What is new in medieval studies? Here are ten articles published in September, which tell us about topics including riddles, droughts, gunshot wounds and more.
Here is a new series we are starting on Medievalists.net to highlight what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten of these articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free.
A simple food with many meanings: bread in late medieval England
By Christopher Dye
Journal of Medieval History
Abstract: Bread was the most important item of diet in medieval England. Cereals were consumed in boiled form, but bread was preferred. Bread was not just convenient, but was also symbolic of well-being. Although breads were made from other cereals and legumes, wheat bread occupied a prime position, and in particular white wheat bread was regarded highly by consumers. Reasons are given for these attitudes, including the practical advantage that white bread was an efficient source of energy and was cost-effective. The political management of the corn trade and bread baking through such regulations as the assize of bread was intended to prevent unrest, but occasionally consumers organised ‘food riots’.
Click here to read the article
Thomas Aquinas, Saint for Our Times?
By Michael S. Sherwin
New Blackfriars
Abstract: Why celebrate Thomas Aquinas? Three eras that celebrated Aquinas in unique ways—the Fourteenth century that canonized him, the Sixteenth century that declared him a doctor of the Church, and the nineteenth century that made him patron of the schools—all struggled with the corrosive effects of nominalism and voluntarism on Western culture. With the help of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, this essay suggests that these eras were drawn to Aquinas because his theology offers an antidote against these twin diseases. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas’s theology can help us confront the ills of nominalism and voluntarism by encouraging us to celebrate nature, grace, and Christian apprenticeship in virtue as the perennial gifts of God’s love.
Click here to read this article
Geographic longitude in Latin Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
By C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Archive for History of Exact Sciences
Abstract: This article surveys surviving evidence for the determination of geographic longitude in Latin Europe in the period between 1100 and 1300. Special consideration is given to the different types of sources that preserve longitude estimates as well as to the techniques that were used in establishing them. While the method of inferring longitude differences from eclipse times was evidently in use as early as the mid-twelfth century, it remains doubtful that it can account for most of the preserved longitudes. An analysis of 89 different estimates for 30 European cities indicates a high degree of accuracy among the longitudes of English cities and a conspicuous displacement eastward (by 5°–7;30°) shared by most longitudes of cities in Italy and France. In both cases, the data suggest a high level of interdependence between estimates for different cities in the same geographic region, although the means by which these estimates were arrived at remain insufficiently known.
Click here to read the article
Aldhelm’s Fandom: The Humble Virtues of Boniface’s Riddles
By Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville
The Review of English Studies
Abstract: St Boniface, the eighth-century scholar, missionary, and eventual martyr, is generally characterized as an important historical figure but a bad poet. In part it is because his verse is so strongly marked by direct borrowings from Aldhelm that it is easy to assume he did not possess the creativity or ability to write for himself. Here, we seek to rehabilitate Boniface’s collection of Latin riddles about the personified Virtues and Vices, engaging especially with Humilitas Cristiana (‘Christian Humility’), Virginitas … humilium (‘Virginity of the Humble’), Superbia (‘Pride’), and Vana gloria iactantia (‘Vainglorious Boasting’).
We examine Boniface’s riddles through the lens of fan studies, arguing that fandom and fan fiction provide insights into group-identity formation and gift-giving that reframe Boniface’s debt to Aldhelm, as well as his entire creative project. Like a writer of fan fiction, Boniface creates new characters based on his reading of Aldhelm’s De virginitate (‘Concerning Virginity’) and, through them, he develops Aldhelm’s warning against taking pride in virtue. However, Boniface’s riddle-subjects speak an encoded message that only a true fan of Aldhelm could appreciate. Distance from this fandom has led to scholarly neglect of a fascinating poetic collection, but we hope to bridge the gap.
Click here to read the article
War and peace: hired troops and military aid in Byzantine and English treaties, c.900–1200
By Ben Morris
Historical Research
Abstract: The rulers of Byzantium and England are well known for their centralized nature and their active approach to diplomacy. Both powers often utilized treaties to bolster their military forces, and to undermine those of their foes. Of course, allegiance was not always clear-cut, with many powers having complex relations with their neighbours and the treaties catering to the conflicting obligations of those involved. This article focuses on the treaties of two of the most bureaucratic powers of the medieval world who have comparable treaty corpuses, utilizing the theme of military service to show that treaties were primarily pragmatic documents.
