Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Medieval Europe

This chapter discusses the interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in medieval Europe. It considers the importance of Augustine’s doctrine of Jews as ‘witnesses’ to Christian truth in the formation of the medieval image of the ‘hermeneutical Jew’. Jews, who lived primarily in the Islamic world in the first millennium, began to migrate into Christian lands in greater numbers from the eleventh century. As Christian ideas about Judaism evolved in the twelfth century, culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Jewish authors responded with detailed critiques of Christian belief. The simultaneous Christian engagement with Muslim sources led to a triangular encounter, especially significant in the Iberian Peninsula, between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers, reflected in numerous dialogues and polemics about prophecy and history. Beginning in the thirteenth century, mendicant friars, including converts, played a greater role in engagement with Islam and Judaism, taking on important roles as translators and inquisitors.

“Io credo…”: “Professing” faith in Paradiso 24

Dantists have largely interpreted Paradiso 24 as a dryly intellectual canto that positively engages with medieval scholastic culture. Consequently the poet’s treatment of faith is seen as both ideologically unproblematic and as an essentially private declaration. The present article argues that such claims are questionable. In actual fact, Paradiso 24 is highly critical of the academic world, while its treatment of faith, although orthodox, is personal, idiosyncratic, and controversial. In addition, the manner in which Dante presents faith has significant political and social implications especially in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Finally, the canto in general and its assessment of faith in particular serve to legitimate Dante’s status as a scriba Dei, an imperative that destabilizes the coherence of the diegesis.

The Papacy Takes Charge

Chapter 8 moves from the Norman kingdom of the twelfth century to the newly changed situation in the early thirteenth century, as the demise of the Hauteville dynasty and the minority of the young king Frederick II Hohenstaufen (r. 1198–1250) created an opportunity for Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) and his successors to enforce their authority in southern Italy. Meanwhile, the Latin conquest of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1204) created an imperative for the papacy to develop a coherent policy towards the integration of Greek Christians into the Roman church’s administrative and legal structures. The chapter discusses how the papacy formulated this policy at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the resulting increase in papal interventions in the legal affairs of the southern Italian Greeks. It then looks at Pope Honorius III’s (r. 1216–1227) short-lived effort to organise Byzantine-rite monasteries into an Order of St Basil under Grottaferrata (a predecessor to Eugenius IV’s more successful fifteenth-century order). It examines the Grottaferrata Nomocanon (Marc. gr. 171), a manuscript produced at the monastery in c. 1220–1230 that was apparently intended to provide a legal guide for the new order yet was still entirely Byzantine in character. The chapter finishes by focusing on the conflict between the Holy Saviour monastery of Messina and the papacy in the 1220s–1230s as an important example of the papacy’s efforts to bring the royal monasteries of the Kingdom of Sicily under episcopal control.

THE BISHOPS’ BOOKS OF CITTÀ DI CASTELLO IN CONTEXT

Revisiting Robert Brentano's 1960 article in Traditio on “The Bishops’ Books of Città di Castello,” this contribution challenges a reigning narrative of the “documentary revolution” in medieval Italy as primarily the achievement of the thirteenth-century communal governments of the north. While these urban ruling regimes did produce prodigious numbers of documents and new documentary forms, they were not the earliest innovators. By broadening the scope of analysis to include all the early administrative codices surviving in Città di Castello — those of the city's communal government, cathedral chapter, and bishopric — the author demonstrates that the initial leap from administrative reliance on single sheet parchments to registers occurred earliest in the cathedral chapter (by 1192), then in the bishop's court (1207), and finally more than a decade later in the commune (1221). At least in this one small Umbrian town, ecclesiastical institutions were the earliest innovators. The evidence of Città di Castello also indicates that political instability and its related economic effects drove innovation, not the reform initiatives of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council. Local ecclesiastical leaders, not popes, were the innovators.