The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 432-433, June 2012.

The disease of love appears in an unbroken chain of medical treatises stretching from sixth-century Byzantium through the Middle Ages to post-Renaissance Western Europe. Lovesickness, known variously as amor eros, amor heros, or amor hereos in medieval Latin medical texts, has attracted the attention of literary scholars because many of its symptoms correspond to conventional signs of love in medieval literature. According to George Lyman Kittredge, “What to the physician were symptoms … became, in the chivalric system, duties (...) — ideals of emotion which the true lover must live up to, and which the hypocrite takes pains to counterfeit.” In the late thirteenth century the Catalan physician Arnald of Villanova explicitly compared the disease of love and feudal service in his Tractatus de amore heroico. He claimed that this love “is called heroic as though lordly , not only because it befalls lords, but also either because it dominates, subjugating the soul and ruling a man's heart, or because the acts of such lovers toward the desired object are similar to the acts of servants toward their lords.”. (shrink)

Already translated into six languages, Francois Jullien's In Praise of Blandness hasbecome a classic. Appearing for the first time in English, this groundbreaking work of philosophy,anthropology, aesthetics, and sinology is certain to stir readers to think and experience what mayat first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a blandpoem. In presenting the value of blandness through as many concrete examples and original texts aspossible, Jullien allows the undifferentiated foundation of all things -- (...) blandness itself -- toappear. After completing this book, readers will reevaluate those familiar Western lines of thoughtwhere blandness is associated with a lack -- the undesirable absence of particular, definingqualities.Jullien traces the elusive appearance and crucial value of blandness from its beginningsin the Daoist and Confucian traditions to its integration into literary and visual aesthetics in thelate-medieval period and beyond. Gradually developing into a positive quality in Chinese aestheticand ethical traditions, the bland comprises the harmonious and unnameable union of all potentialvalues, embodying a reality whose very essence is change and providing an infinite opening into thebreadth of human expression and taste.More than just a cultural history, In Praise of Blandnessinvites those both familiar and unfamiliar with Chinese culture to explore the resonances of thebland in literary, philosophical, and religious texts and to witness how all currents of Chinesethought -- Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism -- converge in harmonious accord. (shrink)

