Interpretazioni del Medioevo nell’Italia centro-meridionale

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

As the citizens of a technological and secular first world—the dot.com modern society of a putative global village produced by access to the Internet and a humanist education—we have a long and historically ambivalent relationship with our medieval past. For citizens of America, a country founded in opposition to the social and political structures, rooted in the Middle Ages, of aristocratic and monarchical England, this relationship becomes even more problematic. On the one hand, the Middle Ages became, almost from the very moment the Renaissance recognized they were past, synonymous with the barbaric, the violent, and the superstitious— "modernity's common, rejected … past," antithetical to the values of rational, humane, and democratic discourse.1 On the other hand, the romance of the medieval has historically provided Western culture with the site of a lost ideal and a past to which the modern must return in order to ensure its future.2 As "moderns," particularly modern Americans, we are schizophrenic about our medieval past; we are also obsessed with it. From the early modern period to the present, western Europe—and in its time, America—has experienced what Umberto Eco argues is a continuous return to the Middle Ages, a return that he identifies as a quest for origins: "looking at the Middle Ages means looking at our infancy, in the same way that a doctor, to understand our present state of health, looks at our childhood, or in the same way that a psychoanalyst, to understand our present neuroses, makes a careful investigation of the primal scene."3 KeywordsEarly Modern PeriodMedieval TextDemocratic DiscoursePrimal SceneMedieval HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Sea level changes since the Middle Ages along the coast of the Adriatic Sea: The case of St. Nicholas Basilica, Bari, Southern Italy

Jean Boucher’s Bonne Renommée seeks to honour the poet’s dead patron Charles de La Tremoille ‘“‘ith the ultimate accolade in the rhétoriqueur arsenal of praise: incorporation in a building, her temple. Yet this conventional encomiastic gesture is here couched in language that appears to recall the fundamental components of the Ciceronian ‘art of memory’ the places (locz) and images (imagines) upon whose successful combination memorization depends. Given the privileged status of the building in classical, and classically inspired, artificial memory schemes, and the proliferation of allegories of architecture in the literature of the later Middle Ages in France, it is not unreasonable to look for some link between memorization techniques current in the teaching of rhetoric and the didactic intention of rhétoriqueur writers anxious to transmit a moral or political message to their readers in an easily digestible and memorable form. Hard evidence to support this hypothesis is, however, more difficult to generate.

<JATS1:p>It is often assumed that those outside of academia know very little about the Middle Ages. But the truth is not so simple. Non-specialists learn a great deal from the myriad medievalisms – post-medieval imaginings of the medieval world – that pervade our everyday culture. But what does the public really know? How do the conflicting medievalisms they consume contribute to their knowledge? And why is this important? In this book, the first evidence-based exploration of the wider public’s understanding of the Middle Ages, Paul B. Sturtevant adapts sociological methods to answer these important questions. Based on extensive focus groups, the book details the ways – both formal and informal – that people learn about the medieval past and the many other ways that this informs, and even distorts, our present. In the process, Sturtevant also sheds crucial light onto the ways non-specialists learn about the past, and why understanding this is so important.</JATS1:p>

