L'Agenda des Médiévistes

Pouvait-on changer de genre au Moyen Âge ? Vivre en homme et devenir sainte ? Naître fille et finir chevalier ? Changer d’habits comme d’identité durant cette période dominée par la chrétienté ?
Pour faire taire les idées reçues, Clovis Maillet démontre que les expériences de transidentité ne sont pas l’apanage de la modernité. Que le combat pour l’émancipation peut même passer par la réappropriation des figures de l’histoire. Ainsi l’héritage de Jeanne d’Arc est-il disputé à la droite nationaliste par les militants queer libertaires qui la considèrent, depuis la fin du XXe siècle, comme une guerrière transgenre.

De Jeanne d’Arc à Hildegonde-Joseph en passant par Eugénie-Eugène, sainte Thècle ou le chevalier Silence, ce livre propose une réflexion sur le genre en retraçant une histoire trans de l’époque médiévale.

Clovis Maillet est historien. Après une thèse sur la parenté chez les saints, il s’est imposé comme une référence sur les questions du genre et de la transidentité dans la culture médiévale.

Informations pratiques :

Clovis Maillet, Les Genres Fluides, Paris, Arkhê, 2020. 258 p. ISBN : 978-2918682769. 19 euros.

Source : Arkhê

Mary of Hungary’s extensive artistic patronage and the collections she formed of an array of artworks, objects and books were by no means an isolated phenomenon within the Habsburg dynasty. On the contrary, the Regent of the Netherlands and loyal adviser to her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, emulated the examples of the Habsburg women who preceded her, and in turn provided an exemplar for those that came after. She continued the traditions, trends and practices her ancestors and peers had established, which had been initiated by female members of the Trastámara dynasty, most notably Isabel of Castile This collection of essays examines the cultural patronage of Mary of Hungary in the light of her multiple identities: a humanist-trained patron of the arts; a Habsburg princess closely implicated in the visual construction and projection of Charles V’s political identity across the alliances and divisions of early modern Europe; and a female regent bound by the imperial, dynastic and political ideologies cultivated by the sixteenth-century Habsburg monarchs.

Beyond forming one of the most important art collections of the European Renaissance and playing a prominent role in the patronage of the artists she received under her protection, Mary used art to construct an image of herself that undeniably contributed to the consolidation and dissemination of both her political legitimacy and that of her dynasty among the courts of Europe.

Table des matières :

Introduction – Noelia García Pérez

PART I: Mary of Hungary in context

Challenging Images: Charles V’s relationship with art, artists and festivities – Mía Rodríguez Salgado
Like Aunt like Niece? Assessing the value of Margaret of Austria’s collection for Mary of Hungary – Dagmar Eichberger
Alessandro Nogarola’s Rediscovered Vita of Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands – Annemarie Jordan Gschwend

PART II: Mary of Hungary and the arts

Mary of Hungary, patron and collector, from political to cultural history: the state of the question –Noelia García Pérez
Titian, Mary of Hungary, and Venus and Psyche – Miguel Falomir Faus
«A woman who is so much like a man»: Mary of Hungary, Female Rulership, and Portraits by the Leoni – Kelley Helmtutler Di Dio
A New Perspective on Mary of Hungary’s Labours of Hercules Tapestries (Patrimonio Nacional, series 23) – Anne Sophie Laruelle
Female readings and dynastic bibliophilia on Mary of Hungary – José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero
Mary of Hungary, Patron of Music – Camilla Cavicchi

Bibliography
Index

Informations pratiques :

Mary of Hungary, Renaissance Patron and Collector. Gender, Art and Culture, dir. Noelia García Pérez, Turnhout, Brepols, 2020 (Études Renaissantes, 31).

Source : Brepols

In recent years, stories of religious universities and institutions grappling with their slave-owning past have made headlines in the news. People find it shocking that the Church itself could have been involved in such a sordid business. This timely book, the result of many years of research, is a study of the origins of this problem.

Mary E. Sommar examines how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and for others’ behavior towards such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues up to thirteenth-century establishment of a body of canon law that would persist into the twentieth century. Along with her analysis of the various policies and statutes, Sommar draws on chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods to provide insight into the situations of unfree ecclesiastical dependents. She finds that unfree dependents of the Church actually had less chance of achieving freedom than did the slaves of other masters. The church authorities’ duty to preserve the Church’s patrimony for the needs of future generations led them to hold on tightly to their unfree human resources. This accessibly written book does not present an apology for the behavior of past Christian leaders, but attempts to learn what they did and to arrive at some understanding of why they made those choices.

