Twelfth-Century 'Renaissance

A tradition of medieval scholarship has slowly been building resistance to the once-held consensus that exemplarity implies authority and thus an author’s always being in control of his or her text, which teaches an ostensible moral. Such new scholarship focuses largely on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English literature, but I would argue that the phenomenon of problematic exemplarity was well underway in the Latin literature of the twelfth century, as is evident in Abelard’s _Historia calamitatum_. This essay argues that Abelard foregrounds his life as exemplary and uses exempla and auctores to do so, but he fails on several fronts that involve conflicting authorities; his own ego, which obviates successful exemplarity; his problematic voicing of Heloise in her dissuasio nuptiarum; his vexed relationship with sympathy, a hallmark of exemplary figures; and his failure to live up to models to which he aspires. The essay finally considers audience reception of the _Historia_ and our frustrated moral reading in the inscribed figures of the hypothetical friend to whom the _Historia_ is addressed, in Heloise herself, and in ourselves as readers.

This study is a historical-analytical attempt to demonstrate the influence and contribution of Arab Islamic Mawashahat and Zajal on the Provencal lyrical poets – the Troubadours that sprang in south of France during the eleventh century. The study consists of three parts in which the first part represents the main part. It sheds light on the influence of Muwashashah and Zajal on the poetry of troubadours. The second part deals with the nature of troubadours and their relation with the poetry of Muwashashah and Zajal. It is supported with five troubadour poets. The last part goes back to the beginning of the European Renaissance in the twelfth century. The European Renaissance started in Italy decades after translations of Islamic heritage, literature and science from Arabic into Latin then from Latin to other European languages. The eighth through the eleventh centuries witnessed the glorious ages of Islamic civilization and sciences in which great portion of it was shifted t o Italy during and after the crusades. Thence, different parts of Europe were enlivened with the movement of translation and multi travels and cultural exchange. One of the changing factors is poetry as a branch of literature.

The Companion to John of Salisbury is the first collective study of this major figure in the intellectual and political life of 12th-century Europe to appear for thirty years. Based on the latest research, thirteen contributions by leading experts in the field provide an overview of John of Salisbury’s place in the political debates that marked the reign of Henry II in England as well as of his place in the history of the Church. They also offer a detailed introduction to his philosophical works (Metalogicon, Entheticus), his political thought (Policraticus) and his writing of history (Historia pontificalis).

Approaching the subject from an interdisciplinary point of view, in the present article I will suggest an interpretation of several capitals in the Romanesque church at the monastery of San Martín de Frómista (Palencia) in light of the urban revolts at the beginning of the twelfth century in León-Castile. I will also claim a later chronology for the church, whose construction frequently has been located in the second half of the eleventh century. A document making reference to the construction of the monastery of Frómista is dated 1066; it states that an ample donation of land was included along with a subordinate neighborhood of townspeople. Through an architectural and iconographic analysis of the building and the close reading of a narrative source, the so-called Primera crónica anónima de Sahagún (c.1117), I will propose that the church of San Martín was constructed around 1120, after the subordination of the monastery to Cluny two years earlier.

"In the best-known in C. S. Lewis's (1898-1963) heptad of children's books about Narnia, an old professor is approached by two children who worry that their little sister is deranged because she claims to have passed through a wardrobe into another world. After the two give a full rehearsal of her behaviour and answer a few pointed questions, Lewis subjects the evidence to logical analysis...Although formal logic is taught even less often today than it was in the Professor's--or Lewis's--day, the situation in the twelfth century was altogether different. The stock of logic or dialectic stood as high in the schools of twelfth-century western Europe as it had ever done--and as it ever would do again. In other words, eight hundred years ago the schoolmasters did teach logic."

Vincentius Bishop of Cracow was Poland’s first native chronicler and a proud contributor to the twelfth century renaissance. In the Chronica Polonorum he placed his people’s history on a continuum with the classical world. This work brings to light the importance of Poland on the making of Europe. "Making of a Medieval Nation" presents in depth analysis of a twelfth-century author’s construct of a history of his nation with emphasis on virtue and civic accountability. The author, Vincentius, was a Polish clergyman. He was educated in Paris and Bologna and became the first canonically elected bishop of Cracow and a participant of the Fourth Council of Lateran. Vincentius gives eye witness accounts of the development of the twelfth century Poland and the ambitions of its dynasty, the integration of the Polish monarchy into Christendom, and the interaction between Western and Polish elites. Vincentius’ narrative maps the cultural exchange and life of the author, his literary erudition, and the historical evidence he presents are primary examples of that exchange. The work of Vincentius is a significant contribution to the twelfth-century renaissance. It demonstrates the strong influence of Ancient Rome, including its history, law and traditions. This book deals with a number of subjects which increasingly gain prominence in English language scholarship: the Christianisation of the periphery, development of political culture, diffusion and growth of ideas, and the integration of the outer regions of Europe into Christendom due to cultural, political and economic interaction. This volume analyses the author, his text and the work’s Polish historiography. It provides important insights into the development of Europe at its periphery and the contribution of Poland to the twelfth-century renaissance.

