From Chronicle to Romance

After Lavinia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Attitudes Toward Marriage

This chapter focuses on interdynastic marriage during the High Middle Ages. In particular, it examines the new emphasis on peacemaking in marriage diplomacy and its competition with other, generally negative attitudes toward marriage diplomacy. The chapter first considers how theological and devotional developments in the eleventh and twelfth centuries attributed a new sanctity to marriages between former belligerents by honoring brides as types of the Virgin Mary. It then discusses Dudo of Saint-Quentin's chronicle De moribus et actis primorum Normanniæ ducum, along with another Christian encounter with non-Christian representations of marriage and desire, the courtly love tradition, with its roots in Arabic and Ovidian accounts of erotic despair. The chapter shows that, by the High Middle Ages, the ideals that would support the great marriage treaties of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were in place.

The Marian Symbolism of Spring, ca. 1200-ca. 1500: Two Case Studies

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID J. ROTHENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Polyphonic Music

Abstract As the season of earthly rebirth, spring in the high and late Middle Ages provided both an ideal setting for secular love songs and a symbolic underpinning for the liturgical season of Eastertide. With the Virgin Mary acting as a spiritual point of mediation, Eastertide liturgy and secular springtime song resonated symbolically with one another, a resonance seen nowhere more clearly than in polyphonic compositions in which Eastertide chants, Marian prayers, and secular springtime songs sound simultaneously. This essay presents two case studies that explore the confluence of these diverse elements within polyphonic music. The first examines thirteenth-century compositions on the widespread tenor In seculum, positing its origins in the Mass for Easter Sunday —and by extension its associations with spring—as the reason that it was used so often and combined with such diverse textual and musical materials as pastourelles, dances, courtly love songs, and Marian prayers. The second study examines the use of multiple cantus firmi in Isaac's Laudes salvatori (from Choralis Constantinus) and Josquin's Victimae paschali laudes, both paraphrase settings of Easter sequences that comment upon their primary cantus firmus by simultaneously quoting additional melodies. Isaac uses the chants Regina caeli and Victimae paschali laudes to emphasize the central role that Mary plays in the miracle of the Resurrection, while Joquin accomplishes this same goal by employing the well-known chansons D'ung aultre amer and De tous biens plaine as vernacular symbols of Christ and the Virgin Mary, respectively. The two case studies, taken together, illustrate a consistent mode of symbolic thought that endured for over three centuries.

The Virgin Mary, Miriam, and Jewish Reactions to Marian Devotion in the High Middle Ages

AJS Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Dead Man

While discussing the rites and customs of burial and mourning in his bookTashbeẓ katan, the early fourteenth-century Rabbi Shimshon ben Ẓadok made the following remark:And the fact that we spill the water [that was in the presence of the dead man] outside [after the death] is because that when Miriam died the well ceased. For it is written: ‘And there was no water for the congregation [‘eda] since it was for her merit that the well traveled [with the Israelites] and we allude to it that he [the deceased] is a great man and he is worthy that water would cease on his behalf.

6. Empress of heaven and hell

2021 ◽  
pp. 99-122
Author(s):  
Mary Joan Winn Leith
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
High Middle Ages

‘Empress of heaven and hell’ recounts how the Virgin Mary came into her own during Europe’s High Middle Ages. Between 1150 and 1250, over 80 cathedrals and 500 churches were erected in honour of the Virgin Mary. There were a variety of factors that contributed to the explosion of Marian devotion in medieval and Renaissance spirituality. For example, Mary’s intercession with Christ acquired new urgency with a change in expectations about the soul’s fate after death. Related to this was belief in Mary’s Assumption, which is examined in light of theology and art. Mary’s place in medieval anti-Judaism is also worth considering. Historian Henry Adams’s description of medieval Marian energy carried over into the Renaissance, when Jesus’s humanity, based on Mary’s motherhood, became the touchstone for the humanist temper of the age.

scholarly journals Courtly Motives In The Art Of The High Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Slivinska ◽  
Larysa Tzvetkova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Symbolic Representation ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Religious Symbol ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Rose ◽  
Gothic Art ◽  
The Ideal

