Early Medieval Europe最新文献

The Italo-Greek saints’ Lives from early medieval southern Italy have been viewed as evidence for violent opposition between Christians and Muslims in the area. I argue instead that these texts demonstrate ambivalence toward the Muslim presence: while painting Muslims as frightening and violent outsiders, they also depict them as capable of engaging in extended and mutually beneficial conversations with Christians. Analysis of selected such episodes complicates our perspective on cross-confessional encounters in early medieval southern Italy, showing that they could encompass both peace and violence and that mutual intelligibility was the presumed basis for interpersonal encounters. These hagiographical depictions of Muslim–Christian conversations also reveal the nature and process of mutual intelligibility, whether through speech, writing, or bodily gesture.

This article revisits Jerome’s treatment of the Rhine crossings of 406 in his letter to the widow Geruchia, and the broader issue of breaching the Roman limes. It argues that his description of the events in Gaul and on the border was framed to fit his notion of the history of salvation. Placing Jerome’s letter to Geruchia in its historical and theological setting, the paper questions the role of contemporary historical details in its composition. Jerome’s account was shaped by hearsay, memory, and tropes from other authors, including Ammianus Marcellinus, alongside the ways that Jerome thought about time, truth, and gender. In this way, the paper casts a new light on what we can say about the early fifth-century invasion of Gaul. The events of 406 are prone to misinterpretation without an analysis of Jerome’s philosophy of history.

This article takes Bede's account of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria as a case study in the mechanics and function of narrative. It is now recognized that Bede's sources for his Ecclesiastical History were very limited and that in composing it he relied upon his own deductions as a historian and upon his narrative skill to provide circumstantial detail and causal connections. This article shows how Bede exploited oral narratives to create his account of Edwin's conversion, harmonizing three, conflicting explanations for it. It analyses his use of oral stories, including traditional story types and folkloric stories, and argues that he combined these with additional information of his own invention to endow his History with causality and plausibility. In this, Bede was following the rules of classical rhetoric.

Alienation of church property was in most cases forbidden under both imperial and ecclesiastical legislation. Nevertheless, between 592 and 599 Pope Gregory the Great dealt with ten cases in which property was either relinquished by churches or in which he deliberated whether to compel churches to relinquish property. His justification for disposing of it was always moral and it allows us an important insight into the limits of holding church property. It allows us also to define more sharply what alienation meant in practice, beyond the contemporary legal definitions. In a period in which the church was growing ever richer, Gregory’s policies show how the accumulation of wealth could be subject to moral curbs.

In the Annales Fuldenses entry for 874, there is a cryptic reference to some heretical ‘Nicolaitans’. This has been understood as a reference to married clerics, yet that particular meaning of the word only became widespread much later in a Gregorian context. This article provides a history of the label from its origins. On that basis, it proposes a new interpretation of this micro-narrative, to explain why this term might have been used in the last decades of Louis the German’s reign, in connection with sexual affairs involving queens.

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.