Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Bernard, “The Late Medieval English Church”

A very interesting historical work by G.W. Bernard (University of Southampton) discussing the pre-Reformation Catholic Church in England: The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability Before the Break With Rome (YUP 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

The later medieval English church is invariably viewed through the lens of the Reformation that transformed it. But in this bold and provocative book historian George Bernard examines it on its own terms, revealing a church with vibrant faith and great energy, but also with weaknesses that reforming bishops worked to overcome.

Bernard emphasizes royal control over the church. He examines the challenges facing bishops and clergy, and assesses the depth of lay knowledge and understanding of the teachings of the church, highlighting the practice of pilgrimage. He reconsiders anti-clerical sentiment and the extent and significance of heresy. He shows that the Reformation was not inevitable: the late medieval church was much too full of vitality. But Bernard also argues that alongside that vitality, and often closely linked to it, were vulnerabilities that made the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries possible. The result is a thought-provoking study of a church and society in transformation.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Vallerani, “Medieval Public Justice”

Harold Berman famously argued that Western legal culture originated in the papal reforms of the High Middle Ages, which unleashed a torrent of law making throughout society. Catholic University Press has just released an English-language translation of University of Turin historian Massimo Vallerani’s work on the evolution of criminal trials in medieval Italy, Medieval Public Justice (2012), which includes statistical analyses of surviving court records. The publisher’s description follows.

In a series of essays based on surviving documents of actual court practices from Perugia and Bologna, as well as laws, statutes, and theoretical works from the 12th and 13th centuries, Massimo Vallerani offers important historical insights into the establishment of a trial-based public justice system. Challenging the long-standing evolutionary paradigm of medieval Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Müller, “The Criminalization of Abortion in the West”

Fordham historian Wolfgang P. Müller has written a new book on the origins of criminal punishment for abortion in western law, The Criminalization of Abortion in the West (Cornell 2012). The publisher’s description follows.

Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of “crime” in the modern sense of the word, which distinguished the term sharply from “sin” and “tort” and was tied to the rise of Western jurisprudence. To find the act of abortion first identified as a crime in the West, one has to go back to the twelfth century, to the schools of ecclesiastical and Roman law in medieval Europe.

In this book, Wolfgang P. Müller tells the story of how abortion came to be criminalized in the West. As he shows, criminalization as a distinct phenomenon and abortion as a self-standing criminal category developed in tandem with each other, first being formulated coherently in the twelfth century at schools of law and theology in Bologna and Paris. Over the ensuing centuries, medieval prosecutors struggled to widen the range of criminal cases involving women accused of ending their unwanted pregnancies. In the process, punishment for abortion went from the realm of carefully crafted rhetoric by ecclesiastical authorities to eventual implementation in practice by clerical and lay judges across Latin Christendom. Informed by legal history, moral theology, literature, and the history of medicine, Müller’s book is written with the concerns of modern readers in mind, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise divide modern and medieval sensibilities.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Jones, “The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World”

Another book about the medieval period, this one dealing with the fascinating subject of the importance of oratory and preaching in early Islam — The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World (CUP 2012) by Linda Jones (Institucion Mila y Fontanals).  The publisher’s description follows.

Oratory and sermons had a fixed place in the religious and civic rituals of pre-modern Muslim societies and were indispensible for transmitting religious knowledge, legitimizing or challenging rulers, and inculcating the moral values associated with being part of the Muslim community. While there has been abundant scholarship on medieval Christian and Jewish preaching, Linda G. Jones’s book is the first to consider the significance of the tradition of pulpit oratory in the medieval Islamic world. Traversing Iberia and North Africa from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the book analyzes the power of oratory, the ritual juridical and rhetorical features of pre-modern sermons, and the social profiles of the preachers and orators who delivered them. The biographical and historical sources, which form the basis of this remarkable study, offer abundant proof of cultural exchange between al-Andalus and the eastern regions of the Islamic empires, as preachers traveled back and forth between the great cities of Cordoba, Qayrawan, Baghdad, and Cairo. In this way, the book sheds light on different regional practices and the juridical debates between individual preachers around correct performance.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Eldevik, “Episcopal Power and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire”

A very interesting examination of the practice of tithing as a political instrument of power in the early medieval period — Episcopal Power and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire: Tithes, Lordship and Community , 950-1150 (CUP 2012) by John Eldevik (Hamilton College).  The publisher’s description follows.

