Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 12 - 2024 i Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

Throughout the Middle Ages and across different cultural spheres, festivals offered entertainment and a respite from daily routines. They also brought people together in celebration and feasting, boosted the economy, and highlighted the skills of various performers. Festivals fed and entertained the masses, becoming a staple of medieval life. This issue explores various cultural, social, and economic facets of medieval festivals. In particular, it focuses attention on several festivals that centered on food and feasting, and others that brought together and mocked aspects of religious and secular life, underscoring the foolishness typical of such events. Besides the theme articles, the pages that follow feature contributions on medieval armour, the histories of chess and of Merlin, an account of the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade, and much more. Be sure to check out…

122 Anglo-Saxon pennies that were found by two metal detectorists in 2019 near Braintree in Essex sold for £325,560 at an auction. The coins were auctioned off individually with the highest price paid being for a very rare single specimen from the Hastings mint, which fetched a price of £24,000 – four times its pre-sale high estimate of £5,000-6,000. The detectorists found 144 coins in total that date from the last two Anglo-Saxon kings of England – Edward the Confessor and Harold II Godwinsson – which had been minted in various towns and cities in England. The Colchester Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge decided to buy 16 coins from the hoard between them, including two eleventh-century Byzantine coins.…

THE ORIGINS, FORMS, & FUNCTIONS OF CHESS The game ends with checkmate when one side captures the king of the opposite party. And, while the figures and the rules kept changing over centuries, the modern game of chess still draws in many ways on the same principles as when it first appeared in the Middle Ages. The origins of chess in India Chess is generally assumed to have first appeared in the sixth century in the Gupta Empire in India. The tale recounted in the Shahnama thus resonates well with the Indian roots of this game. The Arabic word for chess is shatranj, which originates from the Sanskrit word chaturanga or four-limbed. This denotes the four main constituents of the contemporary Indian army: infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants. In addition,…

POLITICS, PAPAL POWER, AND THE CATHARS The infamous crusade against the Cathars in the Languedoc region of France was one of these ‘internal crusades’ that had the same indulgencies as one to the Holy Land. Who were these Cathars? How did the clergy react? What was the role of the Crusaders in the south of France? Cathars and the clergy The words ‘Cathar’ and ‘Albigensian’ are used interchangeably, both in sources and in literature. The earliest reports concerning heresy in the south of France were near Albi – one of the bigger cities in the Languedoc province. As with most religious movements, the heretics in Languedoc tried to offer a simpler belief than Christianity. Cathars, for example, had only two sacraments – confirmation and the last rites – instead of…

FESTIVALS OF BOYS, FOOLS, AND MISRULE The framework for this month-and-a-half of merry-making was the calendar of the Church. From the first day of Advent, which was the first Sunday before the feast of Christmas itself (and which might fall at the end of November), there were at least eighteen feast-days to be marked with special acts of worship; some regional calendars raised this number to as many as twenty-five. The long festive season Naturally, the focal point for this very long festive season was the churches themselves; churches of all kinds, cathedrals, abbeys, and priories of monks and nuns, friaries and parishes in every neighbourhood. Yet, for some of these feast days, both the ceremony and the atmosphere of celebration broke out from this clerical setting into the surrounding…

FOOD AT MEDIEVAL FESTIVALS The calendar of various medieval cultures was marked by either fasting or feasts (the latter usually ended or began a period of fasting). The feasts often became much more, offering opportunities for the leaders of communities to display their wealth and generosity, and garner popularity by feeding the people, entertaining them, and showing their munificence by giving away wealth, too. These feasts became both the evocation of past paradises (such as the Garden of Eden), contemporary ones (the Land of Cockaigne), and future ones that could be achieved (or, at least, dreamed of). Several of these feasts had origins stretching back into antiquity – often the celebration, recipes, and entertainments had long historical pedigrees; certain foods had to be prepared a certain way and the stories…

How Merlin is conceived, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth: “By my living soul, Lord King, and by your living soul, too [Merlin's mother said], I did not have relations with any man to make me bear this child. I know only this: that, when I was in our private apartments with my sister nuns, some one used to come to me in the form of a most handsome young man. He would often hold me tightly in his arms and kiss me. When he had been some little time with me he would disappear, so that I could no longer see him. Many times, too, when I was sitting alone, he would talk with me, without becoming visible; and when he came to see me in this way he would…

Shared Saints and Festivals By Alexandra Cuffel ARC Humanities Press, 2024 ISBN: 978-1641891493 Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook Edited by Vicki K. Janik Greenwood, 1998 ISBN: 978-0313297854 Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World By Beatrice K. Otto University of Chicago Press, 2007 ISBN: 978-0226533315 The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals Edited by Marcia Reed Getty Research Institute, 2015 ISBN: 978-1606064542 Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools By Max R. Harris Cornell University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0801449567 Food and Feasting in Art By Sylvia Malaguzzi J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008 ISBN: 978-0892369140 Medieval Holidays and Festivals: A Calendar of Celebrations By Madeleine Pelner Cosman Piatkus, 1996 ISBN: 978-0861884001 Festivities, Ceremonies, and Rituals in the Lands…

