Gayk and Tonry, eds.: Form and Reform

Form and Reform

Reading across the Fifteenth Century

Edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry

Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century challenges the idea of any definitive late medieval moment and explores instead the provocatively diverse, notably untidy, and very rich literary culture of the age. These essays from leading medievalists, edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry, both celebrate and complicate the reemergence of the fifteenth century in literary studies. Moreover, this is the first collection to concentrate on the period between 1450 and 1500—the crucial five decades, this volume argues, that must be understood to comprehend the entire century’s engagement with literary form in shifting historical contexts.

The three parts of the collection read the categories of form and reform in light of both aesthetic and historical contexts, taking up themes of prose and prosody, generic experimentation, and shifts in literary production. The first section considers how attention to material texts might revise our understanding of form; the second revisits devotional writing within and beyond the context of reform; and the final section plays out different perspectives on the work of John Skelton that each challenge and test notions of the fifteenth century in literary history.

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Steel: How to Make a Human

How to Make a Human

Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages

Karl Steel

How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages tracks human attempts to cordon humans off from other life through a wide range of medieval texts and practices, including encyclopedias, dietary guides, resurrection doctrine, cannibal narrative, butchery law, boar-hunting, and teratology. Karl Steel argues that the human subjugation of animals played an essential role in the medieval concept of the human. In their works and habits, humans tried to distinguish themselves from other animals by claiming that humans alone among worldly creatures possess language, reason, culture, and, above all, an immortal soul and resurrectable body. Humans convinced themselves of this difference by observing that animals routinely suffer degradation at the hands of humans. Since the categories of human and animal were both a retroactive and relative effect of domination, no human could forgo his human privileges without abandoning himself.

Medieval arguments for both human particularity and the unique sanctity of human life have persisted into the modern age despite the insights of Darwin. How to Make a Human joins with other works in critical animal theory to unsettle human pretensions in the hopes of training humans to cease to project, and to defend, their human selves against other animals.

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Sherberg: The Governance of Friendship

The Governance of Friendship

Law and Gender in the Decameron

Michael Sherberg

The Governance of Friendship: Law and Gender in the Decameron by Michael Sherberg addresses two related and heretofore unexamined problems in the pages of the Decameron: its theory of friendship and the legal theory embedded in it. Sherberg shows how Aristotle’s Ethics as well as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica inform these two discourses, at the intersection of which Boccaccio locates the question of gender relations which is one of the book’s central concerns.

Through a series of close readings at all three levels of the text—the author’s statements, the frame narrative, and the stories themselves—Sherberg shows how Boccaccio exposes and explores gender tensions rooted in a notion of the patriarchal household, which finds its own rationale in the natural-law postulate of the inferiority of women. Relying on the writings of the great twentieth-century legal theorist Hans Kelsen, Sherberg demonstrates how through the complex architecture of the Decameron Boccaccio dismantles the logic of natural law, exposing it instead as a rhetoric used by men to justify their control of women.

The Governance of Friendship aims well to advance our understanding of Boccaccio as an intellectual: not only steeped in the key texts of his time, but also at the forefront of critical thinking about such issues as law and gender which will play out over the coming centuries and beyond.

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Schiff: Revivalist Fantasy

Revivalist Fantasy

Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History

Randy P. Schiff

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History by Randy P. Schiff contributes to recent conversations about disciplinary history by analyzing the nationalist context for scholars and editors involved in disseminating the literary historical theory of an Alliterative Revival. Redirecting Alliterative Revivalism’s backward gaze, Revivalist Fantasy re-engages with the local contexts of select alliterative works.

Schiff revises readings of alliterative poetry as Francophobic, exploring the transnational imperialist elitism in the translation William of Palerne. He contributes to the discussion of gender in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by linking the poem’s powerful female players with anxieties about women’s control of wealth and property in militarized regions of England. The book also explores the emphatically pre-national, borderlands sensibilities informing the Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane, and it examines the exploitation of collaborative composition in the material legacy of the Piers Plowman tradition.

