The Image of Music and the Bodies of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages: Rhythmic Procedures as Cultural Representations

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorit Tanay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Late Middle Ages

The ArgumentThe paper argues that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism can be applied metaphorically to clarify the changing image of music during the late Middle Ages. The paper discusses the scientific and rational strategies that thirteenth century musical theorists applied to revise earlier musical conceptualization. It highlights the thirteenth-century innovative affiliation of music with Aristotelian physics and argues that in a very subtle and seemingly contradictory way music theorists expressed the nascent awareness, if not tacit acknowledgment, of the mundane nature of music. It argues further that in the fourteenth century the issue of representing musical-rhythmical variability by means of a suitable language shifted to the forefront of musical theory and practice. The unprecedented emphasis on musical signs and their semantic behavior as well as the demand to demystify the discourse about rhythmical concepts — so as to question the necessity of metacategories — all point to an affinity between fourteenth century musical thought and postmodern sensibilities.

scholarly journals Through the Eyes of a Mapmaker: Maritime Shrines on Cyprus during the Late Middle Ages

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1022
Author(s):  
Ourania Perdiki
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Local Dimension ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Late Middle Ages

Cyprus acquired special importance, especially from the thirteenth century onwards, on the Eastern Mediterranean’s pilgrimage network. Described by contemporary pilgrims as “Terra christianorum ultima”, the island was considered to be the last Christian land in the south-eastern Mediterranean on the pilgrims’ itinerary on their journey to the Holy Land. This study is concentrated on two maps of Cyprus dated to the fourteenth century and preserved in Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, A95 sup. and Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, gr. XI.21. It aims to explore the physical and spiritual mobility and interconnectivity in Cyprus during the late Middle Ages and to consider how these contribute to the development of pilgrimage sites directly related with maritime routes, seamen and travellers. These unique nautical maps captured the sea voyage which had Cyprus as a stopover, bringing to light new insights into fourteenth century Cyprus. The maritime shrines discussed in this article, which are usually “mixed” sacred sites, are directly related with sailors’ needs. They integrate into a wide network of communication, removing them partially from their local dimension.

The Virtues of Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Distinct Role

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.

scholarly journals The Parish Clergy of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: The Alexander Prize Essay, 1911–12

1912 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 89-128
Author(s):  
H. G. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
Parish Priests ◽  
Prize Essay ◽  
The Middle Ages

Until the thirteenth century records touching the parish clergy are scanty, but thereafter they increase in bulk and, with the fourteenth century, there exist, side by side, a number of literary works which afford more than a passing glance at their lives and deeds. The parish priests and clerks of these centuries were not perhaps typical of the mediaeval period, since no century or centuries will afford a type of any class or institution which will be true for the whole of the Middle Ages; and it is possible that the tenthcentury parish and its people resembled the parish and people of the fourteenth century as little—or as much—as the Elizabethan parish resembled the parish of the present day. The changes that affected so profoundly the organisation of the manor during the course of the Middle Ages did not leave its counterpart, the parish, unaltered; and the same economic forces that helped to make the villein a copyholder and serfdom an anachronism, helped also to raise the chaplain's wages from five to eight marks within thirty years of the Black Death. But although the

Communes and Despots: The City State In Late-Medieval Italy

1965 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 71-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
City States ◽  
City State ◽  
The City

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

The Poetics of Waste: Medieval English Ecocriticism

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Late Middle Ages

Waste has been a recognizable socioeconomic problem since at least the late Middle Ages. In England, because of land and labor shortages, wars, famines, and especially changes in legal and penitential discourses, waste became, by the mid–fourteenth century, a critical concept. But a fully fleshed-out vocabulary for thinking through the meaning and consequences of the practice of committing waste does not yet exist. This essay argues that two fourteenth-century poems, Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman, address the lack of such a thinking through, tackling the problem of waste in all its vicissitudes. They deploy the formal resources of poetic language—from personification to episodic structure—to draw together the various ideas of waste from other discourses and to raise medieval readers' consciousnesses about the seriousness of waste's consequences. The essay calls their use of formal resources in creating this critical discourse a “poetics of waste.”

The Criterion for Distinguishing Legal Opinions from Judicial Rulings and the Administrative Acts of Judges and Rulers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Idris al-Qarafi al-Maliki
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
English Language ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Legal Opinions ◽  
Subsequent Revision

This book is the first and much-needed English translation of a thirteenth-century text that shaped the development of Islamic law in the late middle ages. Scholars of Islamic law can find few English language translations of foundational Islamic legal texts, particularly from the understudied Mamluk era. This edition addresses this gap, finally making the great Muslim jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi's seminal work available to a wider audience. The book's examination of the distinctions among judicial rulings, which were final and unassailable; legal opinions, which were advisory and not binding; and administrative actions, which were binding but amenable to subsequent revision, remained standard for centuries and are still actively debated today.

Mozarabic preces in Ars Nova notation: a new fourteenth-century fragment discovered in Spain

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CATALUNYA ◽  
CARMEN JULIA GUTIÉRREZ
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Musical Analysis ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Digital Restoration ◽  
Ars Nova

ABSTRACTThis article reports the discovery of an early fourteenth-century manuscript fragment (two small snippets from the same folio) of Castilian origin. One side of the original folio contained a monophonic piece in Ars Nova notation whose text has been identified as Mozarabic preces, a musical repertoire that was suposed to lack written transmission from the twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. The fragment thus throws new light on the survival of the Mozarabic rite through the late Middle Ages. The backside of the folio contains music written in an old mensural system based on undifferentiated semibreves and puncta divisionis. In this regard, the manuscript may represent the earliest known Spanish source to employ the Petronian system described in the mensural treatise in Barcelona Cathedral (misc. 23). The study includes a detailed codicological examination of the manuscript (including the digital restoration of a palimpsest), transcriptions and musical analysis.

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