Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, pp. 360, 29 illus.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 286-288
Author(s):  
Therese Martin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Multiple Levels

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.

Muslim Roma in the Balkans

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Wild Animals ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Roma entered the Balkans from India during the Middle Ages. They reached Persia sometime in the ninth century and by the eleventh century had moved into the Byzantine Empire. According to the eleventh-century Georgian Life of Saint George the Athonite, the Emperor Constantine Monomachus asked the Adsincani to get rid of wild animals preying on the animals in his royal hunting preserve. Adsincani is the Georgian form of the Greek word Atsínganoi or Atzínganoi, from which the non-English terms for Roma (cigán, cigány, tsiganes, zigeuner) are derived. Adsincani means “ner-do-well fortune tellers” or “ventriloquists and wizards who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown.” “Gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a term often used by early modern chroniclers in the Balkans to refer to the Roma. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice that surround the word “Gypsy,” the Roma prefer a name of their own choosing from their language, Romani. Today, it is preferable to refer to the Gypsies as Rom or “Roma,” a Romani word meaning “man” or “husband.” Byzantine references to “Egyptians” crop up during this period as Byzantine political and territorial fortunes gave way to the region's new power, the Ottomans. There were areas with large Roma populations in Cyprus and Greece which local rulers dubbed “Little Egypt” in the late fourteenth century.

Wild Strawberries from Reichenau: Ruminations on Authority and Difference in Eleventh-Century “Gregorian” Chant

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Parkes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Gregorian Chant ◽  
Liturgical Chant ◽  
Intellectual Status ◽  
The Many ◽  
Music Theorist ◽  
Textual Content

One of the paradoxes of Gregorian chant is the way in which written sources become ever more plentiful across the Middle Ages while commentaries on its cultural and intellectual status take the opposite direction, becoming rare after the ninth century. An exception to that trend is the essay De varia psalmorum atque cantuum modulatione (On the Varied Modulation of Psalms and Chants), a substantial yet little known offering from the music theorist and liturgist Berno of Reichenau (d. 1048). Previously considered to be of uncertain authorship and doubtful musical value, the work is now shown to be an authentic witness, in part through evidence provided by a rediscovered manuscript (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Mus.ms.theor. 95). This permits a new appreciation of the author's unique and revealing agenda—to soothe the many tensions reportedly incited by the textual content of chant. With resonances in contemporary music theory, De varia psalmorum testifies to divergent practices in need of a new theoretical underpinning, as well as to previously unstudied cultures of textual correction existing between the ninth and twelfth centuries. In so doing it offers a rare insight into the liturgical chant traditions of the post-Carolingian age, both in Berno's native Germany and further afield.

Celtic Asceticism and Carolingian Authority in early medieval Brittany

1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia M. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The Impact

In the earlier Middle Ages, Brittany enjoyed a mixed reputation as a region in which to lead a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to God. The (eleventh-century?) Life of Me wan describes Samson and his disciples leaving Britain for a life of spiritual exile. They headed for Brittany because, according to the hagiographer, the region was not only a ‘desert’ where life would be harsher than elsewhere, but also because the ferocity of its inhabitants made it crueller. Others were not so sure whether this was an advantage. Abelard’s tribulations as abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys are well known: though himself originating fromBretagne gallo, he complained that the Bretons ofBretagne bretonnantewere a barbarian, lawless race, and that the monks of Saint-Gildas were dissolute and uncontrollable. Abelard’s comments echo a long tradition of French, or Frankish, castigation of the Bretons, stretching back at least to the ninth century. This criticism often expresses more than hostility to agenswhose language made them incomprehensible and hence ridiculous: amongst the tensions it reflects are problems of Christian discipline and ecclesiastical authority which the Frankish church was unable fully to resolve. In exploring behind the Bretons’ bad reputation, it is worthwhile investigating both the ascetic practices of early medieval Brittany and the reactions to those practices of the Frankish church. In so doing, I hope to elucidate my juxtaposition of ‘Celtic asceticism’ and ‘Carolingian authority’ by showing how Breton ascetic traditions were modified under the impact of Carolingian political circumstances.

The Idea of Innocent Martyrdom in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-century English Hagiology

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 81-92
Author(s):  
Paul A. Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Middle Ages

Kings and princes who were classed as ‘innocent martyrs’ or ‘passion-sufferers’ because they were thought to have been murdered in Christlike circumstances were known in many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. This paper is about six Anglo-Saxon saints of this type, who are also distinguished by their youth. All of them were thought to have been boys or teenage males when they were martyred. To date, work on these saints has concentrated on questions concerning the origins of their cults, and their relationship to the institution of kingship. The purpose of this paper, however, is to draw attention to the ways in which certain religious communities redefined their sanctity in the late tenth and eleventh century, and to make some tentative suggestions about the possible uses to which these cults were put in this milieu.

Early Medieval Poetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Medieval Poetry ◽  
The Middle Ages

This, the first of four chapters on the Middle Ages, explores the rise of vernacular verse from the fifth to eleventh centuries. There is a little surviving evidence for oral poetry in the vernacular languages prior to the fifth century, and the first written example comes from the beginning of that century. The story of Caedmon’s inspired poetry is examined, as is Bede’s ‘death song’ and other evidence for poetic activity in England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Several Old High German poems of the ninth century are considered, as well as Alfred the Great’s interest in poetry. Beowulf, dated somewhere between the late seventh and the eleventh century, includes scenes of poetic performance and may be itself an example of the kind of poem it depicts in performance. Also discussed are the Old English poems Deor and Widsith and the Viking and Viking-influenced poems of the tenth century.

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