Mantegna's Meditation on the Sacrifice of Christ: His Synoptic Savior

The week-long Moriones Festival on the island of Marinduque, south of Manila, weaves together a complex mix of events including street theatre, processions, religious ceremonies, and a three-night sinakulo that dramatizes the history of salvation with a focus on the Christ story. Present throughout the week's events are the morions, caped and elaborately costumed local men enacting a vow or panata, whose identities are disguised by large headpieces and full-face carved masks meant to resemble Roman centurions. The leading morion is the Roman centurion Longinus, who according to apocryphal sources, was the lance-wielding soldier present at the crucifixion and whose sight was miraculously restored by Christ's blood. The ubiquitous morions and the transformation and martyrdom of Longinus provide an active, experiential route into the story of Christ's sacrifice for many Catholics in Marinduque during Holy Week.

This volume focuses on aspects of Carthusian history and culture of the later Middle Ages, a period of growth and vitality within the order. There is a primary but not exclusive focus on the English Province, which to date has received at best unbalanced attention. While the fundamental ambitions and ideals of Carthusianism formulated, articulated, and lived by the disciples of St Bruno between the late eleventh and the thirteenth centuries changed very little, the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries witnessed developments stimulated by and often commensurate with the progress of external culture. In such areas as devotional practice, literature, art and architecture, patronage, and monastic-lay relations generally, the houses of the order grew increasingly sophisticated: in some cultural spheres Carthusians were in the vanguard. The late Middle Ages thus offer rich opportunities for assessment of how a religious organization defined and justified by essentially reactionary conventions responded to constant forinsec evolution. The volume’s approach is multi-disciplinary, involving both senior and younger Carthusian scholars in investigation of the main facets of Carthusian life for which significant data survives. This permits a thorough analysis of the order’s character, one that reflects concern with synoptic understanding of medieval Carthusianism rather than partial assessment through a specifically devotional, literary, or more narrowly historical approach. Subject areas covered include the historical growth of individual Charterhouses, patronage of Carthusians by secular agents, Carthusian architecture and manuscript decoration, devotional practice, and textual culture.

Reviewed by: Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History ed. by Kevin J. Harty Susan Aronstein kevin j. harty, ed., Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History. North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2020. Pp. 208. isbn: 978–1–4766–6844–4. $39.95. Beginning with the publication of Cinema Arthuriana: Essays on Arthurian Film in 1991, Kevin J. Harty’s work on the ‘reel’ Middle Ages has been invaluable for the study of medieval cinema, and Medieval Women on Film is a welcome contribution to this work. Chronicling the cinematic fortunes of medieval women, fictional and historical, the volume’s essays offer an insightful cross-disciplinary exploration of ‘the multiplicity of contradictory roles’ medieval women have played on film for over a century—‘as role models, as saviors, as saints, as sinners, as viragos, as victims, and as victimizers’ (p. 3). Amy Kaufman’s analysis of Hollywood’s Guinevere in the context of ‘evolving anxieties about women and sex in each cinematic generation’ places film Guineveres, from Vanessa Redgrave (1967) to Keira Knightley (2004), in the ‘feminist discourse of [their] time’ (p. 19). In the end, Kaufman concludes, filmmakers’ ‘troubling answer’ to ‘handling’ Guinevere ‘may be the one provided by . . . King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which has no Guinevere at all’ (p. 30). Usha Vishnuvajjala’s exploration of Morgan le Fay on film demonstrates that cultural discourses about women have also determined Morgan’s characterization, as films from the 2000s displace ‘contemporary [End Page 73] misogyny onto the past,’ resignifying the complex and sympathetic Morgan of the 1980s (p. 48). Valerie Johnson’s study of Maid Marian provides yet another example of the disturbing modern misogyny that persists in films set in the Middle Ages; her examination of Robin Hood films from the 1920s to the 2000s finds that ‘neomedieval archetypes [always] dictate Marian’s behavior, her story potential, her narrative role, and ultimately her value’ (p. 69). Of all the fictional screen women studied here, only Isolde, as Joan Tasker Grimbert argues, seems to escape this fate. Grimbert, however, gives medieval sources and not ‘modern feminism’ (or filmmakers) the credit for ‘Isolde’s cinematic characterization’ (p. 64). Turning to historical women, Sandra Gorgievski explores Lady Godiva’s film career, arguing that Godiva’s inconsistent cinematic characterization—‘dutiful wife, feminist activist, and sex symbol’—stems from ‘the audience’s expectation of a film’s genre . . . [and] the version of the legend [they are] familiar with’(p. 144). Fiona Tolhurst shows that narrative expectations also limit Eleanor of Aquitaine, as films never allow her to become the female hero proposed by 20th-century feminism’s Golden Myth of Eleanor. Instead, from Beckett to Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, filmmakers reframe her, using the medieval Black Legend to discredit Eleanor in various ways—as an adulteress, a bad mother, a catty wife, a jealous murderess, a traitor, a rebel. Among the historical women discussed in the collection, only Joan of Arc, as Kevin J. Harty demonstrates, has been allowed a heroic portrayal on film; however, she, too, has been subjected to the visions and agendas of filmmakers who have ‘wrestled with Joan the simple peasant girl, Joan the androgyne, Joan the woman, Joan the doubting sinner, Joan the standard-bearer of a nation, and Joan the self-assured saint’ (p. 196). In addition to these analyses of medieval women’s cinematic histories, the volume offers four in-depth studies of individual films. Donald L. Hoffman examines Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen, arguing that Lang’s legendary queens ‘despite being part of an exciting new medium . . . are creatures of an old worldview’ who precipitate Germany’s fall from myth into history (p. 94). Andrew B.R. Elliott, reading La Passion de Beatrice as both a Tavernier film and a product of French cinema in the 1980s and 90s, finds that this film also remains trapped in old worldviews; relying on a ‘fundamental gender essentialism’ that equates women with suffering and exploitation and men with violence and domination, Beatrice promises but does not deliver ‘a progressive, empowering and refreshingly different film that dares to depict genuine female agency’ (pp. 130, 116). Joseph M. Sullivan and Kristin...

