Professor of Medieval German Literature and Linguistics at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Fellow at St Edmund Hall, and Co-Director of Oxford Medieval Studies.
The Faculty of History and Oxford Medieval Studies are pleased to invite you to an informal meet and greet coffee morning with William Chester Jordan (Professor of Medieval History, Princeton University) on the occasion of his reception of an honorary degree of the University of Oxford. When? Thursday 23rd June, 10.30am-12 noon Where? The garden of Harris Manchester College (Mansfield Road), or in the Warrington Room in the case of rain. Coffee and croissants will be provided. For catering purposes, please register your attendance if possible: https://forms.gle/AkvPUsX2Ur1hbgTU7
Bill Jordan gave the 2021 Oxford Medieval Studies keynote lecture “A Thirteenth-Century Polymath Considers the Jews” – watch it here:
Organisers: Dr Dinah Wouters (Amsterdam), Sarah Fengler (Oxford)
Liturgical drama in the Middle Ages starts by adapting the most cherished texts of European culture: Scripture. Once introduced as a common practice of dramatising the Bible, European drama kept producing scriptural plays. While there was a strong German tradition of medieval mystery plays, the history of biblical drama is by no means limited to the German cultural sphere. New formats and modes of biblical drama developed through the centuries and in different language areas: from French mystery plays, humanist sacred comedies and tragedies, Jesuit Bible drama, and Spanish Golden Age autos sacramentalesthrough to neoclassical biblical tragedy, biblical Trauerspiele in the German Empfindsamkeit, and scriptural plays in English Romanticism. Furthermore, there was a rediscovery of the so-called cycle plays during the nineteenth century, and even today biblical narratives are still being staged, from modern and postmodern biblical plays through to Broadway and movies. A large number of writers from various eras debated the question of how Scripture can be dramatised, including Hugo Grotius, Jean Racine, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Voltaire, George Gordon Byron, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, to name but a few.
In this workshop, we want to explore the continuities, (in)consistencies, and break lines in the history of European biblical drama. Our objective is to come closer to a diachronic, transnational, and comparative perspective on biblical drama as a literary genre.
Programme
09.00-09.30 Arrival with coffee and tea
09.30-09.45 Opening words
09.45-10.45
Keynote by Daisy Black (University of Wolverhampton) Hole-y Bodies: Exploring gender in the textual gaps of medieval and modern biblical drama
One of the key challenges with the diverse texts collected into the asynchronous structure we call ‘the Bible’, is that these scriptures are fundamentally ‘holey’ as well as holy. By nature of their compilation, form and function, they present us with holes in the text, holes in the narrative, and holes in characterisation. Such holes seem to frustrate the process of dramatization, in which divine stories and beings must be given body, direction and story. Meanwhile, the mere act of staging scripture entails its own issues of embodiment, threatening to expose the aching gap between venerated or divine figures and the bodies representing them. Yet for generations of those seeking to dramatize scripture, both scriptural and physical ‘holes’ have also presented opportunities: gaps through which contemporary concerns might be expressed, explored, rationalised and raised in protest. This is particularly the case in the staging of narratives involving women, whose scriptural origins tend to be even more ‘holey’ than those of male figures. Using English-language case studies from the medieval, early modern and modern periods, this paper examines how playmakers across time have grappled with gaps, and used them to give voice and body to ideas about gender and how we choose whose stories are told.
