“The Thirteenth Century Men”: Looking to the Past to Critique the Present

American Art ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-44
Author(s):  
Linda S. Ferber
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Past

Ela Longespee's Roll of Benefits: Piety and Reciprocity in the Thirteenth Century

Traditio ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 1-56
Author(s):  
Emilie Amt
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Archives

Ipsa autem, bonorum temporalium liberalissima ac spiritualium avida beneficiorum …— 1293 charter of Oxford University, describing Ela LongespeeIn 1293, the elderly and twice-widowed Ela Longespee, countess of Warwick, or someone acting on her behalf, gathered together eighteen charters that had been issued to her over the past dozen years and sent them to the bishop of Lincoln, to be confirmed and copied into a single roll. The original charters have long since vanished, but the enrolled copy survives in The National Archives at Kew. Its component documents, all of them detailed grants to Ela by religious institutions in the Oxford area, are highly unusual; even when compared to the few surviving parallels, they stand out for their specific content. The roll itself, comprising eighteen such documents in a private archive created for a thirteenth-century laywoman, is unique. And when it is examined along with other surviving evidence of Ela's religious activities, it provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the reciprocal nature of religious patronage at this time. What is especially unusual about Ela's case is that we know much more about what the religious promised to Ela than what she granted to them. Thus Ela Longespee's records tell us the side of the story that is seldom told when we look at records of religious patronage; they reveal the return that donors expected in the late thirteenth century, with increasing precision and urgency. Using a chronological framework, this essay will examine the surviving documents, tell the story of Ela's life, and explore the most interesting dimension of that story: her startlingly explicit reciprocal relationships with religious institutions.

The Monasteries of Mount Athos

Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 443-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Talbot Rice
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Actual Experience ◽  
The Middle Ages

The peninsula of Athos, home of monks, resort of pilgrims and the sole surviving example of the life of the Middle Ages which exists in Europe, is the only spot in these days of hooting motor cars, roaring machinery and rushing, busy people, in which it is possible to lead a completely altered life. There only in Europe can one meet an entirely original mental outlook. Even in the remotest European village everyday life is of this age and it is only by exercising the imagination that one can transfer oneself to the past. But on arrival on Athos this earth is left behind and one begins to experience the life of a pilgrim of the Middle Ages. One sees from actual experience what that life really was, and one continues to live it until the discomforts of the thirteenth century finally persuade one that the evils of this age are amply repaid by its merits and that the romance of the Middle Ages is even excelled by the adventurous spirit of today. The medieval life is something that one likes to remember as a curiosity, something to be experienced occasionally only. But the claims of its art are more lasting and in these days of ease and luxury we can appreciate them the more fully.

On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

scholarly journals Historical Notices of the Cradle of Henry V.

1876 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 231-259
Author(s):  
William Watkins Old
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Place Of Residence ◽  
Henry V ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Town

The venerable relic which is the subject of this paper is a wooden cot (or cradle, as it has been called) of unquestionable antiquity, traditionally said to have been the cradle of the hero of Agincourt, the glory of Monmouth, Henry V.Lambarde, in his “Topographical Dictionary,” speaking of the destruction of Monmouth Castle in the thirteenth century, writes: “Thus the glorie of Monmouth had cleane perished, ne had it pleased God longe after in that place to give life to the noble King Hen. V.” (“Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales,” by William Lambarde, first published in 1730). It may befit me, therefore, as an inhabitant of this town, to use my endeavour to preserve from perishing the memory of an object which tradition has associated with him who has given undying fame to my place of residence, and which for a period of many years has been lost to us. Tradition, of course, is not evidence. But where direct testimony is not to be obtained, and in the absence of authoritative contradiction, it must be accepted as of a certain weight and worth. It will generally be found to be built upon a substratum of fact, and although, in process of time, the groundwork is almost invariably distorted, it is rarely destroyed. Should there be nothing, then, but tradition to link this rare example of mediaeval furniture with the House of Plantagenet and the town of Monmouth, it would not, I opine, be beneath the notice of those whose professed aim is to classify the stores of the past and to preserve everything connected with those of our forefathers whose history is an honour to our land.

scholarly journals Writing Self, Writing Empire

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Aria Fani
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Literary Environment