Les articles de ce recueil, réunis par des membres du Centre de Recherche en Poétique, Histoire Littéraire et Linguistique (EA 3003) de l'Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, explorent les notions de perception, perspective et perspicacité dans plusieurs champs de recherche (linguistique, littérature, histoire des idées, philosophie et arts) et à diverses époques, du Moyen Age à la modernité. De l'univers sonore médiéval à l'esthétique de Debussy, de la linguistique populaire à l'étude linguistique des relations entre perception, cognition (...) et syntaxe, de Prévost à Proust en passant par Mark Twain ou Virginia Woolf, de la peinture américaine de Thomas Cole aux oeuvres vidéographiques contemporaines, cet ouvrage, tel un kaléidoscope, offre une myriade de perspectives sur la façon dont de simples locuteurs, des écrivains, des artistes ou des philosophes s'efforcent d'appréhender le monde. Les auteurs mettent en évidence les multiples stratégies rhétoriques, narratives ou esthétiques, entre autres, destinées à combler les failles d'une vision trop empirique ou à briser ou brouiller de façon perverse les écrans qui font obstacle à notre perception. Celle-ci survient parfois au terme d'une longue initiation, ou elle ne survient pas, tant il paraît difficile de jeter un regard surplombant sur un monde labile et opaque. La perception n'en demeure pas moins un catalyseur de la création, et aussi de la réception, voire de la re-création par un lecteur / spectateur perspicace qui aime être surpris de voir plus loin que son horizon d'attente. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fashioning the "Order of Saint Clare." A Rule illuminated by Neri da Rimini:Princeton University Library MS 83 in contextFrances Andrews (bio) and Louise Bourdua (bio)KeywordsRule of Urban IV, Clare of Assisi, Urbanist Clare nuns, Manuscript illumination, Neri da RiminiIntroduction1This interdisciplinary essay is an investigation of an illuminated, early 14th-century copy of the rule of the "Order of Saint Clare" issued by Pope Urban IV in 1263, now in Princeton. (...) It examines the unprecedented visual language adopted in a female Franciscan context to authorize their way of life, and places the manuscript in context, exploring how it relates to other early representations showing Saints Francis and Clare together and documenting the production of this and comparable early rule manuscripts, including a previously unpublished copy now in Venice.2Thousands of manuscript copies of rules of life were produced in and for late medieval religious houses and their members, good numbers of which remain extant, though these are scarce remnants of what must originally have been produced. Rules do sometimes appear in extant library inventories,3 but unlike individual books destined for personal [End Page 75] prayer or study and ultimately deposit in a conventual library, their primary purpose was as legal texts binding all who professed them.4 In their iterative function, read and reread, alone or aloud in the community, they were comparable to liturgical books, though they were not for use in church nor kept in the sacristy.5 In the rule of Urban IV for the Order of Saint Clare investigated here, chapter twenty-four required that the rule be read and explained annually by the visitator, while the final chapter emphasized that it be read once each fortnight lest the sisters neglect it.6 This sort of repetition must have ensured most nuns knew the rule by memory, having first encountered its details as novices, with no need to own the text. Copies were perhaps in the hands of the abbess, a visitator, or other monastic superior, or kept in the chapter room or refectory, ready for routine use.7 Nonetheless, wealthier women may have had a copy prepared or received one as a gift, either on entering the religious life or on becoming a superior responsible for its observance.8Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, MS 83, contains a Latin, [End Page 76] professionally made and illuminated copy of the text designed to substitute existing rules, including the 1219 Forma Vitae issued by Cardinal Hugolino and the rule of Innocent IV from 1247.9 Clare's own hard-fought for rule, approved in 1253, was initially for the San Damiano community alone and was followed in subsequent decades by a very small group of houses.10 The making of Urban IV's rule, adopted instead by hundreds of communities, has been much discussed, but the survival of this early illuminated copy has gone unnoticed outside the library catalog.11 The manuscript includes the earliest extant sequence known to us showing Clare of Assisi receiving the rule from the pope and in turn taking the profession of her sisters, images designed to legitimize the new order by building ties to its "founder" while yet acknowledging its papal origins. Among extant imagery it is pioneering. The large, illuminated initials have been recognized as painted by Nerius da Rimini and his workshop but the case has never been set out and PUL MS 83 has [End Page 77] not been included in accounts of this artist's production.12 Better known as "Neri," he is a comparatively well-documented manuscript illuminator whose signatures sometimes survive on his work, a rare practice at this date.13Historians of medieval women religious are by now familiar with books produced by women themselves.14 A beautiful manuscript, for example, containing Bonaventure's Legenda Maior of Saint Francis, the Vita beati Antonii and documents relating to the Portiuncula indulgence was written in Latin in 1337 by two sisters, Elspet von Amberk and Katerina von Purchausen, perhaps living in the Paradies convent in Diessenhofen (Switzerland).15 Other women have been identified as skilled illuminators.16 The prolific activity of... (shrink)

Grâce à ce splendide ouvrage de 431 pages, richement illustré, Anne van Buren a composé une véritable encyclopédie du costume en France et aux Pays-Bas à la fin du Moyen Âge. Sa connaissance approfondie de l’enluminure médiévale lui a permis de cerner année après année les évolutions de la mode aristocratique des cours de France et de Bourgogne, sans omettre d’évoquer les costumes paysans ou bourgeois. Comme elle le souligne dans son introduction, le costume médiéval correspond à un (...) statut :... (shrink)

de Matthieu d'Aquasparta à Thierry de Freiberg François-Xavier Putallaz. CHAPITRE V GODEFROID DE FONTAINES 1. INTRODUCTION Dans le but de délimiter le cadre nécessaire à l'étude de la pensée philosophique à la fin du xme ...