Revivalist Fantasy concludes that Revivalist nationalism obscures crucial continuities between late-medieval and post-national worlds and that critics’ interests should be channeled into the forging of connections between past and present rather than suspended in the scholarly pursuit of origins. The book will be of interest to scholars of editorial history and translation studies and to those interested in manuscript studies.

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Williams: Inventing Womanhood

Inventing Womanhood

Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

Tara Williams

In Inventing Womanhood, Tara Williams investigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenth-century Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s, female roles expanded temporarily. As a result, the dominant models of maiden, wife, and widow could no longer adequately describe women’s roles and lives.

Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres, from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular, writers coined new terms, including “womanhood” and “femininity,” and refashioned others, such as “motherhood.” These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to re-imagine women’s relationships to different kinds of authority—generally masculine and frequently religious.

By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary, Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage, which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies, providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages.

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Barr: Willing to Know God

Willing to Know God

Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages

Jessica Barr

Although authors of mystical treatises and dream visions shared a core set of assumptions about how visions are able to impart transcendent truths to their recipients, the modern divide between “religious” and “secular” has led scholars to study these genres in isolation. Willing to Know God addresses the simultaneous flowering of mystical and literary vision texts in the Middle Ages by questioning how the vision was thought to work. What preconditions must be met in these texts for the vision to transform the visionary? And when, as in poems such as Pearl, this change does not occur, what exactly has gone wrong?

Through close readings of medieval women’s visionary texts and English dream poems, Jessica Barr argues that the vision required the active as well as the passive participation of the visionary. In these texts, dreamers and visionaries must be volitionally united with the divine and employ their rational and analytic faculties in order to be transformed by the vision.

Willing to Know God proposes that the study of medieval vision texts demands a new approach that takes into account both vision literature that has been supposed to have a basis in lived experience and visions that are typically read as fictional. It argues that these two “genres” in fact complement and inform one another. Rather than discrete literary modes, they are best read as engaged in an ongoing conversation about the human mind’s ability to grasp the divine.

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Woods: Classroom Commentaries

Classroom Commentaries

Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Marjorie Curry Woods

With an unusually broad scope encompassing how Europeans taught and learned reading and writing at all levels, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe provides a synoptic picture of medieval and early modern instruction in rhetoric, poetics, and composition theory and practice. As Marjorie Curry Woods convincingly argues, the decision of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200) to write his rhetorical treatise in verse resulted in a unique combination of rhetorical doctrine, poetic examples, and creative exercises that proved malleable enough to inspire teachers for three centuries.

Based on decades of research, this book excerpts, translates, and analyzes teachers’ notes and commentaries in the more than two hundred extant manuscripts of the text. We learn the reasons for the popularity of the Poetria nova among medieval and early Renaissance teachers, how prose as well as verse genres were taught, why the Poetria nova was a required text in central European universities, its attractions for early modern scholars and historians, and how we might still learn from it today. Woods’ monumental achievement will allow modern scholars to see the Poetria nova as earlier Europeans did: a witty and perennially popular text central to the experience of almost every student.

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Raskolnikov: Body Against Soul

Body Against Soul

Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory

Masha Raskolnikov

In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of sowlehele (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, Body Against Soul examines Piers Plowman, the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul.

The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self’s inner powers.

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White: Renaissance Postscripts

Renaissance Postscripts

Responding to Ovid’s Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France

Paul White

Ovid’s Heroides, a collection consisting mainly of poetic love letters sent by mythological heroines to their absent lovers, held a particular fascination for Renaissance readers. To understand their responses to these letters, we must ask exactly how and in what contexts those readers first encountered them: were they read in Latin or in the vernacular; as source texts for the learning of grammar and history or as love poetry; as epistolary and rhetorical models or as moral examples?

Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France by Paul White offers an account of the wide variety of responses to the Heroides within the realm of humanist education, in the works of both Latin commentators and French translators, and as an example of a particular mode of imitation. The author examines how humanists shaped the discourse of Ovid’s heroines and heroes to pedagogical ends and analyzes even the woodcuts that illustrated various editions. This study traces comparative readings of French translations through a period noted for important shifts in attitudes to the text and to poetic translation in general and offers an important history of the “reply epistle”—a mode of imitation attempted both in Latin and the vernacular. Renaissance Postscripts shows that while the Heroides was a versatile text that could serve a wide range of pedagogical and literary purposes, it was also a text that resisted the attempts of its interpreters to have the final word.

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Sullivan, ed.: “The Gentle Voices of Teachers”

“The Gentle Voices of Teachers”

Aspects of Learning in the Carolingian Age

Edited by Richard E. Sullivan

This collection represents a collaborative effort to enlarge contemporary understanding of a phenomenon that has long occupied a central position in the historical consciousness of western society: the cultural “renaissance” that occurred during the Carolingian era (the eighth and ninth centuries). This revival of learning played a crucial role in shaping the fundamental contours of the western European tradition.

The eight essays in this book provide an interdisciplinary overview of intellectual and artistic life during the Carolingian age. Taking a historiographical approach, the introductory essay by Richard E. Sullivan is concerned with current ideological and methodological movements that have given shape to research into and interpretation of Carolingian cultural life. Also written by Sullivan, the second essay explores the larger historical context within which Carolingian learning developed.

The next five essays are devoted to particular aspects of the Carolingian world. Relying chiefly on the experiences of individual masters and students, John J. Contreni presents a panoramic view of studies in schools during the ninth century. Richard L. Crocker traces the reception of Roman chant in the Carolingian world and the subsequent modification of that heritage into new musical forms that played a decisive role in shaping the history of western European music. Bernice M. Kaczynski treats the powerful influence exercised by Jerome on Carolingian scriptural exegesis, while Lawrence Nees explores the extent to which Carolingian artists utilized existing models and invented new images to express their ideas about contemporary political events. Using as his test the Libri Carolini, Thomas F. X. Noble examines how the Carolingians used learning to reformulate tradition in the form of an ideology that exalted the role of the Franks in history. The last essay, written by David Ganz, locates each of the essays in the larger context of contemporary Carolingian scholarship and offers suggestions about further scholarly inquiry. An extensive bibliography is also provided.

Taken together, these essays provide a synthesis of current work in Carolingian cultural history—a rare commodity in English. This volume offers much that is provocative and challenging to scholars of cultural history and of the early Middle Ages, but it is presented in a style accessible to the nonspecialist as well. “The Gentle Voices of Teachers” is a major contribution to its field and will appeal to anyone interested in the history of education, music, religion, and art, and in the interaction of cultural and political history.

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Senior: In the Grip of Minos

In the Grip of Minos

Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille, and Racine

Matthew Senior

Tracing the history of confession from the Desert Fathers through the Lateran decree (1215) and the Council of Trent (1543–63),Matthew Senior examines the significance of these events and the role of confessional discourse in works by Dante, Corneille, and Racine.

Using a multidisciplinary approach, Senior focuses his study on Minos, the legendary king of Crete and judge of both Homer’s and Virgil’s underworlds. Dante transforms Minos into a demon who forces the souls of the damned to confess as they enter the underworld; likewise, the ritual of confession opens the gates of Purgatory. Dante’s afterlife, according to Senior, is an extrapolation of the Lateran decree, a total vision of humanity governed and punished by its own verity.

Following Trent, a new mode of confession makes its appearance, a baroque discourse in which “the heart speaks to the heart.” Senior argues that Corneille similarly creates a new kind of hero who distinguishes himself as much by the confessional trial of self-statement as by his military exploits. In the work of Racine, Senior notes, Minos appears again, tormenting the conscience of Phèdre.

Throughout Senior’s challenging inquiry, major canonical texts are illuminated by the contemporary debate about the modern equivalent of confession—psychoanalysis. Senior engages the work of Freud, Lacan, Foucault, and the Lacanian feminists in an attempt to establish the religious and literary genealogy of psychoanalysis and to explore its potential as a critical tool and, more important, its ability to bind and loose men and women.

