Cornell University Press 2023 Medieval Studies Magazine

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THE EXCERPT

Introduction

The canonicity of Beowulf has obscured its peculiarity. As the poem’s position in academic and popular culture has become more entrenched, readers throughout the twentieth century have become less inclined to regard Beowulf as an entity fundamentally unlike anything with which it might be compared.1 Few today concern themselves with the question of why the poem is so strange, if they even consider it strange at all. The Beowulf poet is not thought of as an artist who radically altered the focal points of the material he inherited, yet that is what he appears to be when his creation is compared with all other extant works rooted in migration-period legend. None of these works is focused on a hero’s struggles against three monstrous adversaries. Instead, what we consistently find are stories of conflicting ethical imperatives, where protagonists are driven by circumstances to kill kinsmen, break oaths, and commit other atrocities. The Beowulf

1. For the history of the reception of Beowulf first among antiquarians and then among professional scholars, see T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, eds., Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1998). For discussion of the poem’s growing influence outside of the academy, see Kathleen Forni, Beowulf’s Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film (New York: Routledge, 2018); David Clark, ed., Beowulf in Contemporary Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2020); Nickolas Haydock and E. L. Risden, Beowulf on Film: Adaptations and Variations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013).

poet knew these stories—they were attached to Ingeld, Hengest, Sigemund, Eormenric, and nearly every major migration-period hero—yet he chose not to make one of them the central narrative of his epic. Such stories and their heroes are relegated to the poem’s background, while its foreground is focused on a gentle hero who fights against monsters, kills no kinsmen, breaks no oaths, believes in God, and behaves courteously. Compared with the heroes of the Nibelungenlied or Vǫlsunga saga, Beowulf appears an odd hero in a very odd poem. Reassessing the relationship between Beowulf and the tradition that likely existed prior to its composition, I attempt in this book to figure out why the poem is the way it is.

The contemporaneous poem Widsith, the most informative witness to the circulation of Germanic legend in early medieval England, provides reason to believe that Beowulf seemed odd in its own time.2 The catalogues preserved in Widsith include the names of dozens of kings and heroes who flourished (or were believed to have flourished) during the migration period, a semi-historical heroic age that extended from the end of the fourth century, when the Gothic king Eormenric died (ca. 375), to the end of the sixth century, when the Langobardic king Ælfwine died (ca. 572). The legends that were attached to the names listed in Widsith cannot always be found in external sources, but when they are preserved, it is fair to say that they do not resemble the legend attached to Beowulf, whose name is not present. As far as we can tell from extant sources, no person mentioned in Widsith was known in legendary tradition for exterminating monsters, exemplifying courtesy, abstaining from transgression, and dying well in old age. It is possible, of course, that legends of this sort were attached to other migration-period heroes in Old English sources that have not been preserved. Nevertheless, the impression given by Widsith, and corroborated by the digressions in Beowulf, is that the legends in circulation prior to the composition of Beowulf were predominantly tragic and amoral in character, focused

2. For discussion of the dating of Widsith, see R. W. Chambers, ed., Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 147–52; Kemp Malone, ed., Widsith, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1962), 116–17; Leonard Neidorf, “The Dating of Widsið and the Study of Germanic Antiquity,” Neophilologus 97, no. 1 (2013): 165–83; Rafael J. Pascual, “Old English Metrical History and the Composition of Widsið,” Neophilologus 100, no. 2 (2016): 289–302. Most of the poem’s scholars have considered Widsith a product of the seventh or eighth century, contemporary with if not anterior to the composition of Beowulf. On the value of Widsith as a witness to the circulation of Germanic legend in England, see R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952), 1–26, as well as the extensive commentary in the editions of Chambers and Malone.

on conflicting ethical imperatives and spectacular deaths.3 The Widsith poet accords considerable space to the heroes of the battle of Goths and Huns (ll. 109–130): he knows the dramatis personae of the Old Norse Hlǫðskviða, discussed below, which tells of a conflict between Gothic brothers that results in reluctant transgressions and innumerable deaths. Like the Beowulf poet, the Widsith poet knows of the tales of kin-slaying and oath-breaking associated with names such as Finn, Hnæf, Ingeld, and Hrothulf (ll. 27–29, 45–49). The Widsith poet also knows of the great kings killed in legend by their spouses or in-laws, such as Ætla, Guðere, Ælfwine, and Eormenric (ll. 5b–9a, 18, 65–67, 70–74, 88–92). What the Widsith poet appears not to have known is a migration-period hero comparable to Beowulf.

Critics active a century ago considered the peculiarity of Beowulf relative to antecedent legendary tradition one of the central problems emanating from the poem. For some critics, it was a defect to be lamented, while for others, it was a mystery requiring explanation. The cohort of major critics active during the first decades of the twentieth century turned away from the disintegrating practices characteristic of nineteenth-century scholarship. While the prevailing tendency among the previous generation was to explain the ostensible incongruities of Beowulf as signs of composite authorship—the by-products of a monkish redactor’s inartful combination of older pagan lays with newer Christian texts—the emerging tendency at the beginning of the twentieth century was to read Beowulf as a single poem, possibly composed by a single author, that happens to contain certain defective or perplexing features.4 W. P. Ker, writing at the very end of the nineteenth

3. The term “amoral” is used here and throughout in reference to the absence of a comforting or edifying “moral of the story” in migration-period legend. It does not imply that the characters depicted within this tradition have no sense of right and wrong. Hildebrand and Signý know that it is wrong to kill their children, and Hengest knows it is wrong to break his oath and kill his lord, yet circumstances compel them to do what they consider abhorrent. What is absent is not a concern with right and wrong but a concern with good and evil. Hildebrand, Signý, and Hengest (among many others) commit the most profound transgressions conceivable, but they are not conceived of as evil or malevolent characters. Their legends focus not on conflicts between good and evil but on conflicting imperatives and compelled transgressions.

4. For a lucid account of this paradigm shift, see T. A. Shippey, “Structure and Unity,” in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 149–74. For examples of the disintegrating approach, see Karl Müllenhoff, “Die innere Geschichte des Beovulfs,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum 14 (1869): 193–244; Bernhard ten Brink, Beowulf: Untersuchungen (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1888); F. A. Blackburn, “The Christian Coloring in the Beowulf,” PMLA 12, no. 2 (1897): 205–25.

century, acknowledges the “theories of agglutination and adulteration” that had developed around Beowulf but proposes that it may still be worthwhile to evaluate the poem as a unitary work, since it “continues to possess at least an apparent and external unity.” As it stands, the poem constitutes “a single book, considered as such by its transcribers, and making a claim to be so considered.”5 Ker proceeds from here to develop a reading of Beowulf as a work that is magnificent in its tone and style but defective in its plot and structure. Seven years later, Ker summarized his position in words that would reverberate in much subsequent criticism:

The great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style. In construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is undeniably weighty. The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors.6

Embedded in Ker’s assessment is an argument about the relationship between Beowulf and antecedent legendary tradition. In his view, Beowulf has retained the dignity and grandeur of earlier heroic tradition but implausibly attached this elevated style to a plot derived from folkloric tradition. The genuinely dignified and grand plots of heroic legend remain present in Beowulf, but they are confined to the digressions (“the outer edges”), while the monster fights that might have been digressions in a well-constructed epic (along the lines of the cyclops episode in the Odyssey) are here presented as the central narrative. For Ker, writing in an evaluative mode, the prominence accorded monster fights rather than conflicting loyalties in Beowulf is both a departure from antecedent tradition and a serious aesthetic defect.

