Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

Walter of Châtillon: A twelfth-century poet's engagement with Jews

This article concerns one of the most eminent poets of the twelfth century, Walter of Châtillon, the author of the well-known Alexandreis. Walter of Châtillon is presented as a case study to show that twelfth-century poets as well as scholars were interested in the Christian-Jewish debate. Walter wrote a treatise against the Jews and referred to Jews and Judaism in many of his poems, especially in his hymns for Christmas. Whereas he concentrated on literal exegesis of biblical texts in his treatise, he favoured figurative biblical imagery in his hymns. A number of things are striking. The first is the central role that the Christian-Jewish debate played in his views on the origins and fate of mankind. The second is the need Walter evidently felt for anti-Jewish language in order to express his religious convictions. The third is the startling absence in Walter's work of the newest ideas about Jews and Judaism that were becoming more and more prevalent in scholarly circles in his lifetime. This latter point raises a fundamental question about the dissemination of Christian views about Jews in the twelfth century. Recent work on the Christian-Jewish debate has focussed on the development of novel ideas about Jews in the twelfth century and much work is being done to understand better how those views were spread beyond the narrow confines of scholarly circles. Walter's hymns in particular with all their hackneyed phrases signal the importance of not ignoring the continuing existence of traditional views about Jews. They also point to the need to include hymns in the study of the dissemination of anti-Jewish ideas.     

Walter of Châtillon: A twelfth-century poet's engagement with Jews

This article concerns one of the most eminent poets of the twelfth century, Walter of Châtillon, the author of the well-known Alexandreis. Walter of Châtillon is presented as a case study to show that twelfth-century poets as well as scholars were interested in the Christian-Jewish debate. Walter wrote a treatise against the Jews and referred to Jews and Judaism in many of his poems, especially in his hymns for Christmas. Whereas he concentrated on literal exegesis of biblical texts in his treatise, he favoured figurative biblical imagery in his hymns. A number of things are striking. The first is the central role that the Christian-Jewish debate played in his views on the origins and fate of mankind. The second is the need Walter evidently felt for anti-Jewish language in order to express his religious convictions. The third is the startling absence in Walter's work of the newest ideas about Jews and Judaism that were becoming more and more prevalent in scholarly circles in his lifetime. This latter point raises a fundamental question about the dissemination of Christian views about Jews in the twelfth century. Recent work on the Christian-Jewish debate has focussed on the development of novel ideas about Jews in the twelfth century and much work is being done to understand better how those views were spread beyond the narrow confines of scholarly circles. Walter's hymns in particular with all their hackneyed phrases signal the importance of not ignoring the continuing existence of traditional views about Jews. They also point to the need to include hymns in the study of the dissemination of anti-Jewish ideas.     

The Rose and the Wine: Dispute as a Literary Device in Classical Persian Literature

As everyone knows, alcoholic drinks, including wine, are forbidden by Islam. Readers of Persian poetry often wonder how is it possible that Persian wine literature is one of the richest in the world and whether the poets and authors ever address the illicitness of the wine in their works. This article examines how one author, Zangī Bukhārī, presents a catalogue of positive and negative qualities of wine in his Gul u mul (“The Rose and the Wine”). Through the genre of debate (munāzara), he shows how a courtly audience may have tried to justify the drinking of wine. The article examines the formal generic characteristics of such debates, showing how the form of the debate is rather appropriate to let forbidden objects or ideas, in this case the wine, speak for themselves thus defending their position in an Islamic society. entertaining in is richness in metaphors and imagery used by the wine and the rose to voice their superiority to each other, but it also addresses a rather controversial topic in an uncontroversial style.     

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.     

Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the nexus of religion and emotion, thinking through the ways in which historians of Japan can make interventions in the field, and exploring research methodologies that speak to a pre‐modern and non‐Christian milieu. In looking to the moral and pedagogical philosophy of Hosoi Heishū (1728–1801), a Tokugawa Confucian teacher and itinerant preacher, this article places an emphasis on the use of contextualised and historically‐specific emic categories of belief and feeling. To do so, it explores the popularising movement of Japanese Confucianism in the late eighteenth century, tracing Hosoi's development of vernacular sermonising and his identification of emotion as both a subject and object of instruction. His rhetorical style and pedagogy is unpacked, followed by an analysis of his popular reception, before turning to a sermon case study to observe these ideas in action. This article offers new insights into the viewing habits and emotional expectations of Tokugawa audiences, underscoring the ways in which emotion terms and concepts can change meaning in how they are defined, embodied, expressed, and valued as part of a broader habitus.     