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Russell: The English Dream Vision

The English Dream Vision

Anatomy of a Form

J. Stephen Russell

The first-person dream-frame narrative served as the most popular English poetic form in the later Middle Ages. In The English Dream Vision, Stephen Russell contends that the poetic dreams of Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl poet, and others employ not simply a common external form but one that contains an internal, intrinsic dynamic or strategy as well. He finds the roots of this disquieting poetic form in the skepticism and nominalism of Augustine, Macrobius, Guillaume de Lorris, Ockham, and Guillaume de Conches, demonstrating the interdependence of art, philosophy, and science in the Middle Ages.

Russell examines the dream vision’s literary contexts (dreams and visions in other narratives) and its ties to medieval science in a review of medieval teachings and beliefs about dreaming that provides a valuable survey of background and source material. He shows that Chaucer and the other dream-poets, by using the form to call all experience into question rather than simply as an authenticating device suggesting divine revelation, were able to exploit contemporary uncertainties about dreams to create tense works of art.

The English Dream Vision contains fresh, integrated readings of several important fourteenth-century poems, including Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and Hous of Fame and the anonymous Pearl. It also provides ground-breaking application of contemporary critical theory to medieval literature, thus introducing new tools to medieval studies and new texts to critical theory.

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Spinrad: The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

Phoebe S. Spinrad

“In the great age of the English drama, death walked the stage in many guises, constantly reminding Renaissance man and woman that all endings were one end. But such a vivid reminder was not new to the Renaissance audience, and in fact was not only a mutation but a muting of the Death that had frightened and comforted audiences for two centuries before. Without the medieval Legends and Dances of Death, without the Dreary Deaths that brandished spears from medieval painting and stage, there would have been no Doctor Faustus, no Bosola, no Yorick.

“It is the purpose of this study, then, to examine the way in which four centuries of art managed to grapple together Everything and Nothing into the greatest drama of the English language—only to lose sight, at the end, of what they were grappling with, and to wrestle helplessly with the scenery as the curtain came down.” —from the preface

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Burns: Arthurian Fictions

Arthurian Fictions

Rereading the Vulgate Cycle

E. Jane Burns

Professor Burns’s rereading of the medieval French prose romance is to be understood in two senses of the term. She questions, in the first place, the premises that have shaped our understanding of the highly repetitive Arthurian tales of the five-story corpus known as the Vulgate Cycle, and suggests, in the second, a new model of reading based on precisely that repetition.

To reread these prose texts, she points out, is to put aside considerations of narrative coherence, authorial control, and linear development, and to embrace instead the digressive and often illogical narrative path suggested by the text’s typed episodes. The Vulgate’s individual tales are composed, in large measure, of narrative redundancies, elements that give the impression that the text is retelling itself constantly, always introducing new protagonists whose actions only repeat with some variation what other knights have already accomplished. In contrast to a more linear kind of reading that might attempt to forge logical links of cause and effect among disparate aventures—thereby making sequential sense of what is essentially and perhaps purposefully a nonlinear narrative structure—Professor Burns proposes a reading that will do just the opposite.

Reminding us that writing in the medieval period was, above all, a process of continual rewriting, and that the medieval “text,” as a result, has little of the narrative autonomy and coherence that we ascribe to, and expect of, printed works by named authors, Professor Burns advances an aesthetic for reading the prose romance that relies precisely on what have heretofore been considered its deficiencies: redundance, ellipsis, and self-contradiction.

Once we accept these features of composition as given, as forms of repetition that parallel the fundamental pluralism of the manuscript tradition in the medieval period, we can begin to see, she argues, how rewriting in various guises typifies the very nature and function of textuality in medieval vernacular romance. If the repetition of stock episodes in the Vulgate corpus poses special problems for the modern reader by defying those narrative constraints generally associated with the well-wrought tale, the allied repetition of competing authorial voices and the systematic recasting of chivalric adventures into interpretative glosses provide other instances of rewriting that work in concert to undermine the most basic tenets of modern literary history and medieval theological Truth.

