Elite and Popular Superstitions in the Exempla of Stephen of Bourbon

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 78-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Rider
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

‘When I was preaching against sorcery and hearing confessions…’.With these words, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon recalled how in a village in the Auvergne he had found a group of women venerating a dog as a saint. He then went on to describe how he had preached against the cult and persuaded the local lord to demolish the dog’s woodland shrine. Thanks to a detailed study by Jean-Claude Schmitt, this encounter between educated friar and unorthodox peasants has become a famous example of interaction between elite and popular religion in the Middle Ages. But it is only one of many such encounters that Stephen describes under the heading of ‘Superstitio’, or Superstition. Part of the interest of these tales for the modern reader is that they provide a window on to some of the unorthodox religious practices of the Middle Ages. Even more interesting, however, is the way in which Stephen links these practices to a clear but flexible idea of the relationship between elite and popular religion.

Time and accounting in the Middle Ages: An Italian-based analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Adamo ◽  
David Alexander ◽  
Roberta Fasiello
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Accounting Information ◽  
Accounting Practice ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages

This work is focused on an issue scarcely examined in the literature, concerning the analysis of the relationship existing between time and accounting practice. The aim is to highlight how changes in the interpretation of the concept of time influenced the development of accounting practices and contributed to the rise of periodical accounting reporting from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century. The socio-economic context existing in Italy in the Middle Ages, the development of commercial partnerships among merchants ( compagnie) and the international trade created the conditions for the development of periodical reporting. The relevance assigned to time in economic activity is one of the crucial factors of the rise of accounting information related to recurring accounting periods. Furthermore, the article shows how the concept of time is important and its significance widely underestimated, in a variety of further applications.

scholarly journals El nomen sacrum ihs como símbolo de la crucifixión en el Sermón de la Circuncisión del Señor de san Vicente Ferrer

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
María Luz Mandingorra Llavata
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Life Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

Resum: El nomen sacrum ihs se hallaba presente en infinidad de manifestaciones artísticas y objetos de la vida cotidiana durante la Edad Media, por lo que era bien conocido por los fieles. El objetivo del presente artículo es mostrar de qué modo san Vicente Ferrer se sirve de esta abreviatura como símbolo de la crucifixión de Jesucristo con el fin de fomentar la devoción al nombre Iesus y erradicar el recurso a adivinos y sortílegos. Para ello, analizaremos el sermón de la Circuncisión del Señor predicado por el maestro dominico y estableceremos la conexión de los elementos integrantes del texto con representaciones coetáneas de la crucifixión.Paraules clau: san Vicente Ferrer, predicación, Nomina Sacra, crucifixión, historia de la cultura escrita Abstract: The nomen sacrum ihs was present in many paintings as well as other artifacts during the Middle Ages, therefore, it was very well known by the public. The aim of this paper is to show the way Saint Vincent Ferrer uses this abbreviation as a symbol of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ in order to increase the devotion to the Name of Jesus and prevent people from consulting diviners and sorcerers to solve daily life problems. To this end, we analyse the Sermon of the Circumcision of the Lord preached by the Dominican master and establish the relationship between the elements that compose the text and some contemporary images of the Crucifixion.Keywords: Saint Vincent Ferrer, preaching, Nomina Sacra, crucifixion, history of literacy

Art, Prophecy, and Drama in the Choir of Salisbury Cathedral

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Matthew Reeve
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Liturgical Drama ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Christian History

AbstractThe former painted cycle over the vaults of Salisbury Cathedral represents one of the great losses of thirteenth-century English art. This paper focuses on the imagery over the three-bay choir, which features twentyfour Old Testament kings and prophets each holding scrolls with texts prefiguring the Coming of Christ. The content of the cycle derives from a sermon, well known in the Middle Ages, by Pseudo-Augustine: Contra Judaeos, Paganos et Arianos. Yet the most immediate sources lie in twelfth and thirteenth-century extrapolations of the Pseudo-Augustinian sermon in liturgical drama, the so-called Ordo Prophetarum, or prophet plays. This observation leads to a discussion of the relationship of imagery to its liturgical setting. It is argued that the images on the choir vaults were also to be understood allegorically as types of the cathedral canons, who originally sat in the choir stalls below. A reading of the choir as a place of prophecy is located within traditions of liturgical commentary, which allegorize processions through churches as processions through Christian history. This leads to a discussion of the allegorization of the church interior in the Gothic period.

