Melusine

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Original Text ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Prose Narratives ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
Human World ◽  
Prose Romances

The Middle English Melusine is a prose romance produced by an anonymous author in the late 15th century. It is a reasonably faithful translation of the French Roman de Mélusine, completed by Jean d’Arras in 1393 at the behest of Jean, Duc de Berri. Jean’s original text, together with a verse version, Roman de Partenay, penned by La Coudrette c. 1401–1405, enjoyed immense popularity in medieval western Europe, with a rich array of manuscripts and incunabula being produced and translations emerging in German, Dutch, and Castilian. There also exists an English translation of the verse romance, The Romans of Parthenay (c. 1500). A pseudohistorical narrative weaving elements of romance and chronicle, Melusine traces the foundation of the House of Lusignan to its mythical ancestor. Cursed to metamorphose into a snake below the waist on Saturday evenings, Melusine’s salvation is contingent upon her marrying a man who swears never to learn of or speak about her secret. After marrying a nobleman of Poitiers, Melusine quickly transforms the wild landscape of Poitou in northwestern France into a rich, cultivated, and prosperous region, constructing an impressive series of fortresses and churches within a matter of days. The first fortress becomes the realm’s main seat of power and is named “Lusignan” in honor of its patroness. Melusine and her husband soon have ten sons, most of whom bear strange facial markings that seem to allude to a supernatural parentage. Despite this, many of the sons venture off on crusade and conquest, spreading their dynasty’s influence across Europe and the Near East. Eventually, Melusine’s snake tail is discovered by her husband; when he reveals her secret to the court, she is forced to leave the human world forever and roam the Earth as a dragon until Judgement Day. As her curse dictates, Melusine must return to Lusignan to hail death and the transferal of power within her genealogical line. Little is known about the precise origins of the Middle English Melusine. As with many insular romances, the translator and patron remain anonymous, though the text’s colossal length would indicate a wealthy clientele. Contrary to literary trends in France and Burgundy, prose narratives written in English appeared relatively late in the 15th century, only truly gaining popularity after the arrival of Caxton’s printing press. The Middle English Melusine is therefore an important example of England’s early prose romances in the vernacular.

scholarly journals “‘But the Fountain Sprang Up and the Bird Sang Down’: Heidegger’s Gathering of the Fourfold and the Seven-Sacraments Font at Salle, Norfolk.”

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 464
Author(s):  
Marie Clausén
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Art History ◽  
Architectural Elements ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

My paper analyses the 15th-century seven-sacraments font at the medieval church of St Peter and St Paul at Salle in Norfolk (England). The church guides and gazetteers that describe the font, and the church in which it is situated, owe both their style and content to Art History, focusing as they do on their material and aesthetic dimensions. The guides also tend towards isolating the various elements of the font, and these in turn from the rest of the architectural elements, fittings and furniture of the church, as if they could be meaningfully experienced or interpreted as discrete entities, in isolation from one another. While none of the font descriptions can be faulted for being inaccurate, they can, as a result of these tendencies, be held insufficient, and not quite to the purpose. My analysis of the font, by means of Heidegger’s concept of Dwelling, does not separate the font either from the rest of the church, nor from other fonts, but acknowledges that it comes to be, and be seen as, what it is only when considered as standing in ‘myriad referential relations’ to other things, as well as to ourselves. This perspective has enabled me to draw out what it is about the font at Salle that can be experienced as not merely beautiful or interesting, but also as meaningful to those—believers and non-believers alike—who encounter it. By reconsidering the proper mode of perceiving and engaging with the font, we may spare it from being commodified, from becoming a unit in the standing reserve of cultural heritage, and in so doing, we, too, may be momentarily freed from our false identities as units of production and agents of consumption. The medieval fonts and churches of Norfolk are, I argue, not valuable as a result of their putative antiquarian qualities, but invaluable in their extending to us a possibility of dwelling—as mortals—on the earth—under the sky—before the divinities.

scholarly journals IGCP 272 - Late Palaeozoic and Early Mesozoic circum-Pacific events and their global correlation

