{"title":"Conjoined Twins in Medieval Imagery","authors":"R. Couzin","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340155","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Notwithstanding their rarity, conjoined twins have often been remarked and represented throughout human history. The medieval visual record includes two depictions of historical twins, some exotic two-headed monsters, the ancient god Janus, and many instances of the zodiac Gemini as conjoined. Comparing the imagery with physiological fact, it is clear that artists were familiar with various forms of natural corporeal fusion, although they were also prone to misunderstandings. The representations reflect conflicting conceptions of the phenomenon debated among Western theologians and philosophers, that they were one person or two. Conjoined twins are found in both European and Islamic art. The conjoined Gemini, in particular, began to appear regularly in both cultures at roughly the same time toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, with possible earlier hints in the West. This parallel iconographical development raises difficult questions of genealogy and dissemination.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48527357","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":"Non-Christian Service on the Public Stage: Artisans, Musicians, and the Implications of Ethno-Religious Difference in Late-Medieval Iberia","authors":"Thomas W. Barton","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340156","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the public service roles performed by Muslims and Jews for municipal governments within late-medieval Iberia through the analysis of a largely unexamined body of municipal records from the city of Tortosa in comparison with a diversity of other cases. The assessment of various contractual public works projects of different sizes conducted by ethno-religiously mixed and homogeneous artisans and laborers serves to contextualize the primary focus of the study: the activity of salaried and contractual Muslim musicians, who played and sounded their instruments with their Christian counterparts in support of diverse events throughout the year, decade after decade, all at the direction of the city’s governing Christian elites. This survey of public service by non-Christians provides a means to evaluate and make recommendations regarding the methodologies and models utilized by scholars to conceptualize and analyze premodern interfaith interaction within the context of Christian hegemony.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46696891","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":"Aquinas Bound with a Talmudic Fragment: An Associative Exercise","authors":"Yakov Z. Mayer, Ayelet Even-Ezra","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340157","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Fragments of manuscripts were constantly used in bindings of new books throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Usually, no intellectual connection exists between the parchment fragment, stripped to its material function, and the text of the new book. We argue that a fifteenth-century codex containing Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, which was bound with a Hebrew-Aramaic fragment of the Talmud Yerushalmi, presents a unique case of an intertextual interaction, as a later hand inserted an enigmatic list of references to questions in the Summa. Following the references, we reconstruct the subtle relations between these scholastic questions and the Talmudic story presented in the fragment, then examine these associations and the topic they seem to address in two contexts. First, the intricate Christian-Jewish climate in fifteenth-century Vienna and the question of Jewish attitudes towards the crucifix; second, the context of annotations and scholarly practices of reading, note taking and drafting.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42231070","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":"William of Tyre, Orientalism and the (De)Construction of Latin Identity in Twelfth-century Jerusalem","authors":"Ivo Wolsing","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340152","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the representation of Jerusalemite identity in William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana (c.1184). William laments that his contemporaries in Jerusalem did not live up to the standards of their forefathers anymore: they were not wise, virtuous men, but put their own needs before those of the community. In doing so, William makes use of a narrative strategy that is found in the Roman historians Livy and Sallust as well. In the histories of Livy and Sallust, it was contact with the Near East that prompted societal decline. The riches and dolce far niente of the East had, in their eyes, corrupted Roman morals. In William’s work, by contrast, the Eastern Other often functions as a mirror for the Self. This, in combination with William’s emphasis on former generations as reference point for the current generation allows for a much more dynamic interplay of identities than an orientalist binary East-West division.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46796228","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":"Coacta voluntas est voluntas: Baptism and Return in Canon Law","authors":"J. Sherwood","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340151","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Throughout the early Middle Ages, the border between Christianity and Judaism was comparatively permeable, and baptized Jews, particularly those baptized under duress, frequently returned openly to Judaism. While modern scholars of Jewish-Christian relations often assume that medieval canon law always forbade this, a single norm governing converts’ re-conversion, or reversion, did not begin to emerge until the mid-twelfth century with the Decretum Gratiani. The Decretum established the preeminence of the canon that barred Jewish baptizands’ reversion and acted as a catalyst for discussions about the limits of consent and coercion, baptism and conversion. These debates provided the foundation for the mandates of the early thirteenth century that did establish the legal boundary between Jew and Christian which lasted into modernity: so long as baptizands consented, even if under duress, they were Christians and could not return to Judaism.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45228701","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":"La Vega de Granada a partir de documentación árabe romanceada inédita (1457–1494): Estudio, edición e índices, written by Carmen Trillo San José","authors":"Mònica Colominas Aparicio","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340154","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44258320","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":"Der Islam auf dem Konzil von Basel (1431–1449): Eine Studie mit Editionen und Übersetzungen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Johannes von Ragusa, written by Jacob Langeloh","authors":"Jesse D. Mann","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340153","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42463560","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":"Predicación anticonversa, inquisición y tolerancia en un discurso de 1461–1462: en torno a Alonso de Oropesa y Alonso de Espina","authors":"Francisco Bautista","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340150","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article offers an edition and a study of an unpublished (and hitherto unknown) text that deals with the preaching of the observant Franciscans in late medieval Castile. It was presented during the Inquisition against the heresy that took place in Toledo in 1461–1462, and its main purpose was to give arguments about the prohibition against preaching directed to the Franciscans. The work proposes a synthesis of the arguments against the marginalisation of the new Christians, a preaching model based on charity, and finally a refutation of the ideas and information presented by the Franciscans. It is a work that offers a new insight into the debate around converts in Castile, and that constitutes a defense of toleration, a position in contrast to the attitude of the Observant Franciscans.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44537971","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}