Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and the Narrative Pattern of the 'Alchemical Marriage’ (2025)

Juggling the Middle Ages, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences Newsletter

Review of Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish, edited by Cary J. Nederman, Nancy Van Deusen, and E. Ann Matter

Parergon, 2010

IV The Central Middle Ages

Annual bulletin of historical literature, 1989

Modi di vita nel Medioevo (Bologna: I1 Mulino) is a popular account of early medieval mentalitts, concentrating on the omnipresence of uncontrolled nature, war and death. E Graus (ed.), Mentalitaten im Mittelalter. Methodische und inhaltfiche frobleme (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke) included O.G. Oexle on the three orders: 'Deutungsschemata der sozialen Wirklichkeit im friihen und hohen Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Wissens'. U. Bestmann, F. Irsigler and J. Schneider (eds), Hochfinanz, Wirtschafrtaume, Innovationen. Festschrift fur Wolfgang von Stromer 3 vols. (Trier: Auenthal Verlag); the first volume includes three articles on the twelfth century; R. Holbach on a Genoese merchant family, S. Zoller on a Cologne merchant family and N. Fryde on leading figures in the English Exchequer. 4.02 Women's history receives a welcome boost with C. W. Bynum's Holy Feusf and Holy Fast; the Religious Sign$cance of Food to Medieval Women (California U.P., $12.95); most of the material in this book is post-1200 but the pre-1200 traditions of female asceticism are dwelt on too. R.I. Moore, in a lively study, looks for the roots of the persecution of heretics, Jews and lepers in the increasing literacy of eleventh-century Christian society: The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Blackwell, f24.95); B. Geremek, La potence ou la pifib. L'Europe et les pauvres du Moyen Age u nos fours (Gallimard, F150) should also be noted. General Mentalitks are flourishing. V. Fumagalli's Quando il cielo s'oscura. 4.03 in Medieval Europe (Chicago U.P., $45) traces the development of ideas about sex and marriage in canon law. W. Hartmann,, 'Unbekannte Kanones aus dein Westfrankenreich des 10. Jhdts' (Deutsches Archiv., 43), discovers and edits six hitherto unknown synodal decrees. R.J. Zawilla, 'The Sententia Ivonis carnotensis epbcopi de divinis oficiis, the "Norman School", and Liturgical Scholarship; study and edition' (Medieval Studr., 49), enlarges our knowledge of the interest shown in liturgical developments in Normandy, in this case in the early twelfth century. See also J.H. Lynch, 'Spiriruale Vinculum; the Vocabulary of Spiritual Kinshiip in early medieval Europe' in TEX. Noble and J.J. Contreni (eds), Religion, culture and society in the early middle ages (Kalamazoo: Med.Inst., $32.95; pbk $15.!)5). 4.04 On the papacy, there are two new biographies: P. Richt, Gerbert a"Aurillac, le pape de I'an mil (Fayard), and G.M. Cantarella, La costruzione della veritb, fusquale 11, un papa afle strette (Rome). B.-U. Hergemuller, 'Die Nameii der Reformpapste (1046-1 145): (Archivum Hbtoriae fontijiciae, 24, 1986) looks at the drive to internal reform within the Roman church. H.E. Hilpert gives extra support to R. Schieffer's thesis that Canossa preceded the real bust-up over investitures in Deutsches Archiv, 43. 4.05 On popular religion, E. Werner, 'Alla ricerca del Dio nascosto: ert:tici e riformatori radicali nel secolo XI' (Quaderni storici, 64), adds nothing new. M.

