The Epistle of Merlin on the Popes: A New Source on the Late Medieval Notion of the Angel Pope

Traditio ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 107-176
Author(s):  
Katelyn Mesler
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spiritual Reform

“Two angels shall lead him,” predictsThe Prophecy of the True Emperor, offering signs by which the people will recognize a foreordained holy leader, sent to restore a divided, besieged, and weakened Christendom. Although this prophecy, which was translated from Greek into Latin in the second half of the thirteenth century, spoke only of an emperor, western Christians soon came to ignore or even change the word “emperor,” preferring to read the text as a prophecy concerning the papacy. The peculiar reception of that prophecy cannot be understood apart from a crucial conceptual development that occurred in Italy during the years surrounding the turn of the fourteenth century. Whereas many thirteenth-century hopes and fears of the future were expressed through the medium of prophetic writings, these texts mainly emphasized the influence of the emperor and other secular rulers on the future course of history, for better or for worse. However, the election of the hermit Peter of Murrone as Pope Celestine V in 1294 offered unprecedented hope — especially among groups of Spiritual Franciscans — that the papacy would become the vehicle of social, moral, and spiritual reform. So great the hope, so great the disillusionment, for Celestine stepped down a few months later. He was replaced and imprisoned by Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303), who shared none of his predecessor's sympathy for the Spirituals or their ideals. In the wake of this turmoil was born a prophetic narrative according to which the papacy first had to be usurped by one or more wicked popes before finally being restored by a particularly virtuous one. The latter would be no ordinary pretender to the throne of Peter, subject to the political machinations of cardinals and barons, for he would be elected by divine providence and crowned by an angel (Fig. 1). Thus originated the concept of the angel pope, thepastor angelicus, which was to remain a powerful image of dissent and reform in the following centuries.

scholarly journals Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
A Minor

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.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

Papal Politics and Communal Contestation

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-195
Author(s):  
Janine Larmon Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Regional Interests

This chapter explores antipapal views that increased in the wake of popes' decisions to use the charge of heresy to achieve temporal as well as spiritual control over communities in northern and central Italy. This region was the geographic arena for the political struggle that occurred between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, which divided Italian communities into rival factions. It was also the locus of papal efforts to assert religious authority over independent-minded towns that were responding to papal bureaucratization and consolidation of power. Within this context, the accusation of heterodoxy became one means by which the papacy punished those who refused to support papal aims. “Heresy” no longer reflected doctrinal error alone by the late thirteenth century. It had become a characteristic of political orientation, an expression of disaffection with the papacy, and an avowal of regional interests that superseded loyalty to Rome. The chapter then traces the steps that led late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italian communities to have political and spiritual antipathy toward the popes and their agents, which became a driving force for these communities to actively contest popes through championing suspect saints, heretical saints, and holy heretics.

Ritual Time and Popular Expectations of Papal Rule in Early Modern Rome

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
John M. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
Early Modern Rome ◽  
The City

The political and ritual life of early modern Rome provided its inhabitants ample opportunities not only to express grievances with papal government but also to voice expectations of newly elected pontiffs. Three ritual moments in particular—each linked as a cycle related to the pope’s reign—looked toward the future. These were the papal election, the possesso (the newly elected pontiff’s procession to San Giovanni in Laterano), and the pope’s death. As the papal election commenced in the conclave, Romans communicated their hopes for a pontiff who would adhere to a traditional moral economy by keeping the city abundantly supplied with grain and other foodstuffs. The ceremonies connected to the possesso reinforced these concerns; during the pope’s procession from Saint Peter’s to San Giovanni, the people greeted him with placards, statues, and ritual shouts, which reminded him to uphold this sacred duty. A pope who failed to abide by this moral economy faced popular discontent. This took the form of murmuring and pasquinades that wished for his imminent death, thus anticipating an end to his odious reign and to the future freedoms of the vacant see, a time in which the machinery of papal government and justice halted, allowing the people to vocalize their anger. Immediately on the heels of the pope’s death came the papal election, starting the cycle anew. This paper will argue that the rhythms of papal government enabled the people to articulate their expectations of papal rule, both present and future, grounded in traditional paternalism.