10.45-12.15 Panel 1
Tovi Bibring (Bar-Ilan University and University of Oxford) Disciplining Emotions in The Mystery Play, Le mistere du Viel Testament as a Case Study
Written by several authors, the 45 mysteries that were compiled in the fifteenth century in an opus referred to as Le mistere du Viel Testament are not merely an “encyclopedia of sacred knowledge, traditions and legends,” as labeled by their modern editors. They are also an important source for understanding the history of emotions in medieval and early modern times. Yet, despite the fact that literary research on the subject has developed greatly over the past years, influenced by the discipline of history of emotions, biblical adaptations in general, and biblical drama in particular, remain quite neglected. Scriptural narratives left enormous lacunas regarding the psychological outcomes of the events experienced by the biblical protagonists. Like any genre of biblical literary adaptation, the different mysteries contained in Le mistere thus provided fertile soil for speculative amplifications about such emotional states. Authors and dramaturges alike could “recontextualize” the psychological implications of any biblical episode in their contemporary setting, and, quite judgmentally, direct the audience toward a supervised formation of their emotions. Such texts thus played a double role, simultaneously constructing the emotional discourse and evaluating it, instructing the audience whether to accept or reject it. In my presentation, I would like to demonstrate the means by which such biblical adaptations acted as an agent to disciplining emotions, according to this double role. Aspiring particularly towards the theorization of the specific contribution of the biblical mystery play to the emotive discourses, I will show the similarities and differences between the mysteries and other genres that perform this literalization of the imagined emotional consequences of the biblical material, such as devotional and didactic texts and parodies.
Cecily Fasham (University of Oxford) Teaching Faith: Performing Pedagogy in the Jeu d’Adam
The Jeu d’Adam represents the earliest extant script for a drama in French or a vernacular language of England. Although the single extant manuscript, MS Tours 927, dates from the late 12th century and was copied in the Loire valley, it is written in Anglo-Norman dialect, and orthographic evidence suggests that its Occitan-speaking scribe struggled with his earlier copytext’s unfamiliar language.
The play has an episodic structure, dramatizing Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden, followed by Cain’s murder of Abel, and a procession of prophets largely adapted from the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermo contra Judeos, Paganos, et Arianos, which includes a debate between Isaiah and a Jew. The Jeu d’Adam has traditionally been viewed as a ritual drama, emerging from liturgy and the performative ceremonies of church services; my paper explores interconnections between the play and contemporary pedagogical practices, building on Christophe Chaguinian’s study of the manuscript in MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play, which locates the play in the context of a large secular institution, such as a Cathedral school.
I examine the Jeu in relation to Peter Cantor’s tripartite educational schema of lectio, disputatio, and predicatio. This reveals that the play employs lectio and disputatio (which pertain to the building of faith), but avoids resolving learning into predicatio (preaching good conduct). I argue that through this, the playwright opens up to his vernacular audience the behind-the-scenes methods of learning faith usually reserved for Latinate students, teaching his audience how to discover divine truth for themselves, through the figural reading of Scripture. He uses debate-scenes to test these truth-claims, and to problematise ideas of textual authority and literary production. The playwright takes on the role of interpres: translator, mediator, prophet, and teacher, modelling a way of engaging with and discovering truth in Scripture drawn from the twelfth-century classroom.
M.A. Katritzky (The Open University) Female religious leaders and the medieval spice-merchant scene
Female religious communities contributed significantly to the highly efficient transnational cultural networks of the medieval Catholic Church; in terms of circulating images, vernacular texts, and above all Latin texts. Drawing on visual as well as textual medieval documents, some previously unknown to specialists, my current researches explore the decisive, previously under-recognized role of their contributions to the development of the so-called merchant scene of biblical drama, representing Easter Holy Women purchasing spices from one or more generally itinerant healers. Encouraged by highly educated female religious leaders in France, Austria, the central Czech and German-speaking lands and elsewhere, theatrical representations of spice-purchasing Holy Women circulated between religious communities right across Europe. As they did so, they moved ever closer to legitimating women on the religious stage, and to providing it with a deeply moving female counterpart—at the end of Christ’s life—to the male-dominated visit of the spice-bearing Kings who herald its beginning.
Through their creativity and patronage, female religious leaders were the first to recognize the great significance of the merchant scene for Easter ceremonies. Their influential repurposing and secularization of this brief biblical episode achieved a substantial, popular, dramatic vehicle for explicating the origins of the Easter Holy Womens’ spice containers, and for extending and emphasizing the impact and importance of the Easter story’s Holy Women in biblical drama. Making full use of the powerful transnational cultural networks of the Catholic Church to communicate between their mostly Benedictine communities, the female religious leaders who contributed most significantly towards establishing the merchant scene as a popular, even dominant, element in Easter performances, instrumentally influenced the development of the European religious stage.
