Mediaevalia Groningana New Series – serie

The essays in this collection share an overall purpose : they aim to shed new light on Scottish culture during the century and a half (1475-1625) which saw the full emergence of Scotland as a player on the European political and cultural stages. Throughout the book, awareness of the larger European background is considered an essential element in the proper appraisal of the productions of Scottish culture. Topics discussed include : the Scottish reception of, and participation in, general humanist learning; the impact of Burgundian patterns of late-medieval piety; international diplomacy; courtly culture under Kings James III, IV, V and VI, and Mary Stuart; poetry and politics; law; libraries; and historiography. The contributions in this volume offer innovative contextualisations and interpretations of many canonical works of Scottish culture; at the same time they also seek to expand that canon by examining several less familiar artistic productions. All those interested in the cultural changes inherent in the transition from the late-medieval to the early modern periods, and in the Northern manifestations of the European Renaissance, will find much of interest in this book. In the words of R.L. Stevenson, the cultural achievement of Scotland during this period may be described as constituting a metaphoric "palace in the wild".

The leading theme of this collection of essays and studies is the diversity of aspects of medieval communal identity. While the authors were selected for the very diversity of their interests, their final papers do tend to cohere around some recurrent themes. All of the studies in this volume touch upon one or more of the complex issues that lie at the heart of religious identity in the Middle Ages. They do so through concrete study of the very real practices by which medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims could police the perimeters of their spiritual communities. The authors were especially urged to note instances where religious identity was shaped without reference to dogmas, creeds, or sacred law. In no case are any of these papers satisfied with normative, legal definitions of Jew, Christian, or Muslim in medieval times. Sometimes small and subtle, sometimes explicit, dire, and violent, the techniques that emerge from these studies testify to the diversity of strategies of medieval communal identity over space and their changes over time.

This volume contains twelve studies, all dealing with aspects of the literature and culture of Scotland during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Most of these contributions began life as papers delivered at an international conference on that subject, held at Rolduc Abbey, The Netherlands, in 2002. Much new light is shed on canonical Middle Scots writers: Alastair Fowler and David Parkinson, both on Gavin Douglas; David Moses on Robert Henryson; Rubén Valdés Miyares on William Dunbar. The essay by Rod Lyall, on the anonymous «Three Prestis of Peblis, and that of Eleanor Commander, on the «Originale Chronicle» by Andrew Wyntoun, both illuminate unperceived aspects of well-known fifteenth-century texts. Both Janet Hadley Williams and Alan Swanson significantly advance our knowledge of the poet, Sir David Lyndsay. Women's contribution to culture is the subject of the essays by Marguérite Corporaal (on poetry by Queen Mary Stewart and by Mary Beaton) and of Marie-Claude Tucker (on the calligrapher Esther Inglis). In the area of Scottish Gaelic literature and culture, William Gillies explores the connections between a prose tale and poem on the topic of the land of the Little People. In the final study, Jamie Reid-Baxter contextualises and expounds a hitherto unknown Renaissance sonnet sequence, «The Nyne Muses», by John Dykes. In each of the contributions in this volume rhetoric and reality loom large; royalty, the third term of the title, is the ever-present final parameter of culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Dans la période qui va du règne de Philippe IV le Bel (1285-1314) à celui de Louis XIII (1610-1643) la royauté française se transforme d'une monarchie aux accents «seigneuriaux» en une monarchie presque souveraine où tous les habitants deviennent les sujets de «Sa Majesté», titre aux accents romains officialisé sous Henri II. Le parcours qui mène vers cette sujétion se trouve cependant être balisé de sentiments. Tant que le pouvoir royal n'est pas encore bien en selle, il exploite pleinement le thème de l'affection: le roi est le pater patriae ou le «père» qui aime ses sujets et qui les consulte volontiers dans les assemblées de notables et dans des États, provinciaux, régionaux ou généraux. L'affection atteint son apogée dans l'assemblée de notables de 1506 où les députés confèrent à Louis XII le titre de «père du peuple», qualification qui est ressassée à l'infini par la machine propagandiste: le roi de France est le «père» de ses sujets.L'étiquette «père du peuple» ne sert cependant qu'à masquer des velléités centralisatrices et autoritaires, car le «père» de la bienheureuse famille française se souvient du statut du père dans l'Ancien Testament et de celui du pater familias de l'Empire romain. Ces pères-là voulaient être obéis.L'issue est prévisible. Dès que le principe de la souveraineté du roi s'est imposé, les rois de France abandonnent le thème de la paternité affective qui leur a rendu de si bons services et, sauf rare exception, ils refusent d'inviter encore leurs sujets bien-aimés à venir discuter de problèmes touchant «le roi et le royaume». La voix du peuple a beau être la voix de Dieu, toujours est-il que les assemblées de notables et, à fortiori, les États généraux sont des obstacles incommodes et incontrôlables. Cela déplaît foncièrement au roi de France qui règne par la grâce de Dieu et qui n'a des comptes à rendre qu'à Lui. Tous les habitants du royaume - et peu importe leur statut - deviennent des sujets du roi-«père». Les États généraux de 1614-15 sont les derniers. Il y a encore deux assemblées de notables (en 1617 et 1626), mais elles ne changent pas la donne: la voix du peuple est étouffée. Ce n'est qu'en 1789 qu'elle se fait entendre de nouveau.