Professor Burns thus addresses the problem of repetition in its largest scope, showing how different types of rewriting in the French Arthurian prose romances present a direct challenge to positivistic beliefs in single authorship, truthful interpretation, and realistic representation on the one hand, while subverting the specifically medieval traditions of Divine Text and Divine Voice, sacred meaning, and biblical representation on the other.

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Sklute: Virtue of Necessity

Virtue of Necessity

Inconclusiveness and Narrative Form in Chaucer’s Poetry

Larry Sklute

Chaucer left many of his poems unfinished. The House of Fame breaks off shortly before its end; the Legend of Good Women has two prologues and stops just before the narrator gives us the conclusion to the Legend of Hypermnestra. And the Canterbury Tales is a work of fragments within which the tales by the Cook, the Squire, the Monk, and the Pilgrim Chaucer are all incomplete.

This incompleteness becomes particularly interesting when one considers that Chaucer’s completed narratives fascinate most by their inconclusiveness. The Book of the Duchess solves a problem different from the one posed by its beginning. The Parliament of Fowls raises several questions about value that it never answers. And Troilus and Criseyde insists on answers that many students of medieval literature agree the body of the work neither asks nor requires. The Canterbury Tales, in its fragmentary structure, its alternating points of view, and its way of presenting debate without closing it, simply refuses to be conclusive.

In his examination of these frequently noted characteristics, Larry Sklute suggests some historical reasons for Chaucer’s inconclusiveness and considers how it both creates and affects meaning in his narrative forms. Dr. Sklute reads each work as Chaucer’s attempt to represent such antinomies as experience and authority, belief and proof, freedom and necessity, truth and opinion. He finds the inconclusiveness of Chaucer’s poems an indication that their author was not always satisfied with how well the narrative forms he had inherited embodied human experience; and he sees the shape of Chaucer’s literary career as a search for an appropriate form able to accommodate the inconclusiveness these antimonies create. The inconclusiveness that prevails throughout Chaucer’s literary career leads him to discover in the Canterbury Tales a kind of narrative unique in the Middle Ages—a form that provided an early model for modern fiction.

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Allen and Moritz: A Distinction of Stories

A Distinction of Stories

The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury

Judson Boyce Allen and Theresa Anne Moritz

This compelling reading of the Canterbury Tales is new in three important respects: It goes beyond the critical truism that Chaucer was fond of Ovid to discover, in medieval analyses of the form of the Metamorphoses as a collection, basic guidance for understanding the form of Chaucer’s own aggregation of tales. It proposes, in light of this evidence, a new order or sequence for the tales that is based neither on the mute witness of some single “good” manuscript or group of manuscripts, nor on the geography between London and Canterbury. And, instructed by the inconclusive results of merely internal evidence, it establishes an ordering grounded primarily in external evidence—in medieval literary commentaries and manuals and in the Metamorphoses itself, which defined medieval principles of literary organization.

By reading the Canterbury Tales as a normative array of exempla in four groups, which exploit the literal and analogical significance of the structure of marriage in order to arrive at a definition of social order, Allen and Moritz are able to posit a medieval unity for Chaucer’s own creation and an obvious adumbration of his intention for the whole. The succeeding three are the heuristic constructs of Allen and Moritz, who, while respecting the integrity of each of Chaucer’s fragments, reorder them according to the example provided by his own medieval editors. The classification of Chaucer’s tales into the four Ovidian categories—natural, magical, moral, and spiritual—obeys both the method and the specific content of medieval literary criticism.

