What’s new in medieval studies? Here are ten open-access articles published in May, which range from female spies to sea voyages.
This ongoing 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 73 open-access articles we found.
The Long Voyage of MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 from Egypt to France (1344/1371–1640s)
By Martina Ambu
Aethiopica
The study of archival documents inserted in the pages and margins of MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 uncovers the long voyage of this codex from Egypt to France. It is unclear if it was produced in the thirteenth or in the fourteenth century, in Egypt or in Ethiopia, but it was certainly donated by king Säyfä ʾArʿad (r.1344–1371) to the new Ethiopian community established in a monastery in Middle Egypt, Dayr al-Muḥarraq. From 1388 to 1507/1508, this manuscript was used to store its legal and from Egypt to France (1344/1371 administrative documents. In the 1520s, MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 was transferred to the Cairene monastery of Dayr ʾAbū Mīnā, where a new Ethiopian church was built next to the Syriac and Armenian communities. In the 1640s, French merchant Jean Magy acquired this manuscript in Cairo, perhaps in Dayr ʾAbū Mīnā itself, on the account of chancellor Pierre Séguier (1588–1672). It is now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Water in an Abbasid City: The Sources, Distribution, and Significance of Water at Samarra
By Peter J Brown
Journal of Abbasid Studies
This paper approaches the city of Samarra through one of its most fundamental attributes — the water supply. In seeking to understand how water was transported to, and distributed throughout, the vast metropolitan area, as well as the significance of the various pieces of hydraulic infrastructure required for this task, new light is shed on the occupation of the short-lived Abbasid caliphal capital, the priorities of its rulers, and the lives of its inhabitants.
Lordship in the Later Middle Ages: A Round Table Discussion
Frederik Buylaert, Sandro Carocci, Thijs Lambrecht, Christian D Liddy, Alice Rio, Tristan W Sharp, Alice Taylor and Chris Wickham
Past & Present
Over the last few years, a number of articles have featured in Past and Present on the subject of late medieval lordship. Three were accepted within a four-month period between July and October 2023 (Christian D. Liddy, ‘The Making of Towns, the Making of Polities’; Tristan W. Sharp, ‘Seigneurial Predation in the Late Medieval Feud’; Frederik Buylaert, Thijs Lambrecht, Klaas Van Gelder, and Kaat Cappelle, ‘The Political Economy of Seigneurial Lordship in Flanders’). The three pieces approached the subject in quite different ways, and with very different findings; at the same time, they were clearly talking about the same thing, and all were concerned with assessing more closely what lords took from, and had to offer to, local societies, and their social and/or economic impact.
This seemed a good opportunity to hold a workshop to place the articles in conversation with each other in order to identify commonalities, reflect on the wider field, and prompt more general questions. The round table took place on 17 June 2024 at King’s College London. The version presented here is a revised and edited transcript, but aiming to retain the feel of the original oral conversation. A brief opening section introduces the articles to give context to the discussion.
Sea Voyage and the Ship as Poetic Metaphors for Pre-Modern Women Poets Reflecting on Their Own Life and on Love: Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
By Albrecht Classen
arcadia
Since antiquity, poets have regularly referred to the voyage, to shipwrecks, and to the danger of the wild sea. In that context, the dominant voices have been those of male writers, but female poets have equally been interested in and dedicated to this topos. Through a comparative analysis of the works of the late medieval French poet Christine de Pizan and the sonnets of the German Baroque poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, this study argues that the disastrous experience of a ship being crushed at sea and the notion of sailing itself served these women well when reflecting upon their uncertain and changing life destinies with all the implied catastrophes, conflicts, and challenges.
This paper might well be the very first analysis of the texts by these two women poets in tandem who indirectly communicated with each other across the centuries and addressed very similar concerns by means of relying on the same or closely related metaphors. However, the purpose here is not to probe possible connections, such as Catharina perhaps having had available a copy of Christine’s writings, which might be rather unlikely, although the former was certainly well educated. Instead, the emphasis rests on the commonly shared topoi and tropes related to the ship, the voyage, and the dangers at sea, which proved to be relevant to these female poets since the metaphors associated with these themes served particularly well for deeper reflections on the problems in life.
To undergird this argument, we can also draw from the evidence in some of the lais of Marie de France where the voyage brings about a fundamental change in the protagonists’ lives. Marie even includes the topic of the near shipwreck that mirrors the emotional catastrophe emerging at that moment.