IV The Central Middle Ages (900–1200) (i) European History

Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, 1990

General G. Holmes, The Oxford illustrcr/ed history of niedieval Eltrope (OUP, f17.50) is divided into six chapters to provide one chapter for northern and one for southern Europe for each of three periods; the relevant ones for this period are the work of the late D. Whitton and Rosemary Morris. Considerations of space make the treatment something of a gallop. For a studied attempt at periodization. see P. Delogu (ed.). Periodi e conrenuti de1 tiiedio evo (Rome: II ventaglio), which tries to categorize the early, central and late middle ages. Jacques Le Goff. Merlievol civilization (Basil Blackwell. f22.50) is a translation of La civilistition tle l'ocrideirt riifdiPval, which first appeared in 1964. when it shocked conservatives iind Catholics by its resolute aim of treating civilisation in its broadest sense of popular attitudes and how they were shaped rather than concentrating o n medieval Europe's finest achievements. Lively. though superficial and now somewhat dated. it is the only comprehensive overview of medieval mentalites in English. A. Gurevich. Medieval popiilur ciiltiirc (CUP. f27.50) attempts to work out popular attitudes to death and religion from didactic religious literature. More profound than Le Goff. it is also more muddled. On Europe and the wider world, see J.R.S. Phillips. Tire rriedievd exparision of Europe (OUP. f27.50). pbk f8.95). a useful introduction to the question. and the idiosyncratic L.N. Gumilev, Searches for an inicrginary kiiigdoiri: the legend of the kirigdoni offrester John (CUP. 1987, f37.50). Neither, alas. really tries to sort out modern scholarship on the Letter of Prester John. At last. a work which tries to set medieval money. usually purely the preserve of numismatists, in its wider context: P. Spufford. Money uiitl its iise in i~ietlievcrl Europe (CUP. f50.00) is extremely informative but not so strong on synthesis. with paragraphs too short to allow for any development of an argument. The twelfth century is passed over rather quickly. especially where France and Spain are concerned. H.W. Goetz. 'Gottesfriede und Gemeindebildung' (Zeit. der Savigtiy-Stiftung fiir Rechtsgeschichte. Gernianisrisckc Abteilitrig. 105) says that nascent communes used similar concepts to the Peace of God movement because they grew out of the Same background, rather than being directly derived from it. E. Patlagean. 'Europe, seigneurie. feodalite: Marc Bloch et les limites orientales d'un espace de comparaison' (Studi niedievuli. 29) attacks Bloch for assuming that eastern Europe wasn't feudal. M. Mitterauer, '"Senioris sui nomine". Zur Verbreitung von Fiirstennamen durch das Lehenswesen' (Mitteilungen des Institiits fiir osterreickische Geschichtsforschung, 96) attributes the diminution of the number of forenames in circulation to the practice of naming sons for one's lord. One of the most ambitious publications of the year was the proceedings of the 1986 Monumenta Germaniae f Iistorica conference on medieval forgeries. Fiilsclzctngen inz Mittelulter. Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (5 vols., Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung). The first volume deals with forgery in narrative sources. the second with the punishment of forgers (mostly dealing with the proscriptions of canon law), the third and fourth with forged charters and the 24 CENTRAL MlDDLE AGES 2s fifth (more details below) with letters. Out of over 150 articles at least half deal with the 10th-12th centuries. Ecclesiastical and papal history E-D. Hehl (ed.), Die Konzilien Deutschlands

'Making Sense of the Early Middle Ages': EHR Review article June 2009

Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus, vol. 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 133-151

Book Review: Early Medieval Text and Image 1: The Insular Gospels Early Medieval Text and Image 2: The Codex Amiatinus, the Book of Kells and Anglo-Saxon Art History, Hagiography and Biblical Exegesis: Essays on Bede, Adomnán and Thomas Becket

Irish Theological Quarterly, 2020

Understanding the Middle Ages. The transformation of ideas and attitudes in the medieval world. By Harald Kleinschmidt. Pp. xix+401 incl. 50 ills. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. £45. 0 85115 770 X