In recent years, several cases about the legal personhood of nonhuman animals garnered global attention, e.g. the recognition of ‘basic rights’ for the Argentinian great apes Sandra and Cecilia. Legal scholars have embraced the animal turn, blurring the once sovereign boundaries between persons and objects, recognising nonhuman beings as legal subjects. The zoonotic origins of the Covid-19 pandemic stress the urgency of establishing ‘global animal law’ and deconstructing anthropocentrism. To this end, it is vital to also consider the extensive premodern (...) legal history that humans share with other animals. Over 200 so-called animal trials have been documented in premodern Europe. In these proceedings, certain nonhuman animals—particularly domestic pigs—were prosecuted, often resulting in their capital punishment or anathema. This paper takes a history of ideas approach to these historical instances where Western philosophy of law and philosophical anthropology intersect, problematising the notion that such trials constitute wholesome precedents of the kind of legal personhood presently debated in jurisprudence. My counter-hegemonic analysis of the legal prosecution and execution of several pigs in fifteenth-century France demonstrates that late mediaeval notions of criminality transcended the alleged human-nonhuman divide whilst reaffirming and reifying human distinctiveness. I propose that pig trials were local laboratories where Christian communities reflected upon the natural hierarchy of God’s creation. Ensuing the apparent breach of the prescribed boundaries of nature, these communities renegotiated and re-naturalised everyday interspecies sociability by utilising the offending animals to exemplify particular norms about what it means to be human, generally to the animals’ detriment. (shrink)

An analysis of the exemplary strategy of Pasquier reveals an intriguing shift in the premises, procedures, and goals of his history, arising from the superimposition of an internalized medieval task on a very different humanist, or classicist, task. Machiavelli's classicizing exempla undermine his theory, while Pasquier's medieval exempla make sense of the Machiavellian project, and can be seen to disconnect the reader from the exemplary. Pasquier retains the Machiavellian analysis of efficiency while subverting the duty of heroic imitation. (...) The priority of consensual purpose over individual action which David assigned to the medieval exemplum reinforces the priority of community over citizen in Pasquier's historical politics. Pasquier's exempla impose on the French reader the obligation of assimilating his or her own laws and history. His initiative is felicitous in comparison with modern projects as well; he reaffirms morality as essentially public, shared, and refuses the inconsistency of deriving a public morality from an infinity of personal acts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the four (...) years of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews (...) became financially less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism. (shrink)

Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored (...) monarchies within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role. (shrink)

Cet article pose la question de savoir dans quelle mesure les émotions ont été un élément de construction du genre par les théologiens médiévaux. Il montre dans un premier temps que la sensibilité, bien que régulièrement associée au féminin, n’a pas constitué un élément important de distinction des sexes avant le xiiie siècle. Le motif de la sensibilité féminine a même pu être utilisé au service d’une lecture égalitaire de certains passages bibliques en plaçant le féminin dans l’humain. Dans un (...) second temps, nous étudions une émotion particulière, la verecundia, souvent associée au voile et, par-là, aux femmes. C’est l’occasion de montrer comment une “émotion” régulièrement appliquée aux hommes, a pu être construite comme spécifiquement féminine en ce qu’elle exprime la réserve et la soumission attendue de la femme qui accepte la médiation masculine que signifie le voile, tout en lui ouvrant un chemin vers le salut et même vers la gloire. La verecundia apparaît ainsi pour les femmes comme un chemin vers la gloire à travers la honte qui se définit en vertu. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin was summarizing. Finally, it demonstrates the lasting impact (...) of corporatist law in eighteenth-century France, highlighting Rousseau’s direct borrowings from the corporatist language and logic of contemporary commercial societies. In this regard, the article revisits and updates Otto von Gierke’s classic argument about the origins of the state in corporatist thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic LiteraturesCary Howie (bio)Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2008, xii + 254 pp.Sahar Amer’s Crossing Borders adds to the expanding bibliography on medieval sexualities by showing the resonances between certain female same-sex relationships in medieval French literature and analogous, though generally more (...) explicit, relationships between women in the medieval Arabic tradition. In the process, sexuality becomes a way of talking about the porous boundaries that constitute the field of Old French, and perhaps even Western, literature as such.Amer’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time, as Sarkozy’s French government once again, in the name of French values, intervenes in the debates around religion and clothing in the public sphere, debates in which the old divides between France and its constitutive others—in this case, certain kinds of Islam and certain kinds of women— have once again come to the fore. By proposing that “medieval French writing is essentially a hybrid, cross-cultural project” (163), Amer contributes not just to the emerging sense of the Middle Ages’ postcoloniality (as articulated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Sharon Kinoshita, among others) but also to the work being done by intellectual historians and cultural theorists such as Joan Scott and Diane Rubenstein on the fantastic investments that take place within and around French universalism (which could be said to inform the idea of the literary no less than the idea of the citizen).Crossing Borders begins with the notion of borders as “fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration” (ix), and it is the emphasis on a more general sense of cultural exchange, more than the fact of borders per se, that will permeate the chapters that follow. (In fact, the border, like “the lesbian,” Amer’s polemical term of choice for the women she describes, may be important for her argument precisely insofar as it resists visibility, as it remains to some extent difficult to locate.) Amer’s reading of Old French texts, in dialogue with a handful of medieval Arabic narratives and erotic compilations, proceeds from an understanding of medieval culture in which there is “a continuity rather than a rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of alternative [End Page 156] sexualities” (9), and in which it is possible to argue for influences that are tough, if not impossible, to trace empirically. According to this logic, ideas and stories may have circulated “next to” more tangible material goods taken to and from the Arab Islamicate world (13), and French authors may have “culled some elements from Arabic material and wove[n] them into a literary fabric to suit their audience’s sensibilities” (163). This attentiveness to what “may have” happened (e.g., 44, 110) is one of the signature gestures of Amer’s critical poetics, which I am tempted to describe as an imaginative historicism, committed at once to the explanatory power of historical context and to what Amer will repeatedly call the “imagination of the audience” (e.g., 79).After an initial chapter outlining this “cross-cultural” poetics of contextualization and imaginative investment, chapter 2, “Crossing Linguistic Borders,” is dedicated to seven stanzas of a late twelfth-century poem, Étienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, in which a long description is given of women who go “against Nature” by “join[ing] shield to shield without a lance” (32). Amer reads these military metaphors for female homoeroticism in light of Arabic sources including, for example, al-Jurjani’s eleventh-century Anthology of Metonymic Devices, in which one of the cited commonplaces observes, “They [lesbians] manifest a war in which there is no spear-thrusting” (36). Most provocatively, Amer argues for the Arabic provenance of two otherwise untranslatable words in Étienne’s text, “trutennes,” which she traces to an Arabic root meaning “the mons of the beloved” (40), and “eu,” which she interprets as an orgasmic onomatopoeia. From mons to moans, the “medieval French literary lesbian” is a condensation of forms and fantasies—and noises—that come from before and beyond medieval France. In fact, the... (shrink)