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-14.30
Keynote by Jan Bloemendal (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam) The Bible on the Early Modern Stage: A Transnational Approach
In the Early Modern period, several Biblical stories were popular themes for dramatic productions. The playwrights were Christians themselves and their audiences were similarly Christian, be it in the course of the sixteenth century more confessionalized. Protestant humanists and Jesuit fathers wrote Biblical plays for the educational situation, and chose, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Joseph, Esther, Jephthah, stories from the Books of Kings, and parables of the Good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the poor Lazarus and the Rich man, and the Prodigal Son. Also the life and death of Jesus was the subject of some plays. We can deal with these plays as individual dramas, but also as nodes in a network. Authors were inspired by each others’ plays. In this paper, I will explore ways of researching them in transnational ways.
14.30-15.30 Panel 2 (chair: Rasmus Vangshardt)
Wim François (KU Leuven) Biblical Drama and Politically Incorrect Ideas in the Early Modern Netherlands
Francisca Stangel (University of Kent) Sapientia Solomonis: Transcending national, cultural, and socio-economic borders
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.00 Panel 3
Rasmus Vangshardt (University of Southern Denmark) Beauty and the Bible in Two Old Testament Plays by Lope de Vega
Sarah Fengler (University of Oxford) German and Swiss Old Testament Plays in the Eighteenth Century. Klopstock, Lavater, Bodmer
17.00-18.30 Panel 4
Alina Kornienko (Université Paris-VIII-Vincennes-Saint-Denis) Le paradigme du “fil prodigue” dans l’œuvre de Jean-Luc Lagarce / “Retracing your own footsteps”: the paradigm of the “prodigal son” in the dramatic creation of Jean-Luc Lagarce
(ONLINE) Jean-François Poisson-Gueffier (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3) Create or recreate? Paul Claudel and the Medieval French Biblical Drama
(ONLINE) Giampaolo Molisina (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Pasolini’s Vangelo and the Loss of the Sacred Dimension in Contemporary Man
Register
If you want to register, either to attend the conference in person or to follow the two online presentations, please send an email to sarah.fengler@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk and dinah.wouters@huygens.knaw.nl.
Friday, 10 June 2022, 5pm, in St Edmund Hall, Old Library
We often talk about Europe, but our traditional ideas about European culture are questionable. This is because we carry views from the colonial and romantic periods that distort our image of history and geography and may prove a burden for future coexistence on the continent. I would like to encourage us to think more openly about Europe, about its broad cultural roots and its intensive relations with its continental neighbours. This includes reflecting on medieval clichés: medieval Europe was not a “Christian land” as the Romantics Novalis and Chateaubriand dreamed it. It was much more than that.
If you would like to participate remotely, please contact Henrike Lähnemann to be added to a teams call.
Storyteller (meddah) at a coffeehouse in the Ottoman Empire. The first coffeehouses appeared in the Islamic world in the 15th century. Source: Wikimedia
The TORCH Oxford Medieval Studies Programme invites applications for small grants to support conferences, workshops, and other forms of collaborative research activity organised by researchers at postgraduate (whether MSt or DPhil) or early-career level from across the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford.
The activity should take place between June 2022 and January 2023. The closing date for applications is Friday of Week 5 of Trinity Term (27 May 2022).
Grants are normally in the region of £100–250. Recipients will be required to supply a report after the event for the TORCH Medieval Studies blog. Recipients of awards will also be invited to present on their events at the next Medieval Roadshow.
Applicants will be responsible for all administrative aspects of the activity, including formulating the theme and intellectual rationale, devising the format, and, depending on the type of event, inviting speakers and/or issuing a Call for Papers, organising the schedule, and managing the budget, promotion and advertising. Some administrative and organisational support may be available through TORCH subject to availability.
The French play was part of the Oxford Medieval Mystery Cycle performed on 23 April 2022 in St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. The Playgroup: Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde (avec la participation de quelques paysans d’Iffleï) had been formed for the occasion by director: David Wiles The play is part of a cycle, ‘Le mystère de la passion’, written in the mid C15th by Arnoul Gréban, organist at Notre Dame cathedral, and doubtless also choirmaster. Full text available open access.