R. W. Chambers concurred with Ker’s assessment. In his 1912 edition of Widsith, Chambers attempts to reconstruct the legends potentially

5. W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan, 1897), 182, 183.

6. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1904), 253.

known to the Widsith poet. In the course of a discussion of the Ingeld legend, Chambers turns to the digression on Ingeld in Beowulf and expresses some dismay that the poet did not do more with this material: “Nothing could better show the disproportion of Beowulf, which ‘puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges,’ than this passing allusion to the story of Ingeld. For in this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge we have a situation which the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.”7 Quoting Ker and regarding Beowulf as a structurally disproportionate work, Chambers shares the view that the poem’s concentration on a plot that had nothing to do with conflicting loyalties is both an untraditional feature and an aesthetic defect.8 A similar view was expressed by Ritchie Girvan in 1935 at the conclusion of his study of the folkloric elements in Beowulf. In defense of the theory that Beowulf was a historical (or pseudo-historical) Geatish nobleman to whom folktales had been attached, Girvan writes that an advantage of this theory is that it helps explain why the poet “chose just this [folkloric] subject, when to our modern judgment there were at hand so many greater, charged with the splendour and tragedy of humanity, and in all respects worthier of a genius as astonishing as it was rare in Anglo-Saxon England.”9 A paradoxical assessment of the Beowulf poet emerges from the criticism of Ker, Chambers, and Girvan: on the one hand, this poet is a towering genius who imbued his work with a dignified style and a noble spirit; on the other hand, he erred in his selection of subject matter and would have composed a better poem if he had chosen to focus on a traditional plot of heroic legend, such as we find in the tale of Ingeld, rather than on the monster fights of a benevolent hero.

The passages from Ker, Chambers, and Girvan quoted above have become infamous in Beowulf criticism on account of their inclusion in

7. Chambers, Widsith, 79–80.

8. In a separate essay on Beowulf first published in 1925, Chambers went on to write: “The inferiority of Beowulf is manifest first of all in the plot. The main story of Beowulf is a wild folk-tale. There are things equally wild in Homer: Odysseus blinds the Cyclops, and Achilles struggled with a river-god: but in Homer these things are kept in their right places and proportions. The folk-tale is a good servant but a bad master: it has been allowed in Beowulf to usurp the place of honour, and to drive into episodes and digressions the things which should be the main stuff of a well-conducted epic.” See R. W. Chambers, “Beowulf and the ‘Heroic Age’ in England,” in Man’s Unconquerable Mind: Studies of English Writers, from Bede to A. E. Housman and W. P. Ker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 64–65.

9. Ritchie Girvan, Beowulf and the Seventh Century: Language and Content, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1971), 84.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s seminal 1936 lecture to the British Academy on “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” These three authors, addressed with reverence by Tolkien, were the principal critics taken to task for failing to appreciate the monsters. Tolkien wonders “if something has not gone wrong with ‘our modern judgement’ ” insofar as it assumes that a heroic story “on a strictly human plane” must be superior to a story that involves the supernatural. He observes the contradiction present in criticism that simultaneously praises and disparages Beowulf: “Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us . . . in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures.”10 Tolkien queries the assumption that the epic of Ingeld desired by modern critics would be superior to Beowulf; he doubts that it would possess the same noble spirit and moral gravity. He contends, ultimately, that the untraditional character of the poem is the source of its aesthetic strength rather than a fundamental weakness: “Beowulf is not, then, the hero of an heroic lay, precisely. He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy. It is not an irritating accident that the tone of the poem is so high and its theme so low. It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod.”11 The Beowulf poet, in Tolkien’s view, is “a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical.” The poet knows that his heroes lived before the Christian revelation, and he finds poignancy in the defiant heroism and virtuous conduct of characters who were “heathen, noble, and hopeless.” As a symbolic meditation on the transitory nature of life that is both fantastical and historical, a cosmic struggle between good and evil set in “the named lands of the North,” Beowulf is manifestly not one of the traditional poems but is rather “a measure and interpretation of them all.”12

Tolkien’s rebuttal to Ker, Chambers, and Girvan was wildly successful. Redirecting the study of Beowulf and putting to rest the notion

10. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95, at 254, 256, 257.

11. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 260. The Old English text can be translated as “life is transitory: everything dissipates, light and life together.”

12. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” 269, 264, 259.

Three QuesTions wiTh

AGOSTINO PARAVICINI BAGLIANI & NESLIHAN SENOCAK editors of

A People’s Church

1. What inspired you to write this book?

When I started visiting Italy to conduct research, I was struck by how the sheer number of local archives, state archives, capitular archives (i.e. archives of the chapter of a cathedral), episcopal archives and monastic archives. Italy is a marvellous place to study medieval religious history. However, despite this richness, the study of Italy in the Anglophone historiography lacks very much behind that of England, Germany and France. In some part, this is in part caused by the rather localized focus of the Italian-language scholarship.

2. What will attract colleagues in the field to your book?

This is practically a handbook that covers broad aspects of the religious history in medieval Italy (bishops, papacy, urban and civic religion, monasticism, confraternities, etc). So, anyone who wishes to have a broad information about any of these topics can start with reading these chapters before they dive into more specific inquiries. The book will serve as a reference, but it also contains a lot of detailed information, each of which can lead to particular research strands. Each chapter also

“The book will serve as a reference, but it also contains a lot of detailed information.”

There are truly great Italian historians, whose linguistic, paleographical, and diplomatics skills in deciphering archival records are unparalleled but overall they are reluctant to write books of generalization and synthesis, in a way rightly so, since any attempt at generalization will cover up the marvellous idiosyncrasies of rich variety of the colors and shapes like a black coat over a colorful canvas. One of the great inspirations for me was to fill in this vacuum of synthesis and showcase the work of a small group of these great Italian scholars by translating them into English. I wanted the book to be a solid introduction to the field of medieval Italian religious history, and to attract the attention of historians to the richness of religious life in medieval Italy.

offers a select bibliography to lead the scholars to more particular areas of research they are interested in.

3. How will your book make a difference to the field?

Even for the understanding of the history of Italy in the last 1-2 centuries, and even today, a survey of the great historical influence of the Church to Italian Society is needed. The ecclesiastical institutions have ill today profoundly influenced not only the urban landscape of the Italian cities—as each traveller to Italy may ascertain, but also the countryside.

Three QuesTions wiTh JUSTINE TROMBLEY author of A Diabolical Voice

1. What inspired you to write this book?

The main inspiration for this book was a fascination with the intense complexity of both Marguerite Porete and the Mirror of Simple Souls. As studies on them both have progressed over the past seventy years, we have seen that Marguerite and her Mirror constantly defy neat categorization and single narratives, and branch out into seemingly endless paths, twists, and turns in their histories. In writing this book, I really wanted to emphasize that complexity, and I wanted to bring one of those new and surprising paths to the fore, to

heresies, and set out to engage and refute those heresies at length.

3. What will attract colleagues in the field to your book?

For those who work on Marguerite Porete and the Mirror, my book offers a new perspective on the history of the Mirror’s reception, as well as entirely new sources through the discovery of new manuscripts and other primary source material. Within the field of heresy studies more broadly, my book further details the ambiguity of heresy and orthodoxy, and how

show that, yet again, the Mirror of Simple Souls is a book with a history that continues to yield new perspectives and constantly challenges previous perceptions of it.