The Christian Peace of Erasmus

The aim of this essay is to show that Erasmus’s concept of peace should be understood as a form of irenicism rather than pacifism. I argue that Erasmus’s basic claims on war and peace do not qualify him as a pacifist, first of all because his concept of peace is non-universal: it is exclusively Christian since it does not include Muslims and Jews unless they have converted to Christianity. Secondly, Erasmus’s willingness to fight the Turks and his call for a Christian war against them suggests that he was not a pacifist. Since the peace Erasmus preached for was exclusively Christian, it cannot be identified as pacifism in its accepted universal sense, but rather as a commitment to the peace of Christendom, and therefore his concept of peace should more precisely be described as irenic. By shedding new light on Erasmus’s notion of war and peace, this essay suggests that his alleged religious tolerance should be considered anew.     

Rewriting Merovingian history in the tenth century: Aimoin of Fleury's Gesta Francorum

Aimoin of Fleury's Gesta Francorum has mostly been ignored apart from its importance as a source for the Grandes Chroniques de France. Aimoin's editorial techniques in reworking his Merovingian‐era sources deserve more attention, however. Through a process of selective editing, strategic silence, and rhetorical invention he compiled a history that would appeal to its probable target audience, King Robert II of West Francia. The most noteworthy changes wrought by Aimoin are the assignment of a divinely appointed imperial and evangelizing mission to the Franks and the transformation of Clovis into an exemplary Christian king.     

The future regnum Hierusalem. A chapter in medieval state planning

At the turn of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century a large number of treatises was written on an envisaged crusade. Most of those treatises, classified as De recuperatione Terrae Sanctae memoranda, also expressed ideas about the way in which society and government should be organized in the future kingdom in the Holy Land, when the crusade which they advocated had successfuly accomplished its aim. This image of the new state and society has not yet received scholarly attention. Its examination shows that it was above all based on an acute analysis of ‘Outremer’ and especially of its ills. These state planners were moved by two motives: to eliminate the weaknesses of the former kingdom of Jerusalem on the one hand, and on the other to create an ideal Christian state in the Levant.     

The future regnum Hierusalem. A chapter in medieval state planning

At the turn of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century a large number of treatises was written on an envisaged crusade. Most of those treatises, classified as De recuperatione Terrae Sanctae memoranda, also expressed ideas about the way in which society and government should be organized in the future kingdom in the Holy Land, when the crusade which they advocated had successfuly accomplished its aim. This image of the new state and society has not yet received scholarly attention. Its examination shows that it was above all based on an acute analysis of ‘Outremer’ and especially of its ills. These state planners were moved by two motives: to eliminate the weaknesses of the former kingdom of Jerusalem on the one hand, and on the other to create an ideal Christian state in the Levant.     

Healing,Entertaining, and Accumulating Merit: The Circulation of Medical Recipes from the Late Ming through the Qing

This article examines the circulation of medical recipes through vernacular literature and personal networks from the late Ming through the Qing. During this period, vernacular texts played a leading role in circulating practical instructions for everyday healing techniques, especially in the form of recipes. Recipes became a versatile textual form for recording and transmitting experience in quotidian practice. They moved among different genres of texts, providing information about healing, offering advice for entertainment, and delivering moral lessons. Literati sociability as well as philanthropic and religious commitments motivated people of varied social means to distribute vernacular texts bearing healing information to a broad audience. Recipes acquired legitimacy and authority by clearly marking their provenance and thus its relationship to particular social networks and, sometimes, a religious purpose as well.     

Matthew Paris on the writing of history

Matthew Paris was one of the most prolific and influential historians of the central middle ages. Matthew's significance rests both on the range of his interests and the scope of his writing. Yet, even basic questions about his outlook on writing, his concept of history, or the relationship with his audience, have hardly been asked. These issues are central themes of this article, and will be used to consider wider questions about Matthew's concept of truth, his handling of information, and his view of the world around him. The article, furthermore, extends coverage beyond the Chronica majora or Matthew's vernacular writings to consider his concept of history as it emerges from the totality of his oeuvre.     