Mainz University Library will be digitizing 462 medieval manuscripts over the next three years. The manuscripts, which can be found in the German cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, have over 170,000 pages. The team at Mainz will generate high-quality digital reproductions of these manuscripts and then make them generally accessible for the first time. Some of these manuscripts have never before undergone close academic scrutiny. “The political, religious, and economic leadership of the Middle Rhine region during the Middle Ages resulted in a flourishing manuscript production,” says Dr. Christian George of the University Library of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “We are thankful for this opportunity to create digitized versions of these cultural and historic treasures and to make them available to the general public.”…

Perhaps the best-known ensemble of medieval chess pieces is the Lewis Chessmen. Counting seventy-eight pieces in total, this assembly comprised more than a single set. They were discovered together with fourteen other gaming pieces and a belt buckle on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in 1831. The earliest reports state that they were found in the bay of Uig, but numerous contradictory stories obscure our knowledge about their provenance and the original archaeological context. Except for the pawns, the so-called Lewis Chessmen are carved to resemble human figures. The set has been split into two: currently, eleven chessmen are exhibited in Edinburgh, while the rest are in the British Museum in London. Nearly all the pieces are fashioned out of walrus ivory, with a few…

The medieval calendar brimmed with beloved feast days and festivals, such as Candlemas, Saint Valentine's Day, Carnival, Easter, Beltane, and Christmas, among others. Many of these were closely tied to the liturgical cycles, which marked important celebrations in the Christian tradition. But each festivity brought with it unique rites and traditions, some dating to ancient times. Ancient roots Many medieval festivals had their roots in ancient celebrations, such as those of Rome and Constantinople; the Roman calendar had around 155 festival and holidays per year. The Roman penchant for spectacle – from gladiatorial combats, wild beast hunts, to chariot races – inspired medieval societies, endowing their festivals with both splendour and awe. In Constantinople, the Hippodrome was a site for much popular entertainment, from chariot races to dramatic displays. Chariot…

NOWRUZ IN MEDIEVAL EGYPT “It has been a joyous festival of the Egyptians in ancient as in modern times.” – al-Maqrizi But this is an article about medieval Egypt, which brings up the first question: why was celebrated in Egypt in the first place? Much of our knowledge about this festival comes from the works of Taqī al-Dīn Ahmad ibn ‘Alī ibn al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442), who was a government official and historian who took a keen interest in Egypt's past. In his book Book of Exhortations and Useful Lessons in Dealing with Topography and Historical Remains, al-Maqrizi offers an account of Nawruz in Egypt. The celebration was known by the slightly different name of Nawruz (an-Nawruz al-qibti). Origin stories The writer records several stories of how this festival emerged. One version mentions…

THE CREATION OF HANGUL Northeast Asia witnessed the birth and development of multiple long-standing cultures and peoples, each of which spoke its own language. Chinese, Koreans, numerous Manchurian peoples, Japanese, and a vast array of steppe populations lived, traded, and occasionally made war on one another since before the dawn of recorded history. But beginning around 1200 BC, it was the Chinese who, at least in this region, first attempted to capture sounds in writing. Language in northeast Asia Early Chinese script featured the simplest of pictographs, similar in usage to Egyptian hieroglyphics where a single symbol or character represented a single word. This early development continued over the next couple of millennia. By the early fifteenth century AD, Chinese characters captured not only individual words and actions but also…

IMAGE, IMAGINATION, AND MEMORY The Thun album's images not only stand among the most precious documents of the armourer's art, but also embody its connections to other media. Further, these depictions of armour, whose creation and compilation span a period of nearly 150 years, traverse the boundaries between the late medieval and early modern (or Renaissance) periods. A paper armoury and its Augsburg origins Though the Thun album is bound in unassuming plain parchment, its first pages feature a series of regal enthroned figures with their bodies encased in armour. Elsewhere in the codex, pairs of armoured fighters, some mounted and some on foot, spar on fields of creamy paper. These are only a few of the 112 drawings that fill the Thun album, which offer a wide spectrum of…

REVIEWS By Eleanor Parker ISBN: 978-1784537869 Bloomsbury, 2018 £15.99 (paperback) www.bloomsbury.com Stories are more durable than we tend to acknowledge. Although a story can morph beyond immediate recognition in the course of a few hundred years, remaining elements can nonetheless provide us with clues about the distant historical circumstances from which that story emerged. Eleanor Parker's book Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England is a testament to the durability of stories, the complexity of stories, and the infinite value in studying stories in order to understand cultural interactions across centuries. Dragon Lords focuses on the impact of the prolonged contact between Nordic invaders, traders, mercenaries, and settlers from the mid-ninth century to the mid-eleventh century. This is the period of Viking England, bracketed by the capture of…

