The making of a monster: the historical image of William Rufus

Few writers, medieval or modern, have had much good to write about William Rufus, the second Norman king of England (1087–1100). Beginning in the twelfth century, chroniclers and historians have portrayed William as a cruel, grasping, and sacriligious ruler. This study traces the development of this unflattering historical image from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and notes that the religious convictions which encouraged medieval churchmen to condemn Rufus were offset in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a more political and anti-catholic approach to his reign. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, historians abandoned this more flattering portrayal and returned once again to the evil image concocted by the monastic chroniclers.     

The making of a monster: the historical image of William Rufus

Few writers, medieval or modern, have had much good to write about William Rufus, the second Norman king of England (1087–1100). Beginning in the twelfth century, chroniclers and historians have portrayed William as a cruel, grasping, and sacriligious ruler. This study traces the development of this unflattering historical image from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries and notes that the religious convictions which encouraged medieval churchmen to condemn Rufus were offset in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a more political and anti-catholic approach to his reign. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, historians abandoned this more flattering portrayal and returned once again to the evil image concocted by the monastic chroniclers.     

Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the death of the Black Prince

This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and caused his death. The prince's premature death had profound political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince's symptoms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material     

Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the death of the Black Prince

This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and caused his death. The prince's premature death had profound political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince's symptoms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material     

Death ritual in fifteenth-century manuscript illumination

Realistic images of death and burial appear in unprecedented numbers as illustrations for the Office of the Dead in late medieval prayerbooks. Taking issue with the traditional, generalized interpretations of these images as expressions of the late medieval preoccupation with death, the author argues that the iconography of death ritual that emerged after 1375 was actually a manifestation of the popular need to assert the restoration of social and religious traditions that had been suspended during the period when the Black Death ravaged western Europe. Viewed against the background of pre-plague catholic death rituals and the literary evidence of the disruption and suspension of those rituals resulting from the onslaught of bubonic plague, the new iconography of death and burial assumes social significance that sets it apart from more eschatologically oriented visual and literary themes associated with death and dying during the late middle ages.     

The Polybian Moment: The Transformation of Republican Thought from Ptolemy of Lucca to Machiavelli

Recent research has emphasized the continuities in European republican political thought from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance and even beyond. Two of the central figures in the story of the persistence of republicanism are Ptolemy of Lucca, who is commonly viewed as the quintessential late medieval republican, and Niccolò Machiavelli, whose work is generally regarded as the classic statement of early modern republicanism. We argue that these two remain conceptually at considerable remove from one another, a claim we illustrate by analyzing the impact of the reception, Latin translation and transmission of the Histories of Polybius, and especially the theory of constitutional change proposed in Book 6. The unavailability of the Histories to Ptolemy and its rather ample use by Machiavelli at the beginning of the Discourses signal an important divergence in the theoretical principles underlying the defense of republican institutions. In turn, this variation captures one facet of the distinct qualities of republican thought that separated the intellectual terrain of the early fourteenth century from that of the sixteenth century.     

Recent Archæological Researches in Rome

Luminescence dating has been applied to ceramic bricks sampled from a selection of English medieval ecclesiastical and secular buildings in Essex, Kent and Lincolnshire, ranging in age from the fourth to the late sixteenth centuries. The results obtained for the Anglo-Saxon churches, which included Brixworth, confirmed the reuse of Roman brick in all cases. The dates for the earliest medieval brick type indicate that brick making was reintroduced during the eleventh century, a century earlier than previously accepted, and dates for bricks from the same secular Tudor building indicate that the practice of recycling of building materials during the late medieval period was also applied to brick.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

Death ritual in fifteenth-century manuscript illumination

Realistic images of death and burial appear in unprecedented numbers as illustrations for the Office of the Dead in late medieval prayerbooks. Taking issue with the traditional, generalized interpretations of these images as expressions of the late medieval preoccupation with death, the author argues that the iconography of death ritual that emerged after 1375 was actually a manifestation of the popular need to assert the restoration of social and religious traditions that had been suspended during the period when the Black Death ravaged western Europe. Viewed against the background of pre-plague catholic death rituals and the literary evidence of the disruption and suspension of those rituals resulting from the onslaught of bubonic plague, the new iconography of death and burial assumes social significance that sets it apart from more eschatologically oriented visual and literary themes associated with death and dying during the late middle ages.     

