What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in November, which tell us about topics including rental disputes in Paris and Chaucer’s use of food.
This series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 61 open-access articles we found.
Cooking Your Goose: Chaucer’s Food and the Realist Mode
By Catherine Addison
English Studies in Africa
This paper uses David Lodge’s discussion of metonymy and metaphor – based on Roman Jakobson’s theory – to explore Chaucer’s treatment of food and drink in The Canterbury Tales. Lodge demonstrates that, while poetry is basically metaphoric in its mode of representation, the realist novel is in contrast fundamentally metonymic. An object described in a realist novel is usually metonymic in the sense that it represents, or is continuous with, objects physically present in the novelist’s own material world. As opposed to the metonymic realist novel, Medieval and Renaissance texts normally use food and drink in allegorical or symbolic ways. Consumable items may represent sin, temptation, the Eucharist or the fulfilment of desire.
In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often does use food metaphorically, but he also displays it in figures that are both metaphoric and metonymic to varying degrees; and, now and then, his representation of food is solely metonymic. In its trope analysis, this paper pays special attention to passages in which food or drink function metonymically, as things in a fictional material world. It demonstrates one of the ways in which The Canterbury Tales contributes to the general process that Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘novelization’.
Examining Medieval Long-Wall frontier systems (11th – 12th centuries AD) through archaeological geophysics in the Eastern Mongolian Steppe Region
By Bryan K. Hanks et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
This paper presents the results of exploratory geophysical surveys and ground truthing of a cluster of earthen enclosures associated with a long-wall frontier system in northeastern Mongolia. This system dates to the 11th to early 12th centuries AD and was constructed by the Kitan/Liao Dynasty. Square and circular enclosures identified along the south side of the wall system were examined using single axis fluxgate gradiometry and ground penetrating radar. Geophysical prospection assisted in the identification of entry gates, rammed earth wall construction techniques, and interior features within the earthen complexes and assisted with the placement of ground truthing trenches. This approach ensured that geophysical survey was integrated closely with on-going development of the research design for the site and aided the identification and interpretation of construction characteristics associated with the long-wall system and the functions of the enclosures.
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature
Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit’s very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.
The Influence of the Principle “Necessitas Non Habet Legem” on Nordic Medieval Laws on Theft
By Mia Korpiola and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde
Journal of the History of Ideas
The chapter on theft in the Norwegian Code of the Realm, compiled through the initiative of King Magnus VI Lawmender (r. 1263–80) and promulgated by him in 1274, opens by declaring theft unlawful. However, the Code goes on to stipulate that larceny would not merit punishment in the case of a starving man who steals food after unsuccessfully seeking gainful employment. The Code of 1274 then prescribes the penalties for petit larceny for first-time offenders who do work to support themselves. Thus, the Code explicitly distinguishes between starving unemployed persons who steal food out of necessity and those who steal despite having access to a livelihood. It was a longstanding and widespread norm, as the Code was drafted for the whole of rural Norway and remained in force well into the seventeenth century. In this article, we consider whether this norm could have been inspired by the canonical maxim necessitas non habet legem (necessity knows no law).
What jewelry did people wear in the Middle Byzantine period (10th-12th C. CE) in the Peloponnese? A technological and analytical case study
By G. Logothetou et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
The present paper presents the preliminary results of the archaeometric analysis of a Middle Byzantine jewelry assemblage made of non-precious metals from the ancient site of Pallantion, near Tripoli (Peloponnese, Greece). The assemblage under examination consists of 26 artifacts, including earrings, finger rings and buckles. Macroscopic observations and optical microscopy were used to examine the manufacturing technology of the artifacts, with a particular focus on the manufacturing technology of wires. The proposed methodology combined a Handheld X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (HH-XRF) and a Micro X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (μ-XRF) to group the alloys used in the manufacture of the jewelry, despite the presence of corrosion. This methodology indicated that the majority of the artifacts was made of bronze, leaded or not, and gunmetal. Moreover, a quantification criterion was used to determine the state of preservation of the surface of the jewelry. Overall, the present study highlights the manufacturing technology of jewelry of the Middle Byzantine period and the tendency to imitate silver jewelry with lower-cost materials.