2. How will your book make a difference in the field?

It challenges the idea that Marguerite Porete was condemned purely as a result of politics, or her gender, or because of a misrepresentation or deliberate misunderstanding of her ideas. Instead, it shows that a range of churchmen—many of whom were entirely ignorant both of its authorship and its 1310 condemnation—studied the Mirror at length and saw in it what they believed were real, dangerous

even when attempting to discuss something already condemned as heretical, churchmen could hold multiple viewpoints. Finally, the book shows how the detailed study of a text’s manuscript tradition can transform scholarly perspectives of its reception and circulation.

“My book further details the ambiguity of heresy and orthodoxy.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

Around the year 1100 the count of Brienne in Champagne gave the monastery of Molesme a woman ( femina) as a gift, for his father’s soul and for his own.1 At first glance she appears to fit the stereotype of the downtrodden peasant, someone unfree—a woman at that, making it worse—who is treated as property, something to be given as a gift, by a powerful lord much more interested in prayers for his late father’s soul than the welfare of a living woman. And yet this brief charter undercuts the stereotype.

She has the dignity of her own name, Rocelina. She is not labeled a serf (ancilla) but rather a woman ( femina), a term that could also be used for a much more powerful person of the same sex. And, most significantly, before she starts providing her rents and labor to the monks, she comes before the abbot and half a dozen witnesses, several of whom appear to be knights, and places a penny in the abbot’s hand “in recognition” (recognitio) of her new position. The penny carries symbolic weight on several levels and, it should be noted, was offered by her hand, not, as the stereotype of servitude would suggest, on her head. It does anticipate the dues she will be paying, though also showing that peasants had access to coins. But most importantly

1. Cartulaires de l’abbaye de Molesme, ed. Jacques Laurent, vol. 2, Texte (Paris, 1911), p. 131, no. 1.134.

it demonstrates that she had to be seen as accepting her new status, clearly crucial, because there would not be a need for such a ceremony if she had no say in the matter.

Rocelina was not alone. Many other peasants in the high Middle Ages insisted that they be taken seriously in decisions that affected them, and the powerful treated this as normal. Yet for far too long historians presented medieval peasants as passive, marginalized, and silent, with little ability to shape their own lives and little impact in the records. Scholarship on them has lagged far behind that on other sectors of society.2 If one presumes peasants’ actions were not recorded, then of course one will not look for them in the sources. But just as was once the case for the study of medieval women, one gets a very different picture if one does not begin by taking a lack of power or influence for granted.

Those who had already concluded that women were not to be found in the sources did not, unsurprisingly, suddenly discover that women had a voice. In the same way, those who failed to look for peasant self-determination were unlikely to find it. But as I shall demonstrate, the documents indicate that despite forces of coercion and constraint, medieval peasants exercised a good deal of autonomy in their choices and in ordering their own lives. Focusing on peasants of northern France, especially the Burgundy-Champagne region in the high Middle Ages (late tenth through early thirteenth centuries), I argue that difficult as their experience must have been, peasants had agency: that is, they were always capable of making their own decisions and fighting back against oppression. And while they may not have always prevailed, they did so surprisingly often.

My central argument then is that peasants during the high Middle Ages were active agents in their society and recognized as such by the more powerful. This argument is based principally on charters, most from monastic houses in north-central France. In support, I weave three major themes throughout the chapters that follow. The first of course is that medieval peasants were more than the helpless and downtrodden beings often portrayed in popular accounts and even some scholarly works. Rather, they carried out their own plans, even in the face of oppression and humiliation, through a combination of negotiation, stubborn resistance, and collective action.

Second, I intend to make the French peasants specifically of the high Middle Ages far more visible. The long eleventh and twelfth centuries are

2. The Library of Congress classification HD 1330, supposedly designating books giving the history of peasants and landlords, is nearly unused in all but the largest American libraries and is primarily populated by books about twentieth-century Asia.

considered the heart of the Middle Ages, a time of economic and cultural flourishing that witnessed everything from the origin of universities to the growth of towns to the development of epics and romances to the spread of reformed monasticism. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, scholars have largely overlooked peasants for this period. Most serious studies of the medieval peasantry focus either on the ninth century with its polyptyques or else on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when manorial rolls (especially in England) provide plentiful sources, unlike anything earlier.

But there are other, underappreciated sources from the high Middle Ages in which peasants regularly appear. Here, and this is my third major theme, by using the sort of charters produced by and preserved by churches, charters that on their face are often not about peasants at all, I demonstrate that peasants as individuals, indeed highly active individuals, can be commonly found in the documents if one knows to look for them.

Medieval historians have long been finding new groups to study and new questions to ask the sources. The days when the rise of the nation-state was the principal focus of the field are long gone. In the last generation or two, first women and gender and, subsequently, saints have become significant topics of study in their own right. More recently scholars have turned to racial and religious differences in medieval Europe. Yet in all these cases it was once assumed that we could not obtain what was considered useful information on these issues. Women, it was earlier concluded, were marginal and ineffective, having no real impact either in medieval society or in the written sources, and whatever the sources said about saints was imaginary if not hopelessly derivative and thus best ignored.3 Just as medievalists have come to realize that overlooking the female half of the population could be considered deliberate obtuseness,4 so they have recognized that the study of medieval saints is improved by not imposing modern visions of proper religion on the past.5 Analysis of minority groups has challenged the

3. Georges Duby’s “A History of Women” series titled its second volume Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). See also Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett (Chicago, 1994); originally published as Mâle moyen âge The seminal work for the serious study of saints’ lives was that of Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1990); originally published in 1978. See also Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994), 95–113.

4. Indeed, Judith M. Bennett suggests that the important role of medieval women has become so widely acknowledged that feminist scholars have decided to move on to more recent periods, a development she deplores; History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006).

5. The study of Merovingian-era saints especially has become something of a scholarly growth industry; for discussion and references, see Constance B. Bouchard, “Restructuring Sanctity and

stereotype of medieval Europe as uniformly white and Christian, arguing for a more complicated reality.6 Here I would like to propose peasants as the next group that needs to be recognized for their role in shaping events for their families and communities, rather than overlooked as silent victims.

The rapid economic expansion of the high Middle Ages, the period under discussion here, has often been assumed to have presented lords with new opportunities to oppress their peasantry. The “feudal revolution” debate of the 1990s turned on the question of whether the economic and social changes of the early eleventh century were accompanied by an abrupt imposition of new forms of servitude or whether there was only gradual change, with significant continuities in peasant subjugation from the tenth century.7

I intend, contrary to both positions, to argue that the high Middle Ages were a period of peasant opportunity and (potential) freedom. If the powerful found in an expanding economy an opening for new forms of oppression, I argue, the peasantry found then an opening to fight back even more determinedly and often successfully.

TheMedievalPeasantry

The challenges of studying medieval peasants are exacerbated by the lack of an agreed upon meaning for the word “peasant” among scholars. Like

Refiguring Saints in Early Medieval Gaul,” in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 91–114.

6. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018). William Chester Jordan, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX (Princeton, 2019).

7. The debates on the “mutations” of the early eleventh century had their starting point with the work by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation, 900–1200, trans. Caroline Higgitt (New York, 1991); originally published in French in 1980. Curiously, only one twenty-page chapter in this four-hundred-page book is devoted to peasants. R. I. Moore has sought to label the eleventh and twelfth centuries a “revolution” without invoking the adjective “feudal,” by concentrating instead on changes in the source and exercise of power; The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000). The debates on feudal mutations have now more or less died out, after exhausting the principals. The (perhaps) final arguments on this topic, including extensive bibliography, may be found in Dominique Barthélemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian, trans. Graham Robert Edwards (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), originally published in French in 1997; and Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2009). Bisson is one of the last to continue to argue for a feudal revolution, even though he now distances himself from the word “feudalism.” Curiously, his recent work does not cite two books, published simultaneously, that seriously undercut the argument; Richard E. Barton, Lordship in the County of Maine, c. 890–1160 (Woodbridge, Suff., 2004); and Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004). Charles West has revisited the topic but has sought to change it from a debate about the eleventh century to a discussion of the ninth; Reframing the Feudal Revolution: Political and Social Transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 1–9.

