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2001 Colloquium Paper Abstracts

"Town and Country in the Middle Ages"

Keynote Address:

Settlers and Spirits: Claiming the Land in Norse Tradition

The first settlers arriving in Iceland at the end of the ninth century--so the historians tell us- found a vast, uninhabited land.  True, there may have been a small number of Celtic monks eking out a solitary existence far from the evils of society, but otherwise the land was pristine.  The Norse settlers themselves, however, did not consider the land to be uninhabited.  In their eyes, an array of land spirits dwelt in the hills, valleys, and waterfalls.  Evidence for the belief in these spirits is to be found not only in the Icelandic sagas, but also in the ancient laws and early historical texts.

Utilizing these sources, supplemented by material from Scandinavia, an attempt is made to describe and define the cult which lies at the root of the belief in land spirits.  In contrast, Christianity, which, in the north, was an important element in state-formation, and led to the urbanization of political and economic power, the cult related to land spirits, with its associations to fertility worship, was firmly rooted in the countryside.  This paper is concerned with the Nordic belief in land spirits, and with the respect shown to them, and to the land in which they were thought to dwell, by the initial settlers of Iceland.
 

Augustine's De Civitate Dei as a Source on Roman Religion in the Middle Ages

Saint Augustine's City of God is built upon the metaphor of a contrast between the earthly city and heavenly, Babylon and Jerusalem.  However, it is in fact the city of Rome which Augustine treats in the greatest detail.  Rome not only provides the well known impetus for the work's creation, but is also the focus of the extended discussion of pagan culture and religion, found chiefly in Books IV, VI, and VII.  It is on this slightly less familiar aspect of the work that I shall concentrate after providing a summary of the transmission of the work as a whole through the Middle Ages.  I am interested in asking what evidence there is for medieval interest in the classical content, despite its widespread availability and the legitimizing authority of Augustine's apologetic stance.  Indications of interest in this material are few (or at least appear so in the scholarship) before the appearance of a number of commentaries in the fourteenth century.
 

Calamity and Consolation: Abelard's Historia Calamitatum as a Twelfth-Century Letter

In his Historia calamitatum (History of My Misfortunes), Peter Abelard tells the story of his meteoric rise to academic fame and fortune and catastrophic fall from grace.  From his steamy affair with Heloise to his castration, from his cavalier beginnings as a migrant professor to his condemnation at the council of Sens, Abelard bares all before his reader.  Despite its self-indulgent overtones, the Historia is in fact a letter written to comfort a friend undergoing temptatio and oppressio.  The friend, however, is never named in the text.  This has led some to believe that there is no real recipient because the letter is only a rhetorical exercise.  Does Abelard assume the guise of consolatio as an excuse to indulge in a narcissistic, self-pitying autobiography?  Or does he have some other motivation for writing?  Who is the mystery recipient and how can his identity, if known, shed light on Abelard's true intention for writing the letter?

In the past scholars have suggested different answers to these questions, some better than others but none of them conclusive.  This gives the impression that Abelard's Historia is one of those elusive medieval documents that we will never fully understand.  However, in this paper I hope to show that the letter is entirely comprehensible, far more so than scholars have been willing to admit.  By doing a close philological reading of the text in light of Abelard's career, I build a case for solving the riddle of the "mystery friend" and for giving the Historia its due recognition as one of Abelard's finest writings.
 

Love is a Battlefield: Azincourt and Alain Chartier's Livre des Quatre Dames

In 1416, just months after the calamitous and humiliating French defeat at Azincourt, the young Alain Chartier completed his Livre des quatre dames, a seemingly conventional work in the tradition of the débat amoureux.  In this poem, four noblewomen describe their amorous woes to the narrator, who is then to determine which of them is the most unhappy in love.  Often dismissed as a frivolous or escapist work because of its apparently sentimental subject matter, Le Livre des quatre dames in fact offers sharp and insightful criticism of the politics and morals of Chartier's era, and this, by means of the very love debate that forms the subject of the poem.  Although the Livre des quatre dames opens in a pastoral setting typical of its genre, it surprises readers' expectations by inscribing the debate itself within a precise political context--that of the Hundred Years War.  Each of the four women has lost her lover in the recent encounter: the first lover has been killed, the second taken prisoner, the third has not been heard from, and the fourth, though physically spared, has been rejected by his lady due to his cowardly and unchivalrous flight from the battlefield.

In this paper, I will examine the poem's innovative combination of political and amorous discourses, and the manner in which a parallel is established between the language and behavior of love and that of chivalric service; the lady and the king are the two parties served, and all too often betrayed, by the knights of Azincourt.  This parallel enables the love debate to function as a framework for exploring the political problems facing France, as well as the moral decay that Chartier believes to be undermining the nation from within, and which is at the heart of the defeat at Azincourt.  The overlap between these two types of discourse endows the Livre des quatre dames, an otherwise conventional love debate, with a newly political significance.  Moreover, Chartier's work shows how poetry, which had often been dismissed as inherently unsuited to the discussion of serious ideas, could communicate a powerful political message.  Alain Chartier is among the first in a new generation of politically engaged writers, and the Livre des quatre dames, one of his earliest works, announces the themes and concerns that would preoccupy the writer for the remainder of his career.
 