The present article is focused on the medieval toponymy of Romanic (but non-Protoromanian) origin preserved in the territory of modern Bulgaria and some neighboring regions where (during the Middle Ages) Old Slavonic and Middle Bulgarian interacted with Romance vernaculars and probably with some Paleobalkan languages. The aim is to shed light on the phonology of these vernaculars, on their contacts with some of the Paleobalkan languages, and on the degree of their proximity to Protoromanian and on their interaction with Old Slavonic and Middle Bulgarian. The investigation is based on several kinds of sources: Works of antique and late antique Greek and Latin historians and geographers who offer a lot of information about the Balkan toponymy up to the end of the 6 th century. The Latin and Greek epigraphy from Moesia Inferior and Thrace. Medieval sources – here the emphasis is on the Old Slavonic (of Bulgarian origin) and Middle Bulgarian works, documents and epigraphic material. In conclusion, an attempt is made at describing the areal distribution of some of the extinct Romance vernaculars.

Relics purported to be from the veritable body of Jesus Christ proliferated in Europe in the later Middle Ages. The response to these relics ranged from religious devotion to hysteria, from skepticism to wholesale condemnation. In 1247 King Henry III processed through the streets of London to present a relic of the Holy Blood, a gift from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, to Westminster Abbey. The main source for this event is an account written at the request of the king by the historian Matthew Paris, a monk at St. Alban's. Nicholas Vincent has discovered an important letter in the archives of Westminster Abbey that suggests that the Patriarch of Jerusalem offered the relic to Henry III in an attempt to gain the king's financial support and participation in crusading activities in the Holy Land, a bid that was not successful. Leading from the discovery of this letter, Vincent launched his own investigation of the events of 1247, and set out to answer one question above all others: why was it so difficult for the Westminster relic to find acceptance as a genuine relic of Christ's blood? In his quest Vincent goes well beyond the events of 1247 to provide a history of blood relics prior to 1247 and to recount the arguments of theologians from the twelfth to the fifteenth century who debated whether or not relics from Christ's body could or could not exist.