“feudalism,” it has been used with very different implications depending on whether one is discussing the Middle Ages or the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In popular usage those engaged full-time in agriculture are called peasants only if they live in backward or undeveloped countries. Terms like “farmer” or “tenant” or “villager” have been proposed as less pejoratively loaded than “peasant,” but I use the word “peasant” in this book as meaning at its most basic a country person (a paysan is someone of the pays, the countryside), someone low on the socioeconomic scale.8 Most typically peasants grew their own food and paid some sort of rents or dues. But they differed from modern tenant farmers in that their rents and dues, rarely uniform even in the same village, were generally paid in a diverse combination of labor, coin, animal products (such as eggs or wool), and produce (such as grain or wine), rather than simply in money—and some medieval peasants paid no rent at all. I discuss the term “peasant” itself and the status of peasants more fully in chapter 1.

Peasants were far from an undifferentiated group, with significant variations in property holdings and legal status. Although the majority were directly involved in agriculture or animal husbandry, many peasants undertook work in trades such as carpentry, baking and brewing, or milling instead of (or in addition to) their farm labor. Some peasants were well-to-do or held positions of real authority, such as bailiff or village mayor.

Peasants constituted by far the majority of the medieval population and were fundamental to the economy. In the modern West, where only a tiny fraction (under 4 percent in the United States) of the population lives on a working farm, it is easy to forget how absolutely necessary are those who grow the food. Although the stock market is now often taken as an indicator of wealth, in the high Middle Ages wealth was measured in land, specifically agricultural land, and in the number of people whom one commanded.

Valuable land, such as that constituting a gift to a church, was typically specified as “fields, pastures, meadows, vineyards, woods, and running water,” that is, the kind of land suitable for cultivation or resource exploitation and indeed already so used. Fishing rights in the stream and a mill were often mentioned as well. Close behind arable land in value was woodland, which the peasants used for building materials, fuel, pasturage, and occasional wild foodstuffs. The woods (sylva) were not trackless forests but

8. See also Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecelia Penifader and the World of English Peasants before the Plague, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2021), pp. 1–2; Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999), pp. 9–10; and Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 5–6.

woodlots and places where pigs could be pastured and honey and wild fruits and nuts gathered.9 But the land would have had little worth without those who lived and worked on it. Monks and secular lords either needed to have peasants to cultivate their land or else, as Bernard of Clairvaux famously did, go out and hoe their own turnip fields.

For that reason gifts of land to the church usually specified the workers who came with it. Agricultural land at that time was almost always identified by its peasant inhabitants as much as by its geographic borders. Property was often referenced by the name of its cultivator, or described by its size given in the number of days it would take to plow it. The standard unit of agricultural land was the mansus, the amount of property that would theoretically support a peasant family. The exact size of a mansus varied enormously with time and place, and a mansus could consist of contiguous land or smaller pieces scattered among others’ holdings. It would be impossible to put the size of a mansus into modern units of measurement, and that is the point: it was described by the people it supported.

The variations in what constituted a mansus and the role of individual peasants in defining a measure of land are illustrated by a document from Autun. In the middle of the tenth century Bishop Hervé of Autun, fearing that he was dying, decided to make a gift to his cathedral chapter, to establish anniversary observances for his soul. 10 His gift consisted of four mansi, identified by the name of the man or men who held each. Two, located in the village of Bray, were each held by one man, respectively Constantius and Adalerus, matching the normal assumption that a mansus would support one peasant family. The other two, however, located in the village of Monthelon, had three men associated with each mansus, in one case brothers. Was the farming better at Monthelon, so that the same amount of land could support more people? Or, as seems more likely, was a mansus larger there? We do not know, and although this sort of question has been of great interest to economic historians, it is not the issue here. Rather, it should be stressed that the property the bishop was giving his canons for his soul was defined by the peasants who lived there. They were not an incidental add-on to the property. Rather, they were what made the property valuable.

The importance of peasants was here fully recognized. The bishop found it appropriate to name them in his charter, so that over a millennium later

9. For pigs’ role in the medieval economy, see Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (New Haven, Conn., 2020).

10. Cartulaire de l’église d’Autun, ed. A[natole] de Charmasse (Paris, 1865), p. 59, no. 1.37.

Three QuesTions wiTh ABIGAIL KRASNER BALBALE author of The Wolf King

1. What inspired you to write this book?

I became fascinated with the figure of Ibn Mardanīsh after studying the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries more generally, because of the peculiar challenges a failed dynasty presents to the historian. Failed dynasties represent historical black holes – their history is written by their successors, and often in teleological ways that seek to explain their ultimate failure.

imagined as a time of implacable religious conflict between Christians and Muslims. In fact, conflict among Muslims and among Christians over differing ideas of sovereignty facilitated intrareligious alliance. Drawing on written sources in Arabic, Latin, Spanish and Castilian, as well as material culture, this book also demonstrates the importance of trans-regional, interdisciplinary study.

2. How will your book make a difference in the field?

This book reframes the medieval period in an important way, adding religious and cultural complexity to our understanding of this period. Ibn Mardanīsh’s story highlights the conflict among Muslims over what constituted righteous religious authority at a time when the centralized Abbasid caliphate was being challenged from many sides. Like many other upstart rulers throughout the Islamic world, Ibn Mardanīsh was the descendant of a non-Arab convert to Islam, and this moment was one in which new groups of Muslims were figuring out how to situate themselves in relation to the Arab caliphate. The eleventh and twelfth centuries are usually

3. What will attract colleagues in the field to your book?

Bringing together a broader variety of sources (written and material) than are usually considered together, and in more languages than are usually read alongside each other (Spanish, Latin, Arabic, along with secondary sources in Spanish, French and Arabic). A microhistorical approach to broad questions of political legitimation and processes of power in a time of transition in the Islamic world and the Western Mediterranean.

“Conflict among Muslims and among Christians over differing ideas of sovereignty facilitated intrareligious alliance.”

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

What happens when social orders collapse? This book of translations offers glimpses from Japan’s medieval era, the four centuries between the fall of the Heian court (794–1185), located in what we call Kyoto, and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) in Edo, now Tokyo. These years brought intermittent civil war, inspiring a national literature built on shared stories but also on the fracture of works like The Tale of Sagoromo (Sagoromo monogatari, ca. 1070), traditionally ranked with The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari, ca. 1010) for its elegant prose and waka verse.1 The “tributes” to Sagoromo presented here—a short narrative, from a cycle of similar works that comprise the lone prose adaptation; forty-one of its poems as cited by two compilers, with their headnotes (kotobagaki) contextualizing each verse; three libretti, from the only known Sagoromo-based songs and surviving play; and the beginning of the leading commentary—thus trace more than the medieval reception of one work. They also suggest how generations

1. See Ruch, “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature.” Put simply, waka are Japanese-language poems in roughly thirty-one syllables. For a more detailed introduction to this genre, and to the related art of renga mentioned below, see Carter, How to Read a Japanese Poem My reference to the “fracture” or fragmentary use of courtly works, elaborated on below, is inspired by David Pollack’s discussion of the role of China in early definitions of Japanese identity; see The Fracture of Meaning for details. However, in the present case, particular works (more precisely, their words and phrases) matter as much as the dialectic he discusses.

