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2011, Medieval Encounters
The Jewish and Christian inhabitants of twelfth-century Rome viewed the urban landscape of their city through the lens of its ancient past. Their perception of Rome was shaped by a highly localized topography of cultural memory that was both shared and contested by Jews and Christians. Our reconstruction of this distinctively Roman perspective emerges from a careful juxtaposition of the report of Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Rome preserved in his Itinerary and various Christian liturgical and topographical texts, especially those produced by the canons of the Lateran basilica. These sources demonstrate that long-standing local claims regarding the presence in Rome of ancient artifacts from the Jerusalem Temple and their subsequent conservation in the Lateran acquired particular potency in the twelfth century. Jews and Christians participated in a common religious discourse that invested remains from the biblical and Jewish past reportedly housed in Rome with symbolic capital valued...
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2005
Near the middle of the twelfth century, a Roman deacon wrote about his efforts to return biblical texts to their original form, while serving at the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. He followed a practice, highly unusual in that era, of consulting Jewish scholars and comparing their sacred Hebrew texts with the Latin translations used by Christians, particularly the Book of Psalms, to determine the original wording and eliminate errors. Referring to one such encounter, he wrote of a 'certain Spanish Jew learned in the writings of several
2019, Jewish Quarterly Review
This study explores the notions of space underlying a famous Hebrew travel account from the twelfth century: Benjamin of Tudela’s Sefer masa‘ot (Book of Travels). Instead of reading it as an eyewitness report documenting the human geography of the medieval world, I seek to understand the “aggregatory” character of a literary work that contains both empirical and imagined information about distant places and lands, some of which it shares with medieval Arabic and vernacular literatures. By means of this knowledge, the Sefer masa‘ot reflects on almost the entire geographic trajectory of the then-known world. Highlighting how the book constructs the Mediterranean basin as an interconnected, Jewish space I, furthermore, challenge the positivism that still dominates the scholarship on this book. My argument, which is partly based on GIS data, is that its “hodological” representation of geography according to routes does not necessarily reflect Benjamin’s own movement in time and space, but rather functions as a way of illustrating the connectivity of Jewish diasporas. In order to contextualize its narrative, I also compare Benjamin’s Hebrew work to the Arabic Rihla (Journey) by Ibn Jubayr, a contemporaneous Muslim traveler from Granada, as well as other medieval sources. Arguably, both Benjamin and Ibn Jubayr use the (loosely-defined) literary genre of the travel account to envision an interconnected and unified Jewish and Muslim oikumene, respectively.
2015, Medieval Encounters
The present contribution discusses the known occurrences of the expression opus Salomonis in Medieval art and literature. The goal is to regroup together the textual occurrences discussed in the past by various scholars, in order to show how the application of the expression differs across different contexts. Most of these Solomonic references depend on the initial topos of the furnishing of the Temple of Jerusalem but they act out in different ways and should be understood according to three main lines of interpretation. The first one depends on a tradition, which is possible to date around the sixth century C.E., mentioning a series of objects that are literally considered as coming from the treasure of Solomon. The second interpretation, strictly related to the former, but whose earliest mention is an eighth-century source, shows us a shift toward a more symbolic dimension, thus referring to objects that result evocative of the context of the Temple for their technique of realization, without, however, being considered actual pieces of it. There is a third possibility, probably developed between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a French cultural context, which deals on a more decorative aspect, conveying an idea of a specific geometric effect
Within European manuscript culture in the twelfth-century, a vast network of monastic and cathedral scholars circulated texts between their institutions, copying them, incorporating them into other manuscripts, and, in turn, preserving them. This study of the early circulation of two texts by Nicolaus Maniacutius († ca. 1145), a Cistercian scholar in Rome, reveals that they were incorporated into other codices in Rome, London, and northern England through different types of scholarly networks, and suggests some of the modes of transmission. How these texts were circulated clearly indicates how each text was valued, and demonstrates how " intellectual property " was valued in twelfth-century Europe.
‘The Solitary Celebration of the Supreme Pontiff. The Lateran Basilica as the New Temple in the Medieval Liturgy of Maundy Thursday’ in: Omnes circumadstantes. Contributions... presented to Herman Wegman. Ch. Caspers / M. Schneiders eds. Kampen 1990, 120 143.
As capital of a mighty empire and missionizing church, Rome for Jews has often appeared a source of unyielding oppression and persecution. Yet Jews have lived continuously in Rome for more than two thousand years, longer than in virtually any other city in the world. This lecture explores the more than two millennia of vexed ties binding the “eternal city” and “immortal people” (as Mark Twain described the Jews).