Producción Científica

Reviewed by: The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy by Linda Safran William Tronzo The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy. By Linda Safran. [The Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. Pp. viii, 469. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4554-7.) The “Art” of the title is essentially that of the works catalogued in the database published on pp. 238–336, which covers 162 sites in the Salento, the southern section of the present-day province of Puglia in the southeast extremity of Italy. The works include mostly incised or painted funerary or dedicatory inscriptions and painted decorations from chapels and churches, in addition to a few other miscellaneous items such as a well-head or capital, a sundial, and an ivory amulet. The works date from the ninth to the fifteenth century, and they are transcribed, described, and illustrated with some small, occasionally difficult to read black-and-white photographs. A set of twenty color plates also accompanies the text. The concept of “Identity” is more difficult to get a handle on. At certain points, the author adduces modern experience (“Beginning in the 1970’s, local folk music…” [p. 11]; the “fate of the soccer squad in Lecce” [p. 209]), including that of herself (“I am, at various and overlapping times…” [p. 4]), which dovetails with her professed interest in the lives of ordinary citizens. Yet one wonders to what degree the arts of the medieval cemetery and the church could speak about them. The ecclesiastical context was one of the most regimented visual environments in the Middle Ages, laden with traditions and conventions, which framed, controlled, and even occasionally obliterated the present in the service of agendas set by the elite. Inserting oneself into this structure as an “ordinary” member of society probably meant relinquishing more than expressing. In attempting to grapple with “Identity,” the author considers a number of topics and themes—names, languages, appearance (dress), status, the life cycle, and ritual. But the protean nature of these categories rears its head at almost every turn. For example, although names are professed to be powerful—“among the most essential and universal components of identity” (p. 17)—they are also declared to be “poor indicators of ethnicity” (p. 221). Nor is language “a secure indicator of cultural or ethnic background” (p. 38), which in any case is a sliding scale, “situational and not primordial” (p. 219). The author calls the Salento a contact zone, which befits a territory in close proximity to the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are discussed, but Arabic is simply dismissed—“the comprehensibility of these texts was probably nil” (p. 41), and its decorative version of pseudo-Kufic possessed only a “nonverbal” significance. The author disagrees with Marina Falla Castelfranchi’s interpretation of a group of figures in a scene of the Betrayal of Christ as Mongols because the feature on which she based her identification—the [End Page 910] mustache—was never associated with them in the written sources. Yet another physical trait in a scene of St. Catherine disputing with philosophers—namely, the “embarrassingly articulated buttocks” of the philosophers—does not seem to have had a textual warrant either, even though there is no doubt in the author’s mind that it constitutes “the only case of physical exaggeration indicative of Jewish alterity” (p. 218). Even though art is considered by the author as an “index of social status” (p. 91), its currency can be problematic. The timeline for important items of dress to enter the visual record, for instance, could be extremely long: although Jews were required to wear badges in 1215, the feature does not make its appearance in local images until 200 years later. On the other hand, imported objects such as icons are argued to have nothing to contribute to the issue of identity and are excluded from consideration. But why is not what one collects and owns just as expressive of one’s identity as what one has made for oneself? At the beginning of her analysis the author actually uses the term bundle to characterize identity (p. 3), which, in the end...

This new monograph devoted to a detailed exploration of the ways in which the medieval past has been wielded to propagandic effect in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;From politicians' speeches to popular culture, from Orthodox Christianity to neo-paganism, the medieval Russian past remains crucial in constructing national identity, mobilizing society during times of crisis, and providing alternative models of communal belonging. Frequent appeals to a medieval Slavic past, its heroes and myths, have provided - and continue to provide - a particularly powerful tool for animating imperialist and populist sentiments.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;This study explores persuasive - and pervasive - recourse to tropes concerned with the Middle Ages in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, seeking to explain why an often romanticized medieval past remains potent in Russian politics, society, and culture today.

