{"title":"The Byzantine Icon of the Virgin in the Church of the Blachernae: Michael Psellos on the Problem of Miraculous Timing","authors":"Paroma Chatterjee","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8929059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8929059","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks closely at the report of a miracle that occurred in eleventh-century Constantinople in which the veil covering an icon of the Theotokos (Virgin) at the Blachernae church lifted itself miraculously. The report, scripted by the Byzantine polymath Michael Psellos, focuses in intriguing ways on the actions and nonactions of the veil when the icon presided over a judicial trial. The article contends that Psellos insists on the theme of timing (with regard to the lifting and otherwise of the veil) and the Blachernae icon's role in determining a critical, decisive moment in the arbitration of human affairs. This emphasis, in turn, bespeaks a broader concern over the timing of sacred icons during significant moments in Byzantine history as understood by contemporary chroniclers: namely, their failure to act in appropriate ways at critical moments when the empire itself was at stake.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"241-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44456150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Madness of Hugo van der Goes: The Troubled Search for Origins in Early Netherlandish Painting","authors":"Shira Brisman","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8929080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8929080","url":null,"abstract":"The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"321-365"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45543293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Mandylions in Genoa and Rome: On the Authenticity of Christ's True Image in Counter-Reformation Italy","authors":"Andrew R. Casper","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8929066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8929066","url":null,"abstract":"This essay recovers the dialectics of authenticity informed by the reinvigorated emergence of the Mandylion of Edessa as an authorized early Christian relic in Counter-Reformation Italy. The original was a miraculously generated icon of Christ's face which later became a major devotional artifact in Constantinople during the Byzantine period. However, by the seventeenth century two celebrated images of Christ's face, at San Bartolomeo degli Armeni in Genoa and San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, made simultaneous claims to be the original Mandylion. By exploring the reception of these mandylions in Genoa and Rome, and in particular the arguments advanced to vouch for the authenticity of each, this essay delineates historicized ways of perceiving holy images as faithful testaments to the origins of Christian history. This analysis therefore challenges the presumed supremacy of modern paradigms of authenticity.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"263-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45161836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Milk and Miracles: Heteroglossia and Dissent in Venetian Religious Art after the Council of Trent","authors":"J. Sperling","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8929073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8929073","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates Benedetto Caliari's Nativity of the Virgin (1576) with its provocative and unorthodox depiction of a bare-breasted wet-nurse in the context of both Protestant and Catholic criticism of “indecent” religious imagery. Reformers on both sides drew a connection between the Virgin Mary's ostentatious display of her lactating breasts and her presumed, derided, or hoped-for miracle-working capacities or intercessory powers. In post-Tridentine Venice, several artists, including Tintoretto and Veronese, all of whom were connected to the Scuola de’ Mercanti that commissioned Caliari's painting, employed religious breastfeeding imagery in a wide array of iconographies in order to express dissent with the Counter-Reformation church's emphasis on orthodoxy. In contrast to writers, artists were able to claim a certain degree of nonconformity and freedom from prosecution. In light of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, it is argued that religious lactation imagery after Trent produced irony, parody, doubt, and dissent.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"285-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44202823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Authority of Written and Oral Sources of Knowledge in Ludolf of Sudheim’s De itinere Terre Sancte","authors":"Christine Gadrat-Ouerfelli","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796234","url":null,"abstract":"After the German priest Ludolf of Sudheim returned from the Holy Land in 1341, he wrote an account of his travels that is far more complex than scholars have assumed. Ludolf expanded the genre of pilgrimage narrative in the way he draws on written sources, such as Hethum’s Flos historiarum Terre Orientis and William of Boldensele’s Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus, while blending into his narrative oral sources of knowledge picked up from his personal contacts while traveling. Pilgrimage literature has often been denigrated by scholars for being repetitive, impersonal, and lacking originality. Yet if scholars were to adopt a less historiographically presentist approach to pilgrimage writing that is more open to the values and strategies of narratives like De itinere Terre Sancte, research could meaningfully focus on what might be called the “mental library” of pilgrim-authors — the full range of written and oral resources at their disposal in the complex processes of knowledge production in pilgrimage narrative.