of literate people coped with upheaval: by lamenting or justifying it in familiar terms, unraveling a tale paradoxically known for its coherence. Even for a premodern work, Sagoromo spans a diverse corpus of texts. Before the spread of woodblock printing in the seventeenth century, Japanese literature circulated in manuscript, sparking revisions on top of the inevitable scribal errors until preferred versions took root. Sagoromo spurred great enthusiasm but no such default, leading to numerous “copies” that vary widely in some aspects: for instance, in the divisions among the tale’s four untitled books (book 1 sometimes ends with a cliff-hanger), the characterization of minor figures, and the roughly 213 waka, tied to emotionally charged scenes as typical in courtly works.2 The tale’s style also shifts across copies, with the oldest extant, thirteenth-century versions (kohon) featuring long sentences and allusions abridged in popular circulating texts (rufubon). This trend toward simplicity reflects Sagoromo’s growing audience over the medieval period, also seen in the pronunciation guides ( furigana) added to some copies. Meanwhile, the plot stayed the same, spanning twelve years in the life of a fictional nobleman, or one round of the courtly zodiac. True to that scheme, in which five rounds mark rebirth, Sagoromo ends with signs of a new cycle but no fresh start. The hero whom we first meet in spring, later identified as the eighteen-year-old Genji or “new commoner” Middle Captain (Gen chūjō), has married the doppelganger of the woman he wants after evading one unwanted bride and outliving another (she becomes a nun and then dies, like his first narrated lover).3 He is also the emperor, having been enthroned by the sun-goddess Amaterasu, mythic ancestor of the imperial house, while his father—demoted from princely status before the hero’s birth—becomes a retired emperor, on the principle that a ruler’s parents should hold imperial rank. Accordingly, while deities praise the hero’s talents throughout the tale, Amaterasu only puts him on the throne in book 4, when his son by a princess, secretly raised as her brother, is poised to join the succession and compromise the imperial line. We leave the hero brooding in autumn, a season poetically opposed to spring; where spring marks new love, fall suggests surfeit.4 His problem is attachment, always excessive in the tale’s Buddhist outlook.

2. The exact number of poems in Sagoromo varies. For instance, while Sugiura Noriko notes that a widely used database of waka lists 210 poems for Sagoromo, she counts 216 in her preferred edition, based on older texts; see Sugiura, “Sagoromo monogatari ni okeru waka no igi.” I give the average of these two figures here.

3. As detailed below, Sagoromo starts in media res. While the tale later hints at earlier affairs, including one with the Crown Prince’s consort (known as the Sen’yōden for her palace apartments), the first narrated liaison involves a poor woman discussed below.

4. The word for fall, aki, puns on the classical verb aku, to become disgusted with.

As his choice of wife betrays, the hero still desires his first object: his foster sister, now a priestess at the Kamo Shrine, which protects the court. Since affairs with priestesses are taboo in any case, the hero’s continued passion portends disaster, also signaled by his wife’s final titles: originally known as the daughter of the former Minister of Ceremonial (Shikibukyō no Miya), another unsuccessful prince, she becomes the new emperor’s Fujitsubo Consort and Fujitsubo Empress (Fujitsubo no Nyōgo, Fujitsubo no Chūgū), names synonymous with failed substitutes and betrayal in Genji. 5 This thread loosely recalls the hero’s father, who may have been demoted for seducing another priestess, the hero’s mother; the narrator speculates that the older man committed a “crime” (tsumi) in the past, since both of his full brothers became emperors. Either way, the hero resembles his father in his lack of restraint, weeping in the end because he failed to seduce a nun, the mother of the “prince” who triggered his promotion.6 Here as elsewhere, the tale comes nearly full circle, eschewing renewal for what translator Steven Hanna calls “traps”: the bonds of desire that structure the plot and, in Buddhist terms, preclude enlightenment.7

This tightly woven narrative, preserved even in simplified circulating texts, sets Sagoromo apart among Heian tales. Many of its poems also resonate with each other across subplots, further unifying the work. One of Japan’s first modern literary critics thus deemed it the highpoint of courtly fiction, despite calling Genji the genre’s signal accomplishment for its greater realism and length.8 Nonetheless, medieval writers unraveled Sagoromo, engaging with different strands of it or putting the same threads to different uses as their worlds “turned upside down” during war and political realignments.9 For example, late twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets with connections to the palace included the tale’s saddest poems in two influential sets

5. In Genji, the hero’s imperial father marries the doppelganger of the hero’s dead mother, assigning the new woman to the Fujitsubo (Wisteria Pavilion) at the palace. The infatuated hero then pursues her nieces, one of whom closely resembles her, just as his (nominal) son Kaoru pursues the sisters of a dead woman whom he loved. None of these relationships ends well.

6. Alternatively, this may suggest an impending golden age led by the hero and his sister, since court myth includes married sibling-rulers: notably, the legendary shaman Himiko (also Pimiko), who conveyed the gods’ will to her brother, who then ruled the kingdom on her behalf. On the symbolic relationship between emperors and Kamo priestesses in particular, see Faure, The Power of Denial, 294–96.

7. See Hanna, “Hemmed In.”

8. See Fujioka, Kokubungaku zenshi, 528. He ties Genji’s more sustained portrait of its hero and his milieu to its allegedly novelistic ethos, his benchmark for judging literary history. Genji spans about seventy years and is three or four times Sagoromo’s length.

9. The phrase in quotation marks, from the fifteenth-century term gekokujō, appears in the title of Pierre Souyri’s 1998 study of the period, The World Turned Upside Down, as translated by Käthe Roth. Some scholars have rejected this view as anachronistic, instead emphasizing continuities like the shared recourse to courtly works considered here; for instance, see Butler, “The Riches of

of waka meant to train their students and celebrate courtly tales (as noted, these genres overlap). By the fourteenth century, an obscure monk in the military capital of Kamakura had combined phrases from many of these poems with bits of the tale’s exposition to create two banquet songs (sōka or enkyoku), sung for shoguns by lesser warriors and nobles and evoking trips to this center of patronage and employment. As my summaries suggest, both the songs and the selections of verse inspire pity, but their purposes differ, as do their presentations of the shared content.

Later writers pulled other threads from Sagoromo, even as the earlier tributes continued to circulate. Notable here, in the late fifteenth century, a courtier drafted a ghost play (mugen nō) for one Kyoto-based shogun, later staged for another, highlighting the tonsured princess and her formerly splendid garments. Meanwhile, anonymous writers turned the arc about the hero’s lover into a cycle of short narratives (Muromachi jidai monogatari) with competing happy endings and bathetic details: for instance, a poem comparing orphans to hen-pecked chickens. Finally, as the sixteenth century ended, a lowborn master of renga—linked verse, based on waka—wrote a commentary on the tale for an ambitious warlord, glossing the poems and confusing points in the exposition like earlier guides, but only after evoking a hidden theme: that the gods assist all worthy men, not just aristocrats. Like their precursors, these writers matched Sagoromo to new fears and desires, suggesting their mixed feelings about change itself.10

Tellingly, while some of these tributes circulated more widely than others, medieval readers preserved all of them, indicating that each work met needs not filled by the rest. In fact, as seen in my notes to the translations, some authors drew on the others’ compositions, underscoring their distinct visions and goals in the process. In this sense, the present book traces Sagoromo’s role in the national literature noted earlier, as a shared source of phrases and themes rather than a shared story.11 This usage recalls that of other Heian

Medieval Japanese Society.” However, I find that Sagoromo-themed works at least echo the perception of dramatic change, by repeatedly tying parts of the tale to new, often challenging circumstances.