Reviewed by: Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child by John A. Mitchell Nicholas Parmley John A. Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Becoming Human offers a fascinating approach to how medieval thinkers understood and contemplated the concept of the child. It is a study, however, that goes beyond the simple matter of childhood; rather, childhood and the matter of the medieval child become the starting point for a well-researched and deftly articulated discussion of ontology and ontogeny, the problem of being and becoming. In this series of essays, Mitchell investigates the various ways in which subjects and objects are linked, suggesting that human identity can be understood through various assemblages of the textual, visual and artefactual. As such, his discussion of morphogenesis through stories of hominization without homogenization, necessarily engages various disciplines, from embryology to object theory to quantum physics. While on the surface these might seem disparate disciplines, Mitchell's careful examination of the evidence (texts, animals' lives, artifacts, cultural practices) is skillfully structured and organized, allowing the reader to easily follow the reasoning and flow of his argumentation. Focused on the 12th to 15th centuries, with particular attention to medieval England, the book returns the reader to a time of healthy debate about embodiment, emergency, and ecology through discourses of the ovum by and amongst cosmologists, philosophers and medical practitioners, in an attempt to "rediscover the ontogenetic possibilities before they become bounded" (xvi). Recognizing our place firmly in the Anthropocene Epoch, Mitchell reminds us that anthropocentrism was not also always an inevitable mode of understanding; nor should it be now. Thus, departing from traditional humanist scholarship of the Middle Ages, he argues that humanity is a plurality of organisms and objects, a conviviality of the animate and inanimate. Following Meillassoux, he warns that the most extreme human fallacy of modern thought is to have removed the earth from the center, only to place the human in its place. And since "we are subject to the past that we not only inherit but also still inhabit," Mitchell's intention is to present speculative alternatives to the supposed pre-critical and pre-scientific medieval past (xxv). "The idea that medieval sciences are all monsters and myth," for example, "is refuted by a casual glance at the mathematical rigor of Ptolemaic astronomy and meteorology, or the sophisticated trigonometry of the astrolabe" (xxiv). Questioning the remoteness and irrelevance of the medieval past concerning these supposedly ultramodern matters is perhaps the book's greatest achievement. "This book stands to upset any complacent acceptance of our times," for the Middle Ages, he argues, anticipated "everything from commodity fetishism to terrorism" (xvi). And borrowing [End Page 374] from Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith's work in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, he suggests in fact that, perhaps, we have always been medieval. The book is divided into three essays: Being Born, Childish Things, and The Mess, followed by a brief 2-page epilogue. In the first essay, Mitchell argues that the concept of ontogeny (becoming), as opposed to ontology (being), is a more useful category for understanding the multiplicity of existence. While the question of where "life" begins is always in the background, Mitchell makes clear that he is not interested in modern bio-politics or bio-ethics (i.e., the morality of abortion); rather he is concerned with an "emergent creatureliness," and how ideas of becoming point to a humanity at risk. He takes as a starting point that "there is something irrational and improper in place of the developing matter of the child" (2). Moreover, "claims for inceptive intelligence or soul (a putative innate ontology) only restate the problem (a dynamic ontogeny) they are supposed to solve" (2). The second essay attempts to fill a critical lacuna. Beginning with the ethical considerations of a tin-metal miniature toy horse, Mitchell argues how medieval childhood, and children's play in general, can be evidence for the priority of ontogeny over static ontology, in order to discuss "an-economic modes of humanizing or post-humanizing" (xxvii). Aware of the pitfalls of "flattening ethics" such that plastics receive the same...

Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the “Middle Ages” has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects—from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology—have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

The meals in a Tuscan building yard during the Middle Age. Characterization of organic residues in ceramic potsherds

Reviews and Short Notices

In the later Middle Ages, the mudejar people (Muslims who lived in Christian countries) built houses, castles and palaces in Spain in a characteristic way. In these special buildings, the craftworks in wood and in plaster are very famous, but there are some wall paintings too. Wall paintings from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries decorate the rooms as socles along the walls. They are little known, even in Spain, for two reasons: first, the main art of this period was religious, in the Gothic style; second, their maintenance is problematic because they were made for private houses. To understand how and with what materials and resources they were made, we have studied this kind of wall painting, found only in Spain. Historical documentation, photographic records and chemical analyses of the painting materials are reported. All these data point to a fresco technique.

