Articles
From author to authority: Anselm’s public reputation and the Council of Bari (1098)
Samu Niskanen
Pages: 1-22
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2153381
Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) was considered an authoritative learned writer across Latin Christendom in his own lifetime. This essay argues it was his triumph at the Council of Bari in 1098, where he delivered a full-length speech on the Procession of the Holy Spirit and was cited by the pope as an authority, which elevated him to such an unusual status for a living author. The proposition is advanced by three arguments. Setting out the historical context, the first explores how Anselm came to be charged with a major conciliar assignment. The second examines events before and during the council, and assesses his achievement in terms of medieval literary theory. The final section demonstrates how his new renown provided a readership in regions where his works had not previously penetrated. The evidence derives from contemporary remarks and early manuscripts, many of which have gone unobserved in Anselmian scholarship.
Holy war and Church reform: the case of Gerhoch of Reichersberg (1092/3–1169)
Johannes Tutzer
Pages: 23-44
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2157470
This paper analyses the connection between holy war, crusading and Church reform in Gerhoch of Reichersberg’s Tractatus in psalmos and other exegetical works. For Gerhoch, the First and Second Crusade constituted a facet of Church reform. By exploring the forms and manifestations of spiritual and material warfare, this essay argues that both the physical fighting on the crusades and the spiritual fight against enemies within Christendom such as heretics, schismatics and simoniacs, were part of an eschatological battle for salvation at the End Times. It furthermore demonstrates how current events can influence exegesis and how exegetical mechanisms as well as Christian concepts of the End Times could legitimate and contribute to religiously motivated violence. During the 1159 Schism, Gerhoch re-materialised the spiritualised warfare of Old Testament rhetoric against schismatics in the face of the imminent End Times and raids on Reichersberg Abbey.
Medical knowledge in thirteenth-century preaching: the sermons of Luca da Bitonto
Edward Sutcliffe
Pages: 45-71
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2153908
Metaphors of physical health and illness occurred frequently in medieval exegesis, with diseased bodies providing figurative language that could be applied to sin and its effects upon the soul. The increasing availability of newly translated medical learning in Europe in the thirteenth century augmented and enriched this discourse in innovative ways. The present paper offers a close analysis of the systematic use of sophisticated medical knowledge in an unpublished collection of model sermons, written c.1240 by the Franciscan preacher Luca da Bitonto. Produced at least 50 years earlier than comparable sermons previously shown to contain advanced medical metaphor, Luca’s sermons offer new evidence for the intellectual and theological contexts in which thirteenth-century preachers sought out detailed and accurate knowledge of the natural world, and for the ways in which new medical knowledge was disseminated and incorporated into medieval religious discourse.
The empress and the humanist: profit and politics in the correspondence of Anne of Świdnica and Petrarch
Sophie Elise Charron
Pages: 72-92
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2153267
This article presents a reassessment of Anne of Świdnica (1339–62), Holy Roman Empress and queen of Bohemia, based on a reading of Petrarch's De laudibus feminarum. By reinterpreting their correspondence as an act of gift-giving within a framework of court patronage, it makes a case for her calculated effort to benefit her public image by corresponding with Petrarch, while he, in turn, benefited by representing himself as an intimate of the imperial family. It also situates his letter within the context of the ongoing political exchanges between Petrarch and the Prague court, and suggests that he sought to harness Anne's influence for his political agenda. What emerges is a new vision of Anne, one with greater learning and agency.
The price of the throne. Public finances in Portugal and Castile and the War of the Castilian Succession (1475–9)
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez & José Manuel Triano-Milán
Pages: 93-110
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2155988
The reign of Henry IV of Castile ended without a clear heir to the throne, triggering a military conflict between the candidates, Isabella and Ferdinand – the future Catholic Monarchs – and Joanna and Afonso V of Portugal. Ultimately, what was at stake was the balance of power not only in the Iberian Peninsula, but in Western Europe more broadly. The conflict transcended the military field and tested the strength and adaptability of two precocious and dynamic state financial structures. The aim of this article is to compare the way both public finance systems coped with this conflict and responded to a challenge that was to shape their future evolution.
‘A competent mess’: food, consumption and retirement at religious houses in England and Wales, c.1502–38
Allison D. Fizzard
Pages: 111-134
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2151040
This article contributes to our knowledge of food habits in late medieval and early sixteenth-century England and Wales through an analysis of under-examined records of retirement agreements known as corrodies; these were struck between religious houses and individuals or married couples. Corrody texts, copied in records from the Court of Augmentations, are a rich source for patterns of consumption, particularly of beverages and foodstuffs, in the first four decades of the sixteenth century. People from a range of social backgrounds acted as careful consumers in their attempts to guarantee their preferred foods in their retirement years. These late retirement arrangements indicate an evolution of food entitlements in corrodies towards greater specificity in terms of what the corrodians were to receive. They also reflect larger food trends of this period, such as a move away from pottage and a desire to secure access to meat and other animal-derived foods.