Women, war and intelligence in Ypres and the Flemish West Quarter (1488–1489)
By Lisa Demets
Intelligence and National Security
This article sheds light on the often-overlooked roles women played in the intelligence networks of Flanders during the war against Maximilian of Austria in 1488–1489, by focussing on the intelligence activities of women in the Flemish West Quarter compensated by the city of Ypres. It also explores the growing professionalisation of these women, noting how the same women were employed repeatedly, reflecting the establishment of more structured intelligence operations by 1489. However, this did not necessarily result in a clear differentiation between the roles of intelligence work and other tasks, such as delivering letters.
The article also contrasts the roles of rural and urban women employed by the city government. The critical yet under-recognised contributions of women, particularly those in rural areas, to this period of warfare show how the involvement of women in intelligence work was not solely an urban or noble phenomenon in the Middle Ages.
From the Masthead to the Map: an Experimental and Digital Approach to Viking Age Seafaring Itineraries
By Greer Jarrett
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
The Viking Age (c. 800–c. 1050 ad) was characterised by a widespread rise in maritime mobility and interaction, as is made clear by an increasing range of evidence. However, this evidence provides limited information about the sailors and the sailing voyages that connected and transformed the Viking world. This paper presents an approach to reconstruct Viking Age maritime itineraries through the combined use of experimental and digital methods. This approach is grounded in a series of experimental voyages conducted by the author along the Norwegian coast onboard square-rigged, clinker boats built in the descendant Åfjord tradition. The experimental voyages are used to reconstruct the preferences and requirements of Viking Age sailors, helping to define practice-based criteria for evaluating which natural harbours and anchorages might have been favoured during this period. These criteria are complemented by digital reconstructions of historical topographies accounting for changes in relative sea-level since 800 ad.
From this combined evaluation, a selection of four possible Viking Age havens is presented. The characteristics and locations of these havens are discussed in relation to contemporary power centres and later seafaring routes. The results suggest that Viking Age seafaring networks along the Norwegian coast may have been more decentralised than their medieval counterparts, and may have relied on relatively outlying nodes on small islands and headlands. The approach highlights the potential of critically combining experimental and digital methods and aims to promote maritime perspectives as an alternative to conventionally terrestrial academic approaches.
Korean Defense Strategies against Japan’s Lightning War in the First Year of the East Asian War, 1592–1598
By Jeong-il Joseph Lee
Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies
This article examines how Chosŏn’s defense strategy countered the Japanese lightning war during the first year of the East Asian War (1592–1598). By exploiting the vulnerability of Japan’s stretched supply line, Chosŏn challenged its overextended north-south front line. Contributing to this vulnerability were the volatile southern hinterlands, dominated by the rugged Sobaek Mountains and bordered by the Naktong River, and the instability of the central regions, including the capital, Hansŏng. The court dispatched officials to foster collaboration between local militias and regular armies and to promote interprovincial cooperation among combatants. The military capitalized on environmental advantages to craft a cohesive anti-Japanese strategy aimed at blocking a potential Japanese offensive from the Yellow Sea, applying pressure on the rear of Japanese troops in P’yŏngyang, and supporting the Ming armies’ southward advance.
The emergence of two distinct fronts, one in the southern hinterlands and the other in the central region, exposed growing vulnerabilities in the overextended Japanese line, thereby undermining their lightning war. This analysis, by revisiting Chosŏn’s war mobilization of human and environmental resources, offers a new perspective on the dynamic interactions among the three states and enables comparative studies between the East Asian War and other sixteenth-century conflicts beyond East Asia.
Swedish Iconography of Drink-Bearer and Horse on the Northumbrian Franks Casket
By Marijane Osborn and Terry Gunnell
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
The two-figure image of a drink-bearer facing a horse occupies the central space on the much debated right-side panel of the Franks Casket. This essay makes two claims about that dual image. First, the abundance of clearly female drink-bearers in early medieval English and Scandinavian texts and artifacts gives good reason to interpret the more ambiguous figure on the Franks Casket panel as also female and the hovering object before her as the drink she is meant to be bearing. The second and major claim, depending upon the first, is that the two-figure image carved on the whale-bone casket in Northumbria bears a close iconographic relationship to the image of a woman with a drinking horn facing a horse on memorial stones in Swedish Gotland.
