Obituary Notice

Abstract

St Vitus’s Cathedral, founded in 1344, is a prime example of 14th-century cathedral Gothic, a product of the cooperation between the ingenious architect Peter Parler and his patron, Emperor Charles IV. The unusual layout consisted of a pair of choirs set side by side in the eastern section of the cathedral, an arrangement inspired by the earlier Romanesque double-choir basilica. One was dedicated to St Vitus and was used by the canons, the other to the Virgin Mary and operated by the mansionars. The royal and imperial necropolis was placed in the latter of the two choirs, with Charles IV’s tomb-chest protected by a sculptured canopy and surrounded by the cenotaphs of deceased family members and later kings and queens. The form of two choirs is probably the result of an extensive rearrangement of the earlier project completed in the 1350s, when initial plans to locate the royal burial ground in the canons’ choir were abandoned. The main choir contained a tabernacle of remarkable design, dating from c. 1365. There may originally have been plans for a third choir to be built around the tomb of St Adalbert located in the middle of the nave, the work on which was initiated in 1392.     

北京石景山八角村魏晋墓的年代及墓主问题

石景山八角村魏晋墓是北京地区发现的一座出有特殊壁画石龛的重要墓葬。石龛出现的原因必与墓葬的时代背景及墓主人身份密切相关。本文从"晋制"演变发展的角度考察该墓墓葬形制和随葬品的年代范围,首先进一步研究充实魏晋都城洛阳地区"晋制"墓葬的演变序列和阶段性特点,然后以之为参照,建立北京地区魏晋墓葬的演变系统,从而认为该墓的年代为西晋晚期,下限可到十六国初期。石龛壁画的中心图像是执麈尾正坐的男墓主人,这一形象是改进东汉旧样后、创新于幽州地区的新图式,体现了与幽州鲜卑的文化联系。本文由此进一步推测,八角村墓墓主人为遇害于蓟城的西晋并州刺史刘琨,该墓为二次改葬墓,石龛为段部鲜卑单于供奉的祭龛。     

The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.     

Preaching and History: The Audience of Ranulf Higden’s Ars componendi sermones and Polychronicon

In his Ars praedicandi sermones, in traditional yet rich metaphoric language, Ranulf Higden compares Christ to a fountain, a shepherd, a rock, a lily, a rose, a violet, an elephant, a unicorn, and a youthful bridegroom wooing his beloved spouse. Ranulf encourages preachers to use such metaphors while using them himself, rendering his text a performed example of what he encourages. This text is clearly linked to two others: Ranulf’s Latin universal history, the Polychronicon, and John Trevisa’s English translation of it. In the Polychronicon, Ranulf relates the life of Christ, utilizing some of his own rhetorical suggestions from his preaching manual. He also depicts a cross-section of good and bad preachers, including Gregory, Wulfstan, Eustas, St Edmund, and one William Long-Beard and his kinsman, who exemplify (in different ways) the wisdom conveyed in Ranulf’s instruction in the Ars praedicandi. This essay suggests that the literary relationship between the preaching manual and the Polychronicon supplies additional support for the idea that the audience of the latter was not noblemen exclusively, but also clergymen who preached and had responsibility for the care of souls (cura animae).     

Finding Thoreau in French Canada: The Ideological Legacy of the American Revolution

Henry David Thoreau’s Yankee in Canada is easily overlooked. Because it is so selective in its depiction of life in the St. Lawrence River valley, historians of mid-nineteenth-century Canada have shown little interest in Thoreau’s first-hand account. To American readers, it offers little of the characteristic Thoreau found in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Yet, it is highly significant as an expression of national self-definition. Thoreau borrowed themes at least as old as the American Revolution when noting the pernicious rule of Catholic and British power in Canada. He set out to expose the promise of republican values by emphasizing the contrast between these and the poor and morally stunted life under Old World institutions. His work must therefore be interpreted as a call to his audience to commit more deeply than ever to the ideals that animated the Great Republic’s founding moment. It must also stand as a civic interpretation of American nationality at a time when this perspective was waning. Before long, Old World peoples would be racialized and the ideological embrace of the republican values advanced by Thoreau would no longer suffice in making American citizens.     

Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch

Abstract

In addition to his exceedingly popular Legenda Aurea, James of Voragine wrote in another hagiographical genre: sermons on the saints. The Sermones de sanctis likewise became immediately popular, as his Dominican brothers used James’s model sermons to learn to preach about the saints in a format that would provide the laity with intelligible and practical theological instruction. James’s corpus gives us a rather unusual opportunity to compare the ways in which a single author manipulates multiple hagiographical genres, and his writings on St Margaret of Antioch allow us to explore how a medieval preacher used a historically disputed saint — a dragon-fighter — to provide a practical model of sanctity to his lay audience. I compare the representations of Margaret in James’s sermones and vita, arguing that James adapted certain features of Margaret’s saintly example in the vita to instruct the audience of his sermons about proper Christian virtues and actions. As a point of comparison, I explore a sermon by Évrard of Val des Écoliers in which the Augustinian teaches his audience a practical skill — how to pray — through Margaret’s example.     

St. Leon and the culture of the heart

This essay reads Godwin's second novel, St. Leon (1799), as an attempt to counter the asperity he expresses towards the domestic affections in his political philosophy of the 1790s. In St. Leon, Godwin seeks to square his newfound interest in the affections as a topic for fiction with his commitment to an anti-establishment political agenda. Though it is presented as a ‘eulogium’ to ‘the affections and charities of private life’, the narrative persistently undercuts the potential for the affections to stimulate readerly curiosity. The focus of the novel constantly shies away from the domestic scene, and instead propels the momentum forwards to the alchemical adventures that precipitate the disintegration of the very affections the novel purports to eulogise. The novel thus plays out Godwin's complicated desire to embrace, and yet simultaneously to deny, the importance of private emotions in the pursuit of political justice.     

ABDULLAH BIN ABDUL KADIR MUNSYI: A MAN OF BANANAS AND THORNS

Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi is best known for his memoirs, labelled by some his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah. The missionary, Alfred North, encouraged him to write his life story, a first in Malay, and it has been assumed that Abdullah, working in a new genre, was relatively faithful to the conventions of the genre; that at the very least, he was attempting to produce a tolerably straightforward account of his life and times. Both his admirers and detractors, though seemingly at odds, saw Abdullah's work as a mouthpiece for British values. It did not occur to scholars that Abdullah might possess his own agenda, and that his working in a foreign genre did not necessarily produce what those scholars assumed it did. This has produced a blinkered understanding of what Abdullah was about. His supreme aim was to enhance his own image and stature. Production of ‘historical’ facts was sometimes a secondary concern. ‘Fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ were not yet established conventions in his literary milieu. He worked under major constraints, for his livelihood depended on not alienating patrons and future patrons, yet he devised ways to air views critical of the powerful. Here he was much more concerned with Islamic issues than ethnic ones.     

John Stuart Mill’s Political Pessimism

John Stuart Mill devoted much of his life to developing a ‘science of morality’ to enhance the social, moral and intellectual character of individuals and society as a whole. His liberal aspirations included the reform of legal and political institutions according to utilitarian principles and consistent with personal liberty, and the development of a diverse and creative culture. Paradoxically, Mill, the liberal optimist, was also a pessimist about achieving these goals. This article argues that Mill’s pessimism reveals an intellectual depth and forthright political realism about England’s parliamentary democracy and the political and cultural consequences of growing affluence and social equality. Mill’s critiques of liberalism and socialism in their original emergence point the way to explaining why his ideas remain provocative and profoundly illuminating in contemporary debates concerning multiculturalism and human rights.     

‘The face of the one who is making for Jerusalem’: The Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral and Joy1

This paper examines the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral (c. 1256–80) from the perspective of two interrelated concepts: the heavenly Jerusalem and joy. Building on previous scholarly discussions of the choir’s unusual creativity and profusion of organic and iconographic decoration, it traces connections between the choir and the rich corpus of writing on the joys of the heavenly Jerusalem. In juxtaposition with the hagiography of St Hugh, this opens a valuable seam of meaning and offers a possible explanation for the choir’s decorative intensity. It also reveals a number of ways, previously unnoted, in which Hugh of Avalon and his spirituality are recalled by the choir built to house his relics.     

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.     

‘Water mixed with the blood of Thomas’: contact relic manufacture pictured in Canterbury Cathedral’s stained glass

Four remarkable stained glass panels in the Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral (executed c.1185–1220) picture the mixing of Thomas Becket’s blood with water at Becket’s tomb. The ‘water of St Thomas’ was among the most widely renowned medieval water relics, reputed to have healed the sick throughout Latin Christendom. This article examines the glass images, comparing them with narratives in the glaziers’ source text, Benedict of Peterborough’s collection of Becket’s miracles. The glaziers presented an enhanced and carefully designed version of the early history of the water relic: the visual images draw strong parallels between the water of St Thomas and the Eucharist, and trumpet the role of the monks of Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Canterbury, the patrons of the glass, in the mixing process. The glass panels also provide suggestive evidence regarding the personnel, vessels and ceremonial involved in the actual mixing of the relic at Canterbury, including the likely participation of a lay sacrist and the possible use of mazers.     

