Friendship and love in the lives of two twelfth-century English saints

For twelfth-century religious the vow of chastity did not mean renouncing a rich affective life. Along with the love of God, Aelred of Rievaulx and Christina of Markyate both found room in their lives for profound emotional relationships with several individuals. These relationships were not carnal but to call them ‘friendship’ underestimates their strength and passion. The modern distinction between passionate sexual love and passionless asexual friendship is inappropriate here. ‘Spiritual love’ best describes these relationships: deep and exclusive without being carnal, involving the passions of the soul rather than those of the body. Vitae survive for both Christina and Aelred, and Aelred also wrote several treatises on the subject of love and friendship. The biographers and Aelred himself followed in a medieval tradition of using the language of erotic love to describe spiritual relationships. These spiritual love relationships did not fit the monastic ideal of love (caritas) towards all; they were particular and exclusive (in each person's life, the several relationships were sequetial, not simultaneous). But they do indicate that twelfth-century monasticism provided a channel for the emotions we today connect with erotic love, without the rupture of vows of chastity or virginity.     

Columbanus in Europe: the evidence from the Epistulae

The continental career of Columbanus has long attracted the attention of scholars because of his achievement as a writer, monastic founder and reformer, and political actor. His Epistulae are one of the most important pieces of evidence in understanding his attitudes and purposes during his twenty‐year sojourn on the Continent, and they emphasize the importance of his ecclesiastical and secular relationships. However, the Epistulae have seldom been analysed independently and together, as their study has often been focused on single letters or specific aspects of the collection. This paper looks at the Epistulae in a more general way, to point out what they tell us about Columbanus's theological and ecclesiastical positions, and the connections he established on the Continent.     

The monastic conversion of Romuald of Ravenna and the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe

Romuald of Ravenna was one of the foremost reformers of the late tenth and early eleventh century, devoting his energy to establishing monastic communities that emphasised asceticism. After his death, he was celebrated for this work in a vita written by Peter Damian that described the conditions of the conversion of Romuald, who rejected the world after an encounter with St Apollinaris in the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe outside Ravenna. Peter Damian’s detailed account of this space not only created a fitting location for the conversion to monastic life, but in its appropriation of the visual, textual and hagiographic landscape it would have invited his eleventh-century audience who entered Sant’Apollinare in Classe to share in the same type of experience as his monastic hero, Romuald, and to connect with Ravenna’s late antique patron saint directly.     

The politics of Greek tragedy in Samson Agonistes

ABSTRACT

This essay charts Milton’s engagement in Samson Agonistes with Greek political thought as critiqued in Athenian tragic drama, particularly that of Euripides. In early modern Europe, Euripides’ plays were not only understood to denounce tyranny but also to remain rigorously sceptical about the workings of Athenian democracy (in itself a highly limited kind of representational politics). Milton knew well the commentary tradition that framed Euripidean tragedy in such terms, and found a corollary to his own political views within it, most notably in the writings of Gasparus Stiblinus whose prefaces are included in the 1602 Stephanus edition of the playwright’s works, which he used heavily. Stiblinus shows how Euripides relentlessly scrutinizes corruption, which his tragedies reveal to be not only characteristic of tyrants but also to pervade democratic systems. Milton’s allusions to Euripidean tragic form in Samson Agonistes evoke these commentaries to denounce political corruption.     

‘The Materialls for the Building’: Reuniting Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and New Atlantis

Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and his New Atlantis both appeared soon after his death, edited by his chaplain, Rawley. The works are, on the face of it, dissimilar, and have been treated as unrelated, on the assumption that Rawley was merely attempting to rush out (in the wake of his employer’s death) two works that had occupied his last years. In order to establish just what their relation is, we need to establish, first, whether New Atlantis was simply a last‐minute addition to the Sylva volume; second, what Rawley says about their association and how he effects it; and third, whether the two works have other concerns in common that would have led Bacon himself to consider them as companion pieces. Such an examination shows that there were intrinsically connected pieces, and can be used to throw light on the aims of both works.     

