Sharon Farmer

Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives

Both in his preoccupation with practical ethics and in the positions that he took, Thomas of Chobham generally resembled other theologians who studied in Paris at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. On first consideration, however, his statements concerning married women appear quite eccentric. Thomas argued in his Manualfor Confessors (c. 1215) that women should employ persuasion, feminine enticements, and even deceit in their attempts to influence and correct the moral and economic behavior of their husbands:

Aristocratic Power and the “Natural” Landscape: The Garden Park at Hesdin, ca. 1291–1302

In 1292, at the age of forty-two, Count Robert II of Artois returned to his county in northern France after spending much of his adult life advancing the interests of members of his family—the French royal family—in North Africa, northern Spain, and southern Italy. After he relocated to France, Roberts employees and household familiars included nine men from southern Italy and Sicily, three from northern Italy and five from northern Iberia. With the assistance of these immigrant employees Robert revolutionized his comital and household administration, began breeding war horses at his stud farm in Normandy, and constructed the most famous northern European garden park of the later Middle Ages—the park of Hesdin. The role of these immigrants in reshaping Artois provides compelling evidence that the colonizing and crusading experiences of northern Europeans led to important transformations at home.

Conflict, Encounter, and the Materiality of the Text: Christian and Jewish Sacred Texts in Europe and North America, c. 1250–1700

In the beginning was the Word, the Word became text, and, consequentially, the medium became part of the message. Over the centuries, the medium that frames Hebrew and Christian Scriptures has varied considerably, with significant changes taking place during episodic periods of cultural and religious crisis, division, and encounter. The essays in this volume closely examine some of those episodes, with surprising results. As we learn from Jourden Travis Moger’s essay, for instance, only by closely examining one of the woodcuts in Martin Luther’s 1534 edition of the German Bible can we come to understand the full implications of its eschatological message. As we learn from Roman Fischer’s discussion of Johannes Dietenberger’s German Catholic translation of the Bible, also published in 1534, confessional disagreements explain only a small fraction of the differences between Dietenberger’s and Luther’s German translations of the Bible; and indeed, similarities between the two translations far outweigh the differences. And as we learn from Ann Plane’s discussion of uses of material Bibles in seventeenth-century New England, even in the midst of violent conflict between their competing cultures, Puritan and Native American New Englanders shared a belief in the talismanic power of the Christian Bible. This special issue opens with Richard and Mary Rouse’s discussion of “Santa Barbara’s Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible.” The manuscript in question is representative of the most important material transformation to occur in the entire history of Catholic and Protestant Bibles: the development of the ‘Paris Bible,’ which first emerged in thirteenth-century Paris, but was soon produced in towns throughout Catholic Europe. For the first time, the Christian Bible as we know it today was compressed into a single, portable, volume that included all of the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. This new format required technical advancements, including the production of tissue thin parchment and the development of tiny, but highly legible, gothic letters and abbreviations. The new Paris Vulgate Bible also included framing devices, such as chapter numbers

La Zisa/Gloriette: Cultural Interaction and the Architecture of Repose in Medieval Sicily, France and Britain

Abstract Recent scholarship has called attention to the common features shared by five French and British elite centres of leisure called ‘gloriette’ that were built or so-named in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Because these centres of repose and entertainment were located in principal residences, and thus were not garden pavilions, it has been suggested that there was no relationship between the northern gloriettes and the garden pavilion of La Zisa in Palermo, Sicily, whose name also meant ‘the glorious’. This article draws on archival sources in order to enhance our understanding of the resemblances between the gloriette of Hesdin, in northern France, and the four gloriettes in England and Wales. Drawing on the significant features of these five northern gloriettes, it also takes another look at the details of La Zisa, suggesting that we should not be so quick to dismiss its possible influence on the northern gloriettes, most especially the two that were built by King Edward I and Count Robert II of Artois after they had passed through Palermo in 1270/72.