Trans* & gender identity in the premodern Mediterranean
By Susan McDonough and Michelle Armstrong-Partida
postmedieval
This paper explores the intersection and imbrication of transness and Mediterraneaness in the premodern period. How did Mediterranean mobility, spaces, and creativity inform and make possible the ‘transing’ of gender? Re-examining previously considered sources with the benefit of recent scholarship on archival silences and trans history, we suggest that Mediterranean culture, migration, local community, and race shaped possibilities for transgender people. Prioritizing the agency of people who lived non-binary and trans lives, we make them legible to a contemporary audience while refraining from imposing our own labels upon them. The messy and contradictory lives of our subjects show the complexity of personhood and identity. We consider unrecorded suffering and reflect on how the physical bodies of those punished for transgressing gender norms were inscribed with meaning that resonated with hegemonic constructions of sexuality and identity. We center the bodies, identities, and experiences of trans people rather than the elite male discourses of a heteronormative society.
“It Requires Privacy”: Sharing a House in Thirteenth-Century Paris
By Pinchas Roth
Jewish History
Analysis of a legal ruling by Yehiel of Paris (d. ca. 1260) in a rental dispute between two Jewish men sheds light on aspects of Jewish life in a major medieval European city. Two Jews rented an apartment from a Christian owner, and a dispute arose when one of the tenants left mid-term and his replacement, also a Jewish man, tried to renew the lease directly with the landlord. The original tenant claimed the exclusive right to renew the lease and that he was unwilling to share the apartment with the new tenant as this would impinge on his privacy in use of the lavatory. This article attempts to unravel the legal and cultural dimensions of the dispute and the demographic and architectural realities underpinning it. The article maintains that the disputants’ legal arguments drew upon both Jewish legal tradition and the legal norms of the rental market in Paris. The legal and cultural significance of privacy in the medieval urban context also plays an important role in the case.
From Kingdom to Colony: Framing the English Conquest of Ireland
By Colin Veach
The English Historical Review
This article offers a new way of framing the English conquest of Ireland by focusing on the development of a kingdom of Ireland both before and after the invasion of 1169. It thus spans the historiographical divides that tend to partition Irish history at the point of the English invasion, and which also frequently disaggregate the study of British and Irish history. By exploring the complexity of Irish political society and culture before 1169, one can see how King Henry II sought to use its structures to facilitate his annexation of ‘the kingdom of Ireland’ in 1171–2. This included the Church, which offered Henry’s dynasty the ideological support and legitimacy it had once provided for Gaelic kings of Ireland.
Paying attention to the numerous references to the ‘kingdom of Ireland’ in the records of the English government also highlights the processes by which Henry’s son John and his successors sought to Anglicise this kingdom by imposing England’s laws, institutions and political culture upon it. Crucially, ultimate control of these structures remained with the administration in England, so in this way Ireland was transformed from a kingdom to a colony. Recognising this liminal period in the development of Anglo-Ireland provides context for the emerging colonial community in Ireland, as well as strategies of resistance and compromise employed by the Gaelic Irish under English rule
Towards the Gothic: Design and Construction of the 12th Century Vaults in Notre‐Dame in Paris, and Possible Origins
By David Wendland, Mark Gielen and Vladimir Korensky
International Journal of Architectural Heritage
The vaults over the choir and nave of Notre‐Dame in Paris play a key role in the development of Gothic vaults—regarding their sheer height and span, and in particular their complex stone structure. A considerable dynamic in the development of new construction details can be seen in solutions that in some cases are still quite distinct from the well‐known constructions of the great Gothic vaults, and that in other cases, although innovative, remain more or less singular. The design of the sexpartite vaults follows a scheme established in the early Gothic and at the same time displays groundbreaking conceptions in geometry and construction. The fire of the roof that in 2019 damaged part of the vaults, but also showed their remarkable structural performance, brought up the necessity of better understanding these structures while also giving deep insight into construction details.