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"37-48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65998614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holy Land Pilgrimage and Geography in Fifteenth-Century England","authors":"M. O'Doherty","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796270","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses a single late-fifteenth-century English manuscript as evidence for an understudied form of “virtual” pilgrimage. Bringing together the techniques of codicological, textual, and cartographic-historical research, the article shows how Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 426 presents a vision of the world profoundly inflected by Holy Land pilgrimage, in which scholarly, mathematical geography is placed in the service of knowledge and understanding of the Holy Land. Indeed, within MS 426, the process of gaining understanding of the world’s geography and of the place of the Holy Land within it becomes a kind of virtual pilgrimage: a form of vicarious wandering that prompts religious contemplation and devotion. The article, which includes discussion of the manuscript’s unique and previously unstudied Jerusalem map, thus reminds us to keep in mind the inadequacy of modern taxonomies for dealing with the messy materialities of medieval texts.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"105-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65998637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pilgrimage, Print, and Performance","authors":"M. Coneys","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796258","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses three poems written in the early 1490s by the Florentine Giuliano Dati (1445–1524), a penitentiary priest at the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome: the Stazione e indulgenze di Roma (1492–93), Tractato di Santo Ioanni Laterano (1492–94), and Aedificatio Romae (1494). Composed in the popular cantare verse form, which was strongly associated with public performance, these works are an unusual example of printed guides to Rome aimed specifically at an Italian audience. Situating Dati’s cantari within the broader culture of the Roman pilgrimage, the article assesses their relationship with established textual and performance traditions and considers the pastoral motivation behind their production. In doing so, it advocates for closer attention to the permeability between ephemeral print and performance in late medieval pilgrimage and devotional culture.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"79-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65998628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Meaning of Imagined Pilgrimage","authors":"Kathryne Beebe","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796282","url":null,"abstract":"There is growing interest among historians of late medieval and early modern Europe in the concept of resistance for understanding women and power. Researchers are beginning to look beyond religious women’s overt and well-documented forms of opposition to reform efforts that increasingly restricted their physical enclosure; they contend that these women also resisted through more subtle cultural means, such as the devotional practice of imagined pilgrimage. Yet recent studies — including one by this author — have argued unconvincingly that late medieval Dominican nuns in southwest Germany who took mental journeys to Jerusalem or Rome thereby resisted their enclosure. This article uses an approach created by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner to check and correct this resistance model. It shows that the interpretation of what imagined pilgrimage meant to and for these late medieval women is most likely an effect of scholars’ present biases, both intellectual and sociocultural.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"141-159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65998661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pilgrimage and Textual Culture","authors":"A. Bale, Kathryne Beebe","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796210","url":null,"abstract":"Pilgrimage formed a central motif of medieval culture and shaped a defining aesthetic of early literature. Despite this centrality, research remains in a preliminary state for many of the actual texts, manuscripts, and books connected to pilgrimage and how they contributed to the exchange and translation of knowledge and ideas. This special issue considers issues of reading and writing before, during, and after medieval pilgrimages, as well as the methodological and historical issues at stake for both pilgrim writers and modern scholars. In particular, the articles address the vexed issue of where — and how much — reading and writing took place around historically attested pilgrimages. By employing insights from literature, history, bibliography, geography, and anthropology, this collection aims not only to understand the past, but also to examine how current biases might affect interpretation of that past. From this multidisciplinary perspective, deeper insight is offered into how pilgrims’ libraries shaped not only pilgrimage, but medieval culture in general.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42629148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Pilgrimage to Purgatory","authors":"Hannah Weaver","doi":"10.1215/10829636-8796222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-8796222","url":null,"abstract":"Telling the story of the exceptional penance of an Irish knight, the twelfthcentury Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii contends that it was possible to go on a bodily pilgrimage to purgatory. The Cistercian monk H. of Saltrey wrote his Tractatus at a historical moment when the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness testimony about posthumous penance. This article uncovers how the Latin Tractatus engages the worries of its audience about the feasibility of the knight’s embodied visit to the afterlife by marshaling familiar narrative patterns from vernacular genres, including chansons de geste and romance. It shows that the Tractatus is an intricately designed text that uses these generic features to dispel doubt, thereby positioning Owein’s pilgrimage as a licit and potentially replicable penitential activity.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"9-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65999076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}