In undertaking a reading of the tales based on medieval notions of story (which were ethical) and literary arrangements (which were logical, discursive, and rhetorical), Allen and Moritz determine for every tale its logical place in a single coherent argument, and thus move considerably beyond those studies of the wholeness of Chaucer’s collection that make much of beginning and of ending, and settle for a miscellany in between. As the present authors present it, the argument of the tales demonstrates conclusively that Chaucer possessed a remarkably shrewd understanding, not only of human nature, but also of that structured social cosmos in which medieval man saw literary decorum and moral truth as the same thing.

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Gregory: Vox Populi

Vox Populi

Violence and Popular Involvement in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century A.D.

Timothy E. Gregory

It was one of the most characteristic if puzzling phenomena of the later Roman Empire that the man in the street commonly engaged in open and heated debate of complex theological questions that seemingly had no immediate relevance to his daily life. According to one contemporary commentator, Gregory of Nyssa, “If you ask the price of bread, you are told, ‘The Father is greater and the Soun inferior.’” And the passionate arguments that raged in all the cities of the East did not, in every case, end with mere words, but led often to acts of anger and violence. Church4es were burned in the night, and cities were drenched in blood. The emperor himself was frequently forced to turn aside from political and military affairs to put down factionalism within the cities, where, on one occasion alone, over three thousand lives were lost in a single assault.

Ancient authors, borrowing their models, perhaps, from Thucydides or Tacitus, recognized the danger inherent in urban upheaval and popular unrest; but with a general disregard for the substantive issues that provoked dispute, they were inclined to attribute them simply and wholly to a natural perversity on the part of crowds that caused them to resort to violence and foster rebellion for their own sakes. Consequently, judgments of the motives behind insurgent acts of the sordida plebs were summarily reached on the basis of a single criterion. If, as usually was the case, the crowd did something of which upper-class literary observers disapproved, its incentive was condemned as base. But if, as it rarely did, an action of the populace gained approval, its inspiration was praised as a rare instance of collective wisdom and the love of truth.

Historiographic progress beyond this rudimentary scheme, Professor Gregory finds, was not made in the centuries that followed, when it remained the prevalent view that the powerful in society were the proper subjects of historical inquiry. It was not, indeed, until the beginning of the present century that, largely as a result of the influence of Marxist thought, historians began to pay serious attention to the role of the crowd in antiquity.

After discussing the reasons serving to explain why individuals accepted one theological position over another, Professor Gregory turns to the complex question of why the inhabitants of the late Roman cities became involved in religious disputes in the first place and gained thereby some measure of political force. He concludes that the uneducated populace of, for example, Constantinople, could not possibly have understood either the nature of populist power or the philosophical basis of a dispute over complex theological questions concerning the unity of divine and human elements in the person of Christ. But what the sailor and the shopkeeper who participated in that formal debate did understand was the personal importance of the controversy itself. They took sides in it, not because they were recalcitrant by nature and simply like a good fight, but because they recognized that on its resolution depended their personal salvation.

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Murphy, ed.: The Holy War

The Holy War

Edited by Thomas Patrick Murphy

The Crusades of the Middle Ages are generally looked upon today as a regrettable and occasionally absurd, if cruel, lapse in the forward movement of man. Yet the taking up of arms with intent of destroying one’s enemies, in full confidence that the shedding of blood is sanctified by divine will, or is at least justified by the rectitude of one’s humane cause, is deserving of study as a recurring phenomenon in the history of man, who continues today to find ample sanctions for committing acts of aggressive violence against the alien both outside and within his culture.

The original essays in this collection are devoted to the analysis of the philosophy of belligerency for moral gain. They are: “The Genesis of the Crusades: The Springs of Western Ideas of Holy War,” by H. E. J. Cowdrey; “Holy Warriors: The Romanesque Rider and the Fight against Islam,” by Linda V. Seidel; “Early Crusade Songs,” by Richard L. Crocker; “Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers,” by James A. Brundage; “The Islamic Conception of the Holy War,” by W. Montgomery Watt; and “Renaissance Warfare: A Metaphor in Conflict,” by Thomas M. Greene. A final section is devoted to a discussion of the holy war as we have seen it in our own time, led by Chadwick F. Alger.