The ongoing research presented here correlates geometric analyses based on 3D‐scanning, carried out on the vaults in Notre‐Dame and on comparable structures, observations on construction details on site, and sources such as historical drawings, with large‐scale experiments reproducing the processes of construction, fabrication of building elements, as well as planning and information transfer from design to building. The approach that refers to the built object as its principal source can be characterized as reverse engineering
Chinese ceramics as global commodities: a thousand years of production and trade of Chinese ceramics in the Western Indian Ocean
By Ran Zhang
World Archaeology
This paper analyses the production and distribution of Chinese trade ceramics from AD 800 to 1900 to understand how these ceramic products became global commodities and how their production and exchange in the Western Indian Ocean evolved. Through a comparative examination of 15 well-identified product types of Chinese ceramics from 216 sites in the Western Indian Ocean, their production kilns, market circulations, and trading quantities have been identified and statistically analysed. The results suggest that the global status of Chinese ceramics in trade from China to the Western Indian Ocean depended on quality, aesthetics, utility, and the ability to navigate challenges such as logistics, production, and market barriers, highlighting the significance of market-adaptive designs in achieving global commodity success.
We found 61 open-access articles from November – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in November, which tell us about topics including rental disputes in Paris and Chaucer’s use of food.
This series on Medievalists.net highlights what has been published in journals over the last month that deal with the Middle Ages. All ten articles are Open-Access, meaning you can read them for free. We now also have a special tier on our Patreon where you can see the full list of 61 open-access articles we found.
Cooking Your Goose: Chaucer’s Food and the Realist Mode
By Catherine Addison
English Studies in Africa
This paper uses David Lodge’s discussion of metonymy and metaphor – based on Roman Jakobson’s theory – to explore Chaucer’s treatment of food and drink in The Canterbury Tales. Lodge demonstrates that, while poetry is basically metaphoric in its mode of representation, the realist novel is in contrast fundamentally metonymic. An object described in a realist novel is usually metonymic in the sense that it represents, or is continuous with, objects physically present in the novelist’s own material world. As opposed to the metonymic realist novel, Medieval and Renaissance texts normally use food and drink in allegorical or symbolic ways. Consumable items may represent sin, temptation, the Eucharist or the fulfilment of desire.
In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often does use food metaphorically, but he also displays it in figures that are both metaphoric and metonymic to varying degrees; and, now and then, his representation of food is solely metonymic. In its trope analysis, this paper pays special attention to passages in which food or drink function metonymically, as things in a fictional material world. It demonstrates one of the ways in which The Canterbury Tales contributes to the general process that Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘novelization’.
Click here to read this article
Examining Medieval Long-Wall frontier systems (11th – 12th centuries AD) through archaeological geophysics in the Eastern Mongolian Steppe Region
By Bryan K. Hanks et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
This paper presents the results of exploratory geophysical surveys and ground truthing of a cluster of earthen enclosures associated with a long-wall frontier system in northeastern Mongolia. This system dates to the 11th to early 12th centuries AD and was constructed by the Kitan/Liao Dynasty. Square and circular enclosures identified along the south side of the wall system were examined using single axis fluxgate gradiometry and ground penetrating radar. Geophysical prospection assisted in the identification of entry gates, rammed earth wall construction techniques, and interior features within the earthen complexes and assisted with the placement of ground truthing trenches. This approach ensured that geophysical survey was integrated closely with on-going development of the research design for the site and aided the identification and interpretation of construction characteristics associated with the long-wall system and the functions of the enclosures.