2018, David Ganz, Barbara Schellewald (eds.), Clothing Sacred Scriptures. Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Cultures, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter
The art and architecture of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean from the first to the fifteenth century. We will study religious art typologically (for example, what roles did religious buildings play?), through important works (i.e. the Great Mosque of Cordoba), sites (i.e., Jerusalem, Damascus, Rome, Istanbul) and media (metalwork, textiles, and manuscripts). We will emphasize art's contribution to contact, exchange and conflict between the three religions, with particular attention to Spain.
This is a teaching document I developed in support of my "Age of Chivalry" course. It began as a simple chronology of the Central Middle Ages and kept on growing.
Course bulletin and lists of readings
In Seven Myths of the Crusades. Edited by Alfred Andrea and Andrew Holt. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2015. Pp. 48-69.
2011, New Studies on Old Masters: Essays in Renaissance Art in Honour of Colin Eisler
This article explores an aspect of Jerusalem imagery in the years surrounding Pope Nicholas V’s Jubilee of 1450, and it broadens the focus of previous studies by considering the picture in the context of contemporary papal ideology. Singling out a renewed interest in the Holy Spoils that Titus brought to Rome following his destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 69 AD — a list expanded to include Passion relics — it concerns the representation of Flavian booty in Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation. Piero’s “stagings” of the biblical narrative takes on historical relevancy when we consider that the sites of the Prison and the Flagellation were transferred to the porticoed courtyard of the Holy Sepulchre in the middle ages; a dramatic recreation of events of the Passion was occasionally set against this backdrop.
The chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade (Geoffroi de Villehardouin, Henri de Valenciennes, and Robert de Clari) have much to say about the Vlachs. Much of that information results from direct contact with the Vlachs, particularly in the case of Villehardouin and Henri de Valenciennes. However, several issues characterizing the Vlachs, especially in Robert de Clari's chronicle, are remarkably similar to stories that may be found in Niketas Choniates. The paper analyzes the role attributed to the Vlachs in the French chronicles, and attempts to explain the similarity to the coverage of things Vlach in Niketas Choniates. As such, the paper offers an examination of all Byzantine sources mentioning the Vlachs before Choniates and of non-Byzantine sources such as Benjamin of Tudela. The conclusion is that the image of the Vlachs in the French chronicles derives from stories about them circulating in twelfth-century Constantinople.
2018
ll saggio prende in esame la presenza cistercense nell’abbazia romana dei Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio alle Acque Salvie nel quadro dell’articolato processo di riforma ecclesiastica tra XI e XII secolo, all’interno del quale convivono riforma monastica, elaborazione del primato pontificio e consolidamento territoriale del Patrimonium sancti Petri. Sono indagati i profili del primo gruppo di monaci riformatori all’indomani dell’impiantazione cistercense nel 1140. Il fatto che gli esponenti di tale monachesimo, rigoroso e riformatore, fossero intellettuali o comunque uomini con una formazione culturale eccellente, provenienti da ambienti e centri notevoli, come nel caso dei pisani, o eccezionale come nel caso di Nicolò Maniacutia, provvide senz’altro di un ulteriore valore scelte che nell’azione del papato alla metà del XII secolo unirono all’esigenza di incrementare la proliferazione di centri di riforma religiosa e culturale quella di disporre di elementi affidabili e rigorosi nella costruzione e amministrazione territoriale, economica e politica del Patrimonium sancti Petri.
2016
2010
The project to revitalize St. Peter’s basilica as the center of a resurgent Church proceeded in step with the goal to reassert papal authority across the Italian peninsula and to extend that authority to the Eastern Mediterranean by mounting a crusade to recover the Holy Land. By embedding references to the Holy Land in the fabric of the new church, the architecture itself became the expressive voice of the papacy’s political agenda to transform the basilica, and all of Rome, into a New Jerusalem. In tracing the development of these ideas as they were introduced by Nicholas V, (1447-1455) refined by Julius II (1503-1513), and translated into physical form by Donato Bramante, this essay provides a new way of understanding myriad problems – multiple papal patrons, numerous architects, and several distinct designs – associated with the project of rebuilding St. Peter’s over almost two centuries. Three terms come together in this discussion: the aspirations of the restored papacy, recen...
2011, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the nascent independent communes of central Italy expressed a new sense of civic identity through the staging of elaborate public liturgical processions that shaped and were shaped by local mythology and idiomatic urban landscapes. The Medieval “Inchinata” Procession at Tivoli: Ritual Construction of Civic Identity in the Age of the Commune examines Tivoli’s Inchinata procession that circled the city every year on the eve of the Assumption Feast. Reconstructing the route and performance of the medieval Inchinata through textual, topographical, and archaeological data, Rebekah Perry argues that the procession evolved as an adaptation of “official” liturgical rites introduced from its rival Rome to a native apotropaic ritual and local narratives embedded in its topography. Through the cosmographical choreography of the procession, the young municipality may have used this amalgamation to invoke the New Jerusalem as an appeal to divine authority for right to self-rule.