Purpose of the article. The article presents a study of courtly motives in the art of the high Middle Ages and the foundations of the ideological and figurative-symbolic representation of courtly images in various artistic forms of this era. Methodology. The study of the content of courtly motives and images, the definition of the ideological foundations of their figurative and symbolic representation was carried out through the use of historical, analytical, symbolic, and allegorical methods. Scientific novelty. The article examines courtly motives and courtly images presented in the art of the High Middle Ages, identifies the ideological foundations of their figurative and symbolic representation in various artistic forms of this era. Conclusions.  The visual images of medieval masters create the world of courtly, filling the courtly universe with numerous subjects that reflect the image and lifestyle of both knights and their Beautiful ladies. And thus they help to understand the norms and prescriptions of courtesy, the models of the participants' behavior in the courteous action, the corresponding rituals and etiquette norms of courteous relations, their attributes, and stylistics. In order to do this, the artists used various techniques - bright colors, saturation with symbols, heraldry, outfits, etc. Especially popular was the use of the rose image, which became the quintessence of Gothic art, its courtly and religious symbol, the embodiment of the ideal of chivalry to the Beautiful Lady, and a kind of reflection of the Christian image of the Virgin Mary.

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old French ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Image Context ◽  
Panel Paintings

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Governing Institutions

Historians of political development in the High Middle Ages often focus on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as the generations in which monarchy finally triumphed over aristocracy to create a monopoly on governing institutions in Western Europe. However, it was precisely in this period that Simon of Montfort emerged from his modest forest lordship in France to conquer a principality stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhône. A remarkable ascendancy in any period, it is perhaps especially so in its contrast with the accepted historiographical narrative. Despite the supposed triumph of monarchy during his lifetime, Simon’s meteoric career took place largely outside of royal auspices. Simon’s experience provides a challenge to an uncomplicated or teleological understanding of contemporary politics as effectively national affairs directed by kings.

Simon V of Montfort and Baronial Government, 1195-1218

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Fourth Crusade ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Biographical Study

Dissenter from the Fourth Crusade, disseised earl of Leicester, leader of the Albigensian Crusade, prince of southern France: Simon of Montfort led a remarkable career of ascent from mid-level French baron to semi-independent count before his violent death before the walls of Toulouse in 1218. Through the vehicle of the crusade, Simon cultivated autonomous power in the liminal space between competing royal lordships in southern France in order to build his own principality. This first English biographical study of his life examines the ways in which Simon succeeded and failed in developing this independence in France, England, the Midi, and on campaign to Jerusalem. Simon’s familial, social, and intellectual connexions shaped his conceptions of political order, which he then implemented in his conquests. By analysing contemporary narrative, scholastic, and documentary evidence—including a wealth of archival material—this book argues that Simon’s career demonstrates the vitality of baronial independence in the High Middle Ages, despite the emergence of centralised royal bureaucracies. More importantly, Simon’s experience shows that barons themselves adopted methods of government that reflected a concern for accountability, public order, and contemporary reform ideals. This study therefore marks an important entry in the debate about baronial responsibility in medieval political development, as well as providing the most complete modern account of the life of this important but oft-overlooked crusader.

Visions of Kinship in Medieval Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Late Roman

What meaning did human kinship possess in a world regulated by biblical time, committed to the primacy of spiritual relationships, and bound by the sinews of divine love? In the process of exploring that question, this book offers a searching re-examination of kinship in Europe between late Roman times and the high Middle Ages, the period bridging Europe’s primitive past and its modern present. It critiques the modernist and Western bio-genealogical and functionalist assumptions that have shaped kinship studies since their inception in the nineteenth century, when biblical time collapsed and kinship became a signifier of the essential secularity of history and a method for conceptualizing a deeper prehistory guided by autogenous human impulses. It argues that this understanding of kinship is fundamentally antagonistic to medieval sentiments and is responsible for the frustrations researchers have encountered as they have tried to identify the famously elusive kin groups of medieval Europe. It delineates an alternative ethnographic approach inspired by recent anthropological work that privileges indigenous expressions of kinship and the interpretive potential of native ontologies. The book reveals that kinship in the Middle Ages was not biological, primitive, or a regulator of social mechanisms; nor is it traceable by bio-genealogical connections. In the Middle Ages kinship signified a sociality that flowed from convictions about the divine source of all things and wove together families, institutions, and divinities into an expansive eschatological vision animated by “the most righteous principle of love.”

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