‘Faites le mien desir’: studious persuasion and baronial desire in Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle

This article examines the remarkable ‘changes and transpositions’ of form found in Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, an important Anglo-Norman estoire recounting the rebellion against Henry II in 1173–74. By reading these literary changes as accommodations of circumstances and persons, they can be used to locate the Chronicle in very specific historical and social contexts. Jordan, clerk of the bishop of Winchester and master of the city's grammar schools, places himself, both socially and discursively, within a community of administrative barons, who are very carefully remembered in the Chronicle as a coherent social affinity, or foedus amicitiae, both alienated from and seeking solidarity with the king. These conditions explain the Chronicle's central rhetorical impulses: to chastise the king, sometimes bitterly, and to persuade him to ‘love, cherish … and reward’ these specific barons. To achieve these rhetorical desires, Jordan draws upon the resources of contemporary literary education to imagine and perform persuasion. The Chronicle is thus a powerful illustration of John Baldwin's account of the ‘interpenetration’ of studium et regnum, institutional learning and political administration, in twelfth-century England. Because the Chronicle has in the past been understood as a panegyric, or even propaganda, for a royalist cause, this baronial reading represents a major re-assessment of its sociabilities and purposes.     

Books received

This article examines the remarkable ‘changes and transpositions’ of form found in Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, an important Anglo-Norman estoire recounting the rebellion against Henry II in 1173–74. By reading these literary changes as accommodations of circumstances and persons, they can be used to locate the Chronicle in very specific historical and social contexts. Jordan, clerk of the bishop of Winchester and master of the city's grammar schools, places himself, both socially and discursively, within a community of administrative barons, who are very carefully remembered in the Chronicle as a coherent social affinity, or foedus amicitiae, both alienated from and seeking solidarity with the king. These conditions explain the Chronicle's central rhetorical impulses: to chastise the king, sometimes bitterly, and to persuade him to ‘love, cherish … and reward’ these specific barons. To achieve these rhetorical desires, Jordan draws upon the resources of contemporary literary education to imagine and perform persuasion. The Chronicle is thus a powerful illustration of John Baldwin's account of the ‘interpenetration’ of studium et regnum, institutional learning and political administration, in twelfth-century England. Because the Chronicle has in the past been understood as a panegyric, or even propaganda, for a royalist cause, this baronial reading represents a major re-assessment of its sociabilities and purposes.     

Diaconiae,xenodochia, hospitalia and monasteries: ‘social security’ and the meaning of monasticism in early medieval Rome

The first section of this article examines the various types of charitable institutions operative in Rome between the seventh and the ninth centuries, in the light of what available textual and comparative evidence reveals about their respective functions. It is then suggested that these centres of assistance were staffed by resident monastic communities, an arrangement which accounts well for their many apparent similarities; which may help to explain the disappearance of the most commonly attested types (xenodochia and diaconiae) over the course of the ninth century; and which opens a window onto an alternative conception of monastic practice hitherto under‐represented in the scholarly tradition.     

Reims,Bibliothèque Carnegie, 806: a little‐known manuscript of Benedict of Aniane's Concordia regularum

Benedict of Aniane is usually portrayed as the major instigator of a series of monastic reforms undertaken by Louis the Pious in the early years of his reign, which attempted to impose the Rule of Benedict of Nursia as the sole monastic standard across Francia. Based on information provided by Ardo, Benedict of Aniane's biographer, the Concordia regularum has been seen as Benedict's main instrument in his attempt to convince or compel others to accept the Rule as a superior norm. The Concordia itself is a sort of commentary on the Rule, where almost the whole of St Benedict's Rule is explained by texts drawn from other monastic rules. However, a number of fragments from a copy of the Concordia, apparently written a decade or more before the accession of Louis, contests Ardo's chronology, and challenges our traditional understanding of both Benedict of Aniane's role in monastic reform and of the Aachen reform councils. An edition of these fragments is included in an Appendix.     

Holy Figures Portrayed in the Edinburgh Fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History

This paper has two purposes. One is to look carefully at the way that the stories of Sālih and Samson are told in the Edinburgh fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History and its accompanying illustrations, and the messages that these convey. The second is to explore the interplay of text and image in what might be termed “the Moses cycle” and to consider the motivation for the unusual textual and pictorial emphasis on Moses. Several aspects of the cycle are analyzed: Moses as an antetype of Rashīd al-Dīn himself, the impact of the Qur’anic text and Moses as a precursor of the Prophet Muhammad.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.     