Early Medieval Sources on Historical Geography of Southeast Anatolia in the 3rd-7th CenturiesThe struggle of Byzantine-Sassanid Empires in Anatolia was occur a huge zone which from Caucassia to Syria desert. But main center of these wars was southeast Anatolia that lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The influence of geography on the course of the struggle is another subject matter. In this study we will identify that early medieval sources on the forts, garrisons and fortified cities in that region

Book Review: The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices

Reviews ROBERrA Anderson and Dominic AiDAN bellenger, eds., Medieval Worlds: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xx, 328. isbn:o-415-25309-8 (pbk). $29.95. This anthology contains a variety ofexcerpts from medieval sources, ranging from charters and monastic documents to literary texts and travel narratives. The editors' objectives are to provide 'an introduction to the period which goes far beyond conventional medieval history'(Preface) and to 'convey the depth of the medieval achievement: its faith, its structures, its ideas, its magnificence and folly, the lives of its people' (2). Anderson is a lecturer in the School ofHistorical and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College; Bellenger, also an historian, is Prior of Downside Abbey in Somerset. The book is the product of a team-taught medieval history course at BSUC. The collection is sorted into twelve major divisions, each representing a particular aspect of the Middle Ages: The first section, 'Introduction to medieval worlds,' is followed by 'The monastic world,' 'The world of the papacy,' 'The world of the Crusades,' 'The world of the feudal kingdom,' 'The English political world,' 'The world of the outsider,' 'The world ofwomen,' 'The world ofthe mind,' 'The world ofthe countryside,' 'The world ofthe town,' and 'The medieval world self-observed.' Each ofthese divisions concludes with a brieflist ofsuggestions for 'Further reading.' In addition to the documents themselves and the standard apparatus (contents, bibliography, and index), the volume also features a useful glossary of medieval terms, with 78 entries from 'Abbot' to 'Villein,' thirty illustrations, a handsome photographic sequence of Wells Cathedral. The discursive matter is minimal, consisting in a three-paragraph Preface, a two-page Introduction, brief contextualizing head-matter for each of the larger divisions, and even briefer commentary preceding the documents themselves. As the collection clearly targets undergraduate history students (and their instructors), it is not surprising that only eight of approximately 160 excerpts are taken from literary sources: Langland, the Chanson de Roland, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory, Chaucer, Gower, Christine de Pizan, and Boccaccio. The literary selections range in length from a generous dollop of Langland (the first 230 lines ofPiers) to a mere squib ofChaucer, the thirteen-line portrait ofthe plowman from the General Prologue. Excerpts from Malory appear in two different sections. At first glance, the volume would seem—with its inclusion of major rubrics for town and country and its two chapters on marginalized populations (women and 'the outsider')— to fulfill the editorial promise of cultural multivalence. Despite these gestures, however, the anthology is actually rather conservative in its ARTHURIANA ?4.4 (2??4) 75 76ARTHURIANA representation of the European Middle Ages, even a tad retrograde: the dominant voice throughout is that of the patriarch and the churchman. All but two of the eleven selections in the introductory section, for example, arc connected in some way to matters Christian and theological: even the excerpt from Malory, the narrative of Galahad's Grail experience (Caxton 17, clxxi-cxcvii), reflects this thematic. And parsing the contents, one cannot help but observe that the first three ofthe 'worlds' are those of the monastery, the papacy, and the Crusades. Nowhere is this spin more evident than in the chapters on marginalized groups. The only secular entry amongst twelve pieces in 'The world ofwomen' is an excerpt from Christine's Citédes dames. Additionally, Christine is one ofonly three women represented in this section (the other two non-patriarchal documents arc 'The Testament ofSt. Clare' and Radegund's 'Letter of Foundation). For the remainder, the usual suspects are assembled: Jerome, Anselm, Augustine, and Abelard amongst them. The section begins with the Biblical account of Eve's fall, and the Virgin Mary figures prominently thereafter. Similarly, only two of the thirteen 'outsider' excerpts are ofsecular provenance. Three documents represent what Christians have to say about the Jews, particularly their causal connection to the Black Death, but no Jewish voice is heard. Lepers and witches comprise the other two 'outsider' groups here—the Islamic Other is not even mentioned, surely a necessary antidote to the casual demonization of 'Saracens' in other sections of the anthology. (The only Islamic voice in the entire collection is that ofUsmah ibn Munquidh, ironically 'An...