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 85-85
Author(s):  
J. M. Dickins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Upper Permian ◽  
Triassic Boundary ◽  
Early Mesozoic ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Late Palaeozoic ◽  
Global Correlation ◽  
Harsh Climate

IGCP 203 - Permo-Triassic events of eastern Tethys and their intercontinental correlation - focussed on the Permian-Triassic boundary sequences and in particular there was a consensus that the distinctive biological changes were associated with strong sea-level and tectonic change, strong volcanic activity and a harsh climate. These factors were connected with an important change in the environment and with the exception perhaps of the climate, reflected deep-seated changes within the earth. The project also resulted in improving the physical understanding of the sequences and their biostratigraphy and correlation.IGCP 272 was developed, and was approved in 1988, to apply these results to understanding the Late Palaeozoic and Early Mesozoic and was focussed on the Pacific as integration around this region seemed to offer especially fruitful possibilities.Working group meetings up to the end of 1991 have been held in Australia (Newcastle and Hobart), New Zealand (Dunedin), South America (Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires) and North America (Washington). Meetings are planned in North America, Japan, Eastern Siberia or Thailand and western Europe (France-Spain-Austria).Special cooperation has developed with the Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic Subcommissions of IUGS and with IGCP 214 - Global Bio-events. Using the more exact time correlations developed it has now been possible to show that major geological and biological events (of different levels of significance) are associated with major boundaries already recognized in the World Standard Stratigraphical Time Scale. These comprise the Carboniferous-Permian, the mid-Permian (twofold subdivision, the Permian-Triassic (already recognized in earlier work), the Lower-Middle and Middle-Upper Triassic and the Triassic-Jurassic boundaries.A special achievement of the project has been to show the similar significance of the Midian-Dzhulfian boundary within the Upper Permian but corresponding closely to the traditional Lower-Upper Permian of China and the Middle-Upper Permian of Japan.Although there are also other events at levels which have not been investigated by the project, those outlined all seem to reflect important changes within the earth.

Bruges, 15th-century centre of the notarial profession in the Low Countries

2009 ◽  
Vol 77 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-102
Author(s):  
Hendrik Callewier
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
North Western

AbstractOn the strength of previous research it has often been assumed that in Flanders the notarial profession had barely developed before 1531. That position can no longer be upheld, in particular with regard to fifteenth-century Bruges, since a prosopographical study into the notaries public who were active at the time in Bruges shows that nowhere else in the Low Countries was the notariate so successful. Moreover, because of their numbers, of their intensive activity in pursuing their trade and of the nature of the deeds they drafted, the Bruges notaries appear to have set the standards for their colleagues in the other parts of the Low Countries. Even so, it remains true that in Bruges as in the rest of North-Western Europe, the notarial profession remained far less important than in the cities of Northern Italy.

Anders Celsius’ Contributions to Meridian Arc Measurements and the Establishment of an Astronomical Observatory in Uppsala

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Stempels
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Astronomical Observatory ◽  
Far North ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Extensive Collection ◽  
Modern Astronomy ◽  
Early 18Th Century ◽  
The Way

AbstractAstronomy has been on the curriculum of Uppsala University from at least the middle of the 15th century. However, since Uppsala also was the ecclesiastical centre of Sweden, the acceptance of new ideas, such as the Copernican heliocentric system, was slow. At the same time, more peripheral universities in the Swedish empire, including Dorpat/Tartu, enjoyed a larger freedom. It was not until the early 18th century that a ‘modern’ astronomy emerged in Uppsala. This effort was to a large extent led by Anders Celsius (1701-1744), who was able to establish good international contacts with astronomers in continental Europe. Celsius participated in De Maupertuis’ expedition to the far north of Sweden, in order to measure the meridian arc and determine the shape of the Earth. This paper explores how Celsius became involved in De Maupertuis’ expedition, and how this effort paved the way to the establishment of a fully equipped astronomical observatory, including an extensive collection of books and instruments, most of which survives up to this day.