Trading Sentiments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially oriented critiques of cross-cultural friendship transformed into unbridled enthusiasm in the second reprint. I explain this shift as both a consequence of a shift in genre, from commercial voyaging to scientific voyaging, and as a reflection of two competing ideas of the relationship between friendship and commerce. The first version reflects a Smithian ideal, where friendship is excluded from commerce, while the second version shows a natural law conception of friendship as commercial imperialism in its ideal, and morally virtuous, form.     

The strategic anthropologist

Ken Booth's Strategy and ethnocentrism, published in 1979, deserves to be promoted in scholars' esteem to the very small category of works regarded as classics about strategy. Three reasons serve to explain why, over the years, it never received the acclaim it merits: the relatively undistinguished publisher; ironically, the subsequent debate over more than a quarter of a century about culture as a factor necessary for the understanding of strategy; and the attractively accessible style in which Booth expressed himself. Strategy and ethnocentrism is witty and even occasionally amusing—characteristics apt to trigger a response of some disdain from over‐serious scholars. We can now assess Booth's book in its proper context, which is the long if very thinly populated history of strategic ideas, largely free of unduly distorting ‘presentist’ concerns. The fact that Strategy and ethnocentrism was written in the context of the Cold War really does not matter for the quality of its argument. This work is a classic because it speaks to all periods and about all participants in strategic history. The originality of Booth's treatment of culture does not lie so much in the realm of his grasp of its relative strategic significance, but rather in his relentless unwrapping of the actual, or certainly potential, harm, including unanticipated self‐harm, of ethnocentricity. Today, studies of culture and strategy are not in short supply, but works that compel readers to attempt to take due account of their own ethnocentric frailties are in desperately short supply.     

UNDISCIPLINED AND PUNISHED

The title of Robert Doran's collection of essays on Hayden White proves provocative and evocative. Provocative because it claims to mark a move within philosophy that pivots on the work of Hayden White, and this despite the fact that White himself explicitly resists inclusion within such a classification, that is, as a philosopher of history. Indeed, another contributor, Arthur Danto, had as of 1995 declared passé the whole subfield of philosophy of history. Doran situates White, then, in a niche White rejects and in any case one largely abandoned by those who do academic philosophy. Thus a question that this title evokes concerns why—whatever philosophy of history happens to be before Hayden White—after him it becomes a topic of philosophical lack of interest, one pursued almost exclusively by those not associated with departments of philosophy. Given White's professional travails, his acquaintance with another undisciplined academic, Richard Rorty, and his long‐standing friendship with preeminent philosophers of history such as Louis Mink, one might well assume that White eschews Doran's disciplinary labeling for a reason. In this regard, reframing him as this book's title does invites a worry that, if only unwittingly, the book elides discussion of why certain positions excite not merely disagreement but prompt rather a type of professional shunning. In failing to confront White's reception (or rather lack thereof) by historians and his position (or rather lack thereof) within philosophy, Doran passes over in silence a highly salient aspect of White's work.     

Peasant Names in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia

Abstract

The historian who is engaged in the study of Byzantine social history is faced with a problem common to pre-industrial societies, or societies in which the majority of the population is both exploited and illiterate. The sources, written as they are by an upper class and largely for an upper class, give relatively abundant information about a small segment of the population, leaving us in darkness about the rest of society. In Byzantine history this is particularly true about the peasantry, which has left us only a very few sources of its own, and rather uninspiring ones at that. The Byzantine upper class wrote its own history, but the Byzantine peasants did not, thus making the task of the modern historian more difficult. Despite these problems, work has been done on both the urban and the rural population of the Empire, and more will probably be done as monastic archives become available. The study of the Byzantine peasantry is of primary importance. For if we are to understand Byzantine society, we must study and understand what happened in the countryside. After all, the Byzantine economy rested on agriculture, and the social relations which determined the fate of the state were, primarily, the social relations prevalent in the countryside.