A Tribute to Albert Friend

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 422-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Otto G. Von Simson ◽  
Dom Anselm Strittmatter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Research Library ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Foreign Scholar ◽  
Sixtieth Anniversary ◽  
The Middle Ages

Within less than twelve months in the years 1955 and 1956 three senior members of the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University departed this life: Charles Rufus Morey, Albert Matthias Friend, and Earl Baldwin Smith. All three were scholars of distinction, and of all three it can be safely asserted that through their own work and through their influence upon their numerous students they decisively shaped the character and quality of American scholarship in the field of medieval art. This is especially true of Morey, who may be said to have made the tradition so hopefully inaugurated by Dr. Allan Marquand and to have passed the torch on to his pupils. If the invitation to catalogue the Museo Sacro of the Vatican Library was an extraordinary compliment paid to Morey, the master, the appointment to the office of Director of Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University was an outstanding distinction conferred upon Friend, his pupil. It was in this position that Friend's activities and influence assumed more and more international or cosmopolitan proportions, and so it came about that when the plan of a ‘Festschrift’ to be presented to him on his sixtieth anniversary was broached, not only colleagues and pupils of Princeton University, but more than one foreign scholar whom he had been instrumental in bringing to Dumbarton Oaks was invited to participate. The result was the volume now under consideration, which comprises in all thirty-two articles in the two fields of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For all the diversity of subjects treated, which is considerable, there is an extraordinary homogeneity to this liberal A dedicatory inscription composed in brilliant Greek was very appropriately prefixed to the volume, to complete an offering which Friend had the pleasure of receiving more than a year before his death.

Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, edited and translated by Michael Roberts. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 944.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 390-392
Author(s):  
Raymond J. Cormier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Middle Ages

It doesn’t pay to sing about the poor! Literary patronage in the Middle Ages is as old as poetry itself. The aristocratic context guaranteed a rich intellectual focus, whether we consider the poetry of praise or blame, and whether fulsome or just simple. Authorized compositions offered to a patron implied a hope for favorable compensation, and with his (or her) audience assured, the ceremonial promotion of the kingdom by the poet brought glory to the sponsor. Following a benefactor’s tastes within a cultural climate of liberality and magnanimity might bring unimaginable rewards to a court poet. A quick example from the life of Fortunatus: the renowned Gregory of Tours rewarded the poet with gifts, such as an estate on the Vienne River.

The Venerable Bede on Prayer and Contemplation

Traditio ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott DeGregorio
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Venerable Bede ◽  
The Middle Ages

As a monk at the famous Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede (673–735) produced a body of exegetical work that enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the Middle Ages. Something of that spirit seems to have reawakened in recent years, as Bede's commentaries are increasingly being studied and made available to wider audiences in English translation. One distinctive feature of this development is a growing awareness that Bede's reputation as an exegete is more multifaceted than has been previously realized, that it goes beyond what Beryl Smalley called “his faithful presentation of the tradition in its many aspects. Whereas earlier interpreters were content to regard Bede as a mere compiler reputed for his good sense and able Latinity, scholars are now paying homage to him as a penetrating and perceptive biblical commentator who did more than reproduce the thought of the fathers who preceded him. As I intend to show in what follows, Bede's treatment of prayer and contemplation in his exegesis attests well to this quality of his thought. The topic to date has received only minimal commentary, mainly on what Bede actually taught about prayer. My approach will be different. I begin with a discussion not of Bede's exegetical method but of his occupations and aims as a spiritual writer. Neither Bede's spirituality nor his role as spiritual writer have received the attention they deserve, and it is hoped that the reflections offered here will help rekindle interest in these neglected subjects. I then consider four prayer-related themes in his exegesis that bring his aims as a spiritual writer into view. Patristic tradition had commented widely on prayer, and Bede, we will see, did not set out to summarize this tradition in its entirety but rather to highlight and distill certain themes within it, those that best suited the needs of his Anglo-Saxon audience.

TheTraditio Legisin Late Antiquity and Its Afterlives in the Middle Ages

Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Middle Ages

Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Life Crisis ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Middle Ages

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.

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