The Discovery of an Early Bearing-Dial

1953 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl V. Sølver
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
North Western

It has hitherto been generally presumed that the division of the horizon into thirty-two points was a development of the late medieval period. Such a division, it has been said, was impossible in the pre-compass era. ‘It is questionable whether even so many as sixteen directions could have been picked out and followed at sea so long as Sun and star, however intimately known, were the only guides’, one eminent authority has declared; ‘Even the sailors in the north-western waters had only four names until a comparatively late date.’ Chaucer's reference in his Treatise on the Astrolabe to the thirty-two ‘partiez’ of the ‘orisonte’ has for long been quoted as the earliest evidence on the subject. The Konungs Skuggsjà, a thirteenth-century Norwegian work, however, refers to the Sun revolving through eight œttir; and the fourteenthcentury Icelandic Rímbegla talks of sixteen points or directions. An important discovery by the distinguished Danish archaeologist, Dr. C. L. Vebæk, in the summer of 1951, brings a new light to the whole problem and makes the earlier held view scarcely tenable. Vebæk was then working on the site of the Benedictine nunnery (mentioned by Îvar Bárdarson in the mid-fourteenth century) which stands on the site of a still older Norse homestead on the Siglufjörd, in southern Greenland. Buried in a heap of rubbish under the floor in one of the living-rooms, together with a number of broken tools of wood and iron (some of them with the owner's name inscribed on them in runes) was a remarkable fragment of carved oak which evidently once formed part of a bearingdial. This was a damaged oaken disk which, according to the archaeologists, dates back to about the year 1200.

scholarly journals THE DISCLOSURE OF POLITICAL PARTY FINANCIAL TOWARD THE PRACTICE OF MONEY LAUNDERING FROM THE RESULT OF THE CRIMINAL ACT OF CORRUPTION

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Denny Arinanda Kurnia
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Money Laundering ◽  
Political Party ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unitary State ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Many

General Election is a means of implementing the sovereignty of the people in direct, general, free, confidential, honest, and fair manner within the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia based on Pancasila and the Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia Year 1945. The election has many dynamics, expensive politics, lavish campaign funds for image politics, costly consulting and surveys of winning money, as well as money politics. The disclosure of political parties is highly important in the implementation of the elections due to the many streams of corruption used in the election. As a result, people do not believe in political parties, or some Indonesians are no longer sympathetic to political parties. The idea of a political party's financial transparency regulation should be carefully examined in the Indonesians’ election codification scheme. In the future, Indonesia must have a transparent and accountable campaign or political funding arrangement, along with strong sanctions and binding on the parties involved. Therefore, the people will restore their trust to the political parties, and assure the political parties to channel their aspirations in the granting of rights in the elections.Keywords: Finance; Political parties; Corruption

Late Medieval Developments

2011 ◽  
pp. 195-205
Author(s):  
David Novak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The People ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Moral Universe

This chapter studies how, following Maimonides and Albo, several other prominent Jewish thinkers reflected on the role of Noahide law both within Judaism internally and in relation to gentiles externally. Perhaps the medieval thinker who expanded the concept of the Noahide to its greatest point was Menachem ha-Meiri. He states definitively that there are no idolaters today like the pagans of the ancient world. Non-Jews are bound by religion, and clearly function in the moral universe as Noahides. By accepting the universal moral law, one that is written into the very essence of being human, Christians have a point of ethical commonality with the people of revelation. The chapter then argues that Meiri revived the biblical institution of the ger toshav, though of course absent the political dimension. It also considers the work of two nineteenth-century, Italian-Jewish thinkers: Samuel David Luzzatto and Elijah Benamozegh. Benamozegh presents a novel approach to Noahide law. He is the first—and, to this point, only—important Jewish philosopher to deem the content of this law to form a separate religion, “Noahism,” a religion that Benamozegh judged distinct from Judaism's monotheistic rivals.

