CHRONICLING THE MEROVINGIANS IN HEBREW: THE EARLY MEDIEVAL CHAPTERS OF YOSEF HA-KOHEN'S DIVREI HAYAMIM

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 423-447
Author(s):  
YANIV FOX
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Italian Physician ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Chain

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

The diaconiae of Early Medieval Rome: From “Greek” to “Roman”, from “Private” to “Papal”?

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-132
Author(s):  
Philipp Winterhager
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Charitable Foundations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Secular State

Abstract Traditionally, scholarship has seen the history of the diaconiae, charitable foundations in the city of Rome, in line with the alleged general trends in Roman history in the early Middle Ages, i.e. the gradual “Romanization” of formerly “Greek” elements of Byzantine origin, and the “papalization” of secular (state and private) initiatives, both taking place primarily in the mid-8th century. Although the diaconiae had come under papal control as late as the 9th and eventually the 10th centuries, this paper argues that this development took place not as an abandonment of private forms of endowments prominent in Byzantine Rome, but namely through the appropriation of “post-Byzantine” aristocratic endowment practice by the popes around the turn of the 9th century.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Modernism ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The Introduction situates David Jones’s work as a poet–artist within the broader currents of high and late modernism, particularly within the context of a tradition of medievalism in twentieth-century poetry. It draws on Alexander Nagel’s conception of the medieval modern to show how Jones approaches the culture and history of the early Middle Ages as a form of live material open to play and adaptation. The Introduction also reframes our understanding of David Jones’s perception of himself as Anglo-Welsh in relation to changing attitudes to early medieval Welsh (Celtic) and English (Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic) history over the course of his lifetime. This discussion introduces the monograph’s central argument: as a poet of the medieval modern, Jones plays with and reworks early medieval English histories, narratives, and artefacts in order to challenge the singularity and exceptionalism of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ canon.

The Church and the Law in the Early Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Procedural Knowledge ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

Two case studies from eighth-century Rome, recorded in the early medieval history of the popes known as the Liber pontificalis, serve to introduce both the problems of the relations between secular or public and ecclesiastical or canon law in early medieval Rome and the development of early medieval canon law more generally. The Synod of Rome in 769 was convened by Pope Stephen III some months after his election in order to justify the deposition of his immediate predecessor, Pope Constantine II (767–8). Stephen's successor, Pope Hadrian, subsequently presided over a murder investigation involving Stephen's supporters. The murders and the legal process they precipitated form the bulk of the discussion. The article explores the immediate implications of both the murders and the convening of the Synod of Rome, together with the references to law-making and decree-giving by the pope embedded in the historical narrative of the Liber pontificalis, as well as the possible role of the Liber pontificalis itself in bolstering the imaginative and historical understanding of papal and synodal authority. The wider legal or procedural knowledge invoked and the development of both canon law and papal authority in the early Middle Ages are addressed. The general categories within which most scholars have been working hitherto mask the questions about the complicated and still insufficiently understood status and function of early medieval manuscript compilations of secular and canon law, and about the authority and applicability of the texts they contain.

Early Medieval Missionary Activity: A Comparative Study of Eastern and Western Methods

1954 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Related Problem ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Ideas And Institutions

One of the more fascinating problems connected with the history of the early Middle Ages is the persistence of similarities and the emergence of differences in the ideas and institutions of the eastern and western remnants of the Roman Empire. Equally intriguing is the related problem of the origins and the nature of the differences which characterize the Slavic and Germanic groups that fell under the influence of the Greeks and the Latins during the early Middle Ages. This paper will attempt to throw some light, on these problems by examining the field of missionary history. It will try to compare the methods employed by the eastern and western missionaries to convert the Slavic and Germanic groups living on the borders of Christendom in the period from about A.D. 600 to 900. Such a comparison might be revealing. It will permit one to see wherein the Greeks and the Latins acted alike or differently as each attacked the same problem. It will also allow one to detect some of the formative forces implanted in the Slavic and Germanic worlds as each underwent the fundamental experience of adopting a new religion.

The Otherness of Non-Christians in the Early Middle Ages

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 33-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Shared Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Others ◽  
False Prophets ◽  
Definition Of

Non-Christian ‘others’ were crucial to the definition of early medieval Christendom. Many groups certainly found it important to generate a sense of belonging through shared practice, history and ideals. But the history of Christianity was a story of conflict, which from the very beginning saw a community of believers struggling against Jews and ‘pagan’ Romans. At the end, too, Christ warned there would be ‘false prophets’ and tribulations, and John of Patmos saw the ravages of Gog and Magog against the faithful. When many early medieval Christians looked at ‘religious others’, they saw not so much ‘members of religions’, as they did people defined by typologies and narratives designed to express the nature and trajectory of Christendom itself. This has been a recurring theme in scholarship which has sought to understand Christian views of pagans, Muslims and Jews in the period, but the effect and purpose of such rhetoric is not always fully appreciated.

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