The city of Libia (Herramélluri, Spain) and its territory: landscape archaeology and intensive survey · A research project in the city of Libia (Herramélluri, La Rioja, España) was conducted combining an intensive survey, aerial photography, satellite imagery, geophysical prospection and the information provided by medieval sources. The data obtained allow us to conclude that, although Libia could have had a Celtiberian occupation, the design of the urban grid was laid out in early Imperial times (Augustus or Tiberius). In the eastern part of the Libia territory, in the Valpierre plain, where a Roman land division has been detected, an intensive field survey was carried out. According to the data obtained, the disturbance of Roman plotted land started after the Roman city of Libia was abandoned, an event that can be established around the 5th-6th centuries. In the Middle Ages (10th-11th centuries), a reorganization of the land occupied by the centuriation was carried out reusing part of Roman boundaries.

This study of disability, concerning the mentalities surrounding disability from social, economic, religious and literary, but few medical aspects of mediaeval culture, will be welcomed for the scope and multidisciplinary breadth of its collection, although the bias does tend to weigh in favour of literary criticism. The premise of the collection, as the editor states in his cogent and reflective introduction, is ‘that Medieval Studies and Disability Studies have much to say to each other.’ Hence, all the contributions, in one way or another, commence with a critique, analysis or exposition of these two disciplines in relation to the specific topic of each essay. In the first part, ‘Reconsiderations’, the authors engage with mediaeval sources, where a significant proportion of the essays concern blindness. The essay on rediscovering the working lives of blind inmates of a Parisian hospital demonstrates that there is a person with an individual identity, shaped amongst other by social and professional status, behind the simple label of ‘blind’. There thus emerges the intriguing observation that persons working in textile production would potentially be prone to industrial accidents causing loss of vision. Blindness is also the theme of essays on St Francis, whose ‘weakening of the eyes’ appears to have been ‘discreetly marginalized’ by subsequent reception of his hagiography, and on blind poet–composers in the fourteenth century, who were believed to possess an enhanced sense of hearing in compensation for their loss of sight, leading not so much to disability but different ability, as one author argues. A similar tension exists in the miracles of Louis IX where disability, on the one hand, figures as testimony for Louis’ saintliness, while on the other hand, valorises the suffering body. Deafness is explored through a literary lens in the character of the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the same writer’s Merchant’s Tale is enlisted for a portrayal of the pregnant body, reflecting stereotypes of considerable antiquity that treat the female body per se as disabled, in that female is deemed an inversion of the male norm. Social aspects of disability are addressed by both literary and historical approaches, namely through the connection between poverty and disability in their portrayal in Langland’s Piers Plowman, and through the ‘legal controversies’ of madness in French jurisprudence. Two essays look at specific figures marked by disabilities, one treating royal impairments in Anglo-Saxon literature, while another investigates the disabled Fisher King of Arthurian legend. ‘Markers of difference’, that is, names suggesting disability in Icelandic sagas, are employed to explore the opposition between individual experience and social context. In the second part, ‘Reverberations’, contributors explore the legacy of mediaeval texts and how they shaped post-mediaeval representations of disability. We encounter Chaucer again in a re-working by the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; Shakespeare's Richard III as a construct of early modern narrative; and the afterlife of mediaeval ideas concerning the relationship between the aged female body and disability. Despite the caveat that the lack of medical topics may disappoint readers of this journal, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the rapidly emerging topic of disability in the Middle Ages. The different approaches employed by literary and historical scholars emerge as one of the stronger points of this collection, in that the tendency of literary criticism to treat disability as a narrative prosthesis is counterbalanced by rigorous historical analysis of sources that uncover the physical bodies of mediaeval persons, making for an interesting, challenging and thought-provoking amalgam of discourse analysis and philological reconstruction. One is, however, left wondering how far the many variant definitions of ‘disabled’ proposed by the individual contributors reflect more of the specific authors' concepts of disability than attempt an emic understanding of mediaeval notions concerning the consequences of physical or mental difference.

The book analyzes the first three decades of the life and activities of the Deputazione di storia patria per le Venezie, with special focus on its editorial policies. The study also aims to investigate the content and methodologies of medieval studies in Venice and Veneto; the cultural orientation of the Deputazione; the organization’s role in establishing liaisons between the central body and the individual municipal traditions; the relationship with the research institutions of the Kingdom of Italy, and the significance of studies on the Middle Ages and medieval sources in the formation of a national identity; and, lastly, the Society’s commitment to promoting and popularizing the local sources and its efforts to define a method for publishing them.