Mary Sommar has taught ancient and medieval history for the past twenty years, most of them at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Stephan Kuttner Institute for Medieval Canon Law in Munich, Germany and a year as a Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

Table des matières :

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1: Introduction
2: The New Testament and Slavery
3: Slavery in the Early Church
4: Slavery in the Imperial Church
5: Ecclesiastical Slavery in the Germanic Kingdoms
6: Carolingians and Ecclesiastical Servitude
Ecclesiastical Slavery in the British Isles
7: The Classical Canon Law
8: The Slaves of the Churches: Conclusions
Latin Lexicon
Appendix

Informations pratiques :

Mary E. Sommar, The Slaves of the Churches. A History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020. 296 Pages, 235x156mm. ISBN: 9780190073268. Prix : 22,99 £.

Source : Oxford University Press

Late Antique artefacts, and the images they carry, attest to a highly connected visual culture from ca. 300 to 800 C.E. On the one hand, the same decorative motifs and iconographies are found across various genres of visual and material culture, irrespective of social and economic differences among their users – for instance in mosaics, architectural decoration, and luxury arts (silver plate, textiles, ivories), as well as in everyday objects such as tableware, lamps, and pilgrim vessels. On the other hand, they are also spread in geographically distant regions, mingled with local elements, far beyond the traditional borders of the classical world. At the same time, foreign motifs, especially of Germanic and Sasanian origin, are attested in Roman territories. This volume aims at investigating the reasons behind this seemingly globalised visual culture spread across the Late Antique world, both within the borders of the (former) Roman and (later) Byzantine Empire and beyond, bringing together diverse approaches characteristic of different national and disciplinary traditions. The presentation of a wide range of relevant case studies chosen from different geographical and cultural contexts exemplifies the vast scale of the phenomenon and demonstrates the benefit of addressing such a complex historical question with a combination of different theoretical approaches.

Table des matières :

Introduction – Fabio Guidetti and Katharina Meinecke

I. Dynamics of provincial visual cultures in the late Roman empire

1. Becoming glocal! Glocalisation, the victorious charioteer from the villa of El Pomar (Hispania Baetica) and the emergence of a regional visual koiné in 4th-century Augusta Emerita (Hispania Lusitana) – Montoya Gonzalez
2. Clothing differentiation in a shared visual culture: Dress imagery in mosaic iconography – Amy Place
3. Act locally, think globally: Late antique funerary painting from the territory of present-day Serbia – Jelena Anđelković, Dragana Rogić and Emilija Nikolić
4. The emperors in the province: A study of the Tetrarchic images from the imperial cult chamber in Luxor – Nicola Barbagli

II. Iconography- or genre-related case studies

5. Images of the rider on horseback in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st millennium AD – Renate Rosenthal-Heginbottom
6. The ‘child with grapes’ from Britain to Bahrain: Shared iconography, meaning and mobility on funerary monuments, AD 100–400 – Lindsay R. Morehouse
7. Baptism and Roman gold-glasses: Salvation and social dynamics – Monica Hellstroum
8. First-generation diptychs and the reception of Theodosian court art – Fabio Guidetti

III. Connections with Roman visual culture in extra-Roman and post-Roman contexts

9. Buckles and bones: Central Asiatic influences and the making of post-Roman Gaul – Carlo Ferrari
10. South Arabia in Late Antiquity: A melting pot of artistic ideas – Sarah Japp
11. The mosaic pavement beneath the floor of al-Aqṣā mosque: A case study of late antique artistic – Michelina Di Cesare

IV. Modes of transfer: iconographies, motifs, objects

12. Circulating images: Late Antiquity’s cross-cultural visual koin&eacute – Katharina Meinecke
13. Bracteates with Byzantine coin patterns along the Silk Road – Guo Yunyan
14. Small worlds of long Late Antiquity: Global entanglements, trade diasporas and network theory – Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Informations pratiques :

A Globalised Visual Culture?: Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art, dir. Fabio Guidetti et Katharina Meinecke, Oxbow, 2020. 416 p., ISBN: 9781789254464. Prix : 40 £.

Source : Oxbow Books