People ask me: “Why did you decide to do a play in French?” Implication: it’s an English-speaking audience, and they won’t understand – middle-English bad enough. Three responses to this one. 1. Political: not good to live in a monoglot culture, and unlike modern scholarship the medieval world did not view life through the lens of the nation-state. 2. Theatrical: to communicate through action and the body is a challenge which forces actors to engage with language on a different level, and reach out to their audience. 3. Intellectual: venturing into Gréban’s text was a journey of discovery, as impenetrable hieroglyphs yielded slowly through rehearsal into recognisable speech patterns, with every phrase having its theatrical work to do. What looks like literary doggerel turns out to be theatrical gold.
An interesting research question follows – what are the cultural continuities that make Gréban’s mighty four-day passion play recognisably French, when set alongside the familiar English cycles? Centralisation is one feature – responsibility not subdivided to autonomous guilds, but a single integrated work for an urban community to mount. Another is the French ability to listen and maintain concentration upon the word. In the English texts, action typically takes place between stanzas, but in the French text couplets conjoin speeches, so each new speaker has a rhyme to echo in order to come in on cue, a feature we found invaluable. The sustained rhythmic flow ratchets up the tension, with enough variety of register and poetic form to hold the spectator’s attention. Like the alexandrines of Racine, the eight-syllable medieval line has a lilt that asks to be animated by the arms, so different from English metres which asked to be stamped with the feet.
After seeing the performance, a friend asked me: “What lesson was the play is supposed to impart?” Implication: medieval theatre was didactic, a case of the church telling the peasants what to think. There is no simple moral to the John the Baptist sequence. In the artistic structure John’s martyrdom is there because it foreshadows Christ’s. People didn’t need telling that tyrants are venal, rather, it’s the recognisable social reality upon which a drama is built. Herod has his reasons for acting, and he washes his hands like Pilate. The medieval Salome is an enigma – we are free to draw our own conclusions, not told what to think. The urge to create theatre or art is a human constant, responding to the sensation of life as a cosmic mystery. The idea that medieval theatre is ‘didactic’ is a handy modernist cliché, serving the narrative of progress, and all the cultural arrogance which that narrative commonly instils. My preferred picture of the longue durée is one of progressive fragmentation, and I find in medieval theatre a holistic model of how theatre used to embrace and address a complete community in all its diversity, along with the gamut of human experience – comic and tragic, bestial and sublime – before dedicated theatre buildings and professionalism in acting and penmanship locked theatre into its lonely compartment.
David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, and lives in Iffley. He is a theatre historian whose main specialisms have been Greek and Shakespearean drama. He wrote the entry on medieval theatre for the Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre. His medieval CV includes a student production of the plays of the Wakefield Master in the gardens of Westminster Abbey, Mankynde in the Burton Taylor rooms, a crucifixion on a farmer’s trailer in Buckingham marketplace, staging three plays by the C10th nun Roswitha, and a community production of the N-Town Creation/Fall and York Noah in Iffley.
Repeat performance of the play at Iffley Church on 24 April 2022. Cast: John the Baptist – Laurence Nagy Manasses (disciple) – Alice Hawkins Sophonias (disciple) – Laura Laube Herod – Alex Marshall Herodias – Irina Boeru Salome – Alice Hawkins Groignart A (servant) – Kate Bunn Groignart B (servant) – Andrew Stilborn Amphiarus (noble) – David Wiles Radigon (noble) – Laura Laube God – Henrike Lähnemann Crew: Director: David Wiles Consultant: Sebastian Dows-Miller Head Creator: Andrew Stilborn Filmed by Isabel Reichenbach
23 April 2022, 12noon to 5pm. A cycle of medieval mystery plays performed by various groups around St Edmund Hall. A multilingual medieval experience not to be missed! All welcome (free of charge)! Performed by a variety of groups with links to Oxford Medieval Studies. Full information https://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/mystery-cycle Directors: Henrike Lähnemann & Lesley Smith, Manager: Eleanor Baker
At 12 noon, the chapel bell will ring for the prologue, followed by Creation in the Old Dining Hall. From there the story of mankind will unfold, with the Old Testament being acted out in the Front Quad and the New Testament in the churchyard around St Peter-in-the-East.