In Praise of Heresy: Hus,Luther, and the Ethos of Reformation

Reformation is confined neither chronologically nor geographically but is best understood as a series of efforts to recover particular visions of Christian faith and practice. These endeavours always have potential for religious and social change. The martyred Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1372–1415) has often been characterised as a forerunner of the European Reformations and Martin Luther frequently referred to him. Past scholarship has evaluated the relation between Hussite history and the Reformation, Hus and Luther, in a variety of ways arguing either for organic connections or dismissing the possibility of causal connections. I argue that what Hus and Luther shared was not theology, common principles of reform, or visions of religious practice as much as a particular ethos. That ethos can best be understood within the idea of heresy. This article examines what Hus and Luther were striving to achieve, assesses the assumptions about Hus current in the sixteenth century, evaluates the Hus myth, and argues for a reconsideration and rehabilitation of heresy, a concept that epitomises the shared ethos that made Hus relevant to sixteenth‐century reformers.     

A Study of the Folklore on the Coasts of Connacht,Ireland

During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, it was commonplace among historians that the common people of medieval England had remained substantially pagan in their religious beliefs. Christianity, according to this view, was essentially the faith of the elite, with the populace embracing what was at best a dual allegiance to the new and old religions. This view has now disappeared, and the time seems right to take stock of medieval popular religion in England with a view to solving three problems: why did the concept of a pagan medieval populace develop, flourish for so long and then decline; what is the actual evidence for medieval popular belief; and what new perspectives can be taken on medieval English Christianity by employing comparisons with paganism?     

Aspects de la Fatigue Dans L’anthropologie Médiévale

Psychosomatic sympton of the sinful human soul, progress of natural and progressive wear of the psychic or corporeal machinery, exclusive property of the world of bodies or place of the obligatory link between the intellect and the body, fatigue crosses the philosophical and theological medieval literature. The various treatments of fatigue can, in their turn, serve as symptoms to differentiate the medieval anthropologies. This article presents four of their figures: the anthropology of danger elaborated by Augustin, greek and arabe medical diagnosis which is passed on the ^{xi th} century, and the readings of Aristotle’s psychology by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in the xiii ^th century.     

Jerusalem Transformed in Post-Reformation England: The Case of the Cliffords and Beamsley Hospital

Abstract

This article explores the impact of the Tudor religious reforms in the rural upland parish of Kirkby Malhamdale, Craven, in the Yorkshire Dales, from the late medieval period, when it was dominated by the economic power of the monasteries, during the Dissolution and subsequent changes, to 1603. Although early churchwardens' accounts have not survived for the parish, the analysis draws upon a variety of contemporary sources including wills, ecclesiastical documents, manor court rolls and other miscellaneous material, as well as the fabric and structure of the parish church itself. Aspects of worship and ritual in Kirkby Malham, the response to the reforms, and the extent to which conformity in the reformed Church of England was established in the parish by the end of the sixteenth century, are examined.     

Dyeing Winchcombe Kersies and Other Kersey Cloth in Sixteenth-Century Newbury

Abstract

Dyeing wool for the thousands of kersey cloths produced annually at Newbury in Berkshire in the middle decades of the sixteenth century took place before export. Substantial statistical evidence reveals that dyeing took place on a proto-industrial scale in Newbury; Newbury clothiers John Winchcombe II and Thomas Dolman had their own dyehouses, and other Newbury clothiers were also producing dyed kersies. Woad, madder and weld were the most important dyes, and the scale of dyeing is indicated by the purchase of woad by the ton. This article uses the Newbury experience to challenge the common view that English cloth exports during the sixteenth century were exported undyed.     