Reviewed by: Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis Kirsten Inglis Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis. Victoria: ELS Editions, 2009. 279 pp. As the title indicates, this collection of essays is dedicated to the memory of Margot Louis, a scholar whose primary publication interests were in the field of Victorian literature but whose “first love, and … abiding passion” was for medieval literature (vii). The volume’s dedicatory framework is appealing in its sincerity and its heartfelt tribute to Louis as a scholar and a teacher, with memories of Louis in these capacities infusing the contributions from her colleagues, friends, and former students. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton [End Page 129] makes clear in an elegant preface to the volume, these essays seek to offer new scholarship that nevertheless captures the particular bent of Louis’s own approach to medieval literature: namely, explorations of “the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination” (viii). The eleven essays (including the introduction) offer a cohesive critical approach while covering a wide range both temporally and generically. Kerby-Fulton notes that the collection is envisaged for use by scholars and teachers, and indeed the volume would be a useful supplement in classes on visionary and mystical experience in the Middle Ages or on medieval women’s writing more generally. The essays introduce and contextualize their subject matter sufficiently to make them accessible to advanced undergraduate students or non-specialists while concurrently maintaining a level of scholarship that make them attractive for scholarly researchers. Kerby-Fulton’s introductory essay, “Skepticism, Agnosticism and Belief: The Spectrum of Attitudes Toward Vision in Late Medieval England” does the work of introducing the controlling vision of the collection (the reception of women’s divine writings), concisely reviews recent scholarship on medieval reception of visions and visionary experience, and offers an intriguing link between skepticism about visionary experience and religious doubt more generally. Kerby-Fulton argues that women’s visionary experiences were taken seriously by their male redactors with some, like Birgitta of Sweden, being “seriously authorized” by their transmitters and others, like Julian of Norwich (as discussed in Jonathan Juilfs’s contribution to the volume), undergoing a process of containment through “abridgement and revisionist biography” (2). Linda Olson’s exceptional contribution to the volume is concerned with representations of Monica both by her son, St Augustine, in his writings and by later medieval readers. Olson’s essay considers written sources as well as visual representations of Monica and argues that she is depicted in these medieval sources far more frequently than would be suggested by her presence in Augustine’s Confessiones. Monica is an important spiritual leader in her own right, and Olson is justified in hoping that this essay will help to draw her “once again from the enormous filial shadow where scholarship has too frequently and too complacently left her” (42). Thea Todd’s contribution reads Christina of Markyate’s Life in the context of her redactor, who, Todd argues, seems to have revised the Life “in light of much later developments of ecclesiastical thought on marriage” (49). Todd provides a detailed and thoughtful reading of the way in which this author uses dramatic dialogue informed by the thinking of the primary authorities of Church and community (authorities [End Page 130] often in tension with one another) on questions of marriage and consent to present Christina’s Life. As is evident thus far, many of the essays in the volume are concerned with the hagiographic tradition and with the visionary experiences of historical figures. Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin: How to Read the Female Body in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete” continues this theme, as do the contributions of Johanne Paquette, who offers a fascinating reading of the Book of Margery Kempe and the marginalia of the text’s red ink annotator, and Jonathan Juilfs, who considers the textual transmission of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love from the mid-fifteenth century Amherst manuscript through its first printed manifestation in Hugh Cressy’s edition of 1670. Not...

Paula M. Rieder's learned, careful book examining the ritual reincorporation of postpartum mothers into the parishes of medieval France offers a useful corrective to the broad generalizations about churching, a topic that has become visible only recently. Churching was important in establishing and maintaining boundaries between laity and ecclesiastical authorities, in defining appropriate conduct in marriage and motherhood, and in negotiating the multiple meanings of both the private and the corporate female body. It was the very pervasiveness of churching in the lives of premodern women, its “ordinariness” (p. 171) as Rieder plausibly argues, that probably made it so rarely commented on by medieval sources. It is a tribute to the author's remarkably exhaustive search of ecclesiastical court records, liturgies, sermons, books of hours, and other primary manuscript sources (cf. p. 214, n. 22: “I found only four descriptions of lying-in in over 1,400 letters of remission”) that in this book significant chronological and regional differences in the uses of churching become clear for the first time.