Click here to read this article
Making St Brigit real in the early middle ages
By Elva Johnston
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature
Brigit of Kildare is the first Irish saint to be celebrated in detail by Irish writers. Her cult enjoyed great depth and popularity. Nevertheless, Brigit’s very existence has been doubted; she has been recast as a pre-Christian goddess despite an overwhelming disparity in evidence. This paper reframes our approaches to the origins of her cult through examining how the earliest writers understood her and made her real for their audiences, real through shaping her sanctity, her historicity and her family relationships. They placed Brigit along a gender continuum where sanctity intersected biology. Yet, Brigit has been treated differently to Irish male saints, becoming a secondary character in her own biographies, reductively overshadowed by a barely attested goddess. It is time for a revitalised appreciation of Brigit as an actual woman, depicted by her first hagiographers as pushing against the grain of an elitist and patriarchal society.
Click here to read this article
The Influence of the Principle “Necessitas Non Habet Legem” on Nordic Medieval Laws on Theft
By Mia Korpiola and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde
Journal of the History of Ideas
The chapter on theft in the Norwegian Code of the Realm, compiled through the initiative of King Magnus VI Lawmender (r. 1263–80) and promulgated by him in 1274, opens by declaring theft unlawful. However, the Code goes on to stipulate that larceny would not merit punishment in the case of a starving man who steals food after unsuccessfully seeking gainful employment. The Code of 1274 then prescribes the penalties for petit larceny for first-time offenders who do work to support themselves. Thus, the Code explicitly distinguishes between starving unemployed persons who steal food out of necessity and those who steal despite having access to a livelihood. It was a longstanding and widespread norm, as the Code was drafted for the whole of rural Norway and remained in force well into the seventeenth century. In this article, we consider whether this norm could have been inspired by the canonical maxim necessitas non habet legem (necessity knows no law).
Click here to read this article
What jewelry did people wear in the Middle Byzantine period (10th-12th C. CE) in the Peloponnese? A technological and analytical case study
By G. Logothetou et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
The present paper presents the preliminary results of the archaeometric analysis of a Middle Byzantine jewelry assemblage made of non-precious metals from the ancient site of Pallantion, near Tripoli (Peloponnese, Greece). The assemblage under examination consists of 26 artifacts, including earrings, finger rings and buckles. Macroscopic observations and optical microscopy were used to examine the manufacturing technology of the artifacts, with a particular focus on the manufacturing technology of wires. The proposed methodology combined a Handheld X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (HH-XRF) and a Micro X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometer (μ-XRF) to group the alloys used in the manufacture of the jewelry, despite the presence of corrosion. This methodology indicated that the majority of the artifacts was made of bronze, leaded or not, and gunmetal. Moreover, a quantification criterion was used to determine the state of preservation of the surface of the jewelry. Overall, the present study highlights the manufacturing technology of jewelry of the Middle Byzantine period and the tendency to imitate silver jewelry with lower-cost materials.
Click here to read this article
Trans* & gender identity in the premodern Mediterranean
By Susan McDonough and Michelle Armstrong-Partida
postmedieval
This paper explores the intersection and imbrication of transness and Mediterraneaness in the premodern period. How did Mediterranean mobility, spaces, and creativity inform and make possible the ‘transing’ of gender? Re-examining previously considered sources with the benefit of recent scholarship on archival silences and trans history, we suggest that Mediterranean culture, migration, local community, and race shaped possibilities for transgender people. Prioritizing the agency of people who lived non-binary and trans lives, we make them legible to a contemporary audience while refraining from imposing our own labels upon them. The messy and contradictory lives of our subjects show the complexity of personhood and identity. We consider unrecorded suffering and reflect on how the physical bodies of those punished for transgressing gender norms were inscribed with meaning that resonated with hegemonic constructions of sexuality and identity. We center the bodies, identities, and experiences of trans people rather than the elite male discourses of a heteronormative society.