1990, Anglo-Saxon England, 19, pp.197 - 246
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury went to Rome in 990, to fetch his pallium. Sigeric, formerly a monk of Glastonbury and then abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury, had been consecrated bishop of Ramsbury in 985, and became archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 989 or at the beginning of 990, on the death of Archbishop AEthelgar. During the journey, or more likely, once he had returned to England, he committed to writing a diary covering his journey and his stay in Rome. This year, the 1000th anniversary of Sigeric's visit to the 'city of St Peter', as medieval travellers called Rome, seems a suitable time to undertake a new examination of the considerable devotional and artistic impact of the Roman pilgrimage on the cultural and spiritual life of the late Anglo-Saxon Church.
2015, Medieval Encounters
Contacts between Ethiopia and the papacy may have developed since the twelfth century and are securely documented from the first half of the fourteenth century. Information and mutual knowledge, very vague at the beginning, slowly increased through merchants, missionaries, and official embassies; both sides learned from each other. But numerous misunderstandings remained and fabulous tales about Ethiopia were diffused in papal documents until the fifteenth century. This was caused, of course, by the difficulty of obtaining precise and genuine information about these remote lands but it was also the consequence of an intentional confusion and distortion of reality, fed by the papacy in order to highlight its universal power.
2014, Studies in Honour of Ora Limor
2014, Framing Jewish Culture: Boundaries, Representations, and Exhibitions of Ethnic Difference, Jewish Cultural Studies, Vol 4
This essay presents episodes, mostly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, that demonstrate how Jews existed within the spatial framework of Rome and elsewhere in medieval Christian Italy, straddling social, economic, and spatial boundaries. Using a variety of sources to physically locate Jews in Italian urban culture allows a better understanding of the civic space available to them in Italian cities in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Stretching from just before the promulgation of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council until the creation of the Venetian ghetto in 1516, this was a tumultuous but transformative period of Italian and Jewish history, in which Jewish communities settled and thrived throughout the entire peninsula.
2012, La Basilica di San Pietro: Fortuna e Immagine, ed. Giovanni Morello, Rome: Gangemi, 2012
The project to revitalize St. Peter’s basilica as the center of a resurgent Church proceeded in step with the goal to reassert papal authority across the Italian peninsula and to extend that authority to the Eastern Mediterranean by mounting a crusade to recover the Holy Land. By embedding references tothe Holy Land in the fabric of the new church, the architecture itself became the expressive voice of the papacy’s political agenda to transform the basilica, and all of Rome, into a New Jerusalem. In tracing the development of these ideas as they were introduced by Nicholas V, (1447-1455) refined by Julius II (1503-1513), and translated into physical form by Donato Bramante, this essay provides a new way of understanding myriad problems – multiple papal patrons, numerous architects, and several distinct designs – associated with the project of rebuilding St. Peter’s over almost two centuries.
This book explores the career of Abraham Abulafia (ca. 1240–1291), self-proclaimed Messiah and founder of the school of ecstatic Kabbalah. Active in southern Italy and Sicily where Franciscans had adopted the apocalyptic teachings of Joachim of Fiore, Abulafia believed the end of days was approaching and saw himself as chosen by God to reveal the Divine truth. He appropriated Joachite ideas, fusing them with his own revelations, to create an apocalyptic and messianic scenario that he was certain would attract his Jewish contemporaries and hoped would also convince Christians. From his focus on the centrality of the Tetragrammaton (the four letter ineffable Divine name) to the date of the expected redemption in 1290 and the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in the inclusiveness of the new age, Abulafia’s engagement with the apocalyptic teachings of some of his Franciscan contemporaries enriched his own worldview. Though his messianic claims were a result of his revelatory experiences and hermeneutical reading of the Torah, they were, to no small extent, dependent on his historical circumstances and acculturation.
2005
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, two major schisms between the papacy and the empire erupted. The first struggle, the Investiture Controversy, lasting from 1077-1122, set the Church against the Holy Roman Emperor on the issue of the right to choose and install bishops. The second papal/imperial conflict concerned the question of papal supremacy over Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1159-1179). Because these two conflicts impacted both imperial and papal territories, the churches on imperial soil had to choose to support either the papacy, the spiritual head of the church, or the emperor, the secular lord of these imperial territories. As part of a territorial campaign to win and maintain the loyalty of Alsace, the homeland of the Hohenstaufen family, Barbarossa directly concerned himself with the affairs of several churches in the region. At the same time that Barbarossa exerted his influence on these churches, artistic programs emerged attesting to the success of the emperor’s territorial politics. The church of St. Peter and Paul at Andlau (1160) in Lower Alsace is of key importance for understanding later sculptural programs designed to please Frederick Barbarossa in the area. Three sculpted motifs at Andlau can be specifically linked to imperial ideology: the Christus Triumphans, the Traditio Legis, and Dietrich’s Rescue of Rentwin. Each of these themes had traditional associations with both the pope and the emperor and had been employed by popes during the Investiture Controversy to advocate papal supremacy over the emperor. Barbarossa and his supporters readapted these three motifs in Alsatian sculptural programs to reiterate the emperor’s traditional God-given right to authority in the sacred and secular realms.