1. Cet article est issu dun travail commencé aux journées détudes «Calcidius et le Timée : état de la question» (CNRS-Villejuif, 13-14 mai 2004) organisées par B. Obrist et moi-même dans le cadre du «Séminaire de philosophie au Moyen Âge latin». Je remercie vivement Anca Vasiliu davoir accepté cet article dans la revue Chôra. Egerunt operosius Bernardus Carnotensis, et auditores eius, ut componerent inter Aristotilem et Platonem, sed eos tarde venisse arbitror, et laborasse in vanum, ut reconciliarent mortuos, qui quamdiu in vita licuit dissenserunt. Porro alius ut Aristotelem exprimat, cum Gilleberto episcopo Pictavensi, universitalitatem formis nativis attribuit, et in earum conformitate laborat. Est autem forma nativa, originalis exemplum, et quae non in menti Dei consistit, sed rebus creatis inhaeret. Haec graeco eloquio dicitur idos, habens se ad ideam ut exemplum ad exemplar. Sensibilis quidem in re sensibili, sed mente concipitur insensibilis. Singularis quoque in singulis, sed in omnibus universalis. 4

The main objective of this study is to offer the first critical edition, accompanied by an English translation and introductory study, of a tripartite Latin text addressing world astrology preserved in a single manuscript: MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1407, fols. 55r–62r (14th/15th century). This study also includes the Middle English translation of discontinuous sections of this tripartite Latin text as transmitted in MS London, Royal College of Physicians, 384, fols. 83v–85r. It is argued that the first part of this tripartite text incorporates a hitherto unknown Latin translation by Henry Bate of the lost third version of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s 'Sefer ha-ʿOlam'. The other two parts include two Latin translations, also carried out by Henry Bate, of treatises ascribed to Ya‘qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī, the 'philosopher of the Arabs'.

Full text open access (UGent site) >> https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8634997/file/8634998

This interdisciplinary PhD thesis, abridging the computational analysis of texts with medieval cultural history and literary studies, treats the collaborative aspect of twelfth-century Latin literature by applying computional stylistics, a methodology which allows to make a statistically founded assessment of disputed texts’ authorship(s) through the automatic detection of textual writing patterns. Five case studies of twelfth-century writing partnerships in Latin are investigated, in which sensitive questions surrounding authority, synergy and gender take a prominent place. These case studies involve Bernard of Clairvaux and his secretary Nicholas of Montiéramey († 1176/8), Elisabeth of Schönau (1129–1164/5) and her brother Ekbert († 1184), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and her biographers, Suger of Saint-Denis (1080/1–1151) and his entourage, and the renowned twelfth-century lovers and correspondents Heloise of Argenteuil († 1164) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142).

The aim is to contribute to and challenge the predominant historical and literary paradigms by which medieval authorship are studied, and allow to formulate new cultural-historical questions. Thereby the usual application of stylometric methods is extended beyond mere authorship attribution, and the practical and theoretical usefulness of computational stylistics  as a new model for the analysis of medieval Latin authorship is assessed. This thesis’s  most important hypothesis is that computational stylistics provides a more accurate and objective means for capturing the ‘distributionality’ of twelfth-century authorship.

The eventful twelfth century was, in many ways, a veritable paradox. On the one hand, it saw a sudden surge in academic works and universities in Western and Southern Europe that sought to bridge the worlds previously thought entirely incommensurable and usher in an age of scholasticism that would eventually lead to the fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Renaissance. For this reason, it has been a staple of mediaevalist scholarship for quite some time now to describe those thorough-going changes as the ‘renaissance of the twelfth century’. On the other hand, the same century also reads as a striking catalogue of most violent acts and disasters: from the rise of inquisition and merciless Christian infighting, over the first expulsions of Jews and the intensification of the Reconquista on Muslim Spain to the blood and gore of the Second, Third and German Crusades. Might it not be more appropriate, then, to characterise this period as an age of profound crisis, in which the true contours of a ‘persecuting society’ were drawn This paper seeks to make a modest contribution to that debate, by guiding the audience’s attention to a tell-tale aspect of high mediaeval life—that of sexual and gender diversity—and by expanding the view over the twelfth century so as to include the affairs in the Great Seljuk Empire (1037–1194), a vast Turko-Persianate Sunnī Muslim state that originated in Anatolia but quickly came to rule over much of the then Islamicate world. The paper considers, in particular, an unlikely rise of neo-Roman European civil law and Seljuk proto-civil legality and its formidable effect on two paradigmatic twelfth-century intellectual debates on the legal and theological standing of ‘sodomy’ (peccatum sodomiticum, liwāṭ): one in amongst prominent Benedictines and the other between the leading Ḥanafī scholars. It is argued that these debates, led in the distinct spirit of concordia discors (discordant harmony) or ikhtilāf (permissible scholarly disagreement), are indispensable for our understanding of legal and social aspects of sexual and gender diversity in the twelfth century and, in turn, the way in which certain rapturous pluralities were continued and ruptured—concomitantly.