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Lynch: Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260

Simoniacal Entry into Religious Life from 1000 to 1260

A Social, Economic, and Legal Study

Joseph H. Lynch

Simony, the purchasing of religious office, was a common practice of the medieval church that was by no means universally condoned. Considered today, centuries later, it seems a quaint misdeed, an infraction of the ecclesiastical code inevitably diminished by the grosser crimes of the age. But if the term is properly and carefully defined, it denotes a concept of enormous assistance in reaching an understanding of that uniquely important medieval institution, the monastery.

Throughout the Middle Ages, religious orders were concrete expressions of a pervasive aspiration to the perfect life, which, it was steadfastly proclaimed and commonly believed, could best be achieved through hard work and diligent prayer in a rigidly structured community where men lived in a poverty that was self-imposed and in obedience to a stringent discipline that they freely accepted. But though religious communities claimed freedom from worldly concerns, they played, in point of fact, a major and crucial role in secular affairs.

At no point did the life of the cloister intersect more consequentially with that of the larger society than in the recruitment of novices. In undertaking to identify who entered the monasteries, why they chose and were chosen to do so, and under what conditions they were admitted, Joseph H. Lynch discovers that entries into religious life represented transactions of major social and economic significance to both the entrants and the communities that received them. Protracted and involved negotiations often preceded admission, whether the candidate was a member of the nobility aspiring to high office within the hierarchy, or a commoner seeking a humbler post. The medieval abbot was accustomed to engaging in what may quite properly be termed diplomacy as an important means to his ends. He bargained with his peers and superiors for gifts and preferences, and sought concessions from, and made compromises with, his adversaries. It was characteristic, too, that he achieved economic ends through means that, on the surface, appeared religious. In the negotiations that were the efficient means of his governance, recruitment was one of the most valuable tools at his disposal.

Ironically enough, in the twelfth century the church itself was to foster the very institution from which came those opponents of simony that brought about its end, and thereby deprived the religious houses of an important source of economic support and bargaining power. For it was those canon lawyers newly trained at the emergent universities who began seriously to question the propriety of the practice, and who, in so doing, were to precipitate changes in whole areas of medieval sensibility that were profoundly to affect future developments in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, education, economics, and government.

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Bulatkin: Structural Arithmetic Metaphor in the Oxford “Roland”

Structural Arithmetic Metaphor in the Oxford “Roland”

Eleanor Webster Bulatkin

“Structural arithmetic metaphor” is defined as an ordering of poetic form according to an arithmetic pattern that uses numbers whose symbolic meaning restates metaphorically some basic idea inherent in the content of the poem.

Although no ars poetica describing the device has come down to us, combinations of numbers have, in one way or another, been used in the structuring of literary works (as they have been employed in architectural and musical composition) since classical antiquity. At some times, they have served simply to achieve harmonies and symmetrical proportions; but at others, they have expressed symbolic meanings as well.

As Eleanor Webster Bulatkin points out, the conception of arithmetic structuring and the notion that numbers carry a metaphoric significance are thoroughly consonant with the whole number philosophy of the Middle Ages, itself the product of a tradition of great antiquity. The use of numerical composition has been demonstrated in studies of the Old French poem La Vie de Saint Alexis of 1040 and Dante’s Divine Comedy of 1321. The evidence is entirely sufficient to justify the assumption that the practice was known during the period encompassed by these two works, and it is to this era that the Chanson de Roland belongs.

The author suggests that there are discernible in the Oxford version of the epic two arithmetic structures: an earlier one, which was probably invented toward the beginning of the eleventh century, and a later revision, which may have been devised at the beginning of the twelfth. The numbers selected, she finds, were chosen for their metaphoric significance, and are designed to emphasize quite different thematic elements in the two versions.

Bulatkin demonstrates conclusively that the coherence of the poetic constructs and their congruence with the obvious intent of the poem, as well as with the evolving historic, aesthetic, and philosophic ambience in which it was composed, indicate a probability that is clearly well beyond chance.

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