Rouen in the Middle Ages. Remarks on the city's medieval Hebrew name The investigation of French Judaism necessarily requires the identification of place-names found in medieval sources. One of the most common Hebrew toponyms referring to a French city, found particularly in manuscripts, is the consonantal term RDWM, which with its orthographic variants RWDWM and RWDM occurs in twenty known instances. This term can refer only to Rodom (variants, "Rothom", "Rotom", etc.) — the commonly used short form, as early as Merovingian times, for the older Rothomagus, the original Latin name for Rouen.

Authenticity, Antiquity, and Authority: Dares Phrygius in Early Modern Europe Frederic Clark Dares Phrygius, “First Pagan Historiographer” In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville—the seventh-century compiler whose cataloguing of classical erudition helped lay the groundwork for medieval and early modern encyclopedism—offered a seemingly straightforward definition of historiography, with clear antecedents in Cicero, Quintilian, and Servius.1 Before identifying historical writing as a component of the grammatical arts, and distinguishing histories from poetic fables, Isidore confirmed that “history is a narration of deeds [narratio rei gestae], through which things done in the past are discerned.”2 Thereafter, he equated historical writing with eyewitness observation, insisting that “among the [End Page 183] ancients, no one wrote history unless he had been present and seen those things to be recorded.”3 But Isidore’s further treatment of historiography grew more perplexing. Upon affirming that “among us, Moses first composed a history, on the beginning of the world,” he unexpectedly declared that “among the pagans, Dares Phrygius first composed a history, concerning Greeks and Trojans.”4 Only later did the encyclopedist mention more well-known Greek historians (to modern audiences at least) like Herodotus. 5 Isidore’s invocation of his “first pagan historiographer” referred most likely to the De excidio Troiae historia (henceforth DET), a fifth- or sixth-century Latin pseudo-history billed as an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. Conveyed in sparse, dry, and inelegant language, the DET was long thought to have been the war diary of one Dares Phrygius, purportedly a Trojan participant in the conflict.6 In reality, the Latin DET was a two-part forgery, as its spurious dedicatory epistle—supposedly from the Augustan-era biographer Cornelius Nepos to the historian Sallust—claimed that “Nepos” had discovered the work in an Athenian archive and rendered it “truly and simply” (vere et simpliciter) from Greek into Latin.7 While potentially derived from a Greek antecedent, perhaps composed as an anti-Homeric jeu d’esprit during the Second Sophistic, the Latin Dares was assuredly not an accurate and verbatim translation of any lost Greek original. 8 Notwithstanding its uncertain origins, Isidore’s pagan counterpart to Moses would go on to achieve canonical status in the medieval Latin West, and survives today in approximately 200 manuscripts. Moreover, Dares’s authority was extended through practices of compilation integral to medieval [End Page 184] textual culture.9 This compilatory impulse—which spawned countless multi-text anthologized codices and similarly animated Isidore’s encyclopedism—encouraged the Phrygian’s codicological pairing with numerous sources both ancient and medieval. Not only did the DET serve, codicologically, as a prologue to Trojan origin narratives like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, but it was also integrated into the structure of universal history, utilized as a means of augmenting the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome.10 Throughout the Middle Ages, Dares served not only as a name to invoke, but also as a source to appropriate and rework: to insert into universal chronicles, append to Trojan genealogies, or render into epic verse. Moreover, the pseudo-author’s status as “first pagan historiographer” was hardly lost on medieval sources: for instance, when William of Malmesbury inserted the DET into his anthology of ancient Roman histories, he made sure to include Isidore’s endorsement directly before the text’s incipit.11 For nearly a millennium, Dares’s fabricated claims of antiquity and autopsy constituted airtight guarantors of textual auctoritas. Between Criticism and Credulity: Dares in Early Modern Scholarship But Dares did not remain undisturbed in the canon. Instead, the DET saw its first recorded challenge with the advent of the early Renaissance. Writing in 1400 in his De tyranno, the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati turned to the Phrygian when debating a favored subject of nascent Italian humanism—the history of early Rome. Here Salutati sought to counter the long-held claim, attested in the DET, that Aeneas was not a pious hero driven from Troy, but rather a duplicitous traitor who had himself betrayed the city to the Greeks.12 The Florentine Chancellor correctly acknowledged that Aeneas’s treason was alleged by “the most ancient historians Dares [End Page 185] Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis” (Dictys, another late antique...