Between Sanudo and Fedanzola: Ashtori Ha-Parḥi as Mediator

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-240
Author(s):  
Amichay Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Close Similarity ◽  
Holy Land

Abstract This essay will examine the close similarity between the treatises of a Franciscan monk named Giovanni di Fedanzola and a Jewish sage named Ashtori Ha-Parḥi in the fourteenth-century Holy Land. The absence of guides for Christian pilgrims after the final departure of the Crusaders in 1291 was filled inter alia by Jews, and some new traditions regarding toponyms and geographical identifications were adopted by Christians as a result. Fedanzola mostly relied on his predecessors Burchardus de Monte Sion and Marino Sanudo. However, I will demonstrate that there are some instances where Fedanzola accepts Jewish traditions regarding locations mentioned in the Old Testament, with Ashtori Ha-Parḥi as his source. I will also show that positing a relationship between the two can clarify some obscure passages in Ashtori’s treatise, Kaftor va-feraḥ.

National Sentiment and Religious Vocabulary in Fourteenth-Century England

2009 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREA RUDDICK
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
National Sentiment ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
The Government

This article examines the neglected role of religious ideas and vocabulary in expressions of English national sentiment in the fourteenth century, particularly in official rhetoric. Many official uses of religious language followed well-established literary conventions. However, documents requesting nationwide prayers during national crises suggest that the government encouraged the concept of a special relationship between God and England, modelled on Old Testament Israel, well before the Protestant Reformation. National misfortunes were explained as divine punishment for national sins, with England presented as a collective moral community. Parallels with Israel were then drawn out more explicitly in public preaching, bringing this interplay between religion and politics to a wider audience.

Fourpenny Retirement: the Yorkshire Templars in the Fourteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 123-128
Author(s):  
Rosalind Hill
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Forest Law ◽  
Edward I

It is now generally accepted that the Order of Templars was destroyed not because of its heresy but because of its wealth. Having outlived its usefulness in the Holy Land, it fell a victim to the forces of financial, jealousy, not entirely unprovoked. Although in England the Order did not hold such an influential position as it did in France, it was nevertheless wealthy and very highly privileged. Edward I, himself a crusader, had in 1290 renewed and amplified a charter of Henry III which exempted the Templars from almost every kind of secular taxation, in addition to guaranteeing such valuable rights and immunities as they already held by authority of the Pope. On their English lands they enjoyed the rights of sac and soc, with all the appurtenances of a private court, and in addition they were quit of scot and geld, feudal aids, tallage and lastage and carucage, and of all tolls, charges, and payments connected with fairs throughout the land. They paid no tax on the export of wool, which their northern estates produced in abundance; in 1390 it was claimed that this privilege, in the counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone, accounted for more than half the income of the London Temple. They were free of demands for watch and ward, castle-guard, and requisitions for building the King’s works. They were exempt too from forest law, and could create assarts at pleasure; nor need they cut the claws of their dogs. Moreover, they could claim the forfeits, fines, and chattels of all felons taken upon their lands, even when these had been judged in the King’s court.

"Holy" land in the Old Testament: Numbers and Joshua

2006 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horst Seebass
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Holy Land

AbstractLooking through the Numbers-traditions of the holy land one has to answer the question whether Joshua is thought of as the literary continuation of Numbers. The survey shows that the traditions of Numbers and Joshua seem to be quite different, though there are parallels in the dividing of the land among the tribes. Probably there is one real connection, because elements of Josh. xviii 1-10 are used in Num. xxvi 55f. All other affinities regarding the theme of the holy land seem to be redactional and quite late. In Numbers one finds awareness of Transjordan as being holy to YHWH, though xxxiv 1-12 excludes it. xxxii 4 remembers land that YHWH had smitten and that is therefore available for Gad and Reuben. Numbers xxxv mentions cities of asylum in Transjordan as much as in West Jordan, for an already existing population.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nisse
Keyword(s):  
French Text ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mandeville's Travels

This book concludes with a discussion of two figures, one Christian and one Jewish, each a master storyteller of fictions of Diaspora. The first is “John Mandeville, knight,” who recalls his journey to everywhere in the mid-fourteenth-century French text Mandeville's Travels. In his account, Mandeville claims that Hebrew is no longer the language of the Old Testament but rather of the Jews' current-day conspiracies against Christians. The other voice is provided by Eleazer ben Asher ha-Levi, whose Book of Memory deals with inheritance in a diasporic inversion that encompasses the loss of Jerusalem. This conclusion also considers The Testament of Naphtali, a text that distills the themes of Diaspora in the Book of Memory and resists some of the redemptive possibilities for the ten Jewish tribes offered by rabbinic midrash.

scholarly journals The Disappearance of an Author and the Emergence of a Genre: Niccolò da Poggibonsi and Pilgrimage Guidebooks between Manuscript and Print*