Negation and OV order in Late Middle English

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD INGHAM
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Large Database ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
15Th Century

Optional OV order in Later Middle English (LME) has given rise to conflicting theoretical accounts. Earlier analyses postulating movement to AgrOP or alternative base orders are found to be inadequate to deal with the occurrence of OV in non-literary LME; in a large database of 15th century private familial correspondence, residual OV order is found to have been productive only with negated objects. Multiple subject constructions with there expletives showed the same restriction. These phenomena are accounted for by postulating overt Neg Movement (Haegeman 1995) as a permitted option in LME. In this framework, it is argued that LME showed a mixed typology having both Neg movement and a null Neg operator. LME had three ways of satisfying the NEG Criterion (Haegeman 1995): Merge not in Spec NegP, coindex [OP]i … [XP(Neg)]i, and Move XP(Neg) to Spec NegP. Modern English has only the first two. The distribution in this period of negative concord with not is shown to support our analysis.

scholarly journals The Distribution of the Perfect Auxiliaries be/have in Middle English Texts

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Alicja Zdziera
Keyword(s):  
Simple Model ◽  
Middle English ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Verbs Of Motion ◽  
Verb Phrases ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Germanic Languages

Like many Germanic languages, English has developed specific periphrastic constructions to express perfective meaning. Before being fully grammaticalized in the 16th century, they were used occasionally in Old and Middle English as complex verb phrases with either habban ‘to have’ or beon/wesan ‘to be’ acting as auxiliary verbs. By the Modern English period, forms created with be disappeared from the language and were almost completely replaced by forms with have, a process which did not occur, for instance, in German. As the data on this development are quite scarce, a relatively simple model is assumed with a steady diachronic progress towards the system established in Modern English, a model which disregards synchronic variation. This paper attempts to investigate the distribution of the perfective constructions with be and have, especially in the 15th century texts and to identify the main factors accounting for diff erences in their usage. Instead of taking into account only the diachronic aspect of the development described, the present study focuses mainly on investigating the synchronic variation in the auxiliaries used with the two most frequent verbs of motion, namely come and go in the perfective meaning.

scholarly journals The “Apocryphal” Inscription from Mangup, Crimea, and Rituals of “Exposing the Thief”: Magic and Law from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Slovene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-93
Author(s):  
Andrey Yu. Vinogradov ◽  
Mikhail S. Zheltov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Russian Regions ◽  
Judicial Practice ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Middle Ages

The discovery of a Byzantine bread stamp inscribed with the text of Ps 29:8 in the ruins of Mangup Basilica in Crimea allows the authors of this article to revise the entire tradition of the Byzantine magical and folk “recipes” for revealing a thief; it is this context in which this verse is used in combination with a special bread. Prototypes of these recipes and procedures are attested in the late antique syncretic (pagan-Judeo-Christian) magical papyri, in which private persons are advised to detect thieves by means of special spells, used either on their own or in combination with bread and cheese, an image of an eye, birds, bowls of water, and laurel leaves. In middle- and late-Byzantine manuscripts, these procedures are still present but in “Christianized” forms, even to the extent that a bread-and-cheese (or just bread) procedure is sometimes described as a regular liturgical rite, performed in a church. In the meantime, there is evidence indicating that the Byzantine hierarchy had been struggling with this and other instances of using magical procedures under the cloak of the Christian liturgy, and, in particular, bishops had been expelling priests who used bread sortilege to determine guilt. However, in Western Europe, especially in Germany and England, where spells against thieves had also been known since antiquity, the bread ordeal (English: Corsnaed, German: Bissprobe) became an accepted judicial practice, and even found its way into the official law codes of 11th-century England. Quite surprisingly, a similar phenomenon is attested in Russia (Novgorod) in the early 15th century. Taking into account the Crimean bread stamp studied in this article, one can conclude that bread ordeals, prohibited in Constantinople, could have been tolerated in the Byzantine periphery, including Crimea, and that it is from these areas that this practice could have come to some Russian regions as well.

scholarly journals The Ritual of “Exposing the Thief” in Old Rus: from the Enactment by the Archbishop of Novgorod Ioann III to Apocryphal Manuscript Culture