Reviewed by: Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 by Theodore Evergates Lindsay Diggelmann Evergates, Theodore, ed., Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 392; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$75.00; £49.00; 9780812247909. While travelling through Champagne in 1179, Walter Map – cleric, critic, and wit at the Plantagenet court – recorded his impressions of his host in Troyes, calling him ‘the most generous of men, so much so that to many he seemed prodigal, for to all who asked, he gave’ (p. 157). This was Henry ‘the Liberal’, Count of Champagne from 1152 to 1181. As Theodore Evergates notes, while this reputation was well deserved, it was not entirely altruistic. Henry’s largesse to monasteries, rural tenants, and urban centres stimulated production and commerce, notably through the important Champagne fairs, which generated considerable extra revenue for the Count through tolls and taxes. Henry’s ambition appears to have been to build a thriving, peaceful, and increasingly unified political entity from a collection of formerly separate feudal regions based on castles or other fortified sites. In this, as Evergates demonstrates, he succeeded. Henry’s father, Thibaut, elder brother of King Stephen of England, had combined the family’s traditional estates in Blois–Chartres, to the west of Paris, with newly acquired lands further east. This created a powerful principality on either side of the royal domain, giving rise to tension with the Capetian monarch, Louis VI, and leading Thibaut to be described as ‘within France second only to the king’ (p. 3). Henry inherited only the eastern lands but he took to calling himself Count Palatine of Troyes to underscore his superior status based on a lordship extending over neighbouring regions. On this basis, Evergates claims persuasively that ‘[w]ithin a decade of his accession, Henry had reimagined Champagne as a territorial state’. Henry’s relations with Louis VII were generally much better than had been the case between their fathers. Ties of loyalty and mutual respect forged during the expedition to the Holy Land on the Second Crusade (1147–49) endured through subsequent decades. These were reinforced by marital pacts: Henry [End Page 146] married Louis’s daughter Marie (from the king’s first marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine), while in 1160, Louis took as his third wife Henry’s sister, Adele, who became the mother of Philip Augustus. Despite the ensuing tangle of relationships which made Henry both son-in-law and brother-in-law to his sovereign and which were potentially in breach of canon law, family alliances underscored a soothing of political tensions. Although the author includes a chapter on court culture in the midst of the dominant political narrative, surprisingly little space is given to several notable figures traditionally associated with Champagne and especially with the circle of Countess Marie. It is true that the idea of a literary court centred on Marie has little or no basis and has effectively been demolished, yet the possibility of connections with Chrétien de Troyes, in particular, is only briefly considered here and is just as quickly dismissed (p. 147). All the same, the cultural influence of new Cistercian foundations, the frequent presence of papal delegations and foreign merchants, and the personal interests of the Count contributed to an environment which encouraged intellectual enquiry and spread literacy and written materials more widely than was usual in the twelfth-century context, so that they became an ‘integral part of life in Champagne’ (p. 176). Architecture, too, saw important developments, especially with the construction of a new comital residence and adjacent chapel of St-Étienne in Troyes, one of the first to be constructed in the new Gothic style. Though it cannot be proven that Henry stopped off in Sicily on his return from crusade, Evergates suggests that this is likely and argues that Henry may have taken the idea for a combined residential, administrative, and spiritual campus from the magnificent works being undertaken in mid-century by the Norman king Roger II at Palermo. The idea is a tantalising one, if difficult to verify. Perhaps this account sounds a touch too idealised or...

This essay analyzes the cases of coexistence within the same church of mural decoration displaying both (Post-)Byzantine and Gothic styles, which occurred during the 14th and 15th centuries on the territory of the Voivodate of Transylvania and the south-eastern border counties of the Kingdom of Hungary. This phenomenon of stylistic diversity under the same roof occurred at different stages during the larger and cumulative projects of church decoration, and the reasons for such occurrences varied. Orthodox patrons proved to be more conservative and very attached to their own cultural, religious, and visual traditions, and subsequently commissioned Western painters with the decoration of their churches only when the artists belonging to their own cultural and religious traditions were unavailable (e.g., Hălmagiu and Strei). In contrast with the Orthodox, Catholic patrons had a flexible artistic taste and were more prone to embrace the alternative aesthetic solutions proposed to them by traveling artists with Byzantine training (e.g., Buneşti, Dârlos, Sântămăria-Orlea, Şmig, Valea Lungă, and probably Deva and Târgu Mureş). A special situation of stylistic diversity under a single roof is represented by those cases, which occurred when Romanian Orthodox patrons—despite their belonging to a different confession—exercised their legal right of patronage over those Catholic churches found on their estates (e.g., Sântămăria-Orlea and Remetea). The Orthodox patrons’ strong attachment to their own religious and visual traditions led to the coexistence within the same Catholic church not only of murals displaying Gothic and (Post-)Byzantine formal features, but also of inscriptions in the liturgical languages of the two Churches (i.e., Latin and Church Slavonic). Since this essay approached the phenomenon of aesthetic diversity strictly from a stylistic or formal point of view, its devotional implications will be analyzed on a different occasion, when it will be contextualized together with other transcultural phenomena, such as those of linguistic diversity under the same roof, cross-credal artistic patronage, and shared devotion of Catholic saints by the Eastern-rite Christians. The results of the project Models of Representation of the Past in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2019 are presented in this work.