P.H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh: a literary friendship

ABSTRACT

Tracing the relationship between P.H. [Patrick Henry] Pearse (1879–1916) and Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), this essay explores the impact their friendship had on their careers as writers and critics. Their work together in St Enda’s, the school for boys founded by Pearse in 1908, provides a significant context for this exploration. There, while working with MacDonagh, Pearse made drama an important part of school life and started writing plays for public performance. Meanwhile, their collaboration in putting together the St. Enda’s school journal, An Macaomh (1909–1913), helped to hone MacDonagh’s skills as a literary critic and to prepare for his later editorial role at the Irish Review (1911–1914). Attention then turns to how MacDonagh’s views on Irish literature and his translations from Old Irish influenced his friend’s development as both a critic and poet. Paticular consideration is paid to “Mise Éire”, one of Pearse’s best-known poems. Finally, similarities are considered between MacDonagh and the hero of The Wandering Hawk (1915–1916), Pearse’s unfinished, English-language, school story for children. Taken together, these various investigations reveal that, despite differing temperaments and at times divergent approaches to Irish writing, Pearse and MacDonagh enjoyed a mutually stimulating friendship that impacted positively on their literary careers.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
R einhard P ummer : The Samaritans .
A lan M acquarrie : Scotland and the Crusades, 1095–1560 .
J ames W illiam B rodman : Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier .
R obert S. G ottfried : Bury St Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290–1539 .
B arry C ollett : Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua .
H einz K remers (ed.) with L eonore S iegele -W enschkewitz and B ertold K lappert : Die Juden und Martin Luther
J. J. S carisbrick : The Reformation and the English People
R obert J. S crimgeour : Some Scots Were Here: A History of The Presbyterian Church in South Australia 1839–1977 .
G eoffrey A hern : Sunlight at Midnight: The Rudolf Steiner Movement and the Western Esoteric Tradition .
N icholas de L ange : Judaism .     

“Castram AD Divisas.” The Castle at the Boundaries

Abstract

Documentary evidence reveals that, when in 1395 the Purbeck marble tomb with gilt cast copper-alloy effigies commemorating Richard II and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, was installed in St Edward the Confessor's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, another tomb was moved to make room for it. It has commonly been supposed that the displaced tomb was the Cosmatesque tomb chest now in the south ambulatory, which has traditionally been believed to house the bones of Katherine, daughter of Henry III, and up to eight other royal infants and older children of Henry III and Edward I. Examination of the evidence indicates that neither part of this view is correct. Three other tombs may have been moved from the Confessor's chapel; of these, the highstatus monument to William de Valence is the most likely candidate for the tomb displaced in 1395.     

A threat like no other threat,George Berkeley against the freethinkers

In this paper, our purpose is to show what George Berkeley really said about ethics and the background conditions of religious life. The point is that true happiness is only possible in a religious sense; it means happiness in afterlife. The major threat to this is freethinking, or what we see as emerging enlightened modernism. His rather quixotic fix against freethinking shows the man as he is behind all the conventional panegyrics. He is a real Anglican soldier who anticipated but never admitted a critical defeat in the most important of all battles. Interest in George Berkeley’s life’s work has been exceptionally selective. Yet his revolutionary immaterialism is only an early episode in his struggles towards a better society and religious life for all the people, regardless of their denomination. From this point of view, Alciphron is central. But he also develops his ethical ideas in his various minor writings, which have been largely overlooked.     

Two Exhumations and an Attempted Theft: The Posthumous Biography of St Cuthbert in the Nineteenth Century and its Historicist Narratives

The tomb, body and relics of the Anglo-Saxon St Cuthbert (d. AD 687) are best known for their miraculous preservation and migration across North East England in flight from Viking raiders throughout the period AD 795–995, before coming to rest at Durham Cathedral (Cramp 1980; Campbell 1991, 79). Their current display emphasizes their role as ‘Treasures’ of the Cathedral and as symbols of England's conversion and early Christianity. What are not mentioned are the modern interactions with the tomb that led to the creation of their modern display as a key attraction of the World Heritage Site. As this article will argue, post-medieval examinations and uses of the tomb have also been important in attempts to control and produce very particular meanings at the site of display. I offer an examination of nineteenth-century engagements with the tomb and body of St Cuthbert, showing how the saint's remains were a locus of conflicting claims of authenticity and ownership. Through antiquarian practices of exhumation and detailed publications of their findings, curator-custodians were engaged in a distinctively local struggle to produce an authoritative narrative for the saint.