‘FLOWER OF THE LILY’: LATE-MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS AND HERALDIC SYMBOLISM IN PARIS, BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE, MS FRANÇAIS 146

2014 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 1-60
Author(s):  
Mary Channen Caldwell

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146 (fr. 146), a manuscript well known for its inclusion of theRoman de Fauvel, also provides an important, albeit understudied, contribution to the history surrounding the allegorical ‘flower of the lily’, or fleur-de-lis – a floral symbol central to fourteenth-century theology and French royal heraldry. In medieval France, the fleur-de-lis emerges through text and music as a symbol capable of invoking, and being invoked by, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and the Virtues, all in the interest of supporting the religious and monarchical well-being of France. This study argues that the persistent return to the fleur-de-lis throughout thedits, theChronique metriqueand most especially the music and text ofFauvelin fr. 146 offers a necessary link between sacred and heraldic symbology both within the manuscript as well as within the larger historical development of this allegorical flower.

Eikon / Imago ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Katherine Anne Rush

Manuscript Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12577 and ivory casket Musée du Louvre, OA 122, and are two of three extant fourteenth-century visualizations of Chrétien’s Le Conte du Graal, produced in Paris circa 1310-1330. Although the objects’ shared era of production suggests similarities of iconography, artistic influences, and production methods, little research has been conducted regarding visual and cultural connections between MS fr. 12577 and OA 122. Through iconographic and stylistic analysis of the scenes each artisan depicted within his respective medium, I elucidate how the casket and manuscript’s imagery personifies Perceval’s dual nature, a young knight symbolic of the secular and sacred. As visualizations of Chrétien’s most religiously-minded legend, MS fr. 12577 and OA 122 exemplify the intertwining of the sacred and secular within fourteenth-century French romantic art, specifically within illuminated manuscripts and carved ivory, materials that through their refinement, rarity, and expense, signified leisure, luxury, and nobility. By examining these two opulent objects, I provide insights into their purpose and significance in late medieval France, especially cultural crossover between the porous realms of sacred and secular medieval life.


INTAMS review ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geneviève RIBORDY

Author(s):  
Bridget Heal

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.


Author(s):  
Peter Linehan

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.


2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-230
Author(s):  
Ulrich Port

Abstract This essay demonstrates how Baroque Catholic motifs of an aggressive and militant Virgin Mary are envisioned in Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans – motifs which seem to be anachronistic with regard to the late medieval setting of the Joan of Arc story as well as with regard to the date of origin of Schiller’s play (1800 –1801). But precisely this anachronism can be read as a symptom of the times around 1800: namely as a return of repressed stocks of images from the age of confessionalization which gained explosive force for different reasons in the first decade after the French Revolution. In the eighteenth century these visual and verbal images of the Virgin Mary had only been cultivated by late Baroque church art and within a popular religious longue durée, which had been criticized and neutralized by enlightened Catholicism and which had been attacked by revolutionary iconoclasm. At the turn of the century, they started a peculiar Nachleben and were – in the sense of Aby Warburg’s Revenants – remembered again, being reactivated and refreshed as Schlagbilder.


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 74-95
Author(s):  
Hazel J. Hunter Blair

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.


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