Early Medieval Europe最新文献

This article discusses a special type of narrative: encounters with named individuals in hell. The catchment is broad (Homer to Dante) but the focus is on the early Middle Ages. Philological and literary techniques elucidate and reinterpret a number of important visionary texts, Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, and Carolingian. Boniface, Ep. 115 re-emerges as a woman’s vision. Gregory of Tours, DLH 8.5 (Guntram’s banquet of 585), where Chilperic is sighted, finds a place within the Roman tradition of the dark or terrifying banquet and the dangerous telling of dreams. In the Visio Pauperculae (terminus post quem = 3 October 818), Queen Irmengard’s torture is reinterpreted by reference to the NT and to contemporary legal realia. An argument is made for an old emendation that required a romantic and courtly reading, including a fuzzy connection to Dante’s Inferno 5.

In about 400 Prudentius visited the shrine of St Cassian at Imola and wrote a poem describing his martyrdom. Cassian, a schoolmaster, had been killed by his own pupils using their styli and wax tablets. The story was popular throughout the Middle Ages and its medieval reception has attracted attention. In addition, and hitherto unnoticed, features of Cassian’s death became motifs in narratives of violence in the medieval schoolroom, and this article explores these and reflects on what they can tell us about changes in the teacher–pupil relationship from Late Antiquity to the end of the twelfth century.

This article studies the portrayal of the character of Clotilde in Gregory of Tours’s Decem libri historiarum with particular attention paid to the killing of Chlodomer’s sons (3.18). It argues that this, along with other episodes attested in Fredegar, is a contaminations from a tradition in which Clotilde was portrayed as a virago in contrast to the quasi-hagiographical Tours tradition on which Gregory in the main depended. This creates an internal tension in her character that later authors, both scholarly and belletristic, have either attempted to minimize or to bring into the foreground in their own narratives.

This paper provides the first edition and thorough examination of marginal notes added to a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript (Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 424). A detailed paleographic, codicological, linguistic, and historical analysis of these additions allows us not only to trace their provenance to the early tenth-century see of Laon but also to show that their anonymous author was a high-status cleric on the episcopal staff. The range of his practical marginalia – which included polyptych notes, lists of payments, and a list of names – points at various accounting practices he was involved in and indicates that he played an important role in facilitating the social power of ecclesiastical lordship over its localities.

This article analyses a ninth-century copy of the Liber monstrorum from St Gall in which the first monster, a ‘human of both sexes’, speaks in the first person. The scribe also put the Liber monstrorum into dialogue with Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, in which Isidore argued that monsters were not ‘contrary to nature’. Combined with an ambiguously gendered depiction of Christ added to the Liber monstrorum by a later user, this suggests that there were some in early medieval St Gall who saw being ‘of both sexes’ – which could be interpreted to reflect same-sex attraction, and/or non-binary, intersex, and trans identities – as natural, even potentially Christ-like.