An essential element among medieval church furnishings was the tabernacle or sacrament house, where the consecrated Host was placed for storage toward the end of the Mass. While the most numerous and best studied of such tabernacles to survive are in and around Germany, this article offers a first comprehensive account of medieval tabernacles preserved in the Basque Country (País Vasco/Euskadi) of northern Spain; scholars have hitherto overlooked these tabernacles. The focus here is on tabernacles created between the (...) councils of Lateran IV (1215) and Trent (1545–1563), when a lack of clear prescriptions resulted in considerable variety. All examples studied were produced in the late Gothic and early Renaissance styles, and these tabernacles’ forms fall into two types: wall niches and freestanding towers. Many tabernacles consist only of architectural frames, but some feature elaborate iconographic programs; while some are true works of art, many others are rather modest or based on fine models but executed in a provincial manner. A fascinating aspect is the Atlantic geographic connections that become manifest in the Basque tabernacles, particularly to northern France and the Low Countries, with which the Basques were closely linked through maritime commerce. (shrink)

When contemporary philosophers look at the medieval debate on intentionality, they usually have in mind what we call “Brentano’s thesis”. Indeed, Brentano ascribes to some medieval philosophers the thesis according to which objects of thought have a special kind of being that explains how can our thoughts be about this or that kind of things. Here, we decided to focus on the debates among the so-called “Latin Averroists”, because they clearly show that the medieval question on intentionality (...) cannot be reduced to the well-known theory of intentional beings. More precisely, we endeavored to understand an apparently strange question that appeared in the faculties of arts in France and in Italy in the 14th century: to which category do intentions in the mind belong to? In Aristotelian terms: are they substances or accidents? The problem is the following: if they are accidents, how can they represent something else that an accident? If they are substances, what does it mean to affirm that we have substances in the mind, even intentional substances? After a detailed analysis of the responses one can find in Siger of Brabant, Angelo of Arezzo, Matthew of Gubbio, John of Göttingen, Anthony of Parma, Bartholomew of Bruges and John of Jandun, we try to show that only a very few philosophers adopted the formal identity thesis , according to which the object in the mind is formally identical with the object known outside the mind. This shows that a lot of medieval philosophers didn’t limit intentionality to intentional being or formal identity, but also considered other explanations of how the human mind can think about objects for which no representation can be found in the mind. (shrink)