{"title":"New and Old Letter Types in the Corpus of Julian the Apostate ( 361–363 )","authors":"Bronwen Neil","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The emperor Julian’s career as a letter writer began long before his brief term as sole ruler of the united Roman empire from 361 to 363. In the surviving collection of 82 letters, only 73 were deemed authentic by their editor Emily Wilmer Cave Wright in the 1923 Loeb edition. The remaining nine she deemed apocryphal. This paper looks at two methodological issues associated with Julian’s letter collections. What grounds should the modern scholar use to discern authentic from forged letters; and were Julian’s letters of the same types as Christian letters of Late Antiquity or were they closer to Classical models? A third question arises from a survey of Julian’s epistolary addressees. These reveal a diverse network of people of various levels of status, including Basil, bishop of Caesarea, the Jews of Alexandria, and a priestess of Demeter and Cybele. How does this diversity compare with the correspondence of ( Christian ) emperors and bishops of the fourth century? I aim to answer these questions by considering those letter types in Julian’s letter corpus that were new in the fourth century, such as letters of recommendation for travellers and letters to religious groups, and others more familiar, that is, letters of friendship and letters of consolation. The overarching hypothesis is that Julian was inspired to write and have collected his public and personal letters in the same way as the Christian bishops whom he knew and with whom he corresponded, notably Bishop Basil of Caesarea.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135809876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Local Priests and their Siblings c. 900–c. 1100","authors":"Alice Hicklin","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Priests’ relationships with their brothers and sisters are richly evidenced in tenth- and eleventh-century documentary sources across the Latin West. But the looming shadow of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ has focused historians’ attentions on clerical marriage and vertical familial relationships ( fathers and sons, or uncles and nephews ). This article redresses the balance, arguing that sibling relationships have been underestimated in their importance to the lived experience of local priests, their families and communities in the tenth and eleventh centuries in post-Carolingian western Francia. It examines how priests and their brothers and sisters managed estates, co-operated to pool resources, and developed inheritance strategies with particular emphasis on how such records may reflect both practice on the ground and the concerns of the scribes, draftsmen and archivists who recorded, copied and edited them.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135810083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dionysios von Antiocheia und das Schicksal einer spätantiken Briefsammlung","authors":"Michael Grünbart","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The letters of Dionysios of Antioch have been preserved in more than 30 manuscripts ( the oldest dating to the 10 th c. ). They are often transmitted in the context of eminent late antique epistolographers ( e. g. Libanios or Basil ). It seems that both the label ‘school of Antioch’ and the function as models favoured their transmission. In addition, Dionysios provided some theoretical reflections on epistolographic techniques that may have interested learned circles. Nevertheless, these 85 short texts rarely received scholarly attention ( due to the lack of facts ), but a new edition ( after more than 150 years ) will contribute to the understanding of middle Greek letter-writing.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135809886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contesting Religious Truth","authors":"Wolfram Drews","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Christian theologians were involved in anti-Jewish arguments almost since the ‘parting of the ways’ of the two religions. In late antiquity and the early middle ages, anti-Jewish arguments were based almost exclusively on Biblical quotations, which were adduced as evidence meant to substantiate the Christian interpretation of scripture. It was only in the scholastic period that new forms of evidence were included in the traditional argument Adversus Iudaeos , which were derived from the recourse to reason. The Jewish figures presented by Christian authors within their writings are constructed entirely according to Christian assumptions and prejudices; only rarely do we get any real Jewish voices representing points of view close to any kind of Jewish reality. This only changed when growing numbers of Jews converted to Christianity in the high middle ages; Jewish converts drew the attention of Christian authorities to rabbinic literature. At first, the Talmud was targeted as a sinister text allegedly undermining theological truth, but later it was appropriated by Christian propagandists, who tried to base their anti-Jewish arguments on the post-biblical canon of Rabbinic Judaism. The article analyses the gradual expansion of anti-Jewish evidence; in particular, it highlights turning points when anti-Jewish strategies tried to include new methods and media to substantiate the credibility of Christian claims to monopolise religious truth. The Jewish side reacted against such attempts by reinterpreting and rewriting the history of anti-Christian Jewish arguments, notably on the occasion of the Paris Talmud trial. The redirection of Christian-Jewish arguments in the high middle ages provides ample evidence for the study of contesting truths, the substantiation and subversion of validity claims, as well as the rewriting of history in order to further political aims.