Front Quad – 11:45-12:00 midday Musical Entertainment 12:00-12:05 Introduction 12:10-12:40 1. Creation and the Fall of Adam (Faculty of English) 12:45- 12:55 2. The Killing of Abel (Holloway Mystery Players) 1:00 – 1:25 3. Noah (Medieval Studies Students)
Churchyard – 1:30 – 1:50 4. The Visitation (Jasmine and the Kilnsians) 1:55- 2:20 5. The Shepherds’ Play (The Pastoral Players) 2:25- 2:40 6. The Magi (The Wise Women) 2:45 – 2:55 7. Herod the Great (The 5th Week Blues) 3:10 – 3:30 8. John the Baptist (Les Soeurs de Sainte-Hilde avec la participation de quelques paysans d’Iffleï) 3:35 – 3:55 9. Lazarus (Medieval Masters) 4:00 – 4:15 10. The Crucifixion (The Manic Medievalists) 4:20-5:00 11. The Resurrection (The Mercantile Minstrels)
Medievalists Coffee Mornings back from 22 April @bodleiancsb. Every Friday 10:30-11:30am in the Visiting Scholars Centre in the Weston Library. Access via the Readers Entrance on Museum Road. All bodcard holders welcome!
Tea
Roof terrace
Sneak preview of new acquisitions
@oxmedstud grads: Apply NOW to Chris Fletcher for title of “bibliobarista” to help & pick items for discussion!
The Legacy of Oxford Palaeographers is a one-day workshop that will focus on the palaeographic terminology used by key Oxford palaeographers, organised by Colleen Curran and David Rundle. Register here
About this event
This one-day workshop on 21 March 2022 at the MBI Al Jaber Building, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, will focus on E. A. Lowe, Neil Ker, Malcolm Parkes and A. C. de la Mare. The intention is not to be biographical but to discuss each person’s contribution to the discipline of palaeography, with specific emphasis on the varying terminology they used. Our speakers will focus on these palaeographers’ larger research outputs and the methodologies contained within, how these resources are still fundamental within the field, and what aspects, if any, need to be updated, questioned, or challenged. Therefore, this event will not only be retrospective but will also encourage participants to think about the future directions of the field. We further anticipate that the workshop will facilitate conversations about how we employ palaeography terminology ourselves.
Programme
10.45–11.15: Coffee/Registration (Rainolds Room, Corpus Christi College)
11.15–11.30: Introduction (Colleen Curran & David Rundle)
11.30–1: Panel 1: E.A. Lowe
Chair: Stephen Harrison
David Ganz
Giovanni Varelli
Jo Story
1–2: Lunch (Rainolds Room, Corpus Christi College)
2–3.30: Panel 2: N.R. Ker
Chair: Christopher de Hamel
Julia Crick
Elaine Treharne
James Willoughby
3.30–4: Tea/Coffee Break (Rainolds Room, Corpus Christi College)
4–5: Panel 3: M.B. Parkes
Chair: Pam Robinson
Tessa Webber
Daniel Wakelin
5–5.15: Comfort Break
5.15–6: Panel 4: A. C. de la Mare
Chair: Laura Nuvoloni
David Rundle
Martin Kauffmann
6–6.30: Respondent: Dáibhí Ó Cróinín
6.30: Drinks Reception (Rainolds Room, Corpus Christi College)
On 17 February 2022, 9:15pm GMT, the St Edmund Consort sings Compline from the crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East, including a bilingual setting of verses from the ‘Christe qui lux est et dies’ from the Murbach Hymnal, MS. Junius 25, by James Whitbourn. Live-streamed via youtube from the Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East. Booklet with texts.