New Scenarios, Old Questions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Regional State ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
City States ◽  
The Many

This chapter, beginning Part II, takes as its theme the advent of the regional states—new and broader political formations that replaced city-states from the middle of the fourteenth century. It looks briefly at the causes of a transformation that profoundly altered the balance of late medieval Italy and which ended with the introduction of other, different political cultures. Far from simplifying the political picture, the regional state absorbed but did not dissolve the many existing territorial bodies, resulting in a stratification of languages and ideas and a configuration of extreme tensions. The Milan Duchy is employed as a case study in order to investigate these phenomena analytically.

scholarly journals Christa, Christus: Christ’s Transgressive, Gendered Flesh in Late Medieval European Literature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kathryn Webb
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Woman ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Many ◽  
Canonical Texts

This thesis examines responses to Christ’s gendered flesh that are located not in canonical literary texts or traditional saints’ lives, but in the sermons, visions and confessions of devout and orthodox men and women, whose orthodoxy, upon closer examination, is nevertheless decidedly unorthodox. In it, using a series of test cases, I argue that closer scrutiny of these non-canonical texts thus offers a more nuanced understanding of late-medieval notions of interplay between gender, sexuality and the divine than has been considered within previous scholarship. Beginning with the thirteenth-century Liber Specialis of Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), I demonstrate that, although remaining within the bounds of orthodox scripture and exegesis, the Saxon author nevertheless presents her readers with a Christ whose identity as saviour is predicated on his elevation of the female and the fleshly, and whose symbiotic, fluid relationship with Mechthild implicates her as co-redeemer through a divine, glorious, joyful, and uniquely feminine fecundity. I follow this with a detailed close analysis of the early fourteenth-century transcript of a young woman’s heresy trial in southern France, in which she confesses to equating Christ’s body with the ‘filth’ of the afterbirth, a concept so awful to her that she had been unable to believe in God or the transubstantiation. As I argue, however, Auda Fabri, experiences a species of revelation not unlike other orthodox female mystics, but, lacking their communities of discourse, must remain in a state of abjection from which capitulation to androcentric authority alone can save her. My third case-study is a sermon by the fourteenth-century English priest, John Mirk, in which Christ condemns an unconfessed merchant to Hell through the clotted blood from his feminised side-wound, which he casts at the dying man. I argue that, in attempting to uphold orthodox belief and practices, Mirk reveals a profound anxiety regarding late-medieval beliefs regarding the body and feminised flesh of Christ, whose appearance Mirk eventually demonises. Finally, to initiate my set of conclusions, I focus briefly on a largely unknown thirteenth-century Hebrew text, in which a Jewish woman in Sicily seems to give birth to a messianic figure from her body, which drips honey and oil. The woman’s ecstasy, resonant of the experiences of Christian women mystics like Mechthild, suggests some sort of commonality between the Sicilian Jewish and Christian female communities in pre-plague Europe. Ultimately, then, this thesis argues for – and contributes to – the need for far wider recognition of the importance of non-canonical and more generically varied source material and its closer scrutiny to gain better understanding of the deeply gendered complexities attached to the many labile beliefs concerning Christ’s flesh and blood during the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals GLOBALIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY

1999 ◽  
pp. 276-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Markoff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Democratic Revolution

Writing on the eve of the democratic breakthrough of the late eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave vivid voice to a critique of the political institutions across the Channel that were admired by so many French reformers of the day. Commenting scornfully on British electoral practice, he observed in 1762 that:"The people of England regards itself as free, but it is gravely mistaken. It is free only during the election of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys merits losing them." Rousseau's contention about the limitations of electoral institutions was in no way superseded by the age of democratic revolution that followed. From the 1790s to the present, there have been recurrent complaints about the depth of popular involvement in political life, the reality of popular control over powerholders, and the possibility that the existence of some form of institutional channel for participation could blind publics to the inadequacy of that participation. Rousseau's critique has repeatedly reappeared in one form or another and has informed movements for a more genuine democratization.

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