Seminars

During the High Middle Ages, a new artistic practice arose that challenged the boundaries of visual media: artisans and patrons increasingly inserted portable devotional objects such as relics and painted panels into the immobile frescoes, mosaics, and architectural sculpture that adorned churches across Western Europe and the Byzantine East. Yet despite its widespread application—found even in the renowned Arena Chapel in Padua—the tradition has never been systematically studied. In this talk, I offer an introduction to the combinatory practice of embedding with a particular focus on twelfth- through fourteenth-century Italy. Considered together with the devotional concerns of medieval viewers, the mixing of different media had powerful theological consequences. It registers an understanding of the wall surface as a charged site for mediating—and containing—the divine. And in this way, embedded objects confront us with a distinctly medieval and cross-cultural paradigm of intermediality.

In this talk I track how the language of Middle English poetry densifies around pearls and becomes precious—precious in both senses of the word: on the one hand, rare and valuable; on the other, refined, even to the point of fussiness. Pearls feature regularly in Middle English writing, from lapidaries and romance to poems such as Pearl, in which the gem becomes an index of value itself. Pearls enable this rhetoric of preciousness because of their distinctive material composition. Grown inside a mollusk as the result of trauma, pearls acquire multiple coats of a calcium carbonate secretion called nacre that yields the gem’s classic play of rainbow tints. The outermost layers allow some light to pass through them, which reflects on the deeper layers, making the pearls faintly translucent. Surface and depth interact, giving the gem interior life. Poetic language similarly reverberates among multiple sounds and meanings through rhyme, puns, repetition, etc. Pearly diction also engages with figurative language to develop meanings occurring on several planes of representation. In an explicit analogy with human reproduction, natural histories and lapidaries explain the etiology of pearls as dew that drops from the sky into the mollusk’s opened shell. The origination theory invites explicit comparison with the Christian Incarnation. Human reproduction is also invoked to explain the formation of gems, acquiring what natural philosophers call mineral virtue (virtus mineralis). I close by considering the connection between the provenance of pearls and the native resources of Middle English poetry.

In reading the works of Albertus Magnus, or those of other theologian-philosophers of and before the mid-thirteenth century — including those of his student, St. Thomas — their uni-directional worldview is so beautifully woven, it appears impregnable, supported as it was at every point by its ties to theology and revelation. And yet, by the final decades of the thirteenth century, in the works of leading university scholars in varied fields of knowledge, one can see this unidirectional hierarchy unravelling—replaced by the destabilizing implications of relativism. In my talk I hope to offer several explanations for this crucial intellectual development.

Fagolidori and senecias are defiant and persistent ghost words across a thousand years of texts. Tracing their history uncovers relationships between scribes and exegetes, scholars and poets, all interacting across centuries and disciplines in a search for authenticity and meaning. Their account takes us from late antiquity to the birth of the modern dictionary, from Carolingian scribes and exegetes to the poetry of Gower and Skelton, and the commentaries of Erasmus. Fagolidori and senecias offer an opportunity to examine the history not only of biblical transmission and multilingual scholarship with their attendant scribal and orthographic peculiarities, but also serve as ideal test examples for the development of lexicography and to demonstrate the endurance of medieval scholarship into the age of print. This presentation will explore the tale of these long-forgotten words and what their journey and afterlife reveal about the processes of textual transmission and migration of knowledge, language evolution, and scholarly practices over a millennium. The words are significant through their reception history into nineteenth-century sources still widely in use, which also show their continuing influence on modern scholarly interaction and epistemological assumptions. A range of rare materials from Burke’s collection will be on hand for participants to examine to illustrate their course through the ages.

In August 1250, after the failure of the so-called Seventh crusade, Louis IX wrote a letter to his French subjects. This letter has never been the subject of scholarly interest, despite the fact that it represents the king’s own account of the disastrous events of 1250 that resulted devasting human loss, the collapse of his crusade, and his own capture. Since its first publication in 1611, our knowledge of this letter has rested on a single manuscript exemplar (Bern Bürgerbibliothek ms. 22). This paper proceeds from the questions that emerged in my reedition of this letter from a second, superior witness found in BNF Latin 8865, which was taken from Blanche of Castille’s own vidimus copy of the letter. It is an attempt to place the letter in the information ecosystem that followed the battles of Mansurah (February 7, 1250), the Battle of Fariskur (April 5, 1250), and to assess its reception in France. It addresses the following questions: Who wrote it (if not Louis himself)? How was it received in France and did its reception have any substantive effects? What, if anything, was the letter’s afterlife?