Transcription of a tract on the plague from a German manuscript from ca 1463, Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. germ. 1, fol. 51ra-rb.

The Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) has been treated by commentators as wide-ranging as Borges, Renan, and Kilito as an exemplary case of the failure of translation. Critics who presume Ibn Rushd’s failure often concentrate on his rendering of Aristotle’s tragedy and comedy by praise…[Read more]

This dissertation considers how Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156, implemented reform through a textual program. Peter’s abbacy witnessed a period of fundamental reconstruction, in which not only the practices of Cluniac monasticism, but also its mentality and institutional ethos underwent dramatic change. This period e…[Read more]

This is a preprint draft of the chapter appearing in the De Gruyter volume, Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

This discussion of Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature (2014), a magisterial contribution to South Asian literature edited by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb, situates this work within broader trends within the discipline of comparative literature and cross-cultural poetics. I consider how this volume…[Read more]

This course covers autobiographical writings in Persian from premodern times to contemporary Iran. It reflects the emergence of autobiographical writing in the first days of Islam and an evolving sense of self, identity, and cultural cohesion, and then records transitions within the political/economic power structures in the geographical region.…[Read more]

Marco HEILES, Die Handschrift MS Broxbourne 84.3 der Bodleian Library, Manuskript, Oxford 2010.

Manuscript description of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne 84.3, German manuscript, 15th century (a. 1469).

The subject of this paper is a fragment of a liturgical book that is a part of the manuscript fragment collection in the holdings of the Utrecht University Library Special Collections. The fragment was brought to light in the 1960s, after it was rebound into a manuscript belonging to the St. Paul’s Abbey, Utrecht, where it was inserted during t…[Read more]

‘Passio Iudeorum Pragensium’, a late fourteenth–century pogrom narrative from Bohemia, provides many unique insights into the medieval tradition of pogrom narratives. It is preserved in the form of a number of related but distinct textual units that allow us to examine the discursive nature of texts such as these. This discursiveness is illus…[Read more]

In reconstructing the events leading to the Prague Easter massacre of 1389, perhaps the deadliest anti-Jewish pogrom in the Bohemian lands prior to WWII, modern historian relied for the most part on literary sources. Yet, these sources composed in Latin, Czech, German and Hebrew pose many problems. Not only are there few historians who can…[Read more]

Manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6298 contains an as yet unexamined fragment of the second batch of the gospel glosses (EvII) from the biblical commentaries of the Canterbury School inserted as an addition in 3r of the manuscript. In this article, I describe this fragment, and I attempt to contextualize its insertion into the…[Read more]

This document provides the description and transcript of a set of liturgical fragments from the holdings of University Library in Utrecht. The fragments belong to a twelfth-century breviary, probably from St. Paul’s Abbey in Utrecht.

The reign of Louis the Pious was marked by a series of ecclesiastical and monastic reforms, directed by the Imperial Court. Given that the initiative for these reforms came from the court and not necessarily from the very communities involved, the debate about them also touched upon the question of who would have the right to intervene in monastic…[Read more]

Besides glosses and other textual annotations, early medieval Latin manuscript commonly feature technical signs, annotation symbols and sigla that reflect readership or provide a framework for interpretation and use. The early medieval Insular book users were particularly keen on using such devices. This article maps the usage of technical signs…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Pearl-poem has seen a significant jump in recent years, due largely to the influx of eco-critical readings throughout Medieval studies. Gillian Rudd’s recent book Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature explores a new and exciting reading of the poem’s natural environment, claiming that the rose met…[Read more]

It is the purpose of this essay to show how, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troy stories (The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde), literary innovation figures as temporal and categorical purification and hybridization. I aim to show that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde implicitly stages literary innovation in terms of the textual strategies that are exp…[Read more]

This study reveals that in medieval Dutch vernacular texts (from the Brabantine authors Jan van Boendale, Lodewijk van Velthem, and Jan van Leeuwen, and in the anonymous Boek van Sidrac) the treatment of individual and universal eschatological topics and themes, such as death, heaven, hell, purgatory, the Antichrist, eschatological people, and…[Read more]

The extensive chains of excerpts from the Scriptures and other sources in two of the narratives prominent in the Virtutes apostolorum, the Acts of Peter (BHL 6663) and the Acts of Paul (BHL 6575) are studied in order to come to a clearer understanding of the origin of these Latin texts. The Virtutes apostolorum is an amalgam of textual material…[Read more]