women’s books was overwhelmingly gender-egalitarian and frequently feminist (that is, resistant to patriarchal ideas).

Devorah Schoenfeld’s new work offers an in-depth examination of two of the most influential Christian and Jewish Bible commentaries of the High Middle Ages. The Glossa Ordinaria and Rashi’s commentary were standard texts for Bible study in the High Middle Ages, and Rashi's influence continues to the present day. Although Rashi’s commentary and the Glossa developed at the same time with no known contact between them, they shared a way of reading text that shaped their interpretations of the central religious narrative of the Binding of Isaac. Schoenfeld’s text examines each commentary unto itself and offers a detailed comparison, one that illustrates the similarities between Rashi and the Gloss that derive not merely from their shared late antique heritage but also from their common twelfth-century context, and the Jewish-Christian polemic in which they both, implicitly or explicitly, take part.

This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya, the recently retired former chair of Georgetown University’s English Department. Inspired by Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and its statement that poetry “traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought,” this work investigates how medieval poetic language reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. At a moment in contemporary culture when poetry finds its value increasingly challenged, Medieval Poetics and Social Practice looks to the late Middle Ages to assert the indispensability of poetry and poetics in the formation of social structures, actions, and utterances. The contributors offer new readings of canonical late-medieval English poetic texts, such as Langland’s Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, and, of equal importance, explore texts that have hitherto not held a central place in criticism but make important contributions to the literary culture of the period. Introduced by Seeta Chaganti, the collection includes essays by Richard K. Emmerson, J. Patrick Hornbeck, John C. Hirsh, Moira Fitzgibbons, John T. Sebastian, Nicholas R. Havely, Kara Doyle, Anne Middleton, Jo Ann Moran Cruz, and Mark McMorris.

This volume offers original studies on the subject of medieval education, not only in the formal academic
sense typical of schools and universities but also in a broader cultural sense that includes law, liturgy, and the new religious orders of the high Middle Ages. Its essays explore the transmission of knowledge during the middle ages in various kinds of educational communities, including schools, scriptoria, universities, and workshops.

The twenty-five original essays in this remarkable book constitute both a state of the art survey of Dante scholarship and a manifesto for new understandings of one of the world’s great poets.

The fruit of an historic conference called by the Dante Society of America, the essays confront a range of important questions. What theories, methods, and issues are unique to Dante scholarship? How are they changing? What is the essence of the distinctive American Dante tradition? Why—and how—do we read Dante in today’s global, postmodern culture?

From John Ahern on the first copies of the Commedia to Peter Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff on Dante after modernism, the essays shed brilliant new light on Dante’s texts, his world, and what we make of his legacy.

The contributors: John Ahern, H. Wayne Storey, Guglielmo Gorni, Teodolinda Barolini, Gary P. Cestaro, Lino Pertile, F. Regina Psaki, Steven Botterill, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Alison Cornish, Robert M. Durling, Manuele Gragnolati, Giuliana Carugati, Susan Noakes, Zygmunt Baranski, Christopher Kleinhenz, Ronald L. Martinez, Ronald Herzman, Amilcare Iannucci, Albert Russell Ascoli, Michelangelo Picone, Jessica Levenstein, David Wallace, Piero Boitani, Peter Hawkins, and Rachel Jacoff.

St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226) and Jacopone da Todi (c.1236-1306) were but two exemplars of a rich school of mystical poets writing in Umbria in the Franciscan religious tradition. Their powerful creations form a significant corpus of medieval Italian vernacular poetry only now being fully explored. Drawing on a wide range of literary, historical, linguistic, and anthropological approaches, Vettori crafts an innovative portrait of the artists as legends and as poets. He investigates the essential features of emerging Franciscan tradition, in motifs of the body, metaphors of matrimony, and musical harmony. Vettori also explores the relationship of Francis's poetic mission to Genesis, the relationship between erotic love and ecstatic union in both poets' work, and the poetics of the sermon.

Medievalists have long considered topics of cultural contact such as antagonism or exchange between western Europe and the Islamic world, the west’s debts to Byzantium, European expansion during the Crusades, and Mediterranean trade. Medieval Cultures in Contact grows out of such traditional themes of European identity and its relations with others, but its essays pose new questions and view the topic from different perspectives.

In recent generations, the study of non-European cultures for their effects on the west has changed to consideration of diverse medieval cultures as separate and worth studying on their own. The change is due in part to the influences of other disciplines, such as comparative literature, the social sciences, and subaltern studies. With the increased interest in such groups, cultures in contact is no longer necessarily European contact with one group or another, with Europeans the common ground in each encounter; it now extends to a much wider range of cultures and their interactions.

The approach to cultures in contact running through many essays of this volume is that the meeting of cultures promotes historical change in the original societies and creates new societies at the point of contact. The medieval world was rich in the meeting of cultures that created new circumstances and results, some based on borders between cultures, others on internal reactions to contact. The essays in Medieval Cultures in Contact consider many diverse locales, periods, and protagonists in which or on whom the meeting of cultures was formative. The topics include the origin of western Christian culture in Bede’s England, the contact of east and west in the Islamic and Asian worlds, the western perceptions of the east in German literature, and cross-cultural influences in several Mediterranean regions. The relations between the Christian majority and the culture of the Jewish minority in northwestern Europe, and the interaction between the occupational cultures of minstrels and clerics are related issues. The second section of the volume presents two models for teaching cultural contacts in the middle ages: one discusses the need to recognize such interactions as part of medieval history, and two linked essays show how literary diversity has been treated in practice.