Click here to read this article
Alexander the Great or Būrān-Dukht: who is the true hero of the Dārāb-nāma of Ṭarsūsī?
By Marina Gaillard
Iranian Studies
Abstract: This article presents a new reading of the Dārāb-nāma (Book of Dārāb, ca. eleventh–twelfth century), a medieval popular narrative in prose (dāstān) ascribed to the storyteller Abū Ṭāhir Ṭarsūsī. While the narrative belongs to the Persian tradition of the Alexander romance, the Alexander figure it depicts bears little resemblance to that presented in high classical verse-forms by the likes of Firdawsī, Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, or Jāmī. Although still a conqueror, legitimate ruler, and champion of Islam, the Alexander of the Dārāb-nāma appears in a strongly negative light: he is lame, cowardly, and sly. In fact, most of his success he owes to his once opponent and later wife, Būrān-dukht: could she be the true hero in the story? Drawing on a critical examination of characters based on Greimas’s actantial model, this study probes the authorial program and intended audience of the Dārāb-nāma, and suggests the work can be read as mock-epic, possibly to cater to a Zoroastrian audience.
Click here to read this article
Women Suppliers to Medieval Courts: Making Visible Ducal and Royal Power
By Katherine A. Wilson
Gender and History
Abstract: This article analyses under-studied women suppliers to medieval courts, with a focus on Burgundian and French courts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through its archival research, it identifies over a hundred women involved in creating, supplying and repairing objects. Starting from the objects supplied, provisioned or repaired by women, the article seeks to understand women suppliers as significant actors in ducal and royal households through the way in which the objects they supplied became visible and meaningful expressions of ducal and royal power.
Click here to read this article
Drought as a possible contributor to the Visigothic Kingdom crisis and Islamic expansion in the Iberian Peninsula
By Jon Camuera, Francisco J. Jiménez-Espejo, José Soto-Chica, Gonzalo Jiménez-Moreno, Antonio García-Alix, María J. Ramos-Román, Leena Ruha, Manuel Castro-Priego
Nature Communications
Abstract: The Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean basin was one the most relevant and rapid cultural changes in human history. This expansion reached the Iberian Peninsula with the replacement of the Visigothic Kingdom by the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate and the Muslim Emirate of Córdoba during the 8th century CE. In this study we made a compilation of western Mediterranean pollen records to gain insight about past climate conditions when this expansion took place. The pollen stack results, together with other paleohydrological records, archaeological data and historical sources, indicate that the statistically significant strongest droughts between the mid-5th and mid-10th centuries CE (450–950 CE) occurred at 545–570, 695–725, 755–770 and 900–935 CE, which could have contributed to the instability of the Visigothic and Muslim reigns in the Iberian Peninsula. Our study supports the great sensitivity of the agriculture-based economy and socio-political unrest of Early Medieval kingdoms to climatic variations.
Click here to read the article
‘Through and Through’ History: The Management of Gunshot Wounds From the 14th Century to the Present
By Justin Barr, MD, Walton O. Schalick, III, Christopher B. Horn, W. Sanders Marble, Shauna Devine and Dale C. Smith, PhD
Annals of Surgery Open
Abstract: Gun violence killed over 46,000 Americans in 2021; almost 120,000 suffered gunshot wounds. This epidemic has attracted national attention and increasing concern from medical and surgical organizations, as evident in this special issue. ‘Through and Through History’ explores the surgical management of gunshot wounds from their earliest appearance in 14th-century Europe to the present. Interweaving the civilian and military experience, it details not only the evolution of care directly applied to patients but also the social, political, and scientific milieu that shaped decisions made and actions performed both in and out of the operating room. The article describes how surgeons have pushed the boundaries of medicine and science in each era, developing new therapies for their patients, a historical trend that persists today when such care has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year.
