Abstract This article seeks to explore a relatively neglected way that medieval Latin churchmen understood and explained their grooming practices by associating hairiness with a superseded past. Using the only medieval treatise about beards, Burchard of Bellevaux’s Apologia de barbis , it examines how Latin clerics connected shaving their faces to their exegetical methods. Beardlessness represented the ability to see through the outer appearances of the Old Testament, the dead “letter that kills” (2 Cor. 3:6) to perceive hidden spiritual meanings. Hair was like the veil of the Old Testament, a thing of the past overcome by a spiritual (and hairless) Christian present. This explanation of Latin clerical beardlessness entangled methods of sacred reading with practices of gendered grooming, creating a particular mode of masculinity for beardless Christian churchmen. Clerical hair was connected to exegetical methods that bore indelible links to hierarchical delineations between different types of people and temporalities.

The Old English translation of Orosius’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem includes several additions, many of which bear on military deception. This article adopts a historical- philological approach to examine the descriptions of military stratagems in the Old English Orosius. Particularly, it focuses on surprise attacks and considers the modification of specific details and the translator’s lexical choices, thereby interrogating the translator’s stance on military trickery. The Old English translator criticizes the use of surprise attacks that take place at night or after oath-taking, as these tactics were typically associated with Viking raiders. He modifies the episodes of Hercules and Camillus, linking their night attacks with cowardice. In his modification, night attacks are acceptable only for defensive purposes and in numerically disproportionate situations. Additionally, by altering the accounts of Sergius Galba and Agathocles, the translator correlates their uses of military trickery following oaths with untrustworthiness and the eventual collapse of authority.

This article examines the representation of religious and spiritual conversion in BnF Français 375 through the focal points of Robert d’Orbigny’s Conte de Floire et Blanchefleur and Gautier de Coincy’s Comment Theophilus vint a penitence. These Old French texts are respectively shaped by the interfaith conversion of a pagan-Muslim prince, Floire, to Christianity, and the intrafaith deconversion and reconversion of the cleric Theophilus. It is argued that conversion operates at a sustained thematic and narrative level in these works through the dynamics of the individual versus the group, as well as Floire’s and Theophilus’s allegorical journeys. The multiplicity of these conceptualizations demonstrates that religious and spiritual change was often portrayed as an ongoing process in medieval literature, rather than only occurring in temporally fixed moments, as is commonly assumed. This paper also foregrounds the importance of Robert’s and Gautier’s shared codicological setting, analyzing the unique dialogue found in BnF Français 375 between discrete textual depictions of conversion and broader interfaith and intrafaith transitions across the manuscript’s Latin and vernacular works. As a result, conversion is shown to be a productive heuristic category for understanding the organization of multi-text and multi-genre medieval manuscripts.

The article examines systematic expressions of analogical mapping in medieval Europe in their social context, aiming thereby to propose a model for a socio-cultural history of cognition. Mapping the main realms where extraordinarily systematic and repeated analogical mapping took place in late medieval European culture, this article follows the development of systems of analogical mapping from scriptural exegesis to commentaries on liturgy and contemplative treatises, to preaching manuals and moral literature in Latin and in the vernacular. I also trace the extension of its themes, from Christian doctrine to courtly love, secular society, and politics. These developments are explained in light of late medieval sociology of knowledge, arguing that the cognitive skill of analogical mapping thrived in informal scenes of knowledge transmission between professional knowledge agents and semi-educated audiences due to its flexibility as a learning mechanism and the ways it catered to the nobility’s growing attraction to agency, playfulness, inventiveness, and individuality.

The geographical discoveries of the early modern period fostered the dissemination of a wide variety of travel books, as well as an evolution of the concept of geography. Daniello Bartoli’s La Geografia trasportata al morale (1664) demonstrates both of these leanings since it narrates a fictional journey through actual locations as it devotes extensive space to the meaning of the earth’s description and human understanding. In Bartoli’s Geography, every place on earth has a lesson to teach the reader. Through an analysis of Bartoli’s text, this essay aims to show how islands are constructed as a moral lesson through the tension between essence and appearance.

This talk—delivered as a plenary address at the 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America—interrogates the epistemic foundations of “medieval studies” that are grounded in linearity, connectivity, and affiliation. In it, I outline a pathway away from Eurocentric periodization and epistemic categories through a model of strategic comparison with Indigenous philosophies. I also sound a hopeful note for “medieval studies” and its capacity to engage the past as the archive for alternative futurities. The talk charts one possible path toward the “early global,” in institutional and scholarly terms, as it relates to the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies (CMRS–CEGS). By rethinking how an institution can provide new and connected methodologies and nonhegemonic epistemologies, CMRS–CEGS has developed a research platform that enables the study of early periods on a planetary scale.