10. See Ebersole, “The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping,” for a thoughtful discussion of the problems with inferring emotion of any kind from medieval Japanese texts and other early and/or culturally distant sources. While I take his point, I do not have space in the current setting to delve into the historical detail he recommends as a counterweight.

11. While Sagoromo’s readership grew over the medieval era, as noted, parts of the short narratives (for instance, their abbreviated account of how the hero got his name, discussed below) suggest that their audience had only a rudimentary understanding of the tale’s plot. The many copies of those works, as well as the triumphal nature of some early modern illustrations of the tale itself, point to Sagoromo’s role in what Ruch later called the common culture, rather than as a shared story as such. See Ruch, “The Other Side of Culture,” especially the conclusion.

narratives, notably Genji and Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, early tenth century), another influence on Sagoromo also favored by poets. In all three cases, medieval writers shrunk the work to their favorite elements, deployed according to their own needs and tastes.12

That said, fewer authors relied on Sagoromo than on the other tales, despite its comparable prestige. In fact, while medieval vernacular literature contains many references and allusions to the featured work, the present volume spans most of the extant long-form treatments of it. As noted, I include excerpts from the leading commentary and present the overlapping poems from the two sets of verse mentioned above, which imply clearer endorsements than the lists of the tale’s waka also made in this era (since the number of poems varies across texts of Sagoromo, the line between deliberate omission and simple ignorance is murky in the latter works).13 I also translate the only dedicated engagements with the tale extant in other genres and discuss the most important work not presented here: a fictional review already available in English, considered below. To my knowledge, the only other noteworthy tributes are a postscript to some copies of the tale, which I analyze elsewhere,14 and a genealogy of the characters (keizu), mentioned in the featured commentary. While visual art is beyond my scope, few medieval pictures of the tale seem to have endured either.15

Given Sagoromo’s popularity in the medieval period, the scarcity of tributes probably partly reflects the confusion caused by its diverse corpus. As seen in my excerpt from the commentary, the renga master felt compelled to collate his own version of the tale before writing about it, because the copies he borrowed contained so many confusing passages and seeming mistakes. These challenges may also have been the reason that the men whom

12. For a broad discussion of Genji’s reception, and translations of many examples, see Harper and Shirane, Reading “The Tale of Genji.” For a close look at Ise’s competing commentaries, see Newhard, Knowing the Amorous Man

13. On two earlier collections of the tale’s poems, see Sudō, Sagoromo monogatari juyō no kenkyū, 58–119. This book also contains transcriptions of a number of relevant works, most of them from the early modern era. On earlier commentaries, as preserved in an annotated copy of the tale in the hand of Sanjōnishi Kin’eda (1487–1563), see Gakushūin Daigaku Heian Bungaku Kenkyūkai, Sanjōnishi kebon Sagoromo monogatari chūshaku. As noted below, the author of the commentary featured here studied with Kin’eda’s family. Unfortunately, I was not able to consult this volume directly while preparing this introduction, but it is clear from the featured author’s comments and later references to his own work that it did not circulate broadly.

14. See D’Etcheverry, “Performing Emotion.”

15. The only directly relevant artwork from this era is a damaged early medieval picture scroll held by the Tokyo National Museum that includes passages from the tale. By contrast, there are numerous early modern illustrations, including those printed with the tale, as noted below, in 1654. For a discussion of the early modern materials, including a survey of the scenes covered in that printing, see Takahashi, “Sagoromo monogatari genzon ega shiryō bamen ichiran.”

he named as authorities did not lecture on the tale, although one of their families preserved earlier exegeses in notes to one copy of it.16 Serendipity and later tastes also shape the present book. Most of my base texts, identified at the head of each translation with the details of my interventions, derive from early modern copies, while I chose the featured version of the short narrative because I like it. Less intentionally, my work tends to obscure the fact that medieval writers used many different texts of Sagoromo because I reference the same three versions of the tale in my notes. See the “note on conventions” for more details on my choices there, balanced between accuracy (here meaning the modern editions closest to the texts cited by medieval authors) and accessibility.

Despite these limitations, the present volume approaches a comprehensive set of sustained references to Sagoromo from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, illuminating the tale’s reception, Japanese history, and human nature alike. While the presumably low rates of literacy in the medieval era mean that these works addressed only a fraction of Japan’s population at that time,17 they also depict variations within this privileged demographic, whose members hailed (as noted earlier) from competing political centers and social groups. Furthermore, despite the diversity of the tale’s corpus, the medieval writers’ shared recourse to a compact and notably cohesive source makes their shifts in emphasis clearly visible, unlike responses to more expansive works.18 As a set, these tributes to Sagoromo thus yield surprisingly rich insights into how people negotiate change, especially shifts in access to power and wealth. I outline those findings at the end of this introduction, when identifying the works translated here and their known authors and audiences. First, I offer a fuller overview of Sagoromo, centered on those elements most popular with medieval writers at large.

16. See Sudō, Sagoromo monogatari juyō no kenkyū, chap. 1, for a discussion of these lists.

17. Information on literacy rates in the medieval period is notoriously hard to come by. Most discussions of this topic seem to center on whether or not farmers were able to sign their names, a level of skill with words well below that needed to make sense of the complex grammar, vocabulary, and allusions found in courtly works like Sagoromo. Given the pronunciation guides noted above, which emerged in later, circulating texts of the tale and also appear in some copies of the short narratives, it is probably safe to say that few people other than aristocrats, leading warriors (often related to nobles), and wealthy commoners knew the tale or its tributes directly.

18. See Harper and Shirane, Reading “The Tale of Genji.” As that anthology attests, Genji was read in canonical texts and through commentaries since at least the early medieval period, in contrast to the freedom of choosing a text from Sagoromo’s diverse corpus. While Sagoromo seems to have inspired exegeses in the early medieval period, as noted below, these do not have appeared to have circulated very widely. Our renga master, for example, does not appear to have had access to them, despite studying with the heir of one of the families that produced them.

MEDIEVAL SOCIETIES, RELIGIONS, AND CULTURES

A series edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne E. Lester

With the intention of fostering the best historical scholarship that focuses on the medieval past as multidimensional, the new series Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures (MSRC) published by Cornell University Press will prioritize work that investigates the profound interconnectedness of religions, politics, cultures, social lives and contexts, ideologies, and materialities that shaped the human experience between 300 and 1500. As a way of framing new narratives of the past, series editors Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne Lester will seek out and cultivate scholarship that breaks new historical ground by highlighting these relationships and that foregrounds links across methodological, disciplinary, evidentiary, and geographical divides.

By cultivating a collection of books that define the period and place of the Middle Ages in broad, interdisciplinary, and multi-confessional terms, we would also be responding to, and taking part in, changes in the field exemplified by new work and critical questions related to the study of gender, race, global history, religious difference and hybridity, migration and mobility as agents of change, and a new interest in class and the material past. The series will be committed to the study of a new Middle Ages, one vibrant in its diversity, vigorous in its lived depth, and vital in its methodological engagements to shaping the discipline of history.

MSRC ADVISORY BOARD

Elisheva Baumgaten,Hebrew University

Paul M. Cobb, University of Pennsylvania

Hussein Fancy, University of Michigan

Samantha Kelly, Rutgers University

Maria Mavroudi, UC Berkeley

Maureen C. Miller, UC Berkeley

Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University

Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University

Anders Winroth, Yale University

MSRC EDITORS

Anne E. Lester holds the John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Chair in Medieval History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Making of Saint Louis and Invisible Weapons, among others.