Click here to read this article
Instrumental Jawārī: On Gender, Slavery, and Technology in Medieval Arabic Sources
By Lamia Balafrej
Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists
Abstract: Female domestic slaves designated as jawārī (sing. jāriya) featured in a range of medieval Arabic sources, including treatises on the mechanical arts. They appeared, for example, as liquid-serving devices and timekeepers. Scholarship on automated jawārī, however, has been scant; little, in fact, has been written on gender, slavery, and technology in the medieval Middle East. Generally, figurative machines have been framed as either practical, proto-robotic forms or wondrous, elite contrivances.
Though seemingly innocuous, these approaches are at risk of reinscribing modern biases. In particular, the utilitarian discourse that sees machines as neutral, useful objects has been shown to manifest a position of mastery, reinforcing a slippage between worker and tool. Yet the hypothesis that the automata were objectifying, framing the jāriya as the object of a patron’s viewpoint, might also partake in the binaries of subject and object, master and slave. To attend to the gendered and class-based politics of automated jawārī requires that we forgo common assumptions about both technology and objectification.
The notion of instrumentality—here defined as the quality of serving as an instrument (āla) in a process of carrying and transmitting—may prove helpful in this regard. Jawārī, it turns out, were portrayed as instrumental figures in various other domains, including in domestic and spiritual contexts. Ṣūfī saints’ encounters with inspired jawārī, for example, foregrounded the female servant as a vector of divine wisdom. Like the engineer’s prototypes, these narratives were the product of a male, patriarchal viewpoint, oscillating between demeaning and valorizing effects; as such, they fortified some of the norms that made jawārī representable, notably as hypervisible, mediating agents. At the same time, these representations expose the limits of utilitarian, apolitical approaches to technology while positing jawārī as vehicles—more than objects—of instrumentality.
Click here to read the article
Top Image: British Library MS Egerton 745 fol. 38v and Kitab fi ma’arifat al-hiyal al-handasiya (The book of knowledge of ingenious mechanical devices, known as the “Automata”) by al-Jazari (FGA F1930)
What is new in medieval studies? Here are ten articles published in September, which tell us about topics including riddles, droughts, gunshot wounds and more.
Here is a new series we are starting on Medievalists.net to highlight what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten of these articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free.
A simple food with many meanings: bread in late medieval England
By Christopher Dye
Journal of Medieval History
Abstract: Bread was the most important item of diet in medieval England. Cereals were consumed in boiled form, but bread was preferred. Bread was not just convenient, but was also symbolic of well-being. Although breads were made from other cereals and legumes, wheat bread occupied a prime position, and in particular white wheat bread was regarded highly by consumers. Reasons are given for these attitudes, including the practical advantage that white bread was an efficient source of energy and was cost-effective. The political management of the corn trade and bread baking through such regulations as the assize of bread was intended to prevent unrest, but occasionally consumers organised ‘food riots’.
Click here to read the article
Thomas Aquinas, Saint for Our Times?
By Michael S. Sherwin
New Blackfriars
Abstract: Why celebrate Thomas Aquinas? Three eras that celebrated Aquinas in unique ways—the Fourteenth century that canonized him, the Sixteenth century that declared him a doctor of the Church, and the nineteenth century that made him patron of the schools—all struggled with the corrosive effects of nominalism and voluntarism on Western culture. With the help of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, this essay suggests that these eras were drawn to Aquinas because his theology offers an antidote against these twin diseases. Specifically, Thomas Aquinas’s theology can help us confront the ills of nominalism and voluntarism by encouraging us to celebrate nature, grace, and Christian apprenticeship in virtue as the perennial gifts of God’s love.
Click here to read this article
Geographic longitude in Latin Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
By C. Philipp E. Nothaft
Archive for History of Exact Sciences
Abstract: This article surveys surviving evidence for the determination of geographic longitude in Latin Europe in the period between 1100 and 1300. Special consideration is given to the different types of sources that preserve longitude estimates as well as to the techniques that were used in establishing them. While the method of inferring longitude differences from eclipse times was evidently in use as early as the mid-twelfth century, it remains doubtful that it can account for most of the preserved longitudes. An analysis of 89 different estimates for 30 European cities indicates a high degree of accuracy among the longitudes of English cities and a conspicuous displacement eastward (by 5°–7;30°) shared by most longitudes of cities in Italy and France. In both cases, the data suggest a high level of interdependence between estimates for different cities in the same geographic region, although the means by which these estimates were arrived at remain insufficiently known.