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2002

Hidden gospels. How the search for Jesus lost its way. By Philip Jenkins. Pp. viij. New York-Oxford : Oxford University Press, . $.     JEH ()  ; DOI : .\S Attempts to write ' objective ' lives of Christ or to embark on yet another quest for the historical Jesus have had a long tradition especially among radical theologians. In recent years outrageous views have seemed to be in the ascendancy ; the more heretical the conclusion the more likely it is to be publicised. From Allegro and his sacred mushroom of  through Elaine Pagels on the Gnostic Gospels to the publicity-seeking work of John Dominic Crossan, Robert Eisenmann and Barbara Thiering the general reader is likely to know their unorthodox rewritings of early Christianity. It is this phenomenon that Jenkins, an historian at Pennsylvania State University, investigates in this timely and well-researched book. One recurring theme is that most of their ' heresies ' are not new ; he cites precedents for them from writings of a century or more ago. But the popularity of similar views nowadays is attributed to the growth of academic religious studies departments, the rise in feminist studies (sic) and the willingness of publishers and the media to pander to sensationalist opinions. Radical historians of religion are fascinated by Christian origins but the origins they wish to see are made to conform to the requirements of modern (secular) society's agenda, where an anti-authoritarian stance and liberal values are buttressed by a revisionist history of Jesus, which is made compatible with such opinions by an uncritical use of certain ancient noncanonical texts. Contemporary practitioners have a large number of esoteric or hitherto lost texts to hand. Hidden documents whose origins are obscure and whose discovery involves subterfuge grab the headlines. The Nag Hammadi codices, especially the Gospel of Thomas and the Dead Sea Scrolls, figure prominently in these rewritings. Valuable though all these texts are, their insights are to do with sectarian movements and should not be used indiscriminately as foundational documents for earliest Christianity. Similarly many of the New Testament Apocrypha give valuable insights into popular piety from the second century onwards but are of little historical value for knowledge of the New Testament era, whose dramatis personae they write about. By misusing such writings a genuinely academic quest for the historical Jesus has been hijacked-hence this book's subtitle. In successive chapters Jenkins shows how many studies of ' Q ', Thomas, the elusive Secret Gospel of Mark and other texts are biased, uncritical or just   three prefaces Schweitzer wrote to his first, second and sixth editions. Although not an entirely new translation, but rather a major overhaul of the earlier one, this edition is a timely resource for English-language theology. Making Schweitzer's final text available to English readers for the first time is invaluable not only for those still engaged in a quest for the historical Jesus but also for all theologians engaged in Christology. This book lies behind all the Christological projects of the twentieth century and its impact is not exhausted yet. S J' C, J  C O The Gospel and Ignatius of Antioch. By Charles Thomas Brown. (Studies in Biblical Literature, .) Pp. xiiij. New York : Peter Lang, . £.     JEH ()  ; DOI : .\Sx Based on a dissertation for Loyola University, this is a study of Ignatius' use and application of the term ευ0 αγγε! λιον (Gospel). The first part of the book analyses the contexts and associated vocabulary and concepts in Ignatius, and in other early Christian literature. Here Brown builds on earlier scholarship in denying that Ignatius uses the term of, or is dependent on (a) written Gospel(s) ; while acknowledging Ignatius' use of pre-formed traditions, he emphasises the oral, preached nature of ' Gospel ' in the letters, and its particular focus on the passion and resurrection of Jesus (as in Paul). The second part develops his argument that in Ignatius, as in other early Christian literature, the term regularly defines the limits of acceptable belief and practice : in contemporary jargon, it is to do with identity and boundaries, binding insiders together and excluding outsiders. In effect, this results in an exegetically based study of Ignatius' thought, particularly his Christology, with rather less of an ecclesiological focus than in many analyses. There is little here that is startling, and the approach is expository and sympathetic, inclined to affirm Ignatius' view of the unity of the Church and of heresy. As such it does serve as an accessible introduction to Ignatius ' thought, if not to recent more critical analyses of his rhetoric. It is well-produced, if somewhat expensive for its length. K' C, J  L L Pneuma. Funktionen des theologischen Begriffs in fruW hchristlicher Literatur.