Moreover, the unusual feature of triquetrae between the horses’ legs in both locations strongly suggests that these separately imagined scenes on different types of artifacts refer to a shared, widely distributed and variably expressed, mortuary performance typically conducted by a female ritual specialist, a performance associated with a horse that implies a journey to the land of the dead. A brief exploration of the archaeology of buried horses and a real-world witness of a mortuary performance support this interpretation of the Franks Casket scene, and the addendum at the end provides further supportive literary texts and discussion.
The Pope of Iceland? Gizurr Ísleifsson and the Gregorian Reform in the Medieval North
By Davide Salmoiraghi
Studies in Church History
In 1053, the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen became patriarchate of the North as part of a process of centralization with which the Curia sought control over Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Although these ambitions risked being cut short by the German archbishops, who aspired to larger margins of independence, Gregory VII (1073–85) was able to secure the Icelandic diocese of Skálholt as a supporter of Roman reforming ideals. Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson (1082–1118) maintained direct contacts with the Curia and organized the Icelandic church as a loyal Gregorian agent. In the absence of royal and archepiscopal authority in Iceland, Gizurr was considered ‘king and bishop over the country’: arguably, the pontiff of his own diocese. Through the analysis of Latin and Norse sources, this article explores how Gregorian ideals reached Iceland during the Investiture Controversy and how papal supremacy was built into the foundations of the northernmost diocese of Christendom.
Meister Eckhart and the fisherman’s wife: exploring the mystical implications of a fairy tale through apogesis
By Duane Williams
Medieval Mystical Theology
This essay provides a mystical interpretation of the medieval German fairy tale, ‘The Fisherman and His Wife.’ I seek to show how a deeper understanding of the tale can be achieved through the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart. I begin by recounting the tale, before moving to a section titled Initial Reflections in which I discuss the tale in the context of categorization, history, variations, translation, and most importantly interpretation. Rather than interpret the tale through either exegesis or eisegesis, I seek to explain and apply a unique hermeneutic method situated between the two that I call apogesis. In the final section titled Eckhartian Implications, I use my method to explore how the tale implies key themes in Eckhart’s work. I conclude the essay by focusing on the significance of the tale’s dramatic peripety and startling dénouement in the light of Eckhartian thought.
We found 73 open-access articles from May – 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 May, which range from female spies to sea voyages.
This ongoing 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 73 open-access articles we found.
The Long Voyage of MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 from Egypt to France (1344/1371–1640s)
By Martina Ambu
Aethiopica
The study of archival documents inserted in the pages and margins of MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 uncovers the long voyage of this codex from Egypt to France. It is unclear if it was produced in the thirteenth or in the fourteenth century, in Egypt or in Ethiopia, but it was certainly donated by king Säyfä ʾArʿad (r.1344–1371) to the new Ethiopian community established in a monastery in Middle Egypt, Dayr al-Muḥarraq. From 1388 to 1507/1508, this manuscript was used to store its legal and from Egypt to France (1344/1371 administrative documents. In the 1520s, MS Paris, BnF, Éthiopien 32 was transferred to the Cairene monastery of Dayr ʾAbū Mīnā, where a new Ethiopian church was built next to the Syriac and Armenian communities. In the 1640s, French merchant Jean Magy acquired this manuscript in Cairo, perhaps in Dayr ʾAbū Mīnā itself, on the account of chancellor Pierre Séguier (1588–1672). It is now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Click here to read this article
Water in an Abbasid City: The Sources, Distribution, and Significance of Water at Samarra
By Peter J Brown
Journal of Abbasid Studies
This paper approaches the city of Samarra through one of its most fundamental attributes — the water supply. In seeking to understand how water was transported to, and distributed throughout, the vast metropolitan area, as well as the significance of the various pieces of hydraulic infrastructure required for this task, new light is shed on the occupation of the short-lived Abbasid caliphal capital, the priorities of its rulers, and the lives of its inhabitants.
Click here to read this article
Lordship in the Later Middle Ages: A Round Table Discussion
Frederik Buylaert, Sandro Carocci, Thijs Lambrecht, Christian D Liddy, Alice Rio, Tristan W Sharp, Alice Taylor and Chris Wickham
Past & Present
Over the last few years, a number of articles have featured in Past and Present on the subject of late medieval lordship. Three were accepted within a four-month period between July and October 2023 (Christian D. Liddy, ‘The Making of Towns, the Making of Polities’; Tristan W. Sharp, ‘Seigneurial Predation in the Late Medieval Feud’; Frederik Buylaert, Thijs Lambrecht, Klaas Van Gelder, and Kaat Cappelle, ‘The Political Economy of Seigneurial Lordship in Flanders’). The three pieces approached the subject in quite different ways, and with very different findings; at the same time, they were clearly talking about the same thing, and all were concerned with assessing more closely what lords took from, and had to offer to, local societies, and their social and/or economic impact.