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Blair Moore
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Illustrated Manuscripts ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Historical Origins

While the anonymous Viaggio da Venetia al Sancto Sepolchro et al Monte Sinai, first published in Venice in 1518, was the most popular Holy Land guidebook in Renaissance Italy, the historical origins of the book have never been fully understood. From four illustrated versions of an earlier manuscript guide, the Libro d’Oltramare (1346–50), one can hypothesize about both the text and its author. The ultimate prototype for the Viaggio da Venetia was very likely one or more of these illustrated manuscripts, and the original author of both the text and illustrations was the Franciscan pilgrim Niccolò da Poggibonsi. Despite the eventual erosion of his name from the printed versions of the guidebook, the assertiveness and originality of the author parallels the production of other vernacular literature in mid-fourteenth-century Italy. Unlike Latin guidebooks of previous centuries, the intent to include illustrations that re-create the pilgrimage experience and the unprecedented descriptiveness of the prose together suggest that the book can be considered the foundational text for the genre of the illustrated pilgrimage guidebook.

Astrology and the Sibyls: John of Legnano's De adventu Christi and the Natural Theology of the Later Middle Ages

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ackerman Smoller
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
Positive Light

ArgumentMedieval authors adopted a range of postures when writing about the role of reason in matters of faith. At one extreme, the phrase “natural theology” (theologia naturalis) was used, largely pejoratively, to connote something clearly inferior to revealed theology. At the other end, there was also a long tradition of what one might term “the impulse to natural theology,” manifested perhaps most notably in the embrace of Nature by certain twelfth-century authors associated with the school of Chartres. Only in the fifteenth century does one find authors using natural reason to investigate religious truths who also employ the term “natural theology,” now in a positive light, for their activities. Among such thinkers, astrology and eschatology frequently played an important role. In that respect, the writings of fourteenth-century Bolognese jurist John of Legnano offer an important example of the place of astrological, prophetic, and apocalyptic material in late medieval natural theology. In his 1375 treatise De adventu Christi, Legnano demonstrated that ancient poets, pagan seers such as the Sibyls, and non-Christian astrologers had all predicted, like Old Testament prophets, the virgin birth of Christ. For Legnano, not simply was Creation part of God's revelation, but, equally importantly, the very categories of reason and revelation blur in a way that points toward the works of Renaissance humanists and lays a foundation for a model of natural vaticination that showed reason's capability to reach fundamental religious truths.

St James in Tuscany: The Opera di San Jacopo of Pistoia and Pilgrimage to Compostela

1999 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
DIANA WEBB
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Principal Feature ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
To Come

Pilgrimage is universally recognised by historians as a principal feature of medieval popular religion, if by ‘popular’ we mean something in which the ordinary laity fully participated. While we can be confident of the fact of this participation, accurate measures of its scale are less easy to come by, while putting names to the thousands of humble participants is less easy still. Narrative sources, such as chronicles and hagiographies, tend to describe the pilgrimages of the great and good (and also of the not so good), and even when, especially in and after the fourteenth century, pilgrims themselves begin to leave accounts of their journeys for their own satisfaction, or for the edification and information of others, they can be seen, almost by definition, as standing somewhat apart from the nameless masses because they are either literate themselves, or addressing a literate pilgrimage ‘public’.The task of putting not merely names, but faces, to ‘ordinary’ pilgrims is not quite hopeless, however, although the materials which make it possible vary in their availability and abundance at different times and places. Use has been made of monastic cartularies to trace at least fragments of the biographies and family histories of members of the knightly classes whose participation in pilgrimage, it has been argued, helped to foster the crusading movement. A little later, the records of English royal government reveal the names of numerous pilgrims who sought royal licence and safe-conduct for their travels, registered the appointment of attorneys for the duration of their absence, or, as witnesses at inquisitions post mortem, remembered births and deaths by the year in which they themselves, or kin or friends, went to the Holy Land, to Canterbury, Compostela or elsewhere. Some at least of these names are those of men (and women) who occur elsewhere in surviving records and about whose lives and connections it is therefore possible to know at least a little. From all over Christendom, too, there are wills, made by intending pilgrims as a necessary part of their preparations.

Milman’s History of the Jews: a Real Place with Real People

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 319-328
Author(s):  
Alistair Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Real Place ◽  
Real People ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking

For English-speaking Protestants in the early nineteenth century, the Holy Land lived in the Bible. In that Land God had done his mighty works, and every name recalled an episode in the history of salvation. Its placenames were as real and resonant to believers as those of their own home district. Chapel-names like Mizpah and Shiloh were not just ‘somewhere in the Old Testament’, as they are to modern readers. Filtered through the anachronism of its readers’ imaginations, and haloed with devotion, the Holy Land was indeed holy.

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