Articles

Byland Revisited, or, Spectres of Inheritance

Tom Johnson

Pages: 439-456

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2060486

This article explores the connections between ghosts and medieval law. It revisits the final story from the famous Byland Abbey collection, concerning the sister of Adam de London and a disputed inheritance, and demonstrates the historicity of the people involved using legal evidence. This opens up a reading of the story in which legal ideas are central to the framing and narrative; I suggest that the ghost manifests a fear of the destruction of inheritance. I then move to argue that the law of inheritance in later medieval England was dependent on a ‘spectral reasoning’, in which the wishes of those who granted property to their children took on an outsized, supernatural agency. Finally, I suggest that this comparison helps to reveal not only the strangeness of inheritance as a legal concept, but also the ways in which it has continued to structure inequality into our own time.

The papal monopoly of the canonisation and translation of saints on the peripheries of Latin Christendom: the case of Bohemia before c.1150

Grzegorz Pac

Pages: 457-477

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2101505

The present paper discusses the attitude of Bohemian ecclesiastical circles towards the papal monopoly of the canonisation and translation of saints. Three cases known from sources dated to the first half of the twelfth century are analysed, all pointing to widespread adoption in the Bohemian Church at a relatively early date of the view that both the canonisation of new saints and the translation of those already recognised required papal approval. The issue is discussed against the wider background of contacts between Bohemian ecclesiastical elites and Rome, as well as Germany. It was the influence of the German Church, where the notion of papal monopoly of the canonisation and translation of saints was widely accepted early on, that provides the key to understanding the phenomenon in Bohemia.

John of Garland on the Jews

William Chester Jordan

Pages: 478-495

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2098530

The works of John of Garland, an Englishman who taught in Paris and Toulouse in the first half of the thirteenth century, have many virulent passages describing the Jews of his day. Although he never denied the possibility that conversion to Christianity could redeem the Jews, he thought it unlikely they would come over to the Catholic faith or remain steadfast in the religion. His invective was extreme by the standards of the time but was influential in that it appeared in many of his pedagogical works for adolescents and young men at the universities. These works and others which were directed at a more learned audience, like those that praised the Virgin Mary and extolled the triumphs of the Church Militant, were written in rhetorically complex Latin and have not attracted the interest they deserve from scholars. This article is a first attempt toward remedying this state of affairs.

Patterns of communication during the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe: insights from the Ottobeuren letter collection

Matthew Coulter

Pages: 496-523

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2101020

This article analyses the importance of communication by letter during the initial months of the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe (c.March–July 1241). It focuses especially on the 10 letters found in the Ottobeuren collection (Innsbruck, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Tirol, Cod. 187, ff. 1v–8v). Through a close reading of the collection and its visualisation in the form of a network graph, this article reconstructs the transmission history of the Ottobeuren letters, including the report of Brother Julian, and shows the manner in which the collection was arranged by the compiler to give a pro-Hohenstaufen account of the invasion. The final section contextualises the Ottobeuren letters as part of a wider correspondence network from these months, and offers a reappraisal of the importance of written communication in the actions of individual princes involved in planning the defence of Germany and Bohemia against the Mongols.

Pursuing the Percys: the original owners of the Percy Psalter-Hours

Eleanor Jackson

Pages: 524-545

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2098529

In 2019 the British Library acquired the Percy Hours, a late thirteenth-century book of hours from York. This acquisition reunited the manuscript with the Percy Psalter, acquired by the Library in 1990. Together they originally formed a single volume psalter-hours. The Percy Psalter-Hours is one of a small number of devotional books for the laity surviving from thirteenth-century England, and probably the only example from York. It provides rare insight into a period of great change in book culture, when devotional books for the laity were growing in popularity and regional workshops for commercial book production were emerging around the country. Despite its significance, the question of the manuscript's original ownership has never been satisfactorily answered. Through analysing the heraldic evidence of the manuscript, this paper proposes a new identification of the intended owners and explores the wider implications for our understanding of the social history of the book.

The first issue of annuities by the Diputación of the kingdom of Aragon (1376–1436): raising capital and sovereign debt in the Middle Ages

Sandra de la Torre Gonzalo

Pages: 546-570

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2102061

This article presents new data on the kingdom of Aragon’s issue of sovereign debt 25 years earlier than the point at which there is routine documentation. The primary focus of this study is to examine how the representative institutions of this territory within the Crown of Aragon undertook the task of raising capital in financial markets. Contrary to a well-established historiographical perspective, this inland kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula and a supra-local political body called the Diputación employed advanced financial instruments that were used in major cities along the Mediterranean coast, and managed to attract investors. A chronological survey is undertaken of the evolution of this debt and how it shaped the kingdom’s relationship to the monarchy, seeking to meet royal demands for extraordinary funding. This study of the management of public debt sheds light on deep structural changes that encompassed fiscality, the creation of new institutions and self-government.

Behind the scenes: Urban secretaries as managers of legal and diplomatic conflicts in the Baltic region, c.1470–1540

Christian Manger

Pages: 571-586

https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2022.2098528

This article analyses the activities of urban secretaries in legal and diplomatic conflicts in and around late medieval Baltic cities. By applying actor and practice-centered approaches of conflict management and the New Diplomatic History to their letters and correspondence, it argues that secretaries made use of a combination of education, specialised governance knowledge and individual networks to participate actively in handling their councils’ conflicts. Thus, this article provides new insights into the activities of educated personnel in late medieval cities and – by combining the legal and diplomatic sphere – also aims at providing a fresh perspective on practices of Hanseatic conflict management.