Focusing on the way bishops in the eleventh century used the ecclesiastical tithe – church taxes – to develop or re-order ties of loyalty and dependence within their dioceses, this book offers a new perspective on episcopacy in medieval Germany and Italy. Using three broad case studies from the dioceses of Mainz, Salzburg and Lucca in Tuscany, John Eldevik places the social dynamics of collecting the church tithe within current debates about religious reform, social change and the so-called ‘feudal revolution’ in the eleventh century, and analyses a key economic institution, the medieval tithe, as a social and political phenomenon. By examining episcopal churches and their possessions not in institutional terms, but as social networks which bishops were obliged to negotiate and construct over time using legal, historiographical and interpersonal means, this comparative study casts fresh light on the history of early medieval society.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Levy, “Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages”

An absolutely wonderful looking book dealing with religion and political and legal authority round about the 15th century by Ian Christopher Levy (Providence College), Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages (Notre Dame 2012).  And note some very similar issues of textual interpretation which we see in our own day.  The publisher’s description follows.

All participants in late medieval debates recognized Holy Scripture as the principal authority in matters of Catholic doctrine. Popes, theologians, lawyers—all were bound by the divine truth it conveyed. Yet the church possessed no absolute means of determining the final authoritative meaning of the biblical text—hence the range of appeals to antiquity, to the papacy, and to councils, none of which were ultimately conclusive. Authority in the late medieval church was a vexing issue precisely because it was not resolved.

Ian Christopher Levy’s book focuses on the quest for such authority between 1370 and 1430, from John Wyclif to Thomas Netter, thereby encompassing the struggle over Holy Scripture waged between Wycliffites and Hussites on the one hand, and their British and Continental opponents on the other. Levy demonstrates that the Wycliffite/Hussite “heretics” and their opponents—the theologians William Woodford, Thomas Netter, and Jean Gerson—in fact shared a large and undisputed common ground. They held recognized licenses of expertise, venerated tradition, esteemed the church fathers, and embraced Holy Scripture as the ultimate authority in Christendom. What is more, they utilized similar hermeneutical strategies with regard to authorial intention, the literal sense, and the appeal to the fathers and holy doctors in order to open up the text. Yet it is precisely this commonality, according to Levy, that rendered the situation virtually intractable; he argues that the erroneous assumption persists today that Netter and Gerson spoke for “the church,” whereas Wyclif and Hus sought to destroy it.

Levy’s sophisticated study in historical theology, which reconsiders the paradigm of heresy and orthodoxy, offers a necessary adjustment in our view of church authority at the turn of the fifteenth century.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Lassner, “Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam”

This is an absolutely wonderful looking new study about the interaction of various religious traditions in the pre-early-medieval period — Jacob Lassner’s (Northwestern) Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities (Chicago 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly published medieval sources, describing life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.
Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Noble & Engen, eds., “European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century”

Wonderful looking collection of essays edited by Thomas F.X. Noble and John Van Engen (both of Notre Dame), European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

The “long twelfth century”—1050 to 1215—embraces one of the transformative moments in European history: the point, for some, at which Europe first truly became “Europe.” Historians have used the terms “renaissance,” “reformation,” and “revolution” to account for the dynamism of intellectual, religious, and structural renewal manifest across schools, monasteries, courts, and churches. Complicating the story, more recent historical work has highlighted manifestations of social crisis and oppression. In European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, nineteen accomplished medievalists examine this pivotal era under the rubric of “transformation”: a time of epoch-making change both good and ill, a release of social and cultural energies that proved innovative and yet continuous with the past.

Their collective reappraisal, although acknowledging insights gained from over a century of scholarship, fruitfully adjusts the questions and alters the accents. In addition to covering such standard regions as England and France, and such standard topics as feudalism and investiture, the contributors also address Scandinavia, Iberia, and Eastern Europe, women’s roles in medieval society, Jewish and Muslim communities, law and politics, and the complexities of urban and rural situations. With their diverse and challenging contributions, the authors offer a new point of departure for students and scholars attempting to grasp the dynamic puzzle of twelfth-century Europe.