Please send inquiries to:

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin (m.cecilia.gaposchkin@dartmouth.edu) and Anne E. Lester (alester5@jhu.edu)

For additional information about publishing with Cornell University Press, please contact: Mahinder Kingra, Editor in Chief (msk55@cornell.edu)

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

At the end of May 1413, the Dominican preacher Vicent Ferrer paused on his way out of the kingdom of Valencia to preach about God’s role in natural disaster. The famous friar, already halfway to sainthood, was five years into a preaching tour of the Iberian Peninsula. He had spent the season of Lent in the capital, also called Valencia, and since the week after Easter had been winding his way north toward Aragon. He traveled with some three hundred followers, including flagellants with covered faces who confessed their sins aloud over the blasts of a trumpet.1 So powerful was the effect of Ferrer’s presence that city after city in the Crown of Aragon wrote the prescriptions of his sermons into law after he preached in their squares. The city of Valencia had passed such legislation on his last visit, and during this Lent the townspeople had proudly claimed the friar as one of their own.2 Shortly after leaving the city of Valencia, Ferrer and his followers broke their journey in a village in the north of the kingdom. It was a Monday, the first of the three minor Rogation Days that led up to Ascension Thursday, so when

1. Philip Daileader, Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life: Religion and Society in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 60, 93–97.

2. Katherine Lindeman, “Fighting Words: Vengeance, Jews, and Saint Vicent Ferrer in LateMedieval Valencia,” Speculum 91, no. 3 (2016): 690–694.

Ferrer stood up to preach in the town’s narrow square, rogation was his theme.3 Why, he asked, do “people in all Christian places” process through the streets asking God to relieve natural disasters? He answered himself with a parable: There was a rich and powerful lord who had a slave or servant woman and many sons and daughters small and large, [and] to [the slave woman] he had entrusted the keys to the bread and the wine and the fruits and to all the other things so that the children could not have any bread except by the hand of the slave. And at times [the slave woman] was very cruel, and did not wish to give the children of the lord either bread or wine. The children, not knowing what they were doing, turned to their father, who chastised the slave etc. Thus it is with us: the lord of the house, of this world, is our lord God the legitimate children are the Christians, and the Jews and Moors and other infidels are bastards, and for that reason do not have the inheritance of paradise. . . . The slave and the servant, to whom God has entrusted the keys of bread and wine and other earthly things is nature, from the hands of whom we must have bread and wine and other earthly things. As God, our father, has ordained that at times [she] is excessively cruel to the children of the Lord, so that when we care to harvest much bread and good wine, etc., she does not wish it, and takes it from us, sending us hail, locust, droughts, and fog. For this reason we turn to the Lord our father, praying him and supplicating him to chastise and curb his servant, and order her to give us bread and wine and the things necessary to us.4

3. The Valencian text of this sermon can be found in Vicent Ferrer, Sermons, vol. 6, ed. Gret Schib (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1988), 107–113. This version is taken from ACV, MS. 276, 233–237. A Latin translation of the sermon is also preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS. 477, 20r–21v, under the heading “Sermo factus in eodem loco de Adzeneta feria 2a in rogacionibus, XXIX. Madij.” For a description of this manuscript, see Josep Perarnau i Espelt, “La compilació de sermons de Sant Vicent Ferrer de Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Ms. 477,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 4 (1985): 213–402. The other locations and dates recorded in MS 477 trace a trajectory from Morvedre north to Barcelona. These suggest that the Adzeneta in question was Atzeneta del Maestrat, which lies between Onda (mentioned immediately before), and Albocàsser (mentioned immediately after). The date of the sermon means that the year must be 1413, which also fits with what is known of Vicent’s movements.

4. “Era hun senyor rich e poderós qui havia una cativa o serventa e molts fills e filles petits e grans, a la qual havie comanat les claus del pa e del vi e de les fruytes e de totes les altres coses, en tant quels fills no podien haver pa ne res sinó per mà de la esclava. E a vegades ere tan cruel, que no volie dar als fills del senyor pa ne vi. Los fills, no sabents què·s fessen, recorregueren a son pare, que corregís la cativa, etc. Axí és de nosaltres: el senyor de la casa, de aquest món, és sotre senyor Déus. Los fills legitims són los cristians, car los juheus e moros e altres infels són borts, e per ço no han la heretat de paraís. La cativa e la serventa, a la qual Déus ha comanat les claus del pa e del vi e de les altres coses terrenals és natura, per les mans de la qual a nosaltres cové de haver pa e vi e les altres coses terrenals, car axi ó ha ordenat Déus, pare nostre, que algunes vegades és massa cruel als fills del senyor, que quan cuydam collir molt pa e bon vi, etc., ella no·u vol, ans nos ó tol, que·ns tramet pedres, lagosta, secades e neules. Per açò no-

This analogy for the relationship between God, human beings, and nature was well outside the norm for medieval preaching. Surviving sermons usually describe natural disaster as the consequence of God’s anger at human sin.5 For Ferrer, however, religious identity was the crucial factor; the children of God were succored not according to their goodness but according to their faith. Jews and Muslims, as illegitimate children of God, had no right to the fruits of the natural world, nor any standing to seek divine aid.6 Even nature shared this subordinate religious status; the word Ferrer used for “slave woman,” cativa, was most often used to describe a captive Muslim who was sold into slavery.7 In Ferrer’s analogy, nature was an entity that could exert influence, but that influence was weak compared to the rightful dominion of God. Nature as an enslaved Muslim woman could have no legitimate power over Christians. She was caretaker rather than owner of the world’s resources, and any withdrawal of her bounty was mere caprice. This image would have seemed particularly apt to a Valencian audience. Their own land, the kingdom of Valencia, had itself been captured from its Muslim rulers by the Christian king, Jaume of Aragon, in 1238 and continued to have large populations of Jews and Muslims. Ferrer’s message was thus tailored to the descendants of crusaders, who saw in their landscape the triumph of their forefathers’ conquest.

government,environment,andreligious differenceinmedievalValencia

This book is about the relationship between God, human beings, and nature, as imagined by Ferrer’s erstwhile hosts, the city council of Valencia. It is about who was thought to hold the keys to bread and wine, who had a right to them, and how they were used to unlock the potential of the land in and around the city from the early fourteenth century to the early sixteenth. While the city council rarely used the term nature to describe the environments and climatic forces with which it interacted, those interactions show that the council had saltres recorrem al Senyor, pare nostre, pregant-lo e soplicant-lo que correguesque e refrene la serventa, e li man que·ns dó pa e vi e les coses necessàries a nosaltres.” Ferrer, Sermons, 6:108–109.

5. Jussi Hanska, “Cessante causa cessat et effectus: Sin and Natural Disasters in Medieval Sermons,” in Roma, magistra mundi: Itineraria culturae medievalis. Mélanges offerts à Père L. E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, part 3, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales, 1998), 141–153.