Compline is the last service of the canonical hours in the Christian tradition, sung before retiring for the night. This version hints at the experience of those who created and used the ninth-century Murbach hymnal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 25) with their daily exposure to the Divine Office in Latin, making the hymns and liturgical pieces accessible through translation and commentary. The service tonight is not a historically accurate reconstruction of a specific service, rather an experiment to make the soundscape of Latin and Old High German liturgy and hymns accessible to a 21st century audience. We are grateful to the Principal and Fellows of St Edmund Hall for the permission to use the crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East; to James Whitbourn, Director of Music, for setting verses from the Murbach Hymns to music (to the best of our knowledge the first time this has been done for the Old High German interlinear gloss!) and for conducting; to the St Edmund Consort, a recently formed group of fellows, alumni and singers linked with St Edmund Hall; to Luise Morawetz for organising the workshop which inspired this; to Andrew Dunning for typesetting the music; to Christiane Gante who translated the Gloria Patri into Old High German; to Henrike Lähnemann for compiling the text; to all participants of the workshop who contributed their knowledge and enthusiasm.
Programme of the workshop. In association with the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford Medieval Studies, sponsored by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Image credit: First lines of the Murbach hymns (fol. 122v, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 25). Produced by Tom Revell
Report on Lucy Pick’s Lecture for OMS: A Guest Blog by Pilar Bertuzzi Rivett
Watch Lucy Pick’s OMS Lecture 2022 here:
The Oxford Medieval Studies Lecture for Hilary Term 2022 was delivered on 8 February by Professor Lucy Pick, historian of medieval thought and culture, author of Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms (Cornell 2017), Pilgrimage (Cuidono 2014) and Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Thirteenth-Century Spain (University of Michigan 2004). Professor Pick is a visiting scholar at the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in Oxford, researching the earliest Latin translation of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed.
As a Hebraist and fellow historian of medieval thought, I looked forward to Professor Pick’s take on what Jewish-Christian relationships meant in the case of Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. It is a treat to be able to read a Jewish Medieval author in Latin and since instances of actual intellectual cooperation (especially in the early Middle Ages, which is what I focus on) are very few and far between, I am always curious to learn about them. I was particularly interested in how Professor Pick discovered this cooperation and what method she was going to use in order to flesh it out.
I found that Professor Pick set the scene very aptly when she opened her presentation mentioning that the Guide to the Perplexed “landed in the Latin scholastic world of the thirteenth century like a stick of dynamite.” Maimonides’ synthesis of science, the Law, Greek physics and metaphysics through the lens of the Hebrew Bible was nothing short of “explosive”. He offered a method for assimilating and interpreting the new Aristotle that flooded the schools of the thirteenth century. Did he inspire part of that flood? Did the Guide open up new avenues of thought for Christian readers that could be used as tools in their polemics against the Jews? These were some of the questions that were addressed in her presentation.
In what to me was reminiscent of the Italian school of microhistory, Professor Pick set aside the Christian scholastics of the mid to late thirteenth century, (whose study “used up most of the scholarly oxygen dedicated to Maimonides Latinus”) to focus on a much earlier community of readers of the Guide, one composed of both Jewish and Christians in the city of Toledo. At the heart of her project is the Liber de Parabola (witnessed in only one manuscript, Paris Sorbonne MS 601), the earliest Latin translation of the Guide (Part III, chapters 29-49 in which Maimonides discusses the reasons for commandments). According to Professor Pick, the Liber has not received the attention it deserves, neither as a witness to the Guide nor for its additional content which bears witness to the earliest reception to the ideas of the Guide. She therefore traced these individuals’ contact with the Liber de Parabola to shed light on both positive and negative aspects of its reception by Christians.
The key characters in this “textual community” are Samuel ibn Tibbon, who translated Maimonides’ Guide from Judeo-Arabic into Hebrew; Michael Scot, court astrologer to Frederick II who began his career as a master in Toledo, translating scientific texts from Arabic into Latin and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo, in whose cathedral Michael and Samuel may have met and in whose writings we can trace the earliest evidence of Maimonides’ impact on the Latin world.
Samuel’s contribution to the Liber is easiest to identify: he used his Hebrew translation for the base texts; he drew on his interpretation of Maimonides’ ideas about philosophical and Biblical exegesis and illustrated it with examples from his commentary on Ecclesiastics. He is cited by name at least six times in connection with the readings of the Hebrew Bible and interpretation of Jewish law. Pick believes that these passages reflect oral communication between Samuel Ibn Tabbon and the translator.
