Communication in a visual mode: papal apse mosaics

ABSTRACT

Apse mosaics are a form of visual communication employed by popes throughout the Middle Ages, from the sixth through to the thirteenth centuries. This essay examines the nature of this visual mode and the means by which viewers could understand it. A theory of viewing widely attributed to Pope Gregory I (590–604) is shown to be especially pertinent to early medieval apse mosaics and to the twelfth-century mosaic in the apse of S. Maria in Trastevere. The apses of thirteenth-century popes display a new, more explicit approach to visual messaging that required less interpretive effort by the viewer. Two mosaics made at the end of this century were signed by the artist who made them. The emergence of the artist as a competing author of the image diminished the utility of this form of papal visual communication, which immediately fell out of use.     

Islands in the stream: Formalism and hermeneutics converging

Benjamin N. Colby and Lore M. Colby. The Daykeeper: The Life and Discourse of an Ixil Diviner. Cambridge and London: Harvard University 1981, xvi + 333 pp. $25.00.     

Answers and echoes: the Libellus responsionum and the hagiography of north-western European mission

This article examines three aspects of Augustine of Canterbury's Libellus responsionum. Through recent scholarship it provides a summary of the Libellus 's textual context. It also clarifies the very contentious issue of just how familiar the Libellus was to missionaries, not only those preaching in England but also on the Continent, and specifically Augustine of Canterbury and Boniface. Finally, in light of the pastoral and textual circumstances, it explores the largely neglected question of just how the Libellus may (or may not) have illuminated the various literary features and strata of Augustinian and Bonifatian biography.     

Memorializing Gregory the Great: the origin and transmission of a papal cult in the seventh and early eighth centuries

This article examines the origins and early development of the cult of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in Rome, England, Gaul and Ireland. A first section analyses the earliest Life of the pope, written between 704 and 714 at the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby, arguing that it depended not upon oral tradition but upon early writings originating among Gregory's disciples in Rome and in part at least recorded by John Moschus. A second section relates this material to the development of Gregory's cult in the seventh and early eighth centuries, highlighting the activity of Archbishop Theodore in England. Although clerical rather than popular, the cult thus promoted established Gregory's reputation as a pastor, evangelist and father of the Latin liturgy.     

Framing papal communication in the central Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the production and consumption of papal communication in the central Middle Ages. It outlines the development of the papacy, which formed the historical and political framework for papal communication, and discusses the processes, themes and meanings behind various types of communication relating to the papacy in Latin Christendom principally between the years 1100 and 1300. Particular emphasis is placed upon the plurality of responses to papal communication and on the relationship between papal communication and authority, and papal self-identity and perceptions. The essay introduces seven diverse and interdisciplinary articles in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History on the papacy and communication in the central Middle Ages.     

Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency

This paper aims to describe Bruno Latour's contributions to the theory and methodology of agency in the Philosophy of Science and to apply them to the study of agency in archaeology. These contributions include an understanding of how artifacts or representations of the world emerge, what the best conditions to study them under are and how to understand the process of change they undergo. A case study using the Hopewell burial mounds of the Lower Illinois Valley will serve to demonstrate the application of this methodology.     

Contra damnationis filios: the Visconti in fourteenth-century papal diplomacy

This article seeks to reappraise the relationship between the Avignon papacy and the Visconti lords of Milan during the fourteenth century. Avignon popes generally viewed the Visconti as the major obstacle to papal temporal power in Italy and thus fashioned propaganda that demonised them. This mythic portrayal, that was re-framed by Florence to justify its own imperialistic ambitions in Tuscany, has been accepted uncritically by modern historiography. Documents from the Vatican archive reveal a more complicated diplomacy. Papal policy toward the Visconti was far from consistent, as the curia welcomed Visconti money and Avignonese popes regularly granted the Visconti papal vicariates. This article demonstrates that the papal-Visconti struggle was a key factor in the creation of the strategic alliance between Florence and the Visconti that made the War of Eight Saints possible and ended the Guelph alliance. This study further suggests that the political ambitions of Giangaleazzo Visconti were stoked in great measure by the Great Schism when partisans of both popes looked to him as the saviour of the Church and of Italy. Finally this article suggests that a re-evaluation of fourteenth-century diplomacy might accord closer scrutiny to the role played by the Church in destabilising Italy.     

Contextualising the papal censure of the Disputationes de Indiarum Iure (1642). The consultores of the Congregation of the Index

This study discusses hitherto unknown aspects concerning the papal censure of the work by the Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira, author of the two-volume treatise on Derecho indiano, known as the Disputationes de Indiarum Iure. Immediately after the publication of its second part in 1639, the Curia (under the government of Pope Urban VIII Barberini) prompted the Congregation of the Index in Rome to examine Solórzano's seminal treatise and, eventually, condemn its section about Spain's royal patronage of the Church. By looking at the circumstances of the censure (e.g. the early ‘leak’ orchestrated by the Congregation, the other reports about the censure), the present work aims at bringing to the attention of scholars the Solórzano file conserved in the Vatican archives. Considering both the reasons of the censure and the circumstances under which it developed, the present study sheds new light on the complex relationship between Spain and the Papacy in the first half of the seventeenth century and beyond.     