The ‘Humidum Radicale’ in Thirteenth-Century Medicine

Traditio ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McVaugh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Transmission Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

A number of recently published studies have drawn attention to the ‘radical moisture,’ a concept developed in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages to help explain the nature of life and the occurrence of aging and of fevers. These studies have examined the broad history of the concept over a span of two thousand years; they have, however, not presented in detail the sequence of the transmission and evolution of the concept in the Middle Ages. It is my intent to focus upon the history of the radical-moisture concept in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to try to establish the particular stages by which it entered medieval medical doctrine, and in particular to examine the importance of Avicenna's Canon for western physicians in consolidating their first disorganized impressions of the concept. I shall illustrate the stages in the transmission process by referring to the use of the concept at the University of Montpellier, for that school has left us a number of texts from the thirteenth century that reveal how the introduction of new Arabic or Greek medical works could alter the medieval academic physician's approach to a familiar topic; they also reveal the way in which personal tastes and interests could lead colleagues to react differently to new materials.

Views of Jews from Paris Around 1300: Christian or ‘Scientific’?

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Biller
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Racial Thought ◽  
The One ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

A Term in many ways inappropriate to the Middle Ages’: so begins AA a recent medieval encyclopaedia article on ‘antisemitism’. It is the first worry of the medievalist. On the one hand, he or she hears the c’est la même chose cry of the non-medievalist when the latter looks at examples of medieval hatred of the Jews. On the other hand, he or she is acutely aware both of the modernity of racial thought and the way in which twelfth-or thirteenth-century texts, when discussing Jews, use religious vocabulary, not ‘racial’. Painful modern Jewish and Christian concern to examine the Church’s guilt pushes in the same direction as the medievalist’s anxiety about anachronism. The effect is to underline religion.

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.

Ritual and reality in the early medieval ordines

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Know How ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.

Papal Legates against the Albigensians: The Debts of the Church of Valence (1215–1250)

Traditio ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
D. Dudley Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Treatment ◽  
Northern Portion ◽  
Rhone Valley ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

In 1232 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–41) imposed a tenth of episcopal revenues on prelates of Occitania to subsidize the church of Valence, which owed 10,000 poundstournoisto various bankers of Vienne, Rome, Lyons, and Siena. In 1865 B. Hauréau first noted the event when he edited one of the main documents in theGallia christianavolume concerning the ecclesiastical province of Vienne. With the publication of Gregory IX's register from 1890–1908 most of the facts of the tax were more widely available. In 1910 Ulysse Chevalier briefly mentioned the tax in his monograph on the long tenure of John of Bernin, archbishop of Vienne (r. 1218–66). In 1913, Heinrich Zimmermann cited Hauréau's text in a note in his detailed treatment of early thirteenth-century papal legations. Recently Alain Marchandisse reviewed eight of the eleven papal letters pertaining to the tax in his study of William of Savoy (d. 1239) as bishop-elect of Liège. These scholars provided no reason for the debt or why the papacy would take such measures to ensure payment. Perhaps they did not study this tax further because a church indebted to moneylenders is not in itself surprising. It appears that the church of Valence acquired the debt, very large compared to the church's income, when bishop-elect William of Savoy (r. 1225–39) waged war against Adhémar II of Poitiers-Valentinois, count of the Valentinois (r. 1189–1239). Struggles between bishops and the local nobility occurred on a regular basis throughout the Middle Ages, so what in this unimportant Rhone-valley diocese interested the pope enough to impose taxes on prelates of Occitania over twenty years to ensure payment of this debt? Adhémar II faithfully supported Raymond VI (r. 1194–1222) and Raymond VII (r. 1222–49) of Saint-Gilles, counts of Toulouse, throughout their struggle with the papacy during and following the Albigensian crusades. Adhémar II was also their vassal for the Diois, which borders the Valentinois on the southeast and comprised the northern portion of the marquisate of Provence. These lands had been reserved for the church in the Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229), which ended the Albigensian crusades. Thus William of Savoy as bishop-elect of Valence defended the papacy's claims on the marquisate of Provence, which the papacy deemed part of the larger struggle between the Roman church and the counts of Toulouse. The facts on the nature of the debts and the steps the papacy took to aid the diocese show that the local struggle between the bishop of Valence and the count of the Valentinois embodied a part of the larger struggle between the papacy and the counts of Toulouse over the marquisate of Provence, which began as early as 1215.

Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus*

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 488-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri D. Saffrey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Western World ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.

scholarly journals An unusual encounter between Man and Death in the Middle Ages as portrayed in Der Ackermann aus Boehmen

Literator ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
G. Thiel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Similar Kind ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article tries to establish the uniqueness of the relationship between man and Death in Der Ackermann aus Boehmen. This is achieved by comparing Der Ackermann to disputes between man and Death of a similar kind and by resorting to possible sources for the depiction of the figure of Death. While Death’s right to kill is in the end confirmed by God, man nevertheless has made inroads into Death’s universal and indiscriminatory powers by emotional and intellectual accusations as well as physical threats. This was facilitated by personifying Death to such an extent that Death was brought close to the level of man rather than remaining a pseudo-transcendental power.

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