2019, Renaissance Studies
From the anonymous contemporary biographer of Cola di Rienzo (c. 1313–54), we know that the self-declared Roman tribune engaged in a theatrical approach to the assertion of power and employed stories and symbols of the city’s ancient past to re- inforce his short-lived reign. One story from Livy was a natural fit for the flamboy- ant Cola in staging his takeover of Rome’s government in May 1347, and yet has not received scholarly attention. This was the tale of Lucius Verginius, the fifth-century B.C.E. centurion whose attempt to thwart the debauchery of his daughter by a rul- ing decemvir, instigated the so-called second plebeian secession. Two important topo- graphical touchstones for the story were the Aventine Hill where the plebs chose their new tribunes and the Prata Flaminia, later the Circus Flaminius, where they voted to make consul elections subject to their approval. Cola di Rienzo employed both of these locations in May 1347, with the former Prata Flaminia serving as the starting point for his march to the Capitoline to seize power. This article considers the reasons Cola would employ the Verginius tale, how he knew the site of the Prata Flaminia and possible reasons its true location was later forgotten until 1960.
2013, Jews in Medieval Christendom. "Slay them Not", eds. Kristine T. Utterback and Merrall Llewelyn Price
2020, Cultures and Practices of Coexistence from the Thirteenth Through the Seventeenth Centuries Multi-Ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World, Volume 1
Once a small Muslim town on the Asian shore of Bosporus, Üsküdar was a quasi-rural settlement known for its summer residences, beautiful vineyards, and gardens. From the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, Üsküdar became one of the most attractive suburbs of Istanbul for the building activities commissioned by the Ottoman imperial household. The increasing number of mosque complexes stimulated the region's urban development and transformed the rural Üsküdar into an urbanized town. As its boundaries began to extend towards the south-east direction, new neighborhoods were being formed, and the new settlers of the town altered the region's ethnoreligious composition. This study provides the first findings of my preliminary research for my dissertation on the spatial evolution of Mahalle-i Ma'mûre formed around Nurbanu Mosque Complex, the most significant imperial endowment in Üsküdar built between the years of 1570-79. The Muslim, Greek, Armenian, Jew, and Gypsy residents of Ma'mûre shared the same public sphere that linked them and shaped their identities and solidarity networks. Focusing on their occupations patterns, local networks, commercial activities, marriage, and divorce practices, I try to map different ethnic and religious communities within the neighborhood sociality through the lenses of judicial records within one year.
The Arch of Titus, constructed circa 81 CE under the emperor Domitian, commemorates the victory of the general, then emperor Titus in the Jewish War of 66–74 CE. Located on Rome’s Via Sacra, the Arch has been a “place of memory” for Romans, Christians and Jews since antiquity. This essay explores the history of a Jewish counter-memory of a bas relief within the arch that depicts the triumphal procession of the Jerusalem Temple treasures into Rome in 71 CE. At least since the early modern period, Jews—as well as British Protestants—came to believe that the menorah bearers of this relief represent Jews, and not Roman triumphadors. This essay addresses the history of this widespread belief, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continuing in contemporary Israel.
2010, Jewish Studies Quarterly
How the Via Francigena was finally put on the map as "Via Romea" and how it was interpreted in all its historical bearing.
2015
Recent decades have seen a steady flow of scholarship on collective remembering and formation of shared identities. This volume contributes to this conversation in four ways. First, it takes part in theoretical discussion on collective remembering by targeting specific theorems and exploring these in analyses of specific, historical source records. Secondly, essays in the volume reflect a rich underlying cross disciplinary discussion, which is certainly required for these complex phenomena. Thirdly, a recurring focus in the collection are instances of collective remembering in religious traditions and settings. Such instances, it is argued, are often “memory savvy” and thus provide interesting case studies. Finally, the volume attempts to understand the dynamics and interplay between past, present, and future in processes of collective remembering and identity formation.
Church History 81 ( 2012) 298–327
There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. This intra-Christian competition did not, however, lead to the contestation of space in the form of processions as it did, for example, in Constantinople. At Rome, intra-Christian competition took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege and occupation. Instead of conquering urban space through processions—impossible as the Roman aristocracy and their patronage of traditional spectacles still dominated and defined the public sphere—Roman Christians resorted to warfare, until the mid- sixth century C.E. when an impoverished aristocracy ceased to lavish its diminished wealth on traditional forms of public display. Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.