Proceedings at the Meetings of the Archaeological Institute

The excavator has two advantages over his architect colleague in the study of ancient buildings: he can take his studies back long before the date of the earliest surviving vernacular buildings; and, by beginning his researches at ground level and going down, he can study parts that other researchers cannot reach. This paper, arising out of excavations undertaken in medieval York over the past eight years, seeks to compare what is now known about the underpinnings of York's medieval buildings with the development established, in the main by Denys Spittle's colleagues in the York office of the RCHM, from the above-ground evidence, the surviving buildings. It is offered to Mr Spittle, a scholar whose studies usually stop at ground level, from one whose studies as often as not begin there, on the one hand in recognition of the patient tolerance he has shown of the enthusiasms of the excavator during his incumbancy of the Institute's secretaryship; and on the other in the hopes that future vernacular building studies will increasingly show a marrying of the evidence from excavations with that from the standing buildings.     

Lex: A Study on Medieval Terminology for Religion

Medieval Christian authors frequently employed the Latin word lex (“law”) and its vernacular cognates to mean something akin to the modern notion of “religion.” Like a religion, a lex was the collection of observances that marked a particular people‐group, such as Christians or Muslims. This article examines the category of lex in its historical context revealing both its similarities and differences from modern “religion.” It argues that the category of lex borrowed on Roman ethnography and Patristic exegesis and was inseparable from larger Christian ideas about society, human nature, and political order.     

Matthew Paris on the writing of history

Matthew Paris was one of the most prolific and influential historians of the central middle ages. Matthew's significance rests both on the range of his interests and the scope of his writing. Yet, even basic questions about his outlook on writing, his concept of history, or the relationship with his audience, have hardly been asked. These issues are central themes of this article, and will be used to consider wider questions about Matthew's concept of truth, his handling of information, and his view of the world around him. The article, furthermore, extends coverage beyond the Chronica majora or Matthew's vernacular writings to consider his concept of history as it emerges from the totality of his oeuvre.     

From Babylon to Christianity: William Foxwell Albright on Myth,Folklore, and Christian Origins

The American Orientalist William F. Albright (1891–1971) is remembered as a leading voice of twentieth‐century “biblical archaeology,” a field that aimed to demonstrate empirically the Hebrew Bible's substantial historicity. Less well known is Albright's research on Christian backgrounds, which by contrast reflected modernist theology's scepticism about the gospel narratives' literal truth. Drawing ideas from the “Pan‐Babylonian” school of biblical criticism, Albright invoked the influence of ancient Near Eastern myth and folklore on the Christ story, this being the culminating theme of his magnum opus From the Stone Age to Christianity (1940). Originally Albright believed that this mythological interpretation would reestablish Christianity's intellectual credibility in the twentieth century and thus help revive New Testament theology. Yet in the latter part of his career he omitted the mythological thesis from his writings, apparently having concluded that it was harmful to orthodox Christian faith.     

‘You say that the Messiah has come …’: The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue – that of the coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist's meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation's text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.     

‘You say that the Messiah has come …’: The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue – that of the coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist's meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation's text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.     

Pious Aspects in the Ethical and Moral Views of Matthias Bel

The author of the paper studies the ethical views of Matthias Bel expressed in his Preface to Johann Arndt's treatise and in Davidian-Solomonian Ethics, which contain a critique of false Christianity and ancient (especially Aristotle's) ethics. Bel refuses any philosophical ethics based on human nature, since man, in his very essence, is sinful and vicious. This leads to the general moral downfall of the young and mankind. He only recognises ethics whose source and the highest good is God. He accepts ancient ethics as long as it is useful for achieving Christian moral values. Bel was a vociferous critic of the morality of the time; he adopted a highly negative stance towards the Jews and Gypsies living in the then Historical Hungary. The author considers Matthias Bel a confident, or enthusiastic, Pietist in the early period of his life and work; later, he rates him as a moderate Pietist.