Articles
The clergy between town and country in late Merovingian hagiography
Yaniv Fox
Pages: 135-158
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2182825
The aim of this paper is to examine the hagiographical portrayal of ecclesiastical activity in the late Merovingian countryside, especially as it pertains to parochial priests and deacons. It considers two saints' Lives, the Suffering of Praejectus of Clermont and the Life of Eligius of Noyon, two roughly contemporaneous late seventh-century compositions, and the different ways they approached the relationships between bishops and their rural priests, and between the town and its suffragan parishes. Although both saints were of humble origins, their career trajectories differed significantly. Eligius was a senior courtier parachuted into a politically significant bishopric by royal fiat, while Praejectus was a cleric who climbed to the episcopacy in his home town after several unsuccessful attempts. It is argued that the now familiar episcopal strategies for networking, attaining upward mobility and competing effectively with peers were available to the rural clergy, albeit on a smaller, more localised, level.
History in liturgy: negotiating merit in Ely's virgin mothers
W. Tanner Smoot
Pages: 159-174
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2183238
As the custodians of a particularly diverse cult of saints, the monks of Ely faced a commemorative dilemma in the in late eleventh century. The abbey's cult centred around the virgin queen St Æthelthryth, whose incorruptible body exemplified the integrity of the monastic community. Ely's reverence for Æthelthryth extended to her female kindred, as the monks also venerated her sisters Wihtburh and Seaxburh, alongside her niece Eormenhild. Unlike Æthelthryth, Seaxburh and Eormenhild had historical traditions of motherhood and bodily corruptibility, impelling the monks to balance their saints' conflicting virtues in commemorative literature. This article explores the shifting merits of the Ely mothers as represented in eleventh-century liturgy and hagiography. The study begins by examining the mothers' pre-Conquest liturgical commemoration, with a focus on their appearance in litanies and proper mass sets. It then analyses the Ely hagiography of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, arguing that he worked to reconcile the kindreds' virtues.
The royal forests of the Árpáds in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
Pavol Hudáček
Pages: 175-200
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2189605
This paper deals with the royal forests in the kingdom of Hungary. Few sources have survived from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it is therefore difficult to find any references to the forests of the Árpád dynasty. For this reason, research on medieval royal forests in Western Europe informs the interpretation of what information there is and shapes a comparison with the situation in the kingdom of Hungary. The ways in which royal forests are mentioned in medieval sources has allowed some of them to be identified in the context of dynastic estates, along with royal foresters or hunting servants. Isolated references to the regale, the monarch's exclusive right to hunting and fishing, also illuminate the study.
Sorrow, masculinity and papal authority in the writing of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and his curia
Kirsty Day
Pages: 201-226
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2188604
This article examines how Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) and his curia used emotions to communicate the supreme authority of the pope through a gendered order of knowledge and feeling in letters. Innocent and his curia worked codes of masculinity into an emotional regime of excellence and spiritual possibility, one that excluded women and femininity and enabled the derogation of feminised forms of spiritual authority. Focusing on Innocent and his curia's use of sorrowful emotions, it traces how Innocent interpreted emotions evoked by earthly frustrations as feminine, and a threat to papal primacy and the authority of the exclusively male, clerical hierarchy on which it stood. Understanding how the pope did so helps us to make sense of how he guarded the papal office as the exclusive preserve of men, as well as how the practice of emotion shaped the communication of hegemonic masculine power in the Middle Ages.
Peace in the desert, peace in the realm: the Carthusian monastery of Durbon, protection and the safeguard of exempt monasteries in Angevin Provence
Hollis Shaul
Pages: 227-251
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2182347
Through a case study of the Carthusian monastery of Durbon in Angevin Provence around the year 1300, this article explores the usage of the legal mechanism of safeguard by exempt monasteries. Though exempt monasteries and royal authorities were often at odds in fourteenth-century Europe, the safeguard allowed monasteries to seek royal protection for their property without relying upon or admitting subservience to lesser lords or bishops. By appealing to the count-king's love of peace, Durbon secured the aid of a regional powerhouse, while maintaining claims to pristine ecclesiastical liberty. By inviting royal administrators to police its rural property, Durbon offered the Angevins a foothold in a strategically important yet previously impervious region. The safeguard functioned both as a representation of the king as peacemaker and as a tool for political centralisation, expanding royal jurisdiction and the temporal power of exempt monasteries at the expense of local elites and their tenants.
Trade, taste and ecology: honey in late medieval Europe
Alexandra Sapoznik, Lluís Sales i Favà & Mark Whelan
Pages: 252-274
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2188603
Often considered a ubiquitous and widely available sweetener, this article represents the first study of the honey trade across Europe in the later Middle Ages. Demand for honey, fuelled by diverse cultural and social factors, encouraged an international trade that by the late medieval period spanned the Mediterranean, western Atlantic, and the North and Baltic Seas, connecting peoples, traders and landscapes from Beirut to Novgorod. As a natural product whose make up and taste was influenced by the environments and ecology in which it was produced, the honeys available to European contemporaries could vary significantly in taste, colour and viscosity, influencing reputation, price and societal value. A study of the honey trade in late medieval Europe sheds new light on how cultural developments, social trends, economic practicalities and political events influenced the consumption of a widely available but diverse commodity.
The crowd's two faces: keeping the peace and fearing the stranger in late medieval Flanders
Mireille Pardon
Pages: 275-290
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2023.2188605
This article examines the reputation of crowds in relation to judicial practice in fifteenth-century Flanders. Medieval chronicles tend to frame rebellious crowds as frighteningly irrational rather than strategic in order to discredit the political movements they described. Legal records from Bruges and Ghent suggest this stereotype extended to disturbances unrelated to revolt. Bailiffs' accounts and banishments reveal concern for neighbourhood unrest and sudden violence stemming from interpersonal disputes as well as political action. Although bailiffs pursued individuals for instigating conflicts, the crowd played an important role in judicial practice, from investigations to executions, affirming legal decisions and preserving urban peace. These contrasting stereotypes affected patterns of prosecution in fifteenth-century Bruges and Ghent. Bailiffs tended to place blame on individual instigators when the crowd acted against the interests of law enforcement. As the reputation of the crowd was law-affirming, the riotous crowd had to stem from an outside, corrupting influence.