6. On Ferrer’s anti-Judaism, see Lindeman, “Fighting Words,” 690–723.

7. On the usage of this word, an archaic form of the modern Catalan captiva (masc. captiu), see Antoni Ferrer Abárzuza, “Captives or Slaves and Masters in Eivissa (Ibiza), 1235–1600,” Medieval Encounters 22, no. 5 (2016): 569–579.

clear environmental priorities that remained consistent over long periods of time. From the late fourteenth century to the early fifteenth, the city council aspired to take control of its landscape, initiating infrastructure projects to address the area’s environmental challenges. From the late 1420s on, however, the council turned away from this strategy. Instead of focusing on infrastructure projects, it began to respond to natural disasters with processions appealing for divine aid. This shift resulted, in part, from the success of its efforts to erase the city’s Islamic and Jewish heritage. The council was thus following Ferrer’s advice; its increasing claims to divine help were based on an increasing confidence in the city’s Christian identity. While there is no proof that any of the councilmen heard this par ticular sermon, Ferrer’s analogy reveals something significant about the landscape of his birth: Valencians’ relationships with God and with nature were driven less by sin and fear than by a consciousness of their history of religious conquest.

The following chapters argue that the city council of Valencia’s understanding of God’s role in the natural world evolved in the course of its efforts to Christianize the city. The landscape around Valencia had for centuries been shaped by humans to suit human concerns. After its conquest, Valencia’s Andalusi past was evident not only in the people who remained on the land but in the very landscape that made it a prize worth conquering: a network of canals that irrigated the arid land around the city, making it one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean. Projects to transform, expand, and improve on this constructed landscape began almost immediately after the conquest, but the city government only began to take a leading role in these efforts in the later fourteenth century. During this period of both governmental expansion and frequent natural disasters, the council proposed infrastructure projects in response to droughts and other environmental crises. Few of these projects were completed, but the council continued to propose new initiatives. At the same time, it sought to minimize the city’s Andalusi heritage and moved in the aftermath of the 1391 riots to eliminate the city’s Jewish quarter. Having rendered the urban landscape more visibly Christian, Valencia’s leaders pulled back from infrastructure responses to natural disaster and focused instead on religious rituals that highlighted the city’s Christian population.

Late medieval Valencia therefore reverses the usual narrative of technological progress. Most broadly, it demonstrates that human beings were making complex environmental choices well before the modern period. Faith in technological capability could and did coexist with faith in divine power in the environment. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the city government routinely responded to natural disaster not with prayer but with plans to “improve” the landscape and address future disaster. By the second

quarter of the fifteenth century Valencia was entering what is traditionally considered its golden age; its political star was rising and it was fast overtaking Barcelona in commercial wealth. Despite its long history of environmental intervention, this increasingly wealthy society chose to respond to natural disasters more with ritual than with infrastructure.

This book thus makes two claims. First, governmental zeal for landscape improvement was not a modern phenomenon and did not necessarily increase toward the dawn of the modern period. Second, and conversely, religious appeals in response to natural disaster were not necessarily ancient traditions and did not necessarily decline over this same span of time. The municipal government of Valencia developed a pattern of proposing infrastructure projects and landscape improvement well before it developed a tradition of natural disaster ritual. These planned improvements targeted both environmental vulnerabilities and evidence of the city’s Islamic heritage. Only after a half century of infrastructure planning and building did the council develop a robust tradition of pleas for divine aid. Religious and material approaches to the environment are by no means mutually exclusive, but in Valencia successive governments made different choices about how to use resources for natural disaster response. Once the projects of the previous decades had made the city of Valencia more visibly Christian, processions through that city increasingly served to emphasize its Christianity. As Ferrer would have put it, rogation processions reminded God that Valencian Christians were his legitimate children, to whom he had a duty of care.

That medieval people were capable of sophisticated manipulation of their environments is well known within the field of medieval environmental history, though less apparent in general scholarship. Of course, as archeological and paleoclimatological work has shown, human beings have been transforming the land, water, and air around them since prehistoric times.8 By the Middle Ages, much of this transformation was deliberate. Scholars like Richard Hoffman and Paolo Squatriti have made abundantly clear that medieval people did not, as was once imagined, live in fearful balance with nature.9

8. José S. Carrión, Santiago Fernández, Penélope González-Sampériz, Graciela Gil-Romera, Ernestina Badal, Yolanda Carrión-Marco, Lourdes López-Merino, José A. López-Sáez, Elena Fierro, and Francesc Burjachs, “Expected Trends and Surprises in the Lateglacial and Holocene Vegetation History of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands.” Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 162, no. 3 (2010): 458–475; A. García-Alix, F. J. Jimenez-Espejo, J. A. Lozano, G. Jiménez-Moreno, F. Martinez-Ruiz, L. GarcíaSanjuán, G. Aranda Jiménez, E. García Alfonso, G. Ruiz-Puertas, and R. Scott Anderson, “Anthropogenic Impact and Lead Pollution throughout the Holocene in Southern Iberia.” Science of the Total Environment 449 (2013): 451–460.

9. Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Paolo Squatriti, Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400–1000 (Cambridge:

People across the continent shaped a wide variety of environments and ecosystems, from rivers to rabbit warrens, to suit their needs.10

The relationship between these efforts and religious belief is not always clear. In the half century since its publication, Lynn White’s one-dimensional characterization of Christianity as an agent of environmental destruction has been repeatedly challenged.11 In place of the White thesis, a more nuanced picture of how religious belief shaped environmental understanding is beginning to emerge from scholarship in different local contexts. Ellen Arnold’s work on monks in the early medieval Ardennes reveals people who were alive to the symbolic power of their environments, while David Shyovitz’s study of Ashkenazi intellectuals shows that their obsession with the super natural was part of a keen interest in the reality of the natural world.12 The work of Christian Camenisch, Christopher Gerrard, David Petley, and Christian Rohr on natural disaster response has shown that medieval observers did not necessarily attribute earthquakes or other disasters to the power of an angry God; such events could be and often were interpreted as purely natural occurrences.13

Acceptance of divine power over the material world did not preclude keen observance of natural causation mechanisms. As yet there has been little inquiry into when medieval people preferred religious responses over material

Cambridge University Press, 1998); Paolo Squatriti, Landscape and Change in Early Medieval Italy: Chestnuts, Economy, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On the medieval fear of nature, see Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).

10. For surveys of this field, see Ellen Arnold, “An Introduction to Medieval Environmental History,” History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 898–916; Richard W. Unger, “Introduction: Hoffmann in the Historiography of Environmental History,” in Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern History: Studies in Environmental History for Richard C. Hoffmann, ed. Scott G. Bruce (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–24; Roberta Magnusson, “Medieval Urban Environmental History,” History Compass 11, no. 3 (2013): 189–200, and Hoffman, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe

11. Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, n.s. 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–1207. Of the many responses and refutations, see, in particular, Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Ellen Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); and Elspeth Whitney, “Lynn White Jr.’s ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ after 50 Years,” History Compass 13, no. 8 (2015): 396–410.

12. Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape; David Shyovitz, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Super natural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

13. Christian Camenisch and Christian Rohr, “When the Weather Turned Bad: The Research of Climate Impacts on Society and Economy during the Little Ice Age in Europe; An Overview.” Geographical Research Letters 44, no. 1 (2018): 99–114; Christopher M. Gerrard and David N. Petley, “A Risk Society? Environmental Hazards, Risk and Resilience in the Later Middle Ages in Europe,” Natural Hazards 69, no. 1 (2013): 1051–1079; Christian Rohr, “Man and Natural Disaster in the Late Middle Ages: The Earthquake in Carinthia and Northern Italy on 25 January 1348 and Its Perception,” Environment and History 9, no. 2 (2003): 127–149.

2023 MAA Collection Price List

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Agresta The Keys to Bread and Wine HC $56.95 $34.17

Akbari Idols in the East PB $30.95 $18.57

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Dalarun To Govern Is to Serve PB $26.95 $16.17

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