Why the Man in the Moon Is Staying out of Town

Of the poems in the Harley Lyrics (Middle English poems compiled around 1340), "The Man in the Moon" has particularly delighted and puzzled readers.  It is no accident that modern editors of Middle English poetry collections often place this poem in the "miscellaneous" section because its strange blend of folklore and life on the manor marks it as a unique poem among the Harley Lyrics and Middle English lyrics in general.  The narrator presents the story of a man who gets caught stealing, flees the manor, and now lives outside of the village as the "Man in the Moon."  The Man in the Moon is an enigmatic figure, but what really makes the poem complex is the narrator, whose character subtly emerges from his dramatic monologue.  Although he offers to help the Man in the Moon come back to town and to settle his affairs by deceiving the authorities, the narrator is an untrustworthy figure.  His risky strategy and his tone of voice which shifts from detached mockery to confident coaxing and finally to bitter scorn--suggest the narrator offers this ruse, not to trick the authorities, but the Man in the Moon himself.

After exploring the narrator's questionable proposal and elusive voice, I would like to suggest possible legal and financial motivations the narrator may have in bringing this runaway peasant back to town.  Manorial court records give us a context for the narrator's motives and can offer an analagous situation.  In one particular case, the manorial court allows the lord to confiscate a man's property and invalidate the claims of the man's heirs--all because the man fled the manor.  If the Man in the Moon is such a runaway, he potentially impoverishes the narrator, who may be one of his family or friends who have pledged to vouch for his behavior and are liable for his failure to appear in court and pay fines.  As an analogy to the narrator's circumstances, this court record reveals how legal issues set two peasants against one another and adds another layer of complexity to this portrait of manorial life.
 

The Case of the Missing Mint: Finding a Narrative (Strategy) in Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds

Chronicles have long been of interest to historians due to their subject matter and to linguists for the analysis of language developments.  Only in more recent decades interest in examining historiography from a literary perspective has emerged.  Despite this general interest, however, one of the best known pieces of medieval historical writing, Jocelin of Brakelond's Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, has not received as much attention from literary scholars as one would expect.

Jocelin traces the abbacy of his "hero" Samson and the events taking place at Bury St Edmunds roughly from 1173 to 1202.  In rather typical fashion for a medieval monastic history or chronicle, the extensive economic affairs of both the abbey and the convent appear as a main theme in Jocelin's text, for St. Edmunds constantly needed to defend the acquisition and assertion of rights and privileges against other clerical as well as secular forces due to overlapping economic interests.  We know that among the long list of St. Edmunds' sources of income establishing its powerful position, the abbey supervised the royal mint, which reached peak production during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, just during and after the time when Jocelin was writing.  Strikingly, Jocelin makes no mention whatsoever of the mint.

In my paper, I first explore Jocelin's reasons for omitting any references to the mint from his chronicle.  Second, I use Jocelin's narrative strategy of silence and exclusion to explore the utility and limitations of modern theory of historiography that approaches historical writing from a narratological perspective.
 

Early King's Lynn

In the early twelfth century, Bishop Herbert de Losinga granted the cathedral priory of Norwich the church of St. Margaret's in what is now called King's Lynn, along with a fair and market.  Around the same time, King Henry I granted William d'Albini the misteria of Lynn, along with half a fair, tolls, and other customs.  The topography of King's Lynn is broken up into three areas, South Lynn, the original King's Lynn, and the area adjoining it to the north known at the time as Newland.  Whether King Henry's grant referred to exactly the same area is unknown.  There is a Saturday market at St. Margaret's and a Tuesday market further north, close to St. Nicholas's church, which Bishop William established sometime later in the twelfth century.  By examining both the archaeological excavations of King's Lynn and the historical documents, including charters and other grants, I hope to shed some light on some of the complexities of the development of early King's Lynn.
 

Margery's Lynn: Locating the Absent City in the Book of Margery Kempe

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Wynkyn de Worde printed several fragments of the Book of Margery Kempe which focused on their protagonist's spiritual life.  In 1521 Henry Pepwell included these fragments in a collection of mystical writings, where he misidentified Margery, a late fourteenth-, early fifteenth-century laywoman from Bishops Lynn, as an anchoress.  On the contrary, a prominent monk whom Margery encountered in Canterbury could only voice his disappointment that she had not been “closyd in an hows of ston that ther schuld no man speke wyth [her]”—or, more precisely, so that no man should hear her.  Indeed “John of Burnamys dowtyr of Lynne” was very much a citizen of the world.  During her lifetime Margery Kempe operated, albeit unsuccessfully, several businesses within her own Lynn; visited various parts of England from York to Canterbury; made pilgrimages to Santiago, Rome, and the Holy Land; and escorted her recently widowed daughter-in-law to the latter’s home in Germany.  Yet the city, and Margery’s hometown of Lynn in particular, while the physical setting for much of her biography, often seems to be little more than a scenic backdrop for her Book, so much so that Pepwell could mistake Margery for a recluse.  In this paper, I will explore the narrative strategies employed by Margery in representing Bishops Lynn throughout her Book in order to reclaim the city as a significant locus for her life as well as the story she made of it.
 