What did a medieval Chinese emperor from 1,500 years ago look like? A team of researchers reconstructed the face of Chinese Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou using DNA extracted from his remains. The study, published this week in the journal Current Biology, suggests the emperor's death at the age of 36 might be linked to a stroke. It also sheds light on the origin and migration patterns of a nomadic empire that once ruled parts of northeastern Asia. Emperor Wu was a ruler of the Northern Zhou dynasty in ancient China. Under his reign from AD 560 to AD 578, Emperor Wu built a strong military and unified the northern part of medieval China after defeating the Northern Qi dynasty. The facial reconstruction of Emperor Wu who was ethnically Xianbei,…

The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen has reported the find of a gold ring, which dates to the fifth or sixth century, near the village of Emmerlev in the southeast corner of the country. It was found by Lars Nielsen. Experts believe it also reveals the existence of an elite family with connections to the Merovingians. The connection to the Merovingians is due to the ring's construction with very well-executed spirals on the underside and trefoil knobs in the transition between the ring rail and the socket with the stone, which is characteristic and well-known for Frankish craftsmanship. This has led scholars to believe that an unknown princely family lived in the area and had close connections to the Merovingians, a leading dynasty in Western Europe in the early…

HIGH-END DESIGNS AND DECORATIONS The simple ownership of a full harness marked one out as being of high status. The expectation that those possessing the income of a knight should appear in battle dressed as a knight, stems from the earliest development of knighthood. Quantity has a quality all of its own Twelfth-century Assizes stipulated that those with an income of £20 should wear helm and hauberk, shield and lance. The English fourteenth-century indentures under which men-at-arms were employed for the Hundred Years War, stipulated that they should come ‘suitably mounted and equipped’, with men being paid less or even sent home if their armour was below the standard. In the sixteenth century, armour came as ‘garnitures’, matching sets where individual pieces could be swapped out for different roles and…

Nawruz was not the only Egyptian festival known for its rowdiness. For much of the Middle Ages, a special day was held on 16 May, known as the Feast of the Martyr. It would be about this time that the Nile River would slowly start to rise and this celebration was connected to it. According to al-Maqrizi, the local Christian Coptic community claimed that a ceremony needed to be held to ensure the rising of the river: a wooden chest containing a holy relic of a Christian martyr's finger would be thrown into the Nile River. This event drew huge crowds, and as alMaqrizi writes, led to much frivolity: The populace of Cairo and Fustāt from every walk of life would turn out and set tents along the banks of…

MERLIN IN LEGEND AND LITERATURE Merlin begins in many places. There is the possibly historical figure named Lailoken, a man who went mad after the ca. 575 Battle of Arfderydd in Cumbria. Having taken part in the horrors of war, Lailoken fled to the Caledonian Forest in Scotland and lived a kind of a shaman's life among the animals and wild nature for fifty years. Only slowly did his eccentricity (and what we would call post-traumatic stress) turn him into a prophet. Welsh beginnings Alongside this tradition, however, another figure appears on the battlefield at Arfderydd, that of Myrddin. Whether storytellers merely gave him Lailoken's details – or if stories of Myrddin predate Lailoken – is unclear. But Myrddin is also driven insane by what he saw in the battle;…

Armours were a symbolic category of objects that could evoke the layered significance of their contexts of use. Distinctive forms of helmets, gauntlets, breastplates, and limb defences evoked specific meanings whether associated with the many variants of tournament combat or the battlefield. Thus, armour formed a visual language for late medieval and early modern wearers and viewers. For instance, a heavy helm of the type now widely known as a frog mouth evoked the Stechen, or joust of peace, usually using blunted, coronel-shaped lance tips. This association could extend to the courtly contexts in which such jousts took place and the rarefied aristocrat ic ancestry of their participants. Conversely, a streamlined sallet could suggest the battlefields of the late fifteenth century or variations of the Rennen, a mock joust of…

By Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom ISBN: 978-1641891677 ARC Humanities Press, 2023 £16.95 (paperback) www.arc-humanities.org My favorite story about the desert Christians begins with a bunch of grapes. One of these monks, Macarius, was given grapes as a gift, but he immediately sent them to another monk. “Then the recipient gave thanks to God for his brother's gift,” the story says, “but he likewise did not think of himself but of others and sent them to someone else.” This continued until Macarius received the grapes for a second time. Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom's Desert Ascetics of Egypt is for anyone who has been pulled in by stories like these. She wisely begins by describing our sources for such stories. The most famous collections of sayings and tales were only put together…