It is widely known that medieval elites had a taste for exotic luxury. Princes, lay noblemen, ecclesiastical institutions and office-holders alike invested in luxury goods to demonstrate their newly acquired status and prestige, and by exchanging gifts to smooth relationships with neighbouring princes and noblemen or to establish and confirm particular hierarchical feudal relationships.  Hence luxury cloth, jewellery, precious gems and stones, weaponry and armour, horses etc. were sought-after items. Many even go as far as to state that the process of massive urbanization and the commercial revolution of the long twelfth century would not have been possible without this huge demand generated by the landed elites and the church; although conversely, the economic weakness of landlords towards the end of the period of medieval growth was to a certain degree self-inflicted, partly the result of their taste – some historians have not hesitated to call it ‘hunger’ – for luxury.

This article offers the first study and critical edition of the Liber de motibus planetarum (Lmp), a neglected Latin text on planetary theory that appears anonymously and without any clear indication of date or place of origin in nine manuscripts of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. An analysis of its sources and parallels to other Latin treatises and translations from Arabic indicates that the Lmp originated in England in the third quarter of the twelfth century. A plausible terminus post quem is provided by the appearance of similar passages in the anonymous treatise Ptolomeus et multi sapientum (1145), which can be linked to Abraham Ibn Ezra and his astronomical tables for the meridian of Pisa. The Lmp would appear to be historically significant for its relatively detailed textual and diagrammatic presentations of Ptolemy’s planetary models as composed of multipart physical orbs. While it is generally accepted that physicalized or ‘orbed’ versions of these models entered Latin astronomy through the influence of Ibn al-Haytham’s Maqāla fī hayʾat al-ʿālam (On the Configuration of the World), the early history of this idea in a Latin context has not been studied to any deeper extent. In this regard, the Lmp offers clear evidence that Ptolemaic orbs and diagrams representing them already were a part of Latin astronomy three centuries before Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum (1454).

De cara a dilucidar las interrelaciones entre la "civilización de lo escrito" y la conformación ideológica y administrativa de la monarquía feudal en el Occidente latino, resulta necesario primeramente abordar la cuestión del rol social que desempeñaron los clérigos áulicos (esto es, de palacio), en tanto que intelligentsia orgánica tanto de la Iglesia como del Estado en la Plena Edad Media.

The first English critical edition of the "Chronica Polonorum". The Chronica Polonorum by Bishop Vincentius of Cracow (c.1150–1223) was written in last decades of the twelfth century, a period when the throne of Poland was contested by rival members of the ruling Piast dynasty in a series of bloody civil wars. Vincentius was born in Poland c.1150 and probably studied in Italy and France, where he acquired his education and perfected his literary skill. After his return to Poland between 1183 and 1189, he became a canon of the cathedral of Cracow and a courtier close to Kazimierz II. Kazimierz had ruled as the princeps since 1177. After 1194 Vincentius became a provost in Sandomierz and chaplain to Kazimierz’s widow, Helena of Znojmo. Vincentius started work on the Chronicle in the late 1180s or the early 1190s at the behest of Kazimierz II. He had completed his text before 1208 when he was elected bishop of Cracow, one of the leading ecclesiastical offices in Piast Poland. During his pontificate he took part in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and was active in the implementation of the Gregorian Reform in his diocese. In 1218 Vincentius resigned his episcopacy to enter the Cistercian convent in Jędrzejów where he may have edited the final manuscript of the Chronicle. He died in 1223. The Chronicle provides an outline of the history of the Poles with particular emphasis on the events of the twelfth century which justified Kazimierz’s claim to the throne of Cracow and with it suzerainty of all Poland. Created against the background of the twelfth-century renaissance, it was written by a native Pole and demonstrates the erudition of the Polish elite and the recognition and appreciation of literary skill by the ruling dynasty. Vincentius offers a commentary on patterns of human behaviour, and his own view of morality through an elaborate use of philosophical and poetic digression and didactic admonition, sourced primarily from the works of philosophers, the poets of Antiquity and the Bible. Classical authors, including Ovid, Virgil and Horace, are quoted on some 150 occasions;  biblical texts appear in approximately 140 instances, with the most numerous quotations taken from the Old Testament, particularly the Books of Kings and the Book of Psalms.  This broad base of reference suggests that Vincentius directed his work towards a sophisticated, classically-educated readership that could understand and appreciate the complex plot, refined poetic form and many literary references..