Travail, redistribution et construction des espaces économiques (XIe–XVe siècle)

Although a popular topic among historians for most of the XX^th century, the expansion of the European medieval economy has recently fallen out of favour. This paper seeks to bring attention back to this subject, at an important moment of the construction of a global European economy, by replacing it in a long term perspective, from the XI^th to the XV^th century, and by analysing its own process of economic development and growth trends. Particular attention is devoted to the social processes developed for the promotion of worker groups and productive activities, which made possible the intensification of labour that is remunerated by a complex set of mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth, which are among the most original creations of medieval societies.     

On the path to oblivion: The pilgrims' declining role in the St. Christopher plays of early and early modern Spain

This article examines the representation of the pilgrim in the corpus of St. Christopher dramas of early and early modern Iberia. The importance of the character's supporting role varies according to the era in which each play is written. At first, in the medieval religious dramas of the Crown of Aragon, the pilgrim not only celebrates St. Christopher's piety and anticipates his meeting with Jesus Christ, but also embodies the sanctity and devotion necessitated of pilgrimage. The pilgrims undergo a transformation in the sixteenth century as they become comic and serve as foils to the protagonist's gravity. On the seventeenth-century secular stage, the representations diverge: they begin with a traditional representation of the pilgrim, but then the figure ultimately disappears as the comedias focus on the later period of St. Christopher's life, the result of a Tridentine directive that refocused the general worship of saints and hagiographical literature.     

Livres, Pouvoir et Théorie

This article tries to understand what kind of theories is produced in books and only in books, without any institutional or scientific guarantee. Two cases are successively studied: a method for accountants and a treatise on nobility. Both contain theoretical proposals, although neither accounting nor knowledge of genealogies or aristocratic habits was considered more than mere practical competence at the time (the end of the xvii ^th century in France). The aim of this inquiry is to suggest that identifying material and social conditions of some evolution of thought (context of composition of an important book, circulation of printed materials or of information, literary market, relationships of the authors with powerful patrons) does not differ that much from a « Zeitgeist » analysis, as long as a book is viewed as a result or a product and its own action is not taken into account. This action consists here in an elevation of accounting and genealogical techniques to theory or even to quasi-political philosophy. Both case-studies then try to show that the adaptation of a book to political action is not an available explanation for historians; rather, it is nothing other than the fact of an interpretation of theoretical needs aroused by this action.     

Unmaking ‘the middle ages’

The idea of ‘the middle ages’ developed only gradually, out of the attack on the Augustinian view of history, which had dominated thought for nearly a thousand years. Petrarch and the Italian humanists began this attack, claiming a new, third age had begun with the recent revival of culture and the arts. The religious upheavals of the sixteenth century helped produce the idea of a ‘middle age’ in religion too. The terms used for this period varied, until medium aevum and its equivalents became accepted, in the late seventeenth century. The idea of ‘the middle ages’ reached its fullest expression in the eighteenth century, with Voltaire, and eventually became part of the institutions of academic history. Traditional usage should not continue to be accepted. If historians see no general pattern in history, they must abondon terms like ‘medieval’, which presuppose such a pattern. A new theory of history may emerge in the future, and will no longer describe ‘the middle ages’ by a name which implies a barbaric interlude. This will enable ‘medievalists’ to produce a truer picture of their period.     

Study of medieval glass fragments from Savona (Italy) and their relation with the glass produced in Altare

Altare was in the medieval and post-medieval period an important glassmaking center in the Liguria region in Northern Italy. The first historical evidence of glassmaking in Altare is dated to the twelfth century. In spite of that, due to the continuity of glassmaking up to the present time and the contemporaneous intensive urbanization of the territory, no medieval glass from Altare or its immediate vicinity has been analyzed up to now. In this work, glass from archaeological excavations in the center of Savona, city with close ties with the glassmaking center, was studied. Glass fragments, dated from the tenth to the sixteenth century were selected from the collections of the Archaeological Museum in Savona and non-destructively analyzed with quantitative PIXE-PIGE. The resulting compositions, compared with known glass productions of the same time and evaluated on the basis of historical documents, offer an interesting panorama on the variety of glass circulation in Liguria.