Click here to read the article
Aldhelm’s Fandom: The Humble Virtues of Boniface’s Riddles
By Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville
The Review of English Studies
Abstract: St Boniface, the eighth-century scholar, missionary, and eventual martyr, is generally characterized as an important historical figure but a bad poet. In part it is because his verse is so strongly marked by direct borrowings from Aldhelm that it is easy to assume he did not possess the creativity or ability to write for himself. Here, we seek to rehabilitate Boniface’s collection of Latin riddles about the personified Virtues and Vices, engaging especially with Humilitas Cristiana (‘Christian Humility’), Virginitas … humilium (‘Virginity of the Humble’), Superbia (‘Pride’), and Vana gloria iactantia (‘Vainglorious Boasting’).
We examine Boniface’s riddles through the lens of fan studies, arguing that fandom and fan fiction provide insights into group-identity formation and gift-giving that reframe Boniface’s debt to Aldhelm, as well as his entire creative project. Like a writer of fan fiction, Boniface creates new characters based on his reading of Aldhelm’s De virginitate (‘Concerning Virginity’) and, through them, he develops Aldhelm’s warning against taking pride in virtue. However, Boniface’s riddle-subjects speak an encoded message that only a true fan of Aldhelm could appreciate. Distance from this fandom has led to scholarly neglect of a fascinating poetic collection, but we hope to bridge the gap.
Click here to read the article
War and peace: hired troops and military aid in Byzantine and English treaties, c.900–1200
By Ben Morris
Historical Research
Abstract: The rulers of Byzantium and England are well known for their centralized nature and their active approach to diplomacy. Both powers often utilized treaties to bolster their military forces, and to undermine those of their foes. Of course, allegiance was not always clear-cut, with many powers having complex relations with their neighbours and the treaties catering to the conflicting obligations of those involved. This article focuses on the treaties of two of the most bureaucratic powers of the medieval world who have comparable treaty corpuses, utilizing the theme of military service to show that treaties were primarily pragmatic documents.
Click here to read this article
Alexander the Great or Būrān-Dukht: who is the true hero of the Dārāb-nāma of Ṭarsūsī?
By Marina Gaillard
Iranian Studies
Abstract: This article presents a new reading of the Dārāb-nāma (Book of Dārāb, ca. eleventh–twelfth century), a medieval popular narrative in prose (dāstān) ascribed to the storyteller Abū Ṭāhir Ṭarsūsī. While the narrative belongs to the Persian tradition of the Alexander romance, the Alexander figure it depicts bears little resemblance to that presented in high classical verse-forms by the likes of Firdawsī, Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, or Jāmī. Although still a conqueror, legitimate ruler, and champion of Islam, the Alexander of the Dārāb-nāma appears in a strongly negative light: he is lame, cowardly, and sly. In fact, most of his success he owes to his once opponent and later wife, Būrān-dukht: could she be the true hero in the story? Drawing on a critical examination of characters based on Greimas’s actantial model, this study probes the authorial program and intended audience of the Dārāb-nāma, and suggests the work can be read as mock-epic, possibly to cater to a Zoroastrian audience.
Click here to read this article
Women Suppliers to Medieval Courts: Making Visible Ducal and Royal Power
By Katherine A. Wilson
Gender and History
Abstract: This article analyses under-studied women suppliers to medieval courts, with a focus on Burgundian and French courts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Through its archival research, it identifies over a hundred women involved in creating, supplying and repairing objects. Starting from the objects supplied, provisioned or repaired by women, the article seeks to understand women suppliers as significant actors in ducal and royal households through the way in which the objects they supplied became visible and meaningful expressions of ducal and royal power.