The seventeenth century marks an exciting period in the life of Persian literarycultures in northern India. Established as a language of administration byTurco-Afghans in the early thirteenth century, several centuries later Persianhad extended well beyond its initial administrative strongholds to become animportant medium for literary and religious composition, historiography, andtranslation. In a literary environment that prized both literary aesthetics andfierce rivalries, the massive textual production on vastly diverse subjects, aswell as the presence of literary salons, standalone bookstalls, and mushā‘irahs(poetic assemblies), cumulatively point to a lively Persian literary culture thatechoed across political, religious, and socio-cultural terrains.Unfortunately, most of the scholarship on Persian in the medieval Indiancontext over the past decades has failed to illuminate this dynamic scene.Moreover, most studies seek to highlight Persian’s influence on India or examineIndia’s civilizational impact on Persian. Both paradigms assume a natural(read: Iranian) ecumene for Persian and thus do not critically considerthe slippage between linguistic, ethnic, and geographic designations wh

No need for mead

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-154
Author(s):  
Jonas Wellendorf
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Formal Study ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Skaldic Poetry ◽  
The Future ◽  
Poetic Composition

This paper will see Bjarni Kolbeinsson as a representative of the new kind of skaldic poetry that had developed around the turn of the thirteenth century. By then, formal skaldic poetry had become an art form cultivated by men who had received schooling and clerical ordination. Skalds such as Bjarni had turned their attention from the praise of kings of the present or the near past towards subjects of the more distant past and religious themes. In Jómsvíkingadrápa, Bjarni brushed aside the Odinic mead hailed by former skalds and preferred to apply techniques of poetic composition that he had learned through the formal study of Latin poetry. A tongue-in-cheek rejection of the traditional exordial topoi and a sensibility for love poetry allowed him to compose a poem that not only rejected the past but also pointed towards the future.

Killing Ambition

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-220
Author(s):  
Oren Falk
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Consolidation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Centralization ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Dependent Product

This chapter seeks to account for the nearly complete absence of warfare from medieval Iceland and its sagas. It argues that a single logic dictated both the embrace of feud as a socially constructive idea and the rejection of war as an abomination. Drawing on anthropological examples and analyses, war is defined by contrasting it with feud; the bond between war and state-formation is emphasized. War presupposes political centralization and differentiation, which Icelanders, committed to the reciprocal logic of feuding, resisted. According to the sagas, ideological opposition to war manifested itself in abortive attempts at political consolidation within Iceland, in confusion and substitution in the face of war elsewhere (in Norway, England, and North America), and in failure to contend with burgeoning warlike activity in thirteenth-century Iceland. Tensions between state-centric warfare and state-resistant feuding existed in historical reality, however, not only in saga accounts of this history; and in reality, tensions could not always be resolved. Uchronia provided a tool for creative, retrospective textual resolution of problems that could not be overcome in practice. As demonstrated by the Icelandic law code, Grágás, the past thus became the path-dependent product of the future. Uchronic ideology worked to emend any perceived historical ‘errors’: any symptoms of war that could not be suppressed in reality were, instead, overwritten and repressed in text

A Demon with Ruby Eyes

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-369
Author(s):  
Manan Ahmed Asif
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
The Past ◽  
Textual Production

This essay takes a longitudinal look at how different communities dealt with political and theological difference in the same space. It examines accounts of Uch Sharif, in contemporary Pakistan, from the thirteenth century to the present. It specifically traces a motif of ‘ruby eyes’ in Arabic and Persian historiography in an effort to delineate how difference was represented and assimilated. It argues that until the late colonial period, religious difference was mutually comprehensible, even if incommensurate. The rupture of meaning in recognising difference continued in different ways in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. The study provides a methodological argument for reshaping the ways in which we look at landscape, built environment and community, in contemporary South Asia. By situating the textual production of the past alongside the material remnants of the past, this essay reads simultaneously ethnographic and textual understandings of difference in Uch Sharif.

Piety and impiety in thirteenth-century italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 83-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Murray
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
The Middle Ages

Everyone is familiar with the notion of an ‘Age of Faith’. It is the idea that, at some time in the past, everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe. In this paper I propose to test the truth of this idea, in one period, and one region.I have chosen thirteenth-century Italy. The Middle Ages stand, par excellence, as the Age of Faith; and the thirteenth century, late enough not to starve us of evidence, was still early enough to be safely medieval. Italy, too, chooses itself: its documents, and its debates, yield the historian a clearer picture than he would get elsewhere. Whether Italy was typical of latin Christendom is a question that would call, not for another paper, but for another conference. But hints of her position will appear in the course of our enquiry. Some sources singled her out, some did not – giving an assurance, between them, that any difference between Italy and the rest was a difference between shades of grey.Italy, then, in the thirteenth century, is our field; and we shall be enquiring in it not, now, about kinds of belief, but about degrees of it. How far were our predecessors, in the time and place chosen, in the modern sense ‘religious’?

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