Medieval cultures to the north and west of the Alps gained their initial understanding of visual spatialization from the Ancient world, but developed their own ways of managing primary and secondary space on any surface where text and/or art interact. The eleven essays of this volume span the period from early insular manuscripts through to later medieval books or artefacts, and examine specific strategies in scribal layout or prescribed authorial design. These vary in their sophistication from the naïve and inadvertent to the self-conscious and at times parodic intentional, allowing us a fascinating insight into the many different ways in which main and marginal space on the page could be employed by medieval imaginations.

Throughout the early Middle Ages, education and learning in Western Europe underwent a substantial development, from Italy across the Alps, from Latin to the vernacular and from secular to (although not exclusively) religious. With Latin as its prime medium, developments in education and learning were genuinely international and allowed for a steady exchange of teachers and texts across borders and institutions. Members of the fifth-century Gallo-Roman senatorial classes ¿ such as Eucherius of Lyons and Cassiodorus ¿ became bishops, abbots or founders of monasteries, and thereby catalysts in the transformation from secular to religious education. Then as now intellectuals travelled, taking both their learning and their books with them: Theodore of Tarsus travelled from the extreme end of the Mediterranean to Italy and across the Alps; John Scottus Eriugena migrated from Ireland to France; Boniface from England to Germany; while Abbo later made a journey from Fleury to Abingdon and back ¿ to name only a few examples. With the mobility of intellectuals comes the movement of texts and books: ranging from Pliny's Historia naturalis and Isidore's Etymologiae or the works of Bede to many of the smaller texts and fragments which have been the subject of study in the ¿Storehouses' project. Although almost all of the precise details of classroom practice in the early Middle Ages remain hidden to the modern eye, and identifiable students' copy books or note-pads are rare, some of the texts and books that have survived still recall the monastic auditorium or schola because of their potential use in the classroom or in view of the texts found in these books. Often these texts and manuscripts testify to the international developments outlined above and to the international nature of the world of early medieval learning. The articles in this second volume of ¿Storehouses of Wholesome Learning' emanate from the second workshop in the project, this time held at Leiden in June 2005. They focus on illuminating the multifaceted practice of learning by laying bare the exchanges of scholarship between the British Isles and the continent. From the Development of the Foetus, found in Bremmer's contribution, to the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, the encyclopaedic knowledge that was disseminated all over Western Europe in written texts and, in all likelihood, through oral transmission, featured strongly in the practice of early medieval learning. The subject of that learning was nothing less than life itself, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense of the word.

Medieval writers who 'translated' Latin texts into Germanic vernaculars not only transmitted their originals, but, driven by individualistic impulses and cultural conventions, also transformed them. This process of domesticating texts was fundamentally creative and might more accurately be described as 'reconstruction'. The essays in Germanic Texts and Latin Models: Medieval Reconstructions explore the ways in which Latin texts and traditions were reconstructed in Old English, Old Icelandic and Old High German and cover a range of genres: legal texts, genealogies, histories, and poetry. They examine how medieval Germanic authors negotiated the need to transmit their models while at the same time fulfilling their own political, artistic and didactic objectives in the creation of vernacular texts. These new studies demonstrate the variety of ways in which medieval Germanic texts were indebted to their Latin exemplars, while reflecting their new culturally specific circumstances in the complex nexus of Latin learning and Germanic lore.

The essays in this book examine various manifestations of monstrosity in the early literatures of England, Ireland and Scandinavia. The dates of the texts discussed range from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries and were written either in Latin or in one of the vernaculars. The present contributions shed light on the physical, mental and metaphysical qualities that characterize medieval monsters in general. How do such creatures relate to accepted physical norms? How do their behaviours deviate from established cultural practices? How can their presence in both fictional and non-fictional texts be explained either in terms of a textual tradition or as a response to actual events? Such issues are examined from literary, philological, theological, and historical points of view in order to provide a thorough, multifaceted depiction of the sub- and supernatural monsters of medieval Northwest Europe.

The Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), a medieval book recounting in forty-five chapters the story of human redemption within the larger context of the Virgin Mary's life, was something of a «best seller» in the Middle Ages, surviving in over 400 copies. Because the author wrote anonymously, however, little about the book's initial context is known despite a century's-long effort to uncover the author's identity. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses investigates a Marian confraternal setting for the Speculum's emergence, and newly proposes consideration of Nicola da Milano as the poem's author. Its central chapters show how the scribes who copied the Speculum preserved the author's rhetorical considerations that served so well the purposes of Marian confraternal preaching, including elements that suit memory training techniques used in the Middle Ages, such as building an architectural structure in one's mind, tagging memories with emotion, and internalizing the transformative nature of spiritual lessons. The final chapter asserts that the poem's lessons would have been particularly desired in the context of plague, when the number of corpses threatened to destroy people's faith in a merciful God. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses challenges assumptions about the Speculum, as well as the dominantly held view that there was an overwhelming emphasis on death in the late medieval period. Rather, this book demonstrates that there was a competing emphasis on life as glimpsed in the glass of the Speculum.