Michael Scot’s identity is more difficult to establish and rests on substantial circumstantial evidence. Michael Scot knew the work of Maimonides as he cited him in his “De physionomiae”; he was in Rome at the same time as the Liber de Parabola was dedicated to Cardinal Romanus and first appeared on the historical record in 1215 in Rome, accompanying the entourage of the Archbishop of Toledo at the Fourth Lateran Council. Pick notes that Samuel consulted books by Aristoteles meteorology (some of which Scot translated into Latin) in Toledo at some point between 1204 and 1210, thus Michael and Samuel could plausibly have met and worked together.
Pick also described how Michael Scot became a close associate of Jacob Anatoli while at Frederick II’s court in Naples. Anatoli was Samuel’s son in law, whose philosophical sermons (Malmad ha-Talmidim) recounted conversations with Michael Scot and his knowledge of Maimonides’ work. In one of his sermons on Parshat Nitzavim, Anatoli showed awareness of the Liber de Parabola, inclusive of its structure and introduction and associates it with Michael Scot. Pick very ably showed parallels between Anatoli’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 4:6 with the opening of the Liber de Parabola which contrasts the interpretation of a commandment with the allegory of a parable.
By means of a venn diagram, Pick highlighted the interpenetration of ideas amongst the translators of key works in Toledo, Naples and Provence all of whom were engaged in a parallel set of translations and commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology inspired by Part II Chapter 30 of Maimonides’ Guide. Since Part II was not available in the Liber, this suggests a wider diffusion of the Guide in Toledo.
The presentation concluded by showing the “polemical” potential to Christian borrowing of Maimonides’ ideas. The Archbishop of Toledo reacted to Part II Chapter 30 in his Breviarium in which he used Maimonides’ ideas of “principle” and “spirit” to argue for the Christian Trinity. This is an example of how the section of the Guide in the Liber de Parabola was used by later Christians in support of a doctrine of “supersession” rather than fostering a more positive understanding of those who follow God’s commandments, as Jacob Anatoli would have hoped for.
This conclusion was what surprised me most about the presentation. I suppose I approached the topic with the eyes of someone accustomed to the interpenetration of ideas between Christians and Jews of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages when it comes to mysticism. However, Professor Pick’s paper showed that by the thirteenth century intellectual cooperation could be both a tool and a weapon. In her own words, “textual community did not mean safety and an exchange of texts could provide ammunition as well as understanding.” In the period of history I focus on, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, both Christian and Jewish polemical tools were still in their pre-scholastic phase; Peter Damian’s work only really impacted Jewish-Christian relations towards the end of my “horizon.” However, the fact that Dante Alighieri put Pater Damian in the highest circles of Paradise, whereas Michael Scot was relegated to the malebolgie of Hell should have alerted me to the fact that there was not going to be a “happy ending” to Professor Pick’s textual community.
Still, any kind of inter-faith intellectual cooperation in the Middle Ages is worth researching because it demystifies some of the myths that surround the history of Christian and Jewish communities. When genuine, as in the case of Pick’s “textual community” or in the case of the Victorines in Paris, cooperation challenges the narrative of Jews and Christians as distinct cultures in “conversation and conflict.” The key takeaway from this paper for my dissertation is that we are better served to approach the history of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages from an organic model of culture rather than who influenced whom, to borrow from David Biale and Michael Satlow. I admire the way in which Pick focuses on people and their agency and how comfortable she was with admitting that sometimes, as in the case of Michael Scot’s identity, one has to rely on somewhat circumstantial evidence. As medievalists, we do not always find “the silver bullet”; we are dealing with people and sources that existed nearly two thousand years ago. Even the most refined sleuths sometimes build cases on indirect evidence. If we wanted simple, straightforward, direct evidence, we would be statisticians or, worse still, modern historians.
I found that the interdisciplinary, multi-lingual approach in Pick’s presentation fit very well with the remit of the OMS and with our own identity as medieval historians. In Professor Pick’s words, “life is best viewed through more than one window.”
Pick reminded the audience that.
“It has been corrected from my own book. I am Moses son of Rabbi Maimon, the Righteous, of Blessed Memory” Egypt, 1170–80 Handwritten in ink on paper Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Huntington 80