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135809870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Philostrats ,Briefe‘ – Einheit in der Vielfalt, Vielfalt in der Einheit?","authors":"Renate Burri","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The complex manuscript tradition of Philostratus’ ‘Letters’ cause a row of problems and uncertainties: it is unclear, for example, which of the several surviving versions of the letter collection is the original one, which sequence of the letters is authorial, which version of some letters that have survived in different lengths is authentic, why some letters differ that much in form and content from others, and, last but not least, if the collection was written by Philostratus at all. These questions seem to pose insurmountable difficulties for the project of a new edition. Therefore, we still rely on editions from the nineteenth century for Philostratus’ ‘Letters’. The question is whether the problems of the formation of the epistolary corpus and the evaluation of its multiple versions can be explained by traditional textual criticism. I argue that a codicological, palaeographical, and historical examination of the individual textual witnesses could shed new light on the open research questions by focusing on the overall context, position, and function of Philostratus’ ‘Letters’ in each manuscript. At the same time, research on the still uncertain purpose and function of the ‘Letters’ could possibly contribute to understand the mechanisms of ( manuscript ) tradition of the corpus.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135810071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Petrus Berchorius bei den Dunkelmännern","authors":"Christel Meier","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract With his ‘Ovidius moralizatus’ ( c. 1340 ), a Christian-allegorical interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petrus Berchorius ( Pierre Bersuire ) significantly contributed to the rehabilitation of Classic mythology across Christian Europe, and the treatise was widely distributed in various manuscripts for almost two centuries. When it first appeared in printing in 1509, however, the book encountered a significantly different intellectual environment, and it became involved in the dispute between traditionally minded Dominicans and a group of pre-reformation humanists which escalated in the ( in- )famous ‘Pfefferkorn controversy’ at Cologne university. Its humanist critics mocked the work of the alleged Dominican Berchorius ( in fact, he had been a Benedictine ) in their famous satire ‘Epistolae obscurorum virorum’, ridiculing Berchorius’ Christian interpretation of Classical mythology.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135810072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neue Forschungen zu Glashandwerkern unter den Karolingern und ihren Nachfolgern ( 8. bis 10. Jahrhundert )","authors":"Martin Zimmermann","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract So far, the history of early Medieval glassmakers has mainly been derived from archaeological sources. Significant in this context was, more than half a century ago, the discovery of a new glass recipe, which began to spread in Europe from the ‘deepest’ early Middle Ages; the question of how this could develop is still subject of various discussions. A new contribution was published by Alexis Wilkin in 2019. According to this contribution, the early Medieval glass artisans owed the technological foundations of their new recipe to their collaboration with metal artisans. There is some clear evidence for this theory, but besides the technical innovation the social conditions of the artisans should not be forgotten. The glassmakers of the early Middle Ages were not free entrepreneurs, in the historical texts they are dependent on their landlords. This dependency, however, gives rise to a purely historical method of investigation: new finds of early Medieval glassworks manufactured according to the altered glass recipe can be assigned to the territories of specific landlords. This paper examines the extent to which family connections can be made visible in the passing on of glassmakers belonging to these families, perhaps also in the development of the new glass recipe.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135809874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wirtschaftssanktionen im 13. Jahrhundert","authors":"Maximiliane Berger","doi":"10.1515/fmst-2023-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The history of medieval economic sanctions is currently both known and unknown. Many instances of their deployment have been acknowledged or analysed in the context of the conflicts they were part of, like the 1205/1206 blockade of the Rhine as an element in the struggle between Philipp of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick. On the other hand, research in Medieval Studies that puts economic sanctions centre stage is still an emerging field. This paper argues that a broader investigation of episodes of economic sanctioning in the narrative sources is a sensible next step to develop this field, since it would bring the triple advantages of expanding its current geographical and prosopographical scope beyond the ecclesiastic Mediterranean ( 1 ), of putting its currently prevailing focus on normative texts into context ( 2 ), and of obviating the more unnecessary pessimisms currently characterising evaluations of medieval economic sanctions ( 3 ). To show the potential of narrated medieval sanctions episodes to inform our understanding of economic thinking around medieval economic sanctions, three examples from 13 th -century historiography are analysed: the above-mentioned blockade of the Rhine, a smugglers’ tale in Matthew Paris’s ‘Cronica Majora’ against the backdrop of papal embargo legislation, and Salimbene of Parma’s report on third-party participation in a Venetian blockade of the river Po.","PeriodicalId":301132,"journal":{"name":"Frühmittelalterliche Studien","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135810067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}