This seemed a good opportunity to hold a workshop to place the articles in conversation with each other in order to identify commonalities, reflect on the wider field, and prompt more general questions. The round table took place on 17 June 2024 at King’s College London. The version presented here is a revised and edited transcript, but aiming to retain the feel of the original oral conversation. A brief opening section introduces the articles to give context to the discussion.
Click here to read this article
Sea Voyage and the Ship as Poetic Metaphors for Pre-Modern Women Poets Reflecting on Their Own Life and on Love: Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
By Albrecht Classen
arcadia
Since antiquity, poets have regularly referred to the voyage, to shipwrecks, and to the danger of the wild sea. In that context, the dominant voices have been those of male writers, but female poets have equally been interested in and dedicated to this topos. Through a comparative analysis of the works of the late medieval French poet Christine de Pizan and the sonnets of the German Baroque poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, this study argues that the disastrous experience of a ship being crushed at sea and the notion of sailing itself served these women well when reflecting upon their uncertain and changing life destinies with all the implied catastrophes, conflicts, and challenges.
This paper might well be the very first analysis of the texts by these two women poets in tandem who indirectly communicated with each other across the centuries and addressed very similar concerns by means of relying on the same or closely related metaphors. However, the purpose here is not to probe possible connections, such as Catharina perhaps having had available a copy of Christine’s writings, which might be rather unlikely, although the former was certainly well educated. Instead, the emphasis rests on the commonly shared topoi and tropes related to the ship, the voyage, and the dangers at sea, which proved to be relevant to these female poets since the metaphors associated with these themes served particularly well for deeper reflections on the problems in life.
To undergird this argument, we can also draw from the evidence in some of the lais of Marie de France where the voyage brings about a fundamental change in the protagonists’ lives. Marie even includes the topic of the near shipwreck that mirrors the emotional catastrophe emerging at that moment.
Click here to read this article
Women, war and intelligence in Ypres and the Flemish West Quarter (1488–1489)
By Lisa Demets
Intelligence and National Security
This article sheds light on the often-overlooked roles women played in the intelligence networks of Flanders during the war against Maximilian of Austria in 1488–1489, by focussing on the intelligence activities of women in the Flemish West Quarter compensated by the city of Ypres. It also explores the growing professionalisation of these women, noting how the same women were employed repeatedly, reflecting the establishment of more structured intelligence operations by 1489. However, this did not necessarily result in a clear differentiation between the roles of intelligence work and other tasks, such as delivering letters.
The article also contrasts the roles of rural and urban women employed by the city government. The critical yet under-recognised contributions of women, particularly those in rural areas, to this period of warfare show how the involvement of women in intelligence work was not solely an urban or noble phenomenon in the Middle Ages.
Click here to read this article
From the Masthead to the Map: an Experimental and Digital Approach to Viking Age Seafaring Itineraries
By Greer Jarrett
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
The Viking Age (c. 800–c. 1050 ad) was characterised by a widespread rise in maritime mobility and interaction, as is made clear by an increasing range of evidence. However, this evidence provides limited information about the sailors and the sailing voyages that connected and transformed the Viking world. This paper presents an approach to reconstruct Viking Age maritime itineraries through the combined use of experimental and digital methods. This approach is grounded in a series of experimental voyages conducted by the author along the Norwegian coast onboard square-rigged, clinker boats built in the descendant Åfjord tradition. The experimental voyages are used to reconstruct the preferences and requirements of Viking Age sailors, helping to define practice-based criteria for evaluating which natural harbours and anchorages might have been favoured during this period. These criteria are complemented by digital reconstructions of historical topographies accounting for changes in relative sea-level since 800 ad.
From this combined evaluation, a selection of four possible Viking Age havens is presented. The characteristics and locations of these havens are discussed in relation to contemporary power centres and later seafaring routes. The results suggest that Viking Age seafaring networks along the Norwegian coast may have been more decentralised than their medieval counterparts, and may have relied on relatively outlying nodes on small islands and headlands. The approach highlights the potential of critically combining experimental and digital methods and aims to promote maritime perspectives as an alternative to conventionally terrestrial academic approaches.