Click here to read this article
Drought as a possible contributor to the Visigothic Kingdom crisis and Islamic expansion in the Iberian Peninsula
By Jon Camuera, Francisco J. Jiménez-Espejo, José Soto-Chica, Gonzalo Jiménez-Moreno, Antonio García-Alix, María J. Ramos-Román, Leena Ruha, Manuel Castro-Priego
Nature Communications
Abstract: The Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean basin was one the most relevant and rapid cultural changes in human history. This expansion reached the Iberian Peninsula with the replacement of the Visigothic Kingdom by the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate and the Muslim Emirate of Córdoba during the 8th century CE. In this study we made a compilation of western Mediterranean pollen records to gain insight about past climate conditions when this expansion took place. The pollen stack results, together with other paleohydrological records, archaeological data and historical sources, indicate that the statistically significant strongest droughts between the mid-5th and mid-10th centuries CE (450–950 CE) occurred at 545–570, 695–725, 755–770 and 900–935 CE, which could have contributed to the instability of the Visigothic and Muslim reigns in the Iberian Peninsula. Our study supports the great sensitivity of the agriculture-based economy and socio-political unrest of Early Medieval kingdoms to climatic variations.
Click here to read the article
‘Through and Through’ History: The Management of Gunshot Wounds From the 14th Century to the Present
By Justin Barr, MD, Walton O. Schalick, III, Christopher B. Horn, W. Sanders Marble, Shauna Devine and Dale C. Smith, PhD
Annals of Surgery Open
Abstract: Gun violence killed over 46,000 Americans in 2021; almost 120,000 suffered gunshot wounds. This epidemic has attracted national attention and increasing concern from medical and surgical organizations, as evident in this special issue. ‘Through and Through History’ explores the surgical management of gunshot wounds from their earliest appearance in 14th-century Europe to the present. Interweaving the civilian and military experience, it details not only the evolution of care directly applied to patients but also the social, political, and scientific milieu that shaped decisions made and actions performed both in and out of the operating room. The article describes how surgeons have pushed the boundaries of medicine and science in each era, developing new therapies for their patients, a historical trend that persists today when such care has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year.
Click here to read this article
Instrumental Jawārī: On Gender, Slavery, and Technology in Medieval Arabic Sources
By Lamia Balafrej
Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists
Abstract: Female domestic slaves designated as jawārī (sing. jāriya) featured in a range of medieval Arabic sources, including treatises on the mechanical arts. They appeared, for example, as liquid-serving devices and timekeepers. Scholarship on automated jawārī, however, has been scant; little, in fact, has been written on gender, slavery, and technology in the medieval Middle East. Generally, figurative machines have been framed as either practical, proto-robotic forms or wondrous, elite contrivances.
Though seemingly innocuous, these approaches are at risk of reinscribing modern biases. In particular, the utilitarian discourse that sees machines as neutral, useful objects has been shown to manifest a position of mastery, reinforcing a slippage between worker and tool. Yet the hypothesis that the automata were objectifying, framing the jāriya as the object of a patron’s viewpoint, might also partake in the binaries of subject and object, master and slave. To attend to the gendered and class-based politics of automated jawārī requires that we forgo common assumptions about both technology and objectification.
The notion of instrumentality—here defined as the quality of serving as an instrument (āla) in a process of carrying and transmitting—may prove helpful in this regard. Jawārī, it turns out, were portrayed as instrumental figures in various other domains, including in domestic and spiritual contexts. Ṣūfī saints’ encounters with inspired jawārī, for example, foregrounded the female servant as a vector of divine wisdom. Like the engineer’s prototypes, these narratives were the product of a male, patriarchal viewpoint, oscillating between demeaning and valorizing effects; as such, they fortified some of the norms that made jawārī representable, notably as hypervisible, mediating agents. At the same time, these representations expose the limits of utilitarian, apolitical approaches to technology while positing jawārī as vehicles—more than objects—of instrumentality.
Click here to read the article
Top Image: British Library MS Egerton 745 fol. 38v and Kitab fi ma’arifat al-hiyal al-handasiya (The book of knowledge of ingenious mechanical devices, known as the “Automata”) by al-Jazari (FGA F1930)
Related Posts
Subscribe to Medievalverse