Seminars

This paper explores what caused the widespread late-medieval transition from economic growth to economic decline—the “crisis of the fourteenth century”—through an in-depth examination of economic growth and decline in the Pyrenean Catalan town of Puigcerdà and its surrounding region, Cerdanya, during the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. Against traditional production-focused narratives based on northern European evidence, it argues that in this region, economic change, both positive and negative, and in particular, the onset of economic crisis in the fourteenth century—which, in Puigcerdà, was precipitous and severe—was sparked and shaped by political and institutional changes, often related to state-building and territorial warfare, and by the way that these changes shaped the choices available to merchants, artisans and peasants on the ground. More broadly, this paper thus argues for greater attention to political and institutional factors in analysis of late-medieval economic crisis.

The 1149 reconsecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem concretized the rhetoric of revival that anchored Latin claims to the Holy Land. New architectural elements, images, and inscriptions placed twelfth-century actions in dialogue with centuries of historical events. In addition to animating the site’s scriptural potency, masons and mosaicists situated the Byzantine past within a Latin present. The succession suggested by their spatial and visual contrast, however, belied the presence of a parallel patriarchate who continued to conduct worship in Greek and Arabic within the changed structure. This talk explores how architecture and objects articulated competing claims to rightful custodianship and how art historians model identity and interaction in space.

It is an oft-repeated, less oft studied commonplace that the reading of books in the Middle Ages was an enduringly, preferentially vocal affair. As scribes copied their exemplars, as choirs sang from service books, as readers read from their volumes in public or in private, they knew and employed the inked pages before them as beginning and ending in uttered sound. What, though, was sound for these medieval readers? What was the voice made of, what were sound’s material physics, and how did books weather the iterative sonic outpouring that was their native and active environment? In this talk, I review later medieval writings on the nature of sound, voice, and their interaction with physical bodies to advance an unfamiliar phenomenology of the premodern book that starts with the ear, instead of the eye, as a foremost site of embodied literate encounter.