Slovene ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 262-295
Author(s):  
Alina S. Alekseeva
Keyword(s):  
Full Text ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Textual Study ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
History Of

The Old Russian ritual of “Exposing the Thief” (“The Decree on the Proskomedia to the Holy Three Confessors Gurias, Samonas and Abibus”) was written by the Archbishop of Novgorod, Ioann III. The creation of the text was inspired by the sign from the icon of the confessors on December 24, 1410 in St. Sophia Cathedral. The full text of the “Decree…” is preserved in two copies from the 16th –17th centuries, whereas the prayer alone until recently was known in two copies not earlier than the 17th century. The corpus of copies of the prayer was replenished with two copies in manuscripts from the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century and from the 18th century, respectively. The discovery of the first copy raised the question about the original text written by Archbishop Ioann: did he write the prescriptive part for a previously known prayer only or the full text? A textual study of the “Decree...” and the copies of the prayer allows to reconstruct the history of the text and conclude that the archetype contained both the prayer and the prescriptive part. Thus, it could be confirmed that the author of both parts of the “Decree...” is Archbishop Ioann, but the prayer is a less uniform formation. The comparison with Slavic prayers showed that the fragment about the forefathers, going back to a Greek tradition, was borrowed by Ioann from a South Slavic manuscript, while the first part of the text about the three confessors was compiled by the archbishop himself in the context of the special attitude of Novgorod to the cult of St. Gurias, Samonas and Abibus.

scholarly journals York’s Guilds’ Names in the 15th Century and Their Translation into Spanish

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Mourón Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Corpus Christi Cycle ◽  
Definition Of

En la Inglaterra de la Baja Edad Media, los gremios de la ciudad de York se encargaban de representar escenas bíblicas tomadas del ciclo de Corpus Christi. Nuestro objetivo principal será describir, definir y traducir los nombres de los gremios que aparecen en la lista de Burton (1415). Asimismo, trataremos problemas surgidos del intento de establecer una correspondencia adecuada entre los términos en inglés medio, en español y la definición del gremio. Como veremos, los términos que designan a los gremios ingleses no suelen reflejar con exactitud aquellos usados para los gremios medievales españoles o para trabajos y profesiones actuales.Palabras clave: Gremios de York, ciclo de Corpus Christi, traducción, inglés medio, comercio.ABSTRACTIn late medieval England, YorkKs guilds were responsible for the performance of short Biblical scenes from the Corpus Christi cycle. Since no translation of the whole cycle into Spanish is available, we will describe, define and translate the guildsK names in BurtonKs list (1415). We will also deal with some problems found when establishing an accurate correspondence among the terms in Middle English, in Spanish and the definition of the craft. The terms which designate the English guilds do not exactly reflect those used for the Spanish medieval gremios or for current trades and jobs in English and Spanish.Key words: YorkKs guilds, Corpus Christi cycle, translation, Middle English, trade

scholarly journals The livre partition phenomenon in J.-G. Kastner’s oeuvre

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
Andrei Yur'evich Seibert
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the 19th century, after a two-centuries oblivion, the interest in a medieval genre “danse macabre” reappeared. Dances of Death were embodied not only in pictorial art, literature and music, but also attracted the attention of scholars. The research subject of this article is one of such scientific works - “Les Danses des Morts” by J.-G. Kastner. Its uniqueness consists in the combination of a theoretical research and practical embodiment of its results in a piece of music. The genre of the tractate is defined by scholars as “livre partition” - a sheet music book. The article contains the biographical data of the life and creative work of the French scholar, music expert and composer, little-known in Russian musicology. Based on their own translation of the original text, the authors study the structure-content components of the tractate and define its specificity. J.-G. Kastner considers the genre “danse macabre” in the historical, philosophical and aesthetic contexts; traces back the interdependence of literary, decorative, and musical versions of the dances. The tractate of the French musicologist considers in detail the range of instruments of dance macabre (based on the collection of wooden engravings of a gothic Doten Dantz printed in the late 15th century). The authors define the features of J.-G. Kastner’s ideas which differ them from the thanatological views of his predecessors H. Peino and E.-H. Langlois.

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