The lost cause: failed French ultimata and the restoration of papal rule in Rome in 1849

In one of history’s ironies, the republic that arose in Rome out of Europe’s revolutionary wave in 1848 was crushed by the new republic that had formed in France at the same time. In an additional irony, the destruction of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal theocracy were overseen by the internationally renowned champion of constitutional rights and freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville, then France’s foreign minister. This article sheds new light on this dramatic series of events through an examination of the French diplomatic correspondence, which reveals growing dismay at the direction in which events were unfolding. The correspondence also gives a sense of how close the French came to abandoning the pope, a decision that could have changed the course of Italian and French, as well as Church history.     

Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.     

Reconsidering reputation through patronage: Cardinal Napoleone Orsini and Angelo Clareno at the Avignonese papal court

The changeable politics of Cardinal Napoleone Orsini (c.1262/3–1342), negotiator and pope-maker, have been explained for over a century as the expression of his independent character and antagonistic relationships. Significant moments in his early career are interpreted as deliberate opposition to his own family's policies. This generalisation does his political acumen and familial loyalty a disservice. In particular, the rationale for his political decisions has previously been relied upon in explanations for his support of the Spiritual Franciscans, reformers and sometime separatists within the Franciscan Order. The cardinal's impact on the group has likewise been understated, as scholars have largely focused on their spokesmen's intellectual output, with limited investigation of the political support that enabled their survival. Orsini was connected to the group's spokesmen at the papal court at Avignon, including the prolific author Angelo Clareno (c.1250–c.1337). Close examination of Clareno's letters allows for a reinterpretation of the relationship. Orsini family documents reframe the relationship as part of an established familial tradition of Franciscan patronage. In this larger picture, the impetus for the cardinal's idiosyncratic patronage of the Spirituals becomes, instead, a small strand in the much larger network of familial obligations and patronage responsibilities. This also sheds further light on the fourteenth-century papal curia.     

Giordano Bruno and Bonaventura Cavalieri's theories of indivisibles: a case of shared knowledge

ABSTRACT

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Bruno and Cavalieri independently developed two theories, central to which was the concept of the geometrical indivisible. The introduction of indivisibles had significant implications for geometry – especially in the case of Cavalieri, for whom indivisibles provided a forerunner of the calculus. But how did this event occur? What can we learn from the fact that two theories of indivisibles arose at about the same time? These are the questions addressed in this paper. Relying on the methodology of “historical epistemology”, this paper asserts that the similarities and differences between the theories of Bruno and Cavalieri can be explained in terms of “shared knowledge”. The paper shows that the idea – on which both Bruno and Cavalieri build – that geometrical objects are generated by motion was part of the mathematical culture of the time. Tracing this idea back to its Pythagorean origins thus sheds light on the relationship between motion and continuum in mathematics.     

Visitor experiences: art,architecture and space at the papal curia c.1200

ABSTRACT

The Lateran Palace in Rome was the main papal residence and the administrative centre of the papacy in the central Middle Ages. The physical setting that confronted visitors to the Roman curia at the Lateran Palace during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) can be explored by piecing together information from curial material and the few visitors’ accounts about the architecture, art and use of space within this no-longer existent building. The article examines how visitors perceived the palace and the use of space within it, placing particular emphasis on visitors’ admission to the different areas of the palace which determined their access to the pope and other members of the curia. The ways in which the layout and decoration of the palace reflected and reinforced notions of papal authority are also discussed.     

The Albigensian twentieth of 1221–3: an early chapter in the history of papal taxation

In June 1221 Pope Honorius III gave legatine powers to three French archbishops, with a mandate to do what was necessary to promote the second Albigensian Crusade. Above all, what the Church's champion in Languedoc, Amalric de Montfort, needed was money so that he could hire mercenaries to fight against the successfully resurgent Provencal nobility. Accordingly, each of the archbishop-legates conferred with the bishops of his legation (in councils unnoticed by Mansi and the other conciliar collectors), and imposed a twentieth on ecclesiastical revenues for the three years 1221–1223. Papal taxes had not yet become a routine matter; hence the Albigensian tax was necessarily an experiment in which the Roman curia learned important lessons for the future, notably the value of using curial personnel rather than local clergy as tax collectors. This paper assembles what is known of the tax, and attempts to assess its significance in the history of papal taxation.     

Clowning and tragic clowning: Miguel de Unamuno as a funny writer

ABSTRACT

The present study considers the role and function that humor has in Unamuno's intellectual and literary universe. It traces Unamuno's attitude toward humor to his reading of the Spanish character in En torno al casticismo (1895) and to his dialogue with the figure of Don Quixote, as found in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) and Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912). Finally, it looks at the theory of humor offered in the novel Niebla (1914) and also at the role that humor played in Unamuno's later political writings, especially those of exile (1924–1930).     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.