Heaven on Earth? Architecture and Authority in Nara and Heian Japan

Of the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, William Coaldrake, an historian of architecture and the first non-Japanese member of the prestigious Kyoto Guild of Traditional Master Builders, observed that "as both a city and a center for national government, Nara was based on an architectonic vision of the human order embracing a symbiotic relationship between imperial authority and the built environment."  Indeed, it seems that there was a special relationship among places, people, and purpose at the Nara capital, reflecting, first, a concerted effort on the part of Japanese officials to emulate Chinese planning and architectural principles, and, second, to accommodate the creation and character of a Japanese government in which "ritual and ceremony provided tangible evidence of the ideological assertion" of its authority in the architectural context of monumental palaces and urban form.  For most of the eighth century, the rigidly structured capital "city of heavenly peace" (Heijô-kyô, the Chinese reading of the word Nara, by which the city is referred to in documents of the period) charted the ideological course for Japanese politics, religion, technology and culture.

But in the year 794 CE, Kammu Tennô transferred the capital city to Heian (modern day Kyoto) and, among other momentous changes in the governance of the archipelago, a shift in the architectural manifestations of authority accompanied the establishment of the new seat of Japanese government.  the Heian capital, from its founding until the establishment of the first warrior government four centuries later, witnessed the flourishing of a new style of Japanese architecture, the so-called shinden-zukuri ("sleeping hall") style favored and perfected by an increasingly powerful group of aristocrats who dominated the court, thus effectively usurping the right of real governance from the tennô.  It is my belief that this new style of architecture reflected the changes in political organization in Japan.  The houses of aristocrats, in both their design and usage, mirrored their ascendancy.

For the purposes of my study of Nara- and Heian-period material, what is important in Coaldrake's work is the conceptualization of a visual map of state authority reflected generally in the architecture of the city and specifically in the residential compounds of aristocrats.  Central to an historical perspective on the transition from the Nara to Heian periods, and of trends in the longue dureé of Japanese history itself, is an understanding of the relationship between the principles and processes of urban building on one hand, and of the principles and processes of society and politics on another.  I hope to bring two important questions to the archaeological and historical material used in this report.  Firstly, what was the relationship between Nara as a place and Nara as the center of governance in the archipelago?  And secondly, how did the policies of Japan's eighth-century state, its concepts of authority, dictate the form of residential architecture?  To accomplish  this task I will demonstrate the "architecture of authority" as evidence by the household archaeology of two important noble figures: Prince Nagaya Ô's residence, an eighth-century royal scion and minister of the ritsuryô state, and Fujiwara Michinaga's Tsuchimikado, arguably the most famous of the Fujiwara regents of Heian Japan.
 

And Then There Was One: Exile and the Creation of a National Periphery in the Narrative of Shunkan

While scholarship in Japanese studies has given much emphasis to the city-country divide, very few have tried to discuss how this opposition of center and periphery was used to delineate the boundaries of the imperial realm, while showing the power of the center to domesticate those far-flung spaces.  The definition of space ws undoubtedly a critical question to the power-holders of Kamakura Japan (1193-1336) for this period saw the repeated invasions of the Mongols (1274-1281).

This paper will take up one of the most famous exiles in Japanese literature, the abbot Shunkan.  In the late 14th century work, the Genpei Jôsuiki (The tale of the rising and falling fortunes of the Taira and Minamoto clans), the abbot is accused of conspiracy by the Taira clan and exiled to the island of Kikaigashima.  Kikaigashima is volcanic island one hundred and eight kilomenters from Kagoshima bay, and thus in the southwest periphery of modern-day Japan.  I will show that the Genpei Jôsuiki constructs in Kikaigashima a space that lies outside the religious, political and cultural control of Japan.  Kikaigaashima's volcanic landscape, its utter lack of agricultural productivity, is used to conjure up an image of topographical malaise.  Its liminality is then put forward as the cause of its "dystrophy."  It is posited outside the "healthful" imperial realm--those that inhabit it are those who are either outside this realm or have fallen out of it.  This symbolic "excision" of Kikaigashima is enacted only so that its "reinstatement" can be staged, a recovery that brings the spotlight on the Kumano faith, a very powerful religious cult in medieval Japan.  Through various narratological devices, this liminal site mapped over by the religious topography of Kumanoits wildness is tamed.  By formulating exile as "disease" and the return to the imperial realm as "recovery," I will show that the text engenders a discourse on the robustness of the emperor's realm.

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