Click here to read this article
Korean Defense Strategies against Japan’s Lightning War in the First Year of the East Asian War, 1592–1598
By Jeong-il Joseph Lee
Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies
This article examines how Chosŏn’s defense strategy countered the Japanese lightning war during the first year of the East Asian War (1592–1598). By exploiting the vulnerability of Japan’s stretched supply line, Chosŏn challenged its overextended north-south front line. Contributing to this vulnerability were the volatile southern hinterlands, dominated by the rugged Sobaek Mountains and bordered by the Naktong River, and the instability of the central regions, including the capital, Hansŏng. The court dispatched officials to foster collaboration between local militias and regular armies and to promote interprovincial cooperation among combatants. The military capitalized on environmental advantages to craft a cohesive anti-Japanese strategy aimed at blocking a potential Japanese offensive from the Yellow Sea, applying pressure on the rear of Japanese troops in P’yŏngyang, and supporting the Ming armies’ southward advance.
The emergence of two distinct fronts, one in the southern hinterlands and the other in the central region, exposed growing vulnerabilities in the overextended Japanese line, thereby undermining their lightning war. This analysis, by revisiting Chosŏn’s war mobilization of human and environmental resources, offers a new perspective on the dynamic interactions among the three states and enables comparative studies between the East Asian War and other sixteenth-century conflicts beyond East Asia.
Click here to read this article
Swedish Iconography of Drink-Bearer and Horse on the Northumbrian Franks Casket
By Marijane Osborn and Terry Gunnell
Early Medieval England and its Neighbours
The two-figure image of a drink-bearer facing a horse occupies the central space on the much debated right-side panel of the Franks Casket. This essay makes two claims about that dual image. First, the abundance of clearly female drink-bearers in early medieval English and Scandinavian texts and artifacts gives good reason to interpret the more ambiguous figure on the Franks Casket panel as also female and the hovering object before her as the drink she is meant to be bearing. The second and major claim, depending upon the first, is that the two-figure image carved on the whale-bone casket in Northumbria bears a close iconographic relationship to the image of a woman with a drinking horn facing a horse on memorial stones in Swedish Gotland.
Moreover, the unusual feature of triquetrae between the horses’ legs in both locations strongly suggests that these separately imagined scenes on different types of artifacts refer to a shared, widely distributed and variably expressed, mortuary performance typically conducted by a female ritual specialist, a performance associated with a horse that implies a journey to the land of the dead. A brief exploration of the archaeology of buried horses and a real-world witness of a mortuary performance support this interpretation of the Franks Casket scene, and the addendum at the end provides further supportive literary texts and discussion.
Click here to read this article
The Pope of Iceland? Gizurr Ísleifsson and the Gregorian Reform in the Medieval North
By Davide Salmoiraghi
Studies in Church History
In 1053, the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen became patriarchate of the North as part of a process of centralization with which the Curia sought control over Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. Although these ambitions risked being cut short by the German archbishops, who aspired to larger margins of independence, Gregory VII (1073–85) was able to secure the Icelandic diocese of Skálholt as a supporter of Roman reforming ideals. Bishop Gizurr Ísleifsson (1082–1118) maintained direct contacts with the Curia and organized the Icelandic church as a loyal Gregorian agent. In the absence of royal and archepiscopal authority in Iceland, Gizurr was considered ‘king and bishop over the country’: arguably, the pontiff of his own diocese. Through the analysis of Latin and Norse sources, this article explores how Gregorian ideals reached Iceland during the Investiture Controversy and how papal supremacy was built into the foundations of the northernmost diocese of Christendom.
Click here to read this article
Meister Eckhart and the fisherman’s wife: exploring the mystical implications of a fairy tale through apogesis
By Duane Williams
Medieval Mystical Theology
This essay provides a mystical interpretation of the medieval German fairy tale, ‘The Fisherman and His Wife.’ I seek to show how a deeper understanding of the tale can be achieved through the mystical theology of Meister Eckhart. I begin by recounting the tale, before moving to a section titled Initial Reflections in which I discuss the tale in the context of categorization, history, variations, translation, and most importantly interpretation. Rather than interpret the tale through either exegesis or eisegesis, I seek to explain and apply a unique hermeneutic method situated between the two that I call apogesis. In the final section titled Eckhartian Implications, I use my method to explore how the tale implies key themes in Eckhart’s work. I conclude the essay by focusing on the significance of the tale’s dramatic peripety and startling dénouement in the light of Eckhartian thought.
Click here to read this article
We found 73 open-access articles from May – 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 April
Top Image: BnF MS Éthiopien 32 fol. 68v
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