Sexual Language and Human Conflict in Old French Fabliaux

1982 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Melhado White
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Old French ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Sexual Encounter ◽  
European Literature ◽  
New Form ◽  
Human Conflict ◽  
Personal Fulfillment

French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.

‘O Hebraic People!’

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-183
Author(s):  
Ruth Nisse
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Literary Transmission

When Chaucer wrote his anti-Judaic Prioress’s Tale, there had been no Jews in England for roughly a century. Nevertheless, the loss of the small but vital twelfth and thirteenth-century Jewish community—and with it Hebrew as a literary language—has implications for Chaucer’s place in a polyglot England. This chapter concerns the Anglo-Hebrew grammarian and poet Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, who composed, among other works, a translation of Adelard of Bath’s Natural Questions and a collection of beast fables, translated from Latin and French sources. The Fox Fables, a Hebrew text from the Angevin cultural moment of the twelfth century, touches on many of the themes of language, literary transmission, and social injustice that later interested Chaucer.

King Arthur’s Charter: A Thirteenth-Century French Satire Against Bretons

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-37
Author(s):  
Christopher Berard
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Old French ◽  
The Other ◽  
Diplomatic Edition

AbstractOn the verso of the last leaf of a twelfth-century manuscript containing the poetry of Hilarius, a student of Abelard, appears a faux charter purporting to have been issued by Arthur, king of the Britons, in the hundredth year of his immortality. In the act, Arthur thanks the descendants of his British subjects for their fidelity and grants them an exclusive franchise to fish in secret rivulets. The privilege contains two prohibitions: one prohibiting Britons from wearing shoes and the other prohibiting them from owning cats. This article provides a diplomatic edition, English translation and analysis of King Arthur’s Charter. It identifies the strange stipulations of the charter as tropes of anti-Breton satire, attested also in the Privilège aux Bretons (c. 1240), an Old French song that mocks the customs and occupations of impoverished Breton immigrants to thirteenth-century France.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

Byzantine Scyphate Bronze coinage in Greece

1961 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 42-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
Unusual Form

The Byzantine coinage in the twelfth century was of three kinds. There were gold nomismata, with a purchasing power which must have been a good deal greater than that of a present-day five-pound note, and also nomismata of ‘pale gold’—gold alloyed with silver—of lower value; at the other extreme there were bronze coins, smaller than a modern farthing, which were the coinage of the market-place; intermediate, but still of low value, there were coins about the size of a halfpenny, normally made of copper lightly washed with silver. The silvered bronze and the gold were not flat, as are most coins, but saucer-shaped. The reason for their unusual form is not known. Numismatists describe them as scyphate, and refer to the middle denomination in the later Byzantine system of coinage as Scyphate Bronze, to distinguish it from the petty bronze coinage. Scyphate Bronze was first struck under Alexius I (1081–1118). Substantive issues were made by John II (1118–43), and such coinage became extremely plentiful under Manuel I (1143–80) and his successors Isaac II (1185–95) and Alexius III (1195–1203). After the capture of Constantinople in the course of the Fourth Crusade, the successor-states to the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, Salonica, and in Epirus continued to issue scyphate bronze coinage, although in much smaller quantities, until after the middle of the thirteenth century.

Simon of Pattishall, Pioneer Professional Judge

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph V. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
English Law

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.

I movimenti rurali: biopolitica e ingovernabilitŕ

2009 ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Annamaria Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Rural Development ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

- The aim of this papers is to analyze and verify the social effects of the collective practices addressed as rural movements in the European literature about rural development of last decades. The reference is to those practices developing new ways of farming and models of rural development. The evidence of these processes overcomes the theoretical perspectives of the last century about the unavoidable disappearance of peasant world. However, the point is to interpret these new practices considering also the constitution of the processes of governance as the new form of social regulation in the post-fordist restructuring phase. Insofar, this work aims to demonstrate the irreducibility of these new rural practices to the mechanisms of governance.Key words: rural movements; community development; governance; biopolitics; post-fordist restructuring; collective action.

The Montpellier Codex, Part 2

1978 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Subsequent Research ◽  
Polyphonic Music

The Montpellier Codex is the largest and most sumptuous extant manuscript of thirteenth-century polyphonic music. The works it contains represent the music of the entire thirteenth century, and perhaps that of the late twelfth century as well. Inspired by Yvonne Rokseth's earlier transcriptions, the present edition draws on nearly four decades of subsequent research to offer improved readings of many motets, and comprehensive collation and analysis of all concordances. The musical transcriptions are included in parts I–III; part IV provides text commentary and translations, an index of first lines, and guides to pronunciation.

A Short Survey of Yemeni Sufism from Its Inception up to the Thirteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Mountainous Area ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Short Survey ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intellectual Activities

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

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