Unknowing the Middle Ages

2014

“Unknowing the Middle Ages” argues that attention to a late-medieval preoccupation with the unknowable helps untangle the work of literary discourse from historical and theological modes of inquiry. The project asserts that the topos of the unknown in late-medieval English literature offers more than some mystery to be revealed; instead, it winds through the poetic fabric of narrative and provides structure for some of the most often-studied Middle English texts. I begin by illustrating how, in the thirteenth century, many putatively “literary” texts reflected a theological emphasis on explication and disclosure. Buoyed by the institutionalization of Scholastic thought and an ecclesiastically-sanctioned program of surveillance, epistemology and religious ethics began to coalesce across textual communities from the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 well into the fourteenth century. What resulted was an eschatological poetics focused on revelation, sometimes to the detriment of a concurrent desire to create a united Christendom. By focusing on fourteenth-century Middle English texts, my project traces what I see as an important shift away from the teleological clarity of this revelatory poetics. I identify what I call a late-medieval “poetics of unknowing,” an act of literary refinement that recognizes impossibility as a productive site for poiesis. In other words, a “poetics of unknowing” reorients the impossible not as endpoint but as the ethical site from which Middle English literary discourse takes place in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In order to trace this “poetics of unknowing” as a strategy that emerges under specific historical circumstances, each of my four chapters addresses a figure whose textual history extends at least five hundred years, and who, across these centuries, had come to signify a historical or theological truth. The central focus of each chapter is to consider how, in late-medieval literary narratives, authors come to un-know the truths that had established the popularity of these figures. When translated into literary contexts, these four figures—Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde— overlap at questions of representation, exceeding the logics of the texts that they inhabit, expressed through the difficulty their readers have had putting them—and the epistemological conundrums they embody—to rest. Chapter one traces the evolution of the medieval Herod the Great from a paragon of madness in the writings of early Church Fathers to the comical, raging showman of the late-medieval English mystery cycles. Across these English plays, playwrights re-imagine Herod’s role as the one true foil of Christ, at once willfully impudent toward yet presciently aware of Christian eschatology. Herod’s hubristic performances and vivid on-stage deaths become shorthand for an entire legion of similarly fruitless attempts to alter the course of Christian history. An obsession with Herod’s impotence, shared by medieval writers and modern scholars, all but guarantees one of two possibilities: either he will not be able to transmit the real threat he poses to the Christian system or the villainy he engenders will inherit his impotence in the face of real power. This chapter also urges an expanded understanding of medieval typological thought, and, through it, a reconsideration of the literary stakes of medieval religious drama. These pageants, far from eliciting a naive confabulation of theological and cultural identity, illustrate an important medieval tension between the authority of inherited exegetical practices and the practical utility of narrative invention when it comes to understanding the complex narrative of Christian history. In chapter two, I turn from biblical history to the foundational narrative of English secular history, the Matter of Troy. Rather than treat how England un-knew its own history by forging a genealogical relationship with the classical past, I concentrate on a later invention to the Troy-England tradition, the figure of Criseyde. Criseyde emerges in the twelfth century as a figure whose betrayal of her lover Troilus provided misogynistic medieval readers with a knowable moral lesson to explain the Fall of Troy. In the minds of medieval readers, Criseyde became, a historical figure whose actions foretold the inherently untrustworthy dispositions of all courtly women. Chapter two offers a focused reading of Chaucer’s revisionist account, Troilus and Criseyde, which not only challenges the historical record, but also the very possibility of a knowable past. I explore the relationship between Chaucer’s narrator and Criseyde in order to show how Chaucer’s Troilus attempts to un-know Criseyde through an ethics of re-telling that focuses on the moments that exceed narrative certainty. Judging by the impressions that Chaucer’s ambiguous heroine created for generations of readers, it becomes clear that Chaucer’s text successfully re-opens the question of English history Criseyde was invented to help settle. In chapter three, I turn to a dream vision that fits neither Kathryn Lynch’s rubric for the “high medieval dream vision” nor the demands for clarity to which other thirteenth-century literary narratives worked toward. The Middle English elegy Pearl, written in the late fourteenth century, challenges the epistemological demands of its genre by insisting that even within the scene of dream revelation, divine knowledge remains suspended in the impossible-to-reach realm separating material from divine worlds. As a poem, Pearl tests the very boundaries the maiden cautions against, raising a paradox: to what degree can one communciate the immaterial knowledges that escape human cognition while writing from within the material world? I look more specifically at the relationship between a complex history of pearl symbolism and contemporary theological, mathematical, and scientific debates in order to show how Pearl reveals a shared concern among these discourses regarding the incommensurability of language and faith. Rather than affirm the pearl as an object that the good Christian can obtain or recover, Pearl interrogates the limits of symbolism and material knowledge to instruct the dreamer in exactly what can and cannot be known about loss. The final chapter addresses the political stakes of literary unknowing through a reading of one of the most lasting legends in European history, the legend of Prester John. Although a twelfth-century invention, the figure of Prester John maintained a mystique, and an unknowability, well through the thirteenth century’s investment in debunking Eastern splendor. In fact, many of the tropes of wonder, suppressed by more naturalistic travel accounts, survive through the Letter of Prester John. I argue that as historical belief in a kingdom of Prester John began to fade, the hope he inspired survives through literature, where John cements his importance as a figure who came to represent the untapped potential of the geo-political unknown. Given the legend’s association with a fantasy of a globalized Christendom, fiction provides a fitting landscape in which his unknowability can be less problematically explored: here John’s elusiveness becomes not a hindrance to finding his kingdom, but indicates the degree to which, through literature, he guards and continually reshapes the limits of what was geographically knowable. As my conclusion explores, the ultimate purpose of this dissertation is to outline a reading method applicable to a number of late-medieval texts. I offer unknowing as a reading ethic that underwrites a late-medieval movement toward understanding the literary as a sovereign discourse. By focusing on four better-known figures of medieval literary history, I create a background of historical certainty against which the literary “poetics of unknowing” labors.

Intellectual Life in The Middle Ages, ed. C. M. Smith, B. Ward,

preferred to the reign-year dating because errors in indictional calculation are frequent, and in any case Charles's chancery may not have used an indictional style dating from 1 September. (Tessier could have added that the argument of Lot and Halphen would require that the same error was made in charters by two different notaries, Jonas (T. 60), and Bartholomew (T. 61-3)); (c) Jonas subscribed T. 30 as notarius, and T. 60 as diaconus, and 'il n'y a aucune raison liturgique de placer la collation d'un ordre sacre entre le 27 et le 30 decembre'. (Jonas did, however, subscribe his next charter after T. 30, namely T. 33 (5 April 844) as diaconus.) Tessier's arguments were reaffirmed by K.