Click here to read this article
“It Requires Privacy”: Sharing a House in Thirteenth-Century Paris
By Pinchas Roth
Jewish History
Analysis of a legal ruling by Yehiel of Paris (d. ca. 1260) in a rental dispute between two Jewish men sheds light on aspects of Jewish life in a major medieval European city. Two Jews rented an apartment from a Christian owner, and a dispute arose when one of the tenants left mid-term and his replacement, also a Jewish man, tried to renew the lease directly with the landlord. The original tenant claimed the exclusive right to renew the lease and that he was unwilling to share the apartment with the new tenant as this would impinge on his privacy in use of the lavatory. This article attempts to unravel the legal and cultural dimensions of the dispute and the demographic and architectural realities underpinning it. The article maintains that the disputants’ legal arguments drew upon both Jewish legal tradition and the legal norms of the rental market in Paris. The legal and cultural significance of privacy in the medieval urban context also plays an important role in the case.
Click here to read this article
From Kingdom to Colony: Framing the English Conquest of Ireland
By Colin Veach
The English Historical Review
This article offers a new way of framing the English conquest of Ireland by focusing on the development of a kingdom of Ireland both before and after the invasion of 1169. It thus spans the historiographical divides that tend to partition Irish history at the point of the English invasion, and which also frequently disaggregate the study of British and Irish history. By exploring the complexity of Irish political society and culture before 1169, one can see how King Henry II sought to use its structures to facilitate his annexation of ‘the kingdom of Ireland’ in 1171–2. This included the Church, which offered Henry’s dynasty the ideological support and legitimacy it had once provided for Gaelic kings of Ireland.
Paying attention to the numerous references to the ‘kingdom of Ireland’ in the records of the English government also highlights the processes by which Henry’s son John and his successors sought to Anglicise this kingdom by imposing England’s laws, institutions and political culture upon it. Crucially, ultimate control of these structures remained with the administration in England, so in this way Ireland was transformed from a kingdom to a colony. Recognising this liminal period in the development of Anglo-Ireland provides context for the emerging colonial community in Ireland, as well as strategies of resistance and compromise employed by the Gaelic Irish under English rule
Click here to read this article
Towards the Gothic: Design and Construction of the 12th Century Vaults in Notre‐Dame in Paris, and Possible Origins
By David Wendland, Mark Gielen and Vladimir Korensky
International Journal of Architectural Heritage
The vaults over the choir and nave of Notre‐Dame in Paris play a key role in the development of Gothic vaults—regarding their sheer height and span, and in particular their complex stone structure. A considerable dynamic in the development of new construction details can be seen in solutions that in some cases are still quite distinct from the well‐known constructions of the great Gothic vaults, and that in other cases, although innovative, remain more or less singular. The design of the sexpartite vaults follows a scheme established in the early Gothic and at the same time displays groundbreaking conceptions in geometry and construction. The fire of the roof that in 2019 damaged part of the vaults, but also showed their remarkable structural performance, brought up the necessity of better understanding these structures while also giving deep insight into construction details.
The ongoing research presented here correlates geometric analyses based on 3D‐scanning, carried out on the vaults in Notre‐Dame and on comparable structures, observations on construction details on site, and sources such as historical drawings, with large‐scale experiments reproducing the processes of construction, fabrication of building elements, as well as planning and information transfer from design to building. The approach that refers to the built object as its principal source can be characterized as reverse engineering
Click here to read this article
Chinese ceramics as global commodities: a thousand years of production and trade of Chinese ceramics in the Western Indian Ocean
By Ran Zhang
World Archaeology
This paper analyses the production and distribution of Chinese trade ceramics from AD 800 to 1900 to understand how these ceramic products became global commodities and how their production and exchange in the Western Indian Ocean evolved. Through a comparative examination of 15 well-identified product types of Chinese ceramics from 216 sites in the Western Indian Ocean, their production kilns, market circulations, and trading quantities have been identified and statistically analysed. The results suggest that the global status of Chinese ceramics in trade from China to the Western Indian Ocean depended on quality, aesthetics, utility, and the ability to navigate challenges such as logistics, production, and market barriers, highlighting the significance of market-adaptive designs in achieving global commodity success.
Click here to read this article
We found 61 open-access articles from November – you can get the full list by joining our Patreon – look for the tier that says